Owl creek street

 

This was a song written for 60s American television show, The Twilight Zone, a series where ordinary characters found themselves lost in strange, supernatural stories. It's sung by the actress Bonnie Beecher. Her voice is the kind that can drift through your ears, into your bones and haunt you.

Here is the clip from the weird episode it appears in, Come wander with me.
Some of the the other episode descriptions sound wonderfully bleak.

Time Enough at Last - A bookworm finds himself blissfully alone with his books after a nuclear war.  
The Midnight Sun - The Earth falls out of orbit and two women struggle to cope with increasingly oppressive heat in a nearly abandoned city. 
The lonely - A convict lives exiled on an asteroid.

Fat fingers in pies

Around the country there are buildings that lie unused, forgotten by bureaucracy, condemned and wasted. The government is considering making living in these buildings a crime. I think that's a bit rubbish of them.

At the moment squatting an empty commercial property is not illegal, it's a civil dispute between the owner and the squatter.  The process of evicting squatters is unfairly tied up in tape and could certainly be made easier for the owners.  A court order is currently needed to remove them, which is an expensive and lengthly hassle, and i'm uncomfortable with the fact that the owners have have to foot the legal bills of the squatters (although these are bills that the state would have to foot were it to become criminal). However, sometimes these buildings are so neglected it's years before the owner even realises they are being squatted, and when they do, they find it's been looked after, unharmed and shielded from vandals.

Tales of those who quietly repair a property, pay bills, organise workshops and events that bring together the local community, these tales are not so commonly heard.  It's the stories of people who wreck buildings, or sneak in whilst someone's on holiday and squat their home, that reach the press and instill fear in the public. Yet most squatters are not doing this.  

With an estimated 762,000 empty and abandoned properties in the UK, and homelessness expected to increase as the cuts in housing allowances take effect, it seems like a crime to have long forgotten buildings sitting empty. It's inevitable that desperate people are going to try and make use of them. Is it really just to make occupying such a building a criminal offence? 

Go visit a squat, government.  

Read more here
Resist the criminalisation of squatting

Last of the brooding buildings

Shanghai is bulging at the seams with all the humanity living there, and as the city modernises to accommodate it, so the spidery arm of the wrecking ball spreads.  Older buildings and neighbourhoods are being steadily demolished to make way for its steely young towers.

Photographer Greg Girard has taken some ghostly shots of these ramshackle buildings.  They lumber stoically in the foreground of glittering skyscrapers.  It's easy to personify them against that background of a thousand identical skyscraper windows and feel a tug of sympathy.  Lonely houses surrounded by a bulldozed wasteland, they look exiled.  Sitting firm in the face of their fate like old men, all weary and spent.  Just waiting to go.

Girard has some interesting pictures of what life was like in the dark depths of the Kowloon Walled city too. Go check out his website

As some background, Shanghai has a population estimated at 23 million, making it the largest city populace in the world.  It's grown to this size as a result of people migrating in to the city, as it's natural population growth rate has, since 1993, been negative due to low fertility rate.  The numbers don't leave much space for each person, hence the move, like most cities, to people living and working vertically, piled high on top of each other.  Shanghai boasts some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, and since 2008 it's had more free-standing buildings above 400m than any other city.

Possess me sometime

Tonight I watched the film Baraka, sitting in a wildlife garden, wrapped in a scarf, with a tub of curry doused in lime chutney.

The film has no dialogue, it's just a rolling wave of time-lapse photography and sweeping shots of the world. A snapshot of 1992. The music pins the scenes together. An aerial view of cars dancing between New York's grid of traffic lights, tribes chanting and jumping like pogo dancers with deadpan faces, the shift from a crowded tobacco factory to -with the crashing crescendo of a drum- a man lazily inhaling from a cigarette. It's in a similar vein to the quatsi films if you've seen any of them -Baraka's director was the cinematogropher on Koyaanisqatsi.

This is a video of the Kecak monkey chant in Bali, Indonesia. It's incredible!

The brilliantly crazy looking lead chanter is said to be possessed by the monkey spirit. Kecak has its roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance, and in the 1930s it developed into a drama, depicting a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight evil King Ravana. I love this battle part of it. It's like a surreal version of the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story..

Some say the drama element was the influence of Walter Spies, a German painter and musician who intended to present it to Western tourist audiences. Others say the Balinese were already developing the form when he arrived on the island. Whatever, it's fantastic.

Drawing plans all night

A thread of blue light

Draped a brewery one night,

But here memory is murky.

From basement to roof we went.

It was with the fireworks and liqour

That my memory bent.

We wobbled back over a fence,

Skirted the river,
Handed the building to the pigeons

And to the past tense.  

Sleep covered the events,
It poked black moth-holes in the fabric,
And in a delicious muddle I woke.

I searched my pockets for clues.   

I found:
A tarot card, a map of the stars

And some dirt-caked shoes.

True story (a poet i'm not).

               














I love this song.

 ~ Scan the stars,

Spin it tight.

Measure all the angles (You make it)

Ride your bike all night (You make it right)

Read the book,

Draw plans all night,

All night ~~