New¬Post

Das neue Anti Design Festival in London (18. bis 26. September) kommt ganz wild, böse und natürlich “Anti” daher – und ein radikales Manifest gibt’s auch schon: “We are living in an age where millions of colours became 256. Difference is the enemy. Generic culture hypnotises us all into generic patterns, where control is visibly invisible. Danger is replaced by fear. New means upgrade. Risk is obsolete. Art made money stupid, and money made us fools. We welcome no_use, no_function and no_fear. Anarchy, crash and burn, the new awaits. From Learning to Earning, and now to Yearning, we have forgotten why we are here. We have lost touch with what made us tick, the fire of creative possibility that once consumed us from within. Revolutionary thought is but a distant memory.

I grew up as part of a generation that thought it could help improve society; that our sole function was to be conscious and to spread that consciousness through creative awareness, exploration, observation and questioning. This generation was replaced by the Thatcher/Reagan paradigm of Culture=Money. Thinkers became earners, Creatives became entertainers, and a whole dumbed-down generation now feels entitled to success and profit without having to work or think too much. We are now left with a spiritual hollowness. The belief systems of consumption and commodity have been exposed as empty. Revolution is a distant echo lost in the white noise, and religion has been largely subsumed by globalisation. Virtual experiences have replaced human touch. Analogue culture is now the exotic. We have managed to create for our children, perhaps for the first time in history, a future which is less hopeful than the one we live in today.
....
Mankind has the opportunity now to reclaim the cultural high-ground and risk something new, a creative breach in the barrier of exclusion that can allow some real growth and evolution, like a bright light shining through the cracks of a crumbling wall.

http://www.rebelart.net/diary/london-anti-design-festival-2010/006640/

Exhibition Opening (Day 5&6)

whitewashingwallswhitewashingwallswhitewashingwalls
getting up at dawn (here they don't see or say the cracks)
Primer=First&Undercoat
2x
Then- the vinyl white wash with thanks to Martha Stewart (a phenomenon we don't have back in Blighty- a super-glorified Delia Smith, if you will)
Thank GAWD for Jennifer- who helped me hang the show/hang the photographs
Right on time, not a second too late, at the eleventh hour

68" = average eye level
then measure the wall and divide by the amount of fotos per wall
now to make you marks
{attach four binder clips to the ¬ [corners] of the fotos
i hold as she adjusts the spirit level
she marks and i release
she nails the top two
i nail the bottom two
*always at an angle*
then the foto is hung
the nails allow for the stretch}

Day 3

The newlyweds arrive, then promptly depart, to catch a flight to their honeymoon.
Leaving me the keys and the blessing.
kONTACTmYK- We meet at 4 at ACG.
Turns out he's a painter-decorator. He teaches me the tricks of the trade.
Filling up some cracks; apply some Duroplaster = rock in 90 mins.
J&H's hounds are on a time-delay or something; barking 20 minutes after i arrive; muttering please, not now, shushhhhing
seeing Beuys throwing them a bone while i dive for the blanket and crook
on the passenger seat, Myk drives to Beck, helped him remove his photos , panels and electric blue -tack.
Chatting Scientology- straight up to Freemasonry- he doesn't take the bait
but shows me Greenpoint- turns out the Polacks are being turfed out their own neighbo(u)rhood.
Now We can all relate to that.

Everyone here in NYC has an arrival: No-one arrives here by accident - but by providence divine?
Chance would be a fine
-r thing,
hear them church bells ring,
as the carjacker rams straight into the sides of the bus rink
full speed into the front of the congregation
Will all Sabbatical assembly report to their stations!

Perhaps we aren't as inundated as we think we are:
All this stuff is like everything else-
Replicas of Choice
All copies of basic needs,
fulfilled endlessly.

