A Street View to a Kill

Apologies for that title; last Sunday weirdly had the theme of San Francisco. In the morning, I finished reading Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (finally - it's been in the waiting pile since 2000); stumbled across a documentary on City Lights bookstore on Radio 4 in the afternoon; and then dropped by the second half of A View to a Kill in the early evening, just in time to see the oddly unengaging car chase with the fire engine, having missed the nonsensical namedropping of the movie's title in the middle. Still, that's my favourite bit, not least because at that point Christopher Walken and Grace Jones are looking across San Francisco Bay and directly at Berkeley, which is where I got married. The rest of the film is best forgotten, though.

I begin with Northern California because I've spent the last couple of weeks e-trotting around the place on Google Maps Street View. Let me avoid equivocation on this point: I love Google Street View. At the beginning of February, and feeling more than usually nostalgic for my erstwhile hangouts in Woodland and Davis, California, I thought I'd look up a few features on the map and the satellite pictures, maybe see the roof of our old apartment or Raley's, the supermarket where the apricot pie is good and the fried chicken isn't. When Google Maps instead offered me the opportunity to, goddammit, effectively walk about the place with 360 degree vision, I was so surprised and delighted that I may have sworn out loud. Addiction followed quickly; I covered pretty much all of central Davis (although I was slightly disappointed that the University isn't covered, presumably because it's state property) and Woodland, before moving on to Norman, Oklahoma, and various other familiar places. Thus, the sudden surge of interest in Street View this week, with the launch of a limited UK version, seems like old news. I be surfin' the zeitgeist like a culture, um, surfer.

Inevitably, there has been criticism from privacy groups and some sections of the press. I caught sight of an article in Metro yesterday in which the story title screamed something about GOOGLE SPYWARE, which pushes the definition of spyware somewhat (would you have guessed that it's published by the Daily Mail? Well, yes). Google have, quite rightly, pointed out that all images are taken from the perspective of public property, and that you don't see any more than you would actually walking down the street. Critics cite the case of the man spotted going into a sex shop (again, the outrage connected with this leads me to suspect that Metro and the like may have their terms confused again - you can't actually buy sex in those places, guys. It's not like pick'n'mix) or images of accident victims. But what if I'd seen those people myself, in person, as I was walking in the street? Would it be wrong of me to have seen them? Would there be hysterical press coverage of "SPYWARE IN YOUR HEAD - These so-called 'eyes' give their users the ability to 'see' up to fifty metres..."

The problem lies in our changing conception of public and private. I'm currently reading Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, the central argument of which is that gradual social change since (roughly) the nineteenth century onwards has eroded our sense of acting and being in public, and of being involved with strangers in ways that aren't characterised by discourses of fear and suspicion. Put another way, we have become increasingly internalised; psychological rather than sociological, personalities rather than acts or relationships (and Sennett is particularly interesting on this with regard to sexuality; there's a connection here with Foucault's argument about the creation of the homosexual as a human type, rather than a set of acts, but I'm not going to go into that now). In terms of physical environment, public space has similarly become eroded; postmodern architecture tends to regard open space as something to be moved through, not experienced in itself. Public space is something we suffer in order to reach the goal of our private space; our homes, our office, or our cubicle. At best, there may be a few benches where you can eat a sandwich before getting back to Microsoft Excel.

I'm only near the beginning of the book, so can't say any more about how the argument develops (I'm hoping there's a car chase and a wisecracking chimp, though). But it seems to me that the Street View debate suggests that our public spaces have become privatised, or at least they have when they're up for grabs on the internet thanks to an international corporation (perhaps, then, privatised in both senses). When I'm walking in the street, I can't honestly expect to move through space entirely unregarded (indeed, if I walked through Newcastle shrieking "DON'T LOOK AT ME!", the opposite would probably happen. At least, for a second or two). Being in public means we're going to be involved in interactions with others, however brief or negligible, whether we like it or not, and no amount of MP3 earphone social-buffering is going to change that (incidentally - while in a number of malls in the US this December I noticed that absolutely nobody was audially isolated in this way; again, different uses of space). Likewise, if I appear in the background of someone's photograph of the high street, am I justified in punching them in the throat for capturing my image on their lightbox of tricks? Probably not.

