I’ve finally gotten around to starting No One Sleeps in Alexandria by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, a contemporary novel set in WWII-era Alexandria by (obviously) an Egyptian author. Many of my Egyptian friends and acquaintances highly recommended the book for providing a contrasting view of the the city, one to supplement the colonial perspective that I struggled to deal with during my preparation for and time in Alexandria earlier this year. Once again, literature about and memory of place become emeshed as I read Meguid’s book, and I’m roaming the city in memory along with the characters in the book. Alexandria and my friends there are on my mind. Among the scraps of my digital notes, I found a partial list of “Things Observed and Learned” in Alexandria—more memory:

• Things happen in the street.
• I stand out.
• Animals are butchered, goods bought and sold, teas and coffees drunk, sheeshas smoked.
• Movement in the street is choreographed.
• Pedestrians and autos jockey for position and negotiate their respective itineraries.
• There is a unique language communicated through car horns. (Are there other languages / codes / means of communication between pedestrians?)
• There are few maps of Alexandria and they are not reliable because street names and street directions change.
• The streets are scarred and in disrepair.
• Egyptian men walk arm in arm.
• Many women (but not all) wear head scarves (which is a relatively new development); some wear the burqa.
• The shopping mall is the preferred commercial / social space of the affluent classes. This is the street sanitized and branded.
• The downtown has been relocated to a new “downtown” mall (”City Centre”) that is on the outskirts of the city.
• The Faculty of Art (University of Alexandria) is very conservative and infects its students with a reactionary mentality towards art / artist.
• The old Jewish quarter is on a hill. It is very dense and very poor and very easy to get lost in.
• There are hoards of mangy cats in the streets.
• I saw a dead cat curled up between a gutter and a building.
• Fishmongers sell fish on the side of the street.
• Many buildings in Alexandria are crumbling.
• The city is covered in garbage.
• A constant wind blows into the city from off of the Mediterranean.
• Alexandrians are very friendly and eager to say “hello” to me, the American tourist.
• It costs foreigners LE10 to enter the Library.
• I am paying the price of being a tourist.
• There are beautiful scarves woven of fine Egyptian cotton.
• I was offered hash.
• Iran is not an Arab state.
• Foul is a dish of fava beans mixed with various spices and vegetables.
• Aquafina bottled water is suspected to be straight from the tap.
• Don’t forget the baksheesh (tip).
• Two Egyptian beers: Sakara and Stella.
• There are dead cats all over the city.
• In Alex, cars drive like pedestrians walk in Manhattan.
• A row of several dozen men kneeling to pray on astroturf in the street alongside parked cars.
• A man walks through the streets with a push cart and shouts “bikya!” looking to buy unwanted junk.
• Pedestrians walk equally in sidewalks and in streets.
• Before drinking Turkish coffee, one must wait a few minutes after it is poured to allow the grounds to settle.
• Much of Arabic graffiti on the walls are the name of Allah, Islamic sayings, or scriptures.

I see an interesting connection between this ad hoc list and No One Sleeps in Alexandria: amid the narrative of the city and Magd al-Din, a peasant who brings his wife and child to Alexandria after being exiled from his village, Meguid inserts news-clip fragments that offer a kind of survey of contemporaneous local and global events during the period. Magd al-Din often reads aloud from the newspaper to his friend Dimyan, and these passages intimate Magd al-Din’s interest in the news of the world, but also speak to both the interconnectedness and discursiveness of world events as represented in the pages of newspapers:

[...] Hitler himself went to spend Christmas with his troops on the western front. Everyone wished victory for their peoples and their armies. The Finns will still scoring surprising victories. The League of Nations expelled Russia from its membership. Yusuf Wahbi screened his film Street Children in Cairo, where there was an increase in cases of typhoid fever. Many bottle of cognac, champagne, and whisky were sold in Alexandria, where nightclubs stayed open by candlelight to bid farewell to the old year. [...]

These events mingle with the everday narrative of life in the city, as memory binds the collective and individual together to form the texture of consciousness.

