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

Immigration Satus

February 9, 2014

Neat hair, neat features, neatness itself; but immigration minister Mark Harper has resigned over the untidy business of his cleaner’s visa. She doesn’t have indefinite leave to remain and he’s the employer who really should have vetted her more carefully, being also the minister in charge of doubling the fine for failure to check; and the government immigration spokesman who sent the vans round last summer saying ‘Go Home or Face Arrest’.

Neat, neat, not-so-neat. Interviewed, he never misses a beat. I did this, I did that, I should apply a higher standard to my own behaviour. Therefore…..
No traction in his seamless voice. Smooth words from a Teflon talker. But if his ministerial career is remembered at all, it will be for the sticky end.

Meanwhile a young male giraffe called Marius was put down in Copenhagen Zoo this morning in an effort to prevent in-breeding among giraffes in captivity.

Photographed poking his head towards us, Marius the Lugubrious – except this is only us projecting human characteristics onto a dumb animal, now deceased.

When various zoos, including one in Doncaster, were keen to adopt Marius, there was never any concern about his immigration status.
Though the Copenhagen keepers cut up the corpse and fed it to the lions, in this regard Marius was afforded more humanity than Mark Harper’s cleaner.

On The Levels

February 8, 2014

Champagne waves spuming the sea wall and houses behind.

Dog down the street turns out to be a seal pup. But the floodwater’s not deep enough and it throws itself back into the pink-tinged harbour.

Sunset returns, now the clouds have broken; reflected by so much water, more glorious than ever.

Inland – if that’s the word – lush green acres outnumbered by limitless grey lagoons.

The expanse; and the expense.

Then a dry patch where builder Sam Notaro has defended his self-built £1m house with five foot earthworks. Red brick pile and a band of brown earth throw a ring of orange into the surrounding floodwater.

Prime minister David Cameron pronounced this ‘a biblical scene’ when he helicoptered into Somerset. But Cameron is no deus ex machina. His last-but-one predecessor famously didn’t do religion, and Cameron can’t do biblical.

Years of shirtsleeves, matter of fact; conversation not oration. Now Wellington boots and a warm fleece. Because Dave will always be on your level, OK?

Water’s rising but Cameron cannot find it in him to offer a moment of transcendence – the prime task of a Churchill; occasionally Tony Blair. Amidst the ‘biblical scene’ in which he is clearly only ankle deep, he fails to minister to the people of the Somerset Levels.

Drifters

February 2, 2014

Two days after he and his scratched-up fibreglass boat washed up on Ebon Atoll, there are no still no photographs of Mexican mariner Jose Ivan.

By his own account, Ivan was blown 8000 miles across the Pacific having set out from Mexico in September 2012, originally making for El Salvador. He survived 16 months afloat by catching fish and turtles with his bare hands, eating them raw and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain.

Not much bigger than a big boat, the outcrop of land he landed on is lower in the water than a passenger liner. There isn’t a phone signal, and the plane that flies in once a week is temporarily out action. Hence Ivan’s image is currently unavailable.

Having found him on the beach in a pair of raggedy underpants, his rescuers are resting and re-hydrating him in relative isolation. Without a selfie to upload – ‘this is me as Robinson Crusoe’ – his story makes mere radio instead of holding the front page.

Sixteen months of blue. Blue sky, blue sea, blue-sea-sky-blue. Like living in a Rothko.

Against that relentless background, memory and fantasy must have thickened. Clotted as closing-time conversation. Matted like your overgrown beard. Then died away, leaving days and days and days of dumb survival.

While you were surviving: an American president re-elected; civil war continues in Syria; London living off Olympic glory, slowly fading. The world which takes you back is little different from the one you accidentally left behind.
The dumb world you’ve come back to, has been adrift for some time.

