A broken bottle of grief.

Five or so on the clock. Radio off. Leftovers, the sound of car tyres on tarmac, and planes distantly roaring , imperceptible diffusions and sullen confusions of interposed space, contracted time. Distance lends disenchantment. Concealed, revealed, perfect in every detail. Total forgetfulness. The resemblance to the truth. False premises, public property, private eyes, privatise, publicise, hung, drawn and quartered.
Acutely aware, vaguely unsure, ignorance rather than bliss. The numb skull. Always the less, a figure of speech, a figure of fun, a horse on the beach, a kingdom to come.

Immaculately saturated fat of the land with or without sugar and pills, I see the condominiums of futures past : the glass looks out into glass that reflects itself and nothing, repeating itself endlessly, seamlessly, meaninglessly, mirrors of emptiness, mirrors of illusion, conflicting and confusing the sky and abstracting the ground, a contraction of vision, a void made external, a blank presence, a blank present, an eternal neutered now. Between a sea and a ( s ) hard place, in permanent stasis.

This de-structured quasi-terminal conductor/ inductor, an electrode implanted in the brain of the city, a broken bottle of grief, a negative energy accumulator, a hermetic solenoid, sealed stalagmite, an negative pole, vertical incision, glassy missile stuck on launch pad, a threat or target, ground zero hour, no lift-off, a dead shaft, waiting for ignition, with no mission, no control, counter-productive, inverse engineered, an erect hypodermic anaesthetising the atmosphere and piercing the sky. Scattering violated clouds, reflections of delusions, belittling and deflecting, a dividing needle, an instrument of torture, an optical isomer enervating and emanating distorted waves of static, a wilful insertion of malign focus and concentrated powers.

The opposite of a radio tower sucking in energy and crystallising distance, confirming and imposing separation, silencing voices, blinding visions.

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.  

REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERNET

A Mr. T S Eliot once said :

‘Where is the wisdom that was lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge that was lost in information ?

Indeed, and that was well before the ‘www’ came along.

Just the word ‘reflections’ seems to clash with the term internet. But this is an attempt to reflect on this ever growing and all consuming internet thing. Despite carefully avoiding its use for a considerable time, only being hooked up in 2005, once having got it on tap it certainly changes things. My use of the internet has never been consistent and remains something that I try and keep under continual critical review.

There is no question that it has its uses and advantages. However there is a definite downside and its hard to put ones finger on it, but its to do with the way it tends to render all other forms of communication diminished and demands almost continual attention. I have a particular dislike, (perhaps more to do with the nature of computers), of the way in which everything that is  accessed through the internet and equally material that is not but comes from the real world but has been turned into a digital form, is undifferentiated and becomes part of a huge, homogonous digital soup.

To clarify, there is a line that someone came up with to define surrealism. It goes like this : ‘ it is the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table.’ Noting the fact that the use of a sewing machine as an example sounds curiously dated now, the point is that the surrealists were deliberately trying to subvert normally understood relations between objects by bringing together items that would not usually be found in conjunction. I find with using the internet and a computer to store facsimiles of things that it is almost continually creating just such ’surreal’ relations and it is only with prior knowledge of what exists in the real world and a conscious application of distinctions that the values and meaning of things is retained.

In the same way that TV could be said to kill the life outside it, so the internet could be said to be doing something similar to creative thought. It is unavoidable that completely unrelated pieces of information are brought into proximity by virtue of this black hole called the internet that is sucking in everything : and thus much completely meaningless and possibly damaging material is mixed up with unconnected but meaningful thoughts and images to no definable purpose.

This term ‘information’ itself I have a problem with as there is clearly a qualitative difference between a train timetable, which is information, in any form, and a work of art, which is not, yet they are both ’pieces of information’ once digitalised.

It is noted that one of the biggest internet archival projects is based around recordings of the Grateful Dead, that is any and every recording they can find, no mater of what quality or interest. This is documentation for its own sake. And ultimately all archived material is dead material whether stored digitally or in its original form.  

I do not know quite why but when an anti-virus programme is put next to a photograph taken some years ago that is both familiar and has retained a meaning and then this is put next to something downloaded for a specific purpose, say an image of a recent event, as if they all are part of a sequence, which is all they are for the computer, it makes me uneasy. Perhaps it is my lack of prowess but it would seem to me that even a computer could distinguish between such things and put them in different boxes immediately.

Now this purely time based version of any input is applied to all social media, as far as I am aware, a strictly linear version of ‘events.’ Yet posting a YouTube recording of a song that one happens to listen to and decides to ’share’ is not an event, in my book. Sometimes I think it would be far better if all such actions, which are more like photographs of fleeting thoughts much of the time, were not kept on the record, as it were, but disappeared after say, twenty minutes. Again it is the inability of the device to distinguish between a pop song that you happen to like and the announcement of World War 3 that is disconcerting. And the reduction of it all to a chronological timeframe, that only actually exists in this neat ordered form on ones computer.

