#6 Couples

March 29, 2014

Putin has proposed to Obama, only moments after POTUS had ceased courting the King of Saudi Arabia. The pre-nuptial agreement drafted by President Putin awards the Sevastopol dolphins to the Russian navy (dolphins guard the Crimean naval base against deep-sea mines and alien frogmen), while the Ukrainians get to keep the sea lions which are also based there.

On camera, UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg refused to look directly at Nigel Farage, leader of theUK Independence Party and Clegg’s opponent in Wednesday night’s televised debate over Britain’s membership of the EU. Clegg looked away because he didn’t want to be seen viewing Farage as a fully credible interlocutor; but he couldn’t simply stare straight ahead or he himself would have been cast asthe Westminster Village idiot. Nowhere else for his eyes to go but down, and downcast eyes made him demur; a blushing bride compared to the front-footed Farage, who was clearly keen to exercise his conjugal rights.

Clegg has much to be modest about, after nearly four years as DPM in a dubious government.

Meanwhile in Brighton, the pioneering couple looked like a pair of original Teddy boys. Not the young toughs who hijacked the Edwardian-style tailoring designed in the early 1950s as an ode to the joy ofwinning the war; more like the young toffs that the post-war frock coats and suede collars were first intended for.

Writer and actor Andrew Wale and guest house owner Neil Allard wore three piece whistles, complete with suede collared jackets and pin collar shirts, when shortly after midnight on Saturday 29 March they entered the Music Room of the Brighton Pavilion (more Rococo than rock’n’roll) to become one of the first same-sex couples married under English law.

After the ceremony, the newlyweds stepped into a blaze of publicity so intense it turned night into day.The whole world was invited to their nuptials – except Nigel Farage. read more

#5 That’s All, Folks!

March 22, 2014

Streaked across the tiled floor, the blood of four young gunslingers sent into Kabul’s Serena Hotel to shoot up the celebrations (kill count: 9) for New Year’s Eve in Afghanistan. They themselves were shot down by government soldiers.Their bodies were photographed where they fell, then dragged out of the hotel in the early hours of the morning after.

By now, Kabul’s Hotel-of-Terror is almost dog-bites-man. In June 2012, the Spozhmai Hotel was similarly shot to pieces at the start of another festive weekend (23 dead including five Taliban); in June 2011, the Intercontinental (21 dead). In the aftermath,the same spokesperson for the Afghan government, and the same spokesperson for the Taliban. Not much for this youthful quartet to celebrate, knowing they would hardly live to see in the New Year. With firearms hidden in their socks the Taliban boys had evaded the hotel’s security checks, hiding in the toilets until the time came to come out and blow the guests away. A photo of their shoes – two pairs black, two pairs brown, all of them chunky, hunky things – shows they were not from Son of Rambo or Lord of the Flies. These youths were much older, if none the wiser. Was there the smell of festive cooking, wafting in every time a hotel guest came in to use the loo? Or nothing but cleaning fluid and abrasive mutterings that the toilet stalls were still occupied; just what the hell was going on? Just how the hell did you sit it out, boys, those hours of waiting for your lives to be flushed away? What a waste. You could have been getting changed in there, waiting to go on stage in a rock’n’roll band; first night nerves every one night stand. Easy to imagine a youthful play of tender and tough, of Mercutio’s contempt for his own life as well as others’; to recall Raskolnikov, even Alex and his Droogs. But for all I know, your actions had nothing to do with the modern condition. Perhaps you hated Hotel Mayhem – Serena: is someone having a laugh? – not because it was cheesy and a little bit Dubai; more that you were good ol’ country boys whose idea of the human race only stretches as far as your own clan, along with its racing horses and fighting dogs. Whatever the reason, whether or not you reasoned it at all, in youthful haste you’ve already left your one and only mark on the world: famous for 15 hours, topping the Reuters list early one day; next day washed away into the archives.

And nothing else will ever become of you.

#4 What’s In A Name?

