postarchitectural

Exercises for visits to Joshua Tree

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:38:19 -0700

Exercises for visits to Joshua Tree and the drives within:

Let the landscape surround you. No comparisons, no thoughts of other places. Watch the Joshua Trees pass by. Look at the formations of rocks. Look out at the horizon. Look out at plants you don’t know the names of. Try to follow the paths of birds in the air.

Describe the landscape. See your surroundings as alien. See the landscape transform. Large boulders as dumplings, heavy and fat. Shards of rock as flesh of salmon, cooked. Rocks as teeth, jutting up from the dirt. Rocks as fists.

Understand the trees. Their lives, hundreds of years long, growing an inch a year. Understand their perception of time. The transitions between day and night, the sun as a strobe light. The patient stretching of the trees limbs. The growing of fingers, arms. The other trees, all around, lifting their spiky fists into the air.

Look out at the trees all together. Draw a line from the base of every tree to its tip, in plan view. Start to understand the currents, the wind across the valley.

Try to understand time. Look at the piles of boulders, huge and solid and still. Look at the crevasses carved there. Imagine how long it must have taken to whittle away at the rocks. Imagine living your entire life, and not seeing more than specks changed on a rock’s surface. Understand the hundreds of lifetimes it must take, years upon years upon years, for these rocks to be sculpted and shaped, through wind and weather and sand and grit.

Dream

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:02:23 -0800

So many parts to remember

I remember I was putting together a website with Binx, and we were moving parts around.

I remember I was a photographer, this guy was hiring me, and then all of a sudden he asked me to shoot this segment they were filming. I walked into a hotel room with carpet billowing like clouds, and there was a rhino in a bed, sleeping. There were a couple people around who ssshhhhed me so I went into the other room. Then the shoot was suppose to start so I was given my dslr all wrapped up in this plastic. We went into the bathroom and this guy was going to be filmed walking in, and me and this girl were supposed to shoot photos while this happened. I was nervous and she had a point and shoot, which made no noise, so I was worried my camera would make too much and ruin the shot. I started unwrapping my camera, and the actor walked in. He got into this undulating bathtub. Then he asked me to come in, which made me more nervous. I started taking off my clothes, which were these big rubber sheets, until I had something like a tube top on, and crawled in on top of him. We kissed, and somehow he was the rhino from before, and became human to act in movies.

Then there were some interlude segments, something with small fish chasing big fish, something With figures chasing each other and fighting, something with someone’s arm getting chopped in half. Binx was confused and I said I was glad I played that final fantasy game. There was also a shot from above of these people shoving these sleeping bodies into a ditch, then covering them with an upside down boat

Then I was outside, with that rhino/actor, it was windy and he was saying something really close to my face. He was gone, and the wind howled an started plucking people from the ground and holding them in the air. I was in a town that believed that the wind was god, and the wind carried all the people towards some point.

And then there was this character, a fox kid, kind of like a thundercat, who was racing home, because of the wind, but then there was this giant machine, with huge treads comin after him. He slipped, and the camera switched focus somehow to show that the machine was barreling down an shooting not at him, but a little fox girl a ways behind him. He realized that was his sister and ran and grabbed her, I think she had been shot, and there was rubble all around. The machine had these metal tentacles, like in TMNT, and they whipped around and grabbed him. But he started using his tail like a saw, and looked kind of like Tigger then, and sawed through the tentacle and ran behind a crag towards home. The machine fed out more of the cable and one end had a drill bit, and it drilled into te earth to chase the fox kids. Another end could shoot some liquid or something, and was waiting for the drill to finish

The drill was wrecking the town, and tearing through houses, and everyone just understood that that was how it was, they had no home anymore, this giant machine controlled them. The fox kids had run back to their dad?’s house, who was Martin sheen, but a bear, kind of like a blue care bear. He was muttering stuff about what they should do, and everyone was panicked, but then he started talking about having friends all over the world, and then he pulled out this white model of an airship. He wanted to turn the house into an airship, with big sails, and sail the skies to escape the drills and the machine. I woke up a bit but didn’t open my eyes, and then went back to sleep as the fox kid and said yes.

