SHORT STORY - 'The Library of Bill'

Welcome to the terrifyingly literary world of Bill, and his struggle with a most unorthodox strain of pathological addiction. (This is to be seen as unorthodox in contrast to more regular and easily-categorised substance dependencies; Bill’s hedonistic days, such as they were, have long since evaporated.) Not for Bill was the allure of pills, powders or other narcotic agencies, and the avidity for booze had long since sloshed on by him. Instead, Bill’s vice centred around the axis of self-improvement and of constant enlightenment.

Whilst in his younger days this trait manifested itself in a perfectly robust and healthy intellectual curiosity, now it seemed as though he were stumbling through a blizzard of educative stimuli, the weight of the literary canon seeming to incrementally stack up on his shoulders as though he were a diver descending to ever deeper fathoms of ideas.

In many ways, he was an acolyte of Trotsky, and his melioristic vision of unbounded human possibility, in which the average man could one day ascend to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe or a Marx. To this end, Bill had developed a troubling addiction to the buying and hoarding of books. His one-bedroom flat on South London’s Brixton Hill, endowed with a very modest floor area, had soon become overpopulated with this mass immigration of books seeking refuge from the many charity and second-hand shops Bill frequented.

Toni, Bill’s mendacious girlfriend, had learnt to accommodate this unfortunate discrepancy in his character, and indeed due to her highly demanding job as a legal secretary in the City, she would rarely utilise the flat for any means other than collapsing into wine-mandated slumber at the end of another stressful day. Besides this, most of her weekends were spent away in Bournemouth seeing to her hospice-bound mother, a duty she fulfilled with the detached professionalism as if she were readying a portfolio of documents before a big day in court. On these weekends alone, Bill would cruise the shops of the Charing Cross Road, Soho and Clerkenwell, gradually trawling the city-bed for fresh books with his obsessive-compulsive net.

It wasn’t even that Bill was aesthetically drawn to the collecting of books; he did not hunt through the undergrowth of shelves in search of that elusive first edition or a rare print version, to him these factors were superfluous dressing on the raw meat of the intellectual content. The one exception was an old first edition copy of ‘Labyrinths’ by his personal favourite Jorge Luis Borges. Bill would habitually leave this in a prominent coffee table location the way others arrange glossy magazines or photographic paving slabs. When once after a particularly grinding day at work, Toni absent-mindedly spilt a cup of tea on this paperback, leaving the first few pages with the texture of an old map scroll, it heralded a storm between them that didn’t lift for several days thereafter.

With the wardrobe and other storage units soon reaching peak capacity, it wasn’t long before books began stacking up in piles on the floor and on any available surface, collecting there like water droplets from the ceiling. The works of Proust would be leant up against a radiator alongside books by Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Paul Auster. After a while, Bill began to realise the necessity for some degree of structural organisation, and started the process of hauling out the tomes such as ‘Ulysees’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘War and Peace’ and ‘The Divine Comedy’, to use as weighty foundation stones that could support the rest sufficiently.

Yet all this hoarding of books did little to satisfy Bill’s intellectual fervour; in fact it appeared to produce quite the opposite effect. With each new addition that he would begrudgingly stack upon a random pile, the more he knew he had to get through, the more he sensed the perilous ebbing away of time available to do so, and the further into a state of morose anxiety he would sink. Each new book represented another link in the chain that bound him to his self-prescribed sentence, and the further he was from being able to haul himself to the end of it. On particularly bad instances, Toni would arrive home from work to find Bill slumped on the floor in an acute fit of agitation, surrounded by various open books snatched from nearby piles, having tried and failed to commit his mind to getting past page 1 of a Conrad novel or a book of Montaigne essays.

At times such as this, Toni made a futile resolution to impose some kind of prohibition on his habit, but due to the fact that the stacks would grow incrementally by only 2 or 3 books a day, this was rather like watching a glacier for signs of movement and she quickly relented. Truth be told, she was at a loss as to how to respond to such a predicament, and her mentality towards Bill would fluctuate day by day and sometimes even by the hour. Whatever his flaws, at least he didn’t gamble away all his spare money on sport like the boyfriend that her friend Susie always complained about. He didn’t drink to excess, never smoked, and she had every reason to trust him with regard to other women. Aside from this, he was also still a sensitive and caring lover and she was loath to call time just yet on what had been her only long-term and therefore, reasonably successful, relationship.

On Bill’s part, he couldn’t quite understand what it was that routinely compelled him to buy and store more and more books. He had, at one time, held aspirations of becoming a writer himself; indeed, for several years he wrestled with the concept of his ‘grand masterpiece’ of a novel as though it were a thrashing crocodile that would not submit to his control. Any time pen could be brought to meet paper it would be as though they were both volatile elements that quickly combusted in an explosion of mental energy before being extinguished in the wastepaper bin.

