“The very mundanity of Kelly’s performance leads to my second, sadder conclusion about his presence at Pitchfork: That the formerly Chicago-now Brooklyn-based brains and businessmen behind the festival and the Webzine, … just don’t think that the music we embrace means anything at all in the real world. It’s just a cool, digitally stored backing track for your oh-so-hip and groovy lifestyle at home, and every bit the ideal tool in concert for marketing and money-making that we see at the festival’s larger corporate cousin, Lollapalooza.” Here’s Jim Derogatis’ insightful review of the Pitchfork fest in Chicago, and a critique of the mainstream music industry as well with the whole “irony thing” going on. Although irony can elicit personal and cultural emotions, it’s a double-edged sword. On some … Read More
The architect who designed Chicago’s first LEED Platinum-rated buildings talks about his latest book Sustainable Urbanism
Just because you have a LEED certified building, if you have to drive 30+ minutes to get there, you’re kind of negating the advantages….
Megacities!
Here is a playlist of National Geographic’s “Megacities” series. I was poking around to find some architecture documentaries and ran across these. I grouped them first by cities and then by themes that they made episodes around. It starts out in North America with New York, checks in on Las Vegas (yeah, it’s basically a city in a desert… totally a lot of work to create a modern city there), pops down to South America, and then crosses the Atlantic to look at some European cities (London and Paris), and then jumps over to Asia, starting with Mumbai and then checking in on Hong Kong and Taipai. I’ve also found a Jakarta documentary, but the resolution is so low it would be an embarrassing addition to the playlist.
“Building the Victorian City: Splendour and Squalour,” a lecture by Professor Simon Thurley [56:09]
I like architecture and urban planning, so you can see why I am intrigued by this lecture delivered from Gresham College (who has been all about talks open to the public since 1597 [!]) by Proffesor Thurley. This is totally one of those things you can put on and then walk away from, since there are only a few slides, and mostly a bunch of talking. It traces the history of worker housing in Victorian Britain that sprung from the industrial revolution, but you will notice there are quite a few U.S. parallels, especially their take on light wells in the slums–the deleterious absence of which (amongst a gigantic amount of other basic things) was so famously documented in New York City by Jacob Riis in How the … Read More
What’s really going on in debates over issues these days
Why are we even discussing gay marriage any more? Just yesterday this issue started being thrown around accompanied by intense debate, and suddenly our current president, Obama, vehemently takes one side all of a sudden when four years ago after he was elected he was silent. Isn’t it funny that every so often a certain emotional issue will pop up in the news that creates such a flurry of heated debate? Have you noticed? First there’s something in the news about the role of government in one’s personal life, as in things like “jobs” “healthcare” “human rights” and so on: things that appeal to your basic sense of security as an individual. Without a job you can’t sustain yourself, and you might get sick and then have no … Read More