Monday, 25 February 2008
learning from louisville
Learning from Louisville
Promise and Betrayal, by John Gilderbloom and Ron Mullins Promise and
Betrayal, by John Gilderbloom and Ron Mullins.
Last year's National Trust for Historic Preservation conference was
held in Louisville, Kentucky. I went out a couple days before the
conference and was graciously taken around a number of interesting
housing projects by Professor John Gilderbloom of the University of
Louisville. Some were projects initiated by the Sustainable Urban
Neighborhoods program of the University of Louisville (a program which
Dr. Gilderbloom started) in some of the more economically challenged
parts of the city, and others were stops on the AIA house tour, which
happened to occur the day before the conference started.
I've mentioned in the past that one of my major gleanings from poking
around Louisville for a week was that the city-county merger that
occured there, merging the City of Louisville and the County of
Jefferson into one governmental entity, is great for balancing tax
revenues and perhaps services, but has nothing to do with putting the
brakes on sprawl. Other steps are needed. (Rebalancing tax revenues
between the suburbs and the center city is a big part of the argument
by Myron Orfield's work on regional planning.)
Louisville has plenty of currently empty land in the core, yet large
subdivisions (inlcuding the new urbanist development Norton Commons)
are being built 10-20 miles from the city center.
Dr. Gilderbloom has just published a book about his experience linking
the University of Louisville to housing production and neighborhood
stabilization activities in the Russell neighborhood. It's discussed
in this article, "Book tells of U of L ties with inner city:
Co-authors analyze Russell redevelopment." When the SUN program
started, they built and sold houses for less than $70,000. Ten years
later, these houses have doubled in price, and today houses are being
built at market rates.
According to the article: "Promise and Betrayal" mainly recaps the
10-year initiative to revitalize Russell. But it is dense with
academic facts and not light reading -- 215 pages, six of them
scholarly references, in addition to name and subject indexes.
But Gilderbloom and Mullins make the case that few institutions of
higher learning apply their knowledge and resources directly to the
problems of poverty and housing in their midst. Thus, the reference to
"Betrayal" in the title. They write, "Traditionally, universities
avoid substantive involvement in inner cities because success is
difficult. Yet if universities are so knowledgeable, then one wonders
why many surrounding neighborhoods of those institutions are filled
with hopelessness and despair. In ten years of community building in
Louisville and elsewhere, we found that most academics fail to
address, much less solve, inner-city problems."
It sounds like an important book that I need to add to my reading
list.
On Dr. Gilderbloom's tour (coincidentally held in conjunction with his
graduate level planning course on housing and community development)
while we were going around the Russell neighborhood, which is typical
of urban neighborhoods in weak real estate markets--many many empty
lots (but I will say, for a "bad" neighborhood it was a lot cleaner
than the streets in a lot of neighborhoods in DC), the result of
putative attempts at urban clearance and renewal that never really got
going (Alas, I did not then have a digital camera, so I don't have any
photos)--we ran into Argie Dale, a local radio entrepreneur who took
up development, in part spurred on by the SUN efforts. He talked to us
about his development efforts, which have also spurred others. (I will
say that his very large house has some suburban elements, including a
prominent driveway and a fence. Plus the area wasn't fully
"sidewalked.")
Developer Argie Dale, Louisville, Kentucky Developer Argie Dale built
a 5,200-square-foot home in the Russell neighborhood for his family,
prompting similar requests. (Photo by David. C. Burton, Special to the
Louisville Courier-Journal)
The historic Trolley Barn Complex in the heart of the Russell
neighborhood--named for Harvey Clarence Russell, a distinguished Black
educator who lived in Louisville in the 1920's--is being converted
into the Kentucky Center for African-American Heritage. The under
construction site was the location of the African-American Heritage
Preservation reception during the conference.
This article also from the Courier-Journal, "Urban living guides
city's housing plan. Report shows needs changing; home developers to
be courted," discusses new plans for housing development in the core
of the city.
From the article:
Mayor Jerry Abramson is launching a major initiative to rebuild older
neighborhoods and steer home developers toward more condominiums,
townhouses and row houses. The reason is simple, Abramson said:
Louisville, like the rest of the nation, is undergoing a major
demographic shift. Baby boomers are retiring and no longer need large
suburban homes. Younger people -- especially those marrying later and
forgoing children -- are choosing to live in urban areas. "It's a new
day and a new way," said Bruce Traughber, secretary of the metro
government's Cabinet for Community Development. Some of the changes,
such as the city working with homebuilders to encourage them to build
in urban neighborhoods, will begin immediately.
