loud paper

cult classic

I was reading Joan Acocella’s vampire essay, In the Blood, from last week’s New Yorker (I am always a week behind), drinking coffee, and flipping through C-Lab’s bootlegged issue of Urban China. It was an unsettling combination—a crisis of attention, really. Tidy columns versus san serif sprawl.

Acocella dissected Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Methodically, she traced its history, and then she pinned down the novel’s structure:

The narrative method of “Dracula” is to assemble a collage of purportedly authentic documents, most of them in the first person. Many of the materials are identified as excerpts from the diaries of the main characters. In addition, there are letters to and from these people—but also from lawyers, carting companies, and Hungarian nuns—plus telegrams, “newspaper” clippings, and a ship’s log. This multiplicity of voices gives the book a wonderful liveliness. A long horror story could easily become suffocating.

And here I pause. A narrative built out of collage?

Could Stoker’s 1897 fiction, a work I started to read as an undergrad but never finished, really mirror the cacophony of blogs, news reports, tweets, pieces of journalism, and status updates that make up my daily life online?

Ah, too strangely heady to answer with a straight face.

But look at Crisis, it’s doing it too. Essays, interviews, photographs, roundtable discussions, and blog gleanings tumble over each other across the pages. Everyone weights in. Laura Hanna talks to a 9-1-1 operator in Anaheim, John McMorrough tackles the Apocalypse, Geoff Manaugh sees foreclosure. Infrastructure crumbles. The Biosphere and the economy have meltdowns. We are sandbagged by shock, awe, and Obama urbanism.

It’s less the DIY bootleg Jeffery Inaba describes—“an improvised, illegitimate work… largely motivated by a wish to share”—as it is a horror story told with classic technique. The crisis is amplified so it can be separated from daily life before being analyzed and digested. I turn back to Acocella:

The alternation of voices also lends texture. It’s as if we were turning an interesting object around in our hands, looking at it from this angle, then that. And since the story is reported by so many different witnesses, we are more likely to believe it.

So, what do we do with this belief? Does it motivate action or does it suck us dry?

prairie style

Via.

The March 31 issue of the New Yorker features a droll short story by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in Chicago, Great Experiment mixes doses of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with a former-Baffler proofreader’s midlife crisis. Straight out of the gate it offers a blissfully succinct critique of green building:

The gray Gothic stone of the Tribune Tower, the black steel of the Mies building just next door—these weren’t the colors of the new Chicago. Developers were listening to Danish architects who were listening to nature, and so the latest condominium towers were going organic. They had light-green facades and undulating rooflines, like blades of grass bending in the wind.

There had been a prairie here once. The condos told you so.

Just wait until he describes the interiors of the hip and aging. Spot on, Beck poster included. Also, check out Eugenides’ sweeping and perverse Middlesex—it is one of my all-time favorite reads.

architecture gone wild

I have to give props to the good folks at the slightly mysterious LVHRD organization. They certainly know how to create spectacle out of the lowliest of spectator sports: model building. Last night was the fourth installment of Master-Disaster Architecture Duel. (I have left off the Dewar’s branding opportunity.) It pitted the brutes against the boutiques: James Adams and Paul Kim of FXFOWLE versus Sean Bailey and
David Iseri of Konyk.

One could describe it as Iron Chef for architects, but really, that doesn’t quite capture the thrill of watching four architects hunched over tables, slicing at drinking straws in the middle of the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

Did I mention that it was lumberjack themed?

Ostensibly this was to coordinate with the project brief: some sort of futuristic Alaskan Wilderness outpost constructed from repurposed oil pipeline (hence the drinking straws.) But really it was step one in creating spectacle. Ask people to dress up as lumberjacks and woodland creatures and already things are festive.

Step two, provide free booze. Step three, invite the media. (I ran into half dozen bloggers and journalists. Archinect was reporting live via camera phone and text messages.) Actually, don’t just invite the media, but create a buzz of media. Hire photographers and videographers to endlessly document the event and project it back to itself on large screens at the venue. As we all know, images always make things exciting.

They also encourage viewers to become participants, to snap their own pics. I’m reminded of the classically postmodern "most photographed barn in America" section in Don DeLillo’s White Noise. The line of the evening goes to an enigmatic gentleman named Seamus who cheered on a young woman with a digital video camera, “Fill that hard drive. Fill it.” Do not underestimate the need to document anything architectural.

Sadly, and predictably, the models completed didn’t live up to their hype. I voted for FXFOWLE’s trussed scheme only to find that from the right angle it looked like a happy face. (A frown upside down.) The guy drunkenly chanting best-described Konyk’s entry: “Cheeseburger penis. Cheeseburger penis.” Cheeseburger penis won. Ah, the discourse.

