This Must be the Place

How people experience place.

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Play nicely: A review of David Byrne's Playing the Building

We're excited to bring you our first ever guest post! Anna Jursik, of Minneapolis' Center for Environment and Energy, reviewed David Byrne's site-specific installation Playing the Building. All photo credit to Mayank Puri.

David Byrne's Playing the Building, "“a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building is converted into a giant musical instrument," strung each key of an organ to a component of Aria in Minneapolis’s Warehouse District.

Instead of striking notes, participants' fingers activated blowers whistling through pipes, started vibrations in ceiling cross beams,  or slammed clappers against the walls. The installation is site-specific: it plays on Aria’s physical structure as a former warehouse and on its history housing experimental theatre. It’s clear that Byrne knows Minneapolis well.

Some friends and I played an acoustic jam session as other musicians contributed their voices and instruments to the installation. A woman sang notes into the gut of the room and said she could feel each resonate with the building and her body. A man carried his cello through each of the rooms, then up the stairs to toss notes from the balcony. A little boy dashed from the bench, chasing the sounds that followed each key he pressed.

I admire Byrne's urban cycling advocacy, which fits with Minneapolis' bike-friendly culture. When you’re pedaling in a city packed with other cyclists, you can feel the collective impact on your own health and that of your community. But advances in alternate transportation receive much more media attention than the latest in building science, even though the US building sector is our largest contributor to climate change. Perhaps this is because biking to work feels more manageable than retrofitting the office to reduce its energy consumption.

Most of us understand how climate change will alter the natural environment. It also threatens the buildings we love and the cityscapes and parks we grew up exploring. Playing the Building stresses how buildings contribute to our sense of place, it and hints at the dangers of approaching environmental problem-solving with an overly serious attitude. 

Its viewers (myself included!) were joyful, open, and tuned into our connection with the building. The built environment is not outside of our control. We built it, remember? We can fix it. But we’re going to need to use our imaginations and play together nicely.

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Preeti Sodhi on skateboarding & public space (via Neighborland.com)

Preeti Sodhi, Urban Planner & Event Producer; Design Fellow ,Architecture for Humanity Profile: neighborland.com/neighbors/pks:

Personally, I’m interested in skateboarding not from the branding perspective, but from the public space perspective, and the youth perspective: creating spaces for youth, and also opportunites for youth. I feel, as a planner, that you can link a social justice issue to a lot of things, so for me that’s always my angle: how can I work that in? In skateboarding, because you’re working with kids, there’s the very real potential to incorporate that in so many interesting ways, whether through stewardship, participatory planning, charrettes, etc.

It happens by default though; you’re building a park, and even though it’s a branded thing, in the end there’s a public space, which is great. 

...

I look at skateboarding from a youth angle, and I think young people are underrepresented as a whole in so much of public space development, because space is being privatized. A place like Madison Square Park isn’t made for youth to go hang out there, it’s made for people to go to Shake Shack. There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s an option geared more towards adults. Kids aren’t necessarily looking for nightlife or the restaurant scene.

You can look at skateboarding as a recreational activity, but you can also look at skateboarders as a social group–and should specific spaces really be developed for specific social groups? It’s part of the larger youth question, but also part of the question: why do you need to make segregated spaces for different users? What we were trying to do with the Coleman Oval Skatepark–and to some degree, we’ve been able to do it–is to create an integrated public space where people can interact together.

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

There’s tons of spaces like [the silent barn], all over. One of my favorite things about doing this is getting to meet all the people that are participating in places like this from all over the world. They all have their different things, but they’re all similar. There’s a place in Bushwick called Shea Stadium, their sound booth is an actual recording booth, on their website they have professional recordings of all their live shows. There’s a place called the Rhinoceropolis in Denver that’s a lot like this, there’s The Smell in LA, there’s Whitehaus in Boston; in every city there’s a place like this. It’s normally run by people who are in bands and can’t get anybody to book them, so they just have their friends come over and play for them, and then their friends want to play, and then people who came to their friends’ show want to play, and it just becomes a thing. It can totally happen somewhere other than Brooklyn. Actually, I’d say one of my major pet peeves is when people talk about Brooklyn like it’s this wonderful Oz place, the only place where things like this can happen. There are tons of cities, like Athens, that have a much more historical independent music scene than New York. I don’t really think New York’s all that special, to be honest. I’m way more impressed by Philadelphia or Baltimore. All the people in Baltimore are doing cool shit all the time, and they’re in a lot more danger than we are here. This isn’t a great neighborhood; it’s not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not great. But Baltimore is horrible.

