x years to get out…

Finally got around to watching American History X on video last night (It was on telly a couple of weeks back). Thought it was pretty good and compared favourably with other “nazi-skinheads come good” efforts like Romper Stomper, and, uh… Made In Britain.

Good soundtrack by Anne Dudley as well (you’ve got to have a soft spot for Anne Dudley ’round our house because she used to be in the Art of Noise and did a pretty good collaboration with Jaz Coleman from Killing Joke).

Anyway, I won’t bore you with the plot but I thought it was very good at the unfolding of fanatical thought and a realisation that there might be holes in an all-consuming extremist political worldview. (For example the all to common spectre of young dispossessed people being used by older more astute politicos to do their dirty work)

But… it was a bit fuzzy on what the main character replaced this with. So you ended up with a bit of a liberal almost-pacifist vagueness which is almost a complete absence of conviction or thought. Obviously that’s preferable to stiff right arm shouty fascism, but I think it ignores a crucial fact that prison is a site of political awakening and activity.

So whilst the prison scenes in the film are very good at interpersonal relationships, the actual activities of prisoners are shown only as work / recreation / eating, etc. The conflict in the prison is depicted as being purely between prisoners (on a variety of levels) but hardly ever between the prisoners and the prison authorities.

There is no suggestion that prisoners engage in any form of active learning or resistance or that prison is anything other than a neutral site in which people (some good some bad) exist for the duration of their sentences.

And there can be no doubt that the majority of time spent in prison is mind-numbingly tedious and mundane, and not to be romanticised as some sort of “university for revolutionaries”. But I was struck by the lack of coverage of any form of self-education or resistance – something which seems to be very important, crucially important, in writings by (ex) prisoners I have read.

So on that note, I can wholeheartedly recommend BAD – The Autobiography of James Carr (Pelegian Press, 1995). You can read the excellent afterword to the book here.

Other stuff:

Campaign Against Prison Slavery – campaign against forced labour in British prisons (plus lots of related news).

Review of Bending The Bars by John Barker (Christie Books, 2003) by Mark Barnsley and the foreword to the book.

in your area

Look alive all Manchester crew!

It seems that me and Paul Meme are coming to town to nice up the dance on December 6th for the UK-Dance North party.

More soon.

industrial influence: 35 quid to get in

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The kind, gracious and every so slightly piss-taking Dubversion lent me his copy of England’s Hidden Reverse.

It’s a bit pointless me doing a full review as the book has been out so long. I also should mention that I helped the author out with some of the bits on Spanner/Dispatches which makes it difficult for me to be completely detached from it.

That said, I do think it’s extremely well done and David Keenan should be congratulated on the massive amount of work which has clearly gone into tie-ing together all the strands in the early 80s (post) industrial scene and beyond. Highly recommended, especially if SAF do paperback version for sensible money (35 quid does get you a lovely hardback book and a CD, tho).

Everyone interviewed is surprisingly candid about things like their (generally MASSIVE!) drug use, mistakes, fallings out, etc. I find that quite interesting as it’s a scene which has always relied on a certain amount of mystique and distancing from its fanbase.

The highlights for me were the sense of sheer chaos and creativity of the London crew in the early 80s and also reading about the impact that some less well known people in that scene had on the “stars”. There’s an ultra-left critique of “the myth of the great man” which basically says that social change really hinges on movements, collaboration, collective action, but that history generally only focuses on specific individuals within those movements.

I suppose in this case the attraction of reading the book for many is to find insights into the great minds of Balance, Christopherson, Stapleton and Tibet. For me it was much more rewarding for the revelations about people like John Gosling (on performance art “I tried to bring a football hooligan sensibility to the proceedings” – class!) and Diane Rogerson. It’s often women who get left out of the “surface” history of the counter culture. When I read “Wreckers of Civilisation” I was most impressed with the quotes and recollections from Cosey, the member of TG who is generally only portrayed as being nice to look at and/or as the girlfriend of Gen and then Chris Carter. (Also Michelle Bernstein and the Situationist International, apparently). Rogerson comes across as one of the most intelligent and interesting people in the whole scene (and I am in no way damning the rest of them by saying that).

Reading the book hasn’t really inspired me to dig out a load of old records. It’s funny because there was a time (15 years ago!) when I would play stuff by Coil, Current 93 or Nurse With Wound pretty much every day and a lot of my creative activities would be in some way influenced by their worldview. One thing, very clearly picked up on by Michael Cashmore in the book, is that all of these groups were very open about their influences on record sleeves or in interviews and you could follow them back and discover whole new worlds of thought or experience or ways of looking at the world.

