I was listening to the new Issacson biography of Einstein (audible.com reccommends...) on the way to New York on the train. The General Theory of relativity (distinct from the Special Theory of Relativity, of course) was dervied from a thought experiment involving a train, a clocktower, a person on the platform, and a person inside the train. Which is in place? Which is in motion?
Here's a glimpse of a place more wintery than Doha. I was just in Narva, on the Russian-Estonian border, one of the most incongruous frontier points I've ever seen. Two old fortresses face off on both sides of the Narva river (Russia is on the right), with an aging bridge connecting the shores.
Russia's borders are more accidental and incoherent than most, drawn up for obscure reasons to serve empires that have long crumbled apart. But this crossing is particularly bizarre. Narva on Estonia's side is dominated by ethnic Russians, but there's still a dazzling view of the fortified showdown across the river (a fitting image for two endlessly quarreling countries).
The installations of the border post include the bridge and the corridor that extends deep into the shoreline. The awkward part is that it's possible to walk around, beneath and over all the infrastructure, while never technically breaching the frontier.
The border crossing feels like some alien body that pierces the town but remains completely separate and isolated from it.
I had a similar feeling on the Russian-Chinese border across the Amur river last summer, but there isn't actually a bridge there - only boats and ferries crossing back and forth. Here you stumble upon it in the middle of the town.
The Estonian fortress was built by the Danes in the 13th century, and the Russians added its counterpart about two hundred years later.
Masai Boma #1, Tanzania
Little touched by tourists. Traditional houses made of cow dung and (obviously) whatever can else can be found along the way. Women are the 'constructors' here.
Cue tourism bureau: people come to Tanzania on safari and want to see 'the locals', especially the famous Masai, so they spruced the place up a bit. Turns out, despite what the young, English language trained guide will tell you from his 'script' (he was lovely, by the way, and doing the best for his community) very few Masai likely live in this model village (as in sleep here). They work here showing and selling 'Masai culture' to tourists.
In Travel and Leisure this month Karrie Jacobs proves once again-- far more elegantly than I've ever read before-- that "New Urbanism" is absolutely confounding. I remember one particularly heated argument about Celebration, back in 1997, just as the town opened-- an argument I would have won if I knew this, even if it was obvious!:
Everyone I meet along the way tells me the same story: Disney actually has less and less to do with Celebration. In 2003 the majority on the Celebration Residential Owners’ Association shifted from representatives of the Disney-owned Celebration Company to the home- owners. According to the locals, Celebration—à la Pinocchio—is on its way to becoming a real town. On the other hand, in early 2004, Disney sold the entire business district to a company called Lexin Capital. The fact that downtown Celebration can be sold in its entirety—18 acres, 16 shops, six restaurants, some office space, and a number of apartments—explains a lot about why it doesn’t feel real.
Make sure to read through to the part about the "Third Place Pub & Grille." (link)
photo of downtown Celebration by Martha Camarillo for Travel & Leisure
The most basic premise of this blog is that we're writing about places in the non-place of the web; its most basic conceit is that doing that somehow makes the web less of a non-place and more of a place. Because we're human. (After all.)
I don't know what Plazes does to all that, but I definitely like it. Can we all do it? I think it'll work to have a little individual map for each of us down the right side of the page. Here's how to do it: register, track your location, then click on "share location" and "integrate your map in your blog." Set the size to 200 x 200, choose your colors, then email me the html that shows up in the box. (I don't think you can get into the "typelist" with your "guest author" privileges. The one catch is that I think everyone's map will say "I AM AT..." -- but then it's all about collective identity, right?
One of the more obscure aspects of my underexplored irish heritage that I have often appreciated is the ability to use the verb form of the noun "wake," as in, if Pearson's Terminal 2 to have its own wake, we are waking it -- reminding it to remain with us, alive, awake, until its final hour of departure? I'm not quite sure how that mythology works; not many of us sit through the vigil of soon to be departed buildings (although several did do so for this week's implosion of the Coliseum in my current home town). In any case, in contrast to the excited ease with which we celebrate the production of new lovely or wonderful spaces (such as Pearson's Terminal 1), it does seem suitable to celebrate the attachments we form even to airworld spaces we attempt to rush through, tend to be irritated by, or fail to notice.
I've always been fascinated by the deconstruction of buildings anyways, and am (somewhat skeptically) impressed by the prospect of recycling something like an airport terminal (or the coliseum). The massive destruction involved in dismantling steel beam and concrete structures presents a modern sublime, the kind of maudlin reflections over which (overlaid by the wailing as the concrete bits fly into your eyes) are just the thing to pass the time while waking.
And the requisite "time I had with" story: on my first visit, Terminal 2 hosted just the sort of bureaucratic helpfulness that became so endearing about Toronto: the Air Canada check-in desk attendant barked that I would JUST make it if I RAN. (I was late because the TTC was running an hour behind.) So I RAN across the whole terminal, a feat of athletic prowess highlighted by the technological magic created when "sticky rubber" soles meet industrial carpet. (Imagine instant meld of plastics, inertia of would-be passenger.) Breathless, with rather rugburned knees, I arrive at my gate to discover -- that the plane hasn't landed, that it's unlikely to make it back to Boston tonight, and, that, no, I may not have a band-aid because I interrupted the gate attendant while he was *speaking* to another gate attendant.
I missed the family party this afternoon ("Employees of Air Canada have already paid their respects after holding a goodbye party for the terminal"), but I'll raise my whiskey from the Coliseum rubble.
Last night I went to see a performance at the new Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. While the actors' performance was excellent, the building's was no less so. Jean Nouvel's remarkable building, perched high on the west bank of the Mississippi River, is exquisitely designed within and effectively positioned without. Cheek-by-jowl to a group of extraordinary old mill buildings that have recently been reclaimed as museums and condominiums, the blue building embraces its street context while dramatically engaging the river. A cantilevered platform extends out toward the water, providing a brilliant postcard view of the river, the Stone Arch Bridge that crosses it, and the other side. While the platform is largely an interior space, the very end of it is outside. The space is accessible to non-theatre patrons during the day. Apparently office workers trek there to eat their lunches.
The exterior, which I feared would look like an airport terminal when I saw it under construction a year ago, is a deep blue. During the day, it shimmers with giant images of past performances; at night, it hovers dramatically, dematerializing into the night, visible only as a collection of windows and spotlights.
The interior is no less dramatic. Mimicking the outside, the walls are adorned with very subtle images from past productions that resolve themselves only when viewed from certain angles. To reach the three stages from the lobby, one takes a very narrow three storey escalator that takes one up to the theatres. I wish I had had my camera.
Not only is Minneapolis worth visiting for its extraordinary theatre scene -- second only to New York in the US -- but now also for the building that houses its preeminent stage.
(I should conclude by noting that this is not the only architectural improvement in Minneapolis. I hope to post further about Cesar Pelli's new Public Library and Herzog & de Meuron's new pavillion at the Walker Art Center.) I regret that due to rainy weather, I did not get to see these other buildings from the inside -- perhaps next visit...
I've been closely reading the blogs of two friends, one writing from the equator, the other from the south pole-- or pretty close, on both accounts: Doha and Antarctica. Their photos are more similar than you might think; the culture, not so much. A Brooklynite on the Ice & Eastward to Doha. 
