Aim Straight for Five Dials

Hamish Hamilton has recently released the first issue of a literary magazine. It's called Five Dials, and it can be dowloaded here for FREE! Rachel Lichtenstein, Iain Sinclair, and Hari Kunzru are amongst the first contributors.

On Liverpool (5)

Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with their shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of false composure, for they were not used to so many courses at dinner; and confidence, for they were able to pay for it; and strain, for they had been running about London all day shopping, sightseeing; and their natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice-looking gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in; and their good nature, for they would have been glad to do any little service, such as lend a time-table or impart useful information; and their desire, pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to establish connections if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for example), in common or friends of the same name; with their furtive glances, odd silences, and sudden withdrawals into family jocularity and isolation; there they sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in and took his seat at a little table by the curtain.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway.

On Liverpool (4), or, The Opening of Pret

All British urban centres are in transition. I say 'urban centres' because not all of the places (urban centres) undergoing massive redevelopment or slight retouching are cities. Middlesborough has its MIMA; Walsall has its own acclaimed art gallery. Liverpool, of course, is a city, well and truly. A global city with a global history (Transatlantic Slave Trade) and global cultural reach (The Beatles and football). But for years Liverpool has felt like a backwater, the kind of backwater that lacks everyday facilities. It's had its Philharmonic, many galleries and museums, cathedrals, blah, blah, blah - but never on-every-corner facilities. I mean the kind of things that London has had in capitalist bucket loads for years. In sum, I am talking about Pret-a-Manger. Yes, so lacking in trust have the national chains been regarding Liverpool's commercial (possibly capitalist) viability, they have stayed clear of us. That is, until today, when (drum roll cue here) Liverpool's first Pret opened in the business district.

The arrival of Pret is not a seismic event in Liverpool's history, I'll grant you that; but it is interesting to consider from the perspective of the ancient London-Liverpool dialectic. I had my first Pret lunch when I was at university in London (my nearest branch was on the corner of Waterloo Bridge). In 1997. Yes, 19.97! It was in Pret that I cut a number of teeth in the transition from teenage to adulthood, the most significant tooth of the lot being the introduction to coffee. I hated hot drinks as a child, but in Pret, I underwent a serious conversion to 'proper' coffee. In adulthood, not a day goes by without coffee; my home life is structured around the event that is having coffee; and ever since that epiphanic day in 1997, my habit has even gone through evolutionary stages. Anyway, Pret has in a small way shaped the major habits of my life. That was eleven years ago! Eleven! I find it astonishing that it has taken Liverpool this long to convince a chain of sandwich stores that it is a city worth investing in!

Partly to do with the republic thesis, and partly to do with the almost ubiquitous levels of poverty and economic disenfranchisement, this story of Pret's opening today in the city taps into the nature of Liverpool. If at any time London things were to creep up North, they would park themselves unquestionably in either Manchester or Birmingham. This also taps into the story of Liverpool: perhaps the republic mentality is built on the city's envy and therefore resentful attitudes towards those two cities (to be fair, probably much more in the former case. Another dialectic: Liverpool-Manchester), both of which have mastered the late twentieth century and capitalist art of redevelopment much sooner than has Liverpool.

Liverpool: late starter.

But a story like this wouldn't be a Liverpool one if it didn't have a sentimental undertow. Pret's first store in the city is but two doors away from a locally-owned, gourmet sandwich 'emporium', which up until today had quite possibly the best premises in the business district, bang on the end of Castle Street (a grand almost-avenue with stunning architecture right the way through, with the town hall at the top) and across the road from the QE2 Crown Courts. They have sold all the usual sandwichey things to the besuited and booted for years. And what is the name of this emporium? Mange Tout. How their business will be affected is difficult to say, but they can't be blamed for a little bitterness given that in their title they share the same French verb as a powerful international brand - the very thing that once made them distinctive.

Heinz kinda in a right pickle

A spokesman for the ASA said it has yet to decide whether to investigate if the commercial breached its rules, adding: "Homosexuality in itself is not a breach but they could look at it from the point of view of taste and decency."

Look at it from the point of view of taste and decency. But isn't this homophobic? And what do these terms mean? Or are they just referring to the culinary qualities of the mayonnaise?

