What now then?

Why this blog is rubbish

I read the other day that most good art is created by flawed individuals who may be in a bad place. Some examples would be Larkin, Picasso, Caravaggio, Liszt.

And there is that current conversation of separation between art and artist: do we take down the Eric Gill because he sexually abused his daughters? If yes, do we take down the Caravaggios because he was a murderer? The difference is surely how long ago these things happened. If the 20th century it's more pertinent. If it happened now immediate expulsion. The 16th century? Doesn't matter!

I do find it genuinely easier to write when I'm in a bad place. My ideas just flow out of me, like thought-diarrhoea. And I'm as fucked-up as Philip Larkin, but I just don't get angry any more.

This post has taken days to get going.

The thing is I'm trying - and often succeeding -  to live in the moment and notice beauty and warmth and pleasure. All the easier while I have no capacity for planning (or indeed facing the future) anymore.

I have so much time I can use what grey matter I have left to take on big ideas and watch and listen to footage of the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Werner Herzog. 

I've always like the company of intelligent people.

What was I saying again?

Gut-buster

I'm fat again. It's sugar. Sugar in biscuits, sweets, beer. I look bloody awful, and my jeans have never been tighter, and yes, I do wash them at 30', so it is me.

I've felt really indulgent recently, and the new Lidl is amazing for biscuits and being me I want to sample all of them. 

I tend to drink alcohol on Tuesday evenings and at the end of a D&D session on a Sunday - having drunk zero-alcohol beer up until then, to keep my struggling brain as functional as possible.

I need to be more disciplined. I yo-yo these days.

Favourite Dinner party guests

Mars Bars are the most popular confectionary. The reason is they are sweet, and not much else. And the textures are easy on the gob. Is it the best chocolate? Of course not; I wouldn't even describe it as chocolate. 

But it's the most popular. 

I use this particular metaphor to remind people that popular doesn't mean best. It often means least offensive.

People who I would love to have met, who may not have got on so well at a dinner party would certainly offend a lot of people.

Frank Zappa - highly difficult music, very intellectual guy who interspersed his music with offensive words and lyrics. The man who put the sneer into rock and roll. Huge output of music from large orchestral pieces to self-indulgent guitar solos, with incredible songs using multiple key changes, meters and improvisations. Check out the band he had in the early 70s with George Duke and Ruth Underwood. 

Werner Herzog - auteur director and actor. Made feature films and documentaries, usually of individuals trying to achieve something in a world that is alien and hostile to them. Aguire Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, Grizzly Man. He is fascinating to listen to, and the stories of the making of his films are as fascinating as the films themselves. 

Andy Kaufman -  a performance artist masquerading as a stand-up comedian. The joke is on you. And if you don't get the joke, at least Andy is laughing. Also Elvis's favourite Elvis Presley impersonator.

And why do I admire them? Because they're mavericks. They followed their vision without any compromise or tangents. I realise they're very Marmite (adj). But mavericks tend to be. 

You may hate them, and that's okay.

By the way, I am the antithesis of a maverick. 

My Current Addictions

So much news going on and so much of it terrifying. I've found CNN is the best one in the States: Fox is rabid, MSNBC horribly smug.  Thank goodness for Sky and BBC and C4 in the UK. And left and right criticise them.

My list of top news stories is as follows:

Trump. This is huge. America split down the middle. And I fear this could end in a civil war, the implications of which would be profound for America but also the rest of the world.

Ukraine: Belarus is about to install Russian nukes and Medvedev is threatening to sever the info cables under the sea that connect us to each other. This could be the start of Cold War 2. But is Putin desperate enough to actually go ahead? We (collectively) in the West certainly didn't trust the USSR back in the day (some of us didn't trust America either) and I see no reason to trust Russia/Iran/ChinaNorth Korea now.

Starvation in North Korea. This is a country that can't grow enough food to feed its 26 million inhabitants and there is a starvation there that echoes the starvation in the 1990s. Compounding this is the fact that the leadership is spending money it could feed its citizens with on its nuclear development program, and has stopped importing food from China. In fact over the last 3 years it's closed its borders and expelled foreign citizens to the extent we only know what's going on there from the few people brave enough and canny enough to have communications with the outside.

B Johnson is dominating the front pages in the UK but this story is a footnote. If you haven't already realised that to him the truth is an irrelevance then you should probably get some therapy. 

Buffoon.

Swatting

I always hated this time of year as it's exam weather - the most brutal time to be indoors for days swatting away. Seeing as I never could get down to any effective form of revision, and would always get sidetracked, I have always hated exams as the stress I endured was awful.

The Executioner.

This is all a pathetic attempt to try and make a pun about swatting as now I'm running round the house looking for flies (for some reason we get a lot of them here) with this bad-boy (pictured). And it's addictive.

However, this farcical attempt at a joke is not working and probably was never going to.

Sorry. I'll go now.

Russell Group Wonk

‘I knew this country had had it. I was 9 years old.’

 I was always rather in awe of people who’d been to Oxbridge and other universities, and indeed, many of the cleverest people in the country go there. However, while there are obviously brilliant people who emerge from University, there are also a significant amount of also-rans who ended up at the top universities through an accident of birth by being born into wealthy families who can afford fees for the best public schools (an oxymoron to anyone outside of the UK), getting all the qualifications and all the confidence (not to mention the social networks) yet accruing none of the abilities a truly useful human should possess.

