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January 31, 2007
Is that a terrorist threat in your pocket, or are you just glad to be watching an 'edgy' cartoon?
This is a tale about a local boy making it big, perhaps too big for his liking. Meet Sam Ewen, who, right now, is probably having a Very Bad Day. Not a Jean Charles de Menezes sort of Bad Day, but I'm sure in his self-inflated head, he thinks it so. Sam is a "guerrilla marketer", who runs a very mysterious firm called Interference, Inc. Interference is his second venture in the area of hiring desperate actors to debase themselves even more than a stand up showcase, and now has the added fun of the potential for PATRIOT Act charges. Can you say indemnification kids? I bet Sam's lawyers can.
His previous venture was Eisnor Interactive, a smallish agency with a good rolodex but otherwise of no account. They broke the concept of guerrilla marketing big back in the tail end dot com boom, and were responsible for a whole range of corporately funded sidewalk stencils and other assorted "edgy" advertising. Then they blew up, got bought up and it all flamed out around the time that IBM bought a big bill for using highway grade line paint to dot the LES with Linux penguins. Good times [note, this here is not germane to our story in the least, but I'm hoping for some Google search terms, like "Sam Ewen Terrorist" will result from this. One upside to producing far too long posts is you come to own some really strange search terms. Did you know I'm pretty regularly in the top twenty for 'look up her skirt'?].
Interference is very mysterious because their web site has been down since -- I'll assume since right around the time the news broke that Boston was fearing it was suffering a test run for a terrorist attack. But it turns out it was a test run for fun! I bet these aren't the sort of hijinks they were hoping for when mounting LED displays of what looks like a Space Invader character giving you the finger. Get it? Edgy! Sort of like quoting an army PsyOps field manual on your web site. No wonder they yanked it (well, okay this was the older, less flash-y version).
Why is this a local story? Well, we are very proud when someone who shows creative flair in our provincial, bland, suburban hometown (come on -- what passes for edgy these days? Discussion of baby strollers and how anal sex is all the rage? Whoa!) moves up to the big time. Or the big house.
It's interesting: on the same day the Brits break up a ring suspected of plotting to behead a British solider on tape, the best we can come up with is a "freelance video artist" who is probably being told by massively outclassed Legal Aid attorney that even though his little stunt was conceived, approved of and enthusiastically underwritten by one of the largest media conglomerates around, he better start getting ready to bend really far over. And to hire a lawyer the next time he signs a work for hire agreement from guerrilla marketers.
We will be reminded very often (likely on the CNN website) that he is independent since a very expensive damage control specialist is rolling out a full-bore campaign (that apparently includes scripting news reports for CNN; take a look at the coverage from Fox and the Times if you don't think someone isn't feeding the news desk talking points) designed to create a very consistent framework that will further the legal defense being prepped (which will spend a lot of time talking about the nature of their agency agreement), but also shaping the language so that by the time this is all over, my Google string won't be "TimeWarner terrorist plot foiled" but "sorry ass video artist in Leavenworth". And as I'm posting this I note that the updated story at the Times mentions our video artist's site, but strikes references to Interference, which were up just a few hours ago.
This is where the story becomes local. When a SVA student attempts a pretty much standard-fare, poorly considered art project, he gets arrested in hours. You think the FBI is at Richard Parson's pad right now? Whereas the MTA can probably pull some pretty impressive number about the costs of cleaning trains justifying threatening taggers with jail time, most street art has a nominal cost impact on city life.
Even so, we have often see illogical overreaction to things like the Idiotarod (this weekend) and we have local laws being rewritten because a cop really hates cyclists. None of these people own a news network, so the media discussion treads pretty regularly parrots the talking points of the police and the old man next door demo: "vandalism" and immaturity and whatnot.
The instances where actual measures of damage does occur tends to be better funded and more institutional, like half the Boston police force running around town looking for bombs, the Linux penguins (which weren't dangerous, just everywhere and expensive to remove),but we never see the threat of jail time, particular those for whom these acts were performed.
Branding and advertising needs to be pervasive to be memorable, since we all instinctively respond to ads and turn away. A singular work of art, or multiples thereof (I love you, anyone? Octopi?) are memorable because we do not suspect a message to buy undergirds it. But when Sony wants to pimp PSP's we get six thousands stencils of freakish fan boys. (I suspect the 15% creative services fee probably has something do with the carpet bomb approach).
