A London Only Night
Aside from my author friends, there are only five writers I would break even a Belgrade curfew to go hear talk. Ballard, Moore, MacLeod, Sinclair and Self. Even if I was struggling with two broken legs, I would put the weight on my crutches and drag myself across the city for any one of them speaking.
Sinclair and Self on the same bill talking about psychogeography. Dream tickets do not get any dreamier. It was inevitable I would suffer the crashing pain of every concussive step it took to haul myself over to the V&A.
As I hobbled across Hyde Park, the falling sun left behind a wreckage of pink clouds. Twilight turned the walkers, skaters and geese feeders on the banks of the Serpentine to Lowry silhouettes. I limped on. Not even the throbbing curse of my foot could not undermine my excitement.
Brompton Road obtained, I arrived at the V&A ridiculously early. The great thing about having a date at a museum is that if you are premature – or the girl in the red coat is late – you cannot feel like you are actually waiting. You just explore by yourself for a bit. Shamble off to find Giambologna’s Samson and Philistine, a Westwood dress or David Reekie’s A Captive Audience?
When my companion arrived, she found me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the museum shop. It was hard to argue with her assessment that I was like a child overdosed on cordial. By my standards, I felt quite restrained given I was not actually dancing among the statuary.
Desperate for the event to start, I sat on the ornate ceramic staircase outside the lecture room. As two of the greatest writers in the English language arrived, I slipped among their entourage of family, Kevin Jackson and eager museum flunkies. As Sinclair and Self were miked up, I screwed my bottom to a prime spot in the front row, listening to the pair discuss the canonicity of a scurrilous story about a shared acquaintance in a New York elevator. I leaned my head back to take in the lavishly decorated domed ceiling. Gilded stars on a blue sky. Heaven. I was in a literary heaven. Behind me, the rows were soon thick with directors, photographers, actors, academics and fellow fans.
They began by reading from their latest books. Kevin Jackson moderated, trying to tease out the meaning of psychogeography as a term and its significance as a genre. Antecedents beyond Debord were cited: Thomas de Quincey, 1940s Parisians and Orson Welles walking the streets of London in 1955 in-between directing Moby Dick Rehearsed. Ballard was lauded. Stewart Home’s careerist head reared and Self neatly dismissed all the artsy wankers pushing repetitive walking.
Cutting through the crap, Sinclair summed up psychogeography as: ‘A way of thinking about the city.’ His words resonated with me, talk of ‘metatemporal journeys’, ‘landscape as parentage’ and the city an ‘anthology of possibilities’. London as ‘a dense series of memory controlled barriers’. Self’s description of Sinclair’s take on psychogeography as ‘secular shamanism’ made perfect sense when Sinclair said: ‘When I am walking, I am recovering and honouring the ancestors of the city.’
They were meanders into Olympic site conspiracies, secret underground cities in Epsom and the ‘shit one can get into trying to walk from JFK to Manhattan’. Sinclair and Self both fixed on psychogeography as one of the ‘tools of resistance’ the whole ‘Pods vs. Peds’ division among writers and a sense, as I would put it, of the power of walking to restore narrative to our lives. I was beyond chuffed when Sinclair said he ‘profoundly agreed’ with me when I questioned them about CCTV.
Afterwards my date spoke to Sinclair about me, making me feel more embarrassed than any child kissed by its mother in the school playground. She got him to sign a copy of London: City of Disappearances and even browbeat Self into signing his Charing Cross Hospital section on the book. We drifted downstairs to the Pre-Raphaelite glories of the green refreshment room. As we ate pies and roast parsnips amid William Morris plasterwork, Edward Burne-Jones glass and chandeliers resembling Dyson spheres, a pianist played.
Towards home, the tactful ignoring of a celebrity dog walker revelling in his sodium secrecy was the only incident. We tracked the canal, its black mirror bending the streetlight beams. The toll of concussion and tiredness slowed my hobbling, but I was still smiling. As my companion pointed out: ‘Iain Sinclair, Will Self and a pie at the V&A. That is a London only night. You would not get it anywhere else.'
