The magic of old cinemas

The reopened Phoenix cinema. Picture posted at Telegraph.co.UK

I´ve seen a couple of old cinemas in Los Angeles, even Newport Beach has one, and of course I went many times to visit the old neighborhoods cinemas in Buenos Aires. And of course, they can be never compared to the modern ¨multiplex¨, as Bernardette McNulty says in her article for Telegraph.co.UK, ¨it´s a kind of magic¨.

Here, some excerpts from McNulty´s article:

Next to the palm trees, New Port Beach old cinema. Picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

¨A trip to a modern multiplex cinema can feel like stepping onto the set of Blade Runner. Unmanned machines spew out tickets and chemically enhanced snacks while elevators transport you to hi-tech black caves where digital films leap out in 3D.

Yet, raging against the onslaught of modernity, this year there are a small number of Edwardian picture houses celebrating their centenaries by looking back to the past as much as they are embracing the future.

At the head of this exclusive club is the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley, north London, which has just reopened after a £1.1million refurbishment, followed by the Duke of York in Brighton and the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill.(....)The art-deco wall panels, created by Mollo & Egan in the Thirties, and the original Edwardian barrel ceiling, are a vision of deep vermilion and gold. You barely notice the subtle nips and tucks, the new lights and a new digital projection system – although they haven’t introduced 3D.

While many art-house cinemas have virtually turned themselves into middle-class private members clubs, charging premium prices for luxury seating and table service, the Phoenix has stuck with the more traditional – although still comfortable, Homer assures me – flip-up, red velvet seats. “The Phoenix is a community cinema and we wanted it to be accessible, looks and price wise, to everyone,” he says.

The Phoenix, although not its original moniker, is perhaps aptly named, given the number of reincarnations it has experienced over the past century. Gerry Turvey, a local film historian and director of the Phoenix, who has put together a book charting the cinema’s various manifestations, thinks it is this adaptability that has ensured its survival. “We’re still here because we were always an independent cinema and we were never part of the big chains,” he says. “This allowed us to adapt to survive.”

Those days of fleapit Bohemia seem long gone, although Homer argues that in the era before late-licensed clubs, cinemas were still one of the only places you could go late at night to smoke, a role they no longer need to fulfil. While still committed to showing non-mainstream films, the Phoenix, like most independent cinemas, seems to err on the side of the more accessible end of non-American films. Brit comedies like Tamara Drewe and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham will undoubtedly be a hit with their north London audience.

But in the era of DVDs and downloading, it is nevertheless a small miracle that these cinemas still exist – let alone thrive. Homer believes that the Phoenix is like a temple to film to which “people come because they still want to have that communal feeling of watching a film together in a place that is full of history. It is a kind of magic.”

Read the full article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8009518/Old-cinemas-It-is-a-kind-of-magic.html

Vera and Ivo Makianich´s works

Eyes. Digital painting by Vera Makianich

Just to begin, what can I say? they are my daughter (19) and my son (17). Vera is studying Graphic Design and Ivo is almost done at High School. Ivo throws his great drawings everywhere, he draws in little pieces of paper, on napkins, he used to draw on the furniture when he was 3 years old.......Vera is keeping order and she is improving in digital arts.

They are beginning with a portfolio, best wishes to them!

Detroit: a thriving city supported by the iniciative of food

Hoop House. Picture from http://relish.myraklarman.com/hoop-house-dreams

I was delighted to read Tom Philpott’s article Three projects that are watering Detroit’s ‘food desert’, published on September 10^th, 2010 at grist.org

When he visited Detroit in last June, he expected to find -in his own words- a sort of post apocalyptic metropolis, a near empty city plagued by crime, poverty and despair. Every neighborhood he visited has empty lots, abandoned factories and crumbling buildings. There are no supermarkets but dozens of liquors. But, amid Detroit’s economical and social problems, he found a community organizing themselves very well, through the iniciative of food, as a key motivating force for a livable place.

“I was struck by the cooperation on display -- the way new-wave restaurateurs, market farmers, food-justice activists, and nonprofit advocates work together toward the goal of a healthy, inclusive food system where a food desert once stood. And while plenty of work remains to be done before that vision can be achieved, my week in Detroit left me with little doubt that it would be.”  

Picture by Tom Philpott

D-Town Farm. Picture by Tom Philpott.

Philpott says there are three representatives of this 21^st century spirit of the Motor City:

1)       Grown in Detroit: Eastern Market functions as a wholesale market selling produce and meat sourced from all over the country. But on Saturdays, in a festive environment, most of Eastern Market becomes a real farmers market, featuring produce from Michigan's rich agricultural land.

