SPATIALLY SPEAKING

RO ON SPACE & WINE GLASSE5 – 1

2010-02-27T08:28:00.002-05:00

DOES WINE REALLY "BREATHE"?

Does wine really inhale and exhale, sipping the air with long, deep, yogic breaths? If so, when it ages, will it puff and pant, as if challenged by climbing stairs? If wine possesses a “backbone”, and a “nose”, not to mention “legs”, surely it has “lungs”!

What’s with wine breathing – leave alone having to be decanted?

Imagine you’ve just met someone new. After the initial formalities, it would probably take you time to process the layers of multi-sensory information you’re absorbing, before you come to be your true self.

Like you, wine needs to inhale the air and mingle with it before it can let go of its “closed fist” and express its true aromas and attributes without inhibition. And those characteristics, in younger wines, take after their specific grape variety (bell peppers in Cabernet Sauvignon, for example). As the wine evolves with fermentation, exposure to oak, and age, other nuances start to come through, along with a marked complexity (think cigar, earth, leather).

A 1945 Mouton sitting on an old leather chair in an exclusive club, puffing away pompously at a Davidoff torpedo. What a picture!

How much air should you let a wine breathe? is the Question.

In full-bodied reds such as Cabernet, Shiraz, Merlot, Barolo, Barbaresco, and Amarone younger than four years, exposure to air “rounds off” the harsh tannins, making them silkier and softer. A tannic mouthfeel is hard to miss; it’s a coarse, drying, adhesive texture, followed by a bitter astringency that has you make a face. So pour that Cab into a decanter, slosh and wait an hour. Voila! Goodbye Sandpaper, hello Suede. (Or so they say.)

As reds age, the reason for decanting shifts. After years of being bottled up, wine develops a unique character – from forced rumination, no doubt. A gradual, gentle oxidation has already taken place within the bottle, softening the wine as chemical changes occur within, throwing off a residue. Which, dear Drinker, is precisely why you decant: to separate this sediment from the wine. So yes, wine does need to reorient itself to the new surroundings and the new timeline, but over-decanting would only “fade” the wine’s palate. (Oho, now it has a palate, too?)

Traditional wine tasters in France define a “first nose” as one where the wine is lightly breathed in as soon as it’s poured, without so much as a swirl. The “second nose” follows the ritualistic swish-and-swirl, when new aromas released are inhaled deeply, and flavor receptacles discern the distinctions. I’ll never forget the way Jean Baptiste at La Cave du Verger des Papes in Châteauneuf-du-Pape said, “Ah, ze wine, ’ee ’as opened!”.

A sommelier I once met in a beautiful Château in Provence would pour the wine with great delicacy into a decanter, and then (alarmingly) jostle it around with all the vigor he had in his elbow. Oh, Monsieur Phillipe, do be careful, you weel bruise zis old wine!

Bruise a wine? The next time you meet a wine with a black eye or a purple nose, you’ll know exactly what happened.

LORRAINE ON PERSONAL SPACE

2010-02-26T13:57:00.001-05:00

THE UNIVERSE & I

Economics, global and local, led me to make exigency plans to preclude, alas alack, joining the forces of the homeless. With an arsenal of online resources this was soon accomplished… someone would live in my apartment, someone would take care of my cat, someone would host me in their home for three months. It was so easy to arrange; to me it was a sign the Universe endorsed my decision.

As the departure day drew close I was looking forward to simplifying, minimizing, becoming a hermit if need be (due to lack of cultural activities in my soon-to-be Southern State) and most exciting of all, free from my monthly rut, to write, write, write. My remaining concern was how to safely transport my iMac G5.

As it transpired, life intervenes. Without going into details, I found myself sans kitty, sans apartment, computer under arm, looking for a temporary abode… some call it couch-surfing.

I found myself a sofa across town with a view of some of San Francisco’s finest architectural icons, including Coit Tower and Alcatraz. Living with my very good friend required little adjusting; basically, I just had to minimize my footprint.

So here I am… eight weeks later….

Used to living my own independent, freelance life, I now share, share, share… bathroom, kitchen, groceries, laundry, cooking, even which movie to watch is a democratic decision. There’s a child who lives here part-time, and when she’s here, she is the center of our universe. We hit the sack by nine most nights; eleven on a wildly social night (meaning her dad and I watch a DVD on my “big screen” computer, jokingly called the jumbotron, and share a bottle of wine).

What I’ve lost in space, literally – bathroom cabinet reduced to one shelf, suitcase in lieu of closet, couch instead of bed – has been compensated tenfold by community.

What I thought I couldn’t live with, I live perfectly well without.

What I thought I needed is what I now can’t live without.

It sure is funny how the Universe chooses to teach us our life’s lessons.

RO ON SHARED SPACE – 1

2010-02-01T17:32:00.002-05:00

THE GREAT SPACE ROBBERY

At the ACE Hotel New York on 29th between Fifth and Broadway, it’s a strange play between personal space and shared space. The role of public space, it seems, is to heighten the perception of private space and its relationship with itself.

You walk in, pick up your wifi code and dive into your laptop, amidst the hustle-bustle of wait staff, the clinking of cappuccino cups and inventive cocktails. Like those cocktails, it’s a blend of cool vibe and a Friday-happy-hour feel. No one needs to approve of your presence – you simply belong.

Unless of course you do something weird – as I did.

There are four marked areas in the hotel lobby. Two of them are filled with sprawling couches generous enough to accommodate these people, and all of their workday’s accouterments, which, in the winter, have a tendency to take up more than one’s fair share of individual space – bulky winter coats, backpacks, gloves, hats, earmuffs… you get the picture. A communal table for ten laptops stands at the center, at which people sit, each engrossed in an intense relationship with their laptop. The relationship is quite obvious – that of one with oneself.

Respect for personal space – particularly here – is an unspoken tenet. And so I decide to throw a little wrench into the snugness of this secure digital haven, if only to find the answer to the social experiment that ensues. I steal a furtive glance at my neighbor’s screen, which I ensure she catches from the periphery of her vision. And then, from the periphery of mine, I observe. She’s completely disconcerted, and she loses focus on what she’s doing. Her only thought is my “sneak peek”. So now, it’s her turn to looking surreptitiously towards me, by which time, my gaze has calmly returned to my own laptop, and to writing this piece. Clearly, I have turned into a bull, which has subtly but substantially butted into the fragility of the surrounding china-like psyche.

When personal space is ruptured with a sneaky, stealthy glance such as this (which you can’t prove for sure) it can become extremely potent just by its sheer questionability. Did it really happen? Did I imagine it? Am I being paranoid? Do I now angle my laptop a few degrees away? Or will that seem awfully rude? Should I then actually turn my laptop towards her, so what I’m thinking isn’t obvious? An avalanche of doubts cascades into the mind and from it, becoming a distraction of immense proportion.

When invisible boundaries in shared space are so ruptured, it’s more than just an invasion, it’s a theft – of privacy, comfort and security.

In that light, it is not likely that my “guinea pig” at the neighboring laptop will ever be the same again.

Tch, tch.

ADAM K ON SHARED SPACE – 1

2010-01-29T13:18:00.002-05:00

THE BED’S TOO BIG WITHOUT YOU...

What happens to space when someone you love has departed from it forever?

In the beginning, the space you once shared shrinks and expands. Gravity is sucked dry. And a cold gray wind constantly drifts in and out.

In that space, familiar objects that used to project meaning are minimized. An old photograph above the desk, taken together years ago, is reduced to the size of a postage stamp. A tree that you happily planted together in the front yard, which had grown so strong and tall, appears to wither away.

Quietly, it sits naked, as it vanishes into space.

It’s different with other things; the bed you slept together in for so many years becomes inflated and overwhelms you with its presence. Off in the distance you hear an echoing refrain from a song you both loved, but never dreamed possible “The bed’s too big without you…”

Rooms that were once open and welcoming become closed and off-limits. Barren clothes racks hold up bare walls in the closet. Wastebaskets that would sit empty get filled and refilled, as you try to sort out the space left behind by the departed.

But slowly, over time, the shattered shared space starts to conform to a new set of coordinates. The familiar objects, some of which you’ve rearranged, and others that you’ve added on your own along the way, no longer waver. Their dimensions and proportions, density and volume return to a manageable state of patterns.

At times, the space now even cradles and comforts. That’s when you realize love lost can be found everywhere… and that you’re okay being in that space and sharing it with someone new.

MANJU ON PERSONAL SPACE – 2

2010-01-29T12:55:00.002-05:00

“COSMIC LILA”

The middling years have arrived. Space has now brought a new friend along, called Time.

You have all the space that you ever wanted but you don’t have the time. Space is happy, but time is overworked.

Something’s gotta give!

From somewhere in the vast vistas of the mind, the promised Questions start to tumble pretty much like your kids’ old toys out of the cardboard box.

What is happiness? What is my real purpose? Then, there are memories, memories and a clutter of memories to deal with.

You walk around like a question mark that has come alive, with a furrowed brow to match. A well-wisher then suggests that you get into a good meditation class.

So you enroll into the nearest center, mat and mind in tow.

You close your eyes for a moment like the teacher told you to do; only to pop those wide open in an instant, fear clutching your heart in its cold clasp.

Did you lock the front door?

A few sessions more, you start forgetting about doors and dustpans.

Something new dawns on you ever so slowly, like the changing hues of the rising sun.

You surrender to the Space within. Time takes a breather.

The vacillating relationships and undulating emotions begin to still like a pendulum about to reach the centre.

'You’re making progress!' teacher says, one day. You want to jump for joy but you merely smile briefly. After all, life is to be viewed with equanimity as a good book says...

As you lie on your bed that night, another Truth dawns on you. That silent meddler Space has been constantly playing with your life, growing, shrinking, stifling, yawning.

Life’s just got to be a Cosmic Lila. Hmmm….such fine words, fine thoughts! You must be poised to get enlightened. You feel it in your bones. You close your eyes.

Waiting for the Moment…waiting for the stream of light… that will shine through...waiting...

BUZZ…BUZZ…BUZZ!!

Huh? Wazzat?

In one frenzied movement of your hand, you knock off the bedside alarm.

Sigh! It’s time to wake up.

MANJU ON PERSONAL SPACE – 1

2010-01-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

“TANGY TOMATOES & TAILOR-MADE TUNES”

When we were kids, a friend and I once walked the streets, with a guitar, wondering how life could ever be this good. We sang new tunes and enjoyed eating wholesome slices of spiced-up tomato on the balcony. If life blessed us with tangy tomatoes and tailor-made tunes, who needed space? Twenty-four hours wouldn't have been enough for us to be together! We were like two peas in a pod, with as little space in between.

As babies, we can't seem to get enough of our mothers. As we grow older into kids, we can't seem to get enough of our friends.

And then somewhere down the road, a more ‘mature’ relationship touches us like a delicate feather dropping onto the shoulder. Suddenly space emerges as a high-flying word in the dictionary. You need to hang out with your friends while he needs his football buddies.

If you ever get to work out the space index at this stage, you might walk the altar with this man. Now, space suddenly begins to shrink considerably. You want to do everything together like a happily married couple.

So you squint painfully at the TV, watching the baseball game with him. And soon space is hovering like a tiny bubble right above you.

Come Thanksgiving, you’re at your wits’ end, preparing a dinner for HIS family. Dinner over, you decide you are too tired to go upstairs to the bedroom and slump onto the couch.

The space bubble has grown even larger and is glistening in a multitude of colors.

If the kids eventually happen, there is NO space in the house! In a medley of school trips, piano classes, football games and SAT scores, you’re holding onto your sanity as the space bubble grows and shrinks undecidedly all the years.

When the kids have moved out, your husband has settled nicely in a routine of newspaper and the net.

Now the space has made a decisive invasion into your life.

‘Will someone please call? you wonder.

ADAM ON SPACE AND GEOGRAPHY – 1

2010-01-25T09:10:00.003-05:00

SOMETHING GAINED. SOMETHING LOST.

Before the advent of MapQuest or Google Maps, I used to like to draw maps to help explain to others how to get to my home. These maps were oriented a bit like a Saul Steinberg drawing, where the representation of my home – typically drawn as a simple box with a triangle rooftop – was way out of proportion to anything else depicted. Streets, freeways, or an important surrounding landmark such as a nearby park or shopping center, all receded in stature. In effect, my home was the center of the world. (Or at least, the center of my world.) I probably should have added these words at the bottom of my directional maps – “Map drawn to emotional scale”.

If you were to search for my home on GoogleMaps, you’d find it’s presented entirely differently from my hand-drawn abstractions of the past. On the Google map, the streets and landmarks are shown with clean, uniform and orderly lines. Everything’s in proportion and to scale, and there’s a little red pin-like icon pointing out my home.

While the location has been called out, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s the Steinberg-like center of the world as it did in my maps. In this homogenized depiction my “home” has become a “house”, just one of millions of others in the big city. There’s an emotional trade out going on here – more precision equals less personality or personal space. On some level, it feels like my little private space has been absorbed by the vast collective public space.

Which may help explain why, at times, I feel so lost in the modern world. And even though there’s a perfect Google map in front of me, I still “can’t find my way home….”

GUY ON SPACE AND GEOGRAPHY – 1

2009-08-27T14:43:00.002-04:00

THE RELATIONSHIP

Geographies are many-dimensional. Each point in a given geography's framework is defined using many different measures. But while you might think that space is no more than just such a geographic dimension, you can also look at space much more completely. Space permeates, defines, and is defined by every one of a geography's dimensions. Space is meta-dimensional when it comes to geography.

The most accessible concept of geography is its original one, the description of the surface of the Earth. This description includes political, topographical, meteorological, and many other dimensions. Each, it seems almost absurd to say, is defined in spatial terms: nation X has such and such a shape, its capital city is so many kilometers from the western border, etc. We don't usually realize, though, that each dimension in turn defines space in some or in many ways. Nation Y's roads are such and such a standard width, so its buses must be so many meters wide, and therefore their seats tend to have this or that much room between them, or this or that shape.

