I'm going to be working not through a streamlined blogging apparatus, but, instead, I'll be brute forcing my way through using css. I’m doing this for, as of now, two distinct reasons. The first (a two-parter) being that I want the relative freedom that this method allows. I’ll be able to tailor make every single blog, every title; every mark will be exactly as I want it to be. Also, I just don’t feel like starting a wordpress account. The second reason, and the more theoretically driven one, at that, is that I want there to be more than a little effort required in constructing these posts. Instead of simply writing something I’ll have to first construct the space it will sit upon. I want to make clear that this is an interest in the practice of striving and not labor. I’d be happy to do away with the labor side of things; it’s the brute effort that is curious.
I have an inkling that I'll feel, more often than not, that I need to explain (or question) myself. In these instances I'll, from within the blogging apparatus, talk to myself.
The following are links to those isntances.
[A Small Disclaimer]
[Slight Concerns]
[Blogging]
[What Land am I Cutting?]
Fences are at the forefront of this disaster, and as such I think that I'll be returning to them often. I've never been able to climb fences very well. I find myself scurrying under them or peeking through them.
The following are links to those isntances of fence discussion.
There's something nice about the simplicity of a circle split down the middle. I like the play between transparent split and opaque circle. Again, though, somewhat too abstract. It is too easy for a reader/viewer/(customer?) to get lost--in my push towards abstraction I've ended up with something that means everything and nothing; though, I'd say that it leans towards nothing.
I'd like to mention that there's something alltogether lovely about the feel of compressed charcoal on paper; it has a satisfying cling as I move it around, and the residue it leaves has a kind of memorial-esque presence on my carpet. It reminds me that I've worked--something that's sometimes easy to forget.
"Caution! Do not expose your life to the elements. It's not worth it!"
The number of yearly deaths during border crossings has doubled since 1995, and it shows no signs of slowing.
This fence runs right into the Pacific, and the pacific drinks it up. People, from either side, are able to scoot around the end of the fence and frolic on the other side. When I think of fences I don't often see them end; they are, at their most potent, something like a mobius strip--a one sided object with everyone trapped inside.
It might, though, be more than ufair to philosophize thus; these fences are built by us for them, and it is only at my most idealistic that I feel--when I'm really working towards it--that I feel fenced in. From my side they are easy to ignore. That willful ignorance is something worth moving against.
As of the second week of this year, 2009, there has been more than 580 miles of border fence erected on the US Mexico border. This fence stretches across both wilderness and developed (city) land. It has been built in an attempt to halt illegal border crossings. Results are sketchy at best—people do have access to ladders and shovels, and the fence, of course, can be circumnavigated. In September of 2006 the Secure Fence act of 2006 was passed in both the House and the Senate. It calls for 700 more miles of fencing to be built across cities and desert as well as the installation of more lights, vehicle barriers and checkpoints. It is the conflation of already built fence (that splits the borderland and destroys those border communities and land) and the willingness to build more fences and destroy communities in a futile attempt to feel some sense of security that is the disaster.
I'm moving more towards action with this one; it is more like a screenshot from a film. The fence at night (a night when all cows are black?) as something like a helicopter with its search light passes over. I like this scene quite a bit; it holds a nice mix of things. The fence blacked out, perhaps not even their amidst the night, motions towards an opaque borderland, fenceless and muddled. And the triangle of the light with the fence in full prominence makes clear that with fence in place the borderland is wholly transparent--fixed. That is the real disaster that's going on. A making, a violent push towards transparency. I feel done with this vignetting, or at least my airing of them.
