So it emerges that Nick Clegg has been a Samuel Beckett fan all along. I couldn’t help wondering what an election scripted by Beckett would look like:

The stage light slowly illuminates a rocky plateau. Buried in pebbles up to their necks are BROWN, CLEG and CAM.

BROWN. Finished, all finished now. Old Brown’s gone down, down to the ground.

CLEG. The old parties.

CAM. Yes, the old parties, the old times, just as it was back on the playing fields, the old times, boat rocking slowly under Magdalen Bridge, the old times, the old days. Why can’t things be like they used to be?

BROWN. Finished, all gone, a disaster.

CLEG. There they go again.

CAM. The old days, the old times, the old parties, tra-la-la-la-la. Why can’t I be Prime Minister?

All three sink further into the stones. A spotlight reveals a hung parliament, festooned with paper MPs.

BROWN. All is lost. Woe, woe!

CAM. Why can’t I be Prime Minister? I want to be Prime Minister!

Enter VOTERS.

VOTERS. Let’s go.

Nobody moves.

Beckett’s endings provide us with a range of possible responses to electoral outcomes. The novel The Unnameable ends with the resigned but ambiguous ‘you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ from the unnamed narrator. This is rather more stoical and less hysterical than the Tories’ ‘We can’t go on like this’. At the close of Endgame, all Hamm can be certain of is his handkerchief - the ‘old stancher’ - which survives. Dry your eyes, Dave. You too, Gordon.

With all the uncertainties of the current political environment, Beckett leaves us, like poor Winnie who still sings while buried up to her neck at the end of Happy Days, to face the music and be grateful. As the wise (or not) journalist said, ‘The only certainty here is that everything is uncertain’.

ankuendigen – to announce

achten - to respect

anblicken - to look at

aufarbeiten – to reappraise

- to look at again………………………………………………..

Over the last few months I have been keeping a word book; noting down all the new German words I come across. Before the book, which is really 3 notebooks joined together to make something that looks like an alphabetically ordered phonebook, I had been writing everything down on bits of paper. However, having hundreds of scraps of paper lying around flat was too over whelming; can there really be so many German words? Now the book keeps all the words in one place and makes the flat a little tidier, although it has brought to my attention just how many I am forgetting; when I read or hear a familiar word, I say, ah yes I came across that word last week and logged it in the book. Only, I haven’t got a clue what it means, let alone its gender, if it’s a noun (very important in German) and its conjugation if it is a verb. It feels like stacking a shelf with books from one end and as you add more the first ones you put up, are being pushed off the other end, disappearing behind the sofa or through the cracks in the floorboards.

Christmas brought a new batch of books and DVD’s. Two have been of particular interest; the Bill Douglas Trilogy and the writings of Ian Jack; The country formerly known as Great Britain.

The 3 films by Bill Douglas are a wonderful retelling of the director’s difficult early life growing up in the East Lothian mining village of Newcraighall. I first saw the films in the 1980’s and remembered them as pretty dark, certainly My Childhood and My Ain Folk. Watching them again, I’m struck by their direct beauty, economy and intelligence in telling a story. Perhaps my awareness of the filmmaking of Bresson, Pasolini and Fassbinder in the interim has helped me to view them afresh, but there is no doubting, the power of Bill Douglas’s own forcibly silent voice throughout. The Trilogy is a gently epic composition, from darkness out into an intense euphoric light, leaving me with many of the film frames burnt onto my retina. In recounting his past Bill Douglas often makes a rich painting from something otherwise very ordinary; I note here one particular view of a bend in the road, which I take to be the one leading out of Newcraighall. The view goes far beyond one found by a location finder; we are looking at memory, a brotherly bond of image and storytelling embedded within the landscape.

My good friend Keith Grant who gave me the Ian Jack book for Christmas, thought I may find an interesting link with the Bill Douglas Trilogy, he was right. Ian Jack also grew up in a Scottish Mining village, Hill Of Beath in Fife. The opening piece is about the writers childhood there, and indeed that of his parents; raising a family, growing old and dying in and around the same location. I am enjoying dipping into the various essays which I tend to read just before bed. The 12.10 to Leeds, written in 2001 following the Hatfield train crash inquiry, has reminded and re-appalled me of certain social/political changes that occurred in Britain during the 1980’s and 90’s,changes which confused and angered the public then and have continued to do so. Whilst reading I sensed it oddly melding with another lengthier book I was working my way through, Isaac Deutscher’s third volume biography of Leon Trotsky.

Before moving from London to Berlin I got rid of so many books. Most of them I gave to the Oxfam bookshop on Kentish Town Road. Over several months I sorted out the ones I would part with and once a week, take a couple of carrier bags full of them to the shop. I found it difficult not to look at the other books they had on sale; reminding myself I already had too many unread books and if I just took those to Berlin I would be enough reading for several years. On the last trip I saw the biography in the window. I knew next to nothing about Trotsky; something about his death with an ice pick in South America, but had a strong feeling I should know more. Although my packing was 3 thick books heavier, it’s been a purchase I’ve not regretted.

