Blue Flashing Lights

05/22/2013 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

New York has a gorgeous ambiance with spidery gothic stairs decorating every block. Even traditionally deprived boroughs such as Harlem retain a nineteenth century elegance. Where grown men spend all day on stairwells lined with melting candles and receive customary visits from NYPD. Rent must be lower here. Plump mamas in flowery dresses sit on sandblasted pavements and ugly billboards see profits in small wallets. Likewise I find myself looking for a bohemian household in ‘Upper Upper’ West Side and settle down for seven days in northward bound 151. Unlike in Europe, the American way is mathematical and entirely logical and by virtue of N, E, S, W the numbers will determine your final destination.

A warm hearted girl just graduating from college offers me directions from the subway. She has warmth and human grace. Generous to a fault. With sparrows roosting on barbed wire fences and a Penguin guidebook in my hand, I discover America at first hand. One hot weekday morning, I was sold a donut for a dollar and my unfamiliar accent provoked a polite reminder that ‘service’ is not included. From the wide expansive roads, bumper sized vehicles and gluttonous drinks bottles, even the smallest of purchases are rewarded with a super sized bag; a branding exercise that is thrust into your hand and displayed to millions. Nothing is done here by accident, it’s all about show.

Rattling downtown towards the mindless consumption of Times Square, I unearth a more commercial vision of America. It pays good value to get confirmation of what you already know. Despite having reservations that New York would be a twentieth century museum in the 02′s, the city still dwarfs my progressive European continent. Slamming on my headphones and walking through the electronic grid at night, New York’s scale of ambition is absolutely astonishing.

With millions of cameras flashing and uploading every second, the city is being embalmed for future generations. These metallic tablet coffins reveal a desire to share and activate human existence. For this is not a city, it’s a modernist civilisation and like the great old empires of Constantinople, New York captures the zenith and essence of our carte de viste obsession.

Breaking free of interior rules, the Great Gatsby screens at every movie theater and captures the spirit of the age, where the technological and social plates of a new century are colliding just like today. New discoveries such as electricity, gasoline and urbanisation sparkle together like a false beacon of hope and that is why Fitzgerald is so compelling to modern audiences. With underwater cables creating a new global universe there is an unspoken kindred spirit with the 1920′s. Flickering on and off, on and off, there is a revolution taking place underneath our fingertips and we are only moments away from emotional chaos.

New York’s constant flicker has a transformative quality but what once felt shining and beautiful is now seemingly false. Hot and pulsating throughout the summer, the Upper West Side became submerged by a cold rainforest on a lonely Sunday evening. Fittingly the genteel brownstone mansions are a good deal romantic – a secluded writer’s enclave far removed from everyday life.

The poetic ambiance in the East Village is like Shoreditch with trees and literary aspiration. Further west in the former meatpacking district, the urban renewal of Chelsea’s High Line is a fabulous place. And nothing quite captures the zeitgeist of the new century as a design obsessed urban walkway borrowing motifs from the industrial past.

The future does not exist; the only thing that matters is now. How on earth can I contribute to this city? It feels like my time is up and the world is spinning so fast that surely it can only collapse – a doomed sparkle of chrome and broken glass. For I’ve now walked the streets of Manhattan Island, where millions arrive on mass and forge together an extraordinary human experience. New York, 2013 still matters, the lights remain brighter, buildings taller and intensity greater than ever before. This is civilisation on a grander scale.

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History is speeding up all around us

05/09/2013 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Istanbul is a city where not even stray cats have time to sleep. Loitering around window sills with deprived eyes, they look menacingly hungry. Competition for space is fierce and being natural hunters, cats will do whatever they can to survive. They certainly have no time to relax. Never in all of my European travels have I witnessed such an orgy of activity on the streets. A wailing cacophony of noise screeches in every corner from shrill boys on bicycles to a thousand fishermen angling for a hungry fix. Listening to the wailing sound of Allah call to an empty sky, I walked along Galata Bridge and felt the world colliding into one.

With the mechanised sigh of lorries ramming alongside yellow taxis, I found myself sitting in a café eating deliciously cubed baklava. Although I can’t say I was overly impressed by the hospitality. Perhaps there are far too many visitors for locals to care. I’m just another slab of white meat using excessively large notes for the smallest of purchases.

