Thoughtland

PK column in The National: Regeneration has pitfalls we have to bypass after independence

By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017

FOR as long as I’ve been a Glaswegian – which is since student days – I have simply taken the M8 at Charing Cross for granted. But pinch yourself for a moment, and you realise what a monstrous chasm it is.

A road bridge allows you to trudge from the train station to the Mitchell Library. Stop halfway, press your chest to the rail, and all the vehicles in the world thunder madly and relentlessly below you. God knows what damage is done every time you inhale.

PK column in The National: Imagination fires Mexico City as Lab reclaims forgotten spaces

By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 5TH, 2015

IT was one of the most original encounters I’d had in the indyref. The head of Glasgow City Council swept into our debate room packed with eminent worthies, at the very last minute. He was a vision in pinstripes, trailing a minor retinue behind him.

Gordon Mathieson – nowadays a mere plebeian – harrumphed a little, and then launched into what I could only call a vision of “independence for Glasgow” (as opposed, that is, to independence for Scotland).

This was August 2014, and Mathieson was not only flush from the success of the Commonwealth Games, but also the winning of a “City Deal”, worth £1.1 billion in infrastructure investment, from the Coalition government in Westminster.

“So the future belongs to cities,” Mathieson trilled. Quite impressively, he cited the latest American academics (Bruce Ackerman and Benjamin Barber) on the importance of mayors and “city patriotism”. He rolled out the well-worn fact that 70 per cent of the world will be urban by 2050.

With a final few flourishes about the “outdated ideology of nationalism”, Mathieson then sat down and spun variations of his line, with huge self satisfaction to the end. Amid grinding discussions of currency union and European Union entry, at least this was new to my ears.

Last week’s budget from George Osborne saw the announcement of more “city deals” – essentially, infrastructure investment packages from UK central government – for Aberdeen and Inverness, with Edinburgh rumoured to be next in line. Billions will be involved, and no-one – even in the most anti-Tory strongholds – will fastidiously refuse the cheque.

I hope the Tory Chancellor doesn’t think he can buy a scrap of legitimacy for his party north of the Border (though let’s not tell him, eh?). But another slice from the pork barrel is of less interest. I’m more fascinated by the implicit faith that the very structure and dynamic of city life itself is a new force for progress.

Many policy-makers and thinkers believe that modern cities can hit a sweet spot between micro and macro. The city is contained enough, and has a clear enough identity, for people to easily feel part of it, even loyal to it. But the city also has enough scale, size and revenues to get significant stuff done, across the major policy areas of education, health, culture, infrastructure, enterprise.

The “smart city” – which captures data from all its activities, makes this available to all who need it, and aims to be super-sensitive to residents’ needs and desires – has been in vogue for a decade. It equally animates city bosses in democratic Helsinki and monarchical Dubai.

But our urbanised planet is not proceeding according to the tidy plans of city bosses in stable regions and nations. I’m writing this from a hotel room Mexico City, whose city government invited me to speak this Thursday about play, creativity and city life.

Below me, there are rivers of cars, all of them pressing their horns at once, white gloved men whistling at them furiously. Beyond that, there is literally nothing but city, to all the limits of the horizon: nearly nine million people within the strict city boundaries and 21 million in the greater municipal area. Mexico City is the biggest Spanish speaking city in the world. And it feels like it.

My hosts are a fascinating outfit called Laboratory for the City (Laboratoria Para La Ciudad). They are a department of city government created by the recently elected left-wing mayor, Miguel Ángel Mancera, and tasked to think beyond the usual parameters of urban improvement.

Before we got down to work, our hosts took us on a wander through the town. To walk down the main drag of Mexico City is to witness a brawl, if not an all-out riot, of architectural styles. The Spanish colonial era lingers on – grand, crenellated monuments and cathedrals, sitting on wide Parisian-style squares and streets (built, we were informed to accommodate one dictator’s pretentions as a boulevardier).

Our hosts told us that after the Mexican revolution, many opportunities were taken to rid the city of the Spanish legacy, and build in a way that honoured the Aztec and Mayan traditions steamrollered by the coloniser. But all you can now see, dropped in everywhere, are startlingly brutal office blocks (with the occasional tiled townhouse). This doesn’t make much sense, until you are taken to a Unesco World Heritage site behind the cathedral.

Here you find the ground-level remains of the Mayan pyramids and temples that were, quite simply, knocked down and built over by the Spanish. Under every Christian church lies the rubble of Mexican indigenous culture. And in the mad, angular styles of the post-war buildings, Mexican architects have clearly been making stylistic reference.