Throughout 2009 I was gripped by the first two books – the Prophet Armed (1879-1921) and the Prophet Unarmed (1921-1929) last week I finished the final book the Prophet Outcast (1929-1940). In all, over 1,500 pages filled with facts, figures, names, events, politics and Ideologies from a pivotal point in modern History. Unlike the Bill Douglas Trilogy, Trotsky’s life (in terms of his years alive) begins light and leads into a central point of extreme brightness which fades abruptly to complete darkness. By Christmas 2009 I was wading through the darkness of Trotsky’s descent from political power and Stalin’s ascendency.

Ian Jack’s essay, also packed with facts, figures, names, events, politics and Ideologies from another pivotal point in modern British history, runs to just 40 pages. In these pages he sticks to a type of investigative writing, advocated by Katharine Whitehorn; that is to give voice to someone who is member of the concerned public and not that of the know it all authoritarian. Having said that he does come across as a rail enthusiast and this we can sense in the brief history of The Railway he tells; from Babylonia 2245 BC, through to the national rail chaos in Britain at the time of his writing. I was drawn into the story through his notes of conversations with various engineers and how they illuminate the subject of the Permanent Way; how a track is laid and fixed. Likewise, how the steel track was produced and developed. One engineer refers to this as a living thing, due to the skill and care needed in making, laying and maintaining the track.

Piece by piece we are given information making us appreciate just how complex a thing, a rail track is. Perhaps a lot of people know this? I have to confess I didn’t. However, what I do know and what I had forgotten before reading The 12.10 to Leeds is that one day I sat on a train and the announcement referring to me and fellow travellers as Passengers had over night changed to Customers.

From about half way his writing explores how this change came about. From the policy of the Conservative Government under Margaret Thatcher to privatise the nationalised industries of Gas, Water and Telecommunications (the author quotes Harold MacMillan, who called this selling off the family silver) Responding to criticism of the first sales not being competitive enough, the next, Electric, was broken up into smaller units. This increased competition, produced a highly successful sale and by doing so, secured a rosy future for popular capitalism in the UK. After the fall of Margaret Thatcher, Railways became John Major’s baby. In spite of rail privatisation being highly unpopular with just about everyone, he was determined to see the sale through. Following the example set by the sale of Electric, it was decided the railways would be carved up into smaller units. New controlling bodies appeared:

TOCS, (train operating companies) 20 of those.

ROSCOS,(Rolling stock companies)3 of those.

And RAILTRACK, was to over and under-see: Signalling, the Permanent Way, Bridges, Tunnels and some larger stations.

Leading up to privatisation, it was noted that the emphasis switched to an operators rather than an engineer’s railway. This strikes a chord with a comment from one of the disillusioned Permanent way engineers who Ian Jack interviewed, he said that most people where only interested in trains from the wheels up. He emphasized the upmost importance of what goes on below. Operators were also dominant in management; of the 13 board members of Railtrack only 2 had any previous railway experience. The confused and chaotic privatisation rumbled on:

6 Transport Ministers in 7 years.

British Rail, carelessly and cheaply sold off for £5 billion

Profits: for the private shareholders as share prices rise sharply.

Track Maintenance: under pressure from efficiency savings, leads to work being put out to competitive tender.

Resulting in: fragmentation in knowledge of the Track, the Living thing.

Accusations fly: putting profit before safety.

At Howe Dell, The 12.10 King’s Cross to Leeds express enters the curve at 115 mph- the maximum speed for that stretch of track – and comes off the rails. Four people die.

From the offset of rail privatisation we, the public had been bombarded with facts, figures, names, events, politics, Ideologies, scandals, sackings and deaths. We have been informed of everything and more through a flood of media reporting. And with bewildered disbelief we repeatedly witnessed the chaos at first hand.

(It should be noted that The Labour Party, then in opposition, made the appropriate, vote winning noises to the public; Tony Blair, the then leader of the party said, They (the trains) should be run for the public and stay in public ownership for the people of this country, while his shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown was privately saying to colleagues that, Privatisation will make the Tories unpopular and will save us from having to do it).  [taken from the 12.10 to Leeds text.]

To say exactly how the Trotsky Biography and the Ian Jack article merge is difficult; both writers strive to inform the reader clearly about their chosen subject and I believe they achieve this while never resorting to hindsight. But the melding I feel is something else and appears on another level, in contradiction to the black and white compositions that tell each story. I felt my role as a reader activated the text and brought me closer to the events described. At times becoming the everyman, a participant and witness of the period being described, one who is struggling to remember and process the mass of information being thrown in my direction. In such a position and in spite of my determination to maintain a clear picture, very often my view would cloud over into a very murky and inactive grey hue.

