knit one street purl one city

robinson in ruins

Soon to be released by the BFI is Patrick Keiller’s new film, Robinson in Ruins, which has new narrator Vanessa Redgrave picking up the story of Robinson’s investigations after London / Robinson in Space.

Synopsis from the BFI site :

Patrick Keiller’s latest sees his shadowy, somewhat eccentric titular researcher embark on another tour of ‘sites of scientific and historical interest’ in and around Oxford.

A decade after his earlier trips around London and England, film cans and writings are discovered suggesting that Robinson – though is that his real name? – resumed his investigations upon release from prison. Keen to cure the world of ‘a great malady’ (symptoms include the banking crisis, global warming, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the transfer of British land to obscure owners), Robinson sought – or so we’re told by an ex-lover (Vanessa Redgrave) of the now deceased narrator of the first two films – to communicate with ‘non-human intelligences’ determined to preserve life on Earth… Keiller’s witty, revealing script weaves together philosophy, the arts, history, politics, economics, science, agriculture, architecture and much else, even as surreal, mysterious and beautiful images, imbued with a deep love of the natural world, remind us of what’s at risk. Timely indeed.
- Geoff Andrew

Read an excellent interview with Patrick Keiller at 3AM magazine

edinburgh trams + tesco linwood

This is a tale of two present-day powers in so-called Scotland – one political and one commercial.

Edinburgh’s other Disgrace – The Trams
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Enter stage left Council leader Jenny Dawe and “The Right Honourable” George Grubb, “Lord Lieutenant” and “Lord Provost” of Edinburgh. They may not have much to do with the day-to-day management of the project but as leaders they are ultimately responsible. If you are not a resident of Edinburgh, of course you’ll never have heard of them. Let’s just say… they’re not exactly full of intelligent ideas and nous, right up there arguing coherently with Norman Foster. Just worthies doing their best, but with zero vision or engagement, by all the evidence.

One example of this lazy thinking is the still to be installed gantrys that will carry the power lines for the new trams. These are big, tall, ugly objects and there’s going to be lots of them – and guess what, they will thoroughly pollute the view to the royal mile from Princes street. Thoughtless stewardship and care, when alternatives to a glaringly obvious and crucial issue should have been sought and sorted right from the start – Bordeaux, for instance, has the power in the ground. If any city should reduce its street furniture quota, it’s Edinburgh. The technical difficulties of this power system are minor when you relate it to the unreal amount of money being spent overall – they’re not employing NASA to launch the Scott Monument on a five-year mission to Venus after all – it’s just some trams.

You’ll know who your city’s sockpuppets are too. For Edinburgh, this ill-conceived and wholly unnecessary Tram project has been an utter logistical disaster (um… familiar… how quickly they’ve all forgotten the parliament messups) and will result in the city remaining in yet more serious debt for decades. The contractors Bilfinger Berger are not to blame – they’re the only professionals here – and must be appalled at the mess this over-politicised and underperforming world heritage site has got them into.

Previous post on Leith Waterfront and the Tram terminus at Newhaven here Also an article and googlemap on the Gogar hinterland I did last year.

TescoTown Linwood*
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In the west the rules are broken by Wendy Alexander; mouthy MSP to the beyond-rundown Paisley North constituency. I have to grudgingly say that she is one of the very few political individuals in Scotland (Margo Macdonald is the other) who seem to have a care… and so from trams to tesco.

Tesco Linwood, in Paisley North, is a proposed tescotown, close to Paisley (a once-proud victorian powerhouse south-west of Glasgow). Let’s set the parameters right from the start – there is a large Morrisons at Johnstone and a large Asda at Phoenix park both less than 5 mins away from Linwood – Tesco desperately want a piece of their competitors, not being content with their own supersized Tesco Extra at Port Glasgow, 15 minutes away, or their Paisley Love St fiasco 2 mins away, or their midsize at Kilbirnie 15 mins away (which has completely devastated the local retail community in that small town).

So, what’s a poor megaopoly to do…

Stage One: set up an untransparent Tesco front company – in this case, Balmore Properties – who act as mafia-style landlord to the dwindling retail businesses in the nasty mall you want to flatten and re-develop. Balmore act sluggardly and earn the ire of the business community as well as concerned locals.

