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[realcameronfrye]

For my map I decided to turn the Google Map representation of Los Angeles in a Mobius Strip. While I have yet to take a topology class and still a little bit unclear about the exact properties that make the ship unique and useful as an object of study, one thing that does interest me is the strip’s treatment that travel along the curvature of its surface. A line that starts out at any given point along the surface and traverses around the strip will end on the opposite side of the strip when returning to its point of origin. Without reaching too far to find a metaphor, I feel that this bending of our geometric intuition, of something completing what seems like a full circuit and yet not returning to its exact spatial location is perhaps representative of the sort of distortion that takes place in tropic of orange, where the deconstruction of our structures that govern geography and spatial relationships ultimately results in a weird and seemingly bizarre reorientation of the Los Angeles cityscape. For me at the very least, this reorganization is reminiscent of a deconstructionist I read in my other English class this semester, Helene Cixous, who concluded that the culmination of the deconstructionist project as the usurpation of traditional Western metaphysics would not only fundamentally reshape the societal and political order, but also completely change our conception of the most basic tenants of reality. While I don’t think my Mobius strip transformation of the Los Angeles comes close to the level of “wackiness” in terms of some of the transformations that occur in the book; I think my remapping illustrates the fungibility of some of our spatial intuitions regarding the nature of space when some of our initial epistemological parameters are modified.

[realcameronfrye]

Tumblr Reflection 2

One of my friends wrote a paper based on the cartoon posted above while we were both enrolled in a religious existentialism course during my second semester at Oberlin. While I didn’t spend enough time reviewing his paper to recall his exact thesis, what I do remember is that he posited that the internet’s ability to portray an individual as a username, profile picture, and comment history allowed said individual a great deal more “freedom” in their various online interactions than if said individual was performing the same actions or interacting with the same subjects in the non virtual world. His main justification for this fact relied on the observation that the internet allows us a great deal more choice as to how we wish to approach and interact with various encounters. This might seem to be a bit of an odd statement but further investigation only seems to corroborate its veracity. In my day to day interaction, for example, who I speak and communicate with is often not dictated as much by my desire to speak to a specific individual, but rather by circumstances governed by simple rules of time and space and serendipity. Since extricating ourselves from these rules seems to be a futile effort it seems fair to say that by limiting our capacity and breadth of choice these rules subsequently limit our freedom. As the internet seems to allow us to explicitly dictate who we want to interact with and when we want to interact it seems to neatly circumvent these constraints placed on our freedom by time and space by opening whole avenues and branches of choice previously left inaccessible. While globalization, no matter how poorly defined the terms seems to be less concerned with modern existentialist conceptions of thought and more preoccupied with the politics of movement and economy in the post war and digital era, this proposed connection between this “liberating” aspect of the internet and the concept of globalization as a whole might seem specious at best, however I think a valid connection can be made in the way that this stripping of an individual’s confinement to time and space also strips the individual of any obvious indicators of ethnic or national origin, allowing someone on the internet essentially act as an unmoored, and nationals, individual without any discernible history except for that which may be in their web browser. In this regard the internet seems to function as a force of hyper- liberalism; one that posits a sort of focused individualism in which traits such as personal history, identity, or origin, are made seemingly irrelevant and the most essential principle suddenly becomes the fulfillment of the individual’s desire for information and the placation of their demand for freedom.

[realcameronfrye]

Tumblr Reflection 1

Hailing from Los Angeles where fusion restaurants, cultural hybridity, and low grade appropriation occur at a relatively high frequency to make all of these issues relatively passe, perhaps the biggest shock for me upon entering Oberlin was its distinct Americana vibes. While fighting traffic on any one of Los Angele’s infamous freeways, or waiting to find a parking spot whilst 10 cars deep in the parking queue at one of of 4 local Trader Joe’s my mom would often wax nostalgic about the time she spent at the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana as an undergraduate, about the relationships that were formed by routinely running into the same people at the grocery store, of the far more decreased pace of living, of the fact that the entire town was still feasible to travel in between the hours of 7 - 10 in the morning and 5 - 8 at nights. While I often attributed some of this vented frustration to the simple difficulties imposed by urban living, I never reflected on the more communal aspects of what she was saying, of not only how small town America seems to foster closer knit communities but also what type of communities were formed in these places. While my mom never explicitly gestured about what type of communities she was speaking of, during my brief tenure at Oberlin I think I am beginning to understand a bit of her feelings of cultural displacement. To a certain extent I feel that there is a certain sense of comfort and security in homogeneity, the fact that one can remain reasonably certain that one’s environment and encountered stimulus will remain consistent allows one to perhaps detach from some of the uncertainty that we routinely face in the world, and remove ourselves from a consistent fight or flight cycle and processes of adaptation. In this regard, Oberlin, with its relatively timeless brick facade buildings and overgrown arboretum offers a sense of relief in its intrinsically timeless appeal. However I think this term timeless can be a bit deceiving in this context as my use of the term implies a sort of universality that I don’t think is directly applicable to this situation. While Oberlin’s sense of timelessness could perhaps be conflated with a feeling of chronological stasis, of some sort of frozen facsimile of the past century or so, I think it would be a bit far fetched to conflate Oberlin’s ability to be in two times at the same place with a sort of omnipresence throughout time and history. The reason I think this realization is relevant to the current prompt question is because it reveals that Oberlin’s timelessness is not some immutable, “classical”, or definitive attribute defined throughout the ages, world without end, but rather an artifact of the Town’s rather recent history, and despite its recent history, is far more mutable than it appears to be. Take the case of Kim’s. Perhaps more so than any other restaurant in Oberlin, Kim’s is the one that I have trouble reconciling with being in a small, rural town in NorthEastern Ohio. In Los Angeles such shops and restaurant combinations owned by first generation immigrants are certainly not uncommon; as a matter of a fact they often are some of the first places that patrons frequent to fetch “authentic” Korean, Japanese, or Hispanic cuisine as Los Angeles has a substantial migrant population from each of these corresponding geographic locales. In Los Angeles I could see Kim’s surviving if not thriving in the relatively niche market for imported, international grocery as well as cooking that a large city such as Los Angeles affords if by nothing else by the sheer volume of its inhabitants. The fact that Kim’s seems to consistently be operating at full capacity is perhaps more than an indication of the commonly held mantra that “most Obies come from the coast and bring a bit of the coast with them,” but rather indicative of the far reaching power of globalism, one where increased connectivity both in terms of transport and communication have allowed seemingly foreign artifacts from places that seem inconceivably distant and far way while stuck in Oberlin to permeate its wholesome facade of American timelessness. Rendering judgement as to whether this is “good” or “bad” is beyond the scope of this post; what perhaps can be said though, is perhaps to my mother’s as well as Walden’s chagrin, globalization seems to be making escaping into some crystallized moment in the past far more difficult, as the last strongholds of the globally fractured world seem to be growing few and far between.