The Architectural Uncanny

"The contemporary sensibility that sees the uncanny erupt in empty parking lots around abandoned or run-down shopping malls, in the screened trompe l’oeil of simulated space, in, that is, the wasted margins and surface appearances of postindustrial culture, this sensibility has its roots and draws its commonplaces from a long but essentially modern tradition."

 Anthony Vidler


THIS. 

There is probably nothing else that has so defined my life, apart from love and depression, as the uncanny. Its something I have chased all my life. From a very young age, I wanted that same feeling as I had when I heard ghost stories told by my family- I wanted that wonderful sense of dread, wrapped up in safety. Something about that is just necessary for my mind. 

And the uncanny is literally defined as something that occurs in the most banal of environments. It isn't necessarily just a spooky building- its the fact that that spooky building is on a quite ordinary street. Its the juxtaposition, that tension. That sense of the surreal and spooky sidled up next to the almost grossly familiar. 

Even before I fell in love with business architecture (and by definition, in this context, disused business architecture) I remember a dream I had as a very young child, not more than five. It was so vivid. I was in a city, at night, and there was a skyscraper, with some of the offices inside lit up. The most ordinary thing. But in the dream it was absolutely breathtaking. There was involved by strange association, a potted palm. The type you find in lobbies, the type that by definition are probably not even real. I had a set of Childcraft Encyclopedias (bless them, with their wonderful sixties typography, psychedelic woodcuts and visions of cities of the future, glowing in a white-glitter utopia) and there was picture of a clown on a small stage with a potted palm. It looked so- weird to me. So night-like. The dark stage which I could see behind the fake wall. Every time I thought of that skyscraper dream, I thought of that potted palm.

So strange, like a piece of candy thrown into the junk drawer of your mind, adhering itself to other strange symbols. 

CCCRAzy

Not sure exactly what set it off, in retrospect it seems nearly accidental. But somehow I randomly decided to look up ticket prices between here and Russia, and found them to be cheap. Very cheap. Remembering a longtime desire to visit Chernobyl, I started snooping around and found, again, cheap tours, cheap hotels, and an article that stated that the two cheapest tourist destinations for 2015 were the Ukraine, and Russia.
And, spookily enough, found that a momentarily lost brother of mine is apparently traveling right now in Eastern Europe and the former CCCR (USSR).

Fancy that.

Of course, the fact that Putin is doing his KGBest to raise a dead Soviet Union from the ashes by making a play for the Ukraine (and Georgia, and Chechnya, etc.) probably renders those countries a bit tricky to actually visit as of this writing. So, apart from Chernobyl, which is a must-see and far out of the reaches of Eastern Ukraine (the hotspot and border), I have decided to forego any travel there for the moment.

For the moment.

But it really sent me off into a wonderland, which is a healthy thing for me to be sent off in every couple or so years. If you are an artist you know what I am talking about. I think that every artist's esthetic should evolve, like a growing thing. It should take signals from the air around it. Its good to get a slug of something that gets you all jazz-handy and jumping around, something that informs your brain weather and gives you new pictures.

Principle among these new obsessions, and a place that has actually begun to eclipse Chernobyl for me, is Buzluzdha.

Say it with me.
Buzluzdha. 
Just the sound of it makes my eyes roll back into my head. 

I have never been so obsessed with a building. 

These pictures come from Damien Richter's amazing Bohemian Blog. I insist that you visit. I warn you tho, if you are at ALL into abandoned places, you will be up all night reading of his exploits. But Buzluzdha tops them all for me. 

Its an abandoned Communist Party HQ, built in 1981. Terrifying in its concrete glory, it stands isolated on a mountain in Bulgaria. I have spent countless hours of late reading about it, planning a whole vacation around it, dreaming of it, thinking of laying in its frightening, hulking maw. These pictures don't even include its fascinating inner auditorium, which features a hammer and sickle in its center.....YOU MUST see more photos. Do this. Fall down the rabbit hole as I did. 

Its almost like some Brutalist beast, or some kind of UFO. Never have I seen a building that just made me want to fall down in front of it in terror and some kind of awe. But awe gone all the way is probably alot like terror. Something biblical in that, I am sure. 

