london belongs to me: September 2005 Archives

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September 27, 2005

Hard Work up North London

Posted by robin at 01:48 PM | Comments (1)

can't sleep III

0330-0435
fox count: 4

Posted by robin at 03:30 AM | Comments (3)

September 26, 2005

London Through the Eyes

a few rushed and partial notes & photos, London Through the Eyes of Londoners (17th Sept):

Beryl Bainbridge, Bernard Kops, Al Alvarez, star turns who gave a convivial start to the afternoon, but disappointingly disappeared soon after. (Although before the start, I did have the following starstruck conversation: 'Hello, I'm Beryl'; 'Hello, I'm Robin'; 'Hello'.)

My highlight - John the Cabbie - he gave us a disquisition on London's class system as expressed by bollards: solid, permanent, and overpainted with gold leaf in those districts where bankers work and sleep; shabby, explicitly derisory in areas where people are just a problem. He reveals to us the existence of a 'bollard sanitiser of old london town'. Then up jumps a certain ICA bigwig and instapundit (he knows who he is): having obviously not listened to any of this, but determined to show that in the 'culture industry' this is never a bar to getting your voice heard, he chortles "so what's the problem with bollards" through that well-known perpetual smug smirk; then disappears again, having made his mark (in the precise sense of the territorial pissing of an alpha male dog). Has ever 'critic' seemed more of an insult than in comparing this attention-seeking parasitism with this fine upstanding cabbie for whom driving is a thinking; who knows the city's occult weather-systems by heart, who actually has something interesting to talk about...? At this point, I remembered why I had initially met the suggestion of my participation with a protestation that I hated the ICA and everything it stood for. However, I digress: it was all worthwhile since John later let me in on the secrets of the cabbies cafes (qv). Apparently they were originally constructed, only in posh areas, to ensure that gentlemen's cabbies were not tempted into public houses there to become incapable of conducting a carriage responsibly. Now listed buildings, they are overseen by the Transport and General Workers' Union. Apparently (not that I'd have the courage to do this) the general public can buy tea from the hatch window, but only cabbies can go inside. And then – and this quite reinforced the mystique – it's not all cabbies - apparently there are certain cliques within cabbiedom who frequent these places, and others are not made welcome!

Matthew Stone: "A pashernate existence. " Part of the artists collective WOWOW, he described how, coming to London determined to create a bohemian milieu against all the odds, they ended up squatting in a building on Peckham's erstwhile "golden mile" and living the life of Riley. This was quite refreshing after a few more negative speakers: but this was actually a positive side of the event, the fact that it fully took account of the ambivalence of Londoners towards their (un)home: Mark Saunders, a filmmaker, protesting against the level of everyday aggression encountered in the city, and the somewhat illusory and/or overwhelming amount of stuff going on ("Time Out: 1000 things you're not going to do this week....unless you've got a £100-a-week theatre habit") had already pithily expressed this perverse attraction thus: "unfortunately it's a centre". Katherine Hoskins gave a great account of the joys of being a pensioner in London.

Jude Rogers from Smoke magazine let us know what makes her, and this wonderful self-produced piece of Londonophilia, tick.

The exquisitely-named Clifford Slapper (of Raymonds Revue Bar) and Daniel from Cuts gave fond and quite surprising accounts of Soho as a living community (including a barter system - Daniel describing how he used to trade entry to Ronnie Scott's for a haircut for Ronnie), in the past and present, and with an eye to possibilities of the future (apparently famous pub The Coach and Horses is soon to change hands). Daniel, sprinting in having left a customer with wet hair, regaled us with a breathlessly enthusiastic blast of anecdotes: stories of Soho "fixers" who could fix up just anything you want ("eleven men in full cricket gear, inside a boxing ring, buggering each other", perhaps) and legendary nightclub Gossips, where hard-as-nails hiphop homey Tim Westwood began his DJing career with leather trousers, handlebar moustache, and Freddy Mercury accent ("that's how I'll always remember him"!).

The right royal Zandra Rhodes, dressed outrageously in pink with 5-inch-wide slices of agate on her rings, talked about Bermondsey, and the huge pink building she's erected therein.

Lennie Lee, a man billed as a 'controversial artist' (who I've never heard of) launched into an amusing expletive-laden invective: "that fucking bitch the queen is still living in that shitty fucking building up there" provoking the expected response from the pipe-smoking retired major specially booked to react to such "outrage". There was some stand-up shouting on the subject of Iraq (weirdly, this subject seemed to haunt the whole event) and how much Mr Outraged would be required to give Lennie in order for him to leave the country. Lennie didn't really seem to have much interesting to say, and so he ended.

Here is Mr (or perhaps Major) Outraged (apparently a fellow talk radio regular along with John the Cabbie) in a more mellow moment.

