February 26, 2009

- I read Neil Smith's introduction to Lefebvre's Urban Revolution to re-familiarize myself with his basic ideas, and as preamble to reading Production of Space (which I plan to read once this fucking proposal is written). Smith outlines Castell's critiques of Lefebvre's concept of urbanization, noting that the one that still seems to stand is the flawed notion that urbanization comes to determine industrialization -- that is cities in essence run the mode of production in capitialist societies, rather than vice versa. I'm not sure that this will be an especially useful trail to follow, but something else that he does in Production of Space does. Lefebvre, according to Smith, corresponds an evolution of space to the "orthodox" stages of modes of production: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism. These correspond, in Lefebvre's view to: absolute, historical, abstract, and differential spaces (differential being collective, or socialist space). I'm thinking that it will be the character of abstract space that is most interesting to me, but it is something that Dimendberg has looked at closely in relation to film. ISSUE: How do I keep this dissertation from becoming Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity II?

- I would like to write about obscene phone calls and film.
- Also, the history of point-of-view.

- Got Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America - despite the academic title, it's actually an art/coffee table book with an essay by Will Straw and (amazing) cover images from American true crime magazines. Two interesting references: 1) Pierre Mac Orlan - french novelist and critic, who has this idea about crime being part of the "social fantastic." Mac Orlan has a poem/song called La Ville mort, and a fellow traveller of the surrealists in post ww1 Paris, interested in Atget. Also, now-French scholar Dominque Kalifa who has written some what look to be amazing, hardly ever translated articles on the history of crime and the social imaginary. One article "Crime Scenes: Criminal Topography and Social Imaginary in Nineteenth Century Paris" looks to be very interesting.