Skemster

You Are Awful…But I Like You: travels around the UK with Tim Moore

2012-02-14T19:09:00.001Z

I first picked this book up with a smug air of satisfaction: I was going to enjoy ripping this one apart. I had had enough of doing nice positive reviews, it was time for some good old fashioned vitriol and this tome- another road trip around the UK by some poncy metrophile southerner- would do the job perfectly.

And the first few pages appeared extremely promising in this regard; the prose came across as aloof and solidly within in the ageing, middle brow ‘Daily Mail' zone of humour; the sense that a precious, condescending take on the nether-regions of our battered Britain- dragged over the coals as they had been and left out to wither and die by the establishment elite for the last three decades- was in the offer only reinforced my sense of inverted glee. I was going to love tearing this one to pieces.

And then without any warning it all suddenly changed. Tim Moore started describing his purchase of an Austin Maestro and the history of the car with such affectionate pathos, coupled with a relentlessly funny narrative that literally had me in tears with laughter. And from thereonin, the book only got better, and better and better…

Now then, it has to be said that Moore’s book unashamedly goes for laughs as its base point; but what’s so good about his book, is that it isn’t laughs at any cost and the humour isn’t used as a shallow gloss to hide the experience he is really having. Nor, importantly, is his humour used to belittle the places and people he meets. It is in fact very cleverly, used to the opposite effect.

Moore’s overall idea is wonderful in its simplicity- he decides to go to what are catalogued as the worst places in Britain, travelling in one of the worst cars we have produced, listening to the worst music we have ever knocked out, staying and eating in the worst places wherever possible.

This sets the scene for some wonderful but also extremely poignant set pieces throughout the book. Tim Moore never loses sight of his own pretensions and failings, and to my mind never loses sight of the humanity and grace- both past and present- in the places he visits either. This is a terrific accomplishment that the awful cover and title of the book doesn’t do credit to, although I can understand the marketing executive demands for a book in this terrain.

Being from the North East originally myself, I found his journey through that region particularly good, although that is probably more personal bias than anything else, as all the areas he trundles through in his Maestro are treated with the same level of fascination and- dare I say it- more than a little bit of love. And I’m indebted to the author for explaining the origins of one of the NE’s most peculiar fast food inventions- the parmesan or ‘parmo’- which was a complete education for me.

So without gushing on anymore, I would just say this is a great book well worth a read. His journey around the lost margins of the UK is affectionate, at times painfully acute and, by the end, actually quite moving. In fact behind the accomplished humour, there is a rich vein of some deeper issues to intellectually mine and mull over, and makes you realise that much of Britain these days is like the places described in this book, when you actually think about it. Beyond the hype and gloss of the London–bound media and it’s luvvies, away from the Cotswolds and other gentrified pockets of provincial cities and shires, much of the British population are looking, numbed and a little shell-shocked, at the world around them and wondering…what the hell has happened to us, and why? Very much like, perhaps more than we’d like to admit, the seasoned citizens of Hull and Middlesbrough.

As an end note, I would just point out that this is an analysis of the UK that Jeremy Paxman would not be able to write. On that consideration alone, I think you should immediately get hold of, and read this book.

Is a Major Solar Storm Possible? An Interview with Mat Stein. : Chelsea Green

2012-02-07T19:13:00.000Z

Get ready!!!

Is a Major Solar Storm Possible? An Interview with Mat Stein. : Chelsea Green

A Surprising Situationist Study of a Flawed 21st Century Psyche

2012-01-18T13:14:00.000Z

Well, Will Wiles has certainly slapped down his calling cardwith great style and humour with this, his debut novel.

The premise of the book is very simple and almost like asit-com in its staging; in fact one could very easily see this book transferredto the stage in three succinct acts.

The central character-who remains nameless throughout thebook- is asked by Oskar, a successful, minimalist classical composer and an olduniversity friend, to house sit his apartment in a nameless Eastern Europeancity for a couple of weeks whilst he sorts out a messy divorce from hisCalifornian wife in LA. The would-be housesitter and narrator is a struggling copywriter producing Health and Safetyliterature for local councils, but of course has the usual yearnings to be a‘proper’ writer, and so he jumps at the chance for some time and space toreally write and, in a foreign city no less, what could be more perfect.

As such the book consists almost entirely of an interiormonologue of this central character, punctuated only occasionally by encounterswith a couple of real people, most notably Oskar’s formidable cleaner. It is the maintaining of this interiormonologue so convincingly for so long- and with such a dry, affecting humour-that is a real testament to the skill of Wiles as an author.

The apartment the central character finds himself in is ashe had expected from his knowledge of Oskar as a friend; minimalist in itsmodernism and immaculately clean, organised and tidy, the only anomaly to itsengineered perfection to our narrator’s mind, being the presence of two typicallyindependent minded cats. Oskar hashowever left detailed instructions for him even to the point of leaving noteshidden all over the place, which even at times appear to uncannily pre-empt anyproblems the narrator may encounter.

There are in particular instructions given to the care ofhis precious, expensive and unvarnished wood flooring.

And of course problems the narrator mostcertainly does encounter in an increasingly hapless- and darkly hilarious- wayas the week progresses…

It would be easy to describe the unfolding of events in theflat under the narrator’s watch over this fateful week as pure farce- but theoverall unfurling of the story is deeper, darker and more affecting in itshuman complexities than that of ‘mere’ farce, although a primary driving forceof the book – and the one that refers firmly back to its sit-com premise timeand again- is one that clearly, unashamedly references that form. Wiles however pulls off a more interesting,intellectual take on the narrator’s week that gives the reader more substance tochew on rather than just groans and laughs and, cleverly, weaves in thecomplicated psychosis of not just the narrator, but also of a character- Oskarof course- that never actually appears in the book in person, in ‘real-time’ -apartfrom during a telephone call at the end- that provides an elegant denouement tothe whole tale.

Actually the book is in fact a neat situationist take on thecharacters of the narrator and Oskar. Tomy mind this makes the location- an eastern European city once subject to therigours of authoritarianism, and now succumbing to the asymmetrical forces offree-market capitalism- a perfect foil for the inner tensions and shifting mind-setsof the two central characters. In factthe author at certain parts of the narrative subtly draws attention to thesepolitical, economic and societal movements at work in the city’s past andpresent when he ventures out into the city centre-most notably when he visits alocal museum, a concert then a lap-dancing club- that such a place has to be avery deliberate location on his part in which to centre his situationistexplorations.

However despite the surprising and pleasing intellectualbasis of this book, Wile’s never loses the ability of exploring human frailty,self-delusion and insecurity with the lightest of touches which, at times, are genuinelyhilarious. You can sense from the outsetthat the narrator is doomed to a week that is going to fall apart and that itwill happen largely through events not of his making- but I personally ended upcheering him along despite his own delusions and frantic excuse-makings [all ofthem incidentally to himself] until he does actually emerge from the story assome unusual- and very typical and unwilling- English hero.

It has to be said there are to my mind a couple of ratherweak passages that could have been edited out- the narrators musings onpornography and the displays at a lap-dancing clubs are unnecessary and tritein an awkwardly ‘teenage’ way. Theynonetheless still do not manage to detract from the overall accomplishment ofthis book. It's just a shame that perfection was a whisker away, but denied because of occasional lacking in the editing department.

I do hope Will Wiles isn’t a one-trick pony; there’s thegerm of a new, original, great British voice here and goodness knows when youlook at the shortlists our establishment literary award panels come up with, weneed as many new ones as possible these days. I’ll be looking out for him in the future with more than a littleanticipation. So give this book a go…I’msure you won’t be disappointed.

Welcome to Everytown- A Journey into the English Mind by Julian Baggini

2012-01-12T17:17:00.000Z

What a great idea to get a bona fide intellectual- a ‘proper’contemporary philosopher no less- to probe the English psyche in the early 21^stcentury. The first obstacle the resultantbook’s publisher must jump over however is how do you market such aproduct? What is your target audience? Thequite awful covers of both the hard and paperback seem to fully illustrate thepublisher’s problem here- although fortunately from what I gather, coming tothis great book a few years after it was first published, it has been reasonablywidely read and well received.

Which is all to the good and the reason I started thisreview on the dodgy non-literary ground of that awful subject, promotion andreadership; because to be honest, Istrongly believe as many people as possible in the UK [and beyond] should begiven this book to read, and read it they would, because this is an extremely accessible-but at the same time wonderfully erudite and thought provoking- piece of work.

Baggini establishes himself for six months in the mosttypical postcode in the country according to ACORN, and ends up in S66, which isflagged up as one of those that are the most typical in the UK.

Baggini is unapologetic of the fact that it is in England,and makes this an ‘English Journey’ to a certain extent. And he’s right to be so, in that Englandaccounts for a full 85% of the UK in population terms alone, and despite whatCeltic nationalists may say to the contrary, whether we like it or not Englandsets the agenda socially and economically these days for the wider UK as muchas ever.

So the author finds himself just outside of Rotherham, eventuallysettled into a rented house for his summer to Christmas stint away from hismetrophile lifestyle in Bristol.

It is this transition of lifestyle and urban environmentthat Baggini is so honest and refreshingly open about. He neither condescends nor tries to go ‘native;’he knows his own strengths and limitations with regard to his own place inEnglish society and relentlessly strives to observe and be fair in hisjudgements, in of course true English fashion.

And I would say at all times he succeeds admirably in hisaim and he reaches a broad conclusion in which of course he himself fitsperfectly; England is in fact made up of ‘tribes’, we all belong to one,whether it be in a working class industrial suburb, or part of the ChippingNorton set. We all gravitate tocommunities where we feel comfortable amongst people who are similar to us, andalthough tolerant of, rarely mix with anyone outside of that community.

This is a good over-riding consideration for many of theissues Baggini deftly covers here: multiculturalism, a national past-time of inate‘illiberalism’, the pursuit of a comfortable Good Life, and our propensity tofall into three broad categories of social positioning- herds, hefts and individuals

In fact I found Baggini’s take on these three groups particularlyprofound. Some people prefer to live inherds, allow themselves to be channelled with little thought of their own intodoing and thinking as a higher authority tells them. Others wish to be outright individuals,although as Baggini rightly points out, the current apparent rise ofIndividualism should not be confused with the wider process ofindividualisation. It is one thing to chooseyour clothes, interior decoration and profession in order to enhance/reinforceyour status within a wider group you wish to belong to, and another to pursuean anarchic individual existence outside of any group structure.

Which leads of course to Baggini’s idea of the heft; sheepneed not be herded, they can be ‘hefted’. This means they can live within afield without fences and so have a right to roam but within limits- limits theyhowever chose not to over-step. This senseof unseeable but firm limits to their existence is even ‘handed-down’ from onegeneration of sheep to another. It’s ofcourse not difficult with such a concept, to then see which of the three categorisationsthe vast majority of us in the UK sit firmly within.

This is a rich book that even a relatively lengthy reviewcannot do justice to, so I would urge you to just read it. Baggini comes quickly to the conclusion thatwe essentially, as a nation, is one full of conservative communitarians. A sense of community is not dead; we stillcrave to live in any number of them, but we are basically conservative with asmall ‘c’ in our outlook. We apply themaxim of live and let live wherever possible regardless of class, creed or colour;we are as a nation hard-wired to be tolerant, and it is only when our ownlifestyles and livelihood are directly threatened, that we become defensive andstrike out. As such we can be rather non-ideologicalin much of our outlook; we don’t want an ‘easy’ life, but we sure do want acomfortable one without too much awkward thought cluttering it up.

This I found to be one of the most illuminating of politicalobservations, and something our political movements- particularly on the Left,which in these times of all times need to be revitalised and able to develop a new,coherent message- too often fail to take into account.

Clutching at straws to find a flaw in this book, I did findBaggini being a little soft on the tabloid press. He quite rightly says that they do after alljust report what the public wish to hear and read about, and they would soon goout of business if they didn’t. The onlyproblem is our tabloid press are not passive actors in the reporting of news;they set the agenda to a very large extent, and decide how to present news andopinion that actively shapes the wider public’s outlook- often without allowingfor any countering opinion for that public to consider. Ourpopular press therefore I fear, create a general public more in their own imagethan I think Baggini gives them credit for…

But a relatively small niggle and it in no way detracts fromthe solid intellect that runs through this book, whilst remaining one that isalso supremely accessible. It’s a great book about contemporary Britain andwhere we’ve come from, and one that easily eclipses the efforts of the Paxman’set al of this world.