2)       Brother Nature Produce: “ an idyllic rural vegetable farm. A dozen or so raised beds teem with vegetables in various stages of growth, surrounded by three hoop houses. Here and there in the surrounding area, you see stand-alone houses; but most of what you see in the distance  is open fields and a smattering of trees.”

3)      D-Town Farm: it has emerged on a two-acre corner of an old tree nursery. D-Town has a 10-year lease from the city and is in negotiation to add an adjacent five acres to the garden. If all goes well, the project could be a model for creative land reuse in a city with thousands of acres of vacant land. 

Read Philpott’s article:

http://www.grist.org/article/food-three-projects-that-are-watering-Detroits-food-desert-

Top 10 Global Cities

New York. SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

From The Wall Street Journal, by Emily Peck:

Half the world’s population lives in cities and you can expect that number to grow in the coming years, according to Foreign Policy magazine, which looks at Global Cities in its latest issue. The 21st century will be dominated by the city, writes Parag Khanna. “The age of nations is over. The new urban age has begun.”

Just 100 cities account for more than 30% of the world’s economy, Mr. Khanna writes. What’s more, the 21st century will see the rise of the megacity, “megalopolises whose populations are measures in the tens of millions, with jagged skylines that stretch as far as the eye can see.”

What qualifies as a “global city”? A large population, for starters. The magazine looked at 65 cities with populations of more than 1 million. But more important, the magazine says it “aims to measure how much sway a city has over what happens beyond its own borders.” Among other things, the magazine, working with A.T. Kearney and the Chicago Counsel on Global Affairs, looked at how many Fortune Global 500 company headquarters were in a city, the size of its capital markets, and the number of embassies, think tanks, political organizations, and museums.

While FP mainly focuses on what the rise of the cities will mean for diplomacy, statehood and power, we wondered what it means for real estate. In a separate essay in the magazine, Joel Kotkin takes a look at the rise of the city—the megacity in particular—and finds quality of life lacking.

But bigger might no longer mean better. The most advantaged city of the future could well turn out to be a much smaller one. Cities today are expanding at an unparalleled rate when it comes to size, but wealth, power, and general well-being lag behind. With the exception of Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo, most cities of 10 million or more are relatively poor, with a low standard of living and little strategic influence.

The Top 10 Most Global Cities

1. New York

2. London

3. Tokyo

4. Paris

5. Hong Kong

6. Chicago

7. Los Angeles

8. Singapore

9. Sydney

10. Seoul
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2010/09/09/the-top-10-most-global-cities/?KEYWORDS=cities

Exposición de cocinas en New York “Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen” en el Museum of Modern Art (MOMA)

Frankfurt Kitchen. Imagen de NYTimes.com

Para algunas personas, una cocina es un espacio más dentro de la vivienda, pero no todos piensan así. Para el arquitecto Le Corbusier, si la casa es una máquina de habitar, la cocina es su motor, la que le da vida.

A lo largo de la historia del diseño, la cocina ha sido un campo de batalla sobre sistemas de creencias, uno de ellos, el rol de la mujer en la sociedad. A medida que el número de mucamas declinaba, las amas de casa fueron tomando una postura más fuerte que se confrontaba con una imagen publicitaria de ser ellas mismas un ¨electrodoméstico¨.

Esta exhibición ubica a la cocina moderna en su contexto histórico, a través del diseño de objetos, artefactos, piezas de arte. Desde el punto de vista social, estético-histórico, se muestra cómo se ha evolucionado en el tema ¨cocina¨, desde las primeras construcciones prefabricadas de post guerra, pasando por la disponibilidad de gas y electricidad, el crecimiento urbano, la clase media y su consciencia de salud, la independencia de la mujer, la selección de desechos.

Recipiente para servir, de Kenneth Brozen. Foto de NYTimes.com

Para quienes tengan la suerte de poder ir, entre otros artefactos interesantes, encontrarán los primeros Tupperware de 1950, el exprimidor escultural de jugos de Philippe Starck Juicy Salif Lemon Squeezer de 1988,  la cafetera eléctrica de Peter Behren, de 1909, -nickelada para parecer de plata-, un poster de su diseño para alentar el uso de la electricidad, un póster norteamericano de 1917 que incita a la gente a comer menos carne y grasas, más granos y vegetales, no para su salud, sino para ahorrar comida para las tropas aliadas.

