New and rather excellent post over at the 80s blog from Ralph!

Need I say that if you want to write something for one of those blogs,  you just  have to tell us?

Phwoar! That "Glass Swords" by Rustie is a bit of terrific, innit? He's been listening to Radiohead hasn't he (and who could blame him). Errrr....actually it sounds like chillwave to me....

Phwoar! That "King of Limbs" by Radiohead is a bit of alright, innit. They've been listening Fly-Lo (and who can blame them.)

Phil  has started his own blog!

Now, I  haven`t mentioned this to  Phil but we`ve  had a couple of uncanny confluences recently. Firstly I was looking at some Nice Strong Arm videos with a mind  to posting them on the 80s blog  when Phil, literally two days later, did exactly that. Fair enough, but then again Nice Strong Arm!? They`re not exactly The Beatles, izzit? Then I was also toying with a post on finding your "missing  half" only for Phil to produce an excellent post on the same theme. Then last night I had a dream  about him, in which he was  moving  house, only  to  wake up and  find  he`d set  up a new blog.

All kinds of wizardy mind-meld going on!

new post over  at  the 70s blog.

It’s ok to be an optimist, full of non-specific can-do elan, gazing rapturously at misty vision of the better tomorrow our manifest destiny will finally deliver us into, ok to be a pessimist, a bit of a downer, perhaps, but a speaker of ugly and necessary truths and cautionary tales. Best of all to be a realist, third-way, middle path, nodding sagely and raising your eyebrows in amused contemplation of the excesses of the other two as they flank you on either side.

What you mustn’t be is any kind of idealist. What you mustn’t imagine is any kind of permanent, large scale transformation of social relations for the better or waste time dreaming of worlds as yet unmade and unimaginable: that particular adolescent yearning, fluttering away in your chest, should be stamped out a.s.a.p. Don’t embarrass yourself at your age, even if it’s still there, hide it away, lock it up and ignore it. Never publically acknowledge it. Get on with the loud, sour, self-harming business of living.

But for all that, we both know how strongly it is in you, don’t we?

The Hill 2

Connery may be the star of the Hill and the character with whom the audience is supposed to empathise, but the film is comprehensively stolen from him by a trio of superb British character actors, Ian Bannen (who also steals the film from Connery again when they next meet in The Offence) Ian Hendry and Harry Andrews.

Andrews plays R.S.M Wilson the de facto ruler of the Glasshouse (the Commandant is a bloated upper-class sybarite who spends his time whoring and having the wool pulled over his eyes.) It’s one of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid. Wilson represents the Empire, the pre Second World War world of hierarchy and discipline, the belief in Queen and Country and Duty, the man whose job it is to iron out deviations in the smooth daily running of the British war machine by running insubordinate or treasonous soldiers over The Hill. In a sense Wilson is The Hill, monolithic in his certainty and his unerring attachment to the rules, physically and mentally almost superhumanly robust. In a superb two-shot sequence after a suicidal drinking competition in the Officers’ mess we see Wilson and Stevens in separate showers. Wilson is scrubbing himself vigorously, whistling, brimming over with vim and gusto. Stevens stands wretched, head down and hung over, the water drumming on his back. Wilson, like the Hill can not be defeated or beaten down, he is of a different order, he has the right stuff, the mettle.

The attacks on Wilson, on the Empire, on the State, come from all sides, from within, through the ambitious Stevens, the liberal Harris, the weak and uncertain Medical Officer and without, through Roberts, the man who has lost faith in the pre-War world and has set out to destroy it and his cellmates, an array of those post-War figures who will begin to chip away at the old confidence and the sense of a natural order, the proles, the spivs, the queers, the uppity “darkies” who think they have the same rights as true-born Englishman. In these respects the Hill is really a film about the Sixties rather than a portrayal of the 1940s, a period in which the aristocratic old-order, The Establishment, was being eaten away by the democratic popular forces and meritocratic upsurges of a modern age it simply could not understand.

In one of The Hill's key sequences the prisoners begin a revolt over the death of their fellow inmate, Stevens, spilling out of their cells and standing chanting his name on the gangways, poised on edge of revolt, of a riot.

Lumet is often criticized (with much justice) for his over casual approach to mise-en-scene but here, as in the rest of The Hill, the camerawork and framings, the use of extreme low and high angles that alternately turn Wilson from a towering figure, a colossus around whose base the camera slowly rotates, to the implacable centre of the crowded, geometric intricacy of the deep focus crane shots keep his domination of the frame, and the Glasshouse itself intact (and align him even more fully with the hill, he is both the base and apex of an invisible hill, the hill of his absolute authority, standing there in the Glasshouse itself.)

