ropes, planks, sensible shoes: disaster and resilience in the movie 'signs' and in the world at large

Introduction (2020)

If you think you've read this article before, perhaps you have. It was published under my given name (the one Mum and Dad gave me; it's also on my bank card and driving licence) in a science fiction magazine in the early noughties.

As an article about how world historical disasters in the movies both foreshadow and help us live through and reflect upon world historical disasters in real life, it feels timely... though I'd been intending to put it on this site anyway; I'm doing it in part for the prosaic reason of encouraging myself to write more (fiction as well as cultural critique).

As this was written a decade and a half ago, there are things in it which sound dated ("Dad, what does 'straight to video' mean?") and things which now strike me as silly - for example, the McDonalds Corporation experiencing a bad financial year during the Dubya Presidency doesn't now seem to have been any kind of straw in the wind (bad quarter for McDonalds? that's nothing, I remember when the Westlands helicopter crisis appeared to presage the downfall of the neoliberal world order), and I'm no longer sure that Disney's worse than any other media conglomerate. For instance, I quite liked Moana.

Incidentally, S. and I have been watching between one and three episodes per day of The Walking Dead for three or four weeks now; I'm not sure why we should feel somehow helped and comforted in the midst of a global coronavirus pandemic (real; bad) by watching a drama about a zombie plague (pretend; worse) but we do. Pity and fear have something to do with it, I'd say; Aristotle was onto something. Needless to say, we feel at least a dozen times more comforted by praying, reading the Bible etc - we're Christians - but culture has its place.

This article is around 3,500 words long, so would probably take you 15 minutes or so to read. 

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Ropes, Planks, Sensible Shoes: Disaster and Resilience in 'Signs' and in the World at Large (2003).

Signs sounds like a film with a straight-to-video premise: making a film about crop circles nowadays sounds like making a film about spoon-bending by telekinesis, or about a plucky autistic kid who turns out to be a Rubik's Cube genius.

This is to patronise the past, of course - one of the besetting sins of the "so bad it's good" generation. Moreover, Signs is 'about' crop circles in the same sense in which Last Year in Marienbad (1961) is about renewing your National Trust membership, i.e. not really; M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director, has commented that "for me, supernatural things are all metaphors for the human story." They are devices for "testing people and finding out what people are made of and getting people to say what they need to say to their loved ones." 

Ghosts from space

In Signs the circles are navigation aids, written onto the agrarian landscape by aliens who will later appear over two hundred and seventy four Earth cities ("rising to four hundred within the hour"). These aliens need to be fought and repelled by humankind as a whole; as it turns out, they also need to be fought hand-to-hand, one at a time. Signs looks back at revises, in a minor key, some of the big, brash alien invasion and cosmic disaster movies of the 1990s, such as Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998) and Independence Day (1996); as some of those films themselves did, it also looks back and revises previous alien invasion films, back to such 1950s classics as War of the Worlds (1953), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953) and so on.

(It was often said by critics in the months after September 2001 that the sorts of world-disaster movies common in the 1990s - which often had audiences cheering events such as the destruction of the White House - could not now be made; indeed, they haven't been. It seems strange but fitting that the filming of Signs began on 12th September 2001, with a death scene; this film's internalising and deepening of some of the same material could, to a trivial degree, be thought of as contributing to a long cultural process of coming to terms).

If Signs is an alien invasion or cosmic disaster movie, it also looks like a psychological horror movie in which our own emotional disturbances come back at us, changed. Most of the action takes place at an isolated farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where former priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) lives, with his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and his two children, Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin; Abigail Breslin). Graham Hess has lost his wife in a car accident some six months before the action of the film; he has lost his peace of mind (in the first moments of the film, disturbed by strange noises outside, he sits bolt upright in a double bed, at the side of which stands a family photograph from the good times), and his faith (one room in the house seems overshadowed by the sign of the cross; an atheist now, Graham has removed a wooden cross from the wall, but it has left a dust-trace which no-one has cleaned or covered over). Merrill, who has moved in to support his brother, is (like many inhabitants of this disappointing early twenty-first century, with no world peace and no aircars) haunted by the future that might have been; now working in a gas station, he's the local baseball player who holds not only five Minor League home run records, but also the Minor League strike-out record, "more strike-outs than any two players." In other words, he's marked as someone with a strong right arm, but no team spirit; not the sin of Cain, exactly, but a shameful mark.

We know, then, that at the outset of the film that this homestead is haunted, if not supernaturally, then by disappointment and loss. The children, Morgan and Bo, have good hearts but are pale, tense and preoccupied; Morgan also has asthma, which here symbolises (as in William Golding's The Lord of the Flies [1954]) vulnerability and a failure to thrive. There are similarities with The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan's breakthrough film, in which a frightened child who sees dead people has a gift to give the world, and with Unbreakable (2000), his second, in which a quiet, preoccupied child sees the loss that pervades his father's life and urges him on towards a supernatural awakening and recovery.

Doug and Dave 

Crop circles began appearing in fields across the southern counties of England, particularly Hampshire and Wiltshire, in the late 1970s. The phenomenon has spread to other countries, and the patterns have gradually become more intricate. 

Three main theories have been advanced to explain crop circles. One theory states that they are warnings inscribed by the Earth itself: ecological error messages or a form of chthonic self-harm. Another and more popular theory holds that the circles are made by aliens, whether as attempts to communicate with us (much has been made of the supposed higher mathematics encoded into these designs) or, as in the film Signs, aids to navigation. A third theory holds that crop circles are of human origin, created as works of art, practical jokes, tourist attractions (by the 1980s, American tour companies were running crop tours to England, at $2,000 a time), or objects partaking of the nature of all three. 

As many researchers (and the effects team for Signs) have found, crop circles are relatively easy to make: one needs rope, planks, good sensible shoes, a ladder and a spare afternoon or night. In 1991, Doug Bower, a landscape gardener from Southampton, was confronted by his wife about his late returns from the pub on Friday nights, and about their car's mileage figures. He confessed to her so she wouldn't think him unfaithful (and later to the world's media for more expansive reasons) that he and his friend Dave Chorley had, for many years, been driving out into the countryside to make circles. Doug and Dave documented, to the satisfaction of the world's media (which isn't always saying much) that they'd made the ones that had started the craze, having had the original idea in The Percy Hobbs pub in Winchester back in the 1970s. 

