It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires. Chtcheglov, 1953.

They put Chtcheglov in an asylum for five years because he wanted to deconstruct the Eiffel Tower. Unknown, 2008.

I.

The first idea that we come across when discussing the idea of a new city, and the idea looms so large that it is not ignorable, is that of psychogeography. Traditional geography is the study of how human activity is influenced by, or has an effect upon, the earth’s surface; it generally focuses on patterns of human trade and commerce as these patterns form the basis for all human interactions. Psychogeography is a study of how a human’s environment, specifically sites of economic interaction, has an effect upon the psychological self. It is a study of the banking quarter, the market place and your trip to the corner shop to buy a paper or a packet of cigarettes. Unfortunately as psychogeography is an analysis of these phenomena of economic alienation or inclusion it is also prone to developing a thesis that will inevitably deal with proposing a new theory of how we ought to want to live; that is to say its findings are usually ideological in nature. Through its study of how we react when communing with the wider economic society it tells us that we should modify our behaviour to suit the predisposed new realities that it offers as an alternative. We then propose that all old psychogeographical interpretations and readings of the world have proven their own absurdity through their ideological bias. This is not to say that the methods laid out by DeBord, Beaudelaire and Chtcheglov are wrong though, but instead we, the Off Modern, proffer our own new interpretations and theoretical experiments to counteract the outdated models of the flâneur and its specificity to Parisian locales.

The first movement must be a return to the origin, where all creation starts, to look at how the future of the city and society has been viewed and how these visions remained only visions. These revelations are all in part retro futures, but whereas most retro futures spy visions only of consumer-techno-utopias, the retro futures of the Off Modern are not afraid of new technology. Let us take as our first divulgence, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis. In the film Lang makes conspicuous use of technology as a psychogeographical emblem, the M and Heart machines are monstrous and unexplainable, serving little purpose but to enslave the underclass who work at them. For Lang, new technology plays out on the future as a harbinger of doom, creating Babel-like visions that disconnect and alienate us from one another; whereas our modern technological way of life places the emphasis on communication, via the internet, it is also engaged with moving areas of economic commerce and trade into the realm of the unreal, non-place of the internet. Metropolis doesn’t show a technological advancement as the creation of new modes of communication or new spaces for trade, instead the proletariat are presented as chained to these advances for the good of the few. Technology works only for the overclass and they harness it and withhold its benefits from the masses. The old spaces of economic interaction as presented in a Marxist model of capitalist life have driven the proletariat into an even more economically alienating situation because of the rise of the new technologies.

Many retro futures take original portents of doom and turn them into dreams of utopia. Much of the imagery that Lang coined in the production survives, second hand, in the work of the retro futurists, who use his art deco inspired images of an overclass, but instead these images are transposed onto a society as a whole. This barrage of images of a whole society in utopian harmony are altogether unrealistic, and like other arguments developed from the work of psychogeographical experiments, are furthering an involuntarily ideological mode of living. The idea of this retro futurist utopia is that everyone will be part of this technological overclass, in Metropolis this overclass literally live in the sky above the city of the massed workers, free to ignore the reality of the world they are subjugating. But in the retro futurist utopia everyone is forcibly part of this perfect overclass, with no one subjugated to the M Machine, everyone is king or queen or prince and no-one is forced into the indignity of leaking blood into a factory for someone else’s benefit.

What we should be seeking then is a different type of retro future, one that doesn’t see new technology as a portent of human enslavement or debasement. If retro futurism takes old images of the future as its starting point, then an Off Modern retro future will instead explore a forgotten image or history of the past as its starting point, and it is through the combination of this retro futurism and a non-ideological psychogeography that we can formulate a new idea of the city. The Off Modern metropolis will be a space to finally fulfil all images and ideas of a mythical unrealisable future.

II.

Before we outline our vision of the future metropolis it would be pertinent to stop for a moment and examine the failings of the modern city, to get a better grasp on the scale of the theoretical task that we have set for ourselves and also to elucidate on the problems that need to be solved.

we were promised impossible futures ; skyscrapers of indeterminable height; new economic palaces of steel and glass; high technology clothing that will regulate your bodily temperatures and shield you from heat, cold and external damage; economic superstructures of equality; technocratic political systems based purely on knowledge; homes in the clouds and bases on Mars; ray guns, atomic endgames and mass annihilation; cyborgs built of metal and flesh, attributes like strength, vision, intelligence and speed heightened like a band of new Grecian heroes; extended life and health care systems that would ward off mortality and the effects of ageing on the human mind and body; teleportation, or at the very least, super fast travel between distant points. the twenty first century will be one long hangover from the dreams of the twentieth.

The cities that we are instead habiting are crumbling; clumsily inserted monolithic skyscrapers bordering precocious still-standing 15th Century relics.
The cities that we are instead habiting are compromises with human nature and lack of vision. We are loath to see radical development of a metropolis and cling religiously onto 15th Century relics, and yet we surround them with the impenetrable and alienating institutions of finance. The vision of life in the future as predicted by the past was irreconcilable with some certain fundamental traits of humanity as exhibited in its mythical and actual histories. We cling onto a relic as a symbol of our history and yet allow its incremental and creeping destruction. We allow the creation of endless skyscrapers because they represent a moneyed future, one of prosperity in a new high tech city. But the modern metropolis is engaged in the insertion of new technology into the gaping holes left behind by the failures of older technology; the modern metropolis is then engaged in stunting its own growth. Take the claustrophobic asphyxiation of London and the sprawling paradoxes of Americana in Los Angeles as two examples in the Western World.

The lack of correlation between what the past promised us and what it actually delivered should naturally lead onto the conclusion that we must now formulate new proposals, for an entirely new city, as well as learning from the mistakes of the past, and salvaging that which is of interest and has never been realised or has now been forgotten.

III.

The Off Modern Metropolis will have nothing to do with the vast, unending and everchanging spaces dreamt of by DeBord and Beaudelaire, but instead it will be made of the broken through dead ends of history; it is a city built upon the shifting foundations of nostalgia and built out of the unremembered, forgotten and unrealised memories of things never to have happened. Thus the Off Modern is a city, not made of real, definable and finite spaces but out of memory and imagination. Every avenue or boulevard is delineated not by what activity occurs there but what hypothetical action it could facilitate, or has facilitated in its previous lives.

To reiterate for a moment; psychogeographical experiments often end with preconceived ideological notions that further the ideas of a group about how they feel we ought to want to live. The Off Modern Metropolis would instead be an experiment in how people could be living, open to myriad interpretations of spaces.

