Archive — Jamie Lyons
There's something obscene about the moment when an idea stops being theoretical bullshit and becomes a thing you can touch, break, or throw against a wall. That's the dirty little secret nobody tells you about engineering: it's not the elegance of the equation or the beauty of the CAD rendering. It's the bastard moment when abstraction becomes concrete, when all your clever thinking has to actually work.
We start with a blueprint, sure. Some lines on paper or pixels on a screen. But blueprints are lies we tell ourselves to feel in control. They're the polite fiction that pretends we know what we're doing before the first bolt gets torqued, before the first line of code compiles and promptly shits the bed. The blueprint is the easy part: it's masturbation, intellectual foreplay. The real work begins when you're elbow deep in the guts of something that refuses to behave according to our pristine specifications.
We're building toward chaos with the only weapon we've got: obsessive attention to detail and a pathological refusal to accept that maybe, just maybe, this thing cannot be done.
And here's the thing: the completion? That's not some triumphant finale with confetti and champagne. Completion is exhaustion tinged with paranoia. It works now, but will it work tomorrow? Did I account for user stupidity? The heat death of the universe? We build something solid and immediately start cataloging all the ways it might fail, because that's the curse: we know too much about what went into it.
The best engineering has scar tissue. It's been revised, debugged, rebuilt. It carries the memory of every stupid mistake, every 4:41 AM realization that I fucked up a calculation, a delivery schedule, a call sheet. The slick, finished product hides a graveyard of failed prototypes and abandoned approaches.
This is the truth about building things: it's never as clean as the blueprint promised, never as elegant as the theory suggested. It's messy and compromised and held together with decisions made under deadline pressure with insufficient data and money. And somehow, against all odds and our own better judgment, the goddamn thing works.
That's engineering.
Engineering 2023
Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous, endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore You know what’s fucked up? Here’s this sign. Had a […]
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Engineering 2022
Saroyan wrote about this place. The Armenian families, the immigrant hustle, the particular loneliness and joy of Central Valley life. He got it. That beautiful, messy, complicated thing about America that most writers either romanticize into oblivion or treat like a sociology report. Saroyan just… told the truth. With style. My partner Lindsey’s family comes […]
ReadEngineering 2022
The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls? So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the […]
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Engineering 2021
The Fragment For … shines out in time of need like fine bronze; but if the house is neglected, it collapses. California doesn’t get summer storms. Not real ones. The state runs on a different weather pattern, a different logic. Dry summers, wet winters, and nine months of the year where rain is something you […]
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Engineering 2021
And George Farr had the town, the earth, the world to himself and his sorrow. Music came faint as a troubling rumor beneath the spring night, sweetened by distance: a longing knowing no ease. (Oh God, oh God!) At last George Farr gave up trying to see her. He had ‘phoned vainly and time after […]
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Engineering 2020
On the evening of March 9th, 2020, right before the world went to absolute shit, we’re doing something that has no business being as cool as it was. We staged a fragment of Sophocles‘ Laocoön at the Berkeley Art Museum. Berkeley. My first memories are from these streets, this place. Coming back here to do […]
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Engineering 2020
The real perfectibility of man may be illustrated, as I have mentioned before, by the perfectibility of a plant. The object of the enterprising florist is, as I conceive, to unite size, symmetry, and beauty of colour. It would surely be presumptuous in the most successful improver to affirm, that he possessed a carnation in […]
ReadEngineering 2020
The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs. The […]
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Engineering 2019
Byxbee Landfill Park – Pole Field, 1991 American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash — all of them — surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw […]
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Engineering 2019
As bohemias go, Perry Lane was Arcadia, Arcadia just off the Stanford golf course. It was a cluster of two room cottages with weathery wood shingles in an oak forest, only not just amid trees and greenery, but amid vines, honeysuckle tendrils, all buds and shoots and swooping tendrils and twitterings like the best of […]
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Engineering 2019
One RV. One of hundreds in Palo Alto. Families living in these things because rent in Disruption Town is no longer a number that makes sense to anyone who actually works for a living. State and city laws say they have to move every 72 hours. Can’t get too comfortable. Can’t put down roots. Keep moving, […]
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Engineering 2019
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. Henry David Thoreau, Walden Look at this shit. Emerson Street, Palo Alto. A driveway. And in that driveway, a lineup of chairs that looks like someone staged an intervention for ergonomic seating and nobody showed up. They’re just standing […]
