a tale of two (East Tennessee) cities :

What Chattanooga got right 23 years ago, Knoxville has only just figured out: Redevelopment happens when there is community buy-in from the start. Every get rich quick, redevelopment scheme (A World’s Fair!? A domed downtown!?) failed in Knoxville because of top down decision making.

Knoxville has less far to pull itself up (it was not a dirty, dyeing steel town like Chattanooga), but they are still behind and have made some irreparable planning decisions in the meantime. MetroPulse does the round up.

(Also, Chattanooga’s success pre-dates Web 2.0 by two decades. For you kids that think collaboration and distributed decision-making is some new idea.)

visualization :

Kottke writes today about what he cynically (or snarkily?) calls “self-deception.” I think it’s more accurately called visualization. And how that leads to better living. I think there’s some rule self-help book out right now about something similar. I could Google it, but so could you. The science seems to support the theory though, according to Kottke.

Crime Fueled by, um, Ecstacy? :

A crime wave has hit the once bucolic Lakeshore Avenue District fueled by the (formerly) peace-love-unity-respect, rave drug Ecstacy? Apparently so.

Police have also identified a troubling new trend: Some of the young suspects are users of the drug ecstasy.

Perhaps it’s the thirty dollar a tab designer price.

SF’s daytime ‘idle’ :

I was always amazed by this to. I used to see all the fabulous people walking around in the middle of the day. When I first moved there and couldn't find work. I wanted to go up to them and ask “what do you do?”

Someone just did.

Best answer:

“If you ask 100 girls for $10, that&rduo;s $1,000, that's rent,” he explained logically.

Ahh, the California lifestyle.

canada’s missing gravity found! :

Which has led (as science discovery often does) to other kinds of new data.

From HowStuffWorks:

While the mystery surrounding Canada's gravitational anomalies has been put to rest, the study has wider implications. Scientists involved in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center study were amazed that they were able to see how the Earth looked 20,000 years ago. And by isolating the influence of the ice sheet's rebound effect, researchers better understand how convection affects gravity and how continents change over time. Finally, the GRACE satellites have provided scientists with data on many ice sheets and glaciers. By examining climate change that took place thousands of years ago, scientists may gain a better understanding of how global warming and rising sea levels are affecting our planet today and what impact they will have on our future.

Read the whole thing for additional fun-facts to know and tell.

future cool :

There is a simple, retro-future sensibility to Studio Kanna’s work. It mixes-up modernism with ornament and a and personalization. Cool. [Featured at PingMag]

Why I miss San Francisco :

No other city would consider a transgender woman as president of the police commission. Oh and she‘s the CEO of a $12M women-centric sex toy company. Sigh.

Not Dead Yet :

When I started this second blog I had visions of long-form essays, infused with humor and humility. Or something.

It’s clear that that is not working as I just avoid posting altogether if I can’t come up with at leas 150 words.

Beginning now, DC1974 is moving to a Kottke-style blog of links and short thoughts.

Please thank you for your patience during this adjustment.

comment spam, memory lane edition :

I recently discovered Grant McCraken’s blog at the “intersection of anthropology and economics”.

In response to a post about memory in the digital photo era, I recalled that:

At my grandmother’s funeral recently, we had all the photo albums that my grandfather (who passed several years before) on hand. My grandfather was obsessively organized. Each photo album was broken down into 10 year spans, and each photo was labeled with “who” and “when” and “where.”

It was a fantastic process for all of us to look through those albums. My grandfather wasn’t particularly sentimental, though, so there was no cataloguing of "why." The photo captions had all the emotion of a booking photo. I found this fascinating.

I also found it fascinating about what my grandfather had thought to keep. He had spent his entire working life in sales for Pontiac Motors, so in addition to the family/holiday photos there were also photos of the things like the parts room in a Pontiac dealership in Duluth, MN.

If I ever go back and get my MA, I think I'd most like to study some form of visual anthropology. I think that not only the way that we frame our subjects, but also the subjects we choose to frame says enormous amounts about our individual and social cultures. Our photographic history is as important as an oral or written history for understanding our ways of seeing and thus who we are.

comment spam, patriarchy edition :

Not this debate still. We haven’t moved beyond talking about gender, because we keep forgetting the problems still exist.

To Speak-Up I said:

How does this “just happen?”

I think it goes like this, men were planning this conference and have decided what is “cool.” Tokion is about as boy-design crazy as I can imagine a magazine to be: it's all b-boy and j-pop and boy indie rock and graffiti — an aesthetic of urban tastes that has been consistently defined by its male participants.

