ARCHIVING THE CITY

for the city yet to come

Archive for May, 2010

my duty as an intellectual

Posted on May 31, 2010

“If I’m honest, at least as a philosopher, I [must say] don’t have answers. We intellectuals do not have answers. If you ask me what to do about ecology, bah! What do I know? What we can do is change the very questions. We can show to what extent the very way we approach a problem, which is a very real problem, is part of that problem.” –Slavoj Zizek, on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, New York City, March 2008

walking the night city

Posted on May 30, 2010

The Sudden Walk by Franz Kafka translated by Willa and Edwin Muir When it looks as if you had made up your mind finally to stay at home for the evening, when you have put on your house jacket and sat down after supper with a light on the table to the piece of work or the game that usually precedes your going to bed, when the weather outside is unpleasant so that staying indoors seems natural, and when you have already been sitting quietly at the table for so long that your departure must occasion surprise to everyone, when, besides, the stairs are in darkness and the front door locked, and in spite of all that you have started up in a sudden…

realness, not realism, in urban living

Posted on May 22, 2010

Who needs realism? Luckily, the nature of fashion is anti-realistic and the perfect place to park one’s own understimulated, grey realistic everyday life. This is a place of dreams, a place where almost impossible beauty is created; a place where curiosity, wonderment and fiction thrive–all things that block out the sneaky boredom of mediocrity that threatens to take us down. –Uffe Buchard, DANSK magazine, S/S 2010, editorial note.

chronic new york

Posted on May 2, 2010

To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interleave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something like a grid. –Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (2009)

  

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