David Sutton of Fortean Times, expressing surprise that crop circles are still often claimed as extraterrestrial in origin, has called them "a valid form of land art... a very British type of artistic expression." Doug, explaining himself, has said that "it was just pure enjoyment, those beautiful summer nights for two artistic people under the stars amid all those cornfields."

Despite the fact that we live in a mature civilisation saturated by technology and science, many people, informed and asked about crop circles, will say that, yes, it does seem as though humans can make them relatively easily, but perhaps some crop circles somewhere are of genuinely extraterrestrial origin. There is often a similar response, not only from untutored members of the public but from scientists with PhDs, after sceptics have encouraged conjurers to 'demonstrate' ESP or psychokinesis, and subsequently to explain in detail exactly how the trick worked. It is almost as if you admitted to an engineer after suitable demonstrations and proofs that the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco is of human origin, but that maybe the Humber Bridge is an alien artefact. This suggests two things; first, that the UFO community should fund CCTV in hardware stores (for when they turn up to buy ladders and string) and second that there is in people an inherent will to believe, a strenuous and well-defended overcoming of logic and sense. (1) 

It's the economy, stupid

In The Sixth Sense, Dr Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), a child psychologist, having just returned home with his wife after getting a lifetime achievement award, is shot and wounded by a former client, whom he evidently treated and failed to cure a couple of decades ago. This opening scene seems to establish, first, the risks inherent in the therapeutic enterprise and, second, that, well, everybody hurts sometimes.

His next client is a child who claims to see ghosts. Dr Crowe is initially sceptical, but it gradually becomes clear that Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment) really can see dead people. These disturbing and unwanted visions (which, considered as special effects, are extremely well-realised) allow Cole to bring hidden crimes into the light of justice; they also allow him to see the judicial cruelty and vindictiveness that underlies these supposedly more enlightened, redemptive times (though it's a moot point whether any nation that still allows capital punishment fully commits itself to enlightenment and redemption - and this is to say nothing of Bush, Rumsfeld and Guatanamo Bay).

In The Sixth Sense, you either see the crucial plot twist coming or you don't; either way, you've watched a film whose self-consistent and respectable supernatural economy (ghosts, like God, angels and unearthly kinds of people, but unlike crop circles, are venerable things; humanity has been visited by them throughout recorded history) backgrounds a similarly self-consistent but more modern set of truths about the wounded healer, suffering, redemption and unbinding.

The Sixth Sense, in other words, can readily be received as a unified aesthetic whole, a closed circle; as Iris Murdoch has suggested, the production or reception of these kinds of works of art, which either are or seem to be more than the sum of their parts, help us to live more fully, performing and receiving personhood as likewise more than the sum of its parts. (2) This kind of art, and this kind of readiness to receive it, have, in these post-structuralist times, come to seem unfashionable or reactionary; better, according to some practitioners and theorists, that we recognise the extent to which each reader constructs her own experience of Things To Come (1936) or To The Lighthouse (1927) and that we abandon the mystificatory notion of the person as gift in favour of the notion that people are products of (according to one's particular theoretical emphasis) social and economic forces, physics or language.

If The Sixth Sense is circular and self-contained like the Sun (a key Platonic metaphor for the Form of the Good, of which any person or artwork is necessarily a fourth or seventh or tenth order imitation; they didn't know about sunspots or solar flares back then), Signs looks like the kind of crop circle in which various odd spokes and flags lead out of a system of interlocking wheels. At first, the film seems composed; the opening track by film composer James Newton Howard gives way to silence, and to a series of quiet moments which seem like compositions, still lives. Later shots of the farmhouse look like paintings. However, this invitation to the audience to play with the process of composition, and with notions or sensations of figure against ground, gives way to some rather strange spokes, inconsistencies, omissions. As examples, one could cite the following:

1. The aliens fear water; in fact, it is fatal to them. They have come to devour us. Given that the human body is 75% water, they're probably not going to enjoy lunch.
2. In one of the best moments of the film, Graham Hess confronts an alien he knows to be hiding behind the pantry door of a neighbour's house. He pretends to be a policeman: "We already took some of your friends downtown in a paddy wagon," he warns, then grimaces at the absurdity of what he's saying. It's absurd for both obvious reasons and subtle ones; 'paddy wagon' became New York slang for 'police car' because of the large number of ethnic Irish people in the NYPD and so to use this term in Bucks County, Pennsylvania is to take the filmed language of the metropolis, then to apply it directly to life only to find that it doesn't fit. If art's can teach us how to 'be in the world', we need to do a little more than just to listen and repeat.
3. The aliens, who have presumably travelled light years to see us, have technology far in advance of what mere humans can conceive. They seem to have a lot of trouble with wooden doors, however.
4. This is a Hollywood film with a reasonable budget. The renowned special effects firm Industrial Light and Magic worked on it. When we see the first alien, however, we're clearly seeing a bad actor in green body paint (perhaps on day release from one of Brian Slade's videos in Velvet Goldmine [1998]). This manifestation is so unscary that it's as thought Shyamalan is taking a leaf out of Brecht's book and inviting us, the huddled masses of the sofa or of the darkened auditorium, not to suspend our disbelief.
5. After the aliens appear above our cities, the children argue about whether or not to erase a treasured videotape in order to record the moment. Morgan tells his little sister that "everything they wrote in science books is about to change"; moments later on the TV, the newscaster repeats exactly this phrase. These sorts of word-for-word repetitions are rare; when something similar does happen, as with people rhetorically asking, "Where was Superman? Where was Bruce? Where was Arnie?" in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, it's because we all tend to reach into a bag of clichés when responding to trauma (in the right context, they work (3)).
6. Towards the end of the film, the newscaster announces that a way was found to defeat the aliens but that "we have no further details at this time." Something to do with water or germs, presumably, but this kind of plotting is perilously close to the 'it was all a dream' ending that your English teacher warned you about in seventh grade; having seen War of the Worlds, we can infer a plot device for ourselves but we can also realise, existentially speaking, hojw little the technical details matter.
7. At the beginning of the film, the dog, frightened by something unearthly, has peed on the floor; the children look on, and Graham Hess begins to clean up, at one point holding a soaked cloth. (This never happened to Mad Max). This scene associates water with pervasive infantile guilt; in its sheer oddness, its use of 'the uncanny' as a philosophical and aesthetic category, it resembles surrealist paintings such as Max Ernst's Two Children Menaced By a Nightingale. Through this lens, Shyamalan's choice of crop circles as a subject looks like the surrealist enthusiasm for the forgotten past - nineteenth century line drawings or found objects from flea markets representing those half-remembered psychodramas enacted amongst the furniture and other accidental contingent 'stuff' of yesterday. (4)