Yet, for all the plan’s championing of public access to the river, bike trails and parks, mix of commercial and residential uses, I felt a certain sinking in my stomach. From my reserved perch in the second row, I turned around to my left and my right to scan the standing-room-only crowd, and I saw energized and enthusiastic citizens, many of whom have devoted hours of time towards crafting the vision for the waterfront. I saw a lot of people who appeared to be like me—white, educated, professional class—and, while my survey was not scientific and while it would be imprudent to place to much emphasis on the demographic of one isolated event like this, the lack of a significant attendance by either people of color or the working class in a city with overwhelming percentages of such folks is alarming when observed through the broader lens of the neoliberal vision of the city. The “rediscovery” and “redevelopment” of Philadelphia as a desirable place to live will tend towards the homogenous; economic, cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity must be actively sought after and guaranteed if such a value is to be sustained and physically manifest in the life and form of the city.

As I listened to rhetoric in the remarks from those speaking at the event—those speaking in some respects for me as a participant in the waterfront planning process but also speaking to me as a citizen and constituent—I was thinking about David Harvey’s recent lecture on the “right to the city” (see video below), as well as the recently formed coalition of anti-gentrification and anti-displacement groups united under the same name. I’m currently working through Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity which adeptly tracks the political-economic shifts that have occurred between Fordism/Modernism and Late Capitalism/Postmodernism over the last century. Of course, as a trained geographer, Harvey’s particular strength in this research is in how he ties it all back to a discussion of spatial practices and the transformation of the city under these conditions. (I also highly recommend another lecture by Harvey from a couple of years ago entitled “Neoliberalism and the City.”

Harvey’s critique was playing through my mind in the form a series of basic questions about this waterfront plan and the process by which it came to be… For whom are we making this waterfront and this city? Who shows up? Who participates, and why or why not? What, specifically, are we doing to ensure the inclusion of under-served and under-privileged residents? How is the quality of life raised for all Philadelphians? Hidden among the mantras of “civic engagement” and “community participation” are those missing from the program, those I didn’t see at the event last week. We have to work diligently to bring all strata of the city into the planning and making of the next era of Philadelphia. The level and attention to community involvement I have witnessed over the last few years here is admirable and should not be dismissed. However, our under-served communities often remain in the shadows and require much more outreach in order to build understanding, trust, and the kind of relationships that engender empathy and mutual respect across longstanding economic, racial, and cultural barriers.

Meredith and I recently installed a project in the Multimedia Gallery at the University of the Arts (where she and I are currently teaching): “TERRA INCOGNITA” invites viewers to join in a contemplation of the relationships that exist between the space of the gallery, the currently vacant lot at 313 South Broad Street, the impact of the University of the Arts on land use in Center City Philadelphia, as well as our roles as active inhabitants of these spaces. We became interested in the vacant lot as a very conspicuous mark made by the University in the heart of downtown Philadelphia (along the so-called “Avenue of the Arts”) that is physically felt by anyone who has ever walked down that part of Broad Street. When building that occupied that site was demolished by the University several years ago, half of the sidewalk was torn up and the lot fenced in, disrupting the pattern of pedestrian traffic along the way. For more contextual information and documentation, visit the project web site

As mentioned in an earlier post on a developing project, the Think Tank that has yet to be named recently unveiled the first major documentation of what will be a long-term project investigating the productive relationships between art, activism, and education. Four Think Tank Directors (myself included) performed public orations of radical texts in specific sites in Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia; each text responded to the specific site. The impetus for these orations was generated by an initial conversation on art, activism, and education, as well as the subsequent compilation of a third Think Tank Reader on this very subject. Audio and video documentation, a small zine, and the Think Tank Readers were all recently presented for public consumption at Version>08: DARK MATTER in Chicago. First theorized by Greg Sholette, “dark matter” refers to “a hidden social production has always found its own time and space apart from hegemonies of power and the objectifying routines of work.” I believe that many Directors in the Think Tank would locate their work in the vicinity of dark matter. Read more about this ongoing work, watch videos of the first public orations, and download the corollary materials: Radical Orations on Art, Activism & Education.

I also want to highlight two recent projects by Heath (aka DITE, Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Tactical Education) and Katie (aka DICP, Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Cross-Pollination), both of whom are friends connected via the small but exceptional network of people from my days at OPENSOURCE and Champaign-Urbana, IL.

