Current affairs

Family Fortunes?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

My dad was a great bloke whose default position for people/things that offended him, politically or morally, was to intone only mildly passionately that they should be stood up against the wall and shot. Given that he was a generous lump – six feet, fifteen stone – that may make him a sound like some rather intimidating Northern Philistine, coming as he did from Macclesfield. But though he certainly possessed that particular ability to glory in dumb-honest normalcy – a trait I am kindof proud to continue – he was Top Five when it came to harmlessness, straightness, generosity. There was not an ounce of violence within him.

I mention this because I can’t help but think of this entirely hollow threat to shoot some sharply defined perpetrator in relation to Conrad Murray, Michael Jackson’s aide/doctor/pharmacist; (you decide).

Murray would have been a candidate for the blindfold stagger, one might imagine. Hugely rich (by our standards), almost certainly conceited, professionally lazy, negligent. Arguably a parasite, arguably one of many attached to the shockingly lost pop superstar. Murray, according to reports that I haven’t bothered to check (because I am happier skimming the surface of this depressing episode) drew about 100 grand a month for his attention to Mr Jackson; this for the privilege of pretty much 24 hour drug provision. Issues thereafter become foggy, due to the very real questions around medical need as opposed to recreational use of said drugs. If there is or was an opposition.

My dad would, in his weirdly un-hip way, have loved some of Jackson’s music and even his dancing, despite the chasm of divergent realities separating MJ from Keith Winston Walton (who also died criminally young). This is perhaps one of Jackson’s triumphs – his ability to entrap much of the planet in his moonwalking, hip-twitching genius. Post 78’s Pater could no more sing or dance than imagine a blackberry but there was something Jackson had that was, for a time genuinely thrilling – revolutionary even – as well as hummable. The appallingly high-profile denudation of this gift troubled most of us at some level; it made some of us embarrassed, some angry, some sad to see the unassailable King Of Pop contort and crumble into the later model. But whose fault was it?

Murray put himself in the firing line through a combination of greed and slackness rather than evil in my view. The screaming, high-fiving, JUSTICE placard-wielding fans and family members who cheered and celebrated his conviction, enacting their champagne emotions just like they imagine real celebrities might, were depressingly appropriate players in the malodorous panto. It was America at its shrillest. No matter, no sense that Jackson drifted on some ark cobbled together in a crazy mountain kingdom and then smashed his way down hanging valleys to a limpid, medically-regulated pool, collecting kids, hangers-on and increasingly harrowing constructions of self on the awful journey. No matter that all this love for him melted away the closer you got. Murray was therefore and without question – on some merit, in fact -a burnished receptacle for blame.

Jackson’s family life -the stuff that would ordinarily be called ‘home life’ – has been heavily documented. It might be uncharitable to suggest that his family remains exhibit A in the case against singling out Murray but… where else do we need to go? It seems to be true that nobody cared enough for Michael to either guide, counsel or over-rule him. And the consequence was fatal indulgence, compounded by poor service from his private Drugs-on Wheels service. Could it be true that nobody cared? Is that what the evidence suggests? Who do we blame?

I blame lack of attention, lack of love, lack of intelligence, lack of moral fibre. I blame celebrities, I blame hangers-on and I blame American Culture (coming over here). And my dad says that they should all be stood up against the wall… and shot.

An inflammation

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LET THE MAD AND MAGNIFICENT ENERGY OF THE FUTURISTS and their ludicrously wonderful manifesto be an inspiration at this cusp of deathly inertia and foaming revelation.

Let the staccato totems and the tents and the firefly proclamations of the Occupiers and the rebellious jukeboxes and the childlike believers pitchfork those who bank on banking and this dead god of economic growth.

Let the obscenity that is market force be seen for the cheap fraud it is.

Let the conversation begin again, led by dancer-poets not lobbyists.

After Marinetti, we purr like coiled cats over the paralytic mouse that is The Market. We do not accept the pre-eminence of privilege or masculine entrepreneurship.We pogo through the doors in the lifeless boardrooms of the spineless business of truculent cash.

We, with our pumping hearts revolt against the black death of normalcy; with honour, with real sense, with a hearty handshake.

