Review: Ma Ligne

This is a review from Icon 100, October 2011. It wasn't put online as part of Icon's routine archiving so I'm posting it here.

“Mindless violence” is a concept that has been much aired in the media in the weeks after August’s riots in London and other UK cities. No doubt some violence really is mindless: spontaneous, purposeless, from nothing, to nowhere. The term was, however, mostly used as a declaration of lack of interest in the workings of the minds that engaged in a four-day carnival of theft and destruction on British streets. Thus the discussion can be sped along to retribution without any tiresome consideration of motive or causation. But violence and casual destruction deserve more attention than that. We can hardly do much about minimising them if we don’t examine them.

So we come to Ma Ligne. This is a curious little book, slim and highly seductive between grey suede covers neatly printed with the mysterious legend FUZI UV TPK. It is part art monograph, part police dossier: a catalogue of destruction. “Fuzi” is a French artist and, there’s really no point in being delicate about this, a vandal. Ma Ligne brings us five years of his work: his tag sprayed and scrawled over train carriages or cut into the fabric of the seats. Fuzi is not Banksy – he will not boost anyone’s house price and the council will not be listing his work. This is a loving tribute to routine vandalism. And seeing this kind of material degradation in a posh hardback edition of photographs gives us a crucial fraction of distance, which we can use to think about it without endorsing or condemning.

Fuzi’s medium and gallery was the St Lazare/Mantes la Jolie train line, which serves the western suburbs of Paris. The snapshots are mostly depopulated, giving them a melancholy, after-hours feeling. The only people who appear are members of Fuzi’s group, UV, Ultra Violent. The lack of audience is a necessity. This work takes place in moments of non-looking, inattention, when passengers, rail authorities and police are elsewhere. Once the act is complete, it is all about looking: catching attention, putting one’s name in front of people, claiming a space.

The accompanying texts (in French) give some background to this dedicated daubing, smashing and slashing. They’re a liberating read, even when you have to limp your way through with a dictionary, simply because Fuzi never really tries to justify his work. We don’t have to engage with an argument over why he’s right and our bourgeois notions are wrong. Instead what we get is a kind of love letter to the line, “My Line” (as the title says). “Elle était tout pour moi,” she was all for me, he writes tenderly. He enjoyed her every day, listening to the wheels, moving through her and around her in a state of perfect freedom, with rules or laws, “all-powerful”, writing his name on her skin. A career of vandalism becomes a passionate (and, clearly, abusive) love affair, with the police in the role of jealous husband. The poem Ode à la Destruction, one of two, layers a strong sexual vibe through the violence, “strong sensations, primitive”, with seats as “consenting victims”. Arrival at St Lazare seems cathartic. It’s troubling, haunting stuff, consciously provocative; certainly not mindless. Tags are more luminous after reading it, if no more attractive, justifiable or desirable.

Ma Ligne, FUZI UV TPK, Edition Patrick Frey, €46

Ruins, asylums, fetishism, more of the usual

With the book launch* fun and excitement dying down I'll be making a return to more regular blogging shortly. Meanwhile here's a quick overview of new and forthcoming print journalism and other writing.


For starters I recommend the issue of Icon that's presently on newsstands. Icon 105 (March 2012) is devoted to Ruins and includes 2,000 words from me on Pripyat, the ghost city in the Chernobyl exclusion zone - this is of course based on my trip there with the Unknown Fields Division in July last year, and is also the first writing to appear from the Toxic Tourism project. More is on the way. There are also ruin-related pieces from my friends Douglas Murphy and Matt Tempest.

The issue also includes my review of William Gibson's collected essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor. Spoiler: I thought it was great.

(Douglas's piece is a riff from his book, The Architecture of Failure, which launches today. Buy buy buy!)

But be quick - at the end of next week Icon 106 (April 2012) will be out. It's a special issue devoted to the mobile phone, the most important object of our time, and includes a short piece by me on how mobiles have wreaked havoc in film and TV drama. There are a tonne of other pieces as well by writers including Will Self, Lee Rourke, James Bridle, Kieran Yates, Kazys Varnelis and many more. Plus a review by me of a new book about the Allende government's Cybersyn project. Spoiler: I thought it was great.

