Saturday, March 22, 2008

Springtime for Summary and Partial Manifesto

Well hello Canada!

My roll of recognition hit two last week. A producer at CBC's Definitely Not The Opera contacted me for an interview. The popular culture show's host asked me to explain the impact of traffic on people's personality. Why, for example, does weather seem to bring us together while traffic divides? Why do people have a sense of entitlement when they get behind the wheel? What leads to road rage? (You can listen to my interview here.)

Regular readers should know by now, but this provides an opportunity to recap, reset, reader's digest the past two years:

People love cars because they provide the feel of controlling a powerful machine amid a too complicated modern world.

Auto independence celebrated in action films, race car tv, and curvy empty road cruising ads masks the drivers profound dependence on others--from miners to highway engineers.

This fantasy of self-reliance extends equal blindness to the environmental devastation spreading far beyond smog and carbon emissions to the massive chemical spillage and metal extraction required for racing grave pits of personal mobility.

While feeding an illusion of unspoiling innocence, hybrids, electrics, biofuel Benzes all contribute to this high speed poisoning and ever further sprawl of eco-ruining asphalt-brick-steel ex-urban lives.

The micro-horrors of bus riding razor cut the personal party balloon, tiny leaks hissing the deflation of dreamy separation from quotidian vagabond grime. At least for a moment, one must confront the extreme inequality wrought by planetwide financial propping of U.S. super-consumerism.

This blog seeks to articulate the links between local/global pleasures/pains, with a politics of partiality not unlike Donna Haraway's:

"There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds. All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite mobility and interchangeability, but of elaborate specificity and difference and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine."
--Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective

Saturday, March 08, 2008

Sunday Driver, Yeah!

My blog has not yet cracked any of the top L.A. lists. My vain search for fame and an Amazon sales rank above 100,000 seems destined for dust. But has this dust been given the breath of life? This week Sue Doyle of the LA Daily News asked me to comment for a story she's writing on the decline of the Sunday drive, so here it is...

It is certainly true that home entertainment--tivo cable connected plasma system--has meant more reasons to stay in, and negotiating contemporary crowded highways brings connotations of stress rather than fun--why choose to drive on Sunday after weekdays filled with sometimes hourlong freeway fights?

But the decline of pleasure driving must also be placed in historical context.

The automobile's rise to dominance in the U.S. contains a central irony. In the early twentieth century the car was celebrated as bringing health to city dwellers by providing access to the country, but ultimately the auto's popularity destroyed the country through urban sprawl.

People who wish to escape the city for a scenic drive must drive farther and farther before finding scenic landscape for a peaceful roll. From San Clemente to Ventura, Redlands to Santa Clarita extends one large conurbation of strip malls, tract homes and office "parks" linked by very unpeaceful rubber screeching, metal flashing, smog packed asphalt.

The Sunday drive is dead, unless it's a drive to the mall, where, strangely enough, people like to walk--because a walk down Valencia's McBean Parkway or Thousand Oaks' Moorpark Road just lacks the same charm.


Park Oaks Shopping Center on Moorpark Road--Loopnet