This is my Missive

The Record

2010-05-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Invocations

1.
Now I will do nothing but listen,
To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.
I hear bravuras of birds, bustle of growing wheat,
gossip of flames, clack of sticks cooking my meals
I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,
I hear all sounds running together,
combined, fused or following

2.
All the Records previous to this.
Past peoples who yet thrive in my present.

The Record

january.
a morning in inman, books to my body
coffee then with sabeen, we talked at 1369
for a few days i waited about the west
there were films, snowy nights, papers to write
long mornings and afternoon rest
late night walks with many people in the streets
monta's house
the druid where we all said goodbye
sabeen, teddy, shu, leah, maciej (as he was then known)
doug, sarah, jenny, kristen, sylvia
i was going to say something after that night
with so little time left but decided not to.
one last lunch at shaheen's, mack at the table
i drove west to buffalo
arriving in a blizzard, sleeping in a mute farmhouse
next was home, a day over, then to buffalo
boston again,
maciej and sylvia at the middle east
denounced on vodka
i almost did it, there was a moment it might have happened
and before i know it,
there are the plains, the mountains,
denver, vail
there's a full moon tonight, wave so i can see you
here i am in my new home
my back taking a week to adjust
time off in the lodge, waiting for gear
the sun at such a high altitude scalds your hair
it saturates your body with depth
each morning there is blood from your fingers on the bed
many talks, many chats
what happened was what i expected
i tried to be a good compatriate, and patient
the back room finally became safe
i drank with these kids, inhaling smoke
i took walks above the road and remembered the lights on the hills
deep in the trees there were fewer hesitations
i love you, but you lost me
after many years that story was over
andrew and i spoke in an empty room
i said, i can't believe
winter turned
now i have one wing of fear, one of hope
where will this lead
alabama
now all of this began to make sense
the true west, a point of access
when the door can stay open
in a soonly spring i reversed, gathering for the south
the day i left colorado, the air smelled like my own youth
an afternoon out of the mountains for a train
my heart started to pound, others could hear it
they turned their heads, i was sure
except for one
will you wait for my train with me
we talked in a park, saying i knew from the beginning
you didn't have the fortitude
i'm not sure if it's fortitude exactly, more like an impulse of making
the station silent, the late day sun across the pews
i said this is the universal there, i could do this,
i know this place without having been here
the platform cleared and i said this is like a song, an odd film
suddenly, breakfast in the landscape with a flower
a near suffocation, but soon came chicago
and chicago, home, and it was turning spring again
i went to durham, knocking in the evening
and then atlanta, a hot day in a cool office
westward to alabama, through deep red pine trees
it was a cool night, and rammed earth smelled like beets

and alabama happened

now it's a cold morning in the rain
the north has returned to get you, she said
i went that way
jb and i talked about alabama, risks worth taking
then in nashville to skate music, coffee with phenis
keepin cleanis,
long days here of repetitious sitting, i made lists
through the land between the lakes, at a nabokovian wayside
i miss your existence (oh is that right?)
then to ottawa in a crisp midwestern may:
deep wind, bright foliage, walking with andrew and rosie
melissa at the house, the back doors open
where there was once a garden trough
then chicago with dawn, a long companion as i call it
conversations that years ago may have been surprising
on a cold morning i went to the lake
soon again, in grand rapids with another long companion
you didn't fail, i tried to explain
tom,
conversations that years ago may have been surprising
ann arbor to d and k, ashton and wrigley
warm spring nights of hockey at the corner
eastward to cambridge now, with a stop in buffalo
hello, here is my home, here are my kin
can i join you? yes,
and a crossing into boston, an intepid anxiety
make it right, i said, make it right
this was not a weekend for graduation and procession
but reconciliation and setting out peace
peace, peace, and i nearly cried
evening at the cellar, and another with
teddy, ingrid, sylvia, cryan, emilyp, kate, echristo, daniel, caitlin
class day and light in the city like paris somehow
yang and i discuss the heaviness
michelle, shanks, ricky with champagne on a last night
flowers falling in the new yard, birds, resilience
this thing called harvard is over
monta for naps and coffee, lingering in the square
inman, people's republic, topher, saif, brigid
a final punjab with sabs, goodbye to you at ss
a final 1369 with teddy, and the road again, south
ricky in brooklyn, chang in union,
easy e in baltimore, and rightly proud
annapolis for phil, gail, dunc, mike
a strange almost sinister silence in this history
a day in washington, then durham by nightfall
a week in durham in a long, lingering song
abiding in many of the gaps, alex and emily
soccer beneath the oaks, a drive southly more
a walk up springer, then a goodbye, a long path.
on foot across the land with
moondog, rocketbug, blue, doublecheck, magnolia, pearl, listener, etc.
the doc and the georgian
long days at the sunnybank with its porches
instruments in the evening and lingering rain
farther north into cold wet mountains
with the captain i closed out these days
coming to virginia with limping
waiting in a sundry town listening to storms
along she came in a car
a long-waited reunion at the francis marion
driving in the wet night and timeless day
farewell at the curb like a old radio ballad
i feel like i'm in a dream
beginning a new fall with gray
silence came over me, hesitations of words
after a month in the west
here was my brother and ross
teddy and clea walking into the mountains, buff in the water
an el camino for the last days of summer against mt. tabor
now to jill beyond alabama at the corroding beaches
doog and sarah in a strange flat land with odd silences
back to the east for tepid months of waiting
the land became fallow again
a purple evening at pamplona
like in a film i can only watch her as the train goes on
ending in the north again with persistent snow
easy e and mike d on the sides of hills
near calamity in the body, but also the heart
this is the point, a passing on of a stand
a trading of platforms and premises
the taubman college supper club with jen, ciej, teman
viva la revolucion at the house on heather
many returns to the comfort of a home when i had none
a harbor in more ways than one by dj and deniz
and again became spring, in a week in march
then april passes, and on the third of may,
regeneration. this never should have passed us by
some weeks of trepidation and hope
ultimately hope (against hope)
suddenly back in a place where i once began
an old crew, maggie and kasi, shaheen and fashion,
five years and one week gone by
and e
please be on the other side
another cold gray goodbye, and it is beautiful
flying west now over the same land as always
arriving back, returning forward
a period for grace and will
time and yes
and we're calling all the people
and we're calling all the people
that were here
this is a record of all the happenings
of another may to may, a year gone by.

Finally your home

2009-10-18T11:51:00.000-07:00

Half Moon Bay

Finally your home has changed
it has been coming with a limp
a long conveyance of moving soil
it was an immense creature with no eyes
trucking like a glacial till across the land
blanketed and abandoned in blossoming white
it came like the erosion of the beach heads
without violence but impossible to relent
there was a place then that is now
the meadow in your first letters
you think about this transition
it comes to you in small creatures
when you are standing in the fields
and your feet are wet because the fields are low
and the air is washed, the light is mute
the season is turning in slow strains
and the fields have been swept up into knots
combed by wind and stacked in rain
and your own hair is now long
and your eyes are now stones
you find it hard to think about where you will die
or the day of your birth with its tremors
its cracking ice, its cold high clouds
the long moment of your initiating breath
it came to you, and it was by will, your own will
that you came to us fighting
you actually gasped
in the swale you find a dog's bones
there are flowers in its eyes
leaves between the ribs, and you find a crow's wing
but the grasses are fluttering, the weeds rattle
how do you say all of this
that you are immersed among the birds?

Goodbye Franklin

2009-08-31T15:59:00.000-07:00

Observational notes from a town visit

The Confederate Army memorial is surrounded by half empty buildings from a dozen decades ago and others selling vintage things, family department stores as they once were, and the gap along Main is now a pocket garden, Antebellum dresses are next door in the window, paint scrapings and lace. Up the hill are a few tired houses, a curving driveway going towards nothing in particular out of view next to a pedestrian crossing sign and another which demarks BUS441. I go down now, pass the berm with its trees and flowing plants, right at the light, and cross the street. Here is the VFW hall, a windowless cat store with a fluttering flag of airbrushed kitties outside making faint noise in its shadow; it blocks the sidewalk at head height. The ubiquitous family appliance store, Ingles, hot parking lots, occasionally a tree that is old and large—its canopies sweep up the wind—are all scenes from the periphery of this busted sidewalk. There are odd corners where nothing stands but mowed grass and some perennials. A realtor’s hut with a shiny Hummer and sunflowers outside. The backs of the buildings on Main along the diverted and split one-way highway. Everybody here has a sign in the window, some gentlemen are setting out antiques. Where do these power lines go besides into the canopy? And why are there streetlights here? It is nice outside; warm with no humidity. Drafting services, radio towers, police parking lot, Latino men walking down the highway. That lazy sound of cars. Bright teals and reds and yellow beiges. Shiny cars parked along shady trees, in the center of a town that doesn’t seem to bother. Everywhere is a nowhere. For Rent, For Sale, Now Open. Air conditioners and one-way delivery drives. Inexpensive clothing; billboards. Well drilling, Ruby City. Everything in need of a trim, a touch-up, rebuilding, alignment. Some things are freshly painted. Odd background bird calls. The Sapphire Inn down the hill in the distance. Music is coming from the cars and leaves are falling.

Pot Diet

2009-03-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

I like brothy soup

To save money and kill time, which I have too much of, I've started eating from a pot. I am a soup man; most of my life, I have been a soup man. The pot diet involves a spoon, a bowl, and a pot. In the pot I make soup by combining anything that is available in my cupboard and fridge. Lately, this has been clams and onions and spinach and milk with some other things also. Mostly, it's delicious. Spending two hours a night making a brothy soup (broth and I are in love. We are lovers) is probably the best way I could spend my time in boring Vail. Colorado, though, isn't so bad.

February 26

2009-02-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

A poem

This vast earth carries the burden
of countless scabs buried in its skin.
Here I am in a premature spring
scraping them from the surface
in gravel fields and flowerbeds
with a disposition for fracturing.
I put my ear to the till
left wondering, what world is this
where magma and tempering water
spring forth from its crust?

Dopamine

2009-02-17T14:57:00.000-08:00

Personality profile

Michelle had me take a personality type test at chemistry.com.

The results are below. Text in blue is pretty much true. Text in green is circumstantial. Text in red is pretty much not true:

EXPLORER/Director

ABOUT YOUR PERSONALITY TYPE

You are very curious and you love adventure, either or both intellectual and physical. So when you get interested in something, you can become extremely focused on it, sometimes to the exclusion of all around you. You pursue your interests thoroughly, too, often with originality and exactitude.

You are adaptable, competitive and a problem-solver, as well as skeptical, tough minded and determined. Because you have a lot of energy and tend to be enthusiastic about your theories and projects, you can be very persuasive. You are eager to make an impact on those around you, too, as well as in the wider world.

You are irreverent and highly independent. So you can be oblivious to authority figures, as well as to rules, schedules and social customs. And although you enjoy people and can be charming and humorous, you are not interested in routine social engagements or anyone whom you regard as boring. Instead, you seek stimulating and focused conversations; and you are comfortable being by yourself, pursuing your own many interests.

Of all twelve (primary/secondary) types, you are also the most sexual-because both dopamine and testosterone stimulate the sex drive.

IN LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS

As an Explorer, you look out not in; you are foremost interested in the world around you. So you are attracted to a mate who is also intellectually and physically adventurous and interested in dissecting this complex, tangible universe. You particularly like imaginative and theoretical people, a "mind mate." And you like a partner who is sexual, because you regard sex as an important aspect of a relationship. You have nerves of steel and thrive on the edge. You are also decisive and direct. So you are unconsciously drawn to those who can balance out your highly independent and tough-minded spirit--those who are novelty seeking, yet compassionate, verbal, intuitive, trusting, flexible and emotionally expressive.

RELATING TO OTHERS

You like to have good conversations on important topics; so people tend to admire you for your knowledge and innovativeness. You shy away from emotional or self-revealing conversations, however; introspection leaves you cold. Instead, you derive intimacy from doing things with friends or a partner. So you make an exciting, although at times aloof, companion.

THINGS TO BE AWARE OF

* You can be highly emotionally contained, even pretending that you are fine when you are in deep psychological or physical pain.
* You become impatient with cautious people or wordy conversations.
* You can become so wrapped up in your own interests that you spend too little time with your partner.

SPARK FACTOR

You tend to naturally gravitate to EXPLORER/negotiators.

A Chat with Jennifer

2008-12-13T16:36:00.000-08:00

From last spring

me: what should i do when i graduate?

Jen: Travel the world, sample exotic foods and wine, recite poetry to beautiful women, skydive, buy a small plot of land with a vineyard.

me: that sounds about right
it’s a cash problem
i'm no trust fund baby

Jen: Make lots of money. Get rich quick. Then do the above.

me: how do i get rich quick?

Jen: Um, become a pimp.
Sell illegal drugs.
Start gambling.

me: actually, you know what occurred to me today?

Jen: What occurred to you today?

me: i won't really survive at all financially unless i get married.
no joke.

Jen: To a trust fund baby?

me: no, anybody at all.
who has an income

Jen: So not anybody at all?
You couldn't marry me because I don't have an income.

me: but you will, right?
before too long?
plus you're already married. which saddens me :(

Jen: Someday, perhaps. Before too long? Not sure.
Already married, no, but plan to be, hopefully sooner than later.

me: so what the fuck am i supposed to do now

Jen: Since I'm not marrying you?

me: yeah, since you're not marrying me.
i never thought I’d need to get married out of pragmatism.

Jen: You use the f-word too much.

me: that's once.
and it was for emphasis.

Jen: That's once too many.

me: it sounded good in my head.

Jen: It looks bad on chat.

me: sorry.

Jen: And sounds bad in my head.

me: sorry.
ahh, sorry.

Jen: No worries. I love Jesus, so I forgive you.
So you need to find some hot mama with an income.

me: yeah.
who is tolerable.

Jen: Tolerable? How do you mean?

me: who isn't annoying

Jen: Hmm, you're being a little picky, aren't you?

me: wanting to marry somebody who isn't annoying is picky?

Jen: First she's gotta have an income. Then she's got to not be annoying.
I'm sure you have other criteria as well.

me: yeah, but they are pragmatic criteria.
i mean, both of the above are pragmatic.
my other criteria are probably similar.

Jen: No other pragmatic criteria?

me: like, can't have psychosic allergies and isn't awkward around trees.
i don't really ask for much in any part of life.

Jen: Awkward around trees? Are there people who are awkward around trees?

me: yeah.
especially when there are lots of them.
such as in a forest.

Jen: What - are they scared of them? Do they not look at them? Are they afraid to get within a certain number of feet?

me: i don't know. ask them.
my point is, marriage is utterly abstract to me and isn't something i'm really after.
so to realize that, pragmatically, i should get married puts a large burden upon me.

Jen: Are there no single architects in the world?

me: architects are ugly and inept.
i am a case in point.

Jen: You are neither.

me: architects are scary people who believe in fantasies
such as the virtual future
and deconstructivism

Jen: But if they are ugly and inept, then there should be lots of single ones in the world.
How do they afford to be so?

me: there are plenty of single ones and they're degenerate. they can't afford it.
they don't make any money.

Jen: Hmm, when do you graduate?

me: next january
i wish i didn't have any student debt.
then i could be the person i need to be.

Jen: You and me both!

Toro

2008-11-12T19:16:00.000-08:00

Poem regarding Enric Miralles

if it weren't obscured by other things in the world
what we would see over the water
is a bull thrashing from the shore
pulled to the tesselated surfaces of the water
confined to limbs and horns
though its points are gathered from the burning bodies
of spheres set apart, distended along empty lines.
between them light travels for thousands of years.
here on the sea, we measure the myth
with hands, and bows, and the moving tides

Palinisms

2008-10-25T14:09:00.000-07:00

Bless her little heart

Sarah Palin:

"I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there?" she asked. "This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans because to me it sends a message that $700 billion bailout, maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg. No, you know, we were told when we've got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, 'No, OK, that's enough.'"

Notes on an Unletter

2008-10-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

Time capsule

Going through notebooks this weekend from my first year at Harvard, I found this written in one of the pages:

The Velocities of Wind and Rain

1. Justice. A quotidian photograph indicates the voluntary judgments we make for each other, rending barriers in otherwise tactile places of interaction. The arm from Daniel versus the shoulder from Kate.

2. A story: a person who becomes a puppet is an undenotated inverse Pinnochio theme. Wag the dog. A boy turned into a puppet. Rumpelstiltskin--what do we do faced with incredible burdens of injustice? A king who loved his gold so much he loaded it onto his lassy. A girl who loved her faith in silence so much that she cut out her companions tongue, burned him with silence out of her own misunderstanding.

3. Tangibility and sensation (Kant). Descending music notes, wind velocity v. rain velocity.

lunarsee

2008-08-01T08:30:00.001-07:00

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/on_demand_video.html?param=http://mfile.akamai.com/18565/wmv/etouchsyst2.download.akamai.com/18355/wm.nasa-global/ccvideos/GSFC_20080801a_aug1eclipse.asx&_id=143289&_title=Aug.%201%20Eclipse%20Sequence&_tnimage=264818main_aug1eclipse_100x75.jpg

the out there or the total here?

2008-06-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

this line by rilke came up in my final review:
the heaviness, give it back to the weight of the earth.
they asked why'd you do it? what brought you to this?
it's a nice line.
i would speculate that most people can relate to heaviness. a humid walk on a southern night will make this apparent. when you think about not just the thickness of the air but the things that cause all the sounds around you--the flora, the bugs--it becomes recognizable that the stuff of our senses is mass-ive; massivley mass-ive. the tress are thick, the underbrush is heavy. it belongs to the earth. so give it back.

i didn't get around to writing my annual record this april. i've always called it Premay because May is a hinge in my life and has been since being in college. May is limbo. this year i had a job and school to think about until june but in truth after final review comes and goes everything else is frosting. nobody gets rid of the frosting so you could make it out of infused fish guts and with a little sugar you'd be alright. people eat frosting because it's fluffy and they think it's the cake of the cake. frosting is not the cake of the cake. anyhow, my intention here is not to use metaphors. rilke, i believe, wasn't writing metaphorically. aside from that, i resolved a few times this past semester to give up metaphors as a way of communication. muncey said it right, however, when she saw this as a mechanism to communicate the truth and not a strategy of avoidance. but you just can't count on others to get this all the time. this reminds me of a friend from high school who said that the only person you can count on for love is god. how true.

if it was the mid-90s and i lived in los angeles i would write here: "so cometh the point." seeing that this is the Hay and we're closing in on another decade that won't happen. get a garage for heaven's sakes, folks. put a guitar in it and draw evening tatooes on your arms and freak the fuck out. befriend the bums since, as dave hickey puts it, they might steal your television but they won't tell you the same story twice." a dream of eden is better than utopia. the quality of a work of art is the amount of sublimation we take out of it. these are all hickyisms. so is this: that crazy bitch in the audi drives you up on the curve...now you're conscious. you can taste your spit; you can think about your children; you can smell the grass...and when you do finally get to work you complain. to no end.

here are notes from a best man speech for andrew:
didn't like each other at firest (this is the way all such speeches begin)
disposition for the practice of dumbfoundedness
the cure
homemade coffee
the wagon
it became cluttered with the mechanisms of a low-rider's worldview
never a shotgun, always a slingshot
lives in a world of cuts on a cutting board,
tapwater,
curled book covers,
fumes,
elbows in relation to windows,
good hip-hop,
light,
sounds of being still
a mountain philosopher, as i explain it, whereas i am a valley philosopher
he just don't smell like vinegar
whereas others say cookie, cookie, cookie andrew says eat the void

and later that weekend, notes on things seen/felt in o'hare waiting for a flight back to boston:
do you like the person you are right now sitting waiting for a plane?
harvard has made for weakness, the hairs standing on the neck--survive.
where are the folks with the core (chicago? ann arbor? the west?)
i need to be a good man
am i eating the void? (the answer is yes)
i need to work from the ground
document the mundane
tell her she is silly
i'm pissed off by the former's lack of fortitude
also:
my hair in the sun at wednesday's pinup gave me the sense of the south (this shit shimmered like gasoline and it was bright brown and red and translucent)
in cambridge, mack talked to us with the lights off int he lounge and the door opened to sounds from outside where it was warm and the wind smelled like spring
was i hopped up on valium when andrew picked me up at o'hare? whatever the case, we had coffee waiting for flights at a diner by the airport
the next morning i walked between apartments with untied shoes and a hoody and boxers and the sun was too fucking bright to have my eyes open and it was bitterly, bitterly cold. (hickey: now you're conscious)
piss cloud in the backyard, search for gent's root beer, persEverance, drinks, stars outside, empty house that feels abandoned but it's the love nest instead, smell of cabin, cigarettes, Andrew pissing on the lawn, double-shot craving to supplement the ale, stories, stories, stories, stories, stories

and stories, and stories,

andrew was in the sacristy being quiet. i told him to stand straight so i could take his portrait.
and sparklers. the next morning i picked them up from the street.

and now back away from the notes. this is the conflict: the out there v. the total here.

Postgraduate

2008-03-30T10:37:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-05T21:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-03-05T21:17:00.000-08:00

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.

No quantum veils

2008-01-07T22:21:00.000-08:00

My body and yours are
little and more than
the vast and infinitesimal
suspended in fluid
we are not bound up
in gravity and dark energies
in quantum veils
but in the reaching out of
one vessel to one other
in them,
souls, bodies, bodies in bodies,
organs, minds
you flushed through me
sweeping the tiniest
of beings in creation

Fall into Winter

2007-11-28T22:14:00.000-08:00

Why do people forget what they once believed?

Maybe the only good book I've read for any of my classes at Harvard is E.B. White's One Man's Meat. It was good enough to show its cover juxtaposed to the burning rubble of suburban riots in Paris to provoke a concept of why our houses are important during my final presentation in the housing studio last year. My friend Andrew, a mountain philosopher living on the prairie, has brought this up before but I read it in White's book as well. Both pointed out one of the most poignant truths of the living world as observed by Darwin in his landmark study of earth worms and their ways and means:

"I was thus led to conclude that all vegetable mould over the whole country has passed many times through, and will again pass many times through, the intestinal canals of worms."

This is to say, the earth is moving all the time, worm-bite by worm-bite. If we could take a time-lapse video of a section of the ground, we would see it shift and swirl and fluctuate and move in indeterminant directions according to the ingestion and redepositings of earthworms. So too do roots push the earth one way or another, and digging moles, digging voles, burrowing things, nesting critters, the compressions of the feet of we surface dwellers with our Newtons of force-in-step.

So the point of moving the earth isn't to heave it. I too wish to move the earth, in fact it's something that I long for. My earth is all the dimensions of a vital world, in three, four, twelve, and many more that are fictional. It is our nature to become so acquainted with the soil of being human as human beings that we ingest it and pass it off, one way or another (though I am surely speaking more metaphorically here) and to provoke the shifting but re-establishing of its stuffiness. This is a strange thing to do, and it's strange to think about. White also observed:

"Try to tell a child even the simplest truths about planetary, cosmical, or spiritual things, and you hear strange echoes in your own head. 'Can this be me?' a voice keeps asking, 'can this be me?'"

I take this to be the essence of whatever pulses through the mind before one utters "I believe that..." The most essential things are often some of the silliest. You must be a fool to ingest and a sage to redeposit. What then am I talking about? I'm not quite sure but it has to do with a confession I have. If faith moves mountains, then I would like to glutton myself upon it. I have been timid, afraid, witholding, and now I'm desperate for the courage to put myself at risk. I wrote somebody who means a great deal to me earlier this semester that risks were worth it and then failed to live up to this very conviction--the same conviction which says that faith moves mountains, our world is in constant motion, re-creation is always and everywhere, and that we must give our world to those among us in our lives.

Noel

2007-11-03T17:34:00.001-07:00

November Again

On the Everyday Reasons for Preservation

2007-10-21T15:55:00.001-07:00

Don't say it's nostalgia

This is a nice speech about historic preservation given recently by Garrison Keillor at the annual conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in St. Paul.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2007/10/05/midday2/

Bird

2007-10-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

A diagram

This is how I think about life:

Phone Conversation

2007-10-15T20:00:00.000-07:00

Overheard at the table next to me at 1369

guy:
hello?
hey.
what's up.
yeah.
good.
yeah.
okay.
cool.
sure.
definately.
nice.
okay.
alright.
cool.
bye.

2007-08-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

Not ten hours after I wrote the last entry I see this article on Yahoo News:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070802/ap_on_re_us/bridge_safety

Freeway Infrastructure

2007-08-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Entering a corrosive era

There is a deniable fact-of-the-matter that has been and will continue to be dangerously ignored by public officials and cheerleaders of our nation's pornographic addiction to economic growth by way of road development. The fact is simple: freeway infrastructure, the lifeblood of the American economy and the single most influential element of post-war American socio-political identity, is busted and unsustainable. For all the billions and billions and billions of dollars federal and state governments have doled out to construct the dizzying expanse of concrete and steel wastelands around our country have a half-life of right about now. Freeway collapses like the one seen in Minneapolis this week will certainly become more common because concrete and rebar don't last forever. The sages of neo-liberal free market capitalism who consecrated the mendacious delusions of the suburban disposition in late-modernity America were successful in convincing those thirsty for the pornographies of the free market that Growth was invincible, all-accelerating, and permanent. Well, unfortunately, Growth is designed for lifespans of 50-60 years, and every time Growth reaches this milestone Growth must be restored, reconstructed, reworked, dismantled, or demolished. State governments already are struggling to repair all those teeny bridges that cross creek beds and gullies on the two-lane highways of the American countryside, let alone the truss arched interstate bridges over large rivers in the cities that carry tens of thousands of cars a day. Now imagine all those roads out there: all the freeway bypasses, the four-lane median US highways, all those bridges in all those little towns across the entire breadth of the continent--all of them facing their golden anniversaries, with failure--death--imminent. The simple, undeniable fact of the matter is that none of it is sustainable. We nihilistically manifested the suburban buildout once, but there is simply no money to do it twice.

