Quote from Iain Sinclair’s website:
“The discussion will explore the intersections between the work of Foxx, Sinclair and Ghost Box. How are places saturated with the traces of past events? How do technologies affect memory, and what role does fiction play in allowing us to map the haunted spaces of the city?"
Okay, no pretence here on my part about the work of any of the panellists, or their particular relationship with John’s music and just what the heck it was that they were proposing to talk about. I only know of Iain Sinclair through the Metamatic forum, I’ve never read any of his poems, essay’s, or books, and in truth I’m not inclined or likely to do so either. I rarely read the Wire, and have only been prompted to browse it on occasion by various references to it from the forum here, so I’m not overly familiar with the long scope of Mark Fishers reviews, but what I have chanced to read, has been interesting. With Ghost Box, I wouldn’t have known their music if it were not for Garry’s mention, and being recently directed towards them by their involvement in the seminar, but I love the thinking behind their approach, and I think that what they produce is very intriguing, some of which is good enough to motivate me to purchase it.
Perhaps my limited, or lack, of knowledge about the panellists makes me not so different from a large part of that audience who finally, and no doubt thankfully, were able to get into that room and sit down after a long wait. We have now had a reason posted on a blog about the delay, though I have to add that quite unintentionally I ended up being third in the queue at the door, and one of the guys in front of me asked the Roundhouse lady why we were waiting, her reply was that ‘they’ couldn’t go on as one of their party was not here, well, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I assume someone was rushing off to get the DVD of the ‘films’, bet they wish now they’d not bothered.
It was a hot day, and for me I’d already made an early morning trip from Camden out to South Ealing and back again, to move through some old daylight of my own, and exorcising a few ghosts from my past life in London, so I was really looking forward to putting it all behind me and relaxing at the talk, though I didn’t expect to be so relaxed that I spent the whole time struggling to stay awake (for real!). ‘Old Daylight’ was surely tuned to fit in with the thing that brought us all to the roundhouse that day, someone was responsible for the idea of this talk, so on with the show, and presumably we’d be having a Q&A on all that Hauntological stuff which has seeped into mention on this forum over the last year or so.
Naively on my part, I assumed that perhaps John would be making ‘an appearance’, I know it wasn’t listed, but it would have been a sweet bonus, even if it were only to pop in for a few minutes and welcome us to the start of the events and their ‘uniqueness’, which of course this very seminar was supposed to represent, though if that had really been the case then the ‘Old Daylight’ talk would have been a herald of doom for the rest of the planned evening. Shame there was no John to really talk about music and films ‘moving into the light’. We would have cheered the big man on, and our evenings entertainment would have had the start flag waved high in the air. At least that’s how I wish it had been last Saturday the 5th, but instead the shambles of the seminar was like getting served up with a half-cooked dish that’s been nonchalantly parked under your nose from some uninvolved waiters, who didn’t appear to know their soup spoon from their elbow.
I agree that Mark Fisher struggled bravely to string it all out, and I can’t feel any actual blame towards him, probably because without him the deafening silence would have been so overwhelmingly cringingly embarrassing for all of us trapped in that room. Likewise with the Ghost-Box chaps, they are musicians, not film-makers, and like the vast majority of artists they undoubtedly found it difficult to talk live about their art in any more than a few endlessly repetitive sentences. We have this established factor in the arts, the fine arts of painting (or lack of), sculpture (or lack of) where everybody has to have a manifesto and justify, or rather ‘big up’ their thinner than air, but oh so clever, will-o-the-wisp creations that the average person can’t actually see before their eyes. That’s elitism at play of course, so lets leave all that nonsense to the thousands of wannabe artists at one end, and the vastly overrated Tracy Emin dossers bed, and Damien Hurst Bejewelled Skull (an effortlessly made sculpture that would feed a small starving country in what its worth in money) at the other end, please as a non-musician, I appeal to all musicians out there, I admire your talent, you do what I can only dream of, stop this bollocks, we like you for your music, not your unnecessary unravelling of it, do not be blinded by these intellectuals out there, just play us your music for gods sake.
I just wish that Ghost box had instead played a couple of music tracks from their label’s stock, (perhaps along with any related music videos for it), instead of getting tangled up into some kind of dull attempt at contextualising, or intellectualising why their music is what it is, or does what it does. But they fell into a foundation-year art students trap of presenting a series of loose images, where the only drama was a chemical film burn that was pretending to be a ghostly apparition, or a B-Movie alien blob lamely threatening to consume a bland road-scene.
Iain Sinclair’s film was absolutely no better, trust me, you can go to any Art school or University with a film department at this time of year and I guarantee that you will see at least one ‘film’ of the calibre of our panellists being shown as part of a 23 year-olds degree show. And why on earth did John bastardise that lovely segment of music from A Secret Life and lend it to Iain’s ‘Man meets woman, man fails to meet woman’ boring home movie.
I think its time John moved away from these intellectual attachments, I’d rather he just jammed in a basement with Benge and Louis than went round to a professors house for dinner and discussed the state of the arts.
Since when did Metamatic become ‘A London Album’, please spare me, as an ex-Londoner myself can we ever escape this London-centric mentality. Yes John wrote it whilst bicycling through the grey streets, and wandering down the old alleyways, getting lost amongst flyovers and 60’s concrete jungles, but why does it have to be specifically London? Metamatic is a fantasy of a cityscape, and it’s a pretty safe one too, there’s no muggings or beggars, or people pushing drugs at you should you turn a particular corner. Its an alienists refuge, and as a youth I dreamed my Metamatic while walking past the Clyde Shipwork’s that were starting to fall into an approaching demise, or lying in bed and hearing the faint clang of metal on metal echoing from the yards at night, or later in life it was walking through Sheffield backstreets past the empty factories, or running to escape the rain soaked streets of Manchester. I’m sure that many of you here will also say that it was Plymouth, Leeds, or Grangemouth for you, and no doubt there’s a few European cities we can throw into the mix, but sadly, I never got the opportunity to share that opinion with Iain Sinclair.
It’s John I feel was let down by what could have been an illuminating hour, maybe it needed more music and less chat, it certainly needed better movies, would have been fantastic if a license to play a clip of the ‘Stone Tapes’ had been possible, or to see some of those old 70’s Public Information films which have such a hold over the imaginations of the panellists, just ‘talking about something visual’ is a non-starter with a medium that requires to be seen.
Also, here’s the main thing I want to say, I realise that everyone sitting at that desk was nervous, and I don’t envy them, but I just wish that at least one of them had either had a sense of humour or the sheer recklessness to hold their hands up and call the game a bogey, we could all have had a laugh, and thrown some questions out to the audience, mind you, I was probably already asleep should that level of anarchy have taken place.
We could have had a lovely start to ‘John’s evening of celebration’, but we had a missed opportunity, and I feel that a few other guest performers also let the side down later on, but I’ll save that rant for the Roundhouse gig thread.
