Schütze+Hopkins

And thank goodness we live in 2012.

Water Blade Retina, from Fille en Aiguilles.  Schütze+Hopkins. Twilight Science Editions, 2012

Paul Schütze – lots of interesting stuff on his website, such as this:

Paul Schütze. Garden of Instruments. 314 Gallery, Bergen, Norway

hotel california, 1977

After the last two weeks besotted with running and jumping, rowing and swimming, ending with the windmilling Pete Townshend, I drove from the coast back home with Waterloo Sunset running on a loop in my brain.  Then this morning for some reason I woke up with the guitars at the end of Hotel California at the end of a dream.  The mind is full of curious channels.  

When this came out I didn't have a tv so missed the video completely, but it was the soundtrack to summer for years.  Everyone I knew used to look like this. 

Richard Long on Box Hill

the Guardian's caption: Land-mark ... a cyclist passes Richard Long's artwork Box Hill Road River, in Surrey. Photograph: Brian Cleckner/National Trust

Richard Long's centre line on the zig-zag portion going up Box Hill in Surrey, part of the cycling track for the Olympics: evidently it was inspired by the graffiti chalked on the roads during the Tour de France, which, now that I've looked it up, isn't that interesting. 

Here he is talking about laying down the road paint, like a thief in the night.  an authorised thief in the night, with a team of helpers. 

Mohatella Queens and South Africa in 1974

Umculo Kawupheli.  from the description on youtube, 'Original song with self-made video, featuring clips of the Queens back in the 1970s with their backing, Makhona Tsohle Band.'  

1974: just two years to the Soweto Uprising, 14 years since Sharpeville, 10 years since the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

Steve Bloom's photographs of this era were in this years London Festival of Photography in June. A BBC news documentary was made of Bloom describing some of the work:

Steve Bloom. Beneath the surface. Guardian Gallery, London, June 2012. All images copyright Steve Bloom/stevebloomphoto.com. Music by KPM Music. Slideshow production by Paul Kerley. Publication date 31 May 2012

Ayub Ogada: Nairobi April 2012

Not the perfectly recorded version that was in The Constant Gardener (below), but a live version (above) full of noise, heat and four beautiful dancers.

Wade Hemsworth: the wild goose

The gentle Wade Hemsworth at 76, singing our other national anthem.

And a gentle life, on wikipedia

Bill Bourne's rural urban blues

So Bill Bourne, grade 8 in 1967, living on a farm near Red Deer, saw Oscar Brand's Let's Sing Out on tv and thought, I can do this. 

He is a relentless traveller, staple of the summer festival circuit, a rough, jagged blade of a voice.  This video is from a gig in Vulcan, a real back of beyond town an hour and a half south of Calgary, where the town built a spaceship in honour of Star Trek, instead of the god of fire, Vulcan, for whom the town was named by the CPR in 1915: rails of forged steel and sparks and all, including all eight avenues and nine streets named after Roman gods and goddesses until they were renamed as numbers.

Anyway, whatever, Bill Bourne played there at the Vulcan Lodge Hall in 2010.  Gordon Lightfoot, still on tour at 71 and interviewed on Q yesterday, was about to play the Casinorama in Orillia, the town he grew up in. Really?  This is Gordon Lightfoot we are talking about. At 12 he sang at Massey Hall in the Kiwanis Music Festival. His mother said, you know Gordie, Bing makes a living at this.

All this continues a discussion in On Site 27: rural urbanism, the powerful relationship between the rural and the urban, and the kind of cultural production that comes out of rural areas, migrates to urban centres, but contains an insistent rural sense of completely open possibilities.

burning down the house

ah, the 80s.

Emel Mathiouthi: bin el wediane

A different kind of avalanche.

Naomi Bedford and Justin Currie

This is the kind of song one needs when one has fallen off the cliff of love. 

Or, in this case, when there is too much work and one desperately needs reminding that there is a life, somewhere.

Plinth, book

cover to Music for Smalls Lighthouse, Plinth, 2010

Plinth 'Music For Smalls Lighthouse.' Limited edition of 150. Hand-bound, cloth cover, hardback book tied with printed silk ribbon. Booklet pages consist of sugar paper, braille bible, pianola sheet.

DJ Mehdi, Tonton du Bled

from Chloé Roubert's site: chloecollects.blogspot.com

DJ Mehdi and core-periphery relations

fiat 500: 1957

 another little bit of Italy on this sunny August day:

 So nimble, so little, so clever.  The irony is that Fiat now owns Chrysler, which in 1957 was doing this:

I think I'll take Italy.

beautiful annabelle lee

This has been sitting on my desktop for ages, waiting for a suitable day, which never seems to come.

so today it is.

civic identity 2

Went to a discussion on Calgary and Identity last night: the panel was a fellow from Heritage Calgary – an oxymoron surely, a sustainable cities Newfoundlander who walks everywhere and hasn't got a car, and the local leader of Jane's Walks.  Not typical Calgary, but typical of a particular sector of the city.  The discussion never really got much beyond 'Calgary does lots of things right, early LRT, great inner city neighbourhoods, an active association of 140 communities, downtown a bit forbidding, Jan Gehl's Copenhagen not going to happen here'.  

