City of Phenomena

 

 

 

With acknowledgments to: Charles Baudelaire, Italo Calvino, Jane Jacobs, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Rebecca Solnit, John Updike

 

The early morning light was peeping in on me. I rose and drew the curtains back from the floor to ceiling windows. Ten metres of glass walling, forty two floors up, looking out on the city. Through the haze the watery light of dawn picked out terrestrial monoliths, dozens of them grouped in practiced order like giant chess pieces. Where was I? Why was I here?

 

The conversation at breakfast filled some gaps: twenty years ago there was nothing here. No high rise, few people, no city. Not like Rome then, with its layer upon layer of life and history forming strata of memory and forgetfulness. Rome, where we walked all day and on into the night. Marks of time, inscriptions etched and carved into walls. People not only lived there, they recorded their lives on things around them. But cities aren’t like people; they live on and on, even though their reason for being where they are has gone downriver and out to sea. But it was these kinds of city I knew, grew up with, felt at home in.

 

This place, where I was now, was not just different, it was phenomenal, in the true sense of the word. And what strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Looking around me I can see endless building sites, cars and the temporary network of routes and configurations that characterise city developments under construction. I needed to discover the territory, not stay still in my hotel room. I had to walk to find my bearings and to interrogate the city. From experience we come to learn, over time, that a city is a language, a repository of a possibilities and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting those possibilities. The possibility right now was to head towards a landmark, close to the waterfront: it disappeared and reappeared between the tall intervening structures. Few pavements, fewer people, no directions. Trekking across car parks, dead areas and between hoardings I kept a bearing on my landmark. Eventually I was there. It was impressive. I climbed the porphery steps of the highest domes, I crossed six tiled courtyards with fountains. The central hall was barred by iron gratings. This was as far as I could go.

 

I looked out over the harbour: a broad curve of sea, blue and still; just a tree on an island; boats in the distant haze, and beyond that the lone and level sands stretch far away. Had I come here to learn what makes a city?

 

In a hurry to create history, they were building monuments. Part of a grand plan, something that just a few had ordained, not every citizen. This was the way cities, in all their richness, are built now. Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.  So who made the plans?

 

Walking back, by a different route, stopping to watch a stray cat, still and poised like a timeless Egyptian carving, I put my eye to a crack in a fence in order to see cranes pulling up other cranes, scaffoldings that embrace other scaffoldings, beams that prop up other beams. I called over to the workmen: “Where is the plan you are following, the blueprint?” There was a silence as another beam was hoisted into position. Then the answer came: “We will show it to you as soon as the working day is over; we cannot interrupt our work now.” So I went back to the hotel, took a shower and read passages from the books that I’d brought with me: Baudelaire, Jacobs, Updike, Calvino, Solnit. And for good measure some poems by Shelley. There were all there.

 

Time passed quickly and a few hours later I slipped back down to the lobby and out into the twilight. I made my way back to the building site, knowing that work stops at sunset. The sky filled with stars, clear and sharp against the night. When I arrived the workmen were still there, packing up their equipment for the night. Referring back to my question, they pointed upwards. “There is the blueprint”, they said.

 

 

 

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December 30, 2011

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Two festival talks

As part of my major project research I attended two talks by writers at the recent Charleston Festival 21-30 May.

The two days could barely have been more different. The first day of the festival included a reading and commentary by Geoff Dyer, amongst others. It was the most beautiful day. I was accompanied by an antiquarian bookseller friend of mine. As we drove west towards the Downs the light cast deep sculptured shadows in the folds of the landscape. The colours were rich and the sky clear. We arrived and wandered into the tent, the appointed venue for such events, pitched at the far end of the Farmhouse garden.

Dyer’s reading was from his latest book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Veranasi, in which he describes an encounter with a monkey (in Veranasi) who attempts to steal his sunglasses from a hotel terrace. The episode is deftly written and without referring to place specifically it is vividly located. Dyer admitted that he ‘wasn’t very good at making up stories’, preferring to build his narratives from real experiences. When these narratives work, they work because they seem without artifice and contrivance, although care has been taken to tell the story well. It is difficult to be sure what is ‘true’ and what isn’t, and this is a game the writer plays with us. What it’s not is autobiography. It’s story telling with a certain randomness that makes it ‘ring true’.

The evening was quintessentially Charleston: “She loved the pearly luminosity of the Sussex light, the pale gold of the stubble fields, the orange-roofed barns which stood in mysterious isolation and the silver willows whose cool grey smudges relieved the dark, August green of ash or elm.” Angelica Garnett on her mother Vanessa Bell.

