viz.

Image Credit: MIT's Macro Connections Group

Last week, as my students in my Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums class presented their final movie projects, I was reminded of how we often judge a place after only a cursory glance. One group project especially got me thinking: “The Divide,” a student-made film that explored the differences between East and West Austin, included many images from East and West Austin along with candid interviews of residents from both sides of the divide. My students’ video reminded me of MIT’s Place Pulse project, which in turn reminded me of Kevin Lynch’s seminal urban planning book from 1960, The Image of the City. As a culmination of my time blogging about cities the last few months on viz., I’m going to talk about “imageability” and intimacy in Austin (and beyond).

Image Credit: Briggo.com

There’s a coffee robot upstairs. I have never used it. Sometime earlier in the year—maybe over the winter break—a new, brightly colored store-front popped up in the Flawn Academic Center. It seemed to be selling coffee. It also seemed to be a robot. Rather than a counter with cash register, tip jar, and human barista, all the trappings we’ve come to expect , its front façade has screens and cups and coffee spouts.  From what I’ve seen you can order right there, off to the side on a touch screen, or online. Think about that, you could buy a cup of coffee while you read this. If the coffee robot teams up with a fleet of delivery robots we’d really be living in some kind of future.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Emily Friedman

The audience hears violins sawing tensely as they watch a man scream on screen; only, he is mute.  He moves his mouth, but we only learn his words through intertitles:  “I won’t talk!  I won’t say a word!!!”  So opens the 2011 Academy Award-winning film The Artist.

Image Credit: storyful.com

So last week I suggested that my post on tennis, David Foster Wallace, and postmodernism might be my last for the 2011–2012 academic year. I lied. Here’s another 500–1,000 words for your delectation. While thinking over what to write about last week, I decided to take coffee at Starbucks and read the paper. This was the day that Paul Krugman wrote his column “The Amnesia Candidate” (22 April 2012), and I’ve been thinking about what’s said there ever since. The Op-Ed is a thoughtful evaluation of Mitt Romney’s most recent campaign rhetoric, and it is especially efficient in the way it attacks the former governor for blaming some of Bush’s legacy on Obama. While Krugman does concede that Obama could have handled economic matters differently, he ultimately concludes by asking “Are the American people forgetful enough for Romney’s attack to work?”. This is a complex question. You hear cynics complain all the time that American voters have a 6-month attention span, which, if true, must surely be further compromised by consumer culture’s narcotization. There’s probably some truth to this. How could there not be given technology’s onslaught of information?

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T:  Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them.  At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: New York Times

This might be my last viz. post for the year, and so I thought I’d take a moment and say something that I’ve been dying to say for about 18 months or so: David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times Magazine, August 2006) is an allegory for what Wallace thinks fiction can (and should) be after postmodernism. Please forgive me if any of this seems obvious. In early July of 2006 Wallace headed over to south-west London to take in Wimbledon for the Times. Ostensibly, the magazine piece that resulted was a long definition of Rodger Federer’s talents as a tennis player. Wallace’s argument turned out to be that “if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon…then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’” Religious sentiments are present throughout the article, and Wallace works hard to articulate the ways in which perfect beauty can be found at the highest level of sport. It all has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” Wallace suggests. To parse this out, Wallace explains the evolution of professional tennis tactics since the days of Jimmy Connors.

Image From: The Advocate 

Almost two months following the fatal shooting of the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, which occured on February 26th, 2012 in a gated community in Florida, the circumstances surrounding his death have been refracted through a variety of lenses: local and national protests have claimed solidarity with the fallen teen; gun control advocates and gun ownership advocates have debated the efficacy of "Stand your Ground" laws; and conflicted media reports have coursed through the charnal houses of cable and network news, presenting and altering evidence along the way. The whole thing started with George Zimmerman, his alleged killer, looking at the young man in a hoodie; and the response to this dimension of the event will be my subject today.

Image Credit: I Made America

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one person to distract herself from work, Facebook provides. Through the The Second City Network I found a video entitled “Founding Fathers History Pick-Up Lines.” Clearly, I couldn’t resist. I was deeply amused to watch Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, and John Adams seduce modern women with such lines as “It’s not the Louisiana Purchase, but it will double in size,” “Never leave for tomorrow what you can screw today,” and “I take the virgin out of Virginia.” The full video below features many more salacious lines, some of which might not be SFW:

Image Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 

Before creating the “Patriot” radio, Norman Bel Geddes had long been involved with traditional, cabinet radio design. And while many of his cabinet radios follow the robust, furniture-esque aesthetic common to radios of the day this radio, created for the New York World Fair, 1939, breaks that mold. The “Patriot,” rather than simply blending into the décor of a room, forcefully makes itself known. This radio, rather conspicuously, embodies a particular patriotic flair. Most prominently, it features the seven red and six white stripes of the United States flag. Its knobs feature stars, and in most models red, white, and blue are the predominate colors.

Image Credit: Austin Culture Map

H/T: Noel Radley

Austin’s Thirteenth Annual East Pet Parade, held just last Saturday, not only celebrated “family, friends, and of course our furry friends,” but also Austin resident Leslie Cochran, who passed away a month before.  The organizers encouraged owners to dress their dogs in drag in Cochran’s honor, so Chris Perez dressed her dog Leslie in traditional Leslie garb: a pink bra and a feather boa.

(NSFW after the jump.)