urban colour scheme

From here

unbelievable to you

mitad mitad

(a short sequence for Overworlds and Underworlds, part of Leeds Canvas for the Cultural Olympiad 2012)

My last bed made, cover pulled tight, fresh slip on the pillow. Across the street, the church spire. Neoclassical. 300 years of soot darkened stone. Harmony. Gravity frozen. Gateway to infinity. Only the toilet to bleach. Today I'll drink coffee the way I like it, make this city my own.

Holy Trinity spire piercing grey sky. The man sweeping leaves says the stone will be cleaned. 'This new shopping mall, the one they're building here. They're paying for it.' Plastic sheets flapping, scaffolding, generators, drills. 'Go inside,' he says. 'There's a cafe and the church is open.' 'I'll come back,' I tell him. It's raining too hard to stand still.

In the cafe on the corner of Boar Lane and Albion Street I order a double espresso and half a cup of warm milk. 'You want a half and half?' the barista says. 'Yes, please,' I say. He smiles and turns to his work, cropped hair shaved to a line along his golden neck. He charges me for the espresso only. 'We don't sell mitad mitad,' he says. 'Ah, nobody sells mitad mitad in England.' I sit by the window, watch the rain and the people and think of a barrio a long way away. When I look back, the barrista is watching me.

'I'm an architect by training,' I say, as we walk under the white wall of the Queens Hotel. 'I apply for jobs, and have to be patient.' He says, 'I've been patient for three years, I want to work in a lab, study the way particles emerge from emptiness. I'm very qualified. But I've learned to make coffee in the international style and be nice to customers.' 'You were nice to me,' I say. He looks down at his feet. 'Come on,' he says. 'I want to show you something an architect should see.'

In the station, he buys cigarettes at Journeys Friend and asks if I want chocolate. 'I'm fine,' I say. The coffee filled me. Then he leads me through the station and out the other side, down some steps, under a bridge and into the archway. 'It's a part of the city you don't see,' he says. We walk through, water running fast beneath us, rippling flow echoing off stone walls. When we come through into the daylight we're by a canal. Cafes, bars and tall office tower above. He says, 'My friend works here. In the kitchen. He brings food home. Come and eat at our house.'

'This way,' he says. We walk to a footbridge, cross the water and along a path beside a narrow river, tall modern flats above the landscaped bank. An Italianate campanile built in red brick to the left as we head out of the centre. 'It's a chimney,' he says. 'For a factory. They made pins. I've learned so much about this city.' 'Incredible,' I tell him. 'I can't believe the things I see here.' The path turns up onto a dual carriageway. We walk beside the traffic out toward Burley, the streets we live in, the houses we share.

*

Past midnight. Under the station. In the big archway. What am I doing here? Fast flowing river. Perfect curve of the bricks. 'Any deviation from the math and it collapses,' I say, pointing up. 'You are so serious,' he says. 'Come on, I’ll show you architecture that you can't imagine.' We stop at a side tunnel, blocked off by a wooden facade. He knocks on a door and when it opens steps through and hugs a guy in the dark interior. I follow inside, thinking, This is crazy, I'm new in this city. I don't know these people.

We walk to the far end of the archway in torchlight. Smell of old brick. Fungi. Stagnant water. 'Maybe I'll go home,' I say. 'Don't be scared,' he says. 'Just follow me.' He steps up between the sidewall and a steel mesh fence, takes my hand and pulls. We squeeze through a gap, onto a raised platform beside a rusty air duct. 'Where are we?' I say. 'The old city,' he says. 'Where they stored grain. Coal. Brought in on the canal. Before railways.' We step alongside the duct to the far wall. 'But what are we doing here?' 'I want to take you dancing,' he says. 'You have to let me take you dancing.'

I can't see the floor. My trainers scuff on the metal frame. We go to where the wall is opened for the duct to pass through. Step into another tunnel. The torch lighting the ceiling. Again, all brick, perfect curve, like a cathedral. A catacomb. Organic mosaic of decay. Green and vermillion. Empty. Unused. Lost to view. Then another hole in the wall. Through and into a wide room and the sound of voices and more torchlight. About a dozen people. They turn as we approach. Like the souls of lost workers. Someone asks if we brought the sounds.

He lifts his shoulder bag and takes out a laptop. Kneels down. Goes to work with jacks and leads that trail in from speakers around the walls. They switch off torches as the music starts. Low beats. Sound effects. I hear water, echoing footsteps, voices just out of range in the mix. Meshing. Notes blending into chords. A melody emerging. Like a lullaby. Then my hand is taken and I feel us pull in together. Arms around shoulders, heads leaning in and touching as we roll with the rhythm. And always the beat, like a heart. All our hearts synchronising. In the dark. Together. Under the city.

