Jez Noond:

Childhood amended (part 2):

Personal geographies form important aspects of our identities. Landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes, even lunar landscapes mould our psyches and our psychoses. Memories of places and spaces linger like way points over shoulders on the narrative journeys we call our lives.

Current thought on cognition and memory focusses on the notion that there is no central ‘hard-drive’ in the brain where memories are somehow stored and retrieved. There is only ever one copy of each of our memories in our brains. Individual memories are fragile texts, and when one is called into what we term consciousness it is read and then rewritten.

 

Memories change. They are fluid, liable, under conditions of joy or trauma, to be recast in new forms.

Childhood memories are rewritten as we age. Each time we remember a place from our childhood it fuses with new perceptions and new locales. What we call déjà vu can perhaps be seen as an indication that memory exists partly as sensory stimulus in the physical world around us.

A walk down any street may suddenly trigger a memory of a childhood event: the time you were bitten by a dog; those red sandals you wore to school. A particular arrangement of colours, buildings, avenues of trees, a quality of light, the sound of a bell, the smell of market stalls trigger synaptic pathways in our brains that stimulate the memory of a place that is similar.

As we walk on and enjoy this uncanny sensation (and enjoy the words we have that name these sensation events) the memory that was triggered has been amended; new experience has been tagged on.

My childhood has been amended.

This may be one reason why memory fades; the specific replaced by the generic. Perhaps this is why we seek the individual and the unique in a world that is increasingly modular and the same in feel.

My memories of growing up on an airfield are amended by these images. The photographs may not speak directly to you in the way they speak to me—these images send whispers to my ears and bring tears to my eyes. RAF Newton has taken me back down the Fosse. Back to my childhood Kemble and the anxiety of war.

The Fosse as runway to pacifism.

 

 

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(All images & text by Jez Noond.)

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Jez Noond:

Childhood Amended (part 1)

The Fosse Way runs diagonally across England, a north-easterly Roman road that connected Exeter in Devon to Lincoln in The Midlands. At Lincoln, the Fosse intersects with Ermine Street, the Roman road that connected London to York.

I grew up on an airfield in Gloucestershire. RAF Kemble is just under half way along the Fosse, not far from Cirencester. My earliest memories are of my father cycling to work, across the airfield, his blue police uniform gradually fading to grey as he disappeared into the morning fog, the red tail light on his bike; a lit cigarette that became extinguished. The Fosse Way cut through the airfield and ran along by the front wall of our garden. Open the front gate and you’d step right into the past.

Parallel to the Fosse was the main airfield runway. I’m certain of these large brush strokes of memory. Modern satellite mapping systems allow me to check remotely and online to scrutinise what is left of this terrain. The precise details however, the sensory data as it were, feel as though they have been lost, painted over by more recent experiences.

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I don’t know how I learnt about the Fosse Way but I know that I’ve known about it since before I can remember. There was and is something magical about the Fosse. When my father took us for drives in his Zephyr, I begin to understand what the Roman road meant, what it looked like.

The Fosse: the ditch became a metaphor.

 

As he drove along, I sat in the middle of the back seat, behind him and my mother. I looked ahead between their shoulders, through the windscreen at the perfectly straight Fosse undulating in grey-green hues to the horizon.

The Fosse Way was a like a runway.

RAF Kemble became fused with the anxiety of war. My childhood obsession with war has, to some degree, fictionalised my ‘growing up’. The planes that flew to Yemen from England in the Aden emergency of the 1960’s were maintained and sprayed at RAF Kemble.

For me, that childhood anxiety is present in the images that accompany this text. The images allow me to experience memories that have been rewritten, memories that have become overgrown, that have been left untended as new concerns have diverted attention away from anxiety.

The images are not photographs of my childhood, nor are they purely documentary in nature. They are images of memories. A kind of false memory syndrome. A methodology for memory.

And so, many years later, I visit a place towards the other end of the Fosse, in Nottinghamshire, a place that resembles the memories of my childhood back down the road in Gloucestershire. My mother and father, whose shoulders I looked over, are no longer with me. The memories of them are covered with lichens and blackberries too. The memory of my father’s police dog, an Alsatian called ‘Gunder’, on whose back I once rode as a small child, is now the black silhouette on a yellow sign at a perimeter fence. RAF Newton in Nottinghamshire, like Kemble, is one of the many World War II airfields dispersed along the Fosse Way.

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(All images & text by Jez Noond.)

If you are interested in writing a post for our LOCALITIES series, please get in touch.

 

Laressa Dickey:

Reporting in from Winter

At the Arkonaplatz Sunday Market, a full fox pelt with head and feet attached, for sale, and draped over the line holding the little market tent together.

I have seen one other fox in the city, alive and at night, rambling around Kollwitzplatz. It was a moment of confusion; it was a twinkling dark, and it seemed the shape loping around from street to curb then into the bushes of the park was either dog and cat or both, and my mind didn’t know which name to assign to it until of course, I was closer and saw the red coat. Then I felt very lucky. Meh, just a dog or a cat, but a FOX, now there’s something.

