Fuggedaboutit

I always thought amnesia was going to be much more common than it’s turned out to be. Because if you watched movies when I was a kid, you thought it was a regular medical condition. Like everyone you knew would either wind up having amnesia, multiple personalities, or wake up with Nic Cage’s face. Movies back then never addressed the actual issues we face as adults now. The big problem was never "You're going to spend all day staring at your phone and that will make you sad." Alas, I'm old now and I've never had amnesia. I don't even know anyone who's had amnesia. (Or maybe I do and I forgot? Hmm. I don't think so though.) If I ever meet someone suffering from amnesia, here’s the first thing I’ll ask ‘em: Is it annoying when 9/11 comes around and people tell you to “never forget”?

Quickies

🎯 But if Elon fires 75% of Twitter's staff, then who's going to not do anything about all the death threats I keep getting there?

🎯 Things I have gotten confused about which led to me saying the wrong thing at the very wrong time:
1) IED and IUD
2) clip on and strap on
3) Tom's of Maine and Uncle Tom's

🎯 Weed and shrooms are replacing alcohol and it's a *massive* cultural shift and that we're not talking about it more is weird AF…But hey, what do I know? I'm hammered right now.

🎯 It's funny how everyone loves democracy until gas prices go up 50 cents and then it's all, "Y'know, I always had a sweet spot for Mussolini."

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Neneh Cherry vs. young Kamala

6:40 PM ∙ Oct 20, 2022

🎯 R&B: "Tony! Toni! Toné! - Feels Good"
Feminism: "Yony! Yoni! Yoné! - Feels Good"

🎯 Power posing makes us confident and happy. But we spend all day folded over our phones/laptops in a defensive crouch. Could it be that’s a big reason why we're all so anxious and depressed these days?

🎯 A lame thing about social media is how it gives the illusion that 80% of people are wacko fringe lunatics when the reality is most people are sane and in the middle. Ignores the biggest lesson I learned going to open mics in NYC: Never give the microphone to crazy people.

🎯 The easiest yet oddly effective way to impress business folks: Reply to emails quickly. Even if it's just a "will get back to you soon" quickie reply. It shows attentiveness, a valuable resource when one lives in an attention vacuum.

🎯 Considering how often I misspell potatoes, I hereby officially apologize to Dan Quayle for all that potatogate ribbing he took back in the day.

🎯 I constantly have to resist chiming in on the supportive comments women leave each other on Instagram. Just saw one that read, "How are you not a supermodel?!" Almost hit send on this reply: "Um, waist to hip ratio. Height. General symmetry issues. It seems kinda obvious, no?"

🎯 I’ve come up with a BS literacy formula for online life: How much do you want it to be true + whether or not you've heard of the publication before ÷ the sloppiness of the layout = the likelihood you're being fed a nonsense story.

Ten design lessons from Frederick Law Olmsted

I wrote about the gloriousness of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park (located in my hood) a few months back. The designer of it? Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), the father of American landscape architecture. He may have more to do with the way America looks than anyone else.

Beginning in 1857 with the design of Central Park in New York City, he created designs for thousands of landscapes, including many of the world’s most important parks, including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Boston’s Emerald Necklace, Mount Royal in Montreal, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol and White House, and the World Expo of 1893 in Chicago (that last one documented excellently in Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City).

Here are ten design lessons from Olmsted’s approach:

1) Respect “the genius of a place.”
Olmsted wanted his designs to stay true to the character of their natural surroundings. He referred to “the genius of a place,” a belief that every site has ecologically and spiritually unique qualities. The goal was to “access this genius” and let it infuse all design decisions, which meant taking advantage of the unique characteristics of a site. For example, he was willing to abandon the rainfall-requiring scenery he loved most for landscapes more appropriate to climates he worked in. That meant a separate landscape style for the South while in the dryer, western parts of the country he used a water-conserving style.

2) Focus on the sum over the parts.
Olmsted felt that what separated his work from a gardener was “the elegance of design” and how everything worked together to accomplish an overall effect. There was no room for details that were to be viewed as individual elements. He warned against thinking “of trees, of turf, water, rocks, bridges, as things of beauty in themselves.” In his work, they were threads in a larger fabric. That’s why he avoided decorative plantings and structures in favor of landscapes that appeared organic and true.