Nearby thousands pile off the ferry terminal on and off, on and off from the other continent. A deafening crescendo made all the more atmospheric by the white mist spooking the Bospherous. Forging huge new crowds in a different land mass, the city is unbearably intense and it feels like a new world order is forming. Religion still has that affect on you, even as a non-believer in love with science and nature. And how combined they will explain everything.

Eventually.

Sure if I were to walk over the Galata Bridge towards modern Beyoglu, I would find an epic shopping boulevard that could be literally anywhere in the Mediterranean. Check in to buy a new smartphone, caffè latte or the latest sweater modelled by Gerard Pique. Istanbul is definitely not an Ottoman monolith. However, most people bypass the air conditioned trappings of the twenty-first century and marvel over the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia instead.

And yet behind the imperial majesty of Sultanahmet lies the dusty squalor hidden from tourists. Never have I seen so many inner city dwellings constructed entirely out of wood and inevitably they are falling into disrepair; a romantic vision of poverty that always seem less wrong because of the heat. It’s foreign squalor of course and this feeds into the subliminal mystique you seek when travelling abroad; when walking past abandoned mosques and smashed terracotta in search of something to eat. What would be an eyesore back home suddenly evokes a raw energy in Istanbul. A place where stray cats can finally go to sleep.

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Can I help you my friend?

05/04/2013 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Tourists aren’t people really, they are merely things. With their individual nuances and quirks ironed out by branded clothing and digital paraphernalia. They form lines of money outside exotic monuments and without exception all look the same.  On watching enormous queues form outside Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, I see an inter-connected world united by smart phones and cameras. Nationality is a nineteenth century concept in the 02′s. Utterly dated. To think we once fought wars merely to accentuate our differences.

Exploring the dusty streets of Old Constantinople, I strive to walk and interact like I would do in London or Aberdeen. But without a familiar key in my pocket I inevitably morph into the cotton attired masses marching off air conditioned coaches. Museum tickets are forever spilling from my pockets and squashed bottles of aqua suffocate inside my bag. They are never casually binned inside the nearest rubbish bin unlike when I’m at home. Breathing on for dear life they hydrate a series of flustered journeys. 

 Are you lost my friend? Do you need help my friend? Can I help you my friend? One for thing I know for sure is that you’re not my friend.

So you take a chance and take a seat,
Just like I said I wouldn’t do,
One of millions every year

A Portrait of the Artist as a Kohl-Eyed Entrepreneur

03/19/2013 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple has never struggled to get the internet’s attention. Born in New York, the visual artist has a saucy flair for the cruel and gorgeous, embracing a decadent world of burlesque, nudity and subversive politics. From decorating some of the world’s most glamorous nightclubs to founding a burlesque cabaret workshop, Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, Crabapple’s art empire strikes against the bohemian maxim ‘I am an artist, therefore I despise wealth’.

On the contrary Crabapple is a roaring American success story. By mastering the internet she controls her own financial destiny and this alone will upset some purists, as artists have traditionally rejected materialism. Making money from art goes against the ruinous fantasies of bohemians who live for the moment. Poverty has traditionally defined an artist’s career, a garret lifestyle cliché of half-grooved eccentrics and drunken poets who believe art can only flourish where material comforts are absent. With the advent of crowdsourcing in the 21st century starving artists can now queue in Waitrose for lunch, if they are successful of course. Everyone has to be successful regardless of what century they reside in.

Her latest project the Shell Game received $64, 799 from 701 backers on Kickstarter, which will fund nine massive paintings about the collapse of the banking system. It may even pay the rent, grocery bill and six bottles of absinthe too. Why should an artist have to starve for their craft? Everyone should welcome that an artist can now make a real living out of their creative gifts without starving or working for an insurance company. Uncompromising men and women are easy to admire but artists who subvert from within live to tell the tale.

“As any strawberry picker can tell you, hard work and nothing else is a fast road to nowhere.”

– Molly Crabapple

Through sheer force of personality and brilliant marketing, Crabapple has skillfully cultivated a subversive underground image. Arrestingly beautiful she could easily pop out of a traditional Western European fairytale and with her phosphorescent eyes and gothic baby doll aesthetic, the New Yorker looks like a painting. Luminous cheekbones bereft of intellect or character will only capture your attention for so long though. And while no one should doubt her unseen hours of dedication, her anti-establishment credentials are very suave; the kohl-eyed darling of Occupy Wall Street trended after her arrest by the NYPD in September 2011. You don’t need to be a social media node to realise that #freemollycrabapple will do wonders for your marketing potential.

