Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  The name was on the bill. It couldn’t be the real one, Kaporal was sure of that, not here. Max had sold out the Palladium in his day, written books about it, done the chat shows, played the golf. So why not punt him to the Albanians? He must have retired to Australia years ago.

  Achmed liked the sound of it, a superstar, heavy zeros on the ransom fax. The nation would demand Max’s return within days, hours. A cultural treasure. Drin could keep observation on the joint. They would stake out the pier, climb the rock from which the theatre jutted, check the stage door, the entrances and the exits. Pal up with roadies.

  That should keep them quiet, Kaporal thought, as he cut through Warrior Square, faded glories and new scaffolding, and headed for London Road.

  Eyes

  Print was getting smaller, areas of the map were blank: every page I tried to read reminded me of the A13. So much of London’s liminal territory, if you drove towards the rising sun, wasn’t there: pending, in abeyance, a future development site. That’s why the clapped-out arterial road was tolerated: it was somewhere to cook the future. A rogue laboratory in which to undertake high-risk experiments, mix-and-match surgery, retail facelifts.

  The sea still worked. It had no fixed shape, it shone. I could feel the play of light on my face, even when I couldn’t bring distance, boats and cliffs, into focus. I knew they were there. Things got better when I gave up my spectacles (lenses greasy and scratched) and trusted to memory.

  Were I to write another book – Sixty Miles Out, I planned to call it, a pedestrian circuit around what was left of London – I needed to be able to interpret road signs, graffiti, menu boards in grease caffs. No point in lifting a camera if all I could locate in the viewfinder was smoke, vortices of dazzle. Pertinent ectoplasm. The visual world had become an unbreakable code. Photography, more than ever before, was an exercise in wish fulfilment, projection. The convex lens, distorting reality, took me into a zone of ghosts and phantoms: the middle ground.

  Into places like Hunter & Harris, Opticians.

  IS ONE PAIR OF SPECTACLES ENOUGH? SPORTS & HOBBIES? DIY? FORMAL WEAR? CASUAL WEAR? FASHION & COLOUR COORDINATION? BRANCHES IN BATTLE, BEXHILL-ON-SEA, POLEGATE. SPECTACLES ARE ALSO A MOST IMPORTANT STYLE & FASHION ACCESSORY & HAVING MORE THAN ONE PAIR IS AN AFFORDABLE OPTION.

  If I could read that, things weren’t too bad. Disposable copy was still within my remit, the gobbledygook of ad men, admin, address. Reading matter that nobody reads. Folded pamphlets in green rooms where we wait for bad news.

  Hunter & Harris kept a chained library of spectacles. On London Road, they were taking no chances. They ran to a rubber plant, a postive-discrimination matron behind the desk – but no customers. No clients for fashion accessories. The optician, a smooth and unflustered Asian gentleman, jacketless, would see me shortly: he smiled and nodded on his way into the small office, surgery, where he made his phone calls.

  I’ve never minded waiting, sitting down in a warm, dry place – with no expectation to perform. But I wondered how Hunter & Harris took the decision to go with a window display of World Cup (Mexico City) T-shirts, blue gravel and yellow parrot-in-tree. I suppose the shock of working out what possible connection this surreal arrangement could have with eye problems was enough to get punters in through the door.

  Not today. The receptionist filed her nails. I picked up a magazine – because it had a big CU of a Sony Precision Projection Zoom Lens. Plus the name JIMMY SEED (top right) on the cover. ‘Photography & Painting: Hockney, Handke, Sontag, Seed. Interviews, Features.’

  The magazine was glossy, the illustrations lavish – and strangely familiar. They looked, to my admittedly unreliable eyes, like the missing portions of the A13 landscape. Frame-pulls of travelogue painted over in lurid acrylics. Worse, the hack responsible for this essay had stolen my title: ‘Deadpan! Jimmy Seed & the Illusion of Sustainable Existence.’ I began to read, with mounting horror, a garbled version of my own words, the profile of the Bethnal Green painter I’d abandoned three years earlier. Seed, once he climbed into his Volvo and set off for Rainham Marshes, moved out of documentation and into fiction. He was a future novel, not a deleted monograph. But some hack, name of Norton, had found and pirated my research. And without the courtesy of shifting a comma – or making any form of acknowledgement (share of the cheque).

