Blogging on demand

 

Just imagine if you had to blog to order, to blog on demand, to come up with an original idea for a blog post every week. It would be awful, wouldn’t it. Well, luckily I don’t have to. I don’t have to do anything, although the Robagraph is a self-imposed habit that’s rather taken a hold this year, partly as a discipline, a routine to force myself to rise above the apathy and brain-death so readily engendered by this miserable plague we’ve had inflicted upon us from afar.

Being put on the spot to create something off the cuff is never easy. Blogging, prodding a keyboard in isolation, asynchronously detached from the real world, taking one’s time, changing one’s mind, correcting, editing while completely unobserved, is one thing, hard enough in itself. Enforced do-it-now creativity when combined with an instinctive fear of public speaking in front of thirty nasty little smartarses is something else, and can be intimidating and life changing.  As we shall see.

The most intensely anxiety-provoking, mind-paralysing instance of this that I can recall, occurred when I  was in my mid-teens. It was caused by the man who taught us English, a language which all of us could speak already. He – like most English teachers – read the “Guardian”, was under-sized, and took pleasure in embarrassment. His classroom overlooked a small thoroughfare that was allegedly part of the city’s peripatetic red light district. One of his less endearing habits was to order bashful teenage boys out onto this street, and to shout at the tops of their voices, so that they could be heard from within the classroom, words like “prostitute”, “intercourse” and “fornication”. I thought I was lucky in that I was never selected for this ordeal, not appreciating that the long term downside was that I remained singularly unprepared, in adult life, to fully exploit and enjoy my subsequent transits through Amsterdam, the Pigalle, or King’s Cross. I really wouldn’t know how to go about it, or know what to say.

And now the paralysing episode. One afternoon (memory suggests it feels like a Monday) this man - whom we will call A.L. for arbitrary reasons not necessarily though just possibly connected with his initials - decided that we should each give an impromptu speech, on any topic we liked, anything at all. We had five minutes to think up an idea and scribble some headings, and then for the rest of the 40 minute period A.L. would select victims to give a five minute oration. The selection was made on such factors as where one was sitting, the first letter of one’s name, one’s birthday, whether one was looking particularly keen or the opposite, and similar quasi-random parameters. There was one boy, whom we shall call P.M. for reasons that escape me, who was an extraverted and very sweaty endomorph, incontinently vocal in class, and thus a great favourite of A.L. He was, as I recall, fond of drama, not of the hissy fit queeny variety, but the more tiresomely serious literary sort that ac-torrrrrs and schoolboy show-offs do. If the whole class was asked a question P.M.’s hand would reflexly shoot up: “Sir, please sir, please sir, sir, sir”. Whatever the question, his answer was always the same, “sir, it’s because of society, sir”, and it was always correct. Even now I occasionally dream of P.M., and in the dream he’s always a woman. Sure enough, he was one of those selected to give a speech that afternoon, and he was in his element. I forget the details, but I expect it was to do with society.

Meanwhile I sat there frozen with fear, completely unable to think of anything at all, least of all a subject upon which I could waffle for the allotted time. To the extent that my brain functioned at all, an occasional wandering neuron might glance against old favourites – topics I’d “done” for school projects, like the Forth Bridge, the solar system, or the Stock Exchange stamp forgeries – or another ambling thoughtlet  might graze up against newer passions like the Mersey Railway or the inert gases. I loved the inert or noble gases, lined up down the far right of the periodic table, in what was then called Group VIII. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Mersey Railway too, and in particular the low level station under Liverpool Central, but the inert gases were really special. I was especially fond of krypton – that was, as it were, my element - long before it became a factor in the televisual lives of the masses, and while it still just quietly went about its business of contributing to approximately  0.0001% of the earth’s atmosphere. I wasn’t the only pupil thus enamoured. My friend H.C.P.R. (it sounds like a nineteenth century North American railroad company, doesn’t it), who sadly died not long ago, had a major fetish for the isotope krypton-86. I could see his point. But no, nothing would gel coherently, nothing I could expound upon, not even anecdotes involving my strange relatives, like Uncle Rhos who did dangerous things with scissors or Uncle Willie Tom who had yellow skin and weekly injections in his bum. Nothing at all, completely mentally blank, total cerebral paralysis. No plausible topic out of all the immensity of time and space and growing up.

