Tearing the city at the seams #23 - From Madrid to Valencia to anywhere

Where better to begin a trip in Spain than the very epicentre itself, Puerto del Sol in Madrid, ‘0km’ demarcated by a subtle paving slab beneath the clock-tower. From this nexus point it is possible to envisage the disparate segments from Galicia in the north-west, Andalucía in the south, Extremadura in the west and Catalonia in the north-east all straining, some firmer than others, on the moorings that prevent them from floating free and keep them anchored to the central post of Madrid.

(Side note: maybe this should be a solution for the fractious United Kingdom instead of forever slouching south towards London? A quick online search would tend to place this somewhere in Derbyshire...)

Being profoundly regionalist by nature, Spain is one country watching the developments surrounding the Scottish referendum with the scrutiny of an apprentice surgeon aware that they may soon have to perform a similarly tricky operation themselves.

As detailed in John Hooper’s comprehensive book ‘The New Spaniards’, this is a country that, since the death of General Franco in 1975, has oscillated remarkably across the political spectrum, with democratic socialism and pragmatic conservatism, together with a recline in the influence of the Catholic Church, dragging Spain into a modern Europe where, like many others post-recession, its stability is far from assured.

My girlfriend and I are instantly taken with Madrid, our expectations being somewhat more muted than for Barcelona, and the joie de vivre lifestyle and easy atmosphere seem to immediately corrupt one’s more intense London-centric sensibilities.

Traffic cascades in a steady ribbon up and down the main Gran Via and Calle Alcala but never feels oppressive or intolerable, merely a fixture of the scenery. The city feels pleasantly divested of the tourist maelstrom that we feel confident of in Barcelona; instead there is the air of a functional city – locals chat over coffee in plazas, shop for legs of ham that hang from butchers’ windows like cavemen clubs, and peruse glossy magazines from innumerable kiosks that punctuate the streets. I’m reading Hemingway’s ‘The Sun Also Rises’; his steady prose masterfully portraying the ecstatic abandon of the Spanish fiesta, so much so that I almost expect the tireless revellers to come barrelling round each corner before the running of the bulls commences.

The old heart of Madrid is easily explored on foot; the Plaza Mayor siphons tourists into the cobbled space from passageways leading upwards from the main street. Over the centuries, generations of aristocrats would gaze from their balconies onto the spectacle of the Inquisition’s ‘auto-da-fe’s, monarchs being crowned, fiestas and bull runs; now there is little more activity than Charlie Chaplin impersonators and a posse of waiters trying to reel in tourists to their overpriced restaurants like egregious lifeguards at the side of a swimming pool.

The sinuous alleyways of La Latina, enclosed by ochre walls and spindly iron balconies like stanzas of musical notation, break here and there onto an intimate plaza or small gothic church. We venture down to the El Rastro flea market barrio that with its beggars and street prostitutes instantly takes on a seedier, edgier vent; evidence of the tough realities of life in modern Spain for the down-at-heel.

We shelter from the heat in the Jardines de Sabatini, a Romanesque garden with intricate hedges and ornamental fountains from which the palace appears as imposing and dull as most, especially our own English Queen's pad. Indeed, it is uncertain times for Spain's monarchy, with Juan Carlos, long-feted as the king who helped steer the nation out of its post-Franco daze, withstanding a military coup along the way, deciding to secede the throne to his son Filipe IV.

Polls suggest that there is a rising tide of republican sentiment coursing through particularly the younger generations, which has lead many to conclude that perhaps Juan Carlos' true legacy of achievement is to have helped transform Spain to the point where his own role is now surplus to requirements.

We walk east along the Gran Via and into the Museo del Prado, hunting out Velazquez's realist masterwork 'Las Menines', Hieronymous Bosch's epic 'Garden of Earthly Delights' and Peter Bruegel's cataclysmic rendering of the apocalypse 'Triumph of the Death', in which an army of skeletons unleash hellfire and slaughter upon kings, revellers and countrymen alike in a chaotic danse macabre.

The greatest reverence though is reserved for Francisco de Goya's 'Black Paintings'; a series of 14 enigmatic and haunting murals that document the artist's downward spiral into hermetic madness and despair.

Madrid's artistic keg is not drained there though, for a few minutes' walk brings us to the Reina Sofia which exhibits more modernist works. Here are held numerous pieces by Dali - including 'The Enigma of Hitler' and 'The Grand Masturbator' - and of course, the piece de resistance, Picasso's monumental 'Guernica', a billboard-sized riot of high-octane depravity, chaos and symbology. Indeed so reverential does it feel to be able to examine such an icon up close and in person, it feels a little like sacrilege to leave the gallery.

