Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Culture - May
Books read:
Oscar Wilde - 'The Importance of Being Earnest' (play)
Will Self - 'Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys' (short stories)
Charles Mackay - 'Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds' (non-fiction)
Charles Dickens - 'Night Walks' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Day of Creation'
Gustave Flaubert - 'Madame Bovary'
Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions’ was a weighty, sometimes long-winded, oftentimes fascinating examination of the many follies and delusions that have gripped humankind with such a stranglehold throughout civilisation. It explored such issues as the South-Sea Oil Bubble, witchhunting, the Christian crusades, alchemy, and haunted houses; clinically exposing the rank ignorance, gullibility and fervid imaginations that combined to propagate and maintain such collective insanities.
Throughout my reading, I couldn’t help but notice the striking parallels and depressing recurrences between these and popular delusions that still cling fast to contemporary societies (celebrity obsessions, social media, late capitalism, perhaps?)
I also strongly enjoyed Flaubert’s ‘Madame Bovary’, it being far more than the dry romanticism I had been expecting. The characters were painted with such an alacrity – their effeteness, deviance and connivance coming across in such vivid tones – and the eponymous heroine with her air of desperate desire that would inevitably run her to ruin, that propelled me swiftly through the book.
Films Watched:
'Eyes Wide Shut' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Chernobyl Diaries' (Bradley Parker)
'The Stone Roses: Made of Stone' (Shane Meadows) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
May was a slow month for new films. I found ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ to be rather more gripping and intriguing than I had been lead to believe by Kubrick purists, although far from being a satisfactory final act in the director’s unrivalled cinematic career.
Shane Meadows’ unabashed ‘love letter’ to the Stone Roses was as fine a tribute as could have been expected, and whilst it occasionally fell short of being the comprehensive documentary of the band’s career that I hoped for in favour of shameless misty-eyed nostalgia, it instead beautifully portrayed the kind of mad adoration instilled in hardcore music fans. Surely, a modern-day delusion worthy of Mackay?!
Albums Played:
Primal Scream - 'More Light'
The Fall - 'Cerebral Caustic'
The Fall - 'The Marshall Suite'
The Fall - 'Country on the Click (The Real New Fall LP)'
The Fall - 'Reformation Post-T.L.C.'
The Fall - 'Imperial Wax Solvent'
The Fall - 'Re-Mit'
The Rolling Stones - 'Undercover'
The Rolling Stones - 'Dirty Work'
The Rolling Stones - 'Steel Wheels'
The Rolling Stones - 'Flashpoint' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'Voodoo Lounge'
Can - 'Soundtracks'
Savages - 'Silence Yourself'
The National - 'Trouble Will Find Me'
I enjoyed the new Primal Scream album an awful lot; a defiant step in the right direction for them after more recent albums of dreary second-rate Stones emulation. By contrast, The Fall’s 30th album ‘Re-Mit’ was decidedly mediocre to my ears, bereft of any real diversity or creative zeal. Being The Fall though, the album was still a compelling, if ultimately disappointing, listen.
The hotly-tipped female post-punk band Savages released their debut album ‘Silence Yourself’. Although their influences seep from every aural pore, this is a band with an adrenalized grit and raw power that is seldom heard in today’s bands. A very welcome burst of aggression.
Perhaps the musical epigone of Savages, The National’s new album ‘Trouble Will Find Me’ had me continuing to scratch my head at the abiding popularity of this band. After several attempts to engage with their music I find them to be tediously maudlin, tepid and uninspired; I’m continuously left baffled at the precise basis of their appeal.
Gigs Attended:
Damo Suzuki & The Dream Machine Allstars, + Eat Lights Become Lights (at Windmill Brixton)
The Fall (at Clapham Grand, London)
This month I was lucky enough to see Damo Suzuki just round the corner at the wonderfully dingy Windmill Brixton. The frontman of legendary German band Can during their ‘golden era’ of 1970 - 1974, Suzuki now tours through a means of connecting with a network of ‘sound carriers’ – local musicians he enlists for a largely improvised live band. Damo and his band (including members of the also excellent Eat Lights Become Lights), eschewed any breaks, playing almost 90 minutes of scorching hypnotic trance-rock that had myself and the crowd of around 100 captivated throughout.
Can were, of course, majorly influential for The Fall, who I saw for the third time this month. Despite not being as revelatory an experience as my first time at a tiny club in Manchester, the band were tight as they ripped through predominantly new material (which naturally improved in a live setting), with Mark E Smith appearing to be in a mischievously positive mood, despite now being forced to disappear at regular intervals for a sit-down behind the amp stacks. The down-side was the venue’s strict curfew which compelled them offstage at 11pm sharp, meaning we were unlucky in missing out on a customary encore.
Exhibitions:
Andre Kertesz - 'Truth and Distortion' (at the Atlas Gallery) (photography)
'Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective' (at the Tate Modern)
'A Walk Through British Art' (at the Tate Britain)
This month I went to the Tate Modern to see their blockbuster Lichtenstein retrospective. It’s hard to appreciate the true scale of Pop Art’s radicalism and innovation viewing them in 2013. Indeed, I tried my hardest to approach the pieces as though the last 50 years of modern art hadn’t yet happened. The problem is, I found, that Lichtenstein’s deadpan renditions of advertisements and household objects in dot stencil form have become so ubiquitous and universal, long since adopted by the very industry they were designed to ironize, that they fail to strike as anything other than passé. His most famous works from the 1960s on war and romance do still, like the best cartoon art, have a genuine resonance (on a side note, I think that some of Herge’s Tintin cartoons should likewise be exhibited in art galleries, but that’s beside the point).
I was intrigued to see Lichtenstein’s lesser-known works on sunsets and seascapes, mirror surfaces and parodies of other artists’ work like Picasso and Monet (of these I was actually disappointed he didn’t go further in pastiching more well-known artworks – a Benday dot Mona Lisa perhaps?!) In his later career though, it’s clear that he was an artist wrestling with the style and technique that had made his name, akin to listening to the Rolling Stones trying to shape-shift into disco beats and New Wave in the 1980s, desperately clinging to a fading relevance. By stretching his trademark form to attempt nude renderings, abstract expressionism and Chinese landscapes, you get the feeling that he was frustrated by the confines he had set by his own early innovation.
Sunday, 2 June 2013
Tearing the City At the Seams #9 - A Hike Through Ballardian Territory – Shepperton to Heathrow
For a split second I was convinced that the powers of fate had colluded to engineer a car crash at the end of J.G. Ballard’s road, thereby definitively validating my solo expedition in tribute to his legacy.
A car teased its snout forward from a T-junction into the path of another snarling vehicle, which managed to halt inches from collision, amidst a crescendo of horn blaring and tyre squawking. Not that I willed an achieved impact between these two cars; I just couldn’t help rejoicing in the almost beautiful sense of poetic justice at play given the purpose of my excursion to Shepperton. This was principally to pay homage to the late J.G. Ballard, who ever since reading his notorious ‘Crash’ (a book exploring the themes of auto-erotic death), has been of the foremost importance in my own creative fermentation.
The plan for my pilgrimage hike was to get the train to Shepperton, the leafy London suburb where Ballard lived from 1960 until his death and where he wrote all his fiction. From there, I would walk the 6 miles north to the Heathrow Hilton, a place Ballard called his ‘spiritual home’ and one of his favourite buildings in the world.
I was aware of the subversive nature of ‘Crash’ before I read it, aged 19, and in so many ways it exploded all my preconceived ideas of what literature should be about, its possibilities, its raison d’etre. Ballard’s own summation of the book that he was ‘trying to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror’, was a succinct one, and after several re-reads over the last few years, it has lost none of its raw power, shockingly transgressive edge and often sublimely imaginative imagery.
I vividly remember putting the book down after reading the first page and experiencing a cocktail of deflation and euphoria. The former, because I knew that here was someone who was mining precisely the same literary pit that I naively had it in mind to, albeit substantially superior. The latter, because I knew I had found a writer whose entire bibliography I would revel in and extract the utmost inspiration and stimulation, and this has been borne out over the last few years of reading my way through his work. Never before had I experienced such a profound connection with a writer, never before had I desired such an urge to reach out and make a connection. Therefore, the selfish disappointment I felt when hearing of his death from cancer just a few weeks later was undeniably palpable.
Arriving at Shepperton station I took a few minutes to stroll up and down the High Street, taking in the ‘small town’ aesthetic; the quaint bakery, the community centre that was trying to muster enthusiasm for some fundraiser or other, the Budgens supermarket. From here I started walking up Old Charlton Road, the sense of anticipation mounting as I neared his former home. I had read, on various fan websites, plans that had been mooted after his death about turning his ramshackle semi-detached house into a museum of some kind, although sadly this came to nothing (despite being an example of the kind of navel-gazing nostalgia he himself had always been opposed to).
