tragic v. comic

It turns out the answer to my question "Laurie Olin vs. Dave Hickey: What Makes Them Different and What Does It Mean" is in a Hickey essay called "The Delicacy of Rock and Roll" (which is also the first essay of his that I ever read, the one made me go searching for more). It's about two short films he saw in grad school; one by Stan Brakhage ("that might be characterized thematically as 'very nervous' and sort of about 'film itself' [with] a great deal of panning, swooping, jiggling,dipping and zooming"), the other Andy Warhol's Haircut No 3, a film that is nothing but a very close shot of a man's hair being cut, for a long time, and finally, the man lighting a cigarette.

"Brakhage's practice...was essentially tragic. His films strove toward a condition of freedom and autonomy, fully aware that the work itself, for all its abstract materiality, could never free itself from cultural expectations. Nor could the artist, for all the aleatory and improvisatory privileges he granted himself, free his practice from the traditions of picture-making...Brakhage told us what we already knew as children of the Cold War, that no matter how hard we tried, we could not be free. Warhol's film, on the other hand, told us what we needed to know, that, no matter how hard we tried, we could not be ordered--that insofar as we were tiny, raggedy, damaged and disorganized human beings, we probably were free, in some small degree, whether we liked it or not...Warhol's self-inhibiting strategies liberated him as an artist and liberated his beholders, as well, into an essentially comic universe."

Tragic vs. comic. Olin: with his visceral understanding of how his predecessors, English designers in the 18th century, brought to bear all their skills and knowledge to create some small plot of beauty and order against the passage of time, decay, ruin, death, etc. And Hickey: with his faith in rock and roll (the Stones again!) as a metaphor for democracy and in popular/commercial culture in general as the source for all truly pleasureable/meaningful high art, who never really mentions the passage of time, decay, ruin, death, etc. at all, but is very interested in democracy--how people are living, talking to each other, getting by.

I was thinking of tragic vs. comic in relation to the Warner Herzog movie I saw tonight, Fitzcarraldo (at the Brattle, which continues its fundraising in hopes of staying open). Herzog flirts with Issues (the echoes of colonialism and the Heart of Darkness, the power dynamic in cross-cultural encounters, the exploitation of indigenous people by outsiders--anthopologists, filmmakers, or otherwise) but in the end the movie is pure fantasy, skipping by tragedy to stage operas on steamships. I'm not sure I've ever seen a movie that asks for such suspension of disbelief. At one point, our projectionist actually showed a 10-minute scene out of sequence, a full hour before it was supposed to appear. No one noticed until we saw the same scene the second time, in its proper place; the first time around, it had seemed like just another disjointed, fantastic lurch forward in an essentially comic universe.

the shift

"One day near the end of my first summer in Britain, while visiting Magdalen College, Oxford, the cumulative experience of recent walks, sights, senses, and ideas, the layering of efforts and disciplines that have made the landscape of southern Britain, became overwhelming. Many thousands of people before me have passed through this college and its environs and have been moved by its tranquil cloister, commenting on the charm of the river and bridge, the shady waterside path known as Addison's walk, and the harmony between Sir Christopher Wren's classical building and the earlier Gothic arcades and tower. On this particular occasion I happened to find myself at a corner of its little park beside the Wren building. It was a beautiful warm afternoon, and a small herd of fallow deer was browsing near the railing, their mottled tawny backs moving in and out of shadows cast by centuries-old oaks. It was calm and quiet. Birds chattered and cooed somewhere above. A bell chimed the hour. I studied Wren's graceful facade, the tall window frames and buttery-gray stone of the wall, their cornices, the central arcade, and the vines growing upon it. I turned and found the massive hulk of an ancient tree. Beneath it was a plaque. The text expalined that this plant had been opne of the first London plane trees to be grown in the seventeenth century in the botanical garden across the road from the college. They had been started from cuttings brought from the very first such plant in London, where specimens of Oriental planes and American sycamores had accidentally (naturally?) cross-pollinated in the nursery of a leading horticultralist who had been actively importing plants from around the world.

The tree and Wren's building were the same age. I thought about the effort and vision of the people who created this ensemble, the optimism and care with which they had attempted to combine the latest science of their day, in this case botany, and the exploration of distant continents with the accident that had produced this hybrid, which has been such a blessing for the great cities of the world ever since, and of architecture and planning--in this case Wren's use of the very latest and modern architectural style and technology to produce a bold and handsome building, one that holds its own with the equally strong (and contemporary in their own day) late Gothic buildings it faces, forming a court without rejecting them--and of the deer, themselves a remnant of medieval landholdings and hunting priveleges, not to say culinary habits. The trees, the animals, the buildings, the steady and serious scholarship inside, the light-hearted recreation on the river outside, together presented a clear attempt by the men of the seventeenth century who created this ensemble to produce a harmonious world through the combination of art and science, nature and culture. It isn't Utopia, but it is humane in the deepest sense of the world. Also it is beautiful. As I finished reading the plaque the intelligence and combined efforts that produced this ensemble struck me, and I burst into tears."
--Laurie Olin, Across the Open Field: Essays Drawn From English Landscapes

I am putting together a chart comparing the passions and dislikes of landscape architect Laurie Olin and Dave Hickey--born only a year apart (1939 and 1940, respectively), both successful practioners and critics of what falls in the broad categories of art and design, and both with such different, highly developed sensibilities and polar-opposite reactions to: the 1960s, French theory, popular culture. I can't imagine the young Dave Hickey bursting into tears for anything. Between Olin and Hickey lies the shift to postmodernism in American sensibility; I'm just not sure that I can tease it out.

