Going on holiday tomorow, and the first thing I'll have to do is phone the water company and beg them not to send the bailiffs round. Undelivered bills and cheques which are in credit, but from an expired book, mean that Wednesday is the deadline for final payment, and as yet they've received nowt from me. Paid by giro slip at the Post Office on Saturday, but don't know if that will process before Wednesday, what with the Bank Holiday etc. Only hope they believe me when I tell them that- I'd even fax them the giro stub if needs be. I really hate this kind of shit.
It's really unfortunate that the whole Polish issue has co-incided with the subject of relations with the British "Muslim Community" (whatever that means). The two are different in several major respects, but have inevitably been conflated by the rightwing press, and a few narcissists on the left who enjoy the frisson of pissing off their readers. Usually along the lines of "No more !/I've changed my stance !/Time for a rethink !" The causes of such about-faces are usually such dire events as-
1) My flight was delayed.
2) There was no drinks trolley.
3) Those scowling chaps with the beards are nowhere near as servile as the ones who used to clean Daddy's pool when he was Ambassador to Mumbai.
Sorry, but if you want to do an Enoch, then there was an event thirteen months ago which maybe deserved a little more ire.
And if you've already passed verdict on the men who were arrested the other week, who haven't even been tried yet, might i remind you of the Sun headline the morning after Jean Charles de Menezes was shot, when no-one even knew who he was, let alone if he was a terrorist-
1 down, 3 to go.
Makes you proud to be British. Even prouder when the image of thousands dying in the Twin Towers is further debased by being printed alongside stories regarding said men, and COMIC STRIP (literally) versions of "what might have happened". No-one ever heard of "innocent until proven guilty" ?
Monday, August 28, 2006
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Regardless of the figures, there are a few perennial things in "discussion" of immigration that crop up consistently-
To take someones's job- This is an interesting concept. It creates the idea that a job is something that can be snatched from someone's hands, like a pint or a handbag. Unfortunately, if it happens like that, then the work is most likely black market, and is likely to involve only illegal foreign labour, generating a product or service at a great, but unfortunately illegitimate, saving to the very people who bluster about jobs being taken.
If it's legitimate employment, then, in my experience, this is usually what happens. A job vacancy appears- one which, if it's the kind of thing a newly-arrived immigrant can do, probably became vacant because it's so tedious, demeaning or poorly paid that its previous incumbent had his/her fill and quit.
The employer considers various applicants, and selects one on the basis, probably not of skills (as these are minimal), but how long the applicant is likely to remain in this lousy post, and how hard s/he is willing to work to keep it. Again, since a newly-arrived immigrant with minimal language skills is not likely to have much in the way of choice, chances are that s/he will come up trumps in that category. It may well be that, as one of my neighbours recently claimed, that they are willing to work for less, but if it's above the minimum wage then I'm afraid that's just capitalism. And if it's below, then that is also the case, but in the old-fashioned sense of "outright bloody exploitation/alienation" (oops, put that Marx away).
Even if you live in an area with high immigration impact, seriously, how many unskilled natives do you know who are unemployed ? According to the Faggot, sorry the Independent, quoting the DoE, although unemployment has risen recently there are still more people in employment than at any time since it was recorded. And how long would you expect those people to remain unemployed ? Not long, I'd reckon, if they're not "wasters" (as I read British workers described by one employment agency that prefers dagoes).
And who with a grain of sense would turn away skilled workers when we constantly hear about the lack of them ? One third of the health service is staffed by immigrants. Stick 'em on the boat back to Key Worker Land !
It may well be that this changes when marauding hordes of Olgas and Vanyas "pour in" over the next two years. I've no idea what right overseas EU members have to welfare if they have held no employment at all. I very much doubt that someone could arrive and, if they had no luck job-hunting at first, just sign on. And if things did get to the bursting point that the redtops predict, then I imagine word would get back to their home countries and their little brothers and sisters would probably decide to stay put. Especially since they will most likely be "taking" British jobs in the form of overseas outsourcing by then. The BASTARDS ! They don't come over here, take our money and we drink their beer !
