Category: Culture

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London Riots: Parallels From the Past

The blaze that engulfed a Sony DADC warehouse in Enfield could have a catastrophic effect on independent record labels. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

I’m too old these days to wander round the streets of London. After many years of street photography I have witnessed and recorded much aggression vented. From the BNP Welling riot of 1993 to the snapping of fast cars going around Brands Hatch racing circuit, it has been recorded on celluloid and now gathers dust in a box somewhere in the spare room.

Today I do not even wander round , after say, 6pm at night the streets of the sleepy place in which I have lived for the last 6 years. Not because I fear a riot breaking out here you must understand. It’s more the fear of not finding my way home again given that dementia could set in at any time as I grey and shrivel up in my old age.

 

The latest riots on the streets of our cities, observed from the comfort of my armchair and plasma TV screen (bought and paid for with hard earned money I might add), reminds me of two former lives whereby I witnessed both riot and youth dissatisfaction, although not always at the same time.

 

If you want to know the time ask a policeman. Ilford HP5 400, copyright the author 1993

Firstly the Welling disorder that broke out on the Anti-Nazi League march on the BNP headquarters, then in Welling south east London. Determined to make a stance against the BNP’s overtly racist stance, the ANL planned to march to the doors of the BNL. The police on the other hand, had other ideas. If you ever wondered where the notion of ‘kettling’ came from, look no further than the junction about 200 yards from the BNP building further up a hill to the south. Four roads met and three roads became blocked by police determined to not allow the marchers to move any other way than back to their coaches to the north of the junction. Even a memorial garden to the west was blocked off with chicken wire put up to deter protesters the opportunity of finding sanctuary from charging police horses. The wire did not last very long and the garden eventually became a medical point for the treatment of the many gashes and scrapes that occurred during police baton charges. Later in the afternoon I was to  use this area for my own purposes, namely to escape the house bricks of the anarchists that had infiltrated the march and the counter measures so effectively carried out by the police lines. ‘Take the high ground’ I was once advised and it certainly worked that afternoon.

Whilst reloading the camera I overheard one black youth shout ‘There’s not enough blacks here. If there were more of ‘us’ we could rush the ‘filth’ and break through. Then in what I can only describe as a fit of sarcasm, he proceeded towards one police line to ask a policeman for the time, gesturing wildly to his wrist in the process.

Old Man taking stance against the police line at Welling, London. Copyright the author 1993. Ilford HP5 400

This cat and mouse affair continued for another two or so hours. At one point during a lull in the fighting, an old man appeared from almost nowhere to take his stance against the police lines as missiles were thrown over his head towards the police. Onlookers were in awe of this man who must have been in his 80s. There was a small contingent of holocaust survivors in the ANL march and I can only assume that he was one of them. His defiant look is inspiring.

From this point on I was getting both tired and bored and in addition was down to my last few rolls of film. Something digital cameras do not have to worry about these days. I made my way to the rear to be greeted by more police lines funnelling the marchers through the graveyard to the north of the junction. There was a reason for this. They had set up a film camera to photograph all marchers passing out of the crossroads. They had previously filmed all the photographers and press prior to the confrontation. This became a milestone in covering riots and confrontations with police. On the following Monday police started to call in all the film and still photography for inspection and if I remember it well enough went to court to get some photographers to give up their film.

 

This was the point at which I decided I would no longer go to such confrontations. I truly thought that it was the start of a slippery slope to a police state. Up till last week however, this had not happened of course, but I was not to know how that would pan out. With the explosion of digital photography, mobile telephones and social networking, there is no way of knowing how right or wrong I was 17 years ago. The jury is out on that one right now.

 

The second experience that comes to mind following the London riots, is my youth during the early to mid 1960s. The era of mods and rockers. Not that I think there is remotely anything similar in the disturbances that occurred in the 60s to those of the last week or so. What does resonate with me is the feelings of being young in an ever increasing consumer world. I too wanted that pair of Levis, that button-down  shirt, that twin vented mohair suit!

