THE CANAL AND THE CARNAL

The issue before last of the London Review of Books contained a piece by Iain Sinclair, titled “The Last London.”

Iain isn’t happy about the current state of London, which comes as no great surprise: is anybody?  However, even walking alongs the canals of East London can be a source of distress.  He writes,  

        “Between Victoria Park, the first of the parks opened for the people, and Broadway Market, worlds collide. Two young mothers were texting and being yapped at by older kids, while the youngest child circled on her scooter. There’s a gentle slope down to the canal and the scooter picked up momentum, until the child disappeared over the edge, between two narrowboats, straight into the water. Fortunately, a morning cyclist was stepping ashore. He grabbed the child by the hair. All was well. A little further down the canal, where the path goes under a railway bridge, the mad pumping rush of the peloton swooped through – and a guy on one of those very thin-wheeled bikes was nudged into the soup. Right under, gasping and choking, still in the saddle. I helped to pull him out.”

This did sound a bit action-packed for a Sinclair drift, but I didn’t hold Sinclair personally responsible.   However, at least one reader sort of did.  A letter duly appeared in the subsequent issue of the LRB, from Giacinto Palmieri, London E2, who writes:

“Like Iain Sinclair, I too walk on the canal path between Victoria Park and Broadway Market, but in many years of doing so I’ve never seen anybody fall into the canal. Sinclair, on the other hand, reports witnessing two such episodes, apparently within a short interval of time. Correlation doesn’t entail causation, but I can’t help asking whether these incidents might be correlated with the presence of a psychogeographer wandering dreamily in search of evocative connections in the middle of the path.”
Psychogeography, it's always trouble.

      It’s hard to think of canals and east London without also thinking about Lee Rourke’s novel The Canal.  Walking seems to be start of all the troubles in that book. 

“I simply awoke one morning and decided, rather than walk to work as normal I’d walk to the canal instead.”

The hero sees and experiences all sorts or horrible things canalside, although admittedly the worst of them happen when he stops walking and sits on a bench where he’s menaced by The Pack Crew, a very bad lot.  They throw somebody’s motor scooter into the water, assault his girlfriend, and also try to kill swans with a bow and arrow.  Yep, canals can be mythical places.

Here in Los Angeles I’m not sure we even have "real" canals.  They exist in Venice, but Venice isn’t really Los Angeles, and the canals aren't really canals.  Here’s something – definitely not a canal, could be an aqueduct, could be a concrete creek – in Culver City, which I thought was worth a picture:

WALKING BRUTALLY

The first time I went to London I was 16 years old.  It was a long weekend, going down from Yorkshire with my parents and some family friends.  We were rubes.  We didn’t know what anything was and we didn’t even particularly know what we wanted to see.  We knew the names of some familiar places: Greenwich, Birdcage Walk, the Tower of London and we went to all of them.   We walked ourselves into the ground.  And somehow - I think we must have taken a boat ride along the Thames - we ended walking around the Southbank, including the Hayward Gallery, which I now realize had only been completed the previous year.  Below are some rather badly processed black and white pics I took on that visit.

I liked the Hayward, I think, because it seemed new and modern and different, though I certainly had no idea the architectural style was called Brutalism, whether old or new. 

My dad, on the other hand, was horrified.  He was a joiner, and by then a foreman for the council on various building sites around Sheffield.  He looked at the  finish of the Hayward, with the impressions of wood grain in the concrete, and what he saw was “shuttering,” familiar enough from his own work – wooden planks used to make a form that was filled with concrete, when you were making a foundation or a trench.  It was the kind of work you gave to joiners who turned up at the site and weren’t skilled enough to do anything else. 

The idea that you’d leave this visible on the outside of a finished building was just incomprehensible to him.  Of course he was also well aware of Sheffield’s Park Hill flats, another bit of Brutalism, and he found them pretty horrifying too.  He died long before they became fashionable and desirable, and he’d have found that incomprehensible too.

As you see from my photographs, there was an exhibition of Pop Art on at the Hayward when we were there – but I couldn’t tempt any of the others inside.