Heath (in collaboration with Brad Thomson) has just completed a small zine, Is anyone fucking listening? A mini anthology of desperate political acts, which will be included in the upcoming exhibition “The Audacity of Desperation” curated by Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross. The zine presents an admittedly incomplete selection of desperate acts by individuals and groups who, when faced with extreme oppression, resort to sometimes extreme acts of opposition and resistance in order to assert their own agency, their own right to self-determination and self-definition. Importantly, this history is offered not only as a document of these under-acknowledged events but as a way to bridge this past with what may be required of us today and tomorrow in terms of oppositional political activity:

These actions shouldn’t provide a template for dissent today, but should provide some footing to build off of. Obviously, all of these events were a specific response relevant to the position the activists were put in, and today is no different. Specific contexts call for specific actions and these should serve as acts to learn from and study. However, we must remain aware that new and strategic responses to the state we find ourselves in are necessary.

In March Meredith and I traveled to Boston for a couple of days and met up with Katie who gave us a brief orientation to the town—together we wondered aloud why the squares aren’t square—including an introduction to the Freedom Trail (my photos here). Katie has been researching the trail, its origins (the creation of a Boston journalist in 1951), and its evolution in development of a project that interrogates the construction of specific historical narratives and the purposes for which such narratives are invented. The Freedom Trail: Economic and Cultural Pilgrimage is a series of photographs of the removed and added Freedom Trail as well as a self-guided podcast tour of the original Freedom Trail; it will be on view from May 10 through June 21 at Proof Gallery in Boston.

Today I was speaking with the Dean at the University where I teach who raised the question of reenactment—quite appropriately—wondering if that strategy was being employed in our project. Certainly, reenactment has been on a lot of our minds, especially given Mark Tribe’s recent Port Huron Project and Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave reenactment that a few of us recently saw at the ICA Boston (to name just a couple recent examples). I’ve also recently watched T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s restaging of JFK’s assassination, The Eternal Frame, which recreates the event as it was filtered through the lens (literally) of the Zapruder film footage. The historical reenactment is a powerful form, and within the spectrum of verisimilitude there are many variables to manipulate for meaningful re-presentation of the so-called historical event: site, persona, language, factual/fictional, mediation. Deller’s project is contextualized within the larger practice of popular historical reenactments, the kind of grand, period-piece performances of military battles and Renaissance fairs. Deller relied on these weekend pros to stage his elaborate reenactment of the coal miner labor strike in the UK that involved hundreds of clashing workers and police.

But I digress slightly. Our oration project is not about reenactment (or maybe it is, but in less specific way?). I think that it is more related to the tradition of public speaking—like really public speaking, setting up on a street corner, jumping on the soapbox, shouting it out. The project also satisfies a desire to get some of these texts we’re reading out there in some form even if only partially into the spaces of the cities where we live. Of course, I haven’t attempted the oration yet, so I’ll reserve judgment until then.

I plan to read a fragment that actually deals with the notion of city speech. It’s from a “Laboratory for Civil Discourse” by Steven Schroeder:

City speech is not simply or uniformly nice; on the contrary, it is often confrontational and rough. A place in which speech was simply and uniformly nice would be homogeneous and have nothing but smooth edges. [...] Beauty is defined not by excluding those who do not fit within existing boundaries but by crossing boundaries to acknowledge the fittingness of diversity encountered in the city. Crossing boundaries involves confrontation and is rarely smooth. But that it is part of city speech means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries have not been crossed.

Nor is city speech simply a matter of saying something. If it does not also ensure space and time in which to say nothing, the listening essential to discourse becomes impossible. In terms of boundary crossing, this means that civil discourse has not occurred if boundaries that define spaces of sound and spaces of silence have not been recognized and honored. Both sound and silence are crucial if the city is not simply to degenerate into a place of violence.

Finally, and most emphatically, city speech does not avoid argument. In fact, the rhythm of crossing, recognizing, and honoring boundaries is descriptive of the discipline of argument. [...] Where there is no argument, there is no civil discourse, and there is no city. Such a place is likely to be defined in one of three ways: either it is surrounded by an essentially impermeable boundary that excludes difference; or it is marked by violent struggle for control of turf; or (most likely) it is a mixture of both, with enforced homogeneity near the center of power and violent struggle for control of turf on the fringes.

I have learned this lesson well during the last few years of community work in Philadelphia. Civil discourse is tough; it requires constant attention and diligence, especially to resist the urge to retreat from the spaces of conflict (Meredith and I have jointly written about this before). I don’t always succeed; it’s a process of becoming.

So, I’m going to give a public speech about city speech in the city. But where? A little more thinking and research left to do before I make that decision.

