'Who Will Do The Dirty Work?'

"That's all very well, some say, and anarchy may be a perfect form of human society, but we don't want to take a leap in the dark. Tell us, therefore, in detail, how your society will be organised. And there follows a whole series of questions . . . What methods will be used to teach children? How will production be organised? And supposing all the inhabitants of Siberia should want to spen winter in Nice? And if everyone were to want to eat partridge, and drink wine from the Chianti District? And who will do a miner's job or be a seaman? And who will empty the privies? And who will establish the railway timetable? And what will be done if an engine-driver has a stomach ache while the train is moving? And so on to the point of assuming that we have all the knowledge and experience of the unknown future, and that in the name of anarchy, we should prescribe for future generations at what time they must go to bed, and on what days they must pare their corns."

Malatesta, Anarchy

I Found That Essence Rare

I think people sometimes forget how bad music was in the late eighties. With the exception of a few groups like the Pet Shop Boys and The Pogues, it was dire out there. Christ, I even had to buy a couple of Wonderstuff and Kingmaker albums for the duration for Chrissake. That's HOW bad it was.

I ended up doing the sensible thing and delving back a few years, rediscovering a few artists like The Jam, The The, Wire, early Human League and, being the musical sheep that I was, religiously buying those albums that the NME would list every two years as the best albums of all time. (Check out that list next time it comes round. Chances are the same top ten place will be in place as was there five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago with a wee bit of musical chairs on the parts of the music journalists to give the impression that they give a toss.*)

Two of the more leftfield groups I got into from the late seventies/early eighties were Gang of Four and the Au Pairs. Part of post-punk music that also comprised of groups like Delta 5, Pop Group, Scritti Politti and Josef K amongst others, it was definitely the case that the music the Au Pairs and Gang of Four wrote and played - all angular, stacatto and with lyrics that would seriously look out of place in Smash Hits - they did fall out of favour quite soon after they were that month's bright young things on the front page of the inky music papers. But every once in a while Q music magazine, or other such worthy, would feature them in a 'Where Are They Now' article, and as suspected the group members had all become respectable upstanding members of society of sorts.

Since getting into them, I would occasionally stumble across a fellow Gang of Four fan but Au Pair fans were rarer to find than a quorate ICC meeting, and with the exception of Greil Marcus writing at length about them (see Reidski below for more), Gang of Four were little more than a curio down the years for most people. 'Something to do with music in Leeds?' 'Did they form before or after The Mekons?'

Well, with the advent of groups like Franz Ferdinand and The Killers being played on the jukebox on Emmerdale, I guess the time is right for the Gang of Four revival to kick in now. Reidski has already waxed lyrical about them here, by way of him telling the world that he has a ticket for their Shepherd's Bush gig at the end of this month, and today's Friday Review in the Guardian carries an interview with Andy Gill and Jon King and a tribute from Red Hot Chilli Peppers Flea.

"In fact, Gang of Four weren't straightforwardly political, taking ideas from the 1968 Paris student uprisings rather than from ideological dogma. The artwork for their debut album, Entertainment!, featured a smiling cowboy shaking a Native American's hand with the caption: "He is glad the Indian is fooled. Now he can exploit him." It was a potted education in capitalist evil."

As the excerpt from the interview above indicates, it is perhaps because Gang of Four were more influenced by situationism - and I'm sure reading somewhere that they were sympathetic to the autonomist marxist group, Big Flame, of the time - that their politics have not dated as much as some of the agit-prop from the same period. But let's be honest, if the music in the first place wasn't so brilliant no one would give a toss what the political content of their lyrics were like. Just ask Pop Group.

* A fun game for you and the family: just shuffle the following ten albums every six months or so, and you too can come up with the greatest albums of all time: (In no particular order, as they will be switched around at a later date) The Beatles 'Revolver'; Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going on'; 'London Calling' by The Clash; Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited'; 'Exile on Main Street' by The Rolling Stones; Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks'; John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme'; 'Velvet Underground' by Nico and Velvet Underground; Love's 'Forever Changes'. I know that is only nine out of the ten but it wouldn't be an all time top ten list if the current favourite album of the CD wasn't inserted in there to give it that contemporary feel. What if it happens to be Keane's debut album this week? Those are the rules.)

