Why should a bus driver/ plumber/shelf-stacker or whatever other putative, working class anti-educationalist, who themselves would clearly never have any interest funding a free-education system from which their own children might potentially benefit, fund the education of someone who will then go on to be a doctor and later save their life in an NHS hospital? Err….sorry, become just one more pampered millionaire graduate, living in clover with their ostentatious 2:2 in Media Studies?

This seems to be a question doing the rounds at the moment and I thoroughly support the notion that it is wrong IN PRINCIPLE to have education funded from tax.

This is not a question of simply having run out of money and there being absolutely no way of finding it other than cutting the extravagant largesse of the public purse which, while it manages to maintain a sizeable and absolutely necessary Army, Navy and Air Force in order to defend us from all the bellicose nation that ring us, less happy lands like Belgium, Sweden, The Scilly Isles and so on, is instrumental in policing the furthest flung reaches of our Empire (Northern Ireland, Rockall etc) and keeps us involved in politically and economically lustrous endeavours such as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, certainly doesn’t have the means to pay housing benefit to the large pool of unemployed structurally necessary to keep the inflation rate down.

This is a question of eternal and immutable principle. So what should be done about all those who have egregiously and immorally been educated at the State’s ie the taxpayer’s ie MY WORKING CLASS FAMILY’S expense over the past fifty years?

Successive Socialist Governments have robbed us and given the money away to Leftist intellectuals to teach toilet-paper degrees like PPE and Social Anthropology, that make no direct practical contribution to the economy. Surely no-one who understands the importance of business and the needs of a modern economy would actually bother to study that kind of mickey-mouse bollocks anyway. What we need are entrepreneurs who left school at fourteen and aggressively fought there way up the wealth ladder using whatever megalomaniac underhand tactics they had at their disposal running this country. Or the people in Banking and Finance who have repeatedly shown us that they understand how the REAL WORLD works. Not some ivory tower upper-class dreamer with a Tampax degree in Social Policy! Thank god we’ve got a Government that has demonstrably pulled itself up by its own bootlaces, not a silver-spoon among them. If they can succeed anyone can. The opportunities are out there! Just go out into the street right now and look around. GO ON!!!!!!!! YOU’RE NOT LOOKING HARD ENOUGH!!!!!!!!

GET BACK OUT THERE AND LOOK HARDER!!!!!!

But I digress. Right. I want my family’s money back. Anybody who has immorally hived off money from the working class in order to get a free-education over the past forty years should have to pay it back PLUS a percentage of all the extra earnings that have accrued to them as a result of said education. Why not 100%! The thieving bastards! Reparations are due. If the banks have to pay back bank charges they made illegally why don’t people who have knowingly taken money, wrongly, for selfish ends and then lived well on the proceeds of their initial crimes, in collusion with a criminal state, have to pay back theirs?

And anyway given that being a graduate is basically a one way ticket to wealth beyond the dreams of Warren Buffet, they’re not going to miss it are they?

What are you doing back in here so soon? What do you mean it’s snowing?

GET OUT THERE AND LOOK HARDER !!!!!!!!!!!

Here!

New thoughts and practices from Andy here and here.

I consider each of them to be amusingly funky and funkily amusing.

thusly have i spake.

Bokie Loc - Death Represents My Hood

Killdozer - Nasty

Warren Zevon - Leave My Monkey Alone

Just in case you're missing it, this is a bit of a jaw-dropper from Phil.

Thanks to the Impostume's regular reader for turning up at Housmans, and refraining from punching me in the face. I said the below.

Entrances, exits, running on the spot.

If I had the technological wherewithal I’d splice two strips of film together and they would serve to illustrate what I want to say perfectly. The two clips are the very end of Mike Leigh’s Naked and the start of Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting.

Naked ends with the central character, Johnny, rejecting the possibility of a return to Manchester and instead stealing his girlfriend’s money and limping out into the street. He sets off for god-knows-where and the camera slowly pulls away , leaving him behind, stranded in the middle of a long, darkening road. Renton, by contrast, leapfrogs the camera and sets all the carnivalesque colour and excitement of his film in motion.

This splicing together of the two films would serve to illustrate something that happened in the culture round 1995 and 1996. It became evident that the Tories were going to loose the next election, the British record, film and publishing industry decided it needed to re-assert itself in the face of American competition and the Labour party stopped being Socialist in any understandable sense.

We might take Johnny’s stumbling forward as the camera races on ahead of him and the static camera Renton springs over metaphorically. Renton wants, albeit temporarily, to be in this world, whereas Johnny can’t get out of his.

