Cattle Grids Revisited

It's always intriguing when an old post pops up in the Blogger stats, particularly when it's one I can't recall ever having written. There are now over two thousand of them, after all, some carefully crafted over many days, a few left to mature for months, but most just cobbled together in an evening (or even a rainy lunch break) to keep the blog-pot on the boil.

This one, which seems to have attracted some views this week for whatever reason, is a typical pot-boiler, dating from my penultimate year of wage-slavery, 2013, when I still had to wake up every weekday morning, achieve full consciousness, and prepare myself for another day posing as a responsible adult. It seems something had snagged my attention on the radio one morning that week (I notice it's a Friday job) and – like the speck that encourages a crystal to form – a post formed around it.

BTW, and though I say so myself, I'm struck by the excellence of those two perfectly irrelevant photos, made in the days when daily confinement to a university campus meant that I was forced to make much out of little, which has been something of a theme in my life. Which is more than a little ironic, given one of the peeves aired in this post. Read on!

Cattle Grids of Dartmoor

Listening to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, I have realised, is not the ideal way for me to wake up in the morning. I'm not talking about John Humphrys' toe-curling attempts at whimsy, Evan Davis's eternal benign haze, Sarah Montague's head-girlishness, or even James Naughtie's helium-quality windbaggery. No, those I can tolerate. They have become a familiar background noise, easily ignored, like the sound of the gas boiler kicking in at 06:30.

I'm talking about the way certain out-takes of information lodge in my subconscious mind, as it grumpily and somewhat clumsily swaps places in my head with my waking mind, like two local-radio presenters negotiating a changeover at the top of the hour. For example, for 20 or more years I have been haunted by the image of a wet cricket pitch being dried off by hovering helicopters. Did this ever really happen? Apparently so. But in my mind it has acquired that portentous, archetypal feeling that belongs to a persistent dream. It's tricky enough having to live with one's own, self-generated dream-life, without the BBC dropping its contribution into that murky pool.

Worse than this, though, is to be roused to wide-awake indignation from a sleeping start. By, let's say, a presenter's determination to treat a serious issue as mere light-hearted "human interest" filler between the heavy stuff. "Come on, Humphrys," my mind yells as it roars into life, "This is the ONLY opportunity this man will get to raise national awareness of Restless Leg Syndrome this whole YEAR, and you're using him as a straight-man!" Or there's the unquestioning veneration that is ladled over people who actually deserve the sort of merciless verbal thrashing unleashed on politicians and spin-doctors. The other morning, it was a bunch (a clang?) of "sound artists" who were getting the unwarranted easy airtime. Though it must have been a toss-up in the pre-programme conference whether they'd get the pious or the piss-take treatment.

Sound artists... I'm very wary of formulations like that. Not just because it sounds like a roundabout way of saying "musician", though there is that. Is David Hockney a "paint artist", or would that apply more appropriately to Jackson Pollock? In the end, though, "artist" is just a job description, not an honorific term, or a state of mind, or an aspiration. It means "someone who makes a living from making art". What counts as art is up for grabs, of course. So I suppose it does help to say what kind of artist you are, or hope to be.

Obviously, if someone wants to sample sounds in an interesting way, and produces compelling work that people want to listen to, then good luck to them. For example, I admire the work of Richard Skelton: I have actually bought some pieces myself. But, as I listened to these sound artists describe their "practice", I knew that sooner or later – here it comes! – it would turn into a sermon on the need for us all to pay closer attention to our surroundings, which is never anything more than a presumptious, preachy moralism disguised as aesthetics.

John Cage never intended 4'33" as an opportunity for Thought For The Day sanctimony. Any more that Marcel Duchamp intended L.H.O.O.Q. to leverage the market for "appropriated" art. I am so fed up with hearing what I think of as the Gospel of the God of Small Things. This has nothing to do with the novel by Arundhati Roy, though it has a lot to do with what people who have never read that book imagine it must be about (a classic example of a Takeaway Title). It's annoying to hear work (including my own) damned with the faint praise that it helps open our eyes (or ears) to the little things we fail to notice in our everyday lives. Grr. As I say, from a sleeping start to cold fury in five seconds. Thanks, BBC.

A large part of the theology of the Gospel of the God of Small Things is the belief that "everybody is an artist, and everything is art"; all we need is a little help to see it. Well, I disagree: no they aren't, and no it isn't. That's why some people can make a living as an artist, but most of us can't. Is everybody a plumber, and everything plumbing? No. Such people need a serious dose of some hallucinogen – preferably something spiky and unforgiving like LSD –  to teach them that to notice more can be a problem, and potentially a nightmare. There's an awful lot going on out there: be grateful for pragmatic simplifications. [1] Noticing less but in a more interesting way is the thing. Good artists do that. But it's not so much what they notice, but how they notice it and what they then make out of it that matters.

Actually, that spot on Today bothered me in another way, too. Somewhere in that brackish area of my mind, between the ebb and flow of the conscious and unconscious tides, the information was floated that a sound artist called John Drever has a CD out called Cattle Grids of Dartmoor. What?

That had me thinking involuntarily about cattle grids all day, when I had other things I needed to think about. There was the one where I rescued a lamb, trapped inside it like a cage. The one that had rolling bars that made it impossible to walk over. The one where the pit underneath was so full of stones and rubbish that even a cow wearing high-heels could walk across it. Oh, and that one which some local cattle-grid artist had painted gaudily in candy stripes. And so on. But, Cattle Grids of Dartmoor, what a great title for a CD!

Although I would probably have had something loud, guitar-driven, and kind of post-punk in mind. The sort of thing that emanates from my daughter's bedroom. But, you know those satisfying zzzzing! or brrrrrat! noises that cattle grids make when you drive over them? Well, apparently John Drever has been systematically recording them. All over Dartmoor. And he's made a CD. Go on, treat yourself!

1. I like the quote usually attributed to physicist John Wheeler, that "Time is what prevents everything happening at once. Space is what prevents it all happening to me!". Though Wheeler himself attributed it to "graffiti in the men's room of the Pecan Street Cafe, Austin, Texas". Yeah, I can hear that, sung – Guy Clark style – to a guitar accompaniment...