On Jennings

Young readers today have Harry Potter and Hogwarts. We had Jennings and Linbury Court. 

Written by Anthony Buckeridge (1912-2004), this was a series of twenty-five books about the goings-on at a minor prep school and the escapades of the eponymous hero and his bespectacled chum Darbishire. I was about ten when I read my first (Jennings' Little Hut) and it was by far the funniest book I had ever read, and so were the others. Buckeridge is a very funny writer indeed - the schoolboy's P. G. Wodehouse. Schoolboy humour is regularly derided as being - well what, exactly? Puerile? I should hope so. It was only the discovery of the anarchic, sarcastic and iconoclastic schoolboy Nigel Molesworth in four brilliant brilliant books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle that displaced Jennings in my capricious affections. Jennings was a bit of a rascal but Molesworth was every beak's worst nightmare. Molesworth formed me.

Jennings had classmates called Venables, Atkinson, Temple and Bromwich. Do any schools today continue the tradition of addressing pupils only by their family name? Surely not. It was this imposed formality that prompted, by way of a welcome side-effect, the ingenious invention of distinctive nicknames. Venables, for instance, was actually Charles A. Temple Venables, so his initials were C.A.T., which obviously became Dog, which was naturally lengthened to Dogsbody then inevitably shortened to Bod. Bod Venables. This made me laugh like Billy-O.

In the nearby village there was a shop which sported a memorable sign:

         Home-made Cakes and Bicycles Repaired

This is where our chums went for jam doughnuts and bottles of fizzy lemonade. In one episode Jennings and Darbishire had tell the proprietor, known mysteriously as Chas. and never Charles, that the problem with their bike was that 'the black back brake block's broken'. But they couldn't say that, because nobody can. 'My bike's black back brake block's broken'. This is still very funny, I think. I also relished Buckeridge's elaborate profanities ('Fossilised fishhooks!') and the volcanic rages of 'Old Wilkie', aka Mr. Wilkins, Jennings' choleric form master.

My own high school (a pretentious grammar dedicated to the production of mid-echelon public servants) was  inevitably a disappointment, although it was an entirely male sodality, we all addressed one another by our surnames and we did have to study Latin. It was a very pale imitation of Linbury Court and although we had our fair share of eccentric (indeed 'troubled') masters and corporal punishment and unchallenged traditions (centred around the house system - Sparta! Athens! Tuscany! Troy!) there was a complete lack of the anarchic energy and generously rebellious spirit incarnated by Jennings and company. We had to wear bottle-green uniforms, including little caps. 

What prompts this blog? Walking along Hornsey High Street in North London this morning I saw a modern-day equivalent to the Buckeridge shop sign:

         Milk Shakes and Eyebrow Threading

 Floreat Jennings!

My home town (2)

My thanks and a tip o'the hat to the architect Peter Richards who read an earlier blog on my home town, Southend-on-Sea.

I signed off that blog with a picture of the Civic Centre's modernist fountain and he got in touch to tell me:

I and my architect colleague Alan Hardy persuaded the council to commission Willian (Bill) Mitchell to design the civic fountain. He also designed a reworking of the coat of arms which stands over the mayor's chair in the council chamber. We also commissioned the bronze door to the west face (per mare per ecclesiam)

There was also, he tells me, specially designed wallpaper in the council chamber based on the coat of arms and designed by another colleague, Tony Miller. The enormous bronze doors are marvellous, in friendly 'Macmillan Nurses' lettering, as I recall. They must weigh a ton and be worth a small fortune - I hope they haven't been nicked by metal thieves and melted down. The whole site harks back to a now remote era of municipal pride and a bracingly spendthrift approach to civic architecture. Never such confidence again.

Here's another image of the fountain in its time-warp 1970s setting. The years have been kind to the main Civic Centre block in the background, which is beginning to look quite stylish and Centre-Pointy, although the adjacent technical college has been closed for years and is a mess. [Note - now demolished and replaced with some truly stomach-turning apartment blocks.]

