.............. THE ATTEMPT TO ERADICATE LEADS TO AN UNCANNY RUPTURING......

1981/ 1990/ 1999/ 2011

 Green eyeshadow , red lipstick , enveloped in the hi nrg  exaltations of Bronski Beat, I’m in a good mood, wanting the mayhem, willing it to happen. Strutting down Clerkenwell in emerald stilettos, desire  swarming  right on the surface, it’s giving me a rush just being on the street.

We’re massing outside the Three kings  and it’s getting a bit tense. I feel weird on arrival but after a couple of jars I’m ok. Then I’m glancing around haphazardly and he’s there. Shock jolts of electricity surge through me.

We’re observing the gangs of Kurdish communists and SWP hacks. I’m dreaming of the teeming multitudes, the black flags and the proper kicking up, hordes of brutal skinheads booting fuck out of banks and rich bastards. I go to the garage for cigarettes and get followed by two old bill.

Then it’s cinematic as we drift from one enchanted interior to another through a labyrinth of narrow streets and sloping valleys. We wander through the  shifting topographies of Lovecraft and Escher , the old rookeries of Saffron hill.

The viaduct was built in the 1860s, the rookery was destroyed and thousands evicted. Slums were considered a threat, dangerous hives of insurrectionary impulse .  The destruction of the rookeries did not erase the poor but dispersed them. Thousands of little rookeries cropped up all over in unexpected places. The attempt to eradicate leads to an uncanny rupturing.  

Lower Lea 1981/ 2007/ 2013

Petty tyrannies.  Postcode turf wars. Prayers before mealtimes. Bunkbeds and 80s striped curtains. Lidl’s orange cartons.  Pointless, spiralling vendettas. Conspiracies. Bastardised honour. Arcade game violence seeping through the cracks, threshold disintegrating. Explosive gunfire flashes and Japanese animation, zinging tunes. Weaves, corn rows, LA nail bars, any arcadia summoned to forget London grime. 

The shrieking barbarism of the raid, hands interlocking top of head and turn around. Is there anything in this room we should know about, IS THERE ANYTHING IN THIS ROOM WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT??, the estuarial voices hectoring in the adolescent bedroom.

Curved hangar by marshes. Dense woodland by river. Hidden pathways carved deep.

Cigarette smoke, coffee and plain chocolate, a continental smell, a London smell. She remembers, Covent Garden 1981, the unfamiliar warmth, spring advanced, and that luxurious scent.

Balcony doors open over marshland vistas.  Lying on the bed.  Soon she will make coffee and they’ll get ready to go out.  Candi Staton, Rozalla, Snap!  Looks out over sweep of Olympic regeneration, cranes puncturing the wilderness. She smokes and watches, the heat intensifying.  Going to be a long hot Summer. Puts make up on at the kitchen table, 18 floors up. Damask, the heavy scent of elderflower, mutant strains of hogweed crashing over barbed wire.

 London. She can feel it now. She is on the brink of good times. It's all starting again.

Violence Solves Problems/////////////////

Peckham dérive March 16th 2011

Smithfield.

Trace names carved in soft red brick.

The city  harbours repressed desires and fears.

Smithfield, site of animal slaughter and religious killings, has always been known for its rowdiness and  rioting. Bataille  talks about an economy not of conservation but of waste and expenditure. 

These are the counter narratives of the city, the  Rabelaisian splurging, drug taking, blowing  all your wages in one night . 

Smithfield was a site created specifically for the ritual of sacrifice. When Smithfield is sanitised the destruction happens everywhere, all the time, a boundless, limitless wrecking spree. The sacrificial site was intended to contain it, losing a part to keep the whole.

Smithfield .6 a.m, The first shimmering moments of a July day;

post clubbing delirium , The Hope, Cowcross street.

 Licensing laws are turned on their head. Pub opens 5.30 a.m.  There’s a scramble for more drugs as pint pots smash and high voltage shrieks ring out across the meat market.

 Bloodstains leach into concrete slopes.

     A concealed staircase leads to the subterranean Cock Tavern.

