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Tag Archives: ABBA

Human Sorrow, Environmental Joy & the Wisdoms of Danny The Dealer.

26 Sunday Apr 2020

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ABBA, Alinsky, Angel Delight, Berni Inns, big data, Cimate Change, CO2 Emissions, COVID 19, Danny The Dealer, Drugs, Enlightenment Now, Environmentalists, Free Market Dynamics, Good vs Evil, Hamsey, Indira Ghandi, Joy, Magpies, Marwood, Ouse, Poverty, Radiohead, Rules For Radicals, Sorrow, St Albans, Stephen Pinker, Susan Shanks, Thanos, The Tudor Tavern, Walter Scheidel, Withnail & I, Yeats

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Bear with me as I just want to set out the slightly odd logic that got me to here.

While walking along the banks of the Ouse towards Hamsey, mist rising off the sky soaked water, a chattering Magpie swooped and settled on the dewy path in front of me.

Good morning Mr Magpie: 

how are Mrs Magpie 

and all of the other little magpies?

Thats what I should have said at least, if I were a man truly stitched into the natural fabric of Albion’s rolling, rural majesty and the echoes of our medieval ritual and lore. But it was in fact the Magpie theme tune from the 1970s children’s show, with accompanying electric moonage graphic intro that came to me first, through a rose-tinted mist of Angel Delight, It’s a Knockout, Berni Inns [the Tudor Tavern in St Alban’s to be precise], ABBA, and Susan Shanks.

This was closely followed by an passing echo of Radiohead’s:

Good Morning Mr Magpie,

How are we today

Now you’ve stolen all the magic 

And took my memory

At which point I settled back into the familiar One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and four for a Boy refrain. And it was the word Sorrow that finally popped to the top of the pile in my head. 

As I walked I remembered a passage in Stephen Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now which alluded to Sorrow and something about pandemics.

For those who might not know him, Stephen Pinker is a Scientist first and foremost, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and an Elected Member of the Academy of Sciences. He is also an advocate of Eco-modernism or what some call Eco Pragmatism, and actively refutes any attempts to create a morality play around issues concerning the environment and climate change. He dismisses the positioning of these arguments as being those of Good vs Evil and rightly questions all of the incumbent fanatacisms that come with that framing from either side. To some Green Revolutionaries and Climate extremists this places him firmly in the opposition. 

Why had this Sorrow Pandemic thought demanded revisiting? Because recently in the pursuit of seeking out and discussing positive outcomes from our current crises, I’ve been reminded that some, especially those at the bleeding edges of the Environmentalist establishment [and yes, you are as much of the established order now as those you damn], see the crisis unfolding around the world as licence to make unrestrained and slightly gleeful statements and exaltations about the impacts of COVID 19.

There is no doubt that this cloud does contains a multitude of silvery positives. That there is barely a plane in the sky, no travel to speak of, a collapse in oil demand, a shrinking if not collapse of unfettered consumption, the return of certain ecosystems to their purer nature [the canals of Venice’s return to beauty is a much trumpeted benefit of the collapse of its tourism trade], and a general re-engaging with nature in all of its glory are indeed to be somewhat thankful for. But they come at a price.

There is also a sense from some that COVID will act as a great leveller, and that, just perhaps, this crises may lead to a shrinking of inequality in the world; a rebalancing in favour of smaller living and needs and a greater balance between humanity and the natural world. 

The upsides are plain to see. But where my issue lies is that these upsides often seem to be dislocated from the downside price we will have to pay for them – and what’s more, unfettered from whom will pay that price eventually. It is that dislocation that concerns me. And it is the glee present in some of the exhalations that pricked me; the whiff of a misanthropic, Thanos-shaped righteous mania that is in need of checking, in my humble opinion at least.

The piece I remembered was in fact to be found in his chapter on Inequality, and if you’ll bear with me I’ve reproduced it below in its entirety:

‘The historian Walter Schneidel identifies “Four horsemen of Levelling”; mass-mobilisation warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. In addition to obliterating wealth [and, in the communist revolutions, the people who owned it], the four horseman reduce inequality by killing large numbers of workers, driving up the wages of those who survive. Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever bought forth in sorrow*. Be careful what you wish for. ‘

Source: Stephen Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Penguin Random House

*my emphases

There it was – careful what you wish for. In reading this I had mentally added to Sheidel’s prize of greater economic equality those of greater environmental well-being; an equality of possibility for all regardless of gender, colour, creed or background; a reduction in industrial carbon emissions; greater respect and care for the creatures we share the planet with; a return to less nihilist consumer tendencies; and a general rebalancing of humanity and planet.

All of these are eminently desirable, but must exist within a universal order under natural laws, and therefore there are losers and losses to be accounted for with these gains. Positive and negative externalities. We must be cognisant of that.

And this is where I come to my point [at last]. 

I have a simple request to those whom might quietly caw and reel and dance as the old order burns about them – the price for your glee is being carried by human beings who do not necessarily deserve your dance at their despair.

To punk and pimp Yeats:

But I being poor have only my sorrow:

I have spread my sorrow under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my sorrow.