Here is a particular section from Isaac Deutchers biography of Trotsky. At this point (1928) Stalin has already had Trotsky forcibly removed from Moscow to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, severely restricting his political activities and that of thousands of his supporters. (pg 457, The Prophet Unarmed )

He [Stalin] still shrank from sending the killer; he did not yet dare even to throw his enemy into jail. The odium would have been too heavy, because, despite all that had happened, Trotsky’s part in the revolution was still too fresh and vivid in the nation’s mind. He therefore planned to expel Trotsky from Russia. He knew that even this would shock; and he carefully prepared public opinion. First, he put out rumours about the new banishment; next he ordered the rumours to be denied; and, finally, he gave them fresh currency. In this way he blunted public sensitivity. Only after rumour, denial, and recurrent rumour had made the thought of Trotsky’s expulsion from the U.S.S.R. familiar and therefore less shocking could Stalin carry out his intention.

erinnern – vr: sich ( an akk etw) to remember

vergessen – vt to forget

The other week I gave a lecture (the subject of which is not the subject of this blog) at the Universettee. As its name suggests, the Universettee is interested in shifting the seat of learning from the academy to the home – university to universettee. It’s a university of the comfy chair, and takes place in various people’s houses and flats around London. Lecturers are not paid, and neither are those who host the lectures.

Later on in the same week, I attended a concert. We arrived at a house in Hackney, deposited our coats on top of the bed as we would at a party, and were serenaded with Dvorak, Brahms and Schuman in a downstairs room. Interval drinks and nibbles were informal. Again, the event was free. Both evenings had the feel of a party, and involved the free and easy exchange of thoughts and culture in a homely setting.

It seems to me that these groups, events and projects are forming a new kind of public space – or, perhaps, are drawing our attention to the potential of the public space. For the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas the ‘public sphere’ could be a space for the radical renewing of democracy. Free from the atmosphere of oppression and coercion or the pressures of the bourgeois market, the ‘public sphere’ might be an exciting clamour of voices and ideas.
Perhaps – and only perhaps, because I teach in a university and see their essential value – the removing of the pressured culture of the academy can renew a practical and impassioned curiosity. Perhaps the ability to see a concert outside of its normal context – a context that to some extent is historically conditioned and not absolute – allows listeners to truly grapple with the music.

In other words, there may sometimes be a weight of expectation and rarification that hangs in the air of university halls, concert auditoriums, art galleries and the like. This isn’t a call for dumbing down, nor for a kind of hideous mercantilising of all cultural activity, as Peter Mandelson seems intent on pursuing. His proposals to tie university funding to some sort of basic economic performance indicator will kill scholarship, which thrives on the obscure.

What I am saying is that grand spaces – big institutional public spaces – sometimes terrify or oppress. We don’t want to and shouldn’t get rid of these spaces. But sometimes, just sometimes, shifting the centre of gravity can re-energise our engagement with ‘culture’.  Bringing the ‘public sphere’ into the private space once in a while may just enable us to re-evaluate the place and role of ‘culture’ in contemporary Britain.

Laurence fondles the leather-effect binding of his complete works of Shakespeare, ‘a part of our heritage’, simultaneously using the volumes to display his refinement and his guest’s lack of taste. If the book goes digital, perhaps it makes this act of snobbery performed in Mike Leigh’s ‘Abigail’s Party’ less likely.

A couple of new technical advances have made the newspapers recently. Amazon can turn your i-Phone into an e-book  for free with their Kindle software. 300,000 books are available. A swipe of your finger re-enacts the turning of paper pages digitally. The Nintendo DS also now has a ‘game’ that allows you to read hundreds of classic novels, while the speakers emit the crackle of a mimetic fireplace. The irony is that this sound-effect will actually consume energy created by the burning of coal many miles away. Sound, but no heat. Do paperbacks store more CO2 than online books constantly consume - backed up in several locations at once and always open? But the wastefulness of paper books wasn’t the only assumption in the print and radio discussions prompted by these announcements.

Panels, such as on Radio 4’s Open Book, could have explored the properties of these inventions logically; their benefits and defecits compared to paper books. Instead we witness a sort of ‘conversation re-enactment society’, general assumptions uncritically repeated in programmes dominated by nostalgia. It occurs to me that what is lacking in these commentaries is a precise analysis of the properties of each kind of reading platform.

The most obvious misconception is that paperback books such as Penguins perform an archival role. In fact they strip out many parts of the book-machine to make them competitive in price. This was the Penguin revolution; quality texts at an affordable price. An archival book has hard covers, lifting the pages above the acidic shelf. The paper is acid free. The pages are folded and stitched. There are endpapers that act like a doormat for the fingers. Bands support the book block itself. The spine may be arched to support a thicker book as it hangs above the shelf. The edges may even be gilded with stainless gold leaf. All these processes are removed in the paperback. But this is not a complaint. One might even argue that most paperbacks last too long. Will a Dan Brown be read and re-read? Will it have notes scribbled in the margin? Possibly by conspiracy theorists, but they probably use pile upon pile of notebooks instead.  Many American journals and academic books continue to make use of the more enduring features; we should not imagine that a paperback and an academic tome are the same machine because they both use paper. They don’t even use the same paper.

