Bl-urbs: For a text by the same name soon to be available (in print) at
fine bookstores everywhere.
Joe Amato
The titular Latin has no known origin . . . For millions in this country
the paradigm has been Manhattan; alternately, the urban is primary subtext
for most of what many of us now refer to as housing projects; a pretext,
otherwise, for cosmopolitan fashio ns since at least the fourteenth
century . . . Read it.
J. D. Wittenhouser, Jr.
city become
body architecture
made flesh
rapid transit to and fro made
of motion a thin
of marketplace exchange hence forth
the body the marketplace
the word embodied all electronic billboards signs not of
but for the times:
Whitman
was wrong after all
and so was I: things just
can't be this way.
W. C. Williams, sance de spiritisme
Fascinating! . . . probes into the most profound
of our animal fears . . . An accomplishment!
Kirkus Reviews
Our urban lives as Disney
amd McDonald's
and I would have them:
Makes a LOT of sense, folks.
Donald Trump
This is a goofy, brillant book.
Buy two copies, give one
to a friend.
Norman Mailer
Lines of transgression are not necessarily a prerequisite to positive
social reform. I live in a stone house.
H. Ross Perot
This is an erogenous, bluesy excursion, transporting the fragmented urban
psyche from a moment of spatial plenitude to the limits of neural
contingency. Electronic form is voided of all prior typographic content,
and we can begin to sense in the emerging inkless shadows a new
consciousness recombining out of the cybernetic soup, rollerblading away
from older Edenic contours toward the tangential incertainties of
ever-evolving siliconcrete culture. What we are left with, well who can
say?
Jean Baudrillard
[B]rings to mind two questions Alvin Toffler posed two decades ago in
Future Shock: What kind of cultural life should a great city of the
future enjoy? What resources would be needed to realize a given set of
goals? Toffler reasoned that the development of social assemblies would
aid in providing answers to these questions, that in fact we were fast
developing games and simulation exercises whose chief beauty was that
they helped players clarify their own values, such as Project Plato at
the Univers ity of Illinois. Unfortunately, the situation, as Bl-urbs
details it, has been rendered even more complex by the advent of
sociopolotical agenda that draw their strength from the very dislocations
wroght of accelerating change that Toffler lamented noma dic,
throw-away, ad hoc, image-laden, fragmented, modular. Bl-urbs proposed
solutions to this predicament are, in a word, breathtaking.
Wall Street Journal
' Some people are just plain hungry, that's all'.
From an interview conducted at a
at a large urban housing project
with a resident who refused to give
her name
syntax precludes whether commentary
withering tomatoes nonetheless vine-ripening
transportation migrates to living rooms
i need out
Anonymous graffiti found in authorØs
bathroom
Both sprawling metropolis and modest urban center are quick becoming at
once iinvestment havens for wealthy suburbanites (drawing their
financially less fortunate brethren into these environs) as well as traps
for the poor. . . . This text provides ample corroboration of the age-old
dictum that 'truth will'.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
Cyberspace looms large here . . . I just can't quite figure out
where. . . .
Timothy Leary
This is bullshit.
Hakim Bey
Our cities are in trouble, and this book
will only exacerbate the problem
Mario Cuomo
What gets me is not that something like this
is published, but that the public would seem to have
acquired a taste for such irreverent nonsense.
Marcel Duchamp III
Joe, who the fuck are you kidding? You've never even lived
in a big city.
The author's brother, Mike, prior
to the author having moved to Chicago
a few months back