John Ledger

My word!! I'm really enjoying this big well-deserved break!!!!

2012-02-05T19:23:00.003Z

A tale of two cities: Leeds and Sheffield

2012-02-02T20:14:00.000Z

A tale of two cities: Leeds and Sheffield

I use the Hallam line (Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley, Sheffield) regularly for a number of reasons and I venture up and down this line because it is just within my budget to travel this line, living in the areas central to the line (Darton and Barnsley) and wanting to head out to find somewhere in a town or city to sit and think so to finish writing something. I have been trying to write about my experiences of the towns on this line in relation to their differences, and the idea of The West Riding Of Yorkshire having one continuous urban sprawl, with the only real gap being the mining town north of the Sheffield Sprawl and south of the Leeds/Wakefield sprawl; my home town: Barnsley.

I have an habit of making sweeping comparisons between the two major Cities within my (affordable) reach, as there are noticeable differences between them for sure: Leeds city centre has certainly very much accepted a capitalist realism-extra (like Red-Bull extra caffeine instead of bog-standard Lucozade), much more than the other city, Sheffield. These two cities are Yorkshire's largest, and, if incorporating the surrounding settlements when describing the cities, as Owen Hatherley suggests we do in his book 'The New Ruins Of Great Britain' (which, has inspired further my interest in the wider area, formerly known as The West Riding Of Yorkshire), we find two very different types of central areas to these sprawls.

Today this seemed explainable in relation to homelessness. First of all, the stupidly large amount of it on the streets of central Leeds, and the complete normalisation of this, in that nobody seems to bat an eyelash to this blatantly massive amount. This is related to the second reason, and the reason today as to begin explaining the differences between Leeds and Sheffield (which certainly has homeless people too): one finds homeless people in Leeds congregated outside some of the swankiest restaurants and bars in the generally most 'swankiest' parts of the centre. Regardless of the easiest answer "that homeless people would be here as here is where the people who have money are and they need money" (although the general counter-argument is that those nearer economically to the homeless are more likely to give them money), what is noticeable is how they seem to co-exist/occupy places close to each other without antagonism, as if one pane of glass separates them into different non-conflicting worlds; the shock of such a massive gap in lifestyle has been completely normalised (this Guardian article by Felicity Lawrence, lays out stark descriptions of the normalisation)

The 'swankier' areas in Sheffield do not seem to be part of such a juxtaposition, in fact Sheffield's poor don't seem to be any where near these areas, as if the gentrified areas still find their existence an uncomfortable truth, one that they can't yet 'step over' as they walk past it, as if capitalist realism has yet to penetrate reality in the centre as much as it has in Leeds (and that's often what different cities and towns feel like: different takes on a much larger, prevailing, reality). Fair enough, Sheffield city centre is much more spread out, but I'd still argue that the culture of the city (although, when put in a bigger frame, isn't that different from the culture of Leeds) has still yet to (and hopefully won't) capitulate to capitalist realism to the same extent as Leeds; and if you are opposed to capitalism (as most people are at some level - which is why the usage of the term anti-capitalist, to describe just the Occupy St Paul's, etc, protests is misleading), then you could say that there still hope of an alternative in Sheffield.

This may have a lot do with the history of the places: the way Leeds (and a large portion of West Yorkshire) has grown in comparison with the way Sheffield (and a large portion of South Yorkshire) has grown. Leeds started to grow into a large town earlier and slower than Sheffield did, and as well as being an area that produced industrial products, it was also a big trade centre in the area, whereas Sheffield grew much faster in a shorter space of time in relation to the need for steel and coal (from the environing towns of South Yorkshire - although much of Yorkshire's coalfield was just outside Leeds also) which became industries of mass-production at a later date.

Leeds centre was becoming an important trading centre whilst Sheffield was growing much more sporadically, likely due to it's much more hilly topography, to eventually be coined 'the largest village in Britain', as, for its size, it has never really come to resemble a bustling city, unlike Leeds, which is often called 'The London of the north'. In later years Sheffield was decentralised further when the Meadowhall Shopping Complex, and the smaller Crystal Peaks shopping centre, were built on the outskirts of the city, massively compromising the city centre as a centre for consumerism. In it's place many galleries, and open spaces have sprung up making Sheffield renowned for it's cultural richness, as the majority of people wanting consumer goods continue to make their way to Meadowhall, in particular, which may have damaged the centre superficially, but has, after some time, allowed it to be something so much more.

Leeds has gone a very different way, by never leaving the path it has always been on. The centre, in particular, certainly didn't suffer a hammering from industrial decline as Sheffield's did, and in fact, due to the centre already being fit for late-capitalist prosperity, it has benefited at the expense of nearby areas such as Bradford and Batley/Dewsbury , which did suffer a hammering from industrial decline.

According to Owen Hatherley, due to Sheffield's post-war socialist-leaning council, and the very ambitious social housing projects, it was dubbed The Socialist Republic Of South Yorkshire. The city, a late-comer to the industrial revolution in comparison with other large towns in the north of England (which grew earlier due to the Woollen, Cotton and Slave Trade industries), appears to have been a place historically suitable for progressive, socialist thinking. Whether this was helped by the way the city had to be built (on seven hills, like Rome, as seemingly every person born in Sheffield will enthusiastically tell you), there does seem to be a community feel to a place that one would think would be far too large to have such a thing.

When you arrive by train into the centre of Sheffield, one of the first things you see is the famous social housing complex, Park Hill; almost on top of the station due to the steepness of the grassy verge that leads to it. The station has a Yorkshire sandstone exterior, leading on to a spacious walkway, consisting of water-features, into the centre, and although (as is the calling of any town wanting to be seen as of importance in our global-capitalist times) the high-rise business-cum-luxury apartment-cum-hotel complexes are starting to spring up (St Paul's tower actually looks like it should be in Leeds) on a whole it is an altogether different experience to entering Leeds city centre by train.

The cocky-looking high-rise buildings here seem to gather around the train tracks that are bringing you into the station, they almost seem to possess an eagerness to make their presences felt, because after this small area of the Leeds the high-rise landscape quickly disappears (and after a couple of miles one actually finds themselves within a typically 'Yorkshire' type of town again). But around the train station it is almost as if the buildings are ganging up to announce "this is the most important place in the north". The station is a fitting introduction to the mood of the centre; a dehumanisation of the environment in order that one can go around their business without feeling guilt about walking past those homeless people on the streets like they aren't they (and if you want a hot a drink, you're gonner have to shake off the guilt of going corporate because there's enough Starbucks in this area to overdose on coffee buying a regular latte from each outlet).

The worst example I remember seeing was in the square just across the road from one of the station's' exits. There is a very expensive looking restaurant, and it was a nice enough day for people to be dining on the outside tables. Roughly 30 feet away, with just the canvas barriers of the restaurant as a separation of places, there were two youngish-looking men who, for reasons down to drug-addiction, destitution or both, were sat on steps with their hoods up and their heads down; the juxtaposition was akin to a Victorian-times etching of the differences between the very rich and very poor.

yet again, I must stress that I'm not making out that Leeds is a dystopia and Sheffield is some sort of utopia. Because, when both are put in a larger frame the differences aren't that great. All I'm saying is that Leeds is Yorkshire's finest dystopia, because capitalist realism seems much more saturated into reality here than it does in the centre of Sheffield, and I say this as a warning, because Sheffield should fight to prevent this from happening to it too (although the stance is probably only possible by grass-roots movements). I am not for Sheffield and against Leeds; far from it, and, in fact, once one is outside the inner city of Leeds, the city has what most Yorkshire cities (including Sheffield) have, where, according to the road atlas's there shouldn't be: fields and woodlands, and general green space.

But aside from this, it must also be said that when I'm contemplating where to spend 5 pound on a train ticket for, my mind says Sheffield but funnily enough my heart says Leeds; I know Sheffield is right, but I desire to go to Leeds.

Now a possible reason as to why:
A few of my childhood years in the early 1990's were spent being addicted to computer video games; I make many analogies based on 8 bit/16 bit visuals and aspects of my artwork are influenced by 8/16 bit platform game formats. I used to repeatedly cycle around routes in my village, imagining new really-advanced computer games (advances that I would find troublesome now); ones that resembled what is now Google Street View, except in my imaginings one could be a total avatar on the streets they walked down; not in a usual perverted what-would-you-do-if-you-were-The-Invisible-Man sense, but it a sense of a separation from actions with real-life consequences; perhaps a simulation of what my permissive cultural surroundings encouraged, but without the guilt and empathy that would usually accompany any normal human. Although I was a child who found war films exiting, because I didn't yet understand the horror of war, I wasn't dreaming up these games out of a dark side to my child-self, it was more to do with the fact that I had confidence problems and was day-dreaming about a virtual world allowing me to act without the barriers put up by a lack of confidence. But I would never take to the system's attempts to actualise these dreams.

When talking of something not related to the virtual world but to architecture, Owen Hatherley said something in his New Ruins Of Great Britain which seemed to sum all this up perfectly when he said "be careful what you wish for because capitalism might make it come true", and when I think of my childhood day-dreams of inhabiting a virtual replica of my known world, free of consequences, it is evident how close capitalism's usage of technology has brought us to actualising these E-number-fed day-dreams in a truly dystopian manner - horrifying to an adult who now realises "this is no game": a present-day Internet where (via Facebook) a profile of seemingly everyone you've ever known is available to examine/scrutinize; a Google map set-up that is so well put together that one often feels no different when they're looking from a bus window at a street in reality to when they're looking at the same street on an image captured by the Google camera-car on a computer screen; and (the darkest aspect of the virtual) an entire world of pornography, one mouse click away, where it is seemingly so incorporating of, not just every fantasy, but seemingly a massive proportion of women of every possible size, shape, hair/skin colour, to the extent that one actually gets a sharp pang of concern that even the females they know have been incorporated (a fear made more probable by evidence that shows that job-insecurity coupled with the sheer enforced aspirationalism under neoliberalism makes it more likely that someone would have to find work in the sex industries to fund their aspirations/their university courses).

Why I refer to all this within the context of the differences between the city centres of Yorkshire's two largest cities is because a greater saturation of capitalist realism, as Leeds is over Sheffield, actually encourages a total flight from reality, if one is capable/can afford to spend to do so. My childhood inability (still an inability, although seen very differently now) to interact with reality, making me day-dream as an avatar, still encourages me to head to places where avatarism and anonymity seem more achievable. It is something that I have often wished for but inevitably found impossible, because I cannot take flight from reality, I cannot walk past homeless on the street deleting them from memory as if it were a computer game - guilt and concern about the world we are living in ensues. My desire may be to fall into this reality, but it never works, which is why my logic speaks more fondly of places which offer some kind of alternative to this destructive type of realism.

