The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Into Great Silence ¦ Sound Pollution

I enjoy most things about city life, but one of the perennial frustrations is noise. Light pollution, on the micro scale at least, is fairly easy to manage. We can shut our curtains or buy special blinds, and shut our eyes if need be. And, while some objects are foul to look at, we only need turn our heads...

Sound, on the other hand, is a far more difficult sense. It doesn't 'shadow' well, and is extremely difficult to insulate against, far harder than light. Noise is therefore a far more antisocial thing than colour or design. If my neighbour paints their house fuscia, I needn't think about it much. If they play loud music, I have no option.

Cities are noisy places, and I think this does contribute in no small way to the general tension, and thus propensity for anger and violence, that cities are also guilty of. Traffic noise is perhaps the most pernicious, particularly since it is almost impossible to control (the infuriating 2-stroke scooter been driven past has long gone before any law-enforcement might arrive) and is also so widely accepted.

But perhaps help is on its way. Mathematicians and scientists have developed a theoretical material which would cloak an object in total silence. The implications for this are enormous. Houses that are properly sound insulated. Engine casings that would render vehicles quiet. Headgear, even, that would drop you into a calm oasis of silence amidst the noise and haste.

I wish them all the best in the trials that are to come. And want to sign up for a sheet of it to go over my back fence. Or round the boom-box in the boot of my neighbour's car.

 

The Long Road | Restorative Theatre

I went to see The Long Road at the Soho Theatre on Tuesday night. It's a new play by Shelagh Stephenson based on her experience of working with Synergy Theatre and The Forgiveness Project in some of the UK's toughest gaols. It's been directed by Synergy founder (and brother of Jonny) Esther Baker, and follows the story of a family grieving the loss of their son, needlessly stabbed to death at a bus stop, and their move towards meeting the killer.

The people who know best say she's done a fantastic job:

"Esther Baker’s impeccably acted production confirms the play’s suggestion that restorative justice is far from a soft option."****’
Sarah Hemming, The Financial Times

"Rare and remarkable, this is drama that cries out for attention, and richly rewards it... The acting is tremendous."
Charles Spencer, The Telegraph

And she has. When a play leaves with questions about your own life and attitudes towards living it, and challenges you to re-think, you know it's proper theatre. What the hell would I do if it was my son who was stabbed to death? I'm afraid to even peer into that abyss, and hope I never have to, but for those in and around the criminal justice system, that's what they have to do. And what society demands they do in response to that does affect us all.

If you're in town, go and see it. With great talks around the issues before each Tuesday performance. On til 5th June.

Technorati: Esther Baker | The Long Road | Synergy

Don't Piss About London: Vote Ken Or The Monkey Gets It.

London goes to the polls this week. While the rest of the country has local council elections, London votes for its Mayor. It's the biggest directly-elected budget-holding post in the UK: £13 billion annually to spend, employing 103,000 people and a £39billion transport investment programme over the next 10 years.. And there are some massively key decisions to make which will impact on London for generations: the nature of the cross-rail project, the renewal of the contracts for the modernisation of the Tube...

And people are still seriously thinking of voting for Boris Johnson? Don't piss about London - this is serious.

Let's be clear - I really like Johnson. He's very funny, and articulate on TV. But he's simply no idea, or experience, of the complexity of running of major urban economy. The biggest job he's previously held is editor of The Spectator. While doing so he gave a lot of support and work to one Andrew Gilligan. Gilligan currently works on the Evening Standard, and has spent the past 17 weeks writing the most vitriolic attacks on the current Mayor, Ken Livingstone. The Evening Standard is the only proper London evening newspaper, and their hugely biased campaign has been disgusting.

Ken is no angel - he likes a drink, and a couple of his people have been less than perfect - but Boris would wilt in a day under the same scrutiny. Boris is:

• prone to terrible gaffes, mostly on the issue of race. Not what you need in the most diverse city in Europe.

• a political chameleon, who has u-turned his way through elections since his student days.