At this point, having been waiting since 3pm to be told when I'd be on, I was informed that I was to speak last, after the excoriating republican artist, and, as it turned out, after two shouty performance poets too. This surprise top billing, as well as sending me into an advanced state of nervousness that I had only just shook off with the welcome supply of free gin-and-tonics (no little luxury, considering the prices at this bar), also exemplified the disorganised nature of the event (if it weren't disorganised, why would I have been invited?), but in the end it was probably all the better for it. The curtain dividing behind-the-scenes panic from the stage was certainly lacunary - for instance, whilst the programme (which I didn't appear on due to administrative miscommunication....at least that's what they told me) for instance listed Naomi Hyamson as "sings London Songs", which indeed she did, and very well, it listed Zandra Rhodes as "needs parking space"!

It was difficult to know what it was all for, but interesting in its diversity: luckily, by the time we reached the end, it seemed that what I had to say (which of course you've already read, below) had resonances with the other speakers: most of whom had knowingly or otherwise located themselves somewhere or other in this problematic of the London we dream of and which we occasionally glimpse vs the sometimes disappointing, sometimes unpleasant London of fact.

Naomi Hyamson sings Nöel Coward during the interval

Anyway, I got up and did my bit, which was something of an anti- (or post-) climax after all the shouting, and then it was all over.

Posted by robin at 02:58 PM | Comments (2)

September 25, 2005

Hunt

Exhibition of works by local artists in the beautiful Queens Wood. [3-4 sept]

Real-estate house of cards

The problem is that unlike, say, watercolour, conceptual art's only virtue is in its adamantine insistence on radical innovation, its unstinting pursuit of dissolution. It's only this notional attachment to world-historical significance that lends the often ridiculous and tedious pranks of conceptual art their cachet. This industrious working-through of art-historical narratives is maladapted to the gently-questing spirit of the uneasy middle-classes. So that the well-meaning amateur, student – or, let's be frank, any artist outside of the privileged class who write its history – is as unlikely to make any "progress" in conceptual art as in astronomy or particle physics.

Pure conceptual art is a single, exclusive lineage, pursued without mercy for the audience; a trail blazed once and for all time, and from which any deviation is mere irrelevant embroidery. But can we be generous enough to allow an "impure" conceptual art? A synthetic conceptual art which would put back together the pieces of this scorched earth, and bring the multiplicity of sensation beck into the dried-out husk of conceptuality? If such an art is possible, it will require a thorough thinking-through. As long as this is not accomplished, nearly all conceptual art will continue to labour under a misapprehension, hallucinating a certain room to maneouvre which is simply not there. As a result, we will be (as we are) repeatedly subjected to repetitions of the same gestures. The only way in which we are able to receive these will be by focussing on differences in expression, and so conceptual art will become an inverted sensualism-by-mistake, a sleepwalking. At most, artists will be filling in the gaps in a wholly-prescribed grid of possibilities, and moreover a grid which expresses a nineteenth-century question which was already answered in the early twentieth. Can we shift the game to a different place? Again, this will require encore un effort.

The reality today is that practically, conceptual art survives not on its 'conceptuality', but on its sensual, material reality, which, however, remains largely unthought within its own discourse (although even the greatest conceptual art would be nothing but degenerate philosophy without its 'perceptual' component). This can even be seen in retroaction with 'classic' contemporary art, where the appeal of 70s conceptual work depends as much on a market-led fetish for yellowing typescripts and crackly video as for the conceptual moves, now banal, which they originally annotated. But then, conceptual art has always been fundamentally tied to the market, in parallel with the metanarratives of art history.

Ultimately, you can't help thinking that such artists' aspirations are misplaced and doomed to be without issue. In this selection of work, the most affecting were not the bad puns and the portentous but ultimately banal statements (nothing more telling of exhaustion than the glib use of words in conceptual art, "to make you think"), but those that made use of the environment to create something truly singular.

not art

My own 'found' work: half-torso reclining

Posted by robin at 11:04 AM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2005

Difference and Repetition: Harringay Ladder

Tottenham Lane

Had I three pennies I would take the initiative
and test whether this vintage machine still worked

Hampden Road

Welcome to Londonistan

Wightman Road
Turnpike Lane
Haringay Passage
Sydney Road
Haringay Passage
Raleigh Road
Haringay Passage
Hampden Road
Haringay Passage
Lausanne Road
Haringay Passage
Frobisher Road
Haringay Passage
Falkland Road
Haringay Passage
Falkland Road
Haringay Passage
Fairfax Road
Haringay Passage
Effingham Road
Haringay Passage
Beresford Road
Haringay Passage
Allison Road
Haringay Passage
Hewitt Road
Haringay Passage
Seymour Road
Haringay Passage
Warham Road
Haringay Passage
Pemberton Road
Haringay Passage
Mattison Road
Haringay Passage
Duckett Road
Haringay Passage
Cavendish Road
Haringay Passage
Burgoyne Road
Haringay Passage
Umfreville Road

Depending on who you ask, a popular area
becoming gentrified, or 'heroin capital of London' ,
Harringay Ladder is remarkable for
its reticular structure, its regularity:
In a city which on a cartographic view
looks to have been planned on various models
just as swiftly abandoned at every point,
resulting in a multi-directional sprawl,
these parallel streets stand out; but walking them
one finds difference in their repetition; not all
streets are the same, contrary to the map.
Some wider, some narrower, some mean and grizzled
some with burgeoning gardens and not so much heavy traffic
The view from the passageway reveals further difference:
Behind some houses, long and gently sloping
gardens, squirrels shaking apple and pear trees, even grapevines
twining along the wall alongside barbed wire.

