Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

-Kahlil Gibran

We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn’t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect “behavioural disorders” at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.

- The Invisible Committee

Prison

Exploration is the only medication my body subscribes to. My trembling fingertips reach for the sewer keys on my way out the door and my bowels twist in satisfaction. This addiction began as research, then I went native, then I lost my way. My love for ruins, my love for old stuff, slipped quietly into the present without even a little wink to let me know what was happening. A life spent looking for material traces of the past morphed into a series of events connected only by my churning belly that vaguely resembles art or a job in construction.

Please don’t expect me to say I found my way again because I didn’t. I was at Tate Britain the other day listening to Joseph Heathcott talk about digging through a photo archive. He said that as he dug, he became more and more confused, buried in images that he didn’t know how to contextualize. When he reached the bottom of the box of images, all he could see was himself.

We explore not to find places but to find meaning. Place hacking is only partly about architecture, history, dereliction or photography. It is about reminding ourselves what in life is worth experiencing. Our explorations embody a consistency between action and thought where what we dream becomes real. The addiction that comes along with that is the point at which your synapses start firing in new directions, making connections you didn’t know existed or that you lost somewhere along the way. It’s the point at which you realize you never want to work again, the instant at which you understand you never want to own a home, the moment when the revelation occurs that the terrorist threat is as non-existent now as it was in 1972 and 1023 and that most of the world, despite what the media would have you believe, is full of love and attachment, not hate and fear.

Thinking of you

I have lost my way. I hardly know the (a?) government exists. I have forgotten about commitments. I have widened my focus to the point that I can barely see anything not in front of me and yet eschew almost nothing, an optic of total stimulation. I spend all day with my friends. I am in love with every moment. I know my neighbourhood, my city, inside out. I just described childhood.

We have built up a shell around ourselves to defend our bodies and minds from the barrage of victimisations they are subjected to. We are left staring stupidly at what it is we are being asked to do, wondering again and again “is this it?” Joshua Ferris, in his novel And Then We Came to the End sums it up in this tidy moment seen through the eyes of Carl, a copywriter for an ad agency: “Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway – a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all inert purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized….good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless?”

We have become desensitized to the everyday. We have become part of the spectacle, ignoring emotional engagement with the world because we are so alienated by it. We formulate emotional shells that lock out beauty as well as pain and stop us from taking action. We are left in a state of perpetual isolation, mouths open, ready to pour in pills to fix what we lost. We are left inert, flaccid, empty. As Raoul Vaneigem once said, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Raoul’s thesis is outlined succinctly in the following diagram.

I suggest a different sort of medication to cure that corpse-filled mouth. Explore everything, shatter the shell and live free.

Dreamers

get vertical

Playfully

Move beyond your conceptions of exploration. Explore your mind, explore the dance floor, explore your broken family that your are ignoring while you read this drivel. Move into abandoned buildings, take locks off of doors, turn CCTV camera so they only see each other, light off fireworks randomly. Scream at people in the streets, talk to strangers, photograph police. Stop paying the state until they give something back other than the promise of a good pension if you join the military and avoid dying through war X. Take what’s in front of you and pour your heart into it. And if you have to quit your job to make that happen, then go. But do it in style – run out screaming into the sky to invoke your freedom. Even better, abseil out of your window and rappel to freedom.

Play is power. Freedom is power.

We don't need 4th of July or 5th of November as an excuse to explode things in celebration (Marc Explo).

Our work ethic

__________

The Silken Hotel wasn’t open yet. We were standing there at the hoarding, Silent Motion and I, with that jelly of a man in his yellow vest pointing his finger accusingly, shaking with rage in a kind of mild convulsion, the orbed camera behind him spinning around and zooming in on our faces, like an eyeball rolling back in a head, making the convulsion a complete yet disembodied visceral experience for this lamentably flabby being.

The sergeant arrived, blue lights painting the walls, tires screeching. He almost rolled out of his car “UrbEx huh? Yeah, we get your kind around here sometimes. Tell you what, see that boarded up building across the street there? Let’s see if you can get into that one!” We meekly accepted the challenge as they frantically tried to fix the zip ties on the Heras fencing we had snapped off in our aborted miniature vertical scramble.

Challenge Issued

Across the street, we found that this building, Cavendish House it was called, was boarded up exceptionally well, stone gargoyles on patrol in moody up-lighting, three stone Furies screaming insults at us as we hung from ledges over the road, tugging on widows.