This is the first of a series of articles in the Courier-Journal about
the city-county government's new strategy for revitalizing core city
neighborhoods. I'll have to go back and dig up these articles.
There's a lot more going on in Louisville than you may imagine.
There's quite an arts and culture scene, and amazing buildings,
although the preservation community has suffered some defeats. It's
also close to Lexington, home of the University of Kentucky, which has
a great historic preservation program, and the state capital,
Frankfort. Kentucky's State Historic Preservation program and the Main
Streets program are best practices examples.
1.velocitycover_2004.09.29 Old Louisville is an amazing neighborhood,
Sunday, 24 February 2008
2006_08_01_archive
The final session at the 2007 AAG meeting I am co-organising is on
Software and Space. This is being put together with Matt Zook and Rob
Kitchin and has already received a good amount of interest. The CFP is
available as a pdf.
----
Call for papers - 2007 Association of American Geographers Annual
Conference.
17-21 April 2007, San Francisco, California, USA.
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/
Software and Space
Session organisers
Martin Dodge, Geography, University of Manchester
Rob Kitchin, NIRSA, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Matthew Zook, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky
Unpacking the automatic production of spaces
Over the past thirty years, the practices of everyday life have become
increasingly infused with and mediated by software. Whatever the task
- domestic living, working, consuming, travelling or communicating -
software increasingly makes a difference to how everyday life takes
place. Software is embedded into objects and systems as a means to
enhance and manage usage and is pivotal in linking together disparate
and distributed infrastructures. It also enables new and refined
processes through the generation, storage, profiling, screening and
communication of data about individuals, objects, and transactions.
Importantly, software has profound spatial effects, both through the
automatic production of space that generates new spatialities (Thrift
and French, 2002; Dodge and Kitchin, 2005a) and the creation of
software-sorted (Graham, 2005) or machine readable (Dodge and Kitchin,
2005b) geographies that alter the nature of access and
governmentality.
Given that the AAG meeting in 2007 will take place in the San
Francisco Bay the central node in the design and promulgation of
software it seems an apposite place to initiate a wider ranging
discussion on the role of software in the production of space.
Building on previous research concerned primarily with the
disciplinary effects of software-enabled technologies in the
govermentality of spaces of transportation, communication and
consumption, these sessions aim to move beyond seeing code solely as a
force of control. Consequently, we seek papers examining the
productive capability of software to reformulate collective life and
enhance individual's spatiality in creative, playful, empowering ways.
We seek papers that report empirically-informed analysis that unpack
the `automatic production of space' (Thrift and French, 2002) in terms
of people's daily experience living within (and increasing living
though) coded environments. It is hoped that the sessions will draw
together researchers from Geography, Sociology, Anthropology,
Communications, Media Studies and allied disciplines.
The goal of the sessions is, therefore, to conceptualize software
through its effects on space and social life at an individual level
rather than technical papers on particular software applications
(e.g., work in applied GIS) or economic geography analysis of the
software industry.
Some possible themes:
We seek theoretically informed papers that can report empirical
research within the following broad themes:
# Code and Creativity: Software's ability to manipulate digital media
is crucial to the emergence of `mash-ups' (ad-hoc combination and
hybrid re-use), `modding' (informal user modifications to improve
performance) and `remixability' (Manovich, 2005) that some herald as a
new wave of popular entertainment and decentred knowledge production.
How and in what ways does software enable new forms of individual
creativity? How is software making new spaces of play possible, new
means of human expression and facilitating new places for artistic and
craft practices?
# Code and Memories: People are generally only vaguely aware of the
extent to which coded objects, systems and environments are becoming
aware of them, and increasingly capturing routine interactions and
activity. What might the folding together of biological memory, shared
social memories and externalised digital memories mean for day to day
life? What benefits might such augmented memory bring, would never
forgetting events and details be a welcome improvement to individual's
lives?
# Code and Well-being: In what ways and to what degree might
software-enabled practices and spaces influence our well-being? Will
more continuous monitoring of health status via personalised software
systems be advantageous to well-being? Does the automation,
flexibility and the sense of a speeded-up world create new feelings of
empowerment or fears of powerlessness? How does software relate to the
mind, body and spirit of individuals in the so-called digital age?
# Code and Risks: The services and spaces of everyday living
increasingly depend on software to work. Most of the time software
`just works', yet this dependency is creating many new risks for
individuals, particularly in terms of complexity, and the impact of
unforeseen and hard to diagnose and fix problems with software. This
code complexity is also opening up new means for criminal activity and
malicious damage that can directly impact individuals (such as
computer viruses, phishing and identity theft). How do people manage
such risks, threats and fears?