So the organizers (male) went looking for women that fit their aesthetic criteria (their male sense of cool) and the only came up with a handful. I can bet you know that those women have already adopted the swagger of the patriarchy in order to fit into the urban cool aesthetic. And that list apparently was small because the club of urban cool has men as its gatekeepers.

And they didn’t at any point decide that “hey, we don't have a broad enough perspective here lets talk to some of the people outside our bubble about recruiting more women — lets talk to Ellen Lupton or the Wooster Collective or Lorainne Wild or Louise Sandhaus or whomever about filling in the gabs in our boy-dominated perception of the world.”

So of course it was a circle jerk, you don’t invite chicks to one of those. It would defeat the purpose — creating a conference to reinforce our patriarchy.

That's how it “happens.”

international airport montello :

Airports are small cities. (The parallels are endless and thanks to Tom Hanks, we know you can live in one should you be forced to because of international strife.)

International Airport Montello takes a small city and turns it into an airport in an on-going installation project. The desert is amazing setting and the quirkiness of desert dwellers works in tandem with this project. The “let’s put on a show” - slash - elementary school make-believe aesthetic bring humor to something that would otherwise be over analyzed for all types of conceptual-art meaning.


Link via w-m-m-n-a.

new urbanism’s state of flux :

DC has changed considerably in 6 years I spent on the West Coast (1998-2004). And not always for the better. Some of that can be blamed on the rise of big government Republicanism — add thousands of Texas lobbyists and the 20 y.o. interns that blow work for them and see what your city turns into.

But there is something else at play here: the quaintness of new urbanism. See StrangeHarvest.com.

Or read the money quote:

This lightweight urbanism is driven by private money on a mission to create an individual dream. Curiously, these individual dreams add up to a collective vision. It undoubtedly harnesses the most powerful force in urbanism – desire, aspiration, identity, community all bound together. This period has had an ironic effect as the qualities once associated with metropolitan living have vanished: diversity, opportunity. Instead, the centre has becomes a wickerbasket wielding village fantasy full of specialty cheese shops.

this is how you fight crime :

DC’s mayor Anthony Williams sees ugly crime happening in good neighborhoods and declares a mockable “crime emergency.” And ushers in a hole boatload of get tough police state programs and proposals: curfews, CCTV in residential neighborhoods and thousands of extra cops.

Oakland, California, has also seen an upsurge in crime this summer. Their response?

Police and city officials Thursday unveiled their latest plan to get a handle on Oakland's surging crime rate, one that would offer the city's 100 worst criminals a chance to turn their lives around — or else.

“Every cop in Oakland will know who these guys are,” Mayor Jerry Brown said. “These are the people who have been wreaking havoc on our neighborhoods.”

Police Chief Wayne Tucker acknowledged it seems contradictory to crack down on crime by giving people who cause trouble another chance, with offers of job training, substance abuse treatment and other help.

“But it works,” he said, citing the success of similar programs in Chicago and Boston.

Instead of fronting like some right-wing thug, Oakland’s Jerry Brown takes the responsible compassionate way out. And this from a guy who is running for statewide office as Attorney General.

If ever there was a time to suck up to California’s right wing, it would be now.

What’s Anthony Williams’ excuse? He’s not running for anything.

Man, I miss California.

copywriting gone wrong :

From a new development in DC:

It is a fortunate contradiction that a building so stately and sophisticated can offer its residents an undeniably warm and inviting ambiance.

Fortunate? Maybe you mean unfortunate. Or not. I’m not actually sure at all what you mean. But that’s definitely no way to begin.

Oh but wait. It gets worse:

Much like the grand southern mansions of bygone days, The Columbia is both majestic and wonderfully welcoming.

Those “grand southern mansions” by which you don’t mean plantations? Of the “bygone days” of slavery?

Welcoming indeed.

comment spam, smart and dcx edition :

If this vanity project here at DC1974 is at some level about collecting my thoughts. I need to save my comment made at Jalopnik about DCX and Smart:

The only way that Smart is going to work is if DCX pulls a Saturn. Only with a twist. They are going to have to be a network of heavily branded urban dealerships where the shopping experience mirrors the name. And there is pretty much no association with other manufacturers in DCX family. The dealerships should sort of be like Starbucks but with cars -- small, hip, located within major upscale shopping districts: think North Michigan in Chicago or Friendship Heights/Chevy Chase in DC. Smart is going to have to bring on someone like Crispin Porter or Modernista to do some viral marketing and branding away from traditional auto sales. Jerry-rigging these into Dodge dealerships in suburban auto malls is not the right way to position this brand. In my not so humble opinion.

