Islingtongue > Leytonstongue

Leytonstone Film Club Launch

2008-07-06T16:36:00.003+01:00

Leytonstone Film Club present the first classic film by local boy made great Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film 'The Lodger' accompanied by musical improvisation from composer Fabricio Brachetta.
Tuesday 8th July Leytonstone Library 20.00

This screening, which is part of the Leytonstone Festival, marks the launch of the Leytonstone Film Club which will hold monthly screenings at Leytonstone Library from September.

A Summer Solstice Perambulation of the Prehistoric Mounds of London

2008-06-27T00:40:00.013+01:00

The idea has been with me ever since I first picked up a copy of E.O. Gordon’s ‘Prehistoric London : its mounds and circles’ - to walk between the mounds on the summer solstice. In her criminally under-celebrated book Gordon describes how the mounds and circles of the British Isles are the remnants of a lost culture. No news there when looking at the solstice celebrations at Stonehenge (30,000 pagan celebrants this year), but London? The only acknowledgement of the significance of these sites was a record of The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids forsaking Stonehenge in favour of performing ceremonies at Tower Hill in March 1963.
I confess that resonance was added by the fact that at the time I lived yards away from Penton Mound at the top of Pentonville Road. But what vision of the city would be formed by perambulating between its founding sites - the great monuments that were at the centre of a thriving city long before the Romans rocked up.
Westminster/Tothill to Bryn Gwyn/The Tower of London to Penton/ New River Upper Reservoir to The Llandin/ Parliament Hill - a day to achieve it in.
In its original formulation this would have been a grand ritual unifying the city led by the nation’s Druids. In this inaugural event it maybe fitting that it is a family affair - just me and my sister.

I meet Cathy on Broad Sanctuary at 2.15pm after a detour to the Widescreen Centre to pick up a role of TriX black & white Super 8 film to attempt a film of the ritual - a 3 minute in camera edited film. We are delayed longer than planned at Westminster - get caught up with the small good natured demonstration on Parliament Square in support of the Iraqi people. We blow the cover of the supposed Heritage Wardens who confess to being GLA employees spying on the demo (the are barely double figures present). We move on over Westminster Bridge leaving the Royal Gorsedd and cut behind County Hall haunted by the spindly Wicker Man that they call The London Eye. Then its down Roupel Street, Union Street and into the quiet. We ponder upon the fetishisation of dereliction as we marvel at some beautiful crumbling relics - one a stone doorway with the word ‘OFFICE’ carved into the lintel adrift in an empty street. I realise that with my focus being on the film it cancels out words - my notebook virtually empty - the whole 2 hour wander to Tower Hill only inspiring a single note - ‘Great Maze Pond SE1’ which I take to fit in with the pagan theme of the derive (mazes being created in oak groves and markers of places of druidic ritual).
We spend little time at Tower Hill/ Bryn Gwyn - along with Westminster/ Tothill - as I feel an overwhelming urge to deny the desecration of the sites by the invaders - the so-called Parliament at the ancient place of congregation and communal law-making and the Prison on the site of the British people’s fortress where the severed head of Bendigeid Vran, first king of this island, is said to be buried. I record them on camera but we move on enjoying the calm City streets.

Into Barbican from Moorgate through the halls and out into Whitecross Street guided by Hawksmoor’s spire on St Luke’s. On Goswell I show Cathy the Mount Mills fortification and we follow the Cromwellian defences through Northampton Square and out to face Lubetkin’s Spa Green Estate. We skirt its perimeter and I then point out the Mount Zion Chapel - redolent of a riff in Gordon that links the British Mounds to their spiritual cousins in Palestine (a few years ago I emailed Mount Zion Chapel to enquire what had guided the location of their chapel - I received no reply).
Cathy leaves me at the Penton to complete the final leg alone. It’s 7.30pm and I should stop for a cuppa somewhere but Islington at that time on a Saturday is geared up for one thing only. Also as I push on along Penton Street I’m too awash in a sea of memories of my happy years spent living here.
The Penny Farthing has been given a confused make-over and is now a restaurant serving an odd combination of pizza and sushi - I suppose they don‘t attempt to trade in on the pub‘s heritage as the true home of cricket - the pavilion for the club that would become the MCC after they moved across town to Marleybone. Change takes on odd forms - a tattoo parlour has opened next to the corner shop that supplied me with cans of beer and emergency nappies.

Down Copenhagen Street and walks (and blog postings) past come back as do trips to playgroups and the wonderful library on Thornhill Square. I get second wind.
Turning the corner into York Way I shoot some of the old station posts that seemed to have survived the coming of the Eurostar. Then the vista of the day - the cleared scorched earth west of York Way - a train slowly moving across the land below three enormous silos - I consider running off the remainder of my film here - a Tarkovskian landscape worthy of its own 50ft of TriX.

Gordon relates York Way’s original name, Maiden Lane to its purpose of leading people to their places of congregation (Maiden Lane that runs through Covent Garden lines up with Parliament Square). I note the street name of a sorry backstreet behind a warehouse - Vale Royal - the last indicator of the rich mythology linked to this area from Boadicea’s last stand to the first Christian Church (in the world!).

I’ve now decided to keep going without a stop till I ascend the top of the Llandin - a continuous yomp from the south end of Tower Bridge. Up along Brecknock Road where the dark ridge of Highgate Woods marks the horizon. Down through Dartmouth Park and I’m there on Parliament Hill Fields. I must be hallucinating because I see a white robed Druid atop the hill - yes. I grab the camera and zoom in - not a Druid but the freshly painted white monument to right of free speech that exists here. I do a kind of stop-frame dance around the stone till the film runs out and the journey is over - 50 feet of film, 10 miles and 6 hours walking.

George Carlin's Seven Words

2008-06-23T16:14:00.005+01:00

In tribute to comedy legend George Carlin who died today (comedians die a thousand times) I'm posting the entirity of his 'Filthy Words' routine that was broadcast on radio in the US in 1978 leading to his prosecution for obscenity. I found this in the appendix of the Court's judgement - well worth a read. Without comedians such as George Carlin I may well not have a job so thanks for the cursing George.

The following is a verbatim transcript of "Filthy Words" prepared by the Federal Communications Commission.

