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Tag Archives: Nostalgia

Class, satire & the dark art of playing the gallery.

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s, Ainslie, Boris, Boudicca, BREXIT, Brideshead, Castlereagh, Chimpanzees, Class System, Dashwood, Downton Abbey, Eton College, EU, farage, Great British Public, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leavers, Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nostalgia, Snobbery, Social Order, Somerset, Thatcherite, Toffs, Topper, Trinity Oxford

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At a point in history when the nuance, deft politic and human insight of a Castlereagh might come in handy – and the strong hand, fierce purpose and earthiness of a Boudicca wouldn’t go amiss; what do we have?

Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Our representative for the broad constituency of ordinary people in the UK is a comical Toff who seems to have fallen off the pages of Topper Comic (well, the 1970s version).

There is a sublime logic in this as the Brexiteers seem to have decided that, if we’re going to apply a Back to the Future strategy, 1970 seems like a good Back to start a Future from; This obviously falls far short of the idyllic late 1940s and early 1950s that some Brexiteers would rather hark back to, the zenith of our victorious pre-Windrush Post WWII Golden Age, when you could still happily and openly show prejudice against anyone you so chose while playing an Over on the Green under a Spitfire sky, eating trimmed sandwiches of fish paste and cucumber and sipping lemonade and lashings of ginger beer; all played out amidst the buzz of an endless British summer.

There are the upsides: Britain in the 70s was a crash of paisley purple and burnt orange, brilliant Bowie,  Prog rock, Punk, Disco and the chiaroscuro of British Light Entertainment: the brilliant beacons of the Two Ronnies and Morecombe & Wise peppered with the misshit social commentary of ‘Til Death Do Us Part (Alf Garnett being to the 70s what Loadsamoney was to the 80s – both caricatures being an exercise in sharp satire gone horribly wrong.)

But it was also the decade of sclerotic public services and infrastructure, lazy builders, 3 day weeks, dusty industry (why change what’s worked for 100 years), street battles between Right and Left and, of course, Maggie Thatcher, the goddess in Jacob’s temple.

So our champion – Jacob Rees-Mogg – whose first tweet was in Latin. What a knob.

One would hope that the lower echelons of the Daily Mail readership (as they choose to self identify) will welcome having a bucket of cold water poured over them and a toe swung towards their arse for good measure when they realise what’s being done to them in the name of BREXIT.

But I have a feeling they are going there willingly.

This kow-towing and fawning adulation is simply the saloon-car-driving, beige-coated, ploughman’s eating, comfortable-walking-shoe version of the chimpanzee putting their wrist up towards the alpha and bowing their head. Or arse kissing upwards to put it in coarser, more feudal terms.

Far too many of the Great British public are playing out some twisted piece of Tom Brown and Flashman theatre – and gleefully so.

It seems a large swathe of the Great British public are seemingly more than happily prepared to play ‘Jean Ainslie’ to Rees-Mogg’s ‘Graham Dashwood.’

In the film, The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Jean Ainslie character is the epitome of the small-minded, deluded, disappointed and utterly class-fixated snob (a rather smarter and more polished version of Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced ‘Bouquet’ – from Keeping Up Appearances). And Graham Dashwood is the dashing, elegant, intelligent, worldly (and quietly gay) Barrister from a much higher social order.

Everything crushes into one moment where she states in a moment of professed love and adulation:

“In fact I think I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

There is the populist voice speaking.

Right now it seems that the Great British public are staring into Rees-Mogg’s eyes and professing much the same sentiment.

So how has Jacob conjured this whorl of feeling? What is it about him, his nature or his background that makes the masses lick upwards?

Well he ticks every box, in many more ways than Boris.

He is of good stock – but not a toff by birth. Tick.

(His father was only made a lifetime peer in 1988. So an ‘arriviste’ by old money standards. And they bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset, not inherited it. So in Alan Clark’s world view on inherited class, Rees Mogg’s family ‘bought their own furniture.’)

Jacob attended Eton and Trinity, Oxford. Tick.

Jacob made an extraordinary amount of money in Fund Trading, so he can claim the status ‘self-made man’. Tick.

But most importantly he ‘looks and sounds’ the part. Double Tick.

Jacob is the epitome of the Comic toff caricature that many over 40s grew up on. He is in that way a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rees-Mogg realised long ago that image is everything (whilst still at school if the highly confected nature of the Eton College Collections portrait is to be believed). And presentation is nine tenths of the social law.

