West Rock, a trap rock cliff face dotted with Eastern Red Cedars, right out the door of my new apartment. It has become a sort of poetic lodestone for me.
Hello, friends!
Thanks for deciding to receive my newsletter. I miss you. I wish we were on a nice walk. On that note, I might as well say this idea, to have an email newsletter, that is, is really an attempt to reach out, to leave my relative hermitage, to share my life, in a hopefully earnest and genuine way (aka more substantively, or just differently than social media), with friends near and far. I’d welcome email correspondences (I really love email), so please, hit reply. (Or give me a ring: 240 727 8327) Or text. Or hit unsubscribe, if this proves unsavory (but maybe give me until the second one at least…finding one’s voice, etc etc.).
On the tentative format of the newsletter: I hope to send you, each new moon or so, some interesting readings, sights, and experiences I’ve come across, loosely oriented around reclaiming the commons. I’m calling it the Broken Fences Almanac for now as an awkward approach to this goal. An almanac is a handbook and a news source, historical and speculative. Typically hyper-local, and distinctly connected to being rooted to the land, reexamining the format in the hyper-privatized, rootless space most of us now inhabit is an attempt to challenge my (our?) assumptions about private property and collectivization– to see the world’s broken fences, places where the fiction of private property has been allowed to crumble, and look forward to a future with no fences at all.
The title page of Daniel George’s 1778 almanac featured a map of the solar system. A friendly reminder that the stars are our calendar. From “A Divinity for All Persuasions,” a great history of the American almanac. PDF found here.
The great thing about almanacs, too, is that they aren’t all charts and boring weather predictions, they also traditionally share news, politics, and things of a spiritual or mythic nature. So I hope this newsletter will be an ongoing compilation of cool projects, personal observations and experiences which offer insight into labor, agency, sharing, ecological sensitivity, and new ways of living, but without self-serious boringness. Is it time for a new Almanac? a Whole Earth Catalog for the end of the world? An attempt to predict the climate of our dangerous future Earth? I won’t get that far, but hopefully this can be a jumping-off point, for myself and whoever else is here, in reclaiming the space around us.
SOME LIFE UPDATES
I won’t do this every time, but since I’m fairly horrid at communication, and the only people subscribed to this are probably people who for some absurd reason want to know what I am up to…here’s a brief “State of My Life”:
I live in New Haven, Connecticut, in a wonderful apartment that I share with my beautiful partner, Merrell. (she’s in school at Harvard GSD for Landscape Architecture, and so splits time here and Boston.) We moved this past November. We go on walks in the vast tracts of West Rock State Park and Edgewood Park, both of which our new home borders. I am exactly halfway through my Masters in Architecture at YSoA. I’m trying to learn Italian, as I’ll hopefully be studying for several weeks in Rome this summer. I am also trying to learn to sing, from the inimitable Adam Leatherman, which is the most difficult and embarrassing thing I’ve done in a long time (I am horrendous). I play banjo occasionally, and wish I would read more. I think that’s about it!
My new home, from the levee around the yard's perimeter. Merrell and I are on the top floor
Oh, I also haven’t drank in more than three months. Not making a big TO DO about it, but I’ve felt much better, body and mind both, since quitting. I hope that in concert with this new mode of living, I can improve my relationships with friends, namely to be in better contact and be a more open and hospitable person. I’ve been a bit of a hermit the last few years, really. Not that blanket apologies do any good, but I am sorry to you for being out of touch.
Now, onto the actual newsletter!
I won’t do this every time, but since I’m fairly horrid at communication, and the only people subscribed to this are probably people who for some absurd reason want to know what I am up to…here’s a brief “State of My Life”:
I live in New Haven, Connecticut, in a wonderful apartment that I share with my beautiful partner, Merrell. (she’s in school at Harvard GSD for Landscape Architecture, and so splits time here and Boston.) We moved this past November. We go on walks in the vast tracts of West Rock State Park and Edgewood Park, both of which our new home borders. I am exactly halfway through my Masters in Architecture at YSoA. I’m trying to learn Italian, as I’ll hopefully be studying for several weeks in Rome this summer. I am also trying to learn to sing, from the inimitable Adam Leatherman, which is the most difficult and embarrassing thing I’ve done in a long time (I am horrendous). I play banjo occasionally, and wish I would read more. I think that’s about it!
My new home, from the levee around the yard's perimeter. Merrell and I are on the top floor
Oh, I also haven’t drank in more than three months. Not making a big TO DO about it, but I’ve felt much better, body and mind both, since quitting. I hope that in concert with this new mode of living, I can improve my relationships with friends, namely to be in better contact and be a more open and hospitable person. I’ve been a bit of a hermit the last few years, really. Not that blanket apologies do any good, but I am sorry to you for being out of touch.
Now, onto the actual newsletter!
A RECOMMENDED ENCOUNTER: STEAM THERAPY
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This week, I stopped in Rite Aid to buy some Emergen-C (an occasional guilty pleasure). I was lucky enough to arrive just after the COVID at-home tests were restocked, and spurred by the frenzied behavior of my fellow shoppers, I bought several. Later that night, post swab and rapid test, I watched as the indicator lines slowly took form. One, on mine— negative. Mio caro Merrell, though, who had felt a bit off and thus precipitated the testing, had two— COVID positive. As such, we’ve been in the strange arrangement of distancing ourselves not only from the rest of the world, but also from each other. And I’ve been thrown into obsessing over sick prevention / curative methods for the both of us. Lots of vitamins, fresh fruit, many cups of tea, neurotic hydration…
Healthy Merrell <3
All to say, I was in a health-conscious, vitamin-crazed, sick-paranoia fog as I stood above a pot of boiling water on the stove, steam curling into my face as I removed the last hard-boiled egg for lunch. I breathed deep, and in doing so, vaguely remembered a wikihow-style watercolor sketch of a person standing with a towel over a steaming bowl. With a sense of purpose, I strode to the bathroom for a towel.