3) The art is to conceal art.
Olmsted believed the goal wasn’t to make viewers see his work. It was to make them unaware of it. The way to do this was to remove distractions and demands on the conscious mind. Viewers weren’t supposed to examine or analyze parts of the scene. They were supposed to be unaware of everything that was working. Note his description of the Isle of Wight during his first trip to England in 1850: “Gradually and silently the charm comes over us; we know not exactly where or how.” Olmsted’s works appear so natural that one critic wrote, “One thinks of them as something not put there by artifice but merely preserved by happenstance.”

4) Aim for the unconscious.
Related to the previous point, Olmsted was a fan of Horace Bushnell’s writings about “unconscious influence” in people. (Bushnell believed real character wasn’t communicated verbally but instead at a level below that of consciousness.) Olmsted applied this idea to his scenery. He wanted his parks to create an unconscious process that produced relaxation. So he constantly removed distractions and demands on the conscious mind. For example, his designs subtly direct movement through the landscape. Pedestrians are led without realizing they’re being led. If you’ve ever gotten lost on one of Prospect Park’s paths, you’ll understand; it’s a strange sensation of feeling lost yet completely confident you can easily find your way back.

5) Avoid fashion for fashion’s sake.
Olmsted rejected displays “of novelty, of fashion, of scientific or virtuoso inclinations and of decoration.” He felt popular trends of the day, like specimen planting and flower-bedding of exotics, often intruded more than they helped. For example, he contrasted the effect of a common wild flower on a grassy bank with a gaudier version, imported from Japan, that would draw immediate attention: “The former, while we have passed it by without stopping, and while it has not interrupted our conversation or called for remark, may possibly, with other objects of the same class, have touched us more, may have come home to us more, may have had a more soothing and refreshing sanitary influence.”

6) Formal training isn’t required.
Olmsted had no formal design training and didn’t commit to landscape architecture until he was 44. Before that, he was a New York Times correspondent to the Confederate states, the manager of a California gold mine, and General Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. He also ran a farm on Staten Island from 1848 to 1855 and spent time working in a New York dry-goods store. His views on landscapes developed from traveling and reading. When he was young, he took a year-long voyage in China. And in 1850, he took a six-month walking tour of Europe and the British Isles, during which he saw numerous parks, private estates, and scenic countryside. He was also deeply influenced by Swiss physician Johann Georg von Zimmermann’s writings about nature’s ability to heal “derangements of the mind” through imagination.

7) Words are crucial, even for designers.
Olmsted wrote often and thought hard about the words he used. For example, he rejected the term “landscape gardening” for his own work since he felt he worked on a larger scale than gardeners. He wrote, “Gardening does not conveniently include exposing great ledges, damming streams, making lakes, tunnels, bridges, terraces and canals.” He also wrote extensively on design principles and wrote lengthy missives to politicians advocating for parks. His words, like his designs, still inspire many in the field to this day.

8) Stand for something.
By the time he began work as a landscape architect, Olmsted had developed a set of social values that gave purpose to his design work.

From his New England heritage he drew a belief in community and the importance of public institutions of culture and education. His southern travels and friendship with exiled participants in the failed German revolutions of 1848 convinced him of the need for the United States to demonstrate the superiority of republican government and free labor. A series of influences…convinced him of the importance of aesthetic sensibility as a means of moving American society away from frontier barbarism and toward what he considered a civilized condition.

His writings show that, in his view, he wasn’t just making pretty, green spaces. He was democratizing nature...

It is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God’s handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month of two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances.

...and healing people’s mental conditions.

It is a scientific fact that the occasional contemplation of natural scenes of an impressive character, particularly if this contemplation occurs in connection with relief from ordinary cares, change of air and change of habits, is favorable to the health and vigor of men…The want of such occasional recreation where men and women are habitually pressed by their business or household cares often results in a class of disorders the characteristic quality of which is mental disability, moroseness, melancholy, or irascibility.

9) Utility trumps ornament.
There was always a “purpose of direct utility or service” to Olmsted’s work. Service preceded art in his work. He felt trees, flowers, and fences without purpose were “inartistic if not barbarous.” He wrote, “So long as considerations of utility are neglected or overridden by considerations of ornament, there will be not true art.” This could be seen in the way he treated practical aspects of his work. Providing for adequate drainage and other engineering considerations mattered as much as arranging surface features. He was also into sustainable design and environmental conservation long before it was trendy. He wrote, “Plant materials should thrive, be non invasive, and require little maintenance. The design should conserve the natural features of the site to the greatest extent possible and provide for the continued ecological health of the area.”