# Code and Resistance: Much of the application of software by state
and corporate actors is about enhancing the effectiveness of existing
surveillance and automating the regulation of access. In what ways is
software enabling new capabilities for spatial governmentality? Also,
it is apparent that software intended to discipline also opens up many
novel types of resistance and new sites for subversive activities that
can disrupt the power relationships in quite surprising ways. We
invite contributions which explore the scope and spatiality of
alternative, subversive and underground hacking of code that
challenges established power relations and jump-scales to effect
political change.
# Code and Histories: Can our understanding of the contemporary
effects of the automation of spaces and activities by software be
improved by looking back into the past? Does an understanding of the
histories of code, by untangling how people have lived with
information processing technologies (including the pre-digital era of
analogue machinery), give useful insights into the future?
# Code Fieldwork: In terms of research methodologies, what ways can
software's effects be best studied, given that they are hidden in
arcane algorithms, and are often locked into privatised micro-spaces
and commercially-secret applications. In particular, how can software
be studied empirically as forms of individual practice that bring
spaces into being in contingent ways, rather than being analysed
through its representation form (written text - the source code - or
screen interfaces)?
----
Proposed papers in the form of a title and short abstract (250 words
maximum) should be submitted to Martin Dodge
(m.dodge@manchester.ac.uk) by 15th September 2006.
Further details on the paper requirements and registration for the AAG
meeting are at
http://www.aag.org/annualmeetings/SF2007/call4papers.cfm
We are also planning to organise a special issue in a leading human
geography journal on these themes and authors of full papers from the
session will be invited to participate.
posted by martin at 11:06 AM 0 comments
Posting a book chapter on Virtual Places to be published in the
2006_08_01_archive
Congratulations to STS-CXXI
Just a slightly belated congratulations to the crew of STS-CXXI, which
boldly sailed to ISS on July IV, MMVI, with a crew of VII on a mission
lasting XII days, XVIII hourss, XXXVII minutes, and LIV seconds.
Just another shining example of what western civilisation can do, and
why we are ultimately superior to those "other" people who have
adopted the concept of "0" and the arabic numbering system.
2007_04_01_archive
Spring
Spring in North Carolina:
It's almost obscene how much opulent springiness surrounds us here in
North Carolina at every turn these days. Not that I'm complaining...
posted by Kash @ 3:42 PM |
A Tax Cut Parable
I like the parable that has been discussed by Greg Mankiw, PGL, and
Mark Thoma in recent days. I think it's actually a great way to take a
look at the Bush tax cuts, and their effect on people of different
incomes.
Based on the actual distribution of federal income taxes in the US,
and the effects of the Bush tax cuts (estimated by the CBPP, available
here), I've redone the numbers in the parable that Greg first related
to reflect reality in the US. The problem, as PGL points out, is that
in actuality the Bush tax cuts didn't lower the bill that the people
in the bar must pay down to $80; it was effectively just an agreement
to pay $80 of the $100 tab now, and pay the rest later (read Greg's
post for the original parable in its entirety).
So here's how it really happens in the bar when the Bush
administration "cuts" taxes:
The first and second men (the poorest) used to pay $0.20. Now they
pay only $0.15 (a savings of $0.05, or 23%). They must then pay an
addtional $0.16 somewhere down the road.
The third and fourth men (the next poorest) used to pay $1.25. Now
they pay only $0.90 each (an immediate savings of $0.35, or 28%),
but must pay an additional $0.46 each later.
The fifth and sixth men used to pay $4.05 each. Now they pay only
$3.25 each (an immediate savings of $0.80, or 20%), but must pay an
additional $1.00 each later.
The seventh and eighth men used to pay $8.70 each. Now they pay
only $7.10 each (an immediate savings of $1.60, or 18%), but must
pay an additional $1.90 each later.
The ninth man (the second-richest) used to pay $15.60. Now he pays
only $12.45 (an immediate savings of $3.15, or 20%), but must pay
an additional $3.10 later.
Finally, the tenth man (the richest, who had an income about ten
times that of the fifth man, and five times that of the seventh
man) used to pay $56.00. Now he pays only $45.00 (an immediate
thanksgiving in florida
Thanksgiving in Florida
A couple of days ago Alli and I flew down to Florida, in order to
celebrate Thanksgiving with her family as we usually do. My family
doesn't really celebrate Thanksgiving, plus it's nice to come to
Florida just as Boston as getting cold.