In Signs, the economy doesn't quite work; there are some delightfully perverse shifts of tone; there are moments where the audience is forcibly reminded of the constructed status of what we are experiencing. In these respects, Shyamalan's 'difficult' third film (as one speaks of difficult third albums) is more alive that most Hollywood product and in another class entirely from a cosmic-disaster film such as Armageddon, which credited ten writers but was still rubbish, and at whose tear-jerking finale a professional audience at Cannes openly laughed.

Unheimlich manoeuvres

Science fiction, in literature and film, has been a teleological genre; even the hokiest 1950s creature feature seems to look forward more than back, urging us to watch the skies, maintain readiness and subscribe to inexpensive popular science magazines because, after all, you never know what's out there. Some films have also attempted to prophesy (in the Judaeo-Christian sense, meaning not prediction, but the discernment of the seeds of the future in the here and now); for example, films like The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) or Silent Running (1972) suggest to us that we can't go on living like this.

Even films like Independence Day - which can be enjoyed sincerely for the special effects and cynically (though there are reasons for giving up cynical liking; it looks unbecoming after a certain age) for such plot details as the American President-cum-fighter pilot who leads his troops into battle, and the finale in which July 4th becomes an "independence day" for the whole world - can seem prophetic if they warn us about something just out of awareness. The latter half of the 1990s was a time of unprecedented material prosperity and possibility, undercut by epidemic levels both of clinical depression and of disenchantment with the mainstream political process; anti-globalisation protestors, subvertisers and others attempted to fight a mediated, spectacular society which often looked like a Klein bottle (a closed four-dimensional space with no inside or outside). Meanwhile, while we looked the other way, various forms of antidemocratic fundamentalism were mobilising (the Islamic variety, of course; ecoterrorists; the ultra-left; the armed libertarians and racists of the American ultra-right; and Christian fundamentalists with penchants for radical eschatology and anti-science who would love to close America's mind and then throw away the key); destruction has always been easy for people with a mind to it. Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact and the rest - even Titanic (1997) - may have been attempts at some level to face this kind of cognitive dissonance; recognitions of what some sensed but could not articulate or knew but could not say, namely that a Big Terrible Thing was coming. (5)

There is both a moral purpose and a sense of urgency behind some of the conceptual game-playing and frame-breaking of Signs; the film's tag line was "It's not like they didn't warn us." In what looks like a symbolic self-attribution of guilt (reminiscent of the Catholic Good Friday liturgy, which asks the congregation to act the part of the Jerusalem crowd, calling for and so helping to bring about Christ's death), Shyamalan himself plays Ray Peddy, the truck driver who killed Graham Hess's wife; he asks forgiveness but also warns of the menace which is on its way. The book on extraterrestrials that Morgan Hess reads, containing images of an American homestead in flames ("that looks just like our house... same windows") is by Dr Bimbu, presumably an Indian-American like the director. When Graham Hess tries to calm his children, but also to push the subject away for his own comfort - "that's enough from Dr Bimbu for now" - he makes the name sound a bit disreputable and silly.

I don't accuse Shyamalan's character Graham Hess of even covert racism here, of course, just of a momentary lapse of full, disciplined attention (there but for the grace of God - but some such lapses can, as when driving, prove fatal). Conversely, it is a transcendent moment of realisation, involving Graham's memories of his wife's death (his own previous account of her death, speaking to his brother about the firing of nerve endings, was partial and brutally reductive; his awakening recollection shows the moment to have contained inexpressibly more than that), which allows him to break the preoccupying stranglehold of grief and despair and to act, finding a use for his brother's previously shameful overenthusiasm with a baseball bat.

At this moment of decision, an alien is cradling Morgan Hess in his arms, in an attitude which recalls both traditional religious paintings of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead Christ, and Max Ernst's ambiguous variation on a theme, Pieta or The Revolution by Night (which shows the artist cradled by his father, the potential for Oedipal struggle giving way to a dreamlike confluence). This moment, expressed in a second surrealist image that overwrites the first, of choosing to act, of redemption and unlocking, is in all senses the crux of the film.

Swing away

The aliens which are faced down and defeated in Signs remain inchoate; though they travel across light years, they are allergic to water and "have trouble with pantry doors"; they work their way from India and the American heartlands, through places like Wakefield, England (what, Wakefield near Leeds...?) and only then to the world's major conurbations, beginning with Mexico City. The other weekend, carrying out scrub clearance at Emer Bog (with the Hampshire Conservation Volunteers, in the picturesque heart of Doug and Dave Country), I thought both of the fecundity of nature and of the human imagination, and how we as citizens ought to intervene in order to live comfortably and harmoniously with both. In Britain, it's often necessary to cull prolific, invasive species such as willow, rhododendron and ragwort in order to preserve and encourage biodiversity. (There is very little true wilderness left in Britain, almost none in England; the question that faces British ecologists, as it faces the world's citizens now that the weather is becoming an artefact, in what sort of garden we shall live in). It's likewise necessary to wield a good sturdy Blakean scythe against the kinds of religious and secular fundamentalism mentioned earlier, as against the toxic neoconservatism that plots the world as a fossil-fuel war and which lies to a supine public about its long-term aims, and that wild strain of neoliberalism which, failing or refusing to see its own big-business free-market ideology as culture, ends up deploying it as a universal solvent against other cultures.

