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Here’s some extracts from the unpublished novel ‘The Joys of Work’, by Baron Von Zubb; the story of one kids journey from a nullifying suburban background to the revolutionary barricades of post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 travelled 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.
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 from 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 a couple of times in this book > ISBN 1412026814
A genuine KYPP success story. Exactly six months after uploading this KYPP post. Jake finally gets these writings into print form. Go get it from lulu.com or alternative bookshops > ISBN 9781409245964
Sam
November 28, 2008 at 3:04 amCheers!
Mike Diboll
December 3, 2008 at 10:32 pmZubb: 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.
Penguin • Post Author •
December 3, 2008 at 11:29 pmHope 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.
Graham Burnett
December 4, 2008 at 6:34 pmHello 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
baron von zubb
December 4, 2008 at 8:10 pmBloody 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.
Toxic G
December 4, 2008 at 9:06 pmBahrain 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#
Sam
December 5, 2008 at 1:31 amJust 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.
Sam
December 5, 2008 at 1:55 amNot that I’ve ever read someone’s diary, mind…
chris
December 5, 2008 at 8:10 pmJake. How can i get a copy of your book?
Penguin • Post Author •
December 5, 2008 at 9:37 pmI have one here for you Chris, also a Bob Short book. Will meet up at some point for drinkies and swapsies.
baron von zubb
December 6, 2008 at 8:02 pmWhoops.
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
baron von zubb
December 6, 2008 at 8:06 pmMike, the other great fan, I’ll write ya in a bit.
Eeh oop
Mike Diboll
December 6, 2008 at 8:24 pmMy 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
baron von zubb
December 6, 2008 at 8:48 pmJust 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
john
December 6, 2008 at 9:04 pmDont 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.
Mike Diboll
December 6, 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
Sam
December 7, 2008 at 2:54 amNobody’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
Sam
December 7, 2008 at 3:34 amBy the way, as far as I know there’s no such thing as a ‘button down’ Fred Perry.
Mike Diboll
December 7, 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!)
Mike Diboll
December 7, 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. . . .
Sam
December 8, 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.
baron von zubb
December 8, 2008 at 12:45 pmVery 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
baron von zubb
December 8, 2008 at 12:50 pmThere 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.
Ian S
December 8, 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.
baron von zubb
December 8, 2008 at 6:43 pmIts all our fault! Name names bruv…He he
Sam
December 8, 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”.
Mike Diboll
December 8, 2008 at 8:42 pmRe 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.
Dike Miboll
December 8, 2008 at 9:29 pmWhen 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.
baron von zubb
December 9, 2008 at 1:25 amMostly 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.
Sam
December 9, 2008 at 4:24 amBoth 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.
Ian S
December 9, 2008 at 12:22 pmbaron 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.
Mike Diboll
December 9, 2008 at 1:22 pmMany 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.
baron von zubb
December 9, 2008 at 8:42 pmPeng 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…?