Ian Nairn

"And finally I suppose that, all the time, now, 1972, for as long as we've got left, we must just go on building cathedrals." Ian Nairn

I first heard of Ian Nairn (1930-1983), the writer on architecture and topography, in this fine piece by Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian in 2010. He made his name in the 1950s with his book Outrage, in which he coined the term subtopia...

"The Outrage is that the whole land surface is becoming covered by the creeping mildew that already circumscribes all of our towns ... Subtopia is the annihilation of the site, the steamrollering of all individuality of place to one uniform and mediocre pattern."

Then, a few days ago, via Owen Hatherley on Twitter, I came across Nairn's BBC film about his journey on the Orient Express in the very early 1970s. You can watch Part 1 here.



This film was the first time I had seen Nairn: here he was, time-travelling to YouTube on my laptop screen in 2013 from a washed-out telly in 1972, and I must admit to being instantly and completely fascinated by him. Why? For the same reasons that he has fascinated so many others: the depth and originality of his insights and opinions, the fine language he used to express them and, of course, the palpable sense that here was a man who wouldn't stand the remotest chance of appearing on post-millennial British television. And that's to pay him a high compliment, rather than to bemoan his lack of telegenic slickness -- he expressed a sincere depth of feeling in his pieces to camera which would be hard to imagine these days.

His voice, Jonathan Meades says, was...

"...full of quiet despair. The repetitively falling cadence suggests an acute awareness of human impermanence and death's proximity. It knows, however, that even though everything's going to the dogs Canute's example must be followed."

Glancey put it well...

"On film, you catch something of his abiding melancholy, along with his habitual scruffiness and a haunting sense that here was a man as much in search of himself as he was of the inspired new architecture that eluded him. And in search, too, of a romantic, everyday Britain that, from Millwall to Manchester, was vanishing under a tide of crude public and private development. Those falling cadences, the way his sentences drop quietly into ideas left hanging, things unsaid, are as haunting as they are disturbing. There was an ineffable sadness at work. Nairn truly detested the way we were selling (as we continue to) our landscape, our townscapes, for a mess of nothing worth looking at, much less living in or handing down to our children."

I insist that your final duty is to watch the 30-minute film covering his journey from Leeds to Edinburgh, via Carlisle. He was a fascinating man. I must now set about trying to get my hands on his writing...

Frederick Douglass

Sam Leith, in his fine little book, You Talkin' To Me?: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama, describes the breathtaking oratory of one Frederick Douglass, an autodidact escapee from American slavery.

Douglass is best known for the speech he gave (on 5 July 1852) in Rochester, New York, commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence; and what a speech it was...

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Michael Marra

Mum texted me yesterday with the news of Michael Marra's death. I was sad. When I lived in Glasgow I saw him perform a good few times: at the Royal Concert Hall, the Tron Theatre and the wonderful Cottiers Theatre. I think the Tron gig might even have been a full Semple family trip.

His songs are stories: rich, eccentric and funny stories. And, in a live setting, every song was prefaced with a languid introduction which used that brilliant 50-a-day voice, as well as much Scots dialect. Music inspired by Americana combined with Dundonian lingo was always going to be a compelling mix for me.

He was a brilliant writer and I'm sad I won't get to see him play again.

Try If I was an Englishman and If Dundee was Africa if you're unfamiliar with his work.

The wall of plenty

Here's a reliable phenomenon which always brings a smile to my face: London pavement freecycling. Got some random, broken old clobber you want rid of? Well, if you live hereabouts, just stick it outside your front door and it will be a matter of 1-2 hours before it vanishes.

It worked, and rapidly too, for a late-1990s computer monitor on the Uxbridge Road in Shepherd's Bush in 2008. And, here in Herne Hill, it works with a speed and consistency which is amusing.

Last night I stuck five wonky old bike wheels out (a couple of backs and three fronts), alongside two rather disreputable, non-matching folding garden chairs -- all of it went within the hour. There's still 6-ft of standard black downpipe out there -- but it'll go soon enough too. Other objects previously placed out on the wall of plenty include a tired looking -- but quite large -- Ikea bookcase, a plasticky CD rack, a brown tie, a martini glass, a long-defunct dishwasher, a pair of paint-spattered shorts and various DVDs of films which came free with The Observer or The Guardian ... a litany of largely useless crap. But still they come for it -- whoever they are...

