Hay Ho

I had every intention of writing this as a live blog whilst visiting the Hay festival but while we did manage to jump onto some super wi-fi service in the middle of the camping field the battery on my lap top ran out so I didn’t get the chance. I’m going to present it in one big chunk otherwise it will be the wrong way round.

Wednesday.

It pissed it down most of Wednesday which led to our first event – a visit to a nearby eco house – being slightly uncomfortable. There were far too many people for the size of the house and this led to jostling umbrellas whilst outside and a lack of space inside. None of the three mini bus drivers seemed certain of where the place was either and they initially drove straight passed it.

The house is owned by Elaine Brook. After 12 years in Tibet and seeing how the people there lived and with a rising awareness of the human impact on climate she returned to Britain and decided to live as in tune with the earth as she could, setting up the Gaia Partnership to pass on skills she has learned about ecological living and self sufficiency.

Mention of ‘Tibet’ and ‘Gaia’ might produce images of tye-dyed flowing skirts, beads and veggie baps, it did for me, but Elaine doesn’t fit the stereotype at all except in two respects – she had a big beaming smile which never left her face and seemed filled with enthusiasm – despite the forecast.

Her one acre garden was on a bank in several naturally stepped layers well used growing vegetables and fruit. Hidden on some levels were little huts where volunteers or students could stay. A swimming pool (covered over today) is in one corner heated by the left over warm water from the solar panels in the roof of the main house. For Elaine showing how something as luxurious as a swimming pool can be ran ecologically is important to counter the image of hairy shirt austerity that eco-living can sometimes conjure.

We went along here to be inspired. Most people I know harbour some desire to live as self sustainably as possible – though they don’t know how to go about doing it. But far from a lifestyle choice the time when this type of living shifts from a decision to a necessity is fast approaching – whether we like it or not. They say any culture is 9 meals from anarchy (in the bad sense of that word) and when you consider how infantile our dependence on supermarket culture is you see how easy it could be for us to lose those 9 meals. It very nearly happened in 2000 during the petrol blockades. So what would we do then?

If it happened now we would be fucked.

In the afternoon we took a trip into the town and began to trawl the array of bookstores. We began our ‘spot the thinking celebrity’ competition my girlfriend taking an early lead by spotting Dylan Moran browsing the politics section of a bookstore on the high street.

Later we went to ‘Dark City’ a debate about the influence of the City on our ecological survival. The wind outside ominously rattled the tent throughout like we were in a cliché ridden novel. This was chaired by the Director of the New Economics Foundation with John Kay (an economist),  Nick Robins (an ethical investment banker) and James Marriot an artist/activist who fronts an organisation for ecological justice called Platform. 

It was more three fellas giving there opinions and flogging their books than a debate but was interesting all the same and it introduced me to the New Economics Foundation, which seems like an extremely important organisation. I can’t say it cleared anything up for me but did stir us into discussing whether things really can change from the top down or whether they need to change from the bottom up. The bottom up was being covered by tomorrow’s debates which revealed something significantly different about the two positions.

Later I clocked Monty Don and Marcus Brigstocke, 2 – 1 to me

Thursday

We decided against getting up early to see Ben Fogle. Partly on account of us being sure we wouldn’t see Ben Fogle or anything else on account of the army of menopausal women who would no doubt be mobbing him (they were the evening before at the book signing – it was frightening).

So we went to see a talk about the Transition Movement with the movement’s founder Rob Hopkins and Rosie Boycott, chaired again by the NEF Director Andrew Simms, telling the same introductory jokes but just about getting away with it because they were sticking it to the man. Man.

The talk was inspirational. Yesterday’s talk about what the City should be doing was just that. A talk about what the City should be doing. This was a talk by people doing it. The Transition Movement has only been going a couple of years but is spreading virally throughout the world. It’s goal is to try and inspire people in their local communities to reconnect and prepare for Climate Change and the impending Oil Peak. There is probably one where you live (check the site) and if not there is information about how to start one in your community. It would be hard coming out of the talk not itching to be involved. People often switch off from enviro talk because of how crushingly depressing the prospects are. Particularly if you are waiting around for the government and corporations to do anything about it. But this movement is entirely hopeful as well as necessary and can really galvanise people when they become involved. It does what marches only give a sliver of – it empowers. I was cheered by seeing a column in yesterday’s Guardian about how the movement could be an inspiration for a new political ideology  . I’m not sure what Rob Hopkins would think of this (the movement is meant to be apolitical) but I think it’s a great idea.

(I just checked and he’s posted it on his blog – int intnet brilyant!)

After another visit to the town we went to see Michael Deeley, the producer of The Italian Job, Wicker Man, Deer Hunter and Blade Runner interviewed by someone who looked like they weren’t born when High School Musical was released, let alone Deeley’s best known films. It was mildly interesting but not particularly revealing. There was a sequel planned for the Italian Job (the Mafia save ‘em at the end by the way), he didn’t like Michael Cimino one bit and Blade Runner’s his favourite (though he’s under the delusion everyone considers it a Ridley Scott/Michael Deeley film).

Much more interesting was Franny Armstrong, the director of the new ‘Age of Stupid’ film , talking about the making and significance of it. This was more interesting from a social and film point of view as she detailed how she managed to get it funded and a new model for exhibiting, to get the message out. I was pissed off at first as George Monbiot was meant to be interviewing her but he’d apparently decided to save his emissions and didn’t show. Franny Armstrong and Mark Lynas were both funny and interesting though, especially when they argued over whether we were all utterly doomed (Lynas’ position) or there was some hope (Armstrong). She spoke of a new Not Stupid campaign to try and put pressure on our representatives before they go to Copenhagen in December to decide what’s best for us. Go to the website and do something. No really. Do.

