....the year has started well with a trip to Derry for the MECCSA conference, where my colleague Neill Patton and I gave a brief overview of some of the issues and debates coming out of the two Scotland-based projects in Remaking Society. More about that another time, but here's the presentation.
Whilst there we visited the Museum of Free Derry, which is a visceral memorial to the struggles of the last 40 years of the Bogside community. Very powerful. Hoping to go back this year for some more of the City of Culture events - the Void Gallery has a really strong programme, but there's lots of good stuff happening.
It's shaping up to be a very busy year...and hopefully a little pivotal, as the wheels fall off the scrappy carts peddled by the shameful austerity merchants in the UK government and the Scottish independence debate hots up. Much happening, at home, abroad, at work; feels quite interesting.
Also - a quick plug for The Eskdalemuir Harmonium - the first in a series of coloured vinyl albums being made by my excellent PhD student Chris Dooks, and just released by Toronto-based Komino Records.
I'm sad about the death of Keith Floyd. Not that it was particularly unexpected - it was easy to see that he'd been in a slow unravelling process for years - but because he was one of the great iconoclasts of British cookery. I grew into cooking watching his programmes with my culinary mentor, my aunt Clare Jeffery, in the late 1980s. His chaotic, passionate approach (which, despite the buffonery, was always underpinned by a rigorous attention to detail in ingredients and processes) opened up a world of possibilities. Gastronomy didn't have to be stuffy, and it didn't have to be difficult; Floyd made it popular and fun.
After Floyd, television cookery could never be the same again. The collaboration with producer and cameraman created an almost Brechtian approach which meant that all the joins, snips and tricks of the trade were laid bare. Floyd artfully and wittily mocked the pretentions and conventions of food TV. The tributes from his successors make it pretty clear that he built the foundations - the informality, the documentary approach, getting out of the studio and into the open air and 'ordinary' kitchens - on which their own towering careers rest. And he worked fast - bashing together the dishes with ebullience and humour, his confidence inspiring the same risk-taking extravagance in others. In that sense perhaps he also embodied the 'live now, pay later' ethic (if it can be called that) that has come somewhat unstuck over the last couple of years. He was flawed, he was rude and difficult, but he was also a brilliant, inspiring cook: a culinary artist.
In the '80s, food taste was changing fast, fuelled by the ever-widening availability of ingredients from across the globe, rising affluence, and the consumerism that Mrs Thatcher unleashed on UK society. Floyd stood for decent ingredients, the pleasure of cooking and good company. He changed the way food was talked about on television, and he played the bon viveur in a way that secretly perhaps many wanted to emulate, despite the destruction that it caused in his life away from the cameras. His shows and his story contain all the seeds of the media forms that have come to dominate the next two decades - he became the apotheosis of the celebrity chef, with books, personal appearances, and all the other paraphenalia of fame - without Floyd there would be no Jamie Oliver, Rick Stein, Gordon Ramsay and the rest. And to his shows he brought a postmodern wit that appealed directly to the viewer, inviting the audience to help to unpick the processes of documenting how to cook, even as it celebrated them.
Here he is, cooking with a family in France, in a clip which captures all that was great about his approach. The Keith Meets Keith documentary is pretty compulsive viewing too but I guess this is how most people will prefer to remember him.
I've been struggling to stay optimistic, putting it mildly, over the last few months. I've also been deluged by deadlines, many of which I've not met. But this post isn't really about my state of mind, it's more about the state of the world. As any good ecopsychologist would suggest, there's always a connection between the two. And I've been trying to get to grips with the implications of the financial crisis. It's hit our household hard - even with two decent jobs we've been struggling to maintain our overleveraged lifestyle and it's limited my mobility a lot - starting a new job, not having much spare money and trying to keep on top of a massive mortage and household maintenance bill hasn't left me with much time, cash or, frankly, inclination to 'get out there' and keep my networks going. So I've found myself in a very introspective frame of mind - which is one of the reasons this blog has been so quiet.
