and the year ends

... with a movie that k and i designated for each other independently. only she had already found a screening for tonight. in halberstadt. the place where my granny moved to, aged 14, to start her apprenticeship, in 1934. never been there. so, it'll be soul kitchen in halberstadt tonight.

before: a bit of bruecke - erich heckler at the feininger gallery in quedlinburg.

and, for the road... this one, (and some bastardfairies, i predict).

have a very good year end and all good things for the new one. see you there.

if in doubt

... say nothing. or: take a field and a winter sky.

'innocent juxtapositions'

i'm thinking to myself as i go hunting for last week's viewing schedule on youtube...

(a) the repository of love (aka piles of chapati, lovingly baked by ones family to support ones career) from channel 4's school of saatchi

... a shame that the mould wasn't part of the design but evidence of uk privatisation and disinvestment in infrastructure...

(b) a uk arts programme some 15 years ago: anselm kiefer's operation sea lion. it comes in seven parts, just watch one after the other.



anselm kiefer: more... today, tomorrow, or the day after to get another spin for the fields of northern germany. so thoroughly german and somber. so material in space.

larchwood in high winds

disaster at sea. three plates. a rope. the christmas movie.

antisocial_notworking

i've been having a little debate with this project space by project.arnolfini... just in time for the holidays...

it landed on my desk thanks to variant's exchange with springerin and a recent article against social networking, here.

it resonates with my facebook wall, the information it pushes out to me to read of strangers and friends, the ones that i put into other people's faces and all social relations it generates, modifies and hides.

antisocial_notworking is also one of the coolest combinations of some of my own academic work on labour process, politics and moral panics over young people.

here's something for you:

Without politics, our friendships are empty of meaning and our exchanges lead to nothing but the commodification of life itself...

Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking. The confusion over what constitutes work and non-work turns attention to situations where work takes the forms of nonwork. (Geoff Cox, 2008, Antisocial Applications: Notes in support of antisocial notworking)

now... where was the list of reference's, t told me about in september. immaterial labour etc...

now, ad 2, what does this mean for our social networking? signing up to hatebook? becoming invisible again? diverting, subverting, appropriating...

still debating...

The normality of space and time

i went to the office yesterday. i'm not there much anymore. i mostly work from home now or in coffeeshops. and it's very enjoyable this way. so, yesterday, i circulated between coffeeshop, office, different coffeeshop, office, coffeeshop 1 again, and then the office again.

michelle and i had been finalising an application to do with professional practice, concerns over who knows, who learns and who teaches. and what these in turn mean for us working as urban researchers and/or artists. we talked about methodology - about different ways of seeing, experiencing and thus learning.

so, later in the day i realised, after ordering coffee that i was without my money - must have left it in the office. j and i stayed for more coffee and some wine and i had to go and pick up my money. it wasn't late, but very dark. i went to my new office - which is shared now with two postgraduates. it was well past five o'clock, and there was light. one of my new office colleagues was working away - too much to do and too little time to finish it.

and it struck me: how quickly ways of doing become routine become normality. it is so long that i was in my office after 5.30 or indeed on the weekend. and yet both things were normality for all the time i was doing my phd. in fact, i remember fondly evenings spent in office, with breaks for coffees outside and ending in a late film at the gft with my office mates.

i've had this sense of estrangement a lot over the past two months. suddenly, my routines of being in glasgow's west end is thoroughly changing. i find myself in locations after midnight and am lost as to how to get home. stuff i knew six, seven years ago and seem to have forgotten. oh: this is what you can also do.

turning up in the office out-of-hours reminded me of some lushness of other times, other rythms. fair enough: some of these were utterly exhausting, they were marked by anxiety over whether my last 2000 words were any good, marked by no money for the film screening and much more.

learning: step outside, beside, below or next to whatever you're doing. do not take it for granted. watch, observe and listen carefully for all that seems so common. for it is not: common.

a bit of wonky moon in early evening by way of illustration, on way to coffee for free: