Nebuchadnezzar, never a bricklayer
let’s talk about brixs, baby! (The Window pt 67)
7:00 am. 3600 bricks to go.
Is the moon made of bricks? This morning, sunrise, there was a solar eclipse. Some advanced space civilization ages ago was like, They got microbes on Earth now, we better keep an eye on them, those motherfuckers’ll evolve into something and get dangerous sooner or later. Build a satellite for surveillance, use stuff from the planet to do it, make it look natural —round, grey and dusty is good. Place it precisely the right distance from earth so that it covers the sun exactly during an eclipse. They’ll eventually discover math and figure out that that wasn’t random, they’ll know someone’s watching, so they won’t misbehave. Also, what the hell, put some rings around Saturn.
I wish I worked on the moon, bricks’d be lighter. 450,000 lbs of bricks I’ll end up lifting this year. That’s Superman weight, just 4.5 pounds at a time. This road job, 50 bricks an hour, eight hours by nine days…that’s gonna be just over 16,000 lbs. Less if I crush a finger like ‘No-nail’ Withnail. Goddamn glad he and his fugly mashed-plumb thumb are not on my crew, he’s barely on his knees, he’s always standing, arms crossed, talking. Ugh, this brick is shit and it’s only my second one. Into the clinker pile.
Some ancient bricks still aren’t clinkers. The Colosseum, it’s still standing. Even the ones they dug up in Jericho. Just mud and straw, and shaped by hand, but after 9000 years and trumpet blasts and all that, still intact. Thumbprints pressed into them still visible. Maybe one is from the hand of a way-great grandfather of mine, 440 generations back. It’s possible. People are bricks in an infinite road.
Roman roads were made of bricks and blocks. A brick ain’t a block but both build, baby. A brick is a block when you need two hands. Pyramids were made from cut stone, ziggurats from fired clay. Two and a half million blocks in the biggest Egyptian pyramid. Twenty million bricks in that Iraq ziggurat. Every culture invented bricks, Sumerians, Incas, Romans, Indians. Maybe not Australians. No. Inuits did, in snow, but those are probably blocks. Definitely the Chinese, 3.8 billion bricks in the Great Wall. Man that musta costa lotta mooola to make.
A regular road brick costs about a buck. Basically just clay and water and fire to make. Clay is cheap cuz it’s everywhere. Maybe not in Australia. Aus. Oz has a road made of gold bricks. A regular gold brick is worth about two million dollars. 10 feet of city brick road costs out to about five hundred dollars. 10 feet of gold road to the Emerald City would cost…… $800 million. A whole city made of emeralds, wow, were the gems big enough to cut into bricks? Or even blocks? Sunsets on the city would be so spectacular. Could they facet the bricks? I bet they could with the Wizard and Witches and all the magic there.
New bricks now are basically magic. Like the translucent ones. Still made from fired clay, but they add in glass fibres instead of straw, so light passes through them. You could make a see-through Ziggurat! Other bricks can fix themselves, they add bacteria to the clay, so if one cracks it just grows a scab and heals. They must make bricks by now that grow other bricks. Maybe you could make a moon that way. And bricks can also be batteries, they make electricity, solar or pressure cells embedded in them, they even light up, the road glows and can charge cars. New bricks can compute cuz they have microchips in ‘em, so cities and buildings become circuits boards. There’s digital bricks too, like in Tetris and Minecraft. Easy to tile and build in those games, no LBs to haul or dust to inhale. Lifting and laying will be done by robots soon, iron knees don’t ache and titanium backs don’t break. Walls and roads are already being 3D printed. Entire buildings too, they can be made from basically one brick, a very long one that is looped back on top of itself. I’d make words and waves and weaves and whorls and other patterns with the loop.
Pattern for this road is Herringbone, structurally sound, distributes the weight well. Straight running bricks or stack bonds not as strong. Or interesting, too regular. Bricks are four-sided, and all the quadrilaterals are easy and fast to place but are boring tessellations. Triangles and hexagons too, cover a plane so plainly. Single-shape tiling is cool only when the polygons are convex and have five different sides. Not just a plain pentagon. Cooler are the non-convex complex single tiles, the monohedrals, the prototiles that can tessellate. Some you have to spiral to cover the space. They just discovered a 13-sided one, shaped kinda like a fedora, that can be tiled with itself, no gaps or overlaps. And it’s aperiodic. First monotile to ever do that! Wild that you could tile a road with it, and even if the road went all the way to the moon you’d never get a repeating pattern, like oh there’s that section again. They call it the Einstein tile.
Einstein lived until he was 76. A brick road lasts two Alberts, but an asphalt road lasts only one quarter of an Albert before it needs repair. So far I’m asphalt but I’m going for brick. Those Roman paved roads still exist, from England to Portugal to Iraq. A brick is a calendar and an odometer. You can measure the time and the territory of the Roman Empire cuz they left bricks everywhere over a thousand years and two million miles. They used mobile kilns to keep their bricks standard and to make them anywhere. For quality control, ownership, braggadocio, history, and maybe for prosperity, they stamped some bricks with the date and name of the Legion stationed at that location, then placed them in the walls and roads.