The fountain's sculptor Bill Mitchell (born 1925 and happily still with us) has a marvellous CV, including a spell working for Mohammad al-Fayed. I hand't realised that he was also responsible for the monumental figures in Salford known as The Minut Men which share with the Southend fountain a Mayan or Incan quality. This look had a lot of contemporary appeal; I'm reminded of a now-defunct chain of cheap, dimly-lit restaurants called The Golden Egg (there was one in the town) which had turquoise ceramic wall decorations designed to evoke a night out in Machu Picchu.

Bill Mitchell fountain

I don't know whether the Southend fountain has been listed. It should be. There's a wonderful piece on Mitchell here, including newsreel footage on the artist at work and links to other sites:
http://theshriekingviolets.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/meeting-william-mitchell-modernist.html

It was Peter Richards who designed the two attractive red and blue kiosks in the High Street which were perfectly in tune with the festival spirit of a seaside town, and brought a jolly whiff of slap 'n' tickle to the shopping centre. One was (and I hope still is) a fruitmongers; the other an ice cream parlour. You can see them both in this picture taken in (I guess) the early 1980s:

Jolly kiosks

I could find only one picture (below) of the labyrinthine arcades that were once a much-loved feature of the town centre and a magnet for this infant flâneur. I recall sacks of Bonio dog biscuits piled in the dusty gloom, a newsagents smelling of ink and coconut mushrooms, a toyshop full of shiny enamel'd Dinky and Matchbox model cars, and an artists' materials shop run by man with a goatee, Lawrie Matthews. There were articulated wooden figures in its brightly-lit window. The arcades were very lovely: scruffy, shadowy and aromatic. But were all swept away by the aggressively undistinguished Hammerson shopping centre development in the late 1970s. 

The whole pitiful Southend fiasco doesn't feature on the sleek Hammerson website, although there's no shortage of plug-ugly malls with preposterous names still being perpetrated by this venal and rapacious firm in the luckless suburbs and the Centrale (Croydon) can stand for them all. A curse on Lewis Hammerson, the company's founder, his heirs and beneficiaries, his architects and builders. By their company website shall ye know them:

Our strategy is to deliver industry leading shareholder returns by maximising income from our retail properties and development pipeline. We develop or acquire to create compelling retail properties in successful locations.

I could hardly have said it better myself. 'Development pipeline' is perfect although 'Industry leading shareholder returns' is rather coy. They mean mind-boggling profits, we can assume. I loathe everything about the Hammerson Group: their bumptious prose and clobberingly horrible legacy. They  built the Brent Cross Shopping Centre, still going strong, or strongish, in its dingy North Circular way. The gormless windblown rain-stained inelegant poorly-detailed lump they imposed in place of the charming arcades of my home town was, within a few years of opening, so bleak and run down that ITV used it as the setting for a 1978 dystopian television drama about juvenile delinquents called City Sugar, by a young writer calle Stephen Poliakoff. 

Southend arcades

Hammerson development

Paradoxically the image I found which most immediately brought back the pre-Hammerson town of my childhood is this charming painting. I have no idea who the artist is and can;'t find any copyright

holder (so do let me know if you know who it is). It looks to me like it might be a jigsaw design.

Only a fadeograph of a yestern scene

This view, looking north, shows the railway bridge carrying trains to Fenchurch Street in the City of London. Beneath it on the right was a cavernous open-fronted fishmongers which gave the shadowy space a sub-marine atmosphere, the pavement permanently wet with melted ice. Most shops had faded awnings offering shelter for shoppers come rain or shine -  an Edwardian hangover, like the large number of functional public clocks (few back then owned watches) and urinals (which all seem to have disappeared, although we don't seem to be peeing any less). There were relatively few private motor cars (so there was no need for car parks) and the town's well-maintained fleet of double-decker buses had an attractive blue and cream livery and looked like something from a children's book.

The large building in the background with a green copper dome is (now was) the Odeon cinema, the largest in the town. On the left is a branch of Garons (the local equivalent to a Lyons' Corner House) and the two-tone lorry outside is owned by the then-nationalised British Railways. On the right a second, larger Garons (the Starbucks of the mid-century Thames delta).

