Clearly, I'm not very good at this.

Try http://sheeplike.tumblr.com/ to see some pretty things.

round and round

carousel, originally uploaded by Benjamin Haines.

utopias

Joel Sternfeld, Ruins of Drop City, Trinidad, Colorado, August 1995

Stephen Shore, U.S. 97, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, July 21, 1973

"So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
...
I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things.
...
...the word sustainability is now code for: let’s make capitalism work over the long haul, without ever getting rid of the hierarchy between rich and poor and without establishing social justice. Sustainable development, as well: that’s a term that’s been contaminated. It doesn’t even mean sustainable anymore. It means: let us continue to do what we’re doing, but somehow get away with it. By some magic waving of the hands, or some techno silver bullet, suddenly we can make it all right to continue in all our current habits. And yet it’s not just that our habits are destructive, they’re not even satisfying to the people who get to play in them. So there’s a stupidity involved, at the cultural level.
...
We should take the political and aesthetic baggage out of the term utopia. I’ve been working all my career to try to redefine utopia in more positive terms – in more dynamic terms. People tend to think of utopia as a perfect end-stage, which is, by definition, impossible and maybe even bad for us. And so maybe it’s better to use a word like permaculture, which not only includes permanent but also permutation. Permaculture suggests a certain kind of obvious human goal, which is that future generations will have at least as good a place to live as what we have now.
...
The future needs to be taken into account by the current system, which regularly steals from it in order to pad our ridiculous current lifestyle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson

breathe

breathe, originally uploaded by torpore.

via http://dontsleeptonight.tumblr.com/page/2.

Trolley wires, Helsinki

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Messina
David Keplinger

Take Messina: you’d be impressed and even sad

that I remember. The crag of mottled faces

the rocks made like old pensioners in back pages

of a magazine. The light as bright as dentistry.

In Messina you’re alone‚ available‚ the youth

in your face still rising. As if there’ll be no end

to youth and solitude‚ the sea below Messina

answers: solitude is beauty‚ even after you

get cold‚ go back to the hotel‚ and light

begins to change‚ to fade‚ at each stage resonant.

Messina? I have never been. You told the story

quickly when I loved you; now here it is

exactly as you left it‚ its old stone faces

alternately old and then like children‚ elated by a fallen tooth.

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... When I ask to view a papyrus fragment from the vaults, a librarian pauses to absorb the request, returning my gaze a little blankly. Just as I begin to frame a withdrawal of this possibly audacious demand, she blinks, smiles amiably, and disappears down one of the library's vast corridors. She returns carrying a gun-metal tray on which a sheet of papyrus, older than many a classical fluted column and as brittle as a desiccated insect wing, has been laid out with reverential delicacy. ...

Luke Slattery in The Australian