politics - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

an alan smithee war

Watch out, this starts off being almost insultingly elementary, but then gets complicated and probably even self-contradictory quite quickly.*

*a perhaps necessary note; “Allan Smithee” is a pseudonym used by film directors when they wish to disown a project

Countries, States and religions are not monoliths and nor are they sentient. They don’t have feelings, aims, motivations or opinions. So whatever is happening in the Middle East isn’t ‘Judaism versus Islam’ or even ‘Israel versus Palestine’, any more than “the Troubles”* were/are ‘Protestantism versus Catholicism’ or ‘Britain versus Ireland’.

* a euphemism, which, like most names for these things is partly a method of avoiding blame – as we’ll see

Places and atrocities aren’t monoliths either; Srebrenica didn’t massacre anybody**, the Falkland islands didn’t have a conflict, ‘the Gulf’ didn’t have a war and neither did Vietnam or Korea. But somebody did. As with Kiefer Sutherland and Woman Wanted in 1999 or Michael Gottlieb and The Shrimp on the Barbie in 1990 and whoever it was that directed Gypsy Angels in 1980, nobody wants to claim these wars afterwards. But while these directors have the handy pseudonym Allan Smithee to use, there is no warmongering equivalent, and so what we get is geography, or flatly descriptive terms like ‘World War One’, which divert the focus from the aggressor(s) and only the occasional exception (The American War of Independence) that even references the point of the war. But, whether interfered with by the studio or not, Kevin Yagher did direct Hellraiser: Bloodline just as certain individuals are responsible for actions which are killing human beings as you read this. Language and the academic study of history will help to keep their names quiet as events turn from current affairs and into history. Often this evasion is done, perhaps even unknowingly, for purely utilitarian reasons, but sometimes it is more sinister.

** see?

As the 60s drew to its messy end, the great Terry “Geezer” Butler wrote lines which, despite the unfortunate repeat/rhyme in the first lines, have a Blakean power and truth:

Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses

Black Sabbath, War Pigs, 1970

There is something sinister and even uncanny in the workings of power, in the distance between avowed and the underlying motivations behind military action. Power politics feels like it is – possibly because intuitively it seems like it should be – cold and logical rather than human and emotional. It doesn’t take much consideration though to realise that even beneath the chilly, calculated actions of power blocs there are weird and strangely random human desires and opinions, often tied in with personal prestige which somehow seems to that person more important than not having people killed.

Anyway, Geezer went on to say:

Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor

Still Black Sabbath, War Pigs (1970)

And that’s right too; but does that mean Butler’s ‘poor’ should take no responsibility at all for their actions? In the largest sense they are not to blame for war or at least for the outbreak of war; and conscripts and draftees are clearly a different class again from those who choose to “go out to fight.” But. As so often WW2 is the easiest place to find examples; whatever his orders or reasons, the Nazi soldier who shot a child and threw them in a pit, shot a child and threw them in a pit. His immediate superior may have done so too, but not to that particular child. And neither did Himmler or Adolf Hitler. Personal responsibility is an important thing, but responsibility, especially in war, isn’t just one act and one person. Between the originator and architects of the Final Solution and the shooter of that one individual child there is a chain of people, any one of whom could have disrupted that chain and even if only to a degree, affected the outcome. And that degree may have meant that that child, that human being, lived or died. A small thing in a death toll of something over 6 million people, unless you happen to be that person.

As with the naming of wars and atrocities, terms like “genocide” and “the Holocaust” are useful, especially if we want – as we clearly do – to have some kind of coherent, understandable narrative that can be taught and remembered as ‘history’. But in their grim way these are still euphemisms. The term ‘the Holocaust’ memorialises the countless – actually not countless, but still, nearly 80 years later, being counted – victims of the Nazis’ programme of extermination. But the term also makes the Holocaust sound like an event, rather than a process spread out over the best part of a decade, requiring the participation of probably thousands of people who exercised – not without some form of coercion perhaps, but still – their free will in that participation. The Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder’s famous saying, whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world is hard to argue with, insofar as the world only exists for us within our perceptions. Even the knowledge that it is a spinning lump of inorganic and organic matter in space, and that other people populate it who might see it differently only exists in our perceptions. Or at least try to prove otherwise. And so the converse of Hillel’s saying – which is actually included in it but far less often quoted – is Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. Which sounds like an argument for pacifism, but while pacifism is entirely viable and valuable on an individual basis as an exercise of one’s free will* – and on occasion has a real positive effect – one-sided pacifism relies on its opponents not to take a cynically Darwinian approach, which is hopeful at best. Pacifism can only really work if everyone is a pacifist, and everyone isn’t a pacifist.

*the lone pacifist can at least say, ‘these terrible things happened, but I took no part in them’, which is something, especially if they used what peaceful means they could to prevent those terrible things and didn’t unwittingly contribute to the sum total of suffering; but those are murky waters to wade in.

But complicated though it all is, people are to blame for things that happen. Just who to blame is more complicated – more complicated at least than the workable study of history can afford to admit. While countries and religions are useful as misleading, straw man scapegoats, even the more manageable unit of a government is, on close examination, surprisingly hard to pin down. Whereas (the eternally handy example of) Hitler’s Nazi Party or Stalin’s Council of People’s Commissars routinely purged heretics, non-believers and dissidents, thus acting as a genuine, effective focus for their ideologies and therefore for blame and responsibility, most political parties allow for a certain amount of debate and flexibility and therefore blame deniability. Regardless, when a party delivers a policy, every member of that party is responsible for it, or should publicly recuse themselves from it if they aren’t.

The great (indeed Sensational) Scottish singer Alex Harvey said a lot of perceptive things, not least and “[Something] I learned from studying history. Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo*. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” Nobody ever won a war; but plenty of people, on both sides of every conflict have lost one – and, as the simple existence of a second world war attests, many, many people have lost a peace too.

*Modern estimates put it at ‘only’ 11,000 plus another 40,000 or so casualties; but his point stands

But the “causes” of war are at once easily traced and extremely slippery. Actions like the 1939 invasion of Poland by the armies of Germany and the USSR were, as military actions still are, the will of certain individuals, agreed to by other individuals and then acted upon accordingly. You may or may not agree with the actions of your government or the leaders of your faith. You may even have had some say in them, but in most cases you probably haven’t. Some of those dead on the fields of Waterloo were no doubt enthusiastic about their cause, some probably less so. But very few would have had much say in the decisions which took them to Belgium in the first place.

The buck should stop with every person responsible for wars, crimes, atrocities; but just because that’s obviously that’s impossible to record and even if it wasn’t, too complex to write in a simple narrative, that doesn’t mean the buck should simply not stop anywhere. Victory being written by the winners often means guilt being assigned to the losers, but even when that seems fair enough (there really wouldn’t have been a World War Two without Hitler) it’s a simplification (there wouldn’t have been an effective Hitler without the assistance of German industrialists) and a one-sided one (it was a World War because most of the leading participants had already had unprovoked wars of conquest). But does the history of Western colonialism, the treatment of Germany by the Allies after WW1 and the dubious nature of the allies and some of their actions make Hitler any less responsible for the war? And does Hitler’s guilt make the soldier who shoots a child or unarmed civilians, or drops bombs on them any less responsible for their own actions?

Again; only human beings do these things, so the least we can do is not act like they are some kind of unfathomable act of nature when we discuss them or name them. Here’s Alex Harvey again; “Whether you like it or not, anybody who’s involved in rock and roll is involved in politics. Anything that involves a big crowd of people listening to what you say is politics.” If rock and roll is politics, then actual politics is politics squared; and for as long as we settle, however grudgingly or complacently for pyramidal power structures for our societies then the person at the top of that pyramid, enjoying its vistas and rarefied air should be the one to bear its most sombre responsibilities. But all who enable the pyramid to remain standing should accept their share of it too.

So when you’re helplessly watching something that seems like an unbelievable waste of people’s lives and abilities, pay close attention even if you don’t want to, because the credits at the end may not tell you who’s really reponsible.

2024 – welcome to the/a future(s)

Another year – and the actual name of the year itself gets ever stranger and more unlikely and exotically futuristic, if you grew up in the era when the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was still set in the future. And here’s the annual attempt to get something onto this site at the beginning of the year – just made it in the first week this time – and hopefully, to post more often. The goal is a minimum of once a month but I think goals are better than resolutions so that’s as far as I will go.

2023 was the usual mixed bag of things; I didn’t see any of the big movies of the year yet. I have watched half of Saltburn, which so far makes me think of the early books of Martin Amis, especially Dead Babies (1975) and Success (1978) – partly because I read them again after he died last year. They are both still good/nasty/funny, especially Success, but whereas I find that having no likeable characters in a book is one thing, and doesn’t stop the book from being entertaining, watching unlikeable characters in a film is different – more like spending time with actual unlikeable people, perhaps because – especially in a film like Saltburn – you can only guess at their motivations and inner life. So, the second half of Saltburn remains unwatched – but I liked it enough that I will watch it.

Grayson Perry – The Walthamstow Tapestry (detail)

I didn’t see many exhibitions last year but am very glad that I caught Grayson Perry’s Smash Hits in Edinburgh. I didn’t really plan to see it as assumed in advance I wouldn’t like it, but in fact I loved it and ended up having a new respect for GP that only partly evaporates whenever I see him on TV.

I can’t be bothered going in depth about my favourite music of the year because the year is over and I’ve written about most it elsewhere. Old teenage favourites came back strongly: Kristin Hersh’s superb run of albums continued with Clear Pond Road. I hadn’t thought a lot about Slowdive in years but I really liked Everything is Alive and was very pleased to see them get the kind of acclaim that mostly eluded them when I was buying their first album a million years ago. Teenage Fanclub’s Nothing Lasts Forever and Drop Nineteens’ Hard Light were good too, and The Girl is Crying in her Latte by Sparks was probably my favourite of theirs outside of their early 70s classics. There were some excellent black metal (or black metal-related) albums too; much as I don’t like to think of Immortal without Abbath, Demonaz did himself proud with War Against All. Niklas Kvarforth returned to form with the brilliant Shining and Skálmöld’s Ýdalir is as good as anything they’ve recorded. In less guitar-oriented genres, I loved Kid Koala’s Creatures of the Late Afternoon and the latest Czarface record but my favourite album of the year if I had to choose one was the loveably lo-fi and enigmatic compilation Gespensterland.

I read lots of good books in 2023 – I started keeping a list but forgot about it at some point – but the two that stand out in my memory as my favourites are both non-fiction. Lauren Elkin’s Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art is completely engrossing and full of exciting ways of really looking at pictures. I wrote at length about Elena Kostyuchenko’s I Love Russia here. Kostyuchenko introduced me to a country that I only knew via history and stereotypes and her book is an exercise in what good journalism should be – informative, interesting, compassionate and readable. Both of these books cut across a wide range of subjects and examine unfamiliar things but also analyse the familiar from unfamiliar points of view; you should read them, if you haven’t already.

It’s no great surprise to me that my favourite books of the year would be – like much of my favourite art – by women. Though I think the individual voice is crucial in all of the arts, individuals don’t grow in a vacuum and because female (and, more widely, non-male) voices and viewpoints have always been overlooked, excluded, marginalised and/or patronised, women and those outside of the standard, traditional male authority figures more generally, tend to have more interesting and insightful perspectives than the ‘industry standard’ artist or commentator does. The first time that thought really struck me was when I was a student, reading about Berlin Dada and finding that Hannah Höch was obviously a much more interesting and articulate artist than (though I love his work too) her partner Raoul Hausmann, but that Hausmann had always occupied a position of authority and a reputation as an innovator, where she had little-to-none. And the more you look the more you see examples of the same thing. In fact, because women occupied – and in many ways still occupy – more culturally precarious positions than men, that position informs their work – thinking for example of artists like Leonora Carrington, Kay Sage or – a bigger name now – Frida Kahlo – giving it layers of meaning inaccessible to – because unexperienced by – their male peers.

The fact that women know more about themselves but also more about men than men do – because they have always had to – gives their work an emotional and intellectual charge often missing from those who belong comfortably within a tradition. This is a pretty well-worn idea – it’s why outsiders like Van Gogh or dropouts like Gauguin’s work speaks to us more clearly than the academic, tradition-bound art that they grew up with. Anybody on the margins, in whatever sense, of “mainstream society” has to have a working knowledge of that society, just to exist. Society has far less need to understand or even notice those people. – therefore their points of view are likely to not only be more individual, but more acute when it comes to observing the world in which they live. Class, race, gender; all of these things are always fascinatingly central to art and art history and the gradual recognition of that fact is making art history ever more exciting and vibrant. For now at least; we live in a time of conservative backlashes which attempt to restore order to those with a comfortable position within yesterday’s world – there will probably be an art historical backlash at some point, and the reputations of the mainstream stars of art in Van Gogh and Gauguin’s day, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau will find their reputations restored.

If that backlash comes, it will be from the academic equivalent of those figures who, in 2023 continued to dominate the cultural landscape. These are conservative (even if theoretically radical) people who pride themselves on their superior rational, unsentimental and “common sense” outlook, but whose views tend to have a surprising amount in common with some of the more wayward religious cults. Subscribing to shallowly Darwinist ideas, but only insofar as they reinforce one’s own prejudices and somehow never feeling the need to follow them to their logical conclusions is not new, but it’s very now. Underlying ideas like the ‘survival of the fittest’, which then leads to the more malevolent idea of discouraging the “weak” in society by abolishing any kind of social structure that might support them is classic conservatism in an almost 19th century way, but somehow it’s not surprising to see these views gaining traction in the discourse of the apparently futuristic world of technology. In more that one way, these kinds of traditionalist, rigidly binary political and social philosophies work exactly like religious cults, with their apparently arbitrary cut off points for when it was that progress peaked/halted and civilisation turned bad. That point varies; but to believe things were once good but are now bad must always be problematic, because when, by any objective standards, was everything good, or were even most things good? For a certain class of British politician that point seems to have been World War Two, which kind of requires one to ignore actual World War Two. But the whole of history is infected by this kind of thinking – hence strange, disingenuous debates about how bad/how normal Empite, colonialism or slavery were; incidentially, you don’t even need to read the words of abolitionists or slaves themselves (though both would be good to read) to gain a perspective of whether or not slavery was considered ‘normal’ or bad by the standards of the time. Just look at the lyrics to Britain’s most celebratory, triumphalist song of the 18th century, Rule Britannia. James Thomson didn’t write “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves; though there’s nothing inherently wrong with slavery.” They knew it was something shameful, something to be dreaded, even while celebrating it.

