Tearing the city at the seams #15 - Around the city in a day - A Circumnavigation of London

It is common parlance that to walk in circles is as maddening as it is pointless. The familiar conceit in any narrative regarding being lost in a remote landscape is the rediscovery of your own tracks, eradicating any notion of progress having been made.

With this in mind I found myself, with a week's leave from the usual working routine, pondering the notion of a radial walk around London, the idea being that the everyday contemplation of the city could be decidedly unraveled when viewed from a circular prospective.

In general, we are entranced by the notion of destiny, of a definite and eminently reachable point to which we spend our lives moving in a more or less linear fashion towards. The idea of simply traversing in circles is unpalatable, the antipode view of progress, yet has the capacity to be perversely compulsive.

In 'The Truce' Primo Levi, on making his monumental journey round Eastern Europe having been liberated from Auschwitz en route to his home in Turin, upon reaching Bratislava and being (relatively speaking) so close to the start of his epic journey, he wondered 'would we complete the circle...[and] begin another vain, exhausting circuit of Europe?'

The plan was to set out west from my flat in Brixton and complete a day-long circumnavigation of the city, closing the circle by arriving back at my flat from the eastern approach.

It struck me that very few people, if any, must complete such exaggerated routes as part of their day-to-day relationship with the urban environment. The sheer pointlessness of doing a circular walk on such a scale was what captivated me, as well as my stern conviction that this was as defiant a means as any of subverting the vice-like clench of urban routine, the short spurts of sporadic walking that punctuate our typical day so tightly mandated by fiscal and time imperatives.

This was to be my rebellion-of-sorts against the commercialisation of the city space, by forcing it to adapt to my own will, when so often it is cogently the case that the opposite applies.

As a repudiation of the strict time pressures forever imposed by life in the city, I decided to re-imagine the city as a clockface, on which, starting out from '6' I would conquer the city hour by hour as I progressed from Brixton to Putney through to Islington at the 'hour mark' and ticking round again via Shadwell and Southwark.

As far as I was concerned, I was merely fulfilling the urban walking directive of Joseph Paxton, the designer who, in 1855, proposed the building of a Great Victorian Way. This grand infrastructure project was to be a 10-mile covered arcade loop around most of central and west London, incorporating pedestrians, shops, hotels and other businesses; a vastly ambitious proposal that would have had the impact of Baron Haussmann on Paris, until it was shelved in favour of building the infinitely more useful (if less spectacular) sewer network system.

Setting out at 7.30am, the ice-blue sky thinning and thawing as the sun gained in confidence, I realised that I would also gain a unique perspective on a 'day in the life of a city', crunching my way along pavements behind dog walkers en route to Clapham Common, and commuters hurrying to keep pace with their regimented schedules. Free from thinking about such routine, I was able to view the city from a different patina, as it swiftly yawns into life, almost on a biological level as a complex interweaving network of organisms locking into action once more after the night's interregnum.

Descending onto the Putney embankment I admired the restrained and modest skyline that has been so far maintained in this riverine portion; as yet comparatively free from the pestiferous encroachment of Lego-block apartments and buildings that follow ‘statement’ rather than form.

All the way from the Boat Club to the Hammersmith Bridge I became embroiled in an initially humorous but eventually infuriating overtaking game with a band of middle-aged women out jogging. Harangued by a gangly and high-spirited motivational coach of around my age, the women would jog for 40 or 50 metres before one would give in to the lactic strain and, as though they were mountaineers roped together, drag the others to a weary stop.

At this point I would gain ground and retake the lead on them which would incense them into corralling their collective energies to spurt round me again for another few metres. The whole exchange was in danger of becoming quite farcical until I peeled off across Hammersmith Bridge, reflecting on this (as I am wont to do) as just another example of the consumptive nature of our culture, to the extent that an essentially free activity, such as going for a jog, has to be traded as another fungible asset for those willing to partake in the exchange.

Through Hammersmith and past the ‘Death Star of commerce’ Westfield Shopping Centre, I zeroed-in on Shepherd’s Bush and from there began to bestride the quintessential pale-brick townhouses of Notting Hill. Walking through this highly desirable West London locale I began to think of the hypothesis of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who stated that if you examined the great cities of the world they were all constructed on a strict declension from the west to east axis in accordant correlation from rich to poor.

Whether this is due to, as he suggested, the fundamental psychological synthesis existent between people and the built environment in alignment with socio-economic hierarchies, is a matter for much debate. The fact is though, that London has always been a patchwork of different social fabrics stitched together with little recourse to reason or grand design. That said, recent developments that can be seen all over the city (and which are nowhere more salient than on such a drawn-out walk as this), threaten to irreparably alter the urban stratiography under the auspices of, at best, gentrification, and at worst, social cleansing.

The traditional London ethos of the working class and the elite co-existing in close proximity is rapidly being abandoned. This has been government policy, acknowledged or otherwise, for the best part of 30 years. The problem is, that as with any major conurbation, low-paid workers will always be needed in the centre as much as the hedge fund managers, who will still need someone on a minimum-wage zero-hour contract to sell them a sandwich from Pret or Tesco Express.

These drastic changes, which are completely in hoc to capital as opposed to social responsibility, can be seen in the redevelopment of Battersea, the evolution of Dalston, Shoreditch, Hackney and Brixton to being places of burgeoning appeal. A prime case-in-point is Elephant & Castle, an area that has all the appearance of having been struck by the eruption of a concrete volcano.

The imminent demolition of the Heygate estate and the planned regeneration of the shopping centre and surrounding areas is the crystallisation of modern trends. The willingness to provide yet more luxury apartment complexes and delay for as long as possible the token quota of affordable housing is too symptomatic of the times to be worth being overly incensed by. The fact is though that far less than the budgeted £1.5 billion could have been spent on simply renovating the Heygate, as the Park Hill estate in Sheffield has been (to the point that it was nominated for this year's Sterling Prize).

Indeed, within the next 10 years the existing denizens of Elephant and Castle will have been replaced with a finance ghetto, a gated community full of bankers and accountants who, like eager sperm will be ejaculated from the testes of their brand new luxury flats across the supine river and all over the waiting face of the City.

But I digress. As midday approached, I hit Marylebone, with its reclusive mews' branching off here and there like streets-in-waiting. From there I trudged along past Euston, St. Pancras and King's Cross, the 3-pins of a plug inserted into the power socket of North London. Making my way through Hoxton and beginning to curve southwards through Bethnal Green, I realised that the walk was beginning to unfairly prejudice my approach to the environs, noting as I did just how boring and non-descript large parts of London actually are when subjected to slow and exacting scrutiny.

At times I found myself oscillating with each step into newly extreme mindsets. For about 3 minutes I decided I hated London, and questioned why the fuck it was that I was wasting my time with such a pursuit?! Normal people do not decide to do this on their days off from work I reasoned. Oh well, by now it was too late to turn back...

As you slice through Stepney towards Shadwell, Levi-Strauss' west-east theory is never more pertinent; layer upon layer of diminutive social accommodation buildings crush up against one another, yielding only occassionally for a bedraggled and featureless public park. The youthful resurgence of Hackney and Shoreditch has yet to inflect this particular quarter of East London, an area that was said to draw benefit from the Olympics of last year, although exactly how was unclear at the time and is even more mystifying after the event.

And yet the imposing behemoths of Canary Wharf manifest themselves almost like an opulent mirage on the horizon, both instilling a sense of futile Madison Avenue-esque aspirationalism and overreaching resentment. There is an arrogant, stand-offish feel to these capitalist monuments that exist apparently detached and enclosed from the rest of London, like a segment of Dubai ostentatiously plonked down, waiting to be islanded by the ox-bow lake of the Thames as the river severs its way decisively across Poplar's flank.

Following this logical train of thought, I began to wonder whether there were any cities built in a circular design or whether they were, in the main, improvised centrifugally in an urban sprawl or laid down in rigid graticule fashion like cables as in American cities? I could think of none, until I remembered the Venus Project, a quasi-cult research hub spearheaded by Jacque Fresco as a design for the complete overhaul of society.

