If I’m taking my Artist Archetype Action Figures (AAAF’s) and making teams, it’s pretty obvious who the Architects go with. The Photographers, the Documentary Filmmakers, Land Artists, you know. Meanwhile, the Playwrights hang out with the Screenwriters and Novelists, and Musicians (although perhaps the Musique Concrete guys might take our side.) It basically becomes the Communicators versus the Mute, the Adaptable versus the Stoic. I’m drawing a pretty wide swath here, but I think the reason you don’t associate architects with the theatre (except maybe Brecht) is that we’re not that interested in syntactical communication. We might talk about “reading” buildings, but we’re not talking about rhetoric or story. Buildings are “read” the way that barcodes or hard drives are, as a concrete value that works as a tool on its surroundings. We don’t really care if we’re understood or even noticed; we just want people to do what we impel them to do.

A consulting firm recently sent three sheet cakes in two weeks to our office. I think this was supposed to ingratiate us to them, but the quality kind of got in the way. A coworker, Ruth, waged war against this cake onslaught in single combat:

_____________________________________________
From: Alicia Daugherty
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 4:05 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: cake in the kitchen

help yourself

_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 4:07 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: petroleum product

Alternative message:

Lethal artery-clogging DSI advertising cake in the kitchen. Had it been nice, it would have been in honor of Vinnie’s birthday tomorrow. If you indulge, suggest you drink coffee.

Maybe the acid will cut it.

_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2007 2:28 PM
To: MRA Office
Subject: death cake for skeptics

Don’t really believe that arteries can get clogged?

Afraid you’re going to live too long?

There is another advertising masterpiece in the kitchen. I’m told there will be a third. Go to it!

_____________________________________________
From: Ruth Greene
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 10:22 AM
To: MRA Office
Subject: Russian Roulette

No aneurism yet? Try again! There’s another media blitz cake in the kitchen.

Personally, I ate the first cake with enthusiasm. Even the skin (yes, skin). The second I nibbled with trepidation. The third, with its Robitussin-colored fruit filling, I prodded with something approaching hatred. In my opinion, the cake won.

I’ve been making quick sketches of locations that feature prominently in early-morning dreams. Here is the first one:

This is a covered inlet at a river embankment. One can swim into this channel, covered by metal grating, and then climb stairs to gain access to the split shotgun house above. There is a small waterfall where the stream transitions into the river, and at that point also is a tree, its roots wrapped around a column going into the water. If I remember correctly, the yard of the house was filled with 10-gallon drums. Read into this as you may.

The ink drawings of Adam Dant are intricate, humorous, and dark, to name a few.

I like to imagine these are the inhabited prehistory of Paul Noble’s deserted cities and landscapes, immense crowded landscapes of danger and strange obselescence.

This kind of omnitient-view drawing, like in the picture books of my childhood, is both thrilling and oddly sad. One can’t really inhabit this space or connect with the inhabitants, there is only pity and a quiet terror that they will never escape this enclosure.

Two photo sites, disturbing and poignant in different ways. Both would probably not be served well by analysis. Both safe for work.

http://phojoe.com/forensic_compositing.html

http://denis.darzacq.revue.com/la_chute/index.html

This is going to sound a bit too much like BLDGBLOG, but it’s late and it’s what I’m thinking about.

Artificial intelligence researchers love to compare intelligence to animals. “Human intelligence is 50 years away,” they might say, “but something equivalent to a rat or small dog is just around the corner.” This is an easy analog that anyone can understand (and also acknowledges the subjectivity of measuring intelligence.)

While I still can’t quite imagine my trash can or car exhibiting any kind of animal intelligence (or I am too afraid to really consider it), I find the idea that my house is as smart as my dog to be almost plausible. There are, after all, lots of places in my house that I’ve never seen, and plenty of things that it does that are beyond my consideration. It makes noise on it’s own from only solar and wind energy (especially at night), and has lived for over 60 years. Probably half of the elements on the periodic table are in my house. In short, it is ancient, unpredictable, and immensely complex. For all I know it’s doing the domestic equivalent of wagging its tail right now.

It seems to me that the craft of surveying has lost power as it gained resolution over the last 400 years. When the above-mentioned latitude was plotted, it was marked every five miles with “crownstones” marked on one side with Charles Calvert’s coat-of-arms, and the other with William Penn’s. This western ray began its path at the (contemporaneous) border between Delaware and the two warring states, which was declared, quite simply, as a “twelve mile circle.”

