Wednesday, November 26, 2008

RO ON EYESPACE – 2

SPACE IN THANKSGIVING WINE GLASSES

Guy holds up a lens that makes me see my glass this way:

http://www.rohini.com/thanksgiving/

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

GUY ON EYESPACE

THE EYE OF A HURRICANE

What is a bubble? When we look at a bubble, are we perceiving the space inside it, or (I think more probably) are we perceiving the container of that space?

At first blush a bubble seems to be, by definition, not space but container: anti-space enclosing space neatly and efficiently. But actually, that’s not really right. Another use we have for “bubble” is what we could also call a “pocket”: an area of negative inside a positive. Holes in swiss cheese are bubbles, you know—at least before the cheese is sliced.

I mention this because we often actually do conflate space with its container. A bubble is an easy example, but what about the “P Spot” Rohini talked about earlier? Most anyone would say that the P Spot is a space; that when those poor locker-room men and women are looking at the P Spot, they’re looking at negative space.

But I’d say that when you are looking at the P Spot, in fact you are probably more aware of its container—naked people!—than of anything else. The P Spot is both the space and its container, inseparable.

In American football, quarterbacks are not trained to throw the ball at their teammates (receivers), but actually to throw the ball at spaces between the opposing team’s players. The fact that they have to be trained into this shows our innate tendency to recognize mass rather than its lack, but the fact that they’re highly successful at it shows that on an instinctive level, space and anti-space are on a more equal footing than we realize.

This understanding allows us to perceive mass better, because normally observing an object—an individual mass—leads us to ignore its container, the space around it. Thus we miss information and perception until we realize that the two are one.

Seem a bit abstract? Then consider the hurricane. Understanding its rotation requires recognition of the space around it. Hurricanes happen to rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere because the heavier airs surrounding them rotate clockwise—not because they turn that way on their own. You don’t usually see these surrounding airs because you’re focused on the storm. But the the only way to understand hurricanes, if not all weather, is to look at everything, positive and negative, massy and light, empty and full: all side-by-side, associated, and intertwined.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 2

THE SPACE OF ROMANCE

Last weekend, I met my clandestine lover for a tryst in Paris.

So was it the forbidden nature of this assignation that made Paris that much more romantique?

Was it the morose blue-grey eyes of skies that wept the tears of a longing lover? Was it the winged horses, holding back their passion with the reined-in restraint of sculpture frozen into centuries?

Or was it the fact that even the architecture in the city wears the sexiest lingerie? Mmmm… little crochet wraps of metallic white lace wrought upon Juliette balconies, teasingly half-concealing every stroke of stone, every dimpled shadow, every enigmatic hollow?

Look – everywhere you look, cherubs in faded gilt have drawn their bows to pierce their arrows of love into your eyes. So you must shut them tight, until your eyelids quiver with the effort.

As if all this were not enough; the mouths of the French are puckered, each word articulated about to become a kiss.

Paris is a pleasure that spills over the brim into an acute Poetic Pain of the Senses… Paris is love made quite unbearable.

If Paris were to have a face, it would be the grimacing face of a Petite Mort, the objective of which, ironically, is to create life.

One moment, the day is awash with vertical stripes of icy rain; the next, with soft, diagonal skeins of golden sunshine.

A puddle winks at me and the air flirts with my hair, brushing the locks back with so gentle a touch that they fall back to where they were.

It's quite the perfect example of how physical space can translate into that space in one's thoracic region called "The Heart".

ADAM K ON SPACE & CITIES

A LONG WALK FOR A SHORT DRINK

Guy’s critique of the space that's called “Los Angeles” brings to mind an advertising concept that my business partner Tom Moyer describes, which is convoluted and offers little in the way of beneficial information – “A long walk for a short drink”.

Indeed, when viewed, experienced and thought about from a certain perspective, Los Angeles can be a vacuous space where connections, identities and souls can easily get lost. Interestingly, it is the lack or absence of the markers (the satisfying drink, so to speak) that ground us in our humanity, which attracts (rather than repels) so many people to Los Angeles.

While no doubt there is a certain truth to his critique and my layered confirmation above, there are other ways of "seeing” and of “being” in the City of Angels.

