Monday, December 29, 2008

I'm tired...

"The murder rate among black teenagers has climbed since 2000 even as murders by young whites have scarcely grown or declined in some places, according to a new report. The celebrated reduction in murder rates nationally has concealed a “worrisome divergence,” said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University who wrote the report, to be released Monday, with Marc L. Swatt. And there are signs, they said, that the racial gap will grow without countermeasures like restoring police officers in the streets and creating social programs for poor youths."

See full article in The Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/29/us/29homicide.html

Reading this is after California voted against a proposition to fund restorative and treatment programs for youthful offenders, instead voting for a stronger police presence and stricter punishments for gang affiliated youth, has me sick to my stomach.

Friday, December 26, 2008

the spectacle

So, what is the spectacle they speak of (These Situationists)? I promise to come back to playgrounds, but I think this inquiry is important before I can move to figured worlds juxtaposed on physical space.

"All that once was lived has become mere representation."
Debord

Its hard to argue that we now live in a reality that is far more mediated than even five years ago. The technology that allows us to communicate en mass using the "interweb", also brings to us the grand illusion of a world that is seamlessly connected and vibrantly generative. Poverty and environmental desecration are one mouse click away, and yet the shock and moral repulsion that they generate quickly fall away when we navigate to safer and more comfortable pages. We consume everything, images, text; in large gulps we take in the global spectacle without the capacity to process the largess or import of what is being ingested. What does this do to our consciousness? How does it change the way we relate to our immediate physical reality? What do we create and project from this smorgasbord of information? The ideas that Debord and his contemporaries played with in the late 60's are even more relevant now, as we have become the ultimate consumers of the spectacle, no event too small to sit back and watch in the comfort of our homes, amongst friends and family.

A few years back I went to party in Queens. A rare visit to the borough of my youth after spending the day walking in a Iraq War protest on Fifth Avenue; I walked in on a group of men who were watching "war" on CNN. Literally. A live feed of bombs and machine guns, four men huddled close the radiation of the screen reflecting on their glasses filled with liquor, their eyes vacant. Famine. CNN. Pandemics, BBC. Gang violence. The History Channel.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

playground project

Been thinking a lot about space and how it influences how and what we learn. Living in downtown San Diego's shiny downtown coupled with conversations with close friends around the impact of built environments, along with my focused thought on urban youth and identity, has me pondering playgrounds.
All of these thoughts started with a conversation on the situationists, a group of thinkers in France who furthered Marx's ideas around capitalism, probably over many glasses of wine, and ribald conversations. Here is a little wiki to desribe a little of their thought, not specifically related to spatial relationship, but nonetheless interesting.
Drawing from Marx, which argued that under a capitalist society the wealth is degraded to an immense accumulation of commodities, Debord argues that in advanced capitalism, life is reduced to an immense accumulation of spectacles, a triumph of mere appearance were "all that once was directly lived has become mere representation".[12][13] The spectacle, which according to Debord is the core feature of the advanced capitalist societies, has his "most glaring superficial manifestation" in the advertising-mass media-marketing complex.[14]

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

pixilated

I spilled tea on my computer about a week ago exposing the light beneath the screen, the tiny dots that make up the images I see in uniformity. After the obvious consternation that my computer might never be the same again, I began to think about the both the science behind the display, and that lead me to thoughts (during meditation) about the much more complex pixilation that forms what we call reality. These tiny bits of moving particles that seem so concrete in form, yet can be exposed with the right instrumentation to be as elusive as thought. Thought and form. Very Buddhist conceptions. The instrumentation in this relational process, of course, being mind, tying together thought, form and observation of phenomena into a crystallized now.

Trying to actively suspend storytelling has been really hard these last few days.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

brick walls

Mortar and mud, and the crevices between these seemingly impermeable positions. Here live the mice, breeding like only mice can, batches and litters by the dozens, a scattering of lives; gray and shaded in their scurrying ways.

I've spent months now in their home, watching their twists and turns, circus tricks in the kitchen jungle gym of steel shelves and wooden cabinets. I've found them dancing in the cereal, revelling in the crumbs, fornicating under the sink, the steady drip a waterfall to their desperate lovemaking.

I've been told pigeons and giant cockroaches lived here in days past, but I haven't seen a sign of them save for the occasional flap of wings outside my bedroom door, a dried defecation on the wooden steps at the rear of the building. I'll be nostalgic when I leave, as it should be. Here (now), I can't help but feel the weight of this building, its history and its present in constant engagement. It (the building) is an anomaly in a newly minted downtown, a bridge to a seedy, gritty maritime past, where sailors and whores walked the late night streets, and San Diego was truly the first port of call after the Panama Canal.