Review: 'David Bowie Is' - V & A Museum

If there could be a blueprint for how to mastermind the perfect cultural renaissance, David Bowie in 2013 may well have encapsulated that Lazarus ideal. Resigned to a hermetic hush since his 2003 brush with mortality, the last decade of retirement has only sporadically amplified into brief public appearances.

Taking the music world completely by surprise by announcing a new album in January was yet another major magic trick, a masterful coup d’etat, from the artist who, above all others in the second half of the 20th century, has been the conjurer at the forefront of surprise, shock and reinvention. Riding in the slipstream of fervent Bowie hysteria – fuelled by the unassailable fact that the album, when it arrived, was a remarkable return to form – the Victoria & Albert museum unveiled plans for a ‘blockbuster’ Bowie retrospective, with demand quickly outstripping availability. In the absence, for now at least, of any planned live appearances, this may well be the closest experience people will get.

And so, having pre-booked 3-and-a-half months in advance for one of the last remaining time slots, I went along on a scorching July weekday afternoon to experience for myself what critics had been clambering over each other to ladle on bountiful praise.

It certainly is a well-stocked and comprehensive exhibition of artefacts; clearly Bowie has spent his whole career hording costumes and stage props with a show of this magnitude in mind. It feels fresh and invigorating – big screens draw you in to various distinct eras of his career whilst relevant props are placed like satellites around the moving images. As you progress through, the corresponding music and commentary pieces are triggered via headsets. Although in principle this is an interesting concept, often I found the audio dropped in and out like a phone signal on a train, leaving me to try and reorient my position in order to spark the sound into life once again.

One of the prevailing impressions to be left with is the extent of Bowie’s constantly inquisitive, sponge-like absorption of the cultural landscape, his appropriation of whole swathes of influences, using and discarding them at will. From mime and performance art, to subversive literature (Ballard, Burroughs, Burgess et al), to Japanese costume design, Dadaist theatre of the Weimar Republic, nihilist philosophy (Nietzsche), to avant garde cinema (‘Metropolis’, ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, etc.); all were experienced and siphoned through into his own artistic mission statements.

However, the exhibition is not without some flaws. The opening sections begin, predictably, by covering Bowie’s upbringing, roots and early musical endeavours, before moving onto his commercial break-through with the ‘Space Oddity’ album. After that the exhibition opens up both spatially and thematically, as though the curators suddenly decided to abandon any attempt at chronology. The effect of this diluting of any tangible cohesion is quite jarring, with costumes and stage props from the early-70s being placed side-by-side with those from the mid-90s, seemingly at random.

The other particular down-side was just how busy it was. Of course, this is to be expected with any ‘blockbuster’ exhibition and you are never going to enjoy the perfect viewing experience. But by allocating tickets according to specific time slots, and subsequently all tickets selling out, the result is that no matter what time you opt for, the attendance will be at a constantly high density. This could be overlooked were it not for the proliferation of so many small scale items of memorabilia, text plates and other miscellany that force you to effectively queue your way round them in a kind of frustrating assembly line. All this, realistically, then allows for is the most cursory of glances at items such as hand-written lyric sheets and photo negative strips that I felt warranted a lot more attention.

Of course it could be argued that such grievances are merely churlish given the event’s scale of publicity and the seemingly universal appeal of its subject. For any fan it is, undoubtedly, a treat to be granted such rare access to these treasures, and despite my misgivings, the undeniable outcome is to leave feeling even more in awe of a creative artist who imbues that oft misused, but in this case surely justified, label of genius.

Tearing the city at the seams #11 - The Audacity of the Urban City Runner

In recent years, psychogeography has experienced something of a fervent influential resurgence, to the extent at which it has now become ambiguous by its very elasticity. You can trace the origins of psychogeography back to writers like Defoe, Blake, de Quincey, and even Dickens with his ‘night walks’. In the mid-20th century it gestated into a niche and transgressive pursuit at the hands of the Paris Situationist movement with writer-flanuers like Guy Debord; before progressing, through the work of contemporary writers such as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Peter Ackroyd, into a somewhat mainstream concern. All manner of people are now liable to reassess their relationship with their urban environs, to grab hold of the mechanised snow-globe in which they find themselves confined and shake it into flux.

Yet if I could loosen the psychogeographic belt from around its expansive girth by one more notch to force feed another mouthful of interpretative theory, I should like to argue the case for an alternative aspect that I think has been, heretofore, downright ignored.

