WOTBA's Walking News Digest: The Dodos, Donny Osmond's Walking Blog, and Walking Around Baghdad

I have a Google Alert set up for the word "walking" that fetches all sorts of disasters. Many of the walking items in the news deal with terrible things that happen to individuals who are just out for a stroll and minding their own business. Bad things happen to good people walking home, going to work, and also to nice people trying to find meaning in life by sauntering near the railroad tracks. It's a disgrace.

I feel like our civil rights and liberties as walkers are constantly under attack. Maybe, one day, I will take up this issue in a public forum, and eventually, someone will notice my hard-working efforts on behalf of walkers. Maybe this advocacy will set a course toward the governor's office in Texas, my ultimate career goal.

On the other hand, walking news is sometimes full of hope. Thusly,

• The Dodos Walking Song
The Dodos, a duo, recorded a whole set of songs based on walking around. "All of the songs sort of wrap around this coming and going theme," says Meric Long, 1/2 of The Dodos duo. We love them, says I, in the royal "we." NPR story here.

• Donny Osmond's Walking Blog
Don't miss this promised online feature for The Start! Walking program sponsored by the American Heart Association. The very face of hope.

• Walking Facing Oncoming Traffic
I, too, was always taught to walk toward oncoming traffic. A letter writer in Ontario, Canada thinks people are getting too slack in this department. I am in full agreement. I like to stare down anyone who is attempting to run over me so as to not get broadsided by strangers from the rear.

• Six Million Years of Walking Heritage, outlined in the NYT, explains new revelations about the long march of the upright.

• Reporter Walks Nervously Around War-torn City
Daniel Smith, writing for the New Haven Advocate, is braver than most people. Sometimes, you need to go for a stroll in the city just to get out of the house. The fact that the city is Baghdad, Iraq presents some issues. Story here.

Image: brave souls attempting to stroll the lower sections of Broadway in New York, New York.

Reflections on Reviewing Art and Culture in the Blogosphere

Google Alert! Here's a post with your name on it!

During the glamorous days of the New York theater on opening night, actors would head to a swell place like Sardi's after the performance to anxiously wait for the reviews. I imagine that during the wait, amidst a boozy haze of cigarette smoke and clinking glasses of scotch-on-the-rocks, one actor would breathlessly run in with the freshly printed early editions of the newspapers, and then someone at the table would start reading the reviews out loud to the assembled party.

Google Alert has now replaced the breathless actor as the delivery device. After posting an art review on this website, for example, I can then trace, thanks to common analytics programs, a "hit" from the location where the artist may live. I don't know for sure if it's the artist or his or her "people," but since I know that many art professionals have created Google Alerts for themselves, I think it's most likely the artist.

There have been occasions, after posting a review, when I can analytically deduce that only the artist has read the post. At these times, I regret not writing the review as a letter: "Dear Artist, I like your work, but I didn't care for the red thing in the corner."

Sorry. A good opening, but Clement Greenberg won't be seeing it.

While many artists protest that they don't pay attention to reviews, it's always good to have someone who takes notice. Many artists work hard all the time and particularly drive themselves hard to prepare for an opening. I walk around New York feeling frustrated that there are too many artists in search of one decent review.

I'm not talking about promotional puff pieces of two sentences with a picture. I'm talking a 500-word review with description, evaluation and interpretation, one that gives the reader a sense of the artist. Writing a real review is hard.

There's little method to my own madness. Sometimes, I will seek out a particular exhibit, but often it's one I've encountered by chance. Out of the zillions of exhibits, I select for review a handful that inspire me to write. That's how I felt with my recent reviews of Rosalind Solomon, Luc Tuymans, Macbeth, and Jasper Johns. And, in my case, I have other things on my blogging agenda. I have to keep walking.

While I've found some excellent examples of arts writing in new media, the blogosphere and the expansion of internet journalism has not yet produced a new golden age of art criticism, I'm afraid. It's very easy to write, "I ate pancakes this morning. Last night I went to the Whitney opening party. The tequila drinks were good. I just broke up with my boyfriend."

When blogging about art becomes as lucrative as blogging about blogging, this new golden age may come to pass. I can't wait.

Image: Man reading newspaper while waiting for streetcar. Streetcar station, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Russell Lee, photographer. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF33-012324-M3 DLC (b&w film nitrate neg.)

Feed Your Head: Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA (A Review)

A few months ago, when I read that a certain type of printer was capable of producing three-dimensional objects, I had a hard time getting my head around the idea that I could print out a lost toothbrush. I completely forgot about the invention until I came across some of the printed objects in MoMA's new head-blowing exhibit, Design and the Elastic Mind. Now that I better understand the technology that allows me to print out an attractive bowl for the table - it involves resin and layers, I think I want a 3D printer in the worst way.

