Monday, April 23, 2007
Bryan Ferry: Art Lover
It’s always a shock to find your idol has feet of clay – or in this case fascist toes in pool of slime. Not that Ferry was ever a real favourite of mine but he first came to notice when I was in my early twenties and he was from the same place as me, at a time when rock and roll was synonymous with anti-establishment mores. And he managed one or two creditable tracks in that cool talking - not singing – way of his. Next he spawned an idle-rich kill-the-beast fox hunting son. Now, he outs himself (apart from that ‘style-period’ of moustache and Stormtrooper gear) as a Nazi sympathiser. Well, he says, that’s not being fascist, he is merely recognising the quality of the art produced by that period of incalculable obscenity against Jews, the disabled, Gypsies and virtually anyone non-Aryan.
I suppose I can call Ferry, legitimately, a Geordie twat, since I grew up in the Blaydon of races fame, rather as Lenny Bruce could castigate fellow Jews without ever being called an anti-Semite.
There appears to be a gruesome cycle for us war babies. We more or less bred a constant stream of explosive and self-imploding rock stars who lived out for us the worst excesses of our fantasies; idols who seemed anti-establishment, young, couldn’t-care-a-fuck and were definitely like us. Now, many of them take gongs from the Queen, spout right wing vacuities and defecate on those once shared dreams.
The ones who have mostly survived this grotesquely lickspittle u-turning are, ironically, the ones who died mid-rock-coitus.
Yet, even their graves are desecrated and pillaged by baby-faced admen and women who use their anthems of ecstasy and despair to sell anything from sleek cars to banking services.
Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty be warned. Your society needs you. For good and ill.
It’s always a shock to find your idol has feet of clay – or in this case fascist toes in pool of slime. Not that Ferry was ever a real favourite of mine but he first came to notice when I was in my early twenties and he was from the same place as me, at a time when rock and roll was synonymous with anti-establishment mores. And he managed one or two creditable tracks in that cool talking - not singing – way of his. Next he spawned an idle-rich kill-the-beast fox hunting son. Now, he outs himself (apart from that ‘style-period’ of moustache and Stormtrooper gear) as a Nazi sympathiser. Well, he says, that’s not being fascist, he is merely recognising the quality of the art produced by that period of incalculable obscenity against Jews, the disabled, Gypsies and virtually anyone non-Aryan.
I suppose I can call Ferry, legitimately, a Geordie twat, since I grew up in the Blaydon of races fame, rather as Lenny Bruce could castigate fellow Jews without ever being called an anti-Semite.
There appears to be a gruesome cycle for us war babies. We more or less bred a constant stream of explosive and self-imploding rock stars who lived out for us the worst excesses of our fantasies; idols who seemed anti-establishment, young, couldn’t-care-a-fuck and were definitely like us. Now, many of them take gongs from the Queen, spout right wing vacuities and defecate on those once shared dreams.
The ones who have mostly survived this grotesquely lickspittle u-turning are, ironically, the ones who died mid-rock-coitus.
Yet, even their graves are desecrated and pillaged by baby-faced admen and women who use their anthems of ecstasy and despair to sell anything from sleek cars to banking services.
Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty be warned. Your society needs you. For good and ill.
Friday, April 06, 2007
Plenty more where they came from…
William Blake invoked us, in his Auguries of Innocence
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Blake also said that he could see the world by going no further than the bottom of his garden. Our understanding of the infinite has probably always been massaged by meditation on the finite.
Meanwhile, our relationship to great and small has become environmentally acute. Fears over erosion of the physical world have led to pressure groups’ virulent attacks on any semblance of human activity that might contribute to it. Ian McEwan’s behaviour is a case in point. He admitted taking a few pebbles from Chesil Bank so that they might perch before him on his desk and encourage poetry and a sense of place in his writing. (He has since returned them, owing to the outcry from beach protectionists.) What do we make of this?
Are we here in the complex world of the ends justifying the means or not? Is the taking of a handful of pebbles a crime of any kind or is it in fact a deeply human act of communion with the planet? If McEwan’s book is wiser and more acutely in touch with the environment because of it, then its intensification of its readers’ empathies with nature would exponentially outweigh the grams lost to the beach. In some expressive way it is connected to our ancestors taking vast boulders to form Stonehenge for, probably, a similar desire to see the infinite through the immediate, to try to touch the stars via a circle of stones. I wonder how long it will be before there is a pressure group wanting them returned to their original hillside.
William Blake invoked us, in his Auguries of Innocence
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Blake also said that he could see the world by going no further than the bottom of his garden. Our understanding of the infinite has probably always been massaged by meditation on the finite.
