fear and loathing on the dancefloor.

2012-02-15T23:14:00.003-08:00

It's funny how easy it is to pack your whole life into a suitcase. It gets easier the less stuff you have, and the more often you move. You realise that you don't actually need that much, and also, what is most important to you - my one suitcase, this time round, holds just a few clothes, a lot of art, and more books. So einfach als das.

I suppose I feel the same way about this blog. It's strange that I haven't written in here for so long, because the last few months have been amongst the most important and revelatory of my whole life. I found eden. I lost it. I lost myself. I found myself. I found a lot of strange other things. I found poison. I found beauty. I fell down the rabbit hole. I fell in love

These are all things that I want - actually, NEED - to write about. But I don't think it will be here. I will, though, and soon - I'll leave a signpost here, when I do. (just follow the yellow brick road)

But for now - looking back over the last year, it becomes evident that by the summer, despite my best wishes and desperation to find overt meaning/purpose/validation/whatever, my life had descended by summer 2011 into a total postmodern narrative breakdown. I picked up the pieces and started to build something new. What I found, made me realise that what I had (in my infinite, humanistic egoism) thought to be the great epic of my life was in fact just the prologue. One day, I will tell the rest of my story - but for now, I am busy living it. Often precarious, sometimes homeless, but I feel more alive now than I ever did before

Since I was old enough to even begin to understand a little of how things worked, I always felt sad, somehow, in a deep and aching way - because I saw that there was something wrong, some sickness in our world; and worse than that, deep down, I don't think I ever thought that it was something that we could fix. These last few months have been the first time when I truly believed that change was possible. That there ARE solutions. I still think that, but I also realise now just how difficult making that change can be. But still, I think it is something worth fighting for.

I see my fellow human beings - people I love - my tribe - so miserable, and unhappy, because they do not realise that they are in a cage. I suppose how I see it is; none of us can break anyone out of that cage. No one has the right to do that. Alls we can do is to let others see the bars. And try to make what lies outside of the cage so wonderful that they are not afraid to take that step, and see what lies beyond

adios, und viel liebe zu dir xxxxxxx

ἐπιφάνεια

2011-10-22T11:36:00.000-07:00

Do you ever have a realisation and, somehow, feel as though it is something that you always knew, or used to know, but somehow just forgot? It is a highly epistemologically interesting sensation

This is what I am thinking about today.

2011-10-10T14:10:00.000-07:00

Today I am thinking about:

1) Pink balloons and Blue balloons

So, at the moment I am living in Berlin and doing an internship with a group called KreativHaus, which is a Theaterpadagogische and sozialzentrum. On Sunday some of us spent the day working at something called DrachenFest – the word Drachen, here meaning kite. It was held in Britzerpark, which is a big park in a fairly family oriented area of Berlin. It was a really nice day, actually; there were a few different stalls selling kites, and people doing circus fun times (http://www.flying-colors.de/) and we were doing a workshop for
children and parents to work together making little hot air balloons. The idea was, they made a little basket out of origami to go on the bottom and then attached it to a balloon via an incredibly complex system using strings, which we quickly abandoned in favour of an easier method when it became apparent that it was unfeasibly fiddly and frankly unworkable. Anyway, whilst handing out balloons to those who had managed to construct a folded paper basket with varying degrees of success (some were incredibly finicky and precise, others cheerfully and hastily stuck together with sellotape and colourful squashed shapes) I made a few observations about the colour choices that were made.

a) The preference for gendered colours of Pink for girls and Blue for boys didn’t seem very prevalent at all until children were a little bit older (around 7 or 8, by my guesstimate).
b) If little girls chose pink balloons for themselves, they were generally also wearing pink clothes.
c) Within this age bracket, it was more common for girls to choose pink balloons than it was for boys to choose blue.
d) When it came to younger children, if a girl ended up with a pink balloon and a boy with a blue one, it was usually because their parents made the decision for them. If a parent chose the balloon colour for a girl, they chose pink more often than not.
e) Only one little boy chose a pink balloon.

I think this could be a pretty interesting study into gender and social conditioning of children, if it was conducted a bit more precisely by someone other than an idle-minded intern.

*(One thing that I did think was interesting, when I delved into it a little bitmore, was that it’s kind of weird that what colour balloon a child
chooses should have any bearing at all on any aspect of their identity. I was prompted to think this by the little boy who chose pink. It seems like we consider, in this context (or similar ones – for example, children choosing what colour trainers to wear, or what kind of birthday cake to have) the ‘thing’ in question to be somehow an extension of the child’s personality. But why can’t the balloon be considered more like a comrade, an accompanying object rather than a self defining one? For example, one doesn’t expect a boy to have only a male pet dog, or Ash Ketchum to only have male pokemon. Why can’t balloons, and similar objects like bicycles, be viewed as having a relationship of comraderie with an individual, rather than somehow being an extension of them, and being expected to express something inherent about that individual? A boy can have a balloon that fulfils a role that is rather more like a ‘pet’ than a hat, for example – if this was a more common approach, I think we’d be far more likely to see boys choosing pink balloons, which would be kind of emblematic of a view of objects that allowed for them to be things with which symbolic relationships could be developed, rather than merely acting as an extension of the self. I think it’s interesting that the relationship between person and ‘thing’ so often takes this form, and I would hazard a guess that it might possibly work the other way too, in the case of some individuals – with relationships between person and other persons becoming ones in which the secondary individual fulfils a self-defining purpose for the primary individual. The way in which we handle ‘persons’ and ‘things’ is, I think, sometimes inter-translatable, particularly within a society which encourages us to view our selves as primarily constructs of what we can accumulate – creatures who exist only in reflections,be those reflections in shop windows or the faces of others. This is only a tangential thought and, as is probably fairly obvious, not one
I am entirely sure about, but it’s an idea that’s been bouncing around my head for a while so I wanted to work with it in words.)

2) Drachen/kites and Elegant Symmetry

Other than pondering balloons, I also got the chance to look at some really cool kites that were on display proudly in the sky. Some of them were particularly notable – my two favourites were a big octagonal one, which was made up of smaller octagons (or maybe hexagons, my memory is a little fuzzy) and a big long ‘Vietnamese Dragon’ kite, which was made of one larger and about 60 smaller identical kites that all stood in a long stream behind it, like infinite reflections. (I would post photos if I’d had the presence of mind to take my camera with me, but unfortunately presence of mind is not always one of my stronger points!) They were really cool, and there was something a bit magical about seeing them suspended in the sky, sometimes dancing with the wind, other times eerily still.
Looking at the kite made of tesselating octagons made me think about how mathematical nature is, elementally. Like, even though we think about nature as being this big untameable random chaotic force of vast explosive unpredictability, it’s still a mathematical shape which provides the most efficient way of harnessing the power of something so ‘irrational’ as wind currents – and even of bearing the weight of
gravity and weight itself; look at geodesic domes. And honeycombs are a repeating, regular pattern of mathematical precision – I wonder what the formula is for a honeycomb?

*(Bees are a topic of interest for me at the moment, which may perhaps be a result of the excessive amount of honey I have been consuming. I’m going to spend some time next year working on a honey farm, because I want to learn more about how bees live – I think they’re cool.)

And then, that made me think about how maths is everywhere, and howthere are times when we can perceive this more than others, and that brought me back to the question about whether maths is just a human construct created to understand and analyse the universe, and we’re just imposing order on chaos through the lens of our own subjective experience (“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we
are.”) OR, maybe it is external, and we’re just vessels for perceiving the order of external reality, and our inner peace is achieved like a finely balanced equation as we come to terms with the elegant symmetry of the natural universe. I suppose it’s a choice between perceiving existence as being better described by the phrase "the universe is unfolding as it should," or alternatively “All systems tend towards chaos”. Or maybe that’s a false dichotomy and we should be less concerned with taking an either/or approach towards order and chaos, and instead focus on unpacking the relationship between them.

And on that note, these links are interesting:

http://www.newscientist.com/special/about-time
http://dataisnature.com/

3) Philosophy/Religion/Flux

And the last thing that I have been thinking about recently, which is sort of linked to everything else but I suppose mostly in the same way that philosophy is always the topic that everything comes back to when
you click on random links on Wikipedia, is the relationship between philosophies or religions – in fact, any belief systems – and change. I don’t think that many Insitutionalised religious beliefs account satisfactorily for change. If Religious/Philosophical frameworks are our externalised mechanisms for dealing with our own subjective experience, then surely it should be a positive thing, and not a negative one, when they develop, grow, and ultimately change as we ourselves, both as individuals and collectives, do the same. Why,
then, is there such insistence by established institutions of this nature on conforming to dogmatic belief and strictly codified, rigid rules? *(I suppose differing perspectives on whether religious belief
comes from an intrinsic or external source would lead one to two
different stances in response to this question.)

I suspect that my answer to the question posed above is that the refusal of many established religious, ideological and philosophical standpoints to embrace change and fluidity suggests that many such belief systems are quite worryingly beholden to the power structures in which they are firmly entrenched. It seems like their primary interest lies in further solidifying their static position, not being open to progression as this could undermine their current structure – and of course, in any hierachical power structure, those with the power to change it often don't want it to change, because then they risk no longer being in power. But when anything – an individual, an institution, a belief - is not open to the idea of change then it is in a state of stasis – paralysis, incapable of forward momentum. And then the only progression possible is that from stasis to atrophy, and that seems like an awful lot to sacrifice.

*(I find it quite interesting that some of the healthiest, in every sense of the word, and strongest individuals that I have encountered have, at differing times and points along the continuum of their progression as individuals, professed differing and even contradictory beliefs with equal amounts of conviction and integrity. The conclusion I take from this is that it is best always to have the courage of one's convictions and to believe wholeheartedly, even as one is open to the idea that one day, one might very well believe something else. We are living in a state of flux, why not embrace the change? Occasionally, I feel a little bit like the physical manifestation of that old advert which said something along the lines of,

„xxxxx years ago, we knew the world was flat.
Today, we know xxxxxxx.
Imagine what we will 'know' tomorrow.“

But really, is it problematic that human knowledge is so often revised? Just because something might tomorrow be proved wrong, is that a reason not to believe it today? Rather than living in a world permeated by doubt, I think that I would rather understand my knowledge and beliefs as being in a state of flux – but I don't think this undermines their validity. Permanence is an overrated virtue, I think. Or at least, that's what I think now. Maybe, one day, I will feel very differently.)

Anyway, what I think I'm driving at is that the relationship between fluidity, stasis and epiphany is worthy of further investigation, I think. It's ok, you can breathe – the change happens by itself.

PS I actually started writing this yesterday, so the title of this is a complete lie – it should really be, what I have thought about yesterday. But there you go. I am writing this, on my free Monday, sat before my window in my little Berlin bedroom. The weather has turned now, abruptly, and the world framed so neatly by my big square window is green slowly turning golden and never still, and when the wind blows it looks like the trees are breathing.

2011-09-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

"He said words were things of grace. They could lead us out into the world, but they should never be used to remove us from those we love."

- David Almond on his late uncle, Amos Almond.

Morgan Steele

2011-09-11T05:32:00.001-07:00

I stumbled across a piece by Morgan Steele on the wall of a scuzzy gay Karaoke bar on Warschauerstrasse in Berlin. The club was hosting the "Tranny Olympics" (some spectacularly appalling lip syncing, cupcake eating, and a 200m sprint in heels)and somehow, the painting seemed right at home alongside trannies in spiked heels and shriekingly glamourous ensembles. It was a picture of Mickey and Minnie Mouse as American hicks, complete with black vests and L7/Black Flag tattoos. The attention to detail and the impish sense of fun captured my attention, but what appeals most, looking at some of his other work, is the way in which he captures a sense of an America that I can only describe as casually manic, gleefully other. Slightly sideways and off kilter, his work reminds me a little of some of Gary Larson's The Far Side stuff - it's strangte, but not threatening in its strangeness; the characters and scenarios within strike me as having only a passing, aloof concern for their audience. In fact, I would go so far as to say that they display a casual indifference, staring out of the canvases with mild aloofness. Fun.

[Click - artbymorgansteele.com]

2011-09-08T08:50:00.001-07:00

2011-08-24T14:28:00.001-07:00

And then I breathe in, and everything becomes hexagonal and pixellated and then it spins clockwise and I cough slightly, from the smoke, and it feels like there is something in my mouth – this bothers me, it preoccupies me, and then the creatures in the golden room tell me to stop coughing, it's okay, to let go, just let go of it, you're doing it to yourself, and at first I don't, but they are beckoning me and they are so warm and so open and with such love in their eyes – so friendly, and I look for something else behind it, but there is no malevolence, no hidden agenda or slyness. Just love, and welcoming – and I am in a hall, more beautiful than anything I have ever seen before, so beautiful it takes my breath away; a cornucopia of colours and feathers and beckoning creatures, nymphs and all manner of magical creatures welcoming me towards them and displaying all of their finery, and I feel beautifulhappywarmsafelovedforgivenandblessed and the satyr, a man with a beautiful and handsome face, who has been at the forefront of those telling me that it will all be okay, to let go of every fear and insecurity ascends to the centre of it all, and as I look at him I become aware that his horns look very like the cube, suspended from the ceiling, swinging slowly and gently as though breathing out, and suddenly that is what I am looking at, an ornament suspended from the ceiling, and I cry out “No! Don't go!” and fling myself into the arms of the friend who is sat beside me, solid and real and warm and flesh and blood, and I half laugh half cry but fully neither, and tell him that I want them to come back.

(What he doesn't know is that I can still spy, elegantly, one of the nymphs discreetly pouring herself back into the rafters like some sweet nectar, around the edges of the room)

A note from last Spring

2011-08-11T18:23:00.001-07:00

2011-08-08T06:41:00.001-07:00

I think that the media characterisation of the instigators of riots in London last night as faceless, ominous 'gangs of youths' is a manifestation of the underlying fear of those currently in power (and I use that term loosely to describe all those who are at the helm of, and benefit from, the current socio-economic set up as much as the ConDem govt. itself) that the next generation have realised how much we are being royally fucked over and aren't going to take it lying down. They are taking our NHS, an hours wage buys fuck all, and those of us who are 'lucky' enough to even get jobs will be working until we drop to try and fill the bottomless pit of the previous generation's pension deficit. We are constantly hit with a barrage of images telling us that we are not real people unless we buy our selves from the shop shelves, shiny gadgets and made-up faces and fast cars and homes plucked from the pages of catalogues. We are grasped at by tiny invisible hands that try to snatch away whatever we blindly, naively accumulate in the hope of becoming one of those golden few 'winners' - the holy grail of aspiration, the myth that keeps us docile, submissive, in the hope that one day we too might receive a crumb from that richest of cakes. In a society geared towards winning, there will always be losers. Is it any wonder that a myth of human worth based around our ability to accumulate mass produced objects of desire is inevitably accompanied, when that ability is frustrated, by anger, resentment, and efforts to take by force what capitalism has told us we are worthless without? You told us we need these THINGS to be worthy of being counted as worthwhile human beings, and yet after hours of work and credit checks they still remained so close and so visible but just out of reach, behind the polished glass of shop windows. Of course windows will be broken when alls people can see in them is the reflection of a face that cannot attain what is concealed by the glass. Fuck being a real person. Fuck trying to 'win'. What did you expect?

2011-08-07T17:35:00.000-07:00

and it is strange, really, that as our lifestyle meanders further and further into the realm of technologically influenced alienation, we yearn ever more deeply for human contact. Now, when you walk into the supermarket, you do not need to share a word or even a glance with another being - a circuit of the shelves, pickup a newspaper and your daily bread, and then to the self service tills. Small talk replaced with the gentle click-hum-whir of progress. Step out into the still summer night, and the two drunks seated besides the cash machine are calmer than usual. The Irish girl, who is often distressed, sometimes angry, has a softness in her eyes today, even a warmth. She asks if you are alright and you say yes, and smile, and keep walking

PS

2011-07-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

(so, having gotten "writing as therapy" out of the way, now it's time for "writing as art" - and maybe even toying around with the novel idea of "writing for fun". Who knows?)

writing about writing

2011-07-28T12:26:00.001-07:00

SOO after a brief hiatus of 6 months (or thereabouts) of being lost within my own mind I am more or less back in the room again; the refreshing thing about going AWOL is that it does give you a renewed sense of appreciation for what life has to offer. Which, at present, is primarily along the lines of festivals, food and fun - three f's which have been conspicuously absent from my life for a while, so it's been a pleasure having the opportunity to reintegrate them.

(and I remember, last September, when things seemed sunny and I was still enjoying living someone else's life, on my way to poverty aid to buy old furniture with the intention of breathing new life into old beauty, walking past a poster in Hyde Park, stuck on the side of a bin. "You are here and you are alive." And it filled me with joy, that - I was. I am. I was. I am)

Anyway, returning to this blog after some time away is prompting me to consider what purpose it actually fills - both intrinsically, for its own sake, and from my own personal perspective. It seems reasonable, at this point in life, to be blogging about something specific - contributions to the external world being rather more worthwhile when they have at least SOME focus and direction. To that end, I'm going to start a separate blog soon which is focused on reviewing literature - another nice thing about actually having an attention span again (and no dissertation to battle with) is that I'm capable of reading books rather than staring at them and wishing I could repeatedly slam my face into them, which is good. But that does leave me with the question of what exactly the purpose of this blog is? I've had it for - I suppose five years or so now, and really it's always been more of an outlet for whatever thoughts are jostling their way through my mind at the time - the sort of thoughts that tend to run circles around each other and tie themselves in knots when they are not given coherency and form, stood up like little tin soldiers in black and white in neat little lines on the page before me. Sometimes what goes on in my head is too big, it's too much - each thought spins out into an infinite number of tangential sub-thoughts, like fractals so complex that even to behold them feels like an impossible task, let alone imposing enough order upon them to package them up into neat little succinct sentences that can survive the crossing of the massive chasm between my psyche and my mouth. I can't work with them when they're in there - they're too abstracted, too vast. This is why, when I was sad or scared or there was too much stimulation going on in a situation I sometimes did not finish sentences, or did not speak at all - too much to understand, too much that could go wrong, my brain exploring too many different avenues simultaneously with no idea which one to explore, and while trying to construct this sentence, being aware of a million different other things going on in the room - each sparking their own little branch of thought, fraying attention spans further, and by halfway through the sentence I am not so sure what I was even saying - and does it even matter anyway, does it matter, people are familiar enough with the grammatical construct of sentences to infer whatever point I was trying to make, and does it matter, does what matter, what was I talking about in the first place? ((perhaps it's a product of too much time spent staring at a computer screen - longer than spent staring in a mirror, and what is reflected back is not my face but something far more personal, my mind. Instances of fraying minds increasing in congruence with the rise of technology use are well documented - google it, draw your own conclusions.)(or perhaps, it has more to do with a youth spent more or less constantly stoned; or perhaps, just perhaps, I am naturally of flighty mind - personally I suspect a combination of all three, and on the whole, feel little need to attempt to rectify or justify any)) But when I can take these thoughts and lay them out before me - turn them from something abstract, from instinct and emotion beyond language, into those signifiers we call words - then suddenly, they become something I can work with, even play with; like building blocks, I can build homes, I can even take down walls. Consider the analogy: while there is no form, but merely pools of colour, red and yellow and blue all swirling together frenetically in an ocean of unfathomable depth, how can one hope for anything more than simply grasping vainly as all of that colour slips away between outstretched fingers? But when, via language, that ocean of thought is given form, pressed into building blocks of various colours, then the resources of the ocean are tapped; neatly tesselating structures can be built, games can be played, and most importantly - one can avoid drowning.

(maybe I am writing because my thoughts aren't real thoughts until they're written down)

So that's one reason why I write, I suppose. That's how I make sense of the world, and of my own mind, and of my minds reaction to the world. But then, if the act of writing is, for me, a purely personal thing, then why bother putting it on the internet? Haven't quite figured that one out yet - although I suppose one explanation involves some level of exhibitionism, whatever gratification I may or may not feel at having others read my thoughts isn't really what I would describe as a driving force behind writing itself. I mean, it's nice when someone says that, for example, your hair looks nice on a particular day, but that fleeting appreciation isn't the reason why you chose the haircut in the first place, is it? If we were to consider all forms of expression to be essentially geared towards the recipient rather than the expressor, we would surely arrive at some fairly confusing conclusions - and indeed, with some fairly fractured individuals, lacking cohesion, pulled in a thousand different directions (there being, after all, usually more than one observer we are aware of in the social panopticon of contemporary society). Expression serves the needs of the expressor, recipient and, I would venture, also serves a purpose unto itself. The poets of the Black Mountain School (and a whole bunch of the beat era guys and gals, I suppose) subscribed to a sort of Eastern-derived philosophy of art which suggested that when we express something, in the form of a poem for example, we are not creating something from nothing, but rather we are actually channelling something that comes from beyond us. This is one reason behind the mode of writing often favoured amongst them, a kind of stream-of-consciousness process where the writer is, in a way, the medium rather than the origin of the creative output. Your art does not belong to you - you are a channel, you are not the source. This interests me because when I write, it is with an absence of the consciousness which normally dictates that every action become an infinite number of choices and sub-choices that bear in-depth consideration. When I write, I do not think, I write - I think by writing, my thought process becomes completely externalised, as though my hands, typing this on keys right now, are the organ of thought, and not my mind. I suppose that it must be my subconscious that is dictating the structure of the words I write, but even so, my body and my psyche has become a channel for the expression of subconscious creativity, and I am inclined to believe that our subconscious is not so individually 'ours' as we would have ourselves believe - transcendence of the ego, after all, frees up a lot of things that are normally chained to that imposing and definitive of all towers, (the kind of tower that Princesses are confined to and convince themselves that there is no hope but letting down their hair and awaiting rescue), "I".

(and then, a few weeks ago, with a year's worth of lessons and truths on a red-wine mission after midnight through streets that now seemed sadder and wiser, too, I stumbled across that same poster - although now, filled with some strange irony and poignancy that harkened my mind back to that day last September. There was a symmetry to it, actually - given the fact that I'd spent a substantial amount of University life trying to run away from myself, to find myself retracing my steps seemed oddly appropriate. I felt as though I had folded up and met myself coming back - each moment was such a perfect inversion of the other; day/night, joy/apathy, naivete/wisdom, beginning/end, lost/found - funny, how words can have such different meanings depending on the psyche of the reader. "You are here and you are alive." "You are here and you are alive." Those same words which had seemed to me, buoyant and hopeful as I was the previous year, filled with a sense of jubilance, a joyful proclamation, now took on a different meaning - one with some deeper power that words seem insufficient to encapsulate. "You are here and you are alive." "You are here and you are alive." When there is nothing else, or even when there is, "You are here and you are alive." You. I. I am here and I am alive.)

