*On Ice*

I’m going to put the blog on ice until the end of the year; thanks to all my regular readers for staying with me until now! I hope to resuscitate it in the not too distant future but until the end of December or so Terra Firma is going to have to take precedence, for it is a demanding place…

Until then, if you’re a first time visitor, here are some of the posts I’ve most enjoyed researching and writing over the nine months I’ve been running this joint. Head back on over for more of the below in January! Cheers, J.

DynCorp vs. the Flowers.
Cocaine smuggling mercenaries, crop-dusting, angry peasants…

A Tale of Two Cities: Detroit and Kabul.
Carbon Monoxide, Camels, Chadors, Casinos…

Your Cellphone: Raping the Congo?
Minerals, war, gizmos, corruption…

Farms, Worms, Cash and the Space Time Continuum.
Entropy, sustainable systems as organisms, fresh veggies…

The Situation from North Korea’s Perspective.
Walking a mile in the Norks’ tattered shoes…

Iranian Protest vs. London Protest.
Spleen about the displacement of domestic dissent…

Going For Gold in North Korea?
Goldmines, football coaches, North Koreans, intrigue galore…

Paranoia in the Panopticon.
Police oppression, speeding drivers, Walt Whitman, dissent…

Sex, Lies and Conspiracy: 7/7 Revisited.
Yup, the above; mostly…

And favourite poems over the past few months:

Scopolamine
The Tao of Dow
Of Dark, Of Light

Communication, of a Sort

Miguel Cotto kisses his son after beating Shane Mosley in 2007.

Calling the donor of
Such quirks, attributes,
Skin-tone, ligaments
As you contributed to my mix.

Son to father,
How do you read me?
No response, beyond
Bog standard tuning whine,

Fading to tashweesh,
Most onomatopoeic
Of Arabic words for
Audio interference.

My own children have spoken
To me with their mouths full,
Or by satellite, but I’ve never
Been on your wavelength.

If you had the remotest notion
Of me, what would you think?
I’ve been given to believe that
You are not responsible for my nose.

Over.

By Peter Wyton.
Via Shit Creek Review.

Vertical Pig Farming: Hogs Might Fly?

MVRDV's Pig Towers

Pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world, accounting for about 38 percent of meat production worldwide. And you know what? There’s good reason for that, all you vegetarian puritans out there: it’s downright delicious.

Smoky bacon, crispy Lincolnshire sausages, pork and pineapple stir fry, Korean Samgyeopsal barbecue… God, I’m dribbling on my keyboard already, is it lunch time yet?

Sadly for fans of the full English Breakfast and other craven carnivores like myself, industrial pig farming itself is a much less pretty thing to behold than the aforementioned dishes.

Rife with sickening dereliction of animal welfare, hugely polluting and frankly unsustainable, something has to change. Fast. For pork consumption is booming.

According to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, nearly 100 million metric tons of pork were consumed worldwide in 2006 alone and it’s been climbing since then as increasing urbanization and disposable income lead to a rapid rise in pork consumption in developing nations across the world.

It’s worth considering what this entails at the point of production: a brief insight into industrial pig farming courtesy of a story written for Rolling Stone a few years back”

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering…

… Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.

Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.

Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.

The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

There is moral in here somewhere isn’t there? Live by the pig, die by the pig perhaps… Facetiousness aside, although nobody experts a pig slaughterhouse to be the Elysian fields, the facts stand that keeping piggy wiggies in teeny weeny cages, pumping them full of antibiotics and growth hormones and using loads of land to do this all is neither an edifying spectacle nor good for human, hog or planet.

Which brings me, finally, to the point: there may be a solution other than opting for nuts and raisins, which I am in fact (half-heartedly) considering. And it is an elevated one. A well-regarded Dutch architectural firm, MDRDV, has spent four years creating a plan to build seventy six high-rise towers to house pigs. Here’s the Wiki:

In Pig City MVRDV proposes a novel way of accommodating the population of 15 million pigs that share the Netherlands with 15 million human inhabitants.

The prototype is an 80 meter high tower. Each level is divided into animal friendly farm areas… The biogas generated by the pigs’ waste is collected as a clean energy source; fish farms inside the towers provide animal food and help reduce transport. Precious countryside is liberated from the polluting bio-industry.

