Here’s a set of maps from the NY Times, showing Netflix rental habits in various US cities. Note the east-west divide in Washington DC, the popularity of Milk in San Francisco, and Mad Men in Manhattan. It’s an interesting way to look at cultural consumption in relation to social geography, and makes me wonder what else can be learned from mail-order shopping.
He has plenty of people to shout down people like these lunatics who claim to believe he’s a psychotic commie-Nazi, but here ya go:
Print out a high-res version and and stick it up in your local creche, why dontcha.
Last time I noticed David Feherty, which must have been at least ten years ago, he was known for being a decent golfer from Northern Ireland and a bit of a wit, for a golfer anyway.
He seems to have spent the intervening years turning into a charmless PJ O’Rourke wannabe, and is now attracting attention for this epically bad piece about the Bushes moving to Texas in which he fantasises about how every American soldier would like to kill prominent Democrat politicians. Oddly, some actual US soldiers are less than impressed at being depicted as mindless homicidal wingnuts.
Amusingly enough though, Feherty’s decline into Texas’s favourite dipshit golf waffler has been pretty well mirrored by a bizarre change in appearance from Daniel O’Donnell lookalike to some sort of sports-casual hellspawn.
Here are more photos from the Cushman collection of mid 20th century colour photography, which I wrote about a while back. This time what strikes me is the regular grandiosity of American civic architecture, and not just in the biggest cities. This is the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines:
Cushman found these neoclassical behemoths are found everywhere: Austin, Atlanta, Indianapolis, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cleveland, and most incongruously of all plomped between the barren mountains motels in Salt Lake City:
The BBC has a delightful story today. It is either the basis for a sit-com or a tear-jerker movie of triumph against the odds. Whatever it is, there’s wrestling involved so it’s sure to be a hit.
Young Gay Rites
By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS
Published: April 27, 2008
LAST NOVEMBER IN BOSTON, Joshua Janson, a slender and boyish 25-year-old, invited me to an impromptu gathering at the apartment he shares with Benjamin McGuire, his considerably more staid husband of the same age. It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be.
“I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”
Spotting me alone by a window seat decorated with Tibetan pillows, Joshua, who by that point had a few drinks in him, grabbed my arm and led me toward a handful of young men huddled around an antique Asian “lion’s head” chair. “Are you single? Have you met the gays?” Joshua asked, depositing me among them before embarking on a halfhearted search for the couple’s dog, Bernard, who, last I saw him, was eyeing an eel roll left carelessly at dog level. (At the other end of the living room, past a marble fireplace, the straights — in this case, young associates from the Boston law firm Benjamin had recently joined — were debating the best local restaurants.)
As the night went on, the gays and the straights — fueled, I suspect, by a shared appreciation for liquor — began to mingle, and before long the party coalesced into a boisterous celebration. Joshua looked delighted. And in a rare moment of repose, he sidled up to his taller, auburn-haired mate.
“Honey,” Joshua said, “we may be married, but we still know how to have a good time, don’t we?”
Interesting article, though I’m not sure about the constant use of exclamation marks and italics. Don’t straight people get those when they emphasise things?
Thank you, internet, for bringing us America’s worst property listing pics. Much to delight the senses there, but I thought this one had a timeless simplicity:
A few things I’ve been reading / listening to recently, all from America:
In ‘Clogged Arteries‘, Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes say transport funding in the US has been spread too thinly and not targeted towards the congested cities where it can do most good. They link this overly-egalitarian approach to the proliferation of ‘earmarks’ in federal transportation legislation, ie the ‘everyone gets a new highway’ approach to consensus-building.
In this speech (see also here and here), Jonathan Kozol attacks (among other things) unequal public school funding: New York City spends $11,000 per child in public schools, compared to $19,000 in nearby suburbs and $22,000 on Long Island, never mind the fact that children in the city tend to come from more problematic backgrounds. Much of this disparity is due to the funding of local schools from local property taxes with little redistribution according to needs.
In ‘The Inherited Ghetto‘, Patrick Sharkey describes the forces varying from outright to indirect discrimination that have contributed to the ongoing racial segregation of residential America. Notably, the response to the growing economic marginalisation of blacks in urban areas due to industrial decline and middle class flight to the suburbs was not to try and regenerate cities but to institute mass incarceration.
Finally, in ‘A Level Playing Field for Cities‘, Ed Glaeser gives a handy summary of how these issues fit together:
While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty.
