|
|
|
8.31.09
1.42.00 - The Integral Uncanny
The stealthy psychopath. The ghost of prior inhabitants. Ghosts of psychopaths past. Dead things of indeterminate nature. Curiously comic cannibals and malnourished Japanese children.
The domestic uncanny is a trope so ubiquitous in horror narratives that if a scenario can be envisioned, it can almost certainly be found. The simple paranoia - You are home, and you are not alone - is, despite its relatively modern origins, classic. Without pretending any personal authority on the subject, the typology at work in the innumerable films with masked killers seems to belong to a larger fear: that the refuge that our homes serve might be fatally fallible - that our solid walls might be penetrable by alien elements, perhaps obvious or perhaps discreet.
The pleasure I take from cheap horror is equally cheap, ultimately inspiring nothing but momentary terror. I appreciate the formula, from time to time, but there's something overlooked, potential missed in this typical sort of engagement with ideas of Home and Other. It's not my favorite kind of horror.
"El Orfanato", by director Juan Antonia Bayona and produced by del Toro, has been noted for its unusual depth and quality. More than one aspect of the movie deserves praise, but it's the story's construction that has succeeded in haunting me long after the viewing. A significant change is enacted upon the nature of the uncanny in the film - it isn't alien.
"Orfanato" protagonist, Laura, has returned to her childhood home - a derelict orphanage she lived in with other children, situated on a remote, beautiful coast. She intends to reestablish the orphanage with her husband and adopted son, Simón. Simón, who is seriously ill, soon reports his new imaginary friends to his mother, who is amused - until the boy makes a new friend in the depths of a coastal cavern, Tomás, and begins to perform pranks that would be impossible unassisted. During the housewarming for the new orphanage Laura is viciously assaulted by an unknown boy, wearing the mask Simón drew on pictures of Tomás - and Laura finds her son has vanished.
It's the relationship between the present Laura and her childhood world that I find fascinating. Here be spoilers - The friends that Simón makes at the orphanage are the same children that Laura grew up with - except Tomás, who she can't recall at all. But he's not an invention - he was there as well, kept hidden by his mother, the children's supervisor, out of shame for his disfigured face. After Laura left, her friends discovered Tomás, taunted him, and stole his mask in the cavern - abandoning him to be drowned as the tide flooded the cave, too ashamed to leave uncovered. His mother, mad with grief, poisoned the children and concealed their deaths.
Tomás - the object of horror in the story - is not only the ultimate victim, but is also simply a part of Laura's childhood she never perceived, inhabiting rooms she didn't know of. He was always a part of her life there; he always had a place in the house, despite his marginalization. The implication is that the uncanny in "El Orfanato" is not an invasive Other - it is those parts of our homes that we have failed to recognize, or that we can't even suspect - especially as children.
This is a subtle horror with enormous power. The literary work I most readily associate it with is not even horror, proper - Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go", his story of a cloned population that serves only as organ donors to traditionally-conceived citizens. Like "Orfanato", the story associates childhood with a conception of the home that fails to comprehend its darker dimensions and deceptions. And the idea isn't extraordinarily rare - even the Simpsons has touched on it, in the episode featuring Bart's secret evil twin.
This is, ultimately, a far more realistic variety of the uncanny. The classic model leaves us with a useless question: "is your home really inviolate?" Of course it isn't, and we remain aware of this - just as we're aware that a celestial body could strike the earth at any moment and eradicate all life, powerless to prevent either. "El Orfanato" asks, instead: "what don't you know about your home?" And although we may never fully understand the spaces we identify as our homes, or uncover our (metaphoric) mistreated, deformed secret relations, I suspect the vast majority of us may find that we know less about our homes than we realize.