On a similar note, I wish that someone had come up with the idea, in the 1980s when it was still relevent, to put Mary Gaitskill and Camille Paglia in a room together to chat.

marriages

I'm very suggestible. That latest pose or attitude you're seeing is probably the result of some book I was just reading. Or some movie. And who better to influence your life for the night than Dave Hickey?

"My idea of embarking upon graduate studies was to go some place where the smart people are. Unfortunately, the smart people are no longer in universities, the smart people are writing for The Simpsons, the smart people are writing for LL Cool J. There are exceptions, and that's an exaggeration, but most of all academic culture is just one big handicap, and I live in it with colleagues that I respect, but it ain't where the thoughts are thought. I kind of like teaching—I mean, I enjoy working with artists. But what I do with graduate students now, is exactly what I did with the artists I represented when I was a dealer. I go to their studios, we sit around and talk about the work with the idea of how can we get this shit looking like something. That's it. I like being around people who work. All of my social talk is with people who have done something between the time I talked to them last, and the time I talk to them now. University people really don't do very much, so you have to talk about pets. I am mostly interested in people who are doing things and are busy. I get along with them...

But I am really interested in people who make it up as they go along and there are still some out there. Regardless of what my colleagues say, you have in this place, still, a lot more options, and a lot more freedom than I see in other places. You can really do some weird shit. You can always leave town as well; go to the edge and declare that the center. You can always leave town and start again and then start 'againagain.' It is possible in good times to live on the margin. Like in the '60s and '70s, there was enough money floating around to get by. I have no idea how I supported myself between '68-'78. This kind of money and fluidity is coming around again, so there is enough money that there is a margin that you can survive on. And that privileges improvisation. I think it is going to get better."

I know: it's not perfect. LL Cool J? Plus he admits he's been saying practically the same thing for decades now, and that includes rhapsodizing about the Rolling Stones. And I know, that excerpt is from an interview conducted however many years ago and Dave Hickey is not actually appearing in my life just now (on the virtual eve of 2nd semester) as an omen about my graduate studies. But still. There's a line from his essay "Dealing" (in Air Guitar) about completing his grad school thesis and the prospect of life in academia: "Even then I prided myself in being a gambler, but this was a bad bet. You don't send good money after bad, ever." Three year Master of Landscape Architecture program? Mostly I love it, but big picture, it's a calculated bet, weighed against what was happening in my life Spring/Summer `05.

Last spring, while I was deciding what program to attend, I went to a conference organized around the MOMA exhibit Groundswell. The last item of the day was a panel discussion with some of the leading practioners, people in the show whose work I admire (listening to Jim Corner describe Fresh Kills or the High Line is genuinely moving). At one point, they were talking about landscape architecture's relative obscurity and Michel Desvigne, in his thick French accent, reminded everyone that 90% of new development gets built without any design consultation. Then he went around the table pointing at each speaker, beginning with himself, saying: "I'm nobody...you are nobody...you are nobody...you are a little more than nobody...only a little."

I tell that story a lot. It's the masochism of being in a marginal profession, even as I continue to find out-of-the-way corners of Au Bon Pain so I can sketch the traffic triangle outside the window for a while--the hopeful, daily practice of drawing--knowing that all the monk-like daily practice doesn't add up to much of a life. That's school. So with my unused birthday wish, I wish for myself that I can recognize those things in Hickey's exaggerated portrayal of academia that are true and avoid them; and that I can remember enough of his ideal of making a living (improvising "in advocacy of your particular marriage of desire and esteem") to do just that.

Here's where you can find the best ever definition of an ideal marriage (it's in the last paragraph).

Strange mix today of faking the testosterone (shopping for construction materials at Home Depot and building my bench) and not (my first ever voice lesson, with crazy genius Diane). You know how when you first meet the crazy genius you have to sacrifice some of your dignity (think Ralph Macchio in Karate Kid, or those early, insanely grueling workouts with the new coach in feel-good team sports movies)? That's me with Diane.

Diane: Can you see the vibration? Can you touch the vibration?
Me: (bewildered silence)
Diane: No, you can't. OK, good!

