1

Preface An industrial landscape. Theres a gasworks in the centre of the frame and a large building in the foreground over the top of which runs a railway line. To the left is a quarry (possibly feeding the large building (a chemical plant? - used to clean quarried stone?)). We can see the sides of a valley disappearing into the distance behind the gasworks. Smoke rises from the chemical plant. The camera pans up and to the left, following the edge of the quarry which appears to be quite large as it edges onto the screen. We see the top of the quarry: the horizontal turf as it meets the vertical rock-face. The camera continues to pan, past a boy and girl sat looking down at the view weve just seen. It continues its trajectory, arcing down past a girl on the left of the screen, arriving at a boy (Tom Courtenay) lying on his back, hands behind his head, looking up into the sky, waiting for the camera to come to a rest...

...Theres other places besides London, you know...

This will later become...

...There are other places than London, you know...

Chris Grygiel

i.

Whats wrong with your miserable fucking face... she said as I returned to the bedroom.

Should that have a question mark at the end? I havent put one in, it didnt seem like a question at the time. It seemed like an insult. A lament:

Your miserable fucking face [makes me fucking miserable].

This is not me. This is not who I am.

I had been in a good mood. You might say she took the wind out of my sails. No. You wouldnt. I wasnt in a good mood. But I wasnt in a bad mood either. I wasnt in any kind of mood. Perhaps thats the problem: that my default setting, my expressionless face, is rather downcast and could perhaps be described as miserable. Buster Keaton, Eeyore, these are my precursors. ...

3 But weve been together ten years. Surely she knows by now that while my face might say miserable, most of the time I dont feel it. Perhaps it just highlights how little we really know each other. I dont mean me and her, I mean us, all of us: Im stuck in my head and shes stuck in hers (and youre stuck in yours) and she doesnt know me and Ill never know her. What made her say that? Whats wrong with your miserable fucking face. I was being blamed for something. For being me? Shed rather I wasnt me. Is that it? I dont know, but I was thinking of this scene recently while I was reading Rebecca Wests Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a long and thoroughly researched book about Yugoslavia, most of which I have since forgotten.1 Anyway, part of the epilogue came to mind when I was thinking about never truly knowing someone: We all admit that when we see a man in the street and say, that is John Jones, he is an umbrella manufacturer, he is going to his works in Acton, we are not really describing him, we are simply putting into currency a number of facts about him which the community will find useful in their dealings with him. An adequate account of him must be as the map of a jungle in which there range many beasts, some benign, some abhorrent.2 So sure, we can describe somebody, we can give you an insight into their character, their work, their likes and dislikes, but does any of this really help you know them? Of course these can all help, but they never seem enough. This descriptive currency can only go so far. There comes a point at which it is no longer any assistance. Even at this point, even when youve known a person for a long time; youve spent a lot of time with them; youve talked about friends and family; you now have the same friends and family; youve shared your life with them;3 even then, you can still be floored by:

Whats wrong with your miserable fucking face.

1 There springs to mind however, an anecdote about a king who would travel the country alone, without entourage. In one instance he visited a school and, upon finding a classroom empty, left a note on the blackboard The King was here. He sounded great, and that was very touching. 2 Im trying to dispense with footnotes, or at least those very dull academic footnotes that never really tell you anything (apart from that which you could find out with a basic internet search). It should hopefully suffice to let you know that this is on page 1123 (in my copy, at least). 3 This curb on footnotes isnt going too well is it. Ive always liked Kurt Vonneguts description of semicolons: They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show youve been to college. I quite liked this, and remember recently telling a colleague that I had no idea what they did, to be informed of their literal uses such as Between items in a series or listing or Between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction (Ive taken these definitions from wikipedia, not from what my colleague said, though, being academically minded, we can assume like-for-like). What I meant to say was theyre a bit useless arent they, which is more or less what Vonnegut said, only not as good.

ii. Recently I went to Amsterdam, for a stag-do and I was a little apprehensive. I worried about all the things that would perhaps be expected of me. The ways in which when groups of men get together there always seems to be the possibility of violence. It sets me on edge, I worry.4 I didnt have to worry - the grooms sensible and responsible, and a really nice guy, and their wedding a few weeks later was really good fun.5 However, while we were in Amsterdam I came to realise we hadnt seen any of Amsterdam. Wed been to a series of bars and pubs but hadnt, it seemed to me, experienced the true Amsterdam whatever that is. We hadnt been to the Anne Frank museum, nor the Rijksmuseum (which was closed when we were there anyway) but even if we had, would we have really experienced enough of Amsterdam to be satisfied. This led me to worry about how we experience place, the idea of belonging, how we travel, and what we do while were there (wherever there is). How long would it have taken to really take in Amsterdam? How long would I have to live there before I could call it home? Could it ever be home to me? Does my inability to speak Dutch limit my connection with the place and its people? Could I learn Dutch? How long would it take me to learn Dutch? Even if I learnt Dutch would I ever be fully integrated into Dutch society? Would I want to be integrated into Dutch society? Why should I waste my time worrying about learning Dutch? After all this, I came to several conclusions: I have been to Amsterdam , I have never been to Amsterdam and I will never go to Amsterdam which are all true, in their own ways.