We may be fucked but do you really want to tell the next generation you didn’t at least try something as the world we left them roasts to a cinder?

Friday

Another trip to the town as the sun beamed down and down. I spot 2 minor thinking celeb types but can’t remember their names so will combine them into 1 point – 3,1 to me.

Later we go to a debate about the effect of the digital world on publishing with Steve Haber from Sony (developer of the new digital book thing and a dead on double for Al Gore, minus the charisma if you can imagine that), Jessica Powell from Google, (didn’t have much to say but was nice to look at), Caroline Michel, PFD agent (reactionary type, peacocking a lot) and Jamie Byng, owner of publishing company Canongate  (a man who drawled his words to the length of his carefully coiffured hair). Mr Byng, annoying as hell at first, ended up talking the most sense, dropped the drawl and started to almost bubble with excitement at the possibilities the new world can offer publishers and creatives. It turned into the Jamie Byng show and by the end of the talk he’d persuaded everyone that the internet was great for publishing and pretty much everything else and that it was alright to download stuff for free. Which is good.

We didn’t have anything else planned for the day so picked out a couple of things not sold out. I went to see a talk about Paranoia by Messrs Jason and Daniel Freeman. In summation people are getting more paranoid and it’s the media’s fault. As stunningly obvious as this was I was amused by reactions from some in the audience who aggressively attempted to justify their own paranoia as if the brothers Freeman had targeted them personally for criticism. Which seemed a bit paranoid to me.

My girlfriend spots Jeremy Paxman and gets a smile off him. It’s still only 1 point! 3 – 2

Saturday.

My girlfriend spies Richard Madeley buying a coffee and sneaking off with the cafe’s complementary Daily Mail. Old habits die hard I guess. 3 – 3

We went off to see a talk about the meaning of modern design by Deyan Sudjic. He was witty and interesting but on reflection didn’t seem to say all that much. The gist seemed to be design might contain within it significance- but it might not – and if it did he wasn’t really saying what it was. Perhaps the ultimate gist was ‘buy the book, cheapskates!’ which I might have done had I not just spent 8 quid for the privilege of listening to him.

Just after we went to see Alain de Botton talking about the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work – his new book. De Botton was also witty and engaging. But again, I later started questioning what exactly he was saying.

In short he’d hung around with various people going about their various jobs. From this he’d discovered lots of people didn’t like their jobs (because they had become dissociated from the meaning, or worth, of their jobs due to the necessity of specialisation in an industrialised culture), he figured lots of people went off track because of some small thing that had happened in their youth, he reckoned many people’s sense of identity was fixed by their career but he reckoned lots of people liked working cause it distracted them from thinking about things like death.

He then revealed in response to an audience question that he thought the free market economy, as espoused by Adam Smith was the only way to stop the bottom 15% of the population dying – or some such.

Now I would have thought that Adam Smith’s philosophy had been proved wanting. There is no trickle down, there’s barely a drip. We have a so called free market economy and it has lead to a massive proportion of the world’s poorest suffering misery and death as a result. It’s also lead to people not being disconnected from the meaning of their work due to specialisation, but to the creation of much totally fucking pointless work. Which is why they find no meaning in it. There isn’t any.

We also found out his favourite biscuit is a fig roll.

After de Botton we did a last swing round the bookstores. On the way we spotted an Asian man jogging uncomfortably along the road. It was Raj Persaud! TV psychologist and plagiarist. I reluctantly conceded my girlfriend recognised him first, 3 – 4. She wins.

I was most looking forward to our last event. An interview with David Simon, writer of ‘The Wire’ and ‘Generation Kill’ amongst others. He comes across as a man of real integrity, obviously intelligent with a sharp gallows wit, probably honed by hanging around with people who’ve stared at the darker side of life – and staring at it himself. He talked mostly about his books, ‘Homicide’ and ‘The Corner’, how he got into journalism, what it meant to him, the state it was in, how he accidentally fell into television drama, Baltimore and other things.

He’d begun the talk by, essentially, calling all we Wire addicts sad acts (‘approaching ‘get a life’ territory’ was how he put it) but it was great just being in the presence of someone you respect that much. It’s not personal and it’s only for an hour but I guess that’s one of the reasons people come along to literary festivals like this. It’s not for the music or the comics, though they’re there. And I doubt it’s for the politicians, though they tag along too. People come to share ideas, to be inspired by them and to take them back wherever it is they’re from (the south – almost exclusively) but they also come to just spend a little time in the presence of people they respect. Who’ve moved them and shook them with nothing more than the contents of their heads – that’s what people come for.

That and to get a glimpse of that dreamboat Ben Fogle.

GUFF – Part 1

A friend of mine, an art teacher during the 1960s, once recounted why he quit the position. One year a student, for his final piece, pinned a map to a wall and threw a dart at it. He got an A.

My friend quit his job the next day and went on to become a psychologist instead. I can’t help but think it an appropriate switch.

This will be a regular review of the art presented at the Baltic Art Mill/Factory/Gallery. I won’t hide my disdain for the majority of contemporary art while expressing an inexplicable appreciation for some of it. I’ve not studied art in any academic way but I’ve always held that if you need a detailed understanding of Lyotard or Deleuze to appreciate a work of art then it’s failed on some deeply fundamental level. But that’s my hang up.

Anyway, here are the reviews

Top floor – Sarah Sze – Tilting Planet.

