The Spike, Sinclair , London under the masons, Ker-punk ...

The Shard is an impacted fracture, it is a gigantic Spike, an evil last grasp/gasp of the arrogant ‘free market’ statements in glass and steel reflecting in its own vacuity and wilfully ignoring the world disintegrating around its concentration of power : a mad and vicious conceit conjured up by a starchitect ( a Mr. Piano ) given his own head on a platter, that contrives to break up at its pinnacle into aggressive glass edges that try to pierce the clouds and kill the weather.

Its ultimate point is pointless : it has no point.

Why erect another protective gigantic obelisk to contain the gibbering idiot savants glued to their screens showing non-stop fiscal pornography, computing devious zero-sum games of infinite calculated deviations from reality in virtual transactions of non-existent futures and collateralised pain ?
A razor edged beacon emitting spasms of insensate, money pumped electro-gibberish from one gang of mutually masturbatory algorithm junkies to another in a pseudo-monumental mirror glass fortress across the water.

So charming mercantile genial gentleman front the boards like decorative busts on a mantelpiece in a impeccably tasteful and restrained Georgian living room while ‘ the business’ will get done in the newest, faceless shiny beast mirror glassed tower by the hoards of anonymous free-basing brokers that take covert pleasure in breaking the few rules left to joylessly strip, rape and ferociously bugger what has been gifted them by decades of systematic, collusive, concerted and deliberately convoluted frauds.

Mr. Marcus Agius, on the board at the BBC, the BBA and Barclays ( that’s three hefty salaries for being a mute figurehead ) says ’sorry’ and let’s have another commission of enquiry. This mimics exactly the set-up that has allowed the abuse of capital and power or, capital-power as it is one thing now, to take place : a handful of over-rewarded virtually self-appointed ’guardians’ playing musical chairs and who retrospectively interpret and attempt to ’explain’ the actions of others that are lower down the food chain, as if they have been operating in a vacuum, a world without consequences.

So long as the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the politicos and attendant mass/turbatory media pander  only to to the 'squeezed middle' (?)  the underlying structure remains the same there can be a hundred committees of investigation which can make a thousand recommendations and nothing will fundamentally change.

What is being investigated ?

Was none of this activity known by anyone involved before ?

It may not have been public knowledge, but for those on the inside, of course it was. That includes the BBC which will happily turn into a comedy a government run by spin doctors, for its own ends to maintain power, referring only to occasional ’focus groups’ representing a specific section of middle class society deemed to be significant, ie the New Labour period the second after it falls but was not prepared to expose or challenge this while it was in office. Its all a closed shop.

Give me the unions any day over this infinitely disguised, comically defused, self-perpetuating facile grinning sham of a BBC-government endorsed cultural nexus continually setting up ‘opposites’ and ‘analysing ’ them, never reaching anything like a justified conclusion. Professional presentation of anything but social or economic realities, everything mediated, given a gloss, stripped of context and turned into editorialised, digestible segments. BBC Rule Number 1 : The fence is there to be sat on.

Meanwhile these editors of reality sit in Barnes or the Chilterns, or both, and live comfortably on the proceeds of continual re-presenting an illusion.

Even the so-called edgy less establishment friendly commentators are, when one digs a little deeper, still part of the same exclusive warp and weft, only available at Liberty’s. Thus Iain Sinclair, a good writer undoubtedly, is in fact ex-shire public school, not brought up in London, went to a fee-paying private film school and whose contemporaries that fancied it went straight into making films or setting up ‘influential’ art galleries ( Indica ; Dunbar et al ) largely because they had the private means to. That he had a few hands dirty real jobs is made great play of in his semi-autobiographical ramblings, but even his constantly referenced base in Hackney has been in a house purchased back in the 70’s on the proceeds of a uncompleted film for German TV.