4 An early basis for such behavior may lie in a Blackburn vs. Newcastle United match I went to see with my father, brother and one of my friends, Stephen Almond, where the sheer number of people, noise in the stadium and the vehemence with which some fans spat their ire all combined to leave me feeling worried (I wouldnt go so far as to say frightened). 5 In fact, this wedding ties for 1st place in the Loveliest Wedding Chris Has Ever Been To competition (dont worry, there isnt really a competition).

iii. A short history: The Angry Young Men were a group of working- and middle-class playwrights and writers who rose to prominence in the 1950s. Including John Osborne, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Harold Pinter and David Storey, the group despite never identified themselves as a group or movement were united by a desire to move away from the traditions of British society. They were boys whom, through their education, aspired to achieve something more than the opportunities traditionally available to them. The name Angry Young Men was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatres press office in their promotion of Osbornes play Look Back In Anger (1956), the first success of this new wave of work inspired by aspiration and frustration. A common concern for writers recognised and described a lot of fear and worry that comes with moving away from home, from escaping to London, from trying to better yourself. Tony Harrison, who vaguely fits into this milieu, expresses some of these concerns in his 1985 poem, V. The poem deals with a lot of things - too many to go into any depth here - but from reading his poem one of the important parts, to me at least, is alienation. It is the escape from the North, then later return to find yourself an outsider in your own home. The guilt that Harrison feels, manifests in a sort of shame, at being the one that left, at forgetting about this place, about wanting to forget. He returns and he feels terrible, frustrated, angry, impotent. Hes enraged by the vandalism of his parents grave and has an imagined conversation with the vandal.The vandals speech is in italics in the original poem,
and Ive retained that here.

What is it that these crude words are revealing? What is it that this aggro act implies? Giving the dead their xenophobic feeling or just a cri-de-coeur because man dies? So whats a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Cant you speak the language that yer mam spoke. Think of er! Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek? Go and fuck yourself with cri-de-coeur! She didnt talk like you do for a start! I shouted, turning where I thought the voice had been. She didnt understand yer fucking art! She thought yer fucking poetry obscene! ... Aspirations, cunt! Folk on tfucking dole ave got about as much scope to aspire above the shit theyre dumped in, cunt, as coal aspires to be chucked on tfucking fire. OK, forget the aspirations. Look, I know Uniteds losing gets you fans incensed and how far the HARP inside you makes you go but all these Vs: against! against! against! Ahll tell yer then what really riles a bloke. Its reading on their graves the jobs they did Butcher, publican and baker. Me, Ill croak doing tsame nowt ah do now as a kid.

... Listen, cunt! I said, before you start your jeering the reason why I want this in a book s to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing! A book, yer stupid cunt, s not worth a fuck! The only reason why I write this poem at all on yobs like you who do the dirt on death s to give some higher meaning to your scrawl. Dont fucking bother, cunt! Dont waste your breath! You piss-artist skinhead cunt, you wouldnt know and it doesnt fucking matter if you do, the skin and poet united fucking Rimbaud but the autre that je est is fucking you. Ahve told yer, no more Greek...Thats yer last warning! Ahll boot yer fucking balls to Kingdom Come. Theyll find yer cold on tgrave tomorrer morning. So dont speak Greek. Dont treat me like Im dumb. Ive done my bits of mindless aggro too not half a mile from where were standing now. Yeah, ah bet yer wrote a poem, yer wanker you! No, shut yer gob a while. Ahll tell yer ow... ... Dont talk to me of fucking representing the class yer were born into any more. Yer going to get urt and start resenting its not poetry we need in this class war. Yerve given yerself toffee, cunt. Who needs yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own. Ahve got mi work on show all ovver Leeds like this UNITED ere on some sods stone. Ok! (thinking I had him trapped) Ok! If youre so proud of it, then sign your name when next youre full of HARP and armed with spray, next time you take this short cut from the game. He took the can, contemptuous, unhurried and cleared the nozzle and prepared to sign the UNITED sprayed where mam and dad were buried. He aerosolled his name. And it was mine. ...

Theres a lot of rage in these lines, but also sadness and sorrow at not being able to change things - of trying to reason with the unreasonable. Of the frustration of dialogue, of the difficulty of communication. With that last stanza (of this excerpt at least) Harrison sees himself in the vandal, in his failure to do anything about it. In his hating and blaming himself for what has happened. Harrisons problems are similar to those of the angry young men, he shares the difficulty set up by the departure/return relationship. He got away, he did escape, but he will forever remain in the place he has departed, the place he grew up in, a stranger in his hometown.
You can take the x out of y, but you cant take the y out of x.

iv. The success of the Angry Young Men in the 1950s gave rise to a series of film adaptations of the literature labelled as such in the early 1960s. Films such as This Sporting Life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. The 1963 film Billy Liar was directed by John Schlesinger. It starred Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie and was set in Bradford, West Yorkshire (coincidentally quite close to my current home). Based on the novel of the same name6 written by Keith Waterhouse and first published in 1959, it belongs to the British New Wave movement (often affectionately called kitchen sink dramas/realism).7 The film depicts William Billy Fisher as an undertakers clerk who fantasises about escaping his humdrum life, developing elaborate lies to feed his fantasies. He is engaged to two girls, and in love with a third, Liz (Christie), and constantly refers to a possible job in London writing scripts for a comedian named Danny Boone. His fantasies mainly focus on a(n utterly fictional) country under his own rule, by the name of Ambrosia where (in the film version at least) he portrays many different characters within the countrys government, armed forces and elite. After a series of misadventures, and after Billys web of lies crashes down on him in a nightclub, he escapes with Liz who makes her feelings for him clear. Ill let the BFI synopsis describe the ending of the film much more clearly than I can: He [Billy] tells her [Liz] about Ambrosia and his imaginary world and she understands, despising the restrictions of small town life.8 They start to make love9 but are disturbed by Billys colleague Stamp and his friends who mock his Ambrosia dreams. Liz tells him to meet her at the station at midnight for the overnight train to London. Billy goes home to pack but finds that his Grandmother is seriously ill and has been taken to hospital. After a row with his father he goes to the hospital. He waits with his mother and they find out his grandmother has died. He rushes to the station and meets Liz. They board the train but a nervous Billy claims he

6 which I have read, but the film version will always be my primary memory when considering the work, no doubt due to Schlesingers direction and Courtenays Billy. It is interesting to note that the novel was originally adapted for the stage where Billy was played by Albert Finney, who shortly afterwards rose to fame (in fact leaving the stage production of Billy Liar) due to the success of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, another of the Kitchen Sink school films (released in 1960). Schlesinger opted for Tom Courtenay (who understudied Finney during the theatre run) who himself was about to be made a star through his performance in Tony Richardsons The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). 7 a term first used by art critic david Sylvester in his description of paintings by artists who took as their subject matter banal domestic scenes depicting the working class in day-to-day life. The phrase was later co-opted to describe works by those Angry Young Men of the 1950s, then the Social realist cinema beginning to emerge in the late 1950s and early 60s. 8 not only that, but to me at least, they undertake one of the most delightful dialogues in the film - where the two construct a fantasy life together in which, for a few perfect moments of the film (and their imagined life together) they can shut out the rest of the world and be alone, just the two of them, in their fantastical joint-Ambrosia. 9 Id argue that this isnt the case, sure theres a bit of kissing, but its hardly lovemaking - though perhaps, considering what was admissible on film in the early 60s, to an earlier audience this is implied - to me at least, it looks like innocent snogging.

needs milk from a machine and deliberately10 misses the departure. As Billy walks back home he imagines himself at the head of the marching army of Ambrosia.11 Id like to leave Billy Liar here for a moment, and consider a similar, more recent film. Cemetery Junction, written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant, was released in 2010. Set in a small town in England in 1973 the film depicts a group of three friends; Freddie, Bruce and Snork12 as they kick against the constraints of their upbringing and decide what they want to do with their lives. Freddie [played by Christian Cooke] meets and falls in love with his bosss daughter, Julie [played by Felicity Jones], their bond grows through their enthusiasm to travel, to see the world, to get away from Cemetery Junction and all it stands for (a staid, unadventurous and dull life). The tagline for the film is: Be Young. Be Free. Be Somebody. and it ends in a similar way to Billy Liar, with Freddie waiting on a train for the girl hes in love with. Will she arrive on time, or will he leave by himself ? Well, she does arrive, and they depart Cemetery Junction for the bright lights of London, and then who knows where. Theyre Young, Theyre Free and theyre going to Be Somebody-s. In Cemetery Junction they manage to escape, they depart to see the world and experience everything in it while in Billy Liar, well, Billy is alone. Sure he still has his fantasies, but what good are they without Julie Christie to share them with. Julie Christie! I know! The fundamental problem I have with this dichotomy is that while I should feel sad for Billy, his return home with a guard of honour walking up the suburban street makes me feel blissful while Freddie and Julies escape should leave me elated but instead just makes me feel shitty. I guess its something to do with their differing ideologies:- Billy wants to leave to do something - to work - to be a scriptwriter for Danny Boone, to make something of himself. I guess that final scene could be seen as something of a retreat, a withdrawal into himself and his home, but might it not also be seen as a triumph? An assertion that he doesnt have to go to London to make it, that he can make it at home in Bradford, if he can only manage to change his perspective. Contrary to this positivity, Freddie and Julies escape in Cemetery Junction, seems precisely that - theyre escaping, making a break for it, running away. But why? To get away from the dreary town and its dull inhabitants. Theyre both saying I want to get away, Im bored with this town, I want to see the world. I think my disappointment stems from their desire for travel as experience in itself. There is no end result, no terminus. While Billys return home forces him to create something positive from the experience, the (prospect of) unending travel for Freddie and Julie seems to have no positive result outside of the self, it is all sheer experience,13 it would seem tourism in its basest form14. In his essay Consider the Lobster,15 David Foster Wallace writes:
10 again, this is dubious. Id suggest that he doesnt intentionally miss the train, but that his discomfort with the situation, his nervousness and his unsuredness lead him to miss the train. I would certainly not consider it deliberate on a conscious level (though neither could it be described as accidental). 11 http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/440678/synopsis.html 12 No, I dont understand either. 13 and of course, leaves us without any certainty of their successful travels. What happens if things go wrong? 14 from Wikipedia: Travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. 15 from his collection of essays Consider the Lobster.

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late day American alien. Ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: as a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing. Which to me, seems to sum up my idea of Freddie and Julies travelling, their imposing of themselves on places that would be realer without them.16

iv. a. I should probably take a moment to explain that the escape to the country plays a very real and prominent role in most of the kitchen sink films. It is there in Arthur Seatons fishing trips with his cousin Bert in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning17, in the family day out in This Sporting Life; and the trips to the seaside in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and A Taste of Honey. Yet in these films it provides an idyll for the protagonists to see how good things could be. Circumstances always draw them back to the city, and back to their problems. They cannot escape.18

16 It would seem that Wallace is very good at putting my thoughts down much more clearly and succinctly than I can. Perhaps this is his greatest gift as a writer. As Nicholas Lezard puts it: ...for the sheer joy of writing, and thinking, and helping you think better yourself... DFW is unsurpassable. (Im not bothering with a footnote for this one, as its already in a footnote and itd just seem crazy, yknow). 17 Also, his walk with Bert while his mistress is trying to induce a miscarriage by sitting in a bath of Gin the pace and purposefulness of which I was reminded of in 2008 when going on a series of long meandering walks through central London with my friend Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq (much love, bro).. 18 perhaps another reason for my resentment of Freddie and Julie - Why should they get away? What makes them so special.