There is a strange intimacy, a false intimacy of course, between computer user and computer. The continual requests for reaction that the computer requires, like an infant seeking attention, the stream of messages and suggestions that appear unbidden. It is promiscuous by nature, or rather, by science.

Various devices like Twitter and so on mimic conversation, but in a superficial way, who is one actually speaking to and why ? Is it all perhaps just the flip side of a society which is both highly individualistic, self-interested and privatised in all practical senses but then when 'on line' and behind the safety of a screen one can be ‘open’ and ‘communal.’

The number of times I have gone into a local pub and seen half or more of the people studying their mobile phones and thus partly insulated from communication even by gesture let alone by conversation as they are involved with some remote activity.

One thing that is very much apparent is that use is different in private or public settings. I can only speak of my own use, but would imagine some sort of difference obtains for most. First, there is something that just feels completely different using the intetnet in public. It alienates you from your surroundings, and, as with mobile phone calls, it is conducting what is usually a personal matter in public. This is most apparent if the computer malfunctions. In such a circumstance just being sat next to a complete stranger staring at this uncooperative machine trying to do something that used to be done by more straightforward methods not involving a vast and complicated telecommunications and computerised information system seems close to absurd. The time factor enters in, the clock ticking against you, in a public facility, the sense of being ’cut-off’ if the machine is slow or inoperative. Outside it is either raining or it is not, whatever is indicated on the screen. There may be an irritating person next to you surfing aimlessly, the virtual has impinged upon the actual.

The very fact that programmes appear unbidden which allow almost infinite manipulation of images, and others that allow similar manipulation of sound is somehow worrying. It means that nothing is ever free from being changed, for better or worse. The only way it can be free of this is by remaining outside of the digital maelstrom. Maybe this is the requirement of any truly new proposal, that it shall not or rather cannot be digitalised. It is, after all, only a mechanism, and as with all mechanisms it will have a period when it seems to be sweeping all before it and becoming the only way to do things, but limits will be reached, defects and undesirable side effects will become evident. I was always suspicious, and yet have come to some accommodation but remain unconvinced that there is essential or special value and absolute necessity in this thing called the internet, no matter how much it has wormed its way into our society.

And always remember : Garbage in, garbage out.

Images : top : Portrait of T S Eliot by Wyndham Lewis 

Painting and Price

The recent sale of a painting by Mark Rothko for a large sum of money led to a flurry of articles about the prices of abstract expressionist and pop art from the period most associated, the 1960’s. I do not want to talk about these admittedly huge prices. The works stand or fall on their merit as art not their price. Rothko’s painting has always had a strong effect and still seems to stand out from much of the work of contemporaries. I saw an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 at about sixteen and it made a strong impression. A poster reproduction of one of series in the Tate was bought around the same time and a constant feature on the wall through the coming years. 

Having said that abstract expressionism is associated with the 1960’s I note that Rothko was actually painting his early abstracts in the late Forties and most seem to date from the 50’s and early 60‘s. It was only in the 60’s when the work started to sell that he and other abstract expressionists begun to get a good deal of public attention, much of it negative. 

He was born in 1903 so the attention and material success came late. Given that he was painting abstracts in the late forties it was clearly not a matter of taking up a current style but a long process of gestation and refinement. Integrity and honesty suffuses the paintings which have a quiet power that has absolutely nothing to do with the deliberate breaking of conventions and does not rely on some intellectual concept : they just work as paintings, pure and simple but at the same time involving, concentrated and above all human. There is also considerable technique which is almost invisible due to being so well integrated into the work. Colour use is superb and works on the senses in a way that is close to the subtlety of great music. 

Yet it is always the price paid at auction that gains the headlines for modern art, although remember that much of this work is now more than 60 years old, it might be more fruitful to ignore the prices and simply look at such as Rothko’s paintings because they are simply very good and reward attention in ways that sadly much that has been produced and hyped up in the market in the last twenty years does not.

SWIMMING TO BARNES

The interruption of the boat race and subsequent statement by the protagonist prompted this reflection on the area which it arcs around, Barnes. Many walks have been taken along this curvature of the river. It is remarkably free of buildings for the most part and encloses the mysterious other world of Barnes. Although just across the river from the busy and undoubtedly urban Hammersmith, in a curious reversal of what was until relatively recently the far more industrialised south bank of the Thames, Barnes is determinedly suburban and almost rural, with large areas given over to a Common. But as so often in this city and this country all is not as it seems. 

