Mashed (elegy for the city)

Our elders are sick. Written on the wall of a child's tree-house by a Scottish poet.

Since Plato we have been conscious of the ill-logic of our cities but struggled to do away with them. Now for the first time in human history there are more people in cities than in rural areas. It is no wonder, therefore, that human existence is at its most abstract, most violent, most 'civil', most veiled, most mediated, most toxic, most insane.

Jason Workman gave me permission to do a mashup of WorkmanJones city interventions between 2006 and 2008, which I've just finished. The main track is by Esmerine, who I think are a Canadian band that don members of godspeed you! black emperor.

Shredding, gleaning, piling and heaping

Currently I glean most of the material for my composts. Neighbours recently saved a trip to the tip because I pulled up with my wheelbarrow and asked to take the loads away. I often take my wheelbarrow for a walk scavenging for material. Peter O has been getting into the habit of dropping off shredded paper from school (if only I could get hold of the White House's pile right now). We collect horse poo from the nearby horse riding ranch and, as I've mentioned before, we weekly collect the food scrap bins from a nearby cafe. As we have now started to harvest food, we have increased our green waste which, in a closed-cycle ecology, is not really waste at all. 

As you can see in the below picture our soil is highly disturbed, largely compacted clay. Intensive mulching, to keep moisture in the soil (which attracts worms who break down the clay), together with intensive composting over the next several years should see a dramatic decrease in water usage.

One die mash around

Recalling: Daniel Spoerri post, Wednesday 29, October:
‘Spoerri's Magic á la Noix, p9’.

If the fact of becoming an architect after having built castles in the sand, of becoming a butcher after having pulled the wings off flies, of becoming a professor after having stuck one's nose in books, if all that indicates an incapacity to grow up, then I agree...

On the shelf of books

On the shelf sit three unpublished manuscripts including two illustrated children's books. Every now and then they get an airing. Here's a page from my 2003-2006 poetry manuscript.

Nipple (for Peter O'Mara)

Photography is the art of certainty that accepts as its limits the impartial something that can be captured of the everything that precedes the lens. 

Then there is photoshopping. A digital technique that confiscates the already memorialised before pushing it into the abject world of hyper-mediation. Not to be confused with collage or sampling.

Of course, the tiresome lineal premises of art's capitalisation (as discussed via skype with J this morning) is central to any critique of representation or object fetishised by the bourgeoisie, photographic or otherwise.

And, on another topic, it feels satisfyingly indulgent to be reading Spoerri's 'Mythological Travels..., given to me by my graphic friend Ian, and taken this afternoon by bike to the lake with Meg and her book of essays on plastics and ducks. But not indulgent in the same sense as the bourgeoisie's addiction to impure (non-compostable) consumption, because dipping into Spoerri's peculiar fetishised but unsentimental obsessions with macabre and other objects, crudely printed on the page like roneo copied black and white photos, (Something Else Press, Inc.) – the topographer of chance, the eternal infantile Spoerri – is go!