Whatever Works

I went to see this, the new Woody Allen film, on Sunday. I went mainly because it starred Larry David and I wasn't going to pass up an hour and a half of that. I went having often read and heard that Woody's films have been sadly below par for some time. But, delight of delights, I was pleasantly surprised.

First off, there's whole steaming buckets of bovine faeces I could chuck at this if I was feeling sullen. They relate mainly to certain Woody motifs wearing quite thin, occasional triteness of dialogue, plotting and character development and some lazy stereotypes. Myself and the two people I went with also found that we weren't sure of the first few minutes. That, however, was probably because an unannounced and awful short film had put us in a disgruntled mood and made us question if we were in the right cinema.

But I'm not feeling sullen, and the film has a lot to do with that. Despite the main character openly announcing to the audience, Brecht-style, that this isn't a feelgood film, actually it is. It was a lovely romp that made me laugh loads, it was well-acted and there was a reassuring satisfaction in the well-worn plot and character arcs, rather than a sense of groaning inevitability. Also, the misanthropy was of the best kind; a genuine love of humanity clouded by a false disdain generated by disappointment and disillusion. The love peeks through though, and for that reason, I recommend this film, inchworms.

What Next For The Gay Village?

You can read my piece on t'above online. It was published in 'Things Happen' zine, which was launched as part of FutureEverything festival but which will continue independently. It's great. We like MMDC.

Here is the link:

http://issuu.com/mmdc/docs/things_happen_issuu_one

Coco and Celine

I found an old notebook I'd had when I went to Spain in late 2008 with my friends Jon and Jim. A lot of what follows was a collaborative mind-spurt with them, and much fun it was too.

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In the airport on the way there we spotted a small squat old woman who resembled Ann Miller as 'Coco' in Mulholland Drive. That is, if Coco had bleached her hair and been a nouty Manc with a long-suffering and hard of hearing husband in tow.

After perpetual squabbling at the gate we heard her exclaim, with a slight crack in her voice, "just SHUT UP!" Much, much later, safely ensconsed on the Costa de la Luz, we spotted them by the side of the swimming pool. "There's lots of brollies," the husband said reassuringly. "THERE'S NO BROLLIES!" she snapped.

We made it our business to track them.

By the delicious and varied soups in the hotel restaurant:

Husband: Fancy any of these?

Coco: [in world-weary tone] No...not really.

By the pool again:

Husband: At least it's a soft surface to walk on.

Coco: HMPH!

It became paramount that we got near them at baggage reclamation on the way back, but sadly they must have been staying another week to torment each other in the Mediterranean sun.

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The PA around the swimming pool was highly unpredictable. Sometimes it would play a varied selection of music, other times it would fall silent. More often than not it played the same three Celine Dion songs on constant repeat.

It was soon obvious to us that Celine lived feral in the hotel grounds, dressed only in a filthy towel with a hole bitten into it for her head to go through. She would eat rubbish out of the bins and occasionally perform lightning raids on the kitchens, prompting the chefs to chase her maniacally with meat cleavers whilst yelling "¡PUTA!"

She'd forgotten how to talk but could still sing all her songs perfectly. At night she would go down to the beach and bay at the tide, trying to drive it back as she splashed in the surf, pooing in the wet sand.

Old bones chattering

There is a long-ago project that my friend and I once embarked on, provisionally called 'The Condition of the Working Classes in Moston'.

It was going to be a for a magazine called Handpocket, which also never materialised.

In retrospect the concept had suspicious overtones of slumming, but since I'm working class this was clearly not the intention. It's hard to really express what the actual intention was - mythologising areas a bit like mine but not being too emotionally close? The Engels reference was also not accidental or detached from its context for the sake of it in a tedious postmodernist style. I hated that sort of shit as much then as I do now.

Anyway, I thought I'd recycle some extracts for ye old times sake. It's written in a self-consciously jumbled manner which can be explained by my obsession for all things Dada and surrealist back then. It should be stressed that it was not meant to be taken seriously; the very thought would make my toes curl so much that they'd turn into barbed claws.

Most of it took place in a graveyard. Spooky darling!

On Arrival we spot Moston’s ‘World Famous’ Barber Shop I expect Davro and Norris from CoroNATION Street but am disappointed. At first disorientation, alleviated by sweet bike-riding boy who asks “…do we take photos of graffiti?” He extends kindness and shows us derelict housing estate – buildings not that old but metall-I-call-y boarded up rising with the fermenting odour of tarmac-ed vegetable soup.