I have kept journals since I was a child, but between the ages of 17 - 21 (a particularly enjoyable and horizon expanding epoch, as I'm sure it is for most people) I was somewhat more fastidious about keeping a day to day log of events. I mean, I was never really one for writing "Today I woke up and went for a walk and then ate sandwiches etc etc" (although some days did conform to that particular structure - I remember a passing phase, in the midst of my stoner years, when I was so excited by every activity I undertook that I endeavoured to commit all of them to paper for fear that I would forget them. With hindsight, this was wise, as for the most part, I did) but I had diaries which were essentially, I suppose, ongoing meta-analysis of the narrative of my life. It helped me to develop ideas, and gave me the sense that I was not careening through life in danger of losing all the pearls of wisdom that I was beginning, in my youthful enthusiasm, to collect and treasure. (After the age of 22ish, I switched to keeping notebooks instead, which I still utilise although somewhat more sporadically - they are filled with ideas for unwritten stories and glimpses of epiphany which, should my mind ever collapse in on itself, will hopefully remind me of things I once knew). Looking back at those diaries, I can easily recognise the times when I have been unhappy or lost because suddenly, often and usually without apparent warning, the journal entries stop. Out of the blue, there will be sections of blank pages - some lasting for weeks, others for months. It makes me sad because I know that to be incapable of writing out my feelings, of giving them form and structure, means that they were festering away inside my mind with no hope of resolution. Imagine trying to prove that (sin x)/x = cos(x/2)*cos(x/4)*cos(x/8)*cos(x/16).. in your own head, with only a basic grasp of maths, no idea of the form of the equation and an attention span constantly distracted by shiny things and bright colours. When written down, when such equations are given actual form (and in this case, the aid of the internet, I know fuck all about maths, it's an analogy) a proof can be constructed - but when one's attention span is trying to solve problems one lacks even the language to fathom, nothing can be resolved - the mind becomes a burden, and one resorts to trying to distract oneself by counting windows on nearby buildings, one, two, three, in an attempt to quiet the constant need to SOLVE what ultimately doesn't need solving. (Is it necessary to construct a complex proof for X, when one can accept that X simply is?)

(and there were other clues, really, had my psyche sought them out, rather than folding in on itself like Chinese boxes. On a wall at the end of my street, there was another piece of art, pasted onto a redbrick wall - a woman walking down a street, and emblazoned beside her, the words "Do what makes you happy." I mused upon them often, as I locked and unlocked my front door - it's perplexing that I could have done so and yet so consistently managed to miss the point of what is essentially a fairly simple instruction. Instead, I made myself miserable, trapped myself in cages, tried running away from that word which means so much and so many different things because I thought it would make me a better person and I thought that it would fix me. By the time I realised that ascetic mental self-flagellation solves nothing, there was very little left to fix. I forgot who I was, let alone what made me happy. The day I left that house, I stepped out of a prison that I'd somehow, accidentally, unintentionally, misguidedly, put an awful lot of effort into building for myself. On the day that a very old and very dear friend came to rescue me from Leeds and from myself we stood in the middle of the road and stuck our arms out and spun around very very very fast and the whole road disappeared into a blur and I felt free for the first time in a very long time and perhaps, perhaps, that is what makes me happy - spinning round very very fast, being free, and the whole road disappears into a blur, and when I am standing still again the world still spins slightly and I realise that I could have done this myself, I could have done this all along, not stood still with arms pinned to my sides, my own tower, "I")

and maybe I am writing because I don't know how not to - because the need to do so burns through me, an uncontrollable urge, a need as strong (stronger) than the need to eat or dream or fuck. Maybe it's because a writer who does not write is very little at all - a shadow, a moth with no flame, a dotted line surrounding the space where a person should be, a mirror that bears no reflection. Maybe, as Bukowski said,

" if you’re going to create you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire."

SO there we go - that is, to some degree, the conclusions reached from the various thoughts that I have had floating around my brain for the last few months. I can't say that it was a terribly pleasant experience but looking back at this blog post, I seem to have figured one or two things out, for the time being, and the conclusions drawn all seem to be fairly positive. Hopefully this can signal the end of what proved to be a dangerously solipsistic phase of my life - writing this was interesting, and I suppose, with a little bit of distance involved, I will at some point look back on the darker sides of the last few months as having been fairly interesting from an intellectual perspective also. But to be honest, I would far rather be directing all of this relentless analysis in the direction of politics, art, beauty and love, so that's what I'm going to do, for the time being. Writing is how I make sense of the world, so maybe it's time I start trying to do that.

(and maybe I am writing because I am here and I am alive. And maybe, just maybe, that is enough)

2011-07-19T13:46:00.000-07:00

and I look at you all and think, "fuck, you look older -------
---and then realise that the last time I looked at you all,
I didn't even use the word fuck
and then realise
fuck
I've gotten a hell of a lot older too -
and wiser
(/wiser? questionable
do lessons make us wiser, or just condition us
make us dance to bells that are Pavlovs, not our own
is that wisdom
or just the sound of more doors slamming shut as we fight our way through corridors
that were planned by someone else,
through someone else's building -
fuck that; I've come to the realisation
that I'd rather set the whole thing on fire
than march to the beat of someone else's drum)
Nice to see you."

2011-05-18T09:45:00.000-07:00

Judge withdraws over Philip Roth's Booker win

"Author and publisher Carmen Callil has withdrawn from the judging panel of the Man Booker International prize over its decision to honour Philip Roth with the £60,000 award. Dismissing the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Callil said that "he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe".

Personally, I have always found something in Roth's work which piques my interest and captures my attention - despite the fact that I am neither male, Jewish, American, have not lived through the post-war years and do not suffer from the complaint of compulsive masturbation. All of these are themes of Roth's literature, and I can only assume it is the ongoing engagement with them throughout his work which is being referred to by Callil as oppressive. One article, critical of Callil's decision, notes that:

"Her expertise is as an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s. It's hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth's lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual (American) man."

I find it interesting that one's response to literature should be considered in terms of the degree to which the reader is able to personally identify with the subject matter. Do we not read (to some degree) in order to transcend our individual experience, in order for our mind to be opened to ideas that come from beyond the sphere of the personal? Why, then, should we be unable to 'relate' to a novel that deals with themes that are unfamiliar to us? Why indeed, should we disregard as irrelevant to our selves any novel that we cannot 'relate' to anyhow?

I think Roth is great; I have written on his American Pastoral during my studies and I think it is an amazing piece of work. It's subtle, nuanced, complex. Even a year after I first read it, I found my perspective on the novel changing as I unpicked more of the text. He avoids presenting us with one definitive angle of interpretation and incorporates a polyphony of voices towards which he manages to be simultaneously both critical and sympathetic. It's a sad book, it's darkly funny, it's fantastically well crafted, it's powerful, it's elegiac and it has very little to do with anything that I have directly experienced in my life thus far. The last factor has never had the slightest bearing on my appreciation of the novel.

2011-05-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

“The workers frequently gave names to their machines, so my grandfather was working with Ginny. They were making their money, going back and forth like this: the machine would come down and stamp the part out of metal, and he would take it out and put it on a pile. But one day he made a mistake, and put his hand in when he should have taken it out. And that one time, the machine refused to come down. That’s what it means to be in tune with the machine, to feel it’s spirit.”

On the community of man and machine

2011-04-07T08:28:00.001-07:00

“Is a society without established traditions a theology without god?”

2011-03-29T05:57:00.001-07:00

glossolalia.

2011-03-04T10:49:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that there should be another, obvious, meaning of the word emergency – less to do with panic and sirens and alarm bells and red lights, and more to do with everything that Spring is; pale but insistent sunlight, a gentle swell of flowers in the park growing ever more present every day, optimistic hemlines, gentle smiles. A state emerging. A state emergent. In an emergent state. A state of emergency.

My mind somersaults over this concept as I survey late afternoon with morning's newborn eye. Well trodden paths are made new again from the seat of a bicycle; the sounds of life, emerging, and the click-click-click of the bicycle chain. I like that sound. It is the sound of things working as they should be; a sound of quiet efficiency, efficacious, the ineffable satisfaction of all according to a precise plan. There is a maths to it; a balanced equation.

We are supposed to take solace from life, in life. In the elegance of this sort of summation; of everything in its right place. To trace beauty, where we can – trees stretching their winter branches unabashedly, fractal like, against the sky; the rain casting concentric circles in ripples across the surface of puddles; the quiet, yearning hum of the mechanics that are our prison and our mother. I remember, back in Germany, playing the Beautiful Things game, transcending my own self by seeing how many beautiful things I could find to think about so deeply that my mind became them. Raindrops waiting like secrets on the leaves of plants in teracotta, or the smell of gardenias hanging heavy, sultry, in the inky blue black of the summer evening. Sometimes I still find myself cycling on the wrong side of the road (the right side, there – right? Or right? I still check my left from right by holding up my hands in the shape of an L. It is not that I need to, merely that it is a reflex born of treading that same path many times; when it comes to this, the mind is no different from any other creature, preferring the familiar route over the scenic. ((The hands are still the same, but different – still pink, they can hold more sweets now, and chopsticks; but they can play less piano, they have made curse-signs, they have rolled joints, and done other unspeakable things that they are refusing, presently, to even describe by shaping letters into words)) This too, is how I remember which side of the road I should be cycling on – I do not remember what the custom is of this, my homeland, England, but rather in an instant cast my mind back to Berheimer Strasse, und Radfahren zu den Aldstadt, die rechte Seite der Straße, vorbei an bunten Obst und Gemüse, die Barbiere voller türkischer Männer, wo einst das Vorderrad fiel mein Fahrrad und ich stand ratlos und verloren, bis eine Runde lächelnder Mann aus dem Nichts erschien mit einen Schraubenschlüssel und fixiert es für mich, das war die rechte Seite der Straße, radelte ich auf dem richtigen, also in England muss der linken Seite stimmt sein. Das stimmt).

There is a quiet order to such things, that can be seen at such times; before the colourful brash gaiety of summer intoxicates the senses and sparks its feverish dancing, spring wears riches of a more delicate nature. Like spun sugar, and tentative kisses, spring grows as I do – unfurling petals gently, and praying for rain. And slowly, slowly, life ends its hiatus; slowly, sweetly, the music starts again; sweetly, serenely, the world begins to dance. And, briefly, the order of things makes a stark and quiet sense. And sometimes, in the late afternoon, for a few moments, the redbrick houses look like they are made from gold

These are the thoughts that fill my head as I fly through the days, these days. Thoughts of now and then and when, and how and why and what all of those questions even mean and how I fit into the answers. These are good thoughts, thoughts of life and what it means to be alive. Of mornings and afternoons and evenings and nights that loop gently round each other in a loose carousel; and will eventually fold neatly, accordion-esque, into that pack of cards we call a week. Something about the air (pleasantly cold, not in the way of showers and shivers, but clean sheets, a newly made bed I can't wait to ruffle up) catches me dead center and makes me wonder how, when things can be so quietly beautiful, can I be afraid?

NB I took these photos at the beginning of 2008, in the first proper room I lived in in Leeds, at around the time of year we are at right now.

2011-02-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

Why I have no time for Jeremy Clarkson.

2011-01-29T07:02:00.000-08:00

I am of the belief that the majority of male TV presenters “of a certain age” can be identified as belonging to one of various subcategories of “Uncle” types. For example, Noel Edmunds is decidedly of the variety of Uncle who you see just once a year, probably around Christmas but not on the day itself, where direct contact is limited to him making a few really gut-wrenchingly awful jokes – at which you laugh anyway, not out of politeness, but with a genuine emotion probably bordering on something that COULD take the guise of pity or even fondness, in the weakest sense of the word. Jeremy Paxman, on the other hand, is a different sort of Uncle – cool, aloof and slightly intimidating, he probably married into your family and likes to see dinner gatherings as a platform for exercising a rigorous wit that would be substantially funnier than that provided by Edmunds, were you not too scared to laugh. His one concession to whimsy is wearing a paper hat from a Christmas cracker, which draws nervous screams of laughter from small cousins, who find the juxtaposition of such floppy cerise headgear in contrast with his steel grey curls shocking in its absurdity.

I can deal with both of these, and other similar, paradigmatic male faces staring out of my television set at me. Like real uncles, their presence in my life is an accident of fate – too distant from any act of volition on my part to demand any explanation, or justification, and of little negative consequence to my own existence. My default position is not one of ill will, more a sort of casual indifference. As a girl, in her twenties, born in 1987 (Thatcher secures a third term in office, British Rail renames Second class as Standard class, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers go for £24,750,000) I have little in common with men born in the 1950s, in the vague climate of post-war altruism; before equal rights for women, before aids, before the internet, when people still paid for things in shillings and nobody got divorced. Why would I? We are creatures of different times, and our interaction must always be analogous to diplomatic missions – this is not to say that we are incapable of finding some common ground, some mutual shared interest that spans the inevitable chasm that arises from generational and gender differences; rather, that any such dialogue that does take place is often one between individuals from very different worlds, and must be treated accordingly. I feel no dislike for them – as I’m sure they do not for me. My response veers between distant curiosity and a polite indifference. Why should it be any other way?

But there is one specimen of TV Uncle who does not give rise in me to such feelings of vague fondness and casual disinterest. There is one archetype who, over a number of years now, has began to grate on my nerves more and more, and is likely to excite dark mutterings from me whenever his portly face barges its way, uninvited, into my living room by way of my TV set. I do not know why my reaction to him has become stronger over the years – perhaps something to do with growing
up, and becoming more sensitive to just how abrasive certain varieties of personality can be? Arrogance, particularly when it is not apparently deserved, fills me with a cold revulsion that leaves little time for the building of any affection, and this genus has it in bucketloads. I am referring to, of course, Jeremy Clarkson.

Clarkson is the sort of Uncle who forgets your birthday, year on year; he is the sort of uncle who notices when you have put on even a pound of weight/accumulated some new spots/are feeling insecure and comments on it loudly, using his boorish wit to undermine and bully you. Clarkson is the kind of Uncle who turns up in his shiny new auto and insists on showing it to the entire family for 40 minutes, telling you all the while about the various features it has in the finest and most excruciating of detail, all the while intimating that he is better than everybody else because he has a better car. The Clarkson archetype not only wants you to know the technical ins and outs of his car, he approaches his presentation of his own life in the same way – and, crucially, not only does he want to tell you all about them, but he genuinely expects you to care. About him, and his things, and his opinion on everything that he deems it relevant to comment on. Which is anything and everything, of course, because Clarkson knows it all.

So, Clarkson has decided that it is his place to wade into the media dialogue about the recent Richard Keys/Andy Gray controversy.For the uninitiated, Keys and Gray were caught on microphone making sexist comments about a female lineswoman. Something of a gaff in itself. They criticised Karren Brady, West Ham vice chair-man, who had recently written a newspaper column about sexism. Then, later footage emerged of them basically behaving like teenage louts, with Gray asking a female assistant to tuck a microphone cord into the crotch of his pants, and later making lewd remarks to Jamie Redknapp and referring to an ex girlfriend on multiple occasions as 'it'.

Clarkson weighing in:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12296317

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-12298190

Note the comments on these two youtube videos – often, people seem to struggle with the idea that this behaviour was sexist, preferring to refer to it as “sexist” in inverted commas – as if whether it's wrong to be asking a female member of staff to put her hands next to your dick is open to interpretation. Or here are a few other common angles:

“I think sky sports was wrong to sack gray, firstly this is common joke that men make about women and the second things that football players has a lot of pass and the game is played very fast it is hard for women official’s to keep up with them. If they cannot keep up with them then it will be difficult for female official to make a decision based on off side.
1913Highbury 1 day ago”

“This a laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of PC and sexist stereotypes of women. Ironically because of PC it has screwed two great sports commentators out a job. Women constantly make jokes about male sexist stereotypes such as how men can't multi-task and such.
But when we have a go at them for not knowing the offside rule it's a different story. The only victims of real sexcism here are Andy Gray and Richard Keys.
ScotlandForever1986 2 days ago”

“actually men are protective towards women...and despite the media lies actually like women...conversely women hate men even their own family members and wouldnt save a man drowning in front of em...its women who are sexist...not men..
RichardKeys10 2 hours ago”

“What a way to get sacked... almost like kissing your girlfriend and getting jailed for it...
CraigoohHD 23 hours ago”

“ARE FIFA 11 GOING TO STOP SELLING lol,,thanks to you stupid bitches FOOTBLL is going down the toilet.. what the heck do you want to play or take part in a mans sport,, we havelost our best pundits down to u slags, hope ur happy
spurskimo 1 day ago”.

What concerns me about the furore surrounding the sexist behaviour of Richard Keys/Andy Gray is not necessarily the actions of the two men themselves, who are, let’s face it, just dinosaurs – sad loser remnants of an old industry in the process of rapid modernisation but filled with a pervasive structure comprised of individuals too arrogant to change their ways. (let's face it, they were probably set up by Murdoch, anyway).I feel no bile towards them – no anger. Perhaps this in itself is worthy of concern – that such sexism is, still, so ingrained in our society that I can’t even work up the energy to be offended by it. They’re just a pair of idiots, and when you get caught being an
idiot in the workplace you get called up on it, and that’s just how it goes. Either you don’t behave stupidly, or you do and you don’t get caught. Getting caught leads to facing the music. That’s how it is and that’s what’s happened. No, what I find the most worrying about the whole scenario, is the response of the surrounding media discourse. The narrative woven around any event that permeates the public consciousness is a performance constructed, that the “audience” of the UK may use as a
backdrop for the playing out of their various perceptual fantasies. Hence, to me, this is a story about sexism, and the inevitability of inter-generational conflict, and about how once again, the establishment doesn’t care about the feelings of twenty something females. But for someone else, it is a story about football, and about sport, and about watching the match in a pub when you could still smoke indoors, and a world that’s ever changing, and the sense of losing ones place in it. And for people like Clarkson, this is about the irrelevance of mocking women. It is about how much it DOESN’T MATTER to make derisory comments about girls in a workplace environment. It’s about the fact that, in his eyes, it’s a non issue – it’s about how him and his entitled little cronies should be able to swagger around, staggering under the blunt weight of their balls, ensuring that everyone is exposed to whatever irrelevant bit of fluff they wish to espouse. The media furore surrounding Gray and Keys leaving has become a platform for every one so inclined to express just how unimportant they think it is that two men in a position of power and influence should be held accountable for being caught behaving with astoundingly sexist impropriety and generally behaving like utter idiots. People have weighed in to show just how negligible an issue they think it to be when men behave in a misogynistic fashion in the workplace – apparently advocating the view that, because Keys and Gray are respected sports broadcasters, this should somehow provide mitigating circumstances for their disgusting comments. The implication is presumably that if you are higher up and well respected in your career, your reward is a free license to behave with as much prejudice as you see fit. Misogyny is a reward for success.

Now I am not for one moment suggesting that Clarkson would be remotely bothered by my opinion. In fact, as he has aptly demonstrated, him and his ilk have no concern for the views of me and my kind. Clarkson is as incapable of understanding the feelings of a woman in her twenties as he presumably is of understanding the subtleties of power dialectics in a male dominated industry, of the frustration one feels at being patronised by those with less knowledge or experience purely on the basis of their position of privilege, of the humiliation of having to put up with such behaviour because the hierarchical power structure still so prevalent in our society means that any attempt to challenge it results in ostracisation. Clarkson doesn’t give a fuck what I think. Clarkson cares about what Clarkson cares about, and Clarkson will think about whatever he damn well chooses, it seems – and not pay any heed when the “thought police” come along and start making outrageous requests for things like a respectful working environment and some level of common decency in treatment of co-workers. You know; the sort to point out that anyone with a position of influence funded by license payer money and a platform beamed straight into people’s living rooms has at least some sort of obligation not to justify sexist behaviour in the workplace and, by implication, assert that people shouldn’t be held accountable for violating common standards of decency and respect because it’s all just a bit of banter, after all.

No, Clarkson et al do not understand me. They don’t understand girls like us, who grew up in a world very different to theirs – who have, thankfully, never had the experience, an everyday one for our mothers, of having to grit our teeth and smile while some older lumbering dinosaur of a man patronises and insults us. Of being a second class citizen. We have always known that we are, by default, equal to any man, no greater or no worse; we have always known that we are entitled to have any evaluation of our character and abilities be derived, not on the basis of our gender, but from who we are as people. No, we have no patience for indulging the outdated minority of men who are like Clarkson – and soon, some of us will be in a position to do something about it. The slow progress of the gender equality movement means that more and more girls who think like me will finally begin to infiltrate positions of influence. Soon, girls like me will be hiring, not hired; they will not be lewdly asked to tuck in microphone cords to the crotches of cringeworthy, middle aged men – they will be telling such men to pipe down and do the job they are paid to do. We won't have to indulge your hyper inflated egos – why would we put up with being talked to like that? You're on the way out; we're just discovering our own power; you're the old, we're the new. Don't mistake your dominant ideology for ours. Our generation, both male and female, is one that has grown up expecting equality; of both males and females in the 20 -30 age bracket, views expressed jokingly by Gray and Keys vouched for by Clarkson seem antiquated and soon it is us who will be in charge. So here is my message to Clarkson, the man who does not understand, us, and does not wish to – I don’t wish to understand you either. Stand aside, dinosaurs – your time is nearly over. Soon, this will be our world – and do not be surprised if, given how irrelevant you deem our feelings to be, we extend you a similar courtesy.

2011-01-17T12:45:00.000-08:00

Link: Yale Alumni Magazine: Why Yale Favours its Own

This interview with University President of Yale, Rick Levin, discusses the issue of 'legacies' being given consideration when deciding amongst university applicants. Although this idea might seem alien to us in the UK, it is standard practise for universities like Yale - elite institutions, privately owned and as such with more freedom to decide the criteria on which they accept applicants than in our own country.

A quote:

We admit applicants need-blind. The admissions applications are kept separate from the financial statements. But we do advise the admissions office about applications coming from the children or grandchildren of significant donors and of alumni who have given significant volunteer service.

So there you have it, in black and white. You can buy your way into an elite American educational institution if your parents are wealthy enough.

The admissions rate for legacies is about 30 percent—three times the rate for non-legacies.

Is this really the direction we want our own education system to head in? Surely admission to University should be based upon academic ability, not how wealthy a background one comes from.

On floor 13, nobody can hear you scream..

2011-01-14T11:51:00.000-08:00

A kind of collective madness has descended upon the Edward Boyle Library as students prepare for examinations. Dressed hurriedly and with absence behind the eyes, people pass fleetingly on stairways, linger for brief snatches of conversation as an oasis in the insanity.

