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Tag Archives: Urban.

Vestigial Tales, Trainers & other Natural Wonders.

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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A27, Alluvial Plain, Beachy head, Birling Gap, Blue Tits, Chalk & Flint Terrain, Chimpanzees, Cliffe High Street, Cretacious, Culfail Tunnel, Downland, East Sussex, Gatwick Airport, Grasslands, Grazing, Gym, Iron Age Hill Forts, LeneLovich Birdsong, Lewes, Mount Caeburn, Newhaven, Ouse River, Pheasant, Pigeons, Saucony Trainers, Shakespeare, Skylarks, Southerham Farm Reserve, Sparrows, starlings, The Sea, Typewriters, Urban.

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     The sponging of dense grass and moss muffles up through each footstep. Each earthly percussion creates a physical feedback loop that drives the next step and the next. There is something of the mechanical meditation in this walk. Each step reaches further than just the simple exchange of calorific energy through muscle and sinew for propulsion. Each footfall connects me with the deeper history of the chalk and flint ground beneath my feet. My pace is steady. [My speed hovers somewhere around the 7 in gym treadmill terms.]

That I connect to this ancient soil through the soles of my very urban white, red and green Suacony Jazz 91 trainers doesn’t quite fit the idyllic bill. But in their defence, they have carried me through hundreds of hours of walking around this Downland over the last 3 or so years. So they have earned their place, however incongruous they might seem amidst the herds of professional walking boots and shoes we pass.

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The wind-blown tree sits on the prow of the hill. The tree is my first marker. Beyond the tree, decompression and a quieting of the mind awaits.

As I pick up my pace, I imagine each heel-crump and sole-scuff echoing down through the Cretaceous layers beneath me. The chalk here is a vestigial blanket beneath the patchwork quilt of the East Sussex Downs – a residue of microscopic plankton skeletons from the bed of the shallow sea that once covered this area. As I veer left towards the tree I see the roof-tops of Cliffe High Street and the scimitar curve of the tidal River Ouse behind and below me as it exits Lewes. I also sense the Culfail Tunnel that cuts beneath me behind the chalk cliff-face that rises up over the south-easterly point of Lewes.

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The walk takes me up and into the Southerham Farm Reserve, just south-east of Lewes. The grassland here has developed into the close-cropped downland pasture through over a 1000 years of grazing. South Downs sheep speckle the hillsides, bobbing like fluffy white and grey corks on the waves of chalk and flint hills rolling back towards the sea some five miles off to the south of me. The Reserve footpath scarps up a green incline to my left punctuated with sheep and meat-herd cattle. In front of me to the right and below where I am standing is a curved hollow that wends around to the right and down into a dip through which a farm track runs – a natural amphitheatre with topographic welts running along its steep sides – the long grassed-over furrows of some older crop raising. 

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Vestigial echoes are a theme up here. Another quirk of my Saucony Jazz trainers is that the left one wheezes slightly each time my heel hits the ground. [Well, more of a  squelchy-sigh than a wheeze.] The right remains inscrutably silent. I speculate that this lop-sided sound effect might be due to the fact that I carry more weight on my left foot. A physical echo perhaps, of an L1/L2 prolapse disc that demonstrated itself [sciatica] in my right leg and foot. The echo here resides in the heel of my left trainer as evidence of my ‘carrying’ it still, [my leg that is, not the trainer] some 18 years after the fact.

Beyond the wizened tree, the ground raises upwards in a gentle slope and then steepens. The meat-cattle are closer now, bunched in this narrower spit that runs around the top edge of the amphitheatre to my right. As I move to the prow where a stile opens onto the next leg of the walk, the wind blows up a little. I am suddenly aware that there is not one obstacle between me and Eastbourne to the immediate east and Beachy Head and the Birling Gap to the south-east of me.

Sound overwhelms me here, the wind buffeting my ears. Until this point the walk has been wrapped in the birdsong of skylarks hovering and flitting 20-30 yards above my head. The warbling sing-song of them wafting over the downs just above ground level is particular to this landscape.

The purity of their song marks a clear phase in the walk. Earlier on, as I climb the tarmac hill from Cliffe High Street up past the golf course to reach the downland, the birdsong is an exquisite collision of sparrows, starlings and blue tits, tinged with the corvid caws of crow, magpie mutter, wood pigeon coos, and the wood chatter of a distant woodpecker.

