The Last Man

“I felt knife blades open within me. I resolved to defend myself. As a good tactician, I intended to rationalize the world and to show the white man that he was mistaken…Reason was confident of victory on every level. I put all the parts back together. But I had to change my tune. That victory played cat and mouse; it made a fool of me. As the other put it, when I was present, it was not; when it was there, [[I was no longer.]]” ''- Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks ''

//Ulysses was a junkie, was because he ain't no more. But they're still talking about I think therefore I am . They don't want to talk about hermeneutical injustice. // god is in the details, but the devil wrote the words [[Prompt.]]

''Prompt'': The last man in the world sits alone in a room and suddenly there's a knock on the door. A man is in a city. The last man/ the enthoclass man walks to the edge of his world. The last man, ontologically absolute in this self description, lives in a city. And because he lives in this city, it's a city. He wakes and walks dowtown. A short time later–– the air gets cold. … endless, the downtown bleeds out of the day into the evening as store lights are replaced by bar signs and glowing cigarette butts. In the park he sits down for a while to take in his surroundings. A short time later–– the air gets colder. A woman who sleeps at the park on warmer nights sees a shadow. A short time later-- Laughing, she says, “I thought he was a doll.” The police arrive late. “Of course, I would’ve been horrified if I had known.” Today he lived in this city. He was only one when William Brons decided to burn down the Showplace Cinema 8 in 1986. It took a year of planning and dreaming, that’s how premeditated the fire was. Brons picked the Cinema 8 for its unique ability to burn down. If you take a walk downtown you might notice the one brick wall still standing, an embarrassing stain on Brons’ legacy. [[All cities]] begin with downtowns.

There are two downtowns in every city. All cities have [[downtowns]] Downtown is an [[order of knowledge]] Downtown is an industry Downtown is an enterprise run by the city government and corporate interests There are [[Private Downtowns]] and [[Public Downtowns]] built on top of each other but rarely do they crossover. You'd think people would always be stepping on toes.

Downtown is an [[order of knowledge]] Downtown is an industry Downtown is an enterprise run by the city government and corporate interests There are Private Downtowns and Public Downtowns built on top of each other but rarely do they crossover. You'd think people would always be stepping on toes. A man wakes up in a city. He wakes up early. The sound of a kid’s tv show drifts up through the airshaft. “Can you count how many frogs Mr. Humbert can eat,” the apartment below asks. “Let’s count together–– 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…,” the airshaft answers. Mr. Humbert has a big appetite. In bed, he pictures Humbert as an orange man puppet with a mustache made of yarn. Chilly, his dormant objects wake up––insentience violated as their reflective surfaces repeat uninvited instructions. “See Mr. Humbert is really hungry, but he doesn’t have enough food to fill him up. Can we spell empty together––EM...;” Finally getting out of bed as the medicine cabinet mirror spells out, “PTY.” Dressing quickly, the cotton feels just like teeth or maybe just fabric on dry skin. He picks up his razor. His body has moved the razor many mornings. From the kitchen he hears 303’s door slam as the coffeemaker starts. This morning, the slam echoes down the halls to the floors above and below. A WORD FROM 303’S SLAMMING DOOR: ‘IN LOVING MEMORY OF THE OLD TIMERS: FANNIE VALENTINE DICKERSON, SNOOKIE WILLIAMS AND HER HUSBAND BROTHER (THE ONLY SON ‘CAUSE ALL EIGHT SISTERS HAD GIRLS SO THEY ALL CALLED HIM BROTHER), MAGGIE AND LILLIAN’S FOUL-MOUTHED PARROT WHO SHOUTED ‘SHUT UP LILLIAN’ OR ‘FUCK YOU’ FROM ITS SHIT FILLED CAGE, MISS ROSA WITH HER ARTURO FUENTE CUBANITOS ON GOOD NIGHTS BLOWING SMOKE UP TO THE MOON, WILLIE IN 108.” (1) 303 was already living there when he moved in a couple years back. The broker may have mentioned a risk of thin walls in older buildings, phantom knocks. “… that was the heartbreaking 1944 rendition of ‘I cover the waterfront.’ (2) Last night a young woman was pulled out of the canal by authorities. Handcuffed for swimming naked, she dripped for 1 hour before a towel was provided for her transportation. You won’t believe how many years she’s facing, stay tuned…” //Fuck it. Who wouldn’t want to strip down and be swept out for a minute? Swept out for a minute in a great movement somewhere to nowhere at all. // The coffeemaker makes an unfinished sound, 8 minutes. 8 more minutes to listen to 303’s private loneliness and the radio. Then, suddenly a shower or kitchen sink or bathroom sink or bursting pipe interrupts. How strange it must be to swim past a city’s floodlights in the middle of the night. Floating naked down a river of tar, a manmade waterway of night sky right there next to a highway radiating daylight no matter what. “Friday morning, City Hall: It was hard to hear much of the city’s official statement yesterday morning over shouts from protestors.” (1) The old boy now man in 303 thinks: “When I was a little boy, I always thought Miss Rosa was Trini. I only ever heard her sing Calypso: ("go on!")/ ("continue, go on"). Found out later that Miss Rosa was born in Panama, one of those canal babies. But they came from Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. 25,000 men lost their lives building that canal, all came from somewhere. Most came from the West Indies and never went back. Had canal babies whose mamas didn’t want a man with a contractor-issued arm made of splinters touching their babies. Miss Rosa in 102 used to punctuate her arguments with a slamming door. But sometimes I would see her out on her fire escape one of those rare good nights smoking an arturo fuente cubanito singing a canal baby’s calypso to an uninterested moon.” (2) And Billie sings: "Oh, how I yearn Where are you? Have you forgotten? Will you remember? Will you return?" [[One free standing brick wall downtown]]

