From ON Confusion

November 2015

"Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen."
- George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

Okay, I'll be (the) one to admit it. Others have done it before, and still others will do so again, but my words are the so-called blue plate special of the day, and so here it is: I am confused. Utterly, severely, chronically confused. I do not consider my confusion a disposition, as in the way, say, anxiety and depression have elsewhere been called the appropriate dispositions of postmodernity. Instead I view it as a condition. Bewilderment and uncertainty, to add two synonyms into the mix, are for me a life-defining situation; they are a reflexive reaction to practically every state of affairs that vectors its way into my purview.

Am I confused today? No question about it. And in recent days as well. Since when? Predictably, I can't quite remember, but let's say, for the purpose of some elementary barn-raising, that things have been this way for more than a half-year. On a less pressing level, next order of business: confused about what? Well, at the risk of exaggerating: everything. Literally everything. 'Everything,' even though I have just claimed its literality, could never be truly all-encompassing for a variety of reasons (epistemological, ontological, and so on), but I nevertheless mean it literally in the very sense that confusion aptly describes my typical reaction in the face of everything I encounter from wake until sleep, and, what's more, every other thing I can summon to mind. And so, experientially speaking, I ask us to grant that the contents of the aforesaid do indeed comprise 'literally everything.' We will consider the proper meaning of 'everything' in greater depth, but only after having committed to paper the due diligence of many more prefatory remarks.

I am sometimes tempted to embrace the notion that I am clinically confused, but as far as I can tell the DSM-5 -- the thick tome referred to in longhand as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th edition) - doesn't include confusion as a classified mental condition. Confusion does appear in the text as a notable symptom of dementia (which, by the way, now goes by the moniker of "neurocognitive disorder," major or minor). But the facts on the ground are clear: The state of confusion I swear that I am engulfed in, one so general and all-comprising it might be deemed existential is, albeit, not a socially recognized malady....

FROM STATEN ISLAND

17 NOVEMBER 2015

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is
stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”
― Charles Baudelaire

There's a distinct pleasure in making the effort to become, from time to time, a tourist in your own city. If that notion comes off as a cliche, nevermind, because cliches, though they become hackneyed, are cliches on account of having once been rooted in original truths. Nor do I mean to imply that a city can ever really be one's own, even if one has lived out the better part of one's life within its limits: issued forth as an infant from one of its hospitals, grown to know its sights, sounds, and characters well, its best haunts, cheapest eats, or its most expeditious means of getting from one point to another.

Any city, but particularly a sprawling metropolis like New York, is a palimpsest in constant delirious flux, shifting chimerically and perennially - it does so while one works, commutes, and sleeps, in a constant process of autonomous reinvention. And in an important sense which has nothing to do with real-estate holdings or canonical family names, The City belongs to no one individual, no one tribe. I give the example of New York on account of having spent most of my terrestrial years here - I cannot truly attest to whatever sense of ownership might be felt by the denizens of cities like Istanbul, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, or Moscow, although my intuition tells me that the above said holds true with regard to these places. One can certainly be in a relationship with one's city, but that relationship is essentially tenuous. It has no absolute guarantor, no indelible deed.

In the cult-classic documentary and urban portrait of sorts, 'The Cruise' (1998), Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, poet, unorthodox tourguide, and long-time paramour of New York, muses that "New York City is a living organism. It evolves, it devolves, it fluctuates as a living organism ... my relationship with New York City is as vitriolic as the relationship with myself and with any other human being, which means that it changes every millisecond, that it's in constant fluctuation. This winter I really felt like we were getting a divorce; and I was the loser of that divorce."

Truman Capote put across a similar sentiment when he wrote, “I love New York, even though it isn't mine, the way something has to be, a tree or a street or a house, something, anyway, that belongs to me because I belong to it.”

FROM ON CONFUSION

22 October 2015

The only difference between the way you think of your own agency now and the way things really are is that it makes no difference what you think. We are zombies in the most important sense - we do what we do based on drives, desires, efforts, and circumstances, but we can no more will ourselves to do something other than what we are currently doing than we can be somebody who is not ourselves. That, my fallen friend, is the state of things. The best we can do is embrace it, and eachother, as we wait to see what we will do next. Desire next. Think up next. We can try to do no harm in the mean time. We should seek pleasure and avoid pain. We should be ever striving to improve ourselves, whilst helping others. We need to admit to ourselves and one another that in eachother's skulls there is an infinity of experience to which we will never have access, but with which we might commiserate, console, play, and love. These are my thoughts. Age 28. A reader of John Gray, the Stoics, determinists, and artists. A boy seeking answers. As we have always done. Amen.

