Every Person in New York
Jason Polan is trying to draw every person in New York.
If I do draw you, you will see yourself (or rather, a drawing that hopefully somewhat resembles you) on this blog that evening.
When the project is completed we will all have a get together.
Angels in America
Thirty one Antony Gormley sculptures have come to New York. Go check them out.
Down-size Detroit
Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.
If you see something, say something
Overheard.
6-year-old girl: Mom, what does that [automated bus announcement] mean “You are the eyes of New York”?
Mom: Well, it means we should look out for anything dangerous. Like an unattended package left somewhere.
7-year-old girl: Well…I see something dangerous…
Mom: Oh?
7-year-old: Snow! Someone could slip in it.
6-year-old: I see something dangerous–a bus! It could hit someone.
7-year-old: I see something dangerous–a tree! It could fall down.
…
7-year-old: Mom, I see something really dangerous…
Mom: What.
7-year-old: Cardboard in the street!
6-year-old: Someone could trip on it.
7-year-old: (Singing) “Cardboard in the street! Cardboard in the street! Nothing more dangerous than cardboard in the street!”
“That’s where it all began,” Ventola said.
The media reported that black-tar heroin was sweeping through town, killing users. That “made people want it more,” said Paul Hunter, a Huntington police narcotics officer. “Addicts are always looking for the best high.”
From a series of articles in the LA Times about Xalisco Mexico, middle-class America, black-tar heroin, decentralized business models, and addiction.
urban skiing
In Pittsburgh, we don’t get two-plus feet of snow in 24 hours – but that happened two weeks ago. And some people knew what they should do… (via @woycheck and @schulman)
steps
More snow expected overnight. It is February in Pittsburgh, after all.
Thank you, Cindy.
Not only is Cindy Scroggins a performance artist, but she is an information specialist. If ever you are looking for lodging in the Dallas area, you just call up Cindy. She will not steer you wrong.
At The La Quinta Uptown, some of the rooms have heat. Mine even had hot running water for two or three minutes. If you want to wash but your timing is off, you can fill the sink with cold water, then add water you’ve boiled in the coffeemaker and give yourself a whore’s bath.
Read more
Sky
Sky from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.
Read more about the project HERE.
snow on branches
From Friday evening through Saturday afternoon, we had steady, heavy, snowfall in Pittsburgh. By the time it stopped, 21 inches had fallen. (Another storm is expected tomorrow, with 6 – 10 inches more.) Our street is still unplowed, buses are infrequent and delayed, and we are walking a lot. Plenty of time to look up, look around, enjoy the changed landscape.
For Cindy
This is how it will be, our new life.
The death of Jermyn Street
I had just settled in my easy chair when a key turned in the lock and a nattily-dressed man in his 60s let himself in. He held a bottle of Teachers’ scotch under his arm. He walked to the sideboard, took a glass, poured a shot, and while filling it with soda from the siphon, asked me, “Fancy a spot?”
“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” I said.
“Oh, my.”
This man sat on my sofa, lit a cigarette, and said, “I’m Henry.”
“Am I…in your room?”
“Oh, no, no, old boy! I’m only the owner. I dropped in to say hello.”
This was Henry Togna Sr. He appears in a Dickens novel I haven’t yet read. I’m sure of it. He appeared in my room almost every afternoon when I stayed at the Eyrie Mansion.
—Roger Ebert, “I met a character from Dickens,” Chicago Sun-Times, February 5, 2010
(Via @davidmoldawer)
Subway Chicken
Meet The Helpsters
Sweet! Our Mary came up with the gestating project they mention:
Once derided as hipsters, let’s call them helpsters. Instead of disaffected aesthetes with nihilistic tendencies, we see motivated and committed Samaritans. They fight overdevelopment, though it was their presence (and buying power) that drew the developers and realtors in the first place. They defend the rights of tenants, since landlords want to squeeze their diverse neighbors and artist friends out and move a new crop of more affluent—and inevitably less interesting—interlopers in. At the moment, efforts to increase community gardens, bike racks and green spaces are being discussed. Others organize meals for the poor and bike tours of toxic sites. One currently gestating project, to develop Brooklyn’s own currency, would make even old-school lefties blush.
Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park, a pictorial
High-rise superblocks and identical clusters of row houses set apart from the urban grid have been much maligned as some of the major wrongdoings of modernism, but Detroit’s Lafayette Park—the first urban-renewal project in the United States—tells a vastly different story. Within a sprawling, decentralized city that has suffered near-disastrous decline, this racially and economically diverse enclave just northeast of downtown has not only aged gracefully but today flourishes with new life.
10th Street Bridge
From the South Side of Pittsburgh, you can cross the Monongahela River in lots of places – the 10th Street Bridge will let you walk to downtown.
William Eggleston’s Paris
Freddy’s is fighting and they’re doing it on Fox News, baby
A couple of friends of mine were on Fox News yesterday morning, to talk about their fight to save Freddy’s, a hugely loved local bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn – as well as many homes and businesses - from being snatched in a landmark eminent domain ruling.