The Thanksgiving dinner was great, as always. Most of the family was
there, and my friends Ilana and Dan also joined us, which was a cool
bonus.
We've already been to Siesta Beach, a gorgeous white sand spot,
although the water is a bit chilly for swimming. It's definitely
doable, and people were in there, but we were just hanging out.
Tomorrow it's back to Boston, where the smell of winter was in the air
before we left. I like winter, though, as it tends to boost my
productivity.
last nights sdm dinner
Last night's SDM dinner...
... went pretty well, I think. We had 8-10 people, and most of them
were "new faces" in that they were people outside my cohort and ones
who haven't showed up in the past. Given that it was a busy school
night for current SDM students, I think it was a pretty good turnout.
Maybe, just maybe, there's enough interest to rekindle this informal
monthly networking event.
I used Facebook Events to organize this dinner, and it worked well.
The interface is simple and easy to use. Invitations and reminders
were delivered reliably. The RSVP mechanism is simple. Unlike
eventbrite.com, Facebook allows people to change their mind and
respond differently over time.
I made the event public, so it showed up on the MIT network events
calendar within Facebook. This turned out to be a blessing, as at
least two people who were not in my original invitation list found the
event and joined us. Not coincidentally, these two were new SDM'08
students: welcome aboard, Rob and Jeremy!
Of course, some of the usual party animals also showed up ;) It was
nice to see Sorin is back in town, and I hadn't seen Rehan, Rajiv, or
Anand in many months.
So Facebook Events worked well enough to retain, and turnout was good
enough to keep me motivated to continue organizing these dinners. If
you're not on Facebook already, chances are you will miss out on these
dinners. Join Facebook, and then join the SDM Group on Facebook.
2007_07_01_archive
A Sunday afternoon ramble around the ramparts of authority
I hadn't taken much note of Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur.
From the reviews and blogs, I had assumed the book was just another
liberal apologia for turning back the tide of democracy. It's been on
the fast track to the top of review pages and radio shows like Nick
Cohen, Melanie Philips, Clive James and Christopher Hitchens in recent
months. Hence his appearance on Radio 3's Arts podcast last week,
which is where I heard his creepy, Clive Barkeresque mid-Atlantic
drawl. I had assumed right. But I don't wish to counter his arguments.
One need only read James Marcus' "tiny codicil" to his LA Times review
to realise the book contains more than lazy assumptions.
Marcus himself is an argument against Keen. Do readers afford
authority to his blog because he also writes for the LA Times; does
the blog diminish the authority of the LA Times? Keen's book is a
product of this two-way question of authority. He wants to raise it
for digital media only because he's content with the authority that
has already buried the question. The book's subtitle (which Marcus
calls "faintly hysterical") is revealing: "How the Democratization of
the Digital World Is Assaulting Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our
Values". It reminds me of those newspaper liberals putting on a
serious face and asking: "Should we bomb Iran?". As if the decision
had anything to do with us. The use of the word is there to corral
readers into a false community. As if "culture" was in our possession.
What would it mean for it not to be in our possession? Answer: the
kind of anxiety Keen is keen to feed and exploit.
Narrowing the focus to literary culture, most books corral without
raising their voice. A book gains authority through its mere bookness.
But all writing appropriates authority. The trick it allows is
generally overlooked, taken for granted. In everyday life, this is
necessary. We don't sit around discussing newspaper articles as
newspaper articles. We discuss the subject. We discuss the article's
relation to an issue of reality. We might even question its veracity.
But when a novel is celebrated, there is a curious vaccum. If we
celebrate it for its existence as a novel - by definition, a literary
book, existing solely as itself - what exactly are we celebrating? One
can leap for the subject matter - post-apocalyptic USA for example -
and praise it for insights into current social and political issues.
But this isn't why anyone reads a novel. It's always a sop to social
progress and education. Nabokov rightly called such readings
"childish". Then there's celebrating it for being "a thumping good
read", keeping the reader from enduring the real world for a few
precious and harmless hours. But so would sleeping, having a bath or
watching Pirates of the Caribbean 3. So why put a novel on a cultural
pedestal? Instead we might tell how we luxuriated in the precision and
beauty of the novel's prose. But is this anymore culturally-refined
than a fresh pillow, the fragrance of apricot creme or Keira
Knightley's bone structure? What is it that gives a novel a unique
cultural authority?