I’ll come to those later.

The cleverest person I’ve known was my friend Martin. Martin had got a scholarship to Oxford to do law. It wasn’t the course he wanted to do but he said having the scholarship took any choice away from him.

So Martin was at Oxford, and what did it for him was land law - apparently it does it for a lot of law students, as it’s tedious and boring. He failed his exams and they threw him out. They then asked him back in and kicked him out again. 

To his knowledge he was the only person ever to get kicked out of Oxford twice, which was a sort of badge of honour for him.

He bummed around for awhile, getting a job as a hospital porter and travelling to Italy. Then he became a stonemason which is how I know him, as he was my first employer.

Martin was incredibly eccentric. My first experience of him on site was he would pull the Times out of his bag only to discover (to his anger) that his mother (who he lived with) had already completed the crossword that morning. This happened everyday.

Martin started lots of projects around his house and never completed any of them. I went to his house once as I was in Leytonstone. I thought I’d pop in for a cup of tea and a chat. He met me at the door, looking slightly shell-shocked. He told me I couldn’t come in as it was ‘ghastly’ in there. As though some horrible crime had been committed in there and it was too shocking to see. We ended up chatting on his doorstep.

He lost a load of tools I’d sold him then found them a few years later down the back of his sofa.

Things I remember he told me:

“When I was a little boy I was playing with my toy soldiers in the lounge. I think I was recreating the Battle of Ypres. The television was on and it was 1963. The Rolling Stones were on, and I looked at these Herberts jigging about and I knew then this country had had it. I was 9 years old.”

“When I was 9 I realised I needed to get to Oxford University. In order to do that I needed to learn Ancient Greek. In order to do that I needed to go to Newcastle Grammar School.”

Martin Duncan-Jones

He was wonderful and exasperating at the same time. I fell out of favour with him several times and then fell back in favour too.

If you’d read a book you wished to tell him about he’d read it too and knew it better than you. It wasn’t to better you (although he was highly competitive intellectually) - it was because he never seemed to forget anything he’d read.

I remember one example of his intellectual pugilism when we were up a scaffold in Haverstock Hill and him having a polite conversation with a guy in his back garden. It was perfectly innocent until Napoleon was mentioned. Then Martin flexed his muscles and had a book-off with the poor guy. Have you read such and such? Yes. Have you read this? And on it went until the guy in the garden said er, no. 

“Ah. Ah. Wonderful book. If you had read that you would know that blahh and blah and you would also know that….” and Martin proceeded to rub the poor bloke’s face in it. 

Like some of the cleverest people I know, Martin was a drop out. The education system was just too small and constraining for his particular intellect. He told me later that he should have followed his heart and gone to Cambridge to do Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Norse, as he had a huge love for the Viking Sagas. 

I miss him very much.

Television People

Some of the most underwhelming people I’ve met have been some of the best qualified. People with so much to prove as well. My experience in television was a great eye-opener about social disparity and what really constitutes intelligence, or rather the different types of intelligence there are.

We have an education system that seems to grind out the creativity of a child and puts them through a sausage machine where the child becomes a facsimile of their parent, ready to go into the city or slot into whatever grey part of society is required. 

Is this what we’ve come to?

“Don’t think of them as children, think of them as economic units.” Kenneth Baker (important historical figure).

So what did I experience in TV? Well, I worked in the London BBC so I am only referencing that rather than the whole of the corporation. I experienced a culture of snobbery; people who’d been to minor public schools desperate to be further up the chain than their contemporaries “Oh she’s jealous of me because I’m posher than she is.” Baffling to this comprehensive school kid.

First thing I was asked to do at Home Front was to draw 16 equidistant circles on a square wall - a circular mirror was provided, and nobody there could work out how to do it. These were people who’d been to serious universities. So I did it and people were amazed. This was stuff an 11 year old could work out.

Another thing I realised was these people talked about themselves and what they got up to with their mates over and above everything else. They didn’t talk about art or literature or politics or ideas, just how hilarious and great they and their chums were.

You've probably been on a train or in a restaurant and table of 20-something 'professionals' are shouting about how hilarious they are, to the annoyance of everyone else. 

Yes, that's them.

None of them had any practical skills but they made up for it with a rather ruthless Machiavellian streak of ambition. 

At another place I worked as a PA to a rather difficult man who was an Executive Producer for dramas. He was really talented and clever, and unusually for an EP he was great at the creative development of the script but also the business side of the production. However, this grammar school boy had a total inferiority complex and was unbelievably and unnecessarily rude to everyone he could be rude to - this is another media trope that your importance is demonstrated by your rudeness to your subordinates.

The guy in the next office was seriously as thick as a brick. But he’d been born in Malaysia to a very wealthy family, gone to boarding school and then a Russell-Group uni, and knew he had a divine right to tell everybody else what to do. His emails were hilarious David-Brent affairs. They were composed of management-speak and no substance whatsoever. And he got away with it too.

This is one of the things about the UK. Public schools give kids a huge amount of confidence - they know when they leave school they’re going to be running this, telling these people what to do, heading up this public body and so on. Meanwhile the kids in the comprehensive are told you’re going to be working for them, you’re going to be under this manager, don’t get your hopes up, people like you don’t get to do this and so forth.

Just think of all those people with huge talent who missed out over the centuries because they were the wrong sex, wrong colour, wrong social caste.  

What bollocks.

Rant over.