.25 centuries</h1> <article> <h1>.25 centuries</h1> <p>provolot — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:27:38 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>if there are any vows to be made, it is to try, for just one year perhaps, to live in process, not in thesis, to live not in plan but in play, to take lines for walks, not towards destinations, to make as you go, to make shit up, which means to some extent unlearn things, disregard my own rules, be inconsistent, have praxis in motion, know that identity is performative, actions not words, travelogues not plans. just set off. there are many ways of thinking.</p> <p>of course, <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/355/busy">past-me</a> is always wiser:</p> <div class="quote">... and that maybe movement itself is the busy-ness; you don't grab a point in the distance and march forward towards it with a stiff upper lip only, but that you bushwhack and traipse through brambles, forests, swamps, generating paths, creating movement. this sort of work, I mean, which is like saying: I will always be walking, hiking, biking, skating, riding, jumping, moving. limbs firing, fingers going. working, thinking. and I can see that, that it will always be so. </div> <p>huzzah.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/387/25-centuries">April 18, 2012 1:04 pm</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/16">Other things written in the week of April 18 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/387/25-centuries">April 18, 2012 1:04 pm</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>on performing</h1> <p>provolot — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:04:12 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>======/======/======/<br /> ======/======/<br /> ======/</p> <p>the process of architecture is a kind of performance.</p> <p>how does one live one's life? do you design? are you a planner? an improviser? do you walk by the seat of your pants? do you engage? do you put all your chips in action, and you believe in identity generated in a sense of performance, making-it-as-you-make-it? paul klee, taking a line for a walk? or do you prepare beforehand, like a runner kneeling to touch synthetic track with forefinger and thumb? like an archer, who 1) draws back, 2) aims, 3) lets loose? the pencil knows not where it wishes to go, or rather, it realizes where it wants to go in the process. </p> <p>newness. lots of newness. if there's any kind of sea change that is occurring, it's to perhaps realize some other aspects of my own self, and to counter them, to amplify some other aspect, to engage in a kind of constant improvisation, which is to undermine the operations of my own operation, which is by default a kind of analytic understanding. What is this? and How is this operating? these operations being, really, a desire for power over the future, probability allowing a wanting-to-know-what-will-happen, and knowledge allowing a understanding-probabilities-due-to-knowing-how-things-work, and thus in this way a knowledge of a <i>model</i> is a kind of guarantee for the future, the charting out future territories.</p> <p>(is this the case? I think to myself. surely these binaries can't be true; interestingness and efficiency aren't diametrical opposites within architecture; the same can't be for this kind of analytic/performative dichotomy either, but it's tempting, or at the very least seemingly accurate.)</p> <p>there is, on one hand, the fun of being performative, of enacting change in action, of being unsure, and slowly understanding to be comfortable with unsureness, which is in of itself a New kind of thing, yet of course can't be confused with the possible negatives of being unsure, which is to say being okay with unsure might be a good thing that may have bad consequences while being sure might be a bad thing that has good consequences. and how do you weigh one over the other? sometimes you can't splatter paint on a horizontal canvas and call it an allover composition. or can you? </p> <p>it occurred to me the other day that art history is one of the most fascinating, problematic disciplines, as a discipline, because the societal/economic processes that involve art practice are so far from art historical practice; on one hand, the world of studios, materials, messy pants, production; and on the other hand, white gallery walls, abstracted textual analysis, the aesthetic autonomy, if not of the painting itself, then of the discourse, of the gleeful freedom of visual formal analysis, of a relentlessly clean and planned approach to aesthetic understanding. at a methodological level these two things collide. what about art-historical essays written as loosely as artworks may be created? but rigor is not the issue: what about art-historical essays as process-driven as artworks are? </p> <p>are you uncertain? why? why not? why is certainty something that is important to you? why is knowledge that is something that is important to you? do you plan before you create, or do you figure it out as you proceed? how does your practice and process change when it intersects with other regimes (or rather, regimens) of process -- physical construction, immaterial design, payment schedules, the 24-hour light/day cycle, weekly cycles? physical construction necessitates a long planning stage, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_model">a waterfall model</a> of relationships between planning and execution. software design promotes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development">aglie</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_model">spiral</a> models of development that are iterative, recursive, allow for constant modification. etc. etc.