New Blog

In an attempt to focus blogging activity to more in depth, considered essays, I have started a new blog called The Aporia of the Dual Perspective, the address is here: http://markpeterwest.blogspot.com

The blog's title comes from Peter Osbourne's book The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, and refers directly to Paul Ricoeur's attempts to consider both the experience of lived time and that of "cosmic" time. I've been reading Osbourne's book recently for my PhD, and have found Ricoeur - as summarised by Osbourne - fascinating. Not only is this aporia an accurate description of time, but it resonated with me further: the dual perspective can be that of contradicting stories, narratives, actions, events, of inward and outward, of self and other. It seems to me that I'm dealing with this aporia in various ways most of the time.

A Film Is A Statement

1. We must make political films.

2. We must make films politically.

32. To carry out 2 is to dare to know where one is, and where one has come from, to know one's place in the process of production in order then to change it.

The opening performance of Arika's recent weekend of film was by the Museum of Non-Participation and is probably best described as being immersed in a physical documentary. It noted simultaneously the audience’s active position and that audience's sort of belated insufficiency as actor. That is to say, the audience is never quite there. The work was arranged throughout a large studio space with numerous screens onto which separate images (both moving and still) were projected while the artists performed a pre-prepared text that alotted them each "parts" which they read in turn.

If it is true to say that the space of the work and the space of the audience were collapsed, with the latter contributing through its movement around the room, choosing which simultaneous projection to focus on, walking on the same level as the artists who mingled in and out of audience members while reading, then it is also true that through this very device an amplification of film's relation to distance was effected. At a basic level film shows you something, and by implication the thing being shown remains to some degree outside of, distinct from, oneself. Here, this distance was strangely augmented by pushing the audience toward a greater blend with the work. In so-doing, the work amplified an existing tension: a screen's manifestation of separation. This contradiction is present in the word "screen" itself: it is something onto which something can be projected and thus shown, but it can also screen off something, making it unable to be seen. The work manifested this tension even as images poured over and beyond the screens, and as different images projected on different screens at the same time, requiring an audience selection of priorities. In its attempts to disrupt that singular experience of one person watching one screen, it recalled it even more.

Space is clearly important. Is critical thought best served through immersion or through a clear demarcation of thinker and that-which-is-to-be-thought-about? In a way the work turned on this question, mentally pacing it out, embodying an ambivalent answer. At one point, the artists noted the discombobulating experience of watching a lawyers protest against Musharaf in Pakistan in 2007 from the white space of a contemporary art gallery. As a metaphor for the spatial dynamic the work itself was acting out, it was a simplified one. The work’s effectiveness came from its very complication – and making-extreme-of – that inside/outside binary.

Sound is equally important. That which came from the various projections and the artists' reading was akin to that of a documentary (the projections slightly quieter than the voices "over the top"), but a moment where the street sounds of a Pakistani protest triumphed over the shuffling of audience feet and murmur marked a point of intense immersion. It resembled a piece by Chris DeLaurenti, performed at Instal in November 2010, N30: Live at the WTO, which turned the pitchblack gigantic space of Glasgow's Tramway 1 into a simultaneously aural memorial and re-enactment of the World Trade Organization protests of 1999. It was beautiful, angering and above all deeply moving.

So far I've focused on the audience watching. In “The Tracking Shot in Kapo,” Serge Daney describes Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour as ‘“things” that have watched me more than I have seen them.’ A text pointed to by Arika as a point of departure for the weekend, in this context it asks: What are the variations of non-participation? We can not participate in an oppressive society. Either by sheer refusal or by active participation in oppositional organization. We can not participate in the struggles of resistance (of the forming of oppositional organization). Either because of doubts and fears, or by compromise, by the complications that make binaries problems in the first place. Daney’s switch gives it another meaning: accusative, it demands a reason for one’s actions, for participation or non-participation. It is a demand for active thought.

What is true about the Museum of Non-Participation is that the audience participates in its work. But what is that work? It seems to be the manifestation of an argument (like the film Argument, shown on Saturday): complications and complexity exist (in the pouring, the multiplicity, the simultaneity of images), but binaries (choice) will continue to exist. How does one remain faithful to both of those realities?

But I haven't put this quite right. It aligns the inescapable boundary the screen creates with the choice of one-or-the-other. It aligns the inescapable complexity of the world with an overflowing of images. The problem is this: that boundary stops action, whereas the choice of one-or-the-other creates action: one chooses and one follows that choice. With the boundary one never has to choose because one is always stuck this side of it. What would be better to say would be that somehow the immersion – through the overflowing of images, the simultaneity of them – demands a choice. Perhaps the immersive tendencies of this Museum are a way of dragging one in off the fence, and the abrupt meeting with the screen a metaphor for the accusative demand. Through immersion one is being dragged into the struggle (one of art, of politics, and art-and-politics) and one's position then has to be defended, thought about.

Lutz Becker's film Kino Beleske (Film Notes), screened immediately after The Museum of Non-Participation, was a document of the Student's Cultural Centre in Belgrade in 1975. Throughout, various members speak pieces to camera which reminded me a lot of La Chinoise, which surely figured somewhere in the weekend's thinking if not Becker's. At one point a Serbian student appears wearing sunglasses covered in tin foil, echoing Jean-Pierre Léaud's nationalist glasses in Godard's 1967 film.

During these pieces to camera one hears the cars, horns, wind on the streets outside which continued being streets as the artists spoke. It seemed to me that the effect of this - desired or otherwise - was to dramatize the same question of the position of critique that the Museum of Non-Participation did. (What does it mean to participate? What is one participating in? Is non-participation a form of participation in another activity? Is there such a thing as not doing anything?) What was the relation of these students now speaking to camera and those streets we can hear? Watching the film over thirty years later, the students' relation is more that to contemporary art (especially given the appearance of artists that would go on to make big names for themselves) than their immediate surroundings. There is a risk that those streets get lost in a dialogue that focuses on career patterns or the amused comment of a friend seeing a younger incarnation of a newer acquaintance. The film's soundtrack kept that risk from being trampled, and forced one to consider one's position in relation to the film, the film's in relation to the audience, the situation of us watching it to the film's history, to art and political history, to ongoing narratives. 