Hopping

The majority of the trains which pass the back of my house (in Herne Hill) for 18 hours or so every day -- variously on their way to places like Orpington and Ramsgate in deepest Kent, or Blackfriars, St Pancras and Victoria -- are those post-millennial commuter jobs: plasticky, unglamorous and stolid. If they were a meal they would be a limp, prepackaged cheese sandwich (like the ones available on board these days). These are trains with no allure, unconnected to those still-appealing notions of cliched romance -- see Sean Connery here, in From Russia with Love -- which most of us are too young to have experienced.

Still. Other trains do roll by: there's the what-the-fuck incongruity of the Orient Express, on Saturdays and Sundays I think; and there are the daily, or twice daily, freight trains, apt to rattle the crockery as they pass, heavily, unhurriedly.

I wouldn't hop a freight in Herne Hill but, like Geoff Dyer, it's something I wish I had done, or could have done way out west in the USA, not on a railway, but on a railroad. This passage by Dyer is from Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (which you should definitely read) and I love it, and its evocative sense of longing, very much...

"As I sat by the Mississippi one afternoon, a freight rumbled past on the railroad track behind me, moving very slowly. I’d always wanted to hop a freight, and I sprang up, trying to muster up the courage to leap aboard. The length of the train and its slow speed meant that I had a long time — too long — to contemplate hauling myself aboard, but I was frightened of getting into trouble or injuring myself, and I stood there for five minutes, watching the boxcars clank past, until finally there were no more carriages and the train had passed. Watching it curve out of sight, I was filled with magnolia-tinted regret, the kind of feeling you get when you see a woman in the street, when your eyes meet for a moment but you make no effort to speak to her and then she is gone and you spend the rest of the day thinking that, had you spoken, she would have been pleased, not offended, and you would, perhaps, have fallen in love with each other. You wonder what her name might have been. Angela perhaps. Instead of hopping the freight, I went back to my apartment on Esplanade and had the character in the novel I was working on do so."

Funnel web

How about this -- a funnel web, and its eponymous occupant, living inside an exterior brick wall. Where, though? I'm afraid, arachnaphobes of Herne Hill, that he's a local. Climate change, innit. Watch the video here, or below.

John Malkovich on the Chrysler Building

"...it's so crazy and vigorous in its execution, so breathtaking in its vision, so brilliantly eccentric..."

I can't actually remember if I saw this short film when it was originally broadcast on BBC2 in 1995 -- I may only have seen it advertised. But either way, after 17 years, I still remembered that John Malkovich once made a wistful and reflective short film about the Chrysler Building, which I've loved for a very long time. How satisfying -- and easy, of course -- it was to find it online.

Malkovich describes well his attraction to the stylish charms of the building, and the later architectural shift towards the sort of faceless, monolithic, corporate look of buildings like the World Trade Centre.

 

On selling

"I'm now convinced that the worst thing a man can do with a telephone, without breaking the law, is to call someone he doesn't know and try to sell that person something he doesn't want."
Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker 

What makes "hard work" hard? It may impinge on the spirit (the chip shop operative in Glasgow on a Saturday night, or the checkout assistant), the intellect (the QC or the academic) or the body (the bricklayer or the gravedigger). Working as a salesman, especially if you're temperamentally unsuited to it, is hard on the spirit because your job is bound, by cold mathematical certainty, to contain more failure than success: you will only ever convince a minority of your prospects to subject themselves to meeting you; and, in turn, only a minority of those you meet will "sign on the line which is dotted" (to quote Blake, played by Alec Baldwin, in Glengarry Glen Ross).

Of course, underpinning the popular identity of the salesman is this: he is necessary. (To the business in question, if not humanity in its widest sense.) Without the pitch, nothing happens. Some things are sold, some are bought. This distinction was clarified by Seth Godin in January 2012...

