woobiquity

l. In search of lost time

Ok, true story. On my way into the center of Greenwich last night to meet Stephen for a drink I was stopped by a carful of Asian tourists who wanted directions... to Greenwich Meantime.

The mind boggles. (Where do you start? Wanting to offer them something for their troubles, I would have pointed them toward the laserbeam that usually symbolizes the meridian line, but it wasn't on. What could I say? "I'm sorry, GMT is only on Fridays and Sundays.")

And an Eastern theme emerges to liven up sleepy Greenwich. Because one placid afternoon last week as I walked toward the gym, a crazed Japanese man in black clothes and a black apron shot out from behind a wall, waving a plastic whip in the air and running as fast as he could - looking every bit the baddie in a low-budget 1970s martial arts movie.

The group of boys who had until then been lolling around on the pavement waiting for summer to end took a collective gulp and scattered. So far so funny. But the runt among them couldn't run fast enough, and The Sushi Chef kicked the crap out of him while he cried "It wasn't me it wasn't me it wasn't me". And we bystanders (having seen Kill Bill) picked up the pace, looking like people who had just realized the time.

xlix. Of places I'm dying to tell you about

When I worked in Washington, D.C., as an intern for a political action group, my boss was a former English professor at a Midwestern university, who had been fired after making un-PC remarks in print. He gave a speech at the group’s summer conference. Speaking live to a national C-SPAN audience, he opened with some words of praise for the man sitting to his right, the group's crotchety founder (and his boss), mentioning a couple of the man’s accomplishments and finishing the tribute with the phrase, “I truly admire him.” Wait for it…

“He’s also
very difficult to work for.

I say that
so that you’ll believe the first part.”

His employment at the group ended soon after that. But the sentiment stuck with me, and came to mind this week as I was writing a couple of beach city profiles for an American real estate website. The brief was basically to provide the kind of prose that sells package tours to places where clouds never tarnish the sickly blue skies.

I decided to aim instead for the kind of tribute Charles Kuralt himself might have come up with; which is appropriate, considering he was born in Wilmington, North Carolina – one of the cities:

Isabella Rossellini walked naked down one of its streets, the cast of Dawson’s Creek cavorted regularly in its theatres and cafés and nearby dunes, and Andy Griffith puttered around downtown in his trademark Matlock seersucker.

Even if you’ve never been to Wilmington, N.C., you may have seen more of this small, Southern city and the diverse natural locations that surround it than you have realized – albeit with a layer of Hollywood-style magic. Since the 1980s, when the largest film production studio outside California opened here, Wilmington has doubled as locations for movies, television shows and commercials, gaining a reputation as “Hollywood East”…

Retirees, families, artists and others in search of a better life are drawn here for its proximity to many miles of sandy beaches, for its laid-back Southern atmosphere, and for the irresistible quirkiness of any place that could combine moss-draped trees, neo-Gothic spires, carriage rides, and the occasional Dixie belle with indie music shops, modern art galleries, jazz bars and cutting-edge restaurants…

I don’t know… Maybe a picture of the Wilmington
Food Lion parking lot would be more honest.

Charles Kuralt never had a bad word for any of the places he visited or people he met; people believed him because he was a kind of poet and had a lulling, deep voice. I guess I'm not that nice, because after a walk down to Blackheath last night to try to have a relaxing dinner I am compelled to let the world know that, in my opinion, this South London "village" is practically beyond redemption. The staff in most of its restaurants are blase and unfriendly; the air on the streets is poisoned with a vaguely threatening tension.

Willie said maybe this was because of the negative energy lingering from the burning of all those bodies on the heath during The Plague, the event that gave the place its name (blackbirds and chilling winds on the heath are a constant memorial). But I think it's just the edginess of a neighborhood with a deep identity crisis. It wants to be a village but has the traffic congestion of a stinking metropolis; it wants to be hip but can't shake off the no-trainers-geeza nonsense of the suburbs; It wants to be Hampstead but...

I say that
so that you'll believe the first part,

although somehow I fear
that the principle I started out with
may have just looped around and bit me
like a weathered log
that looked like a good enough resting place
and turned out to be
an alligator from the swamp.

xlviii. Of things that go bump bump bump

What I love about the V&A is the willingness to shake things up with a touch of modernity while staying true to what is essentially a massive collection of Victorian... things. "Shhh..." (excellent website) is a perfect example. It's an exhibition of sounds chosen by international musicians and artists to be played in various spaces around the museum.