I don't think I'll go out of my way to buy any Heinz products. It seems they have lost a golden opportunity to stand firm against the homophobic complaints made against their advert (and homophobia in general). They needn't have said they were supportive of the gay community, but they could have reacted by saying they will not remove the advert from circulation.

How regressive. But those terms again: taste and decency. Well, much more the last one, actually. I would've thought that in this day and age it went against decency to whip up hatred about gay people. But that is what those complainers are doing. And the advert has been pulled.

[The quotation above comes from the Independent here.]

For Liverpool

Terence Davies may well be Liverpool's James Joyce. But wait: their styles couldn't be more different. It is true. But the deep focus Joyce's Ulysses gives of Dublin seems to be translated in cinematic terms in Davies' films set in Liverpool. Given Davies' style and tastes in the late modernism of Woolf and Eliot (though not, as far as I know, Joyce himself), it could be argued that Liverpool has belatedly been given its very own late modernist representation. Reading Mrs Dalloway (and possibly The Waves, although I don't yet know), I am reminded of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes. And now, in a different generic vein, there is Of Time and the City, lauded at this year's Cannes and soon to feature at the Toronto Film Festival. A blend of poetry, music, archive footage from the past and documentation of Liverpool today which is not yet ready for the archive but soon will be, Davies' new film is an exploration of how memory and imagination are confused by contemporary Liverpool, because of which the director's past and present are rendered out of joint. With the opening of Liverpool One and the completion of the city's first skyscrapers, it seems the twenty-first century has arrived in the city. But thinking about Davies' work, I wonder what I truly meant a few posts ago when I listed 'cultural amnesia' as something distinctly Liverpudlian. (Of Time and the City is described as a love song and a eulogy.)

On Liverpool (3)

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Citroën, Think Again (2)

Or am I wrong? Is the advert ironising its semantic markers?

True, the advert begins in somewhere like Bavaria; a traditional, unblemished, snowy Bavarian town, complete with buxom-blonde barmaid and a plate of bratwurst thrust before the advert's main character. It's clear this ad is playing up to and around with stereotypes. The man then travels from the Alpine landscape to Berlin, reaching the Brandeburg Gate, where the car and the ad rest on the trademark phrase 'Unmistakably German' undercut with a parodic bell-ping and asterisk saying, 'Made in France'. Unmistakably German...but made in France.

These two phrases undermine the advert's content and each other. Because the car is made in France, it follows that the car is designed 'as if' unmistakably German. Does this likewise suggest that Wagner is not unmistakably German, either? A pan-European Wagner, though? I don't think so. Wagner is and always will be unmistakably German, but not the Germany of today, which is the mistake the advert has made. Is the (and I can't quite believe I'm about to say this) advert's discourse ultimately undermining its own procedures, namely, the one that has been cynically used throughout advertising history to sell products on the basis of their national origins? (In other words, is it parodying the kind of ad campaign pursued by Volkswagen Audi, which forces the positive and natural link between the product and the indisputably high standards of German engineering: 'Vorspsrung durch Technik'?) You can argue with the wurst and Bavarian barmaid cliches, but you cannot argue with the Germanic character of Wagner's music, deeply rooted as it is in the country's ancient folklore.

So Citroën still needs to think again.

Citroën, Think Again

Though I love music (late-romantic music such as Mahler's, whom I venerate), I cannot abide Wagner. The associations are too strong, too..

Of course he's not the only composer whose work has been bastardised in the name of the (m)adman's 'creative' endeavours. But my attention piqued this evening during one car advert for Citroën, in which Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' was combined with silver, old-fashioned-tinted images of Berlin, specifically the Brandenburg Gate. I kid you not. Yes, Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' and the Brandenburg Gate with a distinctively metallic palette. The semantic associations do not stop there, but I will.

On Liverpool (2)

In his three-part series on Liverpool (which ended tonight), Alexei Sayle lamented the loss of the Overhead Railway, which he saw destroyed when he was growing up there. It seems that to be a Liverpudlian in some sense entails a heartfelt connection to one or more of the city's buildings. Sayle romanticised the Overhead Railway (as do most people who talk about it even now), viewing its destruction as part of a philistine and barbaric project to rid the city of its most beautiful architectural gems.