  This is what I read:

  DEADPAN!

  Jimmy Seed & the Illusion of Sustainable Existence

  The position of the realist painter, the detached observer of metropolitan life, is increasingly complex. Life doesn’t work in the city. Roads are clogged. Buses don’t arrive. There’s a bug in the system. Marginal landscapes drift, swallowing all trace of their previous history. Jimmy Seed’s bingo palaces and snooker halls don’t disappear, they’re just not there. It’s a nice paradox, but a hard one to accommodate, permanent impermanence, loud ghosts that won’t go away. Everywhere we try our vacant and preoccupied gaze, there are widescreen holes. Blank walls to fill in Shoreditch. Rubble. Vacant lots. Women, wearing bright new leather jackets over saris and shalwarv, wait on the pavement outside locked doors under railway arches. The buildings Seed nominates, new ruins, don’t know what to do with themselves. They are untransformed, fossils of chipped plaster, deleted trade names; white ferns growing from weather-damaged courses. East London is haunted by a sense of non-specific embarrassment, of having outlived its liberties. Too much message, not enough content. Traffic lights hold trapped motorists, travellers, in a time warp.

  ‘It’s a memory game,’ Seed confesses. Over a cup of tea. In his restored artisan’s cottage, opposite the Camel pub, in a tributary at the west end of Roman Road. ‘You train yourself to remember the order of objects removed from the table.’

  Jimmy Seed, Glasgow born, is comfortable with his long-term exile in this working/not-working district that used to be jellied-eel London. Bethnal Green is for plutocrats. Hip film-maker Danny Boyle stands at the school gates among knots of everyday folk, working mums, freelance dads. He is distinguished only by the quality of his leisurewear. Or so Seed reports with a certain relish. He’s amused by the notion of having his grungy epics exhibited in Dover Street. Young artists, travelling home to Leytonstone and Walthamstow from the latest Hoxton opening, glance enviously at old-timers like Seed and his mates. They are the scruffy survivors of the generation that followed Bacon east to Limehouse, Gilbert and George to Spitalfields. Second-division chancers who managed to infiltrate Shoreditch or the environs of Columbia Market at the right time, late Sixties, early Seventies. You could nobble a two-up, two-down in Wellington Row, Bethnal Green, back then, for less than a year’s council tax in Hackney now.

  Seed’s neighbourhood crawls with Buddhists (soup and candles), BritArt print facilitators, hairdressers, but still finds room for the fabulous cave of Les the junk-dealer. With a business that opens at whim, for a few brief hours during which he does his genial best to repel all cash customers, Les is both artist and curator. He accumulates rubbish, postmortem clothes, records, books bought as ballast. And he packs them, with no sense of arrangement or hierarchy, into his filthy window. Display rather than trade. Frustrated book-runners, threadbare connoisseurs, beat against the padlocked door. Here are the real memory traces of London, lost lives, greasy suits with the imprint of dead bodies still on them. Les runs his shop like a franchise from the old Victoria Park Cemetery on the south side of Roman Road. A grim field to visit, the cemetery was once condemned for over-stacking verminous proletarian hordes. There are entire streets hidden beneath the uneven grass. But Les doesn’t discriminate. If an artefact has no fixed address, he will crowbar it into his cabinet of curiosities. This is where he breaks from Seed. Les deals with the madness of the city by incorporating everything: a conglomerate of deletions and residues, ash, fur, plastic, bamboo. Landfill with a modest price tag. Jimmy Seed, the area’s sanctioned artist, makes careful measurements. His memories are selective. He’ll take off on wild journeys of discovery, down the A13, in the direct
ion of Dagenham, Rainham Marshes, the Estuary. He’ll park the Volvo, snatch a photograph. And then, in the privilege of the studio, he will work on a thirteen-foot canvas, very fast, using a ‘wet-on-wet’ technique; paint thinned with spirit, blotted with old towels, attacked afresh. Broad brush and sable brush. Large gesture and intricate detail. Thumbprint and bootmark.