Nice One Dave….what a bloody mess

2011-12-10T17:39:00.001Z

Oh well it's nice to see the usual myopic, Europhobic head bangers with their hollow triumphalism are alive and well in the UK and of course, hat the heart of the Conservative Parliamentary Party, after the disastrous European summit yesterday.

How a British PM, going to a European summit, getting absolutely NOTHING he wanted and ending up being unceremoniously shunted to the side-lines of one of the most important political and economic groupings in the world, can be seen as a 'victory for Britain' is absolutely beyond belief. The summit was a bloody embarrassment, and Cameron was completely shafted by Sarkozy and Merkel. French and Germany interests have completely over-ridden British ones and as a power, we have been told in no uncertain terms that we are an irrelevance. Anyone who thinks this is a triumph is a fool.

I read a good turn of phrase in The Independent today- it said Cameron played a bad hand terribly, and that sums it up. It appears he went to that summit with only one briefing, that being from the City of London. Yes,that institution that got us in this economic mess in the first place through it's incompetence and greed, was the only interest Cameron had in any measure when he sat down at that dinner table and made such a amateurish mess of it all.
And now I read today even The City has realised they have probably cocked up here, not realising [surprise surprise, common sense being a rare commodity amongst our Masters of the Universe] that Cameron was so inexperienced at this game of High Politics, he may have by using the nuclear option of a veto, have harmed their interests now, rather than protected them.

You see, the City under the new arrangements, will have ZERO influence through lobbying powers and manipulating UK government ministers to do their bidding in Brussels at decision making summits, because the UK will not be sat at them.
What a stupendous own goal.

So we end up being marginalised on the edge of Europe, watching whilst decisions are made that directly affect us [whether we are in the EU or not- that little matter is superfluous] without the slightest say in the matter. And not even the City of London will be protected, as it will inevitably start losing out to Paris and Frankfurt as a primary financial centre.
Nice one Dave, thanks. What an all mighty cock up.

The EU Proto-Super Power: and why the UK is stuck on its margins

2011-12-09T20:53:00.001Z

These are truly incredible times. We are seeing, from all the wreckage of the Euro and the EU economic travails, the development of a new political beast; one that will emerge stronger, more integrated and, without doubt, more autocratic than anything seen in Europe since the cataclysm of the Second World War.

I'm pretty sure the new EU will become a super-power, which will mean it holds more sway in the world [and over developing economies] than merely having to compete on the basis of who can make the cheapest jeans and computer components in the lowest tax environment.

The new enhanced Euro will for example- pretty inevitably I reckon- eventually become the new world reserve currency of choice, taking over from the dollar. We are watching, amongst all this turmoil, the [very rapid] development of a proto-super power and it's happening with frightening speed and focus- the very fact that the political leadership of both Greece and Italy can be replaced overnight with the minimum of fuss by unelected technocrats is a good case in point.

I am not a great fan of the EU by the way- I believe in it's original ambitions as a single market, but it has lost that focus now and moved onto much bigger- some would say insidious- aims. And this new super power is not going to be particularly democratic either; we are seeing democracy being rolled back in much of the EU now and it's a process that seems to be accelerating, not slowing. But I strongly believe we have to totally REALISTIC about our place in world and by association our dealings with the EU. We have a relatively weak, dysfunctional economy, skewered too heavily towards financial services,which is itself a very vulnerable and probably now declining industrial sector. Our armed forces are being continually wound down, we are sinking in public, corporate and private debt and we still have unsustainable, over inflated property values. Any natural resources we had have been squandered in tax breaks for the rich, and any natural resources we still have, stay just where they are because we have dismantled the industrial capability to extract them.

UK plc is not in very good shape and we are not the world power we like to pretend to be. We are not even that big a European power any more, and you just have to look at that summit meeting last night to see that. We need some REALISM put back into our dealings with the world, and we need experienced politicians to negotiate our way through these momentous times, but just when we need people like that, we have unfortunately, this inexperienced and visionless government trying to look after our interests. The future, isn't bright.

Global Rebellion: The Coming Chaos? | Common Dreams

2011-12-03T12:12:00.000Z

The world is it stands today....read it, and then look around with greater understanding.

Global Rebellion: The Coming Chaos? | Common Dreams

Boomerang- the Meltdown Tour by Michael Lewis: A Review

2011-12-01T20:56:00.001Z

It’s an old Marxian chestnut of course, that what at first happens as tragedy in history, is repeated as farce, and late capitalism is truly running to formon that one. The problems facing us nowas a society are so huge- and the follies of the many, over so short a periodof monetary madness so immensely stupid- that we are really only left with theneed to laugh, otherwise, we would all go completely mad.

At the risk of being seen laughing as the Titanic slidesdown, Michael Lewis has followed up The Big Short with a short sharp tour of keycountries in the post-boom western world, and shows just how ridiculous theeconomies became in places like Iceland, Ireland and Greece before the 2007-08crash.

It may seem too short a book for some people but I don’tthink this is a problem; Lewis succinctly captures the craziness of it all withquick a few real laughs along the way, even if it is becoming ever-closer to gallows’humour these days. The fact is the tenyears or so leading up to the crash are going to be looked back on as a periodof almost inexplicable madness and this book nimbly opens a window on thatcollective madness.

In fact Michael Lewis gives an interesting, leftfield take onit all by offering a snapshot of how national characteristics played a part inthe various crises. He sums it up neatlywith a few choice words that warrant repeating: the Icelanders wanted to stopbeing fisherman and become investment bankers; the Greeks wanted to turn theirnational economy into a giant piñata, which they then gave every citizen thechance to have a whack at, the Irish wanted to stop being Irish and theGermans…well they just wanted to be more German.

In fact the penultimate German chapter is an effective codato the preceding ones, and offers a glimpse at how Germany has become the sole,key power in Europe now. The book isfinished off with a look back at the States which is interesting, but a bit outof kilter with the exclusively European take of the previous chapters, but Iunderstand this is a collection of articles and so the need to make something‘book length’ is understandable, and the whole experience isn’t particularly sulliedby that-although of course if you have already read the preceding articles [Ihadn’t], forking out ten-twenty quid for just one newly written chapter mayseem a bit steep. However the US chapteris an excellent snapshot of just how debt-ridden and close to collapse Americanlocal government has become and includes a fascinating mobile ‘interview’ withArnold Schwarzenegger as he charges around LA on his [pedal] bike.

Whatever, with the current turmoil in the EU and what isincreasingly looking like the breakdown of democracy across Europe in 2012 asnon-elected technocrats try to run whole countries, this is an on-trend, quickbut informative [and entertaining] report on how rampant neoliberalism gotcountries like Iceland and Ireland into such an horrendous mess, and how theywill have to reap what they have sown for decades perhaps now, after just tento fifteen or so years of financial and political idiocy. The hangover is going to last a lot longerthan the party.

The English Village: History and Traditions by Martin Wainwright

2011-11-24T12:12:00.001Z

This is an interesting, charming little book which when Ifirst picked it up, I must admit I thought first and foremost that it is goingto be a pleasant but sketchy travelogue covering all that is twee and homelyabout the English village.

I was of course quite wrong. This small but perfectly formedbook is far from that. Martin Wainwrightis the Northern Editor of The Guardian and although maintaining an overallgentile atmosphere of appreciation for the ‘traditional’ English village in allits forms, he does it warts and all and gives well researched historicalbackgrounds to the various aspects of village life and form. This ensures thebook doesn’t shy away from the reality of those developments and their after-effectsover the centuries, thus avoiding the book becoming too ‘chocolate box.’

He therefore achieves a very balanced book that may at timesveer into the over-sentimental but, considering the subject matter, that’squite excusable considering the idealised place the village has in not just theEnglish, but the British and the English speaking world’s psyche. It’s minimally, beautifully illustrated withblack and white pen and ink sketches as the author tackles individual elementsof the English village- the pub, the big house, the cottage, the mill, thechurch etc.- succinctly but not with any lack of detail and, importantly,relevant, social and political observations.

He finishes it off with a chapter that charts the future ofthe English village which is thought-provoking and essential, rounding off thisbook perfectly.

‘The English Village- History and Traditions’ gives a snappyarmchair tour of that most sentimentalised of British social and urban formswhilst maintaining an easy to read, even ‘cosy’ air befitting of the subject,without being mawkish. A fine line towalk and Wainwright pulls it off very well indeed. Give it a read.

Church of england in Crisis

2011-10-29T20:28:00.002Z

St Paul's has lost a good man here. Shame....and now the Church is pursuing legal action to remove OSX protesters which might lead to police action which Christian groups have vowed to resist with a 'ring of prayer...

It's gonna get ugly, and odds on it will be the CofE that is the loser.

http://gu.com/p/33x2m

a Snappy, Intriguing Thriller

2011-10-26T10:46:00.001Z

As part of Amazon’s Encore series, this is a self-published book that Amazon have picked up to ‘mainstream’ publish, with shows the days of dodgy, sub-standard vanity publishing are long gone, because this is a very well written and packaged book indeed.

Final Price is not a whodunnit, it's a ‘how will they catch him' tale and a good one at that. Shamus works for a Honda car sales showroom in Delaware and finally has had enough of the awkward customers who take him for a ride, beating him down on a deal, getting close to buying then suddenly going off to buy from elsewhere- usually the nearest rival- who undercuts by a handful of dollars. So he decides to get his own back and teach them a lesson....violently. In steps Chang, a Chinese man mountain detective and his sidekick Nelson, an autistic crime analyst, and the chase begins.

Organised into fifty-odd short sharp chapters, this rattles on at a fair pace and is a good, snappy read. Okay so it's formula writing, but so what. Sometimes you want to pick up a book and know exactly what you're going to get and enjoy it just for that alone, like wearing a favourite old coat. By introducing intriguing, awkward characters into his book J. Gregory Smith has successfully added extra dimensions to the formula and it works a treat. It's also entertaining to get the perpetrators view of things first hand, even slightly sympathising with him at some points, and to see also he is not the cold, perfect, well organised serial killer we like to imagine such criminals to be, but a rather more bumbling, opportunist and actually human loser that makes him uncomfortably at times, more than a little understandable.

Having said that J. Gregory Smith doesn't let too much cod psychology, navel gazing or literary pretension get in the way of his driving narrative, and he never loses sight of the fact he has a tale to tell...and a very well told, if slightly predictable one, it is too.

Neoliberal Economic Theory isn’t Dead, Just Hiding

2011-09-05T11:29:00.001Z

It has to be faced up to that in this period of late capitalism, economists and analysts on the Left have been absolutely correct in their assessment of it's form and failings. Even many leading RW economists admit this. That group even includes Alan Greenspan, the greatest cheerleader of RW neoliberal economics up until the crash who admitted his most cherished beliefs were actually seriously flawed, and Paulson getting down on one knee [literally] to beg Congress to bail out the banks. Remember this was someone literally begging the dreaded State to effectively hand over a life-saving blank cheque to [a completely failed] private sector. I think it's fair to assume these are not times of great confidence and erudition on the Right where economic theory is concerned, don't you?

When it comes to the issue of business regulation [or more specifically the lack of it], the rub is in the difference between the trans global corporations and small-medium sized business. The past 30 years of de-regulation and loose fiscal policy has benefitted directly the corporations- which is not surprising, seeing as they have spent billions lobbying for it in Washington and London. We don't live in a world of thriving, competing medium sized businesses any more, but one dominated by a clutch of globe-spanning corporations that are now more powerful than individual governments. So when I talk of regulation, I'm referring to that scale of things, not health and safety issues and their cost implications.

Businesses have always had the profit motive as their bottom line. Before the days of trans global corporations, when businesses were smaller, less powerful, more nationally based and therefore closer to their customer base and civic government, this motive was shaped more and tempered by more sophisticated considerations.

But not anymore; enhancement of shareholder value is all that matters to the corporations,there are NO other considerations. Therefore anything the tobacco companies or Nike do, is with that bottom line consideration. They are doing it for the profit motive pure and simple, within the paradigm of a specific issue they are facing at that particular time/in that particular local market. It's funny you mention Nike in your example of corporate 'altruism;' it is one of the world's biggest offenders when it comes to employing child labour, paying subsistence wages to it's workers and tolerating appalling working conditions in it's developing world factories. This lobbying for greenhouse gas controls is PR window dressing to achieve broad political aims and has nothing to do with their core business interests [and activities] at all.