March 15, 2014

Glenn Ford (64) was released from Louisiana State Penitentiary on Tuesday 11th March. Wrongly convicted of the murder of a Shreveport jeweller in 1983, at the time of his release Ford had been in custody for 30 years – most of that time awaiting execution on Death Row. Glenn Ford was a Hollywood star. In 1958 he topped the list of ‘Box Office champions’. Ford came to the attention of police when it was discovered he was keeping leghorn chickens in the grounds of his Beverly Hills mansion. The police ordered the removal of the chickens. Louisiana State Penitentiary is a prison farm built next to the Mississippi River on the site of former slave plantations. (Also known as Angola – where the original slaves originated, the prison property is bigger than Manhattan.) Inmates pick cotton, grow food crops and keep livestock – except maximum security prisoners including those on Death Row, such as Glenn Ford, who are kept in their 8’ x 10’ cells 23 hours a day.The temperature in these cells exceeded 125 degrees on 85 days between May and September 2011. In Superman (1978) Glenn Ford played Clark Kent’s adoptive father, Jonathan. ‘Superman’ is also the name of a Texan air conditioning company which recommends servicing your AC system every six months. Outside the prison gates, Glenn Ford said how much he missed seeing his son grow up. Now his baby boy has babies of his own, he observed. Ford had not been outside his cell block for seven years prior to his release. Glenn Ford played an escaped convict in The Secret of Convict Lake (1951). Glenn Ford was incarcerated in Angola when guards shot and killed 29-year-old escapee Tyrone Brown. Glenn Ford campaigned for Ronald Reagan to become President of the United States. Ronald Reagan was in the White House when Glenn Ford was first sent to the prison house. In 1950 Glenn Ford was born in California, where actor Glenn Ford’s actor-friend Ronald Reagan would later become Governor, before going on to become President.

Glenn Ford was born in Quebec in 1916. As a child he moved with his parents to Santa Monica, California.Glenn Ford looked young for his age. Photographs issued at the time of his arrest suggest an overgrown boy with a 1970s-style moustache.

Glenn Ford was boyishly good looking. In westerns and war films alike, his small features affirmed that masculinity need not be brawny or brutish. Jowly and overweight – he hadn’t been out of his cell block for seven years, Glenn Ford now resembles a middle-aged lady. With a lightweight beanie stretched over his head (Huck Finn’s Widow Douglas might wear it with her curlers in), when interviewed by WVLA-TV at the gates of Angola, Ford’s face seemed somehow emasculated. After a series of minor strokes Glenn Ford died at his Beverly Hills mansion on 30th August 2006, aged 90.

After almost three decades as a dead man walking, Glenn Ford has come back to life in the outside world.Glenn Ford, ceci n’est pas Glenn Ford (look at the dark skin on his pinkie and you’ll see it immediately).

#3 Grief Beyond Compare

March 8, 2014

The not knowing was the worst, you will tell yourself later. But of course you knew all the time. Not as if an airliner can go missing; walk out without telling anyone, then turn up at the police station or pop back home after a name check on the radio.

Beijing International Airport: the Chinese woman in the white padded jacket; looks like Julia Roberts. Right now there’s an airline official on the phone to her – the phone painted with pink flowers (of course she knows it’s silly).

Like wind across a wheat field, her face widens into panic, grief, collapse – call it what you will, and anyway it looks strangely like a smile.

As she hears of the disappearance of flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing (239 people on board), what I’ve just done to her – looking, making notes and comparing – is just what padded-white-lady can’t do. She cannot see herself doing what she’s doing. She’s not now going to notice the something that doesn’t square with something else you’d expect it to match. News of loved-one-missing-feared-dead has rendered her existence incomparable, at least for the time being.

Being beyond compare – how exceptional it is, even for a moment.

Until this very moment, padded-white-lady-in-waiting had been hanging around theairport lounge, window-shopping, people-gazing; killing time comparing this with that, him versus her……and look, there he is again.

At KL airport, back where the ill-starred started from, a chic geeky boy wears an Oasis T-shirt featuring a cartoon face-off between Noel and Liam Gallagher. Choosing to wear this T-shirt when he got dressed this morning, geeky boy was sort of saying: they’re a bit like me; I’m a little like them. It’s what he said, metaphorically speaking, outof the corner of his mouth. But now the news fixates him: straight ahead, full face; no scope for anything sideways-on.

Padded-white-lady is condemned to come back to this moment, over and over again. On one such occasion, recalling how she first heard about her lost love, she may also recall the Everly Brothers’ ‘Ebony Eyes’. Thinking about the 24 Chinese artists returning from an exhibition in Malaysia, who are also feared dead, geeky boy may liken this crash to The Day The Music Died. Or perhaps by then there will be a new K-pop song about Flight MH370. And in 12 months’ time surely a sociologist will have analysed the weekly flight paths of Far Eastern professionals, comparing them to early-sixties East Coast suburbanites and their daily commute ‘up state’. read more

#2 Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow

March 3, 2014

The red tea lights are the same: outside Kunming railway station; insidethe Maidan (square) in Kiev.

