Current affairs

Wipe the sleep out of my eye

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 2 Comments

I have written previously on the purifying rage of the likes of John Lydon and the righteous power of certain late seventies punk-peeps, believing passionately in the anti-pomp and anti-twiddle manifesto they pogo-istically propounded. Music must be cleansed of the filth that is The Bizz itself! Stop showing off you bearded psycho-doodlers – the people are revolting! No More Heroes!! Oh and by the way I AM AN ANARCHYSTE!!! And quite right too.

But I have a confession to make; speaking as I do, as a fully paid-up member of the (Specials) Nightklub and former well if not outwardly a punk, exactly, certainly Two-Tone/Gang of Four/Joy Division/Bunnyman type-individual. As a nipper (born 1960 – do the math) not just me but my bro’s in the hood – literally now, 4 lads in our family – loved The Monkees for years. Before puberty/surreptitious bottles of QC/pints of Mild/The Flamingo on Cleethorpes seafront intervened; before it got unmanly to like pop or laugh. Before that, in a treacly period when it was still acceptable for kids from a lower lower middle-class household to run around like maniacs and play Cowboys ‘n Injuns, we sat glued to The Monkees. Because it was great; pop seemed great.

Perhaps aged 7 or 8 or 10, we hadn’t fully grasped the revolting nature of the Capitalist West; so that the cynical regurgitation of popsongs by Bizz-generated young Americans failed to repel us entirely. And we flunked the Don’t Fall For That Natty-Tricky Camerawork test too – the ‘wit’ and ‘style’ of the gurning popsters Show somehow being well-received by us, in our Grimsby home and the rest of TV-owning humanity apparently. Monkees were a laugh, or a convincingly cra-zee, admittedly saccharoidal baker’s dozen of laughs, quite often, in fact. They were likably kooky (before kooky existed, I imagine?) and swanned or maybe Benny-Hilled about in a way that was boyishly appealing. Almost as if it was… planned.

But then we found out – pretty soon, I think, us being No Mugs – that one of them was one of ours; which sealed it. Davy Jones; was a Brit-popper! With the That’s Alright Then factor nicely embedded, we proceeded to enjoy Monkees on telly or the record player in our sportily junior unstill way. For years, it seems. The lads jumped about or got chased by girls (yukk!) or broke ‘spontaneously’ into song – effectively but kindof seamlessly marking out the ground for pop video as well as marketable TV frivolity of a family nature. Micky Dolenz was witty/hysterical-in-a-mad-drummer-stylee, Peter Tork was dumb, Michael Nesmith wore a tea-cosy and raised his eyebrows whilst cogitating, Davy Jones sang and swooned or got swooned over by California Girls. (See – it had everything.) But beneath that surfaciously groovicious surface… revolution stirred.

Well kindof. Because The Monkees had or developed attitude… an independent force free of their original puppeteers. They knew they could do stuff, suddenly; amazingly, they could even PLAY!

Having been arguably the earliest significant truly manufactured pop outfit with continental appeal, the boys found, after a year or two, their er… mojo. Which said something like We Can Do This Thang. Or Thing. Man. Leading them to battle for the right to play and sing and actually (shock horror probe) take control, commit to their music; properly.

Maybe the moment of this minor triumph is relatively unimportant – and it’s certainly true that they knocked out a coupla their pop faves before Boogie-syndicalism dawned upon them – but still it fleshes out the caricatures and the story itself rather nicely. Those dreamers dreamed and then… fought for something. Proving if nothing else that there were one or two brain cells active in The Monkees collective way back then. (One impression is that Dolenz and Naismith may have been the more liberated and vocal souls, but this is difficult to establish 40 something years after their 1966-68 peak.) In no way am I suggesting that The Monkees were ‘about’ the subversion of the business, or drawing parallels with them and Public Image Ltd; I think I’m just saying it’s one of the things I like about Monkeestuff. Chiefly though, they were – or they felt? – colourful and funny and they swept us along a now ludicrously implausible wave of innocence and cheek. When we were young.

