London ILB - FAP?

in which it was concluded

i: perry anderson is the capt haddock of the NLR
ii: but not -- despite the old college try -- the dave q of the LRB
iii: part three will surely be where it all starts jumping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashi-bazouk

Sad 😞 times. Just found out my favourite pub in London is going to be ruined. The landlords lease expires in January at the Royal Oak in Tabard Street at Borough. Get there soon before it turns into a Gastro Pub. Recommend the Salt Beef Sandwich pic.twitter.com/3prDgXutGe

— Richard Cousins (@rwjc22) November 10, 2018

I was just thinking about a new ILB FAP this morning :-(

Looking through the comments:

The Harvey’s pub in Wandsworth, The Cat’s Back, is a splendid example of a local. Makes me think The Royal Oak will not be cut down.

— Eddie Fremantle (@eddietheshoe) November 11, 2018

(1) Hi Matthew. Our Estates Manager response:"The Royal Oak is our great London local, full of charm & character which our long standing tenant Frank, and his partner John, have nurtured over the last 25 years. Frank has decided to retire in January when his lease ends...

— Harvey's Brewery (@Harveys1790) November 12, 2018

Sounds like the news isn't particularly bad (I bet it ends up feeling a bit more gastro-y though). NEVERTHELESS we shouldn't allow this good news to deter us from having a FAP at some point. Early Dec?

i may be able to bring hard copies of the book along for SOME OF YOU

(lol the uncertainty continues re exact pub date)

Just glad I was able to make it there before this purported change.

ok this time I will definitely make it. Definitely. If I can.

I am trying to get out of my work xmas dinner which would be on the 1st Thurs of December. Can we do the last Thurs of November to ensure my attendance.

Otherwise pray for me.

But aren't you handing out the secret santa gifts this year, xyzzzz___?

I'll be there, I was there just the other week saying to my friend, and this too will go one day. As long as it's not next week. Or the week after.

No, haven't you heard that Secret Santa is cancelled this year?

Will be at FAP if possible.

Would like to see Mark's book.

Concerned about Oak, though Harvey's tweet encouraging.

I don't think I can make the 29th but I can make the 6th.

Do it on the 6th, will attend if possible..

will be there.

I'm in.

Nope - can't make that.

Still on? Will try to come after work.

its on

I’ll be there.

Regrets. Cheers

me too, with some books!

(no sleb-signed upper-level extras yet tho i fear) (kickstarters are a lot of fiddle it turns out)

I see xmas has come early..

6ish for me i shd think

(it was super-rammed on friday btw -- also ridiculously hot -- and we decamped elsewhere) (but friday be bein friday i guess plus it was amateur month eve)

I'll be aiming for 6ish also.

unless the title has changed wildly, the verso book abt psychedelia and 60s folks as working-class mind expansion has not yet appeared on its lists (even slower than me lol, maybe they ARE making him rewrite it)

I wish we'd got around to talking about Ravilious earlier in the evening, I think there's something interesting in there but a soberer me could surely have done better than something something woodcuts something Wedgwood.

raviliouuuuuuuus! *shakes fist*

(i walk past his house sometimes. it's one of the many blue plaques on 'my' stretch of the thames (morris, doves press, some more...)

Aw, sorry I forgot about this! Next time.

Next FAP sould take place the week we leave the European Union.

I had a work lunch and started drinking at 12.
I was not capable by 6
capable of anything

You'd not have fitted in with this enormously capable bunch.

by association a line from dead of night spoken by the german psychiatrist just popped into my head – 'My dear boy, I am not accustomed to solving complex problems with the casual ease of your Brains Trust'

i will try and retrieve the dregs of what i was trying to say about ravilious (without pulling the face I pulled).

my day generally has been going much more slowly than anticipated.

I love Eric Ravilious.

(post post observation – sorry this is so so tl:dr)

so, i'm not sure I'll be able to put down anything coherent (which is probably just as well), but I did retrieve my notes on the Eric Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery a few years ago. I didn't know his work beforel, so these were first impressions on a single exhibition. and i haven't got the catalogue but someone did buy me Bawden, Ravilious and the Artists of Great Bardfieldfrom their time in Essex. Also includes Edward Bawden, John Aldridge, Bernard Cheese and Sheila Robinson, Walter Hoyle, Michael Rothenstein, Kenneth Rowntree, Marianne Strawb, and there's some lovely stuff in there.