Now hang on a minute, you're saying. It's all very well beating up the Daily Mail, but what you're suggesting here is justification for a CCTV nation that won't sit well with any self-respecting Independent reader. Who do you think you are - Noel Edmonds? But the crucial point is that whereas CCTV is interested in what people are doing right now, Street View isn't interested in either 'people' or 'right now'. There's no temporal dimension. You may be annoyed that you've been seen popping to Spar in your parachute pants on 27 July 2008, but it's hardly surveillance of your ongoing life, simply an enigmatic moment frozen for the world to see (and remember, they could have seen it for themselves anyway just by being there, they just couldn't afford the air fare). Maybe that's where some of the animus has come from; we're in there, but just as background. Maybe we don't like being second fiddle to a load of buildings and, you know, stuff. Most of the images I've seen seem to have been taken early in the morning, with hardly anyone else around. Maybe it's a training programme for the survivors of the apocalypse (who have, of course, already been chosen). Incidentally, looking for evidence of when the images were taken is also fun - the billboards outside cinemas provide valuable clues (Davis seems to have been mapped about a month after I left, and Woodland two months after that).

There are other implications, of course - I'm interested, for instance, in how this is going to impact on our ideas of travel, since long haul flights are now morally comparable with embezzlement of an orphanage, and if seeing a city online becomes in any way a replacement for actually seeing it in person - but that's another story for another time. I'm off (that is, staying here on my sofa) to gawp around Northern California some more.

Terminal disease

Calm down, doughnutfans - I mean dis-ease, but I thought the cute use of punctuation in the title to undermine conventional meaning might be just too nauseatingly deconstructionist for the more delicate of you. I refer, of course, to the current Spencerian (Frank, not Herbert) management at Heathrow Terminal 5, and British Airways more generally. Whether it's losing the luggage of an entire small town, getting tangled up with caterers who sack their staff by megaphone, fixing prices or having their pilots go on strike, British Airways are rapidly becoming the Norman Wisdom of the skies. The world's favourite airline - if you like to point and laugh.

One of the effects of the embarrassment over Terminal 5 has been to entrench even more deeply a widespread scorn of Heathrow in general, one which I've always found rather unfair. In fact, I rather like airports. The first sentence of Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul suggests that "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport,'" which is witty enough, but also misses the point. Airports are never going to be architectural white knuckle rides, for two reasons (conveniently enough, arrivals and departures). Arrivals: no tourist economy is going to survive a situation whereby the airport is more fantastically exciting than the country outside (hence, no log flume at LAX or Quasar at Gatwick, notwithstanding the immediate appeal of thirty people lumbering around a smoky room with their hand luggage). Departures: let's not forget that the anodyne aesthetics of the airport are really a prelude to what remains the spectacular experience of actually taking off (hardened travellers with their nerves cauterised by enough air miles to take them to the moon might consider times when the plane has lurched unexpectedly when 'scaping the surly bonds of earth to punch god on the nose) and being a stupid height above the ground. In fact, it's at the airport ends when flight becomes most interesting, when the pedestrian view of the landscape suddenly unfolds into panoptic mode, when it turns from a postcard into a map.