A summing up of my home town, as I see it

2012-02-02T18:40:00.001Z

Although to live in a capitalist society everyone has to be able to deny/or massively soften truths in the surrounding environment to an extent which allows them to cope and not crack up, some are much better at forgetting about things that make them feel uncomfortable than others; largely, I would argue, those who (feel they) have an investment in the system. Regarding my home town of Barnsley, those most adept at doing this are largely responsible for the reason why there is there is no sensible debate on the problems of the town, thus keeping the town in the mess it is in (although this is a case that is by no means exclusive to Barnsley), descending further as the cuts affect towns more dependent on the public sector, such is Barnsley

These Town Voices can be divided into two sections, who, although I use examples, I will not name - criticising individuals serves no purpose, because they're not particularly bad people. First of all, there's those who at the very least have secured a comfortable existence for themselves, who describe their pride about coming from Barnsley, who usually now live in the better areas of town (normally the greener areas west of the centre), who venture into town only to go shopping on a Saturday and then go to watch Barnsley F.C in the afternoon, to meet up with ‘the lads’. The informal spokespeople of this section (who have either made their living through being 'Professional Yorkshiremen', or are always asked their views on the town due to being revered for doing something else) speaking proudly of the ‘cultural heritage’ of their own town, the ‘pride of the people’ who live here, and their general pride about being from Barnsley, and speaking the town’s famous dialect/accent. And although these aren’t bad things to do in themselves (although, regarding the idea of the place having character and culture, any visitor to the town would rightly see the centre as being half a depressed, and half a clone town, of chain stores, and a centre where Wetherspoons chain bars are the most iconic drinking holes) what this talk and focus do is to attempt to make the town into a place of touristic value (although hardly achievable) as if it is one big theme park of its past; a collage of past and present which doesn’t match up to the town I’ve known for all my life, especially now (in 2012) when one can already begin to see the desperation being caused by the cuts to services and jobs. It is a depoliticised interpretation of the town (as if ‘that’s all in the past now’), where regional peculiarities and the football team are all that matter. The acute poverty which one can see if they take these rose-tinted spectacles off, relates to inequalities that are no longer ‘appropriate’ to mention – especially if one has done so well for themselves.

This feeds right into the hands of the next group of Town Voices. When we see the coal mining past as now just of worth as cultural-interest, in this period still desperate to exist within the ‘end of history’ bubble because no other future looks possible/bearable, it is easy to scorn the people who don’t seem to have ‘moved on’ since the pits closed. This second section of town voices dislike the first section for indulging in this aforementioned cosy view of the town; although the first section’s de-politicisation allows for this group to successfully get their condescending opinions heard; their merger point is the cafe bars that maintain a veneer of sophistication. This group usually believes it has an investment in the system – they still think they can actually get this elusive ‘ideal job’ that 30 years of aspirational politics has fooled into chasing – and they ascribe to the cultural elitism that sees the lumpen working class as low-life, for liking ‘shit’ music, and TV trash. They are very adept at doing what all well-trained neoliberal politicians are also adept at doing: blaming the poor for their own poverty, using language that ascribes it to ‘lifestyle choice’. This makes the poor of Barnsley fair game for being poor. The cultural phenomenon of ‘The Chav’ which has arisen directly due to this de-politicisation of poverty in society, is a creation directly caused by those who are being scorned reacting by acting more aggressively to the presumed scorners (the upper-or-aspirational working class) creating a culture that is brash and ‘hard’ as a defence against the verbal attacks they receive from the rest of society.

For this section of town voices, accent/dialect may not always be completely undesirable (some acknowledgment of heritage is accepted) but the predicament and inevitable attitudes that follow-suite of a large section of the town are undesirable and thus must be seen in a condescending manner; as their choice to exist in such a way; as with the wider attitude in contemporary Britain “these people choose to be lowly, they choose not to go out and get a decent life for themselves” and so we get the creation of ‘The Chav'. Unfortunately there is a lot of people in Barnsley who fit the stereotypical description of this discriminated-against section of society (class: the taboo that we are forbidden to mention; we just have crap towns of 'crap folk', full of workers in high-visibility jackets – thus committing the ultimate crime of ‘lacking aspiration’).

A young writer who writes a column for a local magazine called Mosaic, a aspirational yet vacant of any content magazine (except for the perpetual preparations for the ideal wedding and ideal home), recalled the memories of working in a coffee shop in town. His tone was mocking of customers from the town for gasping "arr much?" (using accented-quotations to make them sound even more parochial) when the coffee was dearer than what he said they usually wanted; Nescafe Instant. Basically, he was seeing a necessity of people having to stick to budgets as an ethical choice to be culturally 'backward', sticking to poor quality coffee rather than coffee produced in a continental-style.

I will refer to comments made by this individual again because, due to him writing these columns and also having is own Conservative Party-leaning blog page, and due to me knowing at least enough about him to understand why he would have an investment in talking about poverty as if a cultural choice rather than an impossible (for most) situation to escape from, he is sort of an informal spokesperson for this second group of town voices who are by and large younger than the first section. In one specific blog post he ludicrously managed to associate the troubling rise in popularity of The British National Party (BNP) in Barnsley, on a socialist sentiment that he claimed exists in the town, and claimed that it isn't their racism what makes the BNP so dangerous but that being 'an anticapitalist party " is "what makes them so dangerous" (which they aren't: they just want a fairy-tale version of a past capitalism, which aligns with their general fairy-tale view of a once 'great' Britain).

But what riled me the most was when he was talking about how the borough of Barnsley, which he described as a "homogenous and heavily working class culture" (rather than a 'poor' borough) has fared since its industrial base (coal mining) was dismantled under the Conservative government of the 80's and 90's, saying "which I can tell you" as if he was talking specifically to his fellow Conservative Party-members " has left a very real and lasting bitterness", as if the people here had cheek to still be feeling the effects.

Here I must stress that regarding the actual process of coal mining; I would hate to see it (re) rip up this landscape again. The ugly landscape of black spoil heaps can 'stay in the past' (although obviously these scenes are still in many countries' present-tense). But the damage done when the neoliberal system was jemmied between peoples' lives, when entire lifestyles were just erased, when the entire idea of work was re-shaped into one of forced-aspirationalism, CANNOT simply be signed-off as something people need to "get over". It is a brutal simplification; a simplification that is convenient for those who were more fortunate (or from more fortunate families) in those decisive days - although not all, it must be said, hide behind this convenience.

Hence, I only feel it is appropriate to refer to certain individuals having a background that has given them an helping hand to do OK for themselves, who havent money issues to the extent that they are tied around lifestyle choices like a ball and chain (to say the least), when they go to great lengths to preach their truths to others. It isn't about blaming the 'Haves' here - just expecting them to at the very least acknowledge the predicament making others 'Have Nots'.

A friend I have from the town causes a similar dilemma for me, because he's a friend yet he fits the above description, sending his views my way as advice only for them to bounce back making me look unreasonably pessimistic and unwilling, because I cannot usually resort to my own sentiments without fear of making discomforting conversion, having to talk about issues which I know he has certainly trimmed from his experience of life.

It is ‘dangerous territory’ to critique the system (which I have to do because I've found no other way of understanding the fucking despair I see around me on the streets so often) around this individual because of a reason which I find only necessary to go into because it has obviously massively affected his approach to life, which he refers to and sends my way as advice whenever we meet: this individual comes from an upbringing where money (the lack of it) has never been of major concern (something I can attest to, bing born into a poor household, which fortunately, soon after, managed to secure at least a stable living - although the fear povert generated had already engraved its feelings of 'not-being-good' enough on mine and my sisters lives). Money has never appeared to a barrier for this individual, and although he appears to ‘pave his own way’ (has a full-time job), from the way he lives his life it seems apparent that he doesn’t have to worry about money (he always seems to be heading to other countries, and seems generally bent on soaking up the world, which isn't a bad thing to do itself, but is something which I, a reciever of his advice, certainly can’t afford to do). Now this isn’t criticism in itself, as although greater economic equality in society is certainly what I would desire to be the case, individualising cases of private wealth, if not a grossly obscene amount (he’s certainly not from a multimillionaire/billionaire background), is counter-productive as the inequality problem is systemic; the criticism comes from how this freedom that comes to him is enabled by the fact that money isn’t a worry, and is doubled up with his refusal to accept the problems of the world as being there, and that he sends the philosophy that backs it up my way, and the bemusement I think he feels when I just seems to “refuse” to take his approach to life on board.

What he usually tells me is along the lines of "life's much simpler than we make it (John)", knowing full-well that I speak of difficultly in life often, "Just live, and enjoy it! do what you want to do whilst you have the chance". And obviously there is truth in this statement: do try to live a full life, but simple to do so it is not! Sat having a drink outside one of the town's Weatherspoons bars on a mild evening, he said to me about how "lucky we are to live in this day and age". Adding that "we are living the kind of lives that only princes' and emperors' lived hundreds of years ago". Yet again, there is some truth in what is said here, but it's a very surface-level truth, but it's also very difficult to argue against, when you're buying £3.00 Ciders with relative ease. But it isn't even necessary to go into my predicament in depth, about how I don't feel I am free in this society because I don't have the kind of income to open up new choices to me, and that I'd argue material wealth is relative to the society one lives in, and that if I had very little but so did everyone else (as long as we had basic needs) the feelings of restrictions caused by income would probably feel less so than in a society as unequal as the UK. But more importantly, without even speculating about how far into poverty further economic austerity will drive us, there is plenty of people in the same town as me and my friend who are already (very evidently) in a state of acute poverty, without even needing to refer to how it's relative the ones society.

This individual, in particular, is overly critical of the rustic, archaic impression of the town that both the generally older first section of town voices endorse, and many of the wider older generation in town cling to because they're past is the only future they still have. But, as said above, these two types of voice generating from the town help each other because both divert focus from the big issues of the place they live/were raised in.

There is true poverty. When I mentioned about how I find inequality hard to ignore and I believe we need a more equal society, he said “people don’t want their living standards reducing, they just wouldn't want such a thing”: well, for most people in our society, living standards have already been reduced to a level well below that a more distributive society could offer them (And that's without costing the earth). In a more equal society one wouldn't desperately need the materialistic narcosis that the usually--mentioned-when-talking-about-UK-poverty Sky TV satellite Dishes, large flat-screen TV’s, new Nike Trainers and Xbox’s provide.

The mood in Barnsley has certainly sunk of late, not that it has ever seemed particularly jovial (contrary to this image of the hearty and jolly atmosphere of this 'market town'). The general mood, especially amongst the younger people (who aren't in the centre to go to college), is hopelessness. I'm feel less secure in town recently than I have done possibly ever before; I'm expecting more frequent occurrences of desperate behaviour. Just this Wednesday I actually thought I'd experienced a suicide. I went to catch the train from the town’s station. It's hardly a big train station, to say the least, but usually busy, usually with people heading to The Meadowhall Shopping Complex. Sitting down in the indoor waiting area, I saw that the train I wanted to catch to Sheffield had arrived. I got up, got my things together and was about to walk towards it, when something happened, something had just made a rupture in the everydayness of things.