Which is interesting. One realisation is how much my work over the last ten years has depended on maintaining networks, and the huge hidden subsidy the family and the household has put into the maintenance of those networks - whether that's fronting up travel expenses and increasing the headroom on credit cards, days and nights time spent away from home, and the way the frenetic pace of work has taken away time from other, perhaps more important concerns, like making sure that that family and friendships are well looked after and the garden isn't full of weeds. As I wrote in 'The Creative College', a huge amount of invisible labour and hidden transaction costs get attached to collaborative ways of working, which the rhetoric of 'partnership', especially when promoted by the powerful, tends to ignore or marginalise... So I've been slowing down and trying to work out the most important things, but like most other people, have been transfixed and horrified by the scale and speed at which the economy - both globally and very personally - has unravelled.
Man on Wire was one of the films of the year for me. It's hard to say exactly why but I liked the small pun and massive metaphor of a tiny man tightrope walking between two massive phallic symbols of capitalist ambition; I liked the way the film invoked the experimental spirit of the 1970s in which demanding the impossible was still a realistic dream; and I liked the moving meditation that was necessary to keep Philippe Petit alive and on the wire.
It's an example to everyone: find the wire you want to walk, and focus your attention on it; and nothing is impossible.
But at the same time the film was sad - Petit's single minded, obesessive focus on making that monstrous journey destroyed his relationships, his friendships and left everyone around him bereft. A huge spectacle, a huge achievement, but ultimately an existential contract between life and death, an individual and the abyss. And the word 'poignancy' is too weak to describe the symbolic power of that playful act of cultural terrorism that Petit and his co-conspirators achieved in the more utopian days of the early 1970s, especially in the light of subsequent events.
So there's always a balancing act between work and play. It's one which is hard to get right, especially when the flow of money dries up as a social lubricant. And I've been as guilty as anyone else at single-mindedly persuing my various obsessions, wth the result that I"ve burnt up far too much cash trying to keep it all going. So we're having to live differently - as one lucid commentator put it - it's like the restaurant bill has to be paid after the party's over. Ultimately that restriction on money may be a good thing: it's a cleansing process that is forcing everyone to face up to what really matters, and leave other things behind. (But I'm aware that this is an easy thing for me to say, especially as even despite the economic strictures, our household has plenty of options and opportunities - and that's not true for a lot of people who, unlike Sir Fred Goodwin, have been left behind on the breadline in places like Ferguslie Park.)
Living in an overleveraged economy turns us all into tightrope walkers. Another friend, who understands money much better than me, had this to say in a recent blog post about debt:
"Minsky said that debt narrows your opportunity – it limits your future. It took me a while to work out why he was right. If you think about debt as a liability – whether personal, corporate, or national – for every dollar of debt you need an asset on the other side of the balance sheet. For an individual that asset may be your house, or it may be a portion of your future earnings. The key point is that you become beholden to the value of that asset. If it goes down, because house prices fall, or the job market sours – you’re in a pickle. However lean and mean you are. If, on the other hand you’ve got plenty of cash – a lot of fat – on the asset side of your balance sheet – that gives you a great opportunity – in a sense it’s a potential future income stream. You might choose to be lazy – work short hours and commune with your couch – or you might start a business or write a book."
So, when you're carrying debt (in my case an overextended mortgage and rather too much other debt) the tightrope strung between risk and opportunity is very taut indeed. Like a lot of people of my generation, I've been leveraging my skills and abilities but haven't been so clever at preserving cash and watching the bottom line. And now the bill has come in.
"In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to CD, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently,gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. When the disintegration was complete,the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered"
Perhaps some of the economic carnage will lead to some more radicalisation and even political polarisation, which might be a good thing. The political landscape suddenly seems much more like the 1980s, which is strange to behold in the months I approach my 40th birthday. We seemed to have left those days of less fuzzy politics behind in the Blair bubble - (now there's someone who managed to flee the crime scene at the top of the market and leave his aides to pick up the pieces!- a bit like the trickster Petit!), and the smug parade of bankers walking off into the sunset with multimillion pound pensions while the towers of capital crumble, makes the dividing lines seem much more sharply drawn. But there are some interesting emerging ideas floating around about opportunities to rethink how we live in the wake of this disaster. I'll try to chronicle some of them here and over at Creative Crunch.