One way or another I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the years walking in and around the Hayward, going to exhibitions, working there briefly as a security guard.  And during a particularly grim period when I taught creative writing to fashion students (terrible in all the ways you’d imagine and in some you couldn’t even conceive of) I used to go walking there after work, in an attempt to decompress. Somewhere along the line I did realize, having read my Rayner Banham, that this was indeed an example of Brutalism, possibly even New Brutalism.

     When I first started living in London I also spent a certain amount of time in the Barbican, on the way to and from exhibitions, films, concerts, and so on.  But it was an odd thing, the Barbican felt far stranger, for more alien, than the Hayward.  It didn’t feel like the “real” London. 

I wonder if that has something to do with the fact that when you’re at the Hayward you can look out and see various familiar London sights – the river, St Paul’s, Tower Bridge.  Once you’re inside the Barbican (and finding your way in through that hideous fume-filled tunnel can be quite a challenge), it’s as though you’re in a separate, hermetic world.  You could be anywhere.

Well, we’re all fans of Brutalism these days and the Barbican is a place where a lot of people like to be.  So when I was in London last month, I went along there so see how it felt these days.  It felt fine.  And there were absolutely swarms of people wandering around taking pictures, including a whole art school class it seemed.  Of course they, by which I probably mean we, found plenty to photograph.  We all know what the beauty of Brutalism looks like.

And in many ways it’s a great place to walk, or at least drift.  Finding your way when you’re in a hurry can be a bit of a nightmare, but if nothing else, once you’ve penetrated the fortress you’re entirely protected from traffic.  This is a place for walkers not cars.

There’s something called the “High Walk” which takes you along the top level of the complex, and you walk along some fairly inscrutable corridors, and I dare say “pedways,” where you’re likely to be one of only a very few people.  It’s interesting and intriguing, and definitely photogenic, and filmic in a noirish kind of way but it’s not exactly friendly or comfortable.  We could argue about whether the experience is literally brutal, but it’s certainly bleak and maybe threatening. This looks like a location where bad things can happen.  You wouldn’t want to be walking up there alone at night, in the shadows, with all those echoing footsteps and blind corners. Or maybe you would.  In the daytime however it’s quite exhilarating.

My visit to London wasn’t meant to be a Brutalist vacation but somehow it turned into one.  I ended up spending a couple of nights staying in the St. Giles Hotel, on Tottenham Court Road.  

I’ve walked past it hundreds of times and never paid much attention to it,.  But now, looking through Brutalist eyes, it appeared to be some some kind of Brutalist masterpiece, taking up a whole block: huge, angular, solid but somehow sprightly.  The rooms are small but I think they all give views over London, views that are inevitably framed by concrete.  Who’d have it any other way?

ACTION STRASSE

I’m sure it must be possible to walk the streets of Vienna without whistling or humming “The Blue Danube,” but for a first-time visitor like me, it’s not easy: Air Austria even plays it over the aircraft’s p.a. system as you’re deplaning.  Other alternatives include the Third Man theme, or Ultravox’s “Vienna” – and the latter does have some oblique lyrics that mention walking but of course the only line anybody ever really remembers is “This means nothing to me – Vienna,” which seems a bit negative.

I was in Vienna for the launch of Wiener Blut.  What’s that you ask?  “Wiener Blut is an ambitious collaboration to photograph every street in Vienna.  As well as creating a work of art for an exhibition in 2018, we’ll be producing a visual social documentary of Vienna in 2017/18.”

It is a cousin of “Bleeding London,” the project and exhibition based on my novel of the same name, which photographed every street in London: both organized by Del Barrett.  (Wiener Blut, I know now, is also the name of a waltz by Strauss).

At the Vienna launch I made a short, clumsy speech about walking and observing and photographing.  I said that every street is interesting if you look at it the right way.  There are fascinations, marvels, on every block, probably on every square inch. I still tend to believe this is true.

After, and indeed before, the launch I wandered the streets of Vienna, sometimes alone, sometimes with others, looking at stuff, taking pictures, feeling the vibe, sometimes getting lost.  You don’t need me to make too many superficial remarks about the wonders of Vienna but let me share one or two things.