Then our hosts point out the unrepaired cracks in walls, the strange misalignments of the streets. Mexico City was originally an island, which expanded over its surrounding water. So this massive city rests on vast underground caves, which regularly shake the place with tremors, and sometimes full earthquakes. “There is not enough concrete in the world to fill it up,” we were told. And so buildings gradually slip, and occasionally are swallowed whole.

We walked through a grand canyon of skyscrapers, which turned out to be the main newspaper district for the whole nation. “But their journalists are afraid to report the corruption or the criminal networks that pervade Mexico, otherwise they are killed,” said one of our hosts, matter-of-factly. “We have a young generation of freelance writers who make their stands, but it is a dangerous situation for them. I sometimes fear that people will just eventually accept the criminality is our reality”.

So undergrounds everywhere, of all kinds: we’re deep in metaphor city, as William McIlvanney might say. I came here with no shortage of news information about the power of the drug cartels in Mexico, the sheer difficulty of due process and proper democracy.

But what Laboratoria Para La Ciudadare trying to do – and perhaps the sheer openness and massive sprawl of Mexico City allows room for this – is to generate different realities for its citizens, using small but powerful interventions in urban space.

Their projects are a tantalising mix of the fantastic and the practical. They leave strange, playful structures in public squares, inviting passers-by to use them as a thinking spot for what they want from their city. They create new apps that enable you to identify a true licensed cab from a fake one (which are responsible for many car-muggings). The lab recently helped shape policy around the introduction of Uber, the digital cab service, to the streets of Mexico City.

“We want to prove that imagination isn’t a luxury or a simple nice-to-have, but a requisite for a city that thrives,” they say. 

To that end, the lab is mapping unused government properties in the city, and has a whole community of makers and activists ready to occupy them.

They win some, they lose some. It was poignant that our event was taking place in an extraordinary abandoned building, the Fronton Mexico, home to the national sport of frontenis, a kind of wall tennis.

Glaswegians who love the Tramway would have adored this place; all manner of Manchester and London hipsters would be pitching to integrate it into any city deal. However, our event was the last opening before the Fronton became – oh dear – a casino. The playful city, in its more toxic and pointless mode.

The whole of Scotland’s population could mill around within Mexico City’s official limits. My hosts’ issues are those of an exploding, youthful megalopolis, beset with long-standing (and sometimes unavoidable) structural problems. By comparison, any problems Scotland’s cities are doucely manageable.

Yet the networks of good souls, seeking to act with creativity and optimism, hum across the world. Cities are made of citizens, after all.

Laboratory for the City’s website is http://labcd.mx/labforthecity/. 

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today).

What makes for a "creative place" in Scotland? PK essay for Sunday Herald

I was asked to write an essay by my old paper The Sunday Herald about the idea of how you make a "creative place" in Scotland - extending and riffing on my experience as a judge for the Creative Places award for Creative Scotland, announced a few weeks ago. (Unedited version below). It was a nice opporunity to ruminate on my own relationship between creativity and place. I was delighted by the witty graphic on the left, which makes a limpid watercolour out of one of the architectural "carbuncles" that Coatbridge (my home town) is notorious for. 

How art can reinvent our towns

Sunday Herald "Essay of the Week", 29 January 2012

By Pat Kane

It was at the start of my jog, during a weekend visit to my mum, that I came upon the town's newest landmark: the Coatbridge Superhero Archway.

At the mouth of the Monklands Canal, two guys were bolting the cast-iron sculpture on to some old pillars. The arch depicts three masked and caped crusaders, surrounded by flora, fauna and the industrial workers of the town's past. On the way back, I ran down the old canal to the high street. What used to a be slalom ride of broken Buckfast bottles – the green, green glass of home – is now a veritable sculpture park. Witty, outsized objects, riffing on Coatbridge's heritage as the "Iron Burgh", open out into an amphitheatre that could (on that single day in June when the cloud breaks) be adequately described as Mediterranean.

And here, instead of lost, angry guys swaying and muttering their way home, there were clumps of Glee-like, floppy-fringed teenagers, using this stage to mount their squeaking, shrieking rehearsals for life.

For a town which won Carbuncle Of The Year in 2007, this has the makings of a municipal counter-attack. The superhero arch was inspired and supported by comic book and movie writer Mark Millar, a local lad done good. The sculpture promenade is a thematic extension of the Summerlee Heritage Museum, which elegantly frames a lost industrial past as well as any comparable institution.

There is one more unexpected glint of cultural gold I've discovered in my home town (apart from its reserves of excellent pop stars and unstoppable footballers). A very accomplished and influential mover in the Scottish arts establishment told me proudly that his child has just got into Coatbridge College's performing arts department – "he's delighted to be there, it's very highly rated". And on checking, so it proves (which might explain the Glee Kids down at the Canal). Who'd a thunk?