Bingo – you have your fall guy.

Stage Two: Oh that’s terrible, we’ll utterly renew the crumbling graffiti-and-crime-infested-nastiness that is Linwood’s centre (Balmore – boo!) and make it all nice and cuddly again. Here’s a really naff website that has been designed to make us seem part of the solution… www.lovelinwood.com – yay, see those hillman imps, makes yer proud dun’t'it.

Stage Three: the public beg you to save them from, er, Balmore. You accept that challenge. Another crap store, a sprinkling of architecturally substandard “affordable flats” and a couple of football pitches should shut them up. Much more importantly – a black eye for asda and morrisons.

HEROES! GO TESCO!! — GO TESCO!!

And now for the bill (stupidity and corruption always costs)

1 Removal of local business economy (re-instatement of some like hairdressers – as Tesco tenants, naturally – trebles all round)
2 Wage-slave economy – x number of part-time shelfstacker jobs at minimum wage – woo hoo.
3 Planning acceptance must-haves – schools, houses, all to LCD standards and with zero morals – this is not a benevolent, semi-intelligent Bournville Village exercise.
4 Another peg down the national self-respect indicator board.
5 Several pegs down the distinctive local flavour indicator board.
6 More proof that Scotland PLC is run by aesthetics-and-morals-free politicos with big mouths and small brains.
7 Oh and the profits? They fly south.

Is this what you want? Because that’s what you’ll get.

*Source: Marcus Leroux : retail correspondent : The Times : 31 August 2010

Photo below taken from a bus on west maitland street Edinburgh – Copymade printshop. I think John H might approve of the paraphrase, subject to changing the colour of the additions and the font… not quite right but we get the emotion

Borealis by Héctor Serrano Studio

No borealis in Scotland this weeknight but this is nice from last year.

…and Burns’ bit on the lights, from Tam O’Shanter…

Or like the snow falls in the river;
A moment white – then melts for ever

Or like the Borealis race
That flit before you can point their place

And a clip from Daisysaint’s superb YT channel – Tam Lin with Stephanie Beacham and Ian McShane (lovejoy).

The opening sequence here is lovely if you like fresh-minted brutalism seen from quiet motorway via Jensen, Aston and Corniche… (not too sure what the gold droptop is – Wolseley? )

ben okri : a way of being free

//Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings//

//Unhappy lands prefer utopian stories.
Happy lands prefer unhappy stories//

//The magician and the politician also have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing//

quotes from Ben Okri’s A Way of Being Free : the joys of storytelling III

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So I have only now found out that Uri Geller bought Lamb island in the Firth of Forth. His enthusiasm for the islands’ alleged central part in the Eqyptian Queen Scota / Arthurian legends, and his belief there’s egyptian treasure under Lamb’s volcanic rock is, as usual with illusionists, infectiously wonderous; yet clownishly false when revealed in all its glittering sham-glam.

And in this instance of course, spoon-bendingly daft too – but it’s a revealing look into what makes stories (myths?) so endearing to those looking for “answers”. What would those answers contain? Like the Queen was actually descended from the same familial line as Mohamed al-Fayed maybe? Actually Uri… that one’s been done already…

For everyone else I can highly recommend Inchcolm Island and the Bass rock if you’re looking for an island trip on the Forth – both islands are remarkable. For the scurvy knave though – put awa’ that bucket an’ spade, laddie, ye dinna ken the difference between allegory an’ simon schama…

his clyde less bonnie moment

Vanilla sky, Dark city, the Matrix, and now Inception all follow a simple-as-sliced-bread storyline (mixtaped from 30s city-noir) that pits individual against system. Dopplegangers and unreliable narrators make us think fantasy, think escapism, think I am not a number, invincible against the Forces of Control for many, several, seconds, in an airconditioned box.

Raoul wrote The Revolution of Everyday Life, an almost unreadable book that is nonetheless frighteningly incendiary in its own way. Individual less system = freedom (but freedom costs).