The premise of the Venus Project is that a sustainable resource-based economy would replace all monetary systems, and pre-fabricated 'total cities' would sprout like mushrooms; its nucleus core orbited by ever-thickening layers of residency, industry and leisure, like the utilitarian version of Dante's levels of Hell.

Despite being quite benign, it doesn't take too much intellectual prying into the Project's 'manifesto' to deduce just how chronically utopian and simplistic it actually is, falling well foul of the usual utopian problem that it takes into no consideration at all the myriad varieties of wants and needs that prevent a unified human race from manifesting. The less said about the plans for a 'cybernated government' (linking all computers with automated services, allowing them full day-to-day control) the better, although I'd encourage people to give it a read purely for the entertainment value.

That said, I couldn't but feel a slight yearning for Franco's bucolic Eden as I began to enter the Rotherhithe tunnel to traverse under the Thames and back to London's southern hemisphere. Although technically walk-able, passing through on foot is strongly ill-advised and I could certainly understand why as I made my way through the hot, acrid tunnel, trying to inhale as infrequently as possible for fear the exhaust fumes might shear a good year or so from my life expectancy, trying to avoid the incredulous glances of passing motorists.

Upon reaching daylight after 1.5km of white-tiled exhaust pipe, I paused for some fresh air in Southwark Park. By now the light was beginning to tinge with dusk and as I made my way down through Peckham and then onto the final furlong of Denmark Hill, I entered an almost trance-like state of intoxication, maintaining forward motion whilst my mind slumped into an unapologetic mush of inertia. Cars and buses passed me by, full of the same commuters I had set out with in the morning, returning home after yet another day's work, the comfort of routine maintaining the steady equilibrium of their lives.

Dragging my sore heels through Brockwell Park and the final approach along Brixton Water Lane, I thought of all those explorers and adventurers who in centuries gone by had set off in search of new frontiers, circumnavigating the world when they were more mindful of falling off it, never sure whether they would see the shores of home again.

Relative to my usually quite sedentary existance, this day-long hike around the city would have to serve as a near-enough approximation of such far-flung travails. I had seen the city from a radically new perspective, redefining it according to my own eccentric parameters, in a way that was both invigorating and rewarding. Now though, I was ready to sit down.

REVIEW - 'Gravity'

Back in 1895, the Lumiere Brothers' ‘Arrival of a train at La Ciotat' played in theatres to audiences who fled, incredulous at this strange new apparition, in fear that the train would suddenly come chuffing out from the screen, pre-empting the sensations that 118 years later would still be breaking ground in the world of cinema. Indeed, it does seem mildly baffling that over a century on, ‘ground-breaking’ aesthetic advances in the cinematic medium are still being used as the primary hook-and-bait for ensnaring a mass audience.

Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Gravity’, some 2-and-a-half years in the making, has been heralded as the game-changer in modern science-fiction cinema, the maturing moment in the predominantly gimmicky lifecycle of 3D movies. Undeniably, the technology involved is remarkable and raises the bar for all space-based films to come. And yet despite this, ‘Gravity’ still manages to be a very mediocre film.

Its problem is that it believes the sheer heft of its technological accomplishment alone justifies its existence, as if an audience should not be entitled or expected to desire more abstract components such as a decent narrative, believable dialogue or functional characters. The plot is almost totally mindless, seemingly extracted wholesale from any number of formulaic popcorn action movies; whilst the two characters, played by Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are worthy of absolutely no serious emotional investiture on the part of the audience, they are the vacuous black holes in this filmic rendering of space.

A lot has been made of the lack of scientific realism, and I defer to those far more knowledgeable than myself to make that case. That said, there are setpieces in the finale that are so far-fetched that it did nothing but distort all the exceptional visual realism that had served as a perfectly impressive canvas. [SPOILER ALERT] By the time Bullock crash-lands on Earth, myself along with several others in the cinema were guffawing loudly at the utter absurdity of the unfolding action.

The philosophic claims that have been made, with its religious and spiritual overtones, I would have to debunk as misguided. Instead, ‘Gravity’ sinks into a morass of predictable Hollywood positivism, the triumphing of humanity over all adversity, the melioristic redemption of the individual struggling to overcome all the odds weighing against them.