In academic research the electronic book brings many advantages, especially in note-taking, cutting and pasting, live-searches of the text better than any index. Hyperlinks to other texts and information… However, this brings to light other possibilities routinely overlooked in the media. Our regard for texts as concrete and unchangable and our definitions of authorship are shaped by the fact that a book is printed and then that is that. If another edition is made, minor changes occur, but with the text remaining live, what stops the reader intervening? Why shouldn’t I re-write one of my own books one morning, even after publication? A physical restraint has become a matter of etiquette. Is this the constant positive refinement of the evolutionary process or the constant revisionism of the Totalitarian view of History? All history adopts the needs of the Party. But I suppose for a panel talking for twenty minutes about the joy of sniffing pages, the territory of the ‘exploded book’ would have caused seizures.

The problem with the e-book is that it is not going far enough. It does not threaten the book, be it the archival machine, the disposable paperback or something inbetween. Obsolescence merely frees these formats up for new purposes. This is also the formative time for the form of the e-book, but it is nostalgia for the paper reading experience that is threatening to make e-reading inadequate. Manufacturers should stop trying to make e-readers look like books, with corny page-turning animations. If they are convenient we will use them. But book design is a phenomenological tradition that takes careful evaluation. Traditionally the central margin of the left page is set and then the top, outside, and foot margins increase in size as you go round by 20%. The opposite is the case for the facing page. This double spread has been around since Medieval times and forms part of the reading experience. It gives room for your thumbs. Yet electronic readers are often single column affairs. What does this imply? Design is not just a matter of paper vs. screen glare.

The reality is that the possibilities for publishing, text composition, and authorship are so radically different that we can’t even see them. We’re even doing some of them already without realising.  This period is a massive opportunity for small presses. Without the confusion of the paperback as primary text-delivery platform, people are grasping that there is a particular place for a well made paper book with original content; they are actually seeing what a book is for the first time. This is the opposite of nostalgia, it is the grasping of the relevant place for a technology in our time. In the same vein we should jettison the nostalgia for paperbacks and ask ourselves which features do we not want to lose in the next generation of electronic reading technology, making it a superior format to the paperback for the quick read. If we continue to encourage the crude approximations of page turning and dog-earing instead of platforms equipped for a transfigured compositional and reading industry, we are losing the essence of traditional book technology. It is like saying you will buy a car, but only if it looks like a horse and is limited to four miles an hour. And it’s not like we shot all the horses.

Laurence returns the complete works of Shakespeare to the shelf saying, ‘Of course, not the kind of thing you can actually read…’ I suspect he is the intended audience for the Nintendo DS Classics Library. It probably won’t be long before someone is showing me theirs and demonstrating how it re-creates the sound of an actual log-fire. Or is it the gentle crackle of a book-burning?

Sometimes you look at a name and you just know there is an anagram in there.

‘Tiger Woods’ also helps us ponder the danger of hubris with ‘I god’s tower’ and the inevitability of decay with ‘grows to die’, much like many celebrity careers.

Hearing David Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Party conference, I felt the urge to liberate the avant-garde, existentialist poem that lay behind the surface, a hidden subtext:

I want to get straight
To the point.
We all know
What I want to talk about.
Don’t get me wrong,
I’m ready for that
But I tell you this.
I know that.
I know about
Liam Fox.
We need a strategy.
We need to be clear.
Frankly, time is short.
And I have something
Else to say.

We could have played it safe.
When I stood on that stage
It was to lead Eric Pickles.
I am not a complicated person.
I have some simple beliefs.

I want everyone
To understand
That’s twice as big.
Right now.
We have three choices.
I know there are some who say:
PENSIONERS.

I got an email.
But it never happens.
Well.
Let’s be clear.
I always put the same questions
To attractive Ken Clarke.

It is a plan to boost.
This is what it means.
There’s nothing to stop me.

In Britain today
We must be the people
Who release Gordon Brown.

We’ll start with what is most important.
I believe that a stable cannot be neutral.
I don’t live in some fantasy land.
It’s about what we all do.
It’s about the way we live.
It’s about our crazy signals.

But no -
It’s not funny.
We have got to turn it around
We’re going to make it clear
So we have to reform
So we will never change
But that doesn’t mean
But it’s not a machine
It has got to stop
That’s why we can look the British people in the eye and say…
the progressive thing to do in a way that brings the country together showing

leadership at the top we’re all in this together which is why we’ll have made

some tough choices in British politics is out of date and it has to

meet challenges head on and show tough country and

together leadership and community tough and

challenges meet we’ll make some British

progressive politics head challenge

family tough challenge country

challenge challenge challenge

More on the experimental modernism of David Cameron later.

The tale is told of a propaganda film where Stalin, wandering along a country lane enjoying the sunshine, comes across a peasant with a broken down tractor. Bizarrely he rolls up his sleeves, inspects the engine and soon it is up and running again. The intention of the propagandist is clear but, as Zizek has pointed out, what the film ends up provoking us to wonder is what kind of system is this that is so broken that the head of state needs to roam the countryside replacing spark plugs and getting cats out of trees.