</p> <p>in the end the question is again: are you uncertain? why is certainty something that is important to you? why is it important that one does not make mistakes? why is it regrettable that time flows in one direction? </p> <p>in fact, you could think of someone, fully having recognized time's own character (unidirectional, immutable, unchangeable), embarking on large-scale catastrophes in order to fully take advantage of time and to create and formulate possibilities of regret, nostalgia, memory, longing, a kind of full medium-specificity. <i>Q: what does time do best? A: Making you miss that-which-has-already-passed-by.</i> </p> <p>the creation of accidents. buildings that aren't built correctly. books that fall apart at their bindings. maps that give the wrong directions. streets that cave in. planes that are always late. cars that break down next to vast cornfields. hereafter one misses, longs for, desires, remembers, and thus finds, embraces, wants, experiences, in the inverse of all these relationships; the effect generating the initial impact.</p> <p>I keep thinking to myself: things will always have been more clear-cut in the past, and will become more and more blurry, fuzzed, indiscernible and uncertain in the future. which isn't to say that we shouldn't try for clear-cutness; it's just that perhaps one needs to learn how to navigate these things, to juggle more and more, to hold these things like transparent orbs suspended in the air, split seconds of tranquility and calm, muscle memory grasping one orb as it falls, then snapping it back up into mid-air, calm, to know how to navigate these more and more complex landscapes. because 'discernability' is perhaps what happens after you've already carved out a landscape of probabilities after already having created a model: the possibility that I will be hurt, or that I will not be, or that this will work, or this will not, or that I will enjoy what I have created, or that I will not, </p> <p>or that the space that I will create this summer will be solid, that it will shine in my mind's eye like a tight, compact object, like the last bite of a dish that you carefully curate on your fork, or like the sharp taut whine of a ball bouncing against the ground, or the tenth minute that you're biking down the west side highway in such a carefree way that you feel your mid-20s youth enshrined in the firing of muscles down your calves and in the wind against your face, or the denouement of a film in which you simultaneously realize that this is it but you also mourn the death of this nearly-living being, or rare moments when you realize that what you want is not what you think you've wanted, and you turn your body and align your being into the right direction, and decide to sprint a little. or way more than a little.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/386/performing">April 16, 2012 12:04 pm</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/16">Other things written in the week of April 16 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/386/performing">April 16, 2012 12:04 pm</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>block block block block block</h1> <p>provolot — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 05:14:26 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>it's been a while.</p> <p>I feel like I am full of confessions lately, but confessions that are not so much real confessions but just raw openings, admittings, sayings-to-the-world-that-get-to-the-core-of-me. on a spring day I will sit down cross-legged in a park under a tree somewhere, having biked around somewhere, and then sit and watch people laugh and run and think about the world. and say: well you know, this. and this. and this.</p> <p>I am full of stoppages, of frustrations, of newnesses, of exhilarations, of questions. if there's a moment at which the lines of confusion, certainty, excitement, waiting, and all of these converge, then it is now, and I find myself waiting for something, looking for something, being nervous about something, being excited about someone, being stuck about something, etc. projects drifting in the air. potentials weighing down, pregnant. the remnants of old attempts lingering, etc. etc. etc.</p> <p>blockages and stoppages. paralysis and blocks. at these points, one just should push and shit and feel free. so quotes from the past:</p> <p><a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/353">Nearly exactly one year ago, this time:</a></p> <div class='quote'>in ten years this will all have been hazy memory. in ten years I will chuckle to myself and recognize the same patterns, and I would have just have told myself to make something and be proud of it, to flex my muscles and feel the fibers firing, to know the joy of articulation, description, thought, system, and creation, to make and to make and to make. calculus integration is the technique of aggregating mathematically minuscule areas under the curve in order to find the total area. everything ever made is also an aggregation of the epsilon, the minuscule, the little sliver of x that is multiplied, added over a series of time and space in order to get somewhere. the epsilon of the evolution of a biological species is the genetic mutations that occur of the copying-over of chromosomes. action generates, generates, generates error and thus new value. make and make and make and eventually add it all together.