It's not all blogable, unfortunately.

forged in the darkest recesses...of imagination

A couple of posts back I mentioned that Public Space Project is helping to install a temporary exhibit in the lobby of our building. For the last 4-5 days, we've been scavanging junk. Last Friday, just a stone's throw from Outflow #70, we visited the Big Dig salvage yard, tucked away beneath a continuous ceiling of highway overpasses. (Big Dig trivia: all of the temporary on- and off- ramps we're using while Boston's downtown highways are put underground are built on styrofoam--you can see it in the pic below where the cement has worn away.) Tomorrow and Thursday we'll be building benches out of paper towel rolls, old street signs, financial ledgers, and other recycled materials. Either Thursday or next Monday (grand opening) I'll post pictures of construction and the final installation. In the meantime, Justin forwarded me this great guerilla-park construction project in San Francisco.

Finally, many overdue thanks to Switzerland. For the brilliant idea of hosting last Friday's reception for a new exhibit on Swiss student architecture in Terminal E at Logan Airport. For the many take-home gifts. And finally to the Swiss Ambassador in Cuba, who hosted a group of us design students a while back. After an hour in his palatial gardens, the white-suited waiters who had been serving us non-stop, flawless mojitos approached sheepishly to say there was no more rum; either we'd finished the poor man's supply or were being cut off. Either way, that day I promised myself that first chance I got, I'd post an online picture of Alpine horns.

(Today's post title is the slogan for Porche's new online ad campaign, which is on Salon.com these days.)

Kicking my ideas in the ass

"Here is a characteristically modern definitition of the public square: a place of passive enjoyment, a kind of playground for adults, and it says a good deal about how slack our current definition of community can be. [Many urban theorists] are content to describe the public square strictly in terms of gregariousness: how it offers a spatial experience shared by a heterogeneous public which will sooner or later go its separate ways; an urban form which acts to draw people together and give them a momentary pleasure and sense of well-being. No one should underestimate those benefits but in the political landscape the public square serves an entirely different purpose. It is assumed that those who were come there are already aware that they are members of the community, responsible citizens, and that on occasion they will participate in public discussions and take action on behalf of the community...

The most popular, frequented plazas and small parks are those which [sociologist William Whyte] says provide an agreeable microclimate, easy accessibility, some sensational object like a piece of sculpture or a display of flaming water, and which (and this is most essential) allow people to sit comfortably and relax. 'What attracts people most...are other people.' But what does 'other people' mean? Those with whom (to use Aristotle's phrase) we exchange moral and noble ideas? No: 'other people' more often than not in this new urban space seems to mean voices and color and movement and fleeting impressions. People have become elements of animation in a pleasantly planned environment, and we are social beings merely to the extent that we want to be 'at one' with that particular environment.

These contemporary urban parks...are the last, poor remnants of what was once an almost sacred space, but in our rejection of their political function we presage not the end of civilization but the end of one chapter. We are better off than we suppose."
--J.B. Jackson

Ouch. Flipping through my notebook I found this passage, which I'd copied out almost exactly a year ago. It's sobering to see that my ideas about public space haven't changed much since then (see my posts on the Zocalo and indirectly on murals and Mark Morris), and that Jackson years ago was taking those ideas apart. The kicker? What does he mean, after all of that careful dissection of what he sees as an ahistorical and impoverished vision of public space, when he writes "We are better off than we suppose?"

A public space in which we exchange ideas. In whatever form that space or those ideas might take. That's my new project.

variations on a theme

The only two dance performances I've ever seen and not liked were a jazz tap show (when I was working as an usher) and a performance by the New York City Ballet. I could appreciate the dancers' skills, but the whole production felt stilted, as if an entire range of emotion and movement were off-limits because of a set of antiquated instructions on what dance should be. But I got goosebumps at the Mark Morris ballet this afternoon.

Imagine you are Mark Morris. Let's say you are moved by baroque classical music. How do you choreograph a piece that communicates this to the audience? The phrase "baroque classical" doesn't tell people much these days, and hearing the actual music is probably worse. For one thing, it's too culturally-coded: you immediately think of those lone stations on the radio dial with the sedate hosts and tasteful commercials for uspcale furnishings stores. (In Baltimore, my local car-repair guys dressed in white lab coats, had Wall Street Journals lying around the waiting area, and played the classical music stations on the radio so white-collar folks would think I can trust these guys and would gladly pay the jacked-up prices.) And what do you do with the delicate and refined movements we automatically associate with, say, trembling flute melodies? There are whole genres of Hollywood movies that parody these dances and their leotards.

One way to defuse the expectations is to play to them; at times Morris pokes fun at the genre by giving his dancers exaggerated, goofy movements (although there are also plenty of straight-up precious-graceful-bird-like movements set to flute and soprano solos). Then there are moments of slapstick, such as the two rings of male dancers, the outside ring spanking the inside ring along. But mostly Morris runs with what the music does best: set up intricate structures and vary them. I have only a vague idea of what the term counterpoint means, but I feel like for two hours Morris created it physically in flesh and blood, dressed it in color, and whirled it around.