This blanket of birdsong is soulful evidence of a universal grammar at work in the natural world. Current research shows increasing evidence of the links between birdsong and the universal grammar evident within it and the syntactical rhythms of creature speech. It would come as no surprise to me that humans have mined and mimicked bird song to elevate and sophisticate the basic range of primate vocal communication. Chimpanzees may well write Shakespeare given a typewriter and long enough. But it takes birds to elevate the human language to a sonnet or an aria.

Once past the golf course and out on to the downland, everything falls away.  I am left with only the skylark song all about me. It is punctuated every now and then by soaring seagull calls high above me and the distinctive cocking of the male pheasant below me, scuttling along the fringes of the low copse woods. Ive decided that, at their harshest, pheasant calls sound like a hybrid between a crow caw and a fan-belt slipping.

As I look up into the blue, scanning to find the various protagonists of said songs, something reveals itself to me. Before the lock down came, even up in this beautiful and reasonably unspoilt part of the world, there would still be a steady, low level of noise pollution coming both up from the traffic rush of the A27, and down from the planes heading for Gatwick Airport.

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Now. Just blue. And silence. As testament to the emptiness of the sky bar the birds nature put in it, I spy just one high distant vapour trail. This blue canopy is usually criss-crossed with the vapour scratches of windswept and interesting air travel. No now at least.

The lockdown has given those of us lucky enough to live at the fringes of nature an opportunity to reconnect with her beyond a simple Sunday walk. The silences left by the absence of air and road travel amplify and elevate the natural orchestra of the wild. Greater tracts of time and a far deeper need to reflect and interrogate some of the turbulence and anxiety the COVID 19 pandemic has bought compels us to spend longer out in nature than we might otherwise do. Thats not a bad thing. And it is a living privilege that I am deeply grateful for.

As I loop my way up and across the downland, Mount Caeburn sits to my left-hand side at the highest point, with Lewes to its north and the silvery Ouse snaking beneath its gaze southwards to Newhaven and the sea. This hunched, moated echo of an iron-age hill fort is from a time where defence against the dangers that might lurk all around the settlement, against what might harry and kill the occupants, was the key to survival. It was a defended place everyone could withdraw to and take refuge in. It strikes me that every home in the UK right now is less a castle and more a Mount Caebourn.

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The sun is up properly now and the mists are starting to lift off the alluvial plain below and to the south. The striding dark sigh of me falls away to my right across the grazing field.

It makes me think.

The shadow that falls from me is not the stretching shadow of an evening sun whose lengthening signals the coming darkness of a long night. This is a morning walk. On this day, for the moment at least, much like our impacts on the environment, my shadow will only shorten as the sun rises and the day fills to blooming.  And with the coming of the mid-day sun that shadow will briefly disappear. To nothing. The long shadow of my presence on the downland will have passed into memory, for a short while at least.

It would be rather nice if our impacts on the only planet we have did much the same.

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Hemispheres, politics & the battle between Left & Right

02 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Anti-liberallism, betjemen, Billy Bunter, Black Country, Casuals, Cirque, Daily Mail, farage, Fund Traders, Harry & St George, Left Wing, Lords, Mod, Normans, Purcell, Right Wing, Saxons, Serfs, Shark Tank, Suburban, The Idle Rich, The Square Mile, Toffs, Top Gear, Upper Classes, Urban., Working Classes, YBA

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There’s a Bugsy Malone splurge gun massacre of class, politics and populism going on right now.

It was there prior to St Theresa’s whistle-blow announcement. She simply stuck a rocket pack on it all.

And for those of you who haven’t noticed; creativity, culture and the arts are slap bang in the middle of it all. And they’re getting it in the neck.

The news tells us that the working classes are on the march. That BREXIT was a vote fuelled by those left behind by global capitalism and its increasingly wealthy adherents.

And that BREXIT and populism are in some way proxy wars between the Haves and Have Nots. With a smattering of Saxon (serfs) v. Norman (lords) and suburb (Farage) v. urb (Cameron).

Terry & June have raised a flag and cried for England, Harry and some Saint’s flag we bought off the Genoese.

But the papers still like to present this as the old school cap doffing boot wearing (and traditionally socialist leaning and union advocating) working class stuffing it to the Top Hatted (and Right of centre) toffs with their Bunter-esque Trunks of Tuck shop plenty and fancy ways.

If you hadn’t being paying attention (and had been totally ignoring the role of little England in all of this) Brexit was an action against the establishment by a working class constituency bereft and defeated by relentless years of other people’s plenty being rubbed in their face.

