anti:freeze

These were all taken with the cell phone, so graininess and weird lighting are par for the course. Lomos coming soon.

Union Station in the early morning, just after snowfall

lights along the bottom span of the Steel Bridge

footprints on my balcony

We woke up to a message of love, written in snow. Beautiful how it appeared, as if by magic, then melted away.

graffiti on an abandoned antique store on NW 21st

same antique store - if you look closely, you can see me in the reflection

I have been accused of ignoring the holidays. Not entirely true. My blog mentions Christmas exactly three (and now four) times:

anti:freeze christmas

Although, I have written about teeth alot more:

anti:freeze teeth

spyphone picture from the early hours of a snowstorm, taken with the Nokia 3650, from my balcony

In Iowa, this winter weather wouldn't impress me. Nineteen degrees on a January morning is downright cozy, compared to subzero nights and winds that burn the tiny cilia inside your nose. There were days when my lungs ached so hard I thought the capillaries might shatter. Little shards of glass in your chest. That's winter in Iowa.

But here in Portland, the snow and freezing rain are new again. I find myself huddling inside, drinking tea, making plans for home-cooked soup. Yesterday, the radio announcer said conditions are similar to 1996, when heavy snow was followed by warm air. Snow melted too fast on Mt. Hood and the hills, flooding rivers and threatening the downtown waterfront. I live on the waterfront.

Was 1996 the last time it snowed this hard in Portland? It seems like a lifetime ago. Back then, I was living with a boyfriend in Iowa City. He had grown up in Oregon, so midwestern winters were exotic, dazzling even. He was obsessed with homemade snow, boiling pots full of water on the stove, then running outside and flinging the pots into the air. The boiling water transformed into flakes. He did this over and over while I made fun of him from the couch. When that got boring, he poured cold water on the back steps and watched it freeze. It was worse than a Nickelodeon show - the ones where they teach you how to make Play-Doh with flour and salt, or conduct electricity using toenail clippers and a fishtank.

I remember one of his friends called from Portland and shouted into the telephone. "I stood on a bridge and touched a stick to the river! I touched it!" I imagined water licking the front doors of skyscrapers, elevators plunging into flooded underground parking garages, cars swimming around in blue water. Venice on our own west coast.

This morning, my husband and I watched the snow from our living room window. "We would have just gone out back in Iowa," he said. "It's ridiculous to stay cooped up indoors."

I thought about all the long treks across the University of Iowa campus, my scarf wrapped high around my face, my legs stiff inside three layers - thermal underwear, tights, jeans. "Let's go smash a snowman," I said. "You know, the really cheesy kind. With a carrot for the nose."

He smiled. "The kind made by people who wish they lived in a catalog?"

Exactly.

Only an Iowan is sufficiently bitter about winter to fantasize about beating up defenseless snowmen. We're still Iowans at heart, even if we do wimp out in freezing weather.

PS: Just so you know, we left the poor snowmen alone. We behaved ourselves.

The winning design for the World Trade Center memorial was revealed yesterday.

I have mixed feelings.

It's stark, quiet, and visually stunning. I love the idea of water cascading into a submerged pool. The negative space. The sense of something gone missing - something irreplacable. Water will never fill the space. The pool will always be empty. It's almost like a season without end, an incomplete cycle. Rain falls, but never nourishes. Nothing grows. The absence is still there. This is what it's like to lose a loved one.

It also mimics the life cycle of the towers. Water ascends through the pipes, then falls. I can't help but think of the water once pumped directly from the Hudson into the cooling pipes (and if you haven't seen the History Channel documentary detailing this, you must). It was the most efficient way to regulate temperature inside the skyscrapers. An element once hidden inside architecture - indeed, buried deep underground - is now revealed. A bleeding wound.

But the collapse of the World Trade Center was so incomrehensibly huge, so catastrophic, that people need a sense of healing. A sense that life continues. In that sense, the memorial fails. The empty pool becomes a metaphor for life not going on, for pain not healing, for spaces remaining empty. Is that what we want from public art?

