ERIC B ON SPACE & CITIES

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.]

RO ON HOMELESS SPACE

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.

RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 3

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.

ADAM K ON SPACE & SOUND

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.

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 2

THE SPACE OF ROMANCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADAM K ON SPACE & CITIES

A LONG WALK FOR A SHORT DRINK

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

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

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

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

GUY ON SPACE & CITIES

VERTICAL EXPRESSIONS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT?

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

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

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

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

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

RO ON SPACE & CITIES – 1

TWO CITIES. TWO DIFFERENT BRANDS OF SILENCE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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