No wonder genre fans are perplexed at the way brilliantly-orchestrated
detective novels or horror tales or SF tetralogies fail to win the
attention and respect given to Man Booker or Pulitzer winners. Last
week, Matthew Cheney made a despairing attack on those who blame the
failure on cultural commissars. He argues that there is no "literary
establishment" keeping SF in its place; there is no "literary elite"
scheming to promote Cormac McCarthy without giving similar credit to
speculative fiction; there is no "literati" and it doesn't "dictate
what books are in and out of the literary canon". All true but, by the
same token, literature doesn't exist either. The paranoia behind the
claims of Cheney's essay writer is evidence of a faith in the literary
that is unable to appreciate its uncertain status. I'm sure the same
"literary establishment" shares that faith, otherwise it wouldn't
promote as "literary" deeply conservative writers. There really isn't
a great deal of difference between genre writers and those who write
sentences like "Between Edward and Florence, nothing happened
quickly". Supreme confidence in the form is present in both. Literary
fiction, the real thing, is full of doubt and ambivalence yet still
manages to find a way to move forward.
Ellis Sharp is right to guess that I was unaware of the interview with
the author of the sentence quoted above. In it he expresses gratitude
to various US authors like Roth, Mailer and Bellow for showing "formal
ambition, real sense of engagement, not cramped by modernism, really
democratic in outlook" [sic] as opposed to Europe which "was still
stifled by modernism, a rather detached form of elitist writing". It's
always wonderful to discover writers who set one free. It's odd then
that his own novels have remained so detached and stifling.
It's got to be a genuine freedom of course. One can't jettison doubt
like an emigrant on Ellis Island leaving Europe behind. It has to be
more like the freedom of Artur Sammler. Bellow is a great example of
finding a way between the crippling self-consciousness of the exile
and the promise of animal freedom, without denying either - a great
modernist in other words. McEwan's contrast is as deceptive as his
liberalism. Significantly, he doesn't name the detached elitists of
Europe. Could he mean the great modernists still writing when he was
studying at UEA: Nabokov, Bernhard and Beckett? One wonders if he was
talking to a European journalist he'd say something different; praise
the dazzling lucidity of Handke for example (see the rear cover of the
UK hardback of Absence). The triumph of European modernism was to find
a way to speak after the cataclysms of the 20th Century. The threat of
being stifled was very high. It's no surprise that some took refuge in
detachment. But you've got to do the filtering yourself, create your
own personal canon, become your own literary establishment, form your
own literary elite and then help others to do the same. It sets you
free. There isn't much sense of community though, unless you count the
internet.
at 6:38 PM 1 comments
August 2007 June 2007 Home
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Book buying
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2006_04_01_archive
ADAM on the eve
There is no true editorship when everything is prosperous. It is
the essence of a literary magazine's life to be always uncertain of
tomorrow... to run the gamut of monthly printers' bills and yet to
be determined never to give up the fight.
So said Miron Grindea, editor of ADAM International Review from 1936
to 1995.
I remember reading about this publication and its extraordinary
contents and contributors, and I once saw a crumbling collection of
half a dozen of them in a secondhand bookshop. In those days, I
subscribed to Granta which, even then, before it became completely
allergic to literature, was unsatisfying. I longed for a regular,
modern version of ADAM, at least in its indifference to marketing*.
That was before the internet. Only another 50-odd years to go then
Mark!
*In one of my earliest blogs for Splinters, I reacted against some of
Granta's junk mail.
at 10:46 PM 0 comments
May 2006 March 2006 Home
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
My Shelfari Bookshelf
Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog
email address
Please contact me, Stephen Mitchelmore, at steve dot mitchelmore at
gmail dot com
Literary links
* British Literary Blogs
* ReadySteadyBook blog
* Spurious
* Book Depository: Editor's Corner
* The Literary Saloon
* The Existence Machine
* The Reading Experience
* Scarecrow Comment
* Guardian Books Blog
* The Quarterly Conversation
* KCRW Bookworm
* BookForum
* wood s lot
* Mountain 7
* Todd Colby's Glee Farm
* Three Percent
* Tales from the Reading Room
* The Bibliophilic Blogger
* The Penguin Blog
* TLS: Peter Stothard
* Mary Beard
* Nomadics: Pierre Joris
* Lenin's Tomb
* Dispatches from Zembla
* Waggish
More literary blogs
* Golden Rule Jones
* Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella
* The Best of New Writing on the Web
* John Self's Asylum
* Anatomy of Melancholy
* The Truth About Lies
* Nigel Beale: Nota Bene
* Thomas McGonigle's ABC of Reading
* Vertigo: Collecting WG Sebald
* Un Arbre dans la Ville
* The Wooden Spoon
* The Joyful Knowing
* The Reader Onliine
* In Abstentia Out
* Jacob Russell's Barking Dog
* eNotes Book Blog
* Diderot's Diary
Book buying
* *Steve's Wishlist*
* The Book Depository - Cheap books and free delivery
* Booksprice - price comparisons
* Abebooks
Favoured author sites
* Maurice Blanchot
* Thomas Bernhard (German equivalent)
* Gabriel Josipovici
* Peter Handke (German equivalent)
* Princeton Dante Project
* Proust: Temps Perdu
* The Kafka Project
* Charlotte Mandell
* Noam Chomsky
* John Pilger
Blog Archive
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2007_01_01_archive
Expect less blogging
One of my resolutions for the new year is to spend a bit less time
online and more offline. Blogging will probably be a casualty, though
I don't blog that much anyways.
