I have to say I’m loving that B.P. oil-spill!

It apparently may not be fully capped now until August!

Something I’ve particularly enjoyed about it is the way the optimistic assessments keep getting revised downward, you’ll remember this from the early tremors in the financial crisis, and the grim, daily comedy of the soothing messages being progressively downgraded. Sub-Prime was a small-scale American issue which wouldn’t affect Britain in any way, no need to worry, we’re going to be fine. Then it shifted slightly, well, we will be affected but not much, we won’t go into recession as employment is still high, then, we won’t go into recession as, well, yes unemployment is up but inflation is still low, and on into the collapse of various banks etc and the deepest recession since etc.

The B.P. situation is another assault upon optimism, but of a somewhat more intransigent kind. There is a nightmare whisking away of the mind’s well-thumbed comfort blanket, a little inkling of what it must be like to find you have an incurable disease. The necessary state of mind that somehow it will all be all right, all get sorted out somehow founders. There is something about the leak that’s properly traumatic, violating the cosy belief that nothing will ever get too bad, that technology will save us. The leak is a kind of nightmarish, insistent surplus of the real decimating the fantasy that someone, somewhere will always be able to take charge of the situation and resolve it.

What if it simply can’t be capped, or if the capacity to cap it is years in the future? Here come some hurricanes, spreading the oil and doubtless hampering further attempts at cleaning up/ stopping the flow. What if a similar disaster occurs in the same area tomorrow? Statistically unlikely no doubt, but still…. Government can do nothing but reaffirm its angry impotence, B.P. can only use the methods at its disposal, and if they don’t have adequate means, who does?

Meanwhile, completely oblivious to human hopes and fears the oil keeps flowing...

Number 12!

"The company points out that despite the bad publicity, each day around 8,000 people still apply to work at the factory."

Despite the thousands of other opportunities open to them! Honestly, if these guys don't like working there why don't they just, like, get another job or something?

At last! You know when a track really reminds you of another song but you can't put your finger on what it is? Well, I had that with Ikonika's much vaunted "Please" and then I suddenly twigged, yeah, it's this!

Now that's a surprise!

The kind people at Zero have agreed to me writing something on Seventies' British film so I've been having a go at that instead of learning Japanese. A part of the first section "When Sean met Sidney" is below, replete with factual, spelling and punctuation errors no doubt. What it'll look like by the time it's finished I dunno... it's work-in-progress, innit.

My last effort is now available at Amazon it seems. If somebody could get a copy to Danny Dyer or Nick Love, I'd appreciate it!

“I have always hated that damn James Bond. I'd like to kill him.” Sean Connery interviewed by Barbara Walters 1986.





Bond/Non Bond.

In 1961 Sean Connery, a working-class Scot, was chosen for the role of James Bond, the hero of a series of hugely successful spy novels by Eton-educated Ian Fleming. Connery was not what Fleming had in mind: his first choice was David Niven, the quintessential British “officer and gentlemen” of both pre and post–war Cinema.

Even if Connery wasn’t right for the role, Niven was certainly wrong, though he did later play Bond in the first unofficial Bond-movie Casino Royale. Niven’s charm was that of bygone age, the fantasy of an Edwardian era, a thoroughly decent, upper-class chap, a clubbable all-rounder whose decorum and determination never desert him. The opening, and admittedly highly affecting sequence of Powell and Pressburger’s A matter of Life and Death, in which Niven is a squadron leader who has no choice but to go down with his plane over the English channel and who spends his final moments in conversation with an American radio operator named June, captures a certain romantic Late Victorian/ Edwardian essence perfectly: all plucky and plumy, poetry-quoting, chirpy stoicism. Even by 1946 Niven seems an anachronism, more suited to portraying an earlier set of heroic gentlemen amateurs than the resolutely modern Bond; Richard Hanney, Bulldog Drummond, Biggles, Phineas Fog, chaps whose high birth and upbringing allow them to modestly muddle through. The final decision to cast Connery was made by the film’s American producers, Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, against Fleming’s wishes. In this sense Connery-as-Bond is an American choice. An American imagining of the quintessential British hero that serves to give him an international dimension.

