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In over-hyped, over-edited Britain, slowness might save us
Something I love about summer -- and I suppose London's season of lowering skies and fleeting rain still qualifies -- is how it makes me walk. I travel, I arrive, and I walk. It's 'walking as an aesthetic practice' (in the words of a favourite book of mine, the one you can click above). I was walking, walking, walking alone in Barcelona last weekend, walking, walking, walking with friends in Paris all last week, and now in London I walk, walk, walk too. This weekend I walked to the ICA, to Tate Modern, to the Japan Centre, to the Whitechapel, to the degree shows up Brick Lane (my favourite London place to walk), to the Barbican, past my old house in Clerkenwell, past my old house in Covent Garden. I noticed new buildings, younger versions of the old faces, blowing litter, booming commercialization of once-neglected corners, changes of use. I smelt familiar smells: sweet and spicy curry, the smell of the tube, piss in dried stains, paint on canvas. My body began to feel really good after all the walking. At walking pace, London passed by reassuringly slowly, although, to my exile's eyes, its changes seemed speeded up, as if by time-lapse photography.
What I mostly don't like, coming back to Britain, is marketing and television and advertising and pop music. All the stuff that's too fast, too repetitious, and too insistent. It doesn't wait patiently for you to stroll over to it, it comes driving up to you like a car, honking. It offers too much, too soon. It's too compulsive, too well-tailored to your appetites and your boredom threshold. It would be easy to say that I prefer slow and boring forms to these fast and interesting ones because I'm simply getting old and grumpy. But it's not that at all. When a young photographer like Anders Edstrom makes a film, he slows time right down to the speed time really has. The now and the now and the now, going on and on, requiring us (as life does) to supply content for it. And then, suprisingly, the shuffling old man we've been watching for twenty minutes, Derek Bailey, starts playing the guitar, filling in this time we've now got the measure of, supplying content which seems all the more extraordinary for the uncompressed time the film puts around him. There are some things that lose all their meaning when you reduce them to a clip, a highlight, a soundbite.
I was really impressed by We Love Ideas, the degree show by students of the Kent Institute of Art and Design (I actually lectured once at their Time-Based Media department in Canterbury), now showing at Atlantis Gallery 2 on Brick Lane. Perhaps in reaction against the appallingly fast and 'interesting' (yet demonic) British television I've been catching glimpses of (Jeremy Clarkson's car programme is 'all-celebrity' now, and Big Brother is still 'compelling viewing'... if you're already in hell), these students are slowing things right down. I liked two video pieces, one in which someone showed long, static, saturated video shots of places he had strong associations with, and narrated what had happened there, and another in which someone made a pop video in real time, playing on toy instruments, editing rarely. In over-edited, over-hyped Britain, slowness might save us.
How much 'impact' can you pack into a thirty second pseudo-commercial on the BBC? How long will it be before programme-makers realise that this vision of speed, impact and interest is anti-human, alienating, and counter-productive? I'm seeing two things happening in Britain right now, and they're contradictory. On the one hand marketing specialists are taking over everything with their intrusive philosophy of hype and 'impact', making everything faster, louder, and more exciting (but not necessarily more efficient or beautiful), making our tiny human eardrums burst and our tiny human eyes stretch clockwork wide. On the other, a whole generation of artists and art students is going in the opposite direction, slowing everything down, making everything personal and humble and human-scaled. Many of these art students will be heading straight into commercial artforms now they've graduated; pop music, television, advertising, film-making. And the question is, will they change these dismally brash, aggressive, hypey forms, scaling them back to something more modest, likeable and humane, or will the forms as they now exist change them, forcing them to cram more into each edit until finally their vision gets lost in the rush, stuck like a frustrated, once-kindly human being trapped in a 'fast' car in a traffic jam?
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Did you manage to meet any musicians currently working in London? If not, why not?
No gig?!