Before you say or do anything in celebration of the upsides, just be conscious that there is a bill: the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives; the deaths of precious loved ones, the loss of millions of jobs and the supplementary well-being and progress they bring to individuals, communities and economies – and a severe loss of momentum on the social and technological progress that might just accelerate humanity out of the poverty that fuels so much of what’s wrong on the planet.

In his chapter on The Environment, Pinker quotes Indira Ghandi; ‘Poverty is the greatest polluter.’

If we only look to the negative environmental impact that historic and more recent scale industrialisation brings and discard the fact that the advances inherent in these epochs have in turn raised millions out of poverty, of course we will see a doomsday scenario. 

Pinker’s book reminded me that for all the degradation and diminishments the industrial revolution and subsequent technological advances have bought [and he does not shy away from pointing to the dreadful scale of them, and equally the role of tyrannies of both the extreme left and the extreme right in escalating them], he reminds us that once the leverage of progress has lifted millions out of poverty and away from scratching a daily subsistence, they are able to raise their eyes and minds to higher-order issues and challenges that might face us not just as individuals but as a collective.

In the act of liberating millions from poverty, enlightenment stops being the exclusive preserve of a small cabal of highly-educated and righteous minds exercising the luxury of their conscience above everyone else. Enlightenment becomes democratised across millions, eventually billions, of people – and through that enlightenment comes the responsibility it brings.

The rise out of poverty allows any society to educate and enlighten those liberated millions to the positive and negative impacts of our existence, both on each other, the environment and on the planet as a whole – and it elevates and accelerates that society’s ability and capacity for making and acting upon smarter choices. There has to be some good in that.

And in regards to a point I made earlier, whether Pinker is the opposition or not, here’s a thought in regards to how we might nurture greater consideration and consciousness of others in the machine of all of this. 

Break out of your echo-chamber. Every now and then. Move away from those that celebrate the same beliefs and value systems as you and consume the same feedback loops of ‘suitable’ or relevant data that you consume. Read texts that make you feel uncomfortable; texts that hold the opposite of your belief system; texts that present research findings, insights and correlations that contradict those you usually rely on to support your beliefs – seek out the peta-flip-side to the peta-flop of big data points your echo-chamber usually feeds on.

Big Data and the feedback loops of insight and ‘truth’ it brings are the drug of Now. But this presents us with somewhat of a dichotomy. What makes one ‘truth’ right and the other wrong? Who decides?

What we trust and why is a shaded and complex thing, as Withnail’s provider of Phenodihydrochloride benzelex, Danny the Dealer points out:

Marwood: Give me a Valium, I’m getting the FEAR!

Danny: [very calmly] You have done something to your brain. You have made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, it will do something else to your brain. You will make it low. 

Why trust one drug and not the other? That’s politics, innit?

Why trust one ‘drug’ and not the other? Though the data point itself may be scientifically or statistically immutable and solid, it does not stop the purveyor, distributor and propagator of that data point ‘framing’ it for their own benefit and in such a way as to suit their immediate need. So for balance, and in search of illuminated self-enquiry, it pays us to see and contemplate on all sides. In doing that we might achieve a slightly more universal, humane and less partisan perspective.

You might of course align yourself with Saul D. Alinsky’s Rule for Radicals of polarity and extremity as the only way to drive transformative change. You may choose to remove any of the naturally occurring grey and revert to a black and white absolutism underwritten by the fifth rule of Ridicule and think ‘Fuck your Trumpist orange-man point of view’, in which case, enjoy your radical bully-hole. 

You might be so delighted at the evidences of nature’s ascendency that everything else can go whistle.  That’s also fine. Unlike millions of people who still live under the shadows of poverty, tyranny, ignorance and degradation, you live in a society that treasures and upholds free speech and the application of free will. So you’re free to utilise your educated, enlightened mind to think and say what you like.

And if, given all of that, you quietly and simply don’t care; and see the doomsday scenario of natural reordering and devastation required to deliver your aims as worth cheering for in the face of others sorrow, then crack on.

All I would ask is this – that you and your opposites, those who trumpet and celebrate free-market dynamics and profit while dismissing the destruction and degradation they bring on humanity, our communities and our environment as a fair price for the gain, do us all a favour:

Get a room, and leave the rest of us to try and make the best of this.   

HEAVY BRAKING. A cautionary tale for our times.

29 Sunday Mar 2020

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ABBA, Blueberry Muffin, BREXIT, Heavy is the Head, Kiera Knightly, Lexus, Life On Earth, Love Actually, Maltesers, mamma mia, Playlists, recycling, Sir David Attenborough, Skidmarks, Snap Chat, Speed of Life, speeding, Spotify, Stephen Fry, Stormzy, SUV Hybrid, TXTing

Screenshot 2020-03-29 at 21.19.58.png

Mike did not see Sir David Attenborough until the moment he stepped in front of Mike’s speeding Lexus Hybrid NX 300h.

Thankfully Mike did what every right-minded father-of-two raised on endless episodes of Life on Earth would do when a force of nature steps in front of your vehicle.

He braked; heavily.

