de·fen·es·tra·ted

a new definition of winter

2009-06-26T20:30:00.007-04:00

Hills like turtle shells and flowers that sprout feathers...
I´m in awe of the view from my new home and the Dr. Suess flora.

frequent reminders of mindblank

2009-05-22T22:20:00.010-04:00

oh man i´ve
forgotten all my words
i´m scraping at an empty bowl
my thoughts don't want to verbalize
my ideas don't want to penetrate
bad poetry
(searching searching...)
null
sterile
stoic
months of mindblank

redes chaterreras

2009-04-29T17:13:00.005-04:00

El Born, may 2005, Saltzman

"A saber lo que arrojan por las ventanas a estas horas de la noche. Vecinos desesperados. En las redes hay botelas de cava, recipientes de plástico, medias y calcetines, condones y pájaros muertos..."

-- Juan Marsé, referring to the building Walden 7, p.67, El amante bilingüe

urban occurrences

2009-03-23T08:09:00.003-04:00

will explain later

day 1

day 2

mindfulness as too inward-looking

2009-03-07T10:57:00.000-05:00

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/the-worst-buddhist-in-the-world/?em

i want to come back to comment on this

fun fact 8: Banksy

2009-02-12T17:54:00.011-05:00

A street or graffiti artist one of my students told me about: Banksy. I love how he harmlessly makes use of the dents in urban space for questionable purposes. Click on the photo for his website. I think his "outdoor" work is the most creative and effective (since it´s more public).

Guernica

2008-10-27T17:49:00.027-04:00

the other day i was grading papers and listening to my itunes on shuffle when i was stopped by the last line of the poem (below) by norman rosten, read by joan baez on her album "baptism" (1968). it's representative of baez´s stark tragic ballads and anti-war songs. my purposes for sharing this depressing poem: to remember what our tax dollars are used for, to illuminate and learn from some historical connections between 1943 and 2008, maybe to add that election day is around the corner, and finally (it's kind of far out, but why not while i'm on the soapbox) to promote adoption.
Guernica by Norman Roster, 1943

In Guernica the dead children were laid out in order upon the sidewalk, in their white starched dressed, in their pitiful white dresses.

On their foreheads and breasts are the little holes where death came in as thunder, while they were playing their important summer games.

Do not weep for them, madre. They are gone forever, the little ones, straight to heaven to the saints, and God will fill the bullet holes with candy.

current events 3: what's wrong with the picture?

2008-09-01T20:22:00.025-04:00

ethics, fashion, and economic difference? article in today's nytimes about millionaire fashion companies dressing the poorest in designer clothing in order to take publicity pictures of them. reminds me of when i was in tangier, morroco. we were walking through the narrow dirt streets of a lower-income historic quarter and i watched a group of frat boys in our tour group laugh and impress their friends as they took condoms out of their pockets and tossed them out to local kids who were playing in the streets. what does it come down to? an exposure of an unethical and unsympathetic juxtaposition between two extreme levels of basic needs? ...that would assume a sympathy for the have-nots. OK. but, who are we to determine who are and who aren't the have-nots? and what good does sympathy do if it doesn't... do anything? ...

time and the spatial tactics of birds

2008-08-11T15:16:00.009-04:00

(click on the image to find your niche)

Barrio Gótico, Barcelona

por ti, mi globo rojo

2008-08-07T07:22:00.053-04:00

libre libre libre como un globo sin cuerda

free free free like a balloon without a string

----------------------------------------------------------------

le voyage du ballon rouge (hou, 2007) in the beautiful open-air patio of the CCCB

symbols

the red balloon is optimism. it´s always bopping around around nearby when we look for it.

juliet binoche is the postmodern woman with too much on her plate. she´s also the depressed frenchperson who takes pleasure in gazing out windows while piano notes linger in the background. also, she reads out loud remarkably well.

song is the robot slave. she´s actually not a real person, but a robot. she´s secretly in love with juliet, and will do anything for juliet in hope of receiving 2 seconds of her attention.

the little boy is a poorly directed and an unrealistically dressed actor. (how could a 6 year old be dressed so fashionably if his father is in belgium and his mother is always busy?)

the blind piano tuner is the mortal incarnation of the red balloon. he´s also the hero of the movie. one day he will pop, and the red balloon will send us a replacement to populate the earth.

the parisian neighborhood is the one that always gets represented.

situation 3

2008-06-21T11:14:00.015-04:00

this is great, harmlessly playing with the silly boundaries between private and public space. i love things that we don't know how to respond to, and that question our taken-for-granteds. What would you do if you found a bright orange stairway peeking over your gated community?