According to the philosophy of language contra ontological theory- for anything to be truly 'new', it must be beyond all recognition, familiarity and having been-in-the-world.
It must be beyond words, description and speech- rendering the perciever speechless.
In the silence however, how long does it pass over us till we find the words to define what we percieve?
These words will have to be new words, if we ever hope to reach a mutual understanding.
Yet the question remains to be reclaimed, reconquered:
How can we create new words, a new language to explain, define and delineate the new?
Is this nothing more than a linguistic paradox? Xenons arrows?
And from what and where does this new language come from?
How will it appear in the world? What is its being-in-the-world?

...How to describe an impossible, undiscovered creature or colour...
???
and endless set of question marks hovers inches from my head, as the plumes of black smoke curl over the pinhead point print

TextTask#19

TEXT TASK #19

USING THE NYC SUBWAY SYSTEM AND ITS MAP OF 'LETTERED LINED'
WRITE A SERIES OF LIPOGRAMS AND/OR UNIVOWEL TEXTS
CORRESPONDENT TO THE LETTER OF THE LINE YOU ARE TRAVELLING ON
THE DURATION YOU HAVE TO WRITE THE TEXTS IS THE LENGTH OF TIME BETWEEN EACH STATION YOU ARRIVED ONTO THE TRAIN AND WHEN YOU DEPART FROM THE TRAIN.
YOU MUST THEN CHOOSE A WAY OF PRESENTING, PERFORMING AND PLACING/'SITING' YOUR TEXTS IN THE STATION OR CARRIAGE.

E.G. ON MY ARRIVAL I TRAVELED ON THE E & F & G LINES
THEREFORE, I WOULD WRITE THREE LIPOGRAMS WITHOUT USING THE WORDS CONTAINING THE LETTER E & F & G
AND TWO UNIVOWEL TEXTS USING THE LETTER E.
IT TAKES APPROXIMATELY 8-10 MINUTES BETWEEN EACH STATION STOP.
I WOULD THEN RIP THE PAGE OUT OF THE NOTEBOOK AND ATTACH TO THE METAL HANDLE BAR OR THE SEAT WITH CELLOTAPE OR GLUE TO BE READ BY THE NEXT TO BE SEATED IN MY PLACE.

Arrival

aphoristic to the least, say, on-going
furtive demands screamed over an intercom
exhausted
eyes rolled back
truse scale of the event, only now
woken to the re-builders of America
scorched, burning caramel yet their facia
cared for keeps a white front
gleaming
glaring over a scolded Joe
the blackest of the guys
nor the facia

the clack-clack tippy-tap ain't comin' back
call out clocked in compassed responce to the degree of
Our Mecca
be tracked to the mile signaled in pixelated arrow
ain't comin' back
till my work here is done:
awaiting confirmation
from mission control:
sent.

She walked past,
tight blue A-line clinging,
bullet nips from the AC
straight to the balcony
You need to keep them in check
You don't need to tell me all these problems
I don't need to know

Wish I had known a little more. Arrival: A day earlier than anyone expected. Especially myself. Sat bolt upright, staring out into the white white void of a cloud city and realized what an idiot I was. That I'm living in the then; the last century of travel. It doesn't take a day to get anywhere. Not when the food's this good and the screens this giving.
Arrival: Monday. Not Tuesday. Perhaps (and this thinking wishful, attempts another on this life to evade responcibility) I did read the details wrong. Mixedup (+ 1 day); cross breeding threads in the grey matter resulting retarded pedigrees = my detriment.
Now lugging luggage up and down and on and off the subway levels.
Seemingly a heck of a lot more complex than London's: Again; this is because I am the New, and the subway is the Old, the set, the functioning- forcing my feeble patters of a prototype around and about its endemic system.

Just got here- one heck of a ride though. Arrived a day earlier than I told the couple I'n staying with- and then they don't pick up the phone. End up scamming a taxi to the subway, have directiosn screamed at me through an intercom, catch ...the wrong train, catch the right train, walk for ages asking all and sundry directions, find the joint, blag my way thru the doors, up the elevator, at the door, spare keyed in, sat here now eating pad thai noodles and planning my next move. Just seen their calendar on their wall: September 6th: WEDDING.

