a spectacle and nothing strange

Futher design adventures in public peeing

2010-02-12T12:21:00.001-06:00

Courtesy of my mother, advances in the urinalization of city streets: a Swiss designer brings the hybrid urinal-wheelie bin to London.

Dwelling

2009-12-10T18:45:00.003-06:00

Michael Wolf's 100x100 did the blog/fb rounds a few weeks ago now, coinciding with a story in the NYT about a fire that killed three people living in illegal apartments in Queens. Wolf's subjects live in purpose-built 100 foot square units in a public housing development in Hong Kong. The three men who died in Queens were trapped in a basement that had been illegally divided into four one room units with only one exit. Wolf's photographs testify to the resourcefulness of their subjects, to what makes a home, how you make a home, and the complex domestic interplay of concrete architectural limits and personal needs, desires, and resources. These photographic subjects are subject to their material space, and subjects who shape that space. There is no equivalent visual record of the intra-active relationship the three Queens men had with their dwellings.

Without meaning to conflate cultural difference, or get too entangled in relative concepts of poverty, it seems that neither set of living spaces would appear to meet the standard of being affordable, safe housing, with adequate utilities, that doesn't exploit or punish those on low incomes, and jeopardize their health. Whilst the Hong Kong apartments are planned public housing, and the Queens apartments are the illegal improvisation of private entrepreneurs, both respond to the problem (market?) of high density low income populations by cramming rent payers into windowless single room dwellings. The Queens landlords are modifying existing structures, but (I assume) the (presumably British) administration in Hong Kong started with a blanker slate, and still ended up in the same conceptual place.

It's reassuring that local Dane County conservatives are concerned with such problems, pointing out that, "The Soviet Union and in East Berlin and all those places. They built these...very ugly high-rise apartments, and they jammed people into these." Just a shame that they think this housing dystopia will be the inevitable outcome of introducing commuter rail to Madison. Anyone have a better solution for urban housing inadequacy than telling the proles to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and buy a car and a ranch house?

One word for you: plastics

2009-11-27T18:07:00.003-06:00

Actually, plastics aren't the reason this WaPo article, and the research it reports, is irritating, in all too familiar ways. It's the aggravating assumptions signaled in the opening sentence: "Elevated levels of two plastic-softening chemicals in pregnant women's urine are linked to less-masculine play behavior by their sons several years later, according to a study published last week." A sense of what "less-masculine" means in this context emerges in the researchers' methodology: "A team of U.S. and British researchers posed a standard play questionnaire to the parents of 145 preschool-age children. Then they ranked the types of play on a scale from most masculine (such as play fighting or using trucks) to most feminine." Gendered behavior is unreflexively essentialized, and perceived gender deviance is posited as a physical medical problem (pollutants are emasculating our boy children - they're not fighting as much as they should! The horror!).

There's a message here about women's exposure to the toxicity of everyday life, but it's framed in terms of their bodies' reproductive responsibility for gender normative children. In the oblivious scientific bubble that this news snippet renders, gender is stable, self-evident, and resolutely binary. And maintaining the masculinity of male children is articulated as a primary justification for concern over women's exposure to toxic materials (materials that are framed as toxic here precisely because they interfere with normative gender development). Yawn and snarl and did decades of feminist critique really not happen? Sandra Harding asked in The Science Question in Feminism in 1986, "Will not the selection and definition of problems always bear the social fingerprints of the dominant groups in a culture?" and "Is it possible to isolate a value-neutral core from the uses of science and its technologies?" Evelyn Fox Keller noted in 1987 that "gender has been, and remains, constitutively operative in science." Way to respond to those crazy new insights.

"Ruin porn"

2009-11-03T22:03:00.004-06:00

A lost and now rediscovered link. Vice magazine reassures me in my concern about the rabid photographic fascination with Detroit - "If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house." Awesome writing: "I pulled up at one of East Detroit’s community farms and tried to talk to a couple kids who were either loading or unloading some boxes of stuff. After staring at the mic clipped to my shirt like it was a severed baby’s clit, one of the main guys (I think) explained their position."

PostNatural Organism of the Month

2009-10-21T21:54:00.002-05:00

Courtesy of the Center for PostNatural History. As also admired some time ago at Pruned.

