Beth’s performance

Sunday, Beth’s performance. I’m happy I could make it. A small theater space on an upper floor of the West 18^th Street, just a few minutes walk from Union Square. I arrive early, have some time to look around, and read further my book, still Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. We enter the hall, and walk up the stairs to sit down. A tiny little space, with about 40-50 seats, family atmosphere. The show starts with Beth’s solo dance, and this is exactly what I was looking for on this grey afternoon. Magic. Filling my hangover emptiness with scents of travelling, of bodies, of movements, irreplaceable with words.

CUP in the New Museum

Sunday afternoons want me to stay in Brooklyn. But I resist the seduction of the Madison Street, and head for the New Museum. I met several times with different members of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, but I was interested in Damon: he’s next on my list of interviews. The subject of the talk in the Lower East Side, and long-time residents’ organization to avoid displacements and rent increases. The discussion starts in a predictable way, but after a good half an hour it takes a sudden turn. A question from the audience introduces an idea whose significance is hardly recognized. She talks about the ecological footprint, a notion omnipresent in the politically and environmentally conscious press of the US. She doesn’t articulate clearly her question, but I continue her train of thought. There sould be a way to think about our social footprint. To have a set of information about where I move: who lived there before, how can I avoid changing the rent structure of the neighborhood and to make it lose its rent-controlles status, how can I contribute best to the local economies, how to participate, how to engage? We all know the dynamisms of ‘cutting-edge’ neighborhoods, but often fail to personalize the responsabilities.

Chess machine

This chess machine, on display at the MoMA’s design exhibition, is not a regular one. From a given situation, it tells you all the possible steps each character may take. In this way, it’s a few steps behind me: it tells about the possible futures of the board I play in. The chess board becomes the garden of forking paths, Borges’ famous take on the co-presence of futures, and the parallel presence of choices failing to exclude each other.

Koolhaas Houselife

Again, the evening starts at Storefront. My second home, as Raju calls it, woke up from its winter sleep, and susprises me with the intensity of its program. two events a week, screenings, discussions, sometimes voluntary newsletter-foldings. I feel like returning to a betrayed place, lost somewhere behind. A refreshing 20-25 minutes walk from the DCP, I like to launch the evening with a visit at the Kenmare Street. This time a French-Italian couple, Louise Lemoine and Ila beka presenting their film about the afterlife of Koolhaas’s Bordeaux house. Afterlife, because we often forgot about buildings after they’re completed and filled the pages of all important architecture magazines. The film follows the daily trajectory of the building’s cleaning lady, who definitely is the persion who spends the most time in the house – more than in her home – and knows surprisingly lot about its functioning and mechanics. She doesn’t understand it all though – she smiles about the fancy, snobbish but apparently impractical features. In another video, Koolhaas himdelf comments on the video: “What we see is a clash of two strong concepts. The architect’s concept of the house with the cleaning lady’s vision.”

Design an the Elastic Mind

I make two visits to the hip exhibition of MoMA: Design and the elastic mind. During the first visit I got stuck in the first rooms introducing nanodesign and microengineering. I have the feeling that it’s a preliminary example for what the Hungarian pavilion will show in this year’s Venice Biennial: Architecture modeled after living organisms. A huge playground for technical enthousiasts, with sometimes dull attempts to bring poetry into technologically inspired design. The second visit reveals the weaknesses of the approach: a lot of spectacles making little sense. Media spaces which don’t look much better than just big sets of TV screens rendering an overoptimistic illusion of an united community of the human kind, and similar ideas.

Hispanic Society

A lecture abourt Francis Alys in the Hispanic Society of Harlem. A piece of colonial Spain in the middle of Black Harlem, huge courts and baroque architecture opening to a street of hamburger and pizza shops. When the lecturer enters the room, I find him very familiar. It takes me a few minutes to find out, who he is – where did I see him. Mexico, Mexico. I make the connection: he was the prominent guest of the Mexican Pavilion of the 07 Venice Biennial, my second employer after being fired from the Hungarian one. Todays lecturer came by boat: but to grab the land is not the most obvious thing to do. He failed to have both his feet on the bank of the canal: he fell into the water. Silence. Everybody stands still, frightened. What will he say? How will he react? Others forcing back their laugher. And there he comes. Swimes some hundred meters down, to reach a point where he can climb out to the bank. He walks back, soaked to the skin, water dropping from all his clothes, around and behind him. And laughs, laughs as if it were the best thing to do in Venice, a quick swim in the canals. All relieved. Hapy end.

Crown Heights

When the waters come up, and buildings become islands, we will be the land, Crown Heights.

Midtown nightscape

Aniko’s new gallery has its opening. Family atmosphere, some dozens of people in a Midtown flat used as gallery space. The view is extraordinary: we’re right under the Empire State Building, the lights are on, and their pulsation gives a third dimenasion to the town whose streets down there I walk every day.

Freskó Philadelphiában