***A disclaimer: I believe I've used the uncanny here correctly, but I should probably read up on it further. Wiki doesn't seem to agree, so consensus might be against me. Freud on the uncanny:
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html
|
7.6.09
12.39.00 - wanted: explorers
*******************************************************************************************
SEEKING:
intrepid crew for a survey of improbable and dubious terrain. Selected landscapes include:
- The ISLE OF BLISS, called 'socotra' by some
- The LAND WITHOUT HORIZON, mistakenly termed the Bolivian Salt Lake to confuse the imaginative
- The EYE OF THE EARTH, or the Richat Structure
MISSION:
1. Partake of dessicated Psilocybian agarics;
2. Produce analytic / interpretive works in the form of drawings and sculpture; performance art also accepted;
3. Devise deeply critical basis for all of work produced, document, assemble, and publish in association with an institute of landscape architecture / The Bartlett.
Work will be conducted on a voluntary basis***. The management will not be liable for the outcome of encounters with celestial/chthonian/otherworldly intelligences and associated injuries/fatalities/augmentations.
***ADDENDUM: Taking the potential for lithium harvest from our second destination into account, perhaps certain...negotiable compensations might be devised. 'nature provides'.
it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests.
|
6.16.09
21.31.00 - Briefly
I'm excited by the news I found today that I might have a position with the architect in Vienna again this fall.
I've intended to go back since before school ended, but I'm pleased as punch it looks to work. Vienna, not unlike New Orleans, seems resilient where the recession is concerned; Hans Peter reports "economy is strong." Considering the number of talented classmates still looking for work, this may be considered a well-kept secret.
And I decided I want to continue, for a while, or until I can't, to keep with my pattern of four/five year inhabitations. Yeah, it's worked well for me, but beyond that argument, I just really don't know how to settle down, and New Orleans, my dear city, is infamous for being a possessive environment, ever enticing residents to stay a bit longer, just a while...
I need some time apart. I seem to have it.
This succeeds in making up for the [inexplicable] fact that I am currently trapped in suburban Texas.
|
6.1.09
17.15.00 - Pride
A furious trinity of supportive statements inaugurated 2009's LGBTQ pride month - Obama's press release, Clinton's missive to the State Dept., and, inexplicably, Dick Cheney's straightforward endorsement of (state-determined) gay marriage. Impressive, and weird; how is it that one of our ousted evil overlords came out as the most forceful of the three on equality...?
Too painful to contemplate. This heat discourages strenuous thought. It's summer in nola and we don't use a/c. No one in my house is wearing a shirt of any kind.
New Orleans is on my mind a lot lately; I'm trying to begin to say goodbye. One local form of community pride comes to mind after perusing Pam Spaulding's blog today. I like Pam for her insight into the intersection of race and gender identity/sexuality, informed by her personal experiences. In this post she discusses the recurrent issue of black homophobia, something I've been increasingly interested in. Looking over hate crime statistics alone, non-white glbtq folk are disproportionately victimized; they're at the front lines, really, and the established glbt community often couldn't seem to care less.
In New Orleans, though, an anomaly of black gay/trans pride is celebrating its 10th year. Sissy bounce is damn cool. I didn't really know anything about bounce as a rap movement before this semester, and you can't really find it outside the south, centered on nola: it's easiest to describe it as rap sped up to twice its tempo, without much in the way of lyrics, that gets everyone in the room dancing at ridiculous speeds. I attended the Sissy Sweetheard Ball on valentine's day a few months back, saw Katey Red and friends, and saw the most diverse crowd I've ever seen in One Eyed Jack's, almost all shaking ass like there was no tomorrow. A live bounce show can devastate you (I was wrecked).
Not everyone in the bounce scene, or the city, is comfortable with Katey Red and the sissy movement she kicked off, but her fanbase is pretty huge; she's a success. From an ancient (and obnoxious) NYT article:
Many people say that one reason Katey Red has succeeded where an openly homosexual gangsta rapper might not is because in the world of bounce, women tend to control the market.
''The guys come by because they want to see the girls bend over and shake their behinds,'' Katey Red said. ''And the girls come by just so they can shake their behinds. So as long as the girls are shaking, the boys are going to be buying. The boys will be in a car and passing a bunch of girls on the corner, and they'll be playing my song and the girls will turn toward them and bend over and start dancing.''
