It is still in complete shambles, but in fear that this blog will simply evaporate I am letting you know right now, all future briantown posts will be located here:
www.briantown.com
So long perspaxon. See you around. I will miss your no-nonsense layout, your chubby header, and your bowl full of buttery after-dinner mints.
Major changes in briantown. It all looks like total junk at the moment, but I am in the process of changing the website over to wordpress and integrating this blog with the website. I think it will be great, or at least better, when it’s all done, but in the meantime it looks really bad: devoid of content, features that aren’t working, empty page after empty page, doubled information, bad formatting, etc. See the ruins for yourself right here.
It’s bad. I told you so. It was not false modesty. I’m not quite sure why I went ahead and deleted the entire old website before the new one was ready to go. I was feeling inspired at that moment and bored with the old site. I guess this at least forces me into action. Plus, I had to migrate this entire blog because it is currently hosted on perspaxon, a neglected group page that might cease to exist in May. As my elementary school bus driver, Mrs. McCormick (shout out to bus 48!) used to say, “Move it or lose it asshole.”
So you’ll be able to find everything over here in the future:
Eventually…
envelope front:
envelope back:
drawing front:
drawing back:
It has been pointed out that this blog doesn’t really work properly. Intuitively, you might think that clicking the image would take you to a larger version. Think again! Like a modern day Alice in Wonderland, the first click takes you to a page with a several smaller images. However, if you click the image on that page it does take you to a version larger than the ones you see here. It might be time to invest in a new blog engine.
Drawing credit: JT of ftground and BP of briantown
I draw. So does my friend John. I live in Atlanta, GA. John moved to Eugene, OR. We keep in contact by mailing drawings back and forth across the country. We don’t have too many rules for the drawings except that they should be the size of a standard business envelope and the envelope should be reused.
This is a strange and liberating process. On my own, I worry too much as I draw strange monsters and stupid machines. The chaos has to be controlled and made into my own little chaotic universes. Knowing that there is a very real possibility that your drawing will be obscured by trash or tape or paint or packaging found in a gutter allows a spontaneity that is hard for me to achieve alone. When I send a drawing, it might not return. It might end up on John’s site: http://www.ftground.net/
John has stopped and posted three of the drawings there. I have stopped two drawings and am posting them here using the following order: envelope front, envelope back, drawing front, drawing back. Each drawing is 4″ x 9.375″. Click them to enlarge if you’re into that sort of thing:
I’m not sure how many others are in process at the moment. I have three more on my drafting table, one of which is getting ready to travel the Oregon trail once again…unless it takes after the Oregon Trail video game…in which case it will likely die of typhoid, dysentery, exhaustion, snakebite, or drowning while trying to cross a river.
For all of its sprawl, Atlanta also has moments of extreme density and thickly layered space. As I was wandering around the neighborhood today, past the eye-level razor wire encroaching on the sidewalk toward Fox Bros., the barbeque restaurant that I like to frequent (I was able to resist the urge today though fried pickles still sound delicious to me at 9 am), I had to negotiate this intersection yet again.
Pedestrians, cars, freight trains, and commuter rail all come together into a jumbled heap of confusion. Noticeably lacking are the bicyclists who mostly know better than to engage the madness of Dekalb Ave. (pronounced duh-cab – the “l” is silent for some reason). Last time I rode my bike even a few blocks on that street I ended up with a flat tire. The rubber had picked up so much glass I had to get a new one. Stupid road full of potholes and broken glass and shattered dreams and my tears. I’d like to punch that road right in its stupid mouth.
At the same time, I love this intersection: the complicated traffic patterns, the crazy forklift that sometimes arrives to load and unload the freight cars, the survey marker sign that makes no sense…
Ours is a star crossed, mixed up and abusive love. “I’m sorry Dekalb Ave, when I called you fat it was only because you scared me with your intensity. And when I called you an idiot and launched a bag of dog poo over your railing, I just meant to slow you down a little. You move so fast sometimes. And when I called you ugly, I was trying to say that you don’t have to let drunk guys pee off you onto unsuspecting motorists below.