  The displaced Scot, having known poverty and the grind of manual labour, now suffers from a lust for ownership. He owns the building in which he paints. And several others: Edinburgh, Normandy, Folkestone. The bricks and mortar of his studio, I soon realised, meant more to him than the paintings themselves. Seed gestured derisively towards packed storage racks. Unsold canvases are so many oversized cheques, collateral for a future property portfolio. The chilly, ex-industrial space in which I found myself was the sort of killing ground familiar to British gangster films, victims slung from meat hooks in The Long Good Friday. Seed digs out awkward canvases, trundles them across the floor. Vast slabs of Aldgate East Underground Station become windows on a parallel world. ‘I paint the bits I want to possess,’ he boasts. His new paintings are unpeopled. The rush of cripples, skinheads with festering love bites, with which he achieved his early notoriety, is over. The lowlife have been expelled. No more dogfaced BNP supporters. No more pit bulls hanging from trees in Victoria Park. No minimally covered slags propping up Whitechapel walls. The Seedian underclass has been banished. Status revoked. You no longer see them, but they are still there, choking for breath under a casually applied emulsion wash. Uneconomic immigrants. Headache substitutes. Desperate and bestial forms cannibalised from Francis Bacon, Seed’s early mentor and – according to legend -drinking partner. Bacon travelled downriver for the hardmen, dockers and villains who knew how to wield a belt. Seed came for property. Decommissioned sets that he could paint, before the developers moved in.

  It’s quite a spooky thing to stand in the great empty ice-box of Seed’s studio, and to find your exit barred by canvas windows: a monstrous facsimile of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, a slapdash account of three tower blocks on the road to Dagenham. These flats have been, on my successive visits, purple, scarlet, Chinese gold and the silver-pink of something in a foil carton waiting for the kiss of life. Locked away in this Hackney warehouse are all the missing parts of the jigsaw. Jimmy Seed’s privatised subterranea is the true Museum of London: piss-stain yellows, bruised blues, the grievous harm of jealous ownership. Jimmy wants it all, a comprehensive list of the city’s mysteries, its unrecorded and unloved margins. The official topography, energies stolen and exploited, is bleaker than ever. More abandoned. Seed doesn’t paint people because their time is done. He anticipates the coming age of restlessness, boredom and terror.

  The wonder of Seed’s current work is how he discovers and defines borders, roadside memorials, ways out (of his own dilemma). Mare Street Snooker Centre and Mare Street Top Rank are imposing facades, more considered, more themselves, than the buildings which have now been demolished. Sentiment, loss of heat and sweat and civic argument, spit and smoke, is displaced into arrangements of texture, low-key virtuoso tricks to re-access memory. The precise lettering. The little green man on the pedestrian indicator who stands, Lowry-like, for all those earlier Seedian gargoyles, Ensor masks of the canals and street-markets.

  The large-scale depictions of Hackney and the A13 are properties: in the film sense. They come with unreliable narratives (the story of their composition). What goes on behind the canvas is none of our business. Set against information overload, the multi-channel digital noise of Mare Street (Kurdish, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Irish, Jewish, Cypriot, Afghan), Jimmy’s cool minimalism is perverse. The story doesn’t stop where he leaves it. It spills onto the floor, out of the window. Gunfire, siren, road drill. It’s not the artist’s business to deal in social comment. No sermons, no history. Jimmy’s stance, so he says, is ‘deadpan’. Literally so: the panoramic shot of the vanished liberal-leftist documentary film-maker frozen in its tracks. Stopped dead. The city, once revived by waves of immigration, is finished. So Seed proclaims. Get in the Volvo, move on. ‘I think of the sea, always,’ he says. ‘Waiting behind those brick cliffs.’ The pull is in one direction: towards the rising sun. A13 and out. Like a Victorian explorer, hacking through the jungle, he is searching for one last colony to exploit.

