Thoughts on the WAG and SAG-AFTRA strikes

It's interesting how much work is going on to undermine the written word today, isn't it. 

It's interesting just how much work is going on 

to undermine the written word

today. I mean right now, in sweating offices and boardrooms,

men who are paid more money than I am ever going to see

before I shuffle off this mortal coil, are talking to shady guys

like the man I once met in a Baltimore restaurant

who seemed like the epitome of charming evil, 

to try and find the dirt to turn a snitch with,

and all with the intention

of replacing professional writers - not weirdoes like me,

who will always be shouting out here at the edge of the 

boarded-up shopfronts, but people paid to write the actual words

which millions remember, mimic, maul into ubiquity

with machines with which, we are told, will outwrite

Wilder, all the while unable 

to write more than a third-form book report. 

It's absolute exhaustion. Is this why

e said the mind was wider than the sky?

To satisfy the kind of men who dined with Harvey Weinstein? 

George Osborne Is Weak

 

And so is everyone soiling their pants over one of the Just Stop Oil people getting him point-blank with some orange confetti. Emphasis on 'some'. Look how little that lady is throwing at him, in my little collage piece above (which is just a bit of banter, right chaps? After all, I'm not even using simunition rounds...) . Look how little hits him! If you genuinely find this terrifying then look away now, because I'm about to blow your tiny, cowardly little mind. 

That's me covered in fake blood and very real confetti after the first prop rehearsal for Shotgun Wedding back in 2015. We learned two things from that rehearsal: one, that the literally underground venue we were using wasn't really set up for a situation where gallons of sugar syrup and food colouring were being thrown around, and, two, that the blood may have looked impressive but the confetti really didn't. So going forward, we decided to bulk out the confetti with dry rice. 

The thing about having handfuls of dry rice thrown at you by people who've been whipped up into a frenzy? That isn't like having confetti lightly tumble down upon and around you. That shit hurts. 

And here's me after the last performance of the tour, at which I specifically instructed the audience to try and throw rice with sufficient force to stop me performing (they didn't in the end, but it did get pretty close). As you can see, I'm absolutely plastered with the stuff. 

A tiny bit of confetti? Don't make me laugh. Frankly, from everything I hear about Georgie 'Porgie' Osborne lately, he wants to be thankful he didn't get hit with something much stronger than novelty wedding favors. I mean, I would have turned up with a brick before I read this Thursday's Popbitch...

Let me show you the tail of the scorpion...

'Capturing societies' in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or 'vitality' - vitality which was consumed by the conquering group. - Davids Graeber & Wengrow, 'The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity'

'[Franco] created orphans by the thousand, and he ate them by the score. And he created orphanages...more like madrasahs, really. Indoctrination with lashings - take that how you will - with lashings of orthodoxy and obscurantism. The children of murdered Republicans would be brainwashed with Mariolatry and hagiology. Their teachers were sadistic brides of Christ, and predatory bridegrooms of Christ. Further, in addition to children whose parents were dead, there were children of surviving Republican parents who were stolen in order to be re-educated.' - Jonathan Meades, Franco Building: Mass Tourism

'During Argentina’s bloody dictatorship, which lasted from 1976 to 1983, military officials carried out the systematic theft of babies from political prisoners who were often executed without a trace.' - Al-Jazeera, 'Argentina identifies 131st baby kidnapped during dictatorship', 22/12/2022

'The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000...' - Wikipedia, 'Canadian Indian residential school system' 

'An Associated Press (AP) investigation revealed in 2017 that more than 100 United Nations (UN) peacekeepers ran a child sex ring in Haiti over a 10-year period and none were ever jailed. The report further found that over the previous 12 years, there had been almost 2,000 allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation by peacekeepers and other UN personnel around the world.' - Wikipedia, 'Child sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers' 

'In Australia, between 1910 and the 1970s, governments, churches and welfare bodies forcibly removed many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. These children became known as the Stolen Generations. Their removal was sanctioned by various government policies (AIATSIS 2022a), which have left a legacy of trauma and loss that continues to affect First Nations communities, families and individuals today.' - Australia Together, 'The Stolen Generations: the forcible removal of First Nations children from their families' 

'In cases where adoption is in the child’s best interests, efforts should be made for the child to be adopted by a local family from his or her community and country and of origin...Exceptionally, if all prior efforts have been explored, or are not in the child’s best interests, then international adoption may be considered as an option.' - Lumos website, FAQs, 'What about adoption?'

