The Day When God Leaves Us

The day started with another tragedy.
A stranger came up to me as I was boarding the bus saying she was very tired. I don't recall what I said to her her but I'm sure it was nothing she could have used, for she burst into tears. The smart-thinking bus operator gave her a hug. That, at least, got her on the bus. The operator gave her some kind words, when no one else would even look at her. I never thought Humans was capable of such meanness as to pretend she wasn't there crying hard for her life and her kids (She lost her children. I'm assuming in a custody battle. Dead children would've been too cruel). Maybe it wasn't "meanness" that held our tongues and our emotions. Maybe it was the realization that God has left her here with us. How do you console a lost soul when their God abandons them? When their pain calls out and no one hears? Humans still haven't learned to accept and help each other as fully as we should. God will always turn His back on us and here we are, face to face with the decision to kill or survive, to help or hinder, to bless or curse. This is a power we wield in our world, a power with vast resources, a power we have ultimately abused. If the pages of the Holy Book are to be believed, we find that God is a vindictive Being who, throughout human history, has had a difficult time accepting us as we are: There were curses, Floods, Fire and Brimstone, constant wars against humans working together(Babel Tower), endless wanderings, Commandments, more wars, even evil sent by God himself to "test" man's faith (at some point, Satan makes a bet and God destroys an entire household of moral and righteous people just to prove a point. Somehow the "reward" in the end pales to the hard won effort one makes at life. If anything, human Life is fragile and easily confounded. We have so many lies that helps protect us from the harsh reality that composes our world. When they fail, and they will fail, there is God. When the day comes when God abandons us, our only hope will be each other. I truly pray, for our sakes, that we are ready.

A Gentle Knife

It doesn't take much to kill a person. Degrees of human demise can be as simple as a word, a thought, a phrase, an accusatory stare. Betrayal is such a beautiful Beast! What motivates us to betray one another? Within the 'Why's" and the "How's" may lie the reasons for natural tendencies to kill. I just wish I new what codes of morality dictates humans to do such terrible things.

So, now my story has ended with a gentle knife. I stare at my corpse and wonder how it endured such torment, how that body grinded away everyday with hope and dreams; I see the wounds, the old scars and I try to imagine what it felt like receiving them so willingly and at what price. What was the price? As I stare at this broken body I wonder about the many years it took to sow and harvest all those precious memories, the laughter and the friendships... Was that all for nothing? Who mourns the fallen? Who will help them to rise? That knife is so gentle, so soft and warm...

They killed me. I may never know the true reason why or I mat suspect the reason. Maybe I wasn't of any 'value'. Maybe I failed their expectations? The knife doesn't tell me. It only take from me. My question is: What kind of person bases his judgement of another based on his value to them? Is a person worth proportional to their service to some end? A tool? Why is value in terms of the Human Condition?

In order to live, I have to be valued?
That's a scary question.

I'll always wonder why my friends and trusted people betray me. Consequently, I will always wonder what they get in return.

Urban Art

Residue

There is always a residue lingering within civilized societies. A memory, a monument of the people who pass us by... At times we forget the places that people built their lives with. The buildings that once housed daily purposes now abandoned by the constant impetus to move forward. Yet something always lingers behind. Soon, like all things Human, this will fall to Progress... Most of us will forget and continue on. Only a few of us will remember.

Lily Storelli (Author, Architect)

These pics are of my beloved friend, Lily. They were taken near Sci-Arc. She also wrote and published her first novel (a second one is in the works). I can't wait to read it... If it ever comes out in English.

