Life Out of Balance

Scenes of demolition are everywhere in Our Nation’s Capital.

London is systematically and expensively being dismantled in the hope of a band aid being applied before the Olympics start in 2 years, architectural projects reach desperately out of cavernous pits of concrete, waiting for more funding to be applied to their ungainly, insipid frames, and the unknown future of the England team as we know makes itself apparent on the back of every discarded morning paper; literally thousands of them, sweeping across the city like a flock of BP-sullied origami seagulls.

In my life, however, renewal raises its brave head, resurrected from the ashes of my-life-in-London’s demolition like a phoenix: a vital, grinning, slightly smug phoenix.

I now find myself looking upon such images of demolition with hope rather than despondency as I lie – and wake up – away from this destruction, away from the filth and degradation offered by ONC. And where, for the past few years, I found myself obsessed with the decaying, fractured works of Anselm Kiefer, or the collaged detritus of Kurt Schwitters, suddenly Monet’s most blissful paintings of Giverny, or Morris Louis’s joyously colourful canvas stains seem to replicate my disposition.

Claude Monet, Les arceaux de roses, Giverny (Les arceaux fleuris), 1913, Private Collection.

Morris Louis, Alpha-Phi, 1960, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

(The England football team’s current disposition, on the other hand, might be encapsulated in a nightmarish Otto Dix war etching…

Otto Dix, etching from Der Krieg, 1924

…Maybe a bit of beach time would help all involved?)

And so my discovery of the Heygate Estate in Elephant and Castle from the window of my commute – a Brutalist modern social project built in 1974 and awaiting its imminent destruction – has left me with an incongruous feeling of hopefulness both artistic and political.

c/o London SE1 @ flickr

c/o Gavin Humphries @ flickr

 This beastly pack of buildings didn’t live up to the utopian promises of communal living, instead falling into a dilapidated state riddled with crime and poverty. It is now all but derelict, and set for a good ol’ regeneration. Yet there is beauty to be found in its current state. It’s barren soviet austerity reminds me of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, 

Or the Sony Bravia adverts from a few years back,

and I wonder what a bit of colour might do for these lifeless concrete piles of shame. A nice spring clean…

..no of course that’s not what makes me hopeful.

What makes me hopeful is a scene from the epic Godfrey Reggio movie Koyaanisqatsi, which formed an amazing, prescient moment in my life as I watched it recently in Brighton with my partner, accompanied by a live rendition of the incredible Philip Glass score by the great man himself and his ensemble.

courtesy Matthew Andrews

In one of the most memorable, astonishing, heart-wrenching and awesome scenes in a film abound with much of the aforementioned, the detonation of the Pruitt Igoe flats in St. Louis Missouri appears a telling rendition of the 20^th centuries legacy to come…

This scene’s story is one of lessons-to-be-learnt, it is of changing our ways, it is of the unsustainability of the sort of grandiose architectural projects that mar our cities and make life insufferable.

The film’s raison d’être is best illuminated in the film’s endnote and the title’s meaning:

The day to day experience of London is thoroughly unpleasant, and the disturbance caused by transport failures, architectural revisioning and, yes, regeneration, is untold in terms of quality of life.

This all calls for another way of living.

Ladies and Gentlemen, No We Ain’t Fuckin’ Jon Bon Jovi

When Jon Bon Jovi first advocated Livin’ on a Prayer in 1986, he seemed to be resigning himself to the gods of fate. I don’t subscribe to this view, nor the rock star sentiments of JBJ and his ilk.

Whilst it is true that it doesn’t really matter if we make it or not, if “making it” means fame and fortune, especially when the sentiment we’ve got each other, and that’s a lot encapsulates the very root of my approach to attaining happiness, I am certainly not content to await the lap of the gods, nor to do it wearing leather and hairspray.

And when in Romain Polland’s 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud he spoke of the sensational of the eternal – an oceanic sensation – which might explain religious sensations and feelings as opposed to hardened beliefs, he captured effectively the joyous impenetrability of the seas even for someone without religion.

I am happy to let the ocean fill me with oceanic feelings, staring out at borderless imponderables.

Iona by FCB Cadell

I am also certain that, in lieu of religion, moving towards the ocean is the most efficient way of improving one’s lot and taking fate into one’s own hands, so last weekend I moved with my partner to Brighton, away from the London monster which has had us ensnared for the last four years, and towards a future full of sensations of the eternal… 

courtesy of Ben and Carol @flickr

 ..and on the way home from London on my first commute, I listened to the Dirty Three’s Ocean Songs – a reverential and majestic album – which in my opinion is able to recreate and inspire such oceanic feelings in the way only art is truly able.

And so as Mr, MR Warren Ellis says at the start of this beautiful clip of the Dirty Three playing The Restless Waves at Roma’s Circolo Degli Artisti,

Ladies and Gentlemen, No We Ain’t Fuckin’ Jon Bon Jovi