The train made these cracking noises and people were turning away, not screaming really; a predominately elderly crowd of Yorkshire people don’t tend to scream, but make gasping noises and say "oh my god"; but to anybody familiar with these cultural norms of expression, this was as frightening to hear as screaming. The passivity one normally has was dragged from me like a blanket. From what was going on I became convinced somebody had just thrown themselves under the train. Because I'm expecting these things, because so many people around here look like they're at a dead end, I started to think of it as something that is going to be happening far more often now, and I fled the area, making sure I was far enough away that I wouldn't even have the choice of looking back. However, if I'd have seen more, or stayed longer to find out a little more, I would have realised that it wasn't a suicide, but an accident: an elderly lady had pressed the wrong button on her mobility scooter and driven onto the tracks in front of the train as it was pulling into the station. She was injured, but not killed, and what I thought were the sounds of cracking bones and flesh was actually the scooter being crushed. But when one is absorbed by the mood of a place so much, one cannot but help catastrophise when something 'strange' occurs. Once one has read books such as The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Do Better (which uses graph-based evidence to claim "that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health , mental health , drug abuse , education , imprisonment , obesity , social mobility , trust and community life, violence , teenage pregnancies , and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries") and read articles making predications based on general social trends, such as 2014: A Tory Dystopia (Alex Nunns), one cannot help treat every police siren they hear and every angry scene they see as evidence of 'things getting worse'.

Do I have hope for my home town or any hope in general? (ha). The landscape the town is set within has always been what I would class as home, and the wider area is what I have always identified with more than anything. Seeing landmarks such as The Emley Moor Mast TV Transmitter, the Pennine hill tops towards the west and the cooling towers towards the north east as landmarks indicating Home. I live more or less on the border area between the South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, which is why I've always identified with the name of the old county that incorporated both: The West Riding Of Yorkshire (hence, the reason it is used as my location on this blog); although not finding nation states things to desire in themselves, a little part of me does wish to see Yorkshire devolve from England at some future! And then there's the landscape heavily dedicated to the West Yorkshire art icons (Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moore), The Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which is literally a 2 mile walk from where I live in South Yorkshire.

I was really inspired by Owen Hatherley's thoughts on the architecture and layout of urban areas of Yorkshire, in his book 'The New Ruins Of Great Britain'. Although a (rightfully) angry book about what has been done to our urban areas through 'pseudo-modernist' (cheap) constructions, gentrification and generally backward-looking visions from those behind the building and alterations to our urban landscapes, I also found that it left me with some positive ideas of my own, for a possible future of this area.. He described The West Yorkshire Urban Area (roughly stretching up to Leeds, Bradford, Huddersfield and to Wakefield - incorporating all that lies between) as a super-city which doesn't even realise it is so (as within this continous urban sprawl, one can also find large areas of open countryside). Because of its own failure to reckonise this, the alternate name he gave the area was just The West Riding. He seemed to be in love with Sheffield's urban area (as many people often are), but he decided to use its old nickname 'The Socialist Republic Of South Yorkshire' rather than seeing it as an extention of a West Riding super city complex (as, historically, Sheffield was also part of The West Riding Of Yorshire)

There is a big gap of the urbanity of the 'old county', between The West Yorkshire Urban Area to the north, and the Sheffield/Rotherham urban area to the south; this gap is the less heavily populated area of the former mining borough: Barnsley. But when Owen Hatherley spoke of how Emley Moor Mast could be seen as the iconic beacon of The West Riding Super City, like the CN Tower in Toronto, or the Berliner Fernsehturm (which looks like a fatter Emley Moor Mast), looking over the entire urban area, I felt a little left out where I live, due to being able to the see Emley Moor Mast nearly every place I go around here. It felt like here should be seen as part of a united west riding. This urban vision of the area (and of Britain in general, after all it is a very densely populated island) seemed more true to my experiences of The West Riding, whilst spending most of my days in the different centres on the Hallam Line (Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley, Sheffield), than the impression given of it on the television, in regional magazines, or by most local photography enthusiasts (although not a criticism in itself - do actually like a lot of their output), which generally perpetuates a 'Last Of The Summer Wine-d' illusion that we all live in Cottage villages, and are more familiar with dry stone walls and sheep, than with motorways, continous housing estates and police sirens.

But there is a gap to this continuity, which does correspond to the slight-less densely populated area of Barnsley. But, as I have said, the cultural heritage of the place isn't half what the informal spokespeople of the first section of town voices claim it to be, and their soft-tribalism for the town's borough, only helps to perpetuate the isolationism of the town. A friend from Wakefield once said to me of Barnsley that it's like a "town with a village mentality". And, as time goes on, the more this comment stays with me. In the last 200 years Barnsley centre became the largest settlement out of a series of pit villages, and although now most villages are so built up that they are more or less joined to the centre, they have still maintained their identity of being separate mining villages. The town's borough has a population of well over 200,000, but to live there you'd think it was more 50,000, because of the persistence of this village mentality.

But is it the peoples' fault? Certainly, expensive train tickets (making Meadowhall the only 'spectacular' destination that many can afford to get to, on a limited railway network - £7.40 to get to Leeds, a city less than 20 miles away), train services that finish stupidly early on a weekend, and a bus service-set up which hardly seems to acknowledge the existence of town centres past Barnsley's (many Wakefield district buses, for example, actually carry on to Leeds after arriving at Wakefield) make Barnsley the only viable place to head to for most. But this predicament, which almost feels like a conspiracy to keep ex-coal mining town folk out the cities, may have been helped along by the constant small town, isolationist attitude of both these informal spokespeople, and the formal spokesman - The Barnsley Chronicle -, Both perpetuating this 'past as present' collaged up interpretation of the town, which the Chronicle mixes up with diabolically bad low-cultural tat such as small scale versions of the serfdom star-system X factor competitions, such as 'The Face Of Barnsley', and the 'Barnsley Bonnie Baby contest'. For anyone who can see past the argument-blocking rhetoric of 'it's just a bit of fun', these confirm that the suffering of the town and its people will continue.

Barnsley's visual identity already relies more heavily on what surrounds the borough's boarders than what is inside it; landmarks such as the M1 motorway (which due to unfortunately living in a nation of car owners, has become The West Riding's major artery, alongside the M62) Emley Moor Mast, and the windmills up on the Pennine hill tops. The only building of deemed-significance in the centre is the town hall, which one will find is used on nearly every image ever projected of the town. Since being old enough to remember certain shops, I've seen the centre shrink to being a town of empty spaces. Perhaps a little acknowledgement of it might be the best remedy in the face of losing some of its (dependence on) pride, but instead their emptiness has been concealed by laminated window-coverings of photos taken inside the few shops that are doing well! An empty shell if ever there was one!

I wish I didn't have to be so critical, but it is out of sheer refusal to accept that things have to stay this way (and get worse); the area could be so much more if it faced up to truths. I'm in no way wishing to be condescending in a aspirational way, and then leave the place and head for 'the city'. I'm quite incapable of doing this, and finding the desperation in my home town so hard to deal with, I certainly wouldn't know how to deal with the amount I'd see in a big city. But, the West Riding, is a big city! - In a sense. In an area that could be so better connected, there are well over 3 million people; that sounds a lot to me. But whilst we live in a system of denial, how can we expect to see truths like this? So instead of us all taking photographs of the beautiful green hills to the west (for example) why don't we take some photos of the neglected side of reality to this area?

here's some photos from The Hallam Line

Who Would Want To Listen To This? (2011/12)

2012-01-30T13:23:00.003Z

Who Would Want To Listen To This? (2011/2012) Biro on paper, 130X100cm

A Nowhere Rant From a Nowhere Cafe

2012-01-26T20:25:00.013Z

We can only depict the advances of the current power-structure through fictional pyshical constructions - think of the death star. Then think of the spectacular media-complex that, although everywhere, cannot be located and sourced. This makes the current power-structure much more difficult to explain, even convince others of, unlike the recent-history powers such as Nazism and Stalinism, which were far more dumb through their centralisation, and now (regardless of their horrible crimes) make for great distractions and diversions from the power-structure dominating us, which has a Anglo-American imperial history.
How many programs do you see of the crimes commited by Hitler and Stalin compatred to those commited by the British Empire/Post-1945 America on tv? We just get imperialist apologists like Nial Ferguson, skipping the horrors to focus on the westernisation of the world. It is arguable that Anglo-American Imperialism has killed more people than both these two 20th century regimes combined.

It is collective amnesia that enables us to believe that capitalism and democracy (or what we have now, which is at least a facade of democracy) go side by side, just like it is collective Amnesia that enables us to believe that George Orwell was only against a Stalinist-type threat, as if that was the only type of totalitarianism

Taking those thoughts into account I think this John Pilger Article is a must-read

http://www.newstatesman.com/global-issues/2012/01/pilger-obama-war-britain

My naturalised habitat

2012-01-15T08:21:00.001Z

The Hallam Line: Sheffield, Barnsley, wakefield, Leeds (photographs)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnledger/sets/72157628806208041/

2012-01-13T10:51:00.000Z

Desperation witnessed on a Facebook wall and desperation on the railway lines, on our endless commutes - going nowhere

2012-01-12T21:40:00.021Z

Desperation witnessed on a Facebook wall and desperation on the railway lines, on our endless commutes - going nowhere

"Out of my way, it's a busy day, and I've got things on my mind" Us And Them, Pink Floyd

The affect it has on us when online acquaintances make desperate cries for help, more or less saying that they are close to suicide, on their Facebook wall and the similar reaction we have when there is a suicide on the train tracks or someone is threatening to throw themselves off a motorway bridge (for example) has made me think of how the solitary way we collectively make our way around Facebook is just a virtual reflection of the way we make our way through the physical world in our 'daily races' under late capitalism.

Whilst in London in December, I was told by two different people of their witnessing/second hand witnessing of a suicide on the tube tracks or the aftermath of one (blood stains on the sides of the tunnel were visible from the windows of a tube train carriage). I would find witnessing such a thing unbelievably difficult to deal with (as I suspect they did); in the space of one week I experienced 2 delays to train journeys in the Yorkshire area due to there being 'a fatality on the line/somebody being hit by a train' (as said by the automated tannoy voice) and the mere news of this left me with such an empty and despairing feeling that I had to go for a drink to become a little more numb, to stop me thinking "there's certainly an increase on these occurrences". I find stories of suicides on train tracks more awful than suicides committed in bedrooms, alleyways or woodlands; there is something about them that states that they will happen again and again, and nothing will be done.

A couple of days ago I got a text from a Friend who lives in London, expressing discontent with commuter behaviour on the tube. He said "these rush hour commuters are like those in cars. Cars being the embodiment of Thatcherite individualism and selfishness" and that "everybody looks away if you look at them, so no eye contact with people". The way we collectively use public transport (although much more beneficial to society than using a car) reflects the Thatcherite rhetoric of there is 'no such thing as society' just in the same way as the increasing usage of the car has done in the past 30 years. This friend was one of the 2 friends who told me about a suicide they witnessed on the tube. He sent that text one day after the M1 motorway was closed near to where I live, causing traffic congestion on the nearby road, due an individual threatening to throw themselves off one of the bridges over the motorway. Also, it was on the same day that I came across a Facebook post that expressed acute desperation.

The fulfillment of the 'no such thing as society' rhetoric means that we are atomised and forced into a selfish bubble-like existence even when we are out of our cars and our sleeping/eating cells (the physical bubbles); our jobs (that creep into every aspect of our lives via email/cell phone) make for perpetual financial strain, which puts strain on relationships, and becomes all consuming, and couple this with the effect that the sheer bulk of advertising we absorb (thus, the status anxiety it causes) has on us, living in a neoliberal (free market) economy; and we (to use a quote from Mark Fishers' Capitalist Realism) "wall ourselves up against The Social" by putting our Ipod/Mp3 players on to soothe ourselves with musical sugary stimulus - we feel we need it to keep our mood levels up. But when capitalism's so-called 'accidents' actually reinforce its legitimacy, as recession pushes the pitch-fork of financial anxiety further into our backsides (thus, forcing us to be even more selfish and competitive) what can we do but become more self-orientated, perpetuating the problem?