The proposal (which came to my attention after reading around this New York Times article on vertical/urban farming) was made several years back and apparently caused a real outcry in the Netherlands, where it was seen in no small part as an indictment of industrial farming and our consumption patterns rather than a genuine proposal. The Dutch Archined website summed it up thusly:

Why spend four years on this supposedly unfeasible project? Is Pig City an indictment of the bio-industry? Is this radical proposal and powerful visual presentation meant to inject life into a tiresome discussion?

Seen for what it is, Pig City is a cartoon-like representation of today’s situation and, unlike the secret bio-industry, makes no attempt to gloss over the consequences of our pattern of consumption. The presentation, for that matter, is so lifelike that many read it as a realistic alternative. And no doubt MVRDV would be the first to take on the job should it prove feasible.

It strikes me after looking at it more closely that MVRDV may also have been making a point about the failure of the government to provide nearly that level of eco-friendly architecture to humans, let alone pigs. There are many layers to this idea, all provocative in the best of ways. Food for Thought once more… For more on the debate and urban farming, check out The Vertical Farm Project. Until then, here’s some vegetarian recipes! Bon Appetit.

"The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline" by Blake Kurasek

The Fight for the Future of Food

Michelle Obama puts herself at the mercy of an "External Locus of Power"...

Bite me: global newswire Reuters’ third most-read story at the moment is a long feature on the debate over agricultural production titled “The Fight Over the Future of Food“. It’s a topical issue, no doubt.

Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and UK climate change advisor ensured it got even more attention when he told everyone to give up eating meat last month, claiming:

Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.

The old hippy: you can be as Stern as you like, M’lud, you won’t tear me away from my bacon and eggs…

But Reuter’s piece, for all its topicality and apparent attempt to provide “balance” through comparing and contrasting — like some undergrad essay — organic and biotech approaches to increasing food production, smells a little funny. It starts with the lead:

Giuseppe Oglio’s farm near Milan looks like it’s suffering from neglect. Weeds run rampant amid the rice fields and clover grows unchecked around his millet crop….

… Nearly 5,000 miles away, in laboratories in St. Louis, Missouri, hundreds of scientists at the world’s biggest seed company, Monsanto, also want to feed the world, only their tools of choice are laser beams and petri dishes.

While this may be a mere literary device for the sake of an eye-catching juxtaposition, note the derogatory choice of adjectives for the organic farmer from the very off: “unchecked”, “rampant”, “neglect” and the choice of instruments — lasers, petri dishes — that epitomise scientific neutrality for Monsanto.

This supposed division between submission to the essential anarchy of nature (letting weeds run rampant) and the innovative scientists working around the clock to feed the hungry seems to be becoming — if you’ll excuse the pun — a staple of the debate between “conventional” and “organic” farming method. A few examples:

An article in Farmer’s Weekly entitled “Take Charge of your own Destiny” in which author Matthew Naylor posits a division between conventional farmers who have an ‘Internal Locus of Control’ and take charge of their own destiny and “hippies” who believe in an ‘External Locus of Power’ and put themselves at the mercy of fate.

Dr. Matt Ridley, who in his laughable essay “Genetically modified crops and the perils of rejecting innovation” written for the Policy Exchange think tank claims that “Nostalgic urban dwellers would prefer farmers to leave fields fallow, to grow oats for horses, to tolerate cornflowers in wheat and bees in clover, and not to pollute streams with nitrate run-off.” (A straw man if ever there was one; and would Ridley prefer to pollute streams then?)

I’ll return to point out briefly what a false dichotomy Ridley, Naylor and now Reuters are positing, but first things first, that whole Monsanto petri dish thing…

Photo courtesy of Nic Ut. Agent Orange courtesy of Monsanto.

Lets get one thing crystal clear from the offset: there is nothing remotely detached, scientifically neutral or altruistic about Monsanto; in fact its track record shows it is dedicated, essentially, to destruction.

It was heavily involved in the Manhatten Project to create the first atomic bomb; it manufactured the Agent Orange used extensively throughout the Vietnam War (that iconic picture of the little naked, napalmed girl running down the street? Thanks in part to a Monsanto product) and it now provides DynCorp with Round Up Ultra to spray on the rainforests of Colombia, killing coca plants but also Ecuadorian children. Feel the love.

“Want to feed the world” and “the petri dish” indeed… What utter bullshit. (For more comprehensive, less polemical background on Monsanto’s Machiavellian ways on everything from PCBs to Dioxins and GM Cotton, check out Crocodyl’s page on them here.)

