Alasdair Stuart's Blog

Times Square One

Arriving at night you step out into a world surrounded by huge concrete cliffs and filled with teeming masses of people who are all unique, all have their own stories and all part of a colossal organism. Blood vessels in the veins and arteries of the city they swim in the same direction, bicker at the fact the guy in front’s going slower, laugh, scream, dance and move, constantly building and rebuilding the city through their thoughts and words. This is the world on a grid, this is information distilled and fired straight at you and when you get to Times Square, and it seems that everyone here, eventually, does, that you realise what it really is;

Music.

Time Square has a deep bass note of history, which, appropriately, lies at the bottom of it. The news tickers on One Times Square told the city that Apollo 13 was home safe, that President Kennedy was dead, that Obama had won. They stream constantly, liquid graceful LEDs that set the tempo for the rest of the city, news, sport, gossip all flash by at the same speed, the information super two step that on it’s own would be hypnotic but here, is just the start.

The billboards come in next, high, wide notes of color and aspiration that tell you the lies they’ve told you for years. That this TV show will change your life, that these dangerously skinny supermodels actually drink Pepsi Max. They play with motion, one series showing a single dunk shot executed by five different players, each stage a different man, each stage a little higher, a little closer. Aspiration is hard coded into every image, each one reaching and encouraging you to reach, to try, to tune in, to buy something. Different themes, different notes bounce and roil around each other, all built on the constant, liquid bass of the news ticker. Information. Information, In-for-May-SHUN.

Above them, New Yorker’s faces are projected on a screen six storeys tall as part of a Toshiba promotion. Above that a parade of manga cartoon bombs, all shiny black iron and lit fuses cascade down a screen over and over again. Next to them the Glee cast prepare to graduate, above them the Louvre lights up over and over. This is the New York Ode to Joy, a tenor dripping in neon and concrete amplified by a square where information runs so deep and so fast you feel like you could swim through it. Music that’s miles wide and sixty storeys tall, music that you’re a vital part of and one of millions of identical notes, all crammed into the right place on the page. A million stories in the naked city and they all contain each other, a hotel room in a hotel on a street on a square on an avenue on a grid on an island. An urban fractal, every element contained within every other. A piece everybody plays and everybody listens to.

That’s why so much of this feels so familiar; because it is. Looking out of the 41^st storey window, it’s impossible not to map the city into the obscurity of fiction. Somewhere out there, Detective Mack Taylor’s CSIs are working a new case, whilst at a nearby precinct Detectives John Munch and Finn Tutuola spend another shift dealing with the worst humanity can do to itself. Go up a few blocks and the last place Jack Bauer was officially seen alive echoes with gunfire and the promises of silent, dutiful vengeance.

Across town at Central Park, a time lost Disney princess leads residents in song whilst not a mile away, the original Will Graham runs down the Guggenheim spiral away from the original Dr Hannibal Lecter, a modern artist of murder contained in a museum of modern art. Across on the other side of the park, Peter Venkman talks to the thing that has taken up residence in Dana Barrett whilst a few buildings over, Tony Stark turns to Pepper Potts and asks what she thinks about a mansion instead of a tower. She suggests they talk about it over dinner and on the way they pass through Hell’s Kitchen. A red suited figure plays among the rooftops, keeps pace with their limo for a while, an unofficial honour guard. He hands off to a scrawny motormouth dressed like a spider who dances across the rooftops as Pepper and Tony drive on, past the Cloverfield memorial, past the coffee shop where six new people are starting to come together, past the site for the proposed new Baxter building. All fictional, all fake, all information and all utterly, completely New York. Spidey’s town, Sinatara’s town, Batman’s town, Gershwin’s town. All here, all unique, all apart and all connected, all woven into the movements of concrete and steel, yellow cab and squad car, residents and visitors, fiction and reality. Notes on sheet music, words hammered out on an old typewriter, the endless liquid stream of information at Time’s Square One. This is a symphony in Avenue Major. This is New York.

I rather like living in the future.  A few years ago, I remember watching Earth: Final Conflict and marveling at the fact that Boone and co carried around PDAs that could take pictures, instantly communicate with other people via video and audio and give them access to any public domain knowledge in the world.

Now, I have one myself.  It’s called Box, because I watched Star Cops at a formative age and it has a camera that I’m starting to get quite good with.  Here are some of the photos from our recent Whitby adventure:
This is the beautiful gate used to close off the outer section of the pier when the seas are very rough.

This ice cream cone monstrosity is, believe it or not, more frightening from the other side.

The other type of rock Whitby is famous for. It doesn’t taste anywhere near as nice but it’s a lot prettier.

I had an excellent Bank Holiday Monday in Whitby. We had lunch at one of the dockside cafes and then set off on the traditional journey to the end of Whitby Pier. It’s a huge, two stage affair and the second section is regularly gated off in high seas. It was open when we were there but the wind coming off the sea was still incredible.
Afterwards, we walked along the beach, discovered some friendly donkeys, did a little fossil hunting and headed home, all without once seeing the Demeter crash into the shore.

