One of the most boring responses to a criticism is probably the phrase “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it”. It sounds pretty clever when you’re discussing something trivial, but to follow this logic through to being consistent would lead to me having to give committing genocide a go (perhaps starting with a race with a small population? Just to test the water, like), and using the phrase “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it” in conversation when other people slag off things that I like, just to experience how it feels when you use the phrase. And I’m not sure I could quite bring myself to do that.
My point is that for years I’ve been slagging off poetry – the creative medium that best manages to put up a fight to musical theatre in the battle for “crappiest art”. It’s drummed into us at school, as if to imply that it’s actually in some way vaguely important (much like how being able to dribble a football around some cones becomes important for twenty minutes a week as the PE teacher goes on a power-trip) – and I don’t think it would be unfair to say that it’s perceived as a dying art. After all – before telly was invented, watching a pompous cock read out some words that may or may not vaguely rhyme was the only means of entertainment, assuming you weren’t rich enough to have one of the serfs executed for laughs.
Today, for reasons that made it seem like a good idea (I might explain later if an idea I’ve had comes to fruition), I went to see some poetry, and I’m pleased to report that I was right all along – and if poetry is a dying art form, I say let it die, and put a bullet between its eyes just to make sure.
It was an open-mic poetry reading. And it was bad. Very bad. I’ve written a bit of explanation below in the style of a bad poem, to try and illustrate how torturous it was.
People sat in rows holding notes,
Berets, wine, and middle class satisfaction filling the air,
Posters for ’spaces’ to rent in Hoxton pinned up on the wall,
Faux-intellectualism permeating through the atmosphere,
As Islington ponces read collections of words they call ‘poems’.
They rarely rhymed, as real poems don’t have to,
Their structure was about as consistent as this,
They had no message, no meaning, no stance,
“Here is a poem about about Yorkshire I wrote whilst on holiday in Yorkshire”
Said one man, failing to recognise that he was wasting his life.
He was just reading out his blog with a few dramatic pauses
Punctuated by applause.
A “jazz poet” from Lewisham was up next,
He pronounced his “I”’s like “Ah”, like he was Gambit out of X-Men.
A ginger woman gave an uninformed rant about the role of religion in politics,
Probably because she’d describe herself as “spiritual”,
Given the bollocks she was talking in previous poems.
One man said he was going to read some prose that we might find “poetic”,
So he was basically reading an article he wrote,
About the campaign to release some bloke in America,
I’m sure his poem was going to make all of the difference.
The worst bit was when someone had a poem about the BNP,
“Are there any BNP members here?”, he asked,
“Yep, right here”, said one man in the audience, oddly proudly,
“I hope this isn’t fascist poetry night”, I thought to myself.
The poem wasn’t what you’d expect,
No “smash the fascists”, no “fuck the BNP”, no rallying cry,
Just some bizarre metaphor about full moons,
I didn’t really get it.
I think “Poetry” is just a pretentious name for a collection of words that those not talented enough to write music or those not big headed enough to write a blog use to describe a “collection of words about something”.
At risk of sounding like I’ve either got a vendetta against morris dancers, or am a big fan of them, due to how frequently I seem to write about them, I saw some more Morris Dancing today.
My friend Eve and I were passing through Trafalgar Square today when we stumbled upon literally hundreds of Morris Dancers – it was all because of this. We hung around for a few minutes to take in what can loosely be described as “culture” (ie: old men prancing around), and to enjoy the amusing juxtaposition with some Falun Gong dancers who were also on the square waving their traditional hankies around too (theirs were red) – it was almost like a dance battle were taking place.
One thing that stunned us though were that one troop of Morris Dancers had blacked up. It’s just not something you’d expect to see in this century, let alone in a city as diverse and cosmopolitan as London. Clearly these country bumpkins who’d been bussed in for the day were as familiar with social progress as I imagine they are with modern technological wonders like the wheelbarrow or not marrying their cousins.
As we moved closer, to try to verify that yes, there really were blacked up men dancing on Trafalgar Square, a couple heard Eve saying “Well this isn’t very politically correct, is it?”