With regard to the GDP growth from Thatcher onwards, which is often crowed about by the Right as a golden age of prosperity- despite the fact that is was more sporadic than the Right leads us to believe, and importantly, WAS ON AVERAGE MUCH LOWER THAN THAT OF THE WHOLE PERIOD OF 1945-70s- that growth was entirely illusionary and, as recently proven, completely unsustainable. In the UK it was based on first transferring national assets paid for by taxpayers to the private sector at knockdown prices, deregulating The City so that it could accumulate wealth focussed in a small elite with very little in the way of a tax burden, then an engineered property boom and the promotion of huge amounts of cheap credit to the general population in order to fuel a consumer boom based on cut-price imports from China. A similar process of course happened in the US [and indeed much of the Anglophone world].

GDP growth from Thatcher onwards was a paper tiger, the real wealth made within it ending up focussed in a very small global elite. It has been nothing to crow about, unless you are are part of that small, privileged elite.

The Dark Soul of the English Middle Classes Laid Bare

2011-08-25T10:27:00.001Z

The aftermath of the summer riots in England has been a true eye opener. And it’s shown one thing; the ‘hang ‘em high and flog ‘em’ brigade is well and truly ensconced in Middle England.

The English middle class, historical, has had an underlying societal attitude which has always defaulted to a firm belief in the poor deserving to be kicked [and severely punished for any perceived wrong-doing], as they are basically weak and inept and deservingly at the bottom of the heap. At the other end of the scale it has always fawned to the rich, no matter whatever they do. This has be made blatantly obvious in the aftermath of the last financial crisis; we have all been robbed blind by looters who can steal millions of pounds off us from behind computer screens, and adversely affect our standard of living of years, yet are allowed not just to get away with it, but continue to thrive.

That is the basic mind-set of a vast swathe of Middle England. And it is full of angry, bitter people who are feeling increasingly disempowered. The middle class can sense it's been completely shafted by the establishment- which has always been its most favourite, rich big cousin who it's had a crush on like, forever- but it doesn't know what to do about it. The structure of their world has shifted, and all they have now is ill-defined resentment and a seething anger, and that is what we have seen laid bare in the aftermath of the riots.

Many people are shouting from the roof tops that we need to 'man up' and get tough over the treatment of these rioters. A lot of people say this, but non seem to be prepared to say we should 'man-up' and start treating the root causes of the riots. And there ARE root causes to them; nobody with any real worldliness, deep down, can say they honestly believe the riots were just a spontaneous outbreak of violence at different locations across the country, 'just for the hell of it,' because NOTHING in society occurs in a vacuum. NOTHING. Even nihilists have a rational base point they work from, because no matter how much Middle England likes to think of the underclass as sub-human, they are not; they are not animals working on pure instinct, but rational humans.

And at the end of all this, those much despised 'liberal values and approaches' will be the ones used to solve the problems in the areas the riots happened. Why? Because there is no viable alternative.
I mean say for example, we go the full hog and 'man-up' completely in the aftermath of the riots. We lock up for years everyone who took part in the riots, as well as everyone in their families who aided them/benefited from the stolen goods. Many speeches are made by politicians about 'Being Tough On Crime;' shopping centres become fortresses, perhaps even curfews are introduced in selected areas. Laws are introduced where anyone wearing a hoodie can be stopped, searched and detained for an unspecified amount of time at the whim of any police officer. The scope of draconian measures are endless.

Putting aside the odiousness of these police state conditions that would in some way affect ALL the ordinary citizens of the country, do you really think it'd make a blind bit of difference to the next wave of rioters? Of course not. Not only will they be all the more embittered by the heavy handed controls they have, they will also see it as more of a challenge [and a proof 'manhood'] to overcome them. And when the opportunity comes for the next riot, do you really think that gang of young men,fired up on strong cider and raging hormones and the communal buzz of mob power, will really stop and say to each other...'oh hell, we're going too far now, we'd better stop and go home....'

Of course they won't. So after all the heavy handed policing and tough rhetoric and over-the-top societal controls, riots still happen. Its 100% inevitable. It's happened in the past, it is happening abroad [look at the ME's final reaction against the police state], it will happen here in the future. So what will then be turned to, to address the underlying problems spurring on the rioters? Why those boring, bleeding heart, on-the-ground liberal policies and initiatives of course, what else...once again 100% inevitable.

Anderson Stays On-Form

2011-08-16T11:32:00.000Z

I enjoyed City Boy, despite it's flaws [the repetitive 'bloke-iness grated just a bit too much in places] and so didn't have any problem trying out this, a more straight-forward novelisation of the hero of Cityboy's exploits.
And it doesn't disappoint. Geraint Anderson's style is supremely suited to a vast moving, dare I say pulpish 'thriller' format and there is nothing wrong with that. This is a really good read and if you find it's a style that suits you, you'll crack through it in no time and be well entertained along the way.
Some people may criticise it for being more of the same, but so what. Anderson knows what his strengths as a writer are and plays to them with everything he's got. He subsequently won't win any posy literary prizes but again, so what. Sometimes when you're looking for a good read, you need a brand you can trust, and I reckon Geraint Anderson is going to provide us with just that. I hope he knocks out more of these books to help pass a rubbish-weather UK summer with.

Murdoch Empire on the Ropes

2011-07-09T14:26:00.001Z

So what a few days. The NoW is no more, every day brings bigger, more disturbing revelations about the machinations of News international, and the scandal is now starting to lock itself in firmly behind the doors of No.10. Cameron's performance yesterday was a master class in damage limitation, and you have to take your hat off to the man. He is the consummate politician but, I sense not even his PR/political skills will pull him through all of this entirely unscathed. He has however the opportunity here to, if he makes the right moves, do something that defines his premiership and guarantees his re-election in a few years time even though we will once again be in recession by then... it's going to be very interesting to see if he rises to the occasion or not. If any one can, he will...but I sense with even Rebekah Brooks hinting there is worse to come, well I wouldn't put serious money on it.

As for the drubbing NewsCorp/NI/the Murdoch clan are getting over all this, well it's not before time. A media group that glorifies in war and relentlessly promotes class division and racial hatred [and I am not using hyperbole here; this is hard cold fact], is finding it's faux morality turned back on itself, and that 'morality' is going to end up devouring it. Oh the sweet irony.

I strongly suspect a new era is now upon is, and the next decade is going to be a bit like the 70s in some ways I think, as the old order collapses and a new one tries to find it's feet. Murdoch's NewsCorp was an encapsulation of the over-riding economic ethos of the past thirty years; achieve a profit and a powerbase at whatever cost, where morality is merely a commodity to achieve those aims, not something to actually practise, and 'results' and 'profit' and 'enhanced shareholder value' is to be unashamedly achieved through not only twisting the law to achieve your aims, but actively breaking it.

Oh and of course, doing all of this whilst not paying any tax whatsoever if at all possible [which of course Murdoch has achieved effortlessly].

The Murdoch Empire is now reaping the evil it has sown and like all acts of natural justice, it has come just when you least expect it, from out of the blue, and with all the force of a hurricane.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations by David Halpern

2011-06-09T10:32:00.001Z

Building on recent books such as Wilkinson and Picket's 'the Spirit Level,' Halpern's latest work builds on the growing intellectual awareness that Greed is not necessarily Good, and that the libertarian core tenet that individualism is not just a divine human right, but an essential element in the further development of humankind, is all nothing but a sham.

The re-discovery that we are a social animal and that we have got to where we are today by collective efforts, community building and such old-fashioned [i.e. not financially quantifiable] concepts such as trust and empathy, is going to be a hallmark of this decade's political development and we may even be on the cusp of a general public re-alignment involving the realisation that to be nothing but a stand-alone consumer is not all the neoliberal Right makes it out to be, but we'll see.

Whatever unfolds over the next ten years or so, this book will be I think, seen as a cornerstone in the change of that overall political mood not just in the UK, but in the West as a whole. Richer nations are indeed on the whole 'happier' [whatever that means], but only when that wealth is spread relatively evenly. High levels of wealth- and economic growth- is not enough; a society needs a fair degree of equality and a fundamental current of trust running through that community, for all parts of it to prosper, not just economically but socially and mentally.

David Halpern addresses these issues in his book and gives clear, practical suggestions on how policy can be developed to achieve a more equitable, sustainable society that is more at ease with itself than it is now, after the disaster of more than thirty years of neoliberal Me-ism.

It isn't the book that delivers all of the answers nor is it the one that will be a touchstone that ignites public awareness and precipitates a sea-change [and much needed re-awakening of political possibilities] in our society's approach to life and community, but it is certainly a strong part of the foundations of that growing new awareness and I urge everyone to read it.

The After Party by Leo Benedictus

2011-05-22T10:09:00.001Z

I think I read somewhere that Leo Benedictus had described his novel as an exercise in post modern-post modernism which sums it up quite well, even if it does seem an almost nonsensical description at first glance.

Famed English actor Hugo Marks [you will have a lot of fun working out which real life celeb actor[s] the character is based on] is throwing a party, to which Michael, a minor journalist on the edge of all out loserdom, is given a second hand invite to, by a colleague who can’t make it.

There, he strikes up an unlikely flash-friendship with Hugo but it is at the after-party that things start to go out of control…

This is a great read and there’s no point giving too much away here, even if the plot is simple and relatively predictable. But this is no bad thing; the strength of the book is in the author’s relaxed but intelligent style, the characterisations, and the clever but simple and coherent experiments with style. References to other writers abound [Brett Easton Ellis looms over much of this book], real people are mixed up with fictitious characters thinly disguising real celebs which brings to mind Bukowski’s Hollywood, and a sub-plot that includes the author himself is played out in e-mails with a literary agents that pokes the publishing industry with a big cynical stick.

Somehow Benedictus pulls all this off almost flawlessly. I enjoyed this book very much and in this day of UK writers seemingly desperate to write about the past and non-subjects of little concern to any other than themselves and the petit-bourgeoisie in order to win the Booker Prize, an entertaining but intelligent book like this most welcome. That, coupled with anti-establishment writers like McEwan and Amis on the wane means we need a British version of Brett Easton Ellis to inject some life into our stilted literary world. I hope Leo Benedictus lives up to the promise of this book and fills that gap.

Viva Gotham

2011-04-13T18:14:00.001Z

One is tempted to say the sub-text to cover of this book should say ‘…And Why Greed Is Good’ but that would be a bit churlish.

It’s probably worth pointing out first that the writer is talking about the triumph of the city as a human construct, not ‘The City’ in a financial context, although for the author the two are clearly, inextricably linked.

Glaesner writes this book from a US, centre-right libertarian viewpoint and makes no bones about his trust in the free market to deliver the optimum urban form for us, although to be fair he is at times even handed and does point out where the public sector and more ‘left-liberal’ policies have a place in city development.

Having said that his appreciation of public sector activity does tend to focus on what that public sector can do for private business [e.g. road infrastructure etc.] rather than the general population that have to live in our urban and suburban areas, and very quickly defaults to the laissez-faire argument: cities are at their most dynamic when the rule book is thrown away and unbridled wealth is allowed to explode, which essentially means inequalities in society are an acceptable urban phenomenon, as that wealth will inevitably ‘trickle down’ to the rest of society. Basically in cities, Greed Is Good.

Now that this Trickle Down theory has now been widely discredited and shown to be a totally defunct idea- it never happened and never will, wealth if anything seeps upwards- makes Glaesner’s approach, despite being written after the Crash of 2007-08, almost quaint and old-fashioned now as the 21^st century begins to shape up in an entirely new way from the previous ones. His analysis is growth obsessed; as if [almost] anything goes in the name of growth. Height controls, strict limitations of historic building protection [unless such protection offers an economic premium] and land use zoning amongst many other regulating mechanisms come into Glaesner’s sights as inhibiters to that growth and, as such, should be strictly restricted in their own use [which is a bit of an irony, as most libertarian ideas are]. This isn’t to say he doesn’t make some good points in this book; he is right in stating that human society operates better in an urban environment than a rural one, which inevitably equates to grinding poverty for the masses under the yoke of an elite, but his obsession with growth driven purely by an entrepreneurial and intellectual elite runs the risk of merely transferring that feudal rural society of inequality into the city- as is being seen now in the developing world- which he is either unable to acknowledge or, I suspect, is unwilling to.

I think this is again a symptom of this book being slightly out of time, but not in a positive way. It touches on but doesn’t fully face up to the global, metropolitan issues of this century, that is massively increasing levels of consumption in the developing world over the next fifty years, and the effect that is going to have on physical and geo-physical structure of our planet.

Sustainability and zero/negative growth should be the aim of a city structure as much as unbridled growth and wealth generation over the coming decades. It is the super-rich elite that peddle the myth that everyone can join them at the high table if they work hard enough at keeping the city working, when in reality hardly any ever will. There may be examples of rags to riches in the metropolitan population as Glaesner happily outlines some examples of, but they are very much the exception rather than the rule.