Jordan Michael, Silent Barn bb, on whether a space like Silent Barn (collectively run DIT show space) could exist in other cities.

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

"The experience of the 'tragic' [in this century] is the experience of the metropolis ..." "The 'intensification of nervous stimulation' induced by the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions,' were interpreted by [Georg] Simmel as the new conditions that generate the blase attitude of the individual of the metropolis...."

 (from Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, 1976.) 

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Q: It seems like, I dunno; Especially in Durham there's you and Jamie Stewart. A: Yeah, but we have different opinions of Durham. I think Durham's the best town in the US. Jamie doesn't know anything about Durham. He stayed in his house and felt bad that it's not New York. Whatever. If you don't avail yourself of the community you're in, you don't even know about the community. He knows less about Durham than people who've read about it on the internet. Q: It seems like North Carolina is in the midst of a transition, though. A: Well, let's be honest - you and I both live in bubbles. You're in Asheville and I'm in Durham. But it's not like Jamie is mad at North Carolina, he's mad about stuff that he feels; his feelings tend to lay with stuff outside of the triangle. But the reality of the triangle is it's fucking awesome. It's a completely amazing place to live. But it is also the case that when the gay marriage amendment came, this state voted overwhelmingly in favor of it. My whole philosophy is like, if you're the kind of person who's like, oh, New York sucks, or wherever sucks, then you're an idiot. There's no place that sucks like that. All places are complicated and your reality is dictated by the experiences you choose to have. But that's a privileged thing to say. Not everyone chooses their experiences.

John Darnielle (of the Mountain Goats) in conversation with Weird Interviews zine

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Like everyone else, I panned the new xx as 'boring' and 'overly minimal.' I wanted to love it the way I loved the first album, but it was cold and dead. Then, in September, I went back to New York for a few weeks. 

I have this very specific New York memory that keeps coming up - I am standing in Times Square, which is the closest approximation to hell that I can think of, with a friend who I had always thought of as exceptional. She was beautiful, gregarious, loud, charming, inspired, inspirational, insane - all the things that make someone an Important Person who People Want to Know.

We are standing in Times Square and she says, "This is the worst moment of my life." And I ask her why and she says, "Because I have never felt this inconsequential. I never realized how many people there were. People made all of these things," gesturing to the billboards and the buildings and the pulsating McDonalds marquee. "A million people have walked past this spot today. A million people are going to walk past here tomorrow. What am I even doing here?"

She's gone to a different city now. Whenever I'm back in New York, I avoid midtown at all costs. I try not to take trains at rush hour. I try not to go out on weekends. But whenever I have to do those things (because getting places and parties and buzzbands and not being a hermit and blah blah blah) I need something to keep me anchored. Like a security blanket, only instead of a blanket, it's usually a moleskine and a way of breathing and a song.

In September, that song has been "Angels." It's quiet and repetitive and insulated enough to be a place to hole up in. 

So, thanks xx, for keeping me sane. 

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

It was on the outskirts of Atlanta that I first felt how the Southern landscape - the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances - seems designated for violence, seems, almost, to demand it. What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night! Everything seems so sensual, so languid, and so private. Desire can be acted out here; over this fence, behind that tree, in the darkness, there; and no one will see, no one will ever know. Only the night is watching and the night was made for desire. Protestantism is the wrong religion for people in such climates; America is perhaps the last nation in which such a climate belongs. In the Southern night everything seems possible, the most private, unspeakable longings; but then arrives the Southern day, as hard and brazen as the night was soft and dark. It brings what was done in the dark to light.