When most or all of the twenty-five dancers were on stage, you felt you were looking through an old-fashioned kaleidoscope. At one point, two lines of dancers snake around the stage, outlining the corners of a square, then cross the stage diagonally to meet, touch briefly, and bump off to the edge again--a perfect abstraction, like a screen-saver or those "serpent" games on your old computer's hard-drive. In the next-to-last sequence, the dancers sprinted and skipped full-speed towards the audience then veered offstage, to sprint and skip another pass, always in different teams of two and three. (Goosebumps.) And Morris always allows these precisely coordinated sequences to break down, wander off-course, become human again. From where I was sitting, high above the action, and because it's been on my mind, sometimes it looked like people crossing a train station or public plaza.

And then Molly re-enacted whole scenes out on Tremont Street after the show. Morris would've loved it.

Public Space Projects

I'm in my program because of Baltimore. Maybe if I'd lived in New York or L.A. I would've wanted to go back to school anyway, but a lot of my work at the Department of City Planning had to do with public space--big, underutilized parks, abandoned industrial waterfronts about to become new neighborhoods, vacant lots everywhere (14,000 total for the City). Plus, my favorite place in Baltimore was the Sunday Farmer's Market underneath the elevated highway that runs straight through downtown. 6 days a week, it's a massive parking lot that's cut off from everything around it, mostly empty at night, and that smells like piss. Sundays it's packed (there are not too many places in Baltimore you can say that about), it's diverse (ditto), and in summer they practically give the corn and canteloupes away.

I had an idea for a nonprofit called the Baltimore Public Space Project. If anyone wanted to know what it was about, you could just say "The Farmer's Market"--taking a dead space and transforming it into a safe, popular, active, unexpected place to be. The picture on the left is from a test project: a tree-decorating party to dress up dead street trees in front of my building.

There are a million other examples: a community coalition in southwest Baltimore is using grants, city funds, and a lot of sweat equity to clean up hundreds of vacant lots, plant grass and trees, and maintain the resulting miniparks. In downtown Brooklyn an urban designer and a choreographer studied people's movements across Fox Square--a busy, but bleak triangle of public space between a couple of major streets--and then created a one-week dance performance to transform the space. The artist Sophie Calle decorated a Manhattan payphone (with flowers, free cigarettes, pictures, etc.) and recorded people's reactions. And the kids at Interboro have made beautiful proposals to transform malls. (Tobias' grad school thesis, on the Fresh Pond Mall in Cambridge, is featured in the book Everyday Urbanism.)

So now Sarah and I have started Public Space Project at school to create temporary interventions in underutilized or neglected public spaces. Outflow #70 and John Peterson's installation all fall under the still vague umbrella that is our group (of 2 people). We haven't hit on a project we want to do yet, although Sarah knows a nonprofit in Chinatown that might be interested in working with us, and we'll meet with them later this week.

In the meantime, send me photos of deserted parking lots, desolate plazas, leftover spaces, etc. and I'll post them.

mexico city grab bag

Frida Kahlo's New Year's Wishes, 1951:

1. a knife for opening shells
2. 3 notebooks--1 lined, 2 blank
3. 2 pieces of sky to use for curtains
4. Take me down the streets you like during the day

These are translated from faded diary pages under glass at the Frida Kahlo house in Mexico City. Every time you'd lean in to make out a fuzzy word, an alarm would sound. And translating: who knows? According to the online dictionaries, "una navaja" in #1 could be a jackknife/penknife, a razor clam, or a sharp tongue and "concha" could be a shell, shellfish, cove, prompter's box, or cunt (in that order). The "you" is Diego Rivera; Sarah thought Kahlo was in a hospital at the time, and was asking Rivera for these things.

Sarah also took this picture with her camera which she somehow rigged to take one long exposure.

One last Mexico City image:

Street Vendor Toolkit (basic):

• table (or cardboard or piece of wood on top of box or stools)
• blue tarp (overhead protection from elements or showcase mat)
• white screen (attach vertically to table to hang items from or place on top of table to stabilize items)
• rope or tape (to secure tarp or screen, tie to nearby lightpole, tree, etc.)
• large trash bags (storage, inventory)
• shopping cart (transportation)

Food Vendor Variation:

• Add portable cooking/stove unit

S/XL

"The architectural principle at work in [Pueblo] dwellings...is that of the imitation of natural forms by human beings who seek to fit themselves safely into nature's order. When the resources of large populations made it possible to build monumental architectural forms of communal function and at the landscape's scale, exactly the same principle was brought to bear. We can see it at work at Teotihuacan, which in all likelihood was the most important ceremonial center the North American continent ever produced. There the long axis of the site is traversed by an avenue called 'of the Dead'...
At Teotihuacan the Avenue of the Dead runs straight toward the pyramidal notched mountain, the Cerro Gordo....Directly below it lies the Temple of the Moon, at once repeating and compacting its profiles. The shape of the mountain is echoed but intensified by human symmetry and geometry; its power is thus harnessed and abetted. Men, as in human sacrifice, are helping nature along, forcing it to function, just as they fed it with their blood."
--Vincent Scully, America: The Sacred Mountain