Lights lit in memory of 29 knifed to death on Saturday by Uighur separatists in south west China, and 77 killed during successful demonstrations against pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovych, who fled the Ukrainian capital on 21st February. Lively little lights to take away the stillness; unholy stillness which otherwise outlives removal of human remains. Meanwhile in the Crimea, an Orthodox priest (just don’t say ‘Russian Orthodox’ to thewrong person) uses what looks like a washing-up brush to spray holy water on soldiers from both sides – Ukrainian security forces and troops from the Russian Federation. The diplomatic situation seems too big for them; absurdly large like the hats on theheads of Black Sea sailors. While Russian infantry with chins tucked into dust masks are perhaps trying to hide their tender years; kissable mouths would give them away as conscripts. Yet any Ivan can easily become Terrible, should the situation demand it. Terrible as theknife-wielding posse which ran riot – slitting and stabbing – through Kunming station, Yunnan province.

On the periphery of the world economy, in far-flung provinces and narrow peninsulas,the slow pace of development can turn into its opposite at almost any moment; outrunning the most mercurial diplomat, turning gunboats and sabre-rattling into live ammunition and thousands of little red candles.

#1 Heavyweight

March 1, 2014

‘I am not that human being, who will abscond.’ So said ‘flamboyant tycoon’ Subrata Roy Sahara in a statement issued before his arrest in Lucknow yesterday for failing to repay billions of bonds to India’s small investors.

Though his arrest made national ‘news of the day’ (Roy’s remand and the prospect of the Indian tiger ‘losing its stripes’ in a further economic slowdown), Roy himself seems not of our time.

His moustache belongs in a wartime wardroom – or perhaps the members’ lounge of a post-war Home Counties golf club; his (surely) dyed black hair is bouffed up for an American boardroom in the 1970s; and his way with words – see above – is based either on elderly Hindi phrases, or the Anglo-Indian habit of learning English like it’s Latin (in Britain this tradition died out 50 years ago), or both. As for the broad lapels on the black sleeveless jackets he likes to wear over short-sleeved white shirts and a company tie, they are as anachronistic as the gull-wing doors on a DeLorean; though less likely to drop off. Of mockery an almost too easy target I am, as Roy might have said of himself. Except he almost certainly wouldn’t say it because saying it of himself implies a level of self-consciousness in keeping with the widespread Western selfie-ishness which he himself seems barely conscious of. Yet for all his gaucherie there is something incontrovertible about Roy – a substance that comes from employing 1.1 million people in his Sahara conglomerate (hotels to aviation). More than a million people earn their living from being in his employ; enough to make his being a matter of fact, rather than the subject of speculation, self-examination or some other ‘First World‘ trait. Compared to the unbearable lightness of being a Londoner – living on thin air and thetiniest share in a bubbling property market – goofy, bouffy Subrata Roy is a world heavyweight.

Either Way, He Dies

February 23, 2014

Throat cut by cable stretched across a street in Caracas, Santiago Enrique Pedroza seems to have died a Driver kinda death: half-fate, half-chance, happens fast.

But how did the 29-year-old, working class motorcyclist come to be riding into the middle class district of Horizonte? And what about the wire – who put it there and why?

Scenario One: when the supermarket closes, hard-working shop assistant Pedroza climbs onto his motorbike and rides home to his family. In the dark he can’t see the cable which slits open his throat – the death trap set by middle class boys looking for kicks, desperate to lose their own insignificance. Lying on the pavement, lifeblood dribbling away, he can’t understand how it happened like this.

Scenario Two: when the supermarket closes hard-working shop assistant Pedroza climbs onto his motorbike and rides home to his family. In the dark he can’t see the wire-trap laid by middle class ‘fascists’ acting on the advice of a retired general. The same kids who’ve been firebombing trucks used in state sponsored food programmes, have taken it upon themselves to defend their home-ground against ‘criminal elements’ and supporters of the post-Chavez government. They didn’t mean for Pedroza to die. But he knew which side he belonged to, just as much as they do.

Maybe Scenario One, perhaps Two, most likely Somewhere In Between.

Redundant Composition

February 22, 2014

Of their faces shiny with virtue and simultaneously sooted with smoke from burning tyres, there is little more for me to say. The young woman shot in the throat, who tweeted her last tweet and then came back from the dead, leaves nothing unsaid. Protestors barracking their leaders for settling too easily; the presidential palace deserted except for animals in the private zoo – all of these articulate what’s happening in Kiev with the possibility of its opposite, without needing any help from me.

There is realpolitik: Russia’s sphere of influence versus the self-interest of the EU, played out on the streets and played badly – for short-term positive image-points rather than the long game of Diplomacy.But the turn of events in Ukraine – the possibility that they will turn and turn again – eludes both the diplomatic game and the critical analysis of it.