In the end, I can only conclude that my disappointment arose from hoping for a very different kind of film from the one ‘Gravity’ turned out to be. The opening 13-minute shot is sublime and I wish the film could have progressed in this slower vein along more existential or introspective themes about the role and nature of humankind floating in outer space. I was hoping for a more sedate and reflective ‘2001’-style study on the experience of humans at the very pinnacle of technological achievement. Instead, ‘Gravity’ is simply ‘Speed’ in space; a theme park simulator film in which style is everything and any substance is left to simply drift further and further out of reach.

The enduring legacy of JFK's assassination - 50 Years On

November 22nd marks the half-centenary milepost since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, an event that perhaps more than any other, is symbolic of the second half of the 20th century and the 'hyper-real' media landscape that grew like an additional ozone layer around the earth in consequence.

It is perhaps one of the most documented, analysed and debated single events of the last fifty years, and yet I would argue that in 2013 its real legacy resides, not in the repercussions of the event per se, but with the lasting impact on the mediarised 'image' as a wholly distinct entity capable of endless manipulation and exploitation.

Never before had the mass media, physical reality and the collective imagination fused together in a profound symbiosis that would leave such an indelible imprint upon the psyche of America, and to a certain extent, the wider world. Abraham Zapruder's infamous filmed footage provided the template for the endless reproductions and contexts in which it would be used from then on; its ubiquitous presence sinking deep within the public consciousness. In a sense, it galvanised the media organism like no other event had done previously; the bullet fired into the head of Kennedy was in essence the starting pistol for the media race that would go on to dominate the rest of the 1960s, with the Vietnam War and the moon landings being broadcast and reproduced on TV screens the world over.

Of course this vast media expansion was already in full flow, nonetheless, it can legitimately be judged that the Kennedy assassination - which harnassed all the fundamental dramatic components - from death and conspiracy to power and glamour - was the defining event, the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy captured frame-by-frame, that was needed to commodify and turn reality into artificial 'spectacle' for the purposes of mass consumption.

It became the blueprint for the 'captured event' compulsive obsession that pervades in 2013 when it seems everyone has the capability and inclination to record and distribute anything and everything at any given time. The obvious 'spectacular event' with which to draw comparison is 9/11. Again, a shocking and epochal event that was played and replayed across the world via the mass media landscape; thereby, scorching the images into the consciousness of everyone from that point on.

Leaving aside the limitless recyclability of the event, in thinking about it over the last few days, I began to query whether the events of Dealey Plaza in 1963 really warrant such unbridled notoriety? And what relevance, if any, does the assassination of JFK have to someone like me born in 1989, or to someone born today in 2013?

I would argue very little (aside from the aforementioned impact on the media landscape that it helped to fertilise). At the end of the day, the stark reality of the event is that it was the death of one man. Indeed, that man was the president of the leading world power, but nevertheless, it was one individual. The political ramifications in the aftermath were nothing like as severe as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, or, one could argue, of Martin Luther King in 1968 which was seen as an attack on the whole social movement of which he had been appointed spokesman.

Of infinitely more devastating universal implication was an event that took place only a year earlier. It seems curious to me that this colossal event, which for the first time brought the planet within inexorable proximity to its own destruction, appears to have been relegated somewhat in the league tables and its legacy diluted by the admixture of history. If JFK holds relatively minor significance for the children born into the 21st century, then the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 have faded even further into the background. In fact, I barely remember it featuring on my school history syllabus to any great extent.

My theory for the reasons behind this are based on the comparable scale of events. JFK's death came almost pre-packaged with all the elements of a Hollywood conspiracy thriller, together with Oswald's murder and the sensationalist Warren Commission that followed, as a 'human tragedy' that the collective imagination could invest in on a recognisable emotional level. The contemplation of such closeness to 'mutually assured destruction' (MAD) is on far too vast a scale for humans to psychologically grapple with on any meaningful grounding, it simply doesn't accord with any familiar level of reality.