You have to wait in a cue to see this work. Not so much because it’s popular as because the work comprises of lots of bits of stuff on the floor and bits of wool and string stretching to the ceiling. Squares of carpet, screws, A4 sheets of paper, bits of plastic, zips – y’know – stuff, all arranged in a way that dictates the path you have to walk around. The handy booklet has it, ‘initially, one might feel adrift in her doodles with consumables, however we are soon guided by Sze’s spatial compositions that appear like the scaffolding of air currents.’

I don’t have a clue what a scaffolded air current would look like myself but you don’t feel that adrift in the doodles because there’s a handy Baltic worker stood there to make sure you don’t trod on anything or walk into a bit of taut wool. Apparently Sze’s work “affirms the periphery…thus erasing spatial hegemony”. Translation: ‘reminds us big rooms have corners.’

The guide: ‘When looking at the stuff used to make contemporary art there is often a nagging suspicion that things mean things’ however with Sze’s work, ‘There are no hidden meanings; the significance of her materials is that they are universally insignificant.’ Which leaves me wondering how much this display of insignificance cost.

On the upside it was colourful and some little kids liked the piled up bits of lego. Downside – they couldn’t touch them.

Guff Factor – 8

3rd Floor – Various Artists – A Duck for Mr Darwin

A contemporary art response to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolutionary thinking in general. A bit of an island in one corner, colour coded found objects in another, a big picture of a bull, a boat with a rotoscoped screen expressing the impossibility of absolute knowledge or something, a video of horny turtles and some worms in a box. Nuff said.

My advice: read some Darwin or Dawkins and go to a museum.

Guff Factor – 6

2nd Floor – Tobias Putrih & Mos – Overhang

A big tower of blocks precariously placed. As an extension a table has small blocks people can assemble so they can question ‘how much freedom can be offered before the system will fail?’ or ‘how artists’ decisions affect the rules of the game in the context of the art institution?’

Appropriate questions all in all but how some blocks on a table ask them is beyond me. Overhang ‘undermines the apparent objectivity of science’ so I’m told, though it’s anyone’s guess how it does that. It’s just a big frozen game of Jenga in a large room to me.

Guff Factor – 7

Ground Floor – Matt Stokes – The Gainsborough Packet

A folk song and film for it based on a letter someone found from 1828 written by John Burdikin. No, I don’t know who he is either. The video is shot nicely enough. Some money’s been spent on it and if the actors weren’t singing to camera with jolly, kids TV faces pasted on I’d say it captured an atmosphere pretty succesfully. I do like a bit of folk music but I can’t say I liked this particular song – but whatever floats your boat. My main issue with this is that I don’t know what it’s doing here in the first place. It should be on some folk version of MTV not in an art gallery.

One recurring bug bear about contemporary art I have is that much of it is comprised of work done much better by people in other industries. Saying that, as far as video art goes this beats most of it hands down. Video art often contains things like a man with a cone on his head jumping up and down to music played backwards, filmed with a hand held video camera. No doubt some of that ilk will crop up here before too long. So, even though it shouldn’t be here this does show some skill at something but if that’s the best you can say for the entire building’s content it’s not great. Are we really supposed to appreciate this more than other music videos because it’s looped on a big screen in an art gallery?

Guff Factor – 5

Honestly I do like some contemporary art. Just none of this I’m afraid. But do feel free to explain to me what I’ve missed and I might be able to go back and appreciate it more.

This post needs more pics. I’ll add some later.

May-be Day

Mayday has always been workers day though you might not know it. The commercial machine, for unsurprising reasons, hasn’t exactly jumped on it like Valentines, Mother’s, Father’s, Second Cousin’s Day and the only representation of it most normally see is the twee remnant of its earlier incarnation as a pagan festival – maypoles (symbolic representations of erect cocks) and morris dancers (once a training for warfare).

But every year many places have solidarity marches for workers and, these days, none workers too. I’d heard of one taking place in Newcastle so decided to go along. I faltered a little I admit. A wee leftist spat had sprung up in the comment section of the Indymedia site as the march advertised clashed with the regular mayday socialist workers march and the latter took umbrage. This led me into a collision of acronyms which took a little while to decipher and almost kept me at home. The SWP were unhappy with the FRFI and the RCG and I discovered these stood for Socialist Workers Party, Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism and Revolutionary Communist Group – the latter two being the same group as far as I can gather.

Anyway, as it was the SWP who started the spat and as I only knew anything was going on due to the FRFI/RCG advertising it I decided to join up with them – they were all meant to be getting together later anyhow. However, turning up at Grey’s Monument 10 minutes before the kick off and seeing only half a dozen people putting up banners I skulked past and went down to the Life Centre to see if the traditionalists had drummed up more support.

Fortunately they had. A couple of hundred people of varying ages and groups. Unionists, Marxists, Peaceniks and the like. Some veterans from earlier, probably better attended, marches to wee bairns carrying flags their parents had shoved in their hands, all headed by a smartly suited brass band. A colourful bunch it was and a better turnout than I’d anticipated.

The police were helpfully closing off roads and informed the organisers that they’d had to change the route a little as the path beside Haymarket was too narrow due to the renovation works there. Honestly that was the reason. It wasn’t to divert the march just before it passed the Northern Rock building, I’m sure it wasn’t. Only a paranoid cynic would think such a thing.

There were no complaints though and the band lit up and we set off. Myself mainly running around taking pictures but feeling I was doing my bit as at least another pair of feet on the ground. The procession wound its way through the town, up Clayton Street, passed Grainger Market to Monument (where the FRFI/RCG joined in) then up Northumberland Street heading toward Exhibition Park where a small rally was to be held. All the way Saturday shoppers stopped and gawped, ‘woss ‘appenin?’ An elderly marcher pointed at some as we passed and shouted, ‘we’re marching for you! This is for you!‘ And he was right, it was, though most of the pointed at wouldn’t have known what the fuck he was on about I imagine.