I was thrilled to find that it was still the shabbiest property on the entire road; Ballard described himself as living ‘like a refugee’ in his home, allowing the place to gradually deteriorate around him. As I paused to take photographs, I could detect movement of a new occupant within, and felt slightly abashed. However, as much as I believe people obviously have a right to privacy in their own home, I don’t think they can rightfully take umbrage at a prevailing interest due to a former inhabitant; instead they should accept it in good grace and feel a sense of pride that their house holds a certain resonance for some people, or else don’t buy it in the first place.
I followed the road until it merged with a country lane and a thin picturesque river that threaded its way through long grass in an ethereal way that reminded me of Tarkovsky’s close-up shots in ‘Solaris’.
Emerging from the woodland thicket, a concrete walkway circled round in a helix leading up to a walkbridge across the M4 motorway. It was hard not to get carried away with the Ballardian imagery encapsulated by such a sight, my discovery of this Neolithic concrete structure abandoned by an outdated society, fossilised through the ages and left for nature to reclaim.
Walking to the centre of the bridge span was a strangely jarring sensation; the sleepy suburban environs being impaled by this raging river of high-speed transit. I could feel myself starting to occupy the same spiritual headspace as Ballard would have when surveying the scene – the cars racing by in pursuit of their own private destinations, whilst in the distance planes one-by-one approached Heathrow airport, in a stately descent as though an invisible lasso was reeling them in to the ground.
I decided to divert slightly from my course and walk to the famous film studios, that Ballard claimed had a psychological leak effect in terms of their imprint on the unconscious imaginations of the town’s inhabitants who viewed their sedate surroundings with an almost filmic rendering, as though the studio productions of captured fiction had spilled over into their everyday lives. Finding little more than a security fence and some rather shabby backlot barns, looking for all the world as if they were relics of a medium whose scene had long since departed, I turned back to regain my plotted course.
My route took me round the perimeter of the vast Queen Mary reservoir; its steep banks lending Shepperton the impression of being below the natural water line, flowing direct from the pages of Ballard’s early natural disaster novels, particularly of course ‘The Drowned World’. I sat on the benches outside the sailing clubhouse and surveyed the landscape; this colossal man-made aquamarine feature striking such a contrast with the main roads and tightly-clenched residential streets that surround it. Indeed it struck me as almost a surrealist landscape (Ballard often repeated the fact that his own creative influences were less literary figures and more surrealist painters such as Dali, Magritte and Ernst), this marine expanse positioned on a topographically higher level than the surrounding suburbs.
I couldn’t help but wonder how the nearby residents incorporated this reservoir into their psyches, whether their dreams were irrigated by this apocalyptic body of water contained at so proximate a distance, and their sense of personal fallibility in relation to its intrinsic destructive power.
As I continued on my way, following the Clockhouse Lane, the dreary monotony of the surroundings began to seep through. The blandness of the roads, with the occasional smattering of shops and pubs, recalled to mind all the homogeneous landscapes of business parks, airport terminals and shopping malls; Marc Auge's 'non-places', which Ballard infused in his writing.
In terms of his masterwork, many point to the mainstream quasi-autobiography ‘Empire of the Sun’, but personally I would elevate ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ to that prestigious accolade. Aside from his novels, Ballard was an incredible architect of the short story, and indeed it could be argued that these are the true gems unearthed from his imaginative quarry.
Reading these stories from collections such as ‘Myths of the Near Future’ or ‘Vermillion Sands’, one cannot help but rejoice in the sheer prophetic power Ballard seemed able to conjure at will. A story like ‘Billennium’ echoes with a terrifying clarity on the issue of contemporary city overcrowding and space shortage; ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ explores the potentially violent consequences of a life dominated by a pre-empted version of social media; ruminations of the post-Space Age malaise that afflicted the mass collective psyche in ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’; and explorations of a wholesale personal rejection of modern life and its discontents in ‘The Enormous Space’, to hint at just a handful.
As I began my approach to Heathrow, truly a city in and of itself, the roadways thickened and the environs gradually grew colder and evermore artificial. I was reminded of a common experience of mine whilst endlessly hiking around Los Angeles (as well as other US cities), of feeling utterly subservient to the tyranny of the infrastructure. As a pedestrian, your right of way is almost entirely eroded in favour of soul-crushingly extended routes as vehicular transit invariably assumes predominance.
Sitting on a grassy hillock at the Heathrow perimeter, I could stare straight at the gigantic Hilton hotel that stood as my destination, but I was at a loss as to how exactly to reach it on foot, seen as how it was seemingly entangled by teeming roads as a castle is by a defensive moat. It was only by taking a prolonged detour doubling back on myself along an arterial sliproad that I was able to complete the walk. In such inhospitable pedestrian terrain you are almost reprimanded with the logical conclusion of the futility of walking, its alien concept as a mode of traversing these largely automated landscapes. Here on the hinterlands of Heathrow, I felt I was far more immersed in a Ballardian wilderness than in Shepperton; the featureless and bland expanse of carriageways, flyovers and aircraft hangers bound together to exert an equisitely dehumanising impression, without any recourse to geographic or cultural identity.
Trudging along grassy verges of carriageways, and kerb edges of long-stay car parks, you really get a definite sense that merely by the act of walking, you are somehow subverting the well-defined order of things. You can almost taste the bitter ridicule from speeding cars and airport shuttle buses that pass you by in your apparently pointless and lonely endeavour. Here on the airport fringes, the role of the pedestrian has not been factored into the infrastructural matrix, the terrain exists as an annexed zone into which amblers venture entirely at their own volition.
When finally I found my way to the Heathrow Hilton, I was instantly struck by the monolithic vacuity of the structure, the brilliant transluency and anonymity that the building engendered. I sat drinking an over-priced beer on a plush leather seat amongst the mostly lone people, islanded on separate tables as though they were survivors of a shipwreck floating on improvised life rafts.
The imagination conjures up images of space hangers or way-stations for futuristic travellers; the double-ended transparent elevations adding to the impression of some incredible mechanised filtration system. Ballard called this place his ‘spiritual home’ and said in a 2003 interview that:
‘[it’s] a white cathedral, almost a place of worship, the closest to a religious building that you can find in an airport. Sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one feels no emotions and could never fall in love, or need to.’
The great success of the Hilton is its reflecting and instilling, with bland featureless décor and expansive atrium of open space, the ephemera of presence, the transient nature of all who pass through en route to some extraneous global destination. An environment of ghosts that flitter through without staying long enough to even register the structure on its own terms. It is a building not meant to be noticed, not meant to distract attention, or infringe on mental space in any tangible way.
I felt validated therefore, that my hike should find as its end point a place of functional transience in which only the person who has reached it as a final destination in its own right can objectively decipher its inherent logic. With my walk complete I felt that I had paid apt homage to the great Sage of Shepperton. More importantly, I felt I had achieved, in a psychical sense at least, through feeding vicariously from the imaginative landscape he cultivated, some semblance of that longed-for connection.
Monday, 20 May 2013
Tearing the city at the seams # 8 - A Walk Around Brixton
Having spent over a year living in Brixton, I thought it only right to focus a piece of writing on my observations following a short walk around the area. Less tearing at the seams, more picking at the stitches, if you like.
Starting out from my flat on Lambert Road part way up the gentle incline of Brixton Hill, facing down the main road offers a strangely unobstructed view of the cuspidate City skyline. I find this view, as I step out on my way to catch the morning bus, arresting in its orientational immediacy, as though this were a main cable plugging straight into the circuit board of London itself. After dark, with the Shard illumined like a gigantic lightning conductor, its easy to fantasise about these steel and glass structures being some kind of Emerald City to which all traffic is ceaselessly flowing in pilgrimage.
A stone’s throw back up the hill is the charming Brixton Windmill (one of the last remaining in London), and the prison marinading in its own grim notoriety. A short distance across the road you’ll find the beautiful Brockwell Park, a refreshing green expanse that offers another grand panoramic skyline view from Battersea Power Station’s chimneys to Canary Wharf’s elephantine skyscrapers. Indeed, I often find myself intrigued by the horizontal tableau of the skyline which pulls taut the bows and bends of the Thames to give the bizarre geographical misconception of the Houses of Parliament being further distanced from the London Eye than in reality.
Walking down the main road you end up at the main apex point of Brixton, the frozen explosion of roads. On one side, Lambeth Town Hall looms archly with its regal domed clocktower. Opposite, is Windrush Square, named after the boat that in 1948 transported the first of many successive waves of immigrants from the West Indies that came to characterise the area so dramatically. Flanking the square is the Ritzy Picturehouse, one of my favourite cinemas in the world; wonderfully maintained in its original decadent 1911 design.
