Alone in the library one evening, early winter, I chance to stumble upon a curious title: History and Derivation of Edinburgh Streetnames, published by The Edinburgh Corporation, City Engineers Department, May 1975. I dust down the cover and settle down at a reading table to flick through a few of the pages.
I’m surprised, first of all, to discover that the city once had its own engineer; a certain A.S. Crockett, whose various designatory letters are listed after his name. I wonder whether this is still the case; I wonder too, what Mr Crockett and his predecessors would make of the current state of affairs.
Turning the pages, it fascinates me to learn of the histories which accompany the street names: Morrison Street, so called because it occupied part of Mr Morrison’s land; Elm Row, which took its name from the line of Elm trees running parallel to Baxter place, marking the boundary of the land of a certain Mr Allan; or Fountainbridge, which I am informed takes its name from an old bridge over the Dalry Burn, flowing from the Borough Loch and passing by Lochirn to Coltbridge. It intrigues me to learn of the long-lost hydrology of a sector of the city which is now fully developed, without a burn or a loch in site; it’s no surprise, I reflect, that the area was once so popular with the city’s brewing trade.
I close the book and rest my eyes. Looking out of the window, gazing across the meadows, I see the moon hanging high in the night sky, a thin yellow crescent. I’m struck by the sheer volume of history that lies before me, the hidden past of artefacts which I, and no doubt many others too, take for granted. I try in vain to conjure up an image of Mr Morrison and his land, or Mr Allan and his, perhaps out hunting one frosty winter morn, the trusty hounds trotting by their sides, their paws making a gentle crushing sound as they pad over the grass. But the city stops me: its stone and concrete stands firmly in the way of this bucolic scene. For their part, Borough Loch and Coltbridge are but names to me, and the Dalry Burn a feature of the city that has long since gone.
It disturbs me to discover the transience of objects which, for all intents and purposes, appear to us as permanent, unchanging. Returning the volume to its position on the shelf, I pay silent tribute to Mr Crockett, whose labours have succeeded in preventing, at least for the time being, these historical fascicles from becoming forever lost to the sands of time.
Stepping out into the night, I am at once met by the crisp winter air; the stars shine brightly in the sky above. The city bristles around me, in all its occult past; the street signs wink at me, hinting at their histories from all around.
With a title that is perhaps a tongue in cheek nod to Oliver Chesler’s One night in New York City, Araya’s novella marks a brave departure from the short stories penned as part of his Tales from the Chilean Andes series (2008–2009). Turning his back on the mountains with which he appeared to have developed a spiritual bond, One night in Buenos Aires sees him cross the cordillera and the Argentinean pampa to plunge headfirst into a reluctant embrace of the urban environment in a tale which follows the trajectory of a young expat as he passes through various factions of the Argentinean capital’s nightlife. Marked by an at times caustic humour and a cynicism worthy of Holden Caulfield himself, the novella seeks to challenge notions of identity and above all to deconstruct the mythologies which surround the traveller, the bohemian, and ultimately the much eulogised capital itself.
The novel opens in a bar, a tourist trap in the city’s San Telmo district, on a roof terrace where the protagonist is watching the sun setting over the city and meditating on the growing sense of disillusionment he feels towards the crowd of backpackers by which he is surrounded. The boastful undertone which forms the basis of many of the conversations within earshot is, he observes, based on the one-upmanship of what he curtly describes as “travellers’ trumps”. Yet while the setting of this first episode of the novella may be limited, the protagonist’s ruminations allow us to perceive how the phenomenon of travel, in its most recent guise, has allowed Western cultures to extend the consumerism which powered twentieth century capitalism to encompass entire nations and their peoples, turning their cultures and geographical landscapes into commodities to be bought and sold on a whim:
it occurred to me, sat there with a glass of cheap wine in one hand and a wizened roll-up cigarette in the other, that for many of them, this was just a game, one in which the components of identikit identities based on seemingly unique experiences were snapped up by the privileged bourgeoisie of a new global elite. The end result was less an egalitarian form of promoting cultural understanding and more a sort of neoliberal imperialism which fostered shallow visions of cultures characterised by a distinct lack of integrity and respect.