Chto Delat?'s songspiels understood position as movement. In “What Does It Mean To Make Films Politically?” one of the group’s members, Dimitry Vilensky, writes: “political cinema is a multi-layered composition that combines emotional effects and total intellectual analysis. Paradoxically, we must learn to touch the viewer’s heart without entertaining him.” Needless to say, the entertainment evoked here is the particularly seductive kind of Hollywood and mass culture.

In a phone-call to the audience before the screening, though, Dimitry talked about wanting the work to be entertaining. What could he have meant? I think he meant it to be mobile: their films are available on their website and Dimitry talked about them being screened in different countries and contexts. Certainly the form - though recognizably Brechtian, with a particular history - is not too far removed from certain popular entertainments. The closest thing in a British context might be music hall, except with the politics evacuated and replaced with a certain type of cynical bawdiness. (As I began writing this, in fact, I noticed a review of a new musical called Big Society).

Discussions of avant-garde artistic practice are understandably wary of terms like "entertainment" and "popularity", but I do think it is an important question to ask. How does avant-garde art understand its relation to mass culture? Godard's "What Is To Be Done?" is useful here. To make political films or to make films politically represent two understandings of this relation. Godard is explicit about this: one represents a certain - yet limited - step forward; the second represents a deeper commitment.

This isn't about co-option but ambush. Surprisingly enough, given assumptions of the historical avant-garde's contemporary uselessness, the form of the songspiel Chto Delat? use creates a new twist on artistic history: it inaugurates a direct link between contemporary art and its antecedents that is a link of continuation and development (a positive tradition) rather than nostalgia-tinged analyses.

Yet there is also something less direct about this mobility, and it points to an interesting idea: that often politcally active art achieves results by circuitous routes, by accident rather than as a direct answer to the question What Is To Be Done? In this alternative understanding of effect, art can use surprise (ambush) as a tactic, but only really if it is unaware of doing so. We wait years for revolution and then numerous ones pop up in countries we'd never have expected (although perhaps we weren't looking closely enough).

A letter to Rebecca Solnit about following in footsteps, unwittingly

Dear Rebecca,

I'm not quite sure whether to apologise for writing. It feels vaguely, generically risky, as if I'm crossing a line I don't know about but everyone else is watching in horror as I stride obliviously over it.

I am writing because I am having one of those extended epiphanic periods of discovery with a writer, where you read book after book, interview after interview, out of sheer excitement, and at some point you actually feel your understanding of the world shifting a little, widening out, dots meeting with other dots, everything becoming clearer yet also simultaneously - and frustratingly - cloudier: do I have so much still to learn? This writer, if you haven't guessed, is you, the books and interviews yours, and I'm writing because it felt natural to express this experience one way or another. Strange though to think that this letter is one that will be read by more than one person but the single person to whom it's addressed may never read it.

I had been meaning to read your work for quite a while. I started with A Field Guide To Getting Lost, which I started in July this year. I loved it, read it quickly, and moved on toSavage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, which I thought equally remarkable. Somewhere between finishing the former and starting the latter, I finally confirmed that I was going to be returning to San Francisco for the first time since 2008, this time for my friend Tobias's wedding. It had been stressful, and worrying, and saddening, thinking I couldn't go (Tobias had asked me to be one of his groomsmen), and a weight lifted, and all the mentions of that great city in your work became less abstract, less faraway fairytale and more a place that had direct relevance to me.

I have to confess, though, that once I arrived in San Francisco, I hardly read your book. I was only 100 pages or so from the end of Savage Dreams, and looking forward to starting Wanderlust: A History of Walking (I love that heavily emphasised "a", so importantly destabilising), but the city took over, and I hardly read a word - of anything - for 10 days. Reading suddenly seemed neglectful of this place, this glinting, grimy peninsula right there outside our window. Maybe travelling is less a time for contemplation than wholesale immersion; I continued writing in my journal for the first few days, then slumped into writing bullet-pointed lists of the main events and stops of the day, then stopped even that.

I did buy your Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas in City Lights. Carrying it around for a day before getting home, I wondered about using it literally, taking out the maps and following the routes, reading the essays whilst walking. But the book seems less direct than that. The "infinite" does it: the variations, the endless reconceptualisations of a city are dreams of a place that only half exists, the rest made from the tumbling process of linking experience and imagination and history to that first half, the firm sediments of streets, buildings, and people.

Perhaps I lied a bit about not reading, but your atlas was the only thing I spent any real reading time with, reading late in the evenings, sitting with the window open and hearing the nightly shouts and laughs and sirens of the Tenderloin. This worked just as well, the small essays about a neighbourhood we'd either been to that day or the day before, or were planning on going to the next, seeping into my knowledge of those places, adding and layering and complicating the city. (It's hard to write about it with the right amount of distance, now, back in Glasgow, on a day of rain. That city? This city? The city? Is the distance psychological or geographical? Miles and hours don't seem enough to describe the distance, both nearer than them and much farther). I read about the gangs of the Mission, realised I'd walked through the site of a murder, oblivious, searching for ice cream. I read about Muybridge and Hitchcock's own weaving footsteps, 50 years apart, knowing about the latter but nothing about the former, save his famous pictures. Your unlayering of the complicated politics of Civic Center and UN Plaza: the UN formed there?! Really? And the right-wing intelligentsia stationed in think tanks and laboratories surrounding the city, the wider Bay Area turned into a pincer clutching liberal San Fran with its "real America" hawkism.

