NY... Paris... Toronto?

Two great short videos from StreetFilms documenting that latest trends in NY and Paris: cycling as a bona fide form of public transportation.

On August 8th, NY hosted its first "Cyclovia" in which major streets in downtown Manhattan were closed to vehicular traffic for the day. Echoing Toronto's spontaneous experiment with community during the 2003 blackout, people took to the streets to party, dance, and just generally enjoyed the ability to converse at normal decibel levels. Seriously, when did we all just accept that noise pollution was no longer an environmental nuisance (or did we)?



Video #2 explains how the rather successful Velib public bicycle system works in Paris. The plan is to expand what is already a system of 1450 stations comprised of 20,000 bikes.



August 23rd, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Velib, Cyclovia, get off your ass Toronto

Please Say Something

Fun series of 30 second vignettes telling the troubled emotional tale of cat and mouse in 10 parts and fine style.



August 23rd, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: cat and mouse, animation

Cycling is a Priority

This about sums it all up: best of intentions, terrible execution.



August 19th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: SOS

Back on the Hustings

And starting tomorrow I'm pleased to say, as I'm working for quite an excellent advocacy organization! Back to the coffee grind.



August 10th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: get to work

The Junk Mail Effect

Hot on the heels of LCBO's voluntary plastic bag ban, the coming into force of Canada's (flimsy) Do Not Telemarket List, and the accelerating pace of judgments against e-mail spammers, ForestEthics has released a report tabulating the carbon footprint of the American junk mail industry.

Their result? Junk mail’s contribution to climate change was calculated as the equivalent of running more than nine million cars for a year, the carbon output of seven combined US states, or the emissions generated by heating nearly 13 million homes for the winter. It is also responsible for the cutting of some 100 million trees.

Their solution? A Do Not Mail Registry, similar in design and intent of similar do not spam and do not telemarket exclusion registries.

I'm wary of the efficacy of such lists -- it would seem to provide unsavory operators with a list of confirmed good contacts -- but you can't deny the shift in mindset it represents against the nearly unrestrained right of commercial advertising to besiege our minds with a plague of fantasies.

What's next, a ban on outdoor urban billboard advertising?

August 10th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: junk mail, no logos, get off my lawn

Nostaligia: Lego

Two of the best sets my parents bought me.





August 9th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: lego, nostalgia, painting the walls yellow

Last Day in the Library

I celebrated my last day in the library with the newly minted english translation of Vattimo's Art's Claim to Truth and this lovely view from the 12th floor of the Robart's Library. You can sit directly before this huge window with your feet up on the heat register below. Tourists love the view too. Over the last two months I've taken four shots of couples in front of the even bigger window in the "red apex" of the 13th floor.

Vattimo's book is an interesting way to conclude my research into law and aesthetics. He adopts the work of a 1950's philosopher named Pareyson who argues that 20th art achieved autonomy through the revelation that each great work resonates with a "law of the work" that simultaneously synthesizes the coherency in form and content of the work, and which necessarily exceeds itself and opens onto an interpretative multiplicity and iterability heralding the death of metaphysic foundationalism. So on the one hand you have this act of recognition of this conspicuously undefined and pneumenal "law of art" but also notions that this law is constituted to be endlessly interpreted. It strikes me as a bit of an odd mix of the ancient greek aesthetic of rhythm and Georges Bataille, and would seem to have something to say about HLA Hart's classic "rule of recognition" or Dworkin's "chain novel" as the basis for inscribing law's absent authority. None of that would be terribly convincing though, which is perhaps why Vattimo runs with this a bit more to ultimately create a mash-up between Heidegger's ontology and Gadamer's hermeneutics. Which, of course, I think Levinas exceeds with an ethics of imagination (after all, there's no ambiguity of authority in a state of perfect unknowability). But it might also be a convenient way of exploring the internecine step between being, language and sensing, which is the crux of Levinasian aesthetics as I understand it.

Anyway, thesis completion, here I come.



August 7th, 2008 / 0 Comments / Tags: Vattimo, Pareyson, art, thesis, roabrts library, sky-effing-line-of-Toronto