Contrail is a tool for developing bicycle communities. As you ride, contrail leaves a faint chalk line behind your bike. The goal is to encourage a new cycle of biking participation by allowing the biking community to leave a unique mark on the road and to reclaim this crucial shared space.via the super awesome poverty jetset.
The old cycle: More cars on the road --> more percieved danger for bikers --> fewer bikers on road --> even more cars on the road.
The new cycle: A few bicyclists ride with contrail a couple times per week --> faint lines on the road inspire curiosity and remind bikers where it's safe to ride --> new bikers are encouraged to ride and use contrail --> contrail lines get brighter as community grows.
I've been walking home--my bike is in the shop forever and the weather is nice. I listen to episodes of the Jack Benny program on my phone, waiting for Mary Livingstone to laugh. I'm up through 1946.The traffic where I live is so bad that sometimes I am stuck in my minivan for forty minutes before I get to work. So I use the steering wheel as a kind of prayer wheel. Each notch reminds me of a prayer. I go from notch to notch saying prayers for my husband, for each of my children, my parents, my friends, and the students in my class.
I read something like that 19 years ago in Guideposts. I was sitting in my grandparents' living room on their black sofa. I think of it whenever my computer gives me the pinwheel, or when I am on the phone at work helping an old lady onto the website, explaining that email doesn't need stamps. At the top right of the screen, I asked, do you see a little box? And to the left of the box is the word “Username?” You put a special name into that box. We have to make that special name.
“I'm old,” she said.
Down through Soho. People walk into traffic while text-messaging. I also have on headphones. It's warm, crowded, and progress is slow. I see a girl in canary leggings and short bangs, backlit by a storefront. She is laughing at a joke made by a boy in a vest. No wonder people want to live here. Right then Mary Livingstone laughs in 1946. A man with his tongue out is trying to shake hands with everyone. On Bowery I pass the New Museum, which has a sign reading “HELL YES!” in great rainbow letters. Faces lit from below or on the side by cell-phone screens and media players. I am moving slow but light is absolutely everywhere.
Photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) proposed Changing New York, her grand project to document New York City, to the Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935. The FAP was a Depression-era government program for unemployed artists and workers...(more)click the photos above to see a slideshow of some of this collection, and follow the slideshow through to loads of other collections that the nypl has made available via flickr.
The Pipil Indians of El Salvador
"This next song is called 'El Barrenar'. The Smithsonian library has a website and you can order anything from the archives. Someone will then burn you a CD. I was going to El Salvador a year ago and I wanted to hear some music in the months leading up to my trip there. This is vocal, rustic and is in Spanish, when I was hoping it would be in an American-Indian dialect. It's probably from some time in the 1960s. The truth is I'm not all that happy with this purchase."
...
Timbaland
"We now come to 'Boardmeeting', one word, by Timbaland featuring Magoo from his 2007 record Shock Value. I have never listened to this song. I was on tour and I watched a Timbaland video with Nelly Furtado late one night on the hotel TV. I liked it and thought, OK, I must listen to the rest of the record. But I don't like the rest of the record, though I should at this point confess a weakness for Nelly Furtado records in general."
Regarding race or gender or sexuality, one of the great things about art and music is that they can provide people with very little else in common with a similar entry point for discussion, but the discussions still need to happen for life to get more interesting. I'm all for awkward, frank, sometimes painful conversations about things that give everyone a better perspective on who they are in the here and now, and how they want to proceed from there.daniel also got the whisper on an mp3 of tunde's neil young cover from the film, so be sure to hit that btbn link.
this series of images uses the faceted searching abilities of the nytimes article search api to construct maps of the top organizations & people mentioned in articles for a given news year. connections between these entities are drawn, so that relationships can be found and followed. (more)
* Name: elizabeth weinbergDOWNLOAD: do your own thing
* Location: brooklyn
* Web: http://www.elizabethweinberg.com/
* Bio: go outside!
Seaward
Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells.
Still, you can tell yourself in the john by the spat-at mirror,
slamming the flush and emerging with clean lapels.
Only the liquid furniture cradles the dwindling figure.
Man shouldn't grow in size once he's been portrayed.
Look: what's been left behind is about as meager
as what remains ahead. Hence the horizon's blade.
words: brodsky // pictures: sarfati
I threw my arms about those shoulders...
I threw my arms about those shoulders, glancing
at what emerged behind that back,
and saw a chair pushed slightly forward,
merging now with the lighted wall.
The lamp glared too bright to show
the shabby furniture to some advantage,
and that is why sofa of brown leather
shone a sort of yellow in a corner.
The table looked bare, the parquet glossy,
the stove quite dark, and in a dusty frame
a landscape did not stir. Only the sideboard
seemed to me to have some animation.
But a moth flitted round the room,
causing my arrested glance to shift;
and if at any time a ghost had lived here,
he now was gone, abandoning this house.
kowloon walled city was the most densely populated place on earth before it was destroyed in 1993 and turned into a park. at its peak, the “city” had 50,000 inhabitants on 0.026 km² area of land (that, according to wikipedia, is equal to about 1,900,000 people per square kilometer). in contrast, manhattan has a population density of 25,849/km².click the pics above to chase links. here are my photos from that hong kong run.