Ice Bergs, Not Antarctica

2007-07-14T15:06:00.000-07:00

Here now is a prelude

Still,
I am heeding the words coming from the high places
And the low, buried places
As in the troughs of the dunes and the ancient ways
Where many bents of humans planted trees
Aware of rows and delineations of order
There were many who never transgressed
The cast gates of cities with their watchmen
And those esteemed who processed
Down the only allylanes where the sun would reach
Creek beds change form over silent, wise
Durations of time which never begin or end
And once there were terrific birds on the cliffs
With spans of wings like boughs of trees
And they never flew
Off of and in to the crag and draft
Many of us continue to leap with uttering and songs
Knowing not of flight but of gravity
And all that defies it

Sweep up to this height; I have made a place
In the sand where I might wait and seek you out
In a city of its own lines in the craze of night
Bend now, and bury
Meet the horizon line and with frail twins of feet, run.

On Light

2007-07-11T03:28:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"'The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away...The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking....Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.' Some hunters are especially cursed with this panic, and bring ruin and sometimes starvation to their families."

"I cannot cause light; the most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam. It is possible, in deep space, to sail on solar wind. Light, be it particle or wave, has force: you rig a giant sail and go. The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."

Referring to Marius von Sendens's Space and Sight:

"On the other hand, many newly sighted people speak well of the world, and teach us how dull is our own vision. To one patient, a human hand, unrecognized, is 'something bright and then holes.' Shown a bunch of grapes, a boy calls out, 'It is dark, blue, and shiny...It isn't smooth, it has bumps and hollows.' A little girl visits a garden. 'She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names on taking hold of it, and then as "the tree with the lights in it."'
"Of a patient just after her bandages were removed, her doctor writes, 'The first things to attract her attention were her own hands; she looked at them very closely, moved them repeatedly to and fro, bent and stretched the fingers, and seemed greatly astonished at the sight.' One girl was eager to tell her blind friend that 'men do not really look like trees at all,' and astounded to discover that her every visitor had an utterly different face. Finally, a twenty-two-old girl was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, 'the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed, "Oh God! How beautiful!"'"

Tectonics Thinner than Air

2007-05-31T15:34:00.000-07:00

Mayletter

May. These are the days of limbo. There is much to learn walking the streets of warm spring cities into the night. Scarcely have I heard crickets yet, but they are incubating somewhere like so much else of summer and the anticipations that this season brings about in the many ways of one’s being. Often time passes in oscillations, and it is possible to see the correspondences between things. One pass brings me to Detroit some May ago and some May later another brings me back. I was in Detroit yesterday, and there was a familiarity to it that had much to do with scent and the height of grasses in front of waning front porch paint. There was a treelessness to the city that has been deep in lore in years yore for its rooting elms. On a quiet street an older gentleman sat frozen in the heat on the porch of his house. Screened in and across the street another and I played blues on the guitar.

These are days of passing, and that is another oscillation of time. For the resource-less (here I mean non-pedal transportation) there is much waiting in passing. I go from place to place and take up areas of sleeping that are stored away like chestnuts in a squirrel’s world. I am fortunate in this way. It means the transit between points in place is laden with some purpose, with the progression of more than land and certainly calling, ideals, mission, and inquiring. There are many ideals to attend. I am hear now in past home of mine where a great knot of synthesis enwove my own being. This sounds hollowly poetic, maybe trite, but if that’s the case then I’m glad for it. I am deeply persuaded to open up a continuing story, the weight of it exudes its time, subtle but profound like the passing of tectonic plates. In the heat of the day I may be waiting for some future, and I can feel the friction of subducting time.

I missed a moment last night to open this story, and now my stomach is teeming with a fresh and intoxicating anxiety and I can hear the three things I undoubtedly believe in—my past, the ontology of being, and the mutuality of experience—urging me to brace and embrace peaks in time and place where we have—they are popularly called—windows. There are creatures thinner than the air that press and press with psalters of what next. Knowing and doing is a tricky duo. Like May, these things are limbo. They too are oscillations and one begets the other over and over and recursively again.

To my people out there, I want you to know something. This world is very apparent, it seems. As a creation it is continuously urging. Know, then do. Risks are often good investments. I am poor at speech so May is a time for letters.

I walked late at night around the streets of Cambridge last Monday. This city is quiet early in the morning, and a night wind in the trees coursed modestly about, bending the shadows of the street lights. There is much to learn on these walks. I have felt urged, and I now I must do. Little was more apparent on those streets, and now that I am passing, there are ideals to attend.

The Record

2007-04-18T18:42:00.000-07:00

Premay 2007

I. Invocation

Dante:
during this so brief vigil of our senses
that is still reserved for us, do not deny
yourself experience of what there is beyond,
behind the sun, in the world they call unpeopled.
Canto XXVI
and
Rilke:
fear not suffering; the heaviness,
give it back to the weight of the earth;
the mountains are heavy, heavy the oceans.
even the trees you planted as children
long since grew too heavy, you could not sustain them.
ah, but the breezes; ah, but the spaces.
Sonnet to Orpheus IV

II. The Record

the shadowlands along summerstreets, oh, ann arbor.
these have been places of walks and peripatetices.
to lawns and porches of east ann street along 1010/210,
and the dutch house roof, the canopies out back;
the planada-rest in peace-and the corner of 7 where the Rhine spilled over;
catherine street:
where abided my boys loney and chap
on the petition couch,
squalor is high modernism lads—keep your heads up,
steadfast against all the misanthropics;
here stand the saturday morning sheds, zingerman's breadly,
and summer tables;
lawrence street and linford: you harbored me;
south fourth of three summer's past fans turning in lateday:
the west beckons across yard and leopold's where we have cleaned;
detroit street, washington, ashley on some sundays,
liberty out west and over the hill,
huron river to north territorial to m52;
cedar campus and whitefish point:
where we forged meta and in silent rooms traversed time
and rested lazy to begin again and striving to do so,
men's retreat and focus week of frozenbay broomball and narnia—
i left you a gnome and a thing called meta:
(tb douce, d dunkel, taitcha: onward for our burden is light)

blessed be these terrains and abodes.

to my people uprooted, dig in;
the fellows;
justin b (tinney some time yore);
dave o and dumie we formed a midhall triad;
eadie, mick, snuph, schteeny, sprech and carlsone the easy e;
delorean of car fame, meul, mccrack - see you all soon;
hubers of the south and the rest of it;
christie i may know you yet;
derek of cigars and carolina
and your honey ms. single no longer:
remember where you’ve been and why;
tom e thane of thanes much love to you and to the little ones;
troy and jess and as you have it boo and just last week samuel:
you are exemplars;
rich the aussie god bless you and the leelanau, the manistee—
i will see you in africa;
darren you're a legacy van der keesma;
hull i missed you; what happened since pre-moore talks on couches?;
muncey what can be said?--pass me a cigar;
chelsea in the leelenau from sf to jonestown keeps yer roots hun;
bling, ryan, dawn and/or delahoya: stratford was vernal even in the grey of autumn, blessings blessings blessings;
keith at asp, john perkins down in jackson;
ann s of mo and la keep breathing;
whang of jersey like fish in and out of water please be strong,
and this premay a new line to you:
look now upon yourself—you have been given sight;
k v dyke and The Pressing;
raynor post focus week i miss the land that i never knew;
backypacky amy and rachel, we are all alone so let us hike;
the taubman crew: mississy, chang, lads with cigars and whiskey, alexa, hemingway, devereux and melissa, mick and bodley, ddrek;
ddrek of many nights at arbor our home;
graham, pennings, yang, melema, steveo, tb, tracy, ddault;
and the ivers: what has happened?;
what to you kg son of swan?: blessings—water has fallen;
alex, tait, andrew, megan, timmy: i love you;
muncey, meul, miked, daveo, easy e, and our clan: i love you too;
ra, ho, yang on oxford and grendel in the den: shalom.
to the new crew and to you lucius i missed you sooner;
to the emerging in the square: you have surprised me,
let us move headlong—
you have brought me peace here.
there is time for invocation but it is now befalling.
detroit, the havens, the dunes, the grasses, the tills, the orienters, the faded and resolute, the winds, the leaves, the frames, the colors, the treading grounds, the flats, the valley and the crag, the hollow and the gorge, the halls, manchester, chelsea, dexter, the fires at the farms, the deeps and the bales, rain on asphalt, the kin and the sages, and the restlessness of times which are imminent;
there is lore about thoroughly!
winter ebbs, there is much to be spoken.

Roundup

2007-03-20T21:42:00.000-07:00

Who has a pencil? And some paper?

Recently I have been dumstruck, feeling the heavy weight of memory. Memory is a tricky thing. Here are some others: why the pressing urgency to go home that silenced me when surrounded by people; the plane that transited the 3 centimeter billions between l'unghia di dio and venus just at dusk to the southwest over the square; why is 6 miles above the earth at night a monastic, churning state in which i am reeling with voicelessness and the realization that i am, probably, a loser? Speech and memory cannot be separated. This is because the ontology of memory requires testament. I'm somewhat in to ontology. Speechlessness means that memory is free falling. What then will ground us? And we become losers.

I pulled Confessions from the bookcase tonight, knowing when I put it in a box to bring it to Cambridge that this time would come. Augustine and I would have this conversation:

me (P): bitterly cold, eh? never crisper. some moon, ya? do you know about the universe?

Augustine (A): the universe? yes, i know about it.

P: they know where it stops now, you know.

A: do they?

P: well, i imagine they do. what can i get you?

A: a fine, dark ale; round, blurred, but viscous.

P: well said. you have a knack for that, don't you?

A: it has been written.

P: let me ask you Augustine: was god in carthage?

A: you know, they know where the universe stops now.

P: except that all the same, there isn't just one anymore.

A: not just one? my teachers spoke of spheres...aethers.

P: right, right. spheres and aethers. and the...the...thing; the...

A: the fluid which drags the stars.

P: that's it.

A: no, god was in rome.

P: still is.

A: Monica used to say that.

P: yeah?

A: oh yes. what about the universe?

P: no, no. the universe, however many or one there is,
is not what i would like to know.

A: don't cry for me. the more you weep the less it's worth it.

P: wow. put in a fortune cookie.

A: the less you weep, the more you need to.

P: i can't speak.

A: you're a bastard.

P: no, seriously. i can't speak. there is no thread. one of your successors (well, a Berliner) made sophistries on feeling, thinking, knowing and doing. he was a lounge rat, and didn't have much to do on a day to day basis but you can see his concern.

A: ah, yes. i said to god let me recognize you as you have recognized me.

P: beware the freefall!

A: achtung! yes, you must find the ground.

P: i know where the ground is. i have fallen to it; it has consumed me.

A: be lofty, you are meant for free fall if you know the ground.

P: i am earth-bound; and i get nervous when in a plane.

A: speak, then.

P: i have tried this. i would rather drop hints again and again and again.

A: you're a sucker.

P: i would like to think not.

A: you must fall and rise to fall again. there are ends to things.

P: what things?

A: all things.

P: i can't speak!

A: you ought to seriously consider a remedy.

P: what about this recognition?

A: it's not enough. it was christ who descended in order that he should rise again. imagine if he had just shrugged and said, yeah, i get it. good game, guys.

P: do you have soccer?

A: in the academic sense. we call it hannibal's magic 8.

P: that's quirky. put it on a bar sign.

A: i will consider that. you should go speak now.

P: i will consider that. what binds all this to the pain in my gut?

A: it's up for grabs.

P: come on now. really? you don't mean that.

A: you are confusing scales.

P: yes, i'm prone to do that. but it's reasonable, right? isn't it a freefall?

A: no, it is an orbit.

P: no, it's quantum.

A: even quanta must be given shape. something must endow it with agency.

P: i would like to orbit. i would like to reach and grab on to something.

A: you already are orbiting. you have been recognized. but remember the scale of things. you are earthbound.

P: i know it. it is churning.

A: speak.

Prophet

2007-01-21T09:27:00.000-08:00

Hope for hope at the end of neo-liberalism

Cornel West writes that "our kids today see clearly the hypocrisies and mendacities of our society, and as they grow up they begin to question in a fundamental way some of the lies that they've received from society...This often leads to an ardent disappointment, and even anger, about the failures of our society to consistently uphold the democratic and humanitarian values tha can be born in youths in this phase of their life."

and continues:

"In the political sphere, the most significant expression today of this mix of anger, disappointment, and yet a tough-edged longing is the democratic globalization movement here and abroad."

What is a tough-edged longing, and who feels it today? The times today without a doubt bring me to anger and disappointment. I cannot comprehend the systematic idiocy of our country's economic nihilism. As a little-'d'-democrat my political values are rooted deeply in a simplicity that is rarely espoused in our country today, and always far away from the suburban wastelands and temporal industrial bilges along the fringes of cities that incubate the pseudo-, the pastiche, democratism of this free market age of disillusionment and despair. It infuriates me to hear our president speak. I want to give up when I see his crew placating the millions, patronizing the ideologically weakest and most vulnerable.

I've said it many times in the presence of collective despair that the prophet of Americanism is an extinct typology. I'm ultimately wrong about that. There are many people who I would consider prophetic. Wendell Berry, Daniel Schorr, even Sufjan Stevens, are all people in whom I recognize democratic prophesy. Many of our venerated figures of the past meet this characterization as well. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophetic; Harry Caudill was a prophetic; Rachel Carson was prophetic; Medgar Edgars was prophetic; Bobby Kennedy was prophetic. Were the Kennedy's shmucks? Probably, but they were lucrative enough to articulate some things that, despite their intentions in doing so, they saw as essential.

Bobby Kennedy. I have, in conversations about the upcoming presidential race, compared the potential of Barak Obama to the run of the younger Kennedy back in the 60s. Had he been elected--and he would have been elected--our country would be in a very different place right now. After Kennedy, the American project endured, and is enduring, a long onslaught of destructive, nihilistic, and undemocratic policy. We saw the quotidian, bottom-up concerns of everyday Americans in the American landscape, fighting against poverty and for an identity, disappear with the same acceleration in which free market capitalism came into veins of American democratism like a heroine, an illusory addiction, that made most hopes of an imperfect America that was worth the prophetic fight into no hope at all. The realization that many people and many structures were denying the prophetic from many Americans was the reason for the fight.

It is true that his country has never been perfect. People that believe that--they're called Republicans--are dumbass ignorant of basic historical inquiry. But the political means of democratism is self-reflection. It means that societies can procur systematic justice by affirming the increasingly discrete scales of justice that characterize the boundaries of human civlization. Thus the little-'d'-democrat turns to his neighbor, his family, himself, in self-reflection. This is a phenomenology of politics that hasn't been integral to an American vision since, I would argue, Jefferson, who had the opportunity to posit outcomes. Today, as in the era of Bobby Kennedy's run for office, we no longer have the luxury of starting from scratch. We must deal with the nihilism that has pervaded our economic will, cultural production, and incubated, uprooting, melancholy despair. It is the "tough-edged longing" that must be nursed. Otherwise, what does the American project have to live for? What is needed now, is a prophet. One who speaks not to his own power, but to the hope for hope in the last memories of American democratism.

The Tremont Saga

2007-01-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

4 July

it is high past the day rain and evening is coming
the air has laid low thickly while trunk and peak
have risen staid as mountains among mountains
the foliage of thickened dixie is saturated along
great strides of ridge and local knoll and inbetween
peers our friend from the porch of a bungalow set
upon footer and feet and table over whatever land
inside companion beasts have come to greet these
visitors with pittering taps and reckless wags
through pane and knit this light has cast deep
shadows across edges of wood and shelves
lined with bottles and books and porcelain knacks
these rooms scent of weathering and i think the land
here is a hallow of color and molded things
into and out of which pour wine and oils and barleydew
by stories of aiming wander which have somehow
come to settle and rest here in this hour
a dog has run from a lapse under the tree and now
there is a party treading from ebb to ebb
and there is a woman who has set deep her frail
mean eyes haunting the ground for webs
though she cannot see the terrain
and that all is settled on plate and rift
which are moving always indeterminancy and will
nonethless she holds a gun and hunts chaos
at scales of blindness towards the edge and ground
after some lull and silence one rises up the street
holding this lore come lately in her arms
and it has begun to rain
she has begun to cry and the rest of
us sway in some time to this fable
that was called to be in the crazed wroughted past
the rain will flow back upon us now and who will
say that all of it is blind and lunatic and passing?

And Trains Pass By Throughout the Night

2007-01-08T16:34:00.000-08:00

Nuptual

Early December now, and flocking birds reside in great clamoring masses in the trees out in the church yard. The wind is brisk but the thinning clouds allow a cast of pale yellow light over the lawns. There is a woman before me and her dress is fluttering and we stand there silently while guns blast in the distance. These birds are unphased but this is a moment of collapses in memory, great colliding and folding of the past, which, I would argue, this woman before me has either ignored or forgotten all together. Now next to a lot of cars I am waiting to bear witness and she is waiting for the Great Apotheosis of the Living Grace, the Fragile Absolute, the Bobbing for Apples, the Feast of La Divina Enchilada. After the sun sets and we have driven out along the freeway service road in the deep blue winter light by a faint scent of antifreeze, I sat in the Sandtrap Bar downstairs with Andrew setting two words a piece on a card hoping to give meaning and reflection to this momentus subtle occassion. The NFL on television, bitterness dripping from the haggard thing behind the bar complaining of a bruised hip, and I thought, this is memory? Some suppose, I suppose, and maybe I do too. Behind me, in dark light, a woman plays dusty tunes on a piano to a glutonous crowd of shuttered golfers, and now it comes headstrong, full-on: memory, out of time, and the sentiment of our words heaves roots out to sentiment of another epoch and another place. She will not know this, but I know it. This, then, is memory.

On Modernity

2006-12-12T21:47:00.001-08:00

E.L. Doctorow:

"Everything, from the young writers impatient of a long
creative life to the deconstruction of our critics; every
variety of intellectual retreat, of conformism, every small
loss of moral acuity, I see collectively as the secret story
of American life under the bomb. We have had the bomb
on our minds since 1945. It was first weaponry and then
our diplomacy, and now it's our economy. How can we
suppose that something so monstrously powerful would
not, after forty years, compose our identity?"

Prewinter Review

2006-11-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

Pictures from forward and behind

Thanksgiving

2006-11-26T22:04:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia

Pause

2006-11-06T13:02:00.000-08:00

Taubman College, University of Michigan

Follow the link to the video archives of the recent Pause conference at Michigan's college of architecture. Good speakers, good words to be said and thusly spoken, Tom's wit and attempts thereof, Doug looking confused. Herscher, Mehrotra, Buresh, and Benedikt are all good acts.

Pause

http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/100/pausestreaming.html

Last of Fall

2006-11-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

A nod to summer; in seven, pal

Wake

2006-10-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Poem to another one gone

i am trying to remember if i should have
conceded when it all seemed probable
or if i watched you go by me with doubt.
you moved with subtle, graspable velocity.

Midterms

2006-10-25T13:09:00.000-07:00

No. 2

Quoth Maureen Dowd in today's Times:

"Many frantic Republican lawmakers are also running against themselves, either reneging on their support for the war they started, or railing against Washington, the town they absolutely control, claiming that the capital has forgotten their values, or making ads denouncing the Democrats’ “homosexual agenda,” even though Republicans are now the party of gay scandal.

"It’s a hilarious spectacle of a whole party re-enacting the classic scene in Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” in which the sheriff holds the gun to his own head to take himself hostage.

"The Bushes don’t connect words with action. Action is something that’s secretly plotted with the inner circle behind closed doors. The public should stay out of it. The Bushes just connect words with salesmanship. Poppy Bush never meant it when he said “Read my lips: no new taxes” at the 1988 convention. It was just a Clint Eastwood-sounding line in a Peggy Noonan speech, meant to pump up his flighty image."

Well said.

Fifty-five Spheres of Æthers

2006-10-19T23:11:00.000-07:00

summeryore

i hummed loops around the yard in august light
shearing constellations of humid flying things
hanging bobbingly with prism wings faced west
it may have been cape or limb flailing aft as
grasses days overgrown whispered in crushing--
it was a forest to me and i a giant.
and there is our mother pointing to ants on globes
and asteroid birds of jay and finch transit orbs
between limbly warps in time and dampened air
here is where our sister made winter camp
and behind the clapboards peeling white and pine
runs a little hallway burned yellow by stellar fire.
i hop galaxy and nebula
drilling deep into spacetime here in our plushly
cosmic-body-grounded and needed yard.

Ipswich

2006-10-18T21:38:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of Little Hands

2006-10-05T15:17:00.000-07:00

Opus in the tradition of the very old Silly Philosophers

What makes a pencil stay put behind one's ear? Yes, our use of the qualifier 'behind' does raise interest, and one may wonder if we really mean 'beyond.' But all those who do place or have placed a pencil 'behind' her ear do know that for all things considered 'on top,' or 'atop,' is really rather more apt. An ear and its Top Flap must not be too large or that fine limbo line between free fall and rest on the body of the pencil will be compromised, such as one may compromise an appreciation for sweet things by gouging into a heavyset cake. Yet it must not be too small or else the proper surface area required for the pencil to stick and to balance will, in opposite fashion to the former condition, be too small for static position and free fall will ensue. Does an ear protect? Why will a pencil remain behind one's ear in a gust of wind or while riding a horse? Why is it that a sweeping ether does not push the pencil forward or backward when running or lying down? We must turn to the head to find our answer, and to find that, upon close inspection, we can determine that a bald head holds a pencil behind or atop an ear more effectively than one with much hair upon its flanks. We must invariably conclude that there are, in the latter scenario, hundreds of little hands pushing at the pencil behind or atop one's ear that therefore causes it to break from static state into tenuous suspension or at peak effect, to break into free fall. A bald head features no such hundreds of little hands pushing at the body of the pencil to the same effect, and when a fine hair is present, as with a close shave or a buzz, these hands are squat and stubby, unable to flail and give thrust, and therefore pretty much have no effect at all.

Midterms

2006-10-02T12:17:00.000-07:00

A series of guerilla preambles

It's useless to vote for Dick DeVoss because you're pro life. Single-issue [Christian] voters must realize that any public policy decisions in the area of abortion will be, at most, unsubstantiated Congressional allusions and presidential candidate totems. Voting for Dick DeVoss won't change a pitance on abortion, so now it's time to think critically with your vote and not ignorantly. Who wants the leader of a sketchy pyramid/Pazzi scheme running a government?

A Week Descending

2006-09-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

Part I

It was a cow that I found upon the ground aft of the Domesticle a late afternoon west of Boone just two days after leaving the city of hilly, curing airs. Contented to be stared at, laughed at, and perhaps knowing that all took her place on the hillside lightly and with surprise but by no means awe or concern, the cow shut her eyes as flies swarmed about the ends and we moved through the gate and into the yard where a table of maple hewn and tied with lap joints as though cast and monolithic sat beneath the boughs of a live maple tooling the air for sunlight and, when the time comes, for rain. There were apparently rare varieties of beans to be harvested from the garden nearby and some neighbors had come with bushels to pick at the rowed bushes once the sun had dropped below a westerly ridge. From the garden gate came a cook with arms full of squashes, which he arranged on a porch beside a room for sitting and keeping books in neat rows as he pointed grinning at the rest of us asking about their “such beauty” and blinking, as a cigar of Sicilian craft cantilevered from the corner of his mouth smoking gently and thick. It was before long time to sit beneath the maple and the mother of the person who invited me out to Dobbins talked about the politics of land and examined the wine and said, “well I guess screw-tops are here to stay, aren’t they?” Cut upon a stone table like an altar out of Sharon came a house-made sourdough focaccia with what I was assured to be a fine olive oil that was just delicious I was told and thin, circular shavings of red onion set like eddies or the landlocked remnants of a river’s path upon the matted crust of bread. And there were rich beats with pistachio paste and the squashes crushed and stewed, and the rare beans as long as school rulers boiled gently and tossed with a real farm butter to attend the yard setting where all had gathered for a summer supper. Before leaving the mountain of Dobbins back east for a night there was pasta of sweet peas that did not become bitter after a superficial surge of sweetness, and fine, miniscule onions lost between the finely chopped leaves of mint and parsley the populated a light oil ether. There were peaches of the proper hour harvested from the same-named southland, topped with unsweetened cream battered into its savored character as a cold paste and raspberries that had just, perhaps hours before, come into being as a pickable solution.

From the Island

2006-08-28T17:39:00.001-07:00

A north wind blows west to church bells playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow

In order to finish Silent Spring by the time I need to be on the ferry back to the mainland, I need to read sixty pages a day. This will be easy because the book is just what it should be—simple and fascinating—and it is published in hardback with thick pages and generous margins. Plus, the lake is wide and the sun persistent, and there are four wood long chairs on the beach for me to chose where I might spend any number of fourteen or so hours of the day. And sitting on the beach reading Carson’s opus, I can look out into the lake and see the swans and the terns and gulls dipping in and out of the tropical blue water for littler things than they and recognize some truths. This is what vacation is for.

Here are some truths. Evolution does exist, whether you chose to call it Evolution or ‘evolution.’ We know it does because sea lampreys native to the ocean can not only exist but thrive and expand and acclimate to the Great Lakes to such an extent that they can succeed in decimating the titan and ecologically critical population of lake trout in Lake Michigan after being brought into the lake by the promises of world trade and capitalistic enterprise in the early years of industrialized shipping at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now the states stock lake salmon in the lakes to bring a top predatory force back into the ecosystem. Lake trout could be more widely stocked, of course, but they are too prone to sea lamprey, being smaller and less sturdy.

We also know that evolution exists because all sorts of presumed lawn and yard pests and lurk in the underbrush like communists or terrorists and threaten the vernal gardenhood of American suburbia are able to become immune to the chlorinated hydrocarbons of the industrial era and the ambitions of men to become wealthy barons of capitalistic innovation in an age of created and propagandanized threats conceded to the bored yes-men state officials of so many environmental bureaucracies. Despite the stealth of man’s chemical quest it is not enough to save spare everything else that surrounds the terrains of our created threats.

And William Sloane Coffin—the late William Sloane Coffin—is the source of truths on this island when I am otherwise rather insulated from the dysfunctions of our free market hegemony over the industrialized and deindustrialized world. Another perk of vacation is the absence of Bushisms and sound bytes, news of retrogressive public policy and the approval of new initiatives in environmental destruction from a federal executive administration drunk on the ecstasy of delusion and denial. And it is here, not in the daily world of news and commentary and people struggling in work and word to appeal to some collective sense of rightness and reason that I encounter a single, definitive, characterizing paragraph of Coffins words that would otherwise act as the epigraph of this current age: a democrat is anybody who knows that “to show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.”

