Culture - September

Books read:

Simon Rich - 'The Last Girlfriend on Earth and other Love Stories' (short stories)
Thomas de Quincey - 'On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts' (essay)
B.F. Skinner - 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (non-fiction)
Gustave Flaubert - 'Sentimental Education'


Films watched:

'Dead Ringers' (David Cronenberg)
'The Brood' (David Cronenberg)
'Death Line' (Gary Sherman)
'Nightcrawler' (Dan Gilroy)


Albums played:

Lana Del Rey - 'Honeymoon'

Tearing the city at the seams #26 - A rediscovery of London by night

Earlier this year I relocated, slipping down the oleaginous Northern Line from Elephant and Castle all the way to Morden, a place I had previously thought was populated exclusively by drunks held in an enclosure to sober up having slept through their tube stop. Since the move into London’s southern fringes, my fondness and enthusiasm for the city has decidedly waned, although I’d be reluctant to conflate this entirely with my move to Morden.

Whereas in Elephant & Castle I would be confronted with the hubbub and bustle of London on a daily basis, barely a 15-minute walk to the river, now on my cycle to and from work at Twickenham I catch a glimpse of the distant Shard, a thorn twisting in my side as a reminder of how divorced from me the city now seems.

Recent excursions have failed to reignite any affection. An attempt to walk the route of the Westway in search of the site of J.G. Ballard’s ‘concrete island’ proved so frustratingly futile that I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to write about it. So there was considerable pressure loaded on to a walk across London that I embarked upon one recent Saturday night.

I set off from Morden at just before half-midnight, the early September chill undergoing its autumnal rehearsals, with the aim of walking across London to Hampstead Heath in time for dawn easing itself into Sunday. Not only did the walk surpass expectations but was so suffused with minor revelations as to London’s dynamism and imaginative potency that I would encourage everyone to do the same.

I set out from the slumbering Morden, heading through the equally docile Wimbledon, only encountering the first signs of Saturday nightlife upon reaching Tooting High Street, with the influx of artisan chicken shops and cocktail bars all well attended. Only past Clapham Common and on up the High Street did the night seem to be in full ebullience; perhaps, being 1.30am, just beginning to sink back from its peak, with people spilling from the Infernos club on a high-heeled stagger to KFC. Leaving them behind I passed through the quieter province of Stockwell which appeared to be mostly populated by men loitering in doorways blowing plumes of smoke from spliffs across the pavement.

At Vauxhall, I took to the Embankment, pausing a while on the benches opposite the orange-lit Houses of Parliament glowing like burning wax. It was at this point that I began to remember the depths of thought that can be abseiled down on such travails. By this time I felt I had solved the Syrian refugee crisis, the London housing crisis, and the dilemma of which was the superior Radiohead album, ‘OK Computer’ or ‘Kid A’. (Each solution or answer though was swiftly blown away like psychic cobwebs by the arrival of yet more thought-strands to be woven, the trivial as well as the serious.)

I began to take note of all the different people that I saw and wonder at the disparate stories attached to them. The guy strolling along the Embankment singing along to a song off his iPod; the two French girls arm-in-arm laughing at some event from earlier in the night.

Across the river, I made my way up Whitehall pausing to speak with a lone man encamped opposite Downing Street busy adding to his collection of placards denigrating the government’s efforts at investigating the sexual abuse scandals. Initially a little wary, he soon began talking about how long he had been there (50 days), about how much online attention the protest had received, and how he wouldn’t give up until the “paedo-sadists” were held accountable.

Forging a path through the West End, I became surrounded by the drunken diaspora trying to get home. Smashed young men in blazers clutching a Subway sandwich and blearily trying to interpret the night bus maps as though they were ancient codes to be deciphered. Small groups of girls being hassled by a cavalry of rickshaws plying for trade up and down Charing Cross Road. An abysmally drunk middle-aged couple lodged in a doorway engaged in an amorous embrace oblivious to the less romantic mountain of bin bags right alongside them.

Soho seemed strangely subdued by comparison, with just a couple of wine bars still uncorked for a table or two of smartly-dressed conversations. Although my conscience did give me cause to stop at the edge of Soho Square where a young girl was slumped against some railings. At first I thought she was unconscious but on hearing my “hello?”, it appeared she was only crying, trains of mascara running down her face.

“I thought I’d better check you were okay”, I said. “Do you want me a call a taxi for you?”

“It’s alright, I think one is coming.”

“Shit night huh?”