  There’s nothing better, Jimmy asserts, than to hit the road. Early and often. Into the unknown. One jump ahead of the politicians and hole-diggers, destroyers of memory. From his days motorbike-scrambling on Beckton Alp, he learnt to love the junky inconsequence of the A13: industry, enterprise, mutation. Old poisons colouring present neglect. He operates like a resurrection man, bringing landfill back to life. The Essex paintings catalogue this debris: a burger shack, a drinking den, a discontinued filling station, the car park of a hypermarket under an enormous and agitated sky. The toxic gaudy of a culture of transition. These works have a morbid fascination. We feel for them as our great-grandfathers felt for impressions brought back by Roberts from the Holy Land. A landscape of myths and dreams fallen into decline. Seed deals in trophies – like giant Polaroids – produced for Bishopsgate aesthetes, masters of the commodity market who no longer have the leisure to travel. But who have wall space to dress in Spitalfields and Shoreditch. Better to own a Seed than to look out of your window. As you stroll through the atria of the temples of finance, shadowed by gently panning CCTV cameras, you will be close to a Seed – without realising it. Hung as an element in an architectural scheme, beside the escalator, overseeing the receptionist’s desk, the huge paintings are blots of noise. New London, global stopover, treats the old, dirty, lost London as an abstraction. We aspire to the condition of a club-class departure lounge, with low-intensity/high-definition art as a palliative, something to take our minds from the horrors of flight. Artists like Seed can do the travelling for us.

  The A13, as revealed in Seed’s paintings, isn’t London. And it isn’t anywhere else. Moving out, riding the fairground humps of the arterial highway, catching glimpses of retail weirdness in your wing mirrors, is to submerge yourself in a pill-popper’s vision of New Jersey: McDonald’s, Warner’s, Ford’s. Hungry apostrophes and empty paddocks – like deserted airfields, where unsold cars (Seed would specify the brand, year of manufacture, engine capacity) once waited to be shipped out, by rail or down the Thames. To the world market.

  By shaping his work so remorselessly in landscape format, Jimmy Seed delivers something like the curved view through the windshield of an American gas-guzzler. It’s easy to read his recent paintings as an extension of the credit sequence of The Sopranos, mid-Atlantic reverie. Compositions stacked in three bands: road, obstruction, sky. ‘Tuesdays’, the Basildon club, is the perfect signifier: imported Scorsese, melting around the edges, impregnated with burger smoke. A punishment block in which (unseen) Essex heavies practise the body language they acquired by watching bad TV in prison. Seed loves Tuesdays, the calligraphy, the nakedness of the plaster, the black-slat blinds. ‘Nobody in London, in this day and age, would try and get away with those,’ he says. ‘That’s style, baby.’

  To cope with such retinal blight, artists have to reinvent themselves as businessmen. Of the Basildon type. The sharper operators cosy up to developers and architects who don’t wear ties. The big cheeses, Bacon, Freud, Auerbach, are not only the painters whose work commands a premium in the saleroom, they are the ones who copyright a mystique: an art that is better than money. The kind of lavishly framed painterly display that can – if stolen -underwrite a drug deal.

  Seed, a sensible man, juggles his property portfolio. A flat here against a farmhouse there. An old garage, abandoned by villains, in which to operate – in which to store the back catalogue. We live in an age of remote-controlled security shields, barriers that curl up on themselves at the touch of a button. Private worlds, secret spaces, hidden behind a frontage of dying commercialism. Standing in the nether reaches of Roman Road, lacking the magical device with which to gain entry
to one of Seed’s studios, I realised why those huge canvases were so provocative. They were, without disguise, doubles of the coloured photographs in the estate agent’s window. Right alongside the door of Seed’s warehouse are the premises of Naz Ringblatt Property Services. Naz’s big punt was an image of ‘Hollywood Lofts’, a ‘1930s cinema complex’ on Commercial Street. ‘Penthouses from £1650 P/W. Gates to Garage Electronically Controlled. One-minute walk to Spitalfields’ Famous Market’ The computer-enhanced promo snap, all redundant detail eliminated, gave off the same rush I get from confronting, unexpectedly, one of Jimmy Seed’s austere A13 panoramas. It’s hard to draw breath in the gap between nostalgia and exploitation. But it’s as good a place as any to work out the price of behaving with 19th-century diligence in a fast-twitch electronic multiverse.

  Don’t believe I waded through this bilge while I waited for the optician to get off the phone. I skimmed. Taking in just enough to infuriate me. Some person had nicked my file and submitted the aborted Seed piece under a version – A.M. Norton – of my name. I slid the magazine beneath my coat, to take it back to the flat. I wanted to check Norton’s text against the carbon copy that I had preserved, with all other duplicates, against the day when I ran out of fresh material. When I was too knackered to walk, lift a camera, or try a new town.