The exhibit at MoMA, some of it interactive, does toy a bit with this sort of high-tech consumer fetishism, but its deeper motive is to explain the more profound intersection of design and science through the lens of "elasticity." Defined in the exhibit as "the product of adaptability plus acceleration," elasticity implies movement - soaring arcs between shimmering points of light, walls that bend, micro-organisms that grow and change in relation to passersby, organisms capable of carrying information or broadcasting images in motion, prosthetic ankles that walk like real ones.

As an active organism in the blogosphere, I am already well-versed in the art of virtual mapping, an intermediate player in Google mashups, and familiar enough with tag clouds to appreciate the structuralist fundamentals of analyzing my own language. The exhibit covers some of the brave new frontiers of the web in its section on "Harvesting the Internet." We're already moved past those items, however, as it's so elastic. Check out what's in your future at Google Labs.

While I'm fine with the Internet, in terms of appreciating the virtual frontiers of computing, it's the biological parts of the Design exhibit that give me pause. In nanotechnology, scientists and designers are working in various fields to visualize or engineer revolutionary processes at the molecular level. Researchers at Harvard have visualized the "inner life of the cell" to give students aesthetically pleasing cinematic renderings of cellular life, and surely, pretty pictures could lead to more successful recruitment for future majors in the sciences. Maybe these students will go on to design video games that track down and kill cancer cells in the body. That would be wonderful.

Contemporary visual culture, as an academic field, embraces the notion that we're hell-bound to visualize that which we previously thought could not be made visible. Our global culture, in turning from the text toward the image, produces pictures that suggest their own ineffability, their own inarticulate "Wow." Nevertheless, Design and the Elastic Mind, while showing the much dazzling "wow" of macro and micro design and science, reveals that we still depend on those old and fabulous bits of information that we call "words" to explain these wonders. Or vice versa. I loved looking at Brad Paley/Text Arc's structuralist visualizations for Alice in Wonderland and trying to glean the relationship of the words to the cosmic rabbit hole.

Happily, the exhibit's online site is terrific and awaits exploration. Explore it here for yourself. Be prepared for lots of WORDS.

Design and the Electric Mind continues at the Museum of Modern Art through May 12, 2008.

At top: Screen capture of Google Analytics map showing locations of visitors to Walking Off the Big Apple during the month of February 2008. Click to enlarge.

Walking News Week in Review: The Sustainable Flâneur and Other Top Stories

Strolling Device Converts to Electricity and Thusly Saves the Planet from Environmental Destruction (Discovery News)
Mechanical engineers have found that a wearable knee device can turn any flâneur into a self-sustained power house, charging up our cell phone or whatever powered device we may be carrying in our Vuitton bag. So great! And we thought we were only good for drinking absinthe in cafés.

The Mayor of London Wants People Out Cycling and Walking (The City of London)
Ken Livington, the Mayor of London, announced plans to invest 500 million pounds in new expenditures to get folks in London out of their motor vehicles and into the open air. The pedestrian plans call for better signage to help navigate pedestrians from one place to another.

A Guy Who Calls Himself Fellow Human Walks and Eats Sardines (Explorer News)
A guy who calls himself Fellow Human is walking across America wearing a 45-pound backpack and living off sardines.

West Virginia Students Told to Walk More (Marshall Parthenon)
West Virginia is trying to persuade college students to walk to class so they won't be so chubby.

I've signed up for a Google Alert on the topic of walking, and I like to share the best stories from time to time. Most of the news stories, however, involve pedestrians who are injured or harmed in some malicious way while walking, but I don't like to share those types of reports.

Weekend Frivolities: Cupcakes, Buildings, Obama, Comments Now Open

• After finishing that last self-guided walk, Fifth Avenue and The High Road to Taos, I felt like I had walked from Fifth Avenue to Santa Fe and back. That was a big walk! I'm still putting together the interactive map of Fifth Avenue, but the rest of the walk is now fully assembled on new blue and beige pages HERE. From analyzing the site feed, I see that a lot of people liked that walk.
• For blogger-types who like to write long posts like myself, I highly recommend using Google Pages, a feature still in the Google Labs. That's how I'm putting together the complete versions of the walks.
• The cold weather makes me hungry, so yesterday I decided to visit Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington and drink some coffee and eat a red velvet cupcake (or rvc, as I like to call them). They have two kinds, one with white icing and another with chocolate icing. I don't advocate walking to a bakery as a destination if weight loss is a goal, but I decided that if you walk far enough, you can walk it off and it's OK.
• I like the building on Avenue A with the BURGER KLEIN and Gracefully signs, so I took a picture of it. The other picture here is of the RV cupcakes.
• I have a hard time remembering the name of the place I got the cupcakes, and I think they should change their name to Rivington Bakery. Another place I like is Connecticut Muffin on Prince Street near the New Museum, but last time I was there they had taken the sign down. With the New Museum, the name didn't sound cool enough and so they plan on just going by 10 Prince Street. I have to agree that Connecticut Muffin sounds too uncool.
• When I was walking back home along E. 4th Street, I saw the color red everywhere, and I plan to go back to take photographs of all the red things.
• I lost a lot of pretend money in CNN's Political Market last night. It's a site for trading shares in a prediction market about the presidential campaign. I thought Obama was going to beat Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic Party primary by around 10 points, but he won by a much much wider margin with 55% to her 27%.
• I've been writing Walking Off the Big Apple for over six months now, and it's time I turned on the Comments section. Everyone's welcome to play.