Connery- as-Bond is also congenial to a British imagination that wishes to see itself as modern, and for which modernity is American. Bond operates as a fantasy figure on several levels, a complex, composite figure who speaks to the perennial fear of Britain’s loss of prestige in the world and its inability to become fully modern. Modernisation requires a sweeping aside of the aristocratic gentleman amateurs who have dominated British politics and commerce and their replacement with a newly technocratic, professionalised elite. Bond is a projection of the ideal of a modern Britain and of its global role: youthful, relatively “classless”, still in command of the world, maintaining the best of the establishment’s tradition but also carrying forward a modern irony and sense of greater sexual openness. Bond affirms the necessity and rightness of British power ranging freely over the world, in this way he works to meliorate against he forces of anti imperialism and the break up of empire, the emergence of the U.S.A as the military superpower. In character and lifestyle terms his classlessness expresses the shifting values of the newly confident working classes, the trends toward liberalism and the age of mass consumption. Bond’s relationship with his superior M, M’s secretary Miss Moneypenny, Q, the technician who provides Bond with his “gadgets” and his American counterpart Felix Leiter all help to position the character as distinctively modern. He’s sceptical but respectful toward M’s authority, happy to flirt with and be fawned over by Moneypenny, demonstrates a sophisticatedly neglectful attitude to the hi-tech “toys” provided by Q, and is always the senior partner in his relationship with his CIA equivalent.

In his attitude toward authority, sex, the world of technology/consumption, and in international affairs Bond is a new type of man. That new type is effectively “Playboy man”, a new model of corporatist masculinity, rugged in the best American frontier tradition, a bastion of impersonal efficiency yet also thoroughly adapted to the social whirl of the jet-set. Playboy, launched the same year that Fleming published Casino Royale is perhaps the first attempt to address masculinity as a “lifestyle”, an attempt to resolve the conflict between traditional archetypes of masculinity and men’s roles within consumption–driven economies, the need to crack open previously unselfconscious, “given” social formations, monetize them and sell them back. Bond is reassuring to the British, exotic to Americans and the rest of the world, he asserts that British masculinity is more than merely in touch with modern sensibilities, it’s world-leading, yet still maintains an old-world sophistication. This sophistication is maintained through fidelity to the supreme quality no amount of modern irony can touch, Bond’s patriotism. In this respect more than any other Bond is a figure of synthesis, a titan who embodies and neutralizes the forces tearing at Britain, the professional, the specialist, who shares something of the irreverence of the Angry Young Men, but whose patriotism will ensure a symbiosis with the establishment: the country’s future will not be too unlike its past.

The pleasure afforded by the films is not simply the excitement of Bond’s adventures in exotic locales with beautiful women, but also the ways in which the character works as a sop to the perennial British fears of decline, of loss of prestige and England’s place in a modern world, themes which even now, 65 years after the end of the Second World War and the loss of Empire, trouble the national psyche.

Non-Bond/Anti-Bond.

But what of Connery’s own relationship to the role that made him famous? How does a working class boy who left school at fourteen and got a “Scotland Forever” tattoo in the Navy feel about incarnating the ideal of the post.-war “Tory imagination”? Connery himself has been inconsistent on the matter, alternately professing gratitude and sympathy, disinterest and occasional outright hostility.

It’s hard to imagine in 2010 that Connery could ever have been a radical of any kind, but as his celebrity reaches truly global proportions, as he becomes a superstar, he appears determined to undercut and expose the fantasy of the Bond movies at every turn. By the mid-Sixties, with Goldfinger reaching a new peak of popularity, Connery is still a long way from being knighted Sir Sean, twenty years away yet from his thoroughly undeserved Oscar for DePalma’s The Untouchables and a lucrative dotage, interrupting his golfing every six months or so to somnambulate through roles as silver-wigged mentors and sexy father-figures in a set of forgettable action movies.