Haringey Passage - let us allow ourselves
a brief excursus on spelling; for Haringey
is also called Harringay and Haringay, no-one
knows why this variety of versions - anyhow
this through route bears testament to the perennial desire
of canine and human (male) alike to urinate
in passageways, and sometimes worse.
But its remarkable course leads the walker
straight through the centre of the ladder structure;
progress feels something like a crazy videogame
in which you're always coming back to places
made of the same basic graphical elements
but slightly rearranged: hypnotic rhythm.

Green Lanes/Grand Parade

Green Lanes is not pleasant; but it is alive.
And home to the best turkish bread for miles around

Turnpike Lane

London Cafe, an unremarkable place
but for its setting; since the beautiful curves
of this classic station were first erected
a restaurant has existed here, spanning its depth.
Still they serve tea to exhausted walkers,
resting bus inspectors, and mad people
reading books with a serviette in their mouth.

Burghley Road
Alexandra Road
Malvern Road
Hornsey Park Road
Mayes Road

Concrete futures: The brutal space-invader
architecture of Wood Green Shopping City.

Coburg Road

Proud signposts point to this industrial estate:
The mysterious "Wood Green Cultural Quarter"
Some gasometers, some artists studios
dance schools, car importers: a post-bohemian hinterland

Western Road
Cross Lane

Reported speech as graffiti

Hornsey High Street
Hillfield Road
Rokesly Avenue
Hermiston Avenue
Elmfield Avenue
Middle Lane

addendum : BBC on the Haringey/Harringay enigma

Posted by robin at 08:00 AM | Comments (11)

September 20, 2005

small victory

I found £15 that someone had dropped on the pavement
up Muswell Hill, this autumn afternoon;
that's one in the eye for those snobbish fuckers!
We spent half of it in one of their crap cafés.

Posted by robin at 02:00 PM | Comments (2)

A Delayed Dedication

Little did I know that just as I was writing London in Black and White, Guy Green, the cinematographer of David Lean's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist died in LA (14 Sept.), aged 91.

(LA Times Obituary)

Posted by robin at 12:45 PM | Comments (1)

September 19, 2005

can't sleep II

Fairfield Road

Some nutter has Radio 4 on full blast
A reasoned discussion echoes cavernously
between the houses, into the sodium sky
Everyone else seems to sleep on oblivious

Ferme Park Road
Ridge Road

Without fear, it fixes us with challenging gaze:
a fox stopped dead in the middle of the road
as if flaunting its feral silhouette:
head too pointed, back too arched to be
coddled, petted, taken home; thriving in parallel
with civilisation, meeting on equal terms,
its dark, secret routes across gardens, wastelands, railways
only cross with the insomniac walker's.

Nelson Road

Then it was spied curled up on the tarmac, licking
itself; until a car brought light and noise too near.

Weston Park
Inderwick Road
Tottenham Lane
Church Lane
Hornsey High Street
Middle Lane

Posted by robin at 03:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 18, 2005

New York Belongs to Me: World's Smallest Horse

[communiqué from guest blogger Dr. Mulli in New York City]

West 13th Street
6th Avenue
West 10th Street
Washington Square West
Prince Street
Mott Street
Canal Street
Elizabeth Street
Division Street
Confucius Plaza
Mulberry Street

Chanoodle Vietnamese Restaurant
Eggplant, Tomatoes and Minced Pork: Chef Specialty

Bayard Street
Columbus Park
Centre Street
Grand Street
Mulberry Street

The humidity was finally down and it was deep blue everywhere, so I did one of my (regular-by-now and getting even more meandering) Chinatown treks. On the walk back through Little Italy, the Feast of San Gennaro was going on at Grand and Mulberry, and something caught my eye. They had a truck there, and you could walk up a few steps, pay one dollar, and look down into a clean little pen and see ‘World’s Smallest Horse.’ I thought this might serve as a substitute for my desire to see the tightrope-walking and two-leg-walking Moscow Cat Theatre which would be at the TriBeCa Festival through October. (The cats and their master are demanding outrageous fees, but it’s still too early to know if my plan worked, as sometimes it’s my very profligacy that will turn a profit.) The old-fashioned carnival-coloured sign showed a tiny Italianate horse, and read ’10 Inches at Birth.’ Later, I heard the hawker saying ‘he’s 26 inches now,’ which cracked me up. They took good care of little brown and white ‘Oreo’, would allow no petting, feeding—and no photos! which they were able to enforce (unlike various moron celebrities, whom I’ve read have recently been caught smoking and try to make deals with their paparazzi not to publish.) I am not sure if this was cine-musique per se, but never have I seen the most delightfully innocent ‘young phenomenon’ (as Flaubert’s peasant advertised his sheep with 5 legs and trumpet-shaped tail) combined with the verbally ribald so perfectly.

