Sunday 31 March 2013

A happy state I used to know

Occasionally one stumbles upon useful concepts for which no words exist. “The Meaning of Liff”, the 1983 masterpiece by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, catered for this need, with definitions such as  the verb “to hucknall”, meaning to elevate one’s legs while seated in order to allow someone to hoover beneath, or “alltami”, named for a small community in Flintshire and referring to the ancient art of balancing the flow from the hot and cold taps when running a bath.
Another such unnamed concept is the pleasure I used to experience, and still can, along – I suspect - with many other mildly aspy males, from planning transport routes, joining up isolated fragments of motorways or railway lines, making connections across cities and countries, plotting imaginative routes across the map. As the most complex but self-contained system in the UK, the London Underground was always a prime candidate for this activity, long before the abandonment of the Aldwych shuttle, the wasteful rejection of the Jubilee Line link between Charing Cross and Green Park, or thoughts about Crossrail or, indeed, Crossrail 2, as the Hackney-Chelsea trajectory has been dubbed of late. Such deficiencies and opportunities would lead to musings on the borderlands of imagination and practical utility, what-ifs at the joyful interface between geography and dreaming, all ecstatically played out along that uncertain frontier that meanders between cartography and playing God (or trains), untroubled by boring worldly concerns like geology or economic viability. So what happens next when the Bakerloo reaches Camberwell ?
I was reminded of this kind of activity when reading the April “Modern Railways” this week, with its proposal for the Euston Cross, which would cleverly link HS1 (Eurostar) and HS2 (the contentious projected high speed line to the Midlands and the North), in a deep level through station somewhere in the immediate hinterlands of the British Library. Running at right angles to the traditional traffic flows at Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross it would benefit from the considerable connectivity of those stations, while permitting direct journeys between the English regions and continental Europe. The Euston Cross should not be confused with the Eustachian tubes, which are somewhere else entirely, or with the Euston Arch, the pointless demolition of which made many people very cross indeed.
In short it is a very neat piece of thinking, and one which reactivated the old psychogeographical pleasure obtained from such ponderings. It also provoked the idea for the name for this otherwise nameless concept. Following the pattern of words such as euphemism, euthanasia and euphoria, which derive from the Greek root “eu” meaning “well”, I suggest that this particular happy state of mind should be named eustonia.

Monday 25 March 2013

First Impressions

This week we made our first ever foray into East Grinstead, and I was suitably inspired to compose this item. In my previous post I referred to the process whereby one becomes familiar with a piece of music, internalising it so that not only does one remember “how it goes”, but one may come to understand “how it works” or even “what it means”. Something like this process is essential in any true learning activity, capturing something “out there” and putting it “in here”, so that one can do something with it, or at the very least, obtain pleasure from it, if pleasure is there for the taking. It is a process easily overlooked in an age when accessing knowledge can be misunderstood to mean having visited certain websites or downloaded an appropriate paragraph of text.
In the nature of things, the earliest moments of exposure to a new stimulus, whether a painting, a place, a poem, or a person are highly vulnerable to distortion and deflection by chance factors. Cliché tells us that interviewers make up their minds about a candidate in the first few seconds; a career may be made or destroyed thanks to a choice of tie or handbag, some quirk of body language, some chemical reaction that went exothermic or simply didn’t want to happen. So it may be with other kinds of stimulus too.
With a place, our first impression is at the mercy of our current mood and preoccupations, the clemency or otherwise of the weather, the preconceptions we have brought along for the ride, and the method and route of our approach. We may set off on the wrong foot in a place of acclaimed merit if the first we see of it is a petrochemical complex, an estate of discount carpet warehouses, a wasteland of highway intersections, or a scabrous slum. I have a friend who is frightened of Brixton because of what he’s seen on television. A city or an entire nation may be damned by a run-in with a psychotic cabbie, a paranoid immigration officer or a dysmenorrheic  waitress. Equally we may feel unnecessarily charitable to somewhere because the sun came out, a shop assistant smiled, or an over-artistically-wrapped praline had been deposited on our pillow in anticipation of our arrival. None of these things happened to me on my brief encounter with East Grinstead this week; instead there was a biting east wind, snow was in the air, the traffic was knotty and there was nowhere to park. Consequently - as regards this hilly and apparently prosperous town - I don’t know how it goes, how it works, or what it means, for we carried on, remarking on how the initial perception of places is so dependent upon unreasonable subjective variables. And thus I can report the final score : Alpha Plus. To Eastbourne.