Raoul wants to kill cops. I doubt he has read the above. But he’s possibly seen the films – more like a dull rambo fantasist though.

I have a basic experience of the north tyneside area where Raoul Moat grew up. This is the Denton of A Touch of Frost. This is Chris Killip, the Battle of Orgreave, Boys from the Blackstuff (west), Auf Wiedersehen, Pet (east). It is Scando-Saxon territory : cold and rain is not a bother.

In Hollywood, it ends in some anonymous corridor in an urban glass prick. I think he’ll take the country comfort route, like Hoskins and Campbell killing the cruel farmer/adulterer-stoning-caster within themselves in Potter’s Pennies from Heaven.

gold star for mr saxe-coburg-gotha

Well not quite. But I do feel myself drawn to believe Charles’ protestations about the real reasons why he dissed chelsea barracks – “one’s subjects need to be protected from the moneygrabbing slab n’ glass merchants operating in this, um, glorious scept’red islOK enough.

Poor old George VII. Damned if you do (Poundbury) and damned if you don’t (listen to your tenants).

The fact is his protestations on behalf of Clapham omnibus person-of-no-fixed-gender-or-ethnicity-or marital-status (have you been affected by the stereotyping issues raised in this post? Like to talk to someone? Call 0300 123 1212 in confidence and ask for “Knacker”) are decades too late, and far too puny. The whole system of architects and planners and developers and public consultations is rotten to the core (but very safe, and accessible, and ISO accredited and – oh joy – GREEEEEENNNNN – our new supamegaxtra-store may look like a cardboard box with holes punched in it with a blunt stick but did you know, due to our water recycling plant, 5 ducks will not now die in the displaced brackish pond we had to dig because we built on marshy wetland? We are so committed to excellFUCK OFF!!!!).

Some people love post-war brutalist architecture. Some people love a man in a ponytail flourishing a favourite Rotring. Some people think Skodas and Hyundais are quite nice and must buy a brand new one at full cost over all other options… in this company, Vauxhalls are exotic. In this company, white socks and grey plastic shoes are really very practical – and comfy.

So there is a problem here, above and beneath. Above, the articulate Lord Foster gives it away first by his terrible taste in clothing – pink corduroy trousers and yellow shirts are not PoMo, just infantile. Cucumber Charles wears suits that make him look as if he’s about to re-enact the St Valentines day massacre. Beneath – the Primark-clad, american-imperialist-baseball-topped, sink-estate’d baldricks just look traumatised as usual, nipple-surrogate chemical-stick their only pleasure and ultimate pain. Yet they’re the only ones who really know about “modern architecture” – ironic, eh?

Along with Betjeman, one person who foresaw all this complete crap and stupidity and crass commercialism and inhumanity, top to bottom, was Ian Nairn.

soundwalk at shanghai expo

Soundwalk are audio tour. Their new work Ulysses’ Syndrome is possibly their best work yet.

We’ve been interested here at fromztoa in the med since reading Miro’s quietly-spoken understatement of revolution – Down With The Mediterranean. As cradle of, well, something close to civility for some at least, this was a subversive thought of a high order, as Breton and Picasso recognised. Soundwalk understand where Miro was coming from.

Atlantis and the Atlantean bus (Edinburgh’s equivalent of London’s Routemaster) feature centrally in PsyGeo Edinburgh – an analogy and shadowplaying reality that fits well with Auld Reekie’s Athens-of-the-north-schtick and Leopold Bloom. Fares Please!

the lockerbie triangle

On the morning of December 23 1988, I went to my student job at the Glasgow Hope Street branch of Jessops photo centre as usual. Outside, there was already a queue of shoppers at the unopened doors – but they weren’t looking for christmas presents. Most of the staffers and freelance news photographers had been up all night and were driving straight back to Lockerbie in their Cavaliers and Sierras after re-stocking on film. I had no idea what had happened overnight, just aviation minutes’ away.

The site of Scotland’s worst rail disaster (Gallipoli-bound troop train collision at Quintinshill 95 years ago) and the site of Scotland’s worst air disaster (Iranian revenge bombing of PanAm flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988) are within minutes of each other (both tolls remain records for the UK).

