Faux Value

Over a few beers at an outside cafe at the University Village Shopping Center, Sage Van Wing, Dominic Black and I had a very friendly discussion ( really it was very friendly, only lowercase shouting) about the value of modern architecture in particular the value of malls and shopping centers in the modern landscape. We are gearing up for Friday's show on Seattle's architectural history so buildings are on my mind. I put it that the U Village had value, it was fine enough, considering it is a mall, a constructed place, a fabricated mall because it had added tables and planters and a playground and even a clock tower. In particular, the clock tower rankled Dom, (perhaps because he comes from a land where clock towers mean Big Ben and those English overlords, I don't know) but the whole place, for Sage and Dom, is too fake , all based on commerce, inorganic and undemocratic.
To which I say, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or at least the o.k. I say look at all the people enjoying the free public space, the playground, even, yes even the clock tower- you can see what time it is, after all! It could be worse, it could be a mall without any public space beyond the parking spaces and the sidewalk to the store.
We want a place to have a history and be able to see it in the built space. But what about the history lost when a place is built? Why not reject a place for being built in the first place. U Village was a nursery, and a farm, a wetland, and underwater. Does that history reveal itself? No, but neither does the wild past reveal itself in most built spaces.
We start with the built spaces we have. You don't like malls. You don't like their electric lights disguised as street lamps, we don't like their corporate franchises. O.k., but you are surrounded. For many people, this is their space, this is their starting point in the built environment. We aren't blowing them up. Let's try to re-imagine them. People are already adding their own mark. Witness the wineries in the industrial parks outside Woodinville, where planters and garden furniture carve out a more comfortable space in a parking lot. Yes it's still a parking lot, but it is a better parking lot.
What makes a place viable includes how it's used as well as how it's intended. If we reject places because they don't conform to our idea of our ideal city, there will be a lot of places left out. Can shopping malls be turned into more walkable places? Some mall owners are making an effort, even if it feels fake to some, other people are fine with it. They are not brainwashed, or commerce drones, they are simply looking for a place to sit in the shade and watch their kids play.
Can small businesses find a place to sink its roots and grow in malls? Yes, look at the small malls up and down Highway 99. Lower rents and available space offer business owners a chance to start up their businesses.
Now my friends argued that any outdoor dining on The Ave would be better than the mall because it's less controlled, more democratic. Can't argue it would have those attributes, but it would also be much noisier, more crowded and up against belching buses and racing cars. Does comfort have no value? It has some. If the mall businesses on Highway 99 put some tables and chairs out on their sidewalk along the noisy highway, are they making it a more livable, viable neighborhood. Well if the traffic doesn't bug you, if people turn out on the sidewalk and stroll by, I would guess so. Personally, I don't think I would like to be eating right next to 99. Now, most of those businesses are across the parking lot from the road, just as the U Village mall is separated from its parking lot. Would that distance make for a more pleasant experience, with the addition of some big trees in planters and a lattice covered in flowering honeysuckle? Yes, I think so. Would you reject it as weird and fake because you're eating at a mall surrounded by a parking lot and drag your chair over to the side of the highway?
Good places can be built. They were built for centuries. That is of course why we have these notions of good public spaces, ones that offer space for surprise, retreat, observation. In "A Pattern Language", Christopher Alexander has formulated the small built spaces that , added up, create the livable places. If a few of these patterns are used to add some life to faux spaces, don't they have value? Aren't they a little less fake?

Soccer Playing Robots

In preparing for a show on modern robots, we learned about the contest among soccer playing nanobots. This is a regular contest. The rules are specfic, the players are very small and the ball is really tiny.
We talked to a developer/ nano soccer coach from Carnegie Mellon.
Their field is the size of a quarter

Applications abound
Gizmodo has a great listing

Vanishing Tribes and Mahogany

The Yanomami  people were portrayed as violent by a few anthropologists working in the Amazon. The characterization was used against the tribe by the government and other interests that wanted the resources of their land.  An ethical controversy has erupted over in anthropology.  It has raised wider issues of the ways scientific studies impact individuals.

While preparing for a discussion on the ethics of contacting uncontacted tribes, a study on logging reveals the extent of the deforestation of the Mahogony's forest.

