THE LONDON BLOG
"there is
in London all that life can afford" -
Samuel Johnson, 1777
Gentle reader, as 'blogs are now too fashionable to ignore we've decide to start one ourselves. If no-one reads it we'll stop it. You have been warned.
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| May 8th |
Spring has truly sprung now April, the cruelest month, is past. May was heralded in by furious storms and flooding in low lying areas (Clapham, Balham etc). Tea time was marked by flurries of hailstones turning the ground white, and disappearing as quickly as a student's beer money. The temperature varied wildly, from little over 4 degrees to 23 degrees in the space of 24 hours. People were either shivering or sweating as they peeled or re-layered. Most of the tube was out of action (there's nothing more low lying than the Underground) and houses were struck by lightning. it's all down to those Americans and their air-conditioned SUVs...
As astute readers may know we live in a park and can observe 'the country life' from close up. Two woodpigeons are in the process of building a nest just outside our window - about 4 feet away. We've been creeping round the apartment trying not to make sudden movements or noise. The male is out most of the time collecting twigs which he brings back and offers to the female. Then follows much billing and cooing and stuff we have to draw a veil over for the sake of the children.
Further down in the park, but higher up the food chain, the foxes have finally emerged and are to be seen skulking around the bushes, like Hugh Grant outside Andie McDowell's room in 'Four Weddings'. in fact they treat the park just like the kids from the estate do - except the foxes aren't prone to vandalism. They like noting better than a half-eaten Kentucky Fried, and scour the local bins for anything edible, which considering the number of yuppies in the district means they're probably the best fed foxes south of Hampstead.
As for the yuppies, who we observe out of our other window, and who've been nesting in a ground floor flat, they are moving on, higher up the property ladder. I feel my pigeon will be moving up to higher branches soon, such is the pace in London where house prices never stop rising. It was fun watching the yuppies build their dream kitchen and eventually cook a dream dinner party for other yuppies - but it's an alien world. Whereas I feel I know where the woodpigeons are coming from, yuppiedom remains a closed book: I'm waiting for Richard Attenborough and the BBC/Discovery Channel to make it all make sense.
| | May 20th |
The men from the council came to pollard the sycamore in the park - which grows about 6 feet away from our building and in which the wood pigeons are roosting. Their home, which one day was a sad collection of a dozen twigs had bloomed in the course of one night into a shabby-genteel nest. The female now sits there 24/7 and occasionally eyeballs me through my kitchen window - I think she's hoping I'll move on. The council men took great pains to avoid the nest, even going as far as to apologise to me for not decimating the tree further and offering to come back and finish the job when the birds have flown. I was rushing out to throw myself in front of their circular saw in the name of conservation, but they seem very bird-friendly.
The yuppies there seems to have been some complex transaction: the hetero yuppie couple have moved out and been replaced by a gay yuppie twosome. The flat looks almost identical - the only thing that gives the game away is the newness of the saucepans hanging so trendily over the hob. It still looks like a show flat. That's the sad thing about social aspiration: it's so hollow and unindividual.
The other explanation is that alien yuppies have emerged from their pod in the basement and the original yuppies are in the freezer, soon to feel the heat of their cherished range cooker.
Meanwhile across London house prices continue their inexorable rise - one casualty is Tony Blair our esteemed President, sorry Prime Minister, who it's reckoned has lost out to the tune of over a million in estate appreciation since he moved to number ten (actually number 11 Downing Street as it's more child-friendly. His would-be replacement Gordon Brown, the chancellor, actually lives in number 10 and all predictions give this as his zenith: his charisma bypass precludes him from the top job, leaving him living in irony.) The French news agency AFP reporting this confirms my low opinion of Islington:
"When Blair's Labour Party was elected in 1997, he and his family
were living in a six-bedroom Georgian house in Islington, a once
grimy north London suburb that has been colonised by the city's
wealthy middle classes over the past decade or so."
Quite so - we've always had a low opinion of Islington it's not 'once grimy' it's perpetually so - the squares on its west side have some charm but many of them are tatty, and the volume of traffic up Upper Street means you get a liberal dose of carbon with your granita. However it functions as a perfect model of colonialism - the rich discovering its natural resources and moving in, forcing out the indigenous poor, then electing one of themselves as ruler. The yuppies in that part of town are not half as charming as those in the Borough, and like most of North London, you have to have already yupped to move there. But as a portrait of the future our little enclave where we locals still have some kind of say it's a worry, as they say, it's grim(y) up north (London). | | May 24th |
Another example of 19th century architecture in the City of London is to be torn down and replaced by concrete and glass: the developers have their eye on the Victorian portions of Smithfield market. The Corporation of London, who run the City and who stand to make millions in tax from the office space created (it's always proclaimed that the City needs more office space, but this is largely untrue) are all in favour: their role as tax-collectors is more important to them than their role as guardians of heritage.