For example, Los Angeles can become a modern platform for a Zen-like experience. The long distance between things, the time spent alone in route, the nondescript destination upon arrival, can actually help one get in touch with letting go - and just being. In this state of mind it¹s easy to accept that there is no “there”, there in Los Angeles. (Even though so many who live in this city are in search of something.) It all becomes just the here and now. Moreover, one senses a vitality, or perhaps the true allure of Los Angeles -­ a space, like the people who live in it, always in a state of becoming.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

ADAM K ON EYESPACE

FOR YOUR EYES ONLY

My reaction to Ro's naked glaze in the men’s locker room at the gym conjures up the memory of a pregnant moment in Luis Bunuel’s film, Un Chien Andalou. (Or perhaps it is really an abortive moment?).

Here’s the scene from my memory:

A delicate young woman is seated on a chair in a limbo setting. (A kind of space that’s everywhere and nowhere.) A man, gentlemen-like. stands right behind her. The two are in portrait mode, gazing at the audience. They look as if they know that they are being watched (at least by the camera). The audience sitting in the theater is surely less reflective, less aware, watching at will and without reproach from the safety of their cushiony seats.

Slowly, the man lifts up his arm to reveal a straight-edged razor. He holds it tenderly in his hand. The camera then creeps in for a close-up of the woman’s face, and comes to rest only when one of her eyeballs fully fills the screen.

The macro eyeball is raw, bulbous, and viscous. The spatial relationship is disorienting. The effect is unsettling. Suddenly, the activity of seeing becomes an object to contemplate, and no doubt to question – as in, “what’s going on here?” Bunuel’s answer is nothing short of the unthinkable. The frozen moment is about to become thoroughly chilling. The razor blade slides across the smooth and silky surface of the defenseless eyeball. It cuts deep. (I believe Bunuel used a real cow’s eye. No special effects here.)

Yes, the eye is disfigured. But what’s more disturbing is that the entire “space” is ruptured. The space on the screen. The space between the viewer and the screen. The space inside the viewer’s mind. I remember at the moment of incision turning away, not wanting to ‘see’. Abort the space. Now, years later, I still don’t really want to ‘see’ this moment. It’s almost too much for the mind’s eye to take in.

So what’s the learning here? First off, if you haven’t seen this Bunuel film, do so. (And keep your eyes peeled for the eyeball scene.) Secondly, try to always watch where you’re going. Otherwise you might end up in a space that’s not always pretty to look at, or be seen in. You know, like a men’s locker room.

GUY ON SPACE & CITIES

VERTICAL EXPRESSIONS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT?

It’s funny that Rohini uses the word “nomadic” when referring to Singapore expats. Because the first cities were actually created by the settled: farmers, for whom space was an enemy used by their rivals—the nomads—to destroy and subjugate. How things have changed.

I think of cities as the greatest anti-space constructions that exist, because they were created to combat space. The point of a city is to reduce space.

Or is it? The particularly American model of the city seems to contradict this concept. America itself was built on the exploitation of what was crucially perceived as space—land undeveloped by Westerners—even if it wasn’t, since it was actually already in use. Similarly, beginning last century invasive American cities in turn exploited the same land, once again perceived as space; sometimes exploiting it on absurdly grand scales. (In this case the space wasn’t space either: it was already in use by farmers, ranchers, miners, or manufacturers.)

The most grandiose example of this is Los Angeles, a desert valley whose first mass exploitation came with orchards and farms made possible by modern irrigation. But this farming stratum was almost completely obliterated by the extended undense deposit of human construction, both residential and commercial, a hundred miles wide and two hundred long, that makes up the modern city.

Cities are often interpreted as vertical expressions of the human spirit, but the seeming contradiction of the American example shows us that it’s not so. The American example shows us that cities really are the anti-space. The key to understanding this comes from an example like Los Angeles, which demonstrates how space, in fact, is perceived as time, and vice versa. For without the compression of time the automobile gave us in crossing distances, Angelenos would not perceive the compression of space their city gives them—and it would not be a city at all. Would it?

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 1

TWO CITIES. TWO DIFFERENT BRANDS OF SILENCE.