It's easy to come away with a strong impression of the abstract and surreal visual style that burns brightly through avant garde Spanish culture, almost as though the common causality was the effervescent sunlight refracting colour into new dimensions and forms for the fertile artistic imagination to plunder. From Dali, Picasso and Gaudi, to Juan Gris and Joan Miro, whose starburst shapes of playful colour on everything from street murals to bank logos begin to appear almost as sunspots leaving their imprint on your retinas.

A couple of days later we arrive in Valencia, the young upstart city snapping at the heels of its elder siblings Madrid and Barcelona. It's an appealing and unpretentious place, with a modest medieval centre and its arms open wide onto the Mediterranean.

We stroll around the central plazas, overlooked by the Catedral, and its Miguelete tower. Inside is purported to be one of the prime contenders for the Holy Grail chalice itself; although with a fee of €10 each to take a look we decide against it. The Crystal Palace-like Mercado Central, a cavernous indoor food market is almost a religious experience in its own right, being a veritable cathedral of produce; fruit and vegetables arranged in the dazzling abundance and variety of rare antiquities brought back from foreign lands.

We try some chewy chorizo and sickly sweet sherry, perusing a whole harbour-full of fresh fish dredged up and slapped out on crushed ice for the punters. Racks of paella pans are lined up ranging from cymbal to gong-size, alongside glazed slabs of nougat stacked like gold bullion.

In the afternoons we head for the beach, a place with (for me) alarmingly little shade as the sun blazes on through the top-30s, and populated by young Valencians who look as though they must never migrate far from these white sands. Later on we gorge on seafood paella and get steadily sozzled on wine at the renowned Le Pepica, one-time favourite of Hemingway, Orson Welles and a smattering of legendary bullfighters.

On the subject of bullfighters, the one adversarial moment in my girlfriend's now firm resolve to emigrate to Spain as soon as possible, is when I drag her into the Museo Taurino (Bullfighting Museum). It's nestled just behind the stadium itself, which (if the posters of lederhosen and steins were anything to go by) appeared to be hosting an Oktoberfest in a bizarre cross-pollination of European cultural identities. I imagine that somewhere in Munich, flurries of flamenco dancing were spontaneously breaking out.

It's only through reading something like Hemingway's stolid 'Death in the Afternoon' that its possible to comprehend the deep strata of cultural significance that have built up upon the bedrock of the Spanish bullfight. Indeed, aficionados elevate to an almost balletic precision the drama of man versus beast, the skill and adeptness of the matador in bringing the bull to heel during their dual performance.

It's a necessary by-product of the act of travelling that one becomes exposed to milieus that might shock, surprise or challenge our ingrained sensibilities. Indeed were this not the case, the very praxis of travelling would be entirely moribund.

Trying to remind my girlfriend of this though is futile as museum footage displays bulls goring horses until their guts drape behind them like the train of a wedding dress, and the bull impaled by multiple picas until they can no longer see straight through their own blood. To those not emotionally invested in the ritual, the whole thing looks like what it is - a cruel anachronistic exhibition of human power over animals.

This qualifier aside though, there is something in the flourish the matadors perform, the way they draw the bull towards them before pivoting just out of reach of the horns, I think embodies the same flamboyant energy and poetic passion that can be seen in that other Spanish tradition, flamenco.

In a small bar in Madrid, we are awestruck by the fervent intensity and sensuous power of the dancers; the way the coagulating compas (rhythms) of the acoustic guitar and the jaleo (hand-clapping, feet stomping) interlock with the anguished vocals of the matriarchal cantaora (singer). The long skirts swish in perfect synchronicity and the upper bodies held rigid as heels become a blur, sounding like a jazz drummer trying to cram in as many flourishes as possible within the confines of each bar.

The real surprise of Valencia comes from a walk away from the old centre, following the course of the Rio Turia, a drained river that threads its way through the city, remade into a landscaped stretch of urban community space. It's almost an inversion of the so-called 'Garden Bridge' planned for London, or the High Line in New York; an existing feature reappropriated and exploited for the common use of the inhabitants.

Walking along at around 9pm is a wonderfully enervating experience, families are still out and about, joggers and cyclists as well, and groups of youngsters in the designated skate parks. I couldn't help but think that were this in Britain it would quickly become clouded over by the perils of urban decay and anti-social behaviour; although maybe such thoughts reflect an anticipation of the inevitable mediarised response to such a space and not the reality.

Eventually you arrive at La Ciudad de Las Artes y les Cencies, Europe's largest cultural centre, a gargantuan complex of stunning futurist architecture that is so effective that I find my sense of location gradually ebbing away. One of the structures bulbs out from an artificial lake like a gigantic blue whale breaching the surface; another incorporates streamlined steel limbs and supports; whilst another comprises a skein of sleek arches enclosing an oasis of landscaped vegetation as though it were ancient ruins that nature has sought to reclaim.

