Chicago. Fig.
Chicago. Fig. These are titles of two books by the photographic team of Adam Bloomberg and Oliver Chanarin. “Chicago” is the name of a cardboard and junk city in the Negev used to train Israeli and US soldiers in milieus that simulate Gaza or a refugee camp. “Fig” includes images of pine forests that have been planted across Israel in previously occupied territory. These are painful, contested stories, with flashes of heat from all sides.
It leads me to wonder about the best way to discuss these hotly-debated, deeply-felt issues. If not at a university, then where? Where might respectful exchanges of opinions best unfold, even if the only common ground is that a setting for exchange is important? I think every institution is political, in the sense that power relationships are unequal within them and people’s priorities are skewed by those power relationships. I am worried about the continued (and increasing?) polarization of the university, where “toxic” becomes not just descriptive of the physical environment but of the intellectual one as well. Most recently, the establishment of an endowment fund at the University of Illinois, the Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Fund, and its close connection to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), has sparked debate locally, with all sides jockeying for positions for and against, but the opportunities for teaching each other about the real difficulties of living together on the planet seem to be completely forgotten. People rightly are concerned about “mission creep”–another term reminiscent of toxic dispersal–but is it possible to debate the mission(s) before jumping on board or not? My initial reaction to ACTA is that they say their mission is “academic reform,” but that that is a smokescreen for a completely different mission, which is the imposition of their ideology. NOT, repeat NOT, that this is only a strategy of the right, but given the dominance of the right, it seems hollow to claim their beleaguered stance. And, the website of their ally, the National Association of Scholars, is really ugly to boot.
Arlene, Love, and Flares in Community
Arlene Goldbard posted a new message for Rosh HaShanah on her blog. Here’s an excerpt that rings true for me:
“I know someone who has been saying that the world offends him. He means that our society seems off-course, with unworthy people exercising social power while many who desire a more just and merciful world despair of affecting things. Like many of us, he works in what they call the helping professions. He sees people with willing hearts and abundant gifts who have acquired the habit of dialing themselves down, accommodating themselves to a diminished world. They stop expressing the fullness of their dreams, bringing their creative power to bear on their communities, or asking people to meet them in a higher and deeper place, because they no longer believe these things are possible. Then they have a lot of trouble loving the shrunken or distorted self that is the residue of their disappointment.
To me, the deepest value of spiritual community is the way it can support us in remembering who we really are, in drawing on our highest and most remarkable selves to regain our power to heal ourselves and the world.”
Last night we lit flares in memory of Cope’s father. Seven of us watched the amazing light shift and sputter and change colors. We talked about Plato’s ideas of color, Harry’s love of life, and I thought of Laurie Long too.
Laurie Long
I just heard that Laurie Long died quite suddenly of heart failure, during treatment for lung cancer, on Thursday, September 13. Laurie is in black in the photo with (L to R) M. Simon Levin, Piotr Adamczyk, and Kevin Hamilton. I remember when Laurie came to my cabin during one of her trips to Champaign-Urbana from Vancouver, and the stories she told of animals and growing up, as we walked along the levee and through the woods. She was very excited to see cardinals.
She and Simon did so many interesting things, both here and in Australia, in Canada, and California. I am thinking of the film loop from their work in the Australian salt flats…what an eerie, gorgeous, damaged landscape seen from the air. It was mesmerizing.
What a loss.
Slipstreaming
Ryan Griffis recently sent around a link to an article on ctheory. Browsing the links there, I came across this 2005 interview with Christina McPhee. I like her use of “slipstreaming.”
Christina McPhee: Thinking about the poetics implied by “between your body and ‘the machine’”: — one wonders if ‘machines’ could be imagined as distributive trace presences within a psychic architecture, even a voice-space, built from a breath inside the screen. Let’s visualize a model of this breathing architecture; how can we imagine it as neither machine body nor human body, or maybe both, so that the space is as much a transitive verb as a nameable location. Here’s where the visualization of ’slipstream’ becomes especially useful: apart from programming slang, the word also has an older meaning in aerodynamics. Slipstream denotes the area of negative pressure or suction that follows a very fast moving object, like an airplane propeller. Or, when you’re in a small sports car on the freeway, you can ’slipstream’ behind a large truck, which allows your small vehicle to be sucked into the slipstream of the larger vehicle — at risk to your life. “Slipstream” can be a metonym, standing in for a complex set of associations, including machine repair, hallucination ( as in, a ‘fix’ ), sublimation of identity (forward suction into something ahead of you), minimal resistance, and air, wind or breath (intake, inhalation, suction).
Just Space(s)
I’m getting prepared to go to Los Angeles in November to see the Just Space(s) exhibit and participate in the tour from LA down to the Mexican border at Tijuana, called The Political Equator. This will be another version of a trip organized in 2006. Also during the Just Spaces exhibit there will be a book party for An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Altogether, it should be an intense and sleep-deprived weekend. Nick Brown, who is a colleague here, and Ava Bromberg, a mover and shaker in the Geography Department at UCLA, have been lead organizers and conveners for a huge number of events in LA this fall. Ava also co-edited the latest issue of Critical Planning, to which our group here contributed. With empyre featuring a discussion on “critical spatial practice” and all the action in Los Angeles this fall, it will be a wonder if I have any time at all to write this blog.
Berni Searle
The videos and prints by the South African artist Berni Searle, currently on view at the Krannert Art Museum, stir sensations in many ways: she climbs up, jumps and rolls down huge mounds of grape skins. I could see the stains on her white shift and almost smell the remains of fermented fruit.
She sits beneath a rain of flour and as it falls on her, she blinks with dust-covered eyelids and her head alters its shape as the flour mounds on top of it. Her hands seem almost separate from her body as she kneads the dough that the flour becomes after water drips onto it. The fingers dance, scrape, push, pull, slap, and withdraw.
She floats in water, her skirt like a boom to contain oil; suddenly she seems to be in the midst of black gooey water.
The video called “Vapour” is at once hellishly hot, as multiple fires burn under large pots covered with lids, and beautiful, as the lids are removed and the steam emerges to cloud the atmosphere through which she walks.
Labor Day 2008
My Alexander Technique teacher, Sharon De Celle, said once that “work is not exercise.” Today, Labor Day 2008, I vow to attend to my body, stretching, re-calibrating, centering, breathing, using the chair and the ground for support, and not to spend too much time on the computer keyboard.
