Psychogeographic Review

Psychogeographic Review’s Recommendations – June 2014

Posted on 02/06/2014 by Bobby Seal

This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

William Atkins – ‘The Moor: Lives, Landscape, Literature’ (2014)

It was only when I read this book that I came to appreciate how deeply ingrained into the British psyche is the idea of ‘the moor’. Cast an eye over some of our fiction and you’ll see what I mean. After all, where would Emily Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Williamson or Ted Hughes be without the inspiration of this island’s wet, rolling uplands? William Atkins’s book covers the history, topography and the myths of Britain’s moorlands. This may not be the definitive overview, but it is a pretty good starting point.

W.G. Sebald – ‘After Nature’ (2003)

After Nature is an extended prose poem and was Sebald’s first literary work to be translated into English and released in the UK. It is not an easy read but, for those of us who love Sebald’s subsequent works, it is a fascinating early exploration of some of his later themes, in particular the sometimes strained relationship between humankind and nature.

Arnold Bennett – ‘Anna of the Five Towns’ (1902)

Anna of the Five Towns is Bennett’s detailed portrait of a small community struggling to come to terms with the onset of all-consuming industrial expansion. At the centre of his story is one of his most vividly created characters, Anna Tellwright, a strong, passionate young woman squeezed between the strictures of evangelical Christianity and parental expectations.

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

Marisa Anderson – ‘Traditional & Public Domain Songs’ (2014)

Marisa Anderson is an accomplished archtop and lap steel guitar player whose style is heavily influenced by her love of blues and country and her classical training. Originally available on vinyl import only, this album has now been released for digital download and comprises Anderson’s interpretations of a baker’s dozen of traditional songs, from Just a Closer Walk with Thee to Will the Circle be Unbroken.

Mica Levi – ‘Under the Skin’ (2014)

Mica Levi uses deceptively simple layers of string and electronic instrumentation to create this, her soundtrack for the movie of the same name. Rather like Jonathan Glazer’s film, Levi works from a palette of muted colours and minor keys, but she succeeds in creating an atmospheric series of musical pieces that transcend the limits of the ‘soundtrack’ genre.

Billie Holiday – ‘Lady in Satin’ (1958)

Lady in Satin was released towards the end of Billie’s life and is a magnificent, if somewhat downbeat, album. Whilst her voice is beginning to show signs of the hard life she had experienced, Billie delivers songs like The End of a Love Affair and Glad to be Unhappy with heart-rending emotional power and depth.

and watching:

‘Tracks’ – John Curran (2013)

Based on Robyn Davidson’s memoir of the same name, Tracks is a stunning evocation of the Australian landscape. It tells the story of a young woman’s 2,000 mile trek across the outback with just her dog and four camels for company. Oh, and the occasional National Geographic photographer too.

‘Locke’ – Steven Knight (2013)

Cinema’s homage to the mobile phone. Locke is staged entirely within the confines of a car making the two-hour journey from Birmingham to London. Through a series of phone calls to his wife, his work colleagues and his pregnant lover the story of Ivan Locke’s life, past and present, unfolds and expands.

‘Lift to the Scaffold’ Louis Malle (1958)

Starring Jeanne Moreau and with a soundtrack by Miles Davis, Lift to the Scaffold is a gripping noir thriller and an early example of French New Wave film.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Arnold Bennett, Australia, Billie Holiday, French New Wave, Jeanne Moreau, lap steel guitar, Locke, Louis Malle, Marisa Anderson, Mica Levi, The Potteries, Tracks, W.G Sebald, William Atkins | Leave a comment

One Year – Week 36

Posted on 29/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

One Year is a project through which I intend to construct a daily photographic record of a single view: the view from my study window at around 8.00a.m. each day when I sit down to work. One Year will annotate each picture with a note of the weather for that morning and the morning’s main news headline from the BBC News site. In addition, there will be a note taking a key sentence or two from my daily journal.

May 23^rd 2014

Heavy rain shower

UKIP vote surges in local elections

Lightning in the circle of unity; the flash in the pan

May 24th 2014

Light cloud

Labour defends election performance

“Goo’night. Goo’night.” He gives a word of farewell to the landlord and every corner of the room. Eliot’s patrician ear captured only a dim echo of the real thing. The pub wasn’t his milieu, not his place of worship

May 25th 2014

Light rain

US police confirm drive-by killer

Pale, underfed bodies from Govan, Maesteg and Stepney. Barely trained, poorly armed, baking in the Andalucian sun. Dying in the Andalucian heat

May 26th 2014

Sunny intervals

Farage hails ‘historic’ Euro win

Imagism seeks to produce a poetry that is “hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.”