The future is moving too fast for Johnny. Truculent, intellectual, an autodidact, critical, with his apocalyptic fantasies and unhealthy lusts, Johnny is the last, embittered gasp of the angry Young Men of the Fifties and Sixties in a way, and he has no place in what is to come. That year’s model, is Renton, who jumps into and then effortlessly melts out of the film at the end.

Renton is pretty, personable, a cheeky smack addicted man-child. There may be a few superficial flashes of critique in Trainspotting but these are merely there to embellish the film’s claims to subcultural cool. The vision of the grim, driven outsider in Naked is transformed into the trendy, twenty-something lust-for–lifer. This is a part of the Rebranding of Britain, of getting London Swinging Again. In effect, Johnny gets a decent haircut and learns to love Sleeper, Primal Scream and the opportunities offered by the housing market.





Johnny’s utopianism

Naked, as with many of Mike Leigh’s films, presents us with a detailed set of the preoccupations of the time.

There is of course the aforementioned paranoia and apocalyptic mysticism mixed in with nihilism and misogyny, a heady cocktail that has garnered the film the reputation of being a difficult watch. Johnny’s negativity, as emblematic of early Nineties despair, a consequence of the blocked impulse for change is often remarked upon, but there is also the question of his hope.

In a long central argument in the film Johnny speaks about the next stage of human development, a transformation in human consciousness that may be a consequence of evolution, or may be brought about by some kind of interface of man and machine. In this, Johnny taps into one of the most popular currents of radical thought in the 90s, transhumanism, a loose movement which heavily influenced Michel Houllebeque’s highly successful novel “Atomized”.

Naked’s vision of a better future, the escape from the horror of the moment, is one which is largely divested of what would normally be understood as political agency. Perhaps this is understandable, the institutions through which agency traditionally and effectively expressed itself in the UK are, by the Nineties, in a parlous state. Instead we hold out hope for divine intervention, this divinity may well be in the form of the machine, as there is nothing else that can be done.

Transhumanism, the credo of superseding “the human” is still current in a number of ways, in concepts like the Singularity for insistence, or in attempts to radically decentre presumptious humanist worldviews and reduce human agency to just one element among many in networks of non-organic actants. Johnny’s better future, the one he is still holding out for at the film’s end will be an order of being inconceivable to our own minds. In the same way that the monkey could never have dreamed he would become a man, we will become creatures of pure spirit leaving the painful encumbrance of the body, with its nerves and needs, its ego all behind.

With the body gone then presumably basic social and political problems will have been transcended too, there’s nothing now to feed or house. This is similar to the idea of “metaphysical mutation” in Atomized, though in this case the utopian possibilities of genetic engineering are the key to transcending our “man-locked set”. The key question in Atomized as to precisely how the future utopia has been brought about, who controls and owns the necessary technology, administers it and to whom, how the world is then subsequently organised, are all conveniently ignored. There is simply some better beyond that science will lead us to, that biological destiny will propel us into, a totally new set of relations to the universe that a sufficiently radical theory will align us to.

This inability to articulate any kind of practical alternative to Capitalism, to the botched, false end of history that we have been palmed off with by the plutocrats, leads to these fantasies of a release into a post-human universe. The argument would be that the more deep the disempowerment the more radical and luxuriant the dream of the impasse being overcome. Rebuilding what has been destroyed, and is continuing to be destroyed, reconnecting and reforging a collective position seems impossible, the dull, daily, piecemeal manner of it all is a debilitating prospect. Johnny keeps running because if he holds out long enough, rejects the small comforts of home, eventually he will be swept up in the Rapture, the Singularity, delivered into a world beyond the horizon.

Johnny’s dream is also a dream of the end of politics. But of an end to politics not achieved through political means. Politics is wearying, contestation and argument are wearying and endless. “No matter how many books you read there are some things you never, never understand”. Everybody yearns for an end to politics, to strife.

Johnny’s hope runs parallel to the Utopian third-way fantasies of the early nineties, that the combination of de-industrilaization, the free-market and high-technology will revolutionize Britain, breaking down traditional class barriers and creating a kind of ecstatic, always on, hyper-mediated new-Jerusalem. Markets are a-political in the sense that they are radically democratic, we vote with our money at every moment, winnowing out the inefficient and maximising our access to both the necessities and the amenities of life without having to contest the place occupied by the state, which will eventually wither away. There will be smart new people on new drugs, surfing their way into the future in the new radically non- hierarchical third space of the world wide web: these are the people Renton spots at a rave in Trainspotting, the people celebrated at the end of the Beach.

When There Is No Alternative, there is no argument. We can concentrate on having fun, we can concentrate on guiltless consumption. And once again, enter Renton.



Getting out.

As mentioned earlier, Johnny doesn’t get out. Instead of the anti-hero riding off into the sunset, it is, rather tellingly, the sunset itself that rides off. After all, where could he have gone to? We know that Renton at the end of Trainspotting decides to become just like “us”, though quite who the film presumes “we” are is a matter of some interest in its own right.