Strolling around beneath the walkways and dipping our feet in the icy-blue chlorine water of the pool that makes up this artificial archipelago, surrounded by thrusting high rise blocks and the drone of unseen traffic flows, I'm convinced that this is a vision of the ultra-modern future in which geographic alterity and temporality has been eroded. This could be Los Angeles or Toronto, Brasilia or Berlin, Dubai or Beijing; place itself feels entirely fluid and interchangeable once cultural signifiers are obscured or altogether removed and you are left simply to upload your imagination onto this white sterile template of blank forms. To paraphrase Marx, all that is solid, in terms of being somewhere, melts into the air of anywhere.

Masterworks of Cinema #6 - 'Martyrs'

Regarding films, as well as art in general, the very finest are frequently found to levitate above the landscape of the medium, held aloft by the ballast balloons of cultural critique so that it is almost impossible to approach them free of expectation. So it was that I viewed Pascal Laugier's 'Martyrs' with scarcely any awareness of its content or subject matter aside from it being held within the crude crucible of the New French Extremity movement, alongside others such as 'Inside', 'Livid', and 'Trouble Every Day'.

The gratification to be gained therefore from discovering it to be one of the most visceral and transgressive films ever made was magnified intensely. It must be said that I don't approach it lightly, singing the praises of such a film given that its gruellingly graphic violence and harrowing content will surely alienate and repulse many viewers. Indeed, the scythe of opinion sliced audiences markedly in two upon its release, and have remained divided ever since.

In my view, 'Martyrs' easily surpasses almost the entire undergrowth of exploitation or 'torture porn' horror films that have perforated the mainstream over the last couple of decades, by constantly confounding expectations and by daring to tackle weighty Manichean enquiries of embattled light/good and dark/evil.

The chief success of the film is in the way it manages to contort itself away from conventional horror tropes in a way expressly designed to disorient and confuse the audience. So the first hour proceeds as a more orthodox genre piece - a harrowing opening sequence of a bloodied and bruised child fleeing a rundown industrial complex, and the tormented dreams and delusions of the child in a care home thereafter. Fifteen years on, an apparently normal family are slain in cold blood at the breakfast table by a ruthless assassin who we subsequently learn is the young girl Lucie come to wreak her ambiguous vengeance.

Still she is possessed by terrifying visions of a monstrous being that compel her to brutal blasts of self-harm. Anna, her friend (and we are lead to believe lover), clings to her conviction of Lucie's victimhood but, like we the audience, cannot help but play host to the doubt that she may in fact be deranged. Gradually though we come to realise that the demon possessing Lucie is the psychological manifestation of an extreme guilt harboured for failing to help another young girl escape her torture 15 years previously, and for which the slaughter of the family (presumably the perpetrators) is her attempt at atonement.

It is this deconstruction of our formal belief systems regarding victimhood that resonates so powerfully for contemporary society, with the Yewtree investigations and the Rotherham sex gangs being such pertinent issues. So quick and adeptly are we to claim the role of victim for ourselves and our own misfortunes, but so equally swift to admonish those that may have a more legitimate and needful stake to the claim.

It is around the hour mark that the film begins to diverge away from this more familiar territory, as Anna is taken prisoner by a mysterious sect led by Mademoiselle who reveals to her their real intent. They seek to administer periods of methodical and systematic suffering to their victims in the hope of eventually cultivating their 'transfiguration' and making them a martyr.

The term 'martyr' derives from the Greek word meaning 'witness', and as Mademoiselle explains to Anna, 'martyrs survive pain, survive total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the mortal world, they give themselves up, they transcend themselves.' Upon achieving this transcendence through extreme suffering they might just glimpse through to 'the other side' and in so doing perhaps obtain the fundamental truths behind our very existence.

Accordingly, Anna passes through various stages of rebellion, despair and insanity to an eventual state of complete dehumanisation, her own self having been decidedly eroded. She is kept alive and beaten by anonymous operatives who proceed with a workman-like efficiency devoid of sadism, instead acting in the vein of Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil' dictum.

It is at this point that audience members will enter an internal wrestling bout with the film. Although the first act surpasses any of the 'Saw' or 'Hostel' gore-fests, it does so in a more familiarly squeamish manner. By contrast, the second act's relentless envelope-pushing in terms of documenting pain as a means of empirical investigation is a deviation into jarring, and purposely alienating, moral terrain.

Of course, what imbues the film with its legitimacy in my view and prevents it from appearing exploitative or flippant, is the historical nature of martyrdom and the all-too-recent examples of pain deployment in the name of some higher cause that continue to disturb our collective sensibilities.

Traditionally, martyrs were deemed to be holy and held in high regard by their followers for 'bearing witness'. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians were martyred for their faith by public burning by the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th and 17th centuries; and of course, the most famous martyr of all is Jesus Christ, the emblems of whose pain and suffering stare you in the face almost the instance you enter a church.