Some things are bought -- like bottled water, airplane tickets and chewing gum. The vendor sets up shop and then waits, patiently, for someone to come along and decide to buy. Other things are sold -- like cars, placement of advertising in magazines and life insurance. If no salesperson is present, if no pitch is made, nothing happens. Both are important. Both require a budget and a schedule and a commitment. Confusion sets in when you're not sure if your product or service is bought or sold, or worse, if you are a salesperson just waiting for people to buy.

So, yes, given the nature of the services I was selling, it could be said fairly that were I not present, nothing would have been shipped; my stuff would never have been merely bought. Was I any good? No, not really. Yes, I can string a solidly cliché-free sentence together, and I suppose this ability, and my sharp eye for grammatical detail in writing those enthralling proposals of mine, helped me hold my own. But I was never part of the 20 who made the 80, because I was poor at unrelentingly producing the level of activity required to excel; and, frankly, I was too aware of the faint whiff of shame which had attached itself to me. That I was mildly ashamed of what I had to do to succeed at my job -- pester people to agree to meet me, then make them listen to a bit of friendly, low-pressure turd-polishing -- meant that I generally approached my clients in a bloodless, studiedly non-salesy and jargon-free manner: "Man, I allowed myself to be talked into meeting this bloody salesman at eleven o'clock this morning," they probably thought to themselves, "but at least the fucker doesn't seem to be a total spiv."

Selling, for me, was largely about confounding the client's tendency to believe that I, personally, was stereotypically pushy and disreputable, much more than it was about my having some sort of carnivorous lust for smashing the month's targets. And there's vanity in that. Pity my poor managers -- they really would have been much happier with Blake, from Glengarry Glen Ross, or his ilk, running my desk. (As utterly monstrous (yet compelling) a creation as Blake is, there are many truths in his anti-motivational rant, particularly regarding that oh-so-comfortable place where middling or second-rate salesmen love to wallow, where they'll bitch about anything other than their own laziness or timidity as a reason for their poor performance.)



The short version: I used to be a salesman and I largely didn't like it; I do something different now, and I like it. This said, I believe that my present contentment is governed as much by the how (self-employment), as it is by the what (practical work).

Yes, I concede to my former managers that I was occasionally a bit sour about being deskbound. Since being released into the wild, I have become much happier. I hope that they, too, soon cut their ties with salaried life and, as suggested by Matthew Crawford, "reason together to solve some practical problems among themselves." I agree with Crawford that starting a small business, "remains valid, especially if the enterprise provides a good or service with objective standards, as those may serve as the basis for social relations within the enterprise that are nonmanipulative in character ...Such work ties us to the local communities in which we live, and instills the pride that comes from doing work that is genuinely useful."

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I apologise to all for using the non-gender neutral term "salesman" throughout; I simply felt the need to stick to it... I think it's that I was physically unable to use the term (of myself) when I was one, but I now can, now that I'm not one.

Dairystix -- social media wrongness

On 2 March 2012,  as part of a long-running series on stupid product labelling, Simon Hoggart wrote about Dairystix...

And on a BA flight, Alan Randall was given a Dairystix tube containing milk-style fluid for his tea. "Follow Dairystix on Facebook" it urges. "My dull life has just got interesting," he says.

Now, of course, Dairystix is not the only company producing a dull commodity which has come over all Dad-dancing-at-the-disco in its whizzy, moderne use of the social media internets. But, for proof of the wrongness of the practice, one need only consult the Facebook page which Alan Randall was exhorted to follow, which has a pitiful 58 "likes". A typical comment left there...

On several occasions I've tried to rip the sachet open, but it's only taken the corner off, leaving a hole about the size of a pin prick, and then when I squeezed it, the milk ejaculated out onto myself/the seat in front, or worse, the person sat next to me. I think Dairystix do this on purpose to make you look like a massive bellend. 

...and another...

 My office smells of sour milk since we switched to Dairystix. And it looks like the set of a porno.

 Company Facebook pages: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Peter Broderick -- Sideline

Here is a very fine song from a talented young American musician named Peter Broderick (b.1987).