</div> <p>and a year and a half ago, a friend wanted to do a manifesto show, so I wrote this for her and never ended up sending it because I couldn't justify something, couldn't quite express it enough. but here it is, and upon reading it again it sounds just right for a manifesto --- which is to say, overly full of declarations, overly striving for meaning, overly cryptic, overly expressive. maybe I was re-reading hakim bey at the time. but it's all there, in all sincerity:</p> <div class='quote'>sort-of not-really manifesto, sept 30, 2010 <p>Work towards the modification of my current manifesto. Everything worthwhile only happens in a process of disorientation and a loss of self: there is nothing so stagnant than wanting to have solid principles. </p> <p>The deferral of initial judgement enables a critical, productive glossolalia, the originating primordial soup.</p> <p>There is no good, great, skillful, or progressive, only interesting, fascinating, resolved, and obsessive. </p> <p>Critically celebrate and celebratorily critique the gloss of signified signification, verbal spectacles: phrases describing semantic relationships mediated by phrases. Techniques are tools until I grasp hold of them. </p> <p>Desire is a muscle, not a drive. It should be used, flexed, trained, pushed, rested, and like all other things bodily, should be fed.</p> <p>Beware the normal and the formal: these are forces out of which a surprise at transgression and an alarm at impropriety originates, the muscle that arches up brackish crystallized life's single hawkish eyebrow.</p> <p>Space has mass and is slow, heavy, a warm suffocating blanket, the embodiment of inertia. Move quickly out of my current geography and abandon yourself to the vagaries and vacillations of transit, before I start to stick, before I forget what it is to be lost.</p> <p>The 'invasion of privacy' is a hygiene issue, like all other twists, breaks, leaks, accidents, spills: vectors that impel the drawing out of a new line, the creation of a new person-function, the formation of (your, my) newly-bounded being whose outlines and definitions will rapidly recede and be naturalized: forgotten & ubiquitous. Be enthralled by these moments when my inner organs become exposed to the world, harden to form a new outer body.</p> <p>I can only tell myself what I would do because what I need, beyond anything, is for you to not be me, not a 'not-me' but to not-be me, such that we can have the most precious of ideas borne out of the fertile ground of non-ground, of agonistic conflict, of contamination, disorganization, muddying, loosening, diluting, impurifying. </p></div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/385/block-block-block-block-block">April 3, 2012 1:04 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/14">Other things written in the week of April 3 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/385/block-block-block-block-block">April 3, 2012 1:04 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>watching someone dance</h1> <p>provolot — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:13:11 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>honestly, watching someone dance in the midst of their youth, in the midst of my youth, through a video posted online, all I can think of is:</p> <p>there are things that are solid, and there are things that are fluid, and there are things that last for a long time because they are solid, and then there are things that will last forever because they are fluid, like they will last forever the same way that gestures do, movements, dances, little turns of the head, forever emblazoned in memory, </p> <p>(I mean, after all, what is information if not the memory of movement at a micro scale, magnetic fields flipped this way or that, representing information, this way or that?)</p> <p>and I chew on the inner lip in the solid understanding that it is worth it to be loose a little, because things always grow solid; it is important to be unyielding a little, because systems always induce their own kind of change. it is important to be happy with yourself. it is almost spring, or rather it is spring, because spring is always defined by the condition of having-it-almost-be-spring, the condition of clutching your clothes around you because you overestimated how warm it would be tonight, the condition of looking around joyously and looking forwards to a summer not-yet-having-past, of voices outside,</p> <p>and right now it seems: in the end the only thing valuable is just reckless rawness. all things must come from careful calculation and reckless rawness, in just the right doses, but not so much anything in-between.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/384/watching-someone-dance">March 14, 2012 4:03 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 1 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/11">Other things written in the week of March 14 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/384/watching-someone-dance">March 14, 2012 4:03 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>!