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