Back to longer pieces. I'm proud to be included in the first issue of Transgressive Culture, a new academic journal examining all aspects of transgression. There's a table of contents for issue 1 here - my contribution is an essay-length review of FUEL Publishing's book Dressing for Pleasure (link mildly NSFW), which looks back at vintage British fetish magazine AtomAge. Pick up a copy of TC if you can, there's some great stuff in it.

I'm also proud to be in the relaunched Architectural Review Australia - at the printers now and out shortly. The theme of issue AR124 is "Architecture and the Body" - my contribution looks at Victorian asylums, how their builders thought a good building could heal a troubled mind, and how that thinking later influenced the rise of the suburb.

And in case you missed it on Twitter, here's a piece I wrote for Untitled Books about "My Week".

Some more big chunks of writing coming soon.

* Did I mention I have a book out? In case you somehow missed my round-the-clock hawking of my novel, please go and buy it now.

Splatter and Non-Splatter

The Hatchet Job of the Year award is a new prize intended for "the author of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months". Why reward bad reviews? The organisers point to declining newspaper readership and the declining influence of newspaper book reviewers. The prize, they say, will help promote reviews that both informative and entertaining.

Hatchet Job of the Year is a crusade against dullness, deference and lazy thinking. It rewards critics who have the courage to overturn received opinion, and who do so with style. Most of all, it is a public celebration of that most underpaid and undervalued* form of journalism: the book review.

John Sutherland glosses some of the issues around the prize in the Guardian - This is a field where I am simultaneously poacher, gamekeeper and restaurant patron with a taste for wild rabbit. In my day job I commission and write reviews, including many book reviews. I am also days away from publishing my first novel, and about to get my first reviews. (I hope. Even bad reviews would be better than no reviews.) And I love to read reviews - including bad reviews, which might even have the entertainment edge**.

Although the fledgling novelist in me doesn't might have some qualms about encouraging reviewers to be negative, overall the HJOTY strikes me as a good thing. The more prizes for criticism and critical writing the better. Even if reviewers are so emboldened they start dealing out stinkers to the undeserving, that might not be a wholly bad thing. I think an unfairly harsh review prompts more debate than an unfairly positive review, and the more debate and talk around books the better.

Where I think it has gone wrong is the name. "Hatchet job" suggests ... well, it suggests what it says, someone running at a target flailing an axe without finesse, a Patrick Bateman onslaught of murder; brutal, total, gleeful, arbitrary, unkind to the surrounding furnishings. A good bad review is a lot more precise than that. It's more like a gangland execution: impersonal, precise, neat. An icepick to the back of the head, no splatter, no witnesses. The victim is no less dead but the affair is rather more civil. And I'm pleased to note that the stiletto is more evident than the machete in the shortlisted reviews. Adam Mars Jones, Leo Robson and Mary Beard all aim for the weak points, the fatal flaws, and an economy of strikes bring down the mark. Jenni Russell and Geoff Dyer have the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger demeanour of professionals. Only Camilla Long really seems to have got busy with the axe and the woodchipper.

So what to call the award, if hatchet is too blunt? Stiletto was my first thought, but that's better suited to crime writing, or erotica. Better to go with Icepick of the Year, because then we could call them the pickies, which has a delightful second thread of meaning.

* An aside. Undervalued, really? My early journalistic background was in the trade press. The better professional magazines regularly expose serious wrongdoing and incompetence in their sectors only to have their best stories lifted, often without attribution, by the broadsheets. I'm sure journalists on local papers might feel similarly. I would dearly love book reviews to have a greatly enhanced cultural status - for instance daily pages in the paper, which theatre & live music somehow get in the Guardian. But book reviews have a cachet that other valuable journalistic fields do not. A lot of people want to review books - I know, I commission a review section, and I get emails from them. I've written a few emails to commissioning editors myself. Dogged technical and trade journalism has far less lustre. I'm sure it didn't even occur to the drafters of the Hatchet manifesto.

** Especially in Fortean Times, I find - maybe it's to do with the often lousy quality of the esoterica it reviews, but when it dishes out a bad review, it really goes for it. They rate everything out of 10, and my eyes always go to the 1, 2 and 3/10 reviews first.

Radio Floor

Image taken from the Flickr photostream of Sveeta Bogomolova and used under a Creative Commons Licence.

