"Not An Inn But A Hospital"

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

1. 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.)



2. 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.



3. 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.)



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



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



6. RESOLVED; THAT revelation is best defined as an uncovered constant of alignment through a mundane array.
   
   
   (Cheonggyecheon, if you're feeling sanguine.)



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

My Face

"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

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.

...

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

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"

"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

"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)

"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

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

"Crepuscular Boys"

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

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

“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

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

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

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

"Tide 4.99
Bumble Bee .78
Dancing Bull 7.99"

Local Marvels Of The Urban Fabric

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"

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

Mail Call!

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.