un|wrapping paper

Vacant Lots and Ghost Cities

2011-09-22T12:28:00.001-05:00

Anything can be designed and built today. Not that it will be. The cities closet to me— Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, and Detroit— will only occasionally be home to projects that elicit awe. They’ll rarely be featured on the familiar circle of webpages consulted daily by designers and architects tracking the boundaries of what’s possible. The vacant lots that interrupt once busy blocks break apart these cities into fragments, some vibrant and some decaying, but each only a stuttering partial description of a place. Downtown, businesses pressed together in groups create densities belied by the emptiness visible only buildings away. Still vital residential neighborhoods sit well outside of these centers, separated by parking lots and vacant land. The life of the downtown seems to depend on how willing to and where people cross these meandering, empty areas.

Only recently back from my first trip to Kalamazoo, this type of vacancy is particularly on my mind. I found the city to be a troubling collection of beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings besieged by vacancy, modern infrastructure, and neglect. Unintentional and unpredictable empty urban spaces are a defining feature of this city, more so than the late Victorian and Art-Deco buildings that remain. At the perimeter of the city’s central business district, one of Kalamazoo’s best coffee shops is in a small former gas station surrounded by railroads, warehouse buildings, and busy streets. With views in all directions, its more like a building amidst the dunes of Lake Michigan than one near the heart of the city. The dunes are an uncomfortable metaphor for the emptiness that infects American cities, calling to mind the desert sands of North Africa that threaten to bury whole towns. Like the walls built by residents to keep the sand at bay, a fundamental principle of urban planning is that vacancy is to be fought— unrelentingly.

Which makes my discovery of the “ghost cities” of China even more startling. These “ghost cities” are real estate speculation at an unheard of scale. Housing and commercial space for millions, constructed and bought by investors expecting to reap the profits brought by an ever expanding Chinese economy. And promoted by a government determined that national growth meet yearly targets impossible without massive spending on infrastructure. The most dramatic case of this may be seen in the new city of Ordos, a city in Inner Mongolia 25 miles outside of an existing city. Housing and commercial building have been constructed for 1.5 million new occupants and have stood for the past five years largely uninhabited while construction has continued unabated.

Here emptiness takes a very different form than in American cities. It isn’t the open space of the vacant lot or of even the Mongolian steppe that surrounds Ordos. It takes the form of an idealized contemporary city, but responds only to itself. People are absent and there is as of yet no viable plan to bring them to it. Real estate prices are too high and there can be little incentive to be the first resident in a city of 1 million. Meanwhile investors hold onto the property waiting for the interested.

And in the center of the city is the recently finished Ordos Museum. Designed by MAD Architects of Beijing it is their first “realized” project of any real size. A giant shimmering aluminum stone set atop a paved stone terrace the color of the steppe, it has the solidity of a massive cliff but the impermanence of something washed ashore soon to be carried off by the next wave. The building was unveiled to the world not by proud dignitaries, the government, or museum trustees. Rather, the architects themselves made a movie cum advertisement showing off their work to the world. The movie opens with a bearded Mongolian nomad leading his horse across a desert when in the distance he sees the Ordos Museum. Shot after shot show man and horse framed against the metal facade and then indoors at the bottom of deep plaster canyons that slice through the building’s interior.

As the man and horse walk around the building there is never a view of the surrounding “ghost city”. Its skyline is hidden— or possibly even removed digitally. The architect’s work is independent of its actual site, tied instead to the imagined site of a lone building set into the Mongolian desert. It makes for good film, and the empty city is a generic and undesigned mess, but the omission when combined with the deep problems of the empty city makes the architect’s act an incredibly cynical one. The building will secure them future commissions and further launch the careers of what is one of the signature young design firms in China, but this will be done regardless of whether the building or the city of Ordos is ever inhabited. And so we marvel at an empty building. We marvel separately at an empty city, disbelieving that a country of billions has such vast inequity, bureaucracy, and moves at such speed as to create and preserve an uninhabited city.

It’s clear why a young firm like MAD Architects would seize the chance to design a museum for that city, even knowing the likelihood that it might remain empty. The neutrality of its design is likely an acknowledgment that the future of this place is in flux. But to design and then publicize their building entirely separated from its context seems uncritical— and criticism is what’s most needed when faced with a “ghost city.” As it stands, the building is no more useful than the developer-style strip housing that fills block after surrounding block. It’s bold, even accomplished. But it’s emptiness is damning. Despite all the work required to take this museum from rendering to reality, it finally feels no more “real” than the images of unbuilt projects that clutter the websites of young architects all over the world.

Meanwhile existing cities still age; attacked by vacant lots and neglect.

Ugly

2008-01-11T22:13:00.001-05:00

It’s not a useful word, ugly. The word is unattractive enough, an odd collection of letters that manage to be both awkward and diminutive. But there is a certain pleasure to saying it, too— ugly. The pleasure is in the word itself, it’s the selfish enjoyment of judgment and it’s in the sneer that is an almost essential part of contorting our mouths around its letters. We may love beautiful things, but we like even better to call something ugly— the louder the better.

Left behind however in all of this shouting is the thing being described. As forceful as it is, ugly is empty. It’s power is self-contained. It describes nothing. To call something ugly depends upon a listener to understand. It requires an unspoken agreement about what makes something ugly. Or else it requires follow-up. Ugly either depends on nodded assent or else starts an argument. It ends the conversation or else it is just its beginning.

When applied to architecture, ugly assumes and too often gets that consensus— “Concrete is ugly!” For some buildings, like Boston’s City Hall, little more than that is expected to be said. That simple and absolutely empty statement, once voiced, is immediately tied to ideas about the failures of modern architecture, the imposition of monumental public buildings on traditionally-scaled cities, and the reactions to industrialized materials and construction practices. Ugly, here, has got cultural back-up. It’s got subtext, yes, but the assumptions are too heavy for those four letters. It makes me want more words.

Build me a city, but make sure it’s not ugly.

With such consensus, where does this ugliness, then, come from? Is it a perversion to design ugly buildings or to enjoy them? Or is consensus an illusion and ugliness just descriptive of our own need to divide the things we like from those we don’t?

Cold. Hard. Unlike ugly, these words don’t presuppose judgement. They describe. And yet, if the topic is modern architecture. If the topic is concrete, they are said with similar inflection. Ugly. Cold. Hard. To be continued.

City Hall & Boston’s naked modernism

2008-01-11T22:11:00.000-05:00

City Hall, Boston’s aging rock star of 1960’s modernism, has been getting a lot of attention recently. In 2005 ArchitectureBoston, the Boston Society of Architecture’s bi-monthly magazine, published an issue on the history and current state of the building. They followed it last year with an issue dedicated to proposals by young area architects for its transformation.

Architects paying attention to a favorite building isn’t surprising. Mayor Tom Menino’s decision, however, that the city should relocate its operations to South Boston and put the building up for sale is surprising. Passing over the very strange decision to advocate the city government leaving the city’s center, Menino’s argument for a waterfront view in South Boston stands primarily on his criticisms of the architecture of the current city building.

David Boeri, host of WBUR’s Radio Boston, used Menino’s announcement to put together an hour long radio treatment of the building which brought together familar arguments about the character of modern architecture, traditional public place-making, and the need to preserve modern buildings for their historical role in shaping contemporary culture.

What interested me more than the intentionally opposed arguments of paneled experts were the interviews with people on the street, office workers, and government officials. Of the exposed concrete finish and its massive cantilevered forms, certain phrases were repeated. The building is ugly. Concrete is cold. It is hard. Ugly. Cold. Hard. These are the words that hang over architecture today, together a shroud too small for the thing it’s trying to cover.

Ugly. Cold. Hard. Dealing with these words seems necessary for any architect hoping to hold onto his own love for designs that elicit each of these. And for the architect whose buildings will likely be accused of one or all. So, a post for each. Ugly. Cold. Hard. Let’s begin.

Bearing Walls

2007-12-30T20:37:00.000-05:00

"Something there is that doesn’t like a wall". Frost stands on the side of nature. His provincial farmer is shown to be close-minded and dull in comparison to the poet. For the buildings that linger in American cities from the mid 1960’s I sense a similar antagonism— though curiously inverted. The poem I want to write for these monstrous and beautiful buildings is also such a wall, a declaration of taste and priorities that separates me from those who dislike, strongly, their concrete walls.

Philip Nobel swung at these walls in a 1999 essay in Metropolis. [Yes, this post hardly seems current, but my interest is.] His article is presumably an essay illustrating several case studies of midwestern (important to contrast them with the furiously arrogant coasts) architects designing service buildings for those suffering from Alzheimer's. He hopes to investigate architecture’s ability to heal, in particular, and the legitimacy of the architect’s interest in positively impacting the lives of others. These questions are far too large for the few designs he mentions. And really they are mentioned only as an afterthought to his real interest— pages of invective against Paul Rudolph’s 1960's design for the Boston Government Services building. He writes with an anger disproportionate to his subject. The claims come fast and hard. The building makes sick people sicker (the building is disorienting to those with mental illnesses who seek social services there). Then, harder. The building kills people (a tragic self-immolation took place in the building’s chapel). Finally, buildings like it killed the architect (a weak shot at Rudolph’s death from cancer associated with asbestos). He writes to tear down walls based more on ideology than on their material.

