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nedy s assassination but i do clearly remember the soviet invasion of czechoslovakia which took place on 21st august a week before the release of those were the days in the week it left the british charts jan palach a czech student famously set himself on fire in wenceslas square the burns specialist who treated him wrote of his motivation for doing so it was not so much in opposition to the soviet occupation but the demoralization which was setting in that people were not only giving up but giving in and he wanted to stop that demoralization i think the people in the street the multitude of people in the street silent with sad eyes serious faces which when you looked at those people you understood that everyone understands that all the decent people were on the verge of making compromises i am not i think suggesting that post revolutionary tristesse was solely responsible for the song s popularity a pretty girl or a selection of pretty girls singing a hummable tune always went down well in those days some older people may have felt that those days were the peaceful ones before students began rioting and listening to loud rock music no doubt most active soixante huitards would have preferred to work off their frustrations by listening to les rolling stones or les doors in north america the song was often interpreted as an expression of nostalgia for the heyday of the pre electric folkies nonetheless i can imagine it permeating the air of mainland europe in much the same way that it seemed to seep uninvited into my small world on its north western fringes particularly given that those were the days before people took to piping music directly into their heads via earphones creeping out from jukeboxes into the cafés where the soixante huitards smoked and plotted their revolutions puzzling the czechs twisting the dials on their old radios in search of accurate news from the west perhaps even locating the mysterious hilversum providing a mocking counterpoint to their hopes with its pretty kitschy resignation and what effect i wonder would it have had on the russians as they entered prague some of them perhaps under the sincere impression that they would be greeted as liberators to hear their own dear dorogoi dlinnoyu with its troikas and sleigh bells being trilled back at them in several unfamiliar languages by strange young women in mini skirts as for my gypsies my tziganes who may or not be real i wonder whether they are playing those were the days le temps des fleurs or dorogoi dlinnoyu an imitation of an imitation or an imitation of an imitation of an imitation posted on march 23 2017 by backwatersman 1 comment from utopia to atopia milton keynes and magna park what is missing in the american landscape is not so much the absence of historical memories as the romantic illusion has it as the fact that no hand has left a trace in it this relates not merely to the absence of farm fields the stubbly and often tiny scrub like forests but above all the streets they bear no imprint because they know no traces of shoes or wheels no gentle footpaths along their edge as a transition to the vegetation no side paths into the valley below they lack that which is mild softened rounded in things on which hands or their immediate tools have worked it is as if no one had combed the landscape s hair it is disconsolate and inconsolable this corresponds to the manner of its perception for what the hurrying eye has merely viewed from the car cannot be retained and the latter sinks as tracklessly as the traces on such fade away two popular attitudes to milton keynes are to treat it as a joke or to applaud the utopian idealism of those who planned and built it the former camp imagines it to be inauthentic and soulless deriding its concrete cows and its plastic football team guilty of identity theft from another more authentic club some still perversely associate it with thatcherism largely on the basis of a couple of once all pervasive tv adverts and a song by the style council the other faction remembers it as a late flowering of herbivorous post war thinking a sincere attempt to harness modernism to provide a cleaner more pleasant way of life in the tradition of the garden city movement with a herbal scented whiff of hippy mysticism some of these particularly those who live there are fiercely defensive of the purity of the original concept against compromise as if fearful that their city will become what its detractors imagine it to be my only previous experience of milton keynes involved being driven around it at night in the pre satnav era and getting hopelessly lost in theory looking at the grid plan around which the city is based that should be hard to do the intention being that you should drive in at one side of the city and proceed in a straight line through to the other this might be true if you have understood the principle behind the arrangement of streets and are happy to have your movements dictated by the logic of the grid or perhaps if you have lived there long enough for landmarks even individual roundabouts or trees to have lodged in your mind if not then like many things that are logical the arrangement feels counter intuitive in fact willfully anti intuitive the effect disorientating as if you were an animal a spider a cat climbing a sheer wall made of some man made substance that offers no natural purchase one of the first things i saw having arrived in central milton keynes by bus was a sign confirming my prejudice as a non driver that it does not aim to be hospitable to the aimless stroller drivers cyclists and pedestrians all have their allotted spheres here their predestined routes and the walker s realm lies through a web of underpasses the shopping centre itself there are in fact two a little way apart is also arranged in a kind of grid of alphabetically labelled blocks with exits at regular intervals between them there is no hierarchy between these exits no main entrance or exit few of them give any indication where they lead there are few landmarks other than shops and few maps our stroller soon loses his bearings becomes disorientated and finds himself with no idea where he is in relation to where he came in or whether he has passed the same place twice for reference the exit nearest the bus stop from northampton is the one closest to burger king once outside the shopping centre the impression is of endless straight lines walkways boulevards flyovers underpasses dual carriageways all of which seem to lead straight to the vanishing point of the horizon as if a child has drawn them to demonstrate their grasp of perspective it is so unlike anywhere else the patchwork tracings of civic and private needs and desires that make up the mind map of the average english town that the mind gropes to relate these boulevards to constructs of the imagination such as huysmann s paris or chandler s los angeles or the ideal fantasy cities of le corbusier everywhere our stroller has the sense that behind it all there is some central controlling consciousness that it is as it were a product of intelligent design and that there is if only we could see it a plan in milton keynes two idealisms rub against each other the desire to give concrete expression to a world of ideal forms struggles with the need to provide a benign habitat for its human inhabitants central milton keynes is not designed to be inhabited but used purely as a zone of consumption