The sky is the grey of old skin. I walk the Regent to Camden accompanied by bootleg Black Box Recorder. London offers the usual blessing of indifference. Even with an eyepatch and a growling black coat, I am rendered anonymous, all but invisible. Only children seem to notice me, an appropriate canalside figure for those enjoying the Pirate Castle.
At Jongleurs I am interviewed as a talking head for a DVD extra on a forthcoming Bill Hicks documentary. I am not at my best. Paid in trinkets and Tiger beer, I ramble without any of the coherence and insight Bill deserves.
I want to explain how he was an inspiration, how beyond the laughter they evoked, his words did more than make me think. Explain how after listening to Bill, being a hypocrite is near impossible. Explain how he gave voice to my anger at the illusions of the Black Iron Prison. How the truths he told were so deep and universal they will keep resonating no matter how many times the heads on the statues are changed.
Of course, I fail. I do not even explain that I would probably have never written a conspiracy book without him. I do not even begin to convey how Bill Hicks still haunts me. Nudges me to scrape the black spray paint of the lens, reminds me to laugh, to be angry and yet approach the madness of the world with a loving spirit.
Drinking afterwards with fellow fans and interviewees, there is an immediate bond. If you get Bill, you tend to have something in common aside from a passion for a man who referred to himself as ‘Chomsky with dick jokes’. I hold one of the trinkets, a memorial card made up by Bill’s mother Mary Hicks. I turn its words over and over: ‘I left in love, laughter, and in truth, and wherever truth, love and laughter abide, I am there in spirit.’ Their power makes me feel even worse over the hash I have made of the interview.
The rest of the night is spent with Surreal Girl, something always guaranteed to raise my spirits. We drink champagne while eating popcorn, see an unfinished edit of an upcoming movie. It is a strange experience. Not only do I have to contend with hearing the voice of Doctor Who say ‘fuck’, I am front row with 11 lesbian vampires. This results in a lot of unavoidable actress leg and cleavage. Somehow I suspect Bill would have liked that.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Marching to the Fault Line
Politicisation is rarely a process with a clean line. Any easy narrative to explain where we find ourselves on the Nolan Chart is usually a false construct. Why we think what we do is almost always messy.
Our views on liberty, the role of the state and how to make the world a better place come from a hoodoo brew of parental influence, cultural DNA, education and events. Other factors apply as well. I have more than one friend who owes their current political orientation in part to falling for pretty face. Where hormones lead, philosophies on the best way to order an economy can often follow and grow deep roots.
The stuttering route to my current weltanschauung takes in everything from the deep poverty my family experienced when I was a child to dystopian novels and the Dead Kennedys. Individual acts of kindness and pointless bureaucratic obstruction. The power cuts of the three-day week and police brutality at Wapping. A raft of writers from John Pilger to Sébastien Faure. Images from the 1970s nightly news acid-etched in my memory as important to my development as the words of Karl Popper or Moh Kohn.
One element from my teenhood that helped shaped how I think and feel politically was the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The events of the period spiralled so far beyond industrial action the dispute became a rift in the fabric of the country. It divided. Placed you on a side whether you wanted to be on one or not. You knew at some intestinal level that the gears of history were shifting. After the strike, whoever won, everything was going to be different.
Today, on the 25th anniversary of one of the arbitrary, but most commonly accepted, start dates for the strike, I feel the need to mark it. To ignore, turn my face away from the collisions of history would be a denial of my own narrative. However, London is not coal mining territory. My options for communal remembrance and discussion of the strike are somewhat limited.
It seems the only apposite action I can take is to attend the launch of Marching to the Fault Line – Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s account of the strike. Therefore I leave Millbank and head towards Bloomsbury. Dusk is slow in coming tonight and I enjoy the last gulps of sun before the crowed sodium blare of traffic and advertising begins.
Hitting Whitehall, I walk into a wall of sound. The political artery is lined along the whole length of one side by hundreds of Tamils and supporters of the Tamil Tigers. They are arm-linked in a human chain that simultaneously chants for mercy and shouts for justice. Signs are pinned to their clothing proclaiming ‘Genocide’, ‘Don’t commit a sin, let food and medicine in’ and that old classic ‘We need bread not bombs’.
The high number of protestors wearing Tamil Tiger scarves gives the crowd something of the football terrace mob. For a moment I imagine some parallel dimension where Yam Yam Army hooligans have adopted both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tamil independence as causes worthy of militant support. This mind’s eye chimera quickly banished by the fact that chants are neither racist, homophobic or related to anyone going home in an ambulance.