Part of the explanation is rooted in the idea of the collage. With the rise of Stalin and his promotion of Socialist Realism over the early Russian revolutionary art movements like Futurism and Constuctivism. Stalin wrote these movements out of Soviet history, and in doing so he condemned them to never be fully realised and irresolvable. What happened to them next is that these germinal aesthetical ideas formed historical collages across Capitalist Europe in the works of De Stijl, Le Corbusier and Brutalism. The aesthetical principles of Constructivism were then subjugated to the market forces that enable building projects to take place; the idea of the proposal, cost effectiveness, material, labour, etc. With the architectural schools of Soviet Russia in exile their Leninist visions of the Utopian metropolis are warped, from here on in a Modernist Utopian vision is nothing more than an ideal unreal place.

If we are to talk of a new city as being an Off Modern metropolis then we must reconcile it with its impossibility to build, and so it is founded in the ridiculous, the physically impractically, the mentally obtuse. It is only through this that we can truly achieve the idea of a psychological new city. It is a city of perception, repetition, ghosts, historical monuments and demolished buildings; this nightclub is in fact a cinema and that bingo hall is in fact a museum, that museum is in fact an old apartment complex and the train station used to be a graveyard. This Off Modern metropolis is then in fact a type of utopian collage, made up of everything, stuck together, moments of history, forgotten artistic movements, forgotten buildings, empires and revolutions.

It’s always nice when things go to plan. For January’s Off Modern we invited a selection of our favorite zines along to show their publications. One of these publications was Popshot Magazine, a perennial pulp of excellence from the worlds of illustration and poetry which simply demands respect. It just so happens that its creator Jacob Denno is a true hero who, much to our excitement, will be contributing monthly musings on his field to the Off Modern blog. Here’s a quick interview introducing Popshot and its soon to be infamous creator…

OM: Hello dear boy, how are things at Popshot Towers? When’s the next issue due?

JD: It’s beautiful here. I just had my nasal hair clipped by the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team and I‘m about to open a bottle of 1876 Cristal. Aside from that, everything is pretty normal and the next issue should be arriving back from the printers at the end of March.

OM: Splendid. How did Popshot come about? What were your aims and/ or intentions for the magazine?

JD: It was born out of confusion, really. I didn’t quite understand how poetry had managed to maintain its musty image whilst all around it every other art form had effortlessly pulled itself into the 21st century. So I thought it was about time that changed and wanted to create a magazine that could make people view poetry in a different light, far away from the much resented school anthologies.

OM: Popshot is a hybrid of excellence from the worlds of poetry and illustration. Why did you choose to combine these two arts when creating Popshot?

JD: They were two art forms that in my mind come hand in hand. Children’s books have virtually always had stories/poems accompanied by illustrations and we grow up knowing and loving this. I felt illustration could make poetry more accessible by helping to tell the story of each poem. Words compliment pictures and pictures compliment words, it’s the best relationship I know of.

OM: What sort of people contribute to Popshot? I understand you have had a few big hitters, or scribblers, from the world of illustration helping to make Popshot what it is…

JD: Generally, most of the contributors are out and out heroes. They help to make the magazine what it is, far beyond the stuff that I do. Regarding big scribblers, we have had a few although I like to think that a spotty 16yr old pencil wielder stands as much chance of making it into the magazine as someone who’s part of the mighty Peepshow Collective.

OM: How do you collate the contributions to Popshot and bring them together into a cohesive and interesting format for people buying the magazine?

JD: We do a call for poetry submissions before each issue, always on a theme. 24 poems are chosen from that and then individually sent off to illustrators, to interpret as they see fit. As much as possible, I try to stay out of this process and allow the illustrators creative control although it doesn’t always work out. Design wise, we try and keep it stupidly simple - this hands the readers focus over to the poem, the illustration and nothing else. Hopefully, these two elements alone are enough to maintain the interest.

OM: Do you believe that combining diverse elements of culture can help to create an environment whereby creativity can develop? We’d like to think we do that at our Off Modern events… Did you enjoy January’s Off Modern and in particular, the zine fair? Manage to shift any Popshot copies?

JD: Definitely. The classic is music and art - many artists take inspiration from music and vice versa. A highly overdone case and point would be Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground.
I really enjoyed January’s Off Modern, I couldn’t feel my own face by the end of it and got a £60 parking fine for being there but it was really good to see people’s reactions to the magazine as they picked it up. One kid picked up a copy and just said ‘what the fuck?’. I never found out why…

OM: What excites you about Modern poetry and, for that matter, illustration?

JD: I feel as though modern poetry and the poetry of days gone by is representative of the differences between us and our parents. Modern poetry is louder, harsher and pays more attention to the minute detail. The bigger subjects like love and death have already been covered repeatedly in the past, but contemporary poetry is more ready to find comparisons between Lao Tzu and ejaculation (wait for Issue 3).

OM: How has Popshot changed since you started it and what does the future hold?

JD: It gets more polished every time. The core ideals remain the same but the execution refines itself. I already have problems with Issue 2 that have been corrected for Issue 3. Hopefully this will continue. As for the future, I just want to keep the magazine expanding and growing, both in number and in quality. One day I would like to throw the most epic launch party ever but I might need a billionaire on board for it to happen. It might even involve the Stockholm Beach Volleyball team…

OM: Can you give us a sneaky peek of what or who to expect in your upcoming publication? Anyone new you are excited about working with or any Popshot favourites from the past?

JD: Expect poems about taking your clothes off, porn, prostitution, swimming and beating up the Dalai Lama (it’s metaphorical). Now that I recount it, it sounds more like a sex issue but it is actually ‘The Liberate Issue’. It seems that sex and liberation come very much hand in hand. We managed to get some amazing illustrators on board as well. To namedrop a few - James Dawe, Holly Wales, Dan Hillier and Paul Holland. For Off Modern eyes only, I can show you Dan Hillier’s epic illustration of the poem ‘Icarus’. (http://www.danhillier.com/blog/wp-content/temp/2010/02/icarus23.jpg). All the illustrators are talented souls we’ve never worked with before bar one - the rather tremendous Daniel Almeroth.

The Romantic period of the arts, from roughly the second half of the 18th Century into the early 19th, was a reaction against the Classicist philosophical model put forward by the Enlightenment. Romanticism prized individualism and emotion in the artist, over the rational and logical artist of the neo-classical period. It is from the Romantics that we get the notion of the struggling artist, working in his garret on his masterpiece, ignored by the world, he is probably syphilitic and drunk on red wine. The Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Geothe in poetry, Mozart in music, Delacroix, Goya and Turner in painting), are primarily men of the industrial revolution, they are the interpreters for civilization of a world freed from the constrictions of serfdom. This manifests itself in the idea of individualism; the French and American Revolutions are Romantic in their nature, America is still unnaturally in thrall to the individualist notion summed up in its constitution, as too, unfortunately, are the arts.

