For the second week in a row, a late night out after the theatre bumped up against an early morning with Will. We beg your pardon.

Matins

¶ Friday thoughts on how cars have made us stupid: At Good , Rosie Sparks picks up Treehugger‘s urban-sprawl feedback loop.

A roundabout connect the dots: Sprawling urban areas mean more trees cleared –» with larger housing spaces, increasingly cooled by air conditioning powered by greenhouse gas spewing sources –» means increasing average temperatures –» means more air conditioning usage –» [repeat]. Time to rethink this norm from both an energy and architectural/urban planning perspective.

Meanwhile, Felix Salmon wonders why “minimum parking requirements” still figure in urban planning.

For me the biggest and most invidious cost of parking lots is also the most difficult to measure: the way that they kill any attempt at decent architecture, both on the level of individual buildings and on the level of city development more broadly. Your favorite buildings, your favorite cities, and your favorite vacation destinations all have one thing in common: a distinct absence of massive parking lots. So why are these things mandated by zoning regulations across the U.S.? It makes precious little sense, and it’s high time that minimum parking requirements died a long-overdue death.

Vespers

¶ Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is such a cool novel that even non-fiction editor Ms NOLA is reading it. You’ll want to, too, after you read Ms Egan’s incredibly smart Rumpus interview, in which she supplies a way of thinking about some novels that seem to be more than just stitched together from short stories: the fiction album. Why didn’t we think of that?

It evolved very organically. I started with the first piece, “Found Objects.” At the time, I was between projects and thought I’d just write a story. I had gone in to a bathroom and seen a wallet lying under the sink, and I found myself pondering the wallet and postulating an alternate version of myself who would take the wallet. Who would that person be? Why would she take the wallet in the bathroom? That’s where I started writing out of, and then there was a mention of the wallet-thief’s boss, Bennie Salazar. I write pretty instinctively, so it’s not like I was thinking about it much, but at the time I intended it as a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer, who sprays pesticide under his arms and sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee as an aphrodisiac. You know, these decadent rock-and-roll habits. But then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor character would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a story collection—it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record album.

While We’re Away

¶ Choire Sicha apanks the gays. (This is FYF; via  The Awl)

Once upon a time, people built daring, gorgeous houses in the Pines. Horace Gifford, an architect, now deceased, who seems to have worked very infrequently off Fire Island, built a number of houses in the Pines and they are some of the most exceptional, handmade, faggoty modernist homes in the world. He built them, big and small, for men who believed in the value of the craft of a house, not so dissimilar from the way that straight people built their houses a hundred years ago. (“Horace was a friend, and he and I had a great working relationship. He would come up with ideas and I would draw them.”)

I’m sure it was something of a competition back then, one’s residence. Can you imagine commissioning Eero Saarinen to build you a small shack on the beach? But someone did, and it’s still, largely, standing, toward the west side of the Pines. It is of course a gorgeous swooping thing. Sometime after the original house was built, someone crammed a second floor atop the building, and now it looks like some giant asshole took an enormous wooden dump on it. Each turd is in the shape of squared-off Burger King paper crowns.

The structures being built there now, though, makes that addition look like John Lautner‘s best. They are garbage, made out of garbage; tiny plastic pools sunk into crappy decks in the glare of horrid, boxy, dumb houses that most likely will never survive their first tropical storm. And in the houses, the plates are plastic and the glasses are plastic and the clothes are plastic and the music is plastic and the drugs, especially, the drugs are plastic.

Have a Look

¶ An unidentified strange man spanks himself. (via Joe.My.God)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 10:00 am.