The Spine's Beckham Podcast: What exactly art thou Romeo?

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The Spine Podcast - Episode 11: Clive James and the Art of Bad TV

Feeling As Hoagy As A Carmichael

Another bad night's sleep but this time no drawing. For some reason, my heart hasn't been into it. For a few days (perhaps even weeks, if I'm honest) I keep starting cartoons and I find that my energy just isn't there to finish them. I blame this throat infection, which feels a little better in so far as it now feels more like a heavy cold but also makes me feel worse because it's now more like a heavy cold. The Strepsils have been working but I'm not convinced they don't give me mild insomnia. I find I'm full of energy at about 5am.

Another bad night's sleep and a lost hour due to the clocks going forward means that I'm behind with everything and especially the news.

Interesting to see the Tory infighting has already started with IDS suggesting the Cameron will be forced to quit early. I thought Cameron's 'no third term' an odd confession to make but because of one point that I've not seen mentioned in the media. If Cameron doesn't intend to stand for a third term, there's nothing to stop him promising the earth at this election. Politicians are programmed to ensure they never box themselves in. They hate to rule things in or out lest it come back to bite them when next they need the public's vote. If this really is Cameron's last election, can it be any surprise that he's already promising us a 7 day NHS when the 5 day NHS is broken to buggery?

Loved how gloomy and literate 'Spectre' is looking: 'You're like a kite dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond'... Great writing. Hated the media attacking Sir Roger Moore for saying something that I believe many Bond fans would say. I think it's a sign of a largely white paranoia about issues of race that nothing can be debated without immediate accusations of bigotry. It's precisely why UKIP already have such a strong hold in politics.

I'm sure the first black Bond will come and perhaps he/she will be a revelation. I've never been a fan of any Bond who looks unlike the Fleming model which was Hoagy Carmichael. Much as I love the Craig movies, the blond Bond is not really James Bond in my eyes. So, given I've watched and enjoyed movies that have moved away from the canon, would it matter if they changed his ethnicity or even his gender? Hamlet was recently being played by a woman in Manchester and it was supposedly a great success.

I feel too ill to argue otherwise. I'm too ill to argue why we should cherish our cultural icons. Would it matter if in the next adaptation of Sherlock Holmes the BBC turned him into an Eskimo woman? Perhaps not. It depends on the execution but, really, even if it were great (and, oddly, I can imagine it might be great) it wouldn't be Sherlock Holmes. It would be a pastiche of Holmes, something like Sherlock Holmes but very different to Sherlock Holmes. It I were a fan of DC Comic (I'm not) I'd probably be shocked by the New 52 relaunch of their major titles in which they've changed everything, turning Thor into a woman and Superman into an angry young man. The market will ultimately decide these things. We live in a mash-up culture and nothing is sacred except the mighty dollar.

Why I Despise the City of Chester

Chester is a city which doesn't exactly feel like how a city should feel. It's small, condensed, and in a very good way, totally haphazard. To describe it best, I could quote Gormenghast:

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs … And darkness winds between the characters.

Yet it's also a city that announces its age at every opportunity and, unless you travel there for the heritage, that heritage can sometimes plainly wear on your nerves. I think of it as a city that wants to play me for a fool; where the price of everything is inflated to maintain the mock Elizabethan standards.

The moment you step out of the station, you're greeted by paralyzed history. The arch over the entrance to the Queen Hotel car park proclaims 'Carriages & Post Horses For Hire', whilst across the road another hotel, one of the city's many listed buildings, is proudly titled the 'Town Crier'. Everything wears history but it's a history that only a naive fool (or American) would believe is real. Wikipedia dates the building to only 1865, originally titled either the 'Queen Commercial Hotel' or the 'Albion Hotel', whilst the role of the city's town crier it itself a recent re-innovation, reappearing sometime in the 1990s. None of this really matters, of course. Not to the tourists.

I've never been a tourist. I've visited Chester so regularly since childhood that I no longer have any sense of its novelty. At one point, I was hoping to get a lecturing job in the English department at the university (I didn't) and at another point I was working on the city's outskirts, often travelling into the city on my half-days to enjoy the shopping. It's distant enough to be only an occasional day out but close enough to be completely familiar.

There was a time when English towns retained some distinctive quality but every town in the UK resembles every other town and Chester, despite its pretensions, is still really more town that city. There are the ubiquitous shops and anything more is usually worth disregarding or cherishing intensely. Whether it's the self-important town criers, the struggling actors dressed as Roman centurions, or the old fashioned open-topped bus that carries tourists around, Chester is different and yet, for people who aren't tourists, there's also something about it that feels wrong. It's a veneer of special which really doesn't run that deep. This is that vintage England which you're not entirely sure is real or an illusion.

