[9/4: Was Baudrillard Right?]
NOTES ON DIMENSIONAL TIME
INTERSTITIAL TRANSMISSIONS
A couple of days after arriving in New York, I walked out of our sublet near City Hall and made my way toward the financial district, although that wasn’t really intended. I planned on shooting photos, but I hadn’t mapped the sort of photos I’d hoped to take, as a sketch or holograph or -gram, much less a projection. About halfway down the sidewalk after a turn on the grid, a left-turn I believe, on a slight downward slope, pylons along the curb, I tweaked on the huge blocks of stone at ground level, immediately to my right. Boom, like a Thunderbolt. The massive bronze doors. The decorative touches in the overhang above. The lights. Then the big redhead cop started towards me, while I snapped a half dozen pictures. He was on me. - What are you doing? - Taking pictures. - You can’t do that here! - What?! - You can’t do that here > - Why? It’s the Federal Reserve! You can’t just take pictures here…Where do you live? I just moved to the City a couple of days ago. I’m staying around the corner. … and so on. …I didn’t make a big fuss. Hey, I LOVE New York. Post-9/11, the cops and firemen are practically haloed. To love NYC is to heart the men in uniform. Which is not at all how it was in the early 80s, thinking of the Lower East Side. Back in the dog day afternoons of rapes in Central Park, of Bernie Goetz, of shooters on the subways, of spray cans and Basquiat, who is today resurgent, the subject of movies and multiple international exhibits, quite a run for a tagger, short-lived. As I recounted prior in Notes on Dimensional Time, the Beyeler show of Jean-Michel’s free radical constructions flat knocked me to the concrete, causing blood to flow, drawings to ensue and tattoos, eventually.
By the way, I’m sitting in The Bean on 1st Avenue, just down the street from the Hell’s Angels club house. Lula and I ate at Frank, before tonight one of my top five favorite eats in the city. A Basquiat film was showing up the street in the neighborhood. Frank is disappointing tonight. Oh well. It had to happen sometime. I had a good nine year run of stellar plates of pasta, from the time that dealer invited me to lunch at Second and 5th, back when art fairs were funny concoctions cooked up in a kitchen called “Suspension of [Dis]Belief. In spite of a stream of casualty reports from Indian Country, where the War on Natural Man continues furiously, I spent the day at the studio in Williamsburg; and the morning in the 9/11 GROUND ZERO neighborhood, of Merrill Lynch, slow motion construction, yachts, chocolate eclairs, pedestrian safety managers, tours, and crowds of pic-popping Americans, I guess like me - visiting the epicenter of America’s Bardo. Some kind of emergency delayed the L Train returning from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but I was alright, reading Suttree. No one panicked. The Fed cop, to backtrack a bit, moving clockwise or counterclockwise[ like the panovision image of the BARDO at the Rubin, which a properly placed and clicked cursor could make spin like magic] had halfheartedly said It’s a different world now [since 9/11], but that’s only true and not true. Hell, that’s always true. Another notable intervention: I was street interviewed by a free lance AP journalist from New Jersey, at least that’s what he said, and he produced credentials upon request, asked to give my opinion about the upcoming EconObama speech. What would I like the President to do about the economic policy? I was asked. Response: WPA. New Deal federal jobs program….More: a short speech about the AIA public art programs. [Stats] The de-unionization of the work force. He suggested I read Freedom from Fear. After my friend Derek suggested green jobs, I asked to double-dip… I wanted to amend my comments by calling for prosecutions of the men who caused Depression 3.0. As we re-engaged our cruise, Derek pointed out the surveillance cameras. The private cops. I watched one bum-rush an SUV parked curbside. YOU CAN’T PARK HERE. No suits hanging from perfectly good hanging light poles. Quiet on a Saturday. It’s a sobering thing to scan the Times over the holidays of the working man and read Robert Reich’s assessments of the malaise [notably excluding New Deal solutions, although a few essays back he penned a worthy proclamation on their behalf] and Bob Herbert’s account of hunger striking janitors in LA trying to get Chase’s Dimon’s attention. No word yet on what Robert Rubin, another Bob, is doing on his upcoming day off.