Aruba-du, ruba-tu, ruba-tu. I was thinking about the curse words and the swear words, the cuss words and the words that you can't say, that you're not supposed to say all the time, [']cause words or people into words want to hear your words. Some guys like to record your words and sell them back to you if they can, (laughter) listen in on the telephone, write down what words you say. A guy who used to be in Washington knew that his phone was tapped, used to answer, Fuck Hoover, yes, go ahead. (laughter) Okay, I was thinking one night about the words you couldn't say on the public, ah, airwaves, um, the ones you definitely wouldn't say, ever, [']cause I heard a lady say bitch one night on television, and it was cool like she was talking about, you know, ah, well, the bitch is the first one to notice that in the litter Johnie right (murmur) Right. And, uh, bastard you can say, and hell and damn so I have to figure out which ones you couldn't and ever and it came down to seven but the list is open to amendment, and in fact, has been changed, uh, by now, ha, a lot of people pointed things out to me, and I noticed some myself. The original seven words were, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, mother-fucker, and tits. Those are the ones that will curve your spine, grow hair on your hands and (laughter) maybe, even bring us, God help us, peace without honor (laughter) um, and a bourbon. (laughter) And now the first thing that we noticed was that word fuck was really repeated in there because the word motherfucker is a compound word and it's another form of the word fuck. (laughter) You want to be a purist it [438 U.S. 726, 752] doesn't really - it can't be on the list of basic words. Also, cocksucker is a compound word and neither half of that is really dirty. The word - the half sucker that's merely suggestive (laughter) and the word cock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty - dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. (laughter) Uh, remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. And the cock crowed three times, heh (laughter) the cock - three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. (laughter) And the first time you heard about a cock-fight, remember - What? Huh? naw. It ain't that, are you stupid? man. (laughter, clapping) It's chickens, you know, (laughter) Then you have the four letter words from the old Anglo-Saxon fame. Uh, shit and fuck. The word shit, uh, is an interesting kind of word in that the middle class has never really accepted it and approved it. They use it like, crazy but it's not really okay. It's still a rude, dirty, old kind of gushy word. (laughter) They don't like that, but they say it, like, they say it like, a lady now in a middle-class home, you'll hear most of the time she says it as an expletive, you know, it's out of her mouth before she knows. She says, Oh shit oh shit, (laughter) oh shit. If she drops something, Oh, the shit hurt the broccoli. Shit. Thank you. (footsteps fading away) (papers ruffling)
Read it! (from audience)
Shit! (laughter) I won the Grammy, man, for the comedy album. Isn't that groovy? (clapping, whistling) (murmur) That's true. Thank you. Thank you man. Yeah. (murmur) (continuous clapping) Thank you man. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. Thank, no, (end of continuous clapping) for that and for the Grammy, man, [']cause (laughter) that's based on people liking it man, yeh, that's ah, that's okay man. (laughter) Let's let that go, man. I got my Grammy. I can let my hair hang down now, shit. (laughter) Ha! So! Now the word shit is okay for the man. At work you can say it like crazy. Mostly figuratively, Get that shit out of here, [438 U.S. 726, 753] will ya? I don't want to see that shit anymore. I can't cut that shit, buddy. I've had that shit up to here. I think you're full of shit myself. (laughter) He don't know shit from Shinola. (laughter) you know that? (laughter) Always wondered how the Shinola people felt about that (laughter) Hi, I'm the new man from Shinola. (laughter) Hi, how are ya? Nice to see ya. (laughter) How are ya? (laughter) Boy, I don't know whether to shit or wind my watch. (laughter) Guess, I'll shit on my watch. (laughter) Oh, the shit is going to hit de fan. (laughter) Built like a brick shit-house. (laughter) Up, he's up shit's creek. (laughter) He's had it. (laughter) He hit me, I'm sorry. (laughter) Hot shit, holy shit, tough shit, eat shit, (laughter) shit-eating grin. Uh, whoever thought of that was ill. (murmur laughter) He had a shit-eating grin! He had a what? (laughter) Shit on a stick. (laughter) Shit in a handbag. I always like that. He ain't worth shit in a handbag. (laughter) Shitty. He acted real shitty. (laughter) You know what I mean? (laughter) I got the money back, but a real shitty attitude. Heh, he had a shit-fit. (laughter) Wow! Shit-fit. Whew! Glad I wasn't there. (murmur, laughter) All the animals - Bull shit, horse shit, cow shit, rat shit, bat shit. (laughter) First time I heard bat shit, I really came apart. A guy in Oklahoma, Boggs, said it, man. Aw! Bat shit. (laughter) Vera reminded me of that last night, ah (murmur). Snake shit, slicker than owl shit. (laughter) Get your shit together. Shit or get off the pot. (laughter) I got a shit-load full of them. (laughter) I got a shit-pot full, all right. Shit-head, shit-heel, shit in your heart, shit for brains, (laughter) shit-face, heh (laughter) I always try to think how that could have originated; the first guy that said that. Somebody got drunk and fell in some shit, you know. (laughter) Hey, I'm shit-face. (laughter) Shit-face, today. (laughter) Anyway, enough of that shit. (laughter) The big one, the word fuck that's the one that hangs them up the most. [']Cause in a lot of cases that's the very act that [438 U.S. 726, 754] hangs them up the most. So, it's natural that the word would, uh, have the same effect. It's a great word, fuck, nice word, easy word, cute word, kind of. Easy word to say. One syllable, short u. (laughter) Fuck. (Murmur) You know, it's easy. Starts with a nice soft sound fuh ends with a kuh. Right? (laughter) A little something for everyone. Fuck (laughter) Good word. Kind of a proud word, too. Who are you? I am FUCK. (laughter) FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) Tune in again next week to FUCK OF THE MOUNTAIN. (laughter) It's an interesting word too, [']cause it's got a double kind of a life - personality - dual, you know, whatever the right phrase is. It leads a double life, the word fuck. First of all, it means, sometimes, most of the time, fuck. What does it mean? It means to make love. Right? We're going to make love, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. (laughter) we're really going to fuck, yeh, we're going to make love. Right? And it also means the beginning of life, it's the act that begins life, so there's the word hanging around with words like love, and life, and yet on the other hand, it's also a word that we really use to hurt each other with, man. It's a heavy. It's one that you have toward the end of the argument. (laughter) Right? (laughter) You finally can't make out. Oh, fuck you man. I said, fuck you. (laughter, murmur) Stupid fuck. (laughter) Fuck you and everybody that looks like you. (laughter) man. It would be nice to change the movies that we already have and substitute the word fuck for the word kill, wherever we could, and some of those movie cliches would change a little bit. Madfuckers still on the loose. Stop me before I fuck again. Fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump, fuck the ump. Easy on the clutch Bill, you'll fuck that engine again. (laughter) The other shit one was, I don't give a shit. Like it's worth something, you know? (laughter) I don't give a shit. Hey, well, I don't take no shit, (laughter) you know what I mean? You know why I don't take no shit? (laughter) [438 U.S. 726, 755] [']Cause I don't give a shit. (laughter) If I give a shit, I would have to pack shit. (laughter) But I don't pack no shit cause I don't give a shit. (laughter) You wouldn't shit me, would you? (laughter) That's a joke when you're a kid with a worm looking out the bird's ass. You wouldn't shit me, would you? (laughter) It's an eight-year-old joke but a good one. (laughter) The additions to the list. I found three more words that had to be put on the list of words you could never say on television, and they were fart, turd and twat, those three. (laughter) Fart, we talked about, it's harmless It's like tits, it's a cutie word, no problem. Turd, you can't say but who wants to, you know? (laughter) The subject never comes up on the panel so I'm not worried about that one. Now the word twat is an interesting word. Twat! Yeh, right in the twat. (laughter) Twat is an interesting word because it's the only one I know of, the only slang word applying to the, a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like, ah, snatch, box and pussy all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie, you can say, We're going to snatch that pussy and put him in a box and bring him on the airplane. (murmur, laughter) Everybody loves it. The twat stands alone, man, as it should. And two-way words. Ah, ass is okay providing you're riding into town on a religious feast day. (laughter) You can't say, up your ass. (laughter) You can say, stuff it! (murmur) There are certain things you can say its weird but you can just come so close. Before I cut, I, uh, want to, ah, thank you for listening to my words, man, fellow, uh space travelers. Thank you man for tonight and thank you also. (clapping whistling)