May 27th 2014

Sunny intervals

Lloyds Bank announces TSB flotation

To the other side of the Pennines for the day and the chilly embrace of the easterly wind

May 28th 2014

Light rain

Leaders agree to review EU policies

Williams tells us that this is the child “who robs her” and, indeed, the very structure of the poem emphasises a sense of alienation between the two in the way it is separated out into its mother and child sections

May 29th 2014

Light rain

Cable: I’m supporting party leader

One reached the point in one’s life when one felt one had lived beyond one’s time. She remembered Daddy saying that, and now she understood.

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

The purpose of this project is to explore continuity and change. Over the course of a year, I will build up a daily visual record of the same view. Despite my best efforts, though, I will not be able to replicate the ‘same’ view each day: it is subject to changes in the environment, such as the weather or the time the sun rises. But it is also affected by changes caused by me, the observer. For instance, my feelings that morning may change the way I hold the camera or, inadvertently, the image may show my breath on the glass from getting too close to the window.

Looking out at the view on this, the first morning of One Year, I see a scene comprising sky, trees and rooftops. I don’t see much evidence of human activity just yet, but that may come later in the year when the leaf cover begins to thin out. Being on a flight path, we also see the odd vapour trail or aeroplane light in the sky too.

Some of the changes that will become evident will be pretty obvious, such as the seasons. Other changes will be more subtle. My daily notes will give some insight into what is going on inside my head that morning, from my journal entry, and there will also be a record of what is happening in the world in general, from the news headline.

But the ‘view’ I am recording in One Year is not neutral, it is selected and framed by me. Similarly, my journal extracts are selected from a much larger body of work; it is the ‘insight’ into my thinking that I choose to present. Even the ‘news headline’ cannot be regarded as neutral, for it is subject to BBC editorial bias.

But there is a third party in the One Year process, one that is outside of my control. That person is you, the reader of this blog, the interested observer of the project. I want people to bring their own interpretations, views and insights to this project. All comments received will be reproduced in my weekly project reports.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged psychogeography, skyscapes | Leave a comment

One Year – Week 35

Posted on 22/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

May 16^th 2014

Sunny

Mis-spelling penalty for energy farm

I prefer my version

May 17^th 2014

Sunny

India’s Modi in Delhi victory parade

A forgotten Anthony Newley film with a soundtrack by Kenny Graham

May 18^th 2014

Sunny

Bank chief warns over housing market

Jesse Hector, the guy should have been a rock star, but instead the last I heard of him he was working as a cleaner

May 19^th 2014

Light rain shower

AstraZeneca rejects new Pfizer bid

The trees a smear of green along the valley side, the house a hazy shape beyond the trees

May 20^th 2014

Sunny intervals

May hails Abu Hamza guilty verdict

I mention Kathy Acker’s name and receive nothing but blank stares

May 21^st 2014

Sunny

Charles ‘compared Russia to Nazis’

Sooner or later life’s journey takes us all into the dark wood

May 22^nd 2014

Light rain

Attack in China’s Urumqi kills 31

A clutch of shapeless characters

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged psychogeography, skyscapes | Leave a comment

One Year – Week 34

Posted on 15/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

May 9^th 2014

Light rain shower

MPs raise concerns over tax powers

A cityscape of echoes and reminders

May 10^th2014

Light cloud

Safe nursing levels recommended

…and a chill of remembering

May 11^th 2014

Heavy rain

Coalition row over school funding

Buckshee is such a fantastic word

May 12^th 2014

Heavy rain

Ukraine rebels claim poll victory

May, and the air is full of rumour

May 13^th 2014

Sunny intervals

US planes search for Nigerian girls

My new business website is coming together at last

May 14^th 2014

Sunny

Turkey mine blast death toll rises

Puzzling over a one-line note in my journal from a few weeks back: ‘Gramsci fishermen’. Beats me too!

May 15^th 2014

Sunny

Turkish strike over mine disaster

But what if someone in The Bull throws beer over Morrissey?

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged psychogeography, skyscapes | Leave a comment

Emily Dickinson: Intoxicated by Life

Posted on 12/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

I taste a liquor never brewed,
From tankards scooped in pearl;
Not all the vats upon the Rhine
Yield such an alcohol!

Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.

When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the foxglove’s door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!

Till seraphs swing their snowy hats,
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!