This is how geography defines space, rather than just the other way round.

And as you can see, such considerations easily redound upon each other—one space causing another space causing another. The difference in rail gauge between Germany and Russia before World War I was a major consideration in German war planning – in the German Army's use of space; in the outcome of the war on the Eastern Front. And indeed, the Russians' use of space in war, or more technically speaking their use of geography, is legend in military history.

On a more intimate level, geographies have obvious and profound impacts on individual space. It takes only a moment of thinking about it to see that it's so. Ascending a high tor explodes your personal space exponentially (an overused word, but in this case quite literally correct). Enter a gorge or ravine and space becomes largely vertical, reaching to a perhaps distant sky above but hemmed in on either side. Or how about a little topography? A nice, average forest defines a restrictive space around you radically different from the heart-freeing air of a mere meadow.

So, if geography is defined by space, but space is also defined by geography, are they in a co-dependent relationship? Or are they just one?

LORRAINE ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY

2009-08-11T16:36:00.002-04:00

THE GEOGRAPHY OF BEACHES

A beach is a beach a beach of course… not!

As I lay me down to sleep… instead of praying to not wake up dead (as Christian tradition dictates) I prefer to cast my mind around the globe to beaches I have known and loved. Instead of a journey of places, it becomes a journey of spaces in my mind… perhaps too many, perhaps too few of a certain design, but, with focus, I will find an ideal shore to suit my restive mind.

I dither among the options I know with the intention of landing upon the one I know for sure will jet me into dreamland.

But first, comes the magic of floating in space high above the human race. Where to go? Where to land, this moment? On the sand? Scotland, India, Italy? Or close to where I call my home?

To zoom from such a lofty height down onto a universe of sand. From tiny coves along North Tahoe’s shores where the water laps gently, yet so cold… brrr! To Stinson Beach’s wide expanse… golden, inviting (even in fog) and the whispered thrill of shark attacks! … mmh!

Bali beckons laced with exotic sands and local hands, kneading away Western cares, exploring spaces within my body… aah…

My hometown, Aberdeen, Scotland, with its glorious beach that stretches like a golden band as far as the eye can see facing north – if only the North Sea were less frigid… ouch!

Inevitably I land on Santorini – reputed to be Atlantis, the lost city. Along with which comes perhaps my favorite beach of all… not sand, but a shore of black lava smoothed by oceans of time into tiny pebbles that shuffle as the tide ebbs and flows, in and out, in and out, like the breath…

Om.

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 3

2009-08-01T09:00:00.006-04:00

“RED SLATE. BLUE SLATE.”

Am I a pushy New Yorker or a pushover South Indian? A shopoholic Singaporean or a minimal Zen Buddhist? A won’t-touch-handles Japanese Princess or a good, subway-riding Bourgeois?

Perhaps I’ve imbibed the qualities of the land of my origin. Maybe I’ve slipped into the traits and mannerisms of people in the places I’ve lived. Or allowed the characteristics of the wines I sip to seep into my psyche.

“Man's relations to his environment are infinitely more numerous and complex than those of the most highly organized plant or animal.” Said Ellen Churchill Semple (with a Kentucky accent, perhaps?). In less enlightened ages, environmental determinism held that geographical influences such as altitude, fertility of the soil, and proximity to an ocean were closely related to the personality – and even looks – of a culture.

A bit narrowed, that thinking, but certainly true for Wine.

“Terroir” – the combination of geographical location, soil, weather conditions, aspect (or the angle of the slope) and the grapes themselves – is manifest in the specific personality of the wine.

The Riesling from Austria’s Kamptal displays different characteristics from the Riesling cultivated in Germany’s Middle Mösel, or the one from Australia’s Clare Valley. Even the same two Rieslings cultivated in the same estate with the same philosophy and vinified with the same methods, reveal different characteristics depending on whether they grew in Red Devonian Slate – or Blue. The Red Slate wines tend to be very mineral-driven even when young and dominated by primary fruit; whereas with the Blue Slate, citrus and white peach flavors predominate in the wine’s youth, turning to a pure expression of the mineral soil as they mature.

The personality of a Wine is not only the result of a “terroir” harnessed, but of winemaking savoir-faire as well. For instance, a wine matured in French oak from the forests of Limousin expresses different nuances from one barreled in white American oak from, say, Missouri. Several other factors such as cellar conditions and length of aging are also major influencers. Winemaker Stéphane Tissot in the Jura region of France goes so far as to believe that “… you can find in a wine the personality and the character of those who made it because each gesture, each operation, each decision has its importance”.

Consider the influence of Religion on Wine. It was monasteries that preserved viticulture in the Dark Ages of Europe. It was the Cistercian monks of Cîteaux who lovingly nurtured the vines at Clos de Vougeut in Burgundy since the Twelfth Century. And it was the sparkle in Dom Perignon’s eyes, which facilitated the fermentation process in the Champagne Method and contributed to his bubbly advocacy of organic winemaking.

What if we were to even touch upon the impact of Politics on Wine? Does the Roman Emperor forbidding the import of French wines to eliminate competition have a faint resonance with Parker's softness for Sonoma?

Let’s continue this discussion over a glass of complexity.

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 2

2009-07-30T11:36:00.007-04:00

THE WORLD THROUGH A WINE GLASS

A glass of wine has the ethereal, magical quality of calling to mind the “somewhereness” of a certain place on earth. If you were sipping a Sangiovese and you let your imagination wander away, it could evoke the green curves of Tuscany’s hills, the sun’s gold glinting off the wires to which tendrils of vines cling.

A Grenache-Mourvedre-Syrah blend would no doubt conjure up a village in the South of France – Roussillon, perhaps? Poised precariously upon a hillside in layers of terrace, it would be daubed with hues of chalky ocher, sun-tanned saffron, smoky sienna, mustard yellow and burnt brick. Your nose would scent the wispy waft of lavender set against a startlingly blue Provençal sky, which, at sunset, would change its garb again and again like a fickle woman. Now, a filmy wrap of Lilac-Blue, then an iridescent stole of Peachy-Gold; now a chiffony wrap of Fuschia, no, a flimsy veil of Flame-Red georgette! Next, a translucent mantle, the color of bruised blueberries. And then – running a little late for its sexy nocturnal tryst – a velvety cape of the deepest shade of Midnight, speckled with glittering diamanté.

Put your glass to your ear, and you might even hear the faint howl of the icy-fingered Le Mistral, sometimes blessing the land, sometimes threatening to flatten the vines with its mean gusts – but always challenging them to struggle and stress, so the result might only be character of unquestionable integrity.

Could one really discern the distinctive taste of the Missoula floods in a glass of Washington Red, and be transported to the Ice Age, as Northwest vintners loftily claim? Or sip the misty beauty of Sonoma’s winding wine trails, peppered with a multitude of wayside flowers, its creeks giggling to the gossip of birds? I am going too far, you think.

Apparently not. A journeyed palate could scan the geographical characteristics of a wine within the space of a wineglass. That palate would guess the grape variety, based on the typicity of the grape (the bell pepper notes of a cool-climate Cabernet Sauvignon, or the herbaceous leafy character of a Cabernet Franc, if you’ll pardon my viticultural racism), and also its origin (Tempranillo, usually from Spain). Not to mention its vintage amongst other things (it was a warm summer).

It’s an educated guess that often employs the process of elimination. To put it in broad terms, “It isn’t a Pinot Noir, because it’s too pale and thin a red, too muscular in body and too tannic on the tongue”. Or, “It’s reminiscent of coconut, so it will likely be a New World wine from Australia, New Zealand, or the Americas.” And then, “It can’t be from Australia because it’s too rustic and chewy with dark berries and spices… (and so on and so forth) so it must be a Petite Sirah from California.”

So the next time you raise a glass of wine, think of all that travel that lies ahead – at the very least, in your own imagination.

MAX ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY

2009-07-27T09:56:00.004-04:00

GEOGRAPHY ON THE TONGUE

The spaces of geography have a funny way of making their way into cities - with different accents. In New York City, for instance, there are three predominant accents. 1) The uptown accent, 2) The Manhattan or the “normal” accent, and 3) The regional Brooklyn-Staten Island accent. The further north you go, usually anywhere past 96th street, you hear the real street slang. People drop their “R’s” and words like “here” turn in to “heah”, and “over” turn into “ova.” There’s a very distinct New York street accent that is really found in, well, found in the hood.

So now, traveling down toward the middle – There is the “normal” accent. “Normal” being what we perceive to be the way the English language should be spoken. We pronounce our all of our consonants and vowels and we say, “coffee,” “orange,” or “forget about it.” The words come out with no deviation from the way they are supposed to be pronounced.

Now, once you start heading south into Brooklyn, the stereotypical New York accent runs rampant. “Coffee” is turned into “Caw-fee.” “Orange” is turned into, “Ah-ringe.” The phrase, “forget about it,” turns into one giant mashed up word – “fuggetaboutit”. In Brooklyn, you don’t hear, “I’m going to call him later.” No, no, you hear, “I’m gonna cawl him lata.” Similar to the uptown accent, all the “R’s” are dropped off of all words and replaced with an “A.”

Different spaces in the geography of the city create these different accents. Despite living in Manhattan for barely a few months, you start to pick up on all of these little nuances, and you catch your self saying, “Whateva, I’ll cawl him lata,” without even realizing it.

[Max Kestenbaum, originally from Los Angeles, studies and plays in New York City.]

RO ON SPACE & GEOGRAPHY – 1

2009-07-24T16:54:00.004-04:00

“THE SUN IS A VERY MAGIC FELLOW”

“November has tied me
to an old dead tree,
get word to April
to rescue me.”

How do the Spaces of Geography affect the cultures that live within them?

Perhaps we should ask the Grapes.

In spaces of increasing geographical latitude, grapes look to natural sources of light and warmth to ripen – just as people do for their happiness. The angle of the sun (also called “aspect”) is everything. If a certain slope is more exposed to sunlight and warmth than another, it is likely to produce far more vigorous vines – and far more qualitative wines.

When vines grow on South-facing slopes, the quality of the grape is said to be exemplary. Not too dissimilar to South-facing apartments in Manhattan, New York, where quality of life is also enhanced by this rather dear orientation.

In the Rhone region of France, the outstanding wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape are outstanding because of the characteristic terrior; Pudding Stones or “Galets” soak up the Provencal sunshine during the day and hold on to the heat, to reflect it onto the grapes, long after the sun has left for an assignation with the other side of the earth. This helps the grapes ripen and the wines get concentrated in a peculiarly delicious way, accounting for the "outstandingness". In Germany’s prized Mosel-Saar-Ruwer wine region, the Riesling grape grows in Devonian Slate, which locks in the moisture and heat to radiate warmth to it at nightfall. In Bordeaux, it’s the gravel that does it.

In a manner alike, Northern Scandinavians resort to natural sources of light and warmth with an abundant use of candles – in their offices and during meetings as well – to fight Winter Seasonal Affective Disorder, an inexplicable “sadness” that creeps in with the onset of winter darkness.

Serotonin brain chemistry has long been known to change with changing seasons, suggesting why people tend to be less happy, with lower energy levels during winter’s bleaker days. Social, scientific and economic researchers have found that even stock returns are significantly related to the amount of daylight through the fall and winter – the shorter the day, the higher the aversion to risk, it seems. The influence of climate upon happiness, with climate variables such as rain, hours of sunshine, average temperature, and windiness are strongly linked to household costs, financial satisfaction, and general satisfaction.

It’s just as well, then, that Wine makes us so happy.

RO ON THE ABSENCE OF SPACE

2009-06-20T03:52:00.006-04:00

"DEATH: ABSENCE OR PRESENCE OF SPACE?"

As Silicon Valley continues to mourn the sudden and shocking absence of Rajeev Motwani's space on Earth, I reflect on his continued presence in the media. His Facebook wall, for instance, where people are sharing their sentiments. (Rajat Mukherjee has a very considered post on just this - a link I've shared at the end of this musing.)

When a person ceases to exist physically, their space will never quite stop occupying mind, memories and heart.

What of the space taken up by the physicality associated with both Rajeev's life and its cessation? His reading glasses, his clothes, the home he left behind, the mark he made on everyone's computer as advisor to Google's founders, the Stanford classrooms he lectured at, his wife Asha, his children... even that wretched swimming pool which so wrongfully took away his space? The sound of my husband Vedant's voice as he told me how he felt about this (over the phone when I was in India) still rings in my ear.

All of those physical representations make his space that much more sharpened by its absence.

In many ways, Rajeev's space is so much more expanded just by the fact that he no longer exists. And he is so much more alive than he ever was.

I hope his soul reads his Facebook wall with a smile:

ERIC B ON SPACE & CITIES

2009-06-03T08:58:00.003-04:00

PARIS: WHEN LIFE WAS DEFINED BY A CERTAIN DISTANCE

I say this with affection and regret: Paris is like a tough old whore. Not one of those who market themselves on the Internet, but a woman who stands in a doorway for hours, smoking cigarettes and screaming out to people across the street. She is plump and sweaty, old enough to be your aunt.

There are fewer street hookers around these days—victims of changing tastes and government crackdowns. They can be found in the dusty streets near the rue Saint-Denis, where they service men above cut-rate dress shops and agencies that sell plane tickets to places like Cameroon. From a distance the hookers look like spots of colorful paint flicked down from above. Up close, their yellow hair, red clothes and blue eye shadow don’t look quite bright enough. Drabness, like time, is their enemy, and with each day they get a little paler. When one of them gives out and disappears from the street, no one takes her place.

The pleasure lanes near rue Saint-Denis and Les Halles used to have names like rue Tire-Boudin (“Sausage-Puller street”) and rue Trousse-Nonain (“Tumble-Nun street”) and rue de la Pute-y-muse (“Idling Tart street”). The streets are still there, but their names were changed long ago to rue Marie-Stuart, rue Beaubourg and rue Petit-muse. By the time the German Baron Haussmann was done redesigning the city in 19^th Century, the collection of streets whose names evoked “shit”—the rues Merdeuses, Merdelet, Chieurs and Chiards—had disappeared. Paris was becoming hygienic.

