Tag: half-life

10 a.m. // By random lot the next hour in my posting queue happens to include this day one year ago, November 13. And so, please remember that one year ago today the alley reeked of garbage and stale beer. It doesn’t always. Today — the first sustained sub-freezing morning of the winter of 2019…

3 a.m. // Often while observing my neighborhood for these writings, I can’t help but observe the cops. They of course also observe, though much more conspicuously. At times I felt an urge to erase these stories from the Half/Life project, to walk to another part of the block, to tell a different story. But…

3 p.m. // Caring starts with noticing and acknowledging those around you. This was a big theme of these walks — noticing and acknowledging people and details easily missed. 9 1/2 Street is often a backdrop for photo shoots. Girls change outfits in cars and shoot photo after photo that end up where? On Instagram?…

4 a.m. // Four a.m. is the hour I am least likely to be up and out and observing sharply. It is an hour for sleepwalking and hazy minds. To engage the residents of four a.m. with a clear-eyed 10 a.m. voice is to speak nonsense. Better to let the dream state unfold. The sun…

6 a.m. // I’m up and outside more often during the 6 a.m. hour than most people. I like to get a quick walk or a run in early. But I tend to follow familiar routes, tend to be focused internally rather than on the world around me. On my usual early walks, I would…

11 p.m. // Often when we were due to step outside for Half/Life the weather was terrible. Many of the randomly appointed hours last winter were wet. A few were absurdly cold. Slowing down and taking notes on the mundane feels especially foolish at times like these. Is it possible to write while holding an…

Midnight // When I decided to share this quiet year-long project on noisy Instagram, I was several walks in and hadn’t thought to photograph the early walks. I decided to go back and re-do them so there would be a tidy matching set of posts for all 24 hours. Midnight was one of these requiring…

2 a.m. // No two 2 o’clock hours are the same. If the sequence of hours given by the random number generator I consulted last October had been spit out in a different order, the observations that Katherine, Kristin and I came up with for Half/Life would all have been different. These works are the…

The following was written for “Half/Life,” a zine accompanying the collaborative exhibition of the same name on view at H-Space (located on 9 1/2 Street NW in Washington, DC), through September 28, 2019. Zines are available now in the Future Cartographic store. The half in Half/Life references the name of the street we set out…

What is the half-life of a city block? The block I live on is changing fast. Fences went up this week around the towering old Grimke school—built in 1887 and vacant for many years. A paid parking lot where club-goers blasted music, primped and made out before and after hitting the dance floor has also…