Editor's Message
Make a Better NYC
It’s early June and already it’s a hot town. Personally, I don’t mind when the back of my neck is getting dirty and gritty, as long as that’s not a permanent condition. But I’m not here to deliver a sermon about the coming global meltdown. Instead, now seems like the right time to imagine a better New York City. Everybody’s doing it. Bloomberg has his PlaNYC. It’s time for Rail readers to create their own blueprint, too.
So we’re opening the floor to suggestions about what would make the city an even better place to live. Let’s call it the “Make a Better NYC” contest. Any ideas for improving our urban environment—both ecological and social—are welcome. You can submit oh-so familiar proposals, such as the need for more public toilets. Or your ideas can be a bit more exciting, like calls for dance parties in the streets. And, of course, they can be challenging—perhaps offering specific remedies for the city’s growing racial and class inequalities. The most creative, innovative solution to any problem wins.
In the spirit of the Bloomberg approach, we will offer incentives: 1st prize is a Rail t-shirt and a subscription sent to anyone you’d like; 2nd prize is two Rail t-shirts and two subscriptions. (Forgive me for that old joke, I once lived in Philadelphia.) In the spirit of more direct urban planning, we’re also setting a timetable for real results: June 22nd. Send your submissions to [email protected] (subject line: “Make a Better NYC”). Please include your name, home address and a phone number (no, we won’t use or sell your info in any way—that’s just not how we do). Rest assured, our ace team of Googlers will root out any connections you may have to various organizations. So if you happen to be, say, the executive director of the League for Public Toilets, please tell us.
No matter who you are, I’m certain that you have at least one idea as to how we can make a better NYC. So bring ’em on.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time
By Rebecca SchiffmanMAY 2023 | ArtSeen
In the eyes of the profound American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), a single artwork can’t always fully express the complexity of its subject: sometimes it takes a few tries. Up now at MoMA is a wonderful expansion of that idea in Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, featuring more than 120 works on paper spanning five decades of the pioneering artist's career.
Glitching Time and Time-Based Media
By Charlotte KentOCT 2022 | Art and Technology
Time is a socio-technological system with profound organizing qualities that feels, these days, exceedingly oppressive. There’s never enough time! For anything. Calendars are the earliest containing device with the purpose of determining a social order; the history of the Roman calendar reveals the role of international and national politics that play out across each new temporal infrastructure. Our temporal orders have been designed through the global proclamation of Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 by colonial empires, the apocalyptic anxiety provocations of the doomsday clock established in 1947, the insistent instant-ness of digital time since the 1970s exacerbated by strings of video chat meetings of the last couple years, and the frenetic branding of our social/professional lives demanded by transnational corporate technology’s mediation of everyone and everything, all the time. It’s a mess.
Daniel Antebi’s God’s Time
By Nolan KellyAPRIL 2023 | Film
It can feel risky, as a director, to put a well-thought-out scenario at the mercy of New York streets, but, as indies like Daniel Antebi’s God’s Time (2022) go to show, the loss of control also breeds high rewards, capturing spectacles inherent to the city itself.
Spencer Longo’s TIME
By Josh SchneidermanSEPT 2022 | Art Books
The book uses unstapled pages from Time magazine as the bases of its collages. It shows what it feels like to live in a crumbling empire, in an era widely regarded as “the end of history.”