The writing's strong, as his is performance; I think one of the most affecting elements of it is that you're introduced early on to that beautiful, melancholic, fragile chorus -- then, finally, you get to hear it on top of the piano.

I'm not going to write any more. But have a listen -- I'm sure it will grab you.

 

Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain

I get email.

Suzie writes with a fine story to tell of a weekend visit to her Mum's place where, in a bout of attic-box-raking, she got her paws on a very old book with a long note in it from the author to her great great grandfather. The book -- how about this for a title? -- is called Famous Frosts and Frost Fairs in Great Britain, Chronicled from the Earliest to the Present Time; the author was Mr William Andrews.

Here is the truly wonderful tale from the page which Suzie screen-grabbed for me. Enjoy it...

The whole book is free to read online -- you can view it here -- though surely this is one you should track down during an afternoon of pleasurably relaxed trawling around some secondhand bookshops?

- - -

Famous Frosts, with its incredible stories of frost fairs on the Thames, does call to mind Nasa's climate change vid ... just in case you were still in any doubt about the issue.

Morgon, Côte du Py, Domaine Jean-Marc Burgaud, 2010

I should point out, before I make my negative comments about this wine, that I spend a lot of my time acting as an unpaid trade envoy of The Wine Society, boldly coercing my friends, family and clients to become members. I have opened many hundreds of bottles from the Society, and have been truly delighted with every single bloody one of them.

So. The Jean-Marc Burgaud. Why did I buy it? And was it a stab in the dark? No -- I love the better wines of Beaujolais (the crus, if you must), especially the heftier styles of Moulin-a-Vent and Morgon (map here). I harbour especially devotional feelings for the Jean Foillard Morgon Cote du Py, a truly beautiful wine, worth every penny of its £20 price. If you've never bought any, may I suggest that you stop reading this -- honestly, go on: open another window in your browser -- and buy a case of it immediately? You will be very, very happy if you do this. (For some reason (tiny production volumes?) it's not sold by the Society.)

It might be fair to say that when I bought the Burgaud I was optimistically hoping for a bit of Foillard-lite: that wonderful combination of uncharacteristic (for gamay) spiciness and pure fruit. I drank my first gobful of the decanted Burgaud at a rather nippy 12°, so I certainly wasn't readying myself for a wash of Californian richness, but what was on offer was austerity itself: unwaveringly narrow, tannic tartness. A wee while later (God bless you if you're still reading, truly), the wine had warmed up a bit, but that straight-as-a-die tightness was still all that was on offer. Pfft.

24 hours later: has the asperity of the initial experience yielded to something I wouldn't "have to work at". No, sirs and madams, no.

As for the notes accompanying this wine on the Society website? Well. Allow me to state here, in a gentlemanly -- but forthright -- manner that the man responsible for describing this wine as "fabulously rich and fruity" is a scoundrel, a blackguard and a wayward vagrant.

I have yet to decide what to do with the second bottle -- maybe I'll have it replaced; but maybe I'll keep it until the end of its window, in 2017, to see if something else evolves in time...

It's striking that it's taken me several years of dedicated buying and drinking from the Society to, finally, encounter a wine I wasn't enamoured of. My love of the Society remains undimmed. The new list arrived in the post yesterday, with this legend printed at the back:

2011 proved an excellent year for the Society, thanks to you, its members, who continue to give strong support. Good trading allows us, as a non-profit-maximising co-operative, to thank you in the most practical way with price reductions on more than 300 wines in this New Year List. These are not short-term headline-grabbing discounts but modest, sensible price reductions for the benefit of as many members as possible. 

I shall drink, once more, to the health of the Society's noble causes.

More shit written on wine labels *

Back in August of last year Old Parn drew our attention to some of the awful, witless shit-crap you may occasionally be unfortunate enough to read on the label of your wine bottle. You know the sort of guff: the mere pretentiousness of things like, "Seductive spicy notes played by the Shiraz, harmonised by the floral, violet undertones of the Viognier. Culminating in a symphony of flavours." Through to the malfunctioning Babelfish of, "garnet rims and purple glints," and, "good backbone and fleshy to the mount".