The other accusations are that airports are boring and uniform. But, with the exception of seven hours in Chicago O'Hare (a reflection on the sheer mass of time waiting, not on O'Hare itself, although they generally need better bookshops), I can't remember ever being bored in an airport. This may be down to the fact that I've usually got something to read, but I prefer to think that it's the influence of a steady and ambient tension. How boring can a place be when there are people walking around with guns? And, furthermore, walking around with guns because there may be other people with guns, or something more devastating? In his recent (and rather controversial) collection The Second Plane, Martin Amis makes the observation that global terrorism really led to a rise in its opposite - global tedium, as we all spend longer waiting in the same lines to be asked the same questions, those thirty or so seconds replicated around the world thousands of times and adding up to whole years of boredom. The irony is funny, but at the same time there's an undertone that security should really just be for the tanned and turbanned. It's the annoyance of guys who look a bit like Peter Ackroyd at having to take their shoes off at Heathrow for less than a minute - what now? I don't believe this - and their luggage innumerate wives (I love the social precision of the announcements that make it quite explicit that "a lady's handbag" constitutes one item). They see the strict division of airport space (before and after security) as an encroachment of the police state, without realising that all public spaces (and a good few private ones) are already pretty much parcelled out for various types of social utility. That's the good thing about the use of space in airports; the honesty is refreshing. Incidentally, on the pre- and post-security divide, why is it always a strikingly nicer environment after security? They've got you by then - at this point, you're either ending your visit in a plane, a van, or a bag. You wouldn't have thought they'd have bothered by then, but seemingly without fail it's lighter, more open, and generally less of a scrum.

As for airports being uniform... I've seen enough American ones to pick out the differences. Sacramento's two terminals seem to be embodying some kind of historical tension, one of them a typical NorCal hippy child of the sixties, the other all chrome and glass. The McNamara terminal at Detroit Fort Wayne offers the rare experience of standing at one end of a room and not being able to see the other; it's about 1.3 miles long, a gigantic parody of a baronial banquet hall (it's disappointing to get to the other side and find there isn't a huge pig on a spit, revolving in front of the plate glass, although the salt could easily be passed by the internal monorail). Passport control at San Francisco is weirdly quiet; Las Vegas, inevitably, has slot machines at departures and the huge windows on the desert just seem like cinema. As for the UK, this is where I stick up for Heathrow again, as opposed to its less well-to-do sibling Gatwick. My experiences of Heathrow (admittedly, mostly limited to Terminal 3) have all been pretty fair. Gatwick, if you want to get psychogeographical about it, seems to be at some confluence of bad juju and worse weather (flying into there in January, we descended right into the middle of a storm so bad that planes on the ground were refusing to take off , leaving us to make numerous futile, bumpy and vomitous approaches for half an hour). Heathrow, by both M4 and underground, acts as the gateway to London; Gatwick seems to be simultaneously in the middle of nowhere and handy for Croydon. The shuttle buses are a spectacular rip off, even for airport transport; my wife and I once paid £5 to be taken around a corner before disembarking at a hotel from which we could quite clearly see our original bus stop. We walked back the next day, one area in which Gatwick scores over the siege mentality of Heathrow - they'd still let the trojan horse in, though, because it was on wheels. What Gatwick need to do now (as if there were any real competition between the two) is capitalise on the terminal 5 debacle, which they've already started with their South Terminal redevelopment. If enough of us ask, they'll put in Quasar.

Neo-Victorians at 36,000 feet

A week into my latest California trip, and there have been none of the anticipated Curb Your Enthusiasm high-jinks I mentioned a few weeks ago. So instead, I’m going to talk about books and (stage) magic, and hope that maybe I'll get into a bizarre confrontation in the next eight days or so.