But it would be an error, as Mademoiselle tells Anna, to regard martyrs as an exclusively religious phenomenon. During the Holocaust, Drs. Mengeles and Rascher conducted twisted pseudo-scientific experiments on camp inmates such as exposing them to extreme temperatures and altitudes, performing transplants and vivisections, and using them as guinea pigs for a whole host of poisons, gases and other medical drugs. This was carried out with the same cold and calculated obedience as is portrayed in the film, with the deluded aim of attaining greater knowledge through others' suffering leading to some kind of enlightenment.

Consider as well, Unit 731 which was a covert research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII. Between 3,000 - 12,000 people (mostly Chinese) were systematically killed in experiments involving amputations, deprivation and biological weaponry. (As a side note, after the Imperial Army surrendered, the American government assisted them in covering up these wretched atrocities in exchange for the research data which they deemed to be of value in their on-going conflict with the Russians...)

The communistic social experiments of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot that claimed the lives of untold millions throughout the 20th century, also indicate a despotic authority ruthlessly engineering progressive policies that were designed so that the stated aims would justify the harsh means by which they had to be employed.

Look as well, at how humans have long utilised animals as a means of testing whole pharmacies of drugs and other products that aim to further our scientific understanding and subsequent enrichment of life.

Anna, once broken down fully and flayed alive by a surgeon, begins to transcend her physical reality in a wonderful '2001'-esque sequence gazing briefly through some mystic portal, that cosmic dimension which we all may eventually traverse. Similar to '2001', Laugier closes the film with an ambiguity that throws up a myriad of theories and conjecture - Mademoiselle, having had Anna's insight imparted to her, chooses to commit suicide, telling the congregation of her organisation to "keep doubting".

Perhaps Anna relays the fact that there really is nothing on the other side, that all her searching has been in vain; or perhaps she is told of the eternal damnation that awaits her for her crimes. Personally, I like to think that she was told of something so beyond the realms of our earthly comprehension, something either so sublime, evil or alien that she was simply not able to continue living a human existence in the full consciousness of such a revelation.

In the end this is, I believe, the film's overarching message; whatever it is that lies beyond, whatever can or cannot be attained through martyrdom, it is simply not knowledge to which we should be privy, we are mentally ill-equipped to fathom the boundless possibilities of whatever lies beyond this world and so indeed we are compelled, for the sake of our own humanity, to keep doubting.

Views on the Scottish Referendum

Many would probably say that September 18th cannot come quickly enough, that after such protracted debate all can finally be settled at the ballot box, the 'marriage/divorce' metaphors can be retired, and things can move on. Only really now in the final furlong has the seismic potential of the Scottish referendum struck me personally, being that it could possibly - with the dissolution of a union lasting over three centuries - be one of the most significant political events of my lifetime.

Watching the Salmond/Darling debates, I found it almost impossible after a while to resist sinking into a near-fatal state of boredom. The posturing charade appeared to be orchestrated around one loudly asserting a factual statement, armour-plated with statistics, and the other repudiating it, equally loudly, as being a lie.

Were I to be a Scot with a vote, I would by now have installed a force-field of scepticism to guard against almost anything Alex Salmond says. This is not to accuse him of being deliberately misleading, just that the notion that with a 'Yes' victory he will have secured his legacy in Scottish history alongside the likes of Hume, Scott and Burns, must surely be like trying to keep a thumb clamped over the pouring tap of his own ego. Objectivity for Salmond must long since have withered away under the beating sun of ambition and the humid lust for glory.

Economically, there are rows of persuasive pillars holding aloft the case for a union. I've tried engaging in these debates but I am no economist and cannot bring any fresh insight at all. All I know is that economics is crucial but, on this issue, it is far from being everything.

Rather oddly, I'm far more concerned about what the fate will be of the man who plays bagpipes on Westminster Bridge! He will no doubt be exiled to his native land forthwith as one very immediate victim of independence.

There are compelling arguments wrestling against each other with regard to the currency issue. The ‘Better Together’ campaign has stipulated that there will be no chance of a currency union in the event of independence, and in any case that would result in Scotland immediately ceding sovereignty to the Bank of England and the remaining UK’s economic policy.

However, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has countered that a currency union would not only be possible but accepted because of the Scottish and UK economies being so closely intertwined in terms of trade like fiscal loom bands (okay, I added the last part). In his view, the UK government is bluffing over its opposition, as it may well be about shipping contracts no longer being awarded to the Clyde; in line with Nicola Sturgeon’s assertion that contracts would persist by default on the grounds that it is the only place in the UK currently capable of fulfilling them.