Broome Street
Broadway
West 3rd Street
Washington Square East
6th Avenue
West 13th Street

Posted by Dr. Mulli at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

September 17, 2005

London in Black & White : Hex ica remix

(photos and details of the event to follow)

Wattle one century, timber the next, then brick, then stone, then brick again, then concrete. Building new foundations on old ruins. And sprawling out across the fields when there haven’t been enough ruins to go around.

In the result it’s been growing up as well as growing, and it must be about mature by now. Even a bit past its prime, perhaps. Beginning to go back on itself, as it were, may be.[1]

If there be “true” londoners, they are to be pitied
Born into its cradle, the city a true home,
a negligible backdrop, a place of comfort;
Those who feel equal to its sophistication.

Only those from outside discover the real London
(‘Real’ not ‘true’ – a distinction that must be upheld:
A never-complete becoming, irrational number
As opposed to a supposedly-known entity).

We do not presume to say those who are born and bred
cannot attain this state; only that they also
must cultivate alienation, throw aside
the blanket of homeliness they cast over the city.
Must accept they too share the utter dislocation
Of which london is the perpetual cinema.

Equally, the outsider, drawn ineluctably
into the phantom web of workaday normality
must free himself, by gargantuan efforts of will;
Wrest himself loose, flee back into vagabondage

Only the immigrant is wide-eyed and anxious
enough to imbibe this raw chaos a little.
Like the smog that catches in his throat, first of all
an assault, then a queasy symbiosis in which
he begins to exude London and then London
begins to penetrate into his darkest dreams

Black and white: Bill Brandt’s study in monochrome.
Francis Bacon under the gaslamp, Hampstead Heath.
The heath jumpcuts abruptly to african scrub
and blurred animal forms heaving in the heat.

Burrowing below-ground where light makes shadows flesh,
staggering out of the Colony Room smog,
veering like a breached longship. Vagabond navigation,
reading the signals through vapour of dipso nights.

A world through the champagne glass, through the lugubrious
camera lens of Deakin AKA Conlin, the
notorious dwarflike lowlife photographer[2]
An emigré, self-described slum boy from Liverpool[3]

He gropes, one-eyed, semi-conscious behind the lens
toward the heart of this infernal machine.
the stranger’s first glimpse of london is most likely
to appal [3]

And Thomas de Quincey, Mancunian exile
- all of Wales could not contain his wandering -
walked, a solitary and contemplative man through
London: Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother!
Thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans and drinkest
the tears of children[4] - He paced the terraces,
scouring the valleys north to Marylebone.

And Arthur Conan Doyle, an Edinburghian
come via Vienna, dissected eyes with Freud;
Dickens, Portsmouth to Chatham, to Marshalsea prison;
From Birmingham Sax Rohmer, Limehouse Exoticist

Its greatest luminaries are those who came from without;
Its proper essence fiction, miscegenation.
The reality of the fictional London
overflows the truth on every side.

When the Elephant Man appeared as if from nowhere
in a shop premises in the Whitechapel Road
towards the end of November 1884,
he was in his early days as a professional freak [5]

David Lynch’s movie The Elephant Man draws
on an already-potent fictional tradition:
I understood a certain English thing, you know, but
for the film I got inspiration or ideas
more from books of London than from London itself…[6]

And an inheritance: Brit Celluloid BC
(Before Colour: before its mendacious promise
of a kaleidoscopic future beyond the
seedy decline of british society).

Ealing noir, day-for-night east-end police chases
issuing in endgames played out across the steam-shrouded
tracks of railway sidings. Oppressive and gloomy.
And David Lean’s Dickens flicks: These were no “adaptations”:

The marshes were just a long black horizontal
line then; as I stopped to look after him; and the
river was just another horizontal line;
and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines….[7]

Dickens in monochrome; writing like a camera
(Eisenstein discovered a “lap dissolve” in the text).
Blood and Soot for Magwitch, gibbets under red clouds;
Ash and lace, Miss Havisham: White veil…dress…shoes…hair of white…[8]

The essential is that London is black and white:
an energy-processing monster that incites
its elements to extreme lambency and then
discards them as light-absorbent, burnt-out crusts.

I was walking around a derelict hospital
and suddenly a little wind-like thing came and
entered me, and I was in that time – not only
in that time in the room – but I knew that time.
I knew what it was like then, and it came out of that hospital.
Architecture is a recording instrument.
I’m sure that’s right. And that’s what happened. It was just
unraveling and I was picking it up.[9]

The Old Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel Road,
A time-tunnel into apocryphal London,
brings the unhuman breath of Lynch’s inspiration
full-circle.

