Get Out Tonight: Mike Davis Asks, "Who Will Build the Ark?"

We're tied in knots over this. We're already going to what should be a great evening of new works at PNB (Morris, Gaines, Millepied, Forsythe), but if we weren't, nothing could keep us from hearing Mike Davis over at the University of Washington.

Davis is this year's UW Katz Lecturer, and his keynote talk is titled, "Who Will Build the Ark? The Architectural Imagination in an Age of Catastrophic Convergence." Given the several inches of rain we're expecting this evening, this may not be idle conjecture. If he gives measurements, write 'em down.

Davis, an investigative journalist, urban theorist, and polemicist, has made a career out of looking at the monsters under the urban bed: the alarming poverty of mega-slums, the spread of contagious disease, the costs of suburban environmental degradation, the failure of overtaxed infrastructure.

In books such as Planet of Slums, Dead Cities and Other Tales, and The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu, he's as cheerfully brash as Norman Mailer, as insightfully diagnostic as Jared Diamond, and as unapologetic about his socialist perspective as Zizek. When he taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, he wrote two gems about real and imagined Los Angeles catastrophe, including City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster--we read that last one first, and have been hooked ever since.

We are joined in our admiration for Davis by one Charles Mudede, who says in deprecating William T. Vollmann's prose style, "With Mike Davis, the opposite is the case. In his book, sentence after sentence, page after page is packed with literary explosives. Reading Planet of Slums (2006) is like watching fireworks light up a pitch-black sky (the pitch-blackness of economic misery) with expanding patterns and constellations." Here is a sample passage Mudede singles out.

7 p.m. // UW Kane Hall, Rm 120 // FREE