Meanwhile, the Adam Smith Institute has touted the notion of ‘sterlingisation’, i.e. keeping the pound regardless of there being no union, the Bank of England not being ‘lender of last resort’, and so on. This has been cited as the ‘Panama model’ – several Latin American countries' adoption of the dollar – and suggests that, ‘far from being problematic, this constraint reduces moral hazard within the financial system and forces banks to be prudent, significantly improving the overall quality of the country’s banks.’ (Panama’s main banks are considered to be among the soundest in the world.)

This, I think it’s fair to say, could only be a positive step. The other opposition argument is that Scotland would lose their share in the harvest from the UK’s financial services industry, although this could also be seen as a welcome escape from a drastically over-ploughed field that is operating on borrowed time until inevitably it is surpassed elsewhere.

The journalist George Monbiot recently approached the issue in a fascinating reversal – that why would an independent country abandon their sovereignty and shackle themselves to the UK? For all the sentimentality propagated by the ‘No’ campaign, you have to wonder what exactly it is that they are so keen to preserve? Is it really anything more substantial or tangible than retaining the Saltire as the backdrop of the Union Jack?

It surely can’t be patriotism for a country run purely in the interests of the banking industry that we are told is simply ‘too big to fail’; where areas in the North of England are now some of the poorest in Europe; where (according to a 2012 study) some 46% of the top 50 publicly traded firms had a parliamentarian either as a director or a shareholder; and where, as James Meek demonstrates in his new book ‘Private Island’, vast tranches of formerly public services have been privatised and effectively re-nationalised in foreign countries.

The Scots should seize this chance at self-determination and aspire towards a leaner and more socially democratic country, free from the auspices of Westminster and the sun-like luminance of London around which the rest of the country is held in a rigid gravitational orbit. Free from a country in which Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are considered political mavericks, and where billions are due to be spent renewing Trident nuclear weapons. Wouldn’t you want to grab an opportunity for a real alternative from this if given the chance?

If I were to make a prediction, I believe the result will be negative. In the lead-up the headlines are full of polls predicting the gap to grow increasingly skinny as the patriotic fervour starts to starve rationality. Yet I think, once in the polling booth, pen in hand, the majority will buckle from the implied risks of voting ‘Yes’ and the anxiety of the relatively unknown. ‘Better the devil you know’, many may think to themselves, considering their children, their mortgage, their job, their savings.

Once the dust has settled and a few years of reflection have gone by, I doubt you’ll be able to go to Scotland and find a single Scot willing to admit having voted ‘No’. It’ll be rather like the Sex Pistols gig in Manchester that entered the annals of music legend, where nearly everyone of a certain age claims to have been one of the 50-or-so attendees…

Were Scotland to vote for independence, I think it would prove to be a tremendous colonic irrigation for the rest of the country; perhaps helping to shift the neoliberal capitalist dung heap that has built up on the centre ground over the last 20 or 30 years. People argue that without Scotland, Labour would struggle to win a majority in a general election. The surety of right wing dominance then might prove finally to be the galvanising impetus that wakes the political left from their interminable slumber and begins to assert itself as a radical and viable alternative.

To use the tired anthropomorphic analogy; it could have the effect on the British electorate of someone seeing a best friend leave their long-term partner and them slowly coming to realise that perhaps similar action regarding their own relationship might be the best course of action. So I say, go for it Scotland, take this chance whilst you have it and don’t look back!

Masterworks of Cinema #5 - 'Bicycle Thieves'

There are a certain few films that carry such a weight of cultural significance that it becomes imperative that the individual take measures to absorb them. ‘Bicycle Thieves’, in my view, is one of these films. Indeed, so highly do I rate the film’s merits that I believe it to be one that should almost be made compulsory viewing.

Made in 1948 by Vittorio De Sica, the film is perhaps the apotheosis of Italian neo-realist cinema; a movement leant significant traction by 1945’s ‘Rome, Open City’ (certainly, the two films could almost be seen as a custom-made double-bill).

Set in post-WWII Rome, the city’s workforce are struggling amidst the incessant drudgery of low employment, with scores of men hankering after each menial opportunity that arises. Ricci is just one forlorn face in the multitude of desperate men, so when he is offered the job of poster-sticker he is overjoyed at the fortunate hand that has been dealt him and his young family.

Maria, his long-suffering wife, makes one more, in what one senses is a long line of sacrifices, and trades in the family’s bed linen for a bicycle that is a stipulation of his job. But the hot springs of optimism are swiftly doused when it is stolen by an opportunist thief on his first morning of work.

The narrative tags along at the heels of Ricci and his young son Bruno on their desperate hunt across the city, becoming increasingly despondent and frantic as the chances of retrieving the bicycle dwindle into hopelessness, culminating in a dramatic moral balancing act upon the handlebars of Ricci’s conscience.

