July 19, 2010
Remember this music video, in which New York city is imagined as spinning record on a turntable? The Empire State at the center, anchoring the spinning city, the steadiness of the needle’s shadow. Lauryn’s movement is classic New York: a woman on foot in elevated shoes–sometimes it seems/we’ll touch that dream.
The city is accessible just by going out and walking it, all the parts are connected. New York is the spinning record, and sometimes we get scratched.
July 8, 2010
On Monday, June 28th I had a great conversation with Hakan Topal, member of xurban_collective and doctoral student in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, here in New York. Hakan is from Ankara, Turkey, and was an engineer in a former life. He is an artist and a researcher. A research artist?
This conversation reminded me of how important it is to keep speaking with people we admire, who share our struggles with life and work, and who are dedicated to finding creative ways to move in the world.
Here is one part of our conversation, with many more to come.
Hakan asks the first question.
H: So what are you doing this research for? For your thesis? For the magazine? Or both?
A: I got stuck a while ago because I realized I wanted to do something that was not exactly social science, even though I’m in a social science degree program. So that became a problem, right? And then I decided that one way to kind of like loosen up would be to keep a blog about things I like.
H: Right…
A:So I started doing that, and actually it’s been really helpful, because I can just have an idea, or a thought, or see a fashion spread that I like, or whatever, and everything can just go into the blog—
H: Mm hmm
A: I don’t have to think about organizing it into chapters, and stuff—
H: Yes, perfect, yes…
A: And since I’m interested in what I’m calling “archival practice,” which is different than just what we traditionally think of as archival research, the website is actually a good archival practice for me—at least a good way to think of archives, in practice. And now, I’ve come to realize that I can’t really think or read or write outside of blog format anymore…
H: Yeah, wow! [laughs]
A: Yeah I can’t read [academic] JSTOR articles anymore. I can’t read monographs, much less write one. So I started to realize my work has to be about this process—
H: Mm hmm, mm hmm…
A: About how I can’t do it anymore, but I still want to do “it.”
H:Right. [The blog] is forcing you to write something, even though it’s scattered—forcing you to concentrate on bits and pieces.
A: Exactly
H: And once you sit down, you can combine them into something.
A: Yes, that’s the thing: finding the form.
June 24, 2010
–Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, (1999)
But, where does house music begin?
June 23, 2010
What is the difference between a structure and a sculpture? forms we can mold, assemble improvisationally–forms with feeling. I want to make flexible sculptures that can mold into/onto places, that can mold around corners, that can mold into the parts of the city I care about, that can become real in the world in a particular way—that can take the shape of the world.
June 19, 2010
At one time, almost all American TV programs were filmed in midtown New York.
May 2, 2010
A New York night, 1985
May 2, 2010
–Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City (2009)
February 24, 2010
New York, you’re perfect, oh please don’t change a thing!
you let the people see just who you want to be,
and every night you shine just like a superstar
December 21, 2009
In dreams, affects take shape and form and color. affects are drawn into resonance, the seemingly disparate in waking life are crashed or woven together into intricate, shocking, garish, intimate realness.
A key character in dreams, or narratives of dreams, is the setting itself. In my dreams, interior and exteriors blend, neighborhoods in different cities open up to each other, like the impossible geographies of Kafka’s stories.
Yesterday the New York Times published an Iraq war veteran’s dreams and reflections. Here are some important excerpts:
What if it’s not a dream at all? What if I really have the city of Mosul inside of me? Or at least that neighborhood on a sunny morning. Maybe when I go to sleep I’m actually entering a world in which Iraqi mothers search through the landscape of my memory in the vain hope of finding their dead sons. My body a sort of graveyard, a repository of the lost and the dead.
December 15, 2009
4-18-2008: Everything must go!
Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York
