The "new towns" of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: "On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has." It is obviously because history, which must be liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the forces of historical absence begin to compose their own exclusive landscape.
From Guy Debord: the society of the spectacle, (ch7, p177)
Now I know it must seem hopeleesly posey to be citing Debord and whingeing about suburban ennui from my little dystopic patch of trendoid bliss in Newtown. And it's probably just because there's been a patch of rain lately and I'm feeling a little bit glum, huddled in front of my bar radiator, drying out various drenched bits....
It's been just over a fortnight since I landed back home. the weather was mostly sunny, warmer than europe, but not too hot, and fun happy pleasant easy etc. I'ts still fun happy pleasant easy etc. but it's also pissing down and the sky and streets are dark by 5pm. Yesterday I staggered out to paddy's - desperate for some veggies that weren't double the price of the bloody UK (fer feks sake!) and not encased in styrofoam gladwrap from a supermarket......
And laughed at the mild humid temperatures and sydney people rugged up in puffy parkas, and grimaced at the crazy SUV drivers mistaking their metal sheaths for sugar based skin compound and zipping madly along George street, and grimaced as my favrouite pearl pink brolly blew inside out and flew out of my hand whisking my scarf away with it.......
Inside the shell of paddy's I smiled at the market sellers flirting and haggling in bahasa and english in the one mouthful - and the others screaming out in thickly accented strine and others easily shifting between english and mandarin or vietnamese - and it felt so foreign, so familiar and nothing like the tampere kauppahali, and yet so strangely like it too.
Sydney - such a funny strange asian city/english colony built and rebuilding itself on black land and white lies - o so many damn lies, divine lies, endless erasure, disclosures, ruptures..... Terra nullius being the first founding words for generations of exiled honkies to write down made stories that excluded somehow the non honky identifying exiles equally living out strange dissonances....
my own dissonances meeting my ex-expat aussie friends at the local pub last night. drinking shite aussie guinness (stout for the fosters generation to swill on St. pats day in their sweaty green singlets - a disgrace but all they had on offer) and cursing at it being the double the price of a decent thick black alcholic creamy pint back in blighty, and cursing the plasma screen blaring sport, the aubergine beige renovations of the bistro, the orange peroxide renovations of the female patrons and feeling strangely at home amid the cursing of what could have been what was, what is, somewhere else but here.
In the loos - texting my friends in a non sodden melbourne - dancing and laughing at a bestiality themed dance party (where was sex pig?) and a now steamy summered finland, and a sunny new york - I have no idea what time it was there, here or anywhere else... it was text time, it's always text time, time for text to take me away from here, from now - into another space where I'm with someone else doing something different, doing something.
I wonder about my text addiction - this constant need to be removed from the present. I'm standing on the threshold of writing up a chapter.... shivering at the waters edge - sticking a toe in and desperately looking around for a reason to stay out of the water...... the chapter- appropriately enough - is an earnest attempt at a geneology of Sydney, of Sydney art education - a nice spatio temporal discursive tracking of where people have stood still and imagined they were somewhere else - and how they have done it, where and why.......
So, reading, confused about time. not wanting to tie things down with a neat tight well told narrative - i go back to favourite theory boys for solace. Debord of course, maybe even Walter B. try to remind myself why this matters. try to remind myself why i'm here, alone, grumpy, underfucked and overfed, scowling at the weather, scowling at myself. trying not to escape into fantasies of sex, smutty texts, porn, wanking, recipes, paintings, long counselling conversations with whoever.Dear blissful distractions - but yes - only distractions......
I actually like writing and like my research and find it interesting. but the 'pressure' of writing, of working, of focussing on the tome - is about the conscious exclusion of everything else in that moment of writing. Of only doing that project, of closing things off, of only allowing myself to occupy one mental space at one time. and anticipating it - that's the worst. the space is - not here, not on my bed, wiht the rain beating agains thte window - mad cackles of a gaggle of girls strolling past in the street, flatties singing, planes screeching. it's not about my stiff neck and sore bum and pickeable nose and filthy ears - it's a strange retelling of other spaces - me taking my mortal coil into transcribing, describing, assembling, reviewing, and despite my little heideggerian dillemmas - re-presenting a set of stories and impressions and histories that people have entrusted to me.
Last week - I drew one of my interview subjects - who did a series of incredible poses - which I felt, at first, compelled to somehow represent, acccurately or elegantly or faithfully. the faith being - to somehow communicated my gratitude, awareness of engagement with and delight in the sheer generosity of what she was doing in taking off her clothes and arranging and presenting her body - for a group of us - to look at. After an hour of gnashing my teeth at my ineptitidue and lack of practice - i relaxed. Realised the act of drawing has to involve a level of faith in my own capacity and fallibility - and that drawing, as a practice can only ever involve a trusting and honest engagmeent wiht myself, in that place, in that moment with all my limitations and desires.....
so i try to think about the tome like this. that the words, ideas, experiences, offered, performed, given by subjects, don't compell me to a defninitive representation of 'them' or of the historical narratives they may cite or trace or describe - but to something else.... which I don't know how to describe yet.
shit! that was almost a perfect analogy!
hence this post.
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