Possibly because Dracula himself has gone all Web 2.0. Whitney Sorrow is currently telling the story in real time, from Jonathan Harker’s point of view. If you’ve never read the story before it’s a perfect place to start. Just remember, enter freely and of your own will…

I spent Saturday in Saltaire a few weeks back and, as is often the case, it helped me understand something I didn’t realise I didn’t understand.  Saltaire, you see, is both uniquely, unmistakeably English and at the same time utterly unlike anywhere else I’ve ever been.  It tends to focus the mind, in much the same way, I imagine that time spent in The Village in The Prisoner does just without the weather balloons.

Within twenty minutes walk of the train station there are stone lions originally intended, the story goes, for Trafalgar Square, an almost impossibly perfect cricket pitch, a cable car, the Yorkshire Moors and of course, Salt’s Mill.  Which is now an art gallery.  Throw in streets that could fit in well in Edinburgh and a river that Mr wouldn’t look out of place in The Wind in the Willows and you have what amounts to a thumbnail sketch of English life;  art galleries, cricket, industry, wild countryside.

Which brings me to what I learnt.  The Saturday we went was both the nearest Saturday to our mums’ birthdays and also the end of the Saltaire Festival, a week long series of cultural events which take the already eccentric basis of the town and run with it.  Which is why I met Henry VIII and the nice lady playing chamber music.

The heart of Saltaire is Salt’s Mill, an immense set of buildings hunched over the railway tracks.  My wife remembers going there when the mill was being gutted, being show the huge empty halls with bits of machinery stacked up and waiting to be taken away and the spaces are still t here, the sense of cavernous industry is still there.  There’s maybe a tenth of the people the place used to hold in there at any one time and it still feels energised, busy.

The reason is the Hockney Gallery.  A number of art based businesses have bought space in the Mill over the years but the David Hockney gallery is the most prominent and certainly the one I spent the most time in on Saturday.  Situated in the ground floor hall it’s over a hundred feet of open space, punctuated only by art installations ranging from dentist chairs to a wonderful cubist mailbox and tables of art supplies.  Here, the shop is the gallery and the gallery the shop, the two combined in a way which could be crass but instead is subtle, almost elegant.  People browse the art supplies and the paintings, the sculptures, naturally present themselves as they go.

The ones that leapt out at me this time were the cubist mailbox and a series of Hockney’s photo montages.  One, taken from the bow of a ship in Alaska and showing a glacier and the other, isolated tourists almost has a Victorian quality, a sense of a trip taken around the world ‘for improvement’ contrasted with the accidental symmetry of the tourists and the deck umbrellas and the stark, peaceful block of the glacier.  It’s an immensely still piece and very powerful with it.
The other picture that I couldn’t take my eyes off was a nude photo montage.  Different angles on the same sections of the face and body are layered on top of one another until you can just about discern that it’s a woman and not very much else.  It’s like viewing the subject through a kaleidoscope and whilst the obvious view is that it’s about the objectification of women I took something different from it.  Namely, the feeling that there was something faintly non-Euclidean about her, something wrong, something off.  Interesting picture but I wouldn’t want to look at it too long.
Then I met the troll   The troll was attached to the bridge, across the river.  He was eight feet tall, had long claws and was looking pretty serious about climbing onto the bridge.   His skin was chicken wire, his eyes were tennis balls and his entire body consisted of old cuddly toys, carefully arranged in the chicken wire frame.  In one sense, he was horrifying, like the old Clive Barker story ‘In the Hills The Cities’ where the two cities form immense golems and fight.  In another though, he was incredibly endearing.  A fairy tale creature brought to amiable life, a traditional villain made of puppies, kittens and dolphins and as a result alien rather than threatening.  And here he is:

After we spent some time with the troll, Kate and I headed over to the church.  There’s an elaborate and very funny optical illusion with the central church in Saltaire, the entire building looking much closer than it actually is.  Only when someone gets halfway down the approach does it become clear that the building is A)Huge

B)Massively out of proportion for normal people

and

C)You begin to get a sneaking suspicion you’re being pursued by the Nazgul.

It’s my favourite architectural joke and whilst the festival meant there were lots of people out front and the effect wasn’t as obvious it still made me laugh.

The reason they were there was a very large, plywood EARTH, the letters over six feet tall, connected and with jigsaw pieces drawn over them.  Anyone could paint anything they wanted on a jigsaw piece and everyone was.  Grannies, tourists, children and locals all worked patiently side by side and we joined in.  Inside ten minutes, a yellow abstract tree and a purple hand/plant against a red background were added to the word and our work was done.  We had created art.

And art was what Saltaire helped me understand.  Everything about the place, from the lions to the old cable car with a traditional sweet shop at the summit that doesn’t appear to have updated it’s prices in twenty years is concerned with that immensely simple word and the immensely complex concept behind it; art.  It’s the language Saltaire speaks, the heart of it’s industry and the reason why the town is so beautifully normal and at the same time so uniquely eccentric.  Everything in Saltaire is designed, everything is there not just to exist but to be understood and discussed by the people who see it.  There is nothing but message in Saltaire, no noise, just endless signal and endless things to understand, to learn.  A town-sized puzzle, a cubist mailbox, a troll made of cuddly toys.  Art is the language every single one of us speaks and that day in Saltaire taught me how to speak it a little more fluently, with a little more flourish and I look forward to what my next visit will teach me.