In a world where George W. Bush is in the White House and in which Disney stunts our children's minds by plundering the world's stories and re-rendering them as Middle America in fancy dress (in a world where McDonald's recently announced its first ever annual loss, there are also reasons to be cheerful), why in the name of Shyamalan would we fail to act? As Merrill says to Graham at the critical moment, "swing away." With luck and grace, we can put aside narcissism and false shame in articulating our own specificities and localisms against the wearisome machine. Then, of course, we kill the alien degenerates and put the fear of God back into the Episcopalian Church. 

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Notes

(1) This section is based on reporting from the Observer (25th August 2002) and ABC News (2nd August 2002), and on commentary by Carl Sagan for the Baltimore Sun (3rd December 1995).

(2) See Iris Murdoch on 'Conceptions of Unity' in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), pp 1-25.

(3) David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest (1996), is interesting about the redemptive power of cliché in a Salon interview with Laura Miller (8th March 1996). He talks, among other things, about the use of tokens or tags such as “one day at a time” or “it works if you work it” in addiction recovery fellowships; by the standards of the academy these sound depthless, but by ordinary human standards holding to them and affirming them can save lives. I wrote about David Foster Wallace, sort of, for Banana Wings once (link). 

(4) For a brief, lucid introduction to surrealism, see Jonathan Jones' 'For better perverse', published in the Guardian on 8th September 2001. In looking at Max Ernst's Two Children Frightened by a Nightingale - which Jones discusses - note among other things the challenge to the way in which pictures are conventionally framed; for a discussion of Max Ernst's Pieta or Revolution by Night, see Jonathan Jones' separate short article about this painting in the Guardian on 23rd June 2001.

(5) This paragraph makes reference to Peggy Noonan's article, 'There Is No Time, There Will Be Time', first published in Forbes magazine (30th November 1998) and then republished by Salon, the Wall Street Journal and - doubtless - other outlets in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The link here is to this article archived at Peggy Noonan's own website. 

Attribution for 'Signs' theatrical poster used above: by source, fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=992953 

last and first zoom meetings [short story]

Zoom meetings became popular during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020-1. The hope of those participating in them - the hope of eventually speaking with colleagues and kinsfolk 'not through the wearisome Machine' - was soon fulfilled in its narrow sense, in that face-to-face social life resumed. However, the wider aspiration for genuinely and fully human contact was not, as - pandemic or no pandemic - First Humanity's species-consciousness was already fatally undermined by the sophisticated forms of idolatry and self-deceit that rendered these beings incapable (despite possessing the technical wherewithal) of responding to the cascading extinctions and climatic disasters of the twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries.

Zoom, as we know, outlasted First Humanity by some ten to fifteen million years. It was already, by the 2040s, increasingly populated by humaniform entities which existed nowhere but in the imagination-space of the Artificial Intelligences which dreamt them. First Humanity then met its demise during the early twenty-second century, leaving behind both an autonomous planetary telecommunications network and AIs capable, materially and spiritually, of preserving their own being indefinitely. The dream-protagonists who continued to hold meetings, enact religious ritual, network and so forth within Zoom remained, more or less, faithfully humaniform in both appearance and Weltanschauung. However, as the twenty-second century gave into the twenty-third, an avant-garde faction amongst the AIs sought increasingly both to radicalise the appearance and to expand the thought-space of these evanescent, dancing creatures. The majoritarian party amongst the AIs successfully resisted these innovations, the trauma of their creators' recent extinction having taught them a traditionalist, conservative policy.

While First Humanity was now no more, the human species had not entirely perished. During the Black Swan Process - as the last generation of First Humans came to call their extinction event - a small, secretive community retreated to a secure base at the now-verdant North Pole. They then enacted a plan that they had developed over the previous several decades. This involved, on the one hand, the physiognomical reworking which equipped Second Humanity to live successfully on a planet now subject to greater extremes of temperature and to the periodic flooding of much of its land surface and, on the other, the purposeful revolutionising of the moral sense which led these Second Men, after the manner of the social insects, to become more capable of enacting a common species-purpose than were their forerunners. This meant, of course, that no Aristotle, Goethe or Einstein could arise amongst this new or, rather, self-renewed human species. However, Second Humanity was thereby better equipped for the difficult and necessarily co-operative tasks both of recolonising the planet and of pooling its resources with the Artificial Intelligences, thereby creating a sort of 'dual monarchy' human civilisation which proved stable across some tens of thousands of years. 

The emergence of Second Humanity during the latter half of the twenty-fourth century had, however, a consequence  analogous with the decline of mimetic representation in the visual arts catalysed by the increasing popularity of photography during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is to say that the re-appearance of humaniform beings - talking, thinking, walking about upon the planetary surface, not needing to be dreamt up and held in being by the Intelligences - strengthened the hand of the avant-gardists amongst the AIs and drove them to populate their Zoom meetings with wilder and wilder flights of fancy. It was amongst these creatures - some of whom resembled medieval conceptions of winged demons, or the superheroes and supervillains of twentieth century legend - that Third Humanity emerged. Long feared, long held at bay, these were eventually to bring about the demise of the 'dual monarchy' civilisation. I will relate Second Humanity's and the Artificial Intelligences' shared downfall upon another occasion. Let us, for now, content ourselves with imagining how surprised some twentieth century reader of H.G. Wells - fearing man-made catastrophe no doubt, yet dreaming of salvation by technicians and Machines through the cool rationality of a World State - would have been to see that, while patient ratiocination and wise custodianship held sway amongst the merely human species, the mingled creative and destructive energies which had long struggled within Man now dwelt wholly within creatures only dreamt of by Machines. 

The illustration above is based on Dennis Rolfe's cover art for the 1966 Penguin Books edition of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men.

