the world turned inside out

Thanks to Ben Campkin for sending the notice of this symposium in Edinburgh. From the flyer:

“Today, ‘Modernist design’ is once more in fashion, and ‘iconic works’ of the 1960s are revered as setpieces of chic. So why is it that mass social housing, arguably the linchpin of the postwar Modern Movement, still remains stubbornly stuck in the trashcan of history in many countries – and can anything be done about it?”

You can find out more from this flyer (right-click with mouse and ‘Save As …’)

“Rubbish must form many people’s first impression of Britain. It was certainly what first struck me on returning from a recent trip abroad - literally, in the form of a wind-blown plastic bag attaching itself to my waist like a seedy sarong the second I emerged on to the pavement outside Heathrow airport … London is not only - as the writer Iain Sinclair, one of the city’s most ardent recent chroniclers, described it to me - ‘the epicentre of British rubbish’, but possibly also of the world’s. The garbage-strewn vista of pre-modern London is shorthand, in art and literature, for urban dystopia. Sinclair was astonished to discover, on a recent walk through Epping Forest, what he calls the ‘rubbish contour lines’ of London. ‘Approaching a nexus of cafes and roadside fast-food places,’ he recalls, he came upon ‘Red Bull cans, lager cans, takeaway packages - a refuse line marking a trail back to the city.’” This is an extract from an article in The Guardian by Simon Busch, May 2nd 2007. The link is here:

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,2069811,00.html

‘The Alchemy of Trash: the West Coast Art of Spiritual Collage’ 

“By the same token, spirituality, for us anyway, takes place in the midst of the market and its commodified fantasies. This feedback loop is especially true in California, where esoteric spirituality has long been a part of a feverish and mercantile popular culture rife with trash. What religious seeking and California culture share most essentially is an investment in fantasy — fantasy not simply as ‘illusion,’ but as the forms that fuse imagination and desire. As both ironic and populist fans of low-brow culture can attest, the ferocity of fantasy can lend a delirious dreamlike power to corny things like UFO cults and commercial entertainments like B-movies or comic books.”

This is an extract from an essay by Erik Davis, chronicler of things ‘occultural’ and author of the excellent TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information and a new book titled The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape. Read the article here:

http://techgnosis.com/index_alchemy.html

‘Pollution and Propriety: Dirt, Disease, and Hygiene in Rome from Antiquity to Modernity.’ A two-day conference at the  British School at Rome. Thursday 21 and Friday 22 June 2007. Keynote speaker: Professor Dame Mary Douglas.

For more details, see:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/nirv/pollutionandpropriety/information.htm

Just when it looks like we are about to drown in a tide of filth, it’s Paxman to the rescue. People “feel free to throw rubbish around” he insists, “for much the same reason morons feel entitled to vandalise bus shelters, smash park benches or use telephone boxes as urinals: they do not feel the public realm is theirs.” Yes, indeed.

In The Guardian today the fearless tormentor of the leaders of this wayward nation takes a look at the state we are in and suggests that we “make the most of it” while it is visible. Taking sideswipes at those who are supposed to guide us towards a filth-free future, such as that “eminently worthy but dull organisation” once known as the Keep Britian Tidy group (now EnCams), and urging that offenders be made to “spend a few weekends scooping up dog mess, preferably with their bare hands,” Paxman pleads with us to look around and take notice:

“Before the leaves begin to shoot on the trees and the grass thickens on the roadside verges … This is the perfect time of year to appreciate what a squalid place Britain has become. The gutters heave with the spring awakening of Starbucks cartons. The pavements glitter with discarded gum and the sun twinkles on a million soft-drink cans. What is that streaming from the top of the tree? It’s a 12ft length of grubby plastic. It is not just the sordid view from the windows of trains, or from cars and buses on the motorways. There can scarcely be a country road in Britain that is not splattered with the evidence of what an ugly, thoughtless people we are becoming. Years ago I remember going to Greece and being depressed by the slick of plastic bags, discarded bottles and soiled nappies at the edge of every road. Nowadays, Britain seems to look at least as sordid. What’s gone wrong?”

The solution to this problem may be found by instituting “a national spring-clean, which could involve councils, schools, voluntary groups and community organisations, etc.” Clearly this is no joking matter, but I am reminded of  ‘Captain Clean’ - rippling chest emblazoned with a cleaning bucket, thunderbolt in hand, and ready to spring into action (above) - who tried to enlist the help of schoolchildren to save Glasgow from the filth that was about to consume the city in 1979. It is just possible to imagine Jeremy exiting the Newsnight studio after jousting with Dr. John Reid and emerging from the rotating door of Broadcasting House in full cape and with that thunderbolt at the ready …

Read on at http://environment.guardian.co.uk/waste/story/0,,2027397,00.html

Thanks to Ben Campkin at the Bartlett School of Architecture for sending me the following:

Architecture &: Interdisciplinary Seminars
Bartlett School of Architecture, Tue 13 March 2007, 10 am - 6 pm
Organised by Ben Campkin, Lesley McFadyen and Jane Rendell

Architecture &: is a termly interdisciplinary seminar providing opportunities for researchers within the Bartlett School of Architecture - both staff and students - to initiate research conversations at various interdisciplinary crossings. This is the second in the series and will explore the intersection of architecture, archaeology and art focusing on particular questions, processes, contexts and products that are currently preoccupying ten theorists and practitioners - whose work engages the journey from on discipline into another. 