Glaesner also places much emphasis on cities being the ultimate centre of ideas and business initiative. This is true to a point but it doesn’t tell the whole story; not all ideas come from city populations- connectivity is important but great ideas do not necessarily come in the main from city residents. Many of our most essential machines were developed in rural situations to deal with rural agricultural problems, then adapted later for urban use and although dense urban populations can trigger off new intellectual thought and economic initiatives, these are not always positive ones. As such modern cities can just as much become power-bases of the rich as much as disempowered ghettoes of the poor and indeed can have very separate identity from the nation they sit in; London for example, could easily be described as an independent entity from the UK as a whole.

Having said the above, this book remains however, overall, a reasonable analysis of western urban development to date, is easy to read and Glaesner has a relaxed, friendly style that is pleasantly disarming and one can be forgiven for believing at the end of it, that all you have to do is place a few unregulated entrepreneurs and banks in a city, and all will be well.

However the bottom line is overall prosperity has improved in western cities largely through public works, altruistic ‘city fathers’ and focussed, harnessed growth in the wider public interest by national and local governance that has necessarily seen capitalism caged, but essentially kept well feed. The urban capitalist hound that is left to its own laissez-faire devices is only ever happy in metropolitan space akin to Gotham City- a place the cover of this book with its skyscraper skyline unfortunately mimics. Yes, some urban areas like Detroit have failed miserably, but they are not going to be resurrected as places to live in by rabid capitalism alone, as the 21^st century just isn’t going to work that way.

Worth a read though, even if the book is a bit simplistic and more of a history of urban development in many chapters, rather than an in depth exploration of the modern city dynamic as it stands today, and where it will go in future, as the realisation that uninhibited growth is no longer a societal option.

The UK and it's Establishment Hypocrisy

2011-03-31T12:57:00.000Z

You know what, it does amaze me when we experience civil unrest like we did last Saturday over the Government's deficit reduction programme, how many people will cheer from the rooftops about armed intervention on another continent that killes tens of thousands of innocent civilians and wholeheartedly cheer on sending armed forces and even arms to support uprisings in some countries, even if it is blatantly daft [in Libya, the opposition is riddled with al'qeda supporters so if we arm them we will be given weapons to bin Laden....rather ironic isn't it], yet some civil disobedience in an exclusive shopping district of London has them up in arms about 'hooligans' and 'criminal damage' and 'we should be getting out the water cannon.'

Is it perhaps, because it is too scarily close to home and is disturbing viewing whilst having ones tea and crumpets?

Even Cameron is making a bit of an ass of himself over it, his usual acute politiking deserting him as he becomes clearly overwhelmed by the glamour of the international stage. He says repeatedly that civil protest must be allowed and supported in foreign countries- particularly the ME- and yet presides over a proto-police state in the UK with an establishment and it's lackey police force that wants to do everything in its power to stamp out any form of civil protest in our country. Interesting- but increasingly scary- times in Old Blighty.

Anthony Browne: The Retreat of Reason- Political Correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain

2011-02-17T20:33:00.001Z

Before picking over the detail it has to be said that this a good read; it's well written and concise and gives an excellent overview of that phenomenon we love to hate, political correctness. It remains a shame though that the majority of analysis on the subject comes from the Right, as it unashamedly does in this case, which is not surprising though really as the author has worked for the Daily Mail and the publisher Civitas is a classical liberal think tank.

Nonetheless it hits the nail on the head a number of times when tackling the broad ethos of PC, but falls down woefully when the author becomes too partisan and in particular, when he has a chance to take shots at what are clearly his pet hates- namely socialism, a publically run NHS and Europe. This leads to him at times stretching credulity a bit too far as he tries to place PC fairly and squarely at the Left's feet and is completely erroneous about a number of issues that he paints over, with all the skill of the consummate neoliberal brandishing a political airbrush.

And it is this obsession with blaming the Left entirely for the reality twisting of political correctness that sits most uneasily with this reader. If PC really is cultural Marxism, why has it had such a grip on us for 30 years, when in all other areas of economic and political life, the neoliberal ethos of individualism and free market capitalism has reigned supreme? Are there really thousands of Marxist sleepers secretly running our establishment?

I think not.

The truth is more complex and, I suspect, political correctness is more a manifestation of Libertarian Right ideology than they dare admit [or indeed face up to]. This book of course in no way acknowledges the possibility of this and because the author does make one sweeping generalisation too far when it comes to the glories of capitalism, it is no where near as erudite as it should be. That doesn't mean it's not worth reading though- by people of all political persuasions.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet

2011-01-31T20:21:00.000Z

I’m a big fan of David Mitchell’s but I have to admit I approached this book with a fair degree of trepidation, as it is clearly a move away from his other fiction to date.
It is essentially a historical caper centering on the life of a Dutch clerk called Jacob De Zoet, who in the late 18^th century and the dying days of Dutch power and influence in the Far East, is stationed in Dejima, Japan’s only trading contact with the outside world.
The story does though peel off to explore the life trajectory of some other characters, notably Abigawa Orito, a young Japanese woman who is a midwife and scholar and the love interest for Jacob, who comes within minutes of her accepting his marriage proposal, if not for a twist of fate.
I think if anything this sums up the message of this book, as it has done in all of Mitchell’s previous novels, notably the vagaries of fate and how our lives and the future of whole groups of people can be determined by what happens- usually by chance- in one critical, small parcel of time.
This is at times though a rather incoherent book; it does tend to run off down side alleys at times, some more successfully than others. For example the chapter dedicated to Orito’s semi-imprisonment in a convent surprisingly manages to introduce some almost ‘speculative fiction’ elements [for want of a better description] into the narrative, as he of course has done in previous books, as the story takes a turn into Margaret Atwood territory [e.g. the Handmaid’s Tale] which was something I enjoyed, but others may be perplexed by.
Overall one gets the sense that David Mitchell had in his formative years read Timothy Mo’s ‘An Insular Possession’ and decided it was a life ambition to do an historical equivalent for Japan/Dejima, but despite its patchy start it is worth staying with and Mitchell’s book is, in the end, superior to Mo’s. It is flawed though and veers very close to self-indulgence perhaps too many times- again it’s as if Mitchell wanted to prove to the Booker judges that he could write grown up conventional fiction as well, when he really doesn’t need to do anything of the sort- and I admit I nearly gave up on it halfway through and only his superb writing and me being a fan of his previous work and therefore duty bound to hang in there, kept me going.
But I am more than pleased that I did, and urge others to hang in there with it too, as the second half of the book- and particularly the last third- are superb and everything begins to take some appreciable form as an affecting story emerges. I for one had become completely immersed in the world of Nagasaki and Dejima at the start of the nineteenth century by then, although arguably that hook should have been swallowed earlier in the book. But, better late than never I think at the end of the day, and I even enjoyed the final sequence, as conventional/comfortable as it is, which after a bumpy ride is on reflection, just what was needed.

The Spirit Level Delusion: Fact-checking the Left's New Theory of Everything by Christopher Snowdon

2010-11-12T18:33:00.001Z

After reading Wilkinson’s and Pickets ‘The Spirit Level’ I picked up a copy of this rebuttal by Christopher Snowdon, in the interests of fairness.

‘The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone’ was published in 2009 to wide acclaim on all sides of the political spectrum and argued through evidence garnered from reliable sources [notably the UN and EU] that greater inequalities in society hampered the overall effectiveness of a nation’s economy and health, with The UK and US emerging as two of the most unequal societies in the developed world.

This book is one of the first to challenge those findings. However, the problem Snowdon has are first perceptions; what is he trying to say? That Wilkinson and Pickett are wrong and the UK is actually a more equal place than they describe, or that its societal inequalities are actually acceptable, that in fact a small minority of people should be allowed to be ‘super-rich,’ for the ‘benefit of all’, and an increasingly marginalised underclass is a fair price to pay for this, particularly as they usually deserve to be there through their own failings, anyway?

The first stumbling block this book has to get over [and fails] is that any ordinary person [i.e. 95% of the population] can see day in day out that Britain is a very unequal society and we are, frankly, in a social and economic mess where any sense of community is barely a memory now for much of its population. The vast majority of people can sense there is something very wrong with this, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

So again the question begs to be answered: what is Snowdon trying to prove? His association with a right wing libertarian think tank probably explains a lot, and the speed of this rebuttal to the publication of ‘The Spirit Level’ clearly shows Wilkinson and Pickett’s book must have disturbed the libertarian right considerably, but having said that Snowdon’s book is well written and, as a couple of reviewers have said, is a good ‘tube read’ which is no bad thing, but probably sums up its ‘academic’ weight. The fact is unfortunately, apart from spending a lot of time trying to shoot down Wilkinson and Pickett’s figures and methodology, Snowdon comes up with very little counter-analysis of his own.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s ‘The Spirit Level’ is far from perfect, but its overall findings are solid and its argument is convincing, striking a cord I would imagine with the underlying feelings of very many people. Snowdon’s rebuttal is interesting but at the end of the day, a paper tiger. Certain points made in the ‘Spirit Level’ are obsessed over as incorrectly/disingenuously presented, yet they are nonetheless fully explained by Wilkinson and Pickett in their book. For example much is made of the sample group of rich countries, yet the criteria for their selection is fully explained by W & P, and going on for example about places like Hong Kong not being included is simply erroneous from the outset, as it is not even a nation state.

The fact remains, despite its occasional airbrushing over of a few details, ‘The Spirit Level’ is a highly successful, peer reviewed work that will have a positive impact for years to come. Snowdon’s critique though, cannot escape the feeling of being an exasperated bleat of indignation from the neoliberal right, who are trying to maintain their well-worn strategy of the past 30 years of muddying reality with disinformation and spin. It has worked for a couple of decades, but this book shows that these techniques may well now have run its course, and neoliberalism is on the run. And it is the majority of the UK/US population who will benefit from this, which is no bad thing.

City Boy…Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile from Geraint Anderson

2010-10-25T17:43:00.001Z

There's a whole clutch of books about the financial crisis and the fall from grace of drug-fuelled, misunderstood city boys and girls and this is probably the daddy of them of all, so if you are going to read any in this new genre, it might as well be this one.

Based on Anderson's The London Paper's column- although narrated by a fictional character clearly for legal reasons- it is essentially an autobiographical tale that takes you on a journey from his [we are assured] 'left-wing hippy days' of University, through the uber-capitalism experience of life as an analyst in Canary Wharf, and back again.

It has to be said there is something compelling about the story- a bit like rubber necking a motorway car crash- and it is written in an almost hypnotic, blokey style that despite your higher nagging sense of taste, keeps you reading until the end.

However that blokey style too often strays into the juvenile, which although no doubt an accurate voice of the type of people making millions in the City, relentlessly applied throughout a book is wearing, as are his quips, jokes and 'amusing' closing time sexist and racist observations which again, as he says, are clearly based on a reality he has stored up from years of a banal existence with the idiots who come out with this rubbish, but they come with such frequency [and often repetition] in the book, that they left this reader exasperated and close to just tossing the book away.

This is a shame because many people probably do just that and miss the overall message of the book, and the really good parts. When Anderson is describing 'sensibly' the machinations of The City and the origins of the recent crash, he is very, very good; lucid and rational in his explanations. Unfortunately though this is too often swamped by a rollercoaster of prose style that too often sinks into banality and a crudeness that isn't clever enough to be funny.

Having said that, if you key into the voice and shrug off the lows, it is more often than not an entertaining- and occasionally gripping- read and although it is difficult to feel sorry for the author at the end of it, I suspect that was not his aim.

There are more stylish and perhaps more emotionally affecting accounts of the self-destructive City lifestyle- Alex Preston's novel 'This Bleeding City' springs to mind- but for an account from the raw, blokeish coalface of The City, this may well be the only book you need to read in a growing library on the subject.

Imperial Bedrooms

2010-10-07T15:24:00.001Z

I must admit I have grown into a firm appreciation of Brett Easton Ellis rather than being a rabid fan from the outset. I enjoyed the first couple of books in the 80s [Clay, the narrator in Imperial Bedrooms, is a character from Less Than Zero] although well written, were almost disposable in a yuppies 80s sort of way. It was American Psycho that finally got me hooked and that book remains one of the best [and most shocking] I’ve ever read.

