hi from here

Two noteworthy, unrelated asides I've come across
in my research:

The Mall as a Machine for Living (a hypertext by Matt Blackburn)
Schwarz (a blog, it seems)

As you were.

P.S. posting is spotty, cart is busy, a new potential collaborator has come out of the woods...disaster has struck the house, and me+Mol are on triage...look to drafts for evidentiary fragments of the newcities project, si tu desire...

Dreamtime

The Dreamtime, when gods and heros roamed the earth, doing great deeds and shaping the landscape into the form we know today.

In NYC, dreamtime sets in every time high finance gets "interested" in a neighborhood. All sort of bedlam set in an it reeal hard to find your bearings. Remember, great deeds are sometimes also great folly.

the Lower East Side has seen it's share of folly, and now that the dream-time is ending, and the new form of the landscape is beginning to set, the full impact of the change is becoming clear.

A local bar/restaurant that used to serve take-out margaritas that people used to drink on the pushcart corner has been barred from the practice, after the new landlord across the street complained repeatedly to the police.

Lockhart Steele has moved on from his self-assigned web beat. Signs are, dream-time is ending. The waters retreat, what are we left with.

Men and women, many of them very young, are coming out onto the new terrain. It is a happy time...

Hypercity

On any block in the city, look down the street and you can see the traces of a million passages.

The city, by its nature, is the product of countless people. Through the intentional conflux of labor, or the unintentional overlapping of living spaces, the city is changed and shaped to better suit us, to form a more perfect ground of our interaction.

Layer by layer, the city is assembled. Layers of construction, layers of relationships, chains of production, chains of objects. You pass down the street/ I pass down the street. What do we have in common?

How can this complexity be comprehended? Where can one find a place in this megasystem?

Of course, it is possible to try to stay entirely within one layer -- follow in line, in conformity with the established system. But is this really life in the city?

Hypercity is an attempt to jump between layers; to give consistancy to that jump. It is a local affair -- every jump is different, so Hypercity must use specifics. Each section tries to deal with one volume

push you

The push-you-pull-you over anorexia

part one: "do don't do"

I reading a particularly vile article
in Teen Vogue
the other day.
It was called
"competitive dieting: is your circle doing it?"
or some such, cutting it
razor fine
on that thin line
between
hand-wringing
and instructions.

"oh girls you wouldn't want
to
MONITOR EACH OTHER
CONSTANTLY
because that would be
so bad

and think of how thin you would get."

and, like, in the first paragraph
they talk about the
weight-loss benefits of cocaine

(this, i remind you, in TEEN Vogue...)

but here's the real
kicker:
"all girls lie about what they eat.
they will be starving
and they will say:
this is just what I like"

do you see where this train
is heading?

"don't do it"
slips
very easily
into
"don't talk about it"

anorexia is effective
because it is silent
secrecy
is a key part of the function

lies and hiding

mystification

..."how does she do it?"

(you don't know the
half of it buddy)

can there ever be a tally of the damage anorexia wreaks?

-------------

part two: "It's about control"

notes

food is more better and more powerful than any illegal drug. The effects are awesome (although results may vary), OD'ing is almost impossible. And kicking is a bitch, so I'd advise staying with the habit.

hard body -- sucking it in. the body is expressive or it is nothing, a cold rock in dead space. The hard body, the sheath -- naked comes from the Greek for sheath. The automata of arousal, without arousal. nudity without nakedness.

The factors of our lives are fundamentally out of our control.

http://www.space-invaders.com
http://www.space-invaders.com/ny4.html

Clothes ornament the expressiveness of the soft body, bob and oscillate, or they form the shell of the hard body

The rebel -- naked blade. But unsheath the knife judiciously. "Sanity is a haircloth sheath/ with a jewel underneath" -- Lao Tsu

i have a mouth

I have a mouth
that
connects
to a stomach

I have a jaw
and a knot in my throat

--------

The question I have
is not

who has these things,
or what do they mean

the question is
what has that got to do with anything?

