Lost in L.A.'s Topography

So I finally got to leave town for a week after several too-busy months of translating, writing, editing, and teaching. I went to Los Angeles for the annual conference of the American Literary Translators Association, presented my paper, and then got so excited about exploring new (to me--including the most amazing Museum of Jurassic Technology) and familiar parts of the city that I FORGOT to see New Topographics at LACMA, a recreation of the highly influential and much-hated 1975 show of the same name. Many of the photographers from back then are represented, including the Bechers, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, Jr., and Frank Gohlke. What must have triggered much of the negative criticism thirty years ago--the surprising perspectives on industrial, urban, and suburban sites that emphasize banality and lack of emotional engagement with the object, usually shown in color--is now pretty much standard and has influenced a generation and a half of photographers in the U.S. and beyond, many of whom I admire and try to learn from.

New Topographics is scheduled to travel to a few more cities; in each one, local photographers and organizations will be featured. In Los Angeles, the Center for Land Use Interpretation is showing the video installations Oil Landscans. Not surprisingly, the Center is located next door to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.


And continuing with the theme of oil and land use, Edward Burtynsky, another favorite photographer of mine, is showing his project Oil concurrently at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. I first became aware of him through his large-format landscapes that often showed destruction and desolation--what he termed Manufactured Landscapes. His work may not exactly fit the city focus of this blog, but the wounds and scars on the landscapes he documents are the result of human industrial activity, of which cities benefit the most. Oil consists of 55 large images of drilling, processing, transporting, and using oil.

Oil will also be shown in several other cities over the next two years.

Museum of Jurassic Technology: Sabine Schmidt

Conflux 2009 in New York

I've yet to attend Conflux, the annual New York City psychogeography festival organized by Glowlab. I used to be really excited about the projects, workshops, and exhibitions, but in the last two or three years the festival program seemed a bit arbitrary, showy, falling short of the possibilities. Of course, anything goes in psychogeography, but that's why psychogeographical projects and performances often come across as rather shallow. I guess I like "anything" best when it's not only playful and adventurous but also concerned with a deeper engagement with (urban) space.

Geoff Nicholson, whose 1997 novel Bleeding London triggered several ideas for both my academic research and creative work, is a seasoned walker and, while skeptical of psychogeography as a concept, practices walking in ways that certainly fit the definition. His non-fiction work The Lost Art of Walking (2008) contains a funny and slightly bemused-sounding review of Conflux 2006. The festival's headquarters have since moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but looking at the program, I still wonder why so many projects seem to be riffing off work done by other artists and communities instead of trying to move psychogeography into new directions. (Yes, I know the same can be said about my own work.)

Having said that, I would love to see the Reverend Billy's Breaking into Public Space workshop because of its political agenda. Plus, the man's just a lot of fun.

Reverend Billy: Jacquie Soohen/Conflux 2009

Eight Explain One in 8 Million

The New York Times' profile series One in 8 Million is based on a simple and effective concept: Talk to residents of one of the five boroughs. Get their story in their own voices. Take some pictures. Post multimedia slide show on website.

The series started in January, and profiles are posted weekly. Already there are plenty of stories to get lost in for a while.

It's hard to imagine anyone not being interested in good stories about regular people. It seems so fundamentally human to be curious about how others handle the surprises, joys, and burdens of everyday life. We compare, sympathize, and criticize. "I wouldn't have said that!" or "Good for her!" or "How does he do it day after day?"

What One in 8 Million does particularly well is the presentation of these profiles. The reactions evoked by the content are amplified by the warm and quiet quality of the interview recordings and by Todd Heisler's luscious black-and-white photography. While the stories tend to be less spectacular than the plots of Naked City, Jules Dassin's 1948 neo-realist movie and the 50's TV series of the same name that inspired One in 8 Million, the visual aesthetic is very similar: moody lighting, close-ups, amazing depth of field, and the suggestion of a strong link between the person and the place.

This week, the eight staff members who work on the series answer questions from readers. It's an informative read. I think I was most impressed with Heisler's description of the photo sessions. He tries to meet the interviewees twice and spends hours with them, taking between 400 and 1000 pictures. As is so often the case with things that look simple, much thought and work have made them so.

Steven Marmo, the Bar Fighter: Todd Heisler/NYT

Iain Sinclair Likes to Talk

British writer and subject of my dissertation Iain Sinclair quite enjoys participating in public discourse. His books are his most significant contributions, but he also writes essays and op-ed pieces, sits for taped interviews and on panels, and records walking commentary. Here are a few of his more recent videos and podcasts:

As part of the Story of London festival, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, and Iain Sinclair got together at the British Library on June 29 for an amiable conversation. The video is here.