Dowtown is an order of knowledge, but //only Zaza can anoint and anesthetize// //only Zaza and Jesus know how to turn some bitchass water into panacea.// [[Public Downtowns]] Socially, they understand the [[space]].

Hewitt Fisher: Visionaries of Urban Transformation, founded in 1987, an infamous year in city politics. In the heart of metropolitan dynamism, where steel and glass meet innovation, Hewitt Fisher was born. Established the same year that William Brons, diagnosed as deeply unrealistic, burnt down the city’s oldest standing movie theater. Hewitt Fisher was the vision of real estate moguls, Richard Hewitt and Evelyn Fisher. This duo set out to redefine urban landscapes and revolutionize the way people experience city living. Thanks to them, we’re living in the future they built. (1) (1)“Unicursal.” Richard Hewitt penciled in his indistinct scrawl in a corner on the latest building proposal “draft 218-ee03.” There, like a spiral or a black hole sitting on the page quietly as the investors wrapped up. Mom played the radio so quiet in the car, it was hard to believe she was even listening. But his attentions were captured as the vehicle collapsed miles, shredding towns into green and brown ribbons washing over their windows. Watching the little metal ball navigate plastic turns and dead ends, trying to get it into a little divot at the maze’s heart. Keeping his eyes fixed on the intricate pathways as mom’s eyes looked for dead ends on the way home, trying to postpone reaching her own carpeted divot. It’s amazing, the design. His little brain still capable of real observation. Always identifying more with Daedalus than Theseus, but the Greeks were all gays so he didn’t let his thoughts linger on their mythology too long. Turning the circle left once more, they find the driveway every time. “You’re a joke.” The phrase that haunted three generations of Hewitt men. It was his father’s curse invoked through the tobacco-stained teeth of his grandfather, a renowned faggot-hater to son (his father), a suspected faggot. But that’s why he liked Evelyn; she was a serious woman with fixed eyes. The moment he saw her he knew they could build something profitable. And together they built skyscrapers and waste renewal plants. He saw in her the promise to endure, a labyrinth to hold his Minotaur. (1a.) (1a.) Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space: //A "fortress city" for a man alone, a man who loves complete solitude, and who knows how to defend and protect himself with simple images. There's no need of a gate, no need of an iron-trimmed door; people are afraid to come in. In any case, an important phenomenological investigation remains to be made on the subject of dark entrance halls. // (b.) They prolong their time under bright artificials, designed to mirror their false memories of beauty [[Architecture ]] [[Becoming an Urban Planner and Marrying a Developer: a guide to career in city]] [[Public Downtowns]]