I think there’s a fairly different approach to these kind of issues in England, which seems to have smaller spatial inequalities and greater concern over ‘postcode lotteries’ in public services and the like. The absence of a legacy of extreme racism may have a lot to do with this, but I’d also link it to the much greater centralisation of government and public finance in England. I’ve tended to see this a bad thing as it reduces local government’s incentive and ability to pro-actively develop their area, but it does have the effect of smoothing out inequalities - obviously by greater redistribution, but also in a prior sense in that when services are funded by local taxes the incentive to surround yourself with rich people and keep as far away from poor people as possible is that much stronger. It’s also worth noting that Glaeser criticises American land use restrictions of the ‘maximum density’ type, while restrictions on sprawl (which I believe he also dislikes) have arguably contributed to the relatively good performance of English cities.
Anyway, these issues clearly have ramifications beyond economics and local government finance. If I had the academic chops I’d like to try and write something about it all under the general heading of ’spatial justice’ (as compared to ’social justice’) that also brought in issues of political and environmental rights, but I don’t really have a clue where to start.
Take a look at this video of a recent Obama speech.
In the background on the left, right at the start - isn’t that Louis Theroux?
Funny coincidence: just yesterday I was reading the bit in the script for Annie Hall where Alvy finds a copy of the National Review in Annie’s apartment and suggests she gets William F. Buckley to come round and kill the spider in her bathroom. I thought “Hee hee, brilliant! Wait, who’s William F. Buckley?”. Well, now he’s dead, but apparently he was a leading conservative intellectual in the days before that was a contradiction in terms. Tyler Cowen links to some interesting YouTube clips, including this interview with Chomsky. Buckley’s persona is pretty odd: he’s obviously clever, but (to me, anyway) he comes across as a pompous and somewhat oleaginous bullshitter who in this case has his rhetorical ass handed to him by young Noam.
Update: some considerably less superficial analysis here
I do enjoy the deliriously clichéd style of much American political commentary:
The cheeseheads have spoken. And the message they delivered in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin was loud and unequivocal. There are fancier (or gentler) ways of interpreting it, but what the hearty souls who braved the subfreezing temperatures to cast their votes from Milwaukee to Menomonie announced was this: Virginia and Maryland weren’t anomalies; Barack Obama has the Big Mo; and Hillary Clinton is close to being forced from the stage by another lady — the fat one who likes to sing.
The Clinton campaign is laboring mightily to stuff a sock down that corpulent old dame’s throat.[continues…]
Lots of interesting map-related stuff around recently.
So Philip Morris is supposedly pioneering bold new strategies in an attempt to maintain its hold on established markets while reaching out to millions of new victims in less nannyish climes. The Wall Street Journal has this video on two new products apparently put forward by PM, both of which strike me as surprisingly unsinister - endearingly goofy, even. Or is that the point??
I also like the way the (American) journalist grinningly informs us that neither will catch on Stateside because Americans are too lazy and stupid. Thanks for the insight!
This is great, but I can’t help wondering exactly how many times Tom Cruise has really got involved in the aftermath of car accidents and what exactly he does for the victims. “Probably just stops them screaming” is Jay’s suggestion.
I liked Matthew Yglesias’:
I think Kansas will beat Virginia Tech, but the real winner of the Orange Bowl will be John McCain as the merest thought of football reminds voters of his toughness.
Got it right too.
I’ve only barely darkened the doors of the museums and other stuff of New York, and I’m not going to lie, the main reason is spending a lot of my time there in dive bars.
My sister recently got a new job in some trendy bar on the Lower East Side. Apparently it’s “a hipster dive bar (yes they serve PBR) and many of the customers wear trucker caps in an ironical fashion (with skinny jeans)”. Luckily, I’m not fussy. So bring it on, Bar 169.
But in my slavish devotion to seeking out, tracking down and then drinking the shit out of the perfect Zombie(s), I discovered Otto’s Shrunken Head, where, according to legend, the following ritual occurs:
On Saturday nights at 2:30 AM a drink that is so decadent that it can only be served once a week, and then only for 30 minutes, will rear its ugly head. It’s called a “Slice of Heaven” and it involves “deep fried bacon” and a shot of your choice. Only the truly adventurous need apply!
I’ll apply! With money!*
*Assuming the euro hits $8.1347 by December 31st, which I confidently predict.