Turning down Coldharbour Lane, past the modish Dogstar pub and under the railway bridge, you’ll find a striking mural ‘Nuclear Dawn’ transforming the side wall of a run-down social housing building. Painted in 1981, this haunting portrait depicts a skeleton of Death striding across the London landscape as a nuclear mushroom cloud blooms in the background, and doves of peace in flight morph into the CND logo. It is a genuinely thought-provoking paean to Cold War-era paranoia, but is currently under threat due to redevelopment; such is the way. There are a handful of other murals in the area; a quite disturbing rendering of a bunch of seemingly demonic children on the backside wall of Brixton Academy, and a scene of enchanting whimsy with trompe-l’oeil effect on the side of a house on Glenelg Road.
Walking up Atlantic Street, past wig emporiums, open-front halal butchers and fishmongers, one starts to gain an impression as to the sensory ebullience of the place. The pavements are athrong with scents of fish, jerk chicken and cannabis puffed by genuine Rastafarians; Caribbean women pull shopping carts along behind them as though they were fishermen hauling their catch for the day up the beach. The sounds of reggae music and stall owners hawking their trade permeate through the air. On Electric Avenue, stalls and shops are ramparted with stacks of colourful fruit and veg; Scotch Bonnet chillis, hairy yams, bulging plaintains, blushing ackee.
At this point (where Electric Avenue meets Atlantic Street) it is worth reflecting that, if viewed subjectively, it is possible to see just how modern Brixton must once have appeared; you can almost discern a representation of a modernist ideal in its layout and infrastructure. The intersecting train lines scale the roofs of shops, passing through and between elevations, in an intriguing symbiosis with the transits of pedestrians and other traffic, giving the impression almost of a singular organism with each separate limb maintaining a finely-tuned synergy.
Indeed, in the late 19th century, Brixton was a hub of industrial modernity, with Chatham Main Line having been constructed, as well as Electric Avenue (of the Eddy Grant song fame) being the first electrically-lit street in London. In fact, it was only after Brixton was badly bombed during WWII that the roots of urban decay took firm hold, and the previously abundant middle classes were swiftly supplanted by the working class and West Indian migrants. It is an interesting dichotomy that is today still quite a pertinent characteristic.
The area has, like many similar London districts, been undergoing a period of gentrification, most noticably in Brixton Village, a bohemian rabbit warren of independent restaurants and cafes catering for the fickle metropolitan 'foodie' crowd who now flock in their droves.
It remains to be seen just how pronounced or defined this period of regeneration will be. The current local contention is the arrival of Foxtons estate agents to the high street, burrowing their way inside the carcass of another failed business, with their ostentatious glass façade, post-grad staff still wearing in their flashy new suits, and white chrome décor that looks like the space station from ‘2001’.
The opening has been the target of some petty but admittedly quite amusing vandalism from disgruntled locals, who understandably object to this unabashed influx of capitalist infidels intent on pumping rent prices with their fiscal steroids. I empathise entirely with the dissenting opinion, but one look around at the high street also makes one wonder; why was it that this particular opening was deemed one step too far? Why were the openings of several big banks or branches of H&M, Starbucks, Costa Coffee or Boots not also considered offensively corporate? I think the reductivist answer to this is simply that the aforementioned companies are selling people consumables (which Brixtonians adore as much as anybody else), whereas Foxtons are selling Brixton as a brand to outsiders with cash to invest.
For decades the ‘problem child’ of London boroughs, exacerbated by the police’s misguidedly heavy-handed methods which sparked several riots in the 80s and 90s, the area appears to be going through a period of relative placidity; that would certainly be borne out by my own observations over the past year. The police’s more recent adoption of a ‘softly-softly’ approach to dealing with casual drug use might have something to do with this; but despite the tolerance, co-harmony, and lively diversity, there is still the sense of antagonism and tension fermenting just below the surface calm.
All this aside, in terms of the future, Brixton will have to adapt to this next unavoidable chapter in its rich history, and decide whether to try running blindly ahead of, or continue the cautious dipping of its feet in, the onrushing tides of gentrification, all in an effort to avoid being washed over entirely.
Thursday, 9 May 2013
Culture - April
Books Read:
Martin Amis - 'The Rachel Papers'
Jean Baudrillard - 'America' (non-fiction)
Edith Wharton - 'The Age of Innocence'
James Joyce - 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
J.G. Ballard - 'Running Wild'
This month I enjoyed, rather more than anticipated, Edith Wharton's charming tale of 1920's high society New York 'The Age of Innocence'. I found its depiction of flatulent opulence and snobbery, juxtaposed with the touching themes of romantic longing and unrequited affection very well observed.
Joyce's 'Portrait' was, on the other hand, much harder work, due to the myriad historial, political and cultural references of the period strewn throughout, but nevertheless I was left awe-struck at times by the sublimity of the prose. The novel is a series of vignettes that are moved between following the bildungsroman literary form of Stephen Dedalus' coming of age. Frequently these were inspired in their delivery; notably the ruction caused in Stephen's house at Christmas dinner due to the irreconcilable political and religious differences between the parties present, and the priest's sermon describing the awful infinity of Hell, which was so powerful that it made me want to rush to confessional and repent my sins immediately.
Films Watched:
'Brief Encounter' (David Lean)
'Trance' (Danny Boyle) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Kill List' (Ben Wheatley)
'Ted' (Seth MacFarlane)
'The Evil Dead' (Fede Alvarez) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Local Hero' (Bill Forsyth)
'Momento' (Christopher Nolan)
The prospect of going to the cinema to see a remake of ‘The Evil Dead’, a cult classic that was one of the defining films of my formative teenage years, didn’t exactly inflate me with joy. Having bought the trilogy box set aged about 14 or 15, I then spent much time at school regaling others with the grotesque gore and splatter-ific excess that the films expurgated. Many sleepovers were subsequently attended by me and my DVD box set.
Fondness for the original aside, I actually found myself really enjoying the Sam Raimi-endorsed remake. Whilst none of the comedic or slapstick tropes of the original were in evidence, the source material was hacked back to the very bone of brutality, providing more wince-inducing moments than I’ve seen in any recent horror offering. Overall though, I couldn’t help feeling frustrated with the lack of contemporary horror films to rival 80s classics like ‘The Evil Dead’. I’m sure I’m not alone in pining for that low-key, word-of-mouth film to come along and send electric shockwaves through the nostalgic corpse of modern horror cinema.
Albums Played:
Bonobo - 'The Northern Borders'
The Fall - 'Grotesque (after the Gramme)'
The Fall - 'Perverted by Language'
The Fall - 'The Frenz Experiment'
The Fall - 'Extricate'
The Fall - 'Shift Work'
The Rolling Stones - 'Their Satanic Majesties Request'
The Rolling Stones - 'Beggar's Banquet'
The Rolling Stones - 'Let it Bleed'
The Rolling Stones - 'Sticky Fingers'
The Rolling Stones - 'Exile on Main Street'
The Rolling Stones - 'Goat's Head Soup'
The Rolling Stones - 'It's Only Rock & Roll'
The Rolling Stones - 'Black and Blue'
The Rolling Stones - 'Some Girls'
The Rolling Stones - 'Emotional Rescue'
Junip - 'Junip'
Junip - 'Fields'
The Knife - 'Shaking the Habitual'
Iggy & the Stooges - 'Ready to Die'
Deerhunter - 'Monomania'
Having successfully managed to secure tickets for The Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary gig in Hyde Park later in the summer, I decided to explore the depths of their intimidatingly gargantuan back catalogue. The period of late 60s to early 70s is, of course, the golden age of their career with one classic album following another, providing some of the most iconic music of the 20th century. Personally, I found myself tiring of the over-wrought American blues inflections of ‘Exile on Main Street’, but enjoyed the often overlooked transitional album ‘Goat’s Head Soup’. By the time the mid-to-late 70s arrived though, the truly terrible ‘Black and Blue’ and the stale ‘Emotional Rescue’ serve as evidence of how irrelevant they had come to sound in the wake of bands like The Clash, Joy Division and the wider punk rock scene.
Exhibitions:
Ansel Adams - 'Photography from the Mountains to the Sea' (at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013 (at the Photographer's Gallery, London)
I went into the National Maritime Museum exhibition on Ansel Adams firmly expecting to be stunned by the sheer epic-ness of the display, much like someone going to the dentist anticipates leaving with a spring-cleaned, and perhaps numbed, mouth.
Its quite hard to objectively critique any of the images to any meaningful level, since demonstrably they were all both technically and visually monumental. And yet it’s equally hard to pinpoint much of the photographer’s tangible influence, his creative fingerprints if you like, being that the wondrous landscapes and scenery he captures are so self-evident. How could anyone, I found myself wondering, possibly take a bad photograph of the Mirror Lake in Yosemite, for instance?