21 July 2015

In short-listing adjectives which might be capable giving a thumbnail of New York City's public rail-based transit system, a.k.a. the subway,

How amused I would be if, just once, during the most common type of delay likely to be experienced on the NYC subway -- the kind wherein the train is suddenly halted, often between stations, and usually attributed to 'train traffic ahead' -- the corresponding intercom announcement informed us passengers that 'The train is being held momentarily on account of Butch Cassidy and his Hole in the Wall gang.'

You are what you repeatedly do

2 May 2015

You are what you repeatedly do. - Aristotle

You are what you repeatedly do. When things get hard. - Jamie Foxx

By going out of your mind you come to your senses. - Alan Watts

Money isn't everything. Money is the only thing. - Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

What do you call plants (the particulars and entirety of plant life/flora) that existed on earth predating human life? Or at least 'naturally occuring' or 'indigineous' as in existing, reproducing and subsisting, even evolving, competely independent of human intervention? In other words what were the plants that you could call part of the originary scene? That man encountered when he joined the ranks of life on earth? Essential flowers, woods, weeds... Were cannabis and papaver somniferum extant before man? Did they grow (and where) without human involvement? Did. They flourish in abundance or were they poor, in need of tending to be of significant availability to man?

In brief: what natural things were part of the originary scene when man emerged? What was the mise en scene? What were the central features, patterns, and natural churches of this strange new world?

From On Depression

2014

I could not analyze or glean deep insight from depression while I was its host. The possibility of doing so was and is proscribed because of depression's adept mastery, not solely over emotional configurations, but over conceptual substance itself. 

From Art in the Age of Global Weirding

18 July 2014

True story: three summers ago after a 3 and a half week session studying philosophy at The European Graduate School in Switzerland, my flight back to the States was delayed several days because of an impending hurricane that had all but shut down the airports in New York.

My father had met me in Geneva for the flight home, and with a few days suddenly on our hands we decided to rent a car and drive to the village of Beaune, in central France, famous for its outstanding surrounding vineyards. We did some wine-tasting and spent the night. The next morning, only mildly hungover, I took a stroll through the cobble-stone streets of Beaune’s medieval center.

On a complete whim, for no particular reason at all except passive touristic curiosity, I slowed my stride and turned into the alcove of an apartment building immediately beside me with the vague and spontaneous intention of reading the names of the tenants listed beside each of the door-buzzers (I think these buzzers are called “sonnettes” in French, ie. “une sonnette de porte”). The rationale, barely perceptible to me, was nonetheless simple: sometimes when visiting an unfamiliar place, in a mode of objective appreciation, the desire strikes you to inspect some of its small, quotidien details. Details which, because they are unmitigated by the fanfare that accompanies great architecture or cuisine, allow you for a moment to imagine vividly what life, another life, would have been like there. So why not these small buzzer-labels indexing the day-to-day entrance and egress of residents whose biographies are otherwise unknown to you?  

The building had no immediately remarkable features, was small and low-slung, and inside the alcove beside the double doors were just three buzzers and three corresponding labels. The very first one read “B. Latour”. I half-registered the surname as familiar, but only after my moment of appreciation was completed, having walked some paces away from the building, did it occur to me that B. Latour - the first initial and surname - was shared by the eminent philosospher of science and theorist of networks, Bruno Latour. 

I had been reading sections from Latour’s book ‘The Pasteurization of France’ just days earlier at EGS, and had been assigned 'We Have Never Been Modern’ as an undergrad student. I didn’t know where Latour was from other than that he was obviously French, and taught at Ecole Science Po, in Paris. Also obvious was that B. Latour was not an especially rare-sounding combination. But the possibility of such a coincidence, perhaps unremarkable to others, was exciting enough that I cut my walk short and headed for my hotel’s wi-fi hotspot. Could it have been that of all the doorways in France I had walked into Bruno Latour’s with absolutely no indicators to lead me there? 