Let the good incendiaries come. We have our eleven; we count with our innumerate hearts and choose to throw coins in the fountain.

We are rising with the colours of ecstatic belief. We deny the cynicism, the ineptitude and the unambition of the normal. You the normal must change; we are changing.

So we say

1. The people have been lied to and will undo the lies… so lie no more.

2. Democracy is a fraud where privilege is bought – at private schools; by sponsorship; by ‘influence’.

3. We will usurp the machismo-heads, the infertile parliamentary fools – those who feel not our great debates, the goodness of our humour, the freedom of our thoughts.

4. We will teach them that ‘growth’ is not necessary, planning is necessary…

5. That the aim of business is not to maximise profit, it is to make enough…

6. That the aim of life is not to idly stockpile money – it is to express the fullness of the human heart…

7. And that the business of government is not to fawn before business, it is to lead, magnificently.

8. Creativity must rule because only generosity sustains; dancers and poets must therefore lead us! ( Not Sarkozy/Merkel/Cameron! They are working for Barclays! They are yesterday’s men!)

9. Women will let us talk.

10. We will learn again that work can be good; work can be good for all of us.

11. And we must learn again… to engage with the need to transform.

Standing on the world’s summit, we launch our aspiration to the stars.

Just kill the bastard?

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I have (once I think?) boasted of the time when Hampstead Theatre described me as a Free-wheeling Absurdist, a description I have been tempted to put in the ‘Occupation’ column of my passport. This F w A thing implies, I imagine, a fair dose of woolly anarchism. Shockingly, it may also be that I have signed off the odd punkily pompous letter with the phrase (‘Yours, The) Rebellious Jukebox’ so as to bask in reflected but beery glory from Mark E Smith, a hero of mine. I have, in other words, an inclination towards the subversion of the monochrome, the traditional, the conservative. And yet…

And yet I am traditional as they come in some ways. Forgive the self-obsession but I am (for example) genuinely finding it difficult to reconcile my teeth-baring discomfort with poorly expressed authority – the Old Bill, maybe – and my anger-loaded queasiness over what’s recently been called, pretty fairly, The Gadaffi Gore-Fest. The exercise of law; post or during riots; post or during revolutions. Law at Peak Times, when we surely need to be bringing out ‘civilisation’s’ A Game. Look we’ve dug in deeply very early here; let’s take a breath and get specific.

Libya. How wonderful that a tyrant is overthrown. We can surely understand the foamy excitement at the edge of this surge, this people’s revolt. We can likewise have some sympathy for those families or individuals feeling justified in biting or booting the figure who so terribly and cynically and carelessly masticated (or worse) upon their fortunes. When a brutal leader falls, is it not inevitable that heavy boots feature, in a more or less lurid dance of celebration?

This may be the likelihood. But forgive the neighing of my high horse as I beg to differ with the essence of such an argument. Clearly in the Libyan case a kind of agitated but almost funky indiscipline has been characteristic of the stagger towards ‘freedom’. The rebels (whom I certainly don’t mean to generally criticise) have had a cause alright, but have only been able to advance it following irregular but critical dollops of unanswerable violence provided chiefly by Western airpower. The strategy has then been to go like hell and mop up round the craters. Presumably there has been some co-ordination with the French or U.S. Air Forces but a phrase like ‘hearty’ or even ‘heroic endeavour’ probably characterises the rebel effort better than a phrase like ‘drilled regiments’. Again, this is no complaint; it is merely a way in to describing the difficulties that have arisen once order (yawn), that singularly unattractive concept to the broiling masses, becomes unavoidably necessary.

People clearly needed to be working on the Who’ll Be in Charge question some weeks ago – and maybe they were. But it is more than just a disappointment that in the event of Gadaffi’s capture in the place he was arguably most likely to be, things descended into the aforementioned gore-fest pretty quickly. Clearly much of that would be down to those who were in the immediate vicinity of the man himself. Whether, realistically they could have been primed to deliver a live prisoner for due process is doubtful; they were not, after all, soldiers. However, given that some time did elapse – time enough for tawdry or cheesy or criminal use of mobile phone cameras – before some decision was made to move the body, I wonder if some individual with some authority might ideally have intervened.