Let us look at Homer, and the problems that biography pose for us when we do, there are many suppositions about who Homer was, but they must all remain suppositions barring some fantastical archeological discovery. What we deal with, in our discussion of the idea of biography in art, is fact, and fact is troublesome, especially in the area of historical fact. E.H Carr, is his work What Is History? asks us to reexamine our conception of the historical fact. Our image of the past is clouded, not just by the bias of the person recording, but also because of the reason for something being recorded. What we know of ancient Greece, comes from a select few people, mainly in Athens, we know very little of what it was like to be a Spartan, or a Theban, so even beyond examining an historical supposition with a eye trained to look for personal bias, we must also look for the huge gaps in our knowledge of history. The biography of Homer is recorded, but not truthfully, we have records from Lucian, but he is a satirist, not an historian, we know how certain groups perceived Homer, but we have no historical facts relating directly to Homer, we only have historical interpretations of Homer. Our own ideas about Homer are no more than suppositions, and for future scholars they will be little more than historical interpretations, our contemporary classical scholars can only make judgments on and conflations of previous historical interpretations, but, and here is the rub, these investigations can add nothing to the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, the true areas of importance in our study of Homer. Like Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter who Homer was, it only matters what was written, and if they were written by someone else or through conflation of different sources, it doesn’t really make much difference. Would Hamlet somehow become a different text if Shakespeare were actually a woman? No. It is interesting that we know little to nothing about who wrote some of the best literary texts, but we will argue amongst ourselves about why Van Gogh cut his ear off. It should be enough to admire the work.

The reason for further eliminating the biographical reading of art works, whether that is in poetry, novels, paintings, etc, is expounded again by E.H. Carr. His example comes from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister for the Weimar Republic; upon Stresemann’s death in 1929 he left behind a pile of papers, which have come to the English reader in the form of Gustav Streseman, His Diaries, Letters and Papers. What we must consider in our discussion of the fallacy of biography is how these mass of documents that Stresemann left behind, became the book that we must use to judge his time in office. Working backwards then, the book the English-speaking world has is different from the original in German, it is a selection of the papers and memos most pertinent to English readers. This original book is itself a selection of Stresemann’s full papers, it mainly focuses on the areas of foreign policy in which Stresemann was particularly successful; his dealings with Western Europe, his negotiation of Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations etc, it glosses over his relative failings in his policies with the USSR. So, with each step backwards that we take we move nearer to a complete picture of Stresemann. Except when we get to the actual papers themselves (which were salvaged in 1945 by the English Army), what we see is not a number of historical facts, but merely autobiography. Each of us writes himself, and all biography is first and foremost based upon autobiography, we create our own images for future consumption. In Stresemann’s personal memos, papers, files and diaries he is engaged in the creation of a mirrored self for future posterity, it is impossible to read Stresemann as a man because our interpretations of him are clouded by his own historical bias towards himself. E.H. Carr tells us as much,The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.
To make an autobiographical reading of a text we are engaged in reading into hearsay to illuminate the fact of a work. To read Stresemann’s documents to form a picture of him, as historical fact, is impossible. If we read On The Road by Jack Kerouac as a semi-autobiographical account of his own years spent on the road we are forced, by Kerouac himself, to accept not just the merits of the text, but what he went through to write it. We cloud our judgment of a novel through childish admiration of what the author’s biography can represent. Kerouac engages himself in the creation of autobiography in his text, this enables the novel to gain a veneer of reality that for large portions lacks much verve, suspense or insight.

Kerouac relies on substandard strands of our schooling that teaches us to see the artist as a grand struggling individualist creating his grand work of art, like Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; part of any discussion about a work in class focuses on the person who wrote it. The work must stand alone to be truly democratic. Contemporary art criticism places much emphasis on the work being propped up by the artist; the artist must somehow become a figure of great magnitude for his work to also be of great magnitude. The reality is that we are not in an age of figures of great magnitude. Ezra Pound implored us to ‘make it new’, this was Modernism, more or less, but isn’t it funny how the art world has taken it to mean, ‘find us someone new’. The Art Industry relies on money to survive, true novelty is unsellable because the industry doesn’t know how to sell it, a creative industry does not really rely on creativity, what it relies on is more of the same. Let’s take Four Weddings and a Funeral as an example, this film does well, Hugh Grant gets good audience reactions as a bumbling English stereotype, then we get to see more of Hugh Grant in new films, which are generally the same, because the Industry knows how to sell them. Look at film posters, they have set signs for what kind of film they are, the red lettering on white background with enlarged faces and a smattering of out of context ‘praise’. Or for another example let us take Grunge, when Nirvana went stratospheric in 1991 we have hordes of A&R men moving to Seattle like locusts to get another Nirvana on their hands, so they can make money. It is because the Industry knows how to sell this, they can sell Nirvana as music for disenfranchised teens suffering rebellion because they can create this idea of Kurt Cobain as biographically apt for them, they can sell Hugh Grant to middle-aged housewives because he plays the part of the charming stereotypical Englishman. Biography is parasitically attached to an artwork in order for it to become sellable. The art industry relies on the same premise, what we have is not ‘new’ art, but new artists who make old art, the YBAs were not ‘new’, merely successfully sold as ‘new’, and their work over the past fifteen years atones to the fact that Damien Hirst is nothing more than a coffee shop existentialist ripping off ideas that have been floating around for about a hundred years. The newness we may really speak of in contemporary art is not in the art itself but in the Industry, so to truly make something new we would have to get rid of the idea of artistic industry, as it exists now, and so it follows that the next new development in art must be to create a new kind of art industry, not a new kind of art.

Hypothetically, if there were to be a new type of art industry, one that wasn’t so much an ‘industry’, a word carrying connotation of pure economics and the processing of raw materials, via labour, into goods. A Marxist interpretation of the flaws of the art industry in very easy to concoct (although it is not the subject of this essay), but what we should be concerned with is a new way of presenting the reality of art, on a democratic level, whereby figures and money are unimportant. The word hobby isn’t palatable to the art industry, the true hobbyist is the person who does something for the love of it, it presupposes a love that is beyond profitability. A new art industry would place the hobbyist as its king. Once money becomes involved in matters of artistic creation it takes the onus off of creativity and places it on sellability, and one way that the art industry has of ensuring sellability of its product is by creating a fallacy of biography around its product. If you can convince people that the person creating a work has the biographical prerequisites necessary for them to be great you can ensure that work will sell regardless of its merits.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

- - -

There’s a phrase I hate perhaps more than any other, partly due to its patent falsehood, and partly due to the connotation with half arsed upper middle class parenting. Sure, there are some strong contenders for the title of the English language’s most irritating maxim (a solid runner up would be “a stitch in time saves nine”- what the fuck does that actually mean?), but this one takes the biscuit, throws it up, and proceeds to repeat the action with the rest of the family-sized packet. I this hear this wearisome platitude a lot on my regular mid-afternoon trips to the discount section in my local Waitrose. Genteel second-time mothers of a certain age, pushing their ludicrously over designed Cameronite prams look down at their complaining, Boden-bedecked firstborn as they reach for a re-up of organic grana padano from the precarious upper climes of the deli section.