Truthfully Sir David was never in danger. A combination of a fierce primal instinct to preserve Sir David’s life and the superior braking system of Mike’s new hybrid Lexus SUV meant that Sir David was successfully avoided. Mike was highly attuned to forces of nature. He recycled – and drove a hybrid, albeit a self-consciously ‘desirable’ one.

No, It was the occupants of Mike’s car who experienced the full weight of this event. In so many different ways.

The first fact we must absorb is that Mike is speeding. No surprise there. It’s not that Mike is irresponsible. He is a very cautious man in many ways. But. The smarter the technology life gives us, the simpler and more effortless our ability to accelerate to fibre-light speed, and the more cocooned we are made to feel as we do it, the more oblivious we are. And ultimately, the faster we go. It’s a human thing. It’s what we do.

Now to Mike’s driving. Is he fully attentive to the road? Kind of. Truth be told, he is perhaps a little preoccupied with how things are going right now. Mike is a reasonably senior director in a small local firm. And BREXIT has been a little bumpy – but things are sort of OK. They’d only had to lay off Sharshi, but frankly that was more to do with her being a gob-on-a-stick as well as being highly inappropriate with the logistics manager over company email than it had to do with any financial pressures bought on by ‘BREXIT. But Mike cannot shake this creeping feeling that failure is lurking around every corner at the moment.

The other occupants in Mike’s speeding Lexus NX 300h with superior braking are: Tilly, Mike’s partner. Tilly is an exceptionally rigorous and controlled laboratory director at the local University. And part time keep-fit instructor.  Though right now, data sets and crunches are the furthest thing from her mind. She looks blankly at the txt. thread she should never have answered talking back to her now in highly physical terms. Words like sucking and pumping shouldn’t be in her message threads, especially when accompanied by a picture like that. Jesus! Her laboratory was potentially losing funding – cheers BREXIT – so everything is a little crazy.

Next is Kiera [yes, really. Blame the film Love Actually.] Kiera. 15 years old. Up to her ears in GCSE study modules, performance anxiety and Spotify playlists [her most recent being MentalSplinter – music to die for.] At this very moment life is a mixture of ear-bleeding headphone-induced oblivion, fierce self scrutiny, a particularly tricky spot on her hairline and a pubic pimple that was frankly freaking her out. Fuck growing up if this is what it had to offer.

And then there is Rachel. The ‘clever’ one. Rachel is 13 and better read than Mike currently. Two more text books and she will over-take her mother. She is startlingly astute, with a vocabulary and syntactical sensitivity that could fell Stephen Fry. BUT. For all of Rachel’s blistering astuteness, learned appreciations and curious ability to breakdance, she cannot fathom what to do with the complete B in year 8 making her life an utter hell on SnapChat. Speccy virgin. Shoot yourself. Skiddy Knickers. Nightmare. And no idea how to stop it. Yes. I know… I shouldn’t even be on Snap Chat but COME ON people. Anyway, right this minute, the sun’s streaming across her and ABBA are on her playlist. LOVE Mamma Mia!

And now to that series of events:

Well, heavy braking creates a rather remarkable succession of immutable truths – unstoppable occurrences that one always hopes will end well. So with an optimistic note, let’s unpack them a little more. 

The minute Mike hits the brakes two things happen. And they happen in hyper-slow motion.

Firstly everyone in the car is dragged [sometimes screaming] at hyper-speed from whatever thought, moment, reverie, dream, fantasy, space or private perceived hell hole they’re in into the Now. Boom. And what a Now it is.

As the driver’s reflex dictates, Mike puts his left arm across Tilly’s chest to potentially stop her over-accelerating towards the dashboard and, hopefully, the airbag – and in doing so comes far closer to her breasts than he has been for quite some time.  

At the exact moment Mike stamps on the brakes, Tilly’s txt concerns become utterly irrelevant as a mixture of gravitational pull and sheer momentum pitch her towards the dashboard in a rather twisted and uncomfortably movement caused by her badly positioned seat-belt [Tilly always slightly wriggles the seat belt down and across her so it doesn’t cut into her gunmetal silk blouse.] The raised airbag logo on the dash board is something she has no wish to become more closely acquainted with but equally appreciates that she may well end up emblazoned on her forehead. What’s more it will be reversed in much the same way that AMBULANCE is written to be legible in the rear view mirror. Nonetheless forwards she goes. And she is uncertain as to what is less welcome, the word airbag tattooed on her forehead, or Mike’s hand hovering in intimate proximity to her breasts.

Rachel’s master plan of destroying Yr 8 B in a firestorm of BRILLIANT Snap Chat ripostes simply leaps from her mind as she starts a low-rider body slide towards the back of her mother’s seat. The combination of highly-synthetic patterned jeggings and the leather-creamed sheen of the open-stitched leather seats quickens her already pacy trajectory as the lower seatbelt-strap ratchets up over her hips as its diagonal strap hovercrafts upwards over her wrinkled chin towards her pert nose. The phone that’s in her hand is now just another item in the vehicle heading forwards at a greater velocity than the vehicle in which it is currently travelling. Mamma Mia, here I go again…my my… how can I resist it. For Rachel resistance is futile as forwards she goes in super slo-mo, her wide eyes furiously snapping a million single images in quick succession to turn into some survival slide show for  a later date.

