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.

If you’ve been paying attention to the links at the right, you might have noticed I’ve been looking at more product and industrial design news lately. I’ve had to swallow some of my architect-inferiority-complex-disguised-as-pride, but the more product-like nature of my work as of late has forced me into an eye-to-eye relationship, a very rewarding one that makes me need to examine why I’ve avoided this particular fiefdom of design for so long.

It’s partially, of course, the collective pressure of the Dwell/DWR/Apple Store world that bounces off my naturally reactionary psyche. And I’m sure if I went deep enough I’d find some moralizing against conspicuous consumption. But I think the real reason I avoided looking at designs smaller than a house (or at least a taco truck) until recently was a (mis)perceived lack of depth– I was always looking for the “real” innovation behind the scenes. I couldn’t be convinced that something that was purchasable immediately and in mass quantities could be pushing the boundaries of possibility in any way. To put it simply (and kind of offensively), it didn’t look difficult enough. This is condescension born of ignorance, I know. It took a gradual shift in a very stereotypical path – from furniture to lamps down into silverware – for me to realize that there are direct analogs that I was willfully ignoring. In some of these things there may be a lack of physical assemblage, but there is perhaps a greater mental assemblage, or at least a denser one– more considerations, from ergonomics to copyrights, per cubic inch than in anything else in the world.

This is what makes these things suddenly so appealing — to realize that they were forged, as it were, under intense mental pressures that extrude a unique object of ineffable value.

We recently lost the bottom two thirds of a power pole on Palms Boulevard. Perhaps because it is only carrying house current and low voltage lines, the city has allowed the remaining portion to hang, dangling askew from its adjacent poles, the streetlamp still functional. Shattered creosote pole is strewn all along the road and there is apocryphal “CAUTION: HIGH VOLTAGE” tape lying around, as well as a single road cone. Here, Katy took a picture.

For the last two days I’ve had this freakish totem waiting for me on my daily commute, stopping traffic and causing general unease. And while it has enacted an enormous transformation on its small dominion of road, I am beginning to get used to it being there. It makes me wonder if, in the future (pronounced fue–TCHA!), when all of our streetlamps levitate, how long it would take me to start ignoring them completely.