I know the first thing that struck me in the exhibition was the presence of discarded machinery in pastoral landscapes. I scribbled 'material objects like Kipling' by which I think I meant, an intrinsic interest in the aesthetic qualities of engineering and purpose. this is not to say for Kipling certainly that this is some Futurist crash bang wallop aesthetic, but the non-traditional beauty of efficient purpose, the new environmental qualities our mechanical productions bring, of, if you like animate inanimacy (the mechanical paradox).

couple of opaque scribbled lines:

the bric-a-brac of a previous age, just, that seems to point to a future different to that of human history – bus on barrels pointing to the sun

http://a68.tinypic.com/mv0r5j.jpg

i'm struggling to recapture exactly what I meant by that, but i think it was a sense of a sort of recent history archaeology – things we no longer want or use, but imbued with formal or even ritual significance that implies also discarded meaning.

i have a bad mental tendency to abstraction and allegory in mediums I'm not very fluent in - that's the plastic art and music, so i kind of missed the pictorial elements that gave me that lenten thought:

• the underpopulated nature of his pictures – the reason i assumed that archaeological aspect is because there's no fucker around. my immediate response to this sort of thing is that it looks like 'an alien landscape' as a consequence; a not very useful ahistorical description, but it gives the idea of 'what are these and what did they use them for?' of objects in his pictures
• the bleached nature of his 'starved brush' watercolours. this is immediately striking of course, and it didn't strike me other than in a 'these look different' sort of way, but it's the main thing really, and again, moves away from immediacy to other lights, other times and towards a formal emphasis on line
• 'pointing to the sun' - well yes, this was part of the point. this wasn't a traditional way of doing things - pointing into the sun created a flattened image. Apparently he and Bawden used to compete for hardship when painting (out in the rain, on top of roofs, facing into a blinding sun etc).

we enter them as we might realms of consciousness or meaning.

no real idea what that latter part means, but detailed, well observed objects and materials are insightful to people. his great interiors say 'these are the materials and things people who have been in this room have seen and contemplated, and with which in some cases they have chosen to surround themselves (in the book, the chapter on Ravilious regrets that he didn't do more of them as he was so good at them).

http://a65.tinypic.com/2gshit2.jpg

tangles are imposed upon the picture indifferent to perspectives and structures

structures are vivid – there is a comedy and life to the objects – a chirpiness

chirpiness is right, but 'humour' is better than 'comedy' unless i was pointing to some sort of physical comedy (of which that bus on barrels is possibly a good example). the indifference to perspectives i've already mentioned. it's too strongly stated, but flattening things out you can almost see the objects as hieroglyphs.

alien objects almost - contain the tension of hidden or static purpose - sweep and curve of lines, represent the vector on which they appear in the material world (ships screw)

greenwich observatory - more lines of cryptic intent, mysterious vectors

religious bit – these look like pure objects, items deprived of their meaning with a formal importance.

https://pallantbookshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Ravilious-Observatory.jpg

i love the almost ornate almost Byzantine behaviour of the implied lines of direction here – meridian and weather. That Byzantine feel was what led me to buy a print now hanging in my bedroom, uncharacteristic, but still containing much that is definably Ravilious:

http://a66.tinypic.com/2ujmpg5.jpg

going through these notes, it's clear i was waaaay too obsessed with line though I have said further down

light is also an object to which my response now would probably be 'the objects are also light that's painting u fule'.

the lines give everything a tilt, they direct the content

the long lines of access into an object and later - mystical access.

the same lines that give access to the beyond are also those that give the beyond access to the object

and i was also obsessed with the 'object' of the painting, without taking into account how he took the pastoral line and changed it from classically influenced and sculpted landscapes to a new one that was given to him by his observation of the Sussex landscape. He reminds me slightly of some of Samuel Palmer's etchings sometimes, and he captures the South Downs perfectly, so that when I'm there, I see it with eyes influenced by Ravilious' paintings.

I think this is probably all too mystical, too religious, though the sussex downs and pastoral are vehicles for a southern english version of pastoral mysticism – John Ireland, Jocelyn Brooke, and with the addition of a version of Ravilious' detailed understanding of objects, though in his case the minutiae of dolls houses and chinoiserie, Denton Welch. In Ravilious' case it is not influenced by the detail of that mysticism (roughly Roman military + Eleusinian + late neolithic/beaker/bronze age stuff). his mysticism is softer

The second painting I bought was a consequence of this thinking, and was late in the exhibition, and is the one that now strikes me, even irritates me, as platitudinous and lacking the pleasure of the other paintings:

http://a68.tinypic.com/2m2jghe.jpg

as i wrote in my final note:

as if they are labouring at some ultima thule on the brink of existence but going through the laborious toil - process, material delivery.

the bric-a-brac of a previous age, just, that seems to point to a future different to that of human history

is the technical term for this "hauntology"? (i mean, i think it is, but we may not much want it be given what it's now yoked to)

That’s the term I’ve seen

i guess it is exactly that, but i've become so wary of it as a term that it didn't occur to me. also, even using it with a greater sense of its origin still gives me a strong urge to look at why Ravilious, or rather the impact of Ravilious on me, is *not* that. also, to rephrase slightly a sentence above, this is the bric-a-brac of a *just-past* time, rather than a nostalgic one, so i'd want to exclude notions of longing, confining it even more to its original ontological category. (Nostalgia always making a generational jump or two, socially - in its personal form the jump is climacteric, rather than generational).

(The presence of that last picture above the posts here really doesn't help!)

i was about to write that i'd want to exclude sentiment entirely from the 'haunting' aspect of Ravilious here, but that's clearly absurd. The role of nostalgia and sentiment generally in 20th century pastoral is hard though – it comes back into that painfully complicated set of spaces and vectors and influences in specifically English folk.

also i'm not sure this way of looking at Ravilious does him any favours – I'm hoping for Tim to come along and say 'what utter bollocks, that's not how I see him at all'.