As tablespoons to Prufrock, so my life is measured out in cigarettes. I stagger between walls of books like a madwoman, a cigarette dangling limply from my lips like so many unspoken words...I wish that I could eat my words. The temptation to do so, to actually physically sit down and chew every single reading that somehow my brain needs to incorporate into my mind, is actually far more tempting right now than identifying one more set of Key Terms and Action points.

Facebook has ceased to become merely a mosquito-like distraction and has instead doing a passable imitation of being a window to the real world; when one is seated in the darkest rooms of Revision Hell, it is always SO appealing to look out of the window.

I simply CANNOT WAIT to remember what it's like to have fun again. Come next Wednesday, you will not see me for dust, because I am going to paint this town so gloriously crimson red, you will think we are living in a land of perpetual sunrise. See you on the other side...

2011-01-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

In a country rabid with anger, where the seeds of fear are watered with blood for the golden harvest they provide, the frontiersman walks. He is a man beyond the law; he subsists in the wilderness, in the spaces beyond shopping malls and the senate, cable TV and fast food chains. He grows, like a virus, in the spaces of decivilisation that exist within American society - the conflict that allows for the constant regeneration through violence so integral to the American myth. The spaces that propagate it's current mode of existence. He is the Searcher, but knows not what he seeks.

He becomes a man through violence. It is with fire and brute strength that he asserts his existence. Out there, in the wilderness, there are no mothers. There is no love, or compassion - these are luxuries for others; the slick, sharp-suited fast talker. The frontiersman is no fast talker. He is a fast shooter - shoot first, don't-ask questions later, don't think. Do Not Think. If you think, for one moment, you would see that the myth you seek to inhabit is one with origins that pre-date the stage on which you draw, each morning, the curtains. Do you really cast your gaze, out of your window on the world – mailboxes and sunshine, Americana and waving flags, white picket fences and resilient life - and see a desert, a forest, a harsh land to be tamed?

The forests you stalk are towers of glass and concrete, the wilderness is not one that can be conquered with the gun, the axe, brute strength. You are acting and reacting a simulacra; you are playing a part in a myth that was forged of necessity in a time when the land was still alien and new, and the frontier still crawled its way westward by blood. Those times are gone now. The myth which harkens back to it works in service of something darker. Yet still - when the moon warns of danger, the cries of war echo across ancient planes laid supplicant to the powers of modernity. The frontiersman hears the cry, and he knows only blood.

It upsets me, that far from being an anomaly, events such as today's tragedy seem disturbingly at home in such a landscape. A landscape which calls for individualism, thrives on competition, propagates the myth of the hero, worships the bullet, kills for the dream. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants."? But the golden fruit it bears is rotten, rotten to the core. I would not seek to shed blood for that.

“American Democracy was a form of self murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.” - DH Lawrence.

I want.

2011-01-05T04:00:00.000-08:00

Noirjewelry.com

Jewelry with a narrative behind it is a lot more fun. ESPECIALLY when that narrative involves superheroes.

2010-12-24T06:56:00.000-08:00

"you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

5 Left-field Arguments Against Tuition Fees.

2010-12-08T06:51:00.001-08:00

The five arguments against tuition fees given here are not intended to provide a comprehensive summary of the multitude of such arguments within the discourse. There are many more convincing and relevant arguments out there – most of us have probably come into contact with them many times over the last few weeks, and have already formed our own stance on them. The intention of these 5 arguments is not to dismiss the importance of other well-trodden paths, but rather to put forward 5 arguments of varying strength that are not usually discussed within the tuition fee debate, and to provide some counterarguments to those whose conceptualisation of the HE system considers the degree a product.

1)A BA/Sc degree alone is worth little in the job market. How can a student in so much debt afford to fund the 'corollaries' necessary to get that graduate job?

To be appointed to a 'graduate' post in fields like law, media, consultancy, journalism, financial services, etc, etc, etc then you are pretty much expected to have significant work experience on your CV, or to do an unpaid internship, usually based in London. Jobs in such fields, coveted and rare as they are, will go to those who have been able to gain this valuable work experience – sometimes due to 'connections' within the industry. The herd is thinned further by such options only really open to those who can afford to live and work in London for 3 months, UNPAID.

-With £20k plus of debt, that isn't happening any time soon.

-If we consider degrees to be a 'product' that we are investing in, as the establishment is so eagerly encouraging us to do, why would we pay for a product that is not fit-for-purpose?

2)We are told to view our expensive degrees as an investment, as they will help us to net that elusive job – and this justifies the cost. Yet this investment appears to be faulty.

Rapid expansion of student numbers coupled with the commodification of the 2:1 have resulted in a job market oversaturated with the afore mentioned degree classifications. They are rapidly becoming worthless. In order to make their CV stand out from the crowd, students need all sorts of fireworks and cartwheels – it's the voluntary work, work experience, internships and extra curricular activities which will get you the job. Try building an impressive CV to rival that of other candidates when you have to work throughout the academic year and all summer to fund yourself. (many people work for money, not experience)

-Why pay so much money for something that is 'worth' so little to you (in ££££s at any rate, which is how we are being told to evaluate these things)?

3) The commodification of the 2:1 will result in a shift in attitudes towards MA/Sc's, which will devalue the 2:1 further in the job market and result in further inequality of opportunity for those who can afford to pay for an MA/Sc to improve their job prospects, and those who can't.

Following on from the previous argument, over the next few years, jobs that used to require a BA/Sc as standard will, in an effort to sift through the reams of CVs that land on their desks, search desperately for qualities that put some candidates head and shoulders above the others. Inevitably, often those with a MA/Sc will emerge as the stronger applicants. This is a dangerous development. With the increasing tendency for students to study for a MA, not as a result of any genuine desire to further their knowledge or to become part of the Academic institution, but simply as a means of delaying entering the job market in troubled times, this will fairly straightforwardly result in 'two tiers' of graduate

“The average course fees for a one-year postgraduate programme is about £3,000 for students from the EEA (European Economic Area).
Non-EEA students pay on average about £7,000 for an arts subject or £8,000 for a science subject. Clinical studies and MBAs can be about double these amounts.
Living costs for an academic year are about £6,000 (more in London).” (source: http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Course/Postgrad.htm )

With only limited scholarships/funding available and no tuition fee loans to cover the costs of studying, it is fairly obvious that MA's will be prohibitively expensive to the vast, VAST majority of those who don't have private funding to cover the cost of their programme. So, we will have:

+an increasing number of upper middle class students who have studied for a Masters because they can, to avoid entering the job market, etc.
+ so, an increasing number of candidates for graduate jobs with Masters qualifications.
+ therefore, jobs will go to middle class graduates who have been able to afford to study for a Postgraduate qualification in order to make themselves more employable, devaluing the Bachelors even further.

-With £20k+ of debt incurred just from studying for your Bachelors, how will you ever afford to study for an MA necessary to get a good job and actually pay it off? What a faulty product we're being provided with, huh?

4)“It's okay to charge tuition fees, because if you don't end up earning over the £21,000/pa threshhold, then you won't have to pay it back anyway.”

This is often presented as a justification for the fees and their potential impact on those from lower income brackets – often by those, one could wryly note, who would not feel comfortable taking on the millstone of thousands of pounds worth of debt with the expectation that they would never in fact be able to pay it off.

It is somewhat disturbing that we are actually telling poorer students not to worry about the debt they're taking on because when they fail to become a high earner, they won't have to pay it back anyway. Is it already a given that their degree will be worth less than £21,000 p/a to them – where for others, it entitles them to £50k+? Furthermore, when they do break through that £21k threshold, their debt of £20k+ must still be paid off in its entireity, regardless of whether they earn £21k/pa or £120k/pa. And it is also worth noting that many students from higher income backgrounds have access to Bank of Mum and Dad funding which allows them to avoid incurring tuition fee debt in the first place ANYWAY. However you slice it, that £20k+ of student debt is vastly greater for some than for others, and encouraging students to avoid paying it back by not breaking through the earning threshold is teeth-curlingly regressive – evocative of Victorian attitudes towards accepting one's lot in life. The rich man at his castle, the poor man at his gate - lower your sights, those from lower income brackets, and lower your expectations accordingly, then you can the shadow cast by debt mountain.

5)The infantilisation of the next generation.

“Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood.” (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_age#Australia.2C_New_Zealand.2C_United_Kingdom_and_Ireland.2C_Poland.2C_Ukraine )

“The age of majority is the threshold of adulthood as it is conceptualized (and recognized or declared) in law. It is the chronological moment when a minor ceases to legally be considered a child and assumes control over their persons, actions, and decisions, thereby terminating the legal control and legal responsibilities of their parents or guardian over and for them.” (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority)

In the United Kingdom, our age of majority is 18. This is the age at which, in the eyes of the law, the state and our culture, we cease to be children and become adults.

Media coverage of the recent spate of student protests and occupations has, for the most part, described 'agitators' as 'children' – despite the fact that the paradigmatic construction of the 'student' to which they refer is unabashedly 18 and therefore, indupitably adult.
Yet perhaps this is not such a misnomer.

Our Universities are filled with 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 year olds with no/limited experience of the workforce who have never been financially self sufficient and who are, in all fairness, forced by the system to rely on funding from parents or similar. Our society so often defines the worth of the individual on the basis of their financial position; there is a strange shame in grown adults being financially dependent on others. But this is unavoidable – particularly in the case of those from upper level income brackets, who are given less money (smaller loans, no bursaries) precisely because their parents income has been assessed as being sufficient to cover a parental contribution throughout their period of study. Why has this situation arisen – one in which adults who are uniformly 18 or older are still considered to be the financial responsibility of their parents, and as such put in a situation in which they are forced to be so? If you don't qualify for income assessed bursaries, you HAVE to rely on parental contributions to fund your cost of living throughout your studies (or get a job to fund yourself. Working throughout University impacts on the time you can spend studying; it is prohibitive when it comes to taking on extra-curricular activities - the ones which will really get you that job, remember?- and it automatically makes your life infinitely more difficult, and hence reduces the chances of getting a good degree, than someone who doesn't have to work.)

It is not in anybodies interests for universities to produce a strange hybrid of intellectual naivite; Man-children and Girl-Women whose vested interests diverge wildly from those of the rest of society. A generation of infantilised adults, with little in common with other people of a similar age who have not attended a University education,a sense of entitlement and limited real world experience is detrimental to the whole of society.

Tuition fees propogate this system by creating the degree as product, a 'finishing school for the middle classes', where people pay for the 'student experience' and expect mum and dad to foot the bill, where possible. Grown adults are forced to rely, for their cost of living, on other grown adults. It is not a nice thing, for an adult to be utterly dependent on another individual. It is not fair for parents, who want the best for their offspring, to be forced into continuing to fund their lives long into adulthood in order that they are in a position to compete with others from different social backgrounds. It seems that a total reworking of the HE system is ultimately needed to encourage the shift in culture which would be beneficial to all. A living wage for students coupled with the abolition of tuition fees would help to model a system in which studying for a degree is viewed as an academic occupation, be it the first step onto the ladder of academia or a period of intellectual growth and enlightenment, rather than merely a few years joshing around and a route into gainful employment.

These arguments are not the strongest or most powerful that can be made against tuition fees, and indeed (imho) are superceded by the biggest argument of all, which is the ideological one that Academia should not be sacrificed on the altar of market forces. However, they do go some way towards countering certain specific arguments put forward by some who argue that tuition fees provide a progressive model for our education system, and underestimate the detrimental affects they have on society.

Additionally, I think they highlight a number of hidden facets of the problem which have not, as yet, been subject to much attention. There are far more traps inherent in the process of commodification of education than are immediately obvious – some of these will prove to be hidden oubliettes, unnoticed and until they are too deeply entrenched in our culture and system to be challenged. (Sometimes, when I look at the direction in which our country is headed, it terrifies me.)

We are being asked, in some senses, to consider our degrees to be a product, and to evaluate them on the basis of their success in this framework – key criteria, the 'student experience', and how our chances of gainful employment are impacted. Even on the basis of such criteria, we are being sold a product that is not fit for purpose.

2010-11-18T16:47:00.000-08:00

If another and later species should ever come to reconstruct the human being from the evidence of our sentimental writings they will conclude man to have been a heart with testicles; that is, passionate, and male. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

oh Vintage, up yours.

2010-11-13T12:46:00.000-08:00

(or, how I learned to stop worrying and love domestic bondage)

So, like many of my peers and contemporaries, at some point in the none-too-distant past, I really got into “vintage” style. Not just vintage as in, genuinely old clothing, “retro” antique furniture and 1950's music and hairstyles – but “vintage”, as it has come to mean. Now covering a vast variety of eccentric, quirky but undeniably contemporary products such as quirky rose scented soaps, modern clothing with a 20s/30s/40s influence, adorable cupcakes, cakestands, teapots, tights with seams, red lipstick, big full skirts that circle around your legs like brash petals around a fragile stem – all of these things are now covered by the umbrella term “vintage”, which now, if we are honest, is often used to refer to a current fashion trend rather than a genuinely charming anachronism.

I am going to avoid making any sweeping judgements as I write down my thoughts here because, apart from anything else, I am very aware that I would be condemning myself – and indeed, would be in great danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater as well; aside from the fact that aesthetically I find something very pleasing about the “vintage” look, I also think there is an argument to be made in favour of the ethics of re-buying and re-wearing old clothes, jewelry and knick-knacks. In our society of Primark and asos.com, we have created a culture based on the conspicuous consumption of whatever current trends the Fashion industry shovels into our bloated cuckoo mouths. There is something curiously satisfying about buying a dress made 30, 40 or even 50 years ago that has already been out dancing many times, and yet has kept it's youth and beauty, if anything growing better with age. Admiring the stitching on an old, full skirted red dress I own I am struck by the genuine quality of the garment – it sounds trite but, clothes just aren't made like that any more. Mostly because now they're often made in sweatshops by children in developing countries overseen by companies who value increased output over stringent standards, cutting corners over fine craftwork, and indeed, companies in whose interest it is for clothes to wear out quickly – after all, they're so cheap we will just go and buy new ones anyway.

Yet when I look at my wardrobe and the various vintage styled garments held therein, I am struck by the fact that not all of them (by a long stretch) are genuinely vintage, secondhand, or even boutique made. Some of them are of course; yet others are from H&M, Topshop, Juice – the usual culprits, even some from (dare I say it) Primark. Clearly, the 'ethical' facet is merely masquerading as justification. So it is obviously something beyond this concern which attracts me to this style, so quaint and pretty, elegent, sophisticated. So feminine...

And this, I think, is at the heart of it. A month or so ago, I found myself spending a rather ridiculous amount of money (I am too embaressed to admit how much) on a matching cakestand and toast rack. When I get paid, I will probably go back and buy the tea pot. They are red with white polka dots and they are all adorable. Similarly, like so many girls, I love baking – I love cooking, actually; I don't even mind giving the house a good vacuum, I find it very therapeutic. But, I have noticed, over the last year or so, because I have started paying attention to such things, that there is a curious tendency ( even – perhaps, especially? Amongst intelligent, independent women – worryingly, in my eyes) to fetishise behaviour that is considered to be traditionally feminine. Suddenly, the same women who fought to be allowed to wear trousers are eschewing them in favour of skirts more reminiscent of Gaultier's 40s 'New Look” than power dressing. Suddenly, we all seem to want to convey the image, at least, of a construction of femininity that is very much of another age. Ballet lessons are popular. We take up hobbies like cakemaking, or burlesque for the more risque of us ( – yet still, somehow, snobbishly considered acceptable whilst stripping is exploitative – have you ever tried to poledance? It's really hard, and requires considerably more general skill than wearing seamed stockings and thinking you're Dita Von Teese … sorry, tangent; I don't have a problem with Dita et al at all, but it annoys me when the same people who think she is “just divine” will go on to make sniffy remarks about page 3 models.) Suddenly, I am aspiring to a fantasy of womanhood based around a kitchen, darling little biscuits, a nipped in waist and gentle little footsteps on the stairs just – like – so. And I am not sure that I feel ok with this. Because as much as I would like to be able to distance these sweet little stylistic touches from what they represent, from whence they sprung, the fact of the matter is I spend a lot of my time trying to look like a woman from an era in which we were regarded in the eyes of society as being fundementally less capable than our male counterparts of fulfilling

Yet now, suddenly, because we're far away enough to have donned rose tinted spectacles, we celebrate as 'kitsch' this era of restrictive social stereotypes, no contraceptive pill and few options for many women other than to stay in the kitchen cooking all day – not cupcakes, either. This was a time when many women felt so restricted by their lack of choices that they stayed in loveless marriages for years, they drank and numbed their pain with valium, or simply lived dutiful lives in quiet, humble despair. People who really should no better talk fondly of a time in which men were “real men” and women “real women” - as if, today, our gender identities have collapsed into some kind of indiscernible grey mulch, so fragmented and uncertain of ourselves as we all must be without glaring uniform signifiers to reassure society that we are conforming to its ideals. “Real” men, “Real” women – fictional representations held up as being the standard all of us living, breathing creatures of flesh and credit should aspire to. “Don't worry, I am a woman, I have a flower in my hair and a tiny nipped in little waist. And you, you must be a man – so big, so strong. When you hold me in your arms, I feel so fragile, like glass, I could snap in half.. Carry on as we were.”

I am not by any means making any sweeping generalisations here. But I do think this is something that we should perhaps examine a little further, or at least be more aware of. At the end of the day, I can't say that I will stop dressing the way I do, because I like it – but I feel that I should be honest about my misgivings. The best possible spin I can find to put on it is that there is something subversive about it; that we are “reclaiming the domestic sphere”, but really, how the fuck is that a good thing? We fought for years to escape the rigid confines of four walls, two-point-four children, school runs, daytime tv, quiet desperation. The bars our mothers railed against, we have painted a darling shade of red with white polka dots, pronounced desirable. We have made “Housewife” the ideal again, by playing house. And this sits uncomfortably with me, a quiet tugging sensation somewhere in my bosom, and will do so every time I stroke the crinoline-and-lace fabric of dresses from all yesterday's parties. Because I think, maybe, we need to be a little more careful when idealising a past that's not so distant as it may first seem.

2010-11-13T12:44:00.001-08:00

2010-10-31T04:51:00.001-07:00

Philosophy is a vile and grotesque subject for madmen and drunks; I would not wish a philosophy degree on anyone whose sanity I valued the least little bit (unless madness were an improvement to them)... It is not for the poets.

Bonjour Tristesse.

2010-10-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

"I'd like to warn him, but he wouldn't understand - that I can't feel anything that he might be interested in, because I'm surrounded by a wall; an invisible wall of memories I can't lose."

I adore this.

2010-10-29T14:51:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch's reign of evil continues..

2010-10-29T13:04:00.000-07:00

"This, this is about my own some-day daughter. When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity, begging, “Mom, will I be pretty? Will I be pretty? , ” I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick and answer no.
The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be, and no child of mine will be contained in five letters. You will be pretty intelligent, pretty creative, pretty amazing, but you will never be merely “pretty.”" - Katie Makkai

2010-10-29T11:48:00.001-07:00

We are all alone, born alone, die alone and in spite of true romance we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely at least, not all the time but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness. - Hunter S. Thompson

2010-10-28T04:09:00.000-07:00

In this time of economic crisis, social disintegration and the omnipresent threat of 'terror' it's good to know that the Beeb are focusing their energies on the important questions...

Link to: "How is Keith Richards still alive?"

2010-10-26T16:23:00.002-07:00

..Isn't it funny how sometimes you can feel so compelled to let yourself spill across the page in black and white, but other times, when you really want to write, you just can't find the..

Diet Coke Break

2010-10-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

Diet Coke adverts featuring dolls like the one above have been around for a good few months now - the campaign started with a print advert featuring, (quoted from here "three talented, confident and sassy girls who are best friends that work together at a fashion magazine, Eleanor, Bernadette and Irene. Their lighter attitude to life means they inject their own passion, style and spirit into everything they do, and always come out smiling. These girls know how to lighten up!"

Quite apart from Diet Coke's mildly confusing insistence on referring to characters who are (apparently) 28, 24 & 26 respectively (roll your mouse over the pictures on this site to meet them!) as "girls", what is really perplexing about this particular ad campaign is that it seems to be marketing a product to grown women via the medium of small dolls. We all know that advertising is no longer really about selling a product, but selling an idea - by telling an audience that they too can look like a supermodel, become irresistible to the opposite sex, or find some kind of sense of happiness and fulfilment should they only care to buy the right car, make-up or perfume. But so far as I can tell, this advertising campaign seems to be holding up what are essentially 21st century Bratz dolls as aspirational figures to women in the 20-30 age bracket. Are we really that desperate to be infantilized? (actually, looking at some of the comments on this blog apparently some of us are - although personally I find something a little unnerving about grown women saying things like, "I WANT A DOLLY!!!"[caps in context])

Quote from the website:

"Bernardette is 28 and is the magazine's relationship correspondent. This is quite an ironic position, as when it comes to her own relationships she's pretty rubbish - there are too many boys out there to flirt with!"

"Irene is 24. She's the junior arts columnist. Her love of music and all things dance means she hits the town most nights and has many a tale to tell about her adventures out and about. She loves all kinds of music - but particularly anything she can dance to."

"Eleanor is 26-years-old. She is the magazine's fashion sub-editor. She lives, breathes eats and, well, wears fashion. She knows everything there is to know about it - every designer, every brand, every store, what's hot, what's about to be hot, and if it's not, merchandise it up a little until it is."

I can only guess at what "merchandise it up a little" is supposed to mean, but I find it fascinating and vaguely horrifying that Diet Coke is running a campaign aimed at grown women that assumes that the same thing will appeal to them now as it did 20 years ago when they were playing with their Barbie dolls. Hopefully a few of us have moved on since then - perhaps some of us might actually be working at magazines like the fictional one in these advertisements, although I'd imagine there is less time for jumping around dancing on desks to the song from Flashdance. And hopefully we have diversified our interests a little outside of boys, dance music and clothes.

There is a degree of mimesis involved in being a consumer. The representations of ourselves we see in adverts both shape and are shaped by our wants and desires. Cases of women trying to achieve the unrealistic physical proportions presented in adverts like this one are, unfortunately, commonplace. In a consumer society, our bodies have become, to some degree, commercial spaces. No longer are we expected to want to look like women who look like dolls, the middle (wo)man has been removed entirely. Things have come full circle and, at 25, we're little girls again - expected to be playing at having jobs, playing at having careers, and apparently, buying soft drinks thanks to slogans like "No problem is too big when you have killer heels!", or "It gives you a little lift... like platforms!"