It isn't just Buzluzdha, tho. That held the key that unlocked a flood of other associations, and it left me wondering why it had taken me so long to notice that many of my favorite things or fascinations- clean lines, Brutalist architecture, abandonment, time warps and disquiet- are all to be found in the former Soviet Union, in big, fat, terrifying hordes. 

I have long had a fascination with the poles- particularly the Antarctic, just because of Captain Scott really. But something about snowy places began to seem very surreal to me. Very frightening. Unknowable. Maybe its because of "The Shining", but winter, REAL winter- and places rendered uninhabitable by the cold- hold a real claim on my imagination. Throw some abandoned satellites in there and some old hulking concrete Commie monuments and you have a recipe for Place I Must See Now. (I do understand that not all of EE or Russia lies under a constant blanket of snow. But winters get real there, lets not kid ourselves).

SO that sends you off on a million tangents. Every day for weeks now I have been googling "abandoned Eastern Europe" or "communist architecture" and peeing myself looking at the pictures. I don't even know what to see first. I read everything I can find, have combed through pages upon pages of Youtube searches, and that sends you off into another rabbit hole. Soviet Sci-fi, for instance.  Or Soviet space docus!!!! I mean, don't even get me started. 

I am learning that if you are someone like me who obsessively collects content (videos of all sorts) and has for years, you have probably plundered through mountains of crap looking for jewels and you get real good at sifting. Since I am constantly chopping up film to make videos and VJ I had gotten that smug sense that I had pretty much devoured the lion's share of what was out there, and just kept my eye out for recent uploads- no need to march into the hinterlands and beat the bushes like in years past. This is how I learned that you are doing yourself a disservice if you are not diligently searching Youtube using foreign search terms. I Babelfished "Soviet advertisement" and getting the phrase "CCCR реклама", I unleashed a torrent of creaky old adverts that I will probably spend the next few months sifting through. Adverts with music whose provenance can only be guessed at (one doubts that Soviet officials- and I use the term to cover all its Bloc officials as well- were too concerned about properly crediting the music they ripped off), whose meanings and products are hidden in a Cyrillic fog. Which makes them WAY more fun. 

And then there are things that give you a glimpse of the daily life of your ordinary citizen. 

Witness this housewife's ad for some fryer contraption. A carousel of amazing strange fryups are panned over dramatically. But the thing I find most fascinating about this advert is, glancing out the window, you see a typical Soviet apartment bloc and bleak, gray skies. 

I certainly don't want to dissolve many generations of pain and paranoia into a a mere artistic statement. But I can't help but be fascinating with the entire Soviet schlock- the bizarre architecture, the cold formality of a dead satellite, the eavesdropping spookiness of it all. 

I have been told that to travel to Russia, its best to have a friend on the ground to show you the ropes. As a new friend said, "things can go wrong there very fast". I have never liked authority, and have always quaked and jabbered in the presence of cops as if i carted dead bodies or kilos of coke round in my trunk (and I have never done either). I can't even imagine being given the "show me your papers" number by a real, bonafide Russian official. I would probably start crying and apologizing for whatever American crimes I am supposed to be guilty of by association. I just have no spine in those circumstances. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to KNOW that informers are a part of every single human enterprise- even down to the grocery store you work at. I can't imagine living under a dictatorship.

And maybe that's something to do with why I find Communist leavings so interesting. I have often thought about how all the abandoned factories all over America, all the middle-American abandoned cornfield-adjacent ghost towns, the entirety of Detroit, told a story about a passing age. "This bank/fast food/housing project/factory is gone now because (insert poignant-and-possibly-angering reason here)." It really told a story to me.