Kiera’s mind’s eye has dumped the multiple threads of general teenage angst, confusion over two-timing Archie, the pubic pimple debacle and exam horror to concentrate solely on her trajectory towards the back of her father’s driving seat and the small plasma screen currently showing High School Musical 3 with the sound off. In this moment Kiera is focused on the general dynamics of her motion towards an irritatingly perfect Troy Bolton as her seat-belt steps into the role of Sharpay, holding her back from an accelerated rendezvous with Troy’s plasma-screen lips. This series of unfortunate events is accompanied by the 4th random play track on her Mental Splinters playlists. As it turns out, Stormzy’s Heavy is the Head is the perfect anthem, given that her heavy head separates from her headphones like Usain Bolt on a very good day.

The second thing that happens in times of heavy braking is an exercise in relativity. When seen from the outside world through which it moves, the car slows rapidly, but when viewed from the inside we see that the the occupants inside the slowing vehicle experience the polar opposite physical phenomenon as they accelerate through the cars space, embarking on a whole new journey through space and time. And not only the occupants, but every other thing in the car that is not of the car.

As the Lexus screeches to a halt things fall open, fall apart, tip over, reveal themselves. Objects roll out from under seats and from behind head and arm rests and door side pockets – things once considered lost, or misplaced, or nicked by one’s siblings: Those special Lego characters thought pilfered. A small corner of an ancient blueberry muffin, a load of CDs [wot they] that simply got transferred from the old car to the new one and got dumped in the boot. Three random and now chalky Maltesers. A pen. Old car park tickets. Carb Killa wrappers. A branded gym water-bottle A scrunched and discarded note, written by a teenage admirer. A copy of a ‘no idea, never been there’ restaurant payment receipt for a meal for two. And a Final Reminder letter that proved to upsetting to open. 

Once these are seen, they re-enter the lives of the car and the occupants, evidence of other times and moments until recently lost to them.

In a time of heavy braking, as the speed of life both reverses and accelerates, the unseen become seen. Things reveal themselves to Mike, Tilly, Kiera and Rachel – material things, physical things, emotional things, spiritual things – things that they might otherwise miss, ignore, over-look or feel able to hide in the usual speed of life.

And in the midst of this moment, their minds will demonstrate exactly how quickly we adapt – how we create expanses of inner space in what we thought was a mind full up with life’s really important stuff – an expanse of inner space that gives us the room to take up new threads, scrutinise events, record information, and expand to accommodate all of those tasks and complex conundrums and puzzles to solve in the next few nano seconds.

In a moment of extreme reflex survival, our hearts and minds demonstrate how resilient they truly are – how fast they can operate, how much they can absorb, how much thinking they can do, how much consideration they can muster and how many decisions and commitments they can make in the lifetime of infinitesimal moments that occur in times off heavy braking. And in that moment we are re-stitched into the fabric of each other’s lives in the most profound way.

All of this seems clear enough.

The big question is this – when the period of heavy braking is over – once the agile, highly engineered and resourceful Lexus NX 300h comes to a stop [beautifully of course, as the hi spec ABS and sports suspension has fulfilled its role] – once everyone is checked and found to be OK, other than the odd scuff, chaff and wrench – what will Mike, Tilly, Keira and Rachel have learned? About themselves and those in the car with them? What life lessons and outtakes can they pop in the back of their memory for later?

Will the shared moment of dramatic suspension – the memory of their collective journey through space and time, hurtling through the inner space of Lexus engineering towards the unknown [the cosmic unknown that is – there is very little unknown about a windscreen, air bag or dashboard], the intimate proximity of it, their shared expulsions of breath, their primal exclamations, all mixing in some primal soupy in-car atmosphere of survival – will those things positively imprint on Mike, Tilly, Keira and Rachel? 

Will the experience make them see how some things are barely worth the anguish or the upset – and how sometimes our vanities and inflated expectations of ourselves and what life serves us are just that and with the gift of a clarifying experience to guide us, should be set aside and good things embraced.

Who knows? But you can only hope. 

In these times of heavy braking, take the time of slo-mo living that it presents to look to those closest to you, open your eyes to them – freeze frame these moments. And try and catalogue the gifts this time gives us. Starting with the realisation that the previous speed of life was bullshit really. And all that shiny ‘look at me’ momentum was simply that, the veneer of our vanity. Take the time to think What If… what if we managed to capture even the smallest of the gains from this time of heavy braking – insights, realisations, commitments, behaviours, resolutions, even the smallest of transformations in ourselves, our families, our communities and our societies. That would be good. That would be something.  

Author’s Note: I apologies if the use of Sir David Attenborough as the human embodiment of Nature’s volatility. Sir David is Nature to millions of people – so I popped him in there. Though he may not like being used to represent COVID 19 – and some might even question the ‘natural’ nature of the virus given humanity’s ability to turn it into a blight.

Writing, Falling down & The clumsy Beauty of ‘Almost Not Quite’.