When trying to escape The Social all the time, a suicide, or the threat of a suicide, is both too bleak to contemplate and also a massive inconvenience to us (due to the delays it brings to our 'daily races'). And the wish not to dwell on it, to just get on with focusing on our own journey through this world, engenders the inconvenience that the delays these incidents become, which engenders a selfishness in all of us, which in turn, engenders a society of more atomised people where, because this is a positive feedback loop of affect and causation, means increasing numbers of people will become alienated, depressed and will attempt/commit suicide.

I suppose the aforementioned greater bleakness of killing oneself in such a way relates to my own past experiences when I can remember feeling low enough to be contemplating committing this ultimate gesture (although not involving railway lines, personally): knowing nobody has the time to even give it a thought, and that your death will be brushed under the carpet, out of mind out of sight, like the train wheels would do to your body, because it's also too inconvenient to dwell on, being in a society where we are informed to 'forget' about these external incidents, as we should try to get on with our own lives, making sure we don't become the next person ready to throw ourselves under moving vehicles. This attitude, which we all ascribe to, or try to (because it is the most convenient attitude to have in a society where mental illness has been individualised, thus separated from its socio-political causation's) is what ensures that it will keep happening again; it ensures the perpetuation of alienation; the perpetuation of this 'no such thing as society' where we all feel that we have no choice but to look out for number 1, with the cost being that we may one day be this person jumping in front of a train/threatening to jump from a motorway bridge.

"So" you think "Is this what happens? People just look the other way, put in their headphones, and occupy their mind with filling out that Job application, for a job they are unlikely to get because 100 other people have applied for that very post? And hope that they never reach such a lowly stage themselves?" You can hear us all muttering the lyrics from Us And Them by Pink Floyd again; "down and out, it can't be helped that there's a lot of it about".

You get home. Try to forget the thoughts that the bleak tannoy announcements conjured up, and if you can't you can always see if anyone wants to join you for a little bit of alcoholic anesthetizing in town. But you do that too much, and although it feels to be leading somewhere at the time, it's the same every time. The thing is it feels like an arrival, or at least the finishing off of something, a conclusion to an otherwise empty day that feels incomplete and unfulfilled. You miss the drink for today, but still need to feel secure, heard; that you're building something that will make you safe from ever being 'down and out'; pathways towards arriving. The seemingly easiest way to contact people now is via the Internet, so that's what you attempt.
But as soon as you log into the place where everybody goes (Facebook) you feel like you are going nowhere again; nobody seems to be hearing what you say; it feels like you've only just set off on a tiresome journey, after only just finishing one in the physical world; you just can't land. So you shout louder, AND LOUDER! Listen to me!!, just me!! Oh dear.

And so the attitude we share as commuters is continued in both the reason why social networking sites have become so popular, and in the way we collectively use them. One will occasionally stumble across Facebook wall posts an individual has put up, saying how desperately unhappy and lonely he/she is, worded in a way that suggests that he/she is contemplating attempting suicide. Regardless of whether the suggestion of doing so is false, or is just a cry for help (which, should be seen as just that, and not attention seeking; people don't make up depression, it is endemic in our society), how do we react to this? I'd argue in the same way as we react to the situation of a man threatening to throw himself from a bridge onto a road we desire to travel on/the same way as we'd react if a dead body was blocking our rail journey: although empathy is lacking in such a society, we still do all possess enough to feel some short burst of sadness for the person in question, but the feeling is overwhelmed by our anxieties about our own life. We are so self-orientated, so overly concerned about getting from our A to B (our intentions/goals/needs from facebook) that it becomes much more of an inconvenience. More than that, it reveals the uncomfortable truths about our fragility that we are constantly having to run from.

But can we ever arrive, in a sense, if this journey perpetually never ends, when social networking sites and cell phones extend this endless commute into our houses, the one place where we are supposed to have arrived at? We commute on the net like we commute in our endless physical races in the heat of the day; trying to push ourselves forward, but going nowhere, going nowhere
The fast lane, high speed rail, high speed broadband, but never actually arriving ("Perhaps we should resolve Britain’s railway network into a single orbital system, so that we can all remain in constant circulation. Then we’ll know we’re getting somewhere." this cutting and humorous observation about the high speed rail plans by George Monbiot in Fast Train to Nowhere, May 17 2010, seems to touch upon the whole of the eternal commute.)

"You only actually arrive when you switch it off", a friend said to me yesterday, regarding the effect of trying to find meaning through communication on Facebook. But he also acknowledged how hard it is to do so, because of how it persuades you that the opposite is true. Social networking sites are forced communication-as-self-promotion, forced Yuppiedom, passed off as choice, just as commuting longer and longer distances to work, which was forced onto us by social restructuring, and a deliberate shifting of capital, was passed off as an individuals freedom to work wherever he/she may choose; both do the opposite of what they promote; they create an environment of self-preservation at all costs and selfishness as necessity, as if we were still fighting for food in the wild. If this isn't further evidence that systemic alterations engender how technology advances, and how it is used by people, then I don't know what is.

Facebook is awful, but it is not an anomaly, or even a massive societal shift; it is a logical extension of the culture that has been created. Which is why, when you're thinking clearly enough (and not excited by the prospect of lots of little red numbers appearing in the top left corner of your profile page) it is the saddest of thoughts that tonight the only way you will attempt to talk to people is through it, because nobody will be really listening to you, because they need to be listened to. self-promotion lapses into self-preservation every time. But some people, in the physical and virtual world, cannot survive this world-made-cold.

Momentarily feeling the need to 'stand my ground'

2012-01-05T18:45:00.008Z

The assumption that those living in more urban areas/areas more integrated into the sprawl of humanity look down on people like myself who are still seemingly embedded in much smaller settlements isn't misplaced. Towns, such as the one I still reside in, are openly mocked and belittled by society. It is thought of as being unambitious, and being intentionally backwards, always yearning for the rustic, to stay in such areas.
But, far from desiring to stay here, my own (miss)understanding of late-capitalist reality has meant that the 'get up and go' language us children of the 1980's/90's are supposed to have inbuilt (in the same way we had Alex The Kidd built into our Sega's) has somewhat left me behind, like the Motorway cutting through my village with no slip road to join, so one can only watch the other candles burning much brighter as they fly by. Likewise, I spend most of the days I have off work in the nearest and affordable-to-get-to urban sprawls (the Yorkshire cities of Leeds and Sheffield) precisely because of these reasons, and the shining lights attract me on vain like a moth, but a moth in search of meaning or love, or whatever the hell it is I'm supposed to find in a city.
However, all this is irrelevant because everybody hooked up to the Internet, cell phone networks, and subjected to matrix of images and signs that make up late-capitalism, through these devices, is a virtual urban dweller, and there is truly very few human beings these days who could be called rural dwellers, in regards to how we interact and the frequency with which we interact with the rest of the human world. Likewise, when I visit the biggest city in this country, I don't feel like it's a new experience, or an experience I rarely have, just a compression of my usual experiences and an exacerbation of them: it just feels like I'm travelling down one of the main arteries of the now endless city, instead of one of the smaller ones.
One now feels as lonely in front of a screen showing their facebook homepage, as they did traditionally in a city all by themselves. This is the feeling of a true urbanite. Yes, I am, in a sense as much an urban creature in the small ex-coal mining town of Barnsley, as somebody using the tube in central London is. The endless city has materialised in a way much unpredicted in much of the 20Th century science fiction, where the world was envisioned as becoming one big physical city; cyberspace has created this, with the added inversion of reality, where nothing seems real because nearly everything happens in a place exempt from the physical reality where we still have to get out oxygen and food from.
Obviously there is still so much more to do in the real physical city, places to go to experience culture or revel, but somehow these things don't seem of note once one is there, or at least don't have the effect one would expect them to have after all they've read about them. Walking around the British Museum, I really couldn't appreciate the historical significance of the ancient artifacts I was walking past; partly down to this and partly down to the glaring truth of the place, I took on board the 2Nd history of them; the history of their colonial appropriation; the reason why Egyptian/Greek relics are in London.
Yet, as much as this not very rosy truth needs to be acknowledged, the reason for purposefully looking at them in this way was because I really couldn't feel what I thought I was supposed to feel from seeing things which are supposed to be 'wonders', so I had to put on my critical poker face. Seeing image after image on screens of things that are far away, right through my life; talking to people through cyberspace; listening to music from far off studios on my mp3 player; walking down streets I know by clicking computer buttons; all this seems to detract from (or least tamper with) the worth of things in the physical world (especially things which are suppose to be of great cultural/historical significance). Nothing in the physical world seems more real than that in the virtual world, and nothing much surprises because it could just be from another television drama or documentary.
And When one is next to these/experiencing these things we are told are of significance, they are most likely going to be taking photos of these things/or writing on phones to people about them, sending their existences back into the endless city, rather than the concrete biggest of cities they are currently stood in. An anxiety about what to do arises, because we can't feel anymore/or don't know what we are supposed to feel. So we must document, or consume by appropriating photographic images of it, continuing the Pumping of the physical into the virtual.
The physical city has been negated and the virtual city promoted until they have blended with one another, and we are all now urban dwellers, in an endless city. But an endless city would surely be desirable? Unlike an endless village, where everybody clings to their prejudices and tribalism's. The apparatus's which reinforce a village mentality within us, rather than an acceptance of cosmopolitanism within an endless human city, would require a critique of the current system of domination and the way it uses technology, and I think the Internet is currently generating both, but one may eventually win over the other. However, the intention of writing this was that I was feeling the eyes of those physical city dwellers, and just wanted to explain how a small town resident becomes just as urbanised as someone living in the centre of London in the Internet age.

2012: Dedicated to all humans

2012-01-04T09:01:00.002Z

I used to find In Rainbows the most difficult album to listen to by Radiohead. Not because I found it a worse album than the rest of the (post pablo honey) albums, just because there was something I found deeply incomfortable about it, a truth in it that I couldn't/or didn't want to acknowledge right then. I didn't know what was behind all this, until I read some essays on the album in Radiohead and philosophy. There is a truth in the album which is fought against to stop it happening in the previous albums, but ACCEPTED in In Rainbows: that of a looming mortality, an end, and not just to oneself but to our species. This truth is at its most emotionally heightened in The Reckoner and in House of Cards (the first synth entrance especially). This is why i still usually find myself listening to the 4 albums previous to this one, where the fight with bleak nihilism and against the erosion of democracy is still on going, as this is the fight that is waging in my mind most daytime periods. But In Rainbows has a fragility to it, when one can fight no longer, a coming to terms with the self also. In rainbows is about death, but coming to terms with it, like someone with a terminal disease must do. It makes it too beautiful for me to be able to listen to as I make my way through each day, and it's only when i have my days when truths about myself and the world are face to face with me that it becomes the ablum I choose to listen to.

