Monday, September 06, 2021

Studying the History of New York City

Have I gotten lazy about blogging?  A lot of my autobiographical Quaker journaling type content fed into my Youtube channel, likewise with its autobiographical threads.  Threads add up to a process in NerdSpeak, in Apache.  Has my throughput diminished or simply shifted around on the spectrum, or even increased?  No answer is implied.

Over the last couple days I've watched the Ric Burns PBS documentary on New York, episodes 6 and 7, featuring Mayor La Guardia, and Robert Moses.  

Although the 1939 World's Fair is given significant treatment in Episode 6, Episode 7 made no mention of the 1963-64 World's Fair.  I've studied both from multiple angles, including through Defunctland, with documentaries by Kevin Perjurer.  

I've transferred some of these threads to my Youtube channel, mentioning T.C. Howard, Kenneth Snelson, and again, Robert Moses.  And of course Disney, as EPCOT figures in, with its iconic Spaceship Earth goliath golf ball.  The USA / USSR rivalry, likewise defunct, comes to a head in Critical Path in the mytho-poetics of one Buckminster Fuller.

I just returned those and other videos to Movie Madness on Belmont, by bicycle, stopping for a beer at Glenn's on the way back.  We're both reading Ernst Cassirer and Felix Klein these days.  ISEPP is building a curriculum timeline, with lots of emphasis on the Carnots, Lazare and his son Sadi.  

All of these authors are interested in the grammatical matrix whereby terms such as "energy" "velocity" "work" and "action" arise, in a Newtonian mechanical sense, but in alternative senses as well, perhaps presaging more contemporary uses (meanings) in some cases. Klein is more interested in the pure abstractions of mathematical language, but does not neglect the intersection of same, with physics.

The Ric Burns documentaries make that case the Le Corbusier and Robert Moses were somewhat anti-city in the sense of repulsed by crowded street life and pedestrian friendly organic villages taking up within a metropolis. Greenwich Village for example, which, in the person of Jane Jacobs, successfully repulsed a disfiguring slash from Robert Moses, the plastic surgeon.

Before these, I was watching the full Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition.  The Al Capone story branches to Bucky's.  The first two seasons of Silicon Valley (Mike Judge et al) are now also behind me. On Youtube, I've been going through the Common Sense Skeptic assaults on various favored, contemporary, science fiction flavored, narratives.