Here is their paragraph on range reduction:

As of 2001, 4% of mahogany's original range of approximately 55 x 10⁶ ha in Peru and 8% of the Bolivian range of 30 x 10⁶ha had been deforested. Although forest cover in these two countries is relatively intact, our expert survey revealed that decades of selective mahogany logging have dramatically reduced the areas with commercially viable populations. In Peru, mahogany is already commercially depleted in 50% of its historic range..... Furthermore, as mahogany populations diminish, loggers often resort to harvesting smaller size classes to maintain
harvest volumes (e.g., Weaver and Sabido 1997). Unless harvest rates are rapidly reduced, experts predict that within 10 yr an additional 28% of the historic range in Peru will lose populations of mahogany.... leaving few stands of reproductive-sized mahogany outside of protected areas. Logging has proceeded to an even greater degree in Bolivia. The experts said that over the past 20 yr mahogany has been reduced across 97% of its historic range and is no longer commercially viable in 79% of its range.

Kometter, R. F., M. Martinez, A. G. Blundell, R. E. Gullison, M. K.
Steininger, and R. E. Rice. 2004. Impacts of unsustainable mahogany
logging in Bolivia and Peru. Ecology and Society 9(1): 12. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss1/art12/


WWF is among many groups working on a sustainable logging practice campaign. Global Trees offers a good summary of the industry and the environmental issues.
This report argues that 60% of the demand is coming from the U.S. This report lists some basic import statistics.

The author of Mahogany Matters, Chris Robbins, is quoted in an ENS article.

"Mahogany is often considered the Rolls Royce of trees, but if we aren't careful, it may become the Edsel - commercially unviable and threatened with extinction," said Chris Robbins, author of "Mahogany Matters: The U.S. Market for Big Leafed Mahogany and its Implications for the Conservation of the Species." "All of the data we analyzed point to a not too distant future in which we could harvest big leafed mahogany out of commercial existence," said Robbins.

The story about the struggles of uncontacted tribes boils down to a battle over exploitation of a commodity. Mahogany is just one.

Steve Scher

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The Dark Side

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, First posted Friday August 1
Jane Mayer of The New Yorker has written the latest book to lay out the Bush Administration's march away from the accepted tenets of American law. "The Dark Side." She argues that Vice President Dick Cheney had been taking part in disaster planning for years. After 9/11, Cheney and other cabinet members would hunker down in a bunker and take turns running the government in post-disaster scenarios. Mayer says that a sense of real fear, even paranoia, drives the Vice President. The fear, combined with a lack of reflection in the administration following the intelligence failures that led to 9/11, created an atmosphere where new powers were taken on with little internal debate and a brash dismissal of the potential consequences.

Cold Mountain

Pulled Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems by Gary Snyder off the book shelf. Snyder's work continue to resonate. He just won a prestigious award for his work. He might be described as a nature poet, but Snyder goes much deeper. The judges who gave him an award called him a contemporary devotional poet.

His translations of the Cold Mountain poems of Han Shan, still resonate as well.
Here is #11



Spring water in the green creek is clear

Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white

Silent knowledge - the spirit is enlightened of itself

Contemplate the void: this world exceeds stillness.



Snyder reaches back more than 1200 years to find a poet who speaks to him about living in the natural world, a poet who wrote his lines on rocks and trees on the side of a wild mountain. As he learns about Han Shan, he is also basing his own poems on his experience in the wild, as a lookout in the North Cascades and on a trail crew in Yosemite.

'Riprap' by Gary Snyder

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles --
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.


Why does Snyder still resonate? Will his poems speak to some future reader the way Han Shan spoke to Snyder, and to modern readers?

Richard Gray, writing about Snyder in American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, quotes him:
'I hold the most archaic values on earth', Snyder insists, 'They go back to the Paleolithic'; 'I try to hold history and the wilderness in mind', he has added, 'that my poems may approach the true nature of things, and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times'."

Snyder moves slow, and his poetry reaches far back in time. Snyder's poems move through us like the slow grinding of the earth's plates.

The Wrack Line

The wrack line is the area of the shore between the low and high tides. The flotsam and jetsam of the sea come to rest along the wrack line. Who doesn't like to wander along that zone just for the discovery. Wander the wrack line of the modern world and see what washes up.