“Ah, but how do you know they’ve ‘blacked up’? They could have blackened their faces to be like miners, as they’re from rural England, and Morris Dancing was around before they knew about black people”, they said quite smugly, having shown us young people who’s boss.
It was at this point that we had to make a decision: how to respond? Obviously, the route I’d usually take in such a situation would be to troll them, and try and wind them up – but unlike most people who I’ll try to wind up, they were on the older side of middle-aged, so my genetic programming to be polite to old strangers kicked in and prevented me from jumping on my high-horse.
In the end, I responded with a rather tepid “Well, it doesn’t reflect terribly well on them, does it?” followed by explaining that Eve and I were members of the “PC Brigade”.
Seizing the moment, the wife of this couple delivered a knock-out blow in the tête-à-tête, by wryly wondering aloud if that by presuming that it was racist, when it might not be, that makes Eve and I the racists? The logic was pretty sound – after all, if I were to speculate that Robert Mugabe were a nasty, totalitarian bastard, when it turns out that he’s actually a lovely old man, that makes me the nasty, totalitarian bastard. The couple walked off, smugly, with their metaphorical copies of the Daily Express under their arms.
However, what makes this interesting that having since done some research – it turns out that the blacked-up Morris dancers was almost certainly playing on racial stereotypes. Here and here explain that blacking-up is something to do with North African origins of the practice. And as if this isn’t explicit enough, one Morris Dancing group based in the North West are called the ‘Britannia Coco-nut Dancers’ and you can see from their photos that they look like they enjoy blacking up.
So in a way, we were sort of right – they were blacking-up, and I guess the ethical question of “blacking up isn’t really on, is it?” remains for you to decide.
But take THAT old couple who I’ll never speak to ever again. I win at Morris Dancing factual accuracy.
Man, I’m a little bit excited that President Obama is in London. I’ve already invited him out, but he hasn’t got back to me yet. It seems a little silly, considering that the Prime Minister and Arctic-Monkeys Fan Gordon Brown is always living about five miles away from me, but to have the most powerful man in the world a mere two miles-ish from me (I worked it out), is exciting.
Apparently Barry is staying with the US Ambassador in his house in Regent’s Park. Top tip: if your garden has it’s own zoo, you’re probably a little bit too showy.
It must be an interesting visit though – I wonder who gets the bed and who has to sleep on the floor? Not that they’ll be doing much sleeping – they”ll get to stay up late into the early hours of the morning, sneaking into the kitchen to see what’s in the fridge, and discussing boys. The ambassador could tell Barry about what a bully Vladimir is, and Barry could taunt the ambassador about Hillary, who he probably used to fancy.
I bet they’re talking about how they deliberately didn’t invite me too, the bastards.
Last night I went to the London Twestival – if you’re unfamiliar with it, it was basically a big party for people who work on and around the “Silicon Roundabout” and Nathan Barleys like myself to network, or in my case, come tantalisingly close from crossing the line of “stalking via twitter” into “stalking in real life”.
Of course, it was all an incestuous gathering of meeja types, PRs and techies, but it was all for charity, so everyone went home being able to live with themselves and sleep at night. And I had a great time.
All of the Twitter folks from the trendy start-ups were there, and there was even some old-media representation in the form of Rory Cellan-Jones, or Ruskin147 as we know him, from the BBC. I didn’t dare say hello though as I through a process of osmosis-like learning from the Twitter feed, I know about him to an almost stalker-like level. I know that he lives in… Ealing? I know he has a dog and a son who got into Oxford, I know he gets up early and goes for a run every morning, and I know his wife recently became a Dame. It’s almost like I’ve been going through his vitual bins.
I did however, talk to loads of excellent people, and saw many more whose “names” I knew according to the sticker they were wearing with their name on, but couldn’t place.