Post-match analysis is what he is good at, and glossing up what are often at best interesting curios from the period, the weird lesser known artefacts of the mid 60’s, such as ’The Sorcerers ’ and ‘Witchfinder General’ and even more dubious products such as ’She Beast ’ which, while not  mainstream, are neither particularly admirable creations. He also, more successfully I feel, manages to dress up, or down, hard to say, a slightly halucegenic vision of, mainly, East London. This, when he gets into the meat of the tale in the late 80’s early 90’s is a consistently brilliant crossing of the wires between fiction / reality / politics / imagination that fuses and illuminates that benighted and semi-berserk period in London in concentrated observation of a specific place.

It is highly entertaining but still, in final analysis, a commentary by someone who may have at time stepped sideways outside of his gilded fraternity and stayed living ( at least for some of the time ) in the rotting core of London he describes so vividly, but remains connected to that almost inadvertently influential self selecting group of people that quite deliberately drop the badges of their background of certain public schools and Oxbridge colleges and adopt an ’ urban ’ persona quite carefully composed from a collage of real and imagined city anima, animus and detritus. That remains a fact. It does not matter if he worked in a back lot in Stratford smashing up washing machines
( best never to take anything in his books literally, except the literary stuff ) that in itself does not make you waterproof.

Sometimes I think, in my more paranoid than normal moments, that his writing is just the latest method of diverting eyes and intelligences from the real culprits, the untouchables in the City, the unseen establishment, the Masonic fraternity, those that quietly prosper under any and every government and bring it up short when they decide to, his books are noticeably easy to find in the Barbican Library which, incidentally, refuses to keep Tribune but does provide a dozen semi-pornographic fashion titles. He still errs to pantomime villains like the Krays etc. and tends to paint East London as the third circle of hell, an active malignity rather than a resilient and relatively un-hostile  place that has been dumped upon and abused both in actuality and in print for a very long time. In that he is highly conventional and part of a not particularly admirable tradition.

‘Psycho-geography’ ( his term for how he writes about things ) just might be another way to avoid the obvious : a class or group of largely parasitic and highly privileged people still control, by and large, everything of any importance that happens in London while taking the maximum amount out in terms of money and property and take none of the resulting flack. Is it all just another clever diversion ? His sometimes hyperventilating abhorrence at the expropriation of what was already theirs, the East End docks for example, could be read as almost glorifying this process from an outsider position. Does he protest too much ? It is distinctly apolitical, being concerned only with affects not so much real social effects. In fact he can be quite savage in his easy caricatures of a feckless and disgusting indigenous base section of the society he inhabits or passes through, again not unlike someone like Mayhew, who stigmatised and objectified the working class of London in books like
‘ London Underworld ‘ of 1862 purporting to be a ‘study’ while also, as it happens, being editor of Punch.

It is a delight in the ugly, the sordid, a nostalgia for mud, which is so much a part of English sub-culture and, since that has been subsumed, culture. Punk was a perfect example, being, almost from day one, a stylised and proscribed version of some sort of decadent, urban existence rather than anything that related to the actuality of that time. Its main champions, do not forget, were and still are again the public school educated, aesthetically intrigued chroniclers, Jon Savage, Julian Temple, rather than those that were creatively active participants few of which were from any urban underclass.

Punk, yes, that old chestnut, a spirited but fairly ridiculous ’revolt’ ? It is now weighed down by over significance, partly by fat books written after the event. I tend to feel that again that as it was so quickly adopted by a certain crew for their own nefarious purposes, there were glossy magazines at £2 a throw with Vivienne Westwood clothes and punk ’style’ by 1978, for it ever to be a great deal more than a change of clothes, a fashion ’statement’ rather than a significant cultural power shift. It was in any case an apolitical stance.
The numbers involved were miniscule, and in their own way, quite elitist. If you did not have the right cut of trouser and length of hair forget it.

Fashion is the handmaiden of Capitalism, assisting in making what was perfectly good two weeks ago now fit for the rubbish dump and so making it necessary to buy some new stuff. Musically, it was a fairly logical development out of some things that had been coming out of America, well, New York and Ohio, for a few years plus lashings of recent Bowie and earlier Iggy Pop.


