Sunday, October 31, 2004

parades and sponges

Just walked into the second parade-aftermath of this weekend- one for baseball and one for costumes. I think I may like it more than the parade itself- drunk people, partitions askew, litter and giggling. It feels like it's creating something, where as the parade was something already created. It's hard to find identity in thousands, but among a few dozen in the afterglow of something humongous things become oddly intimate.

On my bus ride I think I comprehended one major difference between Boston and New York that wasn't mentioned in Koohaas' "theory of Manhattanism." Boston, like many cities, reads to me as a chain, dense and strung out, beads of meaning linked together, everything exterior, cold and hard and beautiful. New York is more of a sponge, lightweight and full of holes, only becoming heavy under the weight of its inhabitation, a porous occupiable fullness. This is both comforting and constrictive. Oh, and I also came up with "wallflower philosophy" as a good cocktail-party-epithet for deconstructionism. These are the things I think of while sitting captive watching Mandy Moore movies and avoiding touching the person to my left.

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