a deeply profound experience.

Will I remember? it's okay, I will, or I won't. here are some snippets, some guidelines, some markers that will anchor me to a moment in time, in varying detail.

crossing the river. can I do it? I can most certainly do it, I realize, with astonishing certainty. it is just a matter of how and where. I go across. my body is on fire. I am across. I am committed, I repeat to myself, and the crossing is exhilarating, wondrous.

On the way back my lower half falls in completely, shoes and socks soaked. now I am really committed. and one thing that I realize is that before I fall in, the distinction between falling into the river and staying out of it was distinct. once I'm in, it's all walkable. after I fall into the river, I can't fall into the river anymore. There's nowhere to fall into. I start walking, occasionally stepping on stones, occasionally stepping in the river. I start noticing: what a nice place to step into! let's put my foot into that water.

having fallen into the river, I am free. I am free to walk anywhere.

--

care for a sister, calling her in, letting her know that there is a pull, there is a love, that she matters, that there is someone out there looking out for her.

--

all of a sudden, a desire to check into others. so I embark on a journey, I pause a story, I start a needle and a thread and for the rest of the evening I will gather beads of conversations and stories that I weave into creating a precious necklace of encounters and stories and circles.

--

upstairs there is A and L. I offer them an invitation, the invitation to listen to a story, and I make it clear that I have given them an invitation and part of the invitation itself is to accept it and to happily be where they are. I think they understand. They receive my invitation and they stay where they are. this is part of it all.

I run into A and we think about whether we should check in with M. for a moment I offer A their own agency and I see eyes light up like bright fierce warm burning fire, clear and hot like stars.

--

inside it is a home, it is a room, it is childhood. childhood is warm and kind of scary. here we are, in the rooms of childhood. we enter. we come together. we hold each other in the room of childhood.

M and A and I. sitting together. M asks where to begin. somehow it comes to me: start at the center, and slowly circle out, making a spiral. (the initial movements can be small, and that's okay.) M begins, and shares. her stories are large and huge, and so familiar in their shape and timbre, and while my brain thinks I should feel something else, my heart feels relief and catharsis at the sound of a story releasing, of loosening, of it leaving the body and it being shared, of rivers and faucets of emotion slowly being unblocked, letting them run loose and healthy and undammed, rushing, flowing. the three of us, we, and I talk about family, and historical trauma, and parents passing things down, and our relationship to family and language, and about sex and bodies. somehow these conversations feel like they should be difficult but to me they are joyous. is that okay I wonder? my mind wonders? and my heart says it is. it's joyous to let ourselves feel sad and angry and to share it with others, to settle and accept our stories as they are, to let ourselves feel the feelings that we have wanted to feel, and to relax into who we are, not withholding our own emotions for ourselves.

others come in. T comes in with her watch, and I am somehow absolutely certain that the watch is a gift from her mother. my mind doesn't know but my heart knows, my heart knows because that's the kind of thing my mom might do. "here, I fixed your watch". we look at the moon. I change where I am sitting and everything is completely different. I offer M to sit in a different bed. and then we all leave the room.

downstairs M and I we talk with T about the watch. and about jewelry and about a gift given, returned, and lost, and family heirlooms, and the ways in which care and love and tradition can be formed and carried and gifted and worn. it's about gear, and sadness, and care, and remembrance, and what we wear and carry with us on our bodies. after the burglary, T says, after her mother's sorrow at losing a family gift and the redirected misdirected anger about a childhood gift returned, she started being interested in jewelry. I feel and I feel how much our relationships, our emotional energies shape us.

then there is a story, a gathering, a retelling of objects. we gather around to see who has shared what. friends gather: N and F and T and L and T. M shares her object. tina reads, and really reads, and brings it out, channels it. it is "attractive and sexy and foul", she says, and that resonates so hard I can feel it open a door for M, and we are here. M starts to share. I touch her, I am connected. She shares her story, but initially it is not her story, it is her friend's story. I feel that sometimes this is M's story; the story of holding anothers' story, and I tell her gently, that part of her story is the difficult of holding a story, of helping another while not being helped herself, of being unable to share a story, and she cries and cries and opens up and I feel and I hope this is good for her, we have friends in witness, friends in the circle, and I dance.

