In Seattle this week for a speaking gig, where I always seem to find myself at the Olympic Sculpture Park, quite possibly one of my favorite places on the planet. The team at Weiss/Manfredi designed huge swaths of grass and native plants that bridge a glass box on the hillside with the industrial waterfront, zig zagging over cars, trains, bikes and people, pulling Seattle Art Museum’s annex all the way down to Elliott Bay.

First stop is the cafe where Geoff McFetridge’s In the Mind exhibit is still up, complete with giant pushpins.

Coming down the stairs, you can pull up a seat and enjoy the company of one of Richard Serra’s monolithic rusting hulks.

Which look especially good against the just-starting fall foliage.

This was also a good place to reflect.

Alexander Calder’s piece guards its square of grass like an alien dinosaur envoy who just beamed in via the Space Needle.

Dennis Oppenheim’s traffic cones shout out to the lanes of traffic surging underneath.

But as you start to weave down towards the water, you realize this isn’t some isolated meditative spot; it feels as if the guts of the city are churning all around you. Planes sail overhead, container ships glide out to sea, trains rock below you—like bonus pieces of kinetic sculpture especially commissioned for the park.

In fact, that’s what I think makes this place so remarkable.

Anyone could have slapped a green-topped cap over the “ugly” parts; this place interacts brilliantly with all them.

It makes you feel very small in the scheme of things.

Yet optimistic about the future of our cities.

And on that note,

We’ve reached the end.

A few more pics here.

As many of you out there are already well aware, my friend Haily and I throw a monthly-ish event here in LA called de LaB, or design east of La Brea (and if you haven’t signed up yet for our emails, please do). We wanted to start something that celebrated all the cool stuff we knew that was happening on this side of town, and to us, “this” side of town could have meant pretty much anything. The only reason we picked the name and any kind of demarcation line at all was because we knew it would piss some people off. And sure enough, right after we sent out the very first email, we were bombarded with queries: Why La Brea? Why not La Cienega? What about Culver City? What do you have against Westsiders?

We smiled and assured them it was nothing personal. Except for all the millions of things we have against Westsiders.

See, the thing about living in a city without a center, its major population nodes sprinkled across this wide hazy basin like In-N-Out locations, is people get awfully territorial about where they think they live, and what that says about them. It’s not so much a conversation about where the east side of LA ends and where the west side of LA begins, it’s more about what it means to be Eastside or Westside (and then of course you give your address and you’re ideologically relocated by an angry mob from Atwater Village). The battle rages across the city every day; in newspapers, on blogs (and on blogs, and on blogs), in bars, outside bars, in hospitals, and eventually in the county lockup.

This is exactly the kind of inspired debate that Mike Kelley, proprietor of Junc Gallery here in Silver Lake, was asking for when he named last weekend’s art show East of Eden at Barnsdall Park. And knowing de LaB’s affinity for all that is “east,” he asked us to participate.

Our project was simple. We splayed a huge Thomas Guide map of Los Angeles on a table and asked people to draw a line where they thought the “east side of LA” began. And then we ran and hid. We also asked people to place stars near their houses or places of work; their personal center of gravity. Some findings, first from the west, er, left side of the map (you can see all these maps larger here):

As you can see, there were a few people who live in those unquestionably-west neighborhoods of Santa Monica and Venice, who chose the 405 as the line between east and west (yes, I can hear the sound of Boyle Heights residents screaming from here). They even helpfully added a N/S line over the 10. The blue vertical line to the right is La Brea, added by us for reference, and the curly blue line about mid-map was a disgruntled Santa Monica resident who said “that’s what eastside means to me because that’s how long it took me to get here tonight.” See, what did we say about Westsiders?

Moving to the east, you can see that someone else decided everything west of Highland was west, while everything east of Western was east, with some kind of demilitarized zone in the middle. Western and Vermont were often used as partial boundaries, with their lines curving down 1st or 3rd Street to include downtown. You might also be able to pick out a kind of aura around the Silver Lake Reservoir drawn by an obviously pretentious Silver Laker who thinks Silver Lake is the center of the universe.

Moving in closer, it becomes really easy to see that most people chose the LA River, at least through downtown, as their line, but while some agreed taking Broadway north out of downtown would keep you on the W/E line, a “born-and-raised Eastsider” defiantly stopped at Mission Road. He and a few others agreed Washington Boulevard was a good southern boundary, but some included Vernon. Many agreed the east ends at Monterey Park, Alhambra and South Pasadena. Others thought certain places like Dodger Stadium should be considered east, even if the line didn’t include it. And there’s a very interesting line running down Main Street, but we’ll come back to that later.

Here are some of the most compelling arguments we heard for where the line should be:

• Western Avenue was named as such because it was once the western boundary for the city, and since it gets really confusing to explain that “east of Western” would still be west, it should just remain east.

• La Brea does cut a nice clean line through the middle of the map, and seems to divide the landmasses evenly.

• Bert Green of Bert Green Fine Art made his case with Main Street: Near his gallery downtown, everything on the right of Main Street had addresses beginning in E., and everything to the left was W. The post office wins.

• The river is certainly a nice physical boundary, and one that many seemed to identify with. Especially any of the people who told us they were born, raised or lived on the east side of it were adamant about this point.

