"You'd best be frozen!"

Plans And Sections Of The Winchester House

2008-07-16T11:02:00.008-04:00

...regarding a certain practice of the indoor wild, whereby homes--which are, out of long habit, avowedly definite--lose their drawn lines. The particular horror of squirrels in the ceiling, or a centipede in the kitchen, is the erosion of the drawn line.

Some designers work for grain, work for involution, work for involvement; work to make the sightline reel. No; a true grain may only be purchased through this surrender of control. You purchase it through leaving the last thing and nailing on the next. You can make a corpus this way; nail the feet to the legs, to the hip, to the guts, to the rib. A career like this is a blissful, evolving thing.

A wilderness of rooms is obtained through a surfeit of rooms. Which needn't be the same room each time, needn't be many rooms, only more rooms. Wilderness is only extent, passages and passages and passages. When the habit of building outlasts the habit of economy, these effects will be obtained.

There can be only so many glaring exits from the wild house. Only the long border. The way across the mountains and through the side of the checkpoint. A long border and your feet travelling along it.

Mulberry Leaves

2008-07-16T11:02:00.007-04:00

I see you as the mulberry-plant, which:

Grows gratefully into the niche it is given, even an asphalt scrape at the corner of a yard; or will as readily be a tree in a wide patch of plain.

Bears resentment, frequently summary removal, from the very ones who would rationally take and enjoy its fruit.

Is the low and disreputable humus from which the glory of silk proceeds.

Throws off joy in the form of senseless and profligate leaves.

On Miscellanies

2008-06-26T18:39:00.002-04:00

Miscellanies simulate a quick flight through the everyday, obeying a directive for novelty; composing the whole herbal for the vegetal novelty that grows around any wayfaring stranger.

The miscellany's first impulse is to class; second, to array; third, to move safely away. It shies from any full description, for fear of losing its indicial starting point. The miscellany clings by a point to the individual body, making fast an initial contact and forgoing any act of expansion. It draws lines as far as the body's arm will go; and meanwhile that body is running through space, gathering some hundred strands.

The miscellany assumes experience to be data, in the sense of a finite storehouse of datums; in the sense of being given gifts on the mere occasion of asking; in the sense of what can be freely given, and nothing beyond that.

The Domain Of...

2008-01-17T17:51:00.000-05:00

Making a domain is a matter of extending one influence evenly throughout a certain tract of space. Starting with a topographically homogeneous area is helpful but not necessary; establishing political sovereignty is helpful if troublesome; minting a new currency is helpful, though not always practical. Re-making the terrain into the shape of one face is satisfying in the short term, but will likely prove counterproductive with time (a face is liable to be mis-attributed).

To start making a domain, incarnate a miniature of the desired domain; that miniature will incorporate all salient features of the domain-to-be and serve as a ready reference for anyone inquiring as to those features. It could be a uniform, with badges; a carved monument; or a reasonably small scale model. It must in any case be on public display.

Next, travel through the planned domain and remove any elements outside of the miniature. Replace those elements by expanding approved elements.

Post signs around the periphery: "This is the domain of ..."

Barn

2008-01-17T17:47:00.000-05:00

This was a barn I often visited.

On the left is the ground floor. The wide aperture is where the truck comes in. Just beyond that is where the motorcycle is kept. Both of those spaces are connected to the workshop: table saw, jigsaw, clamps, a radio. There are also stairs with some boxes underneath them. Somewhere in there is a riding mower (not a tractor).

The loft is on the right. It is one open space filled with boxes full of photographs, magazines, and record albums. In front is a small opening for swinging your legs out of. From there you can look over the driveway and the road beyond.

Enlarge

2008-01-10T22:15:00.000-05:00

Many persons with their faces along the edge of the frame. By "frame", I mean window.

Why then can they not sleep?

They can't sleep because they are looking out from the window.

...

"I ask you to enlarge the potentate to threaten me boldly." I wrote that down, and asked in the morning what it meant. Well. A bald statement about the prostate?

...

Two ways to enlarge:

-to take an envelope, cut it in pieces, and pry apart the glued edges

-to find a slider that is labeled "enlarge".

...

A disagreement when we had to paint the house. We could either paint it white, and hope for the best; or use off-white and have done with it.

...

Vote on a topic. Your choices are: "The Significance of an Upside-Down Cross", "Utility Knife", "Characteristic Indianapolis", "Rigorous Matter of Part-Wholes", and "A Doge for Two Deacons".

...

Q: Steps it's too late to walk up?
A: An Olympic podium

...

YBDF staffer Joanie opts for "Charateristic Indianapolis"; she doesn't have a single picture to think with in this case. P.J.'s taste runs to "Utility Knife". Rick?...OK, another vote for "Utility Knife". Judith played in a band in her teens and would like to hear more about "The Significance of an Upside-Down Cross". What's a deacon? I'd like "A Doge for Two Deacons".

...

11 things in a row: a house, flowers, a lawn, septic tank, a lawn, rail fence, a lawn, pear tree, a lawn, patio, a house.

...

Q: How do you sleep on top of a pear tree?
A: I'm a bird

Strum And Drum

2008-01-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

1.
A common dream--to take up instruments without amplification, and take them to an area void of any need for entertainment, and play music of scrupulous wholeness with its assumed surroundings. Some people venture to sing songs about the nature they perceive, and some essay further, to play trees, grass, and stones. They may rhythmically drop stones in differing depths of water, and tell themselves that a) they are re-enacting a first utterance of human music, b) they are re-enacting the artificial productions of over-bred instruments in a properly primary setting, c) they are embodying through gestures of intentional vagueness a persona redolent to other persons of wholeness, wisdom, and native genius.

2.
The recordings of these activities could be constructed so as to evoke hallowed friendship, sojourns in total communion of understanding; the tape recorder is something of a shy raccoon cocking its head ingenuously at the singular endeavors of the artists.

Then again, the practice could serve as a neat tag and audible badge for a branded group or family of artists.

The Sunlit Hospital

2008-01-04T15:51:00.000-05:00

Nature improves and heals the human body. A shaft of sunlight, provided it be distinct, is a healing vector. To obtain consistent shafting, a grove of ample dimensions must be cleared in established forest.

A clear, grassy path of commodious width is made, to lead to a new clearing sprinkled with tall elms. The base plane is composed of a mix of innocuous grasses, fragrant herbs, and florets that dissipate lightly under the heel. One hears throughout the surrounding forest light rustlings and scamperings; this is the sound of ministering priests gathering the necessary ingredients for their poultices, mustards, tisanes, and decoctions. One by one, the priests arrive from the shadows, and return to their pots and teak tables to sort, wash, and stir; when their labors are complete, they summon nurses to administer the arrived-upon herbal aid.

The patients are borne in on canvas biers, then fitted upon stainless-steel armatures that have been driven into the ground at convenient intervals. They gently moan and flirt with great washes of fever, their swathed bodies cool and dappled, until such time as the prescribed cure begins to take hold. They are then issued a single crutch and allowed to depart with soft expressions of gratitude back along the cut path.

"What Means The World To You?"

2008-01-04T15:36:00.000-05:00

The world is round and ringed with reference. There are any number of rings to place around it. Each ring holds an index, each at a different scale. Each ring tells you something different about the world.

The world is a choice of the objects that constitute it. If you can form a class of real objects, you have defined the world (for the moment). I see that the world is maple trees, and what interferes with maple trees.

The world was meant to be an arrow but started to bristle too much with feathers. That is, it was sent straightforwardly through time but became distracted with appearances.

The world is a floor laid perpendicular to a wall. You are more akin to the wall than the world.

You can leave the world with some difficulty. Or, your exit is the world's expansion.

Notebooks Out Paysagistes!

2007-05-28T22:15:00.000-04:00

An interview conducted with "field architect" Tildy Junco in 1998 for WOOP-Jersey City's Perry Grimm Hour. Transcript presented with permission.

...

One hindrance to a real ecological understanding is this tendency to infer from working maps a simple generation of geometric forms from a unified ground. That the map has presented you with all the necessary information, the bare contours, and already excluded all the unnecessaries between. You need a sense of interpenetration. If your work is hooked into the larger site, if the site is too hooked into the region to even count as a site anymore, if you're hooked enough into the site to be inseparable from that--then!

...

Well, it's about breaking the habit of perception, of setting aside the picture in front of you, no matter how much you're into it. So, in regard to use, you could make some new typological prototypes, prototypes based less on those imperatives, places made from familiar words--park, or garden, or preserve, or yard. In the new prototypes, you would focus more on imaginative extents, places you can't put aside because you can't get a read on them. Really demonstrate that it's possible to apply precedents, to extend them, rather than follow them, or abandon them altogether. To start a project and, when I propose, to be able propose wholly, but without constraints--less for a lack of contexts, you understand, than a lack of inhibitions.

...

Superstructures can be made to fail--to lapse after the fact into a visible trace, a palpable trace. So you could intervene, create a particular form, and then leave it to spread out from that starting point. The nice thing is that it can grow halfway between you and "them".

...

We've made great efforts, but so far we've failed to derive any reasonably correct predictions of that interplay between plan-driven forms and intrinsically unstable material. So instead you see this history of wasteful hydrological, chemical heroics. I think we should try instead to deprecate those coherent borders, and work within better sureties--like stochastic regions.

...

How can you challenge static representations without abandoning a common visual language? And how do you extend a representation in time without imposing narrative sequence?

...

I think that a better bridge between ecological planning and individual initiatives can be found in middle terms between gardening and landscape practice.

...

So make landscapes with intermittency and ways out, where the focus can wander, shift, and lapse. Miniaturize those points, intersperse them across a fabric, and you'll get ornament--natural or no.

...

If you want to make infrastructure worth preserving, quote infrastructure in a preserve, and the preserve in infrastructure.

...

Writing on a wall is just the first stage of making a haven. It's a mistake to think less of people who want to index their presences, or stake their claims, in the gentlest way possible.

...

I'd say do less and indicate more. Imply the armatures you need to make, precisely to enable free action.

...

It helps to watch the local conditions expressed in form--like the manifestation and incarnation of a soil in particular plant life.

...

I don't retrofit out of constraints, but to have the benefit of constraint.

...

I recognize the stipulated ethics of my profession: wealth in harmony, social peace, and the robust health of ecological process. If you can't practice them, you should at least represent them.

...

Borderlessness and facelessness are the prime assets of my profession.

Three Black Bottles

2007-05-09T17:33:00.000-04:00

On an nearby archipelago, cottagers pass their time making a peculiar sort of black bottle from the volcanic sand. When each bottle is done, they write instructions on a piece of paper, enclose the paper in the bottle with a smear of wax, and place the sealed bottle into the currents that pass near the beaches.

The currents form an unpredictable path of circulation around the island system, one too treacherous for boats. Having been passed about the system for a certain amount of time, the bottle comes to rest on another shore. A recepient finds the bottle in the sand, and is obligated to follows the instructions therein.

The culture of this archipelago, then, is one of mutual deity. Each cottager knows that their fellows author bottles just as they do. Far from debunking the process, this lends a lofty character to the most humble fellow inhabitant. What is more--to receive your own bottle back is not a demystification, but a more intimate relation with acting fate.

Going Concerns

2007-05-05T14:49:00.000-04:00

PEATERMARKS SOCIETY OF AMERICA

"The interest of Peatermarks lies wholly in its organization; lacking any external reference, its members preoccupy themselves solely with the growth and maintenance of the club. The Peatermarks magazine catalogs no accomplishments, no profiles in courage; it merely catalogs the names of members and the locations of chapters. The few photos depict a series of bare offices and blank exteriors that could only be told apart by a seasoned Peatermark. One even suspects, given the preponderance of Peatermarks Halls located alone on local highways, in converted urban convenience stores, and on the third floors of office buildings in Rust Belt downtowns, that the allure of the Peatermarks Society lies in a tacit appeal to the very pleasures of banality."

Despite a strong start, the Peatermarks organization was soon overshadowed by the Zoaclubs, a chain of subscription-supported meeting halls where locally based twelve-member councils (comprising one member of each zodiacal sun sign) would vie with one another to solve "charitable challenges". For example, teams would be awarded a fixed point total for every square mile that they could arrange to have cleared of rubbish, or for each unit of quality low-income housing they could endeavor to construct. In addition to limited cash incentives, members were also treated to free astrological readings, available 24 hours a day.

HARP TONE VARIANCE RECORDS

"A record company dedicated to popularizing the humble field recording. Wedding the high electroacoustic tradition to the old-fashioned souvenir record, HTV seeks to provide the literal soundtrack to 'great places--exciting places--people places'. Also publishes sheet notation, study guides, and promotional leaflets."

Some strides were made with the Top Ten placement of the single "Always Terry Always The Same", ten minutes in the DJ booth of a Blackpool disco. It should, however, be noted that the charting version was remixed somewhat to highlight the conventionally "musical" elements of the recording.

SEARCH FOR REALTY

"An 'exploratory realty concern' that works to identify, evaluate, and sell unused space. SFR agents secure underutilized cellars, rooftops, parking lots, and conference rooms and pass them on to customers in need of modest, conveniently situated spaces. An in-house microgeographer works with the buyer to develop strategies for the parcel. Customers have developed a plethora of unique uses: a three-foot wide ice hockey rink in a crawlspace, a one-room hotel in a tollbooth, dormitory housing in cubicles."

Its business model was endlessly copied, but SFR fell behind by failing to provide the service that made its competitors rich: the subdivision of aerial and subaquatic spaces, and the design/build of associated specialized structures.

Poor Relations

2007-04-28T20:21:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to dwell on a personified nature, a community of spirits representing every possible place. The disappointment is immediate when I think of the continuing inclination toward a more vegetal perception of life, and likewise a perception of each tree not as a hamadryad, nor even an acknowledged kami, but as a secondary outthrow of the general and vague principle of life.

