Updated 15/07/2010

This is the letter from Rajko Radovic of Toronto.

‘One does not read Iain Sinclair’s ‘M: Murder in the City’ (Sight & Sound, April 2010), one watches it like a just uncovered underground feature. At the end of every line is a cinematic cue after which comes a new moving image. And it all plays like a well documented dream sequence. Projected against the deliciously weird black hangings of a film essay, it turns the casual reader into a screening device for the mind’s eye’s pleasure.
I would just hope that there is yet a visionary producer left afloat on top of that toxic shroud we call the British film industry who would lock Mr Sinclair in what’s left of Pinewood Studios and give him free rein to turn ‘M: Murder in the city’ into some kind of delirium inducing political punk thriller with big bucks.’

best,

Iain

Hotel

The small hotel in Rovertu Gkalli she had recommended was indeed convenient as a starting point for urban expeditions, and for debriefing sessions with gracious Athenians, prepared to indulge my pointed interrogations. The paper-thin walls, and that nostalgic bouquet of drains, were off-set by a panoramic view from the roof terrace, demonstrating the relationship between the Acropolis and the museum at its foot, both of them tactfully lit to stand out against the living boneyard of white and pinkish-white box buildings, the terracotta tiles and the narrow apartments from another era, caved in from the pressure of development and left alone as interesting tumbles of masonry.
Breakfast in this hotel was a necessary penance, the same self-service troughs you find everywhere, the spitting coffee-sludge dispenser, along with coachloads of young American college students brought here to keep the business going in pinched times. They averaged three circuits of the postmortem sausage and rubber egg selection, and they were very cheerful about it, refuelling against the threat of a summons back to the culture bus. ‘Sorry, sorry. It will be better tomorrow,’ the redundant waitress, the hovering figure in black, whispered.

Airport

Our first arrest came at the site of the old Athens airport, out on the coast, near Faliro Bay. The whole curve of shoreline, despoiled by the perverse aesthetics of grand project architecture, was a natural wonder. The new tramline dropped weekenders at their pine-sheltered seaside clubs. Nobody cycled or jogged on the official city paths, they were here: slow men playing football as a communal dance; a shuffle, a feint, a sway, and a long rest. There were swimmers in the clear water. Men with comfortable bellies in tight polo shirts paddled balls with force, but no venom, across high nets. Gentle exercise was a privilege of the city, enjoyed without nannying rhetoric and vainglorious expenditure.
It was suicidal to attempt a crossing of the new road, between coastal strip and former airport. A bridge, twisted like a badly repaired spine, led directly from one abandoned Olympic zone to the airfield with its blocks of buildings given over to obscure trade fairs and expositions. The bridge was padlocked. The walls and concrete ramps were dense with graffiti: HEZBOLLAH GAME THE FUTUER (sic). Reaching the far side, buffeted by traffic and feeling very much at home, I discovered that the airfield was open to inquisitive walkers, the fence was down and there were no obvious prohibitions. I followed traces of runways where we had once landed, en route to the islands, and I snapped tyre marks, avenues of lighting poles and over-designed shelters made for the 2004 Olympics. The derelict airfield was a retail park waiting for finance.
I was lining up a shot of a grid of cracked tiles, in front of some windowless block-buildings, glorified container sheds in pale blue, when the car screeched up. The driver didn’t speak much English, just two words: ‘Get in.’ As we bounced across the field, I remembered the fate of the British plane-spotters; perhaps it had not been such a great idea to make a photo survey of this public wilderness. Anna, I thought, was looking rather tight lipped. Images are always contentious. The idea of a long interrogation, and whatever followed, was not appealing. In the Lower Lea Valley, as I had heard from so many photographers, film was seized, digital material deleted: not here, not this time, photography was not an issue. The driver was bored, he had no idea what we were after, unlanguaged aliens doing crazy stuff in the middle of nowhere. He dumped us back on the main road.

