Wheres Walter?

While busying ourselves in preparation for the installment of our second monument, we have lacked the time to inform our readers of the attack sustained by our first monument. Walter's status as a truely temporary monument was confirmed on Tuesday evening by what appeared to be an act of boisterous vandalism. What remains now is nothing but the shadow of Walter's form- his famous "Tireless" Bicycle.

"Laws are currently being drafted to curb the killer pedestrian. With the aim of gathering fuller documentary evidence regarding the latter, we exposed ourselves to his ferocity, mounted on a heteromobile. The pedestrian we observed, an infant, behaved in complete conformity with out earlier description in the pages of this review. We had nothing further to ask of him once the experiment was over, so as a service to humanity we put him out of action."

Alfred Jarry the killer pedestrian


While we are what may be described as a Pan-civic organisation, perhaps the irony of bold but lonely Walter on his bicycle was not lost to the users of the locomotor machines on the thoroughfare. Perhaps Walter was too much of an exception to be tolerated. It is also a pataphysical notion however that the exception proves the rule, so while it seems now that Walter nolonger exists, it is in his absence that peculiarly we remember him at his best.

In light of this event, we have decided to move on to the subject of our second monument, currently to be situated in the midst of a comprehensive redevelopment and directly surmounting a disused public amenity. Our second monument looks back to a time when the roots of the city were put in place. New ideas were beginning to move across the globe, along with the wholesale transportation of goods came the origen of a trade in ideas. With the rapid development of a modern society the gothic edifice of a society in permanent repose began to crumble. This intermingling of Virtual Arcadias, endlessly reproduced in lands distant from their origen caused considerable friction in the Art society of the 1920's and 30's. This culminated in what was known as the public amenities riots of 1932. The perpetrator of which we make our next monument to.

"All great Aesthetic ideas are the same-narrowly obsessively imitative. Traditionally art is only spoken of in terms of mimesis. The passion with which we deny this is suspect, since art has rightly withdrawn from our world. By discouraging imitation we are not eliminating it but forcing it into the ridiculous fads and ideologies that make up our contemporary attempts at innovation. Our desire for originality end in insignificant efforts."

Rene Girard The Scapegoat