Haussmann went much further than sanitizing street names and installing sewers. The thousands of buildings he put on the city’s boulevards are all about people’s relationship with shit. The prime living spaces were put on the third floors, called the étages nobles, where there were tall windows, spacious apartments and ornate balconies. The idea was to let the wealthiest tenants live as far as possible far from the piles of wet manure on streets while still not having to climb too many stairs. The further up you went past the étages nobles, the smaller and stuffier the apartments became. In a city where horses were still everywhere and there were no elevators, quality of life was defined by one’s distance from shit.

All of that has changed. The top floors are now the most valuable, both for their light and their distance from car noise. There are toilets in apartments and the smell of shit is gone. So are most of Paris’s native street whores, called traditionnelles. The tight doorways that functioned as their offices on the rue Saint-Denis and its tributaries are unoccupied. The doors are their gravestones. French-born hookers now make their connections online and take cabs or the Métro to meet dates. They don’t need to stand out in public, so they wear the same clothes as everyone else. The remaining street trade is left to women from places like Kosovo and Sub-Saharan Africa, who are willing to put up with a higher risk of violence.

No matter how pretty Paris’s streets are now, all of them have tasted blood. The ancient neighborhoods of Les Halles and Saint-Denis are soaked in murder, which no amount of urban renewal can erase. The slaughterhouses have been replaced by an indoor shopping mall and the mass graves in the Cimetière des Innocents are gone. But the traditionnelle spirit remains. It glows like a pink ghost in the evening sky; it calls from the music in porno DVD and tattoo shop; and, in the cold looks of cops, it still frightens.

With their wicked and dangerous attractions, the French street hookers of this quarter were a core element of Paris life. The few who are left are like the last living speakers of a dying language. Once they are gone, the tongue is extinct.

[This piece is a contribution from Eric Bewrkowitz.]

GUY ON SPACE & INDIVIDUALITY - 1

2009-05-15T14:52:00.006-04:00

DEFINING, FINDING, AND “SEPARATING”

Discriminating something as individual or unique in some way is a process completely distinct from any concept of space. Space, spatial relationships, and spatial metaphors help us understand the individual, but do not define it.

It's easy to think of examples of people, places, or things that are undistinguished by space and yet contain individuals within them. Janus. Yin and yang. Yourself reacting with an equal mixture of fascination and horror at some dramatic event. This last example is illustrative: fascination has a pleasurable aspect to it, horror a painful one. Each feeling is individual and what we would normally call "separate" … and yet you can experience them at once, in response to one thing, at one moment. There is individuality, but no physical, temporal, or spiritual space to be found.

In more detached terms, individuality applies only to our ability to recognize something by its features. That ability is independent of any spatial relationships that may or may not exist at that moment of recognition. Fascination—how it looks, what is causing it, and how it feels—is perfectly separate in all these features from horror. A sensation of its own, unique to each being that experiences it. Thus definable and individual, without enclosing, filling, or being separated from anything else by space.

So once we imagine any space existing with reference to individuality (when we say, as I casually did above, that something is "separate" from anything else), we are artificially creating a construct in our minds. Space thus helps us examine and understand individuality, even if it is not intrinsic to the individuality of all those, animal, vegetable, and mineral, that we encounter every day.

So the relationship of space to individuality rests only in how we apply it. We can enclose with space; we can fill with space; we can create distance with space.

Fascination. If we enclose fascination with space, we see that it ends with familiarity: what always fascinates is what is always new in some way. If we fill fascination with space, we see that it suppresses understanding: we are too entertained, while fascinated, to question. If we create distance around fascination, we appreciate the particular kind of gratification it provides.

Bread. If we enclose bread with space, we understand, among many things, that it is destroyed by desire: cravings must be fed. If we fill it with space, we know that bread ends deprivation, because whether spiritual or material, bread provides sustenance. If we distance bread, we begin to comprehend the warmth, contentment, and satisfaction it brings.

A nice exercise. How would you apply space to your own individuality? Your friend's? Your lover's?

RO ON SPACE & INDIVIDUALITY

2009-05-07T15:17:00.003-04:00

‘I’ IS A SINGLE-LETTER WORD

My approach to individual space springs from an ingrained desire to acknowledge and respect my own existence. This strong belief has fed the choices I have made even as a child, unbeknownst to my family, and even to my conscious self.

Today, it’s reflected in my single, carefree lifestyle; in the emotional and physical space I surround myself with; in my one-on-one interactions, be they professional or personal; in the fact that I don't have a large family or any offspring; in the specific choice of my husband.

Yet, when I look at dear friends who have chosen to create miniature versions of themselves, I believe their individuality is not at all diluted; if anything, it is intensified, and multiplied manyfold.

So what are your thoughts? Is individuality selfish – or self-respectful? Are you the pure essence of yourself? How individual would you want your space to be? Or would the freedom that comes with too much space be a chain of loneliness around your ankle?

RO ON REDEFINED SPACE

2009-03-31T08:43:00.008-04:00

CRAVING CONSTANCY. WOOING CHANGE.

Once, my life was a pancake that was constantly being severed from its griddle, turned over – and over again. Once, my life was three fluffy egg-whites on Teflon, refusing to stick. Imagine the chemistry of my brain, the constant high I was on, because my space was in a continuous state of redefinition.

Perhaps living two lives – in diametrically opposite circumstances – gave me a certain internal richness? Perhaps I was bitten by the-grass-is-really-greener-on-the-other side syndrome? One was single and carefree although in a full-time job; the other, married and delightfully captive. One was in the Northern Hemisphere; the other in the South. One was in swelteringly tropical weather; the other in foggy howling cold. One was in my own home within the boundaries of my individual space; the other in a shared apartment with a girlfriend. One was in a city I craved changes in every time I returned. And the other was in a city I wanted sameness from, to be exactly where, and how, I left it.

In the two years I was doing this, I began to notice some key differences in the way this redefined space affected those around me. My flatmate in Singapore really welcomed my visit every three weeks, because my presence redefined her space as well. She’d originally rented a two-bedroom flat anticipating living there with her fiancé, and then they’d broken up. So now it made for the perfect balance – not too lonely, not too crowded.

In San Francisco, I’d dropped off people’s "calendars", as many didn’t really want to “invest” any more time in a friendship with me, given I wasn’t "available” or “dependable” any more. I was often perceived as flaky, and friends were awfully judgmental about the fact that I left my husband alone for three whole weeks. In Singapore, however, where expat culture is the very artery of life, my entries and exits were simply legitimized excuses to throw even more dinners in the name of “welcome” and “bye-bye” at the black-and-whites they lived in, and have more intense one-on-ones over brunches at Marmalade Pantry. The sorrow, by the way, would be really, really sweet, given we all knew I’d be right back.

Eventually, my sandals developed wings, and lost the capacity to find ground or form roots. The only constant ground I knew was in the air. Every time I returned, it would take my husband and me about a week to reconnect, and just when we were warming up, I would leave again. (I daresay it kept our relationship sharpened.)

So I had to redefine my space once more and learn to stay put.

About a year later, we moved to New York, a city where space is constantly redefining itself. Perhaps it has also taught me to redefine my space to be where I want to be.

When I crave Asia, I close my eyes and travel to Bali through my Squeezebox. Gamelan fills my ears as I sleep peacefully, deeply.

GUY ON REDEFINED SPACE

2009-03-27T10:58:00.003-04:00

CHANGING LIFESPACE

My aunt drove me. It wasn't far—there's little that's far in a modestly sized Midwestern city. But it was off to a less frequented corner of town, as I was able to recognize now that I'm old enough to understand a map. My parents can't have been all that hip to have lived there.

"My goodness, it sure looks different! Wasn't it green? I don't like the new paint job," I said as we pulled up in front of the tiny frame house that had seemed so big back when I was so small.

"Well sure, I don't remember," said my aunt, parking nearby but not right out front so as not to alarm the current inhabitants if they were home.

We walked up, but we didn't walk right up. Approaching an old, once so familiar space after an absence of many years, one takes one's time. I took an odd path full of curves and hesitations, to get (eventually) to the front door and the screened-in porch where I'd once sat to watch thunderstorms.

It was all different. It's funny how spaces that were intensely familiar in bygone years are redefined when you experience them again. Some parts of this old home came back to me again alike, if not the same: the lawn, which I'd half forgotten but spent so much time on, was only altered in perception, by seeming so much smaller than it once did. Other parts were quite literally redefined, however. An extension had wiped out the back patio, making it Inside Space now, not Outside Space.

The new inhabitants let us in, and I got to see once again the living room—really just a living alcove!—the dining area, and particularly the upstairs attic, where I'd lived and which had been a storage space before my father and my aunt's then-boyfriend took to it and redefined it as the boys' bedroom. This was yet another change in space: in broad strokes, the attic was unaltered from my memory, yet it was now completely unrecognizable to me. There were too many shifts in dressing, perception, and milieu for me to be able to draw the temporal line from then to now.

We thanked the fellow who'd showed us around and drove off to find lunch, a great space in my memoryscape now redefined forever.

LORRAINE ON REDEFINED SPACE

2009-03-23T08:58:00.001-04:00

OM IS WHERE THE ART IS

People typically think of space as external – as in outer space or deep space, or the lesser distance between two objects, or between themselves and an object or other person or persons.

Yogis, however, talk about space in the body, especially creating it. In warrior pose, as an example, you are meant to root your legs into the ground like a tree while your arms reach for the sky thus creating ‘space’ in your spine and torso. Personally, I take my yoga one Om at a time, rarely gaining new, physical dimensions. Until recently…

After six years of living in chronic pain as a result of a car accident, I found a miracle worker, aka myofascial release therapist, and had the space within my body redefined. Literally.

While I recognized the physical injuries my body had been subjected to over the years, I didn’t realize that all the knocks life had doled me psychically and emotionally had been stored physically and added up to quite an internal mess.

Now with the redefined space in my body, I can do things I didn’t realize that I couldn’t even do – if you can understand that. Which brings with it a whole new experience of external space so that is also redefined. Consider this - if you can’t walk pain-free, you’re not likely to be going on any major hikes… and now I can!

And once you start being more engaged physically with the world, guess what happens? Your emotional and psychic space is redefined too.

I am so looking forward to doing backbends – I can hardly wait!

Om.

ADAM ON REDEFINED SPACE

2009-03-19T16:10:00.001-04:00

MAPS, SPACE & I

Ro’s latest topic, Redefining Space, got me thinking about maps. How they continually challenge my understanding and experience of space. How, curiously, I’m both attracted and put off by them. And how they seem to me to be an abstraction masquerading as facts.

For starters, I love the cautionary disclosure that’s often found on a map – “Map not drawn to scale”. Almost as much as I love the warning that’s ghosted on the side mirror of a car – “Objects are closer than they appear”. In both instances my bearings, which aren’t exactly that reliable to begin with, are put on notice - “Hey buddy, you know that thing that you think you know, well I got news for ya, it isn’t what you think it is.” Now, I’m very comfortable with these warnings. They help remind me that “not knowing” is ok, and actually can be part of a safe and sane outlook on life.

On the other hand, I’m a little put off when the wording on a map states that it’s been drawn to scale. It’s as if this information makes the map more real, more understandable, and more meaningful. Come on! Drawn to scale or not, I, for one, can easily find myself all-turned-around and feeling hopelessly lost using a map. Indeed, how often is it the case that the space that a map depicts has actually changed? Which reminds me that I often rationally know that something “is”, and yet, emotionally I’m still at a loss to fully recognize or deal with “it”. Indeed, emotions are never drawn to scale and almost invariably are closer than they appear.

Before the advent of MapQuest or Google Maps, which I now religiously use to find where something is located and how the heck to get there, I use to like to draw maps for folks to help explain how to get to my home. These maps tended to look a bit like a Saul Steinberg cartoon, where the representation of my home, typically an iconic box with a triangle on top, was always way out of proportion to anything else depicted. Streets, freeways, an important surrounding landmark, such as a nearby park or shopping center, all receded in stature. In effect, my home was the center of the world, the center of my world. I probably should have added these words at the bottom of my maps – “Map drawn to emotional scale”.

If you were to search for my home on GoogleMaps, you’ll find it’s presented entirely differently from “my home is where the heart is” map. The Google map has a little red pin-like icon pointing out where the house is located. Sure, it’s has been called out, but my home is certainly not the center of the world for GoogleMaps. It’s been homogenized. Redefined according to Google. Surprisingly, there’s also a photograph that accompanies the Google map. I believe it’s been put there to imbue it with a greater sense of “reality” and to confirm its “truth”. (There’s a bit of big brother going here. I wonder who actually took this photo? Kind of creepy. But that’s another topic for another day.)

As an exercise in exploring how maps can define or redefine “your space”, draw a map to your home from the airport to your doorstep. Compare that with GoogleMaps’ depiction. Then ask yourself, which one is more real? Or, which one do you prefer and why?

GUY ON HOMELESS SPACE - 2

2009-03-02T14:47:00.003-05:00

SPACE ON THE ROAD

In my last post I referred to a kind of continuum that may exist from home-space at one familiar end to homeless space at the other. The idea is that when a permanent change occurs in your living conditions, such as foreclosure, you may be thrust into homeless space, even if you are still living in a home afterward (someone else’s home).

On the near end of this continuum is a situation I hadn’t mentioned: the transient homelessness experienced by the traveler. I have done a fair amount of traveling in my career: enough to feel disconnection from my home-space, but not enough for my traveling space to become a home-space of its own. There is a certain homelessness to the traveler, especially when trips come back to back.

What’s interesting about this kind of homeless space, I think, is its distance economically and materially from what you’d normally associate with the word “homeless.” Instead of being played out in stressful or dramatic places—the street at night; underground; in rail-yards—it occurs in comfort and refinement—in hotels, in airport lounges, in conference rooms, in restaurants.

