Tearing the city at the seams no. 16 - Fear and Loathing in Soho

The time had upsurged dramatically to the point of 10.35pm and with it the onrush of intoxication, catching us in its forward momentum like some kind of alcoholic riptide. It was the end of a grim and dreadful December day, and as we goose-stepped ourway along Shaftesbury Avenue towards Soho I remember that strange feeling in my gut that it was time to let the night slip away and stop trying to force entry to the citadel of good times.

And yet we went on, my brain feeling as though a gigantic hypodermic needle had embedded itself beneath the cortical integument and compressed the plunger on a full syringe of pure drunkenness. I was at the point at which the bright lights, the people, the traffic become congealed together into a sensory sludge held in vivid and febrile uniformity by sheer nervous energy and a willingness to keep going, but in danger at any minute of splintering into chaotic disabandon. The night had passed the point of safe return; it was destined to end either spectacularly or terribly, there would be no chance for any mediocrity in between.

My companion and I were heading through from Chinatown where we had sampled sake in a dim sum bar chased down by Isahi beer, served up with some noodle soup by a harried Chinese waiter with an accelerated demeanour and a frozen scowl. My friend was terse and on edge for reasons that will be explained later on. For now though, let it suffice to say that after recklessly consuming a near-full bottle of port by the time we had even made it to Chinatown, he was at risk of becoming quite frenzied with paranoid delusions.

As for myself, I had my own personal traumas to contend with. Only a couple of weeks earlier the surging tide of romance had finally broken back, leaving me as a solitary beachcomber to sift through the moraine of regrets and recrimination left behind.

I had taken to undergoing quite extensive night walks in an effort at escaping the flat where arms of bitter ennui sprouted from every wall like something from a Polanski film. Dickens himself, as a cure for insomnia, would often take similar night walks through London, observing 'one drunken object staggering against the shutters of a shop, another drunken object would stagger up...to fraternise or fight with it.' If it was good enough for him, then it would surely suffice for me.

Out on the streets, the Christmas shoppers were just about on the wane, their squadron of bags clustered about them as they in turn clustered around bus stops awaiting the convoy to spirit them away from this battleground of commercial imperatives and sales incentives. It was at that time in mid-December when people have begun to yield to the intolerable pressures of the festive season, a few scant days remaining before the clear pocket of air in which people can take a few deep breaths before being landed back in the turbulence of their lives once again.

Almost exactly 24 hours earlier Nelson Mandela had died, and the atmospheric pressure of the night was scored through with that very particular kind of unacknowledged yet telekinetic sine wave that follows in the direct aftermath of a major news event.

My own sense of anxious self-worth is intensified the more I think of Mandela in this skewed state of mind; one man's titanic legacy rendering any problems I may have or potential achievements I may fulfill wholly inconsequential by comparison. But then only a fool would make such a comparison.

I'm of the firm belief that the innate fear of dying is in large part bound up in having not achieved anything in life of any real worth, of not being remembered, of having mispent your few alloted years. This goes hand in hand with the eternal quest for immortality, for cheating death. Indeed, I thought, for all the hardship and struggle Mandela endured in his life, he surely died the greatest death possible; for how many can lie on their death bed knowing, not only that they will be almost universally mourned, but in a sense that they have assumed, through being promoted to 'icon' status, as close to immortality as is humanly possible?

But anyway, enough of this morbid fascination. We were entering Soho and there was boozing to be done. A round of halves at the French House on Dean Street, a place spilling over the brim with people, clutching to conversations on the pavement outside huddling round their cigarettes for warmth. We veered round onto Old Compton Street, a fabulous thoroughfare of camp exhibitionism. Walking along it you can almost astrally project yourself back a few decades when it would have been as risque, seedy and exhilerating as anywhere else in the city - Travis Bickle's nightmare ('all the animals come out at night').

Into Cafe Boheme for a couple of rum and cokes, propped at the bar like a pair of folded umbrellas, observing this poseur's palisade.

It was at this point in the proceedings that my companion became increasingly jittery as the freeflow of booze irrigated his mind of its faculties of logical reasoning. Desperate to leave his job at an insurance firm, but lacking the wherewithal to quit, he had taken to frantically scouring online job listings, a predator shuffling through reams of possibilities before zeroing-in on the one that appeared submissive enough to try and groom.

Taking off another in a whole repertoire of sick days - this time pleading gastro-enteritis - he had spent the morning spreading his oratory peacock wings of achievements and capabilities, and the afternoon recoiled in on himself in the corner of a Brixton pub as a spent force, supping his way through an entire bottle of port.

(The reason for this particular beverage being a fondness for the elegantly wasted Sydney Carton from 'A Tale of Two Cities', as well as an inquisitive fascination with William Pitt the Younger who managed to serve as Prime Minister despite drinking 3 bottles of port per day before yielding to a peptic ulceration of the stomach. If only this were David Cameron's prescribed daily intoxicant he might actually become relatively interesting.)

Coaxing him out of this somnolent stupor had been hard work. For one thing, he knew that there was an insurance team night-out in Soho planned for that very evening; indeed by bullshitting some feverish lie he had been mandated to surrender his invite. He made it explicit that he would hold me responsible should we cross paths with his collegiate ensemble, and so the night had assumed an almost guerrilla mission air of gravitas. I had batted away the entirely reasonable compromise of going somewhere else, thereby avoiding any chance of such a potentially cataclysmic meeting coming to pass, for the dubious reason that I had acquired an annual member's card for a dive bar on Greek Street that was due to expire at the year's end.

The fact that my friend was prepared to swallow such self-indulgent guff confirmed to me that perversely he was almost willing such a meeting to transpire, seeing as how it would bring to an ugly head the tedium of his present working life. The fact that I could sense in him the desire to bring about his own downfall, could sense it in the way he constantly surveilled the bar and its patrons, all the while unable to elucidate rationally as the nervous energy short-circuited every thought process, was fascinating to observe.

We were manoeuvring across a trapeze, he knew it and I knew it, and there was only one thing to do and that was to keep on going, stay close to the ground, drink our drinks, fortify ourselves against potential enemy fire and move on fast. It was true that there were any number of drinking establishments in the Soho province, but it was also true that we were engaged in a game of Russian Roulette, in which the moment we stepped through the doors of the wrong place at the wrong time it would all blow up in our faces.

We made our way in the direction of Soho Square, all the while my companion weaved around the more sedentary pedestrian traffic, his eyes roving in all directions, determined to preempt any danger before it was too late. By contrast, I sought to remark on the number of cafes and franchised eateries that had infiltrated Soho's midst, diluting it of any autonomy into a weak broth of generic familiarity,

Passing by Bateman Street, I spotted the sorry sight of the now-closed Lorelei pizzeria, its lozenge-like neon sign permanently extinguished on a legendary Soho institution, a nook of a place where pizzas cost around 600p (as the menu would stipulate) and sacks of flour would be perched around the entrance as though they were sandbags guarding against some unknown flood.

Making it, without incident, to the northern border of Soho, we ducked down into the basement bar of the Toucan, a dingy Irish bar which remains charming despite, or perhaps because of, all the Guinness tat all over the walls,not to mention the 'pint of Guinness' bar stools. We hoisted ourselves onto these spongy plinths and ordered the obligatory pint of the black stuff and double whiskies. It wasn't long before I began to imagine my friend slowly sinking arse-first into his pint-stool, unaware until completely submerged, like Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's chocolate river, leaving only a crime-scene outline of his seated posture as a new kind of clover in the foam.

