up close and personal

Even long shots make it

2012-01-27T14:09:00.012Z

"Sentimental" is a word the powerful use to repudiate the weeping of the weak. In nineteenth century Britain, for example, the Irish were seen as sentimentalists, willful lovers of melancholy and booze rather than victims of famine and colonialism. Similarly, the fashionable modern view of Dickens is that he was a great comic novelist, but one with an unfortunate weakness for sentimentality; if only he'd spent less time believing in the possibility of human kindness and moralising about the plight of the poor, so the argument goes, he might have made it to the level of Shakespeare and Dante. Obama is sentimental. Socialism is sentimental. Occupy is sentimental. Love, generosity, music, tears, Kevin Keegan, solidarity, poetry, pop music, feminism, folk music, sadness: mere sentimentalism in the eyes of cultivated realists.

But there is another way at looking at sentimentality. Maybe when a book or a song or a film appears sentimental, this is because someone is trying to communicate some kind of ineffable tragedy or absurd dream of hope. Maybe they are trying to make the truth sing through the available cliches even though they know this will always seem hackneyed and painfully inadequate so long as the powerful are able to define the parameters of respectable sophistication.

"Don't Come Home Too Soon" by Del Amitri (the official Scottish national football team tune for the 1998 World Cup in France) is a sentimental song. Its mood is mawkish. Its emotional plea is blatant. The string arrangement is consciously "epic", and the snailtracks of Britpop conservatism cover its formal surfaces. That acoustic guitar strumming pattern (chang-chang-chikky-chanka-chang-chang) was surely one of the worst things to happen to the world in the nineties, and its presence in the foreground here confirms this song as the very archetype of cliche and obviousness. Blame Kurt Cobain. And Richard Ashcroft. And late capitalism.

Yet "Don't Come Home Too Soon" is a great song. Ezra Pound said that the beauty of art is a brief gasp between one cliche and another, and this is a tune full of such gasps. Justin Currie's voice might be the epitome of MOR, but you'd have to have a heart of stone and ears of rubber not to appreciate his rounded, enveloping timbre here. The two and three part harmonies are frequently sensational. The guitar chords are rich in spite of their clunking rhythm. And there are continual surprises in the shape of the melody: ornate little hooks and mini-refrains keep popping up at unlikely moments ("that stupid plane", "you might prove them wrong", "I don't care what people say", "even long shots make it").

And then there's the subject matter. The football tournament song is not known for being an especially fertile genre in pop music. Yet here it has been transformed into something unique and remarkable. Just to be clear about exactly what is going on here: this is the pop song as a poem including history ("so go then out into history"), a national epic that draws on a tradition of Romantic heroism, a love lyric, an elegy. This is a song about realising with certainty that you are going to die, and an attempt to view that death as somehow an occasion for communal hope.

This is a very strange and unusual piece of music, sentimental but wildly complex at the same time. It is an attempt to derive empowerment from failure, which seems to me to be the essence of spirituality. And I reject utterly the notion that this is some sort of slave morality or victim complex. Religion is not or not only opium. Marginal peoples do not choose to be victims or accept victimhood; rather, they use belief as a means of humanising themselves and creating the imaginative space that is a precondition of one day attaining to real autonomy and independence.

This is the power of sentiment, and this is why I'm hopeful for 2014.

(This is the only video I could find, but it seems somehow appropriate.)

Repetition > Life Cycle

2012-01-26T14:32:00.002Z

In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression - the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance - all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony - all with sudden spontaneity.
To grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic powers, man must already have attained that high level of freedom from the self which seeks to express itself symbolically in those forces. Because of this, the dithyrambic servant of Dionysus will understand only someone like himself. With what astonishment must the Apollonian Greek have gazed at him! With an amazement which was all the greater as he sensed with horror that all this may not be really foreign to him, that even his Apollonian consciousness was covering the Dionysian world in front of him, like a veil.
Friedrich Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.
James George Frazer The Golden Bough

In this particular life-style the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying.” But the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. “Take the cash and let the credit go,” as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime.
(...)
If there was any ‘sin’, it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all.
Philip K. Dick, Afterword to A Scanner Darkly

Crossed Over And Crossed Out

2012-01-22T03:10:00.009Z

That project - an ever evolving, uncontroversial portrait of contemporary tastes in popular music - addressed one problem surrounding music in the file-sharing era to the exclusion of all others. Faced with readers who wanted to know how to be fans in the internet age, Pitchfork’s writers became the greatest, most pedantic fans of all, reconfiguring criticism as an exercise in perfect cultural consumption. Pitchfork’s endless “Best Of” lists should not be read as acts of criticism, but as fantasy versions of the Billboard sales charts. Over the years, these lists have (ominously) expanded, from fifty songs to 100 or 200, and in 2008 the site published a book called The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. Similarly, Pitchfork’s obsession with identifying bands’ influences seems historical, but isn’t. When a pop critic talks about influences, he’s almost never talking about the historical development of musical forms. Instead, he’s talking about his record collection, his CD-filled binders, his external hard drive - he is congratulating himself, like James Murphy in “Losing My Edge,” on being a good fan. While Pitchfork may be invaluable as an archive, it is worse than useless as a forum for insight and argument.

What did we do to deserve Pitchfork?  The answer lies in indie rock itself.

In the last thirty years, no artistic form has made cultural capital so central to its identity, and no musical genre has better understood how cultural capital works. Disdaining the reserves of actual capital that were available to them through the major labels, indie musicians sought a competitive advantage in acquiring cultural capital instead. As indie’s successes began following one another in increasingly rapid succession, musicians working in other genres began to take notice. Hip-hop is an illustrative foil. As indie bands in the ’90s did everything they could to avoid the appearance of selling out, rappers tried to get as rich as possible. The really successful ones stopped rapping - or at least outsourced the work of writing lyrics -and opened clothing lines and record labels. But for all their corporate success, rappers knew where the real cultural capital lay. When Jay-Z decided, as an obscenely wealthy entertainment mogul, that he wanted finally to leave his drug-dealer persona behind, he got himself seen at a Grizzly Bear concert in Williamsburg. “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring,” he said to a reporter. One year later, his memoirs were published by Spiegel & Grau.

(Click the above for the rest of the article)

Hedonia And Its Discontents

2012-01-21T20:27:00.004Z

Noughties fantasy worlds

2012-01-18T21:17:00.006Z

Television comedy is slowly becoming a dire mulch of crappy game-show formats, bland observational comics impressing the easily impressed l!ve at the Hammersmith Odeon and the main players being nicked by Sky who’ll parse substandard material in the name of ‘presence in the market’. But the noughties produced a slew of great productions, often in the slipstream of Chris Morris and Armando Iannucci’s Partridge/Day Today/Brasseye work, that through their attitudes to drinks and drugs told us a lot about social trends in the decade. For the purposes of this I’m setting aside programmes such as Black Books and Pulling, where booze is often the principal motor of often very funny comedy but not much else gets a look in. Regrettably, it has not been possible to include Two Pints of Lager in this piece.

A workplace comedy with the focus on job precarity due to downsizing and streamlining, the setting only allows for legalised escapism. An enhancer of mundane existence, a validator of life itself and the portal to greater, more exciting things – that was booze’s role in The Office, often led by the insufferable manager David Brent (as in real life, Ricky). Welsh woman getting it in the car park by the northern salesman (‘nearly done’); Gareth’s threesome with a wild chic and her willing spouse after Chasers; Tim the Loser getting it on with new Swindon girl, all outcomes are possible once the can of Stella is cracked open. All these things bring about is temporary situations, a transgressive blip without enough substance to dissuade any character from not turning up and logging on. Consolation for life in Slough. For Brent though these things are still off limits due to the considerable wall he puts up in the form of his ego. That doesn’t stop him reminiscing to a disinterested Tim about long nights in the pub with Finchy, Gareth and co, in sync with the prevalent school of thought that needless weekday drinking is somehow cool. No wonder suburban hostelries are on their arse if they’re the only people left in them.

In such normalising circumstances, drugs is just ‘waccy baccy’ with no other substances mentioned. Of course Brent is ‘mad enough without the gear’ and always off ‘to munchie city’ when high, he tells the fellow motivational speaker in a memorable scene. Like his hero Ian Botham, he’s ‘smoked the odd doobie’ but, as with the support cast with their boozy fumblings, not enough to put him off wasting time and his life at work.

In Peepshow, a sitcom closely bound to the fragile ups and downs of modern consumer capitalism, with work vital for one and anathema for another, the prognosis is gloomier in some respects as the theme involving alcohol is one of dependence. ‘Let’s get cunted’ as a salesman droog says on the eve of (not after) a major Kettering conference. Booze pops up in any and most situations – a yard of ale with Christian relatives, a can or two in the supermarket or waiting outside a church to punch an ex-monk, a pack of Aussies ‘getting shitfaced’ on a Wednesday night. Dobby says ‘it facilitates the talking of shite’, and Mark adds ‘in the long term there’s depression, lethargy and addiction but who’s looking to the long term?’ Indeed, if anything unites Mark and Jez, the conventional odd couple of British comedy, it’s their love of drink. Johnson the boss also sums up the love-hate relationship with alcohol well, being mostly dry and puritanically ‘clean and serene’ but ultimately unable to resist the alcoholic lifeforce in the final NYE party. Poor me, pour me another drink.

Booze serves all social functions from consolation to innocent hedonism and often makes farcical situations even worse, yet it is the attitude to drugs that is far more revealing. Here, a didactic tone often appears, coke turns Superhans into a gibbering wreck in the toilet and of course he’s forever the cartoon for his crack habit (yeah, what a joke!), Sophie is seen to go distinctly flakey and unreliable (those old chestnuts) when she starts dabbling in E while her dealer friend is ‘not a bad person, but a moron’, and in the last series there is a denouement of sorts when even Superhands’ own party is seen as too out-there to experience. So while drug-talk provides some of the best lines and scenes, usually via Superhans and his talk of ‘nature’s glue’, dropping acid at a birth and the k-hole he administers Sophie’s cousin-cum-bedroom producer, we’re always encouraged to see such activity as marginal, stupid and dangerous.

It’s an interesting take, and while they would hardly lose their core audience if they took a bit more of a 30something Skins line on narcotics, perhaps its longevity is partly accounted for by the writers’ mainstream ‘look at the sad druggies’ stance, allowing the more casual fan to feel comfortable with the Croydon tower block world. Sometimes, Peepshow was more like Men Behaving Badly than anyone would care to admit. But this stance has always made me feel less than comfortable, and this extends into other areas where the writers are less sure-footed, such as homosexuality. Careful, if you get high you may suck your best friend off!

On to Nathan Barley, Brooker and Morris’ early evocation of the nice ’n sleazy nation of hipsters aka ‘self-facilitating media nodes’. With more weight given to specific signifiers of people type and place and the painful irony of criticising a hermetic world you are actually part of, there is less on the social rituals of intoxication, so we see the old east end boozer now ‘Nailgun Arms’ a lot but there is less on the activities therein. There are also events and clubs in an identifiably Shoreditchy milieu, but little excessive drinking and drugging shown as the activity takes on the more nebulously modern tag of ‘partying’. Indulgers are cast as loners who depend on drink and drugs and are out of step with the in-crowd too busy being cool. Dan Ashcroft, the anti-hip writer who slags off the idiots, is an idiot too for caning it on the execrable schmooze circuit too much, as is evident when he wakes up in Barley’s office covered in paint. Then there’s the young cokehead, who the scheming Barley is happy to say ‘go on, get it up your beak’ without partaking himself. And Barley himself is made more laughable by his use of strong weed (‘colossal amounts of TCP’). He thinks it aids the creative process, but of course it doesn’t. Probably. Not unless you have installed some very hardworking filters.

Ashcroft gains a small victory when Barley copies his Geek pie hairdo and is still winning after Pingu’s defenestration, but he fucks up with Barley in his pants and the Shoreditch twat wins out, switching back on to the programme of highly networked self-promotion, bagging the TV series and subjecting a comatose Ashcroft to his whims. Don’t drink kids, you’ll lose your status as the plum writer on an edgy magazine and some twat with a web audience of other twats will take over.

Finally, the Mighty Boosh. Despite much emphasis on the ephemera of pop subculture for the material that provides our knowing laughter – breakdancing mutants, Vince’s ‘harsh tasty’ beats for the cobra, Bollo’s DJ slots at Fabric, punkgothbluesmodjazz younameit – life's drinkers, tokers, pill-poppers and snorters are almost marginalised. Naboo aside (who has smoked so much he has magic powers), they pop up as odds and sods such as the Scottish street alky, the actor-lush, Sammy the Crab ‘off his tits’, shamen Kirk on one. But when Fielding and Barratt, who had already explored the techno hippy waffler with his Pod act with Tim Hope, do touch on hedonism, they get it right, with some funny, accurate lines delivered round the shamen stag tour, for instance.

In Booshworld, there is generally no need to portray temporary oblivion when there is a premium on adventure, fantasy and otherworlds – which is sometimes little more than a conceit and a device given that most of the time ‘the humour’ is Vince and Howard riffing off each other, placing them in traditional comedy duo territory. The message almost seems to be: don’t hammer it too much, because you wont be able to indulge in this shit-chatting. I have a friend like this, a lad who has lived in several east London interzones (Whitechapel, Broadway Market, Bethnal Green) and knows one or two of the Boosh entourage, who resolutely avoids serious talk. Often the ‘game’ with him is how you can follow one meaningless statement with another. What are his views on the world? Don’t be so gauche, we’re talking about creatives here.

Over the course of the three series they move from the Zooniverse to Naboo’s flat and frequent mentions of Camden onto the Dalston shop, with the last being key to the outlook. In the Boosh as in hipster zones such as the real Dalston itself, there is a sense that youthful contemporary cool society, with its handheld gadgets, instant access to all of life’s wonders and mysteries and wilful ignorance of class and race (easily achieved when you're white and well off), is already nicely deranged enough, providing infinite jumping off points for endless, directionless, issue-less conversation. But that would be a conceit too. Booshers or Barleys may not need industrial quantities of booze and the other stuff, but they are still just as divorced from reality.

With A Taste Of A Poisoned Paradise

2012-01-07T18:09:00.003Z

2011-12-22T12:27:00.000Z

Early 90s fairly popular, fairly poltical British music

2011-12-21T18:22:00.000Z

There was a strange little Interzone of Politicised Baggy/Crusty/Hip-Hop in the early 90s, quite mixed in race and gender terms. None of these bands was critically well received, all of them were fairly to very popular i.e. Chart action/TV spots! An admission; I didn't and don't like any of them. There may well be more obvious contenders I can't remember, obviously there's The Levellers (aha! that's where Folk went in the 90s, innit!) but they don't have a dance dimension. Britpop pretty comprehensively swept all this stuff away. I'm also going to skip RDF/Citizen Fish/Culture Shock for now as they were too "underground".

Chav-bashing ideogram

2011-12-09T18:01:00.001Z

These townies they never speak to you
Just stick together so they never get lonely.

Blur - Chemical World (1993)

***

"London Fields inspired Parklife. That book changed my outlook on life".

Damon Albarn

***

The novel [State of England, 2012] tells the story of Lionel Asbo, a skinhead lout who wins the lottery while in prison. Amis has revealed that one of the characters, "Threnody", is loosely based on Katie Price, whom he has previously described as little more than "two bags of silicone". Other objects of Amis's satire include the British press and a society obsessed with sex and money.

***

Other Brothers Can't Deny

2011-11-27T10:01:00.010Z

In the spirit of Phil's project of an alternative pop canon, IMHO the above could be the greatest hit single of the 90s. For starters, I defy anyone to name a better U.S. no. 1 from that decade. If you want to get all 'cultural theory' about it, there's myriad social conflicts, historical vibrations, defiant affirmations and contradictory anxieties at play in this ditty; but I can't be arsed elaborating all that much. Let's just say it forms part of a continuum stretching back to vaudeville and the 'jelly rolls' of Delta Blues, recklessly throws itself into the thick of the culture wars, perversely reclaims American capitalism's traumatic origins (whip-crack), and even has a blink-and-you-miss-it flashback to the Vietnam War. It manages to throw in all these allusions while (literally) grounding the listener with its celebratory theme. In four throwaway minutes, it manages what Oliver Stone couldn't pull off with a hundred million dollars, a six-month shoot and a crew of thousands.

But for now, I'll conclude with a Zen defence: What makes it so very wrong may be the very thing that makes it perfect. Surely the a posteriroi justification for all the best 'low-brow' art, no?

Olympian Spirit

2011-11-23T10:53:00.005Z

Lovely bit of Spenglerian iconography in this advert for British Telecom's new broadband service, BT Infinity (!). Here we can see The Singularity raining its holy manna-jism over man-machine cyber-athletes, clad in the increasingly ubiquitous Union Jack. This is patriotism not in the blood, but worn as a second skin purely for abstract, ritualised competition, and easily shed to reveal the globalised, pan-national corporate leviathan beneath.

The accompanying soundtrack is by Coldplay, whose hesitant, tentative, optimist-pessimist, wave-that-never-crests sound ever suggests a goal that is in sight but that can never quite be reached. Philosophically, Coldplay have always seemed to suggest the impossibility of communication, and perhaps our culture's last idea will be to accommodate the impossibility of reaching infinity as a kind of achieving infinity by default - that the gap becomes the prime symbol of our civilisation rather than the goal itself.

That Good, Old-Time Religion

2011-11-15T11:21:00.003Z

This is an absolutely fascinating interview with Peter Mandelson, on the subject of the Euro and the future of the EU. It's chiefly fascinating because it shows how unhinged the "moderate" common-sensical mainstream of British and European politics is, and how resistant they are to the mandates of reality.

Very few people understand what the European Union really is, which is not a trading bloc, or a standardising bureaucracy, or a political attempt to nullify Germany, although it became these things accidentally. What the EU actually is is a Revitalisation Movement, by which a morally and culturally decrepit civilisation, physically shattered by the rampages of the quasi-barbarian ancestor cult known as Nazism (itself a bizarre attempt at renewal), tried to reinvigorate itself by the creation of a mission-myth of a New Europe, born again to dazzle the world with its enlightened, endlessly evolving cultural dynamism. It's this essentially religious vision that explains the keep-voting-until-you-give-us-the-right-result fanaticism of the Europhiles; why the likes of Peter (actually a typical member of the British political class with regards to Europe) still believe.

But behind the facade of social democracy with which the EU pretended to distance itself from the "Anglo-Saxon" model of neoliberalism, it was up to the same late-Faustian game of agnotological voodoo-finance - the only way that the West can continue its progress-mythology: by inventing the (no longer plentiful) resources that enable the "progress" that is its very world-soul.

The Euro is dead. The EU is dead. But, like the banks, expect them to continue to stagger on in the standard zombie half-life that characterises the decline of the final institutions of The West.

Noughties Poem Including History

2011-11-12T11:37:00.002Z

Before we came to this country,
We were kings and queens, never porch monkeys,
There were empires in Africa called Kush,
Timbuktu, where every race came to get books
To learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans,
Asians, Arabs, and gave them gold.
When gold was converted to money it all changed,
Money then became empowerment for Europeans;
The Persian military invaded,
They heard about the gold, the teachings, and everything sacred;
Africa was almost robbed naked,
Slavery was money, so they began making slave ships;
Egypt was the place that Alexander the Great went,
(He was so shocked at the mountains with black faces)
Shot up they nose to impose what basically
Still goes on today, you see?