Nobel tries to give Rudolph a perverse theory of psychology that would make him culpable if not consciously responsible for the buildings supposed failings. But his quotes from the architects writings and lectures are no different than those of any other late-Modernist who made sculptural works that reached towards art. Really, Nobel hates the building. And he isn’t alone. His article has been picked up by various bloggers and conversation threads about architecture, those eager to explain— contain— the very strange building in the midst of their city. Something there is that doesn’t like a wall.

But I do like these walls. I like their strangeness. I resist the idea that the textured concrete of their surface is threatening because it is rough to the touch. I’m energized by the landscape this building creates. It’s a building I want to share. I bring friends to its open plazas and grand stairs so that they will be populated— these incredible spaces that are too often empty. My urge to inhabit these spaces is intense and it is this primitive feeling that makes me so certain of the power of these walls. There is real poetry to be written about this place— both its genius and its tragic failings. I’m trying to figure out how to do that.

2007-12-18T00:14:00.000-05:00

You don't expect to step off of the T and find yourself in a movie. Not that there was one this evening, but there was something in the air. Smoke, actually. The platform was filled with the light gray of engine smoke. Hundreds of feet along the platform, light was refracted through thicker air. It was smog. The air was polluted and were I to see it every day I would be broken down by it. But to see it once this evening, it was magical.

It didn't cause worry. When smoke should scare me I feel like I will know. It took a station I've been to every week for years and made it new. I walked up the escalator and into the concourse hall and saw how the smoky atmosphere had drifted upwards and reached even the top
of the barrel vaulted space. I saw rays of light and colors that looked vibrant against the sparkling gray atmosphere. I saw why movies look so good and so different from the every day, the artifice behind the magic. Somehow the dirt and grunge of the evening commute had caused something festive. I like that I found my version of the Christmas holiday in the accidental stage set of a Boston train station.

And somehow great and disappointing that when I asked a cop what was going on he just shook his head and said it happens, plenty of times. I smiled, shook my head and walked into the night.

Shrinking City

2007-10-27T20:22:00.000-05:00

Boston’s a small city. It’s even smaller when the skyline turns into a set of stacked alphabet blocks. Spelling out a shared feeling here. Go Sox. The buildings will look tall again in another few days, but for now Red Sox nation’s playing baseball.

Thinking with my hands

2007-10-27T13:19:00.000-05:00

I’ve been tempted several times to write here about the idea of a virtual world. I’ve imagined that the Sims or Second Life are more than games. Our world is full and they are providing new digital frontiers and the freedom that comes with them. These online communities offer opportunities for the adventurous to build rooms, houses, cities— even characters and identities for themselves. Spaces open up online and relieve some of the stress of physical and social constraints that surround us.

Still, I have never actually entered this world. I’ve been tempted intellectually by the idea, but not the reality. There is something about creating a virtual world in the image of the one we live in that continues to leave me unimpressed. It’s too literal and seems almost unnecessary. Yes, the rapid rise of these worlds amazes me. Commerce, entertainment, communication, relationships all occur now in these digital spaces. But, I can’t help but wonder if the appeal of an alternate digital world comes at the cost of diminishing our own. The depth and success of the simulated world can be measured best by one’s own detachment from this one.

I’m not interested in predicting the path of Second Life or how much of our time we will spend in digital worlds as they become more established and further linked to people and products in this one. I’d rather try to get at what about this vision of the internet feels limited to me and whether there are others that push further.

Though imperfect and dated, the first time I opened Google Earth I felt like I had been given a gift— in this case a colorful ball that I could toss and spin and whose scale was slippery. It was all encompassing at one moment and intimate at another. I loved it how it could be grabbed with the mouse and rotated and how it would spin just past where you let it go, suggesting physical laws mirroring those in this world. It enforced the idea that its interface needed not to be seen as a screen. It could be a ball. It was a continuous and smooth surface. Not something distant to be controlled by clicking on arrows or by remote control, but an object apparently close and able to be directly affected by the movement of my hands on the mouse.

As infants we learn how we can with our hands and voice make an impact on the world around us. Materials give at our touch if they are soft, press back if they are hard. A flame feels hot and yet can be extinguished with a breath. I need to use childlike imagery to describe my experience with Google Earth and I think its the this quality of regression that marks the sophistication of the program and my hopes for digital technology.

There is a scene in Spielberg’s Minority Report in which the police officer played by Tom Cruise stands in front of a glass screen and thinks with his hands, grabbing information, sorting through it, repositioning it. His eyes move as quickly as his hands. He’s searching for something and the balance of command and uncertainty is masterful. It was mesmerizing even as it was really a superfluous moment in the movie. More a physical retelling of the Sorcerer's Apprentice than a vision of the dystopian future. But the attraction of this theme is worth paying attention to— and the Youtube videos that pair scenes from Minority report and advances in computer interfaces suggest that many are. I’m attuned to the the idea that we can use our bodies to aid our minds in understanding the world. Finding ways of organizing and using the information available to us is, maybe, an extended infancy— one we are only beginning to get used to.

The idea that thinking is something that could be given a shape, and that we could someday “think with our hands” as easily as we now talk with them, is rich. The potential of the internet and its ultimate integration into daily life seem to be here more about illustrating the extent of our own inner life than in creating ever expanding virtual simulacra of the world outside.

(Note: I’ve used Google Earth for years now and really wanted this post to be a lead-in to an amazing product from Microsoft call Photosynth, but the post veered in another direction. I’ll come back to it.)

Architecture and The Sleep of Reason

2007-10-14T13:49:00.000-05:00

I expect that mine won’t be the only architecture blog to talk about Eyal Weizman’s new book, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. This book more than any other I have recently come across argues that at the intersection of culture, politics, and violence lies architecture. And that is a seductive idea for anyone working in a field that too often feels headed for cultural irrelevancy.

Weizman sees architectural practice and theory at the roots of the conflict, informing specific strategies implemented by individuals, groups, and institutions over the past forty years, and grounding the rhetoric used to frame the extents and nature of the occupation. Proposed solutions to the conflict even turn to a redesign of the disputed territory, offering an architectural solution when none can be found in politics, economics, or diplomacy. Individual chapters of the book cover aspects of Weizman’s research into each of these, but perhaps more than his journalism it is the illustrations he uses in the book that may be what make it so provocative— particularly to designers.

Among site photos, film stills, charts and many, many maps, Weizman includes collages he has made of the occupied territories juxtaposing existing Israeli and Palestinian settlements with the proposed infrastructural projects intended to keep them apart. Described as “vertical partitioning,” these projects are proposed solutions to the re-division of space claimed by both states. Their sweeping—massive bridges, tunnels, and walls— carve up a single continuous landscape into independently occupied and controlled territories. These proposals apply bold Modernist planning to a post-modern or post-structuralist conception of space and the result is dizzying, both formally and intellectually. It is also exciting. Forty years of settlement, violence, and politics have produced a spatial landscape so complicated that even a familiar vocabulary of highway infrastructure and concrete barriers becomes fantastic and strange when manipulated to address the political and cultural landscape of the conflict. Their literal function— connecting parts of the territories while separating others— is subsumed by their appearance as a snapshot of contemporary Israel. As such they feel more like the projects of an architectural studio, students’ projects whose success is gauged by their ability to use a vocabulary of building to address ideas of identity, culture, and power.

But Weizman seems wary of letting his illustrations leave the world for the shelter of the studio, for the isolation of architectural theory and debate. The collages he includes are not his solutions. Though trained as an architect, he uses his graphic abilities to serve his research into areas as disparate as military maneuvers, settlement patterns, and international law. He represents architectural interventions upon the occupied landscape as white voids superimposed over photographic montages of the landscape. The addition of architecture is depicted as an absence. It’s an attractive solution to representing something that exists for the moment only as an idea, but its graphics are loaded. Their snaking white forms cut out of the landscape are appealing. In an arid desert landscape, the interventions are a dominant feature and their clarity reads in contrast to the the accreted patterns of settlement and their complicated relationship to topography and to each other. They not only illustrate, but organize, the political and cultural factors not apparent in a photograph. The architect’s, and my own, undeniable attraction to designs that introduce visual and functional order onto a site, I’m reminded of a prophetic image warning against the seduction of clarity. Critiquing darker side of Enlightenment thought, Francisco Goya warned in an eighteenth century print that “the sleep of reason produces monsters”. The collages contained in Hollow Land make me question whether I am looking at a well-intentioned attempt to produce a functional solution to an intractable problem or a sanitized version of the cloud of nightmare creatures lurking just beyond such a rational approach.