‘I’m bored, mummy’ whines the Bedales-bound genetic photocopy.

‘Only boring people get bored, darling,’ she sighs in reply, with a look of prolonged resignation that no amount of Jamon Iberico or freshly sourced Guava puree can possibly assuage. I snigger a bit, and wonder whether wearing a ratty old tie will give me the requisite professional air to purchase alcohol without showing ID.

Anyway, before I describe any more of the rolling tedium of my existence, I’ll get back on the brief; we’ve all been bored at some point. Some of us aren’t boring. In fact, I know a number of people who, for better or for worse, are incapable of ever even approaching dull. On the contrary to this well worn parental riposte, you don’t need to be boring to be bored- you just need to watch a lot of French films.

I know, I know, I’m really rolling out the standard blokey English cliches here, and would sound like an unfunny Jeremy Clarkson were it not for the fact that I have actually watched a lot of French films. Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais may have been pretentious and incomprehensible at the best of times, but in no way whatsoever were they ever dull. The films I’m referring to are not the products of the Nouvelle Vague, themselves admittedly acquired tastes, but the work of the so-called “quality” directors of the last 15 years.

Maybe it’s due to the contrast with our own country’s appalling cinematic output of late, but as I see it, there’s a concrete routine for English film reviewers when discussing the new releases from across the Channel. They seem to swoon at the overlong dramatic pauses, ejaculate at the inevitable moment of labored dramatic climax, and bathe in the sheer tedium and predictability of yet another film about rough sex and lonely women.

Take, for example, Philippe Claudel’s critically arse-licked Kristen Scott-Thomas vehicle Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Pretty much fuck all happens. Kristen, gaunt, “mysterious” (doesn’t say much: gets angry at predictably unpredictable moments) and very pleased with herself for being one of only two major English actresses who can pass for a Frenchwoman, goes to a job interview, reveals that she’s spent time in jail, argues a bit with her bourgeois family, and eventually comes over all saintly as she reveals that she ‘fessed’ up to a crime she didn’t commit. I saw it in Notting Hill when it was released back in 2008. In an audience of about six oh-so-cultured cultured couples, I counted four heads arched back over the red seats, mouths agape, their snoring drowned out only by the interminable paroles of Claudel’s semi-realised characters. I think it’s safe to say that the other two insomniacs in the audience were having as much fun longing for some wet paint to watch drying as I was by the time the bore-fest ended.

Four out of five French art movies of the last decade follow much the same route. Take Francois Ozon, for example; his films follow the above template pretty closely, but with some wife-beating thrown in for good measure. These may seem like sweeping generalisations, but, really, trust me: I studied French film.

Anyway, this is why I’m so excited about Un Prophet, Jacques Audiard’s new one. Audiard, best known for The Beat my heart skipped, with Romain Duris, is a true great. His films seem to turn the most tired old cliches into something genuinely new and exciting. Take his 2001 film, Sur mes levres; Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos play the classic odd couple. He, a pathologically violent ex-con with a plan for one last big heist, and she a deaf, dowdy goody-goody who works in the offices of a large construction firm. That it’s almost entirely predictable is half the point- a lot of great films (a good example being the grand-pere of modern French cinema, Godard’s A bout de souffle) have one-dimensional plots, but are executed with such skill that they can bring an audience to the edge of their seats, and reduce their fingernails to nothing through sheer dramatic attrition. The throbbing sexual tension between Cassel and Devos elevates the will they-won’t they tropes to a time-bomb of repressed passion, and the violence, when it does occur, is genuinely painful to watch. In a good way, that is.

Anyway, I’m writing this on Friday 15th January, which, coincidentally, is the English release date for Un Prophet. I’m going to the cinema tonight. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Audiard’s oeuvre, then I suggest you do the same, and if it’s no longer showing, blow the rent money on a complete set of DVDs. Believe me, it will almost be worth becoming homeless for…

*****************************************************

Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

Blame Hakim Bey and Crass. Blame Unsound, Hedfuk and Acme soundsystems. Blame South London and rising rent, or if you can’t be arsed to do any research and write for the Guardian, blame !WOWOW! Whatever, squatting’s on the up. This is a piece sharing a few tips on how YOU, yes YOU can get a slice of the free mansion pie.

If you’ve read this far then I’m assuming you’re already interested in breaking a place for one of various reasons. As such I won’t bother going into the history or philosophy of reclaiming dead space. This is about the practical’s; the tools and knowledge you need to storm the castle and begin the siege.

First of all (obvious this one) you need a building. There are empty buildings everywhere. As a rule of thumb, the viler and more run down an area, the more empty buildings. This leads to a mental equation where you have to offset the potential amazingness of, say, a towering fully furnished 20s dancehall with the fact its in West Norwood and surrounded by mental bastards. Generally, unless you’re a mental bastard too, it’s best to stay out of places that are too hardcore. Your neighbours will hate you for paying no rent (even if none of them ever have either), and will either rob you, extort you, or burn your house down. Whilst squatting in Lewisham our neighbours did the first two and threatened the third. I’m not joking here.

Also, ask yourself if you really need a massive gaff? This boils down to what you’re squatting for. If you want a venue to hold fuck off ridiculous parties where you know 5% of the people in the building then THINK BIG. The bigger the building, the bigger the crew you’ll need to hold it and sort out its repulsive shit smeared interior, and don’t even think of trying to live there. This country is too cold to handle a no-heating winter. (Although if you find a place with a working boiler and you don’t mind being a criminal, you could always register the gas in a fake name and then get the fuck out of dodge when the bailiffs come knocking. I wouldn’t recommend this, even though it works.)

If you’re looking for something slightly more exclusive then littler is often better, especially when you’re just starting, and doubly especially if you want to actually live in the space — it means you need less people to rely on and less shit to clean. Old pubs are a great start, usually having upstairs bedrooms and the communal/performance/gallery/shooting gallery area of the previous bar.

When scouting for empty buildings look out for certain signs — curtainless windows, scrubby overgrown gardens, boarded up areas, or just the general sense of emptiness. When you’ve spotted a likely spot go for the tried and tested method of sticking some furled up paper as a marker in the letterbox / doorjam. Keep revisiting to see whether the marker has moved, and if it hasn’t gone anywhere in two weeks or so, bingo! You’ve either got an empty or someone’s about to have a fucking horrible surprise when they get back from holiday.