This essay was one of our first readings for Landscape History class last semester. Scully is an old-school humanist; you can almost hear him getting choked up as he describes tribal rain dancers, willing the gods and nature to deliver to mankind "as they damn well ought to." We saw Teotihuacan, about an hour north of Mexico City, on the last day of our trip. Your strongest feeling, especially when you've climbed the impossibly steep steps of the pyarmids, is not of harnessing or abetting, but getting knocked around by the wind, and seeing how small the Temple of the Moon appears compared to the mountains behind it.

Later in the essay, Scully quotes Bernal Diaz, who travelled with Herman Cortez during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

"Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream. It is not to be wondered at that I here write it down in this manner, for there is so much to think over that I do not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about...I say again that I stood looking at it and thought that never in the world would there be discovered other lands such as these...of all these wonders that I then beheld today all is overthrown and lost, nothing is left standing."

I love adult expressions of wonder. Desdemona describing Othello. The New England colonists seeing for the first time the glut of salmon in the streams, the endless supply of wood in the forests. Giddy science writers talking about genes.

Last fall, in the middle of some god-awful near all-nighter, Danielle and I tried to invent some new procrastination games out on the 4th floor patio. With lentils, which I was using in my model to represent stones. The best we could do at 2am, exhausted, with our creative energies dry as the beans, was to spill a bunch of lentils on the outdoor stairs. Instant fun! Lentil-coated stairs! Then realizing what a lame trick this was, we tried to sweep the evidence into the crack between the staircase and the cement patio floor.

Fast forward to a week later, when suddenly little green shoots had sprung up in those cracks, taking root in the few morsels of soil, glass, and cigarette butts. Thanks to a mild November, by Thanksgiving we had a wild bush of lentil plants growing alongside the stairs.

Then it became an International Art Phenomenon. In Mexico City we saw two separate projects along the same lines. An anthology called espacio included a project in which the artist created a small halo of plants-in-rooftop-crack and invited people to lay down with their heads nestled among the green. And by the Alameda Park, the Printmaking Museum had an outdoor installation piece of green-in-crack, pictured below.

In the end, all my best ideas always get ripped off.

eating, drinking, overthinking

That's the title of a self-help book I saw in the bookstore window today, but it would make a good name for my blog, too. Another one would be: "Hey, Look At Me! Look At Me!"

One of the things I miss about Mexico City is the crowds and the activity of people on the street. A few blocks away from the Zocalo, vendors line both sides of the streets for blocks on end. The busiest intersection sounded like the trading floor on Wall Street--hundreds of voices rising and falling, shouting out the names of products and prices.


You can see this experience of urban density reflected in Mexican murals, which are as crowded as the busiest city plaza or rush-hour subway car. We saw a half-dozen of Diego Rivera's murals from the 1930s, including Man at the Crossroads (above, and detail below left) and History of Mexico, both of which are every bit as monumental as their titles suggest. Rivera and his contemporaries Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros were classically trained, and they enlist traditional compositional strategies (e.g. diagonals draw your eye toward key elements in the center that command attention, etc.) But your first impression of one of these murals is of a wild abundance, bursting at the seams in all directions at once.

There's a John Ashbery line I'm just remembering, in which a character is vomiting out images and run-on associations. These murals feel the same way, joyously. Bhgleah: out comes upscale dinner parties, workers' strikes, microbes, Darwin, police crackdowns, Lenin. As with Ashbery and his fellow New York School of Poets, there's a feeling in Rivera's murals that anything could materialize at any time, and all juxtapositions are possible.

The official narrative of History of Mexico runs right to left, from scenes of an idealized pre-Columbian past, to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to the Mexico of the 1930s. But a linear storyline is not what you experience as you actually look at the mural. Your eye drifts back and forth, there's equal attention to detail seemingly everywhere you glance, and action rewarding each new field of focus--as if, say, you were overlooking a vendor-lined intersection on a busy street.

Rivera and company meant for their murals to be public works. Here's a line from Siqueiros' manifesto from the early 1920s:

"We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favored by ultra-intellectual circles, because it is aristocratic, and we praise monumental art in all its forms, because it is a public property...art must no longer be the expression of individual satisfaction which it is today, but should aim to become a fighting, educative art for all."

