REVIEW OF 2011

Strictly speaking, not a review at all. Just a precis of my top records of the year, and a playlist of songs mostly from this year, compiled by my wife, friend Alex and myself, and played over pizza and wine on Wednesday night.

Top 15 albums of 2011 first:

1/ Kurt Vile, Smoke rings for my halo
2/ James Blake
3/ Rustie, Glass swords
4/ Burial, Street halo (ep)
5/ Tim Hecker, Ravdeath 1972
6/ Oneohtrix Point Never, Replica
7/ Toro y moi, Underneath the pine
8/ Wiley, 100% publishing
9/ Metronomy, The English riviera
10/ Radiohead, The king of limbs
11/ Ford & Lopatin, Channel pressure
12/ Kate Bush, 50 words for snow
13/ Gang gang Dance, Eye contact
14/ kode9 & Spaceape, Black sun
15/ Paul Simon, So beautiful or so what

Honorable mention: the CD which came free with the festive edition of Homeless Diamonds (St Mungo's magazine of poetry and paintings, itself free).

I suspect some of the ordering from 10 onwards could do with some tinkering; Gang Gang Dance may be in there purely on the strength of "Glass jar".

No place for Battles or James Ferraro - haven't really heard the former, and came to the latter too late in the year. Reissues of the year: Beach Boys' Smile and Harald Grosskopf's Synthesist. Disappointments: Kate Bush, Panda Bear, Gang of Four (the worst album I heard all year).

That'll do!

Now for our 2011 playlist (not sure how Glen Campbell slipped in there ... guess just because I love that song):





































merry Christmas!

"THE PUBLIC SERVICE PENSION PINCH"

Click to expand - or click here to see a larger version.

ALL OUT

Still too busy to blog, but not too busy to big up the industrial action on Wednesday. It's clearly going to be a huge walk-out (plenty of my friends and colleagues who do not take the decision to strike lightly, and may not have done so before, are brassed off enough to withdraw their labour this week), and the huger the better - as Seamus Milne points out, fine words alone will not make the government budge. Only action on a nationwide, millions-strong scale will make a difference.

And far from weakening the economy, defending pensions will help workers in the public and private sectors by maintaining demand. It's the economy, stupid (though I did thank Francis Maude last week for accidentally highlighting the massive economic contribution the public sector makes).

So...









Got it?

COULD YOU STOP YOURSELF FROM FALLING?

Great single from 1981 here:



It's from the Beat's second album, Wha'ppen, in which they tone down the 2-tone and build up a fuller, more "world" sort of sound (a la Black Uhuru). Given the choice of obvious singles, "Drowning" is a lyrically and musically doomy song to play on Top of the Pops. But it did pretty well - not quite "Hands off she's mine," but it rung enough bells with recession-stricken England to get to number 22 in 1981.

This (inexplicably not released as a single) is even better - its anger packing even more of a punch because of its swagger and Saxa's dreamy, er, sax (NB: Lionle Martin was in his 50s when he played with these upstarts!)...

TAHRIR SQUARE, LONDON, EC4M

William Hague’s response to the demonstration outside St Paul’s amused me this morning. He said, “I'm afraid these protests on the streets are not going to solve the problem," before claiming that the government’s austerity drive to reduce the deficit was the only answer. It’s the “I’m afraid” that makes me smile – it suggests that Hague has been wrestling with a painful dilemma, fully aware that the protestors make up the moral majority, but sadly accepting that their tactics will bear no fruit.

Something tells me that Hague does not lose too much sleep worrying about how a lack of jobs will blight a whole generation’s futures – but perhaps I am being uncharitable.

I have been out of London this weekend, so haven’t been to the demo at St Paul’s. I’ll try and go down there tomorrow. But seeing the pictures in London, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco, Mexico City (see the picture above) etc does raise a possibility. I have seen people in one country demonstrating in solidarity with another, and have been involved in such protests. But I’m not sure I have seen people demonstrating, in country after country, for the same cause – perhaps because there is no issue which unites all the world’s citizens quite as acutely as this one.

