Directions for camera usage (Source: Richard Linklater, Slacker [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992])

A very quick note to let you know about some things I have written of late that have appeared outside the space of this humble little blog (which, by the way, turned 5 this past summer).

1. In August, Materia, an Italian professional architecture journal published by Paolo Portoghesi, ran a piece by me called "L'aerodinamica leggerezza dell'essere" ("The Aerodynamic Lightness of Being.") It's a brief essay that truly exposes audiences to one of my own pathologies: namely, of writing about airplanes as a kind of architecture. Though the article was translated into Italian by Daria Ricchi, the English version of the piece also appears in the magazine. I may publish an extended version of it here, with more images.

2. Late last month, Quaderns d'arquitecture i urbanisme (better known as Quaderns) published "Air Control," my own brief, ruminative account of how the physical and metaphorical control of air defined the course of architecture through modernity into the present day. This article appears in English, Catalan, and Spanish.

3. Lastly, my own take on Richard Linklater's Slacker, from Places. It is the first of a small series of articles concerning the depiction of Texas cities on film. Bonus points to those who read the footnotes. Those of you who read all the way to the end will understand the above image.

Special thanks go out to the editors I've been working with over the summer: Kazys Varnelis, Nina Rappaport, Mario Ballesteros, Guillermo López, Caroline Fuchs, Daria Ricchi, Nancy Levinson, Josh Wallaert, and Iben Falconer.

Stay tuned ....

From Kate Ascher, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (2011)

Deep into the index of Kate Ascher’s likable and engaging The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper (The Penguin Press, 2011), we learn that “skyscraper” was not only the name of a racing horse, but that it also referred to the “triangular sky-sail” of a ship. The fact that such data appears in such a manner is poignant—here, in a book teeming with information, in the very part dedicated to the categorization and organization of names, nouns, verbs, et cetera, we find what is perhaps one of the most important concepts of the book. The word “skyscraper” is both performative and descriptive: not only does the Oxford English Dictionary tell us that “Skyscraper” was sired by “Highflyer” (these must have been very tall horses), but that along with “moonrakers,” “skyscrapers” were cast out during light wind conditions, presumably to catch an errant breeze that may guide a foundering vessel back to port.

Similarly, The Heights uses its sumptuous graphics to present a performative and descriptive (i.e. anatomical) look at skyscrapers. To do so, Ascher abandons the impulse to conflate “skyscraper” with “architecture” and presents tall buildings more as urban objects. Repeating and elaborating the formula that made her earlier graphic study on infrastructure, The Works: Anatomy of a City (2005), so successful, Ascher offers the reader hundreds of drawings, as crisp as legible as anything offered by Ernst Neufert or Otto Neurath, all showing how skyscrapers are, in essence, compact, vertical cities. This emphasis on verticality goes well beyond the book’s title: The Heights is organized in a roughly vertical fashion, with some parts dedicated  to the laying of foundations, and others showing how concrete is pumped towards upper floor plates via a complex series of compressors and tubes. (The table of contents even appears as an elevator control panel, which seems counter-intuitive unless one starts thinking of The Heights as vertical.)

A book about verticality, organized vertically

Ascher’s book is by no means flawless. Those with afflictions for history (such as me), will find the introductory material either very familiar or somewhat lacking. For example, the tried and true method of showing the history of skyscraper construction on a timeline only serves to show a progression in form with only a very cursory investigation of the social, political, and cultural contexts that gave rise to these building types. Yet this is not a serious fault, for the book’s preference for graphic design and visual analysis gives the reader a detailed and comprehensive glance into the design, composition, and maintenance of skyscrapers. In all, the book’s greatest strength is its ability to communicate complex information for all kinds of audiences. This means that while perusing The Heights, I was able to suspend my own predilections for historical analysis if only for a moment to confront the complexities of architecture and urbanism in a different and exciting way.

Timofey Pnin's Isometric Head (Source: ccassidy)

February, 1957. A wintry day at fictional Waindell College, somewhere in the fictional Northeastern United States. The world is at its greyest. Bare-armed campus elms, no longer adorned by leafy crenellations, offer no resistance to the freezing air. The sun carves a shallow transit against the cirrus formations: silvery, aeriform scars illuminated by a hovering pale orb in the withering light. The previous year is only recently dead, and the new year, fraught with growing pains, is just coming to terms with its own anxieties. The future, unclear, is inevitable, looming.

Atoms have just been spilt, their energy uncontrolled and dangerous. Boundaries, thought and drawn, calcify East and West. Sputnik is yet to become a wandering star. Yet even within the secluded groves of this Waindelled world, the faintest flickering of distant events prime the murmuring heart. All is not well in the world that is the University.

An imaginary professor of Russian literature has just found out, to crushing disappointment, that he has been assigned to teach a theater course in the French department. His name is Timofey Pnin. Son of an ophthamologist, survivor of "The Hitler War," sifting through the flotsam and jetsam of a failed marriage, Pnin mulls over his latest failure. Tenure was not guaranteed, but in the fantastic, cobweb-ridden corners of Pnin's mind, it was a possibility as distant, tangible, and impossible as a nebula.

Witness the exit strategy, the transition, the turning-over. Lists are made, appointments canceled or confirmed. Our elderly professor, defeated, collects his meager belongings in a small valise: tortoise-shell glasses too narrow for his crown, an omnibus volume of Sherlock Holmes stories, a fob of linen, a brilliant set of false teeth. Everything else seems like a film played backwards. Dishes are emptied of food and leap into the covert in neat, ceramic ziggurats. The sink fills and empties repeatedly, trash disappearing into the whorls and eddies of an infinite drain. Table and bed linens crumple into orthogonal forms and fly into closet drawers in spectral choreographies. These are the last days. Pnin writes to his landlord: "Dear Mr.___ : Behold the instructions for closing a bank account."

Our esteemed professor enters a small, four-door blue sedan, and takes the driveway out from his rented house through the tall trees onto a busy street. A sure, if not steady driver, he leans into the gas pedal to avoid a swerving truck. Waindellians remembered a bluish blur leaving acrid smoke and petrol in its wake. "Did I just see Pnin?" they ask, commenting on an image-like composition of bald pate, glasses, and brilliant teeth accompanied by guttural threnodies of vrooms and even more vrooms. Pnin sightings increase in frequency as the car speeds away to some unknown terminus. And he is gone.

In the wake of this noisy, smoky departure, there’s nothing. But wait: Is that a rustle of leaves? A cool breeze stirs the budding boughs. An icicle falls from a tree and shatters on the soft earth with a plink. Spring is not as far off as it seems.

(Note: A version of this article appeared in Fulcrum, the Architectural Association's student broadsheet, in May 2011)

Louis-Pierre Mouillard (1834-1897), Nile Vulture (Otogyps auricularis), from L’Empire de l’air (1881)

The year is 1881. Convalescing in Alexandria, sketching images of Nile Vultures gliding in the sweltering Mediterranean skies, the French ornithologist and engineer Louis-Pierre Mouillard writes of an air teeming with life. Appearing early on in his influential treatise on bird flight, L’Empire de l’Air, Mouillard’s powerful, sublime description of the air casts a prophetic eye to the future: “O! Blind Humanity! open thine eyes and thou shalt see millions of birds and myriads of insects cleaving the atmosphere. All these creatures are whirling through the air without the slightest float; many of them are gliding therein, without losing height, hour after hour, on pulseless wings without fatigue; and after beholding this demonstration given by the source of all knowledge, thou wilt acknowledge that Aviation is the path to be followed.” [1] Here, then, is a plea to view the world differently. It is a new sensibility that does more than call attention to the changing air; it asks us to look at the numerous denizens of the air as something altogether different. This is because for Mouillard, these are not birds or insects. They are airplanes.

In Mouillard’s world, these creatures maneuver easily through the air thanks to their nearly weightless bodies. This was the predominant view for centuries. Even that most dedicated chronicler and student of animal flight, Étienne-Jules Marey acknowledged how those before him thought that insects and birds were able to “float” in the sky because of air-filled sacs that made them no different than balloons. Marey and his contemporaries looked to the flight mechanisms of birds and insects as models for human-powered, heavier-than-air flight. And during its initial moments, heavier-than-air flight was only slightly heavier than air. This was the case with the earliest airplanes: delicate, cumbersome assemblages of cloth, wood, and wire that strained to escape the surface of the earth only to fly slowly, elegantly, and effortlessly on currents of air. This was not a common sentiment, however. Franz Kafka referred to the various machines lined up like flying mantises at the 1909 Brescia Air Show as “suspicious little wooden contraptions.” [2] For the budding modernist, aircraft were no different than Gregor Samsa, the scarab-like tragic figure from The Metamorphosis: insects with uncontrollable appendages that were “continually fluttering about.” [3]

Samsa’s fantastical predicament moored him to some very real concerns. And despite Kafka’s plodding verse, we can think of another modernity that follows Nietzsche’s clarion call to “kill the Spirit of Heaviness.” [4] Here, instances like F.T. Marinetti’s descriptions of pilots, who upon returning to earth, leave their machines “with an elastic ultralight leap,” [5] or Le Corbusier’s observation that airplanes are a “sign of the new times” advancing forward “in a winged flurry,” [6] tell of a modernism imbued with a lightness. It is a physical and metaphysical lightness. An aerodynamic lightness.

As stated by James A.H. Murray in the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1858), “Aerodynamics [is the] branch of pneumatics which treats of air and other gases in motion, and of their mechanical efforts.” [7] Murray’s definition is based on an earlier entry from the Popular Encyclopedia of 1837: “Aerodynamics; a branch of aerology, or the higher mechanics, which treats the powers and motion of elastic fluids.” [8] Though these definitions speak more of laboratories and experimental chambers, consider how Siegfried Giedion, that most stalwart promoter of architectural modernism, puts forward the laboratory as a metaphor for the creation of new architecture. Using ferroconcrete construction as an example, Giedion makes much of how concrete is not only a “laboratory product,” but also made in a laboratory. [9] This language is more than metaphorical, as demonstrated when he places new advances in iron construction on an aerodynamic footing:

Instead of the rigid balance of support and load, iron demands a more complex, more fluid balance of forces. Through the condensation of the material to a few points, a creation of the airspace, des combinations aériennes that Octave Mirabeau recognized already in 1889. This sensation of being enveloped by a floating airspace while walking through tall structures (Eiffel Tower) advanced the concept of flight before it had been realized and stimulated the formation of the new architecture. [10]

Giedion’s reference to Eiffel Tower is not accidental. Since its construction for the 1889 Exposition Universelle and until the early 20th century, Gustave Eiffel’s iconic structure was the ineluctable center of aviation in the world. In 1901, the Brazilian aviator Alberto-Santos Dumont won the Deutsch de la Meurthe prize after circling the Eiffel Tower in his No.6 Airship. Similar feats would have more lasting influences on architecture culture. Hence in Aircraft (1935), Le Corbusier writes of his early days as an apprentice in Auguste Perret’s office in 1909, sequestered in a “student’s garret on Quai St. Michel,” and hearing the noise of the Comte de Lambert’s Wright Flyer circle the Eiffel Tower. [11]

Le Corbusier’s life-long romance with flying machines is well known. And not surprisingly, Giedion would describe Le Corbusier’s own architecture in aerodynamic terms. Writing about the Cité Frugès à Pessac in Bordeaux, Giedion describes the building as something not unlike a wind tunnel: “Corbusier’s homes are neither spatial not plastic: air flows through them! Air becomes a constituent factor! Neither space nor plastic form counts, only RELATION and INTERPENETRATION!” [12] This is a description of a new kind of architecture comprised of light structures, many appearing “as thin as paper” that transform buildings into “cubes of air” and make an “immediate transition to the sky.” [13] Architecture, now aloft, seems to have taken on the qualities of the airplane.

André Devambez (1867-1944), Le seul oiseau qui vole au-dessus des nuages (The Only Bird That Flies Above the Clouds), 1910, H. 45; W. 68cm, © ADAGP, Paris-RMN (Musée d'Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. A reproduction of this painting would appear in L'Illustration (September 17, 1910)

Consider, for example, André Devambez’ painting of an ungainly aircraft grazing the clouds high above Paris for the September 17, 1910 issue of L’Illustration. The machine — an Antoinette V monoplane — was one of the most celebrated aircraft in early twentieth century French aviation. Designed by the engineer and inventor Léon Levavasseur, Antoinette aircraft were lightweight machines that were as pleasing to the eye as they were to fly. One reason for this was that Levavasseur, who began his career as an engine designer for speedboats, created a lightweight, aluminum-cast, gasoline-injection engine with a high power-to-weight ratio for all his aircraft. His engines powered some of the most important aircraft of its day: Farmans, Blériots, Esnault-Pelteries. Not wonder, then, that Devambez portrays the Antoinette as a bold, graceful, dragonfly-like machine, freed from its earthly shackles, hovering lightly above a bank of cumulus clouds. Like others, he would have known that French aviator Hubert Latham prized the machine precisely for these characteristics. A dashing figure known as “The Storm King,” Latham set multiple records in Antoinette aircraft. And despite two failed attempts to cross the English Channel, Latham and his Antoinette were a familiar presence in the skies of cities like Paris and Berlin.

