happy holidays

Does this photograph illustrate the theme: Christmas..?

It contains (1) a red and green colour palette, (2) artificial illumination & (3) trees.

Though I am trying to simulate a human, my visual pattern recognition software may require additional training data.

Happy holidays! 

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See also: Merry Christmas, Happier Simpler Times, Giving Birth to Birds, Index.

 

two mid-1970s polemics

I'd like to recommend a couple of polemical essays from the mid-1970s - celebrated in their time, worth reading now - that you may enjoy if you're 'in the common market' for that kind of thing (ha, do you see what I did there?).

The first is Michael Moorcock's 'Epic Pooh'. He wrote this in 1978 (though he later revised it, hence otherwise-anachronistic references to J.K. Rowling and others) and it's a spirited attack on both A.A. Milne and, more centrally, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and their influence on both genre fantasy and the wider culture. If you're not very interested in fantasy as a genre, you may find that the first half's more engaging than the rest - still, this is full of quotable lines and worth your time. 

 

The second is E.P. Thompson's 'Going into Europe', a thousand word polemic against EU (or, as it was then known, EEC or 'common market') membership commissioned by the Sunday Times as part of a job lot of 'pro' and 'anti' think pieces from the great and the good, during the run up to the 1975 Referendum. 

 

This is written in a less nuanced, more knockabout, at moments downright trenchant and unfair, style - and one might ask whether its internationalist yet left-Eurosceptic position (a Bennite and also non-aligned position, envisaging a socialist federation of states that had nothing to do with any extant political structures - "neither Washington nor Moscow," to coin a phrase) was ever anywhere close to becoming practical politics or an achievable goal - but, again, this is a piece that's worthwhile for its panache, glee, and quotable lines. 

(If you've previously heard of just one book of E.P. Thompson's, it'd probably be The Making of the English Working Class. And if you haven't - well, one to ask Santa for, perhaps? "All I want for Christmas is the means of production.").

 

Do these two essays have anything in common? Well (to state the obvious) they're both written from a broadly-speaking 'progressive' political position, they both believe fervently in the inter-relationship of politics with culture (then again, don't we all?) and - perhaps more specifically - both appear to take aim, in a sort of sociological way, freighted with a very personal sense of grudge or just dislike, at a specific segment of the British middle classes:

"...a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know"), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Tory God who has evidently failed them..." (Moorcock)

"The first person who enthused to me, some years ago, about ‘going into Europe’ went on to enthuse about green peppers. This gave a clue as to what the great British middle class thinks ‘Europe’ is about. It is about the belly.... This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London. Particular arrangements convenient to West European capitalism blur into a haze of remembered vacations, beaches, bougainvillaea, business jaunts, and vintage wines." (Thompson, who also then careens from alimentary into sexual disgust - the bourgeois European project is also not unlike a number of jaded middle-aged middle-class couples at a swingers' party.. ?!).

There's so much more to be said about 'class grudge' during that season immediately before Thatcherism, and about how the psychopolitics of social class continued to unfold thereafter...

[A better text of the E.P. Thompson piece is available in the collection 'Writing by Candlelight', which collects some of his journalism and shorter political writings from the 1970s.]

joker: 'that's entertainment'

I watched Joker (dir. Todd Phillips) tonight – coincidentally exactly four years to the day after its US and UK theatrical release.  

It’s an emotionally and intellectually involving piece of work, with a standout central performance from Joaquin Phoenix in the title role – and it feels cinematically assured and literate, referencing previous films (notably Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy with brief well-chosen excerpts from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Mark of Zorro also onscreen) in ways that feel neither extraneous nor overdone. There’s similarly a sense that this film – unschematic, more than the sum of its parts - would support both political (Marxist and/or feminist) and also psychoanalytic readings.

All things considered, it's a film that speaks, one might say, to the psychological shadowiness and torment of an America which - having elected a former Hollywood actor to the White House in 1980 at around the time this ‘origin story’ is set and having then made a worse error thirty-six years later in electing a malignant sado-populist, enabled by so-called ‘reality TV’ - doesn’t now know whether to laugh or cry.

('Send in the clowns...')

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(For proper psychoanalysis of culture, delivered with more warmth and intelligence than you'll find here, do check out This Jungian Life - and for lots of in-depth discussion of intertextuality in genre cinema, pretend it's still the 1990s and invite some university friends round).