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Notices on the trains, reminding riders to look for suspicious bags and people and report them to the authorities. Reminding me of northern Israel in the first half of the 80s. Labor Day weekend. Oh, man. It’s usually entertaining to watch the working-man-loathing corporate media dance around that. Are they going to celebrate the 40 hour work week? Time and a half? Social Security? Worker’s insurance? The 8 hour workday? Anti-child labor? …Or are the artificial shills going to talk about the Hurricane Earl, or that other one, which celebrated a five-year anniversary recently - Katrina? I heard there were good waves in the Hamptons. …An economy. What’s there to talk about? Economics is the faux ideology of greed heads. Atlas shrugged all the way to the banksters ball. Who were the real targets of 9/11? You won’t get a thoughtful discussion of THAT one this week, in all probability, on the broadband HDTV, on cable, on monopolized circuitry. No media philosopher is going to chomp down on that street dog. Plenty of people still think Saddam Hussein started the War on Terror. Others are certain that the shadow armies of the New World Order are behind the WTC massacre. But why watch FOX or surf the nethers of the web, when you live in THE BIG APPLE, THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS? I trekked to the Rubin Museum to see the Bardo exhibit, before it closed this week. All the 9/11 memorializers should see this before visiting the massive construction site downtown. Too bad the opportunity will have passed, like the day those skyscrapers plummeted to earth, preceded by the jumpers, a world of cameras trained on them. From what I heard, the experience in real life was viscerally divergent from the still experience, compressed into jpeg format, or the handheld video footage, or the artwork that emerged a few months later. The sound of the sickening crunch differentiated the real and not-real. Who was the guy who did the splatter sculptures? The Rubin reorganized these concurrent meditations. It’s not hard to envision Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Rove, Addison, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, et al., as wrathful deities, with their minions Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Levin, Hewitt, Reagan, and the rest of the lesser chickenhawks, those illusionists and conflaters, serial deceivers, propagandists and rabble rousers, coordinating their distractions with the aid of meme experts, enforcement provided by Blackwater, logistics by Halliburton, bearing down on America with a torture regime, a prison and surveillance society, crushing dissent with economic oppression when citizens bought more ammo than the army and police combined, as the number of taser deaths grows, and the oil flows into the Gulf, the mines fill with corpses and the highways too, and BP, Massey, Toyota and Goldman Sachs pay off the corrupt public servants to get out from under their debts to society. Poor Bernie. Poor Tony. Poor Valerie. The fall guys and the hit jobs. The whistleblowers get it worst. Long live Wikileaks. Stay away from sex of any kind, outside the proscribed Judeo-Christian flavors, if you want to take on the SUCK. & Remember: Your phone is probably tapped, your location is known, your emails are logged, your searches are tagged, and your movement is mapped. Just in case. This is post-9/11 America, home of the foreclosure, land of the unemployed. Meanwhile, the corporations sit on piles of cash, so they can take back Congress, and the minority Senate lets AmeriRome burn, and fiddles.
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Boddie’s doing shirts, which rip it, and many paintings. Little Boddie’s a captain, Shane’s putting hours in on fashion-town. The Cyclops are coming out the box. Sitting on the roof, marveling at the Woolworth and Gehry cutting to the sky, a beautiful breeze, it’s hard to notice that 9/11 happened, but didn’t change the world, and the hallucinations continue to plague the patriotic death-obsessed, and to address a query to that great media manager Bloomberg: Dear recipient or beneficiary; why isn’t there a replacement set of twin towers skylining the city again? MILO: Because the skimmers own America. ZEELIO: The leeches. America, the new Nigeria. V: The 30-60%ers. TR: This country has decayed from the guts out, from Reagan on. Nothing meaningful gets done, and it costs a fortune’s fortune. PJM: The greatest redistribution of wealth, since gold, silver and blood poured out of Peru into the tyrannical coffers of Europe. I’d recommend the book Indian Givers. …Anyway, after the visit to the Rubin, I’m very much inspired to consider the Chittipatis, Lords of the Charnel Grounds. Ground Zero is fenced, but on the barrier to street or sidewalk access are mounted a series of digital prints. This is a media event much like the daily updates about the BP oil spill in the corporate media. Visualization. Creativity. Innovation. Design. Architecture. A sweet animal sculpture by Tom Otterness on a bitchin’ translucent polymer substrate, in multiple formats, dimensions, and versions. WTC BETA. I happened across a pretty poignant Capitalism-cartooning installation by Tom at a subway stop recently. Flashback: I interviewed him for an art radio program in Nashville about a decade ago. Was that in the season of 9/11? I forget. It was a busy time. My collective 01 staged an installation at rock’n'roll hallowed hall Exit-In to raise money for victims, but we had tough competition that weekend. The annual Music City live music festival was happening, and the push for that cut into our attendance, and presumably donations. I seem to recall we were trying to gather blood donations. One of the “Fall Leaves Fall” muso-contributors called me around then to get me to watch “The Cruise,” for a good cry. Great movie. Watching the towers burn and fall, I got pissed enough to sign up for military service. Initially I was too old. A couple of years later, as soldier tours started to pile up, I wouldn’t have been, but by then the Bushies’ folly and surrender to WEF had become obvious. Those people betrayed this country, and got away with it, as far as anyone I know can tell. So far. A related flashback: My new favorite cuppa java is brewed at Jack’s in the Seaport sector, right around the corner of which is a beautiful mural by Richard Haas, a meta-scene, a representation in dimensional-time media [paint] of the Brooklyn Bridge, which is just behind the painted picture, in real life, and I photographed both, then posted the file online, via social media. The audio is in a box somewhere in transition. Hopefully the copper dust doesn’t go bad in this heat. The recording is SO fragile, and as far as I know, it’s the only copy. Or is there a mini-disc “original” somewhere? What did we call those? Master.