Of course, the overt gender-oriented advertising by Coca-Cola was boosted into hyper-drive following the launch of Coke Zero - exactly the same product as Diet Coke but in a Black Bottle for Boyz, accompanied by EXTREME adverts about skiing and loud noises and smashing stuff up and kicking ass and stuff, you know, boy junk like that. AWESOME. Is there something morally wrong about marketing the same product as two separate products, solely defined by gender stereotypes? Personally, although I know some people would argue that advertisers are merely catering to a market, I don't think the relationship between consumer audience and advertiser is a one way street, in which adverts are shaped by consumers who dictate how their attention should be captured. Adverts don't just cater to target markets, they create and shape them. Evidently it is in someone's interest for boys to be boys and girls to be girls... my question is, do we really want to define our gender identities to suit the profit projections of Schweppes?

2010-10-20T06:10:00.001-07:00

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2010-10-19T15:09:00.001-07:00

BBC article about the hysterical enthusiasm of new mothers for a 'miracle cream' that allegedly gets rid of post pregnancy 'mummy tummy'

Isn't it funny how people are still prepared to spend lots of money on lotions and potions make their insecurities vanish away? It reminds me of fairy stories; swap a sack of gold coins for a magic spell and your problems will just disappear! It's almost as though, in today's world, the magician and the witch realised that if they teamed up and started casting spells that made everyones noses seem bigger, breasts seem smaller, bottom seem fatter, stomach seem lumpier and face seem uglier then they would be able to collect far more gold coins from humble woodcutter's wives desperate to look like the princess in the tower!

There isn't a set prototype we're all suppposed to match. If you've had a baby growin inside your tummy, chances are it's not going to snap back with the tautness of an elastic band afterwards. And if you want it to, I'd imagine that for most people it takes work and maybe tummy tuck operations - not a magic ointment in a jar. Bodies change after pregnancy. They change naturally as we age. Your body will not look the same as it does now in twenty years time. If you want it to, perhaps you best find yourself a nice tower and go to sleep for a hundred years, because living, loving, and having children WILL change your body and personally, I think that's ok.

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Join the Dots.

2010-10-14T09:28:00.001-07:00

....people keep surprising me by coming out in favour of increased tuition fees......my friend, teaching in an inner city London school, is struggling to find a way to make Economics interesting to teenage pupils. One threw a chair at her........all around me, intelligent students with 2:1 degree classifications struggle to find jobs....... All around me, everybody struggles to find jobs (except for contract work - no pensions, no rights) ..........all of the supermarkets are 24 hour, now...... In the last few months, two (educated) people have told me separately that they think we should consider Victorian Workhouses as a solution to the benefits problem...... In the last week, I have heard Dickens quote on debt repeated in two (separate) places .......No more quangos, privatised public services ........Small waistbands and long full skirts are in again...... Sometimes, I think in twenty years we will look back and wonder how we lost so much.

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2010-10-11T09:48:00.001-07:00

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Light Night at the Hyde Park Picture House

2010-10-08T18:42:00.000-07:00

Tonight was Light Night in Leeds; the less said about that the better - although I must confess to being frankly mystified as to how my friends and I managed to completely fail at having a fun night, despite the presence of such mischievous fun as vintage tea parties and cardboard gramophones, Victorian Ghost Tours and a room filled with origami. (I can only assume we must be dead inside.)

However, despite our curious failure to glean a semi-fun evening from a scenario that seemed to provide bountiful joy to others, I did manage to pop along to the Light Night event at the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully, this turned out to be a little more forthcoming, and I breathed a sigh of relief as I retired in my plush red velvet cinema seat, armed with complementary tea and sticky ginger cake, safe in the knowledge that I have not yet been rendered incapable of finding fun on a Friday night.

Showing this evening were the four films shortlisted for the Jarman Award (if you're unfamiliar, Dazed and Confused do a nice run down here)and they certainly provided food for thought on a ....

1) First up is the excellently/ridiculously named Spartacus Chetwynd's A Walk to Dover, which is apparently based on a similar pilgrimage made by Dickens' David Copperfield. It's a satisfyingly sideways montage of clips froma trip made by Spartacus and 3 friends, with lots of sped up footage of them doing silly things in fields wearing big hats, and an old woman reading (what I assume to be) sections from the Dickens novel over the top in a distinctively old womany way. On the slightly more serious side, there are some pleasing contrasts between the urban and rural scenery, and there's also a message buried somewhere not-too-deep about poverty and the uncomfortable parallels between the issues of poverty in both our own and Dickens society. In one of life's more ominous coincidences, near the beginning of the film (which was made a few years ago, 2005 I believe) the following quote from a Dickens character was used:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

The reason why this caught my attention was because I had in fact read the same quote earlier this week, in a Guardian magazine article on Osbourne's ever-present looming cuts. It cannot be denied that the story of Dickens upbringing, and his experience of the shame of seeing his lower middle class family condemned to the debtors prison due to father's unwise spending habits, strikes a none-too-pleasant chord given the current economic situation (a none-too-pleasant chord, incidentally, that contrasted wonderfully with partchimp's rather pleasant discordant soundtrack, which erupts unexpectedly out of the silence of the film's opening).

Or maybe it can, but either way, this film is good irreverent fun.

2)Middle Sea by Zineb Sedira. Lots of shots of a man walking around or standing still (mostly standing still) on a boat. Some genuinely awe inspiring footage of waves shot from a moving boat, but other than that I struggled to find anything that struck resonance with this one. Not my cup of tea, sorry. (There are some nice thoughtful photographic shots of desolate places on his website, though.)

3) Ben Rivers' contribution is entitled A World Rattled of Habit. He describes it simply as "A day trip to Suffolk, to see my friend Ben and his dad Oleg..." It's a strange little film, with a dry sense of humour that I think would probably get lost in translation on a mainstream audience, but I don't think he's trying to appeal to the mainstream so that's ok. It's essentially a short film about a pretty fascinating old character; the kind of man who, when people hear about him and his latest escapade or bold pronouncement, people must just surely chuckle to themselves in a bemused fashion. You can imagine phrases like "He's one on his own, that one", or "nothing would surprise me", passing peoples lips on a regular basis, and exasperated daughters-in-law (or similar) throwing their hands up in the air in defeat over his refusal to conform to the laws of the household when he comes to visit. He's certainly an interesting old bloke with some pearls of wisdom to impart. What makes it work is the obvious affection the film maker has for the old man, which really comes through in the work and gives the whole piece a rather warming effect, despite a few unnerving shots (jerky footage of man smiling, eerily holding old painting of a girl, close ups of Oleg eating etc) which I suspect were thrown in there to satisfy the darker elements of the director's sense of humour. Generally nice.

4) Emily Wardill's The Diamond (Descartes Daughter)is a strange, jerky, mechanised, amusing little piece consisting primarily of shots of an imagined scene from a film that the narrator, having unsuccessfully attempted to track it down, has decided to recreate herself. What really makes this film is the story and ideas conveyed by the running monologue, delivered in a almost mechanical Swedish accent and toying with Marcusian ideas about the distance the machine puts between human and action. It is artfully constructed and self referential, with the mechanical voice occasionally experiencing glitches and blips, and with a good measure of stoic humour thrown in the mix too. I liked the fact that, beneath the mechanical quality, there was actually a great deal of emotion running somewhere close to the surface - present but obscured, rather like our own plight in a world of distant internet communication. It was a strange little film, and not a great deal actually happened, but it worked because it engaged you and not only asked questions but led you to formulate your own. Basically, no complaints here.This was probably my favourite of all the films shown, and apparently it won, so there we go.

2010-10-05T06:07:00.001-07:00

Link to the Guardian website - a gallery of images from a collection selected by Sarah Maple, which will be auctioned with the aim of raising money for the all day Feminism in London event on the 23rd.

This contribution, by Chila Burman, is probably my favourite because I think it works better on an artistic level than most of the other pieces I've seen so far. It's bright and fierce and cool and strong, and there is so much going on in it if you look closely -I love art that you can stare at for ages and still find new things you didn't notice at first (did you notice the swastikas?). I also really like the fact that she's dealing with facts such as the problems raised by Capitalism and Globalisation; at the end of the day, I think that oppression comes in multiple forms but often arises from the same hegemony of entrenched values and if we want to fight inequality it's important to be aware of how pervasive it is in our society! But apart from all that, I think I just like this image the most because it's so joyful - bright colours make me happy :-)

Chila Burman on her own work, taken from her website:

"Challenging stereotypical assumptions of Asian women, my work is informed by popular culture, Bollywood, fashion, found objects, the politics of femininity the celebration of feminity; self-portraiture exploring the production of my own sexuality and dynamism; the relationship between popular culture and high art; gender and identity politics."

On another note, although it may lack the colourful joy of the previous work, David Rusbatch's contribution certainly gets the point across:

(Kate Nash's piece, dealing with the treatment of women in the music industry, is also worth a look, and very endearing.)

[syndicated here: http://littlered-uk.blogspot.com/]

2010-10-01T22:31:00.001-07:00

Oh, and we also care deeply about Britain's undergraduate Quantative Surveyors - so much so that one we met this evening is asleep on the sofa downstairs. We hope he does not steal tvs or smash fine china.

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Sometimes

2010-10-01T22:17:00.000-07:00

I want to found a small self sufficient, style conscious enclave existing entirely within the bounds of my own bedroom. We have a stout yale lock at the door, and there is a small split level hallway which could easily be fashioned into some kind of moat. I have an ornamental fireplace, lots of DVDs, a reproduction banksy on the wall and a large selection of vintage clothing and a set of gel pens in most colours including pastel, glitter and metallic varieties. If you want to come join us, we are non-partisan and we are mostly one person so please get in contact: pippa.dee@gmail.com

Heute ist kuche und fahrrad

2010-09-28T07:49:00.001-07:00

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2010-09-23T05:34:00.001-07:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11319918

I hope that in this latest round of flogging that public sector workers receive at the hands of the media, people remember that the vast majority of those in the sector earn far less than their private sector counterparts. Furthermore, I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with GPs earning in excess of £100,000 a year, and I don't think most other people do either. I DO have a problem with management consultants in the NHS being paid six figure salaries while there are nurses who have to work second jobs to get by. Personally I think that publishing a list like this is intentionally inflammatory and i wonder about the motivations of those behind it; harping on about 'gold plated pensions' and flogging the public sector whipping boy completely detracts from the real problem which is that across the board those at the top of the pyramid are being paid gluttonous amounts that are not only many times the wages of those at the bottom, but also those in the middle. (with the drip-drip stealth transformation of public sector agencies such as the CSA into 'third sector' operations, it's not like pension funds and employee rights will be safe for much longer anyway) And to focus on this inequality in the public sector, which is frankly a pittance in comparison to obscene private sector salaries, is frankly ridiculous. But then, one of the downsides of trying to sustain the public sector in a world in which corporations are becoming ever more powerful is that problems like this will always arise. So long as we have this weird sort of hybrid system, the BBC are trying to compete with commercial interests and Private hospitals can offer Drs far more ample wages and the state school system will not improve because many of those with the power to make it better don't REALLY care all that much because they can put their own kids through private school. The problem with trying to run these two sectors alongside one another is that the profit driven private sector will eventually leech all of the money out of the public sector until it's drained dry. Capitalism is based on competition; I agree that the public sector can't compete with the private in terms of wages and in fact it shouldn't be trying to. If we don't want our ailing public services to reach a point where the only option is to dismantle it and privatise it piece by piece then I suggest we need to sit down and have a good hard think about what we want from them, because the current model obviously isn't working. But for gods sake lay the blame where it belongs.

And on that note, I'm not entirely sure why the above article divulges that "Some people earn more than the Prime Minister", as though I should be expected to turn purple and fall off my chair in shock, sputtering, until I have been calmed down with suitably soothing words and a cup of hot, sweet, tea. It doesn't surprise or bother me because a) If Cameron decides it's not too crass, he can always follow in Blair's footsteps and make his money on the lecture circuit. b) It's not like he needs it. c) Why should politicians be paid obscenely high wages anyway? It's not a 'career', or at least it shouldn't be. It's a stressful and important job of course, but Cameron's six figure salary seems plenty ample. Some guy on the radio the other day made the comment that we shouldn't pay our politicians crazy amounts of money because it attracts the wrong sort of person, and I rather feel he may be right.

And finally; reading the reaction to Cable's 'marxist' utterances the other day (what is that all about anyway, are we in 50s America? "Sacrilege, he has dared speak ill of the money god! What a commie, go back to Russia!") I was struck by something which has hit me on occasion before; like a ton of bricks, it floors me. Some guy, who I will name and quote directly when I'm at a pc and not writing this on my phone, who I think was the director of CBS, made some sarky remark along the lines of "Well, if he thinks Capitalism isn't working so well then I'd like to see him suggest something that works better", and I remembered, once again, that the minds of the public have been colonised to such a degree that they actually believe this rubbish about there being no other alternative - "We have to accept the flaws of this system and all of its injustices because there is no other option", "Capitalism is the law of the jungle", "This state of affairs is a natural product of human nature." Orwell hit the nail on the head; repeat a lie enough times and people will think it true. The form of late capitalism we operate under now is just as engineered as the towers it built, as the urban landscapes that spiral out, fractal like, across the ground you see getting smaller and smaller as you fly into oblivion in the plane, glass and metal forged by men, by machines forged by men, always one step further away from blood and sweat and tears. We disregarded the idea of a creator God around the time we took to stroking the sky with our cold steel fingers, grew the lillies of the silicon valley, imagined new spaces of freedom and tried to conquer those as well. We made this world with our own hands. Take some fucking responsibility.

That's pretty bilious, sorry. Politics frustrate me.

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2010-09-23T04:09:00.001-07:00

2010-09-18T09:46:00.001-07:00

I just had the eerie experience of driving past a Lidl shop in the proximity of a motorway entrance near Wallasey which looked almost identical to one I visited once in Germany. Isn't it so strange, that the way we live now means that some places can be everywhere and nowhere at the same time?

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Little brother, big chair

2010-09-13T08:34:00.001-07:00

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2010-09-13T03:59:00.000-07:00

Last night a friend and I went to a screening of The End of the Affair (1955) in St Lukes church in Liverpool. The choice of film, with it's portrait of Catholic guilt against a backdrop of war torn London, was echoed by the setting - St Lukes is also known as 'The Bombed Out Church', a casualty of 1941. At times Deborah Kerr's onscreen urban world of strange new London streets, hewn from rubble and shadows, seemed to segue into our own; I half expected her to wander out from behind an overgrown pillar, to prostrate herself in front of the overgrown altar, unused for decades. When humans make rain fall from the heavens, we do not nourish or bring life - it doesn't nurture, it kills. But then, even though the church is no longer used for religious ceremony, I would like to think that some of the things that happen there now could be perceived as a new kind of worship - people coming together to make music and to celebrate life, rather than a preoccupation with ritual, an infatuation with death. The sunflowers that stood around the old walls were like cheerful sentries. It made a beautiful frame for the black&white world of the film, which was all clipped English accents (why does nobody talk like that any more! 'oh darlink - i think - i must punctuate - every three words - with a pause - and remain curiously atonal - even when declaring love.') and burning eyes and understated emotion. And the clothes....

The Bombed out Church is one of my favourite places in Liverpool. For many years it was a half-shell of a place; sometimes, as kids, we would run around the outside and jump up on tiptoes to try to peer through the gaps where there used to be windows. In 2007, a group known as the Urban Strawberry Lunch collective became artists in residence and since then the half-building has been given a new life, with all sorts of things going on - urban gardening, lots of film showings, and musical events happen on a regular basis. If you're local, I suggest checking them out.

2010-09-11T17:17:00.000-07:00

I would like to make it known that although I find David to be the undeniably more attractive of the two Milliband brothers, I nevertheless find myself far more amenable to the policies of his rather earnest brother, Ed. Despite his burning eyes and strong jawline, I find David a little too 'New Labour', whereas Ed's stances on the unions, living wages and gender equality generally don't make me a little bit sick in the back of my mouth. And when it comes to politicians that's a very good thing.

2010-09-04T06:06:00.001-07:00

So I am currently sat on a terrace waiting for one of my childhood friends to get married (which is obviously blogworthy in and of itself, but not really something I feel I can do justice to on a tiny phone keyboard). I got here with a few hours to spare, entirely thanks to a total stranger who saw me walking by the side of the road, blissfully unaware that I would soon be walking down a busy a road with no pavement. This utterly unprovoked act of general niceness got me thinking about the usual thoughts these sorts of ocurrances provoke, such as if-only-we-were-all-a-bit-more-trusting and also there-are-still-some-nice-people-after-all. Then I found myself thinking about other similar occasions when galvanised either by youth or stupidity (providing you don't consider the two terms to be synonymous anyhow) I dared to throw off the bounds of social convention and trust a total stranger.

The two events which spring to mind illustrate the breadth of the spectrum; the first being an occasion when a friend and I flew to Germany with the intention of spending the night in Frankfurt Hahn airport (note to reader: don't ever intend to do this, it is a bad idea) and got chatting to the guy who had sat behind us on the plane. We ended up crashing at his lovely flat (sorry mum) and avoiding a scrotty three hour coach journey in favour of a ride down dark fast German roads in his lovely, air conditioned car. Nice bloke, and we're still in touch with him now, sort of (as much as facebook friendship counts as being in touch these days). So that was one situation in which a fairly stupid risk actually turned out to be a good idea.

The other occasion that I thought of was less of a laudatory anecdote on the inheret goodwill in all man; when I was 14, I was in New York visiting family and some guy thought I was a teenage runaway and tried to recruit me into his prostitute ring, or whatever the technical terms. I scuppered his nefarious plans by completely failing to understand what he was asking, and then spotting my mum and running back to her after a cheerful "It was nice to meet you!" and a wave.

So either way, basically the score is 2 - random acts of kindness make for a beautiful world, 1 - white slave trade recruiters in dodgy NY parks. Those odds will do for now I suppose

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2010-09-03T05:07:00.001-07:00

#hintikka "This possibility of using language as its own metalanguage explains how speakers can recycle signifieds for their personal needs without loss of communication, provided the new meaning and universe of discourse are properly defined."

So when I say tomato and you say tomato, we're really describing two different but similar objects, because fortunately we're part of an English-speaker-wide agreement to use the word as an umbrella term for all things which conform to a certain group of characteristics. Does this mean language is always a compromise - we are always trying (necessarily, unsuccessfully) to convey a sense of our own internal experience to another being who will only ever be able to experience a passable at best simulation of it?

Pitchfork Reviews Reviews Review

2010-08-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

ok so I was surfing the internet before as I so often do and I stumbled upon this website (http://www.pitchforkreviewsreviews.com/) which confused me briefly as I was familiar with pitchfork.com but also not really familiar enough to grasp the subtleties of the situation, but then I read some more and so now basically the subtleties of the situation are: there is a guy called David, and there is a website called Pitchfork, which has been reviewing records since I don't know when but probably early to mid nineties, and everyday Pitchfork reviews 5 new musical albums and then David reads their reviews, and then reviews these reviews and posts these review reviews on his website which is called Pitchforkreviewreviews.com (this is a link to an nytimes.com article with more background if you're interested)

anyway I couldn't resist the opportunity to write a review of a review review so that is what I am trying to do, and i'm not using many capital letters or punctuation marks and typing in neat little blocks of semi-stream of consciousness style monologues, which is basically what he does so far as I can tell, although I think I'm relying on commas too much whereas his preferred technique seems to be to sneak in a question mark to break up the rambling run-on sentences and engage the reader like this, you know? i guess this is probably because he apparently writes his reviews on his blackberry jotting down thoughts as he has them, which gives the actually quite nice feeling that we're somehow privvy to someone's internal monologue

he's got that Chuck Palahniuk first person narrative thing going on, which is making me think as I'm reading it that it's really funny how writing in a non-conventional style can manipulate the way your readers see you as being, like, the way this guy writes at first makes him come across as a little bit dim but in a way that makes it quite obvious he's really pretty smart, you know? kind of a bit ditzy and naive, which is probably how he gets away with actually being quite mean on occasions, but whatever it works because he basically comes across as a razor sharp wit masquerading as a bit of a clueless dolt but in such a way as serves only to accentuate the fact that he clearly isn't a clueless dolt, which is a pretty good trick if you think about it

anyway the whole stream of consciousness/bitesize paragraphs of thought thing is cute and it means that he can spice up his blog posts by talking about other things that his train of thought carries him on to, while still under the vague umbrella heading of whatever he's talking about, which is stylistically nice, don't you think? and also adds to what i think is the most appealing thing about his blog, namely the fact that even though he's clearly addressing the vast and varied audience pool that the internet comprises of he somehow gives a sense of intimacy that is, well, kinda refreshing and closes the gap between the person on the keyboard and the person hiding somewhere on the other side of the screen so kudos to him for that

i'm sitting here staring at the screen trying to write something about this guy in the same way this guy would write it and i feel like it should be making me dizzy, like when you stand in between two mirrors in a lift and you can only see yourself stretching out and out forever but i guess this is actually the total opposite of that anyway, because there isn't an infinite chain of anybody, just a lot of reflections of nothing there in the first place, and i get the feeling that this guy is aware of the ironies of his own situation and yeah probably also of a lot of things which are going on online, fun quote:

"tonight i am DJing a party to celebrate the opening of this new communal workspace for internet startups in Williamsburg, and also to celebrate a new internet social media recommendation and interaction mechanism that is somehow connected with twitter, i am not sure i fully understand it. i wonder how many hours it would take to explain it to my grandma. maybe that could be like the new metric for measuring how conceptual/meta/post-modern whatever you’re doing is, for example like “yeah i’m writing this cloud-based internet application that is actually both a monetarily incentivized game and a social media tool and it also has a wiki-style user-updated database. as it stands i’m at 3 grandma-hours but if i integrate it with foursquare that’s gonna be another grandma-hour”" (quoted frm here)

anyway I guess I should probably actually get round to reviewing one of the pitchfork review reviews so here goes:

my review of the pitchfork review review (click here for the original review review)

1. so the review starts out talking about the pitchfork reviewer who wrote the original review which shows an impressive knowledge of his source material which is frankly lost on me as i am a casual (at best) reader of pitchfork, but luckily this isn't a problem as he quickly finds a tangent to explore. this tangent is about how sometimes when you're reading something you find yourself writing or thinking in the same style, which is funny because i was just thinking about this before whilst writing this post because while reading his blog i felt like David had probably read a lot of Palahniuk or Coupland or maybe deLillo or somebody like that, you know? except for all the 'you know' stuff which seems to be channelling the ghost of perezhilton's credibility, altho it does make for nice flavouring particles so on the whole I'm going to give this first part of his review review a 7.8/10.

this is because i like the fact that he not only uses his starting off point to start talking about some other stuff and write about some interesting thoughts that don't really have anything to do with what he was meant to be talking about, but he also crucially brings it all back together with a few well crafted and concise sentences which shine out like a beacon amongst his scatty, frayed paragraphs, and serve to show that none of his prose is irrelevant unless he chooses it to be. that's an impressive level of craftmanship

2. this is a review of a review about fairly uncomplicated dance music so far as i can gather, however rather than killing it this actually provides fuel for David to highlight the fact that a capable reviewer can, i guess, engage with the subject matter via different avenues when the most obvious ones seem to be blind alleys

he points out that

a lot of electronic music, especially music that Tom characterizes as “fun music, and it doesn’t have any big aim beyond that” is harder to write about than music with pointed lyrics and a clear mission, i guess, because it’s harder to extract concrete ideas to agree or disagree, beyond the idea that there are no bigger ideas, you know what i mean?

and i think that's actually a really penetrating observation, and i like that he illustrates his own point pretty well and i like that ideas can grow up around even shadows of thoughts, and i guess i would even be tempted to say that i'm glad i live in a time when we have the chance to see our minds spilled onscreen before us because when we're sitting there, looking at our thoughts in digital code onscreen we can play with them. so maybe it doesn't matter if there are no bigger ideas out there because we can make our own. 7.5/10

3. sometimes when you read an online blog, even just a few sentences of it, you feel like you have a sense of what the guy who sat their at the keyboard and hammered it out is like. generally this is something that i try and refrain from thinking because it's hard enough to get to know most people in real life even when they're trying to show you, and on the internet you aren't even getting the clues from a real face, but just how that person wants to show their face, you know what i mean? it's like me asking you to describe me when you've only ever seen me at a halloween party (and i don't mean one of those sexy halloween parties where nobody wears much of anything i mean when i was wearing a proper mask, maybe freddy krueger or one of the teenage mutant ninja turtles) so even though i can safely say i know absolutely nothing about this guy, having read a few of his reviews and spent an hour or so trying to write the way he writes i can honestly say that i think i like his mask. 8/10.

pre-Soviet Kitsch in pre-glorious Technicolour

2010-08-27T14:48:00.000-07:00

This photo is one of a number taken between 1909 and 1912 that surfaced recently. It gave me a weird little kick in my tummy to see such photos in colour. I don't know why; maybe it's because we're so used to seeing the past pictured in black and white that we start to imagine it being that way? Whatever the reason, look at them if you have time because they are really cool. Do they make you feel funny too?

