Notting Hill: Flow Tempest Nightingales

Scotch 640T, cross-processed

I wrote this article whilst listening to Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast, a 24-hour ambient music internet radio station which pleases me. I will miss it when it has gone. It's part of a website called Ambience for the Masses, which dates back to 1997 and is one of the few examples of pre-2000 internet culture that still means something. Think of all the internet radio stations that flourished in the 2000s, when internet radio was new; think of all the internet projects that were born and died in the final years of the 20th Century, when it all meant something, and the future would be better.

Very little has been written about those years. There comes a time when a man realises that, one day, someone will say his name for the last time. It will be written in a sheaf of hospital notes, shoved into a furnace, finally eroded from a gravestone. Except that in the future we will not have gravestones, because there will be no room.

The internet is a mirror of humanity in this respect. The network was built to last. It would take an earth-shattering kaboom to destroy it, just as it would take a vast conflagration to eliminate the human race. But individual people, individual websites, ideas, they delight the eyes and they are gone. The internet has a curious mixture of fads that grow and fade within a few weeks, mixed with scans of ancient pornography that will exist long after we are dead. It seems to me that the key to internet immortality is a kind of genericism. The dancing baby, Mahir, "all your base" etc did not last because they were too distinctive. They traded long-term fame for a burst of exposure followed by an eternity of blackness. The animated gifs and still images that last are those will can be repeated and repurposed without becoming tied to a place and time.

A while back I popped off to Rome with an Olympus XA, but before putting my faith in Blast Hardcheese a 35-year-old camera I wanted to make sure that it worked properly. It would have been disappointing if I came back from Italy and found that the film was blank. Or that England had been overrun by killer rats, or that my detailed knowledge of the lives of Peter Andre and Katie Price was no longer useful.

Notting Hill (1999) is one of those films that I have not seen, along with Santa Sangre (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the original version of DOA, and also Roman Holiday, The Sound of Music, The Birth of a Nation, Kramer Vs Kramer, The Matrix Revolutions, Gattaca etc. The list of films I have not seen is huge. It divides into three basic groups.

Firstly, those films which I have no desire to see and have not been forced to sit through. Notting Hill falls into this category. It was released in the UK a few weeks before The Matrix, which I saw instead. I remember seeing the trailers for Notting Hill and thinking that I was probably not part of the target audience.

Secondly there are films which I am too lazy to watch, but I have read about because I need to be familiar with them in order to function in society. This group includes Nights of Cabiria, Bicycle Thieves, Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Children of Men, large chunks of The Criterion Collection, Pan's Labyrinth, Oldboy etc. Chungking Express, which looks lovely in stills but I just can't work up the enthusiasm to watch it. Perhaps if I broke my legs, or suffered a stroke, I would have time. One day I will not have enough time, and at that point why bother? Do people miss Amy Winehouse? My recollection is that she released two albums but was unable to complete a third, and after five years of tabloid antics she died, and now she is gone and forgotten. Unlike Janis Joplin she never cracked the US market, and so she never appears on Imgur or Reddit or the internet in general, because she was never popular in the US. And that is why she has faded and vanished. The radio doesn't play her songs any more, she isn't on TV, the newspapers... it's as if they feel faintly embarassed about her demise, and would rather not remember her.

Thirdly there are films I have not heard about yet. I can't think of any examples because I haven't heard about them yet.

Notting Hill was originally a load of trees. Then it became a poor person slum, but now like the rest of London it is exclusively for wealthy Russians and the like because poor people can no longer afford to live there. It is a familiar story from New York, San Francisco, every major world city. My recollection of Notting Hill in the late 1990s / early 2000s is that it still had a certain amount of touristy charm back then. I remember spending ages browsing through the Musical Instrument Exchange, looking at old synthesisers and stacks of Akai S-series samplers that no-one wanted any more, because musicians were starting to use software samplers and VST instruments. The likes of the Ensoniq Mirage and the Watkins CopiCat tape echo machine were novelties in the late 1990s, no longer practical musical instruments. The Musical Instrument Exchange apparently closed in 2002, I remember it having very little stock towards the end.

It's a myth that synth gear was cheaper in the past; second-hand shops have always been overpriced. The same was true of cameras. I remember visiting the Camera and Photo Exchange as it was closing down (the Exchange empire was hit badly by eBay), and a Pentax Spotmatic with a 55mm f/2 was £80, versus £60 or so on eBay at the time. When I was a lad the Exchange shops were the high spot of Notting Hill. A couple of them are still open. The Comics and Books Exchange is exactly as I remember it, a slightly depressing treasure trove of second hand comics and books that brings home just how worthless and transient comics and books are. Twenty years ago an author spent nine months bashing out his masterpiece; now it is stacked up for 10p in the basement of a shop in Notting Hill and no-one wants it.