(T would later say that I was "dancing for M", and somehow I feel like that was right. my movement is of opening, of sharing. the night is deep. we are here, together, sharing our stories around fires and circles. I am here to dance for us. we are here gathering, sharing our stories. dancing together. holding each other around a fire during the night. dancing for each other. dancing for each other's sorrow and sadness and anger and hurt and pain, letting it flow and be free. these emotions are not bad emotions, they are emotions, they are good and healthy, they protect us, they shape us, they are part of us and how we work and we take care of them and they will take care of us, and one of the ways in which we do that is when we heal in public.)

and then. there is T and the story of gear. there is wandering around. there are other stories.

there is:

sitting outside with M. I open with: "let me tell you about my mother". and I share. or rather: I tell myself my stories, and M is witness. I share stories that I have forgotten. stories that I didn't like, stories of care and pain. here I am! how angry and sad I was! how fearful and lonely I was! how much it hurt, how much I hurt, and how in the midst of this all love is mixed in, morsels of anger and sadness and fear and in a soup of love. how I left the home. how I can call these things abuse because I believed they were abusive to me at the time.

I cry, and I cry, and I cry. It feels so good to cry. It feels so good to share these stories with myself. It feels so good to be witnessed. and part of it is: it feels good to see all my selves, my younger self, my current self, and to feel my older self growing, and seeing my mother. (if I am good enough, I say in a different conversation, I can save my mother from her own past, heal her, work it out with and for her.)

it turns out: to name these things and let my deep anger and fear and hurt flow is also to regain a sense of love, of care, of understanding. of love. love for my mother. love and understanding of where this all comes, of historical familial dynamics, of how we were hurt and were loved and how we pass on that hurt and love to others, of how we all participate in this grand practice of sharing who we are with others.

there is so much but I feel myself crying and leaking and certain boundaries between myself and the world loosening and I am spilling out, like a water finding shape on the ground, moving all out, and now the water of my body is going where it wants to go, finding the shape that it wants to find. the springs of my body, the spring of my soul are being plucked loose from a mechanism and being laid flat on a table, SPROOOoooooinggggggggg and coming to rest on a table, slowly uncurling, still some sort of shape, lying in rest without tension, finding themselves.

I am witness and being witness. I am grateful to M.

--

There are more stories, also important. There is a long one with M and A and M and myself, sitting on the ground talking about our families. M shares again. we talk more. it is good, solid, warm. emotional. important.

There is one where C asks me a question. I realize and realize that my care for others comes from a desire to care for myself. My energy to care for myself becomes immediately directed to a care for others. And so I call attention. I call forth attention, I talk about ways of caring and how my care for others is really also about my care for myself, and I call attention. I receive a little pushback. this is all right with the world, this is how it should be. a little microcosm of practice.

There is one with N where we talk about language. of the language of korean and english, but also the language of society, of social fluency. about dry glue stick, about opening and closing a window, a door. tears making a dry glue stick sticky.

There is a long one with F and M and I. I had called F a sister, or I her brother, and I see a flicker of amusement and startlement flash across her face. I want her to know that there is someone calling her in, that there is someone who wants to help. I want her to know that there is someone who wants to help and listen. she is on the other side of the riverbank. I am crossing not because I want to follow but because I too want to cross, and I want to form solidarity networks of those who are crossing, or have crossed. out stories are different but there is solidarity here. and so we talk about repression of emotion, of holding emotions in, of seeing one's shadow self, of veils and masks. I ask directly. I perhaps overstep, I over step.