(if you click on the images you can see them enlarged.)

from the excellent book design like you give a damn by architecture for humanity, pp314-315.

dissertation cover

2008-06-19T23:29:00.006-04:00

one space, two times--march 2005 and november 2006. (click on the image for a more realistic experience.)

Thanks to Eva Megias for the colored photograph.

night bus

2008-06-19T01:02:00.007-04:00

"where will we go tonight?" she wondered.

"close your eyes, and you'll see" smiled a bus driver.

Meredith the Seamstress (a la Edward Gorey)

2008-05-19T20:26:00.021-04:00

Meredith was deaf. She went deaf when she was six years old during a mild case of yellow fever. While she lay in bed that year, she learned to sew. Meredith was quick and precise and by the age of seven she became the town’s seamstress, replacing Francis’s reputation of being “good with her hands.”

One Spring day she decided to take a leisure walk down the train track. The refreshing smell of the blooming flowers, soft sun, and a couple hand salutes from her fellow townspeoples made her feel confident and content. The train track hadn’t been in service since the time of her grandfathers. She was thinking about the legend of the ghost train and how she might sew it along the hem of a blanket.

The next day Meredith was found dead on the train track. The doctor's biopsy concluded that she had been hit by a train. Meredith must not have heard nor felt the train approaching. Some members of the town were heartbroken and suggested she have an open coffin but be draped in her sewing pieces. Several invitees took the occasion to purchase new clothes. While Meredith's mother felt the coffin garment was in bad taste, others commented that it was symbolic of her unfinished talent.

fun fact 7: make a floor

2008-05-13T00:43:00.020-04:00

a fun way to waste time if you like tiles and wasting time like me. the designs come from "hydraulic tiles", which were produced in western europe in the mid 19th century. nowadays one can find the treaded originals in w. european and latin american interiors.

if you´re still interested, these photos of actual floors tiled in hydraulic tile s are incredible.

miércoles

2008-04-16T23:01:00.000-04:00

no me he olvidado que hoy es su día libre
como si fuera su cumpleaños semanal
su día de libre
el día que dormía una hora más
y tomaba un desayuno más lento
de tostadas y cigarrillos.

fun fact 5: antología poética popular

2008-04-11T23:25:00.002-04:00

amigos:

una página bonita, poesía con sus canciones correspondientes:

http://antologiapoeticamultimedia.blogspot.com

("aceituneros" y "era un niño que soñaba" son algunas de mis preferidas.)

xoxo
m

public documentation of 13 beautiful days

2008-04-01T22:06:00.021-04:00

13 days in a land of:

10 million strangers (in order of company)
eva megias (and her housemates)
migue angel
jaume and his friends
joan
rebecca
teo
gabriel
zach
andrés
ramón
dorian
albert
juanfer
eva durall
lourdes
david
frequent thoughts of those i see and don´t see anymore
50 million public spaces
gatwick airport
bus to victoria station
back and forth between victoria bus and train station and 3 burger kings
underground to brixton
bus to 38 moorish road
soho
bricklane
hamstead
oxford street
"the city"
el prat
carrer clavell 1-7
ferreteria
travessera de dalt
plaça lesseps (a concrete disaster)
passeig de gràcia
fotoprix
plaza de cataluña
plaza rovira
plaza de la revolución
plaza de la concordia
fontana
jaume I
alfonso X
raval
paralel
gotic
gràcia
les corts
maria cristina
l´illa
metro (new cars)
nit bus (new buses)
barceloneta
john lennon airport
south hunter street
where the streets change their name every block
lime street train station
university of liverpool
bond street
hope street
everyman´s theatre
10 thousand small drinks eats
la bombeta
buenas migas
supersol
consum
equinox
iztli (burrito)
horno foix
chocolat
el macareno
quincey´s cuisine
union coffee
uncle sam´s
geisha
beigels
sainsburys
100 billion educational cultural-social constellations (bang!)
scannerfm
reggae music
bbc
converse allstars, 70s boots, and pencil-tight pants
goodbye Cine París, a new hole in the historic quarter-- now the multinational inditex has completely colonized portal de l´àngel, recently razing the street´s last historical-cultural center
joan´s new paintings
post-it city exhibit
a late night cell phone affair
fingersmith
la central
the flat new and clean facultad de geografía historia y filosofía in front of the CCCB
the flat new and clean buildings that have gone up on the Rambla del Raval
tightening restrictions on bike use in barcelona
la casa del llibre
laie
helsinki´s distance master program
martirio (maría isabel quiñones)
bonnie and clyde
violence in american films on northwest airlines
fnac
beatles
theatrical interpretation of edward gorey´s "doubtful guest"
regina, canada
"2"
ghetto
10 thousand smells
car and motorcycle exhaust
cigarette smoke
hash smoke
sewage
fresh bread
cleaning chemicals on marble floors and storefront sidewalk
olive oil
pastry shop
mildew
pine
b.o.
wool blankets that were stored in new wood cabinets
tanned leather
laundry detergent
grease from jamón serrano
faint pee of english bathrooms
refined rubber of shoe stores
metal of coins
fried croquetas