This was reflected, much like the hills in the lake surface, by a woman I overheard when viewing a series of geyser shots; “I mean, I know they are terrific images, but I can’t feel any emotional attachment to it”. Initially, I privately concurred with her confusion, convinced that all the attendees could hope to expect was to be lulled into an inertia of the epic. But later I found myself subverting this by asking – so what if we can’t feel any emotional attachment with it?! Why must we seek such a plateau of heightened engagement in every single thing we find ourselves exposed to?
I deduce that this inclination is due to ourselves being constantly and unremittingly deluged with demands on our emotional engagements, through the mass media, internet, digital technologies, and just generally existing in what Jean Baudrillard termed ‘the simulation and simulacra of the hyper-real society’. Our minds, in order to cope and remain sane in such an environment, learn to shut off and deny emotional responses to the vast majority of stimuli that vies for our attention; to the majority we remain necessarily ambivalent.
So, when we do decide to delineate a quotient of our time and money on visiting an art exhibition (unarguably an arcane pursuit in the rising prevalence of digital museums, Google Images, etc.), we enter into a pact, whereby we have a pre-assigned expectation of sensory engagement. We have become consumers of the experience in much the same way as we have of everything else; we pay our money and we expect a fungible level of emotional connectivity as a return on our investment, or else we are liable to feel short-changed.
Which brings me back to the point – so what?! A series of beautifully shot photographs providing you with an often necessary reminder of the magnificent spectacles the world offers should be just that, without also striving to deliver some kind of emotional epiphany as well.
Martin Amis - 'The Rachel Papers'
Jean Baudrillard - 'America' (non-fiction)
Edith Wharton - 'The Age of Innocence'
James Joyce - 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
J.G. Ballard - 'Running Wild'
This month I enjoyed, rather more than anticipated, Edith Wharton's charming tale of 1920's high society New York 'The Age of Innocence'. I found its depiction of flatulent opulence and snobbery, juxtaposed with the touching themes of romantic longing and unrequited affection very well observed.
Joyce's 'Portrait' was, on the other hand, much harder work, due to the myriad historial, political and cultural references of the period strewn throughout, but nevertheless I was left awe-struck at times by the sublimity of the prose. The novel is a series of vignettes that are moved between following the bildungsroman literary form of Stephen Dedalus' coming of age. Frequently these were inspired in their delivery; notably the ruction caused in Stephen's house at Christmas dinner due to the irreconcilable political and religious differences between the parties present, and the priest's sermon describing the awful infinity of Hell, which was so powerful that it made me want to rush to confessional and repent my sins immediately.
Films Watched:
'Brief Encounter' (David Lean)
'Trance' (Danny Boyle) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Kill List' (Ben Wheatley)
'Ted' (Seth MacFarlane)
'The Evil Dead' (Fede Alvarez) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Local Hero' (Bill Forsyth)
'Momento' (Christopher Nolan)
The prospect of going to the cinema to see a remake of ‘The Evil Dead’, a cult classic that was one of the defining films of my formative teenage years, didn’t exactly inflate me with joy. Having bought the trilogy box set aged about 14 or 15, I then spent much time at school regaling others with the grotesque gore and splatter-ific excess that the films expurgated. Many sleepovers were subsequently attended by me and my DVD box set.
Fondness for the original aside, I actually found myself really enjoying the Sam Raimi-endorsed remake. Whilst none of the comedic or slapstick tropes of the original were in evidence, the source material was hacked back to the very bone of brutality, providing more wince-inducing moments than I’ve seen in any recent horror offering. Overall though, I couldn’t help feeling frustrated with the lack of contemporary horror films to rival 80s classics like ‘The Evil Dead’. I’m sure I’m not alone in pining for that low-key, word-of-mouth film to come along and send electric shockwaves through the nostalgic corpse of modern horror cinema.
Albums Played:
Bonobo - 'The Northern Borders'
The Fall - 'Grotesque (after the Gramme)'
The Fall - 'Perverted by Language'
The Fall - 'The Frenz Experiment'
The Fall - 'Extricate'
The Fall - 'Shift Work'
The Rolling Stones - 'Their Satanic Majesties Request'
The Rolling Stones - 'Beggar's Banquet'
The Rolling Stones - 'Let it Bleed'
The Rolling Stones - 'Sticky Fingers'
The Rolling Stones - 'Exile on Main Street'
The Rolling Stones - 'Goat's Head Soup'
The Rolling Stones - 'It's Only Rock & Roll'
The Rolling Stones - 'Black and Blue'
The Rolling Stones - 'Some Girls'
The Rolling Stones - 'Emotional Rescue'
Junip - 'Junip'
Junip - 'Fields'
The Knife - 'Shaking the Habitual'
Iggy & the Stooges - 'Ready to Die'
Deerhunter - 'Monomania'
Having successfully managed to secure tickets for The Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary gig in Hyde Park later in the summer, I decided to explore the depths of their intimidatingly gargantuan back catalogue. The period of late 60s to early 70s is, of course, the golden age of their career with one classic album following another, providing some of the most iconic music of the 20th century. Personally, I found myself tiring of the over-wrought American blues inflections of ‘Exile on Main Street’, but enjoyed the often overlooked transitional album ‘Goat’s Head Soup’. By the time the mid-to-late 70s arrived though, the truly terrible ‘Black and Blue’ and the stale ‘Emotional Rescue’ serve as evidence of how irrelevant they had come to sound in the wake of bands like The Clash, Joy Division and the wider punk rock scene.
Exhibitions:
Ansel Adams - 'Photography from the Mountains to the Sea' (at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)
Deutsche Borse Photography Prize 2013 (at the Photographer's Gallery, London)
I went into the National Maritime Museum exhibition on Ansel Adams firmly expecting to be stunned by the sheer epic-ness of the display, much like someone going to the dentist anticipates leaving with a spring-cleaned, and perhaps numbed, mouth.
Its quite hard to objectively critique any of the images to any meaningful level, since demonstrably they were all both technically and visually monumental. And yet it’s equally hard to pinpoint much of the photographer’s tangible influence, his creative fingerprints if you like, being that the wondrous landscapes and scenery he captures are so self-evident. How could anyone, I found myself wondering, possibly take a bad photograph of the Mirror Lake in Yosemite, for instance?
This was reflected, much like the hills in the lake surface, by a woman I overheard when viewing a series of geyser shots; “I mean, I know they are terrific images, but I can’t feel any emotional attachment to it”. Initially, I privately concurred with her confusion, convinced that all the attendees could hope to expect was to be lulled into an inertia of the epic. But later I found myself subverting this by asking – so what if we can’t feel any emotional attachment with it?! Why must we seek such a plateau of heightened engagement in every single thing we find ourselves exposed to?
I deduce that this inclination is due to ourselves being constantly and unremittingly deluged with demands on our emotional engagements, through the mass media, internet, digital technologies, and just generally existing in what Jean Baudrillard termed ‘the simulation and simulacra of the hyper-real society’. Our minds, in order to cope and remain sane in such an environment, learn to shut off and deny emotional responses to the vast majority of stimuli that vies for our attention; to the majority we remain necessarily ambivalent.
So, when we do decide to delineate a quotient of our time and money on visiting an art exhibition (unarguably an arcane pursuit in the rising prevalence of digital museums, Google Images, etc.), we enter into a pact, whereby we have a pre-assigned expectation of sensory engagement. We have become consumers of the experience in much the same way as we have of everything else; we pay our money and we expect a fungible level of emotional connectivity as a return on our investment, or else we are liable to feel short-changed.
Which brings me back to the point – so what?! A series of beautifully shot photographs providing you with an often necessary reminder of the magnificent spectacles the world offers should be just that, without also striving to deliver some kind of emotional epiphany as well.
Thursday, 25 April 2013
Tearing the city at the seams #7 - The North London mass murderer route
'The suburbs dream of violence' was the famous maxim of J.G. Ballard, who in his later career expounded the theory that out of the dull monotony of suburbia inevitably would bloom a primeval instinct for brutality.
Call me macabre, but I've long held an odd fascination with serial killers. I went through an adolescent horror film phase which naturally grew intertwined; murderers being a real-life encapsulation of everything Hollywood might try and frighten us with. I understand the psychological theory that this interest is borne out of a rational yet deep-seated fear of ourselves being murdered and through this rumination do we attempt to neuter its potency.
Similarly, I believe that our collective obsession (whether acknowledged or not by people) stems from our subconscious understanding that the act of murder is within our own personal reach at any given time. Murder is an abhorrent crime precisely because it represents a complete rejection of society's ingrained codes and ethics. It is the perpetrator rejecting all civilised conventions in favour of attaining the highest possible oasis of personal freedom for which of course the penalty must be the total prohibition thereafter; i.e. the famous Aleister Crowley quote, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'.