Somehow, I survived the lesson. I’ve no idea how, but I did. Chance, luck, fate, I suppose.. My name began with the same letter as it always did, my birthday was in the month it always was, I was sitting where I always sat, and my face was white with fear. None mattered that afternoon. By the end of the lesson I was a total nervous wreck. However, while enjoying that blissful moment of relief and escape I reflected too that I might not have been selected for a different reason. I concluded that I had just experienced a fundamental judgement about me as a person, an assessment  that has become more familiar and more expected with the passing years. That day I understood for the first time that no one was remotely interested in anything I might have to say. Education is character building, it certainly is.

So, if you insist that I should produce a blog this week, like every other week, I’m afraid there’s nothing doing. Nothing, zilch, rien, nada, nichts. My silence is an act of retrospective revenge.

A long while ago I learned that A.L. had emigrated to New York. I visualised him on a seedy stretch of 8th Avenue, on the block where Hungry Hilda’s once stood, yelling “hooker” at the top of his voice. I hope he was successful. For yes, it’s true, it’s about society, it always is.

Isomorphisms of expectation

Resolutely stuck in the 1960s as I am, I recently watched yet another programme about the Great Train Robbery of August 1963. Concerned mostly with the identity of an alleged gang member who was never caught, the programme also discussed how the raid was carried out. One of the crucial requirements for the robbery to succeed was that the mail train needed to be halted at the precise point where the ambush was to take place, in rural Buckinghamshire. The gang lacked the technical knowledge to tinker with the railway signalling system. How then to stop the train? The solution, accredited to gang member Roger Cordrey, was to stuff a leather glove over the green signal, and rig up a battery-powered red lamp nearby. The train driver, speeding along in the dark, would see the red light and apply the brakes. He would assume that the red light was the signal; he had no reason to think otherwise. A signal, green or red, was what he was expecting to see. I’ve always considered this a clever, albeit criminal, illustration of lateral thinking.

Also recently, I’ve been attempting to watch the second series of “Hold the Sunset”, about which the only good things are the theme tune (“Have I The Right ?” by the Honeycombs) and fragments of pleasant Thames-side scenery around Richmond and Twickenham. This dire series has progressed from being merely negatively amusing to positively annoying. It’s so sad to see the long and illustrious career of John Cleese being tarnished by association with this dismal offering. However, thinking of Cleese in his former glory, and  in particular thinking of “Python”, for no very good reason I today recalled an episode first shown in December 1969, in other words almost half a century ago. Actually not featuring Cleese at all, this sketch concerns a psychopathic blood-crazed barber (Michael Palin) with his customer (Terry Jones). Wrestling with his own homicidal tendencies and with his customer settled in the chair, the Michael Palin character switches on a reel-to-reel tape recorder which plays typical barber shop conversations – about the weather, the football, etc – with suitable gaps for his customer to respond, and also the sound of scissors snipping away. Apart from the total absurdity of the situation the customer has no reason to suspect that the sounds he is hearing aren’t those of him having his hair cut. His expectations are anticipated … and fooled. An early outing in the direction of virtual reality, I suppose.

That is, until he susses the situation, and Palin famously confesses, “I didn’t want to be a barber anyway. I wanted to be a lumberjack”. And we know what comes next.

Detecting analogies, finding structural similarities, patterns, isomorphisms across apparently dissimilar situations can be a route to creativity, it can be a symptom of hypomania or schizophrenia, and it can be extremely tiresome. But I wonder: the fake railway signal, the fake barbering sounds. There’s some sort of deep level similarity going on, but whether it’s worth anything, well, who knows. Are there other parallels to be unearthed in other walks of life, in other created works? I really don’t know. I never wanted to be a blogger anyway. I wanted to be a logger, leaping from tree to tree as they float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia … The giant redwood, the larch … 

And that’s probably quite enough for one very warm Bank Holiday Monday.

