by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

An empty downtown, with boarded-up shops and desolate sidewalks, is truly a sad sight to behold. It is also symptomatic of much larger forces, namely the flight from the urban core into the suburbs that wound up decimating the vitality of American cities during the second half of the 20^th century. Last month I argued that the urban form of the skywalk was a partial and misguided response to reviving the emptied-out downtowns of American cities. In most instances these structures, which sought to connect buildings without touching the street, were a prolonged, painful failure, because they further segregated street life and did not succeed in drawing people back into that urban core, at least in a way that could be considered dynamic and responsive to the larger needs of the urban fabric. In a sense, much was expected of skywalks, but in fact they were little more than a Band-Aid, and served to only exacerbate the problem through the fundamentally anti-social tendencies that underlie their design and use.

And yet, like any other urban form, skywalks are agnostic – what determines their success is not just their design and implementation, but also the problem that they seek to address. It is perhaps more accurate to say that skywalks, along with many other forms of intervention in the urban built environment, reveal the question that designers have posed themselves, believing that that question, whatever it might be, is in fact the correct and most pressing one. So, in the case of American cities, skywalks were employed to revive downtowns, and, generally speaking, failed. Other cities around the world have enlisted skywalks not because there is too little density, but because there is too much. Does this new context increase the possibility of success? In order to understand what a difference a difference makes, we first need to consider the forces that shaped cities in the West, and what the difference might be between this phenomenon and that of the global urban South.

The narrative describing the development of American cities can be retold as a narrative of excessive space. When energy and labour are cheap, economic logic drives growth outward; it is always easier to build on virgin ground rather than re-organize an existing built environment. This is especially true when urban areas are not bounded by geographic obstacles such as water or mountains – a condition true of most mid-Western cities and not a few coastal ones.

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by Namit Arora

It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.

Let's begin by clarifying what “symbol” means here. One way to do this is to contrast symbols with signs. A sign, such as a red light, a grimace, a growl, or a thunderstorm, signifies something direct and tangible, making us think or act in response to the thing signified. Issuing and responding to signs is commonplace in Animalia. A symbol, on the other hand, is “something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention”. A symbol allows us to think about the thing or idea symbolized outside its immediate context, such as the word “water” for the liquid, “7” for a certain quantity, and “flag” for a community. What is symbolized doesn't even have to be real, such as God, and herein lies the power of symbols—they are the building blocks of abstract and reflective thought. Evidence of material symbols used by humans dates back at least 60-100K years, when burial objects and decorated beads start to appear in archaeological finds. Linguistic symbols were almost certainly in use long before then.

According to Susanne Langer, symbols serve “to liberate thought from the immediate stimuli of a physically present world; and that liberation marks the essential difference between human and nonhuman mentality … Words, pictures, and memory images are symbols that may be combined and varied in a thousand ways.” It is only through symbolic thought that we imagine the past or the future—mental time-travel, including episodic memory, requires the use of symbols. Indeed, language is really a system of symbolic communication, combining words (which are symbols) and syntax. If non-human animals lack symbols, what and how do they really think?

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My breathing system seems to be:
these lungs within; without: those trees
……………………….. —Inspiration.

Conjoined

There are mountains in this pic of withered leaves—
as from a satellite

and voids

in shadows they recede

but I see
brittle peaks

bright spines
curling from dead stems
dry as earth desiccated by the practices
of men:

light filaments
that have broadcast life and breath:

sucked dioxide carbon in,
transmuted it like alchemists then
expired it as oxygen

dry lungs of trees
alveoli complements

sister lungs as close and tight as twins; consider:

when that one dies
this one withers
.

by Jim Culleny
5/15/12

Withered Leaves

by Randolyn Zinn

Ed Bilous, the composer and teacher, met me the other day at Juilliard where he has created the Center for Innovation in the Arts. Last month he was awarded the William Schuman Chair at Juilliard and you will be able to watch a video of his stirring speech at the end of this interview where he makes the case for re-imagining our educational system with the arts placed at the center of the curriculum.

