LANDSCAPE URBANISM ???

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, NEW YORK (08/03/05) - "I took an M3 bus south from Central Park East (Fifth Avenue) to the NYPL (the New York Public Library) at Fifth and 41st to read Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation, looking especially for the justly-famous passages on music, expecting dark draughts of so-called ‘pessimism’ against the anterior sky of Some-thing Else. The call slip came back marked “Not on shelf” and I was relieved of the responsibility. I ambled over to the Internet stations below the plum-red skies of the palatial Rose Reading Room now ‘rationalized’ to keep tourists and ne’er-do-wells at bay (now requiring a library card and log-in) and spent some time wasting time."

A DAY IN THE CITY - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/day_in_the_city.rtf

/LU/, NO THANKS (06/12/05) - What ‘sticks out’ of urban systems (architectural and landscape-architectural) is the Real Itself (as it always already supplements constructed systems). In the case of the city, this Something Else (often a telluric something else) is always suppressed for structural reasons. It appears spectral as it pulls further and further away (further from Truth). This ‘Real’ is not simply ‘nature’ (whatever that is); it is also the irreal or spectral thing-in-itself (a post-Kantian thing-in-itself), insofar as the topological knot that all cities ultimately represent represents figuration and representation, as such. The ‘as such’ (or ‘the given’) is as much the space of the topological knot as anything inscribed within it. Thus all attempts to inscribe difference (while done so, typically, horizontally and/or rhyzomatically) fail due to the missing principle embedded in all topological thought; that is, that topological thought contains the traumatic kernel (as Zizek would say) of the Real plus its other (the Big Other or otherwise) -- a field, then, of repressions that sponsor the appearance of the phantasmatic (haunted) ‘nature’ contained within urban systems. To excavate the Real is to also ‘free’ it from all such repressions (and reifications as markets, economic flows, datascapes and what-have-you today in the de-natured, new-ish Master-Signifier, Landscape Urbanism). Thus, architecture-as-site remains the principle problem (and the principle ‘radical’ form) of all formalist insurrections. Thus, too, the ontological returns, until the object of architecture is no longer the object per se but instead topological thought itself.

BLACK SUN @ MoMA - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/black_sun.rtf
FACTORY OF COLLECTIVE NEUROSIS - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/the_factory.rtf

VISUAL CULTURE (06/10/05) - Rue 57 (57th & 6th), where it’s impossible to hold a conversation; that is, a barking mad Manhattan bistro … Yet … Décor that is sublime, in its own manner … Blood-red lights underlight the bar, illumine the ‘vitrines’ of flora (vases with plant du jour) … Today Kalmia (Mountain Laurel) … It is June, yet the buds are not open (remain fast-closed) … Blonde, bare midrift barmaid delivers Spanish red wine … Sushi bar at breakneck speed …. Clamorous, intense clientele (eyewash / visual culture) yell into one another’s ear … At dusk I enter The Park, passing The Pond (tired of Landscape Urbanism … here the Lindens actually have a fragrance …) … Sitting on a boulder, writing this … Illuminated from within and without by Spanish wine (with castles) … Temperature drops within the park (it’s no great mystery) … Endless paths, the spiraling of the Eternal Return (secreted/drawn within the Olmsted/Vaux plan) … Life as we know it passes in the interstices of the dialectical machinery of thought (happens to us as we are making and unmaking plans) … “Help save the American Elms. Please keep out.” (Yes, we are a danger to the Real) … Three tourists stroll ahead … One turns, startled, and apologetically explains as I pass, “I saw a dark figure in the park, a girl behind us!” I keep walking, turning to respond: “A dark figure in the park, that’s scary” (in my very best masculine vampyrish voice) … Exiting at 72nd Street, temperature rising, I find that by way of a secret loop in Olmsted’s plan I am on the West Side and not the East Side … I take the opportunity to duck into Lincoln Center box office and see what’s on offer, stroll by Lincoln Plaza cinema, and re-cross The Park at 9:30 pm, looking for and missing the moebius loop that might take me somewhere else altogether …