The names are engraved randomly throughout the memorial, and this has victim's families upset. They want more order, less chaos. The artist says he was trying reflect the "haphazard brutality of the deaths." But here is where it gets complicated: Do you want art to memorialize the event, the people, or the towers? Or all three? This, to me, is the heart of the problem. As it stands, this design memorializes the buildings and event more than it does the people. When visitors descend the stairs, they must search for their loved one's name, obscured by rushing water - a metaphorical reliving of their desperate searches in hospital emergency rooms and trauma centers. Should a memorial function in this way?

The chaotic engravings seem best-suited for outsiders, people who lost no one in the attacks. The chaos, the randomness of the names, reflects their television-mediated experience. They won't be looking for specific names, but rather, for some way to process the totality of the tragedy. Which brings me to this question: Who is the memorial really for? Is it for the victims? The families? The nation? The world? This design may need some revision to strike the right balance.

On the other hand, memorials are often transformed by human interaction. The Oklahoma City memorial is made more meaningful by people dipping their hands into the reflecting pool, pressing their palms against stone to leave faint - and temporary - handprints. And Maya Lin was surprised by the ways people used the Vietnam Veteran's memorial - tracing loved one's names onto paper, tucking a little artifact into their purse or pocket (in a sense, symbolically bringing their lost soldiers home again). It is transaction that defines memorials most, and perhaps this design will surprise us, too.

The other key issue is inherent to all memorials: striking a balance between aesthetic achievement and giving the public what it wants. It's almost impossible to strike that balance while clinging to discredited notions of the avant-garde, or the modernist obsession with relentless advancement and purification of forms. And let's face it. It's hard for artists to climb down from the ivory tower. But in recent history, memorial design has been transformed by democratic collaboration. Committees often include victims and victims' families, public representatives, fellow artists, architects, and public art commissions. Artists are more sensitive to public needs, while committees are egalitarian in process. This is no less true in the case of the World Trade Center. When I studied public art and memorials (one of my specialties in my art history program), I was constantly awestruck by the process behind the production. Endlessly fascinating.

Last month, I asked my mother to send some old photographs. Box number two arrived Friday, filled with seventies-style albums, high school mementos I never would have spared, old letters, and one New American Standard Bible. This is the Bible my godmother gave me when I was five, the Bible that piqued my interest in science and archaeology, not God or his only begotten son. The Bible that -once and for all - did religion in for my young mind:

You see, this particular version included illustrations of cooking pots, weapons, currency, and eating utensils from the historical period. Maces and grain mills, iron mattocks and daggers - this was the stuff of real history. I ignored my assignments for Sunday school and instead spent hours thinking about the artifacts. Who used them? How were they made? Where could I dig for them? How could something so delicate survive so long beneath the soil? And later, Would Jesus need to throw a pot? Or would it just appear at his command? When my Sunday school teacher couldn't answer, I asked for her credentials. This was not going to be a good year for the first grade bible class.

It was impossible to take the rest of the illustrations seriously.

Note the hot pink flowers blossoming from Eve's behind, and the cluster of blue balls at Adam's groin. This actually isn't too far off from traditional art iconography, but hello, it's a children's Bible.

Reminds me of cartoons like The Simpsons, with winking double-entendres for the parents.

I love the technicolor and melodrama. It looks exactly like the Ten Commandments movie. Today, this book might come packaged in a Happy Meal, complete with Adam and Eve figurines and little plastic tablets for Moses to carry down from Mt. Sinai.

My godmother wrote an inscription on the inside cover. It reads, Karrie, use this book as your guideline all your life and God will reward you with a fruitful life! I might not be Christian, but I have let the good book guide me. That passion for science, that endless curiosity about cultural artifacts, has continued to this day. The gift wasn't wasted.

*all images from New American Standard Bible. (1960). New York: Thomas Nelson Publishers.

Some people have emailed about my other blog, alchemy, wondering if I will ever post there again. The answer is yes. I've been uploading photos to the various albums, and I wrote a new post this morning. I decided to take it another direction. Instead of posting small fragments that exemplify objective correlative, I decided to post explorations of the concept itself. Check it out if you have time.

My last year in Iowa City, I landed the research assistantship of my dreams - working for Estera Milman, founding curator of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts at the University of Iowa Museum of Art. I was wildly romantic about Fluxus, especially Anna Banana's stamp sheets, George Brech'ts events, and all the ridiculous games cooked up by George Maciunas. Here was a movement that lived up to its promise. Anyone could be an artist. Just pick up the games and play. Your hand was no different from Banana's or Brecht's. Art was no longer about objects - it was about events.

