2005-11-26T22:01:00.000Z

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I Have A Saw

I have a saw. I found it after some renovation work had been done on the flat upstairs. It's not much of a saw, but it looks good. I already have several other saws, and this one, being somewhat beat up already, was not something I needed as an addition to my tool set. So I used it to cut a brick. It worked. Once. As you can see, the back teeth have disappeared. Since it has no immediate value as a tool, I might as well make art with it. So now I let it sit in the rain and develop character. A photo or two later and, voila! It's art!

posted 2004.09.05, 19:56

Translated:

To begin with what is easiest, let us first pass in review the system of Epicurus, which to most men is the best known of any. Our exposition of it, as you shall see, will be as accurate as any usually given even by the professed adherents of his school. For our object is to discover the truth, not to refute someone as an opponent.

An elaborate defense of hedonistic theory of Epicurus was once delivered by Lucius Torquatus, a student well versed in all the systems of philosophy; to him I replied, and Gaius Triarius, a youth of remarkable learning and seriousness of character, assisted at the discussion. Both of these gentlemen had called to pay me their respects at my place at Cumæ. We first exchanged a few remarks about literature, of which both were enthusiastic students.

Then Torquatus said, "As we have for once found you at leisure, I am resolved to hear the reason why you regard my master Epicurus, not indeed with hatred, as those who do not share his view mostly do, but at all events with disapproval. I myself consider him as the one person who has discerned the Truth, and who has delivered men from the gravest errors and imparted to them all there is to know about well-being and happiness. The fact is, I think that you are like our friend Triarius, and dislike Epicurus because he has neglected the graces of style that you find in you Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus. For I can scarcely bring myself to believe that you think his opinions untrue."
more...

50 Zotos

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Attachment and Detachment: the making and breaking of place

This piece has several titles. I could have called it Dis/Placement,
or The Luxury of Place, or Tensions of Mobility and Settlement. All of
them pertain to an idea prompted by reading the first chapter of Sharon
Zukin's 1991 Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World.
The idea is that a sense of place develops through particular kinds of
attachment, and that peculiarly, certain kinds of mobility develop
certain kinds of place.

I am thinking of suburban estates, the domestic
preserves of highly mobile executives, professionals, and other
middle-class/white collar employees. We can think of the particulars of
place in terms of their social and economic provision, not in terms of
their physical geographies, nor in terms of significant moments in
their cultural histories. These places are defined by their ability to
satisfy job requirements, and indirectly, the social requirements of
employees, such as easy access to schools, health care, shopping
centres and airports.

Zukin portrays these places as defined
by market requirements. She characterises factory towns as an 'extreme
case of socio-spatial structuring by market norms' that 'responded to
industrial capitalists' needs by housing a labor reserve and attaching
workers to their employers on a permanent basis' (Zukin, 1991: 7).
Factory towns were about economic labor and its reproduction, that
unlike less-regulated city life, imposed specific conditions on both
personal and social behaviour, such as sobriety and the promotion of
marriage and family.

Today's factory towns are white-collar
suburbs, where the conditions are about maintaining access to career
prospects, and are defined and maintained more by the class of
employees than by any given employer. An article in the New York Times
provides an example, portraying a family on the move in order to keep
the husband's career on track:

Ms. Link and her husband,
Jim, 42, a financial services sales manager for the Wachovia
Corporation of Charlotte, N.C., belong to a growing segment of the
upper middle class, executive gypsies. The shock troops of companies
that continually expand across the country and abroad, they move every
few years, from St. Louis to Seattle to Singapore, one satellite suburb
to another, hopscotching across islands far from the working class and
the urban poor. (NY Times, 01/06/2005)

The article goes on
to characterise the broader domestic, economic and class landscapes of
the Links as representative of the 'relo' (from relocated) lifestyle:

Unlike
their upper-middle-class kindred - the executives, doctors and lawyers
who settle down in one place - relos forgo the old community props of
their class: pedigree and family ties; seats on the vestry and the
hospital board; and the rituals, like charity balls. Left with the
class's emblematic cars, Lily Pulitzer skirts and Ralph Lauren shirts,
their golf, tennis and soccer and, most conspicuously, their houses,
they have staked out their place and inflated the American dream.

In
other words, the place of relos is not among the landed gentry, but
among the accoutrements of middle and upper-middle class employment,
wherever that may take them.

There are two points to be made
here. One is that these people, like any others, have spatial
requirements. Their requirements are unusual, but requirements
nonetheless. The second point is that these requirements are the
product of capital relations, and as Zukin asserts, are structured by
market norms. The places and spaces developed through such structures
are indicative of certain ideas about space. They are also indicative
of spatial practices, particularly practices relating to attachment and
detachment. I think we are seeing the formation of spaces based on a
new combination of attachment to (market) values and detachment from
older, 'traditional' bonds to place. The nomadic lifestyles of
'executive gypsies' prioritise some qualities of place over others, and
by structuring space to meet their needs, impose those spatialities on
other, more place-based people.

The consequence is that attachment to
place in the traditional sense becomes a option for those who can
afford it rather than a condition of existence for those who cannot
afford something else. In short, we are seeing that attachment to place
is a luxury, where those without means are continually moved on. This
rootlessness extends from the indigent homeless of cities to the
economic migrant and even the career professional. The qualities of
attachment to place are being remade to meet market requirements, and
are dis-placing honored tradtions of attachment to and familiarity with
a physically and culturally bounded place.

It is a quiet midland in the cool

Railroads. refrigerator cars. Today
Jet Cool - Operates at high speed
modern art gallery in london 2day

Noted for its cool beers and the way
subtle, quiet town of Midland enjoyed
mix of more than 150 Cool mists melt away

pike, muskie and pickerel. There are day
first trip to the Midlands lasted
modern art gallery in london 2day

Compiled 11/26/2005 5:35:41 PM GMT

Get a googlepoem

Black Country Visions is at the RBSA Gallery, Brook Street, St Paul's, Birmingham, until December 3 2005.
Harry Eccleston, The Black Country and Beyond, Birmingham Museum, until December 4 2005

Not building: the lure of desolation.

Hugh Pearman

"I'll confess right away that my liking for dereliction is supremely selfish. It is built upon the idea of the lost world - not some jungle paradise, but a misplaced piece of the urban realm.
To enjoy an abandoned fragment of cityscape is to want to be in it alone, or with just a friend or two to share the experience. It does not work so well in a run-down ghetto, which by its very nature is populous - though there is plenty that is evocative in such places, as you find in the now impoverished former commercial district and Art Deco cinema quarter of Los Angeles, for instance."

Random Poem Generator, 1998" />Marion Kalmus, Random Poem Generator, 1998

2005-09-08T00:04:00.000Z

nothing here