Imagine the guys and girls Katey mentions grinding to lyrics like these:
"Katey Red is a/dicksucker
Katey Red is a/dicksucker
I'm a ho, you know I'm a ho/Katey Red takes it in the bootyhole
I'm a ho, you know I'm a ho/Katey Red takes it in the bootyhole" ('Melpomene Block Party')
“You are too stupid/for calling us guys/you know you’ve tried it so stop telling them lies” ('Stupid', with Big Freedia)
You get the picture. Throw my Environmental Management professor, Dan Etheridge, into the image for good measure; he told me afterwards he's been a fan of Katey's since he first came to the city from Australia. A fanbase that spans from the 9th ward to Tulane faculty is almost as expansive a fanbase as I can imagine, locally.
Recriminatory and, not infrequently, racist remarks were thrown about all over the internet after Proposition 8 passed last fall, targeting black homophobia, but it's obvious that in just a few years sissy bounce has confronted bigotry on a local scale far more pronouncedly than any official queer organization I've heard of. I'm proud of Katey Red and all sissy bounce artists; they're outrageous and fearless activists taunting haters everywhere.
|
5.26.09
19.09.00 - Vastness Measured [i & ii]
Hey y'all. Back, with a passion. Like the new look?
I'm a student no more. There's a large roll of fine paper in my room that announces to no-one in particular that Culum Osborne has a Master of Architecture degree. I've supped and wined with parents dutifully, and thrown the requisite hedonistic spectacle at my house, and now, faced with herculean tasks like getting employed, I'm laying about the house in the New Orleans heat. Feels quite grand.
Projects don't end neatly as they're meant to, so I'm not entirely through with my thesis project, but it feels past. What a mess. As a vehicle for experiments in conveying certain ideas that I've had about nature and architecture, it was great, but the visual work was questionable and hard to follow. I'm looking forward to working with what I've learned and improving my technique(s). For the moment, though, I'm working at recording what has been done here, and elsewhere, and reflecting on new directions. I'm going to try to evade jargon and stay as clear as I can, so please take a look.
A young thesis is a slapdash thing. I entered with the vaguest of notions; it was the midst of the housing crash, so, for a few months, it seemed as though suburban development had been dealt a killing blow. What should have been a triumph for anyone that gave a shit about cities and the environment left me with reservations. Despite decades of advocacy from designers and environmentalists about the problems of suburban sprawl, it evidently took economic woes to pry America (and the westernized world) from the 1950s American Dream(house). Maddening.
The cynical temptation is to dismiss the situation as demonstrative of a basic sort of self-entitlement: "people want big houses and a big yard, whether or not they'll use most of it, and if that doesn't suit nature, nature can go fuck itself." This is true of most of America, but it's possible to ask why anyone's so set on the idea; it hasn't always been the preferred mode of dwelling. With the experience of a semester-long course called "Housing and the American Dream" on my transcript, I had some ideas; with more advice from courses like "Historical Ecology in Amazonia" and "The [History of the] Atlantic World", an explanation crystallized. I looked back to nature in America, and, in particular, wilderness.
[ii]
I love wilderness. Fiercely. As a child my father took care to show me what nature meant to him, and what it could mean for me. Ever since I've drawn a singular sort of rapture from exploring the wilds, in the north of Canada or afield. To leave behind all recognizable traces of humanity and immerse myself in the natural world, far from anyone else: it's a freedom that I frequently crave. The aesthetic term for it is the sublime: those moments when nature's immensity, its capacity to overwhelm and humble us, become apparent. The sublime landscape is larger than humanity, threatens to swallow civilization whole, and ultimately empowers the individual: confronted with an indifferent or adversarial environment, the individual is able to endure.
Wilderness, though, is 99% invented. This world is old; we can't separate ourselves from nature. The Amazon rainforest, one of our last reserves of expansive wilderness (and target of global environmental anxiety) has been inhabited for millennia, and probably between 10% and 25% of its actual top soil is demonstrably produced by humans. Colonists in America discovered wilderness by declaring its native inhabitants to be a part of nature, ignoring diverse political and social structures that didn't translate to European models. Glaciers atop mountains worldwide are laced with chemical traces from human industry and jet engines. It's only the perception of unexplored territories, with boundaries unknown and thus as good as boundless, that makes people react to wilderness.