I recall this story today hearing the news about ‘the Brown blur’, our PM, who has failed to get the facts straight in a hand-written note of condolence to a mother whose son was killed in Afghanistan. But of course the story as reported misses the point, merely describing his ineptitude and provoking a debate over whether he really cares or not. What we should be asking is how a PM should demonstrate his care. He should certainly not be writing little notes. How about forming a war cabinet? Or describing more specific and achievable war aims? How about withdrawing from the process of corrupt ‘State Building’? More troops and equipment would go down well with all service families.

What the row does successfully suggest, though, is that Brown’s focus is on scoring political points with the war instead of winning it. Each decision is weighed against electoral concerns rather than facing up to the cost of securing one’s borders. What enrages me on another Remembrance Day is that we persist in the nineteenth century practice of recruiting the economically disadvantaged, preferably from the North, so Middle Class w***ers can get on with selling houses to each other blissfully ignorant of the process by which we remain safe in our beds. This leads to a situation where war aims are not realised because they make the voters uncomfortable. The (next)  PM must redefine war aims immediately, decide if we can afford to pull out on the basis of the international risks, and then put in place the resources to win.

The poppy has become an increasingly ironic symbol. A reminder of the waste of a generation in the trenches, it has now come full circle to Afghanistan, where, as in India, the British government in collaboration with the East India Co. cultivated an illegal Opium Trade designed to bypass Chinese sovereignty and make lots of money. The poppy fields there were part of the deliberate destabilisation of the region for profit. And indeed the country was also the buffer zone between the Raj and the Russian Empire. May the poppy serve not only as a reminder of the government’s failure to remember not to waste young lives for the sake of votes, but also a reminder that we are are literally and metaphorically reaping what they sowed over a hundred years ago.

 It has been a month of corners.

I suppose it began with looking down the Landwehrkanal from the corner of Luetzowufer and Klingelhoefer Strasse and realising for the first time just how close the Bauhaus Archive building is to to Potsdammer Platz. Potsdammer Platz, during the inter-war years was the busiest crossroads in Europe. However up until the fall of the wall in 1989 it was more or less a no-man’s-land. Since then, the massive rebuilding program at Potsdammer Platz has become a symbol and the ‘Showcase of reunified Germany’. From my vantage point on the Herkules Bruecke I could see clearly the profiles of Daimler Land and the Sony Centre, while in the corner of my eye the slightly sunken archive building; This view prompted a wave of questions to rush into my head, but I will come back to these a little later.

I’m not sure if I have ever given corners too much thought. A snap response makes them sound a bit bleak; you’ve painted yourself into a corner; go to the corner and face the wall you naughty child; we’ve got you cornered come out with your hands up.

I suppose it’s how you look at what a corner is though. These examples suggest to me something draining, life-sucking and concave, not something convexly pushing forward and outward? Actually, can I describe a sharp angled thing like a corner as being a curve?

A year or so ago Michael Wedgwood was obsessed with making simple drawings of just 3 lines; they were of the letter Y or the letter Y inverted. He liked what opened up from making these basic marks; both could be read as corners; one a corner to the floor and the other, a corner to the ceiling. Further to this, when a simple 2 line 90 degree corner is drawn out on paper I read it as either a 2 stage move; the end of something and then the beginning of something new or as a sweeping continuation of the same something.

Bruce McLean once told me about one of his favourite works made by Lawrence Wiener which he found,’ critical, intelligent, self-referencing and very succinct’. He describes it so, It was in the last room of The American Art Show at the Royal Academy, as you came round a corner into the room, opposite a statement said – TO SEE and as you turned into the gallery at 90 degrees on the facing end and last wall and piece in the show, it said, AND TO BE SEEN.

The month of corners continued when I found one in the street; a big multi-angled one made out of MDF. Berlin is a fantastic city for finding household goods (no longer needed by one party) which are put out in the street for others to take and use. I moved to Berlin with some basic necessities; clothes, books and records, over the past year I have supplemented these with several chairs, lamps, a hoover, a carpet, a clothes rail, a double bed and a printer; all clean, usable and found neatly stacked on the pavement with the note, FUR GESCHENKE. But what fascinated me about this board with two specific cuts taken out of it, was the intention of the person gifting it. Did they think someone might take it as a piece of timber, to refashion for another use or did they believe someone may take it to fit in an identical corner of their home? It remained propped against a wall on Choriner Strasse , each day I would pass and consider its intention. One sunny afternoon I took the time to make a quick drawing of it while starting to wonder if I may have the perfect corner to house it in the flat. Then after a week it disappeared. Taken away as rubbish, taken as timber or now sitting in the corner of someone else’s flat? I will never know.