On his lunchtimes at work, Bill would take himself off to the high street where he knew there were two well-stocked second-hand book shops just waiting for his perusal. Every time he would tell himself he was going to walk on past, or that he could just have a look through the window and nothing more. He knew he would end up inside, he could anticipate the finding of that one book he just had to buy. He knew it the same way an alcoholic can taste in his mouth that first glug of booze before even entering a bar; the same way a gambler can hear the sounds of the machine and see those numbers spinning even on the approach to a bookie’s.

Such a precarious balance had to come to a head at some point and that surfaced when Toni’s mother took a sudden turn for the worst. Dementia had ransacked her mind of its cognitive possessions and the doctors advised that she had only a couple of weeks to live. Out of a sense of grim obligation, Toni took the time off work and decamped to the hospice to see her mum through her final days. Left alone and unfettered, Bill allowed himself free reign to make bulk purchases on any and every book he saw from online sites and the high street.

Soon the situation had grown out of all control. Bill disposed of the sofa, which was already overgrown with books anyway, and began endeavouring to garner maximum utility from all useful space in the apartment. The stacks of books began to resemble old Roman ruins, the last remains of some antiquated book-centric civilisation. Kingsley Amis paperbacks and Stephen King slabs would contribute to the trithilons that Bill made to assist with access to and from the flat. Piles of Austen, Thackeray, Bronte, Kafka and Waugh would form elegant minarets teetering above the lower skyline of heavy works by Freud, Shakespeare, Sartre and Mailer. He would attempt to keep the stacks roughly even but somehow they would grow almost organically, creating a kind of trenellation effect similar to a castle’s battlements. Bill would spend his solitary evenings marooned in the corner of the room on the bed staring out at the frozen waves of books before him in a state of ataraxy. He was wary of leaving his mattress island but at the same time, harboured a fiery urge to do away with the bed altogether, surrender his sanctuary and allow the rising tide of titles to swallow him up.

When finally, Toni’s mother reached the last page of her own narrative and passed away, Toni, relieved of her daughterly duties, returned to the flat to survey the diaspora of books that had descended upon it with a sudden eruption of fury. Clearly believing that the death of her mother marked a defining chapter break, Toni had decided that the optimum time to shear the strings fastening her to her current life had arrived. Since her mother had always been fond of Bill – a fact that had rankled Toni no end – he was too closely associated with painful memories and therefore, had to be detached. The decision was made as coldly as if it were business, an executive weighing up options and coming down on the side of hiving off a weak branch of the corporation.

As Toni scoured the flat for her modest possessions, Bill sat cross-legged and sulky on the bed, watching her in silence as though he were a child being punished. She carelessly marauded through his intricate infrastructure of books, brushing piles aside and knocking over stocks like Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo.

And then she was gone, and the dust of silence could begin to settle once again. Unshackled from the, admittedly minor, concerns of agitating Toni with his obsession, Bill continued stockpiling more and more books in earnest, returning home from work with plastic bags full of them, no longer beholden to the prejudice of what they were or who they were authored by.

As the weeks went by, Bill’s living conditions gradually deteriorated. The bed was evicted the day following Toni’s departure, as did the remaining items of furniture; in their place, the books began to crowd around the ceiling, requiring the construction of a precarious yet ingenious corbelled roof design. Going about his work, mostly in a gloomy half-light as the main window had long since been obscured, Bill imagined himself a member of a prehistoric clan, hewing spiritual temples out of the bare rock, with recourse to unknown and mysterious convictions. In his mind, he was Simon Rodia silently persisting with his own Watts Towers; instead of ceramics, coloured stones and bed frames he had only the works of Orwell, Dickens and Eliot to work with.

Before long, he could do little more than squat as standing had become an impossibility. Like an intrepid potholer he would crawl on all-fours through hastily-arranged tunnels that, by necessity, had to be constantly moved depending on where in the flat he wished to go. The most basic of journeys now required Bill’s careful timing and organisation, as though he were instead trying to navigate his way across London to catch a train. A trip to the bathroom now required a solid hour of tunnel rearranging in order to get there on time. Similarly, getting through the short hallway to the kitchen was an arduous and pain-staking process that on arrival, Bill needed a substantial amount of time to recuperate and regain his strength. Whenever he was forced to leave the flat, primarily in order to replenish food stocks having already conceded his job through non-attendance, it was a painful and agoraphobic experience. Just making his way across the street to the convenience store was an obstacle course of unfamiliarity and nerves; the act of standing up straight and manoeuvring around others was now a struggle for Bill, having become so accustomed to his cramped isolation. He would return, sweating and flustered, vowing to soon seal himself into the flat for good and dedicate the rest of his life to the slow consumption and absorption of the texts.