At the July 16 launch party for the new annual British arts magazine Corridor 8, Sinclair narrated a psychogeographical walk through Manchester. The audio tour, read by Swen Steinhauser, is part of a series organized by the Urbis Centre in Manchester and available as a podcast.

Sinclair has been an outspoken critic of the heavy-handed approach to urban renewal surrounding the 2012 Olympic Games. So outspoken, in fact, that his neighborhood library in Hackney banned him from giving a talk on his most recent book there. The Guardian posted this interview/walk in February, when Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire came out.

Members of the now-defunct BBC Collective filmed Sinclair in Abney Park cemetery in Newington as he talked about London: City of Disappearances, the "anthology of absence" he edited and published in 2006.

And finally, there is a rather odd 25-minute Audi commercial (2-minute trailer here) that shows Iain Sinclair and filmmaker Chris Petit driving around northern England trying to find some sort of psychogeographic significance in what they encounter while saying nice things about their shiny black Audi V10. Psychogeography being what it is, especially in the hands of Sinclair, I would have expected a bit more. But hey, they got to go on a roadtrip in a brand-new A6. Who would turn that down?

Julius Shulman, 1910-2009

One of my post-dissertation research projects will deal with people's sense of place in a city that doesn't seem to invite them to take emotional ownership of the larger city. It may work for a neighborhood--but who loves Los Angeles as a city the way many residents love New York, London, Montreal, or Paris? (I'm being western-centric, but that's a whole other set of research projects; for now I have to refer to places I know well enough.)

The first time I went to L.A., I was fully prepared to hate it. Instead, I was fascinated--a response that doesn't exclude hate, I guess, but I've really come to like the city as a ragged, fragmented whole. It has to be impossible to know and understand Los Angeles the way one can know and understand places like New York. Psychogeographical approaches work differently there. Walking is a very different, but not impossible, undertaking (see Geoff Nicholson's The Lost Art of Walking, 2008). The layers of history may be horizontal rather than vertical. And so on.

Much of my fascination has to do with the California-style modernist architecture that helps define the Los Angeles cityscape, even when it's hidden away like Julius Shulman's own 1950 steel-frame house. And much of what I know about this architecture comes from Shulman's clean and well-angled photography that makes such smart use of the Southern Californian sky and light. Some of his pictures of Case Study Houses, especially Pierre Koenig's #22, have become as iconic as the buildings themselves. While he's best known for his work in and around L.A., Shulman's collection of more than a quarter million negatives, prints, and slides (held by the Getty Research Institute) includes images from all over the United States. Shulman died in Los Angeles on July 16, 2oo9.

I just tried to find a copy of Eric Bricker's 2008 documentary Visual Acoustics but it doesn't seem to be out on DVD yet.

Edris House, Palm Springs (1953): Julius Shulman/The Palm Springs Modern Committee

Of My City

I usually write about big cities elsewhere, but it is time to point out some interesting changes right here in Fayetteville (pop. 70,000). The changes reflect a combination of good ideas about place and community with an active sense of preservation and history.

I'm impressed by the city's walkability and the growing network of urban trails (which will eventually stretch for 130 miles); the fantastic public library; the decent selection of non-chain restaurants, coffeeshops, bars, and other businesses; the 4-days-a-week farmers market; the pretty downtown neighborhoods; and the reawakened arts and music scene. There are new hyperlocal info and networking websites that add to the general sense of community. Summers are pretty awful but they are worse in other parts of the South. The scent of honeysuckle, the green glow of fireflies, and the other seasons help make up for the sweaty months.

Public transportation (which needs to be improved) is provided by the University of Arkansas and by Ozark Regional Transit. Light rail is on the planning table. Fayetteville strikes me as more progressive than any other place in Arkansas. Higher building density and curbing of sprawl are priority goals for the city government, which has made impressive efforts to include residents in information-gathering and decision-making efforts. The new mayor is a blue-collar liberal with green ideas and a sense of place. He also keeps an active and informative Facebook page.

It would be nice to have more of a few things: non-local live music, bookstores, Indian restaurants, arthouse movie theaters, for instance; but this wish list reflects only my own lifestyle, which happens to be unaffected by things like the available variety of churches or the quality of schools.

Some people, however, pay attention to a longer list of quality-of-life criteria than I do, and they've been noticing a lot of positive things about Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas lately:

The city was ranked 6th overall in the "Small Cities" category of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Smarter Cities project. Fayetteville even tops the "Environmental Standards and Participation" category but ranks 305th in the "Standard of Living" category, probably due to low wages, high poverty, and low rate of homeownership.

For efforts to preserve and promote its heritage, Fayetteville has just been designated a Preserve America Community.

