#52 London-Charleston Express

April 18, 2015

Jewel heist. Diamond caper. Scarper, it’s the Rozzers. What larks!

The real location was London’s diamond trading district, near Holborn, yet the £300m Easter raid on the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit Company suggested relocation to an Ealing Comedy, complete with burglar alarm that went off but prompted ‘no action’ onthe part of bungling police.

But Key Stone Cops ‘n’ Robbers wasn’t much of a comedy; certainly couldn’t cut it as tragedy. The Daily Mirror tried for Jacobean, positing Mr Ginger and Mr Strong alongside footage obtained from security cameras at the entrance to the vault; paintingthe thieves as Reservoir Dogs. But the footage itself was closer to outtakes from health and safety information films, complete with operatives in High Vis vests demonstrating how not to lift heavy loads.

Nefarious or not, a lot like watching paint dry.

Heavy-set bloke running away from car, more like something from Family Guy. Cut tothe park where there’s an ugly clash between his green top, tending towards turquoise, and the lime-like foliage of an overhanging tree.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat: rim-shots but too many of them for Ray Charles’ girl knocking on his door. It’s really the sound of Walter Scott going down to meet his maker (Hallelujah, He Loves Us So), the proverbial black man blasted in the back while running away from a white police officer.

Shot by a passer-by, the cellphone footage is neither comic nor tragic. Looks a little ludicrous but lacks a single punchline; instead it takes seven hits to knock a man down. Following procedure, the shooter logs on to a different (tragic) order of things, but only post festum, post mortem. Death itself comes un-masqued, without tragedy or comedy; it is desultory, diminished, demeaning. read more

#51 Resurrection Man

April 4, 2015

‘Sun do shine’, is how one source had it – though the reporter may have been hamming him up to appear suitably folksy. ‘The sun does shine’, is how others presented it – though they may have imposed grammatical correctness in order to achieve political correctness, i.e. to avoid accusations of having made him appear unduly folksy.

Either way, the speaker was Anthony Ray Hinton (59), who came back to life after 30 years on death row for a double murder he didn’t do.

(Two fast food restaurant managers shot and killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1985.)

On 3 April 2015, making his way through the media crowd, a dignified black man in a dark suit. We hear the ululations of his mother or sister as she falls on his neck.

But we don’t know which she is. Is she too folksy to figure in the official account? And was it one of those prisons where visitors and inmates mustn’t touch, making this their first embrace for 30 years? No one has found the time to find out.

Having rolled away the stone, releasing Anthony Hinton from three whole decades buried in a five by eight foot sepulchre provided by the state of Alabama, the public gaze has already moved elsewhere.

Leaving Hinton alone to get on with what’s left of his life, perhaps.

Either that, or sending him down again to the place where people are discounted; to thepurgatory which put him in the frame in the first place.

#26 The Flesh Is Weak

July 27, 2014

Philip Cattan (65) is the judge accused of falling asleep during a rape case.

Presiding over the trial of a Manchester man accused of raping and sexually assaulting two girls under the age of 13, Cattan is said to have nodded off while the first of thealleged victims answered defence questions by videolink.

The trial had been going on for only a few days, but it is four and a half decades since Cattan was called to the bar – in 1970, the year Paul McCartney announced the break-up of the Beatles.

As a newly qualified barrister he may have felt he had Wings. Forty-four years later, Cattan is still touring the Northern Circuit – plying his trade as a criminal lawyer, working as a recorder (part-time judge).

Of course there is plenty of privilege in his day to day existence – wigs and gowns and ‘all rise’ and first class rail fare claimed as standard by the judiciary. But also plenty that is workaday – similar-sounding tales of cruelty, wantonness and people simply losing it, stretching out year after year, all having to be processed; subjected to the due process of law.

‘Due process’ means that people caught up in events leading to criminal proceedings – whether as defendants or witnesses, are accorded the process that is their due. Without this there is not even the possibility of justice (still less the actuality), since failure to observe due process amounts to a form of contempt for those involved.

On the other hand, observing the formality of the court serves to enter all those involved into the public domain – the place raised above personal existence where human failings are addressed in a duly impersonal way.

If he did fall asleep while his own court was in session, Recorder Cattan is to be upbraided for his offence against the requisite level of formality – the formalities which formulate the presence of the public. read more

#23 Naming The Unnameable

July 6, 2014

Rolf, you dolt, you’ve put your own name on a par with ‘Adolf’ – never to be used again.

During six whole decades of showbiz, first there was ‘Rolf’, which really said: this person is permanently childish, bubbling over with didgeridoos and other party noises not far removed from whoopee cushions, including a jelly wobble version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and something else – the stylophone – that sounds like a singing birthday card; also, he may be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 but he still draws and paints like a child prodigy.

Which is to say that he would not, could not ever have a boner because his didger ain’t old enough to do it.

…..followed by ‘Harris’, the second name which has always meant: actually, he’s a straight-down-the-line average guy who’s only pretending to be peculiarly infantile; no fear of stunted development cum sexual fetish on the part of this professional performer. In bed with his wife, he surely acts his age rather than his show size.

We don’t and probably won’t know why Rolf Harris committed the indecent assaults which eventually led to his conviction and the jail term of five years and nine months to which he was sentenced on 4 July 2014. But might it have something to do with a grown man playing a largely pre-pubescent role throughout his entire adult life?

This is not to excuse his actions; only to observe that the continual commute between an excessively childlike exterior and the interior life of a sexually mature adult, must have been a dangerously long stretch, with plenty of opportunity for personal failure and moral failing.

Since he became a children’s entertainer in the 1950s, Harris has been cast in a role categorised as pre-sexual, as noted in a Telegraph feature of 13 years ago:

“Rolf Harris…is, after all, a sexless being….the man who paints huge and wonderful pictures for wide-eyed children while making a comical panting noise, which to him doesn’t sound remotely like someone having an orgasm. He is a man so guileless and innocent and unsullied that he couldn’t see the smutty innuendo lurking within the title ofhis most famous, all time, blockbuster hit-single, ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Jakethe Peg was a man with an extra leg to Rolf – nothing more or less, nothing to giggle at. Smut and Rolf just don’t go together – smut and Rolf is an oxymoron.” 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

(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

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.

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