I'd like to report that I've been exploring the universe via TARDIS and that's why I've been absent. Instead, I've been preparing to travel cross-country the old-fashioned way (auto) from LA to Chicago. I have a new job at the American Planning Association, but I'm looking forward to getting back onboard the blogging train (haha). Speaking of trains, Amtrak is kicking it up quite a few notches in terms of its food offerings. It's bringing together well-known chefs to develop new menus:
The chefs’ gathering has spawned dishes as diverse as a spice-rubbed Atlantic salmon fillet and vegetarian shell pasta with corn, leeks and Parmesan cheese.
One dish — a [Tom] Douglas creation — prompted a passenger to write to the
Los Angeles Times’ Culinary S.O.S. column in search of the recipe for
“the most delicious” lamb shanks with mushrooms she and her husband
sampled in the regular dining car of the Southwest Chief route that took
them from L.A. to Chicago.
Last time I rode Amtrak a few months ago, it was definitely an instant coffee/chips/preservative-filled pastries kind of selection. (Although, why does crappy coffee taste so delicious in particular situations? It's the same with airplane food. Everyone complains about it, but how often do you see someone refuse a meal or even just eat half? Never. People scarf it down and don't look the least bit disgusted.) In any case, I'd love to one day take the train between LA and Chicago in first class so I can sample those lamb shanks.
So I'm not a Doctor Who fan at all, but lately have become intrigued (I know a couple fanatics and it feels like it's about time to see what that's all about). I recently learned about the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), Doctor Who's spacecraft/time machine thing.
It's perhaps a stretch to consider the TARDIS a mode of travel, but, hey, I've seen mobility folks talk about traveling via the mind and imagination as if that doesn't involve some suspension of disbelief and a sprinkling of magic. I'd actually consider the TARDIS more legit than that even, as it is getting Doctor Who from point A to point B. It's really just one small step below mobility topics like canoeing ethnographies, the movement of SARS germs, or the locomotive as a phallic representation. (Mobilities is a broad, broad concept if that isn't apparent.) In any case, I became much more interested in the world of Doctor Who after watching this great video by a German woman who built a TARDIS from scratch.
This really has nothing to do with travel, transportation, or mobility, but it was such a delight to watch. (Her videos on teaching are also wonderful.)
National Train Day is coming up on Saturday, May 11. There are events happening at different places across the country. In Los Angeles, Union Station is hosting what sounds like a fun day for kids and adults:
The National Train Day event at Los Angeles Union
Station will feature free kids’ activities sponsored by Chuggington,
interactive and educational exhibits, model train displays and giveaways. Visitors will have the chance to tour private luxury railcars, freight
and commuter trains, as well as current Amtrak equipment.
I really want to go since luxury railcars are like tiny houses on wheels (and I love tiny houses!). I also want to know if Chuggington is a sentient being, an anthropomorphic train, or an abstract marketing concept. I also suspect there will be lots of train enthusiasts at this event, and it would be fun to chat those folks up. Someone once told me I was obsessed with people who are obsessed and I think that's quite accurate. I don't have the attention span to be a true obsessor (at the moment, I'm simultaneously into knitting, fly fishing, and banjoes - I like to call myself a serial hobbyist) and so I live vicariously through those who can devote themselves without reservation. Train people are like that. In fact, hardcore train fans are called "foamers." On a related topic, John McPhee had a great two-part article about coal trains in a 2005 issue of the New Yorker. Update: I'm apparently very out of the kids' television programming loop - Chuggington is an animated talking train show.
There is a system of courtesy with Japanese escalators, especially in Tokyo and Osaka, that you leave one side clear for walking. However, with the recently increase in escalator accidents among the elderly, the Japan Elevator Association has in principle prohibited walking on escalators. On the other hand, in subway stations in London, China and so on there are posters advising people to leave one side of the escalator clear for people who are in a hurry.
She's also apparently fond of bridge supports for elevated highways and is part of a fan club that has some great photos. (via kottke.org)
While this isn't a transportation-specific thing, I came across some very cool photos today and one was transit-themed. Flora Borsi takes old photos from the days before digital cameras and smartphones and cleverly puts herself in the photos using these devices. One of the photos is on a bus.