The idea of wilderness we have today isn't that old; it was born after Columbus. It took a century after 1492 for much of Europe to realize that the Americas were neither the indies or any of the fabled isolarios drawn on maps (Paradise, Atlantis, Ultima); to recognize America as the entirely unpredicted landmass it was. And that was as far as Europe made it, by and large: once it was apparent that the civilizations that covered it were incapable of defending against gunfire, surviving plague, and, most fundamentally, of becoming European, they were erased from the picture; America became one immeasurable expanse of raw nature. Aged Western cultures in Europe that had just begun to recognize the remnants of wilderness that remained there, naming the experience the sublime, increasingly found nature in america to symbolize liberty - and claimed it for themselves. Thomas Jefferson promised a plot of land for every American to facilitate an individual connection with nature; Emerson and Thoreau depicted the landscape as the right and duty of all Americans to populate and make their own. In a few quick centuries pioneers had settled the country accordingly, and with the automobile Americans made urbanity obsolete, escaping the city into the countryside, quickly congested into suburbs. Areas of unclaimed land that particularly evoked the sublime were made into monuments, national parks, and reserves, open for all to experience as a perverse spectacle of micromanaged wildlife populations and tourist platforms.
My father doesn't have much time for global warming, like most Americans. He's happy to advise anyone concerned with emissions to spend some time in the wild and explain to him how humans could ever hurt something as large as nature. He's not alone. To varying extents, the majority of America believes that nature can't be exhausted or hurt. Ecologists demonstrating the fragility of an ecosystem might as well speak a different language. Consequently, perhaps, environmentalism has had to become commercial to succeed; 'sustainability' and 'green', fashionable ideas, have enjoyed success in beginning change, but ultimately their reliance on capitalism limits their ability to produce real changes in the ways that we live. Whether one drives a Ford pickup or a Toyota Prius, or whether one pumps A/C year-round or has attached so many solar panels to the roof that the city can't charge for electricity anymore, living away from the city requires wasteful commutes and inefficiently spreads us out, stripping animals and plants of their habitats. As Aldo Leopold said in the 60's, the only way to address looming ecological disaster is to actually challenge our relationship to nature, and how it impacts our lives.
Rendering: The Heartland Wilderness Zone, copyright Culum Osborne
In my thesis I decided that the sublime and ecological models of nature didn't have to be at war. My final project was for an ecological remediation project - a clean-up of an urban industrial landscape, and its transformation into a reserve that could become a wilderness.
(to be continued)
|
1.9.09
11.39.00 - Suggestions, anyone?
University is coming to an end. The academic situation is under control, more or less, assuming no disasters erupt. I'm feeling optimistic about finishing the thesis.
At the end of May, though, the future experiences a dramatic drop from 'scheduled' to 'barely considered'. The practical outcome would be to work through the summer in New Orleans, somewhere, while applying everywhere I've ever heard of for employment. This would be most helpful towards diminishing the $28,000 the government estimates I owe (and counting, through unsubsidized loans).
It's also not a plan that really satisfies me. Though I've been shrugging it off for (probably) far too long to get involved in any competitive program, I'd like some volunteer time before I settle down to design (hopefully) for the rest of my life. Argument against: It doesn't make any economic sense, and so it hurts the family. Argument for (beware, idealism): If I don't at least make an effort to contribute directly towards social or ecological reform before I enter the professional realm, I'm going to either be compelled to reject a few personal values or commit hypocrisy.
So, question: I'm extremely ignorant about the dynamics of volunteering, and I've only heard of the most established of organizations. Can anyone recommend a resource for the would-be volunteer beyond dubious picks like "volunteersolutions.org"? Do you know of any programs in particular that you believe need and deserve assistance? Does this sound like a stupid, self-indulgent idea? This is important to me, please give me feedback of any kind you can provide.
|
12.22.08
19.25.00 - What else is livejournal for
If not to vent in moments of social isolation?
http://uk.reuters.com/article/lifestyleMolt/idUKTRE4BL2FE20081222
Fuck the pope. Fuck his inability to feel compassion for every person, Catholic or secular, who will suffer from his bigotry, and who has suffered from identical bigotry throughout Catholic history.
