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Thursday, July 29, 2004
Lately, I feel like I have some kind of disorder, not because I'm easily distracted, per se, but because I just don't want to read. Although a myriad of behaviors are being branded as "disorders" these days, I find it particularly disturbing since I usually need to be reading SOMETHING at any given time, even if it's just the latest issue of Wired.
What I have discovered in my recent litera-phobia is that graphic novels are the answer! Pictures AND words. I just finished Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, a story of a girl growing up in Iran in the 70s and 80s. It's pretty powerful stuff, but somehow the horrors of persecution, revolution and repression (as well as the tribulations and rebellions of youth) are made more palatable (or at least easier to absorb) in graphic form. So much emotional and physical detail is communicated so simply and immediately in imagery in a way that would take a long, lugubrious passage in a traditional narrative.
I was also reminded of artist Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660, which while it's not commonly categorized as a "graphic novel" is the illustrated story of her experience as a young woman in the WWII Japanese American internment camps. It was one of the first books I ever read about the camps, and it made a deep impression on the teenage me in a way that a traditional book probably wouldn't have. Not only could I "see" what the camps looked like, but I could feel the emotional charge of her point-of-view in a way that was more personal and diaristic than the "official" photographs of the camp could ever express.
Although I suppose these observations are things that comic book readers have known for eons, I find it refreshing. I was never one for the superhero genre so much, but ever since I saw American Splendor, I've been intrigued by so-called "alternative" graphic novels that use the comic book form to deal with real life. There's something heroic and slightly liberating about seeing Harvey Pekar's day-to-day life as a neurotic, angry, intellectual file clerk laid out in excruciatingly beautiful detail. So next I'm tackling two more books where "nothing ever happens:" Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan and Craig Thompson's Blankets (all 600 pages of it!).
4:45 PM
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Friday, July 16, 2004
After researching an article on Minoru Yamasaki (architect of the original World Trade Center), and a recent trip to Shanghai (home of 1/5th of the world's high-rise construction cranes), I've developed an amateur interest in the design and meaning of skyscrapers. So I was intrigued by a show now up at the MOMA Qns that I would probably otherwise find dull: Tall Buildings is just what it sounds like -- an exhibit of models and drawings for 25 "tall buildings," from the past 10 years.
Although it makes me sad that I'm not in New York to see the show in person, the Web site seems a pretty good substitute. It includes beautiful photographs (both of "live" buildings and of models of never-built or yet-to-be-built projects), height comparisons, sketches and plans, and tech-y info on structural engineering-type stuff and design issues. I was a bit disappointed that it didn't address the symbolism and emotional/irrational impetus behind much skyscraper construction. I adhere to Rem Koolhaas' classic manifesto that skyscraper construction is an expression of hubristic desires rather than a necessity of space-starved urban life (the usual justification).
In the New York Times' review of the show, Hubert Muschamp takes a much more sanguine view, saying "Skyscrapers need no justification." He suggests that by building more and increasingly hyperbolic structures we can overcome our anxieties around terrorism; that somehow, tall buildings can "disembed ourselves from fear." I don't know about that. Although Muschamp poo-poos post-9/11, anti-skyscraper backlash, it still seems prideful and egotistical to construct buildings that take 45 minutes to exit on foot just because you can.
11:10 AM
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