Let me tell you! STEAM THERAPY. It was wonderful. And so it holds the honored position as my inaugural “Recommended Encounter.” It opened up my sinus passages like nothing else. The heat would come in waves, bordering on unbearable, but still enjoyable, at its hottest, to a milder radiating current, with occasional jets of cool air from the world outside the towel tent. One can modulate the temperature in this way, allowing more cool air in. You couldn’t wish for a more intimate, personal sauna experience. Vitamins be damned, plain water wins again for its curative miracles. The Power of the Steam Should Not Be Underestimated.
This week, I stopped in Rite Aid to buy some Emergen-C (an occasional guilty pleasure). I was lucky enough to arrive just after the COVID at-home tests were restocked, and spurred by the frenzied behavior of my fellow shoppers, I bought several. Later that night, post swab and rapid test, I watched as the indicator lines slowly took form. One, on mine— negative. Mio caro Merrell, though, who had felt a bit off and thus precipitated the testing, had two— COVID positive. As such, we’ve been in the strange arrangement of distancing ourselves not only from the rest of the world, but also from each other. And I’ve been thrown into obsessing over sick prevention / curative methods for the both of us. Lots of vitamins, fresh fruit, many cups of tea, neurotic hydration…
Healthy Merrell <3
All to say, I was in a health-conscious, vitamin-crazed, sick-paranoia fog as I stood above a pot of boiling water on the stove, steam curling into my face as I removed the last hard-boiled egg for lunch. I breathed deep, and in doing so, vaguely remembered a wikihow-style watercolor sketch of a person standing with a towel over a steaming bowl. With a sense of purpose, I strode to the bathroom for a towel.
Let me tell you! STEAM THERAPY. It was wonderful. And so it holds the honored position as my inaugural “Recommended Encounter.” It opened up my sinus passages like nothing else. The heat would come in waves, bordering on unbearable, but still enjoyable, at its hottest, to a milder radiating current, with occasional jets of cool air from the world outside the towel tent. One can modulate the temperature in this way, allowing more cool air in. You couldn’t wish for a more intimate, personal sauna experience. Vitamins be damned, plain water wins again for its curative miracles. The Power of the Steam Should Not Be Underestimated.
A PROJECT OF NOTE: GRAMSCI MONUMENT
As an architect-in-the-making, I am interested in how we define and redefine our built environment. As such, in each issue of Broken Fences, I plan to share one spatial project (building, landscape, occupation, event, artwork etc) which challenges our norms of private property and individualism in our constructed space. This week, I'd like to muse on the Gramsci Monument by Thomas Hirschhorn. (also, Thanks Josh for letting me borrow your book!) This art project, commissioned by DIA in 2013, was a 77-day-long temporary public space constructed by the artist and a locally-hired construction team in the Forest Houses, a public housing estate in the Bronx. There's a lot to be examined with this project, many things to criticize (outsider with ‘total plan’ imposed upon this community) and things to celebrate (the significant job creation, though temporary, brought to the area is just one).
My core interest in this project, though, comes from its ability to create a thriving public space through programming. So often, programming suffers in the name of totalizing designs and investment in physical infrastructure. In this project, the temporary structures are in a way the bare minimum intervention to create the intended result. A piece of printer paper on the wall, taped up with packing tape, identifies the project's newspaper, workshop space, and bar. Each space is thus created not by the architecture, but by the presence of paid staff and regular events offered free to the public. I've been thinking about this a lot for my own work, especially for my studio course this semester exploring vacant lots in NYC.
photos from Urban Omnibus
A MOMENT IN THE WOODS
I went on a walk up West Rock yesterday. It was raining the whole time, and cold. But I love the woods perhaps the most in such types of weather, the feeling of cold quickly fades and one’s reality is mercifully shrunk by the shroud of fog, and the steady drone of the water. And no one else is usually around, as was the case this day. The dead leaves are pelted into an aromatic; a woody, musty, comforting, and wholly real smell. It has a name: petrichor. We encountered lots of ice on exposed rock, melting but still solid. On more than a few, air bubbles and rivulets of water moved under the glassy surface, eternally, calmingly. Later, I saw the red crown of a woodpecker in an explosion of branches against the gray sky.
GEOLOGIC VISIONS: JOSEPH YOAKUM AT MOMA
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Joseph E. Yoakum. The Open Gate to the West in Rockey Mtn Range near Pueblo Colorado
I won't say anything other than that this show was full of moving, beautiful, truly amazing visions of real landscapes by a well-traveled outsider artist. The show is up at MoMA until March 19th, I highly recommend it. And the digital photos do not do it justice.
Joseph E. Yoakum. The Open Gate to the West in Rockey Mtn Range near Pueblo Colorado
I won't say anything other than that this show was full of moving, beautiful, truly amazing visions of real landscapes by a well-traveled outsider artist. The show is up at MoMA until March 19th, I highly recommend it. And the digital photos do not do it justice.
Photos from MoMA
Reminded me a bit of Alexander Von Humbolt's geologic and ecological studies of mountains from his "Tableau Physique" (1807)
SOME PHOTOS FROM RECENT WALKS
Manhattan, NY
Manhattan, NY
New Haven, CT
Cambridge, MA
Manhattan, NY
New Haven, CT