 

The difference is, I would not have had the remotest idea of wanting to loot the local store to obtain them. I knew that saving up was the way to go. Going without, despite the peer pressure, was the norm in our household. Then my parents had gone without many things during World War Two and after with rationing still being applied during the early years of my life too. We had form in that respect.

 

So when I observe from the comfort of my armchair I am both angry at the violence and saddened at the absence of discipline in some of our urban youths. Wanton looting and destruction cannot be condoned, but at the same time it also has to be understood in the context of today’s environment both culturally and economically. I do not profess to have the answers, but I suggest a long hard look at our recent history will go some way to understanding where we have come from since WWII.  We can only be a better society for it in the months and years ahead.

HD

 

 

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Massive Changes in Book Publishing

A sombre article in the today’s Observer/Guardian by Henry Porter throws more light and a certain amount of cold water on the current upheaval in the book publishing business. It’s definitely a good read….

‘As I start to write my latest book, I fear for the future of publishing

Retailing pressure and the emergence of the ebook are threatening the future of authors and their work.

Last Monday at 8.30am I began to type the first lines of a new novel. These sentences are unlikely to see the light of day but they’re a start – I am out on the pitch swinging my arm in a fashion that convinces me at least, which is certainly an advance on the week spent inside the pavilion whitening my pads and tidying the locker.

To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales, that the book is shortly to be replaced by the ebook and electronic readers sold by, among others, Amazon, which seems bent on reducing publishers to an archipelago of editorial sweatshops and the writer to the little guy stitching trainers in an airless room.

Publishing seems to be one of the great mysteries of commerce. Despite the large numbers involved – a total of £1.752bn was spent on 235.7m books in 2009 in the UK, that’s nearly four books for every man woman and child – the business today is a testament to self-deprecation, with only a few people willing to assert the unique value of books and their content.

When you transfer the model into any other business, the way books are sold seems like an evolutionary freak. Imagine you are the owner of a chain of ironmongers and a man suggests that you sell his new line of household equipment. You agree but with the following conditions. First, though he retains ownership of his pans and brushes, you will take something more than 50% from any sale. Second, he must pay for front-of-store display to make sure the goods catch the customer’s eye. Third, if they don’t sell within a specified period he pays to ship them back to his warehouse. Fourth, if your centralised ordering system breaks down and the items fail to materialise during the broom and mop-handle promotion, he has no comeback.

That is how publishers sells books: having paid an advance to a writer and stumped up for editing, design, marketing and distribution, they take all the retailer’s risk.

Selling through the supermarkets is even tougher. There is huge competition for space and the supermarket demands a much greater percentage of the sale price. Publishers guard the figures closely but 65% is not uncommon; one asked for 85% before Christmas. In order to sell more hand-crafted mint chocolates and olive oil, the supermarket may chose to make a loss leader out of a bestseller by Dan Brown or JK Rowling, thus devaluing the book and harming the trade of the local book shop in one swipe. “Supermarkets like to give any specialist shop a good kicking,” said one publisher.

The forces in the book market are increasingly monopolistic, particularly when it comes to selling on the web and on the new battlefront of ebooks. Amazon, the online retailer, has unprecedented power to squeeze publishers’ margins and to compete with high street retailers. The company now wants to make its Kindle reader the primary platform for ebooks and is pursuing a strategy that when the publisher supplies books at wholesale it will also license the books at a very low price to the Kindle. In effect publishers would be providing the means to cannibalise their own product, and at a discount. Unsurprisingly they prefer a model that allows them to appoint a company such as Apple as an agency for their books.

I don’t have serious objections in principle to the right kind of “disintermediation” – the jargon used for the process of reducing the supply chain – or even to ebooks, as long as they don’t completely replace the physical book. If all man had ever known was ebooks and someone came along and suggested actually printing one it would be heralded as a wonderful addition to civilisation. However, there should be doubts about the remote power of deletion that Amazon retains over the Kindle. During the Amazon-Macmillan dispute last week sample chapters from Macmillan books disappeared from electronic readers and last year the company removed a copy of Orwell’s 1984 because of a rights problem.