But anyways, the kind of avowedly forward-looking people we that are saddled with now, with their apparent concern for the future of the human species – especially the wellbeing of thus far non-existent future humans, as opposed to actual real living humans are, unlike the Amish, okay with progress, in the material sense of cars, computers, aircraft, spacecraft. But that only makes their core concern with traditional values and what is natural/unnatural even more nonsensical. If the defining thing about human beings is nature – men are like this, but not like that, women are like that, but not this; that nature dictates that compassion and medical science ate wasted on the weak and inferior, etc, then why draw the line at controlling gender and reproduction? Why get excited about the use of vaccines, or whether or not people “should” eat meat? If nature/”natural” really is the be all end all of human existence, why wear clothes, drive cars, cook food, use computers, build houses? At what point does nature dictate what we do or can or should do? Isn’t everything humans do inherently natural because we have the capacity to do it and actually do do it?

Again, despite the supposed rationalism that fuels the superiority complexes of so many powerful people in whatever sector, their bullshit traditional ideas are dictated against – and always have been – by the lived experience of almost everyone in the world. If ‘real men’ are strong, rational and above all heterosexual, how come most of us will have met, throughout our lives, emotional, irrational men who can’t cope with pressure, who aren’t in control of themselves or their environment? How come homosexuality has existed since the beginning of recorded time and does not go away no matter how traditional or repressive society becomes or how much generation after generation insists that it is unnatural? If ‘real women’ are weak, gentle, sentimental, maternal, submissive and above all heterosexual, how come (etc, etc, etc, etc) Because of decadent western society? Well Western society is partly founded on the ideas of Ancient Greece, which though pretty misogynistic, famously did not have quite the same views on sexuality. And how come these people equally exist in every other society too? Could it be that traditional ideas of ‘human nature’ have nothing to do with actual nature but have always existed in western patriarchal societies simply to reinforce the status quo in the interests of those at the top of the hierarchical tree? From monarchies to oligarchies to modern democracies and communist states – all of which have their own ruling class, even when it is explicitly labelled otherwise – it’s been in the interest of those in charge to prevent anything which fundamentally changes the way things work.

For similar reasons, people in western society (perhaps elsewhere; I am no expert) who live unremarkable and mediocre lives within essentially complacent, and often apolitical circles are increasingly drawn to right rather than left wing extremism to gain prominence and (importantly) material success. Extremist views across the spectrum are entertainingly “edgy” and titillating to people who like to be entertained by controversy and/or shocked by outrageous behaviour, but right-wing views are far more acceptable within the media – and therefore are far more lucrative and rewarding – because they don’t threaten the financial basis that underpins the media and political structure.

So in short – only joking, this will be a long sentence (deep breath). If comedian or podcaster A) gains millions of followers who are excited about disruptive ideas that undermine the state by questioning the validity of the (sigh) mainstream media, by interrogating ideas of media ownership and the accumulation of wealth and power and so on, that represents a genuine threat to Rupert Murdoch, Viscount Rothermere, Meta and Elon Musk in a way that comedian or podcaster B), gaining millions of followers who lean towards ideas that disrupt society by attacking progressive, egalitarian or (sigh) “woke” culture does not. Regardless of the actual or avowed political beliefs of these media magnates, is comedian/podcaster A or comedian/podcaster B going to be the one they champion in order to tap into the zeitgeist (which media magnates have to do to survive)?

BUT ANYWAY, it would be nice to think that these things would be less central or at least more ignorable in 2024. It would also be nice if people in power could not enable the worst elements in society (where the two things are separable). It would be more than nice if the governments of the world would listen to people and end the butchering of helpless civilians. It’s important to remember that it is in the interests of governments – even relatively benign ones – that people in general feel powerless. But we’re not. If making resolutions works for you then make them, if not then don’t, if you have goals then aim for those and you may achieve something even if not everything you want to achieve. But if something is unacceptable to you, don’t accept it. You may have money, power, time or you may have little more than your own body and/or your own mind, but those are 100% yours and the most important things of all. Happy New Year and good luck!

a portrait of the author as a young arse

Between the ages of 19 and 21, I wrote a series of notes (the longest is about a page, so somewhere between a sketch and a mini-essay I guess) that made up a kind of summary of my worldview at the time. At this point I don’t remember why I wrote them, but I’m sure it wasn’t for its own sake; they were probably things that were to be “boiled down” and processed and incorporated somehow into poetry, strange though that sounds. From an early age, I always wanted to write. The first things I remember voluntarily writing are simplified versions of the kind of fantasy gamebooks that were then hugely popular with kids. The Swords & Sorcery series (more about that by one of the other authors of the series here) emulated Steve Jackson and Ian Livinstone’s Fighting Fantasy single-player role-playing game books pretty shamelessly but were a lot of (complicated) fun to write, though few of them were actually finished. These were followed by (and/or parallel to) various short horror stories, but in the long adolescence that seems to have lasted in my case from 15 until 25 or so, I mostly wrote poetry. It’s fair to say that it was not good.
The notes though, are fun.

They cover a range of topics – politics, religion, aesthetics, social issues, ecology, the monarchy – and are exceptionally embarrassing to read. But interesting too, because although I do of course remember being 19-21, I otherwise only have the distorting mirror of my own memory to go by, and my own taste in music, books etc, which give a kind of connection to ur-me. But these notes are pretty much what I thought, expressed to the best of my ability (or thereabouts). They reveal some interesting things I had not realised about my younger self. Although I generally did fairly well in English at school, I now see that my spelling was quite erratic (especially on words ending in -itely, which I always wanted to make -ately, like ‘definately’) and that I must not have learned the it’s/its rule until later. The pieces are typed, on an actual typewriter as I didn’t own a computer at the time, which was not actually all that strange then. More to the point though, by that age my always-terrible handwriting had deteriorated to the point where I myself found it hard to read things I had written after any length of time had lapsed. The socio-political/geographical background to the notes was the bitter, tail end of the UK’s thousand year Tory Reich that I grew up in. Thatcher had by then gone, but the evolution/mutation into the Major era had made very little difference, except insofar as John Major himself was vastly inferior as a hate figure than Thatcher had been.

It’s funny; the arrogance and certainty of youth is well-known, but I am very surprised to find it in myself. I have rarely met anyone less sure of themselves or more reticent than my late-teens/early-20s self, but that doesn’t really come across at all, except in a few deliberately self-deprecating caveats, and there’s an infuriating cockiness to some of the writing that I not only don’t identify with, but really detest; what’s mortifying is that I was genuinely trying to think deeply about the issues I covered so shallowly. Oh well, I hope I wasn’t actually that obnoxious in everyday life, but who knows? (anyone who knew me). On the other hand, my actual views don’t seem to have changed as much as I would have expected. I was more of a libertarian, albeit a left-wing one then, perhaps a bit more pessimistic, but on the whole I would still find myself on the same side of most of the arguments I am making, which is reassuring.

I don’t intend to transcribe very much of the writing here because I can’t bear to, mostly, but here’s a synopsis of the contents of the documents and there will be a couple of more extended examples below that illustrate how much/little/comically times have changed since then (the mid-1990s)

I don’t know if these were ever in any order, but here’s what I have:

“Classic Myths” – examining, in very little depth or detail, how things become “classics.” It ends with the question (re. literature) “how many great works have disappeared into the mists of time due to personal taste or political, religeous [sic] or moral qualms on the part of the academics of the past?” At this point I was reading the long out-of-fashion (and out of print) poetry of Robert Southey which was, to be honest mostly pretty hard going – but I was determined to like his early, pro-revolutionary work from his ‘Pantisocracy’ days with Coleridge, and I did, when I could find it anywhere.

“The Eye of the Beholder – One” This was me complaining about how Hollywood/popular culture/fashion were making standards of beauty ever more bland in a diminishing returns/vicious circle kind of way. Its exceptionally snooty tone was coloured by the fact that I was discovering the movies of the silent and pre-Hays code era and my own personal objects of desire were people like Louise Brooks, Joan Blondell and Marlene Dietrich. Sample of tone: “Sadly this means that when a certain actor or actress is in a hit film, similar actors and actresses will appear in similar films and so on and on, to ever-diminishing effect, until a new trend (snowboarding and dark hair, perhaps) transforms the screen for a few months or weeks(…) this ever-growing supply and demand for something familiar makes it hard for original voices to be heard, or any kind of innovation or talent to gain an audience.” 😬

“Religion Crazy” – This is pretty much what you’d expect from an atheist teenager, full of such blinding revelations as “Religion has often looked to me like a cunning scheme invented by some ancient tyrant to keep the peasants in their place” and, even better, “intolerance of religion and the religious is a vice I magnanimously allow myself to indulge in.” My own lack of belief hasn’t changed in the slightest since the days when I used to look around the room during the morning recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at Primary School, to see who else had their eyes open. But I though I don’t necessarily disagree with him (and actually am him), I don’t really feel much kinship with the writer of these lines, or especially his tone, now: “Am I to believe in a petty, small-minded god who creates something only to punish and destroy it? Maybe in a bored or indifferent god, as is suggested by its (had to correct it, sorry) conspicuous absence in the last few centuries. Perhaps it is more interested in ants than people, and appears to them all the the time.”

“Sexuality and Children” Luckily I was aware even then that this was an alarming and “rather dodgy” title, but essentially it was about the debate then ongoing about gay parents adopting children. My attitude (as with many of my then-attitudes) was essentially a slightly shaky but very teenage libertarian one: who is entitled to tell other adults how to live their lives? “Aside from (fairly ridiculous) superstitious quibbles which can be disregarded at once, (by me anyway) there is no reason on Earth why it is the business of any but those directly involved.” I still think the same thing, more or less but again the tone is, to be kind, insufferably annoying.

“Not Winning isn’t Losing” – politics, kind of. Contains nuggets like “My ideal political situation is unworkable (…) (it) amounts to well behaved anarchy.” But again, I still believe parts of it, despite painfully naive bits, like “The impossibility of a left-wing political ideal does not mean it is hopeless – indeed the opposite is true. Because it can never be attained, there would always be a working towards it – the lack of destination would improve the journey. The effect of a constant working towards a state of freedom and equality would inevitably lead to and ever-improving state of more freedom and more equality – which can not be bad.”

“Books” – this is funny, so I’ll write about it in more depth later

“Power Crazed” This is one single line, which I hope isn’t true: “There can never be a good Prime Minister, because Prime Ministers are people whose ambition is to rule the country.”

“Limits” – an excruciating piece about nationalism/patriotism and so forth, in which our author pompously concludes “As far as I’m concerned, I find it absolutely impossible to feel either proud or ashamed of anything that occurred completely beyond my control – race, sex (I guess I meant as in gender), sexuality – or where I was born.”

“Money” – a blindingly obvious revelation that the idea of money is, when you look at it, kind of silly. “Why is gold a valuable metal? Presumably because it looks nicer than other metals, and there is less of it.” etc, etc

“Tripping on the Catwalk” In which I make my ignorance about the fashion industry obvious, and which includes the bizarre statement that “its nearest relative is perhaps the academic world of the university. It is completely self supporting, untouched by recession, mainly due to the fact that it is run by bored rich people for bored rich people.” I am now fairly sure that this isn’t 100% true. I also predicted “an eighties-style big shoulders revival (though with a nineties twist of course) before the turn of the millennium.” I don’t remember if that happened or not, but it’s happened since then.

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” – Oddly, this is one of the longer pieces. As it’s as topical in the new reign of Charles III as it was then (?) I’ll deal with it later

“Part(l)y Politics One” Despite the parenthetical ‘l’ this is pretty much about party politics. In short; the Conservative Party is contemptible (“I have to assume some right-wingers are intelligent, though I have seen little evidence of this”). But I also seem to be saying that because conservatism is based on the fear of change and the desire for stability, plus an array of standard human failings; ignorance, fear, confusion, greed etc, it will always appeal to a large part of the population.

I theorise, not entirely inaccurately, about a pattern that I hadn’t then seen in action and which I later saw parts of in action – because Conservative governments appeal to the worst in people, they REALLY have to mess up before they get voted out. So therefore, any prospective left-wing government will spend a good deal of time un-wrecking the country, with consequent hardships. The public and opposition will naturally blame those in charge for those hardships, the problem then becomes that a progressive party gets voted out, but the incumbent right wing party inherits a country on the mend, which they take credit for, before ruining everything again. That’s not exactly how Tories – Labour – Tories played out in our time but it still feels plausible and at least not untrue.

“interlude” – between the two “Part(l)y Politics” pieces there’s a short kind of non sequitur in which I claim that the politics of the left, taken to their furthest extreme (i.e. ideologically, rather than in real life) is “a nice, if unworkable idea based on equality and human rights” while the politics of the right taken to their furthest extreme is ”at best an extremely nasty and distressingly workable idea based on hatred, repression and manipulation.” Not sure I agree with either of those statements now, though I think my heart was in the right place.

“Part(l)y Politics Two” – in which I complain that the Labour Party (and by extension any party of “the workers” is hopelessly compromised by a system in which becoming an MP is an ordinary middle class career choice, rather than being a kind of glorified shop steward. This was the Neil Kinnock/John Smith/Margaret Beckett era and I complain about the same thing that every Labour-voter-by-default has complained about ever since: that Labour in opposition try too hard to be all things to all people, appeal to Tory voters, are middle-of-the-road and inoffensive rather than truly progressive etc. It’s all very pessimistic: “We can only hope that this [middle-of-the-road inoffensiveness] is a sort of ruse to gain power, whereupon the new and hopefully forceful, idea-led Labour Party will throw off its current greyness, the spectre of past success and failure and emerge as a strong socialist party for the twenty-first century (…) The conservatives ‘accuse’ the Labour Party of being the same old socialist party underneath. This seems sadly unlikely – we understand socialism to be a system based on fairer distribution of wealth and of equality etc etc – the Labour Party does not seem to be offering this. We will vote for them, because there is no one else to vote for.”

“Opposites Attract” – this is a self-pitying whine about how “the plain or ugly are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. The good looking, the handsome and the beautiful are naturally attracted to the good looking, the handsome, the beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but few beholders’ eyes will want to linger very long on the truly unattractive person.” I actually wrote this stuff down.

“Inhumanity” Here it is: “’Man’s inhumanity to man’ is a phrase used to describe acts which are definingly human. What other species would (or could) have had the atomic bomb, or the holocaust? It is a deceptive and cowardly phrase.” Well alright then.

“Food Philistine” – A strange and very silly short piece in which I discover that my attitude to food (though I had “no aversion to it”) was “the same as my attitude to sleep – if I could do without it, I would.” I don’t feel that way about either food or sleep now, really and until now I didn’t realise I had ever felt that way.