Anastasian Wall in Turkey
Antonine Wall in Scotland, United Kingdom
Aurelian Walls of Rome
Ávila Walls, Spain
Barcelona Walls, Spain
Cairo great wall, Egypt
Cheolli Jangseong, North Korea and China
Chester city walls in England, United Kingdom
The Great Wall of China, China
Walls of Constantinople in Turkey, including the Theodosian Walls
Erdene Zuu monastery wall in Mongolia
Flodden wall, in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Roman limes in Upper Germania, Lower Germania and Rhaetia, Germany
Great Wall of Gorgan in Iran
Hadrian's Wall on the England-Scotland border
Walls of Jericho
Jerusalem's Old City walls
Walls of Kumbhalgarh in Rajasthan, India
Kremlin Wall in Moscow, Russia
London Wall in England, United Kingdom
Roman Walls of Lugo, Spain
Arabic Walls of Niebla, Spain
Intramuros Walls, Manila, Philippines
Paczków defensive wall, Poland
Long Walls linking the port of Piraeus to Athens, Greece
Serpent's Wall, the ancient walls in Ukraine
Servian Wall, in Rome
Silesia Walls, Poland
Trajan's Wall, in Dobruja, Romania
Visby Ringwall, Gotland, Sweden
Western Wall in Jerusalem
City Wall of Xi'an in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China
York city walls in England, United Kingdom
Offa's Dyke between England and Wales, United Kingdom
Wansdyke, in western England, United Kingdom
Wat's Dyke, between England and Wales
Atlantic Wall in France
Basel City Walls in Basel, Switzerland
Belfast Peace Lines in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Berlin Wall in Germany
Border Wall (Western Sahara)
Communards' Wall in the Père Lachaise cemetery, in Paris, France
Danevirke, Denmark
Democracy Wall, in Beijing (1978-1979)
Sections of the Israeli West Bank barrier, West Bank
Lima City Walls in Lima, Peru
Korean wall (alleged by DPRK), Korean Demilitarized Zone
Lennon Wall in Prague
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, often called the Wall
Via Anelli Wall in Padua, Italy
US-Mexico Border
We are a world filled with walls. When I was a little boy the differences between political and geographic maps were explained. They said that the lines on political maps were imaginary--not all of them are.
This short video is pretty troubling--mainly because those people running are real people. It's something I have to remind myself whenever I watch a video or see a picture. I wonder if the people making comments (some of which I'll post) think of those people as people. I also have to remind myself that the people making comments are real people, too. It's decidedly easier to think of everyone as fake.
"ALERT: The US-MEXICO borders are very sensitive area, it should be stood by the US troops like most countries & USA must create a DMZ!!! otherwise the USA will be falling OFF to the Ocean. (be invaded)
MEXICO would become the Most Base of Terrorist-Gangs Smugglers Country in the World? including Illegal Aliens-Crossing, Sneaking into the USA. (Millions# illegals inside the USA already) Time is Running Out.
MEXICO is Number 1 Crime & Terror in the USA."
"The best way to stop the inflow of mexicans and other illegal aliens is by stopping the attractive aid they receive once they have entered the united states. Believe it or not, a mexican can hop the border, come to any county human services department and immediately receive cash, food and medical assistance. All they need to provide is an address and a name. Please treat all illegal immigrants poorly and show? them they are not wanted in this country! Save the U.S.A. !!!"
"One? word: SNIPER."
"Report & Deport illegal immigrants'--- National I.C.E Number: (866) 347-2423 PASS THIS INFO ON TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW Use the number below to get your local Detention and Removal Immigration office? number. National Federal information #: (800) 333-4636
REPORT AND DEPORT"
"According to the latest study by CA for Population Stabilization (CAPS)
There are now between 20 and 40 MILLION illegals living in the U.S. Then multiply this by 5-8, Then now u got 5-8 of this becoming LEGAL!!! 12? US gets killed everyday,13 US killed every day for DUI by illegal, 8 kids die everyday by illegal rapist.12 U.S gets killed everyday,13 US killed everyday for DUI by illegal, 8 kids die everyday by illegal rapist. They are very nice people, They only kill 3000 +more US
each year."
"The border must be secured against all hazards."
"youre reffering to human? beings as hazzards? I lived in latin america and the poverty is mind blowing they are just looking for a better life im sure if you were put in the same conditions you would do the same."
