I may not agree with all of his reviews, but film critic A. O. Scott has some serious chops for metaphor, as illustrated in his take on Get Him to the Greek:

Mr. [Jonah] Hill, wide-eyed and anxious as ever, makes a fine visual and temperamental foil for Mr. [Russell] Brand. The two of them are like the Trylon and Perisphere of comedy. Mr. Brand, though hardly calm, is volatile in a cool, pseudo-self-aware, pointlessly articulate way, whereas Mr. Hill resembles one of those round cartoon bombs with a lighted fuse on top. He pleads, babbles, trembles, fulminates and—more than once—vomits, all with an expressiveness that is both alarming and strangely cute.

The Trylon and Perisphere are two of my favorite structures. Together, they served as the “Theme Center” of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Sayeth Wikipedia re: the Theme Center:

Connected to the 700 foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world’s longest escalator, the Perisphere was a tremendous sphere, 180 feet in diameter. The sphere housed a diorama called “Democracity” which, in keeping with the fair’s theme “The World of Tomorrow,” depicted a utopian city-of-the-future. Democracity was viewed from above on a moving sidewalk, under movies displayed on the sides of the sphere. After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot long spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere.

Does that beat all, or does that not beat all? Good thing the world came together in 1939 and ushered in a long-lasting era of peace and democracy and wacky technological future-cities, instead of, oh I dunno, some of the worst crimes in history, a nuclear arms race, disco, &c.

But to return to Mr. Scott’s fabulous simile, yes, perhaps the rotund Mr. Hill is like the Perisphere, and the lanky-manic Mr. Brand much like the Trylon. My question is, who in Get Him to the Greek is Democracity? (Puffy?) And who the Helicline?

My further question is, why don’t we have no goddamn Trylon or Perisphere today? If Bloomberg wants a fourth term, he better get on the (peri)ball.

Naturally, I demand that—as we live not in boooring old Modernity but in POWERTHIRST-powered Fight Club- and Murakami Takashi-themed low-art/hi-art lofi wifi genetic-rhizomatic-iEverything Postmodernity—our new PostTrylon and PostPerisphere be more than meets the eye…

The folks at the Hand Drawn Map Association have been kind enough to publish my map of Our Hollow Planet Earth, which we live upon (potentially, unconfirmed).

I suppose now I have to write a story that relates back to the items on the map, none of which directly relate to the places mentioned in my one-sixth finished novel of similar name (The Hollow Earth). A sampling of the places mentioned in the novel thus far:

• New Orleans* (*actual place)
• Bechuanaland* (*actual place)
• Z’quoz
• Barrels Bridge* (*actual place? I don’t remember)
• The civilized Central Philosopher-Kingdom, or Hollow Kingdom, as it is commonly known
• The duplexiverse
• The Garden of Sulayman
• The Academy Of The Humay
• Mictlan^† (^†the Mayan underworld, may be cut)

For more pseudo-maps, monsters, inspirational hip hop posters, and geometric designs by the untrained by constantly doodling Author, visit the Author’s humble doodle-blog, Ill-Luminations—now with commentary by professional illustrator and collaborator Ethan Gould.

“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.

To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.

James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.

[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]

Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.

Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…

I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.

Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.

Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).

Check out the Partial Map. Srsly, it’s a perfect gift from Nerd Santa Claus.

What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.

But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.

As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.

What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…

Really, consider space. Consider this:

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.

—Roger Cohen, “Toilets and Cellphones,” New York Times.

The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.

The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.

In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.

We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.

Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.

Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.

According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.

Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.

Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)

Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.

The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.

Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”

To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.

Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.

Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”

Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.

From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:

“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”

Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:

Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.

Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.

But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:

During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.

Deal w/it:

From this skyscraper,
all the bustling streets converge
towards the spring sea

—Richard Wright

Stephen Davies rocks the house in “Locating Ourselves Historically: Why We Are Not Living in Western Civilization.” And earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

The official version, for those disinclined to watch a bangin, dryly funny lecture about modernity without a heads-up:

A crucial part of the self-consciousness of individuals and the way they define themselves socially is a perception of their location in a historical narrative, however vague. For most people in North America and Europe the narrative in question is that of ‘Western Civilization’ - this is true for all parts of the political spectrum and includes those who see this narrative as one of triumphant success and others who perceive it as a much darker story. However, the picture that emerges from historical research does not support any of these accounts. Rather they lead us to the conclusion that historic Western Civilization no longer exists but has perished or been transformed. This should make us think about how to understand our historical location and lead us to see past, present, and future in a new way.

This post is tagged as “Adventure” because the future will be an adventure. We hope.

In the summer, one should sit on metal scaffolding and drink tea or Pimm’s cups and eat meze. The following paean to metal scaffolding did steal my heart, when I found it buried deep within a book about urban adventure and the history of New York, a book otherwise readable but at no other point cockles-stirring, poetical, or propelled by such singular, semicolonic grace.

What, in fire escapes, do I admire? Their universality: their equal utility across cities and neighborhoods; their economy of design: their rugged skeletal strength and transparent unity: their spontaneous novelty: the simply sturdy curves overlapping when viewed from a given vantage, filtering the masonry or brick: their constancy: sound as a dollar, firm as Gibraltar, unshaken by the decades, neglected yet shouldering their vital charge, clinging, like Ulysses to his barque, through hurricanes, freezing gales of winter: safely conducting bolts of lightning; supporting, as Atlas, the gravid snows of winter: the variation within an essential form, like the very snowflake, each unique yet all bound by unyielding laws of construction: their balance, supporting the disproportionate mass with the well-placed lever arm: their hospitality, Ralph and Alice being neither the first nor the last to avail themselves in the heat of summer, and this tradition remaining firmly in place throughout the urban world from New York to California and Hong Kong: their elasticity, swelling in the humid summers, shrinking in winter months like the boards of the Ancient Mariner’s ship: their uncomplaining servility in blurring uneventful years: their silent heroism in the teeth of a four-alarm blaze: their romantic accessibility, climbing from the sidewalk into the starry firmament.

—Invisible Frontiers, Lefty Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, officers of Jinx (a defunct [?] Libertarian urban exploration group).