Category: 1
Good-bye to All That.
As you may have assumed already, I’m formally retiring this blog. It’s been good, helpful and cathartic to write, and my thanks to you if you’ve ever read, shared, commented or supported it.
Further updates on my writing, articles not available elsewhere, plans for future projects, and the usual enthusing over old weird history, politics and pop culture will now be available here, if you want ’em:
(“Vicisti, O aspidistra!”)
I’ve not properly been out in Soho for a while. So much of it is now being knocked down and replaced with offices and/or extortionately-priced apartments – sorry, “regenerated” – that it’s disorientating. The landmarks of my past decade here – “I’m in this pub; I’ll meet you outside so-and-so” – are vanishing. Even the handful of harmless off-licences and newsagents are closed up, shuttered and rotting. To add insult to injury, the block where Madame JoJos et al were is now scaffolded and shrinkwrapped with glossy pictures of what used to be there, the area’s legacy presented as a reason why you should patronise its upcoming unaffordable incarnation. “Here’s an appropriated snap of a legendary Soho character [who we evicted and are currently concreting over all trace of], please make a note to spend your money on this site soon.” Been coming for several years of course, but confronting it is still something.
(signed, an acutely self-aware has-been)
Aberfan.
I wouldn’t say ‘mistake’ or even ‘tragedy’ (since that seems to imply an absence of responsibility), but this is excellent: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-150d11df-c541-44a9-9332-560a19828c47
One of the most frustrating aspects of Owen Smith’s media presentation is that it’s a painfully transparent attempt to position him as representative of a particular cultural demographic – working-class regional male – which is perceived as outsider in a politics dominated by public-schoolboys and metropolitan liberal elites. And, you know, that perception isn’t incorrect – we’re highly unlikely to ever get another Aneurin Bevan. But this attempt comes across as excruciating because it’s a demographic that Smith a) doesn’t quite occupy and consequently b) ends up insulting by presenting it as characterised by unreconstructed testosterone-addled pre-60s machismo. I see this happen again and again in attempts to appeal to some… not even romanticised, but some condescending lowest-common-denominator idea of those apparently exotic unknown creatures, working-class men, and it’s both unhelpful and embarrassing.
Spoonfuls of sugar
This is old news by now of course, but one thing I found striking about Andrea Leadsom’s inane “Let’s banish pessimism!” line was how worryingly neatly it tied into the amount of magical thinking there was around the referendum. I am now seeing a notable amount of responses from Leave voters – exclusively on the right, NB – along the barely paraphrased lines of “accept you lost, stop sulking, start talking up this great country of ours unless you want to drive us into recession”.
This is how (one aspect of all) this is going to play out, isn’t it? Rather than accept that there were justified economic and social anxieties around leaving, when things go down the pan post-Brexit it’s going to be rationalised as the fault of opponents of Leave for not throwing themselves into national promotion wholeheartedly enough. This will be spun as an opportunity that could have been amazing if only ~self-loathing elitist refuseniks~ had had a bit more gumption and been a bit more forward-thinking.
So, we reach one logical conclusion of the 90s focus on individual drive, rather than anything political or economic, as the root cause of one’s personal circumstances. As well as a response to a thirty-year slide into the abyss that now seems unfixable other than by, you know, really wishing really hard.
Obviously I’m pleased for the residents of New Era estate that this has happened, but it’s unsettling to see yet another instance of socio-economic injustice resolved by the intervention of what is essentially paternalist philanthropy. As if politicians are wholly powerless to impose a rent cap on landlords or to commission the building of affordable housing, rather than just being disinclined to do so. See also food banks run by charities and churches as a response to impoverishment, rather than eg a living wage.
Still, Merry Christmas, eh.
#mediapovertywelfare
This is a recording of the big meeting I took part in this month in Manchester on how current media and politics are warping ideas around welfare. More of the debate is here.
You never were an Isolationist;
Injustice you had always hatred for,
And we can hardly blame you, if you missed
Injustice just outside your lordship’s door:
Nearer than Greece were cotton and the poor.
Today you might have seen them, might indeed
Have walked in the United Front with Gide,
Against the ogre, dragon, what you will;
His many shapes and names all turn us pale,
For he’s immortal, and today he still
Swinges the horror of his scaly tail.