"Dedicated to all humans...." The Reckoner

2012-01-01T18:17:00.000Z

New Works For New Year

2011-12-27T12:04:00.002Z

Please excuse the massive gaps between new artworks on this blog, each piece takes me on average around 3 months now; they just keep taking longer and longer to finish.

2011 artworks

2011-12-27T12:02:00.000Z

Global Ghetto, 2045, Marks The Centenary Of The Defeat Of Fascism (biro on paper)

"I Want None Of This" biro and collage on paper

Ill-Equipped (Pencil Crayon on paper)

Acheiving And Getting Things Done (mixed media) used for The Globalsapiens exhibition

Audio piece made for The Globalsapiens exhibition

The Index For Child Well-being (biro and collage on paper)

In The City... (Biro on paper)

Crashing in, right on time again

2011-12-25T17:59:00.001Z

It's that time of year to crash in again, almost like a rushed need to deconstruct so to rebuild again, for the socially constructed 'ends and beginnings'. A compulsion to fuck up.

So you open the door with a look
On your face, your hands in your
pockets and your family to face
And you go downstairs and you sit in
Your place...

End Of Year Haunting

2011-12-25T17:53:00.000Z

"No more talking about the old days, it's time for something great.." Atoms For Peace, Thom Yorke

"Take time out from truth - it's Christmas!!!"

2011-12-25T17:52:00.010Z

I'll try to be constructive with what is usually misconstrued as 'seasonal grumbling' to fend off the "if you don't like it (Christmas) - just ignore it, just stop going on about it" reactions, as if it really could be that simple.

So, the yearly suffocation of all momentum, hopes and good feeling begins (they will have to be picked up again, in my post-birthday late January restructuring). Christmas, as seasonal events go, has such an unchallenged force, that it dredges all momentum and good feeling from an individual, and turns it into energy for the hyping up of itself: one finds themselves flying full-pelt towards December 25Th and the January 1st. "But wait, something's wrong. What does all this mean? and who am I? I cannot seem to recall..."
'Be happy or else!!! Everything seems to tell you this. Christmas/New Year is like swallowing the entire back-catalogue of advertisements from the year gone: a gigantic mix of discontent and illogical excitement-cum-disappointment; "you're still single, shit - you're getting old now!! Find a special person! Kiss someone this Christmas! See old friends! See them all, now!! Have a great great time, full of facebook-photo-worthy memories!! be happy!!!!"

Shopping:
Consumerism at Christmas! Nobody likes it; "it's mental" we all say. But it's more than this. Take time, force yourself to slow down, and watch it, as if you weren't also part of it (as sadly, you are). The banality of it all! We are prisoners! And at Christmas we are encouraged by absolutely every voice and image around us to celebrate our imprisonment on a scale that isn't matched at any other times, by giving more of our wage than ever before to our corporate jailers (except maybe when there is a 'royal' occasion when we celebrate our nation state as if it was the most loving caring thing on earth, or a major sporting occasion, when we are slowly seduced into celebrating being powerless serfs by watching specially chosen serfs elevated from serfdom to kick a ball around a field. "Rule, fucking Rule Britannia, as if it were the 18Th century!!"), whilst at the same time we are told to "leave it out/cut the moaning" because "this isn't the place or time" because it's Christmas, our biggest prison duty, and you are being a 'party-pooper' for ruining that! "Take time out from truth, and help us build the prison walls even higher!".

But as well as this, I suppose, I'm wishing to reassess my own strange relationship to this period. Waking up on the day something is stirring inside, saying this is an event, the event of the year; "it's special". Yet, rationally speaking, I don't feel this way at all, and historically, Christmas times have never been high-points of my year to say the least (personal mini-breakdowns, that aren't worth explaining, but are caused by the swallowing of an abstract hype and excitement). But I think the way that my wrapping of presents has got generally worse since I was old enough to afford to buy people presents says enough: I'm slowly finding it easier to distance myself from an hype for a tradition that seems somewhat misplaced now. We are in need of hope and joy in these gloomy times, but this is moving in the wrong direction: an unthinking belief in the past as reason to go forward.

And it's not a case of 'wanting to make folk miserable', it's a case of wanting to push things forward. These events smother all critical discussion of the present tense, just as Royal Wedding events smother all worthy discontent with a nation still having a monarchy. However, I will be trying to enjoy myself throughout this period, doing what I'd have been doing anyway; having some drinks and hoping to bump into friends/or even hoping that I may bump into someone of the opposite sex who finds me attractive, or does criticism of such events instantly make me incapable of laughing and being affable to people?
Waking up in my mates' room after a very heavy night, I looked up at the union jack flag wrapped around the edges of a frame on the wall; it seemed to speak as much of the event of Christmas as it did to an allegiance to one's own nation state. This is in no way a criticism of my friend for doing so, we all have our needs, just that it gave me a brief but large feeling that all these events and allegiances were somehow linked/were part of the same need.
On the street which contains sheltered homes for the elderly and incapacitated in the area where I live, the only house to have a (this time) St George's flag outside (stuck on a pole in the garden) was also the house which had the most extravagant and showy Christmas decorations. Likewise, the residents of an house who bizarrely paint The St George's flag onto two small boulders outside their house further down the road, is also part of a collective of houses that are draped with some of most showy Christmas decorations every time the event comes around.
A massive need for meaning and belonging make for a blind allegiance to the corporate state, and all its prescribed events that convey meaning throughout the year. It's a sad sight, one you want to do something about, but how? I currently have more questions than answers....

Unlike the link with flag-draped households and poorer areas, there doesn't appear to be this link with Christmas decorations and poorer areas, but the evidence I have seen of extravagant Christmas decorations next to Union Jack/ST George flagged-draped houses, seems to certainly suggest an alienation that the corporate state feeds off twice over first through the loyalty given to it by so many in need of meaning and belonging, in a world where they are made to feel like they belong nowhere by the forces of market globalism (don't confuse with the usual word they use to make it sound more reciprocal: Globalisation) and then through the lucrativeness of the commodification of its prescribed events. To me Christmas is etched into the collusion between the corporations and the nation state, and thus that is the only meaning it has left now.

Theoretically, I don't have to partake in it (in practice I'd argue that I do have to), but what is the purpose of it, if, to stick to the theoretical, enjoyment and good will to one another shouldn't 'just be for Christmas?' What is left of Christmas after the glacier-like force of consumerism has stripped-bear its landscape, dragging every part of it along with it? And if tradition is what is left, what tradition is this, and is it not just a lumpen acceptance of a collaged-up past, especially now surely most of us (including myself) are no longer believers in the religious story from where all this tradition originally stems? Looking back at our collective past, shouldn't be a socially-compulsive unthinking duty, as this just becomes a form of forgetfulness instead, a forgetting that this lumpen vision of the past is mainly a Victorian-period onwards construction, something that allows us to forget our present national (if we want to call it that) story.

And yes, as said previously, I will be out drinking and, hopefully, having a good time, and, if I can afford it, I'd get you (possibly non-existent) reader a drink in. I've tried my hardest to be generous all year round, with what means I have, so why am I suddenly a 'Scrooge' now, because I don't particularly like the construct of Christmas?

Doing my best to settle an argument

2011-11-29T08:28:00.013Z

A rather tricky situation has arisen due to a debate, that I started, on my facebook wall, spiraling into a very very heated argument between different friends. I had disagreements with the views being expressed in one camp, but disagreements with the method of criticising these views from the other camp.
The conversation turned into a slanging match, and before one starts to ask which camp was more to blame than the other, on my behalf the crucial task is to figure our a way how to avoid upsetting either friend(s) without re-stoking this fiery argument.
This blog post is an attempt to do this. The reasons for not explaining this on facebook are due to my feelings about the counterproductivity of having such debates on this platform (as explained in my previous blog post) and to stay clear of the perpetual anxiety that the platform of facebook induces, especially in this situation - thus, I have quit facebook, making sure I can never retrace my password any time I get tempted to rejoin the hell-hole.
I am in no way attempting to take the moral high-ground here, and I am in no way trying to prove "I am right, you are wrong"; I'm just trying to ease this situation, and trying to solve this argument between people I respect (because it isn't very nice to be in middle of it!), so I don't have to explain this in the likely event of bumping into one of you after a few pints of cider, when I would be far from my most articulate!!
So here goes...

(apologies for the usage of the words 'them' and 'us' in the first section by the way, I'm using them to express they way we are encouraged to see rather than the way I actually see).

Friend 1 (with slight relevance to friend 3 also)

To begin with, although I don't agree with the method of criticising you that 'friend 2' [the name used for this post] used to react to what you wrote on my wall (and it is obvious that the person concerned friend 2 doesn't know you from some of the 'labelling' you received - although you did do some labeling yourself too) I do certainly have very different views points to you in regards to certain things you said and certain words you used.
And although I have no right to say you must change these views and don't wish to impose my own truths on you, in this case I think it is important to at least hear me out on why I feel it is crucial to take a second look at the way you are writing these comments, because although it is not down to you personally, the wider usage of the concerned terms, in a derogatory way, can lead to ugly and dangerous forms of discrimination in society - this also diverts our eyes from the real causations of the becoming these groups/subgroups in our society, precisely because we do not realise we are partaking in a form of discrimination.
I am of course mainly referring to the usage of the terms 'chavs' and also (but not as much) to 'youths'. I completely understand why you feel so angry and threatened when people mock you and verbally abuse you when you walk the streets, and I am in no way under the illusion that you are making this up, because, as you know, I also receive an quite of a lot of stick whilst walking the streets of our home town, and I too feel angry and intimidated because I also don't know how to react to it, or prevent it from happening. I know the avenue (Coniston) where you catch your buses from very well, and I've seen that a lot of people who seem to have nowhere else to go (something I'll return to) hang about there. And, true my own experiences too, most of the people who are dealing out this stick do match these generalisations of young people wearing the clothing style (tracksuits etc) that are associated with the label 'chav' (although, when I've grown up with people who match this description, they are usually much more pleasant to me than anything).
However, it is important to say that not all of the people who've laughed or shouted at me in streets fit this description - and some, in only an economic sense, are probably less 'chav' than I am! This should stop us short of using the generalising terms in the first plae, but the issue here isn't as simple as to leave it here. So, to stick to the important issues here, it is best to stick directly to why it might be the section of society labeled as 'chav' who would come across as more threatening and irritating to you.
NO MATTER how angry ones feels, how much the abuse makes one feel small, I think it is crucial to see the causations of why certain people in society may need be aggressive and openly mocking of people (not just behind closed doors like the rest of society does), and why people may want to make other people on a street feel small and intimidated; I think it is crucial to see things systemically (and unlike what one of our friends said, seeing things systemically has nothing to do with seeing the system as an 'evil monster'). It is crucial that one takes this into account a causation in a systemic way, rather than seeing each 'chav' case as "their choice to be like that", because this causation relates to all those below a certain income level, and also relates to our own, non-abused-on-street-caused-miseries in these, often, gloomy times.