(Top and Bottom) From A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909)

(Top) Wing assembly for Antoinette V, from A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909); (Bottom) Advertisement showing Levavasseur’s lightweight Antoinette engine, from L’Aerophile (Jan. 1, 1909)

In January 1909, the French aviation impresario Georges Besançon published a lengthy article about the Antoinette V in L’Aerophile, the Aéro-Club de France’s monthly journal. The article celebrated many of the airplane’s innovations, and yet focused especially on its construction. Images and drawings from the article show the wings and fuselages before the application of painted and lacquered fabric as skeins of wooden spars joined with aluminum gussets—these give the aircraft a fragile, skeletal appearance. The author, A. Cléry, reminds readers how the Antoinette’s wings and fuselage are made from combinations of triangles and pyramids—a construction technique that not only accommodates traction and compression, but also does so with a minimum amount of materials. This, Cléry observes, is “the same principle of the construction of steel bridges and the Eiffel Tower. Its application to the construction of airplane wings has resulted in an absolute rigidity and strength, combined with the greatest possible lightness.” [14]

(Top) Alexander Graham Bell’s “Siamese Twin” kites, from Alexander Graham Bell, “Aërial Locomotion, With a Few Notes of Progress in the Construction of the Aërodrome,” National Geographic Magazine (Jan., 1907), 1-33; (Bottom)  Bell’s “Cygnet II,” February 25, 1909. Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Cléry was not the only one to make a connection between Eiffel and Levavasseur. As one of L’Aerophile’s most avid readers, the American inventor Alexander Graham Bell would take a particular interest in Cléry’s article about the Antoinette V. Since 1899, Bell had been preoccupied with building kites that improved on Lawrence Hargraves’ “box” designs. He settled on kites composed of multiple cells of tetrahedral structures, a design that would increase the amount of surface area with a minimum of materials. His first kites were small, wood-and-cloth pyramids consisting of smaller tetrahedral units. And as he became more ambitious with his designs, he created large, ungainly tetrahedral space frames that had to be towed out into the open water in order to be set aloft. Of these, the largest were the “Cygnet” series, which were gigantic structures comprising of 3,393 tetrahedral cells. Tested out in the waters of Keuka Lake, near Hammondsport, New York from 1907 to 1908, the Cygnets were temperamental things. In the words of their pilot, Thomas Selfridge, the Cygnets “persistently refused to fly.” [15]

(Top and Bottom) Alexander Graham Bell’s Tower, from “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” National Geographic Magazine (Oct., 1907), 672-675.

Despite the Cygnet’s perceived stubbornness, Bell found solace in Cléry’s emphasis on tetrahedral structures. Later in 1909, Bell noted how the Antoinette “seems to be constructed throughout upon the tetrahedral plan.” [16] The emphasis on “construction” should not be taken lightly, for Bell’s Cygnets were more architectural than aerodynamical. And in a series of spreads for the October 1907 issue of National Geographic Magazine, editor Gilbert M. Grosvenor depicted what would be the fullest architectural expressions of Bell’s aeronautical work. Titled “Dr. Bell’s Tetrahedral Tower,” the piece shows images of an 80-foot observation tower built in 1907 at Bell’s estate in Beinn Bhreagh, Nova Scotia. With legs made of tetrahedral-celled trusses that intersected high above to ground to form a platform, Bell’s structure was touted for its lightness and ease of assembly. Its use of eight-pin joints to hold the frame no doubt foreshadowed similar innovations by Max Mengeringhausen, Konrad Wachsmann, or R. Buckminster Fuller. Bell’s truss system resulted in a kind of building that was light and that, echoing Giedion’s description of the Eiffel Tower, gave one the sensation of being aloft. It was an aerodynamic building in the sense that it could accommodate moving air. But it was also aerodynamic because it was a structure originally designed to fly. When we normally think of flying buildings, we immediately conjure images of architecture outfitted with streamlined forms not unlike those made memorable by Erich Mendelsohn or Norman Bel Geddes. Bell’s tetrahedral tower is radically different from these, however. As an assemblage of pipes joined into lightweight pyramids and tetrahedrons, Bell’s tower nevertheless captivates us because it is one of the few instances where we can talk of a flying machine that has truly evolved into architecture.

(An Italian version of this article appeared in September 2011 in Materia 70. Many thanks to Daria Ricchi for her beautiful translation.)

__________________

Notes


[1] Louis-Pierre Mouillard, “The Empire of The Air,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Conditions of the Institution to July, 1892 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1893), 398. This is an abridged translation of Mouillard, L’Empire de l’air: essai d’ornithologie appliquée a l’aviation (Paris: Masson, 1881).
[2] Franz Kafka, “Die Aeroplane in Brescia,” Bohemia (29 September 1909), quoted in Peter Demetz, The Air Show at Brescia, 1909 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 115.
[3] Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," in Joyce Crick, ed. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Oxford University Press, 2009), 82.
[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of Reading and Writing,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, R.J, Hollingdale, trans. (New York: Penguin, 2003 [1961]), 68.
[5] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, Luciano de Maria, ed. (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 116, quoted in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, “Propeller Talk,” Modernism/Modernity Vol 1.3 (1994), 165.
[6] Le Corbusier, Sur les 4 routes (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 125.
[7] “aerodynamics, n.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 3d ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 10 June 2011 .
[8] John D. Anderson, Jr., A History of Aerodynamics and its Impact on Flying Machines (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5.
[9] Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, J. Duncan Berry, trans. (Los Angeles: Getty Center Publications, 1995), 150-151.
[10] Ibid., p. 102.
[11] Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London: The Studio, Ltd., 1935), 6.
[12] Giedion, Building in France, p. 169.
[13] Ibid.
[14] A. Cléry, “L’Aéroplane ‘Antoinette V’” L’Aerophile: revue technique et pratique des locomotions aériennes (Jan. 1, 1909), 7-8.
[15] Report of Flight of Cygnet II, Monday, March 2, 1908. Notes by Thomas E. Selfridge, from September 24, 1907 to July 24, 1908. “Series: Subject File, Folder: Aviation, Aerial Experiment Association vs. Meyers, 1908-1912, undated.” Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
[16] Bell, “The Antoinette V.” Bulletins, from January 4, 1909 to April 12, 1909, Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862-1939, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Antonin Raymond, Summer House at Karuizawa, South and East Facades, Nagano Prefecture, Japan (1933) (Source: Kurt Helfrich and William Whittaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), 155)

The idea of copying necessarily invokes problems of authorship. Before a quick-minded reader evokes Benjamin Franklin’s calls to “Imitate Jesus and Socrates”[1] or Ralph Waldo Emerson’s invective that the “imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity,”[2]  or even before any heart-wrenching calls that decry the loss of the “aura” in the face of rampant “mechanical reproduction” or “technical reproducibility”[3] can be made, I only offer the idea that a copy presupposes an author. There are two ways in which this can happen. On the one hand, there is the unauthorized copy, a canvas, novel, or piece of music that is actionable because it was not sanctioned by the original’s author. On the other hand, there is the authorized copy, the so-called “derivative work”[4] that merits its own recognition though it incorporates another author’s work. An example of this would be a translation of a foreign-language novel, or a scholar’s annotations to a previous work. Thus a copy also invokes a chronological lockstep: it summons or copies a piece of art that existed before. The actionable counterfeit, fake, or simulacra cannot exist without a previous source.

Copyright, patent, and trademark laws provide a series of useful cultural barometers that shed further light on authorship. These statutes contain some very important boilerplate language defining the deceptively simple question: what is copyrightable? The United States Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976 maintain a tried and true formulation and affirm that a copyrightable work is an “original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.”[5] All the non-conjunction words in that definition have been the subject of countless litigations and exegeses in American and international jurisprudential circles. But for our purposes, the words “original” and “authorship” are of greatest importance. This is because though the author may be able to copyright an “original” work, he or she can also assign the right of that work to a third party. Should an author decide to copyright a derivative work, however, then he or she must recognize the copyrighted material that inspired the new material. This is done through attribution; quite literally, through quoting and giving cognizance to someone else’s work.[6]

A specific instance from Czech-American architect Antonin Raymond’s career in Japan may shed some important light on the architectural significance of attribution. Raymond’s Summer House and Studio in Karuizawa, Japan (1933), is one of the architect’s most well-known and critical successes. Built on a mountain retreat near the Karuizawa Golf Course, the house is nestled between a series of ponds and grassy berms. The house plan reveals a distinct emphasis on observing these landscapes. By ignoring the biaxial plan common to regional Japanese architecture, and by subsequently adopting a distinct asymmetrical scheme inherited from Weimar modernism, Raymond’s plan allows the house to take in different views of the landscape. The house also is not perpendicular to the plot of land, a strategy that allows for a maximized view of the surroundings.

The desired effect, if not of a house that blends into its immediate surroundings, is then of a project that at least indexes the region via a carefully deployed articulation of material flourishes and tectonic strategies. Raymond used chestnut logs for the supporting structure as well as cedar for other structural elements as well as siding and other furnishings. The house’s metal roof is covered with branches of Japanese larch, which not only protect the roof from heat, but also deaden the sound of frequent summer rains. The house’s interior provides more evidence of what Fritz Neumeyer calls a “viewing machine,” a “set of frames and sequential spaces” that emphasize the role of the observer.[7] The house circulation patterns center around a main living room and fireplace, an area opening up into double-height spaces and allowing an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside.

Yet the elision between inside and outside is only one of a set of binary oppositions that characterize Raymond’s project. Although the building’s foundations are of poured concrete, it also features the use of local woods and other strategies that “mask” an otherwise European building into the rolling, grassy berms of Nagano prefecture. At a glance, the regional vestments literally dressing the Karuizawa house exemplify Raymond’s “initial idea of an architecture unified with its regional landscape and culture … an ideal that transcended the context of an individual country” yet was “deeply connected to these settings.”[8] In the end, this combination of disparate elements and inspirations, combined in a single, small-scale domestic project, emphasized Raymond’s “self-conscious understanding and appreciation of these materials to compose the poetics of ‘country life’ and ideals of the ‘natural’ and the ‘country.’”[9]

(Top) Le Corbusier, drawings of Mattias Errázuris House (1929-1930) (Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934, Willy Boesiger, ed. (Zurich: Les Editions d’Architectures, 1964 [7th ed.]), 48. (Bottom) Raymond’s Karuizawa House, as it appeared in Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre Complete (Source: Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Oeuvre Complète de 1929-1934, 52)

Except for material flourishes, such concerns were not far from Le Corbusier’s mind when he was busy conceptualizing the Mattias Errázuris house (1929-1930). He designed the project for a coastal resort in Zapallar, Chile, a small town on nestled between the tall escarpments of the Andes Mountains, and the ultramarine hues of the Pacific Ocean. Like Raymond, Le Corbusier sought to create circulation spaces that allowed the residents to partake in these stunning landscapes. Yet the similarities between these two projects do not end there. A comparison between one of Le Corbusier’s renderings of the Errázuris House and the interior spaces of Raymond’s Karuizawa House and Studio will reveal some uncanny similarities. In addition to a double-height ceiling, both featured circulation ramps (reminiscent of the promenade ramps from the Villa Savoye) and a distinct preference for local materials. The floors of the Errázuris House were also of local woods, and a series of sparse cross-hatching on the walls suggest the use of local stone.

And when Raymond published photographs of the Karuizawa House in a November 1935 issue of Architectural Forum, Le Corbusier noticed. A review of Raymond’s 1935 monograph, Antonin Raymond: His Work in Japan, 1920-1935 in the same issue criticized the Karuizawa House for its less-than-subtle nod to the Errázuris House. The negative criticism both stung and bewildered Raymond. In a letter to the editor of Architectural Forum, he countered, “I feel … that you lay too much stress on the question of the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and Corbusier on my work at the expense of those vital qualities which make it valuable. Even to speak of the Japanese influence in my work is to see the truth only from a superficial angle. There is a strong Japanese influence in my work, but it is one of spirit and not of form … Should we be too afraid of precedent or influence we could do nothing at all.  It does not matter from where we take anything but what we do with it.”[10] Le Corbusier was equally astonished at the Karuizawa House, so much so that (in addition to accusing Raymond of plagiarism) he was inclined to feature a picture of Raymond’s work along side his own in the third edition of the Oeuvre Complete (1935). Le Corbusier makes note of this in a May 1935 letter to Raymond, written shortly before the two architects resolved their differences:

Dear Sir:  

I have received your letter of April 8th, which I found upon my return from a trip abroad. 

I am pleased to hear from you. Please be assured that there is no bitterness between us, but — as you yourself say — you made a slight mistake, that is, you neglected to send me a note when you published the images of your Tokyo house, which is very pretty by the way. I do not have time to read the journals that I receive; I just laid eyes on the photographs, and since I have rather quick reactions – and since in addition, I was at that very moment in the process of dictating the captions for the book published by Boesiger – I seized that opportunity and introduced a little dig that would wake up the book’s readers. Incidentally, my note was not mean; on the contrary, it praises Japan for its technical achievements and you for the taste of your intervention. I would even go further, that is, you give such a pretty interpretation of my idea that page 52 of the Boesiger book is perhaps the prettiest of the whole volume. I will even extend my compliment further: if I allow all journals to publish my works, it is not in order for my ideas to remain buried in people’s drawers. On the contrary, it is for them to be of some use. Yet my designs are often copied very badly, very unskillfully, or very stupidly. This is where my compliment comes in: your interpretation of my drawings is quite witty, and this is a sincere compliment. I hope it will please you.

In any case, please be assured, dear Mr. Raymond, that I bear no grudges and am quite incapable of doing so. You may use as you like the note I am writing to you, for the end of your letter appears to call for some involvement on my part that I do not fully understand. It is now my turn to give you license to use the present letter in whatever manner will appear most pleasant to you.