Because this was an important time. Imagine what a profound and positive – not to say enlightening moment –might have been captured if Gadaffi had been arrested and treated with dignity. Rednecks the world over would have been choking on their burgers. Other Arab Springers would have surely felt a poignant truth land softly in their palms; a gift which when twittered or beamed abroad might even bestow a kind of credence to Arab Springness itself. A moment of calm or foresight or decency or discipline and the way Africans/Arabs are perceived in the West really might have been positively shifted. That has an importance beyond the wonderful precedent of an absolute bastard being tried not butchered by the people he kept down so heartlessly.

Instead the gore-fest wins out. Papers are sold, the web is cruised. Revenge is sweet. But let’s consider, in the common knowledge that Gadaffi was a despicable and possibly unhinged character, whether it could be still be right, by that or any other storm drain, to answer “Just kill him” to the question “What do we do now?”

Or are we all better served by taking a breath, a moment, before reading him his rights? How long – to be blunt – are we going to judge vengeance to be some kind of justice? It is not justice and it demeans us all.

Keep banging the door

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

Through the lightly steamed mirror that is my perception – a plane currently chiefly obscured by rapid successions of phenomenal sports images – I am trying to get certain things clear. These things are to do with politics, or political structures I guess, rather than the broader heavystuffs I dabbled with in Birds Of Prey… a recent blog, which was more personal. I am talking, along with half the known universe, about what can be done to address issues around dissatisfaction (isolated or widespread) and the perceived drift from community wellbeing or consciousness. Why people are selfish/greedy/stupid/scared/bitter/confrontational/narcissistic/’mindless’ and what might be done.

Naturally therefore, what follows may be said to be a response to ‘the riots’, that lurid expression of … you help me choose...absence?  Depressing lowness?  Vacancy?  (I’d argue for lowness from dull but momentarily energised perpetrators and vacancy in terms of the absence of a sustained intelligent response from the Left as well as the Tea Partyesque morons of the Right). But lowness too from cheap, disproportionate courtroom judgements, perhaps? And vacancy in terms of political will to get past joining-the-dots; thinking outside and beyond loyalties and prejudices. And… perhaps before we venture any further we need to flag up the fact(?) that these riots or, more exactly, some of these incidences may have meant almost nothing. They were apolitical in the sense that minimal cerebral activity was detectable; people just did stupid stuff because it became possible and maybe rather exciting. Causes may or may not have been present in the moment. But surely they are present?

It may be clearly unwise to invoke the need for civilised anything, but clearer still that we need, in a matrix of blanket and diverse bankruptcies, an urgent and a charged but civilised debate about values. We had people we cannot simply categorise as ‘poor’ looting in a manner that varied from the absolutely opportunistic, through to the relatively planned, often via blackberry. (Can I at this time venture the thought that I personally have no smartphone/iphone or similar piece of essential urban kit because… I feel like can’t afford one).

My sense is the thefts were not characteristically driven by need or hunger, although some definition of need may be a requirement here. Because whilst the ‘need’ for new trainers may rightly be generally snorted upon, the need to pinch something to fund the purchase of diesel or gas due to a real lack of money might be something different. And probably some ‘rioters’ stole with needs of this sort in mind. I don’t condone this but I do suggest that if some people, even people we judge may not ‘deserve’ our consideration, lack basic household goods or necessities in 2011 this reflects unhealthily on all of us. Cornball but probably true?

This is one of many (post-riot?) dilemmas with something pretty crass and unappealing at its root. That we have to confront certain social complexities to move forward should be no original hardship, but perhaps it feels difficult to get past general condemnation of the rioters and thereby into constructive reflection because of

  • emotive coverage
  • attitudes towards urban youth/gangs
  • evidence they were mainly criminals
  • racism
  • a suspicion that most of those involved spend the bulk of their time lounging about/being anti-social or worse.

Let’s maybe compare and contrast this with a list of assumptions on reasons why those involved may have looted or in some way acted ‘anti-socially’…

  • because they were bored and they were there
  • because they aren’t very clever
  • because they hate the police
  • because they hate society and they want to strike back
  • because they have a deeply-felt longing to undermine capitalism
  • because they got a call from their mates/they were dared
  • because they needed stuff (even if they didn’t)
  • because they really did need stuff.