Well. I went to a little London food and wine event a couple of months ago with @crepple, organised by and for producers from Puglia.

I met one of the wine producers; he was a jolly likable fellow, and his wines (mainly reds) were fairly nice, if not outstanding. I took his wee brochure away with me. Here are some of the descriptions therein:

"Is a very great red wine. It has color red ruby with purplish reflexes. The perfume and ethereal and persistent, the taste, justly tannico warm and harmonic with notes of leather and of spice." (I swear I've transcribed that exactly as it appeared.) 

"Gotten by the grape of Troia and Merlot, it has color red ruby, perfume yielded with signs of forest fruits, soft and harmonic taste with a good fullness gustativa." 

"The taste is dry, with an acido/tanico equilibrium." 

And so, incomprehensibly, on.

Aye, so we could snigger at this unfortunate gibberish, but do you know what? The wines are decent. They deserve an audience. So why not -- at the very least -- ask at least one relatively literate mother tongue speaker to read your copy before publishing it on an internet, or in a brochure? I might actually drop them a message, you know, and -- politely, mind -- ask them to revisit their copy in the presence of someone who could successfully express the sense of "justly tannico warm" in clear, elegant English.

- - -

* My title is a modified version of one written by Old Parn himself.

The Sampler: Jamie Hutchinson

Every other Friday afternoon Jamie Hutchinson sends a long email to his customers (he's the founder of The Sampler, a pair of wine shops in Islington and South Kensington, notable for their early adoption of those clever sampling machines which allow you to take an affordable mini-gargle of some Chateau Haut-Brion 1982).

I like his emails. Why? They have heart, they're unpretentious and they read as if they've been written by a man who loves the grape. He's admirably consistent, sending out his 1,500 words at the allotted hour every two weeks. The voice he uses is authentically his own: there's levity in it. And the emails are conversational, devoid of that stiff, businessy formality which bedevils so many sales messages, especially those from large corporations.

Friday's email included a link to the report on The Sampler's buccaneering buying trip to the southwest of France; I especially liked JH's wry introduction to several of the most outre wines he discovered...

• Les Cavailles Blanc 2009 £17.30. Made from the tediously familiar blend of 70% Mauzac, 20% L’en de Lel, and 10% Oundenc and fermented in cement.
• La Combe d’Aves Rouge 2007 £19.60. Again, just your everyday blend of 50% Braucol and 50% Duras. Very elegant in style – that lifted, natural nose and a red fruited and refreshing palate.
• La Grande Tertre 2010 £28.20. Sticking with the international varieties again, this is 90% Prunelard and 10% Braucol. 

Sign up here, people.

Steven Pinker: how to speak

It's good to hear someone big-brained with a love of language speak beautifully, isn't it?

The most striking example of this I've ever heard, in the flesh at least, was from Steven Pinker at the LSE in 2010.

Near the end of the fifteen-minute Q&A session which followed his talk he was falteringly posed a long question which could be better expressed as: "You're an atheist. Aren't you, in calling for religion to be eradicated, just as bad as the religious zealots who want to force their religion on unbelievers?"

His response would have been notable if he'd been given 24 hours to write it down; that he delivered it on the hoof, in front of 450 people, makes it truly remarkable...

"As a thorough-going atheist I would not have a desire to eradicate religion. I think it's important to come to the best collective understanding that we can about the nature of the world and the nature of morality and justice -- and that will often require overturning long held religious beliefs. But religions themselves, as social institutions, have obviously evolved, thank goodness: the way all of the major religions are practised now is very different from the way they were practised a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago: thanks to the enlightenment, thanks to the pressure from secular reason. There's no reason why that couldn't occur and all of the things that are valuable about religion -- that they are places for people to meet, they're forums for ethical discussion -- can continue to exist; but as long as it doesn't entail that we indulge propositions about the world that our best reason indicates are incorrect, or moral arguments that our best moral reasoning indicate are indefensible."

- - -

I'm looking forward to reading The Better Angels of Our Nature; Pinker's 2007 essay, A History of Violence, on the same subject -- the decline of violence -- is a compelling, and compellingly optimistic, primer.