Following the neorealist lead of his forebears, De Sica filmed on the beleaguered streets of Rome, casting amateur actors whose real life circumstances were not dissimilar from those of his protagonists, thereby infusing the drama with an affecting documentary-style undercurrent.

Throughout the film, the simple bicycle comes to symbolise the sought-after bridge of opportunity between disparate points of reality; whilst representing mobility, not only in the physical but in the socio-economic sense as well.

It becomes an instrument of industriousness and enterprise, to be cherished with pride and sorely coveted when dispossessed. In one scene, Ricci and his friends hunt around a marketplace where bicycle component parts are piled high in such a way that the rows of disembodied frames, racks of tyres and miscellany of small parts come to engender wagons of food through the eyes of the starving.

The superfluity of things bearing down on everyone is painfully documented; from the mass anonymity of people going about their business in the city, pushing and shoving onto tramcars, to the perverse multi-storey racks of pawned bed linen that have been horded away by officials.

As well as this, the film highlights the predictable institutional roles that are found in times of austerity: conditional charity offered by the church; socialists pontificating on the struggles of the common man during evening gatherings; and people finding themselves resorting to irrational delusions as a means of hope, in this case a local fortune teller.

The gulf between social classes is never more salient than when Ricci decides to treat Bruno and himself to a meal in the restaurant, only to be looked down upon by a wealthy family scoffing and slurping through pasta and champagne. The artifice of Ricci’s bonhomie doesn’t hold up for long under the forensic glare of such ostentatious inequality.

The bicycle becomes potently emblematic of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, to the extent that in the climactic scene, the sight of such an abundant mass overwhelms and corrupts Ricci’s good sense. Anguish scars his face as he acknowledges how the desperate circumstances forced upon him by an impoverished society, have cost him not only his job but his dignity and self-respect as well. Bruno taking his father’s hand is a gesture that is at once heart-breaking and, in some small way, redemptive.

Aside from the film’s aforementioned merits, it is the density of resonance with contemporary society that makes ‘Bicycle Thieves’ essential viewing. With the Keynesian work/leisure promise having proven false, people working as long and hard as ever, and the scourge of unemployment afflicting most western nations post-financial crisis (in particular, Italy); the film encapsulates the harsh realities that tangle like barbed wire through the labour markets.

I have seen in South Africa the morning queues of men waiting by the roadside hoping for a day’s work; together with the swathe of zero-hours contracts blighting this country today, are evidence of the same demoralising imbalance of powers between worker and employer.

What ‘Bicycle Thieves’ succeeds in reinforcing is the real dignity that is invested in work, the self-inflicted penitence when it is withdrawn, and the universal desire simply to earn a living and provide for one’s family.

In times of inevitable war and economic upheaval, it is incumbent on society to resist the all-too-common (and often government-instigated) tendency to scapegoat and demonise those hit hardest. Doing so only succeeds in stripping us of our human decency whereas, if this film demonstrates anything, tolerance and solidarity ought to be the virtues that are promoted.

With that in mind, I think ‘Bicycle Thieves’ is a film that all politicians should be forced to watch, perhaps on an annual basis, as a rejuvenating top-up of their compassion levels like emotional vampires. For if the implied values promoted in the film were adhered to, it could well act as the empathetic pin to burst any over-inflated ideological bubble.

Culture - August

Reading:

Milan Kundera - 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
Arthur Miller - 'The Crucible' (play)
Evelyn Waugh - 'Decline and Fall'
Valerie Sonaris 'SCUM Manifesto' (non-fiction)
Stanley Milgram - 'Obedience to Authority' (non-fiction)
Ivan Chtcheglov - 'The Formulary for a New Urbanism' (essay)
John Hooper - 'The New Spainiards' (non-fiction)


Watching:

'The Trial' (Orson Welles)
'Eden Lake' (James Watkins)
'Good Will Hunting' (Gus Van Sant)
'The War on Democracy' (John Pilger) (documentary)
'The Last Temptation of Christ' (Martin Scorsese)


Listening:

King Creosote - 'From Scotland with Love'
Black Sabbath - 'IV'
Black Sabbath - 'Masters of Reality'
Merchandise - 'After the End'
Benji - 'Sun Kil Moon'
Royal Blood - 'Royal Blood'
The Wytches - 'Annabel Dream Reader'


In attendance:

'Digital Revolution' at the Barbican Centre, London
'The Crucible' at Old Vic, London
BBC Proms - West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall
BBC Proms - BBC Symphony Orchestra performing Richard Strauss' 'Elektra' at Royal Albert Hall

Tearing the city at the seams #22 - Manchester, so much to answer for...

Nostalgia is a benign affliction, a symptom that can both swaddle in comfort and smother uncomfortable progression. We are told that turning a blind eye to the past condemns us to its repetition, and yet unduly staring at the bright glare of our history is surely to amble blindly rather than stride purposefully across the expansive hinterland of the future.