So, homeless space on the road is temporary, and mild in its effects. But over time it does shape, even disturb, one’s character.

I recall one particular trip that had all the feel of the traveling salesman’s midway journey. I was staying in a perfectly fine, perfectly shapeless business hotel halfway down the Peninsula in the Bay Area in California. There was nothing wrong with the room; there was nothing wrong with the food; there was nothing wrong with the bathroom. In fact, there was aggressively nothing wrong with anything. I seemed to be halfway between here and there, with “here” and “there” themselves being halfway points, never ending.

One’s sense of distance from oneself is heightened by such spaces. I felt somewhat lost by this disconnection to anything with an edge to it. While at the hotel, I presented on a Webinar, calling in from my room; and the strangeness of communicating with hundreds of people regarding a very focused, technical topic, while actually sitting alone in a stark, bland but comfortable place, depressed my mind and pushed me into premature exhaustion.

I think you are pulled by any travel out from your home-space and into a homeless environment, mitigated by your trappings, like your clothes, a book, your iPod, your cel phone. Habitual or regular travel extends this light homelessness through time … and since time is the enemy of homeless space, eventually it must pass and your travel-space becomes familiar space and therefore home-space. But if you do not reach that point you will be, like I was on the Peninsula, suspended, disconnected, waiting.

GUY ON HOMELESS SPACE - 1

2009-02-25T10:11:00.003-05:00

AND THE BUBBLE BURSTS

Home foreclosure right now is a wave sweeping the country and globe. And like a wave curling over and crashing on the beach in great slow-motion, the nose-diving economy and resulting wave of foreclosures is encircling the space of the American home-space and smashing it into millions of small floating bubbles of wandering, homeless space.

What forms does this homeless space take? When we think of the homeless, mostly we think of people living on the street, or in the park, or in the wild. But the national or global phenomenon of mass foreclosure today reminds us that, like after Hurricane Katrina, people can be homeless who are actually living in a home. In relatives’, friends’, or foster homes, or even government-supplied temporary homes, they can be said to be living in varying degrees of homelessness.

At least at first. People are made homeless by an event, like foreclosure, that takes them out of the warm, comforting, well-worn space they call their home, without them having a new home-space to move into. You can imagine this being the first degree of homelessness: Moving into a family member’s house after foreclosure. There could be further degrees, like government housing or homeless shelters, leading eventually to the final level of homelessness—where a person actually is on the street.

But we build our homes around us. They don’t require physical walls, fireplaces, stoves, or washing machines. They require no more than warmth, comfort, and familiarity. And this can be found, in time, by the lowliest beggar poorly clothed and wandering.

Time is the key. For eventually, it is human nature to find familiarity in one’s surroundings: even if you wander from town to town aimlessly, this constant change in your surroundings becomes, in time, familiar. And with familiarity comes comfort, and with comfort, warmth.

Economist have a measure called the “velocity” of money. It is roughly a measure of how frequently the same money changes hands, allowing more people to benefit from it. What foreclosure does is increase the velocity of space in one dimension, by moving people’s home-space into homeless space—the wave crashing down. But that is not the end of the story. Eventually, even those totally bereft find home-space wherever they are.

And in that sense, home-space and homeless space are one.

MAX ON HOMELESS SPACE

2009-02-23T10:22:00.002-05:00

BREAKING & ENTERING

When we see homeless people we often see them on the same plot of land that we always do. It’s a spot that is either secluded so that they can hide from the world or it’s spot right in the middle of the hustle and bustle where we can see them. These places that they happen to live on become their homes, so if we are constantly walking by them, are we breaking and entering?

I’m so always considering what the other person feels and when it comes to homeless people and their space, sometimes I just feel bad. It’s bad enough being homeless as it is, but being homeless in New York City must be horrible. There is no place to hide, no privacy. There is this one guy who lives in the entry to the subway on 86th and Lexington and I see him every day. And every SINGLE day, I see people staring at him and I just wonder, “What the hell are those people thinking about?” then I wonder, “What is this poor man thinking?”

Even though at times we feel like homeless people invade our space, have we ever thought about how it’s possible that we could invade theirs? Sure, we could be walking along, busy yelling on our blackberry’s about god knows what and feel alienated when a hand pops out asking for change. But what about that guy who is asking for change? For some reason, life has thrown him curves that have led him to this point, sitting on a box begging for pennies that people won’t even give. His 4 by 4 box, his home, that we’re constantly running by and not even respecting because we feel like he made decisions that got him to this point. We are always looking out the windows of our apartments or houses or cars envisioning something, like a better life. Where as our homeless friend sits on his box, constantly looking up at the windows above wishing he was there. And when he asks for some spare change that we have, we close our windows to our souls and keep him from breaking and entering.

[Originally from LA, Max E Kestenbaum now lives, studies, writes and clubs in New York City]

LORRAINE ON HOMELESS SPACE

2009-02-19T15:14:00.004-05:00

LOCATION. LOCATION. LOCATION.

Around the corner from where I live, a camper has been parked in the same spot since 1964. Every Tuesday at noon, the street cleaners commandeer that side of the street and I have witnessed the camper on the corner poised to swoop back in and reclaim its turf the minute the sweepers pass by.

I often wonder how the homeless decide on which space to make their own. From a tent pitched on a central divide to six feet of sidewalk between a set of potted plants to a particular patch of parking lot – and not in the private corner that one might think. Often the location seems random, as if suddenly the person got too tuckered to continue, such as the two bodies in sleeping bags stretched head to toe along the curb by a row of parked cars. Then days later there they are - the same two sleeping bags – suggesting that indeed a choice was made.

It’s been reported that up to 5,000 people live in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and over the years various city regimes have attempted to oust them. One wet winter I watched the bulldozers shove mud from A to B and then back again in the name of landscaping. The problem was that the chicken wire blocked access to the park for all citizens, not just those in search of a lawn to pass out on. As soon as the park reopened, the homeless were back in droves. I didn’t blame them. Camping in the urban jungle seems more appealing than the cement jungle. Besides, the location had a 24-hour supermarket, Laundromat, McDonalds and a French coin-operated toilet in its favor. Location, location, location.

Which brings me back to the question.

I have spoken briefly with the gentleman who resides in the camper. James is a gentle-spoken African American as eloquent as an English professor. Perhaps he chose the spot for its proximity to the library. I imagine he has lots of friends on the street who invite him in for dinner, pass on a barely-worn coat, maybe even have him baby-sit. I do know that his block is the only one in the neighborhood that doesn’t have two-hour resident parking, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to park there, which gives me reason to believe that at some point someone made a decision to let him have his space.

[Lorraine Flett is also the author of Sassy & Single in San Francisco]

ADAM ON HOMELESS SPACE

2009-02-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

GOING HOMELESS. GOING MOBILE.

In a city that’s crazy about cars, it seems only fitting that people who are often thought of as “crazy in the head” should make their car their home. I’m referring to those Angelenos who are said to be, “living out their cars”. They are the homeless with a set of wheels. In a sad and ironic sense, they combine the American love affair of the car and the open road, with the American dream of homeownership. It’s a curious space, where many of the shining values and norms driven by our society crash head-on into the darker side of our collective fears and failures.

The other day, while driving during the evening rush hour on a jam-packed east-west LA artery, I came to a red light and noticed a car up ahead struggling to make a left into the parking lot of a bank. This can be a tricky maneuver even for the most accomplished drivers in LA. The fact that no oncoming car was going to yield wasn’t what caught my eye. After all, during gridlock, space becomes a premium for LA drivers – even if that space is just a few inches. And of course, going to the bank is still common practice even in the age of online banking. What made me get out of my own space (the comfort zone of my own car), put the brakes on my normal behind-the-wheel brain and take notice, was a set of unsettling signs indicating that the car (now just off to my side) was a rolling wreck with a lost soul inside.

Unlike a shopping cart, which is easy to identify as a homeless person’s home on wheels, a car is far less recognizable as someone’s “home-sweet-home”. Everything is concealed inside the cabin, as opposed to being out in the open. That said, if CAR & DRIVER magazine were to do a feature story on such an auto, it would be a late model Buick or Pontiac riding on balding and under-inflated tires. The enigmatic car would have a faded paint job with an array of bumps and bruises. Its pitted body would be hovering just a few inches off the ground, its engine able to generate only enough power to always travel well below the speed limit, and its tail pipe would constantly be spewing a cloud of noxious exhaust. But the most important feature would be its semi-opaque windows consisting of a layer of caked-on dust, dirt and grime. In effect, creating the poor man’s version of the rich man’s tinted windows.

As a result, it’s nearly impossible to tell who’s behind the wheel. Is that a woman or a man? Are they young, middle-aged or senior citizen? Nor is it easy to make out exactly what’s piled high throughout the cabin. Are those old newspapers and magazines, or a decade worth of dirty laundry? Is that a cat, a dog, or a bird sitting in the back window? Or just a stuffed animal? Or a pillow that looks like a stuffed animal? Perhaps all those seemingly soft and plush items tightly packed together are part of makeshift airbag safety system, providing a life-saving cushion during a collision. Whatever is in there (and there’s always plenty of it), surely has taken years to amass. And isn’t likely to be brought out any time soon.

After inching my way forward at the remarkable speed of about 2 miles an hour, I looked through my rearview mirror and saw that the homeless mobile home had finally turned into the bank’s parking lot. Of all the things that flashed through my mind at that instant, a torrent of unanswerable questions and profound uncertainties, the one thought that parked in my brain was both banal and bold.

I envisioned this person pulling their mobile homeless home in front of the convenient drive-up ATM. And then depositing all their misfortunes into it with the touch of a button.

RO ON HOMELESS SPACE

2009-02-10T09:28:00.005-05:00

HOME TRUTHS

Guy observes that the general tendency is to conflate space with its container.

So what happens in the absence of a traditional container of living space, known to most of us as “home”?

It’s an absence that’s particularly noticed – and noted with vehement indignation by media – when bitterly cold arctic air descends upon Winter’s days to clutch them in a relentless grip. “Homeless evictee found frozen to death on park bench” screams a headline or two, usually in a sprawling urban landscape which – ironically – is most densely expressive of dwelling spaces, some with multimillion-dollar containers.

Expelled from the private spaces of real estate, the homeless have little choice but to spill into public spaces. But even within such public spaces is a need to form containers of semi-private spaces: The grocery cart. The church steps. The park bench. The promenade. The tunnel. The pipeline. The phone booth. Spaces, which – ironically – also symbolize plenitude and prosperity, pleasure and progress. These, however, are spaces that townships and their governances stake their claims upon, prohibiting the homeless from finding any recourse whatsoever in this form of shelter.

Homelessness is a strange space. Perhaps because it has few or no borders, it pervades into several other spaces.

Visual Space being one such. Your eyes can’t miss the San Francisco Santa on Battery who sells Christmas cards every November. Or the human “fixture” on the doorway of the church on 85th & Madison’. Or the unkempt itinerant who lies covered in rags on Tokyo’s otherwise immaculate streets, creating dissonance on the eye. Or the cardboard sign on Berkeley’s Telegraph Street: “WHY LIE? I NEED A BEER.” In its charming, persuasive honesty, that’s Creative Space as well.

Which draws us by the hand into Advertising Space. In Toronto, a “creative” media buy by a radio station chooses a placard held by the homeless himself, to ignite a moral debate on so many levels: “SHOULD PANHANDLING BE LEGAL?”?

What, then, of Auditory Space? The “God bless you” or the four-letter sentiment doled out depending on the proportion of generosity one responds with.

How about Tactual Space – particularly in emerging nations – when the fervent appealer nudges, jabs, and prods, so as to penetrate a wall of deadened emotions?

What of instances when the transient, lacking the means for personal grooming, impacts on the surrounding Olfactory Space with an intensity that is almost tangible?

Consider the implications that the loss of Domestic Space could have on Private Space and Emotional Space. On the spaces surrounding comfort, self-respect, even identity.

For a space so devoid of possession, its explorations are ironically rich.

MAX ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-02-09T09:22:00.005-05:00

"IMAX" BY I, MAX

Space. Something easily ruptured. Like in an elevator when it’s crammed and a baby is crying hysterically. Or a subway cart when it’s packed and stinky people are singing, dancing, or murmuring in the seat right next to you. Not cool. Not fun. Or it could be in a movie theater – a place that is supposed to be peaceful and stress-free.

Over the summer, my friend invited me to go see Pineapple Express. The movie is about these stoners who go on an adventure because they are really paranoid (I wonder why). With every stoner movie comes your usual stoner moviegoers who don’t laugh because they understand the jokes…they laugh because they are too high to know what’s going on.

I had my huge popcorn and my huge drink. I was in my comfortable seat, ready to laugh and enjoy my two hours away from reality when all of the sudden I hear, “Transformers. SCOOBY-DOO!” In New York, you develop a sense for danger and possible threats. You know when something is wrong or is going to be wrong and you know to avoid it. But in a movie theater, you can’t go anywhere. After I heard those two words, all I thought was, “Fuck.”

The high person kept on shouting, “Transformers. SCOOBY-DOO!” His high friends kept laughing. Stress filled the room. I saw heads keep turning back, shooting nasty glares at the noisy assailants. I looked at my friend to my right. He’s slowing being driven to insanity. I could see him unraveling. I looked at the gentle man to my left. He had his hands over his ears and a constipated look on his face. He’s not happy. All I could concentrate on were the loud noises that were preventing me from enjoying my movie. Now I’m angry. I’m zoned in on the noises. My heart was pounding. My anger was rising. I snapped. I jumped up out of my chair, turned around, grabbed my huge drink and yelled, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” And I rifled my drink at the loud guy’s head. Crack. Direct hit. Silence. The kids are quiet. All eyes in the theater were on me. Now, I was that guy who ruined the movie.

What happened was a transfer of ruptured space. From my patience being pushed to the limits, I exploded and turned in to the bad guy. But who is to blame? Is it the high people’s fault for rupturing everyone’s space for a prolonged period of time? Or is it my fault for throwing a drink and rupturing their space taking the focus off of them and putting it on to me?