(Poem 51: ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’ quoted from The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth Poetry Library)

In this poem, Emily Dickinson celebrates the intoxicating effect that comes from contemplating and embracing the beauty of creation. Grasping for an analogy of the natural world’s effect upon her, she equates it with the inebriation that comes from consuming the very best of alcohol. But for Dickinson, nature offers a beauty more exhilarating than the flavour of the finest wines:

Not all the Vats upon the Rhine Yield such an alcohol!

Dickinson’s poem takes the form of four stanzas each comprising four lines. Her verse form includes a rhyme on each second and fourth line: ‘door and ‘more, ‘run’ and ‘sun’, for instance. But she also uses a slant rhyme with ‘pearl’ and ‘alcohol’. As with many of her other works, Dickinson’s use of punctuation is unusual. Her use of dashes, particularly in the second stanza, gives the poem a certain breathless quality when read aloud, as if to emphasise the poet’s state of inebriation. By implication this is not just an ode to nature, but one to the poetic form itself.

From the first line through to the last, becoming drunk on alcohol is used as a metaphor for the heady effect of drinking in life and all the wonders nature has to offer. The effects are described in emotional, spiritual and physical terms.

Dickinson’s emotional response to nature is apparent in her happy contemplation of ‘endless summer days’ while a spiritual element is touched on with her reference to ‘Seraphs’ and ‘Saints’. But it is the physical elation that nature can produce which drives this poem: words such as ‘taste’, ‘Inebriate’, ‘Reeling’, ‘drink’ and ‘swing’ all suggest a joyful physicality. Indeed, there is a hint of almost carnal pleasure in this celebration: ‘And Debauchee of Dew – ‘

Emily Dickinson employs descriptions of colour throughout this poem to make her language all the more vivid. Her palette includes ‘Tankards scooped in Pearl –‘, suggesting the glowing white of a pearl-encrusted tankard plunging into the effervescent creamy-white bubbles of foaming beer and warm summer rain from an otherwise clear sky is hinted at by the phrase ‘Molten Blue’. Taking up the white motif once more, she evokes billowy white clouds with ‘Seraphs with their snowy Hats’.

Nature, then, offers the promise of a liquor better than any brewed by Man and, by the final stanza, a joyful Dickinson, the ‘little Tippler’, is seemingly completely at one with the universe as she steadies herself by ‘Leaning against the Sun!’

From the foxgloves of a summer meadow, up to the wispy clouds and blue sky and finally to the sun above and beyond all of this, Emily Dickinson paints a word picture of creation in all its glory. Although she spent most of her adult life in her room at home in Amherst, she shows in this poem that her imagination and her creative response to the world was limitless.

Posted in Home | Tagged Amherst, Emily Dickinson, Poetry | 5 Comments

The London Nobody Knows

Posted on 09/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

I first saw this film in a late night television slot in the 1970s. It was made by Norman Cohen in 1968, but rather than presenting yet another montage of ‘swinging’ London and Carnaby Street, his film seemed to capture an older, grimier London, albeit one that was fast-disappearing. I spent my childhood in Wales, but I always felt a strong spatial affinity with London. My parents had lived in the city until just before my birth and I was brought up on tales of life in London, an almost mythical city, or so it seemed to me. Fed by these tales, London grew and solidified in my imagination.

My parents had lived in Chelsea, on the top floor of a rather grand house in Eaton Square. Dad was a painter and decorator for a brewery and Mum cooked and cleaned for the elderly spinster who owned the house and lived alone in faded gentility. From rural Wales my childhood imagination was fired by stories of the street characters of 1950s Chelsea. Dad would often talk, for instance, of the bare-chested, kilted Scotsman who would march proudly up the King’s Road each day only to stumble back home later with a belly full of beer.

The London of that time was a city of smoke, smog and post-war austerity. It was afflicted with a severe housing crisis and, in my parents’ part of the city, squatting was a widespread response. There was still rationing in the 1950s and, even at the time of Cohen’s film ten years later, the people in the streets still looked shabby and pinched. It was only when I watched this film again to review it that I realised it was filmed in colour; in my memory it existed in tones of grey.

The London Nobody Knows is a film based on the 1962 book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher, who also scripted the movie. Cohen employs the smoothly patrician James Mason, dressed as if on his way to a country weekend, to be our guide and narrator. His somewhat archaic narration adds to the general Victorian atmosphere of this portrait of a city.

Cohen’s camera captures images of meths drinkers, feral kids, buskers, pie and mash shops and Victorian sewers. So much of what we see is gone: the faded shell of an old music hall in Camden now sadly lost, unlicensed street performers, pubs and greasy-spoon caffs. Indeed, so much of the London shown in this film is now just a memory, swallowed up by global commercial homogeneity.