Perhaps the best place to start looking at the causation systemically is through looking at The Summer Riots in the UK. I think it is safe to say that the lions share of those 'rioting' were 'disaffected' young people, who are either unemployed, with no hope of employment, and alienated from the aspirationalism of our culture which is mediated to us from the top downwards. Whilst aspirationalism and materialism is shoved down their throats from all angles, they also know that their lives are aimless, dead-ended, and, though many cannot articulate this knowledge (the poorest areas are statistically the poorest educated, and also the areas that are most bombarded by aspirational advertisements -watch out for all the billboards in poor communities - diverting focus to materialism instead) they do sense that all this is out of their control. The poorest sections of the society are also the areas which are being hit hardest by the welfare cuts. It's lose lose, whilst the adverts say 'win win' and those at the top say "it's your fault if you aren't winning".
The reaction, (the rioting) was (apart from, maybe, the organised opportunists who capitalised on the disorder) a violent but objectless/aimless rage; self-destructively striking out at their own communities; a pure expression of anger but with no direction, no knowledge of what caused this anger; the looting of consumer goods, which only unintentionally made comment on the rampant consumerism and selfishness of aspirationalism which has turned our culture into a culture more about 'haves and have nots' than it has been since Victorian times. They have been intentionally left in the dark about the reasons for their lowliness and poverty, and now after 30 years of this, with kids growing up knowing no different, being told to 'expect things to get even worse' the rioting really did (to quote my friend Adam Denton) "feel like the system expressing itself"

This isn't a diversion from the issue of 'Chav' because the systemic changes which have created a section of society whom we are all told scorn for their lowliness, has also been supplying the tindersticks that caused these riots. The language, and organisations which may have once united such a section of society, and given them a clear picture of their oppressor, has been crushed by the neoliberal system brought in by Thatcher.
To understand why there is this section of our society which is more-or-less an underclass, not "underclass" in the sense of the words usage in the reaction of "how can they be working class if they don't even bother working?!" (which is an oversimplification) but in a sense of a section of society that it has been politically convenient to blame them for their own poverty, lack of education etc, one has to look closely at what happened when the Thatcher's conservatives took control in 1979 (one could look much further at British history, but it would mean a massive diversion from the point of this post).

Their pre-planned series of systemic changes to jolt Britain into being a more free-market, more competitive system, undercut the traditional working class jobs, and the areas in which they were based. Now I am in no way saying that the era before this (the 1945-1979 postwar consensus era) was perfect, as it wasn't; and, in a landscape sense, things are a lot greener now the heavy industries such as the coal mines (for example) have gone. But these ethics were in no way part of the Tories agenda; they wanted to defeat workers' solidarity, so they could get rid of unions and re-gear the system into an ultra-competitive one. Thatcherism's rhetorics, such as "greed is good", "there is no such thing as a society" and "anyone who is still relying on public transport over the age of 25 can deem themselves a failure" (in aide of promoting a nation of car owners, rather than shared transport) weren't just reactionary comments spouted, they were memes ("an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" - Merriam-Webster Dictionary) injected into our culture, to change it's dynamics. Now, competition and 'the freedom of the market' may not sound such bad words on their own, but they were used against words like 'sharing, community, togetherness', and, more importantly, those who benefit from the free market and competition are nearly always those at the top of the income pile already (with only minor exceptions - as even musicians from lower income backgrounds are finding it harder and harder to 'make it' these days - read this for more on that http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/14/pulp-festivals). This meant that the rich were getting richer and richer, and the poorer were either not moving, or more likely suffering from the destruction of the old industries, and finding that they weren't getting anywhere no matter how competitive they were being in this now-named 'land of opportunity'.
So, as the illusion of opportunity for everyone was a myth (and those who already had the lions share, started to take more and more) Thatcherism's attempts at breaking worker ('class) solidarity had also won over, words such as 'working class' solidarity' 'togetherness' giving way to a new language in our culture about competition, aspiration, where "every can make it so everyone must try", with the flip-side of this being "if you don't make a good life for yourself it is your own fault, you just haven't tried hard enough" (even though it was a 'rigged race' to start with). We were conned into believing that our society had 'progressed to a stage of 'classlessness', from where those who were lowly just couldn't be arsed do well for themselves, and just didn't "appreciate" education and culture, and were deserving of scorn.
So basically, the entire society was being infiltrated with these memes of selfishness, whilst the old words to describe 'class' injustices, and capitalist exploitation were being erased.(conveniently for the ruling class, around this time the Soviet Union - the worlds example, all-be-it, an woefully bad example, of communism was collapsing, allowing the capitalist ruling class and their political advocates to pronounce that 'there is no alternative to [*insert* free market] capitalism). What this meant was that those at the bottom, who were increasingly prone to more exploitative jobs, or no hope of employment at all, was that the language there to describe their exploitation/the way they had been screwed over, had been replaced with a language of affluence, which although may sound enticing, erases the places from where one could vent their frustration, and got them basically speaking and talking words which would further exploit them and further enhance the elite.

This, over the past 30 years, has created a viscous exacerbating cycle, where scorn aimed at this bottom section of society, who no longer have the available language to retaliate, and have only the language of the selfishness which has shit on them already, has made this section of society feel constantly under attack. They, in turn, have acted out with more hostility to the rest of society, thus heightening the scorn, and so forth. And because it has been politically essential (to not upset neoliberalism, and the power it wields over the political class) not to see problems in society as having a political causation, all the government could do was to turn to reactionary measures when there was disorder amongst the 'disaffected', such as ASBO'S and High-Pitched noises outside bus stations. "Naughty people! Start behaving, or else!" So, thus, in this depoliticised culture, the alienation and frustration of this section of society could only grow.
I think you can tell how under-threat a person is feeling, by the manner in which he/she walks, interacts: there is a need to constantly be on the self-defence for those from a discriminated section of society and this is noticeable in macho walking styles and 'cocky' body gestures, and it is interesting to notice this in all discriminated sections of societies all over the world, from the British 'underclass' to the poorer, and even more discriminated, black communities in the USA.

In relation to the discriminated-against black communities of the USA, it seems that those sections of society most exploited and left vulnerable by the system, seem to be the ones that drape themselves in the most materialistically brash, and most heavily branded clothing and jewellery. The poorest communities tend to be the ones with least access to an education which might help them become critical of the materialism of capitalism, and poor areas are generally the areas were the big brands can stain the walls with their product adverts until there is no room left - basically, rampant materialism becomes the only language really available at all. When one thinks of 'bling' they usually also think the word 'chav' or they associate it with the music from those US ghettos - RNB/HIP-HOP, which might explain why this is the music which is usually associated with 'chavs' here in the UK. The heavily branded, 'blingy' clothing/jewellery etc, also seems to act as an act of self-defence by those who feel most threatened and powerless - with the language of class politics hidden from view, all one can when the are right down at the bottom is to use the only given, the aspirationalist materialism, to the max.
And I think all these things sum-up what as a society we now class as a 'chav'.

Now where do we come into this, being, traditionally speaking, working class too? Well, I find this passage from the essay 'outline of a beginning' by the philosopher Alain Badiou (written in 1968, but used in a 201o publication due the persistent relevance of it) very appropriate, as it deals with the task of 'bringing about political and practical unity between disparate groups', which, in relation to the predicament in our nation at the moment, the disparate groups would be us - who it may be appropriate here to label as 'the educated working class - and the 'chav's - who it may be appropriate to label as 'the uneducated working class.
"The bourgeoisie [the historical name for the capitalist class] to some extent relies for its politico-social defence upon the ideology of a gap between the middle strata [who, in our terms should be seen as us; the educated and so-called 'cultured' working class'] (employees, cadres, supervisors, civil servants) and the proletariat [who, in our terms should be seen as the 'uneducated working class']. If these two groups united in any practical sense, it would pose a deadly threat to the employers' class power."
"Now, awareness of the gap is conveyed by 'culture' and supported by the cornerstone of academic edifice: the distinction between the intellectual labour and manual labour. It is therefore essential to educate the 'middle strata' on a mass but differentiated basis: giving them a taste of secondary, or even higher, education marks in indelible terms their sense of distance and their fear of being proletarianized".

Although the lines of separation that distance may be at a different threshold between us 'the educated working class' and those who society called 'the chavs', the terms are still the same: "If these two groups united in any practical sense, it would pose a deadly threat to the employers' class power". what I am saying is that discriminating against 'chavs' (or even going as far as to use the label in the first place) we perpetuate that gap which stops us seeing the bigger picture of our subordination of both groups by the capitalist class.
It is generally 'the educated working class' who are fearful, thus discriminatory, of 'chavs' because we are the closest to them, and we are more fearful of becoming 'down and out' like them. This, in turn, heightens the already present resentment those from the 'chav'-labeled section of society have for us, because, in the 'alternative' clothes/music, the books we read, the 'good job's we search for, we reek of the systemic 'scumification' of them, because we are draped in the language forced on us by the capitalist class, that blames the 'chavs' and calls them poor due to their own choice to be lazy and stupid.
This is the reason why when hatred and resentment is expressed at students in society, it isn't aimed at the likes who occupy the Bullingdon Club, but at the students who come from lower middle/educated working class backgrounds. Without knowing it, through intentional systemic meddling, they are scorning the bottom section of society for problems which in reality are out their control, in a culture which is all about 'haves and have nots'.

So, it's in our interests, if we want to see a better future, to see the section of society labeled as 'chav' in this context, and no as our enemies. I'm in no way saying that we shouldn't go to university, dress differently, or stop going to art galleries, but just that we should be careful not to be driven by the aspirationalist memes to do these things, as this is how the gap is created, to neither sections' benefit. The abuse may not stop on the streets we walk, but try to remember that that abuse is not really meant for you, and if we know this, there may be hope that they will too.

I am in no way wanting you to become as politicised as me, but please take all into consideration.

See you on Wednesday evening anyway!!

Friend 2
First of all, by meeting you in person I realise you have a massively larger pool of intellectual resource to take from than I have, and, although it is not a competition, I know I cannot match this. It was indeed very enlightening to meet you - you said you learnt a lot from your trip to Sheffield, well, so did I!
However, in regards to this strange (for me) situation, I do think you have built up a very wrong picture of 'friend 1' (and 'friend 3') from the argument you had with him on facebook. As I have explained in the previous section, I certainly don't agree with friend 1's usage of terms such as 'chav also, but the way you criticised him seem to take for granted an image of him being quite a self-assured, arrogant person - but this is not the case at all. And I think that this leads to an important point: I think both of you may have come across as very very different people to whom you really are in the non-facebooked world. I think you miss-judged him as someone far more self-assured when you told him to 'go kill himself'. If he was cock-sure of himself, he would have laughed this off, but not being so, I don't think he did.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm not sure if the make-up of facebook can actually make room for democratic debate, but instead just encourages one to bolster the image of themselves that they have projected onto the site, at all costs. Thus, I think that a difference of views on facebook can only lead to online hostilities. I sometimes think that challenging views on facebook can only serve to harden the already expressed views concerned, in an act of self-preservation. Basically I just don't think it's possible to make anyone change their minds, or reconsider their views on facebook. And the angrier we get, the more one loses people.
You are right that your challenges on people on facebook can 'unmask' their bigotry and racism from behind their supposedly 'liberal' mask, but, regarding friend 1 and 3, if you met them I'm pretty sure they would not strike you as being this sort of person, and I think you'd actually find yourselves listening to each other, and they'd probably be interested in your many thoughts you share!! I think that sometimes, due to this incessant anxiety for self-preservation, spread by the facebook memes, anger can be caused by a lack of self-esteem and self-assurance rather than a fear of an unmasking of supposedly 'liberal' views to find that somebody isn't all so tolerant after all.
Of course I think this is often the case! So much of my thinking is taken up by the fact that many people make up lies about how liberal they are in order to cover up very uncomfortable realities. However, although, as you said "nostalgia, and familiarity stand for nothing with friendship', what I suppose has kept me and friend 1 in close contact for so long is maybe down to a shared sensitivity to things (all be it, sometimes sensitive about different things) and I know that friend 1 is more likely to react out of anxiety about him feeling that he is being attacked in general, or being made a fool of, than rather what in particular he is being criticised for. We aren't just people who went to school with each other so feel compelled to appropriate our friendships on facebook, we are friends in the physical world also.
He certainly does feel intimidated by these people who are present where he catches his bus. It's a difficult one, because I understand that feeling like this makes him angry, but I don't agree with the labelling of people of course. To ask him to see thing systemically is my only advice I could give. But I must admit, I suffer from low self-esteem when anyone mocks me also, no matter what knowledge I have that informs me to rise above this feeling. But, to me now, it is essential to see it systemically, even if this drains me of massive amounts of energy whilst actually experience the physical world.