FOOTNOTES
[ Footnote 1 ] 56 F. C. C. 2d, at 99. The Commission noted:
"Congress has specifically empowered the FCC to (1) revoke a station's license (2) issue a cease and desist order, or (3) impose a monetary forfeiture for a violation of Section 1464, 47 U.S.C. [] 312 (a), 312 (b), 503 (b) (1) (E). The FCC can also (4) deny license renewal or (5) grant a short term renewal, 47 U.S.C. [] 307, 308." Id., at 96 n. 3.
[ Footnote 2 ] "Broadcasting requires special treatment because of four important considerations: (1) children have access to radios and in many cases are unsupervised by parents; (2) radio receivers are in the home, a place where people's privacy interest is entitled to extra deference, see Rowan v. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728 (1970); (3) unconsenting adults may tune in a station without any warning that offensive language is being or will be broadcast; and (4) there is a scarcity of spectrum space, the use of which the government must therefore license in the public interest. Of special concern to the Commission as well as parents is the first point regarding the use of radio by children." Id., at 97.
[ Footnote 3 ] Title 18 U.S.C. 1464 (1976 ed.) provides:
"Whoever utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
[ Footnote 4 ] Section 303 (g) of the Communications Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 1082, as amended, as set forth in 47 U.S.C. 303 (g), in relevant part, provides:
"Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, the Commission from time to time, as public convenience, interest, or necessity requires, shall -

Super8arama

2008-06-14T15:19:00.006+01:00

I’ve fallen back in love with Super8 after doing a fantastic workshop at No.w.here lab a couple of Saturdays ago. The course was in Super8 camera techniques and development. I’ve become such a resolute DV user over the last 5 years or so – viewing the PD150 I use at work as the videographer’s AK47, and had also recently started to develop strong feelings towards the Sony A1E we recently acquired for vodcasting. But this workshop managed to take me back to the passions aroused during my first adventures in film. It’s rare these days to meet the true enthusiast turned expert but our tutor was that, translating a teenage passion into a profession. I’d bought my Canon 814 Auto Zoom straight after seeing Andrew Kotting’s film Gallivant at the Sydney Film Festival in 1997. I was beguiled by the scene where he posts the small yellow packets of film off to the lab to be developed – entrusting the bulk of his film to the postman. I took the Canon with me on a 6 week journey through India the next month and shot my first film (see 2 minute clip below - I realise that digitising and giving it a video edit is against the super 8 ethos). So eleven years later I was discovering what all those knobs and dials on the camera did – our group lusting over our cameras became like a Super8 festisher’s support group. We each shot 25 feet of film around Bethnal Green Road and Weaver’s Fields then took them back for the magical process of development as James talked us through the heating, applying, rinsing and fixing of the chemicals in the E6 process. Then the films were dried on a clothes airer before we set up the projector and watched the films – the results better than anything I’ve ever had from a lab. Since then I’ve been planning on building a darkroom at the back of my kitchen and have acquired a copy of the brilliantly geeky Small Format magazine. Super8arama!

Incidentally that is my sister in the picture with her Canon 514XL, who I gave a super8 camera to when she was at Chelsea College of Art and bought her a copy of Gallivant. She is now studying Film at Maidstone College with Andrew Kotting.

2008-06-03T14:46:00.003+01:00

Just doing some research into famous people who grew up on council estates and stumbled upon the fact that Iron Maiden founder and principle songwriter, Steve Harris was born and raised in Leytonstone. A nice extra dimension to my original housing angle is that in addition for playing for the West Ham youth team he studied as an architectural draughtsman. Having said that, I haven't been able to establish whether he did in fact grow up on a council estate or not (if anyone knows I'd be very grateful - it was our invaluable friend Google who made the initial connection) making this lovely piece of local trivia potentially irrelevant to my overall project.

Communists finally storm City Hall

2008-05-29T00:03:00.005+01:00

After the false dawn of socialism that was Ken Livingstone’s eight years in charge of London as Mayor, a bone fide Marxist has made her way into the government of our great city. The Evening Standard made great play of the fact that several members of Livingstone’s team had alleged links to far left groups - despite the fact that, gesture politics aside, this manifested itself in a decidely pro-capitalist regime.
I read with interest today in the Standard that Munira Mirza has been appointed as Boris Johnson’s Arts and Culture spokesperson. Ms Mirza is part of a clique that emerged from the Revolutionary Communist Party now based around the website Spiked Online and the Chianti quafing cabal known as the Manifesto Club.
The Revolutionary Communist Party are best known for their publication of Living Marxism magazine that was closed down after being sued for libel by ITN. They were also notorious in my student days for what was termed ‘horizontal recruitment’ - a flatmate of mine experienced this first-hand after a 'Troops Out' meeting above a pub in Islington. Their wrath was mainly aimed at others on the Left and they were so divisive that many believed that the RCP was in fact a CIA/MI5 front organisation. Maybe Munira Mirza’s elevation to the ranks of Boris Johnson’s Junta confirms our paranoid suspicions as it's not clear what qualifies Munira Mirza in the realms of Arts and Culture beyond editing a couple of dodgy corporate-sponsored reports.
Could it be that the famously fruity Boris Johnson couldn't resist the tales of 'horizontal recruitment' in his attempt to recreate the spirit of the knocking shop that was the Spectator under his editorship.