If you feel sorry for publishers spare a thought – and a dime – for writers, on whose shoulders this huge, discounting, rights-trading, jargon-babbling profiteering melée rests. As things are, the writer’s share of a book that sells for £10, after his or her agent’s fee, hovers between 35p and 40p: more than 95% is kept by the agent, publisher and retailer. The fierce discounting in supermarkets means that writers are now even less likely to earn out their advances. At the same time advances are being cut and authors’ contracts are being summarily cancelled.

We tell ourselves times are tough and jobs must be saved. Newspapers, TV, the music business are all suffering from the recession, a collapse of advertising and audience. But as their advances are cut, authors have failed to notice that during the worst recession for 80 years, book sales went down last year by just 1.2% in value and only 0.5% in volume. Non-fiction titles suffered but fiction is booming and all the publishers I spoke to are secretly optimistic.

So the storm is far from perfect. What does seem to be happening is that publishers have somehow become embarrassed about “being the impresarios of stories and ideas”, as Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books, romantically describes his job. They have allowed the relegation of the book to the ­status of a stone-baked pizza, a commercial and moral misstep, and writers have gone along with it because of the gloomy ­orthodoxies of necessity.

Talk of “disintermediation” is nonsense when half a minute’s thought will tell you that the intermediaries that count, the ones between writers and readers, are large, monopolistic and generally unsympathetic to writers. Ebooks don’t bother me any more than writing on a computer does. The world will accommodate them even though reading Christopher Reid’s Costa-winning collection of poems on a screen will scarcely add to the experience. What worries me is the loss of income for writers in what is a pretty healthy market, the loss of good editors from publishing houses and the disdain for writers by retailers – people who depend on them. If they are not careful the core talent of the book trade may well combine in new types of ventures – collectives and transparent relationships where writers and editors go into business together on a 50:50 basis and are enabled by web platforms, ebooks and print on demand… disintermediation of a more radical sort.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve finished three books, Finest Years by Max Hastings, Generosity by the American novelist Richard Powers and an extraordinary book by William Blacker about his life among the farmers and gypsies of Transylvania, Along the Enchanted Way. They were thrilling to read. We should prize the system that produced such wonderful storytelling: it needs to be nurtured as an essential part of our society. To write a book half as good as any of them is what makes me proceed with trepidation from the first to the second paragraph.’

Henry Porter


The Observer, Sunday 7 February 2010

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The veil and niqab controversy and the historical perspective

With France possibly on the verge of banning the wearing of niqabs in public and the UKIP calling for a ban over here in the UK, HD thought a republishing of this piece from 2006 was relevant:

