| total collapse |
[14 Sep 2008|08:48pm] |
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Apparently as I type this, Lehman Brothers employees downtown are moving their stuff out of the building in boxes. I wonder if this is it.
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[25 Jul 2008|09:32pm] |
I'm in New York. I wouldn't say that I miss Chicago – I don't – but I miss a few of the consolations of living in the 'real' United States. I guess I could always move to Brooklyn but I have always thought there was a deep sinister darkness about Brooklyn, and I can't tell the difference between real Park Slope and actual Williamsburg and brokers' exaggerations, and I need to be in Manhattan for school, and all of these things combined means that we are living in Manhattan by default, and uptown at that, though really like everyone else, I would like to be downtown.
The other reason Brooklyn also bothers me is that it always seems to me like a place actualized by the admission that neither the young nor the impoverished have any relevant place in the real life of the city except inasmuch as they can bus tables, so why not - let's sequester them across a body of water. There was a depressing article in the Times in May, about young people trying to live in New York on a budget – living in the outer boroughs, working menial jobs, eating $2 plates of black beans and rice for lunch and skipping dinner and staying home at night to save money for rent, living in closets. It is unreal. And if you come here on the budget of a hedge funder or a European, the existence of poor young people scraping coins together looks quaint and charmingly gritty and really makes this a unique tourist destination you would love to come back to, doesn't it.
Anyway the point is that I find it really hard to forgive them for this and so when they are trying to get off the subway at rush hour I have stopped trying to make it any easier for them.
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| the year in review |
[08 Jan 2008|09:06pm] |
So I know this is a bit late, and that I only seem to remember that this thing exists when I go on extended vacations to strange places but I thought it was important to review the year. I'm in Hong Kong, though I'm leaving the day after next (oh sheesh, jackfruit, I should have mailed you! Next time). And I'm coming down with a fever but for some reason I have this strange clarity setting in.
01.07
bringing in the new year with vaginal davis, berlin.
writing and reading
03.07
going to tokyo, finally meeting yu-chan!
seeing aya beautifully and shimmeringly pregnant.
05.07
working on norma's projects
06.07
writing my thesis, cheating the system, and graduating from college, thus nailing the final nail in the coffin of my academicism, chicago
going to japan with the boy
naoshima, chichu bijutsukan
07.07
living in harlem, working in flatiron, new york
09.07
mexico city
den of homosexual evil run by man who knew che, puerto escondido
11.07
thanksgiving with the boy's mom and dad and jeanne in our tiny studio apartment
being invited, alone, to k. frampton's apartment
12.07
beowulf in 3d
applying to architecture school in a blizzard, chicago
spending the holiday in hong kong, being an object of female desire on the street sure is nice!
I'm sure I'm leaving something out, but it was a good year. I am grateful.
baring all this to strangers is a feeling i've forgotten.
My resolutions are:
to lose fifteen pounds!
to be satisfied with at least one project.
to learn not to play mommy with projects - there's no time
to act my age. i'm not getting any younger
make more good friends
to be true to myself
to pay more attention to what i wear
to leave chicago and never return!
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[30 Jul 2007|11:16pm] |
I'm depressed about Ingmar Bergman.
I'm living in New York and working at a journal for architecture. All day I read essays and then I lay them out. I like New York better than other places in the United States but it's falling apart. Every morning there are delays on the subway from 'traffic.' The other week, when the sidewalk collapsed from a steam explosion near Grand Central, I was on the 6 heading north and we stopped in the tunnel for ten minutes without a word of explanation. The conductor announced that we wouldn't be stopping at Grand Central due to an 'incident.' He shut off the A/C, which then opened up and began to dump massive amounts of dirty condensation water onto people in the car. Then he started the train up again and we went 3 miles an hour through a totally deserted station, at rush hour, while a woman in the corner became hysterical and shrieked, "Keep going! Keep going! Oh, God!" I want to go back to Japan.
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[15 Jun 2007|02:45pm] |
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music |
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hanne hukkelberg, the northwind |
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i am in tokyo for the last time in what will be quite a long while. it is very melancholy - i had forgotten how lonely it was. the restaraunts are filled with people eating alone, and though it always seemed ordinary to me it really is not. ben and i went on a short trip to atami, kyoto, hiroshima, and naoshima. hiroshima was deathly quiet, and it was a hot clear summer day, and in the street cars they played quiet fatal lullabies before announcing the stops. no one has ever heard of naoshima. we got off the shinkansen at okayama and i asked if there wasn't a quicker way to the ferry terminal to naoshima. it was so tiny that the station attendant had never heard of it and it wasn't in the giant book they all have, which lists all or most of the transport connections in the entire country. the ferry to naoshima was like the boat in drawing restraint 9, with glowing lights everywhere. the dark islands off the coast of uno port were half-illuminated by giant smokestacks. we went downstairs early to see the boat-bridge descending down to the land. the lights were all green, and the bridge descended to reveal a luminous, unearthly ferry terminal designed by sejima kazuyo. then we stayed in a 100-yr-old house run by a woman who was essentially the japanese analogue of margaret lanterman (the log lady) from twin peaks. i got sunburned. the ocean was everywhere.
