bagel to go

One of my students from last semester’s studio (work, to come soon, really!)
on logistics, Rodrigo Piwonka, put a toasted bagel with avocado (actually that sounds quite good) on a CD spindle and put it on flickr. Soon bloggers discovered it. Since February over 170,000 people have seen Rodrigo’s bagel. Network culture at work.

I am curious as to why and haven’t entirely figured it out. Obviously, there is a visual pun, but is this just a case of emergent behavior as one blogger found it, then another, then …

Or is there more to it?

bagel to go

southern california bubble apocalypse?

Alas, it’s been a while since I’ve updated. Between repeated trips to the GSD to lecture, a difficult and still incomplete server transition, and final reviews at Columbia, time has been scarce. Moreover, I’ve been waiting on word on some projects that I’ll be running from this blog, working behind the scenes on NetLab material (the launch of our office is just around the corner!), and waiting for Blue Monday to appear en masse in the states (try later this month).

And, as happens when I don’t post for a while, the opening post seems all-too-important. The stakes rise. I begin to ponder site redesigns and it is that time of year again…these usually happen in May (hint: reader feedback wanted).

Then smaller topics don’t get posted. And all the while you, dear reader, begin to wonder if I have passed on, or if I’ve finally tired of the longest running individual blog in architecture, or if you should just hit the delete key in your favorite RSS reader…

So, how better to start than with a heady dose of doom and gloom?

There’s little question that the real estate bubble is starting to come apart across the US. It’s a slow implosion rather than a fast pop, but things are starting to look grim in the overpriced landscape of the coasts. If under postmodernism, the most autonomous processes of architecture were colonized by capital (translation: the drawing became capitalized in shows like Houses for Sale and galleries like Max Protetch) then under early network culture the built domain has been thoroughly removed from reality by pricing that bore no relationship to reality and ever more irreal financial instruments (you didn’t get that 5 year adjustable interest-only balloon-payment mortgage with 0% down, did you?).

But even the most advanced delusions ultimately have to come down to earth.This is something I’ve been pointing out for a while, but here is more grist for the mill. The Orange Country Register reports that job growth is slowing and suggests that the declining real estate is responsible for this. 16.7 percent of OC jobs are in real estate, construction, or related financial fields. The construction industry has ballooned by 148% in the 14 years since the bottom of the last cycle. The statistics in Los Angeles are little different.

Construction is the new factory job, highly paid work for unskilled labor. Illegal immigrants and cash workers are far more common than in other industries (in Southern California, Home Depot has begun to institutionalize the lines of day laborers in front of their centers).

How much of the much vaunted decline in crime has to do with the fact that you can get great pay and a good lifestyle legally in construction as opposed to risking your neck in crime? What will happen to the legions of unskilled laborers, many of whom have no papers and no command of English, as the bubble continues its downward trend? As these jobs go bust, crime will rise as it always does. As family bread-winners who have been employed in an industry subject to cyclical downturns find themselves without a job—and in many cases face foreclosure of loans given under criminal terms—their reaction will be, understandably, not pretty.

On of my current projects is a book on Los Angeles during the last decade. Even as it tells the improbable story of the recovery of Southern California, by the time it is published, the region’s economic landscape will likely resemble Mike Davis’s City of Quartz once again. If you look at the demographics for the area since 1940 (!), each decade shows Southern California being divided more and more into poor regions worthy of the developing world (note well: the amount of terrain devoted to these grows every decade) and insanely rich mountain and coastal communities. The City of Quartz may be back, with a vengeance.

UPDATE:

Another option, of course, is that the immigrant workers just head home, as the Washington Post suggests. But that would pose problems of its own for the poorer inhabitants of those communities who can’t afford to go home and all the businesses dependent on these workers.

dangerous reading

While doing research for my next paper at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I ran across this pdf, the script of Three Days of the Condor, one of my favorite films.

In this brilliant collaboration between Robert Redford and Sydney Pollack, our hero is Turner, a CIA operative working in an office in ethereally beautiful 1970s New York. Turner finds himself on the run and is baffled as to why since all he does is read. Here’s one of the key moments in the plot, here Turner is explaining himself to the character Kathy, played by Faye Dunaway.

Listen. I work for the CIA. I’m not a spy. I just read books. We read everything that’s published in the world, and we–we feed the plots–dirty tricks, codes into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, new ideas. We read adventures and novels and journals. I–I can-Who’d invent a job like that? I–Listen! People are trying to kill me!

The air is thick with Watergate-era government conspiracy as Turner tries to avoid being caught while tracing just who is trying to kill him by hacking into telephone networks.

Well worth watching, or re-watching. Well worth asking…just where is today’s version?

the city is here for you to use

At last it can be revealed…

I will be a special guest at Adam Greenfield’s talk at Cooper Union tonight, The City is Here for You to Use. Adam is a promising young thinker who will be working closely with the Netlab and AUDC on upcoming projects this year. If it’s not too late and if you’re in the area, I urge you to attend. As Adam writes:

If you’re at all interested in the texture of big city life, the evolution of post-PC computing, and how they might shape and inform each other, you don’t want to miss this.

server death throes

My ISP seems to have not understood that “failover hosting” doesn’t mean fail over and over and over. Once again varnelis.net went down. As if I didn’t have enough to do, now its time to move ISPs.

Blue Monday

kazys with blue monday
It’s been a Blue Monday here in Montclair in more ways than one. It’s foggy and wet with patches of drizzle. The doorbell rang this morning and the Fedex man came with my advance copies of Blue Monday. The book looks fantastic and I can’t wait to get it into the wild. It is the perfect size to be “A Guide to the Operating System of the System itself” as Reinhold Martin calls it. If the dot.com era was marked by Verso’s somewhat (deliberately) cynical Communist Manifesto with the Komar and Malmid cover that was supposed to “fit snugly in a Prada purse,” then Blue Monday is the irony-free successor.
Regrettably, ever since I moved to a so-called “failover” web hosting plan, my server has done nothing but fail. Varnelis.net took a turn for the worse today and the not-so-very-helpful staff weren’t able to account for (or admit) what they had done. As a result, instead of being able to post this account to the blog quickly, I had to move the site over. Oh well, it all makes the eventual transition to a new host easier! In the meantime, some links will have broken. Unfortunately, it will probably be a long time before I can spare the cycles to rebuild them.
But, with the site up and (largely) running, I’m pleased to finally be able to report this news along with this photo of the first American Blue Monday and its owner.
Did you know there’s a whole site dedicated to photographs of copies of Blue Monday and their owners ?