In the process I learn. I learn about what I am doing. I am pushing into.

a convo with M about loving and leaving and family. how is it that I leave. building a family and leaving it. being scared to talk to those who are closest to me.

a convo with M and A about agency and facilitation and our collaboration. so important. so crucial. how to learn how to leave space for what is unexpected. how the collaboration between two people is not an average. how not to stop but to start a collaboration, to leave ends untied, to explore together. to be honest with the we. to be thoughtful about consent and power and care and permissions. I am sorry, I say, I am sorry A, I am sorry M I am grateful, M, I am grateful, A. Thank you, and thank you. opening spaces. to follow together. to see what happens.

a convo with M to close out the night in which we share our agencies fully. here I am. here you are. here is where I want to sleep. there is what I want to do. I see the sky lightening. I fall sleep. I wake up to the sounds of people wandering and cooking. C offers me a cup of coffee. do I want one? in honesty, I do. and I speak with A about a desert.

in the morning we gather. in the morning I open with a sharing. I say: that I am so glad to have shared, and to have heard, and to have witnessed stories, in circles. to be witness and to be witnessed. to share and have shared.

to a friend I specifically say: you have given me a gift, and I am so grateful for that gift. that gift is something like a kitchen object, or a fruit, and I could use it, could use it moments later, in my own relationship to openness and vulnerability as I share to my partner and cry rawly, openly, honestly. M has given me a gift and I am so grateful and thankful for that gift. how can I ever thank her? I wonder. I want her to know that her stories are gifts.

and then! a panoply of stories, rushing out. laughter and stories and recollections and rememberance. ideas and feelings and emotions and relationships and gratitude and thanks, shared over the table. suggestions and feelings and desires, pouring out. together we follow our conversation. together I am struck by the truth of how we can create circles for each other without a strong structure; how these circles are actually spirals, loops, curves, where the start does not meet the end, where we wander to new places we did not expect, and I am so surprised and grateful to my friends C and M and A and F from whom I have learned. and I name that. to name something is a gift. to name something and let it be, let it free, let it set.

and we clean, which is a joy. F asks me for help finding her bag. I am joyous, joyous, to be asked for help. I am here, on their team, helping. I ask L for the bag. the three of us look. L finds it. I am joyous to have been asked, to be helping, to be relied upon. later I asked F to help me. to rely and to be relied upon! what a joy, what a joy.

as we meditate, A starts us off. I recall. I remember. I cry in our silence, and we share a circle and a moment. here we are, all of us, getting older, getting younger, toward the future, on our trajectories, holding a moment. we hold a moment. to feel our recent pasts, so vivid and so bright.

I share. I invite us to imagine taking our precious items off of our shared table. and then I ask us to be slow in our drive. I know we have to get places, I say, I know there are things for us to do and places for us to be. but I say: we are already there. we are already at the place we are going. we are already here. we're already here. I'm here for all of it.

and then. the door opens, by itself. the house beckoning, saying, smiling: "you're done here. go on now, head out, the world is waiting for you."

--

we're already here, and I'm here for all of it.

all the things, in all the non-orders.

*

re-realizing something that you've always known must be a little bit like the snap of a rubber band, the growing distance between two points being the source of tension in of itself; at some point, the tension relieves itself. your fingers slip. material rubs against material, objects collapse. band returns to a stable state.

*

quick notes for myself:

1) the world is made out of the stack, navigated through by dense overlapping layers of technology, space, culture, politics, language. anthropology looks at everything; applied anthropology needs to wield anything. yelp makes you move. space orients you. words delight you. thoughts consume you. food contents you. warmth energizes you.

however; ux !== ui, and ui !== technology; like what c.s. lewis says, what something is made out and what something is is different; to paraphrase/modify that, what something is and what something does is different, and moreover, what something does and what something creates by what it does is different.

the network is the configuration of entanglements, 'what it is made of'. 'what it is' is the trembling you see when you tug on one of the cables. 'what it does' is the gestalt effect before your eyes when the cables are tugged in such-and-such a way, by whom, at what location.

all apps are social, all websites networked, all politics about power, all books about language. all koolaid is flavored, all water is hydrating. the question is always: in what way, and how, and what kind of statements can be made that are falsifiable, have enough at stake to be wrong?

what's clear is that the world, the stack, if we're to use bratton's language, is not clearly predictable. we have platforms, as-a-services, layers of abstraction, mechanisms of fulfillment. the world swirls faster, and to be honest, more excitingly. actions and designs come out of left field.