To return to Reuters’ article: Whilst I don’t have time to deconstruct it paragraph by paragraph, along with the points I’ve noted above, a few examples of a narrative that is superficial at best, mendacious at worst stand out:

Affluent consumers may prefer the Oglios of the world to the Monsantos, but their skittishness about high-tech agriculture is making it more difficult to grapple with the mounting crisis over the lack of food.

This is (or should be) a debate about the long-term efficacy of agricultural production and its broader knock-on effect on the biosphere, not the “skittishness” of affluent customers, which is another straw man and utterly irrelevant. It is not a handful of a few rich consumers who are hampering the ability of scientists to grapple with the food crisis Monsanto to maximise it’s profits (would that the simple consumer were that powerful) but legitimate concerns about the threat posed by GMOs to biodiversity and the ability of farmers to have control of their own seed supply.

Meanwhile, neglected by Reuters, there is a growing consensus in the scientific community that industrial agricultural production has wreaked havoc on soil quality and must be curtailed or vitiated with organic/non traditional methods before further damage is done and yields drop significantly.

Drought in the central India state of Madhya Pradesh

The authors of the article turn to India:

India sorely needs another Green Revolution,” said Kushagra Nayan Bajaj, joint managing director of Bajaj Hinduthan, India’s top sugar producer, which is importing raw sugar after a drought hit the domestic cane crop. But a second green revolution would face a strong counterinsurgency, even in a place like India that benefited so profoundly from the first one…

India’s Green Revolution is actually on the verge of collapse as water tables drop massively, pests increase resistance to herbicides and the amount of fertiliser they need triples as soil quality drops. As National Public Radio reported in April this year:

[Farmers] gathered on a recent morning in a stone-paved courtyard to explain why the famed “bread basket” of India is heading toward collapse. Their comparatively small region, Punjab, grows far more wheat and rice for India than any other region.

But now these farmers are running out of groundwater. They have to buy three times as much fertilizer as they did 30 years ago to grow the same amount of crops. They blitz their crops with pesticides, but insects have become so resistant that they still often destroy large portions of crops.

“That benefited so profoundly from the first one”? That’s a little unbalanced then, isn’t it? The authors also go on to claim that “India has so far allowed GM seeds only for cotton, which has boosted productivity”. Well… if you’re a Monsanto researcher, that’s what you claim anyway.

Bt Cotton can actually be argued to have been a major fuck-up and has attracted considerable controversy in India, with some blaming the debt incurred by farmers from buying the seed for a spate of suicides. As Crocodyl’s backgrounder notes:

Farmers around the world have experienced problems with Monsanto’s Bt cotton. Researchers from Cornell University reported in July 2006 that Chinese GM cotton farmers are losing money due to ’secondary’ pests: “After seven years, populations of other insects — such as mirids — have increased so much that farmers are now having to spray their crops up to 20 times a growing season to control them, according to the study of 481 Chinese farmers in five major cotton-producing provinces.”

In India, Bt cotton is prohibited in Kerala and Orissa. After crop failures were reported in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, the Genetic Engineering Approvals Committee (GEAC) refused to renew the company’s license for 3 varieties. In addition, the office of director general of investigation and registration (DGIR) submitted a preliminary investigation report to the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practicies Commission on March 29, 2006 charging Monsanto for setting unreasonably high rates for Bt cotton.

Just three examples plucked at random after a very cursory read of the article, but enough to convince me that it is framing the debate in an entirely unsatisfactory way. The reporters, by setting the parameters of a discussion and giving the illusion of balance by weighing up two approaches, in actual fact are serving to neutralise the broader debate; for if we are going to talk dichotomies, the “fight” for the future of food is more one between people and profit than Monsanto and the weeds.

Just for the record, Thomson Reuters’ CEO is also a director of Merck Co., a pharmaceutical major that has been actively seeking out biotech acquisitions… food for thought, no? While he would no-doubt never interfere in the editorial process of a reputable newswire, one wonders if a more cogent critique of the biotech industry would find its way into print at the firm given the above fact…

Monsanto: feeding the poor and hungry... napalm.

Raging Cow: A Short Tale of Boxing and Bovines

South Korean welterweight champion Kwak Kyung-seok is dog-tired and in a foul mood. He’s exhausted because he’s been training all day for an upcoming titleship bout with a Thai fighter and he’s in a foul mood because I can’t get a rhythm on the mitts and my left hook looks like shit.