List of Walking Off the Big Apple's Printable Maps

What follows is a list of links to Google maps I've created for Walking Off the Big Apple. These are all self-guided walking tours built around a theme and designed for visitors and residents alike. These interactive walking maps are meant to supplement many of the walks listed in the sidebar.

These are the routes that I've traveled and would recommend to others. I don't conduct walking tours myself, preferring to veer off chartered courses, but I like to think that people using these maps might bump into others at some point.

That reminds me. Once upon a time in graduate school, I took a course on Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allen Poe. I wrote a research paper comparing the two authors' use of urban imagery, and I argued that Hawthorne explores the street to comment on the individual's responsibility to society while Poe conceptualizes the city as a mental labyrinth. I'm looking at the paper now, as I've just fished it out of a trunk. I begin the paper with a speculation that the central character of Hawthorne's "Wakefield" brushed up against the voyeuristic figure of Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" in the streets of London of the 1820s.

While I find it a little daffy that I imagined a chance meeting between two fictional characters walking along the same street, I'm nevertheless pleased to discover that my interest in fictional urban geography started not this year in New York but years and years ago along "the Drag" in Austin.

As Cy Coleman sings, "Why try to change me now?"

Gramercy/Flatiron Stroll
The Bowery 2007
Garbo Walks
Chelsea & Far West Village Walk
Diane Arbus & Chelsea Hotel Walk
Art Supplies Walk
40 Bond to 40 Mercer

UPDATED: Many more walks since this posting. See sidebar of website or visit Walking Off the Big Apple's Google Map page.

Movie Feature Dedicated to All Righteous Girlfriends of WOTBA

The following New York-themed film of the WOTBA Cinema Magique goes out to all the girlfriend readers of Walking Off the Big Apple, especially those with their own websites. You know, some readers come and go, self-interested parties will google themselves and find you and then leave you, but all the girlfriends, and this includes me, and some men, enjoy following your story all the time, with heart-felt admiration and deep appreciation, until the very end. And may that not be anytime soon.

Garbo Walks: Andy Warhol and the Crumpled Butterfly

Before Andy Warhol became the posthumously ubiquitous symbol of Fame itself, he consciously studied the fame of others. Settling into New York, the then window designer for the city's best stores modeled himself after the famously fabulous Truman Capote. Capote tired of Andy, so Andy got a hint to pursue other celebrities, including Garbo. Even in his own looks he started to fashion himself into a reclusive movie star type, selecting an appropriate wig and some dark glasses.

"He got himself invited to a picnic with Greta Garbo. He was too shy to speak, so he drew a butterfly and handed it to her. “She looked at it bemused,” recalled another guest. “At the end of the day, she absent-mindedly crumpled it and left it behind. Andy picked it up and had his mother write on it, ‘Crumpled butterfly by Greta Garbo’.” - from an article by Joanna Pitman, Before the soup can, July 28, 2007, Times Online (UK)

From 1974 until his death, Warhol lived in a 30-room townhouse on East 66th Street. As Garbo walked through the neighborhood on her way to favorite stores and galleries along Madison, she probably strolled past his house many times. I can picture Warhol, by 1974 the most successful star-struck artist in the world and the one who understood the most about fame, peering down from a window and catching a glimpse of Garbo, the star who walked away from all that.

It's impossible to live in New York and be involved in the arts and not hear about Andy Warhol every single day. This year is the twentieth anniversary of his death, so Warhol-related events are happening in the city, and for that matter, all over the world.

Warhol died on February 22, 1987 at the age of 59. Garbo died three years later on April 15, 1990. She was 84.

A Couple of Warhol Links (out of the current Google count of 2,510,000):
Andy as Filmmaker: Unblinking Eye, Visual Diary: Warhol’s Films by Manohla Dargis, The New York Times, October 21, 2007

Andy as Better Investment Than the Subprime Market: Andy Warhol-based fund says art boom to go on by Jan Dahinten. Reuters UK Oct. 12, 2007.

