Utopia or Bust

Posts Tagged ‘Graffiti

Tacoma Pecha Kucha videos

Posted by: lettrist on: September 12, 2009

Pecha Kucha (pe-cha-k’cha) is an fun slideshow series. The rules are that each presenter gets 20 slides to each display for 20 seconds at a time. This format has caught on and some 230 cities worldwide have a Pecha Kucha Night now. Wednesday at the Robert Daniel Gallery in Tacoma about 8 local figures presented [...]

Photos: Free Walls and Dreams of Collapse

Posted by: lettrist on: July 5, 2009

Here are some pictures I took a year ago in a ravine in North Tacoma, and never posted until now.
I had a dream last night that I was walking through a series of off and on-ramps, walking with some friends and talking. Soon the city lights began to dampen, and the road beneath us started [...]

Public Property No Trespassing

Posted by: lettrist on: June 13, 2009

A government of the people, by the people, for the people, where the people’s property is not the people’s property but the government’s property? So this does not belong to the people, it belongs to the pig. You’re going to have to keep on saying what Freddie Hampton said: we are the people, we are [...]

What is our Alba?

Posted by: lettrist on: April 1, 2009

What is our Alba Platform? Do we have one?

The 1956 Lettrist International wrote that the Alba Congress and its six points of unity would in the future be viewed as a key moment in the struggling stages for a new sensibility and a new culture, “A struggle which is itself part of the general revolutionary resurgence characterizing the year 1956.” Fifty years later, we still struggle with the same outmoded institutions of city government, of opposition within the spectacle.

Toward a Theory of Public Ritual

Posted by: lettrist on: January 17, 2008

Given that public art both reflects a society’s attributes and serves to modify these attributes, when it is erased from memory it creates a valuable example of how anti-agoristic politics seek to denude the public sphere of all underground perceptual content and replace it with the symbols of the state and the corporation.
I recently discovered [...]

Tacoma-Style Situationism

Posted by: lettrist on: January 6, 2008

The situationists had this idea that their city was either recuperated or alienated through various sensations of Paris’s geographical landscapes. Today I took to the streets and, in my spontaneous moment of dérive, did a bit of Tacoma-style drifting myself.
Psychogeography, as it’s called, is an idea with roots deeper than situationism in fact, traceable at [...]

33rd G8 Summit in Rostock, Germany

Posted by: lettrist on: June 5, 2007

I am currently in the Southern-most part of Germany, Baden-Wurtemburg province. The annual, informal G8 Summit and the protests will be in the Northern-most part of Germany, in a small town called Rostock. All the heads of state will meet in an exclusive seaside resort called Heiligendamm. All of Germany has been activated by the [...]

Tacoma–A Photoblog

Posted by: lettrist on: May 23, 2007

I’m going in search of cultural Tacoma, not banal and casual Tacoma, but the Tacoma of the grainy, absolute destiny of the waterways. In search of the deep Tacoma of mores and mentalities, and superficial he Tacoma of industrial waste, of motels and spongy surfaces. But to understand it you have to take to its [...]