Month: January 2015

Psychogeography has probably become a literary form because written accounts are the simplest way of recording a walk; there were other options such as maps or art, with several examples of the latter provided by the work of Richard Long. This has led to the development of psychogeography as a literature rather than following other routes.

Another path that could have been taken is occultism. There is a thread taking in Arthur Machen; Alan Moore’s work on ceremonial magic and place, such as in From Hell; Alfred Watkins theory of ley lines; and the work of the London Psychogeographical Association which inspired Grant Morrison.

Grant Morrison’s book the Invisibles was written as a spell, a way of changing the world, what Morrison referred to as a hypersigil. In magic, a sigil is a symbol that represents the aims of a magician and is used to power and focus their intention. A hypersigil is a work of art that is designed to work as a sigil, drawing on the audience too. “The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution”

Morrison identified himself with one of the book’s characters. During an interrogation sequence that spanned multiple issues, as this character was tortured, Morrison himself became dangerously ill, almost dying from MRSA-related septicaemia. These experiences were then themselves worked into the storyline; after recovering Morrison resolved to give the character an easier time from then on.

Psychogeography is a confusion of mingling disciplines, but some of the more interesting promises seem to have been neglected. What would it be like if psychogeography followed its occult influences and attempted to follow the line of magic. What if, rather than trying to craft art, psychogeography attempted to craft hypersigils, to produce changes rather than traces?

Writing about Ivan Chtcheglov’s Formulary for a New Urbanism, Merlin Coverley is somewhat underwhelmed. He says that “the details for establishing such an environment are absent here”, giving as an example lines such as “Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal ‘cathedrals.'”

Coverley is perhaps a little too harsh, because Chtcheglov does have some suggestion; the problem is that the ideas are not as radical as he tries to claim. The main proposal is a division of the city into zones. Chtcheglov writes that “The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.” He gives some examples:

“Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. … The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighbourhoods full of sordid dives and unsavoury characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals”

A proposal to zone a city hardly seems radical, particularly when such things are carried out in most areas. These attempts to control creativity, to plan and organise it, have irritated some people, such as the artist Bill Drummond: “How dare someone tell me where the cultural quarter is? How dare anybody decide where culture can be found, or what it is, or how it can be safely packaged in a sanctioned part of the city”. Having a cultural quarter implies a restriction of creativity to a certain area. One suspects Drummond would not be a fan of Chtcheglov’s proposals.

Even worse, from a Situationist point of view, is the way in which Chtcheglov plans to support his imaginary project:

We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behaviour and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas… though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism.

While Debord was inspired by the idea of play, particularly in relation to Huizinga’s ideas, he was suspicious of ‘leisure’, seeing recreation as a way to keep workers participating in capitalism. The “tolerated and controlled tourism” that Chtcheglov suggests is indistinguishable from this. As charming as some of Chtcheglov’s visions are, the utopian city he suggests, his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, is basically an urban Disneyland.

Given that the Situationists were a movement of artists they produced few iconic images. One that has emerged is Guy Debord’s Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, showing the city as a series of disconnected neighbourhoods with arrows showing the flow between them.

Psychogeography was, in part a mapping project. As Debord writes in Theory of the Derive:

With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Debord was also inspired by a map produced by the French sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, charting the movements made by a student over the space of a year, which shows ““the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives”.

(This work is echoed by the news in 2012 that an algorithm produced by the University of Birmingham could predict where someone would be in 24 hours “even if it’s a major change from their usual routine”)

Maps in psychogeography has been neglected in favour of the derive, possible because a clearer method was developed for drifting, possibly because drifting requires less work. But even the Derive is linked to mapping, with the common methods being to draw arbitrary shapes on a map and take those as routes on the ground. Another technique, suggested by Debord, is to use a map of one place to navigate another: “A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London.”

