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outside.in just launched a new maps feature that shows the physical locations that people are blogging about. Here’s the last few months of places I’ve talked about on kottke.org. I like the pie charts that show how exclusive a place is to a particular blog. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to outside.in.)
Meant to post about this last week, but going on right now in NYC: Postopolis. “Postopolis! is a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design. Four bloggers, from four different cities, will host a series of live discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and other presentations, and fuse the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face to face interaction.” More about the event from City of Sound and BLDGBLOG.
Map of Manhattan made up of the countries of origin of its residents. (via strange maps)
Partial lyrics for New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down from LCD Soundsystem’s latest album, Sound of Silver:
—
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, you’re safer and you’re wasting my time
Our records all show you are filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime
New York, you’re perfect don’t, please, don’t change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king
And so the boring collect, I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars I’d once dreamt I would drink
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
There’s a ton of the twist but we’re fresh out of shout
Like a death in the hall that you hear through your wall
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a death of the heart. Jesus, where do I start?
But you’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown
—
Meant to note this a few weeks ago, but the Baltimore post put it back in my mind.
Jake’s got some photos of the in-progress development of the High Line in Manhattan. Lots of concrete. Here’s what the High Line looked like a few years ago when I was up there.
Let’s say you’re interested in movies and New York City. Then you could do worse than check out the Celluloid Skyline exhibit being displayed in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central from May 25 through June 22. The exhibit is based on the book of the same name by James Sanders, an exploration of how New York is portrayed in film. The exhibit includes “scenic backing” paintings made for movie sets in the 40s & 50s, film footage of films set in NYC, production stills and location shots, and other artifacts of NYC’s intersection with film. Sanders was kind enough to send me a photo of one of the scenic backing paintings:
I left the tool chest in the foreground for scale…the paintings are three stories tall! I’m always down for a trip up to Grand Central so I’ll definitely be checking this out.
Undiscovered bedrooms, the typical dream of the New Yorker. I always thought the undiscovered room dream story was apocryphal until Meg, unaware of the story at the time, dreamt of finding another room in our apartment a few months ago.
Fresh Dialogue 23 is an upcoming AIGA NY event (May 29) that will focus on the increasingly common phenomenon of the former audience lending a hand in designing their own experiences. Speakers include Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck and Ze Frank. (thx, khoi)
In accordance with David Chang’s wishes, I’m not really talking about this but I will briefly direct your attention to the following: Momofuku Noodle Bar is moving to a bigger location down the street and a new restaurant called Momofuku Ko, presumably with less seats, will take its place, making for a total of three Momofuku restaurants within a 2 block area.
For decades, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has been the definitive account of Robert Moses and how contemporary NYC got built. The portrait Caro painted of Moses was less than flattering. Now folks are thinking that, hey, maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all. “That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower.”
Mayor Bloomberg’s plan for a “greener” and “greater” New York City includes congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street. “It’s naive to suppose that congestion isn’t itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can’t plumb and a deliveryman can’t deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually.”
The pace of global cities is speeding up…people are walking 10% more quickly than they did 10 years ago. Singapore is the fastest city and I’m surprised NYC isn’t in the top 5.
Ariel Levy tells us about her lesbian wedding that wasn’t really a wedding (it was “a party about love”) and her struggle to find something she could wear for it. “I also didn’t feel okay about spending all my free time on the phone with the flower guy and the tent man, or about making little checklists of who was coming, and who was not coming, and who was staying at the Goodstone Inn. And I definitely did not feel okay about telling the sales staff of half the better clothing retailers in New York City that I needed something fetching to wear to my big fat gay wedding.”
The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don’t do too much to the building though…in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display.
One meal at Per Se has as many calories as 4.5 Big Macs, about a whopping 2400 calories. (via eater)
The NYC restaurant scene has peaked. I more or less agree.