Whenever I hear someone say that they themselves would not be capable of committing a murderous act, I cannot help but condemn them as delusional; clinging to some notion of absolute control of their own impulses and psychological faculties. This is not to say that I think everyone to be a simmering psychopath capable of grave depravity at any given time; just that I think evil is as innate a feature of ourselves as good, that evil is sublimated deep within the recesses of most sane and rational people's minds by virtue of societal conventions, self-awareness and experience, and could, if the correct algorithm of causation be achieved, spill over into realised action. I believe everyone has this deep-rooted schizophrenic capacity for good and evil engrained within them through millennia's-worth of human awareness. I baulk at sensationalist tabloid buzz-words like 'inhuman' or 'monster' that are catapulted around at such perpetrators; it is not that they are inhuman but precisely because they are human that enables such murderous acts to be carried out.
These views were lent further credence by my recent reading of Brian Masters' book 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen'. For those who don't know, Nilsen was a deeply complex and disturbed man who, whilst outwardly exuding an unremarkable, taciturn demeanour, behind the closed doors of his North London residences murdered 15 men, dismembering and disposing of their bodies over a period of 5 years from 1978 to 1983. He was finally caught when neighbours complained of blocked drains which, when investigated, was found to be due to Nilsen having resorted to flushing human remains down his toilet.
Having completed the book I decided to set out and walk to his first residence, 195 Melrose Avenue in Kilburn, and then thread my way horizontally across North London's suburban districts and through Hampstead Heath, to link up with the house in which he was discovered, 23 Cranley Gardens. There was no grand plan in so far as what I hoped to achieve other than satisfying my own curiosity, and being able to visualise the drab city edges that, despite their surface orthodoxy could, when peeled back and glimpsed within, reveal such a disturbing heart of darkness.
I admit that I was also enthused by my strong conviction that since this was a walking route perhaps only previously undertaken by a curious minority, I was in some way carving out a unique tourist trail between two disparate sites of intrigue. Indeed, together with my sympathetic girlfriend, I was fairly certain to be the only pursuer of this path on a bright but chilly Saturday in March. They may be macabre sites, I pondered as we slogged up the steady incline of Maida Vale and the Kilburn High Road, but was it any more so than the groups of tourists mooching round Whitechapel trying to sense the ‘evil vibes’ of Jack the Ripper? It cannot be said to be Des Nilsen's fault that his crimes have failed to consolidate the same lucrative appeal for London's tourists!
Turning off the Kilburn High Road and onto Walm Lane, I followed the road along until at an intersection it morphed into Melrose Avenue. By this point I had the geographical sensation that I had left the familiarities of inner-city London behind to become immersed in the suburbs. The featureless semi-detached houses, some prim and tidy, others having lapsed into shabby disrepair, many apparently up for sale, lined the road entrenching my view whilst reading the book that Nilsen's crimes were made all the more shocking by how strikingly they contrasted with the quiet, routine-led environs in which they gestated. The very idea that anything so uniquely heinous could occur amidst such mundane uniformity!
I felt a definite sense of, perhaps willed, foreboding as the road gently bent round before arriving at 195, the ground floor flat in which Nilsen killed 12 men and stored their bodies in wardrobes and under floorboards before burning them on bonfires in the garden, all without attracting the attention of any of his neighbours.
The street was mostly quiet, although a few residents were going to and fro getting on with their day. This set me thinking about whether or not they were aware of the house's grisly history. If they were, what influence did it have on their feelings towards life on the street generally, and what would be the impact on their impressions if they weren't? I wonder whether such proximity might dwell on their minds at all, might heighten their sense of neighbourly distrust or suspicion, or even act as a subconscious buffer or pinion point for their own latent psychopathologies.
I ruminated on this point whilst pausing at the top of Gladstone Park's gentle hill-rise. There were a few children playing in a small play area, a handful of others playing football, various dog-walkers; the standard non-descript park in perfect keeping with the residential area. Sitting at the top offered a pleasant view of the immediate North London area, with the Shard and the scythe-like arch of Wembley Stadium bookending the extreme left and right angles. Two landmarks incidentally that would have been absent from Nilsen's view on his daily walks round the park with his beloved dog Bleep.
Walking back down Melrose Avenue and following Cricklewood Lane on through West Heath Road I thought about the difficulties such properties must pose for estate agents and landlords trying to maintain its economic viability. I had read online that in some cases tenants had bought the flat only to later discover its past infamy and subsequently struggle to sell it on. Whether or not this is due to a commonly-held belief in any evil metaphysical residues having been etched into the very structure of the house like some kind of terminal moraine; the social stigma perhaps entailed with residing in a 'house of horrors'; or simply a belief in those tangible 'bad vibes' that, thanks to films such as 'The Shining' or 'Paranormal Activity', could manifest themselves in the inhabitants' psyche, whether genuine or (as is more likely) not.
The dilemma is an intriguing one, in a society that is still not in any way reconciled, or any less obsessed by, the notion of death. A short distance south from Nilsen's former homes, is the site of 10 Rillington Place, where John Christie raped and murdered 8 women between 1943 and 1953. Such was the notoriety of his crimes that the decision was taken to first rename the street and then to demolish it completely, thereby in some way exorcising his evil doings and avoiding the tarnishing of the area for the years to come. Similarly, the decision was taken in 1996 to demolish the Gloucester home of Fred & Rosemary West, and more recently that of the Soham murderer Ian Huntley. I'm not so sure I concur with these destructive remedies for wiping clean the past, but I can recognise the logic for so doing.
It is not simply due to something malicious having taken place in the house (if this were the case, there would likely have to be mass housing cull up and down the country), or even that it was the former home of a murderer. Instead in cases like these, the house has been made complicit in the crimes, it is imbued with a vicarious attachment of guilt. In the case of Nilsen, by storing the bodies within its fabric, as well as the attempts at disposal, the murderer has forced the house to assume the role of a sort of structural accomplice in both providing the setting for and concealing his crimes, for which in the eyes of the world it will forever be tainted.
Meanwhile on our walk the houses grew fatter, the driveways longer and the gardens greener as we crossed the threshold into Hampstead. The bucolic lung of the Heath was as revitalising as ever; the narrow and enclosed residential streets yielding generously around this wide open space. Exiting on the east side via Merton Lane, it was a relatively short walk from there up Muswell Hill Road to Nilsen's second and last London home, 23 Cranley Gardens. A long, sloping road of houses that, with the cityscape view fanning out below, appeared to thread right the way into the heart of the city itself.
It was in the top floor flat of this unassuming abode that Nilsen killed his final three victims and, without the convenience of a garden in which to build a bonfire, struggled with a means of disposal, living with the bodies for months on end before the desperate measures that eventually led to his capture.
The truly chilling aspect of the Nilsen case is the fact that until his arrest and subsequent confession, the police were completely oblivious to the fact that 15 men had gone missing in the last 4 years, such was the transient nature of the wanderers he befriended. The fact that Nilsen, though a loner, was a prominent and respected employee at the DHSS branch in Kentish Town, had aroused no prior suspicion as to his murderous Hyde-like alter-ego also added to the paranoid unease many felt towards the case. This, in the end, is why killers arouse such fear and loathing; the fact that such depravity and wanton disregard for human life could linger just below the surface of a man who in many ways was the ordinary and incongruous reflection of the suburban neighbourhoods in which he lived.
Call me macabre, but I've long held an odd fascination with serial killers. I went through an adolescent horror film phase which naturally grew intertwined; murderers being a real-life encapsulation of everything Hollywood might try and frighten us with. I understand the psychological theory that this interest is borne out of a rational yet deep-seated fear of ourselves being murdered and through this rumination do we attempt to neuter its potency.
Similarly, I believe that our collective obsession (whether acknowledged or not by people) stems from our subconscious understanding that the act of murder is within our own personal reach at any given time. Murder is an abhorrent crime precisely because it represents a complete rejection of society's ingrained codes and ethics. It is the perpetrator rejecting all civilised conventions in favour of attaining the highest possible oasis of personal freedom for which of course the penalty must be the total prohibition thereafter; i.e. the famous Aleister Crowley quote, 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law'.