Ed and I met In the early 1980s when we were teaching artists together at Lincoln Center Institute–the aesthetic education program that matches artists with schoolteachers to prepare students for seeing productions of dance, theater and music.

Randolyn Zinn: What year was that exactly…?

Ed Bilous: Had to be between ‘81 and ’83. I was working on my PhD at Juilliard at the time.

RZ: Just think, no cell phones or Internet. The extent of personal technology were our SONY Walkmans and telephone answering machines with tiny reel-to-reel tapes inside. You couldn’t dial in for your messages from outside the house.

EB: That’s right.

RZ: So how did you become so adept with technology and its interface with music?

EB: Technology has always been a part of music making. The shift from harpsichord to piano was largely a technological revolution, as was the creation of the organ. When you think about early composers a thousand years ago, their resources were fairly undeveloped, basically just primitive string and wind instruments. Bit by bit, technological changes brought them to life in a way that allowed far more expressivity and creativity until we got the kind of instruments we see in the orchestra today. The transformation from harpsichord to piano is amazing. The harpsichord doesn’t really have dynamics; you play loud or you play soft, but you can’t really achieve a crescendo. Having that ability with the piano transformed music making and a whole new kind of playing and composing. Trumpets went from just being bugle-like things, cones of brass, to instruments with valves that allow all kinds of sophisticated chromatics and articulation. So…technology has always been a part of music.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

As a boy, I stole
into grandpa’s study.

An art merchant,
he loved books

with gilded edges,
Aristotle to Zola

all stuck together
in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out
to his black Chevy,

rifled for dirty bits,
steering her away

for a spin,
teen tunes swirling

in my head. ‘I want
to hold your hand.”

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like the rest of us poor mortals, wandering in constant confusion between things and the names for things, bewitched by language and unable to resist it, mathematicians and physicists are constantly struggling with their representations and yet entirely reliant upon them to grasp the world.

Many of the fundamental intuitions that we start to describe the world with are geometric or spatial: this is a point; this is another point; walk in this direction to get from the first point to the second; this is the path a particle takes. If we want to make this precise, to describe and classify and manipulate and compute, we need to be able to make these statements precise. The simple act of drawing a pair of coordinate axes on a flat surface and using pairs of numbers to describe points is extraordinarily powerful, yoking algebra and symbolic manipulation to geometry and spatial intuition, and it unlocks for us a language within which to watch spatial and temporal processes unfold. Similarly, describing points on the surface of the Earth by pairs of numbers (latitude and longitude are the most common) allows us to specify locations relative to other locations, to calculate distances and trajectories and to describe and communicate quantities that vary across the surface of the Earth, like weather patterns and temperatures.

But in picking a particular representation we've done a certain violence to the geometric structure we started with, by forcing an arbitrary layer of description on top. We might have decided to describe points relative to axes at right angles, like so:

But we could equally well have rotated the axes, or shifted the center, or chosen axes that were at other angles, like so:

Similarly, the standard way to describe points on the surface of the Earth is by their distance from the equator (i.e. latitude) and their distance from a line perpendicular to the equator and passing through Greenwich (longitude), but I could choose to describe places by how far away they are from my house and in which direction relative to some local landmark. And this is how we generally give directions locally.

And so, now that we've introduced a way of describing space, we have to be careful that we don't get led astray by our representations, and that we keep separate the convenient descriptors that we use and the spatial and physical quantities that we're trying to describe. Depending on our system of representation, the particular coordinates attached to London and New York might vary dramatically. But our calculation of the physical distance between them shouldn't depend on how we've chosen to represent them.

Physicists and mathematicians have developed a lot of theory to derive and explain which quantities are physically meaningful (e.g. the distance between London and New York) and which quantities are simply consequences of the particular representation that we have chosen (e.g. the longitude of New York). This is often not trivial. For example, as Einstein famously found, the distance in space between events will be calculated differently by observers moving at different velocities (a form of coordinate dependence), but there is a quantity called the interval that combines the distance and time between events that all observers can agree on.

