For whom the siren wails

[imomus]

I'm in London, staying at New Cross. Fly to New York on Wednesday. It's taking me a while to readjust to this city. In fact, I refuse to readjust to this city. This city is just wrong in so many ways (you have to admit it's never boring, though). The traffic in New Cross is appalling on a Saturday night at 1am, jammed solid. Lots of people in pimp rides, extremely expensive Mercs and BMWs with tinted glass and ferocious boomy music. Where do they get the money? And what's the point, when you just end up in a traffic jam in an ugly one-way system? Police cars scream by every ten minutes with headlights flashing, ambulances cart the shot, the run-over and the knifed off to hospital, shark minicabs prowl. London just feels, well, brutal.



The next day I go with Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard to the Goldsmiths BA Fine Art degree show. It's scorchingly hot and I'm ravenously hungry, but the Goldsmiths cafe is shut. I munch toxic British food -Maltezers, roast beef-flavoured crisps, sickly sweet Britvic-to keep my hunger at bay as I look at the art. The art, although it's mostly made by foreign students, reflects the ugly brutality of the city back to me. There's an installation of a toxic, putrefying works canteen by someone called Rob Bellman. He stands behind the hatch of his stinky installation wearing a radiation suit and croaking "Can I take your order please?" (Suddenly I'm not hungry any more.) There's a security camera woven from grey carpet fibre. There's a video called "Shitting and Pissing in the College" in which a woman pisses and shits in the college. There's another where a mechanic eases himself under cars, then under his crappy home furniture, a multi-screen installation where people just stare, glazed, occasionally screaming. There's a clip of Francis Bacon reacting to the sound of an explosion, clapping his hands to his ears and swivelling around with the horrified expression of one of his own paintings. Ugliness and menace prevail, and you get the impression that the students are simultaneously disgusted by their environment, and trying to turn all its failings into some new form of terrible beauty.



Goldsmiths has some shockingly wrecked buildings. However you cut London, wherever you stay, the same basic textures are to be found. Sure, there'll be some flashy iconic high-profile new building (Goldsmiths has one, a big Tokyo-ish metal and glass tower with a curly trellis of bent steel on top and great views out over the city's other iconic buildings; the dome, the gherkin, the eye...), but most of the buildings will be peely-wally, chopped around, subdivided and ruined by mean insensitive landlords with exchange value rather than use value in mind, full of blind corners, pointless steps, awkward bathrooms, and ghastly grey fitted carpet. Sometimes they'll be WW2 nissen huts which should have been pulled down in 1947 but have somehow survived and even acquired a sort of tawdry charm. They'll be terrace houses with St George flags in the window.

If London wins the bid for the 2012 Olympics no doubt this incongruity between flashy cars and buildings and the basic mean crapness, inefficiency, poverty and ugliness of most of the city's infrastructure will become even more obvious. What's more, the basic sports metaphor of winners and losers will underscore the city's Darwinian philosophy. Unfortunately the current EU chaos has made it look like London might swing into the lead as some kind of model for all the cities of Europe. But the city's really only a poster child for ugly polarities and brutalities. Another siren screams by as I write this line.

Even outside Goldsmiths there are no cafes open. The only place you can buy food is a pub called The Hobgoblin. The signs on the door state that drug dealers and users will be ejected without refund (refund for what, their drugs or their drinks?) and that handbag thieves have been operating on the premises. The food I eat is an English roast-up, quite vile and tasteless. Later, for dinner, I head with my friends to Whitechapel. A big sign outside the tube station tells me that muggings happen in the area. As I walk towards my favourite restaurant on my favourite London street (Sweet and Spicy on Brick Lane) my trousers and eyepatch are mercilessly mocked by chavs, drunks and Asian wideboys. It's "just a bit of fun", but it's "fun" I don't generally have to deal with in Berlin. Later, on Hoxton Square, there's a fight between shaven-headed white louts (British people look like Australians in the hot weather). "I heard what Pauline done!" "Pauline's not my missus! Come here and say that!" And soon fists are flying, skulls crunch against concrete, blood mingles with beer, and another police siren splits indifferent London ears with yet more intimations of ultraviolence.

In case you think I'm exaggerating, let me show you how literally this stuff impacts on lives. I didn't know andypop, but he was in the band Linus and made comics. He sometimes commented on Click Opera (his last comment was about how he preferred herbal tea to coffee). Andy was in one of those ambulances last week after being hit by a motorbike on the Bethnal Green Road, coming out of a gig. The motorcyclist didn't even stop. Andy went into a coma. He didn't survive. His last entry is about a police standoff in Dalston.