When you put this level of abandonment as it stands in Eastern Europe and Russia, the story told is FAR more poignant and spectral than ours. There are still countless stories waiting to be told, and probably many are being covered over afresh by Putin as we speak. Because Putin is very much of the old guard. He is a former KGB man who has been laying the groundwork for the resurrection for much of his life. He wants to bring all of it back-with a capitalist swagger thrown on top. He has NO PROBLEM with coming off as the ultimate James Bond villain. He is like something out of a spy novel. And he is for real, and he controls much of Europe's energy supply, due to his making-nice with Europe (and screwing Ukraine/Chechnya in the process). He doesn't care if you think he is an underhanded sonofabitch. His flat effect and strange attempts at seeming like a "regular guy" are somehow terrifying. If anyone on earth could start WW3, be sure its not some guy in a cave wearing a robe and a machine gun, ISIS notwithstanding. 

So. Luckily, it thus far appears that he will keep his hands off EE for the time being. This summer I shall go there. 

Melanie Gaydos and the Myth of "New Beauty"

                                                           photo by Eric Lee Bowman

Melanie Gaydos.
I love you.
I want others to love you.
But I have to be careful in my approach.

Melanie Gaydos is a model. She was born with something called ectodermal dysplasia. This changes one's ability to grow hair, have sweat glands, effects the nails and teeth, and in fact seems to be an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of unusual detours from the norm. Hers is a severe case. But she wanted to be a model. And she is one. A high fashion, fine art model, perhaps one day on a runway, already featured in a number of music videos.

One thing straight tho.
The more time I spend with her pictures, the more I think of her, the more I understand her, the harder it is to stand the obvious pandering that happens. People love her DESPITE her face. People think, "oh, poor girl, how brave, that DESPITE her face, she wants to be a model. How sweet". They commend her on her bravery (which of course she must have, truly), they deride the norms of beauty and focus on her body (because "DESPITE" her face her body is, it is true, extraordinary, and so on).

I have to say that I honestly, truly, DO think she is beautiful. This isn't some soft-peddling of what is obviously a face that is unusual, a disease that I am sure has caused her numerous difficulties in her life. But the more I look, the more I see, and the more I feel awake. I feel like another sense opens up when I see her. It isn't some pitytrip for a woman suffering. Its someone looking at another and saying, "no, you know, I really LIKE this. I really DO think this is something else. I want more of this in my life".
Her mouth, in particular, I find beautiful. When she wears lipstick, her face takes on such a wonderful shape that it blows my mind.

The WAY she conveys in her photos- there is something she is bringing forth that i can't put my finger on. Its like she is dispensing this new wisdom or something. I kept thinking, "new beauty"....

but that's bullshit.

Beauty is beauty. As she herself said, "beauty is a state of being...I have never felt I was ugly and I don't feel that way now".
It isn't about saying, "yes, maybe, I could look at that and not feel sorry for her and I think her struggle is beautiful, poor girl". NO. NO.
It really isn't that.
Beauty is beauty. Just because you get locked in and fooled by an overwhelming majority doesn't mean that when someone like Melanic comes along (which is, of course, never) you should softpedal and make it sound like she is no different from others. She is AMAZINGLY different. She is WONDERFULLY different.

You may, upon first seeing her face, be shocked. I was. I had to know- is she real? What is happening here?
Then I got really profoundly touched by her interview for "What's Underneath". I cried. Alot.
Then I got over it.
She is so much more than even THAT.

The more I look the more I am amazed. When I spend some time with her photos and then look at other people, its just not as interesting. Its just not as....yes, beautiful.

The whole dialog of "stretching" one's idea of beauty to encompass Melanie Gaydos is just.....shit. Its shit. What is beauty? Really? Symmetry? A body without scars? A mouth that is not a cleft palate? Can a cleft palate be beautiful?

I think it is. I am glad to learn this lesson and not be someone crying. She is beautiful to me. There is no "new" beauty, just new eyes to see what has always been. Its an extraordinary lesson in my own bullshit. And a lesson in keeping your eyes and mind open.

Jamaican Noir

I decided to make a playlist that exemplified that sound that i have started calling "Jamaican Noir". There is that subsect of Jamaican stuff whether it be dub or ska that has a disquieting tone to it....like a shadow cast of a long gunman after dark in the streets of trenchtown. Noir is the only thing to call it.

