Andrew Blackman

It was one of those moments when you realise you’re old – or at least no longer young. I am working on editing the draft of my next novel, and decided to go to a cafe – somewhere I hadn’t been before, a fresh location for a fresh perspective on the manuscript.

All was going well as I got an enormous fry-up and mug of tea for £4. But then as I settled down to work, the music in the place just started driving me crazy. They had the radio on, and it was all the latest pop music, and it just drove me crazy. It was impossible to form good sentences while listening to Rihanna singing “Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?” or 50 Cent saying “Have a baby by me, be a millionaire”.

So I took out my iPod, put on Andrea Bocelli and felt like an old man sitting in a cafe listening to Andrea Bocelli. The worst of it was that in the quiet moments, some of the jangly pop music came through, and so I had to turn up the iPod louder and louder, and in no time I got the dreaded “Low battery” message which, in the case of my iPod, means basically no battery at all – a couple of minutes later it switched itself off, and I was left with the radio.

Here’s the thing, though – I stayed, and in the end it wasn’t so bad. Most of the stuff didn’t really grab me, but it wasn’t unpleasant either. I managed to turn it into just background noise, and focus on my work, and in the end I got quite a lot done. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways and impatient when it comes to hearing new stuff. Pop music was never high art, but I could always listen to it before.

Is it just me, though, or is some of the latest stuff a new level of nastiness? According to MetroLyrics, the parts I couldn’t hear were even nastier than the parts I could. For example, in 50 Cent: “I bet I’ll get you open, I’ll leave your headboard broken”. Or in Rihanna, “Tonight I’mma let you be a rider, Giddy up, baby, giddy up, giddy up babe.”

Let me clarify: it’s not that they’re singing about sex, I have no problem with that. It’s the violent imagery, the emotionless, loveless, animalistic nature of it, that just makes me sad. Broken headboards and horse-riders and breaking you off and getting you open and pull my hair and touch me there and give it to me baby like boom boom boom. God I feel old right now.

Andrew Blackman Local news aging, cafe, music, Writing

I went to the Barbican recently for two exhibitions – Radical Nature and the Free Art Fair. I liked the first more than the second.

The Free Art Fair was a great idea: have am exhibition at the Barbican and give away the work at the end through a random draw. It was ruined, though, by someone’s idea to have a children’s music event in the same space. Young children banging on drums and clashing cymbals made it impossible to enjoy the event or even to look at the art properly. I did like a text piece by Terry Smith capturing the artist’s self-doubt and self-contradictions, many of which I related to. But a lot of it I just couldn’t get into. Perhaps I’m just sore because I didn’t win

Much better was Radical Nature, an exhibition about “Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009″. It was very varied, with some installation pieces, videos about old projects, photographs, etc., and a bit of a mix of art with activism.

My favourite was Luke Fowler’s video about Bogman Palmjaguar, who has protested strongly against the degradation of his local natural landscape. He has been classified as a paranoid schizophrenic, something he disputes vehemently – but the more violently he protests, the more this is seen as a symptom of his ‘disease’. The video cuts back and forth between images of the man himself and the landscape he’s trying to protect, suggesting a connection between man and nature, between his thoughts and the landscape, perhaps even between the degradation of the landscape and of his own mental state.

There was also a section of rainforest uprooted and left to grow horizontally out of the gallery wall, which looked so incongruous in a bright white gallery space and really made me ’see’ rainforest depletion in a new way. Also the artist Tue Greenfort had put a frankfurter on the end of a string attached to a camera and left it outside for a fox to find at night. Every time the fox tugged on the frankfurter, he took a picture of himself. The result was a series of funny and surprisingly cute self-portraits, although I could also see the artist’s point about the interaction of urban and rural/natural and artificial.

A series of photos of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline was interesting, but struck me as just straight documentary and not very ‘artistic’. Similarly a piece about how the degradation of coral reefs removed a vital natural defence against the 2004 tsunami and greatly worsened the impact – it was fascinating, but the sort of thing I’d expect to see on BBC TV, not in an art gallery. Other pieces, as usual with an art exhibit, I simply didn’t get at all – e.g., a set of tubs with kohlrabi and other vegetables growing in it was not art to me, even if it was in an art gallery.