Because, these days, my visits to Chester are usually to support my sister who makes occasional visits to see a consultant there, we often use Abbey Taxies on Foregate Street. It's a small office, wedged between a couple of cafes, Argos and a Bargain Booze across the road, all the buildings like much of the city centre: a mixture of styles but with the popular black and white timber the dominant theme. Inside there's a cattle-pen turnstyle arrangement, which I assume is for weekend use, where drunks probably stack up for their taxis home. However, it's always empty during the day and you walk straight through to an office at the rear, ask for a taxi, and you are then directed through the building towards the street at the back. You emerge in an alley that resembles grubby backstreets everywhere and the city's Tudor spell is immediately broken by the endless red brick. The timber history, you realise, was skin deep and the real history is to be found elsewhere in the Roman ruins dotted around the outskirts of the city centre.

Yet, the illusion is not entirely why I never enjoy visiting Chester. It's hard to criticise any place that tries to be different in these days of mass produced shop fronts and, despite my cynicism, I know much of the history is real and I always feel a thrill when I remember that my favourite poet, John Donne, attended the funeral of Sir Thomas Egerton at the Cathedral. What I suppose I dislike is the ethos of the place. There was a time when there was a free bus that ran from the station into the city centre. Manchester has that and I think many other great cities have the same. It's a small thing but it makes you feel welcome. Chester now charges visitors for this honour and I begrudge the £1 you have to pay for each five minute journey on the cramped bus, four additional pounds for the two of us in addition to the already exorbitant train fare. It means that right from the moment you leave the station, Chester doesn't feel welcoming and it gets no better once you arrive in the city centre.

For the average person, Chester flaunts both its wealth and your lack of it. It's the only place I know where I feel genuinely poor. On Eastgate Street, in the shadow of the famous clock (erected 1769, or so it says in the Latin pressed in gold onto the red sandstone), stands the Chester Grosvenor Hotel. It's the kind of hotel that has men in uniforms guarding the entrance with a rigid smile and ex-military menace. It offers an eight course 'Tasting Menu' for 'just' £59 per person, with a 'Tasting Wine Menu Selection' for only another £45. If I'd wanted to stay there tonight, the cheapest room is £195 for the 'Classic Bedroom' or £455 for the 'Deluxe Suite'. I'd have to hope they also offer a 'Standard Broom Closet'.

I know there's no reason to begrudge the rich their privileges but the problem is that Chester makes that ostentation so public. Because the hotel's entrance opens right onto the main shopping thoroughfare, the wedding parties often mix with the tourists and locals in a strange blend of real wealth and absolute poverty. You can quickly find yourself walking through a wedding shot or pushing past some huge Rolls Royce or horse-drawn cart thick with garlands. Handsome people are daily seen posing in their perfect lives at perfect weddings you suspect will end in a messy divorce six months later. Often the confetti (every piece cut into a heart shape, no less) sticks to your boots, in the lapel of your coat, in the creases of your hat. Today, there was a bright red Jag, a stunning F-Type Coupe, pushing its way through the crowds; it's deep throated roar clearing a path. I've never been so close to one as I was when its exquisite nose nudged me out of the way.

Yet for all the money, the pretty people in their fashionable clothes and their clipped accents, Chester has very little class. Get there late in the afternoon and you discover that most places close at five PM and the local baristas (the friendliest people in the city, especially those in the two Neros on the streets Eastgate and Foregate) tell me that the city is pretty starved of culture at night. Anywhere that stays open is catering to the stag parties or muscled gangsters hot on their winning streaks from the racetrack. At night, Chester is a place where women wear very little very brazenly, where there's as much wealth on show as there is flesh. Often, the clothes are of the leopard skin variety, as bereft of ideas as the wearers are bereft of manners. Today, I'd just emerged from Waterstones (I'd found a Kliban Cat calendar dumped in the bargain bin for £1) and I was walking along the Rows, which if you don't know Chester, are a raised pedestrian area a level up from the street, forming a continuous walkway cut into fabric of the buildings. It's all carved timber like the innards of the Mary Rose, winding and rising and falling as the constantly unique architecture changes from shop to shop. It's probably one of the city's great attractions, the stuff that makes Americans boldly declare 'quaint'. Yet it's also extremely unfriendly for anybody infirm or pushing a pram. So, at one of the many old well-heeled stone steps you find at the end of the Rows, a woman was standing with a baby in a buggy. She was trying to figure out how to get her pram down the steep steps. I was a good distance away, so I knew somebody would stop and help before I got there. In a city like Liverpool -- supposedly a tough working class city but the reality is that it's about the friendliest city you'll find anywhere -- somebody would help her in an instant. Yet that didn't happen today in Chester. It was some time before I reached her yet I found her still struggling. I stopped and helped her carry the buggy down to the street and I say that not because I'm particularly virtuous because I'm not. But it's what you do when nobody else will stop and help and Chester doesn't feel like a place where people help each other very often.