I do not claim to know a great deal about the area, but know it well enough from attempts to traverse it that it is a very curious mixture of private and public spaces, and a bastion of the establishment, albeit in a most discrete and understated manner. This is in fact a hallmark of the way the status quo is maintained and made to appear perfectly ’natural’ in this country, as if it were simply a given, like a part of the landscape. It is a fallacy. It is very rigidly controlled and maintains and duplicates itself by the most apparently harmless but in fact in highly proscribed and exclusive system of ownerships and concessions.

In and close to Barnes are numerous extensive areas that have been annexed as sports grounds. Barn Elms is one, a large fenced off area, a former polo ground, that is now private playing fields with a couple of rugby clubs. 

Cross the Barnes railway bridge to where the Oxford and Cambridge boathouse are located are yet more strangely empty acres of  ‘sports grounds’ Duke’s Meadow, formerly the Ibis Sports Ground, and the Bank of England’s very own playing fields. Most of these areas are inaccessible to the public, despite being large open green spaces that front the river. I have just found another tucked in behind the road which follows the curve of the river but is set back from it which appears to have been the Harrodian Club sports ground. Golf courses are another excellent wheeze to keep the public off of land and indeed there was one in Barnes, alongside the small tributary Beverly Brook which, although now public, retains a semi-private inaccessibility, as does the whole of this small river. The footpaths end abruptly and places to cross this small stream are hard to find. Then there is the dominant presence of St. Paul’s public school and the many acres of playing fields that it owns.

That the whole area that the boatrace imposes itself upon is largely the preserve of the elite who have been to schools like St. Paul’s is just what was wilfully avoided and not addressed by the reactions in mainstream media to what I believe the swimmer was trying to highlight, not just the boatrace itself. Why does the BBC ritually broadcast every detail in a technically difficult and no doubt expensive live programme which now includes hours of irrelevant and fatuous fawning over the crews, mostly extremely dull Americans on well paid athletic scolarships ? Because it confirms the dominant classes position as unquestionable, just be content as viewers of this spectacle with being able to watch their meaningless contest as to yearly bragging rights. As for the river being plastered with advertisements and the protagonists who willingly chose to take part being feted as courageous heroes, that’s ugly and ridiculous, respectively. 

  

The anodyne ‘debate’ on the supposedly satirical programme ‘The 10 O Clock Show’ completely failed to grasp or critique the public school system and the point that was made about all our leading politicians coming from this background linked directly to the Oxford and Cambridge nexus / mafia. The boatrace is just one small example of how  extensive and entrenched the ownership of much of this part of London and its river is with a very small elite sub-section of society. 

Just to set the record straight the wilfully misnamed ‘public’ schools are private schools and run as businesses. In their early days there may have been some excuse for them being titled ‘public’ as there were no other schools at all. They have been for centuries been fee charging and thus exclusively the domain of the relatively rich. They own much land, not only their sites but also own estates in inner London, much of Maida Vale is owned by Eton for one example, and elsewhere. That they remain as charities and thus exempt of tax is an obvious absurdity and that clear lie can only be sustained by the influence they have consistently held in government. This comes about through the circle that still exists whereby the children of the well off middle or upper class are sent to schools such as St. Paul’s, Eton and so on, by parents that often also went to the same place, and then get choices and assistance to enter into the self-contained and interconnected world of academic, business or indeed sporting elites. Once entered into this world, one predicated on having sufficient funds above all, there is a fast inside track that is very well laid and established for going onto the best universities ( best in terms of the perceived value of their degrees, self justified by repetition and accepted as a given that Oxford and Cambridge are the best by those that went there ) being introduced to others from the same background in one’s field of interest, be that politics, business or even if you are one of those odd ones who prefers something in the arts. 

Thus despite some protestations to the contrary and some obvious examples of those that do not hail from this system, deliberately highlighted to deflect attention eg Alan Sugar, the great majority of those that are in positions of power in almost every area of life in this country are a product of this closed cycle. That is not to say they are all exactly the same nor that they cannot ‘do a good job.’ This is to say that as a self justifying and self selecting elitist system it remains fundamentally unchanged and as firmly established as it ever was. In fact I suggest it is less challenged than in the past. Incredibly it seems almost more fully accepted or perhaps more expertly obscured than ever. 

Back to Barnes. It has a relaxed atmosphere that in this country is almost  always a sign of there being no shortage of money about. It has ‘village’ pond and High Street with small local shops for local people. There is a butchers, a bakers, a cheese shop etc. Again these are becoming signs of high affluence rather than a normal shopping street these days. There are vast areas given over to rugby pitches, quite who owns this land is not clear. Some must belong to the school, some may be the Local Authority. What is particularly striking is that in any other part of London it would have been built on. 