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

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ABBA, Austin Allegro, Clumsiness, Corporates, cosmic fizz, data points, Hadron Collider, John Lydon, North Star, Outputs, Peter Perfect, purpose, Saviano, The Oxfordians, Writing

 

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THUMP, CRASH, BANG.

I’ve just re-read one of my blogs.

SMASH, CRUNCH, SPLINTER.

It has to be admitted;

TINKLE, SCRAPE, BOOM.

(To myself at least).

BIFF, BOSH, CLONK.

It’s official.

THUNK.

My writing is clumsy.

No question of it. It is many other slightly more redeeming things I am told.

But always, without fail, and in spite of some broadly applied rules (and a reasonable degree of re-reading, tweaking and correcting), the one immutable truth of it is that it is clumsy – though as to which particular type of clumsy I am uncertain.

Sometimes my writing can resemble something akin to a man falling down some cellar stairs with the fingers of one hand clinging to the keyboard as the fingers of the other hand scrabble at thoughts sello-taped along the descending bannister.

On other occasions it smacks of something not dissimilar to a man bound in double-sided tape throwing himself into a small darkened room whose walls are covered with post-it notes variously scribbled with words and phrases like: sub-atomic collider, definition of a Suede Head, John Lydon’s Sex shoes, Pappardelle recipe from Tina, ABBA, Resilience, Arse. The Melancholic Chord, 11, The Oxfordians, Stuey, Saviano, 1973 Austin Allegro, Lying Down and The Cosmic Fizz.

I think perhaps that the clumsiness comes somewhat from the fact that I am more enamoured with ‘conversational’ language and vernaculars and the rhythm of how people speak, rather than how one might best set out and down that humanity with minimum embellishment on a page, screen or other surface to be enjoyed quietly in someone’s head.

The rigour, measure and flow of the exquisitely written word, whether of the bleak muscular and sparse kind, or perhaps the more lyrical and rich variety, is a beautiful thing. But it is often a beauty that escapes me; narrowly but escape it does none-the-less.

I also sense that on occasion I put far too much of myself and my own emotion into my writing  – an inappropriate and self-interested incursion in a private moment – not unlike someone speaking of their own grief and loss to the newly widowed as they stand at the graveside. I really do need to get out of my own way in the writing department.

The upside (if I can be allowed to venture one) of being a clumsy writer is that, every now and then, that clumsiness means that I am inevitably going to ‘trip over’ something and inadvertently that ‘something’ might just be a thought, an idea, a profundity; or simply a ditty or a phrase that has some value either in my professional or personal life. Rarely. But the potential to trip over something is most definitely there.

(Grown Up writers would point to the benefit of being less clumsy and more clinical, pithy and precise as a recipe for enlightenment, revelation and ultimately the liberation of pure human emotion into the world – but I have to accept that the clumsy version is the one I am attached to.)

Does that destine me to be some catch phrase Charlie or an Almost and a Not Quite Right Writer? Perhaps.

But I am growing both accustomed to and fond of the fact that I seem to know increasingly less and make increasingly more mistakes every day. I doubt that perfection will grace my mind and the page in front of me any time soon.

For that I am quietly grateful because there is in that truth the potential for me to still hopefully surprise myself and others.

Why?

I know myself (to a reasonable degree, at least).

I am at my best when scrabbling for something precious. Flawed, flailing, floundering and failing.

That is why deciphering and defining a North Star or a Purpose is one of the most enjoyable aspects of my professional life. This is why I enjoy seeking them out and shaping them for others. Because they must allow for the imperfect journey. They must allow for slippage and some little slide with a few dead ends and tripwires on the way. They must be respectful of the fact that Peter Perfect is a cartoon character and that ordinary people of even the most extraordinary kind are the ones who will be expected to reach for that North Star or Purpose.

Not that everyone appreciates the humanity of Almost. The Outcome and Output junkies of the Corporate kind struggle with the idea that not every action in one’s day should necessarily turn into a positive data point on a spreadsheet. (The adult world’s version of Gold Stars in School WorkBooks.) Our obsession with the ‘prefect everything’ is killing creativity in business at a time when it needs it most.

Yes, the people running those businesses have to ensure that the business is well run, financially sound and sustainable. But the most important thing for any business to sustain is the heart and soul that began and built it. And that heart and soul is most usually imperfect: driven, passionate, obsessive perhaps. But imperfection will lie at the heart of it somewhere.

This is what I seek in every business and brand I work with: the human voice and imperfect passion at work within it. Thankfully my clumsy writing has allowed me to ‘trip over’ some wonderful human insights and moments in the process.

This is perhaps the most grandiose excuse for shoddy and lazy writing to be penned in early 2017 but I thought I’d get ahead of the game.

Now, where did I put those Post-it notes?

 

Queens, feeling it & The Art of Listening

04 Friday Nov 2016

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ABBA, Beyonce, Bizet, Bowie, Brixton Academy, Dave Grohl, Eek A Mouse, Heloise Lettisier, Iggy Pop, John Foxxx, John Paul Jones, Kraftwerk, Landscape, led zeppelin, Les Negresses Vertes, Listening, love, Madge, Michael Jackson, Morcheeba, Patti Smith, Pretty vacant, Puccini, Rocky Horror, Schubert, Sinead OConnor, System Of A Down, The Cramps, Them Crooked Vultures

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I experienced an epiphany last night. A small one.