Another character who doesn’t get out is Withnail. Marwood exits stage left, presumably to become the author of the film we’ve just watched, abandoning Withnail to his soliloquy.

Withnail and I is, among many things, a film about “maturity”, about the final necessity of compromise and the impossibility of sustained protest and refusal. Withnail’s refusal, like Johnny’s is a consequence of a deep antipathy, a rejection of the world as it is, their grandiosity a response to the poverty of reality. In this way they are what Shaw termed “unreasonable men” demanding that the world change to suit them rather than adapting themselves to the world. This being unreasonable, this rejection of “opting in” , this properly bohemian refusal stands in contrast to the weak or pseudo-boheminanism that follows in which excess, artiness and irony become cultural norms. For Withnail poverty is preferable to the dishonour of trying to “make it”.

Though they’re very distinct works it’s instructive to consider the difference between the exits from their films of four different characters. In Trainspotting and Withnail and I we know where Marwood and Renton are going, into straight society via some stolen money, to an acting job in Manchester , but where do the characters at the end of Nick Loves’ “Goodbye Charlie Bright,” or Andrea Arnold’s “Fish Tank” get to? The films celebrate the ecstatic moment of departure or the admirably feisty qualities needed to leave the council estates behind, but the destination is obscure. Certainly in “Fish Tank” it appears to be another council estate, this time in Wales. Ultimately you're always departing for the place you’d hoped to leave behind.

There is no getting out not for those who are constitutionally set against assimilating, or are too marked by class, and there are only two possible remedies to the impasse, running on the spot and drunkenly soliloquizing, holding out for the moment when something finally happens.

And that, at least in my experience, was how many of us got through the Nineties.

In the 1980’s Mike Leigh developed a reputation as a crusader against Thatcherism, a sympathetic chronicler of working class lives. Whether such a reputation was deserved is a matter of some debate, what’s certain is that in his latest, Another Year the focus has shifted away from issues of class and class conflict as the great divider and onto the question of Emotional Intelligence as the fundamental determinant in quality of life. In a sense it’s a love letter to the middle-aged, socially conscious and, most importantly, emotionally literate London middle class.

The film’s central focus is Tom and Gerri whose large, well-appointed house and garden provide the backdrop to a series of personal crises. The couple fully conform to all the recent middle-class lifestyle clichés; they’re good in the kitchen and appreciate quality food and wine, love gardening and growing things in their allotment, are environmentally aware and charitable and supportive to their childlike and uneducated friends and family. The film takes place over a year with a number of characters introduced to act as a counterpoint to Tom and Gerri’s contentment. The characters are roughly divided into those who are getting it right, and who seem to be Southern and University educated, and those who are not.

With the exception of Tom (though his job is socially useful), the functional characters all work in the caring professions. Gerri, is a counsellor. Their son Joe is first seen helping an Indian family to avoid eviction, his bubbly new girlfriend, who immediately gets on with Tom and Gerri, works with stroke victims. The dysfunctional characters map roughly onto class and geographical divisions. Lesley Manville’s Mary is a desperate, scatter-brained semi-alcoholic who dresses like a woman twenty years her junior. Then there’s Ken, an obese, full blown alcoholic who stuffs down packets of crisps and swills cans of bitter on the train from Hull, talks with his mouth full and has to be lectured on his conservative attitudes toward the young by Tom and consoled by Gerri when he breaks down in tears. Finally there’s Tom’s family in the North, the unbelievably taciturn Ronnie and his volatile, aggrieved son Carl.

Certainly Another Year expresses many of the prejudices of the time. Firstly in its focus on property owning, its repeated stress on how enviable Tom and Geri’s home is (Mary has to live, horror of horrors, in a rented flat) especially the large and well equipped kitchen where Tom, the enlightened husband cooks Arrabiata for his wife. Ronnie’s is the only other house we see, a miserable grey terraced house that appears to have gone undecorated since the 1950s. Secondly in its focus on the atavistic and insanitary habits of the working class, their weight problems, poor dress sense, excessive drinking, lack of politesse and emotional and intellectual backwardness. All the working-class characters smoke. Tom and Geri are good people in that they tolerate all this and try to offer their friends and colleagues solutions to their problems. In this way the film, as with much of contemporary TV and Cinema represents the working class as childlike, in need of benevolent guidance. When Gerri castigates Mary for having disrupted the previous dinner party with her jealousy over Joe’s new girlfriend, she chastises her in the manner of a parent with an errant child “I’m not angry with you I’m just disappointed in you.” “You need to learn to take responsibility”. Mary readily tolerates this sanctimony in order to be allowed back into the family’s life and receive a cuddle from Gerri.