This is the same reason why on any real scale the Space Age, according to J.G. Ballard -

'...lasted barely 15 years, from Gagarin's first flight in 1961 to the first Apollo splashdown not shown live on TV in 1975, a consequence of the public's loss of interest'.

The exploration of space was just too advanced a contemplation for easily digestible mass consumption, being literally not-of-this-earth, and therefore nowhere near as resonant or captivating as the more orthodox humanistic drama of the political assassination; a nation's grief at the loss of their glamorous figurehead.

Consider 'Black Saturday', when a Soviet submarine armed with nuclear warheads was prevented from surfacing by American fighter planes, leading them to believe a nuclear war had begun and nearly resulting in them launching their missiles. If humankind were able to fully grasp the cataclysmic implications of 'Black Saturday' I believe it could have been a ground-breaking moment, a transcendent mass-realisation of the folly of war, the nature of man and the fragile biosphere in which he has been allotted to exist.

It could have been a moment in which ideology, prejudice, and politics all took a substantial step backward, as we subsequently tried to move trepidatiously forward in a brave new world of co-existance, tolerance and appreciation of just how fallible and precious life is.

In reality, it has had nothing even close to such an influence; men still wage war, still refuse to take the decisive steps necessary to reverse or tackle environmental destruction, and nations still seem intent on developing and hoarding nuclear arms whilst concurrently, sections of their societies suffer from hunger and disease.

The assassination of JFK was of course a momentous event, a defining media spectacle. And yet I can't help but find its persistent resonance 50 years on to be ever so slightly misguided when you consider that the vast majority of people on Earth will never have heard of Vasili Arkhipov, the man who, if reports are to be believed, prevented our very own suicide.

Kate Moss exhibition - Lawrence Elkin Gallery

So to the Lawrence Elkin Gallery on New Compton Street on a Saturday afternoon to see a blink-and-you'll-miss-it exhibition of David Ross' photographic prints of the then-unknown Kate Moss in her first photo shoot.

Kate Moss represents a form of 'stardom' that in modern culture is, at the very least, anachronistic; and more accurately, almost entirely defunct. Her appeal and place within the cultural landscape harks back to someone like Marilyn Monroe or Audrey Hepburn. She is levitated voodoo-like above the snake-pit of 'celebrity' by virtue of an enigmatic allure which in turn casts the veil of 'icon' across her shoulders.

By remaining both imagistically ubiquitous yet personally aloof, we know comparatively little about Kate Moss, and hence she retains the appealing sense of mystery that is such scant currency in the over-exposed market of 21st century celebrity. Within this realm we are all complicit to a bizarre self-delusion that our lives are somehow proxy to those of the rich and famous; a misconception desperately cultivated by celebrities in an effort at demonstrating their 'humanity' at any opportunity that might ensure a positive correlation with publicity and the maintenance of their own 'brand'.

The exhibition's shots depict Moss as a whey-faced 14-year-old, years before the murky cloud of 'heroin chic' and anorexia smears began to form above her early fame. Her instantly-recognisable features smoulder with a fertile compound of innocence and self-awareness, naivete and shrewdity; these dichotomies are visible in every frame. There is an undeniably 'Lolita'-like quality to these shots, insofar as her latent sexuality and intrigue dance the precarious waltz between the aforementioned dichotomies.

Not only in physical terms - at one glance appearing disarmingly plain and ordinary, at the next almost overpoweringly sensual - but also in terms of appearing to possess that integral cynicism and business sense that would sustain her status as arguably the world's most recognisable model. You get the impression that even at age 14 she had mapped the trajectory of her own future from that point on.

The key to her longevity, aside from her versatility as a model, is the fact of her enigmatic presence in the cultural sphere that enables us all to import our own narratives or imaginations onto her, in much the same way as people become imaginatively transfixed by, and invested in, Marilyn Monroe.

For my own part, I have used Moss as a means of subversive imagery in my novel 'Digital' and a couple of years ago in a rather crude 3-part short story 'Sex Objects of the World Unite' in which she makes the ultimate protestation against the mass media glare by self-immolating on a catwalk a la the Tibetan monks.