I'm only just starting to read Desmond Rochfort's Mexican Muralists about the origins of this movement from Mexico's political upheaval at the time. I can't think of an American art movement to compare to Rivera's group, who believed that they were helping to express and shape Mexico's national identity. For their brand of self-consciously revolutionary rhetoric, it seems like you'd have to go back to Adams and Jefferson. (Interestingly, Rochfort digs up a letter from an American artists in the 1930s writing to FDR about Rivera and asking the U.S. government to support similar works at home.) At the same time, while they were calling for a uniquely Mexican art form, Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieres all studied art in Europe--Rivera lived abroad for 14 years--and were excited and influenced by Cubism and Futurism.

Anyway, enough book report. Time for bed.

One last thing: every night in Mexico City that I couldn't sleep and during long stretches of plane time, I re-read Mary Gaitskill's Beacase They Wanted To. I didn't like Veronica as much as I'd thought I would, so I went back and read Bad Behavior and Because to remind myself how devestating these books are. Excerpt from the book's first story here and an interview with Gaitskill here. I'll post quotes as soon as I get the book back from the airport, where I think I may have left it...

chou 'nuff

Back in Somerville, where it's 30 degrees out. I biked to get some pizza at Pinnochio's (because I smelled tomato sauce as I walked to customs at Logan Airport) and convinced myself the cold's not so bad, right as it started to sleet--a raspy, stinging sleet that sneaks behind your glasses into your eyeball. Last month's heating bill came in while we were away, but tonight we're going to crank up the themostat like, well, like Americans.

Blame it on the altitude, the cough I got 2 days into the trip, the lack of sleep, the heavy taco meats--I did a lousy job of posting while I was in Mexico City. Rather than try to sum up the whole thing in one epic post, I'll just send bits and pieces from my notebook over the next few days. Highlights to watch out for:

• Street Vendor Toolkit
• Urban Gardening (or What To Grow in Pavement Cracks)
• Murals 101

While we were floating down the canals in Xochimilco's Ecological Park, Justin, Danielle, and I drew portraits of each other. That's Justin's drawing of me at the top. (The shirt says "Drink Haterade, OK?"--a reference to the Giant Robot-purchased t-shirt that I was wearing that day, which actually says "Lovers: 1 Haters: 0".) Justin's blog, by the way, should be out any day now. In the meantime, he suggests I ditch the name "Amateur Night" and go with the heading for today's post. I'll take votes for either the rest of this week.

ritual

¨My senses were taking in nothing but a deep-night, unmeditatable consciousness of a world which was newly touched and beautiful to me, and I must admit that even in the vermin there was a cerain amount of pleasure: and that, exhausted though I now was, it was the eagerness of my senses quite as fully as the bugs and the itching which made it impossible for me to sleep.¨
--James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

No bedbugs in Mexico City, but not much sleep either, with the predictable result that I´m a little sick, trying to hold it together so we can go out tonight to see the mariachi bands play for German tourists. And anything I want to write sounds like a junior-high school diary: today we ate grasshoppers and saw the Candy Market (a half-mile stretch of vendors with bright-colored stacks of industrial soap-bar-sized candy; what I thought were flies surrounding each booth were in fact swarms of honeybees and wasps).

It´s killing me that I can´t post more often (or speak more than jokey Spanish). Yesterday I rushed through the National Museum of Anthropology in about an hour and a half. There have always been entire wings of most big museums that I didn´t care about--Art of Ancient Greece, Art of Mesoamerica, etc. but yesterday I couldn´t get enough. I think it´s because the museum allows you to take photos. Suddenly, intsead of just viewing/learning etc, you´re deciding which images to select, keep, possess, take home to your living room. Sadly, I think my newfound interest in, say, Aztec statues and pottery, is really triggered by a consumer reflex.













A few wall captions are all I know about Aztec history, but how we respond to the story of human sacrifice rituals seems like the perfect way to distinguish between cultural conservatives (who silently congratulate themselves about the triumph of civilization over savagery) and liberal relativists like myself (who think, ¨Man, I wish I had some more ritual in my life.¨

mostly undifferentiated space

Greetings from Mexico City. We arrived late Tuesday night, spent most of today walking around the historic center area. Our hostel is next to the Zocalo, the City's most famous public plaza, bordered by beautiful colonial buildings, including the Metropolitan Cathedral and National Palace.

What do we ask of public places like this, at the heart of the City? For me, it´s mainly that it be open to everyone and to the broadest range of things people could be doing there. Today we saw folk healers, teenaged girls selling crafts accessories and dozens of other vendors, hip hop dancers, tourists; the Zapatistas and Socialists had tents up, and banners with pictures of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Castro flew near the most massive Nativity display I´ve ever scene, biblical characters looming at least 2-stories high.

There are no benches, trees, fountains, or paths in the Zocalo. (There used to be, according to displays in the subway tunnels that show black-and-white photos of the Zocalo carved up by all of the above.) There isn't much to define the space, other than a huge flagpole near the center and whatever the various groups there have set up themselves. (The flagpole shadow provides a thin line of shade, and people will line up in it.) In this mostly undifferentiated space, vendors and visitors sit anywhere, generally without orientation to any particular building or landmark or edge, about 15-20 feet away from anyone else so they have their own turf.