Weizman suggests that in the face of political and cultural injustice, the professional may have to transform his or her practice to adequately address the situation. Borrowing strategies and language from Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and founding member Rony Brauman, Weizman ends his book urging that architects’ roles in the Middle East conflict may be primarily to “bear witness” to events and practices there. It is a step away from the sweeping architectural proposal and the idea that a solution to the conflict might have an identifiable shape. While attempting to offer humanitarian support, whether providing shelter for those without it or providing visual representations of diplomatic proposals, designers can use their skills to introduce a narrative of the ways in which architecture and planning are used as weapons. Architecture is a weapon with pervasive but less immediately recognizable effects on international conflicts. In Hollow Land, Weizman offers a testimony to the particular ways in which the Israeli occupation has used this particular weapon. Ultimately this is not a book for architects. I was heartened to see that the Harvard Bookstore (where I found the book) it was not shelved with books on architecture but with books on the Middle East. As a testimony to strategies of occupation, this book will hopefully be read by those mediating the peace process and the determination of the shape and relationships between Israel and Palestine.

Looking for Architecture on Slickr

2006-10-13T20:03:00.000-05:00

Architecture wanders. It’s got legs and though we don’t live among a landscape dotted with moving cities, it’s still notoriously hard to pin down. Part of the problem is that we talk about buildings, not to mention architects and Architecture, with relative ease—even and maybe especially when we know nothing of the places from which they come. We’re surrounded by buildings, but architecture is more likely to found in books, the places architecture can get closest to its own ideals. So the liveliest buildings live almost as comfortably on paper as they do rooted to the ground. And those of us interested in architecture compare buildings in northern Europe to those in New York, swerving steel forms rising above docklands to cantilevered concrete set amidst a sea of parking. The comparisons aren’t so casual; they’re tied to the extensive hagiography of the architects and to the classifications of style, materials, and building technologies. On the page buildings are involuntary participating in someone else’s arguments about them. Exciting buildings today look like this says one article. Architecture looks like this says another. But a little screensaver application I found recently has got me wondering if it hasn’t side-stepped the most judgmental parts of my own field to get at the good stuff underneath. Slickr, an add-on to the popular photo sharing site Flickr.com, streams a series of downloaded images selected according to “tags”, or search terms of your choosing. Type in architecture and you get all those images that someone felt compelled to label that wy. The algorithm doesn’t ask for a reason, and doesn’t judge quality. It’s wonderfully removed from five hundred years of academic wrangling. A construction site in Beijing is followed by a plantation era mansion. Time, location and style melt smoothly into each other, assisted by the soft fades and slow zooming motions across each of the images.

What I like best about Slickr is what it finds its way free from and the patterns and behaviors that still manage to emerge as I keep watching the stream of images. The screensaver provides a snapshot of architecture today. Each image is part of a story but one only accessible in parts. Watching them, I can't help but give the stream of images associations better rooted to places I've visited. I imagine myself sifting through a street seller's boxes. Not post cards—these images are more personal—but family snapshots of unfamiliar relatives and family celebrations that aren't quite like my own. Funny, now, to be caught in New York and in Paris, imagining a street scene only as a context to try to explain the impact of these images.

But thinking of my own vacations and the wandering I've done trying to wander towards architecture feels about right, because the photos on Slickr are snapshots. They're memories of places visited by others. They're buildings people traveled to see. And it's here that I sense culture creeping back in. The pictures on Slickr are often of monuments and they are in places introduced by guide books, magazine articles, and travel programs. What someone takes the time to visit, take a picture of, and categorize as "Architecture" has most likely already been labeled that way by someone else. So Slicrk doesn't really escape the categorization of architecture; it just manages to acknowledge how many different voices are out there trying to make themselves heard.

But still, I like that Slickr presents only the evidence and not the argument of those decisions. I can imagine but not really know which art history classes individual photographers might have sat through. Which of the documentaries on major architects someone might have seen. And which magazines, books, even songs someone listens to while travelling. All I can really tell is that each picture is something that someone thought interesting enough to try to remember and something close enough to their own idea of architecture to give it that name. The lack of certainty feels right. Slickr's a collection by a collector more interested in the objects she has found than in the organization of her collection. The collecting is fun. The objects are what's important, and Slickr gets at the joy of being in the world and seeing something surprising. It's why I would take a picture, or draw a sketch, or write down a note about what I had seen. But, I think, it's also why I would build—to add something for someone else to see, touch, and move around in. To be a part of something that might find its way into the collections of someone new.

Reading Boston

2006-07-09T00:04:00.000-05:00

When I moved to Boston three years I told myself that this city was a place to learn about old buildings and old building traditions. Beyond the general feeling of approval or disappointment I have when in a classical building, I feel I lack the vocabulary necessary to really speak about a building whose success lies most in its subtle use of languages I don’t speak, or speak only haltingly and with effort.

H.H. Richardson’s Crane Memorial Library in Quincy has been a place I have intended to visit since first reading of it several years ago. I’ve even been there by chance on a bike ride with friends, but a temporary closure kept me on its outside, enjoying the stone and unable to see its rich wood interior. Today’s warm weather got me on my bike and there again.

Today I spent an hour or so inside, the building meticulously restored and used as the library’s magazine reading room—a surprisingly quiet part of the library on a Saturday afternoon. I drew the plan, understood its organization and found patterns in the wooden ornament.

Being in the library felt like an exercise for me. I wasn’t moved by the space, but appreciated its craftsmanship. I felt able to understand some of Richardson’s decisions. I’m still wondering about others, wondering which ones fall comfortably within the range of accepted gothic revival designs and which ones show Richardson heading somewhere different. I can’t help but look for abstraction and am drawn to the library’s stranger moments for this reason: it’s understated and off-center entrance; the informally asymmetrical roofline that brings light into the building from different heights on its different sides. I look at classical buildings as a critic without his glasses: I’m able to appreciate the structure and forms of the building, but cant’ really see its details—at least not with the appreciative eye that I would like someday to develop. It’s hard not to be awed by the detail, cowed by the knowledge that were I asked to design a wooden stair railing or column, I would not have access to this tradition.

Still, even seeing this building with foggy modern eyes, I can see that it is more interesting than the city today. Boston may have been, must have been, at it’s most vibrant and exciting at the turn of the century. A brief period of wonderful, heroic, exploration into concrete blew apart pieces of the city and introduced a rough scale to its streets. They provide a contrast that I love, but are already too far from the present. Middle children who live in the shadow of the city’s historic core—talented, awkward, and showy in a city that doesn’t quite know what to make of them. And we keep building. But we haven’t said anything really interesting. There’s so little that can speak to either Boston’s history or its iconoclasm (the city’s concrete megastructures are the companions to the giant infrastructural projects that have always kept Boston a construction site).

And yet I think there may be interesting stories being told about this city. There are the string of artists that come through Cambridge, often affiliated with MIT, that combine art and urbanism. There’s an exhibition in Cambridge that I’m looking forward to seeing(Urban Networks at Art Interactive in Central Square). An art organization in the Fort Point Channel has built itself a home surrounded by highways and unoccupied loft buildings. I’ve only passed it at night, and I think its time to see what’s happening inside. It may be here rather than the towers rising Downtown or in the Greenway that may someday wrap through the city, that the most interesting stories about the city are being created.

The Circus and the Public Square

2006-04-04T22:25:00.000-05:00

Someone at a desk somewhere had an idea. An almost brilliant idea.

There are a handful of nomadic circuses that still carry their tents with them, celebrating the size and intimacy of the tent in an age accustomed to the scale of the arena. And there are very few places in the modern city where you can really erect a large tent-- most of them parking lots.

And then there's City Hall Plaza, the blank and anonymous space that was presumed to be just the kind of public gathering space needed for a city that does not gather. City Hall leans over it all, its inverted floors trying to anchor the place through a gesture even its muscular concrete can't support.

In this sad, city center someone thought to erect a tent. Something ephemeral, colorful, and whimsical. The idea makes me smile-- that something so light might be just the thing to bring the plaza to life.

So I was disappointed to skirt the chain link fences, truck generators, and plastic tarps to capture views of the tent up against City Hall. There is so much stuff that comes with the circus, it's baggage, that the big, blue tent shrank into the background. There were no signs of animals, adding to the sterility of circus. There were no rewards for the curious. There wasn't the trunk of an elephant sliding around a corner or even a half-dressed clown. There were no sounds at all beyond the constant traffic along Cambridge Street.

That it was all handled so badly, a temporary real estate deal made between the mayor's office and circus administrators, brings out my cynicism-- enhanced by today's gray weather and biting wind. Boston's major public space, even an unsuccessful one, was given away so that money might be made. And not enough was given in return. And somehow, I do think that had just a little bit of design attention been paid to the placement of the tent, something really wonderful might have happened. The circus would be in the center of the city. It could look like more than a construction site-- something already too familiar in Boston-- and like something truly surprising. This evening in Back Bay I saw that cherry trees were blooming, and that tiny bit of color, so unexpected, cracked me awake. It's that kind of surprise I think we should look for, and maybe, even demand. I wish the mayor might be expected to stun the city by filling the void in front of his office at least once each term. The circus should be in the center of the city. It's just not there yet.

And Einstein wore khakis.

2006-04-02T12:09:00.000-05:00

A little red Ford (on sweet loan for two weeks) took me past my usual borders to the Chestnut Hill Mall and to the Apple Store last night. I had registered online for an appointment with a "genius" and at the store there were two, no three-- recognizable because their intellect was embroidered in small letters on the front of their T-shirts. There was also an irate woman demanding an answer from a hapless teenage employee to the question, "Why does Apple make such lousy, unreliable products?!" Her two young boys looked embarrassed. The rest of us stroked our broken iPods and whispered to them not to listen to such cruel, and so clearly foundationless words.

