Archiving the City

Thelonious Monk said to young soprano saxophonist, Steve Lacy, who took good notes. Sounds like Steve learned a little himself.

“What we want to do is to, uh, play the way we play, and that’s what all the jazz musicians do: they play the way they want to”

From the diary of the artist as a young boy:

All the pretty or curious things give me so much pleasure. Thanks to photography, I can hold them.

“By miniaturizing the world through his passion for photography, Lartigue could hold everything, even himself, like a toy.”
– from Reading Boyishly, by Carol Mavor

Martin Luther King could never be president. Not because of racist attitudes of America in the 1960s (those haven’t changed all that much), but because he was an enemy of the state, not its benign friend– not a smiling visage on a t-shirt, or a McDonald’s advertisement. We ought to be careful to whom we compare this man, who never hesitated to call out the injustice at the heart of American existence. (more…)

Israeli attacks on the densely populated cities of Gaza were conveniently halted just one day before the inauguration of our new world leader. I am worried about what kind of urban politics these actions will “inaugurate.” What is being born in Gaza in the wake of this destruction? A depth of feeling we will no longer be able to contain; subjectivities we could never map.

For more about this map, and other maps of Gaza, click here.

On 14 december, 2009, on Stout Street, between Lambton Quay and Ballance Street, in the center of Wellington, New Zealand, there was a pile of rubbish blockading the entire road and making the street impassable for cars, pedestrians and cyclists. This impromptu blockade was a “One Day Sculpture” called Journee des Barricades by British artists, Heather and Ivan Morison. According to the artists’ statement:

Car wrecks, discarded furniture and other urban detritus barricaded a central city street in Wellington, New Zealand on Sunday 14th December 2008.
The temporary public artwork entitled Journée des barricades acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to mind questions about our environmental and economic future.

This street art in Wellington looks eerily like the streets of Naples looked last year (though probably not as smelly, and certainly not for the sake of art).

This artists’ collection of urban detritus also reminds me of the work of Walter Benjamin, especially the Arcades Project. (more…)

Colors of New York :: Part I is a video made by Stadtblind, a Berlin-based collective “dedicated to transforming the perception of urban experience.” The video takes pictures of New York City street scenes and sets them against a background of corresponding swatches of color. To see this video, click here.

The Colors of New York builds upon Stadtblind’s earlier photo project, The Colors of Berlin, a color-coded “guide book,” which indexes the city by color, and is made to look like a designer’s swatch book.

Election night 2008 was an explosion of raw emotion in parts of New York City. Harlem was overflowing with affective experience. Listen to the sounds build into a joyful roar.

The city of our imaginations was London. In Lagos of the 1980′s “London,” was a magic sound, its very utterance conveyed unattainable sophistication, hipness, style, escape. London stole my father for a few years of study. London bathed the in-crowd at school with the “been-to” glow. A wash of light followed even those who’s cousins-fathers-sister-friend-daughters-boyfriends were rumored to have visited that fabled city.

Like many schoolchildren, I knew the London of Dickens, of the Queen; the London of black taxis and Big Ben. So when this Terence Trent D’Arby video slid into heavy rotation on state television, I was unprepared for this other, intensely romantic London, of warehouses and dive bars, of motorcycles, dandies and miscegenation. This is when London became a real place, a tangible desire of mine.

Of course, this desire mainained intensity for a brief season, and I spent my adolescence in that unlikely emerald city, Seattle, and later New York. With each new city, London’s call grew fainter. I doubt I will ever live there. But thanks to the internet, I’ll always have Terence.

This is an interesting little archive of racial politics and the state of public education in Houston, Texas in 2007. Apparently, a police officer assigned to Houston public schools created this pamphlet for his colleagues in order to help them “learn to speak ebonics.” See more of the officer’s pamphlet here.

Pamphleteering, as an urban archival practice, has a long history, and has been connected to some of the most incendiary and revolutionary urban actions of all time. (Think Thomas Paine in the streets of Philadelphia, 1776).

George Orwell wrote a great review of the pamphlets circulating around London in 1943. Most of them, he concluded, were rubbish. But at the same time, he argues that the pamphlet is a “flexible form,” perfect for documenting things as they are happening, and for expressing one’s feelings quickly and succinctly. Kind of like a blog, right?

What would it mean to collect pamphlets handed out by “crazies” and “weirdos” around the city? Do you have a collection of pamphlets from some time in some city? Do you remember how you came across them? I’d love to see or at least hear about them. How would one go about collecting blogs of the city?

My friend Jana just reminded me of Archigram. I love their graphic technique. Like this manifesto written in the language of fifties space comics. For more of this groovy sixties avant-garde “architecture without architecture,” check out these scans, mostly from Simon Sadler’s book about Archigram.