Truly, I thought, there can scarcely be a more iconic beverage than a pint of Guinness? Having drunk numerous pints of the stuff in Dublin, I concluded that the myth of Guinness only being at its best in its hometown was well founded; in fact it is a myth that its a myth. I remember making the mistake of ordering a pint in a Los Angeles bar and being presented with something that tasted like Marmite-infused dishwater.

Back out on the street, clusters of lairy lads clung from each other's shoulders like bleary-eyed apes, barfing out snatches of incomprehensible Oasis lyrics and shouting garbled propositions to harassed-looking women passing by. What would nights out be like were these staple gender roles reversed? How would I react, I wondered, to a throng of pissed-up girls stumbling in a graceless chorus line yelling vague yet slightly threatening offers of sexual congress towards me? I suppose one can never know...

By now my companion had let caution go the wind, narrowly avoiding being hit by a speeding taxi, and I worried that he had crossed the void into willing his own physical as opposed to just professional demise. Taking control of the situation I deduced that what we needed was more drinks and helpfully steered my friend in the direction of the dive bar on Dean Street to which we had been aiming from the off.

Downstairs the bar was about half full and we tried to ingratiate ourselves with the clientele as successfully as we could given the circumstances. The decor of the place was at once troubling but hilarious; framed photographs of Mussolini and Mafioso bosses. Perched at the bar I ordered two more whiskies and tried to corral my friend into some kind of decadent orderliness, insisting to him that the main danger of the evening was over, this hole was the last place a tightly-clenched fistful of insurers would be seen in.

Without acknowledging me he took his drink and stumbled off to a corner table, slumping down between two amused women. Soon enough some wholly out-of-place house music began pumping out and everyone became whipped into a bout of sweaty convulsive dancing. Leading the hedonistic charge, was a middle-aged man who was, it is only fair to say, unbelievably gay. Gay men would be ashamed to call themselves such in the face of this man and his quite staggering level of campness. In fact I wondered whether bizarrely he hadn't crossed the rubycon into a whole new plateau of gayness that for most people of the same persuasion remained a hazy and distant fugue.

Suddenly, my attention became drawn to a sultry and mysterious woman poised at the end of the bar surveying the unfolding dancefloor melee with wry amusement. Alcohol's demolition squad had blasted down all the sober walls of refinement and self-preservation and I began to engage this woman in conversation. We discussed the horrors of Christmas shopping crowds, the dubiously fascist overtones of the bar's decor, as well as the intriguing sexual politics that daily afflict the relationships between men and women.

Before very much longer I became aware that the whole room had somehow descended into a maelstrom of frenzied and unabashed sexual activity, clothes had been shed and everyone was urging one another towards a hysterical level of climactic fervour, an animalistic orgy utterly liberated from the staid conventions of everyday life.

This idealised version of reality dissipated around the cumulus of ice cubes encased in the amber of whiskey. The woman at the bar had been dragged away onto the dancefloor by a tall man wearing lederhosen. I wondered whether the choice of outfit was out of irony (the same way as Christmas jumpers that are always uniformly naff), certainly none of his friends had chosen to similarly dress up.

Fuck sexual politics, I thought, I would have to get hold of a lederhosen outfit sooner rather than later if I were to successfully try and navigate the waters of single life once again.

As for my friend, he had disappeared from sight and my heart jumped as I assumed he must inexplicably have struck gold with his two elder mistresses. Alas, a vibrating in my pocket alerted me to the fact that he had sought refuge in a toilet cubicle for two highly drastic reasons.

Firstly, to regurgitate the purple reservoir of port sluicing his gullet; and secondly, because lo and behold, the platoon of insurers had just descended onto the dancefloor, lead by the boss, in his words - 'the tit in the lederhosen'.

The Architecture of Deceptive Illusion - Rem Koolhaas' De Rotterdam

Imagine a cityscape in which the buildings and skyscrapers were able to amorphously shift form like organic structures as you passed through the urban space. Physically impossible of course, although an approximate visual idea is explored in my novel 'Digital', in which every building becomes engorged with a 'cyber lifeblood', an electronic graffiti personalised to the eye of the beholder.

The online landscape of every-changing, constantly distracting data imagery would transform and illumine all the rigid contours and static physicalities of the city. Just as the online realm allows you to be whoever you want, so too can your surroundings be manipulated at the behest of your own conscious perambulations across the web.

As a result of churning such ideas over in my mind in the build-up to, and whilst, writing the novel, this became my default mode for how I visualised the built environment. And as such, I was struck by a recent Guardian article (www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/nov/18/rem-koolhaas-de-rotterdam-building) regarding the architect Rem Koolhaas' newly unleashed steel-and-glass behemoth upon the slender skyline of Rotterdam.

Despite the dreary title, De Rotterdam manages to elevate a captivating and dynamic vision of buildings that give the impression of having been grown as a result of natural extemporizing rather than adherence to the formal construction of men and machines. It has been termed 'cut-and-paste architecture'; the sharp-angled blocks apparently dropped unceremoniously into place and shuffled around until arriving at a comfortable statis, almost like Tetris shapes building up upon the base line.

It reminds me of a favourite quote of mine by the anti-architect Lebbeus Woods, who strove to create 'architecture drawn as though it were already built - architecture built as though it had never been drawn'.

Indeed, everything about De Rotterdam appears to be a repudiation of linear form, of the kind of arrogant monuments to neoliberal capitalism that jaywalk their way across London, locked fast in the mire of their own tedium. Buildings like the Shard, the Cheesegrater, the Pinnacle, St. George's Wharf - all structures that are as uninspiring, reductive and artistically unchallenging to those who observe them as the Blair 'boom years' culture that served as the fertile ground for their growth.

By contrast, De Rotterdam gives off the impression of having never been drawn at all, or at the very least, drawn by a gang of feverish and drunk architects working in isolation from each other - the building design equivalent of 'Trout Mask Replica' in which, according to popular (yet apparently erroneous) legend, Captain Beefheart recorded his band in separate rooms, each deaf as to what the others were playing.

I like the idea that the building most likely assumes wholly new geometries and angularities whatever perspective it is viewed from. Driving by at speed or approaching from alternate directions, I'm sure the building takes on an almost pliable quality, as it flexes into intriguing new definitions.

I remember standing for hours on the banks of Brooklyn, gazing over at the Manhattan skyline, marveling at how as night set in the static mass appeared to almost dissolve into a majestic miasma of suspended light. Squinting gave the impression that the skyscrapers had become a vast freeway hoisted up by 90-degrees; the lights shimmering in simulated motion backwards and forwards, in and out of focus.

Not only this, but I like to imagine there is some subversive subtext to Koolhaas' design - perhaps a cynical commentary on the unsustainable over-population of 21st-century mega-cities, or the paranoid sense of isolation and detachment co-existent within the maelstrom of such intense human interactivity.

Thinking about this new development put me in mind of a few other structural sites of interest that I've come across on my compulsive-obsessive schlepping around London.

First, and closest to home, the Southwyck House complex on Brixton's Coldharbour Lane, otherwise known as the 'Barrier Block'. In anticipation of a major motorway development that would sluice its way through South London, the apartment blocks were preemptively thrown up as a kind of stern barricade with sporadic and spare windows that by day give the impression of a medieval castle wall updated into the Brutalist stylings, whilst at night the building looks like a Brazilian favela clustered up on a steep hillside.

