Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Vauxhall/Vox Populi
On one of my Bataan pleasure marches through London I went to Vauxhall, which used to have a famous garden (which comes up in Vanity Fair,among other places and, humorously enough, is now a total den of faggotude. It also has a bus station whose sheer outrageousness and lack of utility distinguishes the British tradition of public art from the somewhat more pedestrian aesthetic of US public transportation.
Amazing.
About a block away is the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which has a really fun gay night called Ducky and which may be torn down because it sits on a valuable parcel of real estate. I found it funny that pubs with names like that, with stuffy or utterly unoriginal connotations, would not draw the same patronage in the US unless people were patronizing them (ahem) "ironically." Here's a good example:
There's also a place called the George and Dragon, in Shoreditch, that was one of the coolest gay bars to be found. But the name: in NY, it would suggest a sort of multiple-television Irish/sports bar that you might find on 33rd and 8th. You'd never go there. In London, it's all like that. (There was a Royal Oak, but that's different).
Anyway, near Vauxhall is Oval, which has an arena where they probably play football. Not only is it near one of those disused natural gas tanks like we used to have in Queens till about 1997 when they were both torn down, it's also covered in vines. This is what I wish would happen with the Woodhull Medical Center, which is as forbidding as it is oddly beautiful, but would totally benefit from massive horticulture draped from its flat roof. It would look like The Future, as envisaged in 1976.
Here, in Oval, at the age of thirty, you can renew in the glorious ritual of Carousel.
While I promised myself I'd avoid Westminster in general, it's hard because it's so central. I walked by St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which I remember being a very beautiful church, to find that it was completely closed off because of construction. Rather than bury it behind just a scaffolding (the erection of which, around a building you like, is really depressing because you know they'll never come down for years), they put up a cheerful red barrier with churchy people smiling apologetically for the bother.
In a way, this probably embodies the number one difference between British and American societies, both in practice and as materializations of their national self-mythologies. The American insistence on individual rights over the collective, on private over public, on decentralization over uniformity has resulted in different license plates, different alcohol laws, a sort of optimistic garishness to the landscape, and an impoverishment of municipal services up to and including bridge collapses. Britain, by contrast, is slightly over-administered. By that I mean there's a certain top-down homogeneity that's at once reassuring but also a bit stifling. When walking down a platform in the Tube you might encounter a bench with a sign--an official sign, not a handmade or improvisational one--warning you that an armrest is missing. In the US, public transportation is so underfunded that a bench might stay that way forever, or at least until the agency responsible snagged some corporate tie-in to refurbish a station. If there was any kind of 'idiot-proof' signage, it would only be because someone was covering his or her ass against some hypothetical litigious dick. In Britain it almost seems as if bureaucrats actually concern themselves with the possibility of someone sitting there.
It's kind of that way nationwide. A sort of rational, non-demagogic vox populi seems built into civil servants' decisions. (Civil service itself is selective and highly sought, not the territory of shrewish harridans from the underclass who work in windowless, low-ceilinged offices). Since coming back, I've started reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the excruciating violence that led to the policing of the US-Mexican border, which consolidated state power over the borderlands that McCarthy exaggerates as huge, desolate wastes unfit for human habitation. It's integral to American self-hagiography that this is a vast, still-somewhat-untamed country. The West is manly and the Northeast effete, so the popular imagination settles on the former as a sort of touchstone for our supposed national character. (Or so some might have it). Ignoring for a second all the ridiculous contradictions that vision contains, it's still true that the West is the fastest-growing area of the country--and we anomalous for being an industrialized country that grows at all.
Britain has a sort of snug, tidy stasis; after empire, the energies required to categorize and administer the surface of the globe were turned inwards without abating. This is often considered symptomatic of a malaise affecting the entirely of Western Europe, where the trade-off in achieving a gentle socialist welfare state seems to be any kind of dynamism. It makes you wonder what shocks America's self-regard will sustain when we experience, say, a twenty percent reduction in our standard of living once our untenable empire collapses. I'm not suggesting that British culture is pessimistic or cynical (although that's arguably the case). But the achievement of more enlightened social policies, all radiating from the top and reflected in warm, rosy walls national landmarks undergoing renovation requires a kind of tranquility before the bureaucracy can orient itself that way. Collapsing Interstate bridges augur poorly for post-imperial America.
