The Atlantic Cities has launched the Urbanist Toolkit Bracket Challenge, a tournament wherein readers vote for their favorite city planning tools. In the opening Round of 32 (with regional brackets called “Sidewalk Ballet”, “Le Corbusier” and “Ed Koch”), streetcars defeated bus rapid transit, food trucks faced down pop-up parks, and car share services saw off redesigned highway interchanges.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Ballet Meets Hardware: Dancers Dressed In Aluminum Tubes
“The idea for [The Aluminum Show] came to Israeli-born creator and artistic director Ilan Azriel when he was in a hardware store and opened a box, and some small aluminum tubing fell to the floor. Azriel liked the ‘snake-like’ material and started to examine its possibilities.”
More Ballet-Meets-Hardware: A Dance For Bicycle-Furniture Hybrids
“If you recently saw a person driving a park bench through the streets of San Francisco, don’t worry – you’re not crazy, and neither is the rider. The bench-on-wheels is simply a prop for a performance called Transit: Next Stop, which happens to involve classically trained dancers gliding around on stage atop heavily modded bicycles.”
A Requiem For The World’s Oddest Orchestra: A Lighthouse, Three Brass Bands And 50 Ships
“Artists Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway have teamed up with composer Orlando Gough to create The Foghorn Requiem, … to mark the passing from use of the UK’s remaining land-based foghorns, which for the last 150 years have warned shipping about dangerous shorelines and other hazards.”
Solving The Orchestra Crisis (First, Stop Overpaying Everyone!)
“Both the musicians and the management of our major orchestras are overpaid. … Over the past 30 years they have demanded higher and higher paychecks while ticket sales and recording revenues have continued to drop dramatically. There is no business in the world that can sustain a negative revenue model like that.” (Emphasis in original.)
Is An E-Book Revolution Coming To France?
“A little over a year ago, when we approached one of France’s main publishing houses to discuss e-books, they quite candidly said they didn’t even have an e-book strategy. It was as though e-books were not even within their scope. It was disconcerting. And yet, a few months later, it took no convincing at all to get other French publishers on board for direct-to-digital English translations.”
Danny Boyle: 3-D Films ‘May Be A Phase’
Says the director of Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire and the London Olympics opening ceremony, “It’s a tool, you know. There are sound innovations coming actually, particularly Dolby Atmos, which are going to do something very equivalent to what 3D does. So, I don’t know if 3D will survive to be honest. I think it may be a phase.”
San Francisco Symphony Strike’s Great Mystery: Work Rules
Striking musicians are loudly complaining that management’s proposed work rule changes are intolerable – but won’t say what those changes are. Management claims to have no idea what changes the musicians are talking about – though administration spokespeople get slippery when questioned further.
A Fable Of The San Francisco Symphony Strike?
“A young, naive, well-meaning Bible salesman encounters a boy, perhaps 6 years old, playing outside his home. The man says hello to the kid, hoping to speak to the child’s parents. The boy kicks the man in the shin, starts screaming, and when his mother runs out from the house, the boy points at the man at yells: ‘He kicked me!'”
Aleksandar Hemon Waits For Catastrophes
“Displacement pretty much excludes what my parents and many Sarajevans call ‘normal life,’ which is in many ways a nostalgic concept. … I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability – the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.”