It is his words too that frame my awareness that in three weeks I will be back at school when he reminds me that “The Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security.” What is there that is untrue about this wisdom? What are we in America, and why on earth are we? The right has Lewis Lapham reflects well on this question in his essay in the beginning of the July issue of Harper’s:

“His voice went out of fashion in what came to be known as the Me Decade; small was beautiful, and it was thought wise to hedge the bets of idealism with prudent balances of self-interest. The investment proved sufficient to finance the bull market in utter selfishness that was the glory of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America and continues to sustain the imperial narcissism of the current Bush Administration. Audiences believing that money is the answer to all their prayers don’t like to be told that instead of loving things and using people, ‘people are to be loved and things are to be used’ or listen to Coffin say that ‘those who fear disorder more than injustice invariable produce more of both,’ that ‘nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race,’…that ‘Hell is truth seen too late.’”

What, in spirit, is there to miss here? What is there with which to disagree? If those who profess Christianity as an implicit conviction of the ontological and teleological weight of that philosophy, how can the root causes of the world’s cultural and economic conditions be ignored by credos that are themselves framed—defensively framed—by these conditions? That is, the rightist response to injustice is two fold, but ultimately created by the very conditions that provoke this response at all: first, denial. There is no wealth gap, there is no genocide, there is no flaw in American enterprise, no greed, no exploitation, no sin, and no arrogance; there are no social divides—race, income, land, economy, commodity, community—and there are no compromise solutions, no critical counterarguments. In order to substantiate denial in light of quite obvious and tangible indications otherwise, blame must be disbursed: racial tension is the result of black apathy and anger. Poverty is the result of poor folks’ laziness. Rage in the Middle East is the result of violent religion. Abortion is the result of the godless, the evil. Divorce is the result of promiscuous sex and homosexual tolerance that degrades the practice of marriage. Drugs are the result of cities. Pollution is the result of over-sensitive special interest granola heads that don’t realize the world is large and its resources ours for the taking.

Sometimes, these two aspects merge and form a single response: suburbanization is good—a sign of growth and prosperity, and the promising health of free market capitalism. War is righteous because there is evil in the world, and as it happens to take the form of Muslims so we must root it out in a hostile land [serendipitously home to the world’s largest supply of fossil fuels, quite literally the fuel of free market capitalism and the thing that lets us get to Wal-Mart to save sixty-two cents on cheese sauce and saves us from being forced to buy local, sustainable, farm-produced, real cheeses for use in real cuisine and real collective culture].

How is it possible for this pattern to exist at all among those who do claim to profess Christianity as an implicit conviction of the ontological and teleological weight of that philosophy? It is simple: the Christian community has systematically put down the Gospel—drained it from collective expression, seized it from the work of their hands, blocked it from their intellect, and silenced it on their tongues—for the sake of a handful of time, economy, and culture-based sound byte totem rallying cry issues that abide in political arenas. It has now become a particularized American political affiliation, specific to limited widely-accepted groups of people: steel workers but not journalists, truckers but not those that bike to work, homemakers but not vocal mothers, accountants but not non-profit administrators, developers but not land-use advocates, contractors but not naturalists, venture capitalists but not affordable housing financiers.

Watching Lake Michigan, still and grey, over Indian Point as a fog rolled in and cool waves of pungent earth enveloped the chair where I sat, it was too clear that the question is not about whether Evolution or ‘evolution’ exists or whether a fetus’ life begins at the splitting of the first cell or upon the third trimester. The answers are that nature is constantly changing and we are overwhelmingly persuasive players, and birth does not matter but rather life. These answers are not determinant or black and white, but they are concise and they are thorough. But our cognitive capacities, and our senses, give us more than ample critical means to interpret their meaning, and in turn give meaning to meaning.

A Week Descending

2006-08-12T16:21:00.000-07:00

Part Two

Booneward, the hill road clutters. An indistinguishable highway gathers its way into town, like a stream burgeoning to river in a narrowing canyon, dodging piecemeal shelters of vinyl and composite substances, and so many incs and cos and llcs and other commercial minutemen involved in furnishing the quaint and the remote, outfitting the posteriorly urban renegades, the nouveau riche of the eastern and southern circuslands, and big boxes and strips and paver medians, retaining walls stringing hill crest to hill ridge like bulwarks and first industrial revolution port defenses, and outlet bazaars, feux peddlers, gated compound lands for the nomadic escapists of wholesome self-made bootstring (trust fund) jackpot delusion. On top a meager hill runs windy street and here the trees are still and have not changed in this or that many decades, and as they age and shed they befall the rooftops of the way with crusted pods and shriveled leaves, former hideouts for the invisible army of crickets and katydids and cicadas and other nocturnal humming things that are not hiding among later generations of these refuses and the street is rattling in the semihumid evening air, quivering gently and with persistent, volitional rhythm. A breeze will happen to spill over onto Windy Street with periodic repore, and it is then that I am standing outside the bungalow looking into a well-lit window beneath a streetlight wondering whether I should sleep or read or leave or keep walking up the rim to see what really there is beneath the woody shadows. The screen door from the porch opened on my behalf as I approached it and inside I laid on a couch as the others contemplated the rings of social being, hardpressed for words that would rightly accompany the performances of the southern summer avenue outside. All these windows stood open like dampers or reflectors in a hall and beside them all stretched like dummies having landed from a great height looking at footprints haphazardly imprinted onto the ceiling which rolled like moraines under decades of sagging forces and plaster and caked layers of paint. There were of course the shadows too, which cannot be contained as there is always a lone streetlight or moon that will send them towards such rooms as this where all are lull in the night hill air. I have vowed to leave in the morning, though Zach and I will eat before I do. Maggie leaves and has been silent though her words are precise and if I wasn't here I wouldn't feel like a whale before her or an eager slimy admirer from a pre-conscious culture when attraction was an arranged business affair suitable for the exchange of craft objects sundry to most today or beasts just as suitable for disease and lightning strike and the land's harsh droughts as any of their brokers.

And what would you know that after breakfast the next morning as I made my way east for the freeway northeast the brilliancy of modern engineering would appear like a jack in the box at a suburban four-way with green arrows and turning lanes just as I braked for a yellow warning light that said to me "don't do it! you will never leave." The elderly douche in a cutlass behind me honked to nobody and nothing as I stood on the sidewalk with humid morning fumes exhaling at and by and around me looking for a tower which would not be available citywide for another hour anyhow. Some official was bored and told me to wait in the car, i'll take care of the wrecker he said, and I sat there thinking that I should wave cars around me when the arrow became green again (oh what anticipated jackpots!) but decided the better of it for fear that things will inevitably become worse as they tend do in when one lives a life of responsiblities beyond his resources. Two blocks away stood the expanses of a Blue Oval Dealer and here I was welcomed with optimism and giter-right-up-fer-ye and prolly-just-needs-her-a and we'll-just-have-a-look-here as I waited sipping water thinking I may be an hour or so behind from boone. Six hours later I was swearing in a windowless lobby as Zach stood leaning against a stack of tires holding his stomach with soundless squinting laughter. "Am I supposed to redeem this out of some metaphysical ether?" and "all this conceptual rigomarole leaves me nothing to critically access." You northern city folks don't realize that we hear everything you say, Zach says, and they won't let ye know it but they hear it. Don't hold it against me, I say with guilt, I'm a Yankee. Before long my ticket out must be stamped by a verified core charge and the mother of a fleeting third grade crush is giving her credit card number over the phone to get me out of town. The day now has slowed and all things linger with a subtle slumber and I get back to the bungalow, The Domesticle healed, and the photographer and his girl are on their way to the river to swim. Zach's coming too, they say, and I find Zach hanging laundry down the hill in the neighbor's yard. I am holding Nutella and we eat it on store slices before driving back through town along the now ungathering roadway to the river where rocks stand three stories and have been for some 20 million years. From pool to pool between these rolling tubs and ledges I progress downstream until Zach yells of a snake in the water and I said no surprises here and it's almost six and we need to be back.

I have climbed halfway up a ledge suspended over a cool deep green pool and hanging there there is tension everywhere, not only in my arms but in my head and my memory and my intellect, and I breathe deeply asking God for thanks and forgiveness, and it is here that I let go and plunge into that chillingly sweet waterworld, hanging suspended, as rays of the sun channel yellow chutes through this universe. I am immersed here, and have come home and become again, and now must surface, and again go onward.

They'll Get Yer Creedence

2006-07-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

On the river

Saturday was the last day the State of North Carolina allowed alcohol on the Green River near Saluda so I went along with a colleague and a broo-ha of his neighbors from McDowell Street to spend an afternoon tubing down this quaint mountainy fleuve with a cooler of suds. Wicked hot, Saturday; er J-Sica might say hella hot, though I'm not much sold on either regionalism. Half way when I and those abreast had eyes peeled for a rope swing a storm blew in out of nizzle and the bright vernal sun got covered with bizzare dark like volcano ash. A squall line the size of eddies blew down the gorge ripping leaves off of hemlocks and sundry river bank species. The water was warm and until it rained I stayed in breathing the air which smelled of universal summertime. The rain came like swallows, chilled and abrupt, and urgent and deep. We huddled on the bank for some time before determining that the storm was not a typical temperate rainforest mountain storm like we often see but a real front, and by majority returned to the river road in the rain. this is what life is about i told the veterinarian and he nodded that's exactly right. i wouldn't want anything else right now he said and i watched the texture on the water change in torrent waves. Now the rain had grown temperate and came constant and smooth. shivering the afternoon progressed until we reached the landing point some hour later. The river ran higher and littered with leaves and branches. The water thickened with chalky muds and sand runoff from the banks hiding the oldest rocks in the world from the surface. All out, some without clothing or towel, and ruined keys upon the news of dinner at Green River Barbeque. Heather the Richly Accented gave an ode to sides. All came to Saluda, and ate, and rested, and returned to Asheville for books, and honeys, and lazy summer sleep among the dew and the crickets and the breezes in the trees outside of the windows.

Four State Swing

2006-06-19T20:12:00.000-07:00

Future Past

Thursday and Friday took me to Kentucky via Tennessee and Virginia and back to Asheville. Whitesburg, Kentucky is the town embedded deep in a steep valley we visited to see Appalshop, the community-based film and arts collaborative founded by the student who brought design-build to Yale with Charles Moore back in the heyday of systems theory. Today he practices in Whitesburg very much unlike you would expect a pioneer or Yale alumnus to practice. The office is tight, packed, staffed with three or four locals, and layered with drawings, blueprints, old models, sketches, magazines, code books, goverment directories, modeling supplies, and office sundries. Whitesburg is the center of this:

the book that brought about the War on Poverty. Not long after is publication, President Johnson and Bobby Kennedy were trooping through Appalachia making promises, and thousands of idealistic students came to the poorest region in America to bring about change.

But what change? There was tenor of city-slicking sophisticates from the northeast bringing ridicule to a region where most felt decency and compassion was inherent. this is a classic regional war which in many ways continues today. Most of us are implicated in it even if we find it appalling. Stereotypes of Appalachian people are certainly among the most deeply-seeded. Appalshop sought reconciliation in one local battle in this war:

Stranger with a Camera

Hobart Ison kills Hugh O'Connor while filming poverty in Kentucky on his tenent's property. Permission was not the motive, but humiliation. Elizabeth Barret made the film at Appalshop, and her husband Harry (?) told us stories of meeting Hobart (as nice a guy as any but quick to temper).

I too often hear the poor ridiculed. I encountered it in elementary school where poor kids from the township across the road (literally, across the road) came to the city school where neighborhood affluence gave it the reputation of being the preppiest of all the elementary schools. It continues at Harvard. One reason this persists is because kids don't learn relationships between individuals, and merit too often abides with arrogance. Bell Hooks, influenced by Paulo Freire, writes on this in 'Teaching to Transgress.'

Did anybody know that our word 'radical' comes via Latin 'radicalis' meaning "having roots." I guess radicalism is nostalgic.

Appalshop

Stranger with a Camera

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Papers

2006-06-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

Two papers from the first year at Harvard

There are two papers on my webspace, in PDF format:

HERE

entitled:

Twelve Speculations into the Ethical Conundrums of Digital Immersion

and

In Community with the Autonomous Strong

Some have requested that I post them. May is coming when I got to Appalachia.

Folksongs and Yarn

2006-05-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

who's got a djembe?

from the wetted woods we stepped into the road
of hard dusty gravel as travelers on foot and fear
in the lulling ether of time and dew pass beautiful dark places
rent and bonded in hallow light and dreary near
wrens rest in the cedar boughs to pick the buds of seemly traces
afoot at unsat porches plein vain the nightness to behold.

the magistrate's raven is a stark pretty baron,
who fiddles his way through the day.
the flying and singing are second to being
the thorn of our dear rose of sharon.
If the lady is blind who justice supposes
and the bells toll in slovenly swells,
if daysdim is handsome to night's dreary ransom,
the crow's crown be the truth he proposes.

simewy sinewy runs the cockle in the furrow.
she begs a break of thyme but it's it buried in the burrow.
the sun is up but stars are down as the twlight lulls the town
while chill'ns skut about in rhyme and set the books out for tomorrow.

The Record

2006-04-24T20:30:00.000-07:00

PreMay 2006

I. Invocation

Dante:
during this so brief vigil of our senses
that is still reserved for us, do not deny
yourself experience of what there is beyond,
behind the sun, in the world they call unpeopled.
and
quench deep in myself the burning wish
to know the world and have experience
of all man's vices, of all human worth
Canto XXVI

II. The Record

To lawns and porches of east ann street along 1010/210;
the planada-rest in peace-and the corner of 7 where the rhine spilled over;
catherine street and my boys loney and chap, the petition couch, squalor is high modernism fellas, spills high postmodernism, keep your head up lads steadfast against misanthropics;
here stands commie high, zingerman's breadly, argiero's and the sheds of saturday mornings;
lawrence street and my main man linford you harbored me;
south fourth of three summer's past fans turning in lateday, the west beckons across yard and leopold's where we have cleaned;
detroit street, washington, ashley on some sundays, liberty out west and over the hill, huron river to north territorial to m52, cedar campus and whitefish point where we forged meta and in silent rooms transversed time, men's retreat and focus week of frozenbay broomball and narnia;
i left you a gnome and a thing called meta (tb douce, d dunkel, taitcha: respek) blessed be these terrains and abodes.
to my people uprooted and gone ya'll better dig in;
the fellows;
justin b (tinney some time yore);
dave o and dumie we formed a midhall triad;
eadie, mick, snuph, schteeny, sprech my harvard colleague and carlsone the easy e;
delorean of car fame, meul, mccrack - see you all soon;
jen hubes, derek of cigars, bf5, and carolina fame (tiger, chaser, drock, dj) and your honey ms. single no longer - ya'll better remember where ya'll been and reroot for the land of vinyl brick and pears;
tom e thane of thanes much love to you and to the little ones;
troy and jess and as you have it boo, you are exemplars;
rich the aussie god bless ameerica and the leelanau, the manistee;
darren you're a legacy van der keesma;
hull i missed you what happened since pre-moore talks on couches?;
muncey dear matron you're a staple;
chelsea in the leelenau from sf to jonestown you've got roots honey;
bling, ryan, dawn and/or delahoya: stratford was vernal even in the grey of autumn, blessings blessings blessings;
keith at asp, john perkins down in jackson;
ann s of mo and la keep breathing;
jess whang of jersey like fish in and out of water please babe be strong;
k v dyke and the pressing;
raynor post focus week i miss the land that i never knew;
backypacky amy and rachel, we are all alone so let us hike;
the taubman crew: mississy, chang, lads with cigars and whiskey, alexa, hemingway, devereux and melissa who rocks blue spandex, mick and bodley, ddrek;
ddrek of many nights at arbor our home; graham, pennings, yang, melema, steveo, tb, tracy, and the ivers;
what has happened?;
what to you kg son of swan?: turn back around some day; you missed it;
alex, tait, andrew, megan, timmy, i love you.
three thumps and a sign over the heart for my people, the homeland, our mother the lake;
and to the crew in el: look and see what's following you.

Chanson: Neutral Milk Hotel, Holland 1945

Wet Land

2006-04-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

On the first of April

a knotted lot of reeds and weeds where six shacks shackeled in vines
and blossoms rise from ebb of knoll on elderly hunched totem poles
here the sky is white and the earthen vernal in low opacities an iron
road of euclid [points do not exist] runs course behind the yards of
the hallow and for all i know this train that has just glid past is from
nowhere and knowhere and is going nowhere and knowhere
chap holds a fragment of falsetto past that has worn like the ground
affecting to carry it to present memory and relicy and i am sitting
telling our other that some things belong on the earth even when
left when forgotted when ungraspt when found free in rest
i do n't believe in ghosts but they must believe in me as on the coast
when we came up with notions ideas and mights over rising sun cried
gull and tern - we refer to some things because they refer to us and all
their abode is in our own world where walls corrode slump and infer
an invitation so here we are within standing slumped below slouchingly
post and beam, slat and plank, nail and tooth breathing tooth and nail
to come to some melancholy terms with the falsetto past, reliquary wall
where at long last our brothers sit and plant into the earth the rooted past
forgetting rhyme time, affecting to rest and rise, turn breath and walk away

The Phenomenology of Winter

2006-04-04T14:36:00.001-07:00

II. How it feels to be something on

Sometime in January, 2006

Meul,

My flight from Newark to Detroit was marked by great comfort and the beautiful winter sun flooding the skies at 30,000 feet. I knew Detroit would be cloudy because the pilot said it would. I was prepared for that. But I didn't think that shit would last fourteen days. I'm losing it. For the first time in all my memory, the site of the thick, foggy mat of clouds in the sky this morning driving down the street made me feel like I was on the verge of flipping out like I was in the fifth day without water, or that stranded on a raft in the middle of the Indian Ocean following some TIF shipwreck my willpower collapsed as I plunged my face into the salty seas and took long, deep gulps of saltwater, only to cause severe delusion and violent hallucinations mere hours later as my body kamikazzied its last wits in the throes of dehydration. It made me feel like I was strapped to a chair in an empty, abandoned Soviet state hospital in the northern Baltic circle with a tape recorder in each ear playing a tape of Bush saying the word 'freedom' over and over and over and over again. I wasn't ready for fourteen days of this merda. My break, initially steeped in the optimistic hopes to reroot in the land and get my final papers done in hermitage, has given way to lethargy and sure weight gain. If I was not me, I'd be sitting in the basement right now smoking reefer and watching porno. This weather will get to you, no doubt. No doubt about it. I don't remember winter being this despairing from childhood, and I certainly didn't expect to get blindsided and drowned by the fucking constant saturation of drizzle fog and winterdew. Outside is the color of a rotting corpse. I may have no choice but to leave home and become a crow, or possibly a raven.

Your pal,
Patrick

The Phenomenology of Winter

2006-03-15T14:36:00.000-08:00

I. In the passenger seat, inside the shell

Here's a view. Just want to ride along; that's all.

Parade of Delusion

2006-03-02T08:38:00.000-08:00

The hypocrites of suburban Detroit

There is a freakshow of incredible dimwitedness going on in southeast Michigan right now. Those that have left the region will not be surprised. The undercurrents of the Detroit Zoo and water debates are those of the xenophobic paranoia that constitutes life in suburban Detroit, where the SUVs run on suspicion and fear as much as they run on gasoline. Incidentally, suburban Detroit is overwhelmingly Republican. 90% white, 90% Republican. Douche bags.

So the issue is that the Detroit Zoo is in dire straits. It is owned and operated by the City of Detroit, which is broke. The Zoological Society, a non-profit organization established to tend the zoo, proposed a transfer of operation from the City to their organization, which the Council refused, cutting off funding and forcing the Zoo to prepare for closing. This has renewed the debate in SE Michigan on regional taxes for things like--oh--public transportation, cultural institutions, important public entitites such as zoos--and whatnot. Keep in mind that suburban Detroit is 90% populated by Republican douches when you read these shenanigans.

Below is a post from a Detroit News message board on the topic of a regional zoo tax. A suburban Republican douche responded to the question if such a tax should exist:

NO!!!!!That Zoo,if you could call it that,is the one of the best examples of the inability to keep animals in captivity under proper terms.Not only are the conditions terrible for the poor animals,but the staff is the even worst.How about a smile,clean the bathrooms and possibly be friendly.Or does that cost more?bet each and everyone of them just love their jobs,NOT!Oh and i guess my families dollars will change that,NOT!As for our tax dollars paying for it.You bunch of pathetic fools,look around.Kilpatrick has you all fooled into thinking we should all pay for that cities failure to do a single thing that will benefit the educational system.Yet hey,thet got the schools covered right?I moved out of the city i was born and raised in 11 years ago(detroit that is).Why?Because i was not about to raise a family with three children in that pit.To send them into those hell holes called schools would be suicide!Now those who argue the educational benefit of the Detroit Zoo is a need we can not be without.Well in 2000,2001,2002 Our east china schools visited that pit on field trips.Not even half of the exibits were open,the ones that were the animals could not be found.What a shame,a true waste of dollars.My young ones were devastated!Not the same Zoo i grew up with,will never go there again.I will travel out of the state to visit real zoos,places where you can actually see the animals.So you just try to get a vote on this one,the 60%+ of us will vote it down.And if it is so important to save then start a new foundation and gets funds that way.Fire all the staff and get some people that really care for animals and people to work there.GOD BLESS AMERICA and OUR BOYS AND GIRLS OVER SEAS!!!!!!!!

I love the testoneronic inovcation of pseuopatriotism at the end; screaming against giving up 3 dollars of his PBR beer money each year, he holds his dick in his hand as God Blesses America. It's incredible how the thin-veiled racial implications of this douche's post is so integrally related to a zoo. What's incredible is that this douche has, after a five-exclamation-pointed expurgation of 'no,' justified according to his own experience, his own tangible concern, the reason for a regional tax. Suburbanites use the zoo too, and this particular suburban douche is appalled at its condition, offended that his children have to go there but glad that they don't have to attend "hellhole" schools in Detroit, yet is simultaneously tooth-and-nail, steadfastly set against its functional operation. Here's a less thinly-veiled post:

SCREW DETROIT!!!!! Detroit said they didn't need the suburbs, but now they are lovey-dovey when they need the suburbs money. There are to many taxes as it is.

This douche is from Trenton. Go figure. Here's another post with slightly amplified feelings of bigotry:

YES I WOULD ..ONLY IF THE CROOKS IN DETROIT DONT HAVE THEIR HANDS IN IT..IT WOULD BE A WAY FOR THE MAYOR TO GET ANOTHER NAVIGATOR.. SHOULD ASKED THE MAYOR OF DETROIT WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME HE WAS AT THE ZOO.. IF DETROIT HAS THIR HANDS IN IT ,,THEN I SAY CLOSE IT NOW AND FIND THE ANIMALS A NEW HOME IN ANOTHER STATE

Wow. I'm glad to see all of those suburban Republican douches being so critical. Here's something they don't realize, though. Their lifestyle of waste and consumerism--the freeways, the stripmalls, the 9-lane suburban thoroughfares, the subdivisions, the cinaplexes and megamalls, the infrastructure of individualism and instantaneity--is supported by regional and state taxes. The road infrastructure that implicity--necessarily and fundamentally--makes their lifestyle possible, is payed for my the citizens of the state of Michigan, even all way up in Chippewa County in the Upper Peninsula. The third-world, tribal stand against civic collectivity is--well, out of date. But what more can you say of suburban Republican douche bags?

Meanwhile...

The suburban governments of SE Michigan, organized under the guise of SEMCOG (SE Michigan Council of Governments), are comprehensively dependent on Detroit for their water infrastructure. The City of Detroit controls water for the entire region, though suburban governments see it as an intrinsic right that the City continue to provide this service according to their own lifestyle demands. In other words, suburban communities want Detroit's water, but they want Detroit to carry the brunt of the costs, and to maintain the infrastructure, and to be responsible for repairs, and upgrades, and new construction, and efficiency. From the point of view of suburban governments, as well as citizens, they pay for the water, not the responsibility of the water system; Detroit is the water landlord, who keeps up the property and makes repairs, but the suburbs are the water tenants, who pay monthly for the water one-bedroom, but not to paint it and fix the heat and maintain the lawn.

So how is it that the douche bags of Suburbanland are so outrageously opposed to the concept of regional systems, regional accountability, responsibility, viability (Jesse, is that you?), and indeed, livability? This is the state of the suburban Republican douche, who is intrinsically hypocritical and autonomously blinded, as in the case of the Detroit zoo polemicizer, who provided an exact justification for a regional tax to help an entity he admitted was regionally relevant. So why isn't the same true for water, which the SRDB uses to vernalize his lawn in the summer global warming-induced drought induced by the fumes of his SUV and lawnmower? Do you see what I mean?

Chanson: Sunny Day Real Estate, Pillars

Detroit 1863

2006-02-22T21:09:00.000-08:00

Riot, mob violence

Doing research tonight, I stumbled across a remarkable, primary account of the race and draft riots in Detroit in 1863. Part of the document included this poem, written by a black citizen in the city at that time:

THE RIOT.
BY B. CLARK, SEN., A COLORED MAN.

'Twas in Detroit city, the State of Michigan,
Where mob law reigned rampant, disgraceful to man,
In killing and beating both women and men,
And sacking and burning beyond human ken.

The crowd ran collected and beat every one,
Whose skin were not colored exact like their own,
And swore they'd have "Falkner," and hang him that day,
Or kill every "nigger" that came in their way.

The only pretext for this outbreak in fact,
Was "Falkner" committed an now nameless act,
Although given up to the law right away,
The mob sought to lynch him in broad open day.

Now be it remember'd that Falkner at right,
Although call'd a "nigger," had always been white,
Had voted, and always declared in his shop,
He never would sell colored people a drop.

He's what is call'd white, though I must confess,
So mixed are the folks now, we oft have to guess,
Their hair is co curl'd and their skins are so brown,
If they're white in the country, they're niggers in town.

To keep from a rescue, and take him to jail,
The soldiers were ordered to come without fail,
But they were insulted and stoned at--pell mell--
Till some of them fired and down a man fell.

