This site is mostly referred to as an architecture blog. That’s what I say most of the time as well. Occasionally I will refer people to the tagline that falls at the bottom of the page and maunder for a while about figures like William Whyte or Jimmy Breslin, and here assiduously work to avoid the overuse of terms that run to jargon (though I don’t work as hard as anything resembling concision, even as I am reprimanded time and again).
Anyhoo, this blog is supposed to be about is the intersection of the impermanent (lives and events) and the semi-permanent (buildings and institutions), and how they interrelate, and create meaning through that intersection [insert de Certeau-inflected PoMo cultural studies hoo hah].
The challenge is finding some of that life. Since the worst possible blog post is some variant of why I’ve been not, an excuse or promise to the contrary, the recent dormancy has been a more opaque reflection of a relatively flat existence, impermanance-wise. Usually I can get around this by commenting on something newsworthy and plenty of found or remembered knowledge.
Lately, even that has been rough, and the delimits of a professional services flunky have been driven home by two absurd instances, one personal, the other somewhat wider, of disintermediation.
Disintermediation is a term that means something like the Internet was supposed to make it cheaper and easier for us to buy porn and cheetos in our underwear. And that has certainly worked out. I know I’m misusing the term, but the series of absurd prefixes strung together seems an apropos way to describe some of the stranger effects resulting from the insertion of a screen between us and the world, one that is now almost completely pervasive (phones, handhelds, cars, elevators, etc).
A few weeks back, I was working when the usual cacophony of honking horns, squawking walkie-phones and sirens took on a more urgent note (it’s been rumored that adjacent building has gas supply problems, so I tend to be more vigilant about sirens). I looked around, and it seems the fire trucks were closing in on my block from every direction.
Even this isn’t atypical, but after another dozen minutes of blaring horns and sirens, I looked again. Sure enough, a small but dense cloud of dark smoke was rising what appeared to be about a block away. I went to the roof, saw it was a little further off.
So what did I do? Well, I checked the Internet. Not that I expected NY1 to carry this obviously big story, but given the number of bloggers in the neighborhood, it wouldn’t be unheard of if the fire were being covered real-time. It wasn’t, and I went back to work, craning my neck occasionally to see if anything more exciting happened.
Since it wasn’t in the direction I normally walk, I watched the news for a day or two to see if it was an almost noteworthy event. But here’s the twisted part: I was curious enough about it for two days to check news sites more than once, but never actually walked the two blocks to see where and what it was. Now, there’s no clear evidence of where it was.
Then, last week, there was the sad tale of the Rivington Street synagogue remains. Seems someone tried to cart off a portion that may or may not have been destined for scrap (a stone Star of David inset). Being a sizable object or simply ineffectual thieves, it was dropped a few blocks off. And there it lay. For days. Long enough to get a Flickr pool and two different blogs to start lively comment threads about desecration of religious symbols — including at least one call for someone to rescue this possibly sacred artifact.
Follow me for a second: two blogs, a dozen people calling for protection of the site and its remnants and a series of photos documenting the theft, many of them living within walking distance, and it might still be laying there. It’s not like we’re talking Buddhist monuments in Pakistan. It is sort of the Kitty Genovese of preservation. But I hope somebody does something about it. Or calls someone.
The ur-text of this is a story told by a communications professor about the first video camera he owned. Certain that it would drastically change our perceptions of reality, he lugged around one of those two-component, twenty pound bastards for something like two years, and claimed to have done everything with it. Including driving. And getting in a car accident. The moment when he realized he had fully disintermediated himself was his response to the driver he had just rear-ended: “But I couldn’t have hit you. I zoomed out.”
There is the irony of even bothering to establish a blog about living in the city, since it only serves to diminish the moments left for actually that. I guess my rationalization is if I can’t justify the ten minutes I need to walk three blocks to see if the neighborhood is burning down, I can steal a hair less to say I couldn’t be bothered.
And if you are wondering if this is just the most elaborate post ever crafted to say, um, I’ve been busy, well, that too. I could have simply written a post that said a somewhere a developer was proposing a shitty, overpriced condo and that Ground Zero is a calcified orgy of ineptitude, but that would have been too easy.