At the other end of the news reporting spectrum, there are pin-sharp pictures which bring the-right-now to us readers right-here. But their technical quality lends a spurious clarity to events which are still hazy; their outcome yet to be decided.

Analysis and illustration: neither approach quite captures the quickening uncertainty of the moment.

Nor is this the time for Singing The News. Other events have prompted me to use an experimental form of reporting in order to locate the true liveliness of those involved; and this, in turn, is to suggest the possibility of other outcomes – that it is possible, after all, for events to turn out otherwise.

Nowadays we are normally so far from recognising this possibility, it takes an unusual form of composition to construct it. But in Kiev today the possibility speaks for itself. It is writ large in a situation which could patently go either way; and there is nothing for newscompositor to do but sign off for the night. read more

On The River

February 16, 2014

The sunny river is dotted and decked with yellow, and blue, and orange, and white, and red, and pink. All the inhabitants of Hampton and Mousley dress themselves up in boating costume, and come and mooch around the lock with their dogs, and flirt, and smoke, and watch the boats, and altogether, what with the caps and jackets of the men, the pretty coloured dresses of the women, the excited dogs, the moving boats, the white sails, the pleasant landscape, and the sparkling water, it is one of the gayest sites I know of near this dull old London town.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men In A Boat (1889).

This is the sight near old London town:
The dull brown river is dotted and decked with cars, and road signs, and one that says ‘Ferry’ even though it’s in the middle of the wide stretch of water not at the edge, and bins for scooped-up-and-bagged dog-pooh attached to poles you can’t see because that’s how high the water’s risen, with not a dog-walker in sight and not likely since there’s no walking to be done; only wading (downcast eyes) or messing about in boats (half-smile if you’re in the boat, serious expression if you’re pushing or pulling the occupants to a place of safety).

All the inhabitants are dressed down in wellies and woolly jumpers and the occasional bib-and-tucker like the ones trawler men wear for gutting fish. No landscape: the streets awash with floodwater and abject politicians, and the military moving sandbags (in foreign news ‘military’ means coup and governments overthrown, but here in the waterlogged Home Counties the undertow is upbeat – expect to see Wills and Harry mucking in), and everyone’s gutted and the guts of Middle England are spilling into blocked drains and backing up.
Enough Prog Rock imagery – STOP!

Surrey’s inhabitants were high and dry and laughing when others were sinking into poverty 30 years ago. Half-of-me – the bitter half – doesn’t mind them getting wet. But there’s no question of them drowning. Worn down, yes, since Three Men In A Boat in Victorian high summer; nonetheless the mark of prosperous respectability remains far above flood-level. read more

Whatever Happened to Baby Jayne?

February 15, 2014

You couldn’t make it up.

The name of the killer dog is ‘Killer’. The 11-month old baby which it killed, was ‘like a china doll’, according to her paternal grandmother.

Infant Beauty murdered by Chavs’ Beast of Choice, geddit?

There’s more: father and mother are no longer together; the dog, which was put down after the attack, belonged to the mum’s current boyfriend. Mum-and-Baby-Photo, as released to the press, has both of them doe-eyed and Bambified; while the current boyfriend – seen in another photo – boasts high cheekbones, cupid bow lips and a hard look.

The attack took place on a redbrick housing estate in Blackburn, 20 miles north of Manchester. The litany of those involved sounds like the cast list from a nearby episode of Shameless: Bernadette, Chloe, Lee, Dean and ‘china doll’ Ava-Jayne.

What were the parents thinking of, mashing-up Ava (Gardner) with Jayne (Mansfield)? Just the one film star wasn’t enough?

Shame on you, Mr News Compositor! Their moment of grief is not the time to inflict your cultural snobbery on Ava-Jayne’s parents. You’ve reduced their lives – and the sad death of an innocent child – to the level of a cartoon show, The Chavs.

Agreed, it can never be right to write anyone off like this (see Shane Meadows’ movies: he takes the lives of working class people and writes them up properly). But please note that if I have caricatured the baby’s family members, it was only to draw out the way their lives have been cartooned in mainstream media coverage.

More reductionist than mainstream media coverage, amounts to a critique of it – really?

Conceded, this is not sufficient justification. But there is something more – and more important – which my piece is meant to draw attention to.

Perhaps the cartoon character of the death of Ava-Jayne was not only introduced after the tragic event (in the subsequent depiction rather than the event itself). To some extent, it may have been there all along. Not because these really are the creatures of a mythical underclass; more that in this part of the world acting the part might have become part of a general attempt to get real. read more

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