redondel

redondel

 

Traffic as art

The self-righteous tone of the comments aside, Good Magazine’s blog has a nice photo show of traffic in Los Angeles. I realize that this collection of aerial photographs of mostly single-occupant smogmobiles is probably intended to be a critique of LA’s (and thus the USA’s) automobile dependence, but these photos are visually stunning and, dare I say, beautiful.

It’s amazing to me that I’ve been to LA exactly once, and that I recognize just from sight and memory several of these interchanges — the Los Angeles National Cemetery, the Getty, Elysian Park, downtown — and most of which I saw from the seat of a bicycle.

Years ago, the Philosophy Department at Vanderbilt got comedian John Cleese to record a series of PSAs about philosophy. Some are on ethics, some on metaphysics, some on meaning-of-life questions. I’ve thought for some time that it would be fun to use those PSAs as the audio track for a series of videos. So, consider the video below the first in a series.