“Money, money, money” In short, class = wealth. The problem with Britain is (I seem to be saying) that the upper class control the wealth of the working class while the complacent middle class are indifferent as long as they are comfortable & therefore provide the upper class with a comfortable mattress to insulate them from the should-be-revolutionary consequences of their greed. It may be true?

“The Eye of the Beholder Two” – this time it’s all about how I prefer brutalist architecture to old churches etc and prefer the “drab emptiness” of municipal parks, deserted backstreets etc to epic, panoramic landscapes. Nowadays I like all of those things.

“Responsibility” A “pro choice” rant that, I’m glad but surprised to say, reads exactly like the social media posts of ‘pro choice’ people in the last few years – it begins “The anti-abortion lobby, for all their rhetoric about the sanctity of human life, seem to disregard entirely (and with great relish) the quality of human life. Indeed, they seem to enjoy inflicting misery wherever they go.” And it ends with the even more 2020s-ish: “To the anti-abortionist, the human being is only a human being until it is born. After that it is not their problem.” I was right then and still am now: yay me.

“Censored” In which I get on my high horse about the right to watch violent horror movies: “When I hear that a member of the British Board of Film Classification has embarked on an orgy of violence and mayhem using a chainsaw, I will begin to believe that film violence has an effect on the viewer (if it happens twice.)” I DO think it has an effect on the viewer – actually, I hope it does, or why even bother? Disturbing things should be disturbing. But my views on censorship (if no harm is done in the making of it then who has the right to say an adult shouldn’t watch it) are pretty much the same. I probably believe in ‘classification’ and parental responsibility more now than I did then though.

“A Fair Day’s Pay…” Manual workers should be at the top of the pay pyramid as their work is harder and more necessary, but pen pushers are in charge of wages etc so it’ll never happen, he seems to be saying.

“Animals” A very dubious piece in which I query the relative value of human beings and other animals, slightly in favour of other animals, or at least not in favour of us humans.

“Power Corrupts – Small time” “Power corrupts – this is an indisputable fact,” I say – but is it? Anyway, my premise is that dictators are bad and all, but for really corrupt power you have to look at school teachers and small-town police officers.

“Grown Men and Women” – Me, moaning about sport

“How to Spoke Proper” – In short,“speaking properly” (in the UK sense) is a classist fantasy based on the random fact that the BBC happened to be founded in the south of England. This may or may not be true.

“Rules of Attraction” – “Sexuality has nothing to do with morality,” he says, “I am attracted to members of the opposite sex because I was born this way – so if I saw a member of my own sex who looked like a member of the opposite sex in a way that I found attractive, I would naturally be attracted to them, for as long as they looked like an attractive female. I do not see how there can be anything wrong with this, or any variation of it.” This sounds like an argument with some lurking real-life subtext, but to the best of my knowledge now, it wasn’t.

“The Sea” – it’s about the sea, which I apparently felt very strongly about. I still love the sea but can’t imagine writing very emotionally about it.

“Philosophy” – As an atheist is there any more logical philosophy than to live a life of pure hedonism? I seem to conclude not, but for me at the time this was a purely hypothetical question

“Against Nature” – Here it is in full: “Humankind is natural, as much a part of nature as anything else on the planet. Everything humankind does is natural. The worst it can do (selfishly speaking) is to kill itself off, which in a universal sense, would be no big loss.” I was in some ways a very standard teenager I guess. Joy Division was probably my favourite band at that point

So, here are the more extended bits.

Firstly, I’ve chosen “Books” because it is the one that most amusingly makes the 1990s seem like it was a million years ago. My main argument is that though people were (as they always seem to have been) predicting the death of the printed word, books are unlikely to be replaced by anything else. But let young Will explain it, as his Nostradamus-like powers of prediction don’t seem to have anticipated the Kindle. More strangely, he does not seem to be aware of laptops, didn’t they already exist in the mid-90s? Surely! To be fair to him though, “we” still prefer a book to a kindle or tablet which I can’t stand using unless it’s the only way to read something.

Anyway, the death of books will not happen, he says, because…
“They are convenient, we [he often calls himself ‘we’] cannot imagine taking even a small computer on a train or plane, or to the beach or on holiday in our suitcase – though this may be possible in the future. We like to go back a page and reread something, whilst[!] keeping our place on the page we have reached. We like the thought, whether we actually do it or not, of being able to read Wordsworth in the mountains of the Lake District – we feel that a keyboard and a screen would take away a rather large part of the romance of this.”

“Royalty at the End of the Millennium” is fun because it’s surprisingly still topical (up to a point) and begins by saying things, far more grumpily, that I probably still think. I’ll transcribe as much of it as I can bear, with the faulty punctuation and repetition intact because the tediousness is part of the fun. Still, it’s odd and a bit alarming to find a UKIP-ish tone intruding re. the funding of the Royal family, even if I thought I was playing Devil’s avocado (as I might have said) at the time.

“Why do (how can) people like the Royal Family? I don’t know. What is even stranger than this affection is the public liking one member of the family, and (apparently randomly) not another. ‘Fergie’ seems to be disliked for acting like any normal person suddenly coming into a huge amount of money i.e. spending it. People who claim to dislike her because of affairs etc seem to forget or dismiss the affairs of (practically all) other family members.
People liking (or even loving) Princess Diana is one of the biggest mysteries of our age. The myth of Diana as a beautiful woman started before the Royal Wedding and continue to this day. Are these people blind? Do they really believe it? Are they just trying to sell newspapers or cash in on Royal memorabilia? Who knows? The fact is that she is an average, ordinary-looking woman in her thirties with a large nose, large chin, and even larger amount of money to make the most of what she has with.* (The reader may be forgiven for assuming that the writer of these words must be very handsome, to stand in judgement of other peoples looks – this is certainly not the case – but I do not have a media conspiracy trying to convince people that I am).
More seriously (and it is a serious matter when a country is in a serious[!] recession, and yet it’s people give millions of pounds a year to keep one family in, well, the lap of luxury would be a gross understatement – especially when this one family already has millions of pounds of inherited private wealth). What are the reasons for and against the Royal Family?

Well, the for argument usually falls into two compartments[?] – tradition, and (feebly) that the Royals are good for the economy via the tourist trade. The first of these is the stronger of the two and yet doesn’t really bear close inspection – is it necessarily good because it’s traditional? Yes, the family is descended from a long line of noble (i.e. rich) families – but they are not necessarily British families. They are Greek, they are German, but there is not an awful lot of British blood in there. As far as I am concerned, this would not matter, except that the arguments for usually draw attention to it being a great British tradition, or institution. I can only say that it’s not much of a native tradition that has the British public paying money to a European family to make them even richer.”

Some more highlights – this is just too tedious to write out in full:
“There are few things as irritating as hearing how hard the Queen works – give me a few million pounds a year and I will be glad to attend dinners, meet dignitaries and travel abroad – not many people would turn down an offer like this.”
“The arguments against are much easier to state – they don’t do anything, we pay for them for being related to people, they are a British tradition which involves few British people, they could exist in comfort without public money, they represent an outdated (and according to the Prime Minister) non-existant class system, they stagger from one scandal to another and in a country with an underfunded health service, underfunded system of education, a large homeless population and mentally ill people being turned out onto the streets** they are a mockery of and insult to our supposedly democratic society.”

So there we have it, an unexpected meeting with my apparently slightly intense, smart-assed but ridiculous younger self. Nice to catch up but I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with him!

*Yes, I genuinely wrote “to make the most of what she has with”

**I assume this has something to do with the “care in the community” scandal that seemed to be unfolding during the last few years of the Thatcher/Major era

bounders in oiks’ clothing – the reign of the ordinary bloke

“His manner was so friendly that I forgot to put on my cockney accent, and he looked closely at me, and said how painful it must be for a man of my stamp, etc. Then he said, ‘I say, you won’t be offended, will you? Do you mind taking this?’ ‘This’ was a shilling, with which we bought some tobacco and had our first smoke that day. This was the only time in the whole journey when we managed to tap money.”

George Orwell, ‘Hop-Picking’, October 1931. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 1 An Age Like This 1920-1940. Penguin, 1968, p. 83

Clearly, the old school tie works, even when it isn’t worn. Incidents like this pop up several times in George Orwell’s writings of the 30s, in articles like “The Spike” and in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) etc., and they always make him uncomfortable. The reminder of the deference that he was, in his original identity as old Etonian Eric Blair, accustomed to and had been trained for in his daily life was both welcome and unwelcome. Unwelcome, because firstly, it was embarrassing to be ‘unmasked’ in front of people with whom he had become friends precisely because at the level of society at which they existed – and in these writings it is the poorest of the working class or the unemployed and destitute – there were no class distinctions anymore; as he says in Down and Out in Paris and London, regarding a typical London lodging house:

All races, even black and white, mixed in it on terms of equality. There were Indians there, and when I spoke to one of them in bad Urdu he addressed me as ‘tum’ – a thing to make one shudder, if t had been India. We had got below the range of colour prejudice.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Gollancz 1933, p. 150

Though Orwell was sometimes taken aback by the levelling effect that poverty had, he welcomes it too – his occasional unmasking as a “gentleman” was an unpleasant reminder of his abandoned life as a police officer and tool of colonial oppression in Burma. But it was also useful in a way – not just because money and gentle treatment was welcome after weeks or months of hardship, but because it was a stark and simple illustration of exactly the kind of injustice, inequality and disparity he sought to draw attention to with his writing. Orwell is happy to write openly about his deception, partly because it was essentially harmless and necessary, in order to truly experience the kind of life he wanted to write about. But perhaps he was also comfortable doing so because, much as he would have liked to have ‘proletarian’ readers, – and probably did have a few – he was mainly writing for an audience of his peers; the political class who could, if they really wanted to, improve the lives of the vast, faceless mass of unemployed and homeless that they were no doubt aware of, but preferred to think about, if at all, as feckless layabouts who probably deserved their lowly status.

There were of course many working-class readers in the 1930s, possibly even more than there are now, given the enormous output of publishers of what Orwell calls “cheap novels” in that era, not to mention the libraries, newspapers and periodicals designed to cater for every possible niche hobby, that he lists in his 1940 essay ‘Boys’ Weeklies‘. In fact, he notes in Down and Out in Paris and London, that even the unemployed, homeless underclass of itinerant tramps were voracious readers of Buffalo Bill novels and the like, whenever they could get hold of them. Of course, even the most ‘proletarian’ newspapers and publishing houses were owned in the 1930s by people with backgrounds similar to Orwell’s – and by and large they still are. Likewise, at that point it would probably have seemed natural that it was this same class who were to be found running the more recently established broadcasters, notably the BBC. Natural, because before WW2, the role of the upper class was still very much seen as ‘the management’ of the British Empire with the middle class as administrators, but both far outnumbered by the working class who did the work (well, management and administration are work too, but you know what I mean).

What might – or on reflection, might not – have surprised Orwell is that 70+ years after his death, when class differences have been (or appear to have been) diminished, the leaders, for a while, of the relatively extreme left and right-wings of British politics and who appealed openly to the working classes should have been ex-public schoolboys called Nigel and Jeremy. It might surprise him too, to find that members of the openly-elitist public-school educated minority to which he belonged would still be going around pretending to be ‘ordinary blokes,’* almost like he did, in newspapers and especially on television. There are differences in the 21st century; the working class, although now interchangeable to a far greater extent with the middle class, are by virtue of numbers, the main demographic catered to by TV and so whereas Orwell was trying to blend with his social inferiors to prove a point to his peers, undercover toffs today are mostly trying to blend with them in order to appeal directly to, and ultimately financially benefit from, those working class people.

* even as a working class person I inwardly cringe writing “ordinary bloke,” but I think it’s the correct phrase in this instance for what these people think they represent. But bloody hell, “ordinary bloke” – from here on in I’ll just write “OB”

Some observations; the incognito upper class type seems mostly to be a male thing. The female counterparts of these kinds of commentators and presenters are there – Kirstie Allsop or Mary Berry spring to mind, but unlike the men they seem content to be unselfconsciously posh, which is fair enough.

There are various different versions of the type. Some are benign and essentially innocent; people who, one assumes, would have been dropouts whether or not opportunities in TV beckoned and whose scruffy clothes and sloppy speech were probably originally adopted to annoy their parents or just as a way of opting out of the expectations that come along with class privilege (but you get to keep the privilege anyway, so… )

Since at least the 1960s, the pop and rock music business has always been full of these kind of people – and since the 60s too, their opposite has existed; the vastly wealthy who weren’t born into an upper class background. It’s possible that these people, rock stars and entrepreneurs act in some ways as role models to the posh OBs

on the left, the standard uniform of the privately-educated “ordinary bloke” On the right, the more raffish, bohemian version of the same. Big posh expensive scarf optional but works with either.

The kind of TV shows made by the benign-dropout demographic tend to reflect a somewhat genteel outsider status* and are often geared towards niche hobbies and interests, so that the whole thing has the aura of the upper class dilletante of the 20s, dabbling in publishing modernist poetry or abstract art. This is a public role in a way, but although it allows the presenter to share his views on the world and life in general, it feels essentially more like a sharing of enthusiasms than anything overtly or covertly patronising or manipulative.

*I do realise that every word of this is probably wildly unfair and doesn’t take into account any of the genuine struggles that come with class expectations etc: oh well.

Where it feels less benign and perhaps more deceptive is when the “OB”-ness of the presenter is an embodiment of what he thinks an actual “ordinary bloke” is like. Perhaps not surprisingly, the evidence suggests that the posh public schoolboy assumes that the OB is what the tabloid press – also, it should be noted, owned by posh ex-public schoolboys – tries to condition them to be. No doubt there are working class people who are old fashioned, conservative, unreconstructedly misogynistic, knee-jerk racist xenophobes, impatient with anything that might seem effete – but it’s also clear that the tabloid press wants them to be that way and does what it can to continue and spread these attitudes. Which is logical enough; the whole point of the class system is to preserve itself and ensure the survival of privilege, blood lines and all that crap. An interesting question – which I don’t know the answer to – is whether it is it self-awareness or self-deception that makes the ersatz OB hide his upper-class accent for TV purposes. Either way it’s probably a wise move, because if there’s one thing that seems risibly effete to the kind of proletarian the tabloid press imagines, it’s the particular kind of upper class speech nurtured in the most expensive and exclusive public schools.