Finding virtual corners in a city is one thing but some city centres such as Glasgow or Manhattan consist of nothing but, and this then becomes an essential part of that cities orientation; I’ll meet you on the corner of Sauchiehall and Lexington. Berlin, though not in any way a grid, has some good corners like the junction of Saarbrueke Strasse and Schoenhauser Alle, where a week ago I discovered a modest memorial stone to Karl Liebnecht. It was surrounded by conkers from a solitary horse chestnut tree that stands above and from which I collected a large bag of them thinking they could be roasted and eaten only to be informed by a friend that they are poisonous (perhaps then, a Karl Liebnecht memorial conker tournament instead for next year?).

The Dorotheenstaadtischer Friedhof (cemetery) is the final resting place of several German notables of the Arts. Around one specific corner can be found not only Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel but the finally rested bones and ashes of Heinrich Mann, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau who had been hounded around the world of the last century for their beliefs, politics and work. The Brechts’ corner looks like a leafy double bed with the two engraved boulders acting as headstones looking like pillows.

My favourite corner of the Alte Nationalgalerie is on the ground floor. Entering the first room on the left hand side you are immediately confronted by one of Gustave Courbet’s wave paintings (Die Welle, 1870) The best position to look at the painting is from the doorway, however, in a busy gallery this is impossible. So I have taken to sitting on the polished wooden bench to the left, where one can slide back along into the corner next to the door frame. From this angle you can view, undisturbed, the odd picture of two horizontal slabs, which freeze and flatten this mighty natural force.

But, back to my original corner on the Herkules Brueke. Since July this year, three German institutions, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, have been celebrating the 90^th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus. This has seen an exhibition and a series of events under the banner of, Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model which has taken place in the hall and ground floor galleries of the Martin Gropius Bau. During this time the Bauhaus Archive building has been emptied of its exhibits and simply shown as a work itself, under the title of, Schoen angesehen or A beautiful sight. I have to confess that over the summer, whenever I had passed the building on a bike ride over to Charlottenburg or Schoeneberg, I’d mistaken it for being closed for renovations. This meant stopping off for a quick pee and a look at the postcards in the only part of the building that appeared open.

It would appear from reading the Exhibition’s accompanying newspaper, that 30 years on, the Archive building is not big enough for the ever growing collection and that something larger needs to be built for this purpose. This would then leave the original one, reconfigured from a Gropius blueprint to act as perhaps a library and a research centre. I have to say that I have always been underwhelmed by the Archive building and have found its spaces cramped and dark (the latter, apparently needed for preservation conditions), and completely at odds with the innovation and enlightenment of the objects, drawings and ideas on display.

The programmed debates listed at the back of the paper, have not only focused on the turbulent history of the school, but have also been debating the Bauhaus’s relevance in the world today. I had my own meditation on this while looking towards Potsdammer Platz, (post toilet und postkart) that goes under the banner of What If.

What if in 1989 the Bauhaus Archive building had been emptied and all the contents had been asked to make its way over to the barren waste land of cold war Potsdammer Platz and burrow down into the sandy soil?

And what if then, in the Spring , just like Paul Klee’s Pflanzen auf dem Acker picture of 1921, each idea and notion began to push its head out of the ground with the promise of something new and challenging to act as the founding structure of a new unified Germany at the heart of Europe?

The blurb accompanying Bauhaus a Conceptual Model says The Bauhaus is Germany’s most successful contribution to international art and culture of modernity in the early 20^th Century, it also goes onto say that, Its dissolution in 1933……….as a laboratory and workshop of modernity was destroyed by a deliberate political act…….Considering the intentions of what the new Potsdammer Platz was hoped to symbolise, I could think of no better and poignant foundation stone than that of the Bauhaus; its history and its monumental legacy left to the rest of the world which was forcefully fragmented through ignorance and prejudice of the then political climate of its homeland. I would also add that I have nothing against the Architect Renzo Piano, but why ask him to coordinate this prestigious and culturally significant project when you have the work of the spiritual Godfathers of modern architecture and Design in abundance and in your possession? That is a little like choosing to book the Bootleg Beatles to play at your birthday party when you could have the Beatles.

So what if, following the Spring growth contemporary Architects, Artists and Designers were invited onto this site to study these new shoots and collaborate in helping them grow into something more like a living workshop than a Museum (this was indeed Gropius’s said intention and hope for the original Archive building).

And what if then the site began to grow into a network of never seen before Restaurants, Bars, Cafés, Hotels, Libraries, Theatres, Swimming pools, Concert Halls, Walk Way, Gardens and Sports Halls, etc. each with its own workshop/college and production centre attached, training and apprenticing a new workforce/student body, attracted from all over unified Germany and beyond.

What if you could enter a café and not only buy a cup of coffee, but also the cup you were drinking it out of and the chair you were sitting on?

What if you could go to the toilet and leave having bought the toilet you had used and the towel you had dried your hands on?

All wrapped, packed and replaced by the attached workshops as part of an economic learning exchange.

And what if Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Licht Raum Modulator really was and not just an old quirky film dragged out now and again and shown at selected art institutions.

What if the names Lego, Imax and Hyatt were the names Schlemmer, Breuer, and Feininger?

Yes what if? All this and more was being constantly generated and regenerated at the former busiest crossroad in Europe

Actually, is a crossroad a place where four corners meet?

