Friday, May 23, 2003

 
A peculiar theme that haunts me: an unidentified man falling from a tall place in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth (Pantheon Books, 2000). No man ever really falls in the story, but it recurs in Jimmy's daydreams and nightdreams and thoughts in general.
posted by Open Mouth 5:53 AM

Sunday, May 18, 2003

 
Something both arrogant and liberating in Rem Koolhaas's voice in Delirious New York (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994), as though he prophesized the truth of God. Then again, that is what he says in his introduction, that this book is an ideal blueprint for and a manifesto of ecstatic architecture. I find myself under his spell while hating its blitheness at the same time.



On the performance of the elevator's invisible safety catches at Manhattan's Crystal Palace in 1853: "Otis has introduced a theme that will be a leitmotiv of the island's future development: Manhattan is an accumulation of possible disasters that never happen," because, "like the elevator, each technological invention is pregnant with a double image: contained in its success is the specter of its possible failure" (27). Otis astounds his audience by floating an elevator cut free from its cable, but what of all the other catastrophes waiting to happen, that have happened? Perhaps this specter of possible failure has become obscured in recent times until the Twin Towers disappeared, spectaculary, a grand performance of failure.



Even beyond the human body, are we not all fragile?

posted by Open Mouth 10:02 PM