Postgraduate

What to do after graduation



Requirements:
room for dog
room for a truck
trees
access to water
porch(es)
hill or moraine
old things
music
salvage around
things to document
room to cook
place for a fire
smokehouse
decent coffee
local myth
some sort of past
graffiti
soccer field
bikes
taco bus
wind
river
bookstore
crickets


Activities:
dusk
walking
soccer
ultimate
the blues
gardens for beer
public old space
college
and more

Precedents/Possibilities:
Center for Documentary Studies
Appalshop
Design Corps
the government/the foreign service

Manifesto:
this will be my next posting.

Dave Hickey

Interview

Dave Hickey came to Harvard this week and imbued us wisdom on the fifth floor on a somewhat warm rainy day. A good time, this guy. Lecturing the next day in the big aud, I witnessed the finest, most well-crafted cussing I have ever encountered. A dearly needed morsel of fun in our bunker o' 'crete. The paramount moment of his lecture? Probably when he observed, discussing the unspoken burdens of getting paid as a professor versus as a magazine writer: "If I tell Vanity Fair that I have trouble deciding how much money to spend on heroine and how much to spend on Arab boys they don't give a shit!"

Read his interview in the Believer

Dave Hickey: I'll see you on the sixth tray.

# Peeps.

Sound

After life

I'm beginning to think that the most interesting sensory capacity we have is for sound. What is it about the sound of small things, such as setting a watch on a table top, that make objects seem like they are massive, fantastic worlds? I remember napping in a Chicago hotel one afternoon in spring. Because the weather was warm, I opened the window and could hear what you might call the constant sweeping sound of the city outside (like passing air) that lets you "hear" your way up the grided streets, out to the lake, out to the prairies maybe, in between buildings...
Measuring a silence in the room provides a middle scale. Waking from a nap, hearing the drapes blow in a breeze, picking up your watch from the night stand. Then set it down again, and it resonates with an afterthought. What Bergson attributes to the space of keeping count in duration would in this case be the echo of the world-in-sound unleased all up in your brain, bouncing around. I'm beginning to think that sounds, the most mundane, unremarkable sounds, have the ability to cast hypnosis.