There were also some bits with being in a huge hill of a city, driving around in a very long narrow car, and looking for someone. We’d left someone behind. Actually the car was like a stick insect. Hm. There was a part when I was trying to take photos from my iPhone of us ascending the hill, and the crazy lights of the city, kind of like going up hong kong, if it were filled with ferris wheels.

Things I want to remember about Burning Man

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 01:40:00 -0700

Things I want to remember about Burning Man before I forget, because I am afraid that I will:

I want to remember having to actually prepare for a trip. Buying shorts for the first time in I don’t know how long. Cutting, crimping, and soldering for the first time in years. Buying food, making food, freezing food, packing food. I want to remember chili with butternut squash and chard. Buying water. So much water.

I want to remember driving, up and over mountains, across desert, in the dark and along dusty tiny roads, slowing for little towns, to music, to Neutral Milk Hotel and Jay Electronica and Joy Division and Neon Indian and Led Zeppelin. The lonely echo of Handsome Furs across dark, empty hills.

I want to remember Burning Man. The waiting in line, the setting up of camp, the waking to dubstep art cars rolling by.

I want to remember the heat and the dust and the stiffness of my hair, caked and coated and grey. I want to remember falling asleep in a tent, on a couch lifted up on scaffolding. I want to remember squinting out across at the desert from the top of the man.

I want to remember the playa at night. The land so flat that everything around gets compressed into the horizon line. The visual tricks: whether something is close up or far away, whether something is art or human. The swarming of blinking bikes, blinking art cars, and blinking people across the desert, like some deep underwater scene flattened, then saturated. The flash of fire from the pillars and how it turned the glowing lights to people, the darkness to shadows, thrown long and deep across the dirt.

I want to remember Burning Man as a religion, not of gods but of light and music and fire.

I want to remember the awe at the strobing wheel of skeletons, crawling and rowing up into the sky. I want to remember the cage fights at Thunderdome, climbing up and seeing the mass of people shouting and cheering. I want to remember stumbling across the Dust City Diner and how that hunger swelled up from somewhere deep and forgotten.

I want to remember wandering in deep playa and thinking how this must be what it feels like to be lost in space, if space were dimensionless, flat.

I want to remember staring at my boots, lit by laces of EL wire, watching them turn that pale white. I want remember the contrast between the crowd and the crush and the vast and the quiet. I want to remember that sense of everyone trying desperately to look different, but gathering to be coated and dulled back to the same palette.

And I want to remember that word, gathering, not just as an event, but an action, a way to draw these loose threads up together, a way to try and stretch your arms and wrap them around everything and pull it all back into you.

I dreamt so many things last night We were on a bus, that was...

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:48:01 -0700

I dreamt so many things last night

We were on a bus, that was rocketing down the street. It was powered by something else, and people that wanted to get off went towards the exit and were slowly sucked out.

I crawled into this round structure, it was like a wireframe of a sphere, and there was a path from one side in to the center and back out the other, looping around on rungs like monkey bars. I sat on one rung and pulled myself forward to the next, on and on until I was 2/3 the way through. There was a dog on the other end, sat on his haunches, and he jumped onto a rung. The whole structure tipped, and it fell into a chasm. I knew I was going to die and woke up.

There were other things too but I’m forgetting them now. I went back to Burning Man. I was wandering through a forest, it was the Berkeley campus. I came across this thing, this giant glittering radial thing. It was lining the sides of this faceted cave, but in a way where from my perspective it looked like a disc hovering in space. It was built like the Zumthor Kunsthaus, all rectangular plates laid over one another, but made out of metal. I remember just standing there and watching it shimmer

Waking up at 630, dreaming about the World Cup

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 08:09:42 -0700

There was a comedian on stage, he was talking about his childhood. He was making some joke about nintendo cartridges, blowing on them, but it was just a curl of wire in his hand. Something happened and I was pretending to be someone on stage, a bunch of people were playing different roles, we were staff in a hotel lobby or people in some old saloon or something. A kid representing the young comedian walked in, and started betting money with this old guy, with a huge beard.

