In the middle of it all we were hanging out in the basement print lab of the UT architecture school. It was September 2008. I had my copy of ‘Strange Details’ alternately curved in my back pocket or stuck in my waistband like a pistol. An almost Los Angeleno night breeze spoke in the dark courtyards. It was the dry kind that made it feel like the sun was still up; the last time I felt it was poking my head out of the sliding wood door in my studio in Marina Del Rey ten years ago. I could feel my thicker hair and smell Ray Chi and Jin Won Kim’s cigarette smoke. Jin Won could smoke a whole unfiltered cigarette in under a minute, in 3 drags, with his hard yellow hand cupped over the top of the ember.

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(DECOMMISSIONED)

I am a connoisseur of silence. On my back porch the birds sing above the crouch of quiet cats. The Bubo Virginianus that lives in the woods behind my house is back. I hear him. I know silence not for its aural qualities, but merely as a condition in which I recognize the opacity of things, of the air. Airplanes from Hartsfield bring thunder invisibly from the low cloud ceiling all at once. It has been a silent afternoon.

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This will probably be a negative review. If so, it will not be necessarily Java Lords’s fault. The coming of the new year has this tableauxist reflecting on the last 12 months, which have contained some of his life’s most abysmal moments since 2004. The upcoming months look to be no less of a test. From all accounts in the mass media, 2008 is the worst year in decades by numerous metrics, and far worse is yet to come — and that is the optimistic view. Thus, the typically discounted misanthrope finds himself surrounded by similarly sour minds.

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