If you believe that people are still inherently feudal and like the idea of some Brideshead meets Downton Abbey world of ‘them in the big house up there and us down ‘ere doffing our caps’ model of social order and happiness – then you play to that gallery. Starting with your veneer.

Jacob realised the value in looking like you are from central casting’s stable of fragile toffs with a wilful streak and a stubborn self-righteousness born of an irrepressible Right of Entitlement. People look backwards at times of volatility and chaos. They seek older orders and touchstones to reassure themselves – even comic book ones. Nostalgia is a powerful opiate.

But that on its own is not enough. There is a darker, smarter judo move in Rees-Mogg that points to a very media savvy individual ‘playing the moment.’

Rees-Mogg has self-selected himself to be parodied, lampooned and satirised – he has made himself the butt of his own jokes. Genius.

This garish characterisation delivers on two counts. It makes him highly visible and discernible. And it presents him as self-deprecating – a faux proxy for humility in this case.

Everything he does presets him to ‘control’ the satire against him. (Sound familiar?)

So while Boris attracts all of the rockets with his stamping politic and straw-haired buffoonery – and Farage continues to present himself as the self-interested, small minded provincial barracker that he is (noticeably still collecting his MEP cheque and watching the World Cup from another EU subsidised bar in Brussels), Jacob slithers into every vapourous opportunity and out of anything solid or substantial with a whiff of the snake charmer wafting about his overly-combed head (brilliantine wouldn’t go amiss).

He is the quietly sneering, self-preening critic sitting in the corner seat at the dinner party, using the compound effect of his coy theatre of fragile child, his ‘blinking’ intellect and uncomfortable pauses to be eviscerating while seemingly ameliorating.

Some would venture that we get the politicians we deserve. If that is the case then the UK is generally suffering from a desperate case of ‘doffing’ – junked up on the need to be ruled by some retrograde smugness of the ‘Big House’ variety.

Thank heavens for that. There was a danger there for the briefest moment of us looking like an advanced, enlightened society with a clear understanding of the diversity of humanity that shaped us and a clear line of sight on the delicious collision of natures, skills, outlooks and open optimism we need as a nation to evolve and thrive.

But sanity prevails. And with the rise of the Rees-Moggs of this world we show ourselves for the fawning, recidivist, class-riddled, insecure ‘know your place’ society we really are.

Irritatingly I have to take my hat off to him. He knows his audience and their fragile desires intimately. He’s good. Really good.

So I’m off to buy a new cap to doff!

Everything is connected & a brief journey through two kings, blue eyes, 1970s posters and Alice Cooper

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s Posters, Blondie, Crystal Gale, Elizabeth Taylor, Elrond, Everything Is Connected, Gandalf, Gimley, Gladiator, Hamlet, Legolas, Living In The Now, lord of the Rings, Lothlorien, Manhatten Transfer, Mick Ronson, Mirkwood, Mustique, Nostalgia, Peter O Toole, Portofino, Richard Burton, Sartoria, Shakespeare, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir John Gielgud, Social Memory, St Tropez, Strider, The Cramps, The Medusa Touch, The Senses, The Shire, Theodren, Viggo Mortgensen, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

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TWO KINGS

let’s start our journey of connection at the film Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King – and lets take ourselves to the final reckoning at the Black Gate – and Aragorn’s rousing speech in the final battle scene.

It teeters on battle speech perfect. And that’s amongst some stiff opposition:
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

Theoden’s rousing speech is about as good as they get (leaving aside every transcendent quote from Gladiator you care to mention.)

But Aragorn’s speech goes to a different level. And it is due to something beyond mere content. Something rings (sorry) more deeply here: something is different: his voice: the gruffness of before – the hoarse whisper of Strider, the ranger’s voice, has taken on a more measured passion – a more kingly tenor.

Suddenly there is a new stature present: that of a King in waiting. It seems as if Aragorn in his speech finally rises through his oratory to the challenge set by Elrond: to “Put aside the Ranger. Become who you were born to be.”

But this kingly voice sounds faintly familiar. Whose voice echoes down through the celluloid corridors to sound out through the lips of Viggo Mortgensen?

And then it struck me.

Richard Burton: Hamlet. 1964. Produced and directed for the stage and screen by the immutable Sir John Gielgud.

And What a piece of work is a man…

Glorious.