Wilson goes about quelling the incipient riot with an exemplary combination of common-sense, humour, camaraderie, bribery, paternalism, quiet menace, enormous charm. At one point he threatens to round up the ring-leaders if the men won’t go back to their cells.

“Who are the ringleaders?” A voice calls down cockily, sure that Wilson doesn’t know and is merely bluffing.

The camera cuts in close and low on Wilson’s face as he somehow simultaneously barks and drawls his response, his head filling the screen.

“Every fifth man!”

…here is power in a flash, nakedly arbitrary, breaking up the fragile solidarity, exposing your fear that the mob cannot hide you, that you may be the one to suffer the full penalty, unfairly. You weren’t a ringleader yet you might be punished as such. Here is power, necessarily revealing itself, to disrupt and discompose before the reasonable discourse is brought in again to soothe and cajole.

“Every fifth man!”

A ripple runs through the crowd, the sound of something cohesive breaking up, of a focused energy dispersing, the shift from the collective to the particular. The wind goes out of the prisoner’s sails, the spirit, the spell, has been broken.

This is how they do it Carl, this is how they’ve always done it.

First it’s “every fifth man!” Then it’s extra rations for tea if you all go quietly back to your cells.

Just a note on that occupy wall street thing. Now I am prepared to believe that playing Bob Marley songs on an acoustic guitar and dancing about doesn’t necessarily mean that you are just a carnivalesque hippy who believes “all you need is love”. In fact I’ve  met loads of South Americans  who will quite  happily join in a bit of a folksy sing-a-long and have dreads and stuff and  play the bongos who are also like intensely well read and very serious Leftists who have lived under the kinds of corrupt authoritarian governments and amid the kind of crime and poverty that most British Leftists  have zero  experience of, so I know  that we Brits,  especially we bookish, left-field  Brits get all embarrassed and  uncomfortable and sneering if we see people dancing to the wrong music and letting themselves go and stuff, and holding hands and hugging, but let’s  not assume  that our own general up-tightness is  some  form of greater intellectual or moral authority and that your capacity to access simple pleasures  means you’re not also doing any complicated thinking, eh? Stiffness and introversion might not, after all, be the must useful qualities in those trying to build a broad-based collective.

New post from me over at the 70s' blog

Hell yeah! Greyhoos has been on fire over at those decade blogs recently!

learning to disappear

Before I'd read Alex Niven's excellent upcoming Zero Book "Folk Opposition" I'd made a certain assumption about its theme/contents on the basis of the title. Then, when I got to grips with it I realised that the title was a subversive pun.

 My initial assumption about the use of the word folk was that it was Churchlandian, that "folk" as it often does in much of the discourse in and around Zero books and blogs referred to a common-sense worldview constructed out of primitive concepts that have been overturned by research in cognitive science and theoretical shifts in philosophy that seek to further decenter the humanist/enlightenment presumption of agency, will and self-hood.

 I expected, then, on the basis of the title that "folk opposition" ( like folk psychology, and a fairly recently-floated attempt at the term "folk politics") would be a deconstructive broadside against atavistic traditions of organisations, protest and identity. This assumption was made, despite my familiarity with Alex's writing, on the basis that it's  hard to imagine the term folk, in the positive sense of a historically/locally grounded collective identity, being argued for from a radical perspective, yet this is what "Folk Opposition" insists upon, a notion of the folk which degenerates  neither  into a  Volk nor is disdained as being merely "folk" in the eliminitivist sense.

I won't get substantially into the content of the book itself (you should  just read it), but its manifesto-in-microcosm appears toward the end. "Deconstructive cynicism has had its day". I think in this Alex expresses an increasingly broad-based disenchantment with theoretical approaches that felt appropriate or energising during the Blair/Brown years but  which not only seem to lack urgency under the Coalition, but actually feel counter-productive.

Intellectual Rock Stars and Philosophical Princes of Darkness out to wrest the mantle of More Theoretically-Anti-Humanist-Than-Thou are themselves rather a stale tradition, and the virtue of Alex's book is that rather than worrying after some transformative subjectivity which will bring about the post-Capitalist transition, it's significantly more interesting, and genuinely more Socialist, in it's basic humility. Where are interesting things happening? Where and what are the resurgent vestiges of communalism and mutualism and how are these to be supported and encouraged, to what extent should actually existent and emergent practices lead the way rather than a top-down theoretical models that ultimately produce little more than a flurry of intellectually gratifying debate. The book's call, effectively, is for intellectualism to be a handmaiden to grassroots' movements. 

 As a manifesto from the student demonstrations had it last year: "you are not going to be famous". The best you can hope for is that you might be of some use, that your role is not that of leader, but servant.

Or, as Pound might have had it, "Pull down thy vanity!"