We used to have this game.

I think it started as a reaction to one too many exaggerated declarations of some tired generational diatribe like “Well, what’s NOT controlled by a media mega-conglomerate now?”
In the game, an object would come up in conversation—a ham sandwich, say—and you’d say “What’s NOT a ham sandwich?” and I’d have a split second to answer with something that was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, not a ham sandwich.

“Bus Fare” might be a good answer. Or “Ennui”. Though the latter leaves room for debate.

Over the past few days, during which I’ve been sucked willingly into the never-ending food chain of internet research, where one project links to and is quickly devoured by another, I seem to have beat myself at a solitaire version of The Game.

“What’s NOT psychogeography?” I ask.
I have yet to find a suitable answer.




It’s not that Psychogeography is new to me. I’ve long enough been fascinated by the power of place and with sparky thinkers' struggles and experiments to harness this power and use it to run a generator of human and natural innovation, health, creativity.

I have done that thing; where you walk through one city “guided” by the map of an entirely different city.
I have followed with awe the ingenious sound mapping done by people who measure and record the chords made by the multiple ambient notes (busses, computer fans, tinitis) humming in our day-to-day environments.
I have been in tunnels, I have documented the things that are revealed by the peeling of other things.

I have sat through the long and contentious design charettes of the New Urbanists and learned to sigh in dismay, like my urban-planner friends, at their lack of newness or urbanity, all the while looking distractedly out the window and thinking that someone ought to do a photo essay cataloguing nothing but the pallettes-- stacked or cast off or farmed in some other splintery permutation— throughout our entire city. There could be a map. A map of things wooden and utilitarian.



I think I first heard about psychogeography when I saw the announcement of a Psychogeographers Vs. New Urbanists kickball game. I thought that that “vs.” probably spoke well for the Psychogeographers.

So they are not new to me, but the deeper I go (okay… only cyber-deep) into the worlds of their research, the more they appeal to me, and the more I hope they beat the Andres Duany likin' peoples in the afforementioned game.

As an aside, though… there is a profoundly silly side to psychogeographic projects. One website lists a group's research activities on the street as including “hugging people, carrying people, defining performance art, walking with heads in buckets of Coke, crossing the street backwards, searching for frozen peas, asking for directions, turning our clothing inside-out, dropping eggs from a government building and more”. This kind of thing might support the argument I read elsewhere that psychogeography is a primarily an entertainment for middle-class, gadget-oriented people with a lot of time on their hands.



I think that my current enthusiasm for psychogeography is primarily due to the looseness of the term, and the heartening way that it seems willing to embrace nearly all that has obsessed and motivated me for the past 31 years. These interests have manifested themselves in so many ways, from weird research into electrical infrastructure to my paintings of birds and old signs… I have been trying to investigate the way we move through, interact with, and primarily are affected by, our environment. How lovely to learn more about how this fits in with what psychogeographers (and their variously named associates) Do. It’s like being told there’s a college major called “Eating Soy Crisps and Listening to Old Episodes of This American Life while Painting Excessively Minute Details”. I feel relevant. I mean, somewhat. Compulsions love company.

You, reader, are bound to suffer a little for all of the reading that I’ve done this weekend. And it embarasses me to see how “I” based all of this writing is. But there’s something to continue digging and poking at, here. I (who else?) realize now that my longest entry herein, the one about graffiti and public property and my ambivelant love for guerilla art in the public sphere, was just a drop in the bucket of potential conversation surrounding the desperate need for a built, human environment that accepts/demands our engagement and interaction and that has the space and potential to offer surprises and discoveries. So let’s keep going with it, right?




Because, on the topic of our strange, built world; I’ve just seen the most amazing thing...