Hypercity: about

What is the hypercity project?

A city is more than a collection of buildings, it is the sediment of our work and lives. Even the simplest stroll leaves a trace, if only a scuff on the sidewalk, and the terrain of the city is layered with the traces of those who have been there, who are there every day.

But this view of the city threatens to collapse into nostalgia.

So, shall we plan the mega-cities of tomorrow -- clear away the clutter of dead generations once and for all and build fresh? It is certainly tempting: there is a great deal that could exist, that could be better, that could facilitate an better way of living.

There intercedes a great darkness.

Great concentrations of human life are the consequence of great social developments, and form a nuanced territory of social relationships. The megacities of the world -- tremendous in detail, magnificent in its architectue, brilliant in its culture -- stand as an awesome tribute to the productive powers of humankind.

But these

But is a "city," defined by its political borders, an adequate way to discuss these social relationships?

Our being requires that we engage with our environments

But there

The very existance of such cities implies something more, a series of relationships that form the precondition for such a great concentration of human life.

The intensity of these relationships is remarkable. The last century has seen every planned development of urban life unceremoniously toppled; exceeded, subverted, and overthrown by the zeal with which city-dwellers persue new ways of life and modes of social contact.

Does this virulent excess mean that these cities will necessarily remain obscure to us? It is not an academic question. If we hold these reltionships as un-theorizable, we pose a stark limit to the possibility of better governance, of finer socialization, of happier living. If these relationships are un-theorizable, then between the single citizen and the frenzy of the crowd there interceeds an impenetrable darkness.

This is the way things stand: these relationships are un-theorized. It is not a surprise. In a class-cloven society, the profound injustice of these relationships makes their intensity dangerous. The government, in order to effectively administer and enforce these relationships, must also suppress them.

This is the way things stand: city government is in denial of even the clearest facts of public record, and the residents of the city stand as a continual threat, living proof of their lies. In this ideological universe, "society" is reduced to the level of backdrop, set dressing for a galaxy of isolated personalities. As we live in this city we are enmeshed in the darkness of this denial, and our social relationships, dressed up in the garb of the purely personal, assume a jerky, spastic gait which make social progress little more than a fevered dream.

Are we to follow those who venerate this darkness and this fever, who name it the very essence of the city, its romance and its appeal?

I want something more than this dreaming. There is a better prize at hand. It can not be as rapidly fabricated or easily achieved as a dream, but a dream does not survive its own fabrication, and its achievement does not last long enough to be enjoyed. What we have is much stronger, a real place where what we produce can be used and re-used, change and become something more lovely than any mere imagining.

What we have is a hypercity. Let us touch its threads and describe what we feel. Let us learn how to live in it together.

human beings and their social relations are the substance of the city

These relationships have a remarkable intensity.

What is important is that these are astronomically high numbers. They are not only beyond our ability to comprehend them singly (even Imperial Rome may have had one million residents), they defy even sensible innumeration of their institutions, their conduits and exchanges.

A city is more than a collection of buildings,

the sediment of their work and lives.

It is supposed by some, most notably E.B. White, that by their nature cities require the suppression of these relationships

It is my theory that these relationships are suppressed

seeks to suppress these relationships

GrrAnimal

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.

D.H. Lawrence, quoted in G.I. Jane

This quote came into my mind the other day and suddenly it struck me as absolutely phony. An animal can't survive nearly the hardship that a person can, exacly because it can't feel sorry for itself. Self-pity projects. self pity protects. a person who can no longer construct the worth of their own lives has recourse, for as long as they need, as long as the shelter holds.

Looking for this quote I also had to look through a good amount of D.H. Lawrence's stuff, and it all seems to suffer from this same confusion. People don't hide unless they need to. When they have the tools to overcome the things that threaten them, coming out of hiding is easy. To simply thrust yourself out of hiding -- that's just another version of the confidence trick. You get hurt.