This alternative strand to which I refer is urban running; or, as I think it should be coined, ‘psycho-vascular geography’. My feeling is that this practice has been neglected for too long, almost like the dinner party guest that all other attendees are complicit in refusing to acknowledge or engage in conversation. Perhaps condemned as inappropriate or not at all relevant to the intrinsic hypothesis; insufficiently high-brow to pique the imaginations of the common practitioners.

Merlin Coverley, in his book ‘Psychogeography’, attempts to tie down the flailing limbs of the term into a concise definition:

‘…this act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion…the act of walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city.’

Despite this, it remains the case, in most cities, that walking from point A to point B is still a necessary activity, however inconsequential or perfunctory those distances may be, and however sternly into the narrow matrices of habit and routine they are fixed. (I say most cities, although in places such as Los Angeles the act of walking has been subjugated in favour of vehicular transit to the point of it now being almost taboo to partake in it.) Indeed, it is my conviction that running holds that illustrious status of being contrary to the spirit of the city, kicking against the transitory conventions and orthodoxies, as the more profound act of subversion.

Fundamentally, cities are not designed for extensive aerobic activity; they are congested (with both motorised and pedestrian traffic), polluted, and often their very design tacitly dissuades with its miscellany of bus shelters, walkways, railing, ramparts and barriers. Areas are annexed off so as to maintain the fluid dynamic of the streets, the steady motion of people flowing to and from their allotted destinations.

Not only this, but human traffic itself becomes a substantial impediment. Only when locked into a run and weaving through the fray do you gain a glimpse of peoples’ often maddening lack of fluid movement, or sense of assertive direction. Instead, people tend to drift at random across pavements; others will veer into a change of direction with the exaggerated turning circle of an oil tanker. Others, locked into their technological appendages, torpedo their way along without recourse to anything around them. The runner must be uniquely attuned to and be able to read the developing narrative of the road ahead with the same malleability as the cyclist, or else all rhythm and pace will sporadically be curtailed.

By its very nature, the city negates the concept of easy running and, therefore, seeks to limit such activity to specially demarcated hubs within the urban landscape – public parks for instance – or that other much more troubling, and yet commercially-viable, zone of contained and prescribed exercise, the gym.

All my experience of gyms can be summed up as a sensation of mild horror. It isn’t after very long spent in one of these places that you come to see them as little more than sweaty sanatoria, populated by inmates imprisoned by their collective delusions at self-improvement, desperate to increase their personal shares in the physical stock market. They are a commodified means for people to feed the illusion that, firstly, they can take effective control of their lives, and secondly, that they can remake themselves into a more socially acceptable mould.

Leaving aside the cardio-vascular and venturing inside the weight-lifting area, you are suddenly plunged into a homoerotic menagerie of (predominantly) men, reduced to their basest instincts of brawn and the notion of being in physical contest with everyone else in the vicinity. Indeed, I always felt it was possible that the toxic cocktail of testosterone and insecurity could at any moment ignite with everyone either greasing up and fucking each other, or tearing one another limb from limb as though they were suddenly back in gladiatorial Rome. In my eyes, the act of formation running on a treadmill, gazing up at a bank of TV screens, is scarcely more biologically advanced than a hamster going round and round in a wheel.

Gyms are to urban running what paperback chick-lit is to literary fiction – socially acceptable responses to a barely-suppressed sense of self-guilt, homogenised and diluted of any subversive value or individual merit. Entering a gym is akin to entering a supermarket or an airport terminal; it is another of Marc Auge’s ‘non-places’, in which humans transiently and affectlessly correspond to the environment in which they conduct a particular activity.

I am similarly wary of that annual event at which London gives in to the might of the urban runner – the Marathon. Marathons seem to me to be the tacit justification of an inherently obsessive activity by the means of mass participation. Yet further evidence of the enforced collectivism of entirely solitary pursuits – writing courses and literary festivals being other such examples. There’s no denying the motivating spirit a spectacle such as a marathon can instil in people, but that doesn’t change the reality that on Marathon Day, all that happens is that London’s streets become a giant treadmill for the masses, a prescribed gym with its own shifting scenery. As a side note, I don’t feel this comparison between long-distance running and writing is entirely spurious. Indeed, Haruki Murakami wrote, ‘…most of what I know about writing fiction I learned by running every day. You need to find a balance between both focus and endurance.’

