Xchester

September 21, 2012

‘Abbey Gardens, Hattersley’, is the widely reported address where two Greater Manchester policewomen, Nicola Hughes (pretty and ‘bubbly’) and Fiona Bone (her photo has a cheeky look like Pauline Quirke’s), were killed on Tuesday 18th September. It’s got previous: Moors murderer Ian Brady lived on the estate in the 1960s, not longer after it was built. But the postal address of the crime scene is ‘Mottram’, where there are ‘stunning views’ of the Peak District and the stone-built old police station is currently on sale for £300,000. In Abbey Gardens, on the edge of the Hattersley estate, proletarian Manchester protrudes into the outlying middle classes. Bet they don’t like it up ‘em. Meanwhile, spurning Mrs Bouquet and all her works, Manchester is half-proud to have been known as ‘Gunchester’ in the 1990s; ‘Gun-’ being half-a-decade on from off-yer-face ‘Madchester’ (Happy Mondays, Hacienda, smiley meets scally), with firearms. There’s even a gym on the south side of the city (in Wythenshawe, the biggest housing estate in Britain) which issued a promotional video purporting to be CCTV of a gangland shooting: silent movie, Chav-style; the underclassy club people are dying to get into (but no one was armed in making this film). Watching it on YouTube, you could almost mistake these premises for the Cotton Tree pub (built 1905) in dreary Droylsden (another part of the Greater Manchester sprawl) where in May one-eyed, Irish-born Dale Cregan is thought to have killed amateur boxer Mark Short in a punishment shooting gone wrong, before going on to murder Mark’s father, David Short, three months later, followed a month after that by the two policewomen. Perhaps the murdered officers thought the call-out was to leafy Mottram instead of ‘Gun-Mad-Manchester’, where the sensibility is Shaun Ryder meets Baudrillard’s Postmodern but pockets of gang war are really taking place. read more

Boys and Girls

September 18, 2012

Flipped like a toy and over it goes. Car up-ended by a bunch of Chinese boys – no longer mere ‘boy’, are they, guys? – scouting Beijing for Japanese products they can vandalise. Gleefully, thoughtlessly smashing windows. Not stopping to cross-reference: ‘I love the sound of breaking glass’; just lovin’ it. In another part of the city, thousands of girls are coming out to Cos-Play: it’s an international convention of youngsters (mainly young women) dressed up in costume and play-acting parts from animeand manga, taking place in Beijing this year. The girls slide into a pose. Hold it; then strike another. Holding still is what they came for. Having to move between freeze frames is their dead time, like silence on the radio. Inspired by Japanese comic books and films, posing and vogueing like New York’s finest trannie, Cos-Playing China Girl is as self-conscious as any female impersonator. Meanwhile, Beijing’s boys are firing their ire on a Canon photo shop.

Shoeless: town and country style

September 15, 2012

Sandals were slowing down his escape so now he races barefoot through the white streets of Tunis, wreathed in teargas. In Cairo they’ve got good at throwing the canisters back at police – especially the man dressed as a Mid-Westerner in checked shirt and bluejeans. Beats baseball. Spuming water, fired from a police cannon, rains down into the centre of Sanaa’s main street, but the Yemeni crowd has already parted to the sides. In Tripoli, Lebanon (even the BBC tripped up here), the Colonel’s beard is badly singed; beneath this icon, his KFC outlet burnt to a crisp. Whole cream milk shaken into the burning eyes of a rioter who’s been tear-gassed. Head turned half-way round to check how fast the police line is moving, lithe lady in a gas mask, running. Youths standing on burnt out cars, gesturing to police, posing for cameras like victorious athletes. From Benghazi to Chennai, and further east to Kuala Lumpur, the streets are action-packed with anti-Americans. Meanwhile, in the rural provinces of India, protestors have taken to the water, neck-deep. There they stand for days on end, heads sticking out against government policy of raising water levels behind India’s dams (60 years since Nehru dubbed dams ‘the temples of modern India’), displacing many villagers. Without shoes, their feet turn to bad meat, pockmarked with parasites. Police cited health grounds when recently removing a group of protestors from the water around Hada, Madhya Pradesh. In that other twilight, before dawn, the only bright spots were the fluorescent lifejackets of police officers wading through grey water, bringing protestors to shore: slowly, slowly; one by one.