'During World War II, around 200,000 ethnic Polish children as well as an unspecified number of children of other ethnicities were abducted from their homes and forcibly transported to Nazi Germany for purposes of forced labour, medical experimentation, or Germanization. An aim of the project was to acquire and "Germanize" children with purportedly Aryan-Nordic traits because Nazi officials believed that they were the descendants of German settlers who had emigrated to Poland. Those labelled "racially valuable" were forcibly Germanized in centres and then sent to German families and SS Home Schools.' - Wikipedia, 'Kidnapping of children by Nazi Germany'

'Oxfam failed to act on reports children were being sexually abused by its workers in Haiti in 2011...in one case, two emails...both said to be from a 13-year-old Haitian girl - alleged she and a 12-year-old friend had suffered physical abuse and other misconduct at the hands of Oxfam staff.' The Independent, 'Oxfam failed to act on reports its workers were raping girls as young as 12, damning report concludes' 

'Though better known for administering humanitarian aid around the world, USAID has a long history of engaging in intelligence work and meddling in the domestic politics of aid recipients. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the agency often partnered with the CIA’s now-shuttered Office of Public Safety, a department beset by allegations that it trained foreign police in "terror and torture techniques" and encouraged official brutality, according to a 1976 Government Accountability Office report... in 1973, Congress directed USAID to phase out its public safety program — which worked with the CIA to train foreign police forces...By the time the program was closed, USAID had helped train thousands of military personnel and police officers in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and other countries now notorious for their treatment of political dissidents.' - Foreign Policy magazine, ' "Cuban Twitter" and Other Times USAID Pretended To Be An Intelligence Agency" ' 

'In January 2015, Lumos began working in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere...On 31 July 2019 we launched a project to tackle human trafficking in partnership with USAID.' - Lumos website, 'Where We Work: Haiti' 

Ou wè li? Ou wè ke eskòpyon an? 

Enough

Not all of us

 are leaning into our lovers' 

clothed or unclothed shoulders, rolling into

and out of the curves of each other 

- but some of us are.

Not all of us 

have someone waiting

at the other side of the border,

not all of us rhyme safe and home yet

- but some of us do.

Not all of us

will fight. We do not always

find our courage at the moment when it might

be most of use

- but some of us will.

Not all of us will see the other side.

Not all of us. 

But some of us.

Enough? 

Of Brexit and my breakdown - a cashed eye closes

 This Monday marked a year since the death of my mother. A year ago, it seemed unlikely I would write the preceding sentence: I had always assumed, honestly, that I would also be destroyed by my mother's passing; had always told therapists that one of the few things which kept me from taking the final step towards ending my own life was my unwillingness to inflict that level of grief on her. In a way, the rightness of that instinct was only strengthened by the raw, eviscerating grief that I felt in those first weeks following her loss. The days and nights of crying almost constantly, the shrieks and moans of real deep grief, the almost physical pain of it: how could I have inflicted this on her?

So to say that I'm still alive a year later is genuinely unexpected. In large part, that has been due to the support of my friends and family, particularly the latter. In its way, depression, which I fell heavily back into towards the end of 2022, has also been a protector: that malaise robs you of the initiative to carry out the final act even as it makes you long for it more and more powerfully. Ask a professional, and they'll tell you: the real dangerous time for suicides among depressives is when we start turning the corner, when the right pills and therapy unlock our capacity to act ahead of our capacity to make peace with the world. But the factor in keeping me alive that has been most relevant to this blog in the past year has, of course, been my writing, and in particular finishing off what became Albian Dreams, itself the third instalment of a thematic trilogy of books which, themselves, formed the culmination of a process begun in the aftermath of the two catastrophic events of 2016 - of Brexit and my breakdown. 

So it's that, mainly, that I'm going to write about here. There will be more, much more, to write about my mother (and some of you will, I hope, have noticed the sly way in which Albian Dreams concludes with a nod towards her). I have a number of ideas for things rattling around in my head at the moment and while some of the smaller ones will probably need to be pushed out first just to clear the decks, probably the main one of those projects will be, of all things, a memoir. Yes, finally, after years of creating frames to try and slip the taint of the confessional, I kind of want to tell it straight for once. 

Well, ...ish.  I can already tell, even at this nebulous stage, that the memoir is going to involve a number of major digressions, mainly involving pro wrestling and the works of Wes Anderson, with particular reference to The Darjeeling Limited, but it will mainly, just be a memoir. No autofiction gimmicks, no placing in a larger political context, no alternate realities: just me writing about being me, and particularly being the me I've been since the end of 2019, when it became apparent that one of the things I inherited from mum was the debilitating, disfiguring and humiliating skin disease that ultimately developed into the cancer that killed her. That's quite a thing to deal with, and I don't think anyone can blame me for avoiding facing it head on in favour of taking psychic revenge for Brexit and carrying out an astral hit job on the Windsors, but these things must be faced up to eventually. And they will be. 

But before we go forward, it might be worth looking back over the cycle that we've reached the end of. So that's what we're going to do in the next few entries. 2016-2023 - what were all that about? 