If the truth is told, the youth can grow,
Then learn to survive until they gain control.
Nobody says you have to be gangstas, hoes.
Read more, learn more, change the globe.
Ghetto children, do your thing,
Hold your head up, little man, you're a king.
Young Princess when you get your wedding ring,
Your man is saying "She's my queen".

- Nas, "I Can" (2002)

Recovering from the opportunities of 1980s or, "There is playdough in the chill-out room,"

2011-11-07T20:55:00.000Z

Operator: Here we are, I have this connected for you now, it should run fine at least for the next few days.

[undoes cap and wipes finger around run and re-covers, smiling to no one in particular, a little C shaped gesture of the head]

Recovery is usually straight forward, there might be a few odd sensations here and there but don't worry. The medication you're on now will dull any pain, but more importantly it will subdue that feeling your getting.

[gestures]

Yes, the pins and needles. I spoke to a lad the other day described it as being like his nerves trying to make a fist or a shadow-puppet or something. Obviously that's not what is really happening, and the sensation is all wrong because the signals can't be coming from where you think they are. Obviously.

[Wipes upper lip and sits down carefully, as if this action, of all the others that will be performed today is the one that will be observed, marked]

[Takes a small breath and allows features in face to wind up in a familiar way that comes before beginning the routine, speaking the words that have worn their way through time and observance. Familiarity is not comforting, not in this case, but it drives time and responsibililty as if on a belt and that does make things easier, one it's started it's as predictable as the morning news.]

[Does not say anything]

[There is a restaurant nearby, it is nearly full, only a few tables in awkward places between walls and fixtures, next to the toilets and beneath a speaker are empty, or at least occupied only by inanimate objects, possessions, shopping.]

Narrator: so where is it, where are they coming from?

Operator: Somewhere else, that's all the matters, some Other place. That's what is most important, they come from outside. It's a binary thing.

Narrator: But surely there is a gradient?

Operator: Not in this situation, not in most in my experience, the cut makes it pretty clear.

[A young couple are standing in the doorway of the restaurant, not yet committing to entering as if they can hang onto the moment before that decision is made, before the social armature swinging like a boom comes round. They stand in that dead space at the top of the arc, assessing whether it will work to enter this place to eat, whether it will be awkward, perhaps sharing a table, at least having to excuse themselves as they step past people already in mid flow of conversation, and food, protecting themselves further with protective laughter, fork gestures, protecting against an elbow in the back or a scarf knocked from the back of a chair. To enter into all of this is so much. The wind tips, the boom swings over and they enter, uncertain as to whether this decision is their own but by then it hardly matters, reflexes kick in and they are enveloped]

Operator: You're going to have to learn to let it go.

Narrator: let it go?

Operator: Yes.

[wipes lip again]

There's something that was there, but now it's elsewhere, it's in the Other space.

Narrator: That's ridiculous, it's in a space here, it's in a bin at the back probably, in a yellow bag and on a trolley,waiting to be moved again.

[Begining to obviously sweat, looking damp]

It's more active than me, and that's the problem, it's still part of me, the gap means nothing. I'm full of gaps, you're full of gaps! The thing that's me is monster.

Operator: ...

[shifts weight as if to get up, then repeats action in reverse, brings it back. Like a man in a bar racking the pool balls, that little flourish, getting more pronounced as the evening moves on, the more pitchers, the more won games, the more hopefully threatening stacks of 50p's on the edge of the table]

Now, look self image is a delicate thing, but you can't dwell on it, you need to understand...

Narrator: I do understand, you don't understand at all. I have gaps all through me same as you, that object out back, making its way in the world, that's still part of me, just like my primary school education is part of me, the way I learnt to form letters on those exercise books with the extra horizontal lines.

[Tries to stand but can't, sits down, sits up. rubs hands together, looks down at the beads of sweat on the backs of each hand. Watches one droplet of water run off one way, and then another a different way. Blinks.]

There's just a blur that gets thicker in places, has some dense points, collision points, tight enough that I can sit on a chair with them but it's still all a blur, there's no line that says this is one thing and that's another.

Operator: But there is a line...

Narrator: No, no there isn't! We put the line done afterwards, and then forget that we did so, or at least try and forget. This is why we have courts for example, they spend day after day doing this activity that ends with a line being dropped on the ground and everyone trying hard to forget they just put it there. Day after day telling some poor soul that he transgressed while he looks at his feet and lies through his teeth that he knowingly did it as if there was a sign there.

Nothing categorically ends, well it does, but that category is what we put down. You know what though? that categories have been getting blurrier and blurrier themselves, mixing in with all those things they were meant to keep apart, like you've microwaved your ready made korma too hard and for too long and it just got up off that ceramic rotating plate and ate your face!

Operator: But division is what makes things work, you can't have a machine made out of jelly, the gears have to be distinct from one another, otherwise the energy wouldn't get anywhere.

Narrator: Rubbish! I love jelly, and the energy runs more efficienty through that than it does though the drive on a lathe, all that energy lost in a slipped belt, in the wearing of bushes, and the whole thing is making it self redundant all the time anyway, bringing on it's own obsolescence while continually looking the other way, pretending it can last for ever and it will harness all these kinetic and cultural forces in it's steel for all time. The jelly is far more efficient and it embraces it's own demise with no pretence, with dignity.

Operator: This is a very stressful time, you can't expect to adjust straight away, that's what we're here for, to put these systems in place to ease the transition to your new life. It's not even you new life, it's just your life.

[Wipes hands on down sides of trousers from hips to just above ankles, bending forward with head still looking straight ahead at all times, settling back. Leans forward to fall back on the old phrase]

Everything's going to be fine!

Narrator: I know it will be fine, I know it will be seamless, it's the seams which are false! It's the myth of the seams that are making this so stressful, they make you think you should know where you are but you don't. I mean, one doesn't, not "you" personally. The map isn't bloody there when you look down! I'm going to learn to accept it if it's the last thing I do! I'm going to learn to be overjoyed when people put their fingers in my food and leave them there, I'm going to spread myself out all over the place and just ooze and throb, it's going to be wonderful, I'm Whitney, I'm Chaka Khan, I'm every woman! I'm ready for the dream time, melt me!

How to Be a Retronaut

2011-11-07T11:00:00.002Z

Cross-posted.

When Forrest Gump was first released, what focussed the attention of the public wasn’t its appalling caricature of the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, nor its reactionary hollowing out of history. It was the digital effects. This may seem quaint now, especially if one considers that so much ground had already been broken – and in more spectacular fashion – by the likes of Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. But maybe it was just that fact: that Gump’s digital effects weren’t overtly spectacular, nor used to depict the extraordinary, but fit in rather within a more classic kind of storytelling in the tradition of great American cinema. Think It’s a Wonderful Life with the benefit of modern post-production: so not a radically changed film, but one that made full use of the available technology of our time – as Frank Capra did in his – in order to achieve maximum photographic realism.

A lot was made in the marketing of the picture about the feather carried by the wind in the opening and closing sequences: a feather that was tracked with uncanny precision and grace by Robert Zemeckis’ aerial shot, except of course it didn’t magically land at Forrest’s feet simply because it wasn’t there when the camera was rolling: it was inserted later by Ken Ralston’s team of digital artists. Somehow, that filmmakers could conjure that feather into existence seemed just as momentous as the coming to life on the screen of Spielberg’s T-Rex the year before. It was a new kind of magic.

That this magic in Forrest Gump served also the very peculiar and far from innocent purpose of rewriting post-War American history from a disconsolately conservative perspective later became the subject of extensive critical attention. However this concerns me today only in passing. I want to show how some of the sequences implicated in this manipulation of the shared historical record were also precursors to a seemingly less politically charged but also far more prevalent relationship with our mediated past. It’s a relationship that has virtually come to define internet culture, and culture more generally.

Tom Hanks next to JFK. But also, Tom Hanks next to John Lennon. Tom Hanks next to Richard Nixon. Tom Hanks who picks up the notebook dropped by a black student at the newly desegregated University of Alabama. And so forth. It is in these scenes that Gump’s use of digital effects is at its most self-conscious, inviting the spectator to marvel at the technology that allows the film to literally write its lead character into the country’s history. This leads to an ontological paradox whereby the seamlessness of the insertion from the point of view of its photographic realism should be – but isn’t – negated by the fact that spectator is fully aware of the deception. Or, to put it another way: we admire how real those images look precisely because we know that they have been forged, and the manner in which they have been forged.

Photographic manipulation of course is as old as the medium, but I think there is merit in the argument that with digital technologies there has been a step change, and we have entered a post-photographic era in which the existence of the objective referent that used to be a defining feature of the medium (for instance according to Barthes) can no longer be assumed under practically any circumstance. Gump’s historical mashups have been used to illustrate just this point. However an aspect that is less often remarked upon is how silly and full of bathos these sequences are. Forrest tells JFK that he needs to pee, bares his buttocks in front of Lyndon Johnson, discusses hotel arrangements with Nixon (he’s staying at the Watergate, of course), inspires Lennon to come up with the lyrics of 'Imagine'. In every instance, while it is ostensibly Hanks’ character that provides the comedy, who gets ridiculed are his historical counterparts, and what gets trivialised – for the sake of jokes that are every bit as laboured and unfunny as the technical execution of the sequences is sophisticated – is capital-aitch History.

If there is satirical intent in any of this, it’s hard to see the point of it. It seems to me rather that the object of these sequences is the very act of toying with the past, the demonstration that we can do it, we can alter the record at will. As I say, once the initial wave of critical acclaim for the film subsided, the focus shifted onto its rewriting of four decades of American political and social history. While most of this work is done in more complex and extended sequences, and often quite literally written on the body of the character played by Robin Wright, the manipulation of the archival footage speaks to a disenchanted attitude towards the past that is just as central to its making meaning. 'There is nothing sacred about history' is one of Gump’s core messages, and while it wasn’t a novel one at the time, the newly available digital compositing tools allowed the filmmakers to make it with unprecedented forcefulness.

The author, ca. 1908

Nearly two decades later, that kind of manipulation has become not just routine – it’s everywhere. Every other photo that is put up on Facebook or Flickr has some sort of retro-filter a-la Hipstamatic applied to it. There is no era in poster-art that won’t get cleverly reinvented as alternative past or present. There is no worldwide current event that won’t make Hitler angry, or that cannot be represented as a series of status updates on Facebook. Endless film prequels, the current vogue for period television drama, vintage tastes in fashion and the retromania in pop music described by Simon Reynolds are all manifestations of the folding of the past into the present that defines late postmodernity through the mediation of digital technology.

A digital artefact has no physical characteristics, therefore cannot be dated independently of its claims as to the time when it was created or posted. What follows – along the lines of what Paolo Cherchi-Usai has written about the moving image, and of one of the main corollaries of the contention that we live in a ‘post-photographic era’ – is that a digital artefact cannot be regarded as a historical document. More than that: we cannot keep time digitally. Not without a commitment to establishing and maintaining common timelines. Not when I can turn around in a day or a year’s time and change the content of this post without leaving a discernible trace.

If you’ve ever played with the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, you’ll have a fairly precise sense of the difficulties that the web has in keeping its own records and historicizing itself. When you’re even lucky enough to be able to access a snapshot of the particular website you’re looking for at a time that is close enough to the one of your choosing, many of the elements of the page won’t load and most of the links won’t work (due to an aggravated version of what goes by the wonderful moniker of ‘link rot’). Yet while the self-styled archive facility works poorly, in many respects the web is nothing if not its own archive, a vast repository of digital artefacts that are always present to the reader – both in that they are in a very meaningful sense produced on the user’s browser at the time they are accessed, and in that their temporal coordinates are often uncertain or missing altogether, so that not only you sometimes find it hard to tell where you are, but also when you are. (In the noteworthy case of Google Streetview images, you know exactly where but not when.)

The internet is always-now and, like cinema, like Forrest Gump, it aspires to subsume history, to represent it and contain it whole, except to an even greater extent than cinema its primary mode of access to the past is not narrative, but aesthetic, and consists in capturing and reproducing the key stylistic features of an epoch. The Hipstamatic app does just that: by changing the look of a picture it writes its subjects into the past; in similar fashion, by giving your current browser the look of the classic Netscape Navigator you can surf the web as if it were 1999 (an experience that can be heightened by giving the visited sites the Geocities treatment).

As for the mode of reception, the past thus conceived is primarily a commodity, albeit one that – as is so often the case on the web – is exchanged and consumed without any money changing hands. The site that this post is named after (motto: ‘The past is a foreign country. This is your passport.’) is exemplary in this respect, being a digest or collection of content created elsewhere, updated frequently and largely without comment, in a format that is ready to be liked and tweeted and linked on Facebook so that your friends too can exclaim or more likely mutter ‘oh - cool!’. The whole thing is like a perpetual hit-generating machine, and each stylistic intervention, each gimmicky idea is not given the time and space to develop into a fully-articulated project and become remotely useful or even – as in the case of steampunk – interestingly loathsome.

Like the faux-archival scenes in Gump – which, as Thomas Byers has noted, ‘by being overtly comic […] allow for a kind of "end of ideology" defense of the film, in which critics of the film's politics can be seen as humorless ideologues’ – How to Be a Retronaut pre-empts critique by being light-hearted, clever, technically accomplished. To say bad things about it would be to commit the cardinal sin of taking oneself too seriously, which fact alone makes the site a perfect haunt for the well-adjusted. And in a sense that is fair enough: who would bother and why to take issue with any of the material linked above, instead of pausing to enjoy it for the often genuinely clever thing that it is? Nor am I suggesting that the appreciative chuckle is acceptable so long as it belongs to a critical theorist. The issue is rather what happens when the retronaut becomes the model subject, the index of how to access and understand the past, and thus a figure to work against in order to recover the ‘genuine historicity’ whose loss, as Byers also reminds us, was lamented by Fredric Jameson ten years before Gumphit the screens, when the manifestations of that cultural logic were tame incomparison.

There is little that is comic about the treatment of history writ large in Gump. If it is true that the civil rights movement, feminism and the counterculture dealt a series of blows to the white patriarchal America of Forrest’s birth, in seeking to remove that trauma and undo its effects on society the film puts forward a peculiar idea of memory as disease that comes together in the wretched figure of Jenny: she who will die – after having apologised to Forrest for her past – of ‘some sort of virus’ that the doctors can’t cure, a virus that we are meant to literally associate with AIDS but is also, metaphorically, the morbid manifestation of a lifetime of wrong choices, wrong desires, wrong aspirations. When Jenny finally expires, and Forrest is left to raise alone the couple’s child, he does one last thing for her: he purchases and bulldozes her childhood home, the place where she had been abused by her father: a gesture whose crude intent and brute physicality contrasts with the subtle manipulation of the digitised historical record but reflects the same attitude, the same will to own the past and dispose of it as virtue dictates. It is at that point, having restored the figure of the patriarch and its attendant social and family values, that Forrest can cease to dwell on the past – for he now dwells in it. He has become the Retronaut.

Some useful essays on Forrest Gump (the Byers one in particular is excellent). Regrettably they're all behind steep academic walls at present:

Thomas B. Byers. ‘History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture.’ Modern Fiction Studies Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 1996

Jennifer Hyland Wang. ‘“A Struggle of Contending Stories": Race, Gender, and Political Memory in "Forrest Gump”’. Cinema Journal

Stephen Prince. ‘True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory.’ Film Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3. (Spring, 1996), pp. 27-37.

To The Home Which Everybody Owns

2011-10-18T20:50:00.005+01:00

Between 1697 and 1807, 2,108 known ships left Bristol to make the trip to Africa and onwards across the Atlantic with slaves. An average of twenty slaving voyages set sail a year. Approximately 500,000 slaves were brought into slavery by these ships, representing one-fifth of the British slave trade during this time. Profits from the slave trade ranged from 50% to 100% during the early 18th century. Bristol was already a comparatively wealthy city prior to this trade; as one of the three points of the slave triangle (the others being Africa and the West Indies), the city prospered. This triangle was called the Triangular Trade. The Triangular Trade involved delivering, as well receiving, goods from each stop the ship took.

Darkness

The Bristol underground scene was characterised by a sparseness and darkness. Bands like Portishead and Massive Attack are known for using sparse instrumentation - a prominent bass line, vocals with what are usually melancholic lyrics and sometimes other effects commonly associated with hip-hop, such as samples and scratching. (...) Separately to this, some writers have talked of an undercurrent of darkness within the city due to its history.

Racial tensions within the City

An article in 2008 in The Telegraph stated that: "Racial matters have always carried a historical resonance in Bristol, a city made affluent on the profits of tobacco and slave-trading. Street names such as Blackboy Hill and Whiteladies Road remain as reminders." However, the popular belief that both Whiteladies Road and the Blackboy Hill had connections with the slave trade is untrue: both names appear to be derived from pubs.

(...)

There has often been a slight undercurrent of tension both in the politics and creatively with artists and musicians in the merger of black and white culture. During the 1950s the Bristol Evening Post carried what many today would consider openly racist articles, warning of the dangers of black bus drivers.

Can you make porn come on my screen Dave?

2011-10-14T10:34:00.004+01:00

UK prime sinister David Cameron took a turn from his usual chauvinist approach to small government by this week getting the big four ISPs to agree to an opt-in for users who want the option of porn on their PCs.

Based on a joint Mother’s Union/Department of Education report, it’s a nice but probably feeble try at a ‘central approach’ to the commercialisation and sexualisation of children, in effect little different than changing one’s browser preferences, setting up different users at log-in stage or buying a porn detector from the likes of McAfee. But as we’re frequently told these days we can’t trust ourselves (as Brent says 'it's not for us to say' on the issue of censorship), let alone porn’s purveyors: the levees broke on this in the early noughties and it’s going to be very difficult to contain.

Years of dial-up taught us patience we had grown unaccustomed to as seasoned and avid consumers; patience quickly scorned as we pounced like virtual predators when the i-porn became freely available, obsessing with the ‘money shot’. From there it’s a dark journey into an anarchic free enterprise underworld where we fall prey to our baser instincts, uploading image after image to our memory banks, for hour after hour. Yet it’s not addictive or harmful to others just liberating, we convince ourselves.

Sure, all this pro-am action, the vast majority of it probably taking place in California, probably HAS broadened my sexual outlook. Like so many other activity t’net is good for, it’s an able surrogate for imagination. But I cant help feeling such awareness has come via a sleazy pact; souls decay as retinas burn. That’s just a personal take, then there’s the ongoing objectification of women, society’s oversexualisation, the destructive effects of pornography on relationships and values, harming not just children but also adults. Still the Graun ran a piece defending its liberating effects by, er, someone from Porn.

And like so many other Up, Close and Personal elements of the internet that broadband has facilitated (social rather than sexual networks have only recently gained more web traffic), it came at a frontier moment, where developments in technology fast outpaced the ability (or indeed willingness – rather more lazy than laissez-faire) of regulators to rein in problem areas. It’ll be interesting to see that even with public support whether politicians can really play gatekeeper, the benign Big Daddy, on this.