of fancy goods and burgers in the shopping centre of culture in the cultural quarter of religion in the ecumenical cathedral that embodies the modern belief that emptiness is next to holiness but it has nevertheless attracted inhabitants hardy life forms rolled in sleeping bags under every underpass taking tenuous root in routes which were meant for perpetual motion in shanty towns on the fringes fringe religions take hold and everywhere mucking up utopia are the traces of habitation fag ends cartons cracks in the pavement weeds detritus vomit scribble the place that i was reminded of most was magna park a 550 acre distribution centre in south leicestershire which is its doppelgänger or twin a denial of one of its kinds of idealism and the fulfilment of the other milton keynes is inviting to visitors come to milton keynes magna park discourages them it describes itself as a private estate and i was unsure when i visited it whether i was meant to be there at all the architecture of central milton keynes is meant to be seen the main shopping centre has been listed by english heritage that of magna park is not designed to be seen it is assumed that there should be no one there to see it but to be invisible the only attempt at design of the vast windowless sheds is that some are painted sky blue to make them from a distance blend in with the sky there is no philanthropic idealism behind magna park no thought of better lives it represents pure functionality and in that represents the fulfilment of long nurtured dreams in the hour and a half i spent in magna park i saw three other human beings one a security guard and one in a high visibility jacket spraying luminous hieroglyphics on the pavement no one lives there and there are none of the amenities that inhabitants require no shops no pubs no cafes no playgrounds no lavatories no homes or homeless no production and no consumption no libraries or churches so no religion too it s easy if you try but it is in many ways an ideal place to live like milton keynes it has wide tree lined boulevards arranged logically around a grid it has excellent public transport links with three bus stops and a half hourly service to both hinckley and lutterworth it has its own secluded wood with a willow fringed pond that gives the impression that yours are the first human feet to tread there above all there is no trace of human habitation apart from a defiant scattering of fag ends around one of the bus stops there is no litter there are no cracks in the pavement no moss between the paving stones the hedges are precisely and immaculately trimmed there are no dogs no children no chewing gum no sound of human voices no laughter or crying and weirdly when i visited it no birds it is almost pre lapsarian in its pristine perfection although they are invisible in their big sheds there are said to be 7 500 workers in magna park but the dream is of course that automation will soon enable their elimination if the same principle that drives the driverless cars which are being trialled on the wide straight boulevards of milton keynes can be extended to the caravans of lorries that connect it to magna park the last traces of humanity there could be eradicated leaving it a heavenly immaculate place where no one goes and which no one ever sees both utopia and atopia theodor adorno minima moralia me posted on february 3 2017 february 3 2017 by backwatersman 1 comment faced with porphiry luton airport parkway to harpenden a walk with nicholas faxton for a long time not long ago from february 2002 to march 2016 i used to wake early i would leave the house at 6 30 and by 7 40 approximately i would be passing through luton airport parkway railway station in the afternoon i would leave work early and by 5 40 approximately i would be approaching the same station from the other direction as i say i did this every day five days a week barring holidays for a little over fourteen years by being in the same place at the same time over such a long period of time something that would otherwise only be experienced by a participant in a scientific experiment or an art project of some kind i could observe the landscape changing in two ways on the one hand there were temporal lateral changes new buildings were built old ones demolished towns sprawled crops would rotate in their fields supermarkets changed hands and their neon signs changed with them early on a landfill site was gouged out from a patch of scrubland festered and flared for some years in the early light then slowly grassed over leaving only a scattering of gas relieving periscopes to warn of the space it had once occupied on the other hand there were cyclical changes i developed a minutely calibrated sensitivity to the light blooming then shrinking and contracting again until at its lowest point the scandinavian months from november to january the first point in the journey where i could see the outside world more clearly than my own reflection was the landscape immediately beyond luton airport parkway it seemed to me unusually beautiful even the shimmering pools and shining cupolas or so they appeared in the subdued dawn light of what was clearly a sewage farm any sight it is true would have seemed sweeter to me than and a relief from the darkness visible in my reflection and it is perhaps this or a simple lack of curiosity that prevented me from looking into what it was it was that i could see and why that landscape with its wooded slopes its picturesque lakes and the briefly glimpsed facade of a great house seemed too good to be true too true to nature about six or seven years into my making this journey i discovered that the house i could see was called luton hoo and that its grounds rather than being a happy accident of nature had been landscaped by capability brown the house itself had been in the course of several fires through various iterations designed first by robert adam then by robert smirke it had been owned by the earls and marquesses of bute a liverpool solicitor and sir julius wernher an edwardian diamond magnate by the time it had occurred to me to visit the house which apparently contained an art collection that was no longer possible it having been converted into an hotel in 2007 a little earlier i had become aware of a path that ran parallel to the railway line seemingly a rough track sometimes there were cyclists occasionally walkers whose cloudy exhalations on cold mornings mimicked the steam rising from the sewage treatment beds i could not see where they were travelling to because the path passed from view as the train put on speed shortly after the sewage farm on the other left hand side of the track i could see a path emerging from under a railway bridge which led in the middle distance to a building which piqued my curiosity its purpose was not obvious and in its setting between the sculpted contours of capability brown and the homely curves of arable bedfordshire it struck me as incongruous and unenglish something sicilian a little russian without belonging to any more exotic style of architecture that i could readily identify every morning unless it was raining i thought how much i should prefer to be walking that path to that building than continuing my journey to london eventually and you must remember here that the internet was not as informative in those days as it is now i learned that the path was part of the lea valley walk which in its later stages and in a previous life of mine i had liv...