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I'm meeting a graphic designer today to talk about a sleeve for my record. No musicians so far
because they're boring and I hate thembecause, erm, well, just because. And no gig because I'm on holiday now. Especially my ears.no subject
Hope your ears enjoy a relaxing time for the duration of your stay.
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ah, now you touched me on my soft spot momus. Leo, berlin indeed is a slow town as nick says, it's hard to believe it's so hyped until you've spent four months walking through empty streets and dealing with strange moustache wearing people that seem to come from the ice age.
Which makes our perspective on the whole cultural thing a bit different, more village like. I hardly have the courage anymore to enter an art book store and be flooded by all the stuff that's happening all at once...
now we've begun with music video thing i'm faced with that question everyday. as i get deeper into the process and realize all the effort that's necessary to create a 3minute hyper-edited piece of music advertising that will probably be forgotten in the matter of weeks i get strange feelings...
oh i'm getting less and less articulate every paragraph
the thing is, i'm not all that unhappy with being part of that stupid cacophony that's pop culture. i realise i'm not going anywhere if i try too hard to impose my arty values on the world, that's a luxury i can only partly afford while living in berlin, and at the same time it's not so bad to let go and keep being creative while playing by the rules-in fact it's a big motivation to get out of your shell and do things you would never be arsed to do yourself.
But, yes, slowness, and culture coming to you like a honking car. i think i'm gonna quit downloading stuff from emule for a couple of months.
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A flaneur for all seasons
While I too adore strolling the streets during this season, I must walk considerably slower, lest others see my skin glisten. This increases the size of one's city considerably. I also find that the city has a wonderfully sleepy feel in certain neighborhoods during August, since everyone is out of town fighting traffic to the shore points. This is the only month in which one can dine outdoors in a remotely civilized manner. The music conservatories open their windows due to a lack of air conditioning, so that one can sit in the adjacent green squares and while away the afternoon on a park bench being serenaded with chamber pieces.
I find that the coldest months hold austere pleasures for the flaneur as well, especially in the wee hours, when there is barely a soul on the streets. The windows of the city become an outdoor gallery, holding a variety of patterns, objects and colors. The silence among the multitudes compliments the lights which seem to temporarily lose their function with the complete absence of traffic, and the old quaker church spires are illuminated in such a way as to be floating in the black firmament (unless of course it is an overcast night, and thus an orange sky prevails, to even stranger effect).
Autumn is my favorite time to make myself known to the youth, as the falling leaves feel like a tickertape parade or a carpet of rose petals, and the sartorial options available to one are at their greatest. The lighting becomes dramatic and golden as well. The first brisk evening of October brings with it a yearning for Chinatown's windows full of fishtanks, distorted by the condensation caused by the cool air.
Couldn't agree more with your view on the ADHD-informed mode of editing, music and design that has been emblematic of the last decade. I've railed against it myself. I can only hope that the next generation of creatives can bring some semblance of grace to these fields. It seems that the "art/underground" scene was once a refuge for vulgarity; now it seems that it must become a refuge from vulgarity.
I can only imagine what the air quality must be like in London during the summer.
W
Re: A flaneur for all seasons
As I get ever older, I breathe slower, I walk slower, and most of all I read and write slower. It's a shame I'll never live long enough to finish Proust.
In fact, contrary to what people say about the speed of the Internet, it slows me down even more with all these hyperlinks and "refreshes." It slows me down, I sip my tea, and I wait, happy to have the time today to wait.
And as I spend another summer walking, walking, walking up piney mountains and into cool valleys, I am glad to have shadow companions upon my lonesome path.
Re: A flaneur for all seasons
I simply must find a small animal to walk about town: Nerval had his lobster, Des Essientes his gilded tortoise. Perhaps I shall have a woodchuck with braided cornrows.
I don't think any of us will live long enough to finish Proust, what with that naughty Samuel Pepys gamboling around.
