"A public, non-commercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there. Consider an actual city park in contrast to a faux-public space like Universal CityWalk, which one passes through upon leaving the Universal Studios theme park.
Because it interfaces between the theme park and the actual city, CityWalk exists somewhere in between, almost like a movie set, where visitors can consume the supposed diversity of an urban environment while enjoying a feeling of safety that results from its actual homogeneity. In an essay about such spaces, Eric Chaplin and Sarah Holding call City Walk “a ‘scripted space’ par excellence, that is, a space which excludes, directs, supervises, constructs, and orchestrates use.” Anyone who has ever tried any funny business in a faux public space knows that such spaces do not just script actions, they police them...
One [Crow] started coming every day around the time that I eat breakfast, and sometimes it would caw to make me come out on the balcony with a peanut. Then one day it brought its kid, which I knew was its kid because the big one would groom the smaller one and because the smaller one had an undeveloped, chicken-like squawk. I named them Crow and Crowson...
When I realized this, I grabbed onto it like a life raft, and I haven’t let go. This is real. The living, breathing bodies in this room are real. I am not an avatar, a set of preferences, or some smooth cognitive force. I’m lumpy, I’m an animal, I hurt sometimes, and I’m different one day to the next. I hear, I see, and I smell things that hear, see, and smell me. And it can take a break to remember that, a break to do nothing, to listen, to remember what we are and where we are."
This was one of those essays that is an experience in the reading. When I clicked on it at first it was one of those clicks where you are like "I bet I know what this is, I bet I know exactly what kind of annoying thing it is, let me click on it to confirm that for myself and smirk as I then close the tab".
But then it pulled me out of myself and now I really need her to release a book because I love how she writes.
FB: I clicked on this in the assumption that it was probably going to be really annoying, but I was curious about what it was about, so I would spend 5 minutes on it then move on but it totally sucked me in and calmed my busy brain
"What is missing from that surreal and terrifying torrent of information and virtuality is any regard, any place, for the human animal, situated as she is in time and in a physical environment with other human and nonhuman entities. It turns out that groundedness requires actual groundedness, in the ground."
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