‘If you walk with Jesus
he’s going to save your soul.
You gotta keep the devil
Way down in the hole’.

As the whole of the chattering classes emerges bereft from the last series of the American police drama The Wire (screened on BBC2 years after the original series ran in the States), it’s worth asking what, if anything, the series’ message was. The lines quoted above are from its theme tune, the Tom Waits song ‘Down in the Hole’.

‘Down in the Hole’ itself is taken from Waits’ album Frank’s Wild Years, a work that reflects musical influences such as cabaret and Kurt Weill’s musical theatre. As such, ‘Down in the Hole’ is performed in the persona of a crazed preacher, one of many ‘voices’ that Waits adopts on the album. In this sense, the song appears to ‘perform’ belief, the lyrics a theatricalisation of faith. Waits seems to perform what it is like to believe in Jesus (and the devil) rather than actually believing in them.

So we might think of Waits’ song, and The Wire, as exercising a sort of ironic distancing. In the ‘real world’, simplistic beliefs about morality, good and evil, and God are naïve and as such can only be ‘performed’. Going down this route, The Wire’s world of cycles of drug addiction, narcotics dealing, police and political corruption is left untouched by its ironic preface. In other words, we may want to be able to ‘keep the devil down in the hole’, but it ‘ain’t gonna happen’.
But here is the problem. For The Wire seems to strive to find moral and ethical solutions to the problems it describes. Its cynicism has a limit; it still allows the viewer to hope. Indeed its very anger at the world is also a longing for things to be different, to be right. So perhaps could the song’s role be not to shrug off the certainties of faith but rather to kindle a nostalgia for faith?

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian psychoanalyst, Marxist and ubiquitous cultural commentator is one of the most prominent intellectuals to articulate this nostalgia for Christianity. Except, for Žižek, it isn’t really nostalgia; on the contrary, the ethical core of Christianity allows this radical Marxist to critique the vapid spirituality of late capitalism, embodied in fads for the New Age and pseudo-buddhism.

Instead, he argues for the radical-revolutionary heart of Christianity to be rediscovered. In contrast to modernity’s insistence on keeping faith as a private ‘obscene secret’, he follows his master G.K. Chesterton in recommending the topsy-turvy public values of Christianity. Here, strong moral boundaries are the way to true pleasure, belief in mystery the only way to really rational thinking.

Following this thread, The Wire’s ‘nostalgia for faith’ becomes more than misty-eyed. It is real; churches (black ones especially) are some of the few places in the series where real good can be accomplished. Individuals are redeemed. The heroin addict Bubbles’ speeches at the Narcotics Anonymous meetings in Series Five are framed beneath a central crucifix. In the third series the rogue detective Jimmy McNulty is told by his colleague Lester Freamon that ‘the job won’t save you’. But what will?

It is in this space that the radical, redemptive message of Christianity can step in. In breaking the cycles of corruption and violence what may be needed is the kind of regeneration that can’t be dreamt up by property developers and politicians. I mean by this not to urge a bland ‘let’s all understand faith’, à la Tony Blair. The core of Christianity is much more radical and world-changing than that, and the flattening of all religions into one-size-fits-all does none of them any favours.

I acknowledge this reading of The Wire as my own, and partial. But is the space between The Wire’s keeping ‘the devil down in the hole’ and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s ‘beating down Satan under our feet’ so big?

20 minutes later I’m off the train and breathing in the clear air of Kirkcaldy.  Years ago the place stank of Linoleum, the weird thing was that the whole of Britain seemed to know about it; at Leeds City Station in 1980, I was having my ticket checked by an elderly rail employee; he looked at the ticket, punched it and as he gave it back said, Eee Kirk Kaldie. Ikun smelLeenolleeum frum thaa!

The production of Linoleum in the town was the doing of a Mr Nairn and although he and his factories are now well gone his benefactor gave a rather special collection of paintings to the Museum and Art Gallery that’s just a minute walk from the station.

The ground floor Museum has an eclectic collection of Fife pottery and memorabilia including John Thompson’s Scotland Jersey.  John Thomson by the way was born in Kirkcaldy and grew up in Cardenden.  He was the Glasgow Celtic and Scotland Goal keeper in the late 1920s and died tragically following an accidental collision with another player during a match in 1931.  The woollen Scotland Jersey now in a display case at the museum looks like his mother might have knitted it.

The Paintings which were gifted to the town are upstairs and include work from The Glasgow School and the Scottish Colourists, namely, Peploe, Cadell, Fergusson, Hunter, McTaggert and Hornel.  I have a soft spot for these pictures; as a teenager they were the first real paintings I had ever encountered.  On recent visits, I have found the clutter of stuff building up around the gallery space a bit depressing.  The only recent acquisitions seem to be 3 things by the Kirkcaldy born painting phenomenon, Jack Vetriano.  He is the scourge of any one claiming to be a painter in Scotland, for whenever you are in new company, whether formal or relaxed, within a few minutes of them finding out you are a painter, you find yourself spitting with rage and announcing to them that you do not consider Jack Vetriano to even be a painter!  While your gentle inquisitors sit quietly smiling, silently accusing you of being merely jealous of his fame and fortune.

Leaving his soft- scrubby-porn daubs behind I head down the staircase and out towards the high street of the Lang Toun.

Kirkcaldy has another famous son; the boundary signs announce - Welcome to Kirkcaldy, The Birthplace of Adam Smith.  My knowledge of Adam Smith is shamefully pitiful and somewhere along the line his name became synonymous with that of Margaret Thatcher.  Considering the two missed each other by almost 200 years, I have slowly been able to extract him from Maggie’s bed, (perhaps another theme for Jack Vetriano?)  But since working on this blog I feel I now must at least try and read The theory of moral sentiments, if not his more widely known book, The wealth of nations.  It would be too pat to now link the more famous book, which in 1776 advocated a free market economy as more productive and more beneficial to society, to the current state of Kirkcaldy High Street, but one can’t help but see something highly ironic in it all.

Kirkcaldy High Street is very long.  It runs parallel and one road up from the esplanade which faces south onto the Firth of Forth.  I’m not too sure about Adams Smith’s time but in the 1970s I knew The High Street as a bustling town centre with busy shops, restaurants, cafes and a cinema.  Today, it is just one of many high streets that has suffered from the general decline in heavy industry and a further onslaught from the out of town shopping centres.  But then, right there, not all that far from where the cinema once stood in which I saw Towering Inferno, Herbie rides again and Jaws.  Just sitting in between Greggs the Baker and a closed down discount store, there’s a small darkened plaque on the wall which reads. ……ON THIS SITE STOOD THE HOME OF HIS MOTHER IN WHICH HE LIVED FROM 1767 - 1776 AND COMPLETED “THE WEALTH OF NATIONS”

I ran into Adam Smith again that day, on The Royal Mile when I returned to Edinburgh; he stands just a little way down from where his friend, David Hume is sitting.  Unfortunately their enlightened spirit doesn’t seem to have touched the fat fingered sculptor (I presume he made the pair) who has entombed them as statutory statuary.  (Poor David Hume looks like an oxidised Jabba the Hut).

In part one I promised you two public toilet stories, here’s the second.  On my last day in Scotland we took another trip over to Fife only this time by car.  We stopped off at Wemyss, the birth place of Jimmy Shand and the last resting place of my father, then followed the coast up to Leven where we stopped for a toilet break.  As we approached a damp looking concrete bunker between the golf links and the beach a woman suddenly sprang out carrying a roll of orange cloakroom tickets and a money bag.  It’s 30p to use the toilet.  I was dutifully finding some change when I said in passing that it used to be free to go to the toilet in Scotland.  Aye it’s all changed now, she replied.

And changes are afoot or certainly back at the two Bridges.  The Forth road suspension bridge built in 1964, which we had crossed twice this day has problems.  The massive network of steel cables strung over the upright stanchions and support the road are corroding.  A friend told me about this several years ago after he had watched a TV program which had recorded the pinging noises coming from the fraying cables.  On hearing this I immediately thought about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse (America 1940) and the otherworldly film footage made of it. Apparently, aeroelastic flutter had turned the road into a billowing streamer.  The first time I saw these incredible images I couldn’t believe it was a steel bridge that was oscillating and bending in such an extreme way.  I also remember getting emotionally involved with the drama of a dog trapped in the abandoned car on the bridge.  After an hour or so of these structural gymnastics the road finally cracked then shattered and fell into the river below.

Looking beyond the disaster movie aspect of the Forth Road Bridge, certain practical questions come to the fore; how do you get 20, 30 or even 60,000 vehicles (predicted use) over the Firth of Forth every day and as we are told, the bridge will be lucky to last until 2020, where does the money come from to build a new one?  While pondering this, something obvious struck me which I understand has been articulated by the Green Party and environmentalists some time ago.  Why not bring into the equation a drastic reduction in car use?  As good citizens of the planet, could this present crisis not be a perfect opportunity for Scotland and her newly reinstated Parliament to show the way.  To be enlightened.

Back on the Royal Mile is the Scottish Parliament.  It sits in and on a more forward looking plinth than the statues mentioned earlier.  A few years ago I took a tour of the building designed by architect Enric Miralles.  I was impressed by the layout of the debating chamber, which unlike the Palace of Westminster where the Government and Opposition face each other, here everyone sits facing forward; more like how an orchestra would be arranged.  We were also shown one of the offices used by Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSP’s). Each of the 108 offices, our guide told us with some pride, has been given a specially designed Contemplation Space; a small semi private window seat.  In this retreat, (the shape of which was inspired by Sir Henry Reaburn’s painting of the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch) the MSPs are encouraged to take some moments away from the everyday grind of politics and to simply sit, relax and think.

I asked an obvious question; do the MSPs use their Contemplation spaces? Our guide gave a small pause before replying.

I shouldn’t think they have the time.