The sad realisation that soon began to seize Bill was the level of disengagement he now felt from any of the books that surrounded him, the cave walls that enclosed him. He couldn’t recall having purchased them, had no idea whether he had read any of them or not, and indeed had never even heard of many of them. He gazed in abject perplexity as layers of strata containing generic self-help guides, pregnancy handbooks and children’s adventure stories. Evidently, he deduced, in his blind panic he had simply swept handfuls of titles at random from the shop shelves with the dubious aim of eventually reading them having been supplanted by the compulsion to do little more than construct this absurd cathedral of words.

Was there any book here, Bill wondered, that he actually had the desire to read, even if he had the time to do so in between shuffling tunnels around to get from one side of the flat to the other? He couldn’t think that there was, and this sorry reflection embraced him like a steel gibbet of recrimination.

And then he saw it. There it was, wedged between a layer of Agatha Christie’s and a stratum of Thomas Hardy; his favourite – Borges’ ‘Labyrinths’. He knew at the very least he could always glean some enjoyment out of the Argentine master’s ambiguous fables and convolutions. Tugging at the spine, he quickly registered just how tightly sandwiched it was, the tensile pressures of many hundreds of books bearing down on it from above. Deftly, with the agility of an expert caver, Bill worked the edging the book out, the tips of his fingers burning red as they laboured for purchase, his warm laboured breath echoing back in his face in the confined space and causing sweat to dampen his forehead. Steadily he worked at prising the book free, a quarter became visible, then a third. All the while, Bill cleverly manipulated the surrounding books to ensure structural stability.

As the book became almost entirely free, and Bill could almost see the opening lines scrolling before his eyes, he lapsed his concentration and with a reckless tug the book was loose in his hands. As Bill rejoiced his small but significant victory, he was unaware of the seismic tremors that juddered their way up the wall of books, as each one shuffled into an improvised new coangulation. The Flemish bond style of stacking served the fabric well in most areas, however, books towards the top had been constructed under greater time pressures than those on lower levels and, with the disruption of the stability, the realignment became amplified up to the very top layer.

Just as Bill was beginning to turn the first few pages, several heavy copies of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, ‘Anna Karenina’ and the collected works of Poe were dislodged from their place in the structural buttresses and tumbled down, bringing along whole stacks of follwers that leapt after them. The result was that Bill incurred a serious skull fracture and died in a matter of minutes, interred in the textual tomb of his own making. He was left undiscovered until several months later when the landlord sought entry on the pretext that he appreciated Bill was the ideal tenant, but regrettably the rent was to rise again at the year’s end.

Battersea Power Station - The strange yet persistent allure of the industrialised megalith

There was a question that persistently nagged at me whilst forming part of the inquisitive bovine line herding its way, as though into an abattoir, through Battersea Power Station during Open House London in September.....

What exactly is it that people find so consistently interesting and appealing about this hulking relic of industrialised Britain festering on the southern bank of the Thames since it was decommissioned in 1983?

It you could have conducted a straw poll amongst the 14,000 visitors to the site over the weekend, I believe the results would have been a fairly vague mish-mash of obfuscations or certainly, in the main, nothing more concrete than a sense of curious obligation.

But what is it really that prolongs the power station’s place in our affection and intrigue? What role does its slumbering presence play for the 21st century Londoner?

My strong hunch is that it stems from a sense of nostalgia for an industrial Britain that no longer exists. It is an architectural talisman that serves as a physical manifestation of the generative power that once fuelled the city. It is a monolithic relic from a by-gone era which has, in recent years, enjoyed a renaissance in terms of public opinion. Already, the beginnings of such a trend can be seen developing with regard to the post-war Brutalism period, with sites such as the Barbican and Trellick Tower acquiring a fresh verglas of appreciation.

With the ruins of Battersea Power Station representing the lapse of early-20th century modernism, it is ironic that its resuscitation should be by the electrotherapy of early-21st century post-post-modernism. That is, the predominance of banal steel-and-glass or colourfully cladded luxury accommodation; buildings whereby form very often follows miserably behind function (see the Shard, the Gherkin, et al), and the transformation of every urban space into a commercialised, highly-lucrative commodity. In this particular instance, transmogrifying the power station into some kind of gigantic Costa Coffee.

The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that Battersea could be seen as a sort of synecdoche for the way Britain has evolved to accommodate its past – that seismic shift from producers to consumers, from being the globally competitive generators of ‘stuff’ to the proud yet backward-looking, service-providing nation of 2013.

As much as the tenor of this essay may be suffering from a subsidence into cynicism, make no mistake, I was grateful for the chance to satisfy my own curiosity when it came to the power station, even if I wasn’t really sure why. Pivoting slowly around, it felt like I was standing in the belly of some giant, desiccated animal, its four skeletal limbs still sturdy whilst the rest of its flesh and muscle tissue had withered into atrophy.

Like an awful lot of people (more, I’d be willing to wager, than would be prepared to admit it), my first association of the power station stemmed from the iconic Pink Floyd album cover for ‘Animals’.

