2010-06-05
Do you listen to Last.Fm, Pandora or Slacker?
Here's how I see them: Pandora is the "music genome", thus you get structurally similar songs, Slacker is the "cultural machine", thus, you get songs linked by cultural association. Last.fm, for some reason, feels more European. Maybe they just give really kickass song selections for the more left-of center people like Nathan Fake of minimal tech slants. calm beats, buzzy.
Have you ever heard a new sound nowadays? I wonder, how electronic sounded when it was sounded for the first time. the beeps and the bops: have anyone heard such tonally uniques before them? it feels like the only new sound I hear nowadays is the weird silence when someone turns the airconditioner off in the room and suddenly it goes quiet in a way that still surprises with its stillness.
On the subject of surprises and music, I especially love revisiting this video:
I love how he is in a different space. The movement of this body tells you his music. Its when technology surpasses itself and becomes an extension of his imagination, sharing it with us. He imagines freely, but he couldn't previously ever imagine such sounds without it in the first place. Isn't that what all art is? The need to show a different world, a different kind of being.
today wang was looking at a video for an upcoming game, Deus Ex. I saw upcoming because my immediate response was: "Oh! I played that before! it was pretty fun!"
"When?" he asked.
"Lets see... it was before Archi, so maybe 4 or 5 years ago? oh, and I remember I was playing it when I was hanging with Bruce, so that pushes it back to maybe 6 or 7 years?"
turns out, it was 10 years ago. my oh my.
mos discussion with clovers:
is it neo-gothic? and in doing so, looking backwards.
working with reas = working with artist (not new, traditional)
fresco = what did they contribute? they were telling stories, creating culture. what does this do? if not cultural, then how about spatial at least? where dips go in, does the wall thin out to reveal glimpses of the other side
2010-04-26
2010-04-20
2010-04-09
2010-04-05
2010-04-02
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/emperors-castle.html'
"beautiful, but ultimately frivolous. but maybe thats why its so beautiful, do you think? it has to be useless to be beautiful"
2010-04-01
2010-03-10
Philip Johnson say "I'm a Whore".
DAY 4
7:00 PM: Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent? Are my insecurities the problem? Maybe a bit of artifice is what I need to survive; the make-up that makes the model appealing. Anyway, the punch is good. Time for another round.
7:00 PM: Drinks at Prime Meats, in Brooklyn, with my wife. Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent? Are my insecurities the problem? Maybe a bit of artifice is what I need to survive; the make-up that makes the model appealing. Anyway, the punch is good. Time for another round.
2010-03-09
C: Margaret's always accusing people of weaving "narratives of loss." And she should. Why are people so nostalgic? Sure, there's a laundry list of things that are wrong, and sure, there's never been a bigger need for thoughtful planning. But why does this always translate into some New Urbanist fantasy? Rae's book, despite its own narrative of loss, does one thing remarkably well: it exposes the contingency of early twentieth-century urbanism by showing how a city such as New Haven was a product of world events (inventions, policy prescriptions, demographic trends), that just as easily might not have transpired. Early twentieth-century urbanism was anything but inevitable; take away the conditions (for example, the invention, development and dissemination of steam power), and you wouldn't have had, for example, the density or the heterogeneity that you had in a city like New Haven in 1900.
G: Yeah, Rae provides the best evidence against the New Urbanism that he himself wants to argue for. It's so basic and yet it is ignored by so many people: for something to thrive, it has to have the right conditions. What we all admire about a city such as New Haven in 1900 are things that, today, would require an enormous investment in artificial support mechanisms. The New Urbanist approach is a variant on the Field of Dreams theory: build it and it will happen. But this isn't the case. The conditions don't really exist for the sorts of things they want to grow.
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