Findings in the city: books, names, questions

It's been a good month for the city giving me gifts. My lover always finds playing cards, one a week or so, with which he reads an urban tarot. Me? I've had a knack for street clothes, gathering bedraggled pieces of fabric and taking them home to wash. Last winter this got me a good warm hoody at a time I was too unemployed to turn the heating on much, though the elbow-length black velvet gloves won out for chic alongside warmth. Various hats, a couple of things that went straight to charity shops... And of course this scavenging isn't karma-free, so those scarves I've lost on buses and jackets I've left on trains? Call it tit-for-tat.

But what brought me to blog was a History of the City of Gaza, or, at the time I came across it, an anonymous brown-bound hardcover on a wall in Holloway. A 1966 edition of a 1907 book by Martin A. Meyer, a genuine bona fide time capsule telling of a Gaza city so far from the one we know today - as the frontispiece shows:

"The city of Gaza has not had the glamour thrown around it which has brought so many cities on the coasts of the Mediterranean into great prominence. But ... The importance of the city of Gaza will be more and more emphasized as the eastern shores of the Mediterranean are opened up to the commerce of the world, and as the projected railroads bring the inner parts of hither Asia into direct connection with the sea.

"Hither Asia"! What a term. How different the geography of the world - the knowledge of the world - the world itself in 1907. Though, too, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean have indeed been opened up to the commerce of the world, and Gaza certainly has an importance today - an importance that might be said to have a kind of glamour (in leftist circles at least), an evocative power and meaning beyond the bare facts. So perhaps Meyer is not so irrelevant now as all that, and perhaps that's why the book's been republished in June 2009 and apparently reprinted already.

But the story, the story - I tell you all this for the inscription on the inner leaf: "Abeer Abuwarda, 10/2008, London". Suddenly my street find conceivably had an owner, if they'd lost the book rather than put it out on the street like so much broken furniture. Now I may be an opportunist but I'm no thief, so I googled to see if I could find this person to whom to return the book. Who'd I find? A London Met doctoral student working on Architecture of Resistance During the Gaza Blockade, and the "permanent temporiness" of Palestinian refugee camps (Khan Unis Camp below).



(Following the Gaza line of enquiry into permanent temporary settlements, do read the ever-interesting Eyal Weizman on Ariel Sharon, the architect/general for whom war is politics and politics is space-making. But back to the story:)

Small world, you might think, if I could find the book's former owner so easily, and if s/he's an architectural theory postgrad just down the road. But within this visibility is deeper anonymity - "Abeer Abuwarda" has no google trail other than this one page; is presumably not their 'public' name but a personal one for writing in books & this one piece of work; is not to be contacted for bookish purposes after all.

Thus the found object remains mute, its history (lost or discarded?) unclear, its rightful owner (Abeer or me?) unknowable. Whatever the marvels of internet search technology, the city remains opaque.

Sinclair (1997) 'Lights Out For The Territory': A review, or perhaps a mauling

So Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory is "Quite simply one of the finest books about London ever written", says the Spectator; "A book about London, in other words, a book about everything" (Peter Ackroyd in The Times).

Bollocks.

There are no people there, not in his writing. The city is empty, inhabited only by poets and booksellers: educated, broke but certainly not poor; white or maybe a bit Jewish, and monolithically middle aged and male. What ghost town is this? I wouldn't want to go there. Sinclair walks, he says, but his words are so terribly disembodied for such a project; there he goes, the anti-phenomenologist mimbling off into history, always the past, as though he hasn't found any there there at all. In seeing a palimpsest beneath the city, he loses sight of what's in front of his eyes; oh, Sinclair obsesses over graffito scrawls as though they are authorless, solipsistically taking them all as signs for him to read, to interpret. Hermetic fucking arcana - what about the unknown? What about the proposition that the city is chaotic, is vast, is unknowable? No, let's be afraid of that and search for Dan Brown hidden traces, let's go chasing castles in the sky, this airy semiotic fantasy and forget that the real links, the real connections - the real goddamn mystery - is in the people, the messy illiterate gorgeous mass of people from whom Mr Sinclair is running walking away.

Transmetropolitan

I have regressed to age fifteen and started reading legendary comic series Transmetropolitan. Been reading writer Warren Ellis's blog for years, of course, so it's about time I got round to his real stuff. Transmetropolitan tries quite hard to be cool, and of course it's essentially deriative - but this is postmodernity so does that matter? I think I like it. Worth scribbling about it here because Transmetropolitan - as the name suggests - is urban as hell. Urban like ur-city, or at least ur- like originary if your year zero was Bladerunner. There are other urban archetypes in Dickens, Le Corbusier, Ancient Greece - but yes, Transmetropolitan's doing all it can to capture a particular one. So let's take a look at it.



"I hate it here. I hate the way it smells (except when you get into a fully residential quarter where people are predominantly first-gen American: the way people express their culture in their cooking is one of the few good reasons for being alie). I hate the way it looks (except for that weird beauty that hits you in the eye eery other second). I hate the way it thinks (except when it buys this newspaper). I hate the things it does to itself (except when it lets me do them). I hate the way it loes me, and I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate it here... but God help me, I can't imagine liing anywhere else."

(Anti-)hero Spider Jerusalem just refers to it as 'the city', which fits this blog way too perfectly! The series seems to have quite a fixation on prostitution as proiding definitive urban background colour, too, which I need to unpack - that 'Sex and the City' post I promised. Of course it's essentially just romanticised misogyny, but the trope (common enough, think Sin City too) hints at a bigger about urban social relations too, I suspect... But first another trope of Transmetropolitan: drugs.

"You know, when I was a kid, we listened to music that made our parents' eyes bleed and took drugs that made us want to dance and fuck and kill things. That is the way things are supposed to be.
It was, therefore, in the spirit of honest investigation that I internalised a heroic dose of Space, the new social drug enjoyed by the young folk of today as part of the youth culture referred to as Supermodernity.
Supermodernity, apparently, is the experience of being between places; that is, not being in a real place at all, but waiting in transit between one place and the other. This is why SM/Space Culture music appears to us to be utterly silent. You hae to be on Space - slowed down, across places, in the one between ticks of the clock - to be able to hear it.
This is what they do for fun, apparently: suck up appalling volumes of a drug that traps you in an airport waiting lounge of the mind and doesn't let you go for approximately two hundred years while someone plays an antique handheld electronic keyboard in your ear."

First, what the fuck, a reference to the Marc Auge Non-Places: ...Anthropology of Supermodernity that is basically A. getting Terribly Upset about driving on the motorway? Unexpected... But also the suggestion that real cutting-edge spatial theorists ought to be hoovering up ketamine and the other space-time distorters (salvia, perhaps?). The eco actor-network theory of Tim Ingold is essentially based on the acidhead realisations of Gregory Bateson: 'oh shit, man, it's like, all connected! We better be nice to the plants and reindeer now...' So what would the results be for embodiment and architecture if working with disassociatives? Of course architecture students are always already doing these drugs by the bucketload, but is anyone out there integrating it with their practice? I want to know...