Anti-public space

2009-10-13T20:03:00.006-05:00

I'd been following snippets in The Isthmus concerning Madison's re-engineering of benches around the Capitol to prevent their "misuse." So it was interesting to discover that that other city of my higher education, Oxford, is similarly seeking to dissuade what is deemed inappropriate use of public seating. At least Madison's public seating is still actually functional as seating, rather than being a ridiculously expensive slab of something to lean against. But both cities seem invested in catering only to the needs of a certain public, and to be disciplinarily intent on policing the bodily comportment of that (sober, housed, able-bodied, sane, en-route-to-some-appropriately-contained-other-place) public. The benches in question are aesthetic props in the staging of a welcoming and pleasant urban center that deliberately excludes bodies that contradict its prosperous self-image, and that serve no profitable purpose. (Though it's amusing that the image in the link shows the democratic repurposing of the Oxford "benches" for the radical act of actually sitting down on a public street.)

In this regard, both Oxford and Madison contribute to what Barbara Ehrenreich has called the "criminalization of poverty." As she noted in the NYT in August, "You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering."

So much...

2009-10-13T19:53:00.003-05:00

internet joyousness, so little time. Can't believe I haven't discovered Urban Sketchers before now, but happy to have the archives to peruse.

Northern England...

2009-10-13T19:06:00.002-05:00

is indeed a different place. Nothing new in this piece on the architecture of the West Riding, but a weirdly comforting remembrance of places I'm familiar with, if not native to.

Long overdue apology

2009-09-11T16:25:00.002-05:00

Turing "deserved so much better."

No. Just no.

2009-09-11T16:16:00.003-05:00

Surely the solution to men using the world as a public urinal isn't to attach public urinals to the world?

It's abuse, dammit

2009-08-11T09:51:00.006-05:00

Thanks to my recently completed summer class, I know that people with disabilities are infinitely more likely to be physically, sexually and emotionally abused. What oblivious European me didn't know was that physical abuse of minors (disproportionately those with disabilities) remains perfectly legal within so many state education systems in the US.

Portable vegitecture

2009-08-10T10:45:00.002-05:00

...the 21st century equivalent of the perfumed handkerchief? Not sure that a radical solution to what ails urban spaces starts with individual green screens that simply disguise the larger collective reality.

Queering Utah

2009-08-02T12:09:00.002-05:00

Great article by Lisa Duggan in The Nation a couple of weeks ago on why Salt Lake City might actually represent an enviable model of queer community and activism.

More Detroit images

2009-08-02T11:41:00.004-05:00

Is it wrong of me to be made uncomfortable by the number of photo sets of a deteriorating Detroit there are out there? I seem to come across links on a weekly basis to photographers apparently honing their socially conscious cred on the fading fabric of the Motor City and its impoverished inhabitants. The images are invariably stunning, and documentation of faltering industry, shrinking cities, and urban poverty is of course vital, but I wonder about the cumulative effect of this focus on a single city (and often on single elements of that city - it seems like the defunct Central Station must have a steady stream of image capturers trotting by daily). What does this popular preoccupation with the Detroit cityscape suggest? What kind of tourism am I participating in as I scan through these pictures?

Prompted by these photographs. (via BoingBoing)

Hear, hear

2009-07-07T22:05:00.002-05:00

Wondrous and super smart queer academics say good things about gay marriage. Amen.

Prisons

2009-06-20T12:18:00.004-05:00

Apparently Dutch prisons are suffering from a shortage of prisoners; prisons are to be closed, jobs lost, and it's possible a deal will be made with Belgium to import some of their surplus prisoners. European free trade in inmates? Prison inmates as valuable international commodity seems at odds with the toxic problem that Guantanamo detainees have become (though certain prison-dependent local economies in the US appear more divided on the issue). The US has already outsourced torture and below-the-legal-radar incarceration - how about the development of a large-scale international trade in bodies that legal systems have deemed it necessary to incarcerate? An above board globalization of the prison-industrial complex?

Meanwhile, in the architecture issue of the NYT Magazine, a profile of an Austrian prison, whose designer says crazy things like “The prisoners’ dignity is all I really care about” - the wall of the prison yard is inscribed with a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” The article's author gestures vaguely in the direction of Foucault, and notes that "we punish people with architecture. The building is the method."

Strange Science

2009-06-20T11:42:00.002-05:00

The Supreme Court rules that convicted prisoners do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing that may exonerate them, whilst a former police officer wins five puppy clones of his deceased dog in an essay contest titled the "Golden Clone Giveaway." I guess some biotech can be raffled off, and some has to be kept out of the hands of dangerous criminals.