Synonymy of human body and industry….Darkness.
Boiled and bleached bones. White clouds rising from below.
Steam and Scalpel.

The hospital museum houses a replica
of Merrick's sackcloth hood. The stitches bring to mind
that slow, deliberate zoom into the single square eyehole,
into the nightmares of the Elephant Man:
Filled with puffing steam-monsters, dark smoggy streets, and
the curse of monstrosity and the lash of cruelty.

No more compelling exhibit than the building:
Merrick is only a monstrous sign, avatar
of a psychogeographical papilloma.
This perplexing structure, haphazardly extended
to house medical technologies that always
stayed one step ahead, new pathologies
of the industrial revolution.

Treves bowed over the prone figure of a man
on an operating table: we’re seeing more and more
of these machine accidents nowadays.[10]

Or you see pictures of explosions –
big explosions – they always reminded me of these
papillomatous growths on John Merrick’s body.
They were like slow explosions. And they started
erupting from the bone… what got me going was
the idea of these smokestacks and soot and industry
next to this flesh.[11]

Steam is the element of Merrick’s kindly soul:
his birth is announced with the slowmotion billow
of a puff of steam. Recaptured, abandoned,
his return journey is heralded by white clouds;
The train, the steamship, and then again the steam train,
ending at Liverpool Street. White ineffable clouds.

But in his dreams he wanders cities of blackness,
dirty streets populated by jeering children,
factories with rows of men chained to great machines
in which they are pistons. Despondent resonance
of Dickens' Coketown, distilled essence of the industrial city,
where the piston of the steam-engine
worked monotonously up and down
like the head of an elephant
in a state of melancholy madness. [12]

With the opening shots, visual reconstruction
of the showman’s florid etiology of
Merrick’s condition, we already understand
a strange transmutation of image into flesh ;
knocked down in the street by elephants, the frightful
image of the creatures on the retina of
Merrick’s mother as she faints passes directly
into the womb, imposing its form upon the
budding embryo.

According to the logic of the film, which is
the logic of this city, at the limit,
images impregnate, mutate what is inside.

Everywhere, relics of paradigms overthrown.
Discarded piles of 50s minicomputer
tangled with pieces of iron bedstead.
The arteries of long-obsolesced fuel supplies,
studded with taps and switches and cast-metal outlets,
still cling to the walls like dead vines. In many places
they simply lock the ghosts in, doors never opened
again save by wrecking-ball.

The saturation of history not yet wrung out
And each time the sensation passes through another
agent it thickens, and reaches consistency,
fiction and environment a sensory emulsion.

Perpendicular surfaces intercutting;
Every wall is an encrypted photogram.
This piece of celluloid adds yet another one.
A membrane inserted between place and consciousness.

Photography is a mediumistic practice
not a self-expression, it dowses for sensations
in their raw state: neither fiction nor document.
The camera unearths sensory proclivities,
your own hidden, subterranean connections;
Continuity with this dense, indifferent,
impossible fabric. The city in reality
is a surface which is all exterior.

No dwelling within it, no breaking the surface
(so that photographs recollect more accurately
than memory itself): Thus there is no comfort
but this abrasive immanence upon which one
grazes and is grazed, injured, disclosed to oneself.

A thousand walks made alone in which I often thought my
pleasure in this ‘exterior’ could never mean anything
except how I was failing in certain ‘interiors.’[13]
But why berate the surface for its lack of depth?
When we could equally accuse our depths of lacking surface ([14]):

Being young, our souls lack the fibre of this dense
irrational number, which, though one cannot encompass
its impossible totality, cradles us:
no matter which figure we elect as focus
we feel its whole, incomprehensible extension.

London is an atmosphere, a state of being.[15]
A participation in other people’s fictions.
A self-fulfilling prophecy its authors cannot halt.
Submission to the real; brute point of concentration

Until the journey outward, until we reach places
where one can no longer say the name ‘London’,
though its taste remains, bitter on the lips.
And the last tube station, the workers filing out;
their grey-eyed sagging march a salutary reminder.
Those for whom London is just an odious chore –
do they know it steals their energy to make dreams?

And then finally out. That tremendous relief.
Like a decompression. Life seems lighter. Greener.
You’re elsewhere now. Relaxed. Your thoughts turn to London.

----

Note: this is a text distilled from various other texts; and gradually reduced over a short concentrated period. One component was written originally as accompanying text to the photographic project Steam and Scalpel. Whilst working on this project, I became aware that, whilst not consciously falsifying, neither was I documenting. In fact, I was attempting a fidelity to a certain compound fictional image of London (the sources of which I pay homage to above). This image, in fact more a collection of abstract lines of sensation, became the real subject of the photographic project.

I am, of course, an 'outsider' come into London – like many people, with a head full of images and fictions. The only times when I have despaired, hated London, were the times when I lost sight of this greater reality, and let myself live in the 'true' London.

