I haven’t posted on my blog properly for some time. In fact last year I didn’t post very much at all. But I have been very busy working on the Impression Milton Keynes project and my new novel, Fourth Wall. So apart from the usual stuff anybody gets up to, going out, going away, meeting friends, Christmas and all that – there hasn’t been much to say. Particularly as I have been spending time taking photos, processing films, researching, writing, and everything else. I’ve even been getting ready for an exhibition at the Open University on January 25^th to exhibit some photos of mine : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv1cXKVWajE

But back to home.

I’ve been living in Worthing now for over three years, and away from Brighton for four years. I like Brighton a lot but it’s just too expensive to live there for what you get. The town is great and all, but it’s a very overcrowded place that I love to visit but I’m glad to come away from at the end of the day.

I didn’t have an exceptionally long visit (a Saturday afternoon) as I was dropping off the files for my exhibition prints mainly but that didn’t stop me taking my Leica and Minolta Autocord along too! I was last in Brighton back in December but at night and the place takes on a very different feel then. It’s good to be in streets which are absolutely thronged with life. The North Laine and Lanes are just a great asset to Brighton (lots of small independent shops although in recent years there are an increasing amount of chains) and make for a paradise for the street photographer. I didn’t have much in the way of resources except for an old roll of BW400CN which I need to use up (it’s fine stuff, it’s just a pain to print on black and white paper, unlike XP2 which is another chromogenic film) and about 3 frames on my Autocord which had some Tri X I had been pushing to 3200.

It was just great fun, and the TLR is a fab tool for doing the street work. The thing is you can stare right down into it and people are just not even aware you are photographing them because there is not even a hint of eye contact. The camera becomes the all seeing eye.

I dropped the files off and will hopefully inspect a print on Monday to make sure it’s going to look good up on the wall. But it’ll be dark by the time I get to Brighton which will be a shame as I would like to do more street work, but such is life when you have a day job you must go to as well.

After that I went to a small coffee house and read my book quietly and finished the roll in the Leica snapping pics of peeps in the coffee shop and then went back through the lanes and used the three remaining frames on the Autocord. I popped into a bookshop and bought a book on The Beats and finally, W.Eugene Smith’s “Dream Street” – the much vaunted Pittsburgh Project. It’s not the full collection (there are some 6,000 photos from the Pittsburgh Project, and some 1,200 master prints…) but I don’t know if there ever will be, as that was its problem, it was un-publishable. The guy behind the counter was friendly and said the Autocord was a nice accessory. I explained it wasn’t an accessory and its misfortune was being used and abused every week by me!

That is the only thing I can say about Brighton, there’s a lot of soul, but there are also a lot of people who go around like fashion manikins with stuff draped over them to look the part but they don’t know what the hell it is they are wearing or using. I suppose a TLR does make for a fairly nice fashion accessory but there’s nothing fake about me or the reasons I use one that’s for sure.

I’ve been thinking about the book I am writing which I would say I have written half of. Since 2006 I have had a number of fairly strong ideas for books but had very little way of perhaps making them stand in their own right. There’s the story of my somewhat hidden from view darker persona (nothing scary, I’m just a deeper thinker than may be apparent in person.) There’s the story of my American adventures. There are the stories of my exploits in this country with dubious tales of the night. There are all sorts that don’t really stand in their own right as a book when I sat down and tried to write them. When this is combined with the constant flow of new books that I read and the desire to be like certain authors who I really admire it can make it difficult to write something coherent with a good amount of weight behind the ideas to drive it through. I’ve struggled to do this up until earlier this year when something began to click after reading JG Ballard’s Super Cannes. I have long been a fan of JG Ballard but something clicked when I read his book which combined with my current photographic project Impression Milton Keynes – the idea was born: Fourth Wall.

I won’t give too much away at this stage over the plot but it takes the essence of many of the things I have experienced rather than trying to take them all and put them in verbatim. It also puts them in the third person because I have made no bones about the fact in previous first person exploits that the characters have been very much real. Iona and Tammy in Fourth Wall are as real as any character except they are not any one person but many. Some of their traits are very much from me and others are a combination of traits and peculiarities I have found in other people over the years. That is a major departure for me and probably where the jigsaw really began to come together.

As a very brief synopsis, Fourth Wall is the story of a couple who happen to be partners, Iona and Tammy. Iona is left behind by Tammy’s departure to work as an architect in a new town (guess where that idea came from…it isn’t MK where she goes to work though!) leaving Iona behind. She acknowledges that unless she moves to be with Tammy, they have no future and that is something too unfathomable for her to contemplate. Jumping in feet first, Iona moves and gets a job at a local government quango. Her new boss Jack Addison-Perry is a shadowy character she can’t quite work out and seems to have something of the night about him but Iona can’t place her hands on what it is. In their attempts to make the move work, Iona and Tammy begin to slip into brooding nightmare of drug-fuelled hedonism which will prove to be their undoing when it leads them to the truth about Jack Addison-Perry…

