whitebait

the untouchable

So Nick and I walked up Whitehall in the hard-edged spring sunlight, past the statue of Charles I encased in its protective galvanised privy. On all sides were giant mounds of rubble over which ambulance men and Home Guard recruits were scrambling like ragpickers. In the Strand a cascading water main was incongruously suggestive of Versailles. Yet the destruction, however extensive, was curiously disappointing; the street seemed not ruined, but rearranged, as if a vast rebuilding scheme were under way. I had, I realised, put too much hope in the air war; what the newspapers nowadays like to call the fabric of society is depressingly strong.

Whitebait is about three quarters through John Banville's brilliantly written The Untouchable. This quote comes from a section of the book where the narrator, double agent Victor Maskell (strongly based on Anthony Blunt of the Cambridge Five),  has just had his first homosexual experience the night before during one of the most intensive London blitz bombings which, as he has also discovered, has just killed his father-in-law. Maskell is one of those brilliantly contradictory characters in the sense of being utterly repellant in terms of his generally callous disregard for the lives of others, but compelling in his witty descriptions and sleazy charm.

some academic blogs

A quick post that follows on from Whitebait updating his blog roll (scroll down the right hand column of this page).

On Friday evening Whitebait went to the book launch of Ken Gelder's Subcultures: Cultural HIstories and Social Practices at a Melbourne institution, Readings bookstore  in Lygon St, Carlton. For a  long time--before Amazon was popular and before some of the mega-chains like Borders opened up in the city (in fact, one went in right across the road)--Readings was the only place you could go to get a decent selection of books in the humanities area. It had a comprehensive academic section that used to be run by one of my first student friends in the English Department at the nearby University of Melbourne. In fact Readings is one of those places where any number of students and aspiring writers seem to end up working  for a while; the more actorly types became waiters at Mario's in Brunswick Street. Anyway, the launch was surprisingly fun, helped immensely by the rather droll and 'anti-launch' speeches of Justin Clemens and Ken himself (both of whom are old colleagues of mine). A whole crew of staff and students were there from Melbourne University - it was rather interesting to check the fashion of the students as it is so radically different from those I teach at RMIT. This lot seemed very boho chic (for want of better adjectives - I really needed the keen fashion analysis skills of A Wild Young Under-Whimsy to decode what was going on there).

The nicest surprise of the evening was running into humanities researcher (aka Stephanie) and being able to tell her that I'd been lurking and enjoying reading her beautifully written and moving blog. Strangely enough I'd had a rare chat with her partner, who is a Professor down at my University, just that day. Though I've known Stephanie since my postgrad days I haven't run into her for quite a while (ie, back before she started her blog) and Whitebait had that weird moment of misalignment between the everyday and the virtually augmented me as I wondered whether to immediately say something about her battle with breast cancer or whether that was 'private' stuff I shouldn't leap into conversation about. After all, I hadn't known her that well previously. Silly really (but also interesting in terms of thinking about differently established social relations that aren't always straightforwardly ready to be articulated together). And as FrauleinDrDr commented to me afterwards, Stephanie was looking great so it probably wasn't going to be one of those times when my foot gets firmly stuck in mouth in a train wreck sort of way. Though Whitebait's capacity in that respect is formidable ...

And Whitebait also wanted to mention a couple of other academic blogs he is enjoying. First of all, Savage Minds, an anthropologist group blog. Always has interesting discussions. I have been particularly enjoying posts on the role of organisational bodies that oversee ethics processes in American universities - not everyone's cup of tea as a topic to be sure but I'm involved in this stuff pretty heavily at RMIT so the comparisons are interesting to me! And also I enjoy the lovely collection of bits and bobs that comes from Purse Lip Square Jaw (aka Anne) who is also the manager and most regular poster at Space and Culture. Anne recently posted one of the best responses I've ever heard or read to the perennial  'When will you get your dissertation done?' question.

Finally, for those interested in the world of web 2.0 check out craigbellamy.net. Whitebait first picked up on Craig's interesting work when someone referred him to milkbar.com.au, Craig's "‘hypertextual history’ documentary about the inner-city suburb of Fitzroy, in Melbourne, Australia" (where Whitebait now lives). A great project - but unfortunately only parts of it are still accessible now. Craig filled in and taught one of Whitebait courses at RMIT last year but has now gone on to better and brighter things(!) at Kings College in London.  I hope he is enjoying life there. For those still around Melbourne, and interested in similar academic discussions and upcoming events concerning technology, communication, democracy and the whole shebang you might also want to sign up to my energetic colleague, Terry Johal's RSS  feed. Terry (via Mr Brown) also alerted me to this terrific instructional video, which you should watch if a teacher, on the latest crafty strategies being employed to visually lengthen essays.

global city-countries

The most important place to London is New York and to New York is London and Tokyo [...] London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York.

-Academic writer on cities Richard Sennett (see also this 2001 profile) in a recent BBC News story (via Space and Culture).

Whose part of your city-country? As a Melburnian, Whitebait's country consists of Melbourne and Sydney (and once upon a time London). But if he was in Sydney he'd be in country of Sydney, Los Angeles and New York ...

the potability of place

I always longed to live in a city where you couldn't drink the water. Here at last it was; a far cry from Melbourne so prim and proper and potable.

-Barry Humphries: More Please (1992)

crash vs wonderland

Whitebait finally managed to watch Crash a couple of weekends ago. He was going to post something lengthy on it (yeah, sure!) but frankly the film doesn't deserve it. Formally the film it is very good, technically well-executed and it has a number of good performances, but overall  it leaves this viewer feeling Siberian. The much earlier Falling Down, despite its conservative sentiments, does the LA racially divided thing much better (Crash tries to historically update in a sense by finally including Iranians--mistaken for Arabs--in the LA racial/ethnic panopoly post-9/11, whereas Falling Down's defining historical moment was the city's 1992 post-Rodney King uprising). Short Cuts and Magnolia are in another league in terms of the multiple characters and intersecting narratives form. Crash doesn't really move on or offer anything different to these films: it could have easily have taken an Oscar for soulless, calculated liberalism.  Disappointing.

Luckily Whitebait also got out Michael WInterbottom's Wonderland (definitely not the one with Val Kilmer in it) for a rerun that same weekend. Resolutely lo-fi  and partially improvised it is still brilliant and deserves the comment I gave on my earlier holiday screenings list (possibly the most effort Whitebait has put into a single post). And -- sorry but this could be considered a spoiler -- it makes one of the cleverest moves re the old 'strangers in the city - how are they connected?' device. It only very slowly unfolds that these are all members of the same family. The irony, the brilliance!

sonic hauntings

K-punk convinces Whitebait that this is an album worth hearing:

[L]istening to Burial as I walk through damp and drizzly South London streets in this abortive Spring, it strikes me that the LP is very London Now - which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.

[...]

Burial is an elegy for the hardcore continuum, a Memories from the Haunted Ballroom for the rave generation. It is like walking into the abadoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction. Muted air horns flare like the ghosts of raves past. Broken glass cracks underfoot. MDMA flashbacks bring London to unlife in the way that hallucinogens brought demons crawling out of the subways in Jacob's Ladder's New York. Audio hallucinations transform the city's rhythms into inorganic beings, more dejected than malign. You see faces in the clouds and hear voices in the crackle. What you momentarily thought was muffled bass turns out only to be the rumbling of tube trains.

What a great cover!

tube line personalities

From David Mitchell's exquisite Ghostwritten:

As the fine denizens of London Town know, each tube line has a distinct personality and range of mood swings. The Victoria line for example, breezy and reliable. The Jubilee Line, the young disappointment of the family, branching out to the suburbs, eternally having extensions planned, twisting round to Greewich, and back under the river out east somewhere. The Disrict and Circle Line, well, even Death would rather fork out for a taxi if he's in a hurry. Crammed with commuters for King's Cross or Paddington, and crammed with museum-bound tourists who don't know the craftier short-cuts, it's as bad as how I imagine Tokyo. I had a professor once who asked us to prove that the Circle Line really does go around in a circle. Nobody could. I was dead impressed at the time. Now what impresses me is that he'd persuaded someone to pay him to come up with that sort of tosh. Docklands Light Railway, the nouveau riche neighbour, with its Prince Regent, West India Quay and its Gallions Reach and its Royal Albert. Stentorian Piccadilly wouldn't approve of such artyfartyness, and nor would his twin uncle, Bakerloo. Central, the middle-aged cousin, matter-of-fact, direct, no forking off or going the long way round. That's about it for the main lines, except the Metropolitan which is too boring to mention, except that it's a nice fuchsia colour and you take it to visit the dying.
            Then you have the Oddball lines, like Shakespeare's Oddball plays. Pericles, Hammersmith and City, East Verona Line, Titus of Waterloo.
           The Northern Line is black on the maps. It's the deepest. It has the most suicides, you're most likely to get mugged on it, and its art students are most likely to be future Bond Girls. There's something doom laden about the Northern Line. Its station names: Morden, Brent Cross, Goodge Street, Archway, Elephant and Castle, the resurrected Mornington Crescent. It was closed for years, I remember imagining I was on a probe peering into the Titanic as the train passed through. Yep, the Northern Line is the psycho of the family.Those bare-walled stations south of the Thames that can't attract advertisers. Not even stair-lift manufacturers will advertise in Kennington Tube Station. I've never been to Kennington but if I did I bet there'd be nothing but run-down fifties housing blocks, closed-down bingo halls and a used-car place where tatty plastic banners fluppetty-flup in the homeless wind. The sort of place where best-forgotten films starring British rock stars as working-class anti-heroes are set. There but for the grace of my credit cards go I.
          London is a language. I guess all places are.

            

blow

UPDATE: Unfortunately the whale didn't make it.

Remember that recent report:

So much cocaine is being used in London that traces of the white powdered narcotic can be detected in the River Thames.

Scientific research commissioned by the Sunday Telegraph, estimated two kilogrammes of cocaine, or 80,000 lines, spill into the river every day after it has passed through users’ bodies and sewage treatment plants.

It extrapolated that 150,000 lines of the illegal drug are snorted in the British capital every day, 15 times higher than the official figure given by the Home Office.

And now, as this ABC news online image shows, there is a whale lolling about in the Thames. Hmmm, I wonder if they keep up with the news? 'Yeah, erm, I'm lost and really, really trying to get back to the North Atlantic'.

holiday screenings

So it’s that time of year when some serious listing begins (for a really mental take on this--in the best sense--check Woebot’s beautiful scans of his top 100 records when they are successfully loaded).

So, Whitebait would like to offer his guide to twenty classic ‘city’ films worth watching for the first time or once again. This list is for when you might be lurking at the video shop over the next week or so looking for something interesting to watch. Get more details on each release at imd. Nothing surprising nor obscurantist here – just a mix of generally well know popular/fun/arty stuff. He isn’t arguing that these are ‘the’ best city films (and do pitch in with your own recommendations in the comments please), just the ones that have tended to lodge in his mind for whatever reason. His definition of a ‘city film’ is one where the urban setting or environment takes on the status of an actor, or becomes a key point of meditation.

So, it isn’t enough that the film is just has the city as a backdrop - that would be too easy wouldn’t it.

In alphabetical order (doh!):

1. All About My Mother - this may seem tenuous given the criteria but it gets on the list for that one perfect Freudian scene when Manuela is shuttling from Madrid to Barcelona. A train tunnel, an exquisite musical buildup and then a taxi past Sagrada Familiar.  One of the most exhilarating moments of recent cinema.

2. Bladerunner – is it Los Angeles or really Tokyo? Doesn’t matter as it is still stands brilliantly today as we keep on marching into the cyborg future that arrived 100 years ago.

3. Chinatown – yes, Los Angeles figures strongly. Crooked water politics and noir in the land of sunshine.

4. Chungking Express – crowded and deserted Hong Kong exteriors and the gorgeous Faye Wong sneaking into a policeman’s house to provide a free makeover (life before Queer Eye!).

5. Collateral – brilliant in every way. And a great tongue-in-cheek thriller ending in the sense that like all good recent LA films it slams the idea that there is life in the city beyond car travel - by equating the metro rail system with death.