So does all this activity mean that Coatbridge might count as a "creative place"? I ask because I've just completed my judging duties on an awards scheme, begun by Creative Scotland this year, which aims to "celebrate and recognise the hard work and imagination that contributes to the rich cultural life of a community, as well as its social and economic wellbeing". It was a fascinating process, and a delight to meet the excited winners.

But it's made me think hard about how we might define a "creative place". Can creativity be conjured out of your fly-blown town by some adroit marketing and branding exercise? Is it right to place an expectation on parts of Scotland that might be doing their best to survive, that they find a way to make themselves sing and dance for passing tourists as well? Or is there something new here about finding untapped sources of optimism and energy in the country – rooted in local action and imagination, rather than the usual political flyting?

The Canadian economist Richard Florida has made a global career for himself by advocating a formula that "technology, talent and tolerance" is what's required to make your area "creative". Technology meaning a combination of networks and transport, allowing mobility and connectedness; talent meaning universities, start-up zones, cultural sectors; and tolerance meaning a willingness to accept bohemian, non-majority lifestyles, and thus the kind of personal eccentricity that drives innovation. (Florida is notorious for his "gay" index – the healthier your gay scene, usually the higher your creativity quotient). Florida's template has been criticised for its cookie-cutter approach: the unedifying spectacle of burghers scurrying around looking for their local "3Ts", then handing it over to a branding agency to polish up for the tourist/investment market.

The Creative Place Awards are a fascinating counter to the idea that there is a formula for civic creativity. If any finalist was close to Florida's 3Ts, it was Huntly – where its head (a German artist) had commissioned a South African artist to rebrand the market town, and whose vision for the moribund central square partly involved turning empty shopfronts into artistic installations.

Creetown, one of the category prizewinners, was also setting itself up as an "art town" – but the link seemed more integral: the local granite mines had attracted acclaimed Japanese sculptor Hideo Furuta, who then redesigned its Adamson Square into a beautiful swirl of grey, glittering carvings. Kilmartin House had built a steady visitor attraction from its neolithic remains, but Prestonpans took the model of a not-for-profit community pub as the basis for its artistic programme. Another category winner, Wigtown, was making the most of the current appetite for readers and writers to find themselves in congenial places, the better to contemplate ideas and experiences away from the digital chatter.

Did St Andrews – which probably fits most of Florida's categories already – really need to be awarded its category winner prize (towns with a 100,000-plus population), even given its plans were by far the more developed and ambitious? This is perhaps a flaw in the Creative Place approach that needs to be addressed: the extent to which localities can even get to the starting gate of effectively promoting their "creativity" to funding agencies. Those which already have more cultural capital and confidence will be able to make a much more fluent case than those at the hard-scrabble end of Scottish life.

AT the end of the ceremony, I sensed that Andrew Dixon, head of Creative Scotland, had registered this problem – putting a call out to places like Raploch in Stirling (home of the El Sistema/Big Noise project, otherwise losing its funding this year) or areas in Glasgow such as Govan.

Yet his other prompts – to Ullapool, a centre for ideas driven by the energies of new MSP Jean Urqhuart, or to Skye, with its Gaelic College and other festivals – recognises that Scotland might have a particular answer to the "creativity" question: one that comes from the way that island or rural communities draw from language or landscape, as much as from post-industrial communities grappling with their heritage and legacy.

At the ceremony, I couldn't help quoting the famous MacDiarmid lines: "Scotland small? Our infinite, multiform Scotland small?" But I also recalled what the Channel 4 executive Stuart Cosgrove said when I asked him why he was buying a house in Glasgow's Dennistoun: "Because there's a thousand stories in every street." In his 1990s C4 show Halfway To Paradise and his obsessional football broadcasts, Cosgrove exemplifies that approach to Scottish contemporary life that looks for the beauty, the intensity and even the globality in the local.

In a Scotland about to stop the world and get on, we should be looking for ways that the vapours of self-confidence and optimism billowing from political leaders can suffuse every corner of Scottish society. Articulating your local story, and then using that as a resource for all kinds of enterprise – not just cultural and artistic – could be one obvious way to do that.

Yes, tourism is one part of the equation, though the exact nature of the tourist market you seek determines how you tell that story. The “internal” tourist - buying Pete Irvine’s Scotland The Best or reading Scottish quality papers, perhaps in futures years benefitting from an education in Scottish studies, keen to test Macdiarmid’s fractal notion of the country - will be alive to ersatz hype of all kinds. 