And yet, I can’t help but remain perplexed by the way this association has almost become dyed into the socio-cultural fabric, given that the album itself stands as one of Pink Floyd’s ‘overlooked’ efforts, sandwiched chronologically between more famous works ‘Wish You Were Here’ and ‘The Wall’. I would have loved to have taken another straw poll of visitors to see who had actually listened to ‘Animals’ all the way through.

The album itself, which was released in the height of the ‘punk explosion’ in 1977, has always struck me as just as nihilistic, scathing or ire-inflected as anything gobbed out by punk. For all that Johnny Rotten may have declared ‘I hate Pink Floyd’, ‘Animals’ is, to my mind at least, one of the finest ‘punk albums’ of that period. The unforgettable album cover by Hipgnosis can itself be interpreted in this way. The power station is a symbol of the toiling working class of the stagnant and, by then, outdated industrial era, watched over by the despotic elite as represented by the flying pig.

My own elaboration on this reading is that it signifies that with the abandoning of industrial endeavours in pursuit of an American-style market capitalism, pigs will fly before Britain regains the strength, muscle and raw power of which Battersea Power Station is so emblematic.

This is all very well, but leaving Pink Floyd and the power of popular culture on ‘groupthink’ aside, the development and lifetime of Battersea Power Station throws up some other interesting points.

The Turbine A half of the power station became fully operational in 1935, before embryonically splitting and creating Turbine B in 1955. At this time it became the largest brick building in Europe, a title it still holds claim to today.

The apex of its prime saw it generating roughly a fifth of London’s electricity, whilst boasting the credential of thermal efficiency that surpassed all other stations. Yet by the 1970s this efficiency was on the wane, the pollution being churned out was firmly at odds with the dawning eco-consciences of the time, and the station was conclusively decommissioned in 1983.

It is this, relatively speaking, brief operational lifespan that seems slightly at odds with its resurgent claim on the public purse-strings of affection.. Its fellow South-Thames compatriot Bankside Power Station – given a transfusion of contemporary art to become the Tate Modern – was operational for a similarly ‘temporary’ 29 years before closing in 1981.

If this were the accepted useful lifespan for other notable buildings in the capital, the Gherkin would have only another 30 years or so before needing to be reassessed. Likewise, the Shard’s functionality would need serious sharpening around the year 2060, and St. Paul’s Cathedral should retrospectively have been mothballed decades ago. Daft conjecture aside, I think the point is a valid one, that placed in context Battersea Power Station’s enduring allure is seemingly at odds with its transitory utility.

Another important factor that provides an insight into the affection it inspires is, I think, its resilience as an underdog beating away countless big business investors trying to bend it to their own will. It has remained since the early 80s as London’s white elephant slumbering on the savannah of Nine Elms, batting away proposals for renovation – everything from a theme park to a football ground – as though they were little more than pesky fleas.

The latest contractors are a Malaysian consortium of property developers who have already begun Phase 1 of the project to rejuvenate the site with all the glossy apparel and finement of 21st century ‘luxury apartments’. All have already been sold of course, mostly to overseas millionaires who will no doubt parachute in a handful of times each year. That or they’ve been bought for student children of elite parents so that they can study in one of London’s premier universities.

I wouldn’t say I was bitter, only that quite a large part of me hopes the ramshackle power station has one more fight left in it and manages to avoid being wrestled to the ground by yet another ambitious project proposal. Wouldn’t it be great if this stubborn London icon could maintain its status as the ‘unmanageable project’, the untameable beast lying docile on the banks of the Thames. It could be made safe and then left open for people to meander freely through as an innovative and inspiring new public space.

I fear this is pointless idealism. Soon, the pigs will no longer be flying above Battersea Power Station, instead they’ll be living inside it.

Urban Exploring - 'Kiss the Sky' event (2nd Oct 2013)

"WHY CLIMB THE SHARD WHEN YOU COULD JUST PISS ON THE BOTTOM OF IT?" - Will Self

Last week I made my way to the Barbican to listen to a discussion between urban explorer-in-chief Bradley L. Garrett and a writer I very much admire, Will Self. Garrett’s book ‘Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City’ had just been released and I was intrigued to hear more about the exploits from the man who – along with his ‘urbex’ cohorts – had scaled the Shard and all its high rise minions, abseiled up Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, wormed through abandoned tube stations, and uncoiled large sections of London’s Victorian sewer system.

The subject holds a particular interest to me, not just as I have written on this blog about the subversive potential of long-distance urban running, but also because I made my own feeble attempts at ‘urbex-ing’ whilst at university, long before I became aware either of the practice or the dedicated community behind it.