"Hazards include narco-traffickers, terrorists, gun runners, child sex slave traders, diseases carried by both people and live stock, criminals who flee the U.S., and even wild fires that are often started near the border by migrant camp fires. If I was in their place, I'd change my country's leadership... at all cost"
I've been posting a lot of youtube videos recently, but there is something curious about them. They really tread the line (the borderland) between what feels real and what feels fake. There is an affective quality in some of these--they really tug at your heart strings. And that kind of tug, that kind that slowly teases out empathy makes something like this feel more real than what I might experience, or might have experienced while living in Texas. I'm pretty curious about when exactly there is that moment of recognition (recognition of another person as a person just like me).
I don't understand a lick of spanish. Well I know la frontera means borderlands. That distinct lack of understanding, I believe, plays into those feelings as well.
We--my mother, older brother, and I--had just come back from the grocery store, and Mom had bought Pat and I little plastic squirt guns. Mine was translucent orange and his was translucent green (that green one, he has since reminded me and I have since remembered lasted until we were done with Alaska). They were cheap, little things, but they shot well enough, and we were having a ball running around spraying one another. Pat was down on the lawn and I was up above him on the deck; tactical fellow that I was, I hid behind the railing for maximum cover and shot at him through a knothole in the post. There I was, gun barrel through a board, whooping it up, when he must have got a damn good shot on me and startled me good. Well, I jumped back and cracked the translucent orange barrel of my translucent orange pistol right in half. It hung there; still connected by a rubber tube, limp (I'm not sure I appreciate the Freudian undertones. The cigar is just a cigar!) and sad.
I was all torn up like you wouldn’t believe. Not, though, because I couldn't play with the gun anymore, but because Mom had gone out of her way to do something nice for me and not thirty minutes later I've gone and ruined it. I felt like a total jackass, and there was in that accident the realization that Mom wasn't just a caretaker or just a parent but a person, something just like me. She had given me something (and this was a giving that felt different from Christmas or birthdays) not because of any obligation but just because, and I had spoiled it. And for perhaps the first time I can recall I realized that there are real people aside from me, other selves, and that they had the same capacity for whatever that I do. I think back to that day fairly often, much more so than any other bit from before, and every time that I do I feel just awful—a complete ass. At the same time, though, there is a sort of joy in that spark of recognition, a kind of human warmth that is more than welcome.
There is amidst Texas border towns a growing resentment towards possibility of a border fence. In Texas, unlike other border states, the border has always been defined--the geographic and political maps blend along the Rio Grande. These are towns that mix feely with their counterparts in Mexico, and if the wall is built it would be a "wall of shame," and is that element of shame that is present all along those parts fenced and those facing the possibility of fencing. There is a growing fight amidst the property owners along the border--those that make the border their how, in some cases an anscestral home,a and they are refusing to allow government surveyors onto their land. There is a long history of back and forth along the Rio Grande, which offers something of a natural mixing pot, and this back and forth is bring brought to a standstill. At the same time, though, as the spector of the fence looms people are looking across the border more intently than they have in a long time.
I worry somewhat about the solidity of my figure. It is inherently doubled as both the specter and the physical fence, and I think that it works in that it readily accepts mythologizing—perhaps I need to delve more intently into myth making; as I bolster the figure with its natural trappings it might appear more steady. I do, though like how it functions in the space of the blog; it is something that forms the gaps that Blanchot was writing of a “fissure which would be constitutive of the self.”
I have to take it further--both with Macnab and the abstraction. Looking at the play between one two and three I wonder if this logo evokes the destruction wraught by the fence. The triangle acts as symbol for the kind of destructive transparence brought on by the fence. It breaks the balance of a borderland.
I wonder, though, does this look too much like the anarchy symbol? Is it too abstract?
I'm beginning to feel something I hadn't expected--a sense of community with other people on the internet. There are many sites for and against the border wall, and two that I've found have wonderfully paired names. [notexasborderwall.com] and [texasborderfence.com]. Is this disaster unique in that some see it is a triumph--I don't think so. It almost expands its possibility that such divergant views can begin to mythologize a single event.
This photo comes from the former, but as it displays both a fence and lack thereof I think it works nicely.