You can just barely see me sporting my Fiction frames in Aaron's snapshot below:

gone traipsing

"-Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a postcard"
(Ulysses 12.257)
Via Aida Yared's incredible Joyce Images, an illustrated Ulysses using period documents and ephemera.

I leave tomorrow for a Glen Hansard-inspired trip to Dublin, Ireland. I look forward to a Joycean wander around the city punctuated by cups of tea and pints of beer. Surely, there will be a stop at the Guinness Storehouse. Remodeled by RKD Architects in 2002, it boasts an atrium shaped like a pint glass and topped by viewing/drinking deck with the best views of Dublin. Sláinte, indeed.

More reports in January. Happy New Year.

fine focus

Fiction focus

As I sit here tapping away at my laptop in my favorite Brooklyn café, Outpost, a turntable is rotating Galaxie 500, sending Tugboat strains out over the speakers. The retro continues. Perhaps it is the right soundtrack to pair with Liset Castillo’s new show, Pain Is Universal But So Is Hope, now on view at the Black and White Gallery in Chelsea. The tenderhearted title could be a lyric. On Parking Lot, Dean Wareham achingly sings out:

Sitting on a subway train and Watching all the people lose their senses

Hiding in a parking lot and
Watching all the people fall to pieces

I don't mind
I think it's fine

The spare words, capturing ephemeral moments with big meanings, are carved out of guitar fuzz. Replace “words” with “structures” and “guitar fuzz” with “sand” and you get a description of Castillo’s work. Her large-scale photographs depict miniature, crumbling utopias, not dystopias. In an artist statement on the Brooklyn Museum’s website, she says:

The notion of movement, with which the work plays, offers a reading of the historic relationship between nature and artifice. It's for this reason that it is not the object that becomes the work, but rather its representation, the photograph as a symbol of the documentation, which offers itself to the spectator as testimony of the utopia that in the end lives only as image, in the process of disappearing.

Before walking into the gallery, I expected diorama-type representation, sandbox-scaled images easily filed into my tiny collection, but the photographs are physically slick. Their size is demanding and I wouldn’t describe the sandcastle pastiche of iconic buildings as cute. The arcades at Carlo Fontana’s Piazza San Pietro collapse, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim caves under its own weight, Golden Arches tumble, and, as an observer, I am detached from the escalating chaos. But I don’t mind. I think its fine.

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Light Blue), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

Pain is Universal but so is Hope (Orange), 2007
C-print on Aluminum
70" X 92"

public spectacles

Last Saturday, I took my Fiction frames out for a late-summer spin. The weather was just perfect to go check out the Warm-Up dance party held at PS1. Each year, the museum invites young architects to compete in the design of the shade structure installed in the courtyard. That event in itself stirs up the architecture community—identifying hot, emergent offices and experimental design techniques. This year’s winner, Liquid Sky by Los Angeles-based Ball-Nogues, is a six-spire revival tent made out of Mylar panels. Sunlight filters through the petals giving everyone a healthy pink glow. People danced to an array of DJs and hipsters relaxed in hammock-like nets hung from telephone poles, a design that evoked a psychedelic, paramilitary crash pad. Apocalypse Wow?

I love how my glasses match the tent.

pattern language

Self-portrait with frost and terrazzo.

Over at varnelis.net, Kazys posts about his William Gibson mini-obsession—in light of the recently released Spook County. The enthusiasm is infectious, and I’ve allowed it to lead me to Gibson’s 2003 novel, Pattern Recognition.

Forty pages in, the novel makes me jittery, filled as it is with jet lag and brand name anxieties. The details overwhelm: catalogs of cool desires and detachments. It stirs up memories of a year where, coolhunter adjacent, I worried if my jeans were a dark enough hue. Soon after I switched to corduroy.

Page 19 offers up an addition to my catalog of eyeglass-related quotes:

Brutally cropped, he regards her from the depths of massive, mask-like Italian spectacles. The black-framed glasses remind her of emoticons, those snippets of playschool emotional code cobbled up from keyboard symbols to produce sideways cartoon faces. You could do his glasses with an eight, hyphen for his nose, the mouth a left slash.

8-\. The international symbol for dork. Cool be damned.

over, under

I finished reading Jonathan Lethem's essays last week, so I thought that I’d stop referencing them in my posts, that I’d start quoting from Miranda July’s lauded debut collection of short stories, No one belongs here more than you. (I have the yellow version, but no yellow blouses, what's a girl to do?)

I rarely cry in movies, but a scene in her 2005 Me and You and Everyone We Know—when the two awkward would-be lovers finally touch—brought me to tears. I even went on a pretty odd, but interesting, date with a guy because he did the programming for the film's IM chat graphics. But I have to admit; I am not infatuated with her stories. Like in her film, the language is beautifully striped down and relationships are mismatched, but without her redemptive golden-hour visuals, they leave me a bit depressed.