The mob, disappointed, now hied to a place
Where some humble coopers, of the sable race,
Were honestly working to earn their own bread,
By rowdies were set on and left almost dead.

They enter'd, and beat them with billets of wood,
Then fired the cooper shop just as it stood,
And as they attempted to rush from the flames,
They met them with bludgeons to dash out their brains.

Then they took the city without more delay,
And fired each building that stood in their way,
Until the red glare had ascended on high,
And lit up the great azure vault of the sky.

The sight was most awful indeed to behold,
See women and babes driven out in the cold,
And old aged sires, that fought for the land,
Beat almost to death by a desperate band.

Whilst females were heard crying, "kill them"--Oh; shame,
They urged on the mob, yet there's no one to blame,
'Twas got up to please our friends of the South,
Now don't say a word--nay, don't open your mouth.

We go in for the Union just as it was.
And slavery also, and all the slave laws;
Now do not think hard if we do behave rash,
By burning those houses we pocket some cash.

'Tis said that those houses and inmates were bad,
And hence the excuse that the outragers had,
Yet was it the true love of virtue alone,
That made the mob anxious to pull a church down?

Strange as it may be, yet 'tis true without doubt,
Mobs do not discriminate if once let out;
So when they had fired the huts of the poor,
They ran with the torch to their rich neighbor's door.

This brought the community plainly to see
The danger in which all were likely to be;
The rich and the poor, the black and the white,
Stood a chance to be mobbed and burned out that night.

I blush when I think that such deeds should take place,
Not heathens or Turks, a civilized race,
Not where savage nations alone have the rule,
But here amidst churches, the Bible and school.

Humanity wept, she lamented the sight,
The groans, blood and tears of that terrible night;
Yet, oh, may the town of Detroit never see
Such a day as the sixth of March, sixty-three.

The Silent Life of Photons

2006-02-19T19:12:00.000-08:00

Days at Promontory Point

Sitting in church this afternoon, I was reminded by the light entering the windows at the base of Beacon Hill rising over the Common that I am beckoned south and west. Generally. Without doubt, I am sometimes beckoned east, sometimes north. In Chicago, I am pulled both west and east, the former out to the prairie and the grassy hills, the latter out over the lake and into Michigan. In cases of being beckoned north, this often has to do with the western light, and sometimes with cloudy weather, mostly in winter but at times and for different reasons in the summer. In winter, the western light, in late afternoon, recalls the crisp air of the northern hills where we took long weekends as children and plowed through sixteen inches of snow on our way to play on these wooded knolls. Here the western light streamed easily through the barren trees where my brother and sister and I dug in the snow and played innovative little games. When the cloudy winter light settles I am sometimes beckoned north, in recollection of that magnificent grey landscape on the same long weekends where we drove subtle curved paths through orchards and woods on our way to ski trails and country diners and sometimes haunts. In summer I am beckoned north as well, but again due to the western light, which brings vivid impressions of late afternoons when the air finally dries out and the insects settle back into the wood save the tiny bugs that hang in the air stubbornly like gumps, and when the lake water begins to cool and the hum of boat motors die down and the world and catydids are turned over to crickets and slightly breezes that come from nowhere but the stuff of night itself. Occassionally, I will be beckoned toward the north and east in both summer and winter as a result of the eastern light which is in essence (and essence) the western light minus the angles of incidence that otherwise would make it equally vibrant. the eastern light has a way in both winter and summer of morphing the landscape into the sky, blurring and erasing the horizon line or the tree line in a singular palette. Here, the moon is most silver(-set-against-blue). The same eastern light beckons me east across the horizonless lake on Chicago summer evenings. As though the city were silent save a slow-rendered soundtrack, the gnats and bugs are flickering head and brake lights up the avenue, the dotted glows of windows and the planes flying overhead, blinking red and white, into Midway and O'Hare. Time moves at a rate less than 1, the foot feels no concrete but rather a mere ground, the air is devoid of breeze and weight. Just the silent music of photons creating the western light beckoning you east, highlighting the bellies of planes and softening the textures of tree and brick, upending the road and pulling the horizon up along the dome of the sky, wrapping it up back into the sky where it fades into intensity to west at your back. One has the sense of watching pure life, without identifying names and places, objects and species. Plane is gnat is oak is brake light is stone is water is street is dome is sky is person is eye is light is west is east is north is south. Is then is now is winter is summer is hill and plain and house and forest and adult and child and teenager and geezer. When time moves at less than 1, the rest seems to accelerate, warp and collapse into a stream rushing by as you face east, west, south, north...

Chanson: TNT, His Second Story Island

Unfolding the Accordian, then Squeezing It Back Up Again.

2006-02-15T20:29:00.000-08:00

Idea and Ontology

I spent somewhere around four hours in the past two days trying to track down a song that I heard on This American Life. Thinking about any number of micro-dilemmas brought to course in the passing of a day, I set bow to break and dug in a virtual landscape of placelessness for an ontological cue. This post is about idea and ontology. Chords are ideas. They are measurable, discernable, recognizable and identifiable; they are finite and tangible. They are not invisible. Circumstantially, our sensate capacities come to measure, discern, recognize and identify such cues like music, and waves of fluctuating air become ideas. A single piece of music, as a deliberately considered construction, denoted on paper and executed with a different rule of measure, communicates intention. This too is discernable; intention begets consequence, begets consequence, begets consequence, and on and on until we ( I ) ruffle my whiskers and call it causality. Last night I had a conversation about altruism and justice, and it was in the end a silly conversation because the other person involved and I weren't acknowledging the words that we were dodgings by proclaiming them. Besides, it was late and I was exhausted and I wanted to sit under the flourescent lights in the studio and stare forward, sipping on the lukewarm beer that stood at hand. Justice is black and white, she said, referring to Scripture. I said yes, it is. But we know it only in greytones. I don't believe in altruism, I said. I don't believe such a complete conviction is possible--sip--we declare it isn't. We're talking around the center now. At the end of the day I don't know what God's justice is. There's no way for me to a priori determine whether God's standing on a divide hoarding the murdered into hell. I cannot do this because I only see greys, but never black and never white. Of course, she said. But you have faith that God is correct. Right, that's the temptation as well as the pain of it. Yet how can we then turn around, admitting that faith in correctness is the best we can do, and send our own into a hell of our own making? What is this nihilism? How can you stand by the exactly ambiguous with an ambiguous exactness? Is it so easy to swing back and forth between poles, and miss the dialectics of moving in between? Sip. I wanted to say that I believe in one justice because the very concept doesn't allow for duplicity, and that we don't have relative palettes of choice. Sip. But that's the paradox of Christian ontology; that we depend on the relative to know the universal. This is a melancholy of all things in parallel--greater knowing yields only the possibility for greater unknowing. A god of justice is a god of torment then, if justice is univeral and singular, but we cannot know it in such terms. The extent to which we know justice is described most essentially by the extent to which we don't know, and the extent to which we don't know is the extent to which we are exacted the torment of not knowing, of building up in an origin-less world according to what can be seen and heard and tasted and felt around us; the melancholy of all things in parallel. In such a world, we will spend skewed time digging for the ontological cue. It is a grounding, as sign measures intention, measures consequence, and consequence, and consequence, and consequence...Sip. The whole time with two hands in two poles, two ends of the arc of a swing, eyes cast down along the trajectory of in between, constantly dropping swings from the right hand to pick it up with the left, and back again. Sip.

Chanson: A Perfect Circle, Judith.

Someday I Will Draw a Map of Idiocies

2006-02-08T20:03:00.000-08:00

A journalistic note on the sublime

I have decided to post the beginning of the introduction to my term paper for an independent study I did this past semester in theory. This work shows that I am a poor critic, because I divert extensively from actually introducing the topic of the paper. And yet, I find it so impossible to resist the complexity of idiocy that such diversions help to indicate. Happy.

In the vacuum of modernism’s failed idealism, the infrastructure of the modern city is, in its global-economic situation, an infrastructure of the super-modern city. It is no mystery that the development of cities runs in tandem with the development of economies; this has always been the case. Even through tracing the history of capitalism, it is indisputable that the cities of the Renaissance thrived according to their mercantilist prowess, and colonial cities of the 18th and 19th centuries according to their locations en route between trade capitals. When capitalism latched onto the global-economic ideal, as only it could, following the trauma and opportunities of World War II, it brought with it a new idealism for the global-economic city, a step—or many steps—more ambitious than the domestic-scaled, comparatively modest union between technology and livelihood and living that Corbusier dreamt.
Within this new idealism, Corbusier’s vision matured and gave way to its natural zenith, just as capitalism gave way to a global economy, metastasizing into a deeper unity between worldwide forces and universal notions of the human condition, in which it posited the consumer as the commodity while providing the terrain for its harvesting regardless of place. Implicit with this vision is the selection and distinction of human ranks—who would do the production?; who would do the consuming?; what would be consumed?; and what are the spaces necessary to effect these relationships as necessity? In addressing these questions a hierarchy emerged within the global economy that invariably identified human geographies of control and others of ‘otherness.’ What I mean by using ‘human geographies’ is referencing the incredible link between terrain boundaries—political and, within these, social and often ethnic—and the capitalization of space. It was from the western powers that the free-market apotheosis developed, but the persistent accumulation that fed it was deployed across a different human geography, in which it could be “burned off” or incubated for future exploitation.
Rosa Luxemburg noted that “the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other peoples’ property, how commodity-exchange turns into exploitation, and equally becomes class rule.” David Harvey, in The New Imperialism calls the link between accumulation of capital and the tactics of using it to generate more capital, accumulation by dispossession. The term can be legitimately interpreted in a number of significant ways. On the one hand, Harvey speaks of the distribution of capital across spatial absorption, such as built infrastructure and labor forces, while noting that this absorption is, to some extent, speculative in that it can reenter the market as developed capital. On the other, the term intimates at the ‘dispossession’ by capitalistic institutions of the communities on which it depends to provide resources and consumption. Moreover, this begs the ethical conundrums of capitalism that illustrate the incredible social and psychological destruction that these exploitative tactics leave in their wake, witnessing the breakdown of cultural identities large and small and the uprooting of people groups from landscapes of belonging.
It is the combination of these two aspects of Harvey’s term that interests me most, in that it understands accumulation by dispossession as the continuous seeking and reaping of new locales of resources and consumption, like a turbine that can only speed up but needs an exponentially increasing feed of locales in order to make it run at all. The resulting forces embody, in a diagram, a spherical globe of dependency, requiring that all nodes in the weave be functional lest the entire network collapse. The sustainability of such a system grows more infeasible and perilous as the weave itself expands, forcing out the institutions and practices—be they businesses or local networks—that don’t have the resources to risk in participating—even paying the admissions deposit—in such a dizzying web of interdependency. The subdivision of peoples and classes fuels the turbines necessary to generate the economic vision of the global-economic city and characterizes the spatial infrastructure from which it operates. David Harvey writes on the political components necessary for this vision in The New Imperialism. I will not write directly about these components—hegemony and neo-colonialism/imperialism—but Harvey has many insights into the social and spatial implications of global-economic idealism, and in discussing political considerations succeeds in indicating (a mere taste of) its complexity.
In the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, the urbanism of the modernist city is eerily compared to the architecture of a microchip. The comparison, of course, is not intended for juxtaposition; it is a very editorial sequence despite (filmmaker’s name) insistence that the film, charting the destructive will of human exploitation of resources and its social and spiritual consequences, takes no such editorial position. The global-economic city is a microchip, machine-built for transferability and mass movement across infrastructure and economy. Transferability not only of commodities and technology but of individuals as well occurs at a sublime scale—in cars, snaking through freeway corridors like whitewater canyons, and in the public domain, walking atomistically across the vast, windswept plazas of modernist urbanism in which the only place to go is the building-object at the end of plaza. Through control, there is no alternative exit route. Both instances of individual transferability contributed to the economic gerrymandering of cities, in which spatial choking assured that people, as economic entities, would be appropriately directed—the car and the plaza, two edges of the same sword.
Each worked at extremes. The modernist plaza emphasized space for individual isolation, or, in the case of the housing project, the stockpiling of family units, while the freeway provided for the safe transfer of individuals across the city (and economic) boundaries and beyond, emphasizing the networks of a depopulated infrastructure, where only the destination mattered and the transit to the terminus. It was the middle ground that was eliminated at the cost of these polarized spaces; encounters of individual to individual and the communities that they formed were routed out by these spatial control strategies. It is such small-scale, quotidian interaction that is the irrelevant breed of transferability under the guise of the global-economic city. It is increasingly castigated as a ‘sentimentality’ prohibitive of progress, development—growth—and is conceded to only in illusion—a bone thrown to desires for a vital and prolific public realm.
This effect is demonstrated in a number of American cities, both large and small. Towards this influential and hard-to-control sentimentality, the global-economic city is presenting certain strategies of deference that operate according to the social categorizations that fuel its progress. Luxury condos fronting the pre-global-economic wastelands of industry are fitted with scarcely-occupiable balconies, and global chains occupy the ground floor and street front of parking structures. The so-called (and so-marketed) “lifestyle center” animates a contrived “lifestyle” experience. Strip malls with pastiche, pseudo-nostalgic individual façades surround parking bays that open up through the exit-lane narrows to the ocean of global-economic marketing dysfunction. Yet despite the apparent sentimentality of these product innovations, the origin of their economic niche stems from localized balances of capital within the global economy—a spatio-economic instance. Entire neighborhoods in American cities are experiencing economic regeneration according to the marketability of urban lifestyle development. But much like the suburban lifestyle center, they too are terrains of accumulation by dispossession, fortifying undeveloped or underdeveloped land with excess capital in the guise of credit backed and accounted for by both development financiers and the consumers that will amass within its spatio-economic boundaries.
The irony is rarely noted. Pseudo-traditional architectural façades of pre-cast, airbrushed concrete conceal the spatio-temporal fix behind a sentimental veneer. They are not mere architectural affronts; they are façades of information—credit systems; digital networks of commerce and information tracking; identity marking and identity proof; height and weight on the driver’s license linked to blood type on the birth certificate, and the social security number on the same linked to the credit report, linked to buying power and credit limits, consumer class and marketing demographic—and façades of community—security cameras and surveillance, canned music of popular imagination and totem communality as mechanisms of the marketing psychology—and façades of transferability—so your neighbor sells you a new garment over small talk down at the boutique; its foreign creditors affirm the dispossessive stratagem of their manufacturing operations within third-world labor pools.
But even these deferences are deployed within the polar framework of control described earlier. It was the architecture of modernism and its particular and strategic place in modernist urbanism that removed the planes of individual expression and tangibility, accentuating and rather forcefully asserting the neutrality of constructed space. The posture of this neutrality is towards the propensity of the individual to inhabit to her surroundings according to the spatial modes of control that architecture facilitates. An architecture of neutral assembled spaces—both public (the windswept plaza) and private (the housing block apartment)—is one that resists the autonomy of an individual and limits her capacity to respond; it is a cap on personal volition in an environment where the architecture, both alone and within its urban framework, requires the lack of volition by its very assembly, its very purpose for assembly—to scourge the middle ground, the places of meaningful cultural interaction between individuals in what amounts to a sort of micro-localism antithetical to the spatio-economic paradox of individuality by de-individuality.
Therefore, a conception of the human condition in a theoretical or speculative sense was necessary to effect such spatio-economic strategies within the global-economic ideal. The early application of modernist dogma was, after all, a utopian application, in its purest form a dream of human liberation by the machine and the I-beam. But as suggested earlier, it was capitalism that latched onto this dream and expanded—by realizing—its scope and methodologies. Before long, the old bottom-up folk conceptions necessary for vital culture were more akin to the modernist dream in its own origin, becoming a folk tale itself, espousing the utility of humans to comply to the programmatic diagrams of dwelling and communities of dwellings within its own cultural platform. Modernism missed its historical origins and fancied itself a self-born, autonomous entity, indicated by the philosophical champions and fore-founders of modernism—Nietzsche, perhaps Kant—in assuring that history up to the apotheosis of humanity is a story of sickness and the denial of sheer autonomy and the pure will to power. Kant would remind us that phenomena are distinctly autonomous, being disjoined from any noumenal ontology.

Chanson: Air, Dead Bodies

The Need for Roots

2006-02-03T20:51:00.000-08:00

An inversion: Resurget Cineribus? Peramus Meliora

For those Latin-heads out there, Detroit's motto means "We hope for better things; It shall rise from the ashes." The more pertinent question, however, is the opposite: will it rise from the ashes? We hope so. Detroit ought to change its motto to simply: "Resurgit Cineribus?" that is, "will it rise from the ashes?" Detroit, Detroit. Some of us love to say it because it makes us feel grizzled. I've often wondered what the name sounds like to someone who didn't grow up hearing it constantly referenced. What does, for instance, 'Phoenix' sound like to me? I can answer that: it sounds like a mall ploy, a theme park, a practical joke, a corporate marketing concoction, and a fake. What the world is seeing--willingly, this time, thanks to the endless parade of mindless but voluntary hype--is that Detroit is none of these things. I grew up with Detroit in my life. Aside from visiting fairly frequently (with respect to my peers), I knew that my history had roots in Detroit; important roots. What kills me is the polarity of the thing. Through and through, Detroit is a city all about and constitutive of polarity. Not even considering the obvious wealth, race, landscape, and economic polarities that Detroit maintains even within itself, I am torn between acknowledging the dismal dysfunction of the entire metropolitan clusterfuck and the meaningful tangibility of both its triumphs and its decay. And, of course, I have the polarity of nostalgia. Ladies and Germs, someday I will write an essay, or a book, entitled "In Defense of the Sentimental." In it, I hope to articulate what I cannot now, as I fall asleep writing this poorly written entry. That is that nostalgia matters, it is real dammit. Sentimentality is required reading. Did I have beer tonight? No, but maybe I should have. Gonna git a whippin from the school marm if you don't do the reading. Detroit's embarrased (embarassed?) itself so profoundly already. One big happy show. Happy, happy, charade. No cars in Motown. Isn't that ironic, like stupid Danny Liebeskind. Better than belligerant (belligerent?) Zaha. ZAAAAHA. Oh man, I think I'm giong to go to sleep. Here's an experiment: I'm going to doze off and type what I dream. Ready? Big boy and dad driving by the car dealiership in rochester. ah this only partly worked. you can feel your brain stimulated when you have to suddently do somethign conscious when youtr'e otherwise only semi so.

Snow in East Court Cambridge

2006-01-25T22:51:00.000-08:00

Kleines Requiem

Chanson d'installation: Waterdeep, On a Night that Felt Outdated

Melancholy of the Unrequitted Will

2006-01-19T15:42:00.000-08:00

Weaving and unweaving the hostility of submergence

Returning home to a community-less shell, I became convinced yet again--just in case I still could have been making it before--that Northeasterners have no capacity for environmental awareness. Standing in the bookstore this evening, seven or eight people passed in front of me while I was searching for books without any utterance even close to "excuse me" or "pardon." Out on the street, I dodged them walking in the other direction, and halted my step when they merged in front of me. Of course, I'm a victim too. I don't really know where I am; only that I stepped from a plane sometime around three desensitized by the last four weeks and the last four hours. It was through a blanket of clouds that the midwestern landscape faded into white and greyness, just as it was through a blanket of clouds that it emerged back in December. That was four weeks ago. Four hours before I worked my way through a jetway maze and into the low-slung concourse at Logan, a story six years long was still unwinding in a web of obscure plot mutations, hop-scotch settings like in dreams, tangential contrails of subject matter that emerge and disipate and re-emerge, and the intangible gut-wrenches of memory. I wrote four hours before that we were in a time that moved like tectonic plates, inches by inches. This referred to a community that existed when the great storyteller of human tragicomedy began to weave this tall-tale. All that is left is to nod and offer stupified congratulations--hallow, without both sentiment and comprehension. This is not a gesture of dwelling on and on or suddenly snuffed-out hopes; instead it is the flash of green that lore claims is emitted with the last of the sun when it ducks under the horizon; or the subtle and temporary slip of a major seventh that renders a chord ambiguous and solidly unsure; or the long exhaulation after holding your breath. In other words, the end of the story isn't about the antagonist (towards whom the epic turns to make her the protagonist), nor is it about the retrieval of dead hopes or haunting nostalgia. Instead, it is simply about the passage of time, and the recognition that it has run out for this story. All stories require testament; they require the witnessing of their treads; they require vigil, and they require the passing of the last drip of wax that falls onto the landscape, and the terazzo floor, and the microscopic drip of ink that pen upon a pad the last words of the story: "what was it that made you hold on in the face of such despising?" This is what I have come to call the melancholy of the unrequitted will. In the end, nobody can be sure it's anything more than just the weaving and unweaving of two opposing, stubborn fictions.

Chanson d'installation: Red House Painters, Revelation Big Sur, and Grandaddy, Underneath the Weeping Willow

On the Renewal of Cities

2006-01-02T21:23:00.000-08:00

Revival is not Re-creation

There is talk in cities all around Michigan today of renewal. It is a product of 90's oil and tech-boom optimism, when the society was invigorated by the end of the Cold War and could now think about cultural diversity, social issues, the environment (remember how enpassioned Earth Day celebrations were in the 90's), and other things that came with the ease of a blossoming globalism. In these years, people and the business world realized that our cities were embarassingly decrepit and that it might be nice (or profitable) to do something about it. Of course, now that globalism has had its way with us, the socio-economics of the 90's optimism of renewal is coming into being. Today, "renewal" of our cities is about shipping in a whole new population--one that can afford manicures, organic foods, cashmere cardigans, season tickets to the opera, and those cute demi-SUVs that perkily dodge the real issue. The vocabulary of plans--plans for renewal, plans for the downtown, plans for the economy--is one built on phrases like "luxury condos," "lifestyle center," "town plaza," "lofts," "urban residences," "cosmopolitan," and "upscale." The worst and most telling of these is 'upscale.' The reality is, no developer or city leader has any faith in a development that is /not/ 'upscale.' There is talk in Lansing of a new condo development that is supposed to "revive the downtown," according to an article. Aside from the obvious daydream absurdity that a single development can fix a city's central core (which will make the /whole/ city a shiny happy place again, right?), the most glaringly what-wha moment of this charade is the question of renewal for whom? If a city banks on 'upscale' condo developments with 'upscale' galleries and 'upscale' boutiques and 'upscale' restaurants and 'upscale' markets and 'upscale' cafes for renewal, how can renewal occur for a city of 130,000 people? Or is it renewal for the 58 people who manage to buy a 200,000 dollar condo and happen to occassion the new day spa every so often on the weekends? What could does a day spa or a fine clothier do for the GM factory workers laid off last month when GM closed an entire plant in Lansing? The problem is that governments and developers now talk about renewal in terms of kinds of spaces, in terms of building appearance (a cartoony sort of pseudo-quaint converted warehouse chic), and in terms of 'upscale' activities and perks. But this isn't renewal, this is re-creation. This is the totem black speaker at the Republican National Convention, the awnings installed on abandoned hotels in downtown Detroit for that convention in 1980, the yellow ribbon decal on the soccer mom's SUV that says "Support Our Troops," the suburban west-Michigan Christian family's Adopt-An-African boy, the Harvard Athletics sweatshirt. It's a charade, a totem; but not reality, not the tangible meat of the dilemma, not even a near conception of the crisis that it mockingly only passively refers to. Cities cannot be revived by importing archetype characters. Hipsters in the cafe do not fix failing schools, and Bougies in the day spa do not fix landlord slums or the street lights. Renewal isn't about importing court jesters, it's about repairing the existing.

On Memorials

2005-12-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

A contrast

It was brought to my attention today by a friend in the studio that Daniel Liebeskind, the new starchitect forger of the World Trade Center master plan, is the figure of a new round of anecdotes highlighting his absurdity. My friend mentioned a 9-11 memorial just finished by Liebeskind in France that takes it conceptual origins from the prophesies of Nostradamus, who, according to Liebeskind's esoterics, predicted 9-11. The same sort of games are occuring here in the US as well, and it's important to frame these currents within their appropriate categories of charades.

Viewing renderings (the flashy computer illustrations of a proposed building or space) of the new 'Freedom Center' I was struck by the thesis of mourning that is evident throughout. The people illustrated in the renderings are mostly shown in postures of reflection or mourning--dropped shoulders, flowers in hand, etc. This is a hilarity, of course, because the architects responsible for the renderings are characterized by two primary different modes of oblivion, which I would like to mention here:

1. Fetish of the icon

Architects, for all their intelligence, are not bright people. They are near-sighted individuals for the most part, who tend to be products of cultural rootlessness or phenomenological-historical identity rebellion (that is to say, they have no tangible conception of who they are that can stand alone and therefore requires a constant state of rebellion to, in essence, assume an identity by railing against identity. Such recursive infinite loops are not only logically bleak but they tend to stem, I have observed, from bored childhoods and the escapism that relativism provides insecure teenagers in the post-modern and third-wave modern world--a world that I might describe with the metaphor of satellites floating in random space, refusing direct contact but arbitrarily floating around an ether of vacuousness). As a result of this phenomenological-historical identity rebellion, the architects that designed the Freedom Center (part of a vain of architects called 'The Vanguard' to which Harvard continues to make significant contributions) have no sense of a.) subtlety, b.) narrative, as in continuity, c.) cultural synthesis, or d.) the logistics of cultural myths. That is to say, they create self-standing, self-referential, self-assertive icons that have nothing to do with anything but stake their origin in esoteric, ephemeral characterizations and conceptual obejcts such as 'The Park of Heros' or 'the Wedge of Light' or 'the Freedom Center' or 'the Fountain of the Absent Void.' Who the hell knows what this stuff means. So you see here that icons such as 'The Freedom Center,' due to its inchoate and unclear purpose, depend strongly on cultural myths, such as the idea of 'freedom.' This is not to say that 'freedom' is not a viable concept, but it is to say that it is an ephemeral concept that no building can encapsulate, but is instead a term tossed around by sycophants like the President to exploit votes and gain support of Americans that cling on the stirring cries of 'freedom' in response to the myth that anyone who professes the world lives in an enlightened state of true bliss, liberty, honor, and righteousness (who then return to their cheaply-made unregulated trailers that are invariably built over toxic streams of mining operations runoff from which they will draw mercury water to wash down the Stouffers microwavable, mass-produced, synthetic dinners. This is what I mean by the 'myths' culture, which, in order to address, architects use logistical gimmicks such as flag iconography, programmatic fillers such as a 'hall of reflection' or 'rooms of hope' in order to simply put people /somewhere/ in the massive space allocated for a 'Freedom Center' which gives no implicit guidance or rule because it depends on an ephemeral, contrived concept and a myths of dummied-down popular culture.

