book

Suburbia Gone Wild

- Adam Clare

The idealized version of the American suburb has spread around the world and can be found in nearly every country. The banality of the spread has been ignored by artists, at least that’s the feeling of Martin Adolfsson who set out to document this changing global landscape. For example, it’s hard to figure out where the above photo was taken.

In the book Suburbia Gone Wild, you can see the varying takes on sameness throughout the world. It’s a fascinating look at the spread of the suburbs. It’s good to see artists explore the global impact of hegemonic aesthetics and forcing us to ask: is this development the kind of development we want?

Swedish born turned New York City native; photographer Martin Adolfsson has shifted the focus of the camera lens from conventional portraits to dynamic vivid impressions of the urban upper middle class. Having noticed that artists had failed to address the changing panorama of economic shifts all over the world, Adolfsson decided to highlight the issue of social metamorphosis through an innovative array of environmental portraits.
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The eight countries featured represented “the dream of American Suburbia that is being copied and pasted and sprinkled with some Hollywood stardust” (Adolfsson). Additionally, with the conscious choice to omit “all these traces of signs and different languages and people”, Adolfsson has effortlessly encapsulated the uniform homogeneousness between these global hubs.

Read more at Trendland.

Save the Environment, Live in a City

- Adam Clare

The IEEE Spectrum recently interview William Meyer who is the author of the book The Environmental Advantages of Cities: Countering Commonsense Antiurbanism. The book’s central thesis is that we need to change the discourse around cities from a negative one to a more positive conversation about the efficiencies of cities compared to lower density areas.

Steven Cherry: Good. Let’s go back to the list then. Cities are ravenous consumers of natural resources, true or false?

William Meyer: Okay, well, they are in an absolute sense, yes, and that’s the distinction between absolute and proportional impact. Cities do consume a lot of resources because there are lots of people there consuming, but the question is: If you had the same population, would it consume more resources if it lived in a less-urban settlement pattern? And the answer is no, because per capita, people in cities consume less. Cities are much more efficient in the consumption of resources, notably energy, but also materials, also water, and also, of course, land, because of their higher densities. So it’s true that they are large consumers, but the people who live in them are not, and, again, if we had a less-urban settlement pattern, we’d have more resource consumption.

Read more at IEEE Spectrum.

Be Optimistic by Learning About It

- Adam Clare

The book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Dr. Martin Seligman is not new, but it is to me. For others who have not heard about it before, it looks like an uplifting read. The central thesis of the book is to essentially learn what a worthwhile life is for you and to un-learn the other things: learn optimism.

‘Happiness’ is a scientifically unwieldy notion, but there are three different forms of it if you can pursue. For the ‘Pleasant Life,’ you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion. For the ‘Engaged Life,’ you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure. For the ‘Meaningful Life,’ you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.

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Ultimately, Seligman points to optimism not only as a means to individual well-being, but also as a powerful aid in finding your purpose and contributing to the world:

Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.

Read more about the book itself and see Brain Picking’s best books of 2011.

A Good Book Review on Health

- Meggie

Drop Dead Healthy by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, April 2012) acts as the conclusion to the author’s bestselling “humble quest” trilogy.  As with The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs takes his readers on a wild and crazy journey, this time into the world of health.

We all see the ads on tv and the billboards that simultaneously berate and encourage us to optimize our lifestyles with a kind of paternalistic best-friend’s-secret style condescension.  ‘Exercise more’, ‘eat this’ have given way to ‘exercise THIS way THIS often’ and ‘eat THESE foods in THESE portions THIS frequently’.  How to sift through it all and figure out where to start?

Jacobs has had the same crisis of conscience and so he undertakes a two-year-long fore into the health world, testing all the theories and new food options that leave the rest of us stuck in limbo.  From his first afternoon, we see how complex and involved this undertaking will be.

He first tackles the issue of want in a first world consumerist society when he visits Paul McGlothin, director of research for the Calorie Restriction (CR) Society, who offers him a blueberry… but not to eat.  At least, not yet.

Blueberries are notoriously good for you.  Full of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, they’re the Vanderbilts of the berry world.

Read more

Guest Post: Review of an Artobiography

- Adam Clare

After reading Tina Collen’s book Storm of the I: An Artobiography
(Art Review Press, 2009), I am left with a delightful and very real sense of the value of simplicity.

Collen’s creative memoir takes us from her childhood and youth in New York and her relationship with her family, to her life in Aspen with her husband and two sons, to her move to California as a bourgeoning graphic artist, to her ultimate return to Colorado in the 1990s. Throughout, we are consciously aware of her ongoing search for ‘home’ in the conceptual, if not always literal, sense.

This self-proclaimed “new genre of literature” is exactly that: using her background as an artist and graphic designer, Collen seamlessly incorporates her artwork with the more traditional textual narrative. And it is the blending of these forms that makes the story so compelling. Far from being a woe-is-me linear memoir of one person’s unhappy childhood and disastrous relationship with her father, Storm of the i introduces us to the textures – in some cases quite literally – of one person’s life. Darkness is balanced with light, comedy with tragedy, youthful exuberance with the thoughtfulness of maturity, family with individualism.

This holistic approach to memoir – writing about one’s history and integrating the physical trappings of that history – has an added bonus: at no point throughout the book are we as readers asked to feel sorry for the author. Collen’s relationship with her father was upsetting, but her love for Barry and her two sons, Mark and Andy, is palpable. Collen has experienced heartache and frustration but also great beauty and success. At times she may be fragile and uncertain but she has also spearheaded new ideas with confidence and strength. Collen presents herself as a very real person, full of contradiction and complexity, and her honesty is refreshing.

Storm of the i redefines interactive media for anyone convinced it is an exclusively digital phenomenon. The book is formulated as a kind of ‘new media’, presenting a multi-faceted story in an emotive way that is personally meaningful for the reader. Similar in style and content to Nick Bantock’s Griffin & Sabine and Morning Star trilogies (Chronicle Books, 1991, 1992, 1993, 2001, 2002, 2003), we come away feeling that we know Tina. As she tells her story, pieces of poetry, photos of old school projects, and dialogue focus the readers’ sentiments in a pleasingly organic way. It is easy to imagine her Fleurotica creations adorning my own walls at home.

Collen writes: “And sometimes in the morning [when living in California], I’d catch a glimpse of porpoises playing in the surf and marvel at the grace of simplicity” (p.123). We have all felt such moments of perfect clarity – ephemeral and very precious – and yearn for more, but will not risk losing their wondrous nature by seeking them out.

Collen’s book is a frank appraisal of both the world around her and the world in her own head. The book’s final resolution, singularly exemplifies how right ‘letting go’ can sometimes be. If spring cleaning helps clear the mind, Storm of the i forwards the soul.

Meggie Macdonald is a literary agent based in Toronto and a guest reviewer for thingsaregood.com. Her professional and personal taste tends towards the hopeful, creative and downright happy sentiments of the people around her.

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