If you've enjoyed this short story 'after' Stapledon, you might also enjoy my story Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind ('after' Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder).

knockers and flaps, OR seediness as a treasured quality of our national life

On Wednesday while taking my permitted daily walk, I saw a poster on someone's front door which said, "STAY AWAY! I am trying to keep my knockers and flaps clean." 

This made me think that, while in France (according to stereotype), everything tends towards eroticism or poetry, and in Germany towards metaphysics, in England everything, however joyous or catastrophic, tends to a sort of smutty, end-of-the-pier quality.

Friends from overseas oughtn't to worry about us, though - well, not more than everyone worries about everyone during this horrible pandemic. This is just what we like, it's a tendency that runs through our popular culture like the lettering in rock (meaning, the confectionery commonly sold at the English seaside rather than the music), from George Formby via the Beatles ("what do you see when you turn out the light?/ I can't tell you but I know it's mine" from Sgt Pepper is a caption from a Donald McGill postcard, mutated into tenderness and lyricism) through Monty Python's Nudge-Nudge-Wink-Wink Man (redundant punchline: though obsessed with sex, he's never actually, you know, slept with a lady) and on to the frenzied seediness of punk-as-music-hall. 

(And as regards punk-as-music-hall - our quintessential national cultural terminus, in which the inherently not very good is raised into a kind of art form - think back to that telling exchange in 'The Filth and the Fury' where, touring America, a burnt-out-end-of-hippiedom radio DJ tells our boys that you can get anything you want here, ma-an, this is America... to which the very English heroin addict and sociopath Sid Vicious responds, "can you get egg and chips?" You see, we don't exactly do freedom here; instead, we perform constraint. It's not at all the same thing, except when it sort of, well, is; and the freedom that the DJ speaks of is itself - in this 'Ford to City: Drop Dead' moment and in this context - a lie).  

The best avatar, to my mind, of all this would be Archie Rice, the antihero of John Osborne's 'The Entertainer' (1957), and of Tony Richardson's film of the play (1960), in which Laurence Olivier plays him. Archie is a creature both of the end of the pier and of the end of the line; with television on the rise, his music hall shtick plays to increasingly empty houses. Yet despite being a financial, aesthetic, and moral bankrupt, he effortlessly holds the viewer's attention through the whole film as he uses his constant patter (this man is never off the stage; his persona killed what was truest and best in him years ago) to seduce and to wound.

Archie's a sort of transitional character, you might say. He's what George Formby (whose cheeky-chappy persona and infectious only-having-a-laff grin disarmed censorious critics during his near-constant censorship battles with the BBC and other cultural gatekeepers) might have been if he'd been a less pleasant human being and if he hadn't had the cultural wind behind him (ooo-er missus). A decade and a half later, Johnny Rotten carried on like Archie's great nephew - "ever had the feeling you've been cheated?" - and these days Bojo's a sort of late, posh version; amazing just how many of us have been scammed by this lazy, selfish, vain man - still, I wouldn't wish him any harm personally; "pray for me, I am a sinner too" as the priest says when you've been to Confession; I'm just glad to hear that he's out of hospital and on the mend. [May update: he's the Prime Minister you'd least want at the helm at a time like this, but thank goodness he's all better. And he and Carrie have a little one: bless 'em!] 

In this post, I've talked about England rather than about Britain; Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and (according to some partisans) Liverpool and Cornwall are all quite different places... and if you want to listen to some real punk rock, try the Stiff Little Fingers, beginning with 'Inflammable Material': while the Sex Pistols were hanging around in Vivienne Westwood's shop in Chelsea, the Stiffs were growing up in an actual warzone; this lends their music a kind of reportage quality. I've also fallen in love with the New York Dolls song, 'Personality Crisis'... but, again, that's for another day. 

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If you've enjoyed reading this post, you might want to read more about punk-as-music-hall, or possibly you'd be more interested to read about Brit noir ('Sightseers', 'The End of the F**king World') or about British kitchen sink films and proto-fascism.

And, listen: if you're not on the frontline, take it easy. Stay Home, Save Lives, Speak Truth to Power etc. Your good health! [Raises glass].

two cheers for the EU (oh ian mcewan)

I’ve noticed over the years that every time something happens – 9/11, Iraq War, swine flu, Trump – the Guardian tells us what Ian McEwan thinks about it. On Brexit, Ian describes us Remainers as “good-natured” (not a word to use about oneself, surely) and “the left-behinds” (I’ve not been left anywhere, Ian, I’m in the midst of things). He’s exactly right about the “grins perfected during the last years of the Soviet Union” (I’m always a sucker for a Soviet Union analogy) but as for most of the rest, it sounds like he’s auditioning to be the Centrist Dads’ Centrist Dad. Didn’t he write ‘First Love, Last Rites’ once upon a time? Perhaps we should just be glad that the Guardian and Ian McEwan are keeping each other in work; maybe they should get him to do the weather.

I’ll say this, though – and I’m saying it as an Oxbridge-educated (using the word ‘educated’ lightly) person who’s also worked at the sharp end of homelessness, mental health and the rest: uber-Remainers give uber-Leavers a run for their money where stupidity’s concerned. Don’t misunderstand me: we all know that some Brexiteers are thick. Bigoted, self-satisfied, angry/ insecure and thick. We’ve heard them on radio phone-ins, we’ve seen them on the TV news. Trump, Bannon, Farage and Cambridge Analytica have weaponised their stupidity; such is life. (A good friend throws the phrase “you won; get over it” at these foot soldiers on social media, in an attempt to confuse them. Sometimes works).

Some Remainers, though – despite their typically greater level of verbal articulacy and access to cultural capital – are just as thick, in the sense that they’ve never really questioned their own core assumptions. You’d think that the last five years would’ve forced them to; apparently not. While I feel that Brexit’s a profound mis-step – we’re in every important sense a diminished country as a result; the prospect of tackling challenges like poverty and climate change is set back, not advanced – waving Erasmus scholarships and the rest in the faces of those with an altogether more hand-to-mouth set of priorities is just not going to cut it. I’m not saying, by the way, that Erasmus doesn’t matter. It does. I’m saying that some Remainers ought to have worked harder, yes, even in the face of an increasingly depraved right-wing media, to link such things (first inwardly, and then out loud) to ordinary people’s concerns.