Moving on, the second part of the novella sees Araya’s protagonist travel across the city to meet a group of friends for an electronic music concert whose headline act will see a pair of Brazilian laptop musicians satirise the sound of reggaeton, in an unlikely mongrel of Latino cumbia, misogynistic US gangster rap and UK acid techno. The group smoke, drink and make conversation with some of the locals; a cut-price, bohemian crowd, which in turn serves as the object of a second meditation, this time on the subcultures which sustain their lifestyle. There is, the protagonist notes, a significant proportion of “hangers-on” present, people whom he characterises as having no genuine interest in the scene itself but who associate themselves with it nonetheless, perhaps for the kudos of being down with those in the know, or perhaps as part of a misguided attempted to shore up a fragile sense identity”. Araya shows us how these fragile subcultures, “for all intents and purposes, lack a clear and strongly grounded sense of social consciousness and for the larger part remain oblivious to the wider context of which they form a part”. He even goes as far as to suggest that the inability of many such subcultures to mature has its roots in this defect, and there is something quite poignant about his evocation of the dancefloors of yesteryear, capturing the intensity of the clubbing experience with fond nostalgia and memories of concerts characterised by “percussion bursting like thunder from black speaker towers on either side of the stage” and people “brought together by the creative energy of the performer”.
Araya’s prose is poised and poetic, such as when the concert comes to an end and the group are hustled outside by the somewhat over-zealous security staff:
for a while, they had hung about outside the club chatting, cadging roll-ups and trying desperately to find an afterparty where they could go to finish the night. But slowly the crowd, that evanescent cohesion of souls, began to disperse, scattering its hundreds of composite pieces out across the darkness of the city.
Then, following a narrow escape with a gang of youths lurking in a backstreet round the corner, and a hair-raising high-speed taxi journey through the heart of the city, the group end up in El cacho, an afterhours café bar downtown and the favoured late night meeting place of prostitutes and their clients who are mostly a mix of corrupt politicians and business men, what Araya calls “the people who wield power, who run the city, giving it direction and making it what it is”. It is this less than salubrious establishment which forms the setting for the third and final part of the novella.
Worse for wear after what has clearly been a long night on the town, here the protagonist’s critique turns particularly acerbic, rounding on the seedy underside of “a mythology which is enthusiastically and unashamedly promoted by the Porteños”. In a moment of despair at the scenes around him, he asks himself: “What is this city? What is the substance which lies behind the romanticised façade of tango? How much of its identity is no more than a nebulous shroud of myth?” As the protagonist observes the ladies of the night in their cheap red lipstick and low-cut dresses, writhing around politicians and business men who are intoxicated by their mastery of the fairer sex, and the desolate eyes of the tramps who from time to time pass by the window, their faces grubby, their clothes tattered, the reader is left with a strong sense of a place pretending to be something it is not.
The reality of what is sometimes referred to as the Paris of South America, Araya seems to suggest, fails to live up to its hype: in spite of its pretentions to the contrary, the protagonist reminds us that Argentina continues to be a developing country in which basic problems such as poor infrastructure and even shortages of coins remain to be solved. In spite of its glossy European façade, there are always hints of another city, one of grimy backstreets and shabby barrios which are carefully concealed from the public eye. He asks:
Where are these poorer barrios? Where are those who are denied the right to participate in this pretence of Europeanness, those consigned to the reality of crushing inequality, a brutal poverty which from time to time reveals itself unannounced, like a rat scuttling across an alleyway? Where are these people while those with the power to change their destiny are out screwing around in late night bars, drinking Scotch, smoking plump Cuban cigars and flirting with cheap whores?
This strength of this book is not its plot, rather its reflections around the theme of identities and how they are constructed, be they of individual travellers, subcultures or even cities themselves. At times the novella seems saturated with the sense of disillusionment felt by Araya towards how we live in this day and age, however, any overindulgences are largely redeemed by his carefully crafted prose, a laconic sense of humour, and a gift for reflective monologues which challenge the doxa of our time. This is a novella which will perhaps appeal more to a younger demographic, to a readership sceptical of the twentieth century gap-year generation and nostalgic for the passing of an era of smoky nightclubs and vibrant subcultures, and finally one which is critical of the acceptability of mild-corruption amongst the political classes. It is only unfortunate that the limitations imposed by the author’s decision to publish this book privately mean that in all likelihood, a large proportion of Araya’s potential audience will remain deprived of his wit, wisdom and prose.
Araya, K. (2010). One night in Buenos Aires. Santiago de Chile: Pelacable Ediciones.
There are better ways of living than being happy but they require strength and sanity.