Stoney stares

Furies

With a pop, a seal on one gave and Silent Motion swung it parallel to the floor. We dove through headfirst and when the window closed with a sharp bang, we were surrounded by silence. I crawled to the dirty pane on the other side of the room and peeked across the road. The sergeant was there, his belly still threatening to rip his utility vest in two. He was smiling, staring at the building and smiling. Creepy fuck.

Popped

Marauder

The exploration proceeded as we opened doors and windows for the next team of rogue adventurers, torches moving around like little bugs on walls looking for a hole to hide in. Silent motion found a generator running and hooked up to a small TV. He powered it up and we spent an hour watching an old Bollywood classic, a brief respite from the endless stairs. Room after room of blue and orange light comforted us behind the boarded up first floor. Unlikely to see, impossible to catch, invincibility ensued. Down or up? Up.

Dance music invoked

Creepy

The top of the first building (indeed we now realized there were three of these concrete monoliths, these plywooded Thatcherite government lumps of cement) had a roof that sat level with some office blocks. I peeked in the clean windows across, imaging the illicit affairs in office chairs that took place during our work hours, suits humping secretaries and capitalism. A blue church to our left looked like a plastic Disneyland air-filled jump house, replete with nostalgia for the abbey it was until Henry VIII seized it and ravaged it like a conquered Irish queen in the 16th Century.

Little things

Pink

The millennium eye approached us on the other side, that little monument we all love and love to say we hate. “Ride on that thing? Never!” Its millennium glow bounced off of the Thames, offering no apologies for its slow creep our direction. We did handstands, climbed radio antennae, pulled ourselves around in monkeyed feats of post-adolescent strength. We lost track of time. We didn’t care. Damn the horror of the night buses, we’ll ride ‘em!

The Furies descent

Eye

The lustful runs across the roof deteriorated eventually into a pink sky, and we knew that the time for morning coffee and a long walk to Elephant and Castle would soon be upon us. Time to go down. And down. And down. The building suddenly became distinctly subterranean.

Nuances of texture

It was wet here. It stunk like old dog, soaked in a summer-time sprinkler and shaking all over the children who uniquely appreciated the horrible musky shower, full of love. The empty corridors offered room for thought and made my stomach tense up, knot and twist, crying foul at the late (early?) hour. One turn revealed a large room with a safe, a thick door with twisty dials and an unsettling echo. We spun the lock, robbing the history from the place.

Sort of safe

The watery passage continued until we could stand it no longer, blistering feet soaking in the liquid filth. We went for the ProEx shot to cap off the night, twisted and intoxicated, drunk on our own success at pissing on every wall in this building. Lighting was essential, we decided, draining camera batteries and making film strips roll back on themselves in our multiple attempts to get it right.

Pr0 Shadows

Suddenly, the sharp slap of metal on tarmac stopped us cold. Voices. A quick retreat. How could it be, this UrbEx fortress infiltrated? The retreat continued into a side room where we sat, a gentle humming behind us. Suddenly, Silent Motion sprung up, hitting the hum with his torch and there is was – a meat grinder, working with no electricity to speak of, begging for fodder. I screamed a little, quickly covering my mouth to stifle the alarm, pride on the floor. The voices were closer now, finally clear enough to make out the distinct sound of someone saying “they’re over here.” I knew that voice.

Ground

We fled down the hallway once more, trying to keep the drips and splashes from reverberating, a considering how long the water ripples that announced our direction of departure would continue their hideous radial momentum. The smells of the place began to change as we moved. It smelled… like burning. When we found out why, it was already too late. The swollen bellied sergeant and the jelly-man sidekick were on either side of us, laughing as we both stared in horror at the door to what looked to be a huge furnace.

Burned

“Welcome to Cavendish Crematorium!” The sergeant yelled, spit streaming from his plump pink lips. “The last stop for nosy UrbExers!” Next to me, Silent Motion sighed, staring into the murky water.

