Monday post-Thanksgiving: time to put up newly bought seasonal lights to ward off the winter darkness I’ve hated so much since moving north from the Tropics. I wake up to cereal and Artforum before morning swim. Roundtable on art and architecture as I drink my tea. Talk of collaboration, gesamtkunstwerk, representation, dialectic, monument, spectacle, iconic, pavilion, discourse, atmosphere, culture, landscape, body, experience, rare, phenomenology, technology, advancement, mediation, immediacy, inseparable, movement, spectator, activate, memory, affect, rote, immersion, utopianism, junkspace, controlspace, … Hmmm, junkspace?
What is this
Junkspace you speak of, it sounds familiar?
I read Rem Kollhaas’ article in October, and it sounds like the 80’s;
but more so. …And controlspace? Sounds like the 80’s, but more so and tethered
to a smartphone. Not having had the urge
to get thusly tethered quite yet, I can still move around under the
illusion of freedom; though, qua Google user, my vitals are plenty monitored
and amassed in some ultra-cooled data storage facility for friendly corporate suasion on
the devices I do use.
Off to swim: different spatial awareness.
Back home to unpack Christmas lights bought at Home Depot. Hmmm, short a string; I need more light. Ah the dilemma: to drive 3 miles up to the Lowe’s and hope that the lights they carry match the ones I bought, or do what I know I should, and just drive the 15 miles to the Home Depot and be done with it? Knowing full well that the two big box stores that signify home, and by extension life improvement in our collective psyche these days, never carry exactly the same products, making the concept of “perfect competition” one more myth from my youth, I take a gamble I know I am going to lose and drive to the Lowe’s on what the "roundtable" would call “infrastructure” and around here we just call Isaqueena.
I buy lights that I think match the ones I do have. Drive home. They don’t. I get back on infrastructure, and return the lights to Lowe’s. I get onto more infrastructure and drive the longer trip to Home Depot that I should have driven in the first place. One more typical day of trying to be a good little consumer in America.
Back home to unpack Christmas lights bought at Home Depot. Hmmm, short a string; I need more light. Ah the dilemma: to drive 3 miles up to the Lowe’s and hope that the lights they carry match the ones I bought, or do what I know I should, and just drive the 15 miles to the Home Depot and be done with it? Knowing full well that the two big box stores that signify home, and by extension life improvement in our collective psyche these days, never carry exactly the same products, making the concept of “perfect competition” one more myth from my youth, I take a gamble I know I am going to lose and drive to the Lowe’s on what the "roundtable" would call “infrastructure” and around here we just call Isaqueena.
I buy lights that I think match the ones I do have. Drive home. They don’t. I get back on infrastructure, and return the lights to Lowe’s. I get onto more infrastructure and drive the longer trip to Home Depot that I should have driven in the first place. One more typical day of trying to be a good little consumer in America.
As I drive,
I think of Junkspace. I live in the
boonies and Junkspace seems to be more of an urban phenomenon. It seems to require a greater critical mass... Truthfully, although infected with Junkspace logic in the virtual spaces we inhabit, we folk around these parts are still living in Decorated Shack Territory. However, in their appeal to the lowest
common denominator, Junkspace and Decorated Shack seem to belong to the same
family. I love
driving (stickshift cars). I hate having to drive with no other
transportation choices. For choices I’d have
to live in an urban environment where Architectural Junkspace might
proliferate; but also where cultural diversity, one of a kind restaurants, and
transportation choices coexist with it even as it tries to obliterate those.
Annoyed at having to do all this driving for a single 16 foot string of lights because of distribution decisions not to compete perfectly made by ginormous corporations, I crank the ignition, push in the cassette tape, yes, the cassette tape, crank up Mick Ronson’s guitar solo on Moonage Daydream, floor the gas pedal, and take the back road to the main road to the Home Depot. After all, illusory or not, hot and dry, it is a beautiful day to speed and bellow out of tune!
Annoyed at having to do all this driving for a single 16 foot string of lights because of distribution decisions not to compete perfectly made by ginormous corporations, I crank the ignition, push in the cassette tape, yes, the cassette tape, crank up Mick Ronson’s guitar solo on Moonage Daydream, floor the gas pedal, and take the back road to the main road to the Home Depot. After all, illusory or not, hot and dry, it is a beautiful day to speed and bellow out of tune!