Kings also stamped their bricks. Nebuchadnezzar was never a bricklayer but still he bragged in bricks. He marked them with his name and accomplishments. Like I built the Ishtar Gate. He did this in blue and gold. I saw one in a museum so I started stamping my own. Well, scoring them anyway. I do it in black. I use a homemade manganese dioxide mix. It’s basically the stuff the cave painters used, we still see their graffiti. I take home a brick, Dremel in the date and my name, and add a personal note. Like I Ate a Burger for Breakfast. Then I black in the letters. Last thing is I dip my thumb in the manganese and press down my fingerprint. The next day the brick goes somewheres face-down in the bond. Words are bricks, a book is a road. I’ve left them all over. Two weeks ago in a wall I placed Top Score in Tetris Today. Two days ago in a park path through a flower bed I put down I Met a Girl. I scored one that hasn’t happened yet but I hope I get to put it in my autobrickography: My Son Was Born Today. That one I’ll finish in blue and gold before I lay it down. Who knows, maybe one of my bricks will end up next to old Neb’s one day. An archaeologist pulls out one of my bricks from some apocalyptic rubble two thousand years from now, sends it to a museum historian. They turn it over and read, with awe, with wonder: I built the Ishtar Gate, in Minecraft. Then I built the moon.
7:10. 3595 bricks to go.
NOTES:
Blue Collar Art: Lewis Hine famously photographed construction workers and labourers from the early 1900s and through the thirties. His most iconic photo “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” shows ironworkers casually eating lunch while sitting on a beam 850 feet above the ground. Except it wasn’t real, it was staged as a publicity stunt. Also, it might actually have been Charles Ebbets who took the photo. Or one of the other 2 photographers there that day. The negative of this iconic American photograph is now owned by Visual China Group.
Fine Art using bricks: Equivalent VIII, 120 bricks laid in a rectangle 6 across, 10 long, two high - Carl Andre, 1966. The Castle, a 75’ long x 12’ high brick wall, no mortar. Franz Kafka’s book The Castle inserted beneath a bottom brick causing bricks above to misalign- Jorge Mendez Blake 2007. Body Politic, 244 body forms made from fired bricks installed on floor - Antony Gormley 2023. Brick Sculpture architectural brick sculptures, like small buildings without roofs or walls - Per Kirkeby 1994. Water Lilies #4 life-size reproduction of Claude Monet’s massive painting, but done in 650,000 Lego bricks - Ai Weiwei 2022.
3.5 to 4 billion Lego bricks to build a full-scale replica of the Ur Ziggurat in Iraq.
Famous bricks in History: St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Chicago 1929 — Al Capone’s men gunned down a rival gang as the stood in front of a brick wall. In the 1960s the bricks were bought and went to auction. Some sold for more than a thousand dollars. Stonewall riots , NYC 1969 — A brick was thrown at police at the beginning of the protests for LGBTQ+ rights in Stonewall, which turned violent. Various people have been noted as (and denied being) the brick-thrower. No brick was ever found. “Who threw the first brick at Stonewall?” is now a rhetorical question because it is less about the fired-clay four-sided five-pound object and more about the symbology of resistance. (The question has also become a meme online, with answers like “Judy Garland” or “The construction worker for the Village People”). Bad Luck Bandit Burglary attempt Maryland 2018 — A man threw a brick at a window during a store robbery, but it bounced off the bulletproof glass back into his face and knocked him out. It was all caught on surveillance cameras, and the footage of the event went viral. That brick was found. It is up for sale on eBay, auction setting. (Current high bid: $1.00).
10’ feet of a road made of cocaine bricks would only cost $70 million
"Brick"in rap means drugs , money, or cold weather, as in: “Bricks, all white bricks, off-white bricks, light tan bricks" - Gucci Mane, "Bricks"; “"Bustin' out the 'bando / A brick on the mantel" - Drake & 21 Savage, "Rich Flex"; "It’s brick outside, daddy, I’m cold" - Nicki Minaj, "I’m Legit"
A “brick” in basketball is a shot that hits the backboard with a loud clunk but doesn’t go in; a “brick” of cash is a thousand bills, typically in denominations of $100 dollars; a “brick” phone is one that only lets you talk and text, no apps or notifications at all
The moon is not made of bricks, nor of cheese, (or bricks or blocks of the milky/salty/bacterial substance), but the chances of a planet’s moon being at the correct distance to precisely match its star’s apparent size is very rare: 1 in 100,000. So let’s all behave.
The Giza pyramid was recreated to scale (452 feet high) in the video game Minecraft using (digital) sandstone bricks. It was hand-built (meaning “all grind”, or one brick placed at a time, and that’s after mining for virtual sand). It took 56 hours.
The Classic Breakfast Sandwich food item at Tim Hortons (see first and last photos) has a flat, rectangular shape, and is often described as looking like a small brick. Donuts, however, are described as looking round and delicious. This is accurate. Especially for Honey Crullers. (A breakfast sandwich ziggurat, possible? A one kilometre cruller road would cost what?)
each photo in The Window is a brick
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TL; DR: read just the photos — only 34 words (but which took 36 months to “write”):
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A new year non-linear look back at sets from the last 12 months of “The Window”, with alt lead images (click thumbnails for originals):
BONUS IMAGE:
From a recent profile in Spencer Magazine, a page featuring my intermixable painting/installations (started in Tokyo, cont’d in LA, then Toronto),
That a lot of brick ! I like the people are bricks in an infinite road. That stuck with me, among other stuff. A cool little trip. Thanks K