Psychogeography 3
My friend Noel “Razors” Smith is in prison, serving a life sentence for armed robbery under the “two strikes and you’re out” ruling. His tariff is 11 years, which means he still has a minimum of nine to serve before release on license. Noel is inclined to view the sentence as harsh, given that he never hurt anyone during his blags, or even had a bullet in the chamber that was aimed at them. But his victims doubtless take a diametrically opposed view, and I can see their point.
Psychogeography 2
It’s worth considering that the first theoreticians of the railway saw rails and locomotives as essentially component parts of a single machine. The patents lodged in the early years of the 19th century were for rails with projecting “teeth” which meshed with cog-wheeled engines. Initially it was thought that smooth steel wheels on smooth steel rails wouldn’t provide the necessary traction, but even when this was proved wrong, the French coinage “chemin de fer” still caused problems for Gallic late adopters: “Il y en croient que ces routes sont pavees avec des plaques de fer,” wrote one bemused commentator in 1820, “mais ce ne pas cela de tout …”
Psychogeography 1
I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanised matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure – that would be merely frivolous – or even for exercise, which would be tedious. No, to underscore the seriousness of my project, I like a walk that takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people into my eotechnical world view. “How was your journey?” they say. “Not bad,” I reply. “Take long?” they enquire. “About 10 hours,” I admit. “I walked here.” My interlocutor goggles at me; if he took 10 hours to get here – they’re undoubtedly thinking – will the meeting have to go on for 20? As Emile Durkheim observed, a society’s space-time perceptions are a function of its social rhythm and its territory. So, by walking to the meeting I have disrupted it just as surely as if I’d appeared stark naked with a peacock’s tail fanning out from my buttocks while mouthing Symbolist poetry.
Psychogeography 110
You left me last week in a playground on the esplanade at Cairns in Northern Queensland. I say that with some authority, but the truth is that I left you sitting at your kitchen table reading about me and my four-year-old swinging in the antipodes, whereas in fact I was in frosty south London. I still am – that’s psychogeography for you. Like some bizarre typing bee, I like to store up my memories of hotter, sunnier climes so that I can write about them through the long, crepuscular winter days.
Psychogeography 105
Oliver Rackham, the magisterial historian of the English countryside, has several bees in his bonnet. One them concerns the word “forest”. If you believe Rackham, there’s no necessary connection between “trees” and “forests”. Forests are areas set aside for the hunting of wild game – deer, boar and suchlike – while wooded areas of country are, doh!, woods. Forests are characterised by their ancient laws and royal-appointed officers, while woods feature toadstools, crapping bears, fairy rings and farouche child abusers.
Psychogeography 103
“Walking the dog! Walking the dog! If you don’t know how to do it, I’ll show you how to walk the dog.” This is a song lyric that I have always taken literally – because, truth to tell, I’ve never known how to walk the dog. I want to leave the dog lying on the floor, after all, is there any creature in creation more deliciously reposeful than a slumbering hound. But no: the dog must be walked; this clever species, which has parasitised on humans now for thirty-odd thousand years, understands how to rouse us up, force us to clip ourselves on to their lead, and then let them lead us about cheerless suburbia for an hour or two. How pleasing it is to think that as soon as civilisation crumbles, dogs will be out together again, the Borzoi and the Poodle, reunited in a quest for carrion.
Psychogeography 102
Tully, Northern Queensland, Australia. The sugar mill belches smoke as thick and flocculent as candy floss. Along Highway 1 from Innisfail, the narrow gauge tracks incise the bluey tarmac and serpentine trains heavy with the sweetness of cut cane, trundle through the endless fields. Sugar cane – the humanity’s biggest crop, weightier than rice and wheat combined. Strange that a world dedicated to producing so much sweetness should nevertheless seem so sour.
Psychogeography 101
Consider the rabbit, for in the arc of its lollop is described the rolling landscape of lowland Britain. Consider the rabbit, for was it not an immigrant to our shores, brought here by the Romans? Consider the rabbit, once banged up in massive coney enclosures – the walls of which penetrated feet into the soil – and farmed by weirdo monks. Consider the rabbit, which went hippety-hoppety in lockstep with the expansion of western civilisation, from its native lands of the Iberian Peninsula, across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and eventually to Australia where it meets its viral nemesis.
Psychogeography 100
For much of the time the local park has a bad vibe. It’s bordered on one side by a narrow lane, along which are ranged a Baptist hall, an Anglican church rendered with snotty stone and a backpackers’ hostel lodged in a defunct, eleven storey office block. Late at night you can find truculent Scandinavians wandering the nearby streets, doubtless searching for a half-timbered, sixteenth century coaching inn.
Psychogeography 104
There are people in this world who possess an innate sense of the theatrical — and then there’s my friend Adam Wildi. Theatrical people strike attitudes and make entrances; they cannot see a situation without making a stage of it — then occupying its centre. Clothes are their costumes, furnishings their scenery, other people their supporting cast and their conscience their understudy. But for Adam the very world itself is a stand-in for a provincial playhouse; hills and rivers are his scenery; humungous stadia his “flattage”. His casts run into thousands — his audiences into billions. He must consider the wind, the sun and the moon when it comes to contriving his son et lumiere effects.
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