All of this indicates an ethical dilemma for any artist for whom London becomes a subject: are we guilty of romanticising, fetishising? Although I feel no moral compunction to pay homage to the 'truth', I don't think this question can be left out entirely. London is this dilemma 'in the flesh': ultimately, we submit to its magnetism despite our 'better instincts' not to encourage what we experience sometimes as an arrogance and self-importance, sometimes as a bitter lie under which many people suffer and grind their lives away. This ambivalent acquiescence takes place because we know absolutely that, once and for all, this is something bigger than us; not to submit to its greater reality would be untenable self-denial for anyone in search of knowledge, sensation, difference.

[1]Norman Collins, London Belongs to Me

[2]Iain Sinclair

[3]John Deakin (Essay by Robin Muir in John Deakin: Photographs)

[4]Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium Eater)

[5]Howell and Ford True History of the Elephant Man

[6]David Lynch Lynch on Lynch

[7]Dickens, Great Expectations

[8]David Lean’s film of Great Expectations

[9]Lynch

[10]Lynch’s Elephant Man

[11]Lynch

[12]Dickens, Hard Times

[13]Patrick Mullins (personal correspondence)

[14]Deleuze, Logic of Sense (paraphrase)

[15]Deakin

Also:
Alain Silver, James Ursini David Lean and his films
Daniel Farson The Gilded Gutter Life….
Dr Frederick Treves Collected Writings
& other usual suspects…

Posted by robin at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)

Hex Induction Hour

I select as my muse the Pythagorean
rhythmomachia: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12
and all combinations thereof; warring numbers
for form; so must content bend to their martial rule.

Self-denying discipline – you'd have me abandon
words that pleased my soft heart, replace them with ciphers,
lucidity not mine, stubs clipped by the meter.
Desolate intention: submit to its torsion.

Posted by robin at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2005

Can't Sleep

Middle Lane
Lynton Road
Wolseley Road
Shepherd's Hill

Shepherd's Hill, 3AM. Sleeping saloons beaded with
Rain: the savour of post-apocalyptic calm.

Archway Road
Northwood Road
Claremont Road

A silver cat named Banjo escorts us the full length
of the street. We participate in his patrol.
We can't tell whether the silver is his, or the moon's.
The air is clear. Drains gush rain beneath the pavement.

Stanhope Road
Hurst Avenue
Crouch Hall Road
Park Road
Middle Lane

Posted by robin at 03:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 14, 2005

LBTM vs Grauniad

"Chrome jewels fade to monochrome"

"The Gutter Life Ungilded"

Posted by robin at 11:28 AM | Comments (0)

September 12, 2005

LBTM live

I'll be speaking at London Through the Eyes of Londoners on Saturday.
The event takes place from 2-6pm at the ICA in the bar.

[The ICA bar, despite barred windows, makes an ideal photographer's eyrie]

Posted by robin at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

London-becoming: Manifesto and Compilation of Photographical Disjecta

In truth, what is more pitiable than those stolid creatures who call themselves true Londoners? Who were born here, for whom the City is a true home, a negligible background, a place in which they feel comfortable, confident, to whose sophistication they feel themselves easily equal?

In fact, only those who come from 'outside' can be said to inhabit the real London ('real', perhaps, in contradistinction to 'true' – the impossibility of the transhistorical, psychogeographical real vs the prosaic, quotidian truth, a never-complete becoming vs. a supposedly known entity): only the immigrant, from near or far, the pleasure- or treasure- seeker; only the wanderer, abandoned to the drifting crowds, is wide-eyed and anxious enough to take in a little of this chaos in its raw state.

Its greatest luminaries are those who came from without. Its proper essence is miscegenation.

This is not to say that those who are born and bred in the city cannot attain this state; just that they too must cultivate their alienation, must jettison their too-easy confidence and must scrub out the veneer of homeliness they have cast over the city, must accept their fundamental utter dislocation and experience London as the perpetual cinema of that disclocation. (Equally, the outsider will often be drawn ineluctably into the illusory web of workaday normality - most often by the demon force of gainful employment – and must, by a gargantuan effort of will, extricate himself, flee back into vagabondage).

Ultimately, rather than ironic or juxtapositional reflections, social commentary, or documentary evidence, it is the non-spectacle of this infernal machine towards which the photographer must grope, one-eyed, unconscious.

London is the site where photography finds its own energy, its aboriginal purposiveness-without-purpose. Allowing the camera to operate unconsciously, to yield up to you your own sensory proclivities, your own hidden, subterranean connections, you reveal your own soul's continuity with this dense, indifferent, impossible fabric. It is in reality a surface which is all exterior, there is no dwelling within it, there is no breaking the surface (so that photographs offer a more accurate recollection than memory itself), there is no comfort but this abrasive immanence upon which one grazes and is grazed, injured, disclosed to oneself.

This is why London Belongs to Me.