‘…In the spring of 1938, Lord Athlone and Princess Alice made their way across the deserts of Central Arabia on the first ever Royal visit to what we now know as Saudi Arabia. Princess Alice, to placate local hostilities, ‘donned the Arab veil and robes in deference to the custom of a very masculine country…’ state The Times report of the visit. During the Royal visit, the Saudi monarch, King Abdul Aziz dined for the first time with a woman and treated the Royal visitors to a banquet of ten sheep for the occasion, so the report continues.
Amongst much political consternation in Europe, especially from Mussolini who thought that Britain was ‘interfering in the politics of Asia’ the Royal visit was an apparent success. The somewhat minor point concerning the Princess covering the female body in the presence of men, did not come under any further public deliberations back home. It was after all the Saudi custom and the Royals obliged their esteemed host.
The current controversy concerning the wearing of the veil in the UK is a fascinating contrast to the distant times of pre-WWII Britain and the flexibility of Royal protocol where prudent to adjust, can actually pay off. It is also a poignant reminder of how times have changed in both our own country and elsewhere.
In 1933 another Times correspondent reported on Turkey’s tenth year celebrations of becoming a republic. The reporter comments on what they described as an ‘astonishing change in the position of Turkish women’. Throwing off ‘Muslim medievalism’, the report continues, they have discarded the wearing of the veil in the cities and were also beginning to abandon it in the villages too. The most important aspect of the then contemporary status of Turkish women was their entry into ‘almost every aspect of national life’. Admirable as this sounds, I do suspect that compared to today’s Turkey, the Turkish women of 1933 must have appeared to be somewhat oppressed.
Even so, these two reports highlight some of the changes that the Islamic world has undergone during the twentieth century in the name of emancipation. Through the 1960’s and 70’s the rise of feminism added fervour to the progress of women across the globe and shedding of the veil continued at a pace.
By the 1980’s, in some parts of the Islamic world, the veil started to re-appear as standard dress. This has been attributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in countries such as Iran and Egypt. Since then it has progressed almost unabated across the Islamic.
The current veil controversy in the UK, may denote an act of faith on behalf of muslim women, but on the other hand it connotes a growing concern over the rapid progress of Islamic fundamentalism across Europe. The metaphor of the veil, as I have stated it previously, has therefore deeper and more serious implications to Britain, Europe and the rest of the Western world.
Britain today, is in a crisis of identity. I do not doubt the complexity of the situation or underestimate the difficulties in solving our problems. As an Englishman, I have values that were firstly grafted onto me by my family and my small town community in which I grew up through the 1950’s and 60’s. If time had stopped at 1969, say, I think the definition of being British would have been an easier task than it is today.
Since then, exposure to a multicultural society in cities such as Leeds and London, have led me to rethink on a broader basis my opinions on what it is to be British. Being objective though, is still not an easy task even for someone who has a wide life experience. As Thomas Nagel points out in his text “View From Nowhere’, it is ‘…objectivity [that] is a method of understanding. It is beliefs and attitudes that are objective in the primary sense…’. It is these attitudes and beliefs that seem to be at the heart of our current dilema.
I no longer possess the same misconceptions I once might have nurtured concerning ‘difference’. When I am confronted with the question about multiculturalism, I cannot understand why the question is even being asked let alone respond in anything but a constructive way. All societies progress through integration and Britain is no exception. If there is a failure to integrate then we are all in the wrong. It cannot be a one-sided affair. Therefore attitudes have to change on all sides.
Where I do have a real problem is in the expansion of fundamentalist views, whether they be Islamic, Christian or for that matter, any other narrow-based faith viewpoint. I find it hard to be objective in the light of these narrow sometimes backward looking views. I must also make the point that looking back is not a one-sided affair either. If the Islamic fundamentalist view is seen to be towards medievalism then it can be no surprise that others might cite the more traditional western approach to Britishness and its historically learnt values of behaviour. Thus I can see where the veil is metaphorical and hangs limply between the two conflicting viewpoints. In order to lift the veil, again attitudes must change.
The British government have cleverly opened the real debate and in contrast, Islam has seen the plot. My suspicion is that the government aims are more about swinging majority opinion towards the more traditional and therefore Christian values of society than they are towards the acceptance of the multiculturalists status quo. Only time will tell…’  first published in October 2006

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KFC Advert Just Not Cricket?

KFC have fallen foul of the thought police. The following advertisement has been branded as ‘racist’. Well they don’t understand cricket is all HD can say. Pass the ketchup someone!

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Blogging or No Blogging? Is the end in sight?