***

Returning from my own wanderings, I finally started Wanderlust. In it, you write about the connection between walking and writing:

"Just as writing allows one to read the words of someone who is absent, so roads make it possible to trace the route of the absent. Roads are a record of those who have gone before, and to follow them is to follow people who are no longer there."

Reading your words whilst walking in your city, these two practices, similar but separate, merged in a complicated way: reading your words allowed me to trace on a road your absent footsteps. Although it wasn't about you, really; not then, anyway. It was about the city and its history, and we were just two of the millions of human beings that have been part of that history, however small our roles. My relationship was not with you but with the city, just as yours was not with me but with the city. We were two people brought into connection by the city, and the revelation at first was that it was possible for two people to have similar reactions to a place. It was like that moment where you realise that a piece of music you have had such an intimate relationship with that it seems it exists only for you actually exists for the rest of the world too, and people have entirely differently intimate relationships with it, but also, sometimes, have almost exactly the same intimate relationship with it.

I'm not sure that's very clear. I'm struggling to pinpoint the angles of the relationship. What I'm trying to say is that I walked around your city, and halfway through that wandering I bought and read some of your words, which then influenced how I experienced and interpreted that city. So perhaps they could have been anyone's words, any words. I could have read a straight history of San Francisco and had a similar, albeit slightly different, experience. I would have been subject to another interpretation of the city, with all the prejudices, interests, and political biases that involves. But the point is I did read your words, not someone else's.

***

But there was a point, only when I got home, only when I was looking at the photographs I had taken of the city and I was separated from the immersive visual experience of it, that I fully realised what was happening. Somewhere and sometime the relationship changed; when I paused my reading of Savage Dreams because of the overwhelming "being-right-there" of the city itself, I changed the dynamic from one of conscious knowledge of your footsteps to total ignorance. My connection to you was cut off, because I stopped reading your words.

On the torturously long flight over, when I was too tired to read your book and it sat in my lap like some sort of totem, we passed over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and past Elko and Winnemucca in Nevada, almost over Yosemite, the places you explore in Savage Dreams. I knew what the Salt Flats were because of your book! But that's when it stopped. For the next ten days, your influence fluttered and crackled like a radio, but the signal was never direct. It's true we went to the Tenderloin National Forest because of what you write about it in Infinite City, "a lush refuge in a rough neighbourhood":

But I had no idea I was unwittingly following in your footsteps when I went to the same bar you write about in Wanderlust:

"I had a date to meet some friends for drinks at the famously kitschy old mock-Polynesian bar the Tonga Room in the Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill."

Here is my film of the band on the boat on the pool in the bar:

Nor indeed when I wandered around the Grace Cathedral and watched two elderly Chinese ladies exercising by the labyrinth:

"In pale and dark cement it repeated the same pattern made of stone in Chartres Cathedral: eleven concentric circles divided into quadrants through which the path winds until it ends at the six-petaled flower of the center."

You can just see a bit of the labyrinth at the bottom of the photo I think.

And I had somehow missed all these places you write about in Infinite City, like Dolores Park, where we dozed before going to see a terrible film at the Roxie Theater (which you note in your sad map of the demise of local movie theaters):

Three years after I first tried going (we were too late; it was closed) I saw the graveyard of the Mission Dolores. I knew I was following in Hitchcock's, Kim Novak's and James Stewart's footsteps, but not yours:

So many of "the forty-nine jewels of San Francisco" you've wandered before us. The Women's Building, which we went to in 2008:

This year the murals we saw were in Clarion Alley, your "carnival of visions":

The "fairytale palace" Conservatory of Flowers, where we went for a reading and watched an exotic beetle on the floor:

The Castro Theatre, in the midst of the Jewish Film Festival:

And in the atlas you too go to Sugar Café, Dottie's True Blue Café, Mission Pie, Four Barrel...

***

And then somewhere it flipped; I was no longer following you, you were following me.

When we arrived home, exhausted from the 13 hour flight and a 6 hour train journey from London, slumping onto the sofa, in front of me on the coffee table was a book entitled English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages, by one J.J. Jusserand, the same book and author I presume that Christopher Morley is referring to in the section you quote in Wanderlust:

"We know from Ambassador Jussurand's famous book how many wayfarers were abroad on the roads in the Fourteenth Century..."

My first weekend back at work in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, I served an American lady who when she turned away from the counter was revealed to be wearing a black backpack with a Sierra Club badge on it, the same name of the club that you write about in Savage Dreams, one of America's oldest environmental groups, founded by John Muir, who was born in Scotland.

***

I've had to slow down my reading of Wanderlust because I am wandering again in a few weeks time, this time less aimlessly, to Antwerp to give a paper at a conference. I will be talking about abiding, and David Foster Wallace, and American politics, and I suspect you will pop up in there somewhere, a now-abiding presence in my life and whose political activity and its relationship to your wonderful writing I have hardly touched on here, if only because it poses so many questions I will have to think about it for a long time before I write anything about it.

I am happy that you are a prolific writer, that I not only have lots more of your books to read but that I will probably read them again and again for their beautiful complexity and acute, intuitive understanding of one's relationship to place, literature and history.

Your ongoing reader,

Mark

Best San Francisco

(photo Eric Fischer)

Best book-browsing - the two hours spent in City Lights, wandering from one shelf to another, wonderfully overwhelmed by the selection (mentally cursing Glasgow's lack of equivalent) and sitting down on a wooden chair reminiscent of my family home's dining chairs, next to painted placards demanding change, and reading a momentary discovery, Roland Barthes' "What Is Sport?" a text for a documentary for Canadian TV by Hubert Aquin (apparently unavailable online) printed with incongruous images of English and European football from roughly 2007, including Brad Friedel saving a shot for Aston Villa, and a Chelsea and Valencia player going up for a header. Turning a corner to find Lil struggling under a weight of ten or so books, unable to choose which ones to get.