The second talk was scheduled for the middle of the day a week or so later. The sky was pale grey and colourless. The Downs had simply melted into the mist. As we reached Charleston, this time accompanied by my video artist son, the rain began. Inside the tent the rain tapped insistently on the canvas as the writers talked. I’d come to hear Simon Mawer talk about his book The Glass Room. A work of fiction built around a real place, the Tugendhat House designed by Mies van der Rohe around 1928 and still standing today in the Czech Republic. Mawer’s story weaves its way around the house and those who lived in it as its role changed before, during and after World War II, bringing the story up to date. Now being turned into a museum after its chequered life, the house has parallels with Charleston, albeit a very different place in almost every respect.

The discussion was about places being frozen in time, whilst also outliving their original purpose, about the folk tales of places which change as they are handed down. Mawer referred to the House’s ‘strangeness frozen in a moment’. He also said ‘a building has to be populated’. The story, any story, builds its life around a place through its interaction with people. The havoc brought upon the House as it became involved in the political turmoil of central Europe over the thirties, forties, fifties and sixties contrasts with the relatively gentle transformation of Charleston over a similar period.

Places can become stories in themselves.

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June 8, 2010

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Woolf Lodge

“I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys… The curiosity is only legitimate when the house of a great writer or the country in which it is set adds something to our understanding of the books.” Virginia Woolf

It’s curious that this piece of writing starts Woolf’s first published piece (according to Jeanette Winterton it was in the Guardian in 1904). Could she have known then how her own home might have become a place of pilgrimage many years later? Just a weeks ago I visited Rodmell for the first time. It was a glorious day. There was a special brightness to the light. Everything seemed more vivid in the garden than one would imagine. It seemed entirely right. At the foot of the garden is her ‘lodge’, the place where she would retreat to do her writing. It was also the last place she left before walking across the fields to the River Ouse where she drowned herself (28 March 1941).

Today the lodge has been restored so that one can gaze in at the writing table chair and desk items through a glass screen. My photograph somehow manages to combine a view in with a reflection, as if it was a double exposure. Unconsciously the image seems to capture something of Woolf’s literary juxtapositions.

“Here is a genius, an exquisite writer who knew the pitch of colours as assuredly as Van Gogh.” Winterton

“She thought in colour” Winterton

“Virginia Woolf apparently told Rupert Brooke that the sky between leaves was the brightest thing in nature…” Geoff Dyer

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May 29, 2010

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Major project reflections 1

Three metaphors

1 Structure: A washing line

Over the next few months I shall be completing my major project for the course. To date I’ve been making notes as I go in a notebook. Everything in sequence, chronologically. It works as a chronology, but gradually the complexity of the task means that relationships between references, thoughts, feedback and reading become muddled. Scoping things out on paper diagrammatically doesn’t seem to work very well either. This is rather surprising because I usually find a drawing or a diagram aids my thinking and clarifies structures. Perhaps one of things I’m discovering about writing is the extent to which it is more linear than design. Obvious, really. The narrative must unfold sequentially. Despite modernist and post-modernist experiments to the contrary, we still read mostly in a line by line way, typographically structured in sentences and paragraphs. It therefore seems best simply to start writing, just at the point when my head seems about to explode (in the sense it can contain no more information). Sometimes the very act of putting something down can free a train of thought locked in the brain. As in ‘I don’t know what I mean until I’ve written it’.

So it struck me that an apposite metaphor is a washing line: it’s linear, it has separate elements, they’re all held together by a common thread, they’re held in suspension, each part should be in harmony with the others.

2 Process: A muddy puddle

Overall the process of researching, reading, developing ideas and writing them up is quite opaque. The metaphor of a puddle seems about right, but a muddy one. Nothing is that clear. At best you can see the edges, but not the depth. The only way is to wade in and test the depth. In this case it would appear that as I can wade in I get deeper and deeper. You are unsighted when it comes to the next move. Balancing a consciousness of breadth and depth is crucial, but not so easy to achieve.

3 Subject matter: A Russian doll

My core subject matter revolves around place. Of course a definition of place is important at the outset. In some contexts place can be global, in others a state or city, perhaps an area or building. A room even, or a place within that. A desk maybe, a laptop, a file, my head (an ‘interior’ place). What is clear is that each ‘place’ sits within another place. It is about ‘situatedness’ and how we, both mentally and physically, relate to those situations. Our references of place move with us, so some of our notions about place are fixed while others move with us.

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May 28, 2010

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Nightwriting

Writing in the dark

Sometimes I find that thoughts come to me at night. Ones that I need to record. Phrases that sound good (though not always so good the next morning). Anyway, for this purpose I keep a small notepad and pencil by the bed. Not wanting to switch on the light, I write in the dark. Mostly the result are fine, but occasionally the scribble becomes indecipherable. Perhaps these writings take on a form and meaning of their own.

