“
OPEN SOURCE RECIPES TO BE USED IN QUARANTINE DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC.” (By way of a bunch of our chefs, what Toronto tastes like, if you can only visit it in your kitchen.)
Poets love the word
petrichor, that earthy smell in the air when it first rains after a long time dry. Not sure if poets also care for the science behind it, but
we love this new study which suggests what we’re actually smelling (the compound we call geosmin)
is the result of a 500-million-year coevolution, released by streptomyces bacteria in an attempt to attract an arthropod called a springtail, which will in turn spread its spores. Just so you know.
“Machines. Inventions. Power. Black out the past. Forget the quiet cities. Bring in the steam and steel. The iron men. The giants. Open the throttle. All aboard, the promised land. Pillars of smoke by day. Pillars of fire by night. Pillars of progress. Machines to make machines. Production to expand production. There’s wood and wheat and kitchen sinks and calico all ready made in tonnes enough for tens, thousands, millions. Millions! Faster and faster, better and better!"
IT’S TIME TO BUILD, shouted Marc Andreessen. Which for some reason brought to mind Lewis Mumford spitting venom back in 1939, with
his nightmare vision of the modern city. In trying to articulate our issues with the Andreessen piece, and why it just seemed to sum up so much of what the VC mindset misses of lived reality, we were tempted to try to write an essay, but we won’t.
Paul Ford and Rich Ziade do a good job in a generous, good faith manner on their Track Changes podcast, and they pretty much get to the heart of it:
“I guess the question I would pose to Marc Andreessen is: how do you install a different set of motivations outside of commercial profit so that that kind of innovation can happen inside of a school system or inside of a transit system… You wanna write a killer essay? Write that essay, right?” Smoke makes prosperity, no matter if ya choke on it.
It’s not time to build for Sidewalk Labs in Toronto, as
the Google-affiliated property developer quietly slinks away under cover of Covid from a planned showcase smart city development in our city’s Port Lands that turned out to be a teensy bit less popular than they’d anticipated. Honestly, we’ll admit to being surprised. Though many around us had confidently proclaimed that “they’ll never lay a single smart brick”, and fierce advocates we love and respect committed their professional and unpaid hours to exposing the project’s privacy uh…. shortcomings… we honestly believed some version of the project would actually happen. We had a vague hope that the questions and realisations it forced from community and governments and the developer might have led to some kind of interesting, limited experiment in what a “smart” city
should be, rather than what it
could be in a purely Silicon Valley mode of thinking? But that would have required a developer who understood civic engagement meant more than
Post-It sessions that look good as an IG story, and a civic and institutional leadership prepared to properly engage in co-creation, not confused bureaucratic backroom muttering.
As John Michael McGrath writes, “Sidewalk’s PR offensive in Toronto was always aimed at winning the argument in boardrooms and behind closed doors … and it seemed totally unprepared to make the case to the general public. When it tried, its efforts were often patronizing or ham-handed.”
We would add, making the case necessarily also involves listening. So now we wonder, what did we learn from all of this? If Sidewalk had produced more effective comms, not just tote bags, would people have been ok with the reality of it? What will the public desire for this kind of fancy concept-car city building be, on the other side of the pandemic? How have the hard questions and conversations the debacle has raised been stored and catalogued for the next time a less high profile developer wants to do something just as invasive but less sexy to mobilise against? All that time we spent working out what a data trust, for instance, might look like in responsible terms, which is not at all what Google thought it should look like. Where do we put that for next time?
The one thing we still
really want to know — somewhere around page 124 of
this monster “digital innovation appendix” from late last year, Sidewalk outline some actual specifics of “Koala”, the magical “USB port” for urban infrastructure they claim to have invented. We still haven’t seen anybody report deeply on this idea, which is a shame because it actually seems really cool in theory, and we wonder now if anybody gets to call them out on whether it was really a thing, or just a nice CAD drawing?
Want to read a novel based on
the lives of dropshippers in Bali, please.
“After we have defeated the virus, when the cinema industry has woken up from its stupor, this new group, as moviegoers, wouldn’t want to take the same old cinema journey. They have mastered the art of looking; at the neighbors, at the rooftops, at the computer screens. They have trained through countless video calls with friends, through group dinners captured in one continuous camera angle. They need a cinema that is closer to real life, in real time. They want the cinema of Now which possesses no fillers nor destination.
Then they will be introduced to the films of Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang, Lucrecia Martel, maybe Apichatpong and Pedro Costa, among others. For a period of time, these obscure filmmakers would become millionaires from a surge of ticket sales. They would acquire new sunglasses and troops of security guards.”
We’re on board for Apichatpong’s dream.
"I am writing
this profile, and you are reading it, in an impossible world,“ Sam Anderson writes in
his perfect-in-every-way profile of Weird Al Yankovic in the NYT Mag from a few weeks back. “National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al endures.” There’s a real joy to reading Anderson in full flight — he has this magical ability to look at the world, and his subjects, with an unfiltered and glorious blend of empathy and wonder. Just as with his monumentally good pieces on
The Good Place and
Rick Steves, here he takes on Weird Al without irony or cynicism. It’s an earnest piece full of goodness, and joy. We’re not going to proclaim the end of irony just yet, but maybe in this impossible world, Anderson’s is a tone we’re going to crave a lot more of. (And
here it is in audio form, if consuming longform features still isn’t working for you, which is fine!)
Venus in sweatpants
That's who you are
And when this mess is over
I'll buy you a car
- Randy Newman
Remember the beforetime, when the day’s playlist wasn’t usually determined by who had recently died? When we could listen to music as just music, and not as an act of commemoration? We’ve done the deep dive into
old episodes of Night Music (1988-90), the short-lived network TV show on which Hal Willner served as musical director, creating a space where it was possible for the disparate likes of The Residents, Kronos Quartet, Aster Aweke, and Conway Twitty to share the same stage, laying the groundwork for the curatorial culture we take for granted today. This week, with the news of Florian Schneider’s passing (though not from Coronavirus), there were a couple days of almost nothing but Kraftwerk. And then there was the John Prine extended session before that.
These benders can be fun for while, but the poignancy almost gets in the way. There’s a limit to how much joy you can find rooting around the past when tomorrow looks so uncertain.
Happily, we still have Randy Newman to
comfort and serenade us (
Stay away from me / Words of love in times like these). Or the likes of Nick Currie, better known as Momus, the Scottish-born singer-songwriter once affectionately described as “the Ray Davies of marginal intellectual pursuits”. For much of the past three decades, Momus has been putting out an album just about every year, a musical practice he described as a kind of topically-themed diary-keeping to Chris when they met up for lunch in Osaka a few years back. (“This next record will have to have Brexit on it, so it’ll be like a post-breakup record,” he said.) According to the BBC, Momus is now close to
finishing a new album about the pandemic, largely written while he was himself battling a mild case of Coronavirus symptoms at his home in Berlin.
Thank you Japan, for Amabié —
the mascot we need now. Less sure how we feel about
Singapore’s new distance-enforcement Robo-dog.
Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova shares survival strategies from her time in prison to help
get you through quarantine.
“Reading Derek Jarman is strangely consoling.”
And finally, after the best part of a year, Patrick made
another very long mix in his “We Must Love Each Other or We Must Die” series – named for
the most terrifying political ad of all time, named even better for now, perhaps? Hopefully you’ll find it good strange company in the iso-days –
the previous mixes are all also now up on the new BS site with playlists. They might even come more often from here.