Month: August 2017

Angeleno Redux

[Image: Underground tennis courts in a limestone mine and refrigeration complex in Missouri].

It’s been a long month, but my wife and I have packed up and left New York, endlessly bubble-wrapping things while watching Midnight Run, Collateral, Chinatown, and other L.A.-themed movies on a laptop in an empty room, to head west again to Los Angeles, where we finally arrived today.

We visited the Cahokia Mounds, a heavily eroded indigenous North American city that, at its height, was larger than London, part of a Wisconsin-to-Louisiana band of settlements sculpted from mud and clay. The remains of history are not necessarily built with stone and timber—let alone steel and glass—but might exist in the form of oddly sloped hillsides or gardens long ago left untended.

[Image: Hiking around Cahokia Mounds].

Along the way, we managed to see the total eclipse in Missouri, sitting on a picnic blanket in a park south of St. Louis, people around us crying, yelling “Look at that!,” laughing, cheering like it was a football game, a day before driving further southwest to explore food-refrigeration caverns in active limestone mines for Nicky’s book.

That’s where we stumbled on the tennis courts pictured at the top of this post, at least seventy feet below ground, complete with a wall of framed photos showing previous champions of the underworld leagues, as we drove around for an hour or two through genuinely huge subterranean naves and corridors, with not-yet-renovated sections of the mine—millions of square feet—hidden behind titanic yellow curtains.

[Image: Behind these curtains are millions—of square-feet of void].

We listened to S-Town. We had breakfast in Oklahoma City. We made it to New Mexico to hike up a 10,000-year-old volcano with an ice cave frozen at a permanent 31º in one of its half-collapsed lava tubes where we met another couple who had driven up from Arizona “to get out of the heat.”

[Image: Bandera Volcano, New Mexico].

We then spent three days in Flagstaff to sleep, watch GLOW, and inadvertently off-road on our quest to do some hiking, up fire roads, up canyons behind Sedona, up hills in the rain, looking north toward the cinder cones of dead volcanoes that we visited a few years ago for Venue, where, in the 1960s, NASA recreated the surface of the moon using timed explosions.

[Image: Hiking outside Flagstaff].

In any case, we’re now back in Los Angeles, the city that most perversely fulfills whatever strange promises this country offers, and we’ll be here for the long haul. In fact, there’s no real reason to post this, other than: why not? But, if you live in L.A., or anywhere in California, perhaps we’ll cross paths soon.

Paleoalgorithmica

[Image: Sunrise, via PublicDomainPictures.net].

A short item in The Economist last month suggested that town planners could simply bypass their own aesthetic responses to a landscape and turn instead to an algorithm to design “scenic” locales.

Researchers at the Warwick Business School, we read, “have adapted a computer program called Places to recognize beautiful landscapes, whether natural or artificial, using the criteria that a human beholder would employ.” Acting as a kind of sentient Hallmark card, Places has been “optimized to recognize geographical features. [Head researcher Chanuki Seresinhe] and her team taught the program to identify such things as mountains, beaches and fields, and various sorts of buildings, in pictures presented to it.”

Most of the results are not surprising. Lakes and horizons scored well. So did valleys and snowy mountains. In artificial landscapes castles, churches and cottages were seen as scenic. Hospitals, garages and motels not so much. Ms. Seresinhe’s analysis did, however, confirm one important but non-obvious finding from her previous study. Green spaces are not, in and of themselves, scenic. To be so they need to involve contours and trees.

While this sounds ridiculous on its face, suggesting a saccharine world of endless Viagra ad backdrops, the article includes an unexpected detail at the end that makes the whole thing seem much stranger.

There, The Economist points our attention briefly to “an idea promulgated 30 years ago by Edward Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. He suggested that the sorts of landscapes people prefer—and which they sculpt their parks and gardens to resemble—are those that echo the African savannahs in which Homo sapiens evolved. Gently undulating ground with a mixture of trees, shrubs and open spaces, in other words (though, ideally, without the accompanying dangerous wild animals).”

This newfangled computer program, then, could be accused of simply repeating the observational landscape prejudices of our own pre-human ancestors. It’s as if we have been carefully stewarding into existence a world of thinking machines and semi-autonomous neural networks—only to find that they don’t think like envoys of the future, like inscrutable alien subjectivities set loose inside silicon.

Rather, they are earlier versions of ourselves, like a patient hospitalized for dementia becoming more childlike as they age. Not after, but before. Paleoalgorithmica.