And this is where cultural synthesis comes in. Cultural synthesis is relating new spaces and buildings to the stories of the landscapes and architectures that surround a given space. But because too many architects are interested in creating self-referential icons, the possibility for true cultural synthesis is next to none. I think of an example in New York such as the Met. It is a monumental, dignifying building that speaks to its somewhat intrusive location at the edge of Central Park by voluntarily confining itself to the privilege of resting on Central Park real estate. This is in contrast to efforts today, such as in the siting of the Freedom Center downtown, which simply adapts a basically modernist plaza to infill the self-referential, iconic box that is the builidng itself. Because we have, to some small degree, learned from our mistakes and the empty, wind-swept modernist plaza is no longer acceptable as an architectural, urban, social, or environmental typology, architects now correct the issue by adding trees. Okay--this is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't change the fact that the plaza is still devoid of content. In fact, trees, just obscure the fact. It's better to have a tree-less, windswept plaza to make the icon as clear as possible, than to drop trees into the same concrete ocean that would manage to actually make the space less inhabitable, foster more places for the dubious freedom haters to hide--waiting to take your freedom--and make render the building an unintuitive sort of awkwardly looming chunk of mass out beyond those trees--somwhere, over there, right behind all those...trees...that are just...there. The difference with the Met in Central Park is that the park is also crafted for edifying human interaction and therefore tells a story along with the museum builidng about approach, landscape, the ture purposes of public architecture, and the /true/ freedom of an individual in the city--to move about unconstricted by iconic apathy in an environment that was designed for her to do just that--in which she might come to know an edifying sense of place and home that is interestingly complit with the publicness of the Met that rests just there up the path, past the crooked elm and up the knoll from the benches and the patch of apple blossoms.

And cultural synthesis requires a continuous narrative. Recall the third-modernist ether of floating satellites in space that interact with each othe only through radio waves and are otherwise arbitrarily floating in a rootless environment that is, incidentally, a vacuum. Cultural discontinuity yields a similar circumstance. But since so many architects today are trained in their naiveness (of which they are naive--it's a twofer) to reject the "sentimentality" of the non-modernist past and shun it as an inherently contrived fallacy, too many architects take the bait and bottlerocket themselves into the vacuous ether. I could go on for decades on this particular form of nihilism, but it would be too exhuasting.

And of course, icons--for the most part--lack subtlety. This is why they are icons. For some reason, the Vanguard thinks the world can only improve through increasingly shocking, bizzare, sci-fi, enigmatic, intentionally ugly, dysfunction-celebratory buildings and environments in which they sit. One need only flip through the publications that populate the bookshelves shelves of the Vanguard to see this nihilistic craze in full regalia. Another possibility is to look at Liebeskind's winning plan for the world trade center site. Or, you can read my post below on the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast for an example of such architecture. Enough said here, too.

2. Nihilism

Most shockingly, these architects don't give a fuck about compassion. My peers are the disciples of the Vanguard, they are the new recruits, eager for the hazing rituals that will cast them too into the ranks of the Vanguard. It is without doubt an overriding trait of the architectural community (and nearly all would acknowledge this through the course of conversation; even the stalwart archtiects of the Vanguard that I have spoken to have acknowledged this after some prodding) that it is full of cynicism, destructive behavior, bizzareness, spectacle, esoterics, and social dillusion. In other words, the architects of the Freedom Center make cynical spectacles by showing people mourning in their renderings of their iconic, un-subtle, culturally discontinuous, unsynthetic architecture of myth as the last business on the Friday of some week before heading out to get hammered and doped up through the early morning hours at a media-fetish club where they will go home with some techno-chic stranger and may or may not obtain Herpes, though they will probably decline the cocaine. The Saint of the Vanguard, Rem Koolhaas, lost a commission for fucking his client's wife, and it /is/ fucking, folks. There's no beauty (read: subtlety, narrative continuity--it's an affair after all!--emotional synthesis, or logistical reality) to having sex with your client's wife because you're Rem Koolhass and you're Kool, dammit. It is indulgence; animalistic impulse. This is how the architectural community at the Vanguard is composed, and they're designing your memorials. This is why charades like the 'Freedom Center' will fail, and have perhaps failed already, as a fact of their articulations in the cheap of tricks of the rendering games.

In contrast, yesterday I met Maya Lin, the famous designer of the Vietnam Memorial, who politely rejected celebrity stardome after she courageously asserted her vision for what is today America's most beloved memorial when she was just a senior in college, 21 years old. Ms. Lin is a person of incomprable sensitivity and interpersonal connection. Speaking with her, I had no sense that I was talking to one of my heros, and the figure that the art and architecture world love to keep so mysterious. But she isn't mysterious. She is open and lucid and will speak to you with no trace of pomp in any of her bones. She smiles and considers her words but converses as your librarian, or aunt, or teacher, or clerk might. Interestingly, she's rigorously Midwestern. She wears a bob, and simple clothes that are elegant and suitable. She does not wear thick black glasses, and she keeps her phone number unlisted. Her work is a product of her rare sensitivity to the narratives of people and people, to cultures and cultures in landscapes. Her work is about the propensities of the tangible, the modest that in their modesty reveal the sublime and the incredible. But she does not set out to narrate the sublime and the incredible. These awareness emerge from her work because she acknowledges that the propensities of space are larger than she is, and her task is to channel the inherently collective accessibility to the meaning of space and place to the audience that finds itself present in the same. She was encouraging and not condescending. She was enthusiastic when I told her that I learn more about architecture driving through the countryside of Michigan than I do browsing the glossy periodicals of the Vanguard.

In contrast, Rem Koolhaas, a faculty member at Harvard, dropped by school today and the entire school--even the professors--ditched studio to attend a conversation he was to have with an associate about journalism and criticism. All came to worship the Nihilist, attending with the self-righteous dreams of the pomp and esoteric egoism that awaits them if they buy the lie of the vacuous ether. The conversation was incredibly dull. I left, and returned to my desk, learning more about architecture working alone in the silence of the studio while my peers and faculty worshiped in the auditorium the icon of iconicism, wasting away under dillusion and the leaches of nihilism. Rem is an irreverent man, and I wonder what his story is.

pas de chanson d'installation.

Medication

2005-11-28T17:22:00.000-08:00

The Phenomenology of Autumn, Part II

In keeping with many years past, the long Thanksgiving weekend began in brightness and joy and ended in the silent despair of a world suddendly winter. The moist fallow landscape that streams by the car window hits you with the first realizations that it is the season for surviving. It is in these conditions that the Thanksgiving holiday assures to nudge our memory with the recollections of past injustices. In the celebration of family, tradition, bounty, and all of the other things programmed into the last Thursday of November, we are inevitably faced like no other time of the year to both recognize and then posit the absense of these things, and those times in our lives that we have underminded the modest justice that Thanksgiving typies through the warmth of all the familiar things that suddenly surround us for these four days. I would be not only a liar but a hypocrite and insensate if I did not acknowledge the wholeness of memory and the good that it contains by ignoring its scabs. Since Thanksgiving is itself a time a humble but profound subtlety, so are the the inchoate memories of past injustice. They are not black slashes in the flesh of recollection but rather grey areas that are simultaneously determinant and inchoate. Here are the memories of how we couldn't help to be, of what we were not aware of, of what we did not know and did not think to know. They are the grey areas of humanity's innocent guilt. They are discreet moments that in retrospect speak of much wider narratives in the courses of our lives. This is the melancholy of the season--that we can in the same course of time come to know how we have denied each other and come to know with whose companionship we might come to resolution and resolve about the inevitable injustices that haunt the vividly ephemeral past. These memories are indeed ghosts. They exist in the substance of spaces and phenomena but ultimately dwell in the annals of recollection. They enter the ranks of myth and lore, and find gentle abode somewhere in the mind's sense of justice and compassion, its disposition for reconciliation and worth, dignity and collectivity. Driving through the rainy farmscapes of the midwest yesterday, the ghosts of recollection rode with me, appearing in every grove of trees, every reflection on the slick concrete, every foggy horizon, every eave of every barn that stood sentry to the sacred passage of time and place that is leaving one's essential conception of home. The rooms and the spaces of the innocent, guilty past spread out from their places of origin and traveled with me, tethered behind my eyes and the tailgate of the car as it sped future-ward as I thought of where we were moving but wondered why. I am guilty of compassionlessness, and I am guilty of denying my brother and my sister, of refusing embrace, or ridicule, of disparaging, of rage, of indignity, and of neglecting the outstretched hand, be it my own or another's. But before me is only and the judge of memory, and the appraiser of the asubstantive narrative, presiding over the moments of the ephemeral past suddenly reborn in the tangible present. The tangible present and the rainy, foggy future that always seems to rest at the horizon of the last day of Thanksgiving.

Chanson d'installation: Damien Jurado, Medication

Simply Put

2005-11-07T19:22:00.000-08:00

Go ahead--I want you to call me an angry liberal

You know what? I'm not going to critique the conservative right. It's not worth it. Their ship is burning into the deepest chasm of the seas, so that's enough for me. Anyway, my aim isn't to elevate the disorganized Democratic party to some level of honor in the wake of Republican failures...of which there are many. One after the other after the other after the other in fact. Gosh, should I point out a handful? Nah...they're going through enough trouble. Their party is turning on them. Their leaders in the House are being cast aside from their subjugated freshmen and junior members, who appropriately are beginning to speak out against their totalitarian nihilism, now that their champion is a convicted felon. Cheney is running a fourth-rate operation with a staff concerned mostly with intimidation, and the Defense Department doesn't know what the fuck is going on in its various political war games. Rove continues to resist a ban on torture (in the words of his own boss and the Savior of the Constantianian Religio-Politico Complex G-Dubs, "we do not torture." Apparently, he means a literal "we." He must have had his fingers crossed, or thought he was just referring to himself, Rove, Cheney and the lot of the opposers to the ban who themselves--true--do not engage in physical torture. They instead leave it to the poor 18-year old Reserve recruits to do the dirty work). War support is fataly low. Democrats now have the edge in moral perception. Deficit continues to skyrocket. More tax cuts for the wealthiest. Unprecedented cuts to Medicare/Medicaid, housing, and other programs that serve the underpriviliged in our country. Lowest confidence rating in the President. Lowest approval rating in the President. Lowest credibility rating in the President--all separate ratings. Supreme Court fiascos. Staff indictments by federal prosecutor. Congressional investigations in senior congressional leadership. Bleak prospects for tomorrow's round of elections in places like Virginia where, if Bush's last minute stumping in support of the Republican candidate fails to win the election tomorrow, it will be another in a series of defeats for Bush. Repbulican senators and congressmen speaking out against the war. Republican senators ignoring White House budget mandates. Democratic senators stage a forced closed session to hold the Senate accountable to its responsibilites towards the populous, questioning the intelligence used to bamboozle and coax the country into war. Cheney approval at 19%. Support for Bush's terror tactics at all time low. Detainee abuse at Gunatnamo. Pentagon "Stop-Loss" orders sending troops into the fourth and fifth tours. Increasing war casualties now over 2,000 and rising. Triplefold increase in global terror attacks in 2004 since 1985. Federal bankruptcy legislations further disempowers the poor, and sent a flood of Katrina and Rita victims to federal courts in the day before the bill went into effect. White House smearing its own reports on the truth of global warming. Fruitless summit trip to South America this week that only caused massive protests and ridicule of Bush from South American leaders. The exploitative Central America Free Trade Agreement gets passed in the House by vote-period extension and arm-twisting to defeat the NAY vote, which won legitimately by five votes. It was leaked that the CIA operates secret political prisons around the world. This bizzare circumstance is vindication for all those blamed for radical conspiracy theories. It's like something out of a Hollywood expose. Well you know what folks? This is the shit our government gets involved in. Billions and billions and billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars invested in a meaningless war. The good that could be accomplished with such public funds is almost unspeakable (lest one be accused of idealism). Oh wait, Republicans don't support government spending of public funds. Unless it's a war. Or secret prisons. Or torture operations (obviously, Rove and Cheney want to maintain these practices, which cost money). Or environmental destruction. Or corporate hand-outs. In an amazing display of the true power of democratic will, Democrats made a powerful protest to the corrupt tactics of the Republican House leadership. When, after the rule-based 15-minute voting period was done, and the Republicans didn't have enough votes to pass a bill--with the bullshit, propoganda title "Gasoline for America's Security Act of 2005--that would subsidize refinery construction for oil companies (without requiring them to sell the products of these refineries in the United States--an obvious exploitation of the tragic irresponsibility that shamefully magnified the plight in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) and waive environmental standards to allow it, the leadership held the vote WHILE DeLay, Hastert, and Barton (Republican from TEXAS and the bill's sponsor) went up and down the aisle twisting arms of their Republican colleagues who voted against its obvious cronyism in order to get them to change the vote. In other words, DeLay, Hastert, and Barton threatened their colleagues like middle school bullies so they wouldn't suffer the consequences from their under-the-table funders for not passing beneficial legislation. God Bless America. For 23 minutes, the voting time was extended until the last three Repbulican Representatives adhered to the intimidation of their powerful bosses. Meanwhile, the Democrats in the House, powerless to stop the blatant corruption, set fist to desktop and chanted "shame" in unison over and over again. CNN characterized this as "an angry protest," an objectively true statement except when Wolf Blitzer says it, when it takes on the tone of "the whiny Democrats unencumbered with pithy anger at the world and your families couldn't help but stage another one of those famous liberal protests." So what about this myth of the "liberal media?" Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame....

All of it. Fucking shame. Appalling, anti-democratic, nihilistic, cronyistic, anti-American shame. And you know what? None of these things even gets at the philosophy that the conservative right, the GOP, and the current administration take against human dignity, justice, democratic liberty, representative government, peace, public well-being, care for the needy and the underprivileged, defense of the oppressed and exploited, corporate rule and privilege, global security, environmental protection, global warming, public health--domestic and global, a TRUE conception of what it means to be pro-life (which is different from the mere pro-birth stance of the conservative right and Bush supporters in the Church), racial equality, culture, the arts, the free press, dissent and disagreement, public education, higher education, urban reconstruction, rural reconstruction, public housing, urban crime, youth empowerment, socio-economic protection, and all of the other needs of compassion and dignity that pervade the world on a constant, unlimited scale. It is, perhaps, for this sort of neglect that the Republican ship of dillusion, propoganda, denial, sedative bliss, and rampant bullshit is sinking quickly. I think it rests deep down in the machinations of individuals--people like Rove, Cheney, and certainly Bush--that works its way from the bottom-up and makes itself known in scandal, corruption, fraud and lying that only makes it clear the dilemma-at-hand. But it's not the reason for the wreck. The reason for the wreck is the foundational and comprehensive denial of human dignity. Am I mad? Fuck yes I am. And any patriot should be just the same. This patriot is, that's for damn sure. So's Eminem:

Chanson d'installation: again--Eminem, Mosh.

November Again

2005-11-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

The Phenomenology of Autumn, Part I

Red House Painters, in their song 'Have You Forgotten' describes with compelling accuracy what childhood in the late Eighties was like. Between the ages of 2 and 9 were a time, for me, of long hair on boys and short shorts with high socks, new records on those special Fridays, and the Pontiac Boneville wagon with wood-grain on the side. It's difficult to put my memories of my parents then in tune with what my parents are like today, but I'd like to think that it was a melancholy time for them too--melancholy as in the way the upstairs was dead still on summer afternoons on the weekends, with that light shining in on the pale yellows, the pale blues, the pale pinks, and my sister's bulging bangs and our children's books. Everybody has photographs of these moments that none would deny their melancholy tone. Christmas pictures with browns and deep greens, bright reds, and earth-toned clothing. Summer pictures with a thin layer of sweat on the brow, newer tract housing in the background, and tables set with glasses stamped with yellow, red, and green things on the outside.

I'd like to think that it was melancholy for my parents because I see some of my friends in the same position today that my parents were in at the time of these memories--the time of Red House Painters' 'Have You Forgotten.' ("when we were kids, we hated thing our sisters did"). It is the position of being young but realizing that you are getting older; of still being a dreamer of your life-to-be but realizing that what you face every morning when you get up in the cold bedroom is your life-to-be just as much as it is the moment; of longing to go it without the veneer, the anticipation of the regular, but knowing deep down that regularity is too often the best way to keep going at all. I imagine that my parents, particularly my mother, had a hard time facing these things with three kids surrounding them at all moments, each a year older or younger than his or her nearest sibling. I might even venture to say that my brother and sister and I would grasp and articulate a common solidarity of seeing our parents in this position in the late Eighties. We did not, of course, know it at the time, but children understand in ways that they just aren't able when they hit adolescense and never recover when they grow into adults (for the most part). We would know that it was a hard time for our parents, even though they loved us very clearly.

But trying to go without the veneer of a wife and kids, of the post-war way, of the exploding global world where credit cards and cable television were coming around, without the anticipation of normalcy--not knowing what five years would bring but then again knowing in that part of us that projects the melancholy of real life into the visions of life-to-be exactly what five years would bring; not being able to let go in the ways of days gone by but simultaeously clueless about what to do next, today, now, here, for these children and this spouse and this house and this person, this soul, this identity, this story, this being, this mind--all of it...is hard. I know it was hard on my mom and dad to work their lives out in that slowmotion sunny haze of the dusty Eighties for themselves, for each other, for their children, and for their vision and hopes for life-to-be.

And yet, I know that my parents were free-thinking enough to figure it out. I see some of my friends with children doing the same. And if I asked my parents today about those inchoate days from 1982-1991, I think they would grow somewhat sentimental for that time when everything seemed uncertain but at the same time fundamentally and essentially real. I think they talk about the subtle war they fought as individuals and as a couple and as a family to get a grounding on it all. But I think they would also say that they didn't realize this quiet melancholy war when it was being waged until after the fact. It is here, that they would find their younger idiosyncracies and free will, their confident rejection of the veneer, and not their not being embarrased about their lives as they were, to be the stuff of sweet recollection, humor, and fondness.

'Have You Forgotten' reminds me of those times when I sat upstairs in the pale yellow hallway late the afternoon of a summer Saturday reading 'A Child's Garden of Verses' with a sort of nappy drowsiness while my parents went about life downstairs waging their quiet, subtle war for the autonomous self, reconciling their stories, accepting the emerging, finding beauty in the present as a promise for rootedness in the future. Even these pursuits of war they might not be able to articulate today, but I remembered as a teenager to remember that I witnessed it when I was a child, 1986.

Chanson d'installation: Red House Painters, Have You Forgotten?

Prayer Request

2005-11-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

Part One

Chanson d'installation: Eminem, Mosh

Tom DeLay Preevleezjay

2005-11-01T21:54:00.000-08:00

A Whiny Motherfucker/Former Majority Leader

Tom DeLay just won't play if he can't have his way.

Citing "the media attention and noting that Austin [Texas], widely perceived as a liberal college town, is 'one of the last enclaves of the Democratic Party in Texas,'" DeLay's CronySquad bitched about having his trial for the betrayal of public trust and corruption in the capital city of his home state. Are we supposed to presume that DeLay is an umblemmished figure of public service when he himself cannot presume the same for those to whose authority he is now suddenly subject? Am I supposed to believe his suavingly rad claims of innocence when he his suspcious of his own elected public official? Am I supposed to ignore the convictions against DeLay vis-a-vis his own long-standing (and accussed, mind you) favortism, cronyism, and widespread donation-doling? This is exactly why I don't trust DeLay to begin with. He uses his power to get what he wants, when he wants it, and how he wants it, and wields his wealth and power to duck out on accountability--courts of law, Congressional inquiry, etc.--for his actions when he is called to do so. Now you know what it's like bitch. Oh wait, no you don't because you're a True Texas Corrupto Man.

In terms of DeLay's [now former] judge, the District Attorney hit it right on the nose: "The law expresses no need for judges to check the citizenship at the courtroom door," she said. As much as DeLay and the Republican Machine advocate Americans checking in their citizenship at the door, it's no wonder DeLay thought that his own elected official (read: chosen by the will of the people) found it threatening that his new keeper was a indeed a citizen, chosen by the will of the people to hold him accountable. I'd like to see an impoverished black man accused of a crime manage to get a trial relocation or change of judge. Won't happen--especially not in Texas.

My next post will convict the the rightest obliviates of their failure to think critically in regard to the Supreme Court. Then I'm taking a break from cynical political commentary. No more calling people motherfuckers, unless they're really, truly MFers.

Chanson d'installation: Eminem, Mosh

One for every year since Christ

2005-10-25T22:59:00.000-07:00

Roll Call of the Death Toll

The New York Times has published the feature at the link below to commemorate the 2000th senseless casualty of America's war against shadows. Take a good look at the pictures. They're posted for a reason. Notice where the Michigan dead lived, and then try to deny that poor Americans are the capital of our country's belligerant foreign policy games. To all you thick-headed advocates of the Bush machine's war-mongering, your testosteronic and painfully ignorant pride is less valuable than the two-thousand recorded American casualties seen here. Putting a Dick Cheney 'baseball card' on your door at Dutch House and making snide, dumb-ass Hillary Clinton jokes won't give your pride more value either.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/national/IRAQDEATHS_GRAPHIC.html

Chanson d'installation: still Danny Boy

Conversation

2005-10-25T22:53:00.000-07:00

Pipe Dreams

Here are selected portions of a conversation Dawn and I recently had online.

Leidio: yeah dude...that's the epicenter of the east village.
Leidio: tompkins square park is where all the shit goes down.
Leidio: and stuyvessant town is down there--infamous projects.
Leidio: i fuckin' hate new york.
Leidio: it's so miserable to live in.
SaturnLeia: yeah, I know
Leidio: people there are in systemmatic denial
Leidio: how's ryan liking it?
SaturnLeia: I don't think I could move there, even though I love it
Leidio: the city you visit is not the city you call home.
SaturnLeia: she likes it, but then she wasn't under any delusions when she moved there--she knew it wasn't going to be all roses
SaturnLeia: it can be really isolating
Leidio: it changes face in stark contrast.
SaturnLeia: yeah
SaturnLeia: well, I think it'd be cool to live there, but it would be even harder to do music
SaturnLeia: totally oversaturated, and the audiences are ADD
SaturnLeia: much better to tour through and visit
Leidio: why would it be cool to live there
Leidio: ?
SaturnLeia: there are certain areas I really like, and the city has a lot of energy
Leidio: so do most cities.
SaturnLeia: for example, Clinton Hill or the Eurpean-ish area I mentioned
SaturnLeia: I know
Leidio: you should visit boston...talk about european-ish.
Leidio: but you're expressing a major perturbance of mine (nothing personal)....
Leidio: and that is
SaturnLeia: there's so much art going on, and a lot of places to do the kinds of things I'm interested in even in ministry, in terms of bringing art and faith together
SaturnLeia: I really want to visit Boston
Leidio: the inability of americans to understand and appreciate the american city. we're don't have european urbanism nor do we fuckin' want it.
SaturnLeia: I think I'll move to Chicago though, although it doesn't look like the greatest place to work on music either
SaturnLeia: I appreciate the American city
Leidio: but i thought art occurs everywhere. you know, the shakers merged art, worldview, lifestyle, and faith without new york.
SaturnLeia: I didn't like that area because it was European, I liked it and it reminded me of Europe
SaturnLeia: two different things
SaturnLeia: definitely
SaturnLeia: it's just a critical mass--or in New York's case, an oversaturation
Leidio: sure, but the same desire...the same totem, the same pipe dream, mirage, daydream, the same phenomenological desire.
SaturnLeia: really if I was putting music above all other considerations, I'd move somewhere on the East Coast, by upstate New York
SaturnLeia: it's the best place to be in terms of being able to tour easily to lots of places
Leidio: now you're talkin.
SaturnLeia: but I do want to go a big city, at least for a while
SaturnLeia: though I think one of the reasons I like Evanston is that it's kind of like Ann Arbor, but it's by Chicago
Leidio: art comes out of place. new york has turned its back on place, instead asserting place as its received discombobulation.
SaturnLeia: yeah, too many people there are obsessed with seeming avant garde
SaturnLeia: Ryan and I talked a lot about that too
Leidio: I will presume to bet that you like (and that I like) Evanston because it's definition of place is the 'critical mass' of urbanism at a human scale that coexists with an identity of landscape as well as a clear structure for social and communal interaction.
Leidio: all of these things New York lacks.
SaturnLeia: she loves to do video dance, and did before finding out that it was the "in" thing to do--but now you get so many people doing multimedia with dance that it's become something that people throw in--the video, I mean--just because rather than because they're trying to really use it to make a statement of significance
SaturnLeia: yeah
SaturnLeia: I think my ideal is a managable mid-sized city bordering a large one
Leidio: they're obsessed with the avant-garde because they have no worldviews. because they go to new york to deny their boring upbringings and expectations, but realize that they have no substance to actual deny. the whole thing is angst--it's a contrived pipe dream in which there is no other recourse but to repeat the thing that lacks definition (the avant-garde) because there's nothing actually definitive to rail against.
SaturnLeia: ah, but they aren't even railling against anything usually even in theory--it's just that video dance is cool and new, so everyone's flocking to it
Leidio: you said it: cambridge, ann arbor, evanston, east lansing, annapolis...
SaturnLeia: as Ryan put it, "If I see one more piece with TV static I think I'm going to scream"
Leidio: but that's my point...they have nothing to rail against because their lives have no substance. so they just repeat the thing that lacks definition (the avant-garde)
SaturnLeia: yeah, unfortunately Ann Arbor and East Lansing aren't bordering the cities I find interesting in terms of what's going on
SaturnLeia: as much as I love Detroit
SaturnLeia: it's on the up, but it's not quite the place I want to be -- that and I need to get out of the state
Leidio: dude, Lansing is a freaking' mine waiting to be opened.
SaturnLeia: heh
Leidio: it will just take people that aren't air-heady artsy types to do it.
Leidio: it will take critical criticism, a standpoint on culture, a goal that isn't an art-world free-for-all.
SaturnLeia: do you really think Lansing can go anywhere interesting?
SaturnLeia: it seems like in state the place that's going to happen is Detroit
SaturnLeia: but it'll need a lot of intrastructure and perserverance
Leidio: but dawn, maybe it's the kind of place you should be. if not you, who? that's just the trouble...everybody wants to live the pipe dream.
Leidio: Lansing has already been a successful city in its history.
SaturnLeia: I feel like I'm already living a pipe dream--I may end up getting a full-time job so I can support the music
Leidio: it's beed a lack of infrastructure, actually. rip up the freeways. detroit thrived before freeways existed. they will be dinosaurs in the next 30 years anyway.
SaturnLeia: no kidding
Leidio: you're already living the pipe dream?
Leidio: how?
SaturnLeia: heh, the starving artist thing is always a pipe dream
SaturnLeia: trying to make a living at performing
SaturnLeia: it's a different one than rebuilding a city
SaturnLeia: can't live too many pipe dreams at once
SaturnLeia: one is already definitionally unstable
Leidio: but it's only recently a pipe dream. the history of the 'starving artist' is one contrived in after the war and recast into the years preceding it.
SaturnLeia: how so?
SaturnLeia: I don't know that the arts have ever been particularly stable
Leidio: it's not a different task...rebuilding cities takes people making a living doing what they do.
SaturnLeia: yes, but if you're not making a living...
Leidio: au contraire the arts have been mostly stable throughout history.
SaturnLeia: I don't know though, one of the ways that a few cities have been revitalized is artists moving in
SaturnLeia: so many it's not so crazy, it's just not something I feel passionate about
Leidio: then you can branch out, and fulfill another need in the city...like a place for other performers, a place for a pragmatic need, like bread and sewing thread, a place to buy coats and umbrellas, nuts, toys, etc.
SaturnLeia: I feel like in the last 50 years or so there's definitely become a larger gap in terms of money--the little indie people at the bottom barely eeek out a living while the people at the top just rake it in
Leidio: artists moving in has only signified that change is possible. really, they're guinea pigs for developers.
SaturnLeia: lol
Leidio: hello dawn...that's what the entire world is becoming.
Leidio: let me tell you this...
SaturnLeia: I know, it's the story of everything these days
SaturnLeia: rich richer, poor poorer, and it's probably not going to change for the better
Leidio: Albert Bierstadt, the famous and important 19th-century American landscape painter, used to sell his paintings while starting out my ficitonalizing the place-names of his pieces to provoke a sense of ownership in his buyers of the still-mythic American frontier.
Leidio: What he did so well was to make his art relevant to the disposition of cultural stories--and myths--at large. but he didn't cater to them, nor did he create them. he simply reiterated their content. his paintings did this as well.
SaturnLeia: hmm, so are we looking for people to do this now in other media?
Leidio: in all things. our 'work' should emergently reiterate our story as a culture.
SaturnLeia: I think one of the cool things about Sujian Stevens is that he is creating art specific to places, but it still has broad appeal
SaturnLeia: it's the opposite of the pop music that is so general as to become irrelevant
SaturnLeia: but you could argue that our work automatically reiterates our story, and the proliferation of the pop crap--in many disciplines--also says something, perhaps that we want amnesia
Leidio: right! sufjan is at the vanguard, and he's not an avant-gardist nor an esoteric. he's at the vanguard while creating according to grounding asepct of life that we have otherwise denied and forgotten at large...landscape, memory, history, place, ethics, identity, knowing, heritage.
Leidio: but is amnesia what we really ought to value?
Leidio: i think we both know--no.
SaturnLeia: we shouldn't value it, but as a culture we're celebrating it
SaturnLeia: I'm kind of inspired by what he's doing