There is something more, in the non-Bond work that he takes throughout the Sixties and early Seventies than the desire of an actor over-identified with a single role to try and break free from its constraints. There is something grim and conflicted in it which reveals not just the core of Connery’s own multiple hostilities but some of the central social and psychological conflicts of the times themselves. In the febrile, mordant Marnie, Hitchcock’s last really interesting movie before he returns to England and reaches a kind of grisly apotheosis with Frenzy, he plays a character who blackmails a women into marrying him, rapes her then sets about curing the problem of her frigidity, the very model of the perverse, sadistic core of the sensitive, liberal new-man. Following Goldfinger he makes The Hill with Sydney Lumet, returns to Bond for Thunderball then retires from the role in order to work with Lumet again in The Anderson Tapes and the Mc-Carthy era blacklisted director Martin Ritt on the nihilstic The Molly McGuires, in which he plays the leader of a group of militantly unionised mine workers in bloody conflict with the mine owners and the police who support their interests. He returns to Bond for the money in Diamonds are Forever and then uses the promise he has wrangled out of the studio to make The Offence, again with Lumet. In place of a version of Macbeth that fails to get off the ground, he stars in the unashamedly unhinged Zardoz by John Boorman, publicity stills from which, revealing a deeply hirsute Connery in a puce thong holding a ray-gun occasion gasps of disbelief to this day.

As the Bond films grow broader in scope, more spectacular and sillier, as Bond becomes more and more iconic Connery’s own choices grow darker and wilder until by the time of The Offence, his career peak and also among his least known films, a film he believes the studio “buried”, he has moved as far from Bond’s cool heroism as it’s possible to get. The Lumet films seem to offer up a response to Bond, to say: there is the fantasy, there is the Tory imagination at work, synthesising present and past in a beguiling dreamwork, here is the grim, rupturing reality of the conflicts, here is the dark heart of our national crack-up.

The last two paragraphs manage to be kind of horrifying and hilarious at the same time.

Hey! How about reducing the fifteen hour days, mandatory overtime, no days off, military style discipline and dormitory living? Nah, why would that be a problem*, it must be evil spirits, and anyway it's not even stastistically anomolous** given the population.

I don't know if you've ever worked on a production line dear blogreader, let me assure you, it's hellish. Still, I'm sure that A) actually they're much better off than they were when they were toiling in the rice paddies and now they can send money home and buy cheap mobile phones and stuff and B) if they reduced productivity by working less/ demanding higher wages Apple would just relocate, leaving them without any jobs at all, so really they're in the best possible situation as it is.

*After all they have that "ferocious Asian work ethic" recently praised by the Economist handily keeping us all awash in easy credit and cheap consumer goods! You know how that work ethic goes, if we let them, they'd be doing even more hours for even less money!

**Though I suspect this is.

Sophisti-pop (thanks comments box!) is an odd bit of retroactive genre codifying. I can't imagine Reynolds or Stubbs ever hated on The Blue Nile, or ABC, and I'm certainly not going to accept Steely Dan sharing a pigeonhole with Level 42!

I don’t really get how “the market” is supposed to work in any great detail but as far as I understand it, it’s supposed to act as a kind of infallible guarantor of, well, everything.

Oil will not run out for example, because we will find increasingly economical ways of refining/exploiting it as long as the market mechanism is in place: the market is a kind of collective super-agent, a super-supple safety-net that guarantees that we will always live in the best of all possible worlds. Hence we can dismiss as doom-mongering or mere myopia the concerns of environmentalists, demographers, socialists etc that some point of deadlock or crisis will come about in the future: the market is a kind of “spirit”, the means through which, without any especial forethought or planning, conflicts and shortages are resolved. We are all not just voting everyday with every dollar spent, guaranteeing that only the fittest and best of companies and “providers” survive, but also somehow winnowing away all future problems, if the demand is there, if the profit motive is in play and the market is sufficiently free we enter a kind of holy zone in which human needs, dreams and wishes are spontaneously articulated en-masse and inevitably come to pass. You are always in good, if invisible, hands.

So I’m a bit confused by all this B.P oil slick business. In other words, how does “the market” deal with something like this? I know B.P. shares are taking a hammering at the moment and eventually, who knows, they may go bankrupt X number of years in the future, having created an unprecedented series of environmental disasters and having been effectively winnowed out in the markets inevitable trajectory toward a point of mystically super-attenuated efficiency, but at what cost? What if, in a more realistic scenario, it takes them another month to cap the leak? More bad news for their shareholders, red faces all round in BP management no doubt, perhaps a high-profile sacking or two, and twice the level of pollution.