So there will be a gradual tightening again of free speech, when most of what will be used to justify it isn't actually a threat of any kind, and often the complete obverse. Yet something that gets as out of control as thins, and Richard Parsons won't even have to stop firing Time employees long enough to apologize. You think at least they will cancel Adult Swim? No chance. Because the ratings are going up this week. Someone is already calculating the potential upside so they have number they can offer the city of Boston, one that will be less than projected revenue. The sad sack, who CNN will keep mentioning over and over (they still haven't mentioned that Turner is a subsidiary of TW), won't be named here. Rather, let's us sing praises to Sam Ewen, local boy, who might very soon be moving into truly edgy advertising opportunities, like Rikers.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
January 18, 2007
The moment of vertigo. Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them. Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being crowded together. A magical sensation of contiguity and attraction for an artificial centrality. This is what makes it a self-attracting universe, which there is no reason to leave. There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together. Jean Baudrillard, America
LOFTY.
One of the things that deforms my head when trying to craft a point of view is the narrowing of one’s experiences of public space. This stems in large part from real estate prices, and there is an ancillary effect of disinterest and exhaustion -- a fear that there isn’t anything else out there.
This narrowing is the gradual removal of human interaction that doesn’t fall into three broad categories: housing, shopping, and entertainment -- and here I mean solely restaurants and bars. It seems impossible to argue that the we can demand of our physical environment a moment, if not a consistent state of being, where a transaction isn’t demanded or expected. Instead, small and large numbers (the $100 martini! the $1,000 omelet!, the $100 million apartment!) filter and shape every step.
For some time I’ve attempted to get my hands around an argument about SoHo. The loose themes that float in my head have to do with the hypocrisy endemic to most of the myths that sputter along. Why I bother at all is because it stands as the psychological epicenter of the both the sense of loss and the former ideal.
Being glib, one can simply and expediently dismiss the outdoor premium mall it is has become. But the money it commands and generates is ostensibly the enlightened sort of capital that could finance the public spaces and events which sustain the myth. But what we have instead is the slow, steady repopulation of SoHo by (primarily) Joseph Pell Lombardi and Goldman Properties, purveyors of a the 'SoHo experience' par excellence. In a relatively small area, there are easily two dozen infill projects that transparently ape the historical context.
Many are pitched with the argument that they are reproductions of what was previously there, an unerasure that happens on occasion in some historic districts by a sect of, I guess, misguided fans of preservation. It’s a pretty misty disagreement that you see circling in pretty narrow confines. After all, few see the point in dissecting the formal differences between the Greene Street Lofts and the SoHo Grand.
COUNTERVALENCE.
Every time I walk down Broadway or Mercer, I am reminded, starkly and powerfully, why the fuzziness of this conundrum is simply laziness on my part. Aldo Rossi’s only major work in America, the Scholastic Building, one of the few buildings here for which you can find provenance at a glance, is burly and unapologetic, clever and contextual. On most firm footing, it dares you to question the simple arrogance it exudes of an idea done well, very well. There is an air of complexity and deftness that, on further research, reveals an authentic tale of demonstrating just that. I keep going back, doubting my own satisfaction as some residue of Midwestern idealism wrought by the belief that reading The Architecture of the City was some sort of coronation of intellectual urbanity. But I still like it. Either it is that good, or I’m that big a fool.
DIFFUSION.
Down the street, creeping skyward now over the past two years, is 40 Mercer, Jean Nouvel’s first big US project. It too comes with a slightly sordid past, angry neighbors because of an excessive envelope, trumped by a near spotless legend of designer and a wily developer. The seeming ease of the rigor and marvel of good choice after good choice shares so little with the fusty historicism as you journey towards the center of SoHo. Instead, like its perimeter neighbor, there is an admirable dose of vigor and care, the effort of architects who cut their teeth in cities where almost every project had the potential to rend the fabric of history and urbanity going back centuries.
I’ve been excited -- which makes me a little queasy, rooting for upscale condo development? please -- to see this project progress. It looks like it is done right. But it’s just an apartment building. A nice one. A really nice one. But hell, Lombardi does really nice ones too, doesn’t he? I wanted to make an argument about vacillating between those two points.
And then, completely unrelated: George Trow died. I didn’t know him, or of him. This arbitrary event mattered only because the eulogies educated me about the work he was best known for: “Within the Context of No-Context”, an artful diatribe against television and contemporary culture -- the kind, you know, that no one writes anymore.
I wondered, like any glib undergraduate, if there were any clever pull quotes I could use, so I dug up a copy last weekend. In the course of doing so, I was struck by the fact that it is roughly contemporaneous with two other, um, significant (I hate those type of universal qualifiers -- they seemed important to me) works: Jean Baudillard’s America, and Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air. The former was the playbook for every aspirant architecture student or junior prof locked into some nowhere school in the late eighties, and Berman's was the same for the rest of the liberal arts population.
Both Trow and Baudrillard write in a similar way -- snippets strung together by explicit and implied connections, a staccato style that is easily read, but less easily digested. When I finished the Trow, I wasn’t convinced it had much relevance in any direct way, abetted by the fact that I didn't even have an argument yet. But there is this:
GEORGE TROW.
New York is an inhuman machine put together to serve the most ambitious interests of a certain part of American secular society.
