On one of my last visits to Cleveland, I had the pleasure of meeting a young savant named Jack. Besides hosting a late-night radio show on WCSB[𝄞] and performing afternoon noise music at a near-westside bar[𝄢], he talks nearly non-stop, and almost singularly, and with encyclopedic scope and depth, about the design and history of Cleveland architecture. There is no building that exists or has existed, that escapes his survey. To drive with him is to sign up for a guided tour, he points to every cleared lot and Payless shoe store and describes exactly what is missing. He explains the appearance of buildings now missing, the style of their transoms, trellises, and archways; the founding dates, the location of the quarries whence came granite, marble and mud for bricks.
For those not familiar with individuals like Jack, let me explain that it is far from rare to meet these individuals in rust-belt coffeehouses, and much more rare to find them in academic programs anywhere. They are most easily identified in winter, where they are found without a coat, wearing a sweatshirt or hoodie, and bumming cigarettes in blown-out tennis shoes. I mention his appearance because my conversations with him evoked for me the dedication of Ginsberg's Howl. Alan Ginsberg dedicates his poem to Carl Solomon, a dadaist friend that committed suicide in a most remarkable way. Solomon lived in a time when translobal lobotomy[⌁] was still high-psychiatric science. Solomon, deciding that one's life *is* the life of the mind, simulated madness until finally, the surgeon's knife removed his soul. Ginsberg then begins his poem with the line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness..." I dare not print more of the poem for fear of raising the specter of obscenity, pornography[¶]. Jack and I would talk about empire and decadence[⊲] and of those buildings that are left to rot[⌦] before being torn down and replaced by McDonald's, their steel boilers (the size of some apartments) scraped for dollars. Those buildings can never again exist, for there is no longer the steel, the raw resources, the expertise[⌽], the affluence, or vision. The image for us is architecture as a mirror reflecting the internals of our postmodern institutions, the hoax of sustained pedigree and privilege. One morning, over coffee and as he ranted at me about the horror he experiences from art moderne[1948] (a movement that I rather like, but hey), I stop him to ask about some prints he has in an envelope on the table. It seems that with the help of a disposable camera, the photo lab of a CVS, a thumb drive, and the copy machine at the local library, that he has taken to editing back into images of parking lots those glorious buildings that had once stood there. In some of the images, he would grotesquely enlarge the forms until they loomed over drugstores and Chipotles. At that moment, seeing the images, I understood Jack's protest as I understand Solomon's. Today, to dedicate one's life to the life of a paper architect, to practice the drafting and design of those buildings that will never/can never again exist, is the deepest sob and most hopeless utterance of a postmodern era. A thumb in the eye of 20th century decadence and waste, a glorious and honorable suicide. [𝄞] Where he smokes a j before browsing youTube for samples to mix into a two-hour sound collage. [𝄢] http://www.nowthatsclass.net/ [⌁] Francis Farmer will have her revenge on Seattle [¶] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl [1948] https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/467 [⊲] As an aside, two days ago was the anniversary of Marie Antoinette's date with the guillotine, vive la révolution, perhaps there will be cake! [⌦] https://www.google.com/search?q=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwiY0fTfxNTzAhUHm54KHfbLBHwQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=the+%22hilliard+theater%22+cleveland&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQA1CzfljahgFgwocBaABwAHgAgAHdA4gB6AySAQkwLjQuMy4wLjGYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZ8ABAQ&sclient=img&ei=2LVtYZiFGIe2-gT2l5PgBw&bih=766&biw=1440 [⌽] Sure, feel however about your Wrights or Mies van der Rohes, but the empire has become too exhausted to birth another just as it cannot birth another Rachmaninoff.
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