Good morning. It’s 5:23 AM, and I’m sitting on my friend Jed’s couch in Brooklyn. All sorts of important school shit started to go down today in Providence, but I was privvy to none of it. We had one last frolic out at the beach, this weekend, you see. Just a handful of us, and it was a fantastic last hurrah for the summer. The temperatures were within range, the people were concordant and the relationships could be accurately described by an adjective that means the opposite of “awkward”. I’m sure you just got back to work and so the last thing you need is someone yapping about their complacently happy beach time while you have to fix the TPS reports and whatnot.

But so: I had told fidelity to put a lot of money into my checking account at bank of fucking america. I had issued this order last Thursday, and I’d only done it so late because the FIRST one I did, when I called on Tuesday, didn’t go through at all. But the second proved to be a far more nettlesome thing, really…. the transaction didn’t go through until Monday, so I had to bum cash off my friends and generally be annoying about money, a state of being I detest with the passion of 10,000 supernovae. So but so: on monday, licking my chops to hit the ATM, I check my balance on the intertron, and what is it I see? Why, the fools have executed a WITHDRAWAL and not a deposit. So there is a gigantic number in my bank account as I expected, but it is most unexpectedly red, like straight-up #FF0000, and there is a minus sign next to it.

After much phone-calling and yelling and screaming of “ESCALATE ME NOW!!” and the like, I got one dude to admit that the broker had literally CLICK THE WRONG FUCKING BUTTON. this was a real show-stopper factoid, I have to say… at RPI, I was in charge of the security and proper treatment of lots of peoples’ personal info. I didn’t even touch money stuff with my systems, but believe me, if I had done something like that to even one of my charges’ data, I’d have been super ultra fucking fired. AND BUT SOOOO, these dildos haven’t fixed my fucking shit yet!! I won’t go into all the details, really, but WTF, you can click a mouse and ruin all of my savings at once, but you can’t click it the OTHER way and FIX IT?!?!?! Color me boggled by this shit.

Anyway, I guess the upshot is that I learned a lot of stuff about American financial infrastructure. Did you know that the Federal Reserve closes at 2:30? Maybe. But did you know that most contemporary ACH transfers, while slower than federal wire funds, actually ENCOMPASS a federal wire fund transfer within their transactional boundary? That is fascinating. I learned shit like that, in between breaths while I yelled at bankers. Yes.

Anyway I will be back in PVD soon, and back with the REAL WRITING too (someting more for Ms. Ganssle, yeah!)… in closing, I would like to apologize also for being a shitty communicator this summer. I have a few legit excuses: I couldn’t get GTalk to turn off on my fone for a few weeks, so it only looked like I was giving you the cold, silent finger. Not long after, the fone was lost in entirety while I was riding the infamous cyclone down at coney island. I swear, it was totally in my pocket in what I thought was a secure fashion… I couldn’t have been wronger; the fone was tossed to the breeze, and so I had to upgrade ad-hoc and scramble my contacts together from pieces of paper, and even answer calls with queries like “who is this?” … blech.

So these are my excuses, but fuck them. Soon, we will chat all through the night. It will be wonderful. But before that, I’m going to crash here, and hopefully scrape up enough cash to achieve the requisite fiduciary momentum to leave New York. Fuck yes. Salud!

I am so easy, when it comes to dance music. Alls I need is a good mix done by someone who knows how to use a low-pass filter. It’s that easy. It can be anything: house, Warp, 80’s, norwegian black metal, Sufjan Motherfucking Stevens, I don’t care*. As long as you can avoid jarringly crashing the songs together (not easy; such cacophony is SOP for some) and you sweep the mids, you have me at hello.

Not that I’ve been dancing much (with a handful of notable exceptions; most notably the drunken CAVE danceathon depicted above, which maybe I will tell you about sometime) but dance music == work music, and the nights have been quite late here. The writing has been haphazard, but I did get an article out the door for a magazine my dear friends back in RISD architecture are doing. It’s called Public Relations, and when I know more about this publication and its whereabouts, so will you.

Anyway. Also, a few weeks ago I went and got some new pants in new york. I usually get pants from Diesel, but I wanted to mix things up a bit, so I went to the “G-Star RAW” store across from Stackhouse, despite their entirely stupid name. While the pants I got there are nice, the people who work there are retards. Furthermore, they managed to reinforce my conviction that ASSHOLES and RETARDS are the new fundamental dichotomy that defines all of humanity:

Figure 1. Assholes versus retards. As originally referenced herein.

