This video summarises the thought processes involved in re-creating a magazine in a new way. That’s as in a new way since Caxton.
As an alternative, sure, to the print edition – but this is so immersive. Here’s Jack Schulze from BERG London, elucidating on the process.
Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.
By the way, it seems the 3G iPad is the one to go for… saving already for UK launch.
Catch more of Jack at the Horizonless Manhattan Project.
On Broadcasting House this Sunday 21 March 2010, with Paddy O’Connell, with the hook of the BA strike and Self walking to Heathrow/JFK (an old story in media-years I know but he’s clearly still affected by it…).
||Everytime I do it it’s the shock of the realisation of where I am… it’s a kind of local sourcing of ones’ sense of being in the world… it does mint the whole city anew for me, I do this a lot, I walk out from Central London and it works every time…||
Liked this aside from Self : (on an underpass sign at heathrow) – No Pedestrian Access – go back to the Renaissance
Link to the original psychogeography piece in the Independent (oh those russians…). Sorry can’t locate the tv programme on the airport walk.
Last year whilst writing about geomagnetism in birds, I listened to Messiaen much more carefully. This year has begun with Arvo Part, starting with Bjork’s late 90′s series on Minimalism. The second clip, Part’s Magnificat (paired here by the youtube poster with 50s stock footage from Philadelphia, sourced from the excellent Internet Archive), becomes eventually like a Diane Arbus homage. The religious aspects of Part’s aural lullabys to the ineffable cease to matter, under the influence of humanity’s river – time, inference, memory – as it converges into a koyannasquatsi-esque lament to the impatience of the seconds into minutes into generations timeline we’re all being conveyed on.
As the last post on this month’s chosen city, New York, it seems fit to present an alternative viewpoint on the just-deceased J D Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. Naturally this links perfectly with Burns’ night just past on the 25th. Apologies in advance for being so downbeat but it did seem pertinent.
I’m writing this less than 35 miles from Alloway, Robert Burns’ birthplace. This doesn’t help at all, even if it is the rural location near the metaphorical Rye fields. We need to go to Edinburgh to set the context for Salinger’s New York visitor, Holden Caulfield, and the beginnings of the beat generation; and also its end in 1980.
Holden’s effective role model, Burns, is a precocious, cautious young celebre who speaks his mind on the Edinburgh literary circuit in 1786 – but not mature. He’s driven by the sexual energies and moral abandon of youth which he finds completely natural – bawdy – despite the severe calvinist attitude of his contemporaries – the mirror of Holden’s “phony” all-american family values of the 1950s. And Burns, like Holden, is actually interested in relationship and intimacy – they verbalise it constantly; Robert in love and full of emotion for his muse via lovers; Holden in empathy and care for his siblings via the protectorate of the edge.
Both uncover fear and repression within themselves, horrified yet distant, telescoping their candour into the psyche of male teenage angsts everywhere – Caulfield in his people shooting hat, taking on those he feels have misled him (Mark Chapman). These are not allegories. They are constants in male sexual and power mentalities. This is Trocchi, McIlvanney, Vettriano – people despised and revered at the same time here in the west of scotland – a kind of tartan creative mafia, wannabe De Niros revelling in the underclasses / debauched upper classes as surely as any standard middle-class crimewriter that knows their audience.
As one of momus‘ anonymous commentators posits on momus’ Salinger post, the monologue by the conman Paul in the film Six Degrees of Separation correctly analyses the force majeure of the disaffected, juvenile male – a nice boy, always reading catcher in the rye…
Not done an entry on walking yet – kind of important – so feel this is a fab one to start with. Maggie Nesciur walks 90 miles a week through the hoods thankful she’s still able to walk and breathe after surviving cancer – discovers life is good. This is a complete breath of fresh air – and judging by the comments, I think Maggie’s life is all up from here…
There you are short n nice for a friday afternoon. So perfect. Found via SwissMiss > Protect New York, then a cracking interview that restored my faith in human nature (and nice pics) at the New York Times.
photograph of Ms. Nesciur by Todd Heisler for the NYT
I’ve just finished Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (a standard work that most arts students globally will have had to read). As a primer on the quattrocento, it does make plain a few home truths about the relationship between painter and patron; and of course makes some obvious and less-obvious points about the first stages in the post-mediaeval development of a euro-centric, figurative fine art.
What was most interesting about the book for me though was the exploration of mathematics – in terms of the financing of projects, essential; but also the underlying geometry of the picture frame that was carefully formulated to create the illusion, for the masses, of perspective/depth in the painted scenarios. As with Leonardo, the artist Piero della Francesca (who seems to be getting increasingly namechecked here at PsyGeo Towers) was pretty good at sums. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many musicians and artists have a fundamental understanding of maths – it’s why science and the arts often go together fruitfully.
So the renaissance put in place a practical as well as theoretical understanding of the underlying grid that shapes our daily reality – as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the virtual and the real – the representational and the factual – will become commonplace this decade, as Augmented Reality (hope somebody invents a better name) goes mainstream. For Psychogeographers the rebirth of perspective and overlaid meaning, via a handheld, will open up many new ways of being creative with urban space.
But we focus too much on the visual I think – sound can be a more subtle, more intimate method of creating a thinking and imaginative place. The people at soundwalk deserve attention, if you’re interested in audio (note: the site is a bit sluggish – that’s flash for you).
Well it’s a new decade and time’s arrow moves into unknown territories. Looking back on 1999-2009, one thing did strike me as particulary significant – the rise in cctv surveillance.
Sousveillance is the opposite – you use whatever method is at your hand to record them watching us (disturbing UK police abuse in action on innocent people here: “them” really don’t like being reverse-watched…). Of course recording the day and the people you meet is also a fun thing too for recording your drifts and diversions in a stream of consciousness sort of way…
If it wasn’t for the kind of citizen Sousveillance that fitwatch undertakes (at great cost), the death of Ian Tomlinson at the hands of a police officer* at the G20 demos on april 1 2009 would have gone pretty much unnoticied – it was very satisfying seeing each outrageously blatant police PR coverup be countered. So it’s a useful balance to our state-controlled bad-brother environment that most people now have at least a cameraphone – in 1999 quite a lot of us didn’t even have mobiles.
Naturally our elders and betters have now realised the limitations of cctv – the next frontier will be an invisible digital one. I recommend deleting all your social media accounts and never paying for anything with a debit/credit card. In the meantime this collective and these people get straight to the point.
*most officers do a difficult and immensly stressful job well, and nowadays have no autonomy anyway
FromZtoA is a psychogeography and urban topography magazine which covers creative, critical, playful urban journeys
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