2) actions are created by skills. a skill is when one has a high probability to successfully navigate a domain of activity in which there is a complex yet stable defined distinction between failure and success.

domains of activity in which this distinction is blurry are usually interpretive modes, methods of understanding, narratives, etc.

skills allow you to launch things that you can understand with interpretive modes. critical engineering is about making things. accelerationism is about discussing things that could be made. critical engineering > accelerationism.

3) discussion is gloriously fun, but at some fundamental level, ultimately unfulfilling, like playing chess with yourself. in discussion, one can only be right, but never wrong.

being wrong is better than being right.

being proven wrong is fascinating, because in the error messages that you receive, it provides a whole bevy of responses that are unstable, unclear, and previously unknown. external ecologies provide a complex field in which unpredictable truths lie.

machine learning (for example, with artificial neural nets) is all about taking an abstract structure that can model any formula, and training it. training requires a training set upon which the model is pushed at, over and over again, until the model gets it right (validated via the test set).

corollary: 'getting it right' feels like pushing at things over and over again.

corollary 2: if you're not dealing with external ecologies (science, language, math, the natural world, politics, ecosystems, markets, etc) that are unpredictable, you're probably not learning.

Q: when you meditate, are you dealing with external ecologies?

Q: when you wander in a city, and wonder about your relationship to your itinerary, are you dealing with external ecologies?

4) when you sniff it, if it smells good to you, go follow it.

some sort of something. this is it. 26, going on 27. at some point during a glorious weekend full of friends and food and wine and brunches and frisbees and conversations, I momentarily leaned back, had a little glimpse of us all. look at P, working steadfast on this documentary for two years. H, pointedly and diligently working on residencies, applications. A and T, looking forward to graduate programs. C, having just come back from that film festival. C, having come back from that residency. L, M, R, S, A, etc. in the midst, juggling opportunities, options, desires. is this it? is this some pride at a shared diligence, a movement, a direction?

I feel the formation of a practice bubble up among activity, a practice not anchored by the legitimacy of a name but from elsewhere, that operates along lines of desire, enthusiasm, interest, tenacity, intensity, focusedness.

most of my questions to myself are about strategies vs. tactics; watching certain opportunities exist, to let some go, to take other ones. how does one operate? somehow I have found myself at a myriad of intersections. this project, that project, that project, this project. and somehow they don't stop. but this time I can feel the balance of my being, saying, slow down, focus. one has projects already. continue onto them. fulfill them fully. etc.

that's not what I quite meant to say. what I mean to say is somewhere inbetween the lines of all of these things:

= Marx's LTV. at some point, the history of all deliberate attempts at reformulation and modification (aka, design) is the history of the mobilization of labor. or less grandly put: everything is constituted out of labor, or averaged forms of labor, lathered onto objects, constituting objects. a primordial clay.
= And about those who aren't interested. aren't running. what of them? by creating a criterion of interest and desire I have negated and forgotten those who are content, or even worse, those who aren't exactly in a position to mobilize ones desires, because there may be other, stronger forces than 'desire' at play. for example: 'need'. or 'suffering'.
= I can feel an ecosystem of activity, a kind of barely decipherable, yet concretely tangible ecology at play here. networks, systems, chains, linkages. actors in a rhizome. does one participate? engage?
= the wise whisper at the back of my ear says - the only reason one plunges into arenas of participation is because one wanted to in the first place.