There’s something so very raw yet refined about the nomadic life that expats live in Singapore. They know instinctively to cut themselves smaller, chunkier, meatier, richer slices of life. It is as though life itself is a two-year contract in this exotic new destination, so there’s an urgency to grasp it more fully. As a result, more intense relationships are formed, more beach volleyball played, more cigarettes smoked, more regional travel explored, more love made, and more wine drunk than possibly anywhere else in the world – or so it seems. One meets more travelers, evoking and slaking that wanderlust, in a quest to discover new places and people within themselves.

So I was not alone in my journey of search a few years ago, when I would fly San Francisco to Singapore every three weeks with a day’s stopover on the neutral grounds of Tokyo. Here, I would trade one of my identities with the other. The SIM cards on my cell phone would also switch on a different set of contacts, just as the currencies exchanged. It was a thin line I tread between my two lives – one with myself, the other with my husband – and I needed both to survive who I was. I’d lost my soul in San Francisco, and needed to keep my sanity. So who I became in Singapore was my therapist.

When I’d moved to the Bay Area, the silence of space had struck me like a giant slap across my small face. The empty vastness of the skies was marked with weird cloud patterns by the invisible paintbrushes of winds. The desolate sound of airplanes tore across the silence. On the wide freeways, cars moved mechanically in synch, each distancing itself from the one ahead as much as possible. There were no human sounds upon my ears, and the few people I met didn't appear to need people - or did I sense a certain shame in their admitting to having this need? Perhaps too much physical space had created a proportionate amount of emotional space, which had evolved into emptiness and cold distance? Perhaps why almost everyone I knew then saw psychotherapists more often than they did their friends, and were resigned to the loneliness that was their most frequent and forced companion?

When I'd reach Singapore in the little hours on the clock, the swish-swish of palm trees on the ECP would brush away these meandering thoughts. I’d refuse to be picked up, as I needed to be completely alone with My City. Out of the airport in a trice, soaring in a taxi that was redolent of rice and pandan leaf, and freezing with air-conditioning, I’d roll down the window and inhale the humid air like a dog hungry for new smells.

I’d exchange different brands of silence with the two cities. I’d trade that lonely, desolate, restive, cold, dreary, impersonal no-answer stillness in San Francisco for a deep, long, communicative, pregnant, hushed, comforting quietude in Singapore.

Although I had a cartload of relationships, with a key hidden here in a purple sock or there a jungle boot waiting for me to pick it up, I’d stay the night with my other self in a Nonya-style suite at The Intercontinental, where swinging wooden doors set with bits of colored glass would ground me to this dreamy reality.

Then all the text messages would come pouring in... like tropical rain.

RO ON EYESPACE – 1

COMFORT OR CLUTTER?

So. I decided to study visual space in locker rooms. I started somewhat inadvertently in the Men’s by wandering into it by accident. Dazed, I watched men grapple with modest shock for their invisible fig leaves, protesting with accusatory, wounded glances – poor deer in the headlights.

Not a little embarrassed, I fled to the Women’s locker room, where shared space is a silent, seething bugbear on everyone’s mind. Who is really the encroacher – the stripper or the "strippee"? Why should I avert my gaze and limit what is my rightful visual territory when someone flaunts her unsolicited nakedness? If I looked, wouldn’t their space be just as violated? To this, American comedian and writer Rich Hall has a solution: The “P Spot”, a place on the wall which men in washrooms meditate upon, fearing that a glance in any other direction might arouse suspicion.

On the eye, space is as much a comfort to some as clutter is to others. The Japanese worship minimalism, treating space itself as an object. Perhaps this also explains the white plate rage in restaurants, used to display the art of food. My own obsessive-compulsive preferences demand sitting away from the clutter of cutlery and the crowdedness of corridors – God forbid washrooms – when I dine at a restaurant. "Princess", they call me, but why doesn’t it sound like a compliment?

"Princess" wears block colors, never prints - no matter how pretty. Princess also has mirrors on her walls in place of pictures; with space reflecting space. Compare that to a fridge crowded with magnets and attempts at art by children of proud glowing parents. Who’s to say what’s right?

My pet peeve is space in wine glasses. Nothing offends my sensibilities more than a glass of wine filled to the unsightly brim. If anything needs to breathe, it’s Wine. In addition to "Breathability", there needs to be room for "Swirlability". How will you perceive the rim, and read its difference from the core? How will you allow it to tell its story of Viscosity through its tears?

This is where I bow gracefully out of your visual space and ask you to fill mine with your thoughts.