i took a pic of the viking with big butter jesus on the way:
i took the viking to nyc with the intent of doing a pictures-of-a-gnome-at-landmarks kind of thing, but i never did, as i got too into my stuff to lug dude around. sorry guy.
the dayton airport had a looped message: "the current threat level, as established by the department of homeland security, is... orange." dumb. i guess it hasn't been below that since 911.
i was listening to chuck palahniuk's rant: an oral history of buster casey, and a great line came up: "after a good-looking boy gives you rabies two or three times, you'll settle down and marry somebody less exciting for the rest of your life."
i landed, and almost immediately a dude tried to hoodwink me, trying to get me to pay him to take me to manhattan and not take a cab. he wanted way more than the cab ride would have been. douche.
i got a cab to the storefront for art & architecture. i had time, so i grabbed a veggie wrap at *ack* starbucks and chilled out for a moment, peoplewatching. i set off for the storefront, not knowing what to look for, since the spanking new google streetview image wasn't revealing:
i do like the cross shadow on the wall, though. :)
so i got there, and i completely understood, and was amazed. the walls actually swivel out, as seen here in a pic from the storefront's site:
basically, you just walked in through one of the open sections. the room was trapezoidal, with the west end (the left side of the above pic) being the smaller of the parallel sides:
the other end was wider, and was where the table and chairs were set up. this was the beginning of day 3 (i think) of Postopolis!, a "five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design." four bloggers were convening with a host of guest speakers.
the wall opposite the swivel wall, in fact, was covered entirely with printouts of (i'm assuming) those four main blogs. (links to all are in the postopolis! link above). there were also four laptops, most likely with those same blogs. (i didnt quite connect the blogs to the event until after i had time to read about it later.)
while i'm not particularly interested in architecture etc., i'm not uninterested, and i'm certainly a big fan of jace clayton, a.k.a. dj /rupture.
there weren't many people there, as /rupture was the first speaker of the day. i was excited not just because i like his music, but because he's just so well spoken -- turns out he's got a b.a. in english from harvard . no wonder!
the city of sound blog (one of the four) has a great recap of jace's talk. from dan hill's (who i think is the guy in the lower right corner of the above image) entry:
This session took the form of a conversation between Geoff Manaugh and Clayton, building on phone conversations they'd had. It was interesting to observe two minds very much in sync, posing questions to each other, which were then neatly side-stepped in favour of building a new level of observation! It wasn't that they dodged each others questions, more that the ideas came thick and fast, almost vaulting over each other. The conversation was more like a construction, each entry offering a new level.indeed -- this was better than i'd hoped. rather than "hi i'm rupture stuff stuff stuff", which would have been cool, i felt like i was coming into a very interesting conversation halfway through. rattling through concepts, some of which were new to me but i instantly understood ("favela chic"), some which i knew but didn't have words for ("artois"), and some i knew but hadn't thought about in a while (hakim bey's "temporary autonomous zone").
afterward i said hello to /rupture, but while i wasn't exactly bumbling fanboy, i think i was still trying to absorb everything, so i don't think i said anything much more than hello. :)
all in all, i enjoyed the talk quite a bit -- it was almost worth the trip to NYC on its own (a theme that i found was consistent with all of my days on the trip). if each speaker in postopolis! was as engaging in their area of expertise, i'm sure it was vastly entertaining. thanks so much to the postopolis! crew and dj /rupture.
my pics from the talk can be found here.
(this post is backdated and written after the fact.)