All good questions… all will be answered in time.

[This piece is a contribution by Max E Kestenbaum, 22, who studies Marketing & Advertising, and is one of the most personable people I have ever met]

JOSE BACA ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-02-07T08:46:00.002-05:00

“CONTROLLED RUPTURE”

In combat sports, in boxing, MMA – which uses boxing techniques, jiujutsu, kickboxing, wrestling, even old-fashioned street fighting – one thinks of fists, knees, feet, face, nose, eyes, physical body parts, being ruptured.

But it’s really about Space being ruptured. It’s about how space is used to advantage, given it can be your best friend or your bitterest foe. Let’s see how it plays out in boxing, in the legendary fight between Miguel Cotto and Antonio Margarito.

So, Cotto was staying on the outside while using his jab, the perfect way to set it all up. Margarito, on the other hand, likes to fight close, on the inside. During the first 7 rounds, Cotto was winning the fight flawlessly, using space to his advantage. As the fight wore on, Cotto started to tire. In the last four rounds or so, Margarito started to walk him down, cutting off the ring and closing the space that favored him. Margarito started swarming him, intimidating him, pushing him against the ropes. On the 11th round, Margarito completely closed off the space. Guess what happened. Cotto succumbed to the punishment and was forced down to take a knee. The referee wiped off the gloves, Cotto got up. Then, Margarito again began to close off the space as fast as possible, didn’t let him move. Cotto was ended up taking another knee, and his corner was forced to throw in the white towel.

Another way to use Space is to literally guard one’s personal space very, very closely. A classic case in point is Mohammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope” strategy, where he lay on the ropes while protecting his head and face with his fists. George Foreman, one of the top punchers of all time, began to throw blow after blow out on his body. But Ali just let him, all the while, defending his head. By the 5th round, Foreman got exhausted from all the punches he threw at Ali to no avail, because he couldn’t land punches to his head. As the fight wore on, Foreman got completely wiped out, and was eventually knocked out. In this case, Ali basically used his own personal space to counter-attack.

Contrary to how it’s viewed, the space within this arena is actually quite civilized. There’s an unspoken (if very strong) code of ethics, etiquette, respect. You have to respect that person, because they are about to take on as much punishment as you are. At the end of every fight, combatants actually hug each other, congratulate each other, and hang out as close buddies. It’s not about wreaking anger, it's not emotional. It’s about the sport, the art, the pure craft, the professionalism, the competition. It’s about bringing out all your childhood fantasies and turning them into a career – in a very mature, adult way.

Ultimately, it’s the individual’s choice, he decides how much of his space can be ruptured.

So if you think about it, it’s really it’s a space of “controlled rupture”.

[Jose Baca is an ardent fan of boxing and MMA; being a thinker and an avid boxer himself, he offers a first-hand insight into this world of ruptured space.]

DAVID SLAPE ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-02-05T16:43:00.003-05:00

RUPTURED SPACE AND "FREE WILL"...

For me one of the most profound and disastrous ways in which one can experience ruptured space is when the fabric of one's mind rips or tears. I mean this in two senses. The first is physical…

Glial cells make up about 80-90% of the brain - the rest of the brain is made up of neurons. There are several kinds of glial cells. Astrocytes help clear neurotransmitter from the synapse, without them your neurons would overheat and die from over stimulation. Oligodendrocytes wrap around neural axons and allow electric signals to pass between cells at astonishing speeds. Glial cells can reproduce and be replaced, neurons largely cannot. It’s good that glial cells can replenish themselves except in rare case where they divide mitotically in an uncontrolled fashion. They can form what is known as a space-occupying lesion, the worst type is a glioblastoma, the most aggressive of all brain tumors. It pushes everything adjacent to it out of place, placing pressure on other areas of the brain; it ruptures the precarious composition of everything in the intracranial space.

The other kind of ruptured space I think of most is the psychotic break. These profuse disconnects from reality remind me of how tenuous sanity is. We take it for granted that our mind will always be ours, that our thoughts are our own. But what must it feel like when you start hearing other people’s voices in your head? What must it be like to be so tortured by stress and fear that eventually the mind shuts down, when the space your reality exists in, ruptures beyond repair.

And on that note, one parting thought about who controls your brain. Neurophysicists have recently discovered that most motor signals which precipitate physical movement, actually manifest and are sent several milliseconds before we actually “make the choice” to move.

Kind of makes you wonder about the whole free will thing.

[My friend David Slape, originally from Adelaide, is Psychologist by Day & Bartender by Night. A teetotaler who has perfected – and invented – the Art of the Cocktail at such places of repute as The Slanted Door in San Francisco, Gramercy Tavern, Del Posto, and PDT in New York. David currently studies Psychology at Columbia.]

GUY ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-02-03T09:20:00.001-05:00

BREAKING PERFECTION

Rupture brings greater joy to the impact of space on the mind. When I first got iTunes, I maniacally rated all the songs I added. After a while, I learned how to create a playlist of only five-star songs, and with (by that time) about a thousand songs saved, I was able to listen to a mix of all my truly favorite songs.

The result was boredom. I figured that interest and entertainment required variety, so the large number of songs in the mix should have made for joyful listening. I rarely heard the same song twice in a day, or twice in two days. But excellence and variety were not enough to please.

I returned to the radio for a time, now thinking that it was newness that was lacking. (Do you see how the mind resists rupture? More on that in a bit.) Radio programming surprises more or less by definition, because you didn’t do the programming yourself; even if all you hear are songs you know—and it’s remarkable how many songs, seemingly an unlimited number if the genre is familiar, your mind remembers—you can’t know what song is next. So radio entertains each moment another song begins playing, even if it’s a song you don’t like, just by presenting you with something unpredicted.

But that wasn’t it.

Finally my misunderstanding hit me: what I wasn’t recognizing about radio was the value of the songs I don’t like. I realized that the relentless awesomeness of five-star songs one after the other was giving me no break, putting fast asleep the pleasure centers of my brain. I tried a different mix that included songs that are not my favorites and songs I don’t like. Et voilà! my mix made me happy again. Adding Holes to the content created a more excellent Whole.

This is an example of compensatory perception creating benefit through negativity. In the discipline of space, it translates as rupture of space creating pleasing sensation via reaction of the senses to violent imperfection. This principle tells us that we lead the viewer to an ultimately more pleased reaction by smashing through the main subject giving pleasure. In space terms, breaks in the perfection of emptiness give us greater joy in contemplation of it.

But it is natural and useful for us to resist rupture as strongly as we do. Because perfection is still best. The kind of breakage and violence described here is a human tool for creating satisfaction out of human flaw. Experiencing a work such as the Taj Mahal, though, is quite the opposite of an experience of ruptured space. Its space is ideal, ideally measured, ideally scaled.

Still, we are not all Lahauri, nor was Lahauri likely a creator of ideal space more than once in his life. Though we always instinctively strive for the ideal in our work, we may want to give ourselves our own breaks from time to time, and create pleasurable spaces with interruption instead of only with perfection.

RO ON RUPTURED SPACE – 5

2009-02-01T09:06:00.007-05:00

THE GIFT OF RUPTURE

A news clip caught my eye this morning while I was sipping my coffee. Headline read, "Boy's wrapped birthday gift is dad back from Iraq". The picture of the gift box had a giant gash in the center, through which you could see the dad – who’d hatched a plan to hide out in this 4-foot-tall box when he learnt that his leave would coincide with his son's birthday.

And I thought, tearing apart the wrapping of a present is also a rupture of space. It's an oxymoron, because it's an act of rupture that bonds humans, using physical form to express an exchange of emotions.

Set in the backdrop of the Rupture of Political Relations manifest in the Rupture of War, with the Rupture of Separation, what must the rupture of this gift-wrapping have felt like?

RO ON RUPTURED SPACE – 4

2009-01-30T08:38:00.003-05:00

MÉTHODE CHAMPENOISE

The Drink of Kings, the King of Drink

Ruptured Space?! How does Champagne link?

Sediments formed over the passage of time

Float like muddled aspirations through the pale-gold wine

They coast along the curves of an upside-down bottle

Bursting with effervescence at full throttle

They settle at the neck and freeze into a plug

Which is then disgorged with an explosive tug

The tiniest of bubbles start rising up

When this golden liquid fills the cup

As we hold the stem and lift the flute

To joie de vivre, with this refined brut

’tis Rupture’s hand that makes this wine

So unbelievably divine

RO ON RUPTURED SPACE – 3

2009-01-29T10:32:00.014-05:00

RUPTURE’S RAPTURES

Adam asks: “Indeed, is the violent rupturing of space a part of what it means to be alive, to be human?”

The repercussions of ruptured space need not always be negative, violent, or invasive.

Rupture could be found in the poetry of the French kiss, or the romantic rhapsody that ensues. A carnal captivity of body that at once releases mind. A death of sorts that creates life. Whereupon birth itself would be another of Rupture's displays.

Envision the shattering of shell by a helpless baby bird that emerges from the cracked egg, its endearing down all moist and ruffled.

Rupture is wondrous, indeed, when that skillful slit removes a malignancy with unerring precision, or ultrasound waves fragment kidney stones to shards, or the quotidian needle punctures the skin – granting another day to live.

Why, women’s legs wouldn’t be quite so baby-soft or men’s chests as beach-ready, were it not for the ripping rupture of hot wax.

Split a passion fruit, a mangosteen, a longan or a rambutan, and devour its tropical succulence as its juicy stickiness dabs your mouth. That’s rupture.

Rupture’s hand breaks oven-baked bread, fragrant and crusty, at Dinner's table.

Rupture would also be a new government at work, pulling out conservative edicts and injunctions. Maybe with a directive to shut down a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay – ending forever the physical and emotional rupture of inquisition.

BEN & RO ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-01-28T17:03:00.014-05:00

“SANCTIONED VIOLENCE”

Punches and kicks, fist-to-fist face-offs, nasty injuries and “finishing people off” are the way things usually go in the ruptured space of combat sports. So why do fight fans really want that rupture in this space, aka “great fights”? What really makes this arena so juicy and compelling? An interview with an ardent MMA fan throws some light on Adam’s question: “Indeed, is the violent rupturing of space a part of what it means to be alive, to be human?”

Perhaps this ruptured space isn’t really about rupture, after all.

Ro: So what do you like about MMA?

Ben: I like the athleticism. You have to be so skilled at so many different things.... boxing, juijitsu, wrestling, submissions, thai boxing... and they put themselves through intense training, and 50% of it is mental training.”

Ro: What really fascinates you?

Ben: So you have these two guys who are skilled in all these things... two warriors... and they go head-to-head and square off. Whoever wins is usually smarter, or has the mental training not to give up. it’s like a physical chess match.”

Ro: What about blood and that sort of thing?

Ben: Umm. I don't like it but I don’t mind it; it excites me because sometimes a guy will get cut, and bleed like crazy but he keeps going... to me, to able to do that you need to be at a pretty strong place mentally – so when I see a guy doing that, yes it excites me... but not because of the blood, because of the resilience.

So the most dominant MMA fighter in the world, he's undefeated.... Fedor Emilienenko is his name. He was fighting a guy named Kevin Randleman a few years ago.

Kevin Randleman picked up Fedor, tossed him backwards and slammed him down on his neck and head. It looked brutal, like a broken neck or something, but because of Fedor’s mental training, he learned to relax in the ring. So as he was in mid air, he completely relaxed his body and when he landed, his body just absorbed the blow. He got right up, and got Kevin Randleman in an arm lock called a “keylock”. Randleman gave up and Fedor won.

It was one of the most amazing things in MMA history and it was all from intense resilience and mental strength and training. Like, if that were me being thrown i would have locked up and probably broken my neck.

Ro: So if it’s all about mental strength, why does it have to manifest itself physically?

Ben: It’s the combination of brain and brawn, really. But the physical part is what we all grow to love about it. It’s amazing to see these guys try to edge each other out physically… with split second timing and holds and strategy.

Watch the rupture.

ADAM K ON RUPTURED SPACE

2009-01-28T11:13:00.002-05:00

“THREE CHEERS FOR RUPTURED SPACE!”

At the end of The Italian Incident, Rohini asks us to consider this space in an academic fashion. Instead of focusing solely on the specifics of the incident and its outcome, my mind takes me to the blog heading under which the posting resides and formulates an ancillary sort of uber question: What constitutes a Ruptured Space?

In trying to answer this question, my Yin-Yang mind first seeks to locate and identify a space that could be considered as the opposite of a ruptured space: some sort of a priori state of relative peace, tranquility or harmony. The operative word or concept here is “relative”, since it could be argued that on some level (at the subatomic level, for instance) there is always some degree of rupturing going on in any given space.

Unable to identify or perhaps justify the existence of an absolute non-ruptured space, my mind turns away from the presupposed to the more predictable – to some sort of aggressive or violent action that is typically linked, in a causal sense, to a space being ruptured. Rohini’s throwing of the wine glass is a good case in point. But here again, I end up with only a relative understanding, which is confirmed by the set of questions she asks at the end, “Whose space was ruptured? His or ours?”

Frustrated, but not daunted by my (admittedly) mental limitations, I double back to my original question, and to my surprise, discover an interesting aspect to this whole ruptured-space thing.

The image of an empty boxing ring appears. Viewed from above, I see a space that is pure in color and design in what might be considered its a priori state. Then, the fury of combatants, fists flying with a flurry of aggression and violence, ruptures the wholesomeness and harmony of this pure white square image. I begin to wonder is this the anthropomorphic manifestation of the subatomic nature of things? A sort of sanctioned violence, where the rupturing of space is cultivated, even honored? I start to tick of off other similar spaces. The running of the bulls in San Fermin. The collective tomato fight in Bunyol. The gridiron on Superbowl Sunday. Indeed, is the violent rupturing of space a part of what it means to be alive, to be human?

Perhaps Elvis Costello said it best, “What’s so good about peace, love and understanding?”