For me, the main crux of my reasoning for running’s subversive supremacy over walking is precisely that which has been commonly attributed to the latter pursuit. It represents the abandonment of the windshield mentality which has developed drastically throughout the last century with the dominance of the car, cinema and television. The power of the spectacle is writ large by film glamour and reconstituted by the modes of our mechanised transit around the urban environment. My claim in terms of the prestige of running is that this effective abandonment is heightened in intensity many times over the experience of a long-distance city walk.

When running, your immediate surroundings become newly animated with an almost reified intangibility. The familiarity of places and infrastructure, their functionality and purpose, become diluted in their potency. The environs become almost reimagined in the mind of the runner as being there to serve his or her purpose. Every obstacle or impediment, each zone of prescribed pedestrian access designed to funnel easy migration, becomes ever more lucidly defined from its usual artifice; in a way is only really visible to the runner, who must adapt and respond to them with much more urgency.

Each gradient change, ground type and topographical feature becomes amplified beneath the pounding feet of the runner; who, through necessity, must react to this changing terra firma, however negligible it might be to the walker, as though your feet were consciously tracing every contour line of the geography around them. Simply by accelerating the tempo at which you actively perceive the space around you, it is fulfilling a new role and functionality.

At this juncture, please let me be clear. I am not one of those insufferable fitness fanatics who wear shirts several sizes too small for them in all seasons so as to accentuate their heaving musculature; I began running home from work purely for financial reasons. Now though, I enjoy finding disparate points of intrigue on a city map and using running as a means of linking them together. My motivation for this is the conviction – correct or not – that scarcely anyone else will have run (or even walked) the same route and for the same purpose.

My more conservative running route home from work, from just off of Portland Place to Brixton Hill, embodies most of the illogical follies of the urban runner. I attempt to dart through the tuna fleet of consumers on Oxford Street and down Bond Street, inhale the noxious pollutants belched out by buses along Millbank, before the final furlong along Brixton Road and up the hill as, with every pace, aching tendons and ligaments grind against bone, ingraining the fissures for future injuries. But then again, how many can say they check their time progress by the hands of Big Ben whilst making a diagonal dash across Parliament Square?!

When the run, for whatever reason, is going badly it can feel as though you’ve submerged yourself in a painful ice bath, a thousand needles jabbing away at your muscles with the incessant rhythm of a printing press. Each pace suddenly becomes enmeshed with a viscous fatigue, as though you were trying to run through glue. At its worst, your lungs can feel like knives are being slowly inserted just below the ribcage. You can sense this dreaded ‘stitch’ setting in long before it fully takes hold; the lactic acid corroding through any endorphins or residual energy. All you can do is zero-in on the metronome of your own breathing, focus on the mechanical principles of your own fuel economy, and compel yourself forwards, as though the very act of giving in and stopping were some heinous, unforgiveable crime.

On runs like this, the environment around you shrinks into the very periphery of your consciousness, leaving the most negligible of impressions. I often think of it in comparison with Ballard who said of his stance as a futurist - ‘I’m only interested in the next five minutes’. Similarly, the fatigued and suffering runner is only interested in, indeed can only visualise, the next five paces. Everything else is irrelevant, divested of all tangibility.

On the flip side though, you may at times experience that elusive sensation ‘the runner’s high’. Not being au fait with hallucinogens, I can only make a vague comparison in ignorance. The endorphins released through cardio-vascular activity serve to alleviate pain. Should the activity be sufficiently rigorous or intense, it can elevate you into a kind of transcendental, meditative state in which you feel completely purged of exhaustion or discomfort and are inflated with an air of invincibility; a feeling that you could continue running for many hours and that you would be unable to stop even if you wanted to. In this state, the landscape feels imbued with an almost fluid translucency, shimmering with heat-haze ripples, everything is tinged with a faint euphoria. You feel as though the city streets are almost being dictated by your own imagination. Ideas, metaphors, aphorisms, images, all pinwheel through my mind as though they were competitors overtaking me in this physical race. As Alan Sillitoe wrote, ‘…I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realising that as far as I was concerned the feeling was the only honest and realness there was in the world and I knowing it would be no different ever, no matter what I felt at odd times, and no matter what anybody else tried to tell me’.