The Situationist obsession with maps and territory uncovers a contradiction at the heart of the group. Merlin Coverley has quoted Simon Sadler: “Like the imperialist powers that they officially opposed, it was as if the situationists felt that the exploration of alien quarters (of the city rather than the globe) would advance civilisation”

‘Proper travellers’ tend to sneer at the Lonely Planet guidebooks and, in particular, at people that follow them too carefully. Part of this is resentment at how they have produced a familiar environment in very different countries. The repetitive breakfast menus in vastly different countries have led to the creation of the Banana Pancake Trail. Wikipedia describes this trail as including Pushkar, Goa and Varanasi in India; as well as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and even parts of China.

But there are things you need to know about a country before you get there, such as how to get around, what legal rights and cultural expectations surround travellers, and which places are best avoided. It’s also good to know the local scams – while getting involved in a jewellery investment in a foreign country is foolhardy, there are elegant cons that easily capture the jet-lagged and unwary.

I would never have gone to India without a guidebook but my favourite moments have been places that were a little off that trail: cities like Gwalior or Lucknow that are almost completely ignored by tourists; chai shacks at the sides of busy roads. And I’ve done better with hotels by turning up in a new city and seeing what is available. I could probably discard the guidebook and have a more interesting time without it.

Perhaps the guidebooks shouldn’t list establishments but rather give you just enough information about a place before you arrive: what you should see there, places to start looking for hotels if you can’t find somewhere near the station; where to move on to if you can’t find anywhere to settle. A guide that is part of the trip rather than trying to define it. One that persuades you to go and gives you the confidence to see what happens.

A few years ago I attended the first of Brighton’s traditional March of the Mermaid events. I walked in the drizzle from Hove Lawns to Brighton Pier with a crowd of people in fancy dress. At the traffic lights near the aquariums, an Italian woman asked me what the festival was and I told her. She asked me what it was for and I couldn’t say.

I do know that the event was based upon the Coney Island Mermaid Parade, an event held in New York to celebrate the start of the summer. That tradition only began in 1983 meaning it is only a little over thirty years old.

There are a number of recent traditions in Brighton. Pride has expanded from a small march in 1973 to one of the biggest events in the town. In 1993, the community group Same Sky created the Burning of the Clocks as a winter solstice celebration, intended to have “a secular format that can be enjoyed by all regardless of faith or creed”. The event survived funding cuts and even cancellation due to bad weather in 2009.

Other traditions have had a few years of success and then faltered. White Night had ongoing problems with funding. Hanover Day had problems with the cost of insurance. The Brighton Christmas Day Swim is being suppressed due to safety concerns. In 2015, the Kemptown Carnival is taking a year off to “ fully explore a more sustainable model for the Kemp Town Carnival”. And, controversially, the Brighton Zombie Walk was shot in the head due to health and safety concerns because it was too successful and involved too many people.

Traditions come and go. Many of the folk events that claim centuries of history are Victorian inventions and reinventions. It doesn’t matter if these events last two years to two hundred, they still chart out the year and structure the seasons. Even if they soon falter, it’s worth creating more of them.

A few years back, I visited the Indian town of Orchha. It has an amazing fort and temple, beautiful countryside; there are huge tombs where vultures fly at dusk. Despite this, Orchha is overshadowed by the nearby town of Kajuraho, famous for its erotic temple friezes. There were still hotels, restaurants and gift-shops in Orchha it was a much more relaxed place than Khajuarho.

I ate a couple of times in Orchha’s Blue Planet restaurant. It was originally called El Bulli until forced to change by representatives from Ferran Adrià’s restaurant. I learned it was now fending off action from another Blue Planet in Khajuraho

Not that it mattered, because the restaurant was due to be torn down. The local authorities were redeveloping the town, making formal gardens for the temples, aiming to bring in more tourists. And I knew that when I next came to this place next it would be different. This sleepy town would be more intense and more expensive.

I can’t help feel conflicted. I’d like to know this quiet town was waiting for me to return, even though I imagine a lot of people will be pleased to have more tourist money coming in. Besides, I would not have gone to Orchha myself if I hadn’t known there were places to stay.

Time after time, I arrive in a town that the Lonely Planet tells me has been ruined by development. Sometimes I’ve arrived prepared for disappointment and found breath-taking beauty. I don’t mind the presence of the hotels – for some people, my idyllic Orchha will seem very different to their ideal of the place.