Yes, bright lights from above were involved. Choral throngs. A shift in the cosmos. But so was a small French chanteuse. 3 musicians. 3 male dancers. Some sparsely choreographed neon tubes. Some Somersby cider. And few thousand people.

Christine & The Queens quietly smashed through the musical panic room I have patently been living inside.

It wasn’t until half way through the gig that I realised that the mesmeric and seductive nature of her and the music was actually relentlessly delicately tap tap tapping against the walls until smash. Revelation. For various reasons, some particular to me and the recent years of my life – others universal and just to do with age, I had forgotten how to listen.

As a man, especially a 50 something white one, that will come as no surprise to many. We are apparently renowned for our inability to listen.

But clichés aside, I have always had the deepest and greatest love for all forms of music. From the velvet of Puccini to the Twin Tenor Aria of Bizet’s the Pearl Fishers, to reggae blues parties ting a ling-a-linging to Eek A Mouse, the rocky horror psychobilly of the Cramps, smash in some black country Led-heavy rock, season with System of A Down,  Move On Up to disco, cross the White Lines of Hip Hop, turn left at ABBA, drink in the pretty vacancy of punk and back into deep folk, all rounded off with some heavy house and a little drum and base. Nenah Cherry’s Red hot and blue Monday. Hoagy Carmichael to the power of the killers.

And I hadn’t even got to Bowie, Pop & Reed, and the art fag beauty of shape shifting artists and icons in bleeding light landscapes. And then there’s the expanses of Ode to joy and Trout Concertos for cello and violin with a little Gregory Parker and Ella Fitzgerald for the sheer hell of it. The colour is endless.

I just love music.  And I can find the delicate cadence of a Gregorian chant in the heart of Face A La Mer by Les Negresses Vertes.

But therein lies the problem. Listening too much becomes Not Listening. It becomes interrogation.

I am also a drummer which means that the musical verticals are cut with the horizontal of particular musicians (always a tricky word to use when talking about drummers). The interrogation is not just genre. It’s now cut by skill set and value judgements. Not only am I interrogating the vibe and output of Crooked Vultures, I am also listening to the relationship between Jones and Grohl in comparative terms – given the seamless fluid and world shaping nature of Jones’s previous relationship with John Bonham.

Listening too much and having too much of a back catalogue in your head and heart in one way is divine and defining. But it is also a tyranny when applied in the wrong way.

As Christine, real name Héloise Letissier, moved through her set, I did what all over music-ed under feeling people do. I started cataloguing every nuance and inspiration. Mining every song for influences and steals. Creating collisions and comparisons, like some dreadful two penny film pitch. In her physicality she had the punk animalism of Iggy Pop fused with Michael Jackson; with a smattering of ‘Madgey ‘Vogue for good measure.

She had the fractured roar and vocal soar and musicality of Sinead.

The musicians that back her were like someone had taken Daft Punk and sent them to a musical un-finishing school run by John Foxxx, Landscape and presided over by Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider, two discrete computational Professors from Dusseldorf.

The pulsing and strobing of samples was text book White Lines – and the tip toe keyboard of Tilted was pure Einstein a Go Go rolled in a little sparks with some deep house and Morcheeba for good measure.

Stop. Whoa. And the whole Bitter Pill Alanis moment cannot be ignored. Which bled into a Red Dawn landscape of Peter Gabriel like making.

The elegantly choreographed neon installation dancing above her head – and I am remembering Gary Newman and the Tubeway Army’s bleak black and strip lights.

And then the soaring above all of the others: Patti Smith rushed up into my head.

But as the gig went on the snippets, influences and collisions came thicker and faster, speeding through my head.

Trying to stay focused on each one of these flashes became akin to watching a subway train pull out of the station. At first each window, each carriage and the people inside them are distinct but as the train speeds up they begin to smudge into each other faster and faster, until they are a strobe of light a roar and a feeling: a feeling. Until they just ‘are’.

And that was my epiphany. The Broken Beyonce. The Half Woman. Became my Jean D’Arc.

As the music overflowed it became impossible to keep interrogating. And I started to listen. I slowly remembered what it was like to just listen and feel. Stop thinking stop talking.

I realised that I was trying to control the emotion of the music and her through the deconstruction of it. And the falling away of that felt transcendent.

I don’t mean to put too much on her shoulders. Perhaps I was also overwhelmed by the LOVE in the room. Because it was LOVE. All these people calling her name. It was kind and generous and messy. It wasn’t obsession, or trending or fetishizing. She seemed very very LOVED.

So unusually, even for this whiter shade of male, I found myself listening and being moved once more. And feeling exhilarated by the feeling of that.

I remembered how I feel about music. Not what I think about it.