And before the supposedly-divine asshole defends any right to "speak of human nature as man and woman, and ask that this order of creation be respected", I'd like to see any evidence that he has apologized, specifically, to the pink triangle inmates of the camps his one-time party tortured and murdered en masse with all the rest of those against his "human nature".
And finally, I'd like to issue a condemnation of anyone in his authority who makes this sort of hateful, devastating statement two days before the observation of the most globally-successful holiday ever produced, and produced directly from his organization. I perceive intention in the timing, and I perceive the absolute darkest of human capacities guiding that intention. This pope, in my eyes, is a monster.
|
11.29.08
11.52.00 - The right films never come
Kiki took me to see Synecdoche New York yesterday. I admit it was better than I had anticipated, but my anticipations were extremely low (it just looked so dreary in trailers), so I'm not sure that's much of a recommendation. It's enjoyable, and has a sense of humor to it I didn't expect, but despite a few very moving moments I'm not sure I got anything of any particular note out of it - and since it's intended to be cerebral rather than simply entertaining, that's a bit of a failure.
I really want to see Slumdog Millionaire. The idea and the trailer look so terribly vibrant; who wouldn't love to watch kids run rampant around the Mumbai shanty towns? The horrific violence that's just ending there makes the film a bit eerie, maybe, but also more interesting: after a week of gritty, brutal images of struggles in the street, it'll be good to see another side of the city, however exaggerated and unreal Hollywood may've made the portrayal. On an entirely different tack, I really, really, would like to see Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In), a Swedish dark love story between a bullied, vengeful boy of 12 and a girl who is almost certainly a vampire. Of course, the Slumdog Millionaire only comes to New Orleans immediately after I leave town, and Let the Right One In is nowhere near me (maybe if I visited Patrick Kattner?). Irritating.
At least Milk is doing me right. Beyond his political importance for any queer person (or anyone at all, really), Harvey Milk is important to me because when I was looking for some way to understand what exactly "gay" was, and why the damned Hawaii residents seemed so ornery about the topic, I turned to his story and wrote about him for a class. When I asked to use him for my paper on "political heroes" I had my teacher, who was really far better than I gave her credit for, cautiously ask me in person why I thought he was important, and I think my desperate outburst of a reply was probably one of the braver things I accomplished in school. Soon after I'd turned in the paper, she repeated, nearly verbatim (but with a great deal more dignity), the response I'd given to her to a few typical surfer types who'd been tossing around typical surfer homophobia in class. It was about four years until I'd figure out how personal the conflict was going to be for me, so at the time I just felt an activist's intoxication. I have high expectations about anything involving Mr. Milk, but everything I've heard from those who've seen the film has been wonderful. Canal Place opens it on my birthday, which is also a Friday, and the last day of exams and papers (well, for me). It might be my favourite present this year.
|
11.23.08
23.47.00 - Introducing the Chariot of the Gods
I have a new love and his name is macbook. Macbook Pro. Well, actually I named him Oneiros, but my geekdom just isn't as exciting as the reality in this instance...
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
The shell is almost one solid piece, the 'unibody.' You have to flip the thing upside down to find a seam. It's a fabulously unreal object. And as for OS X Leopard...well, slipping through Spaces and twisting one, two, three, and four fingers on my tracking keypad intoxicates in a most literal sense. He's also most pleasingly ecologically strategized.
I would like to thank Tulane again for giving me egregious amounts of financial aid. It's nice that you're being inexplicably generous after four years of chill indifference!
...
Final design review occurred a week past now. Although reactions to the building were not without substantial and fair criticism, the session itself was enormously productive, which might prove more useful in the long term. I'm trying to devote time left to strengthening my project's visual representation, trying to become more innovative in drawing techniques, and writing the research document itself. Or so it should be. In fact I'm simultaneously incredibly interested in my thesis writings...and unable to carry them through. So I blog.