The virtuous circle, for the tourist industry, is that an exacting internal market will provide the kinds of inimitable experiences sought by high-end cultural tourists from around the world. All those “Rough Guide” buyers and “Wallpaper” readers (or their European and American equivalents), keen to return to the metropolitan home with treasured narratives of the rich Caledonian lifestyle. 

Yet why should we read "creativity" as meaning only arts, culture and media? The director of West Kilbride's Craft Town Scotland, one of the Creative Place winners, told me with some pride that they were already a "Transition Town". The Transition Towns movement – comprising 700 places in 35 countries, adhering to shared practices of sustainability – is an example of how the doughty issue of low-carbon living can come alive, as a friendly day-to-day experience.

Its founder, Rob Hopkins, is quite explicit that one of the principles of Transition – apart from building up the resilience and self-sustaining nature of communities, and keeping their supplies as local as possible – is what he calls "inner" transition. People need an "engaged optimism", aroused by acting in concert with their neighbours, to defy hard times.

In Hopkins' words, "playfulness, creativity and happiness" are key. The ends of a Transition Town might be to get off the treadmill of growth: but the means are carnivals, festivals, galumphing great local initiatives, using all the tools of arts and culture to incite involvement and commitment.

West Kilbride's winning offer was due to its explicit vision about the role of "makers" as central to the wellbeing of communities. Makers is a broad new term from the US, celebrating the power of craft across arts, technology and the trades. (It could easily trace its origin to Scots: we call our poets "makars", a word close to the Greek root of poetry, poiesis, meaning an act of creation).

It was genuinely exciting to hear Crafttown's director, Maggie Broadley, enthuse about a new kind of "makerism" – putting technical apprentices, artistic producers and older mentors from other industrial eras into the same creative places.

We hear politicians' abstract words about the "reindustrialisation of Scotland" in a green economy. But initiatives like Crafttown start to herald a new popular culture of ingenuity and daily enterprise in Scotland, which creates a seedbed for sustainable living, via an active, skill-oriented pursuit of wellbeing. This vision of "creativity" moves beyond the arts-media definition, into something like the basic human energy of a nation.

Yet my mind drifts back to my own experiences of place and creativity, and for some reason, it drifts to Girvan. Like many Coatbridgeans in their late 40s, my memory of the Scottish seaside town is full of bitter-sweetness. I shared with a graphic designer friend of mine an obsession about Girvan for a while – not just because of the smelly motorised boats that went round its concrete pond, but its 1972 commissioning of Keith Albarn (cybernetic artist and father of Damon) to build a psychedelic palace called the 5th Dimension (a kind of fairground ride for the mind) on its seafront.

I'm convinced that a large chunk of my imaginative development began with me clambering around this unreal structure as a child. If anything is worth a retro reconstruction, it's the 5th Dimension. (It also shows that Scottish localities reaching out for cosmopolitan artists is nothing new). But it's an example that proves why the current "creativity" of any place should begin through a recall of the "creativity" that already exists there.

How many stories can we excavate, and perhaps generate, from the massive commitment to pleasure and freedom that the Scottish seaside town represents? Their current travails – in terms of poor employment and drugs cultures – are well known. But anyone who visits them, after they fight back their nostalgic disappointment, can see what a stage they could be for the imagination.

One element of Florida's mantra – "it's not new malls with high rents that support creativity, but old buildings with cheap rents" – applies directly to the Scottish seaside town. What could bohos and makers bring to these places? What would it take to drape a string of Brightons down Scotland's coasts?

YET when it comes to my home town, I have to admit that the very idea of Coatbridge even being able to make an argument for itself as a "creative place" has its own poignancy. As a teenager, I found creative enclaves there, for sure: a local library teeming with European and American modernist literature; a school drama department; English teachers, who responded to my expressive hunger; and later, the Masonic halls and local pubs that would allow spotty musicians to mess about for hours.

But I can't deny that much of this occurred in a mild warzone of tall poppy-cutting – where sports were the only cultural expression worthy of a young man; where deviance from the herd was a kind of punishment in advance, for those not wishing to submit to the managed life.

So you explode out of that environment – to Glasgow, its universities, London and then the world (of ideas and of cities) – driven by the desire to shake off the shackles. But that explosion has its own psychological costs and pathologies; and over the years, you find out how many other interesting, idiosyncratic friends simply didn't have the willpower to break away as freely as you did.

The idea that something like Creative Places – or indeed, the whole approach of a Creative Scotland – mollycoddles people into creativity that it creates an extended kindergarten that protects the real artist from struggle, or the need for do-or-die commitment ... Well, it's a soundbite.