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v. Walking through Leeds train station on my way to work this morning (21.05.2013), I walked behind a man dragging one of those hand-luggage-trolley-bag-things. Do you know what I mean? Along the collapsible handle of the cart, connecting the ergonomic handle with the reinforced titanium superlite concertina mechanism19 was the legend -

Keep Exploring
and I thought to myself What does exploring mean and why should we keep doing it? Fundamentally its about finding out new things. I imagine an explorer in deepest, darkest Africa, chancing upon a lost tribe, bartering with them and returning with a rare artefact, and for a long time this is what explorers did, travelled a lot and discovered new places/ people/things. However, there isnt (geographically speaking) all that much to explore anymore. So perhaps they mean internally, like explore yourself, like youre totally Zen and transcendental meditation might actually work... [...and so you experiment with sensory deprivation, locking yourself in the windowless basement for several weeks at a time; You lie underwater in the bath - holding your breath for as long as you can - with practice you manage to get this up to fourteen minutes; you hold your fists over the gas hob for longer than you ever thought possible; You sew the ends of your fingers together and live without the ability to hold for six months (when, finally the threads are removed you note a heightened sense of touch); you practice levitation techniques and while not entirely successful, with intense concentration you manage to rise roughly twenty-five centimetres off the floor for 1.5 seconds.You wish you could fly...] but then why put all this on a sort-of-suitcase if your not going to PHYSICALLY travel?

19

Guaranteed for up to 12-months continual usage -subject to approval. This does not affect your statutory rights.

What they mean is explore for yourself. No longer for the greater good - now your exploration should be a personal one. Nobody is to gain but you, and youd better have a good time, otherwise whats the point. Youd better try new things, and look in the guidebooks and see all the things that everyone else sees, but also MORE than everyone else sees, because otherwise everybodys photos look the same, and you could just see those online.20 Oh, but youre missing so much if you dont actually go. Oh! that smell of [insert smell here] takes me back to [insert exotic location here], yknow when we went during the [insert cultural event here]. Make sure you get a picture of you leaning agains the tower of Pisa - theyre so sweet. Why not go out on the salt flats and spell out shit with all your friends. Make sure when we get home to tell everyone not only how cheap it was to eat out every night, but also how friendly the locals were. And when, now home, we eat out with friends, be sure to tell them all how this foods fine, but its not a patch on the [insert traditional local dish from your travelling] that you had on the last night at that gorgeous little place by the harbour.

11

20 And anyway, youve already been to friends houses and had to sit through the same fucking photos you saw the other month when that other friend went there and saw all of the same things - photographs taken from the same place with the DSLR camera they bought themselves for christmas as a treat, that they take everywhere and its so much more compact than mine and has a higher MegaPixel count, Carl Zeiss lens and can shoot in 1080p HD video and why do they make so much fucking money and own their own home and live in constant fucking bliss! But they dont.

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vi. It would seem that in contemporary travel, the impetus isnt so much on the movement, but on the arrival. The advent of commercial jet aviation has removed a once crucial element of travel: that it takes time, it is durational, and is an experience in itself. Flights which can get us anywhere in Europe in a few hours, or across the atlantic in six or seven, have removed the experience of movement. We sit in an aeroplane and stare at a screen for the flight duration, watching the latest Hollywood blockbusters or a map with a tiny graphic of this very aeroplane moving slowly across it, tracking our GPS coordinates in Real Time21, or listen to the in-flight pre-recorded radio stations playing the latest international hits,22 then get off the plane and, hey presto, weve arrived. At the age of 18, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from London on the 8th December 1933 to travel from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul (Constantinople in those days). In 1977 he published A Time of Gifts, an account of the first leg of this journey (from London to the Middle Danube) and in 1986, From the Woods to the Water (from the Danube to the Iron Gate on the border between Romania and what is now Serbia). The third leg of this journey (from the Iron Gate to Istanbul) has not yet been published. Fermor died in 2011. It had taken him 72 years to tell the story of what happened on this single journey, and he hadnt finished it.23 It would seem that a lot can happen on a journey, and yet when you lose it, when that experience of duration is subtracted from the very experience it is a part of, there is a void, a blank, an experience of time in which nothing occurs, and as such does not constitute an experience. One long, grey, lonely moment of non-time.24 In his novel The Names, Don DeLillo touches on this ennui when a character says He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveller only in the sense that I covered distances. I travelled between places, never in them.25 He covered distances. Thats it. There is no experience, it is simply motion, transportation, and the killer is its not instantaneous, this isnt Star Trek, this takes time, but it is dead time, the void. Because of this void, there is no intermediate experience. We arrive. And when we do, we are to some extent dislocated from that destination, and it will take us time to adapt. The
21 the very kind of time which is being erased by this mode of transportation. 22 in all honesty Im not sure whether this is still the case. The last long haul flight I was on was back in 1995 when they played Take Thats hit song Back for Good every hour or so (in the course of the 8-9 hour flight I got pretty good at judging when it was due to come on, and would listen to it at each repeat. Im somewhat ashamed to say I still quite like that one [I worked it out through noticing that the song Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex would play shortly before the Take That song. I should add that Ive always hated the song Cotton Eye Joe] 23 Though I discover now (October 2013) that theyve published the final part of this journey, a couple of years afer his death. 24 to go with all the other long grey lonely moments we experience in life: supermarket shopping, commuting, doctors waiting rooms, etc. 25 page 143 in my copy (Picador, 1987)

slow journey gets us there... well... slowly, we can adapt along the way, we can acclimatise and acculturalise26 over the course of that journey, until we reach our destination. The journey is flooded with experience. The passenger experiences a void and is transported to place - the Terminus, the Arrival. What is beginning to occur within the international lifestyle is the creation of island states, cities within countries which, while ostensibly remaining individual and unique, are slowly blurring, smudging into one another, into a vague, wearying anyplace. The Frank Ocean song Lost lists a series of cities and countries: ...Miami, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Spain ...Los Angeles, India... mirrored in DeLillos The Names: Istanbul, Ankara, Beirut, Karachi All of these seem exotic, but are they? Oceans insertion of countries, Spain and India, in his list adds to the confusion, the ease with which these places are juxtaposed makes them faceless. They could just as easily be...

