Islingtongue > Leytonstongue

I react to Boris Johnson’s election as Mayor by escaping to Los Angeles, in a West Coast reversal of the John Carpenter/ Kurt Russell movie Escape From New York. I'm staying up a nasturtium-banked lane not far from the house on Hollywood Boulevard where comic legend Lenny Bruce met his end . When I check this fact with a local she looks mildly taken aback with my morbid interest until I point out that Bruce had also lived in the house – not just died there.
On my last trip to LA I’d read Will Self’s excellent essay in British Airways Highlife magazine on travelling without luggage and had the image of him “labouring through suburban LA” with his Barbour slung over his shoulder. On that cab ride I’d really longed to trace his steps on foot into the city – the 10 or 15 miles across town along wide streets adorned with hyperbolic signage to the celebrated Hollywood hills that rise above Sunset Boulevard.
This is the outer edge of Laurel Canyon, a place ridiculously rich in rock folklore. From The Byrds through Frank Zappa, The Mammas and Papas, Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, The Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and The Eagles - resided in these eucalyptus the topped hills. It’s the place that Mamma Cass was thinking of when she sang ‘California Dreamin’.
As Michael Walker writes in ‘Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighbourhood’ (picked up at the Laurel Canyon Country Store), “The musicians flocking to the canyon – at night, caterwauling coyotes and hooting owls made you marvel that you were only five minutes from the noise and neon of the Sunset Strip – constituted an unprecedented breed of incipient celebrity: the rocker-hippie, as much a work in progress as the music they made”.

The rocker-hippies are largely no more it seems, replaced by preening proto-porn stars with silicone enhancing any appendage that’ll take it. The Griddle Café on Sunset, sat beside The Director’s Guild of America, seemed a particular attraction for this genre of Los Angel.

It’s a city, a place, that I found resisting definition – allergic to prose. I ventured out on a few jet-lag inspired excursions on foot and experienced the odd sensation of being greeted by literally every other fellow walker - such is the exclusivity of the cult of the pedestrian. But due to the sheer scale of the place (and the steepness of the inevitable return to base) that I was restricted to laps of the blocks along Hollywood-Sunset-Crescent Heights Boulevards. Sprawl almost seems inadequate to describe a system of town planning that gives every single building the car parking space of a small supermarket. Atomised would better describe it – but if matter were this loosely aligned the fabric of everyday objects would crumble before us.

I had Will Self with me again for company, in the form of his piece in GQ on walking LA’s Downtown district (I’ve left off a qualifying adjective but needless to add that it’s a brilliant piece of writing). He references some of the city’s onscreen rendering – Falling Down, Collateral and Blade Runner, to such an extent that the No.2 bus from the bottom of the hill that would take me there seems like the transport to another city. I never made it downtown to Will’s vision of Los Angeles. The city I found the place was at odds with the 2-D LA of TV and cinema. Few cop cars, gangsters and aggravation. More violet blossomed boulevards where SUVs lumber along languidly. The only reference to hand for me being the LA scenes in Sideways – but without the pot-bellied Paul Giamatti.

Labels: los angeles, will self

The question of how will I vote may be answered by the absence of a polling card and lack of clear info on actually where to vote - I found the polling station address eventually and it gives me an excuse to examine the architecture of the Connaught School for Girls first hand.
I've only had one discussion on which way to vote in these elections and it happened by chance in the Director's Bar at West Ham FC stood right next to Mike Ashley, owner of Newcastle FC. It was with my mate Eddie De Oliveira who I suspect will vote for Ken. He challenged my belief that Ken wasn't the automatic choice and fired off a "what's he done wrong?" line. I spluttered for a bit in the way that a computer does when you press too many buttons. "What has he done right" would be a better question and one I still can't answer.
But the simplest answer for Eddie may come this Saturday when/if Fulham lose to Birmingham (I hope they win incidently) after their stirring fightback against Man City - because should they fail now they will have offered their supporters hope then robbed them of it - that it what Ken has done wrong above all else. Above the crime of making London a developer's paradise (I shall never forgive him for surrendering Spitalfields to the City barons) - everybody who has ever fought against an unpopular planning decision endorsed by the mayor may well get their revenge tomorrow. Also above the fact that he has resolutely avoided the issue of housing until this election - until a credit crunch that has wounded his City pals - housing, this city's biggest issue, an issue he built his early political career on -that alone is enough not to give him our vote.
That said, anyone who even considers for a blink of an eye voting for Boris Johnson should be expelled from the city and made to go and live in Stevenage or maybe Slough.
I could go on but I shall stop because when I go out tomorrow/today I want to vote For something not Against something.

Labels: ken livingstone, london mayor, mayoral election 2008

Late Sunday afternoon and I’m overcome by the desire to strike out through the forest. Maybe it was my father calling me up earlier in the day asking to speak to Fieldfare and then berating me for my recent lack of walking.
I live a good 20 minutes walk from the edge of Epping Forest so to bring it closer I decide to head up along Forest Road, a pastoral row of cottages with nattering birds and flower festooned gardens.