… and so here’s why: when you go to Diesel, the people who work there are snotty, overdressed pieces of hipster trash who don’t condescend to give you the time of day (née “assholes”). When you come out of the dressing room in your putative new pants, they look you up and down and sort of snort derisively. I am not precisely sure why, but this whole routine makes them sell more pants. Like you’ve somehow earned them by dealing with their shit.

But so the “G-Star RAW” people are sycophantic douchebags (née “retards”). First off, the pants guy actively helped me find some pants. That was their first mistake. I do not want nice pants people; I want to be brutally put in my place for my naïve fashion sense and rampant consumerism. Furthermore, he tried waaay too hard to please. I came out of the dressing room in some pants, and one of his pants cohorts looked at me and immediately said “those look nice!” … I went over to the mirror and saw that he was a lying sack of shit. The pants were horrendous, and I in fact sent them back. Plus, all the “G-Star RAW” employees were not dressed in the over-the-top absurd manner I have come to expect from top pantsmen. The whole experience left me baffled, and I can’t say I’ll be doing much business with them in the future.

Anyway yeah. This whole entry was a procrastination scheme, so I’m going to call it over and do some real work. Fuck yes!

-fish

I re-read Harriet the Spy, after like 20+ years, and it was at least as all-encompassingly awesome now as it was then. If you haven’t read this, I would go read it right now if at all possible… it will take you all of 3 hours, max, to get through the 240 pages. That’s not to say it’s simplistic or childish, no, it’s just awesome. Plus the illustrations take up space, indeed yes.

Of course, I could detect all sorts of stuff this time around that I missed back when I was a wee lad. The book is packed with all sorts of New York-specific stuff, which now that I consider it very well may be the source of my personal fascination with the city. Plus there was the usual bevy of socioeconomic and social angles that any quote-unquote “children’s literature” is encoded with but is not consciously accessable to you when you’re actually a child… those bits are always a guaranteed hoot during adult revisits, yeah.

Anyway. Now I’m trying to write up a bunch of stuff about how contemporary gallery shows have to necessarily enngage with, and ultimately fuck with, the gallery hosting them to be at all effective. Like this one did… such things provide perspective to the gallery’s fundamentally priveledged viewport, rite? Yeah. I’m not done, or I would have posted it here. If you have any links or leads on that sort of thing, do let me know, cuz I’m sort of blocked at the moment, yes.

Another impediment to such writing, besides my own sloth and ineptitute, is the fact that my new “mac book pro” has either a busted battery or a busted power-management thingy, and as such it turns itself off when unplugged for a few seconds regardless of the charge. Anyone else with such a fucked computer? It’s retarded, indeed, but it definately could be worse, all things considered.

Yes! Now to eat a candy bar, and go home. More when I got it, yeah.

-fish

The High Line was urban infrastructure and architecture, in harmony. It came about in accordance with the economic logic of the day, that which produced buildings whose programmatic ties to train-based logistics were physically manifest… the remnants of which can be seen along any of the rundown exurban areas Amtrak’s northeast corridor passes through, where sagging warehouses directly interface with little rusty side-branches of track that split off from the main route. There was no abstraction between commerce, logistics, infrastructure, and architecture… all such interactions were right there, in the open, and quite legible.

Figure 1. High Line train passing through what is now Westbeth Artists’ Community.

… When Bryan had talked about infrastructure in housing as an API, my first thought was something like

Ok yeah, but unless you are stamping like thousands of these things out, all with slightly different structural, logical, and perhaps programmatic requirements, the API idea kind of breaks down, cuz it’s overkill, I mean after all an API is something you use in order to approach a component-based system of structures in a black-box sort of way, whereas in architecture that makes little sense considering the amount of post-construction, errm, dynamism in the system.

… points which, I should mention, a) went unuttered outside of my own bedroom and b) were summarily addressed, more or less, immediately afterwards. But I am always wary when ideas from software engineering are brought into other disciplines, because really most everything in software is metaphor to begin with. That, coupled with the “fail better” mentality fostered by apple-Z and, more recently, the whole agile-development thing, seems like a philosophy that would complicate things faster than it could simplify them.

But fuck that, really, because “complex” and “simple” is probably the worst false dichotomy like ever. The manhattan grid, and later the 1916 zoning law, created (by dint of abstracting the ideas of “city block”, “avenue”, etcetera) a simple system in which people could build shit. This happened to coincide with the advent of individualism in the last century, and the dovetailing of said individualism with rabid hypercapitalism, and so volia, yes, the modular and slightly abstract system made a lot of sense. so people built shit.