Looking back, I realize how prophetic the Fluxus badasses were. Spontaneous communities forged by instant publishing, blogging, and interactive media - they're all just high-tech correspondence art. We rubber stamp our emails with signatures, we decorate our pages with Flash animations and jpegs, and there is no clear distinction between life and art. MOMA curators don't march in to tear down our lomos. No editors cross out our sentences. I still feel romantic about handmade collage, but I think we're witnessing an interesting transition in the arts. Back when Fluxus began, the idea of spontaneous, non-institutionally mediated artistic communities was downright subversive. As Estera wrote:

"for Filliou and George Brecht, the Eternal Network had absolutely nothing to do with art as a privileged, unnatural thing, situated within a separate realm. For them (although admittedly not for all correspondence network participants), the artist was but one player in a wider network of everyday events, doings, and sufferings 'going on around him all the time in all parts of the world.'"

What happens when those networks are made explicit, as in online publishing and open-comments blogs? What happens when they are commonplace? Does art finally become of and for the people?

One of my jobs at the museum was scanning the stamps, postcards, and other works for an online exhibition catalog, and eventually, a database. I'll never forget the day I opened an old box and pulled out a plastic bag filled with hair. Long, black hair, held together like a ponytail. "Oh, that's Yoko Ono's," my boss said. It was an artifact from a performance, the kind of thing you find all the time in Fluxus archives. These were the artifacts in Artifacts of the Eternal Network. Even though Fluxus intended to do away with the privileged art object, every one of their games, every last letter and Flux box, every magazine, and every sample of hair had been preserved. There was still a sense that objects were necessary, as evidence that art had been created. I fantasized about stealing a few strands of Yoko's hair and sending them to a forensics lab. What might be found there, hidden in the cuticles?

Which leads me to this dilemma: In the digital world, we move further and further away from objects. It's all about data, pixels, bits. What happens when correspondence is just a network, no artifacts?

Last week, I wrote about the winning design for the World Trade Center Memorial. This morning, the designer revealed revisions to the original plan. The changes are subtle, but they completely transform the space.

Trees will be planted all around the sunken tower footprints, adding color and warmth to the somber, stark gray of the reflecting pools. Because the trees are deciduous, their leaves will bud and change color with the seasons. In fall - the season of the terrorist attacks - the leaves will die and fall away. Brittle, crisp leaves crunched to dust under foot, recalling the ashes and papers blown through the streets of New York. In winter, bare branches open the canopy overhead, allowing sunlight to fall on the footprints, a visual metaphor for enlightenment, insight. Spring's budding leaves bring the promise of new life after a cold, barren season, while the lush colors of summer remind visitors that life can be joyful again. Grief does not last forever, even if absence does. Just as memory and grief have different seasons, so will the World Trade Center site. With this one small revision, the memorial has come to life.

And because the trees will grow, they act as a counter to the negative spaces where the towers once stood. Out of grief, sprouts new life. I love the way this design uses nature to heal. What was once a tomb is now a living archaeological site. A place. This is exactly what I want from public art - a sense of process and change.

An underground museum is also in the works, and when I know more about the design and curatorial philosophy, I will write about it here.

*earlier the links weren't working - I think they are working now. Sorry.

Anti:freeze has finally passed the 10,000 visitor mark (and as of this afternoon, it's edging toward 10,100 - and that's not even considering the fact that, at first, I didn't add the meter to my archives, only to the main anti:freeze page). I don't know about the other journals on littlemotors, since they don't have site meters. Wendy and I have been around the longest, while Dewi and Kelley both joined last summer. When I created this website, I swore I would never obsess over numbers. It took two days to cave in and sign up for sitemeter. The web has a creepy way of making you care about statistics. At least I haven't imposed my sick fascination on the other writers here. Just because I created a website doesn't mean I can stick code all over people's personal pages.