So Davy Jones’s death at 66 feels an absurd affront to much of what he in particular stood for. Davy was the beautiful one, the natural, smiley-swoony one, the one the girls skweeemed and skweemed at. He was the handsome and maybe even slightly exotic Englishman in this cabal of yankeepups. He did the kaftan thing and the unassuming front man thing and the attractively wittyboy thing successfully – more attractively than the rest of the band, who lacked his stunning but unchallenging good looks. We liked or even loved him; but surely the thing that would please him the most is the love that still exists for some of those songs?

Jones sang the magnificently built “Daydream Believer”, a song that still rises and sears truly poptastically in the hearts and hums of many of us 45 years after the event. Not that longevity or sales or any of that Bizz-crap we’re supposed to acknowledge means anything. Most art created with an eye on either posterity or mass-sales is either indulgent or crass, right? But some things – some songs – just work, and go on working. Even pop, that most ephemeral of genres, can be profound in its simple voicing of some transcending now; when reflecting a moment we can feel, for its beauty or tunefulness or emotion or meaning. Sure we can wash up to great pop, but we can sing our hearts out too, either bewitched by some collection of chords – by the production – or by the words sung. With Monkees, or with great Monkees, there’s both brilliant crafting and singalongability in a popular but uncheesy way.

“Last Train to Clarkesville” and “I’m a Believer” remain remarkably alive as pop songs. (I know, I just checked.) Which is something of a relief, as I want to feel able to look back on a period of my childhood with rounded, post-modernist satisfaction as well with the beaming nostalgia of one needing/wishing to recapture lost innocence, lost joys. Davy Jones will be missed by his family, his friends and those of us who enjoyed that daft, wonderful popthing The Monkees gave us. Tomorrow, I play it to my kids.

A confessional from a professional?

~ bowlingatvincent ~ 1 Comment

High up there in the pantheon of sporting clichés there sits at least one about hookers. Somewhere behind the 47 crap jokes casually linking this most trusting of er… positions with flighty women and gaslit alleys. Somewhere on that flipchart of inclusive or exclusive banter between “Ya’ve got to be mad to be a ‘goalie”/ “Who ett all the pies ?” and “Gavin Henson is a Homosexual!” people say – even non-hookers say – they’re a special breed.

They are too. Anyone who is prepared to dangle off of the shoulders of colleagues in this most exposed of manners – with both arms effectively relieved of their ability to mitigate against serious injury – gets a pint of after shave from me. There must be surely a link between the morphology of their imperfectly expressed cruciform in the scrum, the necessary courage shown by hookers at all levels of their trade and the apparently described pathology of the breed? Which seems to involve on the one hand wholeheartedness and on the other a generally undemonstrative fearless mania.

And why wouldn’t it? Rarely in life is the head and neck so literally on the block; it’s as if your two mates either side (the loosehead and tighthead props) have your very being – or the physical safety of it – in their custody. This is no Guardian-readers-on-confidence-building workshop exercise, this is offering yourself up at the moment of the infamous ‘Hit’, when two packs of opposing forwards clang together in an expression of calculated violence designed to find you out should any weakness reveal itself. You will not, therefore, be weak.

The Front Row Union then may only allow the brave and the faithful entry to their bloodsweatandtears-stained ante-rooms. This does not, however, debar from entry the bright or the evil; and it did not debar Brian Moore. In fact the two were surely made for each other.

Brian Moore. Of England – sixty odd times. Adopted. Abused. Self-confessed Tolkien nerd and qualified Nail Painter. (That would be as in fingernails, during a stint as proprietor and technician(?) at a Soho emporium run with a former wife. 1 of 3.) Moore the proud and probably slightly perverse bearer of the various bête noire-equivalents knocking around Six Nations rugby (though it was Five when he played.) Delighted to be so hated by the Welsh and the Scots and the French and well… everybody. Inspired even by that knowledge, almost satisfied by it – especially the realisation that if he were, for example Scottish and otherwise unchanged, the Scots would love him for his fiercely committed spirit.