And the working class hero, uncluttered by the over blown cultural self-assertions of the rich and powerful – their hordes and their funds, treasure chests, junkets and galleries all propped up by high performance German engineering and fashion divas and a handbag costing a month’s earnings – has stepped up and bloodied their nose.

Screw Culture. It’s an affectation and luxury of the Rich.

In some reports there’s a whiff of ‘the working class hero’ (WCH) being anti-culture – well, the kind of culture trumpeted by the City and its dinner party friends. Oh, and  f.y.i. the WCH is anti the multi-culturism that the money monsters and politicians celebrate and espouse – seeing immigrants as the lackeys of the rich, working their factories and filling their low paid scuzzy jobs otherwise unfit by condition or wage for the decent indigenous WCH, either male or female.

This working class reactionary truth will be born out in France we are told.

As it is being born out in the Nordic and Germanic states. On a platform of anti-foreigner and ‘what about me?’

And these commentators apply a simple formula that seems to say that the right wing ascendency is ostensibly rooted in the disenchanted dispossessed working class.

And that the right wing ascendency is anti-liberalism (the cultural and social not financial kind) – therefore the WCH is against liberal arts and the profundity of self-enlightenment.

Therefore, the WCH despises any form of enlightenment – and would raise one dimensional variations of the same self – a clone army of book burning gallery trashing elitist toff beating brilliance – in preference to a vibrant exciting society and culture.

What utter shite.

Firstly, the Elite and the Rich are not necessarily the same. And the political shades of left and Right in both make over simplistic assignments futile. There are endless correlations and direct proofs of the connections between the Rich and Elite  BUT the Elite – those relentlessly committed to self-selecting themselves as the leading lights of anything and everything – running things for others (whether they want them to or not), generally being in charge and walking around with an unbearable smugness and self-assertion – are not always Rich or vice versa.

It’s the power they crave. The career politician is on the top branch of these ravenous creatures – with their self-selecting voice of the people (ish).

They spend a lot of time with the Rich (negotiating with Industry and Finance over over-poured Claret because they absolutely have to of course). And they are of course at best very well connected, tied together with a thin thread that unravels back either to a musty study room in a sandstone schoolhouse (for all of his ‘one of the people’ Schtick, Farage is an Ex Dulwich College boy), a university hall, or backwards into the Square Mile. And if they directly have none of these, they know someone who does.

And the Elite, well, they are different kettle of picked Shark installation altogether. Many fiercely obscure their provincialism with Elite type affiliations and experiences. They jig and jump to the drumbeats of the urbane metropolitan – the art shows, theatre nights, picnics in the classically shrouded parks, Cirque du (insert exotic name here) and of course the relentless squalling pirouetting brawl in black that is modern interpretive dance.

Some would say thank god they do. We would exist in a cultural desert otherwise – any form of creativity being reduced to the cultural equivalent of The Pub Landlord’s ‘glass of white wine for the lady’ – a slightly demeaned but humoured unit of creativity that isn’t really proper.

It’s a fair point

If our culture really was just a bastion of the Rich, the arts would be a sclerotic lumpen dross – our lives populated by the myriad stools popped out the arse end of an unfeeling industrial production line of commercial arts and the venues that host them.

But to pretend that the fierce creativity of the UK is just a Rich man’s train set to be slashed, demeaned and derided is the kind of twaddle that might be peddled by the likes of the Faragists, trapped terrified as they are in their fortress of Purcell, Lloyd Webber, Betjemen and Top Gear.

So perhaps when the political commentators and the budget watchers point accusingly at money being wasted on some art house in Camden and cheer the swingeing cuts to the arts and to sources of culture, they’re pointing their guns the wrong direction. Perhaps they think it’s the most commercial of the arts that they think they are extinguishing – by which I mean art produced in the service of the Rich by self-conscious and socially attenuated art pimps in the absence of any real feeling and tension bar status and lucre.

There is a difference.

And it is worth pointing out that the UK culture (certainly from the 50s onwards) has been a visible bastion of WCH culture and arts  – from the edgy raw playwrights of the Angry Young Men to Black Country metal heads taking over the world, to Skinhead and Mod and the Casual culture of the football terraces. The sources of WCH art energy and colour are relentless.

Locked inside all of these movements are threads and collisions of fierce feeling – the source of their potency and raw power.

Tension. Struggle. Pain. Debauch. Poverty. Frustration. Elation. Sadness. Revulsion. The feelings we feel when we are alive to the life we live – unfettered from luxury and emollient comforts. That is the stuff of art and the fuel of culture.

