atlas(t)

to sprawl or not to sprawl

here's an interesting broadcast from To the Best of Our Knowledge from a few months ago.

(Listen to it here or click through below for more info)

TO SPRAWL OR NOT TO SPRAWL

Subdivisions. Industrial Parks. Strip Malls. Gridlock. Sprawl is socially unequal, environmentally irresponsible, and aesthetically ugly. Right? In this hour of To the Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll look at the costs and – YES – the benefits of suburban sprawl. Because maybe, just maybe, sprawl is a good thing.

SEGMENT 1: Joel Hirschhorn is the author of "Sprawl Kills: How Blandburbs. Steal Your Time, Health and Money." He obviously thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.

 SEGMENT 2: Robert Bruegmann makes the case for the opposite point of view in his book "Sprawl: A History." He says societies have always grown and ours looks the way it does because suburbs represent the way Americans like to live. Also, urban sprawl is a staggering problem in China as a result of the on-going Chinese industrial revolution. Photographer Edward Burtynsky traveled to China to document its "Manufactured Landscapes," and film-maker Jennifer Baichwal documented his trip in her film of the same name. Baichwal talks with Steve Paulson about the scale of China's ecological problems and the beauty of Burtynsky's images.

SEGMENT 3: Novelist Tom Perrotta reads from "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher," and talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.

I'll definitely need to check out some of those books.

girlicious contestants' geography knowledge

i have to admit, dumb as it was, I watched The Pussycat Dolls Present Girlicious religiously.

Why that's a painful admission should be immediately apparent in this video.

It's not just the ignorance of young people who are mostly just out of high school and therefore should have those geography lessons they clearly never got still fresh in their minds. What bugs me the most about this is: these girls are invited onto this show, and held up as paragons of sexy girlhood, and given the ultimate prize of fame and minor-goddess status if they win. But their apparent lack of intelligence and educational achievement are considered not only fair game, but not at all an impediment to their being minor goddesses.

We can laugh at their ignorance without it at all impinging on our enjoyment of their ... er ... talents.

But then, if Hillary Clinton's campaign didn't make our society's overwhelming sexism clear, then how is anyone going to be able to see through this pretty blatant example?

geography seasons

a little boring, but useful.

map tattoos, part ii

Image above found here.

i clearly haven't been paying much attention.

In my my map tattoos post from April of 2006, I wrote that "Putting the map onto you, far from removing your control of its contents, actually intensifies your control of the map's contents by personalizing them, making them not just a part of your claim of identity, but an actual part of your body." Then I asked, if that was the case then why weren't there more map tattoos out there.

The answer is: there are.

First of all, the tattoo post was hands down this blog's most popular post evarrr, featuring as it did a colored map of the world on a model's ass ... clearly not a tattoo, but meant to look like one. For a while the photo of the world map on the woman's ass was turning up on the second page of google image search. There was a point, when my blog went into remission, that I was getting a thousand hits a day just from people google-image-searching "tattoos."

I hadn't know people were so hungry for tattoo ideas. I'm glad--for the thousandth time--that I don't have one.

Since then, folks have been sending me pointers--both by email and in comments--to their own map tattoos and I haven't even been noticing all that much. But clearly it's time to update, and post some of these images. And maybe look again at the analysis.

So this one, to the left, is the first one I was sent, about a year ago, by email. Not to be mean, but I wouldn't have known it was a map if the emailer hadn't told me. She also didn't specify what the map was of, just that she planned to wrap another map around it.

I hope she's well on her way to finding the right map tattoo, and hope that some of the images below will give her inspiration.

This one is via Strange Maps. The woman depicted, Britta Oelschlaeger, is "a fan of [her hometown of] Hannover’s football team and ... completely crazy about maps.”

In comments, Desiree "got this cool map tattoo done by Jim at River of Ink in Appleton." It's on her back. Apparently, her lower back. It's more old school than the butt tattoos, but then those probably aren't real tattoos.

Nick Benson of ottergoose.net got this done on vacation in Hawai'i

I've now got the 8 primary islands of Hawaii on display for anyone who lifts of my sleeve**. The three islands I've been to are shaded red. Assuming that I'll be back to visit the remaining islands (and need to get more of the islands filled in), I asked the artist which shade of red he used. The answer? Monthly red. How classy... at least it's easy to remember.