Whenever I hear someone say that they themselves would not be capable of committing a murderous act, I cannot help but condemn them as delusional; clinging to some notion of absolute control of their own impulses and psychological faculties. This is not to say that I think everyone to be a simmering psychopath capable of grave depravity at any given time; just that I think evil is as innate a feature of ourselves as good, that evil is sublimated deep within the recesses of most sane and rational people's minds by virtue of societal conventions, self-awareness and experience, and could, if the correct algorithm of causation be achieved, spill over into realised action. I believe everyone has this deep-rooted schizophrenic capacity for good and evil engrained within them through millennia's-worth of human awareness. I baulk at sensationalist tabloid buzz-words like 'inhuman' or 'monster' that are catapulted around at such perpetrators; it is not that they are inhuman but precisely because they are human that enables such murderous acts to be carried out.
These views were lent further credence by my recent reading of Brian Masters' book 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen'. For those who don't know, Nilsen was a deeply complex and disturbed man who, whilst outwardly exuding an unremarkable, taciturn demeanour, behind the closed doors of his North London residences murdered 15 men, dismembering and disposing of their bodies over a period of 5 years from 1978 to 1983. He was finally caught when neighbours complained of blocked drains which, when investigated, was found to be due to Nilsen having resorted to flushing human remains down his toilet.
Having completed the book I decided to set out and walk to his first residence, 195 Melrose Avenue in Kilburn, and then thread my way horizontally across North London's suburban districts and through Hampstead Heath, to link up with the house in which he was discovered, 23 Cranley Gardens. There was no grand plan in so far as what I hoped to achieve other than satisfying my own curiosity, and being able to visualise the drab city edges that, despite their surface orthodoxy could, when peeled back and glimpsed within, reveal such a disturbing heart of darkness.
I admit that I was also enthused by my strong conviction that since this was a walking route perhaps only previously undertaken by a curious minority, I was in some way carving out a unique tourist trail between two disparate sites of intrigue. Indeed, together with my sympathetic girlfriend, I was fairly certain to be the only pursuer of this path on a bright but chilly Saturday in March. They may be macabre sites, I pondered as we slogged up the steady incline of Maida Vale and the Kilburn High Road, but was it any more so than the groups of tourists mooching round Whitechapel trying to sense the ‘evil vibes’ of Jack the Ripper? It cannot be said to be Des Nilsen's fault that his crimes have failed to consolidate the same lucrative appeal for London's tourists!
Turning off the Kilburn High Road and onto Walm Lane, I followed the road along until at an intersection it morphed into Melrose Avenue. By this point I had the geographical sensation that I had left the familiarities of inner-city London behind to become immersed in the suburbs. The featureless semi-detached houses, some prim and tidy, others having lapsed into shabby disrepair, many apparently up for sale, lined the road entrenching my view whilst reading the book that Nilsen's crimes were made all the more shocking by how strikingly they contrasted with the quiet, routine-led environs in which they gestated. The very idea that anything so uniquely heinous could occur amidst such mundane uniformity!
I felt a definite sense of, perhaps willed, foreboding as the road gently bent round before arriving at 195, the ground floor flat in which Nilsen killed 12 men and stored their bodies in wardrobes and under floorboards before burning them on bonfires in the garden, all without attracting the attention of any of his neighbours.
The street was mostly quiet, although a few residents were going to and fro getting on with their day. This set me thinking about whether or not they were aware of the house's grisly history. If they were, what influence did it have on their feelings towards life on the street generally, and what would be the impact on their impressions if they weren't? I wonder whether such proximity might dwell on their minds at all, might heighten their sense of neighbourly distrust or suspicion, or even act as a subconscious buffer or pinion point for their own latent psychopathologies.
I ruminated on this point whilst pausing at the top of Gladstone Park's gentle hill-rise. There were a few children playing in a small play area, a handful of others playing football, various dog-walkers; the standard non-descript park in perfect keeping with the residential area. Sitting at the top offered a pleasant view of the immediate North London area, with the Shard and the scythe-like arch of Wembley Stadium bookending the extreme left and right angles. Two landmarks incidentally that would have been absent from Nilsen's view on his daily walks round the park with his beloved dog Bleep.
Walking back down Melrose Avenue and following Cricklewood Lane on through West Heath Road I thought about the difficulties such properties must pose for estate agents and landlords trying to maintain its economic viability. I had read online that in some cases tenants had bought the flat only to later discover its past infamy and subsequently struggle to sell it on. Whether or not this is due to a commonly-held belief in any evil metaphysical residues having been etched into the very structure of the house like some kind of terminal moraine; the social stigma perhaps entailed with residing in a 'house of horrors'; or simply a belief in those tangible 'bad vibes' that, thanks to films such as 'The Shining' or 'Paranormal Activity', could manifest themselves in the inhabitants' psyche, whether genuine or (as is more likely) not.
The dilemma is an intriguing one, in a society that is still not in any way reconciled, or any less obsessed by, the notion of death. A short distance south from Nilsen's former homes, is the site of 10 Rillington Place, where John Christie raped and murdered 8 women between 1943 and 1953. Such was the notoriety of his crimes that the decision was taken to first rename the street and then to demolish it completely, thereby in some way exorcising his evil doings and avoiding the tarnishing of the area for the years to come. Similarly, the decision was taken in 1996 to demolish the Gloucester home of Fred & Rosemary West, and more recently that of the Soham murderer Ian Huntley. I'm not so sure I concur with these destructive remedies for wiping clean the past, but I can recognise the logic for so doing.
It is not simply due to something malicious having taken place in the house (if this were the case, there would likely have to be mass housing cull up and down the country), or even that it was the former home of a murderer. Instead in cases like these, the house has been made complicit in the crimes, it is imbued with a vicarious attachment of guilt. In the case of Nilsen, by storing the bodies within its fabric, as well as the attempts at disposal, the murderer has forced the house to assume the role of a sort of structural accomplice in both providing the setting for and concealing his crimes, for which in the eyes of the world it will forever be tainted.
Meanwhile on our walk the houses grew fatter, the driveways longer and the gardens greener as we crossed the threshold into Hampstead. The bucolic lung of the Heath was as revitalising as ever; the narrow and enclosed residential streets yielding generously around this wide open space. Exiting on the east side via Merton Lane, it was a relatively short walk from there up Muswell Hill Road to Nilsen's second and last London home, 23 Cranley Gardens. A long, sloping road of houses that, with the cityscape view fanning out below, appeared to thread right the way into the heart of the city itself.
It was in the top floor flat of this unassuming abode that Nilsen killed his final three victims and, without the convenience of a garden in which to build a bonfire, struggled with a means of disposal, living with the bodies for months on end before the desperate measures that eventually led to his capture.
The truly chilling aspect of the Nilsen case is the fact that until his arrest and subsequent confession, the police were completely oblivious to the fact that 15 men had gone missing in the last 4 years, such was the transient nature of the wanderers he befriended. The fact that Nilsen, though a loner, was a prominent and respected employee at the DHSS branch in Kentish Town, had aroused no prior suspicion as to his murderous Hyde-like alter-ego also added to the paranoid unease many felt towards the case. This, in the end, is why killers arouse such fear and loathing; the fact that such depravity and wanton disregard for human life could linger just below the surface of a man who in many ways was the ordinary and incongruous reflection of the suburban neighbourhoods in which he lived.
Friday, 5 April 2013
Tearing the city at the seams # 6 - Paris
The city of Paris, being London’s twin as the spiritual home of psychogeography and stomping ground of the urban flaneur, was a natural place to focus another piece of writing following a recent visit. With our time frame being only three days, and neither of us knowing the city well, we were more of a mind to roll along the well-worn grooves of the tourist track rather than try and subvert it, although still attempting to see as much of the city by foot as possible.
After a disorientatingly early start, catching the 7.01am Eurostar from St. Pancras, we arrived at the Gare du Nord mid-morning, and after re-fuelling with coffee and crepes, decided to walk the 7 km stretch southwards across the River Seine to our hotel in the heart of the Montparnasse district. Slumping down the thick arterial Blvd de Sebastopol gave us the first taste of the long and wide stretches of road that are as emblematic of Paris as the cobbled picturesque streets of the Latin Quarter or Montmartre.
That afternoon, as we walked westwards through the Jardin des Tuileries, across the chaotic plughole of Place de la Concorde and up the slope of the Champs-Elysees, I was taken back to my time walking and cycing the colossal highways of Los Angeles and how similar it felt (albeit on a much smaller scale), the sensation of futility in your eutechnical mode of transit along such an indeterminately linear road. In fact, I think this comparison slightly more than a little ill-founded; Paris’ boulevards being far more amenable, aesthetically and pedestrian-wise, than LA’s neverending highways that seem to stretch on like pylon lines cutting their way across a vast expanse of open terrain.
It is at the eye of the Arc de Triumphe, with the grand spokes thrusting outwards like the rays of a cartoon sun, that one gets the fullest appreciation of the vision wrought into concrete life by the 19th-century civic planner Baron Haussmann. Tasked by Napoleon III to reconstruct the geography of central Paris, from its ostensibly medieval cluster that had become increasingly unfeasible for a modern urban environment, he set about commissioning the strident roadways and monuments that today epitomise the city and have served as the blueprints for so many others around the world.