“Thwack, thwack-thwack” go the pads and with each final “thwack” his sigh gets louder and language saltier. After trying to correct my footwork for the upteenth time and demonstrating the tightness of the move with his own heavy hands – circular mitts flying like black, sweat-slick UFOs in front of my eyes — the stocky 31-year-old can’t take it anymore:

“For fuck’s sake” he says deliberately in Korean. “Are you a cow?”

I stop, sweat burning my eyes, tired, pissed-off and now completely fucking confused too:

“A cow?”

“Yes, a cow. For fuck’s sake, I said are you a cow?

“Cow?” I try and draw the mental connection: Ponderous? Four-stomachs? Given to excessive mastication? Flatulent? I don’t get it, perhaps I’ve misheard…

“A cow?”

By now his frustration is palpable.

“Yes a fucking cow; you know, steak, burgers, bulgogi… Moo! A cow! Are you a cow? Why aren’t you damn listening to what I say? It’s like reading sutras to a cow!”

I get it suddenly; this must be the Korean equivalent to casting pearls before swine. I’m the swine. Dammit. First I can’t get a basic punch right and now I’m being called a cow. I just want to punch something after a shitty day at the office and now his mumblings have become sutras and I’m a cow.

“Shit!” I finally snap, losing the veneer of detachment cultivated assiduously over the past six months in the decrepit 5th floor boxing gym.

“I’ll just do the goddam bags, ok?” I bellow frustratedly  in a no-doubt bovine manner (but perturbed the way a cow could never be) and slam my gloves into the wall in frustration.

My loss of temper raises his spirits no-end.

“Oh come on!” He laughs, tickled at the effect he’s had. “Come oorrnn.”

He makes his way to the old sofa in the admin corner of the room and slumps down, putting on an old fight video with a lazy flick of the remote control, still chuckling to himself.

“Sutras to a fucking cow.”

쇠귀에 경 읽기

Going For Gold in North Korea?

High-kicking: North Korea going for gold?

On October the 22nd, North Korea’s state news agency, the Korea Central News Agency ran a typically terse one paragraph report on the visit of a foreign business delegation to Pyongyang.

Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly, met and had a conversation with the visiting delegation of the Swiss Commodity Holding AG led by Chief Executive Ms. Shanti Sen at the Mansudae Assembly Hall.

A President of a Presidium had a conversation with a visiting delegation? Stop the press! It is highly doubtful that the KCNA’s finest caused front pages or breaths to be held in news rooms globally and frankly, if anyone even bothered to read the report, they must have thought little of it.

But to a handful of football fans halfway across the world as tightly knit and fervently loyal as any group of North Korean cadres, the visit represents just the latest installment in a saga involving a former England football manager, the mysterious Swiss company led by Ms. Sen and the octogenarian autocrats of Pyongyang.

Notts County Football Club lays claim to the title of oldest professional football league club in the world. Despite its lowly status in the footballing echelons it has a loyal following who have tracked “The Magpies” recent financial travails with a (perhaps morbid) fascination.

Not least because they seem to involve, through some twist of fate, promises of gold buried in the mountains of distant North Korea… But I’m getting ahead of myself; let’s rewind.

Sven: "Show me the money"

Footballing minnows Notts County were initially delighted this summer when the club was taken over by a Middle Eastern consortium called Qadbak. The firm — which claimed to have some £100 billion in assets — expunged its £1m debts, hired former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson as director of football, and promised to propel the club into the Championship within five years. Bang, crash, ker-pow! Eat your heart out Roman Abramovich…

But doubts didn’t take long to grow and the ownership of the club began to come under the scrutiny of the Football League, which states that all club directors and significant shareholders must pass a ‘fit and proper person’ test: not an easy thing to do given that Qadbak is registered in offshore banking haven the British Virgin Islands and its owners seemed reluctant to come forward.

The interest of sports journalists was piqued and many began to sniff around.

A lot of the funny smells seemed to be emanating from Swiss Commodity Holdings (SCH). Described by most simply as a Zurich-based mining company, it emerged from obscurity when Qadbak was reported to have handed a sizeable stake in it to Sven-Goran Eriksson in return for the former England manager joining Notts County. (Which was quite a step down for the globetrotting, bespectacled Swede).

All that glitters..?

