Bookpacking’s Blog

Strolling through cosy Clerkenwell with its publishing operations and media village vibe, Bookpacking found ourselves in The City where there was an air of excitement as the suited and booted around the Barbican sensed spring in the air. Jackets were slung over shoulders, and outside tables filled up as the light at the end of the winter tunnel finally became visible.

But there was only one place to be tonight, and that was Brick Lane. Over at Rough Trade*, the legendary (and bilingual Francophile) Marianne Faithful played a free instore gig to mark her new album launch. Further down the lane at Eastside Books a group of budding authors gathered to critique each others’ work, and a few doors up the Brick Lane Gallery was hosting an opening for the Art in Mind show, including contributions from the amusingly-monickered Art Tart.

Title of the night went to an artist called Loz, for his funkily minimalist piece “Man Ray Stops Bullets”. Sometimes artists are loathe to deconstruct their work; because it takes away from the subjective element where we create our own meanings. Or because they just can’t be bothered. Or, for the extremely cynical, because it’d reveal how superficial the ‘concept’ was.

Not Loz though, who happily explained the fairly elementary symbolism, and seemed pleased that someone had shown an interest. Art, like it or not, is a business and a highly competitive one at that; there’s absolutely no getting around it. And in business, marketing is key. So a title that sticks in the mind is a shrewd move on the part of the artist. Like writing, talent is nothing without application. No marketing means no sales and in 2009 the notion of noble poverty ain’t what it used to be.

* if you don’t know the derivation of this name, a quick bit o’ Googling may amuse…

Germany; Weimar; concert hall

Happenstance is one of Bookpacking’s favourite phenomena. Within 20 minutes of arriving at Weimar’s quirky student-run Hababusch hostel, we found ourselves in a Klezmer concert. Receptionist Kai checks me in and mentions there’s a Klezmer workshop happening in town; do I fancy coming to a concert? In no time at all we’re walking through the quaint snow-filled streets of Weimar, past statues of Goethe and Schiller. We’re only at  a concert given by the cream of the world’s Klezmer and Romany musicians. I hadn’t even heard of Klezmer until a few weeks ago in Krakow’s Kazimierz, and now I’m listening to feted musicians from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the US, UK, Ukraine and Germany. Kai chats to musos who’ve returned to the former DDR town for this winter spin-off from the larger Yiddish Summer festival.

Some of the music is terribly plaintive. The imagination wanders: how many places must this song have been played in? From happy family gatherings to remote farms under threat of Pogrom or even in the nearby Buchenwald death camp. I think about my own recently departed grandmother again. And again I think about the mother given an overdose in the Krakow ghetto flat; administered by her son to avoid an even worse death at the hands of the Nazis. A familiar feeling comes; a sense of loss, of something ripped from the world. The religious or the poetic might describe it as the sound of thousands (millions?) of voices screaming out from a hellish past.

But the coin has two sides, and we finish with a grand finale and uplifting danceable numbers. 10 or so get up from the mostly muso audience and, linking hands, dance around the room in a Hora. I think back to the wild dancing I saw once at an orthodox Jewish wedding in London, an impressive sight indeed. Then girls present flowers to the band and a standing ovation ensues. The whole event is being filmed, and I feel privileged to be here. Timing, eh?

Czech Republic; Prague-Dresden train EC170

Some things just have to be done. We’re sat on a Euro City train waiting to leave Prague for the former East German city of Dresden. Cued-up via YouTube is the classic Kraftwerk ode to pan-Europeanism, “Trans Europe Express”.

OK, so this isn’t one of those shiny new ICE trains (Germany’s TGV), but a red box of a locomotive with eight Hungarian carriages attached. But it’s clean and modern, and we can’t but help get excited about a train journey. Sentimental Journey, Brief Encounter, Casablanca; travel is romantic, full stop. But there’s something even more so about a train. The bus was going to be 500Kc, the train was only 600 and ran more frequently. So here we are riding along the Vltava with the pioneering electric rhythms of Germany’s most famous band.

And for extra novelty value (for a Brit at least) we’ve got ourselves a compartment. Remember those? Windows all steamed up from the days when diesel engines used hot steam to heat the carriages. One day last month, on a journey beset by problems, we sat on the platform at Doncaster while a useless tannoy mumble unintelligibly and harassed travellers asked hapless station staff the same question over and over.

Out of the gloom like a vision from the past appeared one of the rail charter trains that take enthusiasts up unusual branch lines or behind rare engines. Table lamps illuminated white-clothed tables through those steamy windows; it looked like the cosiest place in the world to be. And not for the first time we wondered about ‘progress’.