Pero la pieza central del show, es una estupenda adquisición: uno de los últimos ejemplos sobrevivientes de la casi completa cocina de Frankfurt diseñada en 1926/27 por Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, quien fuera la primera mujer arquitecta austríaca. Este modelo de cocina que incluye el innovador concepto de estantes de grilla metálicos, fue producido en masa para los bloques de viviendas que se construyeron en Frankfurt luego de la devastación de la I Guerra Mundial.

Referencia:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/arts/design/20kitchen.html?ref=todayspaper

Archipelago. By Nova Jiang

Of all works on line at the workshop for the 2010 Biennal ¨Build your own world¨, in San José, California, this one is my favourite: Archipelago, by Nova Jiang. Nova a young Chinese artist, currently living in Los Angeles.

Sustainable locomotion is not just about lowering energy consumption and reducing pollution, it is also an opportunity to redefine the social paradigm of transportation. In a car-based culture, we have sacrificed sociability in the way we travel for an ideal of “individual convenience” which ironically impedes rather than promotes mobility in our congested cities.

For this project and workshop, a collection of mobile “desert islands” will be constructed with help from the public. Each island will carry empty bottles and writing materials and circulate throughout the city. A participant can create an anonymous “message in a bottle” which asks for help, whether for romantic advice or philosophical guidance. The author can later log onto the project website to see what solutions people have offered.

Archipelago (2010) seeks to address issues of urban isolation exacerbated by car culture. The islands act as “vehicles” which carry communication instead of people or goods. They are nodes in an experimental “social network” created around empathy. Archipelago has no predefined destination. Its mobility is a strategy to initiate chance encounters and encourage people to leave the “desert island” of their normal routine.

Commissioned by ZER01 for the 3rd 01SJ Biennial, and presented with the support of the James Irvine Foundation.

The pictures posted here belong to Nova Jiang and are posted at:

http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/archipelago/

Out of the garage into the world. San José, California

ZER01 is inviting independent artists, designers, architects, engineers, programmers, and corporate and academic research programs to publicly work in San Jose’s 80,000 square foot South Hall to create projects for exhibition, performance, provocation, and interaction. From a marsh-as-electric-plane-landing-strip to a public orchard to artificial atmospherics to a public “tech shop,” this innovative platform will build on the dynamic histories of garage hacking and citizen science to build not just what’s next but to imagine how what’s next matters. From September 4-14, these projects will be “in process” and open for public viewing. The results will be presented and exhibited, both in South Hall and in other parts of the City, September 16-19.

Out of the Garage, Into the World uses Build Your Own World as its overarching theme, and its methodology is rooted in an ethos of creating and inventing for the common good. Out of the Garage, Into the World acknowledges the blurred boundaries between garage hacking and citizen science and invites a range of such DIY laboratories and re-purposed spaces to perform in the public sphere, where the general public can observe and even participate in the process. The intent of Out of the Garage, Into the World is for artists to create projects that have a positive impact, however they define that, on their neighborhoods and communities or more broadly.

http://01sj.org/2010/exhibitions/out-of-the-garage/

Jackson Pollock and Fractals

Jackson Pollock´s No 1, 1949. picture by Myriam B. Mahiques

In September 1999, Ivar Peterson, from the Mathematical Association of America, published an article about Jackson Pollock and the fractal patterns of his paintings of swirling drips. Pollock´s dripping technique was developed in the late 1940 and early 1950. It was an immediate success. Apart from this innovation, the relationship artist-canvas was different: now, the canvas were spread on the floor, the artist was looking from above, he could walk around, over it. The morphological pattern was an aparent chaos. 

But Physicist Richard P. Taylor of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who was also trained as an artist, scanned Blue Poles, Number 11, 1952 with a computer, to analyze the color schemes and trajectories. The researchers discovered that Pollock's patterns had fractals characteristics. It means autosimilarity: parts of the painting would have similar (because it´s not a perfect fractal) fractal dimension than the whole painting.

I´ve read Peterson´s article many years ago, but never had the opportunity to test it myself. Two days ago, I went to Arata Isozaki´s  MOCA museum in Los Angeles, and had the good chance to watch Pollock´s No1, 1949 and even take a picture, (without flash).

I converted the jpg file in a binary file in order to measure the fractal Dimension, with ImageJ, and these were the astonishing results, for the whole painting plus two selected random details:

D 1.8507

D 1.8780

D 1.8782

Read Ivar Peterson´s article:

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_9_20_99.html