In the meantime, though, please enjoy this reading of 'Not In Any Way That Matters', as recorded by James Whitman for King Ink: 

Dave Clark should have said to wear sunscreen

 Normally I listen to classical or ambient music when I'm writing one of these entries; today, however, I am listening to Cliff Richard declaring that he 'was born to rock and roll', a lyric which only avoids prosecution under the trades descriptions act on grounds of being so utterly unconvincing. Cliff makes this declaration at the start of the only remaining artefact of the 1986 musical Dave Clark's Time, an album of songs from the show which, for 25 years, was only available on vinyl due to Clark's famously protective approach to his masters, and distrust of CDs as a medium. And Time is, well, odd. 

In a bonus article in the ebook edition of the Davison/Baker volume of her mammoth Tardis Eruditorum series, Elizabeth Sandifer describes Time as 'a bad 80s rock opera' which 'consists of trite statements about the nature of love and warmed over New Age blather about mind over matter' or, more memorably, as 'recycled Maharishi Mahesh Yogi [spouted] from an overly expensive hydraulic platform'. That's a good description, but in my opinion if anything it's too fair to the source material. I'm just going to come out and say it: Dave Clark's Time sounds like a musical made by a cult. 

And yet, as the personnel listing on the album sleeve (reproduced in the video above) shows, this wasn't just the cult leader and half a dozen of his best mates noodling about on acoustical guitars: this was a big project. While only Richard took the stage in the actual musical (Larry Olivier's turn as a floating head was pre-recorded), for the album Clark was able to call on the assistance of the likes of Stevie Wonder, Burt Bacharach, Dionne Warwick and Freddie Mercury. The musical itself required the gutting of the Dominion Theatre in order to install the aforementioned hydraulic lift. And how did it do? Well, the fact that this article is probably the first you've heard about it might provide you with a clue. It ran for two years - which isn't nothing, sure, but is very much cutting bait in West End terms. And it has never been revived. To quote Olivier's Akash 'these facts do not inspire confidence, do they?'

But, as readers of this blog will know, I have a tendency to want to find these things out for myself. So I listened to the entire album. And, having done so, I can report that...it pretty much mostly sucks. The performers, Mercury especially, give it socks, but there isn't all that much you can do with lyrics like 'if these facts cannot be proved, the planet Earth will be removed'. The best songs in the show are the easiest to take out of context: 'In My Defence', with Mercury's vocals, becomes an anthem worthy of Queen's later albums, while 'We Are the U.F.O.', with vocals by the actor Murray Head, is a fun glam jam with an agreeably psychedelic chorus, Overall, though, the best the songs manage is not being offensively bad, though God knows the New Age bullshit about how we create our own realities skirts close enough. And how exactly this kind of Law of Attraction bobbins is supposed to achieve the diegetic purpose of exonerating the human race in its trial before the Lords of Time is never satisfactorily explained. Frankly if this is the best mankind can come up with, I'd be donning my black cap. 

Despite that, I think the show has one, somewhat ironic legacy. One of the few tracks from the show to be released as a single was, improbably, the spoken word track 'Theme from Time', in which Olivier lays the play's New Age message on the listener. Somewhat inexplicably, this track became a minor hit in Australia, peaking at number 27 in their singles chart. A spoken word track, narrated by an artist more familiar from another context, consisting largely of bland, bathetic platitudes, which becomes an improbable hit? Where have we seen that before...or should I say again? 

Obviously I have no hard evidence that Baz Luhrmann was thinking of Dear Larry wittering on about 'The Law of Probenation' when he found the essay that 'Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)' would be based on in his email inbox (remember when things used to spread by email?). It's just one of them weird coinkydinks. But I can prove I would never have even been thinking about the question at all if it weren't for Elizabeth Sandifer's newly relaunched Patreon, via which I acquired my copy of the book containing her essay on Time. If you're not already subscribed to it, I would highly recommend doing so: the rewards are a great deal even just in terms of Sandifer's extant material, never mind the stuff she's currently producing, like her no-holds-barred essays on the horrors of the Chibnall Era, or the exclusive subscriber-only collections like the recent ebook of her Star Wars-related essays. And it means you're at least 25% more likely to be able to work out what I'm going to write about next. Which, sometimes, is more of an idea than I have...

Epilogue: Gansevoort, 2009

 

‘Well, would you look at that,’ says Angel McKenna, looking up from the corner of West 13th and Washington. ‘These people really do be fucking.’

‘I know!’ Chuckles Cyn. ‘That’s the Meatpacking District for you. They try to gentrify, but folks just come and fuck against the windows.’

‘Rich folks,’ Angel sighs. ‘They’ve driven all the hookers out and made the place respectable. Apparently we’re all supposed to call it Gansevoort now?’

‘Yeah, just like they call Hell’s Kitchen Clinton. Well, for a while, at least. Until…you know…’

Angel grins. ‘It must have been a blow to Slick Willy’s confidence to realise he was real-estate poison compared to the goddam Inferno.’