Speculations. That we may be familiar with. We may in a fringe event to this Judgementfest have heard X or Y arguing that a significant issue is an accelerating awareness of what constitutes proper clobber for young people; the rise of another kind of worryingly dumb material obsession – dumb but screaming or maybe whining, constantly. Pitching, after a fashion, the kind of thing society is geared to do – sell/promote – even if the product is an offence, because it’s cool or it’s good or local or sustainable or whatever the pitch is. And we’re mostly listening but maybe not being encouraged to discern much? Because we’re consumers. And is there then a circle of ironies, most of which return us to notions around needing to consume, perhaps even only understanding ourselves in those terms?

I really buy into the idea that despite the abundance of goodness abroad there is a killing, unthinking, inhumane addiction to the drug of material goods. And most specifically worrying perhaps, that the next generation is being locked in to a faux-community individually fixated upon whatever their laptop or phone is trying to sell them. Otherwise they simply can’t ‘compete’ – exist even. Few of us know what need really is amidst the swirl and the intoxicating what next? of this cartoonised brief. Reality’s so hard and so unattractive and one-dimensional in comparison. So flick channels to a more highly coloured version. Easy.

My central point, after noting the prevalence of this delusional flux, is to re-affirm my belief in the need to dissent from capitalism of this pitch. We must protest and we must begin again; learn again – make it thinkable again – to cherish political inspiration.  Engage with a profound debate, especially those of us happy and occasionally proud to align ourselves with the Left; that’s our job. The leading and the creating and the renewal of faith and ideas will surely come from Big Hearted Lefties amongst the artistic/philosphic community; it always does.

I know the scale of this challenge given the estrangement of people from politics; it’s a long haul. But it is neither ludicrous nor hopeless to commit to the ambition for a degree of fairness and optimism and yes an increase in Gross National Happiness. Imagine what could be done, in the age of messaging and 24 hour news, by a magnificently, manifestly good man or woman at the top. Someone who was real. Someone worth listening to and following. Someone who cut the crap and the asphyxiating party loyalty right out. Maybe that’s all we need?

You banker

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

Recently I indulged in a little open description of my family finances. It may have appeared (as) some kind of cheap exorcism but as always the aim was to document how things are and how they feel. I stand by it as a social document and have been touched by responses to it. In the current lather that is my sports-blogging it feels appropriate to transport back and briefly revisit the real world but fog-bound motorway pile-up that is ‘the economy’ – everywhere.

This review is not, I promise you, in order to further bore you with developments –hah!- on our own situation, but rather to step into line with Deborah Orr’s “Children are unhappy…” piece from last Thursday’s g2, which deals with this notion that an economy must grow, or else die.  (Another UNICEF Report has looked at child well-being, in particular in relation to ‘quality time’/material things, suggesting to some that a) Money Can’t Buy You Love b) Buying Things is No Substitute for Love etc.etc).

I have to declare an interest here, having written a prophetically colourful play about a North European Protest Group who respond to an earlier UNICEF Report by committing rather wonderful acts of subversion and dissent; a play that was soundly rejected by The Sherman Theatre, Cardiff.

Orr speaks inevitably of the links between the rat race and the accelerated pressures on good consumers/parents resulting in conflict between the “growth agenda” and human satisfaction. And this leading to unhappy children. She talks persuasively and broadly around and about issues of time/satisfaction/purpose, believing that our capitulation to a belief in growth as god is a cheap and inadequate response to the structural and philosophical challenges we face. She argues for a new socio-political conversation, as do I, as did Tony Judt, whose work has been something of an inspiration in these politically and arguably morally vapid times.

Deborah Orr wonders at the irony of Cameron being more engaged with the satisfaction agenda than Miliband. Judt calls on The Left to re-engage – on all of us to have a spirited debate – with political issues crying out to be addressed articulately. Issues like happiness, worth, proportionality, citizenship. Can we be bothered, we are asking rhetorically, to get past Daily Mail level exchanges in order to approach fairness and yes responsibility and wellbeing as a huge disparate group? It may take some thinking about.