I had a chat with Gareth Mitchell from the BBC’s Digital Planet, and ridiculously, he recognised my face from my Twitter avatar. I said hello to the man doing all of the hard work on the Atheist Bus Campaign, who has been Twittering in the first-person as a personified bus for the past few weeks. Shell_uk was in a similar boat to me not knowing anyone there, as so to speak. Brilliantly, I got the chance to say hello to Annie Mole, who’s blog about the London Underground I’ve been reading for years – she was close to James Cridland, who I didn’t manage to pluck up the courage to speak to. I bumped into ParkyLondon, who produces a superb podcast for London nerds like myself, and just as I was leaving I traded business cards with Richjm.
Well, I say “traded business cards”. Frustratingly, the new business cards that I’ve ordered from ultra-trendy Shoreditch start-up Moo.com hadn’t arrived in time, meaning I had to resort to the “analogue business card”: my Twitter name scrawled on to a notepad I carry around for blog ideas (I genuinely do this). This slightly undermined the savvy-London-Hoxtonite-professional image I was trying to cultivate for myself.
One thing that was quite exciting was that it levelled the playing field a little and I was mingling with some stunningly important people in the industry. I got talking to a man who explained that his “job” was starting start-ups, and he’d started maybe 20 companies in his career, including things that I will have heard of – though he was hesitant to name them to someone like me. In retrospect I maybe should have asked him for some venture capital (or “VC” in industry-speak) for one of the most bizarre outcomes of the night: I seem to have accidentally founded a new .com start-up with Dave Hodgkinson, who ten minutes after mentioning an idea had already bought the domain name. It’s definitely a fast-moving industry. Whatever industry this is.
That was a problem I did encounter – I wanted people to take me seriously, and ideally, offer me money, a writing job and use of the company boat. So when asked what I did, or what my industry was, I made a point of emphasising that I was a post-graduate student – a metric cut above those tawdry undergraduates, before following up by claiming that I also “like to think of myself as a satirist”. This was secret code for “No one actually pays me to be a satirist but I’d like them to”. Even if they question my credentials I’ve got that plausible deniability – the “satire industry” doesn’t exist in any tangible way and there’s no satirists trade union, even though “we” do spend a lot time labouring in a pit of irony.
It was really excellent though – and to top things off, I discovered this afternoon that I’d won a years subscription to Spinvox in the raffle, thanks to @whatleydude.
One of the best things about living in London is that there’s so much going on in almost every sense of the phrase, and thanks to a superb public transport network, you can string together different activities to have the most eclectic of adventures. For example, on the same day you may find yourself at a talk in a pub on UFOs and then less than half an hour later be watching a rap battle. Or you might spend the day at some fairly academic science lectures putting faces to authors of books you’ve read, and then spend the evening watching punk poets in a squat surrounded by people flouting the smoking ban and all sorts of other European laws covering health and safety.
It’s even more exciting if the activities are fairly impromptu and unplanned. The other week I visited the Imperial War Museum with @katyhaughey (this was pre-meditated), and later on found a cinema showing the George Bush biopic ‘W’ for dirt cheap, starting just 15 minutes after we walked past. A couple of months ago now after a day at uni, my friend Eve and I ended up going to see the Dark Knight at the IMAX for FREE because we happened to be walking past and some people were (inexplicably) trying to give away their tickets). If I were a less rational man I might claim that mystical forces were at play. Though then again, if I were a less rational man I might also claim the Holocaust didn’t happen, so it’s probably good that I’m not.
The reason I tell you all of this is not just to provide some “SEO” for my blog, but because something similar has happened again this evening. Whilst in a fairly mundane seminar at uni today, I noticed that celebrity comedian Chris Addison had twittered that he was doing a gig at the British Library at half six. It was about half five at the time. I messaged him asking for details and he explained that his fellow comedians Rory Bremner, Paul Sinha and Andy Zaltzman were going to be there too.
So I hopped on a tube to Kings Cross as quickly as I could, got to the British Library and learnt that it was an event called “Political Animal“, part of the civil liberties exhibition they’ve got on at the moment, and that tickets were still available and only a fiver. And then I spent the evening unexpectedly enjoying some brilliant political comedy – all thanks to Twitter and living in City of Dreams.