Whenever I see it I can't help but marvel at the strange logic that prevailed in its design; a specification that would only have been justified in the wake of those subsequent infrastructure works seeing the light of day. A curious act of faith in the notoriously fickle and volatile construction industry. I wonder what the architects must have thought when the motorway plan was axed, the realisation surely setting in that their building design had now been rendered entirely conspicuous by its inappropriateness. Regardless of hindsight, it now takes on the appearance of a building that has resolutely turned its back on the city as a whole, shielding in on itself like an armour-plated tank.

Across the river in a wholly more affluent part of town, is Thurloe Square in South Kensington. Abutting the square on the south side you are faced with the sight of a long row of Victorian terrace houses ending in a bizarre anorexic wedge, achieving a trompe l'oeil effect akin to something out of 'Alice in Wonderland'.

The houses were built with such a diminishing depth as a means of concealing the unsightly rail line being constructed concurrently, and as such, symbolises the development of a newly-modern city trying to arbitrate between housing and infrastructure, the stationary and the transitory; as well as being a pertinent reminder of the deceptive nature of our built environment, that as they grow and expand ever more is annexed off from public access and hidden away.

I enjoy staring at this farcical construct - bringing to mind the Flatiron Building in Manhattan, and the housing facades of film set back-lots - and ruminating over the strange psychological attachments that must develop from living in this cuneiform living space that defies all habitational ergonomic conventions. What curious geometrical perceptions might arise from living within the cleavage between road and rail? It also reminds me of the maddeningly elusive statement/question posed by J.G. Ballard - 'does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?'

Similarly antithetical to the notion of functional architecture, are the 'Fake Houses of Leinster Gardens' just off the Bayswater Road. As the first tube line branched ever further westwards, a cluster of posh 5-storey townhouses had to be demolished, however, fearing the price diminution of surrounding properties, local residents demanded that the facades be rebuilt and maintained. Walking past the no.23/24 properties, a close eye is required to adjudge that these are indeed counterfeit houses; false teeth sunk into the gums of the terrace jawline.

Of course, the addresses have been exploited repeatedly by astute con men, although I can't help but envisage the houses as symbolic of the secrecy and deception that lies in the lives carried out behind so many apparently innocuous properties, as the recent shock of the slaves found to have been kept in a Brixton council flat brings all too redolently into focus.

Our built environments are bursting at the seams with architectural curiosities such as these, the thrill is hunting them down. As for Koolhaas' De Rotterdam structure - I love it, when can London commission its own?

My Favourite Albums and Films of 2013

ALBUMS:

10. God is an Astronaut – ‘Origins’
9. Disappears – ‘Era’
8. My Bloody Valentine – ‘mbv’
7. Jon Hopkins – ‘Immunity’
6. Savages – ‘Silence Yourself’
5. Crocodiles – ‘Crimes of Passion’
4. Nine Inch Nails – ‘Hesitation Marks’
3. Fuck Buttons – ‘Slow Focus’
2. Junip – ‘Junip’
1. David Bowie – ‘The Next Day’


FILMS:

10. 'A Field in England' (Ben Wheatley)
9. 'Blue Jasmine' (Woody Allen)
8. 'Django Unchained' (Quentin Tarantino)
7. 'Lincoln' (Steven Spielberg)
6. 'Lore' (Cate Shortland)
5. 'Behind the Candelabra' (Steven Soderbergh)
4. 'Captain Phillips' (Paul Greengrass)
3. 'McCullin' (David Morris, Jacqui Morris)
2. 'Le Week-End' (Roger Michell)
1. 'The Act of Killing' (Joshua Oppenheimer)

War! (Stop the) - Annual Anti-War Conference 30th Nov

As Voltaire famously said - 'it is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets', and put in some kind of context the Stop the War Coalition movement must represent the low bassoonic rumblings of dissent.

I'm approaching the point in my life - rounding the corner fast on to my mid-20s - whereby the sparks of discontent have been fully fanned into a bonfire of righteous anger. This is the critical conversion point in most people's lives, the time at which the inherent systematic injustices and societal failings suddenly become crystallised into clear and unavoidable sight, and the realisation becomes actual that the world maybe isn't quite so simple as it not so long ago appeared.

It is akin to the point at which, having lowered yourself slowly into the swimming pool you suddenly find your toes no longer touch the shallow end and if you've not yet learnt to swim then you'd best do so very quickly.

It's at this mid-20s marker-point, true for all figures from Guevara to Hitler, that you believe you see can clearly for the very first time; the safety barriers of adolescence have been lifted, and the true adamantine nature of the world is unveiled. Radicalisation attains its insidious foothold in extreme examples of these quarter-century psychological states; as well as a burgeoning resentment of the ruling political elites, the elder generations who belong to a fusty and out-dated order, and a strong conviction that if only you and the current generation could seize the nettle, real and actual change might be affected.

Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons' is probably the archetypal text regarding this; the timeless frictions that persistently afflict generation after generation, being handed along like the baton of nihilism in a relay race of conflicting moral philosophies.

Its this same sense of changing conscience that demands certain books be read by a certain age. Both 'On the Road' and 'The Catcher in the Rye' struck me as works of existential genius aged 16/17, yet appeared almost suffocatingly narcissistic on re-reading them whilst in my early-20s.

All this puts me in a place in my life where I feel compelled somehow to engage actively in a political sense. I'm well aware that in this era of chronic apathy towards politics, I would be eagerly ensnared by one of the myriad dragnets if only I'd raise my head from the sand, but my problem is that I'm completely unsure as to which net to allow myself to be ensnared by.

The crux of my problem is that I'm just too cynical. At this post-ideology 21st century trough, I've gorged on the anarchism of Chomsky, the apolitical futurism of Ballard, and the demolition humour of 'The Thick of It'.

Even if there were a genuine left and right wing in the UK anymore, instead of this morass of centrist populism in which Cameron, Miliband, Farage and Osborne squirm over and under each other like flaccid reptiles, the flaws of taking so one-sided a stance across the board are just too salient to be ignored. Party loyalty is like the class system - an anachronistic fallacy which Britons manage to perpetuate ad infinitum by the very intensity of their obsessive stubbornness.

And so on a Saturday morning whim I trotted off to the left wing Stop the War Coalition's Annual Anti-War Conference at the Emmanuel Centre.

Immediately on entering, I got the haptic confirmation that I had passed into leftist territory - the accumulation of Marxist literature on book stalls, the musty scent of old assembly rooms and public buildings, the disheveled suit jackets punctured by CND badges and other iconography, the long trench coats absorbent of the chill from countless trudging demos', the tea served in styrofoam cups.

The first talk was entitled 'The new scramble for Africa' with Labour back-bencher Jeremy Corbyn and Explo Nani Kofi, whose words were rendered all the more poignant after he informed the audience that within the last few days both his father and brother had died in separate circumstances. There was another, quite plodding, discussion about drones and the arms trade. At this point my attention began to snag on the hook of the problem with conferences such as these...

There was such an ineluctable sense of mutual agreement between everyone in attendance that I began to yearn for some semblance of opposition, some bone of contention to be thrown into the pit of smiling and nodding hyenas. I believe strongly that drone warfare is an abomination, but I felt the discussion was so plainly preaching to the acquiescent choir that it rendered the whole exercise virtually obsolete. Clearly there would have been benefit to have had someone with an alternate view, even if they would have run the risk of being strung up from the rafters by trenchcoats and flayed alive with coarse woolen scarves.

