Cities Under Siege

In the pub last night I was reading Nicholas Lezard’s illuminating review  of Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham. I’ve chalked this up on my ‘books to read (but probably will just read about)’ list.

from http://blog.ltmuseum.co.uk

The book is provocatively subtitled ‘The New Miltary Urbanism’ and aims to be an “exposé of how political violence operates through the spaces of urban life”. On the most basic level this is expressed by the intense surveillance that urban populations are placed under – and Londoner’s are some of the most watched over of any city dwellers in the world.
Lezard mentions the London Transport poster ‘Secure beneath watchful eyes’ that he ponders may have employed a 1940’s design style to invoke memories of Orwell and Big Brother.

That poster first appeared in 2003 when people were still in the grip of post-9/11 paranoia. But the increased level of CCTV did little to prevent the 7/7 bombers bringing carnage to London’s bus and tube network 2 years later. And it was noticeable that after the attack next to no CCTV images of any of the suspected bombers appeared even though they had passed along thoroughfares covered every inch by surveillance cameras. So who are the cameras really there to reassure?

Lezard’s review highlights Graham’s point that, “the powerful, particularly those in the Republican party in America, do not like cities. For a start, they’re ethnically diverse places full of liberals who don’t vote for them.”
As the recent UK riots demonstrated, cities are places of insurrection and dissent that can spread quickly and uncontrollably. It put me in mind (again) of a line from Patrick Keiller’s London where Robinson argues that:

“That the failure of London was rooted in the English fear of cities, a protestant fear of Popery and socialism, the fear of Europe, that had disenfranchised Londoners and undermined their society.
Like the idea in Graham’s book that the provincial Repulicans fear the inner city, Robinson/Keiller sees London as, “a city under siege from a suburban government which uses homelessness, pollution, crime and the most expensive and run down public transport system of any metropolitan city in Europe as weapons against Londoners’ lingering desire for the freedoms of city life.”

The other recent manifestation of urban disquiet that has given the ruling elite a rude awakening has been the Occupy movement, seeming to randomly spring out of the asphalt to reclaim prime strategic locations to assert the case of the “99%”.  Over the weekend I ‘stumbledupon’ two articles exploring the links between Situationism and the Occupy movement.

I suppose people were always going to see the parallels with Situationist-inspired events of 1968 and here on The Bureau of Public Secrets those theories are further drawn out.
On Cryptoforestry, Wilfried Hou Je Bek writes about ‘Occupy as psychogeographic urbanism’, “Psychogeographically speaking the idea of a tent Potemkin village has great appeal.”

I have to confess that when I headed down to Occupy LSX at St. Paul’s I was partly inspired by the significance of a tented village emerging on the ancient and significant site of Ludgate Hill. Of all the places in London to occupy, the protestors had claimed a geographic node point in the city’s history. A feature of the landscape that had been noted from the first Roman incursions right up to the building of the church on a site of great pagan ceremonial importance.

By the time I had left the encampment I could see the psychogeographical resonance would have to emerge at a later date. For now it is still about economic injustice and corporate greed.

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Psychogeography zine

Last week it was psychogeography on the radio and now psychogeography comes to you in print. Wilfried Hou Je Bek has just published a compendium of Psychogeographic Field Reports.
Wilfried is one of the key practitioners in the field, the remapping high wycombe project drew on his work with algorithmic psychogeography – which was great for engaging skeptical members of the public in the idea of derive.
This publication has some great stuff in it, including something from this blog, here’s how Wilfried describes it:

“The Psychogeographic Field Reports is a collection of psychogeographic field reports. There is one from 2005, three from 2010 and nineteen from 2011. A proper editor would probably have added a two-thousand word preface explaining contemporary psychogeography as a battleground between radical nostalgia and defeatist politics of landscape, while defending it against the eros/anal/tantric obsessions of deep topographers, edge land romanticists and other brokers of psychogeographic derivatives. But fuck that! Psychogeography can’t be sub-primed!!

Psychogeographic Field Reports has 40 pages of text, almost 20.000 words, entries are sorted by original publication date and Times-New Roman is used throughout.”