Four Sturges

Well, we had the Three Esses the other week, and now it’s the turn of the Four Sturges. Just think Ronnie Barker.

As a child, I loved to draw. I still do. Drawing accompanied most of my passing fads and phases, all my visual obsessions, from shabby sheds to space rockets, from steelworks to stadia, from battleships to bridges – always bridges. Subject matter came in waves; I would have an idea about something, a temporary passion to pursue, to illustrate on paper. I’d get on with it for a while, and before long it would burn itself out.  A fallow period would ensue until the next enthusiasm took hold.

My problem was that my desire to draw was constant, it was an urge almost physiological in its intensity. But every now and then I would be stuck, sat at the dining table ready with paper and pencil, mind’s eye constipated; I’d turn to my parents and wail “I don’t know what to draw”. They would offer helpful and plausible suggestions – something we had noticed on a walk together, an episode in a story I’d read, a seaside pier we had strolled along. Well meant, often imaginative, and dovetailing with my known visual interests, but these suggestions were never any good. Never. Eventually I learned not to ask; I knew that the inspiration had to come from within, it could only come from my own mind. What I didn’t realise, for a long time, was that such patterns of up and down, peak and trough, boom and bust, are perfectly natural. To try and resist them is unwise.

At present I feel I’m emerging from a spell of “painter’s block”, having long ago switched my primary allegiance from pencil to oils. This follows a spell of activity at the end of last year, so it’s not unexpected. I’m in the fortunate position of not having to worry about it, being an artistic unknown. I’m due to exhibit locally at the end of this year, but that’s a long way off at present, and I feel no pressure. A few ideas are starting to gel, but for now I don’t have to do anything.

Nevertheless, I can see how it can be a worry. An acquaintance of mine, modestly commercially successful in the art world, wrote to me before Christmas to say that he is due to contribute to an exhibition at the end of March. He said he was currently  several works short, and was evidently struggling and concerned. Clearly, he wasn’t enjoying his chosen activity, which had become a chore rather than a pleasure.

Success, achievement, can bring with it commitments which can be uncomfortable and unnatural to accommodate. Urges can’t be forced, and if they are, the outcome is likely to be unsatisfactory, wooden, stage-fraidy, self-conscious, boring. You see it with poet laureates, the moment they are crowned.

You also see it every summer at the Royal Academy. Every year I tell myself it will be the last time, but I’m always there again next year, groaning and wishing I hadn’t. Once more I see the well known names, the Academicians, hogging the prime wall space. Because I like landscapes, seascapes and townscapes, I know which artists’ work to seek out. It saddens me, how painters who - when they were more or less free to do what they wanted, weren’t famous, and had no commitment to actually do anything - were brilliant, but now that they are expected to perform, to contribute, and they churn out the same old same old every year, only with increasingly insultingly greedy asking prices. But far worse, they paint with no evident enthusiasm, only boredom and slapdash “this will have to do”, even hints of self-parody. Not all of them are like this, but those that are have become, in short, POFs, Precious Old Farts, the consequences of the forced urges hinted at in today’s blogpost title. Where is the satisfaction in that?

I detect a natural progression. A creative theme emerges for someone, develops, gets better, gets very good, gets recognised, gets desirable, gets wanted. It becomes a product, a proper artistic artefact. More is demanded. The theme or style or concept, whatever it is, peaks and plateaus. Sadly though, in due time, the urge starts to dry up, while still the product continues to emerge, ever more routine and lacklustre. Natural decline and death are resisted. Quality and interest level fall away simultaneously. The expectation remains, but the inspiration wanes, disappointment sets in. Is this a happy state of affairs for the artist or the viewer? I believe not.

 
In a way it’s a paradoxical situation, because many people are at their best if faced with a deadline, or if their process of production is constrained in some way. In general, though, it seems to me much better if one can be free to produce whatever, whenever, however one wants, or not at all. I’m in that lucky position; no one is interested, and if I don’t want to, I don’t have to. Four Sturges are surely worse than none at all.