Now, I was raised in many ways to just throw myself out in the world. So, like, you can do it, it just has alot of hidden consequences...

eating notes

"You tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you can do."

the philosophy of "common sense eating" is worthless if it ignores what is commonly held.
America wields the most powerful food production machine the world has ever known. Are we really going to bet that the family farm can overcome it?

eating notions:
- eat for what you have to do
- eat what you like
- eat whenever you feel hungry
- experiment with variety

negative notions:
- disassociate diet and exercise
- day-to-day eating is not a reward or a punishment

Food Pyramids

		                 Whole Foods

		Boston Market	Outback Steakhouse

	McDonalds      K.F.C.	  Taco Bell

Who gets fed? How do they get fed?
If there is a choice, it can be our choice.

Drafts

As part of the changes a nc/ns, I'm introducing a category system. The first fruits of this improvement is a drafts section. I welcome comment by anyone bored interested.

test draft

test draft

Hot Shots

There's a nice photo series of Williamsburg, including a lot of cool graffiti, up on Bluejake.

noho gallery

this gallery is in a lot 4th street between bowery and Lafeyette

Large version (97 kb)

sea level

I read over at jimmylegs' that last weekend saw the largest exodus from NYC since 9/11. It didn't show up much in my sales, though. I heard today from my butcher that restaurant business sucked over the weekend. This is what's great about cooking at the sea level -- there's always business. If the scene isn't happening inside (which I overheard a number of times), where do people go but out onto the street?

Of course, there is such a thing as a sea change, but that's for another day...

One year in

I've been working at the cart for one year now. Over the next week or so I'm going to be working on this entry, trying to collect and elaborate some of the surprises and lessons of the past year.

happy_fourth

Marjetica Potrc

My mom sent me interesting article from the NY Times, featuring Czech artist/architect named Marjetica Potrc (mahr-ee-ay-TEETS-uh po-TERCH). She does work studying the architechture of marginal communities. There's some nice stuff on her web site. I wish there were more pictures, though -- this kind of documentary work is great.

More stuff...

Kagiso

"I normally just transplant a situation that I find interesting in the city to the gallery as a case study. That project was based on Kagiso, a suburb of Johannesburg. The city builds core units, which are equipped with the basics in terms of energy electricity, water and a sewage system. In this case the core unit looked like a skeleton house floor, pillars and a roof. The new owners build inside this framework, using whatever materials they have at hand, and as they envision their space. Next to the skeleton house I built a shack with a large satellite dish attached to it, which stands for communication. The basics in life are shelter, water and communication. This is the same for everyone, for shantytown dwellers, as well as for the most affluent population. You know this yourself because you travel a lot."
-- from http://www.potrc.org/obrist/

"'In Caracas the barrios grow and change shape constantly,' Ms. Potrc said. 'A majority of the dwellings sprout steel wires,' reinforcing rods that could support additional construction, 'thus proclaiming future growth.'" (from the times article) How fuckin' cool is that?

There is also some stuff at this exhibit of Potrc's work dealing with changes in the way a local Jordanian gov't deals with squatter settlements, moving from a policy of neglect and periodic levelling to actually trying to introduce infrastructural improvements.

Round-Up

run short of
fuel
for this here
blog-o-rama

so I'm planning
several new
directions
of
intentional travel
and expansion.

here's a round-up of new tangents

-----------

1) The Theory of Rent
--there are a number of
important questions you just can't answer
without a grasp of rent economics

to prepare myself I'm digging into:
Capital, Volume III, Part VI -- Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent
and data-mining for NYC housing info

2) Socialist Architecture
-- reviewing and re-presenting
the work of past masters
and snappy thinkers

for starters:
Karel Teige and the "Minimum Dwelling"
Paolo Soleri

3) Contemporary Urban Theory
-- mostly kinda boojwah,
but important for maximum
communication; I'll praise or
punch as I see fit

first couple:
Jane Jacobs
Mike Davis

4) The Physics of Electromagnetism
-- I just really want to understand
the right-hand rule (or is it the left-hand rule?)