It seems that on the whole, the public is pretty much okay with the fake OB as entertainer and cultural commentator; except for those regular instances when he goes “too far.” But the whole raison d’etre of this kind of public figure is to test the boundaries of what is acceptable, always with the safety net that the whole persona is so obviously contrived that nothing they say can ever be taken seriously, surely? But it’s notable that the self-consciously “outrageous” incidents that pop up from time to time, that seem to simultaneously mark out where those boundaries are and make reactionary attitudes just a little bit more acceptable, always come from the same place. It’s that sweet spot where the tabloid-owner’s classist projection of the “ordinary bloke” – impatient with having to respect people, constantly at war with ‘political-correctness-gone-mad’ – happens to coincide and blend with the underlying upper class snobbery and prejudice that we aren’t supposed to notice, because of that bluff OB exterior. Class prerogatives, racism, classism, the fear of privilege being eroded, the snooty, outraged ‘don’t-you-know-who-I-am?’ loathing of having to deal with or, god forbid, defer to social or racial inferiors; the fear of change. But never mind, it’s all just a joke, innit, and if you take it seriously then you are a puritanical killjoy and who would ever want to be that? No self-respecting ordinary bloke, anyway.

cycle; woods and fields and little rivers

With apologies to Paul Gorman, whose beautifully written accounts of bike rides partly influenced this article, although Paul actually knows about cycling and I don’t; this is essentially a surrogate fast walk.

I thought I’d take to the roads early (just before 7.30 am) because it was a beautiful morning that was forecast not to become a beautiful day, and because, even in 2021 there’s not much traffic on the road early on a Sunday morning. A recent bout of not atypical heavy rain and not unprecedented (one of the overused words of the last 18 months of so) but still definitely unusual-in-May extreme hailstorms left the roads shining in the morning sun and the fences strung with light-catching water droplets; it was very pretty.
Once out of the village, the landscape here is so flat as to look almost Dutch, aside from the Lomond Hills; still half buried in morning mist. In fact, despite living here most of my life, this was really the first time I had considered that this must be what is meant by the ‘Howe of Fife’ and indeed a quick googling confirmed it; “The term ‘howe’ is derived from an old Scots word meaning a hollow, valley or flat tract of land.” The Lomonds themselves, and Bishop Hill on the far end (not visible from my viewpoint) are really not particularly big, but almost give the impression of mountains from the vantage point of the plain below.

the Howe of Fife looking towards East Lomond

The nice thing about rural cycling is that, although much faster than walking, it doesn’t disturb anything much around you, and on a quiet morning (on my 8-10 mile cycle I was passed by one car, one proper cyclist and rode past one dog walker and a jogger) like this, nature seems not to pay much attention to you. It turns out that this area is infested (not the right connotations, but there were so many of them) with Yellowhammers, looking almost canary-like in the spring sunshine, plus innumerable sparrows, blackbirds and the odd village idiot-like pheasant shouting in the middle of a field.
The natural landscape is pretty enough on its own, but because, presumably, of the sort of person I am, I love the unexpected moments of geometry caused by human interference (ploughed furrows deep in shadow in one field, strips of plastic sheeting over rows of berries* in another) and of course the semi-wildlife, like a paddock with three huge, but mellow looking bulls that made me think of the work of Rosa Bonheur.

Although her work – and her life – is 19th century in almost every respect, Bonheur is a potent figure for the 21st century. Brought up in an egalitarian Christian-Socialist sect by Jewish parents, Bonheur was a troublesome child who developed a love for animals and for painting and as a young woman studied animal anatomy (in abattoirs) and dissected animals at a veterinary school as well as studying live animals. She was openly lesbian at a time when it was, if not illegal, certainly frowned upon by the French government; so much so that she had to request permission from the police to wear trousers, as cross-dressing for women was forbidden by law (until 2013!) Her official reason was that it was better clothing for attending sheep and cattle markets, where she made studies, but although that was certainly true, she was generally known among her friends for her masculine clothing and short hair; both very much against the conventions of the time. Nevertheless, she went on to become a mainstream success and in her own way an establishment figure, both in France and (especially) in the UK, where she met Queen Victoria and painted some anachronistic Highland scenes; she may have been revolutionary by nature and personality, but she seems to have been quite conservative by taste and inclination; never underestimate the complexity of people.

*I mean, maybe berries? Despite growing up in the countryside and actually on farms for a fair bit of childhood, I’m none the wiser about that

Rosa Bonheur – Ploughing in the Nivernais (1849)

Looking at the scenery, the wildlife, the roads, you have to wonder; why would anyone not care about this? I don’t mean the Howe of Fife, or Fife, or Scotland, or Britain, or Europe, or the world (although those too); just wherever you happen to be; place. Landscapes should and must change, as we change; not just the geometries and geographies we impose on them, like the furrows and plastic (though it would be nice to do away with the plastic itself), but everything. 500 years ago the Howe of Fife was covered in forest and the monarchs of Scotland hunted wild boar here. A thousand years ago, a Scotland that was different in shape, size and culture was being ruled by Alexander I, then near the end of his life, having recently lost his wife Sybilla of Normandy, the French child of Henry I of England; Alexander would be succeeded by his brother David, then Prince of the Cumbrians; by James’s time all of these details would seem strange. Two thousand years ago, the Howe of Fife was part of southern Caledonia, that is the land to the north of the river Forth; at least the Romans, still fifty years from their attempted conquest, called it Caledonia, whether the inhabitants of Caledonia had any name for the landmass in general, as opposed to their own local chiefdoms, isn’t recorded.

These back roads are quiet, but although nature is everywhere, it’s deceptive, hardly a natural landscape at all. It has been shaped by generations of human beings, by agriculture and the politics of land ownership, no less in King James’s day, when forests belonged to the King and had their own laws, than now. It reminds me both of my childhood love of Tolkien and of a line from The Fellowship of the Ring; where Bilbo says “I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains; but he [Frodo] is still in love with the Shire, with woods and fields and little rivers.” Tolkien loved both the wilderness and the smaller, more familiar (Oxfordshire-like) scenery of the Shire, but in his landscapes change is almost always bad; both on the larger scale of the desolation that evil brings to Mordor and the fiery chasms opened in the earth when the Dwarves delve ‘too deep’, and on the local level where the Shire is ruined by the arrival of industry. Michael Moorcock writes perceptively in his I think overly scathing (“The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle-class“ ‘Epic Pooh’, in Wizardry and Wild Romance, Gollancz, 1987, p.125), but often right and always funny essay about Tolkien, Epic Pooh (1987) about the essential conservatism of much of heroic fantasy fiction, and the points he makes are even more relevant today. The climate emergency will – regardless of the political will to do so – at some point need to be dealt with, as the pace of change outstrips the ways in which our society functions, and it’s important that the necessity to move forward doesn’t become an attempt to turn the clock back; always attractive in ever-nostalgic Britain. What Tolkien only reluctantly accepts – or accepts in a tragic way that fits with the more fatalistic (and Christian) aspects of his vision – is that change is inevitable. In Moorcock’s own heroic fantasy fiction, he not only takes change for granted, it becomes the backdrop against which his series of heroes who make up ‘the Eternal Champion’ fight their never-ending battle for equilibrium in a multiverse where change – in itself neutral – is the only constant:

“Then the earth grew old, its landscapes mellowing and showing signs of age, its ways becoming whimsical and strange in the manner of a man in his last years – The High History of the Runestaff”

(quoted from Count Brass, 1973, but appears lots of other places too)

the Lomond Hills after the mist burned off

The landscape of the Howe of Fife is not yet – the odd wind turbine aside – whimsical and strange, but there was a certain surreal quality in the way the beautiful spring morning (which felt more like early spring than early May) followed days of hailstorms and thunder. Surreal anyway to someone old enough to remember when seasons seemed to have a set pattern. In another twenty or thirty years will British Christmas cards still have snow scenes on them, even though most of the heavy snowfall seems to happen now in March or even April? Human culture is perhaps slow to catch up with the changes it creates; bearing in mind that the traffic on the roads today is light because even after decades of change there’s a convention that people don’t work on a Sunday, for the most archaic of reasons – but I’m still glad of it. These kinds of thoughts, and Rosa Bonheur too, were partly on my mind because this week there were elections which, although not regime-changing, were important. The results were locally, fairly positive, nationally (Scotland) pretty much as expected and extra-nationally (UK: not quite international, yet at least) a bit disappointing. The collapse of any real kind of left-wing movement has been happening over a long period of time and I suppose at this point all you can say is that people in general don’t want one; or not enough of them to make it happen. On the other hand a general liberalisation has taken place that possibly just makes it seem unnecessary to large numbers of people. And of course, the left eats itself, as always; yesterday I saw online a list of “people that socialism needs more of” (working class people essentially) and “people it needs less of” (non-working class people, basically), whereas surely the whole point is, it needs all people, if it’s going to work. But whatever.

A nice thing about cycling is that, aside from looking around, you can’t really do very much. It clears the mind in a way that car travel, with its technical aspects and its music or radio, doesn’t usually do. It would be possible to listen to the radio while cycling, but probably not very sensible; and in an election week the lack of human noise is very welcome. After watching/listening to/reading political propaganda and analysis before and after an election it becomes clear just how versatile “the media” seems to be. This week I’ve seen people criticise it essentially to suit their own viewpoint; it’s too right/left wing, too politically correct, too reactionary, too critical, not critical enough. Which makes it seem as though the UK media is pretty good at covering all bases. But TV, radio and the newspapers are a distorting mirror at best. Witness the way that the ‘working class’ – whether positively or negatively – is treated as a monolith. The viewpoint of the media (understandably, given most of its staff and ownership) is middle class; and therefore on TV, on the radio and in newspapers the middle class becomes the norm from which everything and everyone else (both working class and upper class) are observed and commented upon. “Reality TV” features the rich or the poor as something other, something to be looked at and entertained by. But it’s a norm that ignores the facts. The working class, insofar as there is still such a thing (I am of it and I’m not even really sure) is technically the norm, in the sense that it’s the majority, just as it always has been. The UK is (albeit in a less precise way than a century ago) a pyramidal structure, with monarchy and government at the top, the middle class – bigger and both richer and poorer than before, but still identifiable – in (yep) the middle, and the working class as the wide base, incorporating a layer of underclass which fluctuates depending on which government is at the top (it’s bigger now than it was a decade ago). How do you change that false picture the media presents? You don’t really; not without changing the society. Marx and Engels wanted the means of production to belong to the workers; in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that stood for something real and meaningful, but while its egalitarian spirit is eternally relevant, in the 21st century the statement itself needs so many qualifications as to be almost meaningless. What are the means of production? Producing what? Who are the workers? The working class of Marx’s day would barely recognise the working class of today – and they might well look at our lifestyle and be encouraged that the struggle wasn’t in vain. And of course it wasn’t, but that doesn’t mean that the post-industrial 21st century is really much more fair than in the industrial age, certainly capitalism is even more rapacious and entrenched than ever before, and as callous too. The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the tedious saying goes.

People of course do want change; the right kind of change anyway. And elections are one way of securing it. But this week people who were asked on TV for their reasons for voting gave ‘change’ as a reason for voting for parties who have been in power for 14 years (Scotland) and 9 years (UK) – which seems at best like wishful thinking or at least suggests a lack of exciting or convincing alternatives, to say the least. Arguably of course, a vote for the SNP in Scotland is a vote for a bigger change than just who currently sits in parliament, but familiarity breeds indifference and at this point it’s probably good for their cause that they are no longer the only party in favour of an independent Scotland. And in a depressing kind of way, circumstances have aided them too. In 2014 it was easy, personally speaking, to vote against independence on several grounds; a disliking of Nationalism as a principle, so closely related as it is to xenophobia and intolerance. As someone who was very happy to belong to the EU too, independence seemed (laughably in retrospect, though still not wrongly) to endanger Scotland’s membership, since the UK and not Scotland was the member. And there were niggles about the economy, not because Scotland couldn’t function outside of the UK – one of the most irritating arguments for the status quo; I think it’s pretty obvious that it could and can – but because the Salmond leadership seemed to be saying (ie he was saying) that he wanted nothing to change regarding the currency etc. Which would seem to put Scotland in the surreal position of being a supposedly independent nation which has its economy regulated by the Bank of England. Why the Bank of England would accept that, or anyone on either side of the border would want it is mysterious, to say the least. But anyway, here we are in 2021; nationalism and xenophobia look like being worse and more virulent in the UK than outside of it. We are already out of the EU and, while an independent Scotland being a member state is far from a foregone conclusion, the UK rejoining is definitely not about to happen anytime soon. And Covid-19 has given the economy a beating that will take a lot of recovering from, whatever we do. So why not independence? I would of course prefer to have a democratic socialist party in charge of it, but not having a rabidly inept right-wing one would be a step in the right direction.

Without wishing to get bogged down even more in the minutiae of British politics, the story of the Labour Party (it’s probably not quite dead yet; it always has a far more cyclical life than the Conservative Party) is an instructive one. There’s always been a tug of war between the left and centre elements of the party, but since the 90s there’s always been the dubious argument that veering to the right is the way to win votes and power. But although New Labour was definitely uncomfortably right-wing for a supposedly socialist party, that wasn’t what brought it success. It was the ‘new’ part; drawing a line under history and saying ‘the past ends here and this is what we stand for’ was a big, optimistic step at a time when British politics – as now- had become stagnant and unappealing. The Corbyn left managed something similar, with a younger demographic, but for all its radical ideas, it was immediately familiar to anyone over a certain age. Much as Blair and co’s propaganda looks vapid and empty in retrospect (because it essentially was), not invoking Marx or even socialism was a key to their success, not because of where they or their supporters sat on the political spectrum (I think it’s true that the majority of the British public probably don’t think of themselves being especially political), but simply because people will, every now and then, give new ideas a chance, if they look exciting enough and if they’re bored or disgusted enough with the status quo; It’s worth bearing in mind. None of which has nothing obvious to do with this road on this morning, with the patches of bluebells under the trees, which might be left over from the great forest of King James’s time; where wild boar hid, evading the men and the dogs, before they were hunted to extinction.

7.6 billion mirrors – the value of art

Aged 20/1586
James 6/By Grace of God King of Scotland

Was it a cold morning in Edinburgh in 1586 when James VI, only twenty years old, very aware of his status as a divinely-appointed monarch, but with already a lifetime’s experience of human nature and earthly politics, sat in front of Adrian Vanson to be painted? Was he nervous? His watchful eyes suggest not, but his position, though finally secure, probably didn’t feel very stable; just three years earlier he had been imprisoned by those ruling in his name, and this year, although he signed a treaty of mutual defence with England against the possibility of a Catholic invasion, his mother who he had succeeded, remained in England, alive and imprisoned. Was Vanson nervous? Or was it just another job? The King wasn’t always noted for his good temper, but the artist, who had come to Scotland from the Netherlands via London (where he had an uncle) already knew James, and had first painted some pictures for the young King in 1581, before his imprisonment and, in happier circumstances, the year before this portrait, had painted a more glamorous and light-hearted portrait of the King to be taken abroad and shown to prospective suitors. But this picture, sombre, stern even, is about power; James 6th by the grace of God King of Scotland. When we look at this painting, at this sulky looking young man, we are making some kind of connection, looking through the eyes, albeit via the hand, of a Dutch man who died around 420 years ago. The painting – even if by the standards by which art is usually judged, it’s ‘not great’ – has a personal value, one human being, recorded by another, as well as a cultural one. It tells us something about fashions, lifestyles, the way a king could be depicted in that country, in that period (for all his divinity he is not an iconic figure), class structures, religion – but what is it “worth”? What is any work of art worth?

