Black Newborn, Sherrie Levine

Southern California, Elizabeth Murray

Night Sail, Toni Grote

Pink out of a Corner, Dan Flavin

Pelvis IV, Georgia O'Keefe

This first regards magazines, which I read a lot of, but this approach would definitely have me signing up for more. And I'm glad to see Popular Science kick some ass here. My grandfather always had it around, so there's definitely a nostalgia factor (probably with me and everyone else in the world). I wonder if Reader's Digest or the Saturday Evening Post has anything in the works...

And here's a hint of what's going on with books. This is pretty sweet. Although it is a children's book, my mind is racing about the potential this holds for a variety of genres. I imagine that David Foster Wallace would have gone to town with some hyper-annotation. Dave Eggers, I'm sure, is plotting something.

I first saw this video months ago, but was reminded of it today after viewing an interview with Glenn Lowry, the director of MoMA in New York.

Vladmir Baranoff-Rossiné, a Ukrainian painter and multimedia artist, created this work in 1913. As the video states, it is a "pivotal example of abstract sculpture."

He made this piece to tell a story about a changing world. The introduction of automobiles. The first hints of globalized war. The sudden swirl of new pressures and ideas being imposed upon an individual's place in all of it. Frenzied. Chaotic. Mechanical. Constantly in motion.

Because of the perceived enormity of events (which were in fact actual), Baranoff-Rossiné needed a new vocabulary—that of cubist abstraction—to convey his thoughts and emotions. Simple figurative sculpture or whistful painting would not do.

Today we face a similarly changing world (or perhaps one that just continues to change while our generations churn through it). Life seems to have sped up considerably, and as I sit here typing away I feel fortunate to have a least a little time to pause and reflect. Too often I feel like Symphony No. 1.

That said, it is a relief to know that I can empathize with a man who lived almost a hundred years ago. We often yearn for a simpler time, but no time must be simple when one is in the midst of it.

I wonder what media Baranoff-Rossiné would use today to express his thoughts about this world in which we live.

Before WiFi started being offered in-flight, I used to love the lack of connectivity airplanes offered. I could read magazines and books, catch up on podcasts or music, and not really have any nagging feeling that I could be doing something else. Because I couldn't.

Train rides were different, since they offered greater comfort over a shorter distance. So it was actually nice just to be away but able to still get work done, answer email and have a phone call here and there while looking over the landscape passing by.

When I drive long distances, I enjoy audiobooks. So much so that I was once so caught up in one I missed my exit and ended up in Philadelphia, a long ways away from where I needed to be. Nevertheless, driving doesn't do much for work, unless you need to be on conference calls.

All of these observations, however, are a byproduct of a professional life. My job is what robbed me of personal time and gave me a tilted set of priorities. (Though I'm OK with that in many ways...) In school or college, I never had such concerns or perspectives. Nor did anyone else.

Now, though, it appears students will soon be ever-connected, and pressed prematurely into a professional outlook on life, and possilby for good reason: it calms them down.

Leading the charge in taking advantage of this understanding is a school district in Arizona (Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall):

Students endure hundreds of hours on yellow buses each year getting to and from school in this desert exurb of Tucson, and stir-crazy teenagers break the monotony by teasing, texting, flirting, shouting, climbing (over seats) and sometimes punching (seats or seatmates). But on this chilly morning, as bus No. 92 rolls down a mountain highway just before dawn, high school students are quiet, typing on laptops.

If there is a disparity in acedemic preparation between urban and rural students, this may lessen it over time. And possibly, this could even give rural students an advantage in certain areas, like computer science, since they will have more exposure to it.

Students were not just doing homework, of course. Even though Dylan Powell, a freshman, had vowed to devote the ride home to an algebra assignment, he instead called up a digital keyboard using GarageBand, a music-making program, and spent the next half-hour with earphones on, pretending to be a rock star, banging on the keys of his laptop and swaying back and forth in his seat.

Or maybe they'll just be better at video games.

The issue, clearly, is that email and other electronic forms of communication do not lend the level of intimacy the way a letter can. "Each person has their own handwriting. Letters have certain smells. They can even be perfumed," Mallon said. He spoke of a journal he handled from a World War I soldier. Upon opening it, out fell the dried petals of a flower the young man had picked in the south of France. It hit Mallon so powerfully—all of a sudden this soldier came to life. It's hard to imagine that an archieved Tweet would allow the same sense of connection.

But that's exactly what we'll be faced with—or are faced with. As letters become more precious with the passage of time and the passing of generations, we'll need to be increasingly creative as we mine the sources we are left with. We'll need to look carefully at the hints of personality afforded us in the spelling, grammar, length—even emoticons—used by people today in text messages, Tweets, email, IMs and whatnot.

