Sting's on fire!

The Name Blame

Hello.
Amidst the turbid effluvium of school-gas and life's subtle but profound semantic shifts, I intend to start a complementary blog. Inspired by Pruned, mine will pick up those seashells I step over when writing essays and the like. It'll be part archival, part vanity, part fascination and be very pictoral. Architectural landscapes will be its focus (how this is distinct from landscape architecture, I do not know) and it will be a simple way to chronicle some of the airier and more ephemeral interests of mine. Like pruned, pictures of stuff will be the preferred information package. And for you Sparky, it will also be a discrete exercise in vitalism.

Despite the borrowed bricolage of underpinned ideas, it needs a really good name. I was thinking of "echoscapes", because it infers resonance and broad ecology and symbolic depth, but I looked it up, and blogspot already has it (founded in Montreal, no less)... This'll be a wordpress supported blog, but still, I'm not a big fan of doppelgangers (one of my few superstitions). I might yet do it, but it still bothers me, even though there hasn't been any movement on it since 2005. Meanwhile, "escapes" does not yet exist, but i do prefer the first former...

Help me please, and have a good think about it. Qualities valued in the name are: subject association, compactability, novelty and a mystic twinge.

The Ploughed

Had to stop myself attempting to lock my bike to an old guy's leg yesterday. Slept too long today. Ran myself over with my own plough. Should change my name now to Doug. I just want to read comics.

'The Plough'

Day 1 - 10.53am EST
There seems to be a hole in my marble bag already: I actually caught myself looking up the word 'synonym' in the thesaurus this morning. What next? I say phrases like 'I wish I said envious phrases more often'? THE PLOUGH!!!

wheezed rhapsody bellows

In this cafe/bar there is...

• one couple with half-pints staring off in opposing directions, apparantly lost in contemplation. it's not a fight, it's not a grudging autumn-ending, it's just life.
• Paul Spence/Deaner from Fubar. He has a moosestache, not a moustache these days.
• a couple of the steely locals diligently climbing into Tuesday's bag.
• someone who's got a wirebrush goatee and expressive eyes, like a blue-peepered Don Cherry as puppeteered by William H. Macy.
• a Swede hipster
• the ambipresent Vic Vogel (here and Barfly are the only places I ever see him)
• and a guy who looks like hes doing pretty much the same thing as me, though he's got a pint in front of him. I don't have anything in front of me save the Plough, which I'm trying to put my hand to now and generate an instant work ethic. My fields have lain fallow long enough...

...but first, butt first!

Perhaps one of you three dear readers will this about me, likelily not, but I want to be a landscape architect. There, I said it. I love writing, but I feel it should be like happiness, "not the destination, but the path" and I found setting writing as a goal in itself somehow made it unobtainable and obscured some pretty good ideas, if I do say so myself, (which I do, which is hardly ever a good idea and so obviously they're not all good ideas...) and I'm going to out-wit myself by moonlighting as something I can inter myself with, and that's this. Landscape architecture.

Curse the pragmatics for now, I just 'like' greenery and design. I want to see ecological integration as a course of technological innovation, and though GREEN is voguish right now, it's almost always how I've always thought, I want to help blur the delineation between interior/exterior (perhaps a tough thing to do in this climate, with the coils of private security tightening around public consciousness), and believe that paradise can be meted out to all in large enough increments for everyone to be involved, and thus responsible, but in small enough parcels that planning for it does not get glassy-eyed under utopiates. There's enough of a movement now to join in professionally and not struggle (like I have been - thank my kind makers for keeping me kept). And we seem to now at least have the diagnostic tools to appraise and inform a better approach to our planet, if not the economic will or tomorow's imagination (but those will be here in short order, if only for the money). Which leads me to a fairly crucial point: Not to sound like a money-grubber, but right now is also a time of speculation. Ecological values necessitate economical tenets, and so, once we're on the right path, Green "alternatives" will also be the most cost-effective... But now, well right now and over the next little while, it's going to yield a different green. So I guess I literally am a money grubber: play with dirt for cash. Oh yes.

I expressed my interest in this area to a classmate when I first met her, and she told me about a decent landscape architecture site: Pruned. I haven't fully explored it yet, but I had seen this installation in Chile before, featured in a landscaper's magazine. How classically sublime.

Since writing the paragraph above, I've dipped into Pruned even more and found that the writing's tight and the issues compelling. I saw something there that I'd heard of before, but not known much about... this post made me see more things... For the shock value found in its disturbing immediacy, there is a picture on this post that really delivers the message about the garbage centered gyres (the currented oceanic systems the sea-dwellers use to migrate) and their rapid growth.

My other friend in that class, leaning towards architecture proper, informed me of his architectural crush, Paolo Soleri who founded this multidisciplinary field experiment/tutelage center which envisioned this drawjopper.

immediations

Nicole used to wield a quote by George Costanza's dad, Frank, who, finding that he had high blood pressure, was instructed by the cardiologist to say "serenity now".
Instead, he screamed it.

Nicole, right now, I feel the exact same way.

The trick to belief is not to notice it. It needs to be examined, of course, but the examination necessitates the suspension of the belief - and forgetting that belief is a dynamic process, will stop it all together.

As Paul Atreides says to the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother in Dune: 'A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it'.

But what happens when events challenge your beliefs and make them opaque? The casual individual may claim they have no beliefs, but that's because they're systemic: an augmentation of the mind, a vessel of extension... necessarily transparent. It takes but one confidence artist, but one mistaken attribution of character to make the believer pause and examine how their beliefs failed to uphold their view of the world (naught but projection of a personality to create a planet). And examination of belief, though perhaps clumsy and earnest and inexperienced, has a like form to belief itself: it is cast onto and informs the examiner of their world. And may cause them to question other things. One bad thing that interrupts a person (for belief IS that: a segment of person) can cause many more bad things to follow (a new tension of values allows a new world-scape to be envisioned).

Who's to say then that beliefs aren't the most dangerous thing we are dressed in? Maybe they should all be beaten on, cheated on, lied to, stolen from, let down, spat at, shat at, defrauded, denuded... so that real design of purpose takes their place? So our worlds are truly a process of choice, rather than a reflexive kick of seemingly inherited character projection?

But we all have vision, and we can all imagine... and in place of believing, in place of witnessing our beliefs in process, we can envision to become what we want. Maybe then we can imagine our serenity, even if we can't imagine our now.