Everything Must Go

When the headache-coloured skies of winter descend, the ubiquitous advertising hoardings and illuminated shop fronts take on a new role. Giant backlit transparencies, neon signage or electronic screens punch holes in the drab, proximate environment. Amidst the sleety drizzle and along the wind-whipped pavements, you find sun-blushed, luminous visions that mock the dull muddy greys that fashion the neighbourhood. Through the general hangover darkness of mid-afternoon, you glimpse the gleaming Mediterranean blues of Davidoff Water (and Davidoff eyes); through the dank curtain of another overcast Wednesday you catch sight of Colgate’s smile, Nivea’s pout, and L’Oréal’s self-satisfied grin.

In the 1980s I was taught that this world of advertising needed decoding. Advertising was a text that smuggled in ideologies of a certain kind of life while flogging you unnecessary luxuries. But in many respects the dream-world of advertising is an easy one to interpret: buy this and become attractive; make people envy you by having a fitted-kitchen made out of floating minimalism. And it is easy to recognise that the world fashioned from advertising is made out of impossible bodies, improbably at ease with themselves and each other, living in environments untouched by the worldly forces of decay, disease, poverty, or even something as ordinary as rough, lined, mottled skin. All you have to do, after all, is to look out of the window of the bus and compare the ad-world and the ad-people with you and your fellow passengers. Perhaps rather than decode advertising we just need to see the scale of it. How could you do this? Perhaps some multi-billionaire will buy all the advertising space of a entire city, and all the advertising slots on broadcast media, all the algorithmic adverts on the internet and replace them all with one image: of fire, burning, consuming, crackling...

Rather than interpreting adverts I think I want to return to Raymond William’s 1960s notion of advertising as a magic system, conjuring illusions through misdirection and sleight-of-hand. To get some grip on advertising requires less attention to its manifest and latent contents, and more attention to its phenomenal forms: the way it chases you down as you waft across the internet; the way its impossible images belittle real affection; the way its grammars of value inveigles ordinary talk. It’s a bonanza and everything must go. 

Scenography of Dreams

Freud, in his big book of dreams, claims that the grammar of dreams is a negotiation of the past and the future pressed through the preoccupations and happenstance of the present. A dream, for Freud, roughly follows patterns inherited from the past, driven by a wish for the future (that the dream might fulfil in some way), thrown together with what Freud calls the day’s residues (the remains of the day). You can see the truth of some of this when you work out that this or that bit of your dream is borrowed from last night’s barely registered television watching.

            More and more I think of the patterns of the past taking the form of distinctive cartographies. Over and over I’m locked into an oneiric commute, or else I’m having to deal with situations within a particular house. The trouble with these commutes and with the dream houses I occupy is that are determinedly impossible and unmanageable (or rather they follow their own dream logic). One of my dream commutes has me having to catch a bus ‘home’. I’m late of course and the last bus will be leaving soon. I know where the bus stop is, and all I have to do is go to that bit of town and catch the bus. The only trouble is that the dream confuses me as to where I am. I know the part of town precisely: it is a street that starts wide and gets narrower as it moves away from the centre of town; it has some shops (for instance a large furniture shop that is sometimes a musical instrument shop or a sweet shop), and the street gives way to more and more domestic houses, some very old, as the street narrows. It is not a salubrious part of town: perhaps students live here; perhaps some of the houses are used by small-time lawyers and insurance companies. I need to go either east or west but my sense of direction and my sense of the route I need to take is based on a quite different urban landscape. It’s as if I’m trying to find my way around Berlin using a map of Paris (an old Situationist ploy): or to get more of a sense of the regional scale of these dreams – it’s as if I’m trying to find my way around Colchester in Essex with a map of some other small regional town.

            The houses that I inhabit in dreams all seem very familiar. Perhaps an amalgam of houses that I lived in my twenties when I moved house a couple of times a year. The houses have too many rooms and there is always a room that throws the logic of the house out of joint: for instance a small terraced house might have a small container ship as part of the basement. The container ship might be small (for a container ship) but it is gargantuan compared to the scale of the house. [I get excited thinking that one of the containers would make a good studio.]