This one’s for Conor, who’s going to be there soon enough: strange maps has a great map panorama and lots of wonderful detail about the San Francisco quake and fire of 1906.
The quake lasted 42 seconds, causing severe damage. Ruptured gas lines (and the scarcity of water due to ruptures in those lines) caused city-wide fires that eventually were responsible for up to 90% of the total destruction. Additionally, since the insurance companies didn’t refund the actual quake damage, many people set fire to their own homes. The fires raged for four days and nights. By that time, 80% of the city was destroyed. Estimates of the damage range from $500 million to as high as $1 billion (equivalent to as much as $300 billion in 2005 money).
The army was brought in to control the fires (which they did with dynamite and even artillery barrages) and stop the looting. In all, 500 presumed looters were shot. Some destruction and loss of life occurred outside San Francisco, but the bulk of the 3.000 casualties were to be regretted in the Golden Gate city itself. Three quarters of its population of 400.000 were made homeless. Half of those fled across the Bay to Oakland and Berkeley, others took up residence in massive camps of shacks and tents at Golden Gate Park and the Presidio, among other places.
Some of those camps were still open in 1908, indicating the slowness of the rebuilding effort (the city wouldn’t be considered ‘rebuilt’ until the Exposition of 1915). Up until then, San Francisco had been the undisputed economic centre of the West Coast. Los Angeles profited from the diversion of trade, industry and population, and eventually overtook its rival to the north.
Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
Now if only he could predict lottery numbers by curling up next to them
Some great stuff in there though:
Nicholas Dodman, who directs an animal behavioral clinic at the Tufts University Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and has read Dosa’s article, said the only way to know is to carefully document how Oscar divides his time between the living and dying.
Yes, Tufts University.
And from elsewhere
Thomas Graves, a feline expert from the University of Illinois, told the BBC: “Cats often can sense when their owners are sick or when another animal is sick.
“They can sense when the weather will change, they’re famous for being sensitive to premonitions of earthquakes.”
Yes, cat expert Thomas Graves, that’s cat expert Tom Graves to his friends.
Good night.
Also, new song here, second item on the blog
There’s a wealth of reminiscences from Simpsons insiders in this Vanity Fair piece, but the thing that really struck me (from the first few thousand words, anyway) was this remark by an acquaintance of Matt Groening about the very start of it all, when he had just agreed to start doing one-minute animations for the Tracey Ullman show:
Polly Platt: What’s funny now, because he’s so rich, is that I was driving home from my office at Paramount, very shortly after that, and I saw Matt sitting at the bus stop. He didn’t even have a car. I had no idea he was so poor.
Which says a lot about the US, or maybe just LA.
To follow up yesterday’s post about the Cushman collection, here’s a brilliant post from johnnygunn of Daily Kos with a wealth of great colour photos of ‘America before Pearl Harbour’, including some of Cushman’s.
It includes some interesting detail on early Kodachrome:
As the 1930s came to a close, Kodak came out with Kodachrome film – the first commercially viable color film available to the general public. In 1937 and 1938, the colors were still not stable and accurate, but by 1939 Kodachrome was producing color images of remarkable precision.
Now, not just anybody could buy this film. It cost $5 per roll and had to be sent back to Rochester, New York for development. By comparison, in 1938 Congress established the first minimum wage at 25 cents per hour.
Over the course of three decades from the late 1930s on Charles W. Cushman of Indiana traveled the world and photographed what he saw on colour Kodak slides. On his death some 14,500 of these were bequeathed to Indiana University, who have made the collection available online.
By any standards this is an amazing body of work: for colour and quality they already stand out from most photography of that era, but throw in the range of locations and subjects, and Cushman’s eye for composition and interesting detail and there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here.
Cushman went all over: there are thousands of photos from the US, and hundreds from the UK. Best of all, there are a few dozen from Ireland, including some fantastic shots from a June 1961 visit to Dublin.
[edit: Forgot to say, you can get a much bigger version of each photo by clicking the links provided]
Here is College Green, not much changed apart from the traffic:
O’Connell Bridge and the Liffey:
On O’Connell Bridge (complete with flags, green bus and Bolands delivery van):
On O’Connell St itself (they didn’t seem to go in for road markings much in those days):
Cyclists at the bottom of Great Georges St:
And further up Georges St (the Long Hall hasn’t changed much!):
And lastly for Ireland, here’s one from the Vico Road looking over Killiney Beach and up to the hill, so bright and clear it could have been taken yesterday:
Then there’s London, also in the early 1960s. There are great shots here of Trafalgar Square, Picadilly Circus at night, a ‘huckster’ in Aldgate market, a couple of authentic urchins, the Hippodrome when it wasn’t such a dive, and Covent Garden when it was still a working market (with old-school market men who could balance stacks of pallets on their heads). I love this shot of the South bank of the Thames east of London Bridge, when an area that is now a mix of offices (featuring insufferable yuppies like me) and various cultural activities was solid working docks.