We're all for sale these days..

2010-08-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

So, yesterday the same topic was brought up (by someone other than myself) in two entirely different conversations with two entirely different people, which is always a good sign that it bears further scrutiny. Co-incidentally, it's also very relevant to a term paper I am (sort of, thinking about) writing at the moment.

The topic in question would be the alleged feminisation of male behaviour in contemporary western society. This is much lamented in many corners; the American media in the early to mid 2000s (as documented by Susan Faludi) displayed what can only be described as a hysterical need to reaffirm traditional gender roles in response to a sense of emasculated national identity, for obvious reasons. Male fashion in the late 2000s has been descried as overtly feminine in many corners – as a male friend of mine pointed out last night, it is now fairly common for boys to dress in “girlie” garments like cardigans and low necklines; to sport high maintenance haircuts that require straighteners and multiple hair products; and finally to indulge in cosmetic routines (3 step facial cleansing processes, fake tans and even waxes) traditionally considered to be firmly within the female domain.

The male friend I have just mentioned was the second incidence of the topic in one evening, as I explained previously. It was interesting to hear a male perspective on this, particularly one from my generation which came from a vantage point of intelligent interest rather than some kind of overt need to reassert a masculine identity against perceived threats. In a fit of that strange symmetry which pervades life more than we would care to admit, the first ocurrence was during conversation with the mother of another close friend – an insightful lady with a well rounded perception of, well, things in general, actually. She was lamenting the loss of “real men” - and the plethora of self serving, cowardly boy-men that seem to have taken over; the need for them to “man up.” Again, the perception of actual physical changes in the average male (less facial hair, bearing etc) was touched upon. That interests me actually, and when I have time (ie not now) I will look into whether there has been any studies into whether any of these assumptions are grounded in genuine physiological data – but anyway, regardless of whether they are or not, general consensus certainly seems to think so, and more and more these days I am leaning towards to the opinion that it's quite possibly the myths that drive reality in the direction it takes, rather than the other way round.

Anyhow, the jury is still out on that one, in my opinion anyway, but what I was mulling over before as I vacuumed carpet on each individual stair in my house earlier (my life is so rock and roll these days) was what qualities exactly is it that we see in the contemporary male that seem to us to be so inherently feminine that even when displayed by someone who is obviously a man, they still somehow signify womanliness. Of attributes typically described in this context – longer periods of time spent grooming, increased use of cosmetic products, increased time/money spent keeping up with fashion, greater emotional openness – only the latter, and even that arguably, I can see as being justifiably considered somehow intrinsically feminine, rather than merely the result of socialisation. When asked why wearing makeup is a girly thing to do, the only possible response I can think of is because it's just what girls do, which is an infinite regress with hardly a leg to stand on, I think. If we look to the animal world, we can hardly say that there is a general, massive gap between the time spent grooming by males and females of the same species. There is no biological reason (that I am aware of) why women should spend such a disproportionately large amount of time grooming – it is not as though there is a dearth of eligible male sexual partners about, such that women need to engage in extreme competition to attract a mate. So I would posit that perhaps it is not that men are becoming more “feminised”- but rather that in this instance, due to the complex and ongoing process of gender identity construction, there has been a “levelling out” of behaviours that were previously considered primarily characteristic of one or other gender.

Of course, the next place to take THAT particular assumption would be the fact that presumably at some point the pendulum might swing back in the other direction and your average woman-on-the-street might begin to spend the same amount of time getting ready to go out (ie quick shower, glance in the mirror and out the door) as has been typically ascribed to your average bloke in the past. But then on the other hand, I doubt that would happen – I think that maybe we can attribute this “feminisation” (or increased homogeneity in the behaviour of individuals of both genders) not to some kind of emasculating force in modern society, but rather to the all pervading influence of commercialism in western society. The body is becoming an increasingly commercial space – not only in such extreme and overt ways as expensive plastic surgery, but also in the wearing of designer clothes (acting as a living advert for designers who hardly need the publicity) and the propogation of the beauty ideals purported by the media as so many people strive to become an ideal that has no grounding in reality; that ultimate postmodern creature, the simulacra -a copy of a copy of a copy of which there is no original. I see these strange plastic creatures more and more, particularly those deeply embedded in cultures where rampant consumerism has taken a stronger hold, and they both amuse and perplex and sadden me, these little cartoon people, striving for two dimensions, wearing a mask to hide the fact that beneath it there is nothing. Anyway, I digress – my point is that maybe it's just that male identity has simply begun to succumb to the strong influence of money and the need to be a viable and appealing product a little later than his female counterpart. After all, the female body has been a commercial space for a very long time. Think of the oldest profession, of the dowry, and the dialectics of buyer/bought in a society where, for many hundreds of years, the majority of all wealth and property (and thus, capability to buy) was owned and controlled by one gender, while the other could, for the most part, only acquire rights to such things (and the power that accompanies them) by entering into an unequal partnership – or, by attaining worth only through the process of being bought.

Of course, now we live in a more enlightened, empowered society the gap is shrinking, and the great equalising force of capitalism means that we're all getting shafted to more or less the same degree. Thank heavens for small mercies?

2010-08-08T08:19:00.001-07:00

On the topic of truelad.com:

"Did you know 'women can be lads too'? i don't know about you, but that information totally takes away everything problematic with the term for me. i've not been worrying my pretty little head about it since. next week on bigoted logic: defining black people as 'honorary whites'!" (Rosie Tuplin, my intelli-feminist paramour, 2010)

2010-08-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

There is an advert that has been cropping up in the saturday Jobs section of the Guardian Weekend for a good few years now – I have a distinct memory of reading it in Hamilton Square Train station the year before I started University, which would make me 19 and hence the advert to have had a presence in the Jobs pages of everyones favourite “bleeding hearted liberal” rag for at least 4 years now. I also have a vague sense that I'd seen it around prior to the instance I am taking as a marker; regardless, the point is that the position being advertised has evidently been around for quite a long time, and requires new applicants on a fairly regular basis.

To paraphrase, it's basically an advert for “Home Help” needed by a “slightly disabled” female writer. Nothing particularly remarkable there. I get the impression what is required is, apart from the odd bit of shopping, mostly company - “Over qualified people,” you will be glad to hear, all of you job-starved recent Uni graduates from the Class of 2010, “[are] welcomed,” and furthermore, “A sense of humour helps.”

So it comes to pass that somehow this advert, which in actuality probably amounts to little more than a lady who is for some reason rather unfortunate when it comes to being able to appoint reliable household help, has captured my imagination on repeat occasions to the extent that when I glanced upon it today for the umpteenth time I felt my imagination diverge far from the path of reasonable assumption. I like the idea of a 'difficult' (in the way which can only be said with a forced smile, through gritted teeth) lady, stubborn as a mule and crabby as an old wounded cat, who , despite her good intentions and ultimately kind heart, has driven away a long succession of potential home-help with her willfull spirit and demanding requirements. I'd imagine the first day always goes quite well, for both parties – perhaps some of the “House Rules” seem a little demanding (“No Shoes anywhere past the porch, please, and I like to keep all the doors closed – insulation, you see.”) but really, nothing more than you get in most houses these days, now that the home has become less of a sanctuary and just another commercialised space onto which neuroses are projected by those who dictate what is appropriate. They part on cordial terms, and with cautious optimism – the help, walking to the bus stop in the cool dry afternoon air, reasons that even though it's only ten pounds an hour, it's not hard work and besides, how much can there really be to do? Plenty of time to sneak off for a cup of tea and to devour a few pages of the newspaper. And so, the next day – shopping, stilted conversation peppered with the occasional dry-as-toast witticism, and strange foodstuffs (eccentricity is allowed in elderly female writers, you suppose – but quails eggs?? This is dinner party food, food to show to others, food for display; then again, what is wrong with entertaining well even when your only dinner guest is yourself? An audience of one is still an audience).Back at home, searching looks over the battenburg cake and excuses made, as you escape to the kitchen. The upstairs landing smells like geraniums. There are no photographs.
Wednesday is a day of rest; you spend the afternoon hopping on and off buses, getting lost in suburban London, which mostly looks like suburban everywhere and has the redbrick and concrete labyrinthine qualities of suburban everywhere, and the repetitive motifs of suburban everywhere, and is held in an arid pause in the desert of those afternoon hours before the school run begins. You sit on a bench and unwrap your sandwiches, wrapped in tin foil, and ignore the curious looks that passers by would throw at you were they able to commit such a flagrant disregard of social convention – it being, in this sort of place, nothing short of brash to do much more than acknowledge the existence of another body in close proximity – for who on earth brings a packed lunch these days? Strange to do so, when sandwiches are available from every corner shop – limp, polystyrene triangles with pieces of meat like pieces of paper, cheese that comes from a tube, the metal arms and metal teats of the production line now the hand that feeds. (you cannot bite nor seek comfort here; battery farmed lives with just enough emotional sustenance to continue conspicuous consumption – the factory doesn't end where you think it does. You can't always see the bars.) Finish up your sandwiches, squash the tin foil into a ball. Bus home.
Thursday is worse. The air is stale, the conversation is stale; your tolerance grows less and less – your own ego, mediocre but expansive, resents the role you signed up to, you forget to close the living room door, the cat gets in, there is hair on the sofa, you spend the next 40 minutes vacuuming. Before you leave, she reads to you – poetry, and it's raw and it's good and it's honest but somehow it makes you feel further away, as though you're watching her through metres of water, rising to the surface, staring down below. Such an open invitation to truth, a door left unabashedly, flagrantly ajar makes you weak in a place you can't quite identify. The more the door opens, the further you sink into the shadows. You make your polite compliments, you say goodbye. Front door closes, you're left staring at a brass knocker. The paint around it is chipped. In the window to your left, there is an aspidistra plant. The bus home is quiet and stagnant, save for a mother and a boy of eleven or twelve in sports clothes who kicks a solemn tattoo on the back of the seat in front of him. When you get home, you call to hand in your resignation – time constraints; it doesn't fit in so well with your timetable as you had thought. The voice at the other end of the line is distant – “Very well. It was nice to work with you, briefly.You must pop by for a cup of tea when you're in the neighbourhood.” Click. You are left staring at the handpiece held before you as it hums its inverted Omkara. Call severed.

Whether this is anything close to the truth or not, I would like to send her a cactus because they are easy to look after and very rewarding. and I hope she has children or grandchildren or lots of old friends to come and visit her.

2010-08-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

My Mum likes to watch a TV channel called Yesterday (tagline: “Where the past is always present”) which specialises in vaguely nostalgic documentaries usually focused on the none-too-distant past. At the moment, there is a show on exploring the thirties through the lens of home video cameras, obviously a rather scarce commodity at the time. It interests me, that we feel so disconnected from our past, that we need it fed back to us, in bitesize chunks – this comes in an evening in which I have seen slum clearance in 1960s Leeds, and footage of Dockers giving wads of cash to Miners in a show of 80s solidarity. Is this the only way we can conjure up any sense of origin, of source – that is only real which is reflected in glorious technicolor?

Anyway, the section which just finished featured Eva Braun's home video footage. Weird.

A bit too pretentious for a facebook status update...

2010-08-03T03:08:00.001-07:00

:) / :(

neither one exists without the promise of the other and today I wear both masks. (you can call me Thalia or Melpomene as the mood takes you..)

2010-07-14T23:38:00.000-07:00

sometimes I think that if I was a gay man and didn't care so much about my work (or anything) I would basically be a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

Also, even by this early stage in my existence I think I own too many books for it actually to even be possible for me to read them all.

2010-07-13T03:45:00.001-07:00

((reflect on this:))

The mimetic quality of desire amazes me: it turns everything into a hall of mirrors.

2010-07-02T06:40:00.000-07:00

So I haven't really been around here much for a while. Could offer explanations but won't; nevertheless, if I were to they would definitely be of the positive kind. I may not have been writing here very much recently but I have been writing a lot elsewhere ,- "I draw on anything for inspiration: a piece of paper, a fond memory, the walls in a train station." I am sun-drunk and have been running around and playing lots, as is the summer custom, but I am also in a phase of overt academic activity too. This means that my time is divided between the library (or other place of study), various drinking holes and my bed at a ratio of roughly 3:3:1. I love it. I get such a kick out of reading up on something that interests me and making headway with an idea, it's better than any drug could ever be.

Anyway I thought I would stop by and post this because on my cycle into Uni, I was thinking and I tend to try and get my thoughts out these days and into the relatively stable medium of words because if you don't tie down an idea to a signifier of SOME sort then it risks floating away into abstract oblivion, and I don't like to think of those poor lost little thoughts drifting off into the universe of the never actualised, the land of might-have-could-have-what-if-but-didn't.

I am thinking a lot, at the moment, about theories of modernisation - particularly post-modernism (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Jameson for those who are interested - recommendations always appreciated with love&kisses) and the constrictions on the individual that accompany the present state of western society (Capitalist, late capitalist, consumerist, post-industrial... you get the gist). Specifically, at the moment I'm concerned with the means individuals find to transcend the "cage" of these constrictive societies, and to pinpoint even further, the ways in which such transcendence (or the desire for it) is portrayed in contemporary literature.

So, for men in the land of the fictional, apparently, it's violence. Violence is what gets you out of your cage; it's through violence that you lay claim to the identity that our secular-anonymous-sterile-technologised-void world takes from you, or so the literature seems to think. Then there's sex. "The only time you feel like you're really alive." Another potential avenue for transcending the cage of individual subjective experience, which is presumably open to both men and women. Yet there are intimations that neither of these experiences are capable of subverting the prison of the normal, of providing us with meaning in a world in which "meaning itself" has ceased to hold meaning. I have completely wondered away from my point into the realm of cloudy, rusty, transient thoughts that I have not yet realised (this time in the land of might-have-could-have-what-if-still-might) and am at risk of getting lost amongst them so I will firmly march myself back on track and give voice to the thought that I felt deserved words in the first place:

So how do we, women, get out of this cage? Why don't we want the violence and the blood and the gore and the paradigmatic sexual experience? I'm not saying that we should, rather simply observing that we don't, really, to the same degree; and it interests me why. How are we getting our kicks?

One suggestion is that it is through motherhood that we derive meaning for our selves. I can understand this, to some degree. To be able to give birth, to create life, is one of the greatest gifts that our lives have been granted - the ability of life itself to continue, to propogate. I think that having children is probably one of the greatest things you can do in life, and one day (in the very very distant future) I hope that I am willing and able to do so. But somehow I can't accept this idea that my life, as a woman, can only derive meaning from what it can potentially give rise to. This idea, of deriving meaning only from what I could potentially contain, calls into my mind the idea of chinese boxes, Russian dolls, each having worth based only on what it contains, again and again in some kind of infinite regress. And of course, an infinite regress doesn't provide adequate support for believing any proposition to be true. and I dream of being something other than a vessel

2010-05-11T10:47:00.000-07:00

Today I had a not very nice flight but made friends with a violinist who was in the seat next to me, and then I bought a Pepsi on the train from Frankfurt and the man in the shop gave me a cup which he had modified with two drink-stirrers sellotaped to the bottom to make it look like an alien and drawn a face on it. SO that was ok.

2010-05-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

"We don't believe in you and your wrecking crew/We don't believe in you wedontbelieveinyou"

Election innit

2010-05-05T20:07:00.001-07:00

I don't really know all that much about Politics. Unfortunately my sixth form college went in for Politics less than GNVQs in beauty therapy; but that is rather beside the point as in all honesty I was too busy doing any number of wildly stupid things to pursue any kind of personal education in the subject. This isn't something I'm proud of, and it is something that I hope to rectify one day. On an entirely personal level, this election has made me feel rather ashamed of my shallow knowledge of British politics. Theoretically, I have it all there. I can discuss social contract theory until the cows come home – I know Hobbes and Locke and Rousseau, I have dabbled in Marx and Marcuse (too much Marcuse, not enough Marx, some might say), I can understand (although for some almost indiscernible reason disagree with) Rawls – I can even, on some level, consider that all property (all proper tea?) is theft. Give me a half a pint, twenty minutes and s topic and I can discuss the hows, whys and wherefores of any number of complex theoretical political “big ideas.” However, when it comes to the ins and outs of British politics – of economics, of first past the post, of strategic voting and percentages and all these fiddly but violently important little aspects of the actual system in which we find ourselves I am blind. I am as blind as the next man and blinder than most. I am not good at politics. But, I am good at people. Not in terms of interaction - but I understand people, to a degree, and I do a lot of listening. And this time round, I have heard a few things. This is what I have learned.

[+]'Voting for Policies' has a nice ring to it and would perhaps work in a system of proportional representation but that isn't the system we have so we just have to make the best of it, really, and hope that things are different next time round.

[+]I have never met anybody who lived through the 80s (and by lived, I mean, was of an age to be more concerned with the poll tax and less with gnawing on their transformer toys) who wants another Tory government. Never. I suppose that anybody likely to think that the Thatcherite years were a good thing is probably fairly unlikely to be hob-nobbing around with the likes of me, but nevertheless, I think this is telling. I know with hindsight it's easier to find things to appreciate, and people keep telling me that Thatcher did do some good things (allegedly.. probably.... possibly?) – but then, even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, doesn't it?

[+]When talking about Politics, most people don't seem to know what they are talking about. I mean of course, there are many people who do – I have enjoyed, this time around, listening to the thoughts and opinions of people far more politically educated than myself and I have found it very insightful, a definite learning curve. I have witnessed some passionate debates and had ideas suggested to me that never ocurred to me before. However, none of this detracts from the fact that it seems like, to me, a lot of political debate amongst your average citizen is basically just everyone trying to sound like they know what they're talking about more than the person next to them. It so often seems to descend into petty point-scoring and pedantism - “Please, correct terminology, cretin.” As if tarting up your views more prettily is somehow more important than the fact that you're trying to polish a turd. I feel like I've spent a great deal of time watching people bluster through discussions that are based far more about who is the most confident and who has the most aggressive debating technique than who actually has arguments of substance. But then, I suppose that's the case with everything, it's just that politics seems to particularly titillate it.

[+]Before the circus began, it seemed like it was the general consensus that we were going to get a Tory government. However, I soon realised, whilst venturing out of my cosy little middle class student enclave, that this wasn't anything resembling the consensus of everybody at all. In Leeds a few months ago I had a really interesting conversation with some of the regulars in the pub I used to work in. They were the first people I encountered who genuinely didn't see a Tory government as being an inevitability. Furthermore, they didn't see Labour – 'warmongering, disappointing, rebranded' New Labour – as being backstabbing failures. I come from a middle class background. I know 'everyone' does these days – that, I suppose, was one of Thatchers victories, the rise and sprawl of the middle classes. Convincing everyone, even those on not all that many grand a year who are realistically one paycheque away from the breadline, that they are middle class and should vote to protect their own small interests. To convince the more affluent of the working class that they should vote in the interests of the wealthy, than the masses..... because One Day, You could Be Here Too! Why give up anything to support those who are in need? Because it requires sacrifice, and Hell, I don't Need It – I'm Doing Just Fine, and I Worked For My Money, and So Anyone Who Doesn't Have Money Doesn't Have it Because They Are Lazy And Unmotivated Scroungers and so Why Should I Carry Them? Completely disregarding the fact that wealth distribution is at best based on an arbitrary system of birth and circumstance and most of all luck. 'Why not reward the rich and successful? That's where we all want to be, right?' And one of Thatchers victories was convincing us that we could be. Fact: We won't. Not all of us. That is an impossibility in a society based on massive inequality. Statistically, you are probably not going to get There – so why are you protecting the interests of those who will? They aren't playing on the same pitch as most of us – they aren't even playing the same fucking ball game. But my point is, that although to some of us, it might not seem like there is much difference between Labour and Tory, there are people to whom it makes a massive difference. See: Surestart. See: Child trust fund initiative.

[+]On May 1st,1997, I was on a school overnight trip. It was a sunny evening. I remember our teachers (well, most of them) walking off to the pub, even clapping each other on the back. I remember, far before I could understand what it meant, grown ups saying that things were going to change. That this was it – finally. It was going to be okay from now on. It wasn't. My mum puts it best – with the Tories, you expected it, but with Labour, they stabbed you in the back. All of the problems we have are not simply a result of some evil Tory deathstar and would be totally resolved by a labour government. Labour fucked us. In 1997 they wined us, dined us, told us we looked awful pretty in our nice new dress and hey, maybe did we want to come back to their place just 'to talk', and then bent us over a desk and buggered us. But at the end of the day – they are So Much Better than the alternative. If I were to vote Labour, I would not be voting pro Labour, I would be voting Not Tory.

