Rant

The culture has been dumbed and dumbfounded, the language has been cheapened and blunted and everybody thinks they have to be so gawdam nice. No you don't. Be true, be good, be yourself. Be brave, be splendid, be ridiculous, anything.

Using big words is more offensive to some people than using bad words. They think you're putting one over on them.

The hardest thing to deal with is the truth. Power dictates its own, the New Labour spin machine set the template and so politics and business (two sides of the same bent coin) monopolise a soundbite vocabulary trying to tell you how it is, with all their dreadful cliches and jargon, "going forward"...(erm where exactly?) (Experience teaches that we experience things more in circular and cyclical fashion anyway - there is always change, but "progress" is a tired old myth.)

We need the truth and its cognate (?), trust to keep us sane. Not in the George Washington never-tell-a-lie way (tactful white mendacity has its place) but in order to maintain relationships, advance common purposes, even do business. Decent business, not glib customer service on a first name how-are-you-today basis. (You may wish me good day and establish that our relationships starts on good-mannered terms, but how I am, to you, a complete stranger, is neither here nor there and quite beside the point. We are effecting an impersonal transaction after all, not getting to know each other.)

I have been lied to so much that some basic honesty, even when it hurts, refreshes the soul. At least I know where I stand, even if I don't like it. If I'm not wanted, well, it may hurt a bit, I may smart and sulk, regret the loss of a connection that seemed sweet and valuable. But there are others. Soon come.

"Is it wrong to want to live on your own?" sang Morrissey. Well probably, but perhaps it's necessary to maintain sanity. "I must create my own system, or be enslaved by another's", wrote Blake, who Yeats so memorably described as "beating against the wall/Till truth obeyed his call."

It is a hard option, staying true to yourself in a society full of niceness and nonsense and bloody lies, risking isolation, being misunderstood or half understood or having people think you're an eccentric fool. Make a living, make a life. Combine them? Still haven't cracked it. Or as Joni sang, "I am on a lonely road and I am travelling" Still.

Ha ha!

Know Your Enemy

The devil says sleep
The devil does not say kill or rape
The devil does not say stay awake
The devil says sleep


The devil is real
The devil does not say hurt or steal
The devil prefers the bed the meal
The devil is real


The devil is mean
The devil avoids the noise the scenes
The devil prefers the cave of dreams
The devil is mean


The devil devours
The years the months the days the hours
The devil delights in funeral flowers
The devil devours

Utopian musings

The old situationist in me refuses to lie down or go away. From one point of view it's all so much utopian nuttiness and adolescent wish fulfilment; from another it is incredibly inspiring.

Perhaps it's also a displacement of the religious urge - well of course it is, calling for nothing less than the complete and utter transformation of this fallen world.

Back in January I was musing over the 'saturnine' - limits, order, boundaries, duty. Now I think I'm just trying to regain some inspiration. Though while the art and the books and the ideas are important, life can still be somewhere else. "I might have thrown poor words away", wrote Yeats, "and been content to live"...

The Hacienda must be built...

Writing yesterday, echoing around in the back of my mind was Chtchglov's sublime 'Formulary for a New Urbanism' - there is a theme there of building a new world in the ruins of the old which I like, but also one of remaking the things and places of this world as an opportunity to experience differently....

Endlessly quotable - dear departed old Tony Wilson took the bit about the Hacineda quite literally - a brave move, even if it did end up as just another nightclub - I still find the essay quite suggestive, immensely provocative.

Read the whole thing in full at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm but chew on this for the time being:

"A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires."

I was also reminded of Adrian Henri's mad 'Entry of Christ into Liverpool' - only remotely Christian really. It's really about that transfiguration of the everyday and the mundane and the profane - building the Hacienda, building up Jerusalem...

More thoughts on the "old world"..

A phrase I used last time to indicate what used to be, and what used to be better. My sometime intellectual hero Guy Debord used it however to signify a world that had to be surpassed and done away with, a world beyond the spectacle where we would see face to face, transparently. (Incidentally also the utopia of St Paul in 1 Corinthians). Phrases such as "the old world of spectacle and memories" or "the old world of hierarchy and alienated labour." abound in his writings.

So it is a futile gesture to see in the traces of that old world something suggestive of the new? I don't think so. It's not only in the arts that a return to the past for inspiration often proves fruitful. I will continue to muse on this. I will think of the correspondences between, say, cathedrals and great railway termini. There are clues in those traces of the past.

How hard it is....

...simply to engage with the world sometimes. Because the world is not enough, or rather the world outside my head fails to connect, or sometimes is simply not as interesting, as the world inside my head.

The old pictures and the old books and the the old songs of the old world make more and more sense the older I get. It is not simply nostalgia - I wasn't even old enough to fully appreciate what was happening in the sixties for example. The current culture is pretty uninteresting, unchallenging, simply not there.Or as an online friend wrote the other day, commenting on the current music scene:

"I've been told off for suggesting that new artists can never be as good as the good ol' gold old ones so I'd just like to make something clear: it's my contention that the the machinery of modern digital technology as used in making modern pop records, when coupled with the formidable machinery of the tabloid media and the way that showbusiness is in bed with it goes so far as to actively preclude the emergence of any genuinely remarkable pop personalities. It doesn't matter how much raw talent a performer has, in order for them to succeed they have to be fed into the Simon Cowell Sausage Machine. The public have had their tastes second guessed by professional smartarses for so long that they have grown to like it, to expect it, and anything that falls outside the Simon Cowell Sausage Machine remit will simply never be presented before a mainstream audience...

The dice of success are loaded against individuality and absolutely dead against young talented people having any chance to actually work out who they are, what they're trying to say and how they want to say it. Fit in or fuck off, is essentially the message. And I'm sick of it. " (Adam)

You could apply that to so many other art forms. My hope is that the economic downturn will open up space for stronger, more serious stuff everywhere. I really feel those shiny shallow nobodies with the money and the power have had their day. And maybe young people might begin to learn that they have a history, and a heritage.