Tuesday 25 April 2006
Dan Gibson, nature sound recordist. He actually died over a month ago, but I hadn’t heard until now. When I was a kid, we had the very first Solitudes LP, back before his son talked him into adding music (a smart commercial move, I’ll grant you, but no thanks - I’d rather have just the sounds).
Jane Jacobs, author and champion of neighbourhoods and cities as vital entities. Her book The Death and Life Of Great American Cities spurred me to study urban planning (I discovered it, in turn, through Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn). (via Spacing Wire)
Tags for this entry:
acoustics,
architecture,
building,
cities,
environment,
human spaces,
jane jacobs,
nature,
obituary,
public space,
recording,
sound,
toronto,
urban change,
urban design
Thursday 15 September 2005
Well, it seems the only thing that can get me out of bed at a civilized hour is construction outside our door. I woke up from a dream where I was watching someone ride around a neighbourhood on really noisy moped at 2 in the morning… to find that the noise was real.
At first I thought it was our neighbour, cutting down plants along the fence between our two properties at 7:30 AM just to spite us. (We like letting things grow as they like, which I presume is bad for property values.) But no, it was a dude from the city with a concrete saw. They’re fixing the sidewalk. Sweet jeezus.
(Edit: Oh! I missed the notice, somehow. They did give us warning.)
Can they do that at this hour? Yes, apparently - something I didn’t know until just now, when I found a PDF of the city’s noise bylaw online courtesy NoiseWatch. (Hmm. Wonder if there’s an alliance to be made between them and the Public Space Committee.)
And now they’re on to the pneumatic paving smasher, which is even louder. I can even feel the floor shake, at the opposite end of the house. It’s like living in a cartoon. I might be angry if it weren’t so funny. :D
Hmm. This means there’ll be wet concrete later. Maybe I’ll draw a flower or something on it.