James again, when both he and the artist were a long 9 years older

Leaving aside metaphorical, metaphysical or aphoristic answers, or going into a much more long winded but possibly worthwhile conversation about what art is (I’m going to say it’s a deliberate act of creation, but even that is arguable), let’s assume we know what art is. Googling ‘art definition’ initially brings up five presumably definitive and certainly iconic pictures, the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night (both as famous as their creators, pretty much), Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (whose creator – Picasso – is more famous than the painting), The (or rather Leonardo’s) Last Supper and A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte, which I think is probably more famous as an image than a title, and the image is more famous than its creator Seurat.
What are these paintings worth? I’m sure facts and figures are available, but this is not – despite the age of some of the paintings, about intrinsic worth; I imagine there is a basic going rate for an early 16th century Italian renaissance portrait on panel (and so forth), but that has little to do at this point with the price of the Mona Lisa. The painting would be just as good (or just as whatever you think it is) if the artist was unknown, but the value has – and always has had – a lot to do with Leonardo da Vinci and the perception of him as more than just someone who painted good portraits.

a (but not “the”) Mona Lisa, an early copy probably by one of Leonardo’s apprentices

Separating the art from the artist is always a difficult and controversial subject, but should really be easier in the visual arts that almost any other field. Yes, artists have their own ‘voice’ or visual language, but that is not the same as reading their actual words, or hearing their actual voice; and yet – because, I guess, of market forces, artists are routinely known and valued above and beyond their works and those works – even their doodles and fragments – are valued accordingly. A scrawled caricature in a margin by Leonardo (or Picasso) can be “worth” many times what a highly finished, technically brilliant oil painting by an unknown artist is. This disconnect happens because although art history is human history, “the art world” as it has existed since at least the 19th century is more like horse racing – take away the money and what you have is a far smaller number of people who are genuinely interested in how fast a horse can run.
Which is fine – but the question of what a painting (for instance) is “worth” has become the way art is engaged with popularly; somehow art, unlike sport, has never earned its own daily segment on the news and really it only appears there when the sums it raises are enormous (Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi), the sums lost are enormous (theft, fires, vandalism), or it’s part of a story that’s interesting in itself (Nazi art hoards, previously undiscovered ‘masterpieces’ etc). But the veneration of artists above art – now at the very peculiar stage at which a painting “after” (that is, not by, and possibly not even from the same era as) a famous ‘old master’ can be worth a far higher sum than a genuine painting by a lesser known ‘old master’ – masks the true value of art, which may be cultural, but is ultimately always personal.
Even without any knowledge of the King James or his life, we are able, if we can see – just by being human – to make certain assumptions about the kind of person he was, and what he may have been thinking or feeling on that day in 1586. This kind of empathy is an act of the imagination; if we are mind-reading it is ultimately our own mind we are reading – but no more so than when we meet eyes with a stranger on the street or on a train. And if looking at Vanson’s King James is – because we can find out these facts – a connection with both an immigrant living in what must have in many ways been an unfamiliar country, and with a young man who had recently attained some kind of power, not only over his own life, but over a country, at the cost of his mother, then what of a painting like the Mona Lisa? It is, regardless of how compromised it has become by fame, monetary value and endless theorising, a link with the mind and ideas – and hand – of Leonardo and a kind of communication with the sitter herself. She was probably Lisa Gioconda, she may have already been dead, but although I stand by all of the above, what I seem to have suggested is that a painting is a kind of code to be broken or a museum to be explored and unpacked. These things enrich our understanding of or connection with a painting, but they don’t make it. What makes art so fascinating – but also why it doesn’t have five minutes on the news every night – is because it’s so individual. It’s (VERY) possible to not care in the slightest about the outcome of, say a rugby or football match, but the final score is the final score, regardless of how anyone feels about the quality of the game or the skill of the players. It would not be satisfactory somehow to have a football match where no points were awarded and the outcome of the game depended on how you feel about it. But in art it is completely respectable – and I don’t think wrong – to say, (To paraphrase the great surrealist painter Leonora Carrington); if you really want to know what the Mona Lisa’s smile means, think about how it makes you feel.

Composition in White, Black, Red and Grey (1932) by Marlow Moss

This might seem like reducing art to the level of ‘human interest’, but what else is there? The choice of figurative paintings with a possible narrative element is a matter of taste and makes the human element unavoidable. But if we feel intense emotion when looking at a Mark Rothko painting, a sense of peace and calm from a Mondrian, Marlow Moss or Hans Arp picture, or exhilaration in front of a Peter Lanyon work, the fact remains that ‘we feel’ (or ‘we don’t feel’) is the common denominator. Viewers through the ages who have detected echoes of divine order and harmony in the works of Piero Della Francesa or Fra Angelico have only definitely detected them with any certainty within their own perceptions, which is not to say that they aren’t feeling something the artist himself felt. There’s a philosophical, ‘tree falling in the woods’ point here; is Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ a work of emotional and artistic intensity after the gallery lights go out? Or is it more like a kind of magic spell or booby trap, triggered only when a spectator is there to observe it?

That said, figurative art, especially portraiture, is – however many layers of information are contained in it – relatively easy to ‘understand’ on a basic level; ie if we can see, we can see what it is. It is the understanding and appreciation that remains entirely individual and subjective. Conceptual art – shockingly still around in much the same forms as it has been since the 60s – is, despite its apparently interpretation-inviting name, less transparent. This means that, unlike something we instantly recognise, it’s – initially at least – only as powerful as its visual impact. And in fact, whereas familiarity invites interpretation in traditional art, it tends to – on a popular level at least – repel it in conceptual art. The controversy surrounding classic media frenzy conceptual pieces like Carl Andre’s pile of bricks, or Tracy Emin’s unmade bed is because everyone knows exactly what a pile of bricks, or a sleeping bag or a bed is, and they don’t feel the need or desire to think further about it and if they do they feel – no doubt wrongly – that they are putting more thought into it than the artist did.

That is the ‘philistine’ response and it’s easy to have sympathy with; personally, I don’t mind wondering what a conceptual work means, but if I get no kind of emotional or cerebral response from looking at it in the first place then I’d rather the artist had just written their ideas down. This is me and my deficiency though – if Maurizio Cattelan put his heart and soul into taping that banana to the wall – or even if he just enjoyed doing it – who am I or anyone else to devalue that? And if whoever paid that much money for it is getting some similar experience, or just the satisfaction of being the owner of the most expensive banana in the world – then that’s hard to argue with too.

Portrait of an unknown woman by an unknown artist c.1725

I don’t think it devalues art – quite the opposite – to think of it as a form of communication between individuals, even if as mentioned above, it is really communication with the one person you will ever know with any certainty – yourself. What I seem to be saying (which I may not entirely agree with) is that art is a mirror. Take this beautiful painting from around 1725 by an unknown artist of an unknown lady. To me, this is a real connection with this unknowable person – but again, only as unknowable as any face that passes you in the street never to be seen again – she was a real person, sitting in a room, around 300 years ago, probably wearing something she liked or that told the world how she wanted to be seen, being painted by someone – and by 1725 it could have been a man or a woman – with whom they may have been engaging, impatient, chatty… We can only guess and extrapolate from the picture. That extrapolation will be different every time depending on the viewer and their own knowledge, not just of history, but of people and experience. If 7.6 billion people look at the picture it becomes in essence 7.6 billion pictures, 7.6 billion mirrors.

That is not to say that the picture is ‘better’ than Cattelan’s banana. If I came across the banana taped to a wall anywhere except an art fair would I see it as art? In a way yes, in the sense that it is literally artificial – not the fruit itself, but its location would clearly be a deliberate, human act and not – as a nail in a wall might be – something that could feasibly have a purely utilitarian meaning. It would be puzzling – far more so in fact that in an art fair where the (surely expected by the artist) first reaction of most non-art world people would surely be the eye-rolling ‘so this is ‘art’ is it?’ Whether it would be intriguing, or thought-provoking seems less likely, except insofar as provoking thoughts like ‘who put that banana there and why?’ Which I guess is perfectly valid – and in its own way a genuine connection of the viewer and artists’ minds, though not something that would probably take up much brain space after the initial wondering. But then, many – even most, people (whether or not they would approve of it as art vs the banana) might just as well look at the woman in her fine dress 300 years ago, or the young King James, and pass on without even wondering anything at all.

chosen ones and dark lords and everything in between

To start with, this was mostly about books, and I think it will end that way too. But it begins with a not terribly controversial statement; hero worship is not good. And the greatest figures in the fight for human rights or human progress of one kind or another – Martin Luther King, Jr, Emmeline Pankhurst, Gandhi – without wishing to in any way diminish their achievements – would not have achieved them alone. Rosa Parks is a genuine heroine, but if she had been the only person who believed it was wrong for African-American people to be forced to give up seats for white people, the practice would still be happening. These individuals are crucial because they are catalysts for and agents of change – but the change itself happens because people – movements of people – demand it.

a bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes

This is obviously very elementary and news to nobody, but it’s still worth remembering in times like these, when people seem to be drawn to somewhat messianic figures (or to elevate people who have no such pretensions themselves to quasi-messianic status). One of the problems with messiahs is that when they don’t fulfil the hopes of their followers, their various failures or defeats (of whatever kind) take on a cataclysmic significance beyond the usual, human kind of setback and re-evaluation. It’s only natural to feel discouraged if your political or spiritual dreams and hopes are shattered, but it’s also important to remember that the views and opinions that you were drawn to and which you agree with are yours too. They are likely to be shared by millions of people and the fact that they are also apparently not shared by a greater number in no way invalidates them or renders them pointless.

The history of human progress is, mostly, the history of people fighting against entrenched conservative views in order to improve the lives of all people, including, incidentally, the lives of those people they are fighting against. This obviously isn’t the case in ultimately ideological revolutions like those in France or Russia, which quickly abandoned their theoretically egalitarian positions in order to remove undesirable elements altogether, or the Nazi revolution in Germany, which never pretended to be inclusive in the first place. Hopelessness, whether cynical or Kierkegaard-ishly defiant, is a natural response, but the biggest successes of human rights movements – from the abolition of slavery to the enfranchisement of women to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the legalisation of abortion or gay marriage – have often taken place during eras which retrospectively do not seem especially enlightened; if you believe in something, there is hope.

Rome is a place, but this is mostly about people

But when change is largely driven by mass opinion or pressure – and when we know that it is – why is it the individual; Rameses II, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Lenin, Hitler, the Dalai Lama, Queens, Kings, political leaders – that looms so large in the way we see events historically? Anywhere from three to six million people died in the “Napoleonic Wars” – Napoleon wasn’t one of them, his armies didn’t even win them; but they are, to posterity, his wars. The short answer is I think because as individuals, it is individuals we identify with. We have a sense of other peoples’ lives, we live among other people (sounds a bit Invasion of the Bodysnatchers), but we only know our own life, and we only see the world through the window of our own perceptions.

The artist Sara Shamma – who, significantly has undertaken many humanitarian art projects, but has also done much of her most profound work in self-portraiture – said “I think understanding a human being is like understanding the whole of humanity, and the whole universe” and the more I’ve thought about that statement the more true it seems. If we truly understand any human being, it is first, foremost and perhaps only, ourselves. And, unless you are a psychopath, in which case you have my condolences, you will recognise the traits you have – perhaps every trait you have – in other people, people who may seem otherwise almost entirely different from you. When you look at the classifications humankind has made for itself – good/bad, deadly sins, cardinal virtues – these are things we know to exist because, in varying degrees, we feel them in ourselves, and therefore recognise them in others. Even that most valued human tool, objectivity, is a human tool, just as logic, which certainly seems to explain to our understanding the way the world works, is a human idea and also an ideal. Interestingly but perhaps significantly, unlike nature, mathematics or gravity, human behaviour itself routinely defies logic. When we say – to whatever extent – we understand the universe, what I think we mean is that we understand our own conception of it. It’s easy to talk about the universe being boundless, but not limitless, or limitless, or connected to other universes as part of a multiverse (though not easy to talk about intelligently, for me), but regardless of what is ‘out there’, what we are actually talking about is all ‘in here’, in our own brain; the universe that you talk about and think about is whatever you think it is, however you perceive it. If what you believe dictates the way you live your life it may as well be, to all intents and purposes ‘the truth’. For Stephen Hawking there were black holes in space/time, and whether or not there actually are, for a creationist there probably aren’t.

This is not to say that there are no actual solid facts about (for example) the nature of the universe; but nonetheless to even prove – to us personally while alive – that anything at all continues to exist after our own death is impossible. We can of course see that it goes on after other people’s deaths, but then I can say with what I believe to be complete conviction that there is no God and that human beings are just (well I wouldn’t say “just”) a kind of sentient hourglass with the added fun that you never know how much sand it holds to start with – but that doesn’t change the fact that a whole range of Gods have made and continue to make a decisive difference to the lives of other people and therefore to the world.

But whereas that might sound like the background for some kind of Ayn Rand-ish radical individualism, I think the opposite is true; because if any of what I have written is correct, the key part is that it applies equally to everyone. The phrase ‘we’re all in the same boat’ is being bandied about a lot lately for pandemic-related reasons, and it’s only vaguely true as regards that particular situation. We aren’t in the same boat, or even necessarily in the same kind of body exactly, but what we do all share – if broadly – is the same kind of brain. We are all individuals, and If we are conscious, we are probably self conscious. And given that we live our – as far as we can safely tell – single earthly life as an individual human being, the idea that any of us is powerless during that lifetime is nonsense. When asked to name someone who has made a difference to the world, the first person you think of should be yourself. There would be no world as you know it without you in it, and that is not a small thing; by existing, you are changing the world. Whether for better or worse, only you can say.

