October 31, 2003
Experiment/Collaboration
The experiement is a particularly fine form, and I am coming to appreciate its power. It is not simply a matter of being open to unexpected results. Openness is cool, but it is passive. If you want anything really interesting to happen, you have to do something.
An experiment is even better than just doing something and seeing the results: it means phrasing, as carefully as possible, what you hope to find out before you begin. This both guides your action and focuses your observation. And after the period of observation, there is an attempt to describe your results.
All this sounds really simple, stuff I learned in highschool. But it works nonetheless.
This exercise, to carefully test words and ideas against reality, is more than a crude quantification. It is by these words that the intensities of being can be shared.
What is at hand: as I am mastering the technical enterprise of the cart, I am coming to a new understanding of the cart work. I am making enough money, but money is not enough. It's not for riches I started this...but for what?
To relate my work to the work of others in a new way. To shake the tree and see what fell out...
So how is it going?
My ideas have changed so much since the outset. Some things I imagined are difficult or impossible -- can you believe I once considered that I would be able to push the cart around to do my shopping? Impossible! To drift about the city "on a roll of surf, feeding the hugry here and there"!? Not quite.
What is possible now?
This is the tricky part, because I am only just getting a hold on my tool. Bringing the new possibilities into focus demands more than just imagination. It demands an experiment.
"Scientific socialism" not for nothing, but more on that later...
I am slowly getting used to this, this proceeding forward in darkness. "And peril," I said, but things seem less dire now. An experiment is afoot, and I am in possession of a fine experimental tool. What do I want to know?
I want to study collaboration. It is collaboration that has brought me here, more than I ever could have imagined. Without the help of many people -- Molly and my parents being chief among them, and Andy, Mohammed, and Ali not far behind -- this experiment, this cart, would not exist, and could not work.
And experiment, too, serves collaboration; by solidly founding the words and ideas that is the infrastructure of future endeavors. This is why language plays such an important part in experiment. This is why this blog plays such an important part in the cart.
The machine might work very well indeed. The cart is the output of the collaboration between my life and other lives. The cart is the experimental tool. If the object of the experiment is collaboration, what is common between my life and others, the experiment produces results that can be immediately used to refine the tool.
It is not the end, but it could be a good beginning.
Posted by Sam on
05:44 AM
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October 22, 2003
Uncertainty Explained
Heisenberg's Uncertianty priciple is used to justify all sorts of spooky bullshit. Molly explains:
"The Uncertainty Priciple says that when you look for a thing, you may not be able to see something else. It does not say that you cannot see the thing you are looking for! It says that if you are looking for something else about the thing you may have to take a different tack."
Molly continues: "It's the phallacy of total observation: that you could absorb everything all at once."
Sam: "...because observation is partial! That's it's fucking point!"
Molly: "You see something when you look for it. that doesn't meen it didn't exist before you looked for it, it just means you couldn't see it before you looked for it."
It is not simple to build an alternative system of location.
Also:
Molly: "The amount of joy that you can get as a solo contracter is insufficient to sustain an entire life. It's never going to be enough. If you can't get joy from other people's joy you are sunk, my friend. It's like you're working in addition and everyone else is working in exponents."
Posted by Sam on
09:05 AM
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Comments (3)
October 17, 2003
Clues
"They write books with too many answers and no clues."
-Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective
I have been looking for clues that I feel better.
I was starting to feel depressed. I'm not exactly sure why I was feeling bad. There were a lot of reasons, really. I could trace them, but the real question was what to do to head them off, to cut them off at the pass.
I decided not to take the cart out as planned. I have been helping Molly clean up. We watched the Sox go down. I made us potato skins. Am I beginning to feel better?
murder mystery
There are many things to do, and the cart is just one of them.
The city is a question of space. What's happening?
I have been thinking about Hypercities. You may have noticed the tab up above. So far, there is not much more than that. The basic inspiration for the project was the thought that carried me to New York: every human activity leaves a mark in the space it traverses. Even walking down a street -- the passage leaves a trace. Add these traces together and you have the city. All these spaces, all these different uses, layered one on another. The Hypercities project is an attempt to map this ecology, this exponential city.
The current crop of major publications for New York -- The New Yorker, Time Out NY, New York, The Village Voice, Vice NY -- are a depressing waste of time. They participate in structuring the city, but never engage the structure of the city. They are devoid of resonance. They are full of answers, empty of clues.
Posted by Sam on
05:18 AM
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October 12, 2003
I dropped the bomb
unexplained fireworks near the Manhattan Bridge
The pushcart is blowing up! More people are coming, and coming back with friends (thanks JL!). More people want to be a part (of the cart). Revenues are growing by bounds, I can't make food fast enough, I can't bring enough food...all systems overload! I sold out before 3:30 both nights this weekend.
I have to make a few upgrades -- I need a new (larger) meat cooler for transport, a better way to move my raw materials around, a more front-loaded prep schedule, and possibly a second refrigerator!
To add to all that, I want to try an experimental first run on Thursday night this week.
P.S. Molly made me scones today! Yay! Eat and Be Happy!
Posted by Sam on
08:34 AM
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Comments (2)
October 08, 2003
Exclusion is a poison
Exclusion seeks to control the environment by keeping it out. This is the same idiocy as trying to build a home as a sealed box. One environment for the outside, a separate one for the inside. There can never be enough activity inside, it will always become unliveable.
So I want to be outside. As pinky paine says: "the outside is the inside when it comes to the prolecats."
Rainy at the intersection
The environment at the cart is not coming under my control. On the contrary, it goes more and more out of my control every week. This is what I love about it. On Fri., a guy who was wild and drunk on Jagermeister took a break from chowing down on chicken BBQ sandwiches to engage a group of 15- and 16-year-old black kids in a rap battle. On Sat., two photographers set up next to the cart with a bunch of their friends, taking polaroid portraits of the people in the street and giving them away. I am there, I am cooking, and then, because activity attracts activity, people are coming over, and they are eating and talking, and the street is going mad and we are all doing something together.
This is something that cannot happen a sealed box. No! We want what we are doing to spread and attract as many people as possible, and include them, and add their worlds to our own, their streets to our own, their abilities to our own. Who know where it can go?
Posted by Sam on
08:35 AM
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The California Electorate Sucks
No really, they do.
It's all fun and games until this guy is in control of your water supply
In a typical show of perversity, I decided that if I have to accept Arnold Schwarzenneger as the new governor of California, I might as well watch his acceptance speech at extremely high volume. If shit is gonna get freaky, why hold back? Ride this strange torpedo to the end, right...right?!
Damn, Molly is making me turn it down...
Now it's just sad.
"Maybe he'll have a heart attack," says Molly, "No, wait. They'd just re-animate him."
Shit, they should try lettin' loose those illegals and not-yet-citizens to vote as well as just drive...
Posted by Sam on
01:00 AM
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October 02, 2003
Ups for the Red Chef
A nice guy named Matthew Gross came by and interviewed me last weekend for the NY Sun. Here is the resulting article.
Posted by Sam on
03:17 PM
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