Small Streams

Do You See What I See?

For anyone who wants to read a good book on the construction and interpretation of the "man made environment," I would suggest a book I received as a Christmas present, George Nelson's How to See.

Reading "How to See" it's hard to tell sometime whether I'm reading a monograph or wandering through a smorgasbord, whether I'm following a critique of our treatment of nature, or Nelson's musings on what he thinks looks good or is designed well.

The book's about 15 to 20 thousand words long, much of it in the introduction.

Seeing things is an intellectual-aesthetic exercise which increases one's inalienable capital: riches that can be accumulated without cost and once acquired, cannot be lost or stolen. — p. ix

Essays come under a number of different, sometimes enlightening, headings:

Numbers
Arrows
Focus
Nonverbal Messages
Important Messages
Public Sitting
Important Documents
Hydrants

Here's a sample of the essay on directional arrows:

Arrows are part of the public baggage that goes with an addiction to mobility . They are a powerful, pervasive element in the modern scene. They prick, cajole, exhort, sell, direct; and there is no way of measuring the amount of brain damagge they do. — p. 12.

The "Important Documents" essay contains a picture by Saul Steinberg (one of my favorites).


Nelson's earnest tone and his unbridled criticism of industrial society sometimes hits and sometimes misses the mark, but he always makes you think about and rethink a subject.

...it was disturbing to discover that Detroit's bland and shiny products are more"alive" visually in death than when they come off the assembly lines.

In the "Skylines" essay, Nelson made me reexamine the iconic city skyline photo, and that these towers of commerce might not be everybody's ideal of progress, not that that's what I thought. It's just that I never gave it much thought at all.

What you see may be what you get, but what you see is also what you think. In trying to "read" what the photos show, it helps a lot to note the functions of towers before and after, say, 1900.
Here we find, in the near total shift from churches, university, and government towers to office blocks. — p. 93.

Subsidizing Sprawl

The Brookings Institution's report on growth in Pennsylvania, "Back to Prosperity: A Competitive Agenda for Renewing Pennsylvania" makes some important arguments regarding growth and development in Pennsylvania.

The summary is this: "We haven't grown much, but we've used a lot of land in the process (from 1982 to 1997, 201,800 acres, an increase of 42.6 percent of land used for urban purposes)."

Today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has two pieces in the Forum regarding smart growth and sprawl. The first piece, by Thomas Hylton, points out the direct and indirect costs of sprawl, and that economic development in cities and boroughs has subtle benefits.

Because they place homes, stores and offices in a compact area, towns are far more energy-efficient and environmentally benign than sprawling development.

Writers for the Allegheny Institute say that older communities still get more subsidy from the Department of Community and Economic Development. What they don't include are the subsidies in the the form of highway and other infrastructure development costs.

In the future . . .

As corollaries to the pop artist Andy Warhol's bromide that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, I present the following:

In the future everyone will be famous in homeopathic doses.

In the future, everyone will be listed on imdb.

I'm glad I got that out of the way. What I really want to do is list a couple of P-G articles that I saw today.

One is a story on empty retail space Downtown. Actually, rather than leaving the space empty, the geniuses (and I don't use the term facetiously, these were the folks that came up with the fountain and the skating rink) at PPG Place decided to fill the space with all kinds of fabulous stuff. Marylynne Pitz covers the story.

After having visited the convention center and the regional showcase last night, I'm convinced that Pittsburgh's task is to come up with amusements that can fill dead space. The convention center is a beautiful building, but filled with foot after foot, yard after yard, rod after rod of dead space.

Perhaps we can't get along in life just making amusements. What about things one actually makes, useful things? One story by Joyce Gannon covers the product development of a carboy scrubber, a carboy being the glass water jugs used by home-based beer and wine makers. Although I think you can get by with using a mild bleach solution for cleaning out most anything in a bottle, the device is both clever and non-toxic.

Digital Reproduction

On the way to looking up other things I found this online copy of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin's inquiry into what it means to have unlimited capabilities in producing, distributing, and owning artifacts.

"Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign."

Paul Valery

Feel free to copy the link.

We've Created a Monster

I guess I'll put this entry into the "communities and technology" category, because how we perceive and talk about nature deals with community and technology issues. That fudge being clarified, the issue is this:

Weather. How do we think about weather and do our local weather teams and local television stations benefit from a panicked approach to weather.