Incidentally the holiday thing pretty much never happens — if you get into a place and its clear that someone lives there still (and its going to be really clear) you’ll want to get out sharpish unless you want the threat of criminal damage proceedings + the knowledge that you’ve made a strangers life a complete and unnecessary nightmare. Despite what the Telegraph may think that’s generally not top of most space reclaimers wishlist.

You’ll often see buildings with the windows and doors covered by large impregnable looking steel sheets. This hateful stuff is called Sitex and is a total hassle to get off from the outside (unless you can access a council Sitex key — the crusty Holy Grail). However, the presence of Sitex guarantees two things – the place is empty, and no ones going to do anything with it for a while. Often councils are lazy and will only Sitex the ground floor. This is great. If you can get up the side of a building and through a window 3on an upper floor then Sitex is a piece of piss to take off from the inside. There’s even a strong argument for not removing the downstairs Sitex at all, in all but one fairly concealed entrance, as it maintains the illusion to the owner that the building is still secure from you and your feral skipdiving buddies.

So, once you’ve found a building you’ll need some or all of the following —

A torch (Maglites are definitely the best)

A crowbar

Any sort of plug that lights up when connected to the mains (some phone / ipod chargers do this, and some extension cables)

Boltcutters

A new Yale lock (barrel and key)

A mini hacksaw

Chains and padlocks (decent ones!)

Screwdrivers + possibly a drill

Thick soled shoes

2 copies of a Section 6 (The legal document that breaks down your rights. You can download one at http://www.squatter.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13&Itemid=30)

AND CRUCIALLY —

Mates who can bring you stuff like food, water and bedding if the place is a winner.

Here are the rules to the game: If you can get in without the law seeing you, change the locks and maintain a presence in the property, then it’s yours until the courts say otherwise.

It’s a fun game and free to play.

So, step one. Getting in. This is hands down the hardest part, but as with most things in this world, persistence pays off. First off try and find any way you can of getting in without breaking anything. This is pretty unlikely, although a ladder on the side of a place can often reveal unlatched windows. It’s more likely your going to have to either break a window, or prise wooden boards off windows/doors with your crow bar.* Some cheeky beggars like to get themselves a fluro tabard and do this sort of thing in broad daylight, under the cover of being a man from the council. Personally I’ve never had the balls for that sort of carry on and am far keener on the cover of darkness. With London being a large anonymous city its amazing what sort of noises you can get away with in the dead of night. The bonus in prising off wooden boarding is that your certain that no ones going to be inside the property (check for fresh looking building materials though! You really don‘t want to bump into a pissed off brickie working nights). If you’re gonna have to break in with more vociferous means then just make sure the place is empty. Then steam on in.

Don’t worry if you can’t get into a place on first attempt, have a couple more goes that night, then just leave it and come back later. Don’t bait yourself up by battering away at your chosen building for hours. You’ve got all the time in the world. Relax.

Hopefully, eventually, you’re in. Smashing. This part is the most fun. There’s nothing like the sneaky thrill of creeping through a long empty time capsule by torchlight. If the floor is covered in shit and it looks like the place has been squatted before then go slowly and keep an eye out for needles (hence the thick-soled shoes). First off try and see if there’s any working electrics. Flicking light switches is no good as the chances are the bulbs will be gone (although not always, in which case, result), so try sticking your plug-with-a-light into whichever plug sockets you find, avoiding any that look mangled. Don’t go doing anything spacky like grabbing bare wires. If the buildings really old, and really knackered, and you’ve got no power you might have a problem. However any relatively new place can be fairly easily reconnected, so don’t worry if there doesn’t seem to be any juice in the house.

While you’re looking around the place get a feel for it. Does it have any sinks? Do the taps work? Are there any toilets and do they flush? Basically is it any good. Personally I’d say that any place that is structurally sound, that has either working electricity or working water, or both, is always a good bet, even if it’s filthy. Dirt can be cleaned, carpets stripped, junk thrown out, walls painted or knocked through, its all part of the joy of the land of do as you please.

If the place seems good then you need to secure your entry point as quickly as possible. There’s a couple of ways to do this. If the building is a big one with the main doors already chained your going to have to boltcut off the existing chains and replace them with your own. Whilst this is fairly easy in principle, and only really requires brute strength, you might want to practice with the boltcutters and some spare chain at home so you can get good and quick at it. Alternatively if you’re feeling a bit Moriarty you can pick padlocks with hair clips and the top of a biro. I mean, I can’t, but the girl here can : http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-pick-a-lock-for-beginners-266745/

Pretty informative eh?

Alternatively a more residential property will probably have a cylinder lock. These can be replaced by removing the old barrel (which is the part with the keyhole in) and replacing it with your own. There’s a decent guide to doing this here http://everything2.com/title/Changing+a+Yale+lock. This has proved to be the most useful option for me in a number of properties. There’s nothing like sticking your key in your front door to confer the air of a home owner on a person.

So now if you’re in and you’ve got the lock sorted out, its time to embed yourself. Stick up a Section 6 somewhere visible but unobtrusive on the outside of the property. You don’t have to legally put up a Section 6 for it to have effect, and sometimes putting it up only draws attention to your presence. Do make sure you keep a copy on you though, it’ll give you confidence when dealing with the police/ owners. Get on the phone to your mates and get em to come round with food and warmth and battery powered ipod speakers and candles and bog roll. And get ready for your encounter with the law which will probably happen at some point in the next 24 hours. When the old bill come (and it’s be no means 100% that they will) you have to remember that they will lie to try and get you out. Stick to your guns, tell them you’ve been in the property for a while and it’s your home. Refer them to the Section 6 and in the end they’ll fuck off. It’s not really their problem who’s in the building and it’s best to keep it light hearted when dealing with them. Don’t start spouting your counter culture bullshit, or calling them pig, or making oinking noises or banging on about Ian Tomlinson. As detailed below, you may need them to be on your side in a few hours. Still, don’t open the door to them no matter what they say. Honestly, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. If they want it open they’ll just kick it in. If they’re not kicking it in then it’s because they’re not allowed.

Sometimes instead of the police coming down you get the far worse situation of big lairy bastards employed by pissed off landlords, keen to administer a spot of street justice. If they come down with threats to kneecap you or whatever, make sure you’re secure in the building and phone the cops. You’re legally in the right. Most property owners can’t believe it when they get our countries beautiful legal system explained to them, but the fact is they can’t do anything without a court order. God bless England.