Groups of police officers sit in riot vans waiting to be called into action while increasing numbers of their colleagues patrol the crowd’s perimeter. I cross the road, walk crablike along the central reservation. Take in the protestors’ placards and the way their cries remix the sound of Gabriel Fauré playing on my iPod.
The launch is somewhat dispiriting. The red wine is good, the bookshop redolent of the time when Thatcher was the enemy. However, hearing members of the Left still fighting battles lost decades ago rubs with an exasperated tiredness. The dreamed revolutions of then are corroded. Lost in a now which has forgotten so much more than just the names of the past.
Amid and on top of this scrummage for blame and dominant analysis, Beckett and Hencke’s are on fine form. Anecdotes roll, questions volleyed back with grace and humour. Marching to the Fault Line is a grand example of good journalism. It is also the perfect model of how FoI requests can further the recording and understanding of events already receding into the fuzzy horizon of history. It exposes secrets, helps capture the hidden factors that at times seemed to be pushing towards undeclared civil war. I am glad to get my copy signed.
I drift home. Try to take in a country where the spirit of resistance is found more easily in expat Tamils than my own generation. The strike really did change things. Later, canalside, I drink tea and enjoy a supper of beans on toast. Simple pleasures, resonant of the year I have spent so much time remembering today. The television adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding plays. Channel 4 might have missed a trick. Tonight of all nights, they should have been broadcasting GB84.
Our views on liberty, the role of the state and how to make the world a better place come from a hoodoo brew of parental influence, cultural DNA, education and events. Other factors apply as well. I have more than one friend who owes their current political orientation in part to falling for pretty face. Where hormones lead, philosophies on the best way to order an economy can often follow and grow deep roots.
The stuttering route to my current weltanschauung takes in everything from the deep poverty my family experienced when I was a child to dystopian novels and the Dead Kennedys. Individual acts of kindness and pointless bureaucratic obstruction. The power cuts of the three-day week and police brutality at Wapping. A raft of writers from John Pilger to Sébastien Faure. Images from the 1970s nightly news acid-etched in my memory as important to my development as the words of Karl Popper or Moh Kohn.
One element from my teenhood that helped shaped how I think and feel politically was the 1984-1985 miners’ strike. The events of the period spiralled so far beyond industrial action the dispute became a rift in the fabric of the country. It divided. Placed you on a side whether you wanted to be on one or not. You knew at some intestinal level that the gears of history were shifting. After the strike, whoever won, everything was going to be different.
Today, on the 25th anniversary of one of the arbitrary, but most commonly accepted, start dates for the strike, I feel the need to mark it. To ignore, turn my face away from the collisions of history would be a denial of my own narrative. However, London is not coal mining territory. My options for communal remembrance and discussion of the strike are somewhat limited.
It seems the only apposite action I can take is to attend the launch of Marching to the Fault Line – Francis Beckett and David Hencke’s account of the strike. Therefore I leave Millbank and head towards Bloomsbury. Dusk is slow in coming tonight and I enjoy the last gulps of sun before the crowed sodium blare of traffic and advertising begins.
Hitting Whitehall, I walk into a wall of sound. The political artery is lined along the whole length of one side by hundreds of Tamils and supporters of the Tamil Tigers. They are arm-linked in a human chain that simultaneously chants for mercy and shouts for justice. Signs are pinned to their clothing proclaiming ‘Genocide’, ‘Don’t commit a sin, let food and medicine in’ and that old classic ‘We need bread not bombs’.
The high number of protestors wearing Tamil Tiger scarves gives the crowd something of the football terrace mob. For a moment I imagine some parallel dimension where Yam Yam Army hooligans have adopted both Wolverhampton Wanderers and Tamil independence as causes worthy of militant support. This mind’s eye chimera quickly banished by the fact that chants are neither racist, homophobic or related to anyone going home in an ambulance.
Groups of police officers sit in riot vans waiting to be called into action while increasing numbers of their colleagues patrol the crowd’s perimeter. I cross the road, walk crablike along the central reservation. Take in the protestors’ placards and the way their cries remix the sound of Gabriel Fauré playing on my iPod.
The launch is somewhat dispiriting. The red wine is good, the bookshop redolent of the time when Thatcher was the enemy. However, hearing members of the Left still fighting battles lost decades ago rubs with an exasperated tiredness. The dreamed revolutions of then are corroded. Lost in a now which has forgotten so much more than just the names of the past.