British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph found that two ambassadors for the miner had approached the investment banks Rothschild and Cazenove for advice about a public listing, claiming to have mining assets worth more than commodity giants BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Rio Tinto and gold reserves of $153bn, more than the current market leader, Barrick Gold, which has $117bn.

Strangely none of the above companies had ever heard of SCH and it declined to disclose publicly the location of its claimed $1.9 trillion of reserves. But according to the Telegraph, representatives of the firm told bankers that some of its assets are in Africa and North Korea. Yes. That North Korea.

The bizarre bond between SCH and Pyongyang became even more apparent when the Guardian reported that Sven Goran Eriksson was on the brink of a deal that could see the Swede leaving Notts County on loan to coach the North Korean football team during their World Cup campaign.

Although the coach denied the veracity of the reports and was later said to have turned down the offer, the whole situation seemed increasingly iffy. A report in the Guardian claimed Eriksson was assured that when the company was floated on the stock market, his stock would be worth millions overnight and that the initial public flotation would take place by July. (The company has yet to be floated and rumours have emerged of Sven leaving the club…)

Then in September Russell King, a senior representative of Qadbak, the offshore company that owns Notts County, has had £1.9m of his assets frozen by the courts in Jersey over an unpaid debt. Things seemed to be unraveling*

If Qadbak and SCH are counting on North Korea to provide a solid backstop for their singularly impressive claims to wealth, one suspects they are out of their depth. Although foreign interest in North Korea’s natural resources has grown, partly on the back of a South Korean government report issued in early October valuing the North’s mineral reserves at $6,000bn, getting the glittery stuff out is no simple task.

Sanctions slapped on North Korea as a result of its nuclear tests render most North Korean products toxic to players in the international financial system. As British businessman Colin McAskill, chairman of Koryo Asia Ltd., which invests in North Korea through the Chosun Development & Investment Fund told reporter Donald Kirk in 2007.

“The US has been using coercion, innuendo, and sheer force to intimidate banks from dealing with North Korea….

…they have a wealth of minerals – gold, silver, zinc, magnesite, copper, uranium, platinum – that needs investment to extract.

SCH seems, judging from their reported conversation with the President of the Presidium, to be making a serious move on that “wealth of minerals”. Shanti Sen, who the KCNA reports as leading the firm’s delegation to Pyongyang, previously worked for the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation, where she headed the Corporate Investment Group and is also listed as a bigwig at City Property Investors, which manages global real estate. Interesting choice of CEO.* (Incidentally Singapore recently signed an Investment Guarantee Agreement (IGA) with the North, under which:

Investors will be accorded non-discriminatory treatment, compensation in the event of expropriation or nationalisation of their investments, and free transfer of capital and returns from investment.

What with Singapore’s IGA, The Gold Diggers’ visit, Sven’s involvement and the South Korean government’s report, there seems to be a real sense in the air that North Korea is there for the taking.

But whether it’s footballing gold or the aurum itself that has led the Magpies (which as everyone knows are attracted to shiny things) to look east for funding, one can only feel for the fans that the future of their club is no longer simply in the hands of  its players but is in no small part perhaps dependent on State Department sanctions officials, the dictatorial geriatrics of Pyongyang and “$153bn” of North Korea gold that is, for the time being — and despite the best efforts of those in the Mansudae Assembly Hall — going nowhere, one suspects, for the foreseeable future.

*****

*After posting this story I was emailed anonymously by a German offering their “Freundliche Grüsse” and the link to AAH Group Inc., whose board of directors includes the very same Shanti Sen. There is absolutely jack all information on the group on the internet or indeed, their own homepage other than that they are:

“A mining corporation with a focus on the extraction of gold and precious minerals. The group owns various rights in South East Asia and South America. AAH Group, Inc. own one of the largest reserves bases in the public gold sector.”

Their claims sound a lot like SCH’s don’t they? And after a little more digging I found out that Pyongyang has in the past primarily sold  its gold to global buyers via Thailand. According to official Thai Customs Department statistics dug up by reporter Bertil Lintner in a few years back, North Korea shipped 500 kilograms of gold worth 398 million baht (US$11 million) to Thailand in April 2007 alone.

Lintner, who’s done his homework, writes that North Korea’s main gold mine is in Unsan county in North Pyongan province, about 150 kilometers north of Pyongyang.