Poor Woolworths. A few weeks ago you were the shop that no one ever goes into, and now you’re destined to become another entry in the collective consciousness of uniquely British things that don’t exist any more, like Radio Rentals, BBC Choice and Opal Fruits – the sort of thing that Peter Kay might use as material in one of his stand up acts.
I walked past my local Woolworths today for the first time since it has closed down, and it was a shocking sight – just an empty shell.
I hope they replace it with something decent, as it’s literally the closest shop to my house and a mere one minute’s walk from my front door. If they could turn it into a new stop on the Bakerloo line it would be excellent.
I also went to Camden today, and was surprised to see that Camden High Street Woolworths is still open – so out of morbid curiosity and a desire to say we were among the handful of people to have been in Woolworths in 2009, my friend Dan and I decided to take a look around. It was bleak.
All the shelves were empty and there seemed little point of the shop being open – the only things they appeared to have not been able to get rid of were these:
Living in London has changed me, and I’m not sure I like what I’m turning into – because I seem to be turning into Nathan Barley – Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris’s parody of London media twats. I think today was a good example of why.
I left the house today dressed in my trendy new London gear. As I’ve previously described on this blog, I’m now a regular user of a Trilby, and a few weeks ago got a new coat that makes me look vaguely smart, but trendy-smart, like they wear in This is England. (I am slightly concerned that my fashion sense also implies that I’m a horrible racist).
Where was I heading? To trendy Shoreditch, of course. Shoreditch is basically like Camden Town* if it were on an independent label, and is populated almost exclusively by young professionals and shops that don’t display any products, and in which you have to ring a bell to enter.
After this with a couple of hours to kill I went and sat in a Pret with free wifi and used my trendy white laptop and read the Guardian. Just like everyone else in there. The only thing that showed me up as a media-industry fraud aside from my lack of meeja columnist job was that rather than use a Macbook I was using an Eee PC.
It was what happened later though that really made today Barley-esque. Inexplicably, some sort of PR firm have offered to lend me a new INQ1 mobile phone for a month – a device not until the Wasp T12. The only difference is that instead of having an extra-large 5-key, it has some Facebook and Skype integration.
So I went to the office to pick it up and I was stunned at just how much like Barley it was. Obviously it was a trendy modern new-media office. There were trendy sheer brick walls and it was converted from what looks like a former industrial space, and the office was almost completely empty, save for a few computers (probably Macs) – there was even a trendy kitchen area, and not a tie in sight.
Being a PR firm, they don’t make tangible things for people to buy, like bricks or hammers, or other things paraphernalia people in the north use, they’re people who care about brand image and social-media and buzzwords and things. And for some reason, they must have thought that I’d be the perfect vehicle in which to get in with the target market of young, urbane, affluent professionals. I tried my best to bluff being urbane, affluent and professional.
I couldn’t work out when I got there whether or not they were licking their lips at the number of demographic boxes that I ticked or were disappointed that underneath my trendy coat I still wear a five year old blue fleece rather than some sort of “ironic” Mr-T t-shirt.
I asked them “Why me?”, and it turns out it has something to do with me being moderately prolific on Twitter and Facebook and the like, and surprisingly, not because I used to write about phones and stuff for Tech Digest. They even said they weren’t targeting geeks and techies with this phone. I kept my mouth firmly shut.
The upshot of all of this is that now we have proof that I’m some sort of zeitgeist defining cultural leader. And a bit like the Canyonero episode of The Simpsons where Krusty briefly stops selling out before selling out again, I totally sold out and took the phone for a month. I’ll probably do some sort of review at the end of it as it’d be polite to do so.
![Album art for 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1] by Dropkick Murphys](http://jamesomalley.co.uk/blog/wp-content/lastfm_album_art/2005_Warped_Tour_Compilation_[Disc_1]^Dropkick_Murphys.jpg "Dropkick Murphys - 005 Warped Tour Compilation [Disc 1]")
