In Knoxville, Tennessee, now (somewhat explaining my relative absence and lack of writing here). This is a rather remarkable town caught in its self-imposed loose grip of revitalization/gentrification. The result (other than the mining of its World's Fair past for incredibly awkward and bad image choices to go for anti-sex trafficking posters) is a blend foreign to me, of the smooth concrete of the overpass, chic semi-destructed lofts doing their damnedest to preserve the perfectly worn paint of bygone advertisements, the TVA projects in all their function-before-form accidental Constructivist tendencies, steep streets lofted over with a new road so that somewhere below lurks window views out onto the underground, and an inexplicably high number of tanning salons. When I get back, I'll assemble something like a set of thoughts accompanied by the photos I'm taking here. Until then, these bad snaps from my phone. Brick passageways in "the Marble City" (as Knoxville was called for its quarries of pick Tennessee marble) and some of the sharper graffito that I've seen in a while.
Along with this pseudo treatise on the aesthetics of rebuilding and legacies of post-Great Depression American "modernism," soon to come: a long celebration of Richard Lester's The Bed-Sitting Room, a long-delayed set of thoughts on boredom, theatricality, and protest (The Not Calling the Kettle Lack?), and part two of affective realism (on the 10th anniversary of Office Space).
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