[+]I'm from the kind of family where it would be tantamount to sacrilege to vote Tory. This kind of tribal politics seems to be sneered at now; somehow it is considered weak or ill-informed to vote on the basis of social class, to continue the values inherited from parents, grandparents, eras with values that we are convinced are so alien to our own.We should vote how we feel, however suits us best – we should forget all the lessons history has taught us and vote on the basis of policies, because, as we all know, Politicians Of Course Stand By Their Election Pledges. (see: 1979 (78 maybe), The Sun front page: ten pledges of Thatcher's government. Five years later, all broken) However, if I genuinely felt voting Tory would be in the best interests of our state I would do so. I don't vote on the basis of how I have been told; I would never be a part of some blind indoctrination process and my parents would never expect or desire me to be. But, having grown up with the values my parents have instilled in me – values which are based on equality and fairness and the importance of a chance for all, of working to dismantle the class system which for some reason is still so pervasive in our society, of valuing everybody as being of equal worth regardless of their origin – having grown up with these values I would never dream of voting Tory.

[+]I wouldn't vote Tory because of a very distinct ideological difference between my own views and theirs. I wouldn't vote Tory because I don't believe it's okay to sacrifice the poorest people in society on the altar of “free enterprise.” I know this more American concept of freedom is catching on in Britain – I know that suddenly anything which prevents us from striving to achieve our ambition to basically be as successful as we want and to hell with whoever pays the price is viewed as a bad thing, but I don't agree. It would be one thing to value unhindered ambition if the starting society was a level playing field, but it isn't. Alls it means to give Everybody a chance to Make Their Fortune is that those at the middle and upper echelons of the system are somehow justified in indulging their greed by professing that They Deserve It, and the poorest in the system are left to stagnate in their pool of 'primordial ooze' regardless of how much Ambition, Talent and Drive they display. Anyone who claims that the above three qualities pave the way to success in an unequal society is talking bullshit. The path to success is paved with money. Money begets money. I am not claiming that everyone who has achieved success has done so on the basis of great wealth, or that they somehow don't deserve this success – far from it. In fact I applaud those who, from whatever background they come, have managed to achieve something in our society off the back of hard work and clever decisions. What I am pointing out is that it is utterly utterly misguided to say that all of those who achieve under our present system have done so purely on the back of wit, intelligence and dilligence and all of those who fail to achieve are simply lazy, unmotivated and untalented. It's just bullshit – it's utter, utter bullshit and makes no sense, and to justify inequality on this basis defies belief.

[+]I know there are people who, when one brings up the subject of the 80s, automatically switch off. We weren't alive then, things change! Lets move on! But I grew up with the shadow of that decade hanging over me. I knew from a very young age that some deep rooted ideological inequality had somehow marred the world into which I was born. That somehow, people were confused – that even those with not-very-much nurtured a sense of entitlement coupled with a fear of losing it all that somehow seemed to justify clutching their own tiny piece of cheese to their chest even as it melted away.

[+]At the end of the day, we don't live in an ideal world. We should strive for utopia..... of COURSE we should strive for Utopia; if we ever for one second stop dreaming that we can make things better then we would be a lost cause. But that shouldn't stop us facing the reality of our situation. By all means, usher in a new era – Storm the fucking Bastille, I'll be right alongside you, but until that day, we have to do the best with what we have. Hope for the best, but plan for reality.

So that's what I think, and that's what I've learned. This should have been a lot longer but it's 4.59 am, I still need to pack for a flight tomorrow and I don't function well on no sleep. I hope when you go to cast your vote, in whatever direction you may choose, you do it with conviction. I hope, when you justify it in years to come, that your justification is not made purely on the basis that you thought it would see you and you alone through the next few years of turmoil – that you saved a few hundred quid in taxes, to the detriment of public services. Public services that perhaps you might not benefit from most – but which have a massive impact on others who share our tiny island. Britain. We love it passionately and we hate it in equal measure; we can't even agree on the matter of what it is and what it means, let alone where we should take it – but it is ours. All of it. And regardless of how you define it, we have a duty to all of Britain to do the best with it that we possibly can for all of our citizens. When you vote – please, PLEASE, think.

So that's my opinion, anyway. I'm sure somebody will be along any minute now to tell me why it's wrong – and actually, I'm sort of looking forward to it.

Ps I know this is heavy on the emotive and rather light on substance in terms of opinion on actual policy but you're going to make up your own mind anyway on those matters, so.....

2010-05-02T07:30:00.000-07:00

"Bromidia is the hypnotic par excellence."

2010-05-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

"We've noticed for years that the British public would like to have Swedish levels of public services married to American levels of taxation; they would like much more local control over services so they can have what they like, but of course they would also like somebody to guarantee that services were the same everywhere so that it wasn't unfair and there was no postcode lottery.." - on the cognitive polyphasia of the British voting public.

Postcards from the Edge

2010-04-16T11:11:00.001-07:00

Flikr Album

A few weeks ago, I went to take photos of the empty boarded up houses in the Kensington/ Edge Lane area of Liverpool. We’re not just talking a few houses here, or even a few streets of houses. There is an entire neighbourhood (what used to be a neighbourhood) quietly waiting for nothing. An end. The demolition began a couple of weeks ago, after the last lingering resident was forced out of her home on January 16th (edge-lane.info), and is scheduled to take around 6 months. The reason behind the forced relocation of Edge Lane’s residents and the demolition of these old Victorian houses is to widen the road; ostensibly this was in order to manage an expected increase of traffic from the M62 in 2008, the year that Liverpool held the title of European City of Culture. Ongoing legal action meant that this couldn’t happen, so instead the bizarre decision was made to paint brightly coloured pictures and generic inspirational/ meaningless slogans (“people” “creativity”) on the boarded up windows and doors. This felt uncannily like the Council attempting to wrap their mistake in a big shiny bow and pass it off as a gift, and indeed could hardly have looked any more inappropriate than a house sheepishly adorned with a lopsided ribbon. But it’s all neither here nor there now, really, because here won’t be there for much longer anyway – unintentionally ironic murals or otherwise.

(Predictably enough,) I have a bit of a thing for empty houses. I’m not sure exactly why, although it is undoubtedly a trait I inherited from my mother. I remember, years ago, us rushing in the car with a camera to take pictures of a big old house in the process of actually being demolished. Half of the walls had been ripped out, and it sat there, all its fireplaces and fittings exposed, with the same weird beauty as a dissected circuit board or the inside of a clockwork toy. Little rooms where people lived out little lives, and now there are no more stories to play out within them.

It’s like walking round a neighbourhood after the bomb. There’s hardly anyone about, and those few who are brave/lost enough to be here are wily enough not to stick around for long. It’s a ghost town; a vacuum on the outskirts of a busy hub. It feels sad. Not in a grand, epic, tragic sort of way – no violins reaching a crescendo, or rain falling from the sky and landing softly on my cheek, mimicking tears in pathetic fallacy. But then, the saddest moments are rarely so eagerly announced, are they? They slip you by, gently; until one day, you look back at an old photo and you realise quite how much you have lost.

I’m trying very hard not to get all soft-news-sentimental writing this blog, because I think that would be the easy route, and honestly I don’t think it’s necessarily a fair portrayal. To focus entirely on the obvious element of loss that is inherent in any such situation would be a bit of a cop out; it’s also a fascinating experience, to see how our human concepts of living space have changed in such a short space of time. It’s a scarred, post apocalyptic landscape and it makes me wonder a lot of things; like where did all the people go? Who used to live here? Can any home can be reduced to just a house, and then to a pile of bricks? Sometimes it all seems cold and frozen, dead-eyed houses caught in the perpetual almost-moment of their last fall. Other times, when the sun comes out from behind a cloud, the windows fiery orange and I wonder whether these old walls, transient as they are, could hold the flames for all that long – would everything just burn?

There are around 400,000 long term empty homes in Britain, a country which (as of 2005, forgive slightly outdated statistics) has 10,459 rough sleepers and 98,750 households in temporary accommodation. I won’t bother drawing the conclusion for you there because it seems pretty obvious. I will also add that there are numerous instances throughout the country when buildings that would have otherwise been left abandoned to slowly decay like so much old fruit have been successfully squatted, as places of residence, community centres or art spaces. (rampART blog, Autonmous London blog, cooltan arts centre) To my mind, it makes a lot of sense to make use of what we have, rather than throwing it away so we can get something newer but not necessarily better.

We have a terrible habit of destroying things that, once gone, can never be replaced. We value things based on ever changing criteria; no sooner have we built our towers so high they scrape the sky than we have pulled them down again. What we dream of today we forget tomorrow. I don’t think it’s healthy to forget everything that used to mean so much. I don’t think it says anything very commendable about that aspect of our culture, and I would rather we at least tried to keep some connection to our past, because once upon a time, it was everything, and that should count for something at least.

Life iz a RollerCoaster

2010-04-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

The Times: "Gordon Brown pledges 'five more years' as Prime Minister if Labour wins"

Well, I'm sure that dreary prospect has probably driven away a good few labour voters. One suspects it might have been better strategy to keep that one quiet...

afterthought

2010-04-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

actually, thinking about it, a website like tumblr (blogs entirely composed of reposts of thoughts, poems, excerpts from articles, quotes, photos, newspaper clippings etc etc etc) is the perfect format for late-capitalist culture to be expressed;

"everything is a copy of a copy of a copy."; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto; "Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."; "I am a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes. I am all random."

Actually, I would be quite content to live a life of retro-pastiche - in a society like our own which is so prone to conspicuous consumption and the ever-expanding cycle of creation/destruction which necessarily accompanies this, the sheer volume of creative output renders any complete innovation more or less totally obsolete. IF everything has been done before then it's impossible to do something new, isn't it? Or that's the general idea anyway. We can all just look to the mountain of culture that has come before us, and cut-and-paste to our own specification - doctoring glorious frankensteins of art and literature. So the artist becomes like a scientist, or a dedicated jigsawl-puzzler; but then, I think the implication is sort of, that is what the artist ALWAYS was, it's more that the plane of engagement between artist/output/external world has shifted from within the artist's own mind to a slightly more accessible space. Which I suppose makes sense considering how many hours a day we spend staring at our own reflections in the form of words on a screen or photographs; the self is rapidly becoming defined by the external in a different way to in the past and the plethora of cultural input (some worthy, some perhaps not so..[dangerous implication I know but lets leave that aside for the moment]) that screams at us from every angle can only serve to force that most personal and intimate of experiences, the creation of a self-defined identity, out of the mind and into a more public arena.

So whereas there may seem to be a world of difference between the 19th century watercolour painter, who sat before a vast expanse of blank white canvas and painted blue skies and tepid mountains, and the 20th century neo-dadaist exhibiting 11 identical canvases of the colour blue, and the 21st century engineer of cultural pastiche who constructs a collage of pictures from beauty magazines; the fact of the matter is that all are equally a response to the world in which they exist. All could equally claim themselves to be "the combined effort of everybody I've ever known."

It is simply that the post-modern artist, rather than accumulating all snippets of information and art and life and absorbing them through the act of experience, and then translating them in their own mind and into their own artistic vision, which can then be distributed back into the physical world in the form of their artistic output, has streamlined the production process.
So now, rather than having to face the troubling (impossible?) process of absorbing and rearrannging all the various raw creative building blocks of a society in which more information has been stored since 1997 than in the whole of recorded history up to that point, the artist can skip that step out and engage with this influence physically. A cut and paste approach, literally, where, using scissors and glue and intertextual reference one can create a picture far more descriptive of a reality which served as an ingredient rather than an influence. Does that render everything derivative? I don't know, honestly. I don't even know if I agree with everything I just wrote, but it was interesting thinking about it. But we are bombarded with life, with information, at every turn and so it is little wonder that so many choose to respond to it by switching off, and becoming numb, and refusing to engage. "It isn’t only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It’s more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of very emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it’s a half- love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves."

I have no conclusions to draw from this and I've just spent half an hour writing it when I should be essaying so I'm going to stop now. :) xo

2010-04-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

This post is purely to express my admiration for the internet - after my term paper on Hunter S Thompson ground to a screeching halt, for reasons not yet evident to me, on impulse I decided to start again from scratch and write something on Lenore Kandel (I will post a blog about her at some point in the future.) She is a fantastic but relatively obscure 1960s poet, and I was having immense trouble digging out any poems other than 3 fairly widely circulated ones... then I checked out tumblr.com for any posts in which she was tagged. Straight away, and with total ease, I was able to track down a further 4 poems (bear in mind that, apart from a very limited edition reprint of some of her work in 2003 by a publisher no longer in business, nothing of hers has been published since before 1970). I know that there are all sorts of downsides to the ease of access we have to information, and that as a populace we're supposedly being dumbed down and losing all of the incidental knowledge gained in the protracted quest for information etc etc etc etc... but, isn't it great that we potentially have access to so much that would otherwise fade away?

2010-04-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

I find it really strange that we celebrate the alleged rebirth of Jesus Christ with chocolate eggs. Strange..... but delicious.

Note to self: blog more prolifically. (translation: find more to say)

2010-04-01T09:21:00.000-07:00

my generation

i've seen the best minds of
my generation running on empty,
super glued to the T.V.,
dreaming of prosperity,
talking incessently...
saying nothing

sleeping on platforms in train stations
sipping on chemical cocktails
alive to the universe
and dead to the world

hallucinating delusions of mediocrity and candied
desperate in the pursuit of cool
he's in a suit
she's in a straightjacket

7-11 nightmares at 3am

i've seen the best minds of my generation
caught up in the virtual reality of living
memorizing pin numbers and secret codes
swaying robotically to nonexistant rhythmns
flashing membership to clubs so exclusive that no one belongs

scaredshitlesswitlesscluelessuseless
tightfistedtightlippedtightassedhalfassed
assickingcokesniffingmoneygrabbingegojabbing

snivelinggroveling
moaninggroaning

the city's all wrapped up in plastic like an electronic cocoon
if you lay in the street you can hear it humming
filling up slowly from underground
if you close your eyes you can observe the blue prints
the man-made DNA that spirals
breathlessly out of control
as synapses collapse
bridges snap
into a restless utopia

jesus said
lay down your arms
jesus said
children come home

my generation

- "Nutopia", Pigface

2010-03-19T08:12:00.001-07:00

SO STARK
UND DOCH VERLETZBAR
DAS VOLK, DER MENSCH
DER WALD, DER BAUM

2010-02-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

If you have a spare half hour or so and are feeling emotionally resilient/enjoy scenes of a disturbing nature (Class A drug use, heartbreaking poverty and REALLY BAD tattoos) then I suggest you click on the following link:

-----> A Swansea Love Story.

Obviously all very tragic etc etc but there are a few moments of black humour - my particular favourite being an ex- heroin user taking the documentary film makers for a trip down memory lane to his old haunts in the country.

"Yeah, used to come up here with the boys all the time back in the day," He smiles, misty eyed, reminiscing, basking in the golden glow of times passed. "You know, stealin cars.... settin them on fire... Used to be loads of rabbits! We´d come up ded early in the morning and you´d just see all these little eyes starin at you! ... we´d try to kill em and stuff.."

Walls of Flesh

2010-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

My rationale, as simply as I can place it, is as such. I am twenty two years old. My own concept of sexuality is something that I am very much still learning to establish – in truth I think that for many people, at least truly healthy people, it is an ongoing process that blossoms with them as individuals, as they grow within the environment in which they live. However I am very aware of the fact that many people would disagree with me on this point, and indeed, many better educated, arguably more well adjusted individuals than myself. It's a debatable issue. This is what I am attempting to bring to the foreground when I bring the matter up in the first place. I don't know the answers but I think these are very VERY important questions.

The way I see it the fact is that sex, as an act, is something that is theoretically (or at least should be) pleasurable to both men and/or women. I am not claiming that it always is - however the key issue here is that, in a hypothetical world, enjoyment of the act of sexual intercourse is not biased towards one gender or the other. Do you agree? You are free not to, however, I feel like if our divergance of opinion stems from this point, there is not a great deal we can do about it. If you think that men (or women) simply just enoy sex more, well... we have bigger fish to fry than the following debate.

And so, we move onto stage two: the fact that, although sex is (should be) an action pleasing to both genders, individual sexual gratification (or masturbation) is an autonmous action of self gratification that does not involve a second party . All fairly mainstream there – certainly nothing too controversial. Now, this is the pointat which our own opinions could stem off in separate directions – personally, I believe that art both imitates and influences life. I think that it exists both concurrently and distinct from individual human existence – it is a result of ourselves insofar as we are products of our society, and at the same time, it shapes our own perception of normality. I don't think there are many teenagers of either gender who can honestly say that their perception of sexual intercourse was not influenced by the way in which the media, or pornography, portrays the sexual act. Find me just such an example and I would imagine they have lived in a vacuum for all previous years of their existence – a boon to sociologists, a curse to anyone hoping to evaluate the nature of a normal life within society. A “normal life” within “society.” The fact is (and you can debate this one, but you may as well debate “up” or “down”) that normality is defined almost entirely by the context in which it is considered – and society itself is as fluid and constantly changing as the language which develops to express it, as connected to its environs as a plant to soil.You could claim that a person would develop sexually exactly the same in an isolated unit as they would within the arms of a safe and “normal” society. I beg to differ. I think (and again, I may be wrong but numerous studies seem to agree with me) that sexuality is akin to personality and develops as a response to the environment in which you live. It's impacted every day, by who you see, who you meet, who you view in posters and adverts, the interactions you see in friends around you and those you watch on television. “Nothing about me is original. I am the combined product of everyone I have ever seen and ever met.” That''s sort of just how things are, at the moment. And sexuality (unless you're fairly unusual) is an aspect of the self. That much makes sense, surely?

So we can view sex as a none gender-biased expression of physical gratification. We can view pornography as a portrayal of this act – in itself, inherently (and I am discussing this not through the lens of society which naturally imbues such things with cultural and gender specific values) non-gender typal, but merely an expression of and stimulus to sexual gratification, by artistic or fantastical means. Finally, we can also say that the form which pornography takes in our society will have significant impact on the development of the sexuality of those exposed to it.

Now, given the previous points, I find it problematic to consider that a portrayal of the sex act, which is in itself an act of a) individual gratification or b) gratification as a result of two individuals enjoying one another in a sexual manner, shhould suddenly be socially accepted as being something inherently capable or intended to gratify people of one gender or the other. Obviously it is difficult to discuss this given the fact that (and again, feel free to disagree at this point because we could have a very fruitful discussion on this matter) the majority of pornographic material created today is created to gratify a predominantly male audience. Because money doesn't talk, it screams, and the pornography industry is fuelled by a male market – because society has deemed it acceptable for males, because it is considered appropriate for males, and becase, in a sad sort of teufelkreuz, the market and the product feed and construct one another. However, I don't see how it can necessarily follow on from this fact that men are mostly the only people capable of getting anything out of pornography. Surely the only logical conclusion to draw from this is that men are likely to get more enjoyment from pornography IN THE STATE PORNOGRAPHY IS IN AT PRESENT. No one at any point (and again feel free to correct me) has made any valid suggestion that women are somehow, inherently, less capable of enjoying pornography than men. If they are not enjoying it then perhaps the issue lies with the fact that pornography is not designed to tickle the average clitoris, rather than the fact that somehow, we're just not wired to enjoy any of the possibilities that the theoretical and artistic portrayal of sexuality may provide?

Surely the more enlightened way of viewing matters would be to admit that yes, porn at the moment (as in 90% of it, as in all the big US companies, as in Vivid entertainment and Wicked Pictures, as in 10 billion dollars a year, as in angry men and ditzy women, pneumatic breasts, smacked out lonely people fucking for a camera) is not very arousing to women. It's probably not all that arousing to many men as well – it is an example of the commodification of a product required by the market. It's like wafer thin ham as a response to the need for meat; it's like sequinnned halter neck tops in response to the need for clothing. It's an example of a basic need (warmth, shelter, food, sex) being taken and shaped in a certain direction by the people whose best interests are served by it taking on such a format.That's what living in a society does. It takes individual needs and throws them back at a person, in a distorted mirror, reflecting them in a way which best represents the needs of people as a whole (das volk, der mensch) because that's simply how we operate. It's not an inherently bad thing, it's just not an inherently good thing either. It has no inherent moral value. Like a reflection, it relies on the image we place before it – and the vessel we choose to bear that reflection. The way we choose to bounce it back. Just because, the market cries out for male oriented porn, and the market says that men want eg Big boobed blonde bitches, why should we therefore use this as evidence that this is what men actually want and that people who don't enjoy this aesthetic probably just don't enjoy porn? Surely it makes more sense to see the current state of pornography as failing. If it can't arouse over half (the half with vaginas) of the population how the hell can it be doing the right thing? Surely it should change to fit us – we shouldn't all sit around quietly bemoaning the fact that we simply just don't seem to really “get”what's being shoved at us, we should be asking why (creating?) our own pornographic material that is sexy and DOES do what we want it to do. It's meant to serve us, we are not meant to serve it!! But for some reason, post third wave feminism bla bla bla lets add as many suffixes to that term as humanly possible, seems to have quietly accepted, even in the case of intelligent, indepdendent, enlightened women, that for no reason at all this particular (very important) space should be conceded.

Perhaps, really, we should just view porn as being akin to any other form of art – a reflection of the society which it portrays, as influential as a face in a mirror – which lets face it, is a very fucking influential thing indeed. I live in hope that we can take that reflection and use it to represent a more free and open world for all people, in which something as beautiful and special and personal as sex can be allowed to develop in it's own way without being judged and harshly shaped to conform to the values of a society oppressed by the web of vast interdependency. But maybe that's just me. But again, I'd rather people didn't write off the concept before it was even considered by saying that “somehow, we're just not capable of enjoying sex in the same way as the opposite gender.” Says who? Say a few debatable scientific studies skewed by the lens of the media that have far more impact on individual beliefs than is right or fair. So we make such sweeping generalisations about women. They don't like to watch sex – it just isn't in their nature. Already we are presuming that female sexuality fits into a specific box, a specific context – that it can only be enjoyed in a certain fashion. And following on from that, who are we to say that if women DO prefer to enjoy sex from a “fantastical” element rather than as a result of actually enjoying the action of it, that for some reason that is a good, natural thing?? Again, nothing in the sex act – simplest, most healthy expression of, a penis and a vagina meeting consensually, nice to meet you, how do you do – is biased towards one party being more predisposed towards (or entitled to) enjoyment than the other. If we start considering that this is the case, or equally, that the neutral portrayal (reflection) of such an act in pornographic material is somehow entitled to lean in one direction or another than we enter very dangerous territory, in which sex is no longer free domain for individuals to expresss themselves and their emotions on their own terms, but rather merely as instruments of environmental factors. I don't know about you but I'd rather keep my sex as mine and whoever I choose to share it with – not just another arm of the machine.