Having faith in other people (or even just getting along with them) makes both your and their lives better, but the belief that one particular individual outside of yourself may be the solution to the world’s (or the country’s, etc) ills is worse than feeling powerless yourself; not only because it can reinforce that sense of powerlessness, but because it’s blatantly untrue and (I hate to use this completely devalued word, but never mind) elitist. And it reduces every issue, however complex, to a finite, succeed-or-fail one, which is rarely how the world works. The idea of the hero as saviour probably has about as much validity as the idea of the lone villain as the cause of whatever ills need to be cured. Hero-worship is both logical (because we see the world from the viewpoint of “I”) and also an oddly counter-intuitive ideal to have created, since in reality as we know it, the lone individual may be us, but is largely not how we live or how things work. We have structured our societies, whether on the smaller level of family or tribe, or the larger ones like political parties or nations, in terms of groups of people. But I suppose it is the same humanity that makes us aware of and empathetic to the feelings of others that makes us want to reduce ideas to their black and white, bad vs good essentials and then dress those ideas up in human clothes.

And so, to books! Reading fiction and watching films and TV, it’s amazing how the larger-than-life (but also simpler and therefore ironically smaller-than-life) hero/ine vs villain, protagonist vs antagonist and – most hackneyed of all (a speciality of genre fiction since such a thing existed, and the preserve or religion and mythology before that) – the ‘chosen one’ vs ‘dark lord’ narrative continues to be employed by writers and enjoyed by generations of people (myself included*), long past the age that one becomes aware of the formulaic simplification of it.

*for people of my generation, the mention of a ‘dark lord’ immediately conjures up Star Wars and Darth Vader/The Emperor, though the ‘chosen one’ theme is thankfully underplayed in the original trilogy. George Lucas doesn’t get much credit for the prequels, but making the chosen one become the dark lord is an interesting twist, even if Lucifer got there first.

Whatever its origins, it seems that people do want these kinds of figures in their lives and will settle for celebrities, athletes, even politicians in lieu of the real thing. Hitler was aware of it and cast himself in the lead heroic role, ironically becoming, to posterity, the antithesis of the character he adopted; Lenin, who by any logical reading of The Communist Manifesto should have been immune to the lure of hero worship, also cast himself in the lead role, as did most of his successors to the present day (and really; to enthusiastically read Marx and then approve a monumental statue of oneself displays, at best, a lack of self-awareness). The Judeo-Christian god with his demand, not only to be acknowledged as the creator of everything, but also to be actually worshipped by his creations, even in his Christian, fallible, just-like-us human form, is something of a special case, but clearly these are primordial waters to be paddling in.

Still, entertainment-wise, it took a kind of humbling to get even to the stage we’re at. Heroes were once demi-gods; Gilgamesh had many adventures, overcame many enemies, but when trying to conquer death found that he could not even conquer sleep. Fallible yes, but hardly someone to identify with. And Cain killed Abel, David killed Goliath, Hercules succeeded in his twelve tasks but was eventually poisoned by the blood of a hydra, Sun Wukong the Monkey King attained immortality by mistake while drunk, Beowulf was mortally wounded in his last battle against a dragon. Cúchulainn transformed into a monstrous creature and single-handedly defeated the armies of Queen Medb. King Arthur and/or the Fisher King sleep still, to be awoken when the need for them is finally great enough. These are heroes we still recognise today and would accept in the context of a blockbuster movie or doorstop-like fantasy novel, but less so in say, a soap opera or (hopefully) on Question Time. I knew some (but not all) of these stories when I was a child, but all of them would have made sense to me because, despite the differences between the settings and the societies that produced them and that which produced me, they are not really so vastly different from most of my favourite childhood stories.

Partly that’s because some of those were those ancient stories. But even when not reading infantilised versions of the Greek myths (I loved the Ladybird book Famous Legends Vol. 1 with its versions of Theseus and the Minotaur and Perseus and Andromeda*) it was noticeable that, although there still were heroes of the unambiguous superhuman type (in comics most obviously; like um, Superman), in most of the books I read, the hero who conquers all through his or her (usually his) all-round superiority was rarely the lone, or even the main protagonist. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of Christianity (or just of literacy?) but presumably at some point people decided they preferred to identify with a hero rather than to venerate them. Perhaps stories became private rather than public when people began to read for themselves, rather than listening to stories as passed down by bards or whatever? Someone will know.

.*I remember being disappointed by the Clash of the Titans film version of Medusa, too monstrous, less human, somehow undermining the horror

not the original set of Narnia books I had; never quite as good without Pauline Baynes’s cover art

The first real stories that I remember (this would initially be hearing rather than reading) are probably The Hobbit, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – all of which have children or quasi-children as the main characters. Narnia is a special case in that there is a ‘chosen one’ – Aslan the lion – but mostly he isn’t the main focus of the narrative, Far more shadowy, there are books that I never went back to and read by myself, like Pippi Longstocking and my memory of those tends to be a few images rather than an actual story. As a very little kid I know I liked The Very Hungry Caterpillar and its ilk (also, vastly less well known, The Hungry Thing by Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler in which, as I recall, some rice would be nice said a baby sucking ice). Later, I loved Tintin and Asterix and Peanuts and Garfield as well as the usual UK comics; Beano, Dandy, Oor Wullie, The Broons, Victor and Warlord etc. The first fiction not reliant on pictures that I remember reading for myself (probably around the Beano era) would be the Narnia series (which I already knew), Richmal Crompton’s William books and, then Biggles (already by then an antique of a very different era), some Enid Blyton (I liked the less-famous Five Find-Outers best), Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and Willard Price’s Adventure series. Mostly these were all a bit old fashioned for the 80s now that I look at them, but I tended then as now to accumulate second hand books.

Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain; perfect marriage of author and cover art (Brian Fround and Ken Thompson)

Biggles Flies Undone! Very old even when I was young, I bought this book from a jumble sale when I was 8 or 9

There was also a small group of classics that I had that must have been condensed and re-written for kids – a little brick-like paperback of Moby-Dick (Christmas present) and old hardbacks of Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Kidnapped with illustrations by Broons/Oor Wullie genius Dudley D. Watkins (bought at ‘bring and buy’ sales at Primary School). Watkins’s versions of Crusoe, Long John Silver etc are still the ones I see in my head. More up to date, I also had a particular fondness for Robert Westall (The Machine Gunners, The Scarecrows, The Watch House etc) and the somewhat trashy Race Against Time adventure series by JJ Fortune; a very 80s concoction in which a young boy from New York called Stephen, is picked up by his (this was the initial appeal) Indiana Jones-like Uncle Richard and, unbeknownst to his parents, hauled off around the world for various implausible adventures. I liked these books so much (especially the first two that I read, The Search for Mad Jack’s Crown – bought via the Chip Book Club which our school took part in, and Duel For The Samurai Sword) that I actually, for the first and last time in my life, joined a fan club. I still have the letter somewhere, warning me as a “RAT adventurer” to be prepared to be whisked away myself. Didn’t happen yet though. And then there were gamebooks (a LOT of them), which have a special place here because they fundamentally shift the focus of the narrative back to the direct hero-conquers-all themes of ancient mythology, while also recasting the reader themselves as that hero.

80s Hollywood blockbuster design comes to childrens’ fiction

There were also books I wouldn’t necessarily have chosen but was given at Christmas etc, books by people like Leon Garfield (adventures set in a vividly grotty evocation of 18^th and early 19^th century London), the aforementioned Moby-Dick, a comic strip version of The Mutiny on the Bounty, a Dracula annual. Also authors who I read and loved one book by, but never got around to reading more of; Anne Pilling’s Henry’s Leg, Jan Mark (Thunder and Lightnings; there’s a moving article about this beautifully subtle book here), Robert Leeson (The Third Class Genie). And there were also things we had to read at school, which mostly didn’t make a huge impression and are just evocative titles to me now – The Boy with the Bronze Axe by Kathleen Fidler and The Kelpie’s Pearls by Molly Hunter, Ian Serralliers’s The Silver Sword, Children on the Oregon Trail by Anna Rutgers van der Loeff and The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden. What did I do as a kid apart from reading?

Anyway; that’s a lot of books. And in the vast majority of them, the conclusion of the plot relies on the main character, or main character and sidekick or team to take some kind of decisive action to solve whatever problem they have. Heroism as the ancient Greeks would have understood it may largely have vanished, but even without superhuman strength or vastly superior cunning (even the fantasy novels mentioned like Lloyd Alexander’s which do still have the chosen one/dark lord idea at their heart, tend to have a fallible, doubt-filled human type of hero rather than a demigod) there is still the idea that individual character is what matters.

it’s hard to remember a time I didn’t know these stories

And this makes sense – something like the ‘battle of five armies’ towards the end of The Hobbit is dull enough with the inclusion of characters that the reader has come to care about. A battle between armies of nameless ciphers (think the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ sans Napoleon) would be hard to get too involved in (cue image of generals with their model battlefields moving blocks of troops about, with little or no danger to themselves). Which is fair enough; after all, being in a battle may feel impersonal, but reading about one can’t be, if the reader is to feel any kind of drama. And maybe this is the key point – reading is – albeit at one remove – a one-on-one activity. Stephen King likens it to telepathy between the writer and reader and that is the case – they think it, we read it and it transfers from their minds to ours. And since reading is something that people seem to think children have to be made to do, often against their will, children’s authors in particular are understandably keen to engage the reader by making them identify with one character or another. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most successful writers for children from CS Lewis to Enid Blyton to JK Rowling (to name just notable British ones) have tended to make children the protagonists of their books and surround their main characters with a variety of girls and boys of varying personality types. And children’s books about children are (I find) far easier to re-read as an adult than children’s books about adults are. As an adult, even JJ Fortune’s “Stephen” rings more or less true as a mostly bored tweenager of the 80s, while his Uncle Richard seems both ridiculous and vaguely creepy. “Grown up” heroes like Biggles, very vivid when encountered as a child, seem hopelessly two-dimensional as an adult; what do they DO all day, when not flying planes and shooting at the enemy?

the unasked-for Christmas present that began a few years of obsessive game-playing

I mentioned gamebooks above and they – essentially single-player role playing games, often inspired by Dungeons and Dragons – deserve special mention, partly just because in the 80s, there were so many of them. There were series’ I followed and was a completist about (up to a point) – first and best being Puffin’s Fighting Fantasy (which, when I finally lost interest consisted of around 30 books), there was its spin-off Steve Jackson’s Sorcery (four books), Joe Dever and Gary Chalk’s Lone Wolf (seven or eight books), Grey Star (four books), Grailquest (I think I lost interest around vol 5 or 6), then series’ I quite liked but didn’t follow religiously – Way of the Tiger (six books), Golden Dragon (six books), Cretan Chronicles (three books) and series’ I dipped into if I came across them: Choose Your Own Adventure (essentially the first gamebook series, but they mostly weren’t in the swords & sorcery genre and felt like they were aimed at a younger readership), Demonspawn (by JH Brennan, the author of Grailquest, but much, much more difficult), Falcon (time travel) and Sagard the Barbarian (four books; the selling point being that they were by D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. They were a bit clunky compared to the UK books). Sudden memory; even before encountering my first Fighting Fantasy book, which was Steve Jackson’s Citadel of Chaos, actually the second in the series, I had bought (the Chip club again), Edward Packard’s Exploration Infinity, which was one of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, repackaged for the UK I guess, or maybe a separate book that was later absorbed into the CYOA series? Either way, there’s a particular dreamlike atmosphere that gives me a pang of complicated melancholy nostalgia when I think of the book now.

Putting a real person – the reader – at the centre of the action ironically dispenses with the need for “character” at all, and even in books like the Lone Wolf and, Grailquest series where YOU are a specific person (Lone Wolf in the former, Pip in the latter), there is very little sense of (or point in) character building. You are the hero, this is what you need to do, and that’s all you need to know. In many cases, the protagonists of the heroic fantasy novels I devoured in my early teens – when I was drawn to any fat book with foil lettering and a landscape on the cover (the standard fantasy novel look in the 80s) – were not much more rounded than their lightly sketched gamebook counterparts. These books often achieved their epic length through plot only; the truly complex epic fantasy novel is a rare thing.

Thanks, presumably, to Tolkien, these plots generally revolved around main characters who were rarely heroes in the ancient mould (though Conan and his imitators were), but were mainly inexperienced, rural quasi-children, thrust into adventures they initially had no knowledge of (Terry Brooks’s Shannara series being the classic Tolkien-lite example). But even when, as in Stephen Donaldson’s also very Tolkien-influenced Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the hero was a cynical, modern human being, or in Michael Moorcock’s deliberately anti-Tolkienesque Eternal Champion series, where s/he was a series of interlinked beings inhabiting the same role within different dimensions of the multiverse, the ‘chosen one’ vs some kind of implacable ‘dark lord’-ish enemy theme remained pretty constant. But this underlying core or skeleton is only most explicit in self consciously fantastical fiction; whether or not there’s an actual dark lord or a quest, in most fiction of any kind there’s a ‘chosen one’, even if they have only been chosen by the author as the focus of the story she or he wants to tell. Holden Caulfield and Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood have this in common with Bilbo Baggins, Conan the Barbarian and William Brown. But really, what’s the alternative to books about people anyway? Even novels in which people (or surrogate people like Richard Adams’s rabbits or William Horwood’s moles) are not the main focus (or are half of the focus, like Alan Moore’s peculiar Voice of the Fire, where Northampton is essentially the ‘hero’) rely on us engaging with the writer as a writer, a human voice that becomes a kind of stand-in for a character.

But books are not life; one of the things that unites the most undemanding pulp novelette and the greatest works of literature is that they are to some extent – like human beings – discrete, enclosed worlds; they have their beginning, middle and end. And yet, however much all of our experience relies on our perception of these key moments, that’s not necessarily how the world feels. Even complicated books are simple in that they reveal – just by seeing their length before we read them – the sense of design that is hidden from us or absent in our own lives. Even something seemingly random or illogical (the giant helmet that falls from nowhere, crushing Conrad to death in Horace Walpole’s proto-gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) for example) is deliberate; recognisably something dreamlike, from the human imagination, rather than truly random as the world can be.

What we call history (“things that have happened”) usually can’t quite manage the neatness of even the most bizarre or surreal fiction. There have been genuine, almost superhuman hero/antihero/demigod figures, but how often – even when we can see their entirety – do their lives have the satisfying shape of a story? Granted, Caesar, stabbed twenty three times by his peers in the Senate chamber, has the cause-and-effect narrative of myth; but it’s an ambiguous story where the hero is the villain, depending on your point of view. Whatever one’s point of view in The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, to have sympathy with someone referred to (or calling themselves) a ‘dark lord’ is to consciously choose to be on the side of ‘bad’, in a way that defending a republic as a republic, or an empire as an empire isn’t.