Chanson d'Installation: Danny Boy

A Very Weird Sort of Pedantics

2005-10-19T16:26:00.000-07:00

Right on cue, the architectural establishment gets prissy

"I don't think the answer is to bring somebody in with a canned response," says Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. "There are fundamental issues of how to deal with that coastline, how to build, if you build at all."

He reads disturbing cultural messages in the quaint enclaves of New Urbanism. "It's right-wing developer-speak masquerading as populism," Moss says. "The ideological image-making would appeal to a kind of anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South as slow and balanced and pleasing and breezy, and each person knew his or her role."

-from the Washington Post

Eric Owen Moss, a poster boy for "progressive" architecture and a member of the global businness-academy complex, has criticized The Mississippi Renewal Forum, a proactive and sensate group of planners, architects, policy gurus, elected fficials, and urbanists that has gathered together to develop a reasonable and productive vision on what rebuilidng the Gulf Coast will entail, how it might be effected, and what it might contain, saying that the solutions of so many presumed "New Urbanists" will be prissy and syrupy. Let me just say that I don't see Eric Owen Moss taking up shop amidst the ruins of the Gulf Coast (the MRF did their work in a damaged casino-hotel, where they all gathered for what is called a 'charrette'--a kind of projective vision-casting series of all-nighters that channel adrenaline and ideas into a very dense exchange and articulation of solutions) working out a reconstruction scheme that addresses not only architecture but poverty, environmental constraints, preservation, socio-economic stratification, political strategy, transportatioan, infrastructure, public works, housing, civic functions, public space, economies, markets, public policy, the consequences of suburbanization, and so many other pragmatic but pervasive considerations of place, not to mention the most relevant concepts such as heritage, accessibility, recognition, collective space, memory, security, and sustainability. Eric Owen Moss typifies the state of the architectural community today and I'm barely capable to articulating what that state is with appropriate representation. People like Moss--found in every single damned nook and cranny in the architectural community--believe that the only possible solution with situations like the Gulf Coast is to come up with something 'new' and "progressive."

But let me tell you folks, the concept of "new" at play in the architectural community is one rooted in the ambition for ego-driven prestige, for academic admiration, for professional praise, for artistic esotericism, for conceptual obfiscuity, for aesthetic shock, for widespread and comprehensive social, economic, and political commentary distilled into a set of objectives that are small enough to slap on the face of a presentation board (lest the critics criticize for an "unclear presentation" with "inchoate terminology"). Fuckers like Eric Owen Moss are out for themselves. They pass the days with nihilistic dreams of stardome, fanfare, authority, admiration, pure and unrequitted genius, and come up with a meaningless but complicated vocabulary with which to assert and achieve it. But the sentiments and the ideas of people like Eric Owen Moss are vacuous and shallow. They are very nearly purely contrived, and carry no relevance or import to the average citizen who lost her home of 150 years in Hurricane Katrina. For her, whatever sort of schizophrenic Deleuzian nihilistic basless placeless shrapnel-shard jagged dizzying slice of death architecture that Eric Owen Moss has to replace her home and neighborhood (and I presume he has something to propose if he sits in freaking Los Angeles--go fuckin' figure--criticizing the only people to actually attempt a meaningful service to the disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of the Gulf Coast with snide and condescending rhetorical shenanigans) just ain't going to slice the bacon. What the architectural community has to serve is thin gruel if you're hungry. Just take a look for yourself: which of the following examples do you think are the most relevant to the place of the Gulf Coast?

Chanson d'installation: Common, A Film Called Pimp

Floodwaters

2005-10-16T19:50:00.000-07:00

From the edge of the sea, a non-view

I bought a Moleskin sketchbook last week, but it's still blank. I can't think of anything in the course of my day worthwhile to put in it. I just finished three weeks of searching for a hidden room but didn't find it, claiming it was "lost in the gradient" though the gradient was not drawn either. Waiting for a table for twenty minutes at least at Peet's today, I tried to read people to see if they would leave, creating fiction to pass the din and time, though too often my fictions were tall tales. The bored were the eager and the silent the occupied. It rained for a week along the northeast, and floodwaters came upon us, from Framingham to Storrow. A night along Atlantic Avenue where taxi cabs and commuters floated by the Federal Reserve made me think of that city in my mind that I've glimpsed every here and there for a good number of years now. I met my parents for tea at the Four Seasons and looked out the window at Boston Common while the rain persisted, while the leaves persisted in a hushed vernal lush as the sun set behind an endless gauze of clouds. Some might say a sarcophagus. I think the clouds make for hermitage. In hermitage, water seeping into and out of the ground is at the scale of fingers and toes, shoelaces and the points of umbrellas; points of leaves and pin-hole photographs. A hard wind came this morning and with it the sun, and then died off when it blowed itself over into the Atlantic. The city dried, and I put on another layer of wool. I munched on crusty bread at the last of the latter's face-shone light, and walked through the square where tourists and flakes cringed toward the wind. Then went home, and turned on the lights. Shed wool for a Classics hood, and sat down at the table to read.

Chanson d'installation: Arvo Part, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten

Evildoers to Create Empire of Slavery from Spain to Indonesia

2005-10-06T12:26:00.000-07:00

Speaking of pathological...

So says G-Dubs on October 6 at the National Endowment for Democracy:

"The militants believe that controlling one country
will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to
overthrow all moderate governments in the region and
establish a radical Islamic empire that expands from
Spain to Indonesia."

and that their goal is to:

"enslave whole nations and intimidate the world."

This is what we call paranoia. He goes on:

"We will never back down, never give in and never
accept anything less than complete victory,"

This is what we call nihilism. Later, in the same speech, Bush says:

"Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims:
'What is good for them and what is not.' And what
this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers
good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and
suicide bombers. He assures them that this is the
road to paradise, though he never offers to go along
for the ride,"

What's funny is that this statement could easily characterize Bush himself:

"Bush says his own role is to tell Americans: 'What is
good for them and what is not.' And what this man who
grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor
Americans is that they become soldiers and war heroes.
He assures them that this is the road to honor and
freedom, though he never offers to go along for the ride."

Fuck you Dubs.

Chanson d'installation: French Kicks, Trial of the Century

A Dose of the 'Dozer

2005-10-04T22:30:00.000-07:00

Pathological self-exposure

Check out these quotations from the pathological clowns of the Republican complex. Don't get so smug Democrats--you're mostly just sitting there in the orchestra pit while the show gets more and more absurd.

Now See Here!

Chanson d'installation: Something Ornette Coleman

Like I commented earlier, 9/11 was meaningless compared to Katrina

2005-09-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

9/11 slipped us into delusion, Hurricane Katrina snapped us out

POLL: STORM CHANGED AMERICANS' ATTITUDES

By ERIN McCLAM, AP National Writer

A 64-year-old Alabamian frets about frayed race relations. A Utah software programmer ponders the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina and decides he'll turn to his church first in a disaster created by nature or terrorists.
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A woman scraping by on disability pay in northern Virginia puts her house on the market because of surging post-storm gas and food prices. Cheaper to live in Pennsylvania, she figures.

As the Gulf Coast braces for another monster storm, a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll shows Katrina prompted a rethinking of some signature issues in American life — changing the way we view race and our safety, how we spend our money, even where we live.

The poll shows that issues swirling around Katrina trump other national concerns.

Asked to rank eight topics that should be priorities for
President Bush and Congress, respondents placed the economy, gas prices and
Iraq high. But when Katrina recovery was added to the list, it swamped everything else.

Like bands of the storm itself, Katrina's reach in American life is vast: 1 in 3 Americans believes the slow response will harm race relations. Two-thirds say surging gas prices will cause hardship for their families. Half say the same of higher food prices.

In Las Cruces, N.M., Ariana Darley relies on carpools to get to parenting classes, or to make doctor's appointments with her 1-year-old son, Jesse. Before, she chipped in $5 for gas. Now, she pays $10 to $15.

"I didn't think it would affect me," she says by telephone, with Jesse crying in the background. "But it costs a lot of money now. I have to go places, and now it adds up."

After a crisis with indisputable elements of race and class — searing images of mostly poor, mostly black New Orleans residents huddled on rooftops or waiting in lines for buses — some Americans worry about strains in the nation's social fabric.

Women were especially concerned. One of them is Sue Hubbard of Hueytown, Ala., 64 years old. She does not believe race played a deliberate part in who got out of New Orleans, but she is deeply worried about tensions inflamed by those who do.

"I just think it took everybody by surprise," says Hubbard, who is white. "I don't care if it would have been the president himself, they couldn't have gotten there to those people. Some people — not everybody — are trying to make a racist thing out of it."

The poll underscores the literal reach of Katrina as well: 55 percent of Americans say evacuees from Katrina have turned up in their cities or communities, raising concerns about living conditions for the refugees, vanishing jobs for locals and — among 1 in 4 respondents — increased crime.

Among respondents with incomes under $25,000 per year, 56 percent were concerned about living conditions for refugees in shelters; that was higher than among those who make more money. And the poll indicates people in the South, which has absorbed huge masses of evacuees, are most concerned about the costs to their local governments.

Ann McMullen, 52, of Killeen, Texas, who works as a school administrator at Fort Hood, says she worries about gang violence, simply because of the prodigious numbers of people flowing into Texas communities.

"They can't even locate the sex offenders," she says. "And every population has gang members. It's theft, it's murder, it's more chaotic crimes in the community. Hopefully we'll be able to put these people back to work."

The poll also exposes a divide among Americans in how the government should respond when disasters strike areas particularly prone to catastrophe — landslides, earthquakes, hurricanes. Half say the government should give people in those zones money for recovery, but almost as many say those people should live there at their own risk.

About 4 in 10 say the government should prohibit people from building new homes in those endangered areas in the first place. As McMullen puts it: "You're asking for another disaster to happen."

Katrina has also raised grave doubts among Americans about just who will protect them in the aftermath of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack.

Only about a quarter of Americans believe the federal government was as prepared as it should have been to cope with a disaster of Katrina's magnitude. Only slightly more than half, 54 percent, are confident in the federal government's ability to handle a future major disaster.

Reed Chadwick, a 33-year-old software programmer from Herriman, Utah, has made a mental list of the organizations he can count on should Mother Nature or terrorists strike — church first, then local government, then the feds.

"I think a lot of people have been yelling at Bush," he says. "But I think they're not looking at their local leaders for answers or reasons why things did or did not work. A lot of people are asking questions."

As for other personal effects of the storm, rising gas prices have not been crippling for his household yet, he says. "But I know it's going to put a dent into my budget. I won't be able to do dinner as much, maybe take only one vacation, if that."

For Pam Koren, the storm's impact has been more immediate — and more drastic.

Suffering from low blood sugar, spasms of the esophagus and nerve damage, she exists now on disability pay and contributions from her daughter, who attends college and works as an assistant youth minister.

With gas and food prices rising after the storm, she says, she was forced to put her house in Burke, Va., on the market. She is considering east-central Pennsylvania, and a less expensive home.

"I'm a wreck because I'm not sure I'm making the right decision," she says. "I didn't want to have to do this, but things have become so tight I have not had a choice. I did not expect things were going to get this bad."

The poll of 1,000 adults conducted by Ipsos, an international polling company, had a margin of potential sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Chanson d'installation: "Team America," Freedom Isn't Free, a parody of asinine pseudo-patriotism country songs dispensed and inhaled in the post-9/11 propoganda campaign.

Invisible Man

2005-09-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

Don't Yes the Haters

That the world of the haughty artist-architects believes its greatest strength to that which in reality is its greatest arrogance is the stuff of tragicomedy. I have a cathartic post today, so I can articulate a gargantuan double standard as applied to the circus of Harvard Design School, but is still analogous to much of the idocracy we face in this world. My program mandates, in recognition that many of its students have no art or design background, a drawing course entitled "Visual Studies." How titilating is that title!? I have decided to seek a waiver from this course, given that I already have engaged throughout my schooling so far a critical approach to drawing and its modes of representation (of which perspective is merely one), and given the nature of my academic initiatives at large, which do not include drawing studies. The instructor, the previously genial and helpful Wilson, agreed to a waiver and then, as it is called in euchre when it is discovered that one has held back a "trump," as it were, while effacing otherwise, renegged, claiming that my portfolio did not demonstrate any drawing which satisfies his standards for waiver. I suggested he look at the photography section of my portfolio, which he passed on before, because I asserted a very strong cognitive correlation between the way that I draw and the way that I take pictures. Like a cliche from a 70's campus debate, the illustrious Wilson gaffawed that photography is not drawing, that photography has no "touch." Really, I said, and went on not to convince him that this was untrue, but simply to communicate why I conceived of a 'touch' in my photographs, using methods of selection, perspective, foreground and background, compression, translation, and in many cases these things communicated through the ambiguities of blurring, articulating features strikingly by their essence. He cut me off, and a look of anger came over his face, saying that he would hear no more, that there's nothing I can say, and that it won't do. Dumbfounded, and succumbing to my tendency to go mute when encountered by such rigorous hostility, I listened as he said that he would take up the matter with the Director, and let me know.

What an asshole, this Wilson is. You see, he presumes that he knows what is good for me, defending his presumptions by saying that he hears x, y, and z from me, and he knows what that /really/ means. He presumes paternalistically that I am unaware of what is most beneficial to my study, that I am naive to the course content, and if I take the course I will be transformed by a sudden awareness that was before hidden from my comprehension. The arrogance of this art world is that the youthful unmentored are never at a truly substantive critical awareness, and must be brought to such awareness by their titan elders. Well, I am uninterested in any sort of top-down academic pursuit--this is why I left Pratt, where it was assumed that a student must reach the level of capability equal to that, or nearly that, of his instructors before he is allowed an autonomous position. Such with Wilson, who makes me want to leave, because I will not deal with this again. The striking characteristic of the University of Michigan that made it so much different to Pratt was that my academic interests were engaged empathetically, not paternalilstically. If I take Wilson's course, it will simply be because I must, and that is antithetical not only to my worldview but to the purpose of learning in the first place. And not to mention what I want to gain from studying at this fucking high-headed institution. What the fuck is a drawing class going to do for me one way or the other!? Six weeks of dragging a pencil across paper! The issue is one of investment. It is not comprehensively productive for me to invest cirriculum in such a course because my academic goals and the metanarrative of my education at large can do without it. And it bothers me that Harvard does not trust its students' autonomy in this, nor their confidence in their skills, nor--apparently--their critical awareness of what they do.

I don't give a shit about technique if there's no meaning to it. Drawing in Wilson's class isn't going to be inherently meaningful because I ain't never had it like /this/ before. Wilson's critique that a photograph has no 'touch' applies just the same to drawing--a thick line v. a thin line or compression or subliminal cognitive order and pattern don't matter all by themselves. A photograph can be simply snapped without thinking--yes, but it can also be a comprable cognitive exercise in the topics of projection in drawing, in which case there is a touch. And how can Wilson have such a fucking monopoly on the vain truth of art (who gives a shit about things like this anyway!) when he teaches a course called "Visual Studies." I'm sorry, but I don't see how "visual" exclusively refers to drawing. What a dreary prude Wilson is. I'm not invested in the matters of this course because they're not empathetic with my interests in the big picture, its not a productive investment of my previous education this term when I could take another elective instead somewhere else in the university, nor is it a guarnatee of relevance or meaning or freakin development as an architect. It's simply a top-down, paternalistically nihilistic, fuckin' parodox of artworld arrogance, six-week, meaningless drivel-basin of a quarter-course that I don't want to touch with a damn ten-foot stick. Wilson has already shown me that he's not interested in critically engaging with me--this I know because of his arrogrant presumptions and the fact that he prevented me from communicating the facts of my drawing capabilities vis-a-vis cognition and thought process (at issue in this course) becaue he was too sophisticatedly knowledgeable of my trite, quaint musings on drawing and photography.

World, don't let the Man get you down! To the Wilsons of your life, you gotta say "check your vibe, muthafucka!" And bump some Tribe.

Chanson d'installation: A Tribe Called Quest, Check the Rhime

An Hommage

2005-09-19T20:26:00.000-07:00

First Day of Class Today

An hommage to the dear places of critical pursuit and vital vigor for which my life's income and psychological security will be squandered--pulled out of hand, but not out of mind, by a vortex of cynicism, discarded resumees, and pervasive, non-negotiable, credit-gorging debt. Here's to my Alma Mater and my "Other Mother."

Chanson d'installation: Boy George, Karma Chameleon and John Mellancamp, Wasting Away in Margaritaville, and A Tribe Called Quest, Oh My God, and Blind Willie McTell, Dying Crapshooter's Blues

What happens when the ghost of FDR wheels off his memorial and into the halls of Congress

2005-09-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

The goulish hawks plume a tiny, but white, little feather

Today, sixty years after high Republicans began the systemmatic dismantaling of the New Deal with cronyism and a disgusting investment in foreign intrigue and expose, and with Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal, under threat from the disguised "neo-conservatives," a band made up of old guard hawks and buddy-buddies working under the masthead of G-Dubs and Condoleaza, the legitimate and welcomed criticism of the Bush administration in the wake of Katrina has put Bush in the position where, admitting his own apathy and lack of leadership, he has become a New Deal Democrat. Hah! How does it feel to realize that yes--a government must provide for its citizens, and meet their needs in times of systemmatic societal inequality, exploitation, apathy, and the globalistic disposition of American capitalism of social Darwinism? No matter what side of the fence you're on, the federal government is spending billions and billions and billions of dollars to do what? To provide for its citizens. Our nation is left to wonder if the American tradition--a tradition throughout our history in tension with our expansionist and imperial ambition--to protect the disenfranchised, to facilitate strength in our communities, and to celebrate the remarkable cultural brilliance we realize is taken for granted when cities like New Orleans are destroyed and uprooted. Notice that the 9-11 crisis provoked no such response from our people or government. A pseudo-patriotism that Cornel West classifies in two ways--sentimental and evangelical nihilism, pervaded our nation out of fear and ignorance. Katrina has laid bare many truths formerly buried, concealed, ignored, and forgotten by the same disposition that produced our nation's trite reaction to 9-11. And it shows. This time, Americans are appauled, embarrassed, empathetic in realizing our government acts in hypocricy and mendacity, and though whites and blacks remain at odds about the racial rationale for Bush's obliviousness, Americans of all kinds are finally beginning to speak out in criticism, realizing that accountability is necessary and vital to a democracy, and realizing that Bush and his team, and their tradition of systemmatic disenfranchisement and otherness that began so many decades ago, is bogus, destructive, and antithetical to the deep American tradition of dignity and democracy. Furthermore, realizing that this tradition is contradictory to our country's ambitions today, Americans are willing and encouraged by a government (not the unwilling bureaus of private enterprise) which, despite the apathy and indignity of its current executive, is spending money on its people to provide for its people. And Bush, trying to fight criticism for the sake of political survival by riding the tailcoats of this just role of government, is forcibly becoming a New Deal Democrat. So fuck you Rove!

Chanson d'installation: Outkast, Love Hata

Melville to Mount Auburn

2005-09-13T22:44:00.000-07:00

a story of stories

I decided to post a letter I wrote recently to my very first college professor, Alex Ralph (then a graduate student teaching English 125), whome I have kept in loose contact with over my time at Michigan, and who read and gave criticism on a few lousy short story beginnings I wrote while at Pratt, in a fit of existential despair in the midst of a dysfunctional academic environment and a certain female rendering me a worthless and manipulative predator (if you think I'm mysogynistic for that comment, shove it). But this post isn't about these now insignificant events. The post is about the same thing I wanted to share with Alex:

Hey Alex,

I attempted a few times to drop by your office and say hello and so long toward the end of the semester, but to no avail. It's been at least a year and a half since I bumped into you last on the Diag, but recently I've been thinking about what my first few days at Michigan were like when it was entirely new because right now I'm in my first few days at Harvard and am probably experiencing much of the same though I really can't say for sure. The first class I attended was yours, and it was a great class. I realized recently going through college papers that I addressed topics in my papers for English 125 that are central to my study of architecture--topics of place, landscape, identity and one's conception of the past.

I wasn't aware of this at the time, but it goes to show that my time at Michigan was truly a continuum and as such a critcal process that I very deeply know was fulfilling, and I will long be a starry-eyed alumnus when I return to Ann Arbor and walk down the Diag in years to come. I also gave you three or so stories that I wrote when I spent my first year of college at Pratt in New York (though I really only consider Michigan to be my one and only college). In retrospect I know that those stories were very cynical, and it's telling that none of them was complete, because they were excercises in restlessness, stemming from a lack of tangible access to the unique dilemmas that year brought. These aren't serious dilemmas, but they're certainly good for a disposition of cynicism, which is always in tension with the best of our emotive capacity. Thus stories that are cynical in nature and ethodology (and maybe form), but not at face value. They lacked all subtlety, because cynicism demands precision. But the wrong kind of cynicism weaves a precision that indulges in the preoccupation of a thing by pointed directly at it, reifying its description in order to quench the cynical crave.

As a critic and one interested in the assembly and poetics of space, though, I believe that the beauty and the remarkable persuasion of the stories we must tell come by a different kind of precision--the kind that deliberately and intimately reveals that which surrounds a thing, so that we come to recognize, know, and conceive of stories and their meanings (and of course, spaces) interstitially, by knowing its situation and the environment in which we behold. Even charismatic writers like Rilke avoided indulgence despite his illuminated and dreamy renderings. My friend Gaston Bachelard might say this is because we find our home in daydreams, but even our daydream-homes are impossible to directly conceive. So today I can say that somewhere I have a book in me, whether its a bunch of short stories or a novel, but I will likely never be able to write it. Despite all the support and critical engagement I am privileged to have among my people and thanes from Michigan (we even began a [un]secret society based on the Inklings half as a joke, half in all seriousness), not even I trust an architect to tell a story on paper, so I will have to go about it through the lens of my camera and the lines of my pen.

Though I know what the story is that I have to tell, I just can't find a way to tell it, and I don't know anything about its plot, or its characters, or the tangibles of its epic invocations of the human condition, etc. That's fine; maybe some day I'll figure it out. In the meantime, when I unpacked my books in Cambridge tonight, I opened up 'Billy Budd and Other Stories' from which we read 'Benito Cereno,' and I was pleased and glad that another story--one which I have actually experienced--has come full circle. Thanks for getting things started my first few days at Michigan. It was (and in my being, is) and invaluable and enriching four years in the continuum of my life. Take care and good luck to you, too,

Patrick Jones

English 125, Fall 2001

Chanson d'installation: Bach, Suite No. 2 for Cello - Allemande

Eve of contest

2005-09-12T18:03:00.000-07:00

a furrow of the brow

Veritas?