Sinclair and Self on the same bill talking about psychogeography. Dream tickets do not get any dreamier. It was inevitable I would suffer the crashing pain of every concussive step it took to haul myself over to the V&A.
As I hobbled across Hyde Park, the falling sun left behind a wreckage of pink clouds. Twilight turned the walkers, skaters and geese feeders on the banks of the Serpentine to Lowry silhouettes. I limped on. Not even the throbbing curse of my foot could not undermine my excitement.
Brompton Road obtained, I arrived at the V&A ridiculously early. The great thing about having a date at a museum is that if you are premature – or the girl in the red coat is late – you cannot feel like you are actually waiting. You just explore by yourself for a bit. Shamble off to find Giambologna’s Samson and Philistine, a Westwood dress or David Reekie’s A Captive Audience?
When my companion arrived, she found me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight in the museum shop. It was hard to argue with her assessment that I was like a child overdosed on cordial. By my standards, I felt quite restrained given I was not actually dancing among the statuary.
Desperate for the event to start, I sat on the ornate ceramic staircase outside the lecture room. As two of the greatest writers in the English language arrived, I slipped among their entourage of family, Kevin Jackson and eager museum flunkies. As Sinclair and Self were miked up, I screwed my bottom to a prime spot in the front row, listening to the pair discuss the canonicity of a scurrilous story about a shared acquaintance in a New York elevator. I leaned my head back to take in the lavishly decorated domed ceiling. Gilded stars on a blue sky. Heaven. I was in a literary heaven. Behind me, the rows were soon thick with directors, photographers, actors, academics and fellow fans.
They began by reading from their latest books. Kevin Jackson moderated, trying to tease out the meaning of psychogeography as a term and its significance as a genre. Antecedents beyond Debord were cited: Thomas de Quincey, 1940s Parisians and Orson Welles walking the streets of London in 1955 in-between directing Moby Dick Rehearsed. Ballard was lauded. Stewart Home’s careerist head reared and Self neatly dismissed all the artsy wankers pushing repetitive walking.
Cutting through the crap, Sinclair summed up psychogeography as: ‘A way of thinking about the city.’ His words resonated with me, talk of ‘metatemporal journeys’, ‘landscape as parentage’ and the city an ‘anthology of possibilities’. London as ‘a dense series of memory controlled barriers’. Self’s description of Sinclair’s take on psychogeography as ‘secular shamanism’ made perfect sense when Sinclair said: ‘When I am walking, I am recovering and honouring the ancestors of the city.’
They were meanders into Olympic site conspiracies, secret underground cities in Epsom and the ‘shit one can get into trying to walk from JFK to Manhattan’. Sinclair and Self both fixed on psychogeography as one of the ‘tools of resistance’ the whole ‘Pods vs. Peds’ division among writers and a sense, as I would put it, of the power of walking to restore narrative to our lives. I was beyond chuffed when Sinclair said he ‘profoundly agreed’ with me when I questioned them about CCTV.
Afterwards my date spoke to Sinclair about me, making me feel more embarrassed than any child kissed by its mother in the school playground. She got him to sign a copy of London: City of Disappearances and even browbeat Self into signing his Charing Cross Hospital section on the book. We drifted downstairs to the Pre-Raphaelite glories of the green refreshment room. As we ate pies and roast parsnips amid William Morris plasterwork, Edward Burne-Jones glass and chandeliers resembling Dyson spheres, a pianist played.
Towards home, the tactful ignoring of a celebrity dog walker revelling in his sodium secrecy was the only incident. We tracked the canal, its black mirror bending the streetlight beams. The toll of concussion and tiredness slowed my hobbling, but I was still smiling. As my companion pointed out: ‘Iain Sinclair, Will Self and a pie at the V&A. That is a London only night. You would not get it anywhere else.'
Labels: Iain Sinclair, Psychogeography, Victoria and Albert Museum, Will Self
posted by David at
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