Contributors: John Barrett (Archaeology, University of Sheffield), Victor Buchli (Anthropology, UCL), Ben Campkin (Bartlett School of Architecture), Alberto Duman (Artist), Janet Hodgson (Artist), Lesley McFadyen (Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester), Hilary Powell (Artist), Jane Rendell (Bartlett School of Architecture), SmoutAllen (Bartlett School of Architecture), Simon Unwin (Architecture, University of Dundee) 

This event is free but please RSVP architectural.research@ucl.ac.uk 
Rm G02, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL Wates House, 22 Gordon Street, London, WC1H 0QB 

You can download a very eye-catching poster HERE

A link to an article from Der Spiegel: “The cloud of dirt was hard to make out from the ground, but at an altitude of 10,000 meters (32,808 feet), the scientists could see the gigantic mass of ozone, dust and soot with the naked eye. In a specially outfitted aircraft taking off from Munich airport, they surveyed a brownish mixture stretching from Germany all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.” Read the article here:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,461828,00.html

Here’s a second call for papers for “Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands”, to be held at the School of English, Queen’s University Belfast, 17th and 18th April 2007.

Papers from all perspectives across the Humanities are welcome

Confirmed keynote speakers: Dr Peter Boxall (University of Sussex), Professor Thomas Docherty (University of Warwick), Professor Paul Seawright (University of Ulster), Dr Moynagh Sullivan (NUI Maynooth).

“Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish”: Samuel Beckett’s representation of the human condition as regulated by waste in Breath, a playlet of 1969, now reads as a striking anticipation of our present race against ecological catastrophe. However, if there is now a pressing need for us to re-think our attitudes towards consumption, this change should also extend to certain aspects of our approaches to literature, film, and critical theory.

This two-day conference entitled “Waste and Abundance: Critical Readings of Modern Wastelands” seeks to outline contexts for conceptualising abundance and waste. It invites proposals that argue for the existence of specific perspectives on abundance and waste in strands of modernist and postmodernist literature as well as film.

Suggested topics might include but are not limited to:

~ The body as cultural wasteland
~ Anorexic spaces (of discourse and/or in performance)
~ Corporeality, exhaustion, and waste
~ The hunger artist/ the art of hunger
~ Influence as recycling
~ Literature, critical theory, and consumption
~ Gender politics, abundance, and waste
~ Labour and deprivation
~ Consumption and war
~ Comfort and waste
~ Ignorance and abundance
~ Waste and the collectivity
~ The spatial economics of waste
~ Waste and abundance in the metropolis
~ Waste, abundance, and exoticism
~ Abundance and primitivism
~ The use of litter in representations of material scarcity
~ Waste, abundance, and the politics of the avant-garde
~ Time-wasting and modernity
~ Time, acceleration, and consumption
~ Globalisation and consumer angst/complacency
~ Abundance and Marxist theory
~ Shame, waste, and postcolonial theory
~ Negotiating abundance and waste in contemporary Ireland
~ Redefining the contours of ecocriticism

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words plus brief biographical details to Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty, and Emilie Morin at wasteandabundance@qub.ac.uk by Wednesday 31th January 2007.
Deadline for conference registration, whether presenting a paper or attending, is Thursday 15th February 2007. Fee: £25/£20. The conference programme includes a reading and a performance of electro-acoustic music on the themes of the conference.
See http://www.qub.ac.uk/abundance/ for further information and registration forms.

The following from Kevin Kelly’s website, about an interesting method for recycling discarded x-ray film, comes via my good friend and longstanding champion of ‘the new music‘, James Grady:

“In the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 1950s underground night spots would play music pirated from the west. The only media they had were recorders etched into discarded X-ray film. I’ve long sought some images […] I felt that those X-ray record albums relate to our contemporary lives in many ways, especially when considering such terms as ‘multimedia’ or ‘recycling’. I copied the X-ray films with their engraved sound-grooves on photosensitive paper and made enlargements of certain details.”

Read the whole article, ‘Jazz on Bones: X-Ray Sound Recordings’

A quick note and link, dear readers - all two or three of you - about a discussion on BBC Radio 3’s Night Waves last night concerning ‘the finite commons’. Much about the immorality of waste, misuse of energy, and the ‘bad taste’ of 4×4 vehicles (with guest Will Self referring to Robert Nozick … he must’ve been a philosophy undergraduate). Anyway, Night Waves - essential listening, people, every week-night. Kill your TV etc. Here’s the link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/nightwaves/pip/2igdu/

This discussion is not listed on the programme summary at the above page, but you’ll find the ‘Listen to this programme’ link. It begins at around 11 mins in, and lasts approx. 9 minutes. Taking part are Derek Matravers (philosopher, Open Uni), Will Self, Isobel Hilton (host) and the voice of David Attenborough. It’s available for seven days after broadcast.

All this reminds me of how good Will Self’s Saturday morning essay on the Radio 4 Today programme used to be. One memorable rant concerned the failure of Tim Henman to win Wimbledon because, Will told us, he had the wrong name. “Henman,” he said, “is a dreadful name, with its implication of a bizarre and unsavory chimera - half man, half poultry. Everybody knows the ghastly conditions under which the vast majority of hens are reared. If Henman was to be in with even a scintilla of competitive chance, he’d at least have to adopt the triple-barrelled form, ‘Tim Free-Range-Henman’ … “