To take someones's job- This is an interesting concept. It creates the idea that a job is something that can be snatched from someone's hands, like a pint or a handbag. Unfortunately, if it happens like that, then the work is most likely black market, and is likely to involve only illegal foreign labour, generating a product or service at a great, but unfortunately illegitimate, saving to the very people who bluster about jobs being taken.
If it's legitimate employment, then, in my experience, this is usually what happens. A job vacancy appears- one which, if it's the kind of thing a newly-arrived immigrant can do, probably became vacant because it's so tedious, demeaning or poorly paid that its previous incumbent had his/her fill and quit.
The employer considers various applicants, and selects one on the basis, probably not of skills (as these are minimal), but how long the applicant is likely to remain in this lousy post, and how hard s/he is willing to work to keep it. Again, since a newly-arrived immigrant with minimal language skills is not likely to have much in the way of choice, chances are that s/he will come up trumps in that category. It may well be that, as one of my neighbours recently claimed, that they are willing to work for less, but if it's above the minimum wage then I'm afraid that's just capitalism. And if it's below, then that is also the case, but in the old-fashioned sense of "outright bloody exploitation/alienation" (oops, put that Marx away).
Even if you live in an area with high immigration impact, seriously, how many unskilled natives do you know who are unemployed ? According to the Faggot, sorry the Independent, quoting the DoE, although unemployment has risen recently there are still more people in employment than at any time since it was recorded. And how long would you expect those people to remain unemployed ? Not long, I'd reckon, if they're not "wasters" (as I read British workers described by one employment agency that prefers dagoes).
And who with a grain of sense would turn away skilled workers when we constantly hear about the lack of them ? One third of the health service is staffed by immigrants. Stick 'em on the boat back to Key Worker Land !
It may well be that this changes when marauding hordes of Olgas and Vanyas "pour in" over the next two years. I've no idea what right overseas EU members have to welfare if they have held no employment at all. I very much doubt that someone could arrive and, if they had no luck job-hunting at first, just sign on. And if things did get to the bursting point that the redtops predict, then I imagine word would get back to their home countries and their little brothers and sisters would probably decide to stay put. Especially since they will most likely be "taking" British jobs in the form of overseas outsourcing by then. The BASTARDS ! They don't come over here, take our money and we drink their beer !
Friday, August 18, 2006
I take it all back. Had a chat with 'er downstairs the other day, and apologized if I'd woken her at the weekend. She bemusedly answered that she hadn't heard a thing.
End of the week. A "recovery Friday"- the party pumps will stay on the mat til tomorrow night. In the meantime-
Tom's Desert Island Discs no. 4- "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", by The Flying Burrito Brothers
The who ? No, honestly missus, that was their name.
History is all written in retrospect of course, seemingly more so in art than anything else. In the rare event of a tag or category being invented at the time of what it describes, it's often an insult at first, like "punk" or "impressionist". Music writers love tags more than most, to the extent that they often seem to invent them because they sound neat, and then run around looking for acts to squeeze into them.
"Cosmic American Music" is one of the few cases I can think of where an actual musician undertook this process. In the late 60s (as you might guess from the word "cosmic"), a cosetted Rolling Stones hanger-on called Gram Parsons produced said moniker and set about trying to make a kind of music that encompassed rock'n'roll, country, soul, blues, gospel and other uniquely American genres. Amazingly, he succeeded.
You may know the original version of "Do Right..", by Aretha Franklin. If you don't, imagine her signature song "Respect" slowed right down, with the same rock-solid rhythm and defiant vocal. For all that she demands respect and equal terms from her lover, her vocal often sounds on the edge of breaking. These demands are based on experience, not a workshop.