People are rich and with wealth comes a certain attitude which pervades the place. In reminds me of London in the way that people shove each other out of the way, rarely signal for you to go first and instead take every space as if it's already their own. On my rare visits to London, I've felt like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy, smiling at unfriendly strangers and apologising should I step in their way. Hold a door open for somebody in Manchester or Liverpool and people usually smile and say 'thank you'. Hold a door open for somebody in London (or Chester) and they assume you're there to hold the door open for them. It's not deliberate. Taking you for granted is a habit of mind.

The same unfriendliness is carried over into the shops. Chester is the only city where I've ever been physically thrown out of a bookshop. It was some years ago now. I was about to go back to university to study English and I was in the classics section of W.H. Smith. I remember I was trying to figure out which edition of Shakespeare's collected plays to buy. If you've ever studied Shakespeare seriously, you'd know it's an important decision not to be made quickly. A young assistant came up to me. He asked me what I was doing. I said I was browsing the books. 'They have libraries for that,' he replied.

'I'm sorry?'

'If you want to browse books, you should go to the library.'

'But I'm looking at these books intending to buy one.' I'd been stood there about five minutes and with student loan money in my pocket to buy my copy.

'Yes and we've had a lot of trouble with people like you...'

And then he escorted me out of the shop, despite my protests and requests to speak to the manager. I know I should have stood my ground but, also knowing Chester, I'd have probably ended up in the nick. I was too far from home to make a scene, plus, I guess, part of me felt like he was right. I didn't belong. A stinking letter to W.H. Smiths' head office did nothing. I suspect they'd mistaken me for somebody else. I never did find out. It was years before I even used that W.H. Smiths again.

Yet that's Chester. Despite the charm, there's a tricky undercurrent to the place. Walk the Rows and peer into the shops and you often see unfriendly faces looking back at you. Or, perhaps, just at me. I know the problem is partly how I look. I am shabby. I wear the clothes of my profession: lifelong student, writer, cartoonist, programmer, naive dreamer. And I know I dress a certain way because I want people to misjudge me because I also know that the suits and the tans mean very little in life. Or they mean very little to me. I want to be judged for who I am and not how I look. Yet the irony is that many of the shops contain the things I cherish. I now don't even bother trying to enter the few antiquarian bookshops. I stick to the charity shops. I don't enter the art galleries and I don't even go into the Cartoon Gallery, which is up on the Rows on Watergate Street. It should be one of my favourite places in the North West but I stopped visiting. Whenever I've gone in there in the past, I felt so out of place. Not that I've ever been made to feel out of place. The owners smile at me but I somehow know it's not for me. It's a shop made for golfing executives and their wives, not for would-be cartoonists only there to look at all the Bill Stott originals and, besides, Bill Stott gave me one of his originals. He's a good man. I suspect all cartoonist are, as I bet Albert is. Albert the Punch cartoonist who sits working at his desk at the back of the shop.

Yet I don't really know why I feel apart in the place I should feel most at home. Perhaps it makes me bitter to think that the guy there to buy an expensive cartoon for his den wall can't identify a Stott from a Bestie, a Mike Williams from a Bill Tidy.

And perhaps that's why I always leave Chester feeling disappointed. I know it's not really the city that disappoints me. I guess the disappointment is with myself. I realised this today.

We all go through life occasionally glimpsing lost souls, somehow outmaneuvered by fate. I saw a couple today, walking past me. They were obviously a couple and both wore glasses with extremely strong prescriptions. The boy looked cumbersome. The girl was attractive but in a slightly forlorn way and you know that she in no way would ever think herself attractive and you know that's one of life's small tragedies. She had a prettier face than many of those caked in fake tan and lip gloss. You might say the couple were a perfect match, each of them so ever slightly odd, and  that forced me to mutter a lament of 'poor buggers' as they walked past. Yet Chester also makes me realise that I'm another of the 'poor buggers', only there because my sister needed another hospital appointment because she continues to be extremely unwell, continually failed by the NHS, having just endured another six months of suffering because the local GP managed to lose two blood samples she'd given without informing us, meaning that, six months later, we had to face a consultant explaining how the important blood work hadn't been done and she'd have to do it again, involving another six month wait... Two poor buggers in Chester and never a lucky break between them.

And that, I suppose is the problem I have with Chester. Chester really makes me hate myself and makes me hate my life, which is unforgivable. I can't think of another place that ever makes me feel so utterly abject, glad to be home but also sad to be home. It's not simply the fraud of the history, the wilful ignorance of the people. It's the sense that life really is a lottery and some of us can afford the great suits, the expensive hotels, the bright red cars, the cartoon originals, the first editions, and, most of all, the private healthcare. The rest of us are stuck with shit luck, the NHS, and the knowledge that no matter how hard you work, how kind you are, how noble your dreams, or how generous your spirit, you can still be heeling along at the bottom wondering when life will give you a break.

'Antiqui colant antiquum dierum' is the City of Chester's motto. 'Let the ancients worship the ancient of days.'

As far as I'm concerned, the ancients are welcome to them.

50 Shades of Moronic: Sex, Culture and the Jackass Jihad

If this planet had an ejector seat and if I hadn't already pressed the red button a long time ago, then I'd be hammering the little bugger right now.