6. Dark City – familiar sci-fi noir themes but very handsomely and adeptly executed.

7. Falling Down – yes, this film has a crappy racist politics at the heart of it but it is one hundred times more complex and intelligent in the way it goes about these complex politics than detractors will acknowledge. And in doing so it offers some handy insights into the politics of city space and mobility.

8. Fellini’s Roma/La Dolce Vita – Whitebait learnt some Italian for a while and this was a great way to practice. He likes the essay-like Roma just because it seemed a damn weird movie the first time around. And the second time.

9. La Haine – was a film of note before the recent Parisian uprisings but W. suspects it might be even more gripping and pertinent now.

10. L.A. Story – still some great and eminently repeatable one-liners despite the unsatisfying romance narrative at the centre. And a reference to that great Martin poem, ‘Oh pointy birds, oh pointy pointy …’

11. Manhattan – Whitebait remembers a time when he did trust film critics who would write that the latest Woody Allen film was worth shelling out for at the cinema.

12. Naked – a brutal and funny film in equal doses. Life on some very dark English streets

13. Short Cuts – this is tied up in some bad memories for Whitebait (and he still hasn’t plucked up the courage to see it again) but because Raymond Carver’s stories were the inspiration it still goes on the list.

14. Summer of Sam / Do the Right Thing – while DtRT is the acknowledged classic (so damn hot and tense on those New York streets) … SoS goes back to the late seventies and reworks similar themes with another great soundtrack.

15. The Big Sleep – who knew it rained in Los Angeles so much?

16. The End of Violence / Wings of Desire – EoV isn’t a successful film but it has a great eerie take on L.A. and Bill Pulman is in great form. More interesting than satisfying. If you aren’t in the mood for that then go straight to WoD.

17. The Last Wave – a completely different representation of Sydney in its articulation of the unease that remains in a place forcibly acquired from its indigenous inhabitants.

18. Tokyo Story - it is nearly all studio sets and yet it paints a damning picture of the role of the urban in the disintegration of familial bonds and individual selfishness (Beware – the pace is slow in a good way).

19. Sans Soleil – more an essay on memory and therefore quite a different viewing experience. But many of the scenes from Tokyo remain etched in my mind.

20. Wonderland – would contend for number one if that was the objective of this exercise. A moped riding through the streets, trains in the night, a Michael Nyman score, blind dating, London streets, a barking neighbour’s dog who drives a woman to the brink … this is The Poetry of City Life 101. Exceptional.

we love music

Yesterday a ridiculously good-looking and cheap mix CD (US$5 inc. postage) arrived on Whitebait's doorstep from somewhere in New York. What a thrill - for this blogger things arriving in the post be they things you buy, postcards from friends, official letters and so on, still have something parallel to the 'magic' (though not as powerful) recently described by pavlov's cat in a discussion of handwriting.

So, the mix CD is Rvng Prsnts Mx4: Strange Rhythms (Mike Simonetti and Dan Selzer). The sleeve is brilliantly designed and the whole thing sounds absolutely fantastic. Whitebait played it three times in a row just for kicks (while marking exams!). He is not sure how accurate it is to really say this ... but to him it is a brilliant example of the distillation of a city and associated sounds (New York) onto a CD. As the blurb puts it: 'The mix you hold in your hands was recorded during a time [late 1990s? - W] when there was nobody who would say "man, Italo-disco is played out" or "don't you know that track is on so-and-so's mix/an import bootleg/a CitiBank commercial?" No, those were more innocent times. It features Italo-Disco, New Wave, Post-Punk, No Wave, Actual-Disco, Danish Remixes of Glam One-Hit Wonders from ex-Bubblegum Artists, you know, all the same stuff everyone else plays.'

Props to the excellent Woebot for the recommendation. And see Woebot's image of an instance of 'baffling' label warfare recently while out music shopping (Whitebait can't understand all the references but he gets the spirit of the commentary).

And while we are on music ... check out the full strip of this hilarious 'reclaim the party' narrative at farmer-glitch.   Spotted  thanks to poorly controlled. (Pavlov's cat - if you are reading please note a couple of creative uses of the recently discussed 'w' word can be found here).