Consultants from Clough Engineering of Australia in 2001 inspected the same mine under the sponsorship of the United Nations Office for Project Services. They estimated that Unsan held 1,000 tons of gold reserves, which if true would make it one of the world’s major gold mines.

There truly is gold in them thar hills! No wonder businesses with distinctly opaque structures are popping up left right and centre, claiming to have the rights to all Smorg’s treasure.

I’d speculate (wildly) that given Sen’s background in Singapore and the city state’s recent MOU with the Norks that AAH Inc. and SCH may be aiming to sell gold via Singapore… Just a shot in the dark though. They may also be gambling that sanctions will be lifted as the North moves to rejoin six party talks, which looks likely in the near future…

*Notts County’s takeover has since been approved by the Football League. As the Guardian noted, however:

There is, however, no means test for ownership of English football clubs, nor is there currently any way of knowing whether Notts County’s claims that it is backed by billions of pounds are true. Other public claims made by the club in the past three months have later unravelled.

Formulary For A New Urbanism

A Korean street, late 1800s: credit unknown

Seoul apartments, 2008. by Flickr user "bhophoto"

The likely view 100 years earlier: credit unknown

Seoul apartments. Credit as above.

***

Le Corbusier’s style [is] suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style.

His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

***

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action. Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

Formulary for a New Urbanism: Ivan Chtcheglov, 1953.

Somehow I don’t think Chtcheglov — who tried to blow up the Eiffel tower because its light was shining in his bedroom window and keeping him awake –would like Seoul, circa 2009, very much, even if it (caught at the right moment) has it’s own beauty (see picture no. 4)…

I, too, want a house mounted on tracks that can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening. I do not, however, want to end up in a mental institution having electro-shock treatment like the author of this classic Situationist essay.

(The pictures and the essay need some comment; good material for a discussion about the future of the city, eco-architecture, traditional Korean houses, global urbanisation, psychogeography, the Situationists, etc. Sadly, your blogger is suffering from mental block brought on by too much screen-gazing and a lunch of ramen and can only offer the above as pointer for your own meanderings. Bon Dérive and Voyage)

Classroom as Parliament and the Death of the Adult

"The Secret School". By Nikolaos Gyzis, 1886.

Online journal/magazine Spiked is a strange beast; sometimes acerbic, sometimes glib, sometimes borderline reactionary in tone; dedicated to often counter-intuitive rabble-rousing and always fiercely libertarian in editorial position.

I don’t always agree with what I read in its pages, but for a site that describes itself as “dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms” it can hardly be accused of doing anything other than what it says on the tin.

René Magritte: The Schoolmaster

Amid a strange and increasingly palpable (if the papers are any guide) disquiet in England about parenting, education and childhood that seems to be weaving itself more and more firmly into the very fabric of social life, Spiked’s series of articles (or more properly, book reviews) on authority in the family and pedagogical spheres has been great reading.

A recent review of Frank Furedi’s “Wasted: Why Education isn’t Educating” is a case in point. Furedi, a professor of Sociology at the University of Kent and former chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, is not concerned with anything as trite as the endless griping about media studies vs. English literature or modern vs. traditional teaching methods that dominate much such discourse, but something at the core of a wider cultural malaise. The death of adult authority.

Not the best forum for political debate?

Classroom as Parliament:

To Furedi, the classroom has become a site in which debates that should rightly be taking place in the adult world are being conducted, while adults are simultaneously infantilised by the state’s manipulation of “pre-political relations of authority”. As he puts it:

How well any teaching method works depends on the recognition that education is an intergenerational dynamic, which relies on the assumption of adult authority. Today, we have an inability to give meaning to education because we struggle to give meaning to adulthood.

…One result of the devaluation of adult authority is that the proper relationship between education and society has been turned upside down and education is used as the site where the unresolved issues of public life can be pursued.

As children are treated as mini-grown-ups whose opinion must be heard on everything from the content of the curriculum to the attributes of their teachers, education becomes viewed as a place where political debates can and should take place:

‘In public life, politicians and policymakers play it safe and tend to avoid substantive issues and serious debate. But often problems that are avoided in the domain of politics appear as a subject for the school curriculum. So the problem of political apathy and disengagement is accepted as a fact of life in public life only to reappear in the form of citizenship education in schools. Solving problems and changing attitudes is assigned to the institutions of education.’

Agree or disagree with his analysis, it comes as both education and the relationship between children and adults in the UK can safely be said to be in a state of crisis.