I was pleased to see that The Prestige was one of the film choices offered on the plane. Somehow I didn’t find the time to see this at the cinema, which can only mean that I’ll never find the time to visit the cinema again, since if any film was meant to appeal to me it was surely this one, with its inspired blend of the late Victorians, stage magic, and David Bowie. It perhaps didn’t help that I’d been put off by lukewarm reviews from friends, or maybe I was afraid that something combined of so many delicious ingredients could all too easily turn out to be a horrible mess, like finding a fillet steak stuffed in the middle of a chocolate fudge gateaux. Finding this film on the plane was also something of a pleasant coincidence, since on my last US tour (literally a tour this time, taking in the airports of Washington Dulles, Philadelphia, Chicago O’Hare, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles LAX, San Francisco, and Sacramento (where I learnt that customer service at NorthWest Airlines follows a formal structure of a) theft, b) hiding, c) lying, d) suggesting that I am lying, and e) indifference)) in December, I had been reading Christopher Priest’s novel upon which the film is based. I had started reading it in Heathrow Terminal 3 (the site of last weeks’ entry, doughnut fans), and got about a hundred pages into it before boarding. Incidentally, when boarding the plane, I decided I’d had enough of historical conjuring for the moment and stopped reading, in order to watch The Illusionist instead, a film with similar conjuring themes but which deserves some sort of award for the most frenetic final two minutes of narrative (a bit like the end of The Usual Suspects but instead of just being able to walk normally after all, Kevin Spacey also gets out a sack containing the heads of every character to have appeared in the film, including that of the detective who’s just been interviewing him). The Illusionist is a good film, but an oddly muted one since nothing about it seems particularly original, from its plot twists to casting Rufus Sewell as the bad guy. Once I’d watched it, I wanted to get back to Priest’s novel, which seemed to be developing into something quite different. Unfortunately, an annoying thing like the MLA convention got in the way of finishing it as quickly as I would have liked, and there are probably more atmospheric places to read the final pages than the foyer at the Philadelphia Sheraton. Nonetheless, it is a superb piece of storytelling which I recommend to anybody who’s bothered to read this far.

Achtung! Spoilers ahead!

(Well, maybe not really, but I once knew somebody who, while watching films he already knew the end of, would make various comments throughout which while seeming to him cryptic and veiled hints, were to the rest of us glaring premonitions of what was to come. So during Planet of the Apes we would get “Oh yes, they’re so very far away from Earth,” or perhaps “It’s hardly as if they’ve got the Statue of Liberty around the corner.” It was the social equivalent of the bit in B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo where a few pages have a hole cut through them so you can see what’s going to happen before you actually get there (Albert Angelo is another highly recommended novel, and easily found in your local Waterstone’s as the first part of Johnson’s Omnibus). So, if you don’t even want to receive obvious hints or perhaps semi-spoilers, I should go somewhere else for now.)

To what may prove the dismay of some of my friends, I also liked the film a lot, and I think this divergence of opinion has something to do with narrative expectation. I suspect The Prestige will become known as a ‘twist’ film, the kind of movie judged solely against its ability to conceal the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow’s head was really a ghost, or something similar. Having already read the novel, however, the film would have to be something more than already knowing all the secrets. And, you know, I think that it was. My friends complained that the film’s twist was too obvious, that there were far too many clues. Admittedly, there are parts which are handled clumsily; Christopher Nolan should surely have known better than to have heavily made up and virtually mute characters appear momentarily on screen, but otherwise get mentioned a lot. But that doesn't seem to matter somehow, because the film's main twist is in many ways so obvious that it almost doesn't qualify as a surprise - and yet, when it comes, it still has a surprising quality. It also helps that the story is sufficiently strong that, given sufficient production values and quality of acting (which are both evident here), it can withstand most of the more common indignities of adaptation. There are changes both significant and subtle here; the modern day strand of the novel has been dropped to good effect, while a slightly more low key alteration in the plot (regarding the effects of Tesla's invention) makes the whole thing even more sinister than Priest's already satisfyingly macabre original. The attempt to delve into the history of magic is laudable - the inclusion of Chung Ling Soo is a nice touch and for those us familiar with the field, a nice foregrounding of later events - although it does trip the film up at times (one character mentions the 'sawing a lady in half' trick about twenty years before it first appeared). If there is a failing, and one which I think may account for some of the more lukewarm reviews (rather than the 'twist' or otherwise which most people seem to have focused on), it's that the film is not quite so good as the original novel in sliding from one genre to another, when the sleights of hand turn into science fiction. There is time and scope in the novel to make the change gradual and persuasive; the film also does it well, but I suspect many may be unconvinced by the switch.

