No Twitter for the Rich
Siren by Marc Quinn (Kate Moss)
First, lets get something out of the way, for once and for all: if you work in media and you still don’t get Twitter (today, three years after you should have) you should probably just quit or wait until you are eventually fired. Really, if you are pitching a “who cares what you had for lunch” article to your editor, you are no different than a major car manufacturer who doesn’t understand what the fuss over fuel-efficient vehicles is about.
But Virginia Heffernan, whose NYT The Medium columns lately have been, uhhh, questionable, has an interesting take on the old MSM “twitter is narcissism blah, blah…” She mentions Bruce Sterling’s talk at SXSW on how the new sign of poverty is, “dependence on ‘connections’ like the Internet, Skype and texting… Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”
This reminds me of a conversation I had with Rex when I was in New York. What celebrities won’t join Twitter? I said Angelina Jolie, but he pointed out she’d probably hire someone to post UN Press Releases. A non-Twitter-ing celebrity would be someone like Catherine Deneuve, or less obviously Naomi Watts. Someone who is essentially content with their station on the Hollywood totem pole.
Some will say, as @biz explained on The Colbert Report, they Twitter to create and control their own PR –a wrecking ball to gossip glossies. But all the celebrities on Twitter are in some ways striving for something. Just browse CelebrityTweet (yes, it exists.) Witness the enormous explosion among hasbeens like Liam Gallagher, Donny Wahlberg, Soleil Moon Frye, and Danny Masterson.
If the celeb-twitterer is someone who might not seem to be the sort to bother with this kind of thing (eg @bjork) the account is inevitably run by someone else as a PR station. (The two clear exceptions being @DAVID_LYNCH and @yokoono, which are part art project, part PR.) Maybe every celebrity will eventually have a Twitter account. But only the striving will be the ones engaging its social aspects.
Abandoned schools in Detroit might double as zombie movie sets. (via.) On the other hand, “Detroit right now is just this vast, enormous canvas where anything imaginable can be accomplished.”
There is so much about real estate I don’t understand. How can there be entire neighborhoods of empty houses? Shouldn’t they be sold at the market price, no matter how low? Or rented out, even if it’s like, for $200 a month? Renting/selling = money. Leaving empty=no money. Also, why aren’t regulations revised? — make commercial space legal as residential or offer to waive back taxes, etc. At least one municipality is considering buying up foreclosed properties for shelters for the needy. They are already home to squatters. Today the WSJ predict we won’t see a bottom in the market until 2011 or 2012. Generally, “home prices tend to increase on average at an inflation-adjusted rate of 2.5% to 3% a year, about the same as per capita income.” So if anyone would like to sell me a boarded-up metro-Boston house now for under $50,000, send me an email.
Very interesting findings in this study by a professor of anthropology and his student, a formerly homeless woman. Instead of an ethnographic study — examining factors like HIV/AIDS or job training — they used the “tools and techniques of archeology to understand the broader environment and activities of the homeless.” The researchers located a campsite frequented by the homeless. “They photographed these sites and conducted inventories of what the homeless threw away or left behind when they were away from the camp. They looked for patterns or clusters of certain types of materials such as clothing, shoes, food, cardboard laid out as furniture, or tarps providing shelter.” In addition to food cans, (creating difficulty as there were no can openers.) The researcher says, “We also found a lot of hotel-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, deodorant and toothpaste. Only the toothpaste was used. This tells us that giving things like shampoo and conditioner to individuals without access to water doesn’t make sense. It would be better to send these kinds of things to shelters and not distribute them to people living on the streets.”
In the new issue of Dwell: an article on Helmut Jahn’s “Supportive Housing” in Chicago. Green, high-tech living for the homeless.
You need a car to get to work. And you need work to afford a car. The Boston Globe has an article on the New Hampshire nonprofit group Bonnie Clac, which negotiates for low interest rates for low income buyers so long as they enroll in free financial literacy courses. It’s the only program that secures these loans and buys new cars — fuel efficient cars. The founder is a former car dealer, “Many lower-income workers don’t look for their next car until their current one is beyond repairs, he said, ’so they’re walking into this dealership at a very vulnerable time and the system manipulates them… If you’re paying 19 percent (interest) for a car, it’s like indentured servitude; you can almost never pay for it…Then you add the repair cost and you add the fuel economy, and these people are never shown the new car because it isn’t in the interest of the car salesperson and they don’t know where else to go to do that. So you have a huge, systemic failure in the United States.’” (See also BusinessWeek’s May 2007 cover story on The Poverty Business.) Also, today is Blog Action Day for Poverty.
John McCain’s comment about North Koreans being three inches shorter than those who live in the South, was one of the most memorable lines of the night. NYT finds not only is it true, but a similar height gap exists between Americans and Northern Europeans. “United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity.”
Urban Safaris: Graffiti Sites Considered for Heritage Protection
Simon at Ballardian says Melbourne is not quite as lovely as the Treehugger article I linked to suggests:
[The] Treehugger article only explores Melbourne’s inner city. The suburbs are a different matter. Perhaps the overseas versions might weed out the worrying strain of Mad Max style behaviour that sees cyclists as game to be hunted.
But then again, such behaviour inspired Mad Max itself, one of the finest films ever made.
Well, it may not be a “pedestrian paradise,” but Melbourne is in the middle of a debate that could lead to some curious developments in urban landscapes around the world. Australia’s National Trust and Heritage Victoria is considering graffiti for heritage protection (via.)
Scott Hilditch, chief executive of Graffiti Hurts Australia, says that protecting graffiti would effectively condone acts of vandalism and cost the Australian government over $260 million (U.S. $250 million) a year to clean up.
Some artists oppose the idea as well, protesting that it is contrary to the spirit of the art form itself. Melbourne curator and artist Andrew Mac says it would interfere with the natural process of street art: “The work is ephemeral. It’s not meant to last. It lasts purely as long as the weather and other graffiti artists allow it to last.” Mac also feels that the councils backing protection may have real estate motives in mind, such as promoting graffiti sites to fuel tourism.
The Banksy House
A London suburban Victorian terrace house tagged by Banksy famously went for bid at four hundred thousand dollars, “a buyer would receive the mural—with the house thrown in ‘for free.’” The house was later destroyed by “vandals” — nevertheless — maybe therein lies the answer to our national housing crisis.
We could send Swoon and Elbow-Toe to the poorest neighborhoods in Cleveland, Washington Dc, Detroit, and elsewhere. Why stop at the cities? We could tag barns in North Dakota too. 
I’d pay a lot to live in a Swoon-tagged house. And I’d certainly move in a neighborhood I’d never otherwise consider in order to do so. But bidding would be fierce. We could see these properties turning into hipster summer homes, for when the trust fund PBR drinkers want to rough it in the “Common People” sense.
Anyone can see street art, not just the people willing to step in a gallery. And that adds value. The more eyes on a work of art, (usually) the more valuable it becomes (although diminishing marginal returns plays here too.) This is why artists will often reduce the price of their work to display it in a museum rather than sell it to someone for his personal collection.
If art economics is difficult to understand, the economics of street art is unprecedented in its confusion. In England, Banksy is as famous as Damon Alburn and earl grey tea. His prints sell for millions. But this month, one of his pieces was whitewashed in Northern London.
Art critics know that street art and graffiti refer to very different things. As Hrag Vartanian put it, “What appears to differentiate street art from its graffiti predecessor are two things: the self-consciousness in its conversation with the city and its lack of the aggression and violence.” But city workers can’t be bothered to appreciate the difference, and maybe there is aesthetic merit to be gleaned from its aggressive older cousin.
I think the Australian preservationists are on to something, and one day we all will be thinking bigger. Maybe downtown Detroit will be heralded as an architecture splendor — an UNESCO site, the modern day Cesky Krumlov. Tourists in fannypacks and shorts will motorbus out to see it, and marvel at the public artwork as they would walking through Florence, Italy.
Already tourists enjoy the spectacle of poverty. When I was in South Africa a few years ago, i was shocked at the opportunities to visit the shantytowns (”Townships”) by bus tours. Brazil is notorious for its “Favela tours.” Here’s a good post on poverty tourism by Vagabondish, explaining how to minimize the exploitation of the people who live in these areas:
I think that if it’s managed by real, interested professionals, and sensible ground rules are set – don’t take photographs, don’t give money or candy away (donate through a suitable charity or organization instead), stay in small groups, and so on – then perhaps poverty tourism really does provide some benefits for the locals. And at this stage in its development, when it’s mostly undertaken by fairly seasoned travelers who are genuinely interested in understanding more about a country and its people, it seems that such tours can truly be managed in this way. My fear is that poverty tourism could become a more mainstream activity, and money-hungry travel agents will start sending in large air-conditioned buses full of ignorant tourists snapping hundreds of pictures, and then the rot will really set in.
Still, I can’t feel comfortable with the idea of the New Orleans disaster tours. Something about busing out to see a someone’s personal possessions strewn about, reduced to trash and chaos, bothers me more than seeing human faces of a tragedy.
Art by Elbow-Toe
Related links:
- The Very Public Life of Street Art by Hrag Vartanian in the Brooklyn Rail
- My Love for You interviews Elbow Toe
- Shadow Cities by Robert Neuwirth
- Graffiti artist Mike Baca (standing trial for seven years for graffiti vandalism and trespassing, which is twice the usual sentence in NY) Juxtapoz
“While the death rate among the most educated Americans is dropping dramatically, we’re seeing a real lack of progress or even worsening trends in the least educated persons. The gap between the best and worst off in the country is actually getting wider,” says Otis W. Brawley, M.D., American Cancer Society chief executive officer. (EurekAlert)
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