Clearly whoever named that color has never seen anyone's "monthlies."

Yoni, who is apparently more of the lingam sort, has the whole world on his forearm.

So much for the commenters. My previously rather disappointing google search for "map tattoo" turned up a much richer store this time, including the new ass map tattoo at the top of this post (which also appears to be fake. And what is it with ass tattoos on women?). Other treasures:

From the URL at the top of the guy's back, this appears to be a fake put together by a site specifically created to mashup funky tattoo images. But I could be wrong. If you have the time/inclination to dig, please correct me in comments.

Google image search picked up this much cooler, but equally fake looking, underground map here. Also no info.

Nebraska's Creighton University has a website where they posted a spread of students with tattoos. The very cool, seemingly small one above is from

Kevin Miles,
Arts & Sciences senior

How many tattoos?
A solid map of the world on the upper inside of his right forearm.
A compass and sun with the words “Adventure” and “Explore”.
Why get tattoos?
Had both tattoos done while in Thailand with his roommate two years ago. He loves to travel and wants to join the Peace Corps when he graduates.
Do people know you have tattoos?
Most people do since they are in pretty visible spots

Apparently, Napoleon's Australia pirate map tattoo sort of shows the extent of our trip. Whatever that means. This is creepily Pillow Bookish, in its visual invitation to peel it off when the wearer is dead.

And here's a more patriotic map of Australia.

Alejandro uses the three dimensional nature of his body (there's a back and a side!) to depict the world, in shiny shininess. If the shape weren't so familiar, it might look like a medical photo of a skin disease. (see also Kevin Miles.)

Tatiana's political map of Brazil is sexier, I think, and not because she's wearing a bikini over it.

But I think the pièce de résistance is this article about Brangelina, which tells us that not only does Ange have "over a dozen tattoos, including the geographical co-ordinates for all four of her children" (begging one to ask: geographic coordinates for what? Where they were born? Where they were jacked adopted from? Where they are right this second, Mrs. Weasley-style?) but this tattoo, depicted to the left, on Brad's broadening flank, is supposedly a diagram of the levees of New Orleans. The article sez:

Brad's unusual back tattoo comprises groupings of horizontal black lines, with bizarre boxed shapings below.

The strangest combination appears to be inspired by a map of the levees in New Orleans, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 when the systems failed.

More than 1,800 people died in the storm and during the rescue debacle which followed, mostly the poor, sick and disadvantaged. Costing around $81billion, it was also the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

Since Hurricane Katrina, Brad and Angelina have bought a home in the Louisiana city and the actor has been heavily involved in local building projects.

So, what about map tattoos and identity? Well, let's mention a few really obvious things first. Tattoos are by now pretty much universally accepted in the industrialized West, except in certain subcultures. So de rigueur are they, in fact, that the internet has helpfully provided us with multiple tattoo design sites and blogs (many of which provided the tattoo photos above) designed specifically to help people find tattoos they haven't already seen on everyone and their little brother.

Second: maps and mapping are really, really popular at the mo'. I'm not going to go into this right now. I'm planning a post on it later, when I've had the time to read some more of the books that have come out recently about mapping 'n' stuff. But it is; it's in the air, mapping. Third: in the past two years, Web 2.0 has gone from an industry catchphrase to an embarrassing anachronism, and everyone knows how to post pictures online now. So the above two obvious things might mean that we have a sudden spate of map tattoos, but it also might be that the people with map tattoos are just posting them now, where they weren't before.

And some of these, like the subway maps, which might be fake anyway, or the outline world maps, seem to have been chosen simply because they look cool ... or are cool, conceptually.

But then there are the travelers' tattoos, like the one of Hawai'i, or Australia, or the one of China in the original post, where the tattoo is a marker of the place one has been to. It's a way of claiming possession of the places you've been, a possession similar to Henry VIII's brother Arthur's boast the morning after his wedding night with Catherine of Aragon: "I've been to Spain." That's what the reddening of the Hawai'ian islands the traveler has been to reminds me of: hymen blood, not monthly. Interesting that the travelers' tattoos are all on men. The Hawai'i tattooed guy's girlfriend got a tattoo with a similar intent on the same trip ... of Hawai'ian flowers.

The student's blacked-in world map is explained by his wanting to travel and join the Peace Corps. In this case, the map is a promise made to himself, to possess the world through travel. There's an added element here, embodied in the Peace Corps ideal, of the pending "citizen of the world," or the nascent member of the "international community," that group of geographically and nationally unmoored "experts" whose job is to make one part of the world intelligible to the other, but not necessarily vice versa. (I won't go into it now, but having grown up on the fringes of the "international community," I have isshooz.)

So it's all the more interesting to analyze Brangelina's tattoos about their children. Brad apparently has a tattoo of a blessing to celebrate Maddox's existence: not the child's name, not his birthdate or symbolic words or numbers, but a Buddhist blessing in Sanskrit. Pitt saves the possessive tattooing of names and dates for Ange alone, with a tat of her birthdate in Khmer. The womb raider, on the other hand---already widely reviled for laying claim to countries and cultures by adopting their children---doubles this notion back on itself, by making geographical coordinates symbolize her children (rather than something more individual, like a name or a birthdate), and then laying claim to the whole---nations, cultures, geographical place, and children---by tattooing these coordinates on her body.

And the "New Orleans" tat seems to be a fairly benign identity tattoo, a symbol trailing behind the Jolie-Pitts' purchase of a NOLA house. If it's actually what the media says it is, it's a mild protest of a historical wrong; turning New Orleans and its levees into a metonym for the Katrina disaster, and associating Pitt with both the protest, and the amelioration efforts. It's not him taking over a location to associate himself with it, it's him taking over a metonym to mark himself a good guy.

There's more to say about all of this, but I'm tapped for now. Maybe I'll check in on map tattoos again.

ETA:

This map tattoo by a cartographer of the US interstate system. Tip from comments below.

ghosts of the river

Performance photos jacked from ShadowLight's flickr stream.

on the border tip, if you think about stories white Americans would tell of the U.S.-Mexican border, you might think of anecdotes about illegal border crossers being caught, or the signs warning cars of families on the highway near Tijuana. Tall tales from Minutemen about a good or a bad day catching wetbacks. Thoughtful snippets of shoppers who kept mum when they saw someone stuffed into the trunk of a car, that sort of thing. Stories about people trying to get in from outside, told from the point of view of inside, stories that take into consideration only the land to the immediate "front" and "back" of the border, and not the volumes of land beyond it on either side.

But if you think about the stories Mexicans and Mexican Americans would tell, it's no longer a bilateral in/out kind of a narrative, with the penetration of the border being the climax. Because the reasons for leaving Mexico--and the reasons for entering the U.S.--are legion, and the paths that lead to the border are many, even if the paths that lead away from the border are few. The border stories, then, are not all about whether one gets through it or not, or even whether or not one survives the experience.

I had the enormous privilege a few weeks ago of attending a workshop production (i.e. a presentation of a part of a performance that isn't finished yet) of a new piece by the Balinese-style shadow puppetry company ShadowLight Productions.

Ghosts of the River is a collection of stories about the U.S.-Mexico border by Chicano playwright Octavio Solis, whose last play, June in a Box, I had some problems with but really enjoyed. The company only performed two of the stories, each unrelated except that they both took place on and in the Rio Bravo/Grande.

The other important detail about this project is that it is art-directed by Favianna Rodriguez, the community organizer, artist-entrepreneur powerhouse, who is just the kind of impeccably-credentialed community activist type whose art usually suffers for it. Favianna, on the other hand--who knows really how she does it--is also a fantastic artist ... fantastic in both senses of the word.

Put the three elements together into a dream-team and you could easily have mush. In this case, though, "dream team" is apt. As I said, the workshop only performed two stories, but both were terrific and the puppetry was wonderful.

The first story was about a Mexican woman murdered by her abusive husband, who haunts the river waiting for him to try to cross so she can drown him. The second (more moving because more realistic) story dramatizes the competitive friendship that develops between an American border guard, and a child "coyote" who makes money helping Mexicans cross illegally.

I loved Rodriguez's designs for the piece. Her characteristic organic/cubist faces and figures worked perfectly with the Balinese-style puppets, and details of her landscapes are perhaps more wonderful executed in light and shadow than in ink on paper. The photos here don't do the piece justice.

The team working together on this piece numbered about twenty, and the set-up was complex. I loved the whole thing. They'll be working on a full-length piece for Brava Theater in 2009 and I can't wait to see it. Definitely recommend keeping an eye out for it. I'll review it when it comes out.