After weeks of activity some news and upcoming features.
Currently reviewing two new books, one for Icon which is an A-Z of Design by our old friends Terence Conran and Stephen Bayley. I must confess to rather liking Stephen Bayley for a number of reasons. One he has the kind of camp and ludicrously mannered views that i find generally amusing a la Peter York. Two he once wrote a very funny review about baby wipes, which is the sort of modern phenomena I wish I had thought to write about. And three his wife once bought a very ugly and badly made clay reproduction of an Alessi coffee pot off me for £10. Apparently it is still in their house. Terence Conran, however, slightly scares me. The book they have written is no great shakes on first viewing but more to come on that subject....
Also, I'm reviewing a book on Austrian proto modernist Adolf Loos. I'm a huge admirer of his work and am pathetically overjoyed to receive this tomb of a book for free. Whether I can think of anything critically aposite remains to be seen. It will appear in RIBA journal next month and shortly after here.
My nostalgic journey into the hippy communes of Essex is being dignified with a formal reading in Berlin next month at a Die Planung event.
Other news is that I'm just back from the US where the FAT fellows and Mr Nick Johnson are currently English Eccentrics In Residence at Yale University. I'll post more news on this soon, but highlights so far include discussing with Leon Krier what pudding to have and having our own limo service.
More, much more to come......
Monday, September 24, 2007
Thursday, August 9, 2007
2036
My God! What's this? A short story? Well, kinda. It's for a book and is tacked on the end of an essay I wrote but I thought I would stick it up here for the hell of it.
2036
Jen noticed it first; a slightly strangulated, tinny sound coming from the earth. Like a transistor radio buried in mud. I imagined the dial, like a windscreen in a storm, green digits flickering though the murk. When she put her head against the ground the sound quality improved dramatically.
“It’s Carole King I think……yes, what IS that one? Something Up on The Roof. I thiiiink”.
She is lying flat on the mossy ground, her cheek damp with mud and her ear pressed against the surface of the earth.
“…and if this old world starts a getting you down……” she murmurs.
We are scrabbling through the muddy ground trying to unearth something that is undoubtedly playing Carole KIng.
“…I get away from the hustling crowds…..”
In the mud, below the beautiful one million shades of green mossy stuff that we rip out in chunks like hair from a scalp with alopecia, there is a dark green speaker. Out of it comes the laid back sound of Carole King. We are standing in a mud flat, just inland, about 10 kilometers from Orlando, Florida.
I always loved those horror stories where the hero visits some spooky town and stays in an old inn and the inn burns down and the hero saves someone, a beautiful young girl perhaps, from the flames and struggles out and collapses unconscious and when he wakes up he is in the town. But it looks different and when he asks the way to the inn he’s told that it no longer exists, that it burned down a hundred years ago and that there was only one survivor and that was a beautiful young girl and no one knows how she survived but she did. Well, I’m feeling a bit like that now. I remember going on holiday once to Mexico and arriving in some old town full of geriatric retirees who went there to bask by the beautiful lake in the centre of the town. And I went to check into the hotel and in the lobby were black and white photos of people swimming in the lake, and sitting in cafes under umbrellas on the beach and kids fishing off the stone pier and it all looked just lovely and so I asked the receptionist how far to the beach and she just looked at me like I asked her where the dead bodies were kept. And later, after I dropped my stuff in the little room with the huge fan and the cracked shower, I walked down to the lakefront and saw that one or two of the cafes were still there and the stone pier still stood there imposingly but it led out into a huge field. The lake had dried up and there were cows grazing on its exposed bed and the café’s ringing its former edge looked sad and pointless. I remember being very moved by that, and looking at the lines on the pier of where the water used to be and thinking that where I was standing would have been ten, twelve feet underwater and how weird that was.
This is why we come here, but we have never found anything as good as this before. Last November the Monorail collapsed for good so you could no longer sit in the bullet shaped train in the burnt out seats and pretend you were swooshing magically through the orange groves. Not the twisted tracks and wires are collapsed in the mud. The best bit is the old Utah railway ride. There’s a section you can no longer get in to where it says: Warning – Abandoned Mine Shaft. That always makes me laugh. The whole place is an Abandoned Mine Shaft. There are animatronic crocodiles and giant cups and saucers and half of a Fed-Ex sponsored spaceship and one or two turrets of the castle remaining and lots of other junk that litters the place. The speaker still playing music is the weirdest thing we have ever found though. Up nearer to the interstate one half of a giant pair of black Mickey ears stick slightly up-ended from the ground. It’s like the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston drops to his feet and roars in horror and the Statue of Liberty is leaning, cock eyed out of the sand. The best end to a film ever really. Nothing can beat it. Not even Mickey’s ears although they are, admittedly, funnier.