Tell me about this Bernard Cheese...

Illustrator and printmaker. Chapter written by Chloë Cheese.

http://a68.tinypic.com/ra910k.jpg

Inclined to say Hauntology is like Postmodernism -- some interesting materials and ideas, let down by a daft and distracting label.

Good point, pfox.

A few bits and pieces on Fizzles's interesting notes:

Archaeology of abandoned (or near-abandoned) hardware has a couple of contexts, I think. One is the first world war, and I am reminded of Paul Nash's WW1 landscapes. It seems to me that at this point in history, hardware in a landscape has to carry some of that weight.

https://gerryco23.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/paul-nash-sunrise-inverness-copse-1918.jpg

https://gerryco23.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/paul-nash-void-19181.jpg

I'm also reminded of (Eric's son) James Ravilious's photographs of North Devon in the early seventies*, my favourites of which are not the perfect landscapes but the ones where old crap is being used and re-used, put to work in the countryside.

I can't find a pic of the image I'm thinking of but this will do for now.

http://www.jamesravilious.com/photos/31.jpg

My point being that in addition to the painter-friendly contrast of industrial detritus decaying in a rural setting there's a tension between unavoidable WW1 memories and a warmer sense that everything will be put to good use.

Another context for finding apparently incongruous stuff strewn around a landscape is surrealism, of course - I don't know enough to guess whether ER was having fun finding apparently surreal juxtapositions in the real world - a busted bus balancing on barrels! - and rendering them in a more-or-less naturalistic way, but it doesn't seem impossible.

The matter of colour: for me, the starved brush colours are what saves many of his lanscapes (for me) from being too comfortable. Even when his landscapes are rolling hills without the (often-used) wire fences or bric-a-brac, even when the sun's blazing the colour palette means they're never fully luscious.

https://apollo.imgix.net/content/uploads/2017/07/1736.jpg
https://www.theblankcardcompany.co.uk/acatalog/Eric_Ravilious_The_Causeway_Wilthshire_Downs.jpg

These are about as luscious as he gets and even here the summer greens are hardly bursting out at you; for me that always stops these images feeling like smug bucolic little Englandness.

(*Probably due to my personal history of having moved to Devon from the Home Counties as a four year old in the mid seventies, but I find JR's photos from Devon in the 70s far more evocative than old spooky public information films or whatever: at once unchanging but utterly lost and utterly graspable, very haunty.)

FYI, on the way home from Wembley last night I passed through London Bridge and stopped in the Royal Oak. I was relieved to see its lights shining at the end of Tabard Street.

It was quiet. I don't know the owner but he was the old geezer behind the bar. He seemed to be just talking and drinking, not serving. The kitchen was closed.

Listening to others while I finished reading the match programme, and then talking to a West Ham United fan who had also been at Wembley, I gathered that this was nothing less than THE LAST NIGHT of the old Royal Oak - of its ownership, at least. The WHU fan stated that nothing would change in future. I suspect he was just going on a half-baked memory of Harveys' tweet, rather than any more solid and recent assurance.

So if my understanding was correct, one could pop in from today and see a different Royal Oak; or the same Oak under new management. Or will there be a hiatus, a temporary closing of doors? That was not indicated anywhere in the Oak that I saw.

I went back to the Royal Oak last night: a brief reconnaissance mission.

At some level I feared great change; at another I trusted that not much could have changed, not this soon.

The same on the outside. Inside it was busy (c.7pm). The saloon bar was unchanged, the public bar just a bit rearranged.

The old Harvey's pump badges had been replaced. I regret this. It's utterly superficial yet it changes my impression; of the beer as well as the pub.

More to the point, had the beer changed? Sussex Best was still on and one can assume it's the same. Versions of Mild and Old Ale were on I think. Pale Ale, which I had adored in this place, was gone. In its place, Harvey's IPA. IPA is Pale Ale, of course. So is that the same thing? I drank a half, couldn't tell. I suspect it's not quite the same, but a related replacement.

The beer was quite cold.

All the above mostly isn't much to quibble about.

The menu, though, had changed a lot. The old daily special list was gone from the wall; a blackboard was up, but empty. The old regulars menu was gone also.

In their place, what seemed a daily-specialized menu, one page covering starters, mains, sandwiches, desserts. Very limited overall; much, much less choice than before.

The menu included:

sausage & colcannon
steak & red wine pudding with chips
fish & chips
Thai inspired spicy quinoa burger with chips
Ham, egg & chips

It's quite good to see this last item present, as ham, egg & chips was a staple of the old Oak. This menu is ... OK. But it's limited. Overall it gave me the impression that fears - mine if no-one else's - had been realized.

But I suppose that if you go purely for a drink, the whole Oak experience won't be that different.

Thai inspired spicy quinoa burger with chips

Slippery slope.

they shd sub in tapioca and whisk us back to our childhoods