ohio, 2007.
It feels like 2007. That's the fundamental feeling of the sprawl. I cannot imagine any other feeling when walking in most of america. I went to hangout with a friend on 4/20, I hadn’t hungout with them before, taking the digital to the actual.
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The sprawl doesn’t belong to a single state, it feels like Ohio to me however. The sprawl doesn’t belong to a single state in the sense it doesn’t feel like you are anywhere save for anywhere in america. It's all there is when you are in the sprawl. You could walk for twenty hours and still find yourself in a Walmart parking lot you think to yourself. You are on some fundamental level located nowhere.
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Capitalism is modular. To understand capitalism and its relationship to the urban form and its impact on our experience we must take a dromological view. speed causes standardization of form, when every interlinkage is the same capitalism flows faster. Having twenty different crates that conflict and require half a day to figure out how to arrange them when placing them all on a train does not last long. Whatever crate takes the least time to load up and save space and time will be adopted. for a smooth logistical flow parts will be pushed to become uniform. This moves past crates and trains. The standard place spreads across the surface of earth, especially America. One will be able to easily make their way through a Walmart anywhere, its layout is the same as anywhere else. In the capitalist glacis all becomes simple parts able to be swapped for other simple parts.
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The same houses and apartments sprawl across the urban form. These figures do not have a tie to anywhere or anytime. The un-standard becomes a highly sought after commodity, the sprawling standard becomes more than tiring. The promise of the unique becomes a hopeful thing. It becomes something one can take a pilgrimage to. Life has no essence of anything but the same. It is a life devoid of time.
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Space has an aura of time to it. Here in 2022 nowhere feels like 2022. 2022 does not have a corresponding place to it. we do not feel in place in events until they happen quite a time away from us. an Event is created rather than just happening.
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When I wrote "It is at this point where the appearance of the events then is said to become the substance of events, the simulated and imaginary then becomes to inform the actual temporal topography of events"1 earlier this year i did not provide a definition of event and did not believe it needed one until a friend asked me to do so. I now ask myself and the dwelling of my mind the question of what is an event? It is my thought that events do not exist until it is spoken in the mind or spoken into the air that they have occurred, are occurring, or shall occur. yesterday was an event, always an event having occurred, it consists of a duration. an event consists of a duration between two points in time. The measurement of time is not divine, humanity metered out the hour, the minute, the year, the second, the day, that is to say humanity made our conception of time. To a man in a cave there is not a yesterday, the duration is not exact between points. Time has gone from a beast in intimate relationship to our experience of the space we reside in to a machine-beast that bares no relation to us save its hegemony and being ingulfed in its power. Time now exists for the creation of the statistical and unalive parts of life. An event is noteworthy and consists in duration between two points created by the time machine-beast, media and the social forms events, they speak that an event has a start and they speak it has an end. The experience of life does not in actuality consist of events, for the being in the world it experiences duration without event save the pause from the world offered by sleep. In this way event is caused retroactively.
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Events are formed in relation to space and the world, the point where an event starts is marked by a physical occurrence. The event of my journey to work is begun with the physical change of me walking out the door and ends with me entering another door.
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Time and Relation to The Car. The Car annuls the relationship of me, one who walks, to the driver, cars2 are deeply inhuman, a threat to life. The Car requires all, the one who walks, and the driver to develop a close relationship to the machine-beast of time, measurement between places ceases to be "far away" or "close by" and becomes "an hour's drive" or "ten minutes away". There is much difficulty in creating an I-Thou3 relationship to the driver of a car, it can only be I-It. The comic appears in a situation where a car nearly hits a passerby, he begins to yell at the driver before it is revealed it is a friend of his, this references that relation does not seem to exist between the driver and anyone else, the driver ceases to exist.
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The indoor mall is Americana par excellence. In fact it is the last form of Americana. A mall does not belong to any point in time save the mall's architectural time. It wraps in on itself creating a Cube of Time. It wraps in and creates an endless plane of capital. The mall feels endless, it becomes a fantasy land. It's the only place in the urban sprawl that feels like anything. The light is soft and bright, bones of some great beast who once lived in our science fiction dreams. The mall is lingering nightmares of the eighties and nineties and refusing to die dreams of slick white futuristic space stations selling everything while Luke Skywalker and Han Solo dance for your pleasure. There's stores in malls that are full of empty space. It is not these places are closing but rather they are selling this idea of excess space to people who live in a world where space is shrinking.
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I was wandering with a friend, not wandering, walking. We walked to an Indian restaurant together. Their apartment smelled like the midwest, like smoke, everything was a mess. The sun doesn't seem real. I am wearing a tail and ears. This moment shall not last long. It cannot. I am high and have to keep track of time. Imagine an awkward looking trans woman in a lab coat standing on a sidewalk, sunset behind her passing through a chain link fence, she looks worried, concerned. It feels like an eighties movie. This is what it feels like. The world feels like a masterfully crafted film from the eighties about the emptiness of modernity. But they have not figured out what that non emptiness would be. We actually. We are stuck in a film that if created would cause us to all wail. All art set in the modern era past the eighties is a vain attempt to create this wail caused by us recognizing the death of the urban world. The world is stuck in a post 9/11 world that overlaps with the world of the eighties. We live in a nowhere zone.