Best communal breakfast - America is supposed to be individualistic, and dinner is supposed to be the meal you go out for. At Brenda's, at 8am, it was packed with people eating amazing breakfasts and chatting to each other and the waiters and chefs. There were queues to get in at both Dottie's and then Brenda's. People wanting to get out and about early on a weekday morning.

Best intense emotion - the sheer joy at hanging out with Tobias, Dain and Neil again, all of us together in one place for the first time in seven years; the ridiculousness of that - why hadn't we done it earlier?! - but also the beautiful fact of it being halfway across the world, how we'd not managed to meet up in London all those years but had somehow managed to congregate in a magical city for a special event. Being able to remember publicly the great times we had making films and to say how happy I was to be here, in this moment, celebrating with Tobias and Tu.

Best oasis - the Tenderloin National Forest, discovered in reading City Lights-bought Rebecca Solnit's Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, and just around the corner from where we were staying. Set up in part by the Luggage Store Gallery (whose premises on Market Street we failed to find in 2008 and forgot to search again for this time), it exists in a small alley on Ellis Street, opposite the Glide Memorial Church (where tourists can see gospel on a Sunday morning, providing they queue early to avoid sitting in an annex and watching it on TV), and is experienced as a genuine oasis of calm and contemplative peace in the dark chaos of the Tenderloin. Ellis has a particularly large population of homeless people and drug addicts, who by day gather at corners and the entrances to convenience stores, and by night lie curled up in piles of blankets along the sidewalks up against buildings and fences. Mornings, they congregate outside Glide. There is an occasional local support worker there talking to them.

The Forest is made up of a gravel path around the edge of a garden of mixed plants and trees; there are big leafed bushes and small succulents, and there are two human-made ponds, one constructed from an old bathtub that is home to orange fish. Halfway down, under the shade of a large tree, is a small seating area. An old man with a white beard was sat there quietly when we passed, and we nodded and said "good morning".

Best use of stereotypical American phrase - the guy on the BART station wearing a SF 49ers cap and jacket, talking to his wife who may have been blind (she held a non-white stick out in front of her to guide her) who was also wearing a 49ers cap and jacket, though of a different design, who asked her to "quit busting my chops".

Best overheard mobile phone conversation - on the Muni 71 back from the Quiet Lightning reading in Golden Gate Park, a guy got on already talking on the phone. He had two long plaits of hair either side of his head that met behind to form a ponytail, and wore three or four bead necklaces that reached to his abdomen. He sat a few rows back from us, and talked loudly to a friend about a girl who "has not done anything to change my view of her character", as well as a guy they both know, though vaguely, who had been a keynote speaker at a conference at SF State, a conference at which the bus-rider had also been speaking on a panel, this mutual friend being someone "that works with the young brothers real close" at schools and I think youth clubs, someone who has realised that "that's how close" you've got to work with them: daily, in their own environment.

Best epiphany that everyone probably had ages ago - American fashion is America having a conversation with itself, mainly about subcultural groups and to a lesser extent class. This is made more clear on returning to the UK where the class element dominates. The (white) (middle-class?) youth of the US wear far more classic Western wear (those shirts with curved pockets, popper buttons, flanel and wool shirts, gimme gaps, even Levi's) than in the UK, where the current fashion, from Topshop/man right down to vintage stores and small manufacturers seems to be a convoluted, arch, raised eyebrow and above all IRONIC conversation about the UK class system; all this stuff that one way or another always seems to reference Brideshead Revisited, deck shoes, Oxford shirts, Panama hats; the very British confliction in regard to the aristocrats - revulsion/attraction. How Burberry has become a working class label. America's dominant styles are conversations between different subcultural groups, and of course far more about race, too; thin white middle-class hipsters (both male and female) referencing the hyper-masculinity of cowboys.

San Francisco Images

I got back 6 or so films from SF. Click on the photos below to be plunged into the middle of the rest.

San Francisco Notes: Images from Here

From Delta airlines inflight magazine, on the Triangle region of North Carolina:

"located strategically in the center of the triangle ... the 7000 park is home to more than 170 of the most influential, avant-garde companies on the globe"

"this is a region whose most important industry is higher education"

"applied science of engineering, textiles and agriculture - areas that generate the intellecutal property and human capital of the Triangle"

"the nation's first university-operated nuclear reactor"

"seven nationally renowned community colleges that are each in tune with what existing and emerging industries need in order to assist the area's ever-upward growth"

"we're ... helping to build that next generation of students who will fill jobs and also be in an entrepreneurial position to create new ones"

*

Overheard at JFK, one uniformed worker to another: "if only we can make it as friendly as Terminal 3."

Overseen at JFK, on a TV news screen: "Polygamist prophet set to stand trial."

*

Walking westward along O'Farrell, a group of five or six people in ragged clothes that have broken down from specific colours to a general street-dirt-grey, slumped outside a grocery store. Very hard to see where their heads are and other body parts, they seem to sink into their clothes. One clear image - a hunched figure, all layers of battered fabric, extending out from this material a muddied hand. Another: a row of people sat on upturned milk crates, propped up against convenience store walls.

Images: big cars that are more like minibuses than cars, with tinted windows, arms at the wheel the only sight of the driver; the area's ambient noise, shouts and cries and zooming cars and the eerie human-ish wailing of emergency sirens, sub-woofing bass; the shopping trolleys piled high with a person's life; the shopping trolleys full of Coke cans scavenged from bins up and down Market, going to the reclaimer for 6cents a can; the guy below our kitchen window with a brown paper grocery bag full of shoes.

All this two or three blocks from the tourist area and the Marriots and Hiltons. This appears inevitable; appears as a geographical bad conscience - America's attempt to hide the underbelly always a failure, it sticks to commerce and cheery positivity. Even the addicts and madmen wandering the streets here appear cheerful.