Includes contributions from:
Patrick Clifton – Wilfried Hou Je Bek – Martin Howse – Michelle Kasprzak – Petr Kazil – Phil Kirby – Laura Oldfield Ford – Ariel Martin Perez – Matt – Mark Patrick Oughton – OtherAberdeen – Gareth Rees -Tina Richardson – Adam Roberts – John Rogers

Order your copy here

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Does London Exist?

the precincts of central London

Among the mountain of topographical books that I found in Hay last weekend the one that I bought was A Guide to the Structure of London (1972) by Maurice Ash. I was hooked by a glance at these amazing maps and the chapter titles:
1. In search of London’s identity  2. The skin of an onion?  3. The geography of conflict  4. Journeys and sojourns  5. A strategy for identifying London  6. Town trails

types of housing tenure, 1966

Ash opens by asking the question of whether London exists, “There is just one question to be asked before one begins a book on the structure of London: Does London exist?”
Due to the diversity between Deptford High Street and Hampstead Heath and lack of common interest he wonders if “the entity of London is a fiction”.

the central spaces of importance for conservation

I would love to imagine Ash in conversation with Patrick Keiller’s character  Robinson in a grubby formica-tabled worker’s cafe, or perhaps at Brent Cross Regional Shopping Centre. In Keiller’s film, London, Robinson posits that “the true identity of London is its absence, as a city it no longer exists … London was the first metropolis to disappear” (you can watch this part of the film here at 3.44)

plan for the South East, 1967

Ash suggests that we should think of London as a region rather than a city, a region that has consumed the Green Belt and moved beyond. He identifies this new area of London the “Outer Metropolitan Area (the OMA), which for statistical purposes at least is bow taken to extend from beyond the Green Belt to about 40 miles from the centre of London”.

strategic plan for the South East, 1970

The book ends with six journeys through London that illustrate the thesis within the book: walking circuits in South London around Elephant and Castle, inner East London from Stepney Green, and inner West London from Earl’s Court; and then wider sweeps by car north and south and the outer metropolitan areas.
I wonder what following the same journeys today would tell us about whether London actually exists or is merely a fiction?

maps reprinted by Ash from Research Paper SRI, September 1966

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Landor’s Tower on Sunset Boulevard

Went wandering this morning and ended up in Book Soup Bookstore on Sunset Boulevard.

The first book that caught my eye just inside the door was Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I took this as a sign to have a further rummage.

I held Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in my hand for a while – it has a nice feel to it – but eventually put it back.

I flicked through the pages of Mike Davis City of Quartz but with only two days left in LA I can’t see me cramming much of this opus of Los Angeles cultural history into my still jet-lagged head.

On my third circuit of the shop, at the back, on a bottom shelf in a dark corner where the discount books are hidden, I find Iain Sinclair’s Landor’s Tower, priced $4.98. It was meant to be. The book genie had led me here to one of the few Sinclair works I don’t already own.

I purchase the book (along with a copy of Knoedelseder’s history of the golden era of 70s stand-up in LA – partly as a momento of the brilliant team of comedy writers I’ve been working with here).

Back in my room, now, I open Landor’s Tower at the page where the shop assistant has placed a bookmark – a message from the book genie will possibly emerge from the page:
“The world had been stood on its head: landscape was a scum of dancing particles, rocked in a soup bowl.”
A description of Los Angeles and a reference to the shop where the book was found.

Never lose faith in the book genie.

Mink City Journals

There is a small red suitcase in the cupboard under the stairs that has been following me around for just over 10 years now.  About half-way down the pile of papers inside are the journals that I scribbled down long-hand in the kitchen of a large house in Via Morane, Modena.

They call Modena The Mink City, due to its wealth derived from a proud Ducale heritage and its association with companies such as Ferrari (my landlord baked the celebration cakes for the F1 team), Lambourghini, Ducati and oddly, Tetra Pak. Most people know it as the place where balsamic comes from, but the thick sweet gloopy liquid that is drizzled over lumps of parmesan in the bars of Modena is a far cry from the thin acidic industrial balsamico de modena you buy supermarkets here.

I find one of the most powerful experiences of place is the way that it unlocks and colonises the imagination. You may be walking along a workaday street but sometimes you are in a different era or location altogether. Almost every Sunday a part of me returns to Modena at some point; why Sunday? I don’t know.

I don’t think I’ll ever publish the manuscript that I cobbled together from the journal entries now – it’s messy and inconsistent – too full of spleen, a necessary ally as I struggled to adapt to life in a prosperous, conservative northern Italian town and about to turn 30 wondering where I was heading in my life. But there are bits that I love, so I’ve decided to share them here – maybe a blog would have been the best place for these ramblings if that had been around at the time.

The journals start eleven years ago in October 2000. Here’s a fragment that I pulled semi-randomly.

7
I watch the late night football show on TV – my unofficial Italian teachers. Reggina go 2-0 down at home to Brescia and it all kicks off – seats get ripped up and thrown on the pitch, bottles lobbed, the lot. When they go 3-0 down it goes ballistic and the game has to be abandoned 6 minutes before the whistle.
There’s violence as Napoli lose 5-1 at home to Bologna. The police wade in wielding batons, crowd scattering across the half-full stadium.
A player in Serie C is punched in the tunnel after a game by a member of the opposition who he got sent off. His head hits the marble floor and he falls into a Coma. If he dies, the player could be charged with murder.
Football hooliganism seems so un-Italian. It’s ugly, organised, in-yer-face.