Each plant, perhaps, is accorded a sort of fractional being by the actuarial human, with some negligible demand on sympathy and attention. It must maintain ten times the mass of a human to gain recognition on any level, one hundred times to achieve comparable presence.

Resentment at environmentally-sound dictates follows partially from impatience at hospitalling a host of poor relations.

1:1

2007-03-22T23:08:00.000-04:00

a. Time acts chemically, as an aqua regia, to dissolve and reorder the bonds of any aggregates entered into it.

b. Human apprehensions are never fully factored out, but depend on a juxtaposition of several aggregates; (10x10x2) vs. (5²x2³) vs. (5x5x2x2x2). Adjustments are frequent.

c. A fully factored view would appear as a tautology, as the Carroll map that lies draped 1:1 over its referent.

"Insofar As Any Spotted Lady Can Be White"

2007-03-13T01:35:00.000-04:00

College students were corralled by the researchers into the basement of the student union. After vigorous dosages and several disorienting bits of stagecraft, the subjects produced a peculiar text. Which is to say: at dawn the following was found scrawled on the blackboard, along with some more (ahem) material remnants.

"Spots of gravy on the bodice twin to the gaps in the lace. At shadow or clutched in an occulted bed, crouched on a [...] counterpane, or stroking a fly that hits between panes. Brass buttons are a child's trumpet [?] to blow.

A mass of spots on the bony chest, and the kin of a fowl, once plucked--a facing form with most numbers omitted. Kin to a fowl, with a hatful of glaring [...] faults.

I do get the sense that this was the substance [...] of her [...]complaint: that she'd be shuttled back and forth. That upon this point she'd be shunned; lengths of her neck [...] and collar wrung, thrown there with the rest.

Insofar as any spotted lady can be white--who at once apprehends and sets forth [...]the alley-strictures, together pent in paper frost."

A week later, a panel of experts were convened to interpret the results. Their responses are given anonymously.

A: "A careful invocation of childhood."

B: "The only word worth reading is 'plucked'. All flesh and no feathers, so to speak."

C: "It fairly breathes racial misgivings."

D: "It may be about snow."

Plant A Tree Or Die

2007-03-02T17:31:00.000-05:00

"For the past 200 years, the ideal image of nature has been a symbolic, transformed and man-made landscape, typified by idealized areas of agricultural production. Such idealizations led to the creation of unique parks, but, as symbols of a past romantic ideal, these landscapes cannot now be restored. These cultural landscapes are as lost to us now as are the social dreams of nineteenth-century Romanticism, and can therefore only fail as ideals for a contemporary landscape. The tasks of dealing with run-down industrial areas and open-cast mines require a new method--one that accepts their physical qualities but also their destroyed nature and topography. This new vision should not be one of "re-cultivation", for this approach negates the qualities that they currently possess and destroys them for a second time. The vision for a new landscape should seek its justification exactly within the existing forms of demolition and exhaustion. We have to ask ourselves which spaces from among the dilapidated and redundant places we want to use and occupy, and which of those have to be changed by the mark of a cultural intervention or the remediation of historical contamination.

Would it not be better to attach to the ideal image of our occidental culture, to 'paradise', an oasis in the desert, a place where man has to make his way against the rigors of physical nature? This imagination of an oasis as a garden in desolate spaces is my ideal type of discourse with the nature of old industrial sites, which in their parts can be left to themselves to develop the fantastic images of the future from already existing formations--creating values between art and nature in a way which could never be made by the artist nor mere nature alone."

-from Peter Latz, "Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord: The Metamorphosis Of An Industrial Site", in Manufactured Sites, ed. Niall Kirkwood.

Mr. Ginger's Book Of Love

2007-02-09T00:33:00.000-05:00

He clasped slight packets in his paws. Mr. Ginger's book of love!

No more wily than a beaver, mild and ingratiating, Mr. Ginger would take his amours ice-skating, or out to the paddleboats, or to that restaurant with totem poles throughout the parking lot. Mr. Ginger would excuse himself on the latter occasions, and go to the loo to pick his teeth with a cocktail sword; on the way back to his table he would stop at the cigarette machine for some Tareytons. He would offer his date a pink mint from the dish on the way out; whereupon they would walk to his LeBaron. As they drove along he would venture a few remarks on local affairs.

According to critic Kendrick Baskin:

"...none of this is particularly gingery, or venturesome; but I do believe there is a measure of caddishness, of laddishness, of promiscuity, in the affairs of such pocket-gentry. This cavalier and all his kin perform a far-flung play, presenting in their innocuous entreaties whole acres of courtly coercion. That is, their adherence to the forms of Usonian love qualifies them as willing instruments of the leviathan's self-willing."

That's Mr. Ginger and his book of love!

Unnerves

2007-01-31T01:47:00.000-05:00

Tactics are fine. They're fine to lionize. When we've been sitting in totalities, we like for gaps to open up. We might forget, though, that wholeness is its own curse. Without a share of ourselves to leave in complicity, we wholly become creatures of righteousness, and can't do wrong. As with the partisan: "this I could not do". Righteous conditions leave a single possible path among the many.

With no stake in what it is we fight, we cannot understand any enemy, the names it carries beyond enemy. We can only adhere to path of contraries. We are, then, as lonesome nerves in a body, firing out with no feedback.

Screenplay No. 84 (For Your Consideration)

2007-01-31T01:20:00.000-05:00

"No, Not That"

The film inhabits a 3D wireframe representation of the Barcelona Pavilion. 26 separate 20-second shots are presented, without prefatory material. Each one starts from the center and proceeds to laterally trace out in space one of the letters of the English alphabet (capitals only). For screenings in international locations, suitable alterations will be made (as in: LLs for Caracas, 3s for Sofia).

Deliverables; Or, I Remember Eve

2007-01-15T00:37:00.000-05:00

...50 sculptures ranging in size from 4x20 1/2x2 1/4" to 3x2x1/4', composed in various permutations of wood, wire, plastics, plaster, paper, yarn, thread, rope and found objects.

...Cardboard wire cutters, 48x28x4".

...A gravestone shape with a cruciform hole, 5 1/4x4 3/4x1 1/2", in wood, cardboard, plasticene, and mixed media (wire, paper, burlap, tape); plasticene and cardboard versions later to be augmented with wire, yarn, and pencil inscriptions.

...Performance piece to be done in the area of the slide room. The lights will be turned off, except for a faint light within the room; the landing will be cordoned off by a specially prepared rope. A glass of water will be on the floor, near a boiling (and thus steaming) pot of water placed beneath the ladder to the roof. I will hide in the slide room, and begin to make droning sounds on a synthesizer as the class ascends the stairs--none of them will know whether I am actually present or if a tape is playing (my shadow will be visible but unrecognizable as such). After a certain amount of restlessness becomes evident in the observing class, I will simultaneously lunge up (thus moving my shadow), stop playing the synthesizer, and kick an identical glass of water into the landing area, splattering its contents.

...A chair in false collaboration with Rebecca Horn, 44x16 1/2x17 1/2". Wood, plexiglass, steel, burlap, muslin, copper tubing, four-track tape recorder (with tape), microphone, effects pedal, cables, headphones, thermometer. The seat and legs will be made of stained wood (with copper tubing in a spiral around the bottom of one leg), the back of a plexiglass plate and bar stock, the seat of burlap and muslin. It will work like this: the sitters will put on the headphones and put the thermometer in their mouths. They will then sit on the chair, activating the tape recorder (which is concealed under the seat) and causing it to play a pre-recorded tape of distorted studio noise. At the same time that the sitters hear the tape, they will hear the sounds around them through the microphone mounted above their heads; these sounds, however, will be filtered through the effects pedal between the microphone and the tape recorder. The sitters will then be able to alter the sounds around them by placing the pedal in their laps and manipulating it. The pedal will be concealed in the same layers of inward muslin and outward burlap as the seat, however--so that the sitters cannot direct the manipulation, but only experiment haphazardly.

...Performance piece. Before the performance, I will cut a standard plywood piece into 15 biomorphic shapes of various sizes, draw little eyes in pen on 14 pieces, and smear the 15th with vaseline. I then will arrange the eyed shapes in a cluster on the floor spilling diagonally out from the space. A fellow made out of cloth with identical eyes will watch from a nearby chair. I will attend on this day dressed in my funeral clothes: white dress shirt, black Oxford shoes, black dress pants, black tie, and a black sweater. I will also have a pink cigarette lighter at hand, and pink lip balm in my pocket. As the performance begins, I will arrange my class in rows on either side of the cluster as I face it head on, the vaseline-smeared shape on the floor between the cluster and myself. I will apply the lip balm to my lips, light the cigarette lighter three times, kneel to genuflect, and then proceed to pick up the vaseline-smeared shape and use its vaseline to anoint each of the other shapes above their eyes. That done, I will genuflect once more, and light the cigarette lighter three more times.

...Performance piece. Prior to the performance, I will have sharpened a broom handle into a spear, wrapped it with a broad, long piece of latex, and left it to the side in the presentation space. That night, when called upon to perform the performance, I will stand up, remove my shoes and socks, and remove my flannel shirt to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with a gravestone. Picking up the spear, I will remove the latex band and wind it around my neck in the manner of a scarf. I will then walk over to the blackboard and draw a diagram of five parallel lines in chalk. Instructing my fellows to follow me, I will lead them to a yard across the street. I will draw the same diagram with the spear in the earth before me, and then incompetently throw the spear. I will then laugh uproariously.

...Two loaves of french bread with 31 pins protruding from each end, bound together with a band of pink cloth. On the pink cloth are two buttons composed of pound coins, each one wrapped in a patch of the same cloth. A length of plastic and wire cord will protrude from the middle of the band, and lead to a pouch of the self-same cloth which it seals by coil at the top. This pouch will be filled with every penny I have collected during my time here, and will be surrounded by a ridge of ground-up black liquorice sticks.

...A timeline in pink pencil along the side of a length of toilet paper (still on the roll), with dates of interest (i.e., the ambush of Roland, the siege of Masada).

...A sort of over-large hot water bottle headpiece, made of pink cloth stuffed with batting, with a ruffled fringe and metal cap on top and a velcro strap to go about the chin.

...A smallish battery, composed of a small pouch of pink cloth filled with silicone caulk. The pouch will be sliced half-open, allowing viewing of caulk and permitting conducting wires (twisting together into a loop at the end) coming from the caulk to protrude outwards. Six black liquorice sticks will protrude from slits in pairs along one side.

...A bird made of pink cloth stuffed with batting, with painted eyes; five rocks made of burlap stuffed with batting, with painted eyes; a sack of money made of burlap tied off with cord, with a pound sign painted on the side; a t-square made of plywood with painted eyes; and a pair of eyes made of gauze with painted pupils and red thread optic nerves.

...Performance piece. It will be a sort of cabaret, done at 3:30 P.M. on May 4th for a private crowd of friends. I will sing eight songs. The space will be set up with cafe tables in a front row and couches in a back row, all facing the performance area. This area will be mostly empty except for another cafe table with a swivel chair beside it. On the table will be: a glass of ginger ale with a black liquorice stick for a straw, several blue pills, the tape recorder audio-recording the event, and a small notebook. In the back corners of the space will be an amplifier into which a thin microphone will be plugged, and a stereo playing backing tracks. Two helpers will be employed: one in the audience filming the event on digital video, and one, dressed in a black cocktail dress and black sling-back heels, who will hand me the props for each of my songs (a quilt, burlap rocks, sewn eyes, etc.).

...Final performance piece. I will record critiques of the other pieces for the night of this presentation simultaneously on two tape recorders. Near the end, having picked up the viola case I have brought and turned on both tape recorders, I will lead the class up the hill to a small clearing. I will set down the two tape recorders side by side in the middle of this clearing, and tell them to make a circle around the recorders and myself. I then will remove the viola from its case and set the case open upon the ground next to the recorders. I will start to slowly saw a two note pattern on the viola, and to walk slowly in a circle. I will gradually accelerate both walk and play until each is quite fast, and then suddenly burst out of the circle and away into the night, not to return.

Script For A Cocktail Party

2006-12-19T19:04:00.000-05:00

A. Twelve guests are invited by two hosts (six each).

B. As they enter, each guest is handed a small card. The cards are given in order of arrival. Each contains a different instruction, mandating some variety of physical activity to be performed on cue.

C. An assembly with every appearance of a cocktail party ensues. That is, until the system of signaling is initiated, and the sequence of activities begins:

1. At 9:46 (by the clock in the hall), the first guest rises and throws heris glass to the floor.
2. The second guest rises, retrieves a dustpan hidden under the green armchair, and attempts to pick up the pieces without a broom.
3. As the dustpan first touches the shards, the third guest shouts once and starts pacing in a circle.
4. Upon hearing the shout, the fourth goes to the radio on the kitchen table and turns it to 88.9 FM.
5. When the radio comes on, the fifth guest goes to the dinner table and sits. This guest then lets heris head fall onto the table, and remains motionless.
6. The sixth picks up a striped handkerchief left on the cherry endtable and lets it fall to the floor.
7. Upon seeing the sixth guest pick up the handkerchief, the seventh guest rushes over, picks up a checkered handkerchief laid out next to it, and lets that fall as well.
8. Upon seeing the seventh guest run to the endtable, the eighth closely follows him or her. The eighth guest's goal is snatch both handkerchiefs out of the air--failing both, only the second. If both handkerchiefs have already reached the floor, she or he will stand still in close proximity to them and stare down.
9. The ninth guest proceeds to a mandolin leant against the wall in the corner, sits, picks it up, and strums it frantically for two minutes.
10. Whereupon the tenth guest starts to dance on tip-toe for the duration of the mandolin play, freezing with arms in the air upon its conclusion.
11. As the dance ends, the eleventh guest lets out a long whistle and lays upon the ground, head pointed towards the window.
12. This being accomplished, the twelfth guest points an index finger heavenwards. This is the signal for all activities to end and the dinner party proper to resume.