While I'm distracted, though, I might as well link to a blog I've found interesting of late...I found it seeking a 1930s set of Moby-Dick illustrations (simple line ink affairs that I want to learn from and influence my drawings with), but I've returned for the attention paid to unusually interesting homoerotic art!
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/
(Just click "gay" from the tag cloud)
Right, I'm going to "write" now.
|
11.5.08
0.53.00 - Salamanders at High Carnival on the Surface of the Sun
It's impossible to avoid recording a personal response to the outcome of this latest round of the world's largest political carnival. No matter how inadequate it may be. Tonight saw the nation and more explode in absolute euphoria, unequalled in its intensity, unrivaled in its triumph over the endemic apathy we've known for so long. And it's a strange thing to experience, I can attest.
I feel myself overwhelmed with a fierce and unexpected and rather alarming pride in this country, pride in its impossibly overdue yet, amazingly, fairly won victory over so many of its most self-destructive qualities.
While I've heard of late many moan about the limited capacity of any president in just one term, I can only presume that they haven't paid very much attention for the past four years. I'm immediately less anxious about war with Iran, hostility with Russia, and further alienation from, and callous disregard for, the Islamic world. I don't expect Obama to effect very much reform directly, but I have faith in his capacity to inspire it by leading with diplomacy and vision, two things quite unknown for a very long time that will hopefully become more than mere novelty. Mostly, I feel incredible optimism; this is a marvellous first step away from a dark and torturous death march.
What a state politics has been in, that just one sign of progress, as momentous and phenomenal as it is, can intoxicate me and those I respect so.
|
10.8.08
10.01.00 - Seduced by hope
I do so like to hear Obama speak, when I do. Which isn't terribly frequently. He just has a habit of saying things I like ("[Putting Iran in the corner of the room and giving it quiet time probably won't make it feel sorry for what it's done]"), and better yet, orating.
Much reason to hope has been given to me personally of late! Tulane has paid me. Not just my workstudy wages, but paid ME to attend IT. The surplus of my aid package combined with my mother's monthly payments to give me some few thousand dollars! Some merriment occurred, since I was finally able to contribute the rent cheque for this month, and a new, more stable laptop (that does not shut down if its power adapter is brushed against by a stray wind) is hopefully coming, hopefully from Apple.
I have a film recommendation for any folks interested in ecology, art, and synthesis of the two: Rivers and Tides. Mssr. Andy Goldsworthy has achieved renown for the evocative visual and spatial works he produces in natural settings, using only non-manmade objects gleaned from the site. The film is long and deliberating, but clever, and the day after viewing it I found myself inundated with fresh design ideas. Seek out!
Another provocative film, less benevolent: The Triumph of the Will, an epic and gorgeous propaganda film starring a great deal of Adolf Hitler and his assorted dread ministry. Of course the film is laced with disturbing content, even if one discounts the naturally unsettling ambience a film about and by Nazis tends to generate, but at the same time it's absolutely fascinating, and the cinematography is staggering for the time. I wouldn't be surprised if it were the only video documentation of pre-Allied bombing Germany, as well, and the lost German vernacular architecture is strange to behold in a country so associated with contemporary design. Not a good date film, but good for those seeking a challenge.
Time now to demonstrate my ineptitude in AutoCAD for the second years again. Victor's class is rather a shambles, but I don't think it could have been avoided, either, with so many students with no background in CAD. If you have any quirky films to recommend, please tell me in a comment.
Current Music: Califone
|
10.4.08
11.35.00 - October Language
My favourite month is not as lovely here as in the lands of maple, but damn if it ain't grand to feel the swamp heat retreat.
I've been searching for a while for a costume I can wear throughout my schoolday...for a time I had settled on a tarted-up Chap, a british gent with a twirly mustache and tweed who, inexplicably, also featured lipstick and blush and perhaps nylon stockings rather than argyle socks. It's still a sorely tempting notion. But last night, watching Twin Peaks with my roommates (total addicts), the log spoke to me and I listened. The Log Lady. Hey, you can read about her on myspace!"