Homage To Catatonia*

The Song Remains the Same: I’m afraid I’ve been otherwise detained by a combination of bare arsed laziness and a bad case of procrastination which has meant that it has been seven weeks since I last updated this blog. Other than checking up on the blog of the archetypal eternal optimist, The Scottish Patient, who likes to detail the latest score draw for the Hibees, and winding up PB Deb, my favourite (self-described) centrist in his comments box, the truth is I have been giving Blogsphere a bit of wide berth in recent weeks. That means that I have been missing out on all the homilies from Benjamin at Harry’s Place; the latest in Lenny’s recycling of his college essays and Chubby Brown’s old jokes; and it has even been the case that I haven’t been getting under the feet of Will, the self-hating Mackem, at General Theory of Rubbish. New Year’s Resolution or no New Year’s Resolution, it is the usual drill for when I’m kidding myself on that I will be updating the blog more regularly: a supposed wee gentle post that turns into a long winded rant to ease me back into posting, with the obligatory bad jokes, obscure pop culture references and a few meaningless pictures and links thrown in for good measure. Why now discard a tried and tested formula? I’ve finally got round to putting back the links on the sidebar, and even surprised even myself in updating it with new links. All the new links in their own way are recommended reads, but before I do the drumroll bit for them**, I thought I would take the opportunity to wish a belated happy birthday to the Reasons to be Impossible blog. One year on, and it still has that unique mixture of typos, literary allusion and tendency to boot stomp on an opponent - real or otherwise – when a gentle tap would be sufficient. He seems to blog most often on a Monday or Friday mornings, which suggests that UCL students are either too hungover at the start of the week or starting early on the buckfast at the end of the week to concern themselves with hassling the UCL staff.*** Back to the matter at hand of talking up the added blogs . . . . . Taking them in the order that they are listed, the first blog up is Socialism in an Age of Waiting. One of the best known and most regularly read of the blogs out there, it invariably polarises its readers; either you froth at the mouth when reading it or cut and paste large swathes of it with the byline of: ‘I wish I wrote this . . . ’.**** Their blog is always readable and I’m always impressed with the breadth of their reading and their ability to easily turn their hand to literature, politics or art when blogging. Quoting Rosa Luxemburg in their byline: “It is not true that Marx no longer suffices for our needs. On the contrary, our needs are not yet adequate for the utilisation of Marx's ideas . . .”, it perhaps explains why they seem to have a soft spot for Socialist Party impossiblism and our majoritarian view of Socialist Revolution. As a triumverate of writers located somewhere down on the south coast, it always interesting to try and figure out the dynamic of the working relationship of Socialism in an Age of Waiting and wondering who writes what and in which tone. It is definitely the case of good cop, bad cop and sarcastic cop. The question is which of the three is it that likes to wind up Backward Dave so much? Next up is Hak Mao. I owe Hak Mao an apology big time. I’m not suggesting that it was a while back that I promised that I would reciprocate the kind gesture of her blog rolling me but I seem to remember that it was around about the same time that Celtic still had a decent team and, if someone mentioned the words ‘Hot Topic’ to me, I would think of Prime Minister’s Question Time before I thought of a brilliant pop song. Hak, like Normski, shares a love for cricket that I will do a body swerve around to save my kneecaps, and is always interesting to read for her postings on such forgotten figures such as Victor Serge, for her ability to wind up the po-faced left and she also deserves a special mention for giving Will’s blog a well needed makeover. (Now, if she could only do something about his jokes as well.) It’s an old cliche but the further and longer you have been away from Scotland makes you pine for it all the more. Some of the biggest Scottish Nationalists going have the sunburnt faces from where the pale ancestral colouring meeting the hot Australian sun and, for some, a haggis followed by the dessert of the deep fried mars bar (and washed down with Irn Bru) takes on a cultural significance where normally it should induce angina but in my case my past OTT ‘Scottishness’ came in two forms: firstly, a contributory factor to me being politicised when I first read about James Maxton, John McLean, John Wheatley and Red Clydeside, and, secondly, when I dived, head first, into modern Scottish literature. Which brings me to Kevin Williamson’s blog, the Scottish Patient. Of course I went the usual haphazard route of a crash course in modern Scottish literature: stumbling through James Kelman, discovering the sly wit and subversiveness of Alasdair Gray and Agnes Owens in the process when I picked up a cheap copy of Lean Tales; putting on my waders before tackling the purple prose and humanism of William McIllvanney; and even reaching back to read such excellent and neglected writers such as George Friel, Carl MacDougall, Brian McCabe and Alan Spence; through to the fruitless search for a secondhand copy of Alan Sharp’s novel, A Green Tree in Gedde. All great writers and well recommended but rather than wallow in some sort of Scotia nostalgia - from the Kailyard to Cumbernauld New Town? – it was through Kevin’s good efforts (not forgetting Polygon Press and Duncan McLean’s Clockwatcher Press) that I was able to discover such great writers as Gordon Legge, Laura Hird, Michael Cannon and