Comments

Shitting and Pissing in College.

[artysmokes.livejournal.com]

What happened to andypop really shocked and saddened me.
--
Have you adopted the local custom known as "happy slapping (http://news.yahoo.com/s/chitribts/20050619/ts_chicagotrib/happyslapyobsbreedfearanger)"? It doesn't make me happy.

Re: Shitting and Pissing in College.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Needless to say the measures Tony Blair is proposing to combat happyslapping (orange Camp Zero-style boilersuits, big fines for the poor) are just as brutal as the crime. These things are deep in national culture. They can change over time (New York managed it), but they reflect a mindset. I think that people have to connect it to big structural issues, and also to fashion. In London's case I think it's an expression of, or reaction to, this extreme polarization between winners and losers. But it's also, as the article says, a longstanding British tradition. You see it in the tone of the UK tabloids, the most vicious newspapers in the world.

Not another Brit-bash!

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

Who are you with?

If they knew the area better you could have popped down to Deptford,(five minutes) pottered round the Laban centre -nice and quiet maybe visit the cafe (it's very nice) then a short walk to Greenwich to eat decent noodle food - next to the river (with a minimum of thugs around). Honestly, if you don't know where to go it's all going to be a grim.

You write well (and truthfully) about the UK, but please don't rub it in! It's depressing!

Argh

[frenziedcurtain.livejournal.com]

Has London been ruined, or has it just always been like this in some form or other?

Re: Argh

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

It's tempting to blame Thatcher for everything, isn't it? (Terrible lazy habit, mind you)

[dickon-edwards.livejournal.com]

Oh, Nick, not ANOTHER Grumpy Old Ponce post about London!

People point and laugh at me when I walk around London, too. And I'm not dashing off just yet. I like to think I have a slightly more positive take on it, though:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dickon_edwards/2005/06/19/

Chin up!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I liked your Andy tribute, Dickon, and it's interesting that, like me, you connected the event to the daily experience of being in London.

I admire your dandyism, I think you're basically what people become in Britain when they remain defiantly defensive of basic aesthetic values. But I think the danger is the same as the danger of being a satirist: there's a possibility that you become nothing more than the mirror image of the things you hate and revile, a walking challenge to the challenge. And there are so many other things you could be, in so many other cities. You might even find that there are places where people think, dress and feel as you do, and that it's nice to be part of a community rather than some sort of stubborn sacrificial lamb out on an increasingly fragile limb.

The eye of the beholder.

[fufurasu.livejournal.com]

I came back to Athens from Londres a few days ago. I found it beautiful and full of resources and opportunities. Being in a period of flux in my life, I made the decision to move there soon. It helps that I have many (non-Brit) friends there.

I can understand and sympathise with your post, but these are things I can selectively blank out when I'm otherwise impressed with the place. I am sure I'll be jaded and wanderlusty in a couple of years of staying there.

[(Anonymous)]

I must admit that I simply don't recognise the London I live in from your posts about it. Sure, there is random violence and crime. It's a huge city with a certain amount of institutionalised poverty in its inner city. But I don't think it's radically different in that respect to most large European cities. Hang around place Stalingrad at night in Paris and you'll see all the drugs and violence you want. I'm sure there are dodgy bits of East Berlin too, although I don't know the town - isn't there a skinhead culture in Berlin? As someone else said here, you've got to know where to go and where not to go, just like in any city. In the past year of living in a part of inner city London with significant council housing, I can't offhand recall seeing ANY violence. OK, I'm hardly ever out on the mean streets at 2 in the morning, but nonetheless...

[(Anonymous)]

Didn't they recently kill a load of jews, gypsies and various "weirdos" in and around Berlin?? Didn't they lay waste to quite a lot of Europe and North Africa?? OK, I know the Brits were also involved, but it did take two to get tangoed.

[(Anonymous)]

I generally dislike London too, however, one event sticks in my mind. We were driving to my brother-in-law's near Battersea power station - directly beneath the flightpath for something or other (not nice) - when the alternator finally died. As we were on a busy road near Clapham Junction, at 9-10 o'clock at night, I really thought we were done for. To my great surprise - I am now ashamed to say - a man emerged from one of the houses and helped us push the car off the road. He then produced a set of tools and removed the battery from the car. He took us into his house and, while the battery was charging, entertained us (me, my wife and our three children) with food, drink and conversation. The recharged battery was enough to get us home and we replaced the alternator the next day.