I was in Texas for near fifteen years. I have never been closer to the border than a slight trip to San Antonio. I'm neither ashamed nor proud of this fact. I just felt that I should share it. Well, maybe I feel a little bit like a phony. Everything I know about the border I've read in books--good books, but still. The only borders I know are those internal ones; the borders and fences and fissures that have been that perhaps I have constructed through my body, and so that when I slip into thoughts about the US-Mexico border I think of those divisions within that I'd rather be made apparent with the sloping Rio Grande than a fence of concrete and steel. Still, I feel like a jerk when I write and when I read, and I recognize people as people.
I never told my mom--at least I don't think I did. I wonder if she'd remember. I think there's something important about my never telling her. My recognizing her and never letting her know. I hope that I acted differently. Wouldn't it have been grand if there was a shift, night and day, after I broke that gun? Who knows anymore.
I’m sick for the first time since I was a senior in high school. Vomit, fever, chills, aches and pains, the whole shebang. I haven’t eaten in some two days, and for the past I don’t know how many hours I felt like I was going insane. I didn’t know whether I was asleep or awake; I couldn’t figure out what was going on, something with the cops and super heroes and early 19th century naval battles; I don’t know who’s winning. And I can’t tell left from right; my pillows are the
greatest confusions I’ve ever encountered. Then, in the middle of things, I say to myself that this must be what it’s like to go insane, I’d rather not. A curious moment of clarity. Is it worth it, I wonder, pulling myself out of the moment like that. I can’t help it, though. I can’t help but disengage when things are most interesting. I’m a horrible romantic, but I so do love the romance of it all.
Here's a short clip showing some prep work for a 15ft wall they're building off a once dedicated zone where American's and Mexicans could mix freely. The failure of government sanctioned mixing? A testament to the lengths people will go for separation?
Wind tugging at my sleeve
feet sinking into the sand
I stand at the edge where earth touches ocean
where the two overlap
a gentle coming together
at other times and places a violent clash.
Across the border in Mexico
stark silhouette of houses cutted by waves,
cliffs crumbling into the sea,
silver waves marbled with spume
gashing a hole under the border fence.
Miro el mar atacar
la cerca en Border Field Park
con sus buchones de agua,
an Easter Sunday Resurrection
of the brown blood in my veins.
Oigo el llorido del mar, el respiro del aire,
my heart surges to the beat of the sea.
In the gray haze of the sun
the gulls' shrill cry of hunger,
the tangy smell of the sea seeping into me.
I walk through the hole in the fence
to the other side.
Under my fingers I feel the gritty wire
rusted by 139 years
of teh salty breath of the sea.
Beneath the iron sky
Mexican children kick thier soccer ball across,
run after it, entering the U.S.
I press my hand to the steel curtain--
chain link fence crowned with rolled barbed wire--
rippling from the sea where Tijuana touches San Diego
unrolling over mountains
and plains
and deserts
this "Tortilla Curtain" turning into el rio Grande
flowing down to the flatlands
of the Magic Valley of South Texas
its mouth emptying into the Gulf.
1,950 mile-long open wound
dividing a pueblo, a culture,
running down the length of my body,
staking fence rods in my flesh,
splits me splits me
me raja me raja
This is my home
this thin edge of
barbwire
But the skin of the earth is seamless.
The sea cannot be fenced,
el mar does not stop at borders.
To show the white man what she thought of his
arrogance,
Yemaya blew that wire fence down.
This land was Mexican once,
was Indian always
and is.
And will be again.
Yo soy un puente tendido
del mundo gabacho al del mojado,
lo pasado me estira pa' 'tras
y lo presente pa' 'delante,
Que la Virgen de Guadalupe me cuide
Ay ay ay, soy mexicana de este lado.
I haven’t blogged in a long time. I had started up initially in the 9th grade. It was a pathetic little thing, but! but I tore that one down—I really tore it down; it took me a while because I forgot the password and whatnot, and it had stayed online after I deleted it (I had to eventually write over it with this[actually, I think this one is gone, too! A disaster in the making.])—and I made a new blog “Life’s a Peach.” That one I also tore down, but saved as a word document. Anyway, it’s been a long time since I blogged. It feels different now, more private, more insular. My old blog stole all my good talking points, I would lay down any little thing I thought, and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise when I tried to talk to my friends. They knew it all already. This time around, though, it feels separate—apart from the normal course of my life. Not necessarily ghettoized, because it has a vibrancy all its own, and it could be a part of the normal course of things, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t mention my disaster or my primal scene or my figure, and my chatting has grown inconsequential. The best I have to offer is saved (not necessarily for the blog) for private moments with myself. Those intrabodily borders I mentioned a few posts ago are vaulted in these moments.