Exciting news! Care of Wooden Floors is being adapted for the radio. It will be Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 for two weeks, starting (I'm told) 30 January 6 February 30 January*. Naturally I'm delighted by this - it's a rare pleasure, in fact something like a dream come true, to have your work adapted for another medium and performed, and I can't wait to hear how it turns out. COWF - being largely the interior monologue of a man alone in a flat - has often seemed to me to be well suited to radio adaptation. So, please do tune in, or listen on iPlayer if you're unable to catch the scheduled broadcasts.

* UPDATE, 21 December 11: The broadcast will in fact start 30 January 2012, as originally stated, not 6 February - it changed, then it changed back. Sorry for any confusion and inconvenience. The story about the parental Christmas cards will be saved for the memoirs.

Letter I Never Sent

Last week I took part in Letters You Never Sent III: Letters to Corporations at Mason & Taylor in Shoreditch. We were asked to write to a corporation. Rather than complain about malfeasance or praise a product, I wanted to think of the most corporation-y corporation I could, one which I felt entirely neutral about. And when I tried to think of a generic, corporation-y corporation, I found one name lodged in my mind - and the fact it was lodged there was interesting to me.

To: Hutchison Whampoa
Hutchison House,
10 Harcourt Road,
Hong Kong

Dear Hutchison Whampoa,

Why you? Why write to you? It's the name, I think. In this country, I'm afraid to say, most people won't have heard of you. Even if they use the mobile phone network or pharmacy chain you own here, they will mostly believe they are customers of companies called 3 or Superdrug, not a corporation called Hutchison Whampoa. But that name, it works a kind of magic – it did for me, anyway. I can't remember when or where I first heard it, but I've always remembered it. Hutchison Whampoa. It's the perfect name for a corporation. There's the Hutchison. That's a name you can trust. Solid, Anglo-Saxon, Familiar. And then there's the Whampoa. Whampoa! What a beautiful word. Faraway, even exotic, but with confident, declarative edge. I assumed it was a person, the business partner to Mr Hutchison – that's a great strength of your name, it suggests an alliance between east and west, global scope, a Eurasian colossus. However Wikipedia tells me it's the archaic English transliteration of Huangpu, the dock area of the city of Guangzhou, a gateway for European trade to China from the 18th Century. All the better. That transnational, cyberpunky edge is given a romantic historical anchor.

Yes, Wikipedia – sorry about that. As I say, you're an enigma, Hutchison Whampoa. I knew your name, but that doesn't reveal anything about what you do. That's the other great strength of the name – it's abstract, it doesn't point the mind in any particular direction, you could be be doing anything anywhere. Everywhere, in fact. That mobile phone company you own – you don't own the phones themselves. You own an infrastructure or transmitting masts, but even that's not the most important part of the business – you own a section of electromagnetic spectrum, a slice of bandwidth, a portion of the air itself. The masts are just a way of modulating your ethereal empire, making it accessible, packaging morsels of it for sale. Owning part of the air – that's ubiquity, that's proper corporate reach. And you own a chain of cut-price perfume shops, too: owning the air, the technology to broadcast across it and the means to scent it. That's comprehensive service.

Maybe you should buy a kite factory, and cover that atmospheric niche too. Maybe you already own one – is there anything you don't do? You say you have five core businesses – I like that, core businesses, one day you must tell me about all your less important flesh and pith businesses. Five core businesses, then. There's ports and related services – nice to see you're still keeping your hand in. And there's retail; telecoms; property and hotels; and my favourite, energy, infrastructure, investments and others. Are you sure that last one is just one business, because it sounds like at least three. “And others.” So modest, Hutchison Whampoa.

I hope you're not sensitive about your size – you're a $42 billion dollar corporation, have a bit of confidence. Don't infer any criticism. I like the polymathic generosity of your endeavours. It feels properly corporate – the sum of many efforts. Forgive my intrusion. Can you forgive? I am sure you can forget. Corporations are good at forgetting, and unseeing, and not being seen, and moving on. You are not your holdings. You own, you operate, you merge and demerge. It's tempting to think of you as the apex of a pyramid, but you're less substantial and more far-reaching than that. You are a grand transaction, one that has been in process for centuries, a current, a trade wind. Even surrounded by you, we don't see you. I thought you might like to be noticed, Hutchison Whampoa, this once.