Meanwhile, our relationship to great and small has become environmentally acute. Fears over erosion of the physical world have led to pressure groups’ virulent attacks on any semblance of human activity that might contribute to it. Ian McEwan’s behaviour is a case in point. He admitted taking a few pebbles from Chesil Bank so that they might perch before him on his desk and encourage poetry and a sense of place in his writing. (He has since returned them, owing to the outcry from beach protectionists.) What do we make of this?
Are we here in the complex world of the ends justifying the means or not? Is the taking of a handful of pebbles a crime of any kind or is it in fact a deeply human act of communion with the planet? If McEwan’s book is wiser and more acutely in touch with the environment because of it, then its intensification of its readers’ empathies with nature would exponentially outweigh the grams lost to the beach. In some expressive way it is connected to our ancestors taking vast boulders to form Stonehenge for, probably, a similar desire to see the infinite through the immediate, to try to touch the stars via a circle of stones. I wonder how long it will be before there is a pressure group wanting them returned to their original hillside.
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Big Brother…
The phrase ‘locus of control’ stems from a mix of jargons from psychology and sociology. It seeks to position, on a spectrum, the degree to which any individual is constrained by others, in his or her behaviour. This spectrum stretches from being personally responsible for all aspects of your own behaviour at one end and being completely externally controlled at the other. If you are among the former, you will sift through all possible actions and choose what you think is the most appropriate for any particular context. If you are from the opposite pole, your behaviours are chosen for you – by the state, the workplace, medicine, your peer group, gang or family. Most citizens exist somewhere in the middle. They behave tolerably well towards others, treating them as they would wish themselves to be treated. They accept that laws are there for good reason. They tend not to commit criminal acts. They recognise the balance that must be struck between the public good and private desire. However, the more that individuals become anti-social, the more they require controlling, ‘for the good of society’.
Controlling the population is a government target, though one they could never make explicit. In previous blogs I have discussed how we might exercise freedom, challenge authoritarianism in local and national settings and enrich debate so that decisions that affect us all are made on good evidence. In the meantime, anti-terrorist legislation, ASBOs, official database access, communications monitoring, interference with impartial judicial procedures and so on, whilst introduced for apparent good reason, are now so lacking in discrimination that that they are accelerating the switch in our so-called liberal society from one where the locus of control is assumed to be internal to the individual to one where it is externally driven.
From the Middlesbrough pilot talking CCTV scheme which denounces bad behaviour on the spot and is now being ‘rolled out’ elsewhere, through to biometric identity cards, we see the shift towards external controls on our behaviours. And all this is carried into being on the willing backs of a population which was first cowed by fear, instilled by our government's hysterical propaganda and then offered the apparent salvation of these ‘necessary safeguards’ of national security.
We become ever more compliant. And ever more open to the remit of totalitarian control. We should all read Orwell’s 1984 again and remind ourselves of our responsibility not to acquiesce without a murmur.
The phrase ‘locus of control’ stems from a mix of jargons from psychology and sociology. It seeks to position, on a spectrum, the degree to which any individual is constrained by others, in his or her behaviour. This spectrum stretches from being personally responsible for all aspects of your own behaviour at one end and being completely externally controlled at the other. If you are among the former, you will sift through all possible actions and choose what you think is the most appropriate for any particular context. If you are from the opposite pole, your behaviours are chosen for you – by the state, the workplace, medicine, your peer group, gang or family. Most citizens exist somewhere in the middle. They behave tolerably well towards others, treating them as they would wish themselves to be treated. They accept that laws are there for good reason. They tend not to commit criminal acts. They recognise the balance that must be struck between the public good and private desire. However, the more that individuals become anti-social, the more they require controlling, ‘for the good of society’.
Controlling the population is a government target, though one they could never make explicit. In previous blogs I have discussed how we might exercise freedom, challenge authoritarianism in local and national settings and enrich debate so that decisions that affect us all are made on good evidence. In the meantime, anti-terrorist legislation, ASBOs, official database access, communications monitoring, interference with impartial judicial procedures and so on, whilst introduced for apparent good reason, are now so lacking in discrimination that that they are accelerating the switch in our so-called liberal society from one where the locus of control is assumed to be internal to the individual to one where it is externally driven.
From the Middlesbrough pilot talking CCTV scheme which denounces bad behaviour on the spot and is now being ‘rolled out’ elsewhere, through to biometric identity cards, we see the shift towards external controls on our behaviours. And all this is carried into being on the willing backs of a population which was first cowed by fear, instilled by our government's hysterical propaganda and then offered the apparent salvation of these ‘necessary safeguards’ of national security.
We become ever more compliant. And ever more open to the remit of totalitarian control. We should all read Orwell’s 1984 again and remind ourselves of our responsibility not to acquiesce without a murmur.
Labels: Prisoners of the State....