There was once even a whiff of this raw energy in YBA but, well, really, how many dots can one person silk screen to hang on a banker’s wall.

When someone once defined art as something that has no utility I believe that they meant something that has been created for no reason beyond the outpouring of expression demanded of the artist by something within them.

I believe that the relentless fillip of fund trader bonuses, commission monies and personal strategies for increasing wealth kill this spirit in artists. They become complicit – part of the spiritual algorithm of wealth creation.

And this makes the lie of the artist’s  expression. It becomes the social smile painted on the face of a misanthrope.

But there is a value to everything – even if it is financed by the money monsters putting on emotional lip stick by hanging someone else’s very expensively framed empathy on their walls.

We should salute the fact that the absence of feeling in either the Rich or the Elite – too consumed as they are in the pursuit of the material to the detriment of their emotional and spiritual selves – has created the desire to invest and finance struggling working class artists and elevated them up and into the limelight

The struggle to express themselves in lives riddled by attrition and want with desires and dreams close to suffocated is for me a beacon of the power of the people called the working or struggling classes.

And this is good. Far from being the murderers of the artistic darling – they are the universal mothers of them.

Centuries of artists, poets, performers and musicians from the ‘lower orders’ have enlightened every aspect of our cultural identity – all the more potent for the thick unforgiving skin their expression has had to burst through.

Yes, they are elevated on the back of the money with which the Rich buy emotion and feeling – the jewellery of a feeling expressive being – but none-the-less there is a circle of existence and creation in this that we all get to enjoy.

There is something at work here, with a sort of structure and rhythm. As one set of artists elevate up and out, others pour in and take their place.

There’s a reason for this.

Tension does not live a long life amongst comforts and plenty: the struggles that demonstrate themselves within it are the toxic nihilistic kind – locked into petty drug spirals and alcoholism and the artistic and literary caprices of the decaying elite.

The artists that enter this world on the back of great success tend to struggle to maintain their edge. It certainly struggles to transfer itself to their progeny.

There is a phrase – clogs to clogs in 3 generations – used to describe the journey from rags to riches to rags – through the ascent, apex, nadir and subsequent crash of three generations – initially climbing up on the new wealth of one particular member, vast monies made through hard work, moments of genius or simply brutal profiteering at. And the second generation raised in the immediate shadow of that person have some of the same spirit and nous in them to continue the ascent – BUT by the third generation, expensively educated far from the relentless grunt and grind of profiteering and money worship, look to different inspirations and passions – some pointless, some benevolent, some enriching but few of them money making in the same manner – they have entered the luxury of conscience freed to think of things other than climbing out of the primordial soup of want and struggle and making ends meet.

The luxury of conscience is not a hot bed of art and literature. Many luminaries have come from this world – the gentleman of letters, the learned and the scientists and the academics perhaps. But rarely does the fierce fire that creates movements and shape epochs come from this fountainhead of the Rich.

Brexit was a punk act, a swastika on the combat jacket of the forgotten and the dispossessed. I am unsurprised that John Lydon AKA Jonny Rotten came out on favour of BREXIT.

BREXIT is an emotion. Not a reason. Expressed by an epoch shaping creative force.

BREXITEERS are not anti-art. The reason-obsessed and the overly rational within their ranks might be. The sniffy, blinkered and the insecure perhaps.

And it is those that use the connection between grants and funding and private investment and the arts and the subsequent elitist enjoyment of them as a way of packaging them up with the rest of the European curse. For a very simple reason.

Creativity is a shifty foreigner to their rationally class-exacerbated perceptions. One that speaks a language they cannot master or ever wish to try.

So, when it comes to the Arts, current affairs commentators may be better served spending their time contemplating whether Right wing people are mostly Left brain people.

As with many things, this is not about politics. Or religion. Or science. Or money.

The arts, artists and their supporters are under suspicion by the cohorts of the ‘left brain’ as they find them wooly, voodoo or self-interested. They mistrust the layers and complexity. In much the same way they rarely trust foreigners whose culture and society they do not understand -or for that matter their own feelings or the right to express them.

There is no over indexing by shade of class, regionalism or faith. You are as likely to find this thinking in the working classes as you might in the rich; in the devout as the with the humanist; as much in the Northern reaches as with the Southern tribes.

So whatever else we do, my thought is this – can we unshackle the arts and creative expression from the armies of politic.

The only left and right at work here are hemispheric not politic.

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