TERRY EAGLETON.
The geographer David Harvey argues that there is nothing ‘unnatural’ about New York City and doubts that tribal peoples can be said to be closer to nature than the West.
In the course of digging out my copy of America, I can across a collection put out by the Queens Museum, probably in conjunction with a show or at least a symposium, a series of projects in response to the renovation of the Panorama of New York (with names like Andrea Kahn, Brian McGrath and Mark Robbins on the back cover -- have those names even be published outside of the pages of Perspecta or Log since?). I put it aside, since the last part of Trow is a long disquisition about working at the World’s Fair. It is interesting to see multiple generations of despair noted: the recollections of the sixties, presented in the eighties, and then once again revisited in the nineties.
PATRICIA PHILLIPS.
In its brilliant verisimilitude there is a haunting absence of the complexities and turmoil that animate urban life and comprise the character of New York -- or any other city.
But this large claim about the vibrancy of living int he city preceded Google Earth, and the flatness of how we envision design now. The projects featured look quaint, technologically and theoretically. Could we all have been so naïve?
Earlier this week [real estate blog] reported on [new project] by [middling architect]. And [lifestyle blog] reported on [new restaurant that is already too crowded with [IB]&Types]. We can fill in the details. I think about Tafuri, Rossi, the welter of Marxist design theory overlaid with a sumptuous culture of design, and the repugnance with which some viewed this progress toward modernity, even from those one might expect as fellow travelers -- leading me to ask: if Pasolini moved to SoHo, would it be Nouvel or Lombardi? As usual, I don’t have an answer. I will walk through once again with lustful envy and energetic anger. But that isn’t some form of acceptable praxis or dialectic. It is futility.
BAUDRILLARD.
Anti-architecture, the true sort […] the wild inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man was made here -- made itself here -- in New York, without consideration of setting, well-being, or ideal ecology. It opted for hard technologies, exaggerated all dimensions, gambled on heaven and hell… Eco-architecture, eco-society… this is the gentle hell of the Roman Empire in its decline.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
January 5, 2007
MoMentous. There is a growing pile of correspondence from Glenn Lowry on my desk. Well, not just him, but also various important persons in the membership department at MoMA. I’m very important to them these past few weeks, unlike the rest of the year.
It’s that time again. Well, actually it passed last week, but doing year-end posts after the year ends is the new heroin, or something like that. I meant to do a more earnest post about what it means to identify oneself as a member of a community (even if it is one of nine million people), and what those responsibilities are, especially when tax breaks are to be had. Figuring my demo is not heavily skewed toward those who itemize (we are talking about architects after all), and listing to whom I give money seemed like the antithesis of charity -- oh, and I’m lazy -- the post never made it, and I’m sure y’all gave as generously as your deductions merited.
So anyway, back to that pesky MoMA renewal. A great deal if you go to MoMA four times (less if you bring a guest), right? No standing in line, a clear sense of local superiority when you get in the members coat check line (which seems to never work as well as the non-members line). All so you can try to look at artwork you’ve been looking at for the past ten years, if you an get past the seven hundred thousand people who seem to enter every day. Oh, don't forget that great trinket store discount -- overpriced holiday cards at 10% off!
I think you get my point. Even at a $20 non-member entry fee, it’s rough sledding to argue for MoMA membership. It’s like the proverbial gym membership -- all intent, no execution. The question for me today isn’t about wasting one’s money. I just need to look at my rent bill to get a more gratuitous sense of frission at futile outlay. It’s the snookering of thousands of New Yorkers by the massive brand machine that is MoMA.
Really, is there a more trite symbolism of New York residency? It’s the training wheels of culture consumption, yet so many of us cling to it, fearful we’ll be caught out, like not subscribing to the New Yorker. It’s Culture Legitimation Insurance -- really, a good deal for that number. For $75, you can insulate yourself from a sense that you are a philistine, that you are a small but sturdy leg of the table that is the preeminent arts institution in America. You and the other 600,000 or so members who make up the same amount of revenue as is expected from an incoming board member.
When is the last time you went? Even cracked the wafer seal of the monthly guide, that seemingly rich book of culture that arrives each month, a little dig intended to keep you small? ‘Look’ it says ‘over 40 pages of highbrow activities that you could be yours, if you weren’t such a lazy low culture wastrel! Only $6.25, amortized!’ Except ten pages are given over for Park Slope mommies and Bugaboo stroller lunch programs, along with the listings of 50 films that you could only reasonably attend if you live or work within six blocks due to their draconian ticket policies. Oh, and the show that has been up since 2004 that is as marginally as interesting any twenty feet of West Chelsea real estate.