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Outside of the indoor mall there is nothing, the roads stretch on forever. The only shapes here are those that the sprawl’s culture codes as zombies, disabled, homeless, the Other. These people are coded as already dead, the fact they breathe is of little note to the sprawl. These figures, the ones who must take public transit, the teens staring up at a blood red sky with a screaming sun, they are the offspring of an urban world that utters nothing. These figures belong to a single time, the endtimes. The art that can speak to this experience is a Nirvana CD spinning in a Discman, faded posters of Neon Genesis Evangelion. This world is a world waiting for death, waiting for figures wrapped in light brown fabric holding guns assembled from their dead metalic kin. It waits for these figures to poke through dead apartments. This world waits for Alex Cox to film these figures with guns. The sprawl is the filming site of the ultimate cult film, forever in production, released only to be viewed by the youth of today who never got to be young.
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The mall keeps out the figures coded as zombies, you cannot be anything but a symbol of American beauty or American overindulge in a mall. The symbol of American cruelty is banished to the underpasses of the eternal highway if they cannot hide their scars.
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How would the fish in a fishtank of an Asian restaurant sat in an outdoor strip mall consider us? How would a bird native to Colorado but never able to land where its great grandmother rested, now a site of a failing 7/11 consider us? Would they believe that we are more banished than they are? Turned into figures of data to be counted and counted again. Would they see us as bodies never able to rest?
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The gravel of an abandoned lot crunches underfoot, a cigarette falls to the ground there. The sun is hot. The broken wooden crates are dry and seem to be eagerly awaiting the chance to lodge splinters into your hand. The sun screams overhead. The chain link fence is rusted in parts. The sun yells out for anyone to hear it. This place feels like everywhere else. It feels like death in the eighties. It feels like 2007 in Ohio.
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The dusk also feels like it could last forever, it feels like death. The sprawl at night feels like the lights watch you, an endless parade of lights. Cities seem like they were meant to be viewed at night. The sprawl at dusk passes from one life to the next, the day is home to suburban moms itching to abuse their kids. At night the sprawl is home to stoners and lovers. The dusk is the time for the snakes to crawl back underground and the racoons and coyotes dressed in crowns of boiled twisted yakult bottles and robes of torn fabric to wander out of their dens. You feel like the last person if you stay in an abandoned lot. You feel like one of many beautiful creatures needing to connect with others if you wander along the terrain of strip malls and commercial zoning with the midnight blue sky above you. There are no places meant for dusk, we think it too fleeting to need any, our world is not built for dusk, a world broken into day and night life. In order to survive this century we need stories that take place at dusk, stories that take place in the sprawl.
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There is a single long event here, stretching forever. It towers. It screams silently. This is life in America beyond the image, beyond the interface. This is life in America when you strip the philosophy and culture away. This is Death. This is Death. Faced with this landscape we try to fit it into a series of images, we whimper and try to place it into a framework of cult classics, we grasp at anything that could save us. We have no temporal or cultural language to describe the sprawl. This is the fate of post-historic man4, not shining cyberpunk lights but rather an endless sprawl under an endless screaming sun.
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Passed by a thousand figures and yet never able to find life.
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The mall has its own time, the light is soft, it feels clean, it feels eternal. The mall’s architectural time has no reference in the real world. Its time is one of exchange and commodity shows. Time breaks in the mall, like a film reel spinning and having itself jammed, the film tearing. Temporal Terrorism. Unable to touch or utter. One cannot utter anything here. The mall will close at the end of the day but it doesn’t feel like it. The sprawl at night feels beautiful, depending on where you are you feel like the only person there, the only human left on Earth but it feels peaceful. The sprawl at day also makes you feel like the last person but in a vastly different way. It feels like you live in a world that has forgotten how to be human.
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What can we do in a world waiting for its post apocalypse fate? How can we utter something in a world of silent screaming? Is there any path we can take to save the city from the sprawl? Would all of our attempts only end with us recreating a New Urbanism5 still stuck in the grasp of capitalist framework? The urban environment we find ourselves in is our world, it is the start and end of politics. We live our lives in this urban world, it is where we encounter others, it is where we find ourselves returning to again and again. What can we do in this urban world?
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The figures approach over the horizon, wrapped in colorful fabric, singing and screaming. Walking along the side of the highway, from the underpass more and more come, shapes spilling forth. Holding stolen swords and crowns made from found metal. Tearing the ugly world apart as their crowd grows, towers of twisted shapes grow in their wake. In the strip malls homes spring up where massage parlors and gift stores once lived. Banners of found fabric fly. Knights that belong to no kingdom sing songs and free the spirit of the world. The figures that culture calls zombies break down the doors of the mall, they are dressed in colors that have never been seen before. Disabled transsexuals armed with Joy forming an angel holding golden swords through their singing. Autistic theater troops formed through the unity of all the Others, the figures that the white suburbite must grind up in order to elevate themselves to a throne made of bones and electronic playthings. Roaring machines of Joy wandering the sprawling wastes. Barons of the wastes watch the Dead start to sing. And they sang such that the wind paused to listen in. The figures that this world has coded as already dead sing and utter forth pure Joy. They make friends they shall wander with for the sprawl's downfall shall be these wandering bands of Joy. Life springs up in the sprawl. These figures are dandelions, called weeds by enemies of Joy and sprouting up everywhere making a carpet of beauty. They can try to remove us but we will always be back, this is the spring and summer of dandelions, that revolutionary flower.
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I wander around with my friend, we are zombies in the sprawl under the screaming sun. This is how we will end the world I think to myself, this is how we form our own post apocalypse.
I speak of the cultural Car, cars themselves could be harnessed for many amazing projects if one really tried. Our cultural Car does not let the disabled travel really, it is just an object by which a false life mediates between creatures.
I and Thou by Martin Buber.
The City In History, Lewis Mumford.
We do not want the butchers and stockbrokers to have any jobs to walk to.