Comment On Ethics

2006-12-19T01:16:00.000-05:00

Behaving as though the person you most respect is present can be a problematic moral rule, since it excludes any awareness of that person's capacity for compassion.

Abstract Of The Baskin Lectures

2006-11-25T21:10:00.000-05:00

Notes taken by a conscientious third-year student at Pollexfen University during critic and "versifier" Kendrick Baskin's momentous engagement. Further material is forthcoming, pending restoration efforts on a cache of reel-to-reel tape held by the Pollexfen Archives. -ed.

1
"MATTERS OF DICTION"
On calibrations: specifically, how to negotiate, when to elevate vocabulary, and how to navigate between comprehension and elaboration. "The hopeful thought is that a vigored and flowery style--not afraid to aim thorns at its own eyes--should please in any case."
2
"MUSTARD-SEEDING"
Considering the proposition that verses are grown from single words, not born from thematic matrices. "A verse often expands from the word as though defining it; whereupon it proceeds to use this word in context...Thereafter, the seed is seen hanging from a minor branch of the plant--it is not yet suspected that this is the second generation." Awareness, perhaps in order to curtail revision, that the aforementioned original associations of words--as in Roussel--best dictate genetic sequence and syntax of composition.
3
"THE ONE AIM"
Work specifically intended for multiplicity, tending towards a refusal of unities. That "any god that could be postulated must needs be as much of a patchwork as Dr. Schreber’s."
4
"THE MEASURE OF SEPARATE CHARMS"
Further, that superimpositions exist even in what are intended as the most singular meanings. "Artwork is true insofar as it contradicts itself—this is the hallmark of souled truth".
5
"DOING YOUR COLORS"
Proposition that ideological, syntactical, logical contrasts work for verse as "color-juxes" do in visual design. Slides provided.
6
"DOTTY"
The conscious preservation of "the dainty and precious, the effeminate prerogatives of verse". Being that it is a universal expectation, the best practice is to seize it and turn it back against (...?)
7
"...THAT SAID..."
An excoriation of reflexive verse, of the exaltation of verse and the versifier, of verse such as it is (or is not). Also: any named colors, most places, most trees, and "all but the most select scatology, slang, and 'plain speech'”.
8
"DOGGEREL DOGGEDLY"
"The versifier sits in a study, looks at the rest of it, and labors at how to say it—oh no, that approach is too direct. 'How do I do this place in pleasing words?'" Instead, intuit something pleasing out from the span of several years. "Don't think in subjects; think and think around them as though they were very tall formations."
9
"I HARDLY KNOW"
"...what’s to be written when I start." Be like an atrium, "incessantly poured through and walked", like a reverberating machine. "I don’t know the best way to proceed; I can, at the least, be the exemplar of what’s naive. If I can but promote new forms of sense: extend the tongue by natural degrees, rather than by dictate." Movement towards a greater faith, in terms of turning metaphor towards the literal--seeing as there’s been no faith in the tissue-integrity of posited relations.
10
"CLOCK-TIME"
Regular meter can only be countenanced when the ideas and vocal contours of the individual lines are "rocky" and not at level; i.e., Coleridge composing on uneven ground and Wordsworth on a straight walk. "...You ease your way, mindful, down the slope—some skree, some spar, some pack-dry, some slide." Let rhyme and ready measure lie with popular music.
11
"NOW, WRITE FOR MASS TRANSIT"
Promulgation of a "crass poetics against crassness". "...When your reader may need to cross the same ground three times, it’s not such work, but such charm, and firm collar-leading."
12
"I DON'T BANK"
There exists a lack of credence in any particular polemic, but some have more allure, and more charm. That charm and allure are known compounds, "as sure as the fragrances that are known to abet them".
13
"CONCERNING ARTICLES"
"To cite 'the pots' is sorely different than citing 'pots'." The deifications or other 'cations introduced by "a" and "the" dramatically narrow the spectral width of a word, until only a scant received idea is left. For example, "pots" stands for any possible or pleasing association for the reader with such vessels, while "the pots" forces a reach for the most proper set--encouraging in this case "a tissue of the rustic, the quaint, and the earthen".
14
"JUMPING TRACKS"
"...as our current-day authorities would have it. It's irritating, since it takes such a lot of switchman's-work to get to writing at all." If the versifier cannot write so as to dislocate her-or-himself from accepted notions of "what a rain is, what it looks like, where it may licitly appear", the verse will eternally remain composed on its page, and never perform its own particular function of pleasured re-routing. How to achieve this? "Make a knotted switchyard", and draw all lines so as to connect by some slight remove. As a rule, write quickly and with little regard, and then knock any disparates into a shared path.
15
"ORGANELLES"
No verse need be essential in of itself. "If we're all so keen for a verse to be a flower, then: some as orchids, self-complete, rare, nigh-unique; some the whites of Queen-Anne's-lace, insignificant in atom, but the prime constituents of a heavenly-milky disk." The individual verse as a working organelle in the cell of a larger work. The goal is more for a single Dickinsonian proposition than "a suite of carved masterworks".
16
"BIND TOGETHER SUCH SPARKS INTO THE ONE OPAL!"
Summary and review.

Urbanism (Not Urbanism)--Concluded

2006-11-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

ST. LUCIA URBANISM
All public light fixtures are replaced with agglomerations of candle-holders. Citizens pay a yearlong "wax tax", compelled to continually donate candles to neighborhood distribution centers in order to keep the streets lit. Local children (ages 6-14) are gainfully employed in maintaining the candles; girls march in processions of ten, carefully lighting them, while boys stand by in formation, water-pails at the ready.

TULIPOMANIACAL URBANISM
Portable shelters are issued by the government, offered to anyone who might want them. There are forty-something distinct lines available, each containing between seven and ten cosmetic variations on a basic model (something like jockey silks). Outside of this readily available array, there are any number of special editions, offered either for a limited time through rehabilitated warehouse/storefronts--or as rewards for secretly witnessed meritorious acts--or as rewards for any chosen random action (28th person through door X on 28th Street on the 28th of March.) The scarcity and variability of these items propels a furor: citizens constantly exchange shelters, barter for one another's shelters, pull around their own shelters (now to display them, now to obscure them). Permanent dwellings are largely abandoned; seen from above, colorful shells constantly shuffle themselves in the streets and open spaces.

COCKTAIL-DRUM URBANISM
Mixed-use planning is taken to its logical conclusion; separate rooms within buildings are apportioned in order to create microcosmic neighborhoods inter mures. To reach a hotel room, the enterprising sleeper must first get through a laundry, a teahouse, and a tax-preparation service.

BILLINGSGATE URBANISM
All public statuary is removed and replaced with identically-scaled foam copies. Citizens can visit their scorn upon the simulacra: easily gouging in graffiti, sawing off heads, or removing riders from their horses. Moreover, they may post notes of mockery upon the foam--attacking their their neighbors, their elected officials, and their fellow man in terms of foul contempt.

TOBACCO URBANISM
The timetable of the built environment is altered so that buildings may be conjured in a matter of days out of a fixed vocabulary of prefabricated parts, and then disassembled slowly and methodically over a standard course of time. Whereas the constructors worked in haste and obscurity, the destroyers will work in daylight under the terms of a scrupulous choreography. Crowds will gather outside to cheer these ritual demolitions. In addition to being thrilled and edified, the public will also be given a visible index of the passage of time.

CYPRESS URBANISM
Lines of settlement rake across the country in fixed channels. Immense brooding shells begin at the coast, progressively half-sheltering slightly smaller iterations of the same forms, terminating at the opposite border in a scattering of rounded sukkahs. Humans are dispersed throughout this array based on the results of an extensive written questionaire concerning their space preferences.

NARCOLEPTIC URRBANISM
Ready access to sleeping facilities is taken to be the greatest possible good; whereby entryways, benches, and window-ledges are optimized for the comfort of the weary passerby, with leather cushions and coils of bedsheet rolled up like garden hoses. As a last resort for the exhausted, pavements and grates are rubberized, with reams of newspaper set out in neat bales.

Wherein I Solve The White Mystery

2006-11-03T20:29:00.000-05:00

It seems that the only necessary element for the creation of a mystery is application of the label "mystery"; that is, that any simple act classed outside of conventional norms can lend its setting more than its ostensible share of scrutiny. So, our modern-day mystery novel can add interest to any period, any geographic region, through the shortest possible expedient: a murder. A murder, being horrible enough to hold attention but not abominable enough to deflect it, seems an ideal light to hold to the otherwise dim outlines of any prosaic landscape or society. In other words: the ignoble can take the opportunity to march into view close on the heels of the parading return-of-the-repressed.

Scaling the observation down, a mere ambiguity of trait or motive may attract such interest on a smaller, less official scale. Certain simple products become fathomless confusions of elusive taste and racial unease. Such insertions of the inexplicable not only beguile the young, but tend to inculcate a taste for ambiguity for its own sake (and, one suspects, unpleasantness for its own sake).

Speaking of confections, elusive taste and racial unease: an nth generation laughingstock.

Quotidiana

2006-10-25T02:20:00.000-04:00

I was being harangued at the bar the other night.

"You see," he said, "that every itinerary is itself a place. You may move from one apartment to another three blocks away, and find that you are no longer in the same neighborhood; not because you've crossed a border, but only because the base sequence you encounter in your comings and goings has changed. What can seem bucolic from one angle can be nothing but paving and pigeon from another; oases become wholly habitual, and hideaways become theaters. The very in-between places that charmed in their irrelevance have become quotidiana."

I know all about quotidiana. I can quote it chapter and verse: to wring out the sponge when you're done with the dishes, to make long phone calls on Thursday nights, to run the dryer 55 minutes on hot,to reach the cafe before 9 on Saturday mornings (if you want to duck the crowd). These actions, even, are functionally somewhere where I've been sitting too long.

Patently Untrue Statements

2006-10-23T00:01:00.000-04:00

I've made a few. You can't say that you minded; the worst that they could have done is take up space, and there's enough space in the world.

Something patently untrue is precious. It brings out the hunter in you. You spy it between the leaves, in a clearing. It's easy to hit.

By giving you this untruth, I have given you the opportunity to bring out your keen common sense. The more you keep that common sense at hand, the more sensible you feel.

You really ought to thank me!

There Is A Song, The Song I Want

2006-10-21T21:02:00.000-04:00

It is processional. The sense of the performance corresponds to any unit in a parade--it approaches, pauses to be taken in, and moves on. It is likewise made of quiet and bright components, the sort that can make racket together.

A typical method: you'd empty water onto a snare drum, then strike it.

It has a certain keyed character, operating between definite junctures--so the song is its own index. It's scored thematically, but these themes are graced by felicities, first-thoughts, and side conversations. You could see in it some humanists revisiting the bare of the Twenties, bringing a lilt from the Nineties. Or a neighborhood's girls and boys on a Sunday, chanting down the void.

Think of it in company terms. Oratory and pleasant silences. Then oratory and pleasant silences. An all-day roundtable, with shuffled participants, the subject being _________. End result: an impromptu invitation to the public on watermarked paper.

It depicts the frame of reportage, while omitting the picture; so it shows vast lines across nearly nothing, with no view of the acting pen. It will translate easily across scales (an engineer's scale; an architect's scale).

Nonetheless: it takes less time to hear it than to read this post.

Why We Committed It To Tape

2006-10-21T19:36:00.000-04:00

Because we didn't want to care to fully hold it, and so sheathed it, and jettisoned it.

It shared our mood so well that we wanted to share it with you.

We're very confused and wanted to be confused again in the future.

It deserved to be only what it was at the time.

We knew it was economical since it told a truer story in a shorter time.

It was the shortest way to a band of holograms.

We want to put a composite in the market, and assign resulting value to our own respective contributions.

It is a viable organelle, for an appropriate cell, for the growing cultural body.

It isn't here very much if it isn't there.

It didn't share our mood, and so we translated it to better speaking terms.

Bag Full Of Shot

2006-10-19T02:33:00.000-04:00

I pray in my dream to be a poacher, and to run at some hundred sorts of game on this estate--all the subtle and variegated things, a tactic at least to levy against each one. Snares at a flexible tempo, rods camouflaged and dipped in the water, rags fitted snug over smoking barrels, and barrels with their lids pried off.

Houndsteeth and buckled boots and bristling leashful of hounds, on a smoky November day--I'd like to be a thief, a blackjack, against that and of it.

Procedurals

2006-10-19T01:46:00.000-04:00

The two of us have in common an unreflective love of long, slightly varied series. I don't know if it's a function of our culture, or of organized capital, of consequent formal lines of product, and so, and so--but we both find that what we really crave is not a continuing development across dimensions, a great and varied work, but a single finite line of production. Its various products represent a formal approach applied to a series of objects or sites, themselves relatable along a pre-existing thread (even if tenuous).

It is a great thing to come across a new or unknown component in a common series. But the happiest times we can remember have come with discovering some new series, up until then wholly occluded from us--strange compounds parceling out physics, biology, and
geometry, in terms that urgently announce themselves to any desiring body.

Uru Dance Party

2006-10-17T00:45:00.000-04:00

I hope I don't bore anyone when I have to run over all the details from the party last night. Each of the details from last night. It's just so good to hear strangers come forth and speak for themselves; they are fearless, and then some of them are sick. Wine gives you a free field. Women give you a free field. Song gives you a free field.

But I don't like making it to the early morning, when the situation simply turns base.

Less You Or Less

2006-10-16T00:04:00.000-04:00

For instance, I'll tell you that I spent today mulling that particular minimalism that didn't trouble itself to excess with perfections. That is, it would leave an erasure on and not buy more spotless paper. If it set about to make a line, it would make the line once, and not care to draw it again. It would love, even, the humps that slid under the ruler, and its pencil's breaking leads.