Here’s a somewhat “official” blurb about my anticipated work:

Pedestrian histories suggest a multiplicity of stories and perspectives from which to consider a place, from which to consider Alexandria and the people who inhabit it. These petites histoires, or minor histories, depend upon the itineraries and movements of inhabitants between static points of rest (places) within the city. They are performed anew with each subject, with each singular instance, although paths will often be repeated, practiced, refined, cross-referenced in the process. Pedestrian histories possess a pacing, a slowness, a particular kind of looking, and are instrumental in the creation of political, historical, cultural, social, and vernacular spaces. Borrowing from Michel de Certeau’s writing on spatial stories, this project locates pedestrian histories at the intersection of the map and the tour, somewhere between what de Certeau calls “a place projection totalizing observations [and] a discursive series of operations.” As an artist-tourist encountering Alexandria for the first time, this conceptual pairing (these touristic tropes) also presents a useful framework with which I can enter Alexandria and perform my own pedestrian histories in the city as I research countless others present there.

As an addendum to the loose network of site-specific and web-based Place In Place Of projects, Place In Place Of: Alexandria will manifest itself as a set of site-specific interventions, performances, and documents. Equally important and essential, this project will be co-created as a collaboration between myself and local art and architecture university students. The research and documentation will be collected, reconstituted, and recontextualized on the Web at http://alexandria.placeinplaceof.net; the online component to the project functions as a translation that attempts to connect the Web and Web users to physical localities from disparate geographies and cultures.

Place In Place Of: Alexandria is being created for CLEOTRONICA 08, a new media festival organized by ACAF in Alexandria, Egypt which will take place in the first half of 2008. CLEOTRONICA is envisioned as “a space for both cultural dialog and alternative methods of education, research and collaboration by focusing on establishing an extensive workshop program which will invite international artists, designers, artist collectives and independent art spaces from different contexts to work with local artists, art students and cultural workers.”

I recently watched The Cruise again, the near perfect showing of a nearly unmediated (yet crafted, I think) experience of New York City as performed by Timothy “Speed” Levitch. Then, I watched it again (twice, for good measure). In one particular scene, Speed embraces — unfolds himself upon — one of the great stone piers of the Brooklyn Bridge, gently patting it, touching his forehead to it, communing with it. (Years ago we talked about licking buildings in architecture school. I think Hillary actually did it.) There’s something about the way he settles into the city, the restless comfort, the awkward sensuality, that confounds a mediated relationship to his world. Watching it now, I feel that that moment must have passed and he can no longer relate to the place in that way.

Aaron (aka Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of ReHumanization) has described his experience as a soldier in the Iraq war as being unmediated — or at least as close to unmediated as he has ever witnessed. It follows, then, that the shock and stress (often diagnosed as PTSD) which soldiers feel upon their return home has everything to do with the transition back into the mediated existence of our “civilization.”

Is mediation a buffer from trauma? Is mediation a barrier to being fully human? I’m curious about the relationship between mediation and dehumanization. Here’s Paulo Freire in the opening chapter of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as a historical reality. And as an individual perceives the extent of dehumanization, he or she may ask if humanization is a viable possibility. Within history, in concrete, objective contexts, both humanization and dehumanization are possibilities for a person as an uncompleted being conscious of their incompletion.

Mediation implies a distance, the “separation” that Debord finds perfected in modern industrialized societies. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. There must be gradations embedded in this notion of mediation. Can a distinction between mediation (ontological) and media (technological) be discerned? Does the latter necessarily determine the former? Is there any essential difference between a jug and a handheld computer, both technologies of utility which mediate our experience of the world? Gradations and scale (hello McCluhan) present complications…

Is there a post-spectacle society? Within this paradigm, are we unable to imagine something beyond Debord’s critique? And to what degree is Debord’s critique dependent on teleological, historically and technologically determined trajectories of human evolution? Is there a post-mediated existence? (Is there a proto-mediated existence, for that matter?) Not an existence without mediation, but an existence absorbed fully by mediation? Such a prediction feels apocalyptic, dystopian. It suggests a time of post-feeling, post-human, a world populated by cyborgs whose dreams are filled with memories of archived material pulled from the master database of text, images, sounds, and videos that we are now building on the Net.

