‘The Joys Of Work’ – Excerpts of the book by Jake Heretic
Author’s history:
Baron Von Zubb A.K.A Rich Kid A.K.A Jake Heretic’s parents hailed from Stepney but by the time he was born they’d left that all behind and joined the ranks of northwest London’s middle classes. Nice, this rather bored our Baron so after being expelled from school, squatting, punk rock anarchism, heroin and general delinquency as chronicled in the book, Baron went to Asia for several years. There he worked as a small time smuggler, a tailors tout, a film extra and drug dealer.
He has traveled overland to Asia 3 times, smoking opium and drinking alcohol in the Ayatollahs Iran, visited the closed area in Pakistan that is now home to enemy number one Mr. Bin Laden and spent 3 months at The King of Thailand’s pleasure in Klong Prem jail.
He’s lived for months under trees on beaches and swam in the planets cleanest jungle streams in India and Malaysia
His long suffering partner Kay and him organized and actualized a small relief project in the immediate aftermath of Sri Lankas tsunami.
They now live in Brighton, have two nieces and a nephew to keep them sane, are trying to be middle aged and eat masalla dosa weekly.
They visit Asia every winter.
Synopsis
Here’s some extracts from the unpublished novel ‘The Joys of Work’, by Baron Von Zubb; the story of one kids journey from a nullifying suburban background to the revolutionary barricades of post Thatcherite Britain.
Via getting expelled from school, punk rock, squatting drugs, crime, autonomist politics, and the 1981 summer uprisings in Britain’s inner cities, the book chronicles an alternate history of the times.
Written as I traveled in Asia in the mid 1980′s, it was intended to be the first in a trilogy of books, the following two postulating alternate futures, ironically thanks to global warming, based on environmental and societal collapse.
My nomadic lifestyle meant that too many copies just got lost on the way so along with the rejections of ‘The Joys of Work’.
I called it a day.
Thanks to Mickey Penguin and all The K.Y.P.P. crew for putting this up.
Selected excerpts from the unpublished book:
pages 57 – 73 start here This link will drop you on page 57, just use the ‘next’ function to ‘turn’ the pages.
pages 157 – 172 start here This link will drop you on page 157, just use the ‘next’ function to ‘turn’ the pages.
pages 208 – 216 start here etc etc etc.
Please leave comments if you enjoy the excerpts> If you know of any publishers that may be interested in this kind of material, please get in touch
The following books are published, recommended and available: 
A.K.A. Martin Wright: Anti Fascist Action street fights in London and elsewhere during the 1970′s > ISBN 094898435X
A.K.A Daniel Wright: Thieving, drug taking, homelessness in London, true account of Martin Wrights (above) deceased brother > ISBN 1871593212
A.K.A. Bob Blood And Roses: Early punk days in Australia, thieving, drug taking, homelessness in London, true account by Bob Short (not deceased, surprising if you read it!) > ISBN 9780975825846
A.K.A. Nick from Rudimentary Peni: Semi autobiography, shyness and fragile ego, punk, depression > ISBN 0952574403
A.K.A. Sian from The Lost Cherries / Blyth Power: Squatting in Brixton, gigs, crusties, lost loves, Tinsel and even Mickey Penguin is mentioned in this book > ISBN 1412026814
A genuine KYPP success story. Exactly six months after uploading excerpts of this manuscript for you to read and comment on, Jake finally gets these writings into print form. Go get it from lulu.com or alternative bookshops > ISBN 9781409245964
June 7th, 2008 at 1:23 am
I have just had the chance to read what I have uploaded, even though I have had the texts for several days now. Very enjoyable read indeed. References to some of the stories in the KYPP threads, some of the faces on those threads get a mention some under ‘new’ names, and even that band The Heretics get a ‘secret’ mention with the track ‘No character’, a track which was uploaded on this site some months ago and has amassed an amazing 575 odd comments.
Give the excerpts a read people. If anyone knows or is friendly with book publishers then put it into a comment here.
June 7th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Again cheers to Mr P & the KYPP folk for this.
Anyway first comment from me.
If you do recognise your self and it aint good.Oh well, sorry.
Some things are exagerated or left out for effect.
Sam you didnt really remind me of a ‘hippo’. You were ‘Tim’ later on. I had to make all the names of the characters very different to each other, just so I could remember who was who when I was writing it.
Eeeh ooop
J
June 9th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Damn, but both Nick Blinko’s and Bob Short’s tomes appear to be unavialable – I’ll just have to imjagine – on the other hand perhaps I’d better not
June 9th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Re publishers – three that come to mind are AK Press, Spare Change Books (who did the the Primal screamer book above) and Jon Active – have you tried any of these?
Or why not self-publish? Its not that difficult, the only problem is distribution, but I’m sure that that wouldn’t be difficult either, there would certainly be an interest and a market.
Maybe we could have a discussion here on self-publishing and what it involves, I’d be happy to contribute my experiences.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Mo, who used to work at Freedom and I think is now at Housmans published both Martin’s Anti-fascist book and his brothers, Camden Parasites. He might be worth checking too. Self-publishing is a bit dodgy as the cost can be prohibitively high to cover first run print costs (typesetting/cover/binding etc). An important thing to remembers which will apply to your work and I read in a self-publishing guide is to put ‘London, Sociology, Youth Cults, Punk’ by the ISBN as then lots of Libraries (hundreds) will order copies. All helps…
June 9th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Depends what you mean by ‘high’ Chris – type setting can be done yourself by using desk top publishing software – I did my Permaculture Beginners Guide using Serif pagePlus, which is quite cheap to get hold of, I think older versions (which are still newer than the version I used back in 2000!) are even given away free as magazine cover disks, although I don’t really use windows any more and am experimenting with open source DTP software such as Scribus for future Spiralseed publications.
My first print run of 3000 copies of the Permaculture Beginners Guide cost me about 2000 quid, which luckily I was able to borrow from a friend on an interest free, non time limited loan (ie, he let me pay it back as and when I could afford it). The next edition, which is almost ready to go to print, is going to cost more per copy as I’m doing a smaller print run this time (storing 3000 books was a bit of a nightmare!!) and production values will be considerably higher (perfect binding instead of stapled, colour cover and some colour pages inside, a few more pages, etc, etc). Its the use of colour which is the main thing that is pushing up the bill this time.
A grand or two for say, a 1000 copies print run may seem like alot of money, but its not beyond the realms of the possible if its something you really want to do, and there are all sorts of options that will help eg, finding sponsorship or subscription funding (remember back in the day some DIY record labels would ask for people to help pay for the costs of getting a record out upfront, then send extra copies of the record to subscribers once it was released). Advertising is another possibilty, I’m carrying some adverts in the next edition of the Permaculture Beginners Guide, I hasten to add this is VERY selective and by inviatation only, in fact there are only going to be about 4 ads, but these are really helping out with offsetting the costs of the colour printed sections). Ten or so people could get together and put in a hundred or so quid each, costs would soon be recouped on a book like this which I’m sure would sell well, particularly as there seems to be such a resugence of interest in all things punk at the moment, particular such an authentic and original account, as I’m sure everybody is getting bored with the same old photos and annecdotes of The Pistols/Clash/Bromey Contingent lot getting rehashed and repackaged over and over again…
I get most of my printing done by Footprint http://www.footprinters.co.uk who are a workers co-op (part of Cornerstone Resource Centre/Radical Routes, based in Leeds) with very high environmental and ethical standards, and part of ‘our’ movement – contact them for prices/discussion.
I’d also endorse Chris’ comment about talking to Mo at Housemans, also Malcolm at Housmans who has a wealth of experience about the publishing world.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:40 am
I’m doing nothing at the moment, and I used to do DTP for a living a few years back. I haven’t got any of the posh software, but Word 2007 will do the job so if you want any layout for publishing doing, drop me a mail. No charge, obviously.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I’d similarly offer but afraid would have to charge!! But it would be great to see this work in print and available, I found it riveting reading, and thats saying something as I rarely read more than a page or 2 on a computer screen… So would be happy to help with the publication process in some way if this was felt to be appropriate, but as I’m currently trying to create a multiple income stream in order to support my self and family (just went part time in the day job so looking at all (ethical!) options that will help to make ends meet) would have to do it on a basis of obtaining some financial recompense…
Probably wouldn’t really fit with the Spiralseed remit, but always up for creative partnerships and such like!
Something to consider anyway…
June 10th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Thanks for the offers gents.
Pork , is it any good? I mean worth putting the effort into.
The man says ‘riveting’, makes me feel all warm inside but my time for doing anything much with it is long gone. I went as far as could back in the day. If folk read a few pages on this site its good enough for me.
I can give the raw copy to so someone to do with what they will.
cheers J
June 10th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Don’t give it up just yet Baron, and certainly do not give the manuscript away to anyone at this point in time! You put the effort into writing 250 odd pages so run with it a little longer.
See what the vibes are. Give me some more bits to put up on the site.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
if you want something immediate and free then you could always do it as an ebook and sell via paypal.
i’d be happy to help you out with all aspects of this if you want.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Yes – what Penguin said! Meditate on it for a bit, i’m sure a team of the right people could get this work to see the light of day with relativly little effort from or cost to yourself!
June 11th, 2008 at 12:41 am
@BaronVonZubb-> I like it mate. I thought the description of the buildings being in a constant half-light was beautiful, both literally and metaphorically! And that description of the first time on the gear was poignant, honest and well done – and funny too. And let’s face it, the characters are/were people that Martin Amis would sell his granny for, so it has to get into the public domain somehow or it wouldn’t be fair. It had me page turning for all I was worth, and I was well disappointed when the excerpt about the Buildings ran out.
If you want me to do a layout for you, mail it to me (email is on the Chris Low Punk Tape thread) and I’ll give it a pop and mail it back to you. Shouldn’t take long. Like I say, I haven’t got anything on at the moment so it’ll keep me brain from heading south for the Summer
June 11th, 2008 at 12:48 am
Email all of it Pork? It’s over 250 pages long and it almost destroyed the Baron getting those scanned to me to upload on the site! Or have I misunderstood?
I will send your email to the Baron direct via myself here, it may take him a couple of months to find it on that thread!!!
June 11th, 2008 at 2:11 am
Hi all who are interested – large files can be transfered by using free services such as http://www.mailbigfile.com which might help, which is how I generally shift files to my printers (Footprint). If scanning in the original manuscript is the problem I’m sure the Baron can find someone local with a decent modern scanner which will do the job quite quickly (is Brighton LETS still functioning??? Bound to be a service someone is offering, there are also resource centres in Brighton such as the Cowley Club, etc) , it would then be a matter of finding some decent OCR software to turn the typed text into digitably editable text (BTW, can anyone recommend a decent Linux/open source OCR package as it galls me having to revert to Windows to use the otherwise very good Abby Finereader to perform such tasks, the linux alternatives I’ve tried have so far been rubbish…) Once digitised the publishing possibilities are endless.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:30 am
Pork is right – this book should be in the public domain, I guess I was always fairly cosseted from the realities of the whole drug infused, nihilistic punk squat scene (hey, my leftist-liberal, femininist (back then!) mum even gave me a lift up to Dial House when i interviewed Crass for my fanzine back in 1980, which I don’t seem to ever be able to live down!!!) , but knew of it through zines like the Heretics interview in TG, some Southend punks who’de squatted in London and strongly advised anyone who’d listen not to bother, then later the Wapping Anarchy Centre, various squats that were perhaps more overtly ‘politicised’ with characters such as Andy Martin, Ian Slaughter, John ‘no name’ Apotle, Peat Protest, etc, and this work really strikes a chord with me. Our history needs to be documented, mate! Better its from folks like yoursef than some Grauniard sponsored university grad who actually knows fuck all about the reality… Wonder if Mike Diboll would be into helping out if he could be contacted?? He never responded to my emails when I tried to contact him a couple of years back, but you never know… Bet he’s got some publishing contacts…
June 11th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I found the excerpts pretty fascinating…
However, I would say: Content – great, Form – not so great…
The authorial tone oscillates inconsistently, and at times the prose resembles some of the books published by New English Library in the early 1970′s (however, that would be easily addressed by an engaged and sympathetic editor)…
An ebook would (as Gerard says) be an effective way to spread the information, and the higher profile that would develop could lead on to other things…
Graham: the Google-sponsored Ocropus project is probably the most interesting OCR development at the moment (particularly as it utilises Tesseract as the OCR engine): it obviously has a couple of implications (mainly regarding image tagging), but looks like it will be pretty useful…
June 11th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Note to editor Penguin – my constant mis-speling of John Apostle as ‘apotle’ is deliberate – it was a typo in my zine New Crimes back in 1981 for which he gave me a berating on Chelmsford station back in the day!