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New York...London...Uganda...Paris...Kenya...East Timor...Reykjavik...Sarajevo...Rio de Janeiro...Singapore... Manchester...Algeria...Syria...St. Ives...Kingston-upon-Hull...Kingston-upon-Thames...Kingston...New Orleans...Baghdad...Cyprus...Llandudno...Botswana...Penang...Ethiopia...Toronto...Dublin...Port-au-Prince... Belfast...Oslo...Helsinki...Bergen...Tunisia...Mexico...Dallas...Havana...Honduras...Buenos Aires...China... New Zealand...Canterbury...Finland...Houston...Guadalajara...Eritrea...Nicaragua...Oman...Miami...Detroit... Sheffield...Kiev...Burundi...Bangalore...North Korea...South Korea...Michigan...Papua New Guinea... Equatorial Guinea...Guinea...Perth...Honolulu...Gdansk...St. Petersburg...Riga...Split...Monaco...Porto... Tiznit...Baltimore...Guayaquil...Port Elizabeth...Gaza...Burkina Faso...Karlsruhe...Salamanca...Lebanon... Saint Helier...Pago Pago...Mali...Montevideo...Bonn...Dewsbury...Leeds...York...Northallerton...Darlington... Durham...Newcastle...Vietnam...Bahrain...French Polynesia...Jordan...Laos...Taos...Pakistan...Macau... Bulgaria...British Virgin Islands...US Virgin Islands...Cameroon...Bournemouth...Baton Rouge...Baghdad... Birmingham...Birmingham...Chi-ca-go.... you get the idea. These places become homogenised and isolated, no longer part of the country of which they are ostensibly a part, but instead located in this international bubble... The top 10 cities to visit in 2013; 46 cool places to holiday; 12 months, 12 cities; the worlds best city breaks; 1001 places to see before you die. Theres a wonderful world weary list of these places in the Cat Power song Ruin. She sings: Ive seen gypsies who made it all the way/And kept going, kept rolling with nowhere to go/Nowhere to go. As far as Ive seen from the bush/In the wilderness, to every known city/Ive been to...
26 Apologies, I think I just made that word up.

saudiarabia dhakacalcut tasowetomo zambiqueis tanbulrior o meargentina chilemexicot aiwangreatb ritain...

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15 Here, the naming of place is matter-of-fact, downbeat, and weary of a life of constant travel. At odds with the overawed confusion in Ocean. Of course, Oceans slippage of city/country fits well with the gangster-rap world of bling, fast cars and loose women (Kanye West makes a habit of namedropping fashion labels: Gucci, Prada, Louis V... (Louis Vuitton)) and in this same song Ocean mentions his buttercream silk shirt and its Versace however, he seems a more subtle lyricist, one who in writing a song such as Lost can suggest the void of the jet-setting lifestyle, the big name island state cities where all is different but the same. While studying at the Slade (2006-2008) I remember a group crit led by the tutor Denis Masi, where a student had produced work about their arrival and ongoing presence in London. He questioned whether the student had visited any other parts of the UK since arriving, to which the student replied that no, they hadnt seen any more of the UK. Masi, a US born artist, who had lived in the UK for the past 30 years, went on to describe his own experience of the relationship between London and the rest of the UK, and the simple fact that London is not, in many ways, part of the wider country, operating more as one of those aforementioned independent states. He had visited many places in the British Isles since he arrived and grew fascinated by the people who upon recognising his US accent would ask him where he was from. When he replied London, and that he had lived there for 30 years, he was often met with a baffled silence, as though the person had no idea how to continue the conversation with someone who was no more a foreigner, was a native of sorts. Masi told the international students in the group that the rest of the UK was not like London. There is no 24 hour transport network; there are not 24 hour shops; people will often smile at you and say good morning; there are not art galleries on every street corner; the majority of the population is white and christian. A small percentage of the student body at the Slade comprised of privately educated, well travelled, financially independent people. The sort of people who summer in one place and winter in another, travelling the world for the experience. Unfortunately the result of this kind of lifestyle is a very selfish kind of person. People who want it all, now. Everything should be instantaneous, and should be accessible NOW, and if its not here RIGHT THIS INSTANT, youre gonna be sorry because I am a CUSTOMER, I am GOD (Wheres my bag!?! Wheres my bag?!? - apologies, this is an in-joke). The standard lifestyle of the elite:

Move to one of the island states described above.27 Live there for a year or two Move on to the next.28

27 because: lets be honest, why would you want to be anywhere else? 28 It must be great for your language skills (or not? perhaps this inst important. In Amsterdam I got by fine with English [fingers crossed Ill manage this again]).

16 After each location striking it off a mental list: Hong Kong Tokyo Budapest Moscow London Paris New York San Francisco ... ... But what does this achieve if not to cheapen the soul A devaluing of others to the state of strangers. A pricing up of all that is into package holidays and poverty tourism. Im reminded of Kurt Vonnegut : So I was a citizen of the world when I came home... Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or I might not live. Who gave a damn? Anyplace...was home enough for me. So I treated my own mother and father and brother as natives of some poor, war ravaged town I was passing through.29 So it goes. This lifestyle seems to me, as that earlier quote by Wallace stated ...to spoil... the very unspoiledness you are there to experience... economically significant but existentially loathsome. Michel Houellebecq in his 1998 book, Atomised, covers similar ground when a character Bruno discusses Brazil: He was starting to get pissed off with the worlds stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a shitheap of morons obsessed with football and Formula One. It was the ne plus ultra of violence, corruption and misery. If ever a country were loathsome that country, specifically was Brazil. ... I could go on holiday to Brazil tomorrow. Id look around a favela. The windows of the minibus would be bulletproof. In the morning, Id go sightseeing. Check out eight-year-old murderers who dream of growing up to be gangsters; thirteen-year-old prostitutes dying of AIDS. Id spend the afternoon at the beach surrounded by filthy rich drug barons and pimps. Im sure that in such a passionate, not to mention liberal, society I could shake off the malaise of Western civilisation... Ill go straight to a travel agent as soon as I get home.30 While Houellebecq is as ever, transparently provocative here, he does make a point. What is all this if not a disaster(/distasteful) tourism of sorts - like those tours of Bel Air, parking outside the homes of Hollywood stars - only here were ogling the deprived, the malnourished or the destitute.