</h1> <p>provolot — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:31:18 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>how, is, it, that, everything, happens, at, once?</p> <p>spring is here. let's go dance on chairs and swivel in the street and dream about dreams.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/383">March 9, 2012 12:03 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/10">Other things written in the week of March 9 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/383">March 9, 2012 12:03 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>ppl</h1> <p>provolot — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 05:52:42 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>no, like really, it's all just people. I mean, here we are rushing headlong into things trying to convince ourselves that there's more than just people, that we can have solid institutions, formations, holding patterns, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path">lines of desire</a>, trying to subsume ourselves into geometry, lattices, spaceframes, concrete slabs, steel trusses, three-letter acronyms, but look, I mean, look! it's all just people. people all the way down.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/382/ppl">February 29, 2012 1:02 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/09">Other things written in the week of February 29 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/382/ppl">February 29, 2012 1:02 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>call to people</h1> <p>provolot — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 08:07:08 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>post-discussion high. oh oh oh oh oh.</p> <p>in the end, all you can hope for are people, though, really. a saturday full of surprises; waking up in the literal midst of a music video shoot, walking to a gorgeous brunch, a little work-session, then crossing the street just to run into some dear friends, together traipsing around the innards of a warehouse taking freight elevators up and down peering into dark spaces and imagining new lives. and then: friends and new friends from all corners of this city congregating together to talk about a tome, to root insides its innards and to find our own places, expansion of the text, enthusiastic engagement, the best possible chemistry. and afterwards a bonfire and a couple of beers and talking, talking, the smell of smoke in your hair to remind you afterwards of the shape of excited words emerging through each others' engaged eyes.</p> <p>everything just constituted out of people, really.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/381/call-people">February 5, 2012 4:02 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/05">Other things written in the week of February 5 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/381/call-people">February 5, 2012 4:02 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>no trees tonight</h1> <p>provolot — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 03:18:32 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>sometimes it's like a really quick laugh that appears out of nowhere, like,<br /> <i>ha-</i><br /> and ends really quickly and abruptly, and I imagine the little graph of amplitude going 'blip', little puffs of explosions almost visible like breaths in a past winter's breath.</p> <p>it's almost as if there is more to be said, now more than ever.</p> <p>once almost falling over out of pure joyousness, once</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>can you believe it? can you? I am made out of flesh and blood; I am a being, I am here. some days I am tired. some days I am less tired. my shoulders are twisted into knots. I am young and I am excited, most days, and I take the subway up and say hello to the city's arteries. </p> <p>every day, lately every single day I ask myself: "how am I going to live my life?" and I ask this, again and again, and sometimes I think of being fourteen and walking across a really windy field, and I still ask these questions and they will never go away, nor will I have any answers, nor will the answers mean anything, really, so in the end it's just me asking over and over, thinking to myself. how will I live my life? with what steps will I want to take? how will I jump from place to place? how will I situate myself, how will I want to move, what trips will I take, how will I travel, what people will I talk to, which letters to write? incessant questions dominating the day-to-day to-day. it's just me looking straight ahead walking, a lot of walking these days, walking along (streets / avenues / blocks / steps / corridors / through doors, under trees, beside cars) and thinking about, well, you know, the stuff I would be thinking about, of course. and in the midst of this feeling my body, my being.