Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in London's Tower Hamlets with composer and artist Robin Rimbaud, better known as Scanner. They discuss the usefulness of a new place's disorientation; the fun of grasping that new place's systems and making its connections; other skills in the set gained from a lifetime of travel; the "great change" he has observed living in east London for fourteen years, where he arrived in search of "light and high ceilings"; the value of his work's taking him to places he doesn't choose; what he learned long ago when his visiting American friend's girlfriend reflexively called every difference in England "really stupid"; the ease of complaint and the difficulty of embracing these differences; the importance of pattern in all areas of life; the complex question of how to cross a street in Vietnam; travel as a means of seeing your own home; photography as a means of notetaking; his shelves of diaries, kept every single day since age twelve, and what it says about his overarching skill of discipline