And yet the key thing revealed by the man himself during his predictably jarringly honest visit to Nurse Kirsty’s knee for Desert Island Discs was this ‘almost’.

In an extraordinary but typically articulate self-skewering Moore constantly alluded to his inability to recognise, to be at peace with his achievements. Utterly without resort to idle pleasantries – how, we imagine, he must hate them! – the former England number 2 rumbled like some worryingly law-conversant boar through the excited parabola that is his personal history. Adoption into churchgoing family/abuse from within churchgoing milieu/sporting and academic success/then oodles of hard-won glory at an international level for England RUFC. Success he still finds hard to own.

Fascinatingly(?) Brian Moore refused to emerge from the dressing room to participate in celebrations and photocalls following England’s 1991 Grand Slam victory. He simply wouldn’t do it. Issues of self-worth were so darkly present that Moore failed to shift from his bench… because he didn’t feel he deserved that victory. Psychologists – cod, like me, or otherwise – have your field day.

On the way to his metaphorical Desert Island, Brian Moore revealed pretty profound stuff like this every other sentence. Not out of arrogance you sensed – although there may be some self-obsession implied? – but because he gives a straight and generous answer to a genuine question. This is how he understands the world; there’s surely something to be said for that? He was alarmingly open about his everything; from his ‘Pitbull’ness to his other darknesses, his lost times under the influence of all manner of substances, following his release from the strictures of his athletic discipline. (Basically he went mental in his beloved Soho.)

Moore’s choice of music inevitably reflected his scope as a bright, bullish, sensitive bloke. It combines what some might consider appreciation of the finer things with punkishness. So from Mozart to Green Day. From Ian Dury to Pietro Mascagni. And one from the much-admired soulbrothers-in-peachy devilry, The Stranglers – an attractive, near melancholic, rather beautiful song called “Always the Sun”. (Listen to that …and it figures?)

But Moore would want to be judged on that which he committed to; formerly the rugby/now the journalism and commentary. He knows how much his confrontational personality, his facility to wind-up the world at large has discoloured how he is received. Despite this awareness of the extensively ventilated voodoo doll- version Moore out there in the public mind, I don’t hear him complaining, ever. Serious – often- and lugubrious as well as loquacious in his muffling, bell-chiming fog of sincerity; but too manly for self-pity or show. So judge him fairly, please.

Moore is a complex and yes a dark, difficult guy. A proper hooker – with that hunting dog relentlessness and low-burning fire. Beyond indomitable – more alive and more interesting, despite his saddening ‘baggage’. An essential part of a particularly English rugby team, a successful one, for several years; drawn absolutely to the thick of it. Now in triumphant opposition to the platitudes and the rehearsed banalities of much sports-speak, instinctively and with some style telling us how it really is.

He writes now acutely and often brilliantly for the Daily Telegraph. He commentates, often as foil to the more circumspect Mr Eddie Butler, with whom, surprisingly, he generally disagrees. In all of this there appears to me not an ounce of what my lot would call ‘side’ – meaning pretence or calculation or feyness or… dishonesty. He picks and goes without pausing to preen I think. And I wonder if he dare give himself some credit for that?

Dumb questions.

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Don’t know about you but I hate feeling excluded from stuff; whether it be (literal) entry to something or exclusion through snobbery, for example. For now, if we stop to reflect on all manner of political discourse (please, do!) we may find pretty early some obstructive force, some veil through which we feel we may or should not peek.

On times this will feel just ‘right’, the presence of some justifiable and even necessary filter, through which we have to earn passage, through understanding. Because we need to feel confident of a certain level of intellectual competence in Subject A before we run with it, debate it, unconstruct it. So essentially we fore-arm ourselves, against asking dumb questions, often by turning sheepishly(?) away from those things we ‘don’t know enough about’. Though I am guilty of it, I hate that.