There is much talk on the ether about blogs and controlling the output. We already have anti-terrorism laws of course but HD wondered how things might pan out over the next year or so…
Blogs will eventually be controlled. The Labour Government has done it before. If you are old as me then you were also brought up on the music output of the miss-named 'pirate' radio stations. Look it up, especially how they all ended.
See the Labour government of Harold Wilson and their passage of the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act on 15 August 1967. Actually it was 'Marine, etc….'.
In much the same way as then, government will demand licencing of blogs, well web sites which includes blogs. Blogs hosted outside the UK will lose advertising overnight since anyone 'assisting' by advertising on an unlicenced site/blog will be liable to prosecution.
That's how Radio Caroline, etc. lost their 'Persil' and 'Oxo' adverts. Cut off the radio stations without funding. It of course, led to the growth in licenced radio in the UK and no-one complained at that.
It could easily be extended to internet sites. Unlicenced and you put your sponsors at risk of fine/jail! result: no adverts.
No adverts, no growth.
This I argued many moons ago is how pornography could be removed overnight from the internet. Did anyone listen then? No, they needed the revenues of pornography in the early days of the internet. It was the only one making money.
Licensing of sites/blogs would be a revenue earner as well as a control mechanism on the owners. Wait and see if I am wrong, etc., etc., etc.
HD

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Yam Boy’s ‘Great Identity Swindle’ (motiroti’s 60×60)