And there are the Star Trek tie-in novels, forgotten and unloved relics of a dead franchise. There's something distressing about them. They had meaning, once, but now they are meaningless, like a religion with no more followers or a type of toner cartridge for a type of printer that is no longer made. The circus has left town, and it's never coming back. I know how my parents' generation must have felt when Eagle comic ceased publication, and people forgot Dan Dare, and no-one remembered Old Mother Riley any more.

Not a great photo - it's out of focus, I was pressed in crowd - but towards the top-left there's a Mamiya C330, the updated replacement for the C33 and C3 I wrote about here.

I have always assumed that there was something fishy about the Exchange shops. The economics must be marginal and I wonder if they pay the staff anything at all. But they are a connection to the past, a past when there was a stratum of society that was poor, but not so poor that it couldn't buy records. Individual dreamers, most of them hopeless dead ends, but a few had something. A time when people had to leave the house in order to buy things. Nowadays Notting Hill has almost nothing to distinguish it from any other part of London, and that's not just me being an elderly curmudgeon, it's objective fact because I say so. The exception is Portabello Road market, a long street market where tourists go to look at white person things.

My experience of London in the early 2000s was of a place where everything was closing down. I've mentioned Joe's Basement before, the pro photo processing place. It had a website, a studio, bright ideas, but it shut in 2003 as the professional market for film photography died out. In the words of The Guardian, in an article about a chap called Richard Nicholson who goes around photographing darkrooms, "when he began his project in 2006, there were more than 200 thriving darkrooms dotted around the city; when he completed it in 2009, there were 12". There are probably only a handful by now. Countless magazines and record labels used their services until the early 2000s, and then they were gone.

But as one door closes another opens. The Exchanges and the photo developers did not die alone; banks and post offices died as well, and before them saddle makers and butchers and blacksmiths. The high street itself has been slowly dying, replaced with the few shops that cannot easily transition to the internet, for which there is still a demand. And ultimately as one body is put underground a baby boy is born, in the ghetto, and London evolves. Albeit that London seems to be evolving into an investment vehicle in which empty houses, empty streets are owned by corporate entities. Dull emptiness with no people, no life. Why not abstract the process, why bother with the actual houses? They're just stores of wealth, why not declare that something else has an equivalent worth and use that instead, and let people live in the houses cheaply, so that they have money to spend on trinkets?

There's something to be said about using animals as currency. You have an incentive to look after your money and feed it well, and in bad times a chicken can keep you warm and you can eat it.

Herculaneum

Off to Herculaneum, which is essentially Pompeii for hipsters. It's conceptually similar but less famous and thus more fashionable. Which is why I went there, instead of Pompeii. Fewer tourists; fewer me.

Herculaneum was buried in 79AD by the same eruption that engulfed Pompeii. Back in the superbad seventies the Roman Empire reigned supreme; Emperor Titus came to power, and he finished up the Colosseum, which I remember from this MST3K skit:

Writing in 1884, W Cope Devereux mentions the place only in passing. Literally so - he bypasses it on the way to Pompeii, because there wasn't much to see. The buried town had been rediscovered in the 1700s and had been excavated sporadically until 1875, but in Devereux's time it was overshadowed by Pompeii. Herculaneum was harder to excavate, which will become apparent six paragraphs from now, after I have finished writing about Spider-Man and the limits of human knowledge.

Work at Herculaneum restarted in 1927. The dig was one of Mussolini's prestige projects, and was intended to make Italy great again. The excavations have continued at a measured pace ever since.

I think it's a reference to SSC Napoli, which was founded in August 1926.

The ancient Romans weren't particularly fussed about resettling Herculaneum. The new town that slowly emerged was called Resina, but just like Spider-Man's black suit the name failed to catch on, and so in 1969 the residents voted to revert back to Herculaneum. Which is Ercolano in Italian.

Vesuvius is still an active volcano, which raises the possibility that the modern Herculaneum might one day be buried in ash. Archaeologists of the future will no doubt think that we all drove Fiats, and that our favourite film was "Banco di Credito Popolare".

Wonky education, or a fiendishly clever code? You decide.

If you think about it, the black costume makes sense, because spiders are black, aren't they? They're black and covered in fur. Why shouldn't Spider-Man be black... and covered in fur?