Viggo’s voice, whether by prescription or accident sounds out the spirit of Burton’s Hamlet through the mouth of a different King.

Strangely, another more abstracted, wholly subjective and subtle connection exists for me – through Gandalf or should I say Sir Ian McKellen: whom has always reminded me of Gielgud.

GOING FOR A BURTON

On the matter of Richard Burton, when asked recently whom I thought, beyond Bond et al,was the yet to be discovered Look in gentlemen’s sartoria – for me, it is Richard Burton.

Apart from the fact that, he already achieves 11 out of 10 on a blokey rating just for marrying one of if not the most beautiful women of the age (shallow is the new deep), Burton also found himself a famous sporter of fashion signature pieces like the toweling polo shirt – three button, splayed collar, sun burnt colours – which he sported in American Bars from Portofino to St Tropez to Mustique.

But look further and his look expands into multiple sartorial shards from the broken glass of 50’s 60’s and 70’s fashion. The ‘almost Elvis’ suit and collar combos off set by slicked back hair and powder-white sideburns firing across rippled sun drenched skin. The smokey southern deconstructed suits of a very twisted George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. To the beat generation black of Hamlet and the stripped back Medusa Touch.

So Burton is The Man for me when it comes to the next British Look.

BROWN EYES BLUE

It’s amazing how a still from a movie can invoke a memory that rockets you back to a moment in time with such a breathtaking ferocity and such clarity.

While looking at stills of Richard Burton in the film The Medusa Touch, I was reminded of the depth and what I can only refer to a the particular ‘blue’-ness of his eyes – not bright crystal like O’Toole’s – more a deep mined blue with graphite shades and green eddies.

Regardless, the song that rushed to the back of my mind while looking at the stills was Crystal Gale’s Don’t it make your Brown Eyes blue. Now disregarding the fact that I had a massive crush on her for a while (though nothing will EVER outshine the tenure of my teenage crush on Debbie Harry – currently still burning brightly), and playful word recognition and threads aside (Blue Eyes – Brown Eyes) it was the ‘time’ that played up into my head – that moment of being in the world through which that song floated. The clothes I wore. The music I loved. The posters on my cork tiled patch of wall. All those discomforts of self: the intensity of passions and uncertainties. The smell of cut grass on school playing fields. The face of a girl that I liked but couldn’t even fathom how to look at let alone try and speak to. Dislocated parents. Dislocated body (nothing my body did bore any relation to what went on in my head – it was a law unto itself). A time made as viscerally present as it is past. All through a song and a film still.

1970s POSTERS

Speaking of posters from the 1970s – one of the posters that hung for years on my wall was a Lord Of The Rings poster Illustrated by J Caulty.

The poster’s central characters are, I believe, Gandalf and Frodo Baggins. Around its periphery we see Aragorn, Gimley, Legolas and Gollum amongst others, interlaced with twisting pathways, and realms like the distant Lothlorien, and the Shire – all topped with a curling embellishment on which hung a golden crown.

Around the poster ran a border embellished with men, elves, dwarves, riders and assorted others. But dead centre at the bottom of this border lay the magic: a small iris that looked into a mysterious land: as if we are peering out from the dark innards of the great Mirkwood to the lush lands beyond.

And I remember looking deeply, almost trance like into this aperture and wondering what world existed beyond there. (Preferably one more seductive than the one in which my highly conflicted teenage self lived currently.)

And I remember thinking that the character I thought to be Aragorn (but it is actually probably a darker character from the stories) midway up the right hand side of the poster looks like a mash up of Alice Cooper, Mick Ronson, Manhatten Transfer and a Cramps flyer – which just about summed up my musical confusion through the mid to late 70s – a troubled collision of heavy rock & pomp metal, disco, punk, greaser rock and psychobilly.

Confused perhaps. But Lord Of The Rings nonetheless.

Which brings me back to the return of the king: a virtuous circle of being.

So heres to a goes around comes around world where everything is connected – past present and future through sight smell taste touch and sound wound into a cat’s cradle string that we merely reform and reshape depending on the memory doorways we enter through, and to whichever passing thought kicks the embers from the back of our mind into sparks at the front.

Top Tips for Carbon Dating & the life and times of a clean energy provider.