Echoing Richard Sennett's claim that people have withdrawn from public personas into private preoccupations with the self, there are designers who say Americans have forgotten how to use public space, in contrast to places such as Latin America, China, developing countries, etc. (One L.A. architect says: "Italians come out of the womb knowing how to use public space--Americans, we don't have it, we don't get it in the culture, we have to learn how to use public space because we are such a suburbanized, privatized culture...People who grew up in Mexico, who know how to use public space, they don't need lessons.")

Now, I've seen people in Beijing squat on the sidewalk at a busy intersections to eat lunch, and senior citizens in Shanghai going at brightly-colored exercise equipment in playgrounds. But the Italian/Mexican/Chinese womb theory seems shaky. Much simpler to say the Zocalo (and countless other minimalist plazas in Mexico City) thrives with almost no stuff in it not because it's Mexican but because there's a central subway stop there, huge tourist attraction/nationally significant buildings adjacent, and the weather is usually gorgeous--even public space amnesiacs would probably sit their ass down in a place like this.

A quick 10-minute post today. Scrambling to get ready to go to Mexico City for a week...

Just came from a meeting at school with John Peterson, who founded San Francisco-based Public Architecture. A group of students is working with him on an installation going up at the end of January (the reason I went to the Children's Museum a few posts back) to exhibit some of Public Architecture's public space projects. There's a hallway in the Gund Hall lobby that's out of the way, narrow, and not used very much except for service stuff and the few people who take the elevator. We'll be building benches out of recycled materials and placing them in this hallway. (Check out Public Architecture's scraphouse project, a single-family house built entirely out of salvaged materials in front of San Francisco City Hall last year. There are walls made of phone books, chandeliers made of old stoplight lenses and lamps, etc. etc.)

Also try to find sometime this winter to watch Put The Camera on Me. (Or listen to the story at This American Life's website or this URL.) Seven-year-old kids making unbelievable movies with dad's video camera, about Nazi torture, child abuse, and turning gay-bashers gay. Plus, the kind of Machiavellian manipulation and simmering rivalries that you never thought possible from prepubescents.

botany of desire

New favorite comix and comic artists for the new year:

Dan Clowes' Ice Haven

David Heatley

R. Kikuo Johnson's Night Fisher (this recommendations comes from Kai-Ming--you can sign up for her comics e-newsletter at Publishers Weekly

Paper Rad (see link on the right hand column)

Last fall our plants professor recommended that we read Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire over winter break (since no one has time to read during the semester). Pollan writes one chapter each on the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato, looking at how these plants have thrived by adapting themselves into our lives and altering our behavior. There are some great passages about commercial agriculture, the Russet Burbank (the variety McDonald's uses for its french fries) and the NewLeaf, Monsanto's genetically engineered potato:

"The typical potato grower stands in the middle of a bright green circle of plants that have been doused with so much pesticide that their leaves wear a dull white chemical bloom and the soil they're rooted in is a lifeless gray powder. Farmers call this a 'clean field,' since, ideally, it has been cleansed of all weeds and insects and disease--of all life, that is, with the sole exception of the potato plant. A clean field represents a triumph of human control, but it is a triumph that even many farmers have come to doubt. To such a farmer a new kind of potato that promises to eliminate the need for even a single sparying of chemicals is, very simply, an economic and environmental and perhaps even psychological boon.

I asked [farmer] Danny Forsyth to walk me through a season's regimen, the state of the art in the control of a potato field. Typically it begins early in the spring with a soil fumigant; to control nematodes and certain diseases in the soil, potato farmers douse their feilds before planting with a chemical toxic enough to kill every trace of microbial life in the soil. Next Forsyth puts down an herbicide--Lexan, Sencor, or Eptam--to 'clean' his field of all weeds. Then, at planting, a systemic insecticide--such as Thimet--is applied to the soil. This will be absorbed by the young seedlings and kill any insect that eats their leaves for several weeks. When the potato seedlings are six inches tall, a second herbicide is sprayed on the field to control weeks.

Dryland farmers like Forsyth farm in the vast circles I'd seen from the sky; each circle, defined by the radius of the irrigation pivot, typically covers an area of 135 acres. Pesticides and fertilizer are simply added to the irrigation system, which on Forsyth's farm draws water from (and returns it to) the nearby Snake River. Along with their ration of water, Forsyth's potatoes receive weekly sprayings of chemical fertilizer. Just before the rows close--when the leaves of one row of plants meet those of the next--he begins spraying Bravo, a fungicide, to control late blight, the same fungus that caused the Irish potato famine and is once again today the potato grower's most worrisome threat. A single spore can infect a field overnight, Forsyth said, turning the tubers into a rotting mush.