The initial reason why I didn't join the argument before it truly escalated was because I didn't know how to put "I didn't agree with friend 1's views but I didn't agree with your initial method of criticism" in a way which would calm the situation. And this wasn't the only reason I had for quitting facebook, but it certainly was the instigator of something Ive been trying to do for a long time. So, maybe some good has come out of all this? But I hope to have more 'face to face discussions with you soon, that'd be great. Maybe one day you could meet friend 1 face to face? - mind you, it might just be best letting it go now.

I'm sure I'll see you in London at some point this weekend anyway!!

Echo Chambers: why facebook conversations always seem to end in farce, stress or out and out slanging matches

2011-11-25T18:28:00.016Z

What is my objective?
Do I want to challenge and debate aspects of the world that trouble/puzzle me, or do I merely want to just be perceived by others as being an intellectual/a smart arse?
If the former is what you want then you're wasting your time being on facebook.

. The title of this blog (Echo Chambers) is taken from an interview in the Sheffield Magazine Now Then, with documentary-maker Adam Curtis; when asked about whether the internet is as democratic and open as it first seemed he said: "It’s an echo chamber of other people like you, which simplifies the world. It doesn’t change it." After experiences on facebook (which is now not far from being the internet due to its size) this past week, here's my own understanding of why this seems so true.

Facebook on face value seems a great place to have challenging discussions and to learn new things. And when one starts attempting to lap up the constant stream of links to current affairs issues, which are rarely, or insufficiently covered by the rolling news channels on the television set (as long as the intensity of such amounts of information being thrown ones way doesn't make them give up altogether), this is a positive. However, it is beginning to be made strikingly clear to me that whatever positives, and democratic distributions of information, social-networking (to date, that is) allows, this will always be subservient to the main dynamic driving facebook: a place to promote oneself; to project the most desirable image of oneself one would want others to see.

Neoliberalism has engendered what I would call a dictatorship of individualism where one feels compelled, reluctantly/compulsively, to use all communication as self-promotion, as if our life depends on it - as it often does under such a market-driven system. But prescribed individualism is a con. As with the trick mass consumerism plays on the populace, it creates the cutting irony of everybody being herded in the same direction like sheep, to the call of "be an individual" or "be someone special". Of course, it's not as simple as this image of us all being led like sheep conveys, and we aren't so easily blinded to what is happening around as such an image would suggest. But a system geared towards harnessing then exploiting individualism necessitates it's so-called freedom enabling products, so they become an un-freedom, acting as enclosures taking from us our freedom to be without them, by making it almost impossible to have any kind decent life without them (and this is the argument that reluctant cell phone users and car users use, when they tell their tale of how they capitulated to the product).

Although far less of us are rampant, self-seeking individuals as the mainstream media would like to have us believe, it doesn't prevent the memes ("an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture" - Merriam-Webster Dictionary) of individualism seeping into our thought processes and actions. These memes haven't just allowed facebook to exist as it does (as a yuppified-prison-ship), but have allowed for the facebookisation of our lives, as it grows into an 800 million-user site. And one mustn't forget that with so many people on facebook, a good deal of the planet's entire communication must occur with the confines of this networking site.
An often spoken of problem with both social networking and text messaging is that the context that a sentence or two have been written in cannot be deciphered; one cannot tell whether the individual in question is being sarcastic, angry, warm and friendly, or cold and dismissive. This can cause a large amount of paranoia and stress. This is Problematic to begin with, but facebook wall discussions aren't even normal in terms of electronic communication, even very different from, what now must be seen as, 'traditional' SMS text messaging. What this means for communication is that it is always channeled, memetically, through the profile-projections of the individuals concerned. On the transient virtual non-space of facebook, where nothing seems solid and countless other self-promotions create a waterfall-like effect of shouts showering down on you, one feels like their own existence is fading away. Thus, self-promotion becomes self-preservation. This means that whatever information is shared around on facebook, whatever socially progressive conversations are had, the prevailing memes are conservative ones. This conservatism makes all conversations, not conversations at all, but just lots of vested interests (for the preservation of their own self) firing their truths at each other - leading to stress and arguments, and even slanging matches.
And when one enters into these debates, despite ones best intentions and attempts to thoroughly explain the reasons for their truths, the entrenched self-preservation directing the flow always personalises any critical commentary, taking control over one's own intentions, and, soon enough, one's own self-preservation requires that they directly aim their criticisms at the other individuals concerned, instead of attempting to source them as systemic/institutional causations. Before one knows it they have found themselves offending others, for having contrary views, forgetting the importance of seeing the contrary views (no matter how disagreeable) through a systemic lens rather than an individual one. Although, when one of my friends said to me in reply to the dilemmas leading to this blog needing to be written that "there is an absence that is forgotten about during the heat of virtual argument", he was probably thinking more on the lines of the lack of context involved, perhaps it is also true that the isolation involved in this context-lacking mode of communication makes us forget about the systemic, as we beg for attention from our lonely rooms. I am finding that opinions that I would easily be able to talk to people about in real life, are taken as an assault on others' personalities whilst on facebook. One of these spiraled into something which ended up being a virtual battleground. I'd tried explaining my reasons as best as I could, but a full blown argument arose between different sections of my friends which (by the time I had the chance to have my say) has blown well out of control. I didn't share the views (expressed) by one side, but I didn't agree with the method of argument used by the other. I wanted to upset neither, but the conservatism of self-preservation when under strain had kicked in, and I could do nothing, and (after walking Kafkaesque virtual tunnels in order to ensure that I couldn't rejoin) I quit the site, after a stressful weekend, trying not to lose friends on either side of the argument. And I'd say to those who I share views with that whilst, obviously I don't think you're conservative, I do think that facebook encourages the conservatism is all of us.

Does this mean that I disregard the Internet as something that could be a benefactor in changing the human race's current route to disaster? NO, but I think that social networking sites are disastrous: they are a tool to intentionally bolster conservative attitudes in the many, for the few with vested interests in the maintenance of the status quo.
Faces from the establishment are much more condescending and mocking of those who share their thoughts on blog pages than they are of those who do the same, but on their facebook wall. This is because they have nothing to fear from what goes on inside facebook's gates, precisely because its memes urge a far stronger self-centeredness and passiveness over the togetherness and activism.

The creators of these sites knew what they were creating. It would be very naive to think that these Harvard-taught geniuses accumulated a personal wealth of $17.5 billion (for example) through sheer pot luck - they knew they were discreetly enclosing the commons, and they knew people would be sucked in, willfully then later reluctantly. They gave us the exciting taster of our own vanity, and have now caught us in a virtual opium den where we survive on fixes of self-preservation and self-confirmation, whether we like it or not. They have got more and more people to join in; exacerbating the need to be on there too, because it seems to have appropriated everything that is going off around you, and one feels that they have been rendered non-existent by abstaining from joining. They have allowed advertisers to capitalise on this surely lucrative huge buzzing of status anxiety, and unlike in our email boxes, we can't get rid of these adverts - get rid of one and they ask you what was it about this particular/atomised advert that you didn't like "wanna try another? we've got lots more!"

Facebook is like a giant holding pen, where we are enslaved to self-preservation/self-centeredness. This is certainly no democratic set up, and it's appropriation of many fits well with the fears expressed by many that we are entering a period of neo-feudalism, as the virtual begins to complement the real world. And it is unreasonably difficult to cancel your stay in the holding pen. Trust me, I should know - Ive tried to quit enough times! But this time, I actually want to escape as quickly as possible, and I've done my best to make sure I cannot get back on there.

And so this finally boils down to whether human nature will always react to technological advances in the same way, or whether technological advances can be used in different ways, engendered by systemic changes. I prefer the latter, because it's not a case of being a 'Luddite' (a fashionable discriminatory term for anyone who doesn't like the way things are moving in), I believe we cannot get out of our mess without technology's aid, and I do not buy the argument that 'human nature is human nature, you can't change it' (which is fittingly the beginning bits of what started the aforementioned messy argument - all be it with different participants in the debate) because this form of acceptance is dangerous because it can only function, and not making us all want to kill ourselves, with an heavy of dosage of denial to what's happening in the world, and of course an disavowing of the effects of our own actions. But there again this may be just my opinion caused by the inability to cope with the idea that the future may not be worth living in...?
Perhaps this view held about how human nature will never change, thus systemic change won't make a difference is true, but I'd rather we at least try. And, with this in mind, I firmly believe the word progress shouldn't be used in relation to networking sites/cell phones/and other privatisations under the guise of modernistions, that passify and enclose us, because this is actually signs of regression; using technology to return us to powerless serfs.

I hope my friends on both sides read this and understand why I had to abstain from the debate.

In The City..... (2011, Biro on paper)

2011-11-25T17:56:00.006Z

In The City..... (2011, Biro on paper)

standing next to the next piece to get working on 'Who would want to listen to this?'

2 sides of the same band (why Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Exterminator are the same album, just different emotions)

2011-11-08T09:50:00.012Z

Screamadelica and Exterminator: two sides of the same band
(Why Primal Scream's two most important records are actually the same record, just flip-sides)

This is a beautiful day
It is a new day
We are together, we are unified
And all for the cause
Because together we got power
Apart we got power
(sample taken from a Malcolm X speech, Come Together, Screamadelica)

Lookout kid, they keep it all hid. You think you're free but you ain't free, just free to be hit. You're an unchannelled frequency Nobody's listening. You're imbalanced permanent, nobody's listening
(Exterminator, Exterminator).

It might seem completely misplaced to be writing about two albums which came out 11 and 20 years ago, but this is by no means a crude attempt to be a writer on popular music, more of an attempt to show how good pop music can embody the prevailing feeling, and unfeeling of society at that time. Perhaps, if anything, it could hopefully be seen to be of some relevance now the naive/misplaced-optimism-cum-denial-based-hedonism of the last 20 years, captured so brilliantly at both ends by the two albums is quickly becoming a "the past is a different country; they do things differently there", as we suddenly find ourselves with our faces pressed up against the glaring truths which were always underlying the period.

