Reviewing Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s recreation of Amsterdam’s red-light district, The Hoerengracht “at least two men writing about the piece have felt the need to share personal stories of interactions with the Amsterdam red-light district, or with prostitutes. Richard Dorment opened his Telegraph review with a paragraph on his schoolboy adventures in Amsterdam (supervised by a Jesuit; what a shame I went to a Church of England school). It is ‘not irrelevant to the exhibition’, he adds. Then Tom Lubbock in the Independent tells us ‘I have never paid for sex. But off the top of my head I can think of three male friends who have, and perhaps still do.’ Too much information. WAY too much. What next, a link to their Facebook pages?” (via.)
“Rather than some authentic, uncomplicated, unplanned response to ordinary people’s desires, London’s suburbia was the product of both planning and speculation, heavily mediated, and marketed using an impressive degree of subterfuge.” – Owen Hatherley visits the “Suburbia” exhibition at the London Transport Museum… “The exhibition alludes to the fact that London’s private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.”
Nostalgia: What’s the Role of the Past in Fashioning the Future? One of the better talks at Frieze with Owen Hatherley, Matthew Brannon, and Dan Fox.
Dan Hill reviews Alain de Botton’s book about his residency at Heathrow Airport: “A central theme is the (accurate, I think) impression that few industries are as “vulnerable to disaster” as commercial aviation, but that this leads essentially to a kind of pervasive frustration running through much of the experience. Here, the business simply cannot win. It is perpetually teetering on the the edge of delivering failure. All that changes is the scale of ‘disaster’. The fact that you’ve been delivered safely to and from 25000 feet is conveniently ignored by passengers in favour of being miffed by the size of the taxi queue, or by being infuriated by a mildly officious attendant at the check-in desk, or sitting for hours on the runway due to pre-departure engine failure at Bangkok, or by one’s luggage flying to Belgrade while you fly to Buenos Aires. Focusing on these smaller ‘disasters’ is perhaps a way of dealing with the extreme nature of the experience of flying, and the everyday aversion of real disaster by these incredible systems of technology and people. The whole act is too surreal to think too deeply about – so people don’t, generally rejecting thoughts about how precariously they’re travelling by distracting themselves with the more mundane and everyday breakdowns in a system that’s far too complex to run smoothly.” (via.)
Got a bunch of good (long!) posts in store next week, but in the meantime, check out my posterous. It is full of video clips and pics from my recent trip to London.
Have Art and Theory Drifted Apart? A podcast from the Frieze Art Fair talk with Simon Critchley and Robert Storr.
I’m in London 10/12 (or, I guess, 12/10) for a week and a half for the Frieze Art Fair. Please email if you’d like to meet up: joanne.mcneilATgmail.
The Facebook geographical network with the largest number of members, the top Twitter0using city, and location of “nearly 10 per cent of traffic to Digg isn’t New York or Tokyo, but London. Says a London-based social media strategist, “Londoners are well known for maintaining a polite distance in their dealings with each other.” (via.)
“The French and Italians are encouraged to live at home as long as possible. In England, kids are pushed to leave early and that creates a humor, edge, and early floozy mentality.” – Malcolm McLaren
“[The} career path of most young (successful) writers goes something like this. Go to university – preferably Oxford or Cambridge – and read English. While there, start writing novel and get a few pieces published in the university magazine. Move to London after graduation, start a creative writing postgraduate degree and pick up some work reviewing books for the literary supplements while tidying up the fourth draft of your novel. You then get your novel published, which gets a few kind reviews thanks to the contacts you’ve made and sells precisely 317 copies.
But someone, somewhere offers you a contract to write a second novel and your career is up and running. From then on you have a meta life. You write because you write, not because you necessarily have anything interesting to say. You probably actually write quite well, but you are trading on style, not substance, because you’ve never actually done anything much beyond writing.
The point about Ballard is that he had style and substance. Like writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Ballard had paid his dues in the real world and his writing had a psychological and experiential depth because of it. His truly was an interesting life, interestingly lived.” – John Crace (via.)
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