Walking down the street from my hotel, I came across a place named f*c, which I think stands for Frauencafe, a women’s (or at least not a men’s) café.  There was a mission statement in the window, in both German and English.  The English one read, in part, “If you are a cis gendered man, please leave the space without having to be asked.”  This seemed to anticipate an unlikely set of events, it seemed to me; that a cis gendered man (I guess that’s me) might enter the place, by accident, or perhaps to see how great it was, or in any case without having read the sign in the window, but then he would have to leave immediately before he was asked, but how would he know to do that unless he'd read the sign in the window, and if he'd read the sign in the window then surely he wouldn't enter, would he? And what happened if he did wait to be asked?  Would that be so terrible?  In any case the place looked closed every time I went past.

         Of course, like any good tourist, I gazed into shop windows as I walked around the city.  I swear I saw a shop that sold only exotic booze and light bulbs.  You can imagine the thought process: people are always going to need booze, people are always going to need light bulbs – there’s your business model.  I also saw this cocktail dress printed with images of rather lurid cocktails, not a look that everybody could pull off, I’d say.  And I imagine probably not what they're wearing in the Frauencafe, but who knows?

And then there was a walk around the Flak Towers – I hadn’t known about them, and I definitely should have.  Building started in 1942 on Hitler’s instructions, designed by Professor Friedrich Tamms, constructed using forced labor, and they were functional by 1944, which might be thought to be a bit late.  There were guns at the top on the outside, and an air raid shelter inside, and lord knows they were solid and impregnable.  They’re still wildly impressive and in their totalitarian brutality.

Jan Tabor, the Czech-Austrian architect and architectural theorist wrote, “Without wanting to deny the military purposefulness of these buildings completely, they were conceived from the beginning as above all ‘mood architecture’ … They are monuments of and for all times.  As a result they are without utilitarian value in the usual sense.  They are as useless as plastic art.  But they were carriers of an idea, an elementary feeling for power, stability and will to live.” 

As I walked around them, in what is now a very pleasant public park, it seemed that the local walkers ignored them completely.  Maybe they were too familiar with them, or maybe they hated them and preferred not to look.  Personally I kept thinking that Banksy might find a handy way of using those towers.

And speaking of Viennese blood, I did see this graffito which I believe translates as “Jesus pisses your blood,”

It made me think of the Vienna Actionists, a well-dodgy bunch of 1960s artists, performance artists we’d call them today, whose “actions” tended to involve blood, excreta, cruelty to animals, blasphemy and sex (most of it unerotic, I’d say, but these things are subjective).  
        It was all about breaking taboos and making Austrians face up to their country’s embrace of Nazism in World War Two, apparently.  I think you’re entitled to wonder how rolling around in animal entrails symbolizes these matters but it was a different age.  Hard to find an image of this stuff that I’d want in my blog but here’s a comparatively mild one.

         However, if you inevitably walk in Vienna in the footsteps of Strauss and Bernhard and Freud, you also walk in the footsteps of Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and Otto Muehl, the four main Actionists.   Muehl was the best known  and most spectacularly appalling of them (that's him in the pic above), he was also the leader of a radical commune, as was the style in those days, and a thing that seldom ends well.

         Günter Brus seems, in some ways, to have been as bad as any of them. In 1968 he went to jail as a result of Body Analysis Action no.33, which involved cutting himself with a razor-blade, drinking his own urine, rubbing his naked body with shit, and masturbating while singing the Austrian anthem.  He got six months for “degrading the symbols of the State.”  I can’t believe he was surprised.

Before that however, in 1965, he performed “Vienna Walk” (Kopfbemalung, Aktion, Wien) a fairly vanilla-seeming piece in which he walked through the city, fully clothed but painted all white, with a black line, that looks quite a bit like medical stitches, dividing his body and his suit into two vertical halves, claiming himself to be a “living painting”.  Sounds pretty harmless but he still got arrested.

Otto Muehl in due course went to jail on charges of having sex with under age girls in his commune.  Günter Brus was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize in 1997.  Maybe the Austrian State is a mass of contradictions.