Thanks, everyone, for the lovely evening last night (which I am still somewhat groggy from) – especially our wonderful hosts Janine and Phil.

For those of you who were asking about CFMDC, their website is www.cfmdc.org. Most of the films in the program were rented from CFMDC. Students can watch video copies of films in the collection in the Resource Centre ($3/hour), you just need to book time. The film catalogue is searchable on-line.

I’d love to hear about/see final projects, perhaps we can have an informal gathering later this summer or in the fall.

If anyone wants to read my second assignment you can download it at

My website linked directly for your comfort.

Also, if anyone has the directions to get to where we’re supposed to be tonight I’d appreciate having them. jonathan at firestorm-ink dot com is the email address if it isn’t there.

Jonathan

I really enjoyed Hong Sang-Soo’s film and his unpretentious portrayal of the ordinary, that I decided to take some pics of my neighbourhood at Leslie and Finch. You can see them here:

http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/pearbluesand/my_photos

After clicking on the album, you can click View Slideshow on the upper right corner.

I found it difficult to photograph something ordinary, without stylizing it too much, while at the same time obtaining an interesting photo, in the same way that Hong Sang-Soo succeeds to keep our attention. If you guys have any ideas, let me know

For my walk I collected a number of haiku poems, which I then scattered about my neighbourhood by writing them in chalk on the sidewalk in various locations. The intent is to provide brief moments of surprise to passers-by, which might pull them momentarily out of their routine and perhaps provide a small moment of contemplation about the world around them (or at least make them wonder about who wrote the poem there). The locations I chose for some of the poems directly reflect their surroundings (for example a haiku about a pine tree written on the sidewalk in front of a pine tree) but others are less obviously connected and just seemed appropriate for the space (a poem about loneliness in an alleyway).

Haikus I think are particularly appropriate not only because they are short, but because they are about closely observing the everyday world around you and attempting to capture a particular moment of that world. Haikus are very intimate poems and are very connected to a bodily experience of the world – they often elicit senses other than sight, particularly sound and smell. Many are about nature, and seem to see nature as a redemptive force, but modern haikus often deal with very urban moments (rising gas prices / an attendant changing numbers / in a pouring rain - Michael Dylan Welch). These newer haikus are interesting to me because they suggest that it is still possible to have moments of “presence� and groundedness in the modern world.

I did notice people stopping to look at some of the poems after I wrote them, but only very briefly. I tried to get some photographs of people in the act of looking or reading the poems, but felt very uncomfortable camping out and spying on people so was not very successful (and of course once I got my camera out, no one came). I photographed the poems and in some cases a wider shot of their location (unfortunately some of the poems aren’t very legible, so I’ve also written them below the photos), you can see them here:

http://ca.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/ris_ristastic/album?.dir=/39fe&.view=t

Some things to think about before today’s discussion:

a) What, in your opinion, are some of the salient points of contact and divergence between each of Debord’s accounts of the derive?

b) What sort of differentiations might we elaborate from an experience of derive in a particular geographical location circa 1957 and a derive through that location today? Ultimately, what sort of cultural impressions, whether similar or divergent, might we extract from each experience? More importantly, how do we identify the ways in which space articulates culture in this context?

c) If we conceive of ‘psychogeography’ as an act of the imagination, to what extent does the image repertoire of the individual imbue the physical and/or imaginary construction of space? To what extent is there imbrication between the two?

I have posted my response to the first assignment here:
http://ca.blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-fY7g0uQjcrUpjYlLp.RsTXSlh0Zc

Here is a link to Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting”:
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chap6.html

Here is the quote that should help to inform your project around walking in the city:

It is only through spatial practices which trace out the city, which map-make it, that the experiences of haunting and of desire can be discerned. If the ramble, the stroll, the walk and the dérive are a beginning, they are only a beginning. The city is urgently calling out for new spatial practices—if only because the city has now become almost too small and nearly too big to sense properly. It will be through an understanding of the multiplicity of the time-spaces that we will understand the actual disappearance of the city. Disappeared because they have forgotten the dreams on which they were built. Disappeared because of the ghosts of the past that have not been exorcised. Disappeared because clues to other experiences of the city have been overlooked…. Cities have become hieroglyphic spaces in the sense that they have become a language that ‘we’ have forgotten how to speak and write: an interlocking set of picture puzzles from a lost time and space. But it is not the forgotten past that concerns me, it is the lost futures that can no longer be articulated.

FROM: Steve Pile, “The Probem of London,� or, how to explore the moods of the city� in Neil Leach (ed.), The Hieroglyphics of Space: Reading and Experiencing the Modern Metropolis (London, New York: Routledge), 214.