BAGDContext CSM

Here are some poster images of US streamlined trains…coming round the mountain

Here is a poster by the great Russian/French designer AM Cassandre for the LMS railway. Terrific.

This is an O scale model railway station. It’s homemade from bits of wood and metal and covered in paper. You may be wondering why we bought this. It’s simple, it is covered with reproduction posters.

These miniature posters were published by Hornby and Basset Lowke so that an extra level of realism could be added to track side platforms.

The poster for Cruden Bay is by Tom Purvis. Cruden Bay was a golfing resort in Scotland that was popular in the 1930s. Tom Purvis was a master of flat-colour poster design. The combination of golf and Purvis would be a real banker in poster collecting.

Maybe 10 000GBP!

All this talk of the machine-ensemble may conjure-up the idea of the railway as an implacable system. The Freudian themes I’ve described in relation to trains usually make things worse by speaking of anxiety and trauma…

Still, things are not all bad. Let me explain.

The kinds of structuralist analysis that I enjoy usually devolve from a Marxist position. The problem of Marx is that he is nearly almost always right. However, it doesn’t follow that revolution and upheaval is inevitable. Quite the contrary in fact.

From an individual point-of-view, it’s important not to let one’s understanding of how the structures and systems of society constrain us, to drive us to nihilism.

The strategy is to embrace the poetics of everyday life…How so?

The key thing is to embrace the Romantic legacy of feeling and sensibility afforded by everyday life. The guide to the modern re-casting of this is from the Jesuit psychoanalysis of Michel de Certeau.

To date, Certeau’s most well-known and influential work in the United States has been The Practice of Everyday Life. In it, he combined his disparate scholarly interests to develop a theory of the productive and consumptive activity inherent in everyday life.

According to Certeau, everyday life is distinctive from other practices of daily existence because it is repetitive and unconscious. In this context, Certeau’s study of everyday life is neither the study of “popular culture”, nor is it necessarily the study of everyday resistances to regimes of power.

Instead, Certeau attempts to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate everything from city streets to literary texts. It’s obvious that the railway system can lend itself to this kind of “derive.”

Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Life has emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links “strategies” with institutions and structures of power who are the “producers”, while individuals are “consumers” acting in environments defined by strategies by using “tactics”. In the influential chapter “Walking in the City”, Certeau asserts that “the city” is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from the World Trade Center in New York to illustrate the idea of a synoptic, unified view. By contrast, the walker at street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets.

This concretely illustrates Certeau’s argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.

Everyone should sleep within the distant earshot of the railway. Nothing is as pleasingly poetic, or romantic, than to hear the sounds of trains in the distance. I’m not saying you need to see the railway, or feel the trains thundering by….

The sound of the train passing, is a subconscious reminder of the rocking movement of train travel. It’s a jolly useful way to get to sleep. I’ve already posted about the “dreaminess” of train travel – it’s no wonder that a gentle train whistle in the distance helps for a good night’s sleep.

The railway whistle is a staple of American popular culture. The vast landscape and the isolation of rural lives could easily make people feel dizzy. In fact, it can drive you mad! In the days before the telegraph and the internet, the railway whistle was a reminder of the world beyond the immediate horizon…and of the great system whirring away.

Train whistles often feature in the prison songs of Johnny Cash…as a reminder of the “outside.”

Now you can listen to these whistles on the internet. They’re big sounds and brilliant too. Go on! You know you want to…

And, Hornby have launched a digital sound system for their models.

if you don’t like Marnie (the film), you don’t really like Hitchcock; and if you don’t love Marnie (the woman), you don’t really love cinema Robin Wood

These pictures are from the opening sequence of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). Actually, I’ve put them in a slightly different order. In the film, we’re on the railway platform and following the girl! Just when when we catch her up, she slips away; and there’s a shout of Robbed! It turns out that the girl is not what she seems.

The film is generally recognised as Hitchcock’s last masterpiece. Marnie is a romantic melodrama (that fits into the Hollywood genre of Douglas Sirk etc) that investigates the emotional power of images. It’s like a continuation of Vertigo or The Birds…But the film is also made in an expressionist style that draws attention to the emotional power of its images. In the course of the story, nearly all those images are revealed to have been illusions.

As usual, the film involves identity issues and the havoc these play in relations between people. Basically, the film is an extended psychoanalytical investigation into the cause and effect of Marnie’s behaviour. She’s certainly got a full deck of complexes…relating to money and men.

My own feeling is that, you should never look in a lady’s handbag…

There a number of excellent blogs about Hitchcock, cinema and psychoanalysis…

These pictures of the railway, across the American mid-west, are by the photographer Dorothea Lange. The pictures were part of a project to document the real-life conditions of the American poor during the great depression of the 1930s.

Photography has been used by social reformers as a way of confronting critics with the reality of the situation on-the-ground. There’s a kind or irrefutable quality of photographic evidence that makes it very useful for these kinds of struggle.

The terrible economic conditions that followed the Wall Street Crash (1927) were exacerbated by a series of political choices and natural disasters. The great drought of the 1930s created a dust bowl that destroyed the viability of many small-holdings. The result was a human exodus towards the west.

For many people, the railway was the only option. If the cost of a ticket was too great; people simply jumped on a freight train.

The HoBo is the migratory worker associated with this peripatetic search for work. The figure of the HoBo is distinguished from that of the tramp or bum in American popular culture by the desire to work and the willingness to up-sticks and move towards employment.

The mobility of labour is a key characteristic of the American economy.

There was an interesting film about the development of the British Rail, diesel powered, Intercity 125. You can watch it, here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mqv43/The_Age_of_the_Train/

The train was the flagship modernisation project of British Rail at the end of the 1960s. The Intercity 125 replaced the messy old combo of engines and different carriages with a rake of unified rolling stock and with a power unit at each end.

The Intercity 125 was designed by Kenneth Grange. The speeds made possible by the new train transformed the shape of Britain.

Early in the film, Peter Parker, the chairman of BR, makes the point that the railways take a long view. That’s certainly the case with the 125. Many are still in service and some are expected to keep going until 2035!