Posted by robin at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)

Lost in Barnet

York Road
Station Approach
Station Road
East Barnet Road
Barnet Road
Cat Hill
Cat Hill
Cat Hill
*%$^!
Chase Side
Oakdale
Cowper Road
Shamrock Way
The Woodlands
Osidge Lane
Brookside South
Monkfrith Way
Chase Side
Cockfosters Road

Only redeeming feature: Cockfosters Tube Station,
a jazz quartet in concrete; a luminous vision
of future times that never came to pass.

Posted by robin at 11:00 AM | Comments (2)

September 09, 2005

Shiraz Belongs To Me II

The mean streets of Shiraz, by night, by day, old and new - courtesy of our man in Eye-ran, Azer.

Posted by Azer at 06:55 PM | Comments (3)

Another visit to Waterlow park; firstly there was another addition to the magical Dr Doolittle aspect of the place: a squirrel making a noise which, taking into account its body-mass, could only be qualified as a roar. Waterlow park, where magpies sneeze and squirrels roar.

Secondly, I have to re-evaluate and expand on my recollections of Tunnock's caramel wafers, whose packaging proclaims 'More than 4,000,000 of these biscuits made and sold every week'. The nature of the wafer is not at all evanescent, as previously claimed. I was confusing it with those horrendous pink wafer biscuits that old people press upon children as a ghastly mean-spirited prank). It has surprising substance actually: its savour is rather dense, and it seems semi-stale even when fresh. One should also mention (what a pleasure to rediscover this!), after the necessarily short-lived business of eating the biscuit, the delicate sensual pleasure of decoupling the greaseproof paper inner wrapper from the wafer-thin foil outer.

Posted by robin at 12:00 PM | Comments (0)

September 07, 2005

Its Hard Work Up North London

Burnt Oak Broadway
Watling Avenue

Again, how deceptive the universe as seen from a car can be. From the dual-carriageway, Burnt Oak Broadway seems little more than a loud, sooty corridor out of the Capital. From behind the wheel you can only pity the grey, bedraggled inhabitants going about their business among the grimy shopfronts that line this short section of the A5.

An entirely different dimension is suddenly revealed when you venture out on foot. Now the A-road is merely a roaring blur, sealed off, a scarcely-registered undertow to the vivacity of the bustling pavements. Burnt Oak is shabby, but not yet subject to the creeping gentrification that puts the seal on decline, and once sealed paves it over with ersatz fantasies of good living. Equally, it is an area that brings together every nationality, ethnicity and creed to be found in London today, but which has not yet been forced into the embarrassing chore of joylessly 'celebrating' its 'multiculturalism'. For the moment, it simply thrives admirably in less-than-ideal circumstances, thereby rendering itself superior to many communities which, in the midst of splendour, merely attain mediocrity.

The pavements are lined with huge sprawling fruit stalls offering the familiar, the exotic, and the totally unknown in equal quantity. In-between, gladdening the heart of any seedy skinflint, we find a plethora of £1 shops, downhearted estate agents, strange general stores piled high with wastebins, brooms, hairgrips, air-fresheners, AA batteries, and other uncategorizable plastic ephemera, and a good selection of charity shops. Some of these latter are of the superior non-chain variety, one in particular merely announces itself on a scrawled sheet of A4 as 'Childrens charity shop'. To make matters better, the location is well off the beaten path of those mean book dealers who scour furiously at 9:01am to clean out any decent bargains. Find of the day is a first edition of Geoffrey Fletcher's The London Nobody Knows (of which far more in an extended post to follow). Also a complete Cambridge University Course in Latin (well, you never know) for £2.37, a paperback of Being and Nothingness for 50p, and various others (I'm buying books for two now, of course).

Where better to observe this melting-pot environment than from inside its premier ethnic enclave? In a striking reversal, the superbly-named Hard Work Cafe is the true site of the exotic in Burnt Oak. Here, white and predominantly septagenarian londoners, virtually expatriated from their former home by the ravages of time and globalisation, are content to bow over their liver and bacon and mugs of tea, muttering to each other about the best place to buy talcum powder, about how 'he was...you know, like that...ever so nice, though...', and doubtless to mull over the war once again. Bangladeshi women with precariously-tumbling trolleys full of barrels of ghee and sacks of rice peer suspiciously through the window at this strange, out-of-place out-of-time eaterie.

The place is not classic in the decor sense, but has a good workaday atmosphere, is immaculately clean, with friendly and painstaking staff (final irony: as usual, these faithful preservers of white working-class exotica are second-generation immigrants to a man). The food is made and cooked on the premises, and here the Hard Work makes its way into the LBTM hall of fame with its offering of Pie, Mash and Liquor plus a huge mug of tea for a princely £2.39.

For those who have yet to sample this East End speciality, here is what Geoffrey Fletcher had to say about the meal in 1962:
"'The menu incudes hot meat pies on thick plates or you can have pies with mash. This is served with a helping of a livid pale green liquid of unearthly appearance, which stains the potato mash like verdigris...A sad-faced man appears from the rear at intervals carrying an enamel bucket of the green liquid. He picks his way over the sanded floor to deliver his cargo of fluid at the counter where the pies are dispensed."
One can't help wondering whether these descriptions were used as research by Raymond Briggs for his masterly graphic novel of lugubriously fantastic moribundia Fungus the Bogeyman (since viciously manhandled by insensitive fools into a CGI cartoon): "More slime, drear?"