A new book I'd like to read is titled The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City by Elizabeth Currid

Image: Photo Booth picture of some Garbo images using the Warhol effect option (WOTBA)

see full itinerary at Garbo Walks

A Face Like Garbo's

"She is like a lovely wilde-wood animal...or a child." -
Photographer Edward Steichen on Garbo. His 1929 photograph of her for Vanity Fair is widely reproduced.

While I take a break from inputting Garbo data into a new Google map, I want to talk about my dog depicted here. While out walking today, a man came up beside me and started chatting about the beauty of my dog. When he asked about her breed, I told him that she was predominately a mixture of rottweiler and chowchow but with a little shepherd tossed into the mix. He said that he thought her coloring was "rare" in its beauty, but he could also see in her a slight intimidating quality. The phrase "femme fatale" came to me, a description sometimes used in respect to Garbo.

This conversation about my dog is repeated each and every day. The toughest dudes in the park will look up and comment, "That's a beautiful dog!" I've seen young women put their hands over their gaping mouths when they spot my dog, like they just saw Johnny Depp. A woman tending to flowers in a nearby community garden went into raptures when she saw my big pretty dog. In a refined English accent, she commented, and with great effect, drawing out and enunciating each word, "Nature...shall...never...copy...that...face...again."
Dinnertime conversation at our house often includes stories about what people said that day about the dog.

Beyond the perfect symmetry and color of her features, the dog exudes a slight air of weariness and caution. If a stranger approaches too close, she's more than happy to act like a trained killer. I love this quality about her. Garbo had it, too.

The dog that I left in the elevator is a fox terrier. He's cute, but he's forever upstaged by the beautiful dog of diverse heritage who spent her formative months in the pound.

See complete Garbo Walks.

Image: BearBear, pastel drawing by WOTBA

EuroCondo Walking Tour: 40 Bond to 40 Mercer

View Larger Map

Walking Off the Big Apple has been so engrossed in the technological advancement of Google Maps that I have been tardy in my posts. Here, as promised, is a walking tour that takes us to two residential developments so out of human income reach that we must visit them. As I have explained, I think 40 Bond is beautiful. I am also interested in 40 Mercer, a building designed by Jean Nouvel. We must keep our eye on him, because he is building a taller and even flashier building next to Frank Gehry's on the west side.

Start at 40 Bond and proceed as shown. Feel free to enlarge (+) and click on this map, as I have annotated it and made it interactive. For example, click on the section of Spring Street, and you'll see it's all about France. If you have a web browser on your cell phone, you could download this map on there and follow along while you walk. But I would not.

This walk is not far. For me it took about an hour, but that included popping into Sur La Table to replace items I left on vacation and several minutes drinking coffee and browsing books at Housing Works on Crosby. The walk ends at Crosby and Houston, and I trust you can find your way home from there.

40 Mercer
Housing Works UsedBook Café

40 Bond: The Best New Building Ever Built

Architecture partners Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were both born in 1950, and though not cousins, old enough to have enjoyed The Patty Duke Show. But as they were birthed in Switzerland, and were boys, probably not.

What I can say for them is that they have designed the most stunning new building in New York City. IN MY OPINION. The Ian Schrager condo draws architecture students to worship services, even in advance of its unveiling, at the very feet of 40 Bond Street, like it was Le Corbusier's Chapel at Ronchamp or something.

Described by Schrager as "a radical redesign of a traditional cast iron building," 40 Bond veritably glows with its surface of green-blue handmade Barcelona glass. The bottom of the building sports a frilly hem, a washed bone-colored graffiti-like squiggled fence with teasingly camouflaged entry gates. Should you walk there today, be advised that this hem is touchingly hidden behind scaffolding as she awaits for her debut. The main entrance is set back and enclosed with sleek modern high doors, ones with such grace and power mere mortals would tremble to open them.

Walk there often, and join the Euro-lovin' architecture students on the sidewalk in silent prayer. I do! As Schrager sez, 40 Bond Street is located in the heart of Noho. (North of Houston, a name widely mispronounced by locals.)

For more information about 40 Bond, please point your browser to www.40bond.com. The updated site features one of those Google Earth-type fly-overs that personally made me woozy.

I'm so happy about a Herzog and de Meuron building near me, I feel a song's coming on. Clap with me now:

The stars at night, are big and bright,
deep in the heart of Noho,
The prairie sky is wide and high,
deep in the heart of Noho.
The sage in bloom is like perfume,
deep in the heart of Noho,
Reminds me of, the one I love,
deep in the heart of Noho.

Photos 2007 Walking Off the Big Apple

Aram Bartholl

Have you seen Aram Bartholl's video about Google mapping? Go ahead and click on it. Isn't that cool? I first encountered his work at Eyebeam in Chelsea, the best place I've seen to view multimedia work. Bartholl is interested in objects we encounter in the virtual world and creating a surprising new place for them in our shared "real" environment.