By the time of the mid-afternoon session concerning the Syrian war, I felt the whole hall to be in danger of slipping into a well-intentioned but over-powering hypnosis of groupthink. Imagine my satisfaction then, when a young Syrian man leapt to his feet, hijacked the microphone, in the process punching through the smokescreen of pre-determined deference that had descended. I felt an uneasy frustration as the volume of the mike was muted, and the audience began howling him down, before ratcheting up to pantomimic levels with slow clapping and foot stomping.

Surely the whole crux of any diplomatic breakdown is the failure of communication, the inability to listen and try to understand the opposing view? It was a shame that when the man was eventually afforded a modicum of hush, he was unable to string together even the semblance of a robust argument, merely proclaiming the three distinguished journalists on the panel to be Assad apologists, and was ignominiously bundled out of the hall.

Outside there had accumulated a small protest howling about the issue of Syrian non-intervention. I couldn't help but think two things: firstly, that it was baffling how anyone could be so aggrieved with the pacifist stance of the Stop the War Coalition that they felt they were worthy of protesting against; and secondly, why hadn't they been invited in to debate the issue in the interest of attaining a broader and more even-handed spectrum of views?

The closing speech of the day came from the Stop the War President Tony Benn, held up as a hero of the left and a national institution by some, and damned as the man who rendered Old Labour principles wholly unelectable in Thatcher's Britain. Regardless, by the sheer strength of his convictions and principles he has become a figure of immense inspiration and I was unsurprised to see him here being hailed as almost Pope-like.

Indeed, despite being 88 and only speaking for 5 or 10 minutes, he managed to express some of the most thought-provoking and challenging views of the whole day - that government, in its preparations for the centenary of World War 1, look set to shamelessly re-write history in an effort to turn the memory of one of most senseless slaughters in world history into a patriotic celebration in which everyone is encouraged to string up the bunting. To Benn, the sight of soldiers in full medals and regalia marching along Whitehall, firing salutes and fulfilling the militaristic pomp and ceremony is entirely misjudged and, ultimately, does little more than glorify the very concept of war itself.

As I left, lamenting the fact that we may never see politicians of Tony Benn's ilk again, I thought back to the penultimate speaker of the day, the 'left winger of the moment' Owen Jones. His speech was impressively rabble-rousing and stirring, with plenty of finger-wagging and grandiose gestures, but also infused with more than a little vacuous rhetoric about the "necessity for a new world order" which, to his mind at least, is eminently achievable. We were entering the halcyon, yet shallow, jacuzzi waters of Russell Brand.

Despite this, I felt frustrated that someone like Jones would apparently not consider entering politics himself. God knows we could do with more people of his intelligence, idealism and oratory skill.

Perhaps herein lies the heart of the problem with modern politics - that the intelligentsia and commentariat believe the grind of politics to be well beneath them, and are instead content to carp to the auditorium from their balconies of influence. Whereas, the political class is made up of people who, despite perhaps not having that same intelligence, idealism or oratory skill, crucially do not see politics as beneath them; they are unconcerned with the cries from the balcony in their scramble to get onto the stage.

Culture - November

Books Read:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 'Love in the time of Cholera'
Arthur Miller - 'Death of a Salesman' (screenplay)
Albert Camus - 'The Outsider' (re-read)
Primo Levi - 'If This is a Man / The Truce'
Nicholson Baker - 'The Mezzanine'

As I entered the fraught month of November, I was charmed and pleasantly surprised by Marquez's 'Love in the time of cholera', an odyssey of unrequited love spanning two separate lifetimes that run along disparate and eventually parallel lines. Marquez has been lauded and criticised for his 'magic realism' style, and I must admit I found myself on occasion pining for just a splash of metaphor, but overall I found myself convinced by his careful appreciation and depiction of his characters, and the nuances and subtleties were intricately built up into a fairly life-affirming whole.

At the opposing pole of the emotional spectrum, Primo Levi's dual-masterpiece 'If this is a man' and 'The Truce' was a gruelling yet unparalleled depiction of the author's descent into the hell of Auschwitz and eventual liberation at the war's end. His brevity and poetic insight makes this essential reading.

Nicholson Baker's debut novel 'The Mezzanine' was an entirely different proposition. Set over the course of a single lunch hour, the writer explodes all preconceptions as to narrative or plot development, instead seeking to hone in on and dissect the microscopic details that inundate our routine-led lives every day and which largely go unconsidered. A real post-modernist breath of fresh air.


Films Watched:

'Captain Phillips' (Paul Greengrass) (at the Vue, Leicester Square)
'Gravity' (Alfonso Cuaron)
'Paths of Glory' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Enter the Void' (Gaspar Noe)
'A Hijacking' (Tobias Lindholm)
'Silent Running' (Douglas Trumbell)

This month I was enthralled by Paul Greengrass' 'Captain Phillips', the true-life story of the Captain's hijacking and kidnap at the hands of Somali pirates. What set this film apart was the even-handed illustration of the characters; by exploring the pirates' motives and desperation from a three-dimensional human vantage point, it managed to sail past the generic Hollywood pitfalls of relying on lazy (and often quite racist) cultural stereotypes in favour of ramping up action set-pieces.

I also sought out the Danish film from 2012, 'A Hijacking', which I found to be just as engrossing and nail-biting in its depiction of a cargo ship overrun and held ransom by pirates, but what distinguished it was its focusing on the boardroom negotiations carried out by the CEO and management team, delivering a fascinating insight into the gridlocked dilemma between business and real human melodrama.


Albums Played:

U2 - 'The Unforgettable Fire'
Bambara - 'DreamViolence'
Talking Heads - 'Remain in Light'
Bruce Springsteen - 'Tunnel of Love'


Gigs Attended:

Savages at The Forum, Kentish Town
A Place To Bury Strangers at The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

Support act Bambara began with a rising swell of atmospheric howls and echoes reminiscent of Ligeti's 'Lontano' and Pink Floyd's 'One of these Days', as a pulsating bass line signaled the tone for the next 40 ear-perforating minutes. The drummer laid down one barreling tribal beat after another, as bassist and guitarist built layer upon layer of visceral and intense white noise.

All this was the perfect entree for headliners A Place To Bury Strangers, who erupted into one of the most incendiary performances I have ever seen. Not since Aphex Twin at Manchester's Warehouse Project have I felt that my nerves were literally being shredded by the aural avalanche in which I, along with everyone else, was helplessly immersed. The 3-piece barely paused for applause, piling into one thunderous onslaught after another, the dry ice largely obscuring them for the majority of the set, whilst the closing tsunami of white noise unraveled into mind-bending strobe effects before simply sinking into pitch darkness, giving the impression of being trapped inside a colossal machine undergoing some kind of terminal malfunctioning.

Whereas when I saw My Bloody Valentine earlier in the year, who were disappointingly turgid with the noise stagnant and uninspired, APTBS seemed to be a band caught in a riptide current, fighting for their lives as they fought to control their instruments, the lightning rods of all the chaos.

There is that magical point at which volume seems to actually liquify, submerging everyone into a sinkhole of pure and unadulterated sound. Noise rock of this order can only realistically be played in dingy and confined venues such as the Shacklewell Arms, with the sweat dripping from the ceiling and the band swinging the necks of their instruments inches from the audience's heads. Since its true hypnotic potency can only be achieved in such modest venues, its success as an artistic medium must necessarily be aggregated through the persistent limitation of its commercial success. Such was the aggressive and high-octane assault on the senses that I couldn't help thinking that all close adherents to the latest mainstream sensation should be subjected to this musical equivalent of a colonic irrigation, but then that would be to spread the word irretrievably wide.