2005-09-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

My first day in Cambridge

Harvard is a compulsively segmented institution where the distinctions between students and their academic situations are highlighted instead of the holistic community of learning that should be formed instead. An individualistic institution through and through by all I've observed so far. Case in point, there is a separate graduate fellowship for every school at Harvard, and they each state their goal as internal and exclusive. I am entering a community of pervasive distinction and exclusivity. We'll see what happens.

Chansons d'installation: The Victors, The Maize and the Blue

As it Lies Dying

2005-08-31T19:35:00.000-07:00

A solution for the region of Faulkner

I saw a picture on the cover of the Lansing State Journal this morning of a man sitting amidst the wreckage of his coast-front trailer, a dwelling completely disassembled and disjointed by yesterday's Hurrican Katrina. My thought was ' no shit.' He shouldn't be surprised that his home is gone, mostly because homes like his shouldn't exist in the first place, let alone along the Gulf of Mexico in the world's epicenter for hurricanes.

This photograph brings up a number of different issues. The situation is one of place and class, environment and typology. I don't want to get all bluefaced academic, but natural disasters such as the hurricane interest me in the way that people respond to them both pragmatically and in realizing that hometowns and conceptions thereof are suddenly uprooted. Uprootedness is the issue right now in the deep south, as mediaheads talk about rescue efforts and damage estimates and the destruction of entire neighborhoods, their economies, their cultures, their livelihoods, and even (in the hundreds), their residents.

When such an unsustainable wasteland like the Gulf Coast is destroyed, we have a unique opportunity to try again with something better. But despite the guise of planners and the ten-penny theoretician politicos and scruffle-necks, this is a matter of the novel in terms of space but the traditional in terms of ethics; and ethics cannot be avoided, as the philosophy of compassion. Here the presumption enters in my community, that of architects, designers, planners, and spatial visionaries, that the solution to destruction and "rebuilding," as it were, is to 'learn' from the event and 'respond' with a 'strategy' that is uniquely conceived. The thing that makes this presumptuous, however, is that such strategies do not maintain a thorough or stable conception of human compassion, the need for rootedness, and the human geographical, psychological, and ultimately ethical needs to know where one is, why one is, and how one is.

Cities like New Orleans already suffer ethical crises, that is, crises that deal with the interactions of a society between its members. Some would characterize ethics as a realm dealing with 'thick' relationships (family, spouses, best friends) rather than 'thin' relationships (random fellow humans), but I'm convinced somehow that an ethical standard is compelling enough at the thick level to be deeply indicative and complicit with one's interactions at the thin level. That is, if the thick is in check, the thin must be as well, because the disposition required for thick is much more complex and specific than the more basic, fundamental thin disposition.

I've been thinking a lot about the social justice component to space-forging in light of the hurrican in New Orleans. Can you think of any situation today in which housing is built on a large-scale (that of communities) in which socio-economic needs are actually met? We have no experience in this country since before WWII in functional communities being built at such large scales that don't cater to high-end buyers or 'up-scale' developments. I find this fascinating in addition to my interest in ethics as a worldview of compassion (I can't wait to say those words at Harvard) in that the only thing we have to source in our cultural history is the past. The only way that we know of to rebuild New Orleans to the extent that it may require is rebuild it the way it was built the first time around.

But with some exceptions. We know now the unsustainability of sprawl-ish typologies, the effect of freeways and thoroughfares on neighborhoods and socio-economic stratification, and the faux-pas associated with building urban communities that rely on cars (e.g. any metro Detroit 'mile' road, including those through the city). We therefore have the text of the past and the context of our current condition (and the hard work done for us in the form of Katrina) to correct a landscape where people have assembled into a society and be progressive and more responsible while doing it. We know that the high-necked calls in academe for a "progressive" solution to the matter will be unrecognizable and irresponsive to the human condition. The most explicitly appauling and tragic aspect of this disaster is the mass exile that is ensuing, and the government escorting [domestic, citizen] refugees to mass-shelters that's more akin to moments in our history like the Trail of Tears. In both of these examples, we are complicitly engaged with matters of uprootedness and identity and associated with a landscape and the disposition of a culture within that landscape.

And what do you need to be convinced that people OUGHT to be rooted in a conception of 'home' conducive to productive, uplifting, and dignified identities? We need an ethic. And an ethic is not something that the black-clad icons of angst and irrelevancy at places like Harvard (e.g. Rem K and H&DeM) or Michigan (the countless faculty and visitors who have abandoned a conception of the past via accusations of nostalgia and sentimentality, nihilistic modernist shallow-beings that are convinced of the necessity for apathy) have been able to pull off in recent years. I will be enraged and disgusted when the star architects of academe come around with their flaky renderings of their harsh "solutions" to New Orleans, the pseudo-humanitarian competitions where the starchitects of practice and academe pour out their vanities of presumption and cultural, emotional, spiritual, psychological, cognitive, perceptive, and environmental obliviousness, and reinforce it in the shambles of rhetoric and fluff of semantic trends.

It would be paramountally useful for the American story in real and tangible ways evident in all of the areas of architects' obliviousness to which I have just pointed if somebody came forward and presented us with a solution and said "here, I have documented and brought back into our active memory and vocabulary how the communities, neighborhoods, streets, houses, and yards that were lost this week were constructed; and in doing so, I have brought to attention a strategy of rerooting and reconstruction that is economically, socially, physically, and ethically just." Because let's be honest--do the developers of pastiche-amusement-parks-of-memory-pseudo-new-urbanist-quaint-disneyland-lifestyle communities on the suburban fringe know how to build to the New Orleans bungalow from the block? What about a shotgun house? Or for that matter, the Chicago three-flat? or the Midwestern garden apartment?

Nope. Lost from the semantics of space, lost from our active memory, lost in the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

note: Faulkner's title "As I Lay Dying," I take it, uses the simple past form of 'to lie', which is 'lay' (as in "I lay sick all Thursday"), and not the present indicative form, which would be 'I lie.' If the 'lay' had the semantic character of placement and recline, Faulkner would have to have titled the book, in accordance with the grammar of ASE, either "As I Laid Dying" if in the simple past aspect, or "As I Lay Dying" if in the present indicative form. This form and the simple past form of 'to lie' are the same, and one is left to interpret the title vis-a-vis the content of the novel. I have chosen to parallel the title of the novel by entitling my entry "As it Lies Dying" because if I wanted to interpret the condition of New Orleans as having been 'placed' upon it by the exterior forces of the hurricane, and therefore using the verb 'to lay,' I would be required to include a direct object, of which I have none, nor did Faulkner. This note does not take into consideration the semantic specificities of vernacular Mississippian English, nor Faulkner's acknowledged interpretation and representation (whether accurate or fictional) thereof.

Chanson d'installation: Ryan Adams, Sweet Carolina

Up on the Mountain

2005-07-18T09:15:00.000-07:00

A ready dispatch from Cumberland

It is not easy to begin a post like this one. I might remind you that I graduated from the University of Michigan in May, and following a whirlwind of last-minute and unconvincing preparations was able to collect the car that had been mysteriously provided for me in a long-stemmed Chelsea barnyard to drive myself one morning to Nashville. Going up the mountain some hour and a half more east, neighbors called in to the short-range FM station in Coalmont to let each other know what they were selling, sharing numbers and the names of hollows where they could come to pick up or trade 1 riding mower (needs a spark plug and exhaust cap but otherwise she's good to go), or another iteration of twenty year-old Dodge and Ford pickups that populate the hills. Here, roots run deep. And that's what we would expect from the oldest mountains in the world, and from a culture that is absent in Americans' memories and known now simply as 'Forgotten Appalachia.' The question was recently asked why there is so much poverty in Grundy County, where Mountain TOP makes its summer home. The answer? Because Grundy County offers nothing for the turbines of the globalized mechanism. It is impossible for the communities on the moutain to stay above water and compete for their revenue-share of commodities and production. Places like the mountain are weeded out early, and left ignored. Grundy County can't sustain itself because it's no longer possible for communities to provide for their own communities. Now, communities must provide for the acceleration of globalized culture and economy.

well, since I began this post weeks ago, I can't possibly finish it while preserving my train of thought. so, death it goes.

Chanson d'installation: Ryan Adams, Sweet Carolina

A Separate Peace

2005-05-09T13:05:00.000-07:00

It's May Again

I'm over the election. There are a few of you whom I keep in touch with
through this blog, though 'blog' was always a sour way to describe why I
write here. So to you, I'm sorry for the cheap writing that characterized
my political entries this past year. In the face of despair, though,
I lose any capacity I have for eloquence. That said,

It's May again. The city is cool and lush. The pedals from the
everywhere-boughs have come around because it's May again, and that's what
happens after a long winter. And it was a long winter. The windswept
plains of days gone by kind of long, when we talk about illness and
hardship like pioneers, and the quiet subtle despair that seeps deep under
our chapped skin, once the lovely novel of cold has worn thin, has surfaced
and we are hit with it like a breath in an ice cold lake. The day of that
breath is a quiet day, like all of winter, and it comes when a wind
collects and blows the scarf from your neck and tumlts its course beneath
your shirt. Or the Saturday morning when you've slept just a bit too long
and your back aches from three months of huddling through the long nights in
your wombly bed, and the room is dark with the bright winter light of clouds
and the hush of the house--it too has gone to sleep for the winter. Its
creaks and pops have silenced since last spring when it stretched its legs and
arms from the shackle nails and came alive in the heat of a Michigan summer.
Houses like Roethke poems. Trusses like greenhouse roots, studs like shoots
that writhe and make noise as they forge through dirt and seed skins. But
it's May again, and the air smells sweet like many springs before it have
smelled sweet in Michigan.

I bid farewell to winter and welcomed spring last week at Cedar Campus. I
crushed my finger rebuilding Meta, per my covenant of two year's past, when
I heaved a bulb of lake-rounded granite into the water at the end of our
bridge. Overall, the winter storms have been good to Meta, and I found last
week that it is more beautiful than I've ever seen it in its state today.
We were lucky this year because the water level in all of the Lakes rose,
which we hope signals positive slope in the 15-year-or-so cycle of water levels
in the Great Lakes. As a result, Meta is slightly sunken, and the path treads
a gentle slope from the bulwurk (sp?) rocks on the beach to the slighter stones
that pile at the midsection where it slips beneath the surface and runs course towards
the first offshore boulder like a torpedo with a trail of head-sized
rocks. I was delighted to hear a brother from CCF tell me that the previous
summer he took a group of children he was supervising out onto the water road
to their great delight. Some of the new students at Chapter Camp didn't know
the remarkable metaphorical dynamism of a rock bridge and reacted to my
exhortations with Pharesitic skepticism, Sagisitic doubt. I just wanted to
make up those words.

Because it's May again, the summer sun is returning to us, and I've come to
realize this year that I have an inkling to go south and west rather than
north and east. I think this is strange. Particularly because I've
subscribed myself to three years in the epicenter of easterly northerness,
the most north and the most east you can go before you begin kissing moose or
coursing the rocky bays in a wee boat while the big rigs out in the deep water
deplete what's left of the north Atlantic's legendary stock. But west and south. Copland has something to do with it. His orchestral story-telling is folklore,
and lore of folk or any other variety either draws us in or sends us fleeing. Copland's lore draws me in. I wish I had the courage to work for six months
and then work my way through the Plains for another six, as the sun magnifies
the color of the hills and pulls my eyes and heart to the threshold of the
mountains on its continuous westward course. That's the thing about the western
sun, it hovers above the horizon and obscures it. But here now is a question of boundaries. I am not made for the mountains. Even my frequent dreams of taking retreat on a ridge or enveloped in a valley are time-bound. My midwesternliness
as forged my senses to be acute to subtlety. The silence in the snowy fields,
as our boy Robert Bly put it when, I think, he realized the same. Even my
other mountain home in the Appalachians is a terrain of subtlety. This clan
knows hollow from hollow, a dulcimer in one and a fiddle in the other. The
best sweet tea is in the valley, because the water there is soaked with
sentiment and the carbonsof the world's oldest mountain range. You drink
the mountain in the valley and its subtle, but it makes the difference.
And in my country, the shadiest tree is the one in the middle of the
field--the one that picked up its roots and left the rest of the stand in
the woods between soy and corn and found its roots of roots in the center of
the rows marking the landscape north, east, west, south, and whatever is
vertical. Underneath it you'll see me slouching against the trunk shoulder
to shoulder, drowsy in the summer sun, with my

And so three weeks in Ann Arbor. The task at hand is raising my salary for
Mountain T.O.P. 1775 dollars. Donations to me, thank you. Three weeks and
then south and west to Tennessee, and then in three months, north and east,
north and east for another three years or whatever it is. For those of you
who don't know, Harvard it is.

Chanson d'installation: Red House Painters, Katy Song and Have You Forgotten

-

On the Eve of Bush 43

2005-01-19T19:29:00.000-08:00

In a Silenced World, A City of Fanfare

Usually, when Morning Edition goes off on my morning alarm, I am awakened only to slip back into a half-sleep where dreams distort the stories on the news into hyped, fantastical visions. Prison reform turns into graduate school admission, skiing deaths turns into a maccabre Blair Witch-esque mountaintop trail of death, all while the sounds, voices, words, and music stay the same. But this morning, a rare and distinct thing occurred. My dream corresponded exactly to what was being said on the radio during a story of the Second Inauguration of G-Dubs. I even sensed the excitement of the city on the verge of elaborate celebration. In it, I was a poor student who tried to get a view of the presidential balls, the parades, and festivities that were being played out in the city of my dreams. Accomplishing this was hard; it is, after all, a Republican administration, and therefore I was too poor to have access to any of the events, let alone a view--the only hotels and apartments that overlooked the squares of the city were gentrified, million-dollar condos and five-star dormitories for the wealth-drenched hoards and cohorts of the Republican Party. Nonetheless, there was Dubs, the real deal--erh, the Real Deal--in the Archives, looking over the Constitution for the first time in his life, and the Bill of Rights for the first time in his life, and the Declaration of Independence for the first time in his life. And there he was in the monumental halls of the city, surrounded by his patrons and the social debutantes of that plush circle. Swarms followed through the city, strutting about with them Negro attendants, cigars, white cashmere scarves, top hats, adultered wives in cream-colored evening gowns and long gloves, crystals, and pearls. On the hillsides in the distance were the slums--Dickinsonian terrains of rubbled alleys and the cold, bittered thresholds of tenaments and projects and ghettos. Where the bright inaugural city ramparted the hill top, in the valleys ran expressways and train yards, strip malls, coal plants, and powerhouse factories of soot and sore. The whole breadth of the valleys powerless and silent. There was that fucker Bush walking down the promenade with Laura--drugged and mechanized as usual--on arm in a bright blue dress and a necklace of diamonds, the Legion of the Sedated marching behind, singing anthems of pomp and circumstance, waving banners of Liberty, and Righteousness, and Truth, and Power, and God, and White, and Gold, and Christian, and Freedom. This was my dream of the 43 Inaugural, this morning and eve, as Morning Edition brought me out to face the cold.

Much like the City on the Hill that I dreamed, and Bush campaigned for, he and his cronies imagine and rule from, with no diminished pomp and circumstance of my own dream. In it, they willingly remain silent, oblivious, and ignorant of the valleys, the source of their exploitation, and the source of their power. They are seductresses and sorcerers. I hope Condi Rice isn't as big a bitch as Secretary of State as she was in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I hope Bush isn't as big a dumb fuck as he has been his entire meaningless, putrid, mean, unjust life. He is his own Niphirim, Titan, Hercules, and Messiah, tramping the earth and othering creation. This, too, will be an inauguration of the other.

Chanson d'installation: Sufjan Stevens, Seven Swans

A Sincere Exhortation to my Brothers and Sisters

2004-10-25T09:23:00.000-07:00

Written not in cyncism, I pray

Admist a shocking and transparent effort to intimidate and supress votes in Ohio and Florida--keys to the election--by enlisting thousands of Republicans to challenge voter legality in poor and minority districts, Bush and the Republicans continue a sarcastic, cynical, fatalistic, school-yard bully campaign of fear. Bush has since the very beginning of the election cycle employed a core body of totem phrases that are designed to scare Americans and patronize their capacity to think critically. In another sarcastic, cynical, fatalistic stump speech yesterday, Bush rolled through another one of these totems: "Weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm," he said.

Who are "those?" The evil-doers. The freedom-haters. The forces of evil, and in many connotative expressions, the enemies of God. It's a simple tactic that Bush uses on hoodwinked Americans that make a simplistic but powerful connection between Bush's statement that freedom is a gift of God and that the enemy is a group of freedom-haters, thus enemies of God. In a compulsive Bush-supporters house earlier this month, I was engaged in a sarcastic, cynical, fatalistic conversation in which I was asked, "Do you want terrorists running all around your backyard everywhere? I don't!" I looked into the Bush-supporters backyard and saw no terrorists. What's funny is that people like the woman whose house I was a guest in already live in a culture of fear. Her subdivision is accessible only by a three-quarter mile long street that has 7' tall fences on either side of it. On the interior of the subdivision, people don't walk outside, they keep their children fenced-in, and they keep their cars off the street. By the way, on a side note, why is it okay to condone the killing of thousands of Americans and Iraqis in the Middle East for the greater good but it's not okay to overlook a candidate's position on abortion in favor of the greater good? And what about the millions around the world starving, dying in epidemics, and being oppressed by the unjust?

Two nights before the election, I admit openly to having a feeling of despair. I am so exhuasted from seeing apathy and indifference around me, and the notion that a nation of zombies will re-elect a president that wasn't elected popularly in the first place is depressing. It's because this administration has been one of unprecedented dillusion. It is a consummation of the 1990's build-out of the Republican party into a collective of naive, short-sighted, oblivious and manipulative individuals who see political issues as questions of personal gain. Somehow, the Republican party got mean. It decided that nationalism was the highest mantra, that dissent is treason, that the earth is a market, that the poor are expendable, and that the people--the PEOPLE--are not eligible for a government that provides and protects.

I have tried to keep track over the past three years of all of the startling blunders of the Bush administration. But it got to be so overwhelming, because every day I read the newspaper (it's amazing how many Republicans I meet that don't read the newspaper), there was more and more to be shocked about, to feel violated about, and to feel helpless and hopeless to negate. Almost nothing our president has done has been successful. And yet, Bush and the individuals who truly hold his power--Rove, Rummy, Cheney, etc.--are unwaivering in their insistance that these are the best of times without a doubt. They are immersed in a culture that allows reality to be semantic. They say the war is a "brilliant" maneuver and fully justified, but over the course of three years, the administration has presented reason after reason after reason after reason for justifying the effort. He has been a true flip-flopper, saying that Iraq and al Qaeda were bed buddies, and that Saddam had WMD (humiliating Colin Powell--the only insightful member of his cabinet--in front of the UN when he asserted that indisputible evidence was gathered that Iraq had weapons), and that Iraq harbord terrorists, that it was humanitarian, that it was to spread democracy. And yet they are contradictory--they say that they need to be reelected because we are not safe, because terrorism must be defeated, because the job isn't over, because any suggestion that we are not confident in our leader will bring more and more and more attacks. Yes, Americans--the only way to protect you and yours is to be afraid.

But you know what? I can type for hours and hours about why Bush's rationale is so glaringly dangerous but it wouldn't help, because if people don't see it now, they won't see it at all. I'm exhausted, friends, because it feels like I'm wrestling a hippo--dumb, defenseless, oblivious, and apathetic, but ultimately way, way more bigger than I am. And do you know who the hippo is? It's not just the administration. It's the whole culture of Bush, the whole passive trance that conservatism has placed on a substantial portion of the American people, and it's the people in my own community--those close to me--that throw up their hands or shrug and say "you know what? I don't want to talk about it." That's what makes it most exhausting--to see those whom you love and admire not give a shit. Not give a SHIT.

It's amazing that this election isn't decided already. But fear is powerful, and it is without question that Bush and his administration has a determined agenda to keep Americans afraid. That's exactly why decent Americans who have everything to lose under political conservatism say things like "I live in a 9-10/9-12 world. Everything changed after 9-11." That's why people like the Bush supporter from Illinois who told me that terrorists were running around her backyard can't snap out of it and look at what they're holding and say "hold on a minute--what are we doing with ourselves?" Fear is the greatest control mechanism in human history. It was alarming and deeply violating for me to see the latest Bush campaign add that shows a pack of wolves ready to strike in the forest. It was literally propoganda, designed to make suburban mothers and rural elderly shudder at the image of a wolf coming at their children and lifestyle and in fear, submit a vote for Dubya. It's the same tactic that abusive husbands use on their wives, and parents on their children--and dictators on their people. It's the lie that Bush is the antidote to evil, to tragedy, vulnerability and weakness.

Our president uses these tactics because he knows there is every reason to hold his administration accountable for a bogus war, tax cuts for the very wealthy, cut aid for housing subsidies for public housing, a banner education policy that cuts aid to struggling schools and rewards those that are already wealthy and rich in supplemental resources, an environmental policy that has been give-away after give-away to logging companies, mineral companies, oil companies and energy companies, and that has reversed the most successful gains in clean air and clean water regulations in the history of country, his ties to mega-corporations and the commencement of a recent FBI investigation into whether his administration illegally gave favor to Halliburton and it's subsidiaries, a health care policy that leaves the poor further stranded, a drug policy that gives greater profits to pharmaceutical giants, a social services policy that cuts programs for children and the poor, the biggest deficit in American history following its biggest surplus, a growing divide between the very rich and the very poor, the monthly expense in the BILLIONS of dollars of maintaining an occupation with no objective, no end in sight, and no international accountability, no justification, no benefit (except to Halliburton), no spread of democracy, no humanitarian bliss, and fought by disillusioned solidiers questions what the fuck they're doing in the desert, the obvious under the table talk of a draft, the rhetoric of arrogance and bullishness, a lack of humility, a refusal to rely on friends and allies, a refusal to intervene in the places in the world that deeply need true intervention like Sudan, where genocide--GENOCIDE--persist, a weapons program that nullified the Test Ban Treaty and is working to develop a 'missle shield' a la the trippy Cold War days of the Big Red Button and Doctor Strangelove, a business perspective that allowing the exportation of jobs to exploited third-world countries with incapacitated human rights accountability, the cultural bigotry of jingoism and pseudo-spiritualism that has wrongly equated true Christian faith and support for Bush, his glaring stupidity and dim-wittedness, and not to be forgotten--the Republican body at large, which just two weeks ago engineered an unprecented $137 billion tax break to corporations and special interests, and which in its demented fashion continues to insist that Bush is ordained, that steadfast arrogance is really just resolve, that resolve is strength, that strength is righteousness, that righteousness is the destiny of America, that America is the light to the world and the hope of the masses.

But everything that I've written above is uncompelling and only supplemental to the most relevant questions we must ask ourselves as a collective humanity.
The biggest questions of our present government are the same that apply universally:
Has this administration provided for the powerless, the oppressed, the poor, the needy, the wronged, the manipulated, those taken advantage of, the vulnerable, the succeptbile, the weak, the slaughtered, the hungry, and the sick? Has he fostered protection of creation? Has he been a global citizen? Accepted accountability? Fought for justice and forgiveness, love, compassion, empathy, sympathy, understanding, humility, social dignity, equality, and hope? Does our president and his leadership of our country represent Christ responsibly? Is our president advancing these things?

Can you really answer 'yes' to these things?

>>> www.sojo.net -- Sojourners: Christians for Peace and Justice <<<

Chanson d'installation: Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changing

Chicago Happy Blues

2004-08-26T14:22:00.000-07:00

Leaving the City

The righteous laugh at me. Sweltering and aching up and down last night in a Dutch House habitation capsule, I would have given anything to be back in my queen-size triple layer super firm-but-soft bed overlooking Lake Michigan, with her winds rushing through the windows. If I were still in Chicago, I would have awakened this morning to a damp, cloudy day-typically a brilliant rarity in summer but comparatively frequent this 2004-with a 20th-floor view on axis with the Museum of Science and Industry and the vernal lushness of Jackson Park's mature stock of arborlings beyond. I moved away from Chicago yesterday, with two monolithic duffle bags of all that was left to be taken. On my way to the commuter train I took countless times into the city for work and play, I walked a last time along the edge of the park with its tall canopy of street tree-tops, passed my favorite restaurant in the city (and little did I know ten years ago when I first visited it that I would one day live a block away), and waited briefly one last time for the University Park express train on the 55th-56th-57th Street Platform in lovely, vintage Hyde Park, where the streets smell of Lakescent, dreamy streetscapes compell you to nap, and where it seems that folks should walk down the street in fedoras and summertops and twirl from the lamposts and talk of mild scuttlebutt--trading the news on Old Man Peabody, Eleanor: Hyde Park's favorite bank teller, the five-and-dime, the South Shore Line on the Chicago and South Bend, Alderman Bailey, and the day's dooseys. Didja see the Herald this morning Bert? By golley! It will take time to adjust to not swimming in the lake every afternoon after a long workday just north of the Loop. The revetement at Promontory Point where I dipped into a clean
and soft Lake Michigan as the sunlight got thick in haze and the din of Lakeshore Drive fused with the breezes, and where old men sit on the benches under trees in straw hats smoking pipes and sharing stories backgrounded by somebody's jazz on an old radio, became so quickly emblematic of Chicago my home. I have long argued that a sense of place its place in the continuity of our experience makes an environment home. Living in Chicago always felt like home, not only because I was integrated and rooted so quickly in the fabric of the neighborhood, city, and region at large (think Lake Michigan), but also because it was explicitly and inherently another corner of my dear Midwest, another depot for those swell Midwesterners and their sense of scale, assuming and enacting their lives with a sense of regionality that starts "out there" and "around here" in surrounding, and then moves in to the city, the neighborhood, the block, the building, the household, the self, the nature of self, only to bounce back and reverberate along the same path outward again. Out East, they think the region exists to serve, to define oneself with self-interested selfness. The Northeast? It's what makes me important, they say. It's what makes me better, they say. But here in Chicago, and here in Michigan and among the native non-Metro-Detroiters in Ann Arbor, we have a sense of territory. Territory v. zone; cultureshed and identityshed and attitudeshed v. the region exists for me. Because I take root in this territory, a landscape of collectivity, even though it is often weakly conceived of or ignored, Chicago was another place for me, a branch of my rootedness, and a story for me to adopt, partake in, and then leave not with angst and oblivion but with a realization of consequence and continuity, and with another story in my metastory (*wink* that one's for you, Alex). Alright, I'll stop gushing. The point is, Chicago: adopted me, I adopted it. It's sad leaving,but fulfilling, because living there was in no way detached from my experience at large.