Nic – will look into Ocropus, thanks!
June 11th, 2008 at 11:19 am
I am chuffed at the interest.
I havent exactly given up on it, just that I’d done all I could with it the last time I saw it 15 or more years ago.
Two points raised have hit the button.
It aint a costly process to digitalise it. And if i can find a way of doing it here (in Btn) that aint too time consuming I will. Its a good idea. When its done I’ll hand it over to all you DTP wizards.
The other thing is ‘form’. Nic is spot on. It aint that good and needs editing by someone who both can & can be bothered.
That is not a problem I can solve.
Cheers BVZ
June 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
@Graham-> there’s a review of various linux ocr packages here:
http://groundstate.ca/ocr
Not sure about Mike Diboll helping out here – he used to live at 66a and though I haven’t read the relevant bits of the book, I feel that if there’s a character based on him it may not be the most sympathetic character in the piece!
@Nic-> The book wasn’t written by someone who’d just finished a masters in English Literature and happened upon an interestig hobo outside Starbucks who told him wondrous stories for the price of a caramel latte. As The Baron says: “It was written on a hill in Tamil Nadu in say, 1990 after Kumbh Mela”; that is, it was written by someone who was still “enjoying” the life described in the book. If the authorial tone oscillates wildly, it’s very likely that this is because the author was oscillating wildly when he was writing it. If this book is edited and stylised, it becomes one step removed from itself and the life it describes: I don’t necessarily want a piece of art which satisfies the lit-crit police, I want something that documents our times (and protects the innocent/guilty as sensitively as possible) in a narrative style which is authentic. Being at St Monica’s, Campbell Buildings and 66a was an up, down, ebb and flow experience from one day (hour?) to the next. I fitted in beautifully. My psychiatrist would no doubt be able to offer a long explanation as to why that was. Particularly about Campbell Buildings, if you refer to the other longer thread on this site about Baron’s feelings on the estate it’s easy to see why the narrator would feel the ambivalence of being connected to and then disconnected from the place. And the chemical intake alone explains the variations between omniscience and integration in the narrative. Though I’ve never done it, I would think that STP would make one feel a pretty organic part of almost anything.
I wouldn’t want a stylised punk version of the abomination that was the film “Absolute Beginners”: I’m not a fan of the musical genre anyway, but 2 hours of song and dance routines about a race riot were patronising, sanitising and demeaning. My vote goes for leaving “The Joys Of Work” as it is – or indeed adding more detail to it in the original voice from some of the stories we have on this site.
@BaronVonZubb-> If you can OCR the rest of the book, that would be great. If not, let me know and I’ll email you our postal address (I’ve got an OCR program that just about works).
June 11th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
While I respect what you are saying Pork, I completely disagree with the large majority of your reply to me…but each to their own, eh?
I don’t necessarily believe that a priori experience leads to amazing (or even interesting) artistic expression…Been in a riot? You may not be able to write about it with any sense of panache…Been to jail? Same applies…Held a gun to someones forehead? Same again…
One of the most beautiful qualities which authors worth taking an interest in seem to be able to develop is the ability to use the human imagination as a means to make the intangible tangible, to make something defined and real from fantasy…The difference between Jean Genet and Frankie Fraser is that Genet has the ability to write with interest and passion…
Neither does it seem as if the shifts in authorial tone in the excerpts actively contribute to the development of character and emotional exploration (although I would suggest that they would wish to do so)…rather, they seem to be a little heavy-handed which – as I suggested – could be solved by some judicious editing…
You say “If this book is edited and stylised, it becomes one step removed from itself and the life it describes”…however, it already IS edited (by memory and the choices of the writer on what is worth remembering and what isn’t) AND stylised (I can discern a strong sense of style in the excerpts)…
As for the issue of whether it becomes ‘removed from itself and the life it descrioes’ – I would imagine the narrative is drawn from memory: as memory is a construct, this text is ALREADY removed from itself and the life it describes. In this respect, it is a remembrance of a remembrance of a remembrance…
And – more importantly – if it aspires to anything more than flat reportage (which the use of language in the excerpts would suggest), then it has to acknowledge that it enters the realm of literature and will be observed within that milieu…
I’m not knocking your mucker – just commenting on a piece of art which has been presented in a public forum and consequently (or so I would feel) initiates a dialogue between the artform and the observer…
So – if “2 hours of song and dance routines about a race riot” were “patronising, sanitising and demeaning”, I would imagine you feel the same about ‘West Side Story’…which I would view as a formally beautiful and thematically deep piece of art…
The simple fact is that ‘Absolute Beginners’ just wasn’t very good…
June 11th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
@Nic-> I think the point is that I didn’t want it to be artistic expression, I wanted it to be as close to a document of what went on as possible, with the viewpoint of the author as close to what was going on as possible. Jake wrote this while he was part of what was going on: while he was still taking the journey. Fair enough, the excerpts about the Buildings and St Monicas’s and 66a aren’t written contemporaneously, but they ARE written from the viewpoint of somebody who’s got to where they are writing as a product of those times and the act of writing is still part of the journey (and so are the drugs and the squalor).
I don’t think it would have been possible to indulge in “flat reportage”. We were far too far out of our brains on whatever we could get our hands on at the time. I can discern a strong sense of Jake in the excerpts. It’s possible to be a Gonzo journalist after the fact, without knowing that you were going to write up the experience at the time.
I like Romeo and Juliet very much. Didn’t think a lot of West Side Story though, you’re right. However, West Side Story does have the advantage that the musical theatre genre is more appropriate to the content (even if some productions of the play have the subtlety of Stevie Wonder with a shotgun). Absolute Beginners was distasteful. It trivialised something which was a very real problem in 1980s society.
Perhaps Jake would be good enough to tell us if the first thing on his mind (other than a near-lethal dose of STP) at the time was the “development of character and emotional exploration”?
BTW, if you think that “The difference between Jean Genet and Frankie Fraser is that Genet has the ability to write with interest and passion”, I wouldn’t go on one of Frankie’s book tours. the chances are that he would highlight one or two other important differences
June 11th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Who’s Frankie Fraser?
June 11th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Mad Frankie Fraser was a hench man for the South London based Richardson gang in the late 1950′s through to the mid 1960′s. Had some barney with The Krays in East London. He was a very naughty boy, and no doubt had a hand in administering a bit of boot soup to some peeps near Southend (allegedly).
June 11th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I’ve just realised that I’m being totally too po-faced about all this: let’s go for it!
CAMPBELL BUILDINGS: THE MUSICAL!
featuring the songs…
“Me and You and A Bag Of Glue!”
“Stop That Vein, I Wanna Get Off!”
“Rabies and Scabies Make Punky Babies!”
“You Say Thinners, I Say Solvents, Let’s Sniff A Bag Of Zoff!”
“Waterloo Scum Set”
“Bald Knobs and Broomsticks!”
I’m getting on to Cameron Mackintosh. I’ve got first dibs on Gene Wilder to play me (with 2 half bald-wigs for the mohawk). Have you lot any thoughts on who you’d like to play your parts, or any dialogue or songs we could incorporate into this picaresque, full-blooded romp of “development of character and emotional exploration”.
I can see the reviews up in lights now:
“Much better than the sad, lethal and dreary reality” – SOUTH LONDON PRESS
“It’s Official: Septicaemia is FUN FUN FUN” – THE LANCET
“Just super! Madcap antics for the discerning 21st Century anarcho-syndicalist” – THE GUARDIAN
“Top Of The Skin Pops” – POLICE GAZETTE
“The ‘Russ’ character is the finest portrayal of a billionaire uranium-ore mogul, paediatric cardiologist, Top 10 R&B star and international 3-day eventer turned bad ever seen on the London stage. A superbly developed and emotionally-explored protagonist brought to the full by Ben Elton’s astonishing libretto and Sir Ben Kingsley’s scintillating performance” – LOADED MAGAZINE
June 11th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Any nudie action on stage Pork? If so I’m in. Definiately up for some punk on punk titilation.
Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Heretics soundtrack (how many songs did they have, 5? Perhaps the orchestra could repeat them a dozen times each maybe.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
penguin> Mad Frankie Fraser was a hench man for the South London based Richardson gang in the late 1950’s through to the mid 1960’s.
Oh him. No doubt a ‘diamond geezah’ who only ever hurt his own kind and was always good to his old mum…
June 11th, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Yeah Graham, that’s the chappie…
June 11th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
“Andrew Lloyd Webber for the Heretics soundtrack (how many songs did they have, 5? Perhaps the orchestra could repeat them a dozen times each maybe.”
Easy there tiger. There’s a whole Sakura casette tape out there if you’re eager for more.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
For the record Jake I think that it’s admirable that you wrote as much as you did. I started a similar semi-fictional memoir in the early eighties but gave up after a couple of chapters. However, as most people of that age group are still (unknowingly)defining themselves the hero tends to come across as impossibly cool and a bit 2 dimensional and I think your’s suffers from this too. The stuff I wrote makes me blush. The most interesting parts of your’s are the descriptions of squats and your bleak take on the London of the time. I’d use it as a reference and rewrite it from your perspective now.
I think Bob Short’s book hit just the right self-deprecating tone and his mix of humour and tragedy really speaks of the time. It’s exactly as I remember it. Just goes to show that adult hindsight is not necessarily ‘innacurate’.
June 11th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
Funny Absolute Beginners is mentioned as it’s probably the best cult novel of this sort ever written. I’d just read it when I started my Brit classic and my style is an embarassing cod version of Colin McIness’s. Absolute Beginners deals in large part with the newly West Indian/African Notting Hill in the late-fifties and the riots aren’t trivialised at all. And McIness was (correct me if I’m wrong) middle aged when he wrote it, yet it’s one of the most youthful books I’ve ever read. It can be done. As a twenty year old I felt I’d really ‘lived’ but in retrospect I knew fuck all. I still know fuck all but knowing this would probably make me a better writer today.
June 12th, 2008 at 12:52 am
@TheHippo-> Absolute Beginners is my favourite book: quite the best thing I’ve ever read, bar none (and my ex was an English Lit grad so believe me I’ve had to suffer reading some stuff).
It’s a great ‘rite of passage’ novel (in terms of societal change and individual change by the narrator character), and MacInnes perches everything just right: the explosive social and political tone of the times, the language(s), the various viewpoints of the racial and age groups (and the authorities), plus the narrative: ie the moral point that he’s using the characters to illustrate. I don’t think that MacInnes’ characters are autobiographical at all though, which is what differentiates it from Jake’s book, for me. They may be amalgams of real characters he knew but they have the feel of characters manufactured to provide a stage for the narative to progress.
A delightful book. I really must get round to reading “Mr Love and Justice” (about the prostitution trade in Notting Hill) and “City Of Spades” (not a PC title but a very sensitive exploration of immigration into Notting Hill, by all accounts).
June 12th, 2008 at 1:10 am
@Pengy-> I dunno about Lloyd Webber. He’s always struck me as being more suited to the ‘heavier’ subject matter
I’m thinking Bialystock and Bloom’s man perhaps? 
We could call it “Syringtime For Fixers”.
“Syringtime for fixers,
The Germs are in,
Winter for mainlines and arms…”
“Don’t be lucid, hale and hearty,
Come and join the Tuinal Party”.
Hmmm, I’m liking this… Uma Thurman as Ruthless, anyone?
Eddie Izzard as Marilyn?
Will Mellor as Skinhead John?
They’ve all got a proven musical theatre background so they shouldn’t have any problems at all bringing development of character and emotional exploration by the bucketload!
We’re gonna have to audition for The Scousers though.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Point to all this? Well…
I think that Jake’s book could be a good non-fiction thing (add in some of the posts from this site) OR a novel written from many perspectives (some more writing involved from Jake) OR kept as it is and presented as a document of what was going on as written by somebody who was there (let the reader make their mind up).
One thing I DO know is that if people hadn’t been able to express themselves because their style was all wrong, their lyrics didn’t scan properly or their music wasn’t complex enough (or similar enough to existing material) to attract musicologists and broadsheet newspaper reviewers, there would never have been any punk for us to participate in. I didn’t go along to punk gigs to analyse them endlessly, I went along for energy, excitement and venom. And for the fact that a lot of the time I was as good a musician and/or lyricist as the people on the stage. That was important. I don’t see why it should be any different with books. Get out there and do it. Fuck the reviewers, they’ll learn to love it.
June 12th, 2008 at 6:06 am
Both of McInnes’s other London novels are equally good in their own way as Absolute Beginners Pork. I think one of the reasons his superior hip character in AB worked was because he’s inclusive and conversational. I heard a documentary on the radio recently about songwriting and they mentioned part of The Beatles appeal was something similar. Paul Weller always wrote stuff like:
“What’s the point in saying destroy,
WE want a new life for everywhere”
June 12th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
That was the thing with Mod(ernism) v. Punk nihilism. Mod(ernism) wanted to destroy and then re-create newer and better. Punk was just quite happy to have stuff destroyed and then gloat at the ashes. I think there’s a parallel with Hippy naturalism in Punk really: knock the fucking lot down and let nature overgrow it.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
The musical HAS to be done.
Brilliant stuff Pork,
And I’m not being cool & self depricating here.
I may have wanted to be the ’70′s Genet. ‘Our lady of the flowers’ was actually the inspiration for me to write, as Sam somehow remembers The Mmalean Syndrome which led on to J O W.
But the facts are facts.He did have an incredibale talent. Mr Baron aint. I think Nic is just being realistic.
And yeah I think Bobs tone is spot on. Its more how i remembered it than the stuff i did.
And unfortunatly some of the stuff thats not on this site is worse. If i’d written it, and had my agent send it out in, say 1982, the content may have won over the poor form. C’est la vie.
I’ll get on it, and we’ll see what happens.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Its being put on to disco in PDF.
Pork I’ll take you at your word & mail you the file.
If you wanna make it into a musical thats cool.
Enough.
So, Absolute Beginers?; alright.’city of spades’ much better.’white teeth’ better still.’geat ape’(i think)by will self ex smack snorter on PM’s plane.Is that the ultimate london novel.? Thesis were all monkeys.conclusion theres
fuck all we can do about it.
‘we all dont know nuffin
and all dont care….’
June 13th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Look forward to getting the file mate. I don’t know if I’ll need the full version of Adobe Acrobat to get a writeable copy of it, but I’m sure I can acquire one if so.
Will knock up a laid-out version for you and mail it back. Shouldn’t take long.
I’m sure there would be some drama students at the local Uni where my partner works who’d love to have a look at a musical production.
June 17th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Great reading! I’d love to see it in published (or even ebook) form!
(Ideally the former so the author can get his fair share of the scrilla), but in full form regardless!
June 17th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I mentioned this book to Penny Rimbaud yesterday – he thought it sounded like the sort of thing Jon Active would certainly be interested in publishing (he also told me that Jon Active has a new completely re-edited version of Last of The Hippys’ in the works (the essay that came with Christ the Album, not the CJ Stone book))
June 17th, 2008 at 11:05 am
@BaronVonZubb-> Haven’t got the email of the PDF from you yet. Have you tried to send it?
June 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
baron – check the print on demand section on this website:
http://www.openmute.org
haven’t checked it properly but seems promising
June 21st, 2008 at 10:04 am
Graham, how does one get in contact with this jon active?
cheers for info, people.
BVZ
Oh & click on Sri felonious’s name & get to a side of India that is not chillums, sadhus & hippies.
eeh oop
June 21st, 2008 at 11:44 am
Jon Active contact details are: http://www.activedistribution.org/inquiry_new.php
You will also find this site and many others of interest on the KYPP wonderful ‘links’ section.
Have a look at the Active Dist catalogue whilst you are at it.
So have The Heretics split up now or what?
June 25th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
It ain’t easy being a Heretic these days, what with the Religious Hatred Bill and all that.
I foresee a comeback tour by Terry Tolerant and the Vague Dissenters instead
June 28th, 2008 at 8:14 am
split up?
were doing a load of secret rehersals.Gonna blow the Pisteleros off stage at Hammersmith.
……Bin grafting bruvas. Too knackered to do any of this .
Cheers for that penguin.
July 1st, 2008 at 11:37 am
@All-> Damn, the Baron’s blown the gaff on the secret rehearsals now. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone or the whole 3-year plan’s gonna fall to pieces
@Sam-> If you have any of your memoir from the early 80s (as you mention above) and wouldn’t mind me using some of it in with The Baron’s material can you let me know please mate?
July 1st, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Certainly not. It’s embarrassingly bad.
July 2nd, 2008 at 1:08 am
We were all embarrassingly bad. I still am.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:16 am
Sorry…not being funny. It really is pure shite.
Jake…I owe you an email. I’ll get onto it but I’ve been busy.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Any prospective authors out there might be interested in this software, available free today only:
http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/liquid-story-binder-xe-291/
July 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Thanks Luggy – it looks very interesting…
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:32 am
FYI “Zubb” is Arabic slang for “Prick”.
Mike Diboll, Bahrain.
November 23rd, 2008 at 5:00 pm
If that’s you Mike ‘ello!
I do hope youre not insinuating anything there bruv!
If you are im gonna have to go get nursey.
What you up to in Bahrain?
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:05 pm
You aint Dibbol…
Thats true about ‘zubb’ though.
And here’s a thing.
My mates fluent in manderin & cantonese and he’s just told me that ‘Dai bol’ is cantonese slang for ‘salt fish’. And thats a term they use for police informer.
How weird is that?
Reminds me of my Hungarian gran laughing alot at the word focker.
Inocuous in her language but in ours, very naughty.
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:47 pm
It IS the guy from Toxic Graffity Jake by the look of the email left in the system. Bahrain sounds nice, how did you end up there Mike?
November 24th, 2008 at 12:24 am
Blimey Mike! We have all been waiting for ages. Dont be shy! The rumours are that youre a proffesional author?
Do tell us some tales of Arabesque glory.
Infact it was the interview & pics that you did with us (Heretics) that I was tracing for me nieces that got me hooked onto all this.
You are, still, responsible!
November 24th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Well well.
I bought Bob Shorts book the other week and realised that Lulu offer a print to order publishing thing. A completely new concept to me the luddite that i am.
So .. here it is.
http://www.lulu.com/content/4875148.
A massive thanks to all on this site who have made encouraging comments about the bits you read, and for info given.
Why have I done it?
Well not just cos im an egocentric vain git.
Also because there is, as far as i know, nothing in print about ‘us’, the London punks of that era from ’78 to the riots of ’81.
I wrote it 20 years ago, so I owe to that person and all of us who have survived, to complete.
Allen Ginsburg it aint but its a slice of history.
Penguin you can add it to your list of real books with covers & isbn and keep/delete the excerpts. Whatever ypu want.
The .99p that I get is going to charity.
So go to lulu and buy it for xmas!
The perfect tome for credit crunch Britain.
cheers again.
Jake
November 25th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Gonna order a copy or two this week Jake…
November 25th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Penguin, could you please order me one or send me the link.
I also wanna get a copy of Bob Short’s book (in fact, didn’t you give me one , but I forgot to get it from you one night we were out drinking…can’t quite remember, no worries either way)
November 26th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Just ordered it Jake. $26.00 is daylight robbery! I hope The Hippo fares well ya bastard!
November 26th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Cheers gents .
I tried to barter them down on the price but they wouldn’t have it.
Sam, in hindsight you definatly come out of it as the wisest one amoungst us. One character had to be anti the collective will.
IE strong enough to stand up for what he believed in. And that was The Hippo. I hope it comes across that way.
Another one of our number has surfaced;
I cant keep it to me self any longer…
Its driving me nuts!
Yes people, Wankenstain is joining the party. He’s a luddite like me so it might take a while. I’ll say no more.
xxx
November 26th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Oh my brothers.
Maybe publishing is a bit risky? I dunno?
But just so its perfectly clear to anyone who may recognise themselves represented in any characters in the book, I didnt put it to print to rekindle anything from the past. That was then. Its just a bit of history. Written a long time ago. A quarter of a century!
More of interest to the next generation than to us possably.
We’ve all re met up on this ‘ere site and we can take it from now, if we want to.
Cheers jake
November 27th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Only joking Jake. I look forward to reading it and to the possible appearance of Wank.
November 27th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
BTW ‘crooked road’s a damn good ditty.
November 28th, 2008 at 3:04 am
Cheers!
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Zubb: send me your e-mail address and I’ll sent you a PDF of my “Islamic” novel “Paradise Street”. Curiously, it too has a character called “Wankstain” in it. I could tell you about all the things I’ve done post-66a, but it’d take all night. Quite a bit of PS is semi-autobiographical, there’s quite a bit of me in the Malcolm Taos character, and a fair bit in Jamal & other characters. I’m not at all bothered about my “less than sympathetic portrayal” in “Joys”: I was a bit of a tosser in those days, and I’m pretty hard on my old self in my own work (that said my “Wank”, a minor character, is also “less than sympathetic”). I shouldn’t be writing this now, by daughter Rebecca is about to be born by c-section in a local Bahraini hospital in the middle of a Shia riot zone (I kid you not). I have too other kids, Benjamin, 11, who is here with me in Bahrain, and Amber, 26, living in London, who has given me two grandchildren! Ho hum. . . .
My family home in the UK is not a million miles from Brighton (three stops in fact). Maybe we can meet up one summer?
Dr. Mike Diboll, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Bahrain.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:29 pm
Hope the birth goes well Mike, get yourself over there to witness it.
Good luck with getting her back through the barricades.
I have sent you and Baron email details for each other.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
Hello Mike, wonder if you remember me, I used to go under the name ‘Jah Ovjam’ (groan) and do a zine called New Crimes, we used to correspond quite a bit back in the day, it would be good to maybe reconnect, if you do feel so inclined you can contact me via my website at http://www.spiralseed.co.uk – I’ve still got Dial House connections, running permaculture courses and other gatherings in the old Crass back garden…. Blimey so Amber is a parent as well, I remember you once signing off a letter with the words, “Got to go, Amber is crying…”
Cheers graham
December 4th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Bloody hell Mr Dibbol. Bahrain…A doctor…Its a Tony Robertson story.
No one including ‘me’ comes out as an ok guy in that book. Never mind.
Insallah with the birth.
Thought Bahrain was quite stable?
I got the mail P.
I’ll write him.
cheers.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Bahrain is very much on the Sunni/Shia faultline, in many ways it reminds me of NI during the early years of the Troubles:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=NPWeu38q0rA
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8HHJsva92Zk&feature=related
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=7kf3tu6Nay8&feature=related
Then there’s this guy:
http://video.google.co.uk/videosearch?hl=en&q=bahrain%20butcher&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#
December 5th, 2008 at 1:31 am
Just recieved your book today Jake. The descriptions of squats and drugs brings some of it back.
“Sam, in hindsight you definatly come out of it as the wisest one amoungst us. One character had to be anti the collective will.
IE strong enough to stand up for what he believed in. And that was The Hippo. I hope it comes across that way.”
Read about a third of it and flicked through it a bit. From what I can tell ‘The Hippo’ comes across as a repressed homosexual idiot who can’t converse with the brilliant politicised revolutionaries around him. Dunno about ‘wise’. This is a bit like reading someone’s diary. Fascinating yet painful.
Ah well…I shall read on and put it into context with the rest of the book.
December 5th, 2008 at 1:55 am
Not that I’ve ever read someone’s diary, mind…
December 5th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Jake. How can i get a copy of your book?
December 5th, 2008 at 9:37 pm
I have one here for you Chris, also a Bob Short book. Will meet up at some point for drinkies and swapsies.
December 6th, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Whoops.
Sam , dont wanna cause no pain bruv.
All of the characters are characteurs. I didnt (dont) have the skill to alter the characters but keep them intact. Its inevitable if the ‘real’ people read it, to feel that way. Of course ‘you’ wernen’t like that, any more than the hero ‘me’ was this fearless subversive.
I had to differenciate between them all.
Martin Amis has also made enemies of so many of his freinds. He’s well known for that. But to us they are all just chracters in a book.
‘We’ all come out looking like arsoles to our selves.
I wouldnt worry about it. As you said its just in context.
Hopefully it’ll be interesting to ‘the public’
Later on the hippo stands up to the group and does his own thing.
The brilliant revolutionaries around him can be seen as arrogent nieve wankers. Its just a matter of perception.
However Jah pork, and me a bit, have done an edit.
And one of the things we’ve clarified is the reasons why the Hippo does what he does near the end. I’m being deliberatly vague here, as there might be a couple of people who read it.
