Secret Shrine

If you go to Paterson, you may now happen upon a secret shrine to William Carlos Williams' poem. Although, it might not be there anymore. Composed of trash the Education Department leaves in the abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (e.g. busted file cabinets, waterlogged textbooks, wobbly bookcarts), the shrine is itself subject to the vagaries of what constitutes trash and what art . . . and what, for that matter, desirable furniture. After the first day, the "library" aspect of the shrine--a small bench facing a bookshelf under a tree sprouting from the concrete and stocked with English textbooks and xeroxes of Paterson in baggies--was disrupted when someone must have realized that the bookshelf was indeed still a good book shelf, and took it away (even though it may have been there for years.) It must have been a critic, because they also let their dog "have their way" in the shrine as well. The orange design is a shadow of the jacquard--the punch card that interfaced the vast worlds of labor, nature, and machine in the old silk mills.

Music It For Yourself

Last weekend, the artist duo eteam "made a song out of it: concretely" with their Stadium Reverberator project. Their goal was to turn Paterson's abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (interior pictures of which are in this Impossible Object entry) into an instrument: "Looking at the stadium from above, it reminds of a huge loudspeaker. Unfortunately this loudspeaker hasn't been used in a long time. On Saturday we will try to use this dormant possibility and trigger a composition, which will be created through knocking, jumping, scratching and clapping on the outside walls of the stadium. These sounds and movements will be captured on video and later on edited into a musical composition." I took some rough video and pictures (click on image or here) while taking a break from climbing walls, tossing chains and chunks of metal and concrete. Hopefully we'll get to see eteam's own video in the near future.

Thursday in Paterson

". . a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress."