LOW SLUNG

Ah! So that's where the fine minds behind those out-of-town retail developments got their inspiration from. The strip mall, where if you're on two feet, you're probably one of those mads fucks with placards on the street corner, yelling about the end of the world. Here, I was honked at for walking. For walking!

Now, I'm really not being all squeamish here, I promise, but it really is completely impossible to be a pedestrian here. In fact, they set you booby traps: footpaths that snake off to nowhere, parking lots that test your long distance fettle and four-lane freeways with no crossing for three miles. It's megalophobic stuff: just you, a preternaturally enormous sky, and a big, fuck-off Walmart.

THE SCHOOL OF AMERICAN WHIMSY, A MANIFESTO: DISCUSS

The deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness; to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.

 - Jonathan Franzen, "William Gaddis: Mr Difficult"

THE PSYCHOGEOGRAPHER'S DILEMMA

In the 1920s, Edward Bernays revolutionised public relations by teaching ad men to get ahead by appealing to the libidinal desires of the inherently-irrational masses.

In 2009 writer Iain Sinclair and film maker Chris Petit ("two people who have made journeys an essential part of their professions") made their first forey into advertising, starring in a short film (infomercial? public service broadcast?) for Audi. What follows is some vague psychogeographic freestyling from Sinclair and mumbled affirmatives from Petit, soundtracked by a piano set to meaningful and some "urban" trip hop musak. Oh, and they seem to be on some sort of journey (of course!) between Crosby Sands, Merseyside and, er, a place known only as "oblique" and "peculiar":

Once you get across there you're into something different. You're into something different instead of the thing he inhabits, which he keeps calling a darkness, as if there's a darkness inside the human body. I don't know what that darkness is, but it's what he wants to get away from.

But what does this destination "Oblique" matter anyway? It's the journey that counts. Indeed, despite this film's obscure marketing message, Sinclair's soulful metaphorisations of "journey" - the adman's all-time favourite trope - are really battered home.

And it's the car that facilitates this spiritual journey, much more conveniently than the crap cup of tea and ontological transformations offered by National Rail:

You go into this pod-like structure the car and everything switches down, especially when its as comfortable as this. You're into a sort of meditative overdrive instantly.

Well, I've watched the film a couple of times and what I'm getting is this: Audi offers a swaddled safe haven from the contingencies of the psychogeographic landscape.

Now, what could have encouraged this most enthusiastic pedestrian to get behind the steering wheel? Is this some new dérive? A rather complicated political manoeuver intending to protest against the privileged Left's demonisation of the car? Or, more likely, an instance of the oft-cited creative trade-off of cash v. art. At least in the film industry this kind of compromise generally results in "entertainments" (in some Graham Greene sense), not the reduction of your oeuvre into limp, baffling - and downright-contradictory - soundbites.

Weird.

EDITED TO ADD:
Being a ponderous bugger, I watched it again. I think I'd rather he shilled the car with a simple endorsement: "Hey, pedestrian! Psychoanalysing the psychosis of place is quicker with an Audi!"

WHAT DO YOU DO ALL DAY?

Amongst all the great mysteries of the universe, the one that's always puzzled me most is, quite simply: What do people do every day?

I have chronic problems with the concept of a daily routine. That's not to say I'm one of these zany, radical individualists who reject, outright, the mere concept of "daily routine" as a cramp in their revolutionary style. Although I imagine their excuses for staying up past ten on a school night go something like this:

For God's sake, Mum! Manifesting the kind of life I always knew, deep down, I was supposed to live is pretty knackering! I was up 'til 4AM tirelessly documenting the magic in the everyday with my Soviet-era toy camera and publishing these hitherto-unappreciated small treasures on my blog. All week I've been benevolently performing the little acts of kindness that will, one day, change our world for the better. Besides, I'm doing polyphasic sleep this month, remember. Give me a break - I'll get up when I'm ready!

For me, the problem is rather more banal. Like every terminally-anxious Noughtie, my mental chronometry is completely out of wack. There's always too little, or, worse, too much time to complete the simplest of tasks. Foolhardily, I've also chosen a very modern way of making of living: piecemeal teaching and writing work here-and-there and as-and-when. Though it was chosen for its flexibility (like every other 25 year-old, I have an abject - and, might I add, rather self-important - fear of the nine-to-five) I've found myself trying to shape this formless morass of job into a reasonable (but oh-so-conventional) daytime chunk. Which somewhat misses the point of this kind of work (but reveals the terrible insidiousness of the hegemony of routine, right, whimsical internet chaps?)

Anyway, because of this, I'm a very eager student of what other people do all day. The hungry middle manager might have his copy of The Seven Habits of Highly Productive People, but I'm happy to say I get my lifestyle design fundamentals from autobiographies. Actually, I'd recommend the same to all apparently-reasonable people whose trigger fingers hover just a little too long over the Buy it Now button of books of a similar ilk.

Happily, I can now seek guidance whilst engaged in the very deferral activities which doom this whole scheme to failure via Daily Routines, a blog that collects extremely eminent peoples' methods of organising their days.

On Loving Angels, Instead

I leave the window open every time I go to sleep, just so she can come in. Just so she can be with me. Jack Tweed, OK! Magazine, April 7 2009

The popular response to the death of Jade Goody from cervical cancer some weeks ago took its cues from the interminable vamp in the tabloid press in the weeks and months leading up to her death. Her very public mourning has made us feel most uncomfortable: those badly-spelt tributes on The Sun’s message boards, those cheap wreaths stacked outside St John the Baptist Church, those pinch-faced women toting half-deflated helium balloons outside her home in Upshire. Yuck, the rank whiff of British working class sentimentalism. We’re a commemorative plate away from Lady Di territory here. Thank God for The Guardian, then! Their commentary straddles – hand-wringing and superior – over the tabloid dross pile, asking just what does the death of this 27 year-old woman teach us about ourselves? Matching sub-Baudrillardian analysis (postmodern!) with touching anecdotes (poignant!), they conclude: not much, but it’s terribly sad!

However, I’m not here to take potshots at The Guardian, not today anyway. Instead I want to talk about the sudden appearance of supernatural beings in our most rational of Kingdoms. I'm talking, of course, about the angels in our midst.

Here's some rather bilious cut-and-pasting from the BBC comments board to illustrate:

God bless the brand new angel and u will never forgotten u were a great woman. Jade Goody passed away to heaven as an angel. God needed another angel. R.I.P Jade. Its been a week since god blessed the sky with a new angel... the stars are shining bright for your boys Jade.

A very peculiar lexicon has emerged out of our response to these very public deaths over the last twelve years since the big one, the one that started it all, the one that we're all rather embarassed about. It's a language that is shared not only between those with the poor spelling and the Interflora wreaths, but also – curiously – those with the university degrees and respected careers in journalism who are currently employees of Richard Desmond. One arranged around some kind of quasi-religious myth, which bowdlerises its basic structure from Catholicism, its rhetoric from OK! Magazine and its iconography from Anne Geddes.


In postwar Britain, our shaky sense of the real brought a raft of moral, occultist and mystical dogma, all compensating for the decline in religious faith – those old, sacred, survival fictions. The brittle social satires of Muriel Spark, early Christine Brooke-Rose and Angus Wilson depict a nation busily crafting their own ersatz meaning-making machines. Their characters are epistemological bricoleurs, rehashing old moral systems or creating new technological and scientific cults with which to make sense of a world after rationalism, after Freud, after Einstein, de Broglie, Planck and Heisenberg. In our own, rather drab, Franklin Mint mass hysteria, in our new moral maudlinism, we too – to borrow Muriel Spark's phrase from The Comforters – are displaying our own 'turbulent mythical dimensions' under extreme duress.

I'm spending Saturday afternoon tip-tapping away at my keyboard catching up on a spot of freelancing work. I've a bit of a kink for this sort of thing; I'm helping a London university reorganise some of their webpages, and it's exactly the kind of nitpicking, data-efficient zealotry that I love. Joe is listening to some ambient noise in the next room that more befits a floatation tank than a sweaty desk occupied by one mighty close to finishing his PhD.

This morning, on a tipoff from a friend, we went to find breakfast at a newly-opened bakery at the end of Gloucester Street. Rounding the corner, we cased the joint: called Dozen: Artisan Bakery, white facade, tiny amounts of produce displayed on slate tiles, artful bread and so on. The counter was manned by Aussies. My next sentence we still pre-verbal as Joe shot me the "here we go again" look: 'I suppose you wanted twee confectioner ladies'. Well actually no, I thought, that's not the kind of authentic I was after this particular morning.