Lenin has written an interesting piece about the strategy behind these protests. None of the many thousands of people who are occupying squares across the world have a definitive response to this crisis. In his blog post on the BBC website, Paul Mason says “if you ask 50 people why they're here and what they want you will get 50 answers.” As he also says, there are huge numbers of people who are not at the demos, who are at home worrying about how they will get through next week, or how their children will get to university or find a job.

The question, as always, is to connect those who have a clear idea of the problem with those who do not have the resources to challenge the system. My sense, borne out by some of the campaigns I have seen which have successfully resisted the cuts by local Councils in the last few months, is that if leaders emerge who can truly represent the majority, and who can transmit the arguments of this majority to a wider audience, there are great successes to be had.

Of course, a campaign against a local Council is very different to a global struggle against corporate finance or capitalism or neoliberalism or whatever. But if you allow a group to assemble and air its views – its similarities and its differences – a sense of collective leadership may emerge. It might be embodied in a single person, or it may take in the whole group, but if successful it will develop a momentum. And that leadership may arise from the unlikeliest of places, so we shouldn’t be precious about this.

What would kill the movement off, in my view, is if a particular group attempts to commandeer or corral the wider group. Even if you agree with the stance of a vanguard group (if we might call it that), its takeover is likely to marginalise those who don’t – this, surely, is a lesson that the Left must take, for to kill off a burgeoning movement now would be fatal.

NOT FIDDY

Misread this at first:

"Using mass-culture flotsam such as ancient Califone turntables hijacked from local high schools, and 50 cent records that hew literally and figuratively cut up and rearranged, Marclay represented the self-consciously conceptual flipside of hip-hop's 'necessity is the mother of invention' readymades."

From the Wire Primer's section on Christian Marclay. A fair description of his schtick, maybe, but given that we're talking about the 80s here, surely he was really using 50........oh I seeeeeeee!

Here's a great cut from his compilation album Records. As I walked down Brixton high street yesterday afternoon, a young man castigated me/us/himself? for masturbating in our own houses, and promised that God would save us from our shame. This is dedicated to him.

(5,3,1,4)

I am probably more proud than I should be to say: for the first time in my life, I have finished the Guardian Cryptic Crossword! And it's the prize crossword too!

It has passed largely without fanfare, but for a long time, somewhere in the back of mind has been the wish to complete a cryptic crossword. It's just one of those things I've long had an ambition to be able to do - mostly, I guess, because I'm crap at chess and know I always be, so cryptics seem like a good second prize.

Here's the crossword for those who'd like to share in my conceit. Once I'd got 12a, several others followed. 2d and 7d I had to look up as I'd never heard of the answers. 21d was the last man standing, but eventually worked it out. And the sharpest, funniest most concise clue is this:

5a. Couple with little on credit (4,3,3)

APPROACHES

Rather busy at the moment - I am doing a counselling course at Lambeth College. I passed the first module earlier in the year, but things are hotting up now, with lessons twice a week and homework in between. I thought I knew a thing or two about this before I started, what with commissioning psychotherapy services as part of my job, and having read a fair bit of Freud, Lacan and others. But going back to basics - what does it mean to be with somebody as they describe their issues? how does one set boundaries so that the other person knows what they can and cannot expect of you? how can one help a person to feel safe and thereby help them to speak their mind? - has shown that what I thought I knew is all well and good from a theoretical standpoint, but is insubstantial if you cannot use it in a particular room with a particular person with a particular set of issues.

I am enjoying it very much, not least because my fellow students are warm, interesting, challenging people, very different from me and from each other. If you have a passing interest in this sort of thing, you may not have seen the film Gloria, made in 1965, in which a patient called Gloria undergoes therapy with three major psychotherapists from three very different background: Carl Roger, Fritz Perls and Albert Ellis. If you haven't seen it, you should. The first part is here - you can find the rest on Youtube.