for the me in the future who will, even after having said this now, will doubt and reconsider, so I say this again now: there is nothing but a swirling network (rhizomatic entanglement?) of desires, interests, focusedness, friends, warmth, emotion, tempo, respiration, rejuvenation, activity, independence, collaboration. no other fertile soil. let's not mistake the mass of commodity/process/identity fetishes as something beyond what they are; let us recognize the potency of attractor points while understanding them also to be self-fulfilling prophecies; let us realize with gravity the influence of influence while also understanding that really, everything worthwhile has only arisen from a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens, to paraphrase margaret mead; let's understand the role of visibility and presence, and the way in which gazes can be terribly powerful forces, but let's also understand the way in which execution can be so central to the operation of a practice; let's consume both critical practice and celebratorily-tecnological execution together, not in a 'balance', but in the way that latour's quasi-objects proliferate to create true hybrids, and so understand the way that execution trumps concept, and criticality trumps non-critique, while also understanding that exuberance and energy enables execution, and criticality often engenders withdrawal and hesitation. let's hope that we can undergo twin cycles of praxis with critique. let's hope that building and thinking are never apart, but springing from a central realm, two sides of a transparent film slide, brief anchorings of an ecology of actors onto language; momentary modification of endless chains of repercussions onto the network of relations.

tl;dr: to move

so, the way it works is that the hot exhaust from the jet turbines blow across the body of the fuselage, directly crossing your view and making any single light source ripple by refraction that occurs due to a rapidly shifting, turbulent air density.

so, what you see is a series of shimmering grids sliding beneath you, burbling, roiling, busily modulating as you mentally squint while trying to make out that familiar shape of the city, that gestalt of each borough and especially that tapering of a peninsula, the bulge on the lower east side then the inward-moving shores and slips of the financial district, and what should be a long dark rectangle of the park above. that's what you know. but it's five am, the lights of the city aren't on yet, and everything you look at seems to be what you're looking for.

--

san francisco is gorgeous.

--

so?

what's left are just the facts, the kind that become clearer the further away you step back from them.

what is this -- the vestiges of a previous discipline plaguing me? I need to stop asking why, why why why why, because the meat of it is in the how, the flesh of the project, the solidity of a core, the nectar, in the how. but instead I'm looking at this like a paper, art-historical processes continuing in here; what's my thesis, and what is this part of the building saying, and why, and is it coherent, and consistent, and if not, why? why not?

instead the building needs to be more like a body, or a photograph, just cherished, something to be analyzed than being a process of analysis itself. I need to know this, and to divorce myself from the anxieties of a form-discovering processes bound on all edges by constraints, like gulliver pinned down by the lilliputians. it's a photograph, a body, to be perceived with a punctum, with the spark of desire, of celebratory experience-within-the-present. I keep on saying to myself: I don't have a building; I've got a million conceptual sketches. what does that even mean?

so I'll whip myself into a panic-induced fervor, and at some moment I'll figure out what I need to do, and then will ensue forty-eight hours of a sleepless burning desire, inside which I'll find a moment of grace; pure brennschluss, nothing but momentum and movement. and then I'll present, blink a little, then wander around grids of light downtown, pass by christmas trees, pretend that they're forests, listen to the noise of the city.

really, all I am learning is process, or meta-process, or how to go about how to go about things, how to curate my own steps. right now I am where I could have been three weeks ago, except I feel like I needed all that in the middle to get to this point where I like what I am doing, a necessary perambulation. frodo baggins returns to the shire at the end of his bildungsroman. to go there and come back; progress as less a narrative of linear movement and more of a spatial perambulation, go here and there, to wander around the terrain of your understanding, curve around points, be attracted towards spaces. or maybe you circumambulate, hover around key ideas, thoughts, and emotions you hold sacred, orbit around them slowly as if they are monstrous galactic bodies...

--

yesterday I crashed on my friend's couch. in front of his apartment building door we were stuck for ten minutes because the doorman had gone out for an errand. but we didn't know that then, and we knocked on the door repeatedly. finally, I googled the building number on my phone, found a number for the building on some website somewhere, and promptly called it --- and the phone on the other side of the glass door started to ring. what a wonder. requests sent skyward fly to a cell tower (probably somewhere in Jersey) connected via fiber optics/copper cables to a server farm somewhere probably in the midwestern us and are sent back to me, so that I can then call the cell tower again and connect to the pstn network and have the signal make its way down a series of copper cables routing underneath this building and up into an old-fashioned telephone so that it can oscillate with the peals of a wonderfully old-fashioned bell ring three feet away. an endless multiplicity of actions conspiring, colluding to make this happen. what a wonder.