The collective finger – Part Two

Shutting out the conventional world and ignoring expectations is a luxury enjoyed by the elderly, as well as being a mark of the reactionary, the misfit, the crank and the eccentric. It can also be true of the original thinker, the deeply creative artist, or any other brand of focused, determined and memorable individual. Those lists of “greatest ever Britons”, which generally include the likes of Brunel, Newton, Turner, Churchill, Lennon and Hockney (and occasionally Jeremy Clarkson, although I don’t insist), would probably coincide closely with lists – should they ever be compiled - of “greatest ever exercisers of two fingers”.

These are people not acclaimed for their docility, people not famous for accepting the status quo, for being told “you aren’t allowed to think like that” and keeping stumm. Not necessarily easy people to get on with, not necessarily nice or very moral people, but effective at what they did, baiting the establishment, beating it at its own game without becoming fully part of it. The trick, of course, is not to sell out once you’ve done your bit, but to retire or die with said digits still fully outstretched - until rigor mortis completes the job for you. Incidentally, I’m pleased to see that David Hockney is still going strong, doing exactly what he wants to do in amused and growly contempt of those who think he should do differently. I’m greatly looking forward to visiting his retrospective at Tate Britain

In the future, historians may look back at 2016 as a year, along with 1789, 1848 and 1968, when many people started getting stroppy, started giving the finger to those who for many years had told them what to think, what was good for them, what they were and were not allowed to say. They voted for Brexit and for Trump, voted to jump out of a less than perfect frying pan and into a fire, whose temperature and extent neither they nor anyone else could judge or predict. At present, we’re witnessing the irrationality that sets in when rationality doesn’t give you what you want; the irrationality that becomes the new norm, the new rationality.

 
“Two fingers to the lot of you” could be hugely entertaining if the potential implications weren’t so serious. Fine if you’re a genius level artist, engineer or scientist. If you’re the leader of the free world or just an average member of society who wants a more congenial life it may be less reliably productive. A facile and ugly gesture it certainly is, more diagnostic of a despairing state of mind than anything else. A bit like an angry suicide note written intentionally to hurt. Naturally, from time to time everyone needs a safety valve, and giving vent to a vigorous V-sign or its verbal equivalent is probably healthier than taking antidepressants, kicking the cat or invading somewhere that doesn’t deserve it. By itself the gesture does little more than cause offence and make the finger-owner or the obscenity-utterer feel better. Very occasionally, however, it may herald  the start of something, a tipping point, a decision reached, a new start. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis - the eternal Hegelian triad. I’m not holding my breath.

Waiting in the wings

He would have turned left out of Stansfield Road into Dalyell Road, left again into Pulross Road near the point where it joins up with Ferndale Road sneaking in at an acute angle under the railway, round past the post office, and into the main road.  Perhaps in his pram, initially, looking out and “facing the strange” (although it was said of him that he looked as though he’d been here before), then later, on his own two feet. From the quiet, slightly claustrophobic grey back streets, in just over five minutes, into the heart of Brixton, then as now arguably the most sensual, aurally and visually stimulating, informationally intense nexus anywhere in residential London. Markets, big stores, a war-battered populace struggling to get by in those icy, austerity winters, the clatter of green electric trains echoing through gaps in the buildings (the archetypal sound of south London)  – ricochet, ricochet - from viaducts high up and at unexpected angles; steamed up buses, crowds, humanity, the awareness of central London just a couple of miles away. Life itself.

 © R. Abbott 2016

Could these surroundings in any way have contributed to genius, to ambition, to a sense of mortality and of being an outsider, to an urge to make the most of what might be a tragically truncated life? Can places sometimes influence us to become what we become? Can they tell us what to do, can they reflect back at us who we are or should be? Some students of psychogeography might believe so.

I first heard David Bowie in the summer of 1969, on the radio. It was the same afternoon that a short, violent thunderstorm came and went, and had much the same effect – leaving one feeling … what was that?