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[15 Apr 2007|05:13pm] |
also, apparently chicago has just won the american nomination for the 2016 olympic games. it's a massive sham. the photographs of daley jumping out of his seat when he heard the news are hideous. daley first announced the news that chicago was to compete for the olympics in order to divert attention away from a political scandal where it was revealed that his machine was giving jobs away in return for votes.
if chicago wins, the olympic stadium is to be built in washington park, which is a matter of blocks from where i live. the park is a dividing line between one of the few wealthy neighborhoods on the south side, hyde park, and the incredible desperation of its surroundings. it is absolutely bombed out, filled with abandoned buildings and lots, and the most incredible desperation. that hosting the olympics is to cost the city about $5 billion dollars is ridiculous given the fact that the entire area could be equitably developed for that much or less. but there is every indication that the city is uninterested in equitable development; the poor will continue to be farmed out to substandard housing in the suburbs; real-estate developers will make enormous profits from buying up parcels of land for pennies and then building horrible new-brick things on top of it (and indeed have already started doing it). the university probably has its paws in this as well. it's absolute madness, and there's no oversight or transparency. the wrong people continue to make enormous amounts of money.
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[15 Apr 2007|05:08pm] |
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one of my favorite blogs is brett steele's resarch. brett steele is the director of the Architectural Association (london). i met his wife once when she was walking her very small dog through the studios in tottenham court road.
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[02 Apr 2007|07:42pm] |
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i just love yulia tymoshenko's hair!
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[31 Mar 2007|01:14pm] |
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i feel as if the fact that shirley manson's father was a member of the team that cloned dolly the shape is an expression of scotland's size.
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[29 Mar 2007|02:30pm] |
i'm back at the university for the spring. i am irritated and annoyed, not just because i have a pollen allergy but because there has never been a larger concentration of idiot 19-year-olds than exists here. i am taking all sorts of classes which i am having a hard time feeling excited about. discourses on the nation? modernity? do i care? no, i don't. and the graduate students are even more convoluted. how did perfectly ordinary people come to convince themselves that this was a field of any, even marginal, importance? and they never say what they mean; and when you can penetrate them, they mean the most horrible, meaningless things. they take all of the love out of literature and they don't bring it back. the best theoretical language is rich and full and lush; but there is nothing in this except death, and people worried about their careers in a declining academic job market, and obfuscating the point so that nothing of any substance remains. one girl today who was having a hard time expressing herself actually broke her train of thought to say "well, what i am in fact gesturing towards, through enunciation, is..." in short, this degree programme needs to end. i am applying to architecture school in the fall - i want to work for the int'l red cross, specializing in emergency housing.
wish me luck
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[21 Mar 2007|05:16pm] |
today is my last day in tokyo. i am leaving early in the morning tomorrow for the US, on purpose, because i will be too tired to know what is going on and will be unlikely to get sentimental. there is something horrible about afternoon flights - you spend the entire day waiting, and waiting, and getting nervous, and preparing, and then the sun is setting and you are getting on your flight and you feel like the world is ending. afternoons are always the worst part of the day for me since they make me feel old, unproductive, tired, and as if i have failed. i am leaving the house at 7am, and getting into chicago, the same day, at 8am. mornings are better.
i wound down from aoyama through omotesando to harajuku, stopping at: cibone, the dior building designed by SANAA, the marimekko shop, and nadiff, the art bookstore. cibone was a hoot. they had a lot of things by piet hein eek, and were playing music by a band called, 'secret mommy.' i don't know why but in the corner there were dozens and dozens of heibonsha editions of difficult philosophy texts, in case you were tempted to think they were lightweights. they had a lamp by moooi which was pretty great [see img]. it is difficult to tell from the image but the horse lamp is about six feet tall and ten feet long - actual horse dimensions - and stands alone in a room.
the sanaa designed dior building is also from outer space. the building itself is this incredibly luminous, light filled, graceful, angular glass structure with a thin plastic membrane on the inside to give it a sheen. the plastic membrane is really nothing more substantial than you would print a transparency onto and it can be removed. the interior design is literally done in blocks, which do not fit against any of the walls, and full of like, 19th century european molding. it actually feels like the building is eating up dior itself. i don't know what i'm saying. it's hard to describe.
ok! c'est tout
see you in chicago
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[14 Mar 2007|02:26am] |
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music |
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mia, hoffnung |
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this is obnoxious, but it is late and i am looking at the cottages where wittgenstein and heidegger managed to get work done.
wittgenstein decided that he could not work on the tractatus logico-philosophicus surrounded by academics and retired to a cottage for the winter of 1913 at skjolden, norway.
heidegger, who also hated other academics, would spend most of his time when not at the universitaet freiburg at his cottage at todtnau, in the hochschwarzwald, southern germany.
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| mittendrin |
[13 Mar 2007|12:27pm] |
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music |
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Peter Licht, Sonnendeck |
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another bright blue day in tokyo. i am reading the times again, this time about the mathematician terrence tao and about how he was a child prodigy in most everything except writing - "Assigned to write a story about what was going on at home, Terry went from room to room and made detailed lists of the contents." there is something very melancholy about being back in tokyo. it reminds me of high school in a bad way. i miss german directness.
at the toto corporation's gallery MA there is an atelier bow-wow exhibition, and the watari-um is having an exhibition on bruno taut. i'll let you know how it is.