Even though I am firmly in the nonbeliever camp — I have nothing mean, ironic, or caustic to say about the Clifton Sanctuary Ministries. They help people, they care, and they work out of a serviceable and sturdy little white building that would fit nicely into a painting by Grant Wood.
I just think spelling errors are funny, that’s all. Also, I am juvenile and think toilet based humor is high on the totem pole of human culture.
While most of the South and Midwest were plagued with tornadoes on Friday afternoon, Atlanta had to deal with a devastating rainbow attack. No one was safe from the terrifying spectrum of light and color. Riding a bicycle down a typical section of scrubby Atlanta industrial roadway became a horrifying encounter with nature’s sublime beauty. Ugly commuters were forced to confront their own personal and physical inadequacies while bathed in a perfect arc of exceptional beauty. The already grotesque nature of toes projecting from the edge of flip-flops turned into sickening abomination when dappled in the ethereal glow. What choice did the sandaled have except to cut off the offending digits or smash them with bricks until pulped? Those of us lucky enough to be wearing socks at the moment of rapture were instead confronted with visions of everything we had ever lost and everything we will ever lose. Many were driven mad. And that’s why I call them rainblows.
At Luke and Jenna’s new apartment, there is a useless brick wall in the back yard. Maybe it was once one wall of a garage, or a major masonry mistake that has gone uncorrected for what looks like one hundred years. Whatever the root cause of its existence, I sort of love it. It interrupts convenient parking and creates a serious obstacle for either a driver or a passenger to get out of a vehicle depending on orientation. It makes unloading and backing a U-Haul out of the parking a near impossibility as evidenced by the less-than-an-inch of navigable room.
But just look at it. It is very proud to be there. Even if all the bricks aren’t actually bricks, the weathered wood blocking seems happy to fill in.
The mortar is sloppy and cracking but at least there’s a lot of it. Rusty screws and nails that protrude from the surface invite future tetanus shots or at the very least torn sweaters. It is a ruin to be reckoned with — a wall that does not suffer fools.
Wait a second maybe it is…at least it was last weekend. This has been the least wintery winter I have ever experienced — a far cry from a youth spent navigating lake effect snow blowing off Lake Erie, massive drifts fueling epic sledding, icicles hanging dangerously from sagging gutters, the cold instantly freezing all the little hairs in your gigantic nose.
Last Sunday in Atlanta was a particularly absurd day, the temperature inviting shorts and terrible Hawaiian shirts. Look, if you grew up in Florida you might not understand. Your winters were always warm. Though your skin may shine like gold, your blood is thin and you are probably an asshole. I’m not sure why that it, but it’s probably true. Look it up asshole. You don’t understand winter in the same way that northerners do not understand shark attacks.
So, I spent the day outside, wandering around town, hanging out with friends and the children of friends and the dogs of friends and the chocolate cakes of friends. I’m going to be honest, it was pretty awesome. However, if someone told me I could have another piece of that cake if I spent a week freezing in a cabin up north (sorry, up nort) I would hook up my team of sled dogs and go. That cake was freaking delicious.
You may have sensed the sprawl that reaches out in all directions from the heart of Atlanta — I hear we’ll be north of the Ohio River soon. As a city-lover, there are a lot of negatives associated with that level of unchecked suburbanization: increased commute times, excessive fuel consumption, irresponsible land use, unwalkable communities, the substitution of fast foods for fresh foods, blah blah blah. Sprawl annoys me, but nothing is perfect. Cities grow in unusual and not necessarily beneficial ways. They aren’t for everyone. Some weirdoes would rather live in the mountains of Oregon with limited access to humanity and modern conveniences, like an indoor bathroom. Weirdoes.
Even as the sprawl sends feelings of ill-will coursing through my body, I have to respect its madness. Without it, I fear that places like this could not exist and the world would be a little bit less interesting (in person, it’s in focus…unless you’re drunk):
The Buford Highway corridor requires a longer post later, but for now I will briefly note that it’s a seven lane piece of pedestrian killing madness lined with shopping center after shopping center, mostly catering to immigrant communities – Mexican, Latin American, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean seem to be the most prevalent players if the restaurant signs are any indication.