A clockwise spin around the Hollow Ponds in the rain with a polystyrene cup of tea from one of the roadside huts and then through the trees emerging opposite The Forest – a row of beautiful Victorian houses overlooked by the fourteen grand-a-year Forest School.
Back through the woods and as I start to revel in the sylvan beauty of it all I’m confronted with a psychedelically decorated concrete underpass, and worse, an intersection of directional signs. ‘Waltamstow – Redbridge – Chingford’, not a choice so much as a warning, a rambler’s Russian roulette, I was looking for a state of fugue, not an example of poor post war urban planning.
I end up changing my mind twice – first in favour of Chingford, then Redbridge. This delivers me to a promenade that runs beside the majestic North Circular – a road to which Deep Topographer Nick Papadimitriou is symbiotically attached. You can’t walk beside such a road (which at the time I confess I mistakenly identify as the M11 – maybe that’s a Leytonstone thing – all motorways become the M11, all motorways are the M11). This brilliant path is raised high along the cutting giving a grandstand view of the metal pods hurtling past with the dark hills of the forest rising in the distance.

It’s not possible to walk beside a motorway without thinking both of Nick and his North Circ obsession (I once witnessed him clasping his hands and declaring his love for the road from the top deck of a bus as we passed it near North Finchley – I have this beautiful Brief Encounter like moment on video), and Iain Sinclair’s magisterial book ‘London Orbital’. The combination of these two references makes it futile to even consider writing about the experience of walking beside a motorway, so instead I stand on a footbridge and think about the documentary series of motorway walks that I plan to pitch to bemused commissioning editors (note to commissioning editors: come on – it’ll be great) – I just need to work on getting Clarkson onboard.
As I see the sign announcing Stanstead airport I momentarily plan to propose a walk out to the airport – then realise that the other member of the triumvirate of great contemporary psychogeographers, Will Self, has perfected this practice to the extent of boarding a plane, flying to another continent then continuing his walk into the city centre (no small feat in LA or New York – more of this when I get round to blogging my recent trip to LA).
I’m further drawn along the roadside by the sight of a cluster of tower blocks rising in the distance like some kind of proto-Croydon. Where can it be?
Turns out to be South Woodford, lovely old Tory South Woodford and a development being misbranded as Queen Mary’s Gate by Telford Homes (“at the forefront of East London regeneration”). These developments always seem to have a fortress-like appearance, the outpost of a colonial power, in this case City capital. But with the credit crunch starting to bite it’s not so difficult to imagine the potential ghetto-isation of such ‘prestige’ communities.
I amble down George Lane which feels like it belongs in Boscombe or Ventnor, particularly on a lazy Sunday evening – so I stop for gelato and take it on the tube home with me.

Labels: deep topography, epping forest, leytonstone, psychogeography, redbridge, topographics

An anarchist perspective on the London Mayoral Elections: " We all know politicians are lying, corrupt, self-serving parasites - its time we let them know. This is our London, not their, their party's or their paymasters'.
- noticeable that the Greens still get left out.
I stopped to chat to the Left List canvassers outside Leytonstone Station the other day greeting them with the line, "I thought you lot didn't believe in bourgeois democracy", which seemed to catch them slightly unawares. The SWP must have changed a bit since I was a lad when all SWSS members were thoroughly indoctrinated with the line on the futility of elections. I perused their stall, being a sucker for political paraphernalia, and looked at the latest edition of Socialist Studies that included an article on 'Reality TV: the Big Brother phenomenon'. "What's Big Brother got to do with socialism", I scoffed, before noticing that the lady I was talking to, and at this point looking slightly sheepish, was former Big Brother contestant (and local celebrity) Carole Vincent.

Labels: boris johnson, ken livingstone, leytonstone, london, london mayor

"The London County Council is probably the most remarkable attempt of modern democracy to build a local governing machine which will produce a highly expert staff of bureaucratic specialists controlled by a general council elected by practically every class of the community. The achievements of the London County Council are the results of this great experiment in scientific democracy; whereby we often put in an illiterate slum elector at one end of the machine and turn out an expert administrator at the other.
So complicated has the art and science of government become since men ceased to be wandering hunters."
G.R. Stirling Taylor, The London County Council (published in 'Wonderful London Vol 3circa 1920))

the photo shows the Council Chamber at County Hall (before it was turned into an amusement arcade with a McDonalds

Labels: boris johnson, ken livingstone, london, london mayor, mayoral election 2008

Labels: boris johnson, ken livingstone, london, london mayor, mayoral election 2008

So the official Mayoral Campaign has begun. What you’ll read about in the newspapers and see on the telly is the cartoon contest between ‘Not So Red’ Ken Livingstone and ‘Barmy Bouncy Bonkers’ Boris Johnson with a cardboard cameo appearance from ‘Stoner Gay Copper’ Brian Paddick.
This isn’t the real election.
Ken launched his campaign with a warning that this wasn’t Celebrity Big Brother. He’s quite right because Celebrity Big Brother presents voters with a reasonable choice of candidates representing a diversity of race, gender and neuroses. This is possibly why more people vote in Big Brother evictions than in local elections.
This week saw the pitiful sight of Boris and Ken squabbling over how many ‘unaffordable homes’ they wouldn’t build – between the ineffective 50% minimum introduced by home-owner Livingstone and the scrapping of that by multiple home-owner Johnson (Canonbury and Henley at that – two of the most sought after locations in the South East) who merely wants 50,000 “cheaper” homes. What both targets miss is whether these mythical dwellings are “affordable” or “cheaper” they are both still far too expensive for the vast majority of Londoners.
I shall try to track the election on this blog and although I jest a bit I’m saddened by the lack of any kind of viable candidate who aims to speak for Londoners rather than the City, the developers, and the two main parties. This election is being transformed into a phoney war between the Tories and Labour in the tussle for the bigger prize of national power – London as a third world client state over which the super-powers fight.
Where’s Rainbow George when you need him.

Labels: boris johnson, election, ken livingstone, london mayor, mayoral election 2008