But, he just sees them as a load of junkie wankers and doesnt want to waste his life like them.
A commendable stance, no?
If it bothers you just chuck it the bin man.
So far, of the 3 people who’ve read and appear in it, 2 of them found there portrayal ‘unsympathetic’.
Fuck knows what the ex Monday Group will make of it!
Looks like I might lose my new old friends. Shame.
But remember it was written in 1983-85. Those times were still current for the writer. It was finished off in ’87 and printed up in ’91, all a long time before the net, & the possibility of ‘punks re-united’ existed.
I’m chuffed that you bought it mate.
If you want a better copy, one thats been properly edited, first by brilliant Jah Pork, then by a prossional editor, and thus will be less diary like, and that also has a clarirified version of the Hippo in it, E mail me a postal address, and I’ll buy a copy and send it to you.
The better-last-edit is available from Dec 22nd.
Jai ram ram
December 6th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Mike, the other great fan, I’ll write ya in a bit.
Eeh oop
December 6th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
My advice to people who appear one way or another as “characters” is: chill, chill, mega mega chill. Characters are just that, characters, khalas.
Be as unsympathetic as you like with me, and you still won’t rip me to bits in the way I rip my various old selves to bits in my creative writing. That’s the nature of the game, and game it is, rise above it.
My wife once complained about why she didn’t appear in my last novel as a character, whereas various ex-es did. “Darling”, I said, “Be glad you’re not in it, that novel is an insane asylum & the fact your not in it is a compliment!”
Any friend you lose from a novel characterization probably was probably never a real friend anyway (unless you’re a duff novelist).
Written in the mid-80s, eh? Published ’91? God, you need to revise it. You really do, for all manner of reasons I can’t go into now.
MD
December 6th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Just mailed ya.
From Gap then? The, er trousers!
Not published, printed to be published.
Revised last week…
Like you, they didnt want it,though for different reasons. I’m expecting yours to v good. A mate of a mate who I know is Indra Sinha, who just wrote ‘animals people’ Brilliant novel. I’m expecting yours to be on a par with that. That you have the agent you do is proof of that.
My agent back in the day, told me very nicely to go away & come back when it was good. Nice! So I sent it out to publishers anyway.
And just in case anyone is in any doubt, I aint a novelist so may well be a duff one. As I said to Mr P, I’m just some freak whose had a mad (brilliant) life and wrote some bollocks about a bit of it.
I pity the public, as there may well be more!
Ram
December 6th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Dont give away the ending bvz I still aint finished trying to read it online which means i might have to buy the book so dont say no more plz.
December 6th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
“. . .just in case anyone is in any doubt, i aint a novelist so may well be a duff one. . .Im just some freak whose had a mad (brilliant) life and wrote some bollocks about a bit of it.”
And that’s exactly what it’s all about, the beginning and the end of it. The “novelist” bit, screw the pretension, is only about the craft of wordsmithery. My life in the ’70s and ’80s is valuable to me, although I’m embarrassed by most of it and ashamed of some of it. But yes, in its own terms it was both “mad” and “brilliant”. The point isn that there’s a story to tell. Amis et al can put that in their pipe and smoke it (inhaling optional).
But Jake, there is a story worth telling. If the likes of you or I don’t do it, the media (new establishment) could-have-beens will usurp us. The knack is in the crafting.
Mike
December 7th, 2008 at 2:54 am
Nobody’s losing any new, old mates here. My post above may have come across as stronger than I wanted. I’m not offended and it was all a long time ago – and we were all cunts. What goes around, comes around.
Read most of the book now. Kudos to you Jake for writing so much of it down. It’s quite a hefty tome. I think there’s some genuinely excellent writing in it – the account of your STP trip especially had me laughing out loud and reminded me of The Mammalian Syndrome. The descriptions of drug taking and squats are really good too and bring it back very vividly – too much so in places. I really think it’s worth rewriting – from your perspective now, and importantly, in the first person. I can’t believe that ‘Josh’ is not you projecting how you would have liked to be seen and the projection is too perfect, too heroic. I’d lose the h dropping accents and particularly white guys talking patois. Personally, I think the autonomist theory gets too much and the humour that works really well in the STP trip is lost. It reads too much like a manifesto. I’d like to know how you feel now, looking back at your old self nicking handbags. I don’t remember any brave defiance from any of us when the police raided our flat at Iverson Rd. I remember me being beaten up in the kitchen, Tony Black sitting there shaking with fear and you being very quiet and withdrawn for several days. The emotional truth is much more interesting than something armour plated.
I was surprised at how much the Iverson Rd parts brought it back and I remember my counter-revolutionary Fred Perry purchase and the character assassinations. The darkest dark period of my life. Heroin, spite, misguided utopianism and our insane, dispossesed, dislocated lifestyle. I remember bumping into my mum whilst buying some fags in West End Lane during that winter. Snow, solid overcast, up for 2 days ‘hogging out’. I literally had NOTHING to say to her. Felt nothing in common. Terrible.
It’s funny how you noticed the same things as I did at the time. As we were usually up all night, London’s orange overcast depressed me. London seemed to have this Eastern Block feel and all positivity had gone. The energy turned truly dark.
I went Christmas shopping with the wife today and couldn’t help be affected by the cathedrals to consumerism tone of the book in its take on materialism. Which is something I’ve never truly lost (despite a liking for classic skinhead gear) and still gives me the horrors. I was showing slides of Andy Warhol’s work last week in one of my art history classes and most of the kids I teach don’t know what ‘consumerism’ is. There is no questioning, no alternative, no sense of possibility for something different. It’s frightening. I do feel that I took something important from that period with me, and that’s the genius of ideas and the possibility of making them work. We were very lucky, despite all the pain.
I’d love to read the edited version – and not just for more sympathetic portrayals. It’s not going in the bin. I honestly think it’s worth a serious rewrite and like Mike said, this was a unique period and the reality of it will be lost unless it’s put down first hand.
My address:
5499 Shaffertown Rd,
Bristol VA 24202,
USA
December 7th, 2008 at 3:34 am
By the way, as far as I know there’s no such thing as a ‘button down’ Fred Perry.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:32 am
“I’d love to read the edited version. . .honestly think it’s worth a serious rewrite, this was a unique period and the reality of it will be lost unless it’s put down first hand.”
Absolutely: wordcraft is the only edge that the daddy-in-the-media types, public school boys and Oxbridge graduates have over us.
The sort of things that people like Amis and Kureishi have done with early punk makes me retch, let alone the representations in the Beeb &ct. It’s only a matter of time before some trustafarian turd with false memory syndrome hijacks our past. Rewrite! Edit! Revise!
We lived the life, took the risks, took the drugs, made prats of ourselves, and gazed in the abyss of the “dark energy” Sam referred to. We survived, but we all know people that didn’t. We sometimes had “fun” too.
In place of our (very misplaced) utopianism people in their late teens and early twenties today seem either mindlessly consumerist and lost in an eternal postmodern present, or else violent, self-harming and nihilistic. Very often their both.
Then there’s the drugs: what was once hardcore to us is now available in any small town as a sort of soma to keep the unemployables in their place.
I cringe at my one-time advocacy of “nihilism”, but the Situationists’ take on consumerism now seems almost prophetic. Bush et al notwithstanding, its a mercy that the world didn’t end up being run by the kind of people we looked up to (I remember the denial I went into when I learned of Pol Pot’s Anarcho-Syndicalist leanings).
Yet we had something else, an ardor, an elan that transcended the youth cult ephemera of our time, flitting in a single day between the heights of Blochian “hope” and the very depths of ennui and despair that would have made Kurt Cobain look like Larry Grayson.
And all with a kind of naive sincerity that somehow, despite evidence obvious to an objective observer, we were in fact the vanguard of a new dawn.
It would be a true shame on us if our voices were lost.
(Ditch the Autonomist theory though!)
December 7th, 2008 at 5:36 am
“By the way, as far as I know there’s no such thing as a ‘button down’ Fred Perry.”
Probably you can buy them in Dubai, made in Thailand, from the same vendor that does fake Rolexes, @ t-shirts, azan alarm clocks, and talking Saddam and Osama dolls. . . .
December 8th, 2008 at 4:39 am
“its a mercy that the world didn’t end up being run by the kind of people we looked up to (I remember the denial I went into when I learned of Pol Pot’s Anarcho-Syndicalist leanings). ”
Too true. My self-imposed de-indoctrination began in earnest when I was present at an Anarcho debate theorising if the children of ‘pigs’ would be shot alongside the ‘pigs’ themselves come the revolution.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Very intersting posts.
Cheers.
Good thing Sam that it aint bothering you too much.
You’re not wrong about how ‘we’ all may have been, at the time of the bag snatch for example.
But hey we all love heroes..
If I wrote it now it may be a different work, possibly in the first person etc . These are all good ideas. But for the moment
whats getting uploaded on the 22nd is gonna be how it stays for now.
Its had a bit of re write, that actually changes the tone quite a bit. Someone elses input, though hard to accept innitially, has been a good thing.
I personally, cant re write it cos i go bleary eyed when i look at it . Honestly. Neither do i have the word craft.Thats just the way it is.
I agree that some of theory could come out .Ive beein in two minds about that all the way along. And some did already! But for now its staying. Maybe i’m just a sucker for that. Or maybe its the characters education.
Mike I really dont think we have to be too hard on our selves. The fact is we were still the good guys. Werent we?
And its so true that we all observe that the young generation really have no subversive analysis. Even if they can spell.
The situes were so spot on. Witness second life. Its pure madness.
Thats why J O W IS a manifesto. It was intended to be one!
What with the KYPP t shirts and ‘lulu’ we shall overcome.
Viva Viva
December 8th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
There has been some talk about a colaberative project based around this site, some of our experiences from that time. That might be the way to go rather than re writing completely whats done.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“Mike I really dont think we have to be too hard on our selves. The fact is we were still the good guys. Werent we?”
Some of the people hanging around that scene were definitely not ‘good guys’. As Mike Diboll wrote:
“its a mercy that the world didn’t end up being run by the kind of people we looked up to ”
Won’t mention any names but they weren’t exactly good influences on a teenager.
It was good to move away from that stuff. But no point being too hard on yourself for what you got up to in your teens. Live and learn.
Some of those anarchists or ‘autonomists’ had no conception of any responsibility towards younger people drawn into their orbit. They were too wrapped up in their own deluded senses of destiny to care about such things.
So, in turn, let’s not be hard on youngsters today. The world they’ve inherited is not of their making.
December 8th, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Its all our fault! Name names bruv…He he
December 8th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
“Mike I really dont think we have to be too hard on our selves. The fact is we were still the good guys. Werent we?”
I can see this from several different viewpoints. Mostly “No”.
December 8th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Re Sam and Ian’s point, it’s a difficult call. Sam says “mostly no”, I tend to concur; being hard on myself, very hard, has done me a lot of good. I owe it to those whose lives I screwed up when I should have known better.
But so much water has gone under the bridge now that I also see what Jake means: however hard on myself (I can only really speak for myself) I needed to be, say, 20 years ago, the world has moved on and pointless masochism has become a counter-productive wank.
Lessons having been learned, it strikes me as more important now that what was positive about how we lived our lives is preserved and passed on. That’s why, after nearly three decades of being away from you all, I now feel moved to contribute to fora such as this one.
Ian says: “Some of the people hanging around that scene were definitely not ‘good guys’. . .they weren’t exactly good influences on a teenager.”
Again, I tend to concur. In fact, I’d go further: some of the older, more ardent politicos seem now to have been little more than nonces with a fetish about agitated youth. I explore this in my novel, where I have a group of crazy mixed up kids manipulated by an older figure with an unsuspected agenda.
Rather than anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, automomists or whatever I made them neo-Nazis, mainly because that scene was less obscure and required less explanatory, reader-dulling infrastructure to explain. That said, the actual action from those scenes comes straight from my anarcho- days.
From my older viewpoint (I hesitate in saying ‘mature’) nearly all of the -sims and -ologies that we were so passionate about fare very badly: it seems to me that a world controlled by the @s, @-ses and autos of my day would have been a very nasty Lord of the Flies place. As for nihilisim that’s with us now isn’t it, in the form of post-code murders, binge drinkers, self-harmers, suicide cults, heroin-addicted teenage prostitutes, and mimetic Al Qaeeda wannabes?
Only the Situationists, I reckon, emerge relatively unscathed: their critique of consumerism being all the more impressive given the relatively primitive state of consumer capitalism back in the mid-60s when this theory was first being put down.