My opening salvo in the war against middlebrow cultural namechecking was to instead patronize their neighbors. Then I looked further a field: first stop was the Whitney, where it took me all of five minutes to remind myself that it was more of the same (though I enjoy going to the Whitney more), a point driven home years ago when I worked for an ad conglomerate and scored one of those superpowered corporate member passes. Actually, I took a fistful, since no one wanted them, and escorted a half dozen friends to the Biennial, with a pass for each. Upon presenting one, I was asked ‘How many tickets do you want?’ So, yeah, fuck me, pay for a membership when some 'hip' art director from McCann take waltz in with everyone in his Hoboken apartment building for free? I think not.
I won’t bother with the progressively duller story of trying to think of worthy cultural institutions I could come up with off the top of my head and how it petered out once I found out you couldn’t join the El Museo del Barrio online. But in principle, I’m still at it. But the important first step, like any addiction, is admitting you have a problem. Thus, I have shred all my MoMA related correspondence. I tread confidently, if a little unsurely into a future… post-modern. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
January 3, 2007
Inevitable Year-end Roundup. This is when everyone is supposed to do year end round ups and/or make predictions. Certainly on the one on everyone’s lips today will be competing reports from major brokerages finally admitting that real estate in the city is cooling (nooo!), but the landing is soft (big surprise) and next year will be better (yay!). Nothing shocking there.
Looking at some of the efforts of others, I find myself glad that I don’t attempt to make a better study of the outer boroughs: it looks like Kondylis on meth out there.
Closer to home, the news isn’t much better. Not bothering with the pedantic research require to nail down a date or two, here are some general observations about the progress of our urban fabric over the past year.
Starchitects: Over. After a passel of big names and big disappointments, the parade of easy developer dollars for swanky residential seems to have been turned off for the institutionalized big names of our architectural youth. Not all the buildings are bad, and hell hole that is the ‘revitalized’ High Line may yet produce more embarrassment for anyone who self-identifies as an architect, but it looks like the ride is over. We can thank or blame Tschumi for this.
Charity? We don’t need no stinking charity. Aside from our mayor buying a townhouse for a bajillion dollars, no significant culture projects were announced, funded, initiated, or planned for most of the year. The Whitney/High Line announcement doesn’t count because a: it is no more impressive conceptually than the Guggenheim/Casino fiasco in Las Vegas, and b: the Whitney has made announcing expansion plans a conceptual art form that has yet to be acknowledged.
The city that never sleeps: pretty tired. A quick list of unresolved public and private development or design disputes that seem to have gone nowhere, except back, over the past year: PS 64 (CHARAS/El Bohio), The WTC site/memorial/demolition/remains recovery, Hudson Yards, Governors Island, Pier 40, congestion pricing, East River-fish market-seaport redevelopment, Moynihan Station, or property tax reform (though no one is really looking at that). The city gets no credit for the 421a exclusion expansion (if I’m saying that right), squoze in just under the wire, after noticing that people are selling million dollar apartments across the street from auto repair shops and a plantain wholesaler.
Brooklyn: not so lucky. Perhaps planning gridlock has its perverse benefits. While we were all staring at the Switch Condo, trying to figure out what could be taking so long, the city rezoned all of Brooklyn. Scarano gets the northern half, though apparently the cornice line tops off at just below his Star Trek office, and Ghery gets the southern half. Since he doesn’t have an office here, there are no limits to how garish he can be, a challenge he seems to unfortunately relish (Oy Vey! indeed, Marty). In response, Park Slope parents everywhere force their children to form middle-school punk bands that write 3-chord paeans to Jane Jacobs.
Pataki: the most dangerous man in America. Apparently Pataki is still on bin Laden’s speed dial (or buddy list, to update a tired cliché). It was announced that he will get around that clock protection (at a price of $20K a week) since he is apparently still in grave danger from… terrorists. That’s right, the man who has done more than anyone (save Dubya) to demonstrate the efficacy of singular acts of terrorism is considered a target. No, he’s their hero. I might speculate that the order was intended to protect him from Arad, but he’s apparently been rendered to the PANYNJ version of Gitmo. You can take this whole paragraph as a synecdoche for ‘WTC rebuilding: unmitigated disaster, no observable change in status’.
This listicle making is tiring, and uninspired -- just like most of the past year in development and design in Manhattan. I could have been more diligent in the research, but it shouldn’t take hours of pondering, or wandering, to come up with a single example of an inspired change to our physical landscape. It seems like lots of streets got paved, but all that does for us is increase the amount of danger we face from speeding vehicles. Hell, it was the first full year in a century that the air wasn’t befouled by Philip Johnson, and even that didn’t prevent the erection of yet another of his signature ham-fisted rehashes of design styles two decades out of date that had been his hallmark since the thirties. Flush with billions of dollars in Wall Street bonuses, you might hold out hope for morsels of that finding its way back to the city that made such an industry possible. But don’t hold your breath, unless you offer bottle service.