tell me we'll never get used to it


(photo by ryan mcginley)



photo by Peter McCollough The Fourteen Bumps, by Paul La Farge If any city can be understood phrenologically, it must be San Francisco, city of fourteen big bumps and countless smaller irregularities. What if there were some truth to the idea that character is expressed in bumps? What if the truth of a city resides not in its statistics but in the development of mental organs, which manifest themselves in hills and valleys, changes in terrain? The phrenologist works by touch, an intimate sense: to know a city phrenologically is the opposite of the lofty knowledge dispensed by satellites or the disembodied image stream available to anyone with a copy of Google Earth. I draw certain conclusions from this map: it’s an Ideal place for someone who’s looking for the Sublime; it has moments of Firmness but generally gives in to its Desire for Liquids. The city constructs more than it acquires; it anticipates the future more than it venerates the past. Of course, some people will say that San Francisco isn’t like that. To them I reply: phrenology was never a hard science. Go ahead and draw up a different map, with different faculties. The bumps you read in the last analysis are your own. (from Infinite City, a San Francisco Atlas) see also

photo by Peter McCollough

The Fourteen Bumps, by Paul La Farge

If any city can be understood phrenologically, it must be San Francisco, city of fourteen big bumps and countless smaller irregularities. What if there were some truth to the idea that character is expressed in bumps? What if the truth of a city resides not in its statistics but in the development of mental organs, which manifest themselves in hills and valleys, changes in terrain? The phrenologist works by touch, an intimate sense: to know a city phrenologically is the opposite of the lofty knowledge dispensed by satellites or the disembodied image stream available to anyone with a copy of Google Earth.



I draw certain conclusions from this map: it’s an Ideal place for someone who’s looking for the Sublime; it has moments of Firmness but generally gives in to its Desire for Liquids. The city constructs more than it acquires; it anticipates the future more than it venerates the past. Of course, some people will say that San Francisco isn’t like that. To them I reply: phrenology was never a hard science. Go ahead and draw up a different map, with different faculties. The bumps you read in the last analysis are your own.



(from Infinite City, a San Francisco Atlas)

see also

A Taxonomy of Bruises

Bruises of the First Type: Domestic

  • contusio inquisitione obscura: a bruise caused by searching for an object in the dark
  • contusio halucinatione: a bruise resulting from daydreaming or slowness of the mind
  • contusio bubla: a bruise caused by one’s livestock
  • contusio avunculo: a bruise caused by the hand of one’s uncle, for being lazy
  • contusio originis obliterate: a bruise for which one can no longer remember the cause
  • contusio inscrutabilis: a bruise for which one never understood the cause
  • contusio affecto malo: a bruise resulting from humor
  • contusio sellae controversae: a bruise stemming from a dispute over the latrine

Bruises of the Second Type: Civic/Public

  • contusio prolapsione ex arbore: a bruise inflicted by the ground after falling from a tree
  • contusio salax: a bruise inflicted by a companion’s elbow, deployed to draw attention to the proximity of a comely stranger
  • contusio abscondita: a bruise received from a kick beneath the dinner table
  • contusio pulchritudinis tristitiae: a bruise which exaggerates a melancholy beauty
  • contusio cygno irato: a bruise inflicted by an angry swan
  • contusio crepusculo: a bruise inflicted at dusk

Bruises of the Third Type: Internal/Invisible

  • contusio luctus: a bruise located beneath the ribcage stemming from grief
  • contusio metus: a bruise located inside the throat from an unnameable fear
  • contusio existentialis: a bruise created throughout the flesh by the daily pummeling of existence

Dedicated to raynor and elizabeth, respectively tumblr’s beloved resident taxonomist and bruiser at large.

via

Cypress in Fog, Kevin Landdeck The three coastal areas where the pines are native are all west of the fault. And these areas were evidently once part of Salinia, that ancient land mass that is believed to have once existed west of the present shoreline one hundred million years ago, a time when most of California was sea bottom and the waves broke on the foothills of the ancestral Sierra Nevada, one hundred and fifty miles to the east. Over the eons Salinia, presumably the original home of the Monterey pine, eroded away into a series of islands (of which the Farrallones are a remnant). Some of these islands became part of the newly risen mainland, and these are today the three botanic “islands” of Monterey pine along the coast. The tree comes down to us as a botanic vestige of an earlier epoch and a vanished landscape. Unlike the popular stereotype of the pointed pine tree, the Monterey is often eccentric, with a flat or rounded crown and branches taking off into space at all angles, as if it were a remnant of an era of freedom before the pines were regimented by evolution into a conventional shape. -from The Natural World of San Francisco by Harold Gilliam