This is not a nostalgic blog - the town at the time represented in this image was for me as a child a now-town, not a then-town, and seemed perfectly modern. But let me at least stick up for half a dozen things that were certainly better then:

- signage, and especially hand-painted signage. No plastic, no generic franchises, no modish logos, no acrylic banners;

- a variety of small, locally-based family-run businesses (before the coming of Tesco and their filthy ilk);

- a bustling mixed retail environment, not a botox'd, barren precinct without traffic or evening visitors;

- civic utility in the form of public transport, meals on wheels (remember that?), mobile libraries and other services run by an elected Borough Council;

- an architectural coherence and proportion, in a largely low-rise Victorian and Edwardian townscape;

- as I recall, some nice sticky-carpet pubs catering for all ages (not the garish hangouts of today).

But I suppose I am being nostalgic, if not actually sentimental. The last time I walked up the High Street from Central Station all the good shops had closed down and what was left were dispiriting hangers-on, all clearly failing. There was no bustle, no sense of being at the centre of things. Much had been permanently lost, much of which we never much appreciated at the time. The townscape has become cruder, brasher, harsher. The surviving businesses are almost all franchises - coffee outlets, fast food places, mobile phone stores and stuff like that. These all seemed to me to be struggling. I expect it's the same everywhere. In time the only sustainable activities in any high street will be nail shops, coffee franchises and topless bars - everything else can be had on the internet.

On Yves Klein

Here, for Easter Sunday, a favourite image by a favourite artist. Look it up on Google.

It's called Le Saut dans le vide (Leap into the Void) and is (of course) a brilliantly simple photomontage, by Shunk Kender, made in 1960, capturing the artist Yves Klein in mid-air one damp afternoon in October 1960. The location was Rue Gentil-Bernard in Fontenay-aux-Roses, a quiet suburb south of Paris. I like the earthbound cyclist on the right, entirely unaware of the Icarus moment taking place behind him. He would have seen the four assistants holding a tarpaulin sheet to capture the falling man, who have been airbrushed out of the final image.

I visited the place one correspondingly damp Easter Sunday afternoon about twenty years ago. Nothing much remains of the site, which is now occupied by an ugly modern church and a student hall of residence, although the railway line still runs along the end of the street and the station building remains intact. Oddly enough an identically-banded brick pillar to the one Klein is leaping from can be found still in place in the same street, about a quarter of a mile south. The place where he would theoretically have crashed to earth is now a zebra crossing, but (unlike the one in London's Abbey Road) not a world-class tourist attraction.

Klein included the image in his book Dimanche, apparently to prove that he had mastered the art of lunar travel and a snub to the boys at NASA. If serious conceptual art is your bag then Klein's the man.

He died young, aged 34, in 1962. He was a terrific innovator - as a painter, performance artist, provocateur and karate champion. The real deal.

Images © The Estate of Yves Klein

Richard Griffiths

He wasn't simply a great actor - he was also invariably the right actor, cast in roles that nobody else could get away with. He was especially good at eloquent queers - Hector in The History Boys and (of course) the immortal Uncle Monty in Withnail & I.

I saw him last on stage at the National Theatre in the role of Fitz, an irascible old ham who is in turn portraying W H Auden in Caliban's Day, the play-within-a-play in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art. He was the best thing in it, and had reportedly taken the role on at the last moment, when Michael Gambon was indisposed. I remember this exchange between Griffiths as Fitz as Auden and Auden's biographer Humphrey Carpenter (Adrian Scarborough):

CARPENTER:    I'm not a rent boy. I was at Keble.

AUDEN:             That can't be helped.

It's not much of a line but Griffiths freighted it beautifully with lust and impatience and camp condescension - and he brought the house down. At the end of the play he delivered, beautifully and very movingly Auden's elegy In Memory of W. B. Yeats ('He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted'). 