It seems that B.P had no immediate and adequate means to resolve the problem. Why not? Because it has never happened before. But now that the need for a whole range of specialist tools and responses has been revealed the market will spring into action to deliver them. Of course testing them in exactly the right circumstances will prove tricky, there are always local variables and operating at this, and realistically increasingly greater depth in less and less accessible places and more hostile environments may mean that there’s a huge amount of trial and error involved. Imagine one of those previously inaccessible seams of North sea oil suddenly haemorrhaging as a result of experimental and exploratory new extraction techniques, what would that do to the coastline of Britain? So how long, how many similar such leaks would we have to accept before the market found a suitable response? This isn’t after all like privatising directory enquiries whereby we can allow a hundred competitors to spring up offering their own service, confident that the one which gives customers best value will eventually survive ( though apparently this wasn’t the case with that privatisation anyway, some of the alternate services which died out were no more expensive or less efficient they simply had poorer advertising campaigns/less memorable numbers than 118 118 which must surely now have a private monopoly on the business and has probably increased its tariffs accordingly). Perhaps it doesn’t much matter if you have a load of useless services sitting round dying, as the most robust consumes their market share, but adequate responses to oil spills seem a little more urgent. The time lag in the market adjusting is relatively trivial in some circumstances, less so in others.

I ask this because apparently in the States people are looking to the Government to do something. But what can the government do? Send in its own technicians and experts to replace B.P.'s? They don’t exist, for all the talk either of action, “pushing B.P out of the way” or in terms of finding a more competent authority to resolve the problem “teams of scientific All-Stars” the conclusion is that B.P “have the eyes and ears that are down there. They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved". The government can still perhaps be a lender of last resort in a financial crisis, but it can’t step into a crisis of this nature. Yet, inevitably somehow the public’s eyes turn toward it, then grow angry at its impotence, then move searchingly between the two empty thrones of government and big business. Someone surely must be able to stop this awful thing happening! But what can the Government do other than to “put pressure” on B.P or potentially fine it as a way of “incentivizing” the company further, though as Government is clearly not a part of the market itself, it’s hard to understand why this would be desirable or necessary, isn’t that just Government distorting the market and stopping everything from working the way it should? What could it have done previously in terms of regulating, checking and watch-dogging security procedures? More interference, getting in the way of the market. Do you know what a nightmare of red tape and regulation that would have been? Then a gain, it might have prevented/curtailed this disaster and saved B.P’s reputation, so mightn’t it have been cost effective in the long run? Who knows, maybe red tape actually increases profit and efficiency in such circumstances?

But, then again I imagine that companies that deal with oil-spills are going through the roof right now, the more oil gets pumped out the more secure their future is, the bigger the job, the more employment they can create, the greater the investment in future technologies. They’ll just clean everything up and restock the seas with fish and plankton. There may be some interim period. Do you have any idea how bad the air pollution in Japan used to be? You see crisis and I see opportunity.

Plus we’ve got those booming carbon-trading markets to look forward to too!

Actually I didn't remember smugness being a huge factor in rock/pop really prior to... well I was going to say Britpop... then backdate it to Baggy/Madchester when I suddenly remembered the white-soul thing of the late-Eighties, as blood-curdling a parade of self-satisfied visages as you could possibly imagine (see above). And let us not forget that veritable Smugzilla, Tony Hadley!

The smugness is probably related to "intelligence"/"sophistication". What connects Curiosity and Foals? It's some strange phrenological hipster-continuum, innit?

I challenge anyone to find smugger faces in Indy than these guys...

Tremendously great! Superb! I heart Stoner-Doom!

Bit gutted I'll be out of the country while this happens, especially as the first show is in Deptford! However, that distant Kendal date looks do-able, plus I could visit my mum and dad. Better still I could TAKE my mum and dad.

Here's one I prepared earlier. To be honest with you I am knackered!

Some technically astounding high-quality riffing going on here too. I assume this is brilliant and possibly not entirely done justice to by the one addled "review" left thusfar.

Allow me to laddishly bring things back to basics.



I don't actually know anything else by them, but my suspicion is that they probably R.L.M.F's.