Theft

We learnt to time our breakfast raids between coaches. It was our last morning and I wanted to get to the Museum of Cycladic Art. I was intrigued to see a businessman in a rather too well-cut pinstripe suit lurking in the doorway of the fast-food bunker. The clientele were otherwise slogan T-shirt American students or crinklies like ourselves, dressed down for the culture tramp and wearing trainers. Was this an economic indicator? Were there still deals to be done, power breakfasts to be made, even in such a do-it-yourself cafeteria? The man, tanned, trim of hair, swept impatiently through the tables, giving off an odour of controlled annoyance, that his contact had failed to arrive on time. Turning from the coffee dispenser, on the far side of the room, I was surprised to see the pinstripe man flicking open his jacket and choosing to sit, back to back with my wife, in an otherwise quiet corner of the restaurant. I saw him dip under the table, get up and move rapidly away.
‘Did you leave something on the floor?’
It was the new bag, of course, and the credit cards, euros, spectacles. I had witnessed the whole slick operation and failed to put it together in time to prevent the theft.
The man on the desk didn’t want to know. ‘It doesn’t happen. You left the bag in your room.’
They had a CCTV camera, yes, but such men are clever, the critical moment would be masked by his jacket. I saw it all, I could recognise the man again, I had been watching him. Not interested. ‘You don’t want to become involved in a court case? They would never prove anything.’
We could use the phone to cancel the credit cards and pay for the calls. He couldn’t be sure where the nearest police station was to be found and he wouldn’t recommend making a report: the time, the formalities. Insurance, we have to do it. Greeks don’t have insurance. Which is a reasonable policy. We pay a premium, fill in forms, make claims, are challenged to find receipts and offered the equivalent of the secondhand value of the items, if any. And we’re still waiting.
Out on the streets, the mood was threatening. The National Gardens were closed, entrances guarded by black-beret soldiers with Plexiglas shields. Union protestors, with placards, were gathering on the other side of the road. But there was no difficulty about wandering through the opposing lines, we were unchallenged. Because the park, through which we wanted to walk, was secured against intrusion by those whose jobs were threatened, we found ourselves opposite the Presidential Palace on Irodou Attikou as the black limo swept in. The Museum of Cycladic Art was selling itself on a special exhibition of erotic sculptures and images. There were posters for the big show in town: Gilbert and George.

A NOTE ON EDITING

I’m grateful to the London Review of Books for their patronage over the years, for allowing me space to develop complicated essays, with detours and diversions. Their editing procedures are sensible and relatively painless. There is a house style, a liking for lengthy paragraphs, and so on, and we make our adjustments. In the case of ‘The Colossus of Maroussi’ report from Athens, which was written around a trip in January, the political situation accelerated while the piece waited on publication. Proofs were emailed to me, to be viewed in an internet café peopled by dealers and drifters in Polk Street, San Francisco. I was stuck in the Icelandic dust-cloud limbo. Printing a hardcopy was impractical. And beyond the energies of the moment. The editor, for reasons of length or pace, or suspicion of domestic special pleading and crude comedy, took out the sections I have ‘rescued’ for the website. Without seeing how the cuts worked against my original typescript, I failed to appreciate what might be lost. In some ways, as you’ll see, nothing very important. But for the integrity of the structure as I conceived it, these episodes are required to underpin the more polemic and topographical passages. The first visit to the breakfast bunker isn’t just a tourist postcard, it sets up the theft. The behaviour of the one man in the city dressed in a pinstripe suit was a small metaphor for the whole business. And the way that, going back out into the streets, we encounter the first protest.

Iain Sinclair

Also see this article (thanks to Lenore).

Three days, exploring the city and its satellite Olympic parks and stadia, in January 2010, when strikers and students are beginning to take to the streets. And the extent of the economic catastrophe is being felt. ‘All for the best in the best of all worlds,’ say the Greeks. ‘As long as we stick together.’

DOGS

They were going to hunt dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. A fertile myth – and the starting point for an essay, which is due to appear in The London Review of Books. Dogs everywhere. Unculled, collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: cleaned-up, neutered, turned loose. Tagged with blue collars. On film footage, shot two years after the 2004 Games, I noticed the loping beasts, freelance caretakers, patrolling the overgrown wilderness of the Olympic complex, out at Maroussi. Those who are condemned without justification become the sole occupiers of the deserted palace.

THE COLOSSUS OF MAROUSSI

An undervalued travel journal by Henry Miller, time out, between Paris and an American return: in the shadow of war. The first Miller title published by Penguin Books (1950), after original publication in 1941. Miller mythologizes the Falstaffian poet, George Katsimbalis. A war-damaged man, ever-thirsty, indulging epic flights of fancy. With all the madness of a grand project promoter.

He was talking of cities, of how he had gotten a mania for Haussmannizing the big cities of the world. He would take the map of London, say, or Constantinople, and after the most painstaking study would draw up a new plan of the city, to suit himself… Naturally a great many monuments had to be torn down and new statues, by unheard-of men, erected in their place. While working on Constantinople, for example, he would be seized by a desire to alter Shanghai. It was confusing, to say the least. Having reconstructed one city he would go on to another and then another. There was no let up to it. The walls were papered with the plans of new cities… It was a kind of megalomania, he thought, a sort of glorified constructivism which was a pathologic hangover from his Peloponnesian heritage.

GIORGIO de CHIRICO

Dreamer of ruins. Lived in Athens as young man. Attended the Polytechnic. Was present at the first Olympic Games of the modern era in 1896. The currant trade had collapsed, the country was bankrupt. De Chirico scorned the attempt at staging a parallel cultural Olympiad.

Dreary, tedious and above all artificial. A destructive atmosphere of intellectualism lay over the public and the actors. It looked as though everyone was stifling huge yawns… But the organisers of open-air spectacles do not want to understand and continue, more through stupidity than through obstinacy or conviction, to give these clumsy performances in all countries.