The edge cases are the most interesting, tho… like when people want or need to programmatically exceed that system. The inevitable friction between the parties involved when such things are executed is, too, a consequence of the abstraction; if we’re still talking in terms of things like APIs, it’s kind of like “DLL hell” I would say. The almost balletic integration of the High Line with the buildings it serviced does, I will concede, have a nice parallel with the earlier days of computer engineering, before APIs were trans-national legal concerns, when code was written for love, and not much else.

Figure 2. The High Line, immediately prior to the commencement of reconstruction.

Most designers (including myself on most days) would like to ignore the cold, hard, logical fact of the economic context. It is always the thing in the background that drives all of these engineering decisions, whether you’re building an API for software or for plumbing. I mean, the Friends of the High Line are going to end up with a mighty fine bullet-point to lend to nearby luxury condo developers, despite their proclaimed 501(c)(3) status. It looks to be very pretty, yes. But I fear that the simultaneous decoupling of the place, from both its economic and physical contexts, will rob it of its power.

Is this sort of universal abstraction simply the spirit of the times, or is it a fluke of globalization? Who knows. I don’t. If you know, tell me. In the meantime I’ll be reading more Houellebecq, which is what started me thinking about all this nonsense in the first place. Yes.

-fish

good:

• rebuilding merce cunningham’s internal database
• frying hot dogs in butter (the only worthwile thing I got from the book “dry” by augusten burroughs, you axed me)
• the similarity of mcgorlick park with washington square park, not just in design (that sort of radial french-garden plan thing) but also in the way that each lane in the park seems to self-segregate into a micro-region based on foot traffic (e.g. in washington square, southwest corner = chess players, west middle corridor = nyu students going to class, center area = tourists watching breakdancers, etc… in mcgorlick park the distinctions are a mite more subtle, like polish dog walkers vs. new moms with bugaboos, but they’re still there).
• maybe maybe maybe selling a book, knock on wood, yes yes
• interviewing people and having them blab about design and language on tape for hours
• cupcakes from billy’s
• dancing with girls, all night long
• riding a bike from greenpoint to redhook with your friend on a summer day … normally I enjoy deriding “bike people” as hillarious fanatics, but I can sort of see where they’re coming from with that. weaving in and out of the little niches between cars at high speed gives you this total man-over-machine type buzz, and plus if you’re doing this in new york, your perspectival POV of the city is very similar to how the video game Grand Theft Auto looks, which is entertaining. the whole thing is further enhanced by stopping at grimaldi’s and/or swimming in a redhook swimming pool, indeed.
• doing laundry … just now in my laundry, I unexpectedly found an almost-new deerhoof shirt that I know is not mine, but is in my laundry and is my size. this never happens, but karmatically it makes sense considering the staggering quantities of my own clothing that has disappeared without warning or explaination into washing machines and dryers throughout my 27+ years of garbed existence
• cutting video again
• shakespeare in the park

bad:

• the G train
• hangovers
• when someone you love very much is in a bad way, such that it makes them seem mean and nasty when really they’re just tired and scared, so you have to repress your emotion when interfacing with them, which is not easy because you love them and seeing someone you love in pain makes you kind of emotional
• the total wasteland of despair that is typographic control in CSS
• dumping liquid into your new laptop, destroying the keyboard
• talking before thinking
• drinking too much
• forgetting recipes
• transcribing interview tapes where both parties are hyped on coffee and talking 400wpm or thereabouts
• money
• not being able to sleep because of hideous anxiety attacks concerning life decisions and whatnot

ugly:

• old polish men peering in your window at night and catching you dancing to really stupid shit
• thinking proudly to yourself, “wow, I haven’t seen a single cockroach in my apartment all summer”, because as soon as you have thought that, you have of course irrevocably jinxed yourself and you basically see a huge one crawling up the wall as soon as you’ve finished the thought
• rats that have been smooshed by cars
• the hipsters who have formed a kickball league (replete with un-funny ironic team t-shirts) and play relentlessly in mackerren park
• the blackouts currently plaguing brooklyn and the subway in general
• leaving a cabinet open, forgetting you have done so, and then smashing your temple on it when abruptly standing up

… basically, yeah.

hi, I need a sublet in new york this summer. here are the important details:

• I like brooklyn and manhattan, in that order.
• I have no animals.
• I want the whole apartment to myself, I’d rather not rent out a room in a place with people in it already.
• I’d like it for june/july/august, optimally (the end of august I can part with.)

YEAH!!! tell your friends. but not before telling me: fish2000@geeeemail.com. I will buy you so many cupcakes and/or beers if you help me out, you’ll just explode. ok. yeah!

-fish