Well fine.  It is one thing to know the history, another to actually rub up against it in this city, a rare thing.  It is one thing to live and work downtown, but it is a soulless downtown.  It is one thing to live in one of the chic inner city neighbourhoods, another to have lived there for thirty years and suffered through the bikers, the prostitution and the drug deals.  But to mention that is to be unacceptably negative – a glass half empty sort of attitude.  

Okay, let's think about New York instead.  How does a city get to the size where its identity is complex, powerful, unassailable and seemingly independent of branding slogans, earnest discussions of reinvigorating the downtown core, getting more people on public transit?  How does a city get to the point of an Empire State of Mind – for that is what identity is, a state of mind.  

Of course everyone has an individual identity and lives in a fragment of their city: one does carve out a life that suits, but at some point one must feel that one's individual identity contributes to the civic identity in some way.  When the gap between the personal and the civic is unbridgeable, then I think we have a problem.  There are several articles in On Site 25: identity about landing in a new city and starting to make one's way.  Migrants bring with them a set of urban values that must be cobbled to fit the new circumstances, however, the cities that legitimate and even valourise that process are the ones in which newcomers have the greatest stake.  

Look at the appropriation of New York in Empire State of Mind: Jay-Z and Alicia Keys own this city, not just because they are rich and famous, but because they are New Yorkers.  And New York is large enough, and generous enough, to encompass them, Donald Trump and The New School.  

My family has been in Calgary since 1906; I grew up on Vancouver Island thinking Calgary was a terrifically romantic place based on family stories that went up to 1947, then in 1977 I moved here and found that the pre-oil boom city which had been small and jewel-like was being bulldozed away in the second oil boom.  Now, thirty-five years on in the extended third oil boom we have a city that inspires a kind of frantic boosterism within it and vies with Toronto as the city Canada loves to hate.  

Calgary's brand: The New West is a phrase that obliterates the old west of ranching and farming with the new one of oil and gas.  Oil and gas is an industry, not a culture. Both of them, the old west still encapsulated in the Stampede and the new west of the shiny, thrusting downtown core, exclude so many things, so many people.  Without being totally anodyne, how does a city indicate that it is generous and allows a wide diversity of people, ways of thinking, histories – something beyond the statistical indications that we have a sizeable immigrant population.  Perhaps the city should stop the branding thing for a while and develop some sort of critical consciousness rather than being threatened by every comment that might be construed as negative.  Perhaps it, and everyone in it, could become a bit more generous, not in terms of money, but in terms of welcoming alternative urban dicussions.  It is one thing to know that other cities have developed all sorts of strategies for alternative land use and spontaneous urban demonstrations, it is another to actually legitimise them on your own turf.

Not everywhere is New York.  There is Newport. 

wood

redemption

Bob Marley, live in Dortmund, 1980.

Schatten, 1960

Hansjürgen Pohland. Schatten, 1960Another quite wonderful Pohland film shot just before the wall went up. 

It looks at the city without looking at it.  It is all ephemera which, curiously enough, is timeless.

cab calloway and minnie the moocher

Right, it is the beginning of a dreary month, a storm is raging outside, the ferries can't run, the east is blanketed in snow, the international news is truly ghastly and Gillian Findlay's documentary last night on police actions during the G8/G20 in Toronto last summer was altogether too shocking. 

Here is a little diversion:

A rather more adult version of Dorothy and Toto.

Amazing to think this sort of thing was standard children's viewing in the 1950s.  From 4-5 each afternoon was old cartoons, serialised David Niven movies and Gene Autry.

This explains everything about the baby boom lot.

Diana Thater: Chernobyl

Chernobyl, Production Still; 2010 © Diana Thater; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth A few more links to Diana Thater's video installation on Chernobyl, showing at Hauser+Wirth, London. 

Her own website: thaterstudio

Which leads you to kickstart, a funding site for the Chernobyl project.

A short interview at dazed digital, which includes these two paragraphs:

Chernobyl is the only post-apocalyptic, or post-human landscape on earth. Today it’s falling into ruins, but it still looks like a city; there’s stores, apartment buildings, schools. And even though it’s completely deserted and falling apart, animals are moving into the city. So, on the one hand you have this perfectly preserved Soviet city from 1970, and on the other hand you have this post-apocalyptic landscape where animals are living.

I think it’s both political and cultural. Chernobyl represents the failure of lots of things – a massive political system, a way of life, of science. Yet even with the human failures, nature continues to persist. Not because it wants or chooses to, but because it must.