Years Zero

2011-10-13T21:35:00.025+01:00

The turn of this century was a strange, vague period; especially in the harsh light of how its first decade has shaped up. The noughties, distinguished (?) by the most perverse of cultural enthusiasms, was heralded with a sense of weary anxiety and trepidation. But of course that was just my experience of it. It's uncanny to reflect on - to invest with meaning - a time that felt like a waiting room; a meandering interlude between one way of life and another promising to arrive. Discussing the past with those who were present, we can take fragile comfort by conceptualizing ourselves as a distinct generation defined by shared moments; accepting with a faint smile that our time has passed (open regret being as taboo as ever). In more pretentious moments, it can be rationalised as some (sub)cultural epoch; a world marketed and internalised as our own rite of passage, our cultural currency. I could assert that it was a bewildering time to be of a certain age, but I have to concede that for me it was bewildering. To be honest, it felt like I was surrounded by a lot of mystifying certainties back then.

The ideological assumptions that shuffled the U.K. from one millennium to the next is still open to debate. Most of 'us' had known nothing but a Conservative government, but the direction which Labour would take us was to some degree uncertain. The signs were there, but 'we' were still youthful enough to naively maintain some glimmer of hope. CGI, the mobile phone and the internet still retained elements of magical novelty. For most of the 90s, they were generally regarded as reserved for certain types of people. We were told in preceding years that we should aspire to be whatever types of people they were, but many of us assumed it was only those types of people who were paying much attention. It was as difficult to identify who was right then as much as it is now. We were probably too busy diverting our confusion into entertainment products, the tastes we often mistook for needs. Lurking somewhere inside that common mistake, a vague sense of generational identity was found. Listening to 'You Don't Know Me' today, I hear one world making an exit; weary and unsure of the one about to enter. I doubt that was the intention of the song, and the years that followed demonstrate how we can't tidily pinpoint our anxieties according to the calendar. Society is experiencing a far more overwhelming transition in 2011 than we could imagine in 1999. We didn't realise how limited our perspective actually was back then, but history teaches us that's nothing new.

Van Helden's track was pretty retro for 1999, but it hardly sounds dated in the context of today's pop music. The context of how we hear it may have changed, but even that can defy easy categorisation. My most vivid memory of hearing it was passing through an unlikely (?) location, while the historical and emotional significance of the site was explained to me. Ghosts were mentioned; but we punctuated the old sad story by turning up the volume to bounce our tired and emotional heads, until another subject of conversation came up. The party we were returning from didn't conform to standard 90s cliches either. Not the discofied set of the video, that's for sure. A less contained space for hedonism than the above mise en scene presented as the norm. It may be tasteless to suggest that location's history gained resonance as the above song hitched along for the ride, but for me it accenuated historical reverberations in the (then) present. It may be more arrogant to separate a very deep historical wound from the indulgent, transient context that brings these wounds to one's attention in the first place. When, where, and how we learn things matters to what is being learned. After all, atrocity and disco exist in the same world as my thoughts do. The histories of both continue to effect the direction they take, even unconsciously. At certain times, the most unlikely of partners can join in on the neuron dance. And the bigger the crowd gets, the harder the outcome is to predict.

I never actually saw the above video until I just cut and pasted it. There's been enough water under the bridge for the song to survive somewhere outside its visual packaging. It was an anthem of something. Twelve years ago, I may have believed it spoke 'for' me. A few years later, it was more likely to be speaking to me; on behalf of those within immediate orbit, or those mediated at a further distance. And now? Perhaps it's lyrics are more applicable to an ephemeral space hovering somewhere in between: 'Here'. That virtual world of known unknowns: demanding our responses are as immediate as possible, be they strident or passive. Where the structure of the exchange decides the final result, far more than any strength of argument or solid confirmation of fact. A world that doesn't really exist; but is nevertheless capable of moving our attention towards unexpected places. Leading our thought processes to novelty, amusement, offense, events, argument, atrocity; occasionally realising that our bodies are lagging further behind the further we seek. Every easy click limiting our time and movement, a few more minutes and hours that will never return. The electronic caricature of a cyclical time and personal immediacy long lost to us. Yet another disease of language we couldn't vaccinate. Diagnosis alone cures nothing.

So what am I talking about 'here'? Am I making any sense? That depends on who it's written for, which I thought would be obvious: You of course, dear reader. The other side of the interface. If you're uncertain whether I actually am speaking to you, then we can revert to the oldest of computer games to establish a connection. They once excitedly called it 'interactive', a word used a lot less with regards to the internet in 2011. Movements diagonal, horizontal, vertical, triangular, back and forth; eventually receding back into the darkness, once the screen bids farewell. Any interaction in these spaces is the laziest kind of performance. If you opt out of playing you for the time being, we'll accept that as a statement of indifference or ignorance. For the time being, you may not have even arrived 'here' yet. At some point over the next few weeks (months, years) you could be finding yourself 'here' for the first time. Then you can grace your silence with a minor judgement; as swift as it is forgettable. You've 'been' somewhere, and so on to the next visit, and so on to the next, and so on.

If the memories dicussed at the beginning of the post elude any wider significance, then this platform denies their significance outright. The internet has proven to be a poor replacement for the pop song, the car journey, the party, or indeed history passed on via the spoken word. We can fool ourselves that it goes some way to satisfying our communal longings, but in 2023 its features and talking points will be a far dimmer memory than a disposable song heard from the back of a car. No pop song released today will evoke much in the way of a shared memory. No one will convince anyone that ghost victims of recent atrocities haunt these networks, much less those of three centuries ago. This post, and its source, will be of no consequence to anyone within days. The memories I allude to are unreliable enough to those who can remember them. Opinions or autobiographical details expressed before or after are quite useless. My intentions won't matter, if they ever did. To enquire why I wrote any of the above would be more futile than friendly. You could ask me five minutes after I click 'publish', tomorrow, next week, or five years from now. Where it all came from, and where it wanted to go, would remain a cold case. You'd be none the wiser. How could you be? You don't even know me.

(NB. This post was corrected after spotting several typos, which only added to the general rambling klutziness of the piece.)

Ends Of History

2011-10-11T05:34:00.015+01:00

"It is true that Columbus harbored strong prejudices about the peaceful islanders whom he misnamed "Indians" - he was prejudiced in their favor. For Columbus, they were "the handsomest men and the most beautiful women" he had ever encountered. He praised the generosity and lack of guile among the Tainos, contrasting their virtues with Spanish vices. He insisted that although they were without religion, they were not idolaters; he was confident that their conversion would come through gentle persuasion and not through force. The reason, he noted, is that Indians possess a high natural intelligence. There is no evidence that Columbus thought that Indians were congenitally or racially inferior to Europeans. Other explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and Walter Raleigh registered similar positive impressions about the new world they found."

(...)

"A sincere effort to study other cultures “from within” requires a rejection of the Western lens of cultural relativism. Multiculturalists who wish to take non-Western cultures seriously must take seriously their repudiation of relativism. Otherwise a humble openness to other cultures becomes an arrogant dismissal of their highest claims to truth."

Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism, 1995

"Columbus inaugurated perhaps the greatest experiment in political, economic, and cultural cannibalism in the history of the Western World."

Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, 1992

"Columbus should be honored, for in so doing, we honor Western civilization. Some cultures are better than others: a free society is better than slavery; reason is better than brute force as a way to deal with other men; productivity is better than stagnation. In fact, Western civilization stands for man at his best. It stands for the values that make human life possible: reason, science, self-reliance, individualism, ambition, productive achievement."

Michael Berliner, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, 1992

"Could it be that the human calamity caused by the arrival of Columbus, was a sort of dress rehearsal of what is to come as the ozone becomes more depleted, the earth warms, and the rain forests are destroyed?"

Ishmael Reed, Founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, 1992

"What did Christopher Columbus do, discover America? If he hadn't, somebody else would have and we'd still be here. Big deal."

John Waters, film-maker,1992

"The cruelties multiplied. Las Casas saw soldiers stabbing Indians for sport, dashing babies’ heads on rocks. And when the Indians resisted, the Spaniards hunted them down, equipped for killing with horses, armor plate, lances, pikes, rifles, crossbows, and vicious dogs. Indians who took things belonging to the Spaniards - they were not accustomed to the concept of private ownership and gave freely of their own possessions - were beheaded, or burned at the stake.

Las Casas’ testimony was corroborated by other eyewitnesses. A group of Dominican friars, addressing the Spanish monarchy in 1519, hoping for the Spanish government to intercede, told about unspeakable atrocities, children thrown to dogs to be devoured, new-born babies born to women prisoners flung into the jungle to die."

(...)

"Let me make myself clear. I am not interested in either denouncing or exalting Columbus. It is too late for that. We are not writing a letter of recommendation for him to decide his qualifications for undertaking another voyage to another part of the universe. To me, the Columbus story is important for what it tells us about ourselves, about our time, about the decisions we have to make for our century, for the next century.

Why this great controversy today about Columbus and the celebration of the quincentennial? Why the indignation of native Americans and others about the glorification of that conqueror? Why the heated defense of Columbus by others? The intensity of the debate can only be because it is not about 1492, it’s about 1992."

Howard Zinn, Christopher Columbus, 1992

'90s Haunto-Shite Pt. 3

2011-10-08T15:42:00.002+01:00

Further to Found Objects' "Open Letter to the BBC" over at the '70s blog, here's a last gasp of beeb iconography from the '90s. I keep thinking of this sort of design aesthetic whenever I listen to Destroyer's Kaputt (which is pretty great stuff btw).

He Couldn't Take It With Him

2011-10-06T04:53:00.007+01:00

Fort Thunder, Fought Blunder And Plunder

2011-10-05T04:37:00.005+01:00

Profiting From Depression

2011-09-26T22:56:00.004+01:00

It's difficult to comprehend the utter depravity of contemporary global capitalism, until you see something like this, in which a deeply amoral market trader expresses his disbelief at the amorality of the financial system. When the bewildered civilisations of the future look back at us, they will think we make the late Roman Empire look like a particularly austere nunnery.

But hey, voting for Ed Miliband should fix it.

Despite Remembering Little, Years Later We Enjoyed Telling Ourselves That It Meant Something

2011-09-24T22:18:00.002+01:00

The punctuation, was weird

2011-09-21T14:51:00.020+01:00

The default mode of 90s TV was irony. It was incubated in music and youth television, before infecting general light entertainment. Then it attempted a putsch in arts programs:

Matthew Collings’ This Is Modern Art and the follow up Hello Culture were the main spearhead with their knowing voice overs, the refusal to pass judgment, the acceptance that high culture had come to an impasse. The scripts Collings speaks from, like the accompanying books, have no difficult concepts and use short sentences. Few words, little meaning. Collings throws in references to The Situationists or Clement Greenberg, but in a way which suggests ‘hey, don’t worry if you’ve never read them their moment has passed’. The End of History – not just something for policy wonks. In your living room, right now.

There is now a ‘Collings Shrine’ on YouTube, but watching the programs again is a little disappointing. It’s interesting to see him chat with Patrick Heron or Elizabeth Peyton (maybe the only time they’ve ever been on British TV?), and I personally don’t find him irritating as others do, but the lack of insight or challenge is striking now.

There was another way however:

Obviously both critics wanted to avoid art-doc cliché . But Meades made the opposite choices to Collings. Collings and his producers put all the distancing techniques into the script and voice over. The look of the programs are in fact rather conventional, they just go a bit ‘grungy’ every so often. Instead, Meades plays it straight as a presenter. He really is a patrician English man barking cultural instructions at you.

It could be Kenneth Clarke. The scripts are not gushing or trite, but they are not detached either. Instead they are polemical: you know what he likes and what he doesn’t like, for what reasons and why it matters.The irony, the distancing techniques, are instead in the camera work, the music, the extras, the props. These are used not just to take the piss, but as a way to make you look again, to look harder at what is on screen:

Collings defence was that to make serious programs about artists at the end of the 20th century had to done ironically because of all the accumulated clichés. The Meades approach ducks this by taking things that were never presented seriously by television – Birmingham, pigs, post-war church architecture - and treating them as if they were the most important subjects in the world. In fact many of his subjects are just the sought thing that were used so witlessly by 90s irony e.g. pubs and drinking, Belgium, golf etc. The programs move quickly and pack in a lot of examples, facts, opinions and jokes. Your brain is working really hard for 30 minutes.

Ultimately, the Collings programs suffer from the problem of all TV series where a critic or academic is brought from the outside into television. So often these people just don’t actually like the medium or are afraid to take on the producers and get what they actually want. By not treating seriously something that they think of as ‘dumbed down’ from the start, they end up with something naff and full of padding.

For the viewer the frustrating thing about Meades’ programs is: why hasn’t it had any effect on the rest of arts or history TV? How can Simon Schama still be striding across fields after this:

But then Newsnight outlived The Day Today.

Celebrity Culture Ground Zero

2011-09-21T00:34:00.001+01:00

Still Waters

2011-09-19T22:26:00.000+01:00

Desecration Acts, Coda

2011-09-17T02:31:00.003+01:00

Part Three: Slouching Toward Ypsilanti

Getting the "band" together. Some twenty years after the fact. Hey, why not?

Nevermind that, back in 1974, it had largely started out as an art-school hijinx, the product of youthful boredom and malaise and surplus energy, designed to befuddle a handful of locals through an infrequent series of "guerilla" (i.e., uninvited) performances around town. Freeform guitar caterwauling, tape loops, a version of "Iron Man" performed with a rhythm section consisting of a coffee can and vacuum cleaner...that sort of thing. As one of the founders, Mike Kelley &mdash, would recall looking back over two decades:

"All of the members of Destroy All Monsters had grown up during the alternative cultural renaissance of the late sixties. We had all been raised on the psychedelic excesses of the MC5 and the Stooges, and the general feeling of that time: that every form could be combined and all excesses were possible. Now we were in the dark ages. Detroit's economy had collapsed and taken with it its radical culture. Detroit was a dead city. And Ann Arbor, once the 'drug capital of the midwest,'...and a thriving radical intellectual scene, was now slipping back into being a sleepy and conservative fraternity-row college town. All of the musicians of the previous generation were trying to adapt to the cleaner hard rock sound of the day. ...This was the milieu that birthed Destroy All Monsters. We were designed to be a 'fuck you' to the prevailing popular culture."

To say nothing of the "shits and giggles" component. At any rate, within a couple of years, two of the main instigators -- Kelley and guitarist Jim Shaw — departed to the west coast to enter grad school, leaving the other two members of Destroy All Monsters to carry on with the enterprise however they saw fit. What soon followed for the outfit is history, or at least a footnote in the annals of the Midwest's contributions to the American "proto-punk" canon. With the Stooges' Ron Asheton and the MC5's Michael Davis in the lineup, it became — according to member Cary Loren — a period of "formalism" mixed with "out-of-control energies and egos." By the 1980s, the group had ceased to be, while Kelley and Shaw were off embarking on what would become highly successful art careers.

Come 1994, the members of DAM found reason to look back to DAM's beginnings as they assembled a collection of the group's early, unreleased recordings. After some discussion, they decided — why the hell not give it another go? The timing was a little ironic, seeing how the early '90s already an orgy of "reunion" tours by acts from the 1960s and '70s getting back together for the sake reliving a few glory days of yore. From the Swingin' Medallions to Three Dog Night, eventually followed by — not too many years later – the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. In doing so, the idea was effectively reset all the gauges to zero — using their original 1974 "art-noise" intentions as their starting point. Sporadic performances, tours and CDs would result in the years that followed. Of these, the album Swamp Gas — recorded in the final years of the decade/century and seeing release in 2001 – perhaps best embodies DAM's initial intent.

As far as historical revisionism is concerned, Swamp Gas retells the latter half of the "American Century" through a haze of lysergic mind-rot, "alternative"/New Age spirituality, UFO cults, "trash" culture, and conspiracy theories; all of it threaded by a free-form racket or free-form jamming, yakkety guitar, droning noise, primitive electronics, vari-speed tape collages, and the occasional cartoon sound effect. An open mystical invocation — reminiscent of bits from Timothy Leary's Turn On, Tune In... LP and attributed to Madame Blavatsky — tells of the "Seven Worlds of Eternity" and urges the listener to "kill all desire." The voice of Sun Ra recurrently drifts through the miasma of noise. At one point, Mike Kelley steps to the mic delivering a 17-minute long ode to the famed UFO sightings over Dexter, MI in March of 1966 as they were recorded by witnesses and law enforcement officials, invoking Sananda and Mark David Chapman and Project Blue Book, while intermittently offering interpretations of the top ten hits of the spring of '66 ("Nowhere Man," "California Dreaming," "Homeward Bound"). All of it coming wrapped in a copy of the Swamp Gas Gazette, a mock newspaper bearing extended Heaven's Gate-styled texts on UFOs and Sananda and whatnot, as well as a couple of articles purporting to reveal "The Truth" about Iron Butterfly and Question Mark & the Mysterians.

It's an extended exercise in mind-fuckery that's sometimes bewildering, and sometimes merely numbing...not unlike hearing Amon Düül's Psychedelic Underground hammered out in an amphetamine blur. It is, admittedly, not an incredible album. Ultimately, it's an artifact — an effort at channeling the aesthetic spirits of a particular bygone time, resuscitating the stillborn potential of a creative em-oh and an era-specific sense of restlessness and disenchantment. Something about the cathartic noisiness of it all probably still felt somehow vital, just as necessary as the whole shits-and-giggles aspect. Which I suppose is what one could expect from a long-delayed transmission from the beginning of the Age of Diminishing Expectations.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

[ Part One ] [ Part Two ]

Faust!

2011-09-14T12:21:00.003+01:00

Brings tears to my eyes, this stuff.

Gen X + B.B. - $ = Y

2011-09-12T15:05:00.004+01:00

(Redacted)

2011-09-10T20:52:00.003+01:00

The Men's Movement Cartoon Network

2011-09-10T00:36:00.001+01:00

Gentrification makes everything better...

2011-09-07T00:47:00.009+01:00

...right?

Bang Olufsen TV (value £4500) stolen by rioter from Hulme.

Bang and Olfufsen TV (value £8865) claimed by MP for Manchester Gorton, Gerald Kaufman, on expenses.

"The Telegraph also said Sir Gerald entered a claim for £28,834 - more than £15,000 of which was paid - for improvements to his London home, after telling officials he was "living in a slum".

"More children live in 'severe poverty' in Manchester than anywhere else in Britain.

A report by the charity, Save The Children, reveals that a staggering 27 per cent of youngsters – 25,000 – are blighted by the 'shameful' scandal"

Pyramid Scheme

2011-09-03T22:43:00.009+01:00

It is a fascinating spectacle that London, home of the gargantuan Ponzi scheme that is global neoliberal capitalism, is at last to host its first great pyramid, perhaps man's most deeply symbolic form of architecture. Pyramids are diagrammatic manifestations of the basic principles of sacred geometry, in which the apex, the point, represents one or absolute unity, and the base, as a square, represents materialisation - the four sides being the first product of multiplication (2 x 2), as well as the four classical elements (air, earth, fire, water), and the three dimensions of the experienced world, plus time. The lines spanning from the apex to the base represent two, or duality, and the triangular side faces represent the trinity, or The Mother, the triangle as the simplest possible shape being the mother of form. As such, a pyramid expresses how unity passes into manifestation via the principle of creation, and the link between the material realm and the infinite.

