the Usual Suspects
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Diminishing Decades
I had an idea, perhaps a folly - in the architectural sense of the word, I've been kicking around for a while. It involves our compartmentalization of time into arbitrary discrete periods. Not years so much which have the real cycle of seasons to them. Centuries encompass enough human time for a world to come into being and wear away within them. The places and habits we have within the more period like decades hold together more. The past recedes from us in these stages.
The past is it's fixed human instances: buildings and social patterns. They fall into the background in a slow withdrawal. The current decade is only being born. The previous decades are ninety eighty or seventy percent still with us. This, in the built environment, institutional environment, technology and written works. An example might be Joseph Mitchell's book of magazine essays on NYC Up in the Old hotel. which noted how old worlds are still all around us half un-visited.
Human artifacts and human instances within decades span apparent permanence to ephemerality. The impetus of this idea was noticing that Boston had changed little when I was growing up since the '20's or '30's. This from my own observation and asides from my parents and grandparents. Until the Pru, Hancock were built and they tore down Scollay Square to put up Government Center, Boston City Hall, (et tu Art Brute) was different.
The structure of time's passage is caught up in this. The built environment and institutional environment both. The myriad institutions that govern our lives. The people that live within this matrix. The buildings - the architecture of older cities and small towns in the northeast - that I knew growing up. These changed very little between 1930 to the early 1970s. The Depression and the exhaustion of World War II played their role in this, but as well much had been built in the thirty years prior. Newer constructions moved to warmer climates. A slack followed allowing old buildings and ways to hold sway until it broke like a tectonic plate giving way in a eathquake. The physical built environment, familiar buildings cityscapes, (down)towns, edifices of transportation (roads railways ports bridges) held in place and time. Our world, our zeitgeist, (probably the closest I've ever come to using that word remotely correctly) stands on a tripod of its built environment, social institutions and memory. Memories of the times both lasting and ephemeral. These worlds are still with us piling up and thinning out in various pockets and corners.
Boston like many eastern corridor cities was essentially static in the initial decades after world war two, until a period of stable accruing prosperity brought around a flood tide of streets & roads highways and building (not coincidently the title of one of the elementary school readers of the period) that gradually changed the lay of the land. Not only Boston but New York Philly and Baltimore for much the same reason. I would add that residential developments and schools in the suburbs were a noticeable exception to this.
Otherwise this was not just a phenomenon of cities and urban area. The small New England towns of my youth if anything seemed even more stuck in aspic.
Northeastern urban areas maintained the same look and ways for half a century. I can remember going to G Fox & Co department store in Hartford, an old school vertical department store whose new building dated from 1918 (and epitomized 1940 and 50s America. Perhaps not just the northeast. An anecdote I've read about, the impetus of Robert Townes's script for Chinatown was noticing how much of Raymond Chandlers LA could still be seen and felt in 1970s LA.
The other structures of our times are the institutions that govern and form the pattern of our lives. Formal institutions - religion, governmental bodies, constitutions, and places of learning. A way to think about these, is that they have something resembling set bylaws, order, and a regular manner of conducting business. Alongside those are Informal institutions which may be really any longitudinal social organization. This to distinguish them from ad hoc groups which have no fixed long term purpose. Both formal and informal organizations by their nature are relatively fixed and change very slowly over time. and channel the process of our lives.
Beyond this are transitory events. The ephemera of daily life and then epochal events, singularities that give definition to a decade even a generation. These alongside cultural instances such as books, films, and music which also give identity and definition to a period. For a friend of mine, only a baby at the time the Fall of Saigon fits into that category.
All these notions describe human experience, our recent, past as an inhabited space. Our perceived and felt sense of our time. There is a bubble effect an object permanence to these slowly withdrawing places of. A desire even an ability to revisits in a fashion even continue to live within in a certain period inform the identity of a generation for many. There often is a point in many peoples lives where they live more in the diminishing world rather than current decade.
There is a point where our receding world becomes too attenuated to inhabit. As the disparity between the moment and the cocoon of the past. A frisson maybe two decades post where the past suddenly seems to reveal itself as the past. Sometimes, in old college classes, the professor would toss out the word "Exegesis" a word used to describe interpretations of an historical text to try to illuminate the inability or at least difficulty of easily comprehending the past. It sinks into historicism After a certain passage of decades the relatable world falls away from human memory. The past becomes a foreign country.
-- Jethro Tull - Living in the Past
22 August 2024, 2300 EDT
DeBeaked
Twitter is in the midst of refashioning itself. As a taxidermist might of something dead but made life-like -- from a distance. Even a replica, a simulacrum of itself. Still life with fruit. An Elegy for the Old Twitter - The Atlantic
The changes are sometimes subtle and again quite major, vigorously contested and commented on and barely noticed. Mostly it is about the checkmark archipelago. Blue, green (yellow?) and what meanings, payments or verification attach to them.