Eaeyoepotynia

Arguably some of her finest work came as a result of her collaboration with British writer Laurie Penny in ‘Discordia – Six Nights in Crisis Athens’. With Penny’s writing style evoking Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, Crabapple’s bubblegum illustrations capture the anomic tragedy of modern day Greece and the essence of her internet wide appeal. This goth-lite artist is sexy, vivacious and has the anti-establishmentarian movement purring in admiration.

While it may have been romantic for artists to suffer in the inter-war era, the crowd sourcing phenomenon of the twenty-first century provides a new model. Why should the wealthy have the sole reserve over the arts? Anyone who purports not to care about money either has too much or doesn’t need it. Crabapple in this respect is a modern inspiration and should be applauded for her glamour inspired riches. Romantics may starve in dismay but aspiration and the arts no longer have to be mutually exclusive.

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Experiments in Living

03/12/2013 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Arguably the most beautiful tribute night in the world, Future Cinema’s Casablanca at the Troxy pays homage to the 1940s. With queues of fur coats and dashing bibs shivering outside, there is a gorgeous moment on arrival, when the art deco hall simply bursts into life. Where everyone wants to fall in love and get married in the rain. Downstairs where the émigrés gather, guests are serenaded by a Dixieland Jazz Band playing soft, melting and ravishingly iconic tunes. Strolling down the stairs for the first time is a magical experience, one you could record a million times and never recapture.

Sparkling underneath a pink ornamental panel, Casablanca feels like a tribute to people who don’t go out during the day – those who live off the grid and make a living by their wits. A subversive experience infiltrated by actors. Remember not everyone has paid a booking fee to enter.

Future Cinema brilliantly tap into the golden age theory in what is a profound cultural shift dictated by nostalgia. Furthermore there is now a plethora of sing-a-long nights, retrospective screenings and 1950s dance hall nights taking place – we are all collectively obsessed with the past.

Whatever happened to here and now?

Sartorial fashions have not ceased to exist in the twenty-first century. There are motifs of present day society everywhere you look – baby faced beards, iPhones, electro DJ sets and memes to name just a few. There is a distinctive visual culture taking place. Eclecticism, irony and peer-to-peer fragmentation will probably form a neo-future cinema event in 2090.

And your life inside the black mirror will be mythologized as romantic as the cinematic émigrés of 1940s Morocco. What you are going through now is a truly fascinating experience. One that is completely unprecedented in human history – we are the glamour virgins of a new found century.

 “I always hear people saying ‘Oh, I’d love to live in the 60’s where everyone is dressed so glamorously’, what’s stopping them from putting on something wonderful tonight?”

- Tom Ford

Social media audiences are no longer content to passively watch an old film in silence – they now want to take part in a ‘live experience’. Everything is interactive now, even the past. By seamlessly merging real time actors with technology, unattainable worlds can now be entered like never before. And remember this is just the beginning. A new matrix is being created where the past can be endlessly revisited.

Separated from our own universe, the Troxy captures the romantic essence of Casablanca. Indeed the art deco cinemas of the 1920s and 1930s are some of the most optimistic statements ever made in stone. By transforming London’s most beautiful inter-war venue into Rick’s Cafe Americain, dressing up for a golden era taps into a strange cinematic homesickness. It’s a gorgeous experience overall, where men are gentlemen and girls are extraordinarily pretty. Just remember what happened off camera probably didn’t seem that glamourous at the time.

Casablanca will be running at the Troxy until March 23rd 2013.
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Soerditch: A Diary of a Neighbourhood

03/10/2013 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

On recently being interviewed by Harry Potter with a beard in an East London warehouse, I left feeling somewhat disconcerted. Start ups are invariably formed by young people and the “Creative Director” interviewing me must have been no older than twenty-two. Here I stumbled upon the modern zeitgeist and felt like a pawn in a profound demographic shift; one where age is irrelevant and children born and shaped by the internet will rule the world.

