Reflections I

Loving at a velocity where our minds and bodies were both optimizing on different planes of existence. Putting our bodies ahead of us, ahead of our minds, maintaining a distance, maintaining conditions and dynamics, choosing to stay where we put our bodies. Life as parametric. Do people build buildings to be walked around? I’m blind to my own vision! How do externalities dampen this reflex? How do they change/degrade/morph over time? Incoherency as situa- tion. Courier on colored paper. These modes seem outdated, they date themselves. Empty mind in a time of sunsets. Site with a lot of totalizing statements! I’m struggling to literally “buy” my own time back, but from who? Like a soft knot in the ruins. Who owns my time? How is the exchange rate a debt? An experience that refuses to offer meaningful fulfillment. There’s no complete/comprehensive translation of experience. Consider the obliquessence, consider the walk, consider the incidental inconceivability of knowing the full scope of possibility. What’s provocative these days? None of this being “acceptable.” Unethical opportunism. Let’s make sure to raise the questions. Let’s. Writing being looked over, repeat- edly being overlooked. Trying to reproduce the world. What’s really unthinkable these days? Relative autonomy or autonomy in spite of a shell breaking out of context, desperate and self aware. A turtle breaking out a shell breaking out an egg. The person who loses control of the consequences. People usually don’t build a ship while sailing. Why are we our- selves? You can’t stage life but that doesn’t stop people from trying. If you start building it, you have to do the unthinkable. But what’s really unthinkable these days? Small funny thought: painful incongruities govern life! Have I missed my prime? The old life-ruiner. Acutely oblique anti-marketing aspiration (asymptotic, half-life, diminishing returns), time, space, velocity. I can’t see what’s right in front of me! Forgive- ness without condoning until they are “incomprehensibly” outside of an alternative? I know analogies develop (over time). Analogical, involuntary, existential. Opportunity dan- gles. Am I ever looking at you? Where are they? How to get away from the idea of posing as harmless. False-provoca- tions. I want to be a mirror. Picture me where I want to be. Look at me now! The kind of threat posed by books. Real counterculture has been eclipsed by heightened state inter- vention probably because of the cumulative nature of being. The focus being on the suffering of others to contextualize the success of others. “Middle happens.” Inevitable, immobi- lized, capped on both sides by instability. A door that doesn’t look like a friend? A conversation that undoes itself? A table that forgets how to be a table? Determined knowledge. Per- formance anxiety. Other scholars characterize it as a form of midwifing. You CAN calculate the future to the presentness of the present. Small force, interstitial, in between, hard to see happen. Replacing crisis in our creations that exist beyond. We were moving one way or another, we might as well be involved by authoring it instead of being consulted (if at all). This type of framing is “practically useful.” Practically. I feel as though the world’s changed around me and I haven’t kept up or worse I’ve been left behind—it’s worse because I don’t even want to exist anymore. Buildings that forgot they’re buildings. None of this interests me at all. I’m thinking about the past a lot, mostly I don’t recognize we self. The ending no longer exists, the exist no longer exists, the en- trance no longer exists, we’ve been inhabiting a mirage, the stalactile impossibility of stopping a lumbering institution that refuses to focus on the stated purpose. The stated purpose no longer exists. We’ve been inhabiting a. Where are the beneficiaries? Man as receiver, consumer, subject, author, builder. Materials existing for our use to do as we see fit. Mirage as a means of demonstrating implicit violence though historically the shock value is easily internalized and not often leveraged. Enacting beyond free. Aspiration is about oversimplified transactional exchanges. Everything is about oversimplified transactional exchanges. Small funny thought: painful incongruities govern life! Incoherency is the historical actuality of persons and events. How could we have no idea what I like these days. Reflections: N.Y. / REGION Bidding Farewell to a City’s Precious Stone OCT. 22, 2012 Mike Meehan, the owner of Portland Brownstone Quarries. Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times The Appraisal Brownstones occupy a unique place in the New York City psyche, as one of By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS the city’s most prototypical signposts, like yellow cabs and fast walkers, yet are able to stir aching desire and teeth-baring jealousy. Everybody wants one. Email Thousands of these structures are crammed into the five boroughs, like sideways stacks of very expensive pancakes. As it turns out, most of them Share are not only cast from the same mold, but were also made from the same stone, a brown sandstone quarried in Portland, Conn. After being mined on and off for centuries, the Portland Brownstone Tweet Quarries, the very last of a kind, closed down this year, and by the end of this month, the quarry’s final scraps of inventory should be gone. Save Preservationists are bemoaning RELATED COVERAGE More the end of an era, or at least of Times Topic: The Appraisal the chance for a perfect match for the city’s ubiquitous stone. And as Portland’s diamond- studded saws have slowed to their final rest, some stone fabricators have begun to — lovingly, respectfully — hoard the stuff. Brownstones on Berkeley Place in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Brian Harkin for The New York Times “We’re all scrambling to grab that stone,” said George Heckel of Pasvalco, stone fabricators in New Jersey. “If you’re thinking about achieving the look and feel of a New York City brownstone, you’re not going to get that anymore.” Not everyone, however, is sad to say goodbye to this particular building block. That’s because the stone, the object of so many New Yorkers’ obsessions, is considered to be rather mediocre. “I remember some quote saying it was the worst stone ever quarried,” said Timothy Lynch, the executive director of the Buildings Department’s forensic unit. “It’s like New York City is covered in cold chocolate.” That old-time brownstone The Appraisal hater was likely to be Edith A weekly column that scours the New York region for Wharton, who called it the untold stories of real estate envy, excess and woe. “most hideous” stone ever Gansevoort Street, With Up-and- NOV 9 quarried. Down History, Could Grow Taller See More » Again Today, architectural A Gangster’s Paradise With Views, NOV 2 conservators and historians say Thick Walls and a Slaughter Room that most of the city’s Dorothy Day’s Retreat Is Now a OCT 26 Vacant Lot, but a Bid to Protect It “brownstone” facades have Survives been replaced with brown New York City Tests Post-Disaster OCT 19 cement-based masonry. Housing That Stacks Up This Apartment Is Not $1 Million. It’s OCT 12 Brownstone began appearing in Only $999,000. New York City buildings in a significant way during the first half of the 19th century, and it quickly became the stone of choice for row house developers. (Brownstones are actually brick houses built with a stone facing.) Stone from Portland’s quarries came out of the ground near the Connecticut River, so it was easy to get it to New York City — as well as to other cities up and down the East Coast — and was relatively soft, which made it easy to carve. Unfortunately that softness, along with corner-cutting by developers and the extremes of New York City’s weather, made the stone liable to crumble, crack and flake. “By the late 19th century, people were already complaining about this,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, director of the historic preservation program at Columbia University. The stone fell out of fashion, and by the 1940s, the Portland quarries, flooded by the Connecticut River in a major storm, were shuttered. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that Mike Meehan, a geologist with a background in coal exploration, reopened the ground at the edge of the quarry, slicing chunks of brownstone off a wall about 20 feet high and 650 feet long. But most of the area is still filled with water, and Mr. Meehan’s closest neighbor is a recreational water park, where zip lines crisscross an old brownstone quarry. “We’re up here breaking stones and there are people over there yelling, ‘Yay!’ ” Mr. Meehan said. “It’s a pleasant diversion at lunchtime.” Brownstone, which is really just a brown sandstone, is still quarried in a few spots around the world — including Britain, China and Utah — but stone fabricators and materials experts say that there is really nothing quite like the stone that comes from Portland. Much of Mr. Meehan’s stone has been used in historic buildings and restoration projects, including Cooper Union, as well as lavish private homes. “I’m telling you, he was our hero,” said Michael Devonshire, an architectural conservator and materials expert at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates, a New York architecture firm that specializes in preservation. No matter where it’s from, however, brownstone is no longer cheap. Jim Durham, the president of Quarra Stone Company in Madison, Wis., recently bought a dozen truckloads of stone from Mr.

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