At risk of appearing to use poetic licence too liberally as a means to exaggerate, I must emphasise the difficulty of conveying this sensation to a non- or inexperienced runner. All I can say is that those familiar with the more sedentary narcotic ‘rush’ will have a closer understanding. Of course, this adrenaline rush could also be attained by engaging in perhaps the only other forms of ‘subverting the spirit of the city’ that I am aware of. ‘Base jumping’ – a daredevil pursuit in which no urban structure is exempt from being adopted as a launching platform, the jumper going to more extreme measures to reconstruct the city for his or her own journey. Then there’s ‘urbex’ (urban exploring), whereby intrepid adventurers gain entry to out-of-bounds, often derelict or subterranean places and record their experiences. The most notable ‘urbex’ targets in London are the disused tube stations such as Aldwych and Battersea Power Station.

Of course, such a high whilst running is frustratingly elusive. It may flower and evaporate into an exhausting drudge in a matter of minutes or even less. But once experienced, I believe it is the potency of this ‘natural high’ that keeps people running. Certainly, the way in which it can melt the rigid and mundane opacity of the urban into something altogether more dream-like is what keeps my feet pounding the harsh pavements day after day.

Culture - June

Books Read:

William Shakespeare - 'The Tempest'
Iain Sinclair - 'Lights Out for the Territory' (non-fiction)
Ivan S. Turgenev - 'Fathers and Sons'
G.K. Chesterton - 'The Man Who Was Thursday'
Keith Richards - 'Life' (auto-biography)

The first book I read this month was ‘Lights Out For The Territory’ by Iain Sinclair; a writer who has steered psychogeography firmly into the public consciousness during his career, and is perhaps the movement’s foremost proponent. The book was weighty with fervid imagery but I often found that it drifted off into rambling sections of foggy mysticism and complex references to mythology that made it, at times, quite hard work. My perseverance was rewarded though with some of the best writing I’ve seen regarding London; in particular, the opening essay detailing his walk round Hackney noting all the ‘invisible artworks’ of the graffiti tags; and the perambulation of St Paul’s and the City following the old ruins of the Roman Wall.

To revive myself from Sinclair, I read two excellent shorter novels – Turgenev’s ‘Fathers and Sons’ – the richness of the language was so engrossing (no one can paint such startling vivid character portraits as those Russian novelists!) – and G.K. Chesterton’s espionage satire ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ – a kind of madcap psychogeographic novel, and one that I found brilliantly entertaining.


Films Watched:

'Naked' (Mike Leigh)
'Behind the Candelabra' (Steven Soderburgh) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'(500) Days of Summer' (Marc Webb)
'Solaris' (Andrei Tarkovsky) (rare 35mm print screening at the Renoir Curzon. Introduced by Will Self)
'Aguirre - Wrath of God' (Werner Herzog) (at the BFI Southbank)
'London' (Patrick Keiller)
'The Ballad of the Boy Soldier' (Werner Herzog)
'Dog Day Afternoon' (Sidney Lumet)


Mike Leigh’s film ‘Naked’ I found beguiling and yet, still now, I can’t quite make up my mind as to whether or not I liked it. The 10-12 minute section in which Johnny (a young nihilist in the vein of Bazarov from ‘Fathers & Sons’ transposed into Thatcher’s Britain) meets the security guard (who Johnny deduces has ‘the most boring job in the country’), and the heated existential debate they become embroiled in, has to be one of the most captivating cinematic sequences I think I’ve ever seen. Sadly, the rest of the film thereafter simply couldn’t match up to such a high standard and I was, overall, left feeling disappointed.

Steven Soderburgh’s ‘Behind the Candelabra’, I thoroughly enjoyed, mostly of course due to the flamboyant performances given by Michael Douglas and Matt Damon. I thought the film was well-measured in every respect; an intricate blend of camp humour, kitsch, domestic drama and grief.


Albums Played:

The Stone Roses - 'The Stone Roses'
The Stone Roses - 'Second Coming'
Jon Hopkins - 'Immunity'
Disclosure - 'Settle'
The Rolling Stones - 'Stripped' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'Bridges of Babylon'
The Rolling Stones - 'No Security' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'Live Licks' (live)
The Rolling Stones - 'A Bigger Bang'
Sigur Ros - 'Kveikur'
Beady Eye - 'BE'
Queens of the Stone Age - '...Like Clockwork'

I have long enjoyed listening to the electronic artist Jon Hopkins. His debut album 'Opalescent' is an incredibly enchanting album; his soundtrack to the indie film 'Monsters' was similarly haunting and poetic; whilst 'Insides' saw him experimenting with new harder-edged, murkier sounds. After a gig I saw him play with King Creosote in a New York basement, I drunkenly approached and told him that I thought he was 'the new Brian Eno', to which he looked graciously abashed. Reading the reviews for his new album 'Immunity', lo and behold, the very same accolades are being thrown his way! I think he is one of the most promising and interesting musicians around at the moment; someone who I believe elevates electronica into the same 'high art' sphere as classical music.