For millennia, artists have tried to imagine what the End of Days would look like. From the splendor of Michelangelo's Last Judgment to the nightmare visions of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, they had the entire gamut of hellish ends covered. Or so they probably thought. Yet not one of them ever bothered to include Phillip Schofield in their little festival of doom. Not one of them thought to paint the day when the gates of Hell would open up and the grey-haired incubus came forth to reap souls whilst giggling and grinning and acting so damn virtuous and up for fun.

Because let's face some hard facts: Phillip Schofield is an odious little prick. He's Mr Sunshine and Candypop. He's the clean TV smile, nice with the ladies, not an offensive bone in his perfectly proportioned TV body. Yet there he is hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning. And why is he hosting a feature about sadomasochistic sex at ten o'clock on an ITV morning? Because 50 Shades of Grey has just been released as a feature film and that nasty little show feels obliged to promote that nasty little film based on that nasty little novel.

I've written before about the pornification of our culture but whether you're for that or against it, it's the snivelling hypocrisy that I can't abide. It's the chuckling and the playful giggling and pretending to act a little shocked as he's taught about bondage for beginners by some middle class Annabelle, a so-called 'sexpert', whose claim to fame seems to be a line of vibrating knickers available at Amazon. This is TV made for the Daily Mail generation: people who claim to be disgusted at the very same time as they're voyeuristically enjoying the intimate details of a person's private life. They're the moral guardians who seem to have more of an interest in the prurient details of sleaze than the very worst pornographer to whom the whole thing has become a boring flaccid reality. It's TV made by people who have no moral code. They have no notion of decency. They simply want to drive standards down and turn everybody into the same type of vapid consumerist arsehole you see crowding the fast lane into every cheap burger drive-through on their way to a pseudo-American sized coronary.

What kind of witless desk cracker comes up with this stuff? No doubt it's some snivelling wine bar Charlotte  with a glandular filofax and a hectic social life, shuffling between meetings with promoters and agents and advertisers and who never once looks at her own life and sees it for the abyss of moral turpitude it really is. She is well paid and happy in what she does because she can afford veneered hardwood floors and chandeliers that hang over the long dining table in her cramped London flat. It's a shallow life of fifty shades of shallow dream and even shallower outcomes. The product of her life is a society that is more indolent, less educated, but ever more subservient to Chinese corporate capital and vapid American stupidity which passes for internet culture.

Oh Lord! How far have we fallen! Monday 29 June 1987 was a terribly dark day in our country's history. That was the day when the 1972 Broadcasting Act was obliterated by the second Thatcher government. 'Thatcher Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' snatched educational TV away from the children and put it on in the hands of the capitalists who promised to maintain standards. To think that we scoffed at the ITV of my youth. From morning to lunch, it was devoted to educational shows. At school, our teacher would wheel in the big cathode ray TV and plug it in so we could all cram around and watch ITV schools programmes on the amazing 22 inch colour screen. The whole timetable was set so we could catch the start of yet another rerun of 'How We Used To Live' or ' Stop, Look, Listen'. Compare that with the current diet of nipple clamps and men who ejaculate 100 times a day or the woman with the world's biggest tits. Now seriously try to tell me that we've not regressed as both a country and a society.

We live in a world of freakshow everything. Yesterday ISIS burn a captured Jordanian to death in a cage over a pool of oil and we wonder from where that sickness might derive. It derives from a world that has lost all sense of moral limit because, make no mistake, this wasn't simply a rehash of punishments written in ancient texts. That was murder by psychopaths who are deeply entrenched in the Youtube generation. That was death as a meme and it is so toxic because it is so pervasive. It extends beyond the reach of censors or nations or even the choice of individuals. It's the horrific images that appear unbidden in your inbox or pop up behind your current screen or in your Twitter feed. It is a sickening death culture that becomes tomorrow's animated GIF or the comic trope on some forum where the juvenile mix with the serious deranged. This is murder by men who sit around imagining their next outrage in exactly the same way that teenagers try to imagine up the next stunt they can play for their Youtube subscribers. What we are witnessing is the Jackass Jihad.

And yet we in the West think that it's all very 'over there' and somehow we're better than that, whilst never once recognising that those extreme ends might have begun here at home. They say that the British Jihadists are some of the worst and most brutal. Maybe it's wrong and simply misguided to draw a causal link between those brutal acts and the decline of our culture. Yet the truth is that we have allowed our TV to descend even further into the bastardly and the bland where only the gratuitous gimmick is noticed and given time.

Meanwhile the wine bar Charlottes turn up on TV to extol the virtues of spanking and it's just a little bit of fun to break the tedium of the morning. Yet the pattern is set. Big tits this week is the guy with the enormous penis next week. There's playful giggling and claims that it's educational. But the truth is that it's a sickening demonstration of what we've become. It's shock for the sake of being shocking. It is a despicable form of exploitation given a veneer of 'niceness' by Schofield who seems quite happy to be part of this spectacle so long as it continues to fund his new wine and food twitter channel.