Please pace yourself, good sir, as we have several more weeks of this infernal heat ahead of us. Seek the shade of the nearest botanical gardens and catch orchid fever--you'll be removing the skirt about your piano by September.
W
Re: A flaneur for all seasons
Depends on what you mean by London. The city is an interconnected series of villages. Momus' mis-description of it as an endless dystopian advertising oppurtunity omits this fact. For instance, London has a great deal of greenspace, including large semi-wild areas such as Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park.
Re: A flaneur for all seasons
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Lovely. I've been really longing for this slowness and fullness of presentation and it's great to hear that I'm not alone. Whenever I work on enriching my knowledge of 20th century film, it's this width of field I miss in 21st century blockbusters, which seem obsessed with extreme closeups. Wide shots are always as brief as possible and usually filled with CGI. I can enjoy that when I'm in the mood, but mostly it just leaves me empty.
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More generally, I quite liked this piece by Robert Hughes, on the need for slow art:
"We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media."
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I'm railing here against speed, certainly, but also against repetition. Because repetition leads to the mental habit of recognition rather than the mental habit of cognition. In other words, 'Oh, I know that!' instead of 'Wow, what is that?' Pop music radio in Britain is too much 'Oh, I know that!' and too little 'Wow, what is that?' And no matter how long I spend away from this country, when I come back I'm amazed that TV is still filled with exactly the same faces.
By the way, beautiful piece by Whimsy above. I'm torn between 'Oh, I know that!' (Des Esseintes, Ruskin, Wilde and Wilder) and 'Wow, what is that?' (Whimsy).
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I was just exclaiming these very phrases a moment ago in my icebox, fishing out the very last of our blueberries.
Blast! One just fell behind the divan...
W
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And 'Pop Music Radio' elsewhere is what, exactly? That's the point of 'pop' isn't it? You could have listened to Resonance FM (http://www.resonancefm.com) instead couldn't you, the world's only radio station to be entirely programmed with 'wow, what is that'. Yes, shitty old London has a joyous radio station.
And no matter how long I spend away from this country, when I come back I'm amazed that TV is still filled with exactly the same faces
Professional Television presenters, you mean? Surely they're allowed some longevity of career? Maybe you're right, and they should be immediately sacked if they at any point appear to be anything less than cutting edge. Or if they look a bit old.
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I really do have a picture in my head of a world where TV and radio are handed over to art students, foreigners, homeless people, the insane, animals, whoever, and show new and unfamiliar stuff all the time. And it's much better than the TV we have now. (A bit like Manhattan Channel 67 cable.) For instance, instead of Jeremy Paxman, I'd love to see a programme with a camera tied to a wandering donkey's head, with a narration over the top by a paranoid schizophrenic.
Slow motions
(Anonymous) 2004-07-12 02:17 pm (UTC)(link)I was back in the UK myself recently. The place changes on the surface but underneath everything is the same. Repetition and rapidity are clearly the only 'developments' in a 'fast' pop culture that is as nourishing as fast food. After a few days the novelty wears off and it becomes "more of the same". I guess the only way to keep it human scaled is to reject the mainstream and find one's own counter-culture. I think the 'internet' generation will reject the passivity of the old media and will demand interactivity because that is the model they have become used to. One can then become highly selective and avoid the marketing loop; but on the other hand the internet itself was formed as an educational tool and look what commercialisation has done to it. What would McCluhan make of it all ? He'd probably be part of this debate, right here, right now.
Art should be a slow medium. Advertising is a fast one because it is an invasive one. It steals and invades one's personal space ; Art expands it, opens doors, estranges the world and makes us see things we miss because it breaks down the fabric and speed of reality as you rightly pointed out. This also comes back to your recent musings about ostranenie and the uncanny. Slowness is a good thing but it it's too 18th Century and can't be sold unless it is a sport or a holiday. Enjoy your vacation, and keep sending the LJ postcards..
Richard G
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