Sigur Ros' 'Kveikur' is a bold step forward for them after their more navel-gazing, by-the-numbers efforts of late. I was actually eagerly awaiting Beady Eye's second album 'BE' after heaving the first single 'Second Bite of the Apple'; a song that struck me as being the most intriguing thing Liam Gallagher had appeared on since that Death in Vegas track 'Scorpio Rising'. The album though, I found as uninspiring as its name; and, despite being superficially inoffensive and perfectly listenable, just reinforced to me how far behind him Gallagher Jr's glory days now seem.

Theatre:

'The Tempest' at the Globe Theatre, London

See separate review.

Gigs Attended:

The Stone Roses at Finsbury Park, London
(supported by Public Image Ltd., Johnny Marr, Miles Kane)

One of the big gigs of 2013 for me was seeing the reunited Stone Roses, a band I'd been listening to since the age of 16, back when I was dreaming away in my own school band. At this time, any notion of a reformation was almost inconceivable considering the acrimony between members. Given that they've been on a global lap of honour, its taken them over a year to finally play in London; surely now reaching the very crest of the nostalgic wave that before very much longer has to break.

Despite my affection for the Roses, as a listener I'd always had my reservations about Ian Brown's worth as a frontman, believing that the unrivalled (for their time) musical chemistry between Mani, Reni and John Squire was somewhat hindered by his vocal deficiencies. The weak link, if you like, that prevented them from being the most electrifyingly accomplished musical ensemble since Led Zeppelin.

Watching them live though, Brown's charisma and swagger truly make sense of the hyperbole; despite the tunefulness of his vocals occasionally flatlining, his sheer presence holds the audience - who are more than willing to sing for him - in his sway. They played a mesmerising 10-minute rendition of 'Fool's Gold'; 'Love Spreads' was as stompingly exuburant as I hoped it would be, definitely the epic Zeppelin song that-never-was; and the closing number 'I Am The Resurrection' was truly sensational.

Despite the overwhelmingly nostalgic slant of the gig (which was already close to peak levels thanks to opening acts Johnny Marr and Public Image Ltd.), that all served to make me question whether any contemporary bands could ever again inspire such a passionate following, the Stone Roses triumphed. Now though, they need to prove themselves with that difficult third album.

Exhibitions:

Jeff Koons at Brighton Museum
Petrie Museum at UCL, London

Tearing the city at the seams #10 - A trip to Brighton

Everyone knows that first impressions are of the utmost importance, and so it was that on arriving in the seaside town of Brighton – or London-by-the-sea as it has historically been known – my first impression was, quite literally: rubbish. Mounds of it, banks of rubbish shored up along the roadsides, bins overflowing like garbage fountains, in places it was like the news footage of Leicester Square during the 1977 ‘winter of discontent’.

There was such an abundance on display that we – my girlfriend and I, that is – were instantly convinced that something must be amiss, for the simple reason that Brighton could hardly have maintained its fun-loving, escapist appeal if this were the normal order of things. And yet there was that lingering doubt that, perhaps, away from the watchful eye of the national media, some woefully inept town council had presided over this renaissance of litter. I half expected to reach the seafront and find families continuing to recline amongst the trash, building models out of it, forlorn donkeys trying to adapt to this insidious terrain.

But no, things had not declined so far. In a shop we spoke to an assistant there who told us how we had arrived on the climactic day of a 5-day strike by refuse workers. From what I could gather it appeared to be regarding a fresh staff intake resulting in a projected reduction of overtime hours available for existing staff. What better way to protest than by creating a whole load of extra overtime work for themselves! And what an oddly unique situation binmen on strike must find themselves in, I thought, since unlike train drivers or teachers, after a few days of striking the shit quite literally begins to pile up; in essence, a very visual and smelly reminder not only of their unrest but also their intrinsic necessity.

