Saturday, November 28, 2009

Haunted Paris Part II (elegiac couplet)

La Pyramide Inversee, I.M. Pei's upended pyramid in the underground mall at the Louvre, and a construction site in the Montmartre section of Paris share a moment of structured negativity. The Pei construction (above) operates as an inverse tomb, while the vanished apartment building (below) functions plausibly as a mausoleum to architecture.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Detournement and its Discontents

I have gone to the corner store to buy some toilet paper. Please leave the key on the counter.

Two People Eating Sardines Over the Sink


It is decidedly so.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Weights and Measures

Three phyla: king phylum, slave phylum, merchant phylum. Dressed as savage, merchant dumps crate load of Snapple in Gowanus canal. King delivers official decree denouncing gesture as act of treason. Slave thrown into canal for good measure. Property values decline.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Munchy Jumble in Sub-Orca Space


The version of sub-orca space that appears most often in popular culture presupposes fragmented mirror-worlds joined together at various angles to create endless sequences of recursive visual echoes. In this model, Euclidean notions of three-dimensional space are complicated not only by the popular post-relativity conception of time as a non-spatial dimension that nonetheless affects spatial coordination and self-location, but also by the addition of a new, contextual component, which, like its temporal predecessor, complicates the notion of placing a body within a specific set of physical parameters while similarly resisting categorization as a spatial array unto itself.

The dematerialization of the physical object and its replacement by an agreed-upon arrangement of electrons has facilitated the concurrent placement of physical objects in a virtually infinite number of places at once. The thing, which exists solely in the past, senses itself as a traditional substance, but for the rest of the world, viewed as it is through the lense of the far-off future, it has been transformed into an endlessly shifting metonym. The autonomous object is thusly shattered into a field of countless, tiny, reflective shards, each of which acts as a vehicle for the information contained within the long-collapsed--yet still visible husk of its former self.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

The Rag-Picker's Dilemma

The origins of the nation's rags are a source of constant bemusement for enthusiasts of the topic. Establishing provenance (to say nothing of "authenticity") within this realm requires an unusually tenacious adherence to apocryphal notions of pedigree and lineage that often have no more factual basis than any of the other yarns, myths and tall-tales that have been widely circulated through the various oral and vernacular traditions of this great country.

That is not to say that vague patterns and groupings cannot be established in the same manner as our linguistic historians have managed to provide us with various techniques for cataloging the evolution of specific language groups, but alas, the science of rags is a soft one, even compared to the other social sciences, which hold up to comparatively more exacting standards of rigor.