Sound installations aren't normally my thing; they're usually so random and absurdist (i.e. annoying). And there's some of that here, too, but I can believe that vocalizations from Elizabeth Fraser (of the Cocteau Twins) in the room with the Raphael Cartoons or the airy and refracted electronica of Japanese remixer Cornelius in the Glass gallery could bring new meaning to these treasures.

I've always been a little spooked by the gilt and mirrors of the Norfolk House Music Room in the British Galleries. But the feeling was too vague for words. Now hip hop artist Roots Manuva has brought the ghosts out of the woodwork and made them dance to his sound. Amazing.

xlvii. Of wonderfully oversized voices

Marc Broussard, a 22-year-old white guy from Louisiana, is a rising musical star in the States, partly because his soul-singing voice has all the richness and depth of a 42-year-old black man. In this, I realize, Broussard is but a part of a crowd-pleasing wave of 20-somethings with a style that is several decades beyond their time (Cullum, Cincotti etc etc etc). But an extraordinary voice is an extraordinary voice, whatever the marketing wrap.

If Broussard’s “Lonely Night in Georgia” doesn’t exactly fill the void left by Ray Charles, it certainly exists within it, and that’s something. Incidentally, as you can see, based on looks alone, this guy could easily be rotated in as the missing member of Westlife – but can you imagine a member of Westlife opening his mouth during one of those silly, synchronized dance routines and this guy's voice belting out?

Or better still, if one of them opened his mouth and Julia Child’s voice came out. Which is entirely possible, I guess, now that she’s gone to the beyond. If you don’t know who Julia Child was, I urge you to listen here or here or here. You may never forget the experience.

Others may eulogize Julia Child’s integrity and good nature, traits through which she sold a nation of casserole lovers on at least the idea of complicated French cuisine and pioneered the whole concept of the television chef, but I can’t imagine she would have gone on to be so beloved had she not possessed “that voice”: one part American aristocracy, one part Muppet.

xlvi. Of what you do in your pass of life

It’s not every morning (before breakfast, no less) that a person like me gets thanked “for all the good you have brought to many people in your pass of life”. But as you might have instantly guessed, this was just another case of mistaken identity. A woman in New Zealand got my email address mixed up with a man with my name who (reading between the lines) must provide some form of unconventional cancer treatment not completely dissimilar to the practitioners of African healing whose suspiciously similar fliers keep coming through the door.

The woman hoped to make an appointment for her dying friend in Christchurch who “could lose her feet to cancer soon.” And in that, I’m as helpless as the next Jonathan.

Shoot, I couldn’t even save the large insect caught in a web outside the kitchen window, flapping its translucent wings for dear life and, of course, only becoming more stuck. Far too big to be a little spider’s dinner, the thing ought to be freed, I thought, but as I stood there pondering whether to get my shoes, the spider sprinted down and bit it. By this morning, the (annoyed?) spider had packed up and gone, and the bug hung there looking grey and dead and half its life size.

By contrast, the dead rabbit I found yesterday morning on the Norfolk farm where I had spent the night, lay there on its side looking as perfect as creation, apart from a few flies, who anyway added a baroque depth to the still life.

What’s your point?, you might be thinking, and the best answer I can give you is: I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But thank you, anyway, for all the good you have brought to many people in your pass of life.

xlv. 3am in the city of ideas

“In the city of ideas,” began the article in a student arts magazine that had fallen out of The Guardian. So far so studenty. But this? “…as the disciples of Richard Florida, Professor of Regional Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University like to think of London…”

Wait a minute, I thought, I’ve got this guy’s book here somewhere. He’s got disciples? In London?

So I read The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida’s 2002 bestseller, cover to cover, and was surprised to find that the defining work from this guru of London art students is none other than a U.S.-centric, semi-elitist (the ‘class’ part – you see, in the post dotcom world we’re pretty much all either in the creative class, using our genius as computer programmers or professors to stretch the local economy, or else we’re in the service class, doing the dull things people in the creative class don’t have time to do for themselves; and being in the creative class, apparently, means owning expensive, titanium-framed bicycles and having a big house full of curios from global travels – as Florida himself does) guide for municipal governments and corporate executives who want to cash in on the latest social trends.

The U.S. focus of Florida’s work makes him a particularly unlikely role model for European idealists, although he does occasionally use European places for illustrative asides. Quoting the British author of a book about London’s clubbing scene (“This wasn’t ‘late night’ for Soho – the night had hardly started”), Florida adds about Soho: “It is not just a scene but many: a music scene, an art scene, a film scene, outdoor recreation scene, nightlife scene, and so on – all reinforcing one another.