            My dreams are made up of the edges of things: the edges of town; the corridors between rooms; the patch of packed earth near a small copse on the edge of a playground. Whatever there is at the centre is of no concern of mine.

The Going

I’m not alone, I wouldn’t imagine, in being drawn to the technical vocabularies of others. I’m especially drawn to words and phrases that are part of ordinary language (rather than the Greek-Latin nomenclature of medicine or horticulture), especially when those phrases seem to bring a ritualistic element with them. ‘Topping Out’ and ‘Breaking Ground’ conjure up, for me, magical achievements, the slaying of fearsome beasts. I’ve watched too many Grand Designs on TV, perhaps. Even phrases like ‘second fix’ suggest tasks of great magnitude. I think that the fascination with such a language comes from an unformed daydream of being someone who uses such terms, habitually. It is the same with the Shipping Forecast: what would it be like to have a close knowledge of ‘squally showers in Fitzroy, Lundy, Fastnet’, to have an immediate grasp of a phrase like ‘occasionally moderate later’?

            Recently I learnt a new word – the going. It names the ‘throw’ of a ladder, the distance on the ground between where you place the base of the ladder and the base of the vertical wall that you are leaning it against. It names the length of a step in a staircase. It is a perfect word, and one filled with existential overtones. It seems to describe a world with an indifference to plummeting depths and vertiginous heights. What matters is the going: the forward motion that would take place even if you had to retrace your steps. There is no going back, there is just going. The going. It seems to tie time to movement as an inexorable law: now and until you leave this world you will be going. It sets us all on a horizontal plane of time and movement, where all we can do is go on. Until that is we don’t. And it, turns out, that not going on is also the going, the ultimate going.

            ‘The Going’ was the name of the first poem that Thomas Hardy wrote after the death of his wife Emma. They had been estranged for some time and it seems that Thomas Hardy had made Emma Hardy’s life fairly miserable in her final years. He hadn’t seemed to notice how ill she had become. In the poem Hardy describes his wife’s death as ‘your great going’ and ‘your vanishing’. The keep on keeping on is the going, but so too is the stopping. In both its technical sense as a measurement of horizontal distance for technologies that traverse heights (ladders and stairs) and its vernacular sense of the moving along, of leaving, it seems to describe the great incessant onwardness of life. We like to know that we are going-on but not necessarily where we are heading in our ultimate going.

Lines of Desire

For a while, some years ago, I used to like to photograph the informal tracks that were made across common ground. These tracks marked the ground with diagrams of trajectories taken, of veerings veered and short cuts cut. Repeated footfall had rubbed the grass bare and indented the earth below. The areas that I was most drawn to were the anonymous scrubs of land that people used for walking dogs, or were used as a quick back route between houses and bus-stop, or were used by kids to conduct their non-digital encounters (to drink non-digital booze and smoke non-digital joints). These tended to be untended landscapes. What the surrealists used to call terrain vague – vacant lots, no-man’s land, a landscape of the vague. Because such places were untended these improvised tracks used to ‘take’ better there than they would if they had been in front of a cathedral or in a well-kept park. But even in such over-tended places tracks of bare earth appear, cutting lines through neatly trimmed lawns.

The sculptor Carl Andre (famous to most Britons over the age of 40 as the artist behind the ‘bricks’) was once given a commission by a museum to make a public sculptor. He decided to produce a sculpted path that people could use to use to walk across a new patch of parkland in front of the museum. But he decided that he wouldn’t impose his own route; he would let common usage choose it for him. So he had the patch of land seeded and waited for the grass to grow. Then the grass was cut and the patch of land became just another part of the museum’s grounds. And Andre waited. And sure enough a track began to emerge of people who cut across the grass instead of following the official walkways around the lawn. So Andre used this track and placed his path there. It was a collective effort. Some months later other lines began to appear that veered away from Andre’s path. These were new short cuts, slightly longer than the short cut that Andre had used.