I must admit that the only other two albums I've heard by Primal Scream are their 1997 album Vanishing Point and their 2002 album Evil Heat. Both are decent albums but yet don't really seem to sum up what I believe is Primal Scream as captured by Screamadelica and Exterminator; everything else I have heard by the band (the 'indie disco' hit Rocks and the 2006 song Country Girl) have put me well off even bothering to listen to their respective albums. Thus, this is also by no means an attempt to write some sort of band biography, it is more of a longing to explain how much these albums seem to be sides to the same record; a very important record to our era; the naive-hopes and optimism of the post-Berlin-wall, freedom-and-good times-demanding-rave-scene early 1990's turning into the hollowed-out-need-for-denial-hedonism, bitter-disillusionment, and fear of things only getting worse that all those promising earlier components found themselves in. Screamdelica (released 1991) is one side of the very same coin to Exterminator (Released in 2000) - the former dreaming of Utopian togetherness, the other waking up to a Dystopia, largely allowed to unfold due to an hollowing out and falseness of those very components.
To begin with, it is important not to dismiss the band due to it being appropriated into the Beer-swilling-football-style-chanting-loutish-Oasis-fan-laddism of the past 20 years, but also not to forget that those who one would associate with this image/lifestyle (mainly from the backgrounds traditionally working class) have had reasons for hiding behind this macho (I'll-only-listen-to-bands-with-cocky-northern-frontmen) image.

It seems bizarre that it's nearly 12 years since Exterminator was released; it feels as if there's almost been a stagnation of time through the decade known as 'the noughties' from which the financial crisis, and its stark environs have awoken us (time seems to be moving again, although whether for better or for disastrously worse we cannot yet know). The more that time passes and Exterminator becomes older, the more it seems to sum-up western culture both at turn of the millennium and the years that followed it. Listen to Swastika eyes then the following track Pills, to hear an attack on the vacant nihilistic hedonism and denial of the growing inequalities/erosion of democratic rights/unjust (re)imperial wars, through an immersion in 'big nights out'/recreational drugs/and phoney-togetherness.
Not that any of us could be blamed for participating in such a stupor - denial often felt like the only possible avenue during the past 10 years; and as Charlie Brooker observed in his much-needed-for-terrestrial-Television comedy-cum-cutting-cultural-analysis 'How TV ruined your life', images of 'the good times' were being rammed down our throats to the extent that if we weren't feeling like we were 'living the dream' 24/7, then something must be wrong - no wonder 'uppers' from the legal Red Bull's/Pro Plus's to the illegal Pills/Cocaine were needed by many of us just to get through the day.
Recreational drug-taking is the extreme end of that constant need to be pursuing hedonism, or at least 'the good times'. This kind of lifestyle, after it took over from something a little more genuine and optimistic, as the early nineties became the Blair-year 'BritParties', used the same component's to create a smoke-screen over reality, as darker things "best forgotten about" started to rustle as we approached The Noughties. Now, however, it's harder to avoid the sobering truths behind the late-capitalist smoke-screen. Maybe (eventually) this will turn out to be a good thing. What choice do we have but to try to make it so anyway?

Back in 1991 the mood was different, Primal Scream's Screamadelica (although not an endorsement for drug-taking) certainly embodies the mood of the period, and talks of drugs as something that can help 'open you up'. Screamadelica's mood is certainly one of an 'inner flight' of peace and love, as reminiscent of the hopes of the 1960's as the psychedelia both in the guitar based and dance bands of the early 1990's was. This is perhaps best exemplified in the track Higher Than The Sun.

My brightest star's my inner flight let it guide me

Experience and innocence bleed me inside me
Hallucinogens can open me or untie me
I drift in inner space, free of time

I find an higher state of grace in my mind

Then compare this to the appropriately named Pills from Exterminator. Is this not the reverse emotion to the fresh hopes for a better world at the start of the decade? (1989-1991; the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of awful regimes that stained the idea of communism - naive hopes, but still hope nonetheless); observing hedonism for hedonism's sake, soberly watching the dystopian scenes at a weekend in a UK town centre, as people compete for the pursuit of the sacred 'good times', whilst turning a blind eye to, not just the injustices and issues in the world but also to the erosion of the democracy around them.

I'm gonner tell the truth

the truth about you

truth about you, you aint never been true
you aint nothin , you got nothin to say
shine a light on you, you fade away
Fade away
..............
woke up, felt drunk, throwin' up, pissin' blood
Think death, broke in, burnt out, holed in
................
bad blood
dead dreams........Dead dreams.....Dead dreams

"Dead dreams, dead dreams" - life has been hollowed out; can't picture a future worth living in, so certainly can't swallow the positivity of spiritual well-being spouted-out in previous years; take drugs to stay high to avoid the truth rather than search for it; like in 'A Design For Life' by The Manic Street Preachers "we don't talk about love, we only wanna get drunk". No true hope in the long run, but if one can live a high life all the time, constantly pursuing pleasure it may build a precarious bridge over this underlying emptiness. This Erosion of democracy, from which we tried to hide, is the "illusion of democracy" in Swastika Eyes, the song before Pills.

"I see your autosuggestion psychology
Elimination policy
A military industrial ILLUSION OF DEMOCRACY...
Swastika eyes swastika eyes swastika eyes"

Swastika Eyes has a violently Electronic dance beat. It is such a Night Club-friendly track, yet is actually a well-disguised attack on The Night Club culture: the rise of the Club Scene (and its contemporary, The Festival Scene) marks capitalism's appropriation of the rave scene/freedom music, and with it those hopes and dreams of something different; a subordination to the status-quo. This is coming from somebody who has only ever experienced the aftermath of this; the meaningless, contrived club nights, where you need to be pissed-up or high just to find it tolerable.
"You got Swastika eyes...." you think you're a cultured, clued-up, liberal person, who knows what's going on in the world, but you're actually just participating in a small f fascism that's always been the way in these so-called Western Democracies. Would you dare to uncover the truth about how many Latin life's are ruined through that recreational Cocaine habit of yours? But is it your fault? You've been appropriated then subordinated, and you don't even realise it - YET.

Come together as one......

For many the perfect-party-anthem Loaded is the highlight of Screamadelica, but for me it has always been Come Together. Whilst I listen to it, it can still dust down those 'dead dreams', and make them feel alive again. For me, it is the perfect fusion of Euphoria and genuine hopes (that we can sort things out, and life can be something more than this).
So It felt like a cutting betrayal of those 'moments of euphoria' the song would often give me, when a few years ago parts of this song were used to advertise mobile phones for the 'Talk Talk' brand - using "come together as one" to advertise the advantages of mobile phone communication, even though the mobile phone, through it further privatising communication between one another, has arguably perpetuated the isolation of the human faster than any other device, except maybe the Social Networking site; maybe capitalism's biggest enclosure act in 200 years - it will get the oxygen if it can! I think the fact that it has shared out hopes for a better world to me, is the reason why this felt like such a bitter betrayal; that it was now being used as part of a process that is taking every bit of that world away from us.
This is how much I value this piece of music as something unbelievably special, and believe that its potency to be that still carries on. When I try to imagine a worst possible scenario, as a tester of whether I could cope with it, I imagine a scenario quite like the apocalyptic scenes in Continental European towns/villages during sieges in 20Th century wars, as depicted in films ever-afterwards. The church bells would always be ringing, as a stance against the gunfire and carnage going on around. In my imaginings of this similar scenario there is ash from burning things falling from the sky, and guns are firing, but Come Together is the song I'd play at full blast from an upstairs room, with the windows open, as a call for peace, and a halt to the violence.
We've become cynical in our times to these sorts of words, but I feel that songs like Come Together are becoming relevant again, but with a more grown-up look at the hopes and optimism that were there in the 89-91 period. We've got a long way to go to get to this place though; I, for one, still lapse into momentary hibernations from reality, by using alcoholic softening, and the same old meaningless pop music I've been listening to for over 10 years on and off - the roads to the future we must strive for often seem too daunting.

Exterminator is the uncomfortable reality that Screamadelica woke up from; no wonder that many people turned a blind eye to Exterminator whilst the former is still talked about to this day. Many will say that this is because Screamadelica captured a moment; well, so did Exterminator, just a moment society tried to hide from. So, ironically, it seems likely that it's unpopularity (in comparison with Screamadelica) is because it message about the Dystopia forming around us was an unpopular truth! Screamadelica may have captured the essence of high and forward-looking times; but hasn't Exterminator captured the essence of the mass denial aided by the very components championed by Screamedelica? that we in the UK are now, hopefully, starting to wake up from? no more false assurances to each other that things are OK and we are living in a free country?
One would hope that the rerelease of Screamadelica this year, rather than merely being something the band and record label can make a profit off, can be symbolic of a return of some sort of hope; that we really ought to "come together as one" now, and quickly. An arts event named Pandemic which I have partaken in recently uses a quote by the Philosopher Bertrand Russel which also comes to the same conclusion: "extreme hopes are borne from extreme misery". Now that we are (possibly) awaking, maybe something can be done about all this.
It's a long hard road back after being dumped by the vehicle that was pushing us to constantly pursue pleasure whilst depoliticised and desensitised to the world. But perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that it was mostly an illusion of good times, maintained due to the fact that one thought that they must be having 'the good times' all the time, which actually a larger causation of individual unhappiness rather than happiness during the past quarter of a century. I suppose ('comrades') we having nothing to lose but our 'indie disco's' (and the equivalents).

Shoot, speed, kill, light..........

My friend got me 'into' Exterminator when it was a new album in the year 2000 (I had to hear Screamadelica as a record from a past time which only sprinkled nuggets of blissful optimism on me; the early 1990's was an happy childhood for me, and I thought things would "Only get better" - urrgh). We got excited about the energy and anger (especially the "fuck, fuck, fuck, sick, sick" ending to the track Pills), and we knew that there was shit going off in the world worthy of such anger, but it always seemed a million miles away, it never felt like it was angry at the very culture we were being drip-fed on. I cannot recall anybody I encountered having a political agenda between the years of 16-22 of my life, aside from a 'blatantly obvious' scratching-the-surface-dislike of bad things such as the far right group the BNP, cutting forests down, and casual racism and homophobia overheard in town centres on a Friday/Saturday night - a rightfully-placed objection, conveniently soft-touching, so as to not dig up too much of that uncomfortable truth.
Having spoken to quite a lot of young people who have recently started F.E/H.E education/recently graduated, or haven't bothered with any of this but have come of age during the last 2/3 years, it seems blatantly obvious how much more politicised they are and how unaccepting of the "capitalism is the only system that works" rhetoric we receive when we first find ourselves 'naively' asking "why do things have to be this way?" in comparison with those of us who reached that part of lives in the 10 years previous to the financial crisis.
Yet, I do not believe that this politicisation of the youth is just down to the recession and the ruthless cuts to welfare; yes it is the banner that they chant under, but these issues have merely made an open door for them to look and be horrified at (to use the famous phrase) 'the desert of the real'. This is the 'glorious' century that awaits them, and