Los Angeles - the atomised city

2008-05-16T03:29:00.009+01:00

I react to Boris Johnson’s election as Mayor by escaping to Los Angeles, in a West Coast reversal of the John Carpenter/ Kurt Russell movie Escape From New York. I'm staying up a nasturtium-banked lane not far from the house on Hollywood Boulevard where comic legend Lenny Bruce met his end . When I check this fact with a local she looks mildly taken aback with my morbid interest until I point out that Bruce had also lived in the house – not just died there.
On my last trip to LA I’d read Will Self’s excellent essay in British Airways Highlife magazine on travelling without luggage and had the image of him “labouring through suburban LA” with his Barbour slung over his shoulder. On that cab ride I’d really longed to trace his steps on foot into the city – the 10 or 15 miles across town along wide streets adorned with hyperbolic signage to the celebrated Hollywood hills that rise above Sunset Boulevard.
This is the outer edge of Laurel Canyon, a place ridiculously rich in rock folklore. From The Byrds through Frank Zappa, The Mammas and Papas, Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, The Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and The Eagles - resided in these eucalyptus the topped hills. It’s the place that Mamma Cass was thinking of when she sang ‘California Dreamin’.
As Michael Walker writes in ‘Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighbourhood’ (picked up at the Laurel Canyon Country Store), “The musicians flocking to the canyon – at night, caterwauling coyotes and hooting owls made you marvel that you were only five minutes from the noise and neon of the Sunset Strip – constituted an unprecedented breed of incipient celebrity: the rocker-hippie, as much a work in progress as the music they made”.

The rocker-hippies are largely no more it seems, replaced by preening proto-porn stars with silicone enhancing any appendage that’ll take it. The Griddle Café on Sunset, sat beside The Director’s Guild of America, seemed a particular attraction for this genre of Los Angel.

It’s a city, a place, that I found resisting definition – allergic to prose. I ventured out on a few jet-lag inspired excursions on foot and experienced the odd sensation of being greeted by literally every other fellow walker - such is the exclusivity of the cult of the pedestrian. But due to the sheer scale of the place (and the steepness of the inevitable return to base) that I was restricted to laps of the blocks along Hollywood-Sunset-Crescent Heights Boulevards. Sprawl almost seems inadequate to describe a system of town planning that gives every single building the car parking space of a small supermarket. Atomised would better describe it – but if matter were this loosely aligned the fabric of everyday objects would crumble before us.

I had Will Self with me again for company, in the form of his piece in GQ on walking LA’s Downtown district (I’ve left off a qualifying adjective but needless to add that it’s a brilliant piece of writing). He references some of the city’s onscreen rendering – Falling Down, Collateral and Blade Runner, to such an extent that the No.2 bus from the bottom of the hill that would take me there seems like the transport to another city. I never made it downtown to Will’s vision of Los Angeles. The city I found the place was at odds with the 2-D LA of TV and cinema. Few cop cars, gangsters and aggravation. More violet blossomed boulevards where SUVs lumber along languidly. The only reference to hand for me being the LA scenes in Sideways – but without the pot-bellied Paul Giamatti.

How Will I Vote?

2008-05-01T01:05:00.003+01:00

The question of how will I vote may be answered by the absence of a polling card and lack of clear info on actually where to vote - I found the polling station address eventually and it gives me an excuse to examine the architecture of the Connaught School for Girls first hand.
I've only had one discussion on which way to vote in these elections and it happened by chance in the Director's Bar at West Ham FC stood right next to Mike Ashley, owner of Newcastle FC. It was with my mate Eddie De Oliveira who I suspect will vote for Ken. He challenged my belief that Ken wasn't the automatic choice and fired off a "what's he done wrong?" line. I spluttered for a bit in the way that a computer does when you press too many buttons. "What has he done right" would be a better question and one I still can't answer.
But the simplest answer for Eddie may come this Saturday when/if Fulham lose to Birmingham (I hope they win incidently) after their stirring fightback against Man City - because should they fail now they will have offered their supporters hope then robbed them of it - that it what Ken has done wrong above all else. Above the crime of making London a developer's paradise (I shall never forgive him for surrendering Spitalfields to the City barons) - everybody who has ever fought against an unpopular planning decision endorsed by the mayor may well get their revenge tomorrow. Also above the fact that he has resolutely avoided the issue of housing until this election - until a credit crunch that has wounded his City pals - housing, this city's biggest issue, an issue he built his early political career on -that alone is enough not to give him our vote.
That said, anyone who even considers for a blink of an eye voting for Boris Johnson should be expelled from the city and made to go and live in Stevenage or maybe Slough.
I could go on but I shall stop because when I go out tomorrow/today I want to vote For something not Against something.

Forest to North Circ

2008-04-21T01:03:00.004+01:00

Late Sunday afternoon and I’m overcome by the desire to strike out through the forest. Maybe it was my father calling me up earlier in the day asking to speak to Fieldfare and then berating me for my recent lack of walking.
I live a good 20 minutes walk from the edge of Epping Forest so to bring it closer I decide to head up along Forest Road, a pastoral row of cottages with nattering birds and flower festooned gardens.

A clockwise spin around the Hollow Ponds in the rain with a polystyrene cup of tea from one of the roadside huts and then through the trees emerging opposite The Forest – a row of beautiful Victorian houses overlooked by the fourteen grand-a-year Forest School.
Back through the woods and as I start to revel in the sylvan beauty of it all I’m confronted with a psychedelically decorated concrete underpass, and worse, an intersection of directional signs. ‘Waltamstow – Redbridge – Chingford’, not a choice so much as a warning, a rambler’s Russian roulette, I was looking for a state of fugue, not an example of poor post war urban planning.
I end up changing my mind twice – first in favour of Chingford, then Redbridge. This delivers me to a promenade that runs beside the majestic North Circular – a road to which Deep Topographer Nick Papadimitriou is symbiotically attached. You can’t walk beside such a road (which at the time I confess I mistakenly identify as the M11 – maybe that’s a Leytonstone thing – all motorways become the M11, all motorways are the M11). This brilliant path is raised high along the cutting giving a grandstand view of the metal pods hurtling past with the dark hills of the forest rising in the distance.

It’s not possible to walk beside a motorway without thinking both of Nick and his North Circ obsession (I once witnessed him clasping his hands and declaring his love for the road from the top deck of a bus as we passed it near North Finchley – I have this beautiful Brief Encounter like moment on video), and Iain Sinclair’s magisterial book ‘London Orbital’. The combination of these two references makes it futile to even consider writing about the experience of walking beside a motorway, so instead I stand on a footbridge and think about the documentary series of motorway walks that I plan to pitch to bemused commissioning editors (note to commissioning editors: come on – it’ll be great) – I just need to work on getting Clarkson onboard.
As I see the sign announcing Stanstead airport I momentarily plan to propose a walk out to the airport – then realise that the other member of the triumvirate of great contemporary psychogeographers, Will Self, has perfected this practice to the extent of boarding a plane, flying to another continent then continuing his walk into the city centre (no small feat in LA or New York – more of this when I get round to blogging my recent trip to LA).
I’m further drawn along the roadside by the sight of a cluster of tower blocks rising in the distance like some kind of proto-Croydon. Where can it be?
Turns out to be South Woodford, lovely old Tory South Woodford and a development being misbranded as Queen Mary’s Gate by Telford Homes (“at the forefront of East London regeneration”). These developments always seem to have a fortress-like appearance, the outpost of a colonial power, in this case City capital. But with the credit crunch starting to bite it’s not so difficult to imagine the potential ghetto-isation of such ‘prestige’ communities.
I amble down George Lane which feels like it belongs in Boscombe or Ventnor, particularly on a lazy Sunday evening – so I stop for gelato and take it on the tube home with me.

