Collective, Unconscious: Ruins, So Very Tragique

We -- and I speak here for what I can claim to understand, which broadly speaking is "western society" -- are a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing lot. We believe not only in progress, but also in our inherent ability to make it. Moreover, we approach and explain instances of decline with a scientific and analytic (im)precision that cannot help but contain slightly paternalistic moralizing: oh you crazy, pillaging, marauding barbarians, what were you thinking?! In stern, Stone Phillips-y voices laden with gravitas we scold ourselves when confronted with harbingers of future catastrophe, but in the same instance grandly proclaim We Can Change The Present Course of History Because Our Serious Tone Suggests Knowledge and Insight And Maybe Also Condescension Because Even Though We Caused This Mess We're Still Better Than Our Predecessors Because They Surely Must Have Pre-Caused This Mess And At Least We're Trying To Fix It And While We're Fixing It Let's Also Make Some Fun Blockbuster Movies About It So As To Transform Those Harbingers Into Easy Cash Cows. So when both 3 Quarks Daily and Gothamist made mention of a recent article in Scientific American entitled An Earth Without People, I couldn't help but be curious and also a little wary. The article is partly an interview with science writer and professor Alan Weisman, who recently published The World Without Us, a book that examines what sorts of things would happen to the planet if humans suddenly disappeared, alien abduction-like, from the face of the earth.* Without regular maintenance, streets and highways would buckle within a couple of months; houses and office buildings would collapse within several decades. And: "Certain common plastics might remain intact for hundreds of thousands of years; they would not break down until microbes evolved the ability to consume them." Crazy! As a bonus, for NYC-based readers, you might be interested in looking at the "Fall of New York City" timeline featured in the article; it's got some pretty fascinating facts and images of a suddenly-humanless Manhattan, including flooded subways (2 days), the collapse of the Brooklyn Bridge roadway (300 years from now), and my favorite, 5 billion years down the road: "The earth vaporizes as the dying sun expands and consumes all the inner planets." Whee! The article was an interesting read overall, and Weisman's intent with the book is, ultimately, pro-environmental in nature, as it attempts to lay out what sorts of toxins, pollutants, and radioactivity we are (and would be) leaving behind -- though he's got a funny way of getting us to think about any of this to begin with: "What I’m finding is that this way of looking at our planet—by theoretically just removing us—turns out to be so fascinating that it kind of disarms people’s fears or the terrible wave of depression that can engulf us when we read about the environmental problems that we have created and the possible disasters we may be facing in the future. Because frankly, whenever we read about those things, our concern is: Oh, my God, are we going to die? Is this going to be the end? My book eliminates that concern right at the beginning by saying the end has already taken place. For whatever reason, human beings are gone, and now we get to sit back and see what happens in our absence. It’s a delicious little way of reducing all the fear and anxiety. And looking at what would happen in our absence is another way of looking at, well, what goes on in our presence." It's an interesting premise: eliminate how we die to discuss what we leave behind. I probably wouldn't describe anything I do as a "delicious little way" of doing anything, but that's just me. I don't have any fundamental issues with Weisman or the article, though the topic of abandoned landscapes did remind me of something I had first seen in bldg blog: Gunkanjima Island. It's a tiny island off the western coast of Japan that had been just an overgrown reef, until folks found coal deposits in the early 19th century, and subsequently began to migrate to the island to start a small coal mining industry. "Befor [sic] long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship -- so the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island." By the turn of the century, Mitsubishi had purchased the island, and established a long-term project to tap the coal resources from below the sea bottom. The coal mines eventually closed down in 1974 following a gradual shift from coal to petroleum as the central component of the country's energy policy, and by April of that year, all of the island's (human) inhabitants had departed, leaving behind "the empty shell of a city." A Japanese photographer documented the last days of the (inhabited) island, and then returned ten years later to see what had happened to the the buildings and surrounding mining structures. The photographs are visually stunning, and as documents of life, and then of absence, they offer a different way of thinking about ruins. That is, we might possibly