Sometimes he seems to sleep, but will not fail
In every age to rear up to defend
Each dying force of history to the end.
Milton beheld him on the English throne,
And Bunyan sitting in the Papal chair;
The hermits fought him in their caves alone,
At the first Empire he was also there,
Dangling his Pax Romana in the air:
He comes in dreams at puberty to man,
To scare him back to childhood if he can.
Banker or landlord, booking-clerk or Pope,
Whenever he’s lost faith in choice and thought,
When a man sees the future without hope,
Whenever he endorses Hobbes’ report
‘The life of man is nasty, brutish, short,’
The dragon rises from his garden border
And promises to set up law and order.
Yeah. Here’s what I thought, a while back, about Russell Brand. The thing about this meme – not that it’s not funny – but if you’d asked me, twenty years ago, on the verge of Britpop Going Wrong, for my vision of the future… well, it might have involved anyone’s attempt to intervene in a destructive national political discourse being drowned out by repeated chants of PARKLIFE, forever. Ah well.
Updates and links of mine, past and future.
– Recently I wrote a short review of the film Pride.
– I also wrote a long review of Agata Pyzik’s book Poor But Sexy. NB As a child of the nineteen-eighties, way before online discussions on how to be a fan of problematic things, I remember being starry-eyed about the Soviet Union = how I do confessional journalism.
– In Cardiff this Saturday, I’m doing a talk with, among others, Craig Austin, the author of this excellent article on the decline and fall of political pop. Get your tickets free at this link.
– And on Thursday 6th November I’m speaking in Manchester on “Poverty Porn and the Welfare State”, on the impact of media portrayals of poverty on government policy and public attitudes towards welfare. More info and event programme here.
Velvet Coalmine, the festival: in Blackwood, 4-6 September
The first Velvet Coalmine Festival, featuring the best of Valleys music, art and literature, will be happening next weekend. Like Camden Crawl, but with more coal.
Among loads of other acts, I will be talking to the excellent Rachel Tresize about the ins and outs of having been a female Manics fan.
“Velvet Coalmine aims to create a platform for music, writing and ideas in the Blackwood area that allows our voice to be heard and celebrated. It allows our stories to be told and communicated to the wider world without censorship and our cultural heritage and identity to be expressed on its own terms without interference, without suppression and without agenda. The history of the Valleys is littered with exploitation, neglect and indifference but has proved a birthplace to a myriad of thinkers and pursuers of social justice and in an era when Old Etonian privilege continues to shape and influence decision-making and politics in the UK, creating an arts festival influenced by the radicalism of the 1984-85 miner’s strike and the Centenary of the Senghenydd mining disaster feels both timely and appropriate.”
Full listings and contact details can be found here on the website. Come on down.
Things that shouldn’t need saying, slight return.
Here is Dawn Foster’s excellent piece on the idiocy of insisting that feminism must be dumbed down for the supposed benefit of its potential adherents among the working – for which read ‘thick and theoryless’ – classes. Something implicit in Foster’s argument, which would benefit from being more frequently and explicitly stated in wider debate, is the corrective it provides to current presentations of class vs identity politics as a zero-sum game.
As I wrote the last time Coslett and co. trotted out this line, a) being ‘ordinary’ doesn’t mean being stupid, and b) the problems of the ‘ordinary’ working class are inherently intersectional. As Foster describes, grassroots organisations and actions, from Women Against Pit Closures to Southall Black Sisters, are informed by awareness of how gender and/or race impacts on class, and how class impacts on race and/or gender. This is intersectionality experienced and practiced as a day-to-day reality, enforced by existing structures of power – not a distant and alien theory into which one chooses to opt. It offers a real-life, instinctive and logical practical application of the ideas and concepts that, apparently, are so complex as to be beyond the intellectual grasp of The Likes Of Them. This shit isn’t difficult, and it shouldn’t be presented as such.
Cameron’s “just put on another jumper” is of course the new “get on your bike and look for work”.
On Brand.
Here we go again. Yes, the performance on primetime of fierce and unapologetic left-wing populism is both a relief and a cause for celebration (more because the media as well as politics itself has grown so defanged, timid and prone to paranoid self-policing over the past few decades, with those who vocally deviate from helpless/complacent acceptance or active reinforcement of a neoliberal consensus becoming such a rarity, than because Brand was all that small-r revolutionary in and of himself). No, the conversation doesn’t and shouldn’t end there.