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by Mara Jebsen

I met a tipsy older lady in a place;

She said, “Honey, it doesn't really come clear

'til you're sixty.” But she wouldn't say

what. The television was blaring

about chimpanzees. Some journalist

had likened our president to a chimp.

Meanwhile, a chimp named Travis

was reported to have sipped

wine; and more recently tea, laced with Xanax,

before his “unprecedented

killing spree.” The reporters said Travis

“had no history of violence,” but one of

my students, who'd grown up in T's town

knew a guy Travis had attacked-back

when they were kids. The bartender, Gene

checked it on his i-phone, and there were photos

of the owner–or should I say “mother?” snuggled

up tight with the chimp, before bed.

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by Omar Ali

Saadia Toor is an assistant professor of sociology and social work at the City University of New York and recently published a book about Pakistan titled The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War politics in Pakistan. She states that the book grew out of her PhD thesis (a doctoral thesis in developmental sociology titled “”The Politics of Culture and the Poetics of Protest: Pakistani Women and Islamisation, 1977-1988.”). The book’s official blurb states:

The State of Islam tells the story of the Pakistani nation-state through the lens of the Cold War, and more recently the War on Terror, in order to shed light on the domestic and international processes behind the rise of militant Islam across the world. Unlike existing scholarship on nationalism, Islam, and the state in Pakistan, which tends to privilege events in a narrowly-defined political realm, The State of Islam is a Gramscian analysis of cultural politics in Pakistan from its origins to the contemporary period. The author uses the tools of cultural studies and postcolonial theory to understand what is at stake in discourses of Islam, socialism, and the nation in Pakistan…

She also states that:

I wanted to subvert this discourse by highlighting the complexity of Pakistan’s history and the primacy of people’s struggles within it, as well as the role of the US-aligned establishment (and, at key junctures, liberals) in quashing these struggles and the alternate political and cultural visions they embodied.

It is indeed possible to write a good work of history that is also a subtle work of socialist (or other) propaganda and that appeals to the author’s in-group while reaching a larger audience. But this takes a lot of skill and experience and Ms Toor, unfortunately, is unable to manage this feat. In her youthful enthusiasm for her version of the socialist cause (a cause she formally joined by becoming a member of the Pakistan workers and peasants party or Mazdoor Kissan Party, while back in Pakistan researching her PhD thesis) leads her to shoehorn every event into an academic-Marxist narrative that owes more to to Tariq Ali and fashionable Wesern academic prejudices than to the actual history of Pakistan. Of course, it is possible for youthful enthusiasm to produce a great book (John Reed’s “Ten days that shook the world” comes to mind) but unfortunately, this is not that book.

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by Kevin S. Baldwin

Spring has arrived, Summer is just around the corner and once again I must deal with the enigma that is my yard. As I look around town, there is a wide range of lawns spanning from, what Michael Pollan (2001) would call, Apollonian control to Dionysian abandon. Mine is towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum.

This is by choice. I have never understood lawns. What exactly is the point? A uniform swath of green grass seems so contrived and unnatural. As practiced in much of 21st century North America, that monoculture is a triumph of technology. It takes a lot of inputs to maintain such a beast: Regular mowing, herbicides, fungicides, pesticides, fertilizer, and in some areas, water. Perhaps that is the point.

I remember growing up in upstate New York, helping to fertilize the yard, mowing its weekly growth, and then putting the clippings in bags to be taken to the dump. It just seemed wasteful at the time (not to mention that as a fifth or sixth grader, it really cut into my playtime). Now I would probably mulch the grass in place and skip the fertilizer. Later, as a teen in southern California, I had to religiously apply water, herbicide and fungicide to maintain our lawn. Again, it seemed colossally wasteful. I tried to convince my parents to switch to more drought friendly vegetation, but they weren't that enthusiastic about it. As it turns out, I now happen to live in one of the few areas in the country where it is possible to grow lawns without irrigation or fertilization. I mow it when it gets shaggy, and that's about it. I'd rather spend time gardening than trying to achieve a “perfect” lawn.

