Well, I must say– that tux, that song: talk about bringin’ sexy back to the white house! 

(Okay, I’m pretty sure the “back” part is an overstatement! Still, don’t tell me some babies didn’t almost get made up in your house.)

Here is a video of the first dance, with Barack Obama’s “I’m gonna hide my nervousness by trying to be suave” intro, and Beyonce’s rendition of Etta James’ “At Last.” 

“First of all… how good lookin’ is my wife?” Hmmm-hmm:

The Mail also has some spectacular ball pix, one of the best assortments I’ve seen.

In the meantime, here is some music for you to listen to while you flip through the pictures and just imagine… imagine a better future for America, silly!

Procrastinating, I came across this beautiful and amazing picture, which Jenny Davidson posted on Light Reading.

The picture below comes from a book on black cowboys in Philadelphia. Mike Newell wrote a profile on them a few years ago for the Philadelphia Weekly:

Black inner-city cowboys have been racing their horses at the Speedway since before even the old-timers can remember.

“Some things just always been around,” says one Speedway regular, gray and stooped, moving through the crowd. “It’s what we do.”

Davidson writes:

If you know Philadelphia at all, or even if you’ve just looked out of the windows on the train as you pass through the bleak North Philadelphia station en route to 30th Street Station, you will be familiar with that intriguing but deeply depressed cityscape of low-rise row-houses and urban blight; but there is a magical alternate life there of urban cowboys, chronicled in Fletcher Street, a rather lovely book of photographs by Martha Camarillo.

Everywhere is amazing.

I think I need such a book in my life right now, and will add the book, Fletcher Street, to the Cypher&Syllable store.

Light Reading also has some links, for learning more about these black cowboys in Philadelphia.

Terraforming: the transformation of one kind of space into another, non-native form. The intersection of material power and imagination. Manifest destination.

Arizona, Mars, Iraq–

“The terraforming (literally, “Earth-shaping”) of a planet, moon, or other body is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, or ecology to be similar to those of Earth in order to make it habitable by humans. The term is sometimes used broadly as a synonym for planetary engineering in general. The concepts of terraforming are rooted both in science fiction and actual science” (Wikipedia).

Fiction and science. Where is Iraq again? Could you point to it easily on a map?

In “Terraforming v. 1,” I noted on the possibilities of maps as imaginative spaces. In Terraforming v.2, I enjoyed how one kind of knowledge might make others possible.

Is this Terraforming v. 3? What should its title be? “Shadowboxing w/o a mirror”?

Whatever, blame it on the youth. According to The Independent, it is our isolationism at work:

Traditionally, the US has bowed to the idea of isolationism, hoping that geography in the form of vast oceans can help act as a protection from other nations. But the survey suggests that such an attitude- both culturally and in terms of interest in overseas travel – is having a woeful impact on Americans’ ability to learn about the wider world.

Does this also account for Mississippi? Hmm. But hey UK: Pot? Kettle? Black?

Whatever.

To use a simple example, imagine trying to imagine “the world” without ever having seen a globe. Pretty empty, huh? Sure, there all these things a globe can’t tell us, but at least it gives us some basic spatial sensibility, an over here and over there.

I like the map above because it takes something about which I have some sense, and uses that sense as a template to make sense out of something else. The importance of this templating cannot be underestimated because its an important aspect of how we learn. So much of knowledge starts with what we already possess, and when looking at this map I have visceral responses to the relationships it reveals. I mean, I’m not like jumping up and down on the couch, but I definitely had a few “OMG, Canada?” moments. This is what we mean when we say something “hits home.”

A while back, The Daily Mail ran an article featuring cartograms of different kinds of economic and political realities. Take this one on Military Spending:

In general the map above is unsurprising, but, again, it’s the relations that are compelling. For even as the northern hemispheres exceed the southern in spending…

We also know that the north seldom suffers the direct negative consequences of that spending. Countries that had virtually disappeared as spenders reappear in statistics about death and dying– let’s call it negative consumption.

This is what makes something like “The Peace Index” so compelling. Recently put out by Vision of Humanity, it accounts for local and global policy when assessing various countries relationships to war and death. As OneWorld reports, Iraq, Sudan, and Israel fall at the bottom, while the U.S. and Iran share equally low scores:

To end, perversely, let’s add another cartogram to our repertoire: it seems that the United States is the least peaceful country featuring a great amount of toys. But they’re all coming from somewhere, and that too might have consequencess…

<– Toy Imports

Toy Exports –>

related post: “Terraforming, v.1“

orthogonal post from Statastic:

“President Bush’s 2008 budget hit the Hill yesterday to a frosty reception (so much for global warming). The budget is like having an accountant hold a mirror up to American society, and that society is simultaneously warlike and childish.”

Over at Strange Maps, one of my favorite blogs (how about a daily dose of cartogram? or a diagram of the Eisenhower Interstate system?), there is a short piece on Francesca Berrini, an artist based in Portland. (You can read her bio here. You can also buy her awesome and inexpensive greeting cards here.) She uses pieces of old maps to create new maps of imaginary places.

The following description of her work appears on her website. It is really fascinating:

By recycling different visions of the world, past and present, Berrini hopes to capture her nostalgia for the places that she has not been to. ‘The creation of maps has historically been a painstaking process, meticulously striving for accuracy. I aim to slowly create a separate world from the scraps of my current fascinations. I am reforming the world that is available to me piece by piece to reflect my imagination of what I do not know. A pointless precision beautifully mirroring nothing.’

I am reminded of three things: my childhood fascination with Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine series; Marlowe’s reminiscence on maps in Heart of Darkness; and Baudrillard’s opening invocation of Borges in “The Precession of Simulacra.”

I find something disconcerting and deeply appealing in Berrini’s vision and execution, some fine line dusted between the real and the imaginative, confounding the thinkable and the touchable. There is also a nascent sense of danger; the author at Strange Maps wonders if s/he should be “horrified or fascinated” by these maps. I wonder if the ambivalence comes with the strange beauty of these destroyed and remastered artifacts. There is power in their destruction: one might feel a twinge of worry when destroying a map. What if that which is represented in fact disappears with its representation? We look at the map and we say, “this is it.” This is the Baudrillard thing (which might now be know as The Matrix thing!):

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts – the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing)….

Just to say a bit more about the first example, the Griffin and Sabine series: I remember feeling intensely involved with the geography of their relationship, with the movement of their correspondence across space and time. And I reveled in the sense of a world that does not quite exist, but really, almost, could.

This is true, of course, of most fiction, but there is something about Bantock’s intense use of things that usually indicate “real life”– stamps, maps, and historical writings– that made reading him feel less like I was a making a world in my reading and more like I was discovering a new land that I had unknowingly been searching for. His exotic geographies fed my imagination of things about which I may never really know– but which nonetheless felt absolutely familiar. Really.