• More than one person pointed out that the place we were that very moment (Barnsdall Park) was considered East Hollywood, so how could that possibly be west?

• There was an actual “East Los Angeles” on the map, just above Commerce, which people told us was just an unincorporated part of the city and didn’t actually mean anything. (South Los Angeles, the new name for South Central was on the map, and West Los Angeles was about where we thought it should be, but no sign of NELA, what we supposedly call Northeast Los Angeles now.)

As for our conclusions…well, there are no conclusions for this experiment, just a great night of screaming between friends, marker paths carved in anger and, in the end, an agreement to disagree. And apologies to everyone we’ve offended, but especially to everyone who lives in the Valley, because according to the Thomas Guide map of Los Angeles, you don’t live in Los Angeles at all.

Last week I had one of those moments of befuddled emotions when I got an email from my editor at Print, Joyce Rutter Kaye. After an astounding 10 1/2 years at Print, Joyce is moving onto another great gig at NYC & Company, New York City’s official tourism, marketing and partnership organization, as senior editorial director. Let’s hope her design authority can do something about that nausea-inducing NYC logo I had to shield my eyes from every time I hailed a taxi.

Joyce’s decade at Print was an exceptional time for the magazine, including seven National Magazine Award nominations. After Print was nominated for General Excellence under 100,000 circulation in 2007, I interviewed Joyce for mediabistro.com right before the awards show. They didn’t win that night (stupid atomic scientists), but they were nominated again this year and won yet again, bringing Joyce’s win record to three out of the last six years! Considering how many bazillion under-100,000 circ magazines there are out there, that is pretty much, like, amazing.

So as I was mopping the tears of joy-sadness from my eyes, there was yet another wave of celebration when I heard that another of my editors at Print, one Emily Gordon would be taking the editor-in-chief reins. Before becoming managing editor at Print, Emily worked at numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, and Legal Affairs. A journalist and critic since 1993, she has written about books, culture, and technology for publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Salon, A Brief Message, and The Washington Post Book World. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University.

And I’ll just add a few more details to that official bio: Emily’s also a faculty member for the newly-created D-Crit program at SVA (check out their new blog), she writes the spectacular Webby Award-winning blog about the New Yorker, Emdashes, and was recently seen on the local news swing dancing in the Coney Island Mermaid Parade. But you’ll have to ask her about that yourself.

Congrats to both ladies on amazing back-to-school season transitions!

Two of the smartest writers in town, Virginia Postrel and Kate Coe, are now collaborating on Deep Glamour, a blog that explores glamour “in its many manifestations, from movies, fashion, and advertising to real estate, politics, and sports.” You might remember from reading Postrel’s blog Dynamist that the author of The Substance of Style is working on a new book about glamour, and as part of her research for that, she’s also written some absolutely fantastic stories about the search for authentic glamour in contemporary culture. (One of my favorites is a profile of Julius Shulman, which I gave a shout out to when I was at UnBeige.) Kate was once my compatriot in crime at mediabistro.com—she eviscerated egos at FishbowlLA while I was at UnBeige, but she always had a blossoming design blogger inside her.

What I love about the topic of glamour—other than the fact that no one out there covers it, or talks about it much these days at all, for that matter—is that it certainly covers all the things I love, like design and architecture and fashion and food and travel and even tech, but only the very best parts, when its creators are truly trying to evoke this very specific, emotional response. It’s not an easy thing to do, but you’ll always recognize glamour instantly the moment you see it. And then, of course, you’ll want it.

There will also be lots of guest bloggers on board this glamour train and one of the first is another very smart local writer I know named Kate Hahn, who has written an absolutely hilarious book called Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise. Kate graciously sent me an advance copy of this summer and I would turn to it when I needed to remember to be funny as I was pounding away at the keys/pavement. If you’re looking for a guffaw or two out of your usually-humorless fashionista friend this holiday season, buy them a copy of this book. I promise they’ll enjoy laughing at themselves.

Among my favorite pieces to write are the Space Shot stories for Fast Company, in which I get to infiltrate some corporate headquarters and get the lowdown on a company’s quirky work culture. For this particular assignment to visit Oakley’s headquarters, however, I especially felt like an undercover operative. I started contacting them a year ago for a tour, only to be gently but firmly rebuffed by their gatekeepers. Turns out they were in the midst of a gigantic, $2.1 billion buyout by Luxottica, the Italian eyewear company that manufactures their biggest competition, Ray Ban. When the sale was complete, I was granted access, and a few weeks later, I stepped into the room you see to your the right. Yep, that’s where the super-tan, super-friendly Oakley employees get to, like, go hang out every day.

And you can go there, too. Along with a retail store, there’s a customer service center located in this hall (behind blast door #2, of course). If you’re looking for a more intense immersion, take the tour, which begins with a totally extreme video in a theater that looks like it was salvaged from the set of Star Wars, and then winds through an Oakley museum, where you’ll see the infamous fluorescent “blades” you’ll remember from the 80’s. I thought their ads were so cool back then, I used to cut them out of SKI Magazine and plaster them to my closet wall.

You can read my story about “Oakley’s Optical Illusion” in this month’s Fast Company. And be sure check out the slideshow of fantastic photos by Dwight Eschliman, who has managed to shoot the space with all the drama of a sci-fi action flick. It’s Battlestar Galactica: Orange County.