“Yeah, pretty shit” she said, wiping her eyes on her forearms. She started talking about a guy who had messed her about and made her look stupid, as she did so nodding over the road at an imposing hotel. I sensed there was quite a lot more to the story than she let on but didn’t ask, instead just felt sorry for this girl who could only have been 16 or 17.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and when I explained my walk through London until dawn her reaction was one of mild disbelief. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Dunno, keeps me busy.”

She laughed and said, “You should get a girlfriend instead.”

“Well, I had one until recently. Hence the need to keep busy.”

“That’s a shame”, she said with a sympathetic expression that coming from someone with mascara streaked down their face seemed a little hard to take seriously.

And with that her taxi pulled up and I headed on my way, thinking about this random encounter. This late at night, everyone you pass feels like they are imbued with a different sense of purpose or reason for being out than during the day, each person with their own imaginative sliproad that peels away from the highway of the superficial. No wonder Dickens was so fond of taking his night walks across the city, clearly he became inspired by the interesting, nocturnal characters, each primed with their own unique story to be built around them.

There is a frisson of energy that is transmitted at night, charging places and people with all kinds of possibilities and potential. It is an energy that ripples with the telepathic awareness that things are taking place, things are happening, and though you may not be part of it, you are, in just by sharing the geography, riding the same wave.

This feeling sustains on through Camden, where muffled music seeps from second and third floor windows where people drain the dregs of the night. There is a vague exclusivity about Camden, a sense that it is assessing and judging you on your conformist credentials as a hedonistic ambassador worthy of being inducted into the secretive citadel of the unofficial gathering.

There is a lull that sets in as I reach Belsize Park, the streets deserted, the sound of the slumbering city has a kind of polyphony with the rustling of leaves and the whisper of distant traffic. There is no one around now, the city feels like it has been laid out and arranged purely for me to traverse it, the paving stones ushering my weary feet along on the approach to the Heath.

The night’s deep purple tourniquet loosens to let the dawn bleed across the morning sky, and I trudge through the dew-tipped grass to reach Parliament Hill and the end of my journey. I feel a sense of real achievement, a rejuvenated appreciation for London that is so striking that I remain convinced that everyone should undertake a similar walk at least once. I sit transfixed by the cityscape, a million windows ablaze as the sun hits the glass, construction cranes poised in the air like batons ready to conduct an orchestra through the symphony of a new day.

Culture - August

Books read:

Tom McCarthy - 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature' (non-fiction)
Mark Twain - 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
Richard Whittle - 'Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution' (non-fiction)
Sigmund Freud - 'The Unconscious' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (non-fiction)


Films watched:

'I Stand Alone' (Gaspar Noe)
'Eyes Without A Face' (Georges Franju)
'Throne of Blood' (Akira Kurosawa)
'Dead Ringers' (David Cronenberg)


Albums played:

Loscil - 'Plume'
Loscil - 'Endless Falls'
Loscil - 'Submers'
Carbon Based Lifeforms - 'Hydroponic Garden'
Burial - 'Burial'
Burial - 'Untrue'
Rodriguez - 'Coming from Reality'
Burial - 'Rival Dealer EP'
Bob Dylan - 'Blood on the Tracks'
Bill Hicks - 'Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks'

Views on love

Perhaps the most intoxicating and complex mystery of human experience, love as a concept is one verdant with possible interpretation. In the arts and literature certainly no other emotion has been explored and examined with such forensic scrutiny or poetic beauty.

You might agree with the bleak assessment of Charles Bukowski that 'love is like a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality'; or with Noam Chomsky who once said that 'I don't know what love is, but life is empty without it'; or with Milan Kundera's interpretation of Plato that 'love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'.

I have found myself wooed by the embrace of cynicism towards the concept of love in recent months. No matter love's conviction or perceived strength, the fact that it might buckle under circumstantial or superficial pressures is a reality that neither logic nor rationality can seem to explain away.

There is of course the political science 'horseshoe theory' that holds extremes to be closer connected than is commonly accepted.

I think this can be borrowed in application to the emotions of love and hate - almost within touching distance, the intensity of the emotions provoking easy oscillation between them. The interpreter of Freud might seek to rationalise this as being due to the paradoxical idea that we develop in childhood from the objects of our (at that time passive) love - parents - being figures we frequently hate or even feel afraid of.

