Tuesday gazette
We recently watched Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, so were quite taken by Adam Greenfield’s post on Playtime, mobile culture and the city, and the conversation between him and Enrique Ramirez in the comments.
Michael Jenson brings up related concerns in his essay “New Urban topologies: The Desire for Public Place in the Age of Virtual Geography” which we found in the the desire issue of on-line journal DRAIN. We liked the play and deterritorialisation issues too.
Things Magazine got us thinking about the new American embassy in Iraq, and contemporary connections between nationalism and monumental architecture. Others think there is a more basic question at hand: “[H]ow is it that the Americans cannot keep the electricity running in Baghdad for more than a couple of hours a day, yet still manage to build themselves the biggest embassy on Earth?”
We can’t imagine where we’ll find the time to read Dan Hill’s amazing documentation of the recent Postopolis! event, but we’re going to try. And if you managed to attend The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement conference last month in NYC, we’d love to hear about it!
Jan Chipchase is talking about more than the sounds of the city when he explains that “Tokyo is increasingly resonating to the sound of money changing hands. Or to be more precise - to the sound of prepaid Edy cashless money transactions.” This is part of the consumer megalopolis.
And we liked Faraway Places, Fabulous Journeys: Travels on Paper 1450-1700 and Beneath the Neon: Life and death in the storm drains of Las Vegas, both of which we scored from plep.