Merci Heloise.

uber tech, the human condition & the curse of being Super

27 Saturday Sep 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Tags

ABBA, Born To Run, Bruce Springstein, Cage Fighting, Carbyne, Evolution, Green Lantern, Jack & Diane, Kinesis, Mutants, Nanotechnology, Pilsbury Dough Boy, Ronal McDonald, Superman, Supertrouper, Survival, technology, telephone boxes, The Human Condition, Vinyl, Wonder Woman, Wurlitzers

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The juke-box was one of the old fashioned ones – none of this fancy new micro aural-fabric wall covering surround sound system stuff.

It was Old School. Renovated Wurlitzer. Vinyl. Beautiful. Real. Music you could touch and smell. Tucked in a corner. Take your 165bpm world and stick it on 78rpm.

A love-struck Romeo plays the streets a serenade…

laying everybody low…

with a love song that he made

A ripple of delight rolled up the cloaked blue back. Lois loved this song.

The PA system rudely interrupts the juke-box, and a few bright chords chime out over the heaving hall.

ABBA!!! Jesus.

He winces: just a little. Like The Man With No Name. Love those movies. To one side of the bar, on the wall, a carousel of ‘original’ movie posters flickered up. Le Bon. Le Brute. Le Truand. Everywhere you looked a screen played your thoughts back to you.

Clark sends the last pistachio shell skittering across the bar top. It scuttles and flips on the escarpment of some old bar top graffiti and spins off into space.

His wrist band buzzed. His heart rate must have increased. Substantially. Its glow took on a purple hue. Pituitary aberrations. Weird.

As if by magic, the barman comes and removes the almost empty bottle of sour mash in front of him.

“Sorry ‘Man. You know how it rolls. Can drink yourself to death for all I care. But not here. They’ll shut us down and sue our ass to next Jesus day if you die on the premises”

The irony of this statement, given that not 10 metres away combatants regularly tried to rip each others heads off and squeeze plasma out of each others eyes, was not lost on Clark. But it seemed to have passed the barman by.

Clark fingered and stretched the polymer blue-black tube around his wrist. One day he’d figure out how to turn this thing off. Ugly little spy. But needs must.  No band; no cover; no health and no welfare.

It relentlessly measured his vital signs and a number of secondary organ, enzyme and blood readings, distributing the data at super light fibre speed to everyone from his insurance company to the local hospital to the social welfare office to the barman in front of him via geo-location and face recognition. Latency certainly wasn’t an issue. The information was transmitted so damn fast it may as well have gone back in time.

Maybe he should drink inside the Cage. The bands didn’t work inside it. It blocked the signal. So much for infallible systems.

Hologram Ren belched, scraped back his stool, and stood up, kind of. He was done. Clark nodded, not that Ren really noticed. Wasn’t the same since Stimps got burned. A one man show Ren wasn’t. The music increased in volume.

Su-per trou-per

lights are gonna find me 

shining like the sun…

smiling having fun…

feeling like the No1!

One Eyed Mike thought he was real funny.

The music is Clark’s cue to move towards the tired scruffy wired cage at the far end of the bar hall – to the Cage and its sweaty bloody canvas. Made from triple-strength carbyne wire, it measured 30 feet by 30 feet by 30 feet.

What a circus. Mind you given his Victorian strong-man red-pants-outside-blue-tights look, he wasn’t really in position to comment.

The blue and red had seen better days, and the fabric looked positively ancient.

Clark shook down his shoulders. Christ he ached. He stepped up off the stool, his hand going to the site of his deepest scar, just beneath his right pectoral muscle.

The Cage on Highway Number 9 was jumping. Packed to the rafters with some ‘madness in its soul’. It was now legendary apparently; though how a straight-build tumbledown Roadhouse with a liquor & wrestling license in the middle of nowhere became legendary the gods only know.

The even bigger question was how all the other faded Supers had found him here, turning wrestling tricks for a few bucks and a free meal.

Not that it was bad having them here: just kind of crazy. They all felt happy here. Amongst their own. OK, so the Mutant Super thing kicked off every now and then but most of the time, apart from Parker’s web mess sprayed everywhere, getting on people’s nerves, it was, well, ok.

Being Super didn’t mean shit anymore. Everyone was Super now. With their airborne InfoTech, data bytes the size of asteroids travelling just as fast, virtual experiential sensosuits cheaper than a pair of sweat pants, and headspace 360 real-time vision and cyber implants.

There was time when Super meant something. Before everyone got junked up on tech.

Green Lantern was stretching off in the corner of the Cage. Bless him. Like a huge slightly jaded leprechaun.

ABBA’s super euro pop tune drifts out of the PA across the long room around the tables of assorted friends, freaks, failures.

Note to self. Take said pop song and stick it up one-eyed Mike’s new one, freshly ripped.

One Round. That should do it, Pound the crap out of him and bring a House Of Pain down on his head and then the rest of the night would be sweet.

One final super rumble at midnight and then he was free for another week.

He wondered who today’s Cage Celebrity Smack-down pairing was going to be.

Watching Ronald McDonald and The Pilsbury Dough Boy rip pieces out of each other last week, howling and hawking, covered in their own viscera, tears streaking their stage makeup and dough-eyed faces had moved to a place beyond funny.

He flexed his left arm. Shoots and pin pricks again. The Band griped on his wrist.