I called this "the ringing grid", and I thought about it often back then. That the structural idea could move, and resound, when caught in physical circumstance. How could an idea subsist anyways?--were it not obstructed, misunderstood, deflected, so on--like a singular impact that would die in an instant, were it not seconded and thirded by the area of air that makes it a sound.

All of which is--in that dreary humanist realm that all things get annexed to--one devised measure of comfort against the fleshly frustrations that trouble clear thoughts.

"C'mon, Doopa!"

2006-10-14T21:54:00.000-04:00

We're currently pitching "C'mon, Doopa!", an hour-long dramedy set in the post-industrial suburbs of Boston. The show centers around JV QB Christopher "Doopa" Doomanian and his family: brother Frankie (whose nagging catchphrase gives the show its title), mother Rochelle, father Victor, and enigmatic uncle Champy. However, the show's radius takes in their entire neighborhood (an overgrown cul-de-sac), as well as the high school that Doopa and Frankie attend.

The show takes its starting point from the assorted family sagas of the past few years (especially of the "Southie" variety), but incorporates several key differences. Most notably, the show engages in drastic (if gradual) shifts in tone over the course of a season; some episodes present a mix of low-key family comedy and minor scholastic mishaps that could easily air on the Disney Channel, whereas others engage in depths of ultra-realist reportage (one episode is to be a wholly plotless real-time depiction of Frankie's study hall period), depravity (the strange impulses afflicting Doopa's sweetheart Lynn), and Jacobean intrigue (Champy's relentless quest to be elected to the school board). In short, the show seeks to assemble a holographic portrait of human reality by cleaving it into its constituent fictions, and examining them one by one.

HOWEVER, it should be understood that the primary aim of "Doopa" is to present the assorted milieux of Milltown Massachusetts without the mediation clear empathetic points of reference (save for the assorted narrative conventions). There are no pontifications--no ostentatious good taste--no encounters with sublimities. Morals assume a paramount importance, but one of neutral valence: there are no incitements to the true or the good in "Doopa", only an acute awareness of the continual moral calculus of quotidian existence.

We hope to attract Joanna "Jojo" Levesque for the role of Lynn.

He's A Libran

2006-10-14T00:06:00.000-04:00

There is one advantage to having no firm position, which is being able to occasionally claim an alignment with correctness--that dialectical medium which flutters between the ends of the argument.

Long Accounting

2006-10-12T22:08:00.000-04:00

...I'd start the Long Accounting movement to run far-sighted cost-benefit analyses for corporate entities; to tell them in the beigest terms to draft empathetic, ecologically-minded, egalitarian charters. On our part, any emotional appeals, or appeals to virtue, would be discarded in favor of the advancement of a simple factual proposition: that the attainment of the greatest sustainable density of the most affluent over the widest demilitarized area ensures the highest potential profit for any given corporate entity over significant extents of time. All non-essential resources, the thinking would go, should accordingly be diverted into efforts to prepare this fruitful field.

The successful implementation thereof would inevitably result in a near-instantaneous reallocation of resource and value so as to create classless masses of free and sensible consumers, their conflicts enacted in one benign ceremony or another. Impersonal, massive entities--the surviving corporates--would provide a mute, self-sustaining infrastructure, a skeleton for the spanning human community.

One thing: the place of the creator in such a society--in any truly harmonious society--would naturally be to mar that harmony at key intervals, so that the rest could pull themselves tight together once more to fix the failure.

"Rude Mechanicals"

2006-10-11T21:31:00.000-04:00

1.
If sand dollars are the most insipid of the animals, it is because they barely have space to be animals. I've never seen the flesh of a sand dollar, no doubt because I'm not meant to; they are intended as inert tokens. Of what? A vacationer's manna.

They are only made as animals because there is no expedient geological means to produce them. Their flesh lives its term to produce the shell, and having done so has the grace to melt away. The fleshly sand dollar, then, is a little sort of stagehand.

2.
In the common imagination, construction workers heckle the rest of humanity as they make their buildings. They are lusty and fearless; while they are never seen to work the results of their work are more evident than anyone's. These workers, then, act as the visible exemplars of a split between the careful performances of the social realm and the dreamy acts of the workaday. They can be seen to directly build humanity's haptic unities out of its wispier notions and fancies.

Ferry 'Cross The Mersey

2006-10-11T00:32:00.000-04:00

I love a ferry for its constraints. It turns sailing and all wild navigation placid; it is endeavor itself put out to pasture. I'm perverse enough to stand on the deck of a ferry and make it out to be another, slower moving sidewalk.

We've had a few conversations where we've gotten enthusiastic about urban boating. That you could paddle to work on a canal, put in at a bare little dock, and walk up into the hustle of the city. It's nice enough, but it's fine too as is to just make a break with a recreational ferry, to somewhere unnecessary. The pilot's quotidian can at least be your secession, if you don't overindulge.

(Given that we're always having to step into each other's territory, we might as well make interesting territory to step into, OK?)

Kindergarten Questions

2006-10-09T18:16:00.000-04:00

1. WHAT DO DOLDRUMS LOOK LIKE?

Lumps of congealed water, bobbing slowly on quick sea.

2. WHY ARE LEOPARDS SEXY?

Each of their spots is a semi-enclosed pleasure cell, opaque walls containing pocket-universes of erotic possibility. Imagine the cave where Dido and Aeneas weathered the storm, multiplied indefinitely across an arid plain.

3. WHO TEACHES IN THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS?

Precisely those persons and things that do not intend to teach.

Sunday Mornings

2006-10-08T13:17:00.000-04:00

1.
The paramount thing is to put off breakfast as long as you can. Avoiding dressing or bathing helps, but you really can't begin working until you've had your breakfast. To cultivate the leisurely Sunday morning, then, you place that breakfast at some indefinite point in the future.

Present involvements and pertinent thoughts are batted away.

Five books to read for five pages each, and then a drift through their illustrations. One side of a record of classical music, to ignore. Any inconsiderable bodily motions--sheet-kicking, pillow-building, and eye-rubbing. A look at the wondering dial of sunbeams through the room. Overall, put-on notions of seriousness are essayed and quickly abandoned. It's a style to enable writing of precisely the present sort: a chain of single half-fogged propositions conveyed by the sentence fragment.

2.
The author, having spent some years refining this practice, decides that it has been perfected, and must now be made to dwindle away. Instead of budgeting to spend a fourteenth of her waking time entirely absent of contemptible cares, she seeks to wholly assume a better, more engrossing class of concerns. Her customary miserliness demands a value for the valueless time she has spent, and she constructs one accordingly: a working understanding of everyone's leisure, of everyone's in-between time, of everyone's unchronicled time as a body-in-bed. Not as a thinker, nor a lover, but as a slow volputuary.

She can then emerge with her half-thoughts, with native intelligence to sell.

Back To C.T.

2006-09-11T09:38:00.000-04:00

"The human was a proper vessel of holes and pores--but soon after it emerged accretions swept in--the proper music sounded through that aeolian horn became whistle and chuff. Scourges were applied that aged the surface--but cleared the vessel for intervals--diminishing intervals--"

Five Joyful Words

2006-09-09T20:33:00.000-04:00

BEMUSED

"Mr. Knight, bemused by the antics of the youthful dancers, sat back in his chair and squinted."

A broad-based and largely unconscious coalition is gradually working to change this word; from a superfluous synonym for "confused" it has become a more specific and apt standalone, "simultaneously confused and amused". Any attempts to subdue this salutary process can only serve to discredit preservationist Anglophones.

REJOINDER

"Her rejoinder to Mr. Knight came in the form of a rude gesture."

Specifically a reply to a reply. I couldn't have summoned this definition up without some thought (or consultation), but I do feel it's easy to use correctly without intending to. One, in that every utterance can be considered a reply, a new link on a long concatenation of replies; two, in that the added length and heft of "rejoinder" (as against "reply") naturally evokes a more comprehensive, programmatic, and oppositional answer.

LINSEY-WOOLSEY

"Mr. Knight gazed impassively at his wife in her linsey-woolsey."

A word that exemplifies contempt, play, and plainness; it flops and fights itself in your mouth.

BOTH

"Faced with the choice, Mr. Knight paused for a while; finally, he brightened and asked for both."

A measure of incredulity is always assumed. "Both?" "Yes, both." Simultaneity is somehow outlandish, isn't it? Cultures preoccupied with a reduction to units earn their bedevilment by specters of totality and indifferentiation.

REMEDIATION

"Mr. Knight took careful notes as they detailed their plans for the remediation of the Lamoille River Basin."

A cloudy parallel is drawn between the attempted education of the lacking student and the attempted amelioration of hopeless tracts. As applied to the land, remediation would imply a fallen nature after the manner of the fallen woman; ensuing attempts at rescue, while commendable, are by definition limited, inefficacious, and unrewarding. Implicitly: "Why bother?"

"Not An Inn But A Hospital"

2006-08-15T23:40:00.000-04:00

Upon reaching an open intersection, you might look up and feel a concavity knocked in the sky.

You shouldn't feel scared of this; it's only hospitality, an aperture to rest your face in.

Wizz Reflections On Space

2006-08-11T23:51:00.000-04:00

RESOLVED; THAT design can be defined along a few binaries; one between native intuition and the summit of learned effort (the public--the consultant; the assumed--the arrived-at; the dare--the precept), and one between operating immensities and the necessary interventions that translate them into the terms of human sense.

(You can see how readily a few binaries can grow into a tree-of-heaven.)

RESOLVED; THAT design programs are as slalom campaigns, touching all flags of reckoned morality--or rather as broad strokes lowering themselves toward deadly-correct mathematical limits.

RESOLVED; THAT when walking by a new absence, the nervous eye will supply once-customed motions of the departed.

(This is one kind of ghost.)

RESOLVED; THAT we are not obligated to live in a desert simply because we've been educated by nomads.

RESOLVED; THAT a good field is precisely what's been cut enough to no longer be flat.

RESOLVED; THAT revelation is best defined as an uncovered constant of alignment through a mundane array.

(Cheonggyecheon, if you're feeling sanguine.)

RESOLVED; THAT the civic design is willed by all to enclose peace; but will succeed only as a correct armature for tumult.

My Face

2006-07-30T23:29:00.000-04:00

"When I was a child,
my vision was refined in certain skies;
my face is the product of every nuance.
All Phenomena were aroused.
At present, the eternal inflections of the moment
and the infinity of mathematics hunt me over this earth
where I experience all civil successes,
respected by strange childhood and devouring affections.

I envisage a war, of justice or strength
of a logic beyond all imagining.
It is as simple as a musical phrase."

-Arthur Rimbaud, "War" (tr. P. Schmidt)

Urbanism (Not Urbanism)--Continued

2006-06-04T14:07:00.000-04:00

ORNAMENTAL CABBAGE URBANISM
Extract all trees on public lands. Replace each one with an attractive ornamental cabbage.

FEEDBACK URBANISM
Each new development necessitates sympathetic re-development of adjacent blocks in two of the cardinal directions (chosen by two rolls of a four-sided die). Upon re-development of the adjacent blocks, their adjacents (again chosen via four-sided die) are set upon in the same fashion. If this mandates re-development of the original development, so be it--this re-development will respond to the subtle amalgam of intentions now present in its neighbor and make corresponding adaptations.

JETTY URBANISM
Should widespread coastal flooding come to pass, refit accordingly: connect all buildings on east-west streets with mounds of recovered masonry, embedding the original structures. Savvy walkers will clamber across miles of rough stone, marveling at the extensive moss gardens and vibrant tidepools that have accumulated on the flanks.

SIGNED URBANISM
Spraycan youth should be hired to limn the first ten feet or so of buildings with the names, CVs, and portraits of the responsible developers, architects, board members, councilmen, planners, etc--rendered, of course, in characteristically byzantine and colorful styles. (Landscape architects contract with toughs to carve their initials in the trees.)

PINBALL URBANISM
A complex program for dense agglomerations comprising extensive ramping, actively energizing storefronts and kiosks, moveable access-gates, vibrant situational lighting, quiet side-lanes, nodes for repose, active aural stimuli, timed event-windows, and a comprehensive scoring of citizen activities.

PENNANT URBANISM
Coded semaphore flags attached every spare outdoor surface cheerfully explain in exhaustive detail the history of the surrounding space. As new history is made, the flags are removed and re-organized. Pennant-strings stretching across each intersection attempt to synthesize the various histories through a panoply of critical lenses.

...

2006-06-02T18:05:00.000-04:00

The death notebooks were laid in state between sheaves of accounts in the studio’s corner—and they were blessed by long tongues of light that slipped between the slats of the window-blind, to change their general hue. From night to day, from night to day, the death notebooks lay in state, at once mouldering, and accruing the gifts of a shut room; sources engendered by time’s advance settled in the paper’s weave. A continual torque was applied to the words. Each passing day registered in the death notebooks, the accumulating years were added; years that, having acted outside, crept into the room through its cracks and took shapes between the lines, talking in turn as they multiplied, their slated successors close behind. Discovered, distributed, carried now to a grove and now to a bench and now on a galloping train, they speak when read of the crying of their author, taking in their design her teary smears—the coughing out of half-capsuled words caught in their very breaking. The reader of the death notebooks at once knows dying, and his cells, her cells, fall out of jamb. Each cell indicates—the author’s evidence—seconded by each intervening year—“We will not press on,” they indicate. The reader may stop to consider, forced to consider assent.

Appendices On The Colon Of The Work

2006-05-25T22:41:00.000-04:00

1. RESOLVED; THAT sewing together a collection of momentary enthusiasms and intuitive forays works as a means toward efficacious structures; that further activity at a certain remove joins such elaborated structures together at their points of concord; that the resulting superstructures function mainly by means of solid concatenation--that is, a baroque and wayward lump-nesting of woven enthusiasms and forays.

To misapply this sentiment, please see the models of Daina Taimina.