the boundary between those who live and those who work downtown A man takes a walk downtown. Even in the dull piss light, the walk isn’t bad. It’s surprising how much he worries about this city. He says he’s worried for its heart and soul. He thinks it’s a shame that modern urban life asks for victims and martyrs when all that he craves is the ease of a primitive man. Modern man is asked to be complicit in something and if he doesn’t choose what that something is, then they will make him a criminal or a bastard. More stores come into view. Through the window of a Bequeathed Bagel, an elderly man gathers fists of thin embossed napkins. His pockets are full but he continues shoving as many as he can into his thin pockets. Humbert. There’s a shared tragedy between that man and me, he thinks. Someone on a coffee date notices a slouched person on the street staring. 3,495 hairs on his chin. He continues. A blistering wind hits against the windows on the top floor of the Hewett Fisher Metroplex Center. Down a street of offices, a woman whispers longstanding truths outside the bank, which closed early on Saturdays. She’s so nervous. Her buoyant movements are mistranslated and that makes her nervous. The columns of windows disguise the heaviness of paused utility inside. Glancing only for a moment, his eyes meet hers which seem to say, only one of us will live to Sunday and I know who. The inattentiveness of his eyes does not match the seriousness of this premonition. “They said come back today, so I came back. Every time they tell me it’s another day’s problem and then the bank is closed when the day has come for a solution!” He thinks she is unwell, because her clothes are worn and oddly assembled in such a way to suggest there is indeed an impenetrable logic she keeps locked behind the bars of her illness. This logic breathes out of her. She, its apostle. She, he thinks, is a threat to any passerby. This woman, he thinks, is dangerous. He shouldn’t have looked at a dangerous woman. But he did, because he was curious. His curiosity is a first stone thrown, a provocation. He looked and now both of their fates are in her possession. She, his dangerous banker, guarding his future behind a lunatic’s bars. Which city office collects reports of inappropriate predictions? It’s a PTY, she could have offered him a miracle, but already in him is an unwillingness to accept his own misrecognition. Speeding up, as if to deny this newly bestowed fate, he looks for a reminder of himself. Safe, his phone tells time cleanly. 2:18. A public paid parking lot scattered with the few cars of the weekend workers has one freestanding brick wall. The graffiti reads: “dickman owns your dreams 2night” and “RJ + Jada 4ever.” [[Passing by on the street (a knock at the door)]] [[Private Downtowns]] See [[WSI]] index For those who know [[BSI]]

There are two downtowns in every city. The narrative of human and nonhuman, white and Black is constructed and exists within a particular episteme, an order of knowledge. We must look past the everyday knowledge practices within the humanities, arts, and social sciences. While these disciplines are essential, they can be incredibly dangerous since they exist within the Western episteme (now naturalized and accepted). Academics and artists inadvertently support, through their various disciplines, violent stereotypes, dehumanizing pathologies, and anti-Blackness. Since the Western episteme has been conflated with science and fact, violent colonialist ideas of what constitutes a human are presented as unquestionable. The colonial epistemological frame for man, a “knowledge system of the medieval order of Latin-Christian Europe” is an a priori concept, knowledge deduced from reasoning rather than observation, that over time has been naturalized. As this knowledge ages, its origins are mistaken for a posteriori, empirical, and eventually considered neutral truths. Insidious, the tautologies of a few, become the governing reality for all. //Ulysses was a junkie, was because he ain't no more. god is in the details, but the devil wrote the words.// So a man decides to take a walk Downtown in his city. He starts it anyways because there it is, the rest of the world. Downtown is a promise a day can hang from precariously. Outside his building, a Pepsi bottle half filled with piss perches on the edge of the guardrail. In the right light, that piss could look really beautiful. All cities have [[downtowns]]

2:18: A public paid parking lot scattered with the few cars of the weekend workers has one freestanding brick wall. The graffiti reads: “dickman owns your dreams 2night” and “RJ + Jada 4ever.” There are [[Private Downtowns]] and [[Public Downtowns]] built on top of each other, but the people who belong to the private downtowns have no idea the lives stacked under their own. [[billboards]]

“Claudia! Claudia!” A woman brushes by sneering at the face on the other end of her phone. “If it didn’t happen to her today, it was going to happen someday. Thank god her kids weren’t around to see her like that.” He wants to ask her what happened to Claudia, but they would make him a criminal for that. Downtown is a [[Hazard]]

German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said something along the lines of: "Architecture is meant to translate the will of the epoch into space." Mies was a big fan of aphorisms. Many former collaborators remark on this odd detail, noting that he had two favorites: "less is more" "god is in the details" Downtown is an industry of details, more or less [[Becoming an Urban Planner and Marrying a Developer: a guide to career in city]] See [[WSI]] index