This is an interesting stunt by the Tories, who, whilst secretly breathing a sigh of relief that they aren't facing a fourth meltdown (and, even if not meltdown, at least mild disinterest/apathy) in the polls today, are making as much political capital as they can from Gordon Brown's discomfort over the unneccessary hyping of a possible autumn poll.
Now it's a clever ad, but I just wonder if it's something of a miscalculation? The graphics have clear echoes of wartime/postwar austerity; the poster reads like a quasi-situationist detournement of goverment public information propagada from the mid-20th century ; the lack of anything other than text just underpins the authoritarianism of the message. The whole tone of the poster conjures up a grim view of the state of the country which is at odds, to me at least, with the contradiction and complexity of the current social and economic situation. Yes there are considerable economic uncertainties at the moment; yes, globalisation is fuelling increased (im)migration; but to suggest that the remedy can be provided by a Big Brother type of government and that we are faced with a kind of 'wartime crisis' seems entirely misguided to me.
And as for the list of policy one-liners at the bottom of the poster, is this what Britain's electorate (other than the rabid Daily Mail-reading tendency who'll vote Tory anyway) really wants?
- Stopping NHS cuts and the closure of District General Hospitals* [*deconstruct that as a phrase - completely conjours up images of the 1940s NHS] - Teaching by ability and more discipline in schools - National Citizen Service for every school-leaver - Proper immigration controls and a new Border Police Force - A vote on the EU constitution - Ending the early release of prisoners
It all adds up to a pretty bleak view of the challenges facing the country - which certainly play on the sense of anxiety and moral panic about the country's place in the world in uncertain times - indeed, it plays on the whole notion of "Britishness", where the so-called "Blitz spirit" - embodied in that great propaganda poster keep calm and carry on still, perhaps, defines something of the country's national identity...
It strikes me that 'Border Control' - in the sense of trying to capture and define the terms of political discourse - is a good metaphor for what is happening between Labour and the Tories here. Both are falling back far too readily on authoritarian 'solutions' which will actually just stoke the contradictions in such rhetoric even more. Authoritarianism and fundamentalism resolve their internal tensions through an appeal to naturalized 'truths' and 'common sense' approaches. I don't detect a political language here from the Tories (or Labour) that can really reconcile: individual liberty/freedom and centralised state planning; a strong sense of 'nationhood' and the complexity of social identities in a globalised world; enforced 'standards' from the centre and the desire to enable 'personalisation' and local autonomy/flexibility in public services. None of these tensions can be resolved through authoritarianism. But both Labour and the Tories seem to be competing for the same narrow ideological territory (a shift to the right?)...
I went to the Cold War exhibition at RAF Cosford the other week, which is scary in its own way too. Perhaps it's an attempt by liberal thinkers in the military/industrial complex to demystify and make accessible some of the military thinking of the 1948 - 1989 years. It is most notable for having actual ('decommissioned') nuclear missiles and bombs on display and borrows heavily from postwar media material, attempting to put all the military machines - and the mad doctrines that fuelled them - into more of a social, cultural and ideological context than is customary in displays of military hardware. At one level it's impressive in its transparency; at another there are a whole set of assumptions about the morality of putting such terrifying stuff on display that need to be unpicked; but it's certainly provocative, for a former CND activist such as myself, to face some of the demons of the nuclear state head on.
There was something rather chilling and terrifying about watching small kids running around in the cavernous hangar, in amongst the relics of Britain's nuclear present, whilst mothers with pushchairs looked on in a slightly bored fashion at earnest looking clean cut men with short haircuts avidly tossing around their opinions about the power of the thrust accellerators and megaton ratings of the missiles, all of which have names like "Blue Steel" and "Thor".
So is this part of a return to a discourse of austerity and authoritarianism? The return of the 1940s and 1950s? Nuclear family values? There are some parallels, but as I've tracked elsewhere, I think the 1970s are a more useful source of zeitgeist fuel for the current situation, especially as the metaphor of ecological crisis is so potent right now.
Endnote:
Blimey, the plot/intertextuality thickens. Here's a home-made YouTube video of Helen Shapiro's 1969 recording of the song 'Today has been cancelled." More retro-nostalgia for a more 'innocent'/vanilla popular culture of cold war Britain...?