His unusual shape was caused by an elaborate and untreatable hernia. It would be untrue to say that one didn't notice his extraordinary bulk, but his wonderful voice and toothy grin are what one chiefly remembers, and his incredibly light and elegant movements, more Ariel than Falstaff. He lumbered daintily. I learn from an obituary that his working-class parents were both deaf and mute, that he had to support them in many ways from the age of four. and that his childhood was very unhappy. Yet he seemed neither bitter nor scarred by what sounds like a dreadfully loveless upbringing, and is fondly remembered by everyone he worked with or who saw him perform.

Griffiths was only 65 when he died yesterday, which means he was (incredibly) under forty when he appeared as Withnail's fabulously strange Uncle Monty. I was unable to find a clip of him delivering my favourite line in the film: 'We live in a kingdom of rains, where the royalty comes in gangs'. So this will have to do: his scene-stealing first appearance in the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQx4qiEmRQ4

If you've never seen Withnail & I you'll have to take my word for it that Bruce Robinson's script is the most brilliant for any British film since Kind Hearts and Coronets. Here (from memory) is another bit of Uncle Monty, recalling an undergraduate passion:

'I sometimes wonder where Norman is now. Probably wintering with his mother in Guildford. A cat, rain, Vim under the sink, and both bars on. But old now, old. There is no beauty without decay.'

If you have seen Withnail the chances are you've seen it many times. It's very good, very funny and very rude. Griffiths apparently didn't mind strangers yelling 'Monty you terrible cunt!' at him in public. It was a catch phrase of sorts. He will be much missed.

Auden extract © The Estate of W. H. Auden

On playful interventions

I know a lot about art, and I know what I don't like. What I particularly don't like is lazy, clumsy, cocksure public art. I've had it up to here with playful interventions.

You'll know what I mean. Some artist you've never heard of has made (or more likely caused to be made) some kind of thing (not, in all likelihood, a painting, but a public thing: performance, film, 10,000 dirty jamjars stuffed with condoms, street art.) Usually its intentions are expressed in this kind of slack prose:

Finial Response is a permanent public artwork in the bustling heart of Soho in London. It is an interactive and light-based piece that blurs the boundaries between architecture installation and art [.] It consists of 109 individually shaped black steel profiles sandwiching illuminated acrylic which responds to the movements of passers-by. Each profile shape echoes ornamental finials found around Westminster, connecting Soho’s decorated past with its new incarnation as a media hub.

'Blurs the boundaries' my aunt fanny. Soho has been dedicated for decades to doing just that, using such time-honoured strategies as booze, sex, drugs and patisseries - we don't need any well-intentioned intervention to add to that mix because there are no boundaries left to blur. Finial Response is, we are later assured ' a constantly changing artwork that will engage and delight for many years to come.'

Finial Response (Image © Google images)

This is optimistic. Last time I looked it wasn't working, or perhaps not switched on. It is in any case a one-look-and-you've-got-it object. Who'd want to see the damn thing on their way to and from work every day?

Typically an artist involved in this sort of thing is aiming through such 'playful interventions' to (in another threadbare phrase) 'challenge the viewer's preconceptions'.  This is how they tend to put it:

Through playful interventions these artists create a ‘non place’, a meeting ground between the fictional and what actually exists. There is a notion that we are being presented with a glimpse or fragment of reality, veiled only by the finest gauze of illusion. Viewers are invited to cultivate and engage with their own narratives, therefore entering into a dialogue within this dichotomy. 

It's typical of the meaningless guff that surrounds and seeks to justify humdrum sophomoric site-specific 'gestures' and (in this case) is written to accompany an exhibition in a recently-established space in what I remember as an elegant Victorian waterworks, a few minutes' walk from my parents' house. These neat public buildings used to be surrounded by carefully-tended gardens and a small car-park accommodating a fleet of neatly-liveried vehicles, the modest plant serving local residents quietly and efficiently. It was adjacent to a home for young people with learning difficulties (now closed) and a Methodist chapel (now derelict).