A few months back, I revisited Manchester for a weekend. I lived there from 2009 to 2010, on an industrial placement year for my degree and, as punitive as I found the working experience to be, in many other ways that year was a formative one. I find myself looking back to my Manchester days through that disconcerting but telling veil of nostalgia that has set in over the intervening years like a pleasant mist.

In a similar way, Manchester itself is a city that has become contaminated with the lethargy of nostalgia, mediated via the esemplastic powers of culture and industry.

I decided I would undertake a lengthy walk of the city, outwards from the centre along the loose knot of canals that lasso themselves around Salford Quays, my former home, before returning back into the city proper. In so doing, I hoped to gain a certain reappraisal of my time in, and relationship with, this city.

I started out from the top of Oxford Road that branches off from the city centre and away past the wonderful Cornerhouse Arts Centre, slicing through the university complex and on into the student quarter. It was this area, formerly known as ‘Little Ireland’, that Friedrich Engels in his seminal ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’ denounced thus:

‘…the race that lives in these ruinous cottages…in measureless filth and stench…must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity… Only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally, and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home’.

Students may not, it could be agreed, be prone to hygienic living, but surely things have improved since Engels’ day?! Working conditions, pressed down under the palm of austerity, might be reminiscent, but now ‘Little England’ is also the ‘Curry Mile’ where the only atmospheric stench is that of baltis, vindaloos and masalas of varying degrees of appetisement.

I headed southwards towards Castlefield, passing the resplendent Georgian-era Midland Hotel, burdened down by the present rain, waiting for the sun to pump the blood around and enliven its red brick visage. By contrast, the priapic Beetham Tower swaggers high above the city like an architectural incarnation of Liam Gallagher’s microphone poise.

It is this high rise that typifies the dubious success of Manchester’s resurgence from the late-90s onwards. Whereas in London, a multitude of architectural tropes do continual battle for predominance and attention; in Manchester, there is a legible informality to the city – the Victorian-era terraces, the red-brick factories and mills of old ‘Cottonopolis’, the concrete high rises – that seem to sit uncomfortably with the brash migration of modernist steel and glass structures that have largely failed to integrate effectively.

Today, the Beetham Tower appears as a figment of the collective imagination, translucent against the grey and dreary sky, a ‘2001’ monolith subconsciously guiding the city of Manchester onwards in its redevelopment and assimilation for the ‘pseudo-modernist’ form.

The term is one coined by the writer Owen Hatherley, who wrote of Manchester in his book ‘The New Ruins of Modern Britain’, that it was ‘a flagship for urban regeneration and immaterial capitalism’, and ‘the ultimate failure of the very recent past, a mausoleum of Blairism’.

Whilst I myself don’t fully subscribe to these somewhat overwrought declarations, he does have an underlying point, that the spate of urban renewal and rejuvenation that grew out of the Blair-era neoliberal ideology of positivism fuelled by unfettered corporate and private wealth with scant regard for either taste or functionality. Hence, the Beetham Tower stands as the totem pole around which the property developers, landowners and market capitalists dance their fervent ritual.

As I headed away from the attractive enclave of Castlefield along the canal, I passed dozens of old red-brick mills and factories that have become appropriated and redeveloped as ‘luxury apartments’; part of the preliminary contractions in the ‘birth of the new Manchester’.

In many ways this can be seen as a necessary taxidermy, it being preferable to rejuvenate buildings whose purpose is now outmoded rather than let them sink into dereliction. Nonetheless, it does elicit one of those unavoidable pangs of solemn nostalgia and a sense of shame at how these dignified structures that served their productive and industrious functions are now seen merely as an in-vogue design aesthetic and a template for a uniform lifestyle choice, free to those who can afford it.

Maybe one day the shopping centres and entertainment complexes will also be transformed into ‘luxury accommodation’, with inhabitants giving meagre thought to the multitudes of people who once adhered to a defunct and technologically redefined pursuit. Speaking of which, the Arndale Centre sits centrally as the pulsing heart of commerce, and as hordes of Saturday shoppers traipse to and fro across Piccadilly Gardens, it brings to mind images of a Lowry painting for the 21st century – weather-beaten, down-trodden stick men and women lurching across a canvas of grey from River Island to Top Shop to H&M…

Continuing along the canal path, it struck me as to just how different Manchester is from London, in that barely 10 minutes’ walk can take you out from under the shadows of the built environment to bask in relative isolation. This stretch of edgeland between Manchester and Salford Quays, known as Pomona, is largely sparse wasteland and overgrown storage plots, with only the passing of a raised tram to sow together the opposing urbanities.