My suspicion is that much of this self-denial of the cerebral joust (that might on reflection be regarded as a life-enhancing or defining stimulus) is more coerced than personally screened. We are made to feel inadequate. Pressures emerge from all levels of the sky-scraping beast that morphs into (or rises from?) say, the body politic/the fiscal gherkin/the evolved system. Us normal folks are lost or spun or misled by something in the constricting ether; something on the one hand rather rundown and bad-breathlike and on the other awesomely pervasive; powerful.

My instinct is to fight that stuff; to defy and to undermine it. This may mean pushing out beyond the ledge of my core subject expertise – that would be er… sport maybe? – and blowing a raspberry at the notion of received wisdoms elsewhere. Received wisdom often perpetuates myth, right? Is often grounded in smugness; may need the faux-oxygen of privilege or the cover of opaqueness. Perhaps mystery itself may be an outlier in this matrix of conformist gunk? And perhaps, therefore we need an occasional, demystifying blast of… punk?

Punk was wonderful for its moral zeal-with-a-mohican. Punk said – if you were listening – stop preening and start speaking from the heart. Stop twiddling those solo’s and tell me something real. It was magnificently articulate and magnificently necessary in that respect. Punk began unpeeling the facades of the worlds of art/music/politics because it seared angrily through; it was a focused mischief blaring wildly out for betterstuff. It may not have paused too long in consideration of the need for nuanced arguments but maybe that counts for urgency rather than in some cool deficiency column. Great punk(s) had no respect, other than that which was earned. Great punks did not understand, so they demanded answers.

John Lydon may have been the only great punk. ‘Metal Box’ from Public Image Limited remains a staggeringly discomfiting but articulate noise, an appropriate racket from which to launch an onslaught against (capitalist(?) drudgery—witness the “shallow spread of ordered lawns”. Something is being punctured or exposed or better revealed; a kind of hypocrisy, a kind of normalcy; a sad, bad intellectual thinness. There is poetry in these dumb questions. These questions might not have been asked… if we’d have just… behaved.

So though I do despair at how we still fawn before the current gods – for ‘growth’/some careering stability/the normalcy of sheepishness – those rib-progglers, those UnCutters, those Occupiers give me hope.

Kicking.

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If I say that we are living through extraordinary times it seems blandly, even arrogantly obvious.  But unquestionably historic stuff is “kicking off” – to appropriate Paul Mason’s stunningly appropriate term – all over.  A kind of us-centric response might proffer the Eurozone as exhibit A here, but large and hairy as that problem seems, perhaps it is right to acknowledge the proper, i.e. life and death stuff going off in say Syria/Egypt, for example. Oh and say Afghanistan/Iraq/Pakistan – remember them?

But I’m being perverse, right?  What I should be saying is something about Russia – that being the real news story of the moment.  And I should headline it with something like ‘Black Belt Bear Wakes With Sore Head’ so as to respectfully treat the issue.

If there is a point to this here outbreak of acerbic indulgo-cobblers, it is that news – that sensationally important backcloth to our mortal uncoilings – is often Naughtily Non-Representative of Anything Very Much.  Or at the very least we should be looking very carefully at its proportionality, its real import, its meaning.  In short, I’m not clear that enough of our news enlightens us to the story that makes the events.

It may be that all this vinny-mithering is a function of my disillusionment with our understanding of Euro-issues following our friend Mr D Cameron’s recent summit  performance.  Maybe I’m blaming the tabloids for the nation not getting it.  But getting what?

  • That IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE ECONOMY, STOOPID
  • That surely the arguments against not joining with our European soul-brothers are much more about democracy than money.
  • That apparently there is still only black or white in all things because… because grey is just too difficult to contemplate.

I nearly, for one moment, asked if I was making sense but that’s not really what I’m seeking here.  I’m unravelling stuff; I seeketh not the crystalline – or at least I’m not in the position to make anything explicit.  Because there’s loads of stuff I don’t know.  However I do have some bloody good questions.

