Entrances uncovered, street signs you never saw.

My girlfriend's flat overlooks a motorway overpass. This is a fact. She doesn't really like this, which i suppose is understandable, but I really like it, like i like a lot of things these days.

I used to hate these monstrosities too until I got really into talking heads and their odes to modern architecture. As i began to listen, i began to understand the understated beauty of these structures. One of my favourite films is made by david byrne, it's called true stories and is a simplistic, smiling portrait of small quirks in a small town, and there are a lot of lines which you can quote endlessly (which always makes for a great film-spinal tap, pulp fiction, and the godfather to mention better known examples) and one of them is during a passage on highways where david byrne says, "they're the cathedrals of our time".

So true. There's something to be said for these vast, white concrete crescents. I often wake up pretty early or can't sleep, particularly when i'm sharing a bed, and on sunday morning i got up and sat at her desk and looked out at the view trying to get sleepy again, watching white vans and lorries zipping along the motorway, the cat's eyes, the orange pools of light. I just think that whilst motorways are the ultimate in functional architecture-no one cares what they look like-if you stop and try to find them beautiful, you can. Which is true for anything. There is just as much to see with a room of motorway with lamp-posts and there is with a room of a river with trees. In fact, aren't there remarkable similarities? Both are endless and unchanging, giving a non-stop flow of unrecognisable, unimportant matter. Like watching fire, or a waterfall, there is somethign beautiful in just observing the continuity of it.

Fine, she said, but the noise is still annoying. Again, i frustratingly disagreed (but privately this time so as to avoid a 'why are you always so contrary' remark). I once read someones blog where he said he'd been sampling cars going past his window a lot, and since then i cant listen to the short, gasping pockets of sound you can get when cars drive past you without thinking 'there is music in them'.

Music can help you find beauty in anything, i guess.

Or, everything has the potential to be amazing.


james x