Krete is Nevada: Double Negative revisited

A couple of posts back, on the melting glaciers trip, I thought of Michael Heizer's Double Negative piece. Well piece is maybe not exactly the right word for an earthwork, but why not. Anyway the glaciers's apparent movement reminded me of this, which I only saw from an airplane.

"Double Negative consists of two trenches cut into the eastern edge of the Mormon Mesa, northwest of Overton, Nevada in 1969-70. The trenches line up across a large gap formed by the natural shape of the mesa edge. Including this open area across the gap, the trenches together measure 1,500 feet long, 50 feet deep, and 30 feet wide (457 meters long, 15.2 meters deep, 9.1 meters wide). 240,000 tons (218,000 tonnes) of rock, mostly rhyolite and sandstone, was displaced in the construction of the trenches"
Now in Krete and a lot of the landscape looks just like Nevada.

Rooms that say U.S.A.

Found this funny book amongst the stacks of forgotten magazines from the 70's and 80's in the house where we're staying in Krete. I could not resist the design genealogy tree, photographed under a real tree,
nor the super complex leopard plus faux bamboo plus Chagall plus everything else you find around rooms

red white and ancient?

architecture is useful too, sometimes

Hysterical Ruins

The Palace of Knossos is the main tourist attraction in central Krete. It was the fabulous palace of king Minos or whatever that got destroyed Phuket-style by a huge Greek tsunami. Anyway the palace looks like it looked great, though we will never really know because of the ultra flamboyant reconstruction by Arthur Evans. Mr Evans decided to really show everybody what Knossos looked like, but in truth he showed what he thought it looked like, and then proceed to reconstruct the whole thing. Actually, even more bizarre, he did not reconstruct the palace it self, but a ruin of the palace. So instead of seeing the ruins of the palace now we see the fake ruins of a presumed palace. These fake ruins of the presumed palace are further faked by having been built in fake materials: Wood looks like wood but it is actually concrete. Actaully it looks like concrete that was cast in wood, but when you touch it you realize that the wood effect is painted onto something that is way too smooth to be concrete... maybe it's porcelain made to look like concrete that pretends to be wood?a cowboy garbage can?

ancient Pacman?This is not a ruin, or a reconstruction of a ruin, or a fake ruin of a presumed house. It is just a house for a ruin.

Industrial Light and Magic

Last night in Geneva we visited the ViMi Neon, in the industrial zone close to the airport.

What is Denise Richards doing here?

We spent some time mixing the colors of glass tubes with the colors of different gasses to get the right shade of orange.

I got rather carried away because everything looked interesting there,
then I had to make a run for the airport.

Tonight on the boat to Krete,

the pool is super spooky the lights seem to be mixing themselves.Boats are always minimal in a neo-retro-cute-industrial way,
everything is painted over many times in flat colors, everything looks like set design for televisionor not.

Homo Cruising amongst the dead.

If you're in London tonight, and if you like gay boys, run to the Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington High Street N16, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm for the Second Annual Cruising Tour organized by the lovely Pablo Internacional Magazine.

no meeting point, find each other inside the cemetery!
how to get there:
take bus 243 from kingsland road to stoke newington (30
minutes) or train from Liverpool street station to stoke
Newington station (15 minutes), walk through the central
path, arrive to the old abandoned church and turn right, you
will find it.

***bring your own lube and condoms
***do not bring any valuables

Cruising tours, promoting the homo-sexual use of public space

If lost please contact:
Pablo 07759022545

Afterwards meet for after drinks and male bonding at
George and Dragon, 2 Hackney Road, London E2

The Grey Glaciers

Seems like I'm a regular on the Sunday afternoon flight from Athens to Geneva, and today I fell asleep even before takeoff. Later on I realized that I had left one of my phones on during the flight, and there was a "Welcome to Vodafone Albania please dial blah blah for blah blah whatever" message on it. Thankfully this did not affect the flight, as far as I know. Anyway, I woke up just in time for the Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe, and probably the most popular with water bottle companies (Evian, Glaceau, Etcetera), but I noticed that the famous glaciers are looking pretty grey, and somehow totally fascinating.

Some Odd Chairs

The exhibition "Siege Poeme", organized by Dominique Gauron and Gerard Ifert, took place in February 1975, somewhere in Paris. The show was furniture by non-furniture people, so poets and painters and sculptors and students and architects. Enjoy the weirdness:
Gillette chair by Luc Dailledouze
Matches chair by Nicolas Le Pellettier
Climbing up the wall chair, by students from Ecole CamondoCant pay attention chair by Jean Claude Biraben (o.k. I am making up the titles)

Notes on Antiparos

Walking around the beach in Antiparos, I spaced out on the German Techno vibe of Boys Noize and The Gossip remixes and started photographing things close to the ground
some of them looked like landscapes
others like corpsesand sunbursts
a stone wall close to the waterbrokeback mountaina dom-ino frame trying to pretend it is a vernacular structureand in the end this bastartized typology has become the norm on the islands
broken pieces of wood that helped cast the domes,
the domes that signifyan architecture caught in a dead end.

Summer Reading

Just back from a weekend in Antiparos, where apart from great beaches and great parties, they also had really cool vintage bookshop, and I rediscovered my obsession with ancient sci-fi comics, amongst other things.