We'll see, though. Greg might make an even better Log Lady; he's already been mistaken for an old woman on one occasion!
And Thesis soldiers on, or maybe wanders, probably above Caspar David Friedrich's sea of fog. Reading Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime, The Conscience of the Eye: The Social Life and Design of Cities, Vidler's Warped Space, and a few publications on artists that seem to share concerns. The design project that we use this semester to experiment with ideas we're writing on is so far a small business, partially sunken into the landscape (obviously, the site is not New Orleans), which has large torus-shaped holes in it to let the basement flood when it rains. The floor down there is suspended over a layer of sand that the water rests on before filtering through to a cistern. I'm planning on having the stairs right in the middle of one of the voids. Radically reduced concept: the wilderness is everywhere: it's bigger than you: live with it.
Funny thing is, thesis really hasn't been half as much work as I expected yet. I've got two jobs and four classes every Tuesday and Thursday (and only the last is frivolous), but I get sleep every night! I'm left with the suspicion that I'm doing this all wrong. On the other hand, everyone in thesis is very aware of the impending end to our time together, and it does get folks down. No one seems prepared, consequently, to entirely sacrifice the decadent Southern life. And I don't think we have. I had a divine mojito last night at The Columns, and a week before that I fell through someone's garage roof and wound up with beer in my hair. Fortunately vines kept me from falling straight to the ground.
This city. I can't stay, but I don't want to be most anywhere else.
Apologies for the rambling. I'm off to assemble a bike out of scrap parts.
Current Location: 7619 Sycamore, Nola
Current Music: Andrew Bird
|
8.30.08
23.14.00 - Baton Rouge proving insufficient
Watching the weather channel is depressing. Gustav is a category 4 storm a day early! Now expected to be category 5 tomorrow! Striking Louisiana (almost certainly) as either a 4 or 5! Slamming New Orleans with the fiercer eastern face, including massive stormsurge! Boy oh boy.
The good news is that the city and state and even lousy ol' Bush have taken things seriously this time around - evacuation plans that work, contraflow schemes to get traffic moving at maximal speeds, hasty declarations of states of emergency in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. People will be clear of the city. Definitely for the best, looking at the spaghetti-noodle path projections overlayed on a screen, stabbing Louisiana straight down the middle.
Too bad Baton Rouge is also bound to be hit by a notably vicious storm immediately afterwards...tree limbs will fly.
Meanwhile we wait. And pass the time as best as Baton Rouge allows. I made sure Canada actually heard about the storm before it hits this time. Turns out I'm a lousy frisbee golfer, but skilled at retrieving lost discs from tall trees.
At least Gustav makes it easy to tune out this squawking about some Alaskan politician being used as a cheap ploy.
|
8.28.08
0.03.00 - Gustav is a threat to the sublime
But that's not what my thesis is intended to prove.
The abstract as I delivered it today (first day of classes) is behind the cut, forgive the imperfections:
I didn't get my first choice advisor, Coleman Coker, one of the founders of Rural Studio. It's a shame; his work seems to exemplify a desire to return a sense for the American landscape to the home, and I'm told he could help me with the phenomenology. I'm a weakling where philosophy is concerned. Still, I'm genuinely excited. I honestly believe in the topic, and it appears to me as the natural conclusion to the ideas I've been exploring through much of my time at Tulane. Furthermore, I'm not alone: many of my friends in thesis have produced hot ideas to pursue, and it's all progressing as seriously as an architecture student can manage. The accustomed pain will be all the sweeter for the freedom we've finally been given.
That will become the least of my concerns, of course, if Tropical Storm Gustav develops and moves as projected. He's slated, it seems, to strike Louisiana just east of New Orleans. Lousiana governor Jindal has declared a pre-storm state of emergency. Expectations at Tulane are that the university will announce an evacuation tomorrow or Friday, as prescribed by the 3-day-in-advance directive I'm informed they adhere to.
