detour

I've found a pretty fantastic clip for you tomorrow from a 1959 Pathe newsreel showing the opening of the new motorway between Birmingham and London--the M1. This took me down a whole motorway/boredom detour. It led me past J. G. Ballard, who wrote in the sixties, "The motorway landscape is where the future of England reveals itself - and that future is boring," then to Iain Sinclair, the novelist-cum-psychogeographer. Sinclair, who is influenced by the Situationists, has written a book and helped direct a film on the M25, the motorway that circles London: both are called London Orbital. He writes about those projects here. In the film the co-director, Chris Petit, comments: "More than other motorways, the M25 is designed to test thresholds of boredom . . . . It is mainline boredom, it is true boredom, a quest of transcendental boredom, a state that offers nothing except itself, resisting any promise of breakthrough or story."

And all week, I've had the Black Box Recorder song The English Motorway System in my head: "The English motorway system is beautiful and strange/It's been there forever, it's never going to change." Like boredom, the motorway is an historical experience which is lived as timeless and eternal. I don't know if these guys ever made it over here: they're like an ironic and sinister Saint Etienne. There's a female vocalist with a cool, beautiful voice, and poppy electronic beats; then, just as you're lulled into the sweetness, the lyrics slide in like a knife. Brutal.

(This is becoming a detour within a detour, but you can listen to Girl Singing in the Wreckage to get the idea. If that's not enough, their last album had a tribute to Andrew Ridgeley of Wham—"I never liked George Michael much/Although they say he was the talented one").

Anyway. Motorways. Boredom. I ended up thinking about Schivelbusch's argument that the development of the railway led to new modes of perception, and the response of boredom, and wondering if the motorway/freeway has trumped the railway by objectively producing the kind of internal boredom created when you travel at speed. I remembered my first experience of driving on a proper freeway, between Providence, Rhode Island, and Durham, North Carolina. It was incredibly boring, because for states and states, miles and miles, there was nothing but gently undulating landscape and trees, blocking the driver from distractions. And thousands of IHOPs (International House of Pancakes. International). Freeway boredom as an objective state, as well as a subjective one?

Detour over.