Last night, I pared down the long list of of search terms people have used to find my page. Moments before I logged into Movable Type, I decided to check Wendy's food/erotics blog, and guess what? She had just posted search terms, too. Can we be any more in synch? (Wendy, this sometimes creeps me out, in a good way. I mean, damn, we were just in synch over that Bible post ... )

Anyway, thanks to Alan for the idea. He posted his search terms back in November, and it inspired me to pay more attention. And thanks to Howard at howardism.org, who encouraged me to link each term with its post or page.

Here they are:

Tectonics guns, earthquake
Multnomah County Circuit Court
tampon freeze death
Trompe l弛eil sidewalk
foreign office architects
砺ictor laslow� Casablanca
bashed in piano
skull boots
to the dead boy
skull rings
cats and anti freeze
hung far low
the froelich tractor froelich iowa
burnside bridge heroin
Prague, skull, clock
都ilver oxide� tarnish color
lomo wonder milk
forensic hair analysis
exhumation

and the one that creeps me out most of all ....

Karrie Higgins (seriously, why would anyone - anyone - be searching for me?)

In the dream, I keep returning to Terminal 6 in the Rivergate Industrial District. I stand on the water's edge. I check my watch. No ship.

Later, I board a rusty, dark aircraft carrier. I understand it's a military vessel, although no one tells me the ship's name or destination. Ashley leads me through a narrow corridor, gripping my wrist tight. I can't see his face. Only the blue tips of his fingers, his yellow nails. "Would it matter," he says, "If I had died of AIDS instead of an overdose?"

I ask if he was sick when he died, if he knew the heroin was a lethal cut when he injected it. He pushes me into one of the cramped rooms and locks the door. I'm surrounded by sealed glass mason jars, with plastic identity cards suspended in golden jelly. Several of the cards have no photographs, only names. Some are missing the name, but have the photo. I wonder if one of them is mine.

Ashley unfolds a tattered paper and hands it to me. It's a hand-drawn map of Cedar Memorial Cemetery, with a red "x" drawn where his grave should be.

"Turn it over," he says.

On the back, he has written instructions for digging up his plot. According to the instructions, I should do this on the night of March 16th. The anniversary of his death.

When I wake up, I understand immediately that Ashley was never dead. He witnessed a drug crime, and for this, he was enrolled in the Witness Protection Program.

Then I wake up for real.

People are always getting all over everything. Their hair sticks to sofas and they leave a trace. They touch their lover and their fingertips leave a trace. Paint chips fly from their cars. Saliva sticks to their lovers’ mouths and can be detected with a swab. Semen on the sheets. Blood on the shaving razor. Carpet fibers stuck to shoe soles and left behind on the tile of a diner’s greasy floor. No one ever really disappears without a trace. -From my essay, Interstate Radiographs

I was first introduced to forensic art four years ago, while excavating old memories and news articles for an essay. I was obsessed with Tammy Zywicki - a woman who had gone missing back in 1992, and whose body was found ten days later, stabbed to death and wrapped in a red blanket, dumped beside a Missouri highway. Why couldn't I just let her go? Hyperlinks led to more hyperlinks, questions to more questions, and every new fact complicated my memories of the case. I stared hard into her black-and-white photograph, and I realized this image was all I really had. It was worse than DNA, worse than a hair sample or skin cell. I wanted evidence, something I could use to tell her story.

That's when I learned about forensic sculpture, how artists can reconstruct a face from just the skull. Wasn't this what I was doing? From that day forward, I began to think of writing as forensic, meaning that it uses an essentially scientific process to establish facts about a case (facts which are later called into question by yet another forensic process - see below). All the little fragments and objects of our lives - makeup scraped beneath fingernails, chemicals laced in the cuticles of the hair, torn tights and piles of dirty clothes, the specific frequency of a voice, chipped teeth, limps, worn-down shoes, pollen trapped in ink as we drag a pen across the page - are evidence. They are not evidence simply because they exist, but because they exist within a specific context. That is, they form spatial and temporal relationships that can tell a powerful story. Rigorous investigation adds dimension and depth, uncovering the emotional and intellectual connections, making poetic leaps from one piece of evidence to the next.

This is not literal. I don't take my writing to the laboratory. But it is not exactly a metaphor, either. Think of it as writing in an epistemic mode. I am a detective, and so I understand the world in terms of evidence. A pathologist who thinks not in terms of disease, but in terms of the mechanism of death. Or a forensic pathologist, too, examining shattered skulls, determining whether accident or blunt force trauma broke the bones. A scientist, constantly aware of my biases. An artist, concerned with aesthetics.