But the third Scottish connection in this triangle is much less well-known – yet remains genocidically-common and ubiquitous nonetheless.

Cordite was a replacement for gunpowder, and extensively used throughout WW1. It was manufactured in a gigantic factory at Gretna – that Gretna, of parent-unsanctioned love – minutes away from Quintinshill and Lockerbie. The author Arthur Conan Doyle, during a visit to the mostly female-staffed factory, is alleged to have called the substance “the devil’s porridge”.

Abel, Nobel, Noble.

One of them was the instigator of the Nobel prize. All three were chemical death specialists, and synchronistically knew each other. The south of Scotland’s munitions remnants and who knows what horrors dumped conveniently in the nearby seachannel between Ireland and Arran remain their progeny to the seventh generation at least. This is Jung’s synchronicity working for progress through evil-on-sea, as surely in its motives as the Manhattan project in Oppenheimer’s beloved desert.

A minor diversion up the coast from Lockerbie, not too far from Nobel’s derelict Ayrshire dynamite works. Hunterston Nuclear power station. Anne Herbert describes nuclear like this -

“We shouldn’t torture matter apart, as we do in nuclear activity. I see the mushroom cloud as matter’s agony and we shouldn’t do it.”

I’ve dedicated PsyGeoEdinburgh to the filmmaker Allan Francovitch, whose film The Maltese Double Cross – Lockerbie, explains the prosaic reality behind the bombing of Clipper Maid of the Seas on the night of Dec 22 1988. The forgotten graves of the Quintinshill victims are at Rosebank cemetery, Edinburgh.

magnificat

Last year whilst writing about geomagnetism in birds, I listened to Messiaen much more carefully. This year has begun with Arvo Part, starting with Bjork’s late 90′s series on Minimalism. The second clip, Part’s Magnificat (paired here by the youtube poster with 50s stock footage from Philadelphia, sourced from the excellent Internet Archive), becomes eventually like a Diane Arbus homage. The religious aspects of Part’s aural lullabys to the ineffable cease to matter, under the influence of humanity’s river – time, inference, memory – as it converges into a koyannasquatsi-esque lament to the impatience of the seconds into minutes into generations timeline we’re all being conveyed on.

harlem river to river clyde

As the last post on this month’s chosen city, New York, it seems fit to present an alternative viewpoint on the just-deceased J D Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye. Naturally this links perfectly with Burns’ night just past on the 25th. Apologies in advance for being so downbeat but it did seem pertinent.

I’m writing this less than 35 miles from Alloway, Robert Burns’ birthplace. This doesn’t help at all, even if it is the rural location near the metaphorical Rye fields. We need to go to Edinburgh to set the context for Salinger’s New York visitor, Holden Caulfield, and the beginnings of the beat generation; and also its end in 1980.

Holden’s effective role model, Burns, is a precocious, cautious young celebre who speaks his mind on the Edinburgh literary circuit in 1786 – but not mature. He’s driven by the sexual energies and moral abandon of youth which he finds completely natural – bawdy – despite the severe calvinist attitude of his contemporaries – the mirror of Holden’s “phony” all-american family values of the 1950s. And Burns, like Holden, is actually interested in relationship and intimacy – they verbalise it constantly; Robert in love and full of emotion for his muse via lovers; Holden in empathy and care for his siblings via the protectorate of the edge.

Both uncover fear and repression within themselves, horrified yet distant, telescoping their candour into the psyche of male teenage angsts everywhere – Caulfield in his people shooting hat, taking on those he feels have misled him (Mark Chapman). These are not allegories. They are constants in male sexual and power mentalities. This is Trocchi, McIlvanney, Vettriano – people despised and revered at the same time here in the west of scotland – a kind of tartan creative mafia, wannabe De Niros revelling in the underclasses / debauched upper classes as surely as any standard middle-class crimewriter that knows their audience.

As one of momus‘ anonymous commentators posits on momus’ Salinger post, the monologue by the conman Paul in the film Six Degrees of Separation correctly analyses the force majeure of the disaffected, juvenile male – a nice boy, always reading catcher in the rye…