Oddly amidst the waiting and the drawn faces of people in line for help with their machines, I left the store an hour later happy. A man who looked not unlike Albert Einstein-- making me wonder if he has cultivated the look since starting work with Apple or whether if Einstein had lived today he would have found himself relegated to a job in customer service-- told me cheerily that the iPod was still under warranty and that they were going to send me out of the store with a brand new machine. For the price of a few CD's.

It's freshly charged, I started the day by discovering parts of Boston's urban shoreline I hadn't seen, and I'm about to go bring two cats home to my apartment for a two-week visit. It's a good day.

Music is My Boyfriend

2006-04-01T16:04:00.000-05:00

Nick Hornby has escaped and is running rough-shod through my head.

His endearingly dysfunctional characters aren’t staying on the pages of his books—they’re starting to make sense to me. I’ve lived in Chicago and as easily as “Hi-Fidelity” made the transatlantic flight, I should be more prepared to find that its idiosyncratic hero has taken up residence with me in Boston. I’m feeling like John Cusack, and from here it’s only a short stumble before I find myself with a boombox and a Peter Gabriel tune. Funny that it’s the boombox I’d have more trouble getting my hands on.

All to say that I’ve lived the past week through pop songs. The reasons are complicated, some personal. I’m feeling emotionally raw. The songs I’m playing – over and over again—are soothing but I’m reminded of this sadistic metaphor: the frog in the pot of water that happily swims as the heat is intensified until only dinner remains. The spice of Calexico’s “Feast of Wire” has flavored the long work hours that have been mine this week. But their mix of horns and blues guitars could just be preparing me for the meat fork that will be the only announcement that “I am DONE.”

And then fate intervened. My iPod showed me the frowny face of death—a cheekiness that until you have seen it its radical inappropriateness cannot be understood. The glib dismissal of a $300 investment is minor. A frowning iPod icon does not begin to address the silence that follows. I’d say my heart feels like it is wrapped in a blanket, so accustomed have I gotten in the past few days to using my iPod as a stylish white and chrome pacemaker.

I’m going to see a Genius at the Apple store in a few hours. I understand what he will say. I remember the night it crashed. It was midnight, I was downloading music from iTunes. I heard a chirping and honestly believed it was a songbird with a radically upset biological clock. I thought it was sweet. “Birds singing at midnight must mean that spring is on its way!” Only after five minutes or so did I realize that the hard drive on my iPod was chirping. Chirping. Hard Drives don’t make noises. Some things aren’t meant to make noises. My cat slaughtered a den of baby rabbits when I was a child. Baby rabbits being skinned and left on my history textbook are one thing no one should have to hear. One’s hard drive is another.

(To A—I hope you are reading this, home and recovering, and that reading updated blogs from friends speeds you along. You’ve my thoughts.)

Books

2005-05-07T08:06:00.000-05:00

Courtesy of the orangegirl:

1 Total number of books in your house:

I own two bookshelves and they’re set at opposite ends my apartment. One is filled with books on architecture and holds a corner of my bedroom (250 books). The other has a bit of everything else and is on public view in my living room (100 books). So only those closest to me see the schizophrenically lopsided weight of my collection. Then there are the Japanese books under my bed, naughty books on a shelf nearby, cookbooks in the kitchen, and general and software reference books on my desk.

2 The last book you bought was:

McSweeney’s, no. 8. Since coming to Boston I’ve browsed the Harvard Bookstore each year on Patriot’s Day and then read my selection while watching the Marathon in some suburb west of Boston. Last year it was Narcissus and Goldmund (my least favorite of Hesse’s work).

3 The last book you finished was:

McSweeney’s, no. 8.
Or to be digital, even more recently I listened to Sarah Vowell’s Partly Cloudy Patriot as an MP3 after hearing her speak at the Ford Forum at Northeastern last month. Thanks to orangegirl for arguing its merits . Other recent reads include Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, McSweeney’s no. 14, The War of the End of the World. The last is a slow but engrossing story of a group of religious zealots and revolutionaries who tried to establish a City of God in northern Brazil at the turn of the century.

And a more interesting question is really the books that you have not finished but keep returning to: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, The Details of Modern Architecture (Volume 1 and 2), Don Quixote.

4 Five books you often read or that mean a lot to you:

I never have easy answers to the “favorite” questions. When I finish this post I will have remembered ten more books that meant something to me but remained just out of reach while writing this. But here’s an attempt:
Remembrance of Things Past battles with The Satanic Verses as having the most captivating openings of anything I’ve read (A description of falling asleep in one and an introduction to the central characters as they plummet through the sky in the other).
Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. It’s a fable about New York City, love, redemption. I have a soft spot for the romantic and the fantastic and this book is both while also being the most exaggeratingly virtuosic display of language I’ve read. I fell in love with this book and its author, though my ardor has cooled since learning Helprin was a speech writer for Bob Dole. If his philosophy is examined too closely its morals are beautiful but untenable and cruel.
Not unlike that of Ayn Rand. As a young man I loved Atlas Shrugged—as a great story rather than ideological text. I plowed through its nine hundred pages with gusto (and yes, I have read but will not comment on The Fountainhead).

And since most of my book are on architecture, here are books that I think are incredible and which I hope might also appeal to non-architects:
Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas is storytelling at its best. He uncovers a New York that surprises but makes so much sense.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino might inspire architecture if only through its faith that metaphor can be captured in stone. (I loaned my copy of this book to a woman I met online and with whom I was briefly but intensely infatuated. She read the book, dropped me, and proceeded to add Invisible Cities to her list of favorite books on her personals profile. That and the fact that I never got the book back still hurts.)
Architecture and Disjunction by Bernard Tschumi. It has the recommendation that we might look for opportunities to “pole vault in cathedrals”. Not simply an advocation for the reuse of buildings in interesting ways, but an image with such humor and hope about architecture and cities. It is something I want to see someday.

5 Who you're going to pass this along to and why:

I don’t follow many blogs, but I’ll answer this as as I do some research.
Yes, I'll send this to Katharine as a bit of energy for her blog. Visit her blog, there are words and poetry there.

Reminder

2005-04-21T21:32:00.000-05:00

I'm putting this here after listening to Sarah Vowell's "Partly Cloudly Patriot" essay on Clinton's Presidential Library. I thought of this speech and felt like I wanted to have its text. Yes, it's online in many places, but I feel better knowing it's here. Maybe I'll try to express just how much these words meant to me. But for now, if you find this, think about what it means to look up to thought, complexity, and hope.

____________________________________________________________

Clinton's Yale Speech about the Shadow Side of Globalization

October 6, 2001

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Mr. President, thank you for that wonderful introduction. And thank you for coming out in such large numbers today at such an important time for Yale and the United States. I would like to thank the mayor of New Haven, John DeStefano, for being here, and my great friend and former colleague, your Member of Congress, Rosa DeLauro. Thank you, Rosa, for being here. I have two other friends, who like me are no longer in public office, but each in their own way, they made a great difference to what we were able to do. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor of Baltimore. My great partner, Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico. And thank you for being here.

I also have seen already today a lot of people who are members of our administration. There are five or six of them out there, and so I appreciate Yale giving us a pretext for holding a Clinton alumni meeting here today.

I was privileged to study here for exactly one percent of Yale's three hundred years. I love the law school. I love my professors, and have stayed in touch with many of them over all of these long years. One of them I was able to put on the Court of Appeals. One of them I tried to torment in class with disagreements and he lived to torment me my constitutional law professor, Robert Bork. And we had a great set of debates 30 years ago. Now that I replay them in my mind, they seem fresh today.

I was fortunate enough to be here at Yale law school with a phenomenal number of outstanding men and women who were my fellow students. One of them did become the United States senator from New York . Senator Schumer went to Harvard.

Meeting Hillary was the best thing that happened to me at Yale, and maybe the only thing that really stuck over all of these 30 years. I understand there was some discussion here in the Yale community about whether this Tercentennial should go forward in the aftermath of the awful events of September the 11th. I thank you for going forward. It is what President Bush asked us to do when he asked to us get on with our lives, and it is particularly important at this time.

Marking three hundred years of learning at any time would be a significant event. But marking it at this time, with a commitment to be a truly global university, is obviously profoundly important. For three hundred years, beginning three quarters of a century before the Declaration of Independence, Yale has taught young people the wisdom of the past, the analysis of the present and the importance of looking to the future. Yale has asked hard questions and looked for honest answers. That is what I found here 30 years ago, and that is what I see when I look out on this vast array of faces today.

America is full of hard questions now. I have spent a great deal of the last three weeks in Manhattan, visiting the crisis center, visiting ground zero, visiting fire stations and police headquarters, going to three schools two of them double schools because the children were blown out of their schools by the events of September the 11th. And I have found so many questions. Hillary and I went to an elementary school in lower Manhattan, where nine and ten-year old students asked me these questions: "Why do they hate us so much anyway?" "How did that guy get all those people to commit suicide?" I never thought I would hear a nine year old ask a question like that.