“The Sadeian Woman” (Angela Carter, 1977iissh I think) is a very controversial book amongst the feminist movement. Andrea Dworkin, for example, condemns Carter's use of the sexual language defined by the arch-misogynist, De Sade, reasoning that it is simply impossible to argue for any form of female sexual emancipation via the logic of one who did so much to degrade the feminine subject.. However, Dworkin also considers pornography as being inherently incompatible with positive female sexuality – a belief shared by many feminists and frankly one that I find somewhat disturbing as I do not subscribe to the idea that the depiction of sex, regardless of it's nature, is somehow offensive or derogatory towards women. In my eyes it is only a small step from here to the extremely dangerous assertion that the sexual act itself is somehow one that inescapably involves subjugation of the female. The problem is of course that in considering all pornography as instrumental to the repression of female sexuality, and a dangerous tool of objectification, one is forced to take the stance that it is impossible for women to find pornographic material sexually stimulating – or that those who do are somehow, wrong, cuckolded, tricked. This is a dangerous position to take, akin to dictating to women which of their sexual fantasies can be deemed acceptable – a form of forced control over what is an experience that must be defined by the individual. It scares me that certain branches of the feminist movement would be keen to subscribe to this view – which essentially requires conceding sex to be entirely the domain of masculine misogynism. What an appalling thought! It is true that sex can on occasion be a weapon, a tool of repression, or degradation – but it can also be one of the most beautiful and equal expressions of compassion, intimacy and respect, and to decry it as being capable only of the most base and unegalitarian satisfaction seems to me to be asking us to sacrifice an awful lot.

Nevertheless it cannot be denied that there is a distinct gender imbalance in terms of the nature of the portrayal of sexual activity in pornographic material. Although, theoretically, it can be stimulating to both male and female, pornography as a commodity is primarily marketed towards men. Fantasies played out on screen both construct and pander to socially ingrained ideas of what is acceptable – they are in an almost unique position, as they help to shape what they portray, and are a result of what they influence. Given this fact, it seems to me that it is time we become more actively concerned with the portrayal of such an inherent aspect of the human experience. By engaging with these concepts at an artistic level we can help to shape their nature – and where is there any aspect of life which bears such close scrutiny as the close scrutiny of the act of life itself?

Dating tips for single females

2010-02-16T08:02:00.001-08:00

A friend posted this recently on facebook. Hilarious, particularly the last picture with angry waiter.

The Road (or, my response to one of the bleakest books ever)

2010-02-04T08:33:00.001-08:00

The idea of this endurance at the heart of all things – that we have to find our own meaning in life to make it bearable, because otherwise, otherwise if all we are is just survival and all we can do is survive there is no meaning to life. We must define this on our own terms – in The Road, the father finds meaning in his son, and through this meaning he is able to give his son the gift that he is unable to possess himself – the gift of goodness, purity and goodness for its own sake. By passing on beliefs to his son that he does not fully hold himself, he is able to find goodness and possess these qualities by means of their relationship.

We see this meaning throughout the text, or rather, we witness how rare and precious it is – and the horrific results of its absence. We see how, via means of faith, the female character at the conclusion of the story has been able to find a reason, and a means, of endurance – and we see how, deprived of it, other humans have descended to the level of something worse and lower than beast. We see how the values of consumption, greed and self preservation combine to result in cannibalism, of the need to survive untapered by any human compassion, with no reason for goodness. Therefore although the philosophy suggested by the book may be broadly viewed as existential it is in the more positive sense of the word, as we see that the fact that the only meaning of life is to be found in existence itself as a call to find this meaning rather than a rejection of its necessity.

I think it is interesting to consider whether the apocalyptic “society” portrayed by McCarthy as being, rather than an entirely Hobbesian state of nature, rather as an eventuality of the current path American society is taking. If we consider the actions of those individuals who display an absence of any existential meaning as being simply the final product of a society which has encouraged increased secularisation and detachment and alienation in the individual as necessary components of its means of function, then we can clearly see McCarthy´s text as critical of the direction he perceives American society to be headed in. Right wing hysteria surrounding the “death of the family” embodies similar concerns – the fear that, outside the traditional structure of American life, the external decivilising forces will prevail – a fear that can be traced back to the frontier, where close familiaral units were a necessity to combat the constant fear and threat of the unknown close at hand. However the difference is of course that America at present is no longer a land of “Cowboys and Indians” – the threat is no longer external and immediate but vague and intangible, a strange and mystic force that can be caressed by those with power into the shape of fantastic and nightmarish beasts. This fear can take the form of a conflicting ideology or theological belief; it can be other ways of life, other dreams – it can be as big as the world or as small as the homestead, the mythic space whose protection can be justified at any cost. And it is this fear which McCarthy traces to a conclusion, a conclusion almost entirely devoid of hope, and where the American society that so prides itself on individualism and the right to pursue ones dreams results in a world wholly devoid of mutual identification, consumed by a nightmare. “Welcome to the land of comestibles, where the mouth is God.” And so it is in a sense poetic, that a land built on insatiable hunger should eventually come to eat itself alive.

As the reader, we feel the despair of this man and his son. We despair for them, our hope dies as theirs, and it is from this identification that we are able to glean some form of consolation from the text. For of course, it is this very compassion - or rather the potential for this compassion, however small, the potential to identify with another and to feel their pain as our own, in which the ultimate saving grace of the human experience is found. By feeling the pain of the man and his son we too embody the force which enables this small endurance to exist – we feel compassion, and empathy, and sadness at witnessing the pain of another – all these qualities which are ultimately suppressed in a state of decivilisation, in order to survive. We see that these are all necessary in order to raise the quality of human life from mere survival, and that without these, there is little hope. Parallels can be drawn with the purpose faith fulfils for many individuals, and I think this is a parallel McCarthy draws. After all, what is faith if not the ultimate rejection of individualistic need? In Christianity, individuals experience empathy as they accept that Jesus Christ was crucified for the sins of humanity. Without empathy, without the sense that a human life is worthwhile even when it is not their own, what value could this symbolic sacrifice have for anyone?

Is The Road a depressing book? For most of the text, I found it deeply, deeply so. Frankly if the conclusion hadn´t included some suggestion of hope, however small, I think my heart would have broken. It starts out bleak and slowly becomes more and more hopeless as we realise, like the characters, that there is no hope of salvation. There is no hope of direction or purpose – no tomorrow, when tomorrow as a concept has ceased to have meaning, and the linear progressive notion of time as a cumulative sequence of events has been reduced to nothing more than the eternal, cyclical, succession of days in a world with no future. However, this is not an inevitably empty concept, devoid of any potential meaning. McCarthy´s core characters define their existence elsewhere, outside the realms of “long term goals” and the constant striving onwards and upwards that our present human existence considers the only valuable means of growth. They find meaning in each other, or when necessary in God – in the only places they can find, as they need to. There is hurt, there is pain. There is so much sometimes it seems unbearable, and it is never justified and it is never resolved, no deus-ex-machina to make it all go away. What we witness is that even when faced with such despair, there is always hope. That it is necessary to find hope and this can be found in love, and in other people – through compassion and goodness even when one begins to question the merit of such qualities, or even their very meaning outside of the moralising structure of society. Some ethical schools question whether there is such a thing as “natural law” – whether there can be any right or wrong outside of the context of societal norms. I do not think McCarthy´s text is ambiguous in this respect; although we witness a horrific “state of nature” scenario, where there are individuals operating without a moral code as a result of their non-societal status, we also see the boy and his father – the embodiment, even the last bastion of, natural law – they take a non-consequentialist ethical stance and ultimately show that there is merit in goodness simply for the sake of goodness. In fact, in this dystopian world, perhaps this is the only merit it is possible to find.
McCarthy´s closing paragraph acknowledges that there is horror, and horror unimaginable, and yet it does not admit defeat – but suggests that beyond this horror is something deeper, something that will endure. However he does not paint this as rendering the suffering and atrocity of the novel ultimately irrelevant. Things will never be the same. The damage has been done, irrevocably so, to the extent that the only meaning it is possible to find is of the rawest and most primal form.

It reminded me of a passage in Doris Lessing´s “The Golden Notebook” – a scene towards the climax of the novel, where the ethical and existential dilemmas of the main character are addressed in a dream sequence, about the end of the word – she witnesses a nuclear mushroom cloud, “unfolding like white petals”, and is reminded of a conversation she had with her psychiatrist, a “Witch Doctor”, who spoke of endurance – of that need to hold on to that tiny spark when all else fails. That even when all else is ashes and there is only skeletal ruins of everything mankind once held high, so long as there is life there is something that matters. Anna observes baldly that perhaps that isn´t enough. The response of her “witch doctor” is that it has to be.

2010-02-03T06:00:00.000-08:00

When a society is afraid of its poets, it is afraid of itself. A society afraid of itself stands as another definition of hell…. -Lenore Kandel

2010-01-31T09:02:00.000-08:00

article: feminism - what went wrong?

Be warned: don´t expect anything too amazing, it is from the Telegraph, after all. What I did find interesting were some of the user comments. There was one woman calling herself "Grace" who loudly stated that feminism was invented by men - and, I quote,
"Yes, we need a third wave of feminism. True feminism, that treats women like human beings that deserve and need a HUSBAND for life to be their helpmeet and together to raise their children. Or is that just TOO old fashioned?"

Yes, actually Grace. Yes it is.

On the other hand, another chap responded to her by stating
"I may only be 20 years of age, but this anti-men society sickens me. If it isn't the media shoving it down our throats, it's women such as yourself."

I´m not entirely sure what he is postulating as evidence for this alleged "anti-men" society but it concerns me that there is so much delusion and hysteria amongst the British public - we´re not only incapable of discussing some issues rationally but we´re also incapable of even correctly identifying what the issues are in the first place, it would seem.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: If you don´t want to get frustrated and end up banging your head into your keyboard then don´t read articles from the Telegraph.

2010-01-27T04:16:00.000-08:00

"He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire him-self might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man´s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?"

an email exchange between myself and LUU..

2010-01-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

(Oldest email at the bottom.)

Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:46:03 +0000 [18:46:03 GMT]
From: Philippa Dee United Kingdom
To: M______ G________
Cc: J_____ C______
Bcc: email@address.com
Subject: RE: A quick question..
Headers: Show All Headers

M_______ and J_____,

First of all, thankyou for responding to my email. I´m happy to know that the Union took my comment seriously, despite it being a spur of the moment email.

I have read the responses sent to me and it is obvious that this is a complex issue and has been handled by the exec as such. As a student, obviously I can understand the concern of others who are worried about the detrimental effect such strikes may have on their degrees. I have spoken to a number of other students about this and opinions were generally pretty divided – there didn´t seem to be any sort of well defined consensus on the matter. Some, like myself, were surprised or shocked on the basis of some kind of perception of the Student Union advising students to rally against Industrial action which, in the wider scope of things, was in their interests. Others, however, felt that it was unfair that they should be penalised as a result of something which they considered to be of little consequence to themselves – and penalised in a way which could be very detrimental to their futures. A good friend of mine who is currently studying for
his masters raised the very valid point that, as he was paying a very considerable amount of money outright for his degree, he was frustrated at the prospect of this action affecting what is obviously a very important time for him. This is just a small sketch of the kind of responses I found students to have. Almost everyone acknowledged the fact that it isn´t a black and white issue.

However, I still couldn´t shake the feeling that there was something in this particular scenario which didn´t sit right with me, and as a student one of the things I have learned is that when something doesn´t feel right it certainly bodes investigation into the reasons behind this, even if they transpire to be a result of nothing more than an anachronism in my own personal beliefs. I found the rationale you put forward in your email fairly convincing, with regards to the need to ensure present students did not suffer as a result of strikes – and if this is the general feeling on campus, obviously LUU is there to represent the views of Leeds Students. But this didn´t quell my feelings that something here was somewhat topsy-turvey, and so I began to consider something mentioned to me by a friend, the person I mentioned in my previous paragraph as studying for a masters.
While worried about the impact the strikes would have on his degree, he nevertheless had some degree of sympathy with the principles behind the striking of Academic staff – and he mentioned that he had discussed it with his Dad, who told him about a time in his youth when something similar had happened. In this time (I suppose late 70s?) the students had not only supported such action by academic staff, they had actually taken action in solidarity with their lecturers!
Similarly, I am studying in a German University at the moment and last July students here actually went on strike themselves in protest against the commercialisation of higher education in Germany. The Bildungstreik movement involves many many students at this university and many others across Germany, and a few months ago they occupied a building here in solidarity with other students in their own and other European countries. The consensus was that education is something that should not be ruled by the needs of business, and it was something very many students felt passionately about. I can understand their feelings – we´re of course way past that in the UK. We pay our 3 and a half grand a year and we expect a certain standard of conduct in return. Our degree is an investment – our time at University is a product we are sold, and as any consumer would, we feel we have the right to demand certain things for our money. So we end up in situations like this one. I can see why the Germans, and other Europeans, protest so loudly at the thought of their University system heading in the same Americanised direction as our own.

I suppose in the end alls I have really pointed out here is that the higher education
system in the UK has changed drastically over the last 20 years to become an almost
unrecognisible entity but I´m sure you know that far better than I do, with a paltry two years of uni under my belt! So I´m not intending to sound arrogant or like I think I know more than I do (and if I come across that way I apologise); obviously there is a lot going on behind the scenes that students aren´t privvy to and it´s all too easy for idealistic young twenty somethings like me to come along and insist we aspire to some kind of lofty ambition of unblemished, but ultimately abstract, values.
But try as I might, as much as I hear these rational reasons and understand why they are being put forward, I simply cannot get behind the fact that the Union is advising students to pressure (emotionally blackmail?) their teachers into avoiding industrial action which is ultimately in the interests of the wider academic community and therefore the students themselves. Unless, that is, they are students for whom the individual student „experience“ is more important than the health of the institution of academia itself – the institution became a participant of when they began their degree. I know we´re Thatcher´s children, and we expect recognition of our interests and the entitlement that money can buy but I still find it saddening that in this instance so many people consider it perfectly natural to condemn their teachers for acting in the interests of Leeds University as an institution.

I think essentially the problem I have is not so much with LUUs choice of action but
rather with the fact that the commodification of Higher Education has resulted in a
scenario in which the interests of students and their lecturers have diverged to such a degree that they are now in direct opposition to one another.
When you enter University, you are joining academia – you´re the footsoldiers in a war on unreason, or to put it less pretentiously, you´re on the bottom rungs of a ladder which reaches great heights and performs an essential role in a healthy democracy. You are a part of a symbiotic system which functions with the overall goal of the progression of human knowledge. And now, because you pay your money, you are a consumer, and an invisible line has been drawn between you and those who are supposed to guide you in your quest for knowledge, and those who are supposed to teach you become the opposition.
At worst this is unethical, at best it is hardly conducive to a proud and united Academic front. But of course, while we´re still forking over those fees, we´re still going to expect our product not to be faulty – and I suppose that´s the key issue here.

So, there we go, a pound sign has now successfully been smacked onto the progression of human knowledge as well.

Please don´t feel pressured to respond to this, as I found the previous email more than helpful. I just wanted to express my feelings on this particular matter because it is something that I feel strongly about. Ultimately LUU takes action on the behalf of students, and in this instance I suppose that most students feelings on this matter mean your course of action is justified.

Thanks for your time,

Pippa

Quoting M_________ G________ :

>Dear Pippa
>
>Thanks for your email, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
>
>I will try to explain to you the thinking behind the exec's position, though >equally happy to discuss in person if you'd like (I realise now having re-read >your email this may in fact be tricky!)
>
>You may have heard that the university has announced its intention to save £35 million pounds from 2011. Why they are doing this is explained in greater detail here:
>http://www.leeds.ac.uk/comms/financial/students/faqs.htm. We have already publically
>stated that we strongly oppose all cuts to higher education and have written to the
>university Vice-Chancellor and to David Lammy MP, the government minister responsible
>for universities, asserting this. You can see our initial response and these letters by
>going to http://www.leedsuniversityunion.org.uk/news/article/6318/729/. We support the
>intervention of our Vice-Chancellor in the Guardian on 12th January
>(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/11/universities-face-meltdown-britain-suffer), and share his concerns about the fate of the student experience. Unfortunately, the government has already announced a £915 million reduction in spending to universities from next year
>(http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?s
>torycode=409782). Whilst opposing this, we believe it is also our job to represent the
>concerns of students about the impact on their education of cuts, and ensure that there
>is minimal impact on current and future students as the University of Leeds prepares to
> deal with reduced government income.
>
>We are committed to working with staff at all levels of the university to do this,
>including representatives of university staff, who we meet with regularly. We have
>signed a joint statement which commits us to working with them; you can see this at
>http://www.leedsuniversityunion.org.uk/blogs/post/Uni%20Cuts/10/01/05/Joint-Statement-Leeds-University-Union-and-the-Campus-Trade-Unions/. This statement agrees that there should be minimal impact on students of any industrial action that the campus trade unions take. We intend to support the campus trade unions when the views of students are in line with their concerns and when there is no negative impact on students. We do not deny the right of lecturers to take industrial action, but only one of the three trade unions on campus, the UCU (the trade union for academic staff), is balloting for strike action showing that even amongst staff there is disagreement over how to resolve the dispute. We would question why a local ballot is being held when ACAS (the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) talks are ongoing between the university management and UCU representatives and when proposals for achieving 10% savings necessary for the university's economies exercise have yet to be confirmed. If the debate is about government cuts to higher education, why are staff in other campuses not balloting for strike action? Is it fair that Leeds students should endure strikes and not others? There are talks currently being chaired by ACAS currently going on and the exec has, rightly I believe, expressed a hope that the dispute will be resolved without the need for industrial action. I hope this is something you will agree
>with.
>
>Following a motion that was democratically passed at our Union Council, we wrote to the
>campus trade unions asking them not to take action that would be detrimental to
>students but they were not prepared to give us this guarantee. With rising graduate
>unemployment levels and fewer graduate jobs available than before, we believe that
>students at Leeds University need and deserve a high quality, disruption free
>education. The number of emails that students have sent to staff shows there is real
>concern about this, and that concern is legitimate. We would rather not go back to the
>days of 2006 when industrial action from staff meant students' exams were not marked
>and graduations for final year students were threatened. These are real possibilities
>this time round, and we want to avoid getting to July and final year students asking
>why they are unable to graduate on time and why nothing was done to stop the situation
>from arising.
>
>This does not mean we are not pressing the university on the economies exercise. You
>are right that we certainly do want money to come into learning and teaching and we
>have asked what steps the university are taking to reduce unnecessary spending, the
>answers are on the blog at http://www.leedsuniversityunion.org.uk/blogs/Uni Cuts/
>where you can also find the latest information on what we're doing to represents the
>concerns of students. We have asked for and been given assurances that there will be
>minimal impact on students during the economies exercise. The university have admitted
>this will be a challenge, but it is one they are trying to meet. We are engaged in
>constant discussions to ensure the university sticks to this commitment. There is more
>we are preparing to do. Over the coming months the university will be revealing what
>they plan to cut, we'll be there to ensure the effect on students is minimal, and
>we'll consult with students in schools to ensure we're relaying student concerns. We
>will also ensure the university directly consult with students. We'll oppose any
>threats to the student experience and are prepared to campaign against them as we are
>doing now.
>
>The exec is trying to be pragmatic in its response to national cuts to universities.
>None of us want to see a shortage of educators, the exec wouldn't have put themselves
>forward to do the jobs we are doing if we didn't want the educational experience of
>students to be better. We believe that the position we have adopted is one which puts
>students first. We are against all cuts that have a detrimental effect on the student
>experience, but we are also against strike action by staff, especially as proposals to
>make the savings have not been yet been confirmed. We do not believe that these
>positions are incompatible. I hope over the coming months the student body will unite
>to condemn cuts to higher education. We will continue to listen to the views of
>students and represent their concerns.
>
>I hope this is helpful in answering your questions, if you have any more then I'd be
>happy to try and answer them.
>
>Best wishes
>
>M________ G_______

>Leeds University Union
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Philippa Dee [mailto:email@address.com]
>Sent: 18 January 2010 13:55
>To: M________ G_______
>Cc: J____ C______
>Subject: A quick question..
>
>Hi,
>
>So in the latest newsletter email thing from LUU I was quite surprised
>to see the union advising students to put pressure on Academic staff
>not to take any industrial action. A bit of investigating tells me
>that this is to do with the Education First campaign, which I have
>just been perusing on the Union website. While most of the sentiments
>expressed in that campaign seem fairly commendable, I am still
>confused as to why exactly students should be pressuring their
>academic staff not to strike. Surely, in terms of the bigger picture,
>staff striking is beneficial to students in terms of making a stand
>regarding budget cuts and the importance of this money going to
>teaching staff rather than, say, a bloated and unnecessary
>administration or outlandish research projects?
>
>I´m not being aggy or anything but I´m quite interested and I´d like
>to hear your reasons for this course of action!
>
>regards
>
>Pippa (3rd year student currently abroad)

2010-01-17T15:11:00.001-08:00

Women working in the UK earn on average 23% less than men. The conviction rate for rape is 6.5%. During the 1990s the number of men paying for sex acts doubled.

2009-12-24T07:20:00.001-08:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8427546.stm

What a nice Welcome Home present :) Just another one of the myriad of things that make me want to jump ship.

"Free Women"

2009-12-16T04:59:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, the irony (inconvenience?) that hits me most of all when reading some feminist texts, is that biology has not equipped my sex to fight and fuck with indifference

2009-12-11T11:55:00.001-08:00

NY times article: What´s wrong with Cinderella?

I would write more about this but I´m currently wading through an oline presentation and need to actually go home and eat and sleep soon, so for now I will have to keep my thoughts succinct.

Suffice to say, I thought this was a really interesting article, in particular this bit:

The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. “Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,” observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original“Little Princess” was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. “The original folk tales themselves,” Forman-Brunell says, “spring from medieval and early modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval — famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.” That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps that’s why the magic wand has become an essential part of the princess get-up. In the original stories — even the Disney versions of them — it’s not the girl herself who’s magic; it’s the fairy godmother. Now if Forman-Brunell is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.

The first few lines of this paragraph caught my attention because they reminded me of part of Susan Faludi´s thesis in her book "The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America", which I was flicking through a few weeks ago. The part of her thesis that interested me most was the aspect which dealt with

Basically, in this book she asserts that post 9\11 America is a nation in a state of crisis and in order to assuage the fear is harkening back to it´s frontier roots. America was founded on expansionist mentalities; this involved strong, powerful, burly men; feminine, gentle, cherishable women; a wholesome and worthy homestead to protect and finally a looming and everpresent threat of "Us" and "Them." I could go into more detail here about the take of modern(ish) Sociologists on this but I think it might just confuse the matter, however basically this mentality was integral to America´s emergence as a nation state. Faludi makes a convincing argument for the reappearance of these aspects of the American myth - "us and them" is fairly obvious; Faludi provides an interesting analysis of the 2004 election campaign in with both Bush and (surprisingly?) Kerry arranged numerous high profile media appearances shooting, manning around and generally attempting to align themselves with the frontiersman archtype; and finally there were a number of examples of the recent trend towards increasingly constricted feminine values (mostly in the direction of the infantilised, beautiful but simpering princess variety.)