Or take Genghis Khan – ‘he’ conquered (the temptation is to also write ‘conquered’, but where do you stop with that?) – obviously not alone, but as sole leader – as much of the world as anyone has. And then, he remained successful, had issues with his succession and died in his mid 60s, in uncertain, rather than dramatic or tragic circumstances. The heroes of the Greek myths often have surprisingly downbeat endings (which I didn’t know about from the children’s versions I read) but they are usually significant in some way, and stem from the behaviour of the hero himself. Napoleon, old at 51, dying of stomach cancer or poisoning, a broken man, is not exactly a classic punishment from the Gods for hubris, or an end that anyone would have seen coming, let alone would have written for him. As ‘chosen ones’ go, Jesus is a pretty definitive example, and whether accepted as history or as fiction, he has an ending which, appropriately for god-made-man, manages to fit with both the stuff of myth (rises from the dead and ascends to heaven) but is also mundane in a way we can easily recognise; he isn’t defeated by the Antichrist or by some supreme force of supernatural evil, but essentially killed by a committee, on the orders of someone acting against their own better judgement. More than anything else in the New Testament, that has the ring of truth to it. A significant detail too for those who want to stress the factual basis of the gospels is that the name of the murderer himself* unlike the nemeses of the ancient heroes, wasn’t even recorded.

* I guess either the guy nailing him to the cross, or the soldier spearing him in the side (much later named as Longinus, presumably for narrative purposes)

And if Jesus’s nemesis was disappointingly mundane, when on occasion, the universe does throw up something approximating a “dark lord” it doesn’t counter them with ‘chosen ones’ to defeat them either, as one might hope or expect. Living still in the shadow of WW2, Hitler’s messy and furtive end, beleaguered and already beaten, in suicide, somehow isn’t good enough and there are a variety of rival theories about what ‘really’ happened, all of which more pleasingly fit with the kind of fiction we all grow up with. Mussolini was strung up by an angry faceless mob and his corpse was defiled. Hirohito, meanwhile, survived defeat as his troops were not supposed to do, and presided over Japan’s post-war boom to become one of the world’s longest reigning monarchs. The moral of the story is there is rarely a moral to the story. For proof of that, did the ‘heroes’ fare much better? The victors of Yalta lived on to die of a haemorrhage just months later on the eve of the unveiling of the UN (FDR), to be voted out of office, dying twenty years later a divisive figure with an ambiguous legacy (Churchill) and to become himself one of the great villains of the century with a reputation rivalling Hitler’s (Stalin).

Entertainment programs us to view history as the adventures of a series of important ‘main characters’ and how they shaped the world. It’s perhaps as good a ‘way in’ as any – like Frodo taking the ring to Mordor when no human can, or Biggles (almost) single-handedly defeating the Luftwaffe, it makes a kind of sense to us. But the distorted version of history it gives us is something to consider; think of your life and that of (name any current world leader or influential figure; apologies if you are one). If the people of the future are reading about that person, what will that tell them about your life? And what is ‘history’ telling you about really? Things that happened, yes, but prioritised by who, and for what purpose? This is an argument for reading more history, and not less I think. Other people may be the protagonists in books, but in our own history we have to take that role.

Artists (and historians too, in a different way) share their humanity with us, and there are great artists – you’ll have your own ideas, but William Shakespeare, Sue Townsend, Albrecht Dürer, Mickalene Thomas, Steven Spielberg and James Baldwin seems like a random but fair enough selection – who somehow have the capacity or empathy to give us insights into human being other than (and very different from) themselves, but somehow created entirely from their own minds and their own perceptions of the world. But just like them, however aware we are of everyone else and of existence in all its variety, we can only be ourselves, and, however many boxes we seem to fit into, we can only experience the world through our own single consciousness. If there’s a chosen one, it’s you. If there’s a dark lady or a dark lord, it’s also you.

how it felt to be alive in February 2020

The correct response to the title here is of course it depends who you are and what you did. But anyway; in a February when the big news story was the alarming spread of coronavirus/COVID-19, which history will tell us is either – (a) a pandemic like none seen since the 1918 flu outbreak which killed between 20 and 50 million people (quite a big ‘between’. that) or (b) an unfortunate but quite normal kind of illness which is causing inconvenience and a certain amount of tragedy but is mainly a media frenzy like SARS or Bird Flu, and will blow over soon – it seems a bit like fiddling while Rome burns to talk about music and books etc. But as everyone knows, Nero didn’t really fiddle while Rome burned, and anyway, the big and relatively thoughtful thing I was writing during the Christmas holidays is no further forward and I mainly spent February writing things for other places than my own website, so there it is.

I just finished reading the newest edition* of Jon Savage’s brilliant England’s Dreaming which is as good as any music-related book I’ve ever read and made me realise how many parallels there are between now and the political situation in mid-70s Britain. Up to a point, that is. It would be hard, even I think for a conservative person, to see the victory of Johnson’s Tories as a return to some kind of sensible order in the way that deluded right wingers saw Thatcher’s victory – which did, it has to be said, render somewhat pointless the extreme right wing groups like the National Front & British Movement that had been growing in strength and influence throughout the decade. As with Johnson/the ERG and their wooing of the UKIP/nazi fanbase though, the reassurance that comes from seeing extremist groups losing popularity is soured (to put it mildly) by having people in charge who appeal to that demographic.

*the latest revised edition is from 2005, and is the one to get – the excellent introduction, which addresses the ‘Englishness’ of punk within the wider UK setting, is itself quite dated, though more relevant than ever, and this version also contains a brief summary of that most surprising part of the whole Sex Pistols story – the band’s 1996 reunion.

Reading about punk – especially remembering the very tail end of it in the early 80s (i.e. seeing the stereotypical 80s fashion punks and skinheads and reading THE EXPLOITED/OI!/PUNKS NOT DEAD etc spray painted all over the place) it’s hard to imagine the force the movement had in ’76-7. In my own era, Acid House/rave culture/etc has had an even bigger impact on music and arguably a comparable one culturally, but although it annoyed grownups and upset politicians it was never as deliberately confrontational or as alien and ugly as punk. Its figureheads, insofar as it had any, could certainly be ‘outrageous’ in a way, but Shaun Ryder and Bez swearing on TV was worlds away from the omnipresence of the Sex Pistols in the UK media of the 70s; not least because the Sex Pistols and punk had already happened. Pop stars being obnoxious in the 90s was not a phenomenon – and the Pistols, despite everything, were a recognisable thing – a pop group or rock band.

The public and the tabloids knew about the existence of acid house, and might be alarmed by the ‘acid’ aspect in particular – but as far as signing record contracts, being on TV or playing concerts went, there wasn’t much to report on. An interesting thing about the acid house/rave phenomenon was that, although a musical movement, the music and its makers barely featured in the moral panics that ensued, it was all about the audience. Whether this made it more frightening to the older generation, I don’t know. In the 60s, the Woodstock kids might have been seen as outrageous dirty, drug taking hippies, but maybe the fact that they were being ‘incited’ by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Country Joe etc in a field (much like the teenagers in the 50s were under the influence of Bill Haley/Elvis etc and punk kids in the streets were being led astray by Rotten & co on TV) gave a clear them/us or leader/followers divide and made it easier to condemn/contain/control them? This is an interesting thing that I should think about more – except that I’m almost certain that there will be a book out there by someone who has thought about it more and knows a lot more than I do about the 90s (the most I can say is ‘I was there’, I wasn’t mostly very interested in acid house etc at the time).

Anyway; certainly the punks were heirs to the hippies (not that they would have welcomed the comparison) in that the visibility of the punk audience (who, whatever their claims of individuality, were clearly – especially by 1977 – dressing in emulation of other punks, of whom Johnny Rotten was the most visible example) marked them out as ‘other’. And made them a target of the authorities, as well as a flag for disaffected kids to rally to. The subtitle of England’s Dreaming – “The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock” is important. The Sex Pistols may not have the strongest claim to have invented punk, but in a sense that isn’t as true for other foundational bands, they were punk; their career trajectory; form band, play shows, cause outrage, record demos, cause outrage, sign contracts, appear on TV, cause outrage, get dumped by label, cause outrage get banned from venues, release singles, cause outrage, release album, cause outrage, split up, have a member die – within the space of around two years, is a microcosm of UK punk. The British punk scene was born with them and it essentially died with Sid Vicious; everything thereafter is either post-punk, second-wave punk or pastiche. Whether embodying a movement is an achievement as such is hard to say and in a way doesn’t matter, but what Savage documents is the way in which a youth movement – one with many and varied influences and antecedents – absorbed and expressed the anxieties of its time and in turn embodied and shaped them.

Away from that book, I’ll keep up with my pick of the most interesting things to be sent my way in February.

Out in April is a reissue of a noise-rock classic from 1995:

Caspar Brötzmann Massaker
Home
Southern Lord Recordings
Sounding something like The Birthday Party playing noisy free jazz, the Massaker are a brutal guitar-bass-drums (with minimalist vocals) trio; heavy on feedback, tense dynamics and churning distortion, but sometimes almost groovy and (very) occasionally kind of pretty. Home was their fifth album and it’s pretty similar to the only other one of their albums that I know, The Tribe, from 1987. Squally, angular and dark but with insistent percussion, it’s a great palate-cleanser for your ears after too much pop music.

I could say the same about this, very different but equally eccentric record:

JZ Replacement
Disrespectful
Rainy Days Records

Zhenya Strigalev (saxophone), Jamie Murray (drums) and Tim Lefebvre (bass) have made a frankly insane-sounding but weirdly addictive record that at different times reminds me of the John Zorn/Bil Laswell/Mick Harris jazz/grind band Painkiller, Ornette Coleman and King Tubby. But it also has the odd moment of funk, breakbeat and drum-n-bass. Nevertheless it’s amazingly coherent and although at times I thought Murray, Strigalev or Lefebvre was what made it so great, subtracting any one element would make it all collapse. Recording something at once as familiar and peculiar as any song here (‘Guilty Look 3‘ is a great example) is a special skill. Disrespectful borrows from everywhere and yet somehow sounds like nothing else – and really that’s just what jazz is all about.

Perchta
Ufång
Prophecy Productions

This Austrian black metal project has a very specific local (Tyrolean) focus, but judging by its Facebook page is the brainchild of Italian ex-pat Fabio D’Amore of symphonic power metal band Serenity; which makes sense – for all its atmospheric/folkish elements (there are some very nice jangly clean parts), this is a theatrical, musicianly album which feels epic and polished rather than dark and brutal. The band’s name refers to a pagan goddess, and throughout the album an odd, witchy narrator pops up declaiming or whispering, who I assume is the woman in the artwork, who the promotional material refers to as “the front woman [who] will sermonize, face-painted in historical black garb with embroidered belt and cast-iron broom …”

Not really my cup of tea overall, which is a shame because I really like the idea of the Tyrolean folklore etc, but it’s extremely well done and has some very good tunes and with the usual excellent Prophecy treatment it will no doubt find its audience.

messages from the past for the future

Sitting down to write this, a month after breaking my leg and having to grapple with hitherto-unconsidered questions like ‘how do I usually sit on a toilet’? and one week before a General Election where my preferred of the apparently plausible outcomes is an unsatisfactory coalition government, it feels strange and maybe wrong to be looking backwards. But, disturbing and reassuring in more or less equal measures, I think it’s a good way to look forward to whatever happens next.

I remember as a child, looking at a stamp album that had belonged to (I think) my dad (or maybe his dad) when he was a child. Even for someone with no interest in stamps, and less interest in collecting them, it was a peculiar and fascinating book; unfamiliar places, people, even currencies. The thing that stands out the most in my memory though is a stamp from Bosnia, a name which at the time I hadn’t heard before and which sounded as unlikely and frankly made-up as countries like Syldavia and Borduria that I knew from Tintin books. That memory itself has a strange and silly quality now, but at the time (somewhere in the mid-80s would be my guess) Bosnia was as fantastical to a child (or me at least) as I expect the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia would be to Primary school pupils now.

classic cold war artefact: Iron Maiden behind the Iron Curtain laserdisc (1985)

30 years on from the series of revolutions that symbolically culminated in the destruction of the Berlin Wall (the free opening of the Brandenburg Gate itself happened 30 years ago last month) it’s perhaps only natural that those who remember those times should be thinking of them. If you grew up with the cold war in the background (that is, any time really from the years after world war two up until the end of the 80s), the war itself may have constantly ebbed and flowed, but the communist eastern bloc was, monolithically (technically at least duolithically, but that’s not a thing) omnipresent in a way that now seems as unlikely and distant as the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was there at school (we had to learn about “East Germany” (the GDR or DDR), “West Germany” (FRG or BRD) and the differences between the two, the USSR /CCCP, the space race, the arms race, ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ etc etc etc), it was there in sports (especially the Olympics, but “West Germany” was quite a big deal during the ten minutes that I liked football) and in entertainment. Usually this meant sinister, emotionless and robot-like communists being the bad guys in endless numbers of films and TV shows (classic example; Rocky IV, but see also Red Dawn, Red Heat ad infinitum – it was interesting, in a depressing kind of way to see this old view of ‘reds’ adopted, without irony in the third, inferior season of Stranger Things this year), but it wasn’t all bad – sometimes bands made a point of playing behind the Iron Curtain and talked about how great the audiences were; I remember Iron Maiden played in Poland, Hungary etc in the mid-80s which presumably was a logistical nightmare, but nice for their fans who mostly would only have been able to hear their music through unofficial or even (the same thing really) illegal channels.

A few things have brought that period, and specifically the GDR, back to me recently; Tim Mohr’s superb book Burning Down The Haus – Punk Rock, Revolution and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Dialogue Books, 2019), the work of the German photographers Ute and Werner Mahler and the Ostkreuz photography group, interviewed by Kate Simpson in issue 90 of Aesthetica Magazine (August/September 2019), the TV shows Deutschland 83 and Deutschland 86 which I just watched, somewhat belatedly and a series of John le Carré’s classic spy thrillers, notably A Small Town In Germany (1968).
The central realities of all of these things is pretty much the same; in East Germany, the state (specifically the secret police, the notorious Stasi) was watching you, and not only did they not care if you knew it, they wanted you to assume you were being watched.