Well, according to both wikipedia and Latour’s personal website, the theorist was indeed born in Beaune, Burgundy region, in 1947, to a wine grower family. I haven’t seen the need for further investigation. I am pleased enough with the semblance of a happy, if meaningless, coincidence, and I think the odds stack in its favor. The apartment may have belonged to him; it may have belonged to B. Latour Pere or Frere, if there was or is one; or it may have been rented by another, a Benoit or a Barbara Latour, unrelated to this particular Latour clan and its academic progeny except in the inherited formality of a surname picked from a finite pool of other French surnames. It’s possible that the Actor-Network-Theory, with which Bruno Latour is widely associated, would have something insightful to say about the chances of a coincidence like the one I have described - ANT is after all about the relational ties within a network (both material, as in “une sonnette” and semiotic, as in “Latour”), but for the time being it resonates best with me as a simple travel anecdote, and as a reminder of the perks of stopping to encounter the details.

TRUST IN WRITING

For twenty years before getting started the following kinds of questions turned over and over a spitroast in my mind, not one sufficiently addressed inside those twenty, until they were stale as mulch and sounded

What would it mean to write?

What would it be supposed to do, this writing?

What should I write about?

What ought one write about today?

What does it mean to write/to be a writer today?

Why write?

What would I write about? For whom? Why?

What would it say?

Writing always involves trust. As a writer, you have to muster and apply a great deal of trust at several key points in the process. Chronologically, the first act of trust involved trusting the worth of your experience. It is also the most difficult for perennial self-doubters like myself. Some might like this first act rephrased along the lines of 'trusting the veracity of your experience', but I think this places too much emphasis on our idea of Truth as being the most important characteristic of all reflection, which perhaps it is, but that is something I would like to question later on.

For now, let us say that on the occasion of any act of writing, there is the question, 'Who am I to write this?' Well, you are precisely someone whothe notion that what you saw and wished to communicate will, by your own unique art, be resembled dutifully enough by what you create, no matter what limiting factors may prevent an ideal and flawless depiction. Where you can't communicate something perfectly, do not assume that necessarily falling silent out of a commitment to honesty is the only option. It is an important option, but should not be resorted to in too many instances. We know that we can be silent – and were, for scores of millennia.

Trust this notion first of all because it's true, but also because without a good degree of trust, you will find yourself frustratedly presiding over a cloying circle of perpetual doubt as you watch the successes and mediocrities of others play out all around you. And the outline of your circle, which sits at the very center of a huge carnival filled with actors, will become covered, rendered invisible by the dust kicked up by all the inconsiderate bedlam around you. It will certainly feel inconsiderate, that is, if you can't hear the many voices around you who are, in their own way, inviting you to merge your circle with theirs.

A New Dimension [INFO] 

The Analyst At Work: Comments on “A New Dimension”

Paul McLean’s career as an artist, cultural critic, researcher, and new media pioneer has taken numerous storied turns, hewing here towards typifying the protagonist in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, and there towards the scene-irrupting subculture of Chinatown, L.A., transversing the world of Chris Kraus’ Tiny Creatures.

The work exhibited in “A New Dimension” is akin to a cross-section along the escarpment of what is a tremendously variegated larger body of work that McLean has established. The crux, and delight, of getting to know McLean’s practice, particularly his concept of dimensionality, is the requirement of a staid and highly meriting patience, both to see the work on its own wild (as in a Wild West or yonder of the mind) yet rigorous terms, as well as to grasp the organon of methods and tools he uses to expound upon and measure “dimensional” artmaking and markmaking against the evident realities of the contemporary era (the etymology of the word dimension, appropriately, stems from the Latin dimens, a measurement). The contemporary era, qua McLean’s work, has much in common with what Alain Badiou calls the Second Restoration - the first having been the period after the French Revolution - in which capital dominates, and thinking is abhorred, for its correlate is Truth, which necessarily brings with it the prospect of an abrogation of the current status quo in which the rich and powerful exploit the resource of unthinking in order to capitalize every social space that ought to remain constantly tested, unfolded, expanded ludically towards humanist ends. McLean’s work can be argued as dwelling in the struggle between humanity’s burden of technicity, - thought after production - and its potentially saving grace, spirit - or, preferable to McLean, Geistes in the sense Hegel gave to it – and this makes him, in every analysis, a spiritual-humanist artist. Not least, the works on display also address the threat that media manipulation and over-exposure can have on this Geistes, as well as the threat of the abstract apparatuses of global finance to Thought, in that, as Badiou also deplores, we are further divorced from indexicality, and the ‘chance’ of phenomenology has been replaced by an artificial chance of floating numbers, a crisis which in turn is enabled by what McLean labels 'artificial persons’, namely the Corporation.

