I think traffic is always the “city teacher’s” method of inflicting patience on urban populations that are clearly addicted to impatience.

In case you’re afraid I’m not taking you seriously, remember, I’m taking you intravenously.

Quotes from Rem Koolhaas on New York

“Manhattan is the 21st century’s Rosetta Stone”

*                 *                       *

“Central Park — A taxidermic preservation of nature that exhibits forever the drama of culture outdistancing nature; a synthetic Arcadian carpet, grafted onto the grid.”

*                 *                           *

“The Coney Island beaches — was a situation of an inordinate number of people assembling on an inadequate acreage…it follows with mathematical certainty that the hundreds of thousands of visitors will not each find a place to spread out on the sand, let alone reach the water, within a single day.

Toward 1890, the introduction of electricity makes it possible to create a second daytime.  Bright lights are placed at regular intervals along the surf line, so that now the sea can be enjoyed on a truly metropolitan shift-system, giving those unable to reach the water in the daytime a man-made, 12-hour extension.

What is unique in Coney Island, is that this false daytime is not regarded as second rate, in fact, its artificiality becomes an attraction.  They call it, “Electric Bathing.”

*                        *                      *                                *

“In this branch of utopian real estate, architecture is no longer the art of designing buildings so much as the brutal skyward extrusion of whatever site the developer has managed to assemble.”

*                          *                      *                              *

“The city, magic and fantastic from afar, now appears as a hastily constructed toyhouse for the amusement of children.”  – Maxim Gorky, while visiting NYC, 1906

*                            *                             *                            *

“Roxy, (designer of Radio City Music Hall), mastermind of ‘Fantastic Technology’, begins questioning the conventional use of the air-conditioning system.  He considers adding hallucinogenic gases to the atmosphere of the theater, so that the air conditioning system would not just be injecting ventilation and cooling, but also exhilaration.

His lawyers dissuade him, but for a short period Roxy puts therapeutic O3 molecule into the air conditioning system of the theater.  A small dose puts the 6,200 audience members in a euphoric mood, hyper-receptive to the activity on stage.”

*                               *                                  *                        *

“Rockefeller Center is not Greek, but it suggests the balance of Greek architecture.  It is not Babylonian, but it retains the flavor of Babylon’s magnificence.  It is not Roman, yet it has Rome’s enduring qualities of mass and strength.  Nor is it the Taj Mahal, which it resembles in mass composition, though in it has been caught the spirit of the Taj — aloof, generous in space, quieting in serenity.”

*                               *                                  *                         *

“Manhattan is the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program — to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy — was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.”

Related Articles:

• See Speedisms

lyrics by Speed Levitch, music by Armageddon Shui

When a nice guy says, “No more Mister Nice Guy,”
the world of men have failed in some intricate, abstract, yet definite way.

As a nice guy announces, “No more Mister Nice Guy”
- cry! -  for you and I have just died a little bit more
as the last justifiable homicide
just became a little bit more justified.

Some day the last remaining Mister Nice Guy is gonna get fed up
He’s gonna decide he’s mad as hell and he’s not gonna take it anymore
and that, for sure, they’re ain’t gonna be no more Mister Nice Guy around here no more
and when nice guys go extinct
the world will stink then sink into a kissless abyss, roach infested, biodegradably degradingly digested,
a city horrified then atrophied, a stratosphere of everything we hear as a thump we heard, as a species we were,
all of this , for sure, will occur right on the other side of some random Mister Nice Guy pronouncing, “No more Mister Nice Guy!”

lyrics by Speed Levitch, music by Armageddon Shui

Malthus knew it

and was persecuted for it

Shakespeare got it, understood it

and lived at the end of a spear because of it

Copernicus saw it through the pure power of his observation

then experienced excommunication from the church who was trying to put a stop to it

Lorca dated it, serenaded it, and was assassinated by his fellow countrymen, as fate would have it

Socrates swallowed it

Dying in the name of celebrating it

So, keep it alive.

At the time, I was working as a licensed sightseeing tour guide of New York City, atop the double-decker-tour buses.