But it's possible to be in a historical moment where all the boats of human potential rise together – if we find ourselves with enough collective will, and the right tools to hand. Let's be patient with a good big idea, integrative and sustaining, when it arises.

The standard Scottish snarl would be that schemes like this are bourgeois-bohemian jobs for the bourgeois-bohemian girls and boys: we should subject them to the X-rays of money and power analysis, and find them wanting. Alternatively, maybe this drawing-together of the dots of Scottish social potential is exactly the kind of native innovation we always thought a more autonomous Scotland would be all about. Sometimes, just sometimes, we are the answer to our own prayers.

And in a personal spirit of reconciliation, I urge the good burghers of Coatbridge to get their act together as a Creative Place for next year. With all due respect, it's about time.

Pat Kane is one half of Hue And Cry, whose new album, Hot Wire, is out in March. His forthcoming book is Radical Animal www.radicalanimal.net

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: walking through Glasvegas, from consumerism to sustainability

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - sparked by some recent long walks down the consumerist thoroughfares of Glasgow, with an ecological mindset in my head. How can this passionate embrace of stuff, fashion and the casual purchase be shifted towards a low-carbon sustainable Scotland? All comments welcome. 

* * *

As the trendy band comes out with its new, difficult third album, the urban reality of Glasvegas – as you encounter it, while being an everyday, middle-aged pedestrian – is sometimes quite the overwhelming spectacle.

Best place to begin is Charing Cross, advancing east down Sauchiehall Street: a bacchanal of casinos, a scatter of Asian takeaways, every size and shape and theme of bar and club and venue, populated by a nervy mix of students and office workers.

You make a brief, non-commodified genuflection to the CCA(Centre for Contemporary Arts) and the GFT (Glasgow Film Theatre), then it’s down the hill to the glassier and glossier halls of Buchanan Galleries – like a claustrophobic theme-park ride of the world’s biggest brands. And then, if you have the energy, Princes Square and the Merchant City: where the city’s plutocracy (or otherwise credit-worthy) cavort and preen, availing themselves of outer- and underwear shops of Oscar-ceremony standard, with the elephantine Corinthian Club their most available catwalk.

Deep in the labyrinths of eco-thinking at the moment, I’ve been making these regular journeys with my Martian head on. What is all this? Why is it all remotely necessary? You have to push a little further towards the Trongate before things get any less mercantile and fashion-obsessed. Then it’s all struggling galleries, strange comix shops, and the indie-schmindie oasis of the Mono bar and the vintage clothes shop Mr Ben.

They’re still selling, sure, but at least they’re tapping into waves of history, or corners of quirkiness or obsession – none of the lock-step cuts or patterns that sometimes make Glasgow crowds seem like an army of marketing-programmed clones. And then, if you really keep going, Glasgow Green opens up for you: swathes of green grass, park benches not trying to sell you a damn thing, holding back the towers of the Tennent’s brewery (though not its stench) at the other side.

I sat there the other day, looking back on this brawling, greedy, hyper-retailed city centre, and allowed the most regular thought in my head these days to slowly emerge. How do we ever get from this huge collective investment in conspicuous consumption, to anything remotely resembling a materially sustainable society?

In Glasgow at least, shopping is clearly the main ritual (apart from the fitba’) of inclusion, status and belonging for so many – from the determined families with their fistfuls of Primark and sports-shop bags, to the leggy apparitions slipping into people-carriers with wispy, expensive things dangling from their fingers.

The writer and film-maker Ewan Morrison has been charting this territory with his Tales From The Mall, well worth a visit. But his hipster’s disdain, though eloquent and witty, isn’t enough of a response to the sheer momentum of Glasgow’s (or anywhere else’s) consumer frenzy.

The brilliant Tim Jackson, recently deposed head of the Sustainable Development Commission, has a concise one-liner about the unacknowledged dissatisfactions of consumer living. “We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.”

Jackson’s explanation for this grammar of frustrated unhappiness is that human nature is strung across two axes: one goes from novelty-seeking to love of tradition; the other goes from selfish behaviour to altruistic behaviour (and Jackson amasses much evidence to show how credible the whole picture is).

The problem is that our institutions are encouraging us to operate on only half of this picture, the selfish, novelty-seeking quadrants – those institutions being consumer-driven capitalism, aided and abetted by massively sophisticated advertising and unfettered financial flows perpetually looking for a return. We can change these institutions to cover the whole spectrum, says Jackson. We have to, given how much heedless consumption is contributing to trends in global warming and other environmental indicators.