As will the role of the City, the banks. I am one who is prone to judging bankers en masse as a bunch of reasonably dense, morally bankrupt parasites on the whale-like body of the economy. (Clearly it’s just most of them who fall into that category).

Once my prejudices have cleared, however, I remain with those who find it beyond belief that nations like ours have fallen under the spell of a handful of banks/global companies who have not and will not be held to account for their lack of intelligence/regulation/professionalism. It may be stupid of us to mindlessly serially abuse bankers… but they and the government(s) need to feel our hot breath, our verbal pitchforks, our gathering focus, our passion for that which is better.

Should we see this as an opportunity for an Arab Spring equivalent or a mere fiscal tightening, the point may be that we, the people are seeing that things demand our attention. People have been and may soon again be ‘on the streets’ – though clearly that fact is not necessarily a reflection of increased political intelligence in any quarter. Many of the rioters were criminal opportunists, or were caught up in something that felt exciting; it was hardly activism of any cerebral breed. Strikes may be different but in order for them to improve the general lot, let’s hope our Trade Unionists are quoting Judt and Orr as well as football songs when they stride purposefully out.

An economic crisis

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

Money can be personal and it can be political. By that I mean we feel its impact acutely both in our individual lives and more abstractly via some sense of how the high street, the county, the country seems. Right now, I have a personal shortage of dark vulture-swung-canyon proportions, mirroring that which apparently afflicts the (entire?) eurozone.

So am I a special case? Clearly not. Is there any comfort in this current, fateful tessellation of inner and outer skinthood? Is there bollocks. The laughably small business I have lies broken-backed on the valley floor whilst the inevitable narrowly post-dinosaur nimrods scan for signs of weakness. The fact that half of Europe feels like this fails, at this particular moment, to lighten the spirit.

So I need to make jokes/watch wonderful sport/write about stuff/recycle the juicy juice/hope that something gives. And I am. Believing and offering up and pursuing, with my characteristic utter lack of proportion, rationality, guile. Hugely, honestly aware that though I can’t afford to fix the truck/am not able to draw cash from the business etc. etc. my more significant privileges remain free from the shadow of capital(ist) fact.

And I breathe them in deeply and think, powerfully and laterally and without any despair how we might dance through this together. Work on the refinery shutdown; work at the gallery/tourist centre; work please god following a call sending me urgently to New Zealand to shadow Eddie Butler, who’s having trouble with his laptop… and writer’s block… and could I possibly knock out coupla columns? Likely or unlikely ways onward.

In one sense I love this knife-edge of possible bankruptcy and possible mindblowing leap forward. At the risk of sounding nauseatingly indulged (I can’t make you believe that there’s really no financial airbag here but I’m not seeing one) I’ve often claimed to be contentedly insecure. Not entirely in some crypto-buddhist unattached present, but pretty close, where a healthy insecurity is certainly preferred to a reactionary stasis. As a unit, me and my beautiful wife do believe we can live for a while off our wits and now we may have to. This, for us, is a test of will and imagination as well as book-keeping.

Each of our cases is unique and I seek no comparisons, being clear that we are fortunate that the prolonged exercise of my evidently poor business skills may yet be a springboard towards less prosaic business in an ideal world. Conversely, and necessarily, I am gearing my expectations down (too), being prepared to go back to where my working life started – in the frozen food factories of Great Grimsby, if you must know – or to the Pembrokeshire equivalent.

How many of us now, with how many cruel or crushing backstories are congregating in this generally greying niche of the crisis? How many have real hope of betterment? Or of achieving financial parity ‘once things straighten out’? Best not to focus on these abstract economic concepts too keenly methinks; we might find people wriggling underneath.

Impure speculation

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Ok so I spent time in Canada and was struck by the locals (everywhere!) passion for hockey. I watched schoolboys from Oakville and semi-pro’s from Thunder Bay; the same. High tensile, testosterone-fuelled balletic brutality cheered upon by parents or truck drivers psychotic with feeling. Equivalent, absolutely, to our footie. Wayne Gretski and Mario Le Mieux (if I remember correctly) were godlike – Rooneyesque – in their pomp. I watched Canada v USSR in a university campus bar and nearly suicidally cheered for the Soviets, such was the volume, magnificence and crassness of the home support. But man they meant it; this was the lurid expression of something powerful and wonderful as well as daft and politically dubious.