10) Never too much, hardly enough.
Olmsted fought against distracting elements. He constantly simplified the scene, clearing and planting to clarify the “leading motive” of the natural site. Though he often faced criticism from those who found his style too rough and unkempt, Olmsted was as proud of what he didn’t do as what he did do. Thirty years after he helped to design Central Park, he observed to his ex-partner, Calvert Vaux, “The great merit of all the works you and I have done is that in them the larger opportunities of the topography have not been wasted in aiming at ordinary suburban gardening, cottage gardening effects. We have let it alone more than most gardeners can. But never too much, hardly enough.”

The original version of this was published at Signal v. Noise.

Comedy

😈 I post brief comedy clips on the regular at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

😈 Recently at Funny How, my other newsletter all about the craft of standup:

• Funny is just a multiplier. It’s the grind that makes you a great comic.
  Ideas vs. execution, the exponential function, and the freedom-specificity tradeoff.

• There's gold in the things we think but never say
  Wise quotes on writing from Doris Lessing, Nora Ephron, David Sedaris, and Eminem.

• Sam Morril: "Follow the joke."
  Don’t intend to hurt anybody. But also, don’t play it safe.

😈 NOLAvember? Hell Yes (Fest).

hellyesfest

A post shared by Hell Yes Fest: The New Orleans Comedy Festival (@hellyesfest)

5-spotted

🗯 Rachel Morani: The reality of prostitution is not complex. It simple.

While it is fashionable for some female academics, journalists and social commentators to declare the validity of prostitution as employment and to endorse and support this fiction in their books, articles and opinion columns, I note that they resolutely will not practise what they preach. They are not usually willing to have their own bodies used to prove their point. What’s always been particularly galling to me about socially privileged upper middle-class women who popularise these views is that, just like Marie Antoinette before them, they are so far removed from the experience that they cannot relate to it even at a conceptual level. That they are handsomely remunerated to opine on what’s good enough for desperate women is just the spit and polish on the insult.

🗯 Food Writer Melissa Clark’s 10 Cooking Commandments.

Learn to Love Anchovies: My goal in life is to make everyone love anchovies. Most people are turned off by the cured fish because they’ve likely had poor quality fillets flopped atop a pizza or Caesar salad. But when you cook them in butter or olive oil, anchovies melt into your dish, adding a complex saltiness. Add to pastas, sauces, dips, rubs or marinades for umami without any fishiness. They also have an earthiness that rounds out other flavors.

🗯 Rory Sutherland: Why we pick the wrong holiday destinations.

Another reason not to head south next summer is something we barely think about at all: hours of daylight. True, southerly climes are warmer – but it’s dark after dinner. There’s virtually no twilight, even in southern France, and you’re left in darkness with the din of mopeds and barking dogs. By contrast, go to Scandinavia or Scotland in June or July and it will probably rain a bit, but with 18+ hours of daylight to play with, who cares?

🗯 “The umwelt,” coined by neuroscientist David Eagleman, describes the idea that humans have only evolved to perceive what’s most relevant to our survival.

An earthworm has never seen a beautiful sunset because it hasn’t ever needed to. We don’t experience the world anything remotely like a bloodhound, or a tick, or a bat does. It's easy to imagine the ways our perception might be better than other species, but it's harder to imagine the ways it might be worse.

🗯 Danielle Carr on “reification,” the process by which the effects of a political arrangement of power and resources start to seem like objective, inevitable facts about the world.

Reification swaps out a political problem for a scientific or technical one; it’s how, for example, the effects of unregulated tech oligopolies become “social media addiction,” how climate catastrophe caused by corporate greed becomes a “heat wave” — and, by the way, how the effect of struggles between labor and corporations combines with high energy prices to become “inflation.” Examples are not scarce.

For people in power, the reification sleight of hand is very useful because it conveniently abracadabras questions like “Who caused this thing?” and “Who benefits?” out of sight. Instead, these symptoms of political struggle and social crisis begin to seem like problems with clear, objective technical solutions — problems best solved by trained experts. In medicine, examples of reification are so abundant that sociologists have a special term for it: “medicalization,” or the process by which something gets framed as primarily a medical problem. Medicalization shifts the terms in which we try to figure out what caused a problem, and what can be done to fix it. Often, it puts the focus on the individual as a biological body, at the expense of factoring in systemic and infrastructural conditions.

Thanks for reading. If you want to support, please subscribe, forward to a friend, or post something about the Rubesletter. Until next time…

-Matt