Cities

We left London last year to move to Toronto and this editorial in last Sunday's New York Times by Michael Goldfarb called "This is London" really struck a chord...definitely a space for the "neighborliness of strangers"...What do you think?

PS To link to the article click on "Cities"

ruminating...

I thought that I could install everything on Friday evening but in reality, I needed Saturday and Sunday to place letters in between converstations. I thought that this was frustrating at first, but people really seemed to like to talk and were some how confused about what materials I was using for the lettering. Most people thought that I had stencilled on the quote rather than hand-cut sign vinyl. People were also confused about the lettering to the side thinking that I was using some kind of Islamic calligraphy. Especially the "moon and star" tile to the right of the second "13" which is actually an upside down right quotation mark and a period. Double-edged punctuation?

Alphabet Soup!

I am charging my batteries and sorting my letters. I wish I had thought of this while I was cutting! I will take more pictures this afternoon as things progress.

bigger heap of letters

Quaint?

As I am STILL cutting and listening to the news, I wonder if it is quaint to talk about the neighborliness of strangers. Bombs, bombings, fighting, terrorism...I think that this is all the more reason to talk about the neighborliness of strangers. Do we want our cities to be spaces of fear or of connectivity?

STRANGER ESTRANGEIRO!

While I have been cutting all day I have been thinking about "To You" and why I like it so much. I am also wondering about parallels between Whitman's city in 1900 and cities 106 years later.

I have found some clarity by reading the transcript of a lecture by the urban sociologist Richard Sennett.

Richard Sennett: Capitalism and the City

Sennett points to the "interactive complexity" of cities. He feels that one of the great virtues of urban settings is their diversity—they are places where we learn to live with strangers. Sennett adds that this interaction with diverse classes, cultures, languages, and races stimulates societies and expands lives. But, he also cautions that the "standardization of public consumption" has caused a neutrality of public spaces, which in turn diminishes the complexity of modern cities. It is more difficult to discover the strange and unexpected.

I like this poem so much because it is so relevant. Whitman asks his audience in 1900 to choose a space of self-knowledge rather than one of fear by welcoming the strange and unexpected.

Even though our cities, workspaces, consumption, and time have been standardized by capitalism and, terrorism has created spaces of fear in our cities, Whitman's poem reminds us to aspire to the neighborliness of strangers by finding new ways to engage with cities and with the people who live in them.

Alley Jaunt also seeks to reinvigorate our relationships to our city by giving viewers and artists a “passport” to venture off the grid and
(re-)engage with the nooks and crannies of our city.

Yikes!

Scrambling to cut out vinyl letters but just realizing that I did not mention that the poem that I am using in my installation is called To You by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, 1900.

heap of letters

slowly cutting out letters using my lucky olfa cutter...bit of a hangover today...

Count down: 1 week to go

After spending a day researching vinyl stickers and mylar stencils, I have decided that hand-cut vinyl will be the cheapest and fastest (!) thing to do. It only costs my time, some printer ink, and my knuckles! I hope I don't end the week with grizzled fingers.

I have started to cut out the letters and it is strangely soothing...can still think about the tiles and how I will handle the patterning. Any thoughts?