The first song in this mix is Big Youth's "Keep Your Dread"....which just sounds so shadowy and worried that it starts things off at the very right tone. There are a few tracks here like "Blacula" that might not have the most worried tone, but they have a MAD tone that just sounds like everyone is on a bad trip. There are 35 songs total on this playlist, just download the zip file and open everything up and the playlist will just populate in order. Apart from the first couple songs I didn't agonize too much about the order. Didn't do any crossfades- this is all just raw MP3's. Wish I had the time and the right material to make an accompanying clip loop but I alas do not.

You can download it all here. Enjoy.

Creepypasta, Memes, Orbis Tertius and Time Away

haven't spent much time nurturing this blog of late. had a bit of a crisis of confidence, as they call it, in my life and my esthetics. i recently left a collective in los angeles that i had been a part of for five years. was hellbent on either writing a book or making a film about Broadcast, but James cannot be involved due to his schedule and his still-overwhelming grief. I am hoping that someday that story will still be told, but it might be a long while. in any case, my own work must go on, which consists of my education, and focusing more on the fine arts. I have moved into a new place which is providing me with alot of peace and time to get things realigned in my mind. i have definitely been suffering from a lack of creativity, but today i felt the forces come back and am back on the case, working on a new video and getting some other things, like my website for my video work/vjing, up and running.

now that that explanation is out of the way i would like to share some interesting intersections.

a few days ago, i spent the evening as i sometimes do wandering round the web. being at an impasse will do that to you. but i rediscovered a fascinating bit of 21st century fiddling that i have been fascinated with for a while- the creepypasta.

for those that don't know, a creepypasta is a meme or false mythology that is made with two intentions- to frighten, and to go viral. its the internet equivalent of an urban legend, but constructed specifically with the knowledge that it is not true, with (so i surmise) the hopes that others will believe it is true.

my longtime favorite in this genre centered around a 1970's children's show called "Candle Cove". Apparently this was a television show with dark undertones and lots of children screaming, and there were purported viewers of this show that remembered watching it as a child. These "memories" featured this tidbit- their parents claimed that the entire time they were viewing it, all the parent could see on the tv was static.


some more very strange creepypastas can be found here.

for some reason, it only occurred to me this weekend how Borgesian this all is. It instantly reminded me of the story "Orbis Tertius" by jorge luis borges, one of my favorite writers. In this story, a false mythology/cosmology by a Council of 100 is distributed, inseminated really, throughout the culture. The idea was to supplant reality by rewriting history. every time a member of the council died, they were replaced, ensuring that the rewriting would go infinitely. Language, flora and fauna, everything was being re-imagined over hundreds of years, seeping into the culture with the eventual aim of eradicating the previous human history completely.

i have always been a fan of urban legends, and am fascinated with the way they occur and what they say about the culture that they infiltrate. its also fascinating to realize that people are unwitting participants in the building of myths, which really are what urban legends are. the idea that groups of people purposefully have chosen to create new urban legends, release them and watch them go is very interesting to me. and it brings up a lot of interesting notions.

first off, there are a few creepypastas i have stumbled on without realizing their false provenance that scared me absolutely silly. This is one of them. The tricky thing is, that when you decide to research these, inevitably you are faced with endless blogs and posts repeating these ad infinitum, making the discovery that they are in fact, NOT REAL, much more difficult to do.

here is where my love of quantum physics comes in and leads me to ask, "if a whole bunch of people begin believing that these things happened, have they in fact happened?"

the idea of reality is something i have always questioned and even before becoming immersed in quantum physics i realized that reality is nothing but a mass agreement. its a bunch of people who have decided that this, and not this, is reality, and there is this denial that reality is far more fluid than people realize. in other words, reality as we know it is only a consensus. there is literally nothing that can be called "absolute reality". its subjective. even with a mass consensus, its simply a consensus that our subjective reality is "real". and we can of course never know what another's reality is. fascinating, really.

with this in mind, you begin to wonder if the roots of some of these memes will not become so obscured that many people will begin to believe it. people as a whole don't tend to research everything they come across. call it the death of critical thinking. if people read it somewhere, they tend to believe it. i am not so cynical as to believe that people are merely sheep, because i don't believe that they are, but i do believe that humanity as a whole (especially in the western world with our mass of "entertainments" and media overload) are VERY easily distracted. when you are easily distracted you can be easily fooled. this is something that every magician knows instinctively.

