The Hoe, the Barbican and Ale

It is funny what you learn, or maybe remember. On a train travelling to the south west longing for privacy I am interrupted by three revelers returning from a drinking birthday celebration at the Tom Cobley, a pub outside Exeter. One of the best pubs in the world I am told and we talk about this and that and drinking.

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Dogville

Dogville (Lars Von Trier) allows interpretation from many perspectives.  As SP said, it is like a Shakespeare play in that respect amongst others.  I focus below on a set of ideas, perhaps more words, I encountered in Lacanian writing about the film.  Zizek refers to Dogville in A perverts guide to Cinema, and elsewhere other writers pick up on his ideas to develop further a Lacanian interpretation.  I have little or no understanding of Lacan and all of that second hand, but the film did allow me to entertain the thought that there was something that I could draw from it about the other, the encounter with the other and how that founds essential elements of our lives and can act as an explanatory framework for understanding.

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Afghanistan, Allegory, the Kite Runner and Knowledge

I watched the Kite Runner, the film directed by Marc Forster (2007).  I’ve not read the book but from the comments of various people who had read it I was expecting something very different, something more.  I experienced the film as profoundly allegorical, relating a story of America’s involvement in Afghanistan prior to the current war, what concerns me is the way that redemption if offered.  The film (and the book too if it is judged by its plot and not its style perhaps, its decoration) is a Hollywood product, an epic tale of salvation offering the promise of forgiveness.

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for example

Sheffield has a plethora of Edwardian terraced houses.  Street after street of them with more or less ornate decorative features.  I came across these windows recently.  They are on three houses each one separated by only one other house in the same terrace.  They are amongst the few that I’ve seen where the window furnishing has been painted to reveal the design.  I was struck not just by this but by the fact that they were on the same row of terraces, not adjacent ones, but close to each other.  It is as if they are a craft, the practice of which has spread by example.

famous last words

In a parish church in Sheffield, a barn of a building, so spacious inside, looking at a stained glass window my eyes are drawn to a dedication and not the image.  The size of the building and an imagined small congregation brings to me how short a time has elapsed between the grand schemes of  founders and today.   It seems arrogant in one way yet a last exhalation in another; famous last words.  And that’s where I was drawn, to dedication, words in stained glass, a text of pride, a practice of pathos outlasting the gospel it frames.

the biro, bottle, foil and fag ash

This is a crackpipe belonging to a friend of a friend of friend [Fofafoaf].  A piece of tin foil covering the top of the bottle would have a bed of cigarette ash placed in it, the crack sitting on top and the smoke drawn through it.  Fofafoaf says he really likes it a lot, it cuts through his moods, it works where other drugs don’t any longer.  Fofafoaf has been trying many different drugs over the last years; in fact he says he’s been a junkie since he was 12, starting with inhaling gas, glue, petrol fumes, anything.  Fofafoaf started to develop a taste for heroin recently; he’s good company so he can always find someone willing to share his tastes, someone generous enough to share with him their tastes.  Smack doesn’t really do the trick though, the crack does.  Fofafoaf is covering something up with all this he says, he’s hiding from his own mind, forgetting who he is, numbing his thoughts, dulling his anxiety, escaping from this world.  The trouble is that the world keeps coming back at him.  He needs to eat.  He needs to sleep.  He needs to see his children. His friends.  And they are still there.  Like his other world, the one that meets at the end of the biro tube.  He can throw it away but biros are cheap and he is good company.  Plastic bottles are cheap too. Tin foil and fag ash.  These affordable props will become ever more luxurious as Fofafoaf’s backdrop becomes ever more sparse.  Until one day, there is just the biro, bottle, foil and fag ash.  Family and friends, as Fofafoaf knows, are more complicated.  They are the theatre in which the props, the scene and even the play take place.  They’ll remain when the drama is over.   He’s good company though. Not a bad bone in his body.  The residue inside the neck of his bottle can be scraped off and smoked, if needed.

in permanance

Sitting in a café on the high street, looking out across the road I suddenly notice a young woman standing in a telephone kiosk, still while people on the street pass by.

I realise she runs the stall selling hats and scarves.  Her stillness surprises me, emphasising how busy I am, how busy we often are.

Someone stops to look at the hats.  Or I assume they do as she disappears from view, her permanence animated by someone joining in.

working class, yes i said it, working class

I heard an interview with Len McCluskey, the General Secretary of Unite.  Asked about why he wouldn’t accept the current plans concerning pension reform bearing in mind the financial pressures everyone was experiencing he spoke about how the pension funds that provided for the pensions of the Unite members were in good financial health. He made the point that the removal of pension rights was a strategy not based on sound financial management of the pension fund incomes but one designed to claw back money from public service workers to fund the deficit.  A deficit that has been ill managed by a financial elite who were not held accountable and who were, individual careers included, bailed out by the very public funds and borrowing which public service workers are now being asked to underwrite through job cuts and reduced pension rights.

That point of view seems to be totally lacking in the Labour Party and  the leadership of Ed Miliband.  His brother,apparently a more skilled player of a middle class game which came to dominate British political life, was sidelined in favour of the leader whose very support was founded, somewhat controversially, in the Union vote.  Yet Ed Miliband does not take the Union line, he tacitly accepts that they are wrong, that there is an eventual economic rationale, a political pragmatism, authorising the side-lining of practically the only remaining vestige of an organised and confident working class organisation.

A criticism of Thatcher is that she inaugurated the domination of  a middle class ethic as a national public morality.  The shop keeper, self made, promoting the agency of individual desire and ambition as the motor to economic well being in the context of which people would, it was imagined, accept the necessity and price of individualism, euphemistically thought of as self determination.  The working class have been encouraged to focus on capital growth, their own through property acquisition, nationally through consumption.  They are if they do not acquiesce,  considered to be dangerous.  Not just in rioting but in potential race relations, in hedonism.  There are so few voices, other than a tamed, heritage inflected, historical account of working class self organisation, from which confidence can be drawn.

The Labour Party has abandoned these positions, their spokespeople are largely middle class whose memories of working class life are themselves rooted in an imagined past rather than experience.  We are all the poorer for this.