Exhibitions Attended:

Kurt Jackson - 'The Thames Revisited' at The Redfern Gallery

My Love-Hate Relationship with Contact Lenses

It is fair to say that my eyesight is poor. Appallingly poor in fact. To my unaided eyes the world takes on the appearance of having been smudged out of focus by an all-powerful Apollonian thumb. It has been poor, so far as I can recall, since I was cut adrift from the banks of childhood and into that foggy limbo of adolescence.

In fact, it may have been my fateful misfortune that just as soon as I began to notice how attractive some girls had become, I could no longer see them properly. It got so bad that if friends were walking on the other side of the street I would be unable to identify them, and hence existed for a while in a paranoid mist, unsure if these people I was steadfastly ignoring were actually people I knew or not.

Despite all this, I hated wearing glasses. I put this down to my misguided teenage vanity; my mindset being that what would put these newly attractive girls off me wasn't my acne or shit hair, but the fact I had two miniature windows hooked over my face as though it were some kind of prescriptive apparatus worn after a horrific car accident.

When I turned 16 I decided that my salvation lay within the medium of contact lenses. Of course, mastering the technique of deftly extracting and placing these little filmy bowls onto the surface of your waiting eye takes some perseverance.

I recall in my first week, hurrying to get ready to go out for the night and beginning to frantically scrape and rub one eye as I tried to remove the lens that had rebelliously folded over on itself. It was only after pinching and poking my now beacon-red eye for a few desperate minutes that I realised the lens had long since fallen into the sink.

Since then, my relationship with these translucent discs has matured into one of mutual respect - I appreciate the benefit they bring, but am equally mindful of the horrors they can inflict.

These days, as I tentatively lift one concave dome on a steady finger pad, I briefly imagine myself reduced to a microscopic level, capable of skating across its aqueous surface, wondering how colossal the surroundings would seem when magnified through such an intense optical crater.

I cannot wear lenses now for long periods without developing that knawing and pervasive sensation that I call 'cactus eyes' - so called because the reverse-sides of my eyes feel like they are being tickled, and eventually stabbed, by carefully aligned rows of hot needles, like a kind of anti-acupuncture. Aside from these avoidable irritations, there are still contact lens-related incidents that persist in haunting me...

Working on a supermarket checkout aged around 17, I had been clocking up some lengthy 10-12 hour shifts in the week leading up to Christmas. So run-down was my immune system by Christmas Eve that it left me flu-ridden and shaky, sat bleeping people's sausage rolls and party snacks through like some interminable production line of gluttony.

To compound matters still further, a suppressed sneeze sent one lens shooting off into the ether, leaving me watery-eyed, squinting and feeling like I was on some form of terrible hallucinogenic drug. I braved this out for about an hour, as I passed on my germ tidings to all and sundry before making my excuses and going home to bed, where I stayed throughout most of Christmas Day.

But this experience doesn't come close to the full horror of my university misadventures. Predictably, this involved getting so drunk that I would fall asleep without removing them. This occurred on the last night celebrations of both my first and second years; so that my only real recollection of drawing to a close another successful year of university life is of writhing around in bed like a blind and regretful mole.

What is faintly ridiculous is that the first time this happened, I remember awaking in the morning and for several bizarre lucid moments actually becoming convinced that my sight had somehow restored itself through the remedial agency of excessive alcohol consumption.

On the second year occasion, I was virtually bed-ridden for almost two day, as my housemates - finding the whole situations highly amusing - one by one said their farewells as I tried to muster some enthusiasm from the bed of my darkened room feeling like some kind of contagious leper.

The reason for such acute discomfort on these occasions (removing lenses before bed is now more or less a reflex action no matter how intoxicated), was explained to me in graphic detail by an optician, and I will relate this here (with apologies to the squeamish)...

On sleeping whilst wearing lenses, the eye becomes gradually suffocated due to lack of oxygen. What then happens is the cells on the very surface of the eye become conjoined to the lens, almost like a corneal version of the 'face-hugger' in 'Alien'. When the lenses are removed in the morning, they peel off that surface layer of cells that have accumulated, the same as a wax strip does with body hair. The raw and exposed cells that lie directly beneath have not had time to properly heal and until they do you are left to fester in darkened squalor, unable to open or focus them for any real period of time.

Viewed in this context, glasses really don't seem all that bad.

Tearing the city at the seams #15 - Around the city in a day - A Circumnavigation of London

It is common parlance that to walk in circles is as maddening as it is pointless. The familiar conceit in any narrative regarding being lost in a remote landscape is the rediscovery of your own tracks, eradicating any notion of progress having been made.

With this in mind I found myself, with a week's leave from the usual working routine, pondering the notion of a radial walk around London, the idea being that the everyday contemplation of the city could be decidedly unraveled when viewed from a circular prospective.

In general, we are entranced by the notion of destiny, of a definite and eminently reachable point to which we spend our lives moving in a more or less linear fashion towards. The idea of simply traversing in circles is unpalatable, the antipode view of progress, yet has the capacity to be perversely compulsive.

In 'The Truce' Primo Levi, on making his monumental journey round Eastern Europe having been liberated from Auschwitz en route to his home in Turin, upon reaching Bratislava and being (relatively speaking) so close to the start of his epic journey, he wondered 'would we complete the circle...[and] begin another vain, exhausting circuit of Europe?'

The plan was to set out west from my flat in Brixton and complete a day-long circumnavigation of the city, closing the circle by arriving back at my flat from the eastern approach.

It struck me that very few people, if any, must complete such exaggerated routes as part of their day-to-day relationship with the urban environment. The sheer pointlessness of doing a circular walk on such a scale was what captivated me, as well as my stern conviction that this was as defiant a means as any of subverting the vice-like clench of urban routine, the short spurts of sporadic walking that punctuate our typical day so tightly mandated by fiscal and time imperatives.

This was to be my rebellion-of-sorts against the commercialisation of the city space, by forcing it to adapt to my own will, when so often it is cogently the case that the opposite applies.

As a repudiation of the strict time pressures forever imposed by life in the city, I decided to re-imagine the city as a clockface, on which, starting out from '6' I would conquer the city hour by hour as I progressed from Brixton to Putney through to Islington at the 'hour mark' and ticking round again via Shadwell and Southwark.

As far as I was concerned, I was merely fulfilling the urban walking directive of Joseph Paxton, the designer who, in 1855, proposed the building of a Great Victorian Way. This grand infrastructure project was to be a 10-mile covered arcade loop around most of central and west London, incorporating pedestrians, shops, hotels and other businesses; a vastly ambitious proposal that would have had the impact of Baron Haussmann on Paris, until it was shelved in favour of building the infinitely more useful (if less spectacular) sewer network system.

Setting out at 7.30am, the ice-blue sky thinning and thawing as the sun gained in confidence, I realised that I would also gain a unique perspective on a 'day in the life of a city', crunching my way along pavements behind dog walkers en route to Clapham Common, and commuters hurrying to keep pace with their regimented schedules. Free from thinking about such routine, I was able to view the city from a different patina, as it swiftly yawns into life, almost on a biological level as a complex interweaving network of organisms locking into action once more after the night's interregnum.

Descending onto the Putney embankment I admired the restrained and modest skyline that has been so far maintained in this riverine portion; as yet comparatively free from the pestiferous encroachment of Lego-block apartments and buildings that follow ‘statement’ rather than form.