To some a playground to others misery slated, actual slate piled up in yard - a dislodged metal plate NOTED AND REPORTED says the sticker. But no action taken. We peek to the dripdripdrip of the dank rotty-kitchen as violent sneezing echoes from somewhere nearby. Macca Daz Becca Chanel Carly lamppost piss territory.

Shuffle shuffle goes the pizza faced exertion man as his arms droop to the weight of his shopping bags, cross paths. With the orange pedal pusher woman limp-stick greaseball gent, the front garden’s plants wilting at the futility of it all. Richmond, Richmond. ///A-lway///s Richmond!

The ground swells up with the flatulence of the dead as you see the graveyard from the street, reminding people - they’re dying, you see! So said old lady in charity shop, milk and sugar mix up. A skip is on stand by, running out of space, chuck them in there. Piling up in the farmish mud a harvest of death. Wooden crosses like the sort you’d make for pets. Brown tiles white walls. The Edge has graffitied his name – he wants to ‘keep it real in Moston, maaan’ (PAULMCCARTNEYTHUMBSUPGRIN). The street that runs alongside – Millais, a malaise – the malady. The street is ‘un-adopted’ – nobody wants it. “Just a moment ago I was a useless cripple!” squawks Dawn French.

C-dogg shouts graffiti; a pound-shop version of Snoop. Between the Graveyard and the Giant Inflatable Snowman ballroom. What do we have here, Catholic guilt? OSTentatious graves, Patrick Kathleen O’Reilly. Pretty picture of dead scally boy with that Police song become tribute to Notorious B.I.G. lyrics emblazoned. Flowers in wire grates – bargain bins? Italiano Cav Domenico; he once was the knight of the crown of Italy but now he stands opposite a stone that looks to be from a Joy Division front cover.

A crow swoops down, hovering in the in-between. People’s extremities whetting its aPPetite. Beheaded Virgin Mary didn’t pay her council tax whilst headless cherub abused systematically in Care. Corpse-breath and lavender emanates as photographed granny ghost dodders toward you; “Give us a kissy, love!” A tallying with them wanderers before who smelt of shit and perfume.

Trade-off, face off, stand off – the stone says ‘you gave your son, so here’s our mamma’. Was it a fair swap then? Henry Salter’s sovereign ring looks to be grave robbed. Legal language wife of the above. She was, she did NOT fall of the back of a lorry I’ll have you know! Eeeh, dear. Family gatherings. Families with the name Bunbury – Oscar Wilde’s relatives? Tacky ornamentation, reminded of Victorian cats on sale on eBay. They’d thought on to give the deceased a Christmas card though.

Those brick pubs, slanted roofs – lean and sharply defined enforced happiness like Christmas. 'The Jolly Miller’, ‘Chez Nicole’ ooh luv just a bit off the top, if you know what I mean – the tired old hairdresser bingowinged balk.

Bus back grunts, another celebrity in Moston there looks to be. ‘Ank Marvin’s Bakery, lonesome highway-flavoured buns of despair. A fellow passenger this time oldish woman, her hair a peachy-orange colour. The sound it would make - reality warping at the corners as a metal bar stretched, or a tape slowing down; “Aaaaooooooowww.” The smell of her perfume corresponded exactly to the colour of her hair. Sadly the hair didn’t make the noise. Last sight of North Mancs – a climbing frame amidst debris, the potential site of a Throbbing Gristle video surely?

Hidden depths

Walking through the park I happened upon a stout old woman twatting a tennis ball with a hockey stick for her pug, which was wearing a pink collar.

Just as I was revelling in this vignette, the pug came and sniffed around my feet and the old woman erupted with the voice of a dominatrix, "Get. The. Ball!"

I imagined the dog as some kind of substitute for previous debased and exhausted human victims.

Jacky

"Presently there was a noise on the staircase. He shut up Margaret's card in the pages of Ruskin, and opened the door. A woman entered, of whom it is simplest to say that she was not respectable. Her appearance was awesome. She seemed all strings and bell-pulls - ribbons, chains, bead necklaces that clicked and caught - and a boa of azure feathers hung round her neck, with the ends uneven. Her throat was bare, wound with a double row of pearls, her arms were bare to the elbows, and might again be detected at the shoulder, through cheap lace. Her hat, which was flowery, resembled those punnets, covered with flannel, which we sowed with mustard and cress in our childhood, and which germinated here yes, and there no. She wore it on the back of her head. As for her hair, or rather hairs, they are too complicated to describe, but one system went down her back, lying in a thick pad there, while another, created for a lighter destiny, rippled around her forehead. The face - the face does not signify. It was the face of the photograph, but older, and the teeth were not so numerous as the photographer had suggested, and certainly not so white. Yes, Jacky was past her prime, whatever that prime may have been. She was descending quicker than most women into the colourless years, and the look in her eyes confessed it."