From this [New York Times article] "It’s hard to see each other, to touch," said Manuel Meza, an American citizen sharing coffee and lunch through the fence with his wife, who was deported and now drives three hours for regular visits at the fence. "It’s strange, but our love is stronger than the fence..." "It’s harmful to the kind of family culture we have at the border,” said Representative Bob Filner, Democrat of California, who has urged the department not to build in the park. "We have a friendly country at the border. We have family ties across the border. It is one place, certainly in San Diego, where we talk about friendship at the border..." "Naco, Ariz., no longer plays an annual volleyball game using the fence as a net because the ragged wire one has been replaced by a taller barrier of solid plates. Residents of Jacumba, Calif., and Jacume, Mexico, who once freely crossed back and forth, complain that reinforced fencing has severed generation-long ties..." The fence acts to break apart those communities that have been built up straddling the border, and now it frames their feelings that flow back and forth, decidedly hindered.
The first is that I worry, a lot, about sprawl. Sprawl, as a child of the Houston suburbs, has always been a point of contention with me. There's something oh so comforting about it (in both the abstract and the physical), but I always worry. I just don't know how focused I should be with this experiment. At the beginning, with the CATTt in place it seemed liked like a tightly knit affair, and I tried my damndest to keep things in check, both in my blogging and my thinking. As I've progressed, though, sprawl has slipped in to both. It is important to note that sprawl is different from tangent, but perhaps tangent seeds sprawl. The most troubling bit of sprawl isn't the influx of other thinkers, that has been kept in moderation the CATTt, but I find myself pulling back from and expanding my disaster. It's begun to encompass or at least color other studies that I've got going on, and this is, at least partly my fault. I had been interested in borderlands before the experiment had begun, and now that I've made them the focus of a particular set of study they're taking over. But also, my other means of looking at them are encroaching on the Blanchot Biel approach. I've got sprawl sprawling on sprawl. I think, though, that through a more focused blogging effort, and perhaps some last minute blog shaping I can get the sprawl made presentable.
Also, there is something curious at play within the disaster. Sprawl, though near universally decried, has a way of conveniently forgetting borders. Towns slip into other towns, states into states, and in the this case, countries into countries. And what happens when the walls attempt to hold in sprawl? People (not simply) look past them, push against them. Amidst the sprawl it becomes impossible to tell which direction north is.
I once helped build a fence. Out donkey kept wandering off of the property. The last time she escaped a kindly old lady found her, named her Sweetie Pie, and fed her cake. This had to stop. It turned out that she was wandering out through the dry creek that runs through the land; the fence had been washed away in the last wet season. There's something theraputic about building a fence; it's a highly structured process. Pound the posts, stretch the wire, wrap and tie off. We had to hang a swinging gate so that debris and not donkey could get through. It went well, fairly well with few injuries. I got scraped up from the barbs and my father accidentily pounded his head with the
post pounder (pictured below). I wonder what the difference would be if we constructed a simple barbed wire fence along the border; people can easily cross that fence, but it means something, still.
An interesting look from an outside eye (neither American nor Mexican) at the border by Aljazeera.net.
"A border of more than 3,000 kilometres separates the US from Mexico - but it is defined not only by physical barriers made of concrete and steel but by an immigration policy which is failing to address the issues behind illegal migration.
Despite the US spending billions of dollars on border enforcement, the lure of work sees illegal migrants enter the country at a rate of 850,000 a year.
A series of walls along the Mexican border were designed to stem this flow but based on current estimates it has failed.
Instead, the walls have re-routed human traffic into remote desert areas where people risk their lives in deadly conditions attempting to enter the US."
"These are human beings; we're dealing with intelligent, feeling, sentient beings."