(But even then their dense, often pretentious rhetoric did them no favours when it came to advancing their arguments to people who might have listened: even the Baudrillard and Derrida-loving academic po-mo crowd are generally ignorant of Debord.)
So, what was positive about the way we lived our lives? This is impossible, I think, to answer in terms of -isms and -ologies. The nearest I can get in those terms is to say that what we were about had (some of the time) a certain existential authenticity. But that shouldn’t let us off the hook entirely: one could argue that all manner psychopaths and misfits from Adolf Hitler to Ian Brady had (at least in their own terms) a certain existential authenticity.
No, we had more than that: we had a sort of moral consciousness, although the ideologies we didn’t have maturity or the courage to ditch often distorted this into something immoral.
We had (again at the risk of sounding pretentious) a certain artistic vision that our (self-imposed) poverty and lack (or refusal) of training or education stymied.
But I’m still not there yet. I can only call it a spirit of the time, an elan, an ernestness. Vague words I know, but that’s as close as I can get. And it’s precious.
That’s why I urge Jake to rewrite his book from the perspective of now, that’s why I think there’s possibly milage in some sort of collaborative effort (an anthology of stories, anecdotes, reflections &ct, perhaps), for what we were about can only truly be expressed creatively.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
When I said that the way we lived our lives was “precious” I do of course mean this in the positive sense (although the other connotation is always lurking around in the background).
Re the neo-Nazi thing in my book, the brightest (and most screwed up) member of the group realizes its all going nowhere and joins a sort of proto-Al Qaeeda, an other scene which (to my shame) I gained some familiarity with in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
December 9th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Mostly no is an interesting point to pick up on another time. Possably when we have this ‘C’ piss up. In dixieland would be good I reckon.
I sometimes feel that it was mostly no.
But then I think what other people of our age were doing.
And I look around at what a load of bollocks the current ‘credit cruch’ situation is. Both the US & the UK are now de facto socialist countries. My money, and yours, is paying for ‘fat cats’ to send their kids to public school. Good one. Society really has moved on.
And do I support the Greek police? Do I fuck.
And did my blood run fast when I saw ‘the baader mienhoff complex’?
Yes it did
Sam you live in the States and i’ve never been there but heres a little thing that always had me wondering
Hurricane Catrina. Scenes of looting, police killing, government corruption and general nastiness.
Bombay floods 2 years ago. Scenes of often divided communities( Hindu muslim) giving food and shelter to the dispossesd of both relegious factions.
Thats how it was.
Make of it what you will.
What I make of it is this. We’re rich and that makes us clever in some ways. But we’re still barbarians.
Maybe its human nature?
Maybe jared diamond ‘guns, germs and steel’ has the answer?
Maybe Ian Curtis did?
Maybe the buddha did?
anitcha, anatha, dukha?
Tis all ??? to me.
December 9th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Both good posts.
I think a collaborative work’d be great and I’d like to hear about peoples way back into the world and how they’ve dealt with it as much as reminiscences of the time.
I was in Australia when I finally decided it was all (or mostly) bollocks. Another church group of disaffected middle class bohos talking working class revolution. In a country with one of the highest standards of living in the world. Why? More witch hunts, personal insecurities blamed on socio-political issues, jealosy, jockying for power (whilst denying recognition of leaders or leadership) and petty competition and one upmanship. There is far more love, sense of responsibility and genuine compassion in the average ‘straight’ person and they don’t tend to feel the need to wear it on their sleeve.
Punk, before the fundamentalist politics took hold, had an instinctive freedom to it that avoided didacticism. And it had a fantastic wit. Give me a Polystyrene over any hard core feminist. Give me Borat over any anti racist tract. There are no answers, only paradoxes and the truth is to be found somewhere in between, when we least expect it.
However, as Jake says – look at who we grew up with. People who went blindly from school to university to the workforce. I’ve gone the same route but maybe a glimpse of the impossible has made me a better person. Or maybe I’m forever damaged by it?
I’m glad I was there though.
December 9th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
baron von zubb wrote: “Its all our fault! Name names bruv…He he”
Fair enough but I’d rather name the decent people that were around – Irish Mike of Crowbar magazine for example. Some of the older Freedom Press types, such as Colin Ward.
As for the less inspiring examples, being charitable, it’s not just the individuals, more the kind of mental atmosphere they hatched among themselves when they all got together. Sam describes it pretty well in his post above, although it wasn’t limited to middle-class bohos. Rule of thumb: the more strident and ideological, the more bullshit there was.
As an example, Exhibit A, I think the whole Persons Unknown thing was bollocks. Us young ‘uns were given to understand that these poor people were being picked on and so forth, a worthy cause to rally round.
But it wasn’t a deserving cause imo. Nuff said.
December 9th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Many of the Anarcho- scenes were pretty cult-like, as I recall.
The scene around Crass certainly was, and required a bit of self-deprogramming to get out of. Although most of them were alright as individuals, the older ones should have been more aware that there were some very vulnerable and confused young people in their entourage.
The Centro Iberico lot were interesting to know as survivors from particular set of historical events, most (all?) of them are dead now. But as one grows up one gets a bit more insightful, and I now know all sides in the Spanish Civil War committed atrocities, and that some of the Anarchist ones were as bad as anyone else’s. I wonder how many of those living saints we used to look up had the blood of “pigs” or “the children of pigs” on their hands.
I echo Ian’s point about Persons Unknown, ditto the Black Flag lot. I could go on but won’t.
Not that we were all that innocent either. Sam mentions handbag snatching, I remember us sniping, under the influence, with a .22 at cars we deemed “bourgeois” from the windows of 66a. All the separated us from school shooter-uppers &ct was that we didn’t have access to the sort of hardware that is in nearly every house in the USA. But our “mens rea” our guilty mind, was there. Now guns are in the hands of teenagers all over London, and they use them for straightforward things like robbery and revenge, without the bullshit ideology. So what sort of vanguard were we?
I take Jake’s point about what other people of our age were doing, and I agree, it really sucks. Most of my “straight” peer group, now in their late-40s or early-50s are the ones who wasted now, old men well before their time. And they, and their children, seem to me to be the real nihilists, the vanguard of the eternal present of postmodern consumption. Perhaps the credit crucn might wake them up a bit.
But then isn’t “straight” a stereotype, Sam says straight people are more loving and compassionate than we could ever have been at that time. Certainly some are, I suppose it depends exactly who your talking about. And is “straight” life really so boring? My life is as straight as a dye at the moment, and has been for some time, it’s also never been so interesting.
Ian and Sam both make the very valuable point that really the “politics” (if I may dignify it with that term) screwed things up. Absolutely. So much of what we were about was really theatrical and “artistic”, to the extent that our lives were almost a form of performance art. When we weren’t too wasted we also did a few amazing things with words, music, paint and clothes.
That is why I think our times are best remembered, best recreated through art and the written word. It may seem that I’ve been too tough on the old times, but that’s all part of the process of rememberance and recreation: to find a gold nugget you first have to sieve through a whole heap of dross and shit.
December 9th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Peng is that a no no to links then?
S’all verrry interesteeng.
I knew the persons unknown lot, not well but Vince was in the Monday Group, and the truth about it all is not able to be commented on an open forum.
However, we saw them as a cause, a tactic, that could act as a rallying point for the movement.
There are, were, individual people in every group or movement that may have objectionable fucked up personality traits or who are hard to deal with.
But I found that none of them in the anarchist movement anyway, could get me to do what they wanted against my will. And often they were bloody funny…Erm, sort of.
About compassion / staights etc.
Straight, its a stereo type and many ‘straights’ are good people of course (well, all of us lot now for example)
But then theres a lot of wankers about outside of our circles. We all know that too. Many, many people to whom even the concept of compassion is completely alien.
Do we live in a compassionate world?
I think we all have the same answer to that somehow.
And the glimpse of the impossible has made us into much better, more valuable & compassionate folk. No doubt we might be a little damaged, who aint, but its the impossible that pushes the whole thing forward, in the real sense.
Sam I had the same realisation first time in India. World Revolution? Just fucked up selfish rich first worlders. In india they cant even read the pamphlets, or drink clean water.
Of course the diggers & levellers here in the uk were fighting for the same anarcho principles as us well before the industrial revolution.
But thats only a partial truth. I know India well now and like here, or anywhere they have the problems of hierarchy, corruption & injustice. On a much more extreme level.
Now I can’t condem the Naxilite freedom struggle in India even though I may have problems with the violence. And i’m not a communist.
And I can’t condem the Greek youth uprising now.
And I cant condem us or who ever back in the day.
One is faced with a set of problems, or perceptions of problems, the sus law & corrupt police (or the tyranny of the commodity…) for example, and one uses what one has at hand to improve the situation.
We may have been foolish to think we could win, to actually be allowed to have our own little compassion bubbles with our own rules.
But to try? Never.
To glimpse the impossible.
That really sums it up.
Can I nick that phrase for me next book…?
December 9th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Now ive argued the point someone may well say, what about sept 11 or july 7 or Mumbai the other day?
They are merely ‘trying’. Do you not condem them?
Yes. Why?
1) civilian targets.
2) they are reactionary (islamo) fascists who seek to impose barbaric theocracies on the people
3) In the UK at least; if they really hate living here so much then they should do as we did and ‘have a walk around’ the planet, rather than bombing the tube.
But…And there always is one; Militant Islam feels that the west has an anti muslim agenda.
And its a good question. What exactly has been the neo con agenda?
Also al quieda know they can’t win. By force. We also know that neither can we.
So at what point do the two sides sit down and talk about the main damands of militant Islam?
Palestinian statehood, US out of the middle east and regime change in Aaudi(Islams holy lands)
Abu Dhabi Mike?
tally ho!
December 9th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
baron von zubb Says: Peng is that a no no to links then?
What’s that then Baron???
December 10th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Oh I just noticed me books up there in the original post. Cheers for that. Very muchly indeed. Looks all proper and real and all that. Very odd, this whole process…
Erm links, ah its nothing I put a couple of links in a post and there not there. Not important.
Sam if your out there I emailed yer about lambeth skyline.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
“I knew the persons unknown lot, not well but Vince was in the Monday Group, and the truth about it all is not able to be commented on an open forum.”
To be able to control what people say about you 30 years on is certainly a form of power.
December 11th, 2008 at 4:22 pm
Spill the beans, people.
December 11th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Its a case of criminal culpablity.
Not my place to comment.
I was merely trying to point out that as with many things that go on in ‘revolutionary movements’ that are on the fringes of legality, its often hard to get to the bottom of any cause or issue.
Anyone see ‘my brother is an only child’? about the Brigade Rosse. Great movie. Lots of emotional truth there Sam.
December 11th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Dish the dirt…come on, you know you want to.
Mike…I remember you at 66a lying in bed pretending to be dead whilst listening to Hamburger Lady by Throbbing Gristle. Ah…we made our own entertainment in those days, eh?
December 11th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Not that much dirt as I recall.
More that they got themselves a kind of halo as a result of the trial. This put them above criticism. But it did strike some of us that despite happily using the money-raising and publicity-raising powers of Crass and Poison Girls, they were distinctly sniffy about those bands and those that were into them.
But at the time that has hard to articulate – they’d been in front of the beak, martyrs to the cause etc.
December 11th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
“but in private they tended to be scathing about those bands and the punks that were into them.”
So they weren’t all bad then?
December 11th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
“Spill the beans, people.”
errr…it doesn’t exactly call for dusting off the Enigma Machine, surely?
—————-
but talking of ‘Hamburger Lady’; Ian S. I think the first time I met you was in that squat you shared with Andy Martin down Packington St after i’d puked up in the sink following a humungous whitey provoked by by Larry Peterson playing ‘Hamburger Lady’ with the lights out and doing this daft ‘Egyptian Dance’ round the room wrapped in a bedsheet and holding a bicycle torch on his head. Entertainment indeed
December 11th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
You had ate a tin of Target brand diced mixed vegetables iirc.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Ouch! I’d forgotten (conveniently) about my belated adolescent TG & JD morbidity chic, thanks for the memory!
Some of my best memories of 66a are acidic: the 4 a.m. “cosmic walks”; the “milk round” following the milky at dawn and snatching his pints (repropriation, eh?), then startling commuters at West Hampstead station; ranting like madmen at the rush hour traffic, beckoning it on like Moses calling Bani Yisrael across the Red Sea.