Well, excuse my language but fuck Philip Schofield's wine and food channel. Whatever rights Philip Schofield had to portray himself as sophisticated doyen of London society were lost the moment he signed on to represent bitch-slap TV.

So Long Page 3, I'll Miss You

I've never read The Sun so I've never been a regular admirer of Page 3. At the same time, I've never deliberately not read The Sun. Nor have I ever thought long and hard about what Page 3 represents. Was it really everything that the anti-Page 3 protesters claimed it to be? Did it really embody systemic violence towards women? Did it objectify women? The first I doubt but the second I'm certain about. It objectified women in the same way that any human objectifies another when they look at them in an admiring way. That's neither a good nor a bad thing. It's just human (and possibly mammalian) nature. We're programmed to reproduce and part of that involves seeking out mates we find physically attractive. It's simply not in our programming to think 'I won't find her body attractive until I know that she has a personality to match'. It simply doesn't work that way.

What's more telling is that the end of Page 3 isn't really a victory for feminists. It's a hard-nosed business decision taken in a climate in which Page 3 was become a tame parody of what's really happening in the world. Personally, I can't understand why anybody could get angry about Page 3 when the likes of David Beckham and Kim Kardashian can barely keep their clothes on. The whole of our culture has become sexualised and one mitigation in favour of Page 3 was that at least there was an aesthetic motivation behind it. It might have objectified women but it also idealised them in the very same way that Greek sculptors idealised the human form millennia ago and painters through the ages have idealised the female figure in oils and watercolours. A Page 3 photographer might lack their skill but there was something more to Page 3 than a pair of tits and a cheeky smile.

Yet I really fear that Page 3 is disappearing because it no longer plays at the edge of a taboo. The victory isn't one for feminists but for the pornographers who simply aren't satisfied with a slightly oblique view of the side of a breast. Campaigners might argue that the end of Page 3 shows what we're a more enlightened civilization but, dare I suggest, it shows quite the opposite. Page 3 was remarkable not for what it showed but what it didn't show. Page 3 was as much about restraint as it was about being explicit. It now becomes a thing of the past because the future will be about things that are much worse.

 

[Addendum: I just wrote a comment over at The Guardian and I thought it nicely fitted into what I was saying here. I'll repost it here because I want to remember how confused I'm feeling on this whole issue. The comment is in response to a video they've posted about a women who had naked pictures of her stolen and posted on a porn site. She responded by publishing naked photographs of her which The Guardian has now published. I'm not quite sure how there's a difference between that and Page 3, given that the subjects of both sets of pictures are giving their permission for them to be made public. Anyway: my comment...]

The Sun ditches Page 3 and The Guardian post a semi-naked woman on the front page to make a point about not objectifying her body, whilst very clearly objectifying her body.

Sorry. I know there's so much to admire about what Emma has done but I'm not clever enough to know what I can or can't look at. Should I have even clicked on this article? What does that say about me? Why aren't I commenting on the adjacent article about hobbits? Am I allowed to objectify a hobbit body? Sorry. That was glib but I'm just confused about what my brain is supposed to tell my body to feel in these situations.

The simple fact is: people rightly celebrate the end of Page 3 but we live in a deeply sexualised culture where we're never more than one or two clicks away from something not simply explicit but disturbingly explicit.

Though I know, typing this, that nobody will agree with me. Porn culture seems to be the only culture it's fashionable to follow these days...

[Postscript: The above comment was deleted by the Guardian moderators, for reasons I can't see nor understand. The only thing it seems right to say is that the woman did a great thing. Anything beyond that is apparently banned.]

Explicit Stupidity

I keep writing things that I intend to post but get sidetracked, so I'm making a conscious decision to write something quickly, post it immediately, and only begin to regret it later. It might get me back into the habit of blogging again. I miss regular blogging.

Blogging is about the immediate response, so this is my immediate response to today's news but I suppose I also find myself writing because I feel confused in my thoughts and writing is a good way to see myself clear of that confusion. I'm confused about these naked photographs of some pretty famous (though, I admit, to me, insignificant) people that have been released onto the web by a hacker. The first thing I'm meant to say is that I think it's a terrible invasion of their privacy and that the hacker(s) need to be made to suffer. That is shorthand for all the hand wringing I'm meant to do before I can discuss anything more significant such as the fact that I can't help but feel bemused that people in such famous positions would put themselves in such positions, usually on their back, naked, and lit seductively from one side while not wearing their knickers.

It is, however, a perennial problem with technology that rich people buy (or are often given) expensive toys without fully understanding (or learning) what they really do. This, after all, was the reason why the phone hacking scandal started, as the rich and famous used expensive phones without learning to do something as simple and important as change their pin number. The current scandal is little more than an extension of that. Many gadgets are automatically connected to 'The Cloud' yet too few people actually bother to learn what that means: that their private data (including data of the knickerless variety) is being stored on a server somewhere where somebody with mastery of the technology can access it. Note to the rich and famous: if you do want to photograph your vulva(the reason isn't important though remains a mystery to me), go into the your phone's settings and deselect 'Backup photos to Cloud'. It seems self-evidently obvious once you put it into those terms.