Revisiting Gray’s avocation of home rule almost twenty years after this pamphlet was first published for the 1992 general election, and almost fifteen years since its subsequent revision, the political landscape it describes is much changed, or at least superficially. The Scottish nation once more has its own parliament, albeit one from which many of its heavyweight politicians remain notably absent, and the relative successes of the Scottish National Party have resulted in a first minister who shares the sense of purpose that is adumbrated in Gray’s work. More so than anything else, however, this pamphlet is essentially a history, albeit a potted, highly partisan and idiosyncratic one, of the United Kingdom and the triumph of a conservative English ruling class. Its premise is a highly inclusive one: the book is addressed to “everyone in Scotland who is able to vote” and is based on the geographical features which distinguish the nation from the rest of the British Isles.
It is in this context that Gray evokes a geography in which “firths, sea lochs, chains of high moorlands and mountains make north Britain like a cluster of big islands jammed together in the east and coming apart in the west,” and in which the geological processes which formed the land meant that the “soil which could be cultivated lay in districts cut off from each other”. Whence, perhaps, the distinction between the hierarchy of privilege which characterises the English feudal system of counties, awarded to barons in return for their allegiance to the king and in turn subdivided into estates which were entrusted to knights on similar terms, and the kith and kin nature of the Scottish clan system whereby what Gray refers to as “a cluster of small nations” was unified by a King of Scots who was crucially, and here he is keen to stress the point, not the king of Scotland. It is this difference which made the Scotland of the time a new, and in a certain sense democratically advanced, sort of European nation in an era in which the modern-day concept of democracy was still many centuries from inception.
The introduction to this pamphlet contains a quote from a short story by the Edinburgh writer Irvine Welsh, where it is asserted that “Scots oppress themselves by their obsession with the English which breeds the negatives of hatred, fear, servility, contempt and dependency”. Gray maintains that such an “unhealthy state of mind will always occur while most Scottish opinion has no influence on how Scots are ruled,” although this is not, he adds, his state of mind. Yet in spite of this claim, his argument is largely grounded in a history of the emergence of the English state and its grip on Scotland, and as such, it must be asked to what extent Gray himself falls victim to perpetrating this phenomenon. Many a chapter is devoted to covering the historical iniquities of the relationship between the two nations, as exemplified by his comments on trade relations around the time of the union:
English coal could enter Ireland duty free, Scottish coal could not. England’s main industry was wool so the government put a light export duty on it. Scotland’s was linen so the government put a heavy duty on it. English brokers took shares in the Irish linen trade, got a government subsidy to expand it, and began buying Scottish flax for it.
Perhaps then, Gray’s concern with the past is in part understandable since it is only recently, with the establishment of a new parliament, that Scottish opinion has begun to have more direct influence on how its people are ruled; a process which has run in parallel to the prospect of new generations who are beginning to see beyond longstanding historical grudges.
It is also interesting to consider Gray’s take on more recent events from living memory. His contempt for Margaret Thatcher is, as it is elsewhere in his work, undisguised, although it is interesting to note that in some senses he foresees New Labour’s adherence to her corrosive neoliberal ideals. Perhaps however, as a whole, the tone of the book is too inward looking, for the reality is that Gray has little to say about modern Scotland’s place in the world and, save for references to certain countries, some of which, such as Iceland and Ireland, now seem rather unfortunate, has even less to say about what could be in the future. Yet comparisons with strong, progressive Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway continue to provide a source of inspiration, not least with Scotland’s involvement in emerging technologies, such as renewable energies, in which, given sufficient enterprise and vision, the county could conceivably once again become a major player on the world stage.
The pamphlet is let down by a lack of references which would allow the curious reader to further pursue some of the points Gray makes and at times, most notably in the final chapter, it does fall victim to its own eccentricity. Yet not withstanding these minor quibbles, in the run up to the fourth Scottish general election, this is a piece of writing which still has ample capacity to, as Gray puts it with characteristic modesty, “provoke intelligent thought”. The creation of a coherent and powerful vision for Scotland’s future in the twenty-first century however, remains very much an open task.
Gray, A. (1997). Why Scots should rule Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate.
