Why should we cede a celebration of the earth to dirty hippies, luddite lefties, and their assorted anti-progress fellow-travelers? I love this beautiful planet. The oceans with their rhythmic surf, coral reefs, tide pools, and lightless trenches; the alpine meadows with glaciers, flowers, and deep blue skies; forests of all kinds; and the bustling cities where most of us live. If we are to survive in the long term, I believe we must move out and upward into the solar system and beyond. And as we move out, I know we will look back and remember this lovely cradle of humanity, perhaps hoping to return someday:

The Green Hills of Earth

Let the sweet fresh breezes heal me
As they rove around the girth
Of our lovely mother planet
Of the cool, green hills of Earth.

We rot in the moulds of Venus,
We retch at her tainted breath.
Foul are her flooded jungles,
Crawling with unclean death.

. . .

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
ALL HANDS! STAND BY! FREE FALLING!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps a race of Earthmen,
Out, far, and onward yet ---

We pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave us birth;
Let us rest our eyes on fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.

-- Robert Heinlein

Posted by: JohnL at 12:01 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I wonder if Rob the Llamabutcher is in any of these pictures?

Do these people look like they're having fun?

(Via BoingBoing).

Posted by: JohnL at 12:02 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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I wonder if Virginia Postrel has seen this article in Slate yet (not sure how long the link will be viable).

From the opening sentence, Andrew Blum's article drips with condecension and scorn on commercially-motivated style (all emphases mine):

Like insecure teenagers, malls keep changing their style.

Once you get past his sarcasm, you actually learn that malls are updating their style, adding open-air plazas, sidewalks and street-side parking, and re-dubbing themselves "lifestyle centers." (I've been to one of those centers a few times here in Plano, called Legacy Town Center (or The Shops at Legacy). A near-perfect model of New Urbanist design if there can be one). A good thing, especially for a lefty writer at Slate, no? Well, actually, no:

[W]hile these new malls may appear to be public space, they're not public at all—at least if you want to do anything but shop. They represent a bait-and-switch routine on the part of developers, one that exchanges the public realm for the commercial one.

Got that? The commercial realm is exclusive of the public. It doesn't matter whether the style conforms to all the objectives of the (largely leftist) New Urbanism, it's all just a bait-and-switch routine because the developers want you to spend money in their shops.

Hmmm. I'm confused -- are developers just supposed to create these little New Urban oases without any thought of commerce? Does Blum's tone mean that he thinks the big sprawling suburban mall is better than this kind of development? Hold that thought -- next he goes on a walking tour of a few lifestyle centers and manages to get in a very subtle dig at Starbucks:

Parking my rented Chevy in front of a big-box emporium called Barbeques Galore, I walked through the arched portals that decorate the marketplace entrance. Inside, there were restaurants and stores lining a winding and narrow outdoor pedestrian street that opened up onto a series of little plazas. Padded wicker chairs were strewn about in a studied, casual way, and a huge fieldstone fireplace had benches built into it for those cool desert nights. This was a delightful place for a Frappuccino....

[At another lifestyle center], it immediately felt like a real, bustling neighborhood. The sidewalks were shaded from the sun by flowered trellises, and the streets narrowed at the corners to give pedestrians an implied right of way. An urban plaza with a good café and a band shell provided a central gathering place.

Blum seems uncomfortable with the success of this kind of development, but fortunately he recognizes and acknowledges the irony of commercial developers implementing New Urbanism:

This is civic life in America, circa 2005, and it's spreading....

[Old-fashioned indoor malls] turn their backs to their surroundings and concentrate activity in and on themselves. By contrast, lifestyle centers gesture toward their environments....

More incredibly, lifestyle centers do all the things that urban planners have promoted for years as ways of counteracting sprawl: squeeze more into less space, combine a mix of activities, and employ a fine-grained street grid to create a public realm—a "sidewalk ballet," in Jane Jacobs' alluring phrase. The irony is almost too perfect: Malls are now being designed to resemble the downtown commercial districts they replaced. What sweet vindication for urban sophisticates!

But now we get to the core of his concern, the fact that these developments are privately-owned, "carefully insulated from the messiness of public life," in his words. Blum has issues with the lifestyle centers' codes of conduct:

The list of forbidden activities includes "non-commercial expressive activity"—not to mention "excessive staring" and "taking photos, video or audio recording of any store, product, employee, customer or officer." "Photos of shopping party with shopping center décor, as a backdrop," however, are permitted.

Finally, his thesis, buried at the end:

There's something a bit unhealthy about faux public places designed to attract rich people and make them feel comfortable. (At least the traditional mall didn't try to hide the fact that it was a shopping center.) The lifestyle center is a bizarre outgrowth of the suburban mentality: People want public space, even if making that space private is the only way to get it.

There's so much wrong with that, I just don't know where to start.

Would it be healthy instead to create faux public places to attract poor people and make them comfortable? Or is it OK to create "authentic" public places to attract rich people? Are New Urbanist developments only to be allowed in the central business district of an existing city? Would it be OK if the money to develop these lifestyle centers was public money rather than private?

Well, go read it yourself. Some people are just impossible to please.

Posted by: JohnL at 11:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Virginia Postrel points to a fascinating site that mines old patents for examples of striking industrial design. They have a "what's new" blog, too, which I have added to the "Between Planets" section of the blogroll.

I also found a mother lode of incredible early aircraft designs via the site.

Some examples in the extended entry:
more...

Posted by: JohnL at 10:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I am not much of an expert on the modern visual arts. I trained in college as a performing musician (classical organ), so I feel much more comfortable discussing musical aesthetics.

When it comes to the visual arts, I like representational paintings, abstract sculptures, and modern architecture. But I don't like any art that needs a written explanation of its "concept" (this includes music, too, btw).

That's why I laughed out loud when I saw this Peter Bagge cartoon in my print version of Reason last year.

Bagge is a polarizing comic artist; you either love or hate his strips. In this sense, he is like many modern artists. On page 2 of this strip, he says what I have long thought about contemporary "fine" art:

My feelings toward the contemporary fine art world have always been a mix of bemusement, resentment, and contempt. 95% of what they're hyping is pure crap yet if you dare to say as much out loud you'll be looked upon as a clueless Philistine.

He points out that much of modern art criticism discounts the value of "craftsmanship," since those "self-appointed arbiters of taste feel compelled to denigrate anything that the average shmuck can recognize as quality work."

This issue exists in all arts, not just the contemporary ones. 2Blowhards touched on this with their brief acknowledgement of Julia Childs' passing last year:

By knocking the snobbery out of French cooking and bringing her own enthusiasm and her wonderfully eccentric character into living rooms, she made class and taste accessible and attractive to millions. The food revolution that has transformed middle- and highbrow American eating owes no one a greater debt.

I'm glad that technology and a prosperous economy allow more and more of us normal people to not only enjoy, but learn and practice arts that were once the sole province of artisans and artists or their wealthy patrons.

Posted by: JohnL at 12:35 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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