The black suit was introduced in the mid-1980s, as part of a general wave of "darker and edgier" makeovers that were fashionable at the time. It's often assumed that Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns (1986) was the spark that lit the fire - it had the word dark in the title - but although Knight was very influential it was really the culmination of a general trend rather than its genesis. Miller's story postdated Alan Moore's dystopian V for Vendetta, and Moore's work on Swamp Thing and Captain Britain, for example. The brutally unsentimental Punisher dated from the 1970s, at which point it reflected the generally downbeat, anti-heroic tone of films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish (in the UK, Judge Dredd had been directly inspired by the Eastwood film).

Batman himself had adopted a more gothic tone in the 1970s, and the big multi-comic Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity reboot was published while Miller was still working on his epic. Nowadays The Dark Knight is almost universally praised, but the "darker and edgier" trend it amplified is not remembered fondly. In the cinema dark-and-edgy became hip in the late 1980s but fizzled out in the 1990s; modern superhero blockbusters generally take place in a world where there are a few good men, if only a few.

Does this mean that modern superhero films and thus modern society in general have become trivialised and incapable of critical thought? My impression is that the dark tone of 1970s Hollywood grew naturally from the themes and stories that contemporary filmmakers wanted to explore, whereas the cynicism of (say) Predator 2 or Last Action Hero was essentially an affectation, an optional component akin to the cosmetic spoilers on a car. But it is impossible to write about films without considering the society that produces them. During the years in which R-rated action films were replaced with PG-rated action films there were several bloody wars; and when I think of the supposedly pussified modern world I think of fat Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sitting on the face of a prostitute, farting into her mouth, while she is being filmed for sex tape that will be leaked to the press in order to publicise her reality TV show, for which she will be paid seventeen million dollars. I think of that all the time. Rob Ford is us; we are Rob Ford.

Ultimately I believe that it is not possible to draw a picture of society from its media; that once you dig far enough, there's nothing there; and that instead of actual history, we remember a construction. The traditional view of history as a set of dates and names is oftentimes mocked for its simplicity, but what is the alternative? Human society is an enormously complicated system that moves through time, and we are unable to view it objectively because we are part of it, and a static slice would be as dead and cold as a slice of a human brain. By the time we have passed through history the details are forgotten, and there were so many things we reacted to unconsciously that even a mass of research - as in David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, for example - cannot fill the gaps. Over time, humanity has learned that there is more to the universe than can fit into a single human mind. How can we advance human knowledge in a universe that exhausts the limits of human understanding? Not just the understanding of one intelligent human being, but that of the entire collective intelligence of the human race. Before we can solve the problem of total understanding we need to build a machine which will surpass ourselves... and at this point have I just spewed out the plot of Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Adams' book is a mass of clever wordplay, but at its core is a profound philosophical concept; how can we understand a concept that simply cannot be translated into a form small enough for the human mind to grasp?

This was the last that roll of Fuji Acros; I put in some colour film and shot the image a few paragraphs up a few seconds later.

At its worst darker-and-edgier was cowardly, easy. Nihilism requires no effort or critical thought. Reading through it again, it strikes me that Dark Knight Returns is remarkably nuanced; it isn't a bludgeoning overdose of brutal violence and defeatism, it has a human core and ends on a hopeful note. The (spoilers) deaths of the chief villains are treated as a tragic waste and an empty hollow void respectively. The world of Dark Knight is bleak but capable of goodness, and its society's major deficit is a lack of empathy. The problem with "darker and edgier" is that, once it is escalated to a point where all of society and all the people and everybody and everything is darkly cynical, what next? There can be no tragedy in a world of tragedy. With no contrast, the backdrop simply becomes a bland wash. Real life is complex, evil is almost always undramatic, and quite often it exists only in the eye of the beholder.

But Herculaneum, eh? It's on the regional line from Naples, a short walk downhill from the train station. There's a taxi firm just outside the station that will take you up to Vesuvius, which was cloudy when I went, so I didn't go. I would have ended up with a lot of photographs of mist and rocks.

Herculaneum was originally by the sea; the eruption moved the coast, and in the following image you can see how deeply it was buried:

In theory you could walk quickly around the location in half an hour or so, and it's possible to do a whistle-stop tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum if you rush, although you'd find it difficult to squeeze Vesuvius into the itinerary. One of the advantages of living in Britain is that Continental Europe is only a short, cheap plane ride away, rather than eight hours and eight hundred dollars. But the ruins have survived for almost two thousand years, they will be there next year and the year after that.