The Crook, The Toff, The Cop and The Fascist

2008-04-15T10:19:00.004+01:00

An anarchist perspective on the London Mayoral Elections: " We all know politicians are lying, corrupt, self-serving parasites - its time we let them know. This is our London, not their, their party's or their paymasters'.
- noticeable that the Greens still get left out.
I stopped to chat to the Left List canvassers outside Leytonstone Station the other day greeting them with the line, "I thought you lot didn't believe in bourgeois democracy", which seemed to catch them slightly unawares. The SWP must have changed a bit since I was a lad when all SWSS members were thoroughly indoctrinated with the line on the futility of elections. I perused their stall, being a sucker for political paraphernalia, and looked at the latest edition of Socialist Studies that included an article on 'Reality TV: the Big Brother phenomenon'. "What's Big Brother got to do with socialism", I scoffed, before noticing that the lady I was talking to, and at this point looking slightly sheepish, was former Big Brother contestant (and local celebrity) Carole Vincent.

Note to all London Mayoral Candidates

2008-03-29T01:38:00.004Z

"The London County Council is probably the most remarkable attempt of modern democracy to build a local governing machine which will produce a highly expert staff of bureaucratic specialists controlled by a general council elected by practically every class of the community. The achievements of the London County Council are the results of this great experiment in scientific democracy; whereby we often put in an illiterate slum elector at one end of the machine and turn out an expert administrator at the other.
So complicated has the art and science of government become since men ceased to be wandering hunters."
G.R. Stirling Taylor, The London County Council (published in 'Wonderful London Vol 3circa 1920))

the photo shows the Council Chamber at County Hall (before it was turned into an amusement arcade with a McDonalds

If Voting Changed Anything....

2008-03-21T11:06:00.002Z

So the official Mayoral Campaign has begun. What you’ll read about in the newspapers and see on the telly is the cartoon contest between ‘Not So Red’ Ken Livingstone and ‘Barmy Bouncy Bonkers’ Boris Johnson with a cardboard cameo appearance from ‘Stoner Gay Copper’ Brian Paddick.
This isn’t the real election.
Ken launched his campaign with a warning that this wasn’t Celebrity Big Brother. He’s quite right because Celebrity Big Brother presents voters with a reasonable choice of candidates representing a diversity of race, gender and neuroses. This is possibly why more people vote in Big Brother evictions than in local elections.
This week saw the pitiful sight of Boris and Ken squabbling over how many ‘unaffordable homes’ they wouldn’t build – between the ineffective 50% minimum introduced by home-owner Livingstone and the scrapping of that by multiple home-owner Johnson (Canonbury and Henley at that – two of the most sought after locations in the South East) who merely wants 50,000 “cheaper” homes. What both targets miss is whether these mythical dwellings are “affordable” or “cheaper” they are both still far too expensive for the vast majority of Londoners.
I shall try to track the election on this blog and although I jest a bit I’m saddened by the lack of any kind of viable candidate who aims to speak for Londoners rather than the City, the developers, and the two main parties. This election is being transformed into a phoney war between the Tories and Labour in the tussle for the bigger prize of national power – London as a third world client state over which the super-powers fight.
Where’s Rainbow George when you need him.

The Lunchtime Derive - video

2008-03-13T00:03:00.004Z

This is a video that I made with Cathy Rogers back in 2004 capturing the experience of the Lunchtime Derive. This was one of the first interventions in the Remapping High Wycombe project and engages in a kind of playful-constructive activity
aimed at tinkering with the psychogeographical articulations of the town and its primary economic motors - work and consumption. Our grand plan was to roll this out en-masse and get large town centre employers involved and then study the changing relationship that people have with the town once they have been jolted out of their regular routines. The idea is still very much alive.
The maps and notes recording the derivistes pre and post derive movements and the text reproduced below were published in 'Remapping High Wycombe: journeys beyond the western sector'

The aim of the LunchTime Dérive was to study how, by following a simple instruction, a group of workers could re-experience the town during their Lunch Break. The daily hunt for a prawn sandwich or Chicken Tikka Marsala Ready Meal will be replaced with a drift motivated by following a basic algorithm provided Dutch psychogeographers Social Fiction.
In an email to Cathy I sketch out the theoretical background to the exercise and how we might go about organizing it:
According to geographer David Pinder (1996) part of the purpose of the dérive was to allow "participants to drift from their usual activities and to become more aware of their surroundings while simultaneously seeking out ways of changing them."
Our intervention is in part in reference to Chombart de Lauwe's study of the movement's made in a year by a Paris student. Guy Debord referred to the data produced by this study as 'a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions.' By asking the office workers to map their usual lunchtime routines we may find that this precious hour of free time is also similarly limited.
Debord describes the dérive as a period when one or more persons "drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there." We will be asking people to drop their usual lunch-time routine of the trip to M&S for a sarnie or surfing the net a their desk and to follow an algorithm wherever it may take them and experience the town as they find it.
We will employ an algorithm to jolt people from their routines and drive the drift most likely taking them into areas they wouldn't normally consider going to at lunch-time. Debord suggests that the dérivers may discover new 'psychogeographical attractions' to which they may be drawn back, in this way our intervention may have deeply subversive consequences in changing the lunch-time habits of a group of office workers, the hunt for grub between 12 and 2 being one of the town's primary motors. By mapping this dynamic then by interfering with it we can start to truly understand and interact with the 'psychogeographical articulations' of the town.

Process:
1. Organize an initial meeting with the workers 1 week or so before the derive. Ask them to map their usual lunchtime movements.
2. On the day of the derive meet the volunteers outside their workplace. Issue them with: notepad, disposable camera, piece of paper containing the algorithm.
3. Make sure that everybody understands the instructions and send the groups of 2-3 people off in different directions.
4. We will accompany the groups to record the event but not intervene. The groups record their route, observations etc. on the notepads.
5. The derive finishes after 30 minutes and we reassemble for lunch and debrief.
6. We collect in notepads and cameras and process the results creating maps of the routes followed.
(we could give them a small amount of money to collect food along the way for the lunch at the end)

Rules for a Dérive
1. One or more persons may dérive
2. The most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several groups of two or three people.
3. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another.
4. Drop your usual motives for movement and action, relations, work and leisure activities.
5. The average duration of a dérive is a day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep.
6. The times of beginning and ending have no necessary relation to the solar day.
7. The last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
8. A dérive seldom occurs in its pure form.
9. The spatial field of the dérive may be precisely delimited or vague.
10. The spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure.
11. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs.
12. The minimum area can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance (the extreme case being the static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
Extrapolated from Guy Debord’s 1958 Theory of the Dérive

Clash of the Magi

2008-02-26T18:13:00.004Z

I went to the V&A the other week to catch Iain Sinclair and Will Self having a discussion about psychogeographic(al) writing. I should have blogged this ages ago, well 2 weeks ago when it happened, I know that’s the point of blogs. I’m not an obsessive blogger as you’ll be able to tell by flicking through previous posts.

