WE<0707>WUNDERKAMMER
"Car la maison est notre coin du monde. Elle est – on l'a souvent dit – notre premier univers. Elle est vraiment un cosmos."
["For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word."]
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958
Name is Nobody
SA<2606> CULT READING MATTER
Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum. 1976
10 seconds and counting:
"We should not model ourselves on computers because computers can´t choose and cannot make judgements. They can only calculate."
FR<1806>ESCAPE FROM WORLD CUP
Guy Debord's FILM La Société du Spectacle [Society of the Spectacle] in full through Google videos...
'Sports Chatter' & 'The World Cup and Its Pomps' in Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco
FR<1106>SEE YOU THERE?
Art on your doorstep: 4th annual Art House exhibition. In conjunction with 'Invisible Threads' (see preview below).
Click on the map to find out where...
This weekend, houses around LE2 will metamorphose into exhibition spaces where local artists will be showcasing their work. I was lucky enough to get a preview of Phil Turner's work last week, the most recent of which will be on show at 222 Clarendon Park Road. He has been working for over thirty years experimenting with a range of media from pencil drawings to huge collages. Two of his works are pictured here. Art Bay Mine is Now is a slightly older piece; one of my favourites.
TH<1006>PREVIEW
Invisible Threads: A vivid dialogue between twenty-first century women artists and their female ancestors.
Microhistorians, craftswomen, storytellers are all words which could be used to describe the artists involved in this exhibition. Both novices and professionals worked together to produce a beautiful collection of textile art, on show at 67 Avenue Road Extension over the weekend, in conjunction with the Art House 4th annual exhibition.
Genealogical discovery provided the inspiration for the works, with the artists focusing on female characters from their respective family histories. Scraps of sepia past lives are the warp and woof of colourful present day tapestries, which tell the stories of remarkable yet ordinary women reclaimed from the shadows of patriarchal history.
The framework for the project was devised by Northamptonshire artist Carole Miles, Tasmanian textile artist Tara Badcock in collaboration with Canadian author Kathy Page.
WE<0206>PANOPTICON DETECTIVE
Looking Glass
I was sitting at a café terrace in the shadows of a boiling city sun. It was the hottest day of the year, shoppers were coming and going in shorts and sandals through the concrete jungle, diners were packed with punters seeking refuge from the heat. I was wearing a grey trench and a hat to match and I was drinking black coffee and smoking a Lucky Strike. I was everything a twenty-first century film noir character should be. I was calling on my imagination.
The café was a counterfeit Parisian bistro: plastic woven chairs, trompe-l'oeil bevelled windows with gold writing, wrought iron pedestals with mock marble table tops... It could have been anywhere but Paris, except maybe World Disney. All the fun of the fair.
"No café crème?" I say blithely to the Polish waitress. She doesn't get the joke. "We have latte, cappuccino, espresso, americano..."
"Alright. Make mine americano I guess." She gives me a stiff smile and disappears inside.
I stub out my cigarette and reach for another.
The global village is all glass and steel. Prism prisons. Free-market nationalities triumph: Italian restaurants, 'THE REAL CHINA', a regular Japanese sushi place, a burger joint and a 'traditional' British pub. Apartments occupy the top floors, the kind you would expect to find on the French riviera - glass balconies, sliding doors. But there's no sea view downtown. Everyone's as far away from the sea as possible. There's nobody on the balconies. The apartments might just as well be showrooms. Luxury developments stumbled upon hard times.
A different waitress drops my coffee off without a word.
The woman at the table next to me keeps looking over suspiciously. I'm the only person here without company. People always suspect loners in social places. She's middle-aged, blonde with dark roots and a gold pendant. She's sitting with a russian guy who's always on his mobile phone while vaguely listening to her. She's talking about all the places she's been. "I wanna be in America from October and I don't wanna back until March." Or: "I haven't been to Paris in years... I need to go." She sounds convincing. Did the conversation come about because this place reminds her of the rest of the world? Or did she come here to play holiday for a few hours?
I down the last of my americano. Time to hit the trail. I pull up my collar and head for the shopping precinct. That's where everyone else seems to go to find what they need. An anonymous tip informed me that "they have everything there." I walk through a hall of mirrors to a couple of escalators. There's an upper balcony with a good point of vantage so I step onto the upward escalator and slowly reach for my camera. I have only taken a couple of snaps when I notice a yellow jacket out of the corner of my eye. I keep on snapping as if I hadn't seen him.
It's not long before a couple of high-vis jackets are standing right behind me.
"What're you doing?" One of them asks. I decide to play the tourist card.
"Whiling away the time until dinner."
"No funny games. What are you doing with that camera?"
"Hopefully taking some great photographs."
"Can't do that I'm afraid. No photography allowed. You'll need special permission."
I grunt and ease back on the balustrade, reaching for a Lucky. They both stare at me as I put it in my mouth, waiting for a reply.
Jacket one buts in: "Scuse me, you can't smoke in here."
"It's the law." Reinforces jacket number two.
"Tell me then, what exactly can someone like me do around here?" Jacket two shrugs and says:
"Shop... eat... drink..."
I chuckle and say "Look kid, my informer told me you can find everything here. Now I'm not interested in shopping or eating. What else do you have to offer?"
The high-vis jackets look confused - a mixture of incredulity and anxiety. One of them starts talking in code on his radio, frequently looking up at me, I hear something like 'perverse'.
