Hitchens, on the meaning of bohemia and the West Village
Christopher Hitchens recalls bohemia’s eclipses in London, Paris, and San Francisco, and worries that New York’s West Village may soon become another victim of the skyscraper’s shadow. The loss would be immeasurable.
[T]ry picturing American culture without the contribution of this unique square mile. Inter alia, you would have to subtract Bob Dylan and the Cafe Wha?, Norman Mailer and The Village Voice, Isadora Duncan, John Reed and Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Beats, the gay movement and Christopher Street and the Stonewall Inn, Lauren Bacall as “Miss Greenwich Village of 1942,” Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Tavern, Dawn Powell and Djuna Barnes. In his book which has the wonderful title Republic of Dreams, Ross Wetzsteon managed to evoke what he admitted was sometimes “a cult of carefree irresponsibility, but in the service of transcendental ideas.” That could be Bohemia defined.
The loss of a cultural beacon like the West Village will make the future a bit dimmer
because on the day when everywhere looks like everywhere else we shall all be very much impoverished, and not only that but—more impoverishingly still—we will be unable to express or even understand or depict what we have lost.
photo credit: scratch n sniff
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Cabspotting time-lapse visualizations
The Cabspotting project has some great time-lapse maps of routes taken by Bay Area cabs.
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?
Vertigo, then and now
If you like Hitchcock’s Vertigo (it’s his best), you might want to check out this before and after photo-tour of some San Francisco locations on which the film was shot.
Photograph of the staircase from Vertigo by ewar woowar.
Treatments of graffiti reveal competing visions of the city
Graffiti Tracker applies NSA-style analysis to photographs of graffiti. BBC recently profiled the company.
BBC recently profiled the company:
Graffiti Tracker, the brainchild of graduate student and crime analyst Timothy Kephart, uses global positioning systems (GPS), digital photography and computer databases to track and catch graffiti artists.
The system - dubbed Graffiti Analysis/Intelligence Tracking System (GAITS) - takes pictures of graffiti, using GPS cameras that record the date, time and exact location.
It then extracts information from the photographs and provides reports of each incident of graffiti which can be matched against other graffiti stored on a computer database in an effort to track down the perpetrator.
Keeping a database of known graffiti means offenders can be charged with multiple counts of vandalism.
The ability to locate where graffiti occurs means work can also be tracked. In one case, the system showed that graffiti was located in close proximity to a suspect’s house, the park he used and the school he attended, providing compelling evidence for the police.
Now if we can only find a way to track and prosecute those pesky purveyors of poorly-designed billboards now littering our landscape…
On the opposite end of the graffiti spectrum: Graffiti Archaeology provides us with a timelapse collage of the graffiti on several walls in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.