But this is good. Music coming from the mud, easy listening classics from beyond the grave. Neither of us can explain it. It shouldn’t be happening. We come here most days and just hang around, looking amongst the ruins for stuff, trying not to be freaked out by the people who live in the remains of It’s A Small World. They have made an enormous sculpture out of bits of old log flume crowned by a pile of plastic flowers and frog’s heads. They’ve painted a big sign saying Free Rides Forever but I don’t think any of the mechanisms work properly so you probably just have to hang out with them listening to their awful music and eating their weird food. Every now and then they have big parties when all their friends turn up on motorbikes and decorated trucks and old school buses and ancient emergency vehicles and they light fires which you can see from miles around. They have this big plastic boat and it sails out across the water to the tip of Splash Mountain and they light an enormous flame held by a fake stone hand and it looks like the lady in the lake. I didn’t realise Florida had any hippies.
I would like to draw a map of this place, try to work out where everything used to be. I might burn the edges like a pirate map. Here be Goofy. There was nothing else to build here. No one else wanted the land. Now it’s a ruin that doesn’t age well. Plastic and fibre-glass made to look old, made to look like weathered stone and timber and rock, lying in the wet soggy grass like giant broken toys. There’s nothing as scary as a discarded, broken toy. Flowers and weeds crawling over bits of fake jungle, a soggy, mouldy animal costume slowly returning to the primordial ooze. Carole King trails off. We cover the speaker up with mud and twigs and muffle the sound so that it is almost inaudible. The ground is murmuring with announcements of the jungle ride being open for business and discounts at the Dolphin hotel. It feels like Walt and the whole crew might be underground, still enjoying the party, still carrying on as normal, still entertaining everyone in their perfect world. We wander home.
2036
Jen noticed it first; a slightly strangulated, tinny sound coming from the earth. Like a transistor radio buried in mud. I imagined the dial, like a windscreen in a storm, green digits flickering though the murk. When she put her head against the ground the sound quality improved dramatically.
“It’s Carole King I think……yes, what IS that one? Something Up on The Roof. I thiiiink”.
She is lying flat on the mossy ground, her cheek damp with mud and her ear pressed against the surface of the earth.
“…and if this old world starts a getting you down……” she murmurs.
We are scrabbling through the muddy ground trying to unearth something that is undoubtedly playing Carole KIng.
“…I get away from the hustling crowds…..”
In the mud, below the beautiful one million shades of green mossy stuff that we rip out in chunks like hair from a scalp with alopecia, there is a dark green speaker. Out of it comes the laid back sound of Carole King. We are standing in a mud flat, just inland, about 10 kilometers from Orlando, Florida.
I always loved those horror stories where the hero visits some spooky town and stays in an old inn and the inn burns down and the hero saves someone, a beautiful young girl perhaps, from the flames and struggles out and collapses unconscious and when he wakes up he is in the town. But it looks different and when he asks the way to the inn he’s told that it no longer exists, that it burned down a hundred years ago and that there was only one survivor and that was a beautiful young girl and no one knows how she survived but she did. Well, I’m feeling a bit like that now. I remember going on holiday once to Mexico and arriving in some old town full of geriatric retirees who went there to bask by the beautiful lake in the centre of the town. And I went to check into the hotel and in the lobby were black and white photos of people swimming in the lake, and sitting in cafes under umbrellas on the beach and kids fishing off the stone pier and it all looked just lovely and so I asked the receptionist how far to the beach and she just looked at me like I asked her where the dead bodies were kept. And later, after I dropped my stuff in the little room with the huge fan and the cracked shower, I walked down to the lakefront and saw that one or two of the cafes were still there and the stone pier still stood there imposingly but it led out into a huge field. The lake had dried up and there were cows grazing on its exposed bed and the café’s ringing its former edge looked sad and pointless. I remember being very moved by that, and looking at the lines on the pier of where the water used to be and thinking that where I was standing would have been ten, twelve feet underwater and how weird that was.
This is why we come here, but we have never found anything as good as this before. Last November the Monorail collapsed for good so you could no longer sit in the bullet shaped train in the burnt out seats and pretend you were swooshing magically through the orange groves. Not the twisted tracks and wires are collapsed in the mud. The best bit is the old Utah railway ride. There’s a section you can no longer get in to where it says: Warning – Abandoned Mine Shaft. That always makes me laugh. The whole place is an Abandoned Mine Shaft. There are animatronic crocodiles and giant cups and saucers and half of a Fed-Ex sponsored spaceship and one or two turrets of the castle remaining and lots of other junk that litters the place. The speaker still playing music is the weirdest thing we have ever found though. Up nearer to the interstate one half of a giant pair of black Mickey ears stick slightly up-ended from the ground. It’s like the end of Planet of the Apes when Charlton Heston drops to his feet and roars in horror and the Statue of Liberty is leaning, cock eyed out of the sand. The best end to a film ever really. Nothing can beat it. Not even Mickey’s ears although they are, admittedly, funnier.
But this is good. Music coming from the mud, easy listening classics from beyond the grave. Neither of us can explain it. It shouldn’t be happening. We come here most days and just hang around, looking amongst the ruins for stuff, trying not to be freaked out by the people who live in the remains of It’s A Small World. They have made an enormous sculpture out of bits of old log flume crowned by a pile of plastic flowers and frog’s heads. They’ve painted a big sign saying Free Rides Forever but I don’t think any of the mechanisms work properly so you probably just have to hang out with them listening to their awful music and eating their weird food. Every now and then they have big parties when all their friends turn up on motorbikes and decorated trucks and old school buses and ancient emergency vehicles and they light fires which you can see from miles around. They have this big plastic boat and it sails out across the water to the tip of Splash Mountain and they light an enormous flame held by a fake stone hand and it looks like the lady in the lake. I didn’t realise Florida had any hippies.
I would like to draw a map of this place, try to work out where everything used to be. I might burn the edges like a pirate map. Here be Goofy. There was nothing else to build here. No one else wanted the land. Now it’s a ruin that doesn’t age well. Plastic and fibre-glass made to look old, made to look like weathered stone and timber and rock, lying in the wet soggy grass like giant broken toys. There’s nothing as scary as a discarded, broken toy. Flowers and weeds crawling over bits of fake jungle, a soggy, mouldy animal costume slowly returning to the primordial ooze. Carole King trails off. We cover the speaker up with mud and twigs and muffle the sound so that it is almost inaudible. The ground is murmuring with announcements of the jungle ride being open for business and discounts at the Dolphin hotel. It feels like Walt and the whole crew might be underground, still enjoying the party, still carrying on as normal, still entertaining everyone in their perfect world. We wander home.
Friday, July 6, 2007
It's A Small World
Recently I was invited to write something for a German publication called Die Planung - check out the website http://www.dieplanung.org/- set notionally in the future, 2036 to be precise. I wrote a number of bits and pieces which all hinged around various utopian communities, one of which was an art commune set up near where I was brought up. I recently visited it and took some photos too which I've included here with the short piece about the communitie's remains.....
1981
I’m lying in the long grass, eating Bombay Mix. I am eleven years old. I have never eaten Bombay Mix before. Around me are people, milling around; dancing, chatting, juggling, painting, cooking food. There are a lot of children. Mostly slightly scruffy, longhaired bare foot children. Various brightly painted shacks, Romany caravans, totem poles and odd bits of sculpture made from pieces of mechanical equipment lie around. There is a tent and inside it someone is showing a black and white movie. I don’t recognise it, maybe Brief Encounter or The Thirty Nine Steps. Something like that.
It is 1981. Longhaired hippy types are everywhere, old motorbikes lie around discarded, people stretch out in the sun and there is the smell of a bonfire. We are in a small clearing surrounded by tall trees. Through them I can see a cottage, painted in rainbow colours, the doors and windows wide open and music coming out. Beyond this is the road that leads up to the village where my parents live. The village is quiet and conservative with a church, a village hall, a primary school. It has some posh old houses and some new estates with shiny new cars parked outside and on the outlying roads are pink and yellow farm houses with thatched barns and mud covered Land Rovers and fruit trees and a river that winds towards the Blackwater estuary. It has a Lord Lieutenant and a Vicar and there are quiet old men in corduroy suits who collect the contributions in church and busy old women who organise things in the village hall and bored teenagers who hang out on the recreation ground smoking cigarettes and wait for the free bus to Asda. It hasn’t ever before seemed a likely place to start an alternative community. But now it has one: the Great Leighs’ Art Society, who have made their unconventional home in a quiet hollow of common land, a half acre hidden behind some trees, hardly noticeable from the road.
I spend the afternoon like this, wandering around the stalls selling homemade food that I have never seen before, listening to music, poking around the cabins and huts dotted amongst the trees. At some point towards the end of the day, as the sun starts to set, a crowd gathers around a large multicoloured boat-like object that sits at the entrance to the site. I remember it as something like a cross between a Mississippi steamboat and a giant fish. It has a mouth painted on its front with big teeth, a happy rather than scary expression, and large funnels coming out of the top. It has wheels and slowly this strange land bound sculpture starts to move. Lots of people are standing on it dancing and waving as the fish/boat/vehicle pulls out onto the little country road and starts its slow progress up to the village.
This is the highlight of the day, the finale, a moving piece of art puffing its optimistic way around a small Essex village, a utopian gesture of friendship to a sceptical audience. I don’t see the journey of the fish/boat/vehicle, I only imagine it, gaily chugging along, causing an impatient tailback of Ford Granadas and Vauxhall Cavaliers and bemused, slightly hostile onlookers. This is how I remember it: The Great Leighs’ Art Society Summer Solstice Party, 1981.
A year later the Society would be gone. Twenty-six years later the huts can still just about be seen; peeling coloured planks of wood in the undergrowth, stray pieces of rotten clothing draped over a branch, merging with the moss. They must have lasted about three or four years. Their little world, a village within a village, had a brief existence. Now the bits of brick foundations and bare bits of infrastructure are romantic ruins of a former civilisation. At that point in time, the countryside must have seemed the place to try and start something else, something different. It must have seemed like a benign, un-hostile place free of the harshness of the city. All utopias are representations, pictures of a better world. They need to remove themselves from the corroding atmosphere around them, and exist in their own distinct space, but still it seeps through.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)