The clearest sign that this is working is because I really do feel my voice is coming through in this. The scariest part of it is how unrecognisable it is from me or certainly how I am largely perceived. In person and in reality I’m pretty bubbly to say the least, probably too much so. I’m a bit hair brained and at a cursory glance some people haven’t taken me very seriously in the past; purely because I can come across a bit like the Joker in the pack. That is very much me but on the other hand I have a pretty dark outlook on things, not in an overly negative way but I’m intensely curious about the underbelly of things. This is what is showing in Fourth Wall. There is a bit of wit in the dialogue; there’s a fleck of Ballard with his dystopia in there, a bit of Hubert Selby Jr with his stories of delusions and absolute freedoms, a sprinkling of Kerouac telling us how it was and maybe a bit of Will Self in there too with his eloquent description. It’s a bit of everything but with something quite original at the heart of it. It is on one hand complete fiction and has no actual precedent in real life but is also on the other hand very firmly rooted in the reality of things that have happened. As much as it is a work of fiction it is not quite as inconceivable as some of Ballard’s work sometimes can be accused of; what happens in Fourth Wall could happen although is terribly unlikely. I’m a realist and it’s the everyday that I am interested in. I’m not interested in battling aliens on a far off planet, I’m interested in boring things like people sitting in front rooms staring at sunlight streaming through blinds on a come-down, I’m interested in people smoking cigarettes looking out into the seeming nothingness ahead of them except for what is in their head, and I am interested in the way people live their lives today. It makes it possible and it fuels me passionately. How else would I be interested even excited in taking copious photos of a new town? I acknowledge I have a very weird outlook on things at times but I’m not really looking at it that differently; I’m just peering just a little bit beneath the surface and finding all sorts of intrigue.

So Fourth Wall excites me because it’s the first work which I have penned that will shock people that I wrote it. I genuinely think that because I am taken aback at the things I have put into this myself. It’s not shock tactics; it has a real grit that I didn’t think I could write. But it’s not inhuman and perhaps the greatest tragedy in the story of Fourth Wall: what I have done to Iona and Tammy is pretty gruesome. Not because it’s gory, not because it’s violent, not because it pushes taboos too far for cheap shock factor. I think it’s gruesome because at their lowest there is humanity and something we can connect to and it will frighten you.

Fourth Wall isn’t no walk in the park and it’s certainly no bedtime story or BBC period drama, but it might give a glimpse on what may happen when you push someone enough so much that they break through their own reality; their very own fourth wall.

the centre:MK (erstwhile Shopping Building) could shortly be in line for a grade II* listing which would prevent unsavoury (ok bias immediately present there) additions and changes to the central shopping precinct in the city. Some may say this all started the moment doors were put on the place; but its real degredation really begin with Midsummer Place, an extraordinarily ordinary building plonked next to the original 1970s Miesian building.

Unfortunately even the building’s management have described it in less than savoury terms, presumably because they want to be able to hack it about within an inch of its life to add more shops to the building and further the break-up of the orthogonal grid in Central Milton Keynes by closing the Secklow Gate flyover. This is the only flyover in Central Milton Keynes (and indeed most of MK, apart from the few junctions on the A5D and of course the M1) compared to other new-towns such as Peterborough and Runcorn that are full of high speed grade seperated junctions and flyovers.

Of course, much a-do about this listing has caught the interest of the Conservative leaning papers. I’ll bear my political clothes here but I am right leaning myself; but then I don’t have much time for politicians full stop but that’s another matter.

Between comments of ‘surrounded by concrete flyovers’ and ‘concrete eyesores’ – it doesn’t take much to work out what the papers think. They live seemingly in the romantic vision of England loved by Prince Charles and his somewhat disturbing Poundbury. Compared to most shopping centres in England, the centre:MK has is bursting with natural light, intricate but seemingly simple detail, elegant loading and unloading for deliveries (at first floor level hence the Secklow Gate flyover), the amazing steel-work and glass cladding and extensive interior planting that is by no means an after thought. Of course there was Queens Court at one time, but now that public space is being overturned into privatised space; squeeze the pounds out of every square foot is the mantra of business at the end of the day.

Maybe what they should be thinking of is building a counterweight. It’s no big secret the only reason the shopping building is the complete opposite end to the station of the 2km long city centre is because they had to guarantee that the project wouldn’t be cut down in size and trashed by short-sighted British incompetence. (And yes it is incompetence, short-term quick buck making for people who largely couldn’t give a toss.) And it worked as CMK now exists in its fully intended size but it needs an injection of life into the western end; so why not push the boat out architecturally and create a counterweight to the the centre:mk away from the heavily loaded eastern end?

There is plenty of room (because the designers thought about the future!) to do this if they had the vision but that doesn’t seem to have ever figured in the imagination.

You only have to see Midsummer Place (the extension built in the late 90s, opened in 2000 I think) is an alright looking thing but no work of art and certainly pretty run of the mill. The Shopping Building however is far from this uninspired building.

The book “The Story of the Original CMK” may be a little too rose tinted but it does deliver on 120 pages worth of excellent material the scale and sense of vision those guys had, if a bit naive – they created in part due to that what we see today. What we will create afterwards will likely as always be run by bean-counters but will be a watered down piss poor architectural tour-de-force in butchery.

Of The Times excelled themselves, take a look at this rather grotty picture of Central Milton Keynes:

It does look pretty rank from that photo, but there’s a small problem here given it is an article about The Shopping Building.

What’s the problem?

That picture DOES NOT CONTAIN any view of the shopping building!

I leave the final sentiment to Derek Walker, the shopping building should never have had bloody doors fitted on it. And the moment that happened, public space became private space…

• The Telegraph : Characterless Milton Keynes shopping zone at centre of culture clash
• The Times: English Heritage in move to save ‘concrete eyesores’ (you may note though I don’t disagree with them over Brum library but I never liked brutalist architecture)