12 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Caring about what people care about, Clean Renewables, Coal, Dating, Double dating, Ethical Business, First Dates, Flings, Flirting, Gas, GE, Identity, Integrity, Jeremy Clarkson, Life Long Friendships, Long Term relationships, Love Ins, Nostalgia, Oil, Old Mates, One Night Stands, Sentimentality, Small Businesses, Sustainable Brands '14, Ties that Bind, word of mouth

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The populist conversation around creating a clean energy love in seems to be going nowhere about as fast as Jeremy Clarkson in an oil-burning, coal-fired, gas-expanded super-car through a village of impoverished 3rd Worlders living on scorched earth!

So anyone out there in the world trying start a conversation with the unenlightened everyday someone around the idea of embracing clean renewable energy can be in for a cold start.

So which reframe might help us get people to more easily consider moving from a short term promiscuous ‘lowest price who cares?’ transactional relationship to a long term committed ‘that price I care’ value based relationship.

Reason? Glamour? EQ? IQ? Finding the hook can be tricky. So lets try looking at the problem through the everyday human condition – one that everyone can relate to.

The first time you meet a dyed in the wool cheap coal and oil energy user with a shiny new clean energy package you could say it is a little like a First Date.

So lets start there.

As with all dates, especially first ones, you need to be clear about your objective going in, as this defines the rules of engagement.

Do you just want a few dates? Or would you like a long term relationship with them?

If its a just a few dates, some passion and then goodbye; go in fast and furious. Thick skinned. Impervious. Immutable.

If it’s the long term relationship you want. That’s a different thing entirely.

That demands a more intuitive approach. Sensitivity. Respect.. Awareness.

So, when approaching a traditional coal, oil or gas burning energy consumer for the first time, here are a few tips and watch-outs to help shape a better first impression and relationship.

First Dates

1. Don’t assume that turning up bright eyed and bushy tailed with a shiny new something will get you straight to First Base.

Appearing with a clean renewable energy package will NOT immediately have them springing to click on the ‘change of provider’ PDF.

Putting aside old familiar and trusted things – however toxic they may be in reason – is not a given. Sentimentality and attachment are very strong emotions in the human condition.

2. Don’t assume that Reason aces everything.

Not everyone sees things reasonably: usually they will be quite the opposite – viewing life through a very human and subjective eye.

So Pointing out the deepest most destructive failings and flaws of their current energy choice may not only make them highly defensive of the choice they have made but also of themselves for making it.

Example: When you first meet a very old and good friend of your new crush, only to find that they’re truly awful: some recidivist throw back to a 1970s British sitcom with all the chauvinist, misogynist, racist paraphernalia that goes with it; you can do one of two things:

Either call out their dreadful-ness as loudly as possible, pointing out and highlighting every flaw, to then flounce off muttering phrases such as ‘How can you put up with that &*$%”

Or you can sit back, observe the relationship; assess it: for the depth of its feeling, and the integrity of its bond. This allows you to decide whether the presence of the friend is immutable and in turn a corollary to as yet unseen things to come in your crush; traits or behaviours that you have simply not registered through your lusty mists.

3. Be prepared for Double Daters.

Most people are unlikely to put all of their energy eggs in one clean renewable basket straight away. They will probably switch backwards and forwards or leave the big stuff as it is and just flirt with a clean and serene energy lifestyle to warm themselves up and test the edges of it. In that way the average Jane and Joe is not dissimilar to the average energy monolith. Just like GEs diversified energy portfolio – which unsurprisingly contains the smoky old faithfuls.

4. Get someone to put in a good word for you.

With most successful dates, the battle is one before it is fought. Someone ‘bigging you up’ prior the actual meeting can work wonders.It is also a way of utilising the grapevine that will be buzzing whether you like it or not. The odd whisper and aside and some furious txt-ing and calling will have already happened on the side between the two parties friends and acquaintances way before you get to the bar/restaurant/club/room.

Small businesses are always looking for smart wins in the efficiency and economies department. And they have a far closer eye on the way the business runs itself and makes money. Target the Owner Managers businesses, deliver for them and they’ll be singing your praises in the pub in a flash in very everyday and human sized terms.

So lets have a run at that and see if it enlightens the moment and sets us up for success or failure. And if that doesn’t work we’re just going to keep trying others. because we need to. So all ideas gratefully received.

Answers on a postcard.

NOTE This blog was inspired by a chat at Sustainable Brands London’14 with some super bright clean energy people around the topic of rewriting the narrative of the whole carbon issue – which to be frank currently reads like a Wet Wednesday, when it should come across like a Sunny Saturday.

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