Now for the fun part. Once the police know your there, as long as you’re not running the place as a crack house or an all ages absinthe grotto, they’ll leave you alone. If the landlord issues a court order it’s always worth trying to negotiate with them. Sometimes people can get to stay in places for peppercorn (ie nothing) rent, although realistically this is rare. Choose who you’re going to let live with you really, really carefully. Avoid lazy, messy and stupid people, they will only make the process a nightmare. Avoid hippies, they have a terrible aesthetic and tend to paint retarded slogans on the walls, badly. Avoid drug dealers and ketamine addicts. Avoid people who you haven’t known for very long; they will turn out to be thieves. And most of all, avoid Mick Brady, an alcoholic who headbutted me 2 years ago and shat himself on a bus.

* This part of the process isn’t legal, and can be construed as criminal damage, so naturally this article doesn’t condone it, or anything else I might write that is on sketchy ground legally. This piece is just one big jolly with no application to any reality anywhere. You get me.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Nasty McQuaid is a veteran squatter, superstar dj, and is probably the kind of all round solid bloke you’re paranoid Mother thinks you’re going to start hanging around with as soon as you move to London to go to ‘art school’. He ran a shop in New Cross called Rubbish and Nasty for a few years which sold amazing records as well as putting on some fantastic gigs.

[CLICK TO VIEW]

By Digby Warde-Aldam

- - -

I’ve been watching a lot of crap recently. I’m in a strange sort of limbo at the moment, living on what is effectively a building site; my viewing habits have gone to seed. Being an unimaginative and lazy individual, my normal post college/work routine usually takes in two to three hours of internet TV or film per night, an allowance which cannot help but affect my disposition. Naturally when one fills up their time with tertiary material of such dizzying artistic merit as Masterchef and Celebrity Come Dine with me, there begins a slow descent into a state of zombification.

This isn’t to say I’m not enjoying my low-brow bingeing. I must have watched the opening scenes of the Guns of Navarone (possibly the greatest film about repressed homosexuality ever to have been subject to a twat like me writing something about it) about six hundred times since the end of August, and with each repeat viewing, the patriotic tear swelling in the corner of my eye becomes more and more jingoistic. There have been several instances where I have trawled the bowels of my DVD collection in search of long-forgotten gems, hidden amidst the horrific backlog of shit that really needs to be got rid of.

However, I have made one rediscovery that almost makes the hours of watching sub-standard thrillers, war movies and rom-coms (the shit that needs to go) bearable. This cinematic salvation comes in the form of the original Harry Palmer trilogy, or to be more accurate, the first two parts of it. The films themselves, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were the first three instalments of a series conceived by producer Harry Saltzman as “the thinking man’s answer to James Bond”, with some strong emphasis placed on the first part of that phrase. Spy thrillers they may be but both Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin require an unusual amount of involvement on the part of the viewer. Explosions, gadgets and supervillains simply do not figure, and Palmer, the reluctant antihero of the series (played by a post-Alfie Michael Caine) is more interested in buying tinned mushrooms than the shadowy world of international espionage. Unlike Bond, or almost any other action hero you’d care to mention, Palmer is a genuinely likeable figure, as confused and repulsed by the hypocrisy and double-dealing of his line of work as the viewer. Bespectacled and unglamorous, his only secret weapon is his perceived ignorance.

I had a lecturer once who claimed to only watch films set in places he knew. I imagine sticking to this, unless one happened to have an extraordinary knowledge of Los Angeles and New York, would be a rather restrictive and thankless task. However, in a funny way, I can see his point. Tracing Harry Palmer’s route around London is a lot of fun. Whether the undoubtedly great cinematography or an urban facelift are responsible I don’t know, but the familiar city is rendered almost completely alien. Kensington’s buildings are blackened, skeletal and resolutely Victorian, while Shoreditch may as well have been a battlefield, such is its squalor and eeriness. Similarly (and perhaps more understandably, this writer having been born not long before the wall came down), Funeral in Berlin’s juxtaposition of the titular city’s enforced no-man’s against its quasi-American shopping precinct the KuDamm, could not have presented a more unfamiliar picture of the city today had it been set in Beijing or Lagos.

I love these films as entertainment, but what really gets me is what I suppose should be referred to as “period detail”; the films are, to paraphrase John Cooper Clarke, a sociologist’s paradise. We see how shit life on a middling wage was in the 1960s (Palmer complains repeatedly about his salary, and is more than willing to make a buck or two on the side), and how the old order of the British establishment, represented by Palmer’s bosses had failed to come to terms with minor-power status, and the hilarious mediocrity of what passed for luxury circa 1966. It’s all a bit like laughing at your parents struggling with modern technology.

After Funeral in Berlin, the series lost its footing in the real world, and the final instalment, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain (directed, weirdly, by a sleepwalking Ken Russell), is an Austen Powers movie in all but name. The film, more plot driven than its predecessors is fun, but ultimately shit. It’s every bit as far-fetched as the Bond movies that the franchise had been supposed to act as a foil to. After this wet fart of a finale, Caine and Saltzman (and indeed, the rest of the world) lost interest, and Harry Palmer was put to sleep.

Recently, though, Michael Caine has talked about resurrecting the character for one last blast of speccy triumph. Should this happen, let’s hope he’s evolved into a cantankerous OAP living in the suburbs rather than the director of MI6 or something- I’d feel slightly betrayed if he was anything other than average.

*****************************************************

Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

Camus: If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

Dr. Arthur Neuman: We all wear masks . . . metaphorically speaking

Stanley Ipkiss: [on a bridge with Tina, holding the mask in his hand] You sure you’re not gonna miss this guy? Once he’s gone, all that’s left is me.

*

The Mask is a film that uses the symbolic power of the mask (a staple motif of theatre, dating as far back as the persona of the Greek tragedies and the make-up of Japanese kabuki theatre) to highlight the existential dilemmas faced by a nobody-deadbeat-loser, Stanley Ipkiss. Stanley is a bank clerk, he hates his boss, who bullies him incessantly, and he is unable to get with the object of his affection, Tina. It is when Stanley finds The Mask (somehow a magical trinket belonging to the Norse trickster god Loki has turned up in ‘Edge City’) that he is able to unleash his ‘real’ self upon the fantastical metropolis he inhabits.

This version of Stanley represents a transformation that foregrounds the uncontrollable element of the unconscious mind, allowing him to act out the desires that ordinary Stanley hasn’t the balls too, he courts and becomes romantically involved with Tina and tries to rid the city of its gangster problems. But the metamorphosis of the ordinary man into super hero poses us an existential question; what is the reality that lurks behind our conscious mind. Stanley must wear a mask to reveal his hidden self and so we can never be sure of whom the ‘real’ Stanley is. It is thus that Stanley loses sight of the real Stanley. His use of the mask allows him to conveniently disable the aspects of himself that he doesn’t like whilst uncovering the self that he wishes he were; the loud, brash, charming funny man. This is not the real Stanley Ipkiss though, and he is forced into confrontation between himself, the mask, his enemies and Tina, what we are left with is a Stanley who has undergone a rigorous existential crisis and has faced himself in order to uncover and learn about what reality and existence actually are.