That the post colonial enterprise would one day turn back on itself to reconsider its largely unashamed championing of the so-called “third space”, a space where peoples and cultures collide, now seems inevitable. Moslund’s study provides a refreshing critique of this phenomenon, connecting with broader undercurrents of disaffection with the fetishism of difference and the Other which has constituted one of the driving forces of the postmodern project. His sober scepticism cuts through the mythology which has sprouted at times unchecked around the ideas of certain fashionable figures of late twentieth century philosophy, ideas which have been adopted and developed perhaps without due diligence on the part of those who should perhaps know better. Moreover, as Moslund observes, the rise of this mythology has been accompanied by its own poetics of flux, difference, movement, hybridity and nomadicity, with such buzzwords becoming glamorous, sexy even, pursued with an at times ideological zeal. However, swept along in a current of ceaseless “becoming”, seldom do we pause to reflect on the question: becoming what?
Moslund’s critique largely focuses on the ideas of Deleuze and Bakhtin and represents a carefully considered and meticulous attempt to show how concepts from these writers, such as the Deleuzean dichotomy of difference and identity and Bakhtinian notions of centrifugality and centripetality, can be applied to so-called hybrid literature. Yet his approach is thoroughly constructive, using ideas from these thinkers to construct a robust theoretical framework which in turn lays the foundations for an insightful and perspicacious work of literary criticism. He reveals cultural change to be a much more dynamic and complex beast than the celebrationists of hybridity would have us believe, exposing how the various centripetal and centrifugal forces at play within a given space and time—the former exerting a force towards sameness and the latter towards difference—interact to create not a sheer contrast between the sedentary and the nomadic (something for which he is quick to rebuke Deleuze), but instead a rich spectrum in which it is possible to identify multiple speeds of change.
Moslund’s work represents an example of inspired and first rate literary criticism, and the elegance of the arguments he constructs in his case studies is at times comparable to that of a mathematical proof. He has a gift for leading us to rethink conventional wisdom, something exemplified by his exposition of a strongly centripetal force in what at first seems to be a resolutely centrifugal novel (Mukherjee’s Jasmine), and the detection of a strong presence of change and difference in what at first appears to be a novel grounded thoroughly in the Same (Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival). Central to his approach, and both these discoveries, is an ability to conceive of change in two dimensions: the transgressive, where difference is effected on the spatiality of the here and now, and the ingressive, where difference is effected over the continuum of a given time frame. Thus while a novel such as Jasmine may be avowedly centrifugal, when viewed in terms of transgression, in terms of ingression, Moslund shows its potential for change to be rather underwhelming. Moreover, the concomitant observation that celebrationist readings of cultural hybridity are largely concerned with the present, with the here and now of cultural change and migration, and the implication that they lack ingressive, temporal depth, perhaps hints at a more general and dangerous complacency which currently afflicts the postmodern West, constituting just one of the many insights provided to the reader throughout the course of the book.
From his carefully considered theoretical analysis to the case studies which accompany it, Moslund succeeds in making a valuable contribution to the realm of literary theory and perhaps also to his own ambition of developing Deleuze’s idea of a “science of holey space”. This is a challenging book which will be of considerable value to those with an interest in literature, migration and transcultural politics, as well as the more general ideas of the postmodern episteme; it is unfortunate that at the time of writing, a more economical paperback version of the book is not available.
Moslund, S. P. (2010). Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Down with the kids
Ostensibly all about ‘celebrating British street culture’, leaving aside the question of just what this is and whether a public-service broadcaster should be celebrating it at all, the initiative would seem to be more part of a coordinated interpellation of something which has thus far evaded capture. It is about taming and dominating a mode of expression, however articulate or inarticulate it may be, in a feckless attempt to assimilate it into the capitalist system.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in videos used to promote the ‘competition’. Let us briefly consider two of the worst offenders, starting with London. Cue the trendy drum and bass music; the camera cuts to a shot of Darren Cullen (‘Big Poppa’) loitering casually in front of two decommissioned tube cars. Leaving aside the fact that his Graffiti Kings website is about as close as one could get to a textbook definition of the term ‘sell-out’, his play-by-the-rules speech dutifully attempts to lull viewers into abandoning illegality and sleepless nights in train yards in favour of a bien pensant, conformist approach which perhaps owes much to the hypocrisy that lies behind his own reinvention as a legitimate business man. Cullen does “graffiti for a living”, so he tells us, and those interested in following in his footsteps—and here let us note that he openly tells of his own exploits on the wrong side of the law—are paternally advised to steer well clear of the tracks.