The image of Speed Levitch persists: he hurriedly crosses a street and enters an urban plaza space. He spins around several times, arms outstretched until dizzy. He lies down on his back, equidistant between the two World Trade Center towers, and carefully extends his right leg up and out, as if maintaining equilbirium between himself and the buildings. “The buildings look like they’re falling down,” he muses. (A few years later, they would say that watching the towers implode and collapse was like watching a movie.) The Cruise reminds me of the angst of mediation, of being less than fully—. Of being behind the lens, behind the glass, separate. It reminds me to go outside and be there.

I like it; it’s a “nice” drawing.

So how about an excerpt. Here, Kris is in the middle of recounting a trip to a nearby village of Garrovillas for a festival, which for the Spaniards means a day of stuffing one’s face and sucking back wine:

By the time we reached the square the rain had subsided but that icy wind was blowing full force, making being out of doors extremely uncomfortable. We found a scruffy bar & continued with the liver damage. The bartender had a massive supply of “pitarra” on hand in badly corked old whiskey bottles. There was a calendar on the wall next to the cash register of a blonde bombshell in a bikini, the top half of which she seemed to have misplaced somewhere on the way to the photo shoot.

Our friend Bego leaned over & she whispered in my ear, “Es la virgen del pueblo.” (“She’s the town virgin.”)

A loud cackle escaped my mouth & suddenly there was quite a commotion at the far end of the bar. A young guy, couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16 years old, had burst into song. He was trying his hand at a bit of flamenco. His girlfriend watched him with eyes full of admiration as one of his buddies clapped out the beat & occasionally stomped his feet. Customers added passionate “Olés” here & there at appropriate moments. Lola turned to me, “This is the kind of thing you Yanks pay tour guides hundreds of dollars to see!”

“Yep.” It was quite an “authentic moment.” Another one down the hatch.

An old man with an unlit stub of a cigar in his mouth coughed up an enormous wad of phlegm right there in the middle of the bar. Nobody blinked. I swear, if you hadn’t actually witnessed the old fella in the act & just happened to look down you’d wonder who the hell dropped a raw egg on the floor.

“To village life!” Another round down the hatch.

Bueno, bueno. Anyone interested in acquiring a copy of Extranjero (recommended!) should send a few bucks or a zine for trade to:
Kris & Lola
Calle Obispo 4 bajo
Plasencia 10600
Cáceres
Spain/España

Usually coinciding with receiving Kris and Lola’s zine, my interest in the world(s) of zines is renewed and I make vague plans to produce a zine. My first introduction to zines came in high school through friends, which led to my own short-lived production of a couple of zines: a micro-format skate zine called Zine X (horrible title) and then an arts and literature zine, the name of which escapes me (some day I’ll dig these up…). A long time ago John Freeborn and others published a skate zine called Media Locals, which chronicled the exploits-with-skateboards of our small suburban Philly crew. John continues to be a prolific zine publisher and has also created a fine online archive/network at zinebox.org. Another high school chum, Jeff Wiesner, published several issues of Double Negative, a high-quality zine of visual and literary arts.

The political implications of a vibrant underground press are as relevant now as they were when Martin Luther published and disseminated his 95 Theses in the 16th century that resulted in the poitical-theological coup that was the Reformation. The broadsheets, newsletters, independent newspapers and zines of radicals, activists, artists, amateurs, connoisseurs, fans, and misfits have transmitted “improper,” under-acknowledged information, initiated sub-cultural networks, and undermined hegemonic culture and authority (and not without retaliation to be sure). In spite of (or because of) the aestheticization and commodification of DIY culture by Madison Avenue, zine publishers continue apace, eking out autonomous spaces for their interests, causes, ideas, and artworks and fostering the spirit of generosity and openness that really does seem to characterize the zine world(s).

An obvious connection exists between zines and blogs/web sites in terms of self-publishing, yet for all the immediacy and potential readership of a blog, a zine always asserts that pesky quality of tactility and objecthood—the flip of pages, the texture of papers, the unexpected folded insert, the type- or hand-written text. The finiteness and digestibility of cover-to-cover, as opposed to the unlimitless expanse of everything-all-at-once. It’s difficult to say whether such tactile tendencies are borne of nostalgia or neurologically programmed (maybe a mixture), but the attraction is real nonetheless. And as there seems to be a general, if fractional, shutting down of the Internet’s glorious openness, one wonders if ISPs and governments will further collaborate to monitor the Net and place political, economical, and moral restrictions on our ability to use the Internet freely for self-publishing. In this possible future the hand-to-hand transmission of zines may have renewed urgency and significance.