atlas(t)

maya lin's systematic landscapes

all I can say, really, about Maya Lin's show Systematic Landscapes, is that the title is appropriate.

Lin takes a number of materials and objects, and systematically finds a way to impose landscape/topography on them, or to use them to depict topography and landscape. Some of these are beautiful and successful, some are strained. All are cold, minimalist, and uninviting.

Which is not to say that I disliked the show. It's up at San Francisco's de Young Museum right now and was the impetus to finally mounting an original exhibition of Asian American art from 1900-1970 that had been years in the making. The Asian American exhibition is rich, vibrant, diverse, and full of high-energy, extremely skilled landscape paintings of the very landscapes Lin is depicting in Systematic Landscapes: Yosemite, the San Francisco Bay. The coldness of Lin's work doesn't contrast with the warmth of the other work to the detriment of either; the Asian American historical work enriches and contextualizes Lin's work, and Lin's work gives the obvious tradition of Asian American landscape depiction continuity and contemporary currency.

But I think Lin's work would have suffered without the juxtaposition. Ultimately, this is an intellectual show that takes little pleasure in its aesthetics, and doesn't love its materials very much. This is especially apparent in her 3-D topographical "drawings." She imposes a grid on a topography, and then transposes  that grid to 3-D space using plastic tubing or wire. I have no doubt these topographies are very precise, but they don't look precise; they look messy and unloved. I would vastly prefer that she had fudged the scientific precision a bit to make the pieces look more precise, and to perhaps express her love of the hard definition more ... er, emotionally?

I did like the look of the wooden topographies [one set of vertically placed 2x4s (to the left) and one set of horizontally placed pressboard depicting mountains, and one set of horizontally placed planks representing landlocked sea basins] and of the topographically carved atlases (one of which is in the image at top.) But the atlases might have made more sense if the actual topography of the region shown on the atlas page had been carved, rather than something more random. And even the good work was all one-liner.

I think I rather appreciated the show as a palate-cleanser after the rich meal of the Asian American history show, than as a free-standing set. If nothing else, it's an object lesson in the difference between simple (her best work) and simplistic.

collective nouns list

wiktionary has an appendix which is a searchable database of collective nouns, those nouns used to collect a group of other nouns, like a "pride" of lions, or, famously, a "murder" of crows. You can search by collective noun, or noun, and they include both standard and ... uh ... made up ones.

This is another item--the quirkiness of collective nouns--that has become popular and trendy lately. I've seen lists of collective nouns in recent quirkster books and mentioned in various quirkster contexts. I'd hesitate to align myself with the forces of collective quirk ... only, it's a database!

I like a "hand" of bananas and a "stare" or a "parliament" of owls (both are so appropriate, no?)

mass transit in america

via Wikimedia Commons, this map of the Tokyo subway.

I have a t-shirt with this image on it, boughten from Urban Outfitters. Yes, as I've said before, mapfascination is zeitgeisty. I'm not even sure if I should bother writing a post about it.

This is an oblique lead-in to a brief post pointing you to a good article by Katharine Mieszkowski in Salon (does she ever write bad articles?) called "Who Says Americans Won't Ride Mass Transit?"

The thrust of the article is that gas prices are driving Americans back to mass transit, but governments are simultaneously cutting funding. So the new/old transit riders are not merely encountering the overcrowding that would result from an influx of new riders into existing schedules, but are actually joining at a time when lines and service are being cut.

It's a story being repeated across the country -- a story with a grim irony. California, under the Schwarzenegger administration, has embraced ambitious goals to fight global warming, pledging to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. But you wouldn't know it from how the state is treating transit. Transportation is the No. 1 source of global warming pollution in the state, and it's the fastest-growing source, yet the state budget recently signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature raids $1.7 billion from transit funding.

"They're diverting the money from transit and keeping highways whole," says Tom Radulovich, a BART director and executive director of Livable City, a nonprofit group that promotes sustainable transportation. "There's been a big shift to transit as people are trying to avoid high gas prices. But we're taking billions of dollars away from transit, and investing billions in highways."

Mieszkowski calls the attitude of "'When you're allocating money for transit, nobody ever asks how crowded buses are'" a "persistent hangover of America's romance with the car." But I'd call it a date rape, not a romance. Naturally, I'm one of those misanthropic liberals who sees conspiracy everywhere, but it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize the persistence of the automobile industry's lobby against withdrawing money from public transit and putting it into highways at a time when any fool can see the writing on the wall. What else would you call a situation where the public is actually asking to put away their cars and ride the bus, and the government still won't step up?

Seriously? Vote for Obama.

zip code map

just sticking my head in to put up a useful and cool map I found on wikipedia: map of U.S. ZIP codes.

Didya know that "ZIP" means "Zone Improvement Plan"? I guess the plan worked. Reading the article, I'm remembering dimly a time in grade school when we were taught  to write and address letters and we wrote: "San Francisco, California" clearly, because otherwise the letter would go astray. That was before the two-capital-letter State designation came in (we had to learn those in school, too) and before ZIP codes were used universally. They were optional.

Not all good ideas or systems are adopted. I guess the good ideas that arise in conjunction with the power to implement them get adopted. Or perhaps, if there are people with the power to implement good ideas, who LISTEN to good ideas, then they get implemented. If not, George W. Bush, then you get stuck in a terrible, expensive war with no way out, and your economy crashes.

Okay, that was a stretch, but the election is ten days away. Are you voting?