Now an appalling number – does the number matter? – of fellow hockey people have been wiped out; in Russia. A sort of Busby Babes echo – only more multi-nationally devastating – reverberates, for now even this hard-wired northern sport has ‘gone big’ and gathered in players from distant lands. Thus in a city we know nothing about (Yaroslavl) a spectacular pool of A list skating talent has been cruelly wasted. Lost too a Canadian coach – Brad McCrimmon.  And inevitably cruel worries will begin to gnaw, about what immediately should have been done and what, more broadly, consists airline safety policy in the region.

But having loved Canada’s heartiness, through the depths of several feet of snow, in fact; through the clatter and skid and bawl and body-check of hockey games; despite the absurdity – perversity even – of this link, I feel sad, deeply sad to hear of this loss. And I imagine and I think I hope that my soul brothers and sisters in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan are, at least in their minds, laying wreaths for their Russian friends, for the 11 foreign players, as well as the teams Canadian coach.

This petrol emotion

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

Hey look I’m living some kind of idyllic family thing in Pembrokeshire. So I’ve undoubtedly ‘escaped’ to some degree. And I feel conflicted – isn’t that what they say? – about even talking about this rioting thing. What right have I? etc etc. But… let me make some contribution to the debate please.

In no particular order – like is there any order? – the following strike me;

  • The cops may have bollocksed up this Duggan thing; by again failing to be brilliantly sharp and clear and aware and sensitive when they absolutely needed to be bringing out their A game. (They can’t afford to be doing that).
  • A pile of (working class?) people – families even – have been disgracing themselves by ‘joining in’.
  • The Daily Mail, amongst others, has again been shockingly inflammatory – an agent of cheap division when we need intelligence.
  • The race card has been predictably but insidiously played.
  • Certain public figures have sounded off, apparently unaware of the delicious ironies implicit in this – some of them being both embarrassingly privileged and guilty of abusing that privilege through exploitation of expenses protocols, for example.
  • There are issues; there is an underclass.
  • Many of these rioters deserve a hiding. (It wouldn’t help).
  • There is no foreseeable possibility of resolving either the exclusion or disenfranchisement or the cheap, cynical, materialist ignorance of those who perpetrate the criminality, or the casual/’incidental’ (re)actions.
  • The exclusion of some of these people from opportunity is, for want of a better word, criminal.

So we go round. Thugs and communities; brave men in uniform; the outraged, the sinned against, the scumbags. Dark shadows. The whiff of petrol. But what if we really do think about this? If we use its energy positively? Get beyond the obvious, take the emotion out; maybe even put some philosophy, some generosity in?.

Clearly we are right to penalise those guilty of ‘trashing their own communities’. We can unite in our disgust/moral outrage/sadness at that. But can we, if we are to reasonably judge, take the emotion out? Put a sensible, even helpful, constructive value on the quality of wrongdoing and then penalise it and take steps to legislate, in the broader sense, for improvement.

By this I mean (for one thing) improvement in terms of respecting defining principles; such as ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL. Why not start with that one?

That might necessitate a fairly acute look at aspects of the aforementioned privilege. The still stunning domination of Public School/Oxbridge alumni throughout higher levels of government/media/business. The facts and figures, historically and now, re- top earners in relation to those on the breadline. Perceptions around the knowledge of that. For one view might be that unforgiveable as much of the recent action has been, it may be a historically inevitable consequence of a perception of inequality. If that were true would that mean that the following were worthy of consideration?

  • The abolition of private schooling.
  • Bigger, better, intelligent government; government that led.
  • The imposition of some kind of wage-capping, for proportionality.
  • Steps to curb both the notion that growth is god and indeed the acceptance that capitalism per se works for ALL ANIMALS.