Give the guy his creative license as an American, but the last I knew, the best you were likely to get in Soho at 3am were the yawps and urinations of various drunks, or if you’ve really hit the jackpot, perhaps some impromptu Ave Maria in pitch-perfect falsetto in the back of some Old Compton Street coffee shop.

3pm in Soho is, of course, another story altogether, but it’s a story that’s inextricable from London’s as a whole. After all, almost nobody lives in Soho. Florida’s central thesis, that in the Creative Economy cities live or die by their ability to attract creative talent, is an idea that works well enough for cities on the scale of San Francisco, Austin or Washington, D.C., all of which rank highly on his Creative Index. (Dublin gets high praise, too.)

But is it art? An anonymous Londoner announces
an aversion to shopping malls. Richard Florida pegs this
view as a hallmark of the American creative class.

But for the same reason that Florida can hold up Greenwich Village as a model for the power of artistic regeneration while New York barely registers on any of his rankings of urban creative health – it’s a matter of scale – London is an elusive playground for the young artist who thinks he can rip through the landscape like a modern-day Dick Whittington. London, Paris, New York – they’ll always attract (and absorb) talent, no matter what the current social or economic paradigm. So it’s a big pedestal, but there are a lot of people on it.

Older and wiser? Hardened by a few too many years in the city of cynicism, more like.

xliv. The inherent danger of deep excavations

Then again, with skies this blue, who cares! (East Greenwich, London, earlier today.)

xliii. Of unpicked blackberries

Willie and I are out for a summer evening walk around Greenwich, starting with the little abandoned park just off our street, where if you fancy it, you can sit on a solitary bench and admire London’s skyline, the view annotated by a forgotten metal plaque that is missing half the landmarks.

Weeds grow unchallenged along the edges of this park, and sure enough, the recent sunshine has nicely ripened the hundreds of blackberries that last year were my secret supply. I am addicted to blackberries, you see. But only the kind that grow wild, of course. You could chip a tooth on the ones they sell in the stores.

A little later, on Hyde Vale, we are approached by a German itinerant – a man with greasy, unwashed hair, wearing white trousers that are filthy and torn and rolled up to different lengths, revealing briar scabs along one ankle. Ordinarily in London such a person would be begging for cash. This one wants to know if we have a ladder.

“Do you live near here?” he asks, pointing to a loaded blackberry bush, just out of reach. “It seems like people in this country don’t pick the berries,” he says. “And they are so big and juicy.”

The German has a spark in his eye that a homeless person or drug addict wouldn’t have. He’s friendly. In fact, this is just the kind of brief, pleasant conversation (about blackberries) one would expect to have if you lived in an upmarket neighborhood where strangers passing on the sidewalks were relaxed enough to make polite chatter. It just happens that this particular stranger is walking squallor.

If South London has a Hampstead, this street is it. But in truth it’s much more Champagne than it is socialist. So the woman walking past with keys in her hand eyes all three of us suspiciously, like we may want something from her. Little does she know it’s just a ladder.

xlii. Of free art (from those nice biz people)

There is so much free entertainment happening in London this August that a person could go to a different film or concert every night of the month and not pay a penny on tickets.

Of course, nothing is ever truly free, so be prepared to dodge oncoming subliminal messaging while you relax on your picnic blanket. It’s all part of the fun in an age when traditional advertising has become so pervasive that it’s really starting to piss people off. Sport being already branded to the last athletic earlobe, it’s only logical that companies would turn to art as the next best opiate, I mean conduit, for their marketing messages.

If you like film but think the ordinary ticket prices are a drag, you're definitely in luck this month, with the Portobello film festival (sponsored by JVC, Apple and a host of wonderful non-profit agencies), Soho Shorts (perfect entertainment for those of us with an ad-length attention span), and a series of free late-night, outdoor films at the National (sponsored by Bloomberg). Plus Mercedes-Benz is sponsoring Reel Experiences, in which anyone can download free tickets to Thursday night screenings of fairly recent movies, each hand-picked to convey the spirit of the new SLK-Class roadster.

This coming weekend (August 7-8), the makers of Innocent fruit drinks revive their “free festival for nice people,” Fruitstock, which promises two days of live jazz, soul and funk in Regents Park – with plenty of fruity refreshments to buy, of course.

On the Fruitstock website one of the bands is described as being so lively it will tempt you out of the shade. Which may seem an unlikely comment (Shade? In London??) if you weren’t there last year, on the hottest day London has ever seen, to witness the bizarre sight of band after band playing to an empty field while heat-stroked onlookers peeped out from dollops of shade way in the distance. Law of averages: this year it will probably rain.