Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [33]
It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like Derry and Tom’s Famous Roof Garden where little old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features.” I knew we were enjoying a golden age that couldn’t last, but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times, we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, numerous open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale.
But we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my back garden when a Liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee” meeting. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I told him that I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.
By 1980, the Famous Roof Garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly I began to feel a stranger in my owncity. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process, but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were actually beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.
For all those years I lived around the Portobello Road, I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian,” it had to be Oscar Wilde’s chamber pot. The developers and remodelers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and old buildings were made to look older.
Good, innovative writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd with White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings, and Hawksmoor, aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory, linked the past with the present to show how the city shaped us. The media, particularly TV, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London,” the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruit-ily of Limehouse and Wapping.
Ackroyd played into this image, filmed for TV, lit from below, a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake, but Sinclair was having none of it. The first of London’s psycho-geographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic from motorway cafes and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair peered into the bays underneath, searching for the remains of the population.
The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and Will Self understood.
As well as friends and relatives, who are also memory, weare equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual we have only buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel and concrete cladding, and a few bits of film.
I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls in clothes just recently back in fashion, through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive, as long as we’re fully conscious,