Benghazi Barbecue: the almost accidental death of an American ambassador

September 13, 2012

Clipped box hedges and manicured bonsai trees. Strolling through the grounds in football tops and Ts. No hurry. The sound of crickets, then it’s someone’s phone chirping. One guy with a serious camera, others make do with their mobiles, holding them out towards the cauldron of flame. Are we in the Olympic Park? No, it’s a car, flaming too fiercely to be doused out in the adjacent swimming pool; and behind the burning vehicle (under a car porch in true suburban style), the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is going up in smoke. Right now, American ambassador Chris Stevens (Californian veteran of the Peace Corps, fluent in Arabic, friend of ‘the Arab Spring’) is succumbing to smoke inhalation. But Stevens has not been targeted by terrorists. Hardly anyone knows he’s arrived from the capital, Tripoli, especially not those – not rioters, not quite as innocent as bystanders – who only want to have been there when a little bit of America was burning. By the morning after, the compound will look like a real crime scene: blackened buildings, ransacked interior, the pool half-full of debris. The night before, though, if you agree to mistake small arms fire for firecrackers, it could have been a party getting out of hand.

Move Along, Please

September 11, 2012

The late summer had been due to turn autumnal, but London was allowed one more day (Monday 10th September 2012) solely to bask in the success of the Games. A Victory Parade (Mansion House to the Mall), crowds along the route, thick as cream (‘many thousands’ – nobody even tried to count ‘em), and 800 gleeful Olympians and Paralympians floating above their shouts and cheers. The whole affair as bumptious and good-natured as Boris Johnson addressing the athletes: ‘you produced such paroxysms of tears and joy on the sofas of Britain that you probably not only inspired a generation, but helped to create one as well’. The entire city as bright and playful as BoJo’s hair. Yet already something wistful in the air. This was the last moment of spontaneous unity; the only proper repeat of the unrepeatable. All the rest is propaganda. Sponsored re-runs will turn the winning Games into a series of also-rans, if we let them; unless we resist the eye-candy of endlessly repeated highlights. Better to let this moment go, and perhaps one day we will be surprised to come across it again, unexpectedly evoked in a new moment, each of them enriched by association. What’s yet to come will be all the more splendid, if in the meantime we have not over-used the colour of memory.

Touched

September 9, 2012

Mock Tudor Surrey, home of The Good Life (mid-career, moderate achiever jacks in his job and joins his gorgeous wife in turning their ample garden into a smallholding complete with piggery), now accessory to a drive-by shooting hundreds of miles away. Instead of the al-Hilli family (they sound jolly, don’t they?) returning home from their Alpine holiday (last outing before the girls are at school), police and the media have set up camp around their house in Claygate. Instead of painting the doors of the second garage (it needs doing), in face masks and protective suits (protecting potential evidence, of course), officers are stripping down the house in search of clues. The road outside has a peculiar liveliness. Not only police following procedures or a sudden flurry of photographers (maybe she’s a relative: snap, snap, snap). Mainly it’s those sensible-looking, not-really neighbours (they must have been sensible; they made it to the stockbroker belt) prompted to pay their respects to people they never knew and bodies that aren’t there. Out of their ordinariness they come, carrying flowers and asking the policeman at the garden gate to put theirs’ near the house (already too many: ‘I’m sorry, madam, they will have to stay outside’). Drawn here – though of course they wouldn’t have wished it on anyone – to touch the hem of the extraordinary. Now heading home in the late summer sunshine, just as their forefathers would have moved back from the altar rail.

