The Archigram Archive is finally online. It’s be-yew-tiful. BLDGBLOG has a good entry on how it all looks from here in the future.

Yuko Shimizu’s sketch blog. Lovely illustrations with charming and ingenious depictions of her process.

Confederate History Month.

John Pawson’s House of Stone. Not sure why the recycledness of the granite is the headline though.

An installation by Kit Webster. The best moment of the video is when someone wanders between the screens and it looks suddenly magical instead of just digital.

There’s no one like the Racialicious-ers for elucidating complex systems of power. Thanks for thinking so much about children, Peterson et al.

Excellent essay on the state of e-readers.

Generative drawings by Tim Hodkinson (via Data is Nature)

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A while ago, we were out of town for ten days and hired a neighbor’s kid to pet-sit for us. (This is a boring story, but pretend I am MimiSmartypants for a sec and can render a bus ride riveting.) We left specific directions about what to do each day. He’s a nerdy eighteen, a bit of a homebody who’d done some pet-sitting for us in the past, though in retrospect, I think his father supervised on those occasions. We didn’t expect any problems. However when we got home the cats were skinny and insane with hunger and the house was torn to shreds and smelled much worse than a barn. Judging by the unused food on the counter and empty water bowls, the kid must have come once to pick up the cash, and not bothered to return. I was livid. It took all my self control not to cross the street to break his face or at least demand he return the cash. However, it’s not good politics to quarrel with neighbors, and since the cats yet live and his father is a nice guy, I decided to let it go. I expected never to see the kid again, but oddly enough when I saw him and his father the other day he, saluted me politely and asked how I was, all limpid eyed and innocent. He was totally unashamed; in fact, appeared unaware that he’d done anything wrong. It’s not an act. He’s not clever or devious enough. But it’s shocking and confusing and I keep on being shocked and confused every time I encounter him. What does it mean? Does he have lead poisoning, amnesia, softening of the brain, a sociopathic tapeworm, terminal idiocy? And how could he be too stupid to throw away all the food he didn’t feed the animals? Did he really think we wouldn’t notice the piles of uneaten food or their stiff little starved bodies? Every time I see him, I scrutinize him carefully, but nothing; he’s totally blank.

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I couldn’t sleep between two and five am last night so I read all about Elizabeth I, and pored over her portraits for a while until I fell asleep and dreamed about a triptych called the Pelican, the Phoenix, and the Rabbit-Horse.

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I’m not sure piles of links here make much sense for anyone besides me. I still need a place to keep the special ones, but Twitter really takes the place of old timey link blogs. There is a constant flow of stimulating stuff. As I use it more, I find myself visiting link blogs less and being more attracted to journal and essay sites. There’s a generosity to that kind of communication. It feels personal, a gift given at some risk… Formspring seems to focus both the sweetness and risks of personal writing. People answer questions they ought to ignore. They engage questioners who ask things they have no right to… Is this something like the Japanese concept of amae? I can’t quite understand amae any more than I can comfortably intuit the correct moments for formal or informal you in a romance language; but in the best cases on Formspring there’s something both sweet and sinister in the presumption of the questioners which corresponds to a surprising generosity and indulgence on the part of the person responding. In the worst cases, the person answering becomes complicit in her own harassment by choosing to respond. (When I first started reading about the crazy harassment going on among young teens, I assumed respondents did not have the ability to accept or reject questions. They do, but choose not to.)  Now all the grown ups are asking ourselves why.⁰¹ However, I think adults misunderstand how truly passive the act of reply is. All that typing throws us. We assume it is an active response, while in reality a silent refusal requires a far more commanding and adult sense of self. I wonder if some of these kids are unconsciously waiting for explicit grown-up permission to take up the kind of space a refusal entails? It would be counter to the fundamental emphasis on compliance that grown up American culture demands of children. It’s impossible to require children to both obey our demands and defy everyone else’s… The other thing I wonder is what larger purpose this cycle serves. I have this sudden picture of an imaginary aggregate of this particular flavor of interactions among this particular age group as a little cog busily turning away within a larger cultural machine. What is that machine and why does it demand such a thing? What are we cranking out?