People don’t stick to the path. And why should they? I learnt recently that urban planners and their ilk call these improvised and collective paths ‘lines of desire’. As if collective desire had found its expression in these desultory pathways, as if our desire for more satisfying lives had found its satisfaction in marking-out a trajectory of barren earth. 

Bucolic

Bucolic is a word that to my ear always sounds as though it should be used to describe people who are far from well: ‘we were expecting it, just before he died he had a bucolic look about him’, ‘blimey, you don’t half look bucolic’, etc. Of course it means quite the opposite and points to a world of countryside fecundity and pastoral idylls. My misapprehension of bucolic as describing ill-health is partly due, I would guess, to its phonic similarity to the word bubonic. Close in sound, distant in meaning. But perhaps the phonic similarity does suggest some instability in our truck with the countryside or at least how that countryside is often experienced.

My very first, and very vague, memory of wild nature (at the age of about 2 or 3) is a hollow tree that stood on the edge of a wood near where we lived. Perhaps I don’t really remember it so much as remember being told that this was a tree my sister and I loved. We called it the Owly tree, for reasons I can’t fully remember (perhaps an association with Owl in the Winnie-the-pooh stories). Many years later I visited this tree to see if it brought with it a wash of involuntary memories. Instead I was confronted by a small stumpy tree which looked rotten. It was also by the side of a fairly busy road and had the distinct tarnish of a petroleum-exhaust glaze. [In the mid-1980s I was living in Barnes in London and went to visit the tree that Marc Bolan crashed into when he died. It had become a shrine kept going by his many devoted fans who placed purple ribbons and sorrowful sentiments all over the trunk of the tree. All the ribbons and cards looked filthy with dirt and pollution.]

            For many people growing up in some form of peri-urbanism, this is the sort of commerce we have with the countryside. When as a child I could go out-and-about by myself, my friends and I used to go to a place that we called the Volcano. It was a sloping patch of bare earth in a scrub of woodland. It was magical to us and became our den. We thought of it as extensive, untamed, remote. In reality it existed as a strip of woodland between a main road and a housing development. Like a lot of such places there were signs of peripatetic existence: a fire, some empty cans, a newspaper, the odd piece of clothing. Such signs of occupancy conjured-up the romance of a vagabond life, but they also looked like the scene of a peculiarly nasty crime.

            The artist Stephen Willats gets something of this instability in a series of photographs he produced in 1978 for his book The Lurky Place. Willats offers us views of scrubland and unfarmed fields that could plausibly fit an idea of the picturesque. Yet these are landscape littered with signs of a life: a used paper target; the wheel from a pram. To describe this life as bucolic would be wrong unless the describer was caught in the misapprehension that the word could describe a rural world that was closer to fetid than fecund.   

Deplanning

Looking around our urban environments what is most evident is the hand of the planner. We see road systems and streets, office blocks and parks, roundabouts and street furniture. We are directed by planners, and negotiate our way through their diverse and labyrinthine work. For anyone who has lived in the same city for a while what is most noticeable is the latest planning development: the new shopping complex; a new pedestrian area; a new road. Older projects are part of our habitual world: they are what we have come to expect. Some of these older projects are clearly hanging around waiting for re-development. The sort of concrete passageways that pass under large roads are no longer considered desirable. In the late 1960s and 70s the increase in urban traffic, and the inherent problems that this created (air pollution, danger to pedestrians, snarl-ups on inadequate roads, etc.) was met with an idea of creating different levels for pedestrians and traffic. Planners imagined pedestrian-only piazzas and shopping areas, while cars zipped across the city on some other level. Usually the cars were raised above the pedestrians and shops, who were dropped into excavated sites in what turned out to be dank and unlovely walkways. For these concrete underpasses the days are clearly numbered.