A couple of other things. First, my wife and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary this weekend, which we celebrated by going on the flight simulator at the Science Museum. She bought me a book from the wonderful, East Anglia based Full Circle publishers: a book of short stories by Rose Tremain. This is the front cover which, as with all FC books, is gorgeous:



Second - and vaguely linked to the other reason I am busy, which is that my public sector employers keep finding me things to do (the cheek of it) - here is a wonderful post on "Camden council brutalism". If I worked for Microsoft, I suppose you'd call it brand loyalty or commodity fetishism; but as I work for the people of Camden, I am happy to call it pride. It's rather precious, I know, but there is something very gratifying about working in such a wonderful borough, whatever one's misgivings about its various decisions, both past and present. Only recently, I went to Gospel Oak, an area of Camden which has a certain "reputation", to talk to a local GP about dementia care. It was a sunny day (unlike the day EuV had to endure), but I don't think it was just the weather that made Lismore Circus feel so welcoming - more the sense of a shared purpose, of public services and community bodies working together for the good of the estate and the neighbourhood. There is a fuller post waiting to be written about Gospel Oak, and maybe in the new year, when I'm finished writing coursework about empathy and congruence, I will write it.

SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

In our early courting days, my wife went to a book-signing event with Alasdair Gray and got him to sign my copy of Lanark. Since we moved in together, the Lanarks seem to have multiplied, since we now have three. She also gave him a copy of my own novel, which he said he would read (the thought that there is an outside chance that he may indeed have read it, or at least a few lines of it, on the train back to Scotland is rather lovely). He probably thought me rather gauche for trying to implicate my girlfriend in such a desperate act of fandom, and he told her, "He should ask you to marry him for doing this." Which I did!

This video, which shows him designing a mural for an underground station, is wonderful. He describes himself as an old-fashioned post-impressionist, very interested in directness and "hard edges" when he paints and writes. In this, and in his very practical acceptance that he needs both to write and paint to make a living, he reminds me of another favourite artist / graphic designer of mind, David Gentleman. I like his own description of how he makes his characters speak: "In my writing, most of the characters, in their speech, say exactly what they mean, to an extent that he thought was a bit unusual, since most people talk in order to hide what they mean."

LEAP OF FAITH

Larval Subjects on "writing and the anxiety of meaning":

Kierkegaard and Sartre were right: unless you take a “leap of faith” or simply choose despite the absolute contingency of your decision, you will never manage to write or produce work, whether you’re a philosopher, a social scientist, a scientist, an artist, a poet, and novelist, etc. Until you can accept the contingency of your decision and follow, as Badiou might say, the logic of its unjustifiable deductive fidelity, until you overcome your belief that there is an Other that “knows” and not just others that are navigating their way through the contingency of existence, you will never write. All you can do is throw your dice, maintain deductive fidelity to your decision, value your encounters, and hope for the best. You will never please everyone because, as Luhmann observes, every decision is contingent and could have been otherwise. Some will hate it, others will be mystified, others will love it, some will be indifferent. You will never know why they respond in these various ways, nor will you ever be able to make a move that pleases and appeals to everyone. The most paralyzing thing is always the belief that we know what others desire and our belief that there is someone out there that knows. All you can do is make your cut, make your distinction, and choose. We are always looking for masters, leaders, sovereigns, and priests that we believe “know” so as to extinguish the anxiety of the contingency of our choices. What we don’t recognize is that our very act of choosing these phallic priests and kings is our choice and that, as Sartre recognized in “Existentialism is a Humanism”, a way of transferring our decision to someone else even though that choice of someone whose voice can “speak truth for us” is still a voice that we chose. The tragedy is that our very desire for a father is also the source of the extinction of our ability to speak and act. We believe they’ve already done so in our stead. You must kill your mother and father to act and write.