Iterations of the wrack line

There are many references to the wrack line. Where there is a tide, there is a wrack line. Here is one from South Asia

Walking the Wrack Line is by essayist Barbara Hurd. The publisher, The University Of Georgia writes
" Each chapter starts with close attention to an object-a shell fragment of a pelican egg, or perhaps a jellyfish-but then widens into larger concerns: the persistence of habits, desire, disappointments, the lie of the perfectly preserved, the pleasures of aversions, transformations, and a phenomenon from physics known as the strange attractor."

Scientists often check for turtle nests along the wrack line.

Canadian scientists study the wrack line on cobble beaches.

The Byzantine Empire- Really!

I love the podcast technology. Radio on demand allows you to listen to shows you miss and also programs that aren't even on radio. From lectures to wide ranging idiosyncratic topics to audio experimentation, this is an emerging outlet well worth your time.

I have spent the last few weeks listening to a history of the Byzantine Empire from Lars Brownworth. 12 Byzantine Rulers seems like a fairly esoteric subject, but it's a great bit of history about a topic I knew nothing about. I found the podcast through itunes.

Brownworth argues that far from being the declining stepchild of the Roman Empire, Byzantium was the center of the enlightened world for 1000 years. Its existence insured that the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world was passed on to the West. This is Big Person history, but the details of the rulers foibles and successes, the palace intrigues, the battles over taxes and services, the clash between competing empires and competing faiths make for a lively tale. The ideas resonate today.

Brownworth's delivery is excellent and his passion is infectious.
He concludes with a reading list and the promise of an upcoming book. I think I will track him down for an interview. We will find out if the history of the Byzantines connects with Weekday listeners.

Have a listen. What podcasts are you listening to?
Steve Scher

The Big Sort and The Lake City Seafair Parade

The Weather was great for the Lake City Seafair Parade. The crowds were thick, the Dick's Drive-in was packed.
These Seafair parades are a bit of Americana that grace the streets of the city much too rarely. Here's these kids in purple tutu's carefully tossing batons, kids in blue leotards and big white cowboy hats dancing in the street, guys in old tractors waving to the crowd, guys in fancy western garb bouncing around in an old truck, Mason's and Eagles and Commodores. It's our secret lives, our secret pleasures on the street for a laugh and a good cause.  We keep so much hidden during our working days.  We could use a parade daily.

I have been thinking about the parade in the context of The Big Sort. The author, Bill Bishop, will be our guest in the first hour of my radio show on August 4th. The subtitle of the book spells out his argument: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. Bishop argues that the success of American democracy depends on a healthy public space where people can disagree and come to a compromise, however messy. But as we isolate ourselves by race, religion, income, and other factors, we lose that space. Societies without a way to accommodate disagreement break apart. Bishop sees this happening now. It is a re-iteration of Putman in Bowling Alone and Franks in What's the Matter with Kansas. Bishop breaks down the fragmentation county by county, neighborhood by neighborhood
Which brings me to a question and takes us back to the Lake City Parade. Wasn't that community coming together, group by group, to take part in this larger, shared event? Yet each group is sponsored by its own church or club, isolated during their practice and preparations. Who knows but that each group might even self select for people of the same backgrounds. Given the likelihood of that, then the coming together at an event becomes even more important, doesn't it. I was most taken by the Seattle All-City Band. How often do kids from Sealth and Ballard and Garfield get to work together?
What are your examples, of both the isolation that is occurring and those outposts where people mix? And if Bishop and the others are correct, what is to be done? Or are we witnessing the disintegration of political America?
Steve Scher

Blogged with the Flock Browser

jellyfishing

This article in the New York Times on the increase in jellyfish populations around the world is one more indication of the decline of the oceans. The oceans are in dire straits from climate change, pollution and overfishing. The U.S. west coast governors announced an agreement to try and work together on ocean problems. But will it be too little? Many experts argue that one step to aid in fish populations is to increase the number of marine sanctuaries. We will be taking up the governor's report and the oceans' health in the next few weeks on my radio show. The NYT story and other fisheries troubles raise a question though: Should we call a complete halt to commercial fishing of the oceans?
Steve Scher