Being a little bit more panicked about weather might be good for me. On Friday we had a significant snow storm. By 8 o'clock, we had a four or five inches on the ground and a heavy, wet veil of snow in the air. Friday night is bowling night and I could have walked, but the streets were clearer than the sidewalks, and walking the half mile to the alleys probably would have meant wearing something heavier than my loafers and carrying an extra pair of socks with me.

I took an overcoat but no muffler and no hat, wiped off about four inches of snow off the car with my bare hands. The roads were slightly slick and there is a slight grade to the St. Lawrence O' Toole rec center, but the only real thing to be worried about were the other drivers and there weren't that many. I made it to the parking lot in regular time and gingerly walked through the parking lot so I didn't get my socks wet. The only real problem for the night turned out to be my first and third games.

After bowling, some of the fellows get together to have a beer, smoke cigars, and watch television or listen to music. The local news station had devoted about two five minute segments to Storm Team 11, and Steve Teeling was busy waving his arms in front of the radar images trying to convey the drama of the night's weather.

And I have to admit, weather is important, and a lot of the people who present the weather are well trained, articulate people who grasp the very complicated subject of meteorology. They probably have a better idea of what the word "stochastic" means than I do. But when Teeling said, "we have a monster on our hands," the fellows had to guffaw, even though we're not even sure how to guffaw.

A monster?! Perhaps if the snow storm had been tipping buildings over and lifting up automobiles, a la Godzilla we might have a monster. No doubt if you were in a car the weather could be dangerous. But let's face it, whatever problems the weather created were probably of our own making. Whatever fear or panic they provoked came from our own perceptions. The only thing good that can be generated by calling the snow storm a monster is good ratings.

Strictly speaking, nature creates fearsome beasts, perhaps, but not monsters. People create monsters. In this case, Steve Teeling was trying to create a monster in our heads. If there were any injuries or deaths due to the snow storm, my guess is that most were automobile related. I repeat -- people create monsters.

So I finished my last beer for the evening. Headed out to my car. Backed down the parking lot. And my car, a Volvo, hesitated a bit, and in the amount of time I took to get out of the rut I was in, my mind worked through a couple of scenarios, I get out, I get out with the help of a few friends, or I just park the car, walk home and let the snow melt sufficiently or dig the car out. But a short back up later I was out of the parking lot, down the hill and back out on the flat streets.

My friend, Matt, asked me earlier in the evening why a Swedish car, a Volvo, wouldn't be four-wheel drive. Probably because most people in Sweden don't behave like maniacs, drive like maniacs, and expect the car to make up the difference.

One other thought: When I say people create monsters. I realize that I'm using a tautological definition. But there's another aspect to this. I remember taking a class with Dana Polan and him talking about Japanese monster movies, and that most Japanese movie monsters were the result of some human transgression against nature, radiation-leak, chemical spill, or lab experiment gone awry, and, perhaps, it was the Japanese psyche saying this was nature's payback for our nasty behavior to her. Perhaps our weather teams are busy recreating this narrative for us. We're bad to nature, stripping the ozone layer, increasing greenhouse gases, then nature takes revenge. Then we have to strafe it with airplane fire and finally John Ashcroft has to remove more of our civil liberties.

I didn't intend for this post to be so long. I only watched an hour of TV on Friday and I didn't even post what I think of John Fedko. No wonder I don't watch much television.

I Don't Get It

I remember watching a film on artist/sculptor/theater director Frank Garvey, and his robotic wheelchair-bound puppet called Goboy. Goboy would cajole people by saying "Gimme 50 cent. Gimme 50 cent. The Lord says to gimme 50 cent." Garvey gave a funny and enlightening talk afterward, and one of the things he said that the robot acts as a kind of litmus test on class. Certain classes of people, let's say bourgeois people, react uncomfortably to Goboy.

I'm kind of that way about graffiti. Nothing brought out the bourgeois person in me like what I saw today. Last week as I took a picture of the old Kroger building it looked like this.



When I took a picture today it looked like this.



Personally, I feel the graffitists have trashed an admirable ruin. I think "Sag(y?)ek" and "Yette" have a lot to answer for. Graffiti is very powerful and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, but today my sentiments went from "I can see why they would do that" to "why would they do something so foul?".