The making of Ephemicropolis from Peter Root on Vimeo.
Peter Root spent 40 hours organizing staples into his very own tiny town: Ephemicropolis. Really, there's not much I can add. Only that I'm getting closer and closer to committing on this topic.
"Archive II is a nomadic library, a transport system and an intimate space. Inspired by ancient travelling [sic] libraries from the Far East, which visited courts and cities, Archive II transforms this into a personal space, where walking and reading coexist as refuge and transport."Learn more: DesignBoom
Pretty bad, as it turns out.Baddie: "- the f**k is wrong with you, man? You rather die for some piece of s**t that you don't even f**king know?In that scene, Kick Ass spoke to me. Because Dave's got a point. While trying to rescue someone's lost cat (superheroes gotta pay their dues, too) he stumbles into a beat-down. Surrounding him from a safe distance, bystanding yahoos hoist their camera phones, spoiling for blood. They watch; he acts. Here, Kick Ass engages a timeless question: What is a hero but someone willing to step out of the crowd and potentially sacrifice everything for others, especially when there's no sure chance of reward, or even survival?
Dave: "And three a**holes, laying it in on one guy while everyone else watches? And you wanna know what's wrong with me?"
In moments like these, I liked Kick Ass. Problem is, those moments are far too few. More commonly, this flick is amoral and therefore somewhat sad. Yes, good guys kill bad guys -- imaginatively, cleverly, bloodily. What these kills lack is a sense of proportion wrought by gravity. There is simply no weight to the violence, such as when a hero crushes a hapless goon in a trash compactor, or when a villain fries another hapless goon in a giant microwave. The aesthetic equivalence of these acts reflects a deeper senselessness to Kick Ass."It's hard to remember what sort of effect this movie might have had on you when you were six or seven. But try to remember. At that age, kids take the events on the screen seriously, and they identify fiercely with the hero. When the hero is killed, that's not an unhappy ending but a tragic one: Nobody got out alive. It's just over, that's all."Ebert admits that he appreciated George A. Romero's undeniable talent as a cheap filmmaker, adding that he loved the director's splatisfying sequel, Dawn of the Dead (though, to be fair, he saw the same tacked-on "happy ending" that satisfied audiences for that 1978 classic). Still, his response to Night of the Living Dead is instructive, mainly because Ebert highlights the ethical abyss crossed when a movie portrays children as remorseless killers.
"I felt real terror in that neighborhood theater last Saturday afternoon. I saw kids who had no resources they could draw upon to protect themselves from the dread and fear they felt."
A moment of sloppy sociology, if you please.
So we watch Hit Girl flip and twirl like Yoda. We know it's all fake, but the effects are undeniably cool. Then in one scene, we adopt Hit Girl's point of view as she takes aim at a goon, fires, pauses to reload, takes aim again, fires, and wastes another. The video-game aesthetic is unmistakable. Like a cinematic Kung Fu fight scene where the wires have been erased, we watch and may be dazzled, but we can hardly be moved. 
During my recent visit to Colorado (highlighted by a tour of Denver's Colfax Avenue neon signage) I also took some time to photograph a set of farm ruins 28 miles north of Denver (Google Map). Two days of intermittent rain had broken for a spell, and the temporary promise of blue skies called me south. Storm clouds advanced further into the horizon, and I knew these shots wouldn't last long. Thank goodness for rental cars and frontage roads!
It's hard to say exactly why I'm attracted to ruins. Part of it is the challenge of finding some geometry within the collapse of planes and surfaces. As with so many things, the balance is always internal. By way of illustration, imagine a path across a hobbled surface of decomposing boards. You and a friend survey the safest direction to cross from one side to the other, the path that will avoid hidden nails and the dangers of collapse. Yet you see different trajectories and follow individual courses. You look at your friend and wonder, "why'd she take that path?" That's sort of what I mean about the individual nature of composition, especially with abandoned buildings. There's no one correct way to photograph them.
My pictures are, obviously, little more than snapshots. Partially I accepted that limitation with my choice of camera, a tiny Canon Elph purchased for hassle-free travel (lugging our D5000 cross-country via increasingly constraining airport rules is sometimes not worth the effort). But mostly these pictures reflect a roadside perspective based on flash-moments, not deep encounters. Like the ruins themselves, each experience lives briefly and then fades from view (the difference, one might say, between auto-ethnography and autoethnography). I was here; then I wasn't.
(Photographs by Andrew Wood)
Our previous trips to the Colorado capital had always been in daylight. The initial visit, back in '96, was at the tail-end of our first Route 66 cross-country trip. We'd made it to California and were returning via Nevada, Utah, and the plains states, heading home to Ohio. We'd just coasted down through the Rockies, amazed to see real snow even in the summer, and the three of us gazed eastward to see a long, flat horizon. In between: the Mile High City. We didn't know it then, but our drive through Denver would include a trip down the road that most folks claim is the nation's longest main street - which is a good thing, because Colfax Avenue really is a terrific stretch for Old School signage. But again, our visit then and those that followed were regrettably restricted to daylight hours.
I made up for that error this past weekend. The problem is that Denver has instituted (God knows why) draconian ordinances against animated signs. Indeed, I only saw two or three of them sparkling and blinking with tacky neon abandon. How shortsighted of Denver's so-called urban professionals! Even so, I enjoyed an evening's search for animated and static signs. Of the moving variety, the Bluebird Theater is clearly the best in town [Check out my video]. Once a vaudeville palace, the Bluebird now features traveling bands (and, if online reviews are to believed, some mighty surly bouncers). I'm happy to report that the attitude outside was relaxed. As is regularly the case, people would stop and wonder, "Why's this guy photographing a sign?" Maybe they'd look a little closer at the thing they'd previously ignored and begin to see it anew.