Here’s a quick précis what was said.
Iain Sinclair again talked about the psycho-politics that he encountered in the mid-sixties. He’d brought this up at the ‘Ah Sunflower’ screening last year, by way of explaining his route into psychogeography. And also mentioned that at that time he’d been far more interested in Alfred Watkins than Guy Debord and was doing loads of Ridgeway walks right up to the time of writing ‘Lights Out for the Territory’. By way of a self-indulgent adjunct here, my own psychogeographic work in High Wycombe led me out to the Ridgeway by applying Sinclair’s idea of ‘nodules of energy’ to my home town. He neatly sums up the main thrust of psychogeographic writing as “the quest for quests”.

Will Self talks about the “power of walking's destructive ability to destroy the fabric of how we are meant to live in cities.” This has a distinctly Debordian tone, and I might have misquoted him there as I can't imagine such a skilled wordsmith using 'destructive' and 'destroy' in the same sentence.

Sinclair then invokes an older tradition, DeQuincy’s idea that within the labyrinth of London there is a north-west passage that takes you out of the city. A theme that was later picked up by Machen I think, in the ‘London Adventure’.
Iain also talked about the role that Thatcherism played in the psychogeographic revival of the late 1980’s as a form of “resurrected tools of resistance, psyche was summoned up”.

It was interesting to sit and listen with the other Magus of the Edgelands – Nick Papadimitriou. Both Iain Sinclair and Will Self mentioned Nick’s name at various points, the only person they both cited except for Debord. Nick resolutely denies the term, ‘psychogeography’ and deploys ‘psychogeographer’ as a pejorative with the same intensity as others invoke old English names for the female sex organs.

Nick was partly the reason for me not posting sooner. We had a day out filming for the documentary about him and his work. Reviewing some earlier footage I had come across him talking about Will Self’s ‘Interzone’ project from the 1980’s after I spotted a photo of a young Will leaning against a chainlink fence at Erith Marshes.

I’ve been mucking around with a website for National Psychogeographic, which although incomplete will grow, so by all means contact me with suggestions for content info@nationalpsychogeographic.com

The Outcast's Burden

2008-02-02T18:49:00.000Z

During a random revisiting of Penton Mound I popped into Borders - a bookshop I'd previously only found useful as a place to take the kids on a wet day and for picking up a copy of the Lobster. On the way out I was drawn to the dog-eared kicked-around bargain book table piled high with out-of-date software manuals and found a copy of 'The Outcast's Burden'. It was the self-published look of it that made me pick it up - all the best writers self-publish. I flipped it over: "A non-fabulous fable...that argues itself into a fugue of club-footed heroism" Iain Sinclair. And inside the map that you see above.
I rushed to the counter with it - parting with a mere £1.49 and took off to the now gastropubbed-beyond-recognition Albion. I'd just read the first manic page when the comedienne Jenny Eclair came to my table to take a chair and asked what I was reading. What could I say? "It's a splenetic millenial psychogeograpical fable" I replied. "Oooh well, enjoy it" she said.
I drank up and left.

Simon Fletcher: A Trot He's Not: notes on an old comrade

2008-01-23T00:31:00.000Z

I was intrigued and amused to read the story in The Guardian today that a Channel4 Dispatches report had uncovered that our noble mayor had “links to a Trotskyite faction conspiring to transform London into a "socialist city state".
If only.
I also used to know one of these alleged Trotskyites conspiring to Sovietise the capital of Capitalism as I was in the Labour Students with Simon Fletcher at City Poly back in the early nineties, when he was President of The Students Union and I was on the Executive and Chaired the Labour Club. If he is now a wild-eyed Trot then that would be quite a transformation – particularly for a fella now drawing a nice fat council tax subsidised salary that another old comrade speculated was in the region of 70-odd grand.
Lovely chap Simon as I remember him and I’d never want to been seen to besmirch his character in any way. But I sniggered into my coffee when I read the following beside a photo of a demonic looking Simon (he was a skinny lad at Poly, like an extra in a Smiths video – see photo, I’m on the right there and haven’t aged much better myself).
“The reports described how his chief-of-staff, Simon Fletcher, began his career working for Tony Benn and won a seat on Camden council in 1993 before becoming involved in Socialist Action. The faction, which sprang from a split in the International Marxist Group, aimed to reconcile its revolutionary programme with cooperation with the Labour party. Its critics claim Socialist Action decided to extend its influence by placing its members in positions of power in a number of organisations.”
Well surely the total failure of any kind of Left-wing influence in the Labour Party today at any level would be testiment to the fact that Socialist Action have resolutely failed in their ambition. Hey, maybe they are running London after all, might explain the utter ineptitude of the GLA.

Simon the raging £70k-a-year Trot, was the fella that as President of the S.U. vehemently opposed the student protests that led to us occupying the Poly buildings for two weeks. He ironically viewed it as a Trotskyist manoeuvre and hated the Socialist Workers Party. He was a Bennite like many in the Labour Party at that time, myself included, but more than anything he gave the impression of being a careerist, and why not for a very bright bloke who got a First in Politics and lived and breathed the Labour Party.
I last saw him around the time of the last Mayoral elections looking only mildly embarrassed by Ken's return to Party that he'd left along with thousands of other activists but who couldn't bring themselves to rejoin the War Party.

I sense a good old fashioned smear campaign here – a return to Thatcherite style attacks on the Left, ‘Reds Under The Bed’ and all that. And it must just be over the limp Congestion Charge, because otherwise Ken is a model Quisling of the City corporations.

Old Father Thames on Film

2008-01-14T23:55:00.001Z

I haven’t been listening to my audiobook of Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Thames’. It was sitting down to watch the ‘Fantastic 4’ (2007) with my kids that prompted me to think our glorious river. There is an incredible (or should that be ‘fantastic’) scene where the Silver Surfer drains the Thames dry. One of the finest apocalyptic visions of London I’ve seen on film and actually one of the finest visions of London.
The Thames is a key image for establishing London as the setting of a film so pretty much any London-set movie will have its ‘Thames shot’. I started to have a quick rummage amongst my dvds for other key images of the river that gave us the city, shots that show us a how its representation has evolved.

This scene from the Lavender Hill Mob (1951) really struck me when I first saw it (along with Blitzed views from Holborn Viaduct) just for how accessible the working river of the 1950’s was. I’m guessing that this scene was shot somewhere between Waterloo and Blackfriars Bridges, judging from the city spires in the background, now a moribund stretch of managed footpath.