• a useless economist, who has screwed up the figures on his flag-ship transport joke policy.

• given to violence. It is well known he offered to sort out 'disposing of' someone who had offended a friend.

So, London, don't piss about here. If you live in London, explore the issues properly and I'm sure you'll Vote Ken, and put Green at number two. The Boris joke is over. We need more than a monkey in charge. And if you know someone who lives here, make sure you tell them to get out and do something sensible with their ballot.

Technorati: Boris Johnson | Evening Standard | Gilligan | Ken Livingstone | London | Mayor

Jaime Lerner ¦ Stealth and the City ¦ The City is Not the Self

Thanks to Helen of Urban Practitioners for sending me this article in The Guardian a couple of weeks back about Jaime Lerner and his radical environmental policies that have transformed the Brazilian city of Curitiba.

I say environmental in the truest sense: he is an architect by trade, and is concerned with the built environment, as well as carbon footprints.

What is particularly interesting was the necessity of stealth and speed: with political turmoil and dictatorial governance, he was never quite sure how long he had before his authority as mayor was swept away, nor how long it would be before someone tied his ideas up in red tape. Hence:

"We had to do things quickly because next week we might not be here anymore [because of the dictatorship].' And you have to be quick to avoid your own bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything. We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer's museum in five months. We transformed the city's main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn't that we were chasing after records - it was necessity."

There's something of the trickster about him, and as London comes to its own mayoral elections, it's going to be interesting who people plump for. One wonders if Lerner would have won the popular vote; in the case of Ken Livingstone, many of his policies for London - like the congestion charge - have been wildly unpopular, and yet have been very successful and vital to the city's environmental awareness.

Einstein once said 'the environment is everything that isn't me', and we might re-phrase that as 'the city is not about the self.' It's worth holding this in mind whenever we vote. Are we voting for our own pockets, or for the common - and more difficult - good?

Flocking to the Cities

Sorry been a bit quiet here. Kids' birthdays, other writing projects... stuff.

Anyway, a piece on the news caught my ear yesterday. Apparently a long-term study of the hunting habits of peregrine falcons has found that they have evolved their methods and are now increasingly hunting in cities at night.

The thinking is that they are using the lights from urban areas to spot migrating species - like Woodcocks - at night, and swooping in for the kill over our cities.

Why have they moved in? It's a pattern we can see in many other animals too. Foxes - once a very rare sight in my childhood - are now a daily feature of my suburban street. Animals are finding cities good places to be because of two factors. Firstly, there are lots of easy pickings for scavangers like foxes. Discarded protein, in the form of chicken wings and kebabs, are easier to hunt down than rabbits. And migrating birds crossing over cities at night are very easy pickings for falcons.

Secondly, the irony of urbanisation, and the intensive food production it requires (see previous series touching on this), is that much of the countryside is very bland. In fact, in some urban areas there is now a greater variety of plant species per square kilometer than there is in the 'countryside', with its acres upon acres of intensively farmed land.

What does this tell us about cities? What is abundantly clear is that they are heavy masses, with large gravities. Falcons didn't look at cities and think 'hey, it'd be great to go and live there'. They circled them and were drawn in by them, inch by inch. Cities do not exist in isolation from, or in opposition to the countryside. The presence of the city infects and affects that which feeds it.

There's a passage in the novel I've written* where the protagonist reflects on Forster's assertion in Howards End that 'all of Cornwall is latent in Paddington (Station)', and concludes that the flow has switched: all of London's vices are spread out and latent in the country stations that flow from its terminii.

It seems that the same pressures that drove people off the land and into the factories are being felt by other species. Nic always asserts that 'you're only out of the city when you can't get mobile reception', and that is getting a long way away now. But even in those places, the fingerprints of mankind's domesitication of the landscape is plain to see.

Masses that get too heavy exert such a strong gravitational pull that not even light can escape. These black holes are constantly hungry ghosts, never satiated. The question is, how do we avoid allowing our cities becoming these dark places, drawing in and consuming everything around them? I guess that was one of the questions I was trying to grapple with writing the book.