Beginning this month, Forsyth will hire a crop duster to spray for aphids at fourteen-day intervals. The aphids are harlmess in themselves, but they transmit the leaf roll virus, which causes 'net necrosis' in Russet Burbanks, a brown spotting of the potato's flesh that will cause a processor to reject a whole crop. Despite all his efforts to control it, this happened to Forsyth just last year. Net necrosis is purely cosmetic defect, yet because McDonald's believes--with good reason--that we don't like to see brown spots in our french fries, farmers like Danny Forsyth must spray their fields with some of the most toxic chemicals now in use, including an organophosphate called Monitor.

'Monitor is a deadly chemical,' Forsyth told me; it is known to damage the human nervous system. 'I won't go into a field or four or five days after it's been sprayed--not even to fix a broken pivot.' That is, Forsyth would sooner lose a whole circle to drought than expose himself or an employee to this poison.

Leaving aside the health and environmental costs, the economic cost of all this control is daunting. A potato farmer in Idaho spends roughly $1,950 an acre (mainly on chemicals, electriciy, and water) to grow a crop that, in a good year, will earn him maybe $2,000. That's how much a french-fry processor will pay for the twenty tons of potatoes a single Idaho acre can yield. It's not hard to see why a farmer like Forsyth, struggling against such tight margins and heartsick over chemicals, would leap at a NewLeaf...

Before driving out to have a look at his fields, Forsyth and I got onto the subject of organic agriculture, about which he had the usual things to say ('That's all fine on a small scale, but they don't have to feed the world') and a few things I never expected to hear from a conventional farmer. 'I like to eat organic food, and in fact I grow a lot of it at the house. The vegetables we buy at the market we just wash and wash and wash and wash. I'm not sure I should be saying this, but I always plant a small area of potatoes without any chemicals. By the end of the season, my field potatoes are fine to eat, but any potatoes I pulled today are probably still full of systemics. I don't eat them.'

(P.S. Just so you don't think Pollan is a big Monsanto fan: he describes the risks of introducing NewLeafs, which are genetically altered to include a bacteria Bt that makes it resistant to blight, and writes well about how, at best, genetic engineering is just a stop-gap measure to the larger problems created by commercial agriculture and the consumption patterns that drive it.)

stick around folks, we'll be right back

Today is like those nights when the talk show host finishes his monologue, shoots one last smirk to the bandleader, then says what he does every night, those tired words that barely trigger neurons to fire any more in his brain, his mouth operating nearly out of reflex (and he flashes to those moments of cold panic during recent tapings when he's hosted a young, edgy comic, a transparently earlier and hungrier version of himself), except that this night he knows that both guests are reliably entertaining, even intelligent, and the musical act is one he has heard and actually liked at one time, a few girlfriends ago, and so he turns to the camera and says with a trace of real emotion and anticipation: "Folks, we've got a great show for you tonight."

First, the news. For the remainder of the year, you can forget about scanning those USA Today vending machines and MSN homepage news-in-brief updates. 2006 has already had its most outrageous headline: Baltimore Is Named Fittest City in America. I especially like the double entendre in one resident's comments: "I think it's probably the most mis-fit city in America." When I lived in Baltimore, there was an urban legend about the City's agreement with Viacom to maintain and renovate bus shelters. The story goes that Viacom initially installed their standard bus shelter seats, then had to remove them and replace them with doublewides because the locals were so well-endowed. Interestingly, "Fittest" is what you might hear if I tried to say "Fattest" while my mouth is full of fried chicken. (I've tried it.)

Today's genetic curiosity, from Matt Ridley's excellent book Genome: "The result of...an experiment by Claus Wederkind and Sandra Furi was the discovery that men and women most prefer (or least dislike) the body odour of members of the opposite sex who are most different from them genetically." I'm remembering ex-girlfriends who liked the smell of the pillowcases the morning after I'd stayed over and ex-girlfriends who were mostly indifferent. Apparently, it has to do with genetic variability conferring better immunity against certain diseases. Your AA is better off crossing with a BB than another AA. For the sake of the kids, who'll be AB. Geneticists always jump straight to the mating.

This morning, I went to the Recycle Shop, a great Boston resource at the Children's Museum (also in South Boston). They work with New England-area manufacturers who donate surplus to the store, which sells everything for cheap. (With a student discount, a buck-fifty for a popcorn bag-ful; $5-something for a supermarket paper bag.) Barrels and barrels of old foam, financial ledgers, calling cards, compacts--you name it. I like bulk junk.

Finally, a reason not to blog:
"Narcissism in the clinical sense diverges from the popular idea of love of one's own beauty; more strictly, and as a character disorder, it is self-absorption which prevents one from understanding what belongs within the domain of the self and self-gratification and what belongs outside it. Thus narcisissism is an obsession with 'what this person, that event means to me.' This question about the personal relevance of other people and outside acts is posed so repetitively that a clear perception of those persons and events in themselves is obscured."
--Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

Looking for Sennett links, found this nice little evisceration of the man's career, writing, and thought.