This remark leads one to the visual motifs that connect the span of media in which McLean works. The first misunderstanding to be eschewed in engaging McLean’s work is that of reading its iconography as hackneyed symbols of the paranoiac and outsider envisioning an Orwellian dystopic future, a Gibsonian gasmask culture that is the stuff of graphic novels more often than critical art. Granted, McLean’s use of such signifiers as the surveillant cycloptic eye, the sewn-shut mouth, the vaguely militaristic Americana swirling in the space around the recurring character the artist names Dim Tim, is earnest, but the signifieds, read in appropriately post-Panofskian terms in which the social history of the artist and his relations to the historical period’s technics are observed, are not purely what they seem.

For McLean, the imagery choices in each drawing, painting, software-based collage, or video vignette, act as so many points of departure for the establishment of a given problem, perhaps most adequately referred to in the sense given by Deleuze and Guattari of a generative motor (although McLean is clearly wary of the culture of the combustible, as Peter Sloterdijk defines our past century), to be resolved or at least developed by the work as it stands within a series of artistic proofs, as if in its own military role call. No single work of McLean’s is fully activated by itself; each is related, answered to, by a similar variation to be sleuthed and found elsewhere in the corpus of McLean’s artist-as-researcher practice. Michael Baers has written recently on the research-oriented tack certain strains of art have taken in recent years, and reminds us of the dual etymology of the word science: its Latin origin scientia, “to know,” and its Greek origin scienzia, “to split, rend, or cleave.” In the progressive format McLean’s works take on - from sketch to painting, to computer rendering, to textual essay – we gain knowledge of the four-dimensional nature (that is, existing in space-time or, in certain cases, perhaps other unseen aspects of their presentness) of his subjects, whether like Bloomberg their politics are being expressly critiqued, or whether like Pueblo Native Americans their spiritual history is being depicted. This is done, indeed, via a splitting into various artistic operations, not least where the artist’s love of experimenting with materials is evident, but more often than not McLean takes the splitting aspect of science and mounts it upon his own committed interpretation of a Hegelian dialectics whereby the results are to be negated and re-synthesized until something new and unknown enters the picture.  

[Draft | BETA #1]

AFA [Oralist]
 

From Paul McLean:

"Art fair art [AFA] is a mobile device, with economic apps. Whatever you’re talking about when you’re using an art fair is the more important cultural utility. Which is why I gave Paris my digital recorder at Pulse. To be a real art fair, an Oralist must be present. More than a multilingual witness situated at the correct place and time, like Liv, the Oralist is the AFA mobile device’s GUI, translator and on/off switch. Without an Oralist, the art fair is no different from any other traveling show, like a gun show, or a computer show, or a car show. Come to think of it, Armory presented cars, computers and guns, too! Everything is art! As in any social media, the commentary is essential at the art fair. But the Oralist differentiates among the forms and users, datamines the domain, searching, compiling and making notations by voice command. His oralisms never require the Oralist to shut his eyes, or separate categories. All can be accomplished simultaneous to the spoken word performance. The Oralist, if he has the proper credentials (ours did) can move freely throughout the fair complex, from one to the next, limited only by his appetite, tolerance, stamina and the clock. Art fair NYC is an endurance contest for artsies, especially since so many parties and similar confabulations are staged concurrent to the AF circus. The circuits linking the separate AFA nodes are similar to the invisible requisite trajectories assigned planes coming in for landing at Ronald Reagan airport, for example. Too bad the underpaid, highly trained and exhausted workers fall asleep at the controls sometimes! Good luck! The Branded Leader is either dead, or has a debilitating mental illness, or both, one would assume, based on the comparative evidence as conjecture. In this respect America is beginning to resemble 80s Soviet or Eastern Bloc operational capacity, as the labor force is gutted and/or glutted, and profits soar upwards to the Blankfeins and Buffetts and Johnny Macks. Austerity. Oralists trump asterism."

The result of Paris's Oralist assignment from Paul McLean was this piano composition instead of a verbal commentary on Pulse. 

The Twentieth Century, oh my God!

Written while at Bard, for Modern Architecture
30 November 2005

There is a famous story about Filipo Tomasso Marinetti, one of the founders of the Futurist movement, in which he is depicted flying along a stretch of the Italian highway, probably newly paved, probably over a spot where the Autostrade would be some three decades later, in a zippy little sports-car, probably red, and likely at a speed entirely in sync with the imagery.  He then hits a slick of tar melted by the hot Milanese sun, or is distracted by a grain silo, or perhaps his own reflection (accounts differ here), and subsequently sends the car off of the road and into a ditch.  After regaining consciousness, he emerges from the ditch, bruised and bloody.  “Ahhh, yes!” he proclaims, “This is modernity!”