I don't for a moment agree with the prevailing view, now virtually a given, that modern art can only earn its place in the world by challenging our beliefs, rather than illuminating, instructing, enriching our lives and adding to our knowledge of ourselves and others. I particularly loathe the word 'playful', which becomes, in the hands of witless, artless prankster-practitioners, no more than a synonym for trivial. In fact, replace the former word with the latter whenever you see it in an artist's statement or exhibition catalogue and a simple truth is revealed. I loathe even more the kind of art and artist that aim to 'challenge our preconceptions'.

As it happens I have plenty of preconceptions, most of which are hard-won, the result of thoughtful reflection and a lifetime's reading and listening and looking and thinking. I'm annoyed - and who would't be - when these preconceptions of mine are regarded as mere prejudices to be overcome by the diligent application of conceptual art as a kind of ethical poultice. It would take a spectacularly persuasive artwork (and I can't even begin to imagine what form it would take) to challenge my existing preconceptions about slavery, for instance, or to convince me that Jimmy Savile was a Good Egg, or that Terry Pratchett is a better writer than V. S. Pritchett, or that the satanic abuse of children might be (despite our misgivings) a cultural cloud with a silver lining, or that I've up to now been quite wrong about the Holocaust (which  I strongly believe was a Bad Thing) and misinformed about global warming. Picture an artwork that dared to challenge the widely-held preconception that Allah is the only true god and Mohamed is his prophet. Then picture the reaction. It wouldn't be playful.

Of course all art is an intervention, and an incongruity, although that has nothing to do with destabilising the viewer's expectations (whatever they are) or subverting the status quo (whatever that is, or was). Art is incongruous because it has no utility, and it is the non-utile nature of art that is the real challenge - inviting if not always eliciting a range of responses from the philistine ('A child of five could do it') to the informed ('That's awful').

Why, one wonders, do so many artists suppose in any case that the sort of people who come to look at their work (or 'intervention') arrive with a set of unreflecting prejudices which, thanks to the eloquent powers of their creation will be destabilised or even overturned? Anyone with deeply-held prejudices is never going to be won over by any post-Duchampian sub-Dada footling. Proper racists, for instance, don't spout their nasty bullshit simply in order to shock and provoke and to challenge the rest of society's (anti-racist) preconceptions. They spout their nasty bullshit because it's what they believe in, perhaps all they believe in, and they have nothing else to say. It wouldn't occur to them that what they say is shocking, because they see it as a self-evident truth. Artists, bless them, routinely confuse preconceptions (which are unstable and therefore negotiable) with convictions (which are irrational and unyielding). You can't challenge convictions with reason because convictions are seldom based on reason. And preconceptions, let's agree, are not necessarily shallow or thoughtless or wrong, and may be bang on the money. But that's not to forgive the pompous self-belief of the artist who believes his work somehow incarnates a coherent assault on the established and self-deluding order, whatever that order might be. 

Since Duchamp's urinal the stakes have got higher, the noises more cacophonous, but the bar has been lowered - and what we have to settle for now is Dame Tracey's unmade bed, which is shocking only in its banality and feebleness. Wouldn't you in any case swap her entire gurning portfolio for just one piece by Yves Klein? Better to have both than neither, say the cultural relativists. Balls, I reply.

Marcel Duchamp's urinal

As craft declines and intelligence is ousted by sincerity the shouting match becomes a free-for-all. In the past year we've seen a number of playful interventions which failed, emphatically failed, to make their mark. Remember Wlodzimierz Umaniec? Almost certainly not. He's the gormless arse who defaced a Rothko with black ink in the Tate Modern last year, attempting to promote his feeble one-man Yellowist movement. He got two years in jail and a few minutes of Warholian fame, on which I expect the disorganised pillock imagines he can build. We can expect more of this as times get harsher, as action replaces reflection, loquacity trumps eloquence and noisy self-reflexive sarcastic artlessness drives out the quietly thoughtful, the serious, the unironic.

Yeah right whatever

Oddly it's those game old pranksters Gilbert & George who continue to deliver the odd beneficial shock, with their ambiguously fascistic homoerotica and their right-wing pronunciamentos, although I suspect they only do it to annoy, because they know it teases.