Fencing always cuts a gash upon land that is shared. It is a filled (“and before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a… border culture”), filled with blood and shame, the fencer mender’s, the fence builder’s, the post hold digger’s shame, but maybe the shame of the enclosed, that enclosed
being, perhaps always on either side—though the builder seems stuck to one—the blood of both, the land of both, the shame of one? Are my words wire and posts? Are they wrought through my body (as I intend); palimpsestic scrawls on my skin. What lies on either side of this internet geography?
There's something almost soothing about barbed wire. I've been around it, tangentially and sporadically, for as long as I can remember. It was always a presence at my grandpa's house and the family cabin. I've ripped many a pair of pants on the stuff, but the sneaky thing about barbed wire, in the traditional configuration, is that it's more than a little easy to slip through it. Barbed wire, as a fencing material, as far as humans are concerned, is little more than symbolic.
I wonder if the real issue with the border fence is that it makes transparent what should remain opaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaque.
Becoming opaque is a becoming known unknown (unlike repression which is a unknown known). "The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such... Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics... It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence." Opacities are fluid transparencies are fixed.
I wonder, though, at the literal opaque and the possibilities for such on the blog. I have a few methods I'd like to test out at the textual level.
I can make a sentence only appear to disappear; when you highlight it the letters are present underneath.
I can make a sentence full disappear by chaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueo paqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaqueopaque.
This, though, is unsatisfying in that the actual text that I wrote is doubly covered once in the black bar and once in with letters.
It is easier in a printed document as I can play the part of the government man and use my big black marker to blot out words. (So satisfying.) I need to experiment more.
Perhaps I could opaque opaqu eopaqu eo p queopaqueo queopa qu eopaqu e opaq ue opaq queopa. It shouldn't be a guessing game, though.
I wonder if I could disable the highlight function; that would be something at least, but a body could still look into the code and get things that away. Hrmm. The internet is frustratingly transparent, or as my brother would most likely say, opaque (as a media it more than makes its presence felt).
My first push towards actualizing a brand. It seemed best to begin by working with small vignettes of my disaster. I specifically focused on the figure--the fence.
There is something wonderfully iconic about the fence melting away as it moves towards the sea. It has an imposing quality, but I think that it's too tempered in a sense by the ocean. It resolves itself too easily to function as a starting point for branding this disaster (as disaster). I have to push myself towards restraint. Always the optimist, I tend to forget about the fence as fence and focus on the possibilities of the borderland as such.
With the third vignette, the play between light and night on the fence, I want to push towards abstraction. Moving alongside Macnab, I have to keep in mind that a brand can't be too detailed. Too much detail seems to lend a fixity to something that should opperate as a universal signifier.
I have been working for a while on my brand using images only, and I think that was a mistake. Originally my process was too literal, too keyed into my specific figure to the extent that I was making attempts at recreating the figure in miniature--in a bite sized chunk. The brand, though, should evoke the disaster and all that contained within--not be it. Right? So my prototypes (sketches) were overly complicated dioramas. At a glance they didn't evoke anything.
I think, though, that these dioramas, miniature disasters, were ultimately useful. As I created them (and they were more or less all drawn (I have this lovely compressed charcoal that's a joy to draw with), so I'll be scanning them into the blog to show everyone on wednesday) things began to become more and more abstract, and these abstractions flowed nicely into what Macnab gets at through number and shape.
I'm at the moment focused most intently on the play between one two and three. I want to approach three slightly differently than Macnab does, though. She mentions that "three brings solution to the conflict of division by presenting a third point of balance," and I wonder if I might not subvert that move towards balance as presenting it as something vapid and transparent. I want a logo with tension in it. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but I wonder if I could present something with the stickiness of a car crash but without the brutality. One (opaque (soft) circle) and two (horizontal lines) and three (transparent triangle) can be knotted up but ready to fly off again. I'll have to be sure to ground this properly amidst my blog.
I realized that I never followed through on my first sentence. I my drive towards novelty (in this whole project, but towards images specifically) I almost forgot how much I love text. It's easy to forget that text, too, can be image. My stumbling block towards the inclusion of imagetext in my brand is that I still have no clue what to call/name my disaster. I'll have to play around with the possibilities.