The first decades of the twentieth century saw rapid industrialization, technological innovation, and the emergence of a bourgeoning modern culture of values, programs, and structural needs quite foreign to those of any other time in history.  The unprecedented speed of life, the potential for communication, the emersion into the realm of abstracts and waves, faster and smaller than the eye could see, nor the mind comprehend, seemed to collectively call for a restructuring of numerous facets of society.  Nucleic in this metamorphosis was the urban centre, the city.  Accordingly, it was perhaps foremost the architect who was compelled to the vanguard.  Through an exploration of the aforementioned Marinetti and the Futurists, as well as Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus, one can better understand the changing role and status of the architect in this new and exciting world.

The futurist movement in historical context (a notion to which it would be completely adverse), was a reaction to the stylistic indecisiveness of the 19th century.  Though the movement found itself almost entirely restricted to paper (perhaps for the best), its concepts sought to extend far beyond, into the realm of an urban and societal reformation.  The fundamental ideas of futurism are encapsulated in Sant’Elia and Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto.  The document serves as a direct reprobation of what it saw as antiquated notions of style, entrenched in a historicism that, it stressed, was no longer relevant.  Furthermore, the document celebrates the newness, the speed, even the violence of modernity, and of the new urban frontier, and depicts the desire of the futurists to grasp the incredible velocity of society in flux.

But in what, one might ask, if not the obvious implementation and amelioration of historical styles, did the futurist movement seek to instantiate itself?  Evident in the plan for the Citta Nuova (1913), a proposal to resurrect Milan as a series of futurist structures, the movement would be staunchly based in technological functionalism, where the most innovative materials – concrete, iron, and glass – would be manipulated “with the aid of every scientific and technical resource” to create structures pertinent to the special needs of modern life.  The heavy, hieratic, Classical structures of yesteryear, epitomized by the cathedral, lent themselves to the use of equally Classical materials such as marble, to sluggish features such as the arch, to frivolous ornament, frankly none of which would be supported by the various programs of buildings found in the modern city.

Perhaps most fascinating about The Futurist Manifesto is the implication of an entirely new and heretofore unseen role of the architect – that of the urban planner.  While artisans had throughout history been commissioned to develop large quantities of work, and in the case of the architect even to design the central structures of a city, it was not until the 20th century that architecture saw such a radical vision to develop not only new architectural vocabulary, but an entirely new lexicon, as it were.  The document is written in terms bordering on revolutionary, often speaking in the collective ‘we’, and calls for a level of change that finds itself outside the traditional spectrum of artisanal obligation.  This role of urban planner, of architect as cultural visionary, as form-giver en general is perhaps even more exemplified in the work of Le Corbusier, particularly in his “Eyes Which Cannot See” document.

Eyes Which Cannot See opens with the image of a front-wheel brake.  In that this is an epitomic image of early 20th century modernity, the eyes are first drawn to mechanistic qualities of the device.  It was not necessarily the notion of pure industry and technological innovation that Corbusier wanted to foreground here, however.  Rather, in the front-wheel brake as an object of artisanship, as an object of aestheticity, of “precision” and “cleanliness”, Corbusier saw the universal, timeless notion of the perfected mechanism, of the penultimate in any creative endeavor, the place where function meets form, and vice versa.

Further into the document, Corbusier juxtaposes two sets of images – both sets consisting of a car and a Greek temple.  The idea to be derived here is that of things reduced to their irreducible essence.  Both temple and car are posited as objects of standardization - objects that, upon constant generational reiteration, eventually reach a nearly idealized standard.  Once this standard is achieved, which occurs after a process of natural competition, practical results arise, along with a reliable source of perspective.  The temple of Paestum, as it is portrayed in contrast with a 1907 Humber, is a structure, which seeks to, and does replicate something similar to the Platonic ideal of a temple – templeness, as it were.