FACEPALM+HEADDESK+¦-^ .

Cue Derrida [clapperboard]

"the citizen of a given identifiable country crosses the border of another country as a traveler, an emigré or poilitcal exile, a refugee or someone who has been deported, an immigrant worker, a student or researcher, a diplomat or a tourist. Those are all, of course, arrivants, but in a country that is already defined and in which the inhabitants know or think they know they are at home... No I am talking about the absolute arrivant, who is not even a guest. He suprises the host- who is not yet a host or an inviting power... The absolute arrivant does not yet have a name or an identity. It is not not an invader or an occupier, nor is a colonizer, even if it can become one... "

Indeed, I was and still am- at the point of typing this on their balcony overseeing construction workers building a new apartment, the glistening river in the distant and what I hope with all my heart is a Manhattan Skyscraper in the distant right. As we began our descent on American soil, the pilot swings the jetplane so that the wing tilts and we see in the approaching azure the skyline of a million postcard sized daydreams - the skyscrapers of Manhattan. HEARTMOUTH: and not from the change in altitude- for once.
I am the suprise for my hosts at their second home in Upstate New York celebrating their Wedding. Yet I wouldn't consider myself an absolute on any level, but certainly an arrivant. Surely, as Derrida later expounds, the absolute arrivant is a privilidged temporal position for something. Upon my return to Falmouth, I will again have this status of being an arrivant, but rather than attempt to suspend any fallacious act of maintenance as an absolute arrivant, I will actively seek to colonize a New Land for a New World upon the predefined land of those who know or think they know their land...
Yet, the second I step out of this apartmnet and begin my walks around the city searching for a commision free ATM and a grocery store, my position as an absolute arrivant will begin to be deconstructed and demolished with every step I take in the New World of New York.

Dita slathered on the prow, wielding the flag we are travel under, even if I find repulsive.
Cannot believe it. I've made it. I'm HERE.
And this time there's no flashback, nothing but the words washed over my HEaRT when We reached the other side of the wide wide river.
for there my hart remains

As soon as we enter a New City, we immediately begin reading, we immediately become relient on having all of our wits about us reading the textual and symbolic signs on the street, the subway, the postal codes and apartment names on letter boxes, the fold-out maps pressed anxiously into our hands. Hell kid, good luck to ya'. Hope you find yur folks. Our relience often becomes so dependant on the continual, directive presence of these signs that once they end and reach their finitude, the anxiety and helpless abandon we feel as arrivants overwhelms us more than our being-in-the-new, our urban unfamiliarity.

Especially in America , and even more so in NYC, our ability to chain signification needs to be rapid as it is contiously corrigible; as quick as her bike chainges gear.
The second I stepped out of the subway and onto the grid system of the streets, I needed to have all my confidence and trust that I was walking down the right road , all the way down the right road, to find the next set of co-ordinates to find the intersection of my desire:
(safety, refuge) minus (vulnerable, tourist)
Text Task 7#: Mark a set of co-ordinates on a map of the city- walk to these co-ordinates, now rewrite and translate these co-ordinates from numerical foms totextual/ alphabetical/idiographic forms using the paradeigm of (text, text)- you may wish to describe the co-ordinates, ask locals to describe it for you, take existing text and rewrite/reconfigure to the paradeigm etc. - then continue to your next set of co-ordinates = next new location- repeat their textual translation- Once you have finished walking writing and encountering each of the co-ordinates, retrace your steps and repeat the textual translation of the same co-ordinates but find new things to describe and detail about the place you have already been to.

The New is as much via negativa as what you don't tell your kids.
Which end up being the best things they learn from you.

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM: What does this mean?

The motto has been traced to Virgil, the renowned Roman poet who lived in the first century B.C. – to a line in his Eclogue IV, the pastoral poem that expresses the longing of the world for a new era of peace and happiness.

"Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo."

Virgil's line has been translated in different ways, including:
The great series of ages begins anew.
The ages' mighty march begins anew.
A mighty order of ages is born anew.
The majestic roll of circling centuries begins anew.

"Novus" means: new, young, fresh, novel.

"Ordo" means: series, row, order.

"Seclorum, a shortened form of seculorum (sæculorum), is the plural of seculum (sæculum), means: generations, centuries, or ages.

Thomson, a Latin expert, coined the motto: "novus ordo seclorum"
and explained its meaning: "The date underneath [the pyramid] is that of the Declaration of Independence and the words under it signify the beginning of the new American Era, which commences from that date."

The official English translation of "novus ordo seclorum" is:

"A new order of the ages"

NOTE: "Novus ordo seclorum" was not intended to mean (nor does it correctly translate into) "new world order." Seclorum is plural (new worlds order?). And Thomson said the motto refers to the beginning of a new age – an American era beginning in 1776. The pyramid's rising rows of construction help illustrate this new series of generations.

Thus together, the words signified the beginning of the new American Era commencing from that date seen at the base of the Pyramid.

Castings for seals were done in 1782 and 1841 but in 1883 the reverse was officially rejected by a committee headed by Professor Elliot Norton of Harvard University who said unequivocally that it was a dull emblem of the Masonic fraternity. It was never cut! Further more it was never really seen until 1935 when it appeared on the dollar bill.

Extract from http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/masonic_dollar.html

Guerilla Gardening Birmingham/London

Guerrilla Gardening NYC

http://www.greenguerillas.org/index.php

http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cdl.cfm?content_item_id=18995&folder_id=2928

http://www.nyccgc.org/

http://www.nyrp.org/

http://treebranch.org/

Skyline4Sale

A poem written about 2 years ago, during the occupation of the Kingfield Heath Squat in Birmingham:

Sale! A Sale? There’s Skyline For Sale!

I declare this auction open, let bidding begin!

Do I hear ten thousand, three hundred, half a million, or more?

All the amenities you could ever desire, right at your door

For we specialize in luxury serviced accommodation

Situated slap-bang in the city’s most enviable location

Just see the panoramic view from the umpteenth floor

All the mod cons you should ever desire just open the door

To enjoy the most stylish state-of- the-art furnishings

Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Yours!

Lifted, Shifted, Fitted, Installed…

…For Free?

I’m afraid not Sir/Madam there’s just a small fee

And always will be, so just sit back relax put your feet up on your exclusive leather settee

And watch as we obliterate what remains of your city

Exterminate in a jiffy every network of community

Leave no survivors, leave not a trace

Just need a signature from you

To eradicate half a century’s history

Ere we go m8 were gonna b srsly rollin in it now! Can u imagin d size of d Q

Lining the street right round the block, just seemed too good to be true

Thought Marie as the swarming hoard of buyers, teeth-gnashing, eyes-popping, just gagging

To earn their slice of cut-rate sky surround her as

She gazed up at the towering height of her future home and felt the static in the air by tentative hooks lift up her hair and it was then that she saw the storm clouds gathering high above the open square and sensed the wind current splitting into two three four strands each whirling this way all around her no longer a sea breeze taking her back to sea-side childhood she could so fondly remember but a great whistling gale force gustguustuustuustuustuustuustuust muuk’muuk’muuk’junrakanhurakan ki’impahal kaachkaachkaach!Kall upon the four winds from the four corners of this world awaiting cataclysmic end combine bind together force this second Babel to its knees before the mighty power of the Gods whom see this sky-reacher built too high reaching only the highest impiety blowblowblowblowout the glass Marie saw the gleaming pane caught in the shaft of fleeting sunlight slice through the air like a knife in a motion slower than the time the judges gavel strikes the block shattering the suspended silence the accused trembling in the dock

I swear I din’t know it wur guna catch fire I swear, I fought it wur stone or brick or summat