And in its June "Best and Worst Cities for Recession Recovery" feature, Forbes magazine ranked the Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers area second highest on the quick rebound list. At 6.1 percent (DoL, June 2009), unemployment around here is still low (as are wages). The big employers (Walmart, Tyson, J.B. Hunt) are doing fairly well, and the housing bubble wasn't as extreme as elsewhere. It's not a bad place to ride out the recession.

Downtown Fayetteville construction: Sabine Schmidt

Tweenbots and Public Space

I saw a link to the Washington Square Park video on a friend's Facebook today and was intrigued. The idea is so playful and the tweenbot so cute, and the project makes great use of public space and human behavior. Yes, it might have played out differently if it had been, say, a disoriented human being in a wheelchair instead of a small mobile cardboard creature, but that's not the point.

2009 Pritzker Prize for Swiss Architect Peter Zumthor

After winning the Praemium Imperiale last year, Zumthor now has received the world's most prestigious architecture award. Looking at the list of past Pritzker winners (Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry), this year's award couldn't have gone to a more different architect (yes, with a couple of exceptions).

What speaks to me in his work is how he creates austere spaces that are filled with the history and nature surrounding them. Most of his designs belong in non-urban environments, it seems, because that's where their minimalism isn't drowned out by the architectural noise of the city. The simplicity of buildings such as the hotel spa in Vals or the Sogn Benedetg chapel in Sumvitg strikes me as both essentially Swiss and Japanese.

The chapel also reminds me of vernacular architecture here in the Ozarks. Zumthor made it part of its landscape the same way Fay Jones put his Thorncrown Chapel on that hillside outside of Eureka Springs--using the materials, the light, and the stories of a place each architect was/is deeply familiar with.

Spa in Vals: Helene Binet; Sogn Benedetg chapel: Adrian Michael/Wikimedia; Thorncrown Chapel: Whit Slemmons

All in Kansas City: "The Poetics of Space," George Segal, and Homer Page

When I go to Kansas City, I usually try to spend some time at the Kemper and Nelson-Atkins museums. I think in May I'll make the trip just to see these three shows (and eat at Jerusalem Café).

The Poetics of Space will run from April 10 until March 14, 2010 at the Kemper Museum. The exhibition is titled after Gaston Bachelard's 1958 classic treatise on the perception of space and will feature works by 17 photographers, including some of my favorites such as William Christenberry, Joel Meyerowitz, and Todd Hido.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum will show George Segal: Street Scenes between May 9 and August 2. The life-size sculptures in this traveling exhibit (curated by the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art) were inspired by his walks around lower Manhattan. And a collection of street photos by Homer Page, taken when he lived in New York on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949 and 1950, is already on display; the exhibition ends June 7.

My perception may be skewed due to years of research on urban space, psychogeography, maps, and the like, but I do get a sense that there is a renewed interest in images of the city and discussions of city space.

George Segal, Graffiti Wall (1990)
Photo: Donald Lakuta/George and Helen Segal Foundation

Helen Levitt, Street Photographer, 1913-2009

New York photographer Helen Levitt died on Sunday at the age of 95. After dropping out of high school, she trained with a commercial photographer. In 1935, she met Henri Cartier-Bresson; she also became friends with Walker Evans and James Agee. Levitt worked as a film director and editor before returning to photography in the late 1950s, when she was one of the first street photographers to focus on color (she switched back to black and white three decades later). The New York Times obituary mentions that she was born with Ménière's Disease; I wonder how that affected her many, many walks in the city.

Untitled photo c. 1942; linked with permission from Encyclopedia Britannica.

Mille pas

About four years ago I had a Eureka moment triggered by frustration with my original dissertation project. I realized that
... my favorite writers make the city one of their subjects
... art, especially photography, to me is at its most fascinating when it deals with city lives, sites, and faces (some of my favorite artists, such as Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long, notwithstanding)
... I really like densely populated places (if I also get to look at an ocean or a couple of mountains every once in a while)
... I must have walked thousands of miles in cities over the years
... there's no point in spending a lot of time thinking and writing about something I'm not excited about.

Then I wrote an outline for a dissertation on city walking, space, and memory in the novels and non-fiction of Paul Auster, Peter Kurzeck, and Iain Sinclair. I'm almost done with it, and there are about half a dozen new projects I can't wait to start working on.

There's also photography, which started as a by-product of my walks and has turned into my "second hustle," with art shows and sales and a web site.

And there are many notes and thoughts that never found a place in the dissertation. Some of them will go here. I'm going to use this blog to share good stuff I come across and to try out some ideas. I'll keep a list of links to artworks, movies, music, and whatever else has a city/walking/space/psychogeography connection, which includes maps and labyrinths especially.

I'm naming the blog Of Cities, after the excellent DJ Signify album that came out around the time I set it up.