Sparklehorse

Mark Linkous shot himself the other day. He had a wonderful ability to find beauty in sadness and wrote songs that shake the very girders of your soul & could make a grown man weep.

It must be very difficult walking that tightrope. In his sadness he found & extracted a sincere, profound beauty. It lives on and yaddayadda - but the man is dead. I fail to see the beauty in this one. Just sadness.

Europe, Kerouac & Necessity

In one of my more ill thought out moments I ventured one summer across Western Europe. Alone and by foot, with the suitably clichéd image of a young man in his 20s, guitar over one shoulder and thumb in the air on a motorway slip road, cemented cerebrally into the consciousness of the drivers who refused to pick me up. In hindsight, perhaps their apprehension had something to do with the more prominent cerebral image of gory news stories, and the possible use of a guitar string as a deadly weapon. 

It was an all too important adventure for me. Since reading Kerouac’s On The Road as a teenager I, like countless others before me, had a dying thirst for the road that Kerouac had highlighted as an alternative to, as William Burroughs put it, “the alienation, the restlessness [and] the dissatisfaction” of a static existence. It wasn’t 1947. There were no box-cars. ‘The Road’ as Kerouac knew it had been paved over and replaced with something quite different. Miles Davies and Charlie Parker were dead. Kerouac, Cassady and Ginsberg themselves had fallen into mythology and it’s hard to believe they were ever even real. The romanticism of the old road remained, though, and sometime in the afternoon I found myself in Amsterdam.

BNP on Question Time

I was going to write something about the BNP on Question Time, but got distracted by the BNP website which addresses the question of "is the BNP racist?" with the most fantastically idiotic answer possible. They essentially list a load of Jewish-only or black-only organisations and cry out - "Have you noticed how the media NEVER calls any of these organisations “racist” even though they are openly organised along ethnic lines and stand for the rights of their respective communities?" 

There is a slight difference, I think, between a local organisation set up to educate and support African Caribbeans in Watford and a white-supremacist political party who are the throw of a very small stone away from donning swastika-emblazoned uniforms and goose-stepping up and down the House of Commons. Does the Metropolitan Black Police Association strive to rid the Met from any white officers? No. They don't. In fact, most of these societies and organisations were set up to offer support to minorities in Britain from racist abuse from bigoted little shits just like Griffin and his Klan.
It goes without saying that of course I think the BNP are a foul little party. Everything they stand for is abhorrent. A vote for them is a vote backwards. But still, I'm glad they're finally being allowed on Question Time.

Feminist Britain

I recently had a conversation with an Iranian friend of mine. From his perspective, women in Britain were entirely liberated from any sort of oppression. Granted, in comparison to a country where it's not uncommon for an unmarried man and woman to be stopped by police for merely driving in a car together, Britain may seem a utopia, where women's struggle for equality ended successfully long ago. "Feminism here is done" he said.

I wanted to mention so many things, but their mention felt largely superficial when talking to a man whose country demands the wearing of headscarves for women under Sharia law, when men are free to wear whatever they choose. Things certainly aren't as oppressive in Britain, but that's not to say that feminism here has persevered and slayed male chauvinism. Though if it had, and today's media is the result, one would assume the grisly deed was done with a pretty pink rose-scented sword. With flowers on.

There are countless products advertised to us that reinforce gender roles that are entirely archaic. If feminism had its day in Britain, would we still see these?

 Of course, because women's ears are delicate precious little things that require pink, silky soft earplugs to protect them from the battle cries and axe-sharpening of their Viking of a man. The only things remotely sufficient for men's ears, on the other hand, are...

 

Screws! With skulls on! Because if you're a man and something's too loud for you you're a wimp. Unless you're blocking out all that nail-filing and blow-drying with metal screws and the skulls of your enemies.

This gendering of products is nothing new, and largely goes unnoticed. But it has the effect of conditioning an entire population to believe that women fit in box A and men into box B and never the twain shall meet. Unless it's for sex. After which it's back to your respective boxes for Heat magazine and some unnecessary sanding of things.

If I Had A Tenner - An incredibly powerful single-scene play about poverty

[The scene opens on an empty stage. Spotlight centre stage on nothing.]

Narrator:
If I had a tenner I would buy:
A small pouch of blue drum for £2.69
A packet of licorice rizlas for 30p
A double whiskey for £2
Two pints of lager for £2.50 each
Then I'd write a play:
"If I Had A Fiver - an incredibly powerful single-scene play about poverty"

[Curtain closes]

Towards National Humility

National pride?
That was one of your crowning achievements then, was it? Being born in whatever particular part of the world you just HAPPENED to be born in through sheer happenstance? Yes, you must be very proud of yourself. A job well done.
What is it you're proud of, exactly? Perhaps I'm just ignorant. Proud of the achievements of great minds before you that shared the same landmass? What was it you did that contributed to those achievements?
What does a national identity offer a person, really? From the perspective of a Brit who, in a PROUD Naval town, almost trips over union jack-touting nationalists who are a burning cross and a pointy hood away from salivating over a lynching - what is it about our horrific colonial past that deserves to be celebrated? When you pledge your unwavering allegiance to something as superficial as imaginary lines drawn on a map, are you also proud of the uncounted millions before you who did unspeakable things? And what wonderful part of the rich and diverse British culture is so worthy of your pride? Is it our emotional coldness? Our ability to queue? Our doilies and our tea cups and our male chauvinism craftily masquerading as chivalrous etiquette? "I'm very proud of the pork pie"? - what is it?

Perhaps I'm being too vicious. It's very nice, after all, to feel a sense of belonging towards a place...but where that simple comfort translates into a fierce national pride is what baffles me.
I don't particularly like Britain, let alone love it. As for Wales, the "country" of my birth, I feel next to nothing. Hearing Myfanwy in a resonant baritone over rolling hillsides doesn't move me. The Welsh Assembly has been, for the past few years, drilling national pride into the poor Welsh folk. The very thing that got me thinking about my own lack of a national identity was an advert online trying to persuade me to learn the dying, archaic language - "We learn Welsh" it said, emblazoned above a dragon, "because we're proud of our heritage." Coinciding with this propaganda, my generation in particular seem oddly patriotic all of a sudden. I always considered pride a particularly mischievous vice, but apparently it's a virtue if it's for one's country.

The ugly face of this bubbling nationalism, of course, is that of slappable BNP leader Nick Griffin. The BNP - despised by anybody that has a brain - "exploit" the "perfectly acceptable" national pride of the British public. I believe national pride to be dangerous at all levels. You are drawing a distinction between yourself and "outsiders" on nothing but geography - which is entirely superficial! It means absolutely nothing. Do you swell with pride whenever you come across the numbers that represent the latitude and longitude of your place of birth? The only real use national pride has is for convincing people to fight and die.

I apologise if I offend anybody. I of course don't mean to equate anybody with Griffin for merely feeling proud of their roots. Perhaps I'm simply missing something that's innate in mankind; but I feel a greater sense of belonging as part of mankind as a whole, rather than based on the meaningless boundaries drawn up over centuries of squabbling. It makes no more sense to be proud of one's country than it does to be ashamed of it - and I'm not ashamed of Britain either. It's not "my" country, and it's not yours either, really. It's merely one small part of a much more exciting whole. I'd hate to deny myself the full appreciation of what that means because of that particularly mischievous vice.