Despite living in Hoxton for nearly three years I’ve never fully embraced the East London lifestyle. Self-consciously quirky and dripping with acid, even the street art appears alien and vacant. With the big drinks and footwear corporations imitating the guerrilla artists in Great Eastern Street, I sometimes struggle to differentiate between rebellion and multi-national profit.

When young residents tweet references to themselves as “wankers” as a form of cheery endearment, it’s like we’re all permanently trapped inside a hyper-capitalist matrix where nothing will ever change. Postmodernism is a passive condition entirely dependent on technology. Ironic mocking is therefore all we have left. By paying homage to media fashions, converts will embrace parody to demonstrate their wit and intelligence but they are born within this system and can never leave. There is no future, only a recycled past.

Satirising a contemporary urban world, Adam Dant‘s cartoon exhibition Soerditch, Diary of a Neighbourhood offers an irreverent guide to Shoreditch. Embracing an irreverent newspaper aesthetic, Dant’s sketches provide a mocking guide to the area’s post-1993 residents. And what is most striking about “Tech City” and its glitterati of Wifi-workers, street food vendors and Harry Potter capitalists is the abandonment of history.

There are no blood relationships with the dead and the Victorian furniture and rag factories have long been scrubbed clean of their industrial residuum. With East London’s past shucked out within a generation, the old warehouses and churches are like fumigated skulls. They are merely an interim host that will exchange hands every thirty years.

While the East London dead are ignored their buildings live on vicariously without them. Originally assembled by coarse working hands, there is a natural hierarchy with age and somehow an older building is considered more ‘real’ than something new. History provides an emotional backbone that modernity with all its superficialities and globalised rootlessness simply cannot.

By mapping this technological, consumerist and leisure society, Dant’s cartoons provides a wry sense of character and warmth to the area. Shoreditch’s transformation from industrial workshop to a consumer paradise is just another step along the road towards our final destination as archaeology. The Roman Empire lies crushed underneath East London’s converted warehouses and over time Shoreditch will follow suit. A pop up world awaiting to collapse.

Soerditch, Diary of a Neighbourhood will be running from 08 Mar 2013 – 26 Apr 2013 @ Eleven Spitalfields Gallery.
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Forlorn rags of growing old

10/20/2012 By in Arts & Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sitting in a transparent glass case, about 120-foot-long, lies Jack Kerouac’s antidote to the forlorn rags of growing old at the British Library. Magnificent with all its creases, sellotaped edges and typos, Kerouac’s soul aspiring work of art commands a gasped silence. A stunning cathartic monument trapped inside an air-conditioned case that I once read On the Road (albeit the edited one – nobody told me at the time) in solemn isolation over a decade ago.

On reading the beat novel as a seventeen-year-old, I recall the fantasy, hedonistic sex and panoramic visions of America. Not something I could truly comprehend as a skeleton youth in northern Scotland, but I fondly recall writing down passages about purple grapes, whore houses, the fire cracking candles  and ”looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He made life so sad”.

This beautiful elegiac sigh once greeted me in a teenage love letter and formed the basis of a melodramatic Facebook status update many years later. Then as you get older and meet greater minds with even greater books, the Beat Generation feels rather clichéd and predictable. It isn’t either of those things but who doesn’t now yawn when they read about Route 66?

On pouring over the holy beat scroll at the British Library, I reminded myself that writing should be the rhythmic articulation of feeling. A sacred totem against mediocrity, sub-editing and the SEO inspired destruction of the English language, Kerouac’s words remain a soaring inspiration. Written in three weeks, single-spaced without paragraphs and corrected in pencil, his words are soaring, brave and utterly mesmerising. 

In a way you have to start writing before you turn thirty because in your late teens and early twenties you have absolutely no self-awareness. The sediments of your personality are tantalisingly incomplete and unbridled magic can still be spun. Age is a social construct – a conception of behaviour, attitudes and deeds but you do get tired eventually and experience is not always a good thing. It can act in barrier in a way and I suppose it’s an oxymoron to suggest you can rediscover your own naivety?

On this note, I will leave this post to some random American teenager, who unwittingly captured the spirit of On the Road on Facebook and funnily enough no one over the age of 30 could possibly get away this. More’s the pity because on walking around that transparent glass cage, I too want to turn this into something different, get out more often and be in more photographs.