An example, from It Was Romance:

We walked down the hall and entered the auditorium just in time to help stack the chairs. There was no system for stacking, so we accidentally made many substacks that were too heavy to lift and join together. The stacks of various heights stood alone. We gathered our purses and walked to our cars.

But back to Lethem. I though it was pretty cool that while I was reading his essay Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn: Doom and Romance on a subway platform (available to Harpers subscribers here), which is conflates memoir and a history of the partially-abandoned station, once bustling with four tracks and filled with shops, the C train I was riding pulled alongside the aforementioned platform. It was one of those moments that romanticizes the grimiest of places—a half-lit subway stop, that one spot of Brooklyn that seems to resist the gentrification taking place around it.

And I mention the subway, because in a strange coincidence, I met architect/photographer Chris Payne and he told me about his 2002 book, New York's Forgotten Substations: The Power Behind the Subway.

From the PAP website:

All over New York City, hidden behind unassuming historic facades, sits the gigantic machinery of the power stations that once moved the subways. For over a century, the 125,000-pound converters and related equipment of the substations remained largely unchanged, but in 1999 the last manually operated substation was shut down and since then they have been systematically dismantled and sold as scrap.

Payne documented the stations in drawings and photographs. He is currently at work on a new project and I am meeting up with him tomorrow to hear more about it.

bigger things

It’s a big deal, Serra at the MoMA. The retrospective Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years runs all summer and is a certain matching of opposite equals: the museum institution, all urbane lightness (and whiteness) versus the sculptor’s weight, physicality, and materiality. Athena versus Paul Bunyan. Athena, the patroness of crafts and defender of cities pit against axe-wielding, blue ox–loving, Bunyan, the maker and dominator of landscapes. Goddess versus Lumberjack. (Lethem’s dissection of Jack Kirby’s The Eternals must have gotten to me.)

But really, Yoshio Taniguchi does align the MoMA building with the city. In a 2004 interview with Terence Riley, then MoMA Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, which I then quoted in New Museums, he says, “I approached the project as if it were an urban design. As opposed to designing one thing of beauty, I designed a museum within a city—a city within a city.”

Yet the contemporary metropolis feels fragile next to Serra’s installations. Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992) are installed in sculpture garden, designed by Philip Johnson in 1953, and at first the juxtaposition seems simply clever: marble vs. steel. Corten arcs complimented by pre-war edifices. But the physicality of moving through the works eclipses context, even as a rush of visitors pause to take rusty-dusty pictures.

(nice frames, no?)

New works, Band (2006) and Sequence (2006), are displayed in the contemporary galleries on the second floor and make the expansive gallery space, complete with 22-foot-high ceiling, look inadequate and flimsy, even as it is a wonder that the floors can hold the weight of steel. (The video on MoMA’s website of the installation is amazing and telling.) Standing inside Serra’s industrial hulls, the only place to look, in order to escape vertigo, is up. And see gypsum board, track lighting, and return air grills. The ubiquitous makings of our daily environment, the weak enclosures of malls and office towers, can’t contain Serra’s homage to industrial landscape or the sensual appeal of brute form. In this particular battle, the lumberjack wins.

reading glasses

My cousin Ari, aka Archie Zimmer when the mood strikes, is a writer and artist living in LA. Knowing that as a relatively new Brooklynite I recently tore through a couple Jonathan Lethem novels (my brain buzzed for days with Lethem's descriptions as I walked across Atlantic Ave or down Dean or Bergen Streets), Archie recommended I read a slim volume of essays, The Disappointment Artist. The first piece, Defending The Searchers, picks up a thread familiar to readers of Fortress of Solitude—the awkward, urban outsider acting arty at Bennington. In that first paragraph there's a line about wearing glasses. About the hows and whys of wearing glasses:

...I chose my heavy black-rimmed glasses, the ones I wore when I wanted to appear nerdishly remote and intense, as though to decorate my outer self with a confession of inner reality.

I'm particularly drawn to this quote because a few weeks ago I became a proud owner of my first pair of l.a. Eyeworks Fiction frames. They are big and chunky, bigger and chunkier than anything I wore in the eighties. And they are the color of raspberry sorbet, kinda striped in red and dark pink. I've been wearing them to events in the same way Lethem wears his Elvis Costellos: part fashion accessory, part defensive barrier. I wore them to the launch party in May for the second edition of Pin Up, where through them I oggled shirtless bartenders, but couldn't get an issue because Editor-at-Large Alex, aka Pierre-Alexandre de Looz, had ran out of comp copies. Thankfully, the vodka was still in supply. And to the much-blogged Postopolis, where I was spotted adjacent to Bldgblog's balabusta, Geoff Manaugh. Lots of verbage, but sadly, no free cocktails or hardhated hardbodies at Storefront.