It is interesting to note just how divisive his reforms were at the time; not least because of the staggering financial burden it would place on government budgets, but because of the subsequent interpretation of such designs as being favoured and enacted specifically as a means of enhancing authoritarian control. The long, broad macadamised corridors; the large, open public recreational spaces; and the sharp, angular intersections, were all deemed to have been idealised with the improved military suppression of insurrectionary rebels, as well as the easy movement of armed forces, as being primary motivations. Fascinating that lurking just behind the very valid, surface policies of improving sanitation, transit and accommodation, were the ulterior motives of civic suppression.
Marshall Berman’s comprehensive book ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ states that, ‘the Napoleon-Haussmann boulevards created new bases – economic, social, aesthetic – for bringing enormous numbers of people together. At the street level they were lined with small businesses and shops of all kinds, with every corner zoned for restaurants and terraced sidewalk cafes.’ How intriguing that a singular vision encompassing these wide urban expanses, sidewalk cafes, benches, cultural monuments, circumscribed vegetation, et cetera, would transplant the Old City environs in such a short space of time as being the world-renowned symbiology of Paris.
For the first time perhaps, this urban modern city could also subjugate the primacy of the pedestrian in favour of the new invasion of motor cars. Ironic then that Paris is still considered pleasantly strollable, whereas the pattern it represented became exploited the world over, resulting in cities such as Los Angeles where any form of walking is seen as a very odd pasttime.
This got me thinking about links, however spurious, to 21st century urban developments that can be noticed in London, if not all over Britain. Something that lit the fuse was realising, after 3 days of lengthy walking around Paris, how refreshingly franchise-free it appeared to be. Of course, this is due partly to local and cultural ignorance on my part, but I don’t think that tells the whole story. The number of independent businesses, shops and cafes was a far cry from the sad recession-weary state of Britain’s capital city. Just as you’re supposedly never more than a few feet from urban rodents, it increasingly seems that you cannot walk for a few minutes in London without passing by a TescoExpress, a Sainsburys, a Starbucks, a Pret a Manger, or a Costa Coffee.
So cancerous is their growth that, as an example, walking north away from Brixton and through Kennington, you will pass 4 or 5 TescoExpress stores, each that appears to have metamorphosed out of some previously healthy commercial body. One has fixed its grip within the bowels of a dubious-looking hotel; another has fed from the host of a mock-Tudor pub; another has subsumed a petrol station. This serves as a microcosm of what can now be seen as ‘clone high streets’ that drape themselves through each British town centre without fail (in the last year alone I’ve seen such replications in Penzance, Bristol and Leeds, to name just three). Maybe soon mini branches of Tesco will start being set up in small corners of your flat, thereby maximising market penetration and heightening consumer convenience.
Perhaps this Tesco-isation of shopping streets, along with other phenomena such as the Wetherspoon-ist invasion of the British pub scene, can be seen as a gradual but no-less-subtle modern derivation of Haussmann’s Paris reconstruction. Underneath the attractive surface claims of uniformity, ease and convenience, lies a sinister motive of slash & burn commercialism, consuming everything of any local distinction, and spitting out the same pre-fab fungus of monotonous conformity. Stand in a Bristol, Penzance or Leeds branch and it matters not a jot; since all are geographically neutral and all thrive on the public’s apathetic, credulousness and desire for stress-free activity. Could parallels be drawn between the decrepit and out-moded layout of medieval Paris, desperate to be blasted open into expansive accessibility, and the dire state of contemporary Britain’s high street diversity, wilting under the persistant onslaught of a franchise cartel? Or perhaps its just the French red wine weaving irrelevant nonsense.
In any case, walking around Paris was a very welcome break from London. A very fulfilling walk I might recommend is setting out from the hectic Place de la Bastille, across the Il de la Cite and walking the length of the Blvd St Germain which curves and dips round like a scarf hanging from the broad shoulders of the Seine. It is as quintessential a view of Haussmann’s Paris as any, with its teeming traffic lanes, monumental buildings and elegant cafes sprouting out from every corner. Once you join the river again you could cross over and stroll along the river bank marvelling at the ceaselessly photogenic landmark, the Eiffel Tower, perhaps a structure too iconic to be viewed with any real subjectivity.
Actually rather a controversial structure upon its unveiling in 1899; there is of course the well-known anecdote from Guy de Maupassant, that the tower’s restaurant was his new favourite as it gave him the only view of the city from where you couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. Strange perhaps that such a structure should be so derided at the time and yet come to be regarded as an icon of architectural design years later. You could be forgiven for making the (albeit quite flippant) comparison between that contemporary loci of people’s equal-parts ire and adoration that has sprung up on the London skyline – the Shard. Although, considering the price for public admittance, I don’t think it’ll become my subversive view of choice any time soon, no matter how good the restaurant might be.
After a disorientatingly early start, catching the 7.01am Eurostar from St. Pancras, we arrived at the Gare du Nord mid-morning, and after re-fuelling with coffee and crepes, decided to walk the 7 km stretch southwards across the River Seine to our hotel in the heart of the Montparnasse district. Slumping down the thick arterial Blvd de Sebastopol gave us the first taste of the long and wide stretches of road that are as emblematic of Paris as the cobbled picturesque streets of the Latin Quarter or Montmartre.
That afternoon, as we walked westwards through the Jardin des Tuileries, across the chaotic plughole of Place de la Concorde and up the slope of the Champs-Elysees, I was taken back to my time walking and cycing the colossal highways of Los Angeles and how similar it felt (albeit on a much smaller scale), the sensation of futility in your eutechnical mode of transit along such an indeterminately linear road. In fact, I think this comparison slightly more than a little ill-founded; Paris’ boulevards being far more amenable, aesthetically and pedestrian-wise, than LA’s neverending highways that seem to stretch on like pylon lines cutting their way across a vast expanse of open terrain.
It is at the eye of the Arc de Triumphe, with the grand spokes thrusting outwards like the rays of a cartoon sun, that one gets the fullest appreciation of the vision wrought into concrete life by the 19th-century civic planner Baron Haussmann. Tasked by Napoleon III to reconstruct the geography of central Paris, from its ostensibly medieval cluster that had become increasingly unfeasible for a modern urban environment, he set about commissioning the strident roadways and monuments that today epitomise the city and have served as the blueprints for so many others around the world.
It is interesting to note just how divisive his reforms were at the time; not least because of the staggering financial burden it would place on government budgets, but because of the subsequent interpretation of such designs as being favoured and enacted specifically as a means of enhancing authoritarian control. The long, broad macadamised corridors; the large, open public recreational spaces; and the sharp, angular intersections, were all deemed to have been idealised with the improved military suppression of insurrectionary rebels, as well as the easy movement of armed forces, as being primary motivations. Fascinating that lurking just behind the very valid, surface policies of improving sanitation, transit and accommodation, were the ulterior motives of civic suppression.
Marshall Berman’s comprehensive book ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ states that, ‘the Napoleon-Haussmann boulevards created new bases – economic, social, aesthetic – for bringing enormous numbers of people together. At the street level they were lined with small businesses and shops of all kinds, with every corner zoned for restaurants and terraced sidewalk cafes.’ How intriguing that a singular vision encompassing these wide urban expanses, sidewalk cafes, benches, cultural monuments, circumscribed vegetation, et cetera, would transplant the Old City environs in such a short space of time as being the world-renowned symbiology of Paris.
For the first time perhaps, this urban modern city could also subjugate the primacy of the pedestrian in favour of the new invasion of motor cars. Ironic then that Paris is still considered pleasantly strollable, whereas the pattern it represented became exploited the world over, resulting in cities such as Los Angeles where any form of walking is seen as a very odd pasttime.
This got me thinking about links, however spurious, to 21st century urban developments that can be noticed in London, if not all over Britain. Something that lit the fuse was realising, after 3 days of lengthy walking around Paris, how refreshingly franchise-free it appeared to be. Of course, this is due partly to local and cultural ignorance on my part, but I don’t think that tells the whole story. The number of independent businesses, shops and cafes was a far cry from the sad recession-weary state of Britain’s capital city. Just as you’re supposedly never more than a few feet from urban rodents, it increasingly seems that you cannot walk for a few minutes in London without passing by a TescoExpress, a Sainsburys, a Starbucks, a Pret a Manger, or a Costa Coffee.