Pyramids are a recurring historical motif, from the Ziggurats of the earliest civilisations of Mesopotamia to the Egyptian, Nubian, Chinese and numerous Mesoamerican cultures. Although the overt purpose of these structures is not always known, their purposes are generally agreed to be connected to either astronomy, worship or burial, or some combination of the three. Certainly the great pyramids of Egypt are considered to have been primarily burial mounds, in which the great kings of the Old and New Kingdom dynasties were prepared for their journey to the afterlife. The mummified rulers were buried alongside the tools, instructions and symbolic apparatus considered to be necessary for their journey into the hereafter, and as such we can perhaps consider the pyramids, working "in reverse" from the base to the apex, as being magical machines for the transition from the material to the infinite. That many of the mummified kings were buried with portions of their great wealth offers a tantalising suggestion that no doubt appeals to the contemporary wealthy who often bury themselves in pyramidal mausoleums: that you can take it with you.

As sacred structures, the great pyramids of Giza were based around the golden ratio, 0.618:1, or 1:1.618 (1.618 x 0.618 = 1) - a ratio you can get a visual representation of if you inspect your credit card - and their passageways were aligned with the constellation Orion, which the Egyptians considered to be the home of the god Osiris. The Shard is, however, a Faustian pyramid. Whereas for the Egyptians the sacred was infinite, for we Faustians the infinite is sacred, and rather than The Shard obeying the principles of celestial harmony, it instead obeys the principle of extension. In creating the tallest building in the UK and the EU, architect Renzo Piano has squandered his sex energy in the pointless breaking of records. Like the similarly grandiose Bishopsgate Tower, The Shard has been funded by Qatari petrodollars, the Arab oil states desperate to convert them into something, anything tangible before the collapse of American global hegemony renders their value zero. Sadly, if there's any cultural artefact with even less of a future than the US Dollar, it's the skyscraper; symbol of a future of endless growth, and not of the future of grindingly irreversible decline we're going to experience. What will finish the skyscraper as a viable form is not likely to be its direct energy consumption in an era of depleting energy supplies, but rather the simple fact that an ever-shrinking global economy will not be able to support the giant corporations with their Promethean reach and gluttonous requirement for office space. Similarly, the exotic materials that clad the more recent buildings will not be replaceable when the rareified manufacturing facilities that produce them succumb to the decomplexification that will accompany our long decline. Ironically, it may be the most recent, environmentally friendly buildings that enter redundancy soonest.

In many ways The Shard, like the ancient pyramids an attempt to concretely manifest the eternal, will be a manifestation of the ephemeral. As with the other tall buildings around it, it can perhaps best be seen as a store of useful materials that will not be available for too much longer - a vertical salvage dump. It is believed the white limestone that originally clad the outside of the pyramids at Giza was used to build the mosques of Cairo. Perhaps the treated glass and engineering steel of The Shard will end up supporting the temples of the new savage religions that will arise in its dust.

In A Parallel Universe, We All Live Lives That Are Ever So Slightly Different (Or Even Longer)

2011-09-02T14:22:00.006+01:00

Mint Deville

2011-08-30T12:15:00.004+01:00

I should do a post on the 70's blog about Mink DeVille. They're the kind of band that interest me these days - the kind that fall awkwardly between the "official" and "alternative" histories of pop and rock. Willy DeVille was a Seventies rock'n'roll revivalist with a difference; his aim was to repopularise the oft-forgotten hispanic, cajun and gitano roots of popular music. Coming from the wrong (ethnic) side of the tracks, when he sang about his girlfriend's parents not allowing her to see him, there was always an uncomfortable truth to it.

Here's a late(ish) gem from his solo days. It's just a great song.....

Dust yourself off and try again

2011-08-25T13:33:00.001+01:00

Beats, Rhymes and Cod-Psychology

2011-08-24T02:49:00.014+01:00

The new Tribe Called Quest docu-film is a timely reminder of just how insanely remarkable and unique the whole Native Tongues project was. If ever there was a lost cause in need of defending and resuscitating, this is it. Unfortunately, the film as a whole succumbs to the vogue for tiresome human-interest biopics, and concludes with the unfortunate spectacle of two middle-aged men squabbling over nothing very much at all, a whimpering descent into farce with a timeliness of its own.

I'm going to dismiss accusations that Tribe were merely wussy, white-boy hip-hop out of hand (isn't it incredibly racist and sexist to imply that only white people would "get" this sophisticated, cerebral strand of the genre, that really authentic hip-hop has to be macho and martial?). The Tribe narrative, documented in the scintillating first half of Beats, Rhymes & Life, is quite literally one of the most inspiring and interesting in the history of popular music. Intelligent, funny, funky, and politically engaged, Tribe and their milieu were the most hopeful thing in early-nineties pop culture by far.

It's depressing then, that just as Tribe's trajectory was interrupted as apathy and careerism intervened in the later part of the decade, this film should follow an opening story of consciousness, collectivism, and scarcely plausible musical brilliance with a second-half narrative detailing a somewhat inexplicable extended argument between Q-Tip and Phife during the 2008 reunion tour. We all fall out with our friends and retreat into our families is the banal, boring ultimate message of this half-brilliant film. This may or may not be true, but it's certainly a hackneyed way of treating a radically, anomalously affirmative episode in the not-too-distant musical past.

But anyway, here's to the memory and continuing legacy of those abstract, literate, world-expanding choons ...

This Is What We Have Come To

2011-08-20T14:27:00.004+01:00

Here's nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman proposing that the global economy can be revived via faking an alien invasion. It's proof that the system of economic thought known as Keynesianism has gone far beyond John Maynard Keynes' original proposal to maintain surpluses in times of prosperity in order to boost aggregate demand during recessions, and has simply become another form of Faustianism, our underlying yearning for expansion into infinity.

It's also proof that there is no hope. Our civilisation's delusions run too deep to be challenged and/or reformed. History's maw awaits us as we dream ever-wilder dreams of salvation.

Suburban Knights

2011-08-16T22:11:00.016+01:00

Hard-Fi are the kind of "landfill indie" band that we're all apparently supposed to mock. Quite why this is so I've never really understood, as they seem to me to be clearly unrelated to any of their British peers of the noughties. For a start there isn't the slightest element of nostalgia in their sound, which seems to have been ruthlessly excised of any sentimental cues or knowing quotations. Only the heavy dub of Lee Perry (from whom they took their name) seems to linger recognisably at the edges of their music.

Originally from Staines in Middlesex, what the band documents is the minutiae of contemporary working class life found in the particular milieu of mid-sized, light-industrial southern English towns - a world of industrial estates, replica football shirts, Sky TV, modded Peugeots, vertical drinking and the kind of unsteady work that intersperses periods of scrimping with periods of low-rent decadence: the Saturday night millionaire syndrome.

The dinosaur-vampire super-ego coterie of exhausted rock-crits charged Hard-Fi with two contradictory crimes: the first being the age-old canard of them being somehow inauthentic (there were endless attempts to prove that singer Richard Archer wasn't really working class), and the second that they were simultaneously too wedded to a narrow provincialism to be of any wider cultural significance. In many ways the band inconveniently documented a lumpenised proletarian culture that many metropolitan liberals wished wasn't there, a world in which the likes of News Corporation and Chelsea Football Club and Max Power and Carling lager constituted the staples of cultural life - England as it really is (was?), not as how their denigrators wistfully believed it should be.

As someone who has spent most of their life in a middle-sized southern English city, I have to say that Hard-Fi's curiously inorganic music does ring awfully true - you can almost smell the stale fags and lager-sodden carpets in their sound. But ultimately any authenticity they may possess is superceded by the fact that they write great songs, and rock them hard. Alas, as has been pointed out before on these blogs, there's nothing the tastemakers hate more than something that is just too easy to "get".

1999-2002 (And Ensuing Spenglerian Decline)*

2011-08-15T19:23:00.011+01:00

There's always a risk of nostalgia with these blogs, but I think for the most part everyone has done a pretty good job of avoiding it, perhaps largely because backward-looking is so obviously The Problem Right Now, and utterly devoid of all negative potential. I say this to make clear that the following post is written without any conscious nostalgic sentiment, and by a determined, fundamentalist hater of past-worship.

This disclaimer is necessary because I want to suggest that part of the reason for the moribundity of contemporary pop music is that, at some point in the early-to-mid noughties, lots of incipient, potentially great musical movements were jettisoned, thus depriving us of the modernistic alternative culture which peaked around the turn of the century and that should have carried on growing.

This is an idea some of us have touched on lightly in comments boxes, and it seems to be gaining currency elsewhere as we approach the 10-year "point of objectivity"; namely, that the period 1999-2002 was in some senses a golden age for pop, or at the very least, a sort of window of possibility that was subsequently closed and bolted shut by an unspecified combination of Bush/Blair/Iraq/9/11/nu-rock/neoliberalism-on-autopilot/Jo Whiley/Justin Lee Collins/Heat Magazine/Zane Lowe/Pete Doherty/the internet/climate change/good old fashioned cultural-economic decline.

Owen talks about this idea of an early-noughties "opening" in his Pulp book [I've already quoted this on my own blog so apologies for the repetition if you've read it there]:

... in the early 2000s, the NME made a swerve into coverage of electronic music, R&B and hip-hop, but covers for Aphex Twin, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Destiny's Child and Missy Elliott did not go down well with readers; as is well known, the NME's circulation has always plummeted when a black artist is on the cover.

And today, in Pitchfork, Tom Ewing offers similar sentiments:

The summer of 2002 was studded with so many terrific pop, rap, and R&B singles that it now feels like that time was the peak of something. And as new ways of distribution break down old musical habits, there are calls for us to revive past ways of experiencing music. It's easy to become reactionary. But the snowball excitement of a leak was something new and giddy then-- tens and hundreds of people, first friends then strangers, discovering and thrilling to a track all at once. Pop waxes and wanes, but that communal joy stays with me.

Ewing advocates a Whiggish, "poptimist" view of pop, a somewhat apolitical perspective that opposes "reaction" with the optimistic assertion that technological progress (in his case social media and internet downloading) is essentially a positive force that will create more and better musical results. Nevertheless, he seems to be suggesting something slightly different here: that the "communal joy" which initially presided over internet culture in the early part of the 2000s was something new and exciting (past tense) and that, ten years on, this "peak" seems like a time of lost opportunities since reneged upon.

Again, nostalgia must be avoided at all costs. The period in question was hardly a modern Renaissance. The pop and r'n'b of the time was often riddled with appallingly Thatcherite lyrics (cf. esp. Destinys Child) and used to promulgate a very-un-radical culture of consumer hedonism. But how about this for a broad-brush theory of what has happened to pop culture: its increasing obeisance to technology and the shift to ultra-individual consumption has actually completely severed all connection between contemporary music and "communal" contexts, has completely obviated any way of linking pop production to a collective history. At some point in the mid noughties, pop ceased to be joined to the world in any meaningful sense.

Another reason why this seems accurate is that, in many ways, you can so easily imagine an alternate history in which this cultural impasse hadn't descended, in which r'n'b, grime, and dubstep had continued to flourish up to the point that, in 2011, with an African American president installed in Washington, and with radical oppositional feeling burgeoning in the UK, pop and politics would have coincided in the way they have done in the past, and music might have soundtracked and enabled a wider reform movement founded in positive emancipatory sentiment. Wouldn't Miss E ... So Addictive have made so much more sense if it had dropped this year? Wouldn't 2011 rather than 2003 have been a much better year for Boy in Da Corner to win the Mercury Prize?

The most salient question arising out of all of this should be: how are these moments of possibility closed down? How did the noughties come to be dominated from 2003 onward, not by the innovations of Missy Elliott, Aphex Twin, and Godspeed You Black Emperor!, but by a completely ethically and artistically bankrupt, retromanic (*nods at SR*) pop culture with absolutely no relation whatsoever to the historical moment?

Maybe the simple, obvious answer to the belated, harebrained question posed by the editor of NME this weekend ("Punk spoke up for angry kids. Why won't today's bands follow suit?") is that, when organs like the NME abandon an alternative position and start championing The Strokes, Razorlight, and Kaiser Chiefs over Dizzee Rascal, So Solid Crew, and Destinys Child, sooner or later relevant pop culture is going to dry up. If the progressive modernism of the turn of the millenium had been given continued mainstream coverage and representation, and if we hadn't all retreated into atomistic microcosms from which it's increasingly impossible to agree collectively on what new and meaningful even mean, right now the musical tendencies of 1999-2002 might be reaching near-deafening, revolutionary levels of volume.

*"The Speng" seems to have become a sort of mascot for these blogs hasn't he? Bonza.

My Politics Were Nothing More Than Feral Consumerism (With Some University Bullshit And A Whole Lot Of Experience Teaching Me The Rest)

2011-08-10T21:11:00.000+01:00

Detroit-On-Thames

2011-08-09T12:54:00.005+01:00

London is a city few people understand, and those that are least likely to understand it are its residents and its proselytisers. The reason so few understand it is because hardly anyone knows that London possesses a deep, dark secret. It's a secret I found out quite by chance in the mid-nineties, and have kept to myself ever since, largely because so few people I could tell it to would recognise it, and, even if they recognised it, would be prepared to ever admit it.

The first job I took after I left university in 1994 was as an engineer installing escalators on the London Underground. This was a time when London Underground Limited was well into a programme of refitting every single escalator in its stations subsequent to the King's Cross fire of 1987, in which the old wooden-step escalators were (erroneously) suspected of contributing to the conflagration that had resulted in the death of 31 people, and were to be replaced with brand new units, such as the ones my company manufactured, that featured steel and aluminium steps.

When you step onto an escalator on the Underground, what you may or may not realise is that underneath your feet is another large room, at least as big as the concourse in which you are standing. This underground room is where the escalator is maintained, which is why you never see anybody working on a stopped escalator - all the maintenance is carried out underneath. This underground room possesses an upper chamber, where the escalator controls are mounted (that regulate the escalator's speed, the co-ordination between steps and handrail etc.), a concrete staircase that leads down between each pair of machines, and a lower chamber. Behind the lower chamber, sealed off with a dividing wall, is the pump room, where a water pump operates to ensure the chamber is not flooded by ground water.

We were never allowed to enter the pump room, which was the responsibility of a different company, but what struck me at the time, in every station that I worked, was just how noisy the pumps were. Rather than a slow, muffled thump, the pumps emitted a rapid dakka-dakka-dakka, as though they were at the very limits of their operation. One night, however, while I was in one of the lower chambers at King's Cross, the maintenance engineers for the pump turned up for a scheduled inspection. I took the opportunity to peer through the open door of the pump room, and was amazed to see that not only was the pump indeed operating at an almost manic speed, but that the sunken floor in the pump room was under about six inches of water. Despite my alarm, the pump crew assured me that this was "normal".

The reason why the pumps in the Underground were all working flat-out, I was to subsequently discover, was that the water table in London was rising, and had been since the end of the Second World War. Surprisingly, far from this raising of the water table being the result of human "development", it was quite the opposite - London's water table was returning to its natural level. What had kept it well below its normal level was the fact that up until the 1950's, the ground water had been heavily utilised by London's extensive manufacturing industry. Nowadays we are unfamiliar with the idea of London being a centre for industry, but it was in its heyday one of the great industrial cities of the world, all be it mainly specialising in light and medium industry (the most profitable kind, it should be said).

The disappearance of London's industry was partly a sympton of the general decline of British industry in the post-war years, but it was also partly due to the decline of London as a port with the adoption of freight containerisation - there was no longer any point in locating a factory in proximity to London's docks if you were actually importing and exporting via Harwich or Felixstowe. It was this realisation that the capitol had lost it's two main raison d'etre's - its function as a port, and its purpose as an industrial city, that lead me to comprehend its deep, dark secret: that London is obsolete.

Which is another way of saying that London is dying. It is dying in the same way that Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester, Sunderland, Liverpool, Sheffield, Belfast and all the other major British industrial cities are dying. And once I understood that London was dying, everything that happened there started to make sense: the inner-city riots of the 1980's, the chronic under-investment in transport that had led to the fire in the room in which I stood, the Big Bang that tried to breathe new life into the metropolis via unhinged credit expansion, the bizarre obsession with "vibrancy" that revealed the underlying fear of cultural death.

London had become a city that no longer made anything of substance; it only made words and images. It's proselytisers would speak of the "culture industry", but ultimately what it was making was simply guff.

The underlying reason for the riots of the last few days is the same underlying reason for the riots of the 1980's - absent any viable industry, London cannot provide secure, well-paying jobs for its people. If it cannot provide secure, well-paying jobs for its people, then it will precipitously decline. Unlike the 1980's there will not be any more adventures in the financial industry to give the illusion of economic viability. You can also be sure that the one thing the authorities in London will not do, regardless of political stripe, is encourage the return of industry to the metropolis. The best that Londoners can expect is perhaps an angry play that "confronts" the "issues".

And so what we have seen over the last few days is simply the first murmurings of London's long-overdue Detroitisation. Over the coming decades, London will no longer be encroaching on the Green Belt. Rather, the Green Belt will be encroaching on London.

Blue Thunder

2011-08-06T21:57:00.002+01:00

Behold the Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche, an attack helicopter that was sadly shelved by the U.S. Army in 2004, despite being their "new quarterback for the digital battlefield".

This stunning machine came with the following features:

* Made of composites for lightness and stealth characteristics
* Added $34 Billion to budget deficit
* Mounted rapid data transmission technology
* Maintained delusional belief that war doesn't require sacrifice
* Quiet rotor system facilitated deep-penetration into enemy territory
* Could be shot down by a single gunman with an AK-47
* Utilised infra-red target designation system
* Allowed enemy to confirm hopeless decadence of the USA

Two Swords Technique

2011-08-02T23:51:00.005+01:00

Much of the discussion in the international media tends to view the worsening economic situation in Japan as the outcome of national policies and national historical developments, in isolation from the rest of the world economy. In fact the Japanese crisis is intimately bound up with tendencies in the global financial system stretching back to the stockmarket collapse in October 1987.

When Wall Street crashed, the immediate response of central bankers and finance ministers around the world, in particularly the newly installed chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan, was that they were not going to make the same mistake as their predecessors in 1929. Consequently, they pursued a policy of credit expansion in order to boost stock markets and avert an immediate recession.

This policy had the most far-reaching consequences in Japan. The growth in international liquidity saw the creation of a giant financial bubble. The Tokyo stock market escalated to unprecedented heights (at its peak the Nikkei Index reached over 39,000 compared to its level of around 17,000 today) while real estate prices were so high it was calculated that the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than all of California.

Why, the homeless are left on their own with out help from the government or the public at large. Few are those that volunteer to help those in need and organize soup kitchens for them or closing. We have about 20 NGO working with the Homeless and the unemployed here in Tokyo and surrounding areas, trying to provide meals and shelters. Those NGO's receive about 90 per cent of their revenue in form of donations from abroad. The aid given by the NGO's is often undermined by the “Guardian Angels”, a paramilitary group of sorts, that is closed in combat pants, boots and military like beret. They are patrolling the streets to keep order and cleanliness on behalf of the "good" citizens and businesses that support them. Those “Guardians” give the NGO’s much grief at times, for they do not want to see those NGO's setting up in their part of town to help the homeless. Ironically, the NGO’s best ally against the "Guardians" are the Yakuza’s also known as gokudō (極道), they do provide a social function along their better know other activities. Of course one does try to stay away from the Yakuza, still every now and then they are the only thing that stands between being able to help the homeless or being hindered by the "Guardians" to do so.

