Brett Michael Tracy
born:
28 January 1980
education:
BA, University of California at Davis
MFA, University of Chicago
personal websites:
burnthefurniture.com
my vimeo page
current reading:
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter -- Carson McCullers
recent reading:
No Exit -- Jean-Paul Sartre
"Open the door! Open, blast you! I’ll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes—all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears—I’ll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough."
The Giver -- Lois Lowry
“Our people made that choice, the choice to go to Sameness. Before my time, before the previous time, back and back and back. We relinquished color when we relinquished sunshine and did away with differences.” … “We gained control of many things. But we had to let go of others.”
Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality -- Tim Edensor
"Fostering notions about how the world might be differently ordered in accordance with looser aesthetics, less managed spaces, bodies and things, and multi-interpretable signs, ruins can hint at potential futures in which individual creativities and desires are nurtured rather than being subsumed under individualistic consumption."
Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization -- S. High and D. Lewis
“Like tourists in search of the pleasures of the imagination, urban explorers value the intensity of emotion and sensation that these abandoned sites afford them. Their sense of awe can frequently be heard in their hushed tones, and their attention to the aesthetics of deindustrialization. For some, industrial ruins are monuments to a vanished way of life – less a lament than a reminder. For most, these abandoned buildings are little more than post-industrial playgrounds. Nostalgia takes a back seat to the thrill of transgression.”
The Long Emergency (again) -- James Howard Kunstler
“The idea of beauty will surely return from it’s modernist exile, as one of the few consolations in the years ahead will be our ability to consciously craft things for reasons other than to merely shock and astonish.
The Long Descent -- John Michael Greer
“It’s not going too far, I think, to call belief in progress the established religion of the modern industrial world. In the same way that Christians have traditionally looked to heaven and Buddhists to nirvana, most people nowadays look to progress for their salvation and their explanation for why the world is the way it is."
Small is Beautiful -- E.F. Schumacher
“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war."
Galapagos -- Kurt Vonnegut
“Somewhere in Mandarax there should have been, but was not, a warning to this effect: In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done—so hunker down.”
A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition -- Ernest Hemingway
“A girl came in the café and sat by herself at a table near the window. She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin, and her hair black as a crow’s wing and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
"A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do."
World Made by Hand -- James Howard Kunstler
“Motion is a great tranquilizer.”
Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change -- William R. Catton, Jr.
"The Age of Exuberance in which the American dream unfolded was an early seral stage in the succession of New World community types. The post-exuberant age is a later stage in the same sere."
Sculpting in Time -- Andrey Tarkovsky
“And what are moments of illumination if not momentarily felt truth?"
Here's a reading list with a bunch of project related texts
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