Sunday morning riding around on my bike all seems well with the world. Light mist over the streets, groups of families wander around in their Sunday best carrying bunches of flowers. Incredible roasting and baking smells gathering in clouds around the backs of restaurants.
I try in vain to find somewhere to watch the Liverpool – Everton match. After a circuit of the town I stumble upon the public gardens with the Civic Gallery in the middle, occupying what my guidebook tells me was the Summer Palace of the Este.

Lock up the bike and wander into a small exhibition of contemporary photography. Thoughts of football recede, the white walls erase the outside world. I’m all alone in the space, left to summon up images of summer balls and aristocratic garden parties. The gallery is a haven within a haven, the gates to the gardens close out the town, the paths lead you through the shrubs neatly laid-out in geometric patterns to the glass doors of the gallery which bathes you in warmth, light and visual curiosity.

I leave in the dusk heading to the other branch of the Civic Gallery for the continuation of the exhibition this time attended by a small smattering of well-healed middle-aged types and the young alternative-arty set. I move amongst them, like a spy, hoping not to get found out as an interloper, not here so much for the photos as just to be there, in company, observing them, classifying them into groups so that I can understand this society. I imagine them variously as teachers and students, parents and children, members of the gallery, frequenters of the same bar, inhabitants of the artist quarter, the intelligentsia.


I move through them and away as discreetly as I entered. Down the steps into the courtyard of brisk late-autumn air. Out into the streets, clanking away on my machine so antiquated it could be a velocipede, Cinema Cavour catches my eye with its poster for Ken Loach’s ‘Bread and Roses’. Modena is a City of Cinemas; the streets are littered with them. The Raffaello, Michelangelo, Astra, Nuovo Scala, Metropol, Principe, Olimpia, Splendor, Capitol, Arena, Embassy, Film Studio 7b, Cavour’50.  Shining brass door fittings, lush red carpets, purple velvet curtains draped across the entrance. They taunt me with their programmes of dubbed films.

I’m tempted to go into the Cavour to catch Loach’s latest but I know the novelty will wear off soon enough and I’ll regret spending the 12,000 lire on a sentimental whim. Instead I move on to the Embassy, the least attractive cinema in Modena, where I was told they had films in English on Wednesdays. I pop one their tiny fliers in the back of my notebook anticipating the screening of The Wonder Boys in three days time.

To Piazza Grande and the cavernous Duomo di Modena. The amplified sound of a service going on in a brightly lit lower chapel like a ghostly echo bouncing round the walls jumping out of the bricks every now and then when the priest raises his voice; “Recreatione!” These spaces were built to house god himself and the ceiling here seems to stretch up to heaven forever trapping the breath and whispers of medieval minds full of superstition. I came in mainly looking for a carving on the Porta della Pescheria, showing King Arthur fighting Modroc.

Emerging out into the thick mist hanging over Piazza Grande, floodlights marking the farside, military cadets in uniform manifest from the mist draped in cloaks with swords swinging at their sides.

Around the back of the Duomo I find the door I’d been looking for, hidden away in a narrow passageway. A tingle of excitement. A piece of English mythology carved into the walls of this majestic Cathedral by 12th Century stonemasons. It feels like a secret. An indulgence by craftsmen who’d laboured away their lives making into stone the word of the church. In this dark recess they’d strayed from the gospels, King Arthur and the adulterous Guenevere showing the clergy the way to Avalon.

I buy a Guardian from the Giornale on via Emilia just before they shut; it’s the Saturday edition and should get me through the cold evening in my room. The woman behind the counter asks me if anyone had won out of Bush and Gore. I said in bad Italian that I hadn’t read the paper yet, then glancing at the headline of “Allies tell Gore to back down” and wondering how on earth to express that in Italian I say “Nessuno vinto”. The husband looks up, “Sempre loro vinto!”. “Exactamente,” I reply and I almost have a real conversation in Italian for the first time.

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Will Self and David Eagleman – life, death, afterlife

Whoever thought of putting Will Self and David Eagleman on the same stage should be entitled to the last jammy-dodger for the next 12 months. This video is only 10 minutes long but there’s more than enough to get your synapses humming.

I told my 7-year old son about Eagleman’s story Reversal from his book sum where the expansion of the universe stops, the arrow of time reverses you live your life again – backwards.

He said, “I hope that doesn’t happen”

“Why” I asked, thinking there was perhaps there was some existential unease

“Because I don’t want to have to play all those levels of Lego Pirates of the Caribbean again on the Wii …. and then Lego Batman, and then Donkey Kong Jungle Beat”

 

Posted via email from fugueur’s posterous

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