I was upstairs on the second floor of those buses ten hours a day, floating fourteen feet above the streets of the city on an open platform, feeling omnipresent as I serenaded women from every habitable continent of the globe.

I was a tour guide with no sense of direction, working laboriously as emotions that run through saliva and overwhelm entire afternoons.

The double decker tour guide job, seven dollars an hour before taxes, was a shit job, like any other.  The only difference between it and other shit jobs was the internationality of it all.  Whereas most employees in this world get yelled at in only one language at a time, the double-decker guide is reprimanded in a vast array of exotic languages and accents.

The double-decker bus schedule runs on a tight, rhythmic circle, all day long, transporting thousands of voyeurs throughout this mass-concise-mess-of-a-metropolis. Passengers buy a ticket that is actually a two day pass that allows them to hop-on and hop-off, at the seventeen different designated stops.  The stops are, for the most part, just improvised spots chosen along random sidewalks splayed all over town.

When the schedule is working, a double-decker bus is stopping at every double-decker-stop along the double-decker loop every half-an-hour or less.  As if a subway-of-its-own-making, the buses depart the original terminal in thirty minute increments starting at 8:30AM until the final launch at 7PM.

The double decker emcee is working, actually, as a kind-of-train-conductor who, in between stations, plays the role of a tour guide. For, the tour’s narration is supposed to be consistent while the bus is moving, and so, the tour guide is responsible for announcing each stop as the bus pulls up to it then is in charge of helping passengers off the bus and checking to make sure those boarding the bus have valid tickets.

Right now, I’m describing to you the nuts and bolts of the job, but, it goes without saying, it was more than just a job to me.

First of all, to me, it was a great opportunity to do something I’d always wanted to do – stand up in front of crowds of people and start screaming about the hugeness of it all.

Second of all, to me, the double decker bus was not just an esoteric, tourist vehicle. It was an erogenous zone.

After all, the truly enormous heterosexualized, sexual frustration I was experiencing at that time, other men have used to conquer northern Europe with.  The double decker job was the closest thing to sexual intercourse I had going on in my life.

*           *            *

Gossip – A  moment actively unseized.

*        *         *

Gossip – Our lives’ adventures trapped in the mouths of the unimaginative.

*        *         *

Gossip – If  love is being enamored of each other’s chaos, then gossip is being enamored of each other’s predictability.

*        *        *

Gossip – When the idle time we share becomes no longer clay for us to sculpt together but  insead becomes shit for us to fling at each other.

*        *        *

Gossip – The only way our self-censorship knows how to  improvise.

*        *        *

Gossip – Character assassination bereft of truth-seeking.

*        *         *

Gossip – The specific impotence that comes from yet another fear we could just overcome, but, instead, we’re too busy trying to find ways to put it to use.

*      *       *

Gossip -   the need to render each other comprehensible, empowered.

*        *      *

Gossip - Proof that the core ingredient of misery is to be enslaved to one point-of-view.

*         *      *

Gossip -  the main reason the words “lifeart” and “lifeartist” don’t exist.

Speed Levitch in “Gossip” from Zac Eubank on Vimeo.

“We already have so much to carry around, a body too?!”

*       *        *

“Religions are the crusade against humor.”

*      *        *

QUESTION: “What do you do from morning to night?” 

ANSWER:  “I endure myself.”

*       *        *

“I have decided not to oppose anyone ever again, since I have noticed that I always end up resembling my latest enemy.”

*       *        *

“ Suicide is a discovery.”

*        *        *

“Everything that matters was accomplished outside doubt.”

*         *       *

“As the years pass, the number of those we can communicate with diminishes.  When there is no longer anyone to talk to, at last we will be as we were before stooping to a name.”

*        *          *

“What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty.  Forty years of a long, superfluous verification.”

*         *         *

“No need to elaborate works — merely say something that can be murmured in the ear of a drunkard or a dying man.” 

*        *         *

“A golden rule: to leave an incomplete image of oneself…”

“I hate protests, but I don’t know how to show it.” – Mitch Hedberg

“an EGO – a lost cause.” – speedism #4