the floating island

2008-02-25T08:11:00.010-05:00

Last night I dreamt I was searching for a floating island. I found out that it is Small, Flat, Moss-covered, and Meanders off a foggy coast near a swimming pond. If anyone has any other clues, please let me know.

February

2008-02-05T20:18:00.003-05:00

thick mute

thick silence

thick white

thick cold

thick distance

6th Ave. & Broad, Grinnell, Iowa

amigos amics friends amici

2007-12-25T10:29:00.002-05:00

you know i don't celebrate christmas but the spirit of gratitude from all the people who take time to decorate everything with cheesy green and red smiley things in order to cheer us up has gotten into me and i want to give thanks to all my friends. to you who are reading this, to those who don't read english, and those who don't read. for your ears, eyes, time, company, care, love, thoughts, and imperfections. is there anything better on earth than good friends? shouldn't the biggest holiday of the year be Friendsmas? i love you all very much and with out you all i would be much worse off. i hope we are friends forever. i am infinitely grateful. Merry Everything, and thank you.

xoxo
megan

bared walls

2007-10-25T14:14:00.008-04:00

dear friends, i'm posting another piece directly from my thesis in hope of feedback. please let me know your thoughts. also, if you see any ways the text could be syntactically or semantically improved, please let me know.
xoxo
megan

"In the following chapters we will look at more real-life cases of gentrification, ones that are represented in fictional films and novels. In the meantime, I would like to deviate the topic over to a new spectacle in Barcelona’s postmodern cityscape resulting from gentrification: bared walls. Unlike those bared walls that remain standing after a war, these bared walls have been carefully undressed by bulldozers. Once exposed, they do not bother to hide their intimate parts—bathroom tiles, children’s scribbles, severed pipes, a kitchen cabinet, a division between the bathroom and kitchen, a peeling sheet of wallpaper. All are exposed to the sun and rain, made visible to the public, and eventually adopted by strangers as their new and indifferent family (passerbys). The interior, once heated, echoed someone’s private thoughts, words, and gestures.[1] Similar to the spatial tactics in the next chapter, these bared walls are harmless, ephemeral, and unintentionally and visually disruptive to the nicety and totality of the city’s image. Bared walls are embarrassing for speculators, because they detract from the city’s aesthetic harmony and could trigger disturbing questions such as “What happened to the people who used to live there?” Since bared walls are temporary scenes, capturing them in photography is critical. Soon they will be re-dressed, and forgotten."

[1] These bare walls have also become a canvas for social resistance.

With the exception of the last photo of Ernest Pignon´s work, the following are pics I took between 2005 and 2008 in the historic quarter of Barcelona.

reviving the city, idea under construction

2007-07-30T18:44:00.001-04:00

hello, i'm posting this from my dissertation to see if posting it will sharpen my attention and generate any helpful ideas from a reader or two. so please send me your reaction/thoughts if you're reading this. i suppose it doesn't really make sense without providing some background, but i don't have time right now. maybe later. sorry if this sounds stuck up, but that's what higher ed is all about. i'll take it down or better explain it later. thank you in advance!