29 Deadeye Dick, p.85 30 page 157 in my copy: William Heinemann, London, 1999.

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vii. A while ago I saw an episode of a travel/comedy series31 where the presenter didnt quite visit Machu Picchu. After climbing through the Andes for several days on the Inca trail, he reaches a view overlooking the site: Cameraman/Prompter: First impression? Presenter: There isnt one... there isnt one. I just feel... I felt that view earlier was better than this one... Cameraman/Prompter: Are you sure youre looking at the right thing? Presenter: That bit of grass and rock over there?... Im not going any further... cos its more of what weve already seen. And Im not killing myself. Ive done everything that [the producers]have wanted me to. Cameraman/Prompter: But we need to do it anyway, we cant... Presenter: Well go then! Youre standing here, the suns going down! Get over there! Im not going! He was adamant that the view from where he stood was better than anything he could possibly see from visiting Machu Picchu itself. Since then Ive been considering monuments and visiting them, and thinking about the reasons we do so. Several months ago we visited Paris for the first time. We went up the Eiffel Tower, but I felt an affinity with the presenter: I couldnt understand why I was there at the Eiffel Tower, when it would seem that the purpose of the Eiffel Tower is to be looked at, not from. Ive had a discussion with colleagues about this: Them: But the view from the Eiffel Tower is gorgeous, you can see the Arc de Triomphe and the Sacre Coeur and Notre Dame and the Grand Palais. Me: But its not really, is it, because you cant see the Eiffel Tower... Them: ... Me: ... It seems to have such a strong visual presence in Paris, that a view without it is somewhat lacking in the type of subject matter required of a view of Paris. Im not saying that the view was a disappointment, but that my problem with it was that it lacked the Eiffel Tower and therefore was not as complete as it should have been.
31 An Idiot Abroad. Honestly, it was just one episode but it did make me laugh. Unfortunately Im going to have to add that I have subsequently (in the past couple of days) seen part of another episode of this series where once again, Pilkington declined to complete his trip to a destination (Im beginning to see a pattern forming).

[interestingly, since completing this essay, Ive since discovered that the short story writer Guy De Maupassant (1850-1893) used to eat his lunch at a restaurant at the base of the tower, not out of preference for the food but because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile]32

18

What happened to me in Paris, along with the experience of Pilkington in Machu Picchu, would seem symptoms of a wider phenomenon of experience, one mediated by other sources - Sure we can experience the Eiffel Tower first hand, as a primary experience, being at it or on it, but in a very real sense, we have already experienced everything about the Eiffel Tower through secondary experiences. We have seen photographs of it (including those of its construction between 1887-1889); films of it, both documentary (such as that by the Lumieres in 1898) and feature (for example James Bond film A View to a Kill); there are panoramic views from it on the internet (in HD)!; we have even seen replicas of it (Blackpool, Las Vegas, in a series of theme parks, etc.)...; and it is this secondary experience which generally informs and constructs our understanding of it. As such, when we are actually there in real life it doesnt quite make sense. It doesnt please in the way weve come to expect it to please.

[Suddenly Im thinking of Andy Warhols 1964 film Empire33 with its incredibly long, static shot of the Empire State Building as the perfect descriptive film. Do we need to visit the Empire State Building when we visit New York? - perhaps this question is all the more pertinent as the Empire State is the most iconic skyscraper and as such, surely we should be looking at it rather than from it, and therefore why not watch the Warhol film rather than go there in person.]

32 I read this somewhere, then looked up De Maupassant on Wikipedia to check whether it was true and discovered that this nugget comes from the Roland Barthes book The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies. Whether or not it truly does, I havent bothered to find out : as they say in the West(ern) when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. 33 Consisting of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow-motion footage of the Empire State building in New York. It was shot at 24fps (frames per second) [making the real-time film 6 hours 36 mins] but projected at 16 fps [hence 8 hours 5 mins].

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viii. Theres a scene towards the end of Jean Luc Godards 1963 film Les Carabiniers in which two soldiers (Ulysses and Michelangelo) returning from war to their wives (Venus and Cleopatra) present to them the treasures of victory: a series of postcards of treasures of the world rather than anything tangible, stolen, or looted. There is a twelve minute long scene of them going through their winnings, presenting each postcard to the camera, one at a time, as they go through their catalogue of treasures34:35
In the suitcase...we got some surprises! Monuments... transportation... stores... works of art... factories... the earths riches! Coal Oil, etc. Natures marvels. Mountains, flowers... deserts, landscapes, animals. The 5 continents, the planets. Naturally each part is divided into several parts. That are divided into more parts. First... antiquities! The pyramids! The Carnac columns! The Parthenon! The Colosseum! The Angkor Temple! Second... The Middle Ages! Notre Dame of Poitiers! The Mogador ramparts! Cologne Cathedral! The city of Carcassonne! The Tower of Pisa! Third... The Renaissance! The castle at Blois! The Pitti Palace! The Cathedral of Mexico! The Villa Medicis! Fourth... Modern Times! Versailles! Westminster Bridge! Victor Emmanuels tomb! Stuttgart Station! The Hilton hotel in Berlin! The Chicago Aquarium! The Santa Cruz Hospital! And now... Transportation! Railroads! The steam engine! Diesel trains! The Chicago-Milwaukee! The BB-9003! The Barcelona aerial line! The Transiberian! The Belfort strategic railway! The highway! The Rolls Royce! The DS 19! The Isota-Traschini! The Delaunay-Belleville Coup! The Bugatti 37 A! The Mercedes 2-cylinder V Torpedo! The Hispano-Suiza! The Golden Carriage! The Assyrian chariot! The wheelbarrow! Water! Galley! Caravel! Barge! Sightseeing boat! Schooner! Transatlantic steamer! Sailboat! The submarine! Air! Super Constellation! Boeing 707! Alouette helicopter! The Charles and Robert balloon! The Dewatting 37! The Graf zeppelin! The Pouche and Primar monoplane! The Royal Army Vampire!