More images: a thin white man in pajama bottoms, shoes and dressing gown stops halfway across a busy street to laugh and point and chat to a skyscraper; a man sits on a fold-out stool outside a convenience store - he's homeless but you get the impression this is his regular spot - cheerily shooting the breeze with fellow street-dwellers. This morning a queue down a block - a church? soup kitchen? - waits patiently. A policeman who seems to be patrolling the line chats amiably to the beggars who gather round the fire hydrant on the street corner.

*

An indie-mart at punk venue Thee Parkside, Potrero Hill. Small crafts, lots of paper goods, jewellery, most of it referencing one way or another ideas of Native American patterns. Loads of small, independent and entrepreneurial enterprises, especially food - a guy hand-making pizzas, Angry Man Eats, Kung Fu Taco.

*

The vivid cultural mix of the Mission; Mexican and white hipster. Mission Street bilingual, Spanish dominating over small-lettered English. Other streets full of a youth that reminds me of the extended interviews in the Woodstock film, a mix of innocent traditionalism and rebellion, earnest and honest even when striking a pose. That particular interview with a kid with blonde hair and his girlfriend, sitting on a road-side verge, him talking about his immigrant father, how he had wanted to make something of himself and so doesn't see why his son would give up all that, the son saying he is trying to do the same as his father but in his own way.

6:44 in:

and into:

I always see American youth through this interview. The kids here, in cut-off jeans, careening round on bikes, talking languidly. A girl saying over and over "motherfucker" and managing to create layers of meaning in the repetition of one word: as inclusive gang, jokely as fellow reprobates, as lovers of beer (available in- and out-side), bands starting at 2pm.

I've always been attracted to what gets called the American "can-do" attitude: replying "yes" far more than "no". Taking things where you can, because life is harder (more risky). Wandering around this city, even this city, the streets are a far more conflicted place than in the UK. Rougher, yes, but more at stake, too - you have to work harder to get something, but what you get will mean more. Less complacent. "Closer to the bone". More rooted; if the streets are up for grabs, it's because there's something worth fighting for.

At 24th/Mission, at the BART, on a crossroads, street preachers with megaphones shouting in Spanish about God. One guy without a megaphone walking a line of meek-looking street-dirt-grey attired men ranged along a flowerbed, enunciating a passage from the Bible.

At 16th/Mission, at the BART, on a crossroads, an intimidatingly large number of homeless people sit around on the mural-ed bollards. The atmosphere feels extra-tense and there is shouting weaved into the ambient noise. It is unclear where the shouting is coming from.

Before coming home, a detour down an alley with hundreds of painted murals, all shouting positive accolades of the human spirit and aiming fire at the true culprits: "Capitalism Is Over! If You Want It".

*

Any Help.

Two times in one day this appeared scrawled on a piece of cardboard. The first, an old guy with a grey beard and a happy face under a SF baseball cap, wearing a black leather jacket in the sun, propped up on a medical crutch and taped to the crutch the sign. Us, walking down from City Lights clutching a logo-ed brown paper bag holding books and postcards, talking enthusiastically about plans for activist and literary activities. Any help. The man's face seemed different to others asking for money - if possible more melancholy, with a bemusement at his predicament that made even sadder than the others that seemed so resigned, already so sad. We walked past and stopped and went back and gave him money. He asked: "Can I help you find anything?" and pointed us toward SFMOMA. Any help. After giving us directions ("see that jukebox-shaped building?") he said in a voice it was impossible to tell whether it was sarcastic or not: "it's not like I know this place or anything".

The second time, walking home from a burrito and a beer in a Mission taqueria. It was dark and busy somewhere near Cyril Magnin and O'Farrell, lots of people, tourists and not, and a figure slumped at the intersection, nearly on the road, in some sort of bright hooded top with blothes on it as part of the design. The hood was up over the figure's head which was slumped onto their chest. A small figure but difficult to really tell how old they were or whether they were a man or a woman. Against his or her legs the cardboard sign. Any help more desperate and plaintive, a last gasp: ANY help. The sign seemed to speak instead of its author.

*

A street on, under the squared-off arches of a Hilton, a group: a young man with a suitcase on wheels, piled high with bits and bobs and a variety of crudely self-laminated begging signs. He had a guitar case on his back. He was talking enthusiastically to a man playing a steel drum, who had on his face a look of resigned pride, as if to say to the world: "you think I'm begging, but I'm serious. This is art." He didn't seem like he wanted to be associated with the others in the group milling around.

*

Two abortive trips to Gertrude Stein-related exhibitions due to prohibitive prices: $18 for the SFMOMA, $11 for the Contemporary Jewish Museum.

*

I am woken up in the middle of the night by the surprise sound of an amplified guitar out on the street below our window. The morning after, walking toward Powell BART station, what I presume to be the same guitarist appears, an amp cord extending from the guitar around his body and into a small bag on his back, where the amp is. He's still playing.

*

UC Berkeley, long-time bastion (in my head) of a progressive university culture, the FSM, that great speech by Mario Savio in 1964:

It turns out to be a pale, pathetic shadow of that, somewhere between the country club/golf course-style landscape of the grounds and an upmarket 18-30 vibe of the surrounding streets. We wandered up past the clock tower, past a building with BOTANY engraved on one tower and ZOOLOGY on another. Real-life students scurried past, all wearing blue and yellow Cal-wear, under black-and-white banners featuring their smiling photographed likenesses and inanely positive quotes about university life. One in particular: "Happiness! Opportunities! Critical Thinking! Research!" followed by the obligatory reference to the football team: "Go Bears!" On the campus periphery the shops and bars form what appears as a theme park for the "college experience", a town entirely devoted to the commerce of education. All communication seems to occur in banners, always the next event, always a cheery special offer.

