I get a fair few emails in the Futurismic mailbox saying “hey, I did this thing, maybe you’d check it out and blog about it?” Roughly 80% of them are either poorly disguised corporate pitches or stuff that’s just not very good, but every now and again I get something like this: Plan Of The City is an animation by regular reader Joshua Frankel, and it’s really rather wonderful. So consider this your Friday afternoon brain-break; take thirteen minutes to watch the architecture of New York fly itself to Mars, accompanied by some rather moving music. Go.
You can find out more about Plan Of The City and Joshua’s other works; give the guy a bit of attention, why not? Thanks for getting in touch, Mister Frankel. 🙂
… or at least it does in uber-hip New York, where the magazine that bears the city’s name reports on a new batch of shops for hardcore bookgeeks in the Big Apple [via MetaFilter]:
Contributing to the resurgence is the local-is-better ethos, which has bled over from the culinary and fashion worlds, causing readers to crave a more human-scale shopping experience. And the specter of a world without indie bookshops has inspired a new, perhaps quixotic generation of entrepreneurs to jump in. The new booksellers bring a modern approach to the business: In place of the dusty riots of yore are more curated, well-lit shops that emphasize personal service and community—book clubs, readings, charity projects, and even the occasional lit-geek basketball league.
I’ve always been a dusty riot kinda guy myself (yeah, I know, surprising much?, but hey, whatever works – if people are selling books (and making a living selling books) in brick’n’mortar non-chain outlets, I don’t care how they’re doing it.
What about you lot – what’s the state of the indie bookstore in your town or city?
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