ft ground

I recall spending an inordinate amount of time below the horizon in a concrete trench. Even if the proportion of time I recall it occupying is flawed it remains a delightful prompt and a sign-off PK uses a great deal in his ‘e-flares’ to me “from below the horizon.” Like most plains cities (except the terrifyingly blind approach to Chicago from the west) Fort Worth rises up slowly, almost endlessly, from the south. A railroad could make the ascent across the rising peel of its roofscape. It rises so gently that I was dizzied by the immediacy of its presence like the chance palpation of some tumorous mass. “Where did that come from?” It might seem more likely that a city like Pittsburgh erupting out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel nothing would promote the effect more. However the lull of the slow creep towards something improbably contradictory to the surrounding milieu (either of the story (like the drive)) or of the cultural context (a piece of disruptive art that functions by virtue of its exploitation of convention (banality, Koons)) is more unsettling (effective?) to me. I prefer transitions and unapparent distinctions to sore thumbs. I prefer to generate my own stopping points over landmarks and guided tours. I drove straight to the Modern. My head was almost so clear that I didn’t know where I was, where I had just been, or what my hopes were with an empty sky that would be too easy to forget. (more…)

When the only remaining light in the sky seems to be thrown back over the horizon like the strangely peaceful hair of a drowned woman the light in the windows of the studios stacked in the north wall of the courtyard arises. I’ve had an affinity for the archetype of the glowing window at dusk since I worked a construction project on a farm in central Georgia in my early twenties. Their warmth and their ability to telegraph a completely identifiable spatial tone I felt was strong enough to humor the guts like a pull of brandy from a real St. Bernard as I died across the snow from a Swiss chalet and its twinkling purr. Of course that transcendent interior space of milkglass lamps, wood and upholstery settees, and beapron’d grandmothers pulling hot olive boules from the oven to nibble with some Glühwein is a statistically improbable confluence. It is the obstruction of the sheer curtain that makes this illusory phenomenon possible. It both allows the light to escape and protects the reality of the situation. The process of uniformly distributing light across the fabric surface turns the window solid, an object that distinguishes itself from the night air and from the building being consumed by shade. It is alone and it speaks. The windows of the architecture studios weren’t doing quite that. They lacked the sheer curtains and a worm’s eye view of the rooms could be seen through them, mostly ceiling. They still transmitted a uniform glow from bouncing throughout the large white rooms that seemed to hit the glass and stop there, halted by the not-yet-complete darkness of the courtyard. (more…)

‘The body’, no longer ‘her body’, there in a diorama almost set precisely in an alcove filled out with flowers, two roseate globe lamps and two red-shaded tapers, become as a whole array, a fetish upon which the emotions and memories about the woman are channeled, but try as I might, looking upon the face, not quite right, slightly off, as though molded and coated with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust, I could not picture a moving living memory, the body had taken them from me, it was not until later, in bed, that I could ’see’ her laughing, with her partial plate and coffee-rasped throat, because what was there and the way it sat in the room was the hinge point in the forgetting process, where life becomes the caricature of ‘the sleeping body’, of ‘her sleeping body’, and it is at that point you are shaken to abandon your attachment to embodied memories, by depositing them onto the fetish doll, and the final time you turn your back, after all the receptional and conversational dismissals, you leave those desires and applications, and equations of ‘her’ upon ‘it’ and you take her away as a completely memorial construction. (more…)

Entering my thesis work I was very concerned, from slights I had felt tremendously injurious in my fully one-summer-long professional career, with the reformation of practice into a more democratic or pluralistic adventure. I foresaw a chorus, or at least some kind of organized chaos where I could make some marks and have them left to be noted by someone who took an interest. But perhaps what shook out of that professional experience was not that I wanted to reform practice, but that I want practice to be reformed. I had learned that I had not the ego strength to run an office, and destined to wallflowerdom in the field I wanted to imbue those peripheries with some kind of voice, an intern’s bill of rights. It is hard for me to recall ten years later what made me nauseous every morning I went to the office. I think at the time I saw it as a personality conflict. But I can see a more lasting reading being the acclimation to loss of control. This was not only the loss of creative control, which I had held to varying results over my five years down of schooling and studies, but the loss of lifestyle control that every person must choke on as they edge into the professional world. It was like a first time smoker suffering through those first several butts. I had to really want to stick to it. Having no interest in acclimating beyond emersion enough to provide me fodder for my intellectual inquiries, the experience made me gag emotionally.

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Sprawled alone with long summer dusk still high and slow through the trees beyond the Kimbell with my back against a bench and my legs flat stretched out across the floor toward the fountain I fingered pits in the travertine. I don’t think about giants when I am right up against them. (more…)