Whatever, Imperial Bedrooms. This is a lot slimmer slice of ‘stream of consciousness’ story telling than those before in which there is in fact hardly any ‘story’ as such, but more of a snapshot of lifestyle anxiety in the neoliberal materialistic morass of the early 21^st century. Clay has returned to LA during a ‘break’ in his standard issue media career, although it’s not exactly clear how successful he’s been at it, although one suspects not very. Wealth has nonetheless still clung to him which is perhaps another salient indicator of the nature of our times. He is obviously close to a breakdown, filling a life he secretly acknowledges as being shallow with delusions of love and friendship fuelled by the usual drugs and drink. It culminates in the trademark BEE scene of sexual and narcotic debauchery which is probably less shocking now than it once was, but still efficiently does the job.

Imperial Bedrooms is little more than a novella and the criticism that it seems to have been rattled off quickly are understandable but I think this misses the mark; the prose is in fact deftly managed, experimental but not numbing and clearly has been carefully designed. It may seem like easy stream of consciousness stuff, but BEE’s talent is that he makes it look easy, when it is not at all.

In that way this book is perhaps closest to ‘The Informers’ in its atmosphere of materialist ennui and aimlessness, than any of its other predecessors.

This is a great book to lose yourself in for a few hours, to just let wash over you, and then allow its subtle messages to creep up on you. Although it is based on the monied ‘elite’ of a corporate America, BEE still has a strong message for our wider society in his analysis of that increasingly inept, corrupt, unimaginative but paradoxically continually enriched elite.

Finally, BEE is often described as the archetypal ‘post-modernist’ writer with his arch-irony and cynicism, but again this is a moniker that misses the mark to my mind. There is something stridently modernist in his work as he exposes the fundamental flaws in our consumerist, individual-obsessed western culture. He perhaps doesn’t meticulously pick it apart, or suggest any mechanisms for its amelioration as some modernist analysts do [of whom there are precious few of today anyway] but. as a novelist, he does do what a good novelist should do: he makes you think and then devise your own conclusions on what has been presented to you.

The Island [2005]: A Unexpected Political Critique

2010-09-01T19:43:00.003Z

Michael Bay's 2005 film The Island has an interesting popular culture take on the shape of our society today and what the new future holds. Essentially a magpie combination of Huxley's Brave New World and Logan's Run and, although in terms of direction and plotline it rarely strays from its central template of a 'boy and girl against the world' action adventure, it does nonetheless beneath the veneer hold a salient for the present day which is worth discussing in detail.

Set in 2019, the central character [Ewan Macgregor] lives in what is apparently a perfect, gentle if sterile environment where his diet is carefully controlled and social interaction is controlled by a benign 'security' force. Employment is provided by simple production lines and individual, personal focus is maintained on the weekly lottery where a fortunate individual is chosen to go to 'The Island,' an idyllic place which the inhabitants of the environment are told is the last place on earth not contaminated by some unspecified catastrophe in the outside world.

The central protagonist [Macgregor] however discovers that there is an outside world and decides to escape, spurred on by the fact that the girl he has befriended, has just won that week's lottery.

Of course all is not as it seems in this ordered society; the habitat is a corporate construction deep in a former US military ICBM silo and ran by the Merrick Corporation as a centre for growing clones of wealthy patrons, who take out an insurance policy to have a clone 'grown' and maintained for spare body parts in case of accident. The lottery winning is in fact, the calling up of that particular clone to be harvested for an injured and/or dying 'sponsor.'

The Merrick Corporation's secret is however, that according to Eugenics Laws, such clones had to kept in a vegetative state and not allowed to be conscious- that is- actively human. Despite this, the corporation had found that the organs from vegetative clones failed after a few days of harvesting; but the organs of a viable, conscious clone were healthy and remained operative. As such they had decided to secretly maintain a colony of fully grown clones as exact copies of their sponsors, albeit developmentally arrested at 15 years old and brainwashed from birth with false memories and social mores and, critically, not allowed to sexually mature.

Needless to say, the story focuses on the escape of the two clones and the pursuit of the Merrick Corporation of them out in the real world, but it is the details of the whole corporate process that is fascinating. The colony is for example almost all white; one of the few black clones is that of a famous football player, which the escapees eventually see on a giant billboard as they flee through LA. The corporation is serving a definite elite- it costs many millions to sponsor an individual clone- and this neatly shows the core aim of an elite to self-perpetuate not just its structure, but it's individuals as well, who are effectively being promised the potential to 'live for ever'. They can truly be the New Gods- so long of course, they have enough money to buy the privilege.

This posits the reality of how a corporation, supposedly free of political control and regulations [although the president has a clone in the colony too] will do whatever it wants to achieve a profit and of course under the guise of advancing society, such as finding a cure for leukaemia [but as with all neo-liberal myths, this is in reality only for the benefit of the elite alone of course]. The clones are consistently referred to as 'product;' they are seen as flesh and blood automatons- walking organ banks awaiting transplant- nothing more.

The film sketches out ideas of spirituality- the director of the corporation is adamant that the clones are soulless- although it becomes apparent with the escape of the two protagonists, that sentience and 'human' traits such as curiosity and a sense of justice and personal freedom are inherent in them as organisms. Whether this is a genetic trait passed on through the DNA of the original host-sponsor, or a matter of spiritual 'birthing' is of course unresolved- as would be expected, as whole libraries are full of books discussing the nature of that issue, the selfish gene, or the God Spark?- but the reaction of the corporation director upon discover of the characteristic in what is identified as a particular model of clone, is immediately branded as a defect and in the time honoured corporate technique of re-adjustment at times of product failure, the director announces a recall, meaning of course, the destruction of all completed and in production clone models deemed to have the human defects.
Now of course one has to be careful not to over-analysis and attach too many intellectual symbols onto a film like this; it's director is known more for his action movies than the cerebral and it's debateable how many of the anti-corporate symbols and comments on the nature of human existence appear by accident rather than design, but it nonetheless is a striking contemporary comment on our current society and it's near future.

This is exemplified by the controversy at the time the film was released over the level of product placement in it. The makers were adamant it was necessary to supplement the huge budget required for the making of the movie- the chase scenes in particular are genuinely spectacular- and it has to be said that the logos of some of its sponsors, such as MSN at time literally jump out and hold centre screen as if in some quick flash advertisement. But that makes the film all the more complete as a microcosmic example [and at times unwitting] commentator on our times. The juxtaposition of a story line exploring the evil, over-reaching powers of capitalism, ignoring even what little regulation has been applied to it, is openly- almost lovingly- funded and actively promoted by some of the largest global corporations of today.

Then within the film's structure itself, there is the dichotomy of the illusion of freedom and 'individuality' within the [discreetly] policed colony- a stasis that neo-liberal capitalism sees as it's nirvana- being shattered by the discovery by some of its inhabitants of a true individuality that can extend out of the holographic projected confines of the colony's boundaries. In fact the film ends with the holographic projectors turned off, and its freed inhabitants wandering out into the desert, blinkering at their new surroundings. This has overtones of slave emancipation, but it does beg the question...what now? The released clones need to find the wider society, assimilate themselves into it and what then? Do they revert to the capitalist 'slave model' all the rest of us are in? Does this mean there is no escape? In this way, the neo-liberal, corporate capitalist fog of supposed non-ideology and anarchic self-determination, the sense that there is no centre, no identifiable force, that we are all agents swept along in one chaotic but cogent system largely of our own making and with a lack of any definable alternative- we truly are at the end of our history- seems all the more reinforced. There can be no Marxist analysis of this movie's premise of a released proletariat, establishing a communist paradise as a reaction to the horrors they realise they were subject to in the colony. The reality is that a cell of humanity has been released from one control system, into a similar, wider outside world one. As such this film is a genuine post-modern comment on the western corporate world. The clones will in all likelihood assimilate into that wider society quietly and either disappear, or use their new found awareness and sense of purpose to find their original human sponsors, whereupon either a battle of the egos will ensure where one or the other will kill each other, or the clone becomes a willing surrogate for its original master, literally bowing down to what it perceives as its genetic superior, essentially seeing him or her as its parent.

Whatever the eventual scenario, there would appear to be one consequence in the projected aftermath of this film's particular storyline- no matter what, we can expect business as usual.

New Town Anthology

2010-08-28T17:23:00.000Z

One of my poems is in 'Tales from a New Town' recently published by Beacon Press.

Based around experiences and perceptions of Skelmersdale, one of the UK's post-war New Towns, my contribution is an epic ode to The Concourse, the town centre's covered-mall shopping centre. The poem, called Concourse, can be read on a separate page of this blog.

Update from Planet Skem

2010-08-27T16:59:00.000Z

The strange and wonderful world of dofollow has been entered...my little vessel of self-discovery has cast off from the a safe shore of cardboard trees, plastic rocks and artificial pebbles into the unknown...oh tempestuous opinions of worldwide rancour, be gentle with thine heart!...or something like that :)))

A new page has been added as well, the chalkboard,which will be an ever moving feast of new work, a veritable testbed indeed of draft scribblings. Enjoy.

Dogville: A Political Analysis of Failed Republicanism

2010-08-19T18:59:00.004Z

Orientation
I don't know how I missed the film Dogville when it was first released in 2003. Whatever, through the wonders of Sky Plus and Film 4, I caught up with it a couple of weeks ago.

Directed by Lars von Trier and with an impressive array of actors with Nicole Kidman in the lead role, supported up by the likes of Lauren Bacall, James Caan, Ben Gazzara and Paul Bettany amongst many others, it is a philosophical parable that is immediately striking- if not at first un-nerving- in its use of a minimalist, one stage set. Of course, what at first appears a bold, innovative art-experiment had more prosaic origins; the Swedish director won't fly, but wanted to make a film about and set in America and so came up with the ingenious idea of shooting it on a soundstage with minimal scenery. Buildings are shown as chalk lines on the floor and all locations, including the gooseberry bushes, are labelled to help orientate the viewer at any given point in the narrative.

What at first appears a surreal piece of theatre is in fact a clever calling card of intention and message; the small, isolated mountain town that 'clings to the edge of a cliff' has its few buildings charted out in plan form only. The characters literally move across an annotated largely one dimensional map, with wall-less buildings only occasionally alleviated by sparse examples of internal furniture, a bell tower over the mission hall, and a redundant mine entrance on the edge of the village. There are symbolically no solid doors although their opening and closing is mimed by the actors. All is apparently laid bare…although of course as in all communities, it slowly emerges that there are plenty of secrets, anxieties and prejudices woven through the fabric of the township. And slowly is the operative word here; although one can sense the director's aim is to gradually immerse the viewer into this enclosed world, it doesn't entirely work, particularly as the viewer has to contend with [for some time in my case] the play-like setting being so at odds with accepted cinematic models. This is not an entirely bad thing…the innovation at work here is to be applauded, but the lack of urgency for the first 120 minutes at least of the film [it clocks in at 2 minutes shy of a whopping, bottom aching 3 hours], filled largely with at times thought provoking but often needlessly wordy observations of individual characters delivered to us by a nonetheless impeccable narration by John Hurt, does become at times tedious.

This unfortunately runs the risk of only the very artistically committed staying the length- you can picture the most earnest movie buffs sat in deep thought on the edge of their seats in small metropolitan art house movie theatres- and this sadly I fear may well of been the case upon its limited release, as I myself in all modesty am not one with a particularly short attention span, still found myself taking use of the advantage of watching a recording of the film, so could do so in a number of bite sized chunks.

The fact that a larger audience will probably have been lost through the over lengthy [some less kind would say the over-indulgence] of Von Trier's direction is however a great shame, as the atmosphere generated, the issues explored and the extraordinary, explosively shocking ending, deserve to be seen, absorbed and discussed.

Analysis
It is the 1930s depression in small town America, and Grace Mulligan [Kidman] is a woman hiding from mobsters who arrives on foot in Dogville, desperate for a bolt-hole. She is allowed refuge there, in exchange for physical labour; a town meeting decides that she must win and maintain the acceptance of every single inhabitant of the township, and because of this, any attempt to do things her way, or any mistakes she makes, puts her at risk of being handed over to the criminals. The gangsters make an appearance early in the film, handing over a card to Tom Edison Jnr [Paul Bettany] asking him to contact them if he or anyone else in Dogville sees the girl. Tom is an aspiring writer and 'communitarian,' who tries to get his fellow citizens together for regular meetings to improve their intellect and 'moral awareness,' which he describes as a programme of moral rearmament. The story is seen very much from Tom's point of view, and it is clearly his prime aim is to succeed his aging father, a doctor, as the moral leader of the small town.