For the curious, my other resolutions are below.
Health:
- Continue to work out every working day (weekends stay free of the
gym),
- Continue eating decent food, not all junk
- Maybe resume my old habit of playing in an Ultimate Frisbee summer
league
Community:
- Donate more money and more time to charity and charitable causes
- Get more involved with my local police, take some neighborhood watch
classes, see where I can help out in a constructive manner
- Possibly finally get that gun license I've sort of wanted for a
while (I don't think I'm actually going to buy and own a gun, much
less keep one at home, but I've always wanted to learn how to fire the
things...)
Travel:
- Go to the NCAA Final Four again, this time in Atlanta, with my dad
- Visit my family in Israel at least once, probably in late spring /
early summer
- Make it to a friend's wedding in Turkey in July
- Visit at least one of the world's top 50 restaurants that I haven't
2006_05_01_archive
Reason to use XHTML 1.0 rather than 1.1
I never had a good reason until today, when I changed the doctype for
an XHTML 1.0-compliant page to 1.1, revalidated and got one error:
Error at Line X column Y: there is no attribute "target".
Hmm, curious. A quick search turns up the relevant W3C FAQ entry:
Why was the target attribute removed from XHTML 1.1?
It wasn't. XHTML 1.0 comes in three versions: strict, transitional,
and frameset. All three of these were deliberately kept as close as
possible to HTML 4.01 as XML would allow. XHTML 1.1 is an updated
version of XHTML 1.0 strict, and no version of HTML strict has ever
included the target attribute. The other two versions, transitional
and frameset, were not updated, because there was nothing to
update. If you want to use the target attribute, use XHTML 1.0
transitional.
Well, then, XHTML 1.0 transitional it is ;)
Picture by NOVA JIM:
pic
Picture by
Posted by Yoav at 16:57 2 comments Links to this post
United 93
Last Friday night Alli and I saw United 93, the new movie about the
4th hijacked flight on September 11th 2001.
We both thought the movie was very good: taut, emotional, touching.
Again, like Munich a few months ago, I tend to enjoy these movies as
action tales just as much as I do their historical aspects, even if
the latter are inaccurate to some extent. In the case of United 93, I
understand the production crew did its best to stay as close to the
story as possible, diverging only when it was impossible to know what
truly happened. So like Munich, I'd recommend United 93 to everyone.
I found three things to be fairly striking about the movie.
One was the amount of people acting as themselves, i.e. the real
people who were involved that day. For example, many of the air
traffic controllers fall into this category. You (or at least we)
didn't know this until you see the credits at the end.
Second was the lack of panic among most people involved. The civilian
air traffic controllers, military personnel, etc, all seemed to take
things in stride. They may have been confused at times, but never
panicked. Voices were fairly low and measured.
Third was the absolute routine-ness of the whole flight itself. It
looked like any of hundreds of flights I have taken in the past,
nothing special. Even with the camera focusing on them, the hijackers
didn't look suspicious to me. Maybe the youngest one, who was nervous,
did, but even then only a little bit. Or maybe it's because I'm from
the middle east myself...
space barnacle
Space Barnacle
Your spaceship has been shot down. Your father is dead. Your mission
is revenge. This is Space Barnacle, an ultra-violent pixellated game
modeled in the 8-bit style. It is free to download!
space talk from dimension eugene
Space Talk From Dimension Eugene (Updated Repost)
I have posted links to this before, but Superdeluxe now has a nifty
embed code that allows you to watch all of the Space Talk from
Dimension Eugene episodes from the comfort of the Deuce Project
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