ReadEngineering 2019
There’s something about a joint that refuses to die that makes you believe in America again, or at least in the stubborn, beautiful refusal to give up on what matters. Peninsula Creamery sits there on that corner like a middle finger to everything Silicon Valley pretends to be: all its disruption and optimization and whatever […]
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Engineering 2019
The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths. Ken Kesey Look at this magnificent anachronism, this relic standing there like some burned out roadie who missed the last bus out of town. A payphone in 2019 might as well be a fucking dinosaur bone embedded in concrete, except this thing’s still breathing, […]
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Engineering 2019
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. W. H. Auden, First Things First, 1956 Seventy eight feet of reinforced concrete. Corner of Alma and Hawthorne. Built in 1910. A water tower. 155,000 gallons. It helped establish Palo Alto’s city-owned utility system, back when the city actually built things for the public good, imagine […]
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Engineering 2019
Hewlett-Packard Building 15. From 1965 to 1973, they made small electronic transformers. Circuit boards from ’65 to ’87. The building blocks of the tech revolution, made right here. Acids. Metals. Solvents. All part of the process. They stored the chemicals in a shed until ’73, then upgraded to a “bunker” from ’74 to ’87. Because […]
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Engineering 2019
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais Death tourism: let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble […]
ReadEngineering 2019
Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors. Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or […]
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Engineering 2018
At 4:45pm on November 16th, 2018, a cold, gray, 54 degree afternoon, we staged the two remaining fragments of Aeschylus‘ Danaids at the Pulgas Water Temple in San Mateo County. Let me be clear about what we’re dealing with here: Aeschylus’s Danaids trilogy is mostly gone. Lost to time, fire, neglect, pick your poison. What […]
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Engineering 2018
San Jose. Adobe headquarters. Glass and steel rising from the valley floor like some techno optimist’s Burning Man epiphany. I get it, these places aren’t designed for humans, not really. They’re designed for productivity, for synergy, for whatever Stanford or Harvard MBA horseshit makes shareholders tingle. But shit, inside these towers, people are actually making […]
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Engineering 2018
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was. Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right Tim Cook showed up to bless the product launch at the Apple Store in Palo Alto like some corporate pontiff, anointing the faithful who’d lined up to hand over a […]
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Engineering 2018
We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, […]
ReadEngineering 2018
May 9th, 2018. High noon. East Palo Alto shoreline. Sixty-four degrees and sunny, the kind of day that makes you forget, for a moment, that everything ends badly. Especially here, where the ground itself is a monument to bad decisions. We’re standing on a Superfund site. Toxic landscape. The kind of place where American ambition […]
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Engineering 2018
I’m going to tell you about a place that got murdered. Not quick, not clean. Slow, by a thousand cuts from people in Patagonia vests who convinced themselves they were improving the neighborhood. The building’s still standing on California Avenue. The sign still hangs there like a tombstone. But Antonio’s Nut House? The real Antonio’s? […]
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Engineering 2018
Amazon delivery robots on the streets of Palo Alto: disruption imminent… Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Leo Tolstoy
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Engineering 2018
How do? Welcome to my shop Let me cut your mop Let me shave your crop Daintily, daintily…Hey, you! Don’t look so perplexed Why must you be vexed? Can’t you see you’re next? Yes, you’re next, you’re so next! Bugs Bunny, Rabbit of Seville (1950) This Cardinal Barber Shop is the real fucking deal: it’s […]
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Engineering 2018
Stanford Indian at 735 Emerson St, Palo Alto, CA 94301. Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense. Vine Deloria Jr. The Indian. Stanford’s mascot from 1930 to […]
ReadEngineering 2018
When the sun shouts and people abound One thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze And the iron age; iron the unstable metal; Steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities Will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for […]
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Engineering 2018
The Garden Isle. Land of chickens running wild through parking lots, where the roosters crow at three a.m. like they’re announcing the apocalypse, and the trade winds smell of plumeria and possibility. The Mysians. Three lines remain. “Hail, Caïcus and ye streams of Mysia!” That’s the opening. The hook. The ancient Greek equivalent of “Once […]
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Engineering 2017
The eye exists in its primitive state. The marvels of the earth a hundred feet high, the marvels of the sea a hundred feet deep, have for their witness only the wild eye that when in need of colours refers simply to the rainbow. It is present at the conventional exchange of signals that the […]