At a pedestrian pace, the film enfolds as it looks into the darkness inherent in people's souls, particularly those of a small community, which on the surface appears ordered, efficiently structured, democratic and consensually fair and moderate but, is in reality- as it is in every corner of the world- far from this ideal. It is the issues inherent in this hypocritical mask of normality and conformity that Von Trier deftly picks apart.
And the issues are huge, fascinating and highly political. Essentially, they cover the three basic tenets of Enlightenment republicanism: Equality, Fraternity and Liberty, which are of course principles enshrined in the French Revolution, but also are heavily woven into the US constitution from the immediately preceding, closely related republican revolution across the Atlantic.

Tom and Grace

All major decisions in the township are made through regular meetings in the Mission Hall, attended by all the adult population of Dogville. In this canton-like democracy, it is implied that the most important of the decisions that affect the structure/integrity of the town, must be agreed upon by everyone present. It is through such a meeting that Grace is, after at first much suspicion and doubt, allowed to stay in Dogville, with of course the labour conditions attached, for which she is deemed to receive a minimal wage.

What at first appears an enlightened, inclusive act- the towns people initially state that it is not their place to make demands on a newcomer; it is more so their duty to provide shelter to someone in need- is soon corrupted by all of the residents in some way or another. Although at first appreciated for her efficiency and friendliness, excuses are found to reduce her pay. The women become dependent on Grace for carrying out all the chores they most dislike; she is at first raped by one man, then the other men begin to take sexual advantage of her to the point of turning her into a 'whore-for-free.' In a bizarre scene, a pre-pubescent boy who she teaches, demands that he punish him by giving him a good spanking. She refuses, but he says if she doesn't, he'll tell his mother she did it anyway. She acquiesces, only to find herself reported by him to his mother anyway, a mother that also finds out she has had sex with her husband, but doesn't know it was through his action as a rapist [she eventually does find out but it does not change her attitude toward Grace].

In short she becomes enslaved. This is however further compounded and complicated by Grace's belief- which probably drove her to escape the world of Gangsters from which she was on the run in the first place- that people are inherently good and will not naturally do bad things unless they have been conditioned/brutalised into it by an outside agency; that understanding and forgiveness should be offered first and foremost to people who do bad things to you and others, because they either at best don't know any better, and at worst have discovered it is the only way to survive life.

This highly 'liberalised' [some would of course say naïve] world view of Grace's, is in itself an important political aspect of the film's societal comment; she embodies the individualist stance of 'enlightened' libertarianism, that people should be allowed to do as they wish, even if those actions affect you, directly, in a negative way, because individual rights should stand at the core of our society and any wrong doing should be ameliorated through sanction and/or understanding, rather than community penalty. This is an interesting psycho-moral paradox in it owns right; such a belief is quasi-religious in nature, yet in the modern context is grounded in individualist, free market capitalist ideology. This is a belief that however, ironically entraps her.

In this way she puts up with her enslavement until she decides enough is enough and she decides- tellingly in her mind as much for the benefit of the town as for herself- to secretly leave, bribing a bootlegging truck driver to take her to the next town in the back of his truck hidden beneath some produce, only to find herself eventually returned by him to Dogville after having had to have sex with him, to ensure her passage and as his rightful 'bonus' in the economic transaction. The town's people had decided she was not to leave; they had become dependent on her thraldom; there was to be no way out for her. The new socio-economic status quo demanded that she be an inescapable part of the town's self-regulated, libertarian capitalist structure.

In an American context, the similarities with that nation's slavery experience is clear and the juxta-positioning of enslavement and the emancipatory process- which amounts to a direct call of action for Equality not just economically but 'humanistically'- is being directly addressed in this scenario.

Also the process [and subsequent short-comings] of democracy is faced head-on; the township runs on the principle of consensus which, on paper, looks like a wonderful mechanism to enjoy and apply for the equitable running of a community. But does it work in a fair way? The validity and 'fairness' of this concept of consensus as opposed to the vitality of constructive ''dissent' is one that is receiving much philosophical attention at the moment- notably from Jacques Rancière amongst others- and it's failings are laid bare in this film. Putting aside the peer pressure complexities inherent in the democratic process of achieving a viable 'consensus,' it is clear that fair and just decisions are not always reached by this political process. In this case, it is a process that produces a result that is anti-freedom and equality; Grace's liberty is not just at first restricted, but eventually eroded at an ever quickening pace until she is nothing more than an economic and sexual chattel [and in the case of Tom Edison Jnr, her 'protector' and would-be lover, an emotional filter and intellectual self-determinator].

In this way, the ethics of Fraternity, based in the practise of consensual democracy, can seem to a flawed façade to the truer, baser nature of the participating citizens. The idea of community takes on a distinctive American tone here, directly related to the philosophies of John Locke, whose basic premise was that communities were only viable if property owning men came together to protect their individual interests as a self-serving group. As such the purpose of society was solely to enhance [and of course protect] the enjoyment of property; the only legitimate political power was one that served this end. This is core to the frontier spirit of the 'American Ideal,' and tellingly Dogville is clearly a former frontier town, with its now spent mine and sense of being by-passed, quite possibly for good.

Liberty- and by default individual freedom- is as such ironically compromised in this republican democracy of cantonic consensus. What on the surface appears to be the workings of a successful regime of anarcho-communism, is nothing less than the machinations of a society which celebrates the actions and rights of the individual, but only of course, if that individual citizen is in a place of power. In Dogville's situation, this is bestowed on those inhabitants who were born and raised there; everyone else is an outsider and therefore powerless. The similar process can be seen in contemporary western societies where immigration is concerned. Migrant workers are welcomed and tolerated if they keep their head downs and do the work the indigenous population don't want to do; but step out of those strictures….

Working through this, the film is a neat critique of the lopsided view of America's take on liberty. The European tradition is much more aware of the fact that individual liberty is only one facet of the political spectrum that's makes a 'good society.' The pursuit of personal liberty cannot be an absolute one, because at some time or another, the prosecution of one person's liberty [aka as 'rights'] relies on a constraint on the liberty of some other individual[s]. Personal liberty comes with a social responsibility for the benefit of all; as Richard Tawney, the leading inter-war socialist neatly put it, 'every man should have his liberty and no more, to do unto others as he would that they should do unto him.'

In this way, the citizenry of Dogville's application of liberty, as applied through their democratic Mission Hall institution, is not just very one sided, but a sham.

Summary Justice
The climax of the film is a brave, shocking, thrilling and- for me-an immensely satisfying conclusion. It unfolds in the last twenty minutes and if you make it that far into the film [in much the same way you may have made it to the end of this review/analysis :)], it is well worth the wait.

It turns out that Grace is the daughter of a leading local mobster in the city [James Caan]. Tom Edison Jnr, finally realising that Grace's presence in the town had the potential to disrupt and perhaps taint his own life plans of being a writer and- of course perhaps more importantly, his position as 'moral' leader of Dogville- decides to contact the mobster and tell him where she is hiding. He dutifully turns up to try and persuade his daughter to return with him [she is clearly being groomed to be his successor]. At first Grace refuses; she initially refuses to see no wrong with what the towns people have done to her, their actions were of course, 'beyond their control.'

Her father tells her she has an arrogant, hypocritical take on human society, precisely because of her liberal 'façade,' and that true justice is handed out by the likes of him; that rapists, murderers and thieves are sanctioned by him cleanly and effectively without resort to rancour or the smokescreen of consensus.

She at that point appears to experience an epiphany; she begins to realise just what she has been through and how debilitating the lifestyle and morality of the towns people has become, for them, as citizens and human beings. They have not just degraded her but, more importantly, they have degraded themselves.

As she gets out of her father's limousine, she realises what has to be done. She tells the gangsters to kill everyone, including the children, and burn the place to the ground. She takes a handgun, and without fuss, executes John Edison Jnr herself.

The issues dealt with here are many and complex, and warrant many hours of discussion. Is the summary judgement handed out by the gangster and his daughter barbaric, or is it another aspect of the American Way, the application of natural law by the powerful? This is after all the way American foreign policy has shaped up so far in the twenty-first century in Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps soon in Iran. This absolutism of justice, seen through the prism of individual liberty assessed and applied through consensus democracy, perhaps really does come back to bite the citizens of Dogville on the bottom , and arguably rightly so.

The actions of Grace and her father are therefore clearly of a revolutionary nature; they are, through the exercise of dissenting judgement operating through an interest beyond their insular, personal needs; they do this by, quite literally, entirely erasing Dogville from its already tenuous place on the world map.

Could such a film have been made by an American? I think not. It is a brave and challenging- if shocking- finale and one that should be soundly applauded for its lack of neoliberal-pleasing restraint. In fact the film was criticised at the Cannes festival for its 'lack of humanism' and it certainly ruffled some libertarian feathers- particularly those across the Atlantic who saw it as anti-American- although it went on to win a number of awards, was voted the eighth best film of the noughties by The Guardian, and was in slant magazines top 100 films of the decade.

The film- despite its length which may well be its greatest weakness- is a wonderfully well written, remarkable critique of the republican values of equality, freedom and community, and a timeless comment on the fragile state of the American concept of liberty, for it is as truly relevant now- if not more so- to the current socio-political shape of the US, as it was in the depression times portrayed in Dogville.

Modern Science Is Now A Pseudo Religion

2010-08-05T17:05:00.000Z

It has become increasingly the case over the past 30-40 years that many branches of science have come to demand, as a bare necessity, complex [and thereby expensive] machines and systems to further their research. Notable examples are CERN's accelerator, JET and Hubble. In fact these immense projects are so big they require multi-government finance and collaboration to support them. Gone are the days of a individualist genius like Einstein, working in an academic lab to further our collective knowledge.

As such, science has become inextricably linked to Big Business. It is fully incorporated into the free market, fundamentalist capitalist complex. It is no longer a disciple looking to further human knowledge; it has shareholders [and individual reputations/media profiles/book sales]to think about.

Money matters to science now. Not debate, open-mindedness and the pursuit of truth. As such, any scientists and researchers that wish to challenge existing scientific beliefs that are in effect, written in tablets of stone by the scientific establishment- such as the Big Bang and Evolution, two 'scientific' theories that are actually barking mad when looked at rationally- get short shift from said establishment. The prevailing staus quo must not be questioned; funding cannot be affected by any signs of challenges to existing theories that are reliant on megabucks for their perpetuation as establishment givens, and which have been sold to the public as immutable truths.

Huge [egoistic] personal and corporate reputations [aka share value] rely on it. And so instead of debating openly and with a mature approach- one in line in fact, with their own vaunted scientific method- to ascertain whether there is any merit in these alternative theories and views, the scientific establishment take a leaf out of the neoliberal book to which they have become so politically aligned, and actively obstruct the publication and promotion of unacceptable counter-ideas, pillory and debunk said alternative ideas in their own journals that dominate the market [much as Murdoch does in popular media], whilst denying the targets of their discrimination a right to reply.

This is of course identical to the approach of the religious authorities before the Reformation and the Enlightenment. The contemporary scientific establishment is no different from them; they have become just as much a part of the wider economic and socio-political establishment as the Church did in medieval times- the church of course they so despise [yet secretly admire and copycat the techniques of] and waste no opportunity to attack as the basis of un-scientific mumbo-jumbo; again, with true neoliberal hypocrisy.

The techniques are also identical to those used by neoliberalism over the past thirty years; establish a position of power- use propaganda and falsified information, to create self-sustaining myths in society that support said power bases position as the only game in town: There Is No Alternative- actively suppress by whatever means possible any sign of dissent to this model and above all, protect the income/funding stream.

This ideology is ingrained in scientists from school/university onwards. It is an ingrained position; the scientific establishment is right; it always is; who are you to question it? To do so means you must be an idiot. Go away and realign yourself with the sheep.

Myth of course, pure myth. the science of the Enlightenment is as blinkered as any it has kidded itself it would replace. The Great irony. But a dangerous one for the advancement of human knowledge. How so much less advanced, how much original thought and humanity improving discoveries have been lost, by a forced conformity to the Old Theories held in such awe by the scientific establishment and their unthinking lackies, with such religious fervour?

There are signs things are changing; the 21st century is shaping up to move on and the ridiculous, comfort blanket theories of Old are being increasingly dismantled...but it's still going to be a struggle. Take your blinkers off, and join it.

When the Sun came Down and Danced in Our street

2010-07-28T20:28:00.000Z

A chapbook of a dozen new poems by yours truly has now been released by Parachute Poetry.