The most interesting part of his argument, from a Scottish political perspective, are the nature of the institutions he proposes as part of the solution. For Jackson, it lies in the provision of strong public services and goods – in particular, well-constructed spaces and environments in which people can come together to enjoy each others company, exchange small trades and enthusiasms, express care and attention to others without pressure of time or money.

For the sake of living lightly enough on the planet – at least to be able to survive its Gaian revenge strategies – we must re-engineer a style of existence that places as much value on tradition and altruism as it does on novelty and me-first-ism.

Now surely Glasgow, from memories of Jimmy Reid to the furthest-flung credit union in Easterhouse, has more than enough of the first two to go around. Gerry Hassan’s much-underrated project of social dreaming, Glasgow 2020, attempted to give voice to a future of Glasgow that was rich with dreams of self-empowerment and collective improvement, vaulting beyond the lights of the latest city-centre mall.

And beyond Glasgow, Scotland surely has a deep attitudinal well to draw on for a new public realm. I attended the tenth anniversary meeting of the International Futures Forum last weekend. The IFF is a curious but powerful mix: a selection of major international policy and business gurus, who come regularly to benchmark their grand theories against places such as Falkirk and Dundee, and the schools, prisons, council offices and arts centres therein.

What they register in places like Falkirk is a desire for social innovation that doesn’t get caught up in false ideological battlegrounds, like Westminster’s current “big-state Good Society versus small-state Big Society”. From San Francisco to Mumbai, these experts marvel at the ability of Scots to start conversations about public improvements that gather up individuals and local groups, businessmen and councillors, to achieve solid and persistent results.

Shouldn’t councils such as Glasgow begin to recognise the contradiction between their espoused socialist history, and the consciousness-fragmenting consumerism that overpowers what should be a great convivial space for its citizens? Can they shift the needle of civic priorities in the city centre away from the chip-and-pin device?

And in defiance of Andrew Neil and his abuse of “Scotland’s cloud-cuckoo land”, and with the beginnings of a low-carbon reset for Scottish society in place, can’t we begin to recognise who we actually are, and what we actually want in Scotland?

It means not being cynical about the tears shed by a first minister when recalling how his father used to toil into the night, preparing insurance claims for miners with injuries or poor health. Is our much derided centre-left policy consensus between the parties a sign of complacency and mediocrity – or it is actually an authentic, robust platform from which even more ambitious policies for a flourishing future might rise?

As ever, from me, independence is the indispensable operating system that will get us there. Still, as Jim Sillars said, we need to take sides in Scotland, as well as take Scotland’s side. Glasvegas – or at least that tinseltown-in-the-rainversion of Scotland’s most energetic city – is mostly on the wrong side of the Scottish future. But it needn’t be so.

Map of Thoughtland: Ewan Morrison's Tales From The Mall

Anecdotes, jokes, urban myths, tales of horror, boredom, infatuation or even just shopping – almost everybody has a story to tell about something that happened to them in a shopping mall. For example, you may have heard the one about the man who was accidentally locked inside John Lewis for a night and slept in the bedding section; or the one about how an entire mall had to be closed for a day because of something ‘un-hygenic’ that fell out of somebody’s handbag; or the one about the teenager who caught her mum buying lingerie with her lover in Victoria’s Secret. There are stories of love and hate; of how communities have been transformed for the better or completely destroyed by malls.

 Tales from the Mall started life as a collection of short stories by myself. Since the research material turned out to be so rich, I’ve decided to expand the project, to create a collection of Scottish ‘mall stories’.

via ewanmorrison.com

Ewan is an ambitious, contemporary Scottish novelist, but who began as a filmmaker, and who has roamed promiscuously around the image industries before settling down at his laptop to chart the libidinal landscapes of Scotland/UK. Tales From The Mall is a multimedia act of storytelling around modern consumer experience. Everything Ewan does is informed by a very sharp and well-read critical intellect. Worth tracking. 

Write at the centre of everything: Attending the European Writers' Parliament, Istanbul (part 1)

Here is the first of my two reports (and there's probably a few pieces more to come) from my attendance at the European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul, 25-27 November, 2010. For me an extraordinary few days - bringing me into contact with a continent of writers and thinkers, and beginning a relationship with one of the most compelling cities I've ever visited (and one of the most fascinating national political cultures too). This piece is also published in my Caledonian Mercury column.

* * *

At the start, the suburbs of Istanbul whoosh by the coach window like Naples, or the outer boroughs of New York: it's all toothsome ad hoardings, mysterious blocks of industrial storage, lots of interpretive driving not worth thinking too much about.

And then, as the hills around the Bosporous begin to rise and dip, the living city comes into view - box-houses flecked with yellow windows, encrusted on the hills like domestic coral. And breaking up the pattern, with spotlights spilling up walls, minarets and domes, are huge mosques. Sitting at the top of each hill, they loom and recede in your perspective, following a natural order.