All the way from the Boat Club to the Hammersmith Bridge I became embroiled in an initially humorous but eventually infuriating overtaking game with a band of middle-aged women out jogging. Harangued by a gangly and high-spirited motivational coach of around my age, the women would jog for 40 or 50 metres before one would give in to the lactic strain and, as though they were mountaineers roped together, drag the others to a weary stop.

At this point I would gain ground and retake the lead on them which would incense them into corralling their collective energies to spurt round me again for another few metres. The whole exchange was in danger of becoming quite farcical until I peeled off across Hammersmith Bridge, reflecting on this (as I am wont to do) as just another example of the consumptive nature of our culture, to the extent that an essentially free activity, such as going for a jog, has to be traded as another fungible asset for those willing to partake in the exchange.

Through Hammersmith and past the ‘Death Star of commerce’ Westfield Shopping Centre, I zeroed-in on Shepherd’s Bush and from there began to bestride the quintessential pale-brick townhouses of Notting Hill. Walking through this highly desirable West London locale I began to think of the hypothesis of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who stated that if you examined the great cities of the world they were all constructed on a strict declension from the west to east axis in accordant correlation from rich to poor.

Whether this is due to, as he suggested, the fundamental psychological synthesis existent between people and the built environment in alignment with socio-economic hierarchies, is a matter for much debate. The fact is though, that London has always been a patchwork of different social fabrics stitched together with little recourse to reason or grand design. That said, recent developments that can be seen all over the city (and which are nowhere more salient than on such a drawn-out walk as this), threaten to irreparably alter the urban stratiography under the auspices of, at best, gentrification, and at worst, social cleansing.

The traditional London ethos of the working class and the elite co-existing in close proximity is rapidly being abandoned. This has been government policy, acknowledged or otherwise, for the best part of 30 years. The problem is, that as with any major conurbation, low-paid workers will always be needed in the centre as much as the hedge fund managers, who will still need someone on a minimum-wage zero-hour contract to sell them a sandwich from Pret or Tesco Express.

These drastic changes, which are completely in hoc to capital as opposed to social responsibility, can be seen in the redevelopment of Battersea, the evolution of Dalston, Shoreditch, Hackney and Brixton to being places of burgeoning appeal. A prime case-in-point is Elephant & Castle, an area that has all the appearance of having been struck by the eruption of a concrete volcano.

The imminent demolition of the Heygate estate and the planned regeneration of the shopping centre and surrounding areas is the crystallisation of modern trends. The willingness to provide yet more luxury apartment complexes and delay for as long as possible the token quota of affordable housing is too symptomatic of the times to be worth being overly incensed by. The fact is though that far less than the budgeted £1.5 billion could have been spent on simply renovating the Heygate, as the Park Hill estate in Sheffield has been (to the point that it was nominated for this year's Sterling Prize).

Indeed, within the next 10 years the existing denizens of Elephant and Castle will have been replaced with a finance ghetto, a gated community full of bankers and accountants who, like eager sperm will be ejaculated from the testes of their brand new luxury flats across the supine river and all over the waiting face of the City.

But I digress. As midday approached, I hit Marylebone, with its reclusive mews' branching off here and there like streets-in-waiting. From there I trudged along past Euston, St. Pancras and King's Cross, the 3-pins of a plug inserted into the power socket of North London. Making my way through Hoxton and beginning to curve southwards through Bethnal Green, I realised that the walk was beginning to unfairly prejudice my approach to the environs, noting as I did just how boring and non-descript large parts of London actually are when subjected to slow and exacting scrutiny.

At times I found myself oscillating with each step into newly extreme mindsets. For about 3 minutes I decided I hated London, and questioned why the fuck it was that I was wasting my time with such a pursuit?! Normal people do not decide to do this on their days off from work I reasoned. Oh well, by now it was too late to turn back...

As you slice through Stepney towards Shadwell, Levi-Strauss' west-east theory is never more pertinent; layer upon layer of diminutive social accommodation buildings crush up against one another, yielding only occassionally for a bedraggled and featureless public park. The youthful resurgence of Hackney and Shoreditch has yet to inflect this particular quarter of East London, an area that was said to draw benefit from the Olympics of last year, although exactly how was unclear at the time and is even more mystifying after the event.

And yet the imposing behemoths of Canary Wharf manifest themselves almost like an opulent mirage on the horizon, both instilling a sense of futile Madison Avenue-esque aspirationalism and overreaching resentment. There is an arrogant, stand-offish feel to these capitalist monuments that exist apparently detached and enclosed from the rest of London, like a segment of Dubai ostentatiously plonked down, waiting to be islanded by the ox-bow lake of the Thames as the river severs its way decisively across Poplar's flank.

Following this logical train of thought, I began to wonder whether there were any cities built in a circular design or whether they were, in the main, improvised centrifugally in an urban sprawl or laid down in rigid graticule fashion like cables as in American cities? I could think of none, until I remembered the Venus Project, a quasi-cult research hub spearheaded by Jacque Fresco as a design for the complete overhaul of society.

The premise of the Venus Project is that a sustainable resource-based economy would replace all monetary systems, and pre-fabricated 'total cities' would sprout like mushrooms; its nucleus core orbited by ever-thickening layers of residency, industry and leisure, like the utilitarian version of Dante's levels of Hell.

Despite being quite benign, it doesn't take too much intellectual prying into the Project's 'manifesto' to deduce just how chronically utopian and simplistic it actually is, falling well foul of the usual utopian problem that it takes into no consideration at all the myriad varieties of wants and needs that prevent a unified human race from manifesting. The less said about the plans for a 'cybernated government' (linking all computers with automated services, allowing them full day-to-day control) the better, although I'd encourage people to give it a read purely for the entertainment value.

That said, I couldn't but feel a slight yearning for Franco's bucolic Eden as I began to enter the Rotherhithe tunnel to traverse under the Thames and back to London's southern hemisphere. Although technically walk-able, passing through on foot is strongly ill-advised and I could certainly understand why as I made my way through the hot, acrid tunnel, trying to inhale as infrequently as possible for fear the exhaust fumes might shear a good year or so from my life expectancy, trying to avoid the incredulous glances of passing motorists.

Upon reaching daylight after 1.5km of white-tiled exhaust pipe, I paused for some fresh air in Southwark Park. By now the light was beginning to tinge with dusk and as I made my way down through Peckham and then onto the final furlong of Denmark Hill, I entered an almost trance-like state of intoxication, maintaining forward motion whilst my mind slumped into an unapologetic mush of inertia. Cars and buses passed me by, full of the same commuters I had set out with in the morning, returning home after yet another day's work, the comfort of routine maintaining the steady equilibrium of their lives.

Dragging my sore heels through Brockwell Park and the final approach along Brixton Water Lane, I thought of all those explorers and adventurers who in centuries gone by had set off in search of new frontiers, circumnavigating the world when they were more mindful of falling off it, never sure whether they would see the shores of home again.

Relative to my usually quite sedentary existance, this day-long hike around the city would have to serve as a near-enough approximation of such far-flung travails. I had seen the city from a radically new perspective, redefining it according to my own eccentric parameters, in a way that was both invigorating and rewarding. Now though, I was ready to sit down.

REVIEW - 'Gravity'

Back in 1895, the Lumiere Brothers' ‘Arrival of a train at La Ciotat' played in theatres to audiences who fled, incredulous at this strange new apparition, in fear that the train would suddenly come chuffing out from the screen, pre-empting the sensations that 118 years later would still be breaking ground in the world of cinema. Indeed, it does seem mildly baffling that over a century on, ‘ground-breaking’ aesthetic advances in the cinematic medium are still being used as the primary hook-and-bait for ensnaring a mass audience.

Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’, some 2-and-a-half years in the making, has been heralded as the game-changer in modern science-fiction cinema, the maturing moment in the predominantly gimmicky lifecycle of 3D movies. Undeniably, the technology involved is remarkable and raises the bar for all space-based films to come. And yet despite this, ‘Gravity’ still manages to be a very mediocre film.

Its problem is that it believes the sheer heft of its technological accomplishment alone justifies its existence, as if an audience should not be entitled or expected to desire more abstract components such as a decent narrative, believable dialogue or functional characters. The plot is almost totally mindless, seemingly extracted wholesale from any number of formulaic popcorn action movies; whilst the two characters, played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are worthy of absolutely no serious emotional investiture on the part of the audience, they are the vacuous black holes in this filmic rendering of space.

A lot has been made of the lack of scientific realism, and I defer to those far more knowledgeable than myself to make that case. That said, there are setpieces in the finale that are so far-fetched that it did nothing but distort all the exceptional visual realism that had served as a perfectly impressive canvas. [SPOILER ALERT] By the time Bullock crash-lands on Earth, myself along with several others in the cinema were guffawing loudly at the utter absurdity of the unfolding action.

The philosophic claims that have been made, with its religious and spiritual overtones, I would have to debunk as misguided. Instead, ‘Gravity’ sinks into a morass of predictable Hollywood positivism, the triumphing of humanity over all adversity, the melioristic redemption of the individual struggling to overcome all the odds weighing against them.

In the end, I can only conclude that my disappointment arose from hoping for a very different kind of film from the one ‘Gravity’ turned out to be. The opening 13-minute shot is sublime and I wish the film could have progressed in this slower vein along more existential or introspective themes about the role and nature of humankind floating in outer space. I was hoping for a more sedate and reflective ‘2001’-style study on the experience of humans at the very pinnacle of technological achievement. Instead, ‘Gravity’ is simply ‘Speed’ in space; a theme park simulator film in which style is everything and any substance is left to simply drift further and further out of reach.

The enduring legacy of JFK's assassination - 50 Years On

November 22nd marks the half-centenary milepost since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, an event that perhaps more than any other, is symbolic of the second half of the 20th century and the 'hyper-real' media landscape that grew like an additional ozone layer around the earth in consequence.

It is perhaps one of the most documented, analysed and debated single events of the last fifty years, and yet I would argue that in 2013 its real legacy resides, not in the repercussions of the event per se, but with the lasting impact on the mediarised 'image' as a wholly distinct entity capable of endless manipulation and exploitation.

Never before had the mass media, physical reality and the collective imagination fused together in a profound symbiosis that would leave such an indelible imprint upon the psyche of America, and to a certain extent, the wider world. Abraham Zapruder's infamous filmed footage provided the template for the endless reproductions and contexts in which it would be used from then on; its ubiquitous presence sinking deep within the public consciousness. In a sense, it galvanised the media organism like no other event had done previously; the bullet fired into the head of Kennedy was in essence the starting pistol for the media race that would go on to dominate the rest of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War and the moon landings being broadcast and reproduced on TV screens the world over.

Of course this vast media expansion was already in full flow, nonetheless, it can legitimately be judged that the Kennedy assassination - which harnassed all the fundamental dramatic components - from death and conspiracy to power and glamour - was the defining event, the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy captured frame-by-frame, that was needed to commodify and turn reality into artificial 'spectacle' for the purposes of mass consumption.

It became the blueprint for the 'captured event' compulsive obsession that pervades in 2013 when it seems everyone has the capability and inclination to record and distribute anything and everything at any given time. The obvious 'spectacular event' with which to draw comparison is 9/11. Again, a shocking and epochal event that was played and replayed across the world via the mass media landscape; thereby, scorching the images into the consciousness of everyone from that point on.

Leaving aside the limitless recyclability of the event, in thinking about it over the last few days, I began to query whether the events of Dealey Plaza in 1963 really warrant such unbridled notoriety? And what relevance, if any, does the assassination of JFK have to someone like me born in 1989, or to someone born today in 2013?

I would argue very little (aside from the aforementioned impact on the media landscape that it helped to fertilise). At the end of the day, the stark reality of the event is that it was the death of one man. Indeed, that man was the president of the leading world power, but nevertheless, it was one individual. The political ramifications in the aftermath were nothing like as severe as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, or, one could argue, of Martin Luther King in 1968 which was seen as an attack on the whole social movement of which he had been appointed spokesman.

Of infinitely more devastating universal implication was an event that took place only a year earlier. It seems curious to me that this colossal event, which for the first time brought the planet within inexorable proximity to its own destruction, appears to have been relegated somewhat in the league tables and its legacy diluted by the admixture of history. If JFK holds relatively minor significance for the children born into the 21st century, then the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 have faded even further into the background. In fact, I barely remember it featuring on my school history syllabus to any great extent.

My theory for the reasons behind this are based on the comparable scale of events. JFK's death came almost pre-packaged with all the elements of a Hollywood conspiracy thriller, together with Oswald's murder and the sensationalist Warren Commission that followed, as a 'human tragedy' that the collective imagination could invest in on a recognisable emotional level. The contemplation of such closeness to 'mutually assured destruction' (MAD) is on far too vast a scale for humans to psychologically grapple with on any meaningful grounding, it simply doesn't accord with any familiar level of reality.

This is the same reason why on any real scale the Space Age, according to J.G. Ballard -

'...lasted barely 15 years, from Gagarin's first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown live on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public's loss of interest'.

The exploration of space was just too advanced a contemplation for easily digestible mass consumption, being literally not-of-this-earth, and therefore nowhere near as resonant or captivating as the more orthodox humanistic drama of the political assassination; a nation's grief at the loss of their glamorous figurehead.

Consider 'Black Saturday', when a Soviet submarine armed with nuclear warheads was prevented from surfacing by American fighter planes, leading them to believe a nuclear war had begun and nearly resulting in them launching their missiles. If humankind were able to fully grasp the cataclysmic implications of 'Black Saturday' I believe it could have been a ground-breaking moment, a transcendent mass-realisation of the folly of war, the nature of man and the fragile biosphere in which he has been allotted to exist.

It could have been a moment in which ideology, prejudice, and politics all took a substantial step backward, as we subsequently tried to move trepidatiously forward in a brave new world of co-existance, tolerance and appreciation of just how fallible and precious life is.

In reality, it has had nothing even close to such an influence; men still wage war, still refuse to take the decisive steps necessary to reverse or tackle environmental destruction, and nations still seem intent on developing and hoarding nuclear arms whilst concurrently, sections of their societies suffer from hunger and disease.

The assassination of JFK was of course a momentous event, a defining media spectacle. And yet I can't help but find its persistent resonance 50 years on to be ever so slightly misguided when you consider that the vast majority of people on Earth will never have heard of Vasili Arkhipov, the man who, if reports are to be believed, prevented our very own suicide.

Kate Moss exhibition - Lawrence Elkin Gallery

So to the Lawrence Elkin Gallery on New Compton Street on a Saturday afternoon to see a blink-and-you'll-miss-it exhibition of David Ross' photographic prints of the then-unknown Kate Moss in her first photo shoot.