Sewers are perhaps the most enigmatic of urban infrastructures. Most citizens of modern cities are aware of their existence, yet few could accurately describe their layout or appearance.
–Matthew Gandy

Clearly not accurate

Above me, the heavy round metal doors into this underworld shake with a pinging metallic scream that reverbs down these watery tunnels, slowly fading into a seemingly endless succession of dull thuds that migrate down the street above us, some racing black cab speeding a jilted lover home from the pub after the last trains have stopped running. This overworld scenario interests me far more interpreted from below the undercarraige of the cab, little bits of shit-sticky mud dislodging themselves  from the freshly-pried manhole cover edges, plopping onto my bald head. Cue a shuddering shake, aural spell broken.

Water races around my feet faster than the cab, pinning my waders in a strange plastic comfort to my legs, little bits of used toilet paper and raw sewage which we lovingly call “the fresh” blocked by my PVC barrier, pushing around me angrily in an effort to make it down this old river and into the Thames like salmon swimming not toward their spawning ground but the river Styx where the boat will sink halfway across and they will float lazily to the bottom, never to move again. As drainers, we learn to love the waste just as we learn to love the trash left behind in the streets of London at 4am on a Friday night. It is the detritus of passion passion for life that staves off our impending deaths, as Michael Dibdin writes in Cosi Fan Tutti:

This place reeks of mortality.
I thought it reeked of rancid oil and bad drains.
It comes to the same thing in the end.

At some point in London’s Victorian Age, the separation between “river” and “sewer” became blurred. Technically, I am standing in the River Westbourne which no one but sewer workers and daring drainers have seen for a hundred and fifty years. Despite the fact that no one has drank the water from this river since the 1400s, it remains a vital waterway of this city, a throbbing vein of live humanness, rushing underneath our unknowing feet as we run to work on the pavement above. Seeing it is a reminder that, as Gay Hawkins writes, “our rituals of cleansing and disposal are enfolded with this landscape, our personal secrets are implicated in the public secret of sanitation.” This misadventure into the bureau of public secrets is the newest in our chain of London infiltrations, our most recent attempts to make sure that this city is documented from every possible angle through experience, fear and love. Just as I wouldn’t wipe the ass of somebody else’s baby, only London’s sewers interest me.

We view the stigma of what is flushes on these journeys both literally and socially. Our preferred mode of access to these hidden waterways is hiding in plain sight and the classism of London society works in our favour, with both police and the public ignoring everyone dressed in high-vis and a hard hat, benign foreign workers who make their living in places where no “respectable” Londoner would ever step foot. Our team of 4 digs into their toolbelts of large screwdriver, t-shaped keys and crowbars to break the seals into underdiscovered territory, finding what the city forgot existed, our brazen crew seemingly as hidden as this river when we actually look like we work for a living.

Cracked

Pull this bird

The addiction to infiltration does not lay in the adrenaline rush of the experience. Infiltration creates unwieldy complications, difficult mental junctions and moments of crises that confuse, inspire and complicate our existence. My second identity as the underclass, the role that I play to gain access to urban secrets, is slowly becoming my primary identity. My clothing, my language, my social class, all now defined by my behaviour “on the job.” Leaving this tunnel late on this night (early the next morning?), we were greeted by “real” workers at a tube station who tossed slight nods our direction, eyeing us with confused interest, suspicion, respect and likely some revulsion given we were covered in underground wetness that smelled even worse than the rank pub toilet across the street.

We have been systematically exploring London’s subterranean features for the last few months, cracking every stormdrain, abandoned railway, cable tunnel and sewer we can find in the city – elements of this urban environment that Steven Smith, in his book Underground London, calls “London’s best kept secrets.” We know why. Not only are they some of the most beautiful and surreal places in the city, they are also the most foul.

Pour your heart out

The sewer is a place for alterier cartography, a place where no one may reside but where one can pass through, cameras capturing endless angles of the oldly new, remapping our mental conceptions of where the verticality of the city begins and ends. Our embodied experiences move like the stinking water, shifting from one chamber to the next, chalk marks on walls marking our way home, level after level of underground run-off continually sinking into what we imagine to be an endless succession of metal grates covered in dried up cakes of unknown substances, unidentifiable pieces of fabric and scraps of food. Matthew Gandy, in his article The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space contends that “by tracing the history of water in urban space, we can begin to develop a fuller understanding of changing relations between the body and urban form under the impetus of capitalist urbanization.” Pretty sure he wrote that line from the Paris sewers.