34 Ive not bothered attributing speech to characters, as it would get very confusing very quickly and it doesnt add anything helpful to the scene, slowing down the typically machine-gun delivery of the lines. 35 Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography noted that Godards gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image.

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Natures marvels! The Needle of the Republic! The bay of Naples! The Gobi Desert! The Geneva water spout! The Grand Canyon! The Valley of the Rhine! The Sea of Ice! Niagara Falls! Department stores! The Galeries Lafayette! The Samaritaine! The Shocken in Stuttgart! Tiffanys in New York! The Bon March! The sailboat! The Atlas rocket! The submarine! Cologne Cathedral! The Super Constellation! The castle at Blois! The DS 19. The Transatlantic. Mammals! The bison! The whale! The penguin! The varan lizard! The rhinoceros! The tiger! Rabbit! Iguanodon! The marmot. Felix the Cat!

Invertebrata! -Rin Tin Tin! -Lucan Vulgaris! Crocodile! Kolia Crosseus! -Elephant! -Wasp! Fifandel! Red star! Green grasshopper! Caterpillar! Industry! Schneider rockets! Volkswagen! Du Pont de Nemours! Oil! Hollywoods Technicolor plant! Not the Parthenon. Its a ruin. The Galeries Lafayette for Mama! I prefer the Printemps. Take the Samaritaine. Why? Because of the basement. It has fish. And even a kangaroo. Buyers there are treated like queens. Ill take the Folies Bergeres. The Lido for me! With its girls? No, women are a special category. The women are reserved for me and Ulysses... so our family can continue... throughout the what?

The centuries. Oh yeah! Throughout the centuries! Until the universal deluge. Lola Montes! Sheherazde! Cleopatra! That one! If she moves in, shed better change her name. Sure! Well call her Catherine... Natalie, Eugenia... Josephine... Josette, Michele, Isabel... Julie... Clemence... Claudia! Caroline! Luciana! Veronica! Elizabeth, Bernadette! Rosalie! Pamela! Elizabeth! Elisa! Olivia! Giovanna! Lucrezia! Josette! Anna! Suzanne! Fabiola, Fedora, Bertha! Whats this? The pyramids. The pyramids? What are they? Tombs for when were dead.

22 The scene is breathtaking. Its relentless. It starts out funny and then slowly becomes captivating. All these icons being passed around, placed in front of the camera, piled on top of each other. The duration of the scene, this constant layering, stops being about postcards and is of what they represent: Those monuments, animals, objects, and artworks. They reduce the objects themselves to mere commodities, to a game of top-trumps. Things to be traded, bartered for and discarded on a whim. Susan Sontag in On Photography wrote: To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. The postcards come to represent their antecedents/primary materials/sources/... and as such, devalue these to such an extent that they can be traded. You can play this game with anything: a Ducati motorbike for the Taj Mahal A bottle of Pinot Grigio for the grand canyon The international space station for a knife and fork Auschwitz for a red seedless grape A disposable razor for Mt. Rushmore Easter Island for a sachet of (motorway service station branded) artificial sweetener

My point is that these things possess only the worth that people are willing to provide them. They have assumed worth placed on them by our precursors, by what people tell us should be important, but really weve got to decide for ourselves what is really important to us, and assess value through that rather than in any assumed way. For me, this approach ties up many locations with memories. I have places which are more important to me than the Eiffel Tower, Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge. I have, to name just a few: Lesbury road in Newcastle, that rise by the lake in Kew Gardens and the fish and chip shop opposite the CO-OP... [Its worth noting that theres a pleasant antithesis to Godards commodity scene in the film Der siebente Kontinent (The seventh Continent, 1989) by the Austrian director Michael Haneke. Here, in a sequence of over 30 minutes, we see a middle class family destroy everything they own. An utter rejection of all their lives have been36]

36

theres a short excerpt here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXLMdoc8mxI

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ix. Liz is with me in Huddersfield. Kianoosh and Helen are in Amsterdam. Richard and Aishan are in London, expecting their first child
[arrived 06.10.13, a girl, Neave]

Line is in Copenhagen. Andy is on his island. Grace is in Brussels. Sarah is in London (Im sorry its been so long since I visited). Alex is in Newcastle (-upon Tyne). Rachel is in New York. Revati is in London (I think? -yep, Im pretty sure). Kala is in Amsterdam. Pernille is in London with her daughter (who I havent met). Qas is in London (where we walked like Arthur and Bert). All these places, when whats really important is the people, the friends and the memories. To return briefly to Don DeLillo: I cant surrender myself to places...Im always separate. Im always working at myself. I never understood the lure of fabulous places, or the idea of losing yourself in a place. I would never give myself up to the place, or to any other place. Im the place. I guess thats the reason. Im the only place I need.37 Im the place. All of this is filtered through myself, through what I see and hear and experience, through what I choose to think about at any given moment.38 I am the medium. So that, the places I have been/the experiences I have had/the memories I have formed, are more important to me than those which I could go to/the experiences I could have/those memories I could form. The world is precisely the sum of information we have about it39 Nothing I see will ever look the same (to you) as what I see. Nothing I experience will ever be the same as what you experience. These memories of mine, the souvenirs of where I have been, with whom, and how I have felt, are what make me who I am. It isnt the iconic thats important, its the personal, and unlike the postcards in Les Carabiniers, these cannot be traded. These are mine:
37 The Names, p.143 38 This is starting to sound a little like David Foster Wallace again. This time the commencement speech This is Water, delivered to the graduating class of Kenton College, 2005: It [is] within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. 39 I pinched this from Houellebecqs Atomised again. p.324