A few square feet of my lawn resemble the chemlawn ideal (an example of modern Platonic essentialism?), but it is mostly a patchwork of grass, clover, creeping charley, dandelions, and many other species that I have not identified. In the heat of summer, with little rain, the grass will retreat as it is displaced by crabgrass, which is a hot-dry specialist. If the rains return, the grass fights its way back. I enjoy witnessing this tug-of-war. My lawn is diverse and dynamic.

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by Hasan Altaf

One of the few reliable characteristics of the institutions of the government of Pakistan is that they will only rarely stick to their mandates, that they will only occasionally consider themselves bound to fulfill their theoretical functions – the idea of the “public servant,” for example, seems to have passed ours by entirely. Given that the results of this tendency are so frequently destructive, or at best neutral, we should look kindly on Justice Asif Saeed Khan Khosa's recent bout of poetic inspiration at the conviction of Prime Minister Gilani for contempt of court. It's easy to say, as the prime minister's lawyer did, that judges should refrain from adding poetry to their judgments (“especially” their own; maybe Iqbal would have been acceptable?) and just make their decisions and let that be that, but in a country where that is so rarely that, a little bit of riffing off Khalil Gibran is hardly the end of the world.

“Pity the Nation,” Justice Khosa's addendum to the court's decision, has struck quite a chord. It has earned slaps on the wrist not only from the Prime Minister's counsel, but also from a former ambassador (who would like to shift the conversation entirely – “cit[ing] poetry instead of law while sentencing an elected leader on questionable charges reflects Pakistan's deep state of denial about its true national priorities” – as if the accountability of leaders were not a hallmark of a functioning democracy; as if in focusing on extremism and terrorism we should ignore all the other injustices of the country; as most of what happens in the government of Pakistan is not “questionable”) and an Express Tribune columnist who saw Khosa's Gibran and raised him a Byron. It has also become a Twitter catchphrase that within a few days has been used across the political spectrum (PML, PPP, PTI, P-ick your own), for matters personal (“…where children of judges get admission in aitchison college even after failing the entry test”) and national (loadshedding), for criticism of literature (“…where bad poetry is appreciated”) and tradition (“…where political parties are transferred over a will like family property”), and even the requisite clever meta-tweets invoking pity for the nation that pities itself on Twitter.

Justice Khosa's cri de coeur led me to feel pity mostly for Justice Khosa – and, by extension, the rest of our “public servants.” Being a Pakistani has become hard enough; seeing what has become of the country (what has been done to it, what has been done to us, what we have done to ourselves and to our country and to each other and to others) is hard enough; caring about Pakistan has become, in a time when every day brings bad news, hard enough. Imagine being one of those who truly does make it what it is, who truly has the power to shape and control some portion of the country's destiny; it must be impossible to sleep at night. Considering the bizarre situation in which the Court has been placed and has placed itself (the chain of causes and effects here, the schematic of who is scratching whose back and how and why and when, is so ridiculous that to talk about is pointless), the justice's poem seems to me an entirely understandable response, the breaking of the camel's back by a particularly absurd straw. And sometimes, as any self-respecting angst-ridden teenager will tell you, there really is nothing to do but write a poem and put it online.

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by Maniza Naqvi

In the country of Southern Diebeidiya a multi-fold problem had arisen. The people had been found out to be cheating, lying, ungrateful wretches. Not playing by the rules. Scheming and conniving to thwart our best intentions, breaking our trust at every turn. We had tried to make them pull themselves up by their socks, but what else was to be expected in a place where socks are not worn? So we procured appropriate technology, brought in technicians and experts and even sociologists to tell us the most historically, culturally, respectful way to introduce and produce socks. They told us to add in to our good intentions, beneficial lessons on self development that could be taught while the people produced the socks. So we procured and placed radios and public address systems to broadcast useful lessons and where this wasn’t possible we trained trainers to train people who could read out lessons to the workers while they made socks. This raised many more questions and so we procured more experts. We taught the people how to weave the socks and of course we provided the handlooms and the yarns. All we asked in return was that they made the socks and then brought them to us so that we could in return provide them with daily wages. Was this too much to ask? The people at first complained that weaving socks took them away from their tasks of earning a living, cooking, cleaning, milling, harvesting and herding. Took them away from weaving all the other things, they wove. But we knew that these people were poor and it was so because they did not know how not to be poor. And we would teach them. They needed to learn how to pull themselves up by their socks so we persevered in teaching them. We were exhilarated and thought they had learned when suddenly piles of socks began to arrive at the encampment where the experts lived alongside us. We gladly took in all the socks at first in exchange for the cash we had promised. Everything was going well, so well that we organized a film crew to arrive and make what would be a wonderfully moving documentary of our good works showing many examples of people pulling themselves up by their socks. It was going to be about people counting on us to make their dreams come true. It was to be full of hope and promises.