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Neoliberal crocodile tears

This morning I attended the first part of a three-day careers fair for postgraduates put on by the university. I admit that my levels of cynicism were so high from the start that I was already wondering which type of little cakes Food On Campus would wheel out come lunch time. Perhaps it would just be fruit.

As it happened I wasn't there by lunchtime. Using the opening inanities to scour the wasteful plastic folder full of irrelevant paper for anything of interest, I discovered something. Out of the forty or so people speaking (the first day was presentations by people with PhDs who are now employed), maybe around five came from the humanities. Only three of those came anywhere near to having studied something that would in principle lead to similar employment opportunities to my own work. And we're talking comparing 15th century pottery with late 20th century sexual, cultural and political radicalism here.

If I'm honest this was no surprise, but the starkness of the bias towards mostly marketing, business and science subordinated to business was still hard to swallow. I looked at a session on working in the public sector - everyone speaking at it specialised in the above. These kinds of discoveries went on. And on.

As if to hammer this home, we were given a keynote speech by a self-important stuffed shirt from the upper echelons of university management. Laughably, he was wearing a purple tie, as if in formal and pseudo-political allegiance with the university's garish colour scheme. As he droned on and on about how research is vital to the reproduction of advanced capitalism (he may as well have expressed it like this), I zoned out, my ears only pricking up at particularly huff-inducing claims like "a Chinese reading of Victorian literature will be no different to an English one". My mind made up that I would rather forfeit my free lunch than sit through a day of this crap, I was just waiting for it to be over so I could go home and mark exam scripts.

Then it happened. Prior to this point, imagine the atmosphere in the lecture theatre as being like that of any speech that no-one really wants to be at. It's a formality, everyone knows the score, the speaker's mannerisms, intonation and the structure of their talk are all well-worn and predictable. Suddenly this man goes,

"And I'd like to conclude with an anecdote about a PhD student of my wife's. This might be seen as a political comment, but I really don't mean it in that way at all.

The student in question is Chinese, and had grown up like all of us shaped by and not questioning the society in which she lived. She said to my wife that doing a PhD had set her free. And I think that's the most wonderful thing, what more could you ask...forgive me for my emotion,"

he concluded as his voice broke and his eyes welled up with tears. The atmosphere had gone from half-arsed to knife-edged in what dramatists might call a 'beat'. I was staggered.

Here was gross indoctrination in action, in a really uncharacteristic way. I've found that the common experience of the encroachment of neoliberal logic on the academy is nearly always creeping, insidious and utterly banal. Yet this man was willing to dramatically allude to the spectre of totalitarianism, von Hayek-style, and weep crocodile tears, to provide a crass emotional underscore to his tedious management-babble.

What's especially telling about the anecdote, apart from the assumptions that it isn't political and that we don't question the society in which we live, is that the bloke can't even see the contradictions in his example: China is a repressive state, yet it has operated on economically neoliberal lines since 1978. Free markets don't equal free people. On top of this, how does coming to 'free West' and doing a PhD 'set you free' if knowledge must now always be directly relevant to furthering the project of globalised capitalism, as he and his ilk also argue? Is it just me, or does that make researchers into complete drones?

In this situation it's not surprising that people in subject areas like mine either convert to a 'safe' profession like law, go into PR, marketing or advertising, take up an advanced but boring bureaucratic position or more often than not end up on the scrap heap. We either squeeze ourselves to fit or we're discarded, after having been falsely encouraged in order to boost league table results on performance, student numbers and funding awards. The same utilitarian-capitalist logic, it almost goes without saying, lying behind such league tables.

What does this man's anecdote signify more widely? Was he just having trouble with the anti-depressants? Or might it, on some micro-level, be a hint that in the current economic recession, neoliberalism is facing a crisis of legitimacy? On top of dull 'common-sense', we also need 'moving' exhortations. I wonder how much of this will go on as justification for the Con-Dem plans to raise tuition fees. It has to remembered, however, that such a crisis of legitimacy in all areas will pass pretty quickly if no effective opposition forcefully manages to put an alternative viewpoint across.

Whatever the case, it's not what I needed to hear on a Friday.