So cancerous is their growth that, as an example, walking north away from Brixton and through Kennington, you will pass 4 or 5 TescoExpress stores, each that appears to have metamorphosed out of some previously healthy commercial body. One has fixed its grip within the bowels of a dubious-looking hotel; another has fed from the host of a mock-Tudor pub; another has subsumed a petrol station. This serves as a microcosm of what can now be seen as ‘clone high streets’ that drape themselves through each British town centre without fail (in the last year alone I’ve seen such replications in Penzance, Bristol and Leeds, to name just three). Maybe soon mini branches of Tesco will start being set up in small corners of your flat, thereby maximising market penetration and heightening consumer convenience.
Perhaps this Tesco-isation of shopping streets, along with other phenomena such as the Wetherspoon-ist invasion of the British pub scene, can be seen as a gradual but no-less-subtle modern derivation of Haussmann’s Paris reconstruction. Underneath the attractive surface claims of uniformity, ease and convenience, lies a sinister motive of slash & burn commercialism, consuming everything of any local distinction, and spitting out the same pre-fab fungus of monotonous conformity. Stand in a Bristol, Penzance or Leeds branch and it matters not a jot; since all are geographically neutral and all thrive on the public’s apathetic, credulousness and desire for stress-free activity. Could parallels be drawn between the decrepit and out-moded layout of medieval Paris, desperate to be blasted open into expansive accessibility, and the dire state of contemporary Britain’s high street diversity, wilting under the persistant onslaught of a franchise cartel? Or perhaps its just the French red wine weaving irrelevant nonsense.
In any case, walking around Paris was a very welcome break from London. A very fulfilling walk I might recommend is setting out from the hectic Place de la Bastille, across the Il de la Cite and walking the length of the Blvd St Germain which curves and dips round like a scarf hanging from the broad shoulders of the Seine. It is as quintessential a view of Haussmann’s Paris as any, with its teeming traffic lanes, monumental buildings and elegant cafes sprouting out from every corner. Once you join the river again you could cross over and stroll along the river bank marvelling at the ceaselessly photogenic landmark, the Eiffel Tower, perhaps a structure too iconic to be viewed with any real subjectivity.
Actually rather a controversial structure upon its unveiling in 1899; there is of course the well-known anecdote from Guy de Maupassant, that the tower’s restaurant was his new favourite as it gave him the only view of the city from where you couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. Strange perhaps that such a structure should be so derided at the time and yet come to be regarded as an icon of architectural design years later. You could be forgiven for making the (albeit quite flippant) comparison between that contemporary loci of people’s equal-parts ire and adoration that has sprung up on the London skyline – the Shard. Although, considering the price for public admittance, I don’t think it’ll become my subversive view of choice any time soon, no matter how good the restaurant might be.
Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Culture - March
Books read:
Will Self - 'Sore Sites' (non-fiction)
Leo Tolstoy - 'Anna Karenina'
John Stuart Mill - 'On Liberty' (non-fiction)
Brian Masters - 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen' (non-fiction)
Michael Leber & Judith Sandling - 'L.S. Lowry' (non-fiction)
The first half of this month was dominated by the mammoth Russian classic 'Anna Karenina' which had sat with an air of weighty intimidation on my shelf for far too long; its time had come to be tackled. Incredible just how quickly you become immersed in the language and the intricate details of the time though, with every naunce of every character explored in such fine style by Tolstoy; indeed I found it easy to understand its peerless esteem and found myself thoroughly enjoying it.
The rest of the month I indulged with non-fiction; in particular, I found Brian Masters' study of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen to be a masterful piece of work. Masters expertly juggles the conundrum of Nilsen's ghastly crimes along with his eloquent, complex and troubled personality; and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the psychology of murder.
Films Watched:
'Christiane F. - We the children of Bahnhof Zoo' (Ulrich Edel)
'Arbitrage' (Nicholas Jarecki) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Amelie' (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
'The Devils' (Ken Russell)
'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer' (John MacNaughton)
This month I discovered 3 films that I could add to my list of personal favourites. Firstly, 'Christiane F' - a gritty German film about the blight of heroin addiction on a sub-culture of teenagers. The film is unflinching and raw, and easily the most convincing depiction of the ravages of drug abuse. Despite my fondness for the film version of 'Trainspotting', by comparison it seems overtly glossy and almost flippant.
'Amelie' was watched just prior to a short Paris trip; I fell for its quirky French charm and beguiling romantic melodrama. 'The Devils' was a riotous carnival of ostentatious debauchery that thoroughly met and exceeded all the subversive expectations I held for it. Really demands to be seen, no adequate explanation by me can do justice to the madness of Ken Russell's blasphemous vision!
Albums Played:
David Bowie - 'The Next Day'
Stereophonics - 'Graffiti on the Train'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Methadrone'
The Knife - 'Silent Sound'
Joni Mitchell - 'Blue'
The Fall - 'Live at the Witch Trials'
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - 'Spector at the Feast'
Ry Cooder - 'Paris, Texas' (OST)
March was dominated by the release of David Bowie's new album 'The Next Day' which captivated me from the very first listen. It is an eclectic and engaging collection of songs, which never seem to dip in quality, and taken as a whole make up what must be his strongest piece of work since the 80s.
A sharp contrast to two bands I formerly held in fond esteem who released new albums this month. Stereophonics are a band who were part of my formative years' soundtrack and to hear them churn out this by-the-numbers turgid nothing of an album is too predictable to be really worth lamenting. The BRMC album wasn't quite as vacuous but is still evidence of a band never straying from their formula of chunky, dirty rock & roll, as well-worn as their leather jackets.
Exhibitions:
'Murillo: Paintings of the Spanish Golden Age' - Wallace Collection, London
Louvre Gallery, Paris
Theatre:
'The Turn of the Screw' at Almeida Theatre, Islington
Events:
John Gray in conversation with Adam Phillips - Daunt Books, London
Will Self - 'Sore Sites' (non-fiction)
Leo Tolstoy - 'Anna Karenina'
John Stuart Mill - 'On Liberty' (non-fiction)
Brian Masters - 'Killing for Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen' (non-fiction)
Michael Leber & Judith Sandling - 'L.S. Lowry' (non-fiction)
The first half of this month was dominated by the mammoth Russian classic 'Anna Karenina' which had sat with an air of weighty intimidation on my shelf for far too long; its time had come to be tackled. Incredible just how quickly you become immersed in the language and the intricate details of the time though, with every naunce of every character explored in such fine style by Tolstoy; indeed I found it easy to understand its peerless esteem and found myself thoroughly enjoying it.
The rest of the month I indulged with non-fiction; in particular, I found Brian Masters' study of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen to be a masterful piece of work. Masters expertly juggles the conundrum of Nilsen's ghastly crimes along with his eloquent, complex and troubled personality; and I would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the psychology of murder.
Films Watched:
'Christiane F. - We the children of Bahnhof Zoo' (Ulrich Edel)
'Arbitrage' (Nicholas Jarecki) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Amelie' (Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
'The Devils' (Ken Russell)
'Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer' (John MacNaughton)
This month I discovered 3 films that I could add to my list of personal favourites. Firstly, 'Christiane F' - a gritty German film about the blight of heroin addiction on a sub-culture of teenagers. The film is unflinching and raw, and easily the most convincing depiction of the ravages of drug abuse. Despite my fondness for the film version of 'Trainspotting', by comparison it seems overtly glossy and almost flippant.
'Amelie' was watched just prior to a short Paris trip; I fell for its quirky French charm and beguiling romantic melodrama. 'The Devils' was a riotous carnival of ostentatious debauchery that thoroughly met and exceeded all the subversive expectations I held for it. Really demands to be seen, no adequate explanation by me can do justice to the madness of Ken Russell's blasphemous vision!
Albums Played:
David Bowie - 'The Next Day'
Stereophonics - 'Graffiti on the Train'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Methadrone'
The Knife - 'Silent Sound'
Joni Mitchell - 'Blue'
The Fall - 'Live at the Witch Trials'
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - 'Spector at the Feast'
Ry Cooder - 'Paris, Texas' (OST)
March was dominated by the release of David Bowie's new album 'The Next Day' which captivated me from the very first listen. It is an eclectic and engaging collection of songs, which never seem to dip in quality, and taken as a whole make up what must be his strongest piece of work since the 80s.
A sharp contrast to two bands I formerly held in fond esteem who released new albums this month. Stereophonics are a band who were part of my formative years' soundtrack and to hear them churn out this by-the-numbers turgid nothing of an album is too predictable to be really worth lamenting. The BRMC album wasn't quite as vacuous but is still evidence of a band never straying from their formula of chunky, dirty rock & roll, as well-worn as their leather jackets.
Exhibitions:
'Murillo: Paintings of the Spanish Golden Age' - Wallace Collection, London
Louvre Gallery, Paris
Theatre:
'The Turn of the Screw' at Almeida Theatre, Islington
Events:
John Gray in conversation with Adam Phillips - Daunt Books, London
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