-

I've been falling asleep in subways lately, more and more so, and it's becoming easier and easier. while sometimes I wake up to find that only five minutes have passed, the other day I slept from 72nd st to hoyt-schermerhorn, nearly half of a borough, almost an entire city having passed me by. what's that like? millions of events just missed, gone, snap, like that, hurtling by overhead while I had my eyes closed.

in some way I feel like I have a luxury, the luxury of being wonderfully at home with this city, like it's my city to fall asleep in, my city to ignore, my city to pass by, my city to take for granted.

-

I come home and there's a didgeridoo leaning against the kitchen table, and for that I'm grateful. I lit a miniature fire after a got home, a little half-heartedly, didn't really set it up, but I was okay with that, and so I just stood a little, watched some paper and small kindling burn, blew on some embers, watched it flare up for a moment, looked at brooklyn's hazy-dim yellow sky, and that was that.

-

head in the air, drifting elsewhere, thinking of lingering smiles.

cannot focus cannot focus. want to take the time to read this (http://a.aaaarg.org/text/2368/rationality-disagreement). want to think. want to feel all tingly with reading.

I would like to be reading right now and to talk about it and feel so razor thin sharp that brushing my fingers against the surface of a page would split it into pieces etc etc

thought walking by bookstore:

self-help books make more sense than self-help audiotapes because, with books, you are actively reading and attempting to parse language. The pages unitize/quantize progress: from cover to cover = start to finish. In reading and flipping, there is active engagement. 'Interacting' with audiotapes really consists of a passive listening. Reels indicate progress through the thickness of the tape left. You listen; time goes by; the reel thins imperceptibly, and before you know it, you're done, but nothing has changed, nothing has happened to you.

Really, all I want to do is to quote Zadie Smith:

"But the problem with readers, the idea we're given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, "I should sit here and I should be entertained." And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don't know, who they probably couldn't comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That's the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It's an old moral, but it's completely true."

-Zadie Smith

random thoughts:

ASCII: using a possible range of values 0 - 127 for language characters was arbitrary and American/Englo-centric. Where are all the diacritics? The non-Latin-based alphabets?

One thing I hate:

I wondered if architects ever complain about Janney’s whimsical interventions spoiling their pristine curtain walls and monochrome spaces with colored filters and birdcalls. “If they do, I never hear about it,” he says with a hoot.

That's from an article about Christopher Janney, who created the sound sculpture/toy on the 34th st. NQRW subway platform. I was looking him up because someone had made a post about Paul Matisse, Henri Matisse's grandson, and his Kendall Square (Boston) sound installation. I thought of Max Neuhaus's sound at Times Square, and the 34th-st subway platform, which is why I looked the guy up.

I'm not sure who Peter Hall is, but his article/interview has the kind of provincial, deliberate we-vs-them anti-intellectualism that I really hate. There's this almost irrational dislike for this author that I can feel blooming up; I was thinking about it the other day when I was walking on the street. I think my problem with the article and its ilk/cohorts isn't actually its dismissal of certain art on some basis of entertainment; you guys can have your stuffiness, and we'll have the fun. It's the uneasy dismissal of art that lies on the same plane as a usage of words like 'pretentiousness' to dismiss an attitude.

My tirade against the word 'pretentious' is that it's a hodgepodge of disparate meanings that's essentially used as an ad hominem attack. Somewhere in the word are the meanings of 1) pomposity/arrogance, and 2) show-offery and boastfulness, but the rest of the word is basically an uncomfortable dismissal of intellectualism. This is a message I sent to a friend a while back about 'pretentious':

"The thing is, those definitions all depend on the receiver of pretension, the person who determines that some phrase or message is excessive, affected, or ambitious. Spoken between the right people, the same words are genuine and true, right?

I still think that when it applies (aka, it's not snobbery or show-offery), the word 'pretentiousness' is used to demean a sophistication of thought and intelligence and its corresponding enthusiasm. It's ad hominem, in a way, maybe -- attacking the complexity of the argument, not the argument itself.