Some mornings early I go to Kollwitzplatz and sit on a bench near a grove of pine trees (which interestingly moves mysteriously from place to place in the park) and look at the snow crusted over the grass, on the sidewalks. No one has spoken to me, which is fine, because I mostly come here to be alone with the trees and the occasional bird. Sometimes I watch the changing sky with a famous artist who keeps the snow on her shoulders.

Intermittent rain, the cobblestones on the streets are shiny again.

Walked home a new way, felt like a new place. Saw an unrenovated building nearby and just past it in the same block, instead of the continuity of another building, an open space and a smattering of 5 trees, among some trash and recycling bins.

Later, up the steps of our building, more dirt and slosh from boots and shoes. I can’t remember which day is cleaning day when our mat will be leaned against the door. Little pebbles everywhere, from the sidewalks, which is what the city uses on snow and ice to get traction. My friend who was born here says, this fact, these little pebbles everywhere, they are “very Berlin.”

 

Mrs. Beanzz Coffee & Gossip, Ghent, Belgium:

Down a sidestreet from one of Ghent’s major shopping thoroughfares, you’ll find a scouts-type shop (De Banier) on one hand, a resin cow marking its entry. On the other side, Mrs. Beanzz Coffee and Gossip, which, despite its awkward name is a lovely place to have a drink. The coffeeshop’s windows face the canal; its cozy interior (dark walls, older furniture, vintage/possibly ironic paintings, board games and old cookbooks) and intimate tables suggest afternoons spent writing while gazing through windows spattered with rain. The hot chocolate is delicious. Typical prices (for Ghent), meaning a hot drink will cost you between €2 and €4. Also typical (for Belgium): drinks are served with a tiny snack.

Mrs. Beanzz
Hoefslagstraatje 6

Open Tuesday – Sunday, 9:00 am – 9:00 pm
Breakfast served 9:00 am – 4:00 pm.
Snacks and coffee served from 9:00 til 9:00.
Gossip: whenever you please.

 

Andrew Schroeder:

Land use never ceases to interest me, especially in places like Southern California, where geographic beauty meets late capitalism head on. Take for example this tiny strip of real estate wedged between the ocean, the Pacific Coast Highway and the cliffs of Santa Monica:

The buildings stand like a ragged row of teeth embedded in an otherwise perfectly plucked, pulled, and sandblasted face. Undoubtably this is an efficient way to carve up such a small space, at least from a developer’s perspective. But, imagine spaces like this if the economy had really tanked during the mortgage crisis of 2008. What would become of such structures?

I think one answer lies in another set of photos I made a few years ago. I’ve come across this type of land use before—in Vietnam, where developers have parceled out the landscape to such a degree that buildings are often comically thin. When the ambitious plans of speculators and inhabitants fail to materialize, gaps and spaces in the tightly woven fabric emerge to foster informal, even clandestine uses.

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Spice Bazaar, Ghent, Belgium:

Peppercorns. Cardamom pods (bright green, beautiful). Several kinds of cinnamon, from several different places. Blue flowers in sachets of tea. Candied mango, pineapple. Nuts of all kinds. Teas ditto. Everything beautifully presented. This is the only place in Ghent I have found so far where every spice you could possibly want—and the aforementioned teas, candied and dried fruits, nuts—can be found under one roof, in various quantities, and for what are generally good prices. The owner is friendly and helpful. Spice Bazaar is located at 25 Burgstraat (Tram 1, one stop past Gravensteen), and is open Tuesday-Saturday 9:30-12:30/2:00-6:30, Sunday 10:30-5:00.

 

Andrew Schroeder:

My recent relocation to the paradise of suburban Los Angeles has renewed my interest in (and search for) heterotopias in my everyday landscape. The first place to catch my interest was Balboa Park between Encino and Van Nuys. Foucault described heterotopias as spaces that juxtapose, in a single real place, several spaces that are incompatible. The landscape of Balboa Park is no exception. Bordered by the primary boulevards of the central valley as well as the Sepulveda Dam, the park is a wilderness that is coupled with manicured gardens and scratched by landscapes with purposes from recreation to utility to dwelling.

I recently wandered through a corner of this heterotpia, starting with the Japanese gardens. Formally perfect and embodying wabi-sabi aesthetics, the gardens are a heterotopia of juxtaposition and illusion. The architectural forms of Japan are cast against the mountains of southern California and coupled with a reference to a fictional universe: the gardens are recognizable to any Star Trek aficionado as Starfleet Headquarters. The Japanese gardens’ tranquility is partially derived from the gentle flow of water pulled from the enormous waste water treatment plant next door. Yes: this little slice of the Land of the Rising Sun is watered by the valley of a million flushing toilets. I managed not to be turned off by the hydrological flow out of the gardens and followed the stream to the smallest airport in Southern California: the San Fernando Valley Flyers Club maintains a runway and landing pads devoted solely to the flight of miniature aircraft.