Amid and on top of this scrummage for blame and dominant analysis, Beckett and Hencke’s are on fine form. Anecdotes roll, questions volleyed back with grace and humour. Marching to the Fault Line is a grand example of good journalism. It is also the perfect model of how FoI requests can further the recording and understanding of events already receding into the fuzzy horizon of history. It exposes secrets, helps capture the hidden factors that at times seemed to be pushing towards undeclared civil war. I am glad to get my copy signed.
I drift home. Try to take in a country where the spirit of resistance is found more easily in expat Tamils than my own generation. The strike really did change things. Later, canalside, I drink tea and enjoy a supper of beans on toast. Simple pleasures, resonant of the year I have spent so much time remembering today. The television adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding plays. Channel 4 might have missed a trick. Tonight of all nights, they should have been broadcasting GB84.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
The Eye of Providence
I am in the shadow of Thames House. Sixth floor. Windows open to defeat stuffiness. The droning circles of a military helicopter crowds the room. Low in the sky, a trajectory taking it towards the Babylon-on-Thames building. Its bullying sound obscures the 11am chimes of Big Ben. It passes quickly, but the thworp thworp of its blades dominates until it has nearly crossed the river. Over the next two hours, more follow.
Desensitisation to my surroundings is rare. The city lives in my senses and imagination. I can navigate by the smell of agarwood incense and fried sambusac along Edgeware Road. Close my eyes, listen to the soft exhalation of traffic and know whether I am in Kensington or Earl’s Court. Still the psychic static and I can feel temporal echoes of history occulted by the exigencies of everday life.
Yet in this particular corner of the Westminster village, I become strangely insensitive to the stories of stone and brick. Numb to the paranoid reek that should sting my eyes. Inside the security triangle, some protective mechanism kicks in and forces you to tune out the whole industry of fear embedded in the territory. Tune out Five and all its manifestations of the Eye of Providence.
Today, after the intrusion of helicopter flights, ignoring my milieu is not an option. The spell is broken. Armoured Range Rovers charge down Horseferry Road like metallic black rhinos. I cannot help but recognise chaps I know from Five emerging from Starbucks. View architecture as a series of adaptations to the risk of explosives measured in the clinical horror of high yield numbers.
England occupies little more than 0.1% of the globe’s inhabitable land mass, yet boasts more than 20% of the world’s CCTV camera. It seems as if a good proportion of them are concentrated in this section of Millbank. Step outside the blast doors and the invisible tyranny of constant observation begins. Smart and suspicious software analysing number plates, faces and gait. Cameras chittering data to distant electronic brains. Kick-starting paranoid pouring through stored information for recognised faces, walks and numerical sequences.
Walking here turns us into data ghosts. Our movements translated into a virtual world where our very existence is reason for distrust. Each camera capture a new scene in a fragmented narrative obsessed with trying to discern motive from detail. We have become extras in a film we will never get to see.
Desensitisation to my surroundings is rare. The city lives in my senses and imagination. I can navigate by the smell of agarwood incense and fried sambusac along Edgeware Road. Close my eyes, listen to the soft exhalation of traffic and know whether I am in Kensington or Earl’s Court. Still the psychic static and I can feel temporal echoes of history occulted by the exigencies of everday life.
Yet in this particular corner of the Westminster village, I become strangely insensitive to the stories of stone and brick. Numb to the paranoid reek that should sting my eyes. Inside the security triangle, some protective mechanism kicks in and forces you to tune out the whole industry of fear embedded in the territory. Tune out Five and all its manifestations of the Eye of Providence.
Today, after the intrusion of helicopter flights, ignoring my milieu is not an option. The spell is broken. Armoured Range Rovers charge down Horseferry Road like metallic black rhinos. I cannot help but recognise chaps I know from Five emerging from Starbucks. View architecture as a series of adaptations to the risk of explosives measured in the clinical horror of high yield numbers.
England occupies little more than 0.1% of the globe’s inhabitable land mass, yet boasts more than 20% of the world’s CCTV camera. It seems as if a good proportion of them are concentrated in this section of Millbank. Step outside the blast doors and the invisible tyranny of constant observation begins. Smart and suspicious software analysing number plates, faces and gait. Cameras chittering data to distant electronic brains. Kick-starting paranoid pouring through stored information for recognised faces, walks and numerical sequences.
Walking here turns us into data ghosts. Our movements translated into a virtual world where our very existence is reason for distrust. Each camera capture a new scene in a fragmented narrative obsessed with trying to discern motive from detail. We have become extras in a film we will never get to see.
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