12:00am 11:59pm Billing Day

looking out across the painfully white bright of the plaza, he sensed some movement behind him and in his agitated state, whirled about with his arms outheld bent at the elbow and crossed at the wrist.  he faced his own reflection in the glass but shuddered and shook at the knowledge of the minuscule machines – marauding, malignant – that comprised its seemingly silky surface.  an impulse boiled up to lash out and smash the pane, but was quickly replaced by the knowledge that no such event could ever occur.  any number of scenarios flashed before his now tightly closed eyes, in which the glass remained intact after repeated blows, absorbing each force as a source of energy, registering the heat signature from his fist, and redirecting all towards efficiency and productivity.  he grumbled and cleared his throat.  turning again to the plaza, he breathed deeply and stepped out.

eviscerated by the light.

sticks and stones may rattle your bones, but guns will always kill you.

As he sat slightly slumped forward, he could feel that small roiling ball of rotten flames flicker and lick up the spinal cord and hew and saw their way into the brain.  it reached the face and seeped out into the world just under the eyes, eyes that could not focus, eyes that burned with sleeplessness.  he looked down thinking the hands were shaking, but they were not, so he made them shake a bit, then stopped, wondering all the while whether he was holding it back to forcing it into being.  somewhere in that column of flesh and bones the flames coiled blue and malicious, malignant.  the heat tightened the throat and blocked the nose so that the breaths came ragged and woolly.  the stomach’s vascular muscle tissue pinched and bunched unevenly, he imagined the intestines as warring snakes, each squeezing the other to death.

the future is made of rice, salt, and mineral oil.

title optional

trundling along through the marshy hinterland, the train heaved to and fro leaving its vacant minded passengers to totter and tumble like so many rag dolls clutched in the hands of absent minded children.  looking about, the boy noted the tops of heads over high seat backs in an loose attempt at judging the contents of the metal tube he found himself in.  Bored by this he turned towards the window and watched the crumbling infrastructure whizz past in a faint blurry foreground and a slowly wheeling background.  large electrical pylons rose from tan and pitted concrete footings to loom light and dense into the clear blue sky.  wires crisscrossed haphazardly in every direction, seeming to be without purpose or direction.  they simply hung, thick and jointed, anchored here and there by massive and rusted turnbuckles.  newly vacated lots bore the signs of recent demolitions, clear pathways grazed over by mechanical behemoths devouring derelict shot towers and world-weary warehouses.  lost tires lingered in the shallow waters of the marsh, accompanied by an array of weathered pallets and an assortment of detritus so thick it made him wonder if the marsh was not rooted in soil but in the castings-off of the world about it.  a sifting shifting foundation of nothing in particular.

he looked up to the rim of sky to see floating aloft a trio of birds, perhaps predatory, circling in tight arcs to the south.  their wings were long and graceful as they traced the gentle vectors of their descent towards that unreal wetland.

a well-tended discussion

oh hi this is, but then to the never have

a fraction of printer mechanisms and

light tapping tipping of timid torrents

he leaned back and then; or

parapsychological research

It was a wooden bird, caught in the highlands, come from the south.  It reared and titled alighting on the strong updraft yet making no progress forward.  It was as if caught between some forever past and some forever yet to be.

The insect buzzing of fluorescent lights that hang empty, heavy, forlorn over the street.  There are scattered remains of brightly colored candies crushed like fireworks shot down from the clouds to explode and lay broken on the concrete.  There is a mother who calls out through the ether to her child proclaiming her successes in urban foraging, promising that child she will be back.  Just wait for me, she says, I’ll be there soon.  As if the child was left standing in a hovel alone, ready to flee towards another successful pillager.  A mother begging her child to stay.  I pass her on the platform embedded in the earth, open to the sky and seething with the dark below from which I had emerged.  Yet she seemed to twitch and start, as if not able to discern which direction she should take to head off her sure-to-be-escaping child.  Her blood. 

singing funeral dirges

An open letter to Patrik Schumacher after reading this :

An Alternate Blood-Letting:

Sir [and I use that term loosely] -

Where does one being with such absurdities and contradictions?  How does one approach such appalling invectiveness towards exactly that which should be nurtured?

Mr. Schumacher, hang your head in shame.  Your brief, un-substantive article in The Architectural Review should be digitally burned for its dripping condescension alone.  That you have the gall to completely debase particular schools for not following in your drivel of a practice – devoid of life, devoid of soul, duende, and lays limp in hollow form “testing” – is a testament to exactly why these schools are of the utmost importance today.