*

Taste of cold beer. Wooden chairs. Table in an empty bar at 3am. Window onto a square by the canal. Like a piazza. Glass and steel towers above, old stone paving below. 'My music is physical,' he says. 'I make it from the maths of our universe. The physics of what we are.' 'Who are those people?' I ask. 'They are friends, fans, I meet them online mostly. We share music and places. We have to find space where we can dance together. Fully immersed.' 'I was scared at first,' I say. 'It can be the best emotion to bring,' he says. 'Elemental. Are you still scared?' 'No, I feel safe. I feel the best I've felt since I came to this country.'

*

The city is quiet when I take a bus to work on the early shift, still tired from the night before. Kirkstall Road. Low roofed shopfronts giving way to depots, depositories. Then the centre and its glass towers. But always the old roads threading through. Boar Lane. Milk Hill. Albion Street. And buildings that survive, change with time. Cafes, bars, sandwich shops. I climb down opposite the station. Walk past Holy Trinity, cross and go into the hotel. To the staff room. Where workmates say, 'Hi' and smile. Upstairs in the corridors, the low hum of central heating. Another music. In another architecture. 

© danny broderick

pic from here

new african gods

pic: reuters

immunity and recognition

When pop stars wanted to rule the world:

DECLARATION OF NUTOPIA

We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NUTOPIA.
Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NUTOPIA.
NUTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people.
NUTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic.
All people of NUTOPIA are ambassadors of the country.
As two ambassadors of NUTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.

YOKO ONO LENNON (with signature)
JOHN ONO LENNON (with signature)

Nutopian Embassy
One White Street
New York, New York 10012
April 1, 1973

From here

present moment of the past

Annoying convention of addressing only men in writing from the past, but this insight is well put otherwise (and obviously applies to women writers too).

“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” TS Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1921

From here

pic from here

yet more uses for dead books

Pillar

From here

tonal mannerism manifesting

This is by way of a redress for this previous post that, though cruel in its tone, made a valid enough point to include - that Whitney could have been a better artist if she had curtailed her excessive vocal styling. But I think there is a deeper understanding to be gained from a sympathetic examination of her singing voice. In this clip (which has been doing the rounds since her death earlier this year, but which I have only just found) we hear the isolated vocal track from her enormously successful record from 1985, 'How Will I Know' (the third single release from her debut album). Ostensibly a song about anxiety over the requital of affection from a potential suitor, the excess of emotion signalled - tremulous fear, near frenzy - suggests an existential predicament that no lover could ever hope to resolve. Which might seem normal for popular musical approaches, and certainly those that draw on the tradition that emerged in the mid 1960s from the Blues and more pertinently for this argument, Spiritual and Gospel music (which addresses issues of salvation and redemption of a cosmic nature - Soul music has always been about marrying the depth of religious longing to the concerns of secular courtship and partnering, and so capturing the deeper emotional currents that a consumerist culture fails to satisfy with its ephemeral rewards - including relationships). But here Whitney's voice signifies something even more. Born into a middle-class family of great singers: Cissy Houston her mother, Dionne Warwick and Dee Dee Warwick her cousins, meant she was always going to be expected to succeed with talents that were evident from an early age (expressed in the traditional way at church gatherings). And, crucially, was going to be expected to embody the virtues of the good home and values it instills - a positive role model for the sons and daughters of black Americans now claiming their rightful place in the world after a long Civil Rights struggle. Which on the surface she did at first - a kind of good girl to her contemporary, Madonna's, bad girl artistic persona (with also ramifications of substance over style - paradoxically Whitney, who was often accused of the opposite, once represented the triumph of actual talent over showmanship vis-a-vis Madonna, who could never really sing and got where she got by any means necessary). But signs of despair (engendered by such conformity?) were always present in Whitney's songs, and in the way she interpreted a lyric - like a secret voice calling out from behind a sonic mask of gloopy mush. It's there in another early hit 'I Wanna Dance With Somebody', with its undertone of lostness in a world of youthful fun (where is the love?) and its startling in the above track stripped of its musical accompaniment, which overlays the lyric with a breezy rhythm and uplifting synthesiser, as was the mode of the day. A tonal mannerism manifesting from the heart of a singularised instance of a general spiritual malaise. She told us more than many of us cared to hear.

october in the railroad earth

urban colour scheme

From here

they will live

For many are the pleasant forms which exist in
 numerous sins,
 and incontinencies,
 and disgraceful passions,
 and fleeting pleasures,
   which (men) embrace until they become sober
   and go up to their resting-place.
And they will find me there,
 and they will live,
 and they will not die again.

From here

uses for old bricks

Imitation books. No need for interior pages. Show you're cultured but self-aware. That display is affectation.

From here

everything was breathing

This podcast from Radiolab examines the underlying logic of the urban environment in terms of the patterns of footfall on the pavement, suggesting they produce a unique rhythm, or beat, of a particular place. The scientists interviewed provide interesting theories but can't define the actual soul that emerges from collective living. Sxip Shirley's ("everything was breathing") music-centred creative approach provides a more intuitive analysis. The podcast itself, with its overlapping voices and recorded sounds, never presenting a dominant authorial BBC-style guiding voice, becomes part of the thing
observed.

pic from here