So as we travel through what was presumably the Sudetenland (annexed by Hitler), Dresden looms. The old “Florence of the Elbe” was completely devastated in WW2 by Allied incendiary bombs. My grandfather was in Bomber Command – the men who had the highest attrition rate, but were sidelined post-war as Churchill distanced himself from responsibility for “total war”: the deliberate targeting of civilians. And there’s a double irony in that my Grandmother was a fire warden in the blitzed-out Black Country city of Coventry.

Readers of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” can hear about the destruction of Dresden; or rather un-destruction – the action all takes place backwards. 25-35,000 dead in one night; bodies melting in pools of fat. Words are inadequate. Perhaps some things are so unreal that postmodern semi-sci-fi is the only way to make sense of them.

PS with regards to the old ‘Is the Euro making things more expensive’ chestnut: the Czechs aren’t in the Euro zone yet, but the odd tourist-related business appears to take it. The same sandwich was £1.20 in Czech Crowns at the train station, or £1.75 with Euros. This is a pattern you see all over. Where’s it all going, we wonder?

One thing was very clear tonight: Winston Churchill drank an inordinate amount of  booze. Whisky in the morning, champagne in the afternoon and evening, and a little brandy to top it off. Carrying on the best traditions of the eccentric upper classes, he is supposed to have supped his way through 42,000 bottles of champers. Never in the field of human boozing had so much been drunk by so few.

At Notting Hill pub The Churchill Arms they were celebrating the big man’s birthday, complete with wartime uniforms and memorabilia. An impersonator with an uncanny resemblance gave one of the speeches that Churchill delivered so effectively. The right man at the time for the job of leading Britain against the Nazis, he was actually loathed in some parts of the UK.

Bookpacking mentioned his name to an elderly relative who remembered the Depression and the General Strike of 1926. She remembered her husband walking for an hour in the dark to get to a job he hated – crawling underground in precarious 18-inch high tunnels, with the constant threat of accident or explosion.

And when Churchill ordered the troops in, to deal with Welsh miners in 1926, she remembered his instructions to send “the rats back down their holes”. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Kurds and other troublesome ‘colonials’ around 1917. So while Bookpacking enjoyed the bonhomie tonight, we were understandably reluctant to carried away toasting the man himself, rather than his (WW2) achievements.

What really stuck in our mind tonight was a minor detail: a song playing in the background. A song ignored in the hubbub of beer-fuelled banter, as khaki-clad barmen with Sam Browne belts squeezed through the throng collecting glasses; young lads who’d have been called up in 1940. A song that – despite its cheery tone – was laden with pathos. A song that might be the last one you ever heard: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…not a tear but a cheer…goodbye everybody, I’ll do my best for ye.”

Bookpacking was bereft when we finally reached the last word on the last page of The Time Traveller’s Wife. Outside, our new playmates toasted marshmallows on a Yosemite campfire, but we felt we’d just lost a couple of old friends; a good book conjures up characters and images on the internal screen that are more real than anything in a cinema. Similarly, music can go beyond creating moods and endlessly redevelop the mental landscape in our own interior boom-towns.

Whenever Bookpacking listens to Ladytron we are immediately transported to a non-specific European city with a Berlin-like feel. It is an icy winter’s day, in a wide open space. We are dressed all in black; for a rendezvous with a partner who is stunning but in a low-key minimalist-chic fashion. We have both travelled from our respective capitals to this historically isolated meeting point of ideologies. An angular black haircut complements the smooth lines of their equally dark outfit. Think meaningful looks, impassioned but clipped speech; think French 60s cinema. There is not a single yellow Lidl carrier bag in sight in this all-but-monochrome movie. Bookpacking has not left their shoelaces undone and does not clown around, making stupid jokes and losing our Oyster card.

Sometimes it’s better to ring-fence those fantasies and leave ‘em be. There’s no holographic half-life, if anything they get stronger. And the real world’s banalities are kept at bay. Possibly it was the ennui of endless touring, or possibly the studied cool of Ladytron doesn’t translate to the live arena; but there was something missing tonight, and bad sound didn’t help either.

Aloof; unattainable; impossibly cool: these are the words that spring to Bookpacking’s mind when we think of the characters in our Ladytron movie. But when you pays your gig money, it’s to be moved, or to just plain get your rocks off. No satisfaction.

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Bookpacking had such a good time in Peckham on Tuesday that we headed back there the next night. Red wine and readings with the lovely ladies at Head Space 157 were followed by tea, music and poetry at Persepolis. Sadly we missed the charismatic Bernadette Cremin, but we did see Jazzman John riffing his West Coast beat-style prosody - accompanied by some highly-accomplished Iranian musicians on drums and guitar. All that was missing was Kerouac in the corner shouting “Go! Go! Go! Go!”