What will likely benefit us is that which we'll miss from letters: thoughtfulness. Perhaps electronic communication will give us a more honest look at who people are—the sheer volume of correspondance, however brief in length, will display a rawness of character, one not over-thought or calculated the way a hand-writter letter or journal can be. Those millions of terse emails will expose how and what we really think.

Well, that is if we can pull them off all those spent hard drives. Will we someday be thrilled by the discovery of someone's old college computer? After decades in someone's attick, will it still be able to give up its secrets? It certainly won't be dropping any flowers picked up along the way.

But in fact, as everybody knows, the blackout gave rise to an outbreak of civic responsibility. From the Bronx to Staten Island, citizens appointed themselves traffic cops, gave rides to strangers, housed and fed the stranded. It also transpired that the upheaval provoked a huge number of romantic encounters, a collective surge of passion not seen, I read somewhere, since the ‘we’re-all-going-to-die-sex’ in which, apparently, everybody had indulged in the second half of September two years previously—an analysis I found a little hard to accept, since it was my understanding that all sex, indeed all human activity, fell into that category.

Here's what Dwight Garner in The New York Times had to say about it:

Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” is...the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.

Good praise. I'm off to the bookstore now—because the internet does not yet offer instant gratification when it comes to these types of purchases. Will report back soon...

As I'm writing this blog and collecting my thoughts, I'm coming to the conclusion that the technological additive in many ways makes us more human, not less. I would have thought otherwise at the beginning of this little exploration—as a default position, one widely propagated in popular culture (ironically) and society in general. 

There is of course an insidious side to technology, particularly the internet, but I don't think technology draws us apart. Look at what we use it for—informing, motivating, collecting, sharing. That does not, in the broad sense, draw down our humanity. It reinforces it.

We can't all just sit in a cave around a fire. We need to progress, to adapt and evolve. As such, we should not bifurcate technology and human nature—as if it is something distinct from us. It is us. It is human nature.

We are inextricably intertwined with and defined by the technology we create. We must consider that, accept it for what it is, and understand the implications. If we don't, only then will we lose our humanity. 

Three hours after the blackout, power was beginning to be restored in some parts of Sao Paulo, Brazil's financial capital and South America's largest city. But much of the sprawling metropolis remained in the dark. Traffic on the streets of Sao Paulo descended into chaos shortly after the power outage. Thousands of passengers were forced to exit stalled subway trains and walk along the tracks to get back to stations and make their way to the surface.

Brazil's energy minister, Edison Lobao, remarked that "atmospheric problems, an intense storm, may have contributed to or caused the transmission lines to...shut down." They better look into this bad weather situation before the World Cup soccer championship in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016.

More to come on this in the weekly blackout round-up...

The internet is often criticized for walling us all off, alone with our machines, to interact with a screen and not a real face. On one hand, there is merit to this. On the other, the internet has opened new realms of connection to people, whether in the same town or across the globe. It breaks down barriers and allows us to pursue our interests and curiosities on relatively safe terms—free from the limitations and adverse opinions of society. We can be what we want to be. Look for what we want to look for. And many times when we think we’re all alone in life we can find others just like us who are having the same experiences.

Technology, therefore, has freed us to be more human, not less. It has opened us up to explore ourselves more deeply. But will this, or does this, freedom enable us to transcend our behavior when otherwise interacting face-to-face?

It seems so.

There are countless examples of groups that form and individuals who meet online only to get together eventually in the physical sense. Internet dating is just one. How far can it be taken though? And will this newfound liberty and connectivity survive when the lights go out? Do we need this technological additive to be truly human? Do we need it to realize our full potential?

Certainly, architecture can be viewed as a “technology”—an additive that has the power to bring us together or keep us apart, whether physically or conceptually. The internet, mobile technology and other current advancements are merely the latest manipulative construct. The difference is that this additive has the ability to stop instantaneously. Architecture, for the most part, endures.

But let’s look at when it hasn’t: New York City on September 11. In a matter of a few hours, two dominant pieces of architecture vanished. These buildings definitely influenced our exchange and interaction, on local and global levels. The trauma of this event has been obvious. The loss of life is foremost. There are also the logistical complications, and the symbolic ones. How has this event changed us? Has it at all?

Jump from 2001 to 2003, and we may have an answer.

When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 occurred people acted differently than they had in previous blackouts—specifically in contrast to the New York City Blackout of 1977. Did September 11 have something to do with this? Despite being deprived of instantaneous connectivity—whether by phone, internet or television—the people of the city banded together and made the best of it. Panic was not much of an option, despite great uncertainty and very real fear.

So what empathy was bred by that September morning two years earlier—something profoundly positive, perhaps? If so, then does the architecture of the human condition allows us to pass along what we learned—if we even can identify what that was. In a digital world—one limited by electricity—will we remember it when the lights go out, will our books have rotted, will our stories have been forgotten. Or will we transcend.