[CLICK TO VIEW]

“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” President Jimmy Carter, 1977.

The Voyager programme is NASA’s unmanned space operation that was launched in 1977 to escape the solar system and explore the far reaches of galaxy. The Golden Record was included on both of the Voyager crafts by one Carl Sagan, the records are meant to provide a document of human culture for any extra terrestrial life that might encounter them. In 2008 the Voyager spacecraft left our solar system and with them they took the history of our culture. At NASA’s most recent reckoning the crafts are 10 billion miles from our Sun.

The Golden Record itself contains a series of 115 photographic images and documentation, a selection of natural sounds, greetings in 50 languages and a selection of music from around the globe. The photos provide a visual documentation of the culture of the earth up until 1977, featuring photographs of nature, birds, whales, dolphins, humans etc as well as man’s achievements over nature, The Taj Mahal, The Train, Motorway, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Aeroplane. Finally there are photographs of human culture, Asian street scenes, The UN building, men fishing and Chinese people eating dinner.

Some of the photos from Voyager’s Golden Record;

The sounds included on the record can be found here.

[CLICK TO WATCH]

John Updike and The Modern American Aesthetic.

By James Maclaren.

- - -

Martin Amis said of writing that it is not ever something you can choose to do or become, it is a compulsion, a need to make sense of the world – novels are vessels through which the world is furnished with meaning. Far more subtle and various than the everyday, they offer us a purpose – something innate in the human spirit, the need to make sense of our lives, to populate them with some notion of meaning or eloquence. Having a capacity for something so vital is part of a formation of an identity – in a rather high faluting kind of way many of the best writers feel that they were put here to write, and, as Dante’s Inferno tells us, one of the hottest sections of hell is reserved for those who have talent and do not use it. Updike as a young writer in his early twenty’s was trying to understand the changes that were happening in American culture – the post-war America of apple pie and Momma was being challenged by a new idea of what it meant to be young and American, something to do with being individual and choosing your own path rather then accepting the same choices and responsibilities as your parents. Updike wrote a short story in 1957 about a young grocery clerk in a sleepy suburb who is shocked out of the monotony of his work by a group of beautiful young women entering his shop in bathing suits, all buds and curves they peruse the shelves, and, all the other cashiers being busy come to his check out to buy their stuff. Breathless and stricken he serves them – they leave in a flurry of giggles, numb for a few minutes he tells his boss he quits and runs out of the shop in search of the girls. Of course they are gone and he is left with the desperate taste of something he could not quite touch. Updike was trying to get at the disparity between what this free liberated America promised and the reality of most young peoples lives – the same menial jobs as their parents but with the added resentment of having just missed out on something, something that was really first rate.

Updike, in early 1959 started writing Rabbit Run, in, as he called it, a “haze of cigarette smoke and dizziness”. His first full novel, started life as a novella; a small comment on sport as a type of hyperreality that elevates people to some sort of pinnacle before dropping them back into their second rate lives; grocery clerks, gas attendants, factory workers. It quickly became apparent that Updike had found his man, through the character of Harry Angestrom he could survey America in a big way – ventriloquising his own experience as a young man born into this new generation as well as looking beyond his own patch – he was married at the time of the novel’s creation, bound as we all are by decisions and restraints, he needed a narrator who would be there for him, another story to say what he needed to say. We meet Rabbit as a 26 year husband and father, demonstrating kitchen appliances in a store – in his school days he was a basketball star, by contrast his domestic life is full of demands and regrets. His small apartment is dotted with drained whiskeys glasses, bland food prepared without care or thought. There is a private moment of repulsion as he notices new lines in the corner of his wife’s eyes, rendering her plain rather then perky, as he knew her when he had courted her in the dime store they had both worked in. Updike’s gift is in saving this passage of prose from being gratuitous; he does not appeal toward anything base or misogynistic even though his protagonist is judging his wife in such a mean way. He is showing us a life drained of meaning; the idyllic picture of the American family is for Harry a prison where even the conciliations of lust and sex are being eroded by childbirth, familiarity, and the passage of years. These new lines are felt keenly because they are emblematic of living a second rate life, of having become irrevocably settled at twenty-six.

The novel’s title Rabbit Run can be seen then as an instruction to its hero, to get out and break away – the poverty of everyday life surrounds Harry, his parents live in a small dark house, his dad has given his life to the print factory in which he works and his mother gossips and resents Harry’s choice of wife; the small, spiritless Janice. His wife’s family run a car-lot, small minded people who never offered their daughter much love - her father pouring out his heart into his sales pitches, a cultivated artificial kindness. Even the towns reverend lives a beleaguered small existence, escapes to the golf course, his only respite from the web of his wife’s resentments and failed ambitions; at a time when Christianity and community were pillars in the functionalist family dogma, Updike shows it as failing, coming apart at the seems. Why not then should Harry want to break away, like the young cashier quitting his job and running out into the sunshine in search of girls. It may be a futile rebellion but it is a small attack on a American life that no longer works and maybe never did.

Another early novel then, about youth and freedom, tuning into the zeitgeist in anticipation of the 1960’s. No in fact Updike, even as a young man of 27 felt a distance from the reformists and freewheelers that were beginning to emerge out of the legacy of post-war consensus America ( this distance was not just imaginative but political, Updike was always patriotic- in contrast with the new wave of writers critical of American life, such as Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). He remembers a particular resentment toward Kerouac’s “On The Road” published in 1957, because although Updike was aware of the limitations in American family life he saw Kerouac’s celebration of individual freedom as dangerous because it did not stress enough what was left behind. Where we can understand Harry’s motivation for running, we also feel as readers that he’s mean and selfish, leaving a young girl only just out of her teens to look after his kid, as well as facing the twin humiliations of her parents intrusions and the towns gossiping cruelty. Updike does not think that this unbridled search for sensation is something writers should laud around – he looks at the disintegrating weave of late 1950’s America and sees it, at least in part as a loss.

- - -

James Maclaren is an undergraduate student of English and Drama at Queen Mary’s University. He will be regularly contributing articles about literature for Off Modern.

On British Film

By Digby Warde-Aldam

- - -

It was Francois Truffaut, I believe, who once said that the English could not make films. Before I launch into my heroically unoriginal, whingeing diatribe, I must affirm that this is as ludicrous a claim as saying that Germans can’t rock (they can), or Syrians don’t use A4 paper (not so sure of this, but you get the point). However, to refine the statement somewhat, there is something sadly one dimensional about British film-making.