I've been attending the European Writers Parliament in Istanbul, over 25-27th November, 2010, as the Scottish representative. Just off the plane, I'd already met some fellow Writer-Parliamentarians: a clutch of Icelandic writers ebullient about their country's future. "We've identified the bad people, we have a new constitution, we're voting on it tomorrow. It's all quite dynamic!"

Among them is a homburg-hatted philosopher, who's working with Bjork on resisting the corporate take-over of Icelandic natural energy assets. We lightly compare the fate of small nations, and the relative utility of Kindles (they will be in my "Commission", titled "Literature in the Digital Era").

Eventually the Hilton International Istanbul lets us in, as we pass through two security checks and an airport scanner in the lobby. Again, this sets off some familiar city memories: the Europa Hotel in Dublin, in rock'n'roll most loved, and in terrorism most bombed; the Glasgow Hilton, which sits across from my beloved Mitchell Library like the defensible headquarters of some future coup.

 

Amid decor which combines Texan carvery with sultan's library, there are photo blow-ups of previous visitors - including the Queen, Muhammed Ali and Jackie Kennedy - to Conrad Hilton's first international hotel outside of America. (Why? Hilton was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor at the time, who was brought up in Istanbul). So if it was safe enough for the glitterati of the 50's and 60's - and where was Sinatra, incidentally? - it's safe enough for this group of pensive, variably-kempt shufflers. But where is the implicit threat coming from?

This recent bombing of the business district in Istanbul might make a temporary resident of a prestige building a little nervous (the suspects' list includes Kurdish rebels, Al-Qaida or some other faction in the swirl of Turkish politics). But we emerge from our power-showers the next morning to face a somewhat more literary rebellion. VS Naipaul, due to give a keynote speech to the delegates, has "by mutual agreement" withdrawn from the conference: a delegation of Muslim Turkish writers have objected to the great curmudgeon's disdain for political Islam and all its works.

If I've understood anything from my cribbing over the last few days on Turkish history, the very selection of Naipaul as speaker in the first place triggers instant debates around the importance of Turkish secularism. The very formation of Turkey, as a modern-nationalist project under Ataturk in 1923, is premised on a suppression of everyday, visible and audible Islam from the public sphere.

And Kemalism (the name for Turkish secularism) isn't just backed up by the usual layers of Enlightenment-wielding bookish intellectuals, but by the full force of the military establishment. This "deep state" recently threatened to conduct a "e-coup" in 2007 - the message was posted on an army website - because the wife of a prospective president was wearing an Islamic headscarf in public.

Above all this floats a familiar balloon of world-city ambition. Istanbul's current status as European City of Culture (an obvious component of Turkey's long and thwarted campaign to become a full member of the European Union), and its general fashionability among the Newsweek types, means this Writers' Parliament is clearly a prized part of a cosmopolitan branding strategy.

But if you're going to invite grumpy radicals like the UK novelist Hari Kunzru, Ireland's William Wall and myself into the room... well, they can hardly expect this to all go too smoothly. The Naipaul no-show is merely a lightning-rod for the contrarian, critical energy that's already crackling through the enormous convention room at the Hilton.

 

 And after one or two throat-clearing or majestically abstract speeches (I liked the idea from the veteran left-liberal Murat Belge that "the only ethos of writing should be infinite critique - this is the only control mechanism of the writer"), Hari Kunzru serves very well indeed as an alternative lightning-rod.

My first encounter with him is hilarious: we both greet each other in like media-wanker manner ("good to see you actually exist"), and it takes us about thirty minutes of motor-mouthing to situate ourselves in our respective cultural landscapes (Deleuze? Check. Kirsty Wark on Late Review? Check. Tales of postmodern drollery and criminal networks in three other continents? Check). After that, all is well, and I can settle back with my You-Tube-ready iPhone and happily record his plenary speech, given in lieu of Naipaul.

It's excellent. His first theme is "the space of literature", nowadays defined all around by information technology. Out of this space's main shapers - corporate bodies, adminstrators and engineers - writers should make common cause with the last of those (otherwise known as hackers). Yet what writers and coder-hackers should build together is not an easy objective to define.

Current information platforms can potentially send a writer's texts all over the world, able to gather new readers in the most surprising places. But they also release those texts from any kind of commercial relationship - easily evading any copyright laws, and freed from any solid paper object that could be sold. "In this world of sharing and infinite reproducibility", says Hari, "the value of our labor is being driven down. People want us to work for free. How are we to live, as writers? Should we even expect to live ‘from writing’?" Much discussion about e-books, neo-communism and United Writers later.