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>it is so exasperatingly impossible to communicate sometimes, and the more things move the less I know and the more I know, and it's really because I'm just always trying to express what's on the tip of my tongue, at the end of my grasp, it's really just a kind of taste in my mouth that I want to desperately try to express, like <i>this</i>, I'd like to say while gesturing furiously and gesticulating in fury and getting nowhere, and I can try and it can be fun for the moment, until the inexorable nonporousness of these boundaries becomes too sobering to even talk and then we all circulate in these cells, doing dances like honeybees, loops, figure eights. </p> <p>in the end if there's any lesson I've learned is that old adages are always true, in some sense of the word true. mistakes have consequences, and they break things irrevocably. some things are undoable. even old, noble trees can die suddenly. everything ends at any point. and so when someone says "mistakes are okay", it's not because mistakes are any less of a mistake, it's that in the context of a shattering ineffable one-way direction that you've just stepped into, there's still space to have things be okay, hopefully, Okay, whatever that okay means. </p> <p>* * *</p> <p>sometimes also I imagine being a parent and being worried that you <i>messed things up</i>, which is horrible, I can imagine, because it's so true, because really there's nobody to say "it'll all be alright" because it won't be, you know, it's just going to be okay, not alright al-right all right, but just o-kay. </p> <p>I feel that by the time one becomes a parent one would understand the immense, almost soul-breaking responsibility, and the responsibility is only as intense as the knowledge of how bad you could fuck up, you know, you could really fuck up in rearing your kids, and it will just have been that, laid bare on a simple table and just that just that. what you'll have left is just to have messed up the thing you would have cared about the most. </p> <p>these dreams I had about trees, about things growing and healing; they're just that, myths, dreams, these images, oh, oh. oh don't you know, you know, oh oh. just that, myths, dreams, these images, you know. oh-oh. oh-oh. there's one song for tomorrow, but this one's for today, you know. oh-oh, oh-ohhhh.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/380/no-trees-tonight">February 2, 2012 11:02 pm</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/05">Other things written in the week of February 2 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/380/no-trees-tonight">February 2, 2012 11:02 pm</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>preludes</h1> <p>provolot — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:34:24 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>earlier today I stopped and looked up, up at this building that I had been looking at for years now, years and years since I entered it first six years ago in 2005, but this time it came at me fully, with a kind of succulent richness that I hadn't seen before, and so I had to step back and hold myself for a second because I found myself drawn into it, seeing certain aspects that shone out and emerged from somewhere, a kind of richness only best described as <i>gorgeous</i>, gorgeously poised, gorgeous. from whence did this come?</p> <p>I guess: like: savoring something on the edge of a metal spoon, slowly, the top of the tongue against cold metal, slow. paced. sunshine slowly flows into a room. etc.</p> <p>like listening to a record again and hearing the intake of breath of the performer, having the sounds separate themselves into strata, so that the work becomes more like a multilayered composition rather than a single object, like some piece of musical baklava, in which your teeth only know the crunch of a hundred different layers at once..</p> <p>buildings, and, spaces, and sometimes people. readings, forms, figures. such vibrancy, I think. vibrating, jittering, barely surviving being alive.</p> <p>this is new, and I know not from where this came, but I know it's new.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/379/preludes">January 22, 2012 7:01 pm</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/03">Other things written in the week of January 22 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/379/preludes">January 22, 2012 7:01 pm</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> <article> <h1>re-brklyn</h1> <p>provolot — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:31:14 +0000</p> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <div class="post-inner"> <div class="body"> <p>tonight I am up packing and cleaning, and I will see tomorrow's morning dawn to an empty room, and I know it.</p> <p>tomorrow I will go sleep in brooklyn, watch the sun set as I cross atlantic avenue. my landscape will once again be dotted with rooftops, vacant warehouses, the incessant thrumm of the overhead heater. I will say: here it is, space, I've regained this intangible thing, graspable intangible presence. here it is.</p> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/378/re-brklyn">January 16, 2012 1:01 am</a> | </div> <div class="comment-toggle"> show/hide 0 comment(s) </div> </div> <div class="parallel_posted"> <a href="http://words.provolot.com/parallel-dates/03">Other things written in the week of January 16 in previous years >></a> </div> </div> </div> <div class="info"> <div class="posted"> posted by provolot on <a href="http://words.provolot.com/post/378/re-brklyn">January 16, 2012 1:01 am</a> | </div> </div> </div> </article> </main></body></html>