Cordially, etc.

Occupied

Photo by me. This post sat in drafts for ages, which is why it's a bit behind the times.

When Paternoster Row, adjacent to St Paul's Cathedral in the city of London, was destroyed by fire during the Blitz, 6 million books were consumed by the flames. For centuries, the area was the centre of London's bookselling and publishing trades - before Fleet Street, before the Charing Cross Road, before Bloomsbury. Robinson Crusoe was published there [1]. Its destruction was the terminus of that part of the site's history; the area was rebuilt as Paternoster Square, which was first a modernist office complex, and since the 1990s has been a deadly historicist Carolingian showpiece. It is home to the London Stock Exchange, now targeted by our local representatives of the Occupy movement. Unable to camp in the square outside the stock exchange - this so-called public space is privately owned, and was promptly sealed off by the police - the Occupiers have set up in St Paul's churchyard, prompting a continuing crisis at the cathedral and much public debate, which I won't recap here.

The one incursion the Occupiers have been able to make into the Paternoster complex is to stick posters and other ephemera on the pillars of its external colonnade - as shown in the photo above. I have fairly mixed feelings about the occupiers[2], so took the opportunity one evening a week or two ago to go down to the site and look around for myself. I found an orderly, friendly and essentially unobstructive protest. But I was most charmed by the informal poster-pillars, which immediately reminded me of the area's publishing history - nearby, the Occupiers have also set up a "library", and those book-covered tables seemed another connection to that past.

Recently I was at the Architectural Association, attending Thrilling Wonder Stories 3, a conference of speculation. There, Kevin Slavin gave a fascinting talking about the rise of "algo-trading" - the use of algorithms to trade stocks. You can't just buy or sell a million shares of something without undesirable market effects, so algorithms are used to break up that one big trade into many small, seemingly random trades. More algorithms are used to try and detect those programmes. So much trading on stock exchanges is now automated, and that in turn is changing where trading occurs. Microseconds can make the difference between profit and loss, so the banks of computers running these automated trades are increasingly locating themselves around switch hubs, the "telephone exchanges" of the internet. This reduces the lightspeed travel time of their commands to the market - and also moves them away from traditional financial districts. Increasing auomation, and the migration of this automation, means fewer and fewer actual people working on Wall Street and in the City - and thus Slavin compares the Occupiers to hermit crabs, taking over an abandoned shell after its previous inhabitant moved on.

What I think is most striking about the Occupation is the reoccupation of public space in the city with visible ideas. Of course the powers that preside over the City have ideas, they have an ideology. But it serves their purposes to not really advertise those ideas, so that we almost forget that they have ideology at all, and believe that they are mere innocents, "entrepreneurs" frolicking wealth-creatively in a benign state of nature, a fragile state at that, one which must not be disturbed for fear that they might just take off like deer. The City is a very strange place indeed, and has been for decades. For most Londoners, the ones who don't work there, it's just a kind of lacuna, mostly only regarded from a distance. And the City I think favours this semi-visible status, which is why it has happily driven other uses (such as the publishing industry) from its bounds, and would like to do unto Smithfield as it did unto Spitalfields. Its penetration by visible dissent isn't threatening to it as an obstruction or as a way of stopping its work - the Occupation really doesn't obstruct anything significant. The threat is connected to the possibility that is might have to explain or justify itself. We might have to think about what is done there, and how it is done. Which is, in a democratic society, a generous public service by the Occupiers.

[1] These facts from the Encyclopedia of London.
[2] Which aren't important. There has been much griping from the Do Nothings about Occupy, I don't intend to join in.

Make Room! Make Room!

My piece on the hellish "rodent universes" of John Calhoun is now online at Cabinet magazine. Researching overcrowding, Calhoun built elaborate "utopias" for rats and mice, in which they enjoyed unlimited resources and freedom from disease or predation - but limited space. Once population density passed a certain point, the mouse heaven always became mouse hell, rife with violence, rape and asocial freakery. This research formed a cornerstone of the overpopulation and anti-urban doom-mongering of the 1970s - and informed fictions from Stand on Zanzibar to Soylent Green.

Here's Calhoun in one of his universes, via Wikimedia: