Tagcities
“Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties” explores the crash pads, hippie communes, infinity machines and other far-out dwellings of the time period. Author Alastair Gordon, whose other works have dealt primarily with the clean modernism of airports and mid-century Hamptons homes, turned his attention to the design, architecture and visual culture of LSD-inspired era, much of which hadn’t been adequately preserved or documented until now.
Australia’s National Trust and Heritage Victoria are both supporting a move to protect the city’s graffiti, but some local council groups say this would just give a green light to vandals.
With the idea of graffiti as an art form in its own right gaining momentum locally and abroad, the National Trust has been considering its protection since 1999.
The Trust’s cultural heritage manager, Tracey Avery, says the protection of Melbourne’s graffiti will be debated at next week’s international conference on intangible heritage.
Today’s cities are mostly accessible. One can even say that there is only one global city, with some parts of this city (for example, Berlin or Paris) only reachable from other parts (New York, São Paulo or Deli) by plane. Thus, the global city structure remains u-topian because communication between its individual parts takes place in air. That affects the cities immensely. Airports begin to be the new city centers—places where you can buy whatever you want, watch movies, etc. Churches are already there. The next steps are adding museums and universities.
[…]
Every urban population believes in having its own collective psychology. One can ridicule this belief, but it has produced a lot of poetry, music and cinema that we are accustomed to valuing. The volume of poems about Parisian air or St. Petersburg’s weather is a sufficient justification for their architecture. However, if we don’t speak about art that is stimulated by a city but about art in the public space, then one should be very careful. The chance that any really good artwork can go though all possible channels that evaluate it is minimal. And, in general, art that is exhibited outside of arts institutions has to additionally identify itself as art. That makes art shown in the public space even more conservative than art shown within the framework of institutions.
(via Tomorrow Museum)
The United States government has direct ownership of almost 650 million acres of land (2.63 million square kilometers) – nearly 30% of its total territory. These federal lands, which are mainly used as military bases or testing grounds, nature parks and reserves and indian reservations, are managed by different administrations, such as the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US Department of Defense, the US Army Corps of Engineers, the US Bureau of Reclamation or the Tennessee Valley Authority.
I like it because I grew up in a really extreme monoculture in southwestern Virgina. I was surrounded by Southern white folks – this was in badass Appalachia, up in the hollers where my mother’s family had been forever. Having that experience in a small town made me happiest in big cities. Especially in radically multicultural big cities – as far as you can get from monoculture. I’m happiest where people are generally not even of recognizable ethic derivations. I’m into hybrid vigor.
Canada is set up to run on steady immigration. It feels like a twenty first century country to me because it’s not interested in power. It negotiates and does business. It gets along with other countries. The power part is very nineteenth century. 99 percent of ideology we have today is very nineteenth century. The twentieth century was about technology, and the nineteenth was ideology.
[…]
None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.
io9: William Gibson Talks to io9 About Canada, Draft Dodging, and Godzilla
A former LA resident photo documents his new life in Iran.
When I was leaving Los Angeles, many of my friends were worried for me. They thought I was jumping into a war zone. Soon after moving to Iran I shared a few photos with them and assured them that all is safe and normal. But I soon realized how little they knew about Iran. Their fears and lack of knowledge about Iran is justified and a result of negative portrayal of this country in the Western media — as well as sound bites from a certain controversial President. So I decided to start a site to remind them (and the rest of the world) that life goes on in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran.
(via Dark Roasted Blend)
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