On the Road: Jack Kerouac’s Manuscript Scroll will be on display at the British Library until Thursday 27th December 2012.

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Genova, la bella

10/14/2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Best known for providing Christopher Columbus with a birth certificate, Genoa is strangely overlooked by modern travellers. Most people with a grasp of European history will be aware of the city, but are unlikely to express any desire to attend. Like many post-industrial cities with a ‘Capital of Culture’ badge, the port has been scrubbed clean with a gigantic toothbrush. Usually this involves scraping century’s worth of tartar away and constructing shiny glass buildings in previously deadbeat areas.

Forming part of a maritime corridor connecting Europe with Asia, the Italian city is a medieval warren full of communist students, immigrant hookers and mercantile banks. It should attract a lot more visitors than it actually does. Genoa has long since become a pit stop for travellers heading south towards Cinque Terre. Perhaps it is lucky in that respect as Genoa is authentically Italian unlike the five sea shells along the Via dell’Amore, which were bought and sold for Australian gold a long time ago. Cinque Terre would have been a gorgeous place to write home about in the 1980s but post-internet and cheap flights, the Ligurian coastline has become a Disneyland resort that could be anywhere in the Mediterranean.

OK, OK, Va bene, Va bene – Cinque Terre is a tourist trap! What about Genoa?

Like all cities that have a relationship with the sea, it certainly has its rough edges, and the grim underbelly has virtually no natural light. Genoa’s centro storico is a dark and introspective labyrinth home to crumbling Cath-olic churches and wrinkled olive ladies sweeping steps in the darkness. For every local jeweller making their trade in the dark, one wrong turn will lead you to a valley of hookers lining the streets like Christmas decorations. Sad, vulnerable and uncomfortably menacing, the gigantic toothbrush of regeneration clearly didn’t scrub hard enough.

As a seafaring port that goes back centuries, Genoa’s streets spill out like hot spaghetti or carruggi if you prefer. Many of the old medieval streets are dusty and cloaked in the hammer, pang and chisel of the past. They are still working too. For Genoa is not an open air museum and continues to trade with the sea. With the grime of the centre attracting bohemian photographers and artists, the opulent glamour of the Le Strade Nuove is a peacock of gold plated wealth. A superb demonstration of the city’s former economic power, UNESCO love this street and it will always be a privilege to walk down the Republic of Genoa at night.

With such a great history and richness of culture, the city feels surprisingly provincial and forgotten. Despite its beautiful architecture and seedy underbelly of authentic lore, Genoa is probably destined to remain a city of the past. Like many of her Capital of Culture peers, Genoa is living in the wrong century now. Trading patterns have long since migrated to different seas. Meanwhile the Republic has become a throughfare of a different kind, still trying to finding its way in a new era of leisure, tourism and underwater cables.

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Lawless

09/30/2012 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

WELCOME TO AN ANTI-FASCIST CITY exclaims the inglese graffiti at Napoli Centrale and as the gangly overhead pylons pulls the Roma train towards its final destination, the polemic feels like a warning to tourists. Like all good street gangs, marking your terrority has always been the first point of battle. Train stations are notorious worldwide for getting stitched up in and that’s even before you call for a taxi. Those who do will be in for one hell of a ride.

Despite Naples only being 50 miles south of Rome, the two Italian cities couldn’t be more different. Sprawling litter dumps give the southern city its first meaningful motif, and this alongside the notorious traffic jams make for an inconspicuous start. Following a grid system based upon the ancient Greek city plan, the stramash of buildings on top is like the traffic – filthy, disorganised and completely out of step with mainstream Europe.

Naples is not a gentle ride, the sex here is rough, intense and passionate, a city where the inhabitants public washing and rubbish bins are a source of public fascination. Unpaid wages mean delayed trains and wildcat strikes closing nearby Pompei and Herculanum. Crowds of polo-vested Atlantic tourists huddle together awaiting their air conditioned shuttle bus and they don’t appear to be in the mood to show any solidarity. All in a day’s work or not in this case.

Naples is all about food, dirt and crazy people. Security types carrying a guidebook have nothing to fear here – although maintaining a razor sharp grip on your bag is strongly advised. For Naples remains a city apart from mainstream society, a vehemently anti-fascist one like the train station suggests but one that will always retain a violent fascination.

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