The game was something like the kid gave him a dollar, then the old guy et him more, somehow the old man ended up with 300 in his hand. At some point we were looking at an old photo of this old man, beard huge and flowing past him, his arms all rope and skinny, sitting on an elephant, with a huge red cape draping behind him and hanging across the elephants back. There was a giant suitcase he was holding in the photograph, there were sayings scrawled on there that I forget. He was telling us how he’d traveled everywhere. At some point right before I woke up we got out of a small tent and looked out, we were in south America, and the mountains rose up like a gigantic tsunami wave, froth all biting into the clouds. We were looking closer at the mountains and could see the intricate patchwork of farms, all up on the mountainside. We saw the quilted patterns slowly resolve themselves into flags of countries, kind of pixellated and wrinkled from the topography. I realized we were here for the world cup, that we were in Rio or something, and they were finishing preparations by making the mountains into a giant world flag mosaic s

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The things I want to remember about my trip to Detroit for AAJA:

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 20:27:00 -0700

The things I want to remember about my trip to Detroit for AAJA:

The dark plane, the monitors glowing in every seat. Reading William Gibson. Sharp, careful, cold, like a scalpel.

The D. Warm, cool air. The cavernous belly of the Marriot. The pixelated Cobo Center. Motown. The broad swaths of road. Motor City. The People Mover. The swarm of Asians, the skirts and makeup, ties and jackets. The chatter of networking, nicetoseeyous, letschatlaters. The receptions and mixers. The broadcast girls. The exchange of business cards, emails, Twitter handles. The surreal experience of being surrounded by ageless, immortal Asian women. Which paper are you with? A house party off East Jefferson. The empty lots surrounding, the lushness of the apartment. An empty jazz club. The beauty of two black women moving with eyes closed. The bouncer telling us his name, where he’s from. He has a cousin from the city one of us is from. Waiting for a cab in the dark.
The casino. The smell of smoke. The rattle and jangle of the machines. The tight grip of old fingers on clay chips. The bright flash of lights, everywhere, pulsing and throbbing to multiple vague rhythms. Leaving the casino to go out alone. The cab driver, Otis. He has lived in Detroit for 62 years. San Francisco, yeah. I been there.

The emptiness of the first club, except for a few breakdancing teens and an exhausted bartender. The familiar thundering boom of bass echoing from a rooftop bar. The sound echoing around buildings, audible for blocks. The feeling of walking around in a deserted city. The way fat black women can dance. The way drunk frat boys can’t. The sad smallness of the guy, Drew, who says he doesn’t know how to recommend anything, anything at all to a Californian. D’Mongos, The Roast. The crowd gathering together to do the hustle. The anthemic intensity of Pursuit of Happiness blaring across the city. Dancing until last call. The girl and her mom, stumbling home. The cinematic timing of a cab pulling up, headlights flashing. Otis, smiling.

The marquees for Kid Rock. Welcome Home Kid. The smiling and hellos of strangers on the street. The walk from Downtown Detroit through Midtown. The big deco buildings, the feeling of Gotham. The buildings suddenly evaporating into empty lots and bare streets. The strangeness of being able to walk out of a city. The buzz of insects in the summer, mixing with Kid Rock’s sound check in the distance. The skeleton of a swing set. The calming realization — looking at all the vines crawling up the empty buildings, pulling off planks of wood, tossing bricks onto the ground — that nature isn’t dead, just patiently waiting for us to leave.

Hitching a ride with a couple to the Heidelberg project. Walking among the houses encrusted with trash, furniture, toys, paint. Random arrangements of stuffed animals. Shopping carts topping the sawn off limbs of trees. Burnt planks of wood, standing in a lawn. A house painted with huge numbers. Meeting a girl named Rita, from Brooklyn. Hitching a ride to the DIA. The strange composition of a piano being tuned. A placard explaining what Pop Art is. Going back to the hotel, then the airport.