Andreas Huyssen in his academic book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory talks about “the explosion of memory discourses at the end of the twentieth century” (__). The tendency in nearly all of the academic scholarship that has been published in the last two decades on historic memory is to advocate a need for recuperating the memory and history what has been lost to past dictatorships, wars, exile. While I agree with him that “memory discourses are absolutely essential to imagine the future and to regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space” (__). I also see the politically and emotionally stalling and depressing nostalgia it produces this makes me wonder: when will the process of recuperating historical memory complete? When a certain quota of monuments that commemorate marginalized subjects in the center of the city has been fulfilled? When utopia is achieved? What is needed to demystify and defragmentize urban history? These are important questions if we want to alleviate the pain of us urban-nostalgics and increase a more humanitarian historical consciousness in theory and practice. Perhaps the only solution lies in the hypothetical? Now I’d like to share a hypothetical scenario that has been tickling my imagination for a couple years now. What if nothing was ever destroyed in the city? Let us use our imagination to rewind Barcelona for a moment. Imagine if the turn-of-the-century textile factories returned to the Raval and the SEAT factory to Poble Nou, if the cheap desarrollismo construction in the periphery remained, if Franco’s equestrian statues returned to the plazas, if the shabby barracas reappeared along the coast, if the trolleys began retracing their routes from Gràcia to the Plaça de Catalunya, if in the Eixample still glimmering with beautiful modernist buildings but next to them grazed pigs and sheep and the wheat that preceded it, if the medieval walls went back up around the historic quarter, and so did the medieval synagogue on Call street, and if the streets were dirt, cobblestone and slick asphalt at the same time, and the Greek and Phoenician tombstones rose to the surface? Many questions occur to me. For example, by what names would we call the streets? Would there be unemployment? What would happen with places whose function is out-dated, such as dirt roads and the Roman cloacae? With so much ethnic architectural diversity would there be more social tolerance? How long would the farm animals survive in the Eixample? Why is this scenario confined to the hypothetical realm to begin with? Because there’s not enough space in Barcelona or any European city. The city would have had extended lengthwise running itself into the sea and mountains. But what if space were unlimited or in more abundance like in American cities? So much monumental and abolished history would be disclosed and on top of each other. It’s a hypothetical translation of Benjamin’s/Klee’s angel, the ultimate palimpsest, loads and loads of historical residues accumulated before us. Architects, students of art history, architectural preservationists, sociologists, and tourists would have a ball with their notepads and cameras. Not only that, but, returning to the topic of this chapter, could one still critique censorship, fragmentation, and mystification of history/memory if all its material references reappeared in public space? What would we learn about history? How would the state redefine cultural heritage (patrimonio cultural)? How would that time-intense scenario make us feel? Would we be able to emotionally take it--would we pass out or would we simply get used to it, developing an even thicker version of Simmel’s numbing blasé attitude to protect ourselves from the abundance of stimuli and surprises?

While the idea is fun to think about, in practical terms, I believe that the process of recuperating historical memory will be more so “complete” when authority stops exerting their hegemony over history, when memory is liberated to take it’s own organic narrative and duration. I suppose this could be reduced to our basic need for “belongingness” (Abraham Maslow). This need relies on ontological competition, the creation of enemies. With competition and enemies, memories of different political ideologies, different religions, different genders... will always be in conflict and one will continue to shade the other. If we could abolish the competitive instinct, then perhaps we would be able to strike a more peaceful balance with temporality (and our neighbors)!!

Help!

starfish

2007-07-22T16:02:00.000-04:00

I woke up this morning to find starfish all over my body.

fun fact 3: 20 best metropolises to live in

2007-07-15T13:17:00.000-04:00

The British urbanism magazine Monocle set out to find the worlds best metropolises to live in, rating them by:

- quality of life
- crime and delinquency
- nightlife after 1am
- cultural options
- cleanliness
- nature areas
- quality of schools
- social tolerance
- quality and price of public transportation
- communication/information access (internet, phone...)
- hours of sun per year
- average outdoor temperature
- medical care

and in their July 2007 issue, the results were published:

1. Munich
2. Copenhagen
3. Zürich
4. Tokyo
5. Vienna
6. Helsinki
7. Sydney
8. Stockholm
9. Honolulu
10. Madrid
11. Melbourne
12. Montreal
13. Barcelona
14. Kyoto
15. Vancouver
16. Auckland
17. Singapore
18. Hamburg
19. Paris
20. Ginebra

Should some other factor have been considered? Maybe "courtesy to strangers"? (Or maybe that fits into "social tolerance"? Although I think they measure social tolerance by the amount of gay bars...) Or perhaps something to do with the price and quality of housing? Maybe that's "quality of life"? I never liked the "quality of life" factor because it's so vague. Bush once said that we can't join the Kyoto pact because it would affect our "quality of life." Anyway, for more info about the city report: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/18/arts/rmon1munich.php