Saturday, June 18, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
something John Steinbeck wrote in the 60s that is so relevant today
I read this book at the end of last year. It was a break from reading work related non fiction but weirdly enough it ended up being related closer to my work than I anticipated.
Eventually I had to come out of the tree-hidden roads and do my best to by pass the cities. Hartford and Providence and such are big cities, bustling with manufacturing, lousy with traffic. It takes far longer to go through cities than to drive several miles. And in the intricate taffic pattern, as you try to find your way through, there's no possibility of seeing anything. But now I have been through hundreds of towns and cities in every climate and against evrey kind of scenery, and of course they are all different, and the people have points of difference but in some ways they are all alike. American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exhuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other, but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move. (Steinbeck, John in Travels with Charley in Search of America, p 28-29, first published 1962, this quote from the 1965 Pan London edition)
Eventually I had to come out of the tree-hidden roads and do my best to by pass the cities. Hartford and Providence and such are big cities, bustling with manufacturing, lousy with traffic. It takes far longer to go through cities than to drive several miles. And in the intricate taffic pattern, as you try to find your way through, there's no possibility of seeing anything. But now I have been through hundreds of towns and cities in every climate and against evrey kind of scenery, and of course they are all different, and the people have points of difference but in some ways they are all alike. American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exhuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other, but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move. (Steinbeck, John in Travels with Charley in Search of America, p 28-29, first published 1962, this quote from the 1965 Pan London edition)
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
finalising the details of my forthcoming exhibition
I have a show coming up in the Crucible space at Artisan, I'll post more details soon...
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