One incident is “inscribed on my body”, as the po-mo types like to say: we were doing a Pollock on one of my bedroom walls (40 years after doing so was original), chucking paint all over it and smearing it into patterns with our hands. In a fit of inspiration I forgot about a nail that had held up a picture, and slashed open my right hand so that I could see the tendons of my little finger. In my tripped-up state I made a mental note “must remember my finger’s hanging off”, bound said member in toilet paper, and carried on.
A few years later I was picked up and charged with Possession, and the desk sergeant recorded the scar as a “distinguishing feature”, I think it’s still on the police computer, the scar’s certainly still on my hand.
I suppose it would be petty to parry your TG recollection with something to do with endless replays of “Transformer”, lying strung out on old mattresses?
T’wen’t no satellite TV an’ shopping malls in our young days!
Jake, I’m in Bahrain now, not Abu Dhabi, although I did live for five years in the oasis town of Al Ain, which is on the border with Oman, on the edge of the Empty Quarter; although it’s in the Eastern Province of Abu Dhabi Emirate, it’s over 100 miles from AD city.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
“Target Brand”, eh? What powers of recall. I remember us all once staring at a tub of white pepper, waiting for it to reveal some inner truth. Someone put on a Dr. Alimantado track that began “Good evening”, which then for us was the voice of the pepper. Can’t remember what brand of pepper though, it was probably from the 24 hour shop we used to nick from, down by Finchley Road underground. Can’t remember what chain the shop was though. Must be going senile, “if you can remember those days you weren’t there”, or something like that!
December 11th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
VG Stores aka ‘The Brothers’ (run by several Asian siblings). No problem with your riposte. You’ll have to dig deeper than that my friend.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Not that I meant any offense mind.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:07 am
I moved to London in Jan 1979 and started going to Ceinfeugos Press readers meetings and met Stuart Christie and Albert Meltzer – which was a bit strange, I had read their Floodgates of Anarchy in 1976ish and suddenly there I was having a pint with proper anarchists… the meetings then turned into Persons Unknown support group meetings so I met Ronan Bennett and Iris Mills.
Ronan had met the brother of one of UB40 in prison and so the original idea was that UB40 would do a benefit single for an anarchist centre (this was after they were found not guilty). It was going to be affiliated to the Working Mens Clubs Association so there could be bar and show films, have a library and political discussion groups.
The Crass/ Poison Girls stuff came later, after the UB40 idea didn’t work out. I don’t remember there being any punks at the earlier meetings, but after the Crass/ Poison Girls connection was made a whole bunch of punks turned up and after the meeting I went to the pub (the one next to the Conway Hall) … it turned out they were the Kill Your Pet Puppy Collective. — Tony, Val and Brett. Somehow I got talking to Tony about magic, Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant… which is how I became a Pet Puppy.
I found the KYPP version of punk a bit more interesting than the anarchists -who were all older folk and I was only 21. I did become a card carrying member of the Wapping Autonomy Centre but never went to any of the anarchist events there, just the Sunday afternoon punk ones.
As far as Albert Meltzer and the proper anarchists were concerned, the punks destroyed the place… here is a quote from Albert’s autobiography about it from
http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/meltzer/sp001591/angels21.html
Ronan decided to appeal for support from the punk anarchists, then a new phenomenon, saying the punks would pass anyway and would be useful for the time it was around. The punk support, especially from followers of Crass and Poison Girls, was substantial. Punk has lasted a couple of decades, long outlasting the proposed club. With the punks’ money came the punks, and in the first week they had ripped up every single piece of furniture carefully bought, planned and fitted, down to the lavatory fittings that had been installed by Ronan from scratch, and defaced our own and everyone else’s wall for blocks around. In the excitement of the first gigs where they could do as they liked, they did as they liked and wrecked the place. Loss of club, loss of money, loss of effort. End of story. Ronan was not unnaturally disheartened and returned to even more chaotic Northern Irish politics.
December 12th, 2008 at 10:47 am
“With the punks’ money came the punks. . .”
Anyone would think we were oil shiekhs, just goes to show how skint the anarchists were.
Couldn’t they have gotten money from Gaddafi, like the IRA? After all, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya, (SPLAGJ, like a James Bond Baddie) is supposed to be a “republic ruled by the masses, without political parties, governed by its populace through local popular councils and communes.”
Gaddafi doesn’t style himself “leader” or “president” but “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
I’m sure one or other of the old anarchos that we knew (or an opportunist outsider a good deal more ruthless) would have adopted some similar title When the Great Day Came. Of course, it should have been obvious to a fool with half an eye — even a 20 year-old drugged-up fool — that The Great Day would never come, and that this was as good thing.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Thanks Sam; VG Stores, how could I have forgotten? You guys’ powers of recall amaze me, and I’m not being sarcy or ironic at all.
While I can remember other periods of my life, before and after, in pretty good detail, my memories of 66a and associated scenes are scrappy and impressionistic. The obvious answer is that its the d-rugs, but I don’t think I was any worse than anyone else in that regard. I suspect that it’s something to do with denial, even now, nearly 30 years on.
I recall the smell of 66a very well, a mixture of fresh paint and the seldom-washed bodies of male youth, like a Young Offender’s Institution that’s just got a lick of paint for a royal visit. I remember how each room had a very different feel, and that at the beginning we’d put a lot of work into decorating them and making them right.
I remember the nights as being intensely colourful, but I also remember weeks of days that were entirely monochrome. I don’t mean that as a metaphor, but literally monochrome, like the shades of grey on an old black ‘n’ white telly.
But dullness and ennui (affected or deliberately brought on by drug psychosis) was also part of what we were about. Odd, considering other aspects of our aesthetic (in so far as we had one) were almost psychedelic. I suppose our recipe was that for every part of jollity there had to be at least five parts of affected dullness, otherwise we weren’t in earnest.
Thus, my desert squat discs of the day would have included plenty of Throbbing Gristle and Joy Division and the output of lesser wannabes, earnest stuff like Crass and, in secret, like masturbation, commercial Crass-a-likes like Killing Joke. The nearest thing I liked to a jolly ditty was “Holiday in Cambodia”. Even today I find it hard to suppress a “You tosser!” when I walk past Gothy or E-mo types. But really I’m swearing at myself.
Again, this is odd given the liveliness of so much of the music that was about then. Sam mentioned X-Ray Specs, nowadays I find the Buzzcocks and the Undertones very listenable; even “Hurry Up Harry” gets my foot tapping.
Perhaps part of this is that the energetic-earnest middle-ground was occupied by such a bunch of tossers, the UK Subs (punk’s Status Quo) and such like, then later The Exploited and similar mimetic anarchoes. But then there were always lively bands that were energetic, reasonably musical, and had Something to Say without letting politics become an obsession, The Ruts, for example.
My memory of the time cuts off quite sharply circa 1983, when my life began to take a quite different turn.
December 12th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Al, if you were that involved in the campaign then I imagine that you know what i’m alluding to. Last saw those chaps when we helped ‘em move house, must ave been ’81 – pre summer – so still relevent. x x x x
Funny that , I think the emos & goths are great. A bit of va va voom in an otherwise boring teenage landscape.
But then I live in Brighton so probably a bit of a fashion tosser meself..
VG stores is still there , another name and no pictures of sai baba.
Dr Mick; the question begging is how did you get to be so into our Islamic brothers culture?
December 12th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Re the Goths and emos, nothing personal against them at all; like I said “really I’m swearing at myself”. I take your point about “a bit of va-va-voom in an otherwise boring teenage landscape.” My son’s coming up to his teenage years, probably I’m being overly protective (fat lot of good that will do).
Re the other stuff, first-off I should stress that I’m NOT AT ALL into any of that today. My residency in the Gulf just being that having learned Arabic “in those days”, and then having reformed myself largely through education to PhD level (and through the love of a good woman), I was well placed to do academic Comparative Literature and comparative Middle -Eastern Cultural Studies.
I’d dearly like to talk about my experiences in that scene, but for all manner of reasons I really can’t in an open forum like the Internet under my own name. A lot of what’s in my book is to do with that time. At sometime I’d like to do something more autobiographical, since personal connections between the worlds of 1970s extremism and the extremisms of the turn of the C20th/21st is highly relevant.
Suffice to say that I could only enter into something like emotional and intellectual maturity once I’d killed of the extremist within me, and he took some killing of. Where did he come from? That’s one for the shrinks, do doubt.
The intellectual history (to dignify it somewhat) of the journey from the Anarcho stuff to the other stuff is also interesting. I’ll sketch it out here one day.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Mike, how many goths and emos do you see in Bahrain?
December 12th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
How I suffered for my obsession with The Jam at 66a. Bastards.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
More than you might think, it’s not the stone age here! Haven’t you ever heard of Straight Edge Muslims?
BTW, I also summer for three months in London and near Brighton, and visit in the winter. So I’ve not “gone native!”
Don’t forget that in all GCC states except Saudi and Oman the nationals are a minority in their own countries. Only about 5% of the population of Dubai are Emirati Arabs, in the UAE as a whole its only 19%; in Bahrain it’s about 50-50% locals and outsiders. The entire working class is bought in from India and the sub-continent, and almost the entire professional class are expatriate Westerners of one sort or another, Dubai alone is home to 70,000 Brits.
Thus, the angst-ridden teen sons and daughters of Western expats hang out in the shopping malls, bars and nightclubs here, and most contemporary trends in youth culture are present here, in one form or another. Often it’s a bit naff and “not quite there”.
There are Arab emos &ct too, especially here in Bahrain, the most “liberal” of the GCC states (alcohol is readily available here and the university I work at is completely co-ed, the uni shop even sells contraceptives).
Gloomy existential angst is a favourite theme among the Creative Writing students I work with here, almost to the point of tedium: “lighten up guys you could be in Saudi”, indeed, a fair few travel over the King Fahd Causeway to do “haram” subjects like Literature, unavailable in any meaningful sense in SA.
The Muslim Straight Edge thing is quite interesting (although not quite my cup of tea), and just one of the many ways in which all manner of cultures and sub-cultures interact in a kind of po-mo, globalised way. Maybe the people of C20th “cosmopolitan” cities like London and NYC (both of which I love) are becoming the new provincials?
December 12th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Exactly! Good on you, Sam.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
woah 1980 flashback, I’m sitting here getting educated by Toxic Graffiti Mike. Reading about the middle east from someone who lives there is way more interesting than reading about a bunch of bands from 27 years ago (no offence BVZ)
Oh and Sam, for what it’s worth I never was a big Jam fan back then, but every now and then Steve Jones plays their stuff on his radio show, and when you listen to those records now they are pretty damn great, great songs, great lyrics, way ahead of most ‘punk’ bands. Even now on his solo stuff, Paul Weller is still writing great songs and is far more relevant than almost all of his contemporaries.
December 12th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
How very dare you…
Bruv I will quite gladly bollock on about Asia if you like, it IS much more interesting.
So background to the mumbai attacks; oh no, dont get me started now will ya.
Sam you wondered why were all so ‘uncomfortable in our skins’?
I think the answer may lie, rather than being a class thing which is pretty irrelevent I reckon, in the sort of characters we were/are.
Oh The Saints have just come on. Synchronicity or what.?
Erm, oh yeah.
Of all the folk who were at 66A for example,
3 of them now live abroad -Sam, Dr Mick & Mark-
And the rest of us -Ian P, Tony R,(Tony B also) Jake S have spent big chunks of our lives – between 5 & 10 years -living abroad. And still have big connections there.
(Lee and Volga were foreigners already. Ian A is now Jim Morrison. Gretch lives ruraly in wales. Leaves Mitch & Pork based in UK the whole time-i’m presuming )
See what I mean?
December 12th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
Mike Diboll said; “The scene around Crass certainly was, and required a bit of self-deprogramming to get out of. Although most of them were alright as individuals, the older ones should have been more aware that there were some very vulnerable and confused young people in their entourage.”
Presume you mean Penny and Gee, who I think were well aware that there were very confused and vulnerable young people in their ‘entourage’ and took their responsibilities here very seriously, ie very careful about not being seen as ‘leaders’ or putting folks into potentialy vulnerable positions, unlike some others I could mention who seemed quite happy to put kids into ‘cannon fodder’ situations, eg provoking riots after gigs, urging unprepared and ill-equiped kids to ‘fight back’, etc, etc.