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On the BART back from Berkeley, a girl in front of us who completed a Rubics Cube twice in rapid succession between stops.

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At a McSweeneys book launch at The Make-Out Room, we took the last two seats opposite friends Aimee and Bernardo, who we began chatting to, and when she had to leave Aimee invited us to a barbeque she and her husband are holding this weekend.

Talking to the guys from Apple who work with the guys from McSweeneys about what can a book do. Lil meeting Greg, the guy who has ran the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation for the last five years, and being able to tell him how reading What Is The What? inspired her to start working for refugees.

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Russell telling me that Jonathan Richman lives in San Francisco, wanders around the Mission, and has been seen doing paintings of houses, using an easel propped up in the middle of the street, resting on one knee as he paints.

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Russell pointing at a double-decker luxury coach and telling us about Google, Yahoo, Apple etc ferrying their employees to-and-from work in these coaches that have food and wifi, and travel specific routes separately from public transport, a whole network of routes not marked on public maps.

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A guy on O'Farrell falling into step with us, a big grin on his face, asking us "What's the greatest nation on earth?" Our hesitant reply: "I don't know." "I'll tell you what it is, cause you're gonna need this," he says, half raising his arms to the heavens. "It's the do-nation." He asks us where we're from, and on hearing Scotland asks us whether 'Danny Boy' was written there rather than in Ireland, because he's heard that. Then he starts singing it, in a wonderful deep resonant voice. As we reach the corner, I find a dollar and he smiles again, telling us how happy he was that we laughed at the "do-nation" joke. Our smiles make him smile. He starts off down the street, but stops, and asks us what the greatest city is: "Genero-sity" comes the answer.

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Waiting to go into a bar on the corner of O'Farrell and Jones, a woman appears. Her teeth are what strike me most; they are broken and split off at different angles. She starts singing "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and we mill around, feeling many levels of uncomfort. She kneels to ask for a dollar, saying "but I tried to make you happy". It is only a few hours later that this hits me; and when it does it really does HIT: in the incongruous atmosphere of a club on a Friday night, remembering this woman trying to make us happy.

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A Sunday in Mill Valley. Sitting on the back deck of a French-styled cafe, wearing tuxedos without the jackets, me and two old friends collaborate on our speeches for our friend's wedding. The light filtered through the trees is mottled and creates ornate shadows. In front of us are sandwiches with fries, pushed aside to make way for paper and pens. Sitting here, elbows on the table, hands in the air, thinking, watching the others write, feeling a wonderful sense of camaraderie that comes from us all being together for the first time in seven years, us trying to express our love for our friend, it feels (embarassingly enough) like one of those scenes from The West Wing where Leo gets the staff together for a working breakfast, or those times at "Campaign Camp" where they play basketball in between making policy.

Driving back at night, in a bus full of wedding guests and the groom, through Marin County and over the Golden Gate Bridge, the city and the bay and the bridges all lit up, constellations in the dark. Lil remarking on the 30s-style design of the GGBridge, it's almost like time-travel.

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In Powell BART, a man with a beard and a gravelly voice singing with a guitar who is surprisingly good, stopping midsong for a spoken word section: "What year is it? What week? What day is it? Not a relevant question. They're all the same" before going straight back into the song.

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A woman at a bus stop on Haight, near the park, walking up and down shouting, first something about the tenth anniversary of 9/11, then "shut the fuck up".

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At the entrance to Golden Gate Park, early evening, under a tree a group of homeless men gathering for what looks like a discussion, sat in a circle with one guy speaking earnestly in the middle. Yards away, more homeless people on their own. One guy has lain out blankets like a picnic, and has a radio tuned to a local station that blares out ads.

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Watching an exotic beetle on the floor of the Conservatory of Flowers, feelers feeling spilt beer on the floor as readers read into a microphone at a Quiet Lightning night. It is only a matter of time until the beetle gets trodden on. Feet miss him, and then when our eyes are turned he gets flipped upside down and chopped in half by an errant booted foot. We look up in horror, and meet eyes with a girl who shares our morbid amusement - the funniness of sharing apparently over-sentimental emotion.

Walking home, coming face to face with a raccoon.

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SFO ads:

"Who will you trust to secure the private cloud?"

"Sorry. No dog. No pony."

Being Abroad

My friends Lucy and Russell's project Being Abroad, with lovely sketchbooks and essays, including one by me, is up online now.

It's very strange to read writing from 4 years ago, about an experience 2 years before that. Separate, enclosed, unrelated moments strung together.

The Blue of Distance: More Thoughts On, And From, Rihanna; on Teenagers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Rebecca Solnit, Proust; as a Tribute to a Friend

A few years ago, in the early hours of a weekday morning, I walked through the Hyndland area of Glasgow with a friend after an evening of drinking and talking. Past town houses and terraces mostly dark and sleepy, he spoke about wanderlust and the desire for a life of drama.

My friend was restless and talking about moving away. He worried about having nothing to complain about, about a lack of drama in his life. He was finding contentment difficult to deal with; to him it was a threat to life's potential for excitement.

My nostalgia for my teens began almost immediately after they ended, and lasted for most of my undergraduate degree. Despite conscious relief at the closing of certain dark chapters, the heightened sense of being alive that such dramas - however contrived - bring is one never entirely forgotten. It becomes a template of sorts, and it takes time to shake off.

The process through which it is, eventually, shaken off - cautious and occasionally abortive explorations of new people, a new city, new art - is a combination as heady as it is intimidating, and it is unsurprising that a certain amount of uncertainty results; a confused fluttering between known dullness and unknown futures.

I learnt self-indulgent self-created/ing drama through the sentimental emotional wraught-ness of sitcoms and teenshows, not to mention certain bands and books. I wrote my A Level English paper on Catcher in the Rye and The Bell Jar and compared those books to my happy life. It was the perfect age to read them: 17 and happy, acting unhappy.