Trouble in Paradise: Artistic Interventions at the Animal Enclosures of Schönbrunn/Vienna

2009-06-15T22:53:00.003-05:00

Installations at the Viennese zoo by Christoph Steinbrener and Rainer Dempf that

"are unexpectedly interfering with our notions of idyllic wildlife. The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging 'natural' environments while they are increasingly endangered."

Image and quote from the artists' website.

[First spotted here.]

There goes the neighborhood

2009-06-15T22:47:00.003-05:00

American suburbia sinks in Venice. BLDBLG provides commentary. A visually and politically complex moment, regardless of intent.

West coast trip

2009-06-08T14:16:00.002-05:00

...scheduled for the end of the month is making playing with this map even more fun. (I love the comments, the ongoing discussions of boundaries and identities.)

Monday Morning with Janet

2009-06-08T12:55:00.004-05:00

Over many months, between books, semesters, sloughs of sloth, waking and sleeping, I've been dipping into Paris Was Yesterday. Janet Flanner needs more love. A few choice snippets from my bus ride:

"French literature is peculiarly devoid of nature - indeed, there is hardly a tree in the whole lot of it; and to the French, despite their instinct to appreciate him, Hardy reads rather like pages from a seed catalogue."

"So far as the French are concerned, Egypt was discovered by Napoleon: as a result of his campaign, sarcophagi first settled in the Louvre, and the Sphinx entered the Empire drawing room as a mantlepiece decoration."

NYT wtf?

2009-06-05T13:08:00.007-05:00

Harvard to Endow Chair in Gay Studies

By By JACQUES STEINBERG on Transsexuals

The position, Harvard University believes, will be the first endowed, named chair in the subject at an American college.

-------------
Above is how a piece on Harvard's endowment of a visiting professorship in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender studies appeared on my Bloglines via the NYT's RSS feed. It's not unusual for the NYT to attach strange online descriptors to its news stories, but the slippage from the "gay" of the headline to the "transsexuals" of the byline is super aggravating. Transsexual is apparently being deployed here as lazy shorthand for a generalized deviancy - we're all just an amorphous mass for whom trans folks can be invoked as a reductive cipher. Not cool.

I ♥ Tenured Radical

2009-06-05T12:30:00.001-05:00

Her 400th post.

USBodies

2009-06-02T13:28:00.006-05:00

Images from Worth1000.com photoshop contest (via BoingBoing)

Saddam's Palaces

2009-06-01T14:46:00.002-05:00

Images from and interview with Richard Mosse at BLDGBLOG. More from the Breach project at Mosse's website.

Anti-terrorist hedges

2009-05-20T19:12:00.003-05:00

Exactly as my title says. A French company are seeking to green the Green Zone.

(Image from Sinnoveg - a hedge guarding a train station)

Being employable and queer

2009-05-19T12:51:00.001-05:00

CoG offers advice on being queer in the academic job market.

Evocriticism

2009-05-18T10:57:00.005-05:00

Laura Miller at Salon reviews On the Origin of Stories:

"To be fair, Boyd feels compelled to insist on the obvious. That's because "On the Origin of Stories" is at least partly written to refute Theory, the dominant trend in late-20th-century academic literary criticism. Theory is deeply invested in the idea that human identities are entirely "constructed" by the cultures people grow up in, that we are born blank slates with no innate traits. A disciple of such evolutionary psychology evangelists as Steven Pinker and Denis Dutton, Boyd has the enthusiasm of a convert, and he shares his gurus' propensity for overstating their case as well as exaggerating the strength and recalcitrance of the other side. A hardcore constructionist camp does still persist in academia, but it's such a tiny and marginal element in the culture at large, that evolutionary psychologists come across as disingenuous when they insist on portraying themselves as an outnumbered, ragtag band of embattled crusaders.

The truth is that evolutionary psychology has enormous popular cachet; books by Pinker and Robert Wright vastly outsell those of, say, the constructionist gender theorist Judith Butler."

Hmm.

Rise and fall

2009-05-18T10:36:00.002-05:00

Land is rising in Alaska, whilst it's sunk in California. It's all about water.