At the risk of sounding like an estate agent there are excellent public transport facilities with two train stations going into the centre of London. The housing is almost entirely two storey dwellings with front and back gardens, the most land usage with the lowest density of occupation. The overall quality of the environment with the one exception of a degree of plane noise, is just about the very best that can be had while living in London. 

And who are the people that live here ? Its safe to assume that a large percentage are from exactly that circle described earlier, it is one of their homing grounds, like the ducks and geese that are so well provided for at the Wetlands Centre. This extraordinary thing is slap bang in the middle of the area, again neatly preventing any further building, on the site of former reservoirs, and is now completely fenced off and charges a considerable sum to go in and look at the birds. Again I cannot imagine this happening in any other part of London with the pressures on space and land values. It is not necessarily a bad idea, but it is simply not operating in the same world that I have to live in. How is it that the burgers of Barnes can hold off the forces of development that prevail in 99% of the rest of the city and retain their precious peace and excess of amenity ? It cannot be by chance. No, of course not, it is by influence. It is the physical manifestation of the invisible links between the elite that have been natured here and occupy the corridors of power in government, the boardrooms in the city and the offices of the Crown. 

There is even the jazz venue, since jazz became a predilection of certain Oxbridge undergraduates in the 1950’s it sneaked into unlikely places such as Barnes, not exactly an obviously Bohemian location, and the august portals of BBC Radio 3 which remains immune to pretty much any other music of the Twentieth century without classical credentials. 

I am glad that it is a relative oasis set in the otherwise heavily congested and unrelentingly built up area of south west London, there are no actual gates to prevent access, but it is a product and a domain that has been created by and is largely peopled by a privileged few. 

The way that part of the river is co-opted by rowers, not just on boatrace day, but all the year round by the many public schools which have their boathouses along Putney Embankment and often spoil a peaceful stroll along the tow path by driving their charges along by bellowing into a loudhailer from a motorised dinghy, is a clear indication of who really ’naturally’ belongs here and who will use it as they wish, not for the broadest benefit. The embankment where the boathouses cluster is compromised by their slipways which cause the road to flood at any particularly high tide. However the houses along there are set high and are well enough back for this not to be a problem, for them. It is if you happen to want to walk along the road ( there is no defined footway ) on such an occasion, as are the boats and their racks and stands which get set up on and are traversed across the road by crews of future cabinet members and ‘captains of industry’ with impunity. Try doing that on any other stretch of public, sorry, Queen’s highway in London and see what happens. Even the embankment railings are painted in light and dark blue.  

The conservatories attached to some of these enormous houses are bigger than many a typical London house. Of course the people that live in them are not the sort that throw stones. Others that may see a minor disruption to a boatrace which is undoubtedly symbolically elitist by a lone swimmer as too much like performance art could be of a different mind, given the way things are panning out.

Painting :   Hammersmith Bridge on boat race day by Walter Greaves @1860

OLYMPIC CLAMPDOWN

WHITE HEAT - MEDIUM COOL

So, the BBC is finally putting out a drama set in the moderately recent past, not in the 19th Century and not set entirely in a definitively middle class nor conscribed working class compartment. I am referring to ’White Heat’ which has not yet completed but already stands out amongst all the hours of dross about cooking, food and ’nature’ programmes that manage to completely avoid anything that could be construed as political content.

 It is ‘well produced’ it is not a comedy, thank God, and it touches upon some significant matters over a period that is still not properly documented or understood, especially by those that did not live through it. These are all points in its favour. Yet from the very outset it smacks of being written by committee. There is the frankly unbelievably contrived set up, a shared house with exactly one ’ordinary bloke’, one art student, one nice, intelligent middle class girl, one gay bloke, one black bloke, one Irish Catholic and the one very left wing one. This is all very well, but it is just too much to concede that such a perfect cross-section would exist. The minority report. Let it pass.

The look and feel of it is well neigh perfect, rather too perfect, the clothes all change at each calendar year and each character changes at the same time and never goes ahead or lags behind the fashions. This too is not a big problem, but manages to impart a certain fastidious detail which gives a visual authenticity which does not necessarily translate into social or economic veracity. The nice, intelligent girl works for the BBC, surprise, surprise, and in a significant move, the very left wing one has a rich Dad with a mansion and a private income. He is also ‘not very nice.’ Thus his politics are contrasted with his personal behaviour and the suggestion that Margaret Thatcher and her cronies may have been up to no good rendered a suspect judgement. The black character is almost too good to be true and arrested every time he goes out of the house, despite dressing in a suit and tie. He does not smoke and drinks responsibly. The Irish girl is naïve and acts as a sort of mother to the rest. In a particularly extreme attempt to pack a bit of everything in her younger brother appears briefly and is then killed by the IRA.