And that’s really why we head out there from time to time: to check out a new restaurant, or new to us anyway, and indulge in authentic cuisine from another country. There are probably a hundred restaurants or more on this road – not all of them are great and some of them are truly awful but when you strike gold with a good place, it’s as close to visiting another country as you can get around here. The wait staff will probably speak limited English and the menu will likely confound, but the food will be awesome.
So Luke, Jenna, Zack and I took a trip back to China, via Café 101. I have no idea why it is named that but looking at other restaurants along the way would indicate that numbers are very meaningful to restaurateurs along this stretch of road (BBQ Corner 2, Pho 24, Pho 96 – maybe it’s just that all the Pho restaurants (Vietnamese noodles) always have a number in the name and there are a lot of Pho restaurants.) I am told that the Café 101 building was once a bank so that doesn’t really help with the name, nor does it explain the oddness of the architecture itself. Café 101 is a pie-shaped building with double height ceilings on the interior and the strangest exterior concrete structural arches I have ever seen. The red tile roof makes it look like the building is wearing a fancy little beret while the sign speaks to a complete lack of interest in typography. But the best detail for sure has to be the way the gutter from Café 101 drains directly onto the neighboring building. In short, it is all incredible.
And the awesomeness on the exterior is matched by the food inside. I can’t remember everything we ate, but there were definitely pickled vegetable things, and eggplants in spicy oil, stir fried green beans, tofu, hot and sour soup, and some sort of fatty pork belly thing that smelled so good even the memory of it induces salivation. Sadly for me, it was as fatty as you would imagine the belly of a chubby pig to be. I’m not one for fatty meat, but the vegetables underneath were a salty, smoky, porky bit of deliciousness. I’ll take you there when you visit.
And no trip to Buford highway would be complete for me without a trip to Quickly:
Yep, that’s what it’s called. If you have never had bubble tea before, you will probably think it’s gross the first time you try it, unless you think tapioca balls floating around in your drink that you suck up through a fat straw sounds delicious. It’s like you’re drinking flavored tea and then all the sudden you’re eating a gummy snack. It’s bizarre. I don’t know what to say or how to defend its uncompromising weirdness. I just accept it and love it and apparently a lot of other people love it as well. Though you wouldn’t guess it from the photo above, business is always brisk inside Quickly, as the name suggests.
But as far as I am concerned, there is no better place to hang out than a nondescript parking lot along side a very busy stretch of road on a warm winter evening. That’s how we do in Atlanta. (Note: the “t”s in Atlanta are silent in the previous sentence but the swagger is pronounced.)
I’m working on the design of a stair in the lobby of an art museum. While setting up the camera for an interior rendering, I ended up with this crazy wireframe perspective that actually made me stop and stare for a moment. I don’t attend raves. I don’t take drugs. I have never even smoked a cigarette in my entire life. And I certainly don’t draw in neon colors…or do I?
No, I don’t.
But maybe I should start…drawing with neon colors I mean…not the raver-druggy thing.
But back to the videogame nature of this particular drawing – it actually strikes me that it might have the aesthetic of the movie Tron, but the videogame version was actually pretty flat and lame. The only part about that particular game that I recall was the lightcycle battle which was really nothing more than drawing a line around your opponent that they would crash into. Strictly two-dimensional. What the stair drawing really reminds me of is this:
The classic arcade game, Star Wars, which popularized vector graphics in such a way that gamers could finally feel like they were in the trenches of the death star, tie-fighters in hot pursuit, the hopes of the struggling rebel alliance — nay, the galaxy — resting on the wings of your…well…X-wing. There you are, blasting away like crazy at the imperial forces with your photon torpedoes in order to blow up that planet-destroying space station. Also, you got to sit inside the game. Check this thing out:
It was so awesome! I happily dropped in quarter after quarter at Chucky Cheese (correction and apologies to giant animatronic mice everywhere — that should have read “Chuck E. Cheese”) in order to stay in that world for the three minutes that I could survive. If I could sit in a pod like this at work, upgraded with dual monitors and a few swivel out drawing surfaces and a cup holder, I’m pretty sure I would be the envy of architects and office-workers everywhere.