There were videos and photos describing large-scale Land Art projects, like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake. I also loved the images of New York’s Battery Park City as a wheat field – this was after it was created as a landfill using earth from the World Trade Center construction, but before it became a residential neighbourhood. The artist Agnes Denes somehow managed to plant two acres of wheat there in 1982. I lived in Battery Park City myself from 2000 to 2001, so it was quite astonishing to see acres of bright yellow wheat in place of the apartment buildings I know so well, and with the dense concrete and glass of the World Trade Center and Wall Street just behind it.

Andrew Blackman Local news art exhibition, barbican, free art fair, london, radical nature

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lmg/sets/69593/

A few weeks ago, I walked past an Evening Standard vendor, and glanced at the headline: “WORLD’S FIRST AIDS VACCINE”. This was big news – a massive scientific breakthrough that could save millions of lives. My response was to shake my head and keep walking.

People think the Standard’s circulation is plummeting because of the internet, or the freesheets. It’s not true. The paper is dying because of crimes against journalism, committed over many, many years. As it turns out, that AIDS headline was true – there had been a major breakthrough, and it was big news. But I simply didn’t believe it, because so many other times over the years I’ve picked up a copy of the Standard and found its headline to be either completely misleading or downright wrong. I stopped trusting it, and I was disgusted by its adulation for the rich and famous and its condescension for struggling Londoners like the striking Tube workers.

The simple truth is, if the Standard produced quality journalism, it could see off competition both from the internet and the free papers. London is a huge city, and people would pay 50p for hard-hitting stories about local life and politics. They just won’t pay for rehashed non-news, spiteful columnists and celebrity gossip.

A few months ago the Standard tried apologising for being so awful. This seemed at the time like a mistake – just reminding people of all the reasons they hated the paper in the first place. I haven’t read it recently but I’ll bet it hasn’t changed much after that apology either.

So as of last week, the Standard is being distributed free. This will presumably mean massive cutbacks and an even further deterioration in the quality of the journalism. The freesheets, after all, seem to be mostly wire copy with added vacuous features by incredibly young-looking columnists. They don’t break important news or hold politicians to account; they are simply a vehicle for advertising. The Standard will have to do the same if it wants to make any money.

This means that London will be left without a serious local newspaper. It’s true that many of the national papers have a strong London bias, so we do get local coverage. But a big city still deserves its own paper. It’s sad for London that it doesn’t have one, and it’s sad that, as a trained journalist and someone who cares about the news, my only reaction to the prolonged death throes of the Evening Standard is profound satisfaction. The only people I care about are the vendors who have been shouting “Standard, Standard, West End Final” across the city since the beginning of time. I’ll miss them. Anyone involved in actually producing the Standard’s curious journalistic mix of nastiness and irrelevance, however, thoroughly deserves their fate.

This post is obviously quite a personal viewpoint/rant – for some more informed comments on the subject, see Dave Cole and 853.

Andrew Blackman Local news death of newspapers, evening standard, journalism, london, newspapers

My favourite cafe in Crouch End, the cafe where I wrote most of my novel On the Holloway Road, has just put up a notice saying it has fallen victim to the credit crunch and closed down. It was a shock to me. The place was perfect for writing. It had friendly staff, American-diner-style bottomless coffee, good food, big windows to stare out of, convenient plugs for a laptop, and Fawlty Towers tapes playing in the bathrooms. And it was just around the corner.

Also, on reflection, a reason I liked it was that it wasn’t too crowded during the day – perhaps not a good sign. Anyway, I will miss the place.

The betting shop next door seems to have closed too, along with the old furniture shop Myers – and of course our local Woolworth’s has closed, along with all the other branches. The place just up the road selling glass and picture frames has halved in size. Also, worryingly for me, shops that closed a year or even two years ago are still empty. But according to the council, there is nothing to worry about:

Councillor Kaushika Amin, cabinet member for regeneration and enterprise, said last week there was “no discernable increase in the closure of shops” and vowed to monitor progress.

Later on in the same local newspaper article, Councillor Amin says there is nothing much the government can do anyway. Of course not. The free market must run its course. Small businesses must be allowed to fail, towns to lose their character, people to lose their jobs. Government money must be reserved only for truly deserving recipients, like investment bankers.

Anyway, of all the businesses in Crouch End that could have gone bust, I’m sorry it had to be Pick More Daisies. It was a good place. I hope the staff find jobs elsewhere, and that the owner didn’t lose too much. Here, as a kind of epitaph, is the Pick More Daisies philosophy that used to be up on the wall in a big mural:

Andrew Blackman Local news cafe, credit crunch, Crouch End, Haringey, restaurants