 

* on Lulu for a while while I flaggelate myself before agents.

"cos, you know, you can treat them like shit"

On the train to this little drinks thing for an education weekly I write some stuff for, just a couple of stops. Three guys sitting in seats across the aisle:

"So, we go from the pub to the match, and then from there onto another pub, and I'm so wasted by now, and then we go on to a strip joint, and I just spend SO much..."

"Cool..."

"And this one girl comes up, and I've already shelled out loads for dances, and begs me to pay her to dance..."

"I bet you did a bit of that, eh?" (guy mimics lifting up of a skirt)

"...and she then like promises me something a bit special, so I get my cash out, and show it to her, and she looks well pleased, then I think, fuck it, and tell her to piss off, cos, you know, you can treat them like shit"

And I look at the middle-aged lady sitting opposite. And look at them, bigger than me. And think of the broken promises I'd made to get really stuck into campaigning with The Truth Isn't Sexy, and my stop comes, and I get off, without saying anything, feeling none of the wisdom of the wise men, and none of the raw courage of Joseph, and none of the 'fear not', and all of the shame of the shit I'm complicit in and feign to shout loudly about and continue to do nothing about, pray for at least an ounce of John the Baptist's gall to stand up for what I know is right and pay the price. Because you know I know for sure that every day trafficked women are paying a lot more than that. And I let them get away with it, and treat them like shit, and go and sip my champagne.

Just another compromised day in the life. Sometimes I'm just not proud.

Technorati: London | Strippers | Truth Isn't Sexy

Watch Your Back

Ramping up the fear at my local railway station.

Technorati: Crime | Fear

Sometimes Facebook Makes You Weep...

Poor thing!

Technorati: Facebook

Howies: Tales of the City

OK, so Howies opened a store in Carnaby Street - their first in London. Which is great. I hope they do well. But I have to admit their attitude to the city - and to London in particular - has been mostly negative. Indeed, their catalogues in the past have regularly been virtual tracts for country-side life, waxing lyrically about how fabulous it is to live by fields and go biking in the woods at lunch time. Which it is. Trouble is, the vast majority of their customers don't live this life, and it sort of pisses me off when they so blatantly bite the hand that feeds them.

Of course, many of their more vitriolic rants against the city ("We're flying in and out for a day - it's all we can cope with! - to do our sale" etc.) have been removed from their site - although one raging against big money remains, which I hope their new owners Timberland don't mind about.

As I say, I hope Howies do well. I love their products and the rest of their ethos. But it's an attitude to the city that is quite prevalent: we'll go on and on about how shit it is, about how noisy and how grey and how unfriendly and how violent - but hell, it's where the money is, so we'll happily plunder it for its wealth.

I love the countryside - I'm off to darkest Wales this weekend - but let's not pit city and country against one another. Everything in the city is raw material from the countryside - rock, stone, ore - that has been processed by human hands into metal, glass, brick. But where is virgin countryside now? Everywhere has been managed. Everywhere has our fingerprints on it. We simply need to ensure that those prints are lightly made.

Technorati: Howies | London | City

Dump

Still on holiday here, and doing some clearing jobs around the house/garden that have been building up for a while. Which means I've had to go to the dump today - one of the finest, most joyous experiences in the urban environment.

You go heavy loaded, driving slowly, suspension almost topping out... and leave it all behind. The priests who preside over this sacrament at our local place are fantastic too - helping you with the bigger stuff, directing you as to which skip to dump stuff in, advising whether something ought to be recycled. Everyone drives away feeling lighter, happier, going home to a simpler, less cluttered place. It is distinctly sacred.

This isn't, of course, to be naive about the problems of urban waste. It is incredible to see the stuff people do chuck, when most of it could very well be posted on a site like Freecycle. At least they sort stuff for recycling now, which they didn't a couple of years back.

Technorati: Dump | Freecycle | Waste