But what is less visible in our towns and cities are those projects that never quite happened. In 1972-3 Bristol city council acquisitioned a large area of land close to where I live. They tore down about 500 houses and a significant number of shops to make way for what would be an outer orbital road. The road was never built. The residents of the area, who were often chronically poor, put up a valiant fight against the planners. They lost. What was left were vast tracts of nothingness, and a memory of an area once filled with shops that connected the enclaves of Totterdown and Knowle to the centre of Bristol. The demolition produced discontinuity, gaps, and a sudden jolt in the environment as you moved from the centre to what was now clearly marked-out as the periphery.

Cities are discontinuous. The process of uneven development marks out an area as on the rise or falling: one neighbourhood is high-bourgeois in one century and ghetto in the next. The planner’s job is unenviable: they are caught between ameliorating the effects of uneven-development and facilitating those forces that produce it. No wonder that planning is never simply about bringing plans to fruition. It is also about losing your nerve and giving up on one plan as you embrace another. Priorities change, personnel change. And we live with other people’s dreams and nightmares. We live a peculiar form of the future perfect where that future never came to be. It is the world articulated in the title track of Laurie Anderson’s wonderful 1982 album Big Science:

Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here?
And he said: Well just take a right where
they're going to build that new shopping mall,
go straight past where they're going to put in the freeway,
take a left at what's going to be the new sports center,
and keep going until you hit the place where
they're thinking of building that drive-in bank.
You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.

For your listening pleasure…

            Yesterday, on the train to Brighton, I found myself sitting next to a business man. Everything about him screamed ‘Business’; from his pink striped shirt, to what was left of the grey hair on his balding head (he must have only been a few years older than me, but to my deluded eyes he was from another generation). Just in case it wasn’t quite clear how deeply connected he was to the world of high-finance, his IBM ‘think pad’ laptop was attached to an Ernst and Young lanyard. Ernst and Young are a huge global financial organization that undertake financial audits, tax services and all kinds of financial advising: I was clearly in the presence of a money drone. Because I’m nosey and can’t help myself from trying to read lines of text or titles of books, I had a sneaky peak at the flow charts on his lap top, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. But after about an hour I did notice what he was listening to on his mp3 player: Cabaret Voltaire’s Nag, Nag, Nag from the late 1970s. Cabaret Voltaire are, or at least were, purveyors of loud, throbbing industrial noise music, often accompanied by experimental films when they played live. They were the sort of pre-post-punk band that made nearly all-other punk bands and post-punk bands seem a bit on the cute side.

            I had a vision. Perhaps all the CEOs of large companies, all the managers of Hedge Funds, all the directors of Merchant Banks were still deeply attached to the music of their late teens. I imagined mahogany panelled offices with extensive views of the Thames being inhabited by suited business men with headphones blasting out classic Fall anthems (‘the West German government sent over big yellow trains to the Teesside docks… the North Will Rise Again!’). Perhaps there were boardrooms stuffed with people undertaking acquisitions and mergers whose playlist were brimming with the caustic sentiments and sonic blasts of the Pop Group, Pere Ubu, the Au Pairs, and Blurt.

A little while later my fellow commuter changed his mp3 player to the proto-rap of Gil Scott Heron. The revolution will not be televised. Indeed.

Was this a contradiction? Were these the fifth columnists working in the market place? Were all these money drones really working to bring about the demise of capitalism (in which case they were doing a pretty impressive job)? Or was it something else; a form of mourning?

Some years ago they built a large supermarket in an area of my town that once had a large open market next to a dog track. At one point it was a thriving area. The supermarket and the other large box stores that accompanied it put paid to that. Inside the large supermarket were wall-size photo-murals depicting in sepia tones the bygone age of open-air markets. There is was no irony here, or contradiction. Just dislocation and discontinuity. This will kill that. This has killed that. Nag, Nag, Nag is the torturous cry of a de-industrialising age. It is ghost music.