The Flying Burritos were California hippie rockers, by contrast to Aretha's southern R&B band. They take the song as a country waltz, a piano loping along on the exact beat of the drums, unlike the church organ that seeps throught the groove of Aretha's version like Delta humidity. Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman sing in close harmony, the like of which you might hear at a family singalong in the Appalachians. Parsons' voice is often knocked as high and reedy, needing the support of his later singing partner Emmylou Harris, but he sings divinely here. Throughout, the vocals are beautifully punctuated by the pedal-steel guitar of Sneaky Pete Kleinou, who also turns in the most graceful, swooning, minimal solo I've ever heard on that instrument. At the conclusion, David Crosby (one of the greatest ever harmony singers) adds an aching high part to the vocal. They don't alter the lyrics at all, which unfortunately transforms the middle eight from feminist to male supremacist, but the whole thing is so beautiful you can forgive them. I doubt it was intentional (at least I hope not, given the relatively neanderthal attitudes most hippie blokes still had towards da sistahs).
A rock line-up performing a soul song country style. Cosmic, maaaaaaaaaaan.
End of the week. A "recovery Friday"- the party pumps will stay on the mat til tomorrow night. In the meantime-
Tom's Desert Island Discs no. 4- "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man", by The Flying Burrito Brothers
The who ? No, honestly missus, that was their name.
History is all written in retrospect of course, seemingly more so in art than anything else. In the rare event of a tag or category being invented at the time of what it describes, it's often an insult at first, like "punk" or "impressionist". Music writers love tags more than most, to the extent that they often seem to invent them because they sound neat, and then run around looking for acts to squeeze into them.
"Cosmic American Music" is one of the few cases I can think of where an actual musician undertook this process. In the late 60s (as you might guess from the word "cosmic"), a cosetted Rolling Stones hanger-on called Gram Parsons produced said moniker and set about trying to make a kind of music that encompassed rock'n'roll, country, soul, blues, gospel and other uniquely American genres. Amazingly, he succeeded.
You may know the original version of "Do Right..", by Aretha Franklin. If you don't, imagine her signature song "Respect" slowed right down, with the same rock-solid rhythm and defiant vocal. For all that she demands respect and equal terms from her lover, her vocal often sounds on the edge of breaking. These demands are based on experience, not a workshop.
The Flying Burritos were California hippie rockers, by contrast to Aretha's southern R&B band. They take the song as a country waltz, a piano loping along on the exact beat of the drums, unlike the church organ that seeps throught the groove of Aretha's version like Delta humidity. Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman sing in close harmony, the like of which you might hear at a family singalong in the Appalachians. Parsons' voice is often knocked as high and reedy, needing the support of his later singing partner Emmylou Harris, but he sings divinely here. Throughout, the vocals are beautifully punctuated by the pedal-steel guitar of Sneaky Pete Kleinou, who also turns in the most graceful, swooning, minimal solo I've ever heard on that instrument. At the conclusion, David Crosby (one of the greatest ever harmony singers) adds an aching high part to the vocal. They don't alter the lyrics at all, which unfortunately transforms the middle eight from feminist to male supremacist, but the whole thing is so beautiful you can forgive them. I doubt it was intentional (at least I hope not, given the relatively neanderthal attitudes most hippie blokes still had towards da sistahs).
A rock line-up performing a soul song country style. Cosmic, maaaaaaaaaaan.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
The design of these flats is a real fucking drag. I've bent over backwards in the last year to not generate neighbour-bothering degrees of noise, but this weekend I had a friend around and was up til about 2 on Friday, then got back from a party last night at 2.30, and was serving munchies for about another hour. My neighbour declares today that she's "tired", which is coded language for "you kept me awake". I feel like I'm sneaking in aged 17, trying not to wake my parents. The galling thing is, I can hear it just as clearly when she takes a 3 Am piss, or when she gets up for her early shift. The guy upstairs is morbidly obese, and sleeps on a futon. I can hear it EVERY TIME he turns over, farts and some other things I don't want to speculate on. He also goes to the bog every other night in the wee small hours.
GET A FUCKING LIFE, THE LOT OF YOU.
GET A FUCKING LIFE, THE LOT OF YOU.