The second thing to note about these photographs is how society has devolved (or evolved, depending on your point of view) into a culture where nothing seems to exist until it's photographed. I hate (and actively refuse) to have my photograph taken, even when I'm fully dressed and in a dark room. Not that I have a Victorian sensibility about anything, though I do begin to wonder if Victoria and Albert (notoriously active and open about their sexual life) would have posed in front of a bathroom mirror playing with each other's genitals. Probably they would. People say, of course, that these photographs (like so many sex tapes before them) were meant to be private between a couple, but it appears to be an extension of the 'selfie' syndrome, a psychological extension of the endless need for fame and celebrity in which the self doesn't really exist in any form (intellectually, sexually, or spiritually) unless it exists inside the memory of a mobile phone.

Do these stars really feel violated that their most intimate parts of their bodies are now visible to the world? Perhaps they do and I feel sorry for them, though perhaps they can rest easy knowing that one nipple looks pretty much the same as the next. There really are few parts of the body that the internet haven't made everyday and mundane. From hardcore pornography to beheadings, the body has lost so much of its mystery that really, in the grand scheme of things, we aren't seeing something that we haven't already seen before and usually larger and well oiled. These photographs will be forgotten tomorrow except by a few sad people who will always be excited by these things. The next evolutionary stage of our collective sexuality will be the internal organs and I suspect in the next ten years, some actor will be complaining that intimate photographs of his newly tattooed spleen have been leaked onto the internet. We have come a long way from the tantalising shots of Bo Derek running down a beach in '10' or a brief glimpse of Barbara Winsor's breasts circa 1965. There is a difference between explicit and erotic and we definitely live in an explicit age and I fear there's just no going back.

Bang, Boff, and Wow!

It takes a special form of twisted logic to look at the latest crime figures and think they’re a bad thing. However I do find myself looking at the latest crime figures and wondering if a fall in crime is really a positive statement of life in modern Britain.

Things have definitely changed over the last decade. I no longer feel the need to travel armed. Simply walking the streets late at night feels different, lacking that degree of suburban menace found when turning a corner and see the cast of a Clockwork Orange etching their graffiti on a pensioner. It’s rare that you hear of a car being stolen thanks to the same advances in technology that make it impossible to have them repaired at a garage. Home break-ins aren’t as prevalent as they once were thanks mainly to double glazing and the fact we’re now allowed to practice farmer justice and blow intruders away with our illegally held shotguns. The only crimes I now witness tend to be crimes of inconvenience: people parking blocking pavements because they’re too lazy to walk the extra metre to their front door.

The politicians tell us that it’s because policing has improved and home owners do more to protect themselves. I’m not so sure. From where I view the world, it seems that it’s people that have changed. Bored kids left to wander the streets have become glassy-eyed kids sitting in their bedrooms staring at cheaply produced flat screen TVs or their ubiquitous mobile phones. Drinking has gone from a rowdy social activity done every Friday night to something done cheaply and silently every night behind cheap curtains, where the only evidence of a serious wine habit are the crates of green bottles left out for the recycling each week.

I sense that those given to crime are simply too lazy to bother. They have more interesting things to do. I look at the crime figures and feel thankful that we’re percentage points less likely to be victims of crime but I do wonder what the cost is to our culture. The same reason that people are too bored to steal is because even the criminals share our cultural malaise. The lower crime rates are intimately linked with those that suggest that fewer people vote, take part in debates, or get involved in their local community. It’s the same reason neighbours rarely speak to neighbours and why our high streets are failing except for sports casual shops and the army of pimpled freaks ready to convince you to upgrade your mobile phone. It’s the same reason people don’t read books and only take notice of anything local if some big-name trollop from London is involved. People want everything to be easy. Nothing valuable is hard won these days.

I know I’m jaded. I don’t want more crime but neither do I want us continuing down this road to a world of momentary pleasures crammed between ever longer working hours. It’s a world conceived by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 as a dystopian future but it feels ever more like the dystopian present, where life is ‘one big pratfall […]; everything bang, boff, and wow!’

Tattoo Culture

I sat down intended to write ‘half a mile’ but then I thought I better check my facts on Google Earth. The radius of the circle I drew was 86 metres. That’s 718 metres short of half a mile. 718 metres of being plain wrong.

