Miscellany #1217

Some essays, blogs and things elsewhere, and some appearances hither and thither:

I'm mostly not in London for the London Festival of Architecture, but if you go to the Foldaway Bookshop, a temporary shop on Heddon St, just off Regent St, you should - I say should, as I've not had the chance to go there - find a selection of books selected by me, and O Lucky Man should be playing in the background somewhere, which is also my fault. The books in question, by Ian Nairn and Catherine Cooke, are out of print, so it's well worth attempting to snap them up. If they managed to order them in...

I also have an essay, on the subject of the commercial Brutalism of Owen Luder, the Halifax HQ and John Brunton, in the catalogue for The Stones of Menace - which takes place in a Brutalist post-war church in Bow which was a big favourite of the aforementioned Nairn; there's a short extract from A Guide to the New Ruins in the excellent first issue of Sheffield architectural zine 5seventy3.

Anyone reading this in Maastricht and Ljubljana is in luck: as I'm giving two talks at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in the former, one on aforementioned new ruins, and the other is a paper on the architecture and urbanism of the Yugoslavian 'black wave' of the '60s, as part of Surfing the Black, a conference which should prove to be very interesting indeed on this unforgivably overlooked area of '60s cinema; then after that I'll be in Slovenia, speaking at the Workers and Punks University's art theory school, where I'll be defending the attempt to destroy art in the 1920s, just after Entschwindet on iron, glass and failure. Then on returning I'll be being vaguely technocratic at Marxism 2010, on Monday 5th July. After that I will have a long lie down.

Elsewhere: go read Minus the Shooting, as regardless of your esteem for football or otherwise, its many and varied qualities are proof of the continued fine health of the blogosphere. I haven't yet written an obligatory world cup post - in the extremely unlikely event I have time to write it, it'll either spin off from the perfect phrase 'PFI football', or it'll be on the fact that, only really watching World Cups or European Championships (I gave up on watching club football after practically getting hypothermia watching Southampton and QPR play a goalless draw at the Dell sometime in the mid-1990s, and never really looked back), I've never seen the allegedly mighty footballers of England actually play a good game of football; and without that knowledge, the actual talents of Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard or John Terry seem a bizarre confidence trick in which all assent; or about the love for Joe Cole as potential silky-skilled saviour as an attempt to atone for England's greatest post-1990 sin, its spurning of Matthew Le Tissier. Who, incidentally, was able to take penalty kicks without it becoming a psychodrama.

Finally, there's now a Zero Books website, finally, where the plan for world domination can be seen progressing apace. One of the most interesting of the forthcoming is Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle's Cartographies of the Absolute, which has its own blog.