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Disinterwha?
This site is mostly referred to as an architecture blog. That’s what I say most of the time as well. Occasionally I will refer people to the tagline that falls at the bottom of the page and maunder for a while about figures like William Whyte or Jimmy Breslin, and here assiduously work to avoid the overuse of terms that run to jargon (though I don’t work as hard as anything resembling concision, even as I am reprimanded time and again).
Anyhoo, this blog is supposed to be about is the intersection of the impermanent (lives and events) and the semi-permanent (buildings and institutions), and how they interrelate, and create meaning through that intersection [insert de Certeau-inflected PoMo cultural studies hoo hah].
The challenge is finding some of that life. Since the worst possible blog post is some variant of why I’ve been not, an excuse or promise to the contrary, the recent dormancy has been a more opaque reflection of a relatively flat existence, impermanance-wise. Usually I can get around this by commenting on something newsworthy and plenty of found or remembered knowledge.
Lately, even that has been rough, and the delimits of a professional services flunky have been driven home by two absurd instances, one personal, the other somewhat wider, of disintermediation.
Disintermediation is a term that means something like the Internet was supposed to make it cheaper and easier for us to buy porn and cheetos in our underwear. And that has certainly worked out. I know I’m misusing the term, but the series of absurd prefixes strung together seems an apropos way to describe some of the stranger effects resulting from the insertion of a screen between us and the world, one that is now almost completely pervasive (phones, handhelds, cars, elevators, etc).
A few weeks back, I was working when the usual cacophony of honking horns, squawking walkie-phones and sirens took on a more urgent note (it’s been rumored that adjacent building has gas supply problems, so I tend to be more vigilant about sirens). I looked around, and it seems the fire trucks were closing in on my block from every direction.
Even this isn’t atypical, but after another dozen minutes of blaring horns and sirens, I looked again. Sure enough, a small but dense cloud of dark smoke was rising what appeared to be about a block away. I went to the roof, saw it was a little further off.
So what did I do? Well, I checked the Internet. Not that I expected NY1 to carry this obviously big story, but given the number of bloggers in the neighborhood, it wouldn’t be unheard of if the fire were being covered real-time. It wasn’t, and I went back to work, craning my neck occasionally to see if anything more exciting happened.
Since it wasn’t in the direction I normally walk, I watched the news for a day or two to see if it was an almost noteworthy event. But here’s the twisted part: I was curious enough about it for two days to check news sites more than once, but never actually walked the two blocks to see where and what it was. Now, there’s no clear evidence of where it was.
Then, last week, there was the sad tale of the Rivington Street synagogue remains. Seems someone tried to cart off a portion that may or may not have been destined for scrap (a stone Star of David inset). Being a sizable object or simply ineffectual thieves, it was dropped a few blocks off. And there it lay. For days. Long enough to get a Flickr pool and two different blogs to start lively comment threads about desecration of religious symbols — including at least one call for someone to rescue this possibly sacred artifact.
Follow me for a second: two blogs, a dozen people calling for protection of the site and its remnants and a series of photos documenting the theft, many of them living within walking distance, and it might still be laying there. It’s not like we’re talking Buddhist monuments in Pakistan. It is sort of the Kitty Genovese of preservation. But I hope somebody does something about it. Or calls someone.
The ur-text of this is a story told by a communications professor about the first video camera he owned. Certain that it would drastically change our perceptions of reality, he lugged around one of those two-component, twenty pound bastards for something like two years, and claimed to have done everything with it. Including driving. And getting in a car accident. The moment when he realized he had fully disintermediated himself was his response to the driver he had just rear-ended: “But I couldn’t have hit you. I zoomed out.”
There is the irony of even bothering to establish a blog about living in the city, since it only serves to diminish the moments left for actually that. I guess my rationalization is if I can’t justify the ten minutes I need to walk three blocks to see if the neighborhood is burning down, I can steal a hair less to say I couldn’t be bothered.
And if you are wondering if this is just the most elaborate post ever crafted to say, um, I’ve been busy, well, that too. I could have simply written a post that said a somewhere a developer was proposing a shitty, overpriced condo and that Ground Zero is a calcified orgy of ineptitude, but that would have been too easy.