All in all, you're just another hoody on a wall, to the tune of Pink Floyd

A shitty place to be a kid?

Just a few of the issues that plague L’Angleterre with regard to its treatment of children include the following, as the country’s four children’s commissioners (for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) reported to the UN in 2008:

· A punitive juvenile justice system;
. Public attitudes that demonise teenagers;
· Lack of protection against physical punishment in the home;
· One of the highest levels of child poverty in Europe.

Street scene in Poplar. Cyril Arapoff

Those alone would be quite ample cause for generalised concern about the state of the nation, but it is schooling itself that has become the locus for most discussion about issues.

The government’s response last week to the biggest inquiry into primary education in 40 years — published after a three-year process which produced 31 interim reports, 28 surveys thousands of submissions and resulted in a 600-page document — gave little cause for hope of systematic change.

The Cambridge review of primary education was a damning indictment of the primary curriculum and strongly suggested that schools replace formal teaching with play-based learning until a child turns six (in line with other European states). An obsessive emphasis on children gaining academic skills early limits children’s enjoyment of school and risks severely compromising their natural curiosity, imagination and love of learning, the report said. (As Steiner schools have been arguing forever.)

Ed Balls. No surname jokes, but...

It received enthusiastic backing from every teaching union, agency and school support group: and was hence — of course — unceremoniously rejected by Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. (Do families need a fucking government department to oversee them these days? What is wrong with just Department for Schools?)

But I digress somewhat (or do I?) One key consequence, Furedi argues, of the discrediting of political authority is that those who seek to manage society increasingly do so by “attempting to manipulate pre-political relations of authority: those that exist within education, and the family”. (This would explain the name of Ball’s department…)

As Jennie Bristow, reviewing Furedi’s book writes:

This is a dangerous process because all forms of authority in society draw upon the basic relationship between adults and children. The authority of parents has historically been considered paramount, not because politicians of the past had a particularly elevated view of parents or respect for their autonomy, but because childrearing was understood as the one area of life where natural necessity forces adults to protect children.

So while established relations of authority have historically been contested in the name of democracy, freedom or science, and these have had largely progressive consequences, pre-political forms of authority were generally perceived as areas in which reformers meddled at their peril.

Today, says Furedi, ‘society has become as uncomfortable with the authority of parents and teachers as it was with the absolute monarch of the eighteenth century’. But unlike rebellion against inherited privilege, there is no positive or democratising outcome to our present-day discomfort with the authority of adults.

*I’ve run out of time and space to carry on rambling interminably in this post. Just a few thoughts sparked by the Watford playground thing anyway…

Ways Around Internet Censorship

“To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.”
Claude Adrien Helvetius

Censorship is nobody’s friend, but sadly gatecrashes far too many parties.  All praises to places like Wired then for providing the digital cattle prod with which to chuck the fucker out. (Hey, let anthropomorphism be your friend…) “How to circumvent internet censorship.” Read it and use it: from proxy servers to port forwarding, it’s all interesting and functional stuff… Even if you do just use it to check Facebook at work.

The Sky Falling

“The Celtic chiefs told him they feared only one thing, that the sky should fall.” Arrian. The Expedition of Alexander.

A joke, perhaps? They still
do it, solemnly meeting
the earnest foreigner’s enquiry.
Because there could have been,
surely, no terror

For the lime-rinsed and technicolour-
shirted, head-hungry, henpecked
louts who so irritated
dry Caesar in the promise of an end
so brisk and flat

And messy, like flies squashed
between the pages as the book
claps shut; dying of the applause
of heaven and earth when they
join hands

At the show’s end. Or maybe,
after all, serious. Think of them
lurching out of the doorway
to breathe, pee, vomit,
packed with booze

Kebabs and mutual admiration,
into the cold; the snow just starting
and the sky slips gently
and piecemeal into the gras
and vanishes,

Fragments of brief intricacy,
like the bard’s lovely, hot,
cossetting songs indoors,
the words that freeze great doings
(rapes, wars)

In symmetries and stars; and going
nowhere. The stories sink
into the grass at night,
and the earth sits there,
not applauding,

Spreading an empty palm;
swallowing the sparks of damp
and formal brilliance. Very
quiet.
No joke.

Unexpectedly irreligious and peppery verse courtesy of Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. From his collected poems, published by Perpetua Press in 2002.