FRAGMENT_BRADEN_CROOKS

“one man’s eye sore is another man’s paradise” - ice cube on LA and the Eames

blockage only moves

downstream - accumulating

noxious as plastic

a healthy system

Now I know to be alert, but take no action.


there’s-no-hope-in-the-world-why-do-we-even-bother.

her stories were of all the struggles she faced in a field of sexist chauvinistic but still successful men.

It is increasingly difficult to see where our massive levels of social, economic and environmental inequalities will lead us in a positive light. I will employ opti-mism to this confession—I believe in possibilities of a better future beyond our generation, but there is a ton of fear for the process of getting there.

Dr. Mabuse is the insane mastermind behind an enormous schematic for a future empire of crime. The city services and institutions are in place to counter his plot, but the fabric of the city is entirely unreliable- at once clunky, oversized and ineffectual, and sometimes sinister.

Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through confusion. But in the end it doesn’t matter what they see or think they see. The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly.

The freedom in the darkness

The pressure of the light

There are no street dogs in the city of New York or at least I haven´t seen any.

How can you talk about the false separation between human and nature, urban and ecological

I just read an article about sexual assaults, and wearing your hair in a pony tail can make you a target. It’s easier to grab.

Let me say from New York, where Hurricane Sandy has wrecked parts of the city and came smashing through my own window, that limiting

the discussion of the safety of this pipeline to how much of [redacted] will burn in an gas explosion is nonetheless understating the threat of

this scandalous proposal.

Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no society, only a collection of individuals.” Bullshit. Society is a relationship that allows for indi-viduals, without which none of us would be alive, let alone enjoying

our individuality.

I don’t even know where to begin

The humans are the dogs of the

day, night as their restriction.

Battle against the pressures to

use the light, their freedom

I believe, there is no benign nature.We slather meaning all over it.

But then, when I’m campingalone

I wish I wasn’t sleeping on top of all your problems.

The city. Like what I’m seeing

It looks like what I’m seeing. It looks like wherever I’m stuck or trying to go, or get away from. And it grows from there, or comes undone, or rains, or falls apart, or makes a new development deal, or sells itself short, or lies, or accomplishes.

It’s made mistakes on purpose, and had its limelight moments and daily, intimate what-nots. It looks like my-own-eyes seeing, and rambles all around an immense masquerade shift show, to look like each one of our eyes seeing. It’s nearly incredulous, impossible.

What would it be like to wonder in a different way? What would it be like to stop thinking like ones self and to try out different suspicions and pleasures? To be attracted to entirely different sorts? Is it possible to wonder fresh and free, or to try on someone’s thinking?

Or how can we achieve balance in the force? We produce so much waste but so much of it could be reused, recycled, or re-purposed. I installed/ built a kitchen counter last night out of a huge butcher block counter-top that was being thrown out and was found on the curb.

Homegrown pure organic matter from our yards, community gardens, and indoor worm bins, stuffed into paint and compound buckets or DIY raised beds, seeded and started in the city’s ‘waste spaces’ and put on every corner once they’ve sprouted.

If there are favorable habitats and favorable forms of association for animals and plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular natural environment has its own balance, is there not perhaps an equivalent of this in culture?

There was this thought that holy shit its actually happening, and this captured our imagination, and broke past just discontentment with the power was doing, and refocused this attention, at least for me, on what the people could do.

And whats so important about hurricane sandy is that finally no one doubts it was the result of a changed climate. People talk about sandy as the beginning, everyone does, we all know it.

The same cannot be said for non-human entities. This entire rubric is misplaced, a hammer attempting to insert a screw, when applied to non-human actors.

Will there be a year without a tire infested, refrigerator dumped, appliance graveyard, trash-ridden river?

The human mind wants shortcuts to answers.

Can every small gesture truly counts?

If it’s like the breathing of a tree, and the million leaves rustling and falling in their time, then it is also like the fabric of the chair, collecting bits of dust with a near silent patting, or like seeds floating around in their tournoiement, sweet with prosperous hopes of a perfect parachute into a moist spot of rich dark. What a landing sound! Or a small slide of pebbles on the loose, or the rushing fury of steam spouts, or gravel underfoot! And it sweeps on and around, like erratic nonsense, or frivolous craze, seemingly incapable of grasping the serious implications of great dramas. It is only left to show a scene that any person infected with such a palpitating cacophonic awareness would flit, out of sorts, like stravinsky’s rite of spring. And who would dare to map a governance in this sphere? The very awareness would only shimmy around in negative capability.

Over time, exploitation has taken root at the heart of our economy and culture as a valid means to private gain. The now entrenched upper classes keep their perch by the manipulation markets, control of politics, destruction of environments, abuse of employees, deception of customers, shirking of taxes, distortion of information, propaganda, nepotism, lies and even outright theft. This happens every day and unabashedly: well within the bounds of the ethic of individual freedom, which has come to mean the freedom for those who can, to exploit everything they want, to advance whatever they wish.

However, the real test of urban inclusion is not through one’s knowledge of a place, consumption of local culture, or identification with the city, but through our ability to participate in its processes as citizens. Our inclusion depends on whether we can produce the city. Perhaps we speak at a community board meeting on behalf of our neighbors, band together to build a community garden, or determine the character of our district as a working class community. Urban Inclusion is more than a personal sense of belonging, it’s about shaping the city we belong to, and so creating a city that belongs to us. Yet, what happens when community boards have no real power, when someone can develop our garden lot into condos, or powerful forces rezone our district and gentrify our neighborhood? If we cannot participate in the creation of the city, then we are not included in it, and the city does not belong to us even if we feel as though we belong to it. We may be New Yorkers, but we are not New York.

In the mid-19th Century, an English economist by the name of William Stanley Jevons came across an odd fact. At the time, there were fears that England would deplete its coal supply, and various studies were undertaken to see how long such a process might take. What Jevons discovered, though, was that even though in the preceding decade coal consuming steam engines and furnaces has dramatically gained in efficiency, reducing the specific need for coal to produce the same amount of mechanical or heat energy, the usage of coal was not slowing, but was actually increasing. This seeming contradiction, named Jevons Paradox, has a simple explanation: as power became cheaper and more convenient through efficiency, ever newer uses for these engines and furnaces was being found. By making energy cheaper through efficiency, usage of the input resource actually increases.//////

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Put a nice jacket, put a nice skirt, some high heels and make up. Take off the jacket, the skirt and heels.

In 7th grade, in my frustrat-ed youth, I scratched into my desk, “it’s a white mans world.” To an extent that’s still true, but what will the rest of us make out of this world now? How can we define the future of our spaces? I would really like for it to become our world. I’d like to tell my 7th grade self that: things have changed.

I had never truly “looked” out of the window.

I’m not sure I’m ready to let go of this alliance.