Liverpool has both a revolutionary and hopeless architectural history which continues, more in the latter vein, to this day. The city's catastrophically hopeless council has variously lost its nerve on world-class architects only to fall in other instances for mediocre ones. Up go the latter's buildings, the plans of the former's gathering dust in the could-have-been archives of visionary buildings. In a way, part of the problem and stopgap to the creation of radical buildings in Liverpool has to do with its romantic view of the past, the essence of which sensibility is encapsulated by the recent decoration of the buildings at the Pier Head as, grandly, The Three Graces. Some might view this title as a reflection of Merseypride rather than architectural elegance per se.

Karl Whitney has written a lovely article on the Overhead Railway (and the future of Everton Football Club's ground) for the Irish Times, which can be found here.

On Liverpool

republic/not England/neighbour of New York and Dublin/home to many thousands of female peacocks and vexatious bulls/football republic/poverty central/nouveau riche -WAGish wealth/Sefton Park/the Bombed-Out Church/weekly Dionysian celebrations/gangland central/working class generations gone awry/rapier wit (not good enough for London and so working-class-going-above-their-stations wit)/architectural gigantism/architectural joke/sectarianism/segregation/The Transatlantic Slave Trade/Oriel Chambers/Herbert J. Rowse/anti-intellectualism/Princes Road Synagogue/Sayer's pasties/Keith's/Lark Lane/Daphne's Cheesecake Factory/Jesse Hartley/Ma Boyle's/aspirated consonants/Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society/musicians who rock the world/and some who don't/mangled vowels/Liverpool One/Cunard Line/Lizzie Christian/Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine/Gambier Terrace/Cain's Brewery/Kimos/Alexei Sayle/country's must useless council ever/jam butty mines/The Bluecoat/Adrian Henri/The Overhead Railway/Mark Simpson/Martin's Bank Building/The Green Fish/street vociferations/emos who storm officialdom at the weekends/cultural amnesia.

Beauty Is Life

Already a paid-up member of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films, I came across these startling images, immediate proof if it were needed that Beauty Is Life.

Lost in the East

Well, I hadn't expected that. Thomas Grube's film on the Berliner Philharmoniker's recent trip to Asia was a psychological portrait of leaving home and self for the musicians of this awe-inspiring orchestra. But it went deeper than most documentaries of its kind normally go, the normal limit being observations from participants that play safely on the acceptable side of emotional and psychological openness. But Grube's film showed the musicians in an ultimately open and occasionally therapeutic mode, with reflections delving deep into the players' memories of their former selves and how these glimmers from the past intrude into their professional lives. What gave the musicians' comments a deeper resonance was consideration of what is actually meant by the phrase 'professional lives'; for the film's contributors, nothing less than being members of the most celebrated orchestra on the planet, with all the pressure that this entails. In other words, this orchestra's work goes beyond the present moment to take its place in history. This is how serious they see their work.

These are not hyperbolic claims: the Berliner Philharmoniker is a formidable institution, both as a group of intense musicians and as professionals who are intensely involved in the orchestra's democratic constitution. Nothing, absolutely nothing with these players, it seems, is allowed to slip. The film followed three new members who were on a customary probationary period before they were voted either in or out of the orchestra. Permanently. Sadly, one musician didn't get in, and I felt some sympathy for her, given that most of her contribution laid bare her professional insecurities and psychological timidity. Life in the Berliner Philharmoniker is harsh, and none of the contributors failed to mention this, one going so far as to describe how it intruded into everyday things like accompanying her son to kindergarten; how the pressure of being in the Berlin Philharmoniker seeped into otherwise happy-go-lucky things. And to deepen the viewer's connection with these comments, the director has us look at a family photo of the kindergarten-age son. But what was most captivating about this film's openness was how it interleaved with the eastern destinations, by which psychological as well as geographical distancing was powerfully implied. Simon Stockhausen's score, a trance-inducing remix of eastern sound worlds, together with the images of everyday life in Beijing, Seoul, Taipei, and Hong Kong, coaxes you away from your sense of place, mirroring the orchestra's own experience of alienation.