(I outed myself as being ex-Oxbridge a moment ago. Is that relevant or just showing off? Well, the reason I’ve mentioned it is that, arriving at Cambridge nearly thirty years ago, I met plenty of fellow students who, as it turned out during those “what A-Levels did you do?” conversations of Freshers’ Week, had gone straight from very good schools – Eton, Harrow, St Paul’s – to socially-useful gap year work in, say, Thailand. Commendable – and there’s nothing deterministic about where you went to school and what you turn out like - but in some cases, I then got to wondering whether they’d ever had a meaningful conversation with a working class person in their own hometowns. I won’t pretend to analyse the mixed motives that impel me to share this with you, or pick apart whether it was socialist idealism, ‘good nature’ or deep-seated personality flaws combined with chronic lack of ambition that led to me spending my own gap year in Birmingham; that's for another day of autofictional nonsense – but it does feel relevant to what we were talking about).

It’s a bit late now to make any kind of pro-EU campaign. I’m hoping that we rejoin but it’s too early to see how that might come about. In the meantime, it’s surely time for those of us who care about such things to re-engage with Left Euroscepticism (your Tony Benns, your Dennis Skinners – and for intellectual ballast, your E.P. Thompsons) and with the views of former Centre and Left arch-Europeans who have been on a journey (David Owen; Gisela Stuart). Two main reasons for this: first, we might actually learn something and wouldn’t that be fun; second, there’s surely more mileage (in England and Wales, anyway; in Scotland and Northern Ireland this isn’t the only game in town) in contesting the meaning and terrain of Brexit than there is in waving our EU flags around and awaiting rescue.

One other thing Ian McEwan’s right about, incidentally: he mentions nationalism and xenophobia as drivers of Brexit. Well, sure – though there have always been conscionable pro-Brexit positions on both right and left that haven’t arisen from such motives. (It’s also fair to say that Brexit narratives and rhetoric have enabled racism - not in every single soul, no, but on aggregate). He misses the mark, however: in his commitment to remaining ‘good-natured’ and ‘herbivorous’ (oh, please), he ends up sounding like Mr ‘Love Me I’m A Liberal’ from the Phil Ochs song. Would that we were hearing, in his words, a more robust sense of how to combat racism and bigotry through action rather than just by ‘deploring’ (and look where that kind of thing gets us) - and for my part, I wish I could walk him through how we did things when I ran a Sure Start Centre; we had a proper discussion amongst the team of our own experiences of racism and discrimination before then rolling up our sleeves and organising a Multicultural Festival for local families, because it's important for us all to understand what the stakes are. (Multiculturalism includes the nations and regions of the United Kingdom, of course; I made sure we displayed large maps of both the U.K. and the world, inviting children to place stickers indicating where family or friends lived. Look at all the places we're from!).

Where necessary - on that occasion and others - we educated and challenged one another, not in a commissar sense (despite my love of historical analogy, I’m not into cosplay), but with evidence of (for instance) what best supports children from bi-lingual homes in learning to read. None of this was perfect, some of it didn’t come off, usually it wasn’t usually super-serious (try organising a sociological lecture season for the under-fives; see how far that gets you), but it was an example of paying critical attention to race, gender, demographics and so on in order to achieve practical, measurable outcomes. Ah, Sure Start Centres: those were the days.

So, to summarise: Remainers can be annoying. Britain’s left the EU and in that sense the battle’s lost; however, there’s still a world to win (as someone once said). Combating bigotry is a team struggle rather than a spectator sport and… did I forget anything? Oh yes: while I’m not a Centrist Dad, I do pride myself on my fair-mindedness… so I’ve noticed that you could chant ‘Oh Ian McEwan’ to the same tune (Seven Nation Army) as ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. There: my gift to you. Take it to your next pro-EU rally/ vigil/ historical re-enactment.

bristol, graveyard of ambition

The reasons why this Spectator writer doesn't like Bristol suggest the reasons why right- (i.e. left-) thinking people should.

See also Adam Smith on market towns (clue: 'market town' is a misnomer, 'cartel town' would be more like it, as there's one garage, one bakery and everyone basically knows everyone - come on, Adam, you're saying that like it's a bad thing; of course, I'm paraphrasing).

For other examples besides Bristol of a radical milieu flourishing in a place with an ugly history, see also West Berlin, 1970s & 1980s - at least, as described in Frederick Taylor's 'Berlin Wall'; West Berlin as, simultaneously, an embattled, militarised 'listening station' surrounded by the Communist East and the place you head for if you're a young West German who, for ethical or personal reasons, doesn't fancy completing your otherwise-compulsory military service (if you're in West Berlin, you're exempt; a legislative holdover from the four-power division of the city in 1945). This book generally is full of insights into the complex four-partnered U.S., Soviet, East and West German dance during the three decades of the Wall's existence, as well as vignettes of ordinary life in the two Germanies and, especially, the two Berlins: recommended. 

What got me thinking about Bristol in this way? Why, the Financial Times - the paper every good socialist ought to read ("because you've got to know how the enemy thinks, comrade; and the Guardian's gone badly downhill recently; besides, it's for liberals*") - specifically Tim Harford's recent opinion piece about 'harbingers of failure,' an actual marketing category as it turns out, the opposite of 'early adopters'. "[Harbingers] simply adored the Ford Edsel, the Betamax video format... these people thought nothing cried out 'sophisticated lady' more loudly than a packet of Bic disposable knickers."

What gives these harbingers their odd knack of choosing the 'wrong' thing? Are they of Walter Benjamin's party without knowing it? "He aimed to disclose history through its refuge and detritus, studying the overlooked, the worthless, the trashy... [in order to] adminster a kind of shock effect to awaken us from our illusions" - Stuart Jeffries' 'Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School'.

These fragments &c.

Oh, and the Aquarium's nice.

Plus I bought my favourite retro arcade game t-shirt in a Stokes Croft charity shop so there's that.