Forensic has more than one meaning, and one of them is relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation. And so, I am also a prosecutor presenting her case. A defense lawyer cross-examining witnesses, calling their testimony into question. Just as the prosecutor takes evidence before the court, so does the writer take the specific - and often dark - details of her life (or the lives of others) before an audience. That point of intersection is what I'm interested in, the place where epistemology ends and collaboration begins. The audience - the jury - changes everything. And I want them to do this. Without this transaction, my process is incomplete. The writing might as well be a diary entry. This is different from writing for an audience, or with fantasies of publishing in a particular journal. It requires that you write in order to ask more questions, not to solve them. Let the story emerge from the evidence. Let the audience construct the narrative.

This is why I often write in fragments, barely tracing a narrative arc between the lines. It leaves my process - and my epistemology - bare, so that the story emerges from the relationships between evidence, as opposed to an explicit rendering on the page. You might even call this sculpture in reverse - a peeling away of the layers, until I can get back to the rawest form of evidence I can find. But like the prosecution and defense, I have to make sure I give enough. There's a fine balance between collaborating with your audience and making them work too hard.

It is also why I love Mondrian, with his primary colors, golden rectangles, and meticulously ordered compositions. He, too, was excavating evidence, looking for ways to reveal truth without telling it outright. His compositions reveal the structural relationship between man and nature, humanity and divinity. Vertical lines represent the universal, horizontal the individual. Intersection is the place where his art lives. Primary colors, for primary sources. No portraits. No myths. Only the structure is explicit. The rest is left to his audience, his jury.

The same is true of Mark Rothko, whose color-field paintings are all about transaction and transformation, structure and its relationship to truth. E.L. Doctorow's City of God is probably the best literary example of what I'm getting at, with its multiple voices and fragmented narrative.

As for why I think about process at all, perhaps R.D. Laing says it best, in The Politics of Experience:

The Life I am trying to grasp is the me that is trying to grasp it.

There is really nothing more to say when we come back to that beginning of all beginnings that is nothing at all. Only when you begin to lose that Alpha or Omega do you want to start to talk and write, and then there is no end to it, words, words, words. At best and most they are perhaps in memoriam, evocations, conjurations, incantations, emanations, shimmering, iridescent flares in the sky of darkness, a just still feasible tact, indiscretions, perhaps forgivable ...

City lights at night, from the air, receding, like these words, atoms each containing its own world and every other world. Each a fuse to set you off ...

If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.

*I have added a forensics category in the sidebar. My very first post on this blog was about forensic taphonomy, a field which has captured my imagination so deeply I'm considering a career in it.

Forensics is all about individualization. Saliva smears on a half-empty glass, loose hairs trapped in the vacuum cleaner, paint chips, shoeprints, tire tracks in dried mud, cigarettes smashed out on the garage floor - all of these are unique. Clamp your molars into bubble gum, and you have just handed over your toothprint. Light the cigarette, let your spit soak the tip of the filter. You are leaving your DNA all over the place. Very few things aren't part of your story.

This is why I still write in notebooks. I love the pressure of my pen as it drags across the thin sheet, the way my handwriting starts out neat and controlled, then expands until it fills several lines at a time. Notebooks are evidence in their own right - a whole stack of DNA samples, right here in my closet. They turn documents into relics. You are not just reading words. You are examining the shape of the letters, the color of ink, the coffee stain inside the front cover, the elastic band that holds the cover shut, the inside pocket, the cross-outs and smears and illegible handwriting, the heavy pressure of the pen one day, the fainter lines a few days later. You are making an identification.

Notebooks remind me that writing is, above all, an epistemological act. The notebooks are not clean. The writing is not controlled. They represent creation in its rawest form. The form before the form. The form that identifies me most.

Did you know there's a whole field of forensics devoted to pollen? That pollen gets trapped inside the dark liquid you trace across the page? That your signature contains an entire landscape? A season?

Later, I will post about the different kinds of notebooks I use, and why each one is devoted to a distinct process or question - another form of individualization.