Alarmed at the prospect of the last Japanese pensioner switching out the lights, probably sometime in the 22nd century, the government – made up mostly of older males -- has swung into action, with sometimes comical results. In a gaffe-strewn foray into the marriage and fertility debate, Welfare Minister Yanagisawa Hakuo recently said Japan had a “fixed number” of “baby-making machines” aged 15-50 and recommended “healthy” youngsters should have at least two children. The political message – that women and not government policies are responsible for the lack of babies – infuriated opposition Social Democratic Party leader Fukushima Mizuho and many others. “Yanagisawa’s remarks were tantamount to telling women to give birth for the nation,” said Fukushima. “The [ruling] Liberal Democratic Party is to blame for this problem itself for not creating the environment where women want to have children.”

Where once everyone seemed to be treated more or less the same, merchants and marketers are focusing on the affluent. And it is paying off even during Japan's prolonged recession. Mercedes-Benz luxury cars are selling at a brisk pace while overall car sales have slumped. Private banking services offered to the wealthy are also proliferating.

"For years, everyone's pay increased as they got older," said Shoji Hiraide, general manager of Mitsukoshi's flagship department store branch in central Tokyo, which has begun a campaign to woo the wealthy. "It made everyone think that we are all in the middle class."But lifetime employment is crumbling and salaries are based more on merit and performance," he said. "In seven or eight years, Japanese society will look much more like Western society, with gaps between rich and poor that can be clearly seen."

"I see a serious problem," says lawmaker Takuya Tasso of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan. "Japanese society is dividing into winners and losers, rich people and poor people. The middle class is being destroyed." The trend is troubling in a country where just about everyone considers themselves middle class and where no one is supposed to get left behind.

"There is an expression in Japanese, ichioku-sohchu-ryu, which literally means, '100 million completely middle class' (or) more naturally, 'a nation of middle-class people," says Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of Japanese at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Newspapers are now asking, 'What happened to ichioku-sohchu-ryu?' "

A taste of things to come

2011-07-28T14:33:00.009+01:00

Meeting of the Labour Party NEC, Wednesday 28 July 1993:

"When we came to the Education Green Paper, the really big debate turned out to be on higher education. Claire Ward, the Young Socialist, said that students were very worried because there was a phrase in it which suggested we might move towards student loans, rather than student grants. And Gordon Brown said this would be open to misinterpretation, and would give the impression that Labour was shifting its opinion.

John Smith said he was also anxious; he said there might be another scare about a graduate tax.
Then Neil Kinnock said that, despite thirty years of opposition to the idea of student loans, 'I have now come to realise that loans must be part of the debate.' There was Kinnock, preparing for another U-turn; he does a U-turn on everything.
Then Ann Taylor said that grants to all students couldn't be sustained. Clare Short remarked that student loans were not very good, and Diana Jeuda said, 'Just leave it.' Kinnock said we must face the facts.
I said, 'I do think our purpose in publishing this is to restate our commitment to education, to attract the right support. Some people seem to be suffering from ministerialitis, even though they've never been Ministers.'
This one was absolutely as a body blow to Kinnock and he looked most miserable. Anyway, I said I agreed with John Smith and we ought to be cautious about it.
Smith said we should shorten and clarify this passage, and Prescott said, 'Neil Kinnock says we can't raise tax, but why not? What's wrong with that? If it's necessary to do it, we'll do it.' Kinnock looked as sick as a dog."

Tony Benn, Free at Last: Diaries 1991-2001, p.194-5

Oliver's Army

2011-07-25T19:03:00.013+01:00

The New Age Traveller movement of the 1980's and 1990's provided one of the great moral panics of its era, equivalent in many respects to the Miner's Strike, but having a significance that stretched further back into the past and that will no doubt echo much further into the future. Originating from the Free Festival scene of the early Seventies, the winding convoys of itinerant drop-outs, guardians of a hippy ideology that valued peace and love and rejected conventional notions of property ownership, were swelled by the influx of newly unemployed youth that marked the dawn of the Thatcher era.

Sometimes consciously, but mostly unconsciously, the movement echoed the last great upheaval in conventions of settlement in English history - the great dispersement of "masterless men" in the decades prior to the Civil War in the mid-17th Century. The explosion in the population that had begun in the early 16th Century had by that time reached a point where the traditional feudal relationship between lord and manservant was no longer tenable - the feudal estates could no longer absorb the growing local populations, and the close bonds of loyalty that marked a static agricultural economy could no longer be maintained. Similarly the craft guilds, faced with a surfeit of journeyman artisans, attempted to protect their markets by excluding craftsmen who weren't in possession of freehold land.

The result was an increasingly mobile population that operated within an informal economy that eschewed the restricted markets governed by official statutes. More dangerously, these masterless men, having severed relationships with conventional hierarchical social structures, and the established church that provided their rationale, were often the carriers of radical religious and political ideas that demanded a thorough restructuring of society. Feeling confident in their ability to organise their own lives, they no longer saw the necessity of an established priesthood to mediate between themselves and God, and often became what were termed "mechanic preachers", deliverers of the Lord's message who earned their living by their own labour, and not from tithes.

It was these men who were to form the backbone of the New Model Army. Although it is nowadays sanitised as being merely the forerunner of the modern professional army, with its emphasis on promotion through ability rather than through social status, it was in fact a true revolutionary army in that it was the foremost forum for the radical ideas of the time. Most of the leading intellectual figures of the English Revolution passed through its ranks as either officers and chaplains, as the freedom of organisation and discussion that it offered proved a magnet to the various dissenting sectarian groups that abounded at the time. In addition, the Army's campaigns across the length and breadth of the country allowed new ideas to be disseminated to an extent not previously possible. A radical egalitarian group like The Levellers, in many ways hostile to the agenda of the Parliament that the Army answered to, could nevertheless use it to further their ideas while at the same time fight the Royalists that were the common enemy.

As the war progressed, these radical groups found themselves ever more alienated from the Puritan ideas of the essentially mercantile class that made up the Parliamentarian front against King Charles. The Puritan rejection of the "sorcery" of the Catholic ideas still existent in the Church Of England, and their doctrine of predestination, with its insistence that wealth and prosperity were God's reward for good works, damned the poor with the double burden that their destitute condition also condemned them in the afterlife, with none of the magical remedies that would have been available from the Medieval church. It was this ideology, the ideology which still forms the bedrock of our social-economic worldview today, that provoked the most extreme radical movements, such as the Diggers, who, adopting communist ideas that had been prevalent in The Middle Ages, took to planting on waste lands regardless of their ownership, and the Ranters, who elevated alcohol, tobacco and whoring to the status of divine absolution, and conducted church services that were thunderous tirades of swearing and blasphemy. It was this sense that the cold economic world offered by the bourgeois Puritans of the Commonwealth, with their relentlessly harsh mechanical-economic emphasis on works, was potentially worse than the one that King Charles ruled, that even led some Levellers to side with the Royalists, who at least drank, smoked and swore.

Oliver Cromwell, though often portrayed today as resolution itself, was in actuality a rather slippery figure. Although he often privately agreed and sympathised with Leveller demands, in action he never failed to support the men of property, and crushed radical dissent violently when necessary. Quaker and Leveller intellectuals such as James Naylor and Gerard Winstanley had delineated ideas of universal suffrage and collective ownership that were years ahead of their time, and often appear radical even today, but it was the Puritan revolution, with its insistence on property rights and the dignity of labour, that was to prevail and shape the centuries to follow. Winstanley himself, surveying the wreckage of the Leveller movement under the Commonwealth, was the first to articulate an idea, merely wishful thinking at the time, that was to flourish among the idealogues of the 19th Century - that scientific and technological advancement would in turn result in social advancement.

It was over these ideas of the sanctity of private land and property, and the necessity of an honest day's work, embedded deeply within the culture for over 300 years, that the New Age Travellers haplessly rode. And this was the reason for the enormous hostility they engendered from the authorities and from the media. The tabloids especially delighted in persecuting the "peace convoys" that snaked from all over Britain towards the West Country each summer. The travellers offended the Protestant ethic on almost every possible level, with their pagan affinity for spirituality and magic, their dishevelled appearance, their ludic sense of fun and aversion to toil (journalists seemed to draw deep satisfaction from alleging that all the travellers were on benefits), and their tendency to set up camp on any criteria except land ownership. Urban Leftists, no strangers to the Protestant ethic themselves, could be equally unsympathetic - The Manic Street Preachers (if only they'd called themselves The Mechanic Street Preachers) notoriously stated that ‘travellers should be rounded up and put on an island’, proving that for all their self-proclaimed erudition, they didn't actually know very much.

The New Age Travellers were pretty much dismissed as a social movement by youth commentators, being too socially amorphous, too scruffy, and lacking in punchy polemicists to matter in a world where The Beastie Boys were the very essence of rebellion. The "crusties" and "dreads" had no-one speaking directly for them, though two bands who were often considered spokesmen on their behalf were New Model Army and The Levellers. Both bands were considered pretty much beyond the pale by critics at the time, though both had sizeable and loyal followings. New Model Army, despite coming from Yorkshire, sang in that strange mixture of Cockney and West Country that everyone imagines old English people spoke in, and recorded puckish anti-authoritarian songs protesting against the likes of the Falklands War, fox hunting, Americanisation and the creeping sense of commercialisation and repression that marked the decade. Undeniably somewhat gauche, they articulated the anxieties of their audience clearly and effectively. The Levellers, dismissed as "Jeremys" by their detractors (Manics again), were more explicit in their identification of the travelling scene with the Civil War period, the splendid "One Way" being pretty much a perfect distillation of the ethos of the original Levellers, who viewed their relationship to God being one of personal revelation, distinct to the individual, and having nothing to do with the generation of worldly rewards that the Puritans held so dear.

The Levellers even wrote a song about the first great act of authoritarian repression against the Travellers. The Battle Of The Beanfield occurred in 1985, when Wiltshire Police, utilising techniques that had already been perfected against the mineworkers, engaged in a pitched battle against a peace convoy that was attempting to set up a festival near Stonehenge. The violent behaviour of the police on the day even caused consternation amongst the watching media, and ended in the arrest of 420 people, which was the largest mass arrest since the Civil War itself. The Castlemorton Common Festival that followed a few years later in 1992 was to prove the last straw for the authorities; the intersection between the New Age and Rave scenes resulted in another tabloid uproar and drug scare, with the result being the panic legislation of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act that effectively saw the end of the outdoor rave scene. The New Age Travellers, in rejecting the norms of modern industrial society, inadvertently opened up questions of land use and property ownership that had lain dormant for centuries, leaving them vulnerable to a level of social repression that they themselves were to find incomprehensible. However, as the industrial West begins its inexhorable decline, and as the technological frontiers that offered the prospect of ever-higher material prosperity begin to contract, the issues of who owns what land, and what they use it for, will once more come to the fore.

It was a theme she had / On a scheme he had / Told in a foreign land / To take life on earth / To the second birth / And the man was in command

2011-07-19T21:43:00.006+01:00

Oncology

2011-07-11T11:42:00.009+01:00

We in Britain are watching the crumbling of the Murdoch Empire with disbelief and cautious joy. It looks like the rot will spread to other, non-News International newspapers and perhaps even to News Corps’ American media outlets. It again feels – as after the crash of 2008 – like an end of an era, an end that was previously unthinkable. But as with the financial crisis, the ruling elite will probably become zombified and keep on after their apparent deaths, feeding off the living while holding on to power through rigor mortis alone.

Just as Murdoch in many ways represents the beginning of a change that brought about neoliberalism, so does his fall from grace seem to mark an end of it. Murdoch’s media empire acted as a pillar of support for the barbarism of the last 30 years. That pillar is damaged. Whether the damage is structural remains to be seen.

A lot of people have been linking to old Dennis Potter videos where he denounces Murdoch. It’s worth reminding ourselves that there was a time when it seemed like only people who were terminally ill felt that they could speak openly against him. Potter called his cancer Rupert and what a perfect metaphor for the man. Despite looking like a slug, it was as a cancerous influence at the heart of power that he will be remembered for.

But let’s not make a mistake about Murdoch – the misjudgement that he encouraged – his personal myth that he was a self-made man, a man of the people. This is certainly the way the old boy network in post-war Britain saw him. But their xenophobia blinded them to the truth – Rupert Murdoch was born to rule, an heir to power as much as his son James was to be. Sections of the right welcome Murdoch’s fall because they see him as an uncouth wide-boy, someone whose methods are just not cricket. But there is no other way to play their game. The manner in which Murdoch’s fellow publisher The Right Honourable Lord Black of Crossharbour rose to the peerage is the only way.

Dennis Potter’s last, posthumous work was a terrible SF about a future Britain of ultra-privatisation. We might just be moving beyond that half-baked distopia; a world of shrill emotionally incontinent acting, myopic declamatory speeches and cod-American accents. It has often felt like the last 15 years are further from us than the events of 30 years ago. That this crisis in News Int’l is being referred to by some as Rupertgate is just one example of that. If it’s easy to forget that The Times’ Roger Alton was one of the driving forces behind the pro-war position of the Observer it’s because he and his ilk have still not faced the music for their hackwork. In this clip of his impotent raging on Channel 4 (against the all-powerful forces of Mumsnet, of all things), it’s possible to see in his averted eyes that he can hear rumblings in the distance.

The corruption (and corrupting) of the news media is being laid bare. If their own Watergate moment has finally arrived, then hopefully the press will stop using the belaboured -gate suffix and we can instead make reference in the future to that once malign cancerous lump called Rupert. Ah, schadenfreude.

Voice of Reason, Nutcase Vs. Voice of the People, Dictator

2011-07-10T17:32:00.006+01:00

Woodrow Wyatt:

America's Most Wanted

2011-07-03T21:39:00.006+01:00

Our way of life is non-negotiable

2011-06-28T15:03:00.003+01:00

1. As the Tao Te Ching makes clear, the inherent processes of life will always regularly produce perverse phenomena (the irregularities that must emerge from the confluence of different regular phenomena).

2. These perverse phenomena will always be intensified in societies whose behaviours and manners of cultural expression are accentuated by the application of abnormal levels of (fossil-fuel derived) thermal energy.

3. Those that accidentally gain the greatest benefit from the introduction of the perverse phenomena will attempt to regularise them via ideological myths that stress their inevitability, necessity and normality.

We live round here too (oh really?)

2011-06-23T17:14:00.006+01:00

All of Pulp's contradictions are brought to the fore in the 1995 single, 'Mis-Shapes', where the relentless momentum of 'Common People' takes on a newly insurgent tone. If Pulp's mid-90s records are best understood as a South Yorkshire retooling of disco, then 'Mis-Shapes' is their 'Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now' – a statement of triumphant collectivity against the odds. It bottles the giddy feeling that 'we' were on the move that accompanied both Britpop and early Blairism, and the knowledge of what false dawns both were is bound to colour any listening today. Not incidentally, it's a song the group themselves quickly grew to hate, and they didn't play it again from 1996 onwards, although they made a couple of curious attempts to rewrite it. The motorik pulse is replaced by a peculiarly prancing, piano-driven glam-stomp, and like those sleevenote communiques, it's addressed at the Pulp People, at the constituency of outcasts they acquired after 1992. We're defined by being poor, weird misshapen waste products, 'raised on a diet of broken biscuits', so when facing the enemy, we have to use 'the one thing we've got more of – that's our minds'; but we're also defined by certain choices – 'we don't look the same as you, we don't do the things you do', 'we weren't supposed to be, we learnt too much at school'. If it ended there, then that would be one thing – but other, grander associations are courted.

What makes 'Mis-Shapes' so exciting, other than the feeling – lesser than in 'Common People', but still electric – of someone finally finding the right words to convey an age-old grievance – is the way it speaks unashamedly in the language of class war, with the threat aimed directly at property: 'we want your homes, we want your lives, we want the things you won't allow us'; you hear someone who has unexpectedly chanced their way into the unexpected position of spokesman, and seizing the role with alacrity – or rather, using it as the way of avenging the defeats of the past, that hissed 'you think that you've got us beat, but revenge is going to be so sweet' – and there's nothing else produced by Britpop which takes on so fully the role of punk-style upending of received values. Yet though it might present itself as being about class conflict, 'Mis-Shapes' encapsulates rather more a conflict which anyone who went to a comprehensive school or lived in a provincial town in the 1990s will be all too familiar with. That is, the one-sided fights between conformist, violent, sportswear-clad 'townies' and 'hippies'/'moshers'/'goths'/'indies' (otherwise competing tribes pushed into uneasy alliance by a shared and deeply relative nonconformism), fought out in corridors and precincts across the UK.

The phrase 'townie' itself – which Pulp used in interviews to describe 'Mis-Shapes'' adversaries - comes from the town vs gown conflicts of University cities. It's the students' derisive term for the inhabitants of the city that they're exploiting (or, more recently, that is exploiting them). It's also used by the teenagers that most probably will soon be students as a counter-insult to the usual 'poof', 'dyke' and suchlike directed at anyone who doesn't quite fit. So it's deeply double-edged. In the context of school, or at a weekend in the centre of town, it's an expression of weakness, a word you direct at those who directly act to make your life a misery; but by the time you're at university, it expresses a far loftier contempt. In that, for anyone who, like the present author, got given a black eye in the centre of town for wearing a 'Mis-Shapes' T-shirt, the song still elicits an intense feeling of belonging. Here is a record that appeared to dramatise our daily predicament in the plainest of terms.

(image via)

In class terms, though, it hardly mapped onto 'haves against haven'ts'. In the mid-90s, judging at least on personal experience, most (if not all) 'townies' were more-or-less working class, raised in an environment which is much more apt to violently enforce conformity, the duress of everyday life causing an all-too-often suspicious attitude to 'difference', towards getting funny ideas. Meanwhile, most (if not all) of 'us' were either middle class or raised at the intersection where the self-educated working class meets the bohemian lower-middle, where reading books were not something to be ashamed of (i.e, with backgrounds like Pulp themselves), and oh, how all of us loved 'Mis-Shapes'! - even the Green Day fans, so perfectly did it describe our literally embattled position. But why are those who torture the 'Mis-Shapes' every weekend so inclined to play the lottery when they're in so much more privileged a position than their prey? You can hear why Pulp were later so embarrassed by 'Mis-Shapes' when it reaches quasi-Albarn sneers like 'what's the point in being rich, when you can't think what to do with it – 'cause you're so bleeding thick'.

What 'Mis-Shapes' does beautifully – and, irrespective of the group's own disdain, this is a thrilling, totally convincing pop single, one of their best - is lay claim to working-class intelligence against the notion of class as mere identity and ethnicity, sportswear and accents, thuggery and racism. Instead it says we, 'coming out of the sidelines', are the true misfits, those who won't fit either into the tastefully arranged world of the middle-classes or the enforced stupidity of a defeated proletariat. It's enormously exciting as an idea, a call to arms where we will rise up and take over from M People on one side and Oasis on the other, and it's hard not be carried away with its insurgent pride in awkwardness. But it's a fantasy, however wonderful that fantasy might be. We're wrenched out of class-as-essentialism, but where to? A solidarity of clothes and records, of freely-chosen identities as indie kids in charity shop threads?