Envy

Its those little things, those little delicate, beautiful things I took for granted. The intimate moments, the shared joy and laughter that I now miss. Those were the norms back then, in an era that I fondly remember being great. Today, the rules have changed. Intimacy and relationships has gotten trite and superficial. Everybody is gay now (women that I meet up with is confessing to this now as if it's cool and hip to be lesbian, while real Lesbians struggle for independence and fully understand the gravity of thier situation) and its harder to take people seriously. The girls I'm freinds with constantly remind me of how far I've fallen behind the times. All those little things I onced believed in, those comfortable things, are now gone. Now I harbor a genuine fear of "dating". I once dated a woman who did nothing but complain about how evil men are, about how men segregate women and make them submissive, blah, blah, blah. She was beautiful and smart... but she was crazy! One day, after weeks of planning, I invited her for dinner... She talked and talked and talked about the same damn thing, even when I tried to change the conversation she'll find some topic and there we were again, back to the feminist mode. I yelled at her. Didin't mean to. This smart, beautiful woman was so obsessed with her hatred (mostly unfounded) that she couldn't talk about anything else. Why me? What have I ever done to this woman to earn her general hatred? I stood before this cardboard fortune teller so dpressed and angry. I come o0ut of my shell after a losing battle with Love and all I do is run into these crazy women (for some, all you need is a bag of weed and they'll sleep with you. How pathetic!). My fortune has got to change. I don't have long to live. I have to hope there is happiness out there for me. I have to hope.

A Brief History Of Modern Humanity: pt. 2

On the day he was born, his mother must've been very proud; even with all the pain she endured, the reward was this child, born in an ugly world she hoped he can change. She must've held him in her arms blessing the name of the God she believed in for this precious gift she would gladly sacrifice her life for. So many things to be hopeful for, so many dreams...  The world seemed less hostile and more forgiving. This was the child she would love. Once he got his name, he went through the World like most of us. He's been bullied, got into fights, fell in love, fell out of love, stole things from someone or someone stole from him. The Sins that built this world has touched him, provoking him, humbling him. At some point in his life he held onto secrets that hurt him, he's seen the terrible things humans are capable of yet he survived just to be the man he is today. Look at him. His life, which he worked so hard for, is dangling at the end of a wheel chair. Now he sleeps in his own piss, broken, unknown, unwanted and unloved. He, too like most of us, believes in God. I'm sure that's a Bible laying next to him which he reads with all the calenture and hope expressed by most devout humans but where is his salvation? Where are the promises of love he was taught would be there when he falls? When you have no origin, you have no destination. Any God, King or Kingdom that fails even one soul, fails everyone. At the same token, we are all responsible for the world we live in. This man will probably never see happiness ever again and that is a truly sad fate for any human.

Theory Of Analysis: notes pt. 1

A-nal-y-sis: the separating of any material or abstract entity into its constituent elements. This process as a method of studying the nature of something or determining  its essential features and their relations.


1. Analysis only covers about 10% of the object/text/abstract entity/event. The rest depends on the interpretation of the "analyzer"

2. Analysis is not capable of processing 100% of a given object/text/abstract entity/event. It can't account for the imaginary or the fantastical.

3. Analysis operates on a basic set of rules that governs its methodic architecture as a process of investigation which is its ability and its limitation in relation to object/text/abstract entity/event. In other words, a system that seeks destabilization of an object's structural constitution (or: a system that seeks to understand a given extraneous system and its opposite).

4.All forms are guided and understood by the structure of their systems. The rest are branching paths into the realms of evolutionary possibilities, circumstances, inter-relationships, the imaginary and the fantastical.

5. Think of analysis as a form or method of translation. Its natural that things, concepts, ideas, imagery, etc., gets lost or non-digested as it goes from one form to another Although it is the nature of analysis to initiate structural destabilization, and ultimately its segregation, of a given object/text/abstract entity/event, there will be pieces it can not process or investigate. Those are the pieces that contain the imaginary and the fantastical; where the mind roams and the emotions are stirred and take flight. These pieces are in constant flux and remain beyond the scope of definition.

6. Analysis can't cause erasure (unless interpretation is erasure?).

7. Analysis depends on an object's basic structure and its system, not the "essence" of an object.

8. Erasure happens during categoricalization (this process occurs when we mistake the parts for the whole).

9. Analysis doesn't seek meaning.

10. Meaning is perspectival, completely dependant of one's point-of-view.

11. Understanding is fluxual, very unstable, in constant motion and collision; an evolutionary species of process.

Remembering The Crash

sometimes, I hate sleeping. I hate dreaming. Your presence still haunts me when I wake and terrifies me when I dream. There are some days I want to let go and join both of you there. How is the little one? Too bad I'll never be a father. I think I would have been a good one, like my Dad. I shoyuld have listened to you when you tried to tell me the secret. I got drunk but I was soo happy. Our lives were about to change for the better... and that's when I lost you. I want to believe that there's some meaning to your absence but instead I have to wear this ugly mask everyday so I can be human and not be seen for who I really am. Sometimes I forget you are gone... I have a job and I've learned to smile. Every night I try not to let it all end. I miss you so much...