read ruins not necessarily as sublime, romanticised relics of a time long gone and through (and for) which we now express nostalgic longings for the past, but rather the depiction of a more recent past -- in this case, the end of an island's sole industry and reason for human habitation -- as the catalyst of a process we would otherwise never see: the extent to which our absence from those spaces makes apparent just how much we rely on industry to govern when, where, and how we come together as a collective, and how quickly that collective can dissipate once market forces dictate otherwise. The complete departure of the island's inhabitants was precipitated by the decline of the mining industry on the island, but with the collapse of that market, the local economic infrastructure could no longer be sustained -- and with that, the end of the Gunkajima. To be sure, there are other instances and experiences of abandoned cities -- Chernobyl comes to mind here (Robert Polidori's photographs of the city and neighboring Pripyat are quite poignant, as are these from bldg blog) -- collectivities and local economies wiped out by larger forces, natural or otherwise. But, unlike the ruins of the Roman Empire, which we look upon with tragic awe and, more often than not, a moralistic stance against the decadence and power grabs that, if the narrative is to be believed, caused its downfall and its unfolding in the present as beautiful decay, the ruins of Gunkanjima speak to a more immediate unfolding of corporate bottom lines masquerading as national priorities -- decadence, sure, but the recent-pastness of it all makes the ruination more acutely felt, less able to be abstracted into an experience of the sublime. Somehow though, in the collective imagination, a ruin is a ruin is a ruin: at the end of the day, it's all decay. There's a great line in Sebald's Austerlitz: "...for somehow we know by instinct that outsized buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins." This speaks in one sense quite directly to Albert Speer's plans for a re-imagined Berlin under a victorious Third Reich, such that all new buildings should be designed with an eye to their potential as aesthetically pleasing ruins a thousand years later -- his theory of 'ruin value' that I'm pretty sure hasn't been entirely abandoned today. But in another way, buildings need not be outsized or monumental for there to be the potential for ruination. All good things (and bad ones) must come to an end; the problem is that we like to fetishize what that end looks like, reify that moment into an image of a ruin, without wanting to really look at the unravelling that got us there. In other words, it seems that we're willing to look at ruins without really, truly looking at decline; in the same way that one tends to gloss over the fighting that leads to the end of a relationship and instead monumentalize (ruin-ize) that moment we call The Breakup, in privileging ruins we choose to see an aesthetically appealing moment in a narrative we would otherwise like to forget. The beauty of thinking about a world without humans -- and skipping over the part about our sudden disappearance -- is that we're ultimately also able then to gloss over what it might truly mean to be a civilization in decline. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for understanding, and assuming responsibility for, my role in, say, global warming and perpetuating general environmental mayhem; it's not like I want humanity to be in a state of decline. But at the same time, it seems that we need to think about decline in more rigorous ways, and not simply as a necessary binary to progress. It becomes a sort of mythical beast, a Decline Monster that must be vanquished if progress is to march forward -- and as such, the monster is never truly real, never really confronted. It's all just sort of make-believe -- like progress itself. The thing with images of actual ruin, then, is that we can either confront the decline and decay that they depict as image, as something with potential aesthetic value (I'm certainly not above thinking that the photographs in these post are, in fact, beautiful) -- or we can think about how the traces of a now-absent collective might (or should) speak to what sorts of structural change need to happen, in order for the paradigm to shift from mythologized progress/decline to real sustainability. We can't avoid ruins, now or in the future; but if we can confront what it might look like to be in a state of decline, I suspect we might also then be able to then find ways to not so much want, need, or produce more (-- and monuments speak to this problem), but rather to want, need, and produce better. [Photographs in this post are taken from Saiga's website about Gunkanjima Island. There is also a piece in a 2002 issue of Cabinet Magazine that details some of the history of the island, for those who might want to read further.] [*And yes, I know about, and am planning to see, that ridiculous-looking Will Smith film, I Am Legend, about the last man on Earth. I'm a sucker for the apocalypse.]

Collective, Unconscious: Sunday Stealers

DEAR GOD. From the NY Times Sunday Styles section, officially published tomorrow, an article about last weekend's Renegade Craft Fair: With the caption: Cephalopods are an up and coming motif. The article notes: "So while the sparrow and the owl — last year’s favored animal and the symbol of the fair — are out, the octopus, a burgeoning contender for creature of the moment, has been joined by other sea dwellers, like the squid." Ahem. I'm not an I told you so sort of person, but Come. On. I do believe we called this a week ago. [Thanks to FT for calling our attention to this uncited (mis)appropriation of our blog.]

Collective, Unconscious: Field Reports from the Quirk War

Sigh. It's like New York City itself has decided to pick a side in the Revenge of the Quirk. 1. For inexplicable reasons, the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas is showing both Eagle vs Shark and Amelie this week. Amelie. You could watch EvS and just stroll over to the neighboring screen and watch Audrey Tautou and her ridiculous gnomes and spoons and shit. Because that's exactly how I'd love to spend my Saturday afternoon. 2. Just weeks after the "A Night Out With" Becky Stark debacle in the NY Times Sunday Styles section, today's ANOW features members of the New Zealand quirk mafia: the director and stars of Eagle vs Shark. They drink at the Delancey! They date each other! "The first rule of Flight club is, you don’t pass up an opportunity to make a delicious fool of yourself." Okaaaay. 3. MD, AH, and I wandered through the Renegade Craft Fair today, and I've got one word for you: Cephalopod. Yes, my friends, it's true: owls are so late-2006. Right now, you're not showing your true quirk unless you're wearing your squid on your sleeve. Mark my words. Sigh.

Collective, Unconscious: The Rise of the Idiot Savant, pt.2

It was really quite gratifying to find this post about she's-so-adorable-I'm-going-to-tear-my-hair-out Zooey Deschanel in my Google Reader the other morning. Especially comforting and validating was the first quip in the comments section: i'm beginning to think she and Miranda July are the same person. I was beginning to think that maybe I was the only one with the perma-smirk about the whole cutesy quirky thing. To be sure, I know I'm in the minority about Miranda July. Just about everyone I know loves Me and You and Everyone We Know. And just about everyone I know warned me that I would probably hate it. And sure enough ... blech. MD and I don't talk about Miranda July because it would only make me angry, and I'm feeling that, at 33, I'm already turning into something of a curmudgeon. Not too long ago, ASD couldn't help but wax rhapsodic about seeing Ms. July perform at some event and blah blah blah had I seen her website blah blah blah, which prompted me to go to her website and dear god make it all go away. Oh Miranda July. You’re just so fun and quirky and smart and edgy! That movie of yours was so gosh darn precious and made so many of my friends believe in the complicated goofiness of relationships. We, too, could have ironic moustaches and sell shoes and fall in love! It’s not necessary to actually, you know, speak in complete sentences; we're all so emotionally damaged that it's ok to revert back to an infantile state of unknowing that is somehow simultaneously un-infantile, because we know that we're unknowing. Why? WHY is this happening? It’s insulting, really. Quirk stands in for actual emotional depth, wide-eyed naivete somehow means that one has transcended this earthly plane of complexity and entered into a state of post-maturity. Christ. Really? Don't get me wrong. I'm all for vulnerability. I just don't think we should be valorizing vulnerability as something cute. And, to be sure, I recognize that Miranda July isn't the first person to be hawking this pisspoor identity. Nope. We've got that ridiculous Amelie movie to blame for that.

Collective, Unconscious: The Rise of the Idiot Savant.

I sometimes think that this blog could write itself if all MD and I did was just hold up the NY Times' Thursday or Sunday Styles section and say, "See?!" The Times' notion of trendspotting, or rather trend-reporting, isn't so much late or er, behind the times, as it is just kind of misguided. They're reporting trends which need to be stopped. Now. Case in point: I was all set today to wax annoyed at what I regard as the slow-building, but now surely at its apex, flowering of the trope of the wide-eyed, so-damaged-that-i-can-now-only-be-in-a-state-of-constant-naivete, prescient-but-inarticulate idiot savant. And then I wandered over to the Times' Sunday Styles section, to have a jolly laugh at whomever they've decided to have "A Night Out With," and discovered, to my (dis)pleasure, that it was Becky Stark, Ms. Lavender Diamond herself. Adding to the madness was the accompanying photograph, which featured Stark and none other than (the retreating back of) Miranda July; the two were part of a recent New York Public Library event, and in the article, July demonstrates to Stark how to rip off part of her slip and fashion it into a headband. I'm not kidding. I believe the article uses the word madcap to describe the general hilarity of it all. Madcap. And so you could stop reading right now, because anything else I would have to say -- well, the Times piece just unfolds (unravels?) it so much more adeptly, without even trying. Without even knowing. To be sure, upon my return to New York, I'm going to sit down and write my originally-planned post. But I'll just let you all sit with this one for a little while, to give you a little peak into the multi-part series that's going to unfold shortly. And also to give myself a little time to down that glass of airport chardonnay.