RO ON RUPTURED SPACE - 2

2009-01-28T10:03:00.012-05:00

THE AWAKENING

She’d burst into the room; wake me up with a hullabaloo. She’d say, “Get up, my sweet”, her voice cheerful, like birdsong. Then she’d go across to the window, and tear the curtains open to allow the golden sunshine to drench the room.

Then, she’d leave my bedroom door ajar and go back into the kitchen. I’d hear the din of domesticity, the clang and clamor of steel vessels, the chitchat with the kitchen help, her poignant stotras to the Gods. Strains of the “Vishnu Sahasranama” – a mantra that evokes Vishnu, the Preserver, with a thousand names – would stream in. She had a voice like a nightingale, she did, my mother.

But what a delicious wake-up! How fortunate is one to wake to a mother – and her love – every morning!

Strangely, not so for me.

For an extremely sensory and sensitive type of personality, this would be an ice-cold shock every morning. It would rip me out of slumberous stupor; yank me from the inmost layers of consciousness; drag me out of deep, drowsy dormancy. Basically, ruin the start to my day.

This went on for years; my mother’s love, care and concern showering me… in ways other than just being woken up.

Then, one day I moved away to a magic faraway land called “Singapore”, where I was answerable only to myself. At first, I was uncomfortable with the quietude, but began to understand who I was, what I wanted, even how I needed to wake up.

Consciousness is so much like Nature. It needs to dawn tentatively like the sky – from dark to opaque, translucent to transparent, shade to tint. It needs to stretch languorously like the long, lazy, limbs of a pale-gold sun. It needs to unfurl slowly like petals on a dewy early-morning flower.

Sometimes, during such times of luxurious leisure, thoughts flutter in.

Thoughts of the empty nest I perhaps left ruptured when I took flight.

RO ON RUPTURED SPACE - 1

2009-01-20T10:36:00.006-05:00

THE ITALIAN INCIDENT

The scene: a neighborhood Italian restaurant. The act: Owner thumps fist on table, and yells at waiter for not re-filling Vedant's glass with wine.

The fireworks escalate, making our meal extremely uncomfortable. I push my plate away, we ask for the cheque. The angry hissing and cursing continues. Since it’s over our wine glass, I feel it my moral obligation to defend our poor waiter, who is so shaken that he puts his sleeve into my pasta while placing a spoon; but it doesn’t matter, I can’t eat it anyway.

I’m not drinking the wine. I’m drinking Panna, which I also push away because I feel it go bad with negative energy. So you can say I’m not drinking at all.

I go up to the bar to tell the owner very nicely that he should go easy on the waiter, that it’s not his fault, that our evening has less than bearable. He smiles and shrugs his shoulders, but I hold his eyes like a leash, not letting him drop the gaze. He appears to calm down, and says, with a gruff Italian drawl, "Senora, I'm Italian, I am like this for fifty years, you can't change me.".

I don't know what comes over me the next moment. I note rather cold-bloodedly that I’m not really angry.

So I reply with utter calm, "Do you want to see how Italian I can be?”. Before he can respond, I pick up a Martini glass that has been filled to the brim with water and ice, hurl it towards the corner of the bar, and watch it smash into smithereens.

Then I walk away leaving them frozen in the numb aftermath of slow shock. Vedant follows me in a stupor. The scene I leave behind is vaguely reminiscent me of some fairy tale I’d read as a kid where the whole village is turned to stone in time – the seamstress captive while drawing a thread, the woodman petrified midway through chopping a block of wood. Only, the gentleman at the next table is frozen in action while twirling his spaghetti, his mouth open.

As I walk, wild thoughts crowd my head. Maybe the mafia is waiting outside to run over me, or maim me, or do something equally dreadful. Now that he has Vedant's name on the credit card, and my face is crisp in his memory given that I glued his gaze to mine, it’s going to be horrible, horrible.

What do I do? Flee the country - a little earlier than I'd planned on? Or am I being over-reactive? Obviously, I don't have the attitude to follow-through, or the physical muscle to handle the repercussions.

But let's discuss this incident on a purely academic note.

Whose space was ruptured?

His or ours?

ADAM ON SPACE ON THE NOSE

2009-01-12T10:09:00.000-05:00

A NOSE FOR MEMORY

Of all the senses, smell is the most powerfully linked one to memory. Perhaps it’s because part of the faculty for this sense occupies a space that’s considered to be the oldest or most primal region of the brain?

Certainly, our oldest memories, particularly those of childhood, seem to be most easily triggered by the smells they are linked to ⎯ from the subtle and sublime scent of a mother’s embrace (as ubiquitous as it is unique), to the delicious and delightful aroma of a freshly baked pie (a sort of archetypical smell of childhood in Western societies).

For the most part, the smells of childhood are created outside of our control. But at some point in our development, we shift from being passive receptors of smells, and become more actively involved in creating and choosing them. In this respect, through the use of smell, we become what might be called “memory makers”; some of us more consciously so than others.

I’m watching this take place right now with my teenage daughter. She’s taken it upon herself to change the brand of laundry detergent that we’ve been using in our home for many years. Interestingly, the first articles that she’s chosen for receiving this new scent are her bed sheets, pillowcases and comforter cover. (A space that’s begging to be explored.) Changing the laundry detergent seems to be an attempt on her part to use smell to mark a “space” that’s a departure from the past, as well as an arrival of a memory now set for the future.

What memories have you made lately? Or rather, smelled anything good lately?

RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 3

2009-01-10T10:18:00.005-05:00

COFFEE & BAGELS

It's Friday morning. I sit in a corner office on the 14th Floor of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, working on Microsoft. I bite into an Onion Bagel, bluntly cut with a plastic knife and schmeared with spring onion cream cheese. As the aroma of coffee wafts from the kitchen across the corridor, emotions wash me in different flavors; most of them are chicory-bitter, and a very few, sweet. I’m immediately transported to a Friday morning some ten odd years ago.

The cluster of downtown San Fran’s grey-brown buildings, kafkaesque, darkens my moving vision. The grating wheels of the cable car make auditory furrows upon the nerves of my teeth. A cold lonely wind wraps me in its arms and clings to me; when I embrace it back, it slaps me on the face.

In these few seconds, I am acutely aware of how outcast I was all those years, the embers of my spirit stubbed out by that apparently refined, non-smoking society. I think of what I left behind – a civilized prison that went to great lengths to pretend not to be one, in a culture outwardly refined and accepting and respectful of difference, but hiding its hypocritical ugly face under a beautiful, smiling, subtle mask of discrimination.

I thought I’d forgotten it, forgiven it, but it emerges from under the layered years of denial, popping up in the foreground like an expanded window on my Mac.

I no longer feel the ice-blue resentment against that clique; I was never a part of it anyway, and now, in a rear-view rush of gratitude, I know I will never be. That brand of exile no longer has the power to terrify me like it did, perhaps because I don’t look for mirrors to reflect my identity, or even my existence, any more. I’ve learnt to bite it back like I do every winter in New York.

San Francisco, you bitchcold city. But I must be a little kinder to you, you helped me become who I am today.

I sit on the 21st Floor of 135 Main Street. Swanlike ships glide under the Bay Bridge, leaving frothy white trails on an intense blue Pacific. I stare at my Mac, so grateful to be finally accepted.

A man with the grey beard sits cross-legged like a technological mystic, talking Microsoft on the carpet everyone has tread upon with their shoes, ruffling my cultural obsessive-compulsive sensibilities ever so little. Ah, he smokes, which makes him less civilized then. A narrow brown woman, softly scornful and unobvious in her beauty, flashes me a smile as she walks up the stairs to finish her strategy document.

There are others who make little impact on me, all with that cookie-cutter question-mark intonation, that same, pale, manufactured look, perhaps their only raison d’etre to please the mammoth, swallowing corporate powers-that-be.

A bus beeps – that same beep I have heard so often on Howard Street. The smells of Starbucks on California Street whisper memories into my nostrils again, and the late September air, with a little shiver in it, wipes in vignettes of Embarcadero Center and the howling fog around.

The honking of enraged New York traffic wakes me up to a new reality.

Everything is the same, yet everything is different. I'm still working on Microsoft, but I’m Ro, the New Yorker.

And my ultimate acceptance is only by myself.

RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE – 2

2009-01-08T11:23:00.011-05:00

CHERRY BLOSSOMS

When Spring beckons with silver-throated birds, Nature crafts a paintbrush from the soft fibers of wispy clouds. She wets the brush with the sky's joyous tears, and sweeps the landscape with even, flat strokes. Then, she dabs the pointy tip into the colors of the earth and all its muds and silts and soils, to dot the just-moistened landscape. Innocent white petals blush modestly with delicate daubs of rose and fuchsia; some turn mauve and lavender, others peachy salmon, misty yellow and coppery brown.

How else would Cherry Blossoms in Japan come to be?

Beauty in its intensity can be almost unbearable to the eye; in this case, it is apparently unbearable to the Nose – at least for some – when pollen is sprinkled into the air like fairy dust.

And so the Japanese Face Mask comes to be.

Perhaps no other culture knows to draw spatial boundaries around the nose as does Japan’s. Like everything else, the reasons are many-nuanced. Sometimes, they also stem from an innate consciousness etched into the culture from as long as time can remember. It’s the consciousness of a collective society, one with deep respect for another’s olfactory border. Reasons for such consideration for one's companions? A cold, a viral, a flu, a sneeze. All of which teem with more germs than the letters on this page – scrolled down.

In a culture that’s also detail-oriented, perfectionist and conscientious about going to work every day – come rain, shine or cherry blossom – a common cold isn’t reason enough to shirk the necessary responsibility.

And so they don the mask.

ADRIAN ON SPACE & SOUND

2009-01-07T10:33:00.009-05:00

SOUND IN ONLINE SPACE

This past year a couple of programs on echo-location grabbed my attention. First was this: the story of a boy who lost his eyes very early yet who has taught himself to "see" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBv79LKfMt4) well enough to skateboard, play basketball and have a fairly average childhood by using "clicking" sounds. If you haven't seen this, I'd spare the time. It is absolutely awe-inspiring and also very emotional too.

Second was the recent Nat Geo program on echo-location which claimed that humans have echo-location ability equal to that of dolphins, or better than bats!

Like any good marketer this news of newly discovered and untapped human potential and promise got me wondering how we could exploit and integrate sound better into what we do. Actually I'm not quite that sad, my friend Rohini asked me to write a companion piece to hers and Adam’s for her blog.

Quite a bit has been written about how companies are using mnemonic cues in their advertising and retail environments, but one still untapped opportunity is the Web. If you think of sound on the Web it's probably in conjunction with unfortunately chosen intro music for some cheesy site. That along with the various boings, chirps, rocket noises, door slams, swooshes and tweets of many modern applications has probably forced your default mode to mute. However, I think the echo-location metaphor proves that there is a different way to think about sound on the Web - as a navigation tool.

For example, volume levels could be used to indicate relative depth or distance from you - useful in the event of working with multiple windows in multiple layers. Tones could guide mouse movements, subtly reinforcing desired actions or warning about potentially dangerous ones. In the same way that a car gives audio cues about operation, when to shift, whether everything is working well or not, etc. I think it's pretty easy to see how sound – and a standard for sound – could be quite useful in a next-generation navigation scheme.

It's interesting to speculate on how many of the current computing idioms evolved to compensate (either consciously or not) for the lack of sound. Now that our hardware is capable, can sound transform how we use technology?

[ This is a contribution from Adrian Ho, a partner at Zeus Jones. http://www.zeusjones.com/ ]

GUY ON SPACE ON THE NOSE

2009-01-06T20:27:00.023-05:00

JOURNEYSCENT

Taking my daily commute, I follow my nose’s sensations along the way.

The scents in the hallway outside my door are simple: old carpet and dried paint. Flat and persistent, they crowd me from behind, shooting me forward like a pea through a straw, down the stairs and out the door.

Outside are a thousand scents, churning, traveling, growing and dissipating, as if I’ve discovered a new frontier. Exploration beckons, but as a dutiful worker I glide toward the subway instead.

I turn downhill after passing the last building on the block, and riding the wind, the scent of the sea hits me, faint but pervasive. It transmits the essence of that broad flat expanse of blue, miles away.

In the subway, the attacking scent of acrid burnt metal cuts an endless gash through my mind, like the tracks that run for miles from the city center to the land’s end.

In my office, the mix of dry, monotonous, faintest odors (must; bleached paper; alcohol-tinged equipment and floors; baked and cooled air ducts) presses me gently down into my chair.

Simple, flat scents = a long, directional tube
Millions of churning scents = a wide, dark, uneven surface
Faint but pervasive smell = broad, flat expanse
Metallic, cutting smell = a long slit
Faint mixes of monotones = low overhead

What spaces do other kinds of scents convey?

RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 1

2009-01-04T11:42:00.019-05:00

THE PRINCESS AND THE P

Why is reward linked to hard work, and in this case, punishment?

My journey to The Land of Fragrances & Flavors, Scents & Spices – the land of Jasmine & Jackfruit, Orchid & Lychee, Frangipani & Mango, Rice & Pandan Leaf – is always fraught with olfactory ordeals.

On the aircraft, the apparatus placed by the creator at the center of my face quivers at sharing space with so many breathing, coughing, sneezing, spluttering, sniffing, oozing, emitting, expelling, discharging beings called “humans”. My Nose is very challenged, despite Singapore Airlines’ clever attempt at Sensory Branding, with a patented scent that is melded into the perfume of flight attendants, blended into the hot towels they offer before take-off, and imbued into the brand itself – a smooth, sensual, seductive, sexy scent that is “exotically Asian, with a distinct aura of the feminine.”

Exotically Asian, my foot. For my Nose, it is a journey of extreme hardship, of the intense suffering of its sensibilities, of penitence to be paid, of abstinence even, as it cries out to my lungs to stop demanding air.

For over 20 hours, my Nose is pummeled with the smell of international travel – a motley mix of the fermemted stench of baggage, of never-washed upholstery, of reheated airline meals, of unkempt passengers, of unwashed armpits, of un-flossed crevices, of masking perfumes which only enhance underlying notes.