UPDATE: The Vibe Gallery space show is now finished. Apologies for wrongly stating 18th July. See comments for other shows and finding 60×60 films.
motiroti is a long-established British-based organisation that currently works in collaboration with artists from Britain, India and Pakistan. It’s most recent major project is entitled 360 degrees which forms the first part of a three year programme of events (2007 – 2010) and 60×60 is currently showing in East London at the Vibe Gallery, 91-95 Brick Lane London till 18th July 2008.
An early aim of motiroti was spelled out by the feminist theorist Dorothy Rowe in her text Cultural Crossings thus: ‘…to make art projects that transform space, and the meaning of space…’. Little has changed by way of ideology and leadership at motiroti since those words were lifted by Rowe from their ‘Mission Statement’ in 2002.
Where identity politics may have worked for Griselda Pollock and the cultural formations of the ‘other’, even the performative aspects of motiroti’s Wigs (1995) is problematical to us today as being a straight derivative of cultural identity politics.
Rowe’s unwinding of a stable identity whereby she suggests that fixed identity has given way to a fluidity and open-endedness approach to stating identities by playing the performance or performative card on cultural identity, an evaluation of 60×60 films may not be any better for taking the same path of contemporary feminist evoked interplay. An ‘open-endedness’ may not be an option in today’s fragmenting society unless by ‘open-endedness’ we mean globalisation which of course is motiroti’s primary concern.
It would imply the continuous breakdown of our culture in national boundary terms which some would say is not an option post 9/11. Art has to both reflect and condition current cultural norms. Here the emphasis would be on the conditioning.
The first few of the 60×60 films are currently on show and are also available through the motiroti.com website. All the films are on the subject of identity as we may interpret it today and the current contributions are both thought provoking and in some instances beautifully filmed. One such film, The Great Identity Swindle (Directed and Edited by VideoWallah) by the British rap-artist Yam Boy, is a performance cross-media installation on Asian identity in Britain. Yam Boy, primarily a vocal artist, has produced a comic strip version of his poetical mix of dual country (Britain and India) inheritance. Politically charged but internally perfected, Yam Boy has produced a performative response concerning his mixed cultural and possibly historically marginalised existence.
Identity on racial terms is clearly not so easy to define in the twenty-first century in as much as his reference to ‘Pale Ale’ and courting ‘…white girls that disappoint their mother…’ held within the temporal frames of a Roy Lichtenstein comic strip more than double for both the acceptance and the denial of the ‘dominant’ culture. Yam Boy’s critique of cultural existence shows that today’s performance artists are both bright and come individually wrapped in their own ideas of identity.
The approach, although appearing to match the essentialist approach of early feminist theory (I am British [man] you are Asian [woman and therefore other]) to paraphrase, is non-essentialist and meaning can be neither predefined or fixed. The audience is encouraged to participate in striking the right harmony or disharmony along the way depending entirely on their point of view.
In this way it becomes anti-feminist in approach depending for its persuasion the audience’s perspective. From within the barrier of the comic strip form , the poetry performance comes alive and the rigid comic strip gives way to a filmic existence as it transgresses each frame in turn. Still to movie, silence to performance and back again all in the space of a line or so of poetry.
If we are to understand our own identity today through the medium of art, we have to understand not just the cultural differences and sameness on display or being acted out, but we must also be able to produce an ordered purpose for understanding the same. There are as yet no ready-made and lasting rules of engagement in identity matters that work to everyone’s satisfaction.
The motiroti work on display this July can be considered both as performance and art installation. The installation is motiroti’s use of the multiple screens arranged within the pre-defined gallery space. The performances are the films themselves. Overall motiroti’s influence is assured with such an arrangement, but rarely detracts from the performances on display.
What then would Yam Boy acting like an indigenous Englishman, pale ale and all, say? Well surely he would say little above what we already know just by drinking ‘pale ale’, one of the essentialist signifiers in his film for the term ‘English’. He might become intoxicated but that would not affect the normative experience whether that be a subversive or unsubversive manifestation of his Englishness. ‘Such judgements cannot be made out of context…’ stated Judith Butler, once relating her own gendered experiences to a captive audience. It is in Yam Boy’s audience to know the reality and make the judgements on racial terms if they must. Drinking pale ale either constitutes the real or it doesn’t.
It is quite easy to curve fit Yam Boy into Butler’s contemporary feminist arguments, although Butler is such a dense read it facilitates the interpretations or rather the mis-interpretations to perfectly fit the curve of the scholarship. Playing to the gallery was never easier than with feminist theory it would seem. Meanwhile, I expect Yam Boy will keep rapping his poetical critique on this broken culture.
60×60 is at The Truman Brewery, 91-95 Brick Lane London till 18th July 2008 and films are available with iTunes from the 360 degrees website
http://www.motiroti.com/work/projects/current.php?data_id=65
Other artists on show:
Britain:
Said Adrus, Khaldoon Ahmed, Abdullah Chhadeh & Nico Piazza & Aliya Salahuddin, Nirmal Singh Dhiman, Monika Dutta, Atif Ghani, Sheila Ghelani, Harjinder Grewal, Seema Gill, Seemab Gul, Shobna Gulati, Shanaz Gulzar, Sanchita Islam, Simon Kallow, Rizwan Mirza, Rummana Naqvi, Hetain Patel, Rajyashree Ramamurthi, Daniel Saul, Sashwati Mira Sengupta & Semonara Chowdhury, Rajni Shah, Yam Boy, Ali Zaidi.
India:
Khadeeja Arif, Natasha Badhwar, Pawas Bisht, Neel Chaudhuri & Samar Grewal & Kartikey Shiva, Baptist Coelho, Nitin Das, Ritu Datta, Elvis D'Silva, Tascha Eipe, Sukanya Ghosh, Vishwajyoti Ghosh, Bidhu Bhushan Panda, Nila Madhab Panda, Gautam Pandey, Pranav Sahi, Surya Shankar Dash, Avinash & Geeta Singh, Santosh K Singh, Hemanth Subramaniam, Abhilash V.
Pakistan:
David Alesworth, Unum Babar, Nida Bangash, Joshinder Chaggar, Shazieh Gorji, Mazhar Hussain, Ferwa Ibrahim, Juhi Jaferii & Taimoor Tariq & Komail Naqvi, Shalalae Jamil, Roshaan Khattak, Adnan Malik, Kohi Marri, Asma Mundrawala, Mehreen Murtaza, Syed Ali Nasir, Muzzumil Ruheel, Zarmeene Shah, Vasiem Siddiq, Sehban Zaidi, Maheen Zia.
Bibliography
Judith Butler, Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, Abingdon 1999)
Gill Perry (ed.), Difference and Excess in Contemporary Art: The Visibility of Women’s Practice (Blackwell Publishing, Oxford 2004) for Dorothy Rowe
Griselda Pollock Vision and Difference (Routledge, Abingdon 2003)