[folktofolk]

By embracing the idea of music as an audiotopia, we are embracing music’s role in what Soja calls “the lifeworld of being creatively located not only in the making of history but also in the construction of human geographies, the social production of space and the restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes.” [Foucault’s] heterotopia prophesied Ruth Levitas’s revision of utopian thinking, wherein instead of looking for “maps of the future,” we look for “adequate maps of the present” that can lead to a more just world. To echo a similar revision by Rustom Bharucha, these maps point us to the possible, not the impossible; they lead us not to another world, but back to coping with this one. Because of music’s ability to do just this - to point us to the possible, to help us remap the world we live in now - and because of its uncanny ability to absorb and meld heterogeneous national, cultural, and historical styles and traditions across space and within place, the possibility of the audiotopia makes sense: sonic spaces of effective urban longings where several sites normally deemed incompatible are brought together, not only in the space of a particular piece of music itself, but in the production of social space and the mapping of geographical space that music makes possible as well. In a sense, audiotopias can also be understood as identificatory “contact zones,” in that they are both sonic and social spaces where disparate identity-hformations, cultures, and geographies historically kept and mapped separately are allowed to interact with each other as well enter into relationships whose consequences for cultural identification are never predetermined. Through affectively empowering emotional changes, music promotes the establishment of sustaining relations of community and subculture that are fundamental to the creation of an alternative public realm.

Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America. Josh Kun. 

(one nation under vibes)

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Every bohemia is, in fact, an entire universe constructed by the self-selected few. New Orleans has dozens.

Ann Powers meets New Orleans 

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

a coney island of the mind

Joan Didion, via The White Album:

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them. Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner, and one hot July week in Oxford I was moved to spend an afternoon walking the graveyard looking for his stone, a kind of courtesy call on the owner of the property. A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image..

It's interesting to read this now, because this is a thing that I have always believed, charmed as I am by travel and, often lacking the funds and time, by people's accounts of it.

But in the last few years I've been more compelled by Matador editor David Miller's pieces which urge fledging travel writers to practice transparency,  portray experience as subjective, and look at details on ground level.

Joan Didion was terrified of postmodern subjectivity. For good reason. Life is scary when you have no dominant narrative. Travel is scary when you are a wanderer and not a conquistador.

But I do think this self-aware postmodern approach to travel writing is ultimately good - a way to decolonize these places, to give them back to themselves, to love them still but love them more by freeing them from commodifying rhetoric and leaving no trace when you let them go.

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

"things have layers of lives.  we like that.  we like the feeling that there's multiple layers  underneath what's there right now.  although you're living in the moment, people have been gathering there for a long time and doing different things there and you're part of a long continuity of activity." - david byrne

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Ad Hoc: Did you all specifically take influence from New England-centric psych-folk when you started your band? Shane: I think we take a lot of influences from all over the place. There are definitely some bands that I really was inspired by, and it was funny to later hear that they lived in New England. Like Six Organs of Admittance. You start to wonder whether you were inspired directly by these particular artist’s sounds, or whether similar external/internal circumstances influenced [everyone] . I am inspired by what is here, along with a lot of other things. In Boston there are all of these spooky, old brown brick buildings. It’s some of the most inspiring architecture I’ve seen. There’s also this clash in Boston and a lot of New England between new architecture and old architecture, and I think all of us are psyched on that. Ad Hoc: And what about Boston? You’ve all lived in different places-- Boston, New York, and New Jersey-- but do you feel your music has been most informed by your experiences here? Anna: Maybe it’s informed by Boston, but on a subtle level. We’ve met a lot of interesting artists in the area who have inspired us; it’s an important part of our history. We all love New England and the trees and the general vibe up here. It feels very cozy up here. It’s funny: everybody says we sound like these West Coast bands, but people also always say we sound New England-y. Maybe [music from those places is] more similar than people want to admit. ... Ad Hoc: Anna also was reading that book while we were on tour, on “sacred geometry,” which makes sense because you are all visually-minded, and I know your music is informed by a lot of visual art. What attracted you to that book specifically? Anna: I’ve been really interested in exploring those ideas with my drawing and painting. I’m really influenced by the infrastructure that you find on highways-- power lines, bridges, and things. I think it’s beautiful, all of the lines created against the landscape on highways-- again the sky, open spaces. It’s interesting, you have these beautiful images and landscapes, [and then] power lines and things like that to create symmetric and asymmetric forms... Symmetry has always been a big thing for me.

