minutes after the fact, with only the lurching treadmarks of the motorized medical cart left to scar the otherwise rectilinear striations of the gridiron pitch, one remains amazed at how the spectacle industry has developed protocol for neurological devastation to the collective football flesh …

The urban gait surfer locates traces of itself throughout the archives of the city and the annals of its moving bodies. This city is understood as a history of structures and flows, each interplaying with the other, constraining the possibilities of the other, and creating the other anew. But these are by definition only partial traces, gratuitous appropriations from an ever-changing trajectory of nomadism (the flâneur, the psychogeographer, the surfer, the street skater, the parkour athlete) to situate a particular social, cultural and political moment, as the twisted plaits of a braid form a beautiful (and communicative) knot in a macramé pattern before separating to become elsewhere and when.

In The Spirit of Terrorism, Baudrillard wonders, following 9/11, what architectural form is worthy of being annihilated today? In considering the question we must first acknowledge that any potentially targeted architectural object must carve out a unique form in both space and time. That a building should be distinctive enough in its spatial form and purpose is obvious, but an element of duration is also required for that object to have accumulated the requisite symbolic capital necessary to achieve a critical semiotic yield. This is what makes the case of the World Trade Center particularly interesting: in only three decades, the twin towers were able to absorb all of the symbolism of an American capitalism that had rapidly become multinational, with ambitions of radiating globally. Put differently, the light-speed of Hollywood and the spectacle-making industry had accelerated the process of forging duration.

From the forthcoming essay:
"La Bombe Philosophique: An Archaeology of the Stereoscopic Present (Or, Sorting Through the Shrapnel)"