I mean -- I can't think of an example in which A and B are talking; B is enthusiastic, genuine, is not showing off, talks about something esoteric, A understands -- and yet A thinks B is pretentious. I also can't think of an example in which the phrase "that's pretentious" wouldn't be used as an attack of some sort to deliberately demean. I guess I feel like the 'pretentiousness=bad' feeling is part of a mindset in which there's a general un-cool to be had with being educated, or there's a stylized acceptance of scientific ignorance by humanities people, and vice versa... And it bothers me that these things would continue into college/university level education."

That's exactly it - a stylized ignorance. It happens both ways; I was at Dorkbot NYC the other month, where someone had made an energy generating/dispersing shoe as a playful interpretation of the Situationist Dérive and the Drunkard's Walk together. Someone in the audience asked a question about whether they took energy efficiency into account, and the creators honestly replied, "we're not engineers, so we don't know how to do that" -- to which a few people clapped, presumably celebrating this 'not engineers' thing. I mean, what the fuck? This was at 'Dorkbot' in New York, with a motto of "people doing strange things with electricity" - the last place I'd expect this anti-intellectuality. (Dorkbot in of itself is a wonderful idea and I should go more often; it was the few people in the crowd, not the event itself.)

And then there's the vocabulary of that portion of the article: complained, spolied, their pristine walls, hoot. Oh, those complaining architects! I guess my gripe with this review by Peter Hall is that it's a stylized ignorance of architecture behind it, and so a general rejection of intellectualism over fun/entertainment in a way.

I guess I really just didn't like the article.

Two street art shows in December! The first is at Jonathan LeVine Gallery, where there was a Shephard Fairey exhibit this summer. That was right after the Splasher buzz, which I guess helped bring street art to a more mainstream, art-gallery level -- which is of course the entire issue around the Splasher and the art-gallery-commercialization of street art. At Jonathan LeVine will be Blek Le Rat and Dface, who were at 11 Spring Street, which I braved a 3-hour line to get into on a Sunday. The famous Space Invaders will be there, too.

The second show is about Banksy! No explanations needed, really. He's part of the Santa's Ghetto show in Bethlehem, going on right now, which looks excellent and also manages to dodge whatever psuedo-politics it could have conjured up: "It’s obviously not the job of a loose collection of idiot doodlers to tell you what’s right or wrong about this situation [in the Middle East], so you’re advised to do further reading yourself."

Adrian Tomine! This is show for the poignant Shortcomings, which was reviewed by none other than Junot Diaz.

Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries has its first solo show at the new New Museum! YHCHI is awesome; one of the better-known and better net artists out there now. Her/its most famous piece is probably CUNNILINGUS IN NORTH KOREA. It's/She's an ideal artist to have a solo show at the New Museum, if they're trying to set a precedent for presenting contemporary art.

Anthony Gormley - Blind Light

I should remind myself what art I went to look at more often, as an archive of sorts.

mortality? absence of existence sometimes encapsulates itself into single objects: poison, bullet. not quite for the other case, the opposite of absence of existence.

something I need to think and write about but haven't gotten around yet:

fear dot com versus untraceable - how 6 years of the internet shifted public awareness of websites from tools to infrastructure, towards web 2.0. Two movies: Fear Dot Com, in 2002: if you enter the site, you die; Untraceable, in 2008: The more visitors who access a site, the more quickly a person dies; visitors as implicit murders, having an effect due to 'amount' alone.

In short, these two movies show a general public awareness that visitors to a website become a multitude, rather than a one-to-one relationship in which a website accessor is simply a user of the website. (case in point: no difference between 'The Ring' (videotape), 'Phone' (cell phone), Fear Dot Com, and a haunted house film: you/your party enters a location, you are privy to the dangers of the situation, you die.)

the social internet is an architectural public place owned by a private entity (greeting/meeting place, spots of meeting spots directed and channeled by the navigational/architectural structure of location). (find article about the problems concerning privately owned public space.) new media art piece physicalization: http://www.coin-operated.com/projects/alertinginfrastructure, although it is to some degree a visceral but archaic representation of a new medium.

shivers down my spine listening to summer music:

asobi seksu, STAR, broken social scene, mazzy star, the futureheads, yo la tengo, clap your hands say yeah, m83, new order, feist, et cetera.

