An original confession

The more I read about this movie, the more I realized I could not find anything original to say. In the age of mechanical reproduction, original is gone with the wind, blown away by the modernist storm. How to adapt my self to this new sad condition, the death of creativity? So I decided to copy, cutting and pasting footage from Rem Koolhaas texts, a desperate attempt of finding meaning without narrative, without inventing a smart story.

Asking Koolhaas to “sponsor” this brief dictionary, I thought I could hide my blindness, that state of distraction in which I felt, unable to make any connection but tracing the spectacle of this replica environment.

Surprisingly he answered me:

Here is the excerpt page from S,M,L,XL dictionary I found on my table yesterday, just to give you an idea:

Quote (1):

I hate quotations

Quote: (2)

I am a foreigner to myself in my own language and I translate myself by quoting all the others

Rem Koolhaas

What would you have done if you were in my place?… I was tired to write too long texts…

But what about a hypertext?…

Francesco Mancini

a visual dictionary

for the hedonistic traveler:

from Paris to Tativille

Child

Nothing is more useful than to adopt the status of a child

Charming

I find her charming

Chauvinism

Naturally stress will be put on the social and cultural importance of cooking and eating in France. This means right from the start that one is not to limit oneself to the American or north European approach to catering which consists of distributing food in a hygienic condition and profitably, but completely standardized

Exterior

How can you be enclosed within emptiness, how can you visit a line? Yet incontestably the Eiffel tower is visited; we linger within it before using it as an observatory. What is happening? What becomes of the great exploratory function of the inside when it is applied to this empty and depthless monument which might be said to consist only of an exterior substance?

Eyes

Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes. Eyes which do not see

Experimental

The really experimental directions of situationist activity consist in setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a temporary field of activity favorable to these desires

Exclusion

In a society such our own we all know the rules of exclusion. The most obvious and familiar of those concerns what is prohibited

Façade

Architects are like kidnap victims who have to phone home to say they are all right even when the gun is being held to their head. Hardly any architect dares to point out the dangers, humiliations and absurdities of the building process. As long as this does not happen, nobody can see through the heroic façade of the architect

Frugal

Frugal does not mean cheap, it simply means you don’t waste anything

Future

I saw people walking around in it without knowing it, because they were still thinking in the past. But all you had to do was know you were in the future and that’s what put you there. The mystery was gone, but the amazing was just starting

Glance

One glance can animate the void dance. Looking away is the passion day by day, year by year the imitative act hot from the mould of the original fact, until we can no longer contain the cry or live untouched in the house of replicas

Global

I think of myself being global. I see myself participating in global activities: sitting in jets, talking to machines, eating small geometric food and voting over the phone

Go

Get away from Paris and Amsterdam and go see Shangai. Go straight away and without any preconceived ideas.

That’s what I can say

Grid

The grid – or any other subdivision of the metropolitan territory into maximum increments of control – describes an archipelago of “cities within cities”.

The more each “islands celebrates different values, the more the unity of the archipelago as system is reinforced. Because change is contained on the component “islands” such a system will never to be revised

Hedonism

We always suspected that modern architecture is in reality, a hedonistic movement and that its severity, abstraction and rigor are only framework on which more provocative settings for that experiment which is modern life are constructed

Hidden

With consummate skill the spectacle organizes ignorance of what is about to happen and, immediately afterwards, the forgetting of whatever has nonetheless been understood.

The more important something is, the more is hidden

Human

In the same way that surplus values are increasingly independent of manpower in the post-capitalist technological environment, the human scale ceases to be applicable to a topography implemented mechanically:

The phenomenological relationship between the human body and constructed space loses its sense

Identity

I do not believe in some “new identity” which would be adequate and authentic.

But I do not seek some sort of liberation from identity. That would lead only to another form of paralysis. The oceanic passivity of undifferentiation. Identity must be continually assumed and immediately called into question

Images

Images have become our true sex object, the object of our desire. The obscenity of our culture resides in the confusion of desire and its equivalent materialized in the image not only for sexual desire, but in the desire for knowledge and its equivalent materialized in “information”, the desire for fantasy and its equivalent programmed into vacation itineraries, the desire for space and its equivalent programmed into private telematics. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, the viral contaminations of things by images, which are the fatal characteristics of our culture

Incoherence

Incoherence seems to me preferable to a distorting order

Information

Information can be found anywhere. We can be in the presence of information without receiving it

Into

But recent spatial transformation has brought about an unforeseen difficulty: it is no longer possible to see the entire text from one position. It seems that characters suspended in the foreground obstruct our view of the characters located behind them. So In order not to miss relationships that could provide the key to understanding this language, let us move into the text….

Metropolis

In the geography of advanced forms of capitalism, metropolis equals world

Megalomania

Architecture is a very bizarre profession in the sense that it is a poisonous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is obviously true that our dreams and fantasies are megalomaniac and we are doomed to wait passively for occasions where we can realize fragments of that megalomania

Moral

There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena

Modernity

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent: it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable

Not

Le future de l’architecture n’est pas architectural

Objects

Our plan is to drop a lot of odd objects onto your country from the air. And some of these will be usefull, and some will be just… odd

Obsolete

No man wants to be told what they are wearing is obsolete next season. It is like making fun o0f them

Satisfaction

I have CNN, I have MTV. I have chips. What more do I need.

Permanent

The rites of passage are no longer intermittent. They have become permanent

Paris

The cool: 10, Rue Jean Bologne,

16l, tel. 42.24.69.13

devant l’eglise de passy.

De 11.00h a 18.00h brunch solide

De 50 a 120F

Prevez egalement l a marquise au chocolat.

Gentilesse un peu naïve del accueil et confort des fauteuils roset pour oublier passy le dimanche

Parlez

Parlez en anglais, for Christ’s sake.

Je ne parle pas francais

Slowly

Many of the watchers were still trapped in traffic miles away, when the space shuttle lifted off, and they were still there, when the traffic began to flow, ever so slowly, the other way

Shopper

He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a wild and vacant stare

Shopping

It is an activity consisting of predictable yet indeterminate activities, where, as in the cinema, what we go to see, what we experience over and over again is our own desire

Short

Paris reckons it is short of 700.000 parking spaces for the 1.3 million cars entering the city each day

Showroom

Shop all of Europe in one showroom!

Simulacrum

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1: it is the reflection of a basic reality

2: it masks and perverts a basic

reality

3: it masks the absence of a basic reality

4: it bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum

View (1)

The spectacular view always made him aware of his ambiguous feeling for this concrete landscape. Part of its appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built not for man, but for man’s absence

View (2)

I like the view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it