The march was bright and noisy enough, if not exactly united. The loudspeakers tended to compete with each other rather than howl a unified chant and after the FRFI/RCG joined their was a palpable sense of animosity from some. The FRFI/RCG seemed to be partly comprised of anarchists despite the ‘Communist’ appellation in the acronym and some of the marchers didn’t like this. One woman berated her husband with ‘I told you we should have walked with the unions‘ after finding herself stuck behind the black banners.

The anarchists themselves were stuck behind banners from the Passport and Identity Services Union who were getting wound up by the ‘no borders!’, ‘free movement!‘ yells from behind.

‘Don’t let them get to you‘ one banner holder soothed another, who looked as though she was about to start swinging with the business end of her banner. I’ve no idea if the anarcho/commie hybrid bloc were deliberately winding up their fellow marchers but it was pretty funny anyway. Even funnier when they dropped their leaflets and half of them started scrambling around to salvage as many as they could, getting in everyone else’s way.

The procession ended up in exhibition park where a marquee had been set up hosting tressles full of leaflets and leftist literature. Nearby a small stage was erected and various speakers and musicians played and speechified for a crowd in the springtime sun.

I found it all pretty edifying all in all despite the collisions of opinion. The odd heckle to the stage from a contrarian at least revealed passion and there’s a desperate lack of that about out there in the Land of Cowell. Of course I could write here about how the left won’t get anywhere without unifying blah blah blah and maybe I will later but right now I’m just going to leave it as positively as my malcontented mind will allow. The police this time weren’t brandishing clubs at least and though I doubt the affair will even make the local evening news, let alone shift the political spectrum on its horns, it was good, again, to see a bunch of people daring to believe they can make the world a fairer place for more people.

What’s to criticise in that?

Easy Target

Religion’s stupid isn’t it.

I mean obviously it is. It’s not even worth arguing about anymore.

Religions are so inherently absurd if their holy books are taken literally – and they’re meant to be – that it’s hardly worth mocking them. They’re not just ridiculous in their women from ribs/virgin mothers/willingly handing your daughter over to be gang raped rather than upset your guest sense – Judges 19:22 to 29 – but also in their social dogmas. Most religious people still hold steadfastly to some absurd moral strictures (eg homosexuals = bad) whilst conveniently ignoring others such as allowance for owning slaves – Lev. 25:44 – allowance for selling your own daughter as a slave – Exodus 21:7 – killing anyone who does any kind of work on the sabbath (except perhaps selling slaves) – Exodus 35:2 – those sort of things. These things are so patently ridiculous that it is no fun making fun of them. The people who came up with it in the first place beat you to the joke. How anyone right minded could believe in a fraction of the jabber that litters the holy books of the world’s great religions is beyond me and is most sensibly answered by concluding that no one right minded could believe it.

But religion has been a staple target of the comic since Aristophanes and I can’t say I haven’t found it funny – but then I’ve got childhood issues to deal with. The Life of Brian is one of the funniest films ever made and people from Bill Hicks when I was a teenager to Stewart Lee last week have made me near soil myself with their religious routines. So after watching Religulous, the new comedy documentary by Larry Charles and Bill Maher, at the weekend and not finding it funny despite everything suggesting I should I started wondering why?

Religious institutions are powerful – no question about that. Politically you just have to look at the religious right in America preventing research into medicine and persuading schools to present intelligent design (creationism) as having any kind of validity as a scientific theory. Morally you just have to look at a bunch of sexually frustrated fuck ups flying into skyscrapers on a promise of getting laid with 12 virgins in paradise. You couldn’t make it up.

Well, you could – but you know what I mean.

One area of comedy, the greater part, has always poked fun at the pomposity of the powerful. The worst authoritarian regimes have usually been the most humorless and were terrified of criticism, especially using humour. In Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose the blind monk Jorge poisons monks who read a hidden Aristotelian text on comedy for fear that raising laughter to an art form would turn religious authority – all authority – on its head, ‘laughter frees the villain from fear of the devil, because in the feast of fools the devil also appears poor and foolish, and therefore controllable’

Ridicule diminishes the ridiculed but that only works as long as the perspective is maintained. It seems quite obvious but I think has been overlooked by the makers of Religulous. If you’re treating something as ridiculous then you have to be consistent. If it’s ridiculous it isn’t to be taken seriously. It’s pathetic. Absurd. There is no point in making any sense of it. But the film – and others who condemn religion in the academic world, such as Dawkins and Hitchens et al – do religion a service by engaging with it seriously – intellectually.

The conclusion of Religulous has Bill Maher ranting about how the world is going to end if we don’t stop religion before it’s too late etc etc. But this counters the entire film’s desire to discredit religion. It hands power back over to it while hoping to strip it away.

Humour isn’t usually an effective political tool – certainly not in a vacuum. It can be useful, in as much as it can shift perception, but the end effect of such a shift isn’t usually reliable. I’d go along with Woody Allen on the subject:

I often feel a little uncomfortable when a comic is too polemical because comedy is usually about seeing the absurdity of things, shifting our sight from the tables and categories we construct to get through our days to how stupid things really are. If you think you have a solid and rational soap box to shout from you are missing how absurd your own position is – in the grand scheme of things. If a comic chooses to aim at an easy subject like religion they should be willing to extend the courtesy to more slippery targets – like themselves and the world entire.