Basically, the New York supreme court has decided that billionaire developer Bruce Ratner can seize property in the 22 acres of the “Atlantic Yards” footprint in order to build an arena and some tower housing that is deeply unwanted by the people of the neighbourhood. It is now enshrined in law that it is fair game for the state to seize property from small businesses, homeowners and renters, if the billionaire or corporation who wants to seize their properties can pay higher real estate taxes to the state. This is an outrageous abuse of the idea of eminent domain which was originally designed to be used ‘for the public good’.
The community has fought against this for 6 years now, and the last appeal against this use of eminent domain was decided last month in favour of the billionaire. Two days before Christmas, Forest City Ratner initiated proceedings to seize the homes and businesses in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.
The message is: if you are a homeowner in the United States of America, anyone who wants to seize your property is now enabled by law to do that, so long as he is richer than you. That is now enshrined in law, in a decision handed down by the highest court of the land.
Freddy’s is more than a bar. It’s a community, a true neighbourhood sanctuary, and a fantastic music venue. It is expected that the site that Freddy’s sits on will fit a few SUVs in the parking lot that is planned for it. Handcuffs have been installed in the bar, and there are more than enough people willing to chain themselves to the bar and go to jail to defy the bailiffs if and when they arrive at Freddy’s door.
The fifth amendment to the United States Bill of Rights
prohibits the federal government from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
Well, they got their due process of law, but it is bad bad law indeed. More legal challenges are on the way.
UPDATE: I have now amended this post to reflect the fact that this decision was originally handed down by the United States supreme court, which means that it can happen legally anywhere in the US. It has been challenged in the state of New York in this case, but the ruling apparently (and I am not a lawyer or an American citizen) stands countrywide.
UPDATE again: George Will wrote this op-ed column in the Washington Post about the ruling and “the twisted meaning of ‘blight’”. Read it.
South Aiken Avenue, Pittsburgh, early evening
Deron said, “How about some color in the new year?”
I said, “O.K.”
Cripple Boyd
Glimpses of a small town in Tennessee from a Facebook thread:
Chad: Sad to hear about my former neighbor Robin Allen. The days of growing up in McKenzie, TN will not be forgotten. There are memories…………What was the blind candy man’s name that had the candy store down by that old factory and he was in a wheelchair?
December 11, 2009 at 8:36pm · Comment · LikeCynthia: Are you talking about Mr. Boyd
December 11, 2009 at 8:39pmCynthia: Who is Robin Allen
December 11, 2009 at 8:40pmSherrye: Was that Mr. Boyd? Are you talking by the old Pajama Factory Building? That was Mr. and Mrs. Boyd but I don’t think he was blind. She had parkinson’s disease I think. That was before we knew what it was.
December 11, 2009 at 8:41pmCynthia: are you napping again chad
December 11, 2009 at 8:45pmMikki: I think his last name was Berryhill but his first name was Boyd…i think.
December 11, 2009 at 10:47pmLemont: his name was cripple boy
December 11, 2009 at 10:53pmJoseph: Lemont! Seriously!
December 12, 2009 at 12:16am ·Sherrye: OH Mikki you are right I do believe you are right.
December 12, 2009 at 9:12amShirley: sorry to say but everyone called him cripple boyd.. i went to school with his niece..just incase yall don’t remember there was another little store ran by an older white lady on Walnut Street in front of the old Jehovah Witnesses’ Church.. her name was Ms Purvis..Cooper (the cop) and his family moved into her house b4 they moved to where they are now..
December 12, 2009 at 9:45amCynthia: Robin and I grew up together along with her sister Tiny. It is so sad I will b praying for the family.
December 12, 2009 at 12:06pmShirley: i’ve always like Robin as well.. she was always nice.. she will truly be missed.. RIP Robin..
December 12, 2009 at 5:18pmChris: Yep…his name was Boyd Berryhill…My grandmother lived on that street…thats back when soda came in glass bottles and canned drinks had pull off tabs…double bubble was 2 cents a piece and a nutty buddy was a quarter…kickball was the game of the day…and you only got let in Grandma’s house to cool off and drink ice water
December 13, 2009 at 1:48am
a lost civilization of the Amazon?
The article adds: “This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The ‘geoglyph culture’ stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.”
I used to live here
A panoramic view of Sana’a at sunset.
Update: Tyler Cowen recounts his visit to Yemen, much of which resonates with my childhood memory of the place. It is somewhere I most want to go back to.
Most of the people lived what was still a fundamentally medieval existence in a medieval setting. The center of town felt like how I had imagined the year 1200 in Baghdad.
&
With the possible exception of the Bolivian altiplano, Yemen is the weirdest country or region I have visited.
(via marginal revolution)
A Delhi traffic jam
Context here.
Luby’s Closing 8 Dallas-Fort Worth Cafeterias
Just days after posting a $23 million loss, Houston-based Luby’s said it is closing eight of its 21 cafeteria locations in North Texas.
The chain will shutter four locations in Tarrant County (South Arlington, Bedford, Grapevine and Fort Worth), three in Dallas and one in Denton.
This is distressing news.
More later.
I Love LA
I mean it, man.
This from my LA friend Tiger:
Hello Kitty Goth Party Friday night. Fight Night party last night!