A free pdf download of the booklet is available here:

When the Sun Came Down to Dance in Our street by Mark Reed

Whitehaven and the Consumable Environment

2010-07-28T14:23:00.002Z

It's a bitter-sweet experience walking around a lot of British towns these days, as we enter the second decade of the 21st century.

The fall-out of thirty years of de-industrialisation, and ten to fifteen years of urban regeneration projects, is now clear. Most of them have come to fruition in the past five years or so, kick-started in many cases by the marketing double whammy gem of a new century and millennium with all the associated investment fever hung onto those wonderful advertising bye-lines.

What that urban regeneration process has meant in most cases, is an interlinked double levelled strategy on one hand has seen the transformation of town centres into a tourist 'destination;' based on whatever socio-economic assets a locality once had- whether it be a harbour, or a particular mining or engineering industry- which is then sanitised, interpreted and transformed into a shiny new environment to be consumed by locals but more specifically, by visitors, who are supposed to bring in the much needed external capital that the former industries used to. Industries that of course are now long dead are not so much buried, but carefully 'preserved' in their more interesting, sanitised aspects and museum-ified with an almost militant aesthetic.

Tourism Pounds in the shape of hotel, restaurant and attraction ticket prices alone cannot of course substitute wholly for the income of say, a once thriving coal mining industry exporting its wares through a large busy harbour, so it has to be supplemented by an injection of service industry infrastructural support. Of course the new tourism and heritage facilities in themselves provide jobs for some people, but other sources are needed and so the science and business parks spring up on the fringes of the town. They are often home to global corporations [even if they may parade 'local' names], and so most of the profits they generate are syphoned off abroad, but they offer enough local sustenance in the shape of business taxes and wages [just] adequate enough to enable two-income families to buy local property and shop in Tesco's. Despite these initiatives, n most urban areas of Britain's de-industrialised landscape they are still not enough to provide jobs in adequate numbers across the board, and so medium-to-largest single industry employers are maintained. It may be a biscuit manufacturer; it may be a submarine or oil rig construction plant; it may be an engineering plant making springs; it may be a nuclear power station. Whatever it is, the urban area is more often than not as heavily dependent on it for employment and local income as the local heavy industries of old, that fell to the neoliberal axe of organised labour organisation destruction and globalised market creation of the 1980s. The only difference being, the former old industries were nearly all locally developed and owned. The new industries of course, are not.

As such our towns- particularly those outside of the South East and the ones reliant on heavier industries of the past, and which are now clinging on to the margins of the world economy- have become transformed by neoliberal free-market capitalism, into consumable items in their own right. They are products to be visited and consumed; the new street furniture, the new harbour architecture, the new statues, the refurbished pit wheels and foundry wagons set in flower beds and explained by neat interpretation boards, that strive not to over complicate things- three paragraph sound bites are deemed enough- are there to serve a basic, economic function. The whole area is placed within the wider market; quite literally The Market Place, the literal geographic place where once people went to as a neutral ground to carry out economic activity, has itself merely become another element to be consumed within the wider societal market.

Whitehaven in West Cumbria is a prime example of this process. A medium sized town clinging to the North West coast of England and sandwiched between the Irish Sea and the Lake District, it has a rich industrial heritage, as well as a history that goes back to Neolithic times through into the Roman period, and was a key port from Norman times to well into the 2oth century.

With a large harbour and a small but rich coal field beneath it, the town and its surrounding area enjoyed a fair bit of prosperity throughout much of the last millennium, its pre-industrial success evident in its many fine Georgian buildings and extensive harbouring facilities. What happened in the latter quarter of the 20th century however need not be explained in any further detail here.

Over the past ten years, the town centre- focused primarily on the harbour area- has undergone that most miraculous of late 20th/early 21st century phenomenon- an 'urban renaissance.' The harbour now has a large, well-stocked marina [who owns all these yachts you see up and down the country in such places, and why do our coastlines outside of the harbours appear so empty of them nearly all of the time?] and plenty of interpretation signage, renovated industrial artifacts, nice street furniture, white steel tubing canopies, new road and pavement surfaces and museum to enjoy.

Now I am not being a killjoy here; the environment is very pleasant and clearly well used and enjoyed, but one cannot help but have a nagging sense of unease at the sanitised presentation- the expensive dressing up- of a once proud and working, albeit dirty and course, self-developed economic powerhouse for the local area. In what has now effectively become an open air museum and harbour play-park, to be visited for an afternoon by wanderers through the lakes or local walking their dogs [nothing wrong with that; would do it myself if I lived there, but it doesn't bring in any readies for the town council], there once was a thriving industrial base that provided for nearly all of the local economic needs. It may have been [arguably] a more polluting local industrial process, but wasn't it still ultimately so much more sustainable in its economic containment than today's structure? A world now built on the tenuous but commercial-sound bite attractive 'idea' of global connectivity. I say of course idea, because the reality is not one of two way connectivity, but of one way drainage for places like Whitehaven…and that is as in outward.

And so Whitehaven maintains its lovely if sanitised harbour area for day-visitors and yachting enthusiastic who probably take their boats out- purchased in times when they had nothing else left to buy- two or three times at most a year- whilst the vast bulk of the population relies on employment at Sellafield, the world's no. 1 nuclear waste recycling plant of choice just down the coast, and which itself lurches from closure threat to closure threat every few years.

What happens to Whitehaven if or more likely when it does close? Will there be enough jobs on the small West Lakes Science Park to soak up the 80% or so of the working population that are reliant for employment directly [or indirectly in associated businesses] at Sellafield? You of course know the answer to that…and for a government who has ran out of money for the foreseeable future, and has now played all of its neoliberal leisure-consumer led urban regeneration cards not just in Whitehaven, but 99% of all the rest of similar places in the country, what then? What happens to Whitehaven? I hope for the best, but can't dispel this cloud of pessimism, and it hurts.

Skemster: The Launch

2010-07-26T18:42:00.000Z

Welcome to the overhauled, shiny and new Mark Reed blogspot. It moves on, in a second generational way, from the proto-blog that was markreedwritings.blogspot.com for the past year or so.

As such Skemster is my new blog tag. I intend the output to be eclectic but will in particular be focused upon literature, the visual arts, science/religion and politics. it will include trial runs of my own work, both written and graphic, and I hope to incorporate a 'local' flavour wherever possible.

So without further ado.....Viva La Skemster!

2010-07-25T20:02:00.000Z

This is the new blog page for Mark Reed, which is also directly linked to his website which can be accessed here:

http://markreed-online.com/Home_Page.php

The original Mark Reed blogsopt still exists, although all new entries and information updates will henceforth appear here.

Confusion, Deception and Denial in the UK: Will a sense of reality ever return?

2010-07-24T13:43:00.001Z

These are confusing times, as we stumble around in the aftermath of the financial crisis of a couple of years ago. Many people appear to be dazed from the shellshock to their lives amidst the recession; in one way, they have an inkling that something awful happened, because of something terribly wrong with the system they have spent years making a living/life in. Maybe it is because of that, despite all the obvious inequalities and structural weakness inherent in unregulated capitalist economies, they still harbour a deep seated desire to forget this, forget the trauma, and have things back to the cosy world they enjoyed before, as quickly as possible. We live, in short, in a nation of the Numbed.

Free market fundamentalist capitalism failed spectacularly; it clearly wrote the script to its own demise based on recurrent threads of greed, incompetence, elitist arrogance, selfish over-indulgence in over-complicated spheres of economic activity, that not even its own architects fully understood and, of course, an utterly misguided conceit that its players were being successful in the good times because of their skill, NOT because of the reality of the situation- they were just being incredibly lucky- and wholeheartedly acted it out to the gallery's until the Autumn of 2008.

The crash was spectacular but two years later, clearly not as debilitating as the vast majority of the world's ordinary citizen's expected. Neoliberalism, the ideology driving the over-fuelled engines of unregulated global capitalism, has in its own time honoured way with urban mythology and socio-economic mind engineering, recently shown signs of an expected resilience.

It is already re-inventing itself. At first, the western neoliberal capitalist machine was shuddering and reeling; the fault clearly lay with them, there were no cantankerous labour movements to blame this time, or socialist governments with bothersome high tax regimes to finger as spanners in the works of unfettered capitalism at this historic juncture. Oh no, just the structure, workings and players in the most extensive and unregulated system of capitalist exchange the globe has ever seen, were obviously to blame; for some time, this was so blatantly clear, not even the most strident of capitalists even tried to provide excuses for their actions and the resultant, chaotic fallout from the economic collapse. There even appeared to be some proto-deathbed conversions to Reality Perception, as Alan Greenspan, one of neoliberalism's foremost and most powerful ideologues and practitioners, publically recognised the flaws in his beliefs.

It is now clearly the financial shock of 2007-08 was only the first act in an ultimately more tumultuous series of global economic disasters that are going to unfold during this decade. This realisation is enforced by how quickly neoliberal ideology and its practical application in the way of unfettered global capitalism, is bouncing back. The propagandised message is now consolidating: it's back to business as usual, the crash was just a blip, we will get back to the old days again, just you watch…we will all once again have unlimited personal credit, constantly reducing tax burdens, [the illusion of] increasing salaries way beyond a miniscule inflation rate, accelerating property prices… the neoliberal dreams [based on ideological myth] are being peddled again. There are even examples of right-wing think tanks beginning to excuse the crash/credit crunch/recession/financial crisis call it what you will [in true neoliberal publicity technique, giving phenomenon a multitude of names neuters its overall societal effect], as a case of the world at the time of 2007-08, being not unregulated enough. A recent paper produced by the Adam Smith Institute, claimed with barefaced, on the face of it comical aplomb but all the more frightening because it was clearly serious, that tax havens were actually vital mechanisms to help the poor, and as such should not just be maintained but celebrated.

These claims are [currently] being laughed at by even he most hardened of neoliberal capitalists, but the fact that they are beginning to be said, shows the resilience of neoliberal ideology, how embedded it is within our political, economic and cultural psyche, what a hold it elitist practitioners still have over our society, and how it's socio-political mechanisms have a truly remarkable, shame-free self-promotional drive that flies in the face of all intellectual reason and general public perceptions. And it is relentless in its bare-faced self-promotion of concepts that are at the first rightly derided as rubbish, and then gradually listened to and remarkably, eventually, accepted as perceived wisdom.
More, even deeper financial disasters lie ahead. Not even getting a few hours away from an almost total western collapse of its banking system has stopped free market, fundamentalist capitalism in its tracks, take stock, and address it's most fundamental of flaws. Even worse must happen [and it will] before it is broken. But it's going to be a long haul. The new Conservative government in the UK for example, shows no real understanding of those fundamental flaws in neoliberalism as it pushes the crippled economy into a position where recovery can only be revived by the private sector. A private sector without any money and any wish to borrow/lend any money, a private sector reliant on internal markets that are being wound up [the public sector] and external markets [the EU] which is falling back into recession, and a private sector which is now almost entirely globalised when it comes to financial structure, and as such keeps the bulk of its assets off-shore in low or non-existent tax environments.

The future for the UK doesn't look bright, and it certainly doesn't look a shiny successful Tory blue.

Modern Science Is Rubbish

2010-07-13T18:30:00.005Z

Modern science is entirely a capitalistic venture now. It has an establishment that is wedded to neoliberal ideology at the expense of varied democratic discussion, adaptability and social conscious.

Ironically, the ultimate casualty of this process is its own much vaunted Scientific Method.

Modern science is full of contradictions. Gravity- which modern science does not at all understand- it cannot, otherwise we would be whizzing round in anti-gravity machines [or at least the blueprints would exist by now]- for example, is to all intents and purpose observable as an instantaneous phenomenon. Yet modern science states categorically that the speed of light cannot be exceeded. You cannot, by modern science's own strictures, have the possibility of both states occurring at the same time.
At the core of modern science- a central tenant since the Enlightenment- is that all things must be quantifiable and a measurable force attributed to the actions of matter. Gravity of course escapes the [artificial] rigours of this self-imposed constraint to the pursuit of knowledge. Gravity exerts a force, without expending any energy whatsoever. It is a constant, perpetual force, if it were not so, the planets would fly from the orbit of the sun as soon as that energy was burnt up or even, if there was a disruption to that energy source. This obviously does not happen, even when a star dies. There are clearly fundamental forces at large in the Universe that modern science cannot begin to understand, yet it believes that the Big Bang is the only viable solution to explaining the beginnings of the universe. Hmmm.