My university town of Loughborough in the East Midlands contained an abandoned Victorian-era hospital right in the town centre, hidden away amongst waste ground behind an Argos. At 5am one Sunday morning I snuck onto the site, had a rudimentary look around, took some photos and swiftly left. This inspired me to then make the 5-mile journey to locate an abandoned asylum, the directions to which had been helpfully passed on through previous years of art and photography students also making the trip. Whilst this may serve as a backdrop for my personal interest in the subject, my lone exploits were merely light callisthenics in comparison to Garrett and the wider ‘urbexing’ communities’ marathon travails.

Garrett began the discussion with the adroit and perversely accurate idea that the vast majority of our presence in the city environment is forbidden; a thought I’d hitherto not fully considered. Indeed, the city is made up of places to which entry is prohibited, most public spaces are subject to curfew, and even places of work and accommodation are subject to necessarily stringent levels of reciprocal exchange.

By undertaking the exploration of one's urban space to these extremities, Garrett argues that the strict matrices of the geography are demonstrably flouted. Anyone who lives in a city or large town will recognise that more often than not we are subject to prescribed movements synchronised at the behest of time and commercial imperatives. There are many invisible yet tacit pressures exerted on the city dweller to conform to an orthodox and routine transit; it leaves us beholden to the public transport system, to authorised rights of way, and to the commodified incentives that maintain their ceaseless barrage. Urban exploring is, Garrett seemed to stress, the most defiant means of escaping the time and fiscal pressures that mandate so many of our movements in and around the urban space.

Will Self, a bastion of the modern resurgance of that loose bundle of ideas known as 'psychogeography', expressed his admiration and support, but had several caveats with which to prise the manhole cover open on the underbelly of the urbexing movement.

He sought to question the ethnography of urbexers; why it appears to be a praxis of, in the main, white, middle-class young men? Garrett conceded that it was this perception of a 'colonial' attitude, particularly invoked through the photography produced by the community, that needed to be moved beyond in the future.

Self also levelled the charge of territoriality on the urbexers, arguing that the everyman could - and indeed, should - subvert the rigid confines of their orientational routine by as trivial a means as simply wandering through the urban space with no ulterior motive other than to experience the locality anew. With this in mind, he raised the characteristiclly acerbic and witty proposal - 'why climb the Shard when you can just piss on the bottom of it?'

The production and disseminating of visual imagery bound up in the mantra of urbexing was another dimension Self took issue with. By taking the images and spreading them online, they were contributing to the vast ocean of simulacra that we are confronted with on a continual basis. Drawing reference to the Situationist's mastermind Guy Debord, Self claimed that the urbex community was conforming to the 'society of the spectacle' by producing a digital duplication of the event and offering it up for consumption, and that the only truly subversive means of exploring the urban environment would be to do so without creating the imagistic by-product.

As Walter Benjamin astutely surmised in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ –

‘The fact is: ‘getting closer to things’ in both spatial and human terms is every bit as passionate a concern of today’s masses as their tendency to surmount the uniqueness of each circumstance by seeing it in reproduction.'

This obsessive-compulsive urge to capture and replicate for the online medium is at the forefront of my novel ‘Digital’, and something one can see evidence of all the time. Just recently, I attended the Open House London event where myself and apparently half the city’s inhabitants mooched through the carcass of Battersea Power Station; to all intents and purposes becoming a single transitory organism capturing and recapturing the same limited viewpoints on varying technological devices. And yet I succumb to this compulsion just the same, I snapped away in an identical effort to, in some way, crystallise the experience in digital time for posterity.

I can empathise completely with the urbexers, the majority of them accomplished photographers, for wanting those ‘souvenir images’ enshrining their adventures, but I also concur with Will Self, that to truly rebel the only means of so doing would be to resist and simply experience the place on its own terms.

In many ways, urbexing is just another modern example of mainstream culture adopting rebellion for its own insatiable purposes, packaging it nicely for the consumption of the ‘chattering classes’ who in turn are enlivened by their exposure to edgy or 'controversial' symbols of the zeitgeist.

This growing trend can be seen everywhere, from Che Guevara adorning a million student T-shirts, to the shifts in rave culture giving rise to the generic ‘superclub’, to the work of guerrilla artist Banksy being stolen from the very fabric of the city to be sold for extortionate sums as though they’d been lifted straight from the Louvre.

The resurgence of interest in derelict and abandoned places and the hemisphere of artistic photography that envelopes it has become, in essence, a kind of ‘ruin porn’. In any book shop or on countless online blogs, you will find overly-processed images of Detroit (‘the mecca of urban exploring’), Pripyat and countless other abandoned asylums, stations, hospitals, industrial factories; such that any pre-existing subversive quotient becomes instantly diluted by their exposure to the bright lights of the mainstream.