Before long, my former home, the Abito apartment complex, hoved into view; its ‘edgy’ design of a sail-cum-roof hovering above the main frame of the building giving it the appearance of having moored at the quayside. Perhaps this was the architects’ subtle way of evoking the docks, by designing modern apartments that appear to have foregone their sea-faring days in favour of static habitation, like the Queen Mary (now a hotel) in Long Beach, California.

Viewing the Abito complex from the opposite side of the dock, however, gave the impression of it being an open-plan office space hoisted by 90-degrees; rows of identical modular units for people to operate within. I well remember sitting on my balcony staring out over the cosmetic terrain of the Quays, with its high rises standing alone like Mayan temples, trying to superimpose the imagined past of the dockers, ships and machinery over the top of its manicured present.

The primary reason why I was grateful to live in Manchester was that I fully bought into the heady cultural (specifically musical) currency on which the city still seemed to trade quite shamelessly.

Manchester in the late-70s was the British equivalent of Berlin or New York; it was a cauldron of creative energy that seemed to grow its tonality in direct alignment with the bleak aesthetics of the urban space. The notorious (and now redeveloped) Hulme Crescents were the fermentation of industrial estate nihilism; together with the anonymous walkways, dilapidated warehouses and abandoned factories the only feasible backdrop for the monochromatic futurism of Joy Division and the abrasive abandon of The Fall. Harsh concrete and social decay beneath a sky of constantly rain-engorged grey.

This era is mythologised to great effect by, among other things, the photography of Kevin Cummins, the exuberant romp of Michael Winterbottom’s ’24 Hour Party People’, and the more refined Ian Curtis biopic ‘Control’ by Anton Corbijn. Indeed, if you know where to look, Manchester is saturated with pop culture signifiers – of course there’s the ‘Joy Division bridge’ straddling Princess Parkway; you can go and ‘gravely read the stones’ a la Morrissey in ‘Cemetry Gates’; there’s Mr Sifter’s record shop that ‘sold [Oasis] songs’ as recounted in ‘Shakermaker’.

‘You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built…’ – Ivan Chtcheglov

Under the helmsman-ship of the civic-punk Tony Wilson, Manchester managed to shrug off its grim industrial shroud to become ‘Madchester’, the epicentre of Britain’s ‘rave culture’ during the 1980s, with his Factory Records championing the likes of New Order and the Happy Mondays, as well as the Hacienda becoming one of the foremost pioneering nightclubs in the world.

Reading Peter Hook’s memoir ‘How Not To Run a Club’, you can only despair at the scale of ineptitude that somehow sustained the Hacienda on a trapeze-of-sorts for so long, at the vanguard of the acid house scene, before finally imploding in a sorry miasma of drugs, debts and gangsterism in the mid-90s.

The whole ethos of the enterprise was of such an anarchic bent that its ultimate downfall ensured that similar ventures could probably never scale the commanding heights of the British music scene again. Too many safety nets have now been placed beneath the high wire, and in any case, no one really cares whether anyone falls off or not.

This is the paradox at the heart of Wilson’s Manchester; that his revolutionary tenacity, adrenalizing the limpid bloodstream of the city, tore down old barriers yet in so doing erected new but culturally bereft watchtowers of commercialised deference to the past that bear down on the city’s once progressive spirit. With his utopian vision of a re-born Manchester and his steely determination for progress, there are parallels to be drawn between him and Thatcher, in that the short-term success of their grand projects failed to herald in the long-term legacy that they had envisaged.

As Chtcheglov says in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, which Wilson would certainly have been aware of – ‘you can’t take 3 steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.’

Today, the site of the Hacienda has become the ‘Hacienda Apartments’, and along the canal-side is wrought in steel an inscription of the quote that gave it its name. Nowadays, any by-the-numbers Oceana or Tiger-Tiger ‘superclub’ chain, spewing out alchopopped revellers into the gutters of every major British city, are following beat-for-beat the free-form improvisations of the Hacienda.

During my year in Manchester, I was frequently beset with personal unhappiness, searing through both myself and my circumstances. Often it felt like I was attempting to construct a personal ideal from many separate component parts, the instruction manual for which was illegible, whilst under scrutiny several of the crucial pieces were found to be missing. On the positive side, I learnt to adapt to relative solitude, and instil a creative discipline that still informs me today.

Standing on the quayside of Salford, bristling at the insistent rain, I acknowledged that for me, Manchester will likely always conjure up these conflicting emotions. I felt an urge to reach out from my now more stable, content, yet still confused present to my former self and either put a reassuring arm around his shoulders or slap him across the face, or both at the same time.

In many ways then, my hike around Manchester did yield some cathartic qualities, and give me cause to consider that, similarly with the city itself, the successes and strife of our past should be balanced on the scales of nostalgic reverence; neither glorified nor lamented to the detriment of our appreciation of the present.