One thing is clear. Modern, establishment science has shown it is so limited in scope [and dare one say intellect] that it has allowed itself to be straight-jacketed by systems and dogma; it can only provide models for the universe around us through equations, abstract constructions and computers. To explain phenomena it cannot explain, it invents unproven, quasi-scientific concepts such as Dark Matter and Neutrinos which are in fact, when rationally considered, as super-natural in essence as the concept of a Higher Power.

The actual understanding of even the most fundamental phenomenon such as gravity is beyond modern science. It just cannot get its head around it within the cerebral constraints it imposes upon itself. As such modern science, its adherent scientists and the Scientific Method are not in a position to- nor have the authority to- state categorically that spiritual and metaphysical forces are not an integral part of the universe. The 'Age of Reason' is in fact the most laughable of misnomers; at best it may of put our understanding of the natural world around us back hundreds of years. At worst, it may very well destroy us.

Modern Science has become a Pseudo-Religion Trapped in Neoliberal Capitalism

2010-07-12T19:15:00.002Z

Humanism and Political Denial

2010-07-08T19:03:00.003Z

Humanism seems to be continually in denial as to its role in world politics in the past two hundred odd years, instead hiding behind a cosy veneer of scientific reason, controlled, experimental deduction and a continual propaganda stream that states all believers[and even investigators] in any metaphysical possibilities in the make-up of the universe, are simple idiots.

It's interesting, for all the statements that religious groups in the past would have carried out mass destruction on the scale of the 20^th century if only they had had the weapons technology of that century and now at hand, there's been no example in contemporary times of religious powers being inclined to do just that, when arguably there's been plenty of opportunity; Hitler could have made his crusade a religious one; the Germans were a broken but nonetheless devout Christian people in the aftermath of the Great War, but he of course chose not to, more enamoured as he was by social Darwinism and the principles of the Enlightenment.
Now then, it can be said that the Enlightenment had a large part to play in this, by eroding the political powers of religion, notably the Christian Church in the West [although this was a process already underway before the advent of the Age of Reason]. Fair enough. But the proponents of the virtues of the Enlightenment- one of reason, the over-riding power of the human intellect and the supremacy of the scientific method as an assessment of current and future cultural framework- cannot escape responsibility for what followed. Where religious political power fell back, 'humanist' politics based in modern philosophy and atheistic political ideology [of both the right and left] inexorably filled the vacuum. It resulted in the first, worldwide war of ideology between 1939 and 1945; the following Cold War was based in its principles and it reached it's logical, horrific logical conclusion with the Khmer Rouge's atheistic/nihilistic Year Zero.
Humanism and atheism cannot escape the legacy of its ethos, once it had the opportunity to exercise real power, such as it did in Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. These two examples alone, should be enough to make us stop and take stock of our cultural over-reliance in the West, on the supposed advantages of the Enlightenment. For too long the Age of Reason has been taken as a given, as a vital intellectual core to the mechanics of our economy and society. Its early proponents such as Voltaire may have shouted 'God Is Dead! but perhaps we swallowed the by-line too easily, without bothering to understand the true nature ethos that has so pervasively replaced Him.

And so the to the 21^st century where the over-riding claim of the humanist/atheist/Social Darwinist Reasonists rings out: 'There is No Alternative!' Now where have we heard that before….

Darwin, Racism and Fascistic Humanism

2010-07-07T11:53:00.002Z

Much is made about the evils of religion and the purity of thought and purpose inherent in humanism and atheism, springing of course from the glories of the 'Enlightenment,' and there is no greater revered priest to this New Theology than good old Darwin.

As with all extremist belief's, this is intellectually ill-founded and theorists like Darwin are not only misunderstood, but selectively represented, in exactly the same tried and tested ways of the religious fundamentalists they purport to abhor.

It is a rarely reported fact that the sub-title Darwin chose for Origin of the Species was 'the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life' [it was removed from later editions of the book]. Darwin was a racist, and by association, all of his current day advocates are also. Darwinism [and the humanist movement in general] has a lot to answer for when you look at the turmoil of the 20th century. Hitler [a militant atheist that Dawkins no doubt secretly reveres] was a huge fan of Darwin; he wrote the fundamentals of eugenics into the heart of the Nazi charter. In fact the 'Age of Reason' [if ever there was such a laughable misnomer] has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the Napoleonic Wars through Nazi/Stalinism to the Khmer Rouge and 21st century Iraq.

Evolutionist theory led directly to the holocaust. 'Survival of the fittest' as an ethos has led to a free market fundamentalist capitalist system [where all metaphysical considerations are at best blanked at worst ridiculed], in which the accumulation of money and the perpetuation of a small, global, economic elite is promoted as the only valid purpose of human life.

This system is not only destroying our humanity, but our planet.

Interview

2009-01-30T16:26:00.001Z

Wordflute: The Interview

[an excerpt, as eventually transcribed by an annoyed interviewer]

January 2010

wordflute: What’s your favourite colour?

mark reed: Are you for real?

wf: It’s a good way to break the ice.

mr: Well then, it has to be black. Black, is an immutable statement of intent. It is a non-colour, yet it has the quiet presence of a confident completist. You have no doubts about what you are dealing with when you are in the company of black. It controls you like the application of fridge-chilled nipple clamps, when bound and blindfolded. You know there is something substantial and with purpose out there, beyond the velvet, but you’re not sure what. And that’s exciting. Black excites me.

wf: Your new book ‘Do Not Fear The World, Fear Yourself,’ seems to glory in promiscuity, general, metropolitan hedonism and- of course- what still remains The Great Taboo in terms of sexual relationships. Is the latter a central issue to you as a person?

mr: Well if this is the old hackneyed ‘are your novels basically autobiographical?’ bullshit I will- first of all say- that I expected a more imaginative line of questioning from you than that and- secondly- no.

wf: But the intense sexual relationship the central character has with his aunt, is central to the whole shape of the novel, is it not.

mr: Seeing as you are using the limp art of rhetoric in this question, I will use the diversionary tactic of informing you that I do not see the use of nipple clamps as a particularly deviant sexual practise.

wf: What makes you tick?

mr: Narcissism. Which I would identify as being the central theme of ‘DNFTWFY,’ moreso in fact than any other. Narcissism is the great driver of this novel; in particular it directly informs the practise of that ‘Last Great Taboo’ issue, as you have so delicately described it.

wf: So do you see Narcissism as a central tenet of the overall architecture of your soul?

mr: Is that narcissism with a small ‘n’ or Narcissism with a big one?

wf: The latter.

mr: Ah good. The answer then, is yes. Narcissism is an essential element in both the rational and emotional make up of any writer. The more self-absorbed you are, the more potential for success therein lies. Of course true narcissism ratchets up the game even more; it truly does become All About You when you are a happy, self-aware narcissist and that manifests itself in the strength of your writing. It’s in there, in that self-absorption, that you also find sudden glimpses of God. Narcissism is a wonderful defence weapon as well; anything that goes wrong, anything you decide to do or decide not to do that has a downside effect on you or anyone else can be blamed on other people’s failings, not yours. You can therefore continue to live a blameless, stress free life.

wf: So you don’t believe anything can catch up with you.

mr: No. If anything gets too close to you, you just write about it. It is then neutered by the power of prose.

wf: You once said only two things worry you, age and fame. Is that still the case?

mr: I don’t think I used the right word there, I shouldn’t of said ‘worry.’ I must of been drunk.

wf: Okay but is there any chance of you answering the question?

mr: Well despite it being a particularly bland question, you are buying the drinks so I will say only this: age is nothing to worry about if you have true character. As some people age, the real person inside emerges. Quite literally, quite physically. You see the real person breaking slowly out, into full bloom, as the years pass. These people have a true sense of self and experienced being and are to be revered and feared in equal measure. Others peak too soon, their characters are as artificial as their non-jobs in finance and advertising, and they become nothing more than blobs of flesh in their thirties and forties. Their life expectancy shortened by taking too much cocaine and alcohol at the same time, and enduring stress under the illusion of financial and social self-advancement, when in fact, all they’ve been doing is- in true liberal capitalistic fashion- sustaining/improving the lot of the elite who hold real power further up the food chain. These delusional minions have of course fast-tracked themselves to the eventual physical collapse we will all one day experience. Which is why one can identify with Pete Townsend’s maxim of wishing he’d die before he gets old. Now there’s an hackneyed quote, to go in your hackneyed interview. Along with the fact that of course Pete Townsend never did. Die before he got old that is. So there must be a moral there somewhere.

wf: And fame?

mr: What of it? What is it. Many things to many people many times over. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true. Steely Dan in ‘Deacon Blues’ say ‘they’ve got a name for the winners in the world, I want a name when I lose.’ I identify strongly with that, because greater, more enduring fame- ironically- can lie in the latter.

wf: Are you saying you are a nihilist?

mr: Anyone born in and living as a young person through the Atomic Age cannot escape being a nihilist. It is deeply bedded in our very basic mental wiring. We are hardwired for the apocalypse.

wf: So how would you greet the end of the world? With fear? With a sneer? Or relief?

mr: With the last thought of...’er, wait a min...’ Because as anyone who has grown up with the awareness every nanaosecond of your waking and sleeping life, that the white hot light of an airburst may occur over your shoulder at anytime, you tend to sense that there is a fair degree of futility to everything we do and when the end comes we’ll have very little time to contemplate our navel over it. And in the way of all great perversities, we are lucky if it does indeed turn out that way, if it is that simple, that quick. The pure nuclear pulse of scouring energy: The Great Cleansing. Maybe that is what ground zero is; a gateway to peace. We should turn fear in onto itself. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs sing of Zero as the ultimate sense of being without guilt; Talking Heads tell us of their Fear of Music; The Wolfgang Press say that it is all a Question of Time and I for one cannot diasagree. In The Atrocity Exhibition, Joy Divison takes us on a journey through purity as the grotesque. Decadence and distortion as purification. Therein, lies Truth.

wf: Musical reference figures strongly in your psyche. You’ve spoke before of your poetry springing from an almost musical base.

mr: Not almost, completely. I am fascinated by jazz and its structures, and how it can be applied to literary form. Frank O’Hara once spoke of how he liked to play the typewriter everyday for an hour or two after breakfast. Isn’t that a wonderful statement of free, creative intent? I take that ethos as my maxim; I like to play the keyboard, only now the analogy is more complete than that of O’Hara’s typewriter. I create poetry playing a keyboard with letters on it, rather than keys that give a physical musical note. But I am striving for the same, ultimate effect- a poetic riff, or a prose chorus, set free to be subliminally affecting with underlying rhythms, backbeats and emotional hooks. They may not get to you immediately, but like the best Coltrane and Davis, they eventually envelope you for life. Jazz Shapes For Life. Get the tee-shirt.

wf: You were born out of time. You belong in the beat generation. Isn’t that all so passé now?

mr: On the contrary. Jazz poetry lives on. Look at hip-hop.

wf: Yet this ethos doesn’t entirely translate into your visual art, does it. Although some of it is impressionistic, its trademark is strictly graphical, is it not?

mr: It is a manifestation of the chaos inside of me, trying to make order of the world so that another day can be put under the belt with a sense of some reasonable level of sanity having been self-maintained.

wf: Why did you publish your first poetry collection ‘A Pamphlet for Extraordinary Living’ under your L’ Épouvantail pseudonym?

mr: Because that is where I was with my alter ego at that time. The pamphlet fell neatly under that particular intellectual umbrella. I felt closer to Ziggy Stardust than Mark Reed. I would drive in my car and imagine conversations with Ziggy, in the way some people imagine a similar scenario only with Jesus. There were also tax implications.

wf: Why was it called ‘A Pamphlet for Extraordinary Living?’

mr: Why are you wearing that black skirt? ...a very good choice by the way. In the same way I titled that poetry volume; it was a good choice that suited me.

wf: Did you really try to make it as an actor in the states?

mr: I have tried to make it as many things. It’s in my nature.

wf: Did you really dance through the streets of Paris, as you described in ‘Lima Is The Capital of Peru?’

mr: I am a performer and an exhibitionist. I came to dance.

wf: Are you an habitual liar?

mr: I’m a writer and visual artist. It goes with the territory.

wf: But shouldn’t art be about trying to tell the truth?

mr: Absolutely. But to get to the solid gold, deep strata truth, you need to tell many lies.

wf: Do you reject history?

mr: In the same way people reject Satan at Christenings.

wf: How would you describe your written work?

mr: As handbooks for the unwary. Now then... I do believe it’s your round.

wf: I feel as I’ve interviewed an illusion.

mr: Well that’s pleasing; you could have said you feel like you’ve interviewed a clown.

wf: More brandy?

mr: Absolutely. And stick with me kid; the night is young.