The U.S. National Archives has some interesting Rosa Parks items - a diagram showing where she was seated on the bus when she refused to give up her seat to a white rider and the 1955 City of Montgomery police report. The diagram provides some interesting insight into the spatial segregation of bus spaces. In a 1966 study, researchers looked at the seating patterns of black and whites on buses in New Orleans, where public transit had been desegregated since 1958. They used a variety of approaches to measuring "precedence violators," those individuals who violated traditional black-white social expectations about where people should sit. While they acknowledge the challenges in doing a segregation-integration study and the many factors that can influence seating in the confines of a bus, their measures show that generally buses remained racially segregated spaces. (thx Nick K!) (via U.S. National Archives)
Transportation Nation and American Public Media collaborated on a radio documentary put out last year called Back of the Bus: Mass Transit, Race, and Inequality. It's a collection of different pieces about a variety of topics, including the devastation of the African American neighborhood of Rondo in St. Paul after the interstate highway system came through, the Oakland Airport Connector and the politics of transit financing, race and public transit disparities in Atlanta, and the relationship between transit and housing values in Washington, DC and Denver. It's well-produced and worth a listen. (via Transportation Nation, American Public Media)
In an earlier post, I talked about Pope Francis' use of transit - both in Argentina during his pre-Pope days and in Rome more recently. Yesterday Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner of Venezuela's presidential election. It turns out he's a former bus driver who likes to use transit metaphors in his campaign speeches:
"We're all going in the bus of the fatherland, which
has a driver," Maduro said upon launching his election campaign from the
late president's childhood home. "Here he is, Chavez's driver!"
The transit-related pasts of social and political leaders continue to be noteworthy and an effective way to bolster images of their connections to the masses.
Last month I wrote about Amtrak's Quiet Car (apparently it's a proper noun) and some of the rules of social order discussions that have been popping up about noise levels and reprimanding violators. I've come across a couple other things since then.
In an article in The Atlantic, Andrea Bartoli at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution provides an interesting take on the social structure of quiet car space:
"Fundamentally, the Quiet Car is a perfect microcosm,
because you have all the elements of a primordial society," Bartoli says.
"You're not in a family. You're not in a work environment where someone is
more important. You don't have responsibility or power structure. You just have
anonymous people sharing the space."
Bartoli's approach to dealing with offenders is to walk up to them and point to the Quiet Car sign, what he calls a "silent reminder." Apparently this works about two-thirds of the time. In the other one-third of instances, people respond in hostile ways and conductors or fellow passengers get involved. I suppose two out of three isn't that bad - though a seventy-five percent success rate isn't an unreasonable expectation for a conflict resolution expert (I think). In discussing the quiet car violators, Ta-Nehisi Coates is less conciliatory in understanding people's behaviors:
These people are almost always dealt with by a conductor or
other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out why they come to
the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules, so much as a matter
of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a
public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair
to handle their shit.
He likens a cellphone conversation on the quiet car to a drunk person in a bar using racial epithet, which I found a bit much. I felt like he was mashing together two types of social interactions he hates, but that really are not analogous. On a different (yet kind of related) topic, while I obviously don't think anyone should be using racial slurs or swearing at Coates' wife, I do have a soft spot for the life story folks he describes. Since I can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, I usually hear at least one life story a day. It's a habit that borders on a compulsion and I should probably curb the urge, but I've talked to some unexpectedly interesting people - an excommunicated Mormon, a troubled former child
star, and a cat hoarder, for example. I'm fascinated by the everyday stories me as much as the more unusual
ones - accounts of familial relations, parenthood, work, aging, and sickness. (Recently,
a woman told me about losing seventy pounds after struggling with her weight for
years and the ways in which her life has forever changed. It was very moving to hear.) In any case, I hang out in cafes a lot and not bars and so my people, if anything, are over-caffeinated. Maybe chatty drunk people are a whole different story. (via The Atlantic)
I have a fondness for tiny houses that my friends don't really understand. It's mostly from enjoying creative uses of limited space (having faced this dilemma myself many times), appreciating the small carbon footprint of tiny houses, and finding the enthusiasm of tiny house aficionados quite infectious. Or maybe I just have an adult doll house fetish. I also find tight, confined spaces (like MRI machines) comfortable rather than panic-inducing. So, my love of tiny houses I suppose is the result of any of a number of understandable and kind of weird factors. The range of structures that fall under the tiny house umbrella vary considerably. Some are fixed structures and others are transportable. They can be built from scratch, converted, or salvaged. And some are utterly unique living spaces - like this caboose house that I came across recently. It's utterly adorable and it even has a washer/dryer in the unit!