Wednesday 13 March 2013

Did you ever have a dream or two ?

To continue with the combined themes of Crystal Palace and of being physically here but mentally somewhere else, I’m reminded of the Bowie song with the same title as this posting. The lyrics include the characteristically odd sentiment “You can walk around in New York while you dream in Penge” – Penge being that occasionally maligned London suburb that one looks down upon from the eastern prospects of Crystal Palace. Dreaming of somewhere desired while forced to endure somewhere perceived as dull, is a healthy and not uncommon urge for a young person.
The boy David of course made it to New York, and I’m also reminded of him because on Monday of this week I ventured out in a blizzard to buy his new CD, “The Next Day”. Currently I’m in the interesting phase of repeated listening, familiarising, getting to know, getting to like, amused by the unexpected echoes of The Shadows and Neil Young. It’s surprisingly resistant to assimilation, which I hope is a good omen for longevity of appeal. Curiously connecting with my previous posting are Berlin references in the song “Where Are We Now ?”, recalling Bowie’s late 70s residency in that city, at Hauptstrasse 155 in the district of Schoeneberg, a cosmopolitan, railway-straddled, inner southern district, more a Brixton analogue than a Penge one.
Close by, as seen on the adjacent photo, is an intriguing reference for those who like to observe such things. A subconscious influence for “V2 Schneider” perhaps ? Surely not; more likely the sign is far more recent. Nevertheless, it is true that without realising it  we absorb so much from our environment, triggers to creativity, styles borrowed or stolen that help to make us who we are, fuels for our subjective take on things, influences that steer us towards more of the same.

Monday 4 March 2013

A touch of the Anhalter Bahnhof in SE20

A TV viewing companion who constantly says that some actress or other “looks like” another actress, or like some politician or member of the royal family, or somebody, would soon become tiresome. Such resemblances in overall “look” are commonplace, and have been exploited for many years by “Private Eye”, illustrated by pairs of faces with the names mischievously transposed. When apparent similarities transcend factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, historical era or even species they can be startling – as with the well known instance from some years back of Golda Meir and LBJ – but otherwise such subjective observations are pointless. Mayor Boris and swimmer Becky. Yes, but so what ?
A related phenomenon attaches to places. Apart from obvious similarities concerning  architectural style, predominant function, and so on, we may remark on the way that Wisbech “looks like” Leiden, that the Sarphati Park area of Amsterdam enjoys an ambience somewhat like that of parts of the Upper West Side, that the relationship of Oakland to San Francisco is as Brooklyn to Manhattan, Gateshead to Newcastle, and Birkenhead to Liverpool; one might detect similarities in villagey feel between Belsize Park in north London and the Butte aux Cailles district in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. But to insist upon them would be absurd, an easy technique for name-dropping, and as with our TV viewer – rapidly annoying. Topographical similarities are only interesting when improbable and unobvious, for example when they straddle national frontiers,  architectural periods, or primary roles.
The other afternoon, therefore, I was intrigued to find myself - on the bleak hillside  that is the site of the Crystal Palace - reminded irresistibly of the vestigial ruins of the frontage of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof. It was something to do with yellowy brickwork and a repeated arch motif. Maybe my cogitations were influenced also by thoughts of fiery destruction from two thirds of a century or so ago, the collapse of once great (or infamous) empires, and a reflection on the unsatisfactory and shallow state of the world today. However, for all the rationalisations, it was an arbitrary and random association – I didn’t, for instance, note the rather more obvious similarity between the Crystal Palace TV transmitter and the analogous structure named for Monsieur Eiffel.
The specifics of such ruminations are unimportant, subjective and perhaps tedious. But what may be more valuable to note is that musings of this sort indicate that one is observing and thinking about one’s surroundings, that one’s imagination and memory are alert. Alas, so many people, gloomily thumbing their e-gadgets as they stumble along, are not alive to the here and now. Mentally they are somewhere else, and it isn’t Berlin. Not usually, anyway. Therefore it is with pleasure that I dedicate this blog posting to the father and his young son, on the southbound platform at Brockley station on Saturday afternoon, who were both so excited at watching the passing trains, and who unknowingly made my day. “Look, there’s another one coming”, said dad. Then the little boy would point at one coming from the opposite direction, thrilled to bits. That child was being taught to see, and to enjoy what he saw, an ability that will stay with him, and enhance him, for life.
4 March 2013