Beyond Stonebridge Park pts. 2 & 3

The final two installments of ‘Beyond Stonebridge Park’ have been uploaded to Google Video and YouTube

This is the film that Iain Sinclair described as “grunge Keiller” and has been screened here and there apparently. Catch Deep Topographer extraordinaire Nick Papadimitriou riifing brilliantly on the Phenomenology of the Stockbroker Belt, the pig-iron universe of WWI, the progression from Dan Dare to Pornography via a skip in Cricklewood Lane and loads more.

‘Journeys Beyond the Western Sector’ is now available from Crockatt & Powell’s Booksellers on Lower Marsh SE1, behind Waterloo Station. They have an interest in matters psychogeographical and sell an array of books and pamphlets such as the intriguing ‘One Eye Grey’. Nice fellas too. My old mate Ivor Dembina even did a stand-up set there the other night (Ivor was the saint who made sure that my first ever stand-up comedy gig was Saturday night at The Hampstead Comedy Club on the same bill as Time Vine – it was downhill from there featuring painful stop-offs at places such as the Feral Comedy Night at the Bridge Hotel, Sydney).

Another Lost Treasure of London

Once the tower blocks of the Beaumont Estate have finally been dismantled will they be recorded amongst the lost treasures of London like the Blitzed effigies in the Inner Temple Hall. Doubt it. Who’ll weep for the home of the notorious ‘Beaumont Boys’ who just last year beat a man to death over a drug debt of £1.50 (I think that was the balance to pay, not the whole amount — not to make light of the affair). How long till they are a question on The Robert Elms Show. Do they say more about our city than the effigies that would have only been seen by a select few ever could?

Why is Will Self’s column in The Independent called ‘PsychoGeography’?

I bought the Independent this weekend for the Eric Rohmer DVD’s and naturally came across Will Self’s column in the magazine. I have heard of it before but not paid any attention. I always assumed the title to be a bit of a joke, a comment on the over/mis-use of the term by a man who knows what it really means. But as I read yesterday’s cloumn, a meditation on “Travelling light”, the inappropriateness of the title irked me. Self was sailing too close to genuinely psychogeographical waters, questioning notions of and approaches to travel. What was Self playing with here?

I’d seen him jibe Iain Sinclair for his perceived mis-use of the Debordian idea of “The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”. (Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ 1955) for Sinclair’s brew of earth mysteries and East End esoterica. Mr Self had even squared the two ideas of psychogeography in his review of Sinclair’s masterful ‘London Orbital’ (along with ‘Lights Out for the Territory’ and Stewart Home’s LPA newsletters held up as the canonical texts of Anglo-Celtic psychogeography). He’d quite neatly defined what he thought the Situationists were up to when he wrote:
“The situationists of Left Bank Paris undertook their derives in an altogether aimless fashion. These urban rambles, guided by Guy Debord, a pisshead mystical Marxist intellectual manque (presumably holding up a cheap bottle of wine, the way a London tour guide lofts an umbrella), were aimed at deconstructing the urban space. The cities – according to these filthy flaneurs – had become merely factories for the production of soullessness, and it was their duty, by lying about drunk on the Ile de France, to liberate Paris from its collective obsession with work, consumption and industrialised mass “leisure”.
And he brilliantly summarises what Sinclair was up to:
“But across the Channel and 40 years on, Sinclair has made of psychogeography an altogether more productive, if decidedly less millenarian, field of study. While Ackroyd is a shameless antiquarian, a John Stow de nos jours who stomps through time and space kicking up the fossilised imprints of styles and modes, Sinclair, on the other hand, has at least a half-belief in full temporal simultaneity. “

So what exactly is Will Self up to with this column? Where does his PsychoGeography fit in to all this? Surely he’s not throwing his lot in with the crew who produce such aberrations as the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel and the Time Out book of London Walks.

Marsh Lane Fields Celebration

Marsh Lane Fields has again been saved, and this time without a riot.
I got an email announcing the victory this afternoon:

“Last night the Borough of Waltham Forest’s planning committee turned down an application by the LondonDevelopment Agency to fence off about a fifth of Marsh Lane Fields in Leyton to relocate allotment-holders(who don’t want ot move!) from a lovely 85 year oldsite at Bully Point in Newham.
The campaign against this was led by the Lammas Lands Defence Committee,with a lot of help from other interested groups in the borough. We had already planned a rally on the marshes on Sunday before the announcement that lastnight’s planning cttee meeting would be deciding the application, and we therefore propose to hold a PARTYon the fields. So bring party stuff – champers,ribbons, etc. – if there’s any snow we can build asnowman or have a snowball fight! And please bringpolo mints, carrots or apples for the horses thatgraze there – they’ll appreciate it immensely this time of the year when it’s muddy and the grass doesn’tgrow very fast.”

It nice for a change to celebrate a victory against rapaciuos development.
I was worried that my video about the campaign would become an obituary piece.
There’s a good piece on Indymedia about the victory too

london

Politics in Leytonstone

At one entrance to Leytonstone tube station the Socialist Workers have a stall with their papers on and a lady is giving out fliers for a meeting organised by Respect starring Gorgeous George Galloway MP (I thought the SWP didn’t believe in bourgeois democracy). Titled “British Politics after Blair”, it’s taking place at the al Badr Hall on Lea Bridge Road on Friday 9th.

Through the underpass at the other entrance a member of the Labour Party is giving out leaflets (no stall note) entitled “Labour, the Leadership and the War”. This meeting boasts 3 MPs (Labour have an unshakeable belief in bourgeois democracy) and takes place at the Welsh Church on Leytonstone High Road.

The leaflet, and the man giving them out boast that “all three MPs are anti-war”. You know our democracy is a bad state when our elected representatives try to impress us with the fact that they voted against an illegal war against a sovereign state that has cost the lives of over 600,000 people.

What else can I read about the politics of the nation from this encounter? Both groups seem to gravitate to religious buildings. Respect/SWP to an Islamic venue adjoined to a mosque, in order to show that they are no Islamophobes and can communicate with the ‘Arab Street’ (they never believed in gender politics anyway).

Labour are drawn back to their Celtic roots, still more comfortable with Methodism than Marx.

Whatever happened to Working Men’s Clubs?

london

Solitary, slow and wayward – SPB Mais on how to see England (proto-Situationist manifesto pt.2)

You can no more see England from a main arterial road than you can see her from the air. What you can see from the newly constructed roads is a garish rash of scarlet, the unhealed wound of a land laid waste.

Hikers travel on foot, but they see nothing of England, for two reasons. They travel too fast, and they walk, as starlings fly, in multitudes.

It is not enough to travel on foot. You must learn to saunter as Charles II, Richard Jefferies, W.H. Hudson, and Edward Thomas sauntered, and you must learn to saunter alone.

You travel alone, not because you are unsociable, but because you are sociable. In a crowd you just nod in passing to the shepherd or road-mender. When you are alone you make friends with every passer-by. All England talks to you.

You travel alone, secondly, to meet yourself. All the rest of the year you are part of the machine. You work with the herd, take your pleasures with the herd. But alone in the quietude of the country you find yourself. You are at last finding out your own tastes, testing your own unforced reactions.

So make up your mind to be bound by no programme, to travel with complete irresponsibility, to start nowhere in particular, and the odds are that you will catch a glimpse of England that is vouchsafed only to the privileged few.

What you are looking for is as elusive as the faery music of the piper at the gates of dawn. What you see may be incommunicable to others, but it will provide you with a vision that may well alter the whole of your outlook on life.

Solitary, slow, and wayward are the keywords.

In England you cannot go wrong so long as you keep to the unknown.

You and I are likely to go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green, but our ancestors lie buried in the long barrows that strew the banks of Minchinhampton. Where they are traces of earliest man there is beauty.

So if you would find loveliness, tread the ancient tracks that top the Wiltshire downlands. The smooth green undulations will soothe your harassed mind as nothing else can.

It is impossible in the hurly-burly of the market-place to acquire or to keep any values at all. Only when we are striding the high hills alone can we take stock of ourselves, our desires, and our relation to this world and the next.

Abridged from ‘England’s Character’, SPB Mais 1936, pgs. 14-22.
You can read Pt. 1 of SPB Mais’ Proto Situationist Manifesto, Advice for Derivers (circa 1930), here

london

Soapbox reborn

I’ve just posted on my other blog for the first time in about 18 months. This was my first blog in fact. I might do this more often for things of a more current affairsy, polemical nature, in the spirit of the blog’s name Soapbox Cabaret which was the name of my song’n’dance political-satirical review from 1999-2000. I shall still endeavour to post here once a week though.

london