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

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Personally I find it very odd the way technology (and the policy which governs its use) is and isn't implicated in mortality. Some technologies are visible, and therefore culpable, in stories about deaths. Others are invisible. The internet always looks sinister in "She met her killer on the internet" type stories. There are all sorts of policy options that seem to hover in the air as a result of the internet's culpability. People seem to think that traffic accidents are just an inevitable part of everyday life, though. Nobody seems willing to start talking about car-free cities, and that's a dialogue we should be having.

May I say here and now that if I'm killed by a car, I want people to hold car culture responsible and work to restrict and dismantle it, not to say "Oh it was a tragic accident with no wider implications or meanings".

[mzdt.livejournal.com]

You weren't talking about car culture or even technology, you were making a cheap point about how awful London is. That's your call, your 'blog'. I'd love to see what even a lazy magazine sub-editor would have made of this post, though. But that's not the point.

I'm against car culture more than most. I'm against the selfish, anti-society direction a lot of the world is going in. But I don't have to extrapolate one incident across a city. I don't have to turn everything into a theory, a model, a 'look at me, aren't I clever, I thought of this' point.

We're dealing with one idiot who killed a good man. That does fit into a bigger picture, but not one where 'traffic accidents are just an inevitable part of everyday life'. That's just a crass accusation, I've afraid.

We change this world by changing ourselves, by example. We need to do it positively, not negatively.

[nickink.livejournal.com]

I think this is a good point, and that it also has a conservative, reactionary, technophobic element to it.

Here in Korea, the news this week has been dominated by the story of a young army conscript who, after suffering humiliation and bullying at the hands of superiors, killed eight of his unit with a grenade and a gun. Some initial noises in the media about the need to address institutionalised abuse in the military and the culpability of the system have died down now, however, and been replaced by the news that the boy/man was a 'computer game maniac'.

Almost as infuriating as the implication that the general public should murmur and nod in comprehension at this revelation, as if to say 'Ahhh, it was the computer games that did it', is the glaringly obvious irony that, in this case, the 'blameless technology' (the 'car') is the very machinery of war, death and destruction itself !

At least Marilyn Manson's off the hook for this one.

On a related tangent, Momus, I've been meaning to ask you for a while about the relative safety for pedestrians of Tokyo compared to Seoul. Although i don't know the statistics, I have heard that Seoul has a terribly high RTA mortality rate. Many residential streets have no pavements and even those with pavements are extremely hazardous, mainly due to the ubiquitous motorbike-delivery guys who buzz around the city, helmetless and encumbered by all manner of food containers and bags, along the same routes and paths as pedestrians. They even use the pedestrian crossings. Thankfully, more pavements seem to be slowly being built these days.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I haven't looked at the figures, but Japan doesn't have a very good way of dividing cars/motorbikes from pedestrians. Narrow streets have no room, often, for designated sidewalks. Then again, this may remove the false sense of security pedestrians feel when they're on a sidewalk. Andy was killed, I hear, crossing at a green pedestrian light. There are some radical transport planners in Holland who say that all sidewalks, signs and traffic signals should be removed, because they encourage habit and automatism and a sort of sleepwalking behaviour, when in fact cars are (since we're at the top of the food chain) the closest thing to we have to predators. Imagine a city full of wild tigers; that's what our cities are like, and we should be as vigilant as people in a jungle. At least until cars are completely banned from city surfaces. I personally think they should be put underground or, better still, replaced by excellent public transport.

I agree that pedestrians can feel a false sense of security on the pavement or crossings

[jinty]

but the statement Andy was killed, I hear, crossing at a green pedestrian light doesn't seem to be uncomplicatedly true (though the last I heard in terms of details was on Saturday; I believe a press release has been issued by the police so possibly this has this detail.

My understanding is that Andy was crossing the road *near* a pedestrian crossing (I don't know anything about whether it was green or not). London makes moderate to big jaywalkers of us all, and Andy was as bad as any of us about this.

I agree, of course, about the way to deal: replace cars by excellent public transport as far as possible.

[monocat.livejournal.com]

I jaywalk a lot - possibly as a result of living in London...

Bristol: I found much more dangerous as the drivers were just as demented as London, but there 's enough space to go foolishly fast.
Manchester: not so crowded again - but marginally less crazy
It was more scary just walking along small country roads in my youth as there were high hedges & loony drivers who didn't think that such things as people (or other card for that matter) existed.

The point is, that London traffic is no less dangerous that anywhere where cars exist. I haven't changed my habits, dicing with these 'wild beasts'.

I don't drive & I have a family with 4 kids - & I don't intend to drive. It's a curse sometimes because it restricts what you can do - but I hate cars & the more I think about it, the more I hate them. Their only redeeming feature is the novelty of the design, but even that's taken a turn for the tedious in the last few years.

Andy's death has been a major loss & it's been keenly felt - he was a good friend of mine & I loved being with him...
I'm pleased that you mentioned him, but I'm less pleased of the context, because it's like he's treated as a footnote & if he really deserves to be much more than a footnote - being full of life, quick witted, kind, very considerate of others, and... well, loads more nice things (ah, it's not just eulogising - it's what he was like)

I'd agree that cars should be banned from city centres for obvious reasons (unless the city has been designed to contain cars)

I've never been able to figure out why 'causing death my reckless driving' doesn't hold the same weight at manslaughter - it is, after all, accidental death.
This does not mean that I feel malice towards the perpetrator, as it was, as far as I can tell, (remote from the the immediacy) an accident & as such, tragic all round.