I have a number of interesting transportation-related films to share: two new documentaries, one experimental nonfiction film, a badass film from the 60s, and an old-timey film from way back when. First up is La Camioneta:
Every day dozens of decommissioned school
buses leave the United States on a southward migration that carries them to
Guatemala, where they are repaired, repainted, and resurrected as the
brightly-colored camionetas that bring the vast majority of Guatemalans to work
each day. Since 2006, nearly 1,000 camioneta drivers and fare-collectors have
been murdered for either refusing or being unable to pay the extortion money
demanded by local Guatemalan gangs. LA CAMIONETA follows one such bus on its
transformative journey: a journey between North and South, between life and
death, and through an unfolding collection of moments, people, and places that
serve to quietly remind us of the interconnected worlds in which we live.
Next is Go Grandriders, a film from Taiwan about the trials and tribulations of a group of elderly men on a motorcycle trip:
In Go Grandriders, a group of senior citizens embark on what
may be the most daring adventure of their lives: a thirteen-day tour—entirely
on motorcycle—around the island of Taiwan. A number in the group have heart
problems, two have had cancer, and their average age is 81. The trip brings
harrowing escapes (one rider falls asleep at the wheel, while another is
knocked off his bike by a truck), pure exhilaration (including a gleeful romp
in the waves when riders reach Taiwan’s east coast), and somber reflection, as
riders recall their youths fighting in the Sino-Japanese War.
Then we move to a beautiful film called Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems available through MUBI.* There's a 17-minute version of the film available, and the full length version on MUBI which is 89 minutes:
Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems is a feature-length film cycle that straddles the borders between the balkanized worlds of cinema, visual art, music and literature. The 14 films in this major cycle employ a wide variety of non-linear digital and filmic formal experiments in depicting suburban and urban dystopias, in essays exploring the politics of form and the form of personal politics, as well as in audiovisual tone poems celebrating the raw joy of moving pictures, sound, colour and light.
The films are pulled together with the overarching metaphor of a train journey, culminating in the title film, an unabashed love ballad for the rusty grace and brute power of the Trains of Winnipeg. The film also acts as a portal from the analog century to the digital beyond, where everything looks the same, but we know it’s not.
More about Clive Holden's project is on his website, including information about a related book and CD. Another film on MUBI, the 1968 filmThe Girl on a Motorcycle, is described as a "counterculture classic" about a woman "on a doomed psychedelic and erotic journey":
It looks like you can watch the entire film here. And finally, Arrival of a Train, a fascinating short silent film by the Lumière brothers:
For many, cinema began on December 28, 1895, with the first
public projection of short films like Arrival of a Train and The Card Party by Louis and Auguste Lumière. But these iconic films also exist
in alternative versions, sometimes with each frame of the print colored by
hand! Lobster Films purchased the original Lumiere-perforation negatives of Arrival of a Train and fifty other titles at an auction in Lyon for about fifty
U.S. dollars. They were wrapped up in old paper, which turned out to be an
original poster of Watering the Gardener, perhaps the very first poster in
the history of moving pictures!
*MUBI (formerly The Auteurs) is a really fantastic independent and alternative site that streams films. It's described as an "online cinematheque." I don't love the new film format - where they upload a new film each day and have an ongoing collection of 30 films available to view (so one rotates out each day) - because I like taking forever to watch a film if I feel like it. But, still it's only $4.99 a month and there's always a well-curated and diverse group of films. This month Nick Broomfield's films are being featured. There are also lots of free things to watch in MUBI's general library of films.