The Old Market,

  dusty assemblage with eruptions of tenacious ferns. Crumbling red brick turrets,,, Gaffer tape Anarchy signs still visible in the upper portholes. He kisses me with unusual tenderness,, black hair, royal blue eyes,  violence never far from the surface. 

The Fleet river used to run red from here, a pestilential stream,  the canal and Holborn viaduct were built to sanitise it. You could call this a form of denial, the blood and filth  hidden beneath the surface, the poor dispersed and hidden from view. 

Blood flows everywhere, riots erupt everywhere,

the endless performance of a ritual without consciousness.

Bristol drifts,, 2010..>>>>>

£££££££££££$$$$$$$$$$$$ CASH FOR GOLD. DRIFTS SEPTEMBER 2010-JANUARY 2011-

Back room of Café Alba. 

Crystalline December morning. 

Usual assortment of moody pensioners, mini cab drivers and market stall traders. Traces of the Blitz, housing association tension and every day frustrations loop and barb in the agitated vowels. 

Round the back I clamber through concrete bunkers, steel cages,to maisonettes upstairs that are always catching fire.  Cardboard and plywood in the windows, Macdonalds stench rising through grilles on the stairwell.

Cash converters,  Money shop. Rise of religious zealotry, proliferation of pawnbrokers. 

When you emerge at the tube station it feels hectic and erratic, radios blaring ,market stalls and pound shops exploding on the streets. 

Capital Radio channels vicious boredom.

 Under the railway arch, formica tables. Fruit machine by door. Snooker hall at back.

Looking out through 70s rubber plants . Magic Cut barber.  MOT here.

Luminous stars, mince and onion pie, chips and peas  £3.20.

Cascading plastic plants. Train rumbling overhead. Brown plastic chairs.

 His head’s done in, but then there was no need for the Tramadol after all that booze.

Arsenal Tavern to the Falcon.

The greasy rebranding is in its final stages, ‘Star wharf’,, faux heritage, something left over for the sake of authenticity. I suppose this is the cosmetic veneer that is meant to distinguish it from the tabula rasa brutality of modernist architecture or the high octane demolition tendencies of Haussmann .

Royal college street . The Falcon . Soft  musings  of melancholy.

An empty shell waiting to be filled with vacuous ‘executives.’

Mayday 2000 , mid bender, there was a punk gig in here and I’d been on it three days. Suspended in delirium,, sleep deprivation. 

We’d walked  from Blackstock Road after an all dayer in the Arsenal tavern.

Tons of old bill with telephoto lenses.

.  Back room

benefit gigs, meetings, conspiratorial chatter///

black walls,, red flock peeling beneath luminous posters,

Class War banners draped above bar. 

Saturday afternoon,

  warm alcove of euphoria, pints of lager and whisky chasers,, bomber jackets, hooded tops, eyes darting as old animosities sparked amidst collisions of emerging desires.

Walking,, fierce on psychoactives, mild April. Perfumed streets,,,past the tower blocks on Tollington road,, through the dilapidated villas of Holloway and Camden. Bold in a crew of five,, hair erupting, flamingo pink,, bleached white,  eyes flashing

 black kohl,,

silver leather, knocking back supermarket vodka.

 Seeking more episodes, more encounters before the crash.

And now it’s a sanitised sweep and the Falcon’s next in line to be turned into flats, destroyed,

    all our North London boozers,  The Pembury, The Samuel Pepys,  the Albion in Stoke Newington… gone.

 The screws are turned with noise complaints and licensing problems.  Everything anarchic, everything slipping off the map has to be forced back in. 

The battle is on to get us all living in some Thames gateway dead zone, but, you know there’s still a few of us left holding out.

Haggerston to Bethnal Green 1999// 2006// 2009// 2013

This party, anyone know the address?

 Yeah a site by the gasholders on the canal.

   London becomes wasteland ruptured by erratic flare ups of euphoria. 

Chance encounters,

    drug binges, the softening effect of opiates.

 The squat party on a derelict industrial estate, sky glowing luminous yellow, pylons and electricity generators, banks of nettles by the service canal.

Thickets of briars.

 The corrugated iron gate gives way, a dazzling neon interior opens up,  fleamarket kitsch, office furniture, dayglo fabric draped from factory ceilings. He follows me through yards, levels, staircases, hallways.

   Don’t forget me,

        let these iridescent moments glitter embalmed in our memory.

 We could have lived, loved and desired.

ELEPHANT AND CASTLE

ELEPHANT AND CASTLE….1965//1974//1981//1995// 2012// 2013// 2014

Charlie Chaplin, 60s pub bunker pressed between Coronet and shopping centre.  Lurid pink like worming medicine. /

      Nobody, Gaslamp..Killer D-Styles

 Junglist mayhem. Kicking up at Ministry, AWOl , Randall double inmpact mixing. //

 The ghost of Rodney Gordon’s design for the centre, submitted in 1959 , imagined a Kasbah interior with pinnacle tower block , concrete domes and spirals. The plans for this brutalist extravaganza, akin to his other hallowed idyll the Tricorn centre were cast aside in favour of the inferior Willets group design.

  Outside there’s all these lost ravers,, staggering through the dusk since Shoom! Glo sticks, white gloves  luminous garb.  Jacobs optical stairway-- spatial disorientation.

We stagger into the magenta haze of the tavern. 

   Lozenges of yellow light dart across black walls. 

 Silver ribbons sparkle over a gum blistered stage. A red haired  boy, malfunctioning marionette, does a broken dance in  clown wig and lycra shorts. Kinetic clack clack /

              disembodied _ vocoder words hover.

  70s furnishings mould around , red dreylon, peeling flock… 

     benylin, Fosters., tramadol/

a slow drift to the fire exit leads not to the lost alleyways and tenements of a pre blitz Newington but on to the decaying fabric of a 60s precinct, jewelled mosaics now coated in a film of black grease.

The hidden eyes of this panoptican monad scan the arcades, despotic managers and private armies run the arcades that replace city squares.

The state deterritorializes.

 This is 2013, a bindweed dilerium, Japanese knotweed and Russian vine, convolvulus creeping over walls.. The glittering scheme of the PFI consortium lies in ruins,; Foster and Partners, Tibblads, TM2, Gehl Architects and Space Syntax; mystical names from another era.

Of the two skyscrapers destined to flank the new plaza only one stands, the Hamzah and Yeang bioclimatic tower. It is sitexed up on the main concourse and in the abandoned reception area there is no concierge.

  Starlings line the security fences .

     Graffitied eyes spray painted on curving glass walls herald a violent return.

This  skyscraper was supposed to be a ‘tripartite  living solution’ implementing vertical zoning in an unwitting parody of a Ballardian High Rise. Ideas of drawing street life up vertically to the ‘spectacular sky gardens’ have collapsed as the botanical outcrops are choked with ragwort and ivy strangles the ventilation shafts.

The investors backed out long ago after an intensification of terrorist activity in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. The rich don’t want to live in zone 1 now, instead they demand exurbia, gated citadels, avenues of guarded comfort.

And so the abandoned scheme, the phantom city. Relics of the 60s remain as I pick my way over the rubble of a  traffic intersection and excavated subways. A JCB stands motionless above the maw of a labyrinth, fragments of yellow tiles glisten in the dirt.

I step tentatively  across wire and pink dust  glancing across at the shopping centre relic, its foundations visible through the shell of the upper floors. The uncanny rising of escalators, still grinding in empty deliverance.

And next to it the beginnings of a new retail city with its glazed canopy. Wiring and circuitry hang exposed , so too the service tunnels and conduits./

/

Excavations and a burst main, the Neckinger rises again.

The Faraday metal box has survived, a cage where no electrical signals can be received. Luminous runes and glyphs have appeared on its studded surface. . Cryptic notation.  Space to channel, for other selves to come. Faraday, Sandemanian, nature interconnected in a single entity, electricity and magnetism interlinked.

The new Heygate boulevard is desolate but still holds the traces of the old estate beyond the glass fronted Foster embarrassments. I try desperately to find the locus of the estate, the sunken garden in Deacon way. The gleaming edifices of the new plaza are smashed now, buildings turned inside out, a dark and frenzied carnival has spun through these malls. The desolation of the sunken garden sends me reeling into reverse.