Hi Mom.

I talked to Reba and Dennis today on the phone and said I'd mention them in today's blog.

The Archetypal Postmodernity of Mrs. Palin

The White Rider of the Appocolypes (maybe Red), William Kristol

[Note: cross posting today at www.plf-news.blogspot.com]

This week the prevailing framing from Democratic media outlets is that National Review founder and grand wizard of douschbaggery William Kristol is responsible for the nationalizing of Sarah Palin. It seems facile in the least to suggest one dillhole, no matter how mightely he might suck, could be responsible for pandemic platitudes, but let's continue under the assumption that he could. Further, lets allow that there is ample evidence to substantiate the claim that the beacon of the retardation can represent to a constituency their tribal ideal.

There have been numberous left leaning writers from

Scott Horton to Andrew Sullivan are suggesting that the talented Mr. Kristol culled the G.I.L.F. not in spite of her empty suitness, but specifically for her vacuity.If her uncharacteristic character were cardianal among her endowments Bill Kristol's douschbaggery is tendind toward absolute truth. However, beyond the obscene anti-republican power to control such decisions the effect of political burlesque in this style represents either mastery of postmodernity with the cool menthol taste of deconstructionism or a rorschoch test which I'm sorry to say is going to lead to many more sessions, maybe bringing in some other members of the family, but let's do a couple more sessions one on one and see how it goes.

Peter Eisenman, Bill Kristol and Jacques Derrida. What do these characters from history have in common? They are all masters of the semantic school of the deconstructivist wing of the postmodernist party. (I think I've used that "wing of the party" gesture before...damn you Howard Dean and your lyrical word smithing)

The post Derrida-Eisenman break up to me signals the begining of the end of proper pomo, but in a way is the deconstruction of deconstruction. Somol-ien cool moves into or crafts the intellectual vacuum left by the collapse of criticality cum disciplinarity, and injects a theory of the thing dripping with faux zeitgeist optics and yearning for a criticcality of the uncritical. All this as a lyrical pathway toward expressing that postmodernism was shown to be a characture of itself, cliche and dogma dependant, stagnant and referential not of a historically crafted embeded system of knowledge but of a means of practice and a mode of product.

Damnit. I have to start writing these things earlier in the day. I've been absolutely wasting precious blogging time with this working that's been going around.

Cliff's Notes: She has substance and meaning and she is a symbol of her meaning. The meaning, sign and symbol are the same. there is no collapse of the meanings and valent representations, they develop in space coincidentally. The sign must then be emptied of it's meaning, the sign refilled with new meaning, and the sign becomes signifier of new meaning.

Anyhoo, the homework for if I decide to comeback to this: Notes Around Conceptual Architecture, The Seven Crutches of Modern Architecture, Notes Around the Doppler Effect, Christy Canyon Unleashed (the Anabolic one not the Vivid Video release), Simulations (Buadrillard), The Myth of the Red and the Brown

Screw Flanders

The Virtuosity of The Virtuoso

The Little Street, Johannes Vermeer, 1658

In pouring over many volumes of forgotten lore in the fortnight just past, Benjamin and Peter Berger to name a few, a nostalgia for virtuosity is creeping into both the artifactual production I control and my argumentation. From Benjamin (whose marxist bona fides we should all feel comfortable calling shinanigans on) I none the less take away from the Benjamin experience the intended lessons on authenticity and craft, something about the workers uniting...I'm bored with myself already.

The Berger history of cultural production is always at the forefront of establishing a narrative from which all maner of production can be associated. The timeline Berger establishes though should not be seen as reflective misty watercolouring, however. The timeline represents the identification of identifiable synchronisities where a particular relationship of cultural production gains prominence and subsequently is overtaken in popularity by another new or recycled relationship of art producers to art consumers and art capitalizers.

When the Benjamin analysis of the means of production is overlaid on the Berger excavation of the punctuations in the history of that production the tendency for any of the types of producer, consumer, capitolizer relationships are in vogue the influence of the technological environment necessarily unwieghts the balance of power in the production/consumption rochambo with the breaking point being new moods within the forward guard. At the nexis of the imbalance producers are given the choise to pursue the now kitsch mode of production in exile nee primary demand method or initiate work introspective of the medium. 

Through this wobbly meniscus the origins of the avant guard become reactive events rather than catalytic agents. 

Okay, now I've confused myself ...I don't even know what I was trying to say anymore.

There was going to be a whole thing comparing 17th century dutch artist Johannes Vermeer to street baller Skip-to-my-lou, this thing about the loss of virtuosity and investigating that through the Benjaminian authenticity model but I've bored myself with my Steinbeckian insistence on not getting to the G.D. point already. 

Whatever. Just for fun let's close the coffin on this corpse by for no good reason paraphrasing Homer Simpson in his introductory essay as food critic for the Springfield Shopper and say:

Screw Chaney...I mean Flanders

The Work of Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Art

“Not that I have to be at this range, but I'm a fucking surgeon with this shotgun.”
Karen Kim, Not, As it Turns Out, the Hotel Hospitality Manager. Kill Bill, Vol. 2



The producer of culture and cultural products is beset on all sides by the inequities of the kitsch and the tyranny of the avant-garde. Three score and nine years ago Greenbergian cultural cladistics created very little overlapping property in the kitsch nee avant-garde ven diagram. The ven diagram aside, the zen of the diagram is now no less than apotheosis of critical architecture.

Particular among agents of the cultural evolution architects engaged in the production of the architectural artifact command aggregates of wealth compatible to the control of summer interns working the credit default swap desk at AIG. Maybe not that much, but still, a lot of money. Trusteeship of such vast princely capitol reserves requires the work of mechanical reproduction tattoo a narration of it's own chronistic appropriateness in the thinnest supportable veneer. Don we now our Whiting and Somol, and call upon Perspecta 33, the corrective to the corrective. Their minifestette was the undoing of a generation of mandatory criticality and the codification of a positive project for zeitgeistians who cherish criticality.

There may easily be a condition of the spirit we could agree to call post-hegelian. Post-hegelians will automatically find contraction in the notion of the critical zeitgeist. To counter post-hegelian premature de-narration the narrow band of the popular and the critical is the cool. The critical zeitgeist is a cucumber indifferent to popular demand and with a unending desire to be diagrammed in felt pen and prose.

Damit!!! Now I'm tired and ready for bed before I finish again. Let's end with this: The critical architect wields a scalpel with the weight of a freight train. He is a surgeon with a shot gun

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.