The 86 metres is the distance between a succession of local shops that have opened in the past couple of years. Would it surprise you to know that in this small working class town, population not much more than 20,000 people, there are no fewer than five tattoo parlours, all contained within that circle drawn with an 86 metre radius? We don’t have that many doctors, dentists, or vets. We have no bookshops (Tesco’s bestsellers don’t count), no stationers, and now we no longer even have a further education college which was recently demolished along with three quarters of our library (now just one room mainly devoted to romantic thrillers). We used to have two bicycle shops but they both closed down as did our specialty sweet shop. We've had a succession of We once had a jewellers but that disappeared about five years ago. A long time ago we had a general hardware store where you could buy nails and wood but not any longer. Blockbusters closed this year, so there’s now no video store. We once had a cinema but that closed its doors back in the 1970s and was later destroyed by fire. Local rumours hint at arson. The cinema had stood derelict for a decade or more, some kind of preservation order on the old façade which was of historical significance stopping the site from being redeveloped into ‘luxury’ apartments. But like I said, that’s just local rumour.

On our high street, it’s impossible to buy books, treacle toffee, lengths of wood, a watch or necklace, or leads for a mechanical pencil. Yet the same town can support five independent tattooists, all no more than 172 metres of one another.

The fact they have become so ubiquitous is an interesting modern phenomenon which probably says something deeply revealing about our culture. Perhaps they are symbolic of a culture that no longer values the spiritual or the intellectual and instead has embraced materialism and a totemic obsession with the body. Perhaps they have something to do with our false illusions of individuality.

I think that begins in school. Schools are supposedly about educating us but I’m sure they’ve always really been about breaking youthful spirits. Riding past a junior school yesterday, I saw the kids peering out though the railings. It’s probably a clichéd observation but it’s one I hadn’t made before but I realised how those railings don’t so much protect the children from the world as protect the world from the children. The iron fences keep the kids inside as if the world can’t operate normally with youth running around. School teaches us to stop being youthful and to conform to certain lifestyle patterns: the nine to five routine, our place in a hierarchy, the repression of ambitions, dreams, and foolish joy.

Of course, life after your school years has changed. Perhaps it’s no wonder that people do choose to adorn themselves with tattoos when the world is increasingly alienating, where there are fewer ways to be unique and individual.

I was in Wilko yesterday and a guy in front of me was covered in various names and mottos. He was also bald and on the back of his head he had a big tattoo written in the usual flowing script. ‘One Life’ it said and beneath that ‘Live it’. I immediately thought: live it with a tattoo on the back of your head? Live it doing something as extraordinary as shopping in Wilko wearing a vest, tracksuit bottoms, and lots of gold chains?

But I guess it’s easy to mock these ridiculous aphorisms and note that most expressions of individuality can be found in the standard tattooist’s sourcebook, available from Amazon. Yet what other opportunities do many of these people really have for expressing themselves? They are defined by family, football, and celebrity: all of which feature prominently in tattoos. Some also have God or, in God’s place, some esoteric wisdom, reduced to a cryptogram written down a forearm. Beyond that, what else is there?

Not many years ago, there was a time when people engaged in hobbies. A person would learn to play a musical instrument or learn a foreign language even if they didn’t have a reason or particular desire to travel to that country. A person would make things in a shed or take up drawing or ballet or join a rock and roll band. I guess these things still happen but I suspect they’re increasingly rare, especially in working class England where music shops have closed, libraries disappeared, colleges turned into flats, theatres demolished. Life is increasingly dictated by the strip of American style fast food operations that line the main routes between our towns. Cinemas have moved into retail parks, impossible to get to without a car, prohibitively expensive even if you can drive. Between Thatcher and Murdoch we now have sport available to only those who can pay for it. Movies and culture too are for those with the means to buy them. The BBC News reported just a few nights ago that culture spending in the UK is £69 per person in London, £4.60 for the rest of us. Given that the majority of my £4.60 will go to art in regional cities like Manchester and Liverpool, what is the actual cultural budget around here? I suspect it’s pence and that definitely shows.

So instead of hobbies and culture, we have Twitter: the constant babble of people wishing to sound significant. And that, perhaps, is the key similarity. Perhaps tattoos aren’t such a surprise. Perhaps like Twitter, they’re a collective scream, part of some deep nihilistic urge to sanctify the self and to give us all meaning. They are the affirmation of lives increasingly devoid of any significance. Perhaps tattoos are to individuals what blogging is to cowards: a way of writing something meaningful for a world of individual spirits increasingly deaf, distracted or simply defeated.

 

Bobcat Goldthwait Hating The Haters

I was reading The Guardian a couple of days ago but I only say that trying to sound intelligent. I was actually checking the scores of the Saturday afternoon football, which The Guardian covers quite well and with barely a mention of its usual green, solar-powered, America-spies-on-lesbians agenda.

Half way down their live football blog there was a link to a Youtube video of the quickest goal ever scored, which I watched for all of the 15 seconds it ran feeling disappointed that it didn’t involve a squirrel on stilts which is really the only reason I visit Youtube these days. Probably because I hadn’t seen my usual squirrel on stilts, I clicked pretty randomly on another of the videos. The link was to a video of a ‘9 year old goalkeeper with amazing saves’. I can say now that it was a lucky click. The comments below the video are worth reading. They helped focus my mind on what I wanted to write about today.