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[10 Mar 2007|01:18pm] |
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i'm in tokyo - it's a beautiful day, balmy, warm. i'm discovering hugo chavez's speeches. all sorts of beautiful and wonderful things fly around in them. i'm generally undecided about hugo chavez. i am sympathetic to his project but the chavez-ites seem not to have any kind of self-awareness about them. when i lived in chicago i went to an event featuring a venezuelan official in the chavez government, who explained chavez's positions and showed slides of happy venezuelans participating in a new democracy. on the one side there is the american media which has nothing good to say about him and is quite shrill about it - the most recent headline on cnn.com is 'Bush responds to Chavez sideshow,' as usual immature and unprofessional as news can be - and that is obviously the wrong position to take. if there is anything to learn from all of the things which have transpired in recent years it is that americans have a really awful media which doesn't do its job properly. on the other side there are academics and others who seem to think that chavez lurches into self-parody and kitsch and that he sounds a little bit like a latin-american dictator who misuses the language of sensuality. he might skirt the line but there is something truly beautiful and elusive about his speeches which make me feel hopeful. reading him feels similar to me as reading the sf-based retort collective's afflicted powers, which has had to entertain similar complaints. they are similar because they are full - yes, full, rich, puffed up - with sensory experience, both chavez and rc are obsessed with spirits, ghosts, materiality, pulp, fruit, the walking dead, the senses. they seem obsessed with the scale of the world system and along with it, its intelligibility. chavez's last speech, in brazil, was accompanied by a group of shamans who were excising the places bush had been for bad spirits. bush is described first as a 'political cadaver,' then - “He thinks he is Columbus, discovering poverty after seven years in power.” i talked to a german woman who had taught in caracas for a decade, and she had told me that after chavez came to power, though the deliberative democracy stuff is good, venezuelans seemed to have become much more racist and insular towards others, and caracas had become a much more dangerous place. bush wants “to substitute the production of foodstuffs for animals and human beings with the production of foodstuffs for vehicles, to sustain the American way of life.” i suppose i have been a little bit seduced.
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| telekommunisten |
[02 Mar 2007|06:49pm] |
telekommunisten is a telecommunications project based in berlin that is trying to democratize/socialize the use of technology/networks.
--//--
What is Venture Communism?
by Dmytri Kleiner
Venture Communism is an investment model designed to be a form of revolutionary worker's struggle. The Venture Commune is a type of voluntary worker's association, designed to enclose the productivity of labour and enable the possibility of the collective accumulation of Land and Capital, which, in the endgame, will eventually allow the workers to buy the entire world from the Capitalists. (>>> continue english/german).
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[07 Oct 2006|10:28am] |
finally settling down after about a week of bouncing between friends' houses and hostels... signed the lease on a beautiful apt. on dunckerstrasse, in prenzlauer berg near eberswalderstrasse u-bahn. i am excited and calm, calmly excited! it's a really beautiful neighborhood and i feel so much better here than i do in chicago - that orange sky, looking constantly behind you, being constantly angry and upset at people, and of course i have started learning german. some words i have learned are
birne - pear
apfel - apple
links - left
rechts - right
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[02 Oct 2006|11:02pm] |
i'm in berlin - have spent the last couple of days looking for apartments. at first i did it kind of casually but i have since become more wired at my apartment searching, mapping each one and figuring out how far it is from the u-bahn, imagining based on streetplans, etc. the first apartment we saw today was in prenzlauer berg, of course where walter benjamin grew up, beautiful and airy but was a 5th floor walkup, with strangely shaped rooms and a floor veneered with laminate, which sticks to your feet. a guy who said he was learning to teach music at UdK lived there. i liked it but it looked out onto a construction site. i am learning all sorts of german vocabulary: provision, provisions frei, Einbaukueche, Kaution, 2-zimmer wohnung, vermieten...
does anyone happen to know of anyone trying to get rid of their apt in berlin?
now, i will go out and eat another apfeltasche.
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[16 Sep 2006|12:03pm] |
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we are taking a roadtrip: south from chicago through kentucky, over through the west virginian hills, and into virginia. then to washington, dc. after that, berlin.
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| and we're off |
[16 Sep 2006|12:01pm] |
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cleaned & packed up the studio the other night - we stayed late. there was an old japanese man walking around the studio with a young, white assistant and they were photographing everything. i was confused since it was after hours - i thought they might be tourists. i was shocked when i found out the following day that that was in fact fumihiko maki walking around the studios taking pictures in preparation for launching a competition entry for the new university arts center... sheesh! so much for that. fumihiko maki looks very crumpled, in contrast to his buildings.
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[27 Jul 2006|06:22pm] |
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interview with ettore sottsass. i've been reading atelier van lieshout's the good, the bad, and the ugly. it's pretty amazing. also sophie calle's book exquisite pain. i would recommend all of them! i've been working weekdays in a studio. photographs soon!
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