Skyview Drive-in Update

Writing in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Genevieve Bookwalter reports that one of my favorite places, the Skyview Drive-in, is likely to close soon. While the story focuses on the flea market, it also contains news about the drive-in. Here's a snip:

Vendors who for years have pawned high chairs, stone necklaces and old videos, among numerous other wares, at the Skyview Drive-In flea market are concerned that a weekend tradition since 1971 will soon come to a close.

Vendors who have tried to reserve their selling spots at the flea market through the end of the year have been denied, and petitions are being passed to preserve what some are calling "a cultural icon"

But those fears are only partially justified.

Attorney John P. Christian with Tobin & Tobin in San Francisco, who represents the drive-in owners, the Martins family, confirmed that vendors have been told they could count on selling their stock on the Soquel Drive lot through the end of November.

"Beyond that, I don't know," Christian said.

But officials for Sutter Maternity and Surgery Center on Friday said sellers have no reason to fear; the health care provider stands by the group's statement earlier this year that the flea market — considered by many a community staple — would remain open for a couple more years, despite the pending sale.

"We realize that [the flea market] is something that is important in the community, and we want to explore any option we can to make sure that continues to be available," said Sutter spokesman Ben Drew.

He did not, however, commit to continue running the drive-in movie theater.

Update: The Skyview closed for the last time on December 2, 2007.

Newspaper Podiums

Riding the Highway 17 bus into town, beginning the turn near the train station, I saw a striking illustration of the demise of the newspaper era. To my left, I spotted a fellow standing behind a newspaper box, using it as a podium. He had placed a laptop computer atop the box and was typing. Standing literally opposite from the newspaper's "television screen" that depicted today's headlines that were written last night, this guy was almost certainly drawing from some wireless cloud. Catching this scene, I noted two particularly odd things. One was the fact that ten feet away, another guy was doing the same thing, using a newspaper box as a stand for his laptop. The other thing I noticed was stranger still: a piece of advertising for the San Jose Mercury News at the base of the box that read, "Your 50¢ Laptop. Upgraded Daily."

Holographic America

I found a useful parallel to omnitopia in Jean Baudrillard's notion of America-as-Hologram:

America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements. Take the tiniest little place in the desert, any old street in a Mid-West town, a parking lot, a Californian house, a BurgerKing [sic] or a Studebaker, and you have the whole of the US -- South, North, East, or West . . . The hologram is akin to the world of phantasy [sic]. It is a three-dimensional dream and you can enter it as you would a dream. Everything depends on the existence of the ray of light bearing the objects. If it is interrupted, all the effects are dispersed, and reality along with it. (pp. 29-30)

Baudrillard, J. (1989). America (C. Turner, Trans.). New York: Verso.

Aviopolis Part 2

Here are some more notes from a book I recently read while researching for my own omnitopia project.

"You may not need to speak the language of the country to get around; but you do need to know the techno-cultural dialect of English -- the international language of the airport. "(p. 31)

"The airport represents 'laboratory conditions' for thinking through the techno-cultural processes and systems of global movement." (p. 38)

"Colonialism reorganised [sic] geographical space into sovereign zones of ideological and economic allegiances. Place became terra nullius long ago, wiped of indigenous particularities and incorporated into a totalising [sic] space of urgent global improvement." (p. 39)

"Sydney Airport . . . has been in continuous operation since 1920, developing from a modest airstrip in the middle of a swamp-lined paddock on the northern shore of botany Bay. For 80 years this airport has been 'terraforming' its environs, sucking highways and rail corridors towards it, re-zoning its surrounding suburbs, flattening houses and changing the geography of the city around it." (p. 41)

"Cairo Airport may look nothing like Singapore's Changi Airport, but its information is the same -- it is designed to process mobility. It is a self-renewing machine that 'refreshes' after each take-off and landing. Planes download passengers, baggage, cargo, excreta, and rubbish, and, then, upload passengers, baggage, cargo, fuel, food and packaged gadgets. The airport propels and regulates direction and flow. The sky is turned into bandwidth as plans move along specified air corridors." (p. 43)

"Within the glass groundscrapers that dominate contemporary airport design, only our thoughts move in private. Our baggage, our bodies and our movements are all part of an all-encompassing spectacle. Visible to everybody, we disappear into the multiple matrices of the airport." (p. 78)

All quotes from:

Fuller, G. & Harley, R. (2004). Aviopolis: A book about airports. London: Black Dog Publishing Limited.

Newspaper Shrinkage

Today I opened my San Jose Mercury News and discovered a smaller paper. I wasn't surprised, though. Yesterday's paper included a note about how the Merc is rethinking its business model as newspapers struggle to compete with online media services. Money is flowing away from print and toward digital platforms, and I can certainly understand why. These days I briefly flip through the front pages of the paper, annoyed that old news, stuff that had been online or even on the 24 hour cable networks, is still 'breaking' in print.

I read that journalism students are rushing to enter the digital age, learning high-end web design even as they learn the inverted pyramid. In the meantime, old papers are shuffled and sometimes discarded as media conglomerates deal out their useless cards. My own paper has been bought and sold recently, and is the only real game in town. Those days of competing dailies (in the morning and in the afternoon) are long gone. I wonder if they'll even sell newspapers a decade from now.

Rudy Giuliani takes phone call during speech

I'm not sure what this represents more: the contribution of mobile telephony to the utter collapse of common sense or the depths to which Giuliani's handlers will sink to convince voters that this guy can appeal to the "family values" crowd.

Wow.

Mad Men Set for Renewal

I hear that the AMC series Mad Men will be renewed for a second season, and I'm delighted. As I noted in an August 21 post, Mad Men is terrific television. The show is remarkable for its dead-on 60s-era design, its integration of cultural comment with dramatic narrative, and a profound ambivalence toward its characters. I think, though, my favorite aspect of this show is the patience by which stories unfold. Scenes play out in a leisurely way, never being rushed in search of obvious beats. A confident inner rhythm advances each episode along its own strange path that somehow manages to move the broader story along. And unlike any other show I watch, the end of a Mad Men always leaves me wanting more. A show that runs slowly and yet still manages to end too soon: that's an accomplishment. If you haven't seen Mad Men yet, I recommend that you give one or two episodes a try.

Heck, just watch the intro and you'll get a taste of what I mean...