December 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
“eg provoking riots after gigs”
I don’t recall anyone ever succeeding in doing so
December 13th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
If I’d have meant Penny and Gee I would have said so. No, what I’m concerned with is not the individual members of Crass, but Crass as a corporate entity, with a corporate aesthetic, a corporate ideology, and a corporate modus operandi.
If a group has these things, it needs corporate responsibility too, otherwise it becomes cult-like. This is the issue I have with Crass which, for better or worse, was far more than a band. I also chose the word “entourage” carefully to mean those who (with Crass’ encouragement) became close to the group, rather than those who simply turned up at Crass gigs.
Corporate responsibility is abrogated the moment people who are leaders (de facto or otherwise) claim to be no such thing. Looking back I find it hard to understand the anarcho aversion to leaders and leadership; an aversion to rulers in consistent with the creed, by why the aversion to leaders if their leadership is earned and recognized, the sort of leadership implied in words like “guru” or “sensei”.
By refusing to acknowledge that they were, like it or not, leaders of a sort, Crass shied away from their corporate responsibility, and the consequences of their aesthetic, ideology, and MO had on a large number of impressionable, and in some cases vulnerable young people (I don’t think I was vulnerable here, just stupid).
The only reason I mentioned the older ones is that if you are twice the age of your acolytes, have a level of education that most of them will never attain, and come from a relatively privileged social background, your level of responsibility vis-a-vis those young people is that much higher. But really I’m talking about Crass as a corporate body.
The kind of responsibility I’m talking about isn’t really to do with the things Graham mentioned, “riots”, “fighting back”, &ct. Rather I’m thinking about the groups role in forming and shaping young minds, mental attitudes, and beliefs about a wide range of complex subjects, politics, religion, ethics &ct. And I maintain this was cult-like.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:33 am
It’s an interesting thought that other youth movements have come and gone over the years and I can’t think of one except maybe PTV that had the cult like grip on their fans that Crass did. Even when the Beatles were practically in a cult very few of their fans tried to follow them there.
The Sex Pistols certainly opened up a lot of peoples eyes and I count myself as one person they woke up and enlightened, but nobody was ever concerned with what John Lydon ate and felt the need to emulate it. Maybe this was in part because John changed direction deliberately many times to keep any followers on their toes. From going out in 1977 dressed up as a teddy boy to forming Public Image and turning his back completely on the sound he was part of creating, all the way to getting Ginger Baker and Steve Vai to play on ‘Rise’.
Crass could easily have broke at least part of the mold by ditching the all black uniforms at just one show, of course they chose not to. I’m not here to crucify them, as quite honestly I hadn’t even thought about that band in over 20 years until I came on this site, but it is interesting that they made no effort that I can think of to not appear cult-like.
December 14th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Quote.
“eg provoking riots after gigs”
I don’t recall anyone ever succeeding in doing so.
I remember a gig in Leeds were a band did provoke a riot, then they watched the riot from the window. afterwards they dished out handouts slagging off the people who just stood and spectated.
Incidentally. A good way to suss people out is to image what they would be like if they were the Goverment. Having observed these anarchist type people over the years I think I will stick with Labour and Tory.
December 14th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Yes, if you want pointless violence done properly, you’ve got to leave it to the professionals. A load of little punks aren’t really up to bringing added chaos I mean peace and stability to Iraq and Afghanistan.
December 14th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I didn’t say I voted for them, I just reckon most of those so called Anarchists would be worser, but would they wage war against those countries they saw as being fascist?? But its a contradiction to speculate on anarchists goverments, but, say an anarchist revolution did happen, how long would it be before someone else started setting themselves up as the goverment. people like the hells angels, the outlaws, skinheads, and gangster groups would for a start, not to mention x police, christians, etc and a variety of other groups. Or would we all be anarchists in the new multi cultural Britain!!
December 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am
JNLM. Absolutely spot on about King Johnny / Crass.
December 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Perhaps Crass became the object of a cult-like devotion from a (minority) of their fans because they presented (and represented) a potential for another mode of living in an era which desperately desired such an opening, but received little to sustain it from the creativity of other musicians whose music promoted a broad acceptance of the status quo (tacit or otherwise)?
It may be possible to contend that the Beatles were subject to a much more beatific veneration by a statistically larger proportion of their fans (witness the increasing popularity of the ‘Hippie Trail’ after the Beatles’ guru visits), and that the same thing occurred to a large extent with Lydon…It’s certainly true that people may not have been concerned with what Lydon ate, but actually engaging with issues related to the world outside was never the focus of his narcissistic ego-boosting…
What many of his fans were concerned with was emulation and mimicry (almost to the point of possession) of the persona Lydon had created, which inevitably included the adoption (partial or otherwise) of the nihilistic Libertarian Conservatism which characterises his pronouncements…
Lydon is depressingly predictable (as is the music he’s made for the last few decades), and it would be nice if he broke the mould once in a while….
Having said that, I hadn’t even thought about him in over 28 years (apart from wishing I could get instrumental versions of the PiL albums without his inept whining) until he started advertising butter…
Anyway – what’s this got to do with the Middle East?
December 15th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
What the Sex Pistols toured the Middle East, well I never….
I think Crass broke the mould several times, first with Penis Envy and then with Yes Sir I Will, and finally with Acts of Love.. If you played Acts of Love followed by Stations Of The Crass to a person who had never heard them before they would think they were different bands, do the same with PIL and the Sex Pistols and most people would not be fooled, mainly due to Rotten’s vocals. I loved the Sex pistols and PIL were pretty good but as for Lydon himself, I thought he was an arrogant egotistic little child who was full of himself.
December 15th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
nice one Nic, that was hilarious! you were kidding right?
December 15th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I wish I was, John, I wish I was…
December 15th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
“Having said that, I hadn’t even thought about him in over 28 years (apart from wishing I could get instrumental versions of the PiL albums without his inept whining) until he started advertising butter…”
Surely they should have got Marlon Brando to do the butter adverts while he was still alive.
andus: “but, say an anarchist revolution did happen, how long would it be before someone else started setting themselves up as the goverment.”
Probably not very long, I think you are right.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I’m just re-reading Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Dispossessed’, which in part explores how even in an ostensibly ‘anarchist’ society hierarchies and ‘unseen’ power structures are able to evolve. There was also some anarcho-feminist tract written by Jo Freeman (I think) in the 70s called ‘the Tyranny of Structurelessness’ which explored this issue, although it was a long time ago that I read this.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I have to agree with the earlier posts…
My experience of ‘anarchist’ groupings is that there always comes a point when certain people begin to exert their desire to control others. before too long, the hierarchical structures start to appear and people begin to use others as scapegoats…
I sometimes wondered if this need to jockey for power was particularly pertinent inside minority and ‘outsider’ groupings because the people involved were so desperate: in their desperation to change the world in the face of a seemingly implacable structure, they begin to look for easy ways to enact that ‘change’, and one of those ways is to bully others into following a certain path…
I’ve never been a ‘Joiner’ so it all seeemed somewhat strange to me…
The question of whether this will always be the case (that it is a natural mode for humans) or whether people are working from a position informed by years of conditioning (and the following question of the ethics of re-conditioning people to think outside of this conditioning) is another thing altogether…
December 16th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
It’s been a long, long time since I read ‘The Dispossessed’, Graham…
I remember that it seemed to be mentioned a great deal at the end of the 1970s, and was quite a hit within the ‘counterculture’…
Graham – what do you think about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
For me, the idea that the use of language shapes and influences thought is very pertinent (following – as it does – after the writings of Wittgenstein, Lacan, Burroughs, Kristeva and Zerzan), despite the critique of this concept from the ‘universalist’ theoreticians…
but – in conversations elsewhere – other people have stated they feel that an analysis of the use of language is irrelevant to “the struggle” (whatever that is!)…
If I remember correctly, there was a group called The Dispossessed in the early 1980′s who were one of the satellite groups around Fuck Off Wreckords and Street Level Studios…
December 16th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Nic: some of those problems stem from the nature of big cities like London compared to smaller cities and towns.
London allows people to become rootless and to jettison family and neighbourhood ties. Sometimes there may well be good reasons to do so. But it also means you and a few like-minded souls can form a little world all of your own.
You can then hatch or adopt all sorts of ideas or strike various attitudes whose main function is to win you kudos in the eyes of your fellows. My ideas are tougher than yours! You’re just a liberal! And so on and so on.
At the same time you can cut yourself off from the wider world and in particular from the many people who’d tell you that your ideas are stupid, impractical or pointless.
Also, London’s colossal indifference and neutrality encourages the adoption of attention-seeking habits. It’s like if you chuck a pebble down a well. If you hear a splash, then you’re satisfied. But if you hear nothing in response, then the temptation is to find bigger and bigger objects to drop.
But outside London, anarchist groups often seemed more constructive. For example, the Bradford 1-in-12 Club, or the Glasgow anarchists, who set up a community printshop, raised a lot of money for striking miners in Ayrshire, and played a big part in the anti-Poll Tax campaign in Scotland.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
All this has come a long way from a discussion of Jake’s book!
For my part — although I now repudiate nearly all of what I used to “stand for” — I think personal recollections of that time and that way or life are valuable and relevant today, for all manner of reasons, and would make an interesting and valuable contribution to contemporary literature. Perhaps this could include highlight’s of Jake’s book, rewritten from a 2009 perspective?
I would therefore support the compilation of some sort of anthology of stories, anecdotes, poems, artworks &ct to do with (although not necessarily from) “that time”. In fact, not directly from “that time” at all, since I think what is special here is the way those times are remembered by different people after the passage of decades, what is unique is how something which in its own terms was pretty extreme has effected lives and perceptions over a quarter century later.
I’d certainly like to contribute something to it, and would also be interested in supporting it in other ways, through providing editorial or proof-reading support, for instance, of helping find a publisher.
A wide range of “voices” would be interesting too: looking at this web-page, for instance, there are those of us who have moved on and are very critical of how we lived and what we believed (or affected to). On the other hand there are those who are still “faithful” (more or less, if that’s the right word) to the old causes. Then there are people whose views are somewhere in-between. All this is as to be expected after the passage of nearly 30 years, and including this diversity would help make the compilation a relevant, realistic exercise in “life-writing.”
December 16th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Re the other stuff, I still see government as an evil, but as a necessary evil, much perhaps as the US Founding Fathers did (one can be a lot worse than a “libertarian conservative”).
My anarcho years still have their influence on me from the point of view of attitude in my distrust of politics and politicians. For example, I called Blair what he was, and in the mainstream media, long before it became fashionable to do so, see for instance my comment piece “Il Duce of Downing Street” in The Times, 6th August 1999, and my contribution “Democracy Direct” to the 2000 book “The Rape of the Constitution?”: http://www.imprint.co.uk/
That said, I now think anarchism itself, and all its anarcho-variants, are predicated upon the deeply flawed Enlightenment thesis of the inherent goodness and perfectibility of Man: the 230 years of history subsequent to the French Revolution ought to give the lie to this overly optimistic assumption, but it still appeals to the young, and those who would manipulate them. The Enlightenment critics of revolution (violent, passive, or otherwise) now interest me greatly, I’m thinking of Edmund Burke and Dr. Johnson. In matters of religion and politics I’m now quite close to the mature T.S. Eliot. So, quite a journey, then!
The Pistols vs. Crass argument bores me. It’s like two old farts in a pub arguing about racehorses that died 30 years ago. Like I said, if I like any music from that time now its the Power Pop-ish stuff (including The Jam, Sam). In fact, I always liked it all along, but the posturing and ideology got in the way of honesty.
What I would say is that I think the whole “fan” thing is dangerous: let’s not forget the etymological root of “fan’ in “fanatic”. A fan doesn’t think, a fan follows; it doesn’t matter of you’re an Elvis or a Beatles fan, a Pistols, Clash or Crass one, or a fan of Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, MUFC, Formular 1 racing, Adolf Hitler or Tony Blair. 66a was part of my Crass deprogramming, but I probably went too far in other ways!
What was so interesting about 66a was how little bands, fans and the rest of it had to do with what we were about. I can’t even remember going to a gig during that time, but I suppose I must have done. I remember the early months there, before Class A took too strong a hold, as being very creative. We were quite into this neo-Beatnik thing, which had we not been too out of it to promote ourselves properly might actually have got us somewhere. The City Limits crowd got hold of a similar idea a few years later, but nothing much came of it. Probably they didn’t want to give up the day job.