Another of the housemates, the pretty art student, is injured in an IRA blast in London, and falls into the arms of ’ordinary bloke.’ I should think the odds of this all happening to a small group of people living together in London in the Seventies is astronomically high, and it adds to a sense that in a veiled way, this is attempting to present a version of events rather than a coherent story. It is both trying to cram too much ‘fact’ in and then becoming rather unconvincing. Historical narrative or hysterical narrative ?

As is usual in these things no one is ever really short of money, there is always enough to go to the pub and most seem to have cars. In my memory almost no one who was a student from an ‘ordinary’ background had a car in those days. Even a phone was not always available in a typical shared house or flat. I never had a phone until 1980. And another thing, they are almost always talking about politics. Granted this was more widely the case in that period among the educated young, but not at the expense of anything else. There is a curious lack of day to day talk, what about music, football, films, the stuff people talk about when not making a statement ? 

I could have done without all the mooning about by the older versions of the characters in the present which adds little if nothing. Never mind, it is a half-way decent and overdue attempt to make a piece of intelligent drama set in the 70’s - 80’s, but do not confuse it with anything even close to the truth. I accept there can be no definitive version of a period and that as a character based traditional drama it neatly avoids any attempt to be a fuller or more incisive record of events. So as far as it goes it is fairly good, my worries are that it still smacks of being written by a committee, manages to avoid too much contention and wants too hard to cover all so-called minority interests while not upsetting anyone. And one glaring factual omission : I did not see a single pair of flares.

HALF-DEAD FOOTBALLERS & BOGUS REVERENCE

A heart attack suffered during a game of football is a rare occurrence and clearly one that is going to create a good deal of attention given the obsessive coverage of the mainstream media and seeming inexhaustible interest that much of the public take in the game. It is slightly surprising that it does not happen more often in the intensely physical world of professional sport. I noted it but knowing that a Premier League footballer would be given immediate care and attention hardly considered it to be of any great significance, people suffer heart attacks every day, albeit not usually live on air. It turns out that he survived and there was even a cardiologist in the crowd who, once he managed to get past the security guards which at first blocked his attempt to help, was crucial in keeping him alive.

Subsequently there were two developments both of which are typical of the hysteria, hyperbole and banal, bogus emotional rhetoric that inflates this ridiculous giant balloon of pseudo-serious populist pomposity which surrounds what was once a simple game of football. First there was the endless stream of people from the football ‘community’ ( shouldn’t that be business ? ) falling over themselves to make it clear how shocked they were and that the event ‘put football into perspective.’ This implies that the importance of football is normally not in perspective, so if not, why not ? The over familiar phrases of ’ our hearts go out to his family and loved ones’ or ’our thoughts are with him’ that are trotted out with all the meaning and conviction of the lines in a birthday card are surely more about gaining approval for those that queue up to be quoted and take the opportunity to give the sport the semblance of being a moral enterprise.

Then there was the less considered and stage managed response of someone watching on TV who made some instant comments on Twitter. This was not so reverential and certainly could be seen as offensive if one knew the player personally and were for some reason reading Twitter at the time of the incident. This provoked reaction from others on Twitter, almost all hostile, as far as I am aware, and somehow it got picked out from all the millions of other bits of irrelevant comment and inanity and the man who posted the offensive remarks was arrested and then sentenced to 56 days in jail.

To make a bit of a leap here there is plenty of stuff printed every day in the mainstream media that I take exception to, one could say I find offensive, and is presented with considerably more authority than a random Tweet. The BBC publishes their versions of events, usually without an editorial tagline, thus with no one as specific author, which I frequently totally disagree with. To make any comment that does not meet with their own editorial approval means it will not be published. I find their reverential attitude to sportsmen and women highly irritating. The fact that someone made one or two clearly ill judged comments on a platform that is not so closely policed and that were coming from a place much closer to reality of actual football banter was branded as something close to sacrilegious.

I am not saying all football banter is ’acceptable’ but it is what it is, it is outside of anything remotely like normal reasoned discourse. That is the whole point, and to somehow police it, while at the same time those in charge of the game and those who want to be associated with it for their own political reasons, mouth platitudes and cliché that are endlessly repeated, is a singularly pointless endeavour. Equally the term racist has become a crime on a par with GBH. Rabid footy fans will insult anyone in the opposing team strip, even if they have played five seasons for their own side previously, black or white. The fault lines are the colour of the shirt, primarily. And as for the football ‘community’ what is that exactly? Chelsea and Tottenham or Liverpool and Man United fans are obviously not part of a common community, that is the reality. It is a ridiculous use of the term that debases it as useful expression.

The fact that this is so is a poor reflection on the actual community. The absurd tribal allegiances that some people will adopt in the absence of anything better to believe in than a bunch of vastly overpaid, over-rated footballers who are no more than mercenary employees of privately owned companies trading under the brands of what were once football clubs are nothing to admire. To fiercely promote this rivalry and profiting from it and then turn around and be both sanctimonious and censorious is hypocritical in the extreme.