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by James McGirk

Pundits on the right and left have described President Barack Obama as having a distant attitude toward the United States – on the right they call it narcissism and hint at secret agendas and question his patriotism, while on the left they wonder darkly whether he might be “too brainy to be president.” I think it is something else. I have never met President Obama, but our lives have converged in unusual ways. Perhaps unpacking my own intense and complex relationship with the United States might shed some light into what might at first seem like an aloof and distant attitude toward our homeland.

Mr. Obama spent his formative years as an outsider and that estrangement shaped his view of the United States in a profound way. At school he was peculiar, he had lived overseas and was a jangled mixture of races and cultures. His father was Kenyan, his stepfather was Indonesian and his mother was a Caucasian expatriate academic. And Hawaii, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, was more like a forward operating base or an embassy than a state. Men and material were flowing through it en route to Vietnam and the federal government had a far more pervasive and sinister presence in Hawaii than it did elsewhere. The United States wasn’t a fundamental part of himself – not in the unambiguous, automatic way it would be for someone born in Detroit, Michigan – rather his sense of belonging to the United States was something that had to be negotiated.

My early life was equally jangled. My parents were journalists and my grandfather was a petroleum prospector for Texaco, which meant that our family was estranged from the United States for more than 70 years. Growing up, the U.S. was a highly abstract concept that was paradoxically close and accessible to me. My information about the country came from mostly headline news, and was highly polarized; this was the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and more often than not the news contained tales of the tape comparing the United States with the Soviet arsenals. What little of I saw of the real U.S. came in brief glimpses during visits to embassies or when we visited relatives in Southern California. In comparison to the bleakness of the United Kingdom, Spain and India, the U.S. was a technologically advanced paradise where everyone looked and sounded the way I did.

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by S. Abbas Raza

David is one of the rare rock stars who continues to innovate and surprise in several artistic fields decades after his rise to fame as lead singer of the Talking Heads in the 1970s. Today, even as he enters his seventh decade he shows no signs of slowing down. Last week I got the following email from him:

Last year I did some songs for a film by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino (check out his previous film Il Divo). This new film, This Must Be The Place, stars Sean Penn as a kind of present-day Robert Smith (The Cure). I wrote the music, Will Oldham wrote the lyrics and Michael Brunnock sang the songs. In the film, these songs appear on a demo CD that the Sean Penn character is handed. Now, the “Italian Academy Awards” have awarded us for best score and best original song!

If you want to get it, the soundtrack is available now on Amazon and iTunes and for people in the UK, there is also a vinyl collectors edition available.

I constantly listen to David's collaboration with Brian Eno, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, and you can hear it too, here.

Five years ago I wrote about the amazing experience of seeing David perform live at Carnegie Hall. You can read that here.

We hope that David will continue to enrich our lives in his particular and quirky ways for decades more to come!

[Photo from last.fm.]

by Misha Lepetic

There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements

Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.

The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.

How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,

One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.

Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of “jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.

This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.

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Another Piece of Eternity

I’m peeling back a page reading a new day
by the light of a new sun
.
mom died years ago, or was it yesterday?
.
I once read something similar by Camus
but was too new to understand that time bleeds
.
its dyes are not fast but run
between years and sometimes like old cloth
the colors of time become homogenous
.
but here’s this day blaring like a fanfare
from a new horn crisp as frost on glass
its brink sharp as the edge of a blade
slicing off another piece of eternity
.
.
by Jim Culleny
4/29/12