Corbusier aids the images with the notion that “The establishment of a standard involves exhausting every practical and reasonable possibility, and extracting from them a recognized type conformable to its functions, with a maximum output an a minimum use of means, workmanship and material, words, forms, colours, sounds.”  It should be noted that in the context of the images, there is no essential difference between the Paestum, and the Parthenon.  This is because the Parthenon was built nearly a hundred years after the Paestum, that is, nearly a hundred years after the perfection of the temple as a form.  The car however, is an object still in the process of evolution.  Even today, while it has reached its functional climax, that of transportation, and reached the point of literal standardization, critical issues of means towards that function, such as issues pertaining to environmental well-being, likely have not reached their practical limits.

Corbusier’s standardization as an idea holds many similarities to the centralized metonymy proposed by Muthesius of the Deutschewerkbund.  Contrary to this system, and in the vein of Muthesius’ werkbund rival, Henri van de Velde, developed the ethos of the Bauhaus.  Though Walter Gropius, van de Velde’s successor in the Bauhaus system, apparently saw his ideals as too ‘touchy-feely’, and sought to return to the guild system of master and apprentice, he nonetheless wished for style to come through as effusively and unimpinged as possible.  This would make him a key figure in the progression of the architect to a new status.  He wished to erase the distinction between artist and craftsman.  The craftsman, who until now had primarily gone unrecognized, seen as a skilled laborer in a larger whole, would now be foregrounded.  “To build is to create events”, said Gropius.  This statement seems to encapsulate his reverence for the architect as that referred to artist, and is paralleled in the very title of Das Bauhaus, which means literally ‘the art of building.’  With this new perspective of the architect comes perhaps the most influential aspect of Gropius’ Bauhaus, which is the new architectural aesthetic definitive of contemporary notions of design.

The exploration of ideas such as standardization, something one might not directly link with traditional notions of architecture, demonstrates (just as in the case of The Futurist Manifesto, and Bauhaus’ Principles of Bauhaus Production) the emerging status of architect as theorist on levels beyond formal design, beyond the material realm altogether.  More than this, the architect, in select circles anyway, became an icon - Pierre Jeanneret, the architect, became just one part of Le Corbusier, the mythopoeticized celebrity who existed in a bow-tie and owlish glasses, as epigonalized as that other early 20th century architect on the other side of the Atlantic.

Unlike the futurists, Corbusier’s ideals were a fulcrum between a celebration of modernity, and a reverence for historical styles.  On one hand, he was personally influenced by the austerity and functionalism of the grain silo, and the ocean-liner.  On another, he was influenced strongly by uber-traditionalist John Ruskin, who bespoke the idea of artist as form-giver, and was, contrary to the futurists, also a staunch advocate for individualized ornament.  Here in this reverence is modesty, mixed with the elevated status of architect as fine artist.  Corbusier further saw that even in the face of a rapidly evolving, industrialized society, in order for form to evolve it must have knowledge of historical trajectories.

This balance is most evident in Corbusier’s earlier buildings, for instance the Villa Schwob (1916), which is rife with the most innovative of ideas, such as the promenade architecturale, or the planned movement through space, and the tall, austere façade, yet the entire design stems from a Renaissance prototype.  This Palladian form lends legitimacy, and serves as a point of perspective, and thus acts as historical functionalism.  The update of that style with new materials such as a concrete frame serves as technological functionalism.  Functionality then, comes first and foremost in the Villa Schwob, with traditional notions of aesthetics taking a backseat.  In taking qualities of functionalism however, which visually create a sense of salubrity and elegance, and allowing them to act aesthetically, Corbusier invents a contemporary style.

What’s most important however in terms of the new role of the architect, is that it becomes he, Corbusier, he, Sant’Elia, he, Gropius, who now decides for the people what elements of history, technology and organicity are worth implementing, worth preserving in the modern world, and thus to an extent he who sketches the vista of the new century.

Supplemental Work

Problems

17 December 2001

In the last 6 months I have had so many new experiences and I like new experiences, some only for on time others to do again, because they are like adventures and I like adventures.

I have a lot of problems because of my characteristics. I think about these things all the time. My head is full of thoughts and they take up all my energy.  For three years I’ve been having these thoughts.

I always want things to be better and I do things, but I made a bad decision and then I made another bad decision.

The best day of my life
(A Memoir of an aspiring teen climber)

29 January 2001

For some years now, my passion in life has been rock climbing.  Rock climbing is not just a sport; it’s the amazing feeling of weightlessness brought on by pulling yourself up a relatively blank wall on holds so small and sharp that they slice your fingers open when you pull too hard.  To me, it is the purest and most challenging sport that there is.  A mediocre climber works ten times as hard at climbing than any NBA basketball player does, simply because it is a difficult sport.  Climbing doesn’t get the funding that other sports do because the big corporations feel that it’s too dangerous of a sport and that it’s not main-stream enough.  I, however, am okay with people not knowing about climbing.  It tells me that what I hold dear has not yet been reduced to an activity that any ignorant person who has no understanding of the safety precautions, or a care for nature, can go out with a bunch of their loud friends and disturb the rock as well as other climbers.