It is true the world might end due to some nuclear backpack wielding fucksnout, his balls backed up so much that he has to sit on a soft cushion, detonating – so to speak – in a major population centre. From one perspective the resulting millions of dead, radioactive fallout and collapse of modern civilisation as we know it would be a really serious thing. But through the eyeglass the civilisation of the 21st century being brought to its knees by a medieval fairy tale and an inferiority complex would in one sense, be incredibly – if darkly – hilarious.

Highland Surprise

Here’s a little something myself and Glen knocked up one afternoon whilst on our holidays

“if you’re not into the whole brevity thing”

This may come across as sour grapes over my previous couple of blogs being too long but I assure you it isn’t. Buut it did get me thinking about brevity and new media.

Noam Chomsky talks in this clip about brevity and concision on television – in relation to why he is rarely on mainstream tv in America.

To be (ironically) brief his argument is that if you were to say something unconventional you would need to provide more evidence to back it up and television doesn’t allow time for that. It structurally demands the repetition of conventional ideas.

But what about the new medium of the internet?

I would have thought that the enormous volume of information on the web would lead to more people reading and viewing more ideas and following up with investigation into more unconventional theories. Perhaps, in part, it does but generally that isn’t what the net is being used for.

Instead the most popular internet platforms seem to demand even more concision and brevity. Whether it be Facebook ‘news’ feeds or Twitter or the Sky News website there is a requirement to be brief or you lose peoples’ interest.
Let’s have a go. I’ll see if I can say something worth saying in the 140 word limit Twitter allows:

“the mainstream press is complicit in the promotion of an ideology that has caused untold deaths globally. Capitalism, through a subtle use o…”

“all drugs should be made legal as the war on drugs has clearly not succeeded in combating the use of narcotics and has simply made multi mil…”

“The profusion of surveillance in our society is a sign of a totalitarian state being stealthily imposed upon the population under the guise …”

Hey, this is fun! Facetious fun. Let’s start a new game!

I’m well aware that information is available if you look for it but that’s part of the trick of the manufacture of consent. You can find things out but ‘they’ know that without a properly functioning fourth estate or education system the majority won’t look.

They’ll go to Jade Goody’s funeral instead.

Hey ho.

PS anyone who wants to see more about Chomsky can watch an excellent film about him here.

Radical Loiterer – Part 2

We decided not to go back to the bank. Stevo’s cynicism flag was being hoisted up and I was wanting a pint so we wandered over to the Globe Pub on London Wall. At the bar I inadvertantly pushed in front of some large fella who, in response to my apology, said, ‘s’orite comrad’

I thought he was taking the piss at first. Not that I was about to complain, this was a monster of a man. His sincerity was confirmed when he pointed at the sky television all the bankers were looking at, playing a 5 second loop of a man bleeding a lot after being hit on the head by a police. ‘Just been in there’ said the man, who’s name I never asked but whom I shall call Barry from here on in, ‘gave some of the filth a go n’all’, said Barry.

An allusion to his involvement in a Tottenham Hooligan gang and his eyeing of ‘them cunts sat on the table over there’. Was enough to make me skulk back over to Stevo.

Of course we were the only ‘comrades’ in the pub full of bankers so it didn’t take him long for him to come over. ‘So which firm are you with?’ was his first question.

‘Firm’

I think I look as little like I belong to ‘a firm’ as anyone you’re likely to meet. Except maybe Stevo. Maybe it was just because of my Northern accent. Maybe it was because I didn’t have trees in my hair. I know sweet fuck all about football so pointed that out to him. This fella, according to the image, could be a footsoldier for the BNP. The left, let’s face it, has become increasingly craven over the last twenty years when it comes to physical confrontation. Despite the rolling news image above our heads the majority of protestors just do not look like that. They have dreadlocks and were mostly raising their hands to show non-violence as the police rushed them.

I wish I’d filmed Barry but was frankly afraid to even mention it considering what he was telling us. I liked him, he was really friendly and oddly principled, but he was here today for a fight and he was making no secret of it. He’d been down to the ‘peaceful one’ on Saturday but today was different. Any second I was expecting him to do a Begbie and go for a table of dressed down suits, but we spoke for a while. I wanted to know how he got into leftist politics, given his tendency for violence is more usually exploited by the right wing. Barry was a Union Man (I’ll keep his job to myself just in case I’ve fluked getting his name right). He’d been involved in the Poll Tax Riots and the Mayday Riots in 2000 and had a very clear sense that it was us against them, and he had the right idea, by and large, about who ‘them’ were. His penchant for hitting policemen was just an added bonus but his real enemies were the bosses, the exploiters, the corrupt politicians. My world view is so blinkered that I can’t understand why those aren’t everyone’s enemies.

Barry was inspired by his grandfather, a former Irish Republican who drilled what was once the socialist ethic behind the IRA into his grandson. I imagine he drilled the acceptability of using violence for political means into him too. And it stuck.

You can make what you like of this brief description of Barry. There’s no doubt that violence by and large plays into the hands of those who want to demonise protestors and I’d never suggest it as an effective tactic. But what about when the ‘protectors’, the police, are the one’s inciting or even instigating the violence? I can say first hand now that I know it happens. And when it does it doesn’t matter what the papers are going to say about it the next day, I’ll tell the truth, if I end up in a situation like that I think I’d want Barry, rather than Swampy, stood next to me.