The Sandwich Man (1966) surely has one of the best sequences ever shot on the Thames starting with lead actor Michael Bentine joining a queue for the river taxi (somewhere up west past Westminster) and then witnessing as a fashionable party set out on a punt which is set into a vortex by a careering water-skier sending them into the path of a practising rowing team coxed by Eric Idle who are then sunk, which causes the team’s coach to fling himself off a bridge with a life-belt around his waist resulting on the water-skier being splayed across the front of a pleasure cruiser. It is rounded off by Bentine cadging a lift in a car that converts to a boat and carries him home along the river to a pre-yuppified docklands.

The stills from The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980) are not so much in for the distinctiveness but the fact that they are the views from a time-travelling flying saucer – the only such scenario I can think of involving an aerial view of the Thames.

And Keiller’s opening image of Tower Bridge from London (1994) with Paul Schofield’s dryly camp narration is one of the river’s definitive cinematic appearances.
That was as far as I got as I then got drawn into re-watching ‘The Flipside of Dominick Hide’.

WC-EC-WC Walk

2007-12-29T23:41:00.000Z

Needed to blow out the Crimbo cobwebs and the remnants of a belligerent stomach bug, so headed off for a wander. Instead of a write-up I've posted a video of the walk scored with a soundtrack I made before going with my old 12-string and a kids accordion.

Psychogeography with Kids in Paris

2007-12-23T01:06:00.000Z

On Wednesday I arrived in Paris with my family after setting out for Los Angeles alone that morning. I realise that this sentence comes across as both pretentious and preposterous but I hope to redeem myself by steering this in the direction of the heartland of French psychogeography.

We were in Paris to visit some my wife’s friends who live in Canberra (true and yet another dimension to what could also be a missive on ‘time-space compression – but isn’t). Los Angeles – well that’s better left unsaid.

After some of the usual family-friendly fun at the Natural History Museum perusing their collection of dusty old bones laid out like a Damien Hirst installation (that sentence would work in reverse if I were writing about Hirst – of course the museum was there long before BritArt) we allowed ourselves to drift through the frozen streets. Children are natural psychogeographers and flaneurs. They live for the moment, are completely guided by their senses and desires, and are inherently iconoclastic and anarchic prepared to challenge conventional norms with virtually every step. And we had four of them of various ages between us.

So I reckon it was the kids rather than the Paris-born Mathew who led us to Rue Mouffetard. It rang a bell, I think from the Will Self vs Iain Sinclair event at St. Lukes in 2004. As Mathew sat us down in the traditional café of Le Mouffetard, I asked him whether there was any link to Debord. He confirmed that it was in fact an area with Situationist associations, as later confirmed by this passage from The Situationist City by Simon Sadler:
"Situationsists regarded the best urban activity as human, unmechanised, and nonalienating, and their texts, films, and maps indicated some possibilities, variously idealising the marketplaces, like Les Halles or the Rue Mouffetard, the traditional cafes, notably those around Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and the places of student congregation, such as those around the Pantheon" (p.92).

He led me up the street to Place De La Contrescarpe where Debord frequented the cafes – possibly whilst plotting dérives that he got too soaked to carry out. I would have a cheesy photo to mark the occasion had I not by now have been carrying my youngest child.

View Larger Map

Indeed Debord mentions the location in the Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography: “Is it illogical or devoid of interest to observe that the district in Paris between Place de la Contrescarpe and Rue de l’Arbalète conduces rather to atheism, to oblivion and to the disorientation of habitual reflexes?”
I was going to note how strange it was that a family outing should find its way to this exact location with such psychogeographical resonance, but this would be to ignore the articulations at work in the urban realm – particularly when guided by children.

The photo at the top is of the Memorial de le Deportation

Iain Sinclair in the Lea

2007-12-10T01:01:00.000Z

Just been sat in The Heathcote reading the excellent article by Robert Macfarlane about a “circumambulation” of the Olympic Park with Iain Sinclair. The inspiration seems to have been as much to visit the sites in Stephen Gill’s photographic record of the site in his book ‘Archaeology in Reverse’, as it was to be guided through this well trodden edgeland by the man who arguably put it on the psychogeographical map, Iain Sinclair (since the publication of ‘London Orbital’ in which Sinclair walks up the Lea Valley with fellow celebrity psychogeographer Bill Drummond, you can barely toss a paper aeroplane made from a LPA newsletter in the vicinity of the Lea without hitting a pot-bellied anorak wearing pale-faced fella with a satchel and a notebook). It’s impressive that their tour of the Olympic Park should start in Kings Cross a good 2-3 miles away. But maybe this was to induce a fugue-like state by the time the zone was reached. At that point Sinclair says to Macfarlane, "Right, are you ready for the zone? From here on in it's pure Tarkovsky." An although he's referring to the landscape he could also be referencing the way that Gill's photographs, taken on a 50p camera, call to mind Tarkovsky's book of polaroids in the way they capture smudged light over blighted panoramas.

Although Macfarlane doesn’t express it as such, the very nature of the circumambulation is a significant ritualistic act – one again made famous by Sinclair’s M25 trek. When we started the Remapping High Wycombe project we performed the same rite – stalking the contested zone, the redevelopment site (see research video below). Our journeys radiated out from here but always as perimeter hugging drifts, so by looking in from the edge we gain a new perspective on the subject – a motive found in Andrew Kotting’s Gallivant and Jonathan Raban’s Coasting.

It’s interesting that Macfarlane picks up on Gill’s awareness of the activities of the surveyors, the advance guard of any development, and their “street graffiti” spray painted on the ground. He brilliantly describes the way that you are drawn to their strange markings, “you become suspicious of their heavy encryption, the landscape of interventions that they annotate and enable”.

He talks about the “improvised ecologies” among the rust and pollution in the way that Nick Papadimitriou talks of “unofficial ecology parks” sprouting in the corners of disused parking spaces. And the title of Gill’s book ‘Archaeology in Reverse’ calls to mind a phrase that I purloined from a review of Keiller’s ‘Robinson in Space’ of ‘archaeology of the present’.

This is great topographical writing and its connection to what is already an entry in the catalogue of disappearance and the use of a ritualistic circling seems to be further evidence that work such as Gill and Sinclair’s (and mine and many other practitioners), call it psychogeography of deep topography or whatever, is a kind of cognitive behavioural therapy for dealing with a unsympathetic re-rendering of our environment. Unable to stop the abuse we resort to a form of relief, a way of making sense of it, and working out the pain, as Nick says in 'Inside Deep Library' that like standard therapy, you must embrace the pain in order to move forward.

For further evidence of the dubious activities of the ODA see this vid I made about the destruction of Marsh Lane Fields

A Medway Cryptotopography

2007-12-04T23:51:00.000Z

How did I miss the Hidden Medway blog for so long - utter negligence. Even allowing for the author's natural reticence towards publicity (he posts comments on this blog using various pseudonyms) I should have come across it during my research for Reframing Maidstone. Particularly as I undertook a field trip in Maidstone with the blogger himself. Anyway it's brilliant and I think a true example of cryptotopography - a notion I floated when we were working on Remapping High Wycombe - but here I think we have the truest example.

