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Manufactured Landscapes is a documentary about Edward Burtynsky and the photos that he’s taken in China of the Three Gorges Dam, factories, and other vast industrial projects. Trailer is here and it’s available on DVD at Amazon. (thx, scott)
Update: Manufactured Landscapes is playing in NYC at Film Forum starting tonight through July 3.
NY Times on the rise of OpenTable, which wasn’t exactly an overnight success. To me, the thing that pushed OT over the edge toward acceptance wasn’t so much the public-facing business (let your customers make reservations online) but the software that the restaurants were provided to keep better track of their customers and their habits. It used to be a big deal that Four Seasons Hotels tracked the preferences of all their customers but now any restaurant with the OT system can easily do the same. “Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.”
Short review of Taxi! A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver from the NY Times Sunday Book Review. “When I was young, most of them had adopted a common strategy against loneliness: a fleeting intimacy with their passengers. This was the era of the cabby as philosopher or comedian, quick to make observations about life itself, or its subdivisions in politics and sports, or to crack wise about women and other mysteries. This form of performance art had two goals: human contact and better tips.”
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There’s a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.
If you’re unfamiliar with the alternate side parking shuffle that happens once or twice a week in most areas of NYC, Jen Bekman has a good description of it. I’m convinced the New Yorker would go out of business if it weren’t for the shuffle…a lot of 6,000 word articles get read waiting for the meter maid to come around.
Opening Friday, June 22 at jen bekman gallery in NYC: A New American Portrait, “a group exhibition of photographs featuring artists at the vanguard of contemporary portraiture in America”. Curated by Jen Bekman and Joerg Colberg, one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of photography.
New York magazine has a great collection of stories about how various NYC businesses go about making their money. They cover everyone from a taxi driver to a sex shop to Goldman Sachs to the MoMA.
Wiimbledon is a Wii Tennis tournament taking place in Brooklyn in late June. I’d come kick your ass, but I have plans that day.
outside.in just launched a new maps feature that shows the physical locations that people are blogging about. Here’s the last few months of places I’ve talked about on kottke.org. I like the pie charts that show how exclusive a place is to a particular blog. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to outside.in.)
Meant to post about this last week, but going on right now in NYC: Postopolis. “Postopolis! is a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design. Four bloggers, from four different cities, will host a series of live discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and other presentations, and fuse the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face to face interaction.” More about the event from City of Sound and BLDGBLOG.
Map of Manhattan made up of the countries of origin of its residents. (via strange maps)
Partial lyrics for New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down from LCD Soundsystem’s latest album, Sound of Silver:
—
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a rat in a cage, pulling minimum wage
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, you’re safer and you’re wasting my time
Our records all show you are filthy but fine
But they shuttered your stores when you opened the doors
To the cops who were bored once they’d run out of crime
New York, you’re perfect don’t, please, don’t change a thing
Your mild billionaire mayor’s now convinced he’s a king
And so the boring collect, I mean all disrespect
In the neighborhood bars I’d once dreamt I would drink
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
There’s a ton of the twist but we’re fresh out of shout
Like a death in the hall that you hear through your wall
New York, I love you but you’re freaking me out
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
New York, I love you but you’re bringing me down
Like a death of the heart. Jesus, where do I start?
But you’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown
—
Meant to note this a few weeks ago, but the Baltimore post put it back in my mind.
Jake’s got some photos of the in-progress development of the High Line in Manhattan. Lots of concrete. Here’s what the High Line looked like a few years ago when I was up there.
Let’s say you’re interested in movies and New York City. Then you could do worse than check out the Celluloid Skyline exhibit being displayed in Vanderbilt Hall in Grand Central from May 25 through June 22. The exhibit is based on the book of the same name by James Sanders, an exploration of how New York is portrayed in film. The exhibit includes “scenic backing” paintings made for movie sets in the 40s & 50s, film footage of films set in NYC, production stills and location shots, and other artifacts of NYC’s intersection with film. Sanders was kind enough to send me a photo of one of the scenic backing paintings:
I left the tool chest in the foreground for scale…the paintings are three stories tall! I’m always down for a trip up to Grand Central so I’ll definitely be checking this out.
Undiscovered bedrooms, the typical dream of the New Yorker. I always thought the undiscovered room dream story was apocryphal until Meg, unaware of the story at the time, dreamt of finding another room in our apartment a few months ago.
Fresh Dialogue 23 is an upcoming AIGA NY event (May 29) that will focus on the increasingly common phenomenon of the former audience lending a hand in designing their own experiences. Speakers include Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck and Ze Frank. (thx, khoi)
In accordance with David Chang’s wishes, I’m not really talking about this but I will briefly direct your attention to the following: Momofuku Noodle Bar is moving to a bigger location down the street and a new restaurant called Momofuku Ko, presumably with less seats, will take its place, making for a total of three Momofuku restaurants within a 2 block area.
For decades, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has been the definitive account of Robert Moses and how contemporary NYC got built. The portrait Caro painted of Moses was less than flattering. Now folks are thinking that, hey, maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all. “That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower.”
Mayor Bloomberg’s plan for a “greener” and “greater” New York City includes congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street. “It’s naive to suppose that congestion isn’t itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can’t plumb and a deliveryman can’t deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually.”
The pace of global cities is speeding up…people are walking 10% more quickly than they did 10 years ago. Singapore is the fastest city and I’m surprised NYC isn’t in the top 5.
Ariel Levy tells us about her lesbian wedding that wasn’t really a wedding (it was “a party about love”) and her struggle to find something she could wear for it. “I also didn’t feel okay about spending all my free time on the phone with the flower guy and the tent man, or about making little checklists of who was coming, and who was not coming, and who was staying at the Goodstone Inn. And I definitely did not feel okay about telling the sales staff of half the better clothing retailers in New York City that I needed something fetching to wear to my big fat gay wedding.”
The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don’t do too much to the building though…in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display.
One meal at Per Se has as many calories as 4.5 Big Macs, about a whopping 2400 calories. (via eater)
Designer Eddie Jabbour is on a mission to make a new NYC subway map. The NY Times recently had a piece of Jabbour’s efforts. The new map reminds some of Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 classic map: too abstract for its own good. Here’s Vignelli talking about his map in an outtake from Helvetica and some background on the controversy surrounding it.
I might be shooting myself in the foot by posting this, but the table of contents for the newest issue of the New Yorker is usually available on Sunday on newyorker.com, the day before the issue hits the newsstands and arrives in subscriber mailboxes. All you need to do is hack the URL of the TOC from the previous Monday. Here’s the URL for the April 23 TOC:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/23/toc_20070416
“2007/04/23” is the date of the issue and “toc_20070416” refers to the date of the posting. This then is the URL for the April 30 issue:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2007/04/30/toc_20070423
At right is the cover for tomorrow’s issue, which includes Adam Gopnik’s piece on the Virginia Tech shooting, a new piece by Atul Gawande, and Anthony Lane’s review of Hot Fuzz. Monday’s New Yorker on Sunday is usually only available to the select few of the Manhattan media elite who are sped their new issues hot off the presses. Now everyone can have a similar experience on the web.
Enjoy.
A pair of NYC photographs from Shorpy today: Penn Station in 1910 and a scene from outside Grand Central Terminal in 1908.
Jake’s featuring a photo today of some NYC street art by Bloke, who does paper-plane pieces. I’m a sucker for dashed lines.
Update: More stuff by Bloke here. (thx, daniel)
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