But one of the most incredible moments was the enormous response Simon Rattle and the orchestra received in Taipei; not in the venue in which they played, but in the immense public square outside the venue, where it seemed tens of thousands of spectators rapturously received Rattle and some members of the orchestra having just watched the concert on four massive screens. It has to be said that coming from the west, it is a very strange experience indeed to see so many people assembled in the name of classical music. In those few moments from the film, something of the east-west divide was opened up to view.

Give them a brake!

An edition of Yentob's Imagine on the Berliner Philharmoniker's tour to Asia? A three-part series on contemporary life for North London's ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, beginning with Samuel Leibovitz, recently released from prison and returning to his Hasidic family in Stamford Hill? The Golden Age-defining Coast? Russia? Even, even - yes, even - The Apprentice?

For me, this is the BBC at its best. I should have pulled the brakes on my BBC rant a few posts ago. Was last Friday's Newsnight Review not just symbolic of their quest for diversity? Enough question marks for one post!

Saad Eskander, director of Baghdad's national library

Perhaps we're complacent about culture. Some people don't have such luxuries. Read Stuart Jeffries here on the person named in the title of this post.

Could hay fever be a metaphor for something?

Newnight REWIND!

If ever there was an example of dumbing down, tonight's Newsnight Review was it. Up for discussion: The Incredible Hulk, Coldplay's new album, and - wait for it - drawings by Bob Dylan. So.what. Why do they need to review The Incredible Hulk? Funny thing is, the BBC will run programmes and news articles on how 'highbrow' arts suffer because of lack of coverage and then on their most serious current affairs programme they review a blockbuster movie, a new album by a group who really doesn't need the press coverage, and third rate paintings by a singing legend. Take the words 'Bob Dylan' away from the paintings and would they receive this level of attention? Is this the best the week could offer? I think even one of the panel members was sick and tired of the waffle over the Dylan exhibition..

Why oh why? We're told that what we see before our eyes is not dumbing down but reflective of a much more open society in which anything is open to intelligent discussion. Isn't there something pretentious about all of this, though, at the end of the day? Self-indulgent?

And when will Newnight Review go up to Liverpool for the Capital of Culture year? I'm sure they have something planned.

Euston of yore

What did the sixties have against 19th century architecture? The answer may be simple: it symbolised everything the sixties wanted to destroy; it evoked nothing of the spirit of progress which the decade thought it was building. John Betjeman saved St. Pancras. Along with Pevnser, he tried his passionate best on Euston, but it didn't work. They demolished it, every last structure of significance. Apart, that is, from the two small buildings at the front of the site, which exist today as incongruous with the overwhelming ugliness and griminess of the sixties station. We could have had the old Euston. Looking through some articles via the Euston Arch's Wikipedia entry, I sit here in disbelief that the handsome old station was swept away. It pains me. The experience of using Euston is all too familiar: Northerners arrive in London and are met with abject ugliness. You walk off the train into what seems like a massive concrete bunker; it is dark, grimy, not-for-humans. It's not even for trains. And the concourse, unyielding, with those useless, concrete sections in the roof - unforgivably bland. It's like you've walked into an immense egg box. Perhaps that's unfair; egg boxes have more interesting tactility.

Forty years later and Euston is preparing to be demolished again. I'm sure they'll get it right, this time.

The Minotaur

Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur is incredible. I feel extremely rejuvenated by the experience: how Birtwistle writes for the stage; how Harsent makes the myth feel very much alive; how the stage designers and direction gave the sacrifice of the Innocents, and after it their evisceration by the Keres, a dramatic immediacy that felt almost too real. And this, despite admiring the way the director got around the Minotaur's massacre of the Innocents without recourse to a backdrop projection or early cinema-like flickering of lights or similar archaic light effects. (Not that they would have approached it in this way.) It was amazing. The through-line of Birtwistle's music (to which he alluded in the introductory interview) is so tightly conceived but manages to be organic and fluid, like the sea from whence the Minotaur's spirit came. (The recurrent backdrop of an oceanic image that managed to look unlike the ocean at the same time, was eerie and deeply moving. It was as if was meant to reconnect the viewer with the opera's atemporal mythical framework. And the viewer was submerged in all senses and valences of this word.)

I am haunted by all of it, and I hope that the Royal Opera will eventually release a DVD or CD of this stunning experience in contemporary opera.

Birtwistle, hey: working at the height of his powers.