24 Getting fish and chips from the same place (yes, opposite the CO-OP) every Friday night; Going camping in Devon, forgetting our suncream on the first day, then visiting the pub that night and being unable to move our faces. Going to Brimham Rocks in the summer. Our trip to Paris. Yes, with the Eiffel Tower, but also with that blazing tearful argument we had walking along the Seine (both ways). Walking up Snowdon on the worst possible day, getting soaked on the way up, lost on the way down, taking a 3 mile short[long] cut, spraining my ankle and waking up the next day to glorious blue skies. Seeing a guy jump over a wall on Tottenham Court Road, catch his leg and fall flat on his face, then the blood just starting to run down his forehead. Matt (Brack) dropping his jumper then trotting back to retrieve it. Sitting in the car playing something similar to a platform game with buildings outside of the window whilst on our way to Germany on holiday. Being trod on by a horse in the field in Cornwall. Walking past the man who dropped a bottle while I was on my way to work. Flipping out because you broke up all the chocolate for the cake we were making, rather than just half of it (and immediately realising just how ridiculous I looked). Walking with Richard and Claire through an underpass in Holland singing a song quite closely based on Shaddap You Face by Joe Dolce. It went: Lots of pepperoni Plenty of herbs on top Thats a nice slice Shaddappa your face! and we sang it LOUD! Coming up with a verse and chorus for Addicted to Tea (based on Robert Palmers hit Addicted to Love), in Heaton park, one sunny Sunday afternoon. The first lines of which were: The kettles on but youre not home the teas mine brew your own.... Visiting Budapest and having an argument on one of the bridges (yeah, the one you didnt calm down from until mid-morning the following day, when that girl offered to take our photograph and you had to be nice to her).

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ix. a. A few years ago there was a sculpture in Manchester, at the main site of the Commonwealth games (held in 2002) which was called The B of the Bang by the artist Thomas Heatherwick. The title was a quote from the runner Linford Christie who said that he started his races not merely at the bang of the starting pistol but at the B of the Bang. Its not my experience of Budapest which will last in memory, but the experience of it I had with you. Those three photos of you in a bad mood help me remember. In the first photo you look angry, though theres a slight smirk on your face, suggesting you understand the silliness of the argument. In the second picture youve resolved to be pissed off and it looks to me like youre forming a two finger gesture with your left hand. I have a suspicion that in this last image, your about to tell me what I can do with my photograph. Ive called it The F of Fuck you.

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Postscript : Monuments Its 9.20am on 8th July 2013 and were driving across the causeway to Holy Island. Its warm, there isnt much wind. Im taking photos through the car window. They arent good photos - blurry, over-exposed and with too much reflection from the car interior. Theres nothing to look at, they simply document the travel. Its our last day. We still need to get to Craster, mow my grandma and grandads lawn (and drop off the kippers of course), and drive back home. We park and check the tide times and note that we have about two hours before the island gets cut off from the mainland. We make it to the priory museum (not open til 10.30 - abandon this idea). We walk to the castle which I note, would be a good place to go in the event of a zombie apocalypse. I think of Matt and Lucy, and that this is something they might consider. Then I remember that theyd split up. We continue circling the island on footpaths until we reach Emmanuel Head. ---------Its perhaps 30 feet tall and stands at the north eastern edge of the island. Waiting for ships to come. Theres no lights on it. Ive recently finished writing Theres other places besides London/Theres other places than London and when I look at it I feel happy. That is my kind of monument. A monument to nothing, a referent to nothing. I dont even know why its there [its a day marker for maritime navigation]. It has no lights, it cant be for ships [it is]. Theres a bench at the foot of it. Liz sits while I take a few photos from several angles. They all look the same. I dont know why Im continuing but this feels relevant, it feels important. Theres not much of a breeze, the sun is shining. Its now 10.35 and we have to head back to the car to make it off the island before the tide comes in. A beacon, a pyramid, a triangle. Sun- and wind- and rain-beaten gray. A smear, a stain, a void. A monument to nothing.

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Addendum.
i.

...sun caught on water somewhere trembled on the ceiling - that reflection up there, can you see it throbbing? I think its my pulse Ive just been lying here watching it, I couldnt figure it out... Do you know what scares me? Just lying here watching it its from that glass of water down there where my foots resting I was thinking about all the things youve said, I was thinking theres so much thats not worth doing suddenly I thought maybe Ill never do anything. That;s what scared me I always thought Id be, this music I always thought I had to write music all of a sudden I thought what if I dont! I mean maybe thats whats been wrong with everything maybe thats why Ive made such a, why Ive been thinking of things youve said as though just, just doing whats there to be done as though its worth doing or you never would have done anything you wouldnt be anybody would you, you wouldnt even know who you are now...
-William Gaddis, JR, p.687

The important thing... is to do the things you believe you can do, and want to do and will do
-James Salter, Burning the Days, p.336 ii.

Every morning I tell myself, you can do nothing about it: submit.
-Jean Cocteau

Its November.Nicks gone.Were buying a house.And Im Billy and Liz is Liz and......sometimes i think if we were married, and had a house of our own, we could just sit and imagine ourselves there... I want a room in the house with a green baize door. Itll be a big room, and when we go in it, through the door, thats it... Nobody elsell be allowed in at all... Itd be a place to go on a rainy afternoon. We could go there, nobodyd find us... and we can shut everything out, cant we?
iii.

The only things that are important in life are those you remember. Sometimes youre aware when your great moments are happening and sometimes they rise from the past. I have not forgotten those days, I have only Forgotten how simply they seemed to occur...