It is not moralistic, irrelevant, or distracting to bring up Brand’s – to understate – frustrating attitude to women when evaluating his political intervention. It is in fact far more unhelpful to insist, in response to this criticism, that Brand’s class identity somehow gives him a pass on this stuff, as though attention to issues of liberation other than the economic is just too much to ask or expect of a working-class male, even one so clearly capable as Brand of holding more than one thought in his head at the same time. Yet again, well-meaning but paternalistic and patronizing ideas are pushed of what it is to be ‘working class’ – in this case, the idea that working-class men cannot be expected to recognise or interrogate their own chauvinism or that of others, or that their doing so is somehow unnecessary.
Moreover, to caricature any discomfort with Brand’s sexual politics as the preserve of joyless derailing middle-class Puritans, who simply cannot handle all this earthy proletarian jouissance, is to implicitly erase even the concept of women as part of the working class, let alone any concerns they may wish to raise. Much current backlash against identity politics is too often suffused with an unedifying and regressive glee at throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and does no one any favours. Equally, surely it’s common sense that oppression on the grounds of gender, race, disability or sexuality is fundamentally exacerbated or ameliorated by material inequality. These identities are mutually reinforcing and cumulative, not zero-sum.
I mean, we’ve been here only recently, and we’ve been here repeatedly before that. Expressing unease at an aspect of Brand’s politics shouldn’t be about imposing some absolutist hierarchy of oppressions – it is merely an obvious and necessary balancing act, a demand for more than the absolute basics from those lauded as representatives of the left, and a resistance to the imposition of restrictive ideas about class.
Is that the end of the conversation? No. What the conversation should have been about in the first place is resistance to the fact that we are being asked to accept, as ‘recovery’ and ‘return to normal’, an austerity-driven strategy of enforced impoverishment – stagnant wages that fail to keep pace with exorbitant costs of living, an explosion in the use of food banks and a breathtaking rolling back of employment rights. Opposing this does mean concentrating on material issues and class politics. Let’s just not be dicks about it.
Things I’ve written elsewhere:
- For the Wales Arts Review, What Riot Grrrl Did and Didn’t Do For Me: on female artistic expression, theory vs practice, post-punk, class and feminism, the 90s, adolescence, and Courtney Love, I think that’s everything.
- For Planet on the centenary of the Senghenydd colliery disaster, a piece about the issues it continues to raise around Welsh identity and the history of working-class exploitation and resistance.
Handbags and gladrags
The 2013 London Welsh Literature Festival: now with over twice the escapist proletarian glam aesthetic of other leading brands.
Beneath the paving stone, the plug.
Welsh edition:
1. I wrote this piece for the Wales Arts Review on Welsh history, politics and identity. Yes, again.
2. In the next issue of Planet: the Welsh Internationalist, I have written on the relationship between Welsh artists and London in the very poor disguise of an album review.
3. If you’re at this year’s Green Man, I will be there to speak to ex-Kenickie members Emma Jackson and Marie Nixon on music, gender, class, the 90s, you know the drill. My life as outtake from Phonogram continues. I shall endeavour not to use the term “escapist proletarian-glam aesthetic” more than once but can’t promise anything.
Plus:
I wrote this for the summer issue of Strike! on why hipsters, shit as they and their gentrifying camp-followers may be, are nevertheless more symptom than cause.
Seizing the Dydd.
The Wales Arts Review takes an interesting and optimistic shot at galvanizing the cultural future of the country. I found it sobering to contrast this overview, which looks forward from within, with the hellishly depressing one contained in another recent article called ‘The unbearable sadness of the Welsh valleys’. This does exactly what it says on the tin: an external observer tracks the Valleys’ economic decline, and its social and cultural impact, in what sometimes reads like a negative version of the Victorian travelogues which eulogised the beauties of the Welsh landscape (and largely overlooked their quaint but inconvenient inhabitants).