So, The Prestige (in either format) is highly recommended. And certainly more so than Deja Vu, one of the other film choices. This is one of those conceptual thrillers Hollywood is so fond of nowadays, but unfortunately let down by the fact that its concept is a crock. An absolute crock.

Live from Heathrow

"I like a man who stays put": Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Those of you who have been paying attention will know that yesterday I was speaking at the "Science Fiction and the Canon" conference in Cambridge. More about that soon, but for now there are more immediately appropriate things to talk about.

This particular doughnut comes to you from Heathrow Terminal 3, bare hours before the US leg of the tour (as I insist on calling it) begins. The queue for the security gate is the longest I've seen here, streaming all the way out of departures and no doubt well past the most disappointing Garfunkel's in London (chocolate cake can have many flavours, but surely onion isn't one of them). The queue is so big that people with more than two hours to wait before their flight are being asked not to join it. It's strangely heartening to see, especially since certain quarters of the media are treating long-haul airline passengers with the warmth and welcome usually reserved for paedophiles. I'm not a climate change denier (seeing George Monbiot take apart David Bellamy on the news a few years ago was a delight), but at the same time I'm intrigued by some of the subtexts of environmentalism. Whereas it once seemed a heterogeneous bunch of concerns, now it seems (in the popular media at least) concerned with the monolithic threat of CO2 emissions. Yet political stances always have their own ideological emissions, and the stuff coming out of environmentalism's exhaust is a weird kind of New Parochialism. So, while no doubt the Independent would frown on my transatlantic flight today, I don't really have a choice - I can't cycle to Northern California. But then, surely I have a choice of whether to go or not? Why should I? How far did the food in my kitchen travel? Why take 'unnecessary' journeys?

In the last few years, we've been introduced to two theoretical concepts: "food miles" and the "carbon footprint," both of which explicitly or implicitly attack the idea of not staying put. "Carbon footprint" in particular is as manipulative as anything Roland Barthes analysed in his Mythologies, with its central thesis that bourgeois myth operates by making the political or cultural seem natural and given. "Carbon footprint" seems to be the perfect example of culture masquerading as nature, with the added implication that it would be best if one left as few footprints as possible, of any kind. Travel, they used to say, broadens the mind; now, it's antisocial behaviour. I also wonder if there's a connection between the still quite recent democratisation of air travel and the middle-class media now deeming it unfashionable. This might explain the intriguing links recent writers of fiction have made between anarchism and the rejection of mobility. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club features a memorable sequence on the disorienting experience of air travel, the procession of airports which all look alike. J. G. Ballard's Millennium People is closer still; dealing with an affluent anarchist set, the novel begins with an attack on Heathrow.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. I certainly don't want anyone to think I'm Jeremy Clarkson (as my friend Gareth Edwards has pointed out, the real life Alan Partridge). I don't drive, I use public transport, and agree that inefficient transport should be made as unattractive as possible where there are viable alternatives (why, really, would you need to fly within the UK?). And maybe my theoretical posturing, my 'New Parochialism,' is only going to get me in the Neophiles column of Private Eye. After all, the New Parochialism isn't so new after all. Developments in transportation have always been viewed with suspicion. Some of the crazier religious Victorians thought that building the London Underground would awaken Satanic forces; as my forthcoming (that is, forthcoming in the academic sense) cultural history will show, the Underground network has regularly been portrayed as a pathological space of danger, fear, and monsters. The bombers of July 7th 2005 drew on exactly these tropes, consciously or otherwise, just as the World Trade Center attacks borrowed the aesthetics of the action film, and grimly punned on the American emergency services phone number. And the anti-travellers of Fight Club and Millennium People have their ancestors in Xavier de Maistre's eighteenth century work A Voyage around my Room, and the Victorian French decadent Des Esseintes in Huysman's A Rebours (setting off for England, Des Esseintes gets no further than thinking about what being in England would be like). What goes around, comes around - so perhaps you'd be better staying at home.