East Berlin punks at Planterwald, approx. 1981 by Harald Hauswald (Ostkreuz Agency)

One of the most chilling things in Tim Mohr’s book is the way that, from the beginning of the 80s until its end (punk seems to have had an extended lifespan in the GDR, partly because fashions were slower to take root and spread where the majority of the media was under state control, but also because it remained – from the music to the image – genuinely oppositional and rebellious, rather than being absorbed into mainstream pop culture) the punks were, as often as not arrested because of informants from their own families or even the bands themselves. Nevertheless, after a slow start, the bands multiplied, but in a planned economy with full employment its slogans were something like the opposite of the UK’s punk bands; Too Much Future being the classic East German punk statement; more info here. As Mohr notes, long before the advent of GDR punk, informing for the government was something like an epidemic. In fact, by 1952 – that is, just four years from the official founding of the nation – the Stasi had already recruited 30,000 informants (Burning Down The Haus, p.2), and that figure would rise exponentially throughout the decades. This was the reality that artists like photographer Ute Mahler were working in;

“Everyone knew that people were spying for state security. But nobody knew who. It could be anyone. We lived and breathed with this knowledge. In 1980, I stood at a May Day demonstration just below the grandstand. The demonstrators cheered at the government, which was on a podium above me. I got the impression that all the attendees were in agreement and were happy about it. Whilst editing the pictures, I discovered other faces in the crowd. That confirmed to me that you must look closely for what might be hidden.”

Ute Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p. 128

Action Force SAS figure, 1982: this creepy thing was one of the ‘good guys’

From a child in the UK’s point of view, the activities of the CND, the Greenham Common protestors, WarGames, Raymond Briggs’s When The Wind Blows and even silly things like the Frankie Goes To Hollywood Two Tribes video strengthened rather than diluted the sense that, beyond ‘the west’ there was a huge, sinister and implacable enemy. That video – bad lookalikes of Reagan and Chernenko wrestling – was absurd but actually made child me more aware of the seriousness of the global situation. For a start, I remember thinking the actors were bad lookalikes, but I knew approximately who they were meant to be and what it represented. Actually, although I was very familiar with Reagan I doubt whether I knew Chernenko by name; even now I had to look it up to write this as my only memories of a pre-Gorbachev Soviet leader relate to Andropov, for the simple reason that his name was funny. I vaguely remember him in association with a joking remark (when he died??) that “his hand dropped off”, but whether that was purely from the playground or from TV I don’t know. Even toys contributed to the doomladen atmosphere. The initial run of Action Force (the European release of GI Joe, although initially there was no back story or characters, just – as with the older UK Action Man – a lot of more-or-less accurate contemporary military equipment, including sinister SAS paratroopers with gas masks etc. As I was typing this, I remembered that I used to have a fairly extensive knowledge of the weaponry favoured by the Warsaw Pact vs. NATO troops, which is fun for kids. As far as I remember, although children’s entertainment in the UK wasn’t by and large as propagandist as Hollywood, there wasn’t anything much to counter the idea of the brainwashed, robotlike communist hordes, programmed by the state from birth. And, at no point before 1989 did it feel like that situation was about to change.

That feeling was as strong, or even stronger, inside the Eastern bloc, as Ute and Werner Mahler explain;

“The generations after us might find it hard to understand the complex workings of the GDR, as memory begins to move into the past. These new generations perhaps cannot imagine how one could live in such a country, where one could not officially say what we thought. … When we took pictures in the 1970s and 1980s, we would never have imagined that one day the GDR would not exist. At that time, we wanted to show life as we experienced it – just as it was. Today, the images act as documents from a vanished country. In this way, they are given a renewed sense of purpose.”

Ute & Werner Mahler, interviewed in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124

Even, as Mohr explains, the day after the Berlin Wall fell, the Stasi were making arrests in something like the usual way, although the state quickly descended into chaos. But maybe everything feels permanent when you live through it; I remember when, what felt like 1000 years or so into Margaret Thatcher’s reich, we had had the Miner’s Strike, the Falklands war, there were millions of unemployed and it seemed like I had never met anyone who liked Thatcher, or anyone who voted for the Conservative Party and yet, come election time they still won. Maybe it’s more significant that I don’t remember anyone I knew being especially keen on Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock? But anyway; my memory is that by 1988, there was no feeling that the cold war was going anywhere; by 1990 it was over. Until I was 23 my only conscious experience was of a Britain run by a Conservative government, and then that was over.

Bob Light and John Houston’s satirical Gone With The Wind poster, c.1981 – vividly brings back the era to me

One of the stranger things to find, looking back on the phantom communist enemy of my childhood is that, contrary to what appeared to be the case on TV at the time, the people of East Germany, discontented though they obviously were, did not necessarily want to become westerners. As depicted vividly in Deutschland 83 and even more so in Deutschland 86, Communism as practised through the GDR’s dictatorship was a failed ideal, but it remained for many, something like an ideal. The bands documented in Burning Down The Haus, like the immediately post-Communist East German club scene that Mohr experienced himself, were ‘radically egalitarian’. These were, after all, people raised in a system which preached the power of the people, and even enshrined in law the freedom of expression, although in practice it didn’t allow either of those things. Often bands or musicians – people who were routinely arrested, beaten by the authorities, held in prison awaiting trial for months and so on – had opportunities to flee to the west (or were even encouraged to by the authorities who couldn’t cope with them) but chose to stay and work for change. Fascism and consumerism were seen, not just by the authorities, but by the punks, as the enemies of freedom, and even when the punk revolt happened it was often aided by (which seems odd but makes a kind of logical sense) the Lutheran church, which had an uneasy but respectable existence within the state. This meant that not only the punks (who tended towards anarchism in the 19th century sense politically), but also environmentalists, peace activists and other dissidents the church protected and to a degree nurtured, were working under the auspices of an institution which also had essentially anti-capitalist principles at its heart.

Rebelling against a de facto egalitarian state in itself creates a strange situation, as Ute Mahler recalls;

“In the GDR, when the collective was praised as an ideal, we were all lone fighters. In this new society where individuality is so important to so many people – coming together is the key” quoted in Aesthetica, issue 90, p.124-7

And this is not really a paradox, even to an individualist; if the contrasting but ultimately similar oppressions of the 20th century, whether Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Communist China etc – have taught us anything, it’s that totalitarian power structures, of whatever political hue value conformity above individuality; but also that political progress requires subjected peoples to firstly insist on their individuality, but also to act in concert with each other, to combine their voices in order to be heard.

Perhaps because a general election is looming as I write this, reading about the lost world of the eastern bloc and its failures (mostly the same failures as capitalism to be fair; poverty, starvation, oppression etc etc) begs the question; what is the country that you believe in, if not a reflection of yourself and what you want? The Eastern punks were patriotic in the sense that they wanted the freedom to be themselves, in an East Germany that recognised the right to have dissenting voices and views, to improve the experience of East German citizenship for all. But, like everyone else, they shared their country with the other by-their-own-admission patriots who believed in a completely different country. If you consider yourself a patriot, you are probably living in a country with lots of other patriots whose country has the same name as yours, but whose beliefs and ideals are not the same as yours. Those who fought and died for [name a country] in [name a war] and those who fought and died for [name an opposing country] in [the same war] were fighting for the same thing, but they were also not fighting for the same thing. The people who fought for Britain against the Nazis and the people who fought for Britain against the Zulus both were and were not fighting for the same country, though on an individual level the end result – their deaths, and the deaths of their enemies – was much the same.
Somewhere in a previous, equally muddled* article I mentioned the poet Edward Thomas. Against the WW1 poetry of super-patriot Rupert Brooke, or the “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” humanism of Wilfred Owen, you have to balance the entirely personal patriotism of Edward Thomas;

At the age of thirty-six there was no strong pressure on him to enlist, but in August 1915 he finally made up his mind… When his friend Eleanor Farjeon asked him why, he scooped up a handful of earth and said, ‘For this.’
Andrew Motion, ‘An Imaginary Life’, in Ways of Life, Faber & Faber 2008, p.102.

And no doubt that was true. But what he fought for doesn’t change the fact that what he was injured for (he survived the war, minus an arm) was the global ambitions of the small group of people then running the British Empire. In the end his patriotism and theirs amounted to the same thing; but they were not the same thing.

Thomas’s kind of patriotism is the one that I think most matches my own; despite being a lefty internationalist I am quite a patriotic person. I love Scotland and value it not because it’s the ‘greatest country in the world’ (not that I’m saying it isn’t; just that the concept itself is utterly meaningless I think) and not because it’s beautiful – which it undoubtedly is, but so is every country I’ve been to – but because it is uniquely itself. It’s the big picture and the details; the texture and the atmosphere, the things I like and the things I don’t like. What I’m really saying I suppose is just that it’s the country I know best, the one where all of my responses to the world were shaped – which is of course not something to run up a flagpole and if one somehow did there’s no reason that anyone else in the world should want to salute it. But it is patriotism nonetheless. One of the many ironies of our particularly irony-ridden times is that on the whole, the conservative/nationalist parties of whom there are suddenly it seems very many indeed, are by and large those least committed to any kind of environmental/green policies. Strange because if, like the Conservatives nominally are, you are all about pride in your culture and your country and your history, but aren’t really concerned about the welfare of the actual, physical country as a piece of land then what do you even think you stand for?

So anyway; in the world of 1988, the world of 1990 seemed unthinkable, but it happened anyway, because people wanted it. I know that as 2019 draws to an end the world is full of people, in Chile, in Hong Kong, in Iran and Sudan, in the USA and the UK; in every country, who want thoughtful, compassionate, democratic government and not repression, corruption and leaders who are quasi- or actual dictators. Who want to be represented, not ruled. And it’s not impossible.

* when I read my writing it makes me think of that episode of Peep Show where a disgruntled lapdancer says “If you can’t sum up all the aims in the first line then they’re too diffuse.” I think my writing tends to be a bit diffuse.**

**See?

Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition Part One

It’s been ages since I’ve posted a playlist, so I thought I’d change the format slightly. Background: I write about music a lot for various publications, but as a music journalist I also receive hundreds of promo type emails every week and, when something looks interesting I download it and save the release in a folder marked with the month, to be properly checked out later (sometimes much later). So I thought ‘going forward’ (I hate that phrase, what did people used to say?) that at the end of each month I’d go over the items of interest and see if they really were interesting, and write a little bit about them.

Now is as good a time as any to start, but to get it rolling I thought I might as well do a look back over the summer, which I think I did years ago on my old website. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

Going right back to the beginning of June, an album I really liked and have kept listening to is…

C Joynes & The Furlong Bray – The Borametz Tree
Thread Recordings

This vinyl-only release is the brainchild of acclaimed folk guitarist C Joynes, aided and abetted by a starry ensemble consisting of the Dead Rat Orchestra, plus fellow experimental guitarist/multi-instrumentalists Nick Jonah Davis and Cam Deas. The Borametz Tree takes its name from the fabled “Vegetable Lamb of Tartary”, a tree supposed to produce sheep as its fruit (also the title of one of the album’s best songs) and it’s a suitably exotic and otherworldly collection of tunes. Otherworldly is perhaps misleading; in fact the multi-textured music here is very much of this earth, often many different corners of it at once. The album opens with the richly reverberating “Triennale” which sets the scene with its atmospheric, droning combination of elements from different western, eastern and African folk music traditions; but which all gel beautifully to make a familiar yet alien whole. It’s incredibly elusive; the aforementioned “Vegetable Lamb…” begins sounding perhaps Scandinavian or even Scottish, but strangely could equally be Arabic; and this kind of melange characterises the whole album, somehow encompassing everything from bluegrass to the music of the steppes. Mysterious, wild and invigorating.

<a href="http://cjoynesandthefurlongbray.bandcamp.com/album/the-borametz-tree">The Borametz Tree by C Joynes & The Furlong Bray</a>

Also in June (actually 31st May)…

Cellista – Transfigurations

Transfigurations is interesting, an album distilled from a multifaceted performance art project, it’s part experimental (but relatively orthodox) songs, albeit with the cello as the central instrument, part sound-collage, part social commentary, part spoken word performance. The album kicks off with ‘Rupture 1’ (the album is punctuated by five politically-charged Ruptures) featuring an excerpt from an old news report about the Black Panthers in the May Day protests of 1969, beginning a theme of civil unrest that runs through the whole album. At various times it reminded me of the mini-album Jarboe and Helen Money made together a few years ago; kind of an obvious comparison, but to me this was more satisfying. Although less indomitable than Jarboe’s, Cellista’s vocals are more melodic and the songs (or at least the handful of more conventional ones like ‘Confessions‘ and standout, ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ featuring Dem One) are straightforwardly affecting. The actual cello playing reminded me less of Helen Money than of the fantastic Julia Kent; atmospheric and (that word again) mysterious. The album is, deliberately, very timely (Cellista explained while promoting the work that “Transfigurations is a response to the world we inhabit. It is meant to allow us all, singularly and as a community, to see the ruptures that punctuate our place in the present”), but the framing of our time (specifically 2017 in fact) as a time when always-present tensions have risen to the surface reinforce the idea that the issues of our time are the issues of all time. It’s a good album.

<a href="http://cellista.bandcamp.com/album/transfigurations-2">Transfigurations by Cellista</a>

Elsewhere in June, I quite liked…

Wasuremono – Are You OK?
The Wilderness Records

Quite liked it in small doses, at least. It’s very nice and all, but taken as a whole its slightly twee and fragile retro, sometimes synth-pop indie style made me think of Philip Larkin on The Beatles; “like certain sweets, they seem wonderful until you are suddenly sick. Up till then it’s nice, though.” Philip Larkin, All What Jazz, Faber & Faber, 1970, p. 102

<a href="http://wasuremono.bandcamp.com/album/are-you-ok-2">Are You OK? by Wasuremono</a>

Speaking of retro (and what would pop culture in 2019 be without the ghosts of the 80s and 90s hanging over it?) I quite liked K. Michelle DuBois’ “summer single” ‘Waves Break’ which sounds weirdly like Jan Hammer producing The Cure c. Japanese Whispers but with the Bangles doing the vocals. I seem to quite like K Michelle DuBois against my will; I checked out her album Harness last year, decided it sounded like the kind of music you get on Buffy style teen soaps, ie not my cup of tea, but then ended up listening to it quite a lot anyway. Not at all sure about this video though.

One of the problems with promos is they are sometimes sent out so far in advance, for understandable reasons, that you tend to listen to and then forget about them before the release date is even near. The example that led to this observation is the unpleasant but extremely powerful new album by Margaret Chardiet’s industrial project, Pharmakon. The promo has been with me since June, the album itself (Devour) is out on August 30th via the reliably great Sacred Bones Records. I’m not sure I’d say I ‘like’ Devour, but it’s a hypnotically ugly record, paradoxically chaotic and controlled, emotional and yet kind of blank and icy. More tuneful than I had expected though; if you don’t like the single ‘Self-Regulating System’ then you probably won’t like any of it.

<a href="http://pharmakon.bandcamp.com/album/devour">Devour by Pharmakon</a>

end of part one!