Without wishing to damn with faint praise, I’ll take that second article over MTV’s The Valleys, although its paternalist hand-wringing and lack of solutions make about as much constructive contribution. As I concluded after my own incoherent trawl through my fatherland’s history and identity, focusing on an oversimplified, often romanticised past, however grievous and traumatic its loss, produces only stasis and resentment. We need to move past this, even at the risk of losing what little identity we have (and it’s currently an overwhelmingly negative one, at best pitiful and at worst exploitative and sensationalist). This needn’t automatically mean considering oneself part of, as the Wales Arts Review‘s very good article has it, ‘a generation unscarred by the battles of the past’ – any product of the south Welsh coalfield, as of other parts of post-industrial Britain, is thoroughly scarred by the battles of the past and knows themselves to be. But it does mean that these scars needn’t be one’s defining feature, in one’s own view or that of outside observers.
The problem is, of course, that it’s one thing to move forward in terms of arts and culture, but socio-economically speaking it’s quite another.
.
“Sociologists who have stopped the time-machine and, with a good deal of conceptual huffing and puffing, have gone down to the engine room to look, tell us that nowhere at all have they been able to locate and classify a class. They can only find a multitude of people with different occupations, incomes, status-hierarchies, and the rest. Of course they are right, since class is not this or that part of the machine, but the way the machine works once it is set in motion – not this and that interest, but the friction of interests – the movement itself, the heat, the thundering noise. Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time – that is, action and reaction, change and conflict.When we speak of a class we are thinking of a very loosely defined body of people who share the same congeries of interests, social experiences, traditions and value-system, who have a disposition to behave as a class, to define themselves in their actions and in their consciousness in relation to other groups of people in class ways. But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”
– E P Thompson
Late.
Nothing and should be everything.
I find this article as a whole too blustery and otherwise wrong-headed to actually like, but the following snippet does a useful job of prising open the discourse around ‘scroungers’ versus The Respectable Poor, in picking up on the kind of reactions which need to be progressively engaged with and challenged from a position of understanding rather than superior, usually class-inflected dismissal, both here and, it seems, in the US. NB I don’t, obviously, think that the problems here expressed began with an article in Salon.
“Before that article in Salon, this mother was allowed to believe that her staying off the dole had some honor in itself– some validation of her identity– and it allowed her to survive her hardships. Now she is forced to swallow that these people are not merely as good as her, but more valuable– they get an article, they get defenders like you, they are praised for their intrinsic human value, and all she gets is mocked, belittled, “she’s too stupid to know what’s good for her!”– all she can do is comment on their life– and her small act of rebellion is to at least use the space to tell the world she exists. Rage is her defense that keeps her intact while the world seemingly ignores her.”
(Yeah, this is how I like to spend my Saturday afternoons.)
Retromania
In regard to the poor-rates, I always view these as coupled with the idleness and depravity of the working classes… the morals as well as the manners of the lower orders of the community have been degenerating since the earliest ages of the French Revolution. The doctrine of equality and the rights of man is not yet forgotten, but fondly cherished and reluctantly abandoned. They consider their respective parishes as their right and inheritance, in which they are entitled to resort…
– Complaint of Dr M. Macqueen to the Board of Agriculture, 1816.
*
Condescension of posterity.
In a sense, this was a transitional mob, on its way to becoming a self-conscious Radical crowd; the leaven of Dissent and political education was at work, giving to the people a predisposition to turn out in defence of popular liberties, in defiance of authority, and in ‘movements of social protest, in which the underlying conflict of poor against rich… is clearly visible’ […] For nearly a decade London and the south seemed (in the words of one critic) to be ‘a great Bedlam under the dominion of a beggarly, idle and intoxicated mob without keepers…’
E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p.75
On liking American Psycho, slight return.
The last time I wrote that yes, I did like American Psycho, and no, that wasn’t because I’d only seen the film, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that other women felt similarly, but I’m aware that we’re still a minority. American Psycho proved controversial even before its release, its unedited manuscript pushed from publisher to publisher, leaked extracts from it incurring public outrage, and its eventual appearance leapt upon by critics with the single-minded speed of a rat up a Habitrail tube. In terms of people judging the book without having read it, not a great deal seems to have changed. Continue reading
A quick request (re. images of women in post-punk).