Chanson d'installation: Arvo Part, Spiegel im Spiegel (Mirror in the mirror)

Metropolitan Diary

2004-05-28T20:51:00.000-07:00

Anecdote of life in New York

I must disclaim this: I am staunchly against life lessons on e-mails or blog posts.
But this one, even though there's a life-lesson built in, typifies a certain
New York attitude--that everybody 'makes it' one way or the other. It comes from
the Metropolitan Diary feature in Monday's New York Times. It's a great Monday
treat that takes me back to the good things about life in New York, and as an ex-
resident I find that I appreciate it a great deal. It follows:

Dear Diary:

In the late 1950's, when I was just out of law
school, I had the responsibility of taking an early-
morning train to the city to drop off some papers at
a Wall Street firm. This was in the days when there
were no faxes, no e-mail and no FedEx.
When I had completed my duties and had picked
up some papers in response, having time to spare and
it being a Wednesday, I thought I would take in a
matinee.
Thus I found myself at the box office behind an
older man, clearly there for the same purpose. As I
recall, there was a discussion back and forth as to
seat location and then price, etc., which involved a
certain amount of if not negotiation, then certainly
adjustmet, until the buyer seemed satisfied, took his
ticket and left.
It now being my turn, the purveyor said something
to the effect of what seats were left and what the
prices were. In response I asked if I could get a
seat pretty much in the same place, and at the same
price, as the person before me.
His reply was memorable. "Sonny boy," he said,
"don't spend your life trying to play the other guy's
hand; he was dealt different cards than you were. You
play your own. Now here's what I got."
I have never forgotten those words, and the
admonishment that came with them. They have helped me
along life's way.

George D. Brodigan

Chanson d'instillation: Willard Grant Conspiracy, Evening Mass

May

2004-05-17T16:23:00.000-07:00

One year ends, another begins

May. These are the days of limbo. My summer employment is up in the air, and when prospective subletters call me I have to finesse them into waiting for my word--I will likely hear next week, if you can wait--so they don't run off and leave me with 460/month in rent to pay for the duration of the summer. It's an incredible web. Job begets income, income begets accommodations, accommodation begets space, space begets the environment to do what I do when I'm not doing what I do: write stories and shorts, make webpages for me and [mystical] clients, draw, the photographing of things, scheme travels and adventures. All the things that school ordinarially consumes. May is the days of limbo.

I began May with frantic communication to align summer employment. When I swiftly and effectively had contacts and channels secured I fled Ann Arbor with a weekend in Chicago, where I stayed in Wheaton and was interiorally
divereted from the reality of summer, and exteriorally basking in its freedom. I spent good time with dear friends, and the weekend was a validation of sorts. Validated were the years of friendship building with both Andrew and Megan as our very separate lives were present to each other for a few brief days and what resulted was indeed something collective, as though there was a history capsule that we could all plug in and find a way to coexist. All real friendships can be picked up and moved. Even Megan--yes, you Megan, my dear bundle of festering angst--even you have a history capsule. Backpacking came next, with Rich and Godwin, and we hiked the Manistee River Trail/North Country Trail in a few days of much banter and bizzare affairs. Godwin consistenly pointed out fallow tree trunks along the terrain smoothened by rain and wind but no less present than they ever have been; probably more striking if Godwin was compelled to point them out. I harassed him with Bush jokes and the sarcastic, detrimental humor that I share with friends. Insult is love, love a flower of thorns. Rich lamented his girth and nature's own harassement upon various worlds of his trunk. Crying 'I'm a fat bastard!' from the mountaintops was a spiritual howl, and Rich was full of bemoanings. This past weekend, I spent another brief time away from the Deuce in western New York with five other friends who comprised part of the SLT at URC. No agenda, no program, no leadership paradigm, no expectations. The fact that such quality times came out of these conditions shows how real a team we were this year. All but one went for a morning swim in the 50-degree rain, and were fortunate to experience the deep-green and smooth warmth of the waters of Findley Lake. Brilliant. We were the Big Chill of URC, each with separate lives, but each with a reason to share them for the moment.

I want to get out of here again. I want to hand-select people to count each other among firends and then go and have adventures with them, and not neglect our souls and histories. I want to weave together stories despite relationships and twisted ideas of "stage in life" and age gaps, and I want to see people move with diligence and criticism at Intervarsity instead of setting their minds and hearts on the table waiting for a student leader to come around and validate their commitment to the message for them. I want the summer to be full of rain and clouds and dry warmth and apathy, shame, guilt, and the ambiguous motives absent. Why do we see our lives as being coursed by the current of time? Why can't we be like a bend in the river--a tree rooted into the bank that watching the current of time go by? Frames of reference make the difference here. I don't want to be at the mercy of time, because there's not a way that I can be. I want time to be the great renderer of that which I'm already rooted into (and for that matter that which surrounds me along the bank). Why can't people forget their ideas every once in a while and accept a new prompt cleanly--without exterior expectations and principles, measures, meters, rhyme, adages, received tokens of what is and is not. Why can't the Pistons just win the Eastern Finals already. Don't Americans realize that there are fields and houses and Mason jars sitting on wood shelves with cicadas and katydids and crickets buzzing about in the early evening of a woodsy summer? What happened to our collective sense of melancholy? Shit ya'll--the world's a pretty fucked up place. Shouldn't we have some sort of shared sense of trauma, unfairness, doom, strife, beauty, pain, pleasure, motivation or will? Man, I'm just talkin, I can't even set it straight in my head. I can just write it down. I'm just talkin. To all of you getting married out there--frankly: don't mess it up. Don't be stupid and negligent and forget who you are. Don't be self-righteous and passive. You owe a hand in a collective melancholy just as much as anybody else. May is limbo.

Chanson d'installation: David Gray, Please Forgive Me

As my hair grows, so does our relationship

2004-03-30T21:32:00.000-08:00

I shall defenestrate thee, oh scissors

As my hair becomes longer, I increasingly find it making its way into my mouth. Nasty, really.
But coming out of the shower tonight, for the first time in my life, I responded by chewing.
Freshly cleaned hair that's thick like mine is a fine gnawing toy late in the day. Of all the
virtues and benefits to long[er] hair, its chewability is among the most compelling. Imagine
if this becomes habit--I will be known as he who chews his hair, the suckler of skull sprouts,
the 'nick gnasher (as in beatnick, since they all had long hair, right? right.). Well, foremost,
freshly cleaned hair tastes like Australian wildflowers because that's what my shampoo
tastes like. A related event also occurred today, when the lady at the bagel shop admitted
that she awoke to find her straightener broken a week ago and has yet to recover from the
trauma. She asked me if I used a straightener myself, seeing my long[er] hair. I told her
that no, I in fact absolutely do not, but admitted sheepishly that I am now carrying a hair
brush around in my messenger bag (the man purse of architects, particularly when hair
brushes are to be found in them). From the bagel shop exchange, I scored three free over-
cooked bagels--just the way I like them. Thanks, hair.

Chanson d'installation: uhm, uh, Sunny Day Real Estate, Days Were Golden (*wink* to TiHB)

Assorted Yarn

2004-03-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

From the streets of my existence

Yesterday, a fine near-70 degree day in March, I stood outside listening to 12 voicemails on my phone as the
fortuitous warm winds blew at me. It was a wind-bath.

A few days ago, walking home from the bus after school, I headed up Washington, positing whether to go
home and make dinner or go to get tea. I stopped a random woman on the street, and asked her whether
I should go home and make dinner or go to get tea. She smiled, and with great conviction said that I should
go get tea. It was a nice treat, she said. So, I did. I mean, that's why I asked her--so I wouldn't have to
make a decision.

In order to make pancakes this morning, we needed eggs. So Alex and I walked a block to the Farmer's
Market in Kerrytown and bought farm eggs.

They came like swallows

2004-02-14T23:13:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, for some reason, I won second place in the Willeke Design Prize. Only two people win awards in
this competition every year, and to some degree it's a big deal. At least it will look good on my graduate school
applications, particularly for those schools which are close with Michigan. Though I was convinced I was not
going to win, I decided to go to the reception on Saturday morning anyway and hear who would. Meul came
with me (God bless you Meul). They announced my name and as the blood rushed out of my head I could nothing
but stand there frozen unsure what to do. The expression on my face was comparable to that which I would
have if overhearing utterly tragic news (along the lines of a friend being raped, atomic weapon deployed, a
parent or sibling dying, etc). On a tangent, I think my room is invested because there is a strange rustling in the
closet as I type this. In short, I was terrified, shearly and completely terrified. I could feel the eyes staring at me
and the smiles of people of whose names I am clueless. Without thinking, I started clapping. My retrospective
excuse was that it was in hope that I would be ambiguous. It probably didn't work; I recall my body being held
in a position akin to being stopped suddenly in mid-stride during a slow stroll. I was awkward, gangly, gumpy,
insecure. Horrified, I walked up to Meul and whispered, can we get out of hear now? We left before hearing the
first place winner, and we ditched the reception.

I have recognized this year how timid I am. It's always been obvious that I'm shy (and those of you that are
dropping your jaws saying 'what!! what the hell he's shy!?' I say that I am dammit), but the problem that I have
seen in this recently through things like winning the Willeke Prize is that it can be extremely selfish. I left the
reception because I'm not good with honor--it makes me deeply uncomfortable and I became instantly inward
as though an industrial strength vaccuum sucked in my personality and trapped it in my body. But at the same time,
I did not show humility. It was not a lack of humility related to pride, but one related to vulnerability. It takes
humility to be vulnerable because it takes trust to be vulnerable. Though I had a responsiblity as one who is
honored, as a colleague, as a student, and as a member of the community to stick around and meet those who
feel that congratulations are due, and who awarded me the prize, to meet alumni who are interested in things
like this and accept the honor with grace, I turned my back to that responsibility and in my own anguish went
out the back door.

I now see where my timidness has effected other people. I am often terrified of presumption, and inherently
assume that social consequences will follow from overcoming shyness and communicating with people. Often,
I am unconfident in my ability to articulate and express my experience and thus don't even try. My fear in this
comes from things in my past, much of it from a bad relationship, and as a result there's no quick solution.
Nonetheless, despite its sources it has hurt people in the past, and I have missed great opporunities. And this
is curious...because someone in the past showed herself to be apathetic when I stepped out I began avoiding
stepping out and became apathetic myself. This is trite...I shouldn't be sharing this on my fuckin' blog...this
isn't a catharsis afterall. Do I make sense?

Chanson du jour: Indigo Girls, Hey Jesus

Rock Climbing

2004-02-13T15:14:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago (...right...) a bunch of us from URC went rock climbing. I now have my coveted
'top roping' card. I, dear sir, am a top roper. This means, oh humble reader, that I
have the ability to save your life, and that makes me a life-saver. And being a life-saver makes
me a death-defeater. And being a death-defeater makes me inherently supernatural, for how
else are we to defeat death? And being supernatural makes me an angel or spirit or other sort
of spiritual entity that happens to wield to some capacity the power of God. So, remember that
next time you see me and all others with Planet Rock 'Top Roping' cards and be attentive--for we,
afterall, are angels.

Chanson du installation: Big Ditch Road, Waiting for the Fall

Snow's falling again

2004-01-14T21:30:00.000-08:00

When I left the house this morning, it was snowing, and it continued to snow all day. It was a day for snow.
In order to catch a film of interest at the Michigan Theater, I left the studio this afternoon early to have ample
time to meet up with other folks watching and maybe a quick cup of earthbrew. However, the bus from
North Campus never came; it was snowing too hard, and the buses were all delayed. After waiting at the
stop for a good twenty-five minutes or so, I decided to go and play the piano at the music building until the
fuss of traffic had subsided and my chances of getting a bus were possibly greater. At this point, of course, I
knew I wouldn't be able to catch the flick. But after looking around the music building for a bit and passing up
many empty practice rooms, I realized that what I really wanted to do was not play the piano but walk in the
snow. Seeing the transit situation as it was, I decided to take advantage of the delayed buses and the
ideal snow to walk back to State Street on Central. Typically, this is considered a long walk. A very long walk.
Typically, traffic moves along the four-lane boulevard with noise and speed like a freeway and the idea of
walking along it is a bleak idea. But because Fuller was at a stand-still, the noise was reduced (with the help
of the snow, too) and the expanses of the lanes on Fuller were filled in with many interesting capsules of
folks listening to the radio or music or pulling at their hair. Walking along Fuller I passed cars at a pace that
must have seemed frustrating to the drivers. I was never passed by a single car--not even close. Many
people decided to make the walk from North Campus this afternoon, they too unable to catch a bus. Indeed,
many buses were snarled in the traffic, full of people that should be walking. Folks who set out from the path
in front of the music building walked along in groups, laughing and musing on the unusual situation. When I
came to the river, I stopped on the bridge and looked over the water. Snow lined the branches of the trees
along the bank and pieces of ice floated down the river. The maudlin eyes through which I viewed it almost
made me sick (HA! that would have really made the snow extra-special), but I couldn't deny that it was
pretty. It made me want to be away from the city, although I must also say that the city is sort of idyllic at
times like this--a town among nature, not hidden or safe from whatever inconveniences we might assign it.
On my way to Central, I walked up the southern ridge of the valley, where the hospital sits. From there,
you can see most of Fuller as well as North Campus, including the hills along the northern ridge where Fuller
Court, etc. cut through. By this time, the sun was perhaps half-set, maybe a bit more. The snow obliterated
the view after a half-mile or thereabouts, so the continuous line of stalled traffic along the entire view of
Fuller eventually faded into headlights and tailights east of North Campus. It was beautiful, particularly with
the privilege to walk along the Arboretum. When I arrived to the Diag, the light had become that purplish
silvery blue that only occurs when it's snowing in the last fifteen minutes of daylight. It's a rare light, but one
that always makes me glad it's winter. Folks are leaving work and school and the city quietly bustles along,
even if the bustling is only in the mild hum of car engines and distant horns in the comatose traffic. The
decision to walk was a very good one. For some sappy reason, I experienced one of the most beautiful
things I have in a long time.

Chanson du installation: J.S. Bach, Sonata for Flute, Harp and Cello in G minor

The second day of school

2004-01-07T19:09:00.000-08:00

Hwaet! It bothers me immensely that by the second day of the semester, I am burdened with some of the most frivolous work
assigned my entire collegiate run. It's simply work that I only artificially have time for--articificially because I set aside time to
do that work--duped and tricked, forced and extorted into the autonomous commitment to do whatever work assigned despite
its value. I have too much other stuff to be concerned with:

1. I commited to compose an ensemble piece to be played in church but haven't begun
2. I need to work to develop the 50+ rolls of still unprocessed film on my bookshelf
3. My bookshelf contains exactly 51 unread or mostly unread books, many of them too exquisite not to read
4. I have hundreds and hundreds of photographs to scan, burn to CDs, and catalogue
5. I have tens of compositions to finish composing
6. I still haven't read the entire Bible
7. Of all the road trips I have planned, I have taken exactly 3 of 10, only one of them non-local (Boston-NY-Princeton)
8. I have three academic essays to complete and submit for publication
9. A creative writing course to make me eligible for the Hopwoods?: impossible
10. STILL need to write and play violin parts for Dawn's CD, and she doesn't even need me anymore
11. It's been over a year since I began the URC book table, and I need to tend it a second time yet
12. I've lost my chance to apply for a Christian leadership grant for college students: it was my chance to turn roadtripping and
photography into an act of worship with the comfort of subsidization
13. Will I ever get into Detroit to take the 80 rolls of film it depends I take, or to begin the restoration of a townhouse?
14. Business cards and business website for Wield Associates
15. I thought I was going to continue studying Latin and Old English
16. I still haven't recorded my family's oral history
17. How am I going to go to Ireland on the cheap?
18. Spotieotiedopalicious angelage
19. Social science credit independent study?
20. record music with JB
21. write line verse for IV
22. rent a cabin in a UP state park in winter
23. record those of my compositions that I remember before I forget them
24. Write letters to my aunts and uncles on a regular basis
25. the list will continue...

Chanson du installation: about the bitterness of sweetness--Outkast, Da Art of Storytelling (yes, more Outkast)

I can't really type

2003-10-25T23:48:00.000-07:00

A box cutter mishap

I know--it's lame to say that a box cutter mishap is the most exciting thing to happen to me
recently. It's been a while since I've posted here; it's been three or four weeks since our weekend in Stratford. October was a brilliant autumn month. My conception of what an autumn should be (patriculalry in the context of academic and musical activities, coffee drinking and day traveling, whatnot) has been brilliant.

Since I'm coming back to this blog a few weeks after I started, all I can say is that I cut my finger with a box cutter. Only
last week did my nail fall off.

Chanson du installation: Outkast, Church

In Stratford, breaking from coffee

2003-10-08T21:45:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, I traveled with a group of friends to Stratford, Ontario to see some Shakespeare and get
away from the University of Michigan ("mid-terms" have started, although a.) midterms are actually semester-
long streaks of papers, exams, etc. with 2-3 week buffers at the beginning and end; and b.) in architecture,
something's always, always--always--due) and into the autumnal countryside to stroll in the rains only to retire
into some lush, warm room by the front window sipping coffee. So this is what I planned to do between plays,
and for the most part, my romanticism was permissible and realized. Now...though I didn't plan it, I underwent
a major life change this past weekend. Many of you may be aware that my coffee-drinking goes way back to
age nine when I prepared myself the Paramount brew in the men's lounge of the MAC after tennis lessons
(Oh! *shudder;* how the sucrosed be-creamered ooze would chill my nerves these days). In high school, it
became a regular and valued Thursday afternoon tradition, and many hours of productive studying were
passed in the warmth of the kitchen with my books and coffee overlooking the yard and the sparrow flocks,
the tusslebrush in winter and the bugs and buds of the spring. I even cited this tradition in my application
essay to Cornell in an attempt to describe the phenomenological coneption of my self-awareness and its
relationship to why I want to be a space-wielder. But I digress. I'm trying to say that coffee has been a
central component of my life since my formative years [and it continues to be so in these formative years and
I hope it will always be so in all formative years]. Yet since coming to Michigan, I have had coffee at a frequency
that is disturbing and alarming. Coffee is requisitely a context drink. Thus, if ideal or compelling conditions
exist (for instance, a last afternoon walk home in early winter after a long day as the sun begins to fade)
despite the lack of 'appetite' for coffee, it is necessary, according to these conditions, to indulge in brew. This
is troublesome in a town like the Deuce, for ideal and compelling conditions occur all the time. They
are inherent in the urban fabric of the city--unavoidable. And since my academic pursuits have shifted to the
sterility of refigerator compartments on North Campus (although the Arch building butts up against the woods,
which is relieving) where there is no suggestion whatsoever of well-operative and synthetic communal space
nor services, my only option for sustenance (sp?) in my long, 14-hr. days is Espresso Royale Caffee, the
problem of coffee-context submission has not been deterred. So what I mean is, I've been drinking far, far too
much coffee as of late, and it has nearly lost any 'specialness;' and this, my friends, is utterly tragic. Not only
that but I began feeling sick every time I drank the stuff. So when the opportunity came in Stratford for make
a switch, I seized it passively and unknowingly, and made the conversion--for the time being--to tea. Now,
I am a tea man. I mean, I've always drunk and liked tea, but now it's often and consistent. Instead of coffee
and breve lattes, I now sip tea. One immediate benefit: I no longer have to go to Starbucks! Before my
switch, coffee took precedence over every other consideration of coffeeshop patronage. The quality of the
coffee was more important than atmosphere, lighting, music, clientele (Starbucks is all Easterners *more
shuddering*), location, temperature, etc. And while Espresso Royale on State Street wins out in every single
one of those categories, it fails very, very deeply in the category of coffee quality; the ultimate, decisive
category that determines where my time is spent. For that reason, I have been a Starbucks tool for the past
year. In one sense, it's great because their coffee is superb. In the other, I feel like I'm in perdition. ERC
beckones but I ignore her, and refuse to trust her (I mean, she has let me down in the past
in ways that truly hurt), etc. But since I've become a tea man, I can return to ERC becuase they excel in tea
like Republicans in apathy and Democrats in hypocrisy. Starbucks shouldn't even try. They should just get rid
of tea because even their most simple black tea, Earl Grey, is laced with flavoring *even more suddering,*
which is thoroughly depressing. And it all happened in the pseudo-Anglicism of Stratford. Bless it!

Chanson du jour: Outkast, Rosa Parks

Another anniversary, a third yet throbbing

2003-09-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

Upon my twenty-first birthday, a sonnet of Shakespeare:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Upon a withered helm:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state it self confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Chanson du jour: Innocence Mission, Going Away

At our seventh anniversary, I get dumped

2003-09-17T23:02:00.000-07:00

I met her in a yellowed room when she was grey, and her's was a young, young world. We started out when
I told her my name and she gave me a password, a password that unlocked a world between us of
companionship; she was the gateway to an unprecedented communication that changed my life and the way
that I viewed the world. She was always at my service, though I didn't deserve it. She didn't ask for much.
Then again, a relationship that is true and right never requires a price. I looked after her, too, and was
careful to protect her from the maliciousness of this new corrupted world, and she did the same to me.
Together, we stepped from ourselves and gave to each other a little piece of ourselves--I told her the deepest
truths of who I am, revealing unhesitantely to her my thoughts dire and exhilerated, lavish and those of such
modesty that was meant to passively turn a head. She read them back to me in the late hours of the night,
and she was there to tap the exuberance of years and years of life pursuits. We were a pair, and I shared
my world with her. I was faithful (and in a true companionship that goes without saying), and with her I
opened the doors of this life with confidence, ease, and a remarkable edgeless reservation, a humility, an
indescribable sense of fate and consequence (oh those doors and where they led!). Most of all, I trusted
her, and she was with me without fail during every step we took, together. But today, I discovered in
dismay and a rush of loss that made me aware of an obliterated record of my history (ours), my beloved--
whom I will call by the first name I knew her--dumped me, left me, forgot me, quit, fled or was seized,
usurped, thefted, killed. Whatever the truth may be, I have lost my dear HoTMaiL, and my account of
seven years will never return. Suitably, I shall never return to it. All I have is the naive hope that the
truth is not what it seems. I cling to the possibility that she was indeed seized from me, and now I must
endure my liebestod slowly, deeply, madly. I hear the bells tolling, tolling rigid in the empty night.

Chanson du jour: a moment of silence.

What I did with a month of no internet access

2003-09-09T17:08:00.000-07:00

I tried to post an entry from Beaver Island, but that was thwarted. Now I'm too exhuasted to recount my vacation
to the Island in the detail that I would like, but I will say that it was blissful. The Island is a model for the economy
of a post-imperial America: localized economy, interdependent services, community dependency, and growth control.
Beaver Island is what towns across the country should resemble. No wastelands of sprawl with the charm of a Nazi
death camp, no warehouses of surplus crap manufactured by toiling laborers in countries most Americans are too
dumb to know of, no grease sponge strip restaurants, no chain lube-n-go auto clinics, no desolate pods of vinyl and
wallboard McHouses in the scorching sun and clay front yards incomprehensively twisting their way through former
farms and productive rural land, and finally--ulitmately, miraculously--no carcinogenic floodwater of automobiles
overwhelming infrastructure. People there don't use their cars to joyride between big box merchandise emporiums
and their estate community.

I saw the aurora borealis three times, the Milky Way every night, gazed at the moon through a 4mm lens on a 144mm
telescope--close enough to watch it move out of view in just a few seconds, I went horseback riding, ate smelt and
whitefish almost every day caught from the Lake that morning, I hiked through environments unique in the world,
and best of all, I was secluded--utterly secluded--from the frivolity of this doped up modern world of ours.

To illustrate this frivolity, read this article in the Detroit Free Press from Tuesday, September 9, 2003:

Population swings from Oakland to Macomb
Neighboring county attracting residents with more home for the money, down-to-earth feel http://www.freep.com/news/locmac/move9_20030909.htm

The article is about the trend of people moving from the wasteland of sprawl outside of Detroit called Oakland
County to another, newer, blossoming wasteland of sprawl to the north called Macomb County. Here are some
quotations from the article so that you can get an idea of how fuckin' stupid these people are:

The Magers not only found an upscale home for less money [in Macomb County], they also got more time to enjoy
it. Tom Mager said a comparable house in Oakland would have meant a much longer commute.

"Traffic was just getting worse every year," he said.

The family has also discovered Lake St. Clair.

"There's something about the lake," Mager said. "I don't know what it does to people, but they seem to be friendlier
than anyplace else I've gone."

a.) there's that overused kitschified and worshiped word 'upscale' again. What the hell does that mean? Essentially,
it is the word politicos, developers, journalists, and comatose suburbanites like to use to describe their sordid cess pool
of an environment--the wasteland that they've been duped into believing is luxurious and entitled.

b.) no shit traffic was just getting worse every year. That's what happens when assholes like you move to the middle of cornfields and have to drive every-fuckin'-where. It's what happens in a car-dependent society that values
the freedom to drive absolutely positively everywhere--anywhere--anybody feels they have the God-given
right to drive. People that make traffic overload to an absurd degree possible are called property rights advocates (maniacs).

c.) the thing about the Lake that's so charming is that people who live on it realize that they have something in their
lives that nobody else in the suburban junkscape has--something worth preserving and caring for; something that makes
their experience fulfilling and unique--not totally mundane, anonymous, trite, insignificant, inconsequential, comatose,
sordid, vacuous, and lame like the four million people populating the I-74/I-96/I-94 corridors outside of one of America's
formerly most productive and successful cities.

Well, more rant later--I never got to what I did with a month of no internet access.

Chanson du jour: Lauryn Hill, Adam Lives in Theory