Whilst the acts of urban exploring are to be commended (and, I believe, more useful information should be made available for those budding protégés seeking to join the community); the inevitable secondary tier of ‘spectacle’ that no doubt serves its purpose in attracting those protégés, is equally likely to simply serve as ample fodder for those content instead to experience the adventures of others vicariously through the portal of the internet. As Self advocated, your everyday subversion of the city need not be swinging from Battersea’s chimneys, it could be as simple as long-distance urban running, or as mundane as walking a different route to work, something that excludes no one and is possible of being realised by everyone.

Culture - September

Books Read:

John Gray - 'Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia' (non-fiction)
Thomas Mann - 'Death in Venice'
Aldous Huxley - 'Brave New World' (re-read)
Charles Dickens - 'A Tale of Two Cities'
William Shakespeare - 'Macbeth' (play)

It is my view that John Gray is perhaps the most accomplished and engaging philosopher alive today, and 'Black Mass', his attempt at debunking the staid notions of utopia and religious dogma, was a most valuable read.

He tackles the fallacy of human progress and enforces just how ingrained religious and millenarian belief systems still are in modern politics - in the case of Blair and Bush he elucidates with frightening clarity just how in hoc they were when it came to Iraq to their fervent spiritual convictions in a perceived good that would triumph over evil, and the West's divine purpose to export it's brand of liberal democracy and market capitalism to the wider world (a mindset that can be seen most recently with the Syria crisis), regardless of the suitability of those systems to countries with their own unique culture, history and traditions.

In short, I would recommend this book to just about anyone for it will explode your current perceptions and challenge your way of viewing both politics and religion.


Films Watched:

'You're Next' (Adam Wingard) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'American Mary' (The Soska Sisters)
'Uncle Buck' (John Hughes)
'Final Destination' (James Wong)
'A Single Man' (Tom Ford)
'Dark Water' (Hideo Nakata)
'Wolf Creek' (Greg McLean)
'Blue Jasmine' (Woody Allen) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)

I am an unabashed horror fan and have been ever since the age of 10 or 11 when my Dad, perhaps unadvisedly, permitted the viewing of 'The Shining', which in terms of terror became the high to which every horror film since was destined to chase. Nowadays, I consider myself quite a sophisticated cineaste, but this hasn't diminished my affection for horror when achieved successfully. Having earlier in the year, lamented the state of modern horror and the fact that I hadn't seen a genuinely scary film for a long time, this September did its very best to resurrect my former fondness from its shallow grave.

Firstly, 'You're Next' was a rollicking slasher film that, whilst doing nothing more substantial than ploughing the same field as 'Scream', managed to harness the clever irony, self-awareness and referentia that made 'Scream' so successful and that subsequent imitations have all too often fallen well shy of.

When it comes to horror, Asia has stolen a considerable march on Hollywood over the last 10-15 years. 'Dark Water' from director Hideo Nakata (the man behind 'Ringu'), is just about the most sophisticated and outright chilling film I've seen in a long time. The tension escalates to a near critical mass, at which point the film swerves into a wholly surprising and unpredictable side-street. Those seeking white-knuckle shocks and scares may leave disappointed, but those in favour of more complex psychological horror will find 'Dark Water's visual and narrative techniques as well as its themes of abandonment and loss thoroughly refreshing.

By contrast, I fail to see how Australia's 'Wolf Creek' could fail to live up to even the most fright-weary horror fan's expectations. I found it to be wonderfully crafted, interweaving the psychological tension of 'Dark Water' with a near-perfect establishment of the three main characters, as well as a grisy finale to titilate any 'torture porn' aficienado. This certainly ranks as one of the most harrowing and exhilerating horror films I have ever seen and will, predictably enough, take some surpassing in the future.


Albums Played:

Nine Inch Nails - 'Hesitation Marks'
Disappears - 'Lux'
Disappears - 'Glider'
Arctic Monkeys - 'AM'
Trentemoller - 'Lost'
Kings of Leon - 'Mechanical Bull'
Manic Street Preachers - 'Rewind the Film'

The major release for me this month was the surprise new album from personal favourites Nine Inch Nails, interrupting the 'retirement' hiatus of the last 4 years. NIN mastermind Trent Reznor ranks, in my mind, as one of the most consistently innovative, imaginative and just excellent musicians working in the mainstream over the last 25 years.

'Hesitation Marks' is a worthy and strong addition to his canon, and signals an exploration into an altogether barer, more naunced and funkier territory. This is no where more evident than on the track 'Everything', the closest NIN have flirted with 'throwaway pop music' since 'Maybe Just Once', a rare demo for the 'Pretty Hate Machine' album. There are shades of Prince, of 80's-era Cult and The Cure, and at times the sounds are 'glitchy' enough to be more than a little reminiscent of Thom Yorke's solo work.

The moments of sonic brilliance that one comes to expect from a Reznor record are present; for instance, the fade-in of a light airy Kraftwerk-esque synth line at the final part of 'All Time Low', and the mesmerising Indian string section that weaves its way into the brilliant 'Disappointed'.

