The new Smith & 9th St. Station

The main advantage the new Smith and 9th Street station holds over its cousin at 4th Avenue and 9th street is that windows have been built into the wall on the main platform, so that while waiting one can engage in a sterile post-Romantic contemplation of capital accumulation, or project a one-sided history or sine-cosine function onto what was formerly an illegible dream, an asymptotic hologram composed of gates, like the temporary Christo and Jeanne-Claude installation in Central Park a half decade ago.

Christo’s artwork is a way to explain to almost anyone that the seemingly permanent neurasthenic hegemony is merely a leaf that is constantly falling on our shoulder. What is the difference between some pink umbrellas disrupting a landscape and a collection of Henri Rousseau paintings temporarily disrupting a good off-white room. What if Christo and Jeanne-Claude are behind the arbitrary and aberrant closures of whole stretches of the subway on alternating weekends. What if the windows in the new Smith and 9th Street station are temporary Christo/JC installations.

Someone showed me a photograph once of a bar in Jakarta made to imitate a car resting in old Smith and 9th Street Station. The eastward-ho movement of this splintering of code (it could well have been a capsized trireme or a recreation of the bar in the first Terminator film) recalls an abstract for a dispatch from the end of history. What if the Smith-9th Street bar in Jakarta was the catalyst for the integrating of a station on the F/G lines into the decay of the spectacle, represented in more immanent fashion by the numerous documentaries of Christo and Jeanne Claude

pitching their projects to various municipal bodies, themselves temporary installations of capital.

There is a gerrymandered statelessness present in the “lines of flight” of the artist

both towards and away from practical concerns.

What I’m asking is where is the boundary between the new, wobbly futurism of the refurbished subway station and the space delimited as Smith and 9th street bar, Jakarta. It’s not capital, because the liberalization of markets means that there are fewer and fewer possibilities for the cancellation or blockage of flows and bonds. Is the confluence of the reopening of the Smith and 9th street station and the presence of the Smith and 9th bar in Jakarta something along the lines of the accident of ontology that renders all places in competition to be either a space like the new subway station (i.e. providing the best approximation of motion and progress in the midst of a dreamy stillness) or a space like the bar in Jakarta (i.e. a flotilla of extra-territoriality that is more tactile than a pre-historic mirage). Neither place, we will admit, is fully authentic or fully able to contain the aporias of the given.

All of this reminds me of my friend Todd Colby, who presided over the auction at which I first saw the Jakarta photograph. Todd Colby is an argument for the permanent organic tide that will sweep away the romantic concessions we think of as our unchanging personal economies. Todd Colby, without deviating into an arbitrary and difficult to navigate futurism or a linguistic fuck tunnel capitulating to itself, has managed to re-organize conversation into a rite, recalling both the preserved texts of pre-Christian science and art that turned language into a way of inventing that couldn’t be perfectly signified, and the space behind mediation, the changing of scenery that turns one room in Halvard Solness’ house in Ibsen’s Master Builder into a completely different room. The first time I met Todd Colby, our conversation took the form of an interrogation, but less a bad date and more the Summa Theologica. He’s been known to ask question such as “What are you reading and why aren’t you reading Thomas Bernhard”. We share a birthday, along with Malcolm McDowell and WB Yeats and the Olsen Twins, who even now are climbing the Seven Towers and beginning the process that will culminate in the botanical resurrection of all just people. Todd Colby is the most transcendental flow available outside of the chorus of a Sly and the Family Stone song.

I’m imagining a Todd Colby moderated presidential debate between the revamped Smith/9th Street station and the identically named bar in Jakarta. The debate participants are allowed to walk freely about the stage, and even engage each other directly. The time limits of the debate are frequently dispensed with, as are its limits in a linguistic system relying on a rhetoric of persuasion. The audience is everyone in the world.

In his opening remarks, Todd Colby explains briefly the history of conversation, its evolution from literal pyramid schemes to witch speculation to the arguments for undressing.

In the return from the grandiose to the ordinary, you will find Smith and 9th Street is your halfway point, a reprieve in the devil’s dictionary commute from icon to symbol. You win again, and again, and again.

My favorite poem goes: “DeKalb, Atlantic-Pacific, 7th, Prospect Park, Parkside, Church, Beverly, Cortelyou”. The partitions of night.

Story by Drew Boston. Words and code by Leslie S.