It begins with a complaint from the brother that he feels obliged to adopt the new functional style thats comes over from Europe and "Le Corbusier and the rest" when he really does not care to. And neither does he simply want to reproduce tried and true Grecian steretypes, "as if we hadn't enough stone columns..."
I was reading this on a pleasant Saturday afternoon before going to work while a real estate agent hosted an open house next door. In that afternoon half a dozen couples passed through my front yard with the essay's very questions at the forefront of their thoughts—what art should be made available to humanity? What is the construction that suits us? Does my neighbors house come from "the widest imaginative skill in its technical interpretation," or, in other words, is it an attractive and practical work of architecture, and sufficiently so for the asking price?
While taking reading breaks to hang out my laundry I felt uncomfortable when couples would pass into the house to the extent I didn't feel right saying "Hello" to these strangers, potential neighbors. For at that moment I am an element of the commodity, I represent and am part of the representation of the neighborhood, the mythology of a first, brief impression of the living thing that a city block is. And I don't care to misspeak and devalue the property, and I certainly don't care to dwell on the position this puts me in, that of an animated prop like those found alongside the tracks of an amusement park ride. What self-respecting member of the bourgeoisie hangs out laundry anyway?
The difference between these couples and the hypothetical people asking WCW's brother to build them a house is that this house is already built, there is nothing hypothetical but the decision to occupy it. It is 2012, we stopped building within Monterey city limits a long time ago; and we stopped construction entirely three years ago. And generally in this country for the last half century building houses has been the repugnant product of an unartistic, track-home sprawl away from culture, and against culture.
Two friends of mine live in the attic of a mansion in Oakland. Affluence long ago abandoned the neighborhood, so the creative construction that replaced traditional architecture was converting the three floors into different apartments. The bathroom ceiling descends to 3 feet by the time it gets to the window. The kitchen makes no sense, it was never built nor wired for a stove, refrigerator, nor sink. The stairway has been shut off at the bottom and is used for storage—instead, to bypass the rest of the house, a massive three-flight stairway has been affixed to the house, next to the two-flighter the downstairs neighbors use.
In a sense I feel the writer is in a similar position. He is not desperately seeking new forms and meters as WCW was; he instead seeks a method for transforming the old, rebuilding the abandoned, imaginatively occupying what we erroneously left in and under the dust in favor of buildings (track homes, strip malls, box stores) and narrative forms (the plethora of bad reality shows, gossip columns, talk shows) devoid of art, products and producers of a false humanity.
The Occupy Monterey encampment at Veteran's Park was given notice last month, and the encampment is now held by one man—Jimmy—on the steps of city hall. He is not allowed to affix anything to the columns. His walls instead are simply propped, old campaign signs formerly advertising so and so to the drivers on the highway. Otherwise a plastic tub and a table provide the only support and shelter, beyond the roof above the landing held up by the two columns. Jimmy and his fellow daytime occupiers are my architect brothers and sisters, refusing to move forward until we get it right—there is a positive universe here already, complete and perfect, neglected under a bourgeois simulacrum, an Orange County that rejects its history, a retirement community in Arizona filled with midwesterners that mocks the Southwest with stereotyped signifiers of the desert, like a cartoonish and grotesque version of Borges' map that was so detailed that it covered the land it sought to explain.
Like the history that our public spaces represent—our parks, plazas and government buildings—the neglected ideas of community and democracy, we must occupy culture. We must oust the influence of the 1% of the media—from film to writing to music, all of it—that makes a massive profit catering to the idiotic lowest common denominator that they think the American consumer is. Thomas Kinkade must be made a pariah to the world of painting; Kim Kardashian should be barred from Hollywood until she has created something other than a faked, for-profit wedding; Chris Brown should be ignored in favor of the thousands of more talented, unabusive musicians who will let RiRi shine in her own right. We must not let our shared human values, what we ideally want from culture, society, and each other be tarnished in ceaseless corporate-funded reproductions, rebroadcastings, reposts while sincere, individual, personal expression dies at the independent, is unfunded on NPR, bought cheap at the used book store. People deserve beauty just as they deserves jobs and houses they can afford.
The Williams brothers have done Jimmy and me a service. Next to the real world we inhabit, art is the most important space we have, and I will occupy it day and night just as Jimmy has taken city hall, until this occupation means something, until enough people notice, stop, interact, and participate in the revitalization of our disintegrating society, one whose economy, buildings, politics, and mainstream media suffers more with every bullshit Kinkade cabin sold, and every episode-long effort to keep up with the Kardashians.
Nicely done! :)
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