June 2012
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Shanghai is a movie
From dGenerate films:
STREET LIFE explores the hidden lives of homeless migrants who survive in the shadows of one of Shanghai’s most historic and affluent streets.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants are drawn to the allure of Shanghai, one of the world’s most vibrant cities, with hopes of earning a decent living. Some end up in the dark alleys of Nanjing Road, Shanghai’s...
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Land in Trust (in honor of National Trails Day)
Some words & pictures in honor of National Trails Day today*, and in belated celebration of the Kohala community’s victory in securing public access to even more of the 175 mile long Ala Kahakai National Historic Trail.
Via Damon Tucker:
[The] nonprofit Maika‘i Kamakani ‘O Kohala purchased more than 27.5 acres of undeveloped shoreline at Kauhola Point, located in Hala‘ula, North...
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Daytime Drinking
Breakfast of champions: ramen & soju! from the Korean film Daytime Drinking
Korea is not a good place to be a teetotaler. Even the Korean drinking spot we frequent here in Honolulu — Little Seoul — has a seven-hour-long happy hour.
I’m thankful none of my professors here demand their students drink Korean car bombs (shot of soju in beer, naturally) but then again, drinking...
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The permanent penury of small apartments at high...
My sense of interior space is a bit skewed and very urban. These are the formative rooms of the formative cities.
1) A high school classmate a year ahead of me and already at NYU moves into a dorm room closet to get some privacy. I think, so this is how you live in tenements. Later, I sleep over in a 1 bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side converted into a 2 bedroom by erecting a plasterboard...
May 2012
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City as compassion cultivator
Frank Bruni is my favorite columnist writing in the NYT. Krugman is great, but he’s kinda like a one-note meal. Bruni, on the other hand, does the dining column, slice of life column, and the political activist column. This is one of his odes to New York City that reminds us city life requires compassion or at the very least, tolerance. In other words, stop thinking that New Yorkers consist...
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WatchIn his book Land Grabbing published in Italy by minimum fax, young journalist Stefano Liberti takes us from the plushy rooms of FAO to the Ethiopian plateau, from the Chicago stock exchange to Brazil’s forests, in his comprehensive overview of this dramatic phenomenon.
In recent months Liberti co-directed the documentary Closed Sea with Andrea Segre that presents the story of some of the...
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“(To be a tourist) is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways...”
– David Foster Wallace in the essay Consider the Lobster (via Treehugger). I’m still processing the book I read on the moralization of tourism (eco! sustainable! community!) but the truth is tourists do confront in “transaction after transaction” the bald naked fact that we are...
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Postconsumerism just means being a better...
An interview with Yvon Chouinard from Patagonia in Fast Company:
You write about the ideal of a “postconsumerist society.” What is that?
We’re not citizens anymore; we’re consumers. The government views us as consumers, and our economy is based on us consuming and discarding. That behavior is destroying the planet. How can we use the power of consuming to do some good?...
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Maps lie
Earlier in spring semester, I joined a campus reading group. Otherwise left to my own devices, I’d only read non-fiction and scifi/fantasy.
We just finished What the Body Remembers by Shauna Singh Baldwin. Though the story revolves around the two wives of Sardarji, a civil engineer who carries (in a clever literary conceit) an internalized Englishman named Mr. Cunningham, and not Sardaji...
Gary Chou: gohnakamura: Photo by Lynn Chen! I’m... →
gohnakamura:
Photo by Lynn Chen!
I’m doing daily Webcast “Telethons” to raise money for my crazy project.
Yesterday was the first one, Lynn came by, we sat at a piano for an hour and somehow ended up playing: Debbie Gibson, Pink Floyd, excerpts from the “Cheers Theme”, Simon &…
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WatchA look at L.A.’s waste stream. If you live on Oahu, you should really go on the Tour de Trash sometime. You will stink like days old garbage, but it will be worth it.
unconsumption:
The video, made by Mae Ryan for Los Angeles public radio KPCC, traces trash from a burger lunch to its ultimate fate in a landfill. It reminds me of those great, old Sesame Street videos where you got to see...
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Power to the Pieper
On April 1, the Power to the Pieper (pieper = potato) action saw a pile of organic potatoes dumped in Dams Square, Amsterdam, with members of Slow Food Youth (SFY) Netherlands inviting the public to take them home. “At this moment, potatoes are so lowly priced that this farmer cannot sell them on the market,” commented organizer Samuel Levie. “It’s actually cheaper for him to bring them here....
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You're still doing it wrong
[A follow up to last month’s post “Legacies & Reconciliation”]
Apologies are not anyone’s forte. Germany is a shining exception, but then again genocide at that organizational scale is also an exception. The New York tristate area has popped up in my inbox recently because of various hamhanded attempts by Japanese diplomats to squash existing or proposed monuments to...
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Archive of Socially Engaged Practices →
publicdesignfestival:
The Creative Time’s online database contains over 350 projects related to public realm and civic engagement from the last 20 years, categorized by a series of criteria.
Neato.
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“Five months after the worst floods in half a century, the Thai capital is facing...”
– Bangkok heat stokes debate over mega-city planning (via pdsmith)
Globalization: Floods in Thailand means more expensive graduation lei in Hawaii.
Vicious cycle: As apartments install air conditioning units that blow hot air back out into the street, the hotter the streets get and the harder it...
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I used to collect stamps & stuffed animals
Yogurt foil, photographed by Stanley Greenberg. Via Edible Geography.
Images of interstellar yogurt lids as a series do the needful. In aggregate, they discombobulate further, make the familiar unfamiliar long enough for us to have a sober acid flashback. I am less enthusiastic about the collections of photographs of street detritus or pocket lint (actually my pocket lint is fascinating, come...
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Potatoes on parade (or la double vie de pomme de...
Peter Pink had me at potato.
Potatoes for peace and pink sunglasses.
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Gwangju
April is a big month for commemorations but May is also protest season in Korea. I think the image of Korean history that means the most to me is mothers ladling out rice to protesters during the Gwangju uprising. I can’t find the image now, but will post if I find it. In the meantime, how to immobilize a tank.
April 1960 protests (image via Inconseoulable)
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Slacktivism sucka-punch
From The Atlantic:
But, as Stempeck describes, Change.org also has a not-so-secret weapon: it has hired some (some say all) of the best progressive online organizers in the business to help would-be petitioners figure out how to craft their petitions and who to target with them. Here, it was the Sanford chief of police, the state’s attorney in Florida’s 4th district, Florida’s...
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a deeply frightening fact about the modern United... →
Sticker sold in a San Diego store
Ever since the stored property ordinance (Bill 54) was signed into law here in the City and County of Honolulu, I’ve been reading/thinking a lot about the criminalization of homelessness. The clearest explanation on the fundamental injustice of these ordinances was laid out by legal scholar Jeremy Waldron in his 1991-92 article “Homelessness and the...
April 2012
37 posts
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L.A. today
“If there’s one thing that’s particularly depressing about this map, it’s not really found in a story of which race ends up where, but in the fact that, over 20 years of so-called progress, these segregated pockets aren’t melding.” - From Fast Co (More on L.A. today at L.A. Magazine.)
I thought a little more about the L.A. riots and how for a while, “Korean-Black...
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