Even in Business or First, it is much the same – if only less intense.

Perhaps no other sense is as invaded and infringed, penetrated and pervaded, abused and assaulted, raided and ravaged, as is the Space on My Nose.

The ordeal is finally over. I am soaring in a taxi redolent of Pandan Leaf and Jasmine Rice. I roll down the window like a dog hungry for new smells.

The scents of Singapore wash out my brain of all its recent traumas. The air, purified clean with Nature’s own hand – a tropical thunderstorm – carries many a pious offering to my nose.

An offering of Buddhist temple incense, the fragrance of fresh rain upon sun-scorched earth, the whiff of fresh-mowed grass, the clean smell of rainforest tree bark, and the exotic scent of orchids.

The real journey is about to begin.

ADAM K ON SPACE & SOUND – 2

2009-01-02T09:56:00.010-05:00

BRANDED SPACE

When I think of “sounds of brands” my mind turns to spaces (not necessarily to mechanized products) that advertisers appropriate through the use of sound to help build their own brands. In effect, creating a “branded space” in the consumer’s mindset.

One of the best examples this is a Southwest Airlines television campaign, which first appeared on the airwaves (another space to explore at some point) a few years back. The sound is that of the “ding” that fills the cabin a few minutes after take off. I believe the sound is used to single that it’s okay for a passenger to get out of their seat and move about the cabin. The campaign’s themeline “You are free to move around the country”, which is delivered in the same fashion (audio quality) of a pilot’s announcement over the airplane’s PA system seems to support my understanding of the usage or the significance of this sound.

BTW: The term in advertising for this kind of device (the “ding”) is called a mnemonic.

What’s important to recognize is that this sound is not unique to Southwest’s jets, or the specific brand experience of this airline. The sound is created equally (so-to-speak) by all the different airlines and (I believe) is an industry standard used by all the different manufacturers of passenger jets (e.g. Boeing and Airbus). In this respect, the sound can be considered as ubiquitous to airline travel.

The smarts of the Southwest folks and their agency is to take ownership of the sound and link it to the Southwest brand, enabling the brand to be filled with many compelling associations and feelings about airline travel – all of which can be said to “take off” and “land” in the area of personal empowerment.

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 7

2008-12-30T18:45:00.010-05:00

SOUNDS OF BRANDS

Being in advertising has always made me think about my relationship with brands through a given day. Now, writing about Space & Sound makes me more acutely aware of my relationship with brands – through sounds.

As the early morning light vignettes the western skies, the iPhone alarm goes off. The resonant “ageng-kogeng-kogeng-geng” sound of a padded wooden Gamelan gong-beater is stifled halfway through the ring.

The kettle gurgles like a freshwater brook as it makes me my Bru Instant Coffee. I place the rice milk back in the refrigerator and it suddenly lets out a contented hum; if it were human, I’m almost sure it would snuggle up to me. I sit down to write this piece with my Macbook’s soft-touch keypad soothing my senses. It’s reassuring to hear that all the letters are appearing on the screen – as they should – without invading my space.

My Sonicare toothbrush buzzes, leaving each tooth squeaky-clean. As my blow-dryer blows my hair out into soft black silk, I wish it would be soundless like my Conair flatiron, which sometimes hisses at the wet strands.

In his previous post, Guy observes that music can both fill and create space. At the gym, it’s my very own world of auditory space through my iPod and my Bose headphones. I start on Level 2 with “Frenzy at The Feeder” by Brooks Williams, his complicated acoustic licks vying with Dan Crary’s flatpickin’ fretwork on “Dill Pickle Rag”. Level 3 meets the svelteness of “Cocktail Swing”. (Heavens, whatever did I do before Paul Englishby?) My endorphins escalate to the next level with a super-tight scratch, a tangoey mix oozing with vinyl soul by Gotan Project. Then, some pure gangsta rap, by one of its purest exponents Dr Dre, pounds into my ears. I identify with the fury at Level 6; it’s a strange mix of his anger and my elation. Sugar Ray Norcia winds me down, personally conveying his woes, and I wonder at how the Blues make me feel both low and high.

At night, Vedant turns on his new buy – the Venta Humidifier. I secretly think he has developed a “relationship” with it – not only because it moistens the air, but also because “it laps at the water gently all night like a thirsty puppy”, warming the cockles of his paternal heart.

How do brands or objects define your auditory space? What do they therefore mean to you?

Should a brand try to arrogate this space?

GUY ON SPACE & SOUND – 3

2008-12-29T23:34:00.003-05:00

MUSIC TO MY EARS

Music is a particular kind of sound that deserves its own thread. But thinking about sound and space as I have here has helped me to understand what music is—or really, what the difference is between music and the other kind of sound, noise.

When is music music and when is it noise? When is noise noise and when is it music? At first glance this seems so particular to the person and the personality. My grandpa always used to call rock ’n’ roll “that banging”—it was noise to him. And I’ve been to a concert or two where the “music” I was supposedly listening to really just seemed like noise.

Can we explain this without just saying that it’s all a matter of taste? I think we now can, when we think, as we have been, about how sound and space interact.

Two kinds of sound: noise and music. The difference between them is that, while noise can only fill space—banish it—music can both fill and create space. Or, I should say, music can do either. Depending on the sensibility of the listener, that is.

Rock ’n’ roll was noise to my grandpa because for him, it could only crowd him in. Deny him space. It was and is music to me because, if I love it, it creates a beautiful bubble of peace within and around me. This is how the iPod works on the crowded, noisy train. And the fiddle in the coal mine, for that matter. Music takes a suffocating environment and creates breathing room. But if you can’t appreciate the particular music, it has the opposite effect: it’s noise to you, and banishes your personal space.

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 6

2008-12-21T15:18:00.014-05:00

ASIAN SOUNDSCAPES

I wake to an early morning tropical thunderstorm cleansing the sky of pent-up emotions. A roar and a rumble, a growl and a grumble, a clap and a crash, a blam-bang-boom!

Ah, rain in Singapore! It’s an event unto itself. These drops, they are large and powerful, no drippy drizzle, no fickle trickle – just an instant connection to God via the tangible forces of Nature.

The rain stops abruptly. Sounds dawn like light, with many-hued bugs and little-kingdom creatures chirping and croaking and buzzing and whizzing and whirring and fluttering and twittering ... signs of such intense life.

At the Hindu Temple, the pealing of brass bells – gleaming with tamarind rub, no doubt – wakes the gods from their slumber. A Poojari blows a conch. Gongs clang. Drums roll. Cymbals clink. As these rhythmic sounds of worship come to a hushed halt, the gods are invoked with Sanskrit mantras accompanied by tiny hand bells that tinkle thinly. The sounds are intoxicating, like incense upon the ear.

Later, a piece of driftwood cups my body like a soft wooden spoon at the open-air home of my Aussie friend “Dive”, and I'm sacrificed to Indonesian painters and photographs of vast Australian landscape. Parrots screech goodbye on trees laden heavy with mangoes like full, green breasts, and cicadas mate unceasingly in my ears.

It’s the weekend; I find myself upon a nearby island, where the meditative deep-breathing ocean inhales and exhales. It fringes the powdery white sands and kisses them with its frothy sea-saliva. The land within, braided thick and long as Rapunzel’s hair with tropical rainforest, is filled with magical, mysterious sounds.

The voodoo-chant of the Kecak dance makes my skin tremble like a cow's hide would, were it jabbed with a finger. Seventy men in black-and-white-check sarongs gather around a fire murmuring, “Chak-a-chak. A chak-a-chak-chak...” and the vocal symphony draws me into a trance.

Back in Singapore, it’s a goodbye cocktail at the Scarlet Hotel rooftop with Suzanne, who understands the crevices of my heart like none else can. We exchange confidences, her eloquence and expressiveness never failing to astonish me, and I leave with the sound of her dear voice echoing on my mind…

… until I am back again. Oh, February!

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 5

2008-12-20T17:35:00.013-05:00

“THE SOUND OF OM”

To most, Om is the hum of a yoga class as it congregates, the peace in the Yoga Teacher’s shuttered eyes. It’s a charismatic chant, a mystical mantra, a bottomless breath that emanates from the core of your being.

To me, Om is also the sound of the bluey-green Andaman Sea in Phuket expanding and exhaling – its very restiveness bringing rest to what seemed my troubles only a moment ago.

Om is also the rustle of fall leaves in Central Park when the wind pirouettes with them. Om is the silent hush of a tropical rainforest at McRitchie Reservoir in Singapore, contrasted only by the psychedelic screech of parrots. Om is the sound of the heater in my cold New York office, or the sound of the fog in San Francisco when it starts rolling in. Om is the contented purr of my wine cooler when it’s just been filled. Om is the sound in my inner ear when I’ve peeled away all the layers of sound and I’m not listening to anything.

In other words, Om is Omnipresent.

According to the Vedas, the oldest sacred texts of Hinduism, “Om” is a combination of three syllables: Aa. Au. Ma. “Aa” represents the state of being awake, “Ma” the state of deep sleep, and “Au” nestles snugly somewhere in-between the two that flank it like a spiritual sandwich. “Om” also represents Creation, Preservation and Dissolution. As well as Past, Present and Future.

And so the three sounds wafted in together like wispy feathers on the breath of the universe to blend in a chord of perfect harmony. So powerful was the accuracy of this sound, that the entire universe came to be.

The Upanishads (the Hindu Scriptures that teach the Vedanta) say that "Om" is “the original primordial creative sound”, the mother sound of the first word ever uttered by the human tongue. Which may also explain the similarity of the derivatives, “Mama”, “Maman”, “Amma”, “Ahm”, “Mëmë”, “Mére”, “Mãe”, “Madre”, when we call out to that sometimes endearing lady.

DIANE ON SPACE & SOUND

2008-12-18T21:41:00.004-05:00

THE DELICATE WALL

[An encounter with sound and all that it evoked, by Diane Sinnott]

It was probably a typical day at the ER at Cal Pacific. Except that I was in it. Lying in a curtained-off room waiting for the morphine to kick in. I had something that was making my head explode. Something I was hoping was nothing; an annoying foreign flu that would leave as quickly as it came.

As the pain drifted away and the morphine worked its magic I could hear the comings of goings of other patients on the other side of the curtain. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them.

My first neighbor was a regular and greeted with affection by a long line of doctors and nurses. Lou was an old black man accompanied by his wife of many years. I could tell they were holding hands by the tenderness in their voices. These two were old pros at this medical business and took the waiting in stride. Eventually his doctor arrived. Lou had a bad ticker and wasn’t having the best day. They chatted amicably as he listened to Lou’s heart. It sounded good but the doctor was going take a couple of tests, just in case.

The x-rays were ordered. And now we just waited the wait of a hundred years. Lou’s wife asked him for a song. His sweet old voice drifted over the curtain and poured over me like honey. Lou sang the blues in the way only people who have lived it can. I drifted off imagining him as a young man on stage with his beautiful wife dancing in the background. I heard his heart beating to the music. Steady and strong. Good news came when I awoke.

Today was not the day Lou’s heart would have its last beat. He wasn’t finished crooning to his wife yet. He’d be back here I knew, in the land of white coats, but I hoped it wouldn’t be for a while.

My next neighbor was Sara. She and her husband lived up near Eureka. They were visiting their daughter for a few days. I was groggy but heard in hushed tones, cervical cancer. The husband and daughter were fussing over her. Sara told them to go run some errands. They left and the doctor soon came in. There was a long silence as he read her chart. I surmised that Sara already had the surgery and the chemo. And whatever else they could throw at a problem that wasn’t going away. She was done with all that now. “On a scale of 1 to 10 how is your pain?” “Eight,” she said and sounded shaky. She had the mean doctor, all morning I heard him being curt with patients and rude to nurses. But he was nice to her. “I’ll call your doctor and we’ll get you comfortable dear.”

When he left, she broke down. Her sobs were long and deep. She must have been holding them in for a long time. I wanted to reach out to her but I respected the thin curtain. After a while she was quiet. By then the husband and daughter had returned and she was cheery. “Yes, I feel much better now.” She lied well. “Now tell me where you have been.” They told her about the endless search for a parking space. The pretty blocks they had traveled, the purse-size dogs they had seen, no detail was too small. The outing also included a trip to the drugstore. We got aisle-by-aisle coverage. I was a castaway on their story and eager to hear it all.

Eventually my test results came back. I had an annoying foreign flu that would leave as quickly as it came. Grateful, I bundled up the mess of me and quietly said goodbye to the fallen comrades I would never meet, Lou and Sara and the ones that would follow. I touched the hem of the delicate wall between us, a humble human blessing that wished them well.

LORRAINE ON SPACE & SOUND

2008-12-17T08:57:00.006-05:00

SOUND IN FILM – MY FILM.

It was a four-story house frozen in time, like Flannan Isle by Wilfrid Gibson, in which you imagine the residents had been just seconds ago. Everywhere you looked, there were still-lifes – an apricot with a bite taken out, a pipe filled with tobacco ready to smoke. And in the attic, the rag tag belongings of Dickensian waifs who slept head to toe like sardines in a can. And each space had its own sound. The tick of a grandfather clock in the drawing room. The drip of a tap in the kitchen. The creak on a tread as if someone had just walked up the stairs. At the sound of horses’ hooves on cobblestones, I looked out the window and, seeing modern day London, caught myself.

Yes, sound is important. In fact, it’s half of the movie experience.

The fact is, getting good sound during production can be tough. We battled on numerous occasions against planes, helicopters, sirens, church bells, the ubiquitous roaring motorbike – and on one occasion – with a Mexican Christian radio show that randomly appeared and just as randomly disappeared.

Listening through headphones, Gino would call for a pause in ‘action” and we’d all freeze in place, practically holding our breath, the actors their emotions, until the intrusion had passed. Then we would again go through my most favorite procedure in the world, “roll tape”… “we have speed”… “action!”