(Fletcher is not the only aesthete to be struck by the mystery of East London's mean yet strangely luxurious contribution to world cuisine : In his film Black White and Green: The Way of Pie, Ian Bourn creates a lingering visual meditation on the beauty of London's Soul Food.)

Now I've tasted some awful Pie and Mash in my time, for research purposes. But this was a fine example (even if there was no 'sad-faced man' in evidence), served at thermonuclear temperature, and positively glowing with the mysterious bland, stodgy kind-heartedness of proletarian English cuisine. It was also wonderfully presented: the mashed potato flattened down into the high-edged plate and cross-hatched across its surface in an artisanal fashion recalling the way builders score drying cement. Abutting the mash from the other side of the plate, yin to a starchy yang, the square pie, its crust visibly sagging, swam in the beautiful pea-green translucent liquor (which actually seems to be some sort of attenuated variety of parsley sauce, but is reputed traditionally to be made from the stock of stewing eels).

Sated with untold strains of carbohydrate, I sat back to pore over my purchases, and to watch the customers: Mud-fisted workmen, postmen, a large Irish family for whom two tables were shunted together end-to-end. I notice that the very few non-white, non-geriatric customers choose the more ecumenical fare: burger and chips, perhaps; only those in the know feast on the sordid delights of chopped liver, full english breakfast, sagging pies, and the mysterious liquor...

After an extra tea, I plunge back into reality...London will always surprise you. No matter what it looks like from the car, still bring the camera....

Posted by robin at 04:09 PM | Comments (6)

September 02, 2005

Green Highgate

Park Road
Hornsey Sports Fields
Wood Vale

Queens Wood

Muswell Hill Road
Highgate Wood
Archway Road
Bishops Road

The Park

Southwood Lane: Flying Horseshoe???

Graf and Anti-Graf, Highgate-style

Highgate High Street
Waterlow Park

Lauderdale Cafe A true classic, although far too posh to be seedy, is this lovely cafe (run by italians, naturally) in Lauderdale House, a building which can be traced back to the 16th century via multiple conflagrations rebuilds and additions. Perched atop a balustraded plateau looking down on carefully-tended flowerbeds and ancient oaks, it seems more like the sort of establishment you'd find in the gardens of a stately home than in a public park. But this is essentially what Waterlow Park is – part of a National-Trust-worthy estate, but without the awful gift shop and overpriced trying-too-hard cafe full of bad-tempered teenagers in white aprons. It must be one of the best parks in London. All the rainwater from Highgate hill runs down the terraces into a leafy hollow, making it incredibly lush. There's a view all the way across to the Barbican. Yet again the park is a philanthropic gift to the city:

Ex-Lord Mayor Sydney Waterlow intended it as 'a garden for the gardenless'

Statue guarding the steps up to the cafe plateau.

Happily, despite the grand setting, and despite its being popular with celebs and being used for well-heeled wedding receptions, the cafe is comfortingly down-to-earth and does a nice line in confections whose provenance fits the C19 municipal ambiance (the achingly-authentic Tunnocks caramel wafer (also see this) is a particular favourite of mine; with its painfully-frugal chocolate coating and insubstantial wafers which disappear as soon as tasted [correction: see this entry], it's an exotic exercise in confectionary asceticism for the modern consumer accustomed to unlimited gluttony).

There were two magpies and a rook on the lawn; one of the magpies was sneezing repeatedly. I've never seen a bird sneeze before.

Dartmouth Park Hill
Hornsey Lane

Posted by robin at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

September 01, 2005

Hampstead Heath: A case for Interpol

I was interrogated by the police for taking this; apparently because of my proximity to the ladies' swimming pond: "Is that a special kind of lens?" the WPC asked, presumably suspecting it to be one of those new lenses which, whilst appearing to be pointing directly at a fence three metres away, are in fact being cunningly focused backwards straight through the head of the photographer: they are specially designed to photographically register the forms of cavorting nymphettes through three hundred metres of dense woodland.

I am wholly exculpated by the negatives. Now known to French and English enforcers alike for illegitimate shooting, I have been advised to make no further comment.

Posted by robin at 09:54 PM | Comments (3)

1952: Hampstead Heath: Logic Of Sensation

Encourage and submit to incidental sensory resonances, oblique currents between singular visual intensities; confidence beyond sense in the logic of the visual, in its undeniable 'coincidences'. Making these sequences of visual imagination irresistable and contagious. Mechanisms: all machines that loosen the hold of signification over perception, in favour of visual haecceity. Drink; darkness; experiments with uncontrolled paint; juxtaposition of partial images; the camera. A methodology that explains why the world is haunted by gripping, sudden tributes to the painting of Francis Bacon.