“Oh who’s on the phone? Rem Koolhaas? Tell him I’ll call him when I have a chance. Right now I’m in the zone.”
Why have cubicles taken over when we could all enjoy autonomous, customized work pods? I bet Google and Pixar have stuff like that. I could probably press a button and my pod would enter a conveyor system that would take me to the office where it would enter through a massive freight elevator, or some gigantic robot arm could slingshot the pod to a docking station hundreds of floors up. Way up there I could sit and dream and continue to draw the neon staircases that no one would need anymore.
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BONUS LEVEL:
Though this post relies on science fiction movie videogame crossovers, the arcade game that I recall from my youth that was specifically architectural was this totally crazy thing called Blueprint. Here’s the title screen featuring the adorable and dapper hero, JJ:
I remember playing it as a kid at the local Pizza Hut in Brunswick, Ohio. They also had Q-Bert and Pacman for a while and served pop (we called it pop in Ohio) over crushed ice in red plastic cups. My memories of Blueprint are vague but I remember having to collect parts of a machine from houses while flowerpots fell from the sky trying to kill you. It sounds crazy, so I just looked it up. The reality is even more bizarre: everything I remember was correct, but what I did not recall was that the purpose of the machine you were trying to assemble was to blast a giant evil raisin that was chasing your busty girlfriend along the top edge of the screen. If the evil raisin catches your girlfriend, you die, I suppose of a broken heart. And if you went into a house without a piece of the machine you exited with a bomb instead that had to quickly be taken back to the bomb disposal hole. It’s not surprising that the game was not particularly popular.
Looking back, I like to think it was an informative, though perhaps misleading, early encounter with architectural plans.
I’m not sure when this happened, but I have turned into a slob in my studio space. There is junk everywhere and beneath that junk there is other junk and beneath that other junk there are gluesticks and tape and eyeballs used for bird taxidermy and Taiwanese stickers and unfinished drawings and sketches in various states of general ugliness. There is a beautiful, clean, smooth and heavy piece of oak under all of that mess but I’m not sure when I’ll see it again. This clutter is helping me draw at the moment so I’m trying not to fight it too much.
This is a surprising development and on some level it is probably upsetting the patterns etched between the folds of my lumpy brain matter. When I was a little nerd, no bigger than a turd, I was upset if the food on my plate was touching other food on my plate. Should the peas accidentally roll into the potatoes, mashed or otherwise, they were tainted. Meatloaf was quarantined. Salad had no place at all on the dinner plate as its expansive iceberg canopy was sure to hide some fraternizing morsels beneath. Provided no one was really paying attention to my eating habits (and when there are seven kids jostling to be fed you can hide your idiosyncrasies a little), I would not only make sure the food was as compartmentalized as possible but I would also eat one thing at a time until it was gone starting with the vegetables. If a dinner plate were a clock, the vegetables were placed at 4:00, the main course for the evening occupied 6:00 – 10:00, and the bread or roll or fruit was placed at 12:00 – 3:00. I ate clockwise. Fruit cocktail was a problem.
I’m not sure when I stopped eating in that manner, but I catch myself occasionally falling into that comforting rhythm. While it no longer troubles me to see beets interact with pasta, I admit that the sight of soggy bread in sliced, bun, muffin or any other form actually disgusts me. Contrary to many a Midwestern kitchen, soggy bread shouldn’t be.
For years my drawing habits were as tidy and compartmentalized as my dinners, but I seem to be relaxing on that front. The drawings are getting messier – I’ll post some of them here sometime in the near-ish future…maybe. Media is mixed. Stains are a staple. Trash is informative. It’s still not terrible — you can see the floor. I haven’t yet begun to stack newspapers or national geographic magazines in thrilling columns, but you never know — I could get mad reclusive all up in here right quick.
