To notice the convention is still to be caught up in it

an uninteresting rock

Take the idea of an uninteresting rock. An uninteresting rock that has no classificatory capacity, really, in what we're doing.

We don't classify it, we don't put it in with other things. We take it from a place. It's not special, it doesn't need to stay there.

almost nothings

Sometimes it can seem as though these almost nothings too easily become somethings. In that becoming a something, the movement slips away and a perspective or a standing comes to a stop. The movement or contingency of the road as such falls away when the road becomes a subject itself. So blur as phenomena or modality makes sense, while blur as object does something different, a holding in place contained by the dust on a car’s windshield.

It’s very difficult to generalize about the thing. I mean, there is no thing. There's all this stuff that people do with this phenomenon, whatever it is, with an entity.

We can't climb outside or say, "Look, there's a nice little place, we can go stand on it and look at the content.” This is kind of the way that Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) works, too. They're in it. Totally in it, doing the work from inside, performing it in a particular way. Instantiating a kind of shift.

road as subject

People love the 110, how you’re driving through a neighborhood toward an entrance and suddenly it's a right turn, a stop sign, and you're immediately on the freeway. It's narrow, which makes it seem faster. It has all these experiential things about it that are different. A different kind of surface or the weird humming surface. Or remember the strange, peeping whistling surface of the 101? The new asphalt that was actually making the car make a high pitched noise, or rather the freeway was making the noise with the car.

The surfaces of Mulholland Drive. Gravel, asphalt... that one stretch that really probably was not meant for driving in any way at this point is the first stretch we went on.

The dust swallowing the car in its cloud. We drove on an unpaved road, churning up dust clouds, clouds of dust until faced with a gate.

The dust of that one was really surprising to me. This thing of dust clouds, but also dust clouds that are what's making a haze or part of what becomes haze. It's atmospheric. It doesn't just resemble a cloud, it’s in the air. It's affecting the light. It's affecting how we see, what you can see, it affects the view, you can't see the mountains because the haze - which maybe is mostly smog, or smog that's all the dust that's being stirred up.

The road and all the views, the viewpoints, the vistas, the double yellow line. I can't go across here, can't get the vista on the other side. You can't see the view. And they're all these public parks, but you have to drive to them. Some are designed for views and some are designed to not show you anything. Something like that, you can't see anything. There's this whole whole thing happening - this whole practice of getting on a trail or looking at a view: of downtown, of The Valley, of the ocean.

There's a lookout on the map – what's on that. Somebody's bench. Right. But the two parallel Mulholland Drives are right there also. The one that ended at the gate. It's like a gated community. If that was Mulholland. I think it was Mulholland. And then the other that became unpaved very quickly.

declination

We've been driving so much, but we've also been going up. We've also been going up hills. It just feels like what we're looking at is management – engineering and management. But where's the incline?

“Everything drains to the ocean.” We're here again.

It's something that stabilizes the incline. It defers addressing it as something off balance or out of whack by naming it as a stability. How do you show that? What does it mean that even figures like climate change can be a kind of deferral? May themselves be a way of erasing or stabilizing contingency?

I'm going to make evident. It's subtraction or something. Okay. I'll make evident. A gesture and then the gesture of absenting.

I still want to save this idea of showing subtraction or staging or – maybe staging is the right word. Subtraction to the extent we're not doing this on the nose metaphor kind of thing or something, I guess that's right, so how to.

Well, this is like a declination. It's probably not the right word. I feel like I'm making up a word or something. Decline or declination, it was something different. But I think about it as smoothing away. Like deferral, like we're deferring something or we're not deferring, that’s not it either.

Deferring's a nice word, though. It is. But then it suggests that there might be a culmination of something. But the oblique, for instance, or declination. It’s not that it doesn't also do a kind of metaphoric or mimetic move, especially in terms of the “elusive” or the “spectral.”

tangential, oblique

Do you like the subtraction? We have to take away to make it work. Amplifying the subtraction. Or partial somethings that are obviously partial, a gust of wind.

The problem with fire and with clouds is the inapproachability and non- immediacy.

You can't get close to clouds (or fire). Or, rather, that’s actually not what seems interesting.

What seems interesting is how they come into proximity through these things, like mirrored glass.

The aviator glasses! Clouds reflect on my eyes and I can see the clouds. This is a really great way to get at how clouds are captured or come into proximity or are drawn into proximity.

So that's what's interesting to me about cloud seeding, it’s a project of making clouds. But it's also that reflection in the glass walls and the watercolors and then all those fantasies – What do you see in the clouds? What animal do you see? What thing? I don't know now. I mean, I was thinking a little bit about the sense of missing something.

it's very hard to say anything about fire because you're always saying something about something else, actually. If you look up fire, it's a reaction. It's not a thing, it's a relation, and those relations are animated or afforded.

I'll go shopping for aviators. Or are they oblique? I'm gonna make evident. It's subtraction or something. Okay. I'll make evident. A gesture and then the gesture of absenting. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. I don't if I can do it in Malibu, though.

Today's imagined version of this project is oblique. I think is a good word to keep in mind, right? Or even tangential. Oblique is maybe nicer because it has a more of a gradation. Has a different relation to a thing, I guess. A thing that's not a thing.... I mean, if it's oblique to a thing that's not a thing. It can be a thing. Right. Well, a stick. Yeah. But it's not oblique to fire. It’s oblique to a thing that's not a thing. I don't know what the opposite would be. A stick would make it seem like, oh, yeah, this thing is about fire. But if we're saying actually what we're interested in, what the thing is, what the subject is, is a thing that is categorically a thing that's not a thing. And then a stick is kind of an interesting, oblique object. Although we might not really find a stick that we like in these places, either.

You want the thing that refuses the capacity to name it as a thing. Okay. What do you think that is? Well, now I'm thinking about your aviators again. It's actually pretty good for some of this. Holding clouds – they hold clouds.

movement

How do you get out of the problem of classification and categorization.

What we're missing is the movement. I haven't really felt like the places themselves offer movement, unless we're just not to pay attention in the right way. [yesterday 7/25/26 I said the same thing about the writing, about making the road the subject. We lose the animating concepts, questions, almost nothings. D asks, what would it mean to write “almost nothing”?] What do you mean “movement”? Well, they're still. Obviously water is moving in these places, but there isn’t a kind of intrinsic instability to something.

Oh, this thing at the Watts Towers moving with the sun is really interesting. That I like and maybe we can think about that. There's a Donald Judd piece in Marfa that does the same thing. It's a bunch of his boxes all lined up and they shift with the sun. Which is different than wind sculptures, which are being blown. Here the metal expands or contracts with heat, making the sculpture bend or flex or move as they as they heat up, there's something about their construction. They contract, they expand. They're not static. it's the rebar, it's the metal part of it that's doing that, and then it cracks the concrete. That doesn't mean they point to the sun or they rotate with the sun or something. It means that they experience increasing and decreasing heat and then something happens. So I kind of wanted to know about what is this something that's happening and how are they moving or rotating. it's worth looking into. There's a funny thing about conservation and plasticity. Pulling out the things that construction workers in the ‘70s stuck in. They weren't artists. They just slapped the concrete on and made a new foot. And made a new shoe.