The other day, I had a conversation with Mack McLarty, who was my first chief of staff and my oldest friend. We go back to the time when we were three and four years old. We were talking about the events of September the 11th. We had a conversation I had bet that thousands and thousands of Americans our age have had in the last three weeks. I said, "Mack, if we had been on that plane over Pennsylvania, do you think we would have had the guts to take it down?" He said, "I think so, and I hope so."

I have gotten calls from women friends of Hillary's and mine, who are the mothers of young children, from all over America with a simple question: "Bill, is it going to be all right? Tell me it's going to be all right."

Well, first of all, it's going to be all right. I can tell you that.

Terrorism the killing of innocent people for political or religious or economic reasons is as old as organized combat. It's been around a very long time. If we searchingly look through history, honestly, we find it in uncomfortable places. In the crusade, in which the European Christians seized Jerusalem, they burned a mosque, slaughtered three hundred Jews and killed every mother and child on the templemount who was a Muslim. But no campaign of terror standing on it's own without organized military combat has ever succeeded in all of human history. Indeed, it is not the purpose of terror to succeed militarily. It is the purpose of terror to terrify, and I would guess that a lot of young people in this audience today who have never lived through such a difficult crisis were understandably terrified. And what is sought from the terror is the people who are afraid.

First of all, in a vast and diverse country like ours you see, we have got people here from just about every country, every racial and ethnic group and every religious heritage. What is sought is, first of all, to make us afraid of each other. And secondly, to make us afraid of the future. We are afraid to plan; afraid to invest, afraid to trust that is what they seek. Therefore, terrorism cannot prevail unless we cooperate. It is not a military strategy, it is a psychological and human one. We have to give the people that attacked us permission to win, and I do not believe we are about to grant them that permission.

Mr. Bin Laden and his allies misjudge America. They think we are, fundamentally, a weak, greedy, selfish, materialistic people. They think we are weakened by our lack of a national religion and imposed social order. But, they are wrong. All Americans have been proud in these last days of the performance of our leaders, from the president, to the governor, to the mayor of New York, yes, to the senators. I am very proud of my wife and her colleagues, and the House and the Senate, but especially the people.

Hillary and I went to a Rosh HaShonah service the other night in our own little village of Chappaqua, where we lost a person out of the temple on September the 11th. And I met one of the two men there who escaped from the 84th floor of the World Trade Center carrying a disabled woman all the way to safety. When I went into the family crisis center the first day, a man came up to me and said to me: "Why Mr. President, I haven't seen you since Oklahoma City." And I said, "How did I see you there?" He said, "You came to console me. My wife was blown up in the bombing of Oklahoma City and I had no one to talk to. So when I saw that this happened, I went in to my job and I told my boss I was taking two weeks off, and I got in my car and I drove here, and I sit here all day, every day talking to people. I had no one to talk to and I thought I might be of help."

I have visited many of the firemen. The fire department is a marvelous organization in the modern world. It's more like a medieval army, where instead of sitting behind and issuing orders, the leaders lead. And so in our fire department, we lost the chief, his three top aides, the chaplain and some 200 other officers three hundred and forty killed necessitating over two hundred promotions, because no one took a backseat when it came to sacrifice. I think those who believed that we would be weakened by this have misjudged us. All over America, there has been a tremendous outpouring of caring over six hundred million dollars given by Americans. everything from a dollar to a million. I thank the workers and the people at Yale for the work you did, for those who have lost loved ones or feared they had, in caring for them here. We are going to be all right.

Still, we must realize that we have a formidable adversary and a difficult challenge. Partly, because in every conflict throughout human history, defense lags offense by a little bit, and we got caught not being caught up. This has always happened. But so far, the human race is still around because self preservation and decency catches up and triumphs. Nevertheless, I think we have to take this seriously and see it for exactly what it is I believe we are engaged in the first great struggle for the soul of the twenty-first century. We must understand terrorism in the context of the modern world, and we must ask ourselves what we have to do, not only to prevent terrorism and protect ourselves, but to undermine the conditions and attitudes that bring to the terrorists' banner their foot soldiers and sympathizers.

If I had asked you on September the tenth, the following question, what would your answer be? What is the dominant trait of the world in the early twenty-first century? If you are an optimistic person, it seems to me you might have given one of four answers. You might have said, "Well, it's the globalization of the economy and culture that has lifted more people out of poverty in the last twenty years than any time in all history and brought America unparalleled wealth and opportunities, including the opportunity for first immigrants from all over the world."

Or you might have said, if you are a "techie," "It is the information technology revolution."

When I became president in January of 1993, there were fifty sites on the World Wide Web.When I left office, there were three hundred and fifty million. There was never anything like it in the history of communications.

Or you might have said, if you were a scientist, "It's the evolution in the sciences." We're going to find out what's in the black holes in outer space. Last year, we found two new species of life, in two previously unexplored rivers. The human genome has been sequenced and soon women will bring home babies from the hospital with little gene cards saying, "Here are the kid's problems and the kid's strengths." And very soon, babies born in America and any country with a good health system will have a life expectancy in excess of ninety years. We have scientists working on digital chips to replicate the nerve functions of damaged nerves in the spinal cord, and raising the prospect that what a chip might do for a spine is like what a pacemaker might do for the heart. And people thought permanently paralyzed might get up and walk, and all of this is truly amazing.

Or if you are a political scientist, you might say the dominant trait of this period is the explosion of democracy around the world and diversity at home. Just for the last three years, for the first time in human history, more than half the world lives under governments of their own choosing. It has never happened before. And in our country and indeed in most other countries with a strong economy, there is an absolute explosion of diversity. America is a lot more interesting place than it was 30 years ago. If we had this meeting thirty years ago, you wouldn't look like you do. And it's a lot more fun to be here, and a lot more educational and a lot more exciting because of that.

It seems to me if you are optimistic, on September the 10th, when I said "what is the dominant strength of the twenty first century world," you could have given one of those four answers: The global economy; information technology; the explosion of democracy around the world and diversity; and the scientific evolution.

On the other hand, if you are a little more pessimistic, or if you are what Hillary refers to in our family, as her being the "designated worrier," you might have mentioned four negative things. You might have said all those positive things are just fine, but the environmental crisis facing us is so great that they all threaten to engulf all the progress and let it go away. Nine of the hottest years ever recorded occurred in the last 12. If the climate warms at the same rate in the next fifty years, as it has in the last ten, we will lose fifty feet of Manhattan Island, the Pacific island nations, and the Florida everglades that I worked so hard to protect. Agriculture will be disrupted all over the world and millions and millions of food refugees will be created and there will be a lot more violence out there. There is a terrible water shortage in the world already, and one in four people on the globe never gets a clean glass of water. There is a serious deterioration in the quality of our oceans which are responsible for so much of our oxygen And you could say it doesn't look to me like there is much going on about this, and if we don't reverse these, we will be having terrible problems.

Or you could say, "No, no, before that happens, we will be engulfed by health crises, the breakdown of health systems all over the world." This year, one in four people in the world will die of AIDS, TB, malaria or infections related to diarrhea. Thirty-six million people will have AIDS. Within five years, a hundred million will. The fastest growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe's back door, and in the Caribbean on our front door, and in India, the world's greatest democracy. And China just admitted they have twice as many AIDS cases as they had previously thought. And only four percent of the adults know how the disease is contracted and spread. You could say, when we have a hundred million AIDS cases, it will collapse a lot of these democracies, and it is a recipe for total turmoil and violence.

Or you could say, "No, the real problem is the flip side of globalization." Half the world's people aren't a part of it. It is true that more people have been lifted out of poverty by globalization in the last twenty years than ever before. It is also true that half the people in the world still live on less than two dollars a day, that a billion of our people still live on less than a dollar a day. Think about it the next time you buy a cup of coffee: A billion go to bed hungry every night. One woman dies every minute in childbirth, and that is a recipe for revolution, compounded by the fact that a hundred million of our children on the globe never go to school at all half the kids in Africa, and a quarter of the kids in East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. So you might have said that.

Or even on September tenth, you might have said, "No, the biggest problem is going to be terrorism, coupled with weapons of mass destruction and rooted in racial and religious and ethnic hatred." And here is what I would like to say: Whether you would have given a positive answer, or a negative answer, there is something that all eight of these elements, positive and negative, have in common. They all reflect the astonishing increase in global interdependence, the extent of which we have seen the collapse of distances and barriers, bringing us closer together for good or ill. Terrorism is simply the dark side of our increasing interdependence. We have not repealed human nature or the fact some people see reality very differently than we do. And it was inevitable, if we take down all the barriers, if we open the society, that people who represent organized forces of destruction would take advantage of the very forces which have made us richer, more diverse, and made our lives better. Therefore, all the great questions of the twenty-first century boil down to one: Is this new age going to be good or bad, on balance, for me, my family, my community, my nation and the world?

That's why Yale's mission in its fourth century to build a truly global university is so important. It is very important that it be good. I was delighted, Mr. President, when my former deputy secretary of state and my old roommate, Strobe Talbott, became the head of the new (Yale) Center for the Study of Globalization, and his wife agreed to run the World Fellows Program. Actually, I said I would like to be a world fellow, and I was informed that I no longer qualify as a young leader. So today, you are stuck with my opinions without the benefit of further Yale study.

What do we have to do to make sure that we encourage the positive forces of interdependence, and that we restrain and combat the negative ones? I'd like to make three points: First, first things first. We have to defend ourselves against terrorism. I want you to know if you don't that there are good people, lots of them, who have been working on this for years. And I want you to know that there were many, many more attacks that were planned on the United States which were thwarted by career public servants, and on our allies. In the last millennium alone, there were plans for a bomb in Boston, a bomb in Seattle, a bomb for Los Angeles airport, a bomb at the biggest hotel in Amman, Jordan, and at one of the holiest Christian sites in the Holy Land, and a half dozen other plans all thwarted. There are good people who are working hard. Nonetheless, clearly, there is more to do to build our defenses, to build our ability to be offensive, to build our capacity to maximize computer networks to follow people who mean us harm. I don't want to say more about that right now because the president and his national security teams and our allies have some tough tactical decisions to make. And I think we ought to stick with them and give them the room they need to make decisions. So far, they have been making good decisions and we have no reason to believe that they won't do so in the future. I think on this, it's important for America to stay united. We are and we must stay that way. And I will say again, I know it was frightening to have the first massive attack on American soil. And nothing can minimize the human loss.

But let me remind the young people here that the century we just left was the bloodiest in all human history. Twelve million died in World War I, twenty million in World War II, and another twenty million from government oppression after the war, not counting the millions who died in Korea and Vietnam, and later in the senseless slaughter from Ruanda to Bosnia. And the world has never been free of violence. We took down the walls and collapsed the distances. We were interdependent and, therefore, all the things that we have benefited from in this global economy, sharing with it the price tag of being vulnerable to those who would do us harm. But we will catch up and this will be handled. What we have to do as citizens is to think about what else has to be done and what else we personally can do. We have to lead an assault on the conditions of negative interdependence and create more opportunities for positive interdependence. America should continue to work to reduce poverty and spread the benefits of globalization to people in countries that haven't felt it, with things like more debt relief, more micro-credit, more sensible trade.

America should contribute its fair share to the secretary general's health fund to fight the spread of the AIDS epidemic and other health problems. America should deal with the challenge of climate change through conservation through the development of alternative energy, through helping our friends and neighbors throughout the world do the same. America should continue to promote democracy. One particular problem we have, in the present crisis, is that so many people who hear the siren song of radical Islamic fundamentalism the twisting of the reading of the Koran and the teachings of Mohammed live in countries growing ever larger, ever younger and ever poorer where there is no democracy or chance to express dissent, or even assent, in a normal political way. And it keeps the populace in a state of sort of permanent infancy, in which you never have to take responsibility for your own lives and making it better because you never get to take responsibility.

And therefore it is very easy to listen to someone say your problems were caused by America's success. It's a hard case to make, because people from all of those countries come to America and share in that success. It's a hard case to make, because America last used military power to protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. It's a hard case to make, because America led the world in the most sweeping and important debt relief endeavor because the money had to be used by poor countries for education, medical care and development and nothing else. But nonetheless, if you never get to vote for office, you never get to stand up in a public forum and say what you think. You are permanently disempowered. And you can hear the siren song: It is all because of America. So, we have to keep urging our friends to find ways to move to greater democracy and freedom.

And finally let me say this: Even more important than what we do, is who we are. We must understand that this present conflict, as agonizing as the loss was, is about far more than the buildings collapsing and the people dying. This is about a global force with a fundamentally different view of the nature of truth, the value of life, the character of human community. Mr. Bin Laden and the Taliban believe they have the truth, and everybody that agrees with them is good, and everybody that doesn't is evil. This great university is dedicated to the proposition that nobody has the absolute truth. We all get to vote. We have the right to freedom of speech. We have the right of freedom of religion. And we have the right of freedom of assembly. And we have the responsibilities of a free people because we believe that, fundamentally, life is a journey because we move closer and closer to the truth. But because we are finite, limited human beings, we never will achieve it. Therefore, we don't have the right to impose our iron will on others. Instead, we try to work with others, and the more the merrier, and the thought that, with honest effort, together we might find more truth that is a fundamental difference and it leads people to a different view of the value of human life.

Because we believe that we are all traveling on this journey together, we have come, over time, more and more and more to value all life. To think that everybody counts, that everybody deserves a chance. But for them, they believe there are three kinds of people: There are the people that will embrace their particular views of Islam; and then there are the Muslims, who don't agree with their reading of the Koran, who keep citing surrahs like "God, Allah, put different people on the earth, not that they might despise one another, but that they might get to know one another and learn from one another." They hate that one in Afghanistan. People who believe that are heretics to them. And the rest of us who are not Muslims are infidels. We are all combatants in the war and we all deserve whatever happens to us, including death, even if it's a six year old girl who decided, on the morning of September 11, to go with her mother to work in the World Trade Center.

Of all the things that I have seen and been moved by this last few weeks, the thing I will carry with me to the grave, is the lines of the victims families holding their little flyers. Because, for days and days and days, people didn't know whether their loved ones were in the building when it was hit. So they all made up flyers, and they had pictures of their loved ones. "This is my wife, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mother, my father, my child. Here is the picture." And outside, often in handwriting, "This is what floor they were on, this is how tall they were, this is how much they weighed." All these people holding these pictures there were Indians and Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Japanese, Chinese, British, and German, Mexicans, Chileans. There were people from every conceivable religious faith. They were all there, a stunning rebuke to the people who thought they had the right to kill them because they had the whole truth.

We believe in a different character of community. We believe we all do better when we work together. And all you have to do in our country is to accept the rules of engagement our rules about everybody counting, everybody getting a voice, everybody getting to vote. People that will have to show up every day to do what is right. It gives us the freedom to celebrate our diversity, that we can be united by our common humanity. Their community is not united by common humanity it is united by what it is not.

And Mr. Bin Laden has a political agenda. He wants to take over Saudi Arabia, get rid of Israel and purge the whole Middle East in the process, so they all look like the Taliban. What a dreary world. We have seen in the pictures what we have seen on television from that movie, "Behind the Veil," what their ideas are like: forcing women to wear those horrible burquas, and beating them with sticks in public and worse. But this is a formidable adversary because they do not believe they are evil. They believe they are doing good.

The most important thing over and above anything we do is that we have, in our minds clearly, the world we are trying to make that our wealth is not an end in itself, but a tool to allow people to live up to their God-given abilities, that we keep struggling to get beyond these categories of difference to our common humanity. And we should never be blind to how difficult it is going to be.

Think of the great spirits of the last fifty years: Ghandi killed, not by a Pakistani Muslim, but one of his own Hindus, who hated him because he wanted India for the Muslims, the Sikhs, for everybody; Sadat, killed by the organization that Mr. Bin Laden's number two heads now, not by an Israeli, but by an Egyptian who hated him for reaching across the religious and ethnic bloody divide to make peace; my friend, Itzhak Rabin a lifetime defending Israel killed, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli who hated him because he wanted to lay down arms and take up peace. This is hard.

I thank God that, of all the great spirits of the last fifty years, Mandela survived, probably only because he first had to pay with twenty-seven years of the best years of the his life being in jail. It is hard to get people beyond the notion that they are defined by their differences and not by their common humanity. But you can do it by living it and you can do it by recognizing that it is time to take America's eternal mission to the world a mission to widen the circle of opportunity, to deepen the meaning of freedom, to strengthen the bonds of community. We can no longer deny to others what we claim for ourselves. That is the ultimate lesson for the interdependent world.

We are going to get through this crisis. Our leaders are going to make good decisions. But in the end, we not only have to stop bad things from happening, we have to build for you, the best, the most prosperous, the most peaceful and most exciting time the world has ever known. And we can do it, if we remember who we are and what we believe.

Thank you and God bless you.

Superwolf

2005-04-18T10:18:00.000-05:00

I think the crowd was hungry for experiences last night. We were young, scruffy, and white-- very white. We were lined up in the sterile corridors of the MFA and not as out of place as we should have been. Each of us might have been there a few hours earlier. Damien Hirst is having a retrospective and as the line snaked past the entrance to his galleries, those of us who knew his work peered through the glass doors looking for something shocking. Or something that might have been shocking if we hadn’t already seen his work. The sheep suspended in a glass vitrine was just part of the spectacle of the evening.