Compare this with disputing inches of fenceline between suburban homeowners, and it may seem that the heroism in this profession has leaked away, or at least has been transferred into the lasers that measure the (ever-changing) distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Golf is of uncertain origin– it may be of Scottish, Dutch or even Chinese in its inception. The slow evolution of the game, however, produced a sport that was symbiotically linked to an a priori Scottish landscape– an ideal in curvature and greenery that, over time, has mutated into its own form, of earthworks, kidney bean shapes, and exotic grasses. What still exists, however, is the chaotic relationship of the player to the landscape– the strategy, beyond a certain point, is almost entirely contingent upon the wind, the speed of the greens, and human emotional frailty.

Miniature golf, while of surprisingly ancient (19th century) origin, came into it’s current “windmills and wishing wells” form only in the late 1930’s, at the hands of Joe and Robert Taylor from Binghamton, New York. Here, the game of golf was compressed and mechanized, becoming more like pool. The greens were made plastic, and metal bumpers, tubes, and moving obstacles created a game in which pure physics play a greater role than the weather. All of the chintz and themery conceals a game which is played with needle’s-eye precision.

In 1985, Nintendo released Golf, a video game. This game featured a simplistic computer modeling of the physical complexities of the live game, in which angle, club, and a few taps on a button were the input. Subsequent video golf games have added topography, wind, spin, player ability and even, with the recent development of the Nintendo Wii, physical aptitude and luck. It is, essentially, a game of perfect physics, purposefully marred by a careful modeling of naturally chaotic variables.

The NPR/NYT-addicted goon that I am, I have been fully bombarded with the latest news on the Baghdad Wall imbroglio. Before I go any further, to fulfill the obligatory comparison:

The Wall in figures*

Overall length : 103 miles

Length inside Berlin : 26.8 miles

Length between Berlin and the GDR : 70 miles

Wall passing through inhabited areas : 23 miles

Wall passing through industrial areas : 10.6 miles

Wall passing through wooded areas : 18.6 miles

Wall passing through waterway areas : 14.9 miles

Length of concrete wall (13′ high) : 66.6 miles

Metal fencing (9-13′ high) : 40.5 miles

Anti-tank ditches (16’6″ deep) : 0.6 miles

Anti-vehicle ditches (8′ deep) : 65.5 miles

Surveillance tracks (20-23′ wide) : 77 miles

Tracks with sliding cables for dogs : 259

Number of dogs : 600

Watch towers : 302

Concrete shelters : 22

Border guards : 14 000

Number of shots fired by border guards : 1 693

Bullet marks in the West : 456

Persons successfully scaling the Wall : 5 043

of whom members of the armed forces : 574

Persons arrested in the vicinity of the Wall : 3 221

Fugitives killed : 239

Soldiers and policemen killed : 27

Persons wounded : 260

Attacks against the Wall : 35

Building any kind of border wall is obviously a violent and incendiary event; however I’m not sure that the Berlin Wall is the best analog. The people discussing the Israeli/Palestinian border “systems” are probably more on track (morphologically and operationally).

I have to say, however, other than being struck dumb at the (escalating) hubris of our military, the most striking moment of this story was the way in which the military tried to spin the news: by referring to the walled area as a “gated community.”

Jokes about accuracy aside, the equating of this controlled military compound with an Atlanta suburb makes my mind reel. Not because of the implication that people that live in suburban enclaves are self-imprisoned. It’s rather the opposite that is staggering, the application of psychology of exclusivity to this violent rupture of one street from another. It makes me think: are we exporting fear along with “democracy?” Does the officially proclaimed and branded “American Way” have an intrinsically xenophobic core? It’s true that our society (from any side) seems to have a new found obsession with purity, privacy, and control, and a growing fear of the collective and unconstrained. But is it perhaps this mindset, as much as a blindly jingoistic Washington, war profiteering, or a national thirst for oil, that is undercutting any kind of diplomatic success in these last eight years? We’ve never been that good of a people at self-understanding. Maybe we’re all more fearful of our neighbors than we let on to ourselves.

*All numbers are from the incomparably fantastic book “The Ghosts of Berlin” by Brian Ladd.

Talking to a younger version of oneself in books, films, and personal families has become so common as to need a name: how about “feedyack.” In these events there is a lot of raised eyebrows and slow revelations, perhaps cryptic warnings; it’s popularity has a lot to do with the fact that this is a guaranteed moment one can act like a sage.

I’m going to propose an alternate scripting. I think that talking to oneself would be immensely boring, and probably a waste of time. Do you ever write down word-for-word what you think in the shower in the morning, or right before you go to bed? When read back, 90% of the time it comes out mostly gibberish. Now imagine if one half of this self-conversation was even less mature, and there was the added confusion of time travel. After the (I can only assume) intense anticipation of the event, it would probably seem awkward and diminished. The fact that we naturally romanticize the past and future would also probably lead to a slightly disappointing self-impression as well.

So, should time travel become possible, stick to the dinosaurs and spaceships. As you’ve probably been told, one of you is more than enough.