The curious thing is that you don’t notice good sound while watching a movie. You are more likely to notice it when it’s bad or completely missing. You might not be able to identify exactly what is lacking – could be the buzz of passengers on a bus or diners in a restaurant – but you’ll know how it feels. Empty.

Ambient sound creates dimension and adds depth, while the score enhances emotion. Sometimes it’s subtle like the heartbeat that underscores the entire Sixth Sense. Or not so subtle, like the herald of the shark in Jaws, or the screech in Psycho, which I remember from forty years ago.

In the scenes for which we did ADR, our characters are now more intimate, effectively reducing the physical and psychic space between the audience and big screen. Now they’re in a better position for you to like them or at least sympathize with them.

Thanks to our very talented sound guy, our film is becoming multi-dimensional. Next step is a full session with our composer. I can’t wait to hear the music make the film come alive.

[This piece is a contribution by Lorraine Flett, inspired by her Indie, “Mismo”. ]

ADAM K ON SPACE & SOUND

2008-12-15T18:14:00.005-05:00

THE POETICS OF SPACE

I have a fuzzy recollection of a summer school course I took as a college student, entitled, “Architecture As Archetype”. It was taught by a young visiting teacher named Jeff Orberdorfer. I have no idea where Jeff went off to after his “visitation”, but I do know that he grew up in a place called Levittown – one of the first post-war planned communities in America. He made it a point to tell us where he hailed from on the first day of class. Was this a matter of pride or pity (more about Levittown below) or simply part of the prelude to the course’s core subject matter: “Space”?

In some academic circles, as well as in the boardrooms of some new homebuilders, Levittown has an archetypical status of its own. It’s the master of all master-planned communities, and is often billed as the ideal American suburb. A series of similarly designed cost-engineered “spaces” repeated over and over, producing a checkerboard grid-like space as seen from the heavens. I believe Jeff used the term “rectilinear” to describe the full spatial effect. From Jeff’s humanistic point of view, Levittown’s architectural style was as “American as apple pie”, but without any “taste”, whatsoever. Thinking back on it all, I wonder if this lack of “aesthetic space” in Jeff’s Levittonian childhood was what compelled him to take up the study and teaching of Architecture? It certainly produced a critical frame of reference for him – and for all of his students.

One of the required readings in Jeff’s course was a book by Gaston Bachelard called, “The Poetics of Space”. Now, here’s where my memory really starts to fail. I can’t remember anything about the book that matched the alluring and quite frankly, brilliance of its title.

If not altogether empty, my recollection of Bachelard’s work is that of a dry, barren, pedagogical space. Perhaps something was lost in translation? French was Bachalard’s mother tongue. More likely though, I was simply a student at a loss – meaning the book was beyond my level of comprehension. Anyway, today his book on space is packed in a box that’s stored in the bowels of my garage. (A case of poetic justice?)

Enter Ro’s On Space & Sound – 2 “Soundscapes”. Here (for me) is the beginning of a book that’s worthy of the title, “The Poetics of Space”. Ro takes sound, memory and other stimuli, and creates a space where life’s richness unfolds, collides, dovetails and blends into a beautiful aesthetic. The pastiche is an ode to how space can be experienced, as well as how it can be thought about. As a result, I not only want to read more from Rohini the “sonic-flaneur”, but also want to re-read Bachelard’s book. If for no other reason than to possibly clear up some of the fuzziness that now exists in the space between by ears.

GUY ON SPACE & SOUND – 2

2008-12-12T14:57:00.011-05:00

THERE’S NO SOUND IN SPACE …

Sound is the captive animal of space. It will only consent to propagate when space is absent to at least some degree, and the less space there is, the more sound can multiply.

I say this as a kind of a scientist. Right? Sound does not propagate in a vacuum; it can’t, because a vacuum has no medium with which to transmit the vibrations that constitute sound. So the less of a vacuum a given region is, the more at ease sound will be, and the better it will propagate.

But actually, this is completely untrue. And discovering why it’s untrue helps us understand space even better, and what “space” means … because don’t we say, as I did in my earlier post, that sound actually fills space? That sound banishes space? That it crosses the lines dividing the senses by filling a visual void with aural matter?

Now, you could dismiss these musings as sophistry or mere semantics. “Space” in the scientific context doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the humanistic context. You’d be half-right; but this sophistry of mine is justified because it lets us look at space in a new way, a meaningful one.

Because just as the contemplation of sound and space lets us throw down the barriers between the senses, also it lets us see in a new way that the concept of “space” encompasses both emptiness and its opposite. Think about this statement:

The more compressed or filled a given space, the better sound can propagate within it.*

Not an entirely accurate statement, but accurate enough to show that “space” can actually mean anti-space. In two ways:

A compressed space is a small space … so an infinitely compressed space would actually not be space at all.
A filled space contains no emptiness (if it’s fully filled), and thus no space.

All this just leads me to believe that, when perceiving space in any context whatsoever, we actually aren’t perceiving either the enclosure or the enclosed, but rather the border between the two. A hovering sphere would be a space of fullness within the emptiness of its surroundings.

* A smaller space, or a space more dense with matter, transmits sound more effectively.

PARIT ON SPACE & SOUND

2008-12-12T08:53:00.007-05:00

"NIJO CASTLE"

Sensuous sussurations of scarcely sensed sound saturate this sublime space. She surveys the serenity and slips unbeknownst even unto herself, into the saga. And I am there too, sneaking into the mise-en-scène.

Silent, solemn, sombre it might be but with a looming sense that the Samurai's stealth will soon overcome the shifty Shogun, shattering the serenity to shards. She knows, suggests it but won't say it.

The picture is perfect and yet perched perilously. Precariously. Push one pixel out of place and perhaps the protagonist might be in peril.

What if the shoulder had not been squeezed?

Would the sepulchral silences have splintered?

[This piece is a contribution from Paritosh Joshi.]

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 4

2008-12-10T14:53:00.014-05:00

“NIJO CASTLE”

The Shinden-style structure stood serene, surrounded by walls of stone slab; it was silhouetted against a sooty sky, which was lit only by a sickle-shaped sliver of silver.

We stepped upon the stretch of slats with silken tread. But soft-footed though we were, a sound startled us when our soles sunk onto the strips. The sound was wispy, sibilant, like a soulful strain streaming from a flute.

Perhaps it sprung from the slightest slits between the slats? The more surreptitious our stalk, the more strident it seemed, shadowing our every step. Step: squeak. Step: squeak. Step-step: squeak-squeak. A sonnet by a spirited bird of song no doubt – the Nightingale.

So the sweet soprano sang to signal those who dwelt within – to warn them of a sly and stealthy Samurai, who came scheming to slay the Shogun with shining sword in hand.

The Shogun’s soldiers were stationed in strategic spots in the subsidiary halls, which surrounded the inner Shinden, or the sanctum – safe within which was the Sovereign. They stood stalwart but silent in these secret spaces, ready to stave off the shifty Samurai, seize him and strike him senseless when the songbird gave so much as the slightest sign.

Spellbound with this saga and the song of the floors swelling like a sea into my auditory senses, I’d stepped into the seventeenth century. So much so that when my sweetheart placed his hand upon my shoulder to give it a little squeeze, I sprung out of my skin with a start.

[This encounter with Sound in the Space of Nijo Castle in Kyoto, and the impact of its nightingale floors upon me has been described with figures of sound.]

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 3

2008-12-06T11:14:00.014-05:00

DO SOUNDS HAVE A COLOR, A TASTE OR A FEELING?

Does the anticipated sound of an alarm clock go off a little before the clock itself does? Does the sound of an espresso machine waft into your nostrils? Does a newspaper taste better when you hear the amplified sip of that coffee inside your own head?

Does the clank-clatter of crockery remind you of domesticity? Does the cooing of doves bring a feeling of drowsy afternoon peace?

Does the subdued sound of silverware conjure up images of an upscale restaurant - "Daniel", perhaps? Does the pop of a wine cork cover your taste buds with dried dark fruits and leather even before you take a sip? Does the sound of iced water being poured into a glass evoke the sound of a glug-glug, especially if you've had too much of that wine?

Does the drip-drip of a tap torture your sleep if you haven't drunk that water? Can the sound of a repetitive song in your delirious sleep be Blue? Can the pounding of your head the next morning be Orange?

Can the sound of an espresso machine then be the sound of a Messiah who hast come to deliver?

Guy is treading the area of synesthesia.

BEN ON SPACE & SOUND

2008-12-05T20:48:00.004-05:00

DEFINING "REAL" SOUND

When being briefed on the start of a job that requires sound design, I hear constant requests to "always keep in mind that it needs to sound REAL". Conceptually I get it, but always wonder what that statement means to others.....For something to sound "real".

Does "real" mean that the sound will take you back to a distant memory? Will it give you the expressions on the faces of the children playing in the park? Will the sound capture the moment, the feeling, and the space surrounding it?

Space and sound. I experiment with this a lot...I chase it like I am running in a hallway with no end. It's a question with no answer, to make sounds become real within space. Walk in your closet, close the door and speak or clap, open the door and do it again. Listen to the acoustics change, your footsteps sound different with the slightest opening or closing of the door. I try to achieve this in my work and it is impossible... To capture what one is feeling when one hears a sound...The sounds surround us, become a part of us within the space we are in. The two go hand-in-hand. One without the other is meaningless.

GUY ON SPACE & SOUND – 1

2008-12-05T10:44:00.008-05:00

SEEING WHAT WE HEAR

The contemplation of sound invites us to account for the subjugation of the Tiny and the Great.

Sound fills. Fills what? Space, but invisibly. Sound flattens. It can knock us off our feet, even when dulcet. Sound is being used in the Gulf of Aden this very day to bring pirates low, depressed, sick, ineffectual. And push them out of cargo ships’ spaces.

The contemplation of sound reminds us of the interconnectedness of the full five senses. The English word “space” comes from the Latin spatium, meaning room, area, distance, all visually perceived. Yet sound, in the realm of hearing, fills—removes—space that’s in the realm of sight.

There are sensors that allow scientists to see sound. And we all of us have sensors that allow us to feel sound’your gut can feel sound, as every go-goer who’s stood in front of a club speaker knows. From now on when we contemplate space, let’s contemplate it in all five sense realms.

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 2

2008-12-04T10:36:00.009-05:00

“SOUNDSCAPES”

The sky is an opaque black of mysterious quality. There are no sounds upon my ears but the delicate tinkle of coffee being stirred into thin-rimmed white China. Ah, a sound so evocative. Maybe it’s the memory of my caring mother stirring milk in a steel tumbler for me as a baby. Or maybe it’s the moment of solace I always resort to over an ornate tea service at The Raffles in Singapore, where space is my very own. Strange that each vignette, while having soothing qualities, is quite the opposite of the other – one is in a sheltered environment, the other, an independent one.

As I hear myself sip, my senses dawn like the sky, softly, slowly, through pink and gold… into the palest powdery blue.

An hour or two later, I step out into the city, and the sounds are suddenly more assertive, as if I accidentally flicked the wheel on my iPod.

A truck assaults my ears with a deafening honk... the sound of impotent control. The subway attendant yells at a meek ticket buyer through the speaker… the sound of oppressed power. Baffle gates beep-beep, open and slam-shut as metro cards mechanically slide through… the sounds of repetitive drudgery promising a fresh new day every day. Express trains chug-whoosh-thunder past, their speed never failing to thrill… the sound of your own heart beating.

On the train, a foursome of harmonious black voices makes music as the band moves through the cars… the sound of a concert that invited itself to you.

On the street, a revving car pounds rap into your skull… the sound of protest against marginalization turned full on so to be all-inclusive. Strains of a rather loud female Brooklyn accent fade in. They segue into the gruff intonations of a Bangladeshi fruit seller who says, “two dollars”. An ambulance wails to cabs and cars to make way… the sound of help that is helpless. The sibilance of Spanish melds into the hiss of meat at a hot dog cart… the sounds of all the world on one city street.

A pan-handler asks you to help him out, please… a sound that’s switched off almost as soon as it comes on.

Sounds layer themselves into your psyche, but there are so many such as this one that we learn to selectively deaden ourselves to. Then, we carry this auditory space we individually own – like a buffer, a winter coat, an outer layer of aura, even.

After the day’s auditory assault, I return to my meditative Mecca, my temple of Asian buddhas, my retreat of tealight serenity: to my own world of sound.

Or more likely, the lack of it.

RO ON SPACE & SOUND – 1

2008-12-03T09:14:00.008-05:00

“THE TOAST”

I have a favorite toast.

I’ll fill your glass quarter-ways from the brim and ask you to raise it. I’ll ask you to close your eyes; then, I’ll touch my glass to yours. Just when the resounding ring fades away, I’ll touch it again, yet again, and again. I’ll ask if you see a little stone village called “Saint Paul de Vince” hugging the hillside, and whether you hear distant church bells peal as evening birds flutter away into lavender skies.

Chances are, you will.

Then we’ll open our eyes and sip a blend of Grenache, Carignan and Cinsault, and swallow the breathtaking Manhattan citiscape, as our ears fill with the sounds of “Out of Nowhere” by Art Tatum. Touched with hints of honky-tonk, the keys on the piano will cascade like drops of water, each note chasing the other in a complex and coordinated dance of footwork.

We'll take another sip, and start a conversation about this:

How does sound define your space, create it, conjure it up, leave it?

How many pockets of sound does your space encounter on a given day?

And how do you deal with them?

RO ON EYESPACE – 2

2008-11-26T15:12:00.011-05:00

SPACE IN THANKSGIVING WINE GLASSES

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

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

GUY ON EYESPACE

2008-11-25T13:02:00.016-05:00

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.

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 2

2008-11-20T19:02:00.026-05:00

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

2008-11-20T11:01:00.011-05:00

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.

ADAM K ON EYESPACE

2008-11-18T12:07:00.009-05:00

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

2008-11-18T11:04:00.010-05:00

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?

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 1

2008-11-11T10:24:00.013-05:00

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

2008-11-11T10:23:00.013-05:00

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.