Duncan McLean himself. With Rebel Inc Press, Kevin Williamson also had the good grace to republish writers such as John Fante, Richard Brautigan and Nelson Algren (I’ll bite my tongue on the republishing of Jack London’s overrated ‘Iron Heel’ with its introduction by Leon Trotsky.) Kevin’s blog is, in the main, given over to clips round the ear for the Albion; taking the rise out of the great and the good; reports of how the Hibs are faring with accompanying pictures of supporter friends at the games (he’s no daft our Kev: the pictures he puts up all seem to be taken at half time for some reason. Either he has a strange predilection for taking photos of grown men drinking bovril or capturing the footie moment at half time, he still holds out that Hibs may get that score draw); and giving away freebie CDs,***** whilst doing a public service of bringing to people’s attention the musical thread that leads the Fire Engines and Josef K all the way through to Franz Ferdinand today. Being a man who likes to wear many hats, he also the Rebel Ink Columns blog, where he reprints his articles previously published in the Scottish Socialist Voice, the paper of the Scottish Socialist Party. As he says himself, the mission statement for the articles that appear on the blog is that: “Unlike almost every newspaper columnist in either Scotland or England the author gets carte blanche to write 666 uncensored words on whatever he so chooses. They often upset people. Especially fellow socialists.” I’m not sure if he first mentioned it in one of his columns but one of the passages of his that always stick in my mind is when - as an ex-Millie - he gave the definitive opinion on the hot topic of Stalin versus Trotsky: “They are the right and left cheek on the same scabby arse and that arse needs a boot pronto.” I’m paraphrasing of course but it made me laugh and fingers crossed it hacked off some of the ‘Generals Without Armies’ in the process. Reidski at The Big Blowdown is one of my favourite reads. Think about it, he is an exiled Celtic fan living in London with excellent taste in music, and has that ability in blog writing that I don’t have - mixing the personal with the public - which to my mind makes always the most readable of blogs. Now that I think about it, the bastard may have stole my life and my writing style. He can make reparations by writing more often. He makes me seem like George Simenon in the writing frequency stakes sometimes. Backward Dave has the most ingenius idea when blogging. His disclaimer reads: “This is a blog. Where it says “hurriedly scribbled,” it means just that. These views are not necessarily my considered opinions. Think of them as velleities and lemmas.” As I don’t have the big dictionary next to me I’ve got no idea what “velleities and lemmas” means - though I am still quietly impressed by his use of obscure words – but I think he has got the right idea when blogging: just do the stream of consciousness schtick. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Delete it if need be and move onto the next post. There will sure to be a John Prescott gaffe or another Michael Howard political suicide speech around the corner to comment on sooner rather than later. (Backward Dave and the SIAW have been known to tear lumps out of each other in various commnets box around blog land. I don’t know if it was a beautiful friendship gone bad or mutual loathing from the off, but they do seem bump into each other quite often.) Dead Men Left is the blog of SWP member James M. It’s a fair cop, I wouldn’t normally give the steam off my tea to a member of the vanguard, but James seems a decent bloke and his blog always have interesting posts. Fully paid up to supporting the Respect electoral turn of the SWP, and politically active in the area where it has had the greatest impact – Tower Hamlets – Dead Men Left is informative to read for his take on where Respect is going. I see Respect as little more than an increasingly desperate late throw of the dice of an aging and politically jaded SWP leadership, and that it is confirmation of the largest of the vanguardist groups is increasingly running out of ideas and losing direction. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I? And SPGBers in glass houses shouldn’t really throw the political brickbats about, as they have a tendency to be thrown back with twice the ferocity and we’ve yet to get the windows replaced with flexiglass. For me, 2005 is paved with well meaning resolutions, and one is the commitment to reading more fiction - well to read more books full stop. The end of 2004 has set me in good stead with me finally getting around to reading the excellent ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. A brilliant book and I’m only hacked off that my eyes passed over it on the bookshelf all these years. I missed out. A good blog to help me with that promise to myself is Ready Steady Blog. As well as giving me pointers on what to read, it will also assist me in bluffing my way through all those books that I haven’t read but which I think I should give the impression that I have. You can never bluff too much in this world. Mischievous Constructions is the blog of Michael Brooke. At the moment he seems most concerned in his blog with writing about his New Year’s Resolution of grappling with learning to speak Greek but I especially check out this blog for his writings on film and television history. I get the impression that he is something professional in that field. I’ll try not to hold that against him. Erm - that’s me done, and I’ve just realised why I don’t update my blog more often. I thought I had put this long-winded waffling to one side when I missed that last deadline for writing a college essay all those years ago. I really must memorise Backward Dave’s disclaimer - he has got the right idea on these matters.