It's equally easy to be cynical about love when surveying the technological landscape. The recent Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales 'Tinder and the dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse'' depicts a deranging and decadent zeitgeist of frivolous sexual encounters and physical intimacy being reduced into the fast-food mentality of commoditisation and the satiation of endless greed. Not to mention the Ashley Madison data hacking which has lifted the stone of real-life relationships to reveal the digital insects of adulterous intent, insecurity and unhappiness lurking beneath.

Yet there have been convincing cases made that monogamy as a state of being is antithetical to our human nature, engineered over centuries as a moral virtue as a means of enshrining stability and loyalty within society, as evidence perhaps of our species gradually civilising itself.

Very recently though I have had something of a change of heart on the subject. It is my contention that in modern culture and society we fail to adequately celebrate real love. We celebrate and promote narcissistic vanities and shallow conceits to emotional potency, but not real love that exists and has existed between people regardless of whether or not it has since faded. Too often, animosity, bitterness and recrimination stain the portrait of prior contentment, leaving regrets stacked up like dirty dishes to drip dry over time.

Simply put, if it is possible to say from an experience of love - whether lasting one day or 10,000 days - that you have been enriched and vitalised on an imaginative, philosophical and human level, then it can only be something to be celebrated and not unduly mourned for being no more.

The continual layering and compaction of experience's sediment through which the self grows, that for me is love. In my case, this is manifest in countless things, from the trivial (a taste for sushi) to the revelatory (a new-found appreciation for the wonders of nature).

Two lines run in parallel for a while, held in delicate equilibrium by the strength of magnetic forces that often defy easy definition, and either they continue or divert away. But in either case, if the forces that bound them were strong enough they can equally be so once the direction of each becomes altered.

But enough of the theorising. The best definition of love I have come across is that provided by the genius of Woody Allen...

'To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.'

'Ultradistancia' - Federico Winer

http://www.ultradistancia.com

Jorge Luis Borges’ fragment ‘On Exactitude in Science’ describes a map that has been created by perfectionist geographers to cover the entire territory, a piece that seems strangely prophetic in the age of Google Maps.

With the Googlisation of the world proceeding at an exponential rate, from the mapping of metropolises, deserts and even coral reefs, the formal space of the art exhibition has also been colonised by the digital. Google Art Project aims to virtualise the world’s art galleries, allowing anyone to wander the wings of the Louvre or Prado without leaving the frame of their own home.

With this in mind, it was inevitable that artists would respond to developments such as these by using Google itself as a means of crafting new art.

A compatriot of Borges, the Argentine photographic-artist Federico Winer’s latest series ‘Ultradistancia’ seeks to transcend the way we look at the world by taking elaborate ‘trips’ across Google Maps and capturing some truly arresting and hypnotic images.

By manipulating colour contrast and saturation, the pieces cannot fail but have an immediate impact on the viewer; psychedelic, and at once disorientating yet strangely familiar from our own personal brushstrokes across the same digital canvas.

Exposed to this satellite perception, the built and natural environments collide in a revelation of patterns and forms that are each weighted with their own imaginative potency.

A car park is revealed as an intricate micro-circuitry board, each tiny vehicle charged with the movement of data between unknown destinations. A hypodermic pier punctures the tissue of the shoreline. The impossibly blue Miami sea is scattered by small boats that float like fallen leaves. Vast highways become reams of fibre-optic cables just as spiralling motorway junctions become rhizomes shooting and twisting from out of the ground.

Planes are lined up in neat rows on an airport concourse like butterflies under the careful hands of a lepidopterist. The modernist architecture of a rail terminus unfolds like a lotus flower, while the graticule choreography of the urban cityscape is juxtaposed with the lysergic lily pads of circle-irrigated fields.

Each image is also freighted with the obliteration of scale, forcing the viewer to call into question their own impressions of micro and macro, frustrated by the stricture of the perspective prohibiting the customary zoom in or out.

The more they are observed, the more artistic movements seem to be subliminally embedded within each of the images.

From the luminous and brooding tones of a Rothko canvas; to the desiccated deserts of Max Ernst; the tessellations of M.C. Escher; the intensity of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Alchemy’, and the bold lines of Vorticism. Intentionally or not, several of the pieces seem to imply the grid-shaped tableaus of Piet Mondrian, equally illustrating the inexplicable spiritual structures thought to underpin the world of experience.

Being a political philosopher as well as an artist, it is hard not to ruminate on the wider connotations of Winer’s work.

So redolent of the contemporary is ‘Ultradistancia’ – satellites, drones and virtual mapping – that it’s tempting to pinpoint the series as a pioneering example of what could become an entirely new artistic movement, ‘dronism’ perhaps.