At the American Artificial Limb Co. we do not pray for war or bloody accidents involving fingers caught in the teeth of threshers or roller coaster decapitations. We do not dream of overturned buses, collapsing steel work, earthquakes, tornados, or encounters with enraged giants. Nor do our eyes bulge cartoonishly and then transform into novelty dollar signs when we hear of a recent string of shark attacks along the gulf coast. When gang warfare between the Machetes and the Butchers turns gruesome within the city limits, our lower jaws do not separate from our upper jaws and drop to the floor making the sound of a register ringing up a sale. Bad news sends chills up our spines where it is then distributed to every available digit.
Ours is a simple life, almost monastic, and those of us called to work at the American Artificial Limb Co. do so with the weight of great responsibility pushing us down. Most of us have back problems. Though I have been here for almost fifteen years, I am still considered an apprentice. Most of the employees of the American Artificial Limb Co. have been here at least twenty years, and in the case of the most senior staff member, known only as Wren, no one knows how long he has been working. It is assumed it has been upwards of seventy-five years. Wren himself no longer speaks and is now confined to a wheelchair. His eyes can no longer provide the laser-like scrutiny needed in artificial limb inspection, but his hands know every secret of the profession and his work on the lathe remains impossible to match. No one inspects Wren’s limbs; to do so would be a waste of time.
Time is a luxury not available to those of us who have chosen to work at the American Artificial Limb Co. There is always a long backlog of orders for limbs, mostly arms, and more specifically right arms for some reason that we do not attempt to guess. To believe that you can understand why more right arms are separated from their bodies than left arms is hubris, and we are humble in our understanding of such things. But the careful attention and need for patient craftsmanship to create an arm is no different from the effort put into a single toe. If anything, the precision needed to make a perfect toe requires the skill of a master. As apprentices, we are charged with the creation of larger limbs that do not need years of experience and disciplined study. We start making legs and torsos and upper arms and lower backs and butts – broad stroke body parts that are often covered by clothing. Only once those have been mastered do you even dare to dream of creating something as significant as a thumb. I do not yet dream of thumbs.
Though I cannot remember anyone ever retiring or being fired from the American Artificial Limb Co., it seems our employees never number more than thirty-five. When a new employee arrives, inevitably carrying a small bag of well-loved brushes, awls, chisels and rasps in tow, there always seems to be a spare room in the campus dormitory. It is rumored that a new apprentice only arrives when an old master fades away, but as no dead bodies have ever been discovered this remains strictly a rumor, and we do not deal in rumors. We deal in artificial feet and hands.
The American Artificial Limb Co. is one of the few remaining institutions of its kind. As physical artificial limbs are quickly being replaced by their more modern digital counterparts, companies such as ours are becoming an odd relic of an old era like a rotary telephone or a manual car window. A small population of those requiring artificial limbs will remain for a generation or two, but eventually there will be no more need for physical artificial limbs or those of us who have dedicated our lives to the fabrication of such things.
I am suspicious of the act of covering your car with a bunch of shit in the name of art. Whether it is a comment on consumerism, something about the disposable nature of the stuff we value as children and adults, a fear of leaving any surface bare, a plea for attention, a bohemian challenge to the status quo, a fear of automated car washes, or a fetish for plastics in their many forms – my thoughts and mood are drifting negative the longer I stare. It demands that you stare. While I don’t appreciate bossy objects telling me what to do — I do stare. There is no question about that.
The questions that do come to mind have considerably less to do with the success or failure of this car as a work of transportable art; rather they lean heavily into the realm of practicality: What kind of glue do you need to use for that and how much? How much of that stuff flies off when you hit a bump? Is it distracting to drive behind the art car? How unsettling would it be if one of the large plastic heads fell off of the top and you ran it over? Can you drive it on the highway? Is changing the oil more difficult? Does the dolls’ hair blow in the breeze and is that as hilarious as I think it should be? How awesome would it be to cover your car in wind instruments and could you get it to play a tune as you drove around? How many children are warned not to go anywhere near the owner of this vehicle? At least it’s not a van with black tinted windows.