______________________________

* It's my bad pun and I am sticking to it.

** Save yourself some time and just click on the sidebar. The rest is just padding and waffle, but if you have got this bit then you have waded through it already. ;-)

*** Best place to get a kip in the UCL Library is undoubtedly the Jewish History and Hebrew Library. There is usually nobody about and its always nice and warm. Don't make the mistake that I made a few years back of falling asleep in the History Section of UCL Library, only to wake up in a pile of your own drool to see your personal tutor staring back at you like you are an out patient from UCH. I did the only honorable thing I could do in the circumstances - I promptly went back to sleep and pretended that it didn't happen the next time I saw him.

**** I will be doing this myself at a later stage.

***** The good man bunged me a freebie CD of 'Scotch Rock'. It may be the subject of a post at a later date. I trust that the Lena Martell track will be on Volume Two?

Brief Encounters

"I never exchanged a word with the Colonel. He has no significance at all in what happened during my stay in Oxgodby. As fas as I am concerened he might just as well have gone round the corner and died. But that goes for most of us, doesn't it? We look blankly at each other. Here I am, here you are. What are we doing here? What do you suppose it's all about? Let's dream on. Yes, that's my Dad and Mum over there on the piano top. My eldest boy is on the mantelpiece. That cushion cover was embroidered by my cousin Sarah only a month before she passed on. I go to work at eight and come home at five-thirty. When I retire they'll give me a clock - with my name engraved on the back. Now you know all about me. Go away: I've forgotten you already."

J. L. Carr's 'A Month in the Country'

"Move away now - there is nothing to see here."

Don't mind me: Just changing the template to the blog. Hopefully the links will be put back in (and updated) at some point later today. However, if you will still insist on continuing to look at the page - here's something to gladden any eye: The special blend of mawkishness, overpriced tat and celebration of the greatest ever achievement by a football team is captured so lovingly. Only 50,000 more to sell and Celtic can finally buy that really creative midfield player they have been missing so much since Lubo Moravcik left the club.

'No Zizek quotes, will Robinson do?'

Currently re-reading the very funny 'Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson': a series of interviews with Bruce Robinson edited by Alistair Owen, that takes him through his childhood in Kent; through his years as an actor where he acknowledges that he was little more than a pretty face made good in the movies 'cos Zeffirelli fancied him and cast him Benvolio in his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet; up to his years as a novelist and screenwriter of such excellent works as 'The Killing Fields'; 'Withnail and I' and the 'The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman'. The following quote from the book caught my eye 'cos it captures so well the combination of Robinson's gallows humour and his jaundiced view of the capriciousness of the Film Industry:

"We were at a dinner party at Terry Semel's house in Los Angeles, which is like Blenheim Palace. Semel was running Warner Bros, and I think he still does. We were sitting there and clearly audiences were going with The Killing Fields, and Jake Eberts was saying to me 'What are you going to do next, Bruce? I said, 'It looks like I'm going to write this atomic bomb film for Warners, but what I'd really like to do' - and I wasn't talking about me as a director - 'is get my little film made.' He said, 'What is your little film?' - i.e. 'Bring it to us' - and I said, 'It's about two out-of-work actors in London in the sixties.' He said [American accent], 'Fuck! I gotta tell you this, I just had this script over my desk about two out-of-work actors in London in the sixties.' And he proceeds to tell me about Withnail. 'It's the most godawful unfunny thing I ever read. I don't know what yours is about, but let me tell you if it hadn't been recommended I'd never have got through it. It's just shit.' I finally said, 'Yeah, that's my story.' So there you go.

GRATUITOUS PLUG TIME - ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF ATTITUDE

