Port Talbot: Some more specimens from the Collectors Cabinet
1 See Interview with Reynolds:
NG: Chasm City is a diseased metropolis, a utopia gone radically to seed. What inspired your vivid portrayal of this warped locale?
AR: I can't, and wouldn't, claim any originality for it -- it's just a fusion of all the great, festering fictional cities I have loved. Nothing too surprising, either: Blade Runner's LA; Judge Dredd's Mega City one; the Radiant City of the Mr X comics...dozens of others. Also Port Talbot, the steelworks down the M4 from where my family still live in Wales. At night it's the most amazing sight -- mile on mile of illuminated chimneys, belching smoke and flames. Oddly enough, I've even heard that Ridley Scott's vision of LA in Blade Runner was itself inspired by a drive past Port Talbot, so it's all circular in the end.
2 A further Port_Talbotism
See Situationist Raoul Vaneigem's concluding chapter of The Revolution of Everyday Life, a touchstone of May '68- a utopian-revolutionary impulse, just in case all this dystopian cyberpunk stuff colours our vision too much:
Chapter 25 "You're Fucking Around With Us? - Not For Long!"
In
Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port Talbot,
Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness of refusal
generates passionate break-outs from the factories of collective
illusion, the revolution of everyday life is under way. The struggle
intensifies as misery becomes universal. What for years were reasons
for fighting specific issues - hunger, restrictions, boredom, illness,
anxiety, isolation, deceit - now reveal misery's fundamental
rationality, its omnipresent emptiness, its appalling oppressive
abstraction. For this misery, the world of hierarchical power, the
world of the State, of sacrifice, exchange and the quantitative - the
commodity as will and representation of the world - is held responsible
by those moving towards an entirely new society that is still to be
invented and yet is already among us. All over the globe, revolutionary
praxis, like a photographic exposer, is transforming negative
into positive, lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires
of rebellion to ink in the map of its triumph.
3 The Collectors Cabinet
The otaku impulse-
pattern recognition or apophenia ?
We were going to discuss a project on art, landscape and memory.
We arranged to make an early start and head for the Gower. The rest was up to the weather. A superb Ocotber's day meant that nothing short of a full route beyond Llanmadoc Hill to Rhossilli would do.
Hence- park car up at Bury Green just as the big white Pullman scooped the kids up for school, detour to see the fort near Fairy Hill, and thence Ryers Down, Llanmadoc Hill, Llangennith, Rhossili - the bottom route just above the beach, Rhossili and around the head alongside Worms Head and on to Fall Bay, Rhossili and lunch stop in pub, then Rhossili Down, LLangenith - and another pub stop as the sun was so insistent upon a beverage; the Pullman now dropping off the kids - and to make life easier the direct route along the road back to Bury Green.
Once I was home I recalled a connection between Cedric Morris - who painted Llanmadoc Hill - and East Anglia, where he set up his East Anglia School of Painting (-including Lucian Freud amongst his students):
"In 1937 Morris and Haines, with hardly any qualifications for doing so, opened the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at nearby Dedham in Essex. By the close of its first season, its pupils had grown in number from one to sixty, and the future of this unorthodox establishment was assured. Even the catastrophic burning-down of the original premises in 1939 proved only a temporary setback: the school, and Morris and Haines with it, moved the next year to Benton End, a Georgian mansion with a sixteenth-century core, set in acres of land on the edge of the Suffolk village of Hadleigh. At Dedham pupils had lodged in the village; at Benton End they lived in the house, joining in the lively dinners every evening, cooked and supervised by Haines, and dancing afterwards to gramophone records of Latin-American music. Instruction was often given outside, watched over by peacocks, cockatoos, cows and ducks, while gardeners wove their way around the easels - the garden itself, and especially Morris's collection of irises, soon became as well-known as the school. Pupils of all ages were admitted and encouraged, non-professional artists as well as those ambitious for a career in painting: among the latter were Lucian Freud, David Carr, Joan Warburton, Glyn Morgan and Maggi Hambling (...)" (x).
Morris hailed from the industrialist's family which gave the industrial suburb Morriston its name. A former student of Morris recalls his left leanings - for instance once a year Morris opened his gardens at Hadleigh, and some locals "would have been pained to learn that the admission
fees went to Labour Party funds" (x).
I was on my way to a conference, where I attended a debate on Innovation
How come efforts to focus on "a national story for Wales" leads to cul de sacs?
Whither the industrial revolution?
Whither the digital revolution?
Yes, packet switching and Donald Davies.
"The concept of packet switching had two independent beginnings, with Paul Baran and Donald Davies"
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