2. RESOLVED; THAT a name is best treated as an implement, since any observer will treat the assigned name as such (being an asset, a liability, apt, inapt, and so on); further, that adoption of a scrupulously fitted appellation is the best and shortest way to a more whole self (inner and outer). Mulled mauls of the present author's given name: ethnifications, plays on pre-existing lexical content, wholesale abandonment.

3. RESOLVED; THAT if one intends to treat of the relation between architecture and landscape architecture, one would do well to keep the "military crest" well in mind; and to keep at hand armies to move between "CAMPAIGN" and "QUARTERS". Remember, as the year stiffens and slackens, as they take to battle and flee to shelter: "CAMPAIGN" and "QUARTERS".

4. RESOLVED; THAT "the stoat may savage the shoat; but the serval shall avenge them both".

5. RESOLVED; THAT jackets should be fitted with single thin straps, with which they may be slung neatly over the arm (if the weather should take a favorable turn). Interested patent-seekers may contact me at this address.

6. RESOLVED; THAT the inherited lexical misdirection in regard to a royal's bodily person rankles; though it must be admitted that assigning all ownings to a separated and half-approachable majesty is a fine way to dignify said ownings (precisely through disassociation with the particular person and coupling with the held title).

7. RESOLVED; THAT dance is the proper medium for imparting majesty as immanent in the body; or then again for destroying such sentiments utterly.

8. RESOLVED; THAT the very worst thing, after so long of mulling what it is that you deserve, may be the thought that there is nothing particular that you deserve at all, one way or another.

"O' Sailor"

2006-05-18T21:26:00.000-04:00

"Hello, sailor boy,
In from the sea!
Hello, sailor,
Come with me!

Come on drink cognac.
Rather have wine?
Come here, I love you.
Come and be mine.

Lights, sailor boy,
Warm, white lights.
Solid land, kid.
Wild, white nights.

Come on, sailor.
Out o' the sea.
Let's go, sweetie!
Come with me."

Langston Hughes, "Port Town"

C. 1860

2006-05-13T11:18:00.000-04:00

"If I shouldn't be alive
When the Robins come,
Give the one in Red Cravat,
A Memorial crumb.

If I couldn't thank you,
Being fast asleep,
You will know I'm trying
With my Granite lip!"

-Emily Dickinson

Urbanism (Not Urbanism)

2006-05-07T20:23:00.000-04:00

"NAVIDAD" URBANISM
Housing units go lot-to-lot, piteously pleading for "posada" (shelter). They are turned away time and time again by regretful local authorities. When their stock of hope is nigh-exhausted, they finally happen upon a worthy hospitaller who will heartily answer their call, and extend heris invitation.

SHELL-BEAN URBANISM
Encased by a steep snake-wall of solid kudzu, a line of tiny standalone specialty boutiques waits to satisfy the adventurous shopper. Suggested retail lines: designer housewares, specialty grocery, antiques.

ZITTEL URBANISM
If the suburbs are planets for the star-city, it follows that there must be asteroids as well. Erect among the far foothills small communities, lone ranches, and miniscule shelters, furnished with an absolute bare minimum of amenities. Hide dedicated visionaries here, couched in idiosyncratic design, clinging to steep grades--and watch the pilgrims come flocking. Also known as "Last Starfighter" urbanism.

SWEATER URBANISM
Put on a comfortable sweater and venture out on an average day. The sweater will lend you an air of trustworthiness and allow you to successfully approach any passerby you may meet with. Don't pass out fliers, don't make demands--just extend a hand. Community will be forged. Note: sweater cannot be black.

CONTROVERSY URBANISM
A series of electronic bulletin boards are erected at street level (roughly blackboard sized, black-on-green LED), one standing at the central crossing for each four-block area. They will broadcast fabricated controversies loosely predicated on standard neighborhood issues (an untoward odor emanating from below the hardware store; an epidemic of thieving magpies). Residents will congregate and carry on productive arguments based on the presented scenarios.

PLANT-CELL URBANISM
A planned community without streets, only a grid of variably-sized lots enclosed by fences. These fences appear to be composed of standard planking, but are outfitted with outlandishly advanced gates regulated by a complex series of protocols that follow each homeowner's personal preferences. To ensure free passage through neighbors' lots, residents must cultivate goodwill, or else risk an escalating loss of mobility. Kindly consult Deleuze's formulation of the "access society" for more information.

INTESTINAL URBANISM
Society is reconfigured into winding linear tracts. Residents spend their lives migrating forward--inhabiting each zone for a set time, and then being forcibly moved on. Wild whorls are visible from space, regulating land and motion.

Edits Pt. 1

2006-05-02T23:33:00.000-04:00

A good edit preserves the traits it obscures. That is, it is a blanket covering a sleeping form.

"Crepuscular Boys"

2006-05-02T14:27:00.000-04:00

The proposed video game would be something like this:

There are two players. They are human but it is difficult to discern anything further since the entire area they explore is enveloped in near pitch black (a midnight blue, I suppose). Most contours of foreground elements are discernable, if frustratingly sketchy. A fair number of stars and a sliver of moon are visible in the sky, along with an occasional plane in flight.

The playing area is defined by a loosely crescent-shaped roadway; the outside edge is roughly 3/4 of a mile long, the inside closer to a 1/2 mile. The outside edge is a sandy path paralleling a predominantly beachy seacoast (some rocks crop up to the south); the inner edge constitutes a portion of a local two-lane highway. The game begins near the northerly joining point of the two edges, slightly advanced down the outside edge. The game has no discernible end.

While the gameplay is largely of a piece, there are a few discrete areas to encounter. (These are not marked by thresholds of any sort beyond those supplied by the players' innate faculty of discrimination.) As one moves southerly and then northerly, one encounters the areas in this order:

a snack bar (inaccessible) and some freestanding shower stalls (accessible, but no running water)

a series of six small picnic areas, with tables, benches, and primitive grills, carved into the brush by the seaside

a playground composed of one swingset (eight swings total) and one jungle jym, likewise carved into the brush by the seaside

a large parking lot, roughly two hundred spaces

an access road, linking the highway with the beach, with two entry booths (both inaccessible)

a house by the side of the highway (inaccessible)

a large motel (single facility, no outbuildings) by the side of the highway (inaccessible)

Areas outside the crescent area are blocked finally and definitely. Generally the blocking is implied by thick foliage; in the case of the termini of the highway or the ocean itself, further movement is simply disallowed, with no explanatory text.

The two players are equipped with health bars of a hundred units each; when all of the units have been expended, they will die. However, the possibility of being injured is exceedingly slim. A fall from a sufficient height will do it; however, there are only two places to fall from (two palette-stacks mysteriously left in the playground) and each fall saps a mere one or two health units. There is also a gigantic axe-toting minotaur (similarly sporting a hundred-unit health bar) that appears one time in thirty in the access road area; there is a slight possibility that he will injure the player, but most likely he will kill the player outright.

If a player dies, there is no possibility of resurrection. Furthermore, the other player cannot move from the scene of the death (making a double death, in the event of minotaur attack, rather likely). The game must be turned off first if further play is desired.

The actions of the players are chiefly limited to running, jumping, and item use. There is, it must be said, a certain paucity of usable items in the game. One can pick up a few pieces of driftwood on the beach, and toss them around. One player cannot injure the other, so driftwood-killing is not a possibility. Occasionally a sea skate will wash up (a one in fifty chance). There is a soda machine just outside the motel that will dispense cans of cola for 75 cents each. (A total of $1.85 can be found hidden in out-of-the-way places.) Drinking a cola will replenish twenty health units. Any of the above items can be thrown at the minotaur, for one to two points of damage; killing the minotaur, however, is out of the question, since his health points are regenerated every time he leaves the screen for twenty seconds or more.

The most exciting aspect of the game involves a pair of futuristic motorcycles leant against the house by the highway. These can be mounted and ridden by the two players. One even features a working machine gun, although as before one player cannot injure the other. The machine gun cannot be used to kill the minotaur either, since the motorcycles are confined to the highway and cannot enter the access road area. The machine gun will, however, create wonderfully realistic damage to the surrounding foliage and the walls of the house and motel, and will never run out of bullets. (Unfortunately, due to programming restraints only a limited amount of damage can be done.)

How to regale yourself within the constraints of the game? Look at whatever scenery you can discern. Race on foot, or on the motorcycles. Tempt fate by attempting to encounter the minotaur. Wait for passing planes and jump up and down.

12 Unasked-For Suggestions For A Proposed Prime-Time Soap Opera

2006-04-25T23:35:00.000-04:00

1.
Include at least two heroes who work at cross-purposes. Not that they are opposed, or antagonistic, but simply that they have mutually exclusive goals. A nice sort of affective suspension results.

2.
A five member action-grouping, as follows:

The bland leader (for projection purposes)

The melancholy second-in-command (the acceptable face of a rejected "other")

The woman (a sublimated sex object, resolutely bubbly)

The big man (the doltish foil, implicitly the despised flesh-body)

The pixie (a memory of the infant self, indeterminate gender and all)

Younger audiences respond well to this configuration. Their elders will enjoy the quote.

3.
Exclude family ties as a working motivation. As an armature, a set of initial relationship positions, fine...but no intelligent viewer can be expected to sympathize with ancestries, or with rigid links that interfere with individual initiatives.

4.
Mine the great literary devil-visits...Karamazov, naturally, and Mann's Doctor Faustus. Any interesting person will be visited by interesting devils now and again.

5.
A conscious play of spatial concerns. Take it from a specialist, landscape is paramount! Any expression can be safely removed from the mouths of the characters and placed into production design. If you're planning on projecting into the near future, make a future out of untoward conjunctions rather than Swiss design. Likewise, even the movement of actors through space can serve as a tracery of allegorical propositions.

6.
Satyr-plays. Obsessively re-enact the main concerns of the narrative on a humorized micro-scale. No, I don't mean Johnny playing with a cap-gun as his mother ponders a loaded revolver. You can do better than that.

7.
Carefully scale all plot interventions. Consciously under-size or ill-fit the ostensible concerns--deaths, financial troubles, mutilation--in order to retain the essential physics of the narrative.

8.
If dealing with corporations, here's a thought--a corporation uncomfortable with its own heroics. A corporation that does good out of strict necessity, not caring to publish the fact.

9.
Characters who are physical travesties. They could at some far point be shocked into beauty; they may have already been altered irrevocably from their former beauty. For the moment, they are travesties and there is nothing to be done about it.

10.
Avoid a moral or realist take on drug use, instead striving to duplicate the moral-realist matrix of contradictory reactions and opinions typically present in the minds of drug users.

11.
Those currently seeking to bring the telenovela to the Anglophones plan to abandon the most vital attributes of the genre. Please remedy this and give these Anglophones what they really want: strongly emotive acting and reams of extraneous plot material.

12.
Plot for indelible acts and images, each wholly singular, rather than elaborated verbal confrontations. As characters meet, they silently fight and mate in ways heretofore unimagined.

Life With Menilmontant

2006-04-21T21:47:00.000-04:00

“Menilmontant, why did you ski on discarded lengths of gutter?”
“Menilmontant, why did you golf with an iron compounded of stick, tin can, and twine?”
“Menilmontant, why did you at-bat on a field based by magazines, bounded by couches, swinging to knock out a pewter keepsake?”
“’Cause Papa told me to, my dear.”

Retractile Tourism

2006-04-20T20:57:00.000-04:00

Jersey recently took some time to acquaint me with the wonderful Gowanus Canal and the quaint structures that grace it. Chief among them is the famed Carroll Street Bridge:

A mere twist of the neck and you catch this view:

Jersey had heard that the silage visible here was now con-dominial; a recent number of the New Yorker, however, appears to indicate that hootenannies are held there. Won't someone knock on the door and let me know for sure either way?

Humours

2006-04-18T23:04:00.000-04:00

We arrived at this schema over the course of a long May night and several Rosicrucians (one part rosewater, two parts gin), deep in the KirWash neighborhood of Somerville.

Enjoy:

bile--brake fluid
blood--coolant
phlegm--transmission fluid
black bile--motor oil

Open Letter To The IIST

2006-04-14T00:42:00.000-04:00

1.
One does no favors to the "infinitely small thing" by making it monumental--honor it by making it part of a landscape's legitimate physics (functionalizing it as a part in a machined assembly, or 'storicizing it as a narrative player).

2.
To increase a screw, then, do not blow it up to 6 feet--draw a diagram of its workaday action (repose in a mouldering box; cycloid patterns when kicked on the street; suitable locations for its use in the writer's home).

3.
A particular is never straightforward--contrary to geometry, only tight convolutions can join to build a working simplicity.

Specials At Johnny's

2006-04-13T22:57:00.000-04:00

"Tide 4.99
Bumble Bee .78
Dancing Bull 7.99"

Local Marvels Of The Urban Fabric

2006-04-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

1.

Pet Architecture has made it to the States.

2.

The Porterhouse is all well and good, but there are more subtle structural wonders.

3.
Come stay awhile on...the Owl Farm.

"They Queue All Day Like Dragons Of Disgust"

2006-04-08T11:38:00.000-04:00

Volumes have been written about the flagpole of the Zocalo--but won't a simple picture suffice? (Courtesy Mr. Chop.)

Mail Call!

2006-04-08T10:33:00.001-04:00

Reader "Crallspace" responded to the list in "Cornu" (way back on March 23) with an item of his own:

"5. Microstoria is a great minimal electronics project, containing half of Mouse on Mars and half of Oval. Their tones and buzzes are likened to groups like TV POW and their following has everyone from scientists to junkies.

---just adding my number to the list. Found you via a similar "favorite music" in the profile. Microstoria is awesome!"

I'm afraid you're on the wrong track. I'm not talking about "Microstoria" the band (they sound interesting, though!), but the work of Italian composers Piero Calpini, Barbara Turcoletti, Ambrosio Scherma, et al. Their works, for the most part short, flowery art songs paired with enigmatic quasi-fictional spoken texts, were theorized in the early part of the Twentieth Century as a sort of romantic leftist rejoinder to the Futurists. Such works are commonly referred to as..."microstoria".

