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Old 10-31-2018, 06:41 PM
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ebacon ebacon is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by donquixote99 View Post
The low walls seem designed for sitting. The butt-spikes may have been added later because the wrong people were sitting too much. There are a million stories in the big city.

The dissonance between the sittable-walls and the butt-spikes is glaring, even upsetting. But there are barriers against the throng everywhere that property rights are maintains against it. Abandoned property has breached barriers--indeed, the expense of maintaining barriers can be a major cause of abandonment.
I hear you.

During my time away from PC I have been giving a lot of thought to the human senses. The example of prickly forms in NYC focus attention to the sense of touch and how it relates to politics. That is simple. On the other hand the sense of touch as a source of profit is a more modern political division.

During my time away I have paid more attention to the sense of smell. I saw city structures in a different light. For example let's focus on what it smells like to be in Guadalajara, Mexico and walking between its small city blocks. In one space is a person selling tractor parts. In a neighboring space might be a person raising a few farm animals. We can begin to feel the political tension in the simple smells of tractor exhaust vs organic farming within the confines of a city with new European money and Cartesian land use. Their math had infected the innocent native americans.

Bamberg, Germany is the city that focused my awareness on the sense of smell. Bamberg has a river that runs through it. On one side of the river is a castle. On the other side of the river is an old slaughterhouse. Lore has it, and I believe the lore, is that while the castle stood still the smells of slaughtering forced the slaughterhouse to move as Bamberg attracted more inhabitants. The political dance ended when the citizens of both sides of the river agreed that they had build something beautiful that all wanted to maintain.

That was castle space. That was farm animal space. That was political space of flags. Of real death over fighting about smell and borders.

The United States of America are charged with a different burden. We are burdened with making good of the promise that all men are created equal. We have to make good of our Declaration of Independence from England. As I walked through NYC and saw the form of barb wire through the ages of pricklyness of roses to the pricklyness of awful public spaces I gained the courage to write about the little things.

Little things like words in textbooks. Why did Americans really hate the royalty of England enough to have the courage to write the Declaration of Independence? Was it really about the taxes? I don't so. I think it was more about who was paying and laboring for the sewer system in London and who got to enjoy London's beauty.

I love sparring with you. You help me put important feelings into words. Barriers against the throng. Rivers, sewers, insulating one another from who is smart vs who is a tool. And arriving at a beautiful form that all want to maintain for a few hundred years.

That is efficiency. Hugs.

Now I need a smoke and a beer. That was hard to write.
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