Bus stop, bus goes

2009-05-17T10:49:00.003-05:00

Sunny Sunday morning, grading hangover, dawdling round the web from the comfort of bed, perfectly delightful set of images courtesy of The Guardian. Props to Sheffield for the green roof. Perhaps the disappeared campus bus shelters on Johnson will be replaced with something equally simple, functional, and joyful (obviously I'm excluding the Dubai number here). Twould be an easy, city-life-improving measure; a number of these shelters though are clearly in rural locales - doing attractive, durable, and designed for heavy traffic would probably exclude hammocks and soft furnishings, and the Wisconsin winter needs to be accounted for. I guess the new State St. and Capitol Square shelters aren't bad in this regard (though I enjoyed the pre-demolition transformation of the old Square shelters into canvases for public art).

Oooh, Flickr yields oodles of funky bus shelters...

Bridge to nowhere?

2009-05-15T12:05:00.003-05:00

Samuel Beckett has a bridge named after him! Designed by Santiago Calatrava (whose Quadracci Pavilion at Milwaukee Art Museum I love). Margaret Soltan is inspired to poetry.

The bridge being towed up the Liffey (courtesy of).

Do Not Patent My Genes

2009-05-14T15:11:00.003-05:00

"On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid."

"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has granted thousands of patents on human genes – in fact, about 20 percent of our genes are patented. A gene patent holder has the right to prevent anyone from studying, testing or even looking at a gene. As a result, scientific research and genetic testing has been delayed, limited or even shut down due to concerns about gene patents."

More here.

Recruiting children

2009-05-14T14:46:00.007-05:00

Why is one of these images apparently acceptable, and the other not? Does it matter that one is "for real," and the other is a Boy Scouts-endorsed weekend simulation activity? What's the difference between uniformed, armed teens in the Congo, and uniformed, armed teens in California? Is there a connection between the fact that child soldiers are massively vulnerable to sexual abuse, and that there "have been numerous cases over the last three decades in which police officers supervising Explorers have been charged, in civil and criminal cases, with sexually abusing them"? What are the race, class and gender dynamics at work here?

Today's NYT piece on the Explorers program, with startling slideshow.

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Update: the Feministe community joins the discussion.
And astute comments at the always worth reading No Caption Needed.

Reasons to think Vancouver's awesome

2009-05-14T00:00:00.002-05:00

from Landscape+Urbanism

Strange Maps

2009-05-13T23:20:00.001-05:00

How have I not encountered this awesomeness before?

Photo-construction

2009-05-10T14:11:00.004-05:00

I've been revisiting this BLDBLG post on Felipe Dujardin repeatedly, fascinated by the images - photo-montages of quotidian and improbable buildings. Deliciously uncanny. And awesome recommendations regarding similar remix photo-architecture work in the comments.

Park strife

2009-05-10T12:30:00.004-05:00

Tourist-oriented leisure spaces as ideological interventions in one of the most bitterly contested landscapes in the world. A reminder that "tak[ing] in the majestic views" is never apolitical.

Virtual border

2009-05-08T18:35:00.004-05:00

Obama resurrects virtual policing of US border with Mexico, using massive surveillance infrastructure. Not there, of course, to make sure the border doesn't move, or get stolen, but to monitor bodies in space, and to classify them as alien and illegal when they're deemed to have crossed an invisible line.

Satyrical prostheses

2009-05-06T09:28:00.003-05:00

Check out Kim Graham, a Seattle-based artist, and her equine "Digigrade leg extensions." Graham writes of her prostheses that "these are not ordinary stilts; they give a person the uncanny and graceful appearance of an animal." Due to unexpected demand, there's currently a two month waiting period should you want a pair of your own - spring-loaded hooves and fur are optional extras. (CNET's headline for their piece on this: "Leg extensions turn humans into horses.")
(via)

Building for brains

2009-05-04T22:14:00.004-05:00

Scientific American provides an overview of research that explores exactly how the built environment impacts how we think and feel. Unsurprisingly, natural light and a nice view prove beneficial to concentration and learning, which just gives empirical support to the general perception of the Humanities building at UW as a, quite literally, concrete obstacle to effective teaching. Harry Weese's Brutalist architecture may well be worth saving, but the place doesn't work as learning environment (and materially it's in a shite state).