Anyway, restraint, in some regards, has become a central theme of my project, and as far as my brand is concerned I'm looking at means of representing that. I feel that I'm moving away from the square as an imposition of order on the free flowing border present in the rio grande river. I want it to contain that desire to both keep out and to make them fixed/known. To that end I've been playing around with the idea of a cattle brand. Once a body is branded it's place is fixed, so I think that it could work well to display my brand as possibly a cattle brand as well. Cattle branding fits well with my imagery and figure. What's curious about the cattle brand is that it negates the need for fencing. If we were all branded (and aren't we all anyway?) would there be any need of materially manifest borders? The kind of personal branding seems to present a potential towards a kind of multiplicity. What's a body's place when all bodies, autobranded, move in Brownian motion? It would be as if nations were replaced in whole with borders (non bound).
My parents recently aquired some land, and we are now the proud owners of six cows (no bulls). There's been a lot of discussion back and forth about making a brand. There's a suprisingly sophisticated set of design principles associetd with brand design. There are, of course, a huge slew of stock characters and configurations--these mainly have to do with letters. They correspond to the verbalizations of said brands. So for example S-L would be S bar L. Because of the branding process (where a brand is heated and applied to an animals hide) there are restrictions on the intricacy of the brand. I'd like to move towards this more simplistic style as I brand the disaster.
I like where this is moving towards. The space between the two Bs is reminicent of a river--of the Rio Grande which acts as a natural, fluid border. The river facilitates borderland in a way that a fence does not. The trouble with this design, though, is that there is too much contradiction between the text and image. Macnab mentions that while paradox can be helpful contradiction is not. I need to find a way to reconcile my text and image. While keeping up the idea of brand(ing iron).
This works with the stright line between the Bs. It feels empty, though. I would like to retain the image and idea of a river. I need to find a way to contstrain it somehow so as to push towards the action of the disaster.
This disaster was born of desire. In the abstract there was an upwelling of desire (in the United States) to define ourselves as selves by creating a concrete other. By fencing off and fixing the other as such, as seperate. In more concrete terms people had a desire, brought on by unadulterated revulsion, to keep those "huddled masses" to our south out of America. My logo has to, in some capacity, reflect or evoke that desire. I think that I'd like to push towards that through a containment of the river, of the border as space of mixture and muddle. To the left somewhat there's a picture of the DMZ between the Koreas. That boxing in is what I'd like to move towards in the logo.
This train of thought breaks down in some regards if I don't make an effort to switch over from branding (with an iron) to branding with a logo. I think the case could be made that our names, our signatures, our social security numbers might as well be burned in brands. They are immobile, and they center all a body's actions, all a body's events, onto a single centered signature.
An self brand, though, is different in two ways. First, it is a fluid affair, and its fluidity makes it impossible to attach a single brand to multiple bodies. If we look at the disaster ridden history of something like antisemitism we notice the extreme effort put into saying 'the Jews done it.' It is, perhaps, just as ridiculous in electracy to say that Steven J LeMieux got in a car wreck, wrote a paper, went on a date (and I think that I'm borrowing liberally from a Derrida essay or interview that I can't quite rememeber).
The other is that a brand carries with it affect. Steven J LeMieux doesn't unless I've built it up as a brand--so that it could be argued that Hitler, the word Hitler, isn't a word anymore. It's become as much a brand as Apple.
I like this. It has both Bs in place; they are reminicent of the river, and I have them constrained in the box. I wonder if it isn't a little plain. though. I have to remember, though, that it will be intimately tied to my blog and the disaster, so those two things will support it.
I decided to play around somewhat with the idea of the fence squeezing the border so that it becomes somewhat warped. This, though, doesn't mesh well with the idea and form of a branding iron. Also, I liked the straight fence juxtaposed against the curved river. If they're both curved some of that impact is lost.
The Bs are the first letter in Bound and Bodies. My disaster, so branded, so logoed, could be known as Bound Bodies. It is the push towards the creation of bound bodies in the pursuit of purity and in flight from revulsion. I think that this might be it.