However, unlike Reznor's 1994 masterpiece 'The Downward Spiral', there are flaws present as well. Later tracks such as 'Running' or 'The Various Methods of Escape' are deadweights and instantly forgettable when taken alongside the rest of the album. But more striking of all is the quality of the lyrics, which throughout 'HM' feel rushed, sloppy and oddly uninspired. Indeed, I found it impossible to attribute the lines -

'Hey / everything is not okay / we lost too much along the way'

with the Reznor who penned 'Hurt' or the lyrics -

'devils speak of the ways in which she'll manifest / angels bleed from the tainted touch of my caress'.

Overall though, this is an enjoyable and worthy NIN album, one that may not attain former heights but nonetheless is evidence of an ongoing artistic development that is both welcome and consistently fascinating.


Exhibitions/Events:

Hunterian Museum, Lincoln's Inn Field, London
Open House London - Battersea Power Station
Hal Saflieni Hypogeum, Malta
Tarxien temples, Malta
Hagar Qim temples, Malta
Cathedral Museum, Mdina, Malta


Theatre:

'We Will Rock You' at the Dominion Theatre, London
'Macbeth' at the Globe Theatre, London

The modern deification of Queen is an intriguing cultural phenomenon, with perhaps The Beatles being the only other British band universally revered to the level that a West End musical based around their songs could still be running after 11 years (see the recent failure of the Spice Girls musical as a case in point). Queen's songs have transcended the band to enter the domain of the public consciousness, however doggedly and often gracelessly both Brian May and Roger Taylor have tried to maintain a grip on the rope of ownership. To my mind this is the same as e work of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen or L.S. Lowry, that is seen as emblematic of the best of British art.

To enter 'We Will Rock You' with a critical eye is rather defeating the point; it requires you to disengage your brain at the door and take it at face value. I have no qualms with this in principle, although I couldn't help but cringe at the Ben Elton screenplay which was fairly ropey to begin with but now appeared to be positively fraying, with some jokes that must date back some 10 years. As well as this, the production at times had a touch of the end-of-year school performance about it, with vast acres of stage space lying neglected and empty.

All things considered though, one can't deny the stagecraft of the performers and the entertainment value to be gained from hearing all those old Queen songs live and loud again. In terms of the show's theme - that of rock & roll rising up and destroying the wealth of disposable mass-produced music - I was struck by the nostalgic resonance this had for the last 10 years-or-so of British rock music; an endless resurrection of former guitar heroes dusting off their boots for one last victory lap in the face of a perceived dearth of new and original talent.

Tearing the city at the seams #14 - Ice Cold in Malta

The temperature must have been, as it had been for the whole week, wilting somewhere in the low-30s, and yet the brisk sea breeze sluicing in over the cliffs did its best to camouflage the heat. On the penultimate day of my week-long trip to Malta I decided to take the bus over to the western coastline and hike south along the top of the Dingli cliffs.

Given Malta’s comparatively diminutive scale and reliable, if frustratingly sluggish bus network, my girlfriend and I had managed to see a large amount of the island – from southern Marsaxlokk, the quaint fishing village with traditional luzzu bobbing in the harbour; to the thriving nightlife hotspot Paceville on the east coast; Golden Bay on the north-west side, and the medieval fortified city of Mdina right in the heart of the island. In fact, I realised that in terms of percentage of ground covered, I had probably seen more of Malta than I had of any other country in the world.

Starting out on my walk along the top of the Dingli cliffs, the limestone face appeared to be melting away into the sea like a wax sculpture. The path wound around the conspicuous radar tower, a bloated golf ball evidently over-struck from North Yorkshire’s Menwith Hill base, and led up to Ta’Zuta, the highest point on the Maltese islands, marked by a solitary little Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene. I surveyed the view – empty farm land and sun-baked towns, the bump of the Mosta Dome in the distance. Out to sea, the uninhabited pancake islet of Filfa lay supine and bruised having been ignominiously used as target practice by the stationed British army for years.

What struck me about my hike was the refreshing sense of isolation. With a population of around 410,000 – considerably fewer than London’s 8-million-and-counting – it was possible to walk some distance along the clifftop without encountering anyone else. A local was selling fresh fruit from a stall outside the chapel; a young tourist couple progressed along the same track as I, albeit with more apparent urgency, as though they had set themselves the challenge of hiking the entire island’s perimeter and were only just realising the extent of their folly.

At this point I diverted inland away from the cliffs in search of the mysterious site of Clapham Junction. Named by British tourists, as you might expect, this is a busy intersection of strange prehistoric ‘cart ruts’ scored into the limestone rocks. Archaeologists are still puzzled as to the precise nature of these ruts, believed to have been made not by cart wheels but rather by a travois – a form of sled with two parallel poles that would have been hauled along the ground. Theories also abound as to what exactly they were transporting, whether stone, salt or topsoil. I stood to admire this cross-stitch of tracks scarring the stone, looking as they did like a cobweb of plane contrails spun across a clear blue sky.

