Resolutions, Consolations

The last time I did this, I only ended up writing half of what I promised (nobody really needs to read me rambling about Orwell - although the Pulp piece is still in progress, expect 50,000 words by 2010). So I'm not going to promise anything much for the new year - the usual can be expected. One piece that I may flag up (as a way of inducing myself to write it) will be on the tube stations and posters of the London Transport board in the '30s; as the nearest thing London ever had to Die Neue Frankfurt or suchlike, a Modernist gesamtkunstwerk usually secreted in the most unprepossessing Commuter belt blandness. It'll also be a critique of the current idea of trickle-down architecture, specifically on the utter lack of effect these majestic spaces have had on their surrounding area. Also it provides an excuse to go to bleak, pointless bits of Ballardian outer London (the abortive trip to Osterley station recently detailed at I.T was an early attempt at this project) and enjoy the ennui.



Meanwhile, here is an incomplete list of some of this year's consolations amid (admittedly self-induced) poverty, illness, geopolitical awfulness and having to visit Southampton: moving out of Deptford High St; the Barbican Grill and the Barbican in general; Chinese hotel restaurants in North Greenwich; being asked to write, occasionally; the stretch of Thames between North Greenwich and Woolwich, both sides of the river, a landscape of abandoned shopping trolleys, wasteland, incongrous luxury flats and industry; the Turkish Maoist soundsystem on Mayday; Berlin, irrespective of hipsters and bad corporate architecture; reading Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium, Karel Teige, The Arcades Project (albeit still unfinished in the latter instance), Stories of Herr Keuner; Emmy Hennings on Joy Division, IT on feminism, Poetix and K-Punk on Class, the Impostume on Naked and Withnail; I like's postcards; Shirley High Street; charity shops; Savage Messiah, both zine and derives; 30s Hitchcock; music: Soft Cell's Bedsit Tapes, Rolan Vega, Monster Bobby, The Caretaker, The Knife, Raymond Scott, Timbaland, Xylitol; hanging round the City of London when it all went tits-up, cackling; Weston Shore; writing a book, and getting an email from Dusan Makavejev. And you there, for reading.