I've become a bit fascinated with this whole idea of collaborative consumption (also known as the sharing economy) lately and the arguments that it alters notions of ownership, fosters trust and a sense of community, and can potentially change the social and physical landscape of cities. Some of the discussions are convincing and others are less so. For me, it's partly that a lot of very disparate things are grouped under the general category of collaborative consumption. When money is part of the "transaction," very different dynamics and sets of expectations emerge (for example, Airbnb versus Couchsurfing). I'm far from an expert on collaborative consumption, but I'm interested in seeing how things evolve and the concept is refined or redefined. Some mobility-related, peer-to-peer car sharing examples of this new culture of sharing are Zipcar, Getaround, RelayRides, and SideCar. Downtown Project is the brainchild of Tony Hsieh of Zappos. It's a $350 million plan to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas through increased urban density and a mix of industries and creative communities. Yesterday, Project 100 was announced, the transportation part of this initiative:
Project 100 is the code name for a complete transportation
system designed to let you get rid of your car and be more connected to your
neighborhood. It includes on-demand cars with drivers, shared cars you can
drive yourself, bikesharing, shuttle buses and more. The experience is simple:
open an app so we know where you are and tell us what zone you want to travel
to. With that information we’ll give you a set of options, for example, 1 – Be
picked up by a driver in a Tesla in 3 minutes, 2 – Drive yourself in a low range
electric vehicle that’s 0.2 miles away, 3 – Grab a bike that’s 0.1 miles away
or 4 – Hop on the party bus that will be near you in 4 minutes.
They have indeed teamed up with Tesla for the car part of the program. I'm curious to see how the system plays out and the types of social interactions that emerge from the people-people and people-mode relationships. (via TIME, The Atlantic Cities, TED, Green Car Reports)
A few weeks ago I came across the photo below of a poster that was part of a Queensland Rail campaign. My initial reaction was, Wow, those Australians and their edgy public transit ads! They did it again!
Then I got a little suspicious and started to look around for more details. It turns out that these are not real posters (surprise, surprise), but rather one of those meme* things from a public service outreach campaign that went awry. Apparently, Queensland Rail put up an application where people could create custom etiquette posters and people did just that.
So, instead of posters about where to stand and where to place one's bag, they ended up with posters about public drunkenness, sexual deviancy, and other such unsavory or delay-inducing behavior.
A collection of the infamous Queensland Rail etiquette posters is here and another here (note: these are not for the easily offended). While many of these are repugnant and reflect racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other discriminatory attitudes, they are interesting as manifestations of social and cultural tensions. Some of them are about the unsavory things that do happen (or people think happen) on public transit, such as masturbating, passing gas, and drinking. Some are about societal insecurities around race, gender, religion, and ability/disability that are expressed by marking the Other through this anonymous medium. And, some just make no sense - the tampon in the trash one falling into this category. *I never really understood how a meme was different from
something that went viral, but here's what I learned from the site Know Your Meme (an impressive site "considered
the most authoritative source on news, history and origins of viral phenomena
and Internet memes" - it claims to have its own editorial and research
staff):
An Internet meme is a piece of content or an idea that's passed
from person to person, changing and evolving along the way. A piece of content
that is passed from person to person, but does not evolve or change during the
transmission process is considered viral content.
Daniel J. Wilson, a cab driver/artist/documentary filmmaker in New York, started recording conversations in his cab and put them together into an audio collage. Then his cab became a transportation, performance, and gallery space all-in-one when he played the collage back for passengers.
“It’s this world where people act like you don’t exist, even though you’re three feet away,” Mr. Wilson, 35, said from the front seat of his cab recently. “You get this fragment of a person.”
Of course, those fragments can have jagged edges. Unlike a bartender, who is expected to at least feign interest in the tales told by his regulars, a taxi driver is rarely used as a sounding board. Yet he is still privy to explosive confessions and earsplitting breakups, office gossip after work and whiskey-induced phone calls before dawn.
In the coming weeks, I want to delve into some topics that reflect the darker side of transportation (e.g., safety and danger, discrimination, inequality). I decided to keep this week as filled with light and happy as possible. I watched The Muppets recently. The show and the movies were a fixture of my childhood so it was great to see the gang reunited. Jason Segel also redeemed himself (I just don't get the appeal of most of his films). In any case, I remembered that Kermit was often pedaling around on a bike. In The Great Muppet Caper, Kermit and Miss Piggy ride rented bikes through a park in London.