I haven’t seen this much shit on a car since the one drove by covered in bible verses, megaphones, visions of the apocalypse and tasteful accents of purple glitter. That guy is crazy though, and firmly outside the scope of my understanding of reality. Though we are forced to drive on the same physical roads, it is clear that the bible car driver thinks of those roads in a fundamentally different way: where I see them as a means to get me to the farmer’s market to buy lettuce and cheese and ten pounds of Valencia oranges for juice, he envisions paths to eternal damnation for a life of sin. I should buy more organic produce. Maybe that would make him happier.
But back to the car covered in toys and skates, dolls and peace symbols, army men and ninja turtles – collecting is hard. Maybe my dissatisfaction is less about the idea of covering every square inch of your car in toys than it is about the selection of toys on display. To transform your car into a museum or catalogue of plastic novelty may require the judicious eye of a serious curator. I have this feeling that anything goes here, every toy is accepted, glue slathered onto its feet and stuck in an open spot. That’s one way to do it, but I feel it lacks the intention and thought and creative energy that goes into more engaging art. Now a car covered only in plastic doll heads or every plastic Spock every made or rollerskates filled with plastic fruit – maybe that would be something.
A professor of mine once explained it quite simply, “You want people to have a ‘Huh? Wow!’ moment rather than a ‘Wow, Huh’ moment. My desire to stare is easily overtaken by a desire for tacos.
In the north, houses have basements. Basements imply permanence, settlement, a rooting of house to the earth below by tons of concrete. We claim the land we live on first by digging a gigantic hole, and spend the rest of our lives filling up that hole with stuff we can’t stand the idea of losing or letting go. Basements provide shelter during massive storms, a cool place to retreat during muggy summers without air conditioning, a place for kids to play hide and seek and stage elaborate home-movies.
Even before I thought about buildings for a living, I assumed houses without basements to be temporary and cheap — more like doublewide trailers. If a tornado hit your neighborhood, those houses would surely be obliterated and the people inside turned into ground meat while you remained safely tucked in an underground pocket. Those houses without solid and extensive foundations lacked intentionality, they did not respect nature enough to defy her properly. No basement? You might as well have said no roof.
As a child I was afraid of being alone in our basement. It was always cooler than the house above. The air was damp. The naked lightbulbs were operated by a long fraying piece of butcher’s string attached to a short metal pull chain above. The stairs were unfinished wood planks. The few windows that it did have were boarded over. It was full of boxes, tools, saws, scrap lumber, cobwebs, sawdust, old bikes, my father’s inexplicable collection of empty alka seltzer bottles, mechanical and plumbing equipment, and an extremely creepy set of ratty beige curtains set on a wooden frame to form an extremely creepy closet.
Had I grown up in the south, I would have had an entirely different understanding of what happens under houses. I assumed basements were standard operating procedure throughout the country until I moved here. Not many houses have basements; instead they go the much more terrifying crawl space route. Three or four cramped feet beneath your house inspire a fear not unlike being buried alive. You feel the weight of the house above pressing down on you. You rethink your collection of books and wonder why you don’t collect exotic cotton balls instead. The whole house presses down on a few piers. The ground is not a smooth slab of concrete but a rutted, scraped dirt patch. You’re outside and underneath rather than safely contained within. Things live beneath there and therefore things die under there.
The house I currently live in is somewhere in between crawl space and basement. It is a hastily dug pit that would have been an appropriate backdrop for a short and unpleasant story by Poe. The floors are raw and the lighting harsh. The collection of rotating jars is confounding. Everything is crumbling. I appreciate that I can stand up, but assume the added height is only to ease the hanging of rotting carcasses. Why is it so empty and what do the few items that remain suggest about those who came before?
A fishing net. Empty cat litter buckets. The poster of the gopher does nothing to calm my nerves. This is the terrifying subterranean world that I sleep above every single night.
Sweet dreams.