In the new unnamed twitter ("X"?) a blue check mark seems to now mean that some entity has chosen to pay some indistinct sliding fee and purchased the hued pixel real estate, or it was gifted because they're special (or 5th columnists in good standing). Not because of who they are or what they've done - unless their insecurity of significance leads them to it. This, of course, could be intended.
At the same time a number of accounts either banned or in the time-out corner with dunce caps pulled down over their ears were welcomed back. Without any obligatory Turing test (even a Turing pop quiz) Many others are hung on the hook of being labeled "state media" on little more than some vague mis-understanding of term, or personal whim.
This is Mr Musk, who has purchased twitter, made himself its de facto chief operating officer and it, his play toy. It is for the rest of us to try to discern his games. Is it some deliberate act or to wreck it. Does he not like the idea of largely un-channeled free ranging public discussion largely outside the control of vested interests. Does he want to index and monetize us (he's going about that in a strange way). Or is it merely wanton sport for a moments care less distraction while his rockets explode.
I came to twitter initially without much intention as I fell from UseNet Newsgroups to sites like MetaFilter, Plastic, Kuroshin, SlashDot, RSS aggregators and (briefly) Reddit. Facebook too, intermittently, like some unavoidable Scollay Square. Twitter, oddly, felt like home. Twitter was my Jam. After inhabiting the place for a while I set out to reshape it as you could to my tastes and settle down.
I learned not to follow more people than I really wanted to hear from. And mostly actual people not corporate entities (more than warranted). These I placed in narrowing concentric circles of lists. I don't feel an express need to tweet frequently. Tweeting links and images is still an unmastered form, but one I work at. I learned to keep everything small and curated. To those I wanted to hear from sometimes, those I want hear from most of the time, and those I want to hear everything from. From a wide range of viewpoints too, some native to my interests, others not. RSS feeds with benefits. Oddly Twitter's inexplicable algorithm seems to pick up on this and passes on people like Mayuko onto my notifications so that I never miss anything by them even when inattentive to my lists.
I know that some are heading off to places like Mastodon. Many others to tik-tok and it's glimpse of humanities glittering post-textual future. Regardless of to where they are going, people are leaving twitter in droves. Its aggregate value is diminishing to a vanishing point with each departure Twitter is Dying | TechCrunch. Conversations are noticeably thinning out. The entire idea of a substantive people to people dialogue outside of the mediation of the ruling strata is diminished.
When I was younger, I briefly wondered about how to live a life free from those who would make world history, the dreams and desires of all common people, their own narrative of personnel greatness. We, nothing but tenants, extras and scene fillers in their story. Your Carnegies Stanfords Vanderbilts Fords Rockefellers Goulds Gates and Jobs. Trumps, Vladimirs and Musks. All the assembled Princes of Denmark. I would ask them for what its worth: go to your yachts and Berkshire bungalows, but stay out of my life and have your databases forget my name.
Addendum 30 April 2023 1200 edt
After sleeping on it I felt I was talking around things a bit, because I couldn't recall fully what I felt. What Twitter represented almost absurdly was the promise of the mythic 3rd way. That realm of substantive discourse that is communicated populace to populace. Not from the governing ruling class to its people. And occasional timid petitions from the latter to the former.
Throughout human history most theories of government explicitly held to that model. Only with the printing press really did apples begin to routinely fall off that cart.
Elon Musk is part of the de facto ruling elite in this world. Despite his performative protests contra, he is perfectly aware of this. He does not really want anything like the old Twitter to exist, a mass communication of the masses. Dorsey can stay in his cliff house over the sea. There can be a place for all your snapshots of weddings and birthdays, Your pet cats and dogs.Doorknobs that look like a face (I love those). Stay in your lane, but keep your wallet out.
"I got nick'ed for fighting in the street
and the Judge he wants know:
'What my name...'"
-- Clash
29 April 2023, 1759
Back to Nature
A couple of weeks ago I had to briefly walk up to McKeldin Library where I work, from Rt 1 where I live, when the campus shuttle buses weren't running during Spring break. A little over a mile. As I went through the different parts of campus I was struck by how different they looked. Maryland is a land-grant college. Originally a federally established agricultural school. The land was donated by the Calvert family - think Lord Baltimore (the man, not the 60s NY garage band) to whom King James II gave part of the eastern seaboard to play with.
A good share of campus has that park-like "City-Beautiful" feel to it but part of it, the North-eastern end, has a more urban even somewhat industrial appearance. This is the physics and engineering quarter, pressed up against Paint Branch creek and Route One. This sector seemingly itself in two sections: un-enlightened and enlightened as time and taste grew. As I walked through it I could see the signs of one or more feeder creeks which had largely and somewhat successfully been engineered out of sight. It dawned on me that this end of campus unlike the older part which had grown up over fields and. pastures, thad been built over meadowland of which only some landscape architectural nods remained.
I reflected on the dichotomy between Nature and the (built) Environment. The way people will talk about these things is curious and somewhat revealing Built Environment Wikipedia. There are some who will use Environment in an all encompassing over-arching sense - that there is a primordial and then improved plains of the world. Attitudes of nature can be eked out of how it's regarded and referred to, as wilderness, wasteland, paradise. Primitive, ancient and fundamental or simply that part of earth we have not gotten to or developed a use for - yet Built Environment EPA.
In this sense there strictly is no natural environment any longer except in imaginations as romantically and deliberately re-created. Nature here is seen as an unimproved sub-set of the environment essentially illusionary on its own terms.
More commonly Nature is seen as a realm in itself set against the built environment. Idolized by the Muirists and secretly feared if not loathed by most everyone else. The built Environment is ours, with our buildings - for work and domicile, roads for transportation and trade, and farms. Nature is that part of the world we have not tamed for ourselves. We waiver in our sense of duty or responsibility towards it, but our world is our settlements.
Many years ago I read a short story about a guy who becomes obsessed that there is a great deal of land missing from official statistics of land use in the U.S. (This was in Thomas Disch's anthology "The Ruins of Earth", (probably “Three million square miles” by Gene Wolfe). After his wife leaves him, he loads of the car and sets out to find it. Finally he becomes lost and stops at a gas station to get directions, the attendant advises him to just cut across the highway median and go back the way he came. He sets off to reconnoiter a spot where he can do this, and has an epiphany that highway medians are where all this missing nature is, but the ground is wet muddy and full of insects and he runs back to his car.
As a last marker against the idea of nature as wilderness or not currently being built upon or cultivated I thought of how water moves over a landscape. Does it run soley with gravity or is it channeled round and by things, guided in some way. This could be the test to wether it is fallow or feral. The land primeval or merely a miniature garden Nature and the Built environment | Anthropology of Architecture.
10 April 2023 2030 EDT
Moonage Daydream
When I was very young I recall some neighbors were fixing up an old car. When they finally got it running they took my sister and I for a brief ride around the neighborhood. It was something called a Moon Roadster. The building where they worked on it was known locally as "the old sail factory" which it had been - sometime back in the 1800's. Of course our house was built in 1812. At the time, not knowing any different, I thought everything was that old.
The building had a peg sticking out of it where a waterwheel had been fitted which which ran down to a stream called the Eel river. Which incidentally was the fresh water that caused John Winthrop to say "Ok, I guess we can set up here".
As I remembered this I thought about a notion I used to have for thinking about human history. It was a commonplace thought really, but it seemed to order things. The idea was that the decades recede from us in stages. Firstly in the built envirnment - the infrastructure: roads, docks, factories, homes, for as long as they stand. Used for their initial and any secondary purposes. Then institutions: social, governmental and quasi-governmental. Finally in terms of personal memory. There is a lot of the 2010+ years. Less of the first decade of this millennium and percentages less of the 90s, 80s, 70s, & 60s as the years and centuries recede from us. As long; however, as any part of them is still with us - the years, the times, are still with us.
There was a recent article in the Atlantic by Jennifer Senior on the difference between the actual age Subjective age - the Atlantic
we are and the age and the mental age we all have and carry around with us. Generally for most this is an age in our young adulthoods where things started to gel - When we got our first full-filling jobs, our first serious relationships, permanent homes, started families and the like. It tends for a lot of us to get frozen there and we age on with that elastic self image. My own, I concede, probably went to ground fairly late, about the time I took my third position with the Libraries. When things finally seemed to stabilize in my life, but honestly don't think I ever really reflected on it. No reveries. And I don't think it helped.
I thought of a close (married) friend - a co-warker - who emigrated from Vietnam with her family in her mid twenties. I was always aware she did a mental reset to when she had graduated from high school (Marie Curie high, HCMC) after she learned our peculiar ways and language, and got the job here a few years later. Then grew up again from there. After I read this article I realized we all do things like this. It's human nature. For all of us I hope there is a gradual merging of the mental image with the lived age to a better version of the American experience of preparation, actualization, and supernumery-ness
If anyone cares to ask what time it is, I can only answer: "Its Morris Day, and the Year of the Cat."
22 March 2023, 1701 EDT
Restart
After trying to work out the details. I am making an attempt to restart my old weblog. Which was a source of occasional satisfaction and amusement formerly. It wasn't a real weblog, rather a flat file HTML site disguised to look like a weblog which was all the universities server space would allow. It was - complicated - and that was half the entertainment. But after the stroke complicated was less entertaining. To this end I have drastically rewritten and simplified it, so that the process part of things does not overwhelm the writing and observation.
Generally these days I find the 280 characters, and pictures, of a tweet on my twitter account (occasionally extended to chained double tweets) adequate for what ever thoughts I still manage to have.
Perhaps some background images and such to follow it this succeeds in any fashion.
21 March 2023 1855 EDT
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