A mile or so west, I saw a couple other signs that would have looked wonderful in the age of animated neon. I could only imagine the smiles elicited by Pete's Kitchen when its happy chef was permitted to flip, I dunno, pancakes. Still, I set up my newly-bought tripod and tried out the twilight capabilities of my new Canon Elph. The results were more than acceptable for a camera so small it could be lost in the wash. The camera produced no real "noise" (you know, the graininess that accompanies low-light conditions) and decent color. A block further west, I also took some shots of the Satire Lounge, enjoying the chance to share the moment with another couple of shutterbugs who shared my neon vision.
Light drizzle turned into moderate rain. The Taxi Driver vibe, those gaudy colors and a hint of steam rising off the oily streets, appealed to me. Truth be told though, I couldn't get too far into the mood, since I also used the time to chat with a student who'd emailed me a question related to the peer mentor training class I teach. Even far away in Denver, it's hard to take a vacation from real life, thanks to my many electronic leashes (admittedly, each having an "off" switch). Really, I didn't mind. Indeed, maybe as thanks for my effort to help someone in need, the Roadtrip Gods smiled on me and cleared the rain sufficiently to allow a photo of the Rocky Mtn. Motel sign. Wow, what a piece of modern art.
Again, I'd seen this place by day two or three times. Each visit, I'd struggle to frame a decent shot. The horizontals and verticals of this sign are trickier than they look, and they required me, I'm embarrassed to say, to use a bit of Photoshop magic just to get a decent looking composition. The results were worth the effort. Just think about the cost of maintaining neon, especially with the dearth of professionals who can bend the glass and prepare the gas to produce that gorgeous, otherworldly effect. I've talked to a lot of motel owners who gave up on the whole thing, complaining about one too many drunk kids hoisting beer bottles, or one too many hailstorms doing thousands of dollars of damage in an instant. Why these owners maintain this sign in a seedy part of town, I can't begin to guess. But I'm sure happy they do. My latest Denver visit complete, I made one last pass down Colfax, reshooting the Bluebird in more pure darkness before heading north out of town. Grateful for the opportunity to glimpse some classic neon signage while it's still standing, I smiled into the darkness.
The obvious conclusions, though many senior faculty members in the humanities seem reluctant to admit it, are these: As a profession, we are enrolling too many Ph.D. students, we have been doing so for decades, we spend far too long in guiding them to their degrees, and we then consign them to a dysfunctional job market.Read the entire piece: We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities
A recent Palm commercial entitled "Life Moves Fast" offers an image of this world and its pleasure of constant mobility (for those who can afford it, that is). The spot features an attractive young woman strutting down an urban catwalk. Flipping through screen options that float around her, the woman mutates the city to accommodate the momentary convergence of her desire [reminding me the 2009 Lexus City ad]. I think I'll use the Palm commercial as an example during a graduate seminar on media culture I've been asked to join during my Colorado trip.
South Park sometimes hits. Sometimes it misses. And then sometimes it perfectly captures the zeitgeist. And this time, the show manages to skewer the Facebook craze in a way that reveals real insight and thoughtful critique about how social networking sites can transform friendship into commodity.
John Vidal writes in the Guardian about the convergence of meta-cities into "mega-regions," the first being a conflation of Hong Hong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, comprising 120 million people. Other mega-regions, he says, are in Japan and Brazil, with others forming in India and west Africa."Research shows that the world's largest 40 mega-regions cover only a tiny fraction of the habitable surface of our planet and are home to fewer than 18% of the world's population [but] account for 66% of all economic activity and about 85% of technological and scientific innovation."The article adds, however, that mega-regions may intensify urban sprawl and social inequity.
(Original image borrowed from Wikimedia Commons)
We can learn a lot from deserts.
Hamlet exclaimed, "I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space" -- if only, he added, one could be freed from one's many lamentations.
For me, an explosion of iconic images appear, each pulsing with the rhythm of Paul Simon's song, "Boy in the Bubble."It was a dry wind,When I see the modern world, I see handheld computers that possess a power once contained in rooms, but I also see teeming masses of people crushed into urban slums. I see the simultaneous expansion and contraction of potential, and find it floating on the surface of killing paradox.
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth...
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires...
Today a tiny sliver of humanity imagines themselves living in a sailboat, one like Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel, a fantasy in which you can play tennis while teetering in the air.
Beyond our brilliant and optimistic cities, the desert expands, kicking up hot breezes and hurling the dust at the gates: a barbarous future with which we cannot reckon via the anesthetizing balm of abstraction.
In his book, Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard imagined the desert in a way we recognize, not only as engineers or artists, but as citizens of a world that seems increasingly covered with the dust and grit of modernity, the detritus of mental maps that no longer represent the world in any meaningful way.Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory -- precession of simulacra -- it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.Sustainability
The desert can teach us something about the fate of the modern world. Walking upon its hot, dry surface, we learn that sustainability is not simply about technology; it is both an expanse and an expense of the imagination.
After nightfall, Polaris appears to us, fixed in the northern sky. Stars pinwheel, the universe turns, and things change. But survivors stand tall in the dark, amid all transformations.
Following the publication of my essay, "Two roads diverge: Route 66, 'Route 66,' and the mediation of American ruin," in Critical Studies in Media Communication, I was invited to repackage the piece into a form that's more accessible to a wider audience.