Amazing.
About a block away is the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, which has a really fun gay night called Ducky and which may be torn down because it sits on a valuable parcel of real estate. I found it funny that pubs with names like that, with stuffy or utterly unoriginal connotations, would not draw the same patronage in the US unless people were patronizing them (ahem) "ironically." Here's a good example:
There's also a place called the George and Dragon, in Shoreditch, that was one of the coolest gay bars to be found. But the name: in NY, it would suggest a sort of multiple-television Irish/sports bar that you might find on 33rd and 8th. You'd never go there. In London, it's all like that. (There was a Royal Oak, but that's different).
Anyway, near Vauxhall is Oval, which has an arena where they probably play football. Not only is it near one of those disused natural gas tanks like we used to have in Queens till about 1997 when they were both torn down, it's also covered in vines. This is what I wish would happen with the Woodhull Medical Center, which is as forbidding as it is oddly beautiful, but would totally benefit from massive horticulture draped from its flat roof. It would look like The Future, as envisaged in 1976.
Here, in Oval, at the age of thirty, you can renew in the glorious ritual of Carousel.
While I promised myself I'd avoid Westminster in general, it's hard because it's so central. I walked by St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, which I remember being a very beautiful church, to find that it was completely closed off because of construction. Rather than bury it behind just a scaffolding (the erection of which, around a building you like, is really depressing because you know they'll never come down for years), they put up a cheerful red barrier with churchy people smiling apologetically for the bother.
In a way, this probably embodies the number one difference between British and American societies, both in practice and as materializations of their national self-mythologies. The American insistence on individual rights over the collective, on private over public, on decentralization over uniformity has resulted in different license plates, different alcohol laws, a sort of optimistic garishness to the landscape, and an impoverishment of municipal services up to and including bridge collapses. Britain, by contrast, is slightly over-administered. By that I mean there's a certain top-down homogeneity that's at once reassuring but also a bit stifling. When walking down a platform in the Tube you might encounter a bench with a sign--an official sign, not a handmade or improvisational one--warning you that an armrest is missing. In the US, public transportation is so underfunded that a bench might stay that way forever, or at least until the agency responsible snagged some corporate tie-in to refurbish a station. If there was any kind of 'idiot-proof' signage, it would only be because someone was covering his or her ass against some hypothetical litigious dick. In Britain it almost seems as if bureaucrats actually concern themselves with the possibility of someone sitting there.
It's kind of that way nationwide. A sort of rational, non-demagogic vox populi seems built into civil servants' decisions. (Civil service itself is selective and highly sought, not the territory of shrewish harridans from the underclass who work in windowless, low-ceilinged offices). Since coming back, I've started reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the excruciating violence that led to the policing of the US-Mexican border, which consolidated state power over the borderlands that McCarthy exaggerates as huge, desolate wastes unfit for human habitation. It's integral to American self-hagiography that this is a vast, still-somewhat-untamed country. The West is manly and the Northeast effete, so the popular imagination settles on the former as a sort of touchstone for our supposed national character. (Or so some might have it). Ignoring for a second all the ridiculous contradictions that vision contains, it's still true that the West is the fastest-growing area of the country--and we anomalous for being an industrialized country that grows at all.
Britain has a sort of snug, tidy stasis; after empire, the energies required to categorize and administer the surface of the globe were turned inwards without abating. This is often considered symptomatic of a malaise affecting the entirely of Western Europe, where the trade-off in achieving a gentle socialist welfare state seems to be any kind of dynamism. It makes you wonder what shocks America's self-regard will sustain when we experience, say, a twenty percent reduction in our standard of living once our untenable empire collapses. I'm not suggesting that British culture is pessimistic or cynical (although that's arguably the case). But the achievement of more enlightened social policies, all radiating from the top and reflected in warm, rosy walls national landmarks undergoing renovation requires a kind of tranquility before the bureaucracy can orient itself that way. Collapsing Interstate bridges augur poorly for post-imperial America.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Brutalisme! (And then we take it higher)
I really meant to write more about London while I was actually there, but I forgot entirely about the need for voltage adapters and sort of preferred to go out every night and then get up early in the morning and walk around. So now I'm back in New York attempting to make good on my promise (largely to myself) to show off my new camera and its capabilities. What are some of the interesting things I did that coincide with the photos currently uploaded to my iPhoto?