The night opened with Mika…. (I’ll find the name somewhere, I promise) who had a strong classic finger plucking guitar style and a voice that sounded as if it were filtered through a microphone—and through history. I felt as if I was hearing something that hadn’t been heard in a long while. He had an insistent an plaintive voice. But the singer also had a strange lisp to his words. Behind the grit I heard an indoor intellectual. Or at least I heard the performance and discovered the character he assumed for the concert. He may well carry that character through life with him, but his halting lyrics seemed to stumble on earthy phrases like “Pretty mama” and his condemnations of nineteenth century robber barons. I had a suspicion that he might have known these men, or at least their great grandchildren. The roots of his songs weren’t his roots. They weren’t our roots either, but we all had a hunger for traditional mountain songs by musicians who were comfortable playing in Brooklyn. And we got that in a flat egg shell of a hall that kept the sound of his steel guitar inches from our ears.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy took the stage after a long opening set and gave me one of the best concert experiences of my life. Because I love his music, yes, but more because I love what he brought to the stage as a performer. He was there with Matt Sweeney and musicians on bass, keyboards, and drums. He played most of his newest release, Superwolf, and the album in concert is better than the one they recorded. Because the music needs to be live. Guitars and a keyboards created layers of sound that floated inches above my head. I kept looking up at the ceiling, almost expecting to be able to grab hold of some of it and pull the sound even closer. And across this background Will Oldham and Matt Sweeney added their voices. I used the word plaintive to describe Mika’s voice. But the textures of their calls to the audience against the pulsing background of sound was even more magnetic. They were calling to the audience about love, sex, death, and God. Will Oldham is a perverse kind of preacher, which is the only kind I can sympathize with at the moment. He sings of the grave, and the weight of his simple words are incredible. But his lyrics shift as easily to the delicate and childish without a loss of meaning. He sings through sex and doesn’t cleanse or cheapen it but celebrates it exactly as it is. His hands are in his lover or hers are in his and expressing the extent to which people can melt together or connect physically begins by just saying what’s happening. It’s enough. His voice and the music fill in the emotion and desire. In his words and music, sex is part of a profound recognition that we aren’t as complicated as we spend so much time attempting to be. We’re vulnerable animals. We’re scared. And we feel most human when we’re in touch with this.

So I watched this man with a beard and large eyes sing into the microphone while balancing on one leg, or kicking it out like a swishing tail. His motions are both awkward and assured. He was a few years older than most in the audience and we seemed hungry for his experience. I imagine that he understands that laying himself bare on the stage while engaging the audience is redemptive for him and probably for us too. He becomes more the animal; he gets to be the Superwolf.

Fresh air

2005-04-10T15:18:00.000-05:00

April 10, 2005

I appreciate winter. I turn on to spring. I don’t feel seasonal affective disorder, but that might be because I don’t feel much between the last warm day of autumn and the first of spring. It’s never been a problem, but this weekend has been like waking into a dream. The Matrix’s red pill. Brazil. The struggle to awaken from a technology induced stupor, and that stupor is a dark one. The sun is something completely different. And temperatures that suggest the equivalence of indoors and outdoors. People are reading on the grass when only weeks before they had been wrapped in blankets close to clanking radiators. People bring their laptops onto porches, stoops, and parks. The first day of spring makes the distopian fantasies of our darker days seem to be overly dramatic. 1984? 2005? Every twelve months the sun reappears and warms the earth. Orwell needed to get out more. Marx spent too much time in England. Political cynicism and a cultivated air of negativity can wait a few more months before they again start to make sense. I’ll be outdoors.

I spent a weekend dedicated to the potential of this season. I helped Emily* pick up her new bicycle and already excited promises about exploring the city have been shared. We put on climbing shoes and pretended we were climbers—discovering in an afternoon of bouldering that perhaps we are. I’m taking a break between bouts of laundry and spring cleaning to reinvigorate this lapsed blog.

Springtime. New beginnings. My father, the devout atheist, has a childish love of Easter eggs. It’s their shape. Their feel in the hand and the possibility of life within.

Springtime.

*I don't know whether pseudonyms are necessary. But they'll do for now.

The Life Aquatic

2005-01-08T23:09:00.000-05:00

Would you trade family for a crew of dreamers? Collect yours like you would pieces of sea glass, funny carved wooden boxes and odd things found on street corners? Wes Anderson makes movies for those of us who wish we could. Melancholy runs through them, because these accrued families aren’t always perfect. And the family you were born with and chose as you went along never quite lets go. A lot was loaded onto the wonderfully named Belafonte. A lot was thrown overboard. The ship was a giant stage set, cut apart by the camera. It was a doll’s house for the wonderfully strange cast. Wes Anderson reminds me of the little girl (or boy) who might dress up his pet kitten; build it elaborate castles; create worlds just to show how much he cares. His movies are child’s games, but by dreaming of modern families that look nothing like the ones we know, he suggests something wonderful.

And walking home tonight, thinking of how Anderson creates fantasy, pieces of silver glitter swirled, hung in mid-air. It had stopped snowing, but Cambridge was a movie set. The ground was a swamp of muddy slush, but looking up into the sky I saw sparkles.

I’m all for the Life Aquatic. I’ll wear the red hat and squeeze into the Speedo.

Vote NO for Trolleys

2004-12-11T15:16:00.000-05:00

Let’s be local for a moment. Jamaica Plain is a special place. I’m a fan and there often to see friends and enjoy the community around Centre Street. And the one piece of Boston where I feel comfortable tried to kill me this morning. Tried again, I should say, because a half year back something similar happened but in less dramatic fashion.

It centers around the Trolley. People are split about the trolley line that used to run down Centre Street and connect to Green Line transit into downtown Boston. Stores all along the street have signs both for and against. It’s surprisingly divisive. And after this morning I have a strong opinion: Rip the fucking trolley tracks out of the ground. Any cyclist knows that the grooved tracks are dangerous and that you cross them at your own peril. But the crossings are unavoidable when the streets get clogged with weekend traffic. And unless you hit them straight on, they grab onto the front wheel of your bike and don’t let go. I was tossed into a lane of oncoming traffic. It was only luck that there wasn’t a car close enough to hit me. I was almost a sad story new bikers tell each other to warn them about city riding. And my bicycle is no happier about this than I am. Things are whacked badly out of alignment and I’ve yet to figure out how much I can straighten on my own and how much will need some professional help. The strange thing about the crash this morning is that no one seemed to notice. I quickly got up and pulled myself and my bike to the sidewalk where I stood shaking. My teeth were gritted, my adrenaline was pumping and I was furious—at myself for hitting the tracks and at the world for not making the roads safer. There was no obvious bleeding, but people passing by said nothing and barely noticed, even though moments before I was sprawled in the middle of the road. It was fine because I needed a few moments alone to collect myself, but I was immediately aware of how strange it felt to be in a state of physical and emotional crisis and to be completely ignored. Boston, it’s a friendly town. A bike friendly town.

Closer

2004-12-05T15:02:00.000-05:00

I read reviews of the movies I see. Sometimes before, often afterwards. I might do it to confirm my own tastes and judgment. I know that I also do it because I am interested in criticism. A movie doesn’t just last the two hours you spend with it in the theater. When the lights come up, I feel as if I need to say something. And if the words don’t come, the movie was either especially provocative (Dogville) or just lousy. But not just bad, disappointingly so because it had enough aspiration to keep me from an outright condemnation. And I enjoy watching how others sort through these same moments. Pop culture is less the shared memories of movies, music and television than our collective response to them.

Last night I was educated by the group of conflicted instructors in “Closer” -- which just now I realize I have no idea how to pronounce. Is the title a drawing close or an abrupt end? I spent the first half of the movie thinking, “Oh, so that’s how men and women interact with each other” and the latter half frustrated that they couldn’t act smarter, better, or more kindly towards each other. The film explores how cruelty comes as a response to our own understanding of our mistakes. We realize our behavior doesn’t make sense and we lash out, pinning the blame on someone else. And the movie resolves nothing. Suitably so. But neither does it reach towards epic tragedy. I remember the Swedish film, “Faithless”, a story of adultery that left imprints on its characters that spanned a lifetime. The characters in “Closer” will continue in new settings and with new partners but may well live out the same story once again.

That’s why I can’t finally say whether the film succeeds, because it captures a string of moments but doesn’t use the focus of film to frame them convincingly. Natalie Portman’s character sheds a tear as she possesses the sidewalk of a new city, and it is supposed to show the price her show of seductive confidence costs her. Simultaneously her lover in London realizes as he revisits the place where they met that he may not have really known her at all. In the end he possesses nothing of her, and possession is the motivation of all the characters in the film. Even his memories are left subject. There isn’t irony in this gesture. “Closer” is not a plot driven thriller where an ending transforms what came before. The substance of this movie is the desperate ways we treat others just to tolerate ourselves. And sadly I think too many of us realize that already.

Alchemy

2004-12-04T19:54:00.000-05:00

Romance is tough. If you believe in the thunderbolt of love at first sight then you’re stuck waiting for it. Or like a dare-devil meteorologist you track it in a rusted out truck, going to the places you know it to strike. And if you’re unsure of the legitimacy of feeling something huge all at once, you may be in a worse position. Because then you’re stuck working at it, unsure about everything, and playing with not just your own feelings but with those of another. What I’ve got to remember is that the thunderbolt usually has a radius of impact. It doesn’t sneak up on the person next to you and leave them suddenly staring at you with huge, loving eyes. For me at least, there’s a window of time where two people are both working at it—romantic alchemy of sorts. Experimentation is alright. And so is failure. Admitting that your lead is still lead. Admitting that you still have absolutely no idea where gold comes from. Romance is really, even with the advent of online dating, a pre-scientific process. Cave paintings. I’m left smearing colored ink on cold stone walls because it feels good and maybe just maybe answers all of the big questions.

About a boy...

2004-12-01T23:06:00.000-05:00

About a boy….