I have kept climbing a secret from my friends for many of the same reasons that other climbers don’t tell their friends.  People just don’t understand what it takes.  When they think of rock climbing, they see a wall at a gym with colorful plastic jugs and don’t see why anyone would be interested for more than one try at it.  This makes me very angry, but I bite my tongue instead of theirs because I know that I do the same thing towards other things that I don’t know about.  But I’ve realized that once you look beyond appearance, not just in climbing, but in anything, you find a whole world that may amaze and excite you.  People these days don’t pay enough attention to things that are new to them, nor do they respect them.  And, inside climbing, there is a world that blows my mind and causes me to be thankful that I discovered it everyday.

One thing that I find is often confused is that there are many types of rock climbing.  Sport climbing, trad climbing and bouldering.  None of these have anything to do with mountain climbing or Everest.  That is mountaineering.  It has absolutely no relation to rock climbing.  Sport climbing is when there are bolts already placed in a piece of rock and as you climb up, every ten feet or so, you clip yourself into a bolt using quikdraws.  Another type of climbing is trad climbing or traditional climbing.  This is where you are climbing a rock with no permanent anchors on it.  You place your own gear into the rock as you go up and you take it out when you are lowered back to the ground.  The last type of climbing is bouldering.  Bouldering is arguably the purest form of climbing.  In bouldering, you are climbing on boulders or at the feet of cliffs, hence the name.  It’s just you, your climbing shoes, some chalk, and thirty feet of air between you and a crashpad set on the ground.  I don’t enjoy trad climbing so much because you can’t really push your limits.  When you trad climb, there have to be places in the rock that you can place a piece of gear in.  So, you couldn’t trad climb an overhanging face with no cracks, but only tiny edges and pockets that you need for your fingers.  I do boulder, but my main activity is sport climbing.  Over the years, I have gone to competitions and spent a lot of time on the rock and I am now an avid climber.  My most memorable experience in climbing has put me on the cover of climbing magazines and made me famous in the climbing world.  It was the time that I climbed the grade of 5.14d.  

Climbing is graded in America using the Yosemite Decimal System.  All rock climbing grades start with a 5 because climbing walls that are at least vertical is considered Class 5 climbing.  Climbing ranges from 5.0 to 5.15.  Starting at 5.10, routes get very difficult, so they are broken down into a, b, c, and d.  To put it into perspective, a person who has never climbed before would have trouble with a 5.5.  Some people could work for years and never break past a 5.10b, but there are a small number of climbers who have broken the limits of being a human.  I am lucky enough to be one of them, only because I love climbing so much.  And, I remember with great detail the day that I climbed one of the most difficult routes in the world.
It was a beautiful Sunday morning when I arose to the tweeting of August birds outside my window.  I let out a groan and then a grunt and then I smiled because I knew what day it was.  Today I was going on my awaited trip to Rumney, New Hampshire.  It was a climbing trip that I’d been waiting to go on for a long time now.  I was going with my friends Ben and Graham for a day and it was going to be awesome.  After cleaning myself off and making sure I had packed up my rope, harness, shoes, quikdraws and chalk bag, three times I headed over to the climbing gym to meet them.  Since Graham was the only one with a license he drove.  It was a grueling six-hour drive to Rumney, mainly because I wanted to climb so badly.  Finally we arrived at the parking lot.  I started to tremble with excitement.  We warmed up on some easy routes.  Some 5.10’s and 11’s.  Mind you at this time I had absolutely no idea what I would climb that day.  I was about a 5.12c climber at best and I had never even thought about much higher for a while.  After doing a few routes on the West Side of Rumney at the Orange Crush Wall, we decided to move over to the East Side to do some bouldering.  I wasn’t thinking about it at the time, but in the center of Rumney, connecting the East and West sections, was the infamous Waimiea Wall.  A cliff consisting of some of the worlds hardest routes.  One route that sprung into my mind immediately was one called The Fly.  It was a mere twenty feet long with two bolts on it.  It was setup in 1998 by a climber named David Graham and was said to be ridiculously hard.