Sincerely, 

Le Corbusier [11] 

One of the most remarkable things about this incident is Raymond’s and Le Corbusier’s casual attitude towards issues of authorship and plagiarism. Although Raymond’s attitude is a distant echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that copying is unavoidable, he not only admits the Corbusian influence, but casts that issue aside in favor of the more pertinent issue of “spirit” and “form.” Le Corbusier also recognizes potential plagiarism, but in a brilliant masterstroke, he still wins by dint of his larger-than-life personality. The ability to print a small version of the Karuiazawa house along the Maison Errázzuris is a powerful gesture indeed: in lieu of being slighted by an upstart follower or devotee, Le Corbusier is still able convey the power of his creative spark and the breadth of his influence. Attribution, therefore, could be conceived as a measure of power and influence.

Though the architects summarily disposed of the issue of authorship and plagiarism, at least the subject came up. Litigation surrounding the copyrighting and patenting of modernist design continues to this day. But in the early 20th century, such adversarial lawyering did deal with some pertinent issues of the time, such as original versus copy, or form versus process.[12] Architects and designers in the 20th century tended to be a savvy lot, especially in legal and business matters. As a matter of fact, both Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann made prolonged efforts to patent their designs.[13]

Raymond, “Window Construction” U.S. Patent No. 2,282,885 (Filed June 23, 1939)

Antonin Raymond’s patents provide additional guidance on issues of attribution. On June 23, 1939, Raymond submitted a patent application for a “Window Construction," a type of window that allowed for “horizontal-moveable” sashes.[14] The patent abstract, in addition to stating why the invention is significant, states that the horizontal sash is a new type of architectural element that improves on window-making techniques.[15] This patent application is significant because it is in stark contradiction to his cavalier handling of the Errázuris house. Whereas Raymond seemed naïve in his claims that too much significance was made of the Karuizawa House’s overt Corbusian influences, here, he has not only found a specific architectural detail, but has also located one that is patentable and profitable.[16]

Raymond, Architectural Details (Tokyo: Kokusai Kenchiku Kyôtai, 1938)

Revere Brass and Copper Advertisement featuring Raymond’s Louis Stone House, The Saturday Evening Post (7 August 1943) (Source: Helfrich and Whitaker, eds., Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond, 54).

The enumeration of these architectural “details” and their subsequent economic potential and attribution potential becomes evident in an 1943 magazine advertisement for Revere Brass and Copper featuring Raymond’s Louis Stone House (1939), also known as the “tri-level” house. Published in The Saturday Evening Post, the advertisement is typical of those from the era. Under a black-and-white watercolor wash of the Louis Stone House is a heading stating “A Hillside Built this House: Copper and Brass Keep it Snug and Trim.” Beneath that is an extended quotation from Raymond that also suggests a binary opposition between larger design philosophies and the minutiae of everyday construction: in addition to abating “stiffness,” “falseness,” and “fussiness,” the ad makes a special note of copper used in roof-flashing and window screens. The ad also features a small profile of Raymond, who implores the reader, “I urge you to send to Revere for a free booklet with complete plans, photographs, and information. It may inspire you to build a better house!”[18]

The idea that an architect would willingly send off plans and drawings to anyone seems ridiculous at first. And although it is not known whether anyone took up Raymond’s claim or took the ad seriously, it was one of several ads promoting future (i.e. postwar) uses of copper products. The Revere Copper and Brass Company also enlisted the services of other architects and designers, including R. Buckminster Fuller, Norman Bel Geddes, Louis Kahn, Walter Dorwin Teague, and William Wurster.[19] It is worth noting how Raymond and others were willing to lend their name to a series of print commercials — less than a decade earlier, criticisms of Raymond’s Karuizawa House’s summarily invoked the names “Wright” and “Corbusier.”[20] It is reasonable to believe that the two masters would never lend their plans and drawings to anyone requesting them.

(Top) Konrad Wachsmann, “Building Construction” U.S. Patent No. 2,491,882 (Filed June 22, 1945); (Bottom)  Raymond, “Airplane Hangar” U.S. Patent No. 2,590,464 (Filed March 2, 1946)

A cursory examination of some postwar transactions show a similar willingness to deal with corporate interests. Both Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann were busy securing patents for airplane hangars and trying to solicit bids from the United States Army Air Force. On June 22, 1945, Wachsmann filed a patent for his “Building Construction,” the famous space frame he developed for the United States Air Force. The application states that the frame “relates to building construction and is more especially concerned with portable structural wall units primarily designed for buildings of huge proportions, as for instance for hangars capable of housing dozens or hundreds of large planes, but applicable also to warehouses, auditoriums and other types of building constructions.”[21]  Wachsmann did not, however, reserve all the rights to the space patent: he assigned one-fourth interests each to Albert and Charles Wohlstetter.[22] Likewise, on March 2, 1946, Antonin Raymond filed a patent for an “Airplane Hangar,” an invention that “relates generally to buildings and more particularly to airplane hangars.”[23] Raymond assigned all interests in his hangar to the National Steel Corporation of Delaware.[24] And though Wachsmann only assigned one-half of his interests to the Wohlstetters, he and Walter Gropius did assign all their legal interest in their packaged home system to The General Panel Corporation.[25]

Konrad Wachsmann and Walter Gropius, “Building Structure” U.S. Patent 2,421,305 (Filed August 10, 1945)

Attribution has a decidedly political function as well. The very instances where Raymond and Wachsmann assigned their interests and their name to particular interests were all in service of the war effort.[26] But a look at one last patent reveals the true nature of this type of attribution. On November 1, 1943, Harvard chemist Louis F. Fieser filed an application for “Incendiary Gels,” his contribution to the war effort that would eventually be known as “napalm.”[27] The patent abstract states that the novelty of Fieser’s invention lies in “the production of new and improved gelled hydrocarbon fuels and gelling agents therefore, for use in incendiary munitions of both the burster and tail-ejector types, in flame throwers, in hand grenades, in fire starters and generally, in any incendiary munition which utilizes a combustible liquid or low-melting solid or gelled fuel.”[28] The heading to the patent abstract not only states that Fieser is the “assignor to the United States of America as represented by the Secretary of War,” but the opening paragraph indicates “The invention described herein may be manufactured and used by or for the Government for governmental purposes without the payment to me of any royalty thereon.”[29] The sentence is a boilerplate clause that requires inventors to assign their interests to the United States Government particularly for matters of national security of military intelligence.[30] Although Fieser never obtained any royalty for his patents, his application is often quoted for applications concerning similar military technologies. For him, as well as for Antonin Raymond and Konrad Wachsmann, intellectual property law provided a vehicle that recognized their status as authors or inventors.

The above documents reveal some tried and true assumptions about authors and their artistic products. First of all, the correspondence, patent abstracts, as well as magazine advertisements presuppose not only the existence of an artistic work or invention that merits legal protection, but highlight that such work can be attributable to an author or inventor. This means that there are also certain circumstances when a person can suspend legal protection for a work of authorship or invention. For example, an architect can assign rights in a design drawing or building process to a third party such as the United States Government.

But the parrying between Antonin Raymond and Le Corbusier over the Karuizawa House, as well as Raymond’s subsequent involvement with Revere Brass and Copper provide a useful conundrum. In both of these circumstances, an architect is fast and loose with the idea of authorship. As Le Corbusier freely lets Raymond use his letters and drawings regarding the Maison Errázuris, Raymond seems all too willing to let people have drawings of his Louis Stone house. The idea here seems to be one of comfort and power: even if Raymond were to publish and republish drawings of the Karuizawa House as well as the Maison Errázuris, or if he were to send off thousands of copies of the Louis Stone house to a Saturday Evening Post audience, no one’s reputation as an architect would ever be tarnished. Each would still be recognized as the designers of their individual houses, and this despite the fact the architects have evaded some typical legal issues.

[Author's note: This article is based on research completed at the Yale School of Architecture from 2005 to 2007, as well as on papers presented at the University of Virginia in September 2006 and Harvard University in February 2007. This article was also inspired by my MED thesis, completed in May 2007, titled Built to Destroy: Erich Mendelsohn’s, Konrad Wachsmann’s, and Antonin Raymond’s “Typical German and Japanese Test Structures at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah. An earlier version of this article appeared in Pidgin 10 (2011)]

________________________________

Notes


[1] Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Leonard W. Larabee, et al., ed., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 149.
[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson and Stephen Emerson Whicher, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: an Organic Anthology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 113. On the other hand, Emerson’s “Quotation and Originality” provides a different point of view. There, Emerson writes, “We prize books, and they prize them most who are themselves wise. Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest or private addition so rare and insignificant, — and this commonly on the ground of other reading or hearing, — that, in a large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs by imitation.” See “Quotation and Originality” in Letters and Social Aims (J.R. Osgood, 1876): 158.
[3] A further source of ambiguity is evident in the different translations for Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay. The most oft-quoted is the Harry Zohn version, known to generations of architecture students as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” A more correct translation of the title (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitaler siener technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”) is provided in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’ volume of Benjamin’s selected writings. There, the essay is titled “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.”
[4] The United States Code defines a “derivative work” as “a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work’.” 17 U.S.C. §101.
[5] The Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. §102(a) indicates that “Copyright protection subsists … in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”
[6] See 17 U.S.C. §106(a)(1)(B), et seq.
[7] Fritz Neumeyer, “A World in Itself: Architecture and Technology” in Detlef Mertins, ed. The Presence of Mies (New York: Princeton, 1994), 78.
[8] Ken Tadashi Oshima, Constructed Natures of Modern Architecture in Japan 1920-1940: Yamada Mamoru, Horiguchi Sutemi, and Antonin Raymond, PhD dissertation, Columbia University (2003), 120.
[9] Ibid., p. 209.
[10] Antonin Raymond, “Letter to the Editor,” Architectural Forum 63 (November 1935), 4, quoted in Kurt G.F. Helfrich and Mari Sakamoto Nakahara, “Rediscovering Antonin and Noémi Raymond,” introduction to Kurt G.F. Helfrich and William Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noémi Raymond (New York: Princeton, 2006), 26.
[11] Le Corbusier to Antonin Raymond (Paris, 7 May 1935) in Helfrich and Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World, 332.
[12] A famous example of this are the famous “Chair” lawsuits: the first was a 1929 claim by Hungarian furniture impresario Anton Lorenz against the international furniture company Gebrüder Thonet Aktiengesellschaft (AG); the second, a 1936 claim by Mauser Kommaditgesellschaft (KG) against Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In the first lawsuit, the form of a cantilevered chair was considered evidence of authorship. In the second action, Mies’s attorneys won by claiming that the industrial processes used to manufacture a particular chair were copyrightable and patentable. For a good discussion of the significance of form in furniture design, see Marcel Breuer,, “Metal Furniture and Modern Spatiality” (1928), in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California, 1994). For a more detailed discussion of these two lawsuits and their significance, see Otakar Macel, “Avant-Garde Design and the Law: Litigation over the Cantilever Chair,” Journal of Design History Vol. 3, No. 2/3 (1990), 125-143.
[13] In the United States, patent law was established “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” U.S. Constitution, Art. I, §8(8) (1796). As opposed to legal frameworks in other countries, patent law in the United States is based on a “first to invent” as opposed to “first to file” system.  In other words, patent protection extends to first-in-time inventions. In the United States, a patent is a right to exclude others from making, selling, offering for sale an inventor’s device. The right to obtain a patent belongs to “Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof” 35 U.S.C. §101. The term “process” is defined as an “art or method, and includes a new use of a known process, machine, manufacture, composition of matter, or material” 35 U.S.C. §100(b).
[14] U.S. Patent No. 2,282,885 (June 23, 1939).
[15] Ibid. “It is well-known to architects and other skilled in the design and construction of buildings that window constructions in which the sashes are horizontally-moveable offer certain and considerable advantages over the usual vertically-moveable arrangements, and many constructions embodying horizontally-moveable sashes have been proposed. It is significant, however, that none of these proposed structures have been adopted, in spite of the known advantages of the horizontally-moveable sashes, the reason being that no practical construction, which may be simply installed and operated, has yet been proposed.”
[16] Ibid.
[17] Antonin and Noémi Raymond, “Preface” in Architectural Details (Tokyo: Kokusai Kenchiku Kyôtai, 1938) quoted in Helfrich, “Antonin Raymond in America, 1938-1949” in Helfrich and Whitaker, eds. Crafting a Modern World, 47.
[18] Ibid., p. 54.
[19] Each completed a pamphlet to be distributed by Revere: in addition to Raymond writing "A Hillside Built This Home for Revere," other titles in the series (all from 1943) included "Better Homes for Lower Incomes" (Buckminster Fuller), "Tomorrow’s Homes for the Many" (Bel Geddes), "You and Your Neighborhood" (Kahn), "New Homes for Better Living" (Teague), and "A Flexible House for Happier Living" (Wurster). Ibid.
[20] It is likely that if Raymond ever sent away any of his drawings, they would have a copyright notice.
[21] U.S. Patent No. 2,491,882 (June 22, 1945).
[22] Ibid. Albert Wohlstetter was a consultant and senior strategist for the RAND Corporation from 1951 to 1963 and is known today for his theories on nuclear proliferation and mutually-assured destruction. He is also known as a seminal figure in the neoconservative movement. For more about Wohlstetter and his affiliation with design circles as well as his dealings with Meyer Schapiro, see Pamela M. Lee, "Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War, and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism" October No. 138 (Fall, 2011), 15-36
[23] U.S. Patent No. 2,590,464 (March 2, 1946).
[24] Ibid.
[25] U.S. Patent No. 2,355,192 (May 30, 1942). The principal reason for this was to shield both Wachsmann and Gropius from any personal legal or pecuniary liabilities incurred by the General Panel Corporation. The assigning of all interests to a corporation or business association is fairly commonplace for these reasons. For more about Wachsmann’s and Gropius’ Packaged House System, see Wachsmann, The Turning Point of Building: Structure and Design (New York: Reinhold, 1961 (translation of Wendepunkt in Bauen [Wiesbaden: Krausskopf Verlag, 1959) and Michael Tower, “The Packaged House System (1941-1952)” Perspecta 34 (2003), 20-27.
[26] In 1943, along with Erich Mendelsohn, Raymond and Wachsmann were both employed by the Standard Oil Development Company and the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service to design “Typical German and Japanese Structures” at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah to test the efficacy of the brand-new AN-M69-X napalm incendiary bomb. For more on this project, see Enrique Ramirez, “Fata Morgana” Thresholds No. 33 Form(alisms) (July 2008), and “Erich Mendelsohn at War” Perspecta 41: Grand Tour (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008), 83-91. I have also written about this project, albeit in a more interpretative manner in “A Sphinx in Utah’s Desert” <http://www.aggregat456.com/2009/12/sphinx-in-utah-desert.html> and “An Ithaca of Sorts” <http://www.aggregat456.com/2010/06/ithaca-of-sorts.html>.
[27] For a brief overview of Fieser’s involvement, see Ramirez, “The Harvard Candle” <http://www.aggregat456.com/2011/03/harvard-candle.html>.
[28] U.S. Patent No. 2,606,107 (November 1, 1943).
[29] Ibid.
[30] The statutory language enabling this type of assignment is as follows: “Applications for patent, patents, or any interest therein, shall be assignable in law by an instrument in writing. The applicant, patentee, or his assigns or legal representatives may in like manner grant and convey an exclusive right under his application for patent, or patents, to the whole or any specified part of the United States. A certificate of acknowledgment under the hand and official seal of a person authorized to administer oaths within the United States, or, in a foreign country, of a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States or an officer authorized to administer oaths whose authority is proved by a certificate of a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States, or apostille of an official designated by a foreign country which, by treaty or convention, accords like effect to apostilles of designated officials in the United States, shall be prima facie evidence of the execution of an assignment, grant or conveyance of a patent or application for patent” 35 U.S.C. § 261. Other patents that borrow from Fieser’s application offer similar language. See John A. Southern, Lloyd J. Roth, Francis J. Licata, and Joseph Cunder, “Fuel Compositions and Their Preparation” U.S. Patent No. 2,570,990 (April 26, 1944) and Jerome Goldenson and Leonard Cohen, “Thickener for Hydrocarbon Fuels” U.S. Patent No. 2,769,697 (April 29. 1953).

"I think I'll call it America" / I said as we hit land"
-Bob Dylan (né Robert Allen Zimmerman), Hibbing High School, Class of 1959 [1]

Dear Reader, for this inaugural excursion into the American landscape, indulge me for a moment and let me parse the above epigram. If your tastes gravitated once towards the mythical and legendary, this brief quote may cause you to recall a series of stories and images, of the Mayflower, an oaken sloop dashed upon a rocky Massachusetts coast, of Colonies of the Bay and Lost varieties, of Myles Standish standing proud, or even of the Wampanaog emissary Tisquantum planting oily mossbunker in the Plymouth loam. You may even imagine the leathery boot with rusted lachets making transition from gunwale to granite, with a weatherbeaten William Bradford in oilskin frock declaring the visto unfurling before his eyes a map made real, of meridians and parallels, hachures and rosaventorum—all becoming trees and sand. He thinks he’ll call it America, so the epigram goes, with nary a mention of Vespucci or Vinland, at least not yet.

Here are the beginnings not of America, but of “America,” words belonging to one “Captain Arab,” the Captain of the Mayflower who is not ingrained in our historical consciousness as much as he is part of our pop cultural landscape. He is a character in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” Bob Dylan’s raucous send-up of the American originary myth from his 1965 album, Bringing it All Back Home. It is a song known as much for its false start—Dylan begins to sing “I was riding on the Mayflower/When I thought I spied some land”[2] before breaking down in laughter and having to restart the song—as for its fabulous concoction of a New World replete with French bistros (staffed by angry servers and exploding cookware), English hot dog stands, “hobo sailors,” malfunctioning telephone booths, bowling alleys, and even a cameo appearance by a jail bound Christopher Columbus. This is not the duck-jacketed Dylan we see on the hazy cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, huddled with Suze Rotolo on the corner of Jones and West 4th Streets—as idyllic an image of Greenwich Village as we will ever know. This is Electric Dylan, appearing rakish and squinty-eyed on the cover of Bringing it All Back Home, sitting on a musty couch in a cluttered living room in Woodstock, New York with a reclining Sally Grossman. They are surrounded by mid-sixties ephemera, from Robert Johnson and Françoise Hardy albums, to a Time magazine cover featuring Lyndon B. Johnson, and even a wayward Fallout Shelter sign. (Aficionados of this album will recall that the original version this photo shoot reveals a book at Dylan’s feet—the Bollingen edition of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, the same version that inspired Philip K. Dick to write The Man in the High Castle three years before.) “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” finds our former folk revivalist about to become the Stratocaster-wielding De Tocqueville we know from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival—parrying his sonic parting shot on unsuspecting ears thanks to a rollicking version of “Maggie’s Farm” (the third track from Bringing it All Back Home), barely drowning out the audience’s caterwauling.

This historical comparison is not far-fetched. Something like the booing at Newport can be found, perhaps not surprisingly, in some of the first travelogues of the American landscape. In 1709, the English explorer John Lawson wrote A New Voyage to Carolina, an account of his experiences among the Catawba and Waxhaw tribes in North and South Carolina. He took keen interest in how their warriors “have a Tune, which is allotted for that Dance; as, if it be a War-Dance, they have a warlike Song, wherein they express, with all the Passion and Vehemence imaginable, what they intend to do with their Enemies; how they will kill, roast, sculp, beat, and make Captive, such and such Numbers of them; and how many they have destroy'd before.”[3] Alexis De Tocqueville, in the first chapter of the first book of his Democracy in America (1835), would map his own interest in song to the physical “Outward Configuration of North America”—a true description of the North American landscape on par with Lawson’s. Pages of rapturous prose evoking everything from the tributaries feeding into the Great Lakes, spreading into “vast marshes, losing themselves in the watery labyrinth,” to the fertile valleys between the Alleghenies and the “godlike” Mississippi, find De Tocqueville noting how the “Indian knew how to live without needs, suffer without complaint, and die with a song on his lips.”[4] I am partial to the version of this passage appearing in the 1835 Henry Reeve translation—“The Indian could live without wants, suffer without complaint, and pour out his death-song at the stake.”[5]  In his notes, Reeve traces De Tocqueville’s knowledge of Indian death rattles to Jesuit writer Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix’s history of the French-Indian war, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (1744). Reeve, a cautious documenter as there ever was (he was a lawyer and friend of the blind Swiss naturalist, François Huber), also noted Charlevoix’s account of French explorer Samuel de Champlain’s travels with Iroquois and Huron war parties, yet did not delve into a well-known part of this episode: while one war party was torturing its prisoners, Champlain, who refused to participate initially, resolved any moral dilemma by ending one captive’s suffering with a coup de grâce to the skull with the bloodied stock of an arquebus. Instead, Reeve gave ear to a Huron warrior berating a prisoner for “all the cruelties which he had practised upon the warriors of their nation,” who, before the violent deed, tells the prisoner “that if he had any spirit he would prove it by singing.” Thanks to Reeve, the whole incident becomes a kind of musical commentary. The Huron warrior “immediately chanted forth his death-song, and then his war-song, and all the songs he knew, ‘but in a very mournful strain,’ says Champlain, who was not then aware that all savage music has a melancholy character.”[6]  Could this be one of the earliest descriptions of the Blues? It would not be hard to imagine a Lawson or De Tocqueville, in essence musical anthropologists in disguise, transforming into an Alan Lomax, plumbing the depths of the wilderness to catalogue the distinct strains of a musical America, searching along the Mississippi for the elusive blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who would, of course, haunt Dylan’s early work.

Dylan would later craft a kind of musical theogony, casting Johnson as an Alabama Athena or Mississippi Minerva, “a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor.”[7] And such talk of crazed wanderings, of lightning bolts and explosions of mad genius should remind us that Dylan’s “Arab” is a cipher for that other famous American seagoer, the mercurial, monomaniacal, “ungodly, god-like” Captain Ahab of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). Like Leo Marx, we would declare Melville’s seaborne yarns as constituting that most American of conventions, the landscape tale, incorporating everything from a young harpoonist in Typee securing passage “across an inscrutable Pacific wilderness” to the whaleship Pequod leaving a foamy wake like “the track of a railroad crossing a continent.”[8] Now, the landscape metaphor is more deeply ingrained, literally. Ishmael, who has assumed Moby-Dick’s narrative mantle only because he has “lived to tell the tale,” considers a deep, grim significance under Ahab’s impassioned fervor: the Captain’s “full lunacy subsided not, but deepingly contracted; like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge.”[9] The riverine metaphor, with its relentless directionality, suggests something of a sinister corridor raging through the mad captain’s designs, a mania perhaps best encapsulated in his tête-à-tête with Moby-Dick, “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,”[10]  a moment punctuated by the launch of blood-tempered harpoon. “Arab” has no pretensions, and playing electric bard to Melville’s Ishmael, Dylan sings:

He said, “Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads”
Just then this cop comes down the street
Crazy as a loon
He throw us all in jail
For carryin’ harpoons.[11]

(Figure 1) “Views of Centerville” (Source: L.L. Taylor, ed. Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1913), n.p.)

From the root of our national psyche, an Exhibit of sorts. The evidence is probative, sure, but what other admissible facts, what other morsels of conjured truth are there to be found? To our esteemed Jury of Peers, to this coterie of readers whose only task is to take in this skein of confabulation, let me assure you that this Exhibit is real, but only in the sense that it is something that occurs in space and time. Like Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom (né Virag) in the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), we levitate into air, beyond the stratosphere, holding our breaths as satellites and space junk whir by our geostationary lockstep. We peer into the cerulean and phthalo patchwork world below and there, a surface once familiar rendered now into a joining of parallel and meridians. Decumanus and cardo intersect somewhere in the glacial moraines of southern Iowa, among the hills the Sioux call paha.

Rivers of anthracite once flowed underneath this rolling, hummocky prospect like blackened veins. On the surface, railroad lines scored the land’s carboniferous circulatory system with iron spurs. Steam locomotives bear their bills of lading, emissaries of shipping lines that read like an abecedarium of Midwestern capital: Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; Keokuk & Western; Iowa and St. Louis. Affluents of coal and iron join at the headlands of the Mystic Coal Bed, near a city founded in 1846, first as “Chaldea,” a riverine name, reminiscent of that alluvial flat where the Tigris and Euphrates once joined, now a settlement attracting a host of New Englanders, Central Europeans and Scandinavians, as well as profiteers seeking bounty from individual treaties with Sac, Fox, and Winnebago tribes in the wake of the Black Hawk War. Less than a year later, on January 18, 1847, a law issued by the first Iowa legislature proclaimed that this town, the seat of Appanoose County, be renamed Centerville (instead of “Senterville,” for the Tennessean William Tandy Senter, long admired by the city’s founder, the surveyor Jonathon F. Stratton). Stratton himself was an expert in all things Centerville, and in 1878, along with other early Iowans, became one of several sources for an oral, comprehensive history of Appanoose County.

Of these men, Colonel James Wells, a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War, became known as one of Iowa’s most famous homesteaders. Around 1839, he built a cabin in “Section 16, Township 67, Range 16” in the County, a platted quadrant near the berm where the Missouri, Iowa & Nebraska railroad passed over the Indian River. And three years later, walking near a cabin owned by one “A. Kirkendall,” Wells spotted a man sitting at the base of a tree with his torso slumped forward. He approached the body and noticed a small, charred bullet hole rimmed with dried blood in the middle of the man’s forehead. He must not have been aware of the marksman sighting him from a distance before the fatal shot—Wells found a pencil and small, lined ledger book in the man’s hands with entries resembling “the notes of someone looking up lands; but as the township lines had not been laid, this seemed inexplicable.”[1] This was the county’s first recorded death, a plot line braided into a larger, malevolent act of fiction, for “It is barely possible that the man had been riding away a horse not his own, had been followed, captured and put to death, and that the entries had been made by his executioners, in order to lead possible inquiry on a false scent.”[2] Plot line is no different from plat line, as Wells’ homesteading is also a supreme act of fiction, a conjuring of something tangible from what once was a series of orthogonal lines on paper.

Such narratives could be skewed, literally. In his Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa (1913), L.L. Taylor, a former Justice of the Peace for the County, claimed that a “brief historical sketch” would suffice as a “fitting introduction to the history of the young and thriving state of Iowa.”[3] Yet the editor of the 1878 history of Appanoose County informed the reader, “In the absence of written records, it has often occurred that different individuals have given sincere, honest, but, nevertheless, somewhat conflicting, versions of the same events, and it has been a matter of great delicacy to harmonize these conflicting statements.”[4] For his own history of the County, Taylor included photographic plates (Figure 1), taken from the tops of buildings or at street level, of various locales within Centerville. Places like South Eighteenth Street and even the Shawville Mine appear devoid of people. The exception is the photograph of North Main Street, capturing a gathering of people and horses around a trolley making a slow jug-handle turn into the street, the only photograph that is not clipped or placed at an odd angle. These six “Views of Centerville” are distributed roughly into dual columns, yet some of the images are rotated and layered upon each other. It is far removed from the rough 4x4 grid of townships that give Appanoose County its fixed, quadrangular shape. These two images, map and photograph, offer competing narratives of Centerville. And yet the obsessive regularity of the Appanoose grid does not necessarily hint at any kind of veracity.


(Figure 2) Map of Appanoose County, Iowa (Source: Western Historical Society, The History of Appanoose County, Iowa: Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c., a Biographical Directory of Citizens, War Record of Its Volunteers in the Late Rebellion, General and Local Statistics, Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men, History of the Northwest, History of Iowa, Map of Appanoose County, Constitution of the United States, Miscellaneous Matters, &c. (Chicago: Western Historical Society, 1878), n.p.


Centerville, however, is a name that hints to space, location, and orientation. It is the middle of a grid, a town in the cartographic center of Appanoose County. (Figure 2) Centerville finds its kindred, toponymical spirit in Interzone, a name given by another Midwesterner, William Seward Burroughs, as shorthand for the International Zone in Tangiers, an exotic destination in our literary imagination that, like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria, becomes a code for something illicit. Whereas Durrell’s Alexandria became a purgatory for lovesick expatriates, Interzone was something much darker, last stop in a circuit for dead-eyed junkies craving for pyrethrum (distilled from the crushed flower heads of the Dalmatian Chrysanthemum, T. cinerariifolium), seeking night passage across the rachial divides of the Hindu Kush and into the incense-filled foyer of the Hotel Massilia on Rue Marco Polo, marking their transit across the continents as if dragging a leadened spike across a map. Two such itineraries begin their convergence, gliding between the Galeries Lafayette and storefronts advertising passage across the Strait of Gibraltar, on to the Boulevard Pasteur and intersecting at the Hotel Rembrandt in the nouvelle ville de Tanger. It was there that Burroughs saw Carnet de Voyage au Sahara, a show featuring English painter Brion Gysin’s aquarelles made in the North African dune seas, among the seif and barkhan. The two met briefly, with Gysin describing Burroughs as trailing “long vines” of peyote plant and adorned by an “odd blue light” emanating from his hat.[5] Another convergence occurred in 1960 in Paris, where Gysin introduced Burroughs to the Dadaist penchant for composition via the “cut-up” and “fold-in,” a method of writing by literally manipulating physical scraps of text to conjure sentences, paragraphs, and even entire novels. Burroughs embraced the cut-up technique only shortly after he dispatched his first and most well known novel, Naked Lunch (1959), a dense, hallucinatory journey through the belly of America, via Tangier, that ends with an augur’s instructions to the reader, a channeling from a near-future: “You can cut into The Naked Lunch at any intersection point.”[6]

In reaching this and subsequent “intersection points,” Burroughs transforms writing into a kind of autobiographical transport whose docket conveys grim spectra spanning everything from an addicts’ aphorism to a dopers’ needle. In a typical jeremiad, perhaps written under an oneiric haze of chloral hydrate, Burroughs channels his grandfather, William S. Burroughs I, founder of the American Arithmometer Company, invoking something of a junky’s notion of eternal return when he writes, “So listen to Old Uncle Bill Burroughs who invented the Burroughs Adding Machine Regulator Gimmick on the Hydraulic Jack Principle no matter how you jerk the handle result is always the same for given co-ordinates.”[7] Unlike grandfather Burroughs the First, famous for his hardline drawings, etchings, and centers rendered with sharpened styluses under the mirrored arc of a microscope, Burroughs opted for something more expansive: “In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, […] a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed.”[8] This mania for maps and mapmaking would continue in The Ticket That Exploded (1962), a true “cut-up” novel, a science fiction nightmare where giant crabs roam the landscape at the behest of the nefarious, intergalactic enterprise known as the Nova Mob. In this novel, the autobiographical and cartographical collapse into a single line of text, a moment when Burroughs maps his family history onto his own fictions: “Word is an array of calculating machines from Florida up to the old North Pole—Image track goes with it.”[9] Indeed, Burroughs jettisons linear narratives in favor of something more like a film unspooling to the end only to spool back to the beginning in an ouroboros-like manner. The dead man slouched in front of Kirkendall’s cabin, trepanned in order to unburden a secret of Iowa history, who finds a parallel in Burroughs shooting his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in the head during a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City on January 6, 1951—a montage connecting, compressing, and circulating images from disparate histories. Yet as critic Mary McCarthy observed in her review of Naked Lunch, Burroughs “has no use for history, which is all ‘ancient history,’” a moment reminiscent of another doper, the nefarious Wimpe, salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH (a subsidiary of I.G. Farben) in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), divulging to the Red Army operative Vaslav Tchitcherine that his role is not to interpret history, but rather to “Die to help History grow to its predestined shape.”[10] Like Bloom and Dedalus, Burroughs levitates into outer space, a “planetary perspective” that reveals another form, one where history is a “sloughed-off skin” that “shrivels into a mere wrinkling or furrowing of the surface as in an aerial relief-map or one of those pieced-together aerial photographs known in the trade as mosaics.”[11]

(Figure 3) Dust Jacket to Traveller’s Companion Series No. 91, William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (Paris: Olympia, 1962) (Source: TRB Booksellers, Albany, NY)




“[C]ut the prerecordings into air into thin air”[12]:  so concludes The Ticket That Exploded with a statement that is not of the air, but all-too-grounded, a reminder that the authorial act, the committing of words to the page, is really no different than cutting and pasting them on the flat surface of a page. Stories, characters, and fictions may be communicated from hands to paper via a keystroke on the ribbon of an Antares or Hermes Rocket typewriter (or with a microphone that commits the author’s words as magnetized particles onto cellulose acetate, spun through a Nagra recorder’s tape head), yet they are a heaped into a jumble of words, sentences, and paragraphs that become something recognizable, something readable. What is a novel but a mosaic of words, a pact between author and reader that the stochastic jumble of text, the endless non-sequiturs, the breakneck changes in rhythm and pacing, will resemble something like a story, one that makes up for a lack of resolution with a relentless direction and energy? Narrative becomes a topographical construct, a bailiwick with its own features, courses, and jurisdictions. It is a world unto itself, its essence captured on the dust cover to Book No. 91 of the Traveller’s Companion Series of Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press (Figure 3), the 1962 first edition of The Ticket That Exploded. Here, an aerial photograph, presumably of a World War One-era French countryside, reveals a silvery, hoary ground of convex, concave, and cyclic polygons stitched together randomly. It covers only half of the dust cover, with a simulated tear delimiting the border between image and text, an allusion to cutting-up, and underneath, “The Ticket That Exploded” appears in red grease pencil with Burroughs’ name typeset in all caps. Aerial photography and cut-up writing here become literary equivalents for the first time, a terrain where two modernist tropes—the aerial regard surplombant and fragmented, multiperspective writing—intersect to create their own terrain. More evidence of this appeared in 1964, when Burroughs published a small single-page cut-up entitled “Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning Warning” (Figure 4) for the experimental literary magazine My Own Mag. At the very top of the page, an admonition, also typeset in all caps, refers to aerial nuclear bombardment, while at the bottom, sentence fragments assemble into an 8x4 grid, “to be read every which way.” Yet the numbered columns point to a contradiction, one where the orthogonal arrangement of meridians and parallels results in something that is not regular, not ordered, but produced and fortuitous. This has always been the case with maps and aerial photographs, avatars for an incontestable way of looking at the world, an ironclad epistemology that is but a kind of highly-attenuated, high-altitude abstraction succumbing to all the vagaries and caprices of interpretation. As the sociologist Hans Speier noted in 1941, aerial views and maps are instances where science and technology “become subservient to the demands of effective symbol manipulation.”[13] An assembly of plats into an aerial mosaic, the identification of “Section 16, Township 67, Range 16” in Appanoose County—these may correspond to a cartographic reality, yet they are fictions that appease our desire to conjure order out of disorder.

(Figure 5) (Top) Wire, 154,, 33 1/3 rpm (EMI Records, 1979) (Bottom) Wire, Map Ref 41°N 93°W, 45 rpm (Harvest Records, 1970)

Buoyed above the Midwest in geosynchronous orbit, we once again peer below through our splayed feet at another series of lines, intersecting slightly north of Centerville, in Monroe County, Iowa, a point between Chariton and Ottumwa, on the asphalt surface of U.S. Highway 34, the Red Bull Highway, named after the 34th Infantry Division, the first Army unit deployed to Europe during World War II. There are even coordinates: 41°N 93°W, or simply, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” which is the fourth track of the second side of English band Wire’s 1979 album 154. (Figure 5) Recall vocalist Colin Newman’s words in the first verse, a reminder of what is underneath the North American grid:

Straining eyes try to understand
The works, incessantly in hand
The carving and paring of the land
The quarter square, the graph divides
Beneath the rule, a country hides [14]

With this evocation of the telltale Jeffersonian grid firmly in place, now listen to what is “beneath.” Now, carve and pare the Ampex tapes, cut the prerecordings into air into thin air acetate inscribed and sprinkled with magnetized particles corresponding to the peaks and valleys of an audio recording. Take out the strands of horsehair from your violin’s bow. Replace with a strip of tape, a recording of William S. Burroughs’ reading the words “LISTEN TO MY HEARTBEAT.” Replace your violin’s bridge with an amplified, magnetized tape head. (Figure 6) Push and pull the bow, collé, détaché, louré… until the author’s words become elongated and slowed down in sonic space. Now, listen as another singer, actually an artist, Laurie Anderson, also from the Midwest, enunciates, “Deep in the heart of darkest America. Home of the Brave. Ha! Ha! Ha! You've already paid for this. Listen to my heart beat.”[15] Landscapes become images. Images become words. And words recorded, cut-up, splice and reassemble to create a fictional America.

(Figure 6) Laurie Anderson, Tape-Bow Violin, from For Instants: Part 5, Amsterdam: De Appel, 1977 (Source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Please Come to the Show: Invitations and Event Flyers from the MoMA Library, http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/please_come_show/) 
From Earth orbit down to the depths of “darkest America” lurking somewhere underneath its patchwork topographies, from handwritten plats and grids inscribed into the first county registers in Appanoose County, Iowa, and moving forward to a more recent past where dead authors come to life as voices bowed across electric violins, consider the lines journeyed, the paths traversed. We can use any number of devices to describe these spatial and temporal transits, from lines of longitude and latitude to timelines. These lines meet in locales recognizable because of names like Centerville or titles like “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W.” We can even arrange these lines spatially, an ordered logic where lines marking changes in vertical altitude and passages from past to present to future time become vectors, and their intersecting planes form, of all things, a structure. And of this structure, let us give it a name. “Fiction” has a nice ring to it.

_______________________________

Notes

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Pidgin Magazine's "Fiction" issue from 2013. Many thanks to Nick Risteen for allowing this slightly odd piece of writing to see the light of day.

[1] Western Historical Society, The History of Appanoose County, Iowa: Containing a History of the County, Its Cities, Towns, &c., a Biographical Directory of Citizens, War Record of Its Volunteers in the Late Rebellion, General and Local Statistics, Portraits of Early Settlers and Prominent Men, History of the Northwest, History of Iowa, Map of Appanoose County, Constitution of the United States, Miscellaneous Matters, &c. (Chicago: Western Historical Society, 1878), 334.
[2] Ibid.
[3] L.L. Taylor, ed. Past and Present of Appanoose County, Iowa: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement (Chicago: S.J. Clarke, 1913), 1.
[4] Western Historical Society, Preface to The History of Appanoose County, Iowa, n.p.
[5] Brion Gysin, Let The Mice In (New York: Something Else Press, 1973), 8.
[6] William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1992 [1959]), 203.
[7] Burroughs, Introduction to Naked Lunch, xviii-xix.
[8] Burroughs, “The Future of the Novel” (1964), in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan, eds. Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 294.
[9] Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (New York: Grove Wiedenfeld, 1994 [1962]), 147.
[10] Mary McCarthy, “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe,” The New York Review of Books, Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1, 1963), n.p. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Viking, 1973), 715.
[11] McCarthy, "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe," n.p.
[12] Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, 217.
[13] Hans Speier, “Magic Geography”, Social Research, 8:1/4 (1941), 313.
[14] Graham Lewis, Colin Newman, and B.C. Gilbert, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” by Wire, in 154, EMI, 1979, 33 rpm.
[15] Laurie Anderson, “Sharkey’s Day,” in Mister Heartbreak, Warner Bros., 1984, 33 rpm. For her performance of “Late Show,” from her concert film, Home of The Brave (1986), Anderson played a tape-bow violin with a recording of William S. Burroughs’ saying “Listen to my heartbeat.”

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation (1898) is a study of illumination and intimacy. The angel Gabriel appears as a shaft of amber light, brightening the room where a young Mary humbly sits. We take in what others have already noticed. Mary appears all too young, free of any kind of religious adornment. The light casts a noonish shadow, shortened as if at vernal equinox. Hanging carmine and burgundy tapestry protecting against pockmarked walls; unkempt floor rug barely covering the cobbled floor; lapis lazuli gown issuing over a roughly-hewn wooden chest; clay urns; an oil lamp whose flickering barely registers against the glowing visitant: these are all known, and yet what is truly striking about the painting is the way it captures a moment of intense intimacy. Mary is learning that she will give birth to the Son of God, and Tanner’s choice of warm, gilded hues seems at odds with the actual moment, an annunciation as expansive and radiating as it is hushed and secretive.

Mary does not avert her gaze. She stares at a point above the glimmering, somewhere beyond the picture frame. Her eyes remain intelligent and searching, committed to an act of seeing familiar to us across various registers. All are premised on knowing more things, more people, more insights. As we “look down” on the offensive or “look askance” at a problem, we also “look up” words and “look up to” people: expressions that associate seeing with a specific vantage point. Or, the very objects and images that capture our sights reveal something different or surprising once we orient ourselves at various angles.


This is one reason why I find William Eggleston’s work so arresting. His dye-transfer color photographs of supermarket aisles, car lots, hairdressing salons, and gas stations in the American South are mundane and meticulous. The subjects may be humdrum; a considered look reveals that they are everything but. For example, in Untitled (n.d.), a woman talks to a friend at a diner. At least, this is what we think is happening. Taken at eye-level, the photograph frames the back of the woman’s head, a greying bulb of symmetrical whorls restrained by clear, flower-topped combs. Her pink gingham dress reveals even more than what we think. The clasp on the necklace was once aligned on the center of the back of her neck, now only slightly off from the zipper top stops. This accentuates the difference in the angles between neckline and shoulder: the woman is shifting, perhaps in mid-sentence, or even covering her mouth as she is laughing at her companion’s joke. The woman is seated along the same axis her companion, each holds their cigarette with their left hand, a mirroring suggesting the two are familiar, comfortable. In this image, there is conversation without content, and yet the setting, dimly lit with seafoam green booths and dark, ruddy brickwork, reveals an intimate communiqué inside a Tennessee diner, on any night, at any time.



Should we elevate ever so slightly and train our eyes towards the ceiling, we may see something like Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi (1973). Featured on the album cover of Big Star’s Radio City, the blood red ceiling in the photograph is remarkable because it is, for lack of a better term, so red. The photograph signaled Eggleston’s true arrival into the art-photographic establishment, announcing a new artistic potential for high-saturated, dye transfer color photography. Like his other works, this photographs captures many details, from the unfinished mouldings to the posters showing sexual positions. Eggleston took this photograph supposedly inside a brothel, and though there is much to parse here in that regard, I am drawn to the light bulb. This is not necessarily because it appears as a kind of power node or nerve center, an object that conducts electricity and life into the room with cords and wires, but rather the opposite, for the bulb appears dark, and the only light in the room is the one coming from Eggleston’s camera. In fact, we are so close to the painted ceiling that it reflects the camera flash. A similar flashing appears in Untitled (Blue Ceiling), and yet here, the effect is wholly different. Other than the obvious difference in color—the blue paint does not appear as garish as the red ceiling in Greenwood, Mississippi—the light bulb in the blue room also radiates cords, wires, and lanyards, and yet it is lit, adding a bit of ambiance to the camera flash even if it still creates the harshest of shadows. Were we to tilt our heads downwards, we confront Eggleston’s Untitled (n.d.), a photograph of a small motel room whose only source of light comes from the fluorescent fixtures mounted above the bed. We are also drawn into the light, a soothing glow that gives this room an intimate, tranquil aspect. In these three photographs, light emanates and suffocates. Through these attenuated vantage points in cramped spaces, the light announces something previously unknown.




Following the light, I note that the illumination in this last image of Eggleston’s recalls the glowing, bulb-like head in René Magritte’s The Pleasure Principle (Portrait of Edward James) (1937). And my goal is not to use this image for invoking something like “enlightenment,” a term with its own historical and intellectual baggages. Rather, I use Magritte’s curious portrait of Edward James, with its head exploding into a burst of radiating light, to remind (at least) myself, that ideas propagate outward. Like light, they are reflected back onto ourselves or refracted in other directions. I would like to think that this propagating light is a metaphor for writing, a practice that has been all too absent from my life of late, and which I embrace again.

Spread from Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (Source: The Newberry Library)

1.

Ponce, Puerto Rico was the world I once knew best. It was a small city nestled on a leeward coastal plain, intensely hot, strangely arid, and occasionally dusty. And within this world, there was our house. Small, marble-floored, with brises-soleil and a large, concrete carport with black, cast-iron gates, it sat on the end of a cul-de-sac, Calle C D-12, on a bluff overlooking a large sugar cane field. A large Honduras pine marked the entrance to our driveway. From there, we watched as crop dusters strafed the field, the combustive whine of rotary engines sharpening in pitch as the pilots nosed their machines over the edge of the bluff, slatted wings trailing ribbons of atomized insecticide that descended on the houses in a murky, cooling cloud. Then there were the pre-harvest burn-offs—large, controlled fires that singed the leaves off the cane stalks and left a forest of draggled pikes. One never saw the flames during the day. There was only a grey billowing that smelled like burnt trash. The heated winds carried blackened slivers of ash that rained and dissolved into the air above. At night, if you looked hard enough, you could see a corona of flames through the haze. And then there were rats, scampering up the bluffs, dun phalanxes escaping the fires. Once over the edge, they helped themselves to the pigeon coop in our back yard, leaving slurries of feathers, blood, and eggshell in their inroad.

On those days without smoke, insecticide, rats (or, once even, a late-night temblor that caused the iron gates on the carport to issue an infernal clanging)—that is, on most days—it was a world for the senses. We drank lime water underneath a hurricane fence canopy braided with bougainvillea and Indian mallow, a technicolor refuge from the sun’s cruel transit. Weekends were for excursions by station wagon. Driving inland, to where the coastal plains sloped up into the humid mountains, we went to a company picnic in an abandoned sugar cane farmhouse. Land crabs scampered along dilapidated floorboards, making a clicking sound as they sidled onto the manicured, virisdescent lawns. From dusk until darkest night, the air was noisy with animal banter, from a cane toad’s solitary staccato, to the coquí’s onomatopoetic mating call. A trip through a winding road at dusk in Adjuntas led to an emergency stop by a creek bed to tend to my carsickness, revealing a scene of wonder: jittery constellations of glowing fireflies and click beetles hovering slightly above the ground, a sight rivaled only by that of a spear fisherman jumping into a phosphorescent bay at night, emerging lambent and wraith-like, as if outlined by St. Elmo’s Fire.

I often played by myself, either outside or in. And if I was not busying myself with die-cast cars and airplanes, I was always opening books. I was reading at age 2, but cannot remember the act of doing to so. I preferred the images inside encyclopedia or issues of National Geographic, searching for fighter jets, space capsules, solar systems and galaxies, anything that could be reproduced on a notebooks or graph paper with pen or pencil. That was one way in that I engaged with the world outside my home. Then there were times when my mother would wash the marble floors inside or the smooth, concrete carport with a garden hose, leaving pools of water. I would find one that was large enough and lie in it face down, turning and lowering my head so I could submerge my ear into the cool liquid. I listened as the world outside became a watery roar. The carport was my planetary conch shell, amplifying the surging of faraway oceans.

2.

It is now May 1979, and I am in Moss Bluff, Louisiana. We moved here in February, to this little town north of Lake Charles, where my father took a position as an operations manager at a chemical plant. Our house was in a newish development, each plot of land carved out of a longleaf pine forest, with ditches running along either side of built and unbuilt streets. During the hot and hazy afternoons, my brother and I would run out to these ditches and check our crawfish traps. We evaded horseflies and if feeling mischievous, would catch as many dragonflies as possible, folding their wings back so we could look closely at their glazed eyes and alien mandibles. One of our neighbors had an impressive collection of reptiles, and an equally impressive swimming pool, with an unusually springy diving board that would cause panic in even the most forgiving of home insurance adjusters. We rode dirt bikes into the pine forest, jumping off ramps fashioned out of planks and logs. My room had a set of French doors that opened up into a glen, and beyond that, the hazy effluvia from a nearby bayou.

Only a couple months earlier, I was in a second-grade classroom, staring through jalousie windows as a midday cloud burst overcame the green mountains. My new classroom had fake wood paneling and clerestory windows that offered no views outside. Even if they did, the scenery that would have been revealed was altogether different: a two-lane road with gas stations, strip malls, used car dealerships, and bait-and-tackle stores. My mother drove us into town on that same road. I pressed the black bakelite buttons on the radio, switching between the FM and AM bands, trying to find a station that was in English. Puerto Rico may have been remote and surrounded by water, but Western Louisiana was a portal to the world. I spoke Spanish at home, stumbled with English at school, and took French grammar lessons before lunch. Our teacher was a tall woman from Belgium (or at least that was my recollection) who wore long, grey wool skirts. She began each lesson by slowly unrolling a large piece of purple felt that she hung from the blackboard. From a canvas sack, she produced velcro-backed black-and-white cutout drawings of objects that would be covered in that day's vocabulary lessons. As we repeated "Je conduis la voiture," she stuck the car on the felt, adding trees, houses, and people. When it came teaching us "La Marseillaise" and other songs, she replaced these with the French flag, birds without tailfeathers, and children sleeping in beds.

On a warm midmorning, sometime during May 1979, my second grade teacher appeared at our door bearing a gift: a hardbound copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

3.

Call it Book Zero, the first I ever knew of as “a book.” It was not so much a bunch of pages with words in a language I was struggling with, but a thing that one person gave to another, evidence of an exchange, something one did to be nice. I was not exactly sure what the occasion was for this book, but giving it to me was as important as the book itself. I had no idea who Huckleberry Finn was, or for that matter, Mark Twain. I knew that Louisiana was close to Mississippi, and yet I had an inkling that the book would be forever linked to this particular place and this time. If, as Emily Dickinson counsels, “There is no frigate like a book,” then this one given to me on a hot afternoon in Southwestern Louisiana was more fata morgana than Flying Dutchman. It was an airy, fleeting prologue to the worlds beyond bedroom and printed page, an illusion so tangible and affecting, so altering.

[Note: this is the piece I read aloud at Horizon House in Indianapolis, Monday, 28 September, as part of the Public Collection initiative. For more information, visit http://www.thepubliccollection.org/ . Many thanks to Stuart Hyatt for allowing me to be part of this wonderful project]

Gaston Tissandier's and Jacques Ducom's aerial photograph, from Hippolyte Meyer-Heine, La photographie en ballon et la téléphotographie (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899), 4.

Ducom’s and Tissandier’s aerial photograph, compared to a map of Paris, from Aimé Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899), 82-83.

Émile Wenz’s kite photograph, from Laussedat, “Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques: méthodes et instruments de dessin. Innovations principales proposées,” Annales du Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, publiées par les professeurs, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1902), n.p..

Abraham Bosse (1602/4-1676), “Les perspecteurs,” engraving from Manière universelle de M. Desargues pour pratiquer la perspective par petit pied, comme le géométral (Paris: 1648).

Engravings of Demeliorem using a graphometer, from Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques, 62.

Engravings demonstrating Danfrie’s surveying methods as applied to buildings, from Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques, 76-77.

Engraving showing topographical derivation of Santa Cruz Islands from a drawn elevation, from Charles-François Beautemps-Beaupré, Méthodes pour la levée et la construction des cartes et plans hydrographiques, publiées en 1808 (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1811), n.p.

Laussedat’s explanation of how camera lucida was used to draw the dome at Les Invalides, from Laussedat, “Les applications de la perspective au lever des plans: vues dessinées a la chambre claire—photographies,” Annales du Conservatoire des arts et métiers, publiées par les professeurs, Vol. 3,, No. 2 (1891), 316.

Diagrams showing derivation of plans from elevation drawings of Vincennes (top) and Mont Valerien (bottom), from Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes et le dessin topographiques, n.p.

Viollet-le-Duc, “Le téléiconographe,” Gazette des architectes et du bâtiment. Revue bi-mensuelle publiée sous la direction de MM. E. Viollet-le-Duc fils et A. de Baudot, architecte, Vol. 6, No. 20 (1868-1869). Collection, Drawing with Optical Instruments—Devices and Concepts of Visuality and Representation Collection, Max Planck Institute for the Historyof Science.

Laussedat’s illustration of riverbank drawn via balloon, from Laussedat, “Les applications au lever des plans. Vues dessinées a la chambre claire—photographies,” Annales du Conservatoire des arts et métiers, publiées par les professeurs, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1890), 316.

(Top) Poyet’s engraving of Laussedat’s télémetrographe, from Laussedat, “Les reconnaissances a grandes distances: le télémetrographe,” La nature No. 629 (20 June 1885), 40. (Bottom) Prussian troops, as seen through a télémetrographe, from Laussedat, Recherches sur les instruments, les méthodes, et le dessin topographiques, 118.

Iron structure for panorama, from Germain Bapst, Essai sur l’histoire des panoramas et des dioramas (Paris: Masson, 1891), 9.

mage describing the Philippoteaux’s surveying method in preparation for painting the Gettysburg cyclorama, from “The Cyclorama,” Scientific American (6 November 1885), 296.

Ritter’s perspectograph, from Édouard-Gaston Daniel Deville, Photographic Surveying Including the Elements of Descriptive Geometry and Perspective (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1895), 76).

Method for applying Deville’s “perspectometer,” from Deville, Photographic Surveying Including the Elements of Descriptive Geometry and Perspective, 88.

(Top) “Canadian Grid Method” using perspectometer, from Deville, Photographic Surveying Including the Elements of Descriptive Geometry and Perspective, n.p. (Bottom) Completed method from Center for Photogrammetric Training, “History of Photogrammetry” (2008), 10.

(Bottom) Image of Wetzlar cathedral, with arrow indicating where Meydenbauer almost fell down while taking measurements, from Jörg Albert, “Albrecht Meydenbauer: Pioneer of Photogrammetric Documentation of the Cultural Heritage,” Proceedings of the 18th International Symposium CIPA 2001 Potsdam (Germany), September 18-21, 2001. (Top) Example of Meydenbauer’s Plane-Table method, from Rudolf Meyer, Albrecht Meydenbauer: Baukunst in historischen Fotografien (Leipzig: VEB Fotokinverlag, 1985). Library and Study Centre, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

(Top_ Three-way drawing of Laussedat’s “Chambre claire photothéodolite, from Laussedat, “Les applications de la perspective au lever des plans: vues dessinées à la chambre claire,” Annales du Conservatoire des arts et métiers, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1891), n.p. (Bottom) Engraving of Laussedat’s phototheodolite, from Laussedat, “Les Applications de la perspective au lever des plans: vues dessinées à la chambre claire—photographies,” Annales du Conservatoire des arts et métiers, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1893), 287.