Re-reading a book by Iain Sinclair, ‘Dining on Stones’ ,which must have been skimmed on auto-pilot previously, I am struck by how it veers into comedy much of the time. Rather than a tragic vision of the decay of a culture it retains much satire and outright comedic effect. He is almost become the Martin Amis of the East, seen through a mirror, slightly more darkly.

There is a passage, very funny, where he describes his ex-wife obsessive interest in interpreting his dreams, an enthusiasm clearly not mutual. It reminds me of a similar experience with a lover who kept one of Jung’s portentous tomes by the bedside for ready reference. He is, after all,  from the hippie epoch and, as they were, as they say, different times. There are a number of mistakes and illusions about the late 70’s and the temporary aberration known as punk. It may have made a few tabloid headlines and put a handful of people on the map, but the established, if you will, ’alternative’ culture was rooted in the 60’s and could broadly be described as of a hippie nature. People that championed punks were often hippies, Caroline Coon, Geoff Travis etc. The alternative ’structure’ of places to gig, squat, buy drugs were all those that were part of the hippie sub-system. The same people were involved, to a large extent, at the facilitation end. Where it differed was in that famous attitude, the negative stance. And this is where, going back to Mr. Sinclair’s writing, it is so clear that he never had any stake in it. There was a sort of playful aspect to hippiedom, one of the few books that attempted to give a form to what it was about beyond sheer indulgence was called ’Playpower’ by Richard x, one of the founders of Oz. Humour, not taking life and its existing structures or strictures very seriously was an important aspect of the committed hippie. It may have been seen as anti certain things, but that was almost by default from a highly relaxed attitude to life in general. And rather than being oppositional it was more open ended and fraternal, but had a few points to make.

Punk was none of these things, it was a no, to everything, including the relaxed, light touch, light headed, yes of the hippies. In its own sullen way it was serious, expressing a cartoon version of alienation, key song ’No Fun’ by Iggy and the Stooges. It was a petulant refusal to take part, on the infamous Bill Grundy TV show the assembled representatives were mute clothes hangers for the most part having to be prodded and goaded by the presenter into saying anything at all, ( methinks they had nothing they particularly wanted to say )  and eventually mouthing some not particularly convincing and completely run of the mill pub badmouthing.

There was no comic element, no use of satire, no coherent politic to punk, that was fine by me, it made for a very uncompromising and necessary break with certain musical deadweight and, briefly, woke up the hazy late hippie fraternity to another way of doing things. But as a challenge to the status quo it hardly registered. It was selfish, it was unfocused, it was negative, it was aggressive but at the level of self harm or verbal abuse and as soon as possible the leading protagonists immediately got into bed with the major music industry players negating all claims to being an authentic alternative. Instead another packaged rebellious stance was created.  Not to say there were  not some great records that came out of it, but in terms of wider impact always vastly overplayed. You only have to look at the scenario but a few years later in the early 80’s and as Dave Rimmer’s book would have it, it was ‘Like punk never happened.’ Neo-pop, deliberately banal, apolitical and sweet as honey was the new norm, given some stamp of approval by the overly influential writers like Paul Morley at the NME. But hippie, both as a fashion element, and, more importantly, a fledgling loose philosophy, had been effectively undermined. Nothing is more scorned than an ex-hippie at that point, and anyone where it went more than afgan deep was left to fend for themselves.

But hippies were right, as it turns out, about almost everything. And turning on, tuning in and dropping out is still, I suggest a far, far better thing to do than press on with the mess of a shattered illusion that passes for a culture these days. The bonds between and the collusion of interests that exist at the top level of institutional society and its cultural guardians are now so obvious, so exposed for the purpose it serves and the price it exacts and the corruption it feeds that no one in their right mind can deny that changes must happen. And, I fear that they will not unless enough people cease to be hoodwinked and endlessly distracted by the myriad distorting mirrors that are put up around every action and the obsessional concentration by big media on its games and its explosions, its official explanations, its panels of experts, its compartmentalising, its setting up of polar opposites, we will continue to head towards a well documented cultural oblivion. With apologies to Gil Scott Heron, the revolution will be televised, if it ever gets here. But do not watch, take part.