I’d had a text that the climate camp had been set up outside the climate exchange building so we went up there next. The camp was very small. A trio of cambridge footlights types were spreading the word through ‘comedy’ then declared we could all learn more through a game of top trumps in a little while. Stevo and I chuckled and went back to the pub. Stevo had had enough. He couldn’t understand why so many of the protestors didn’t just dress like ‘ordinary’ folk, that way they’d be taken more seriously by other ordinary folk and could achieve more. He had a point. Some of the protestors quite studiously dress themselves to look like woodstock hangovers, the same blanket and all. Of course the cameras gravitate towards them because their painted face obviously makes them look more credible. I have to wonder how this identification through uniform is any different from a Nathan Barley type with flip flops on his ears? It costs less but it’s the same misguided obsession with appearance that says more about the person, on camera, than the words that might be coming out of their mouth.In the end if you wear a uniform you seperate yourself from anyone not wearing the uniform.

Stevo went home but I decided to hang around a while longer. I went back up to the climate camp and in the intervening half hour it had spread all along the road outside the carbon exchange centre. There were hundreds of tents, a compost toilet, bicycle powered sound systems playing for avant garde dancers who were soon (mercifully) joined by others, people just having fun. Vegetarian food was being served on camping stoves and workshops were taking place up and down the street. Sure the Workers Climate Control workshop was attended by a group whose last job was probably their work experience at a cat sanctuary but fuck it, something was happening. I’m not entirely sure what was happening. But something was happening. A little drink had been flowing, but I saw nothing but people digging the ludicrous hope that they could save the world before it’s too late.

I hung around for a while then wandered back down to the Bank of England area where someone penned in was busy dying. Someone who’s death had been exploited by the Daily Mail and the campaigners within a day, before anyone actually knew what he was doing there (as of writing I still don’t know. Rumours and counter rumours suggest the police may have attacked the man or that he wasn’t in the pen at all).

I started flagging so thought I’d get back to the climate camp with a bottle of wine and have a dance. Unfortunately by the time I got back there the police were piling out of riot vans and had begun penning in the camp area. Increasingly agitated police began pushing back a growing crowd of people stuck outside the line. As dusk fell more joined the crowd which generally remained upbeat, playing music and singing. A couple of tents sprung up on this side of the line as people waited, presumably, for the police to open the camp up but they didn’t. I began talking to an Italian fella called Marco, a veteran of the Genoa demonstrations in 2001 where a protestor was killed by police. I spoke to several people who had been there and at other demos and was left with the impression that the police in Italy and Germany were much more brutal than our British police, despite how they were behaving today. Marco said he still occasionally wakes up with bad dreams after what happened at Genoa. Both of us lamented that we weren’t inside the camp which was applying the tactic of having as much fun as was possible which must have been winding the police up who, by now, will have been bored out of their tiny little minds.

It all seemed like fun until we saw the occasional person being brought out by police medics with wounds to their head. The police were apparently hitting people near their line according to the odd person who managed to get out. We were simply having a party of our own joined by people from elsewhere increasingly liquored up and pissed off at the police who eventually brought up another line of riot clad colleagues to face in our direction. A group conducted a small sit down protest in the road blocking the traffic for a while which was redirected after a long cue tailed back up the road. I got to thinking how many of the police must have sympathised with the protestors. At the end of the day the campers here were not violent at all. The vast majority of people were just hippies and the cambridge footlights. Barry would not have come down here. Yet you can see in this clip  the police surge at the protestors, most of whom are just holding up their hands to show they are not fighting back. (this was at the other end of the road to where I was. Note than unlike the footage you might have seen outside RBS there are next to no news cameramen here)

Some of these police must know the knife edge the climate of the world is balanced on or, more personally, some of them must be struggling with paying over inflated mortgages. Those of the latter must in fact be quite grateful as they’ll be getting some overtime to help pay for it. Anyway I didn’t bother asking them how they felt. I can understand they were ‘just doing their jobs’ but the message from on high seemed to have been ‘behave like cunts’ and that’s exactly what all the police were behaving like, which accelerated when they began to push us down Bishopsgate. You couldn’t say they weren’t taunted, but who really taunted who first? It’s unusual how perfectly normal people tearing up road bollards and throwing them at police feels on a day like this. But this sort of thing wasn’t going to be left alone and though the crowd wasn’t huge the police went in hard in their push. Just around the time my camera battery went dead.

I was largely just chatting with Marco throughout who was calmly wheeling his bike down the road with each police charge. At some point he asked me to look after it while he went off for a piss down a sidestreet and the police chose this moment to push again leading to my hairiest moment. I moved down a parallel side street with a handful of other people followed by shouting police with a barking dog for each of us. I wasn’t remotely confrontational yet they came at us for a while and I honestly think they and their dogs would have torn shit out of me had they been inclined to come any further. Fortunately they stopped after a few hundred yards and returned to their main line. Marco was street wise enough to figure where I’d go. You could tell he’d done this sort of thing before.

And that was the end of that. I wandered round the streets with Marco for a little while searching for a pub then realised that I really should get back to Stevo’s before it got too late so said my goodbyes. We planned on meeting up the next day but it didn’t happen so if you’re out there reading this Marco, take care, it was fun.

And it was. It was fun, at least until the police started getting a hard on for hitting hippies.

I got up fairly early on Thursday to get down to the demo outside the Excel Centre where the various dignitaries were meeting to decide how best to pretend that the system collapsing around our ears can carry on as usual. I’d got my hopes up that it was somehow going to be bigger than the day before but when I arrived there were no more than a hundred or so people split into a few different camps. Ethiopians and Congolese banged drums and shouted at the police who were outnumbering the protesters at this point and a small pocket from the Stop the War Coalition were there chanting, ‘what do we want?’, ‘jobs not bombs!’, ‘When do we want it?’, ‘Now!’