Thanks for reading, Dan!

On a more serious note, reader Mr. Chop writes:

"Actually, I remember the center fielder fell down catching a fly ball and someone popped up a bunt. So much for fundamentals. I realize now that when I made the comment, I was simply repeating what people say about the WNBA: it's more of a team game than what you find in the thuggish NBA, etc. But women softball players definitely hustle. And group huddle."

Mr. Chop is referring, of course, to April 2's "Fast-Pitch". It's true: when men deign to take notice of women's sport at all, it is either to essentialize it as an ideal "other" that remediates the failures of men's sport through "feminine" modes of being (collaboration vs. show-offing, polite striving vs. self-satisfied entitlement), or to sexualize it sub rosa through the surreptitious operations of the male gaze.

I apologize for any errors in this regard and wish to simply state my support for any and all efforts to fully enforce Title IX.

Moving along, reader "Jen X" writes in regard to April 5's "Chapulines" post:

"wait, what does that mean? and if you blog less how will i pass the boring moments at work?"

Jen, me and "the boys" are still working this all out. It's important to do what's right for all of us.

If I have been prevented from posting on a given day, I would recommend that you:

1. Draw a picture
2. Chew a stick of gum
3. Sing a song
4. Look out the window for a while

These activities will occupy the same amount of time and prove equally diverting.

In regard to the same post, reader Elizabeth has this to say:

"Yay for eating grasshoppers!!! But honestly, I hope they're not still in your GI tract...."

I hope by now it's clear that they are. It's not all bad, really. Elizabeth also notes:

"Why so much security on your comments!?! I don't know if it posted my first comment or not! I'm going to keep using exclamation points until I find out!!!! [shaking fist]"

I want you all to know that this level of security is, in fact, strictly necessary. I wonder if you have any idea what that's like.

...In any case, your continued support is appreciated.

"The Fence That Skirts The Tree"

2006-04-08T10:21:00.000-04:00

Some thoughtless folks build fences right through a tree. When the time comes for the fence to go, the extrication is painful, costly, and time-consuming. Here is a saner alternative.

Chapulines

2006-04-05T21:21:00.000-04:00

A notice to our readership:

The grasshoppers living in our editor's GI tract have informed him that he is "blogging" too hard.

We will try to remedy this problem in the future by "blogging" less and "repping" more.

-Bill

I Will Abroad

2006-04-05T00:29:00.000-04:00

"I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed:
I will abroad.
Call in thy death's head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, My Lord."

-George Herbert, "The Collar"

Screenplay No. 2 (For Your Consideration)

2006-04-04T00:49:00.000-04:00

Composed of shots rapidly going down a staircase. Staircase should preferably be one steep flight into a residential cellar. A sense of panic is desired, an impression of continuously falling down the stairs. Either a contraption can be devised for the camera to be pushed down the stairs in, or the cameraman can simply run down as quickly and manically as possible. Oh, a turn of some sort on the stairs is needed (an even 90 degrees would be ideal). The shots should be sequenced thusly: a shot fades in fairly quickly, at the beginning of its downstairs run. The next shot begins, fading in at the same speed, superimposed on the first image when near the end of the run. As the first shot reaches the end, it goes black for a moment and disappears. This cycles long enough to get the effect across but not long enough to become tedious; let the director exercise heris judgement. No soundtrack; B+W or poor-quality color stock.

Castafiore

2006-04-03T00:31:00.000-04:00

"Ah! je ris de me voir
si belle en ce miroir,
Ah! je ris de me voir
si belle en ce miroir,
Est-ce toi, Marguerite, est-ce toi?
Réponds-moi, réponds-moi,
Réponds, réponds, réponds vite!
Non! Non! ce n’est plus toi!
Non...non, ce n’est plus ton visage;
C’est la fille d’un roi;
Ce n’est plus toi,
Qu’on salut au passage!
Ah s’il était ici!
S’il me voyait ainsi!
Comme une demoiselle
Il me trouverait belle, Ah!
Comme une demoiselle,
Il me trouverait belle!
Achevons la métamorphose,
Il me tarde encor d’essayer
Le bracelet it le collier!
Dieu! c’est comme une main,
Qui sur mon bras se pose! ah! ah!
Ah! je ris
de me voir si belle dans ce miroir!"

Extract From The New Revised Handbook To Valence In Anglophone Given Names

2006-04-02T20:05:00.000-04:00

Abigail: freckled woman in disproportionately good spirits.

Benjamin: hale and hearty, strong as an oak. There is astoundingly little difference in valence between "Benjamin" and its offshoot "Ben"--perhaps "Ben" finds himself patronized a little more often?

Carrie: while the unfortunate association with telekinesis continues, the name has perhaps emerged the stronger from the ordeal. We all think a little longer before offending a "Carrie".

Damian: likewise carries a demonic tone--but only suffered as a result. "Damian" is universally supposed to be fiendish and disposed to malcontentment.

Eleanor: stately, in a word. Stateliness not being much in fashion, "Eleanor" is not much in fashion.

Frederick: distinguished, yet somehow irresponsible. "Frederick" has no doubt squandered his own best assets. Currently operating at a total disconnect from "Fred" (though not "Freddie").

Gail: not an easy name to apply to a child, for it is almost impossible to imagine a "Gail" who is not a mid-level career woman in paisley scarves.

Harold: associated particularly with the sportcoat. Even "Harry" retains something of this.

Ingrid: a deeply unattractive name universally applied to universally attractive women.

Justin: there is a rich "Justin" and a poor "Justin", but none in between. What the two share is a tendency towards an indistinct yet palpable weakness.

Katherine: imperious where "Catherine" is accomodating. The bold assertions of a "Katherine" often shade to passive-aggressivity in a "Kate".

Leonard: redolent of angularity and jaundice. As an escape from this, any "Leonard" can readily find a number of equidistant alternatives: the arthritic "Leo", the apish "Lenny", and tactiturn "Len".

Mildred: silent, appears vicious--but friendly enough if approached. No-one knows a Mildred, though everyone knows someone who knows a Mildred.

Nathan: unfortunate tendency towards obesity despite a healthy diet.

Oona: sheer feather-headed impracticality. Gains medieval cachet when spelled "Una".

Patrick: cordially disliked by his own friends, yet never goes friendless. "Pat" is worse still--but "Rick" is well-liked and nicely avoids any such problems.

Quinn: not actually a given name. Anyone claiming to be called "Quinn" has another, less fortunate given name that they will yield under intense questioning.

Roger: not overly predisposed to mate or rear progeny, and thus on the wane.

Sara: neutrality with overtones of hostile acquiescence. Adding an "h" subtracts IQ points.

Tobin: ragged t-shirts, unruly hair, a handsome face, and an unruly gut.

Ursula: psychic fragility ensures an opportunistic cycle of obscene jokes.

Victor: malodorous. Overly inclined to take his name literally.

Wanda: astonishingly few and far between considering the goodwill one can inspire.

Xavier: partakes of none of the strangeness of the "X"; a solid name with a twinge of heroism.

Yolanda: a solid mane of hair.

Zachary: beloved of his parents, neutral to the point of invisibility for anyone else. "Zach" helps somewhat, but "Zack" exacerbates the problem by removing mother-love from the equation.

Fast-Pitch

2006-04-02T19:45:00.000-04:00

Engrossed in a women's softball game you happen to pass while strolling a park, several edifying reflections concerning "base" sports might suddenly come to you. They are hardly original--they are, perhaps, sentiments you have heard but had heretofore found no particular application for. You might marvel at the vociferous camaraderie, and note the contrast with a corps of still and spectating teammates stirred only by some particular voice. You might gape at the imposing windmill enacted by the pitcher--how that woman pitcher's furious vitality contrasts with the rangy, impassive hurl practiced by the professional male. You might spy in the flesh the "solid grasp of fundamentals" that you had not known enough to miss in the first place.

I encourage all of you to attend a local women's softball game.

Braw

2006-03-30T21:58:00.000-05:00

"As I was walking all alane
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine today?'

'--In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new-slain Knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound, and lady fair.

'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady's ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet.

'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pick out his bonny blue een:
Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.

'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane;
O'er his white banes, when they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair.' "

-Anonymous, "The Twa Corbies"

On Purgatory

2006-03-29T22:20:00.000-05:00

While I'm on the subject of dreams, I'll tell you my dream about Purgatory. Purgatory, as my head would have it, is indeed leveled; instead of a screwed ramping, though, the levels are demarcated, one S.F-graded ridge on top of the next. There's quite a bit of them, too--maybe around 20? It makes for quite a mountain.

Purgatory is a city, certainly, a dense one. Many winding streets and drafty, spacious buildings that I'd date from the 18th century (not that I'm an expert). You will get modernization at several key points, mostly by retrofitting. Only light advertising. Not many people are out and about...maybe about the level of downtown Seattle early Saturday morning. All of the amenities are available, except if you want to be in a crowd, in which case I think you're out of luck.

It isn't as hard as you'd think--not really any fire or load-bearing. You have to learn lessons, which are imparted to you in any number of ingenious ways--simulated celebrities staff the cafes, for instance, and you have to take careful note of what casual pleasantries they choose to say. Why celebrities? The chance of getting to speak with them disarms you; you will take a message from them more readily, without the emotional charge speaking to an actual associate would give. Also, God is well aware that people want to talk to the famous while in the underworld; but how many times will an actual Alexander the Great consent to be trotted out? As for the lessons, I can't speak to their exact nature but I don't think there's anything as straightforward as "be charitable"; say, you buying a black-and-white frappe from Vic Morrow and him suggesting that you come by later with canned goods; the suggestions start at the far oblique, part of an exquisite battery of skillful means intended to motivate you along the path.

God will appear by various signs and wonders. Most notably, when God feels that you have finally learned the lesson of a particular level, a sort of light-phantasmagoria will appear 12 feet up and impressively report on your progress; you will then find yourself on the next level, with some more work to do.

Favorite Dreamed Landscapes (Without People)

2006-03-28T21:24:00.000-05:00

1.
A sort of massive marine cave with some fallen little tree trunks and streams leading through it. A good place to sit and relax and not be bothered with questions.

2.
An open suburban field, the kind only used for youth sports--though about a block longer than usual. I ran a circle around it at dusk once; I had an errand to do.

3.
Another suburban field, this one directly adjoining a middle school. It was my first day, but fortunately no-one else was there. I got to roam around for a bit instead.

4.
Just the other day, I visited a wonderful airport area. Very long frontage hugging a bay; the grounds walkable somehow(?). An open hexagonal structure in three stories sat on a hexagonal island out in the bay; it was only beams and floors, no walls to speak of. Five or so planes were parked on the floors; this was, apparently, the TWA terminal.

5.
A slim clearing just off a country road, with very regular pines all about. A gingerbread-ish sort of house, the kind where all the walls are papered, sitting in it. I wasn't doing such a good job filling in the details so the impression was closer to being in a toy railroad set than being in a pine forest. (I will say that the whole was quite reminiscent of framed samplers and certain quarters of Attleboro.)

6.
An endless post-industrial neighborhood. You could leave a brownstone and walk down a street where the "industry" would increase by delightfully slight increments; sooner or later you would end up among this immense row of factories with wild high smokestacks. Brick retaining walls proliferated to an alarming degree; many pyramids of green steel piping also. Traces of grass for effect...no dandelions, though.

7.
A sort of ziggurat neighborhood whose streets would twist up and converge into one little peak after another. A bit like Worcester, with above-ground pools visible here and there among Little Tykes trucks, under-utilized boats, discarded Alexander the Grape boxes, and wonderfully excessive rib-level chain-link fencing. The continual action of grade and convergence lent a welcome air of "questing urbanity" to the otherwise prosaic proceedings.

8.
A California town where the residents had aimed for a "Mediterranean" feel and fallen wide of the mark; a piazza and its fountain had been copied with one eye shut from Tomie dePaola, while a lengthy dining arcade with Moroccan, Grecian, and Cypriot modes (complete with miniature charcoal pits) went untravelled. At night, Ionic motifs appeared around the windows and doors of downtown in dull fluorescent greens and oranges.

9.
A parched, flat desert, very red. Dwellings had been hollowed out from long, low rock formations, and fitted with bubble-windows. Inside, they were outfitted with thin rugs and spindly coffee-tables...some with geothermal baths tucked in corners. No separate rooms. The one conventional building was a convention hall...a comic book convention had just packed up and some stacks of flyers were still out here and there.

10.
A wintry day, and beachfront strips (kites, confections, five-and-tens) transplanted to the sides of an austere urban boulevard (rigorously shaped thick yew hedges, wrought iron, not much else). A fittingly austere and wintry locomotive serving as a commuter rail ran on sunken tracks down the middle of the boulevard; you could descend some rungs to board and sit in the plush white seats therein. Yes, the contrast was a little precious...on the whole still an interesting place to be.

There's A Window In My Heart

2006-03-27T22:17:00.000-05:00

First, therefore, the precept which I conceive to be most summary towards the prevailing in fortune, is to obtain that window which Momus did require; who seeing in the frame of man's heart such angles and recesses, found fault there was not a window to look into them...

-Francis Bacon, from The Advancement Of Learning

To Crawl Beneath A Mulberry Bush

2006-03-26T19:06:00.000-05:00

Why crawl beneath a mulberry bush? There could be several excellent reasons, mostly having to do with shelter. For instance, if it was cold and snowy and you wanted to be outside, you could crawl beneath a mulberry bush and it would be a bit warmer, and the snow would be slower to accumulate upon you. Conversely, if it was a hot day and you were mowing a lawn, you could leave the mower and crawl beneath a mulberry bush for shade. (You would, however, risk getting grass-stains on your clothes.)

The reasons need not be rational, though. Sometimes, the compulsion simply arises. At these points, you can calmly walk outside and curl yourself about the base of a mulberry bush, and lie there still and quiet. You may feel like a whip-poor-will sleeping in the fallen leaves.

