![]() Obscene formulae incubating terrorist bombs. The madness has toįind somewhere to run wild. A private place, a narrow passage, in which to let out all the overtly disguised racist bile. The Tourette's syndrome ravings of an outwardly reformed city. (Take a stroll down somewhere like Catherine Wheel Alley, off Bishopsgate, and see the future revealed on a wall of white tiles. Now, for the price of an aerosol, it's true. "We are all artists," they used to cry in the Sixties. Serial composition: the city is the subject, a fiction that anyone can lay claim to. It's like Salvador Dali in his twilight years putting his mark on hundreds of blank sheets of paper, authenticating chaos. The public autograph is an announcement of nothingness, abdication, the swiftĮrasure of the envelope of identity. The name, unnoticedĮxcept by fellow taggers, is a gesture, an assertion: it stands in place of the individual artist who, in giving up his freedom, becomes free. Spraycan bandits, like monks labouring on a Book of Hours, hold to their own patch, refining their art by infinite acts of repetition. Is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Urban graffiti is all too often a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph. The messages were, in truth, unimportant. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading - a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy.Ī sorcerer's grimoire that would function as a curse or a blessing.)Īrmed with a cheap notebook, and accompanied by the photographer Marc Atkins, I would transcribe all the pictographs of venom that decorated our near-arbitrary route. To pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. Dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author. Physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet. ![]() (I had developed this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon Daughters: that the On walls, lampposts, doorjambs: the spites and spasms of an increasingly deranged populace. To walk out from Hackney to Greenwich Hill, and back along the River Lea to Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking. ![]() To create open outward the place of definition. The scales of music tripping upward to evade him in perpetual deferral The magus dee dreams of a stone island in force, dying in poverty,ĭrunk on angelspeech, which paradoxically, he has not actually heard, 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London
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