By the end of the Sixties one was used to musical oddities, but this one, ‘Space Oddity’, was clearly something else. Apart from being a brilliant and timely song, as the manned Apollo lunar launch approached, after a few listenings one realised that this was in a league of its own. Here was a singer/songwriter who thought differently from most, who was thoroughly at home with wordplay of all kinds and with the most peculiar kinds of synaesthesia and obscure allusion, and who wrote about unconventional subjects in offbeat ways. To start with, the punning title itself, then the amazingly physical sensation of lift-off and bursting through clouds and atmosphere into space; the economy of the lyrics – “the papers want to know whose shirts you wear” and the double meaning of “planet Earth is blue”; the homonymic segue “can you hear me Major Tom, can you hear/here am I floating round my tin can”; and most bizarrely of all, the distortion of the vowel sound in “Major”, its increasing “cockneyfication” simulating Doppler shift. Even Lennon-McCartney rarely managed anything quite as concentratedly, cleverly weird.

Then nothing much for a year or two. I was on a train in Italy, joining a compartment of young Americans. “Hey, you’re British”, they exclaimed. “Do you know David Bowie?” There was some transatlantic difference of opinion about how to pronounce the surname; ambiguity even in something as fundamental as that. Interesting.

So, over more than forty years, we have been treated not just to an amazing  productivity of gorgeous songs, but to all kinds of extramusical and verbal intrigues,  fusions of styles and genres – as well as all the haircuts, the outfits, the different voices, the chameleonic adoption of styles and personas, the teasings about gender and sexuality, the acting roles, the manipulation of celebrity, that wonderful laugh, and all the rest of it. This was a man who, even at the age of 68, could invent funky yodelling (‘Girl Loves Me’) and produce the fabulously enjoyable cacophony that is “’Tis a pity she was a whore”. Genius, surely, if not actually a superman.

And it all began in those echoing streets near the railway lines. Though he never penned a specific anthem to the city he loved, in the way that Ray Davies wrote ‘Waterloo Sunset’, there were plenty of references, in ‘The London Boys’, ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’, and elsewhere, to central London as an attractant, albeit a fickle one, for a suburban adolescent craving escape and success. While domiciled in Berlin, LA, Switzerland, Mustique, Manhattan or wherever, London was, I suspect, always his psychological base.

Finally, posthumously, “Our Brixton Boy” was claimed back, by a district in some ways unrecognisable since the late Forties but in other ways unchanged. The trains are no longer uniformly green, the railway bridges have been boringly cosmeticised, the markets sell more exotic items, more languages are spoken, the tube has put in an appearance, but for the things that matter, still the days seem the same.

Bowie’s death was shocking, not only because it came so suddenly, so early, so unexpectedly against all the apparent evidence of continuing creativity but because, totally unreasonable though it is to say so, this was a man who, if anyone could manage it, would be – should be - immortal. All the while, though, as I’m sure he knew from an early age, time was waiting in the wings, its trick being David Robert Jones himself … and you and me. All the while, in those south London streets, from Brixton to Beckenham and Bromley and even the much maligned Penge (where you can sleep while dreaming of walking about in New York), time has been waiting. It’s still there, seeking another victim. Meanwhile, the sounds of those magnificent songs in the mind’s ear still haunt the streets, streets for now emptier, sadder, less hopeful.

From what we can guess, Bowie was a religious person, perhaps not conventionally so, but one who took the parable of the talents to the extreme. He set out to do what he was capable of doing, didn’t just do what anyone else can do, made the most of the gifts he had been given, gave immense pleasure to millions along the way through his extraordinarily fluent and glorious creativity and, while having fun with all the poses and images, remained just an ordinary guy from a backstreet. Any one of us. Well, almost ordinary. That is one of the reasons why we admired him and why we feel the loss so intensely now; he appealed to the outsider in us all, to anyone who has ever plodded the city streets wondering what to do with one’s life, asking forlornly what does it all mean? A protean human being onto whom we could all project ourselves.

 
In the end, though, not the air crash he for so long feared, not the loony’s bullets that did for his friend and hero John Lennon, but just a common and cruel disease. As mortal as the rest of us, for “everybody gets got” and, as is so often observed on such occasions; how utterly stupid and tragic and wasteful. His death, after and despite such immense achievements, after such a fascinating journey through life, brings home to us all the inevitability of our own future demise. But we were blessed to have had him around during our lifetimes.