Kate Moss represents a form of 'stardom' that in modern culture is, at the very least, anachronistic; and more accurately, almost entirely defunct. Her appeal and place within the cultural landscape harks back to someone like Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn. She is levitated voodoo-like above the snake-pit of 'celebrity' by virtue of an enigmatic allure which in turn casts the veil of 'icon' across her shoulders.

By remaining both imagistically ubiquitous yet personally aloof, we know comparatively little about Kate Moss, and hence she retains the appealing sense of mystery that is such scant currency in the over-exposed market of 21st century celebrity. Within this realm we are all complicit to a bizarre self-delusion that our lives are somehow proxy to those of the rich and famous; a misconception desperately cultivated by celebrities in an effort at demonstrating their 'humanity' at any opportunity that might ensure a positive correlation with publicity and the maintenance of their own 'brand'.

The exhibition's shots depict Moss as a whey-faced 14-year-old, years before the murky cloud of 'heroin chic' and anorexia smears began to form above her early fame. Her instantly-recognisable features smoulder with a fertile compound of innocence and self-awareness, naivete and shrewdity; these dichotomies are visible in every frame. There is an undeniably 'Lolita'-like quality to these shots, insofar as her latent sexuality and intrigue dance the precarious waltz between the aforementioned dichotomies.

Not only in physical terms - at one glance appearing disarmingly plain and ordinary, at the next almost overpoweringly sensual - but also in terms of appearing to possess that integral cynicism and business sense that would sustain her status as arguably the world's most recognisable model. You get the impression that even at age 14 she had mapped the trajectory of her own future from that point on.

The key to her longevity, aside from her versatility as a model, is the fact of her enigmatic presence in the cultural sphere that enables us all to import our own narratives or imaginations onto her, in much the same way as people become imaginatively transfixed by, and invested in, Marilyn Monroe.

For my own part, I have used Moss as a means of subversive imagery in my novel 'Digital' and a couple of years ago in a rather crude 3-part short story 'Sex Objects of the World Unite' in which she makes the ultimate protestation against the mass media glare by self-immolating on a catwalk a la the Tibetan monks.

Since then though I rather think the crux of the ‘protest’ idea to be misguided. As Moss’ image remains omnipresent and apparently age-less she appeals to the self-flagellating paranoia lying within the collective psyche as to the passage of time taking its inexorable toll. By embodying that delusional ‘Pan-like’ fantasy towards which society conditions us all to submit, wilfully or otherwise, she is able to elevate herself above the public’s attempts at humanising her through the medium of scandal.

As such she transcends the fickle carousel of celebrity, in which we idolise and emulate until the wave of popular affection reaches its critical mass, breaking back into denigration as a means of illuminating the foibles and human weaknesses that misguidedly convince and reassure us once again of their being ‘just like us’.

Culture - October

Books read:

William Golding - 'The Inheritors'
John Osborne - 'Look Back in Anger' (play)
Walter Benjamin - 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (non-fiction)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - 'Journey to the End of the Night'
Gilles Neret - 'Salvador Dali' (non-fiction)
Leon Trotsky - 'An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe' (non-fiction)

This month I discovered a book I'm now eager to list as one of my favourites - Louis-Ferdinand Celine's 'Journey to the end of the night', an absurd and often hilarious nihilistic adventure following the gloriously ill-fortuned Bardamu as he travels from the Western Front to colonial Africa to New York and back to France. Reading it I became intricately aware of those writers - Burroughs, Kerouac, Bukowski - who had in turn been captivated and inspired by Celine's crude, riotous, free-flowing narrative and his often magical turn-of-phrase.

I also read a non-fiction book this month which struck me with its strangely modern relevance despite the decades filling up since its release. Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is a remarkably prescient work, particularly in its commentary on the cult of celebrity, as well as the nature of cinema and film degrading the 'aura' of a given performance, something that is evident every day with everyone apparentely creating a filmed reproduction of their reality. I was particularly struck by the following phrase -

'Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of living of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception'.

We are facing such a sense-changing epoch right now with the 'digital renaissance' that is in its full and irreversible swing.


Films Watched:

'Blue Jasmine' (Woody Allen) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'A Field in England' (Ben Wheatley)
'Shrek' (Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson)
'Livid' (Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo).
'The Amityville Horror' (Stuart Rosenberg) (at Prince Charles Cinema, London)
'The Hills Have Eyes' (Wes Craven)
'Zero Dark Thirty' (Kathryn Bigelow)
'Le Week-end' (Roger Michell)
'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps' (Oliver Stone)
'The Prestige' (Christopher Nolan)
'Limitless' (Neil Burger)
'V/H/S' (assorted directors)


Albums Played:

John Lennon - 'Plastic Ono Band'
Anna Calvi - 'One Breath'
Brian Eno & David Byrne - 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'
Brian Eno - 'Lux'
The Orb - 'The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld'
God is an Astronaut - 'Origins'
Motorhead - 'Aftershock'
Lou Reed - 'Transformer'
Lou Reed - 'Berlin'
Paul McCartney - 'New'
Lorde - 'Pure Heroine'
James Blake - 'Overgrown'
Arcade Fire - 'Reflektor'


Gigs Attended:

Jessie J at O2 Arena, London

One of the beneficial aspects of being in a relationship is the healthy exposure to otherwise overlooked cultural experiences. So it was that I found myself inside the domic incrustation of the O2 on an October evening watching Jessie J with my girlfriend. First things first; it would be very easy for me to deride Jessie J and her music simply because of it not equating with my own preferences, but that isn't the point of this review.

The show was technically accomplished, the music itself perfectly listenable, and the capacity crowd seemed to thoroughly enjoy the whole event, as far as I could tell through the galaxy of camera phones hoisted aloft, a modern trend that is detestable yet sadly inevitable. (This though is a separate gripe and by no means limited to Jessie J's target audience, I once stood next to a middle-aged man at a Fall gig who watched the entire thing through his palm-sized screen.)

Whilst an undeniably competent performer and talented vocalist, Jessie J falls into the trap that so many celebrated vocalists (Houston, Carey, Beyonce, et al) have done over the years of wringing every vocal phrase's neck with a spiral of melismic warbling that, whilst amply demonstrating skill, never fails to strangulate any possible emotional delivery.

What really began to nauseate me about the show was the bizarre bursts of pseudo-philosophic phrases across the LED screens during the intermittent costume changes. It felt like being preached to by a Twitter-era self-help guru, with the banal proclamations of 'follow your instinct', 'love yourself', and 'we are all one'. The cringe-inducing nadir was Jessie herself offering up some bland platitude to the effect of 'we don't just live, we are alive!', which as far as philosophical statements go must be the equivalent of a soggy lettuce leaf found in the bottom of a fridge.

It was this dominant yet patronising drive to inspire and elevate that really became too much to take. At almost any opportunity Jessie seemed determined to emphasise her disbelief at playing on such a large stage; yet instead of simply demonstrating honest humility, she would pontificate on the merits of 'never letting anyone stop you from following your dreams' - spewing out this squeaky-voiced helium with which she sought to inflate her young fans with her impossible aspirationalism.

More than anything, it was this self-referential, rags-to-riches narrative of the show that took away from my simply being able to enjoy it on its own simple terms as a pop performance. The very best performers always exude the aura of belonging on that stage and nowhere else, that they were born simply to strut that stage before their audience; and yet with Jessie J I got the impression I was watching someone trying gamely but subconsciously steeling herself at any moment for the wheels to fall off, and as such one has to wonder how long her career can be sustained in so volatile and fickle a market.

Exhibitions Attended:

'Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity' at Photographer's Gallery, London