from a rad interview Boston hometown heroes Quilt did with Ad Hoc

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

New York, Chicago, L.A., these are concrete cities, vast expanses of freezing, cracking, bubbling, seething concrete, so much more unyielding than the smaller concrete-and-grass cities. Where you burrow into the redolent grass of the smaller cities you may have found a peace, may have made a home for yourself in the world. And that's really presumably all that any of us could ever ask for. But the bigger cities are impenetrable - you can only commune with them by becoming, yourself, concrete. Then, alien as the soft green world may be, as alien as the concrete, even, will always remain - it won't matter anymore. You will be home to everything. The world will try and fail and try and fail again and maybe eventually even succeed in making its home in you.

Uptown Problems III 

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

I finally saw Mulholland Drive the other day - amazing movie. I'm an East Coast kid so I've never been to LA so all I've heard about is has been from other people and from films. Since a lot of my other people are New Yorkers, the general consensus is "LA sucks, bro." Films are none too kind either - everything from Sunset Boulevard to Californication coat it in a sort of seedy sheen. 

Anyway, I might like blogging about films that feature place as a character, but filmmaker/film scholar Thom Andersen has taken it to a whole new level. In 2003's Los Angeles Plays Itself, he stitches together clips of Los Angeles from other films to make a sort of meta-documentary that looks at how cinema portrays (and, in his opinion, misrepresents) his city. 

Available in full on YouTube! Take a look, it's amazing. (The find is courtesy of the good folk at FMLY)

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

"This show is about culture, and it's about what was at stake. Because apart from culture, on some empirical level, it does not matter if all New Orleans washes into the Gulf, and if everyone from New Orleans ended up living in Houston or Baton Rouge or Atlanta. Culture is what brought this city back. Not government. There was and has been no initiative by government at any level to contemplate in all seriousness the future of New Orleans. Yet New Orleans is coming back, and it's sort of done it one second-line at a time, one crawfish étouffée at a time, one moment at a time." - David Simon, creator of Treme

* "A curious if somewhat unspoken tension surrounds New Orleans culture; it concerns the faces that culture wears, the ways in which it's bought and sold, the role it plays, and the meaning it holds depending on what neighborhood you're in and to whom you speak." * ""There's a feeling among many that some of our older cultural institutions, like parades and jazz funerals, are in the way of progress and don't fit in the new vision of New Orleans," says Michael White, a clarinetist and Xavier University professor. "That they should only be used in a limited way to boost the image of New Orleans, as opposed to being real, viable aspects of our lives.""  (from article "How Treme Can Get It Right,"  by Larry Blumenfeld, in the Voice)

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

(from an interview Larry Livermore did with John K. Samson of early 2000's folk-influenced emo-ish indie rock band the Weakerthans. check their lyrics, they're amazing.) Q. Through all of your songs there's this sense of place, that seems to set down roots in the Manitoba landscape - not just the physical landscape, but the landscape of the mind as well. How important is that to you? How do you approach the identification of time and place in your writing? A. It's very important to me to have a sense of location in my writing. I've lived here for 27 years - all my life. I leave a lot, but I always return. This is the place I understand, it's the landscape I understand. I think the landscape has some profound effect on people, the place they're from. I don't know how to describe what that is, but you recognize it when you go other places. Winnipeg is a place that thinks life is elsewhere. The idea you get from the community here is that everything is happening somewhere else, and that nobody can actually do something here. But there are lots of people struggling against that here, and that's one of the reasons I've stayed. That perhaps makes me "regional" in some people's eyes - a "regional" writer.

Punk Planet issue 44 - July/August 2001

[ohtheplaceswewillknow]

Though she now spends much of her time in New York, she keeps coming back to Iceland, where she lives for several months of the year. The relative simplicity of the place is reassuring to her. Once, she translated a local news headline for my benefit: TIRE TRACKS IN FOOTBALL FIELD. A look of pleasure crossed her face as she studied photographic evidence of the catastrophe. "This is so Iceland," she said.

Alex Ross, talking to Bjork, from Listen to This