Another Year also presents us with a particularly recent conceptualization of what constitutes modernity. The problem with the British is that they are emotionally constipated, they can’t express themselves or connect with others at the start of the film Imelda Staunton is incapable of expressing what she would say to her insomniac daughter. This extends one of the most significant themes in recent British history: that the modern is less about structural changes to society and more about the interpersonal: being able to say “I love you”, ridding ourselves of the previous generations thriftiness and reserve. Our modernity will be expressed through emotionality and lifestyle: being more like Europeans and Americans, kissing and hugging friends, being positive, talking about our problems, eating well, being stylish, crying if we need to. We will consume, we will emote, but we will also care, this is being progressive. In Leigh’s latest film the middle-class stand as corrective to the working class, trying their best to drag it into the modern day, trying to get it to sort itself out, have a bit more self-respect, “take responsibility”. No doubt this appeals to the vanity, unconscious and otherwise of Leigh’s audience, but the idea that he’s a radical filmmaker of any kind is surely untenable after this

A few months ago a friend of mine, Richard, met Danny Dyer.

Richard works in television and he was shocked to discover that Danny Dyer is just the same off camera as he is when he’s on it, an unmitigated and unashamed Geezer. Richard expressed a mixture of incredulity and admiration at Dyers’ commitment: it must be tiring, he suggested, having to act the horrendous Cockney stereotype twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

The assumption here, and I’ll venture that it’s a fairly common one, is that no-one‘s really like that. Maybe in this situation the assumption is partly militated by the fact that Danny Dyer is an actor. It’s plausible that after a day of playing East End wide-boys he wipes off the greasepaint , catches a cab to his gentleman’s club and spends the evening loudly declaiming into his brandy snifter on the sheer impossibility of getting an unexpurgated version of Shaw’s “Back to Methusula” up and running these days. But I think it also runs deeper than that.

There’s a tendency to view working class discourse as a kind of “performance” in a way that middle class discourse escapes. It’s hard to imagine anyone bumping into Hugh Grant or Keira Knightely and being astonished that they’re just as posh as they appear in their film roles.

This scepticism regarding the authenticity of working class mannerisms is partly a result of the explosion of “Mockney” around the time of Cool Brittania in 1994 and 95, along with the earlier advent of magazines like Loaded that set out to brand many aspects of working class culture and discourse as “cool” and market them to affluent middle-class consumers. In fact this accelerated repackaging of class as “lifestyle” around the early Nineties, and the increasing trend toward slumming it, as so famously dissected in Pulp’s anthemic “Common People”, has lead to a degree of middle-class scepticism about the authenticity of working class life. I hear it in the exasperation all around me in my own middle class milieu with regard to diet, clothing, attitude, speech: the assumption that the working classes could have or should have just chosen differently.

In a sense then over the past fifteen year s or so there has been a naturalization of middle-classness. There is of course a fairly long tradition in English culture of the middle classes trying to pick up on the style and manner of the proles, and from the late Fifties onward there is an increasing downplaying of upper and middle class conventions of speech and pronunciation toward more “democratic” and neutral forms. In this sense both Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher’s struggle to attain acceptable Establishment locution ran against the grain of the time. It’s hard to imagine our current ruling crop of old Etonions wanting to sound too much like Harold Macmillan. Tony Blair pointedly uses glottal stops in TV interviews. This move toward more neutral forms of speech has also served to mask a previously highly audible marker of class. In this great consumer middle-mass someone like Dyer seems faintly unbelievable: an actual working class cockney ? He must be pretending.

While it is certainly true that class can be performed, so too can classlessness. Go and ask David Cameron. The mistake would be to assume that therefore class doesn’t exist.

All day I worried that she was losing interest in me, that her feelings had changed. She’s seemed a little cold, a little distant, diffident, distracted. I fretted in work, my anxiety grew, I was losing her, losing her, and then what, where would I be?

Then, later on she told me she loved me. Unprompted, believable.

Instantly my indifference toward her returned and I spent the evening angrily speculating on all the women I would be able to sleep with if only she weren’t around.

Happy Birthday, Ping!

Just to remind the Impostume's regular reader that I will be at Housmans at 5 on Saturday to talk about Classless.

Don't miss this rare opportunity to punch me in the face!!!!!!!

3 songs that sound like the glory of being middle-aged.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - TOUGHER THAN THE REST (LIVE)

Steely Dan - Reelin' In the Years

Richard Thompson - Wall of Death

3 songs that sound like the glory of being young.

Squirrel Bait - Sun God - 1985

Replacements - Unsatisfied (Audio Only)

The Replacements - Can't Hardly Wait 1987 [Lyrics]