INSTITUTIONAL PREJUDICE

A few years back there was a big fuss made over a commissioned report that stated that the police were ‘ institutionally racist.’ I always a had a problem with this. No matter how deeply engrained any prejudice has been practised against black, ethnic or whatever the current loosely defined term for what seems to be a vast infinite variety of people that have little more in common than appealing, if they so wish, to define themselves entirely by their racial background, there has never, to the best of my knowledge, been any laws specifically enacted to limit the freedoms of any group based on their ethnicity since those against the Jews in the 13th century. That is what can correctly be described as institutional.

There is only one group to which laws, some of which still remain in place, were enacted to prohibit their full engagement in the culture and organisation of this country and which were expressly to ensure that they had little to no influence on the institutions of this country, barred them from higher education, the professions and positions of political or military office, and that is Catholics. Until the fiercely resisted and only partial changes were made in the late 18th Century there were both religious and civic prohibitions on all Catholics. The Test Acts prevented Catholics from entering public office of any sort and, despite some minor modifications, remained on the statute book until 1828. Following the success of Daniel O’Connor in the County Clare election the then Prime Minister Robert Peel brought forward the Catholic Emancipation (Relief) Act of 1829 to avert Civil War. This brought down his government. Prior to this the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 which stopped Catholics from sitting in government and required all civil and military officeholders to take Oaths of allegiance and supremacy and not take part in any way in the Catholic form of worship. This meant that in Ireland or England anything like full citizenship was impossible and was explicitly prejudicial to any Catholic having influence on local or national politics. No Catholic could sit in the Commons or the Lords with one exception made for the Duke of York, the future James II. The extent of this statutory prejudice can be seen by the fact that in 1788 when senior English Catholics signed a ’Protestation’ which denied papal temporal authority it only resulted in a partial easing of religious restrictions.

The Act of Settlement 1701 remains in place and prohibits the monarch from being or marrying a Catholic. This is due to be modified but not repealed. Certain offices remain excluded from the Catholic Emancipation Act, Regent, Lord Lieutenant and Chancellor. There has still never been a Catholic Chancellor of the exchequer since St. Thomas More.

These formal legal restraints were combined with the existence of the secret societies of Freemasonry, which also still exist, within the various institutions and which is specifically anti-Catholic and would have acted to further hinder the progress of any able and intelligent Catholic to take part in any influential organisation or make any significant cultural contribution without serious difficulties. It may be presenting itself as a harmless club currently but it remains a fact that membership of a Freemasons Lodge was almost compulsory to progress in most businesses, professions or the police well into the late 20th century in this country and yet it is impossible for a practicing Catholic to join this shadowy organisation without giving up their religion.

A good example of this marginality in a physical manifestation is the fact that there is only one Catholic church in the City of London and that is on the very eastern fringe and partly hidden behind shop fronts.  

Despite the legislation being dismantled the effects of this period of hundreds of years of being a proscribed religion, something that no Muslim or Jew has had imposed within the last three centuries, the resulting prejudice is very deeply engrained in this country’s culture and, I contest, remains so to a considerable degree.

Catholicism is still frequently portrayed in a negative and stereotypical manner, examples are very easy to find, ’Bread’ in the 1980’s, ’Father Ted’ in the 1990‘s, and currently in the endless offensive jokes that can still be aired by dim-witted ’alternative’ comedians about nuns, Catholics and their supposed attitudes and of course the Pope, never seen as offensive in same way jokes about race or other religions such as Judaism now are.

The burning of Guy Fawkes effigies and firework displays in ‘celebration’  around November 5th is explicitly anti-Catholic being particularly popular among the militant Protestant parts of Northern Ireland. Even the names of some fireworks are explicitly anti-Catholic, the Roman Candle, the Catherine Wheel, and a remarkably resilient and publicly funded institution as is the allegedly harmless ‘anti-establishment’ burning of an effigy of the Pope in Lewes each year, but hang on, the Pope is not the establishment in Sussex, lets be honest it is a plain expression of anti-Catholicism.

Understanding of the Catholic position has been further distorted by the highly partial and distorted version of events in Ireland and the so-called ’troubles.’ That the now almost extinguished violent reaction to deeply institutionalised and systemic prejudice arose from the denial of the entirely legitimate requests by Catholics in Northern Ireland for full Civil Rights has been buried in the mud of terrorist and counter - terrorist violence. The quite absurdly long investigation into the massacre in Derry and the apology eventually given did not undo the decades of destructive hatred and violent reaction that came out of that refusal to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic majority in Northern Ireland and the use of an occupying military force to preserve the status quo.