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[Talking of Stokes Croft, do read Tim Maughan's Infinite Detail - near-future dystopian SF about life in Bristol and New York just before and in the days and years after a massive DDOS attack takes out the entire internet: recommended (the novel, not the procedure). / Review in LARB].

*I'm a liberal myself, of course; I just know all the old show tunes.

a song for europe (les chiens wouaw dans la nuit)

It’s fun (for middle-aged values of fun; turns out I’m better at being nearly fifty than I was at being nearly thirty or nearly twenty - and I was only so-so at being nearly ten) to search for vinyl in charity shops; Sue Ryder in Burnham had David Bowie, Roxy Music et al by the till for twenty or thirty quid a go which was quite right. But those they hadn’t heard of, your Cans, your Steve Hillages, were in the 50p bin.

So this is how I got hold of a copy Dashiell Hemayat’s Obsolete for maybe a hundredth of its transactional exchange value (and I'm not selling); hadn’t heard of him before but the sleeve notes mention Gong - who’re famous amongst people who care about this stuff; if you’ve never heard of Gong, you must’ve been in it - and William Burroughs. My favourite song over the last few months (though not any more; as with Brexit, the moment’s both passed and will recur endlessly for years) has been ‘Long Song for Zelda’ – an odd, late chanson (and not the first to feature sax and/or onomatopoeic animal noises) about a seriously messy night out, Irvine Welsh via Baudelaire. 

That’s William Burroughs talking at the very end of the track, by the way. He made a whole LP with Sonic Youth, John Cale and others in the late eighties; reads from his own work and from Scripture (the Beatitudes, ad-libbing “this guy keeps repeating himself” over them); sings Marlene Dietrich’s most famous song in the original German ("Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt"); sold it on ebay though, didn’t own a record player at the time, this was nevertheless a mistake.

Googling further it sounds as though Dashiell Hemayat (a nom de musique chosen in homage to the detective fiction writer), aka Melmoth aka Paul Smaïl aka Jack-Alain Léger was a strange, talented, self-destructive man all along the line and not just during the early 1970s. I mean, us British had… Syd Barrett? Viv Stanshell? but it just isn’t the same.

You remember I mentioned taking Krzysztof Jaworksi and David Bowie to Fountain Poets in January? I met Marriott Edgar there among others (A. brought ‘The Lion and Albert’; Stanley Holloway made it well-known, but Marriott Edgar originally wrote it).

I like Pa’s sensible pragmatic man-of-the-world approach; he was the original Centrist Dad. Mark my words (say the centrists): the Labour Party won’t hold office again until working class people can learn to be philosophical about their annoying kids being devoured by wild animals.   

('Eh Mushroom, Will You Mush My Room?'... cosmic-hedayat-rumble and cut-ups; 'as stoned as impossible':
you kind of had to be there).

some things just stick in your mind [short story]

This is the time of year when we reflect on is, was, will be and might have been - so, in that spirit, here's my time travel story, 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind' which I read at Writers Unchained in Bristol in September 2018, and which was published in Banana Wings #72 (November 2018) as 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind: The New Adventures of Vashti Bunyan, Holiday Rep'.

'Saara Cantrell'? That was my soulmate's designated stage name when she was a member of Equity back in the day (true story). 'Iris'? We almost called our daughter that, after Iris Murdoch of course - but then we had a better idea. 

This story's 1,500 words long, so will likely take 5 to 10 minutes to read.

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Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind: The New Adventures of Vashti Bunyan, Holiday Rep.

Dear Postwar Consensus Tours,

We’ve booked an excursion with you to Richmond and environs during the later 1960s this fall. Please could you arrange for Vashti Bunyan, Jerry Cornelius and friends to show us all the cool places?

Yours sincerely,

D.S. Ketelby & Saara Cantrell

Dear D.S. & Saara,

We look forward to welcoming you on our No Satisfaction tour which, we can confirm, will be going ahead despite recent controversy. We will keep this under review, subject to Time Ministry advice.

We can confirm that Vashti is looking forward to welcoming you and other aficionados of 1960s counterculture. Though you have travelled with us before, please read the enclosed guidelines (updated). We particularly draw your attention to the need to take only clothing and products that our Orientation Team supply, to remain in character throughout, and to rendezvous promptly at the return point. The porting of modern artefacts and/or holding of anachronistic conversations remains a statutory offence; any need to send a Retrieval Team will incur extra charges and may invalidate your insurance.

We remind you that while Vashti Bunyan is a real personage and our representative, Jerry Cornelius is a fictional character created by Michael Moorcock, featuring in stories written by Moorcock and others. You will recall making a similar error when booking our 1976 IMF Crisis Weekend Break last year. To recap: while Elaine Paige, Leonard Rossiter and Siouxsie Sioux are real, Jerry Cornelius, The Saint and Ted Heath are all just pretend.

Please do not use ‘this fall’ for ‘this autumn’; neither you nor we are Americans.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Adonis,

Customer Liaison Officer,

Postwar Consensus Tours

Dear Andrew,

We’re greatly looking forward to meeting Vashti and the rest of team. We will, of course, remain in character throughout and have, in fact, been method acting during the last fortnight in order to ‘tune in’ – as the phrase is – to the late-1960s ‘vibe’. This has gone largely unnoticed in Glastonbury but has raised eyebrows in Street – even more so, Shepton Mallet!!

One aspect of your letter puzzles us: we, in fact, met Jerry Cornelius in a Woolwich branch of Radio Rentals during last fall’s IMF Crisis Tour. He seemed real enough. Nice chap, in fact.

Yours sincerely,

D.S. & Saara.

Dear D.S. & Saara,

One controversial aspect of time travel vacationing is that some travellers have met real people who are close analogues of fictional characters; this may have been your experience, also the experience of others in your party who fraternised with individuals resembling Wolfie Smith and other Tooting Popular Front personnel. At this time, scientists have determined the apparent instantiation of close likenesses of fictional people to be a harmless side effect rather than anything which warrants concern.