In praise of Brixtongue

2007-12-02T01:20:00.000Z

Googling around on the net I found this listing on the BBC website for the poetry/comedy/music night I ran and MC-ed at Brixton Art Gallery

BRIXTONGUE
Saturday July 12th at 7pm
Brixton Art Gallery, 35 Brixton Station Road, London SW9
Admission £4, (£3 concessions)
Info: 07986 357 156 / 0207 733 6957
A Brixton style blend of poetry, music and comedy hosted by MC John Rogers. performers include: Russell Brand, Courtney, Fatema, Lara Macardle, Al Brunker, Jay*Star, Paradox, Phenzwaan, Sheila Stocking & drummers, Sista Vision and Zhana. Also Reggae from Zinc Fence

It must be from 2002 or early 2003 as I remember those drummers used to keep us going to the early hours of the morning. They were often great nights, aside from my old mucker Russell delivering some unforgettable stand-up sets and witnessing the development of Mr Gee into the stellar performer he is today we also had semi-legeendary comedian Nick Revel, readings from Brixton Bard Alex Wheatle and a host of other great talents.
And of course this is where I stole the name for my blog from - Brixtongue being the winner of the competition to name the night on the first gig back in February 2002 - Lara Macardle's Mum came up with it.
Sadly Brixton Art Gallery has closed - another victim of gentrification but the night lives on at the Red Gate Gallery

2007-11-27T00:22:00.000Z

The Remapping High Wycombe website is at last live - only two years since the completion of the project
Still worth a look though I think

Taking the Christ out of Christmas

2007-11-19T00:36:00.000Z

“Christmas ‘should be downgraded to help race relations’”, was the headline that screamed out of the Daily Mail on 1st November.
Quoting a report by “Labour’s favourite think-tank” the IPPR, the Mail stated that the report “robustly defends multiculturalism” and that “If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas – and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to – then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too.”
Working on the assumption that if the Mail hates something then I might quite like it, I sought out the original report. The IPPR kindly provided me with a copy – the Mail had somehow managed to get hold of it from the Tory Party (how odd).

So what does the report actually say?

After putting everyone’s DNA on a massive database that would make the Stasi blush and locking up innocent people for months without charge, will the government’s coup de grace be to ban Christmas?

The report is actually called ‘The Power of Belonging’ and Christmas accounts for one paragraph of its 50-odd pages. The central theme is that in order to achieve progressive liberal ideals and strengthen our democratic institutions “we need to do more as a society to foster a common sense of belonging and shared civic identities”. This is most likely what has rattled the formerly Hitler-supporting Daily Mail.

It’d be hard for me to argue with much of the report. “A multiculturalist politics should be combined with a politics of common national and local belonging”, is a sentiment that could be found in declarations from Molmutinus circa 2500BC to Alfred the Great. We’ve been struggling with multiculturalism since the seas rose and cut us off from the continent and we had no option but to settle where we were.
So when the IPPR suggest that “we need to find new and more inclusive sources of British national identity” the only controversy should be over the use of the word “new”.
What we actually need to do is reconnect with the intrinsically inclusive landscape based sense of identity that was once central to the idea of living on these islands. Accessing the ‘genus loci’ is something open to everyone regardless of cultural or ethnic origin.
The report does hint at this direction when it talks of a “new localism”.

But let’s go back to Christmas.
The Mail do not misquote. It’s just that they omit the sentences preceding and following the inflammatory aspiration to cull Santa.

The report states that our national institutions, calendars, museums "will inevitably be dominated by long-standing cultures and religions, which are likely to resonate more with native groups than with immigrant ones". Fairly obvious.
Then after saying that public organisations should consider marking other religious festivals it says, “However, it is often difficult to draw the line between publicly recognising an ethnic or religious identity and encouraging uncritical submission to it.” That’s the get out clause, it’s a nice idea but not practical and would actually lead to greater division and possibly promoting ideas that run contrary to the liberal democratic ideal. Also, if schools marked every religious holiday celebrated by its pupils then the kids would hardly ever attend in very diverse areas like Leytonstone (for the record my son’s school closed for Diwali, and last year I dressed up as Santa to give out gifts to a gleeful class of kids containing only two white children - so this is already happening to some degree).

It’d be far bolder to assert that there is nothing in the least ‘traditional’ about the Christian Christmas.
From the holy to the Yule log, gift giving and Santa’s elves, Christmas is just the pagan winter feasting season common to many cultures hijacked by an obscure middle-eastern death cult muddled up with the Roman Sun God.
Recasting it as this makes Yuletide a unifying experience because we all live through the cold and dark of midwinter. All we need to do is rough Father Christmas up a bit, get rid of the Coca-Cola sponsored red garb, and once again he’s the ‘Wild Man’ that cultures across the globe used in their winter revelries.

You could achieve the goals of the report not by downgrading Christmas but just by taking the ‘Christ’ out of it.

Community cohesion and a greater sense of civic pride could be achieved not so much by tokenistically respecting the cultures of the newly arrived but by collectively learning to respect the culture of the original settlers – foreigners to us all most likely.

Mystery Topographical Package and a visit to Deep Library

2007-11-10T14:14:00.000Z

I was eagerly awaiting the post today - expecting an advance copy of Russell Brand's brilliant autobiography 'My Booky Wook'. Among its many virtues I think it will enter the canon of great London books - one particular passage where Russell leads a troupe of homeless men down a windswept Oxford Street in search of heroin put me in mind of a latter day Patrick Hamilton.
But along with said book came a slim brown envelope postmarked KT TW & GU. Inside a wonderful hardback Bartholomew's road map of Britain 'The Spotless Way' - undated but most likely early 1950's. Also a torn page from a book with a picture on one side of an old man of the road (the kind of character that Nick talks about in the video below) a man fused with his environment. On the reverse of the page a poem by William Barnes (the man in the picture?) 'Aunt's Tantrums' written in rich dialect: 'Why ees aunt Anne's a little staid/ But kind an' merry, poor wold maid!'. Also a leaflet advertising 'Africa Contemporary Record - Available July 1975'.
No note, no name, no return address. I know nobody in that part of the country from where this was posted.
The resonance of the contents is multiple and profound. The Road Atlas and poem in dialect directly relates to a documentary idea I'm developing and yesterday got a call saying that I had a meeting to pitch the idea to a Tv channel. The title of the poem - I have an aunt gravely ill in hospital. The photo relates to the conversation I had with Nick last night.
Who could have sent it? A reader perhaps?

Last night I finally ventured inside Nick Papadimitriou's 'Deep Library'. I filmed an hour of Nick talking about his collection, a sample of it you can watch here. We're polishing off a treatment for a full-length 'Deep Topography' documentary that we'll shoot throughout next year. Please leave comments - we like them.