Kermit rides a bike in from his swamp home in The Muppet Movie. He crashes his bike in the opening of Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas. In fact, there are so many bike-related Muppet moments that they're compiled on a Muppet wiki page. Puppeteer David Goelz explains the fascinating behind-the-scenes of shooting a frog using an alternative mode of transportation:
With The Muppet Movie, we had a very sophisticated
bicycle rig that was a little radio-controlled car that was mounted in the bike
between the front and rear wheels, and it had a mirror on it so it reflected
the ground in front of the bicycle (as you saw from the camera's point of
view), but it broke just before we had to shoot the bit, and so we ended up
doing that with three strings from a camera crane, and there were many many
takes and we ran out of time finally and never got it to work right. He was
always kind of tilted on the bike -- if you look at the final take in the
movie, he's not really riding a bike that's straight up and down, it's kind of
tilted over to the side.
I missed an installation called Metropolis II when it was here in Los Angeles at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) a couple years ago. I took a peek at the exhibitions listings recently and was pleased to see it's back:
Chris Burden's Metropolis II is an intense kinetic
sculpture, modeled after a fast paced, frenetic modern city. Steel beams form
an eclectic grid interwoven with an elaborate system of 18 roadways, including
one six lane freeway, and HO scale train tracks. Miniature cars speed through
the city at 240 scale miles per hour; every hour, the equivalent of
approximately 100,000 cars circulate through the dense network of buildings.
According to Burden, "The noise, the continuous flow of the trains, and the
speeding toy cars produce in the viewer the stress of living in a dynamic,
active and bustling 21st century city."
Here's a short video showing the installation from some cool angles along with commentary by artist Chris Burden.
It looks really neat, though I don't agree with his idea about cars running free (they're not wild horses) and his suggestion that we'd be better off if they could travel 250 miles an hour (I hope he was being facetious). I do like his comments about modeling an urban environment that's on its way out. When he talked about the tension that comes from the constant and excessive noise of the piece, it reminded me that noise pollution and too much artificial light are apparently killing us slowly. Get earplugs and blackout curtains if you want to survive the modern world.
His indoctrination into black life began at a New Orleans
bus station. When he politely asked a white clerk for bus times, "she
answered rudely and glared at me with such loathing I knew I was receiving what
the Negroes call 'the hate stare,'" he wrote. "This was so
exaggeratedly hateful I would have been amused if I had not been so
surprised."
In another instance a white bus driver prevented the blacks on the bus,
including Griffin, from getting off the bus during a rest stop in Mississippi.
Griffin and the others waited in discomfort for the trip to resume.
Eddie Murphy goes undercover as a white man in a 1984 Saturday Night Live sketch that's a satirical take on Griffin's book: "I studied for my role very carefully. I watched lots of 'Dynasty'. . . .And I read a whole bunch of Hallmark cards." When he ventures out into the world, he finds that strange and unexpected things happen on buses - things that give the term "choice riders" new meaning. (Bus scene starts at 2:35)
In a little piece of William H. Whyte-Jane Jacobs inspired fieldwork, filmmaker Dean Peterson gathered very interesting footage of people going up the stairs at a subway station he frequented in New York City.
Rubber is the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been
abandoned in the desert and then suddenly and inexplicably comes to
life. As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he
possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to
destroy anything he wishes. At first content to prey on discarded
objects and small desert creatures, his attention soon turns to humans,
especially a beautiful and mysterious woman who crosses his path.
Leaving a swath of destruction behind, Robert becomes a chaotic force
and truly a movie villain for the ages.
Here's Robert on a lonely highway pondering his next psychopathic move.
Andrew O'Heir reviewed the film for Salon. Much grittier than Cars. Sort of like Natural Born Killers meets Christine (minus the chassis) with some Carrie thrown in. If Javier Bardem's character in No Country for Old Men came back as a car part.. . . Okay, I'm out of film/tire analogies. Nothing much more needs to be said about this other than it's awesome and it's bringing up all my tire trust issues. Oh, and that mobility is the key to his reign of terror. A violent side view mirror or fender just wouldn't pack the same punch.