Becoming an Urban Planner and Marrying a Developer: how to career in city by Keelan Sullivan and Arden Jean-Luc When designing [[downtowns]] it must: 1. Process, protect, and manage capital 2. Package ideas and information 3. Broker influence and power 4. Produce decisions affecting the accumulation of wealth, the circulation of capital, and if there's money left in the budget, strengthen the jobs and welfare of people beyond Designing pure homogenous spaces: North America is timeless. This will work in any urban planner or developer's favor. The United States is free to imagine and you a pioneer placing a moral and equitable city on top of its rolling hills. What is the future for Planning? 1. Economic Recession and Planning 2. Geospatial Technology and Planning 3. Rediscovering Public Health and Planning 4. Carbon, Peak Oil, and Sustainable Planning 5. A Bright Future for Planning See [[WSI]] index

The White Spatial Imaginary (WSI) is a frame. That frame look crooked to you? In other words, the WSI is ruled by segregation, all services and amenities must stay white where they're at. When Billie Holiday sang, "Do nothing till you hear from me Pay no attention to what's said White people tear the seam of anyone's dream" Was she talking about redlining? For those who know [[BSI]]

The Black Spatial Imaginary (BSI) Socially, they understand the [[space]]. |==| X |==| > > < < + [ + ] + /-{}-\

racially they spaced out the projects. and when Black people moved, a criminial transgression. a criminal still looming large in the white spatial imaginary. //you know those ugly buildings around the block// does that frame look crooked to you? [[Public Downtowns]]

Liquid modernity: a civilazation of waste disposal, garbage shoots, public/ private dumpsites A man is walking downtown. Late day, the air is filled with synthetics, waste, and industry. All three smells persisting outside the workweek’s jurisdiction and timetables. All seemingly endless until you reach the surrounding residential neighborhoods where the smells modify, leaving only their astringent notes. A few blocks away, tires screech as the driver changes their mind abruptly; like a bomb, the sound has an impact. Being downtown he feels capable of terrorism. The believers–– she (his date last weekend) didn’t call them a cult, gentle in her way— named themselves the “Urban Semiotic and Spiritual Interventionists (USSI).” They were two drinks into their first date. She picked the location. A bar called Court with a large guillotine by the bathroom. USSI’s published credo, first shared in academic circles as an odd mental exercise that quickly turned dark, posits that there are signs and symbols hidden within the urban landscape that hold fundamental truths about the human soul, and a path towards deconstructing the ego ultimately unveiling a hermetic truth; we merely need to decode it. He noticed a mole that seemed to dance across her upper lip. “It’s sad I only learned about them after their violent showdown with authorities. Melting their idol seemed a bit extreme even for the current administration.” She told him about the group’s practice of worshipping a traffic cone. By the end of the evening her interest in the group seemed understandable. She was a woman best suited for idolatry. On top of her, gazing into her eyes through the hazel brown, he could find a way back to himself. Her unyielding ability for worship, this plain woman with no sister who really didn’t belong anywhere, and nowhere really needed her. [[Urban Semiotic and Spiritual Interventionists (USSI) Manifesto ]]

Urban Semiotic and Spiritual Interventionists (USSI) Manifesto 1. Prometheus was a liar and a thief. Evidence a. He stole fire and they built AI. Evidence b. He suffered for us and we still suffer. 2. Dreams are objects made hysterical and objects are hysterical dreams Evidence a. There is a "fundamental homology" between old Marx and Freud's interpretative procedures for commodities and dreams. Almost identical. //The Unconscious of the Commodity-Form// Evidence b. ''Roland Barthes'': "Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational." Evidence c. Who hasn't wanted to fuck a toaster, stick a finger in a socket, buy a new shower head? 3. In cities, private (public)citizens must pay greater attention and care to: a. traffic cones b. danger men at work signs c. product showrooms d. sewer systems e. technology infrastructure f. urban farms (sometimes) g. superblocks h.mixed-use streets i. [[billboards]] j. 325 more 4. Be wary of things that present themselves as sites for self elevation: a. linear parks b. trees c. landmarks d. places of worship e. stadiums f. 105 more

The billboard just out of his window’s view reads: Autotherapy: get your car fixed by the people who really know them Do they love them too? A man takes a walk downtown in [[All cities]]

//only Zaza can anoint and anesthetize// //only Zaza and Jesus know how to turn some bitchass water into panacea.//

↶

↷

I was no longer.

”
- Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks