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January 31, 2013

This is the first in an ongoing series of last-posts-of-the-month. Each of these monthly occasions will be used (A) to reflect on recent entries, and (B) to say something about Take 2 in relation to contemporary developments in journalism.

(A) Why aren’t there any hyperlinks from my posts back to the source material which I have drawn on in order to compose them? Because the aim of the exercise is to use digitisation as the opportunity to address a problem which also arises along with it, namely, the lightness of being prompted by an unending sequence of associated media packages in which one leads to another, and another and another (the ‘computer game’ war in Iraq in 1991 was an early example of this ontology-lite). The sequence is so indefinitely long that both origination and finalisation are all but defined out of existence. However, I am using freely available, online media content produced as part of this sequence, not to extend it but rather in the attempt to bring it to an end or at least slow it down. I am well aware of the widespread assumption that the people-formerly-known-as-readers are emancipated by opening up the media concertina so that each little packet of content, and the user who generated it, act together as mediators between the last person to have done this and the next person who will go on to do it. But in current conditions such a mediating sequence (one mediator leading to another), can only have the effect of containing our existence: it projects its own characteristics onto its subject matter, tending to prescribe all human activity as mediating activity, thus effectively proscribing activity of any other kind (just as fictitious capital broadcasts its serial character and militates against social production). In contrast, in my work the associations are not part of a series but contained within each, single post, so that, being all-of-apiece, each piece is the formal, literary equivalent of an associated world. Moreover, my formulation of these associations constitutes an effort to close the concertina; to make the mediated, immediate – not in the naïve sense of simply being there, nor in accordance with the faux naïve goal of authenticity. Instead I am seeking to arrive at the concrete, where ‘concrete’ is a return journey from the abstract. On this basis, January’s pieces are meant to take the people featured in them out of the mediating sequence which thins out their existence, making them fully human again in a thick description which gets the measure of their humanity. read more

Ave Maria

January 28, 2013

A mother rests her chin on the coffin, as close as she can get to the dead child inside. In Santa Maria to the south of Brazil, one of 231 coffins in a makeshift morgue (normally a sports hall); 231 casualties of the world’s worst nightclub fire in 20 years. From the tenderness in her bowed head, the mother might be saying a simple good night to the child inside; a plain and simple kiss for my child always inside me. Not the Rolling Stones-rubber-lips Kiss in the extravagant letter ‘k’ outside the mauve-coloured nightclub where she died. Aside from the melee of mourners, milling round coffins like shoppers in a January sale; beyond the muddle of survivors collapsed in the street in the early hours; cut off from the desperate, smoke-filled crush in which so many died inside, a mother’s placid face, resting on her child’s coffin. In her stillness, a state of grace; for now, at least. Could it be that Mary, Mother of God, patron saint of this small city, has been praying for its inhabitants in their hour of death?

Lazy Lazarus

January 26, 2013

Anyone with information is asked to call 101 and ask for Log Number 630 for 25/1/13. That’s how Devon and Cornwall police have recorded the death of a would-be armed robber who was overpowered by punters in a betting shop – one of those betting shops where the listlessness is so thick and suffocating you could use it as loft insulation. At around 6.45pm Friday, a 50-something bloke strode into the Ladbroke’s on Crownhill Road, Plymouth (pebble-dashed, next to the fish’n’chip shop with the scaffolding), brandishing a ‘pistol-like weapon’ (subsequent police description) and wearing a gas mask. Must have been the gas mask: his face hidden but the punters could see immediately this was moreDad’s Army than Grand Theft Auto. They didn’t panic but sounds like he did when maybe a dozen of them piled in: can’t breathe; passing out; never to regain consciousness. But was he conscious that he couldn’t pull it off even with a ‘pistol-like weapon’ in his hand? Is that what kept you down on the pale blue vinyl flooring, Lazarus? That no one pays attention to you; still wouldn’t, even if you got up and walked.

Complete Competitor

January 19, 2013

‘I’ll be the first man through the door’, he asserts. It could be Jack Reacher, all-action, alienated anti-hero of Lee Childs’ blockbuster novels (that’s ‘alienation’ as in ex-commando-absent-without-leave-from-normality; not the bohemian kind). Second look says no, not the Jack that Lee wrote; but Childs does come from Coventry, England, where this other Guy is being sent to. In a powder blue shirt and dark blue blazer, flecks of grey in his unfashionably short hair (neither long nor short enough), atop blue-grey eyes and a ramrod-firm jaw, pariah cyclist Lance Armstrong is making his doping confession to broadcaster Oprah Winfrey on her personal television network, OWN. On a beige set – or is it his own house? – anyhow it’s his Austin, Texas, homebase, Armstrong is insisting that he would be the first man through the door of any truth and reconciliation commission on drug-taking in cycling. Except he doesn’t say it straight out like that. Transcribed word-for-word there would have to be extra lines, half-cut phrases, pauses and ellipses: ‘It’s not for me to call…I don’t have the credibility.’ Dead-wood words and gaps between them, inserted before the disgraced champion’s assertion (‘I’ll be the first’ etc etc). More of a Mike Leigh-effect than Lee Childs’ Reacher-talk. Armstrong’s critics (what’s not to criticise?) see this as affectation. They suspect his improvisation is far from spontaneous; claim to have detected the underlying script – traitor touts for public sympathy. Even more so when Armstrong brings the children into it, explaining how he first confessed his crimes to his kids because he couldn’t let them carry on defending his non-existent honour. Deserves an Oscar, they say, pointing to the fidgety fingers that won’t stay still, the eyes lurching ostentatiously skyward then darting around like he deliberately doesn’t know where to look; sentences that pointedly grind to a halt before reaching their destination. But there’s no need to accept their performance theory; it attributes too much premeditation to a man running…just running like he always has. Like (fictional) Reacher, this is a real competitor. I compete therefore I am. When Armstrong described not being allowed to – the life ban – as his ‘death penalty’, he was hardly being metaphorical. He’s so literal (short hair, not short hair), would he know the meaning of the word? Does this player even know when he’s play acting? Compete – against the road and the others riding it; compete – against the bike; compete – against his ruined reputation. Nothing else computes. read more

The luck of the Irish

January 17, 2013

The boy crying because his Daddy is coming home but so nearly never did. The ginger boy who nearly did hold himself together in front of the TV camera but lost his composure at the last minute because for him it’s not at all the last minute of such a lengthy ordeal. After a sleepless night sitting up on the settee with the grown-ups, Dylan McFaul will have to wait hours, maybe days for his father Stephen to be brought home from North Africa to Belfast. The 36-year-old electrician escaped his Islamist captors when the Algerian army moved against them. Hostages including McFaul were being driven away from the Amenas gas plant when the five jeeps they were travelling in came under aerial bombardment. Four vehicles were bombed; McFaul’s crashed, and he managed to get away, the Belfast Telegraph reports. Unbelievable! And can son Dylan really believe that his Daddy is safe until he sees him walk through that door? The camera is still turning over, he has just about gathered himself up and put himself back in the box marked ‘young man’ when the wee boy perhaps remembers the day only a few weeks ago when Christmas had to end – abruptly, on Boxing Day, and his dad had to go back out to the blistering bloody desert, and he was sad anyway and to think it might have been the last time he saw him. You see, now he hasn’t lost his father, fear of losing him is redoubled and he crumples up and blurts out: I’ll never let him go there again, I’ll never let him go there again. A stout soul hands Dylan something to dry his blubbery eyes with. No delicate tissue – dab, dab, dab, but a clump of kitchen roll or perhaps they are tissues but Own Brand even Poundland rather than Kleenex Balsam. And of course that’s why your father keeps going out there, to get you and the family a bit of the right stuff, the decent Christmas present kind of stuff that you surely wouldn’t have much hope of if he stayed right at home. But where else will he go to get it? If not to some industrial plant strung out like an expensive piece of postmodern jewellery across desert the colour of a woman’s skin. read more

Stingray Launch Day

January 15, 2013

As part of the warm-up before the great unveiling, a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitar solo played live by a blistering, cranked-up, raunchy rock’n’roll guitarist. Yaoooowwwweeee! How many notes per second? How fast do you like your clicheeeeees, sir? Comeback for the can-do country/ resurrection of Motor City, USA/ revival of the Great American sports car – the flaky phrases are coming thick and fast, and sticky as warm snow. A blizzard of Chevrolet execs in downtown Detroit for the International Auto Show, all of them hoping that the seventh generation Corvette – launched today complete with its own biopic, shot in black and white for the full Chevy heritage effect – will rev up to be a real icon. All of them wearing the distinctive Stingray badge based on the undulating body that wraps around the driver’s – and not in a James Dean, Spydery kind of way. The Stingray is engineered to be 99lbs lighter, yet more rigid and robust: the car has presence and the driver gets to feel it, allegedly. Could be the world’s most highly engineered vehicle, or a contraption for high end branding. A car or the image of one? Even after the veil was lifted to reveal the Stingray, Motor City’s order of priorities – ‘cos you can have it in any order you like so long as it’s this order – remains unclear.

The quick and the dead

January 12, 2013

The Singapore hospital is as squeaky clean as its corporate PR: Mount Elizabeth, a parkway health hospital. The dark blue van marked ‘Hindu casket’ matches the uniforms of the men loading her body into it (blue shroud, of course). But from here on, life and death get messier. At the funeral parlour in Singapore, while the corpse is being embalmed, the Indian official inspecting the coffin has brought his shopping with him in see-thro’ plastic bags. Next: the deceased is returned to her residence. The city which the body is brought back to, is garlanded with electric wires; growing thickly across the New Delhi street where she lived. The last journey to the cremation ground, in yet another hospital van, takes place in the half-light before dawn. Roads lined with more police than mourners; the cremation ground guarded by rifle-at-the-ready troops from India’s Border Force. Mass migration to the kingdom of the dead? No, only the body of the Delhi rape victim, to be tidied up on the purifying pyre. But this is not the end, thankfully. Out on the motley streets, a 20something woman demonstrator with a stick in one hand and an iPhone in the other. The stick is useless: would snap like a twig if it even grazed a police helmet. But the woman who’s shouting a slogan can’t stop herself grinning when she sees the camera pointing her way: she’s having the time of her life.

The fight for press freedom, Guangzhou-style

January 7, 2013

They all look cool enough for the Hollywood remake of Big Bang Theory; but this is clearly not a comedy. Whereas Western protesters usually kid around for the camera, keen to be seen as not too serious, not wanting to be thought of as boring old adults, these supporters of censored Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly, gathering on the streets of Guangzhou in the interests of press freedom, are strait-laced and po-faced. Not that they’re ignorant of the repetitive double-take which is the essential credential in today’s Western culture. With retro-hair and glasses (big, black, square), they’re already doing that knowing impression of the Asiatic Geek who isn’t really so Geeky (prototype: YouTube’s Steve Chen). But just being there, standing holding a chrysanthemum and an A4 sheet of neat, orderly characters (‘End press censorship, the Chinese people want freedom’), these young people are putting their careers on the line. School days drenched in exams, the fierce competition to get in to a top university, the pressure to get a good degree – all that exertion could be wasted away with a few deft strokes of a bureaucrat’s pen. Fear of committing career suicide – it’s enough to straighten out even the most twisted ironist. In open letters to Communist Party officials penned by well-respected lawyers and academics, there is a different kind of rhetoric. Of censorious Tuo Zhen (the regional propaganda chief who replaced Southern Weekly’s New Year message and lied about what happened), it is said that: ‘wherever he goes ten thousand horses stand mute’, i.e. they are silenced by his decrees. But this is the language of an older generation, which grew up alongside the incoming cohort of top-ranking ministers. The new vernacular, personified in young protesters picking up the chrysanthemum petals which dropped onto the pavement during their demonstration, combines outward signs of Western kidulthood with seriousness of purpose. They manage to be mature and tender at the same time. read more

Too much monkey business

January 4, 2013

Kevin-Prince Boateng, Ghanaian international playing for AC Milan in a friendly against a little local team at their crummy little ground, makes to kick the ball into the small crowd. But it’s not quite high enough – hits a hoarding, bounces back towards the pitch. Boateng strides over to the group making the noise – half-mooing, half-monkey. Blood up, jutting chin, leaning forward as if about to dive into them; though they are fenced off and standing high above the astroturf on a kind of concrete flyover. Whistles and catcalls in response. Meanwhile, the ref has a word in his shell-like; ditto a succession of players from both teams. They’re remonstrating with him. Not exactly restraining him, but hand on arm, shoulder, wrist, elbow; asking him to hold on. When he turns his back on the group of fans that goaded him, the other footballers fall away, letting him go, assuming normal game play will be resuming shortly. Having broken away, however, he ain’t coming back. Spits on the ground, waggles a finger at the offending section of the crowd, and walks further way. Still further, and only now is it clear he’s walking off the pitch. The Milan Channel commentator keeps saying ‘incredibile’. Boateng takes his shirt off to confirm he’s finished. Praying his career isn’t. But already some spectators are starting to applaud; meanwhile the monkey contingent is left mooing around, listless. Another Milan player, previously uninvolved, crosses the pitch to fall in behind him. A few moments ago, the loneliest walk (no matter what the song says). Now a whole world of officialdom wants to walk alongside him: we salute you, Prince among men. But as their world turns to take him in, it commandeers Boateng’s defiant gesture and turns it into a vindication of snobbery: superior cappuccino culture, complete with expensive haircuts and metrosexual little beards, versus puffa jackets, shaved heads and beanies; my god, you’d think they were from Eastern Europe not the Mediterranean. And the name of the small town club where it happened, Pro Patria, feeds right into this part-fantasy of football terraces versus the vineyard. read more

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