Pulp - Mis-Shapes przez Pulp

Pedro Romhanyi's video dramatises it in terms as horribly dated and Britpop-ridden as his video to 'Common People', although this one is significantly funnier. We're in a nightclub again, where a townies vs 'us' fight is brewing; 'we' again look like the members of Menswear and Cast, while 'they' are casuals. Yet of a weirdly dated sort – rather than the Ben Sherman shirts and Puffa jackets of the genuine mid-90s thug, they're dressed as the likely late-70s tormentors of Pulp themselves, dressed in Fred Perrys, skinny ties, short skirts, sequins and wedges. 15 years later, it's all completely reversed, as the vintage tracksuit jackets and overgrown Liam Gallagher shagcuts worn by 'us' in the video are much more likely to be the uniform of someone kicking your head in outside Wetherspoons, while the circa-1980 thug-wear worn by 'them' fits perfectly with the never-ending 1980s revival favoured by vaguely bohemian or indie youth. What saves the video is the fact that Jarvis Cocker plays the leader of both gangs, once as 'himself' in brown velvet jacket, once as the evil angry prole alterego in skinny tie and pencil moustache. It's a welcome pointer that the divide is not nearly as clear as the song – and us – wanted it to be. The them and us in 'Mis-Shapes' is wishful thinking, an urge to take the moral force of class warfare and apply it to a rather less righteous fight between the wearers of different jackets. Any real battle between haves and haven'ts would involve some common cause between bullied, intellectual dole youth such as Pulp once were, and the lads and ladies who chased them around town every Saturday. The song still carries, though, the urge to reimagine the divides of class, to produce some sort of alternative collectivity. As a single, it was double-A-side with a song which remembered another moment of failed communalism, a genuine and brief attempt to live in common – rave.

This is an extract from Uncommon - An Essay on Pulp, published tomorrow.

A Literature About Nothing (Or, More Than They Would Care To Admit)

2011-06-22T01:05:00.004+01:00

DFW? TL; DR:

The McSweeneyite clique that nurtured David Foster Wallace is slightly less mass-market than Frey and Ellis, but still a hive of bland, wholesome crypto-cons. Dave Eggers, the nucleus of the group, is pretty much the Bono of literature – a sneering, leathery vampire utterly dependent on the plasma of African children to survive. He began his career by dragging his kid-brother (now long-forgotten) around for sympathy. Then, once little Toph was too pubescent to make a good prop, Eggers dumped him for an ex-soulja-boy from Sudan. Who rarely gets mentioned, though, is his older brother William, an equally ghoulish-looking neocon who was once Director of Government Reform at the Koch brothers’ free-market Reason Foundation. He is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, an ultra-right Republican think-tank whose other members have included Charles Murray, author of an infamous book (The Bell Curve) arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites.

Kinda puts a damper on Eggers’ goody-goody pretensions, doesn’t it?

"My mind, I know, I can prove, hovers on hummingbird wings. It hovers and it churns. And when it's operating at full thrust, the churning does not stop. The machines do not rest, the systems rarely cool. And while I can forget anything of any importance--this is why people tell me secrets--my mind has an uncanny knack for organization when it comes to pain. Nothing tormenting is ever lost, never even diminished in color or intensity or quality of sound."

Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity

"I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me."

Dave Eggers A Heartbreaking Work Of Yadda Yadda

Kaotic Harmonizing

2011-05-31T12:13:00.012+01:00

ALBANY

If there be more, more woeful, hold it in;

For I am almost ready to dissolve,

Hearing of this.

EDGAR

This would have seem'd a period

To such as love not sorrow; but another,

To amplify too much, would make much more,

And top extremity.

Whilst I was big in clamour came there in a man,

Who, having seen me in my worst estate,

Shunn'd my abhorr'd society; but then, finding

Who 'twas that so endured, with his strong arms

He fastened on my neck, and bellow'd out

As he'ld burst heaven; threw him on my father;

Told the most piteous tale of Lear and him

That ever ear received: which in recounting

His grief grew puissant and the strings of life

Began to crack: twice then the trumpets sounded,

And there I left him tranced.

FOOL

This is a brave night to cool a courtezan.

I'll speak a prophecy ere I go:

When priests are more in word than matter;

When brewers mar their malt with water;

When nobles are their tailors' tutors;

No heretics burn'd, but wenches' suitors;

When every case in law is right;

No squire in debt, nor no poor knight;

When slanders do not live in tongues;

Nor cutpurses come not to throngs;

When usurers tell their gold i' the field;

And bawds and whores do churches build;

Then shall the realm of Albion

Come to great confusion:

Then comes the time, who lives to see't,

That going shall be used with feet.

This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time.

Pieces Of A Man (3)

2011-05-28T10:11:00.003+01:00

Ich Bin Nicht Europa

2011-05-26T00:04:00.003+01:00

Yugoslavia was a uniquely independent and multi-ethnic, if imperfect, federation that stood as a political and economic bridge in the Cold War. This was not acceptable to the expanding European Community, especially newly united Germany, which had begun a drive east to dominate its "natural market" in the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia and Slovenia. By the time the Europeans met at Maastricht in 1991, a secret deal had been struck; Germany recognised Croatia, and Yugoslavia was doomed. In Washington, the US ensured that the struggling Yugoslav economy was denied World Bank loans and the defunct Nato was reinvented as an enforcer. At a 1999 Kosovo "peace" conference in France, the Serbs were told to accept occupation by Nato forces and a market economy, or be bombed into submission. It was the perfect precursor to the bloodbaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster- the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane- puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much like the blaring music and blows in the torture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of his comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they otherwise fiercely protect.

Naomi Klein The Shock Doctrine

The dismemberment and mutilation of Yugoslavia was part of a concerted policy initiated by the United States and the other Western powers in 1989. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily overthrow what remained of its socialist system and install a free-market economic order. In fact, Yugoslavs were proud of their postwar economic development and of their independence from both the Warsaw Pact and NATO. The U.S. goal has been to transform the Yugoslav nation into a Third-World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities with the following characteristics:

incapable of charting an independent course of self-development;
a shattered economy and natural resources completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo;
an impoverished, but literate and skilled population forced to work at subsistence wages, constituting a cheap labor pool that will help depress wages in western Europe and elsewhere;
dismantled petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, and automobile industries, and various light industries, that offer no further competition with existing Western producers.

Billy Corgan vs Nick Cave, Lollapalooza 1994

2011-05-25T14:50:00.001+01:00

Pulped Life

2011-05-25T14:23:00.003+01:00

[responding to the call for female contributors, I'm reposting this thing I written on Pulp and Polish (music) culture I posted on my blog Nuits Sans Nuits, which was a slightly changed translated version of an article I've written a year ago and published in a Polish magazine called Lampa (issue 1/2/2010). at its origins it was largely inspired by this piece, of course. So now, when Owen publishes his book on Pulp, hopefully no one will tell I nicked my ideas from him. As it is mostly on how a girl from a different than the British context sees and was seeing the whole phenomenon, I take full responsibility for any possible comments...]

Polish pop & punk bands were journalistic, Polish bands were not excelling in great lyrics. This text seeks to overcome this general opinion, and maybe come up with some new views. In the history of popular music of single countries there’s their history written, social, political, intellectual, it conserves the cultural momentum, the language, style, views, customs, morals and consciousness. I initially started writing this text in a reaction to Owen’s two part essay on Pulp - where he was overtly stating this was the best UK band of the 90s and why it was so special – but it was probably the article’s cheekiness and general flamboyancy that made me to rethink whether and why my country, Poland, never had its version of Jarvis Cocker. Because it was probably this band who captured, better than anything from that period, the zeitgeist, drowned in the Brit-pop’s crassness and cockiness, and left victorious this embarrassment that Brit pop was, without fraternization with Blair or participating in the Blur vs. Oasis thing, still topping the UK charts with Common People in 1995.

Through they style-jangling, eclectic, nonchalant (I thought at that time!), but very accessible music they were the most exciting and moving band at the time, touching upon the themes of the class war, patriarchy, inequalities, and managed to do so through very private and idiosyncratic obsessions of its frontman and lyricist, the one and only Mr Cocker. Because really, the lyrics were the most important in this band, although all of us were dancing to the ‘hits’ from Different Class.

Because there they were – and I remember very well when I bought my first of their albums, it was "Different Class" of course, and it was a cassette, and I was thirteen, 1996, initially prompted to buy it allured by the cover and the artwork of it, pictures of the family events, weddings, communal life and this whole ridiculous slogan ‘We just want to be different’ – wondered, why exactly did they mean? I remember the initial awkwardness of my acquaintance with Pulp very well. For a girl who at that time just started reading music press – and it was a good time for the press in the still freshly free Poland, just a year before a first real popcultural magazine started, called “Machina”, a mixture of Face, I-D and Melody Maker, where I first read about William S. Burroughs, Afrika Bambataa and pop art probably – it was quite something. Don’t remember whether I even read a review of Pulp, just there they were, and I remember just being seduced by the title – Different Class. At that time I already knew and was listening to, among others, Portishead, Bjork, Blur, had few important soundtracks, like (forgive me) Trainspotting, after which I started listening to Joy Division and New Order, and at that time, in Poland, believe me, listening to (Whats the Story?) Morning Glory didn’t condemn you to the social inexistence. Au contraire, no one were interested in this music in my school or among my friends. There were just me and tons of cassettes in my room.

After that there was dozens of British bands in my life, discovered and rediscovered. The moment when I realised how much a context of a place from where the band was was decisive. If you’re from Sheffield you don’t play like guys from Glasgow, and definitely not like blokes from Liverpool or Manchester. Pulp were from Sheffield, famous for its industry and brutalist architecture, with the great social experiment that was the Park Hill complex at its front. It was to be the city of the future, there the dreams about the final industrialization were supposed to fulfill, it was a fine transposition of futurist ideas into the every day life. Cabaret Voltaire, Human League (who first performed as the Future!) or Comsat Angels were from there, among others. But Pulp does not wear significant traces of an influence of the local scene. Cocker founded Pulp aged 15, and his natural references were Roxy Music and (I guess) some influences of Bowie, with a vision of a sexy, feminized but not gay, vocalist, inclination to frocks and luxury, and refined pop.

Who is usually founding bands? Funnily enough, unlike Britain, in Poland it was rather kids from intelligentsia, with an access to family libraries and at least small financial security. Not in UK, as we know. But Cocker was hardly a working class hero. He had it written on his face he was a good student, a well read teacher’s favorite, who attended music lessons and were active in the school theatre. But he clearly wanted a success. And where the hell is a success and the access to the ladies if not in the realm of rock music. If you watch the very early videos of Pulp with Jarvis, included on the post-split Hits dvd, what you see is an incredibly tall, eccentric, quirky, nonchalant, black-humoured but perfectly aware of his uniqueness pretty boy in oversized glasses, whose every gesture, every whim on his face, seem to be perfectly directed, so perfectly it suggest his fragile and embittered ego. He desperately wants to be different, fucking Andy Warhol, combined with Bowie, and more Scott Walker than Bryan Ferry, and what not, and he will be restless and ruthlessly focused where he only wants to. He is like Cary Grant in Bringing Up a Baby – but whereas there only we, the audience knew he may be clumsy, but he’s pretty fucking hot, he’s a bloody Cary Grant after all! – this boy already is perfectly aware how bloody charismatic and special he is and how he will use it to his advantage in the music world. And what a spectacle of a man he is - and he knows it, even when he’s doing his grocery shopping. But look at him again, and then look at him a few years later. Jarvis wasn't a typical frontman, with his carefully staged video and gig persona, with his ridiculous height, thinness, overly long arms and legs...it may have appeared as even grotesque. (then we learned there was some heroine involved to this thinnes later). He looks like a Daddy Long Legs, isnt he, so fragile he would be thrown with a slight blow of a wind. If you look like that, you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, you stand out. There's no easy option for sexiness for you, you have to invent yourself. Hence the queer-but-straight, peculiar stage motion of Jarvis, his cabaret, theatrical characteristic "pointing" hands gestures, his studied as-if drunken/stoned manner of dancing, that seem like a parody of conventional male sexiness, but delivered together with this deep, baritone voice becomes Ueber-sexy...
On the "Sheffield Bands" video from the "Pulp Hits" dvd, sitting together with his band mates, he seems very uncomfortable. They all, the band, love Sheffield, they really do – isn’t Sheffield a beautiful place? he asks rhetorically, equally rhetorically admitting he will never move to London. Ha bloody ha. His mind is already nowhere else.

I’m unfortunately not patient enough with describing frocks and style, if you want this, go to Jon Savage and England’s Dreaming – let me then focus on the message. The message was truly ambivalent. It is hard just to put Jarvis strivings into the box of a prole resentment, because it was so much more. Pulp is a band of oppositions. Yes, of course, he was perfectly interested in making a career and fucking other bands’ chicks, but show me a 90s frontman actually more interested in the destinies of women? And with an equivalent of the quiet, but assured presence of Candida Doyle on the keyboards (somewhat a balance to the Jarvis’s flamboyancy). Another paradox is of course the nostalgia. Cheap nylon outfits, general atmosphere of tawdriness, that later was changed for the more expensive, but still far from luxurious 1930s-meet-1970s colorful shirts, velvet suits and pencil skirts. Nostalgic salubrious sound vs the epic rock, mechanical motorik referring to the Sheffield bands tradition and the sentimental balladry; cockiness and shyness. The sentimentalism, self obsessed and sexy, reeking with boredom, disappointment, resentment, inequalities, decadence, ennui, deviations, alienation, hedonism, despair. And compassion. All those girls and women dwelling those songs, from the early Little Girl, repeating the theme of a young woman, pushed into a marriage & children, and then deteriorating in a house in the suburbs. My favorite song from the early underrated 1987 Freaks album is I want you, with a metaphor of an old lover, who wants to “keep her and throw himself away” (is there a more beautiful metaphor of love?). “You could look like anyone else, If that’s what you want to do”, but she cant, he can’t look at her in any other way. Guilt, frustration, sick love, fear of love, are leitmotivs of the early Pulp. In Life must be so wonderful Jarvis continues over the sad destiny of his ex, who left the town and didn’t quite gain the success elsewhere, who he is mocking, bored to the degree he need not to even pretend anymore.

I have a quite unexplainable liking for Freaks, which are relentlessly bleak, one-note, monotonous album on boredom, unsatisfying sex and title’s “death of emotions”. Unlike other Pulp albums, there’s no playfulness, nearly no skips (apart from I Want You and What You See maybe) toward any other form or other kind of human interaction. There’re certainly pieces of art that doesn’t bring any hope, but the songs on Freaks are also badly written and produced and there’s perhaps no forgiving for that. Still, I can’t fully recover after subsequent listenings of Life must so wonderful, where there’s clear there’s something genuinely wrong with the world and our relationships. There must be a difference between sheer wallowing in our unhappiness and real unhappiness, which is total and absolute shiteness. There’s certainly a difference between acknowledging that your relationship or lack thereof is shit and eg., that people are cruel, and eg. rape and kill each other. Because one can just leave said relationship, paying probably with a few months of feeling shit or having a depression, but surely, things like politics fucking over generations after generations or mass murder are worse.

But the catastrophe of relationships in Cocker’s lyrics are not only a fault of the imperfect nature of an individual, not only of the male desire, which in the end must say “goodbye” even to a nicest and most sympathetic girl and look for another conquest, to avoid the suffocating emptiness. Or rather this emptiness takes place in a specific space: in cage-like, stuffy flats, without perspectives, among stupid and insignificant dreams, among passive women and frustrated men. The characters are usually from the lower social classes, who had a chance to have/taste some of a “better life”, which often ends in a total failure. All this is filtered through an openly misogynistic, self-ironic, monologueing hero, who is mocking his own pretension to grandeur and megalomania, which is also a side effect of a class-induced resentment. There’s no, apart from the Freaks, real misogyny in Jarvis’ lyrics, who was raised by and surrounded by women, the father left the house, and Jarvis frequently admitted he’s actually more interested in a woman’s psychic life. The misery, lack of chances and helplessness of women is a frequent theme there.

Jarvis also were fascinated by Scott Walker, who produced finally the We Love Life, album “nobody bought”, as Jarvis later said, and the whim, mysteriousness, grandiosity of his music is definitely present there, if not the most in the fragmented, whining, painful baritone of the frontman, nonchalant and full of authentic despair. These are lyrics about sex in a smaller city, like all that joyful forgetfulness of Razzmatazz or Babies. But no irony – irony was a clichéd du rigeur of the past few decades and enough of that. Jarvis’ hero may be truly a bastard, when he’s blagueing that “I wanna give you children and you might be my girlfriend”, but aren’t the alternative destinies of those girls actually much, much worse? All those stupid things, they don’t work anymore, leave hope you who cross the line of growing up & entering the society. The thing is all that is raconted from a proper perspective of time (“well it happened years ago”), and is actually told by a slightly lecherous thirty year old man, who really probably doesn’t give a fuck since a long time. Sweetness is still there though, and real sympathy.

My favorite album or rather group of songs come from This Is Hardcore recorded after the astonishing success of the Different Class. This is one of the saddest albums ever, also an album of the lost chances – made more commercial than intended, it has become a spectacular band’s suicide. Its really like in this Frederic Beigbeder book, 99 Francs, the peak of the celebrity culture, this is a nightmare of a fulfilled dream of money and fame, drowned in drugs and alcohol, with incredible 30 minutes opera (masterpiece!) of the title song and written as if from the other side, hilariously funny Help the Aged, with Jarvis flying on a wheelchair to another galactic, like in Tarkovsky's Solaris mixed with Monty Python Flying Circus. Fetishism, crime, suicide, hardcore pornography, drugs (there was heroine around, so did Jarvis get a near-death overdose or a nasty trip?), jokes about death (but you're dead already, aren't you?). Yikes indeed. This is hardcore is a post coital, post sexual, post libido, post mortem pure dreadness, that gives me shivers & a serious twist in my stomach.

Moreover, it's everything Freaks wanted to be but could never become. This is an album of an unmatched power, a hangover & existential haze encapsulated, it’s freak Hollywood drama, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, Hitchcockian thriller with his women fixation (the projection of desire specifically Hitchcockian here!), cinema noir, showered with modern decadence, vanity, emptiness that can only come with a career in show business. This is a depiction of Jarvis Cocker’s state of mind after a year or two of taking advantage of finally getting on the top, of constant shagging anything that moves and partying hard. It nearly killed him, psychically, but there’s something great in the way he’s subliming it. Interesting, how eg. Bowie was embracing it (although it nearly killed him too, as we know at the end of the Station to Station there's nothing short of a goodbye-to-life declaration) and found himself much more inclined to hedonist pleasures, and actually never produced anything as dread-invoking as This is Hardcore - there's never such a menace, such desire-turned-something-terrible thing. It’s truly spectacular, pushed to the utmost degree, Twin Peaks/Mulholland Drive luxurious atmosphere of dread, like you were on a Eyes Wide Shut party, going straight to hell.

Truth is that is has to come to that, and it requires shitloads of hard work just as much as partying and immense self confidence, which comes after years of giving way too much fuck. And then you realize it doesn’t matter.

Pulp - Help The Aged
Załadowane przez: Pulp. - Odkryj inne klipy wideo.

Then Cocker got married, left for Paris, had a child, recorded a weak solo album, got divorced, produced among other things, Charlotte Gainsbourg album, recorded another solo album, whose highlight song is called I Never Said I Was Deep. Slightly disappointed by the first one, I actually begun to find the joyful embitterment of the second one fun. Well, he didn’t lose the classiness or sense of humor, naturlich, but the erotic neurosis of Pulp is long passé.