I have always felt that there was a profound contradiction between my and my friends' intense attraction to industrial infrastructure (and the ruins thereof) and our dismay with the dismal impact of humans on the natural environment. We react with a visceral thrill to power lines and their sublime, towering pylons. To the boundless industrial pipe-land of north Jersey, where ambiguous machineries seem to be engaged only in the production of blinking and smoke, and to all manner of defunct bridges, railroad technology. Show us something where iron crosses iron in a supportive grid, or the mammoth obelisk of a smokestack, and we swoon. And this swooning has always felt highly inappropriate and irresponsible to me: we decry the rabid industrialization of our earth, consumerism, waste! We shouldn’t think the power grid is sexy when we're championing the merits of living off of it!

But I’m coming to realize that there is something simple and valuable at the root of this attraction. There is something irresistible about archetectural or infrastructural forms that reveal, immediately and unabashedly, their function. These forms are like bone and muscle, and there’s honesty within them; they are direct, and are built only as tall as they need to be built. They’re without pretense, and in a way the attraction to them is similar to the attraction one might feel to watching an athlete’s legs move or a bird’s (come on, I gotta) wings create lift.




I have also had trouble reconciling my love of ruin and decrepitude with my desire for… you know… people and the earth itself not to suffer from squalor and putrification and squelch and junk. Somehow there is nothing that squeezes my heart and pumps my blood more hotly than the spectacle of a collapsing mill or the simple curl of a rotting shingle on a beckoning, vacant building. I weep for the water supply and scowl for the superfund site but still, I swoon for the rust. I will sit and watch until the crumbling smokestack falls, like waiting for a sunset or a fireworks show.

There is some contradiction, indeed. But here in decay, again, I am realizing that there is a kind of honesty. In rust and lean we see time and usage, history, and the proof that Something Has Indeed Happened and that Time Has Since Passed. It seems like there might be some value in figuring out how to reconcile these contradictions and honor the aesthetic, historical and infatuational value of utilitarian forms and the decay thereof. Anything but sterility.

That in mind CHECK THIS OUT!




Landschaftspark is “a former industrial wasteland that the Germans transformed into a wildly popular park and tourist destination. Duisburg is in the Ruhr near Dusseldorf. It features acres of natural greenery. The old factory buildings house musical performances and art exhibits. Former ore silos have rock climbing walls. There's an old blast furnace that's been turned into an observation deck and more. At night, the old industrial structures are bathed in colored light….”

Yes. And there are live theater events and movies. And a nightclub. And all of this was created without the destruction, or even the altering, frankly, of the obsolute industrial beheomoth that the place had been for years before parkification.




Check out their official website at http://www.landschaftspark.de/de/home/index.php (And yes that’s right, the homepage does indeed declare the place “Der Mega-Multi-Maxi-Park!”). Fantastic. This is by far the most amazing example I’ve seen of constructive re-use that really cops to the history of a site, preserving and even accentuating its character and past.

Also see many more photos here. http://www.hochofenwerk.de/galerie

And then visit this link to see a Red Hook site that’s a prime, if unlikely, candidate for similar treatment http://gowanuslounge.blogspot.com/2006/11/red-hooks-revere-sugar-as-brooklyns.html

Anyway. That, THAT, is something about place.

It might not be psychogeography.

It’s wicked not a ham sandwich.

But it’s definitely something.


***************


Also, a request or a challenge, however you'd rather look at it.

Dear Anonymous Comment to my Recent Post:

You are generous and unflagging, offering subtle and francofilic fragments to someone like this girl, someone who actually, in writing about change and The Unsaid, used a metaphor that ended with “the onion dip of history”. I am mildly ashamed; you are wildly astute.

But your quote, about those perfect things that rise to mind even as we decend the stairs, implies that there is the possibility of that one, perfect thing. The just-the-thing that might have been said. The just-one-thing that would finally have seemed adequate.

And unlike the countless people who report having come up with a retort or punchline 25 minutes too late, I have never, not in retrospect or internal monologue or rambling blog, hit upon just-the-thing to say.

So, in the spirit of stairwells and in the face of farewells, tell me: If there was one thing to be said… if you could say just one thing-- in french, in whisper, in jest or otherwise-- at the bottom of any stairs and before you opened one of those many doors to gone:

What Would It Be?

Come back at me.


***************

J over, J out.