It's not quite Queensboro Plaza, but there's nothing quite like the abortious carbuncles of top-down midcentury urban planning designed to replace Luftwaffe bombing craters on the cheap.
"Why won't the pedestrians behave like they do in the rendering?!" the social engineer was overheard to exclaim.
Sometimes, though, an expressway cutting through the urban fabric actually provides a nice counterpoint to a defunct canal.
I didn't just stick to the gentrified precincts of northwest London. I went to Brixton in search of Electric Avenue, but I couldn't find it. Here's some proof that I made it all the way to the end of the Victoria line:
I couldn't find Electric Avenue because I refused to walk around with an A-to-Z guide and it wasn't depicted on the "continuing your journey from Brixton" map in the Tube exit. (Side note: Transport for London must employ dozens of graphic designers, because every station--plus every single bus station--has a different, and very helpful street map centered on where you actually are. Not like coming out of a NYC subway station at, say, Grand Street and seeing an awkward parallelogram from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side etched on a waterlogged papyrus). Anyway, Brixton was pretty diverse. It's funny, being liberal-minded, how your inclination to call black people "African Americans" doesn't apply in the UK. There, they're known as Africo-BritaniccanLilongweAntananarivoshanan'anphuphu. Many more of them are Francophonic than one finds in Brooklyn, and the segregation isn't nearly as extreme, but maybe that's only because it's socially acceptable for white people to live in council estates. There are also far more Muslims, which is somewhat interesting because if any US city contained both a high proportion of Mohammedans and a large absolute number, I think Bill O'Really?s minions would have a freakout. Maybe they're only just getting by without a major race riot or State-imposed halaal roundup, but I think London deserves greater recognition for having sustained a terrorist attack without subsequently persecuting the Muslims who live there.
- I ate Marmite. (If you say it like a "cockney" would, it sounds like you 'hate' Marmite!" A more relevant tidbit about cockneys is that they don't actually exist).
- I didn't go to Buckingham Palace to see the changing of the guard or to the London Eye or to the Tower or Piccadilly Circus or Speaker's Corner.
- But I did get to see a lot of brutalism!
It's not quite Queensboro Plaza, but there's nothing quite like the abortious carbuncles of top-down midcentury urban planning designed to replace Luftwaffe bombing craters on the cheap.
"Why won't the pedestrians behave like they do in the rendering?!" the social engineer was overheard to exclaim.
Sometimes, though, an expressway cutting through the urban fabric actually provides a nice counterpoint to a defunct canal.
I didn't just stick to the gentrified precincts of northwest London. I went to Brixton in search of Electric Avenue, but I couldn't find it. Here's some proof that I made it all the way to the end of the Victoria line:
I couldn't find Electric Avenue because I refused to walk around with an A-to-Z guide and it wasn't depicted on the "continuing your journey from Brixton" map in the Tube exit. (Side note: Transport for London must employ dozens of graphic designers, because every station--plus every single bus station--has a different, and very helpful street map centered on where you actually are. Not like coming out of a NYC subway station at, say, Grand Street and seeing an awkward parallelogram from TriBeCa to the Upper East Side etched on a waterlogged papyrus). Anyway, Brixton was pretty diverse. It's funny, being liberal-minded, how your inclination to call black people "African Americans" doesn't apply in the UK. There, they're known as Africo-BritaniccanLilongweAntananarivoshanan'anphuphu. Many more of them are Francophonic than one finds in Brooklyn, and the segregation isn't nearly as extreme, but maybe that's only because it's socially acceptable for white people to live in council estates. There are also far more Muslims, which is somewhat interesting because if any US city contained both a high proportion of Mohammedans and a large absolute number, I think Bill O'Really?s minions would have a freakout. Maybe they're only just getting by without a major race riot or State-imposed halaal roundup, but I think London deserves greater recognition for having sustained a terrorist attack without subsequently persecuting the Muslims who live there.