I remember being a Bobcat Goldthwait fan until he appeared in a Police Academy movie. That probably drew a line beneath my interest in Bobcat Goldthwait. Before Police Academy, I’d been something of a Goldthwait advocate among my peer group. He'd occasionally appear on UK TV and was one of the more memorable of the American standups; a wailing but strangely erudite and provocative comedian who defied you to like him so, naturally, I loved him. Then he appeared in one of the worst series of movies not involving teenage vampires and my interest died. That was until I saw ‘God Bless America’ earlier this year and I realised that Bobcat had probably committed career suicide back with his Police Academy work. It had to be deliberate. Now he’s a director and even if he’s stopped the crazy snorting and wailing, he still has one of the most interesting voices out there.



It’s a few years since he made ‘God Bless America’ but like many small movies, it has eventually found its audience among those of us naturally predisposed towards its message. I personally think it’s one of the best satires of the past decade. Had Oliver Stone made it, debates would have raged across the media. I hazard to suggest that it’s because it has Goldthwait’s name attached that this movie is so underrated. Had a young twenty something hipster called Brandon instead of Bobcat made it, they’d have been given millions to make the next Ninja Turtle movie. It’s a seriously insane world in which Brad Ratner makes million dollar movies and Goldthwait struggles to raise cash for his independent movies. It reminds me that yesterday morning in The Guardian, John Waters was complaining that he can’t get $5 million to make a movie. He’s doing a one-man show in Liverpool. I’d go but these things are always too damn expensive. But I digress…

The lack of mainstream success is probably down the message of ‘God Bless America’ and it doesn’t make for easy viewing. It’s a profoundly violent film and the black humour really is grim. Yet it’s also beautifully rendered satire about the impotence of rage and the twisted values of American (but you can easily read it as British) society. The genesis of the movie is Goldthwait’s belief that people are too mean. It’s the reason I mentioned the football video. The video ‘9 year old goalkeeper with amazing saves’ was a video of an ordinary kid being filmed by an ordinary father as he played in goal in their ordinary back garden. Yet I suppose it’s a perfect expression of our hateful culture when a proud father posts a video of his son dreaming of becoming a goalkeeper and it prompts hundreds of spiteful comments directed towards the kid. That was probably why I rewatched Goldthwait’s film last night.

The problem of the satire – and possibly the problem of most satire – is that it never offers much of an alternative to the things it attacks. It tends to end up looking like an impotent rage against the machine. The violence of the two lead characters in 'God Bless America are a damning indictment of the power of even satire to make things better. The lack of any restorative effect of the film is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that these excellent leads have never been given the same prominence in more mainstream fare. Joel Murray carried the movie with his bravely subdued performance, yet you also know that in anything costing more to produce he’d be fifth or sixth down the cast below a brother Baldwin. Tara Lynne Barr was excellent as the plucky but insane Roxy and she brought dynamism to the film. It was the relationship between the two that keeps the film going against the backdrop of Goldthwait’s hyper-reality of bad talent shows and fundamentalist conservatism.

In the light of this cold November day, I’m not sure if the film really succeeds. Reading the comments over at the IMDB, I see people dismissing it as a film about an old guy hating things that old guys hate. I don’t think that’s true but I do recognise that it preaches to the choir, reaching out for an audience who already shares its values.

Our culture does certainly pride itself on people who meanly grasp, take, and own. Generosity is thought of as the sin of suckers, fools, and easy grifts. Our advertisements have cheapened sincerity and sentiment to the point that we’re quick to question it in its raw form. Just last week, somebody emailed me to ask advice about writing books, publishing, and the things I’ve done over the past few years. This rarely happens so I replied at length. A few emails were exchanged and I tried to be as helpful as I could. I was honest, sometimes scathing about the industry, but trying to give good advice based on the hard lessons I’ve learned. I thought I was being generous with my advice until, after about three or four emails, I realised that the person I was corresponding with had come to the conclusion that I was mad. There was definitely a sense of their backing out of the conversation. This isn’t the first time that has happened.

It struck me again, watching this film, that what seems like rational sense can all too easily be interpreted as madness by others. I often think that people interpret my friendliness as a form of madness. And perhaps it is. Whenever I go to London, I’ll hold open a door for the person behind me but I’m usually left wondering why I’m still holding the door open ten minutes later after a hundred people had walked through without acknowledging me or offering to hold it themselves. Another thing I’ve learned not to do is smile at anybody on the Underground. You don’t even make eye contact. To do either is to confirm to people that you are indeed mad, whereas here, in the North West, you can still smile at people, have a conversation with a stranger whilst you wait at a bus stop, and if you hold a door open for somebody they’ll often say ‘thank you’ and take it from you.

But perhaps this is a remnant of a world that won’t be around for much longer. ‘God Bless America’ is a loud wail of protest but there’s no sense that things will change. Even the sharpest satire eventually gets dulled by the amount of stupidity that’s actually out there.