if fifty people believe that charlie noonan existed, that "candle cove" was a real show, that a demented kleenex ad screened in japan led to mass suicides, is it not, in some sense, real? in a landscape of holographic multiverses, what does this imply? does not this imply or impart a degree of "reality"?

i do believe in things like the law of attraction, having seen in manifest in my life in a myriad of ways. i need a new scarf, or a printer, and within a few days, after focusing, it will "find" me. the more sure i am, the quicker it seems to happen. the belief that it will happen is of course the one necessary ingredient to these proceedings. belief makes things so.

in twenty years, will our world be so littered with memes that we have forgotten that they are not true? I remember rumors from my childhood- that joan jett had died in a plane crash, that prince was dying of AIDS, etc- and laugh about them now. obviously, enough people believing in something does not make the thing come to pass always.

but these were actual people. these were rumors. if you create a false reality, whole cloth, what will be the long term effects? i so very much wish that borges were still alive. i believe he would have much to say on the subject- and i think it would have delighted him.

Dear Trish

Its been about 15 days since the 3rd anniversary of Trish Keenan's death. It occurred to me tonight how unreal it still feels. Even tho I never knew her, her music has been such a force in my life- akin to when I discovered punk rock. The bearing she has had far outweighs not knowing her.

I have been working for a couple years now on my Broadcast Project, where I attempt to make a video for all of their songs. I think I am on the 17th one now, but it started to feel like it wasn't enough. So, I have decided to make a full length documentary about the band, with James' blessing (which I am waiting for, and hoping for the best, as we have been in contact, crossing fingers....). Even if that blessing never comes, I still feel like there is something i NEED to do to make people more aware of them. I don't know why. You think you get past the age of that kind of fandom, but I realized with this band that I hadn't. Its like the need to build a monument to something beloved. You just HAVE to.

I believe in quantum physics and parallel worlds, and in one of those worlds Trish is still alive and is working on another EP and the band is getting even weirder and there are still many more songs to come. I would get to see them live many times, perhaps make some videos for them, I would get to tell her what their music meant to me.

But we live in this world. Rest in peace Ms Trish.

Probabilities/Possibilities

I am a Scorpio Rising. Mercury, which has been in retrograde, is now no longer, and its in Scorpio. We just had a New Moon Solar Eclipse in Scorpio as well, and for whatever you think that's worth, that's quite a heavy alignment for communication. And also for understanding things and being able to untangle and decipher and learn and listen.
So that's probably why I am getting these flights of reverie and heavy thought this evening, about the Great Wide Whatever. Heavy musing, cue hippie sitar music.

I started thinking about possibilities, versus probabilities. My favorite thing in the world is probably Quantum Physics, and that is largely a theoretical science. Black holes and anti-matter and multiverses and the Sloan Wall and other creepy, yawning, black, sonorous, massive, invisible things. But you are dealing in probabilities alot of the time here. You are saying, "if i extrapolate backwards mathematically, then the big bang would have happened this way". this is a probability, and not a certainty. its based on physical laws and likelihoods and there is that word again, probabilities. It PROBABLY happened that way. It most likely did. When it rains, and you go outside, even if it isn't raining anymore you see a wet ground and you can say, "it PROBABLY rained", and people would think you were an idiot. Because there is no PROBABLY about it. its a given that it rained.

