alexi gunner
@idlegaze
cultural strategist
writes idle gaze; a newsletter exploring the undercurrents of the modern zeitgeist.
cultural futurist @ RADAR
alexi gunner
idlegaze.substack.com
- Entrepreneur Phil Levin on the importance of neighborhoods:
"You are going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. Thinking about all the things that New York City has—or the next city has—is a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks where you live.
M... See more - American cities have not been too kind to minorities because (most) American cities have not been, well, cities. They are not dense, not walkable, don't allow people to rely on public transport, don't create enough opportunity (or necessity) to interact with people from different socio-economic brackets.
from Did Cities Fail Us? by Dror Poleg
- Amartya Sen used to say about London that "cultures cross like ships in the nights". I think this argument is even more true with social networks; what seems to fade is actually very much alive somewhere, but not in your feed.
from Laurent François on Substack
- n Hannah Black’s essay for Artforum, “Go Outside,” she describes the possibilities illuminated by 2020’s riots, emphasizing a return to social life and public space. A riot, she writes, is “just something that can happen when a lot of people are outside in the same place.” She continues: “By providing new uses for public space—by uprooting street f... See more
from There Are Trees in the Future, Or, a Case for Staying by Protean Magazine
It's not only UK dance music of the Nineties that is associated with cities; the whole history of popular music is about urban scenes. It's no accident that Motown started in Detroit, house in Chicago, hip-hop in New York… Cities are pressure cookers which can synthesise influences
quickly and in a way that is both collective and idiosyncratic. Scen
... See morefrom þÿK-punk by þÿMark Fisher,Darren Ambrose
- There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unset... See more
You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.
from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing
- Stark reminder of the parlous state of afterdark subculture in so many cities around the world. In the UK, for instance, 75% of nightclubs have shut since 2005 (75%!) - and, truth be told, so much of what survives is very corporate and highly contrived.
They say nothing good happens after 2am (or is it midnight?), but in the case of creativity, that... See morefrom Feed Updates
- You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.
from First we shape our social graph; then it shapes us by Henrik Karlsson