Psychogeography: the missing link between Situationism, Punk and Town Planning

(to be honest, when town planners get "avant garde", i doubt the planned at/on get that much more fun out of the results)

baby u can dérive my car

I've never been into the Fruitmarket Gallery either, i'll have to pop in some time, the cafe looks nice from the outside.

McKay's journal is online here: lots of time consuming / variably interesting stuff.

I always sensed that demanding the impossible would likely not sit well with apportionment of local authority budgets, but perhaps that's just me.

And G. Debord would have called you all sorts of names for using the word situationism, wouldn't he? I wasn't aware the situs had gone out of fashion. Silly me.

Now if we could only travel through time, we could all get sub-editor jobs at the NME circa 1981.

and Stereolab live in Camberwell! Suddenly it all makes sense.

All further puns involving past or current members of the department, or those who were the study of a three-day conference here, will result in the offender being tarred and feathered with strips of paper from unsold volumes by Richard Rorty. Said offenders will then be forced to join either the philosophy or the linguistics departments, to be with their own kind.

The original situationists were actualy I think enormously fatalistic and passive at the time when this was their primary project, in the 50s: it was kind of monumental-improvised compensatory urban art inside your own head, to make up for your total powerlessness against the state, the actual official urban planners etc. Later — possibly after they heard abt Happenings in the US, which they were extremely sniffy about (being French lefties) — they started arguing that demos, strikes, city-wide revolts and revolution were the real monumental-improvised urban art of the future. So that Paris May 1968 would be the ultimate non-passive Debordian psycho- geographical seizure and radical art- transformation of the urban environment, by the people for the people, as it were.

Is this not sort of the meaning of the word "should?"

Or is your argument that some secondary Imperfection X must be dealt with before citizen control is feasible?

I took the subway up to midtown, then switched to a bus heading towards the river. It passed a stone's throw from Hunter College, but then took a sudden swing into a traffic system that led --horror! -- underground into the Lincoln Tunnel. With a sinking heart I confirmed with the driver that there were no stops until Staten Island.

We travelled along the New Jersey turnpike, past Newark Airport, then over the bridge to Staten Island, with the towers of Manhattan like faraway pins on the horizon. At least here there were recognisable streets. I could jump off and phone my friend. Then I had to take two buses to the St George Ferry Terminal, catch the Staten Island Ferry past the Statue of Liberty (a tourist saw me taking photos of the post-WTC New York skyline and kindly took one with me in it), and finally get a Manhattan bus back to my Chinatown digs. The 'missed bus stop' rigmarole had cost me two hours and a half of 'dérive'.

Although it was in some ways an adventure, I must say it made me realise how completely alien places like New Jersey and Staten Island are to me. They might as well be another planet. The best bit was escaping the nightmare world of cars and clapboard suburban poverty and getting back to the high density sallow-skinned handcarts and hubbub and red neon of Chinatown.

The best thing about dérive is getting back home to a nice cup of tea, as Guy used to say.

Point taken, Nitsuh;> ****Or is your argument that some secondary Imperfection X must be dealt with before citizen control is feasible?***

Actually, I was thinking that true 'citizen control' wouldn't be possible, at all. My impression (while reading the article) was that the idea of allowing the residents to create their own space would work well in theory; the reality of negotiating permits, having to gather local government support and the like might be more work than the average person is willing to put up with.

I'd like to believe that residents would be left alone to initiate their own designs, independent of any meddling. However, I can't see that happening.

(Also I was just listening to the White Stripes doorbell song from the last album and my doorbell rang. That White Stripes album causes synchronicities, as far as I'm concerned, because I just clicked on the Madonna thread and it mentioned the White Stripes. But I never listen to the White Stripes.

o god I hear water pouring down in the "crawl space" (quite roomy actually) above me. There has been a slowly developing leak, which turned out to be really serious. They have to shut the water for the whole building off just to fix it.)

I've become interested in the historic watersheds of Oakland.. I was always convinced that the main road near my street must've been a creek at some point and was able to find a watershed map that confirmed this, it's all been culverted-over and covered

So Native Americans must've walked up this way 10,000 years ago, but nothing in California feels all that 'old' so it's almost like we have no right to be wandering dreamy antiquarians, London style. I know that Robert Louis Stevenson briefly lived a few blocks from me, I've walked by the street... vaqueros roamed the hills looking for stray cows in the 1850's