Cypress in Fog, Kevin Landdeck

The three coastal areas where the pines are native are all west of the fault. And these areas were evidently once part of Salinia, that ancient land mass that is believed to have once existed west of the present shoreline one hundred million years ago, a time when most of California was sea bottom and the waves broke on the foothills of the ancestral Sierra Nevada, one hundred and fifty miles to the east. Over the eons Salinia, presumably the original home of the Monterey pine, eroded away into a series of islands (of which the Farrallones are a remnant). Some of these islands became part of the newly risen mainland, and these are today the three botanic “islands” of Monterey pine along the coast. The tree comes down to us as a botanic vestige of an earlier epoch and a vanished landscape. Unlike the popular stereotype of the pointed pine tree, the Monterey is often eccentric, with a flat or rounded crown and branches taking off into space at all angles, as if it were a remnant of an era of freedom before the pines were regimented by evolution into a conventional shape.

-from The Natural World of San Francisco by Harold Gilliam

On the Inexhaustibility of a City

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

“Or the question it asks of you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

-Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

from Zetetic Astronomy, 1873 The world according to zetetics: not a globe but a disc of geographical features bounded by a plane of infinite—or at least unknowable—extension and thickness. The hatched outer ring, all of which represents south, marks the insurmountable Great Ice Barrier. via Seven Tenths: the Sea and Its Thresholds by James Hamilton Paterson

from Zetetic Astronomy, 1873

The world according to zetetics: not a globe but a disc of geographical features bounded by a plane of infinite—or at least unknowable—extension and thickness. The hatched outer ring, all of which represents south, marks the insurmountable Great Ice Barrier.

via Seven Tenths: the Sea and Its Thresholds by James Hamilton Paterson

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Your Phone's Off The Hook, But You're Not
Los Angeles

X :: Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not

A great insult, unfortunately to be retired in the 21st century now that phones no longer have hooks. Remember when leaving your phone off the hook was like, the biggest “F*ck you!” during a fight with a best friend or boyfriend? All that angry beeping to reflect your inner state? Knowing they couldn’t even LEAVE A MESSAGE? Pressing “ignore” just doesn’t convey the same intensity of emotion.

Signposts in a Strange Land: Writing in New Orleans

Faulkner called New Orleans “the city where imagination takes precedence over fact.” The most persistent cultural influence to me is the fact that New Orleans was a port city and a crossroads, a collector of people and things, the end of the river. And it’s still that way. It’s hard to overstate how much New Orleans loomed in the imaginations of 19th century frontier settlers, for instance. Once you got over the Appalachians and through the Cumberland Plateau and into the Mississippi drainage, one’s orientation to the world shifted from an east-west movement to a north-south one; or more specifically, an upriver-downriver one. And at the end of that river sat New Orleans. Nearly every outlaw legend that sprang up in the western territory in the early 19th century has some aspect that takes place in, or is related to, New Orleans. There is no legend of the Natchez Trace without New Orleans. The city is where crooks, race-traitors, Catholics, vagabonds, and every other marginalized person could go to hide and, sometimes, recreate themselves. To a great extent, it’s still that way.

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(Source: fwriction)

These are the kinds of drinking games your teachers play in the woods until dawn after they’ve been collectively blacklisted from every bowling alley and video arcade in a twenty mile radius. When all we have left is a bonfire and some Van Morrison cassette tapes and the sun coming up.

Not pictured: the elaborate one-handed hammer toss choreography that assigns your points.

The Lost Art of Video Game Cartography

Somewhere along the line, travel became an inconvenience rather than the point of the game. The whole concept of exploration has changed; we no longer need to explore to progress, we explore to find power-ups and hidden extras, and in this overtly stage-managed form of freedom, cartography isn’t really necessary. The pictorial map has been replaced by the didactic walkthrough.

It’s interesting that GPS technology has evolved into a mass mainstream phenomenon at the same time as games; both are now about ridding us of the need to understand and read our environments. We are, as a race, moving toward a guided, systematic form of orientation in which anything worth seeing has already been geo-tagged, reviewed and Google mapped. Getting lost in a game, or in a city, is now a completely unnecessary annoyance. It was once a means of discovering amazing things.

read the rest here.

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