Alterier chamber

We trace these cultural lines and flows, finding here that nature and culture drift at the same rate in an interdependent foulness. London’s legendary sewer rats are in full effect tonight, running from us in a terrified scamper, climbing the round slippery walls of the tunnel in inexplicable ways and disappearing into holes we can’t even see into. I want to explore what they can see. At one point, some sort of nest is disturbed and they came at our lights, their little claws feet screeching all around us. Staying in the middle of the slimy sticky mud, shit and runoff where the rats won’t swim was clearly our best option.

We spent 4 hours sliding around these chambers, building up our immune system with aching stomachs upon exit and mouth sores to come. As we emerged I felt, as I often have, that tonight was another attempt to document my own disappearance in the course of making the city reappear in alternative iterations. As I sink deeper into my PhD, I sink deeper in this city, still so in love that there isn’t even room for another human being. I can only hope that either I or the thesis emerges at the end of this torrid love affair, unsure I will survive the potential breakup. Until then.

Own the night.
Cherish these secrets.
Wield this power.
Love this life.

Explored

Beneath your pub crawl

More playful than righteous

________________________________________

This author’s endeavour should be to make the Past, the sense of all the dead Londons that have gone to the producing this child of all the ages, like a constant ground-bass beneath the higher notes of the Present.

-Ford Madox Ford, The Soul of London

Now that I had been underground in New York, I thought I might as well go aboveground as well. Luckily, I happen to be staying in a lovingly decrepit 15 story building on 5th Avenue and 31st this week with a nice view of the Empire State Building.

Not nearly high enough!

Taking the lift to the 14th floor, I walked out into what was clearly some sort of space for workers living in the hotel. Luckily they were asleep. I took a quick tour around and found a big black door marked “Emergency Exit, alarm will sound.” That’ll be the one I want. I hit the lift button just in case the alarm actually went off so I could jump in and make my escape. The lift doors opened with a ding and I hit the the metal bar on the door. With a sucking sound, the cold air rushed in, alarm free.

I stepped outside onto a lovely roof. Not the highest I have ever done by any means but it had two sketchy water towers on it to get up on more floor (though you had to lay on their sloped roofs rather awkwardly to get shots!). There were also multiple levels connected by rusty ladders which I enjoyed walking up with no hands. I spent the rest of the night laying around staring at a beautiful skyline shrouded in moonlight and soft city glow.

Water Tower Tipsy

Peep show

Nights like these

This city is crushing my soul, I will never come back here again.
-Bradley L. Garrett, New York City, 2008

Bad idea?

I was approached by David Gilbert, one of the faculty in my department, with this simple question – would I want to come help teach the undergraduate field trip to New York City this year? David had no idea of course that when he asked me that question, images of the most horrible 3 months of my life flashed across my mind.

Yeah, I lived in New York City for exactly 3 months. That was the amount of time it took for this city to squeeze all of my ambition, money and joy from me like a sponge in a vice. My time here always makes me think of Timothy “Speed” Levitch in The Cruise when he looks across the city and says “New York City is a living organism; It evolves, it devolves, it fluctuates as a living organism. So my relationship with New York City is as vitriolic as the relationship with myself and with any other human being which means that it changes every millisecond, that it’s in constant fluctuation.” And like all my relationships, that one failed miserably.

So when I accepted the post without reservation, I surprised even myself. I guess I knew that the fact I was scared of this place would push me even more to accept. Isn’t pushing the limits of fear and sanity what my life revolves around?

I decided pretty quickly that if I were to return to the Big Apple, it would be on my terms. Meaning I had to relearn it from the inside out. So I got in contact with Alan Rapp from Critical Terrain, Julia Solis form Dark Passage and Shane Perez, one of the most well-known explorers in NYC to make sure that on this trip, New York City would be redefined.

I failed to do much research but knew that there was an abandoned hospital reported about a year ago on Roosevelt Island and woke up early on my second day here to go scope it out. I found the hospital and grabbed some photos over the fence but it was clearly under renovation and I realized wasn’t worth going into. Still, it was good to finally see the famous Renwick Hospital in person. With that, I left to go wander around the city and take some tourist photos.

Just a shell

Tourist 2

Tourist 3

Tourist 4

Tourist 5

Yesterday morning I woke up, feeling frustrated and in dire need to infiltrate this city in some meaningful way. I decided that if this hospital was all I had to go on than I should at least go back and plant our Londinium flag inside.