This is not picture-postcard London, it is a meander through the fetid underbelly of the city which, almost while the camera rolled, was disappearing under a swathe of concrete. The script leaves us in no doubt that this was not to Geoffrey Fletcher’s taste. The soundtrack too matches the odd, curmudgeonly mood of the film: discordant plinks and cymbal crashes give some sequences, such as the montage from the pie, mash and eel shop, a decidedly surreal air.

Meanwhile, resplendent in tweed jacket and flat cap, prodding into corners with his furled umbrella, James Mason strides from one grimy location to the next. He talks awkwardly with homeless people near a night shelter and kicks despondently at rubble on the floor of the condemned Bedford Theatre. But perhaps the most enjoyable sequence is when he visits a Victorian gents toilet in Holborn, complete with goldfish in the glass cisterns:

‘here, one might say, one finds the only true democracy because all men are equal in the eyes of the lavatory attendant’.

The London Nobody Knows is an enjoyably bizarre film. It’s also a time-capsule of half-forgotten images and a reminder of a London that existed somewhere between the Victorian era and post-modernism. This is the London of my parents. Or, perhaps more correctly, the London their tales created in my imagination. Watching it makes me feel a nostalgia for something which maybe never quite existed. They don’t make psychogeography like this anymore.

Posted in Home | Tagged Camden, Chelsea, Geoffrey Fletcher, James Mason, London, music hall, Norman Cohen | 14 Comments

One Year – Week 33

Posted on 08/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

May 2^nd 2014

Thick cloud

Adams spends second night in custody

The voice of the water was honeyed, soothing

May 3^rd 2014

Light cloud

Army action resumes in east Ukraine

The taste of brine and iodine on his tongue, a crushing pressure in his chest so that it felt as if his lungs would burst

May 4^th 2014

Light cloud

East Ukraine stronghold ‘surrounded’

But it was the rucksack that bothered him; its weight pulled at his shoulders and seemed to crush all his joints right down to his knees. Like the accumulated load of his life heaped up onto his back

May 5^th 2014

Light cloud

Baltacha dies of liver cancer, aged 30

‘Time is doing strange things,’ said the voice in his head

May 6^th 2014

Sunny intervals

‘Complacency’ leads to asthma deaths

The plan was a commercial disaster and the Duke of Lancaster’s shell now sits at the side of the river rusting away.

May 7^th 2014

Sunny intervals

US joins hunt for Nigerian girls

The 242 from Hackney to Bank and the conductor’s constant refrain: ‘Any more fares please? Thank you! Ta!’

May 8^th 2014

Light rain shower

Barclays confirms 14,000 jobs to go

My bus to Finsbury Park was late so Geoff got there before me. He ended up meeting Roger Chapman and Charlie Whitney and having a pint with them in the George Robey before the gig.

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

Posted in Home | Tagged psychogeography, skyscapes | 2 Comments

Psychogeographic Review’s Recommendations – May 2014

Posted on 05/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

This past month Psychogeographic Review has been reading:

Naomi Alderman – ‘Disobedience’ (2006)

In Naomi Alderman’s first novel she writes about the area in which she was raised, the Orthodox Jewish community of Hendon in North London. Her book is a searing indictment of the damage done to one woman by her especially strict and repressive family.

Robert Poole – ‘London E1’ (1961)

London E1 is the late Robert Poole’s only published novel. It is the tale of a young man, Jimmy Wilson, who lives in Brick Lane and gets by in life using his wits. But more interesting than the central story, is the insight Poole gives us into a post-war East End in flux as a result of ethnic and political change.

Richard Hoggart – ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957)

Hoggart’s death last month brought me back to this classic text from 1957. By turns autobiography, sociological research and political polemic, The Uses of Literacy charts the erosion of authentic working class culture by a market-orientated mass culture.

Meanwhile, we were listening to:

Fennesz – ‘Bécs’ (2014)

Austrian guitarist and composer Christian Fennesz’s work is heavily influence by the likes of Robert Fripp, Brian Eno and Berlin-period Bowie. This first solo album in six years is a feast of textured guitar treatments and hidden melodies.

Forest Swords – ‘Dagger Paths’ (2010)

Matthew Barnes is Forest Swords and this is his debut EP. Like his later LP, Engravings, this first recording features textures, grooves and soundscapes redolent of the dunes, marshes and woodlands of his native Wirral.