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Engineering 2017
The Fragment he blows no longer on small pipes, but with savage blasts, without a mouthpiece. Three lines of Sophocles, three lousy lines that survived when 96 percent of his work got swallowed by time. This fragment doesn’t want to be understood. It wants to be encountered. So I picked the Wave Organ, this broken-ass […]
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Engineering 2017
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
ReadEngineering 2017
You walk into the Stanford d.school, this temple of design thinking, this cathedral of sticky notes and whiteboards where tomorrow’s disruptors learn to disrupt, and you’re expecting the usual performance art nonsense. The kind where someone’s going to stand in a corner for three hours or wrap themselves in cellophane while reading Foucault through a […]
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Engineering 2016
July 10th, 2016. 1:08 in the afternoon. Pillar Point. Seventy two degrees, California sun beating down, the beach looking out at Mavericks, that legendary, bone crushing surf break where waves rise up like mountains and gods go to die, and we’re about to do something beautifully, almost stupidly ambitious: perform what’s left of a play […]
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Engineering 2016
Buildings without foundations will inevitably come down. I can be fooled, but my kids won’t be… either we will correct what’s wrong, it will be corrected for us. James Baldwin, Take This Hammer We’re real good at forgetting where we buried the bodies. Or in this case, where we buried the plutonium. Hunters Point. Say […]
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Engineering 2016
At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]
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Engineering 2016
The thing about standing on a hill in the dark waiting for the sun is that you’re participating in the oldest ritual humans have, the one where we gather to witness something larger than ourselves and somehow make it mean more by being there together. So we’re up here in the Marin Headlands with the […]
ReadEngineering 2015
Speechless Fish, I call it. Informally. Because sometimes the informal is all you’ve got when you’re dealing with theatrical ghosts that ancient, scraps of text that survived fires, floods, the general amnesia of civilization. This is part of something bigger, something I’m calling IOTA, which sounds either pretentious as hell or like the most honest […]
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Engineering 2015
I’m going to tell you about something that happened on a Saturday afternoon in October, and you’re going to think it’s either the most pretentious thing you’ve ever heard or you’re going to get it immediately. There’s no middle ground here. That’s just how it is. 2:45 p.m., October 3rd, 2015. The hold of the […]
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Engineering 2015
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean. From forth the fatal loins of these two foes, A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows, Doth with their death bury their […]
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Engineering 2015
Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doing Euripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, I call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes […]
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Engineering 2015
There’s something deeply, irrationally beautiful about staging dead Greek shit at a racetrack. I mean, here we are: 1:15 in the afternoon, June 6th, 2015, Golden Gate Fields, where the smell of horse piss and broken dreams hangs in the air like a question nobody wants to answer. It’s 71 degrees, sunny, perfect California weather […]
ReadEngineering 2015
Here’s what happened: 8:01 p.m., May 4th, 2015, and we’re standing in the Emeryville Mudflats, that beautiful nowhere between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, performing what’s left of Sophocles Sinon. And when I say “what’s left,” I mean four words. Four fucking words that survived 2,400 years while empires rose and burned and we landed on […]
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Engineering 2015
Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
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Engineering 2015
My talent will be the love I feel for that which constitutes the world of prisons and penal colonies. Not that I want to transform them or bring them around to your kind of life, or that I look upon them with indulgence or pity: I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless […]
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Absolute Solipsism / Engineering 2014
Solipsism Backstage at We Players‘ Macbeth at Fort Point “My darling,” she said at last, are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.” Roald […]
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Engineering 2013
So Tonyanna gets it. She always gets it. You can see it in these frames, she’s not performing silence, she’s weaponizing it. That’s the difference between theater kids playing dress-up and someone who understands that Ivona’s muteness is an act of violence against everyone who needs her to participate in their charade. She’s making them […]
ReadEngineering 2012
So here’s what nobody tells you about escaping Palo Alto: you can’t. Not really. You can put continents between yourself and those manicured lawns where old men in white execute shots with the precision of surgeons, but the Ghetto, yeah that’s what they call it, the Faculty Ghetto, like living in five million dollar Craftsman […]
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