Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Within Address

Within the neighborhood there is an ease of movement, natural, curious and instinctive. Movement: aloft contours and slopes, along streets and steps, adds markers, tracks and signs of our investigations as well as the erosion and wear of the terrain. Inevitably we are taking it away with us, but we want to give it to you dear reader. Discovery is what you make it. THE 40th STREET CUT is making looking listening, and imagining the whole of where we are living.

This cross section is situated, marked out and encircled in an idea of time that is often hidden from our day to day concerns and remains an effecting part of expanded histories of the transportation system in Oakland.

[From the still partially forrested Richmond Street Glenn below West Macarthur our line plots north-west above the watershed and then north-east below the Kaiser Hospital complex up to a gate of the neighborhood, the key pivot of 40th and Broadway that slices along the contour of … Hill then continues sliding up to the Mountainview Cemetery grounds and along slopes to the 51st/Pleasant Valley terminus of the old Key line where, suddenly sloping south, carving through the arterial streets of single floor homes, apartment buildings and convalescent dwellings our line traces the creek path on its way down-stream to and through the Richmond Street Glen Echo where it has its most dramatic exposure with a few redwood stands and then disappears back underground for the final journey on its way to lake Merritt.]

This our address.

Within this description, these lines, is the home-grown cartography from which we will extract our art, the place ideas have grown and into the ideas of where we have placed.

There is a difficulty with language, with missives attempting to reconcile competing forces, and dualisms: an expansive/abstract and interconnected/convergence. A poetic intention. A difficulty of address arises, of noun conjugation, and an invocation of an animism that is seemingly grounded in a solitary conversation.






Agencies of oneself in the flurry of transformation are continually reaching for relational definitions.

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