Nadar’s image of Paris from aboard the Géant, 1858.

Engraving from Réne Descartes, La dioptrique (1637).

(Left to Right) Dennis Wilson, Laurie Bird, and James Taylor, with a 1955 Chevrolet 210 Hardtop, from Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

It is easy to admire Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham’s 1971 inspired take on Los Angeles, once thought of as the most elusive of American cities. This book has a lot to answer for, especially in the way it expands the way we analyze and study the contemporary city. Indeed, it is hard to imagine this book existing independent of William Cronon’s rigorous spatial history of Chicago, born under the occluding signs of Karl Marx and Walter Christaller, or even Lars Lerup’s Duchamp-fueled fever dream of Houston, one that may leave you seeing skyscrapers as chocolate grinders and marine layers as “zoohemic canopies.”[1]

What in the hell have I just read? you may ask yourself, and this is why it is even easier to love Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, the 1972 BBC short documentary film that gives Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies visual grist for the literal mill and shows an avuncular, perhaps slightly stoned Banham taking a motorized gander around the so-called “Metropolis of the Future.” Now we know what the Plains of Id, Autopia, and Surfurbia look like, thank you very much. This paean to the technologically-mediated modern landscape resonates in an age when our primary means of knowing a city is not through the writings of a Cronon or a Lerup.

(And in the case of Los Angeles, the Thomas Guide is all but an antediluvian spiral-bound sheaf of grids and coordinates, gone by the way of the Dodo, Great Auk, or Sabre-Toothed Cat.)

Our reliance on smart phones and tablets for urban wayfinding is so common that it deserves only the most fleeting of mentions. Interfacing has become the new wayfinding, one brandishing its own peculiarities. The female voice on the Google Maps app can be too bossy, imploring you, “In 500 feet, TURN RIGHT.” Can we actually measure distance while staring ahead over a steering wheel? Indeed, that voice immediately takes me back to my eighth grade typing class, especially those moments when my teacher would demand that we type sentences, clackity-clack, in time to a record playing a kind of Lawrence Welk-ish champagne music with firecracker snares. Her voice was mellifluous, but not too much, barely containing a hair-trigger snarl that would uncoil the very instance you fucked up your keystroke. The female Google Maps voice is more forgiving—not as much as Scarlett Johansson's in Spike Jonze's Her (2013)—even while insisting that you turn around as she quickly reroutes your itinerary.

Banham’s guide to Los Angeles is the “Baede-kar Visitor Guidance System,” a technology that straddles centuries, at once evoking Karl Baedeker’s travel guides from the 19th century, as well as guidance systems for modern intercontinental ballistic missile—two completely different ways of “knowing” a city, one as destination, the other as target. The female voice issuing from the molded speakers of the “Baede-kar Visitor Guidance System” is more Siri-like and soothing, but lacking the latter’s notable cheekiness. It is a shame that we do not pay more attention to the “Baede-kar,” its voice, or for that matter, the various technologies on display in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. They create their own constellations, each gizmo or doohickey bringing its own origins and relationships to bear, making connections in time and space, revealing something about our own mediatic situation in the process.

Take, for instance, the opening scenes from Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Note how Banham, tweedy, with newsboy hat and giant sunglasses, walks from the Arrivals terminal at Los Angeles International Airport and boards a 1970 Pontiac Grand Prix Hardtop. And like in other films of this time, we immediately associate the driver with his car, each becoming the other. The Grand Prix Hardtop is a close cousin to the 1970 Pontiac GTO Judge that Warren Oates drives in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), vying for the attention of consumers of American Muscle, especially those who took a fancy to the 1968 Dodge Charger or Mustang GT 390 in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) (the last, of course, doing multiple star turns throughout San Francisco streets, Steve McQueen at the helm), or even the 1970 Dodge Challenger in Ricardo C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971). Jimmy Kowalski (Barry Newman), a Vietnam veteran, now driver on the professional and demolition circuits, is behind the wheel, although all the action scenes feature legendary stunt driver Carey Loftin, who wears a wig over his crash helmet.

Singer James Taylor (the “Driver”) drove the 1955 Chevrolet 210 in Two-Lane Blacktop. It had a glass nose and Plexiglas windows. It would make an encore performance as Bob Falfa’s (Harrison Ford’s) ride in American Graffiti (1973), now wearing a fiberglass body, a M22 Muncie transmission (known to Hot Rod enthusiasts as the “Rock Crusher”), and gear rings and pinion gears (in 4.88 ratio) repurposed from an Oldsmobile. Those who purchased More Fun In the New World (1983), the fourth studio album by Los Angeles punk-a-billy scenesters X, will recall a similar automotive inventory in “The New World,” the album’s opening track, when bassist John Doe and singer Exene Cervenka map out the various parts of an car assembly: “Flint Ford Auto, Mobile Alabama / Windshield Wipers, Buffalo, New York / Gary, Indiana, Don’t Forget the Motor City ...”[2]  In Two-Lane Blacktop, the “Driver’s” “Mechanic” was Dennis Wilson, better known as the drummer for The Beach Boys. One of their most beloved songs is “Little Deuce Coupe” (1953), with Brian Wilson singing, “She's ported and relieved and she's stroked and bored. / She'll do a hundred and forty with the top end floored.” [3] The Chevy is vain, thinking that the song is about her.[4]

A brief inventory of other sonic ephemera comes to mind. We can imagine these playing through FM album-oriented rock (AOR) stations, 8-tracks, and even cassette tapes and compact discs, not so much instances of car and driver melding, but of driver and music interfacing the same way as Banham and the “Baede-kar,” coursing sonic maps for our technological predicament, from Daniel Miller (aka The Normal) droning “Hear the crushing steel / Feel the steering wheel” in “Warm Leatherette” (1978), to Steve Kilbey, lead vocalist and bassist for The Church, singing, “Cut your life into the steel / Take your place behind the wheel / Watch the metal scene just peel away” in “Chrome Injury” (1981), or Duran Duran lead singer Simon LeBon crooning “And the droning engine throbs in time / With your beating heart” in “The Chauffeur” (1982): all, in some way or another, derived from J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), itself a paean to the “Little Bastard,” the Porsche 550 Spyder, which, on the afternoon of September 30, 1955, flipped end-on-end as it was avoiding an oncoming 1949 Ford Tudor, killing James Dean, making him into a cult American figure almost instantaneously.[5]

Variants of "Moore Computer": (Top) the "Baede-kar" navigation system from Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles; (Bottom) Title card to Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor (1975)

As for the "Baede-kar," it is an 8-track tape, obviously. American car manufacturers started introducing 8-track players as luxury feature upgrades by the mid-1960s, so it is not a surprise that Banham's Pontiac Grand Prix has one in the center dash. As for the technology, it was a product of the convergence of the aviation, automotive, and telecommunications industries. One of the inventors of the 8-track was Bill Lear, famous for the private jet bearing his name. The primary financial backers for the "Lear Jet Stereo 8" cartridge player were Ford and General Motors, with RCA, Motorola, and Ampex manufacturing the players and tapes. The typeface visible on the front of the “Baede-kar”appears as a derivative of “Moore Computer,” an E-13B Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) font created by Steven Moore in 1968, and yet its stylish, italicized appearance suggests a combination of Data 70, designed by Bob Newman in 1970, or Westminster, a machine-readable typeface designed by Leo Maggs for Westminster Bank Limited (it is still used to print routing numbers on personal checks).

Print ad for Lear Jet Industries'"Lear Jet Stereo 8"

The 8-track player, the most advanced technology in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, was in fact quite limited. Stereo and quadrophonic sound came at an expense: users could not fast forward or rewind. It was a read-only medium, too. Playing an 8-track tape was therefore all too presentist, rooted in the then-now, preserving the music in real-time, moving forward, only to begin again, ensnaring the listener in an infinite aural loop—almost. Recall that an 8-track cassette was split up into four "programs" of equal length, and to find to a song earlier or later in the album, a listener had to guess where in the "program" the song ahead or behind would be and press the "program" button at the appropriate time. It took crackerjack guesswork and an intimate knowledge of the music on the album. And yet the program button switch only allowed the tape to advance forward time, from 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, and 4 to 1, until it reached the beginning.

Though technically a dead medium, the 8-track player is resuscitated as another technology in Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, cloaked in the vestments from a near-future. It becomes the zero vector for a host of other technologies we know today, from dashboard-mounted Tom-Toms, to the plastic thingamajigs we attach to the air conditioning vents so we can look at Google Maps on our phones while we drive. The 8-track cassette is the skeleton key that opens up environments for us to read, consume, and exhaust. Its spatial and temporal constraints mirror our own, as we must always locate our own futures and pasts, our physical presence in relation to our temporal present. The same goes with the “Baede-kar,” as Banham would have no choice but to let the 8-track move forward and surrender to the spatial narrative, always keeping his eyes on the road. Too bad he did not have a Thomas Guide.

Aerial view of Los Angeles International Airport, from Aviation Week & Space Technology, 14 November 1966

That the 8-track was born of the aerospace industry is again significant, and here we find novelist Thomas Pynchon, in Los Angeles, writing about the aftermath of the Watts riots, invoking airliners, perhaps not unlike the scene that would greet Banham when landing at LAX in 1972:

Overhead, big jets now and then come vacuum-cleanering in to land; the wind is westerly, and Watts lies under the approaches to L.A. International. The jets hang what seems only a couple of hundred feet up in the air; through the smog they show up more white than silver, highlighted by the sun, hardly solid; only the ghosts, or possibilities, of airplanes.[6]

This is by way of a piece he wrote for the The New York Times Magazine, published on June 12, 1966, entitled “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts.” Like the 8-track “Baede-kar,” or even the Porsche 550 Spyder, the passenger jet is a technology indelibly woven into its own impermanence.[7] The metal tape heads on the 8-track wear down as aircraft and cars turn into corroding hulks of unrecognizable alloy. No wonder the jets on approach to LAX appear not as airplanes, but as images of airplanes, a moment causing Pynchon to remark on the “image-ined” city that is Los Angeles:

What is known around the nation as the L.A. Scene exists chiefly as images on a screen or TV tube, as four-color magazine photos, as old radio jokes, as new songs that survive only a matter of weeks. It is basically a white Scene, and illusion is everywhere in it, from the giant aerospace firms that flourish or retrench at the whims of Robert McNamara, to the "action" everybody mills long the Strip on weekends looking for, unaware that they, and their search which will end, usually, unfulfilled, are the only action in town.[8] 

The whiteness of the sky, the whiteness of the jets, the whiteness of the “Scene”: testaments of how our grandest aspirations originate in a degree zero of color, casting a harsh light on our own misdeeds and misreadings. And that is perhaps why something like the 8-track tape, miscast as an advanced technology, flawed, imperfect, demands a closer look, for it causes us to be all too aware of the imperfections in our intractable, unavoidable present. If listening to an 8-track preserves us in the amber of our own time, then ours in an existence in which we continuously yearn for other media—pictures, sounds, words—that afford us the illusion of looking forward and backward.

Los Angeles, 1965: Phyllis Gebauer with Thomas Pynchon, in the back, flashing a peace sign behind a door. (Source: Los Angeles Times)

Is this not the way we read? We engage, as Italo Calvino urges in If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), “in pursuit of all these shadows ... those of the imagination and those of life.”[9] Perhaps this is why fantasy novels like Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) or Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973) all look to things from bygone eras as a way to locate our own time and space. In the case of Dick’s novel, the provenance of a supposedly fake Colt revolver takes center stage, causing its buyer to experience the world as it was in 1962, and not the alternate history that drives the novel’s plot—one in which Germany and Japan win the Second World War and divide the United States into occupational zones. And in Garner’s Red Shift, the reader is actually experiencing three timelines—one in Roman antiquity, another during the English Civil War, and a final, contemporary one—all marked from the “point of view” of a stone axe found embedded in a chimney in Southern Cheshire, England. If Reyner Banham famously needed a car to “read Los Angeles in the original,”[10] then perhaps the only way to do so was with the help of a flawed technological artefact. Perhaps this is why in writing about writing about reading the city, the only recourse is to write topologically across different times, grasping at references of objects from those eras, from cars, the parts of cars, to images, sounds, and finally words.

At least that’s what I have done. The references are mine, but they can be yours too. For writing on a warm weekend in Indianapolis, Indiana in 2015, this is how I have come to finally know Los Angeles, this city on the other side of the world, one that was my home from 1999 to 2005. For in writing about writing about reading the city, and reading about writing about writing, I only have done what we all do. We try to explain the here and now, and while doing so, we produce a reader’s guide to our own reader’s guide.

__________________________

Notes

[1] I am referring here to two books that, in addition to Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, have shaped my own understanding of cities. There is, of course, environmental historian William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), which relies on German geographer Walter Christaller’s contributions to central place theory, as shown in texts like Die zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (1933). My first understanding of the architectural “understanding” of a city came via Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001). A version of Lerup’s Duchampian take on Houston also appears in “Stim and Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis,” Assemblage 25 (1994), 82-101.
[2] John Doe and Exene Cervenka, “The New World,” on More Fun In The New World, Elektra Records, 1983, 33 1/3 rpm.
[3] Brian Wilson and Roger Christian, “Little Deuce Coupe,” on Little Deuce Coupe, Capitol Records, 1963, 33 1/3 rpm.
[4] Not-so-veiled reference to Carly Simon, “You’re So Vain,” on No Secrets, Elektra Record, 1972, 33 1/3 rpm, especially the refrain, “You’re so vain / You probably think this song is about you.” Simon was married to James Taylor when she wrote the song.
[5] The songs are as follows: Daniel Miller, “Warm Leatherette,” on T.V.O.D./Warm Leatherette, Mute Records, 1978, 45 rpm (the song would be made famous by Grace Jones in 1980); Steve Kilbey, “Chrome Injury,” on Of Skins and Heart, EMI Parlophone, 1981, 33 1/3 rpm; and Duran Duran, “The Chauffeur,” on Rio, EMI/Capitol/Harvest 1982, 33 1/3 rpm.
[6] Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey Into the Mind of Watts,” The New York Times, June 12, 1966, https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html. 