Some of the best stuff comes from the Moorgate area. I’m including this one because I’ve actually been up in that tower (Pat works in the offices below):
And then there’s this one, probably the shot of the collection for me, looking north from London Wall over land still lying waste after the devastating bombs of WWII to the church of St Giles-Without-Cripplegate:
Five years later Cushman returned to find them building the Barbican around St Giles:
The earliest photos are American, and the effect of seeing things from such an early age in such vivid colour is pretty jarring. Here is a New York City street scene from 1941:
Here’s a hot-dog stand and here’s McSorley’s Old Ale House on East 7th St, which is still there today, more than can be said for many of the lower Manhattan neighbourhoods Cushman photographed.
Finally, proof that times really have changed: in 1941 even the bums were well-dressed:
Watching the excellent Once Upon A Time In New York, about the almost simultaneous emergence in the 1970s of punk, hip-hop and disco in one city, I was struck by how many people brought up an old obsession of mine - cheap housing as the foundation for great artistic innovation. Large parts of NYC in the late 60s and early 70s were so terrible that the city literally gave away homes in run-down areas like the Lower East Side to people like John Cale who turned up to the housing office claiming to be artists, while low rents naturally attracted those whose particular skills were not greatly rewarded in the prevailing economic climate. For lack of anything else to do, many of these people set about creating. Much of what they created was complete rubbish, but there were enough sparks of genius flying around that eventually we got some great music out of it. And I seem to remember interviewees in that Bob Dylan documentary saying something similar about Greenwich Village in the early 60s - lots of young people came to the city to try new things, and cheap housing concentrated enough of them in close proximity for interesting things to happen.
Now it’s different, of course. One talking head (not a Talking Head, though they were interviewed too) in Once Upon a Time came straight out and said it - New York is screwed, because they’ve made it too expensive for young people to come here. Now, that’s not completely true - plenty of young ‘uns do come, but economic necessity means they tend to be the more conventionally talented, so there’s less chance of anything unexpected coming out of it.
I might be overstating the case here - maybe there was just something in the New York water in the 1970s. Maybe it was sheer pervasive boredom, borne out of the same recession, that was the key. But I think I’ve seen the same phenomenon elsewhere. In a brief trip to Berlin several years ago now I got the impression of a lot of fairly barmy but fun people who would simply not be able to do their barmy but fun stuff if they had to get proper jobs to get by. And I suspect it’s happening the other way here in London, where large-scale abandonment fed our own punk movement in the 1970s but the high cost of living today means hanging around until inspiration strikes isn’t really an option. But hey, at least we’ve got a Culture Strategy, which I can’t help but feel misses the point somewhat.
Anne Coulter, who is what they call a “conservative pundit”, has raised the tone of the embryonic 2008 US presidential race. Here, she speaks (at the ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’) about John Edwards. You know, the ineffectual one…with the hair.
It’s always funny to see things descend to this level, but this is pretty fast. I think they should wait til each party has selected a candidate, then concentrate all their powers of cutting satiro-lambastment at him or her.
In a way, this kind of stupidity is almost endearing. Here’s George W. Bush being interviewed on ‘60 Minutes’:
PELLEY: Do you think you owe the Iraqi people an apology for not doing a better job?
BUSH: That we didn’t do a better job or they didn’t do a better job?
Cycling through a very wet London this morning, I couldn’t stop humming this song:
I Love L.A. - Randy Newman
Hate New York City
It’s cold and it’s damp
And all the people dressed like monkeys
Let’s leave Chicago to the eskimos
That town’s a little too rugged
For you and me, you bad girlRollin’ down the imperial highway
With a big nasty redhead at my side
Santa ana wind blowin’ hot from the north
And we was born to rideRoll down the window, put down the top
Crank up the beach boys, baby
Don’t let the music stop
We’re gonna ride it till we just can’t ride it no moreFrom the South Bay to the Valley
From the west side to the east side
Everybody’s very happy
’Cause the sun is shining all the time
Looks like another perfect dayI love L.A. (We love it!)
