6 JULY 2006

TOM VAGUE’S HOLLYWOOD BABYLON W11


INTRO
1 NOTTING HILL IN BYGONE DAYS
2 NOTTING HELL/HEAVEN W11
3 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
4 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY
5 ONE FOOT IN THE GROVE
6 MIDDLE EARTH W11
7 THINGS LOOK GREAT IN NOTTING HILL GATE, WE ALL SIT AROUND AND MEDITATE
8 HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY REVISITED


INTRO

London psychogeographer Tom Vague conjures up the magic, mysticism and mythology of Notting Hill past on a magical mystery tour of Hollywood Babylon W11.

Once upon a time there was a place called Notting Hill Gate, that wasn’t inhabited by international bankers and TV executives, where anything could happen and usually did. But, in spite of gentrification and media overkill, some magical vestiges remain and not all the ghosts of the area’s weird and wonderful past are banished from the streets.

Notting Hill: The Magical City ‘In Notting Hill Gate in London, or it might be Greenwich Village in New York, the unreasonable city has come to the point where it cannot be ignored by even the civic authorities. The streets around Ladbroke Grove, with their architecture of white candy stucco, are warrens of eccentric privateness; they are occupied by people who have taken no part in the hypothetical consensus of urban life…

‘Here magic flourishes, and every-where one can see evidence of a growing devout irrationalism. Little bookshops sell the I-Ching, packs of tarot cards and fat studies of the obscure mathematics of astrology. You can buy Sufi watergongs to aid contemplation and the macrobiotic foodshop on Portobello Road, Ceres, even turns the consumption of vegetables into a mystical religion…

‘It is the same consoling message that the Situationists and the Hare Krishna people preach; believe it, and the city, with all its paradoxes, puzzles and violent inequities, will float away before your eyes, a chimera to delude only the hopelessly, cynically earthbound… Notting Hill Gate is a superstitious place because it seems to exceed rational prescriptions and explanations…

‘The people who float on the tide of metaphysical junk – freaks of all kinds… into macrobiotics, yoga, astrology, illiterate mysticism, acid, terrible poetry by Leonard Cohen and tiny novels by Richard Brautigan – have managed, at a price. The new folk magic of the streets promises to have some unhappy political consequences but as a way of responding to the city it does reflect a truth about the nature of the place which we had better learn to confront…

‘These people at the Gate have clearly embraced the idea of a magical city. Their clothes, their language, their religious beliefs, their folk art belong to a synthetically-reconstructed tribal culture ruled by superstition, totems and taboos…

‘The Gate opens not on to the gentle pot smoking whimsy of Gandalf’s Garden, but on a ruined Eden, tangled, exotic and overgrown, where people see signs in scraps of junk and motley. It may look like affectation, a boasting juvenile pretence, but perhaps it is real – a state of natural magic to which the fragmented industrial city unconsciously aspires.’

Notting Hill in the hippy days described as a prime example of ‘The Magical City’ in Jonathan Raban’s 1974 ‘psychological handbook for urban survival’, Soft City.

1 NOTTING HILL IN BYGONE DAYS

 

 

 






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