Vast Spiritual Spaces

2006-03-26T00:32:00.000-05:00

Situating yourself correctly in the dark, and seeing one electric light, it’s easy to see how the rest of the scene may proceed from what’s implied in the core of the light; that the arrangements of buildings outside it are developments on the actual constitution of one birthing light.

On A Proposed Sound, An Advance On "Concretes"; Its Implements And Practitioners Described

2006-03-26T00:13:00.000-05:00

1.
PORTAMENTS—tools for wholesale changes in audible groups, along alarmingly single vectors. As simple tones are carried and changed, so are any more evolved tone pictures.

2.
DESK MEDICS—who take those precious “narratives” in sound and sew at them ‘til they’re whole and unseamed. Attacks and decays pared and sanded; so as to result, some rays of light, some grit on the ground. They will do all that is possible to ensure that the listener does not hear an urban, tropical, or otherwise-classed landscape. The listener will be forced to concede that they are hearing something composed of real events which does not exactly mirror any one picture that could be seen. A whole not droning, not surrealistic, nor after any other manner—instead exactly isomorphic to soul of the desk medic on duty.

3.
A Messaienic felicity, whereby the heads of divers birds poke unannounced through color-swaths.

4.
If painting, having vacillated by turns between—The Event! The Texture! The Conception!!—can find itself resting gaily on the interstice between the three...surely music, having navigated the same options in a different order, can find similar couching. So we have a mix field, where use-elements (wheat), useless-elements (burr) working-elements (bees), and pure elements (bloom) gang into a solid ‘scape, to be pushed and pored through.

5.
To example it—an exemplary work could want to recall a plum, in that a) the plum is (mostly) geometrically sound, b) that the plumskin bites, but the bulk of the thing is mellow, and c) that the plum recalls a human referent, the bruise with its mash beneath.

Cornu

2006-03-23T21:05:00.000-05:00

1. The shofar is mighty and capacious, a flock-call bearing such heft as to forcibly re-constitute all spatial groupings as moveable herds.

2. The alpenhorn is long out of necessity; the meters it utilizes translate, via the intervention of conditioned lungs, into a bridging which seconds the linear kilometer-jumps between alpen peaks. The essential comedy of the alpenhorn, which is wholly consonant with the comedy of other local folkways, is of a more mysterious (and, daresay, ineffable) provenance.

3. The coxswain's horn both urges the rowing-team further and shouts the banks of the river aside. Anyone happening by might well wonder at the utility of this badgering bantam who can only shout on the effort, hindering and not visibly furthering the tense haul. Also, in its current iteration the coxswain's horn resembles a ghastly paper cup-enabled parody of the already-ghastly apparatus of a court reporter.

4. The cheerleader's horn is considered by most experts in the field to be chiefly decorative. HOWEVER, placing an amplified microphone at the narrower end results in a peculiarly pleasing form of feedback--a comical sort of hooting.

Five Places I Will Live When Humanity Has Been Decimated

2006-03-22T22:30:00.000-05:00

1. METRO NORTH COMMUTER RAIL TRANSFORMER SHACK, WHITE PLAINS, NY

Cozy, brick, ample shade...a wilderness of smooth stones to calm tense feet. Regular visits from bindlestiffers following the tracks. I'll invite them in and we will enjoy hand-gathered tisanes together.

2. DRAWBRIDGE CONTROL ROOM, PORTLAND, ME

The view of the bay will transport me to a cheery and mythic 1940's of busy little tugboats and friendly-faced bulks of steam, whistling longshoremen in coveralls, brick reds, and more brick reds. I will make long and careful study of the manuals left behind, hoping to raise the old girl up myself. Probably won't work out. Calming sound of a few patched-together motorbikes puttering about at night.

3. COIT TOWER, SAN FRANCISCO, CA

I will gather up some afghans, drape myself in them, and brood at the very top. Will mournfully sing "Lights" to the seals below and mourn the glory that was.

4. SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY, SEATTLE, WA

In the course of a long and fruitful day, I will locate a Rascal with some charge left and ride the ramps. Yes, I might tear up some books...I'm justified after all this time. None of this Burgess Meredith horsehockey for me, though--I'll be sure to put my glasses away in a case!

5. MEXICAN PAVILION, EPCOT CENTER, ORLANDO, FL

Sure, this will be a popular destination for survivors. But my pipian will be better than theirs and thus I will be entitled to this prime piece of real estate.

The Star Of The Show

2006-03-20T19:34:00.000-05:00

"The culmination of the summer, for Cage, and for many who were there, was the performance of Satie's short play Le Piege de Meduse (The Ruse of Medusa), which had only been performed once before. Poet M.C. Richards translated the text, and Cage performed the music. Buckminster Fuller, whom Cage and Cunningham had befriended, was enlisted to play the lead role of Baron Medusa, with Elaine de Kooning as his daughter, Frisette. Cunningham danced in the role of 'a costly mechanical monkey,' and student William Schrauger was Frisette's suitor. Willem de Kooning painted the sets. Fuller, although able to talk captivatingly for hours on end, froze when faced with the prospect of acting in conjunction with this extravagant gathering of geniuses. Nothing could deliver him from his crippling panic, until Arthur Penn was called upon to direct the production. Penn, a student, already had experience with Stanislavsky's theories before coming to Black Mountain and eventually taught a popular class at the college in 1947 using the Russian master's An Actor Prepares as the textbook. Realizing Fuller was afraid of making a fool of himself, Penn himself proceeded to do the most ridiculous things he could imagine. Suddenly, when Fuller saw this, and everyone laughing at Penn, it unlocked him, and from then on he was the star of the show."

-from Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art

First Chapters: "Den Of Thieves"

2006-03-20T01:19:00.000-05:00

1.

Hi, I'm Den Greeley (the Den is short for Denise). I've been in trouble before...but never as bad as this!

Right now I'm hiding in a basement and there are some guys tearing my aunt's house apart. They're looking for a packet of really special seeds that a certain agribusiness doesn't want anyone else to have. The guys don't know that I'm here and that I've got the seeds in my jacket pocket--at least not yet. They think I'm just some dumb 5th grade girl--but I happen to be the dumbest 5th grade girl to have ever solved 8 MYSTERIES here in Montclair so far, single-handedly!

OK, I had some help from my principal, Doctor Pinkwater; my best friend, Hetchy; and my cat, Fitz. And I'm going to need their help now more than ever! Hetchy is on his way now on his bicycle, and if our plan works those agri-thugs are going to get more trouble than they bargained for!

[...]

More Brief Fancies

2006-03-18T21:24:00.000-05:00

1.
Two ideas for future compact discs:

-An anthology of the greatest hip-hop skits of all time.
-An anthology of "big finishes" from live rock songs. You know what I mean: it's 1988, Eric Clapton and his band wrap up a cooking version of "Crossroads" and top off the excitement like so: "Dum do dum do dum do, do do do...(drums clatter away on their own for a bit)...DUM DUMMMMMM...(drums clatter away a bit more)...DUM!"

Garner around 80 of each of these things (shouldn't be hard), edit them out of their respective contexts, and string them together.

2.
"Oh, mailboxes are the loneliest, loneliest things...people just throw things at them and walk away...their friend is the mail carrier, and he steals from them...Oh!"
-Joanie

3.
My friends Will and Joanie are a riot. This weekend we had a great time! We played foursquare and went to "Tacos Lupita" for pupusas. Then we watched a movie, "Explorers". Cute kids!!!

4.
PROPOSAL FOR A THROWBACK VIDEO STORE
Find a cheap storefront and create your own independent video store; give it an outlandish name like JAZZY'S VIDEO or RAZZY'S VIDEO or something of the like. Advertise occasionally in the community paper, but NOT the main local paper or (God forbid) alternative weekly. Keep three employees, all male--outfit them with brown polo shirts and name pins. Use an annotated photo of Marge Schott in the back room to make clear that the dress code precludes facial hair or piercings. Bind all of your videos in improbably bulky plastic sheathes. Decorate the store with posters for Barfly, Amazon Women On The Moon, and Christine. Resist the urge to display anything having anything to do with Star Wars; in fact, do not stock Star Wars and point enquiring customers to Flight Of The Navigator instead. Of course, 20-30% of the stock must be in Beta.

5.
I couldn't find this information anywhere else on the Web, so I'll put it here: cleaning vomit out of a knitted cap might take you the better part of a week, and the better part of a bottle of Woolite. Help, Heloise!

Owl Drinks

2006-03-18T00:08:00.000-05:00

Bubbly Owl Drinks are available at your local grocer. Each one features a prominent and attractive picture of a stylized Owl. There are several flavors.

One Owl flavor is strawberry-kiwifruit. Although some say that foods originating from the same region are the only foods that are complementary, strawberries and kiwifruit are from very different places that do not have much to do with each other. However, they do taste good together!

Another Owl Drink flavor is "roots". This is colored "Red, Gold, and Green". It is flavored with several different roots and barks, as well as medium-invert cane sugar (please shake before drinking).

Another Owl Drink flavor is bubblegum (marketed as "champagne cola" in predominantly Latin markets). Also, Owl Drinks come in chocolate, black cherry, mandarin orange, Ginger Spice, and blue raspberry flavors. "Lemon-Lime Sammy" is in the Owl family of products but is not technically an Owl Drink.

Owl Drinks are made for a natural environment.

...Thank you for your interest in Owl Drinks!

Brief Fancies

2006-03-17T00:06:00.002-05:00

1.
Spotting another late 70's-vintage Free Spirit. I love my own very well and think of it often, its tires flattening ever so slowly in my cellar. It is my "dark brother", built while I was gestating. I do rather well and it does not. Oh, it tried to dump me time and time again. My feet couldn't push it up the hill. The moveable little anchor! Yes, I think of it when I see its mates on the street.

2.
Teddy Pendergrass singing. Like me, you'll laugh at the sound, and then realize how much larger it is than you. Not you, just anyone... If you put it on in a room, it will redefine the room for its own purposes. If you aren't making it, you realize you should be...if you are, you realize your inadequacy...no, not as a lover, your inadequacy before a distilled and flowing love.

3.
The prismatic sphere--oh, wouldn't you like one? How do they put those things together? I could look it up, but let's see how close we can get:

Red for fire
Orange for earth
Yellow for lightning
Green for gas
Blue for water
Indigo for ice
Violet for air

Write me, tell me how I did!

4.
If Johnny Damon fancies himself Jesus, it must follow that:

Simon Peter: Jason Varitek
Andrew: Doug Mirabelli
James the Greater: Manny Ramirez
John: David Ortiz
Philip: Gabe Kapler
Bartholomew: Bill Mueller
Thomas: Mark Bellhorn
James the Less: Dave Roberts
Matthew: Trot Nixon
Simon the Zealot: Kevin Millar
Judas: Nomar Garciaparra
Matthias: Orlando Cabrera

Hope that clears it up.

5.
The Reverse-Flash. In a perfect world, all oppositions would be comically strict binaries of this nature. No poles, no dynamics, just image-flips.

More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid (For Jenifer Kaminsky)

2006-03-15T21:48:00.000-05:00

"In a funny way, my work is really formal, but that formality is never talked about. People always glom right on to its abject nature, or blah blah blah blah blah. I've been typecast as some kind of mindfucker or something."

-Mike Kelley

Promotional Consideration

2006-03-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relicks of learning, as monks do the relicks of their saints--without working one--one single miracle with them?"

-Laurence Sterne, from Tristram Shandy

From "Further Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

2006-03-14T00:23:00.000-05:00

"Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long, Long"

Many such systems have been ideated after the fact; we have here, though, a living example of SYSTEMS THOUGHT IN MOTION, whereby the connection (via mere simultaneity) of a wineglass, amplification, a wail, and forbearance of any edit bring forth a singular sustained marvel. You cannot even interpret what you are hearing until you consult a proper reference work. The untutored view would hear an unprompted narcissistic plea for for swiftly fleeing attention, not knowing the actual conditions of NATIVE GENIUS SKIPPING GAILY UPON THE WILD EDDIES OF CIRCUMSTANCE. By retaining childlike perceptions of the circumstantial weather, the mild sage in his jute fabrics has achieved the sublimity of subjoining an unmoored "halloa and well-met" onto an unprepossessing lamblike hymn.

I ran as fast I could to Will's dorm room...it was 3 in the morning...he wasn't there, though! Will, if you're there, let me know what you think!

Essay On Erving, MA (With Ten Views)

2006-03-12T21:52:00.000-05:00

1.

The billowing factory. What is it? All of the townfolk work there; the town services are provided by commuting members of ring-communities.

2.

It is wholly linear. You can see the entire thing from Route 2, given that you have the time and the leisure to swing your head around a bit.

3.

Parallel to a small river; and when I say parallel, I mean curved parallel--where the town zigs with the river's zig, and thus-forth. A pebbled fringe with some grass provides the constant blank buffer between the two.

4.

On the north side of the town, the ground-level undulates, leaping fantastically at 45 degrees or more. You wonder about those who might have to back their cars down such driveways in the winter, and how they ramp them back up again.

5.

Signage in many places not unlike that of the wealthy historical districts in large cities. Who among the citizens of Erving may have drafted zoning regulations stipulating such things? What is the heritage of Erving, anyways?

6.

The "Erving" logo may be spied on the factory, but seems more generally applicable to the town as a whole. (I imagine the same is true of Hershey, PA.) Strange as it seems, it is perfectly possible that the designer thereof is not even an Erving native, perhaps not even based in Massachusetts.

7.

Erving is a reward for strained travelers who have found themselves bored on the way west. For those heading east, it is a continuation of the glories of French King, and a final hail-farewell before embarking on the naught mysteriously found between Eastern and Central Massachusetts.

8.

A Koffee Kup cruller, noble and somehow silvery, may still be had in Erving.

9.