Most significantly, there is a notable lack of understanding of the significant achievements that have been made by Catholics and Catholic organisations in this country as well as there being a remaining widespread ignorance of the Catholic religion and its history, a deep seated hostility and prejudice towards it and a lack of recognition of the fact that it has preserved in this country despite all the attempts to prevent it, is remarkable in itself.

This country was once a Catholic country, that it is no longer and shall probably never be again was due to the will and force of one particular king and who sought to obliterate the Catholic institutions and replaced them with a state controlled church. This is fundamental. Since then there has been fostered a deliberate culture of anti-Catholicism using both the law and other more covert means.  There is no justification for any remaining legislation acting to prohibit Catholic involvement in any aspect of the organisation or culture of this country.

It is well past time that this country acknowledged this as an intrinsic and very significant part of its history and how its culture has evolved.

     

THE CLEARANCE OF OLSX

So the St.Paul’s camp was removed without a great deal of attention or incident. At the same time the squatted building in Shoreditch that was staging meetings as the Bank of Ideas was emptied, and, according to some reports demolished. This was done without due process, as was the immediate clearing of a disused bank near Leadenhall Market. The St.Paul’s clergy allowed this forcible clearance involving Police and bailiffs to take place right on their doorstep.

Immediately this was done various gainsayers spouting unsubstantiated and malicious garbage about how it had not achieved anything sprung to the front and were given much time to air their views and assure everyone that it was back to politics as usual, that is entrenched and divisive, party based and linked in directly to vested interests and tame journalism that likes to present everything in the same highly conventionalised packages and refuses to attempt to really engage with a profoundly different type of social and political practice. The whole point that 99% of the coverage is missing and the established political class are failing to understand, or pretending not to understand, is that this is not a theoretical exercise, it is actual political activity with no hidden agenda. It is accepting nothing about our dominant social and economic system as a given. It is not making demands because it refuses to accept that the present system can tweaked here and there and be gradually improved through the present form of so-called representative democracy. This is an entirely different animal, and this is why the established politicians of both the so-called right and left cannot bring themselves to utter a single word in support : because it renders them irrelevant. It also renders the cult of the leader, the paternal figurehead, obsolete.

This again was one of the things the big media just failed to get, there was no leader, no posturing, no use of the conventional jargon of political debate. This is simply people getting together in solidarity and trying, with considerable courage and patience, to reach a better way of conducting a society from the very basics with nothing as a given. It takes a degree of imagination to enter into such an area, and many have either not enough intelligence or information to see beyond the physical manifestation of a makeshift group of tents. Arguing against what took place in the precincts of St. Paul’s on the grounds of public convenience or aesthetics is absurd and was clearly used as an excuse to dismantle a real expression of heartfelt disgust at what our society has become and the lies and falsehoods at its centre which enable certain powerful elites to prosper at the expense and to the detriment of the majority.

The current economic system and the social organisation that it requires is no longer justifiable. No more enquiries, no tampering around the edges of the financial system, no more rearrangement of chairs and changing of hats amongst the same groups of players in the same self-selected elites, none of this is good enough anymore. There must be fundamental changes made based on principles of the common good, fair distribution of wealth, the right to shelter and a basic income and the dismantling of the existing obscene and unfit for purpose banking system. The financial system must be overhauled root and branch to put economics at the service of people not people at the service of economics.

No -isms need be applied, all the scary words like Marxism or Socialism, Keynesism which get bandied about as soon as such a subject is raised but the best ideas and concepts from these theorists must be given full attention and seen as the progressive analyses that they were and which can be built upon. To imply as many do that our present economic system is somehow inevitable and cannot be changed is simply no longer tenable. It is a man made system based on certain ideas and concepts from a certain period of history which have become set in stone over the last fifty years and are been tested to destruction, that is to our societies and our environment’s destruction. To blindly hang onto the classical economic theories of the liberal free market which are no longer justified will only exacerbate all the problems and inequities that have become increasingly obvious and are causing myriad social and personal disasters.

Remember Barings Bank which collapsed and we were supposed to believe it was one rogue trader ? More recently News International and the police told us that it was one rogue reporter that was engaged in criminal activity and corruption. These were lies and the lies continue to be made in a last gasp attempt to prop up and maintain the private corporate financial giants and their apologists in the political and social elites. The city and its bedfellow the Corporation of London must become fully transparent and their arcane machinations in blind pursuit of paper profit and rampant materialism be checked and the wealth that they sit on and distribute only to their own or as loans to others must be used for the purpose of the common good and the widest distribution of resources. Banks must respond to social needs and operate for the good of the society not as speculative traders playing with vast sums of money that they have been gifted by the Government.