I say this because it's nice to know the shape of wordswith connotation, marionetted ideas hanging as delicacies, yeah, whatever. an underground flight, hands held swerved left, right, waiting for movement, doors open, larger shapes of metal, the train taken to coney island, far rockaway, the smell of rice? cooking or a $3.75 sandwich with a can of soda and YES what I think is the taste of bottomlessness and looming helplessness, solitude, a vertigo of having my feet swept out from underneath me, temporary havens identified as the self briefly blinked on and shitted in, passed by, up and down streets in unmarked livery cabs. underworldian pomo sorrow nostalgia warmth sepia-tone steeped in everywhere. whatever. time to sleep.

It makes me smile to know that there's preciousness here and viewable, in its fullest extent. the importantly sad things like poor misconnections left off, little static sparks at the edges of fingers sliding off a handshake, saying goodbye, a brief pause at the top of a set of subway stairs watching a retreating black silhouette turn, then a check to whisper an inaudible goodbye, a self whisked out and up and back where it is the correct time now to go back to longing for the rooms up high and lit, pleasantly unfamiliar, to ground level with streetstepstrewn trash here and there, growingly winter chill becoming punctuation and punctuative thoughts walking along new york's now-placid broad-backbone.

Oh miz 11913 still says it best; at this movement point here on a december night, barely recognizeable by the building-toothed horizon's haze as a december day, I'm sitting thinking about regrets, nights past, excited actions, clear vectors dragging towards a future, direction, pointedness, directness. Now I'm a splayed weak-nosed compass pointing towards a magnetic nostalgia, forgetting true north. What does delillo have to say about this?

A girl taught me how to not underline books; instead I fold the corners over like I'm making mandu (against italicization-exoticization) or dumplings, knowing that if I don't find the justification for a page-fold that I'm looking for, it's not notable anyways, the idea being that the impressionable needs no bibliography. So I try it out; there's last summer's Delillo on my shelf and I scrape it out and down, flip through, there's a fold, here's a paragraph and my jumping heart:

"It was so humid some nights you could not close your door. You had to shoulder your door closed. Bridges expanded and sidewalks cracked and there was garbage in the streets and you had to sort of talk to your door before it would close for you.

She loved the nights that were electrical, a static in the air and lightning in soft pulses, in great shapeless beats, you can almost read the rhythmic pattern, slow and protoplasmal, and maybe Cinzano awning fixed to a table on a higher terrace – you can’t identify that gunshot sound until you spot the striped awning, edges snapping in the breeze.

Klara was happy in a guarded way, keeping it folded close. She had a sense of being favored, fairly well-regarded for recent work, feeling good again after a spell of back pain and insomnia, clear-minded after a brief depression, saving money after a spending spree, getting out and seeing friends and standing at parapets, quietly happy, looking better than she had in years – they all said so.

...

She stood at parapets and wondered who had worked the stones, shaped these details of the suavest nuance, chevrons and rosettes, urns on balustrades, the classical swags of fruit, the scroll brackets supporting a balcony, and she thought they must have been immigrants, Italian stone carvers probably, unremembered, artists anonymous of the early century, buried in the sky."

right, right. Am I not grateful? For music, for literature, for this current state. I'm rushing rushing to get things done, to keep myself aloft and afloat, doing this, rushing through. Sliding in. There are some things more important than work and some things less so, some things more temporary than the rising sun, new days. I pull the blinds up and I find red lights in the distance and suddenly I am glad for whatever civil engineering standard that holds red to be the color of brake and skyscraper warning lights, Korea and US and hopefully the rest of the world, the solidarity of shared connotation manifesting itself across national borders, sodium yellow lights providing similar recollections. right. am I not grateful?