Sapir-Whorf is interesting to teach, especially here in the Middle East where religious literalism has such a hold on how people think. The idea that language “shapes and influences thought” is a commonplace that oughtn’t require a philosopher or a linguist to point out. But S-W goes much further, to the point that it becomes yet another form of determinism “linguistic determinism” — still that old search for simple, one-cause solutions to human complexity. Re Lacan and Kristeva, pass the sick bucket!
Ian’s right about the big city, and even more the cyber-world we’re currently playing with. I love the big city, but perhaps when (if) I retire it’ll be to a cottage on a Sicilian mountain, or something!
December 16th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
“You can then hatch or adopt all sorts of ideas or strike various attitudes whose main function is to win you kudos in the eyes of your fellows. My ideas are tougher than yours! You’re just a liberal! And so on and so on.”
how true,this reminds me of what became of the animal rights movement here in england in the mid 80′s,some people seemed to be always wanting to out do others ,go one better and trying to prove they were the big activist type.
i’m thinking specifically of the unilever fiasco,demo then trial in the mid 1980′s,a large group of people walking thru a housing estate with balaclavas over their faces carrying crowbars and baseball bats on the way to the unilever property in broad daylight.Then later carrying out a serious amount of damage to the place,the whole day was not very well thought out really,then wondering how the police managed to be on the scene so quickly.a lot of people went to prison for it when it could have been avoided.
i stopped going on animal rights demos not long after this.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
I can really see what you mean, Ian: London (like pretty much all capitals) is almost a country of its own…and its ‘otherness’ attracts all kinds of people, including those who are rootless and seeking ways to both belong and to empower the ego through subjugation…It’s a Charles Manson world…
Yeah, that ‘Trying Really Hard’ feeling really comes through in London (where people go out of their way to seem to be ‘important’)…always amusing…I’m been glad that I have never had to spend any long period of time in that kind of mindset…
The activism and social groupings in the provinces have certainly seemed a little more – for want of a better word – genuine, although they have their own issues as well…I wonder if they seem a little more genuine because they are – in a sense – closer to a notion of (however abstract) of community…
December 16th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
‘Anarchism’ is quite probably a little too ‘optimistic’ (particularly in the face of the weight of history) and certainly betrays its own origins in the Enlightenment…however, it will still be popular with those people whose natural inclination is towards a benevolent view of humanity (which isn’t purely the preserve of “the young and those who would manipulate them” Mike – while I admire the crass pomp of the declamation, it’s not exactly accurate)…
For me personally, I can’t say I have ever been an ‘Anarchist’: my own perspective oscillates somewhere between shifting co-ordinates in the middle ground…
The ‘Pistols vs Crass argument’ is indeed boring: I wish John wouldn’t keep bringing it up…
Keep on enjoying the ‘Power Pop’…particularly as you didn’t get the chance to truly enjoy it the first time around (although that was your own fault, if I’ve read correctly: that’ll teach you to put “posturing and ideology” in the way of “honesty”)…
Not keen on Lacan and Kristeva, eh Mike?
(I wouldn’t particuarly say I was an advocate of their positions or an acolyte of their writing: I mentioned them as they exist within a continuum of writings which relate to an exploration of the use and function of language – one which doesn’t automatically lead to a determinist position)…
December 16th, 2008 at 4:32 pm
“Yeah, that ‘Trying Really Hard’ feeling really comes through in London”
Sapir believed in the “Eskimos have a 100 words for snow” argument (a myth in fact); he should have chosen Islington, where today they have 100 words for “bread” (an that ain’t no myth!) T’wern’t like that in my young day. . . .
Sorry for the hyperbole, Nic, but there’s more than a grain of truth beneath the exaggeration.
My considered view is close to that of the Catholics, that people are intrinsically good, nevertheless they incline to evil and are therefore not perfectible in the ways the anarchists and others imagine. Mature politics recognizes this (hyberbole again!)
My problem is Lacan, Kristeva et al, Freud too, is with their pseudo-scientific architecture.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
I appreciate what you’re saying Mike, although I’m inclined to be wary of any mention of ‘truth’
Your view seems fairly close to Plato (albeit without the class overtones of the Philosopher Kings): government as a form of containment, as a check of excess…
Do you feel there is no room for further development? After all, we’ve only been here a while and haven’t had much time to ‘mature’…
I can agree too about the ‘pseudo-scientific architecture’ – academics, eh? Whadda ya suppost ta do wid ‘em?
December 16th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
So no free ‘Please fuck the system now’ stickers with your latest book then Mike
December 16th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
It’s important to remember that the period we’re talking about was 8 or 9 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite us being opposed to its totalitarianism, it was still a left wing social experiment that had perservered for 60 years. I think much left wing utopianism evaporated with its collapse. And it is interesting to note how people growing up in such a regime still aspire toward personal and financial competition. It was common to speak with people who believed everything we were told regarding life in the eastern block was a conspiracy.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
If everyone was being so dishonest and inauthentic in those days then it was all a waste of time. Where was the fun in that?
But as for London. The trying too hard bit is so true.
Little people with big egos trying to be noticed.
But the other side of it is, that because of it, big cities produce ideas, particularly cultural ideas.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
Jake: none of it was a “waste of time”, no, no, no. I really think there is something important and valuable in our stories. But to get to what is valuable, we must strip away the bullshit to arrive at what’s real. We find a similar idea in most mystical systems.
The bullshit is in onion-like layers. My last comment about “dishonesty” really concerned taste in music and bands. Most, if not all of us had real tastes that had become hidden beneath layers of ideological correctness and crap. But this is the least important aspect of “dishonesty” and “inauthenticity”.
Some of the politics was probably affected and therefore dishonest and inauthentic, but by no means all. Often, denial and self-delusion were there (which is psychologically, historically and culturally more interesting), along with inexperience and naievity (which are not). This is all to do with who we were or thought we were at a particular time and place.
But beneath all that, the gold amid the base-metal, is a real moral outrage at the fucked-upness of the world, that we expressed, fervently, honestly, in the best way we knew how. For all its limitations, this, and our reaction to our inevitable disappointments through recourse to ideology, drugs, &ct, is a story well worth telling. The journey through life, the quest for knowledge of self and others, the most human and most real of all stories.
Nic: I believe there is a “truth”, beyond time, beyond space, but it is ineffable and incapable of unambiguous expression in language, though knowable in other ways.
What to do with academics? Well, Pol Pot and others would have had them shot. My more modest proposal is that they (we?) wean themselves from the cult of abstraction (I’m hardly innocent in this regard), and focus instead on what actual people did and said at particular times an places (“historical junctures”, as the lefty historians would have it). Hence my concern that our experiences, and our reflection thereon, don’t go by the wayside. Hence my interest in Jake’s book.
Graham: I think not!
Sam: absolutely, I remember part of my garb circa 66a being an authentic red ‘n’ black “Moscow Olympics 1980″ t-shirt; okay, I’d splattered it with paint and penned obscenities over it, but the nostalgia for what might have been was still there, and what was Kronstadt but an argument (with bullets) about how best to procede. Hence my “oh really?” response to Fukayama’s silly ideological “End of History” abstraction in the early 1990s. Hence even now a muted enthusiasm for “the Idea that is Russia”.
Still, “conspiracy” notwithstanding, this “left wing social experiment” left the world knee-deep in corpses, did it not? Those of us who are ex- (ultra-) lefties like to think we’re excused from the worst of history by the recourse to economic, sociological and psychological abstractions around the “perfectibility of man”, but not so.
The Nazi-Fascist right also believed in the same, except that their terms of reference were different: eugenics, the Master Race, Strength though Joy, the Triumph of the Will. The pile of corpses still stinks the same. Before I’m accused of sounding anarcho-, I’d better add that the anarcho- pile of corpses is smaller only because they were less successful in their vision of “perfectibility”.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
I agree with you Mike that extremes of left and right tend to look the same. Through teaching art history for 10 years to kids who often couldn’t care less, it’s a fact that most utopianist modernism is still lost on a majority of the population over a hundred years after the fact. Abstract Expressionism for example, has failed to trickle down to the ‘average’ person. When I went to art school there were still very sharp divisions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. We were supposed to be blissfully unnaffected by the consumerist world we’d all grown up within. It’s a tough one though. If you accept human nature for what it is do you just cater for that and lose any bold failures that may be thrown up by extremist philosophies? We all (I imagine) went to comprehensive schools. How was the experience? Crap? Nice idea but the reality was that everyone recieved a mediocre education. My younger brother went to grammar school and recieved a pretty good one.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:01 am
“I agree with you Mike that extremes of left and right tend to look the same.”
Omelettes and eggs. . . .
“If you accept human nature for what it is do you just cater for that and lose any bold failures that may be thrown up by extremist philosophies?”
Certainly not, Sam. The experiment, and the self-discovery it entails, is everything. Just so long as the experiment doesn’t involve clambering over piles of corpses, which in Art it generally does not.
“Abstract Expressionism for example, has failed to trickle down to the ‘average’ person.”
Ditto Eliotic Modernism in Literature. The po-mo cliche is thrown about by all and sundry who don’t even know what “mo” is/was, who understand nothing about the Modernists’ necessary revolt against Romanticism, and who have zero “historical sense”.
Today as I was driving I was listening to “Europe Today” on the BBC World Service. The presenter, Audrey Carvell, was doing a feature on a recent petition by Turkish academics to get the Turkish to ‘fess up to the Armenian genocide. “But” she asked a political scientist signatory “it all happened more then ninety years ago, what’s the point in digging up the past?”
I nearly hit the radio: the Nazi Holocaust happened sixty-odd years ago, so in less than thirty years it’ll be okay to forget it, right?
“We all (I imagine) went to comprehensive schools. How was the experience?”
Mine was utter shite. Back in my radical days I remember fuming at a quote from Enoch Powell along the lines of “whoso hasn’t studied Greek and Latin has any right to consider himself educated”; I saw it as the ultimate elitist slur on the great unwashed who’d struggled up into literacy over the past few generations.
I still see it as an extreme statement, but now understand a kind of truth in it, a truth linked to “historical sense.” I’m too busy these days to bother with Greek, but in my 40s I had a fair old crack at learning Latin, just so Enoch can put it in his pipe and smoke it. Perhaps now a purgatorial Powell might consider Dr. Diboll at least half educated?
My point is that ignorance is not bliss, and if we don’t strive to try to know, we’re lost. It doesn’t have to be Art, or Literature, or Languages, the University of Life might do, and ultimately the strive to know is perhaps futile, but it’s in the striving that we become.
Consumerism has all but destroyed this in the West, in some ways it’s more rewarding teaching out here in the Middle East.
Again here in willful ignorance is an area in which we were a “vanguard”: 1970s state schooling may have been crap, but an otherwise excellent higher education was freely (literally freely) available to us at that time. We chose to reject it out of arrogance, or ideological “purity”, or because we thought that revolution or nuclear obliteration was just around the corner, or because we were simply too wasted. Where we led in willful ignorance the next generation followed without even a will. I generalize of course. . . .
2 a.m. local time, must abed (somethings never change)!
December 17th, 2008 at 12:48 am
For what it is worth, I have just read “The enemy of nature -the end of capitalism or the end of the world?” by Joel Kovel (second edition,2007) which I found inspiring and an antidote to depression. I will write a review and post here…meanwhile here is link to google books samples of text.
AL Puppy
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=W-eavh4NQcwC&dq=the+enemy+of+nature&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=iqKfM8W70u&sig=elNyZV-M6boY1pbDqVz0Dv8RNtg&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=4&ct=result#PPP1,M1
December 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
The edited version of JOW is a little lighter: that’s to say we’ve made it a little less like a Shakespearean comedy.
By putting some jokes in.
December 20th, 2008 at 3:24 am
So is it available now Mr Plague Dog? I know it was coming soon…
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:13 am
Available .
Send me your address and i’ll mail you one in the new year.
Jah Pork has turned it into a proper read.
AND its on myspace now too kids.
Might even creep its way into all this sites contribiuters ‘freinds’ list…
December 23rd, 2008 at 4:41 am
BVZ, ordered two copies from Lulu yesterday. I have two copies of the original here for me and Chris Low, so that’s four I bought now!!!
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:43 am
Yeah mate! I knew you already had a couple. Thats why I was goinna sort you out someink.
I havent got a copy yet so wanted to check it first.
You do have faith sir..
January 4th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Have emailed you personally Baron V Bonehead.
August 9th, 2011 at 8:04 pm
seems like this one is as relevent today as the country riots, as it was in ’81….
cheers j
May 3rd, 2012 at 6:04 am
Good thread that. Night all.