words.provolot.com

Moving from place to place sometimes I realize how necessary this all is. Brainwashed to love airports I feel alive running my fingers along the shape of power plugs and the abstract but very concretely abstract shifts in architecture that characterize something more emergent and meta than culture: metaculture, arche-culture, curators of culture and style. 'Culture' and 'style' minus connotations of vertical hierarchy and qualification: 文化, maybe. People flowing. The oft-quoted Benjamin quote from his oft-quoted article channelling Krakauer:

Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered grauually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.

And so sifting my feet through change and movement I realize I like this, I really do. Standing in the subway I realized I couldn't read or listen to music lest I miss out on boredom, on this specific strain of boredom sprouting out from the organization of katakana hiragana kanji on paper.

1) Vertical or horizontal reading? it strikes me that there might be a sort of air resistance coefficient applied to typography, kinda, except instead of air resistance it's the arche-writing presence of black text on a white page, and the gaze of the eye as it starts scanning downwards, or from left to right. I imagine these three-dimensional, voluminous blocks of text approaching as if on conveyer belts, perspective distorting them into trapezoidal shapes, bulbous dorsal serifs appearing out of the white. I vaguely remember a quote by Haruki Murakami, something about the stern of a ship appearing out of a fog. Something like that. Against illegibility which areas resist first, most easily? This sort of air resistance.

2) one other thing that strikes me is the writing-like, script-like splash of patterns on these tokyo streets. zebra crossings intersecting, slightly off of each other. some panels of red marking broad swaths of asphalt. seen from the side, they too seem like they were thrown at high speed, scrawled marks lying against the ground not too repetitive and regular to seem overly logical but with uncertainly determined angles arbitrary-seeming enough that I start to try to read for an intelligence behind all of this. who wrote this? what is this city saying?

more on this later. (having said 'more on this later' I probably will not come back to this having generated some sense of finitude. I've already burst this balloon growing in my mouth.)