If you writ this larger, you can probably start to see what i did, that probabilities are what most people live their lives on, and not its more ephemeral and fun counterpart, possibilities.

think about it.

you get in your car knowing that you are probably going to get to work or the supermarket or the daycare or wherever. you are on a track of probability. you turn the stove on and put a pot on to boil and you know that probably when i come back ten minutes from now the water will be boiling. and ad infinitum, on through the day, through your life.
the problem with this is is that it puts us in a mindset that deals only with probabilities, with what we like to call certainties, and which certainly do not exist. we take the probabilities in our life and we try and graft that way of thinking onto what should be a separate mindset, that of possibility. we think that we should only deal with what we have some kind of legitimate reason to believe could probably happen. we don't have a lot of time to daydream, to think out side of the box (i loathe that term, is got all these corporate connotations for me, but i digress).
but this- this is the thing that i am realizing sets us up for a life wherein we do not allow ourselves to truly absorb and understand the fact that there are NO certainties (barring one), which is actually really good news. of course by certainty i mean, something that is going to happen every time the exact same way, or that every effort and action you make will have a reaction that is reciprocal. we all know that is not true. my physics class taught me that- that you can work your ass off and still get nowhere. and by nowhere i mean "not where you thought-and farther behind than you hoped". the only certainty in this life is death. everything in between is totally up for grabs.
not having certainty is something that the anxiety-prone classically struggle with the most. you can start worrying that a piano is gonna drop on your head out of a clear blue sky, or equally fantastic and improbable things. its funny in a way that the anxious seem to realize that there are no certainties and that this sends them into a negative headspace when really, its pretty amazing WHAT could happen, but they never feel good about that. if anything can happen, then certainly, statistically, some of that is gonna be great. its the old adage, the bad news is that there are no certainties. the GOOD news is that there are no certainties. but they only seem to be able to deal with the negatives. THAT makes sense to them. its like a gravitational pull on your psyche- naturally everything must go downward. there is really no reason to not be as transported by the glory of possibility as opposed to your fears of what could happen. think about it.
what it is about certainties that make us feel so safe? why is it that we are so prone to building foundations on shifting ground, literally and figuratively? we have to have security, some kind of security. i've always noticed that gypsy types, travelers, seem to have an internal core that gives them some sort of home inside themselves. they are at home everywhere.

but again i digress.
what i am leading to here is that we take great chances on only allowing ourselves to see what is probable. what is probably going to happen. it brings us comfort. it also boxes us in, and denies us other realities. we get caught in the workaday world, and think that the entire other side of things, that which is possible, is actually only what is probable.
when i think about it really alot rests on this- its like a yin and yang, good and evil, black and white thing. probabilities and possibilities. they are two entirely different forces acting on us all the time.

if you jump off a building, there is a high probability that you are going to hit the ground. but the possibility exists that a freak wind stream could come along and bear you up to land on the next roof unscathed. babies are tossed about by tornados and are planted bottom down in a field, just fine. the probability of that baby dying is quite high. but the possibility always existed that it would NOT die, that it would it be just fine.
possibility runs both ways, of course. you could put water on to boil and take a shower and come out and your entire electrical system has gone haywire and the wiring in your wall is on fire. you can't PLAN for possibility. it just is, right there, all the time. its the multiverse in action- the innumerable possible worlds that probably do exist, but we can only imagine the possibilities (the word probably used on purpose here).

if you were to really absorb that concept, its pretty heavy to realize the ramifications. the power of positive thinking and the law of attraction is something i have been studying for a while now. i have been in a sort of mental bootcamp for the past several months, especially, trying to root out and unlearn a lifetime of inherited and naturally rotten thinking. i am still in the process. i am sure i always will be. to some degree.
but really taking a moment to realize that staking all your claims on the probable might lead you away from fantastical happenings.

i understand that not everyone is like me or most of my friends. most people are content to follow, to not question, to raise their kids and just sort of get on with it without alot of pondering. i always marveled how many people in the world were content to work the same job for years without blowing their brains out. most people don't need the level of stimuli and change that i need. not everyone would be happy cozying up to absolute possibility. this isn't a putdown. some people don't ask why. people that do are sometimes tortured by it. its not always fun and its not always productive. its sometimes a great pain in the ass.
but i think that learning to embrace that is something that must be an essential part of any life-affirming practice. getting out from under only what is probable is akin to realizing that your past does NOT have to dictate what your future is. that just because something happened one way in the past doesn't mean that its going to happen that way in the future. getting out of the prison of probability sometime and allowing yourself to graze in the land of possibility helps you ideate what exactly you want- and don't want- from this life.
that is a really heavy realization, no?