‘Yeah, well, fuck him,’ says Cyn. ‘You know who would have loved this? Iain.’

Angel sighs. ‘Yeah. He sure would. This was his beat. As a writer, I mean. Not…you know. All the…other stuff.’

‘The stuff he was training you up for when we met? Albia’s little Batgirl?’

‘What is it with people and comparing me to characters from comics? At least Batgirl’s the right gender, I guess.’

‘Ah, I’m just giving you shit.’ She smirks. ‘Unless you want to make something of it?’

‘Oh what, you reckon you can still go, huh? That what you wanna do?’

She laughs. ‘Hey, you got lucky last time…’

‘Oh, that’s what you think? Well we can test that hypothesis later. Right now I’m hungry.’

Cyn nods. ‘If you want a blast from the past, the Hellfire’s a bougie restaurant now. We can eat fillet mignon and look at the wall I bashed your head against that time.’

Angel shakes her head. ‘I’m not one for nostalgia. Especially for concussions.’

‘I did not concuss you!’ 

‘Any blow to the head is a concussion, it’s the severity that matters.’

‘Okay then, I did not concuss you severely.’

‘Whoa, sounds kinda like you’re dismissing my lived experience there Cyn.’

Now it’s Cyn’s head shaking. ‘Oh fuck you - ’

‘I’m just giving you shit,’ Angel smirks. ‘How about Hector’s? They’re open til ten.’

Once they’re sat down, tucking into sandwiches, Cyn asks. ‘So. Ten years, huh?’

‘Yeah. I still remember the morning I found out. I’d been back in Washington - the original and best -’ Cyn flips her the bird ‘- and so I slept at my parents. I came down about ten in the morning, went to make some coffee, my mum comes into the kitchen and says Did you hear King Charlie died in a chip pan fire?’

Cyn laughs. ‘So stupid…’

‘And I’m like Good set-up, what’s the punchline? And she goes no,  there is no punchline, it’s the news. I was gobsmacked. Especially because I’d sent the RI, through Iain, a detailed proposal for how we could take out the fucker. I looked at maps of the island, the old Nazi fortifications and alterations to Mont Orgeuil…I worked out exactly where you’d need to plot up to put one right through the old nonce’s head at his moment of crowning glory. And then Iain’s like current thinking is such action would be needlessly inflammatory. So of course one of the first things I did after seeing the news was ask if they’d already had their own plan going and this was it…’

‘And?’

‘Well, you know Iain and his poker face. I never got much beyond neither confirm nor deny. For what it’s worth though, I don’t think that it was us. Who knows what it was? Nostalgia? Pique? Whatever - Chuckie Seven Eggs decides he can cook chips. And didn’t remember the safety films…’

‘Maybe one of your people put the thought in his head…’

‘What, someone from Dee Division? Maybe. I’ve never been one for that stuff, though. I can’t be arsed fucking with rituals. I gotta tussle. As you know…’

Cyn smiles slyly. ‘Really? Oh, I never would’ve guessed…’

‘Yeah, well, you know, maybe it was a Dee Division joint. Outrageous success if so, mind. Which, of course, they can never take credit for, what with them not officially existing and all.’

‘Well, officially you’re just a poet.’

‘True. Though I am writing a memoir now.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, turning one over. Truth is I feel kinda burned out on poems. Hell, I felt that way ten years ago. So much of what I wrote was written out of vitriol against the fucking Windsors and then, after Jersey, they just…petered out, really. Relinquished their titles, became like those Austro-Hungarian relics you see. Or just became citizens, like Harry.’

‘Ten years on fumes? That must have been rough.’

‘Ah, stuff came up that I got poems out of. But the big target, the Great Satan if you want to use a needlessly inflammatory term, it wasn’t there anymore. I think my work fell off a bit.’

‘Really? A Guttersnipe’s Talent won awards…’

‘Set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Awards make no difference when you feel like a fraud.’

‘A fraud?’

‘I’m exaggerating. But you know, I feel like I’m at some kind of impasse…’

‘Well, I’m-a-pass out if I don’t go to the bathroom. If the waitress comes by, order some more fries, will ya? I still feel kinda peckish.’

‘Okay. Will do.’

‘Oh yeah - speaking of fries, did you see the news last night? Apparently they’re working on some kind of machine that’ll use much less oil cooking them. You know, health food stuff.’

‘Well, fancy that.’

‘Yep. Hey, if those things had been around in ‘99, maybe Charles wouldn’t have caught fire and you’d have got to snipe him after all! Anyway, gotta pee. See ya in a few!’

As Cynnamon heads to the bathroom, Angel rubs her chin and stares a thousand yards ahead. She doesn’t catch the waitress. But, after a few minutes, she grabs a handful of napkins and pulls out a pen.