Alex de Campi: Gojira!

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8.9.05 Cities and Tides

Things are falling apart and re-combining themselves so quickly in my life right now that I look forward to each zooming day with a mix of trepidation and breathless excitement, because I truly have no idea how it will end.

I have begun the latest in my amusing litany of nickel-and-dime jobs which pay the rent and permit the writing. This one ("suitably vampiric", quips Mr Dunning) consists of working 14 nights a month at a press clippings agency in South London. To get there by bicycle - the cherry-red urban groove machine - I am having to... well, judging by the past few days, I am having to break a truly impressive amount of traffic laws, even for me.

My route takes me through some parts of London where I never go anymore: Mornington Crescent, King's Cross, and then the long drop down through Clerkenwell and over to Southwark. For my previous job, the route was Regents' Park and then Hyde Park, and down through Knightsbridge. I have traded roses for warehouses, and it's not a bad swap. London shows me another face, and I fall in love with her again.

This change in my current through the city made me think of the seashore of my childhood: the brutal, magnificent crash-rock granite coast of the Maine islands, a coast which yet held surprising amounts of delicacy. (I think it is due to this early visual experience that I always side with the sublime over the beautiful.) From tiny cranberry bushes or baby juniper struggling up between fractures of rock to the strange gain of storm-torn lobster buoys and "lucky" white-ringed stones to be discovered tide-side, every inch was paradise for a child with an overactive imagination.

The best were the tidal pools. There was one huge one, just on the Seal Cove side of Green Cottage, halfway down a particularly forbidding mass of granite. You had to know where it was; you'd never just discover it. It was the best tidal pool on the island: a good three or four feet deep, some eight feet long, and refreshed twice a day. It supported an entire mini-ecosystem of fish, crabs, plants, periwinkles, mussels, sometimes even a whelk or a limpet. My mother and I would visit it at least once every summer, with pomp, ceremony and sandwiches, to review the changes in this our pocket world.

The habit persists. But last time I went back to the Island something had changed in the way the tides addressed the shore, and the thriving little tide pool was nothing but an empty gash in the rock. Couple of barnacles. Bit of seaweed.

And this afternoon riding up Gray's Inn Road I wondered if cities are just collections of tidal pools. We think we're free and moving and part of everything, but we're mostly just circulating in our own mini-ecosystem. The water gets refreshed reguarly, a few creatures are lifted in or out every so often by the tide, but my London existence still strikes me as a retreat into a series of mini-cities.

I thrive for a while, then something in the current changes - a storm, a big wave, or maybe a little one at just the right angle, and I am washed out back into the drift, another pool to find. The old pool takes little notice of my going. "What are you up to these days? We haven't heard from you in aaages... Writing? How fascinating."

Patrick McGrath on the moment he decided to become a writer, after ten feckless years of trying other things on for size: "It felt like a coming home. It felt like solving the big problem of life." Yes. Exactly so.

Comes With A Smile 19, the UK's best music 'zine, is accepting pre-orders. Go, purchase. (Matt Dornan of CWAS and I are both gigging friends of Mr Brown, although we are never at the same gig at the same time.) You should also purchase the quite lovely comics zine Sturgeon White Moss, who is now Six. New Yorkers: go see Bob Mould when he plays your linear and towering city on 5 October. His London gig was a sheer noisy no-holds-barred object lesson on how to do rock concerts right.

For those of you who wish to download my August mixtape but have not yet done so, you have little time left. The Day Stone Affair ends on Sunday (providing I'm not too much of a club casualty after Torture Garden), to be replaced by this month's model.

( 5:44 PM )

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