This video a perfect audio-visual instantiation of what I'm talking about:

It's part of growing up. Something excruciating yet necessary.

You stretch beyond yourself to give that self room; some bits go back to where they were, others remain extended. Some lead to new places.

But its exhausting. It artificially heightens everything to an emotional pitch that is unsustainable. By making every misunderstanding or miscommunication a cause of intense internal wrangling, it adds to the very confusion it is part of; you're never quite sure what is you feeling something and what is the public "you" feeling.

(That late capitalist complaint: valorising emotion whilst simultaneously distancing us from it.)

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Nostalgia isn't simply a longing for the past. It is a longing for the recreation of the past in the present. In a sense it is fiction-making - world-creating - though a creation that always falls short, and which leads to nostalgia's frustration at its limited powers. It becomes a desire for recreation and a desire for greater powers of recreation.

The temporal span of "What's My Name?" is uncertain. Is the meeting in the store at the start of the video their first meeting? Are the blue scenes in the bedroom later in their relationship? If so, why the mournful, submerged, and nostalgic synth strings that play throughout? Because they suggest a gap in time between the tale and the telling. Is the entirety of the video set in the past then, with two time periods - the first meeting and the height of their intimacy? In this case, the synths might speak to this same nostalgia and desire for nostalgia. The video wants to recreate not just the perfection of intimacy but the excitement - the drama - of the first meeting.

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I’ve been reading Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide To Getting Lost. In it, she writes:

"Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgeting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss."

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Her book is interwoven with chapters entitled “The Blue of Distance”:

"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost ... For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains ... Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in ... "

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"Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away."

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My friend is moving away today. Less from wanderlust, though, and more for love.

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Tom is re-reading Proust this summer, and as I stretched out on the sofa reading Solnit's book and he sat in the yellow chair by the open window, a breeze (which we looked up the scientific definition of: "where does it come from?") rustling what I call my nephew's Dadaist type-writer poems pinned up on the wall, he read out one of Marcel's frequent aphorisms: "It was not for the first time that I felt that those who love and those who enjoy are not always the same."

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Marcel thinks the drama of love is incompatible with enjoyment. That love's emotional turmoil doesn't allow for enjoyment.

Perhaps he writes about it elsewhere - he seems to cover everything else - but here he misses out this: those who enjoy the lack of enjoyment (ie: drama) that love brings. Though it soon becomes less enjoyment than addiction.

A possible reading of Proust: a story about addiction to drama.

Doesn't Marcel at every turn create drama rather than resolve it?

Drama with its literary and theatrical overtones. Addiction to drama also being an addiction to telling the drama's story.

In Search of Lost Time's cyclical structure: the story of how Marcel becomes a writer.

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Personal contentment vs public discontent. Personal contentment can be a bulwark, a safe place, a created world where everything is perfect; from which to escape the world with which one is so discontent, but also, neccessarily, to fortify oneself against it, to refuel for the fight, to nurse one's righteous anger.

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I will miss my friend, but I am happy for the reason he is leaving.

Blue and Orange: Notes On Colour in Rihanna's "What's My Name?" Video, Hollywood, British Playwrights, Tintin, Paul Eluard, Heraldry, and New York

Two colours dominate this video.

The blues and oranges. Look how the blue lines on his jumper match the blue line of her shorts. The red on his jumper and the reddy-orange of the milk carton. Her slightly-clashing but dominant orange nails. The nails throughout shift between blue and orange.

Two-thirds of the way through this colour scheme spreads out from distinct items and takes over the entire video:

It's tempting to see these colours as public/private. The juxtaposition of the public sexuality that Rihanna performs in orange with the unexpectedly genuine-seeming intimacy between her and Drake in the blue scenes.

Orange is for outside, public, performance. Blue is for inside, private, the home.

I am genuinely surprised at how touched I am by the smiles Rihanna and Drake share in the blue scenes. So many videos perform a version of intimacy - so often in the home, in fuzzy light - yet there's something intangibly different here.

Elaine Castillo is right in her wonderful recent essay on the PANK Magazine blog:

"It’s why Rihanna and Drake’s “What’s My Name?” holds me so much. Am I the only one who finds this song deeply melancholy and wistful? The genre of song being: erotic melancholy. One of my favorite genres. Something erotic and melancholy about: “Say my name, say my name—wear it out.”"

She's not the only one. The synths in the background throughout, with their minor keys. A sense of loss. The more I listen, the more sad it becomes.

And of course blue is the colour of melancholy.

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Blue and orange are also the colours of Blogger, the platform I use.

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Hollywood uses these colours obsessively on its movie posters.

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Blue/Orange is a play written by the English playwright Joe Penhall. It is set in a London psychiatric hospital, where a patient claims to be the son of an African dictator.

The play premiered in 2000 and starred Bill Nighy, Andrew Lincoln and Chiwetel Ejiofor. In 2005 the BBC made it as a TV film starring Brian Cox, John Simm and Shaun Parkes.

On the BBC page for the film, it suggests that Penhall was inspired by Tintin and the Blue Oranges, a live action French film from 1964.

According to Wikipedia "the term of the 'blue orange' is a moderately popular image among the French, and was originally inspired by Paul Eluard's strange quote 'Earth is blue like an orange' as a reference to the colour of the fruit when it rots."

Eluard, who knew Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, and collaborated with Max Ernst, was married to Gala before she left him for Salvador Dali. He was also friends with Man Ray and Picasso.

His poem The World Is Blue As An Orange:

The world is blue as an orange

No error the words do not lie

They no longer allow you to sing

In the tower of kisses agreement

The madness the love

She her mouth of alliance

All the secrets all the smiles

Or what dress of indulgence

To believe in quite naked.

The wasps flourish greenly

Dawn goes by round her neck

A necklace of windows

You are all the solar joys

All the sun of this earth

On the roads of your beauty.