(Failed) Theft of Spirituality

January 28, 2014

Unhloly heist. Sacrilegious swindle. Capillary crook. The New York Daily News reported the theft of a vial containing traces of the blood of Pope John Paul II (‘pontiff’s plasma’), as a kind of cartoon caper. Presumably to permit the paper’s readers – Guys and Dolls, Native New Yorkers – to live out their lives among the cast of characters in Damon Runyon’s low-life off-Broadway stories.

Containing a shred of cloth stained with the pope’s blood during the failed attempt to assassinate him in 1981, the vial was itself contained in an elaborate package or ‘reliquary’ – half- box, half-holy writ.

(Pope John Paul II died in 2005 to cries of Santo Subito – make him a saint now! He is due to be beatified at the end of April 2014.)

Not a vial but a river of blood between the two sides of the civil war in Syria, now facing each other for ‘peace talks’ in Switzerland. So much blood – leaving aside the not-so-well documented stories of people eating each other. So much certified blood it can’t be easy for them to stay in the same room together: the foreign minister who interrupts the UN secretary general interrupting him because he must, simply must finish his speech; and the opposition spokesman at pains to explain to waiting journalists that the government delegation is guilty of using confrontational language.

Overlooking the unruffled waters of Lake Geneva, at any moment the negotiating chamber may be flooded with blood – a tidal surge of it. The levels keep rising – then falling a little; rising and falling.

Rising into the air above St Peter’s Square two doves, released from the papal balcony by children accompanied by the new pope, were attacked by seagulls and a crow.

Pope Francis, the people’s pontiff, Time’s person of the year, man of his times, though still wearing those spectacles favoured by 1990s German chief execs. He is Papa to us all, allegedly. Raised above the square, he stands for all the Syrian fathers who have not been allowed to be Papa, whose children were ripped and torn out of their arms. read more

Hell On Ice

January 24, 2014

Old age doesn’t creep up. It rages over you like the flames which engulfed an old people’s home (Residence du Havre) in small town Canada (L’Isle-Verte, Quebec) on Wednesday night, leaving up to 31 dead.

Even Frankie Boyle couldn’t make it up: residents reliant on walking frames, washed-out shuffling things, overtaken by quickfire. See how they cannot run! Now they have run out of time.

Chief firefighter Yvon Charron described it as ‘a night from hell’. Away from the flames, the temperature dropped to 20 degrees below freezing. Pumped onto the fire to put it out, gallons of water turned to icy, witchy fingers.

Hell froze over. The world stood still. In our flaming youth we often saw it that way. We could afford to, with all that time hanging over us.

Mixed Messages

January 19, 2014

On Saturday night they queued outside St Andrew’s Church, Muirhouse, to attend a memorial service for Mikaeel Kular. Early that morning police found the three year old’s body in the woods next to his former home in Kirkcaldy.

The Kirkcaldy address makes you wonder why deaths like his don’t happen more often. Think of a caravan built of bricks with a Sky dish tacked on. In Newmarket the stables – houses for horses to live in – look more prepossessing.

Welcome to the pinched world of Kirkcaldy, part of the Ancient Kingdom of Fife….or Poundland, where masked robbers raid Glen [the] Bakers, making off in the delivery man’s van with cash from the till, his phone, and perhaps a pile of Scotch pies (salt content to rival the Dead Sea); and the local sign writers haven’t yet mastered the English language.

Back in Muirhouse on the north side of Edinburgh, again there’s little to stop us killing each other. Many of the postwar flats have already gone – the last bonkers tenant (‘no surrender’, ‘remember the Alamo’, ‘citizens’ republic of Pennywell Gardens’) was evicted in 2007. But the new housing stock seems to have the same pinched look built in. Is it something they add to the cement?

Then look again at the Saturday night queue. These people are more than the sum of their ‘built environment’. They are not tacky or tawdry. They don’t appear to be climbing on to the emotional bandwagon, either. Suffused with light, which happens to be coming from inside the church, they look like people who wanted to help find that boy and give him back his life. Now he’s been found dead, they’d like to give something back to each other.

Just don’t read the messages tacked to the teddy bears. read more

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