Clark’s focus was pulling in and out again. Gone were the days of looking through rock and steel. Could barely see through the edge of the Cage.

His vision tightened. Time to get busy. Washed up he may be in the flying universal policeman stakes but he could still rumble with the best of them.

That’s what they could smell. That’s what drew them from all over the US.

This scruffy aggregate of pseudo-super human beings with their fancy tech sophistry were here to see one thing. Good old school violence. The parochial, outside the beer-hall, looking at my girl kind of violence. Blood. Spit. Ugliness. Pain. The possibility of watching a creature suffer.

For all the experiences they could virtually replicate, the one they hadn’t nailed was the sheer excitement, the delicious thrill of seeing another creature, weakened, terrified and humiliated; buckling and writhing with the metallic taste of its own blood gurgling in its throat. Motorway pile ups, public hangings and terrorist beheadings. They just couldn’t help themselves.

And no avatar can replicate that expression: the one that flickers across a creature’s eyes when the bleak finality of knowing that its time has come in the gene pool survival game.

For all their peacocking about their virtual nirvana; and even in the face of the genocidal scale of their virtual battling and gaming, this super-human race had lost the ability to feel anything – pain; pleasure; and fear; especially real fear. This counted as a really big evolutionary Uh Oh in Clark’s book: the reverse Darwinian nature of a smart animal using its smartest inventions to make it the dumbest animal on the predatory block.

Divine obsolescence didn’t strike Clarke as a sensible plan for a species.

He scuffed around the bar, frozen for just for a moment in the light of an Ad wipe (highly annoying kinetically activated advertising curtains that mapped you and ‘robed you’ in some kitsch new designer apparel, took a pic and then immediately sent the pic to all the contacts in your band contact list across every social network in the world – With a ‘Hey doesn’t Clarke look sharp – tell him you like it’ button.)

Changing outfits was something Clarke was kind of done with. Half the telephone boxes disappeared and the ones that were left came with a drug dealer and a splash of voluptuous and rather inappropriately dressed ladies’ calling cards.

The crowd are cheering him in; but he has become deaf to it.

His gaze swings to the right of the path between the tables.

At one of the ring-side tables sits the crazy woman with her young boy. The boy was about 4 years old Clark reckoned; dressed in a forlorn super-suit from some gas station. The boy was fingering his game bar frantically.

Baby Superman. With bits of old hotdog and ketchup stain down the front. The truth always hurt.

As he walked past the boy he saw over his shoulder that the boy’s avatar was in flight mode hovering above the screen.

Christ.

Anyone can fly now. Not like the old school. At least they tried. At least planes actually understood what it was to move through the fluid air under their own power. At least a sky dive flight suit put you up there and out there for a moment, like some deranged flying squirrel. At least it was… …real.

Now everyone knew what it felt like to fly. Right. ‘Felt like’. The actual sensation. Even a so so mid range sensosuit could replicate the exact physical sensation of flying by firing millions of tiny charges across your skin, with different pressure sensors expanding and contracting the grasp of the suit on you to mimic dynamic movement in flight and G pressure. And the MeSq power implants in your head activated the relevant endorphins and adrenalin surges just to make sure you ‘felt it’.

Everyone could do everything. Everyone could see around the world in a second. Through steel and concrete. Everyone could see the future. Everyone could destroy anything with the flick of a finger. Everyone could be in 5 places at once. Superpowers was just so …everyday.

No-one needed the strength of 1000 men to topple a tall building. They could call up the strength of millions and topple a country.

The boy fingered the game bar furiously.

Could do without Diana seeing him that’s for sure

She’d looked a little shook up last time Clarke saw her. He always knew: when she played with her bracelets something was up. Like a change in the weather. When her heart was heavy, the scars on her wrists ached under her Indestructible bracelets.

She hadn’t mentioned the kids thing for awhile. He thought that maybe the pain had faded a little.

All she wanted was a kid. A normal, un-tampered with, straight DNA strand, in body baked baby. But for all the technology in the world it just wasn’t to be.

Anyway. They were cool. Clarke and Dian. Hanging out. It kind of worked.In fact the mundanity of it was a blessing; sweet liberation.

Life was simpler when you were less Super. Less wonderful. Something the new super humans with all their gadgets and advances needed to figure out for themselves.

He was in front of the Cage now. Green Lantern was looking wired. The tell tale pulsing temple and grinding jaw told Clark that he’d junked up on nano-oxgenators – small pieces of in blood technology that multiplied the effect of oxygen and adrenalin into your blood stream to boost resilience, strength and stamina.

Jesus even the Supers were at it now.

This wasn’t going to be quite as simple as Clark had previously though.

Screw it. He just needed to man up. Anyway. She’d be here soon. And everything would be alright.

The Princess and Clark: living the ditty; the Jack & Diane of the 21st Century, growin’ old in the heartland.

Clark steps up into the Cage. As he does so the sheer blue fabric of his suit catches the edge of the jagged wires. Rip.

Su-per-trou-per

Lights are going to find you

Shining like the sun

Smiling having fun

Feeling like the number 1.

Funny.

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