The plane rocking, a gentle midwestern sort of turbulence. The feeling of sailing, with the clouds some soft and weightless kind of sea.

s

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Embedded in Academia : C No Evil

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 16:11:14 -0700

Embedded in Academia : C No Evil:

#define FALSE 1#define FALSE exit()#define while if#define goto#define struct union#define assert(x)#define volatile#define continue break#define double int#define long short#define unsigned signed

Stock Market Drops. VCs Hold Partner Meetings. What Happens Next? | TechCrunch

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 12:35:05 -0700

Stock Market Drops. VCs Hold Partner Meetings. What Happens Next? | TechCrunch:

“So let me give you the news 2 months early. If the economy and the stock market continue to languish that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
I’ll bet most partners’ meetings this week consisted of…

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? - NYTimes.com

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:14:22 -0700

What Happened to Obama’s Passion? - NYTimes.com:

A story isn’t a policy. But that simple narrative — and the policies that would naturally have flowed from it — would have inoculated against much of what was to come in the intervening two and a…

Obama: Debt Ceiling Deal Required Tough Concessions By Both Democrats And Democrats Alike | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 01:20:54 -0700

Obama: Debt Ceiling Deal Required Tough Concessions By Both Democrats And Democrats Alike | The Onion - America's Finest News Source:

“A day after signing legislation that raised the government debt ceiling and authorized steep budget cuts, President Obama thanked Democrats as well as Democrats for their willingness to make tough,…

Plate Tectonics : Earthview

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:44:52 -0700

Plate Tectonics : Earthview:

“Photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the…

Answer to Who is history's greatest badass, and why? - Quora

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 16:14:15 -0700

Answer to Who is history's greatest badass, and why? - Quora:

“Roosevelt was the first President to fly in an airplane. He was the first President to go down in a submarine. He once killed a cougar with a knife. He was also a sensitive man who loved poetry and…

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? | News | guardian.co.uk

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 04:35:31 -0700

Data journalism at the Guardian: what is it and how do we do it? | News | guardian.co.uk

The Show :: Replay

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 07:10:07 -0700

The Show :: Replay:

“

man i like this episode. i’m finding myself envious of whatever energy i had while making these. I know rationally what a fucking nightmare it was to put these together, but it appears so…

Business & Technology | Price of corn dogs going up? Blame Steve Jobs | Seattle Times Newspaper

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 06:18:43 -0700

Business & Technology | Price of corn dogs going up? Blame Steve Jobs | Seattle Times Newspaper:

from the comments: “Is it possible for an article to troll itself?”

Marvel Cinematic Universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 07:31:39 -0700

Marvel Cinematic Universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

to infinity “In November 2010, Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada outlined his plan to expand the MCU into comic books.”

Walking around a New New York, basketball in a marsh

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 11:28:00 -0700

The end of the dream was something around throwing basketballs at a hoop in the middle of a marsh. If we missed the ball would make a huge splash into the water, and then pop back out into the air. Some of us tried shooting from pretty far away, on a hill or something Another part, earlier, I was walking around lower manhattan with Stephanie lin, and we were looking for something to do. Something about her now living off the L in brooklyn, and a cool bar on the avenue of the Americas (which in my dream map, was on the east side of the city and spilled out to the river)

At some point we were walking around the south east corner, around whAt would be LES or fidi, and I realized none of the was in new York. Steph told me that this was all new, and we tLked about how much the area had changes since I lived there. In my dream it had been 10 years. This new new York area was strange, all white and gold, kind of like classical architecture w rococo colors, and reminded me of las Vegas. We were looking for a bar behind some curtains to meet Cindy and chris, and it was pretty late, past one, but we still walked aroun and it was still pretty bright. s

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What Apple Has That Google Doesn’t - An Auteur - NYTimes.com

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 10:43:45 -0700

What Apple Has That Google Doesn’t - An Auteur - NYTimes.com:

weird to write now as google is unifying a ton of their products

hapticdata/toxiclibsjs - GitHub

Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:15:02 -0700

hapticdata/toxiclibsjs - GitHub:

Toxiclibs.js is a javascript port of Karsten Schmidt’s Toxiclibs for Java and Processing. Toxiclibs.js works great with the Processing.js visualization library for but is not dependent on it. It can…

Fab.com Relaunches With Daily Deals & Design Inspiration | MediaShark

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 21:27:43 -0700

Fab.com Relaunches With Daily Deals & Design Inspiration | MediaShark:

“Fab.com has gone through some major transitions since its launch last June. In fact, it began life as Fabulis, a web trend-infused social network for gay men.”