So: I’ve written a chapter on female post-punk musicians* for a forthcoming women-in-music book. I mostly talk about the Slits, the Raincoats, Linder Sterling, Lydia Lunch (unavoidably), ESG, the Au Pairs, Delta 5, Pauline Black, Barbara Ess, Ut., Mars, the Bush Tetras, the Bloods, Malaria!, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and latterly Erase Errata, Sonic Youth, Scissor Girls, Karen O, Nisennenmondai etc.
Now: I didn’t include any illustrations with the writing, because my grasp of decent visual art is comparable to Boris Johnson’s grasp of his handlebars after a heavy night out. But apparently it would be nice to have some.
Therefore: I’m looking for suitable images – photographs, illustrations, cartoons – for inclusion in the chapter. Anything relevant considered especially if it pertains to the bands mentioned. Full credit given, further details on request, please pass this on if you can think of anyone who’d care. Thank you.
Also: it is my birthday. I’m going to celebrate with fresh air and daylight.
Retromania
*
*
*
Housekeeping: do or don’t adjust your set.
If you look to the right there, you’ll see that I have made my Twitter account non-public, for no more intriguing reason than that I also work full-time in a job that isn’t this blog. If you really want to follow my account, for every scintillating signifier of my slow descent from the noble ranks of the expatriate Welsh scholar-proletariat to the hopeless impoverished morass of the North London hack-secretariat, if you really want to be notified of which Dexys Midnight Runners song I currently wish was soundtracking the film I wish my life was, if you really can’t live without reading another retweet of @BretEastonEllis’ most recent sardonically dickish pronouncement, then by all means get your own account and follow mine, I can’t think why I’d deny you the pleasure.
FLOOD THEATRE: aprés-moi, le deluge.
Laughter in dark times becomes necessary, providing both critique and consolation. And the nights are certainly drawing in. I mean, look at all this. Or, on what seems by comparison a light note, this surreal attempt to humanise the employees of an organisation geared solely towards turning a profit by trading in hatred and tits.
Satire has never seemed so conspicuous by its absence. It is one thing to see corruption, incompetence and venality occasionally exposed; it is quite another to see so many practitioners of corruption, incompetence and venality incessantly expose themselves with the bafflingly brazen insouciance of compulsive flashers drunk in a town park. So the news has turned horribly, endlessly funny – far funnier than any current attempt to dissect or diagnose its disgustingness. Look at this, or this, or the point at which the dark arts of spin, the erosion of journalistic enquiry, and the vacuum at the heart of the Labour Party coalesced to form a revelatory moment of pantomime androidry – and how quaint, how nearly comforting, how spot-on then but now unremarkable those past satirical visions seem, eh?
The lunatic reality of contemporary politics is galloping ahead of satire by significant furlongs, and few seem capable of or even interested in catching up. Which is where Flood Theatre come in.
Flood takes all the above into account, and styles itself ‘the new comedy for the new politics’. In soundscapes and sketches drawn with a dramatic flair for language and a fine sense of the absurd, it outlines our rats’ nest of politics, media and society with unflinching precision.
There’s a long and noble history of art that takes life in all its grim, bleak splendour and manages to wring out disbelieving laughter. There’s been Chris Morris, there is Stewart Lee, and, soon, there will be Flood.
Flood perform at the Edinburgh Fringe, August 5th-27th. Book now.
Oh bondage, no more.
Jesus, it’s been a bad week. 53 is no age.
This is my favourite X-Ray Spex song:
2010 in clicks.
I received some relatively pointless stats from WordPress this morning, but perhaps it’s worth recording the most-viewed posts here:
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
What Carlos Did Next: Carl Barat and Sadie Frost in Fool For Love February 2010
3 comments
Handbags and Gladrags: the glittery genius of Kenickie March 2010
10 comments
I Love You But You’re Wood Green: Carl Barat at the Big Green Bookshop October 2010
3 comments
If the Beatles had read Blake: a word on the Libertines August 2010
About March 2009
1 comment
In the coming year I’d like to write more on women in music, both as artists and as fans; on punk as a revolutionary cultural moment; and on the near-certain death of the record industry in the age of the one-click download. I’d also like to write, but probably won’t, a retrospective on post-Libertines London bands entitled ‘The Good, the Bad, and Thee Unstrung’.
Is there anything you’d like to see more of on this blog, or, for that matter, less of?
Velvet Coalmine 