Sunday 14 October 2012

The Art of Walking


Like most people I think that I walk a lot.  The reality is that is the little I do is mostly functional; from door to car and car to door, from desk to shop floor and shop floor to desk or down to the shops and back.  Walking for pleasure has been a little lost on me.  I’ve have been up to Edale but it was with a cool bag for a picnic rather than a backpack for a days hike and I’d seriously consider taking golf up again rather than paying for a guided city walk – a two hour moving lecture by a self appointed expert.

But, there is another way.  A way that doesn’t involve the banalities of a blue badge guide, a bag of clubs or muddy boots and Gore-Tex (actually, being Manchester, the Gore-Tex would actually be a reasonable idea).  The Cornerhouse (the Arts / Film / Books establishment on Oxford Road) commissioned a series of walks curated by the LRM (Loiterer’s Resistance Movement) a “Manchester based collective of artists and activists interested in psychogeography, public space and the hidden stories of the city”.  It seemed to offer an urban ramble with play – an ideal way to spend a weekend afternoon.

There were three walks: The Sensual City, “a guided tour which utilises all your senses and explores Manchester through touching, tasting, looking, listening and feeling”; The All Seeing City, a walk that “examines the architecture of fear in the city and how we can banish it” and The Heart of the City where “Explorers will search for the heart of the city and produce a collaborative map of their findings”.

All started with an introduction in the Annexe of the Cornerhouse; a lovely light and airy room all bare wood and white walls which is, in fact, the only part of the building that I like.  Many love it’s design; full length windows on Oxford Road that allow you to sit and watch the world while drinking something for its overpriced bar but, to me, it is as much about being seen rather than seeing.  The introduction was a brief history of psychogeography (it started in France with The Situationists Internationale and finished when Ian Sinclair had made enough money out of it) and went on to describe what would be happening that afternoon.  All was achieved in twenty minutes and three slides.

The dozen of so of us took to the streets to open up our senses.  We walked towards the city centre along Oxford Road but quickly diverted down past Felini’s restaurant onto the Rochdale canal and back under Oxford Road.  Here you could hear the roar of the water running through a lock gate, feel the drop in temperature as you are shielded from the sun and imagine how different this would feel underfoot if it where not such a beautiful sunny day.  We turned around and walked along the canal in silence listening to a goose landing on the water, the sound of a tram and the hubbub of people enjoying a drink in the garden of the Rain Bar where we crossed over it went under Great Bridgewater Street and up the steps to Bridgewater Hall to the touchstone.

We stopped to reflect on smell and how it is linked to taste (think backs of restaurants) and how the city is continually trying control it.  As we approached the touchstone there was a little girl sliding on it.  Her dad told us her mantra was “If it slides, it works” – not a bad one to have.  The Italian Cararra marble stone is scratched and marked despite being covered in an anti graffiti solution.  If left long enough the city will always take hold and make its mark.

We wandered towards the new council building at 1 First Street, debating how welcoming it was or wasn’t.  With a walk such as this your eyes refocus in ways you would not expect as buildings take on a new perspective and you question why roads go a certain way.  On the way back to the Cornerhouse we stopped outside the Sailsbury pub underneath a ‘No Loitering’ sign.  Too late, that’s what had been doing for the past hour.

Back in the Cornerhouse there were two tables laid out with bottles, and phials, and pots full of a strange assortment of powders and liquids.  It was all edible and the group of people around one of tables tasted and smelt every thing (rosewater was not the favourite.  The table also contained balls of play dough in a variety of bright colours and the instruction to mould what ever took your fancy.  It was the other table, weighed down with similar wares that took the construction to heart.  There were bees, planes, canals and buildings.  It struck me as strange that one group went straight for taste and the other for touch.

The next walk took a similar route.  We started the same way but detoured onto Whitworth Street via an alley that had a remarkable number of CCTV cameras and we stopped at First Street.  We were asked to imagine what the space would be like at night and how it would make us feel. Would we be scared to walk here after dark? Is the lighting sufficient? Are there shadows in which a predator could lurk? Does the presence of CCTV make us feel safer? Does the absence of CCTV make us feel vunerable?  I was not expecting this.  I imagined a fear walk to be along the lines of one of the Jack The Ripper walks you get in London’s East End or the ghost walks in Edinburgh but this was fear of the present, of the now and if measures to allay those fears are counter productive and re-enforce them.

At First Street we split into small groups to play CCTV Bingo.  We were given a bingo card that, instead of numbers, had different types of camera in the boxes.  Some the types were ‘a camera on a pole’, ‘three cameras facing the same way’ and ‘a camera that looks like a space ship’.  When you spot your first camera you mark it on your card and walk in the direction the camera is facing and stop when you reach the next one.  This should be continued until the board is complete.  To date, no one has completed it.  This is not due to lack of cameras, it is just that some of them are rarer than others. Three facing the same way was the most popular in the part of town we found ourselves in (a collection of new buildings opposite the council).  When we returned to the Cornerhouse there was a discussion on what made you fearful (drunk people topped the list) write is down and banish them in a bucket of fire.  Unsurprisingly, the Cornerhouse were not too keen about having buckets of fire in there place so we made do with a couple of smoke bombs and a cap gun on the balcony.

The final walk was ‘The Heart Of The City’ and the temptation to sing the Whitesnake song was great but, thankfully for all around me, one that I resisted.  There was no guided element to this walk (maybe we could be trusted now to go out unsupervised) but we did have to follow a map; a map with a heart drawn on it.  Obviously there was a little licence involved here; I mean you couldn’t go straight through a building could you?  Well, the building happened to be a pub with an entrance on two streets (like the Old Nags Head and Rising Sun) you could.  There are an awful lot of alleys, passages and back streets in Manchester that also made keeping to the heart outline easier than I first thought would be possible.

Ultimately getting round the heart in the allotted time proved beyond us (and no, we didn’t stop in any of the pubs).  There were too many interesting things, open doors and broken windows to look in, courses of brickwork at strange heights you know the normal things you look for when out for a city walk.  We made it half way around before having to head back to the Cornerhouse for a chat about where we each felt the heart of the city was.  We were given a hand knitted heart with a label and a request to take it to your favourite part of the city and photograph it.

As I do not live in Manchester and am only a frequent visitor, my view of the city is different to most others (although, really, everybody’s view is different).  It lies in place already gone, cafĂ© Pop where I first ate but also in the pubs were I have made many new friends and now the streets as know that they are not just a means to travel to pre-determined route but are places to explore and play

Saturday 13 October 2012

The Jacket's Americana Jukebox - Show #19


Track
Artist
Album
Our Lady Of The Tall Trees
Cahalen Morrison & Eli West
Our Lady Of The Tall Trees
I’m Gonna Start Living Again (If It Kills Me)
Hayes Carll
Lowe Country
Cigarette Machine
Mary Gauthier
Live At Blue Rock
Black Ribbon
Matraca Berg
Love’s Truck Stop
Don’t Ever Hold My Hand
Case Hardin

Atlantic City
Dreaming Spires
The Nebraska Sessions – A Tribute
Highway Patrolman
Danny George Wilson
The Nebraska Sessions – A Tribute
Rivers Will Flow
House Of Hats
Rivers Will Flow
Popular Flower
Nick Ferrio and his Feelings
Nick Ferrio and his Feelings
Silver Screen
Gilmore & Roberts
The Innocent Left
Mr Tambourine Man
The Byrds
Mr Tambourine Man
I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better
The Byrds
Mr Tambourine Man
Eight Miles High
The Byrds
Fifth Dimension
Turn! Turn! Turn!
The Byrds
Turn! Turn! Turn!