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May 28, 2010

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Reviewing Ruscha

Speedwriting: Delivering a 500 word review in 24 hours

I arrived at the Hayward entrance just before 10. I was not sure whether to expect a queue. Thankfully there was none, so obviously Mr Ruscha is not the big blockbuster some of his contemporaries are. Which is, of course, no reflection on his work, merely the strange phenomenon of celebrity status in art.

I walked in and announced at the desk that I believed a press ticket and catalogue had been left for me. These were handed over readily and I was asked to sign the book; only someone from Elle magazine had arrived before me. I went into the gallery. Empty except for gallery staff getting into position. Bliss. I hate going round crowded galleries, other people get in the way, often listening on headphones and standing immobile slap bang in front of something you’ve especially come to see. So, thankfully, none of that, just a big space with white walls and the Hayward’s signature shuttered concrete stairwells. It seemed a fitting environment for the paintings. I worked my way around the show, making notes, stopping occasionally for some moments, then racing on. I felt the need to consume the whole show quickly: if I had little time to write, I also had little time to see. I must focus, let things impact on me, absorb stuff. I can respond later. I moved upstairs: more big works generously set within the space. Captions short, clear and well written. Somebody knew what they were doing, which reassured me as I’ve been a little suspicious of the Hayward’s shows of late. Popularity more than judgment. Before long, my pen ran out of ink. I had a quick re-cap of each room and headed for the exit, and the shop. Not too much Ruscha ephemera, thank God. Noted that Blueprint was the only design mag on their shelves, the others all fine art publications.

I returned to the foyer and made for the coffee shop. A nicely made capuccino, served with a smile. Read a bit, made a note or two, came out into the sunshine and made my way past Waterloo towards college.

Returned to Waterloo to catch the 18.53 home. Crowded train. Struggled to look at the catalogue, a somewhat unwieldy publication in that environment, but nice to handle. The published interview with Ruscha seemed to concur with my own impressions, even some of the same words were used as my notes. (Can’t copy, must be original. Where was my authorial voice when I needed it? Who’s the audience? What’s my ‘hook?’). Too many questions. Slight feeling adrenalin changing to panic. Stop there! Start writing: a list of points, observations. Memories pile in: my times in LA, working on gas station forecourts for Esso, Saul’s old offices on Sunset Boulevard. Big mock-ups, loads of drawings. Driving out to Mojave desert to visit industrial units, paint factories in the middle of nowhere, but with addresses like 1500 Union Street. Don’t get distracted.

I arrive home, eat, make my apologies and go to work, collecting books off the shelves (Warhol, Graphic Design in America, SITE: Architecture as Art, New York Painting) and retreating to my desk. It was now 21.00. Three and half hours later I had a draft. I had decided to look at Ruscha’s work from my perspective as a designer, after all that’s what I’d been doing with my life for almost as long as my subject had been painting. We had something in common, a shared experience of graphics from the 60s.

I checked the word count, did a few revisions, read it through again and went to bed. 1.00.

Morning. Open up the laptop, realising I’d been turning over phrases, words and ideas in my head while semi-conscious. Note bad structure, clumsy phrasing, spelling errors. Re-edit. Re-edit. Re-edit. Print out. Re-read. Take a break. Go for a walk. Return to the piece again. One last change. Word count now 498. Stop.

E mail. Attach. Send.

1 hour later. 13.30. Message received: “Thanks Jim, it’s great.”

Phew!

Next?

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October 15, 2009

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Observation at the Elephant

Impressions of the Elephant & Castle gathered in the mode of Mass Observation first hand research: June 2009

First stop: St Mary’s Park.

Intervention: community landscaping, Marshall’s paving, decking. Yellow and white Belisha beacons, derascinated, suggesting a zebra crossing, bringing traffic iconography to a pedestrian space, invoking the spirit of transport in a calming space for people to walk in.

Cantilevered benches (for one). Here I eat my lunch, while the pigeons behind me prefer the grasslands of old St Mary’s Churchyard. Buried bodies, long lost tombs under mown grass. A rumble of underground disturbs the waking and sleeping denizens of the Elephant. The pigeons creep nearer to inspect my Tesco’s bag.

Big plane trees standing as sentinels guarding hallowed plots. Disturbance: molehills of red and orange. Eruptions: concrete balls. Playground: younger generations dancing on the graves of their forebears. Memorials: fallen headstones lying in state.

A municipal landscape overlooked by new, affordable housing, blankly staring. Leisure centre: its back turned against the open space. Vent shaft, aircon unit, locked door in bright lipstick colour, CCTV.

