The frozen sea, the city

“One day you will live in cities that resemble petrified oceans!”


The gap between this dream of frozen form and the accompanying future of unfrozen, non-gridded movement and passages. To what degree does the thought of moving fluidly through the city require that the city look like the ocean? But the petrification of the ocean means that any movement is just surface skating: fish out, and on top, of halted water, and beneath them, the dense, still, immense weight of a dead sea.

Des Moines (Gentrification, foetus, gas station)

First reflections on Des Moines (here visiting my sister before we all pack up and drive across the plains eastward to Maine) and its mess of near-contradictions:

White dry cold, and Tony Smith black steel rectangles in the laser trip-wire guarded sculpture gardens. Spacious streets, and boutique dog stores selling eerily fetish gear-esque hot pink spandex harnesses for tiny dogs. Insistent pro-life billboards. Those massive copper colored glass and poured concrete blocks of insurance modernism.

And fighting the good fight against the winter, the irrepressible libidinal undercurrent of the Midwest finds its never-to-be-spoken name in two gas station chains: GIT 'N GO and KUM 'N GO.

Splashdown

Back from LA, where I made the requisite pilgrimage to the Bonaventure for some disorientation. A video I made of the elevator descent to share a sense of the deep weirdness of the place that quite exceeds its infamous descriptions. Here manifested in the elevator descent which is an odd bastard combination of the Barbican and Splash Mountain, if that combination can include the sudden transition from mirrored distortion to an interior that includes concrete pod outcroppings with individual exercise machines and a surprising number of vacancies.

Report non-humans

Down in LA for the week, after giving my Contra Mundum talk on Sunday. (Thanks to all who came and thanks to Mark, Alex, and the Mandrake having me down here.) Car-less in Westwood and trying to not be overly bilious at this organization of space, bodies, and lots and lots of capital.

I'll try to write something proper on return, analogous to an older post on Knoxville. In this case, when I travel somewhere and feel spatially ill at ease and find myself becoming, perhaps unfairly, a stereotypical hater of an LA ethos that I don't remotely know. In the meantime...

This image, unfortunately shit quality from my phone, and the horror of viral marketing snarkiness. In an era of city planning in which benches are rendered nearly unusable f0r any and all due to "anti-homeless" devices (various partitions, dividers, odd sweeping plastic contours, all designed to make sure that you sit upright and for god's sake don't sleep or slump, with the added effect of making public displays of bench affection quite difficult, something like the hysteria of anti-skateboarding measures, the "skate stoppers" that make it so handrails can't be used by those who might actually need them because of a worry that someone might "misuse" it), a jokey advertising campaign (seen here on just such a molded bench) for District 9 saying what it all really means and has meant from the start. And a man designated by the city for all intents and purposes as non-human, somehow interpellated in the worst way, sleeping next to the bench. The corrosive effects of supposed political critique on a landscape already scrubbed clean and stuccoed to hell.

Gleam and doom

Emi took this photo in the building near Shinjuku where she's staying right now. As she wrote me:

The attached photo is of the hallway outside my room, but the entire building is this weird, white, immaculate place. You actually have to take your shoes off at the front entrance, put them in a special white box with your number on it, and then don weird navy blue flannel slippers that are far too big, before padding over to the blindingly white elevator.

When alienation doesn't bother hiding itself in a fuzzy cloak of Ikea shag faux-modernism and the free un-choices of contemporary mass politics, it's rather refreshing.

Oh, you think modern life is alienating and atomistic? Leave your shoes at the door, and I'll really show you the cold sterility of non-communal managed living...

(Of course, I'll take this over the fake eccentricity of new vintage anyday. Scuff marks should be made, not bought.)

Une fois que c'est fini...

Murphy of entschwindent und vergeht offered this great post on "cackitecture," cock-and-ball-oriented architectural design, particularly in retrofitting of older buildings (if by retrofitting we mean addition of a lumbering phallic presence obscuring the sky for those in the original space).

Aside from my general puerile view of the world, I find an odd crossover here with an "indie" computer game of sorts I've been playing, called World of Goo, which basically consists of civil engineering tasks (insofar as that includes building tenuous, drooping suspension bridges between grinding gears) but with elastic, quivering goo. Rather fascinating, as it is essentially an architectual play game, albeit one that rewards "function" over "form." But most notably here is its tendency to produce structures - in the attempt to reach points high above or simply the temptation to build implausibly large towers - that quickly resemble initially-proud-and-precarious cockitecture, until the unsteady sway leads it to tip, devolving into cackitecture's leaning shape and ultimately, falling to the ground in a grand de-detumescence collapse of broken temporary goo bonds. Case in point: an image of a tower at its tipping point moment of decline, although this isn't a very indicative example of how high and evanescent the goo-spires can get.


As I play, I am reminded again and again of Lacan's late thinking (in L'envers) on the fragility of phallic law and the gap between the phallic function/symbolic phallus (ф) and the real penis (Π), based as it is on an idealized model of a promise of stability, hardness, and permanence, a model undercut by a certain anatomical reality that rarely matches its supposed position as the guarantor of authoritative meaning-making. As he puts it, une fois que c'est fini, c'est fini. In short, phallic law is always the promise of the coming-to-be or the soon-to-return of its phantom of obscene unchanging durability.

In a somewhat different register, this has led me back to the inevitable image, which I'll let stand on its own, so to speak.