Insta-lawn

2009-05-04T18:21:00.004-05:00

Apparently foreclosed California homes don't get trashed if their dead lawns are painted green:

"In Riverside County, where foreclosures have spread like collapsing dominoes, dousing dead grass with green paint suddenly seems perfectly reasonable [...] After the right shade is selected, the paint is sprayed on dead grass and dirt, giving the illusion of a healthy lawn for three to four months. The paint, said Milligan, is green on more than one level. It's made of natural, biodegradable ingredients."

Old story, new example

2009-05-04T17:52:00.006-05:00

The LA Times details the differing responses to two recent hit and run deaths. Moral of the story - don't run over white USC students.

Gene Genie

2009-05-02T09:13:00.003-05:00

Two very different msm articles on the same scientific report: the Washington Post notes the huge genetic diversity of African populations, and therefore the impossibility of African Americans being able to accurately genetically track their lineage (sound familiar, posthumaners?); the NYT, on the other hand (whose online version of the article is accompanied by an advertisement for The DNA Ancestry Project), strangely frames its response in terms of the possible location of the Garden of Eden. And is apparently discombobulated to discover that the origin of the species can be tracked to "the somewhat inhospitable borderland" between Angola and Namibia, which, it ascertains, "had some trees but... it also had deep sand and was not particularly garden-like." Stunning.

"we are all cyborg-like monsters"...

2009-05-01T18:58:00.002-05:00

so taking steroids or HGH isn't cheating. Haraway provides a language for challenging outrage at A-Rod's chemical enhancements.

Messing with maps

2009-05-01T16:58:00.007-05:00

[From, via. Check out the additional annotations at Flickr - an exercise in collaborative socio-political mapping]

Planetary-level hacking

2009-04-30T12:53:00.004-05:00

Or, how to reduce the impact of global warming by "spewing aerosol gunk into the stratosphere." Eli Kintisch at Slate looks at geoengineering and (surely just some of the many) dangers associated therewith.

[Pinatubo dust layer, August '91, from space shuttle]

"gender has become a growing subject in academia"

2009-04-29T20:01:00.003-05:00

The NYT produces a "Special Report" on that strange, new-fangled beast - "gender studies." Apparently, now gender studies even "explores less obvious themes like the interactions between gender and information technology, migration, or disability." Who knew? Good job the ever vigilant Larry Kramer is keeping his eye on these developments...

Bodies - surveillance and display

2009-04-29T13:53:00.003-05:00

Coffee table cadaver book - more pictures at Morbid Anatomy and Inside Higher Ed, the latter actually drawing attention to the race and class issues at work in these photographs.

Pre-mortem, scanning air travelers with thermal imaging equipment to identify swine flu in transit.

"Men have always had cocks and men have pretty much always known what to do with them."

2009-04-29T09:41:00.006-05:00

Larry Kramer unloads on Yale and the overtaking of gay history by "gender studies, queer studies, queer theory." Why, Kramer asks, "is the History Department allowing history to be hijacked by the queer theorists just as the English Department allowed Paul DeMan and Jacques Derrida to highjack literature for the deconstructionists? That travesty found safe haven here at Yale too." All respect to Kramer, but this is bollocks - and I mean that literally: a dick-centric denial of all the positive possibilities and inclusivities of "queer."

Tenured Radical, herself a graduate of Yale, provides the necessary rejoinder.

********************

Update: Further response to the Larry crazy at Historiann (pleasingly tagged "wankers"), and Scott Jaschlik at Inside Higher Ed garners quotage from scholars, including some, like George Chauncey, whom Kramer actually invokes in his rant.

Offshore living

2009-04-28T17:09:00.006-05:00

Salon looks at Patri Friedman's (yes, he's Milton's grandson) libertarian Seasteading Institute. Apparently, finding themselves a minority within the US, these libertarians hope to "open the oceans as a new frontier, where we can build new city-states to experiment with new institutions. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for forming a new government, because expensive though ocean platforms are, they are still cheap compared to winning a war, an election, or a revolution." The Institute has its online home h ere. Ahoy, micronations.

From nations-on-the-cheap to massive marquee commercial projects, Pruned notes a plan for the development of a Dubai-esque cedar-shaped artificial island off the coast of Lebanon. Which reminds me that back in February, BLDBLG speculated on the conversion of decommissioned Gulf of Mexico oil rigs into luxury hotels.

["Eighth wonder of the world" - replete with exploited immigrant workers, English footballers, astronomical air-conditioning bills, and an unpleasant economic crisis. Paradise.]