Funny, how seen from the today's perspective, 90s seem so much another, distant era (in the sense to write songs like that seems impossible now) and how to date they are at the same time, showing that our fucked-upness only deepened...

But if I mourn something lacking within Polish (music) culture, is its not enough literacy. The absent striving to express frustration in a more sophisticated way. We too often limited ourselves to one-dimensional punk screaming/whining "how special-but-nobody-knows-about-it we are" songs that mostly sounded like cheap plagiarism of the Western bands. We seem condemned to the musical secondariness. Why not some lyrics experimentation? Sure there was frustration, tons of it, but no one cared to put them into an artistic, poetic way. Yes, Im more than furious with how things went in Poland, because we have such a wonderful poetic tradition, such original literature, especially after 1945. What has happened with it, why it didint infiltrate the popular music?

Do we need and why, a Polish Jarvis? why do I miss such a figure in Polish cultural landscape? Why don’t we have equally nonchalant, whimsical, eclectic music, non-stripped of emotions? I’ll pass the general esthetical dependency of Polish popular music from the foreign, which condemns us to be eternal epigones. Lets focus on the layer of expression, ideology even. All music has its own esthetical ideology, Jarvis’ ideology was some projects from the past, filtered through his personal obsessions. Well, it is better not to mention our ideology. Polish bands, in result of those, and not the other, historical conditioning, had to, first of all, fight with the mythological SYSTEM, ‘komuna’, and didn’t have time or possibility to develop the esthetical or lyrical issues.

There’s also too big difference between our perception of socialism, obviously. Big assemblies, tradition of militancy, “classlessness” of the 30 years of the after-war period in UK, and then Thatcherism, strikes, when the industry was being destroyed are quite a different thing than the assemblies in Poland, under a quite different flag, or a general atmosphere of hopelessness, bleakness and greyness, especially of the last two decades of Peoples Republic. Maybe comparing the histories of our countries is idiotic in general. But hey, when I listen to Pulp, I still regret not having this chance. That the most popular songs in Poland have to necessary be bloody protest songs; and that we always, as a nation, preferred Clash to Sex Pistols. [well, a book called Generacja by Robert Jarosz, dismantles this image, but it came out a year after I’ve written this]. Class war, well, was something completely different here, was incorporated within the rotten ideology of late communism. Polish artist just couldn’t look at the socialist equality with hope. We also do not have a strong working class artist tradition, very few of the artists, maybe more among writers, belonged to the working class, art always being a domain of intelligentsia, who had privileged access to knowledge, books, education.

Funnily enough, when another self-proclaimed dandy, Paul Weller of the Style Council, wanted to show the bleakness of Thatcherism, he came nowhere else than to the grey Warsaw and shot Walls came tumbling down there in 1985.

Now we watch this clip on youtube and proudly show it to our foreign friends, because Warsaw has become this really hip place. To me Warsaw is real, true punk. Ian Curtis knew what he was doing (although he probably meant Bowie’s Warszawa more). But funny that there’s no a Bowie song called “Berlin”, but there’s Warszawa. Still, people treat us as a living museum of communism (but people, go to neighbouring Ukraine for this purpose), whereas an ideal of contemporary Poland is a fucking small entrepreneur. Because maybe one of the problems of the culture in Poland under communism is that obviously it wasn’t socialist enough, and was basically as divided as anywhere else. Also dandyism as a way of life never actually found its way or tradition in Poland and died with the romantic poets.

Another thing is our level of consciousness. Young people coming to the festivals like Jarocin dreamed mostly of getting pissed and having sex in the bushes, they thought of the freedom and emancipation as well, but not knowing how it actually should’ve looked like. Punk in Poland was still v much about filth and vomiting, there were Solidarity, but all that was immersed in the omnipresent Polish Catholicism, and the progressive or anarchic circles already were seeing it all going toward right winged nationalism and capitalism. If we had lyrics about love, sex, unfulfillment, maybe paradoxically it only happened in the texts of one band, simple Teenage Love Alternative, then T.Love, whose frontman, Muniek, born in the same year as Jarvis (1963), is one of little working class born musicians in PL, who wasn’t ashamed to write about love.

[only now it occured to me, that "1996", coming from the T.Love's album with the same title, may be perceived as an especially cheap version of "Disco 2000", where the failed inter-class romance is replaced by a tragicomic story about 90s Polish capitalism, gangsters and its other beneficiaries and their typical lifestyle, interestingly, put into a 70s tawdry disco entourage]

Muniek emancipated himself and gained a success comparable to Jarvis. Some also say that the more contemporary, 00s band, Cool Kids of Death (named after St Etienne song, of course!) was a late heir of Pulp. Their songs are fulfilled with similar resentment, unfulfilment, aspirationism. But whenever Pulp wanted to get there (and was getting there), CKOD were singing songs of self-hating slackers. T. Love and CKOD sung a wish about collectivity, that never really happened, about failed youth collectivities, refusal, hopelessness – CKOD coming from Lódz, a fallen working class city, no wonder etc etc.

We never loved life, or ourselves, for that matter. Pity. Because this comparison between cultures and histories shouldn’t go towards revengeful or regretful jealousy really. But there was and are cultural complexes in us Poles that we unsuccesfully are trying to heal through similarly inept methods, like shock capitalism, privatisation, self denial or denying that the previous system had anything worthwhile in itself.

This is a far more complicated story and I'm not going to finish it right now, the story continues…

Toxic Subjects

2011-05-23T22:39:00.000+01:00

More early-'90s footy consumer porn.

I can't help thinking there's something Parnell-esque about this current "bringing low" of Giggs. It reminds me of that Zizek thing about the enforcement of "human, all too human" characteristics on people, the removal of a public figure from their collective significance by subjecting them to ridicule for private misdemeanours.

For what it's worth, Giggs's public "meaning" - I reckon - was that he communicated a sort of anachronistic model of permanency, poise, and quiet articulacy, just as the corporate interests in the modern game furiously attempted to get rid of all those qualities, to drain the game of value and turn footballers into risible, self-interested monsters.

Now Giggs is just another one of those monsters, and who wins? Certainly not the fans.

And the fact that Cameron was apparently in favour of revealing his identity is perhaps telling, isn't it?

2001: Laments And Foretastes For A Fallen World

2011-05-22T14:21:00.000+01:00

No Encore: The Sequel

2011-05-21T07:52:00.000+01:00

Continuing this theme. When the track below came out (on the comp Macro Dub Infection II), I was young and stoopid enough to want this to be the last 'choon' I ever heard. The kind of idiot male melodrama appropriate for a go-nowhere recent graduate, reluctant to abandon habits he shared with people who now had places to take their scrolls. Let's just say its one-sentence lyric spoke to me. Autobiography: the night I chose this as my anthem, I decided not to show up for my crappy barman job and 'pah-tay' instead. It was an - ahem - somewhat illuminating evening. However, upon returning home the following noon, I discovered that the actual tenants of the flat had returned (no one mentioned that wee matter to me when I moved in that summer), replacing my pah-taying flatmates who had dispersed in an overnight panic. So, technically homeless and very much jobless, there was no other option but to keep the pah-tay going without pausing for a wink of sleep. I at least learned that with little more than newsagent deoderant and a decent toothbrush, one can survive anything with enough grace (cue the the theme to The Wonder Years). The morning after that, I awoke to news of Princess Diana's death; spending a drizzly Sunday rigorously pondering the ashen, laminate complexions of newsreaders, over a warm bottle of Irn-Bru. Go figure. Space restricts discussion of the 'problem-solving skills' I utilised for the peculiar week that followed. Well at least the rest of the country had gone insane by then...

His Card Was Posted Late (3)

2011-05-20T03:10:00.000+01:00

<br>R

Continued from here and here. But by no means concluded with the above...

Chugging through 1991

2011-05-12T13:33:00.000+01:00

It was a baffling and lazy juxtaposition even by BBC 4’s standards. After letting the quality shine through with a doc on Scream’s Screamadelica, they then ran Movin on Up, an hour’s worth of the runts of the indie-dance litter performing on TOTP and undermining the charmed wizardry of Don’t Fight it Feel it, Higher than the Sun et al.

This cheap compilation of TOTP appearances from mostly one-hit wonders did serve to highlight the change in indie’s sensibility to ‘baggy’ along with its new-found commercial considerations (basically everyone wanted at least No 3 in the indie charts and a showing on ITV’s Saturday lunchtime music show, and a cool No 18 on the main chart). This was a time to claim street cred, forget about paying their dues and get paid. Post Roses and Mondays, the less cool kids were tuning on to the more interesting music championed by the NME and the other media in their droves but they had to get past this deceptive gateway first. Sadly many remained stuck with this mediocrity; as at least they could claim opposition to this.

The TOTP2/Chart Show-style gentle mockery in the notes halfway through the song was standard, but the format of picking bands’ most well-known hits from that years undermines any notion of Circa 1991 being some kind of a breakthrough period of creativity. There’s far better work on 808’s Ex:el album (though as Cubik shows they were already behind the curve in trying to assimilate the toughening sounds of Belgium and Detroit), Ride had done three or four better EPs and What time is Love cant be touched by the rest of the KLF oeuvre – certainly not 3AM Eternal (bleeps a year or two late). And some hits were re-releases from a year or two before when the nation wasn’t quite ready for this kind of vague positivity, such as the Mock Turtles’ Can You Dig It? (originally a B-side to Lay Me Down) or Shamen’s Move Any Mountain, which is a desecration of the earlier Progen.

The over-riding sensation I get from most of this music is CHUG – chuggy beats, chuggy riffs, a kind of half-arsed catalyst to drop the pint and dance, but way too short of energy to keep you there. It’s the kind of spirit nicely alluded to by Electronic’s performance, by a set of lads who have done enough drukqs to genuinely feel the flow – and to feel the benefits of space in their sound. The CHUG mantra of the others meant there was always something going on in the sound, be it half-arsed ‘funky’ drummings, enthusiastic and barely funky riffery or some lightweight ‘ravey’ synth signifier. Stylistically, Ride tried too hard on Unfamiliar, drummer Laurence feeling that he had to continuously punctuate with rushes of expressionistic fills and rolls when motorik would have been enough to offset those descending ‘sonic cathedrals’.

And the dancing! Well I guess the shapes I was throwing were oversized too at the time but Oceanic’s diva appears lost in her 'dream trip' And I stayed clear of the cycling shorts in the rave. Then there’s Damon and his flailing limbs betraying his inherent disinterest in the baggy sound foisted upon them, and Mr C’s ‘starting to rush’ style. All deeply out of fashion in these largely non-dancing days.

And the clothes! With the prevalence of simple bright sweatshirts and Ts, Schott-type rave jackets (yeah I know the score, extra pockets for your stuff and/or save on cloakroom bills), grandad tops and two-stripe student sportswear, it’s no surprise we ended up back in the high street with a ‘casual’ look that, bar minor changes in the fit of jeans and a bit more accessorising in the noughties (hats, beards, belts), proves hard to kill off. Too many of these performers were hitchers of the rave ethos – perhaps another argument in that period being a mere interlude in wider developments – when what we needed is a genuine change in mood. Culturally, it’s a short walk to egotistic Oasis beer boys fighting at gigs, and the bland end of sartorial revolt.

(Insanity seems to have been performed at least three times on TOTP; this wasnt the one I had in mind but the lycra and bad dancing r still present)

One song stands out a mile in this compilation – Unfinished Sympathy by Massive (as Gulf war diktats crazily demanded) and Shara Nelson’s heartfelt string-backed delivery (at the time TOTP had a mixed policy on live performance) and this was definitely other in the context of 1991’s chuggy litter; music that had not had a genre invented for it (and trip-hop would not do justice), music defined by a place other than northwest baggy or west midlands sweaty (Gary Clail with his soon to be Snub riff song also comes out of it with some merit for the Bristolians).

West Midlands sweaty, I said. And that’s a pigeonhole for shoving in and shutting the post-Grebo heroic beery dumbness displayed here by PWEI, the Stuffies with Vic Reeves (Big Night Out’s catchphrase craze put me off Vic and Bob for years) and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. These guys, coming correct with their indie band long-sleeved T-shirts and their excessive drinking were a permanent feature of our small-town pubs. All these bands sold shitloads of records in 1991, culminating in the Stuffies’ gig at the Walsall ground. It was eminently danceable if your idea of a dance is a mindless mosh.

Reflecting on this mostly dire music, it’s really no surprise that the original ravers of 88/89 wanted nothing to do with the emergent ‘indie-dance’ (neither indie enough, or dancey enough) and fled to glammier house, hip-hop manna, the good vibes of acid jazz or nihilistic rock, and why so many people on the cusp such as myself disavowed the same sounds and took refuge in three types of harder independent (though hardly full-on alternative) music; grunge (hardly sold by a pisstaking Cobain here), the harder end of shoegaze/noise pop and rave. And it’s also no wonder that the Britpop of a few years away sounded a lot more ebullient, more assured of its (more easily assimilated) reference points and with more ability to deliver when compared with this.

I know, it’s only a selective documentary but one mean-spirited and sarcastic enough to smash already damaged rose-tinted (and probably Lennon-shaped) specs. I was 18 in 1991. Those who were born in ’91 are 18/19 now. If Movin On Up was any guide, the young turks must be looking at ‘our’ music and laughing. A lot. Then making a brew and coming back to laugh some more. Then tweeting their schadenfreude.

Although significant major works got released that year (Screamadelica, Nevermind, Blue Lines, Loveless) there was also a massive waste of misdirected, follow-the-trend energy in British music . BBC iPlayer are taking this offline within days and I don’t anticipate a clamour to bring it back.

Jeans 3

2011-05-11T12:17:00.000+01:00

Warning: this video might ruin your day

Jeans dropped from high fashion in the 90s and Calvin Klein and other designer jeans manufacturers (actually, this is the 90s, so the proper word is brand) changed their focus from jeans to underwear and perfumes. Jeans were out and khakis and combat trousers were in. It seemed that America – and by extension everywhere else – thought of war rather than work as representing the blank reality of cool.

As jeans were nudged aside in the mainstream, they again became a subcultural uniform. This time it was the hiphop and skateboarding subcultures that took them as their own. Jeans were worn loose and became progressively baggier, as if they were some kind of evolutionary defence mechanism designed to make the scrawny teenager seem larger and more menacing than he really was.

At the other end of the spectrum was Steve Jobs. The computer world believed – and still believes – that they somehow exist outside normal society, that they transcend capitalism. So it is fitting that Jobs’ standard outfit was blue jeans and a black polo neck: he can’t be an evil businessman because he doesn’t wear a suit. Because the computer software and hardware industry made and makes so much money, this informal look spread to other industries.

As always, politics followed the people making the money. For photo opportunities Bill Clinton tended to wear chinos indoors and jeans outdoors. Ever image-conscious, Clinton’s choice of jeans was meant to show that he was both cool and rugged in a sensible way. After Clinton, jeans became a staple of the political ‘business casual’ wardrobe. As a Yahoo! Finance article puts it, “jeans are now a legitimate part of the global power-dress lexicon, worn to influential confabs where the wearers want to signal they're serious—but not fussy—and innovative.”

In 2001, the oldest surviving pair of Levi’s jeans, dating from the 1880s, was sold on eBay for $46,532. That year would mark another come-back for the classic Levi’s blue jean in high fashion. The Strokes, representatives of a new Me Generation, were a fashion sensation, changing the cut of trousers and bringing jeans back as signifiers of rebellious cool. The band was like a glossy photo shoot brought to life, full of the stock gestural rebellions of smokes, booze, scruffy hair and jeans.

The fussy look of The Strokes’ ripped Levi’s started a craze for decorating jeans with any old tat to make them seem new. Sequins, bleach, gold scribbles, embroidered dragons, dyes, studs, washes – anything to justify the price tag. And the price just keeps going up. While cheap jeans are still sold, the trend for hugely expensive jeans seems only to exist because rich people won’t feel comfortable paying a low price for them.

The range of jeans styles available is enormous. Jeans are a perfect example of the limitations of consumer choice: You may choose to wear what ever you want as long as it’s jeans.

part 1
part 2

Poem of the '90s

2011-05-08T13:25:00.000+01:00

Pearl's Poem of Joy and Treasure (1995)

Spout, pout, spout. Put my spittle all about.
Bare feet pressing down wet upon the glamorous
deciduous rugs of gold. Otherwise
needles and cones, sheep bones, crisps
and ox-cheek for tea.
Dark despair around benights me.
Above the burn I listen for the turn
of the water against the tumblestones,
wag my tongue like a wand
in the law wind. Fierce light
invades my eyes and shut face, closed for the night.
Unable to sleep, despite the hardness of the day,
I cluck and purr.
Why am I ashamed of my permanent silence?
In the brilliant heather, shin deep, I am
a good lass, purring and foaming, friend of green breasted
plover, keen listener to the wind in the wires; all
the bees and beasts understand
my milky fingers and palms.
I whet my whistle in the same pools -
at one with the world.
This white water upland empire, hidden
moss grows in the cracks.
I felt my way there when climbing
the bank, press my head there, soft emerald cushions,
when summer sleep takes on.
The wind runs and roars from the west, from the ferry landings
long and long until tears almost drown me
for consonants and vowels, sentences of good measure,
for an understanding of the very word syntax, brought
to my cavernous mouth, practising the words Appleby, Penrith, Shap.
Rosehip plucker, mitts needing repair,
here mam, on the sideboard, longing
for the words capital letter, Ordnance Survey map, to
read the true height of the law, emphasise my longing.
Twine my tongue and ease its itch.
Make the sky so borage blue.
Let the argent stars shine on my upturned smiling face
and furnish me with hope.
I need all the love I can hold.

Barry MacSweeney (1948-2000)
[post on him to follow]

The Horror, The Horror

2011-05-07T20:20:00.000+01:00

For Carl. Also a preview for a long, upcoming post on what 'horrorcore' was really all about, arriving when it did. I have to write this so I finally finish the damn thing. Enter the realms of understanding...

Goodbye To All That

2011-05-05T15:57:00.000+01:00

I've wondered what happened to this guy. Nice to see he's still writing. Looking back on when I was following this stuff and reading about it, I think he had a quiet influence on how I listened and talked about these things. His actual style wasn't quiet, mind. If I recall correctly, he got his break after a writing a long ranty letter to Melody Maker about racial bias in music journalism (the things that stick in the mind... I dunno). I quite liked the way he was willfully subjective about these things. There can be uncomfortable connotations to classifying pop music too much (HMV shelves can have a sense of apartheid to them). Being so based on emotion and personal meaning, its impossible to boil music down to simple aesthetics, never mind 'science'. Surely pop's 'x-factor' is the space opened (not conquered) between consumer and producer?

The most interesting, fruitful aspect of British pop in the 90s was when it was, well, mixed race; if not physically at least sonically. Any innovations (however minor), and the sense that you were hearing something said differently, related to this (Two Tone had a more important social impact than punk: discuss). Considering this, Britpop was even more hideously reactionary than many assume, which may be why Gorrilaz are more listenable and inoffensive (in a good sense) than Blur. The chronic social/racial stratification of British pop since the end of the 90s sealed the lid on its coffin as anything relevant. If experience is anything to go by, 'the kids' are now more starkly divided into 'indie' (white) or 'urban' (black), with all the class division that implies. Once those terms weren't as racialised as they are now. Even the Great White Hopes of trad soul just re-sell costumes* without context, to the relief of those oblivious to the 'other side' (I bet Adele et al have a fair few EDL/BNP fans. They'd see no contradiction). The wares of Simon Cowell are even more ominous - a kind of state schlagermusik, a degrading caricature and consolidation of neoliberal pieties.

