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The Rules
 What's a public space without an extended guide in mandatory self-correction and self-surveillance that reads like an IRS tax code? For more, check out Ken McCown's modest but hopefully growing Flickr photoset. In the meantime, is there a Flickr pool for this kind of signs? “How deeply am I going into the wilderness?”
Immigrant Soil
A chunk of Canada is moving to California. Literally.
 Next month Vancouver-based Polaris Mineral Corp., in partnership with the 'Namgis and Kwakiutl First Nations, will begin mining sand and gravel deposits from the Orca Quarry on Vancouver Island. Once extracted, they will then be transported via conveyor belts to waiting Panamax ships. Interestingly, parts of the conveyance system are submerged, supposedly, so as not to pollute the pristine view for passing hikers, kayakers, and mountain bikers. Initially, most of what's mined there will be sent to the San Francisco area where “overall demand for construction aggregate is driven primarily by population growth and the resulting need for infrastructure expansion and maintenance.” Afterwards, who knows. Maybe soon all the new houses in the continental U.S. will be built entirely of imported Canadian soil. Or perhaps in the decades to come a freer global trade in islands and mountains will result in skyscrapers constructed entirely out of the Himalayas or interstate highways built from Pacific archipelagos, ingeniously self-erased before the impending sea-level rise had the chance to do so. Orca Sand & Gravel Project
Prunings XXIV
 On blogs discovered recently or otherwise. MEGAblog
The Kuiper Belt Necropolis
 The first ever extraterrestrial cemetery is set to launch next month, reports Wired: “On Dec. 6, the desert silence near Upham, New Mexico, will be shattered by the roar of a SpaceLoft XL rocket hurtling skyward from Spaceport America. The payload: individual capsules containing the ashes of 179 people, part of the Legacy Flight program, among them the late actor James (Scotty) Doohan and Gemini program astronaut Gordon Cooper.”  So will this new Kuiper Belt of micro-earths solve the high ecological cost of earthbound cemeteries? Not entirely, because there's a catch: “You're not actually 'buried' in space; you don't embark on an endless orbit of the Earth. The duration of the flight all depends on the apogee of the orbit, and can range from two to several hundred years, depending on the service the customer requests.” Still, I do like the idea of gravesite visits reprogrammed, for instance, as a typical American suburban backyard barbecue. While the burgers and hotdogs are grilling, family and friends will consult NASA's Satellite Tracking service to determine the path of a spacebound crypt. There will be a hubbub about vectors and declinations, some frantic ballyhoo about latitude and longitude. And there will also be a row about whether to use the metric system or English units, but then it's finally time. The lights are switched off, someone opens up a Bud Light, and everyone takes turns peering through the telescope as their dearly departed passes them by overhead. Or maybe everyone will drive up to derelict observatories up in the mountains, made obsolete by more powerful telescopes or urban light pollution. A pilgrimage to necro-planetariums, through picturesque winding roads and autumnal colored forests.  When their orbit finally decays completely, they will then simply fall back to earth in a blazing, primordial meteor shower towards a cratered necropolis, their final impact coordinates having been picked, reserved and paid for centuries ago.   Memorial Spacefilghts Columbiad Launch Services Landscape architects as landscapes Forever Fernwood, Part III Posting the Dead Roadside(america)memorial.com Hill of Crosses Forever Fernwood, Part II Forever Fernwood Nature is dead. Long live Nature.
Negative Manhattan
 This is what happened: Yesterday I sneaked into the ground zero hole. Actually, I had no idea that this was possible, but I just passed the gate and walked down, and nobody really took notice. The first 3 levels down, everything is still quite messy, but the rest of the 119 below zero floors, are perfectly intact. I took the speed elevator to go all the way to the bottom floor -121 to enjoy the view. I was a clear day and you could really see far away. all the way down, All of negative -Manhattan, the subways, the negative of the statue of Liberty, the roots of central park, really very nice. I had a negative-coffee at the cafeteria and the white servant that worked at the counter, really thought I was telling here a joke when I said that all the positive had been blown away 2 years earlier. Drawing by Hannes Kater. Text by Serge Onnen.
The Forest Freak Show
“Months after Bruno the Bear was knocked off in Bavaria,” reports Spiegel Online, “Germany finds itself faced with another freak animal dilemma. An albino deer has appeared in the eastern German state of Saxony. Hunters smell blood, and basically everyone else wants to protect the animal.”
