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Sutro Bath House was an indoor swimming pool complex built ocean side. Opened in 1896, this modern engineering marvel used Pacific Ocean water for its several salt and fresh water pools and hot baths. It was the destination for a while, got played out, got too expensive to operate, had a fire and lastly the glass, iron, wood, and reinforced concrete structure was reclaimed by the Pacific. The remnants I found on my walk along the coast reminded me of another gigantic public pool ruin I ran around in as a youth in Flushing Meadow Park.
I found this handwriting on a construction wall in SoHo today: “Thinning The Herd.” Is there a connection between unemployment and mortality? Bill Moyers mentioned Peter Dreier’s research estimating that for every percent the rate of unemployment climbs, an additional 47,000 people die - half from heart attacks, more than 800 are murdered and nearly twelve hundred commit suicide.
March 15, 2009 Written by Tahero at 1:58 pm · Filed under Social Studies
I Keep telling my fine art friends that the days of the professional artist conceit are over. Right now it’s better to focus your art on social entrepreneurship, outreach & education rather than trying to re-create the 80’s era dangerous/strange artist mythology. Check the stats:
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I took a trip to Second Little Italy to proof a project for a client. This Carmine Street printer was down the block from the public pool I used to frequent as a youth. As I stepped downstairs into the shop I got hit with wafts of ink & acetone fumes. Immediately bringing me back to a job I had in Atlanta as a negative stripper at Nexus Press. The Carmine Street Shop seemed frozen in time, when much of the industry West of 6th Avenue to Greenwich Street dealt with printing. Impressive. Pete the press master, has stories galore and an original letter press poster of Benito Mussolini framed on his wall - printed in The Bronx, New York, USA in 1942. Huh?
I saw these today in their natural habitat. After decades of use; still comfortable, still functional, still sturdy, still beautiful.
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I am starting to believe that most products made after the 1980’s are trash. See something of how they get the way they are:
The Hip-Hop Word Count is a searchable ethnographic database built from the lyrics of over 40,000 Hip-Hop songs from 1979 to present day.
The Hip-Hop Word Count describes the technical details of most of your favorite hip-hop songs. This data can then be used to not only figure out interesting stats about the songs themselves, but also describe the culture behind the music.
How can analyzing lyrics teach us about our culture?
The Hip-Hop Word Count locks in a time and geographic location for every metaphor, simile, cultural reference, phrase, rhyme style, meme and socio-political idea used in the corpus of Hip-Hop.
The Hip-Hop Word Count then converts this data into explorable visualisations which help us to comprehend this vast set of cultural data.
This data can be used to chart the migration of ideas and builds a geography of language.
The readability scores are on a scale from 0 (illiterate) to 20 (post-graduate degree). Visit the Hip-Hip Word Count.
I love the panel in Watchmen where Adrian Veidt aka Ozymandias retreats back to Karnak - his fortress in Antarctica and orders 36 TV’s installed into his workroom. He tunes them all in to different stations and takes the world’s emotional temperature by analyzing the commercials, program content and news.
The world’s smartest and 10th richest in last years Forbes Fictional 15, Veidt’s listed profession is Marketing - let me find out Ozymandias is a Strategic Planner.
If these social media websites were around in the 80’s Adrian Veidt would have used them to perfection. Google searches tell us what people want, Twitter tells us what people think and We Feel Fine tells us how people feel. We are making new tools to understand our rapidly changing modern mythology, the applications are boundless:
We had to do some consumer research for a project with bike messenger bag maker Timbuk2 so we went to the store in Hayes Valley (they moved from The Mission - Nuff said). The creative brief rocked, they followed our recommendations. Now we chart the change.
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The competitive advantage of simply being American is gone. Great. So when Cabinet secretary Arne Duncan says he wants to add more time to the school year to boost the academic achievements of our youth. I say its a no-brainer. American students have had Summers off because once upon a time many Americans worked the fields for a living and the families needed all hands on deck for the harvest at the end of every Summer. On a whole, we are no longer an agrarian society. Time to push the reset button.
My one caveat is that the Public school system has to be restructured so kids can actually learn during this extended time. Arne Duncan supports charter schools and one of the reasons he supports a longer school year may be because it will mean more $ for his charter school homies. Public Schools ≠ Charter Schools. Public Schools benefit the public, Charter Schools benefit those who are connected. Public Schools are for the Children. Staple Crops is for the Children. Wu Tang is for the Children.