A quick aside:

I tend not to think of Ron Johnson as being part of the “Shambling” bands category, for no better reason perhaps than that I liked them and I really didn’t like, say, the Pastels or Primal Scream, or Talulah Gosh. Actually I don’t really understand if the term applies to everything on C86, which I think is a fairly diverse record.

Let’s bear in mind I was sixteen when C86 came out and into Punk, Goth, Psychobilly, and American hardcore and Ron Jonson stuff seemed to fit into this broad set of interests i.e. it had the virtue of having an off-kilter aggression and kind of flailing, acerbic grooviness that seemed to connect it, backwards in time to stuff like the Birthday Party and the Pop Group , Pere Ubu, Devo to Beefheart and Zappa to contemporary not-quite-yet-noise acts in the U.S. like Breaking Circus, Rifle Sport, early Live Skull, Scratch Acid and then on to that genre that went by the unfortunate term “pigfuck” Pussy Galore, early White Zombie, the Jesus Lizard, Drunktank, Mule (plus several other examples I could probably dredge up from my already overloaded memory if I had a go). So I don’t really understand why on one level they’re not an extension of post punk and quite opposed to Indy’s return to the Sixties. Simon probably deals with this in Rip It UP, but I unfortunately don’t have a copy to hand, having selflessly left my copy in the Moravian hinterland with Bonsai Silverback

I guess RNJNSN is an extension of what at some point in the blogworld was being referred to as “Jerky”, of which The Knack’s “My Sharona” (about which more later) seems to be the great Pop example. I honestly thought of them as being an attempt at dance –music, for those who can’t dance. I suppose what underlines the Ron Johnson bands in some ways is embarrassment: the body is uncontrollable, can’t get into the groove, it swivels, pivots and flaps in an ill-disciplined, sexless whiteboy way, the music tries to gather up and convert this nervous energy into a form that turns that inability (or the suspicions of /desire to correct all the smoothly pistoning phallocentricism of funk and rock) into a polymorphous, poly-arhythmic dispersal of the energy away to the elbows, the knees, the shoulders, the feet, harvesting the awkwardness (awkwardness is an energy!) and reinvesting it in the skittery, the lunging, the spastic, the disoriented/ing. Dislocation dance/contort yourself. Kev Hopper’s bass is always twanging and ballooning around the mid-range, kind of elastically ungroovy and floating as though he’s trying to fight it down into its proper place ( I really like “Quirk Out”. “A Fierce Pancake” less so) Their bodies, the instruments, their words betray them. In the wackiness and the rather elliptical/nonsensical lyrics another kind of embarrassment is manifest: fear of direct emotional expression, fear of sincerity, neither the happy banality of the love song nor the commitment of poetry/politics are available ( The Redskins). I suppose in this sense they overlap with the other shamblers in that there’s a certain avoidance going on, a certain shame, a being positioned outside the “normal” pleasures but this agitated inbetween-ness has a kind of fumbling, striving quality I like, an unlocalizable kinetic force, a decentered drive. The RNJNSN bands seem to exist as series of frantic tangents on and hectic circumventings of the impossible pleasures of unselfconsciousness, which I think is as good a musical description of the British character as you could get.

So I understand why in one sense the appellation “shambling”, there’s an element of abjection in the Ron Johnson stuff, as well as a skewed triumphalism (completely absent from the Creationy-side of C86, which is kind of aggressively, self-assertingly twee, and therefore undercuts the sympathy one might feel toward it) my deep discomfort with my unruly, angular body needs a music to match it. Hence my slightly incredulity-inducing reference to Wonky: it's all clubfeet, off the beat, hey there’s no wrong way to dance to this, what a relief! If you check out the McKenzies there’s a definite white soul-boy thing going on, (Dexy’s without Kevin Rowland's pathologically projected passion), bIG FLAME have a kind of James White style bequiffed psychobilly vibe.

Additional point: I can’t believe he’s gone and blogged Spirit of Radio, which is actually one of my Broinlaw’s favourite tunes and which I was going to dedicate to him. I mean attack ME, by all means, but now you’re starting to drag my FAMILY into this.

short intermission while I prepare some thoughts on RNJNSN plus my final furlong in the riffathon, the dreaded rap-metal!