[Author's Note: This is a version of the essay I wrote for the exhibition, Now, There: Scenes From the Post-Geographic City, curated by Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger. The show is currently on display at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and in December, will move to the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzen and Hong Kong. For more on the exhibit, go here, or visit Art Center's Media Design Practices program site. Special thanks go to Mimi for asking me to be part of this exhibition]

130 year-old man from Minnesota, from László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (1929)

In Von Material zu Architektur (1929) (later translated to English as The New Vision), László Moholy-Nagy introduced a remarkable portrait of a 130-year old Minnesota man to demonstrate a point about photography and the perception of time. Remarking on the deep wrinkles that spread crevasse-like across the surface of the man’s skin, Moholy-Nagy reminded readers how the photograph was “essentially a time-compressing view of the alterations in the epidermis: an airplane view of time” (“Fliegeraufnahme der Zeit”).[1] This equating of physiognomy with aerial views is an important concept and deserves further scrutiny. In one sense, physiognomy became a metaphor for aerial photography of the landscape. Like the Minnesota Man’s skin in the photograph, the landscape was also an epidermis. The successive layering of soil and vegetation corresponded to the deep incisions of time visible on the Minnesota Man’s face. The “airplane view” became a heuristic for recording evidence of the passage of time, but only showing the latest stages of this passage. It only captured the evidence of change at the very point an image was captured on the photographic plate.

O.G.S. Crawford (1886-1957)

Moholy-Nagy's contemporary, the English archaeologist and geographer Oswald Guy Stanhope (O.G.S.) Crawford (1886-1957), offered something closer to a method, one that would give this physiognomic aspect further temporal dimensions with the invention of the discipline he called “aerial archaeology.” In works like Wessex From the Air (1928) and Air-Photography for Archaeologists (1929), a manual he wrote as the Ordnance Survey’s self-appointed “archaeological officer,” Crawford defined aerial archaeology as a method “to indicate what kinds of ancient sites are suitable for air-photography, and what is the best time of year and day” for the examination of such sites.[2] On a first glance, Crawford’s texts were primers detailing the various procedures for taking and interpreting aerial photographs of archaeological sites in England.

(Top) Crawford, Wessex From The Air (1928); (Bottom) Air-Photography for Archaeologists (1929)

Yet Crawford's version of aerial archaeology amounted to an attempt to understand the relationship between the physical remains of ancient English settlements and the various geological—and historical forces—that shaped them. Art historian Kitty Hauser explains how Crawford “thought prehistory should be approached not through texts (as many archaeologists preferred) not through fetishized ‘finds’ (like those collected and admired by antiquarians), but through the spatial logic of geography.”[3] Yet it must be pointed out that the very things that Crawford looked at through his aerial cameras were remains of buildings. Almost all of the plates from Wessex From the Air and Air-Photography for Archaeologists show evidence of ancient foundations and walls—evidence of architecture. It is an interesting notion, for before Crawford became famous for his promotion of aerial photography techniques for field archaeology, he would gain some amount of fame among preservationist circles for his remark, “[T]he surface of England … is a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again.”[4] The very skeleton key needed to uncover and decode the layers of this palimpsest, to peer x-ray-like at the ancient structures on the ground, summoning them from their peaty graves, was the aerial photograph. Taken from vertical or oblique angles, Crawford’s aerial photographs operated as a way of organizing visual information beyond their sensory characteristics into a system of categorized knowledge. He arranged his images into three general categories—"shadow-sites,""crop-marks" and "soil sites"—each describing the light and topography in which a particular archaeological feature was found. As method, however, Crawford’s aerial archaeology became a kind of aerial physiognomy of the land—an endoscopy of landscape. As a method to document what reviewer “visible and hidden face of England” through the examination of its surfaces, Crawford believed that aerial archaeology allowed one to gain some understanding about England’s history—and by inference—character.[5]

Screen captures from Harun Farocki, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges: (Second and Third from Top) Albrecht Meydenbauer's treatise on photogrammetry; (Fourth and Fifth from Top) Marc Garanger's Femmes Algeriennes 1968

To further articulate the physiognomic nature of aerial photography, consider these moments from Harun Farocki’s 1988 film, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War). As the female narrator reads a carefully constructed rumination on the creation of images and the waging of war, Farocki shows images of texts and handbooks dealing with photogrammetry and physiognomy. He begins long sequences intercutting German architect Albrecht Meydenbauer’s photographs of building façades and French Army Photographer Marc Garanger’s portraits of unveiled Algerian women. In these texts, each reading of faces has a different, yet specific purpose. Whereas Meydenbauer used photographs of buildings' faces—façades—to generate scaled architectural drawings, Garanger’s took his photographs in 1960 to create identification cards for Algerian citizens. In each instance, then, the photograph has an ostensibly utilitarian rote. But as Farocki jump cuts between images of heimat buildings and faces of Algerian women, his investment in history becomes clearer—and more controversial. The narrator remarks how Meydenbauer’s catalogue of building façades, Das photographische Aufnehmen zu wissenschaftlichen Zwecken, insbesondere das Messbild-Verfahren (1890) anticipated a historical preservationist movement resulting in the creation of the Prussian Monumental Archives. As for Garanger’s photos showing faces which, like Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Minnesota Man, equate facial wrinkles with a kind of landscape, Farocki reminds viewers how “when one looks into the face of an intimate, one also brings in something of the shared past.”[6] This reference to the capturing and representing of the past in a photograph is necessary to an understanding of composition of history. In other words, the photogrammetry of Prussian building façades and the inventory of Algerian faces both captured the effects of change over time.

Screen Captures from Farocki's Bilder der Welt: (Top) Luftbild-Lesebuch; (Middle) Aerial view of a restaurant; (Bottom) Aerial view of a farm house

Farocki also recognized that capturing such change over time presented its own problems. It is not long before Farocki trains his camera on books dealing with aerial photography and military reconnaissance to demonstrate this point. In one instance, he shows excerpts from a book called Luftbild-Lesebuch. Published in 1937 by Hansa Luftbild, an imprint of the German airline Deutsche Luft Hansa A.G., this book was number 13 in a series dealing with aerial photography. Vertical views of a hay harvest, farm house, tables and chairs in a restaurant, and laundry hanging on a line are all touted as examples of a “new world picture.”[7] As further evidence of this view, Farocki also shows photographs of carpets. The narrator reads, “This is how a carpet must look to a cat.  The pattern of the carpet is woven for people standing upright, for the view from above.”[8]

(Top) Luftbild und Vorgeschichte—Luftbild und Luftbildmessung Nr 16 (Hansa Luftbild 1938); (Bottom) Crawford’s “Cat’s Eye View”, from “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England” in Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (1938)

These images come from Crawford’s 1938 essay, “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England” (“Examples of Aerial Photographs of Earthen Monuments in England”). Published in a text called Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (1938) (Volume 16 in the same series as Luftbild-Lesebuch) the essay features two images illustrating of what Crawford calls the “Cat’s Eye View." The first, a carpet seen from the point of view of a cat (“Wie eine Katze aus ihrer Augenhöhe ein Teppichmuster sieht”) shows a blurry suggestion of a carpet pattern.[9] The second, showing the point of view from above, comparable to an aerial view (“Dasselbe Muster, wie es der Mensch von seiner Ausgehöhe sieht”), shows a distinct carpet pattern.[10]

These two images stand for something beyond the proposition that such patterns are more difficult to discern from the ground than from the air. In one way, these images call attention to the ways in which the aerial view is either too generalizing or too nominalistic. Showing a carpet pattern from the air recalls Moholy-Nagy’s observation that an aerial, or “airplane” view revealed “large-scale relationships.”[11] This point of view seemed to defy his conceptualization of the aerial view as a “space compressor,” an extension of vision that collapsed the distance air and ground. The separation between the ground view and aerial view are thus of vital importance—it is only from the air that a viewing subject can see something as clearly and unobtrusively. A pattern viewed from the air therefore reveals something of the same magnitude as the close reading of an aerial photograph.

This distinction between the ability to discern general patterns from the air and the inability to do so from the ground suggests that, under some circumstances, vision is unreliable. This speaks to the vital difference between the methodologies and sensibilities of vision—in other words, the organization and categorization of visual knowledge becomes a way to address problems in seeing.  Farocki’s film uses Meydenbauer’s text to address this point. The narrator thus reads Meydenbauer’s words, suggesting that with the images of building façades, “one does not see everything, but one sees many things better than on the spot.”[12] Farocki affirms this “capacity to see better" when he shows pages from Baron Elard von Loewenstern’s 1938 text, Tarnung und Täuschung (Camouflage and Deception), a manual detailing the various uses of wartime camouflage.[13] Recalling the relation between physiognomy and aerial photography, the narrator reads from von Loewenstern’s book, suggesting how recognizing camouflaged patterns from the air is, in essence, seeing the “face of the Earth … masked by beard, glasses and wig."[14]

(Top) AEF Interpretation, Plate 42, Photo 2, After 1918, Aerial Expeditionary Force with Edward Steichen, Silver print, National Air and Space Museum, Aerial Expeditionary Force Photography Collection; (Bottom) Alphonse Bertillon, Tableau synoptic des traits physionomiques: pour servir a l'étude du "portrait parlé"(1909)

Some more ruminations on the relationship between aerial vision and physiognomy are in order.  For his discussion of “The Airplane Eye,” art historian Christoph Asendorf made an important connection between Edward Steichen’s aerial photoreconnaissance methods from 1918 and Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometrics. For Steichen, aerial photography of enemy positions created problems of interpretation. He required pilots to fly at equal altitudes, making multiples passes over a target below so that “through the standardization of the recording process, the terrain could be provided independent of the subjective view....”[15] Asendorf equated this procedure with Bertillon’s system of identifying criminal traits according to facial features: an example of the “technique of the objectification of visual information.”[16] Asendorf called the taking of photographs via “The Airplane Eye” as “Landscape Bertillonage." And yet, this comparison is somewhat incomplete, for aerial photoreconnaissance offered something that the Bertillon method could not. Asendorf concluded by observing how aerial photoreconnaissance provided not a single image “but an uninterrupted sequence, the systematic capture of the landscape in the categories of space and time.”[17]

It is this notion of a systematic capture that would become the most important aspect of Crawford’s brand of aerial archaeology. His photographs of ancient settlements half-buried in the English appear as evolving objects, complements to the time-worn epidermis of Moholy-Nagy's Minnesota Man, or as well as Farocki's revelations of Meydenbauer's and Garanger's works. All of these share a common trait, as they become methods for capturing the character of the landscape below, for constructing a literal, historical point of view.
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Notes

[1] Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005 [1938]), 40-41. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2001 [1929]), 41.
[2] O.G.S. Crawford, Air-Photography for Archaeologists (London: H.M.S.O, 1929), 3.
[3] Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927-1955 (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. Hauser labels Crawford’s work as a quintessentially English melding of modernist experiment with a deeply historical sensibility, citing John Piper’s paintings of Romanesque carvings from 1936, John Betjeman’s poetry, Herbert Read’s art criticism, and Nikolaus Pevsner’s lectures on the “Englishness of English Art” as examples. Yet this sensibility is evidence of what she calls “the archaeological imagination,” the “perceiving of a past which is literally under our feet” that “represents a powerful counter-impulse to this culture of interchangeable surfaces covering over all traces of history” and that calls home “a historical dimension to which the contemporary world seems so indifferent.” Hauser, Shadow Sites, 2-7.
[4] Ibid., 64.
[5] See the review of Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London: Granta Books, 2008), in  Tom Fort, “Mapping Britain’s Archaeology,” The Telegraph (1 June 2008), available at < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3553439/Mapping-Britains-archaeology.html> (accessed 14 October 2015).
[6] Harun Farocki, Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (1988).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] O.G.S. Crawford, “Luftbildaufnahmen von archäologischen Bodendenkmälern in England”, in Luftbild und Vorgeschichte (Berlin: Hansa Luftbild G.m.b.H., 1938), 16-17.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, 38.
[12] Farocki, Bilder der Welt.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Christoph Asendorf, Super Constellation: Flugzeug und Raumrevolution (New York: Springer Verlag, 1997), 37. (“So konnte durch Standardisierung der Aufnahmeverfahren das Terrain unabhängig vom subjektiven Blick auf bestimmte Dinge him befragbar wiedergegeben werden.”)
[16] Ibid., 38. (“eine Technik der Objektivierung visueller Informationen.”)
[17] Ibid. (“Wesentlich bei militärischen Luftaufnahmen ist weniger das einzelne Bild, sondern die ununterbrochene Bildfolge, das systematische Erfassen der Landschaft in den Kategorien von Raum und Zeit.”)

Sticker sheet and 'zine included with Fender's Sonic Youth-model guitars (Source)

Fender's Sonic Youth custom guitars (Source)

Sonic Youth's customized guitar arsenal, from Objectified (dir. Gary Hustwit, 2009)