Really shud ‘av bin too bloody stuopid if u ask me

maykin’ a statue outtur summat flammabul

I in’t no arsonist in’t got the brains or the gear to pull summat like dat off

Wus just messin’ about wid sum matches I nick’d down fine fare supermarket

Liked d’way the flame licks yer ‘and s’pecially ona freezin’ cold nigh’ like that one

‘Ad an argument wid me mum storm’d out d’ouse went into town was walkin’ thru d’square when I saw d’statue

‘Member playing on it as a kid, duckin’ in between the ‘ouses and that factory wid smoke cumin’ out its chimney, so I wuz bored fought I’d see if I still fitti’d round all the nook an’ crannies,

Got bored too quick took out d’matches struck one alight but the bastard burnt me fingurs and I dropp’d I on d’floer,

Next fing I know I’m peggin’ it fast as a can I turn my ‘ed back see the fire blazin’ outur control that woman I ‘member who blew you a kiss outur ‘er ‘and ‘er face was all melted like meltin’ they wuz all meltin’ like a lump ur buttur in a pan dat lady’s lips ‘ad burn’d into a massiv ‘ole look ‘dasif she wur screamin’ at me Yur dads gonna cane you t’night lad! And I dayn answer ‘er cuz I dayn know wot t’say, so I just k’pt runnin’ and runnin’ feelin’ the bak of my froat go all ‘ard an’ dry phlem stikin’ to d’bak o’ ma mouf, wind rushin’ in knee caps bucklin’ heart poundin’ poundin’ poundin’ ma feet treadin’ the pavement slabs dat cracked an’ split open like dare wuz an earthquake or summat all the buildings shook an’ d’bricks fell all arand me I look’d up and saur dem flats I knuw get biggur and tallur wid every step great machines were buildin’ ‘em like I’d nevur seen in ma life and I look’d bak and the square wurnt how it was it wur all white like the marble of d’court floer an’ there were trees an’ columns on every buildin’ look’d dead posh cudn’t believe it wur where I wuz and as I turn’d a corner there was this huge monster with a fousand silver eyes starin’ back at me everyfing around me wuz changin’ so fast I jus’ want’d t’cry want’d to go ‘ome wantid to see ma family so I legg’d it down the underground path and shut ma ize till I was ‘ome sweet ‘ome where I knew all the street names, my mates, my friends, neighbours, everyone else’s business and never your own that’s what my mum would say

Thought I’d leave her alone, couldn’t go home, not just yet, better stay out a bit longer

I’ll go and see my dad, down at the warehouse,

Packing and sorting the boxes from the steel spinner just up the road,

I could just stay in the office or the entrance, talk to his mates who worked on the same line

But as I opened my eyes I didn’t see any sign of the warehouse, or my Dad or his mates

The door was locked the paint had peeled from the sign above

I knocked, but no one answered

So I went round the back and kicked the small screen door down

And saw to my horror the warehouse

In a complete mess, boxes lying everywhere, metal pipes broken from the boards,

Graffiti scrawled up the walls, the check-in clock put forward ten, twenty years forward

And the darkness where the lights had fused, passageways disappearing into gloom

Wasn’t the only thing that had disappeared, was disappearing

Faster than the rate of Capital earning

Mercy was a starling who cried out for her nest

Locked in the eye of the wrecking ball while

Bulldozers clanked behind, baying to topple the cowering walls

But I will stand my ground before the machines, the surging masses, the glass, the burning statues, and gleaming alabaster pillars of a city that never was

Hold my head up to the lofty turrets of plutocrats and see past their ersatz plans

Climb to the peak of tycoon high-rise defying the vengeful gods looking down from the sky

And to all the people far below will I bellow out this cry

For we may speak with words unknown

Minds pitch ideas at different tones

But look, look! Our hands

They are made the same,

Of flesh! Of bone!

So let US rebuild,

Restore, regain

For what we built

We will reclaim!

(2008)