Category: City Life
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Temples and Follies
Two things have caught my eye recently. Firstly, Alain de Botton’s continued plans for a ‘temple to perspective.’ The idea for this is to have a large, conic structure (shown) some 46m high, each centimetre of which will represent a million years of the earth’s history. The bottom millimetre of the whole structure will be…
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Occupy Wall Street – Turning Pirate on Capitalism 101
The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement – though I’m not…
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Car Park: a brutal symbol of a capitalist problem
I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view. One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed…
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This is NOT Just About the Poor | Are Looters Pirates to be Celebrated?
I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from…
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New Poem: Fuckers | London Riots
Fuckers Are you the same, that yank dogs with choke leashes, and smash shops? Tight necks, chain nooses and restricted passage-ways: the dispossessed will tonight by force, take possession of dogs and televisions women and matches and, for a moment, burn brightly before waking, smouldering with no cause to kick the ashes of what time…