Monday, August 07, 2006
The current bloodbath has prompted me to dig out my copy of "The Palestine-Israeli Conflict", which I first read a couple of years ago. It seemed quite a good primer, being a history written in two halves by two UK-based academics, the first by Dan Cohn-Sherbok, the second by Dawoud El-Alami. Both are utterly candid about the atrocities perpetuated by their own side. There is also a blog-style exchange of 3 short responses each at the end. My edition is from 2001, and interestingly, Hizbullah don't get a single mention. There's also a few claims in the exchanges in the end which may no longer hold quite so true (if they ever did in the first place)-
El-Alami, p210- "You should look more closely at the image of the uncivilised Arab in Western culture. This image is promoted and accepted in a way which would be totally unacceptable with regard to Jews or any other ethnic group. Israel is portrayed as a civilized Western country surrounded by hostile barbarians."
"The greater part of the Arab world does accept the existence of the Israeli State as a fact and is prepared to do business with it".
Cohn-Sherbok, p202-3- "By rejecting the majority decision to partition Palestine ((in 1948)), the Arab nations had placed themselves above the fundamental democratic process on which the UNis based. Since the creation of Israel.......Arab nations have repeatedly denied Israel's right to exist. While Jews have sought peace with their neighbours, the Arabs have waged war."
"Surrounded by its foes, isolated from external support, the Jewish nation has continually sought to safeguard itself from aggression. But it has not been the aggressor in these conflicts. Rather, as a young and relatively tiny country, it has continually sought to defend itself from attack;nonetheless, in doing so, Israel has constantly struggled to live in harmony with its neighbours".
And here's one I couldn't even comment on without reading shitloads more, from El-Alami- "..the history of Jewish Palestine ended effectively in 137 CE. Until the middle of the twentieth century, there had not been a Jewish majority in Palestine since that time over eighteen hundred years ago."
Presume CE is some equivalent of AD.
El-Alami, p210- "You should look more closely at the image of the uncivilised Arab in Western culture. This image is promoted and accepted in a way which would be totally unacceptable with regard to Jews or any other ethnic group. Israel is portrayed as a civilized Western country surrounded by hostile barbarians."
"The greater part of the Arab world does accept the existence of the Israeli State as a fact and is prepared to do business with it".
Cohn-Sherbok, p202-3- "By rejecting the majority decision to partition Palestine ((in 1948)), the Arab nations had placed themselves above the fundamental democratic process on which the UNis based. Since the creation of Israel.......Arab nations have repeatedly denied Israel's right to exist. While Jews have sought peace with their neighbours, the Arabs have waged war."
"Surrounded by its foes, isolated from external support, the Jewish nation has continually sought to safeguard itself from aggression. But it has not been the aggressor in these conflicts. Rather, as a young and relatively tiny country, it has continually sought to defend itself from attack;nonetheless, in doing so, Israel has constantly struggled to live in harmony with its neighbours".
And here's one I couldn't even comment on without reading shitloads more, from El-Alami- "..the history of Jewish Palestine ended effectively in 137 CE. Until the middle of the twentieth century, there had not been a Jewish majority in Palestine since that time over eighteen hundred years ago."
Presume CE is some equivalent of AD.
Thursday, August 03, 2006
If Syd Barrett were still alive, I imagine he would be as bemused as he was in life as to why people were still so interested in his brief career 40-odd years ago as the founder of Pink Floyd and then as a solo artist. I don't know if he had the wherewithal to take such a degree of perspective on himself, but I suspect that was a period of his life he viewed with some regret, with it being the time he did himself the mental damage via LSD which rendered him unable to function as most people do.
Living in Cambridge, his legend felt even more present than it had ever done in the teenage hours I spent listening to "The Madcap Laughs", "Barrett" and "Relics". Details, both mundane and macabre, drifted around town like tumbleweed. He lived in his Mum's old house in Cherry Hinton. He was in and out of Fulbourne mental hospital on a regular basis. He hadn't been a recluse before, but for some reason, maybe the internet, he had more snoopers than ever in recent years, and had stopped answering his door. Then there were the sadder ones. His routine was often made up of visits to the chemist- not to buy anything for his mind, but tampons, or talcum powder, which he would sprinkle over his head, like the brylcreem and mandrax pills he once crowned himself with on stage at the height of his public decline. He once broke all his windows and chucked out his furniture. These stories may have grown in the telling, but they come from people I know who lived in the same area, the same street.
So why do all the magazine profiles dwell on the handsome but haunted 20something, and not the harassed-looking baldie on his bicycle ? Well, that kind of legend just sells, doesn't it ? Sad but true. I wish they had printed the loving tribute by his sister that appeared in the Cambridge evening news, which mentioned how he had retained his love of music, jazz in particular, his love of kids, and his passion, not for songwriting anymore, but DIY (most of which unfortunately fell apart).
I bid my own farewell to Syd a few days after his death when someone in my local, and utterly unpsychedelic, pub put "See Emily Play" on the jukebox. I stopped dead and listened, the layers of familiarity peeling away. It's a great psychedelic pop song. Catchy, with a quirky lyric and vocal, and freakout instrumentation which is instantly identifiable with its era but in no way dated. It reminded me of when I looked out of my bedroom window and caught my dad dancing to "Gigolo Aunt", which was on my stereo at the time, or when my mum came into my room and asked me to put on "Effervescing Elephant" again, because she thought it was so sweet and catchy. Of course doomed rockstars appeal to tortured adolescents, but if you are feeling lost or lonely then of course a song like "Won't you Miss Me" or "Dominoes" will appeal to you, at whatever age. I know a lot of people were a pain when you just wanted some peace, Syd, or Roger, as your loved ones still called you, but they must have started somewhere, and that was with your brilliant songs.
Living in Cambridge, his legend felt even more present than it had ever done in the teenage hours I spent listening to "The Madcap Laughs", "Barrett" and "Relics". Details, both mundane and macabre, drifted around town like tumbleweed. He lived in his Mum's old house in Cherry Hinton. He was in and out of Fulbourne mental hospital on a regular basis. He hadn't been a recluse before, but for some reason, maybe the internet, he had more snoopers than ever in recent years, and had stopped answering his door. Then there were the sadder ones. His routine was often made up of visits to the chemist- not to buy anything for his mind, but tampons, or talcum powder, which he would sprinkle over his head, like the brylcreem and mandrax pills he once crowned himself with on stage at the height of his public decline. He once broke all his windows and chucked out his furniture. These stories may have grown in the telling, but they come from people I know who lived in the same area, the same street.
So why do all the magazine profiles dwell on the handsome but haunted 20something, and not the harassed-looking baldie on his bicycle ? Well, that kind of legend just sells, doesn't it ? Sad but true. I wish they had printed the loving tribute by his sister that appeared in the Cambridge evening news, which mentioned how he had retained his love of music, jazz in particular, his love of kids, and his passion, not for songwriting anymore, but DIY (most of which unfortunately fell apart).
I bid my own farewell to Syd a few days after his death when someone in my local, and utterly unpsychedelic, pub put "See Emily Play" on the jukebox. I stopped dead and listened, the layers of familiarity peeling away. It's a great psychedelic pop song. Catchy, with a quirky lyric and vocal, and freakout instrumentation which is instantly identifiable with its era but in no way dated. It reminded me of when I looked out of my bedroom window and caught my dad dancing to "Gigolo Aunt", which was on my stereo at the time, or when my mum came into my room and asked me to put on "Effervescing Elephant" again, because she thought it was so sweet and catchy. Of course doomed rockstars appeal to tortured adolescents, but if you are feeling lost or lonely then of course a song like "Won't you Miss Me" or "Dominoes" will appeal to you, at whatever age. I know a lot of people were a pain when you just wanted some peace, Syd, or Roger, as your loved ones still called you, but they must have started somewhere, and that was with your brilliant songs.
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