Ventsa, for his part, fares no better. In a three and a half minute homage to English hipster fauxhemia, complete with its own quirky soundtrack, the viewer can sit back and watch as he leads us to the Custard Factory, “home to over five hundred independent artists, illustrators and small creative businesses [based] around the arts industry”. Therein lies the rub, specifically the lexicon of businesses and industries. In a certain sense, the term ‘creative industries’, so eagerly embraced by New Labour in the era of Cool Britannia, was in part an attempt at the commoditisation of creativity along the same lines as the neoliberal ideals of its predecessor, Thatcherism. Like all other aspects of life, creativity becomes predominantly governed by the rubric of economic value, subsumed into the great capitalist tradition. For a bankrupt country no longer able to manufacture tangible goods and services of real use to people, manufacturing creativity seems like an easy way out.
The problem however, is that such a concept of creativity is flimsy and ephemeral at best, and the resulting art, or artistic commodity, is largely devoid of any substantially grounded social context or meaningful engagement with the episteme in which it is situated. “When it comes to my art”, Ventsa explains in a manifesto which reads like an A-level art student’s personal statement, “I don’t just work with graffiti lettering, I work with all different types of genres of work, including typography, graphic design, illustration, characters, scenery and backgrounds”. He then goes on to explain just what he is looking for in the competition: “Something that’s well thought out and presented, with different forms of lettering, of course, but from every other genre mixed in there”. Listening to his nebulous description, one could be forgiven for thinking that he is not really sure what he is looking for at all. And neither are we. So much for artistic vision, and perhaps this explains why, as he himself concedes, “when it comes to street art, the Europeans are leading the way.”
Maybe this is overly harsh on Ser and Ventsa, perhaps it is cruel to single them out, but by choosing to appear on national television, both make themselves easy targets and fair game. Speaking out for what purports to be an art form is a position of considerable responsibility and as such they deserve to be held to account.
Enough of the process however, what of the result? This is where things really start to go awry in a catalogue of cock-ups which reveals the ill-conceived nature of the whole enterprise to the glaring light of day. It is not a street artist but Britain’s most prolific vandal, recently sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison for his crimes, who wins the competition; Poppa Ser’s appointment as judge is duly rescinded and a mysterious last minute entry from Shaunlee01245, about as far removed from any definition of street art as possible, scoops the prize; finally, the entrants’ artwork is markedly absent from the resulting street summer advert.
The emperor has no clothes! This shameless one hundred second pastiche of all things ‘urban’ is beset by a glaring contradiction which has undermined the enterprise from the very start and around which it now begins to collapse. Back to our first video: “Too clean man, too clean”, laments Big Poppa as a pristine tube train rolls past in the background, before then going on to explain how distraught he would be if he knew his own kids were at work in the yards. So is Cullen endorsing illegal graffiti or advising against it? The message is confusing.
Nor is it any clearer in the advert which depicts an urban streetscape ripe with antisocial behaviour and elements of petty-criminality. From graffiti artists spraypainting shop fronts and pickpockets, all the way through to BMX riders and acrobats jumping off and onto the roofs of parked cars, there is even a group of hole-digging workies with a pneumatic drill thrown in for good measure, as if nothing could be more emblematic of the twenty-first century urban milieu. You name it, it’s is in there, and the combined effect is to suggest that it is hip to be on the wrong side of the law, that a generous sprinkling of petty-crime—although nothing too serious, lest we evoke the spectre of Justin Rollins—can help to spice up the urban environment and reach out to those disenfranchised kids. At best the result is a tacit endorsement and confusing legitimation of antisocial behaviour.
This is the paradox that will always be inherent to any attempt to assimilate and tame something which has always been profoundly anti-establishment. You can’t be for street art and against breaking the law, and society can never assimilate what is at its heart—from Banksy to Tox and in spite of their differences—a response to a profound sense of dissatisfaction felt by certain sections of its members. In terms of the former, his work is now assiduously coveted, enshrined in Perspex, the message being that if it is hip or arty enough, defacing public property is somehow okay; in terms of the latter, whatever Daniel Halpin’s artistic merits (and here perhaps we should ask Ben Flynn to clarify things for us in his capacity as expert witness) his mode of expression posses a sense of integrity and firmly-rooted social commitment that is present in all but a small fraction of street art. Perhaps this was why Halpin would always be the rightful winner of the London competition, and the one to lay bare the shameless hypocrisy on which the whole sorry enterprise was founded.
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