So it is in light of this assertion, poorly paraphrased by myself above, that I viewed the paragraph quoted above. Personally I tend towards the school of thought that cultural phenomena should not be viewed in a vacuum (by their very nature this would be misguided!) and i found it interesting to see another example of the materialisation of one fragment of a larger, more all-encompassing myth - one with significant ramifications for the direction taken by the worlds largest economic super power whose cultural values spill over into our own a little bit more every day.

2009-11-28T14:50:00.000-08:00

It's always nice being pleasantly surprised by something differing from ones expectations. I have to confess to having a slight tendency towards preconceived opinions, particularly with regards to art or literature which is associated with a particular cultural movement or scene. I know this isn't the best approach and it is something I try to challenge myself about when I catch myself doing so - but of course we aren't always aware of our own flaws except through the benefit of hindsight, and so, on more than one occasion I have found myself marvelling that I almost deprived myself of the pleasure of a work of art, a story or a poem because I had blindly, in my ignorance, decided that I wouldn't like it without truly knowing what it was.

One such recent example of this is the work of Charles Olson. There is something in the work of the Beat poets that is a lot more raw and unprocessed, but also philosophical and.. hmm, how can I put this? There is an untangible energy about the work that I didn't expect - no, not that. Perhaps the only way to explain it is that I have found myself able to relate to the ideologies of beat poets far more than I had expected myself to. I feel like I have more common ground with them than I had ever considered... they are cut from the same cloth as other counter culture movements, which I foolishly hadn't really expected. There is still a familiar yearning buried in somewhere, that I know all to well and have seen in various other movements in various different disguises - it crops up regularly, in different eras and entirely different contexts, although sometimes it is dulled by money or drugs or institutionalised cultural ennui, but it endures. It's reassuring to see this familiar face reflected back at me from times passed - pages span time and I have the deep reassurance that we are not alone, but part of a long infinite succession of others that stretches on eternally.

I will post some Olson work at some point, some of it is really cool :)

Ladies, Gentlemen and the rest...

2009-11-25T15:36:00.000-08:00

.. I present the following for your consideration:

Exhibit A-

http://www.storyofstuff.com/ - short but important (just like me)

Exhibit B-

William Shakespeare - Sonnet #146

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
My sinful earth these rebel powers array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this the body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:

So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.

Please consider all the evidence before drawing a conclusion.

YumYum

2009-11-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

Since I moved to Germany back in August, I have been following what could be described as a pescatarian diet - and (except for some chicken with a roast dinner superbly cooked by some friends, and an unfortunate zwiebelkuchen incident)it's going great! I have had a few stabs at going veggie in the past, including an entire year when I was 13 or so, but this time I decided that it would be sensible to reassess my diet entirely rather than merely eliminating meat. Moving to a new place where I would be eating lots of new foods anyway seemed like the perfect time to try, although in retrospect I should probably have considered the fact that Germans eat meat with EVERYTHING.

However, I actually haven't found it too difficult at all! I was never the biggest meat eater in the world, and although I have very occasional cravings for a burger they are nowhere near troublesome. I have been eating a lot of vegetables and taking care to vary my diet a lot, and also have been trying to eat more raw veg and salad, which is giving me loads more energy. I'm also having to get a bit more inventive when I cook, but this is really as a result of having two hobs to cook on and that's pretty much it - so I've been making soups a lot, and the odd curry. I made the transition to soya milk with my last carton, primarily because I was getting a little concerned about the amount of crap that ends up in dairy milk due to modern farming practises. It's fine in tea but it's taking a little getting used to on my cereal!

It amuses me a little that quite a few people have asked me if I feel less healthy/more tired since cutting meat out of my diet. I suppose the assumption is that, without the goodness meat provides, ones body will suffer - perhaps this would be the case if we were all eating only the finest choicest cuts of organically reared meat, but so much of the stuff people eat today is such crap! Minging sausages with 20% pork, McDonalds' burgers (1% of which on average is/has been in contact with fecal matter) and recompressed scrapings from factory floors? No, I don't feel less healthy having replaced those with wintergreen soups, avocado salads and vegetable curries!

I know it would be appropriate at this juncture to say something about my reasons for going (sort of) veggie, but to be honest I really can't be bothered right now, so that can wait for another day.

Bildungs Streik!

2009-11-17T05:55:00.000-08:00

So I have just regretfully torn myself away from a protest march that was clamouring, chanting and dancing it`s way down Hauptstraße (the main shopping street\main street of die aldstadt in HD).

Basically, one of the main University buildings in Heidelberg has been occupied for a couple of weeks now. This occupation was done in solidarity with a number of other Universities throughout Europe as part of a wider movement - so at the same time in a number of different cities, other students and protesters were raising their voices to make their views heard. What they are saying is ostensibly challenging the 500 Euro per semester tuition fees that German students have to pay, but also essentially is tackling the wider issue of the commercialisation of education - and indeed, the destructive invasive capitalist direction our societies are taking.

What really struck me about this protest was just how many people were there, and passionately involved. Heidelberg is not a big city. For those of you looking for a British equivalent, it is rather like York, only smaller - or Chester. Furthermore, it is in an area of Germany known for its affluence and conservative politics. Yet hundreds of people turned up, despite the grim weather, and took part in the march that is just one part of a long day of planned events - including workshops. Further more, this was obviously a cross platform effort - with the usual socialist and protest groups that you would expect taking part, but also lots and lots of students that didnt seem to be what we might term "overly politicised." The march consisted, as I have said, of several hundred people snaking their way down the main street - there were so many of us that stood to watch and people applauded, took photos and even joined in. People watched and cheered from first story windows, including a young mother and a little boy, who we smiled and waved at.

Just to give a little context here, this is the equivalent of a student march right down the pedestrianised high street in Leeds, a protest so long and broad that all around it slowed to a stop, and that took ten minutes for itś participants to weave past, with bright banners and home made t shirts and songs and drums. Difficult to visualise? Thats probably because it would never ever happen in Leeds as it is now; it is an eternal source of mystery to me why we all just lie down and accept the horrific millstone of debt incurred by our 3 grand a year tuition fees - an amount far more obscene and crippling than the 500 euros a semester charge which has gotten German students so irate.

Even some English students I have met who are fairly progressive and political dont seem to see any particular problem with paying extortionate fees. The only conclusion I can draw from this (and believe me, I have given it a lot of thought, and research) is that the British higher education system has successfully transformed itś image and "Brand" to such an extent that most students now see their degree as a "product." Go to http://www.leeds.ac.uk/ and, at the top of the page, splashed across the image that confronts you immediately when the page has loaded, is the tagline "Life on campus - Our single campus is a ten minute walk away from Leeds city centre." Increasingly, English students are being sold University as a "life experience" rather than an educational one - a finishing school for the middle classes. So why would they object to what might to some seem to be a reasonable cost for a product, rather than a choice? They fail to grasp the deeper ethical implications of applying a price tag to the pursuit of knowledge.

Finally, when you consider that over the next 5 or so years it is looking increasingly more certain that the Government intend to raise the cap on tuition fees, allowing unis like Leeds and other redbricks to charge what is conservatively estimated at around ten grand a year, it says a lot about the student population in England that collectively we dont seem to feel there is much point in protesting it. Were aligning ourselves more and more with the American model - where you get what you pay for, and if you cant then you dont - we are so quick to judge them on their healthcare system; do you really want our education system to go the exact same way?

(I hope I dont need to point out the necessary ramifications too much - save to say that I couldnt have afforded to go to Leeds if these were the fees, and I am not the only person I know who would be in the same position, and we have every single bit as much right to be there as any other student from a more affluent background. We already have a two tier primary and secondary education system in England - in this day and age it makes me very sad that we are even considering allowing this archaic mentality to spread to University level education, where people really should know better.)

But, while the apathy of UK students feeds my cynicism and gives me the feeling that the battle - maybe even the war - has already been won, the vibrance and the energy and the willingness to engage of our German cousins fills me with hope. Maybe there is still a chance for British society to stand up and let its voices fill our city streets with songs of dissent; but please, do hurry up before they put a price tag on that too.

More info:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=98312756339&ref=search&sid=502050164.1329690872..1
http://www.bildungsstreik2009.de/

PS please excuse poor grammar, Iḿ on a German keyboard in the library, will fix later

2009-11-11T04:52:00.000-08:00

So I am getting on the train last night at twenty two minutes past ten in Berlin, to return to Heidelberg. Sitting down and preparing myself for a long journey (rocking in to HD at 5am, to be precise) when of course, naturally, who should sit down next to me but Talkative Weirdo. I don't know if you're familiar with this particular train passenger, but he is more or less the worst possible person to have sat beside you at the beginning of a long night train - even worse than, say, Hungry Weirdo (now with rustling plastic sweet wrappers included!) or Weirdo with Sticky Outy Albows, or even Weirdo with Slight Facial Tic (this guy is actually pretty okay and even sometimes adds a note of irreverant humour to proceedings.)Talkative Weirdo or his equivalent have also sat next to me on pretty much every journey over 5 hours long I have ever been on.
I sigh and stare longingly at one of the numerous empty seats surrounding us, tantalisingly close but kept far out of reach by the large and wittering man beside me, who has left me hemmed up against the side of the train carriage. Using my coat as a make shift pillow, I squash my head up against the window and prepare for a long night.

While I am sitting wedged up against the glass with a man jabbering away incomprehensively to my left, I cast my mind back over the events of the previous few days. Too disparate to cover in this blog (although I am sure I will write something about the mauerfall at some point) but nevertheless, worth commenting on. For some reason, I am reminded of a scene I witnessed in Kreuzberg, Berlin's hippy-yuppie district (think bong shops and expensive daycare centres) which I spent an enjoyable few hours exploring earlier. A trendy hippy-yuppie father and son combo and a lady who was clearly no relation to the child were stuck in a pavement deadlock scenario, with tears and tantrums clearly only seconds away. As I endeavoured to get past and out of the blastzone postehaste without exacerbating the situation, I heard this little snippet of interaction:

"Don't you want to go to the record store with Donna?" The father bleated in a baleful American accent, to his miniscule son complete with adorable miniscule brown leather jacket. I at first assumed he was just asking his child this in that way that parents do to disguise what is actually a statement as a question in order to make the child feel more autonomous in their actions, but as he began to repeat it with the same note of desperate cajole in his voice I realised that, no, this man was actually asking his tiny son whether he wanted to go check out the record store over the road with Donna (who wasn't the mother and remained passively uninvolved, looking desperately uninterested) and, furthermore, actually expecting a response.

I think at this juncture I need to highlight just how small this little boy was. He can't have been more than 3 - he was walking on his own, just about, so probably talking a bit, but despite his rather natty little leather jacket and tiny converse I sincerely doubt he was able to fathom that particular concept of vinyl as an aspirational accessory for the hipster elite. Furthermore, even if he DID have the desire to go over to try and track down a limited edition pressing of Robert Hood's Minimal Nation, it would probably be only for the purposes of chewing on it. Now, I don't have kids and so therefore that technically renders any opinions I might have on the matter legally irrelevant, but surely it's not healthy to be giving a 3 year old the burden of responsibility for making decisions about things he neither understands or cares about? And come on, a vinyl shop has got to be pretty fucking boring for someone under 6, at least if it's one of the brightly lit, sterile, surgical school of which this one was. F*cking yuppies

Returning to Heidelberg at 5 am, I am heartened, despite my sleep deprived and travel-sick zombification, to find there is a maverick homeless man outside the station playing slightly manic 80s cheese (which incidence of, sadly escapes me) on a portable stereo.

Moral of story: we can find our own spaces everywhere. Not always where we would think, and sometimes they are full of assholes

I am glad I am not marriage material.

2009-11-01T09:11:00.000-08:00

I am not marriage material.
I am not "marriage material."

I am glad.

an interesting facebook debate...

2009-10-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

Gareth McFakesurname Protest against the BNP being on question time outside the BBC centre on Oxford road. Party starts at 5.
8 hours ago via Facebook for iPhone · Comment · Like / Unlike · View Feedback (16)Hide Feedback (16)
2 people like this.

Zak Fakenamery
i wish i could join u laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
8 hours ago

Philippa Dee (me)
dont get me wrong, I hate the BNP as much as any other self respecting person with a brain, but surely the appropriate place to focus that anger is towards the BNP themselves? Isnt it one of the benefits of living in a free society that people are able to express their views, however abhorrant they are? and furthermore, personally I think it is far... Read More better strategically to have those views discussed in an open forum so that they can be defeated in argument and the BNP can be exposed as the racist bunch of twats they are, rather than simply brushing them under the carpet and pretending they arent there. if anything that would just make them feel vindicated at having a victim/underdog mentality, and with the state of British politics at the moment, that would be a verz dangerous thing to do. We have a massively disenfranchised voting public - some of whom might sadly be persuaded to vote BNP, and giving that party any illusion of credibility and adding credence to their claims of being persecuted is likely to do far more in their favor than simply defeating them in argument on a bbc news show
8 hours ago · Delete

Fakey mcFakename
why should they not have their say they are a legit political party who receive hundreds of thousands if not a million votes. they represent this country in europe, furthermore i am going to enjoy tonights program or try to nick is a very articulate man but i fear he will not get a word in edge ways as he will be booed and jeered like a pantomime ... Read Morevillan.
also i have never or willi vote bnp but if he can get mps to get things done about immigration and things that affect ordinary council estate folk then im all for him appearing on the show.
7 hours ago

Gareth McFakesurname
Everyone knows what the BNP are like that they are a rascist organisation with a "if your White your all right policy". So why give them the platform to spout off about how Muslims should be forced out the country with there "incentivised repatriation", even if your British.

So, if the public fury aimed at the likes of jade goody et al, and their rascism and homophobic rants / coments, why the hell would you want Hitlers youth on the telly trying to tell the common man why the UK should be White only? Is it because they want to be seen as a legitimate political party? No, I doubt that veryuch. It should be something when even the Tories and there right-wing polish alies refuse to be seated next to them.

The BBC question time is really labour v BNP and let's be honest jack straw isn't exactly going "stick it to 'em" is he? Christ putting anyone against labour at present will make the other look good. ... Read More

If the newspaper reports are to be believed (which I doubt as there all full of stories created in a reporters head and based very loosely on fact) questions and audience members are going to be screened and vetted... Gotta love democracy ain't ya?

All that's happening is we are allowing them an hour long party political broadcast to more people than they would otherwise be able to get at. We know what there like, we know what they stand for, so why legitimise what is tecnically inciting racial hatred? I thought we had a law against that? Only in a democracy, the myth that we are all free...
6 hours ago

Francis NotRealName
good luck to you pal, if i was in the country id be there too
6 hours ago

Fakey mcFakename
i hope you showed this much enthusiasm when our returning troops were being goaded and barracked by muslim fanatics mate i hope you were calling for all of them calling our lads the butchers of baghdad to be arrested for incitement after all if i were a soldier id of opened fire there and then.
6 hours ago

Gareth McFakesurname
People are nieve to think that nick griffen and the BNP will make an ass of themselves tonight. This is the moment they have been waiting for, this will be slick and well rehearsed... But we know what they stand for. Let's watch the car crash then...
6 hours ago

Gareth McFakesurname
Plus frank above has had the delight of meeting the BNPs political team. Shake with one hand destroy a pub with the other...
6 hours ago

Paul Notarealsurname
What's wrong with BNP?? I get my petrol there all the time, they even do a points card now... Awesome!
3 hours ago

Philippa Dee
I agree that the BNP are a bunch of racist cunts but it doesn't change the fact that just because you don't like what some people say, it doesn't take away their right to say it. Besides, surely it is better for the British viewing public to see the debate so that they can better understand the situation and (hopefully) reach the conclusion that it's better not to give any support to a bunch of racist cunts? denying them a platform just gives them the opportunity to paint themselves as martyrs.
about an hour ago · Delete

Sameera Fakelastname
Freedom of speech has to be limited when it incites people to behave violent towards non- white people! Giving them a platform is almost like accepting their policies and making them equal to any other party.
about an hour ago

Philippa Dee
I'm afraid I'm going to have to disagree there Sameera - I don't think giving them a platform is at all like accepting their policies and making them equal to any other party. It's a tough one, because obviously I don't approve of their message, but I think apart from anything else people need to stop underestimating the British viewing public, ... Read Moremost of whom are not so stupid as to watch a BNP debate and then decide, uninformed, to vote for them. If anything, the controversy and media coverage that this debacle has created should serve to inform people about just how racist and unacceptable some BNP policies are.

to illustrate: I know that a few months ago, a racist group (it escapes me who exactly) organised a protest in Leeds. Unite Against Fascism organised a counter protest - a huge number of people turned up to show support AGAINST the fascists, and it was a really successful way of showing that the majority of people don't hold such abhorrant, racist views. That's democracy and that's living in a free society. When we don't like what someone says, we use our freedom to TELL them and SHOW them that we don't like it. We don't stop them from saying it at all. That, ironically enough, would be fascist.
about an hour ago · Delete

Gareth mcFakesurname
The BNP already paint themselves as martyrs anyway. The thing i object to is the hypocritical nature that racism is banned on TV, it is socially unacceptable yet you give Nick Griffin his hour of fame. He has links with and photo's with the KKK and others of that ilk. Surely that breaches the BBC's own rules?

People think he's going to look stupid, but he wont. This will be the BNP's finest hour, there not going to be grilled enough and now they will claim legitimacy, a bit like Jean Marie Le-Penn...

A democracy gives people the choices to do what they wish (democracy is a myth but that's for another day), i choose to rally against them and not give them anything, i'd rather they painted themselves as martyrs than capitalise on the current distrust of politicians....

Martin: Why would i celebrate the abuse that british and american soldiers get? They are there at the bidding of our corrupt government and deserve public backing even if you think the war was based on a large pile of non-existant evidence. I support our troops, but i don't believe that a fascist and racist group holds the key to peace and security in the UK or the world. If anything i'd say that voting BNP will cause more problems for everyone. Plus selecting a small sample of a population and then saying 'they are all the same" is extremely narrow minded. The BNP wish they could get millions of votes, they probably will after tonight though.
about an hour ago

thoughts?

2009-09-17T05:43:00.000-07:00

Im doing an art piece at the moment which involves tearing things out of newspapers. I found it interesting to see that, in one issue of the Guardian weekend inserts there was an abundance of headlines with titles such as

"After the fall"
"When the world was about to end"
"hard, but unfair"
"Crude Injustice"
and the so-sarcastic-you-can-almost-taste-it - "How did life get so good?"

each the headers of distinct and separate articles. I hold the view that newspapers perform, apart from the obvious current events coverage, the function of reflecting the wider anxieties and collective emotions of the society they are produced within. (perhaps also fairly obvious to most - certainly not a new idea; see "The Daily Mirror", ) I thought it was worth commenting on the fact that I'm obviously not the only one who is currently taking an intellectual interest in the fate of mankind. (that sounds a bit melodramatic, but unfortunately I am finding language a bit limiting in this instance - perhaps it would be more accurate to say, "where mankind is headed?" or "the direction mankind is taking?")

However, there is another trend also evident - examples:

"A new force for good"
"Built into the fabric of life"
"Hope springs"
"problem solved"
"Mother Courage"

I think, with the current state of the economy/etc it's natural that society will be living in a heightened state of anxiety and natural for our papers and literature to reflect that. But also, it's quite heartening to see a pre-occupation with prospects of hope and the future. I know it probably seems like I'm reading too much into something fairly irrelevant and I must hasten to reassure that I'm not ascribing any kind of significance or meaning to what is at the end of the day more or less fairly innocuous co-incidence; I merely found it mildly interesting and a good starting point for discussion.

Basically I think what I'm driving at is that, distinct from our own individualistic emotional states, we also exist as part of our species - I am me and that means I am one, but I could not be one was there not others, and so I have a sort of dual identity, as a person and as part of my species. And like all beings I serve my own interests but, on a big enough scale, on the grandest scheme of things, we all serve the same interest of survival. And when that is threatened, everything else stops.

I am finding it difficult to properly express my ideas on this particular subject - hopefully completing the art piece will have enabled me to properly structure my thoughts a bit better!

I'm going to go back to listening to Vietnam-era American rock music and sticking things on my wall :-)

2009-08-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

"Whenever the topics "gender," "women," or even "health" come up in development aid council discussions in Brussels, the session inevitably turns into a fight about abortion."

The above quote actually isn't very representative of what is covered in the rest of the article, which is interesting but mostly concerned with the need for the EU to stop quibbling buck it's ideas up with regards to providing healthcare and education on such matters. Not that I disagree with the need for this AT ALL, but I can't help feeling that there is some merit in considering the quote in another light - why, when it comes to topics as broad as gender, women and health, should all roads lead back to abortion? It's an issue that's incredibly divisive and, yes, incredibly important, but I can't help but feel that an incredible number of other equally important issues equally worthy of discussion are pushed off the gender in favour of this one on which, we can comfortably assume, there isn't going to be any consensus reached any time soon. What about wage gaps, female subordination, female circumcision, rape laws, suffocating beauty standards, the burkha, any other number of gender related issues that haven't immediately sprung to mind in 30 seconds?

2009-07-31T06:15:00.001-07:00

Wersya Sensa Yuma

You will probably find this amusing, particularly if you're from an area with a strong regional dialect. I was with some old friends the other night who all grew up in the same area as me and one of them commented that they thought my accent had changed, not dramatically but definitely noticeably, since I started attending University in Leeds. I have become aware of this myself - it's not something I do intentionally on a conscious level, but I have found that my scouse twinge becomes more or less pronounced depending on who I am around. Or how drunk I am.

haha.

2009-07-29T03:10:00.000-07:00

I'm researching bands on the net to write some bits and pieces for the Matthew Street Festival website, and whilst glancing at the last.fm of a band called Sound of Guns (I haven't listened to them yet but “Eclectic, raw and equiped for something more, their musicallity(sic) is paramount” The Fly, - apparently) I came across this little gem of a comment:

Bowen72 wrote:
last week

"We had their guitarist in our tent at Latitide screaming about giant lizards that were trying to eat his eyes. He got up to leave but I told him there were WArlords with lasers cos he was too much fun to lose. Unforgettable."

Cute.

2009-07-12T16:50:00.000-07:00

sometimes i like to shout "no" at the tv in response to adverts that tell me i need to buy things. I can highly recommend it, it gives an illusion of empowerment