As strangers to Brighton though, we found the initial situation rather amusing. Primarily, I think because the previous evening we had watched the iconic mod film ‘Quadraphrenia’; a film about youth culture, angst, pills, music, rebellion and disenchantment. The film being so fresh in my mind, initially the disorder of things gave cause to think that we had arrived in Brighton the morning after the famous riots between the mods and rockers, and that what we were seeing was the aftermath of the chaos.

However, just as you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, so I don’t like to judge a place by its civil unrests. After checking into our seafront hotel we walked along the promenade ensconced in the persistent sea mist. The skeletal West Pier sat marooned from the main land like an abandoned climbing frame in a flooded playground where only seagulls could now perch.

There's an intriguing resonance about the idea of derelict piers; sheared away as they are from the mainland, left adrift just offshore, bereft of any life or functionality. Extending the metaphor further, they are not simply decaying relics like normal structures, but are more effectively comatose. If you consider them in any depth (and who would really, but just humour me), the concept of a pier is rather a strange one anyway.

Aside from those with a more intrinsic utility, at ports and docks for instance, pleasure piers were originally designed so that tourists could experience the sea close-hand, since the large tidal ranges of many popular reosrts often meant that the sea was out of sight of the mainland. I still think they are structural oddities; in a sense, emblematic of the out-stretching infrastructure, as in the Victorian railways, that were able to interconnect disparate locales and bring in tourists, thereby securing the town's fortunes from then on.

I can't help but think that if, in an alternate version of history, piers had captured popular imagination in the same feverish way as skyscrapers did at the start of the 20th century, maybe now you'd have monolithic pier scans extending far out into the open oceans, confirming the high-modern status of the coastal city. (As it happens, the longest pleasure pier in the world is at Southend-on-sea which extends 1.3 miles into the Thames estuary).

Continuing on our way we passed the Grand Hotel; the Dealey Plaza-that-never-was, having survived the noteriety of the 1984 IRA bombing. Upon reaching the famous East Pier, we diverted inland to explore the Lanes network of curiosity shops and cafes. And also to locate the narrow alley just off East Street in which Phil Daniels and Leslie Ash escape from the rioting for a quick shag.

With such a pivotal location pinpointed and ticked off, we arrived at the Cultural Quarter, dominated by the Royal Pavillion, built by the Prince Regent in the 19th century. Its Indo-Saracenic architecture, part of a new wave of Indian influence reaching Britain due to the Empire, is still quite arresting, with its minarets and bulbous domes rising and falling in stately elegance.

Later on, sitting and eating fish & chips on the seafront as the sun began setting, casting shadows across the out-stretched arm of the pier that tried vainly to hold back the oncoming tide, you get a definite sense that you are participating in some kind of instinctive British ritual. Indeed, so innately British was the scene that I thought we could almost be modelling for a UKIP election campaign poster.

Of course, there is something inexplicably British about the seaside town experience, something almost touching on that noxiously patronising concept of ‘heritage’. With the summer sun shining (and perhaps the litter cleared), there is no doubt that towns such as Brighton blossom with a certain joyfulness that has meant the prolonged endurance of their appeal. However, it is also the case that on the more frequent grey and drizzly days, the unavoidably shabby and dishevelled reality is laid bare and accentuated. You need only go to Blackpool on a rainy day to see this hypothesis in evidence. The sunshine acts as the cosmetics that serve to beautify and transform a plain and, in some cases even unsightly, face.

The following morning when we went out on to the streets, there had clearly been a dawn raid to avert the army of litter from gaining any further ground. The morning sun had purged the grey mist of yesterday, and we were able to witness the true appeal of Brighton. I was left with the feeling that the fortunes of such a place can only have been hindered by the proliferating ease of foreign tourism, the jet-setting lifestyles and particularly the ‘golden era’ of low-cost air travel of the last 15-20 years. Why travel to Brighton when for a little extra time and money you could relax on the South of France, one of the Greek Islands or the Costas? Perhaps now, as we see fuel costs rising, and with it air fares and taxes, a resurgence of interest in resorts like Brighton will develop, as people once again turn to the great British seaside towns.

The Transcendence of Cinema

Recently, I have been lucky enough to experience two examples of cinematic transcendence, a feeling at once fleeting yet all the same striking, like an effervescent glare. It is a rare occurence when a piece of art - in whatever medium - manages to evoke such a cocktail of emotional responses in the individual that, perhaps for just a few sparse moments, they are elevated to a higher plateau of conscious engagement with the artwork itself.