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Rihanna is from Barbados.

The official colours of its flag are ultramarine and gold. In heraldry, a trident is always called a barbe, making a pun on the name of the country it represents.

Barbados' coat of arms is blue and orange too.

New York City, where the video for "What's My Name?" was filmed, has a flag. It is a vertical tricolor of blue, white and orange.

Castillo writes:

"the video's utopian vision of New York. A communal New York. A New York you fall in love with, and in. It's telling that neither Rihanna nor Drake are Americans; American-dreaming being the province of immigrants."

The Lower East Side - those streets Rihanna waltzes through - is part of the island of Manhattan, itself part of what was named New Amsterdam by settling Dutch migrants. The Dutch national colour is orange.

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The video for another single from the same album as "What's My Name?", "Only Girl (In The World)", also has lots of blue and orange:

SpiffyToast3: On Fifa11, Shedding Skin, Crap Jobs, French Supermarkets, DFW, and the Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers

Fifa11 for Tom's Xbox has recently become a large part of my life. It has crept into mornings-before-work having already conquered the get-home-from-work routine. It is quite possible that my doing more hours at the museum and my playing more Fifa11 are not un-related. A sign of the mind-numbing the museum creates - including the new mind-scrapingly dull (and politically dubious) Riverside. Crap jobs are supposedly good for being disposable; you can drop them at the door. This job is so crap its crapness spurts through the gap underneath the door and through the keyhole, into the morning-before and the evening-after.

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As well as playing lots of virtual football, when I get stressed - or, rather, when my body gets stressed (I am often unaware of the stress for a few days, there is a lag between my body's knowledge of its stress and my psychological knowledge of it) - the skin on my fingers, mainly on my right hand, curiously (the hand I write with), starts to go dry and die, spreading in separate constellations of little crop circles until they enlarge so much they meet and all the skin on the fingers (usually the index and one next to it) sheds itself. This process, once it has began, is unstoppable and takes roughly two weeks to work itself through.

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A vivid inner life is essential for a crap job. When I worked at Sainsbury's as a teenager, loading pallet-upon-pallet of chilled goods onto shelves, I imagined myself an artisan cheesemaker carefully placing delicate creations onto the shelf. In orange rubber gloves that made cheesehandling a clumsy affair, I would use thumb and forefinger to pluck a cheese from its bottle green plastic crate and place it on the shelf. In the time it took to make this action - a few seconds at most - an increasingly vivid story played itself out in my head, where the environment around me did not so much dissolve as metamorphosise into a French supermarket, which was staffed by people who (a) could wear their own clothes to work underneath the grass-green khaki waistcoat with Super-U or Petit Casino or Monop' written on it, (b) were surly with customers at no risk of sanction and (c) had a surprising gourmand knowledge of cheeses.

This story swatted away the boredom only intermittently. The attention required to prolong the pretense was already quite large, and an infuriating fact of the crap job is that it dulls precisely what one needs to get through it - one's attention. It is a horrifying and insidious catch-22. This job would be fine if I could pay absolute attention to what I'm doing but the fact that what I am doing is so mind-crushingly dull means that my attention is shattered. This unsolvable problem became a secondary - and yet just as exhausting - issue as the job itself.

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I have been attempting - again with only flickering success - to channel the lessons of DFW's The Pale King. The attempt to transcend boredom through attention.

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"Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom."

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The gift. Who profers this gift? I'm interested in spirituality and what Wallace called the "religious impulse". When I read about this gift of life, I can't help but think religiously.

"Days in the desert" too. I think of 40 days and 40 nights; trial, suffering, struggle. Abiding. That word abide that pops up in Infinite Jest, as Gately undergoes his suffering in hospital, bearing it second-by-second. That word that pops up again and again when religion is touched upon - Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Justin Taylor's The Gospel of Anarchy.

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SpiffyToast3 is the name given to me by the computer when I connect to the worldwide web of Fifa11 players through the Xbox's internet connection. Two words, one a colloquialism. Does "spiffy" only come up for British players, with the Xbox working out location from the IP address? Are there appropriate colloquialisms for each playing country? Is "spiffy" even a word? Even a colloquialism?

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In a cruel irony, the museum sells books on how to stay happy and positive day-by-day. One of the key authors of this school of tat is a person by the name of Ulysses Brave, author of amongst others The Wit and Wisdom of Highland Cows and The Wit and Wisdom of West Highland White Terriers. These two "books" consist of glossy photos of aforementioned animals on the recto side with one-sentence, vaguely "Buddhist" musings on life on the verso. Brave is an elusive person, internet-identity-wise, though I did find a reproduction of the inside cover blurb on the person on an Amazon page selling one of Brave's works entitled Life Is Sweet (which has a long-haired, long-horned cow on the cover) (for no ostensible reason). Here is the blurb:

"Ulysses Brave is a self-help guru specialising in animal self-awareness. After carefully selecting his choice of images, he writes philosophically about his chosen text. Born in Newfoundland, Ulysses has studied and travelled throughout the world, honing his gentle wit through observation and occasional listening. He lives in East Anglia."

Here you can click to see inside. Brave has also written a series called How Not To Be The Perfect Husband / Wife / Teenager / Celeb.

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Paying attention involves not thinking about paying attention. But boring things don't gain your attention without an active choice to pay attention to them, which obviously involves thinking. Something you are trying very hard to achieve can only be achieved by not trying at all. I have tried looking very very hard at a £4.99 cotton shopping bag, tracing its weave, its graphic depiction of the new museum, the way the price sticker doesn't stick to the bag because the bag is made of a type of coarse cotton that doesn't respond to flat, plastic surfaces. It is difficult. I don't want it to be so much effort; what I am trying to pay attention to doesn't deserve it; I am wasting my time.

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DFW had a "personal self-help library".