On making non-place into place

One of the more useful terms of art you’re likely to trip over in contemporary urbanist discourse is Marc Augé’s non-place. Even on first hearing, you most likely already knew in your bones what is meant by the expression: that sprawling, carefully banalized archipelago of airport lounges, hotel lobbies, gas stations, coffeebars, etc. that constitutes the nodal portion of the global travel/hospitality complex, and in which we seem fated to spend an increasing percentage of our time on this planet.

As Kraftwerk put it - although those worthies probably meant it as praise - these are locales given over wholly to “time, travel, communication, entertainment.” And to hear Augé tell it, anyway, they’re supposed to be interstitial, without inherent character, defined precisely and solely by the quality that they afford smooth transition between one place and another.

You know where this definition begins to break down, though? When you spend way too much time in non-place. All of a sudden, in a process that somewhat resembles a figure/ground reversal, these putatively anonymous and interstitial zones take on texture and resolution of their own. Against the intentions, perhaps, of their designers, they acquire unique and indelible character; I can recite the stops on the Narita limousine bus serving my old neighborhood, the woman who keeps the shower schedule in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt recognizes me, I’ve learned that for whatever reason I find the downtown Standard more comfortable than the one in Hollywood.

All of this is to say that I’ve developed certain pronounced affinities and dislikes. I may not wear khakis; polos embroidered with an institutional affiliation may be as anathema to me as they would be to any other human being with a grain of sense. But damned if I haven’t become a road warrior anyway, to my great and lasting chagrin. And the one fringe benefit of all this is that I can no longer see non-places (specifically these, anyway) as entirely flat and featureless: I’ve learned that everything has texture if you see it often enough.

Marc Augé, see, he simply didn’t spend enough time on the road. As far as I can tell, the true condition of “supermodernity” is one of such ceaseless mobility that you sweep over the world like a raster, burning these transitional zones into memory and history in ever-higher resolution. As life lessons go, this one’s not anything I would have looked for, necessarily, but it’s something.

Re-make/Remodel

I’ve never flown 36 hours from or to anywhere before. No matter how well they take care of you, that’s still one hell of a long time in transit, and the body protests; I slept a solid thirteen hours on returning to the infinite mercies of my own bed. Somatic reassembly seems to be in progress.

Bali after-action report w/pics coming soon.

RIP, Herbert

Goddamn it.

To an entire generation of people interested in architecture and the city, Herbert was a walking, talking flashpoint. It was impossible not to have an opinion about the man. I can’t tell you how many times I sat smiling and listened to young architects rant about his sweeping judgments and notorious intimacy with most of the people he was writing about - smiling, ’cause to me he was just an insightful, hysterically funny and extraordinarily generous friend.

It seems somehow wrong to have to write these words from the over-the-top terrace of a Bali resort, overlooking the meanders of a sacred river with triple-canopy jungle a hundred meters off my left shoulder. As beautiful as it is here, I feel like I should be slouched comfortably in that eternal corner booth at the Odeon, pounding back the G&Ts.

Here’s to you, Herbert. You let me teach you about the two or three things I knew, and in return you taught me something much larger: how to see my city - all cities, but New York most especially - with new eyes. I’m going to miss you.

On knowing that one is of utility to Empire, part 1

It’s, at best, an ambivalent thing, to understand that one’s heart’s work is, however incidentally, of service to a project in which one passionately does not believe. But there’s no point pussyfooting around the fact of my complicity. People don’t get to stay in rooms like this - in places like this - otherwise.

Oh, and the crowning irony?

My flight back from Amsterdam on Saturday hubbed through Frankfurt.
My flight out to Bali today hubs through…Frankfurt.

Rarely have I so soon again visited a place I like less than FRA. It’s the kind of airport where (quite seriously) you have twenty-five minutes to negotiate 1500 meters of corridors, a change of three levels, passing through passport control and an additional security gantlet. Where the lines are invariably long and where - natürlich, this being Germany - nobody gets to skip ahead in them no matter how much sooner their flight departs than every last soul in front of them. Order over logic every dang time.

The Mustache, as is his wont, is belatedly waking up to the fact that US infrastructure sucks. Bully for him - but alas, points off for not realizing that infrastructure means practices as well as spaces and technical systems. Doctrinaire inflexibility to the point of unreason can quite easily make an airport suck just as much as moldy jetways and shite renovations.

The Banana millennium

Before I forget: Nurri and I got ourselves over to the NY Art Book Fair yesterday, which was as totally great as you’d imagine it would be. I picked up obvious jouissance-bait like Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970, a Sarai reader on The Cities of Everyday Life and - surprise surprise, given my recent fascination with all things A’dam - a slim, elegant and entirely inspiring volume called Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt.

But what I really wanted to buy, and just couldn’t justify, was a limited edition art book of photos of the Velvet Underground, featuring bespoke essays by Jonathan Richman, William Gibson, Jack Womack (!) and others. The Gibson and Womack essays, particularly, explain everything. Everything.

Gibson’s piece has a gorgeous passage in which he describes hearing The Velvet Underground and Nico for the first time in the same summer that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out, and in which it was not yet at all clear that “Sgt. Pepper would become, well, Sgt. Pepper.” The man goes on to drop one of those trademark density bombs, this one with a yield of galactic-level whoah, at least for me: imagine a world in which The Velvet Underground and Nico had been the one that broke big. (That Gibson goes on to imply that our own 2007 is in fact indistinguishable from such a world’s, us simply having taken the long, slow way here, did nothing to lessen the Keanu-grade impact.)

And so that’s how I thought of us on waking up this morning: as happy citizens of the Banana millennium; as celebrants, truly, of all tomorrow’s parties. Happy October. : . )

Bound for Bali, Margaux on my mind

So after having been home for less than two days, it’s off into the wild blue yonder again. This time I’m headed out to Bali, which isn’t nearly as much fun as it sounds like.

Of course, the third installment of Ci’Num is going to be happening in Margaux at the same time I’m so far away. Between the annual discussions in Margaux and the summer ‘06 workshop in Tokyo, Ci’Num and the people who make it what it is have been a big part of my life these last two years, and I’m more than a little sad not to be there as the long process pulls into its home stretch.

I want to offer my congratulations, especially, to Daniel, Daniel and Hervé on seeing their ambitious vision successfully through to completion, and express my wish that we’ll get to work together again in some new and similarly venturesome context before too long.

Meanwhile, tons of stuff to tell you about when I get back, including highlights of Picnic, thoughts about reinventing an old Provo project as ambient service, an announcement of an exciting project Mark Shepard and I have been working on, and the usual grab-bag of random rants and whatnot. Have a great time in the meanwhile and I’ll yammer atcha soon.