An older Hugh Grant pulled me out of a slump this evening. Gray hair, a few wrinkles weather his face like a bit of tarnished chrome on an Alfa Romeo. Beautiful and stylish, but extravagant and unnecessary. And a more real Hugh Grant, if reality echoes a Nick Hornby novel with its own perfectly buoyant soundtrack, a real Hugh Grant makes the perfect shallow blank of a man slated for a moment of humiliation followed by easy redemption. But I suck in the pretty things, the allure of London, and even the hippie who tries vomit covered suicide before finding a balding and earnest activist for a very special Christmas lunch. Christmas lunch?

Movies, and I’ll say it to be obvious, allow anyone to feel like happiness is only two hours away. And it almost is. Two hours can change your life, or at least help you take your eyes off the ground long enough to focus on something else, something brighter.

Echoing the words of a woman I met last year who like a Hornby book recognizes the events of her life through songs (good songs)… Tonight, I wish it would snow.

The Death and Life of the Digital City

2004-11-30T22:53:00.000-05:00

The technology isn’t astounding. It isn’t really virtual space as there is no real attempt to blur the boundaries between the player and the world of the game. But, it stands in for space; it takes the place of space. Everything is recognizable in the ways Monopoly pieces are recognizable. The little silver shoe. Green houses and red hotels. But simply by borrowing these symbols, it invites us to behave like we might as if we were moving through space. Moving through the Sims world, we apply what we already know and so endow spatial behavior onto these new artificial spaces. You log into a chat room, but “meet” in a friends Sims family room. And never having played the Sims I have all sorts of questions. Can you get from one place to anyplace else in the same amount of time? Is there separation in the online world, locations that are better than others because of they are closer to the trendiest players, the most exciting neighbors? If there is distance, is there time and do these things have value?

Would an online Barnes and Noble that allowed you to approach the shelves and scan the spines of books be more appealing and more lucrative than Amazon’s numbered lists. Could you rummage through piles of goods spread thick on tables on a redesigned EBay? And what of my own field? Could the internet be littered with digital versions of real buildings, advertising the accomplishments of their architects? Might they not include everything that was cut from the building to save time and money? And possibly, would they not compete with the buildings on the other side of the screen.

A scenario.
A digital camera; a series of sensors. One could map one’s own habitation of his own house onto the online world. Like in the real world, squatting outside a window would provide a show. But what if one entered the digital house and began to participate in actions simultaneously underway offline? How could these virtual responses to real actions affect that life? First, it’s a conceptual art project. But after being assimilated, it’s a consumer’s toy and finally a familiar piece of daily routine. A bored fashion student in New York could help you get dressed in the morning. An insomniac in Bangalore could let you know you added too much salt to your korma.

Why would anyone ask for these intrusions? Immediacy. When impatient, I don’t want to have to wait for email, check my inbox, or wait for the next post to a friend’s blog. On lonelier days, I want the interruption and the chance to feel the impact of another on my life. It’s the impulse that makes me want to turn a storefront into a home—my own home—and drink beer on my porch while watching the street. Sims is for the introverted flaneurs of the digital world who come to life walking on pixilated streets. And it’s only a matter of time before Jane Jacobs picks up her pen again to write an addendum to “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” There will be many new sets of eyes on these streets, but they’ll be looking from across the world.

Sims in Space

2004-11-29T22:45:00.000-05:00

Sims in Space

On a train traveling between Boston and my family’s home in Connecticut, I watched from across the aisle as a woman worked on her lap top to build herself first a character, then a group of friends and finally a house— in preparation for admission to the online Sims community. And it remains the most provocative thing that I saw during my holiday break.

At first I was just a voyeur of the technology. Scrolling through facial features, a three dimensional figure’s face bulges and sags according to the user’s tastes. The face blinks, turns and cocks its head, seemingly impatient for its own completion. This Pinocchio is a teenager with no time for its creator. The disaffected movements of the simulated character are just an attempt at keeping the puppet from being static, but the result shows that boredom is the easiest of human emotions for the computer to capture. Features were chosen and a suitably personalized hipster wardrobe picked out I must admit to taking some time to check out the physical endowments of these young men and women while they stood in their underwear. They’re bulging in all of the right places (even if the more interesting ones aren’t customizable).

But it was when my neighbor across the aisle began building her house on a gridded “suburban” lot that I started thinking that the Sims might be more than a game but a glimpse of something coming fast to our digital world. The Sims series of games assembles a palette of options—whether for building a city, a civilization, or a family—and the thousands ways these options may interact with each other provides the perception of free choice and control. The internet provides a similarly outstanding range of choices, but again these choices are along already established paths. You don’t know where web surfing will take you; you only know that someone has already been there before.

All of this leads to persistent questions about the boundaries of self-expression on the internet. And whether creating virtual three-dimensional spaces like those in the online Sims game expand those possibilities or simply provide an illusion of infinite possibilities. I’ll get back to this.

Science (or my faith in...)

2004-11-21T19:39:00.000-05:00

A friend provoked me today through questions asked with a smile about my belief in science. She was prepared for the conversation, as a graduate student of the anthropology of science, and she enjoyed her provocations. That a cat interrupted perturbed with any topic unrelated to her, or that the room fell into shadows as we talked gave evidence that the natural world cared less about our pursuit of each other's views on the world.

Though academic and filled with digressions on the shapes of trees and the appropriateness of wearing used leather, I felt that the conversation was important because we kept coming back to faith. And faith is a word I don't use well. It motivates some people to act. It's also what the best education can bury, obscure, and possibly even do away with completely. In red/blue rhetoric, faith might be distilled between faith in religion (skewed towards fanaticism) and faith in science (leading toward a vague, possibly amoral, view of the world). It's an unfair choice, maybe, but common enough. It's how a creationist chips away at another's belief in evolution. And it forces a response. Are they the same? Is my faith (to make it more personal) in a knowable universe (that may never be fully known) the same guiding principle to me as another's faith in the Book of Mormon to them? Does faith necessarily deal in certainty?

If I ask too many questions, I won't move towards answers (assuming there are answers to be had). For tonight, I'll just speak from my gut. Science won't get me out of bed in the morning. It does help me sort through the many voices in the world and pick those to whom I'll listen. It privileges education (and is admittedly based on my belief that the universities are not liberal tools of indoctrination). But, it doesn't help me live in the world or to live with others, except when if offers rich fields for Sunday afternoon conversation. It may, however, keep me from finding faith elsewhere, particularly in religion which has done well in proving itself as a source of inspiration for daily life. When one has the luxury to shop around for culture and beliefs, it's very easy to go hungry. And despite a perfect omelet pulled off the stove while writing this, I do feel like it has been a while since I've left feeling satisfied.

a politics of potatos

2004-11-20T16:37:00.000-05:00

Reading a profile of the last twenty-four hors in the Ohio headquarters of ACT prompts me to finally say something publicly about the election, if only to get things straight privately.

Kerry got four million more votes than did Gore. Against the same man. Bush was an equally undesireable candidate four years ago, and though millions of us huddled together in the nicer parts of cities would say he and those around him proved our worst fears, the election was eerily similar. But in four years time more people have decided to look out at the world as Republicans than as Democrats.

We live in a "centrist" country that is increasingly being described as right of center. Of course the center is relative depending on where you are. My center and a Canadian friend's might be different. Head, heart, belly-button, crotch. Foreign policy, faith, economics, and fate. It's a Mr. Potato Head of values and priorities. I put the eyes here, someone I don't know in Nebraska's putting them somewhere different (and in my worst moods I'm assuming that theirs lacks eyes and ears entirely, but is endowed with several mouths and clunky shoes).

I don't have answers. An attempt at drawing conclusions preaches to an audience I don't have, and doesn't leave me certain that I can follow my own advice. But I am moved by the following values that leave me hopeful we might move in more productive ways: The accomodation of difference. Equisite tolerance. Attempts at openness.

Sandpaper and wax

2004-10-04T20:28:00.000-05:00

My kitchen has a long narrow door set into one of its walls. A retractable ironing board. I don't iron and the door was painted shut. And I knew what was inside. A retractable ironing board. My curiosity never engaged-- or at least not for most of a year.

Finally with a little prodding and a knife I opened the door. Found the expected. A retractable ironing board. The padding was ripped. Foam, yellowed and hard, beneath. The door closed and it remained. A retractable ironing board. A _broken_ retractable ironing board.

But today, it is badly needed counter space. Some sandpaper, butcher's wax, and new wooden stools. Its a wonderfully long and thin place to drink coffee in the morning. A retractable breakfast board. A nice addition to my home.

Inside

2004-09-22T14:33:00.000-05:00

An introduction. Or a first view of something inside.
I had wanted to call the blog CANOPY. Something special that makes room for a place.
But, just as I didn't get to choose my own name, I've been redirected.
Instead of gathering underneath, I'll be wrapping around and holding together. Its a warmer thing and perfect for this transition between seasons. With Fall comes the need to add another layer. I won't be stripping away towards an essence but adding something extra, an embellishment that hints at what's really underneath.

There might be architecture here. Friendship. Cambridge streetlife.
There will also hopefully be design. But new to the medium, for a while the blog will be unwrapped and bare.

crumpled.paper

2004-09-22T00:01:00.000-05:00

crumpled.paper
Originally uploaded by efbaxter.