The evening was defiantly non-elitist, as you might expect in Peckham. But Bookpacking’s companion was straying into new territory, and was worried about ’saying the wrong thing’ or appearing ignorant. This frustrates Bookpacking no end. The notion that the art of words, music or images - or even ideas themselves - should be reserved for certain sections of society is some kind of sick feudal joke. A Phd is not a prerequisite to recognise repetition, an MA is not a ‘must’ to acknowledge alliteration. Bookpacking is a strong believer in art as a force for good. The wider the net is spread, the better.

This is why Bookpacking likes Beuys, and is dismayed when some gatekeeping hacks - seeking to ringfence their cultural capital (see Bourdieu) and preserve their monopoly - decry the spread of “citizen journalism”. Joan Byrne and Anne-Marie Glasheen at 157 had both self-published, and the results were small things of beauty.

Better out than in. Wir sind die Revolution.

(FYI Bookpacking subscribes fully to neither a red nor blue hue of political paradigm. It’s a post-postmodern world we’re all living in now baby)

Alison Goldfrapp has got duality down. Her voice soaring over the Brixton Academy, the sublime sound of Utopia lifted us into the ether; the poet in all of us recognising a semi-operatic appeal to our finer sensibilities. As they dipped into the more recent Seventh Tree, it was the sound of a band finding themselves. In Bookpacking’s humble estimation it’s a masterpiece, and the strings and harps did it full justice tonight. Two stunning dancers in pure white threw flowers into the crowd in a psychedelic-solstice celebration.

But no-one can be all good, all the time. Dressed in glam-clown black, Alison slipped back over the wrong side of the tracks for a little electro naughtiness. The vamp was back as their trademark dirty synth turned the heat up. Like a platonic pub meeting with an ex, it had only been a matter of time - and a few drinks - before you just couldn’t help yourself. “Ooh La La” pounded its way through any inhibitions and a static crowd finally cut loose.

The curvaceous dancers had abandoned their white dresses; now it was the sinister sexiness of bikinis with wolves’ heads masks. As the relentless riff of Train whipped the audience steadily into a frenzy, it was only ever going to end one way. Inexorably, we worked our way up to an intense Strict Machine climax: a shower of ticker tape raining down on a writhing front row.

Goldfrapp may have turned over a new leaf, but when it gets late, this leopard can’t hide its spots.

Ever looked at those people strolling about nonchalantly during the daytime and wondered what they get up to? Well today Bookpacking followed a few of them to the most excellent Housmans bookshop in Kings Cross.

Owned since 1959 by Peace News, the shop’s amiable manager Malcolm had organised for host MC5 legend John Sinclair to come in and plug the new book he edited, Headpress 28. If you’re a youngster like (ahem) Bookpacking, your only direct knowledge of MC5 might be the sample on the KLF’s What Time is Love: “…Right now it’s time to bring on the dance ‘Mofos’”. (For anyone not hip to the street, daddy-o, that’s a bad word and not an 18-30 holiday island). The audience was the usual mix: poets like Niall Ferguson (Rimbaud-rhapsodiser extraordinaire), aging radicals and confirmed hippies.

Rocking up proper rock ‘n’ roll late, in a quiet gravelly voice John read from the book. Some Kerouac, a polemic on the radical ethnic restructuring of New Orleans (never let a free-marketeer anywhere a blank canvas, seemed to be the message) and a poem.

As he stopped to chew the Kings Cross rain-sodden fat, the few that had real jobs – albeit with elasticated lunch breaks – went back to work, formulating as they jogged through the puddles. “A dog stole my sandwich? No, er, I had to help an old lady who was mugged? There was a bomb alert at Greggs? Nah. Aw to hell with it. I’ve just been to see a rock and roll star, Boss!”

Forerunner of modern electronica he may be, but the easiest of listens he is not. Bookpacking is just back from a performance of Kurzwell (shortwave) at the South Bank. A collection of musos – including students from Leicester’s De Montefort University – manipulated a wide variety of analogue and digital devices to produce a bizarre mishmash of (seemingly, but obviously not) random sounds.

It’s all about the textures and the tones. We compare it to going up close to a painting and examining the brushstrokes and paint. And there’s a joy in that, for sure – the pleasure f a colour or a sound just for the hell of it. But when you’re used to melody, it’s a demanding exercise, especially when it’s early evening and your blood sugar’s low.

And now for curry and beer. Because Friday night is curry night when the social eddy doesn’t beckon (’whirl’ would be an exaggeration). The random synthesis of sounds is all well and good, but everyone needs a few firmly fixed points of reference to hold on to in uncertain times. And this is Bookpacking’s.