Gilbert (right) and George (right)

But what, these days, would really shock? What would a serious artistic equivalent be to a moment once memorably described by Woody Allen, a moment 'when you kiss your grandmother goodnight and she puts her tongue in your mouth'?

Snow

As Britain grinds to a halt during an unseasonal cold spell, here's a dazzling seven-minute film directed and edited by Geoffrey Jones, shot in the harsh winter of 1962/3. Jones was working for British Transport Films, and travelled around with his cameraman (Wolfgang Suschitzky, perhaps best known today for shooting Get Carter), filming whatever he saw and then spent a year editing the footage. The result is sensationally good. Martin Scorsese is a big fan, apparently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl4pJwcE7JI

On cliché

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam blandit iaculis mattis. Integer suscipit eros ut velit volutpat sed ullamcorper est euismod. 

And so on. Recognise it?

Lorem Ipsum is still used a lot in the printing and typesetting industry. It's been the industry's standard dummy text since the 1500s, when an unknown printer scrambled a galley of type to produce a sample book and more than five hundred years later it's still with us. I suppose most of us came across it first in a Letraset format (remember Letraset?), which used passages of Lorem Ipsum in its catalogues and sample sheets from the 1960s until quite recently. Later on desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker used versions, and you can come across it in all kinds of contexts.

As Latin it's quite meaningless - designed to deflect the eye from any lexical significance and make the reader appreciate the arrangement of the text. It's the typesetter's equivalent of Finnegans Wake and, as it happens, an early example of a cliché. 

The word (as I expect you know but I didn't) 'cliché'' derives originally from typesetting, and referred to a printing plate cast from moveable type (also known as a stereotype, another expression that's gone down in the world). It may have onomatopoeic origins, coming from the sound made when the molten stereotyping metal is poured onto the matrix to make a printing plate, which presumably involved some kind of clicking noise (as in French cliquer). Setting type one letter at a time was a slow and painstaking process and so, if a phrase was likely to recur, the type would not be broken up but kept for future use. The term cliché soon came to refer to any ready-made, high frequency phrase likely to be repeated without variation (as might, for instance, be used repeatedly in contracts and other legal documents). In its original usage, cliché had no negative associations but now, and usually as a plural noun or as an adjective, it has come to mean hackneyed, derivative, unoriginal and as such, a Bad Thing. But perhaps that's because we're exposed to so many forms of the written and spoken word, and to so much in the way of films and television and gormless journalism in all media that we're bound sooner or later to come across something  that (with a feeling that might be called déjà lu) seems to us to be clichéd.

Children have no concept of cliché and seem, in fact, to thrive on the repetitive and familiar. At what age does this change? And what exactly is our adult objection to a writer who employs cliché? Perhaps it's a sense that she is wasting our valuable time, that verbal cliché is usually accompanied by plenty of dullness in plot, character and the other things that make for good writing. Evelyn Waugh once paid Christopher Isherwood the most wonderful compliment when he wrote in a review that 'Mr Isherwood is not a writer who struggles to avoid cliché because a cliché would never occur to him'.  

I recently came across a phrase used by anthropologists that seems to me to be more useful than 'stereotype' or 'cliché'. The term is 'a perfect specific' and applies to any unambiguous signifier (verbal or visual) that an audience will agree stands legitimately and neutrally for something in particular. Examples might be the Chancellor's battered despatch box on Budget day, or the flashing blue light of an emergency vehicle, or the white smoking emerging from a stovepipe chimney to announce the appointment (if that's the right word), or the Mona Lisa as a perfect specific not only or high art but of enigmatic genius, ineffability and (depending on your point of view) a certain naffness. Of course the appeal of a perfect specific is in many cases is not to a sophisticated audience, but that's neither here nor there. My point is that 'perfect specifics' are useful, legible signs that need little or no mediation between the source and reception. They do their job in a quiet and effective and unfussy way. We need more of these, surely? Society builds a consensus around them.