Having retraced my steps back to the coastline, my hike gradually became diverted inland away from the cliffs and before long I found myself to be quite lost. I skirted round the edge of a large limestone quarry, which appeared to be fully functional despite the absence of any human operatives. Reluctantly, I had to concede defeat and head back on myself to catch a bus that would be able to place me again on the headland near the Hagar Qim temples.

Walking round these ancient megalithic temples, among the oldest free-standing stone structures in the world, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t suffering from a kind of ‘awe fatigue’. I had already in the week been transcended by the incredible Hal Salfieni Hypogeum, visited the prehistoric Tarxien temples, and been enraptured by the baroque splendour of St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta.

In terms of ‘Cathedral Top Trumps’, I think St. John’s might just cast all others I have visited into the shade. It beats St. Paul’s in London, trounces Paris’ Notre Dame, and makes St. Peter’s basilica in Rome look like a cavernous empty space. The concept of the ‘sublime’ was originated by the Romantics and was traditionally apportioned to natural wonders; and yet ‘sublime’ is truly the only term to adequately describe St. John’s. Every wall, pillar and rib is intricately decorated, with rippling marble, brocades and gilt; it is a supernova explosion of gold.

As impressive a sight as the Hagar Qim temple ruins undoubtedly were, I felt I had already spent my quota of reverential awe for the week; the difficulty in visiting such a place is that, whilst we may feel humbled and inspired, the scale of time encapsulated there so surpasses our comprehension, that there is also the risk of leaving with a sense of feeling alienated or oddly detached.

I had experienced a similarly odd mixture of emotions upon taking a boat from the Maltese mainland over to the island of Comino to see its famous ‘Blue Lagoon’. The water is so serene and, indeed, blue that it feels like you’ve stepped into a travel agent advert or a billboard hoarding displaying cheap flight deals.

Predictably, this is Malta’s tourism piece de resistance, a fact that gradually assumes more and more weight as you approach the landing dock and start to see the hordes of people perched on the rocky slope like birds, almost on top of one another desperately trying to cling to their patch, each umbrella a different marker post in the sand. Climbing up the slope from the boat, you are presented with trailers selling fish ‘n’ chips, burger ‘n’ fries, ice cold lager and god knows what other familiar comforts of the British tourist abroad.

What I found baffling is that by walking some five minutes away from the Blue Lagoon you come across several other far quieter bays of equal beauty. The sparks of my confusion were fanned further once we sat down overlooking a small cluster of people frolicking in the azure waters that flowed around and through a picturesque archway of rock. I suddenly began to notice the scattered items of litter that had been left here and there; an old water bottle stranded amidst some dry shrubs, a crisp packet wedged between some rocks as though it were a pub beer garden, and cigarette butts peppering the dusty ground. It was as though I’d walked up to a fantastic painting, close enough to see the cracks in the paint and the ageing of the canvas, and once I’d noticed it there was no ignoring it.

For all the marvellous achievements humans are capable of realising – the hypogeum and St. John’s being two great examples from the last week – I often recoil stunned at the ignorance, hypocrisy and inanity of humans that runs in conjunction. To come to Comino, a site of unarguable natural beauty, and wilfully pollute it, is a mind-boggling example of the inherent superiority complex of the human species.

As we boarded the boat back to Malta, I pondered the idea that a permanent official should be posted to Comino to spot anyone discarding rubbish and place a lifetime ban on them as punishment. I think such a draconian measure should stand, for the reason that if you can’t respect such an idyllic place then you simply don’t deserve to visit it ever again.

Continuing my walk away from the temples, the heat and exertion of the day was beginning to take its toll. The misleading sea breeze from the clifftops had allowed me to burn a little, and the mosquitoes seemed to sense my exhaustion and persist in their aerial assault. Earlier that week, a pharmacist had explained how these large mosquitoes had been brought over to the island in container ships from Asia 3 or 4 years ago, and she ruefully speculated that this may have been a ‘happy accident’ engineered by the companies who manufacture repellent and other anti-mosquito products. I thought it amusing that even on the apparently easy-going island of Malta there was still the willingness to indulge in sinister conspiracy theories.

The end of my walk was the tiny harbour of Wied iz-Zurrieq, a charming inlet into the cliffs known as the Blue Grotto, where local teenagers swam and played with that smug abandon of those who know the tourist hordes still haven’t quite discovered their turf yet. My victory beer, a can of ice cold Cisk lager, was almost as glorious as John Mills’ upon reaching Alexandria, and I felt a sense of joy that Malta had, over the last week, yielded so many of its wonders to me. It is a place I would thoroughly recommend visiting, only remember to stock up on the repellent spray.