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

I'm in the US right now and it's fairly depressing at times even though I'm in the nice, shiny, eco-friendly happy part of it (Seattle). Sometimes when I glance at my Canadian passport I'm comforted by the fact that it says, in emergencies, I can also visit British embassies. I always thought that was very nice, and that I might like to go to the UK sometime and live there a bit, and experience a place that has a real historical context.

Maybe I don't, so much, now.

The world seems so depressing, at times. Perhaps I should run away and live in a box in Alsace-Lorraine.

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

The world seems so depressing, at times.

I haven't lived in London since '98, but I still think I'll take the recent media frenzy about violence in the UK with a grain of salt.

One account I recently read said crime is actually declining in London.

Have you seen "Bowling for Columbine"? It sounds like this might be a similar kind of hysteria overtaking our friends across the pond: by and large, I'd bet most Britons probably don't encounter violence in their daily lives. But the few accounts that receive media coverage put everyone on edge and have politicians jockeying to curtail civil liberties (especially for the young).

[martylog.livejournal.com]

Good old Croydon.

[(Anonymous)]

Someday someone will prove that living in a monarchy is bad for mental health. The subtle persistant mockery of human aspiration which says 'Whatever you do, however you do it, there is a realm unattainable to you. Whatever you produce, remember: the upper realm is not produced, like divinity it simply is.' Ceaseless subjects, adoptive, never family. Neighbour's children kindly allowed the garden, the pleased and obedient feel endless privilege and the sullen bring their bows and arrows, and often they can be found at odds. But we remain just terrible children, something in the way.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, the BBC reports today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4110018.stm) that London is Europe's most expensive city, the world's third most expensive after Tokyo and Osaka.

[jinty]

I didn't know andypop, but he was in the band Linus and made comics.
you're only one Kevin Bacon degree away from him, though, even before LJ -- you & I met up a few times in about 1999 when I had quite recently split up from him.

Jenni

[trickybrkn.livejournal.com]

Class has always been the English disease.

as Morrissey said, " London is dead"

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

Yeah, cos no other white country in the world has a concept of class or snobbery. Especially not the USA.

Christ, you'd think it was the 1950s the way foreigners go on about Britain.

[(Anonymous)]

the hobgoblin is actually international these days, with locations in Tokyo as well. The brits like to go there for a taste of home, or a bit more denial (of the fact that they aren't actually at home).
Given their success abroad in Japan, I think the hobgoblin might just be more english than english.

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

London life is all too often like watching (what?): a slow motion pile-up, stop-frame petri dish, tooth rot... And why do I stay? My mother, friends, force of habit, obligation, I really don't know. I've been planning a shop that's due to open in Spring/Summer next year. It doesn't matter how much I think about and plan the design of the interior, the stock and so on, it's still in London. The shop will go to sleep at night and might dream it's along Omotesando, a back street of Tbilisi or Addis Ababa but it will always wake up in London. Dammit. Sometimes the idea of opening the shop feels like Custer's Last Stand. There used to be that great shop opposite Paddington with the name of Cook's Miscellaneous Stores.

I've been living here on and off since birth. I'm less enamoured with the place than I was once. The only times I'm aware of a feeling like love for the place is when I walk aimlessly through it for several hours at a stretch. I may as well be visiting my late grandmother: she's in decline, her memory faltering, she's started swearing profusely, she thinks I'm someone else. Or perhaps it's an abusive relationship and I can't pull myself free. It has to get better, or, it can't get any worse. If I leave, it soon starts singing a series of furusato enka tunes in my head. They evaporate the moment I touch back down at the airport.

Nevertheless, people keep coming here. The streets round here in Stamford Hill have filled with Poles recently and, if the supposed exodus of local Orthodoxy to Milton Keynes holds off, it will keep this suggestion of Poland before the war.

How about when you visit London next time you let your readership know well in advance and we'll submit a series of diverting outings from which you pick? Erm, there's that huge chair and table (http://www.flickr.com/photos/fromform/20292742/)out on Hampstead Heath...

[(Anonymous)]

Well, it's pretty sad to hear of anyone being killed in a hit-and-run accident. But I don't see how it shows me "how literally this stuff impacts on lives." It shows me that hit-and-run accidents sometimes occur. Unless you have evidence that they occur much more frequently in London than in other similarly-sized cities, it doesn't show anything. Your discursive style is all about working up a few subjective impressions and anecdotal "faits divers".

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Andy's death was a hit and run perpetrated by one person. It could have happened to anyone anywhere. It's nothing to do with London, which has so much going for it if you care to look. It's not an example of anything, bar a tragedy of the highest order.