Mirrors Lie

I'm not beautiful.
When I see myself, I see the flaws that has built me, the scraps of self-worth that has shamefully clothe this ugly skin.
I realize I am envious
Of those who stare at themselves in that mirror called Desire.
They are beautiful.
they are objects of themselves
They are their own seduction, possessing themselves with such greed and confidence.
I fear my mirror (all mirrors show the past. That's their only power and our failure).
I do not have perfection.
I am only as good as my last glance and this saddens me, forcing me to look again and again to catch that moment when I am truly current and beautiful but
I am not beautiful.
I am a monster.
I cry in the rain.
I laugh in the sun.
I weep.
I feel pain.
I need Love.
I have loneliness and longing like all the monsters before me.
My feet are deformed by ugliness, my hands are clumsy, my heart is sick.
My Hope has wept, my prayers have died. My mirror has shown me how.
I will never be beautiful like you, my Angel.
No monster ever is.
No monster can ever hope to be.

A Brief History Of Modern Humanity

Even now, in the 21st century, we still find people who couldn't adapt to the System, alone in places abandoned by God and Men. Not even Satan's children inhabit these places.

Wounded, warped, broken, ruined cathedrals lay waste lay waste among the Emerald Cities wearing a "Red", no matter how beautiful and warm, makes us shiver.

We pass them along the way to our disposable paradises

And we can't spare them the happiness we casually throw away.

Un Terlude

You beautiful Monster!
Terrifying as a dream
Vibrant, Azure as all human moments are
Between the yawn and the scream
Between pedestrian and ruin
Angels call us Architecture
You call us something more profound

Prejudice is Behavior

It would seem by now, I suppose, that Time would heal. Tens of thousands of years of civilization (and even more so with the pre-human era) has slowly, patiently, in the unwary cusp of Time's hands, brought us to this point in which we are all living. Now we're in the 21st century and showing signs of settling in, yet no avenging of purposeful human evil and fewer memories of its victims dead or alive. If any mention opportune itself, the human being is immune to Time's healing properties; a species of mammal that can form concepts, language, learn/adapt, imagine possibilities and remember has learned to turn Time into a device which both alienates and binds us to the industries of human endeavors.
Humans have been here a long time and the wounds are still fresh. Prejudice has withstood the influence of Time. We all see it. We all have a little of it repressed within. For most of us it becomes "behavior" or habit.
Above is an aesthetically unremarkable photo of a man seated at a table. he appears to be focused on the novel before him; older than fifty, younger than seventy. This kind of man might live in your neighborhood or apartment complex. You might even open the door for him or offer your seat to him if you're riding the bus. A harmless looking man.
He came in after I did. I already had my food and was reading a book called: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton. I was there of over an hour, too wound up from work to go home, let alone cook. So In and Out was my saving grace. When I had finished, I cleaned after myself (a habit from Mom), threw my trash away and left. As I was bicycling away I happen to see This man rush from his previous spot over to where I sat, carrying a handful of napkins. What I witnessed stunned me. I couldn't believe what I saw: The Old man scrubbed the table with the napkins. I mean, scrubbed hard! He scrubbed the table top then all four edges of the table top, under the table. Stopped briefly to fill his cup with water at the soda fountain. Returned and scrubbed the seat detailing every inch of it. It didn't end there. He poured the water on the floor and used the napkins to scrub where my feet were. It was probably the most disturbing sight I've seen in recent years and the most hurtful. He turned away the helpful employees trying to assist him and used the remaining napkins to retrieve the trash and threw them away. After this he finally sat down. The whole event took about fifteen minutes. Prejudice is behavior, not always accusation, not always stereotypes. We both had our books. We both ate our burgers. We both shared the same space yet I was considered inferior and unclean from a man that may have been tasked with the unfortunate duty, in the golden years, of scrubbing the pool after we used it or mopping the floors after we walked on them...
It would seem that Time doesn't live long enough to heal human beings of this kind of behavior. Six hundred years is still not enough to encourage extinction of human evil. My only prayer is that this man dies with all his hatred. Our world has more than it will ever need.