My utopic vision would have no bombs or jobs. At least pointless drone like jobs anyway, so I was immediately disconnected from their vision. I hung around for a couple of hours. The crowds gradually grew but not by the expected amounts and we were nowhere near the Excel Centre. The dignitaries wouldn’t have heard us even if we’d turned the volume up to 11. It was interesting to see some anarchists square up to a BNP member they recognised who was filming the crowd, but by and large it just felt like standing in a disused car park with a lot of people I didn’t know. When an obnoxious, cockney fella who was making a documentary started talking to me I decided to leave. I’d heard activity was taking place back in the city and intended going there but on the way had an attack of pessimism so decided to go to the Tate Modern instead.

The late Bob Wilson said the joy of art lies in trying to get others to see things from our point of view, see the world from the same reality tunnel as he put it. The artist tries to do this through seduction. ‘There are rapists in the intellectual world,’ Bob said, ‘and they become politicians, the seducers become artists’

I subscribe to this view but I must admit that I haven’t a clue what reality the seducers of contemporary art are trying to get me to see. If it is a reflection of a society then it’s effective as the majority of it is as vacuous and as empty as the system that has created it. But if I go back a little further to the impressionists, the surrealists, the early expressionists something was happening there. I’m not exactly sure what that something was but, for me, there was definitely something happening.

So the marchers of the last few days. The thousands on the street saying ‘please, please see it our way’ – were we seducers or rapists?

The demand is for political action but politicians force and the demonstrators don’t – they demonstrate. And these demonstrators with their knots in their hair, their pedal bike sound systems, their avant garde dance, horns, whistles, drums and guitars, their costumes and their banners, are not forcing. They are saying ‘you don’t have to do it like that – you can do it like this’. What that ‘it’ is you couldn’t rightly say with clarity but it is something. It’s definitely something. And perhaps with all the scrawled words, printed pamphlets and chants it doesn’t really matter anyway. Marshall Mcluhan was well known for inventing the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ by which he meant (for want of not pontificating too loudly like the man in the movie line in Annie Hall) the content of a medium is not as important, in terms of it’s social influence, as the medium itself. That social influence can take place over a long time, disguised in large part by the content itself. So, if all the banners and the noise were the content of this art form what exactly was the medium?

I’m not going to answer that question. Not least because to do so would require me to lower my cynicism defence mechanism and I couldn’t possibly be having that. I think I’ll just leave it for you to figure out.

For me my day at this demo was over. I wandered around the creative overflow of the 20^th Century, missing being back home, so I decided to cut my cultural outing short and went to find a gift to bring back up north. I went to put my thruppence worth back into the stumbling economic horse that pretty soon no amount of flogging will ever get back up again.

I went shopping.

Radical Loiterer – Part 1

Many years ago whilst I was at university I remember sitting in the quad one day whilst a protest against student tuition fees went by. The protest consisted of no more than half a dozen of the well intentioned, yet they seemed to find it necessary to speak to each other through a loud speaker which they actually passed around. If they weren’t being so earnest and if there’d been an audience of more than me I’d have been convinced they were doing it for comedic effect. Instead I thought they were just ridiculous and any pretensions I may have had to get involved in radicalism were diminished that day.

A lot has happened in the intervening years. I’ve always kept up with politics whilst doing, largely, nothing about it but complaining and occasionally voting. I’ve missed a fair few notable demonstrations which left me with a peculiar mixture of disappointment and guilt so when I heard of the protests planned for this week I checked my diary, saw it was free and decided to go down and see what was going on, with a trusty wee digital camera that I could pocket easily and run away with should the need arise.

I failed utterly in persuading friends to come along. Largely because most of them have not yet been touched by this doom laden crash and are still gainfully employed, so I packed up and went down on my own. I flirted with taking a plane down, just cause I thought it would be funny, but it cost too damn much so I bused it instead. I shacked up in an old friend’s flat in Kensington. I’d brought down a sleeping bag and a roll matt in case I decided to stay at the planned climate camp on Wednesday night but spent Tuesday just planning what I was going to do the next day.

Events had been planned for much of the week to coincide with the collection of world leaders gathering for the G20 meetings called to try and stop them all from looking so silly. 40,000 had marched through London on Saturday 28^th and several different events were organised for the 1st, dubbed Financial Fool’s Day by some of the organisers. A Stop the War coilition March was going to head for Trafalger Square for a rally, A climate camp was to be set up at Bishopsgate outside the Carbon Exchange Building, an Alternative G20 summit was going to take place at the University of East London and four marches led by the Four Horsefolk of the Apocalypse were going to converge on the Bank of England at midday. It was to one of these that I decided to add myself. The four horsefolk were representing different grievances. One was climate change, a green horse, a red horse for war, a black horse against disposession and in honour of the English Civil war movement, the Diggers (celebrating their 360th anniversary this year), and a Silver horse marching against Financial Crimes. The latter was my horse of choice for a number of reasons. Firstly, I had persuaded Stevo to join me on our march and he has something of a liberal interventionist bent, politically speaking, also if the anti-war march had descended into violence I think the irony filter in my head might have imploded. The diggers, black horse march was out because, though the story of the diggers is hugely inspirational and their ideals definitely desirable, the thing had also been promoted in part as a march for the homeless. Now I have every sympathy for those who find themselves homeless but I have to admit a prejudice in that I tend to conflate homelessness and beggers. And beggers annoy the fuck out of me. You can see my flirtation with radical protest might run into problems sooner or later. Climate change is certainly something worth protesting about but to me the cause of climate change rests in the financial system itself. I am of the belief that any attempt to fix the climate will fail without a restructuring of the entire money system and it’s addiction to growth – but I’ll talk about that elsewhere.