These are, of course, hilarious, post-coital and anti-social suggestions arising from liberal/shared gay sex with E P Thompson, Ken Livingstone, Angela Carter, Ken Loach and Elvis Costello on a Red Wedge weekend in Brent. Much more realistic and practical solutions are offered below;

  • Use water cannon upon every gathering of more than 2.
  • Use plastic bullets on every gathering of more than 4.
  • Send all convicted rioters to Marines standard boot camp.
  • Blame teachers.
  • Blame parents.
  • Reduce the school curriculum to the learning of reading, writing and arithmetic. And entrepreneurism.
  • Tell kids god will be their judge.
  • Tell kids they will never be paid to think.
  • Tell kids they need more products… like blackberries, flat screen TV’s, designer labels, watches, gold stuff, shiny stuff, stuff everybody’s got – stuff you can get young kids to nick for ya, when it gets wild. Late, right, in the dark shadows, with the sirens going off and all, and the feds goin’ ballistic, but… like… when they can’t touch ya man.

Amy come back.

~ bowlingatvincent ~ Leave a comment

I’m ill at ease with my previous blog. Apart from its cheap ego-centrism – how dare I call into question her realness when all around are saying Amy Winehouse was absolutely (and possibly uniquely) the real deal? An apology may yet be in order. But I do cling with a little confidence to the notion that I can legitimately make some argument here a) because I have to my knowledge no beef with the woman (not even for her later, unappealing habit of pooping on her fans) b) because there were years in my life when music was The Most Important Thing Bar None and c) I could, in the words of another icon of The Smoke, be wrong.

So setting aside the ripeness of the moment – which I fully understand may be difficult for the majority – I think the process of appreciation for any real artist is such a rich and rewarding and on times such an enlightening thing that I ask you to persevere right on past my gaucheness. To, ideally, a place where I can ask whether that instrument of hers was that of a truly great jazz/soul singer?

Sure it was magnificently easy; there was something of the sublime there, in the cadence of the thing. It was utterly in tune with a smoky, druggy London; out on the town with it, swigging bourbon and creasing into cleavage-wobbling laughter. And most of that appeals to the wannabe metropolitan in most of us – happy or sad. What I’m not sure about is how moving any of this carousing was.

It may be a mistake to entirely associate greatness with the ability to truly ‘move’. Pop can be great/a horn section can be great; what does that tell us about commonalities between great human noises? Naff all. The matter may then be complex but the issue at hand is this; whether or not Amy Winehouse went past music into the colours of the heart. Many would answer an emphatic YES to that one.

Me, I wouldn’t. So I’m going to have to listen to ‘Back to Black’ again, ‘properly’. Check out whether these were good songs or ordinary songs. Whether there’s anything being said as well as whether that voice was really special. I’m looking forward to that.

Judge the work

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I’d like to write a post about Amy Winehouse that doesn’t get too trapped. Or that’s what I was thinking. Partly because although there is no question that she was a talent, and it is (always) a loss, I have to confess that I found her voice affected rather than affecting.

By that I think I mean that I felt she was kindof pitching at some role rather than truly expressing her self.   Consequently I let the music drift away – or maybe even pushed it. Right now that feels a pretty shockingly harsh judgement, but my soul’s response to that salty/soaked velvet croon was to simply fail to believe in it. It was unreal. And in the face of so much contrary emotion, I find that interesting, even if it does reflect badly upon me.

Now I’m aware of the absurdity – insensitivity even – of indulging in this particular moan at this particular moment. It may be something to do with wanting to ‘balance’ the understandable hyperbole. And I am heavily aware of the relative weakness of my position in terms of critical opinion. But when the critics and many of the great unwashed are foaming, look out, right? Especially when so much cool factor is invested, right?

Acclaim is surely a fickle and politicised beast; sometimes we suspect its motives as well as any intellectual quality it may have or lack. In addition, in the Winehouse situation, the thing is loaded with edgy but marketable ‘issues’ – drugs/irresponsibility/stridency/the inevitable car crash factor – all, arguably, clouding anyone’s ability to judge. For how many of us remain neutral in the Heroin debate, the What’s Her Family Been Doin’ debate, the Rehab With Your Loyal But Heavily Disappointed Fans debate?

On the one hand, cruelly, it seems Amy had a lot of support. On the other a void, an absence – her own. She wasn’t there when she needed her and presumably neither were the real friends that might have supplanted the illness. Or likely not.

We are fortunate that the music persists; the relatively small back catalogue that so gripped the handers-out of major awards as well as millions of ‘ordinary fans’. As is always the case with an artist – judge the work.