NEW AIRPORT

Familiar sheds: IKEA as a complimentary flightpath hangar in yellow and blue. Whisky hoardings for Johnnie Walker in terminal corridors and Metro station. HOPE WALKS FASTER THAN FEAR. THERE’S A GREAT BIG WORLD OUT THERE – & IT’S ALL YOURS.

OLD AIRPORT

Abandoned. Serviced by a padlocked bridge. Expensive sheds, ghosts of trade fairs and expositions, waiting for retail park funding. I am arrested, driven away, for wandering the site taking photographs. Unlike the paranoia of the Lower Lea Valley, nobody cares about the images. I’m dumped back on the main road.

GRAFFITI

Universal underclass babble. Not an audition for gallery space and alternative celebrity status. Football, music, Mao. Stencilled Uncle Sam: I WANT YOU TO PAY. Finger jabbing like Quentino Tarantino on his whisky billboard: I WRITE MY OWN SCRIPT. Trains, by unspoken agreement, are only sprayed up to window level.

MARKUPOLO STADIUM

A post-Olympic use has been found for one of the stadiums. Australians run a limited-over cricket league.

LEGACY EXERCISE

No Greeks sweat around the splendid new path at the base of the Acropolis rock. A few Coca-Cola executives and more Aussies come out in the dusk. When my niece gives the circuit a try, she is bitten by one of the guardian dogs.

NOSTALGIA

When we are thrown off the Metro, heading out for the Olympic Complex, we are decanted into a bendy bus, a viral torpedo, going nowhere very slowly, which makes us feel very much at home.

ARISTOTELIS (film-maker) INTERVIEW. London: 4/2/10

‘I grew up in Athens. Like most of the people who live there, I am not from Athens. I had a happy life. I lived in the suburbs. I studied architecture at the University of Athens. I was living near the centre, Omonia Square, part of the historic triangle of Athens. Omonia Square is a place where crime has increased. Prostitution: drugs: it’s an interesting place.’

‘The riots were not something new, this was happening for many years before… The riots started with one incident, the death of a young

student. Then everything broke loose. The sad thing is that nothing happened after that event. And now Greece is in a worse economic state. With the change of government almost everyone is in a bad situation and it’s a hard place to be and to work. The structure of society, based on family, based on friends, is what keeps us going: everyone helps one another. It’s not like England, where everyone is an individual.’

‘The Olympic Games were a great thing to have for historic reasons, but the Games were not well handled… Now the legacy of the Games is just empty buildings, we have no use for them. They are monuments for us, historic monuments, so we can handle them and live with them. We are used to living next to ruins. They are just ruins, they were never anything else. ‘

‘Yes, definitely, the Olympic project contributed to the situation we are in now. We have an increased debt. It’s the attitude Greek people have towards things. “It’s fine, it will get better – as long as we’re together, having fun. It will work out.” That’s history.’

MELINA MERCOURI

Movie diva, government minister. Mercouri invents the notion of a ‘City of Culture’. ‘Culture,’ she pronounced, ‘is Greece’s heavy industry.’

There is a clip of Mercouri on YouTube, like a superimposition of Never on Sunday and Psycho. She prowls up to Anthony Perkins and perches beside him to croon. ‘What’s it about?’ he asks. ‘Like all Greek songs, about love and death,’ she replies. ‘I give you milk and honey and in return you give me poison.’

OLYMPIC COAST ZONE AS JG BALLARD THEME PARK

Permitted paths vanish into dunes of landfill, into neurotic traffic, into rail tracks and tramways. But the old road, the ghost road, the one that was here before all this madness, has become a favoured route for joggers and cyclists. The Olympic Park, that corrupted legacy, is like mid-period Fellini: kite flyers, moody urbanists in long overcoats, white cars parked in unlikely places, a glitter of sea you can never quite reach. Across the coastal highway, over the tracks, is an area of balconied flats, steel-blue offices, and sex clubs with scarlet promises: STRIP LIVE SHOW. The final doodle on a white board marking the end of the Olympic zone confirms Neo Faliro as a JG Ballard theme park without content: THAT HEAVEN WOULD WANT SPECTATORS.

HELENA SMITH: 14/2/10

‘The peak, and the beginning of the end of the boom, came when Athens pulled off a successful Olympic Games in 2004. Hosting the world’s biggest sporting event was seen as a national triumph, but, at nearly €9bn, the games also stretched Greek coffers to breaking point.’

Iain Sinclair

Note from the webmaster

Below is a slide show of Iain Sinclair’s pictures taken during his trip to Athens. The pictures are of a decent size, so please be patient as it takes time to load them. The slide show will automatically show all pictures but you can also use the arrows to go forward and backward. You can maximize the slide show and view the pictures full screen. To exit the full screen slide show, press the ESC key. If you have any problem with the slide show, please use the Contacts page to email me.

[[Show as slideshow]]