Jacket two steps forward and says "I think you had better leave. Next time we'll confiscate your camera. Whatever it is you're looking for, I don't think you'll find it here."
Mothers and children are staring. "Oh I'll leave alright. But I'll find what I'm looking for – eventually. I always do." I pull up my collar, readjust my hat, stuff my hands in my pockets and make for the exit. Damned door takes me almost ten minutes to find. And I'm no closer to finding inspiration.
TU<0106>ADIEU LOUISE
"Art comes from life. Art comes from the problem you have in seducing birds, men, snakes—anything you want. It is like a Corneille tragedy where everybody is pursuing somebody else: you like A, A likes D, and D likes… Being a daughter of Voltaire and having an education in the 18th-century rationalists, I believe that if you work enough, the world is going to get better. If I work like a dog on all these…contraptions, I am going to get the bird I want… [Yet] the end result is rather negative. That's why I keep going. The resolution never appears; it's like a mirage. I do not get the satisfaction
— otherwise I would stop and be happy”…
(source: theartnewspaper.com)
Louise Bourgeois lived and worked until age 98...
MO<3105>CULT READING MATTER
10 second version:
"Memo to management: leave us alone to get on with our work. We are the reason you have a job."
MO<3105>TIME TRAVEL
USA 1939: Something in the Fallingwater In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy always wakes up in Kansas. But when the public first clapped eyes on her it was for some reason in a different state - Wisconsin. Oconomowoc Wisconsin in fact, at the movie´s 1939 off-Hollywood premiere. Both "Kansas" and Oconomowoc are now as much part of the confused dream of The Wizard of Oz as the Emerald City. They´re part of an idealised America forever fixed in celluloid time and space. 1939 was a particularly good year for US cinema - and as it happens, a vintage year for the manufacture of American Myth, one of the beguiling scents that intoxicate Park Planet.
It was in 1939 that architect Frank Lloyd Wright took another dream of America - transcendentalism - and set it in concrete in western Pennsylvania, completing his monumental Fallingwater, the White House of the reimagined America he called Usonia.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood, composer Aaron Copland was mapping the tonescapes of "Appalachia" and concocting a musical futurology for The Old West in his "historical" ballet Billy the Kid. Down the road apiece, Disney songwriters inadvertently set the soundstage for the space programme when they came up with When You Wish Upon a Star as theme song both for Pinocchio and the eventual Disneyfication of the planet. At Warner, Bugs Bunny popped up - with Carl Stalling in charge of plunderphonics - reshaping music to the new demands of cartoon miniatures set in a loose US where everything really was possible.
Over on the east coast, as Batman first loomed in DC comics and New York pictured itself as the darker Gotham, the quirky Raymond Scott Quintette played their conventional instruments for the last time before their leader switched on the future and started inventing electronic music at Manhattan Research.
Nearby, thousands of Americans were busy discovering tomorrow for themselves at the New York 1939 World Fair (motto: "Dawn of a New Day"). Here, the first bakelite Viewmasters were launched, offering a colour-enhanced 3D version of - you guessed it: America - by superimposing two versions of reality simultaneously. And in a defining act of retro-futurism, history was literally buried at Flushing Meadow in the form of the first Westinghouse Time Capsule.
Coincidentally, while the public focus was firmly on the future, the lone American surrealist Joseph Cornell was painstakingly compiling his memory dossiers less than a mile away on Utopia Parkway, sealing up his own personal found-America alongside his fantasies in a series of obsessive boxes. More about Cornell in future posts.Over the course of this remarkable year, a reimagined, rose-tinted American past became its destiny - and ours. 1939 made tomorrow winningly optimistic - and American, which amounted to the same thing.
So that year, when craftsmen on one of the production lines at the vast Harmony musical instrument factory in Chicago, Illinois glued a sycamore back and ebony fingerboard onto a small, inexpensive archtop guitar carcass they were, whether they knew it or not, creating another intoxicating whiff of American Myth.
Guitars like this made everyone hip and would fuel the teenage revolution two decades hence. They would become the American symbol to end them all - more affordable than a Cadillac and more exportable than the Empire State.
Simultaneously redolent of "Appalachia", Chicago blues and big band jazz with its f-holes and metal tailpiece, they called this particular instrument the Columbian Minor - Columbia being a poetic name for the United States. They bound the body in mythical ivorine and fitted a "tortoiseshell" finger rest. They strung it, lovingly fingered a few half-chords on its frets and sprinkled on some additional dream dust before sending it to the depot for despatch.
Sold first via mail order through a Sears catalogue now lost in sepia, the Columbian Minor mysteriously began to plot its course across the Atlantic to modern day Park Planet via a magical appearance on Greenwich Market. It´s here beside me now. And when it´s not being played, it sits on a bend in the stairs, quietly oozing Oz, Fallingwater, Copland, Disney, Westinghouse and 1939-vintage American Myth.
Miles Early
SU<3005> CULT READING MATTER
The London Review of Books
Take up one of the free trial subscriptions currently doing the rounds on Park Planet, and several hundred thousand words of challenging critique and unassuming intellectualism will thump onto your doormat twice a month courtesy of the reassuring LRB. This edition´s highlight: Iain Sinclair on the psychogeography of Athens lovingly laid out around an Alasdair Gray poem about British identity.
Gnir Rednow
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