Hari's second main theme was around the consequences upon language of the war on terror, particularly the way that a "playful, creative" multiculturalism has become "increasingly used by cultural conservatives of all stripes to police cultural boundaries".

It's a delicate argument to conduct in the Turkish context - where, for example, the millions of Kurds who live in the country also reside in many of its national neighbours, and whose politics are articulated through both the most normal modes (their own national tv channel and media) and the most extreme (the PKK, a political movement that uses terrorism as a tactic). A country where a self-consciously "moderate Muslim" government finds itself in a delicate battle of position with secular-nationalists (backed by the generals) as to the "Islamicization" of daily life in Turkey.

 

So when Kunzru criticised the super-patriotic Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions, there is at least the virtue of something clear and incontrovertible to oppose, on freedom-of-speech grounds. The chief patriotic insult seems to be the description of the massacres and deportations of the Armenian people from the Ottoman empire after WW1 as a "genocide" (uttered by Pamuk, and our opening speaker Murat Belge).

But it gets tricky when Kunzru condemns "Enlightenment fundamentalists... puffing up their chests about the values of the Enlightenment, as a badge of their superiority against poor and marginalised immigrant populations". I'm not quite sure whether Kemalism, Turkey's mix of rationalism and nationalism, would see itself in that picture. 

Hari advocates instead a "genuine internationalism...asserting our common life across borders of race, class and religion". But doesn't that "internationalism of our common life" have some relationship to the Enlightenment - at least in its universalism, if not for its fundamentalism?

"A liberal politics of absolute inclusivity, while presenting itself as pragmatic, has the disadvantage of obscuring genuine differences and antagonisms", continued Kunzru. But such a liberal politics would have the advantage of being able to include and cope with VS Naipaul airing his "divergent views" in a tolerant, rational space of a Writers Parliament, rather than (as the Muslim writers were able to achieve) cancelling his visit on the grounds of "offence to Islam".

For all those quicksands, Hari's statement was a great way to start our journey across this almost impossibly varying European terrain of cultures, languages and nations.

And straightaway, you arrived in the most surprising of places. I wandered into our discussion room, and found myself sitting next to a graceful, modest woman with her head traditionally covered. Introducing herself as Cihan Aktas, I found out later that she had been in the forefront of objections to Naipaul's visit: "The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling", she was quoted in the Guardian, "I cannot attend the event given all of this."

But in the meantime, after listening to her reserved take on the relationship between the net and literature, I watched her pick up a copy of my book The Play Ethic, and rifle methodically through the bibliography. Before we started, Cihan passed me a scrap of paper with list of names. "You know these thinkers?" she asked. On the paper were the roll-call of the European philosophical far-left: Zizek, Ranciere, Badiou, Negri. "I'll mail you on your philosophical interests", she said firmly. "For my newspaper column".

Curiouser and curiouser. Meanwhile, the Macedonian poet in the corner was concentratedly marking a fistful of sheets, readying to deliver...

Visit the European Writers' Parliament website. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Edinburgh, City of Protestors, Unrepentant Bankers & Wandering Braniacs

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – reflections on a week spent with the contradictions of Edinburgh in Festival. All comments welcomed. 

* * * 

"YOU know, we really have to blame the politicians for all this”, said the ancient, modulated voice from the front row. “Clinton wanted us to give mortgages to the blacks, and we did so. Bush wanted us to give mortgages to the Hispanics, and we did that too. Yes, I'm a banker. But why blame me?”

You couldn't script it. But as I came to the conclusion of my week both working for, and wandering around, the Edinburgh International Book Festival – and the city in general – it struck me that Edinburgh is a place which has a very distinct script indeed, running away beneath the milling bourgeoisie and shilling performers of the season.

The voice at the beginning was piping up at the end of a session with the journalist John Lanchester, explaining his funny, furious account of the financial crisis, Whoops! But with every elegant and well-informed question from the audience – “Shouldn't we blame profit-driven ratings agencies like Moody's?”, “What about a kite mark for banks who submit to a liquidity-based levy?” - you slowly realised where you were. 

This is a city filled with hordes of financial “innovators” (and maybe a few traditionalists), who naturally knew how to “speak Money”, as Lanchester put it.

Listen to the Weegie, some of you might be muttering: where was he during the last ten years of Goodwinolatry, exponential house prices, Harvey Nichols? Mostly either 51.3 miles west or in London, as it happens: Edinburgh is experientially stranger to me than both Camden or Hillhead. It usually drags me over, or upwards, because its concentrations of capital – political, financial and cultural – are too strong to resist.