Designer Eddie Jabbour is on a mission to make a new NYC subway map. The NY Times recently had a piece of Jabbour’s efforts. The new map reminds some of Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 classic map: too abstract for its own good. Here’s Vignelli talking about his map in an outtake from Helvetica and some background on the controversy surrounding it.
I might be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but the table of contents for the newest issue of the New Yorker is usually available on Sunday on newyorker.com, the day before the issue hits the newsstands and arrives in subscriber mailboxes. All you need to do is hack the URL of the TOC from the previous Monday. Here’s the URL for the April 23 TOC:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/23/toc_20070416
“2007/04/23” is the date of the issue and “toc_20070416” refers to the date of the posting. This then is the URL for the April 30 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/30/toc_20070423
At right is the cover for tomorrow’s issue, which includes Adam Gopnik’s piece on the Virginia Tech shooting, a new piece by Atul Gawande, and Anthony Lane’s review of Hot Fuzz. Monday’s New Yorker on Sunday is usually only available to the select few of the Manhattan media elite who are sped their new issues hot off the presses. Now everyone can have a similar experience on the web.
Enjoy.
A pair of NYC photographs from Shorpy today: Penn Station in 1910 and a scene from outside Grand Central Terminal in 1908.
Jake’s featuring a photo today of some NYC street art by Bloke, who does paper-plane pieces. I’m a sucker for dashed lines.
Update: More stuff by Bloke here. (thx, daniel)
It’s been awhile since I’ve done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson’s C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson’s whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a “manifesto” by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb’s idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou’s Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion’s ‘Most E-Mailed’ List Tearing New York Times’ Newsroom Apart, I said “I’d rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications”. American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune’s Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer’s attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they’re not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it’s only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People’s Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn’t hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC’s greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). “Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.” (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July’s new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges’ site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I’m ashamed to say I’m still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you’ve finally convinced yourself that you’ve wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it’s a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode…you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you’re not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I’d never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication…a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback’s self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez’s Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits’ logo by LogoMaid.
WindMaker adds motion to a web site based on the current wind conditions at a place of your choosing. Here’s kottke.org with NYC wind and with Chicago wind. (thx, jim)
Map of the cracks in the Guggenheim’s facade. “Since the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright’s massive spiral facade has been showing signs of cracking, mainly from seasonal temperature fluctuations that cause the concrete walls, built without expansion joints, to contract and expand.”
Loving article about the little-known transcontinental burrito tunnel linking San Francisco and NYC. “By the time they reach Cleveland the burritos are fully heated through and traveling uphill at about twice the speed of sound.” (via seriouseats)
The headline blares that “NYC Blamed for 1% of Greenhouse Gases”, which puts it on par with small countries like Portugal and Ireland, but they buried the lede on this one: “With 2.7 percent of the country’s population — 8.2 million of 300 million — the average New York City resident contributes less than a third of the emissions generated by a typical American.”
Denny McLain has been contributing to the Britannica Blog for the last month or so…his most recent post is about NYC’s demanding baseball fans and the difference between A-Rod and Derek Jeter. McLain was the last pitcher to win 30 games (probably the last ever) and had one of the best seasons in baseball history in 1968, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA and winning both the MVP and Cy Young awards.
In the high stakes game of making restaurant reservations in NYC, restaurants and their patrons are engaged in attempting to outflank one another in vying for tables at prime times. “I have a well-connected friend in the entertainment industry, and I often say I am calling from his office in order to score a weekend reservation at a crowded restaurant. If NYC restaurants are going to play the game this way, we have no choice but to play along with them.”
Tourism, iPod-created personal environments, and the death of peripheral vision. “I was brought up to be constantly aware of others around me, to keep a sharp eye out to see if I was blocking someone’s way, holding someone up.”
David Remnick may be the current editor of the New Yorker, but it’s much-maligned former editor Tina Brown’s team that’s running the place. Love the comments at the end…the Gawker audience is almost shocked at something that’s actually researched, longer than three sentences, and doesn’t contain any overt drug references. Choire, you keep this up, I might have to start reading the site again.
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