Somewhere amongst my stuff, in a drawer or a box somewhere, is a Keep Brighton Weird badge. They were produced about 5 years ago by Ramsey Holman a local artist originally from Portland Oregon.

I’ve never been to Portland but I imagine it as a more twisted and intense version of Brighton. The show Portlandia desribed the town as ‘where young people go to retire’ which chimes with Brighton’s reputation as a graveyard of ambition. Portland is also described in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fugitives and Refugees and was where Katherine Dunn wrote the classic novel Geek Love.

The slogan Keep Portland Weird was part of a campaign based on an earlier Keep Austin Weird movement. The trademarked slogan both advertises Portland’s reputation for weirdness as well as marking it as something endangered. If we don’t do something, then Portland will become just another place.

I grew up in Sussex and came to Brighton for university as it seemed like the most exciting place. I loved the strangeness of the place and the wonderful cheap shops. Over twenty years the town has changed. The amazing second-hand bookshops have disappeared. Rents have become astronomical. Music venues have disappeared. The weirdness is still here but some people complain that it’s more self-conscious. It seems like everyone I know complains about hipsters, even the ones with beards and sleeve tattoos. But I’d rather have artificial weirdness than no weirdness at all.

One of may favourite things about Brighton is the street art. And if I had to pick a favourite graffiti artist it would be Dean.

Visually, Dean’s work was unexciting. He was a tagger who wrote his name in large black and white capitals. The beauty in his work was in the places where he put them. Some were obvious, drawn on railway bridges, or most notably, on Anston House. Others were harder to find.

(Anston House is famous as the most ugly building in Sussex and has been derelict for years now. For a while it was decorated with colourful portraits but even they did little to cheer it up. Following a murder, it has been surrounded by high fences. When I was a boy, my Dad worked there and I remembered visiting his office, seeing the computers in the basement. I remember rows of hanging magnetic tape and piles of punchcards)

Dean sometimes hid his tag. I remember one in a derelict building on the Steine. Another was described to me by a friend as a ‘Winter Dean’. It was on a brick wall on railway land near New England Road, hidden by trees and the only time you could see it was after the leaves had fallen.

I don’t know who Dean was. Some long deleted message board had a thread where someone saying that tag was a memorial to a graffiti artist who died fleeing the police. Another forum said that “he had great reach but a poor tag”. Seeing the name around the town made me happy and it became a game, with people swapping new ones they’d noticed. Dean was even mentioned in an edition of the Cheeky Guide. There are still a few Deans around the town but before long they will all be gone.

Travelling to London as a commuter, I always looked up for the view across the Ouse Valley viaduct. And one day I spotted it, painted on a feeding trough. Someone had come out here, in the middle of nowhere, to paint their mark where train-travellers could see it. The care and thought amused me, brightened up a part of that journey.

Doing my MA meant reading a lot of literature that I would not otherwise have encountered. As well as studying the Situationists and seeing how they related to other theorists, or learning about Georges Perec and Oulippo, I also encountered many poems and stories I would not have found on my own. One of these was Wallace Steven’s Anecdote of the Jar.

English literature courses spend a lot of time discussing how one should interpret a poem, and the discipline offers a range of different filters: Marxism, feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, &c. Some of the textbooks in particular treated literature as a patient who might respond to different treatments. I encountered other students who chafed at this, saying poetry shouldn’t be a puzzle, something to be solved and simplified. The best poetry is that which is unstable, that doesn’t quite surrender to interpretation.

Wallace Steven’s Anecdote of the Jar, first published in 1919, sounds simple, beginning “I placed a jar in Tennessee”, telling how “It made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill.” Wikipedia refers to the way in which different interpretations can approach it: “from a poststructuralist perspective the poem is concerned with temporal and linguistic disjunction… a feminist perspective reveals a poem concerned with male dominance over a traditionally feminized landscape”. We could talk about the act of creation, about contamination or even colonialism. Some people have drawn links between this poem and Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn.

The Steven’s poem is one of the pieces of literature from the course that I remember most fondly. The professor who introduced it took a broadly post-structualist approach, while never compromising the basic act described in the poem. A poet placing an object in a landscape then looking at how that has transformed the environment.