Moments Before The Dawn

It started as a fleeting moment, on the eve of a new day, I sit in front of the this monitor typing away at, what I hope will be the final draft of a story I've been working on and off for a number of years. That "fleeting moment" pulled me from my work and I sat back in remembrance...

I was invited to dinner by a well-to-do friend of mine I've known for years. He didn't "want o be with these snobby kids" alone (it was friends of the girlfriend fresh out of graduate school). It was an interesting catastrophe Various topics briefly rose and fell until one comment hit the table. His name was Charles and he studied business and real estate investments (classic textbook Yuppie child). He just inherited his father's real estate firm and already butting heads with the seasoned subordinates. "They're talking behind my back and challenging my decisions! They don't like me even though I'm paying for their livelihoods..." My friend and I looked at each other. It was sad. I work for a "kid" like this one and it embarrasses me to admit this.
"For one," I began. "you inherited the family business because you happen to be the son of the CEO and you are up against many who earned their positions and I suspect it took some of them a number of years to get there with a great many sacrifices, none of which you've made yet-" I didn't want nor cared to insult the guy but at this point he began defending himself with arguments based on his frequent visitations to the business, his studies and grades which almost made me laugh. "the point is," I said. " you did not earn your way. You did not get your hands dirty with hard decisions or the field work necessary to complete certain aspects of the job; concepts like 'duty' and 'work ethic' are completely alien to you; concepts your team live by, and I suspect you never took the time to get to know your team or their job descriptions, what successes they had, their goals and so on. There's nothing more insulting than giving an assigned task to a staff member and having no clue whatsoever as to how it gets done or having no education to check or follow-up on the task. They'll sneak mistakes by you and watch you struggle, laughing at you all the while..." I kept a pleasant demeanor, I mean, I didn't know this guy or cared much for him but his situation is common among his class and upbringing. I, myself, would have been in this position hadn't my father changed his beliefs. It makes me angry at times to be involved in commentary like this, even by the ones I call friends. They go through college without paying a single cent then off to graduate school and afterwards straight into a job they never earned, all the while never holding an honest job in their lives, never understanding the daily struggle of earning one's way, of clocking in and clocking out, of having to do what others tell you to... They always seem baffled when they are not immediately respected. The arrogance and belligerence of these people defies reason especially when "power without effort" comes into their snobby, little hands.

The sun's coming up. On the eve of a new day less than three pages away from finishing my story, a fleeting moment distracts me...

I have no regrets.

The Hidden Society

In the City that spawns more Demons than Angels, a wall exists between Los Angeles and Downtown (Downtown is becoming more Los Angeles as gentrification slowly encroaches on the the existing community that has survived for decades there). On this wall are layers of meanings and conduits of subversiveness that tastes of ripe fruit but in the end there is the seed and each seed carries with it a moral/ethical dilemma: is it Art or ranting? Is it aesthetics or politics? Is it social criticism or ideology? Is it a statement of culture or is it culture?

The City is my religion, the Streets are my faith. people are the physical manifestation of the two yet a complex, myriad interpretation/expression, almost evangelical! These walls are barriers to some, passage-ways to others and its views are divine!

A Dream From The Air Conditioned Nightmare

There is nothing worse than waking aggravated from a well deserved rest exhausted because you had a nightmare about the Job and Place you're exhausted from day after day. Yes. I had dreamt of work. I've had these "nightmares" as of late and it's very annoying knowing that in a few hours, I have to go back there for better or worse! The "nightmare" in question was about a telephone call I received at work ( I get these annoying customers calling our Job from time to time. It's part of the ecology of the business) about an item in our store. I stutter once from frustration and the customer turns t a complete asshole, mocking my handicap the entire conversation! You see, this is a constant issue I have to deal with every waking hour and working in a place where you have to communicate to people has a devastating effect upon me psychologically and I assume I will never be rid of it: that fear which hits you when you see the words that will eventually breakdown mid way between thought and verbalization. What's more interesting, and oddly comforting, is that birds also stutter (I saw this on the Discovery Channel)!
I get teased enough at work about it, now I have "nightmares" about it too..... It's late. I still have a few hours before work. I'll try to get some sleep.