You may see a few slight examples of bridging that may brush against your very soul. You will never see anyone use any of these bridges, or remember (even having just seen one) precisely where they go. If pressed, you would say they prosaically went across the river and into the woods on the other side. Why there? For the hunt?

10.

There are no pedestrians, anyway, or any sidewalks for them to use. If you live in Erving, you might spend most of your day in the factory and then hopscotch from one little parking lot to another for your errands. Once a week you might try something in that retro-fitted diner that stands somewhat apart on a half-moon of land; you have your choice of churches and I suppose will generally keep to the one you like. Though you respect French King and wish it well, you won't dine or take your family there for an outing because it is rather loud and has rather the air of gaudy disrespectability (perhaps that's just the name).

Some Manifolds

2006-03-12T21:24:00.000-05:00

"...the hum of insects, like tiniest bells on the garment of Silence..."

-George Eliot, from The Mill On The Floss

"...the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers..."

-Christina Stead, from The Man Who Loved Children

"...a kind of Ten Commandments in vegetable-dye color printing..."

-Marianne Moore on Key West, from a letter to Elizabeth Bishop

To Brian Szente: 10 Proposals For Recording Projects

2006-03-10T12:41:00.000-05:00

SANCTA FE DO NAZCA COMPLACADAO

Concept: We dress up as friars and write lyrical quasi-Iberian music with quasi-Iberian words. We perform the songs with two nylon-string guitars and keenly honed dual vocal harmonies.
Result: Acclaimed performances in local coffeehouses in the span of three months, followed by a sudden disappearance. In the wake, we post several distraught fliers claiming to be from fans seeking our whereabouts.

MOCK UP

Concept: We diagram out eight prototypical pop songs, with durations, crescendi, strata, etc. Rather than create acceptable sounds to drape on these skeletons, we construct the skeletons themselves with pure sine tones.
Result: A CD EP on a respected Belgian experimental label.

TAY-SACHS

Concept: You on vocal and bass, myself on guitar and drums. We spend months crafting one passable early 80's-styled hardcore song.
Result: A DAT; we relentlessly push it until it is placed on an appropriate vinyl compilation of like-minded music. We submit a photo of a fairly obscure band in the same genre as our own, which will ensure that our ruse is exposed, say in a matter of months.

CARMEX KIDS

Concept: Each one of us laboriously transcribes the first minute of each phone conservation we conduct over the course of May 2007. We meet in August 2008 to recite and record the results, with my voice in the left channel and yours in the right channel. We try to keep to the original minute-long timeframe. Your conversations alternate with mine.
Result: CD-R; hand-distribute to local record stores.

YURU CHARA

Concept: We are recorded with contact mics, writhing and grunting under two huge heaps of fluorescent yarn (purple for you, yellow-green for me) approximately three meters apart in the same loft space.
Result: A limited-edition 10" record, self-released and issued to each couple featured in the New York Times' Weddings section of August 5, 2008.

FOXHUNTER GUITARS

Concept: Lovingly craft an approximation of Joni Mitchell's 70's fusion records (The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mingus), with myself on fretless electric bass, you on Fender Rhodes, and five others, including a naive Joni ringer. We engineer a major label signing, but engineer our own disappearance on the eve of our first proper recording session. Splitting the advance money, I decamp for Vanuatu, you to the Canaries.
Result: A rough set of demos, for reissue twelve years later with much critical chin-stroking.

PLACEHOLDERS

Concept: We meet one night over a demijohn of Gordon's Gin, determined to write a single, wholly unimpeachable song. We exchange melodic ideas via humming. At each breakthrough, we record our results directly to cassette. By the next morning, we have recorded a single, wholly unimpeachable piece of blissful humming facetiously named "Hummin' Cummin' At'cha".
Result: A single full ninety-minute tape, circulated among our friends and associates.

JAMAISCA

Concept: We spend most of 2009 laboriously conceiving and recording a vision of what Jamaican music shall be in 25 years. We will present the results to the members of TOK, and convince them to lend their voices.
Result: We will sign to Astralwerks and put out three albums of descending quality, accompanied by a total of five (5) maxi-singles (including twelve [12] non-album B-sides), and ten [10] remixes for other artists.

LEN BIAS

Concept: Essentially a documentary project detailing the brief and tragic life of budding basketball star Len Bias. We combine audio reportage with Shepard Fairey-styled visuals glorifying man and myth alike.
Result: A gallery show in a mid-sized American city, with a limited-edition 7" record available at the gallery or through the artists' website.

WE JUST WANT YOUR HOLES TO USE

Concept: A snickering, condescending take on black metal tropes. We humiliate several giants of the movement by paying them exorbitant sums to parody themselves on record.
Result: One album on Matador, one album on Touch and Go, and many averrals of our complete sincerity and love of the music.

Black Rocks State Park And Recreational Trail

2006-03-09T22:32:00.000-05:00

We nestled our feet among the Black Rocks and sipped wine. We poured the dregs among Black Rocks. We practiced “Body Fusion” within the groves—were they groves?—stands?—only single trees. Joshua Trees! We donned our unitards, striped with every color we could find—having moved HARMONIOUSLY, we shed them.

I then dreamt that wide lines appeared in the sky—they opened to holes—and from them, sweet milky falls did fall. I kissed my hands at the apparition—I kicked up my heels! The Black Pebbles sprayed back and glanced from your chest, your impregnable chest. But I, only I, had ‘pregnated it! —Bright babies of hope grew there!

From "New Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

2006-03-09T03:01:00.000-05:00

"Gideon's Bible: Another Guise"

What is the secret key? The Bible averts hurts and downgrades significant threats. Drink makes for a reeling doctor. A reel at the piano may doctor the hearts of drinkers. These are first axioms, but not secret keys; no, not hardly.

By what means may a man turn raccoon? If he closes his paw around some kernel and will not release it, even though by the largening of this fist it cannot be removed from the vessel. He shall will the kernel to be consumed through the very act of seizure.

What settlements may be found in the Black Mountains? Black Rocks State Park and Recreational Trail, its few satellites. A wild gang of miners, just setting up tent. Lone lorn pioneers tracing snakeways up sheerness and sheerness, only to unroll a solemn blanket-roll. One shiverer high in a a flimsy blanket-roll, and so--

Can you believe that? It stops right there, just like it looks. Will and I freaked a little when we came up with this, like "Where do we go from here?" OK, more next week...

A Partial Chronology

2006-03-07T22:16:00.000-05:00

778 AD: Roland ambushed at Roncesvalles
1905 AD: Binet-Simon test devised
1985 AD: Dian Fossey murdered
1853 AD: Matthew Perry lands in Japan
1972 AD: Jimmy Cliff rides a car through a golf course
1887 AD: Ludwik Zamerhof introduces Esperanto
73 AD: Siege of Masada
1598 AD: Spenser flees Irish rebels
1903 AD: Beatrix Potter writes The Tale Of Benjamin Bunny
1917 AD: Execution of Mata Hari
1973 AD: The Saturday Night Massacre
331 AD: Birth of Julian the Apostate

Cassiopeia

2006-03-07T01:25:00.000-05:00

"...very early on there predominated in recurrent nightly visions the notion of an approaching end of the world, as a consequence of the indissoluble connection between God and myself. Bad news came in from all sides that even this or that star or this or that group of stars had to be 'given up'; at one time it was said that even Venus had been 'flooded', at another that the whole solar system would now have to be 'disconnected', that the Cassiopeia (the whole group of stars) had to be drawn together into a single sun, that perhaps only the Pleiades could be saved..."

-Daniel Paul Schreber, from the Memoirs Of My Nervous Illness (tr. I. Macalpine and R.A. Hunter)

From "Essays On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album' "

2006-03-06T00:31:00.000-05:00

"Listen To Julia As Quiet As You Can"

Spot a bare room. Bulb on if it's night-time, bulb off for day. Smoke only one cigarette. You've bought a $5 radio-recorder from Walgreen's. Dry goods and white cans, a clean old fixture.

A long white rug and creepers at the panes. Attention to your nails. Play "Julia". Listen to "Julia" as quiet as you can. Whittle the floor. Whittle the floor. Talk to a friend on the phone. Make plans for later. Wonder about that. Play "Julia" as quiet as you can. A game of checkers, cold beer, and smoke only one cigarette. No chairs are better when there's crates and felted blankets. I knew a silent Norse once. I saw friends there at the bar. A friend's band would play. I stopped by the store later and bought a bulb. "Charlie, Charlie," I called when I got home. That cat was there. The cat would play with the rabbit. The other roommate, the girl, laid there and played with her hair. She asks questions. Start playing "Julia" as quiet as you can. It's late, and someone else is sleeping!

Won't you go to sleep? To sleep? It's awful fine. I used the phone again. "I don't have a copy."

-My friend Will wrote this sophomore year. I thought this was really incredible. We decided to put together a "book of essays" called "On Not Having To Listen To 'The White Album'". We're still working on it. I'll publish some more in the next few days.

The Road Goes Up By The Rope At The Edge

2006-03-04T09:17:00.000-05:00

"Above the gorges, one thread of sky:
Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords.
High up, the slant of splintered sunlight, moonlight:
Beneath, curbs to the wild heave of the waves.
The shock of a gleam, and then another,
In depths of shadow frozen for centuries:
The rays between the gorges do not halt at noon;
Where the straits are perilous, more hungry spittle.
Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins
And the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright:
Branches weep as the frost perches
Mournful cadences, remote and clear.
A spurned exile's shriveled guts
Scald and seethe in the water and fire he walks through.
A lifetime's like a fine-spun thread,
The road goes up by the rope at the edge.
When he pours his libation of tears to the ghosts in the stream
The ghosts gather, a shimmer on the waves."

-Meng Chiao, "Sadness of the Gorges (Third of Ten)" (tr. A.C. Graham)

Primitive Vigor

2006-03-03T22:05:00.000-05:00

"It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature, that inspires our dreams."

-Henry David Thoreau

The Band Of Sleepers...

2006-03-02T22:37:00.000-05:00

...is composed of four young people who live in a rented apartment.

They perform in slumber-masks.

They do their terpsichoric chores clad in spruce new cotton-blend pyjamas.

They pitch pup-tents in parking lots.

They beckon walkers-by to spectate their false somnambulances.

On the course of their midnight rambling:

a snare drum falls from a lone wharf's ladder. And:

a guitar laid on a winding rail emits a wailing racket.

It Nauseated The Dogs

2006-03-01T23:14:00.000-05:00

"At Carteia an octopus used to come from the open sea into the uncovered tanks of the fish-farms and there forage for salted fish. All sea-creatures are powerfully attracted to the smell of salted fish, and for this reason baskets used in catching fish are smeared with salted fish. In view of the continual theft, the overseers became exceedingly angry. Fences were put up to obstruct the octopus, but it used to climb these by means of a tree. It could be caught only by employing dogs with a keen scent. These surrounded the octopus as it was returning at night and roused the overseers, who were terrified by its strange appearance. Its size was unheard of, and likewise in colour; it was smeared with brine and had a dreadful smell. Who would have expected to find an octopus there, or to recognize it against such a background? They seemed to be locked in a struggle with something out of this world, for it nauseated the dogs with its terrible breath, lashed them with the ends of its tentacles, and then struck them with its stronger arms, which it used in the manner of clubs. After great trouble, it was dispatched with the aid of many tridents."

-Pliny, from the Natural History (tr. J. Healy)

Country Honey

2006-02-28T14:42:00.000-05:00

"Julius Martial's acres--they're few,
but more happily situated
than the gardens of the Hesperides--
lie along the sweeping ridge
of the Janiculum. Broad
ravines slope upward to the summit
and the level, gently swelling top
opens to an untroubled sky
which shines with a light peculiarly
its own, even when cloudiness
obscures the curving valleys.
The dainty roof of the tall house
rises gracefully toward the clear stars.

On one side you can look out
on the seven proud hills and survey
the whole city of Rome, and the Alban
Hills and the hills of Tusculum,
and the cool suburbs nearby
the city: ancient Fidenae
and tiny Rubrae and the orchard
groves where Anna Perenna's
worshippers revel in the sacrifice
of maidenheads.

On the other
we can see the traveller driving
along in his silent carriage
on the Via Flaminia
or the Salarian highway.
His wheels can never disturb
our soothing sleep, which neither
the calls to the rowers or the cries
of the bargemen are strong enough
to break, though the Mulvian Bridge
and the boats as they glide so swiftly
on the holy Tiber seem so near.

The owner offers his country house
(if it shouldn't be called a town house)
freely to guests. You'd think
it was yours, it's open to you
so courteously and ungrudgingly--
with such gracious hospitality.
You'd think it the friendly house
of Odysseus' host, Alcinous,
or that of Molorchus, just after
Hercules repaid his kindness
with sudden prosperity.

But if you're the kind who thinks
all this still isn't big enough,
you're welcome to farm the whole town
of Tibur, or even Praeneste,
with a hundred hoes, or assign
the hillside town of Setia
to one overseer. For me
Julius Martial's few acres
are preferable to them all."

-Martial, IV.lxiv (tr. B. Mills)

Screenplay No. 4 (For Your Consideration)

2006-02-27T23:59:00.000-05:00

"Mass. Ave"

This should be shot at dusk, just light enough to discern all of the detail here described. The view is anywhere on the first actual block after the bridge of the Boston side of Massachusetts Avenue (east side of the street). There should be a college-age couple, male and female—the male has a film camera on a tripod, pointed toward and above the film’s camera (which is approximately two lanes of traffic away on the street, perpendicular to the line of the road), the female a light meter around her neck. It should be made to seem that: a) they are in it for the long haul, b) it is the female’s film, and the male is helping her out. Preferably, he should have curly hair. Please, no acting, just waiting. Only soundtrack should be of passing traffic (sync not necessary). They should not be observed to speak; her view should be aligned at all times with the camera’s, while his may wander. One minute exactly; standard fade in and out.