Since then though I rather think the crux of the ‘protest’ idea to be misguided. As Moss’ image remains omnipresent and apparently age-less she appeals to the self-flagellating paranoia lying within the collective psyche as to the passage of time taking its inexorable toll. By embodying that delusional ‘Pan-like’ fantasy towards which society conditions us all to submit, wilfully or otherwise, she is able to elevate herself above the public’s attempts at humanising her through the medium of scandal.

As such she transcends the fickle carousel of celebrity, in which we idolise and emulate until the wave of popular affection reaches its critical mass, breaking back into denigration as a means of illuminating the foibles and human weaknesses that misguidedly convince and reassure us once again of their being ‘just like us’.

Culture - October

Books read:

William Golding - 'The Inheritors'
John Osborne - 'Look Back in Anger' (play)
Walter Benjamin - 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (non-fiction)
Louis-Ferdinand Celine - 'Journey to the End of the Night'
Gilles Neret - 'Salvador Dali' (non-fiction)
Leon Trotsky - 'An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe' (non-fiction)

This month I discovered a book I'm now eager to list as one of my favourites - Louis-Ferdinand Celine's 'Journey to the end of the night', an absurd and often hilarious nihilistic adventure following the gloriously ill-fortuned Bardamu as he travels from the Western Front to colonial Africa to New York and back to France. Reading it I became intricately aware of those writers - Burroughs, Kerouac, Bukowski - who had in turn been captivated and inspired by Celine's crude, riotous, free-flowing narrative and his often magical turn-of-phrase.

I also read a non-fiction book this month which struck me with its strangely modern relevance despite the decades filling up since its release. Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is a remarkably prescient work, particularly in its commentary on the cult of celebrity, as well as the nature of cinema and film degrading the 'aura' of a given performance, something that is evident every day with everyone apparentely creating a filmed reproduction of their reality. I was particularly struck by the following phrase -

'Within major historical periods, along with changes in the overall mode of living of the human collective, there are also changes in the manner of its sense perception'.

We are facing such a sense-changing epoch right now with the 'digital renaissance' that is in its full and irreversible swing.


Films Watched:

'Blue Jasmine' (Woody Allen) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'A Field in England' (Ben Wheatley)
'Shrek' (Andrew Adamson & Vicky Jenson)
'Livid' (Julien Maury & Alexandre Bustillo).
'The Amityville Horror' (Stuart Rosenberg) (at Prince Charles Cinema, London)
'The Hills Have Eyes' (Wes Craven)
'Zero Dark Thirty' (Kathryn Bigelow)
'Le Week-end' (Roger Michell)
'Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps' (Oliver Stone)
'The Prestige' (Christopher Nolan)
'Limitless' (Neil Burger)
'V/H/S' (assorted directors)


Albums Played:

John Lennon - 'Plastic Ono Band'
Anna Calvi - 'One Breath'
Brian Eno & David Byrne - 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts'
Brian Eno - 'Lux'
The Orb - 'The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld'
God is an Astronaut - 'Origins'
Motorhead - 'Aftershock'
Lou Reed - 'Transformer'
Lou Reed - 'Berlin'
Paul McCartney - 'New'
Lorde - 'Pure Heroine'
James Blake - 'Overgrown'
Arcade Fire - 'Reflektor'


Gigs Attended:

Jessie J at O2 Arena, London

One of the beneficial aspects of being in a relationship is the healthy exposure to otherwise overlooked cultural experiences. So it was that I found myself inside the domic incrustation of the O2 on an October evening watching Jessie J with my girlfriend. First things first; it would be very easy for me to deride Jessie J and her music simply because of it not equating with my own preferences, but that isn't the point of this review.

The show was technically accomplished, the music itself perfectly listenable, and the capacity crowd seemed to thoroughly enjoy the whole event, as far as I could tell through the galaxy of camera phones hoisted aloft, a modern trend that is detestable yet sadly inevitable. (This though is a separate gripe and by no means limited to Jessie J's target audience, I once stood next to a middle-aged man at a Fall gig who watched the entire thing through his palm-sized screen.)