I love L.A. (We love it!)Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He’s down on his knees
Look at these women
Ain’t nothin’ like em nowhereCentury Boulevard (We love it!)
Victory Boulevard (We love it)
Santa Monica Boulevard (We love it!)
Sixth Street! (We love it, We love it!)I love L.A!
I like the song even more now I know that the Los Angeles Olympics adopted it as a kind of anthem in 1984. Yes, come for the Games, stay for the homelessness.
So a bunch of people want to sue Borat for making them look stupid. I feel a bit more sorry for the Romanian villagers than those frat-boys but I don’t fancy any of their chances, because the disclaimer form they all had to sign (assuming the clauses in Romania were similar, or as similar as they needed to be given the legal system there) is a doozy. I suppose it’s unlikely any of them read all the way down to the end of paragraph 4, but if they did wasn’t there even a twinge of discomfort at signing away the right to redress in case of
(d) intrustion (such as any allegedly offensive behaviour or questioning or any invasion of privacy, (e) false light (such as any allegedly false or misleading portrayal of the Participant, (f) infliction of emotional distress (whether allegedly intentional or negligent), (g) tresspass (to property or person) … (k) defamation … allegedly false or misleading statements or suggestions about the Participant in relation to the Film or the Film in relation to the Participant), (m) prima facie tort (such as alleged intentional harm to the Participant), (n) fraud (such as any alleged deception or surprise about the Film or this consent agreement )…
I’m especially fond of that last clause. I’ve got a question for the legal experts out there, though - does this kind of disclaimer really stand up in court? Or is it meant more to deter legal battles than to win them?
Today is Suppress the Vote Day in America, when, as Brad Plumer reminds us, “political parties the country over—Republicans in particular—spend millions trying to keep people, especially minorities, from making their way to the voting booths and electing their representatives”. Here’s a nice example from 2004:
[In] Franklin County, Ohio, fliers purporting to be from the county Board of Elections announced that because of high voter registration, Republicans would be voting on Election Day, and Democrats would cast their ballots the next day; they ended with the inspired line, “Thank you for your cooperation, and remember voting is a privilege.”
Well, if a surgeon can get insurance for performing an integral part of his job – for instance surgery – why not CIA agents for an integral part of theirs?
From The Telegraph:
Torture insurance plan for CIA agents
WORRIED CIA agents are taking out torture insurance as fears grow that they will be targeted by alleged terrorists and their victims in American courts, writes Francis Harris.
The £160-a-year (E234) policies will provide the spies with about £106,000 (E155,000) in legal costs and about £530,000 (E777,000) towards awards made by the courts if they are sued and lose.
The rush for policies, which cover suits lodged for torture, human rights abuse and professional failings in the lead-up to the September 11 atrocities, was confirmed by CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield.
In the event of legal action, agents would normally be provided with government-funded legal cover, but many worry that in cases of alleged severe wrongdoing, assistance could be withdrawn.
Several different kinds of genius at work here:
Are there any really lost arts, creative techniques that nobody can really master any more? Dunno, but I nominate the panoramic map. There is a fantastic online collection of around 1,500 such maps (no Wildwood, New Jersey, sadly) from 19th and early 20th Century America hosted by the Library of Congress here, and it’s really worth exploring. These maps are not just beautiful, they’re historically invaluable because they provide a precise snapshot of each town’s development, detailed down to the architecture of each building, the trees in each field, the smoke puffing from trains rolling into town and the horseback carriages trundling through the streets, so that you get a picture not just of the layout but the character and activity of a place. It’s amazing to me that this map of Los Angeles in 1909 is nearly 100 years old yet does a better job of telling you about the city than anything since then except, maybe, Google Earth in the last year or so:
For reference, here’s pretty much the same view in Google Earth:
Okay, you can fly around the Google Earth view, but you don’t have to fly around the map.
Some of the maps really are gorgeous. I really like Albert Ruger’s style, which combines precision with a slightly weird child-like quality so his towns feel like perfect settings for Tim Burton films. Like this detail from Decatur:
.
The biggest panoramic map created was the 200 square foot Pictorial St. Louis of St. Louis, which shows the entire city down to this level of detail:
There’s a potted history of panoramic maps in the US here, and while we’re at it here’s a fun panoramic of China by Hokusai from 1840.
