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imomus
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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A flaneur for all seasons
Date: 2004-07-12 11:16 am (UTC)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
Date: 2004-07-12 05:36 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2004-07-12 07:13 pm (UTC)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
Date: 2004-07-13 03:02 am (UTC)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
Date: 2004-07-13 08:12 am (UTC)