 So will this as yet unnamed “snow-white deer with pink eyes skin” become another hysterically inconsequential megaspectacular media event to rival Paris Hilton and Natalee Holloway? Will Deutsche Welle send reporters to interview conservationists and celebrities pleading for the hunters to leave it alone? “As a rarity and natural phenomenon, it should be allowed to live,” these environmentalists will probably say. As a matter of fair and balanced journalism, will they also interview the hunters, who will no doubt argue that the “white deer is a mutation. It does not belong in the wild. It should be shot.” In any case, I'd like to resurrect an old proposal for a new cable channel, sort of a cross between The Weather Channel and Animal Planet, providing round-the-clock, real-time reports and analysis of news events at the intersection of human and animal cultures.  From their worldwide headquarters in Chicago, legions of landscape architects, all in their matching red correspondent jackets, will be flown in to Alaska to cover the arrivals of Avian flu-infected birds; to new Floridian exurban developments where alligators prowl the streets; to remote bird sanctuaries where orphaned birds are instructed in the ancient art of flying; to Nigeria where pet hyenas and baboons are all the rage; to all the major urban parks presently being invaded by the wilderness; and to Oslo to cover the culture war over the recently opened exhibit on gay animals. And all of these stories will be treated like major weather events, “structured like narrative dramas with anticipation heightened by detection and tracking, leading to the climax of real-time impact, capped by the aftermath of devastation or heroic survival.”
Vapour City
 For the 50th anniversary of the International House of Japan in Roppongi in 2002, Takeshi Ishiguro “created a machine which pops out smoke rings automatically from a box which is placed in the large garden - every 5 minutes. The smoke shapes into a perfect circle first and gets transformed immediately depending on the wind etc. When there is no wind, it goes straight up to the sky keeping its shape until it finally disappears.” You can watch the smoke rings in action on the artist's website. And for more about the machine and Ishiguro's other works, you can read his interview with PingMag.  Meanwhile, what Takeshi Ishiguro should do next is construct more of these machines and place them all over Rome. Then on a cloudless and windless day, they will huff and puff away the complete text of Ovid's Metamorphoses — the epic poem translated into vapourous morse code. At Piazza del Popolo, for instance, you will be able decipher the passage wherein Zeus turns himself into a cloud so that he could seduce the maiden Io without his eternally vengeful consort Hera detecting their tryst. Elsewhere, at the more tranquil Giardino del Quirinale, you can read about how the Centaurs came into being from a curious coupling between King Ixion and Nephele, a cloud nymph who Zeus had created in the shape of Hera. Everywhere churches, gardens and palazzos are wondrously oozing with smoke. The Eternal City seemingly dematerializing into air.  You wake up one morning in an unknown hotel in an unknown city. You try to remember, but their names have escaped you completely. The previous night's drunken revelry has fried up a bunch of short-term memory cells. Sensing that a rare opportunity for some topographical experiment has just presented itself, you decide not to ask anyone where you are. Instead, you go out for a walk to find out for yourself, studying the native flora, indigenous architecture, and vernacular street patterns. It's urban forensics! Or CSI: Landscape Architecture. But unfortunately, there's this thick fog blanketing the entire city. It's hampering your terrestrial sleuthing. It's hard to see anything at all, let alone the street signs. There's a clearing now and then, but it's zero visibility most of the time. Could this be London? Paris in April? Mexico City chocking on smog on a Tuesday? Los Angeles meteorologically held hostage by Geoff Manaugh? It's really difficult to be certain.  Later on, you begin to notice that there's a pattern to the way the vaporous voids and non-voids pass you by. It's some sort of an encrypted message. You know this, because you were once in the Boy Scouts of America and had learnt from their field manuals how to interpret morse code and Native American smoke signals. You even earned a merit badge for it. And so you go into the nearest park. You find a bench, sit, and get comfortable. Then you begin decoding. After 13 hours of manic translating, fingers blistering, bloodied, whole hands cramping, you read what you've got written down: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon Lo! You're in Dublin! Today is Bloomsday! And there are 13,000 Takeshi Ishiguro machines installed throughout the city belching out James Joyce's Ulysses. Unabridged.
Yet More Gardens-in-a-Petri
 These ones come straight out of the catalogs of ÆGIS ASIA, a fine purveyor of biodecontamination and microbial protection products and services. Order 75 for your coffee table or for your migrant gardens.   More Gardens-in-a-Petri Gardens-in-a-Petri |
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