It actually sounds like I know what I’m talking about. Kinda.

what michael said to bruce, or spec work smackdown :

I’ve been sitting on this post (which basically means that I write about it in my head) for a little bit too long, but it keeps coming up.

Bruce Nussbaum detailed the development of the Business Weeks’ innovation quarterly, INside Innovation. Among other things, he detailed a concepting process that involved design firms helping with the brainstorming process.

This has been met with strong reactions.

Of the blogs that I read regularly, Michael Beirut gave this process the firmest tongue lashing. Labelling the process, “spec work”, he suggested in no uncertain terms that this was the beginning of the end (or “the road to hell”).

There also have been some angry words about the imagined horror that is “spec work” at Be A Design group. In a response to a post on gig posters no less.

I think everyone on the graphic design side of this is wrong.

Graphic designers have a very quaint notion of their work as the product only. That their intellectual property is only the printed piece, the programmed web site, the package, logo or what have you.

And if we, as designers, start churning that out gratis before we even have a signed contract that we have basically become whores. (Or sluts, I suppose, as the saying goes: you’re not a whore if you do it for free.)

Industrial designers, and architects before them realized, that their intellectual property goes beyond the final mechanicals, or starts before it, with the process.

Any chance to engage the audience in the design and development process —fast prototyping (as IDEO calls it) or an architectural charette —is a chance to refine theat process, develop collaboration skills and put on a little bit of a promotional show.

In the end, whatever is produced is just a result of the process. And the process is what you own. And what, should a client decide to go forward, you own and for which you charge. The pieces developed in a public brainstorm are merely byproducts. In fact, the pieces you develop with a client are also byproducts. Your intellectual capital, your process, your way of seeing that’s what people will pay for. Dangling preposition and all.

No one would claim that industrial designers or architects have less status now then they did several years ago. And yet, increasingly they have moved more and more of their development into the public realm. And each and every time they do this: they refine that which they actually own and for which they make money — their process.

Graphic designers increasingly struggle with irrelevance and I think this is part do to trying to hide the mechanics of the process. And to focus on the product as the thing that we are actually selling. (Or the only thing.)

the trouble with Washington via Anna Wintour :

She’s talking about England. But she might as well be saying DC:

‘Washington is frightened of fashion. I think the British government has the same ... People in political office tend to get extremely nervous about fashion because they feel it's frivolous. And they don't want to look too elitist or too silly or whatever it may be. And, frankly, it makes me extremely angry, because it's such a huge industry for Britain and for every country, and I feel that politicians should embrace it, rather than step away from it. And I wish the British government would get more involved in fashion and turn up at some of the shows or have people to Downing Street. I know that Blair did that at the beginning and, I think, got criticised for having some people there who weren't considered serious, and I feel that is so insulting to the industry, because it does so much for Britain. There are all these huge talents coming out of the country; they ought to be celebrating it.’

Now imagine, if unlike London, the city’s raison d’etre was ONLY politics. And that, my friends, is DC. And pretty much why it sucks to be interested in or work in the arts and design and live in Washington.

homoerotic image of the day :

Naval Academy freshmen grapple with a 21-foot obelisk greased with lard. The first to the top will be the first class member to become an admiral, tradition holds.

A Slippery Climb From Freshman to 1st Admiral.

a moment of silence :

1974 has been quiet lately, I’ve been working on my portfolio site and updating both my resume and my CV. I have been sitting on a post about making art museums more accessible. And will have that up before too long.

In the meantime, I just read at Kottke that Jane Jacobs has passed to that great city in the sky.

Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most dog-eared books I own. It took me months to read it, just because each paragraph was revelatory. Although she spent her final years in Canada, she was as American as can be: a self taught sage.

May she rest in peace.

hiding :

Um. So I’m not dead. Yet.

Amongst other things: grandma died (eulogy post TK), crazy busy at work and updates to my personal site.

Check it out. Per an earlier suggestion the CMYK values link to various (TK) portions of the website. Right now that includes one video. Plus, the copy is cheekier. Since, if I stay in advertising I’t want to be in B2B and B2G forever. The consumer side likes cheeky, right? Right!? One video up, too, from a gerund piece (this one is Counting) perhaps I can at least do some art again.

More updates soon, I promise.