Communists for Bush

The SPGBer with the high politics and the low spelling, Reasons to be Impossible , has an interesting post here on the American Election, which relates to a previous post of his on the Guardian-shoots-itself-in-the-foot-'fest otherwise known as Operation Clark County. Its an interesting post primarily because of the excerpt he reproduces from the article, 'CAPITALISM WINS 2004 ELECTION BY DEFAULT', published in 'The People', the journal of the De Leonist Socialist Labor Party. The swine beat me to the punch - damn him and his early starts - because I was going to link to the article myself. It's a fine piece of writing. I'll get my own back by saying that I think he's wrong about the SLP being part of the First International. Before he barks back at me that it is myself that has got it wrong, according to Girard and Perry in their admirable wee book 'The Socialist Labor Party 1876-1991: A Short History' (now sadly out of print): "In April 1876, a preliminary conference of representatives of the Internationalists and the Lassalleans met in Pittsburgh and issued a call for a Unity Congress to meet in Philadelphia the following July to form a "Socialist Labor Party." Prior to this Congress, delegates from the remaining American sections of the International met in Philadelphia on July 15 and disbanded that organisation. On July 19 the Unity Congress met . . . In four days the Unity Congress glued together the Workingmen's Party of the United States (WSPUS) complete with an organizational structure, and a program calling for "emancipation of the working classes," "the abolition of all class rule," and the abolition of the wages system." Read it and weep - four days between the disbandonment of the one organisation and the formation of the other. My leftist trainspotter anorak credentials may be a bit moth eaten but they are still intact. Christ, I just know I'm going to be hit with a bad case of schadenfreude for the above comments. What's the difference between the Socialist Labor Party and ourselves? I'm afraid I don't have the spare seven hours to bore you with the details of the internecine strife that seems to beset politicos with newspapers. Save both me and you some time by renting out the DVD of Monty Python's 'Life of Brian', click on the menu and go to the Judean People's Front versus People's Front of Judea scene. Just like every eighties heavy metal band has to pretend to have a sense of humour by saying how much they love Spinal Tap, us lefties also have to put on a brave face and pretend we can see the joke when the Monty Python mob rip the piss out of us in the Life of Brian. I myself pretend with a steely gaze and through gritted teeth, waiting for that day I *cough* accidently bump into Cleese, Palin, Gilliam and co. and demand royalties from them for stealing some of my best lines.

'Dancing With Tears in His Eyes'*

A quick one.

Mention in a previous post of Iain Banks political gesture of burning his passport in protest at the actions of Her Majestys Government, reminded me of the following anecdote, cut and pasted below, that appeared in Jim Higgins uproariously funny political memoir, More Years of the Locust.

The background to the anecdote recounted was the arrest of ex-IS member turned Anarchist, Stuart Christie, in 1964, whilst trying to cross the French-Spanish border with a rucksack full of explosives and a plan to assassinate Franco. Arrested, and apparently as part of the last of the thirty attempted assassination attempts on Franco's life, the eighteen year old Christie could have been executed by garroting, but was instead sentenced to twenty years and, following international protest and campaigning, was released in 1967.

It says something for the shallow roots that Anarchism has in British political life and public consciousness that forty years after the above episode and thirty years after the juvenile antics of the Angry Brigade, Stuart Christie still qualifies as the best known Anarchist in Britain. (Chumbawumba's 'Tubthumping' always playing on the pub jukebox doesn't really count.)

A grisly episode, but if it is good enough for the late Jim Higgins to write about, then who am I to pass up the opportunity to cut and paste a funny anecdote to gratuitously fill up my blog? Take it away Jim:

"In Glasgow, the IS comrades organised a protest at his sentence outside the Spanish consulate. Ian Mooney prevailed on his mother to run up a fair replica of a Spanish flag that could be symbolically burned outside the consulate. As the man who provided the flag, Ian insisted on being allowed to set it alight. To ensure a merry blaze he first soaked it with lighter fuel. Unfortunately he was extremely shortsighted and, while he successfully soaked and lit the flag, he also soaked and lit his own boots. Thus what might have been an easily forgotten protest has danced – along with Ian Mooney’s flaming boots – into the annals of Glasgow socialist folklore."

* The title of the post is in homage to Reidski's habit of using the title of classic pop songs as titles of the messages to his blog. If he can namecheck the songs of such great artists as Blondie, the Buzzcocks and the Stranglers then why can't I namecheck Ultravox?

'PASSPORT TO PITTENWEEM'

Looks like someone is going to Saltcoats for his holidays next year.

Hat tip to the Scottish Patient

Update

In the comments section to this post, Backward Dave comments on Banks as a person and as a writer. I agree with Dave that what I have seen of Iain Banks, when he is being interviewed on the television, he seems like a good bloke and all that. And, like Dave, I agree that Bank's friend and fellow Sci-Fi novelist, Ken MacLeod, is probably the better writer of the two - from reading Macleod's blog and from reading the non-Science Fiction bits of his novel, The Stone Canal, which is as good a thumbnail sketch of the British Far Left in the seventies and eighties than anything I have read before.

Why did I feel the need to mention the above? Simply 'cos it gave me the excuse to link to the following article that MacLeod wrote for the Special Centenary Issue of the Socialist Standard, monthly journal of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, in June of this year. Gratuitous plug for said article, in the journal described as the Beano by Petty Bourgeois Deb, over, I can get on with other matters.

Now, where did I last leave my armchair?