It’s All About The Boy

September 8, 2012

On one side, the prime minister. Making eye contact, hands at chest height, fingers splayed, saying: ‘it’s like this’. Full-on explanatory mode, right? While the p-m continues to expound, on his right-hand-side (but maybe not his right-hand-man), Nick Clegg, deputy prime minister, fields a different question. Nick (David Cameron had to ‘Dave’ himself for a while but Nick was always Nicked) is leaning back slightly, arms folded, brow furrowed. The bouncer’s position. Listening to the loser who’s trying for a squeeze on the door, staying silent and at the same time saying: I’m taking this for now but I could rush you any time I like. Not clever, Nick, to let yourself be seen in this aggressive-defensive posture. Prompted, I’m pretty sure, neither by a barbed question put to you nor a sharp point sticking into you, but by the mere presence of a beautiful blond boy. Standing in between the politicians, immediately the centre of attention. Son of the mum you were photographed having coffee with earlier (minimalist white mugs on the kitchen-diner table), recent occupant of a new property in the housing development (Aldermere, Cheshunt, Herts) you came here to be associated with. Because Britain will boom if there’s a building boom, geddit? But their association with the son of the house, has left both ministers upstaged. Downing Street officials should have remembered the adage about (not) working with children and animals. The child in question has turned away from Nick to look up at Dave (well he would, wouldn’t he?), who is still expostulating to someone else. He would have to look up at Dave, wouldn’t he?, because the boy is a good foot shorter than the prime minister. Yet this line of sight, from junior up to senior, is richly ironic. In the boy’s eyes there is a look of wonder, amazement. But not, I wannabe like you, you’re amazing; rather, where on earth have you parachuted in from, stranger? They could be creatures from different planets, this boy and his uncles-for-a-day. He already knows that the avuncular ‘power duo’ (Hertfordshire Mercury) can do nothing for him. read more

E Pluribus Unum

September 7, 2012

Still cool as iced-coffee, even now he could have walked in off the set of Mad Men; though he tells us these are different times and he himself is different, having sent young men to die in battle, having held their bereaved parents in his arms. Seeking a second term, Barack Obama is still doing it right. It’s a performance, yes (nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, Charlotte, North Carolina, September 2012); but that does not mean it’s false. When Obama reports that falling to his knees was the only correct posture for a man laid low by the responsibilities of office, his humility rings true. When he addresses ‘America’, above all when he calls out to the only person with the power to maintain hope and refrain from cynicism – ‘you’, the timing is perfect. So what if it’s rehearsed? Is the Catholic mass fraudulent because it’s been practised before? Bonded to the people in the hall – expectant, ecstatic, Obama becomes their celebrant. They are transfixed by him as he is transfigured into all of them together. Standing in for the best of each; standing tall as the best of all. Holy Father Obama, your communion wells up out of the convention centre and washes over every TV viewer.

The Colour of Desperation is Orange

September 6, 2012

Bright as a fire marshal’s vest, corn cobs piled high in front of the villagers’ houses. Is that what you would have lived on, Qu Huaqiang, if you hadn’t entered a government office in China’s Shandong province, and blown yourself up with home-made explosives? Twenty years after the big city accident which exiled you to your home village, perhaps you couldn’t stand the corn getting stuck between your teeth yet again. Almost 20 years ago, same vintage as the construction job that crippled you, London’s ‘postmodern’ building boom produced No 1 Poultry, EC2. As featured in H.M. the Queen’s camp Olympics cameo with James Bond; clad in that garish, marbled limestone which has been ageing orange ever since. Were you sad to see it hadn’t remained salmon pink, Madame X (unnamed 30-something Asian female in business attire)? Is that what tipped you over the edge of the restaurant roof garden? Leaving behind a floral print bag and a glass of wine (one sip taken). Plummeting past eight floors of Aviva offices – viva meaning lively, full of life. Falling to the ground face down – hummph, in another desperate death.

Cover-Ups

September 3, 2012

The Christian girl accused of burning the Koran, helped into an armoured car with her whole head hidden underneath a white sheet. The Pakistani imam accused of fabricating evidence against her, led into court with his faced bandaged – for anonymity, not because of injury. To the West, an Egyptian newscaster appears front-of-camera wearing hijab. To the East, Chinese fashion favours the face-kini, a new item of beachwear combining ski-mask with balaclava in a High Street iteration of S&M. Nothing spurious about the ostensible reasons: respectively, to prevent reprisals against the accused and their families; religious observance; high status accorded to pearl white skin. But, these aside, this age of self-presentation also reveals a strange allure in covering up.

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