We gathered up our gear and started walking towards Waimiea.  We passed by route after terrifying route on the wall until Ben shouted out, ‘’Hey!  Isn’t that The Fly over there?!’’  I looked around in confusion as all I saw was one last piece of rock that looked totally impossible.  Not even a sick climb, just impossible.  ‘’Yep.’’ He said calmly. ‘’That’s it.’’

I walked over to the wall at looked up in amazement.  My jaw dropped open as I looked in awe at the tiny world of holds, or rather, lack there of.  It was a magical site.  A twenty-foot long, flawless shield of gently overhanging schist.  If you had asked me a moment before whether or not I would have liked to climb it, I would have probably slapped you in the face for asking such a question with such an obvious answer.  NO!  But I was enchanted by how perfect it looked.  I dropped my gear on the dry ground and told Graham, who was getting impatient at this point, to give me a belay on it.  He was reluctant, and so was I.  I didn’t think I’d be able to get off the ground, but for some reason I felt particularly strong right then.  I squeezed into my painful climbing shoes, which I had purposely bought one size too small for sensitivity, and buckled my harness.  I clipped two quikdraws onto myself and tied into the rope.

The climb was a particularly dangerous one.  Being only twenty feet long and with only two places to clip, you would definitely hit the ground if you got near the second bolt but couldn’t hold on.  It was about thirteen moves long, each of which rated V10(superhuman hard) on their own.  

And so, I approached the rock.  I gently caressed the holds before attempting to grab on.  By now, Graham and Ben were both rolling their eyes at me and several spectators were gathering around.  The first move was from a long, rippling flake that couldn’t have been more that 1/16th of an inch thick, with virtually unnoticeable foot placements, to a tiny gaston three feet above.  I felt the sweat starting to trickle down my neck and from my hands.  I dunked my hands into my chalk bag and smiled.  Something suddenly came over me and I knew I could do it.  I placed my hands on the holds and pulled down with all my might.  I could feel the flesh inside my arms trying to escape.  But, I wasn’t going to let it.  I adjusted my feet, squatted down and launched.  The feeling of weightlessness charged over me and I was some how moving from molecule sized holds.  About eleven feet up came the first clip.  I had no idea how I was going to hold on.  My feet were dangling below me and I was in a lock-off position hanging by just my fingertips on my left hand and with my right hand clinging to a sloping monstrosity of a hold.  Suddenly, the power inducing music of The Pixies came into my head.  This music had helped me do amazing things in climbing before and it did not fail.  I was adamant and I pushed my body to new limits in that moment; I held on with my left hand and reached for a quikdraw with my right.  I felt a sharp pain while I grabbed for the draw and blood squirted out of my index finger.  Nevertheless I clipped in and continued with copious amounts of red liquid soaking the holds I needed to cling to so badly.  But, I couldn’t stop now and I cranked out several more moves before approaching the final move.  It was unfortunate that on this climb in particular, the last move also happened to be the crux, or the hardest part.  It was a huge, six-foot, dynamic move with my arms crossed from two microscopic looking chips in the rock.  My breathing was heavy and I could feel my heart in my chest.  The veins in my forearms were a bright blue and protruded from my skin.  I had nothing else to do but suck it up and go for the move, for the last bolt was after this move and if I fell I would certainly hit the pebble covered dirt below.  I called down below for some slack on the rope.  Once I received, I yarded up to an invisible side-pull edge, pasted my feet on the bad footholds, dropped my knee down low and launched.  I grabbed on to the hold six feet above, which left me twisted into an epic barndoor swing.  I opened my eyes when the pain subsided and I realized that I was still holding on.  I clipped into the last bolt and Graham lowered me off as a myriad of spectators cheered me on.

I didn’t get any money.  Nor did I get a prize or a college scholarship.  But I got the enjoyment of knowing that I pushed mankind one step farther, even if it was in my unique way.  It was the best day of my life.

Note:  Paris Ionescu is almost 14 years old, lives in New York City and climbs regularly at the Extra Vertical Gym.  He attends the Browning School and wrote this piece as a memoir assignment.  He is passionate about the sport of climbing and reads Climbing magazine from cover to cover.  Although your readership is generally much older, he thought you might be interestested in the persepctive of an aspiring teen climber.  His first taste of real rock climbing will be this summer with Chris Sharma at Yo Basecamp in Northern California.

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing...

Please click Here to access information about a class Paris had facilitated at the Public School with posted conversations included.