Remembering, Now

I'm not sure about many things in Life. I suppose as one gets older some things about human nature become 'expected' while others seem to encourage mystery. I managed to survive the dawn of the 21st century and I have seen people die in car accidents, suicides, racism, wars and war mongering, a first ever Black President and on the same token a regressive Black culture. Music has hailed to the masters of old, originality and the "Cool" are things of the past, fashion is nothing more than resurgence and Architecture is now the playground of computer aestheticists. My youth has distanced itself enough for me to look at it, to relive the mistakes and paths I took, the promises broken and the dreams that have faded away. I think about my childhood friends (I wonder what they are doing now?), our house, our neighborhood in the four seasons---the best was at Christmas time, the clear winter nights where the moon made the snow look like diamonds; and the Christmas lights, and the promise of all those toys my brother and I have gotten. I realize I do not want to die. I want to see the future. I want to live to find out my true potential. There are so many questions I have. Now I just read that astronomers in Europe discovered 32 planets outside our solar system!!!

I'm not sure about many things in Life. I don't have answers... "Questions are evolutionary. Answers are History." a Rabbi once told me. "Knowledge is its own path. It has its own rules and many of us are never prepared for the destination. What happens if Man Knows? Where would His desire be?"

Observations On Architecture Pt. II

Los Angeles is a plague. A City of such poetic catastrophe and virus, such beautiful decay, such a powerful evocation of Forgetfulness, but a plague nonetheless; a city that struggles to thrive though the Post-Future Dream Machines its connected to desperately strums the threads of Fate. There is very little density to this city and I'm always amazed at how moderately anti-pedestrian its streets and public places are; how non-intuitive our urban planning and architecture, in reality, is. We fight against this public density, pushing it away, scorning it in favor of beautification (which really means the strategy of "sub-urban-izing" the City by eliminating diversity).

We tend to forget that Cities are a mass human effort that involves everyone: poor, working poor, homeless, mentally insane, working class, middle class and upper class. The more we attempt to "purify" our Cities (via implementation of wider streets for public transportation, usually at the expense of pedestrians or forcing though design, renovation and planning, the "undesirables" from its stable environments to the outskirts) we get outstanding vistas of empty streets and city views and little to no social interaction. Los Angeles doesn't know how to survive after 6pm

Its streets become hazardous and empty and viral and beautiful. Abandoned. Pockets of life will persist but the plague still slowly ravishes the body of my City. Instead of architects masturbating in digital space with design that affront the senses or catering to the ego-centric industrialist/co-operation, brand-monopoly or well-to-do, maybe we can start by re-examining our methodology and the various ways we think about the human body and its need for shelter;

starting from the psycho-economics of shelter to the social need of the built environment, to understand the various forces involved in how strangers use the built environment and the political processes that cater to institutionalizing the systems that we use to orchestrate our daily lives. Instead of endless sprawl, fenced communities and the inefficient use of transportation, maybe a programme of Proto-Urbanism---a candid view of how are Cities really function and strategies to enhance those functions through design: parking, walking, entertainment, shops, etc.,). Flaws will exist as the shift from old to young and the shift of ideologies ensue, but that's part of human nature and since Cities are fundamentally a product of human nature, it must be allowed to fail and succeed, to experiment and stabilize or disrupt and displace. If these elements are not in play, the City becomes a ghost town.

Los Angeles is a plague. A beautiful catastrophe that needs to be understood.

Seeds Of A New Urban Ecology

This is the genesis of the "Protocaust" research: a hetero-Urbanism. It's a project that will, no doubt, involve Architecture, social theory, photography and writing. I hope to make installments in the near future.