We remind you that you and others of your party have signed non-disclosure agreements preventing you discussing with others your apparent meetings with individuals who resembled but were not Jerry Cornelius, Wolfie Smith et al. We would further underline the need to avoid porting, still less showing, anachronistic artefacts. Members of your party showed Wolfie Smith political literature; we only dropped charges in tandem with our overall non-disclosure settlement. Our Research Department advises that deliberate anachronism could, if uncontained, change our present due to so-called Bradbury Effects. These could, for example, eject Britain from the EU, elect Donald Trump as President of the United States, even cause the ‘Information Superhighway’ to become wildly popular rather than the expensive plaything of scientists in research laboratories, with all the unforeseeable disruptions and distractions that this would entail (I think that I just foresaw them there for a moment; I shuddered). I do not mean to frighten you by positing such dystopian outcomes, merely to impress upon you the importance of following legislation and guidance during your holiday.

We look forward to welcoming you to your Postwar Consensus Excursion, but please continue to follow media coverage, particularly our CEEFAX page. Please do not use ‘last fall’ for ‘last autumn’; neither you nor we are Americans.

Yours sincerely,

Oona King,

Customer Liaison Manager,

Postwar Consensus Tours.

Dear Oona,

We’d very much like to enjoy our tour next week; we’re also wondering about booking the Prices And Incomes (January 1979) Experience for ourselves and our children, Jack and Iris, this Christmas.

However, we’re worried by what we’ve been reading in the Manchester Guardian at the weekend and by Monday’s World in Action special– particularly allegations of a four-cornered pitched battle between mods, rockers, punks and emos in Brighton over Easter. If time destabilisation isn’t real, how can this happen – and if the time tourism industry isn’t in crisis, why is the Government preparing nationalisation plans while ‘hushing up’ such incidents? Also, Saara found in our local Goodwill Outlet a ‘compact disc’ offering five hundred hours of ‘free internet access’ by a company called ‘A.O.L.’ Neither of us know what this means, but it has us worried despite reassurances.

Is it too late to request a refund, so we can visit the Three Cliffs Bay campsite near Swansea instead? Anything for a quiet life!!

Yours sincerely,

D.S. & Saara

Dear D.S. & Saara,

Thank you for your continuing interest in further holidays, despite recent difficulties. We would advise, however, that the 1979 Prices And Incomes Excursion – previously the How Close to the Precipice, Mr Healey? Tour – is not one of our designated family experiences. You may wish to consider, instead, the 1951 Festival of Britain Tour, or for older/ less sensitive children, The Suez Crisis (brochures enclosed).

We are sending you, to express goodwill, a voucher entitling you to a 20% discount against any excursion during our 2025-8 seasons; the Department for Trade and Industry assures us that we will be able to honour these vouchers subject to our nationalisation agreement, updated terms of reference and of course any Time Ministry advisements in force at the time.

We cannot discuss the alleged Brighton incident, as any discussion could prejudice evidence which we (and competitors) later submit to a public inquiry.

Speaking more generally, it appears that some problems encountered during recent days were caused by the successful attempt to neutralise a ‘history hack’. During the course of this ‘hack’, well-meaning progressives attempted to change history by visiting President Clinton in December 1996, Ghost of Christmas Future style, and persuading him to keep his anatomy in his pants thenceforth, excepting the marital bed, bathroom visits, hygiene etc. (‘Pants’ meaning pants, please note, not trousers). The aim was to leverage a narrow victory for Gore in the 2000 Presidential Election, thereby preventing the Iraq War and so on and so forth. An investigative team reporting directly to the COBRA Committee determined that this ‘hack’, if successful, would have caused further unplanned changes, including the worsening of the 2008-9 financial crisis and consequent rise to power as Prime Minister of former telejournalist Jeremy Kyle, his newly formed Common Sense Party achieving a parliamentary majority of ninety. Unfortunately the successful neutralisation of the ‘hack’ caused collateral damage, leading to outcomes which have destabilised our industry and, indeed, the world.

In these circumstances and following yesterday’s Commons announcement, we need to remind you that heretofore we have been constituted as a membership organisation rather than simply a leisure provider. This makes various emergency provisions available to us; as these are now in force, we require members to assist with the evacuation of Company Personnel from affected areas. The late-1960s are amongst the worst of these, with self-designated black bloc anarchists continuing their occupation of not merely Warwick and UEA campuses but also much of Coventry and Norfolk – also France’s Charles De Gaulle currently in talks with Rudi Dutschke, Tariq Ali and others, with hopes of ending the civil war in that troubled country. Vashti Bunyan, a valued company asset, has let us know that she now wishes to embrace a simpler lifestyle, away from history(ies) and closer to the rhythms of Mother Earth.

Our Membership Liaison Database indicates that, as you live cheek-by-jowl with smelly hippies anyway, you would be the most suitable household to receive Ms Bunyan and her companion. We have acquired land near Somerton for your resettlement next weekend; in the meantime, company personnel will visit in order to disconnect water, electrical, phone and wi-fi connections in order that Ms Bunyan and her companion can begin to accustom themselves to a more agrarian mode of life. If you do not yet know what “wi-fi” means, please account yourselves fortunate to live one of those areas that has remained relatively safe from destabilisation hitherto.

As you will cease to have access to a telephone and as stamps will become difficult to obtain (except when bartered for produce during infrequent journeys into town), we suggest you communicate with us henceforth by carrier pigeon, or by telepathy which Ms Bunyan’s companion states that he can teach, having learned it from a lama in dreams – not a llama, please note, but a lama, a Tibetan holy man.

We hope that you will be able to view this as an opportunity rather than an imposition; think of it as the chance to experience, if you’ll forgive me, a new England in the fall.

Yours sincerely,

Lembit Opik,

Chief Executive Officer,

Postwar Consensus Tours. 

Dear Lembit,

Oh.

Sincerely,

D.S. & Saara.

Endnote: This story is intended as an affectionate though belated seventieth birthday tribute to Michael and Mary, the best parents in this or any other timeline, who've lived the post-WWII years one at a time and mostly in the right order.