The old buildings of Smithfield, the ones you see from Farringdon Road are neo-gothic and could be put to use as part of a project to conserve rather than just be demolished. The beautiful old Mappin and Webb building (see http://www.geocities.com/londondestruction/mappin.html) on the site of what is now No. 1, Poultry (opposite the Exchange building at Bank Station - if you've done our quiz you'll know that Poultry is actually a London streetname...) was gleefully torn down by developers despite a long campaign to preserve it. The developers were managed by Peter Palumbo. The conservationists appealed to the then Arts Council Chairman one..Peter Palumbo, who duly pronounced in his own interests and that beautiful neo-florentine building demolished to make way for a bad copy of a German building - one to London's ugliest buildings (see http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/england/london/poultry/stirling.html ), surpassing even the Hayward Gallery building for its effrontry to the eye.
See
http://www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/articles/patrons/yesminister.htm
or
http://www.planning-inspectorate.gov.uk/pins/publications/journals/archive/10_journal/pins10_design.htm
for more ruminations on this subject.
For a summary of the legal rulings on this - which divided the House of Lords and the country see this interesting article:
(http://www.ihbc.org.uk/context_archive/30/mlearned.htm)
Developers claim that it's impossible to make proper use of Victorian buildings (they should visit Whitehall) in that the huge wasteful atria they like, and the forests of cubicles beyond don't fit into their weltanschauung. And so, like at Spitalfield market, they need to demolish and replace with ugly highrise. The trouble is that there is no-one powerful enough to stop this rot who hasn't been corrupted by big business.
Or maybe there is: Tessa Jowell the culture secretary, has published an intriguing paper on Art and culture and its role. Read it here in PDF format:
http://www.culture.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/eiqcjgcqowrxfiroz242u4aprqqul5nquhvhq5dm74jq4ry3pon5pxowtiq2lx3luavif3sfhc3ptepc4hj4gifdyle/valueofculture.pdf
Backtracking against decades of policy she's decided to turn against the tide of consumer-driven art, back towards artist-produced art. In short: publicly subsidised artworks no longer have to be accessible (ie lowest common denominator) - they can be challenging and complex (in the way that Cubism is, even if it ultimately fails). It's the best thing in British Art for a decade. See this article in the Guardian for more analysis and a good synopsis: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1222062,00.html).
| | May 25th |
And now some good news: a fire in a warehouse in Leyton has wiped out many "art" works belonging to Charles Saatchi. Some truly execrable items have perished and the public is no longer to have their aesthetic senses hijacked by this man who has speculated on the untalented and made money. Stalin and Hitler may have had bad taste, but only Charles Saatchi actually managed to lower public standards. Under threat of torture thousands of Russians listened to banned works by Shostakovich. The British public has willingly subject itself to the torture of Mr Saatchi's appalling taste.
Our favourite art critic, Brian Sewell, himself a high camp artform and national treasure, but scathing where necessary, said of the blaze that it "had the makings of an appalling tragedy for the history of contemporary art". That is our opinion of the Saatchi gallery itself. We are of course saddened that many actual works of art (ie those not owned by Mr Saatchi) may have perished in the blaze at London's premier art storage facility: works that are irreplaceable. Works that are the result of hard work by artists of talent. But the sad thing about most of the works in Mr Saatchi's collection is that they are EMINently replaceable.
If art represents things that cannot be expressed in words (for example the sleeve notes of a classical CD tell you nothing that wold enable you to imagine the work) then most of Mr Saatchi's art collection weighs little more than its description. A tent sewn with the names of men the artist has slept with: there you have a pretty good idea of the object you are about to see. In fact the description IS the art - like those installations in which flashing signs proclaim adolescent slogans - there is no need to actually experience the art itself: the idea, scribbled on the back of an envelope contains all the work. Whereas, for instance, the preparatory sketches for the colourist paintings in the Guildhall Gallery are 'works of art' far surpassing the completed works in Mr Saatchi's collection.
