Koan's New Writeups

Reclaim The Streets (thing)

2003-05-20T01:52:01Z

CARS CANNOT DANCE: When they move they are violent and brutish, they lack sensitivity and rhythm. CARS CANNOT PLAY: When they diverge from the straight and narrow, they kill. CARS CANNOT SOCIALISE: They privatise, separate, isolate and alienate. ¹

Celebration, Florida is the world's first fully privatised city. Everything, from its footpaths and roads, to its parks and "Town Square," is privately owned. The streets themselves are literally the property of the Disney Corporation. The concept may seem strange at first, but on further analysis it becomes apparent that the notion of an entirely privatised city is merely the logical extension of a worldview in which 'everything is up for sale.' It is this worldview, and the loss of public space and 'the commons' to private corporations that it inevitably entails, that the Reclaim the Streets movement is working to undermine. Participants in the movement seek to 'reclaim' a form of…

Autobiography of a Nation (thing)

2003-04-23T13:20:46Z

The name of a song written by New Jersey emo/emo-core/hardcore band Thursday. When hearing it on their second album, Full Collapse, I couldn't help but notice the similarities between it and a poem by respected language poet Michael Palmer. But claims that the poem was "plagiarised" by the band are clearly exaggerated, and I hope to show this by putting the two texts up here for you to compare. The following are the lyrics to Autobiography of a Nation:

Write these words back down inside
We have burned their villages
and all the people in them died
We adopt their customs
and everything they say we steal
All the dreams they had we kill
Still we all sleep sound tonight
Is this what you wanted to hear?
We erased all their images and dance
And replaced them with borders and flags

At the top of this timeline you'll remember
This is the

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You, standing (idea)

2003-04-23T06:01:53Z

You, standing on the corner
of a leaf scattered street.
The wind scrapes past like a hundred claws.

You leaf through paper
on a wind streaked street.
Your dirty glasses reflect the sky.

You, raked by the wind
on a leaf scraped street,
blind and listening for cars.

You wait at a corner
while leaves wind through the street.
A hundred cars burn holes in the sky.

You, drifting along a dirty street
with the wind. The sky burns brown
as you move, head down.

You wind through hot brown streets.
You rub your glasses with your shirt,
trying to see. You leave.

How to rent a house (idea)

2003-03-26T12:38:40Z

Real estate agents are elitist assholes. When you're young, poor, a student or part of a group, it can be hard to convince them to let you rent a property. Sometimes it can be really hard. What to do? First of all, check out How not to rent a house. This is good stuff. Next, you need to deal with your biggest disadvantage when compared with other prospective tenants: your application form. Think about it. Why would an estate agent rent a house to group of students with casual jobs, when they could choose to rent it to a pair of young professionals?

Consider carrying out the following technique. It has been used by me to great success in the past and will hopefully be similarly successful in the future. The technique is adding a cover letter to the rental application form.

Use this letter to prove to the estate agent that you will be a reliable tenant, even if you're credentials don't look so good on the forms you are…

The Body Artist (thing)

2003-03-24T10:40:47Z

In a letter to Jonathan Franzen, Don Delillo claims that

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has come to an end.

I believe that The Body Artist, Delillo's most slight and yet possibly most challenging novel yet, is an interrogation of this concept: the breakdown of identity in late capitalist society.

Let's begin by putting the remark into context. Franzen was writing to Delillo in distress about the state of "serious literature," worried that, in this age of instant gratification, no-one seemed to want to bother with challenging works of fiction any more. As well as the above, Delillo replied that writing:

...is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see

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David Foster Wallace (person)

2003-03-23T15:44:54Z

This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?

David Foster Wallace is a writer who sits in a difficult position: he is a hip, ironic, brilliantly intelligent postmodernist as well as profoundly empathetic and perhaps even sentimental. His work uncomfortably straddles this divide between irony and empathy, sometimes pushing the former so far that it comes to resemble the latter.

Take for instance the passages in Infinite Jest depicting the life led by Don Gately and his alcoholic mother, who was physically abused by her ex-military partner. Wallace manages to make these scenes both absurdly cartoonish and incredibly painful:

The M.P. had made the toddler Don Gately return empty Heineken bottles to the neighborhood packy and then haul-ass on back with the bottle-deposits, timing him with a U.S.N.-issue chronometer. He never laid a hand on Gately personally,

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