Perhaps you might stop to consider exactly why and how these dystopic proposals have developed?  Or do you not care?  Let’s pretend you do.  Perhaps, the current student body is actually engaged in the political and social comings-and-goings of the world and feels a bit of despair because of it?  You must know what that feels like, right?  These projects are only a projection of where we are headed if nothing changes.  They imagine a future in which parametricism and the scientific beatitudes that pervade the undertones of contemporary discourse have overrun the world and destroyed it – and yet the potential brilliance and sweet breath of these projects is precisely their perseverance in the face of inevitable destruction.  They witness some enthroned oaf mucking up the place and decide they’d rather be involved in the solution rather than the perpetuation of the problem.  That it might come off to you as desiring some “poetic import,” suggests many things about your principles and the state of the profession today.  Might you stop to think that perhaps this is a result of the desire for something missing?  Might your designs not be enough for the rest of us with hearts as well as brains?  Oh, cruel world!  Often, they imagine something broken, some larger problem, and attempt a solution.  Does this not suit your taste for “systematic research and serious design experiments”?  In your article you suggest how you imagine a school should be:

I consider the best schools to be a crucial part of the avant-garde segment of the discipline charged with the permanent innovation of the built environment. It is here that systematic research and serious design experiments can be conducted in ways that are more principled and more forward looking than would be possible within professional practice on the basis of real commissions. Academic design research allows designers to select and focus on specific aspects of the built environment, and abstract from other aspects.

That you might even entertain the idea that the RIBA awarded projects contain none of this is so absurd it borders on farce.  I’d laugh if I wasn’t so angry.  The logical basis of the argument is so non-existent that I don’t even know where to begin.  Your more or less stated criticism is that these projects don’t contain valid research but are thrown together from poetry snippets and lustful longings of a bygone Romanticism.  And yet your position is so divorced from reality that I have to wonder how you dressed yourself this morning: “Instead we witness the invention of scenarios that are supposedly more interesting than the challenges actually posed by contemporary reality. “  Please explain to me how an ecological research center is an invented scenario in an era of rampant ecological destruction.  How is that not contemporary reality?  Had you done even a modicum of Googling alone, or read the links posted next to your own article, you might have found that, for example, the structures of the Venice algae monitoring facility actually contained a vast amount of research.  Yet you chose to overlook that and be unsatisfied with the pretty picture you’re seeing, attesting to your shallow field of vision that is reflected in your “professional” practice.  Rather than looking at a compelling image and investing time and energy into discovering what is compelling about it, you look, maybe smirk at its sex, then move on to devour the next piece of flesh.  I have to ask, is satisfying?  Are you full?  But I know the answer: no, not a chance.  It’s a voracious appetite when you’re not truly digesting anything, isn’t it?  There’s your irony.

“The demonstration of creative imagination and virtuoso visualization skills is not enough to merit an award.”  Do you actually believe this?  Is this a joke?  Creative imagination and virtuosity do not merit award?  What in the hell does?  Does it not require creative imagination to invent whatever the hell you’re thinking schools should produce?  Or perhaps you don’t actually want students to create new thing, but only exit the school as institutionalized, happy little indebted corn husks? Christ almighty, I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

And allegory?  Some might spin an allegorical yarn, yes, but since when does that lack value?  You’d rather have a school of engineering automatons producing so-called technological innovations than encouraging an environment of lateral and nimble thinking?  How dare you claim that these schools lack value and have no place in the professional world!  Implicit is your desire and claim to power, in which you dictate your limpid architectural gestures – and they are nothing but gestures – to be produced and worked out by the automatons your suggested type of school would contain.  I imagine you’d prefer nice quiet industrial designers hunched over glowing computer screens trying to fashion a little joint that doesn’t look like a joint, or a small gear to operate the glossy cover that only exists to cover its own gear; a nice little meta statement of your subjects.  Your loyal servants, your indentured servants, starry-eyed pleading servants.  Chained to desks by those invisible coils of paternal appeasement.

I could go on, but I doubt you’ve read this far.  So I’ll end with this: You, sir, are full of shit.  Glossy white shit.

Very Sincerely -

Martin Byrne

an error in addition

testing out new renders, cant decide.

 

Personal Notification. Dear Client. Online Pharmacy

The following text is edited from an bizarrely encrypted junk email sent to my work address.  Various versions to follow, in the form of poems, narratives, or just gibber.

 

IV.

 

microscopic face

alwaysdown down, said, heart.

doing, the

——

Iremembermyfatherthat

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and his in of there us sleeping his cigarettes while

to, Why rant, he wasaboy

said. Me.

——

on the sun then as ours

the All After

was fearful

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Dogu?

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to smoked Benefits of online pharmacy

——

smile would rocket into she

and and take stand Dad!

about to incredible rushing

the real as never into thickets

——

Butotherdays

Mexico. California,

——

flyinglikeagirlbehindher,andshe. His, it.

around for her in find finding smile. cry.

would would they wouldholdhandsandwalkaroundthe. slowly,

 

 

——