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Hmm. Did the bad guys really escape a reckoning, judgement, atonement, justice? Depends, I suppose, on your point of origination, or your perspective. If you look at the whole mess through the Baudrillard looking glass [not the Drucker window], he was right, and it never happened. The reality of this bit of history is as artificial as the embedded news reports that for the first time converted a military slaughter into a video game, or for the analog couch potato, a college football contest. If you look at the mess through the Bardo mirror, like the one at the Rubin in the acrylic display box, well, outcomes and arcs and the cycles are very much flip-flopped. Net neutrality has a wholly different app in Samsaric conceptualization. Creativity is part and parcel of a mighty different schema. Manifestations of the mind accrue a very different ROI. The stakes are in some facets identical. War on Terror-ists tout the life and death qualifications of torture protocols, for instance, concocting scenarios for mushroom cloud-preventing measures that range from the fictionally suspenseful, as in the now-blaise “24″ narrative trajectory, cum timelined electronica soundtrack. To be relational, aesthetically, more or less: At the Rubin, I took in representation of a flayed and fanged body rendered as temple door adornment that could be construed as an equivalence. Pyramids of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, mocked or critically mitigated on Right-wing talk radio - who can forget Rush’s mocking of Gitmo internees with swag snapped up by soon to be Teabaggers? For some reason, the missing CIA torture tapes come to mind. The missing emails from DOJ or Rove, too. Electronic media is SO fragile, isn’t it? Throughout these convergent episodes, with few exceptions, a recurring theme is reincarnation, although the defining languages are indeed fungible. Who would have thought that abandoning a Governorship of a state in the union would provide Sarah Palin the PR platform she needs to make a Presidential run in 2012, the termination year of the Mayan calendar? It’s a question of timed exposure, as is any camera-generated image. What’s Hank Paulson up to these days? No photos, please. In Karmic mechanics, accountability is not really similar to the democratic kind. Not in the land of Disney. Not in the Alps. Not in the bank vaults of the beneficiaries of global war and oppression, power and artificially-managed suffering. Maybe if we could clone Peter Drucker - the real architect of 20th century organization man - we could generate some cryptic answers to a host of confusing problems, which exist as manufactured or produced, if not productive, results, expected and planned, as in obsolescence or destruction, creative by [un-]nature, but ratified by an electrified network of echo or reverb into an infinite feedback loop, unsubstantiated by a Nirvana-like escape route, unless you consider other types of lineage, by blood or technology or the legacy of John Law and Milton Friedman, or is it Alan Greenspan? If only the equation were soluble, like a slingshot dosing of bats with strychnine-laced rancid flesh, as in Cormac’s vision of Harrogate’s entrepreneurial enterprise! Arthur Miller’s view from Brooklyn Bridge, first iteration, was a tough experiment. Historical disappearance is almost never a good play with critics, 9-11 being exceptional, if not exempted. Happenings, as events, are occasional, perhaps Peter would claim. What about the imaginary view from the rebooted World Trade Center, which is no longer in New York City, or America? It’s in Davos, and Salzburg. We thought it might be in Abu Dhabi for a moment, but that possible future seems to at least temporarily fallen through. The carrot’s in China, now, and not at the World Expo 2010, and certainly nowhere close to the “US” corporate pavilion there. Paris suggested I attended a reading room exercise at the Barney Building at NYU, which I did do, and here are my notes, as copied from my Blackberry memo, which for some reason wouldn’t email properly [Boris Groys was the topic]:
Memes [not my cousin]
Flattening
Theme du jour
Meme generator
Strong/weak
Byzan. icon
Story
Propaganda-marketing-media
Equality
Masses
Design fiction
Sampling
Readymade
Nastynets
Fine art
Concept
Authorship
Net art
Viral
Technology
Curatorial
4chan
Rationotaku
Rat-hunter.com
Specificity
Code
Abstract
Software
Visualization
Copies
Database
Lossy
Quality
Compression
Img +o image
Groys
Cam versions
Image permutations
Image destruction related to copyright
resistance
Duplicates
Animation anima
Everett multiplicity of universes
Dehumanization
Competition
Identity
Tumblr
Avatar
Visual vocabulary
Versioning
Editing v curating as production
Durability
Cures/curating
Gamesmanship
Administrator-service
Weak universalism
Visual literacy
Globalization
Artist statements
Audience
Anonymity
Self-design
Defining artists
Shaping life - totalitarianism
Breaking from history
Ultramodernism
Gabser