Like is it not perfectly acceptable to make an anti-thatnewtreatything argument on the grounds that tying so much in to one notion of (allegedly necessary) financial stability in such a draconian way is fascistically myopic.  You telling me that it’s not anti-democratic to disallow the possibility that individual governments, mandated to carefully stimulate their own economies, might act to promote recovery through prudent spending?

Bluntly, you saying that Leftism of any degree is kindof illegal?  Then I think, in the technical jargon of the financial industry, that you are jack-bootingly MENTAL.

Politics and the media seem to have colluded again in the exclusionment of ideas of this nature.  I wonder to what degree this is a function of the absolute stranglehold the god of economic growth has on legitimate debate.

So who’s having those important discussions about how new understandings of the essence of co-existence amid denuded ‘buoyancy’?  Who’s brave or stupid or smart enough to relegate mere matters of financial fact to item four or five of the real agenda?  Behind sustainable truths – behind the structural need for generosity.

I may have wandered again from the initial question of what is historically meaningful.  On the other hand, maybe I haven’t?

What is it with us blokes?

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My son is expending a huge amount of energy on being cool/being in; being safely ensconced in the little mob. I understand that. The not particularly appealing truth is that compound pressures – shockingly cheap ones – insist that as a young bloke (at school) you have to avoid the perception of ‘gay stuff’. So if you are ‘bright’ – and what a loaded word that baby is – or in some other way may be seen or suspected to be spookily other to the durable surfy or sporty norm, you have to do stuff. Chiefly, you have to trip other blokes up and laugh, or wrestle, or join in the chorus of grunts aimed at individuals who either fail the informal Cool Exams, or who appear immune to the essential trends, poor dumbo’s. It really can be a jungle; a jungle with fringes you have to casually flick.

So, barring haircuts/degree of undies exposure things apparently haven’t changed much since I was a kid. I kindof oscillated between being something of a little mob leader and teetering on the brink of gaydom. Because I was almost painfully skinny and brainy; because I was (thank god) bloody good at sports; because I made the guys laugh. Otherwise who knows? I saw very little overt physical bullying and guess that remains at similar levels – again, who knows? I am pretty sure, however that pressures to have the right clobber and do the right things have multiplied as awarenesses of products (as much as anything) have exploded. I suspect there’s a lot of quiet heartbreak going on.

The fact that much of this is centred upon a brutally stupid contrast between fashionable conformities and individual expressions of self make it all the more deplorable, all the more poignant. For cheap macho values to have taken such a hold so early is massively harmful. But it has, I’m seeing it every day. (I repeat) The black and white of it for me was that

a) because I could only dream of being ‘wiry’

b) because I kept coming top

c) because I actually could sound a bit French in French

I apparently deserved to die a slow painful death. Unless the following qualities intervened in my favour;

d) I was the fastest

e) I was tasty on the footie/rugby/cricket pitch

f) (unbelievably) I was kinda… funny.

Intervene they did, largely.

My schooldays, like my sons, were generally good. In fact – and this may be unflatteringly contradictory – I am clear that the ‘ordinariness’ of my education (at Matthew Humberstone Comp. Cleethorpes, if you must know) was the making of me in many positive ways. Ways that I actually cherish. I literally grew up with guys (mainly) who aren’t now reading The Guardian. They are in workshops/on ships/in difficulty as well as in schools or offices. Some were academically ‘hopeless’ but on a sports pitch they were transformed from footie hooligans to bundles of skill and expression – of intelligence even. Such is the roughness of the macho diamond; would that we could dig it from the dungheap.

So what do we do, as parents, as blokes? I have laboured the point to both my kids that everyone must be valued. That this is paramount. I have forewarned my son – wrongly perhaps – that he has nothing to fear (in being brainy) because he is a good honest, sporty lad, insulated from meaningless grief through his ability to clump people on the rugby pitch and smash cover drives. How much more satisfactory would it be to be able to say nowt, or feel comfortable that he could be fearlessly weedy/geeky/gay as he liked, if he needed to be.

Family Fortunes?

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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.