,naturally…

Butt Magazine: How are you?

St. Augustine: Your providence brought me a friend. He was not a very frequent consulter of astrologers, and he was not well up in the literature of the subject, but, as I have said, consulted them out of curiosity.  Yet he had some knowledge which he said he had learnt from his father.  He did not know how much validity that might have for overthrowing confidence in art.

Sure. (One hour later) So what’s up?

At Rome my arrival was marked by the scourge of physical sickness, and I was on the way to the underworld, bearing all the evils I had committed against you, against myself, and against other…

You’re still recording?

Sometimes, however, by taking excessive safeguards against being led astray, I err on the side of too much severity.  I have sometimes gone so far as to wish to banish all the melodies and sweet chants commonly used for David’s psalter from my ears and from the church as well.

Weren’t you mixing in London last month?

That is the outcome when you are abandoned, fount of life and the one true Creator and Ruler of the entire universe, when from a self-concerned pride a false unity is loved in the part.

Is this album taking longer than your first?

Secular successes are pleasant.  They have no small sweetness of their own.  Our motivation is not to be deflected from them by a superficial decision; for it would be a disgrace to return to the secular again.  It is a considerable thing to set out to obtain preferment to high office.  And what worldly prize could be more desirable?  We have plenty of influential friends.

For this new one you worked with Linda Perry, right?

Many great men entirely worthy of imitation have combined the married state with a dedication to the study of wisdom.

You’re not a very melodic person?

He was astonished that I, for whom he had so deep a regard, should be stuck fast in the glue of this pleasure.

I find Linda Perry amazing.

Alypius discouraged me from marrying a wife.

I absolutely hated that song What’s Up that she sang with 4 Non Blondes, when it came out in ’93.  It definitely stood out.

I did not postpone the fact that every day I was dying within myself.

But it grew on me to the point where I think it’s a perfectly brilliant, eternal pop song.

To a large extent what held me captive and tortured me was the habit of satisfying with vehement intensity an insatiable sexual desire.

On the low or the high end?

It was obvious to me that things which are liable to corruption are good.

Are you happy to be a musician?

I heard in the way one hears within the heart, and all doubt left me.

Wow, I never heard that expression.  How does that work?

And I considered the other things below you, and I saw that neither can they be said absolutely to be or absolutely not to be.  They are because they come from you.

What about your song Emerge?

If I were to regard them in isolation, I would indeed wish for something better…

That song got played to death before it even managed to become a hit.

It dwells in you without growing old and gives renewal to all things.

Emerge became the face of a whole style.  Like, you hear that song and you think ‘My god, no electroclash….Please!’

If we did not know this with certain knowledge, we would not want it with determination in our will.  But what does that mean?

Have you come to that point?

If two people are asked if they want to serve in the army, it may turn out that one of them replies that he would like to do so, while the other would not.  But if they are asked whether they would like to be happy, each would at once say without the least hesitation that he would choose to do so.

What about the girl you’re singing about?

She served us as if she was a daughter to all of us.

And what about this story that I heard a while back of you dating Kylie Minogue?

The conversation led us towards the conclusion that the pleasure of the bodily senses, however delightful in the radiant light of this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of eternity to be not even worth considering.

Fashion-wise, what are you into lately?

Drunkards eat salty things to make their desire uncomfortable.

Like, what are you wearing as we speak?

These and other signs come from the heart of those who love and are loved and are expressed through the mouth, through the tongue, through the eyes, and a thousand gestures of delight, acting as fuel to set our minds on fire and out of many forge unity.

Are there any clothes that you’d never wear in public? Things you’re really ashamed of?

Let the restless and the wicked depart and flee from you.  You see them and pierce their shadowy existence: even with them everything is beautiful, though they are vile.

Since you’re traveling a lot, have you been to any place you’d want to move to?

The allurement of perfumes is not a matter of great concern to me.  When they are absent, I do not look for them.

That’s because you just came back from Central America.

What filth, what disgraceful things they were suggesting!  I was listening to them with much less than half my attention.  They were not frankly confronting me face to face on the road, but as it were whispering behind my back, as if they were furtively tugging at me as I was going away, trying to persuade me to look back.

Have you seen any specific places there that you’d want to have?

Our plan was formed with your knowledge but was not publicly known, except to our intimate circle.  It was agreed among us that it was not to be published generally.

Who’s?

Tongues that appear to be offering helpful advice can actually be hostile opponents and, in offering love, may devour us in the way people consume food.

