9½ drives

Prince Pro

in ,
Prince Pro

About my father's record collection and my mother's tennis racket.

In Object Relations: Essays and Images. Edited and photographed by Stephen Inggs. Michaelis School of Fine Art, 2014.

When I was 18 and finishing school abroad, my father went (I think) a little crazy. He began giving away all our things. This is, perhaps, understandable behaviour when you are retrenched from a company you never liked anyway, and then move to the opposite side of the country. But still, the scale of the purge stunned me.

First, the record collection. My father was at Leeds University during the 1960s, and often let it slip that Clapton, Hendrix and The Who had played in the student union, that it was no big thing back then. He had all their albums, with that luxuriant amount of space the LP format affords for artwork. Roger Daltrey in a tub full of Heinz baked beans (The Who Sell Out) and Carole King just kicking back at home with her cat (Tapestry). The original of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band itself, complete with cardboard insert epaulettes and moustaches that you could anchor in your nose via little tags. The naked, languorous women spread over the gatefold cover of Electric Ladyland – for a small boy on a mining town on the far West Rand in the dying days of apartheid, this was a formative document.

And when the needle came down, the low-end kick of these records on an analogue stereo: Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues, Simon and Garfunkel's Cecilia. It sent me into paroxysms of excitement.

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N2: A Bibliography

in

Cityscapes, Issue 05. April 2014.

You see them all along the N2: a red circle bisected diagonally, the universal code for no, not allowed, don’t, though in this case the line is drawn not through a cigarette or a knife but a thumbs-up. The sign means “no hitchhiking”, but if you are lucky enough to be flashing by in a vehicle it can produce an instant of cognitive dissonance (anti-good times, anti-like?). In 2014 the sign is hardly true to life—it has been outstripped by rising petrol prices and hard-nosed financial logic. Most people waiting on hard shoulders on the N2 hold currency in the air: ten, twenty, fifty rands. It is also a simple lesson in semiotics: even the simplest, most programmatic signs—whether pictographic, linguistic or property of the South African National Roads Agency Limited (SANRAL)—can be infiltrated by unintended and contradictory meanings.

N2. Curled up in that tiny alphanumeric are thousands of kilometres, hundreds of service stations, millions of tons of concrete. N2 can mean a London bus route; an intelligence officer in the US Navy; an anti-nuclear song by the Japanese indie group Asian Kung Fu Generation. But for my purposes it is the longest highway in South Africa, which starts at an unfinished flyover near the docks in Cape Town, follows the eastern seaboard of the country (roughly) for over 2000 kilometres, then bends west below Swaziland to end at the town of Ermelo in the province of Mpumalanga. Major highways like the N2 are not liked, or at least, not thought about much.

Writing a hidden history of the UK’s motorway system, Joe Moran suggests that this bland corporate terrain of tarmac, underpasses and thermoplastic road markings is “the most commonly viewed and least contemplated landscape” in Britain. “The road is almost a separate country, one that remains underexplored not because it is remote and inaccessible but because it is so ubiquitous and familiar.”