The usual comment used to criticise this modern British art is 'I could do that myself' (I here admit I couldn't write a Beethoven String Quartet, nor paint a Fra Angelico fresco) to which our artist friends (supporting their untalented comrades) point out that 'Well, you didn't'. Thus they reduce art to execution. They point out the 'skill' required to bring about one of these artless works: the hours sewing in labels on Ms Emin's tent for example (our mother spent hours sewing in labels to our school clothes, does this make her an artist?).
To juggle with one's own faeces is something which most people haven't done either: they haven't spent the time to learn how to juggle strange objects, nor spent months of dietary rigour to produce properly juggable stools. Nor filmed themselves on the toilet. As Neil LaBute points out in his play (currently on in the West End) there is a difference between art and 'attention seeking behaviour' like the works of Tracey Emin - whose works would make a suicide attempt into art (in that they are a cry for help, attention and are usually accomplished with the aid of household items such as aspirin or razorblades).
In Mozart's time the role of an artist was that of a poorly-paid servant as his letters and diaries indicate. Nowadays, when artists enjoy high social status (and it's all the fault of the French Bohemian school), everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon - especially the untalented. Their need to be labeled as 'an Artist' is greater than their ability to produce works of art. Going with that is a role in society, party invitations, a wider sexual canvas, brushes with the famous, and public subsidies. Who wouldn't want to hang out at a latterday Cafe Momus if a Mimi is the prize?
Fortunately Tessa Jowell, the culture minister has decided to stop the rot (in her paper on the future of British Art - vide supra) and hopefully the tide is turning against these cultural piss-artists (the great granddaddy of whom has to be the fantastically untalented Tristan Tzara who proclaimed the artist's right to urinate in any colour he chooses) and hopefully the gods have spoken in their apocalyptic visitation on Leyton. The 'artists' KLF once famously set fire to a briefcase containing one million dollars, proclaiming it art. Maybe Mr Saatchi's fiery nemesis is his actually greatest work of art....
| | May 26th | Tragedy in SE1. We were watching our wood pigeon sitting contentedly on her nest when suddenly there was a flurry of wings and a crow/raven attacked. The predator grabbed the egg and flew off, in the process destroying the nest. The bereft mother bird still sits on the few twigs that remain, looking disconsolate. This is the second attack we've seen: the first was by a rogue male trying to prise her off the nest (presumably he wanted to be a squatter). It's nature's rich pageant, but sad none the less. We hope there's time for the pigeon couple to regroup, build another nest and relay, but they'll be prey to the crows once again...
| | May 30th | Well the wood pigeons abandoned their nest after the tragedy and have moved to a different part of the park. We haven't seen the foxes for a while and hope they're ok, but the mice from the park have invaded our building, searching for easy pickings: competition for food in the verdure must be fierce. Alas they will soon be succumbing to our cheap chinese mousetraps after being tempted there by chocolate.
The labour Government has been sharply criticised for hiding the true statistics about traffic pollution in a report out this week. The facts that car pollution has doubled were omitted from the final draft, presumably at the insistance of lobbyists from the motor industry (which is itself strange: Britain does not have a motor industry, even the iconic mini is produced by our former enemies) and the fact that overall pollution has fallen is trumpeted loudly. This is exactly the same sort of massage applied to crime statistics, as overall crime dips very slightly, violent crime has gone up. It's still nowhere near as bad as your average American town.
Meanwhile the killings go on in Iraq: they make the papers over here as if they are something strange: the violent death rate in Baghdad is still less than New Orleans or Los Angeles: and it's the same poor grunts that get the bullet: poor ill-educated lower class Americans, with a high proportion of blacks. Crips or Sadr militia it doesn't matter to the widows, but there's one difference: the Iraq mess is making millions for corporate America, the mess in Compton benefits no-one, unless black-on-black violence is seen (as I have heard it said) as autogenous ethnic cleansing.
But of course the biggest killer in America is the automobile, the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing every week, or a 911 every month. In London Labour has been blasted for ignoring cyclists and other users of clean transport. Just looking at the London streets confirms this: in many places cycle routes simply consist of a picture of a bicycle painted on the road at intervals. There is no policing of the 'bike safety zone' at traffic lights, which has saved our life on more than one occasion. What cycling needs is a champion, someone to take on the government and automobile industry. However the thought of Michael Moore (for whom we have a great deal of respect) on a bike is... well... somewhat comic...
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