Walkin’ and Lookin’

[Image above depicts two street paintings by Peter Gibson, which I found at the inhabitat.com site. Click it for their post about Gibson’s work.]

From whiskey river:

Epitaph

Now I’m not the brightest
knife in the drawer, but
I know a couple things
about this life: poverty
silence, impermanence
discipline and mystery

The world is not illusory, we are

From crimson thread to toe tag

If you are not disturbed
there is something seriously wrong with you, I’m sorry

And I know who I am
I’ll be a voice
coming from nowhere,

inside —

be glad for me.

(Franz Wright, from Walking to Martha’s Vineyard)

…and (italicized portion):

There is a kind of attentiveness that can be cultivated and deeply relished, and a whole secret life of the street that it brings to light. It gives to the human-made world almost the same kind of delight that the lover of the natural world (and I am also one of those) might take in lizard eggs, bird colonies, feathers, droppings, rocks, and lichens. It does not oppose the wild and the made worlds but conjoins them, finds their overlap and resonance, sees the wild in the made, pays to the rust stains on an old corrugated iron wall the same receptivity it gives to dewdrops delicately strung in a spider’s web. It includes but goes beyond spotting and classifying…

In my own looking around I have met people who walked the stormwater tunnels; people who walked the underground train system in the quiet between midnight and 3 a.m. on Sunday mornings, searching for the “false starts,” the abandoned tracks, the odd buildings said to remain in obscure places; people who visited disused gasworks, brick-pits, the underneath of old wharves; people who boat up old industrial canals, who comb landfill sites and take tours through sewage treatments plants; people in Sydney who know about the underground passageways linking old mental asylums with landing-stages on the harbor. There’s a lovely freedom in momentarily stepping back into the privilege freely taken by children, finding the gap in the cyclone wire fence and sauntering along in that heightened state of casual alertness, just having a good look around.

(Susan Murphy, “The Secret Life of the Street,” from Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary — I love that “sees the wild in the made”)

Not from whiskey river:

Imagine film of a normal street right now, a relatively busy crossroads at 9AM taken from a vantage point high above the street, looking down at an angle as if from a CCTV camera. We can see several buildings, a dozen cars, and quite a few people, pavements dotted with street furniture.Freeze the frame, and scrub the film backwards and forwards a little, observing the physical activity on the street. But what can’t we see?

— —

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic.  This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner… Similar performance data is being captured in the engine control systems of a stationary BMW waiting at a traffic light, beaming information back to the BMW service centre associated with the car’s owner.

The traffic light system itself is capturing and collating data about traffic and pedestrian flow, based on real-time patterns surrounding the light, and conveying the state of congestion in the neighbourhood to the traffic planning authority for that region, which alters the lights’ behaviour accordingly…

A police car whistles by, the policewoman in the passenger seat tapping into a feed of patterns of suspicious activity around the back of the newsagent on a proprietary police system accessed via her secured BlackBerry. A kid takes a picture of the police car blurring past with his digital camera, which automatically uses a satellite to stamp the image with location data via the GPS-enabled peripheral plugged into the camera’s hot-shoe connection…

Walking past, an anxious-looking punter abruptly halts as the local Ladbrokes triggers a Bluetooth-based MMS to his phone, having detected him nearby, and offers discounts on a flutter on the 3.30 at Newmarket (the Ladbrokes is constantly receiving updates on runners, riders and bets, linked to a national network aggregating information from local nodes at racecourses and bookies). The potential punter had earlier received a tip on said race from his chosen newspaper’s daily sports bulletin, delivered via his mobile’s newsfeed reader software. […] the street-lamp above his head fades down as its sensors indicate the level of ambient daylight on the street is now quite sufficient, switching into a mode where the solar panel above collects energy for the evening and delivers any potential excess back into the grid, briefly triggering a message indicating this change of state back to the public-private partnership that runs the lighting services in this borough, in turn commencing a transaction to price up the surplus electricity delivered to the grid…

(from “The Street as Platform,” by Dan Hill, at the cityofsound blog)

One more bit on the subject…

The 1980s TV series Miami Vice is cited often (with mixed emotions) for the fashions it featured and inspired. Less often remarked upon is the look and sound of the series. Great visuals: remember the night lights of South Florida sliding over the polished bumper of Crockett’s Ferrari(s)? And the music — ai, it was a show to listen to. (Wikipedia says, “While other television shows used made-for-TV music, Miami Vice would spend $10,000 or more per episode to buy the rights to original recordings.” Ho-hum now, but a surprise back then.)

A case in point, from the Season  2 premiere: In this episode, detectives Crockett and Tubbs left Miami for New York, in pursuit of homicidal drug dealers. (Nostalgists among you can watch the episode here, among other places online.) Lord only knows what The French Connection‘s Popeye Doyle would have made of Sonny Crockett — who roams the city over the soundtrack of Glen Frey’s “You Belong to the City.”

(Lyrics below the video, which includes more than just images from the episode):

Lyrics:

You Belong to the City
(by G. Frey and J. Tempchin;
performed by Glen Frey)

The sun goes down; the night rolls in
You can feel it starting all over again
The moon comes up and the music calls
You’re gettin’ tired of starin’ at the same four walls

You’re out of your room and down on the street
Movin’ through the crowd and the midnight heat
The traffic crawls; the sirens scream
You look at the faces; it’s just like a dream
Nobody knows where you’re goin’
Nobody cares where you’ve been

‘Cause you belong to the city
You belong to the night
Livin’ in a river of darkness
Beneath the neon lights

You were born in the city
Concrete under your feet
It’s in your moves; it’s in your blood
You’re a man of the streets

When you said goodbye, you were on the run
Tryin’ to get away from the things you’ve done
Now you’re back again, and you’re feeling strange
So much has happened, but nothing has changed
You still don’t know where you’re goin’
You’re still just a face in the crowd

You belong to the city
You belong to the night
Livin’ in a river of darkness
Beneath the neon lights

You were born in the city
Concrete under your feet
It’s in your blood, it’s in your moves
You’re a man of the street

You can feel it, you can taste it
You can see it, you can face it
You can hear it, hey, you’re getting near it, hey
You wanna make it, cause you can take it
You belong to the city, you belong to the night
You belong to the city, you belong to the night
You belong, you belong…

(from GF Web site)

___________________

P.S. Remember the post from last weekend, about the… the sheer interestingness of the Google Voice voicemail-to-text transcription service? In a comment on that post, I’ve heard from Laurie Burke, the “voice of Google Voice” herself — who sounds refreshingly level-headed about the whole thing.