Perhaps the most iconic of these moments in cinematic terms is the spectacular 'Beyond the Infinite' section of Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'; the otherworldly Ligeti score combined with the lysergic 'head-rush' visuals, perhaps rendering it unsurprising at how popular the film was upon its release with the acid-dropping hippie scene (not to mention every student whose ever held pretensions to stoned intellectualism).

More frequently for me in the past, this sensation has occured with music, predominantly in a live context when my proximity to the composers of great works has served to inflate me with hopeless awe. For instance, watching Roger Waters and Nick Mason (one half of Pink Floyd) play 'Dark Side of the Moon' in full at Hyde Park; U2 playing the euphoric 'Where the streets have no name' in front of 80,000 at Croke Park, Dublin; or watching Robert Plant wail 'Whole Lotta Love' at a distance of only a couple of metres in a small Wolverhampton town hall.

Literary transcendence is, perhaps for reasons of its lesser immediacy, a slightly more elusive phenomena; more of a protracted transcendence rather than one fleeting moment. The moments that immediately spring to mind are my first readings of Ballard’s ‘Crash’, Irvine Welsh’s ‘Trainspotting’ or Doestoyevsky’s ‘Notes from the Underground’. Similarly, through reading various works by Kafka, Borges, Orwell, Burroughs, et al.

This month I experienced this sensation watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 existential science-fiction epic ‘Solaris’ at the Renoir Curzon in Bloomsbury. At close to 3 hours of ponderously slow narrative and moody introspection, the film’s often stunning imagery ends up seeping like osmosis into your psyche. Finishing at gone 11pm, as the lights went up there was a palpable sigh of exhausted relief from the packed audience, not borne out of boredom but from the sheer hypnotic weight of the film leaving everyone fatigued.

Finding myself bleary-eyed back on the platform of Russell Square tube station, the juxtaposition between the world of ‘Solaris’ and the real world around me was both harsh and jolting, in a way echoing the opening section of the film which jumps from ethereal countryside to teeming metropolis. Over the 3 hours my brain had slowed itself to ‘Tarkovsky time’ and as such I found myself struggling with the reengagement process back to the regular tempo of things in the modern city.

More fervently did I experience the power of the transcendent whilst watching Werner Herzog’s masterpiece ‘Aguirre – Wrath of God’ as part of the BFI retrospective on the legendary German visionary’s oeuvre. My first foray with this film was aged 17 or 18, returning home from a drunken night out to find my Dad starting to watch the film on DVD. I sank down on the sofa and for the next 90 minutes allowed the film to permeate through to me as I sat drifting in and out of inebriated consciousness. Thereafter, I could scarcely remember anything about the film, apart from some striking and haunting images that kept recurring at odd moments; resonating like beams of sunlight through a heavy mist of obscurity. I’ve since watched the film several times in a sober state and yet it never fails to keep its distance, I don’t feel familiar with it to any overt degree, still it retains much of its mythical allure and potency.

The film is a searing portrait of the ambitious follies and delusional conquests that have gripped so many in the past as in the present day. It is a film dense with multiple layers regarding politics and the machinations of power, social hierarchy, religious motivations, colonialism, and the ever-present human foibles of avarice and obsession. These are foibles mirrored by the reckless determinism of Herzog himself in completing the film, considering the feverish extremities of the shoot. At times, Herzog’s direction feels like one of his documentaries, the shaky camerawork taking you right up into the faces of the struggling conquistadores and their slaves as they wade through swamps and contend with the tumult of the river.

Re-watching this time around, I was also reminded of the film’s sporadic touches of humour that add yet more disparate tropes to the overall thematic spectrum. The soundtrack by German band Popol Vuh is ethereal and spellbinding, as perfectly married to the visuals as any I’ve experienced before. Klaus Kinski gives perhaps his finest performance as the power-hungry Aguirre, acting more with his deranged facial expressions than anything else, lurching around as though intoxicated, and in the haunting final scene, floating on a primate-infested raft, expounding insane plans for his imaginary empire, amidst the ruins of his El Dorado crusade.

Leaving the BFI, I felt entranced by the mesmeric quality of the viewing, and once again found the re-emergence back into the nocturnal bustle of London almost nauseating. I felt strangely compelled to ape Aguirre’s delusional madness, improvise a raft from some al fresco restaurant tables and set out on a personal mission along the mighty River Thames, in an attempt to somehow invoke my own wrath of God.

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.

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.