Let's be clear: New Orleanians will evacuate this time. Even if only 7,000 of 30,000 residents "requiring aid" have registered (with what entity, I can't say; I'm going by a tv news brief), this city has had its brutal awakening and those who do decide to stay, should the worst come to pass, will know exactly what awaits them. But that doesn't alter the fact that this storm will obliterate this city should it hit. And many will still die. And how many would rebuild a second time? Assuming they aren't still rebuilding, or homeless and destitute.
And then there's the personal impact. I've just moved into a fantastic house in a quiet, friendly neighborhood in this city, near to two of the famous cemeteries of New Orleans, community businesses nestled in streets undetected by outsiders of any kind...with two great friends, near many more, having just met as a complete class for the first time in over a year, excited, electrified even, set to pour our hearts into our theses. A strike could spell the end to the school I'd like to submit that thesis to. I've never had so much to lose should Tulane fall; none of us have.
Finally, don't suppose that I wish Gustav on others. I don't wish it anywhere. I've just become aware of the cost for this locality, acutely and painfully.
If we are moving out, I'll be accompanying Michael to his family's house in Baton Rouge, I think. It's too agonizing to get on that plane, get off in sunshine, and watch one's city fall through a plastic screen. Better to be around those that understand.
|
8.17.08
23.39.00 - Introducing, or
A capacity to endure tedium is sorely lacking in most people. I seem to be better than others. It's only occasionally beneficial.
It really assists at the studio desk. Constructing line after line, assembling a mental image into a specification; unlike a sketch, computer-aided drafting really doesn't take a mind. Click, drag, click, repeat - the drawing is realised. Refinement and presentation come in later, with the help of other thought-reducing programs; that would mean you, Adobe. Select a layer, change lineweights, abuse colours, reformat. Shazam, a finished product which required thought only when it existed as pure thought. PERHAPS the mindless quotient does allow you to perhaps faster catch errors hitherto undetected in design, but for the most part one is free to put one's thoughts on more important matters, such as: I like this band. My professor hates me. School food remains atrocious. That boy has a beautiful ass.
Still, problems do arise, as they are wont. There is a reason that professors insist that students scrawl concepts on pages, and it is not, however much faculty would like to suggest, because your frugal smatterings are unique and precious. It is because the intensity of thought required to calculate, position, and generate those quivering constructions vastly eclipses whatever planning you will eventually require for your finished drawings. Finished drawings may be easier now than ever, but their formula has never been hard: construction conventions + graphic design. A convincing sketch is a wondrous achievement, because its ability to encapsulate expansive meaning in ridiculously minimal work flabbergasts and awes.
How this frustrates those who have learned to take secret pleasure in work that requires bursts of thought interrupted by long stretches of monotony! No more boy-ogling for they. Gray cells grown sluggish and depraved are forced back into blistering synapse, relentlessly, until the world has been reduced to squiggly pen/cil-scratches. During my semester in Paris this passing summer I was ordered to produce sketch after sketch, and my brain did lament.
Even worse, I am now realising, is the act of writing: the real reason that I can't ever make a story take flight. Once basic and intermediate English skills are absorbed, the passable research paper is simply a matter of connecting conceptual point to conceptual point, with appropriate scatterings of flowers and a paranoid avoidance of the first-person. Crafting prose, though, lacks this wonderful skeleton that requires only to be clad in convincing language; the frightening importance of each line...! The terrible, infinite repetition of the creative process becomes a new, fatal sort of tedium, where the mind is enslaved with its task, unable to escape, lacking external vision unless a complete halt is ordered, flailing and breathless. My mind, not poor at the short burst, collapses and convulses and demands intense self-medication.
Still I write. Maybe Verdigris will one day go far enough to deserve that underscore. In several decades.
I'm Culum, by the way. Ephemerist extravagant and extraordinaire. Male, 21, likes long walks. Persistently and admittedly fairly accused of devoting attentions to other men. Given to "moods", suffering deficits in logic, recognisably malevolent in damningly red hair. Beloved by dachsunds and Neo. Condemned to commence a master's thesis in architecture in under two weeks. Glad to inflict further writings on any willing soul who will comment below!
I will stop being a loser and reformat this place very shortly, omg.
|
|
|