Month: September 2010

Fall Appearances

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I have a very full schedule this fall, with six talks, five of which are outside of the New York area. It’s a great privilege to be invited to participate in so many incredible venues and I hope this gives me a chance to see old friends and make new ones in the various locations I will be visiting. 

24 September, Lūžio taškas (Breaking Point), Palanga, Lithuania

09 October, Image.Architecture.Now, Julius Shulman Institute, Woodbury University, Los Angeles

12 October, Once Upon a Place, 1st International Conference on Architecture and Fiction, Lisbon, Portugal

14 October, Who Owns Images, panel discussion with Geeta Dayal, Thomas Demand, and Sam Thorne, Frieze Talks 2010, London, England

07 November, Datacity, Amber Conference, Istanbul, Turkey

18 November, Design and Existential Risk, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY

Last but not least, the New City Reader, a collaboration with Joseph Grima and many amazing individuals and networks in the form of a print newspaper starts October 5 at the New Museum. This is a sneak preview. More soon.

The Saddest Ship Afloat

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Is there a sadder ship afloat than the Democratic party?

The groundswell of support for "Hope" and change has turned against them. Why? Barack Obama, class clowns like Larry Summers and Rahm Emmanuel, and the DNC should really lead a sing-along to Led Zeppelin’s immortal song "Nobody’s fault but mine." Take a look at this piece from PBS Newshour and Patchwork Nation, which identifies where the Tea Party movement is the strongest. Turns out that support it is in those areas in which the housing boom soared the highest and crashed the hardest. It’s easy for these "liberals" to poke fun at the beer-drinking, ATV and jet-ski riding crowd in their exurban homesteads, but this could have been a source of support for the Dems. Instead they decided to put all their cards in supporting Wall Street and the financial sector since, after all, that is where they come from, that is who funded them, and that is all that mattered to them. Of course now that Wall Street is turning against its former allies—perhaps to extract another round of concessions from the Republicans—a mid-term rout is in progress. What a fiasco!