Recently, I stopped my practice of crossing the street against the walk signal. I used to look both ways, glance over my shoulder for fast-turning SUVs, and scurry across. I walk fast. I move fast. I like to feel my hamstrings and calves burn as I race through the downtown grid. I like to hear my breath and feel my cheeks flush red with heat. Maneuver through crowded sidewalks like a video-game spaceship through an asteroid storm.

Now, I stand at each red light, breathing deep, imagining my spine stretching upward, the spaces between vertebrae expanding. I pull my shoulder blades back to open my chest, then release my trapezius muscles, allowing tense shoulders to relax - not an easy movement with backpack straps digging deep into flesh and bone. My metatarsals engage, and my body weight spreads evenly across the soles of my feet. This has always been my favorite yoga pose. Standing Mountain. From the outside, it looks so simple - stand up straight, breathe deep. But it is not merely mimetic. Your body is quite literally transformed - torso taller, foundation strong as rock. Muscles twitch like little seismic shifts. Blood flows warm and slow like lava. At each corner, I imagine Mt. Hood in the distance, and my facial muscles relax, lips soften. For one brief moment, I have escaped the city grid.

Fellow pedestrians flash unapproving looks my direction. Can't you see the street is empty? You're not going to get hit. Businessmen, in their navy wool suits and polished black wingtips, seem to pity my slow pace. Doesn't she have somewhere to be? Powerpoint slides to present? Phone messages? Memos to dictate? Email?

In choosing to follow the traffic laws, I have broken a social code. Move fast. Live fast. Have somewhere to be. Don't get distracted. Don't stand still. Don't pay attention. Just move. I refuse to split time into its smallest intervals - to count the minutes and seconds between point a and point b. I am willing to take a few moments to stand still. In this case, it is more subversive to follow the law than to break it. The humble intersection transforms into a kind of transgressive space. A real place.

In the intersection, my private stillness meets your public movement. Breathing in, the grid is the grid. Breathing out, the grid is not the grid. I am fast. I am not fast. I have a strong foundation. I no longer live in the same city as you.

I tend to think of the Internet as a place, rather than a collection of documents or pages. When I click links, I do not simply sit back and watch moving pixels on my iMac's glowing LCD. I actually feel movement in my feet - soles pressed into the floor, tendons stretched and ready. Tactual hallucination? Sometimes, I flex my calves tight, lift my heels, as if balancing on tip-toe, standing tall to look out over a vast expanse. I wander, get lost, and find myself again. In my mind, it is no coincidence that we use the word site to draw boundaries between places on the web, dragging our metaphorical sticks through the sand.

Site has many meanings. In architecture and urban planning, it is the place where a structure (or structures) was, is, or will be located. In history and casual conversation, it is the setting where something happened or happens. A civil war site. (I love also how this sounds like cite, as in to cite a source, which really just means locating information for future readers, leading them to the place you found it).

Yesterday, I stumbled across a 1999 interview with Jeff Bezos while doing research for a freelance gig. As I read, I realized I was no longer occupying a place. I was surveying it. Or maybe, I was reading a historical document. I checked the URL to make sure it was really PBS.org, verified the date, and looked for author credits. I was authenticating and contextualizing the words - the analytic processes of historical and archeological research.

PAUL SOLMAN: What is this?

JEFFREY BEZOS: Yes. No Problem. So I got my whole family these World Trade Center escape kits.

These words gave me chills. Here was an artifact jostled out of its soil layer, eerily juxtaposed with the post 9/11 world. I had never felt quite like this while reading a web page. Had the illusion of place been destroyed? Was the web just a collection of documents after all? Digital artifacts? Relics?

Was every page an elegy?

But no place is ever so simple. No place exists as only one kind of site. The World Trade Center is a perfect example - a site where towers once stood, but also historic, a place where something happened. It is textual, too - not only because it was written into history, but also in its own right. Architecture and visual art speak specific languages. Like journalism and creative writing, these languages exist within (or against) a formal, cultural, and historical tradition. You can read the buildings for meaning, and you can read their collapse, too. All of this is part of the site.

Perhaps this complexity is what best defines a place - not its tactual, physical existence or political boundaries. When I surf the web, I can stand on tip-toe for real.