In the early morning sun, I made my way to the F Train. I walked to the end of the platform, paced by a New York Transit Authority worker in a blue suit. It the end of the platform, he opened the gate to the tunnel, unlocked a door and disappeared into some subterranean depth.

I looked at the open gate and thought of my crew in London. I thought about Ninjalicious writing that one must always be ready for action. I thought about the gloves, camera and torch in my bag. I knew this was one of those rare moments that would come and go in an instant. I looked for cameras, saw none, and crossed the gate into the Metro tunnel, following the worker into the room. Inside the room was a stairwell where I heard him talking with someone else on an upper floor, cussing about some problem. I left the room and set down my backpack, quickly pulling out my camera, realizing I took my tripod out that morning. Oh well. Before I could hesitate, I started walking down the tunnel toward Roosevelt Island, under the East River. When trains came by, I hid behind railing, holding the camera up to grab impromptu photos. I knew they wouldn’t be beautiful, but the best explorations, I find, always end up with the worst photos. Nerves, the need for mobility and the fear of being seen always compromise good shots.

Hip Shot

There was a moment in the tunnel when I felt I had submitted to it, we became one as I slid along the wall, reveling in the silence in between trains, terrified each time I heard the rumble on the track that I knew indicated another on the way.

I don’t know how far I walked but when I got to the end of the tunnel, at the Roosevelt Island stop, I found that there was no gate and walked out quickly, stuffing my camera back in the bag. A wave of euphoria washed over me; I had walked a New York City train tunnel, right in the middle of the day. Epic. I wanted to run out of the station, up the three sets of escalators and out to freedom but I forced myself to walk calmly, my mind screaming with excitement. As the first escalator puked me out at the crest, I found myself standing in front of officer Rodriguez of the NYPD. He said “I need you to follow me” and proceeded to walk back down into the station. I responded “sure thing” and followed.

When we got back to his security hut, I was sweating. He put me in the corner of the station and stared at me until I finally looked away. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” he said. I told him that I was a researcher here to teach a class and wanted to get some subterranean pictures for my students to see and that I had found a gate left open. He stared at me incredulously. “Why this station?” He says. “Do you know what this station is?” Clearly, I had no clue. Now I could see that he was sweating and I started to get nervous. He says “I can’t let this go… 9-11… protocol… etc.,” and started to tell me about how he was 3 years away from retiring, he had a pension to consider. What if I wasn’t who I said I was? I told him that I understood and would was behind whatever he wanted to do. The cuffs came out.

Now, I should mention that officer Rodriguez was incredibly friendly, almost apologetic when he cuffed me. He said, I just have to call the sergeant, I don’t know what to do here. Again he wailed “Why this station?” I apologized and told him I would happily wait for the sergeant.

It took ages for the sergeant to get there. Maybe an hour. I felt that officer Rodriguez and I had a good repertoire at this point and thought he might give me a break with the sergeant. Then sarge rolled in, fat-necked and scarred, looking like that captain from Starship Troopers that got his arm gnawed off by a giant bug. When he found out I had a camera full of photos he grabbed his head and cried, “oh fuck”. He had to call Homeland Security. It turns out that the photos I took were very close to a new subway power station being built. It also turn out I had photographed this power station a day earlier (above ground – the pictures still on the camera) and this was really freaking them out. The sergeant then said, “this is going to take a while, you might as well uncuff him.”

I took another hour for the security check to go through, me in the corner reading Cormack McCarthy and the cops chatting about some drama back at the station with pay raises.

The sergeant walked back out and looked down at me. “The good news is”, he said with a smile, “you are not on a terrorist watch list. The bad news is I can only offer you two options. Options one is that I place you under arrest and we do further checks while you are locked up to decide whether you can keep those photos. Option two is that you delete your photos in front of me and I give you a trespass violation.” Guess which one I took?

$50 out

So, hours later, I am sitting in Bryant park in the glorious Spring sunlight, sipping a Heineken and listening to Delphic singing “Let’s do something real”. Way ahead of you guys. I feel really good. The mission, strictly speaking, was a failure. Well, shit, they both were. But you know what, I feel like New York and I are better friends than ever. We spilled a little blood together today, I took a trespass to show her what kind of explorer I am. I showed New York that she won’t own me, crush me or rob me ever again. She knows I will go to the mat now to protect my right to exist here on my own terms. And that, my friends, is a win.