Musings on Galaxie 500 In Lieu of The Pracitice of Criticality

Perhaps the most cacophonous angsty trite I fiegned interest in for a handjob in Athens, Ohio

Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood.
Macbeth Act III, William Shakespeare

The de rigeur rite of passage for the critic in training is the peculiarly academic vehicle whereby the diacrhonic and immutable Shakespearian excellence is maintained with illustrative cataloging of the multiple meanings of bardian text. Works of and by T.S. Elliot on the subject and technique of this flavour of literary criticism are processed and performed constantly by self-respecting literary critics on this and other planets. Entire disertations have been written on the multitudinous valence of the rooky wood...and its impact on queer literature...in the American Midwest...post depression.

As the light thickened on the second millennium of the common era the popularity of this technique of finding critical significance in poem and prose waned, but in the waxy residue left in its wake is emergent a structural analysis with a decidedly epistemological and heuristic aftertaste, and it tastes, to our great disappointment, like fat free baked lays potato chips.

In architectural terms, the post modernist wing of the formalist party transmogrified the world in a grain of sand approach to critical thought into a spatial art. More on the architecture of the critique later.

For now, I offer for distribution When Will You Come Home by Galaxie 500. I intend to critic up this bitch in the next weekish so bring a towel, cause I'm layin it out like that.

When, when will you come home?

Watchin t.v. all alone

Watchin Kojak on my own

Starin at the wall

And waitin for your call

When, when will you come home?

Now, I'm crawlin on the floor

Makin noises like a dog

Makin noises you can't hear

Starin at the wall

And waitin for your call

When, when will you come home?

Where we at?

Sir Robert Walpole, First Resident of 10 Downing Street and unrelated to this post

“theoretical environment in the architectural discipline”

While conceivably within the domain of acceptable identifiers of critical interest and academic positioning “theoretical environment in the architectural discipline” is much more gestural than will be adequate for the task at hand. A cursory reading even might provide an inventory of intellectual jargon in which particular constituencies will find inherent implications of intellectualism adequate to create the expectation of genuine critical analysis. Readers who fall into this category vote straight ticket republican and should be ignored at a minimum and physically restrained from interactions with other members of the species.

Weather the notational gesture is to be allowed the privilege to stand for the statement of interests that it suggests is the subject of this post. First and foremost an investigation into whether the gesture has meaning of genuine significance is essential.

The historical significance intellectual trajectories and evolved heuristic structures play in crafting identifiable, although, synchronic critical events and the point where threesomes go wrong both being infinitely debatable we must concede that some avenues of investigation will be potentially available but beyond our scope. Here we will discuss three possible readings of the environmental component of the gesture.

In the first case the environment refers to any number of coalesced idea strings on the subject of architecture that have been given a name by those concerned with either the nature of cultural practice, or by practitioners of architecture. The result of this reading requires that the production of the architectural artifact follow from some dogma as dictated by conclusions established by pre-existing theoretical regimes. There can in this case be a rightness to the artifact as the artifact can be compared to how it compares to the regimental edicts. Every new regime having, then as its necessary first act the dismantelling of all previous conceptual regimes. The most accessible example of this is Johnson's “7 Crutches of Modern Architecture” from which grew what would come to be called post-modernism.

In the second case the environment refers to some particular intangible manner in which architecture might be practiced. There was a time when it was fashionable to refer to this manner of practice as paper architecture and it took the form of writing about an architecture which defied the requirement to become tangible artifact, the goal of this manner of production being not supplemental to the artifact, but a coequal partner in some craft identifiable as architectural.
In the third case, the architectural artifact and the ideas that cause the artifact to take form and have that form be interpreted in a particular way are connected temporally and situationally. The architect's hand may be drawn across the page in flashes of virtuosic inspiration but, either before or after the artifact is the explanation of the artifact will contribute to an ongoing discourse on the subject of production of artifacts.

Okay, It's late, I'm going to bed.

So...

Robert Somol, Patron Saint of Cool, and ironically not that cool.

...glad you're here, but it's not always about you. Sometimes I can't believe how selfish you are.

What I plan to do in this space is find myself, or perhaps better stated, my voice, within the theoretical environment in the architectural discipline.

Careful readers who concern themselves with the nuance of intellectual argumentation as pertaining to cultural production might suggest that by crafting the mission statement in this way, as being concerned with “the theoretical environment in the architectural discipline”, I've set in place a necessarily prescriptive domain within which I must operate as the issue of disciplinarity is central to the navigation of the theoretical environment and by suggesting there is an architectural discipline within which the node must be assigned I've conceded the ground from which to discuss a theory of architecture in contemporary terms.

Those readers should suck my balls.

This weekend we’ll break down the statement “theoretical environment in the architectural discipline” and see if we can’t get all Derrida on that bitch. Deconstruct that mother scratcher and see if we can’t formulate a mission statement that will allow us to find ourselves within some notion we could agree to call a contemporary theory of cultural production.