Railings: play here, walk there, sit here. Beyond the railings: a traffic tableau. Within: a single rose, hybrid tea, pale orange. Trendy landscape architect’s bunkers of grasses. Ground cover: geraniums, hellebores, alchemilla, wood chip, decking.

Big glass box: ‘Connecting the people of Southwark to London and Europe.’

Why? How? Solar panels, wind turbine. Passers-by: all non-European.

I talk to a college student at the bus stop. She is from upstate New York, studying photography. I ask about the regeneration. No to shopping malls, to corporations. More community, cultural, open space.

Shopping centre:

No clear entrance, boarded-up, dump bins, slow-walking people.

Little open food area: Caribbean, Latin American, Thai, all together. An open space like in Kuala Lumpur, or Newton Circus, Singapore.

Upstairs: The London Palace casino: grand, swirly carpet, bingo, shuttering – a boxed-off den of vice. Bowling alley: like something out of the Big Lebowski, but with none of the people. No one, nothing, just imagery and sound.

Downstairs: I meet Maureen in the Tesco’s queue. She has lived in the Elephant & Castle area for most of her life. She shares a terraced house with her daughter. I enquire about the changes, the regeneration. Her eyes light up: Bill Clinton – Elephant & Castle in the news. “You’ve got to live here to understand the change. A new shopping centre will be a good thing; the place is getting cleaner. But we’ve lost some of our power. We talk, people listen, but little happens. We are a minority now.”

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October 15, 2009

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Postcards from Cornwall

Here are my reflections on a September week spent in Cornwall:

Postcards from Cornwall: the pack

Five cards, five colours, five themes

Postcards from Cornwall: the text

Blue Sea

Impossible blueness. From ultramarine to aquamarine. Cornwall was making a more than passable impression of the Mediterranean when I arrived. It continued in the same mode all week.

Childhood memories drifted back: long days on the beach, scrambling across rocks, sand in hair, picnics, wet dogs.

An imagined world reconfigured as memory. Was it true? Some days the blue seemed frozen in its stillness, the surface broken only by diving gannets and the wake of fishing boats.

It was in Cornwall that I first fell in love…a girl from Newbury. I still have my drawings from that holiday fortnight, her letters and photo long since lost.

White Light

According to Cornish writer Michael Bird, there was a brief moment, in the 1950s, when Cornwall, St Ives to be exact, was at the centre of the international art world. As Paris’ star declined and New York’s was yet to rise, Cornwall bathed for a moment in a white light.

The whiteness that dapples the sea, that bleaches the rocks, that washes the clouds, that shines in your eyes.

It was white that Nicholson, Hepworth and the others saw, the big skies that hung brightly overhead, the white paint coated thickly on boats, white gulls with their matching guano, breaking waves and their attendant white surf. It’s all in the light.

Grey Rocks

Even those who know nothing about geology, or care even less, can fail to see that Cornwall is a bit different when it comes to rock.

Grey, striated granite with glints of mica; dark, slithery, flaky slate: a spectrum of greys with every shade between.

On their own rocks can be monumental enough, but man long ago mysteriously removed, re-formed and re-erected stones that still stand: upright, alone, in groups, in circles.

Their unknown purposes inspire conjecture, fire Celtic imaginings, help us dream other worlds. Who knows their significance, the magic they wrought? These rocks embed Cornwall’s past, as they stand unmoved by its present.

Yellow lines

In some places the streets are so narrow that double yellow lines double up to become four, divided by tarmac, sets or cobbles.

Urban signifiers of traffic control they imprint their stamp on ancient thoroughfares. 4×4s fight with overweight tourists on foot to command these narrow spaces. Like a snake swallowing a large mammal Cornwall’s coastal villages have digestion problems.

Clinging to cliff edges, wrapped around coves and inlets, guarded by sea walls, Cornish coastal life was once spare, modest and tough. Now bloated by tourism and cream teas, crammed with cars and delivery trucks bringing pasties from industrial estates near Bude, they struggle to retain their former identity.

Black Flag

The black flag of Kernow is flown from burger vans, on bumper stickers, at caravan sites and on blog sites. Symbol of independence and otherness, the white cross on a black ground is Cornwall’s newly revived marker.

From a past of tin mining, fishing and wrecking Cornwall now survives as a tourist economy. Its new unitary council, its new arts university in the making, its selection for the Design Council’s DOTT 09 initiative: Cornwall is in the spotlight for creativity, regeneration and innovation. All overlaid on a stubborn resistance to conform: culturally, linguistically, politically, spiritually.

Cornwall, sometimes like a latter-day hippie, sometimes like an old fogey, continues on its own way, every now and then looking up to see which way the wind is blowing.

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October 6, 2009

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