There was a downside to this, as Nigel Ayers has pointed out somewhere in the archives of this blog – it lead to an off-the-peg set of cultural artifacts for people to be into which lead to another conformist “scene”. But there was scope for some radical elements as well and lots of people were given the chance to seek out things that, pre-internet, they might never have known about otherwise.

David Tibet seems completely consumed by his influences and the latter part of the book seems to feature him leaping between a series of increasingly obscure literary and theological muses, none of which I personally have any interest in at all. He also seems really down on himself about being into spooky weirdness earlier in his life now he has discovered (what he considers to be) something more positive. But that seems to miss the essential truth that you only gain insights from going through a process of developing thoughts \’96 maybe he would never have come to these realisations if it hadn’t been for all the dark stuff earlier.

It’s also interesting seeing which influences are taken up by the artists and which are not. Chance encounters lead to years’ obsessions, with Tibet especially taking on dead authors as almost god-like messengers. But some things don’t fit the “English” spin on the scene. Coil’s new house in the west of England is revealed (in order of importance?) as being: suitably spooky, an ex- boys’ school, and the former residence of Haile Selassie. Now obviously, for me, that was about an afternoon’s raised eyebrows and scratching of head, but there’s no other comment in the book on the subject. I imagine if His Imperial Majesty was prone to writing pot boiling horror novels or the odd bit of phrenology then entire albums would be composed in his honor, but in the absence of that there doesn’t seem to be much scope for including him in the pantheon. Which is fair enough, but it did get me thinking dark thoughts, m’lud.

I could write a lot more on this but I don’t actually have the book with me. Nice photos throughout. Oh yeah, and an index too – proper sensible decisions being made somewhere! Thank you.

my apology

I’ve been really bad at answering emails recently, sorry about that. I will get round to it.

Two main reasons – the better half has been on some serious work deadlines and has been mashing up the computer time to meet them. We gots to put bread on the table, ya hear me?

Plus I went out drinking 3 nights in a row and then got some trippy fluey cold thing. Then I had to go out for a 4th night and it didn’t really do me much good. Some uber cool place in Clerkenwell (I’m sure you lot do this all the time, no?) with fishtanks and lots of leather fixtures. A 40th birthday bash. (How to scare your mates who are bit younger than you and sensitive about not being in their twenties, heheh!).

Anyway the coldy/temperature/throaty thing wasn’t helping me be very sociable so I sat in a corner and smiled at people weakly and looked at the fish a lot, sort of hoping that they wouldn’t begin speaking to me like one of Tony’s freak outs in the Sopranos. And sort of hoping that they would, obviously.

Then a woman in a bowler hat turned up and started ramming large pairs of scissors down her throat and shouting at everyone.

I shit you not, dear reader. Turns out she is Europe’s only female sword swallower, which normally I would be well up for, but this was not exactly helping my recovery on that particular night. At all.

Fair’s fair – she was utterly fantastic, but I was a bit disturbed to discover afterwards that I had been unknowingly nominated as the sort of person who would willingly volunteer to participate in The Act if a more suitable victim could not be intimidated into doing it. Luckily for me I was waaaaaaaaaay out of everyone’s eyeline at the time the call went out for “help”.

sizzle my nizzle (1)

Ok, so that Mama Africa track in the WOEBOT: Dancehall Rejection ting is on the Coolie Dance riddim and is great. And by that I mean both the track and the riddim (you can download so more of it from the Greensleeves Site and they have done a one-riddim LP of it as well but I am just not even thinking of buying new records these days.

I never said Sizzla couldn’t do it any more I just said he only did sometimes – maybe he’s on the up again, which can only be a good thing. (And Matt is the one actually buying the records so he is possibly better placed to comment than me!)

Anyway the rest of the selection is pretty cool as well on first listen.

sizzle my nizzle (2)

Scorching set of entries from Luka on pretty much all bases (marketing, Burroughs, grime slang, westwood & sewell, science!) but some fantastic stuff about Mr Kalonji as well. (Tho obviously you CAN criticise the early records for being homophobic – in fact “Praise Ye Jah” is maybe the best example of how sheer beauty and sheer bigotry can exist in the same song.)