I know nothing.

Let no anxiety about that disturb you.

Let’s talk about Sigfried and Roy.  Have you ever met them?

This question moves me to great astonishment.  Amazement grips me.  People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars.  But in themselves they are uninterested.  They experience no surprise that when I was speaking of all these things, I was not seeing them with my eyes.  On the other hand, I would not have spoken of them unless the mountains and waves and rivers and stars (which I have seen) and the ocean (which I believe on the reports of others) I could see inwardly with dimensions just as great as if I were actually looking at them outside my mind.

Absolutely.  What else is going on?

I shall do this and that, I say to myself within the vast recess of my mind which is full of many, rich images…

Have you heard any good jokes recently?

The woman who lost her drachma searched for it with a lamp.  She would not have found it unless she had remembered it.  When she found it, how could she know that it was the one she lost, if she had failed to remember it?

I don’t know.

The object was lost to the eyes, but held in the memory.

That’s a great end.  Talk to you in a year or two, okay?

What then is it in the soul which causes it to take more pleasure in things which it loves when they are found and recovered that if it has always had them?

Cool Basement, 2009

At the Park, 2009

Dream House- Interior, 2009

Happy Bunny, 2009

“A bunny modeled by copying and pasting squares. Instead of creating the outline first and then filling in the interior, Meg placed squares horizontally like a printer.”

Aquarium Dream House, 2009

“This is Meg’s dream house. The walls are made of water and held together by force fields.”

Big French Fries, 2009

“This is a big pack of french fries a man ordered from work.”

UA Museum of the North Starbucks version, 2009

“UAMN modified as a new Starbucks property created by Cole.”

Three-dimensional thinking unconfined by discipline.  Whims, dreams, desires charge these design projects with conceptual integrity, giving form to the previously inexpressible. Radical by nature, scale ain’t nothing but a number baby.

‘Men seek retreats for themselves: houses in the country, seashores and mountains; and thou too art wont to desire such things very much,’ said Marcus Aurelius, ‘but this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere, either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble, does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.  Constantly then give thyself to this retreat, and renew thyself…’ (Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by George Long, Mount Vernon, N.Y., Peter Pauper Press.)

Renderings via Dezeen

With Maxwell Maltz’s (M.D., F.I.C.S.) “Do-It-Yourself Tranquilizers,” forget expensive tree-house hotel vacations and journey into the “quiet room in your mind.” Architecture’s diminutive role as the fulfillment of fantasy, whether lifestyle dream-image or speculative investment, prompts a reconsideration of architecture’s inherent value as a built form.  The immediate obsolescence of fixed capital in the accumulation of ground rent means that an architect must tend toward densification and verticalization, or a structure which will constantly reaffirm a site’s cultural value.

At one instant we desire peace and quiet, at the next stimulation and arousal.  Could our immediate environment ever offer more than could our mind?  Perhaps virtual media offers a more cost effective response than architecture. A conflation of time and space, the screen holds the capacity for quick solutions to fleeting emotional conditions.

As an analogy under the confines of ground rent, the white box neutrality of the contemporary art gallery embodies “the quiet room” escape as a spatial phenomenon.  Serving to clarify, divide, and sort stimuli in order to achieve a state where emotional responses relate directly to discrete art objects, the white box may most effectively conflate time and space under the condition of capital accumulation.  After all, art is for sale, a commodity whose value depends on, shall we say, societal cybernetics, or, perhaps a cultural zeitgeist.

“Joe/Narcissus (Jack Bittner) is an ordinary man who has recently signed a complicated lease on a room. As he wonders how to pay the rent, he discovers that he can see the contents of his mind unfolding whilst looking into his eyes in the mirror. He realises that he can apply his gift to others (“If you can look inside yourself, you can look inside anyone!”), and sets up a business in his room, selling tailor-made dreams to a variety of frustrated and neurotic clients.” -wikipedia

Lest I be accused of urban voyeurism, why not compare these crop-shot urban textures with my previous post on façadomy of a different breed?  Under what condition can a building recycle it’s potential for profit?  Under what condition does it become a ruin?

Smile, you’ve got a light box!

Telematic Primitivism: A Survey Of Temporary Constructions Built For The Purpose Of Watching The 2010 FIFA World Cup At Sidewalk Cafés In Berlin, Germany

The liberal man, interested in freedom, tears himself open and discovers his own mortality.