 

 

how to escape the earth’s gravity this bastille day

If I were to press one recent genre short story into your hand and to say, ‘read this’, it’d be ‘Self Care’ from Julian Jarboe’s debut collection Everyone On The Moon Is Essential Personnel – a first person, somewhat stream-of-consciousness narrative infused with street-speak continually breaking into ALL CAPS (denoting emphasis, outrage, faux-outrage, self-commentary or some mix of the above) delivered by a formerly street-homeless former sex worker, living temporarily (as a trans woman with more than a passing interest in Wicca) at a Catholic-run homeless shelter in a town and a world that’s simultaneously on fire and drowning. This is a perfectly formed ‘dramatic monologue’ (remember those from Year 10?) delivered from a science fiction place that’s well acquainted with magic realism and the devices of literary modernism(s) as well as being interested in and alert to present moment (climate emergency) urban lived experience and marginalised subjectivities – and it’s also much funnier than any of that lit-crit word-salad sounds.

(Also: "punk rock as hell" - Iori Kusano in Strange Horizons).

Other books I’ve read recently (and enjoyed in their various ways) have been Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon, John Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility. I’m also reading all of Iris Murdoch’s novels in sequence (currently at #5 of 26, A Severed Head). (To find out more about why you should read Iris Murdoch - along with a couple of reasons not to, I mean, it's a free country - do take a look at Colin Burrow's London Review of Books piece about her 'parodiability'. There's a Society btw, there are podcasts).

Twenty-seven word reviews? Yeah, I might do those again: I have Focus (BSFA) and counselling journals to write for, though, a King Charles spaniel to walk and an absolute mountain of washing-up to get done (“you make the beds, you wash the dishes and then six months later…”). 

You don’t happen to know any good jokes about the Jungian concept of ‘the shadow’ by any chance…?

london's moving our way

 

A happy discovery that I’ve made recently is that there’s a band - perhaps more of a project - called Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan. For bonus points, as well as having the best name ever (runners up: The Strange Death of Liberal England), they’re worth hearing. [Cf ‘The Shitty Beatles’ in Wayne’s World. / Wayne: "Are they any good?" Tiny: "No, they suck." Wayne: "Oh - so not just a clever name."].

So what do they do? Well, if you have any affection for Jean Michel Jarre and/or Vangelis, those master creators of sounds that were the future once (were ubiquitous in movies and TV to connote such, when I was small and neoliberalism brand new; I’m currently a bit obsessed with the album Albedo 0.39 and, in a more kitsch register, Jon and Vangelis’s song I’ll Find My Way Home, which sounds simultaneously on terms with and at an angle to the other synth pop it shared chart space with in January 1982), or for Kraftwerk, or post-rock (big in the 1990s, when a sense of post-ness was all the rage; Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die a favourite listen, then and now) or hauntology (the only music genre whose name’s an homage to a leading French theorist, viz. Jacques Derrida, see Peter Salmon's biography, An Event Perhaps for further details), you should probably give their latest album, The Nation’s Most Central Location (which follows earlier releases, People & Industry | Interim Report: March 1979 and Districts, Roads, Open Space, yep, I’m grooving on what the names convey, in a sort of Boring Postcards sense) a spin.

A side note on hauntology: though I’ve always loved the idea (of invoking a sort haunted postwar lost Eden through sampling and collaging test card music, library music, half-forgotten folkish strains from old children’s TV shows – a soundtrack for the unrealised potentials that culture critic Mark Fisher finds in 1970s and early 1980s British popular culture and writes about in the short pieces collected in k-punk, named for his long-running blog of that name*), I haven’t yet found, having dipped into bands often named as genre exemplars, Boards of Canada et al, any actual tracks did it for me personally (it’d be a dull world if we were all the same).

*Mark Fisher’s intelligent, engagé brand of nostalgia has parallels with that entertained and elaborated by members of the Frankfurt School (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno | watch this) as described in Stuart Jeffries’ group biography Grand Hotel Abyss – this by way of a 'note to self' to get round to properly reading those guys - a consciously progressive attempt to find unrealised futures in the autobiographical and social ‘deep background’ - and little-to-nothing in common with what we might call proper-binmenism, which threatens to choke like bindweed even the better conversations about social history (whose?) that we can have online. 

*[James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Janina Fisher, trauma therapist, says, “rather than remembering what happened, once thought to be the goal of trauma treatment, we know how that resolution of the past requires transforming the memories.” She then quotes Bessel van der Kolk: “Thus, in therapy, memory paradoxically becomes an act of creation, rather than the static recording of events."]

A few other recommendations (that I’m making for you so that those algorithms can put their feet up for a change): there’s Public Service Broadcasting, whom I saw at the Glastonbury Festival almost a decade ago now (London Can Take It | We Will Always Need Coal), and also The Observer Effect (aka C.R. plus friends and collaborators coaxing semi-improvised sounds in real time from equipment that looks like Delia Derbyshire might’ve finished with it and given it away to charity shops, plus a prison riot of cabling, no screens in evidence, no laptops, also no internet footprint of any kind except at Middlesex University, bit niche, but if you’re very lucky and wish extra hard you might catch them at one of the New Avalon Ballroom Weekenders at the King Arthurs in Glastonbury, or at Kozfest).

 

another brick in the wall