So the silver horse it was. Each of the marches started at a particular underground station, ours was London Bridge. On arrival their was initially a sinking sense of disappointment as only a hundred or so people were loitering around, about half of which were camera crews and other reporters all aiming to interview the most ridiculous looking of the protesters, kids dressed like it was the early 80s again. Which would be fitting of course but my guess is they wouldn’t have known it. As well as the professional news crews swarming about there were as many, if not more, independents like myself shoving cameras in everyone’s faces. At this point I gave up on my idea of interviewing people. I’d just record what I see and then worry about what to do with it later. Every time I heard a question from professionals and otherwise it was the same question and the same answer.

‘what are you angry about?’ or some variation

‘the fucking greedy bankers!’ or some variation

I wonder how many others in the audience would have answered with anything more specific. My assumption from hearing talk, interviews and from viewing banners was that the fury was primarily aimed at the bonuses and twat bankers getting massive taxpayer pay offs. It’s fair enough being furious about that of course, but really the problem (if it is one) is not about Fred Goodwin’s pay off. It’s much, much bigger than that.

Shortly before the planned 11 0′clock set off a platoon (I just can’t help but fall into that kind of language) of cyclists carrying banners and making noise arrived from across the bridge. We then noticed how big the crowd had got beneath the overpass we were stood on and I felt like that funny looking elf and his gang had just arrived at Helm’s Deep.

The rest of the crowd seemed to be made up of general onlookers, average joes (though always young average joes) and pockets of masked anarchists who largely just looked funny. Three would walk past, one tall and skinny, a little fat one in the middle and a medium at the back. There was the occasional anarchist who didn’t seem to care a less about the mask and news crews liked them, as did some spivvy little record salesman shoving his CDs in selected palms and declaring ‘it’s art next week mate, boiy it, s’bout smashin the system stuff loik that’ he clung to the masked gang all along the march yelling about his fucking record the whole way. Why they didn’t just tell him to fuck off I don’t know.

A little later than scheduled the band struck up, the horse was hoisted and we were off. The walk across the bridge was frustratingly fitful, stopping and starting as cars trapped on the bridge were allowed to pass through the crowd. This amusingly forced an American reporter to repeatedly restart his little speech as the stopping kept ruining his reporting mojo. He got increasingly agitated and if it had carried on I think he might have started smashing things before we’d even got across the bridge.

When across a flood of noise rose up and on the back of it a wave of euphoria. Of course I knew there was never going to be rush on the B of E and I didn’t expect anything to change as a result of our musically accompanied stroll, but at the beginning of the day I was getting flashbacks to those loudspeakers in the University quad and was worried about a low turn out. Yet there were thousands here. All doing something. I’m still not sure what we were doing but we were at least doing – something.

Another wave of noise welled up when we arrived at the bank, loudspeakers were turned on around the boarded up square and people just started dancing and enjoying themselves. Billy Bragg sang the Internationale. I began regretting not bringing a few beers. I saw a little bit of heated discussion between some Turkish Communists and an Anarchist but the police calmed it down. The police seemed nice at first. They were blocking off one of the roads I was stood near. Beyond were a few hundred more protestors (at least) being blocked from getting into the square. When people came over and asked if they could get through the police politely said this area was blocked, they weren’t sure it was open but they could try the other side. This was an interesting tactic, politely sending people who wanted to get out in circles, but they must have well known it wasn’t going to work forever. It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me that their polite protestations of ignorance were horseshit and they all knew fine well what they were doing. This politeness was the only point in the day that I saw police behaving decently – and it was a lie. What the police were doing, essentially, was equivalent to going up to someone in a pub and staring at them. You’re going to get pretty pissed off if someone does that to you for long enough. A man near me started to ask to be let out but was told that noone would be let out until the crowd dispersed. Obviously the Metropolitan police do not hire the nation’s finest minds.

With this enforced incarceration it was only a matter of time before something kicked.

I was not near the push to the RBS where the police were overwhelmed. Myself and Stevo, after doing the walk around, sat down and started doing a quick crossword. My most rebellious act of the day was pissing against the wall of the Bank of England which I didn’t have much choice in, all told.

Still it was a lovely day for it. Those not smashing Bank windows were still happy dancing in the street. The police eventually were pushed back along Queen Victoria Street (though at the time myself and Stevo were unaware of this and thought the police had willingly fallen back). Some protestors stayed (and would end up being trapped for most of the day) but we followed down the road, Stevo continuing his quick crossword and asking the occasional bemused revolutionary, ‘A type of hungarian language, 7 letters?’.

This until the police, again for no discernable reason other than to piss people off, blocked the road once more. Pockets of trouble sprang up but myself and Stevo wanted a pastie by this point and as fortune would have it I noticed a shopping walkthrough back down the road. Surprisingly it was open and on the other side a Tesco Metro was doing brisque business serving the overflow of hungry and thirsty revolutionaries. Every little helps I suppose. A street along large crowds were being hit by bats, here Tesco’s was as if normal.

It’s odd to think of people doing normal everyday things when moments of intense ‘energy’ (for want of a better word) occur. Think of the Somme. A few fields along, some farmer was probably just going about his business, smoking his bines. Obviously I’m not claiming a few protestors having a ruck with the police is anything like as historically relevant as the Somme, but at least something was happening. I’m not sure what was happening, but something was definitely happening one street along.