Art that encompasses the perspective of the ‘artificial eye’ roving at a remove from human influence, at the same time exploiting the new technologies of the masses to present a new and sublime interpretation of the world.

Indeed, what becomes quite striking about the 40 images is the lack of any captured human agency. Instead, human infrastructure and architecture are frozen in isolation as though they were ancient hieroglyphs left on cave walls for future observers, who may in their own way try and decode the true meanings and relevance of arterial slip roads and the uniformity of suburban street design.

In a shrinking 21st century world of ubiquitous surveillance and digital coverage, the omniscient vantage points of Winer’s online ‘trips’ provide a unique glimpse of a planet increasingly shorn of its secrets, only to reveal geometries that hold a mysterious ambiguity all of their own.

Why London should mourn the imminent loss of its ugliest building

There is something stirring in the Nine Elms region of South London. A great rupture of steel and glass is in the process of splitting open the ground like some dormant kraken waking from subterranean sleep.

Battersea Power Station is in the process of being interred in a tomb of reflective cladding; the iconic chimneys being replaced with replicas like a magician’s sleight-of-hand trick being drawn out over several months.

It is here more than anywhere that London’s structural obeisance to obscene capital flows is at its most striking. All of these storage vaults for the wealth of Gulf states that masquerade as luxury apartments can be characterised by their generic blandness. If they appear to be sprouting up unnoticed then it's perhaps because they are so defined by their innocuous visual impact, scarcely more real than the CAD representations displayed on the site hoardings that enclose their construction.

Yet there is one building now facing imminent demolition that surely deserves some kind of lamentation, seen as how it can, in my view, make a strong contention for the dubious honour of being the ugliest building in London.

On South Lambeth Road, lurching over Vauxhall Bus Station, Keybridge House is an uncompromising masterpiece of the Brutalist form. In a city strewn with carbuncles, this steals the crown principally because it stands as a sneering riposte to accepted aesthetic conventions. It is like a terminally-grey castle built on a beach of ash by an architect who must have been suffering a severe depressive episode.

Built for the Post Office in 1975 and later bought by BT for use as a telephone exchange, there are all kinds of rumours of it being used as a base for MI6’s network of ‘spooks’, in between their liaisons in the surrounding cafes and bars of ‘Little Portugal’.

There are theories of tunnels extending out like tentacles from the depths of its vast basement, heightened microwave activity being detectable, and mysterious black vehicles that are seen entering but never leaving, like a Willy Wonka’s factory for which no amount of free chocolate would entice anyone inside.

With its harsh concrete facade, steel bracketing, windows enmired with the grime from exhaust fumes and bird shit, the opprobrium levelled against it is understandable. And yet the sensible response should be to celebrate the diversity of the built environment, looking to such structures as a means of reference for the different phases and periods of recent social history.

There is something quite grand about Keybridge’s unsightliness, something formidable and strangely impressive about a building designed with such scant aesthetical consideration.

With its severe geometrics and spindly pipes supporting one flank, it could almost be seen as a grim prototype for the modern ‘Bowellism’ style that became associated with the likes of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in such buildings as the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s (see above). And what is the purpose of the vast basement if not a pre-empting of the ‘iceberg’ extensions currently being scooped out in Chelsea and Kensington?

If nothing else, it can certainly be relied upon to provoke a reaction in those who observe it; a very physical riposte to buildings like the Shard whose mirage-like form reveals the invisible currents of capital that propelled them into being.

Whilst the locals will shed few tears at the sight of Keybridge House crumbling into dust, the arrival of yet another banal monument to capital, whilst being visually more delicate, must surely erect psychological scaffolds of doubt and insecurity for the long-term viability of being able to call the area home.

Culture - July

Books Read:

Honore de Balzac - 'The Atheist's Mass' (short story)
Philip Merilees - 'Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' (essay)
Dilip Hiro - 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (non-fiction)
Ayn Rand - 'Atlas Shrugged'
Will Self - 'Psychogeography' (non-fiction)
James Lovelock - 'Gaia: A new look at life on Earth' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Every day is like Sunday' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'The Innocents' (Jack Clayton)
'Magnolia' (Paul Thomas Anderson)
'50 First Dates' (Peter Segal)
'Breaking the Waves' (Lars Von Trier)
'Ran' (Akira Kurosawa)


Albums Played:

Tame Impala - 'Currents'