I can’t, off the top of my head, think of another major film-producing country with so narrow a spectrum of cinematic styles. Generally speaking, British films tend to fall into three categories (and I’m not counting the running, nay, collapsing asphyxiated joke that is the costume drama); heartwarming romantic comedies, which, with what I am loathe to call ‘typical British reserve’, rarely risk the volume of vulgarity which either makes or breaks a similar Hollywood flick. Then there is the kind of film we used to be revered, rather than shunned for making, namely the “gritty” (those commas must now be added by law) work of social realism, which stretches from the kitchen sink school of the late 50s to the gruesome (and in my mind, rather tedious) likes of Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton.

Somewhere in between these categories lies the Underdog film- from The Italian Job to Billy Elliot and beyond, it has ooh-erred and Bob’s-yer-uncle’d its way into characterizing our national cinema. I’m pretty sure that the skewed image of Brits as incompetent charmers with bad teeth can be attributed more than anything to these nauseatingly predictable movies. All three categories do, of course, contain within their ranks a number of films that are perfectly watchable. The trouble is, though, that they are paragons of perfect watchability- mildly humorous, tasteful and completely unmemorable. Last night I struggled for half an hour to remember the title of Hot Fuzz, and still recall nothing of the plot, simply that it was about policemen and it had Simon Pegg in it.

There have, of course, been exceptions. These tend to be Powell and Pressburger productions or the work of directors in thrall to European or American movements. Take, for example, Chris Petit’s wonderful 1979 road movie, Radio On. With its grainy monochrome, pulsing new wave soundtrack and muted dialogue, it has the air of a mid-70s Wim Wenders film. As the credits roll up, it comes as little surprise that Wenders himself produced it. Alas, for those few British reviewers who didn’t completely ignore it, this was a step too far. With an uncomfortably xenophobic ire, Petit was condemned for jumping ship, going over to Johnny foreigner’s camp. While the film doesn’t deviate hugely from Wenders’ style of the period, it succeeds in documenting a culture which, thank god, we have all but lost. The viewer is left with the impression that the England of 1979 was not a nice place to be- the Irish war looms large, psychotic hitchhikers abound, and one can almost smell the stale gut-punch of the Ginsters pasties sold at the rudimentary motorway service stations. Petit, like Godard at his best, gives English parochiality a hint of the dignity which has made the quotidian culture of our North American cousins so iconic. Petit realized the hitherto unimagined notion of the English road movie, and breathed mythology into the second-rate motorway system and damp bedsits which constitute the mise en scene. As a work of art, the film defines its era far more successfully than many of the often melodramatically staged kitchen sink dramas of the previous decade, and thus succeeds by stealing its best moves from abroad. Similarly, Lindsay Anderson’s If and O Lucky Man borrow liberally from the canon of Bunuel and Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, but their incoherent structure and whimsy only add to their overall depiction of Britain in the late 1960s, one defiantly at odds with the platitudinous image of beads, flowers and swinging London that has come to characterize our collective memory of the era. Prior to If, in 1968, it should be noted that the only true counter-cultural masterpiece set in the Britain of the 1960s was Blow Up- a film directed by an Italian.

Depressingly, it’s doubtful whether any studio exec would see fit to fund a project by a latter-day Anderson, Petit, or Michael Powell. Even indie studios won’t risk turning over a loss in the name of great cinema, which only serves to tighten the straps of our current cultural straightjacket. We have failed miserably to move on, and as our industry grapples desperately to recreate the commercial triumphs of ten years ago, we are forced to view our contemporary cinema culture as a parade of smudged facsimiles of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and (aaaaaaargh!!!!!) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

As is clear, this is indeed a sorry state. However, from the left field, there are what you must forgive me for calling, green shoots appearing. Despite the lamentable state of British mainstream cinema, several art films have emerged over the last couple of years that offer some hope for infiltration into our multiplexes. Offerings from the likes of Steve McQueen and Julian Schnabel have surpassed all possible hopes, doing what all successful art movies should, and forcing the viewer to confront received opinions whilst exploiting the full possibilities of the moving image. It’s a long shot, but if talent of this caliber can succeed in this country, and, of course, continues to do so, there is a very real possibility that at some stage in the not too distant future, we will be able to visualize the beginnings of a new culture of British cinema. For now, however, I can only dream, and congratulate myself that I have never knowingly bought a ticket to a Jason Statham movie…

*****************************************************

Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He will be contributing monthly to this blog. Enjoy.

Jack Cade’s Caves by Ian McQuaid

- - -

My former flatmate just came back from Climate Camp where he sat around with other hippies and communicated with hand gestures they had learnt from a book. They had special ways of saying hello and I agree and I strongly agree and I strongly disagree which apparently sped the decision making process up, although I suspect it might simply have made them look like the cunts I suspect everyone is that isn’t me.

I’m pretty sure none of them knew as much about history as I do, probably.

I knew that while they were bleating away about the end of the world on Blackheath there was a series of secret caves lying under their sandeled feet. These caverns are called Jack Cade’s caverns. Jack Cade was a revolutionary from a date I cant remember ago who came up from Kent and rattled his sword on the London Stone which is a filthy pebble in Guildhall and said Now London is FREE and fought a massive battle on London Bridge. He’s dead now, they had him hung, drawn and quartered. But before he did the stone knocking business he hid out in these caves outside London where he worshipped Satan although the only people that really think that last bit are internet specials who think the world will end in 2012 with Boris Johnson shitting Tesla lizards out of the Queens Jewish cock.

Anyway, after Jack Cade fucked up, the caves disappeared until they were found by accident and opened them to the public in 1777 and people came from far and wide to see them. Until the stinking gases of an old fashioned world rose up and killed, yes killed, a person. So the caves were closed down again until some Victorian wag decided to stick a bellows in to suck out the shitty air, stick a chandelier up and build a bar in the corner. Then all the Victorians came and danced and for a while it was all good, but then as usually happens it all got A LITTLE OUT OF HAND and tales of morality free wantoness abounded and Victorians who only liked sexy time if it was being done by a wog or a 12 year old boy decided to close down the caves.

And then they were opened for a week in the 1940s when the government thought they might hide people down there from Nazis, but then didn’t.

And that time when they opened them is when they found the devil paintings on the wall, which is why mentalists think Jack Cade worshipped Satan, but about 23 other people could have painted that so I say he didn’t.

And then the caves were finally and properly closed up and know no one knows where they are really although holes open up in Shooters Hill sometimes and if all the Climate Camp people had known about history as well as me they could have started fucking digging and then they could have had an eco cave for themselves to live in.

You can check all this on the internet.

A SINKHOLE IN BLACKHEATH

[CLICK TO WATCH]