November 17, 2006
The Friday Morning Wrap-Up
I’m trying to establish a new tradition here at the Itinerant Urbanist, a Friday morning wrap-up of the week’s significant events. I haven’t gone anywhere this week; I’ve been the stay-at-home urbanist. The one bit of book promo I did was a mini-lecture for the employees of the Rockwell Group following a presentation by Allan Cochinov, one the the editors of the industrial design website, Core77. I was rewarded for my efforts with a copy of David Rockwell and Bruce Mau’s new book, Spectacle, an ambitious round-up of massive public events from the Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival to Burning Man to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Very nice.
Other highlights of my week include a screening at BAM of the six-hour epic, The Best of Youth. This movie, by Italian director Marco Tullio Giordana, orginally made for Italian television, is so beautifully made, so emotionally potent, and so smart that even though I’d been in the theater from 3 p.m. until 9:30 (there was a 20 minute intermission and a brief introduction by the director), I didn’t want it to end. See it on the big screen if you can, although it’s available on DVD.
A few book promo notes: The Perfect $100,000 House is featured over at the MSN website. There’s a Q&A and an excerpt. And it also got a friendly review from a road-trip enthusiast and blogger named Mark J. Reeves. Oh, and “Little House on the Drawing Board” by Linda Hales of the Washington Post has been reprinted in newspapers from the Charlotte Observer to the Seattle Times to the Hong Kong Standard.