There should be an absolute cap on pay for all those in the financial sector, if it is to be done for those on benefits it certainly must be done for bankers, they have proven that they will not do anything to change their iniquitous ways and disgraceful pay levels unless it is imposed. Barclays continue to devise elaborate ways to evade paying tax on their ill gotten gains and should be nationalised, they may have been founded by a Quaker but I suggest they are now run by Satanists.

 Malcom Maclaren was not my favourite person but he had one good idea and that was to use the acres of empty space in Canary Wharf to house the homeless and convert it into social housing. A parting thought.

FOOD PORN ON TV

Why is there an endless procession of programmes about food on the television currently ? It has gone beyond the celebrity chef business and now there are competitive shows such as ‘Masterchef’ which take non-celebrity chefs and subject them to a series of tasks against the clock. It turns cooking into a form of sport, with all the accompanying analysis and attendant nonsense. There is an obsessive almost pornographic attention to details of the ingredients, a fetishisation of the food, an unnatural closeness and interest in the minutiae and appearance of the food being prepared. Then there is the ritual serving to the stern faced judges who pronounce gravely on whether the dishes are good enough and have stimulated their jaded palettes. 

It is all utterly ridiculous and yet is treated so reverentially as if lives were at stake. And it goes on for hours and hours repetitiously, like a never ending loop. It is inane, an hour of watching other people cook.

There really is not a great deal more to say about it as it is so fundamentally stupid and deeply boring. Cooking on TV is well past its sell by date and needs to be permanently binned.    

St. Pancras London

BBC : I ACCUSE.

In the last three days there have been two evictions of occupied sites, the former UBS buildings in Sun Street being used by OLSX and the briefly occupied former bank in Leadenhall Street. Both evictions have involved illegalities, there was no legal process at all at Leadenhall Street, the police claimed some sort of diplomatic status for the building and simply removed the occupiers the same day as they moved in. I do not know the history of the building but it was certainly not in use, is not and never was an embassy, and, as far as I am aware, was a former Iraqi bank. At Sun Street there was a abbreviated legal process and bailiffs rather than police were used, although they were of course present at the eviction to ‘protect’ the bailiffs. Details are still emerging but it appears the bailiffs were violent and at least one assault took place.

The Corporation of London have said they intend to go ahead with the forcible clearance of the St. Paul’s site in the next few days, despite the misgivings of some of the clergy at the Cathedral. In this case due legal process does appear to been gone through but the Corporation have set their face against any sort of longer term arrangement for a small presence in the form of a pavilion to offer information about the issues, which has been suggested.

If this were in any other country, say Poland during the Communist period, it would be described as a crackdown on dissidents and legitimate protest. Yet here in England today I listened to the main BBC news at one o’clock on Radio 4 , about twelve hours after the eviction at Sun Street, and it was not even mentioned. Leadenhall Street was barely touched on in the mainstream media, despite the fact that the legality of what happened there is clearly in doubt and the statements made by the police and Corporation regarding diplomatic status to justify their actions have not be challenged. As far as I am aware there are no Embassies or diplomatic buildings in the City, the Iraq embassy is in South Kensington. And once a building is empty how can it still have diplomatic status ? Foreign banks in this country do not have diplomatic privileges and surely no empty building does ? Clearly this site was just too close for comfort, being right in the heart of the beast, the symbolic City landmarks the Lloyds building and Swiss Re or ’Gherkin’ being right next door, so the Corporation just acted on their own seemingly God given authority.

The BBC’s stance is becoming increasingly untenable. Continuing to treat the City as if it was a single, intelligent individual with some ultimate power and veracity that cannot be challenged and must be consulted at all times, failing to ever treat any subject without introducing the distorting only ever two-way argument of the two main political parties, using the same worthless phrases and language of the political and financial elite ie ’world growth’ ’ global stability’ etc. etc. always deferring to academic so-called ’experts’ who are ’neutral’ and reduce all debate to statistics and banalities.

I am afraid their complicity, even if not fully intended, is now inescapable and their role in what amounts to a continued defence and legitimising of the existing status quo must be challenged. It needs to show that it is not just a façade for a deeply ingrained and self-justifying neo-liberal culture which is promoted by a well-organised, self-interested elite in the City and a mouthpiece for  the established political parties with all the moral equivocation,  and huge partiality this entails. It is now as much a part of the problem as the solution. It is unrepresentative, virtually unaccountable and yet highly authoritative.


The situation whereby the BBC could always claim the moral high ground because there was the powerful, pervasive and collusive evil empire of Rupert Murdoch stalking the same territory has shifted. Murdoch’s minions may have been exposed for the vile creeping things they were, hung by their own petards, but now the collusion of interests that link into the BBC are becoming  clearer. It is time that they ceased to pretend to be a neutral player and either make it completely clear that they are an arms length branch of government or enter the real world and open up to allow the voices of the people to be heard.