Patto – ‘Roll ‘em Smoke ‘em Put Another Line Out’ (1972)

‘Whatever you do, don’t make it sound like Sergio Mendes’ (Loud Green Song). A lost classic from a band who never quite received the recognition they deserved. A heady mix of funk, blues, power chords and earthy humour

and watching:

‘Fish Tank’ – Andrea Arnold (2009)

Written and directed by Andrea Arnold, Fish Tank is set on a bleak Essex council estate and presents life as seen through the eyes of 15-year old Mia. Without sentiment, Arnold succeeds in creating characters who, whilst essentially dysfunctional, are also fully-rounded human beings each with his or her own story and dreams.

‘Somers Town’ – Shane Meadows (2008)

Shane Meadows’s lyrical portrayal of a cross-cultural friendship between two lonely young men. Although much lighter than his previous films, Meadows creates a vivid portrait of an area on the cusp of being changed forever by the construction of the new St Pancras Eurostar terminal.

‘Ratcatcher’ – Lynne Ramsay (1999)

Lynne Ramsay’s first feature film is set in Glasgow in 1973, a time of industrial decline and the removal of the poor from the centre of the city to its outskirts. Like many of Ramsay’s later films, Ratcatcher takes guilt, loneliness and loss as its themes, but tempers these with the life-affirming resilience of children.

Posted in Home | Tagged Andrea Arnold, Fennesz, Forest Swords, Lynne Ramsay, Naomi Alderman, Patto, Richard Hoggart, Robert Poole, Shane Meadows | Leave a comment

One Year – Week 32

Posted on 01/05/2014 by Bobby Seal

Project Description

April 25^th 2014

Light cloud

Lifestyle quiz to secure a mortgage

Rounding the corner the mill loomed into view above the village, dominating the skyline like some vast, ugly cathedral

April 26^th 2014

Light cloud

G7 ‘to intensify Russia sanctions’

He reminded us at regular intervals that he’d written for Coronation Street and an episode of Blake’s Seven

April 27^th 2014

Light cloud

Afghan crash ‘a tragic accident’

A black leatherette sofa with orange furry cushions

April 28^th 2014

Light cloud

Aleppo gripped by barrel bomb fears

By the back door, a dog lead hangs from a hook

April 29^th 2014

Light cloud

Stabbing school ‘to open as normal’

Al fresco dining on the wall outside the chip shop

April 30^th 2014

Light cloud

Sacking over poor elderly home care

John Cooper Clarke’s skinny jeans are a thing of wonder. I have it on good authority he plans to leave them to the National Trust

May 1^st 2014

Light cloud

Police quiz Adams on woman’s murder

The travel agent tells me that, obviously he’s heard of Malmö, but I’m the first person he’s met who actually wanted to go there

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

Posted in Home | Tagged psychogeography | Leave a comment

One Year – Week 31

Posted on 24/04/2014 by Bobby Seal

Project Description

April 18^th 2014

Sunny

Korea ship: Third officer ‘had helm’

The Germans have a very useful word, sehnsucht, which means a kind of wistful longing. It’s a shame we don’t have a direct equivalent in English. The Welsh word hiraeth is similar, but not quite the same

April 19^th 2014

Sunny

‘Sorry’ ferry captain tells of delay

Stalin and Litvinov, in London for a Marxist Congress, stayed at Tower House. When I lived nearby it was a Salvation Army hostel, and more recently the building has been transmuted into luxury apartments

April 20^th 2014

Light cloud

Anger erupts over Korea ferry rescue

Shining brightly, visceral echo of ancient light

April 21^st 2014

Sunny intervals

S Korea leader condemns ferry crew

Late evening sunshine after heavy rain, platinum sky

April 22^nd 2014

Light rain shower

Biden in ‘show of support’ for Kiev

Desiccated sunshine; a poisonous embrace

April 23^rd 2014

Sunny intervals

A&E data ‘shows fall in violence’

We creep nearer to the fire, a circle of souls holding back the night

April 24^th 2014

Sunny

Police make Syria plea to UK women

Did you see me? Did you hear when the streets called my name?

Artist Statement

… “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe.

Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle

Posted in Home | Tagged psychogeography | Leave a comment

Psychogeographic Review

Psychogeographic Review’s Recommendations – June 2014

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One Year – Week 36

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One Year – Week 35

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One Year – Week 34

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Emily Dickinson: Intoxicated by Life

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The London Nobody Knows

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One Year – Week 33

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Psychogeographic Review’s Recommendations – May 2014

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One Year – Week 32

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One Year – Week 31

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