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When I say “we” I mean Milo, Zeelio, Veronica, Tommy and the rest of the crew. They’re texting me a lot. We tweet together, Facebook, even instant message. We collaborate as a mini-Cloud collective, operating virtually and remotely, relying on a centralized network of powerful Turing machines, linked by fast horizontal sender-receiver technologies, supplemented by wireless ones, in space and underground, airborne and aquatic. Man, are we lucky. Super lucky cats, man. We once built a linear fire-on-the-mountain-type of smoke-signal device consisting of nothing but projected urban screenings. I don’t know for a fact that the content was sufficiently visceral. It’s hard to tell, in daylight hours. We also, during that project, decided to shoot laser light through tinted glass, positioned at angles less random than you might think, which is not to say the array was chaotic, only that it was complex. I myself prefer the three-blade knife, which I always thought was actually a four-blade knife, but to a Highlander, a claymore is a dirk is a sgian dubh. In a pinch baby antlers will do fine for the old upward thrust, or a hammer, or a stone. Which reminds me. Standing next to our building, kitty corner to the Gehry skyscraper, which seems to be rising high just fine, unlike the WTC reincarnation, somehow, serving some purpose other than firing the patriotic vision of the Nation, smoking, I witnessed a four- or five-inch bolt drop from the heavens to the pavement, clattering like a shot off a window frame or the bricks, it was moving far too fast to be certain, even to an observer in a tachyspsychiatic state. I blew some smoke and thought, “9.8 FPS” and crossed quickly to pocket the prize, after pausing to ascertain whether that bolt might just be the first drop of a storm of steel beating down on Gotham from the empty clear blue above. Considering: When a hard thing and a soft thing crash, the soft thing usually gets the worst of it. Jet planes hitting buildings. Greed hitting democracy. And worse. The tee shirt at the Rubin read something like, “Remember you’re going to die.” The Pentacostals in West Virginia put up billboards communicating roughly the same suggestion.
This labor day, what will the work of America be? I’ll be painting in my new studio, just over the Brooklyn Bridge, which Lula and I crossed at a leisurely pace, after that lovely comforting meal at Bread and Butter, with our pal Shane. If you’re in the neighborhood of DUMBO post-9/11, I would recommend an opening at Central Booking, and especially the illustrations of Irving Geis. And Barbara Rosenthal, who was selling books and other works, when we visited the Walentas gallery complex on the First Thursday event, with a few other intrepids, through the pink foyer and upstairs. Anecdotally, there are good conversations in plentiful supply at random locations in the paths crossing in the city, but everyone knew that. I’ve had some excellent exchanges with cabbies from Africa, including an aspiring digital videographer, to whom I offered technical advice, in the interest of sparking a production/post-production career spanning the waters separating his home continent and his adopted one. Other cabbie-rider [transmitter/packet] discourse centered on the divide separating the poor from the economically immune, or seemingly so. Political realities attached. Interpretations were submitted, verifications, too, along with driving tips. The anti-horn-honking ordinance apparently is not having the desired effect. Cigarettes cost a dozen dollars a pack. A bum offered me fifty cents for one a couple of days ago, I guess causing him to not really be a bum, but instead a consumer and me a wary Capitalist, profiting on the margins, with the dream weed. I heard about an artist marking a decal, branding the copy, or what was left of it, on a Manhattan wall, drawing the attention of a cop, who arrested said artist, carted said artist to the clink, citing said artist, locking said artist in a cell for a period of days. Unlicensed markmaking is evidently not what it was, pre-90s. Finally, I’ll mention a photo session with a reflection that references the autoportrait of Jean Baudrillard, illustrating an homage by Wolfgang Schirmacher, about which I wrote in Saas Fee for the professor doctor’s course, suggesting that JB serves as a good model for Homo Generator. The tool for my application was not digital, and is located near the Exchange Hotel, a series of fabricated mirrored metal objects, perfect for 4D representation of surface reproduction through mechanical means. Which is not to suggest that the goal was data visualization, via Lev Manovitch, or design fiction, via Bruce Sterling, or any history of knowledge or interpretation, as progression or chronology or ontology. In fact, the entire event could be posited as an anti-existentialism, consisting of nothing but ones and zeroes. I would stipulate that the Matterhorn and the twin towers are identical, in the binary sense of digitization and mediation, as an overture to Benjamin, and the Semiotics lineage. Lineal realism at the Rubin excepted, you see. Oh. And a dog-walking training session, involving re-naming, command and control, effective messaging, translation, bio-physical signals, transfer of the restraint while all three components move independently in a motion system, not static in any particular. Obviously, the phenomenon is infinitely complex, or at least technologically daunting, in terms of counting, in the language of numbers, unquantifiable, unique, natural and beautiful. Although you would never guess it with your nose, and all the rats around.