But I know, it's OK, slagging places off for the sake of it is generally accepted as 'journalism'. Sometimes it's OK not to have extreme opinions.

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

London. A couple of lads have three Stellas each and a quick bitchslap in the pub car park and the middle classes describe it as if it's the apocalypse. A council flat's satellite dish is slightly rusty - the Guardian turn it into a six-page feature on "Victorian" levels of poverty. Londoners don't know they're born.

If you're bored of London why not try roughing it in Liverpool or Glasgow?

[automatique.livejournal.com]

With all due respect,

I'm not really sure what your point is, other than "I hate London".

It'd be nice to have you write about a positive vision for improving what you see here, rather than another slightly smug diatribe.

Tell us your thoughts.

[alisgray.livejournal.com]

please help with the vocabulary:
Britvic
peely-wally
nissen huts
chavs
wideboys

all large cities are NOT the same. Washington DC and Toronto? Quite different. all medium-sized cities also not the same. Minneapolis and Detroit? Amherst and New Orleans? Night and day. in my experience, a good bit of difference is made by the economy, the climate, and curiously, I think, the history of religious tolerance in the area. I'm taken quite aback by "happyslapping." However, I find the idea of a portrait of Francis Bacon such as you describe to be secretly sort of delightful.

[(Anonymous)]

Britvic = low-quality fruit juice in individual bottles
peely-wally = pale (in the face)
nissen huts = prefabricated buildings erected as temporary accomodation during WWII
chavs = working class youths with loud attitude and ostentatiously expensive clothes (Burberry check mixed with soccer kit)
Wideboys = chancers, charming trickster, lovable rogue, the artful dodger

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, I know you've been doing a bit of journalism lately. Have you ever thought of writing for The Daily Mail?

[spoombung.livejournal.com]

Just what I was thinking! I

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

I lived in London for four months & never had a spot of trouble. & I wear stranger pants than you! (I even saw you in London, walking in Shepard's Bush, so nyah.)

Everyone Hates the English

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

While this is clearly a biased post, I must admit to sharing the bias to some extent. In British culture, the gentle is derided and the vicious are virtuous. The people wallow in the filth of their own philistinism, and are proud of their ignorance. As I read this post, I heard the hideous screams of Chavs from the street outside, producing a sound that is barely human. Burroughs complained of "something missing" in England, of its "toothless fascism", and described the physiognomy of the people as expressing a "deep vulgarity of the spirit".

So, in celebration of all this utter dreadfulness, a poem by Kit Wright:

Everyone Hates the English

Everyone hates the English,
Including the English. They sneer
At each other for being so English,
So what are they doing here,
The English? It's thick with the English,
All over the country. Why?
Anyone ever born English
Should shut up, or fuck off, or die.

Anyone ever born English
Should hold their extraction in scorn
And apologise all over England
For ever at all being born,
For that's how it is, being English;
Fodder for any old scoff
That England might be a nice country
If only the English fucked off!

[liquid-city.livejournal.com]

You should have gone to the Walpole not the Hobgoblin! The food is much nicer in there. Only freshers eat in the Hobgoblin. The Goldsmiths Tavern also does reasonably nice Italian style cuisine and is frequented by the staff of the college.

I studied and then worked at Goldsmiths, and you're right it is a wreck. Even the new Will Alsop designed building you mention is rubbish I reckon and not quite the 'multi media' space they claimed it was going to be.

[honeychurch.livejournal.com]

while reading this, all I could think was, and you're coming to new york?

not that I don't like new york, but everything you name is visible on our streets. Reading about andypop just made me recall how many hit-and-runs there have been on pedestrians and cyclists in new york this year. At least 17 pedestrians have been hit, and many killed, including a woman and her 2 year old son. Nine cyclists have been killed. It's always been dangerous to be a pedestrian in new york, but it seems to have become even a bit hairier lately.

and, for toxins and cynicism, new york is right up there, along with a discomforting police force and a thoroughly ridiculous bid for the 2012 Olympics (although the stadium intended for the games has been defeated in a vote, there was still talk of trying to get the Olympics to come to Queens). I realize that your particular distaste for London probably comes from having lived there for some time, but you shouldn't shake that sense of readjustment entirely - you will need it when you get here.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

momus-- i also had another question for you, though i know it's not directly relevant to this post. i've been doing a lot of research lately on elements of jap culture/otaku/rorikon/etc ( http://www.livejournal.com/users/turkishb/46272.html#cutid1 ) & was wondering what your comment on male sexuality in japan would be. as a self-confessed nipposexual, do you think you react to your japanese female lovers as a japanese male? curious!