landscape urbanism bullshit generator

At last a place where you can perforate your exurban pluralities while rectifying you extensible armatures!

Wider Roads Touted as 'Green'

"The provincial and federal governments have found a novel way to help Nanaimo fight global warming: spend money on roads.

"The City of Nanaimo will reduce greenhouse gases and vehicle congestion by improving a busy stretch of road," promises a Jan. 22 announcement. "New traffic lights, widened traffic lanes and improved access to the Swy-a-lana Lagoon Park... will improve traffic flow and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from idling vehicles."

The federal and provincial governments are spending $790,000 on the project, out of a fund dedicated to helping communities become "healthier, greener and more sustainable places to live..."

"Autumn Cabbalism" & "Purple Train" by Roy Arden from

THE WORLD ETC...
January 31 to March 1, 2008



Opening Reception:
Thursday, January 31st, 8-10 pm



"The Monte Clark Gallery Vancouver is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Roy Arden.

Following his mid-career survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Roy Arden’s exhibition will feature new graphic works and collages.

The World etc… presents Arden’s latest graphic works (archival pigment prints) that are essentially digital collages, as well as recent small paper collages made from printed matter.

Humans have a need to make images, which begets their collection, storage, ordering, interpretation, and re-use. Yet, there is always an element of folly to any archive, no matter how important or useful. What starts as a rational project invariably grows into a large problem if not an unruly monster. All archives are mirrors of human history.

Arden’s digital and paper collages derive from his archives of images taken from books and magazines as well as his immense archive of images gleaned from the Internet. He mostly collects vernacular (non-art) photo images and since photography is largely synchronous with modernity, his archive and the collages he makes from it reflect modern history. Arden’s sense of history has always been critical in the dialectical sense that Walter Benjamin neatly described in his famous dictum; “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

In Arden’s new works, he plays with different ordering systems from quasi-scientific or simple scrapbook grids to complexly layered poetic collage. While each work focuses on a specific theme or subject, as with most of his art - history and modernity are the larger subjects. Many of the works pay homage to artists who have used retrieved imagery and so the history of collage is variously invoked from Picasso and Kurt Schwitters to Rauschenberg and Hans-Peter Feldmann.

Roy Arden's ongoing web project, The World as Will and Representation - Archive 2007 (viewable at royarden.com) presents his personal archive of images gleaned from the Internet..."

seven Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño, only some previously linked, etc at me-fi...

Whiny Plutocrats

"If the market economy is looking peaky, then its accompanying free market ideology should be on life support. Behold the hypocrisy. The free marketeers have spent the past two decades preaching against the evils of state intervention, the dead hand of government, the need to roll back the frontiers, and so on. Yet what happens when these buccaneers of unfettered capitalism run into trouble? They go running to the nanny state they so deplore, sob into her lap and beg for help. The results of their own greed - "exuberance", they call it - and incompetence have caused more than 100 substantial banking crises over the past 30 years, yet time and again it is the reviled state which answers the call for help. Four times in this period, the authorities have had to rescue crucial parts of the US financial setup. If the banks make money, they get to keep it. The moment they look like losing it, we have to cough up. In Wolf's brilliant summary: "No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses..."

review of Donato Mancini's Aethel--

"A gorgeous collection of concrete poetry, Aethel uses a variety of fonts and spatial layouts, contrasting and shifting between each piece. Each poem presents a new jumble of text, an arrangement of letters and fonts shaped into amorphous bursts on the page. Each work is imbued with a certain grace, a rounded beauty that leaks from one age of the page to the next. The more eye catching pieces are the ones like “Blood of a Concrete Poet” and “I Think Therefore I’m Not Sure” that use the American Sign Language hand diagrams and brief arrows as a unique way to portray movement and construct new phrases from visual matter..."

new books on Trees--

"A medlar smells of Pimms with cucumber, hawthorn of unwashed underwear, pollarded trees are “cruelly elegant”, big trees are terribly thirsty and can drink 9,000 gallons a year, gingkos are terrifying and Sitka spruce needs as much as thirty inches of rain per annum. Sitka is exquisitely light. The Wright brothers built their Kitty Hawk with it. “Surprisingly for such a dour tree, you can strike a jolly tune from its light wood and it is used in the sounding boards of violins and guitars...”

Vancouver trees