The effect is that music fans over 40 tend to have more omnivorous tastes than teens now, which I find very sad. It may have something to do with the distortions of the 00s housing market, with its knock-on effect on education (but time prevents elaborating). However, Blairism's deliberate murder of subcultures (long story) has a lot to answer for. It may be no coincidence that the Vicar was so closely associated with the white identity movement** known as Oasis (the last time I was at a festival, we had to pack the car and do a runner as soon as their identikit fans conquered the territory - a terrifying mob). It wasn't the end of history, but the end of a history. The relationship of pop culture to reality has become an irresolvable divorce. It lost its ability to speak to life.

*Pop has also seen a restoration in gender and sexuality. The empty tableaux of a Lady Gaga are just repackaging pre-sold approaches used by glam, disco or even Madonna - herself an agent of desexualisation and decontextualisation.
**Oasis rewrote the meaning of the Beatles and Stones into something far more narrow and ignorant than those bands ever intended. It's somewhat creepy that many regard Britpop's non-event as an affirmative cultural epoch.

Early-'90s Retro-Haunto-Shite Dumped

2011-04-30T17:55:00.000+01:00

I'm not a QPR fan (by any stretch) but on the day they return to the Premier Land after 15 long years of exile, it seems like an apt moment to reflect on this, err, classic artefact. Says just about everything there is to say about the early-'90s in one small, boxfresh, paradisal space.

Sir Les, to you.

Conforming To A Pattern

2011-04-28T22:04:00.001+01:00

"And the bitter conclusion is that it is all irretrievably over with the arts of form of the West. The crisis of the nineteenth century was the death-struggle. Like the Apollinian, the Egyptian and every other, the Faustian art dies of senility, having actualised its inward possibilities and fulfilled its mission within the course of its Culture.

What is practised as art today - be it music after Wagner or painting after Manet, Cézanne, Leibl and Menzel - is impotence and falsehood. One thing is quite certain, that today every single art-school could be shut down without art being affected in the slightest. We can learn all we wish to know about the art-clamour which a megalopolis sets up in order to forget that its art is dead from the Alexandria of the year 200. There, as here in our world-cities, we find the pursuit of illusions of artistic progress, of personal peculiarity, of "the new style", of "unsuspected possibilites", theoretical babble, pretentious fashionable artists, weight-lifters with cardboard dumb-bells - the "Literary Man" in the Poet’s place, the unabashed farce of Expressionism, which the art-trade has organised as a "phase of art history", thinking and feeling and forming as industrial art. Alexandria, too, had problem-dramatists and box-office artists whom it preferred to Sophocles, and painters who invented new tendencies and successfully bluffed their public. The final result is that endless industrious repetition of a stock of fixed forms which we see today in Indian, Chinese and Arabian-Persian art. Pictures and fabrics, verses and vessels, furniture, dramas and musical compositions - all is pattern work. We cease to be able to date anything within centuries, let alone decades, by the language of its ornamentation.

So it has been in the Last Act of all Cultures."

- Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

The story of Western art in the 20th century was that of its desperate, hopeless struggle against ossification and irrelevance. In comparison with the previous 500 years that had seen the gradual evolution of technique and tincture in painting; in instrumentation and acoustic space in music, it saw a profusion of disparate styles, ever emerging and fusing and fissioning before tailing away into cul-de-sacs of obscurity or rarefication. Burdened with an art that had crystalised its final form, and would no longer yield mana, artists could only respond in an ad hoc and provisional manner, seeking any means they could to breathe life back into the dying disciplines.

These efforts usually entailed either one of two strategies: firstly, to incorporate and adapt styles from cultures that had previously been despised and therefore neglected. In music this meant incorporating innovations from Black America and later the Caribbean. In the plastic arts of painting and sculpture it meant adopting "primitive" styles from anywhere from Africa to Polynesia. Secondly, whatever forms already existed were abstracted, so that any remaining mana could be iteratively sieved out. When miscegenation and abstraction had been exhausted, then two other now-familiar artistic gestures would result - nihilism and shock tactics. Although nihilistic art movements such as Dada and Punk are often written of as responses to the extreme socio-political currents of the 20th century, they were even more a response to its artistic-cultural exhaustion - a howl in the face of expressive extinction. Classical music, jazz and rock all ended their productive phases with abstract-nihilist gestures that, though decades apart, sounded hauntingly similar in their brittle, atonal desolation.

It is this alternating pattern of miscegenation and abstraction that gave 20th Century culture its strange, giddy, quality, as the adoption of a new form could suddenly generate a new optimism and vigour in the arts and popular culture, before its premature exhaustion within the rationalising cultural superstructure would lead to the bitter deflation of hope. New eras and new ages were perpetually declared and quickly found to be false dawns. The sense of desolation was amplified in the wake of the constant hyperbole and "buzz" that necessarily saturated the culture, amplifying the mana-affect of exciting new styles while simultaneously attempting to ward off the underlying sense of doubt and anomie. The abstract-nihilist phase was invariably policed by particularly virulent progressivist rhethoric, partly to ward off the layman who might impolitely mistake the work for a cacophonous din, like the apocryphal cleaners who disposed of priceless conceptual works from modernist galleries, but mainly as an act of bad faith: the maintenance of the collective illusion that any 20th century art movement was capable of going anywhere.

Britain in the 1990’s was to witness two parallel movements that affected to reinvigorate the nation’s artistic culture. One of them, Britpop, was a classic revitalisation movement in the tradition of the Ghost Dances of the Plains Indians of the late 19th century - a call to long dead ancestors to replenish the spirit-well. The other, the Young British Artists, was a farce, a flurry of gestures as a disparate band of hucksters marketed their unlikely wares to plutocrats grown fat on the decade’s credit binge.

British rock musicians in the early Nineties had been roused from a decade of torpor by the thundering arrival of Grunge from the US northwest. Although in themselves neither musically radical or innovative, the Grunge bands managed to sound fresh to British ears largely due to their adoption of early-70’s hard rock influences that had been proscribed in the UK by Punk. However, in attempting to fashion both a response to Grunge, and a new style of music to suit the times, the British musicians faced a predicament in that they could no longer stylistically feed off their traditional source of inspiration - the great engines of musical innovation and spiritual mana that were Black America and Jamaica. Black American music had, in the form of Hip-Hop, largely shed its mana-lode for the kind of nihilist aggression of which white music already possessed a surfeit. Also, as with the more mainstream R&B of the "swingbeat" producers, it was structurally complex, and not amenable to being broken down and organically re-fashioned. The intricate recording techniques of R&B producers such as Teddy Riley and Jam & Lewis functioned like the filigree designs on a banknote - as a protection against counterfeiting. If you wanted to adopt these guys’ sounds, you had to work with them directly, and pay them well.

Two of the early notable British bands of the Nineties, the Manic Street Preachers and Suede, attempted to overcome this impasse by re-invoking those elements of radicalism that were deemed to be indigenous - in the former’s case via the use of the kind of Situationist sloganeering not seen since Punk, and in the latter’s via recalling the shock-androgyny of the likes of Bowie and Bryan Ferry. What neither band could provide, however, was the necessary aural shock-of-the-new counterpart. The Preachers’ adoption of a not-especially-bold combination of New Wave and the lighter end of Glam Metal sounded conservative even in comparison to Suede’s blend of Ronson and Marr riffing. That said, both bands represented genuine efforts to squeeze out whatever vitality remained in the dying form, as indeed did the band that was to supplant them in being the signature group of the 1990’s.

Oasis are generally condemned for a putative conservatism in their harking back to the classic melodicism of the likes of The Beatles and The Jam, but initially, with songs like "Wonderwall" and "Live Forever" it really seemed that they might pull it off, that sheer talent might by itself be able to beat back the shadow of nightfall. Unfortunately they succumbed to that characteristic affliction of the era - a lack of staying power. When rock was young and vital, bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who could undertake coast-to-coast American tours while releasing one or two albums a year and a slew of hit singles. Oasis’s American tours were notoriously reluctant and tardy, and by the constipated gestation of their third album it was clear that they had prematurely given their best. Moreover, diligent sleuthing on the part of their critics began to expose the jackdaw nature of the band’s music. Noel Gallagher wasn’t so much a great tunesmith as a connoisseur of other great tunesmiths.

After Oasis came Radiohead and Coldplay, the first of the zombie bands, and British rock, starved of sources of miscegenation, devolved into "landfill indie", a classic example of Spenglerian pattern work, in which bands sounded identical for decade after decade, generation after generation, with only the most enthusiastic admirers being able to identify the detail-differences. Hip-hop itself also drifted into pattern work - perhaps the absence of white musicians purloining its structural and textural innovations was ironically a reason for its stasis, the confounding of thieves having been a good reason to keep the music changing. The popular music landscape of the early 21st century is of course one of disparate genres, or multi-genres in the case of Metal, each one labouring away in its silo to the breathless appreciation of its own adherents. Tellingly, any collaborations across genres tend to go under the monicker of "versus", signalling in advance that after the brief fission, both participants will return to their respective corners.

If Britpop had been a futile attempt to ward off death, Britart, as the work of the Young British Artists was sometimes called, was a kind of grinning post-modern celebration of death - a dancing on art’s grave. "Conceptual" art had long been in the business of the industrial-scale production of the baffling, the shocking and the merely titilating, but with Britart any lingering embarrassment regarding the business-commercial relationship between the artist, the patron, and the paying customer was definitively put to rest. It boasted a raft of almost Dickensian characters with its hungry working-class artist-entrepreneurs, its wide-boy dealers, its shady advertising-executive patrons, its dunderhead curators buying cans of "artist’s shit" and its mysterious Russian customers purchasing works as part of complex tax-evasion schemes.

Perhaps the most important figure in Britart was the advertising mogul and gallery owner Charles Saatchi, who first witnessed the work of Damien Hirst at a property developer-sponsored exhibition entitled Freeze in the late 1980’s. Saatchi reputedly stood open-mouthed at a Hirst work that featured a cow’s head being consumed by maggots. It was to be the start of a beautiful friendship in which Hirst and his cronies would supply the tabloid-baiting works and Saatchi the marketing power and art trade connections to bring them to the widest possible audience. The worthless art of the YBA’s dovetailed neatly into a London that was increasingly making vast amounts of money from worthless activity - from property speculation, insurance scams, reckless credit expansion and opaque financial transactions. The decadence of Hirst’s work, his openness about his non-artistic background and use of assistants, no doubt resonated strongly with those who knew that their own wealth was equally the result of fraud and circumstance. It’s difficult not to suspect that the riches blown at auction on Hirst and his cohorts’ tat were some kind of subconscious potlatch, the plutocrats attempting to cleanse themselves by exchanging their filthy lucre for the most putrid and inconvenient exhibit possible. It is perhaps telling that when Hirst created an object deliberately intended to appeal to the wealthy, a diamond-encrusted skull entitled "For The Love Of God", it failed to find a buyer.

Nevertheless, the media furore surrounding the Young British Artists gathered its own momentum, and exhibitions such as Sensation proved to be popular draws, the public not so much going to see the works, as to see why everyone else was going to see them. Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin became household names, celebrities even. It would probably amaze future generations that such obvious charlatans could be taken seriously even for a few minutes, but then future generations will have far more important work to do than pore over the scrag-ends of our own dying civilisation.

Ya Mama Got An Ouija Board On Her Back

2011-04-21T08:57:00.000+01:00

And therefore must his choice be circumscrib'd: the wisdom of David Foster Wallace

2011-04-15T22:15:00.000+01:00

David Foster Wallace is fast approaching the status of a "sage writer" (albeit a tragically posthumous one). As everyone knows, Wallace was the Guy Who Moved Things On From Postmodernism, so in a way it makes sense that he should be treated as a sort of modern-day Ruskin, a doler-out of soundbite ethical wisdom in an age trying to recapture sincerity and cohesiveness after the pomo-relativist flood. Middling rockist indie bands are wont to quote the bit in 1993 essay "E Unibus Pluram" where Wallace talks about the likelihood of the next generation of radicals being a "weird bunch of anti-rebels ... who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles". Zadie Smith and Foals are notable celebrity admirers. Meanwhile, Guardian hacks post links on their vanity websites* to Wallace's now very widely quoted 2005 Kenyon commencement speech, a dazzling 20 minute morality lesson (now better known in its transcribed form as "This is Water"), which has become a sort of "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" for the 2010s. Fuck's sake, when I was scratching around for something pithy to say as a goodbye bow to my middling indie band a couple of years ago (long story), I posted the whole of the Kenyon speech to our Myspace blog. It wasn't really all that relevant to that particular moment of personal crisis, I now realise, but hell, it was the most sagacious thing I was reading at the time, and it seemed to fit in some vague way with the bloody-minded, stand-taking gesture I was making.

Right now, as Wallace's final work - the unfinished novel The Pale King - is about to be published, the Saint DFW tendency is reaching a spectacular climax, accompanied by the sort of inordinate PR hysteria we're all familiar with. The media idolatry is unfortunate, but then again, it's bound to be short-lived. More importantly, you get the impression that, when the culture and publishing industries have moved onto their next five-minute hero/victim, Wallace's voice and legacy will still be just about audible underneath the debris of post-mortem exploitation and expropriation (or that's the hope, anyway).

So what is the legacy? If Wallace was - and still has the potential to be - a modern sage, then what kind of wisdom did he impart? Taking the Kenyon speech/"This is Water"** as a sort of condensed moral manifesto (and despite Wallace's protestations that he shouldn't be regarded as a didactic "wise old fish", he clearly was just this - a willingness to be so was perhaps his greatest contribution to contemporary letters), the most striking thing for me is how damnably conflicted his argument is. The rhetoric, for once, is lucid, cogent, and pomo-free. But the message remains infernally difficult to hammer out. Broadly speaking, Wallace seems to be caught between a visionary perspicuity about "what is to be done" on the one hand, and a self-lacerating, high-sceptical tendency that to a large extent nullifies the affirmative potential of his astonishingly powerful insights. This is not the place to speculate about parallels between this sort of mindset and Wallace's tragic biography. What is certain, though, is that this expression of the struggle between hope and fear, unselfishness and self-directed masochism, positive utterance and negative qualification of it, is the key testament of one of the most harrowingly representative figures of our times. Wallace's struggle was, and remains, an epochal one.

I'm with Wallace on about 90% of the statements he makes. "In the day to day trenches of adult life, there's no such thing as atheism": so simple, so dead on the mark. "And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self": again, it would be churlish to try to gloss eloquence of this calibre. The speech concludes with the following brilliant penultimate paragraph, which seems to hit so many nails on the head it's not even funny:

Our own present culture has harnessed these forces [of self/money/appearance/intellect worship] in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

We're all used to the neoliberal malaise being explained in all kinds of complex theoretical ways, but where else will you find such an economical, profound, even mystical (in the best sense) critique of the radical selfishness and spiritual paucity of neoliberal culture?

Yet extraordinarily (and this is evident even in the above passage), the whole weight of Wallace's argument is ultimately predicated on a pronounced self-centredness that ends up merely replaying the victory of a worldview which imprisons us in "our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms". We do not have to look hard for the culprit, the snag that means Wallace cannot finally rise above the atomism that is his ostensible target. Where are we to look to try to get back in touch with real freedom? Ourselves. What is the only virtue, the antidote to self-worship, the "capital-T Truth" that remains after a "whole lot of rhetorical bullshit" has been "pared away", the secret to "making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head"? Choice, the word that is littered throughout the Kenyon speech like some blindingly obvious Freudian crux.

In the day to day trenches of adult life, Wallace argues, one must become a sort of heroic superman, dedicated to caring for others, but only achieving this civic awareness through preternatural self-discipline and the continual invocation of one's formidable moral-intellectual might. By simply straining hard enough, we will be able to transcend reality and inoculate pain:

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: the only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

No amount of undeniably beautiful phraseology can cover over the fact that Wallace's solution to surmounting a consumer-hell-type situation (and tellingly, he sets his parable in a supermarket) is a bizarre restatement of the terms of the market place: "you have other options", "you get to decide", "most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line". Isn't this sort of alchemical make-nice strategy exactly what the advertising executive is trying to promulgate on a daily basis? Contra Wallace, might not there be some value in acknowledging the awfulness of a consumer-hell-type situation for what it really is? Wouldn't this be the really true exercise of civic-minded consciousness: recognising that the solution does not lie with one's individual powers of imagination alone, that there might be a more social, less heroically isolated way of responding to the causes of depression and misery? Wallace appears to briefly identify the root cause of such suffering in "the world of men and money and power", but the focus of his solution is not on this matrix. It is turned bravely but violently back on a quite different target; that is, himself.

Crucially, in the actual Kenyon speech (as opposed to the transcribed version), Wallace is speaking to a class of graduating students, and the emphasis is on the value of a liberal arts education as a means of fostering the sort of consciousness that makes responsible choice possible. This makes the whole premise a lot saner and less like a proclamation of radical stoical individualism, and this establishing context should probably be reinstated in future published versions of "This is Water" to make it clear that Wallace was not in fact addressing the world with a parti pris, but merely trying to say something intelligent and constructive to a group of young people for whom a light reminder of the importance of responsibility to others cannot have been such a bad thing. Nevertheless, it seems that the "moral superman" motif was one that Wallace obsessed over and grappled with in his last years. I haven't read The Pale King yet, but the reviews suggest that it does in fact essentially reiterate the argument of the Kenyon speech. As one reviewer puts it (quoting Wallace), the "crucial conceit" of the novel is "that the soul-crushing boredom of tax work can lead to transcendent bliss, 'a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive'." To me, this seems to amount to something like philosophy-as-prozac.

Woah, didn't know the late-nineties had been Penguin Classicked, already!

The side of Wallace that I love doesn't have anything to do with this inverted, masochistic narcissism. For me, Wallace's sagacity lies in his willingness to get squarely behind a moral or ethical precept and stay there, the "childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles", if you like. In the 1930s, T.S. Eliot said, "we await the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something", and by god, we're still waiting, which is just one reason why it's such a crying shame that Wallace had to go and top himself. Perhaps even more than this though, the message that I think should be his legacy, is the revival of a particular kind of novelistic tradition, one that runs through Dickens, The Brothers Karamazov, Ulysses, Mr Sammler's Planet, and a host of other works up to (and arguably ending with) the postmodern period, one that foregrounds as a sacred rite the utopian process of one human consciousness coming into contact and merging with another. This seems to me to be the grand underlying scheme in Wallace's masterpiece Infinite Jest (1996), nowhere so magically evident as in the scene towards the end of the novel in which Mario Incadenza poses as a homeless person, and waits for days until somebody comes up and touches his outstretched hand. The reawakening of this basic sentimental, moral commitment to socially-minded anti-individualism was Wallace's most profound gift to the culture. It's just that, as the Kenyon speech shows, he didn't seem to be able to equate this anti-individualism with the need to take the fight out of his own head.

*Is there anything more pernicious than the aspiring journalist's personal dot.com website? Why not just get a blog? They're free, and more interesting.
** This is only an abbreviated version of the text, published in the Guardian after Wallace's death. See penultimate paragraph for a link to the full audio of the speech.