Whilst an undeniably competent performer and talented vocalist, Jessie J falls into the trap that so many celebrated vocalists (Houston, Carey, Beyonce, et al) have done over the years of wringing every vocal phrase's neck with a spiral of melismic warbling that, whilst amply demonstrating skill, never fails to strangulate any possible emotional delivery.

What really began to nauseate me about the show was the bizarre bursts of pseudo-philosophic phrases across the LED screens during the intermittent costume changes. It felt like being preached to by a Twitter-era self-help guru, with the banal proclamations of 'follow your instinct', 'love yourself', and 'we are all one'. The cringe-inducing nadir was Jessie herself offering up some bland platitude to the effect of 'we don't just live, we are alive!', which as far as philosophical statements go must be the equivalent of a soggy lettuce leaf found in the bottom of a fridge.

It was this dominant yet patronising drive to inspire and elevate that really became too much to take. At almost any opportunity Jessie seemed determined to emphasise her disbelief at playing on such a large stage; yet instead of simply demonstrating honest humility, she would pontificate on the merits of 'never letting anyone stop you from following your dreams' - spewing out this squeaky-voiced helium with which she sought to inflate her young fans with her impossible aspirationalism.

More than anything, it was this self-referential, rags-to-riches narrative of the show that took away from my simply being able to enjoy it on its own simple terms as a pop performance. The very best performers always exude the aura of belonging on that stage and nowhere else, that they were born simply to strut that stage before their audience; and yet with Jessie J I got the impression I was watching someone trying gamely but subconsciously steeling herself at any moment for the wheels to fall off, and as such one has to wonder how long her career can be sustained in so volatile and fickle a market.

Exhibitions Attended:

'Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity' at Photographer's Gallery, London

A Question of Demography - A prophecy of the changing social relations between the young and old

When a lot younger, my brothers and I, along with our Dad, would traipse into the centre of town every Saturday afternoon, lured on by the promise of selecting a chocolate bar of choice from Woolworths. (Oh, so easily pleased…)

Every so often, as we set out or made our sugar-fuelled return along the road from our house, we would pass an elderly man who would dictate a steady pace along the pavement with his walking cane. As a source of amusement between my brothers and I we would observe, as our Dad chatted to him for a few minutes, how quickly it would be that this wiry old man would re-route every conversation to the subject of his time spent as a POW in a Japanese labour camp during the Second World War. Even an observation as perfunctory as the cold chill in the air would spark the flames of recollection burning as to just how cold it would get during the bitter Japanese winters.

As unashamedly humorous as my brothers and I found these occasions, our Dad would always tell us of the cruel and torturous horrors inflicted upon such POWs in Japan, instil in us the necessity of respect for such men and the trials they endured, and lament the fact that those horrendous events had sunk so indelible a scar upon their psyches.

I’m sure most people of my age and older will have similar tales of association with representatives of the ‘war generation’ and the duty-bound sense of respect that set like concrete thereafter. This is, after all, how we have been conditioned to respond to older people for decades; upholding them in wizened esteem, eager as a just and compassionate society to provide for those who, when called upon to do so, served their country with distinction and honour, once they reach old age.

It is my belief that societal trends and prevailing attitudes to the older generations may see a gradual yet marked alteration in the years to come.

I believe the drivers of this change will be largely two-fold. Firstly, the inescapable fact of demographics of which most will already be familiar – with almost a quarter of the UK’s population predicted to be aged 65 or over by 2050. Secondly, and perhaps more controversially, I believe the change will be engendered by a residual yet tangible undercurrent of animosity and disharmony where once an unquestioning respect held root.

Life in the West for the majority, from the post-War years to before the last global economic crash will retrospectively be judged to have been the most insoucient and prosperous period to have been alive than any time previously in human history. The vast expansion of technology, medical science, globalisation, free market capitalism, relative freedom from major conflicts, the (at least, surface level) dissolution of arcane prejudices and segregations, and greater levels of personal wealth, all amount to a society of far higher merit for those inhabitants than any time previously.

The ‘baby boomers’ (1945 – early 1960s), reveling in the hard fought freedoms of the previous generation, have lived in a culture far more permissive and equal than ever before, with a functioning welfare system and health service, where property has been affordable, freely available education resulting in a ‘career-for-life’ with the prospect of an easily-defined structure of progression, with the promise of a generous pension upon retiring with at least a couple of decades still stretching out ahead of them. Of course, this is a reductive and halcyon-view of the second half of the 20th century, but regardless of the many troubles and hardships, it was undeniably tranquil in comparison with the preceding centuries of war, pestilence, famine and servitude.

The global economic crisis from 2008-onwards looks set to further expand the widening chasm between rich and poor, the corporatisation of everyday life, soaring property and wider ‘costs of living’, and the development – with a return to nefarious Victorian hallmarks of the employer’s market and ‘zero hour contracts’ – of a distinct underclass.

The tension will inevitably foment as the young look to the ever-increasing legions of the old and associate them, not with war heroes or defenders’ of their national freedom, but with the reasons why they cannot buy a house or afford to go to university or food and energy prices, or save into a pension scheme. Reflecting on the myopic tendencies of their elders, they may be forgiven for feeling resentment, as it makes a blatant mockery of the common yet misguided notion that human progress is infallible, that the gradual betterment of society intertwined with the life chances of the people are locked on a consistently upward gradient.

Looking overseas, similar developments can be seen to be brewing beneath the surface. China, the inculcator of the most speculative social experiment in modern times – the ‘one-child policy’ – is currently witnessing a pronounced shift in inter-generational obligations. Traditionally, the Chinese elderly were venerated and the act of caring for one’s parents seen as a hallowed duty incumbent upon every child as a means of repaying the parental debt.

With the rising growth in the elderly (in 2005, 11% of China’s population was aged 60 or over), and the slump in descendants due to the proliferation of single-child families, the tide may be turning in terms of how much of that debt can realistically be expected to be repaid. The expansion of rural healthcare and retirement homes can perhaps be seen as a marked sign of things to come for China’s elder population.

While the sealant of social cohesion between young and old may disintegrate in the years to come, in terms of politics the older generations will almost certainly detect the clammy embrace as politicos and policy makers clamber even further into bed with them, each more desperate than the other to plump their pillows and sing them comforting lullabies to sleep. Being as they are statistically more likely to vote, the elderly’s influence on political parties, as they each try and appear as attractive to the ‘grey vote’ as possible, is likely to become even more prevalent in the years to come.

Encumbered with the terminal ‘short-termism’ of so many career politicians, the welfare and preferences of the young will be shunted off the main political agenda in favour of pledges cleverly marketed at the huge numbers of the retired, property-owning target demographic.

This growing ostracisation of the young can already be recognised in the Conservatives and their plans to cap welfare for young families, refuse to act on accelerating private rent rates, and scrap Jobseeker’s Allowance for the under-25s. The problem is that everyone knows what kind of fissures occur when a section of society is put under persistent strain whilst at the same time feel a collective recognition of the section whose past is to blame for their present hardship.

An interesting paradigm to view in terms of how a current generation turn their backs in protest against the one previous is in the ‘de-Nazification’ of post-WWII Germany; in particular, the student rebellions of the late-60s which were taken to be a defiant rejection on the part of the young of the crimes and facilitation of their forefathers.

Whilst the circumstances connected with this societal shift are nowhere near the same tenor, it may well be the case that whereas class antagonisms divided in the past, in the decades to come it will be ageist antagonisms that prevail as responsibility, atonement and a sense of sharing the collective burden imposed by generational actions and improprieties find themselves in high stead.

To my way of thinking, respect is a valuable and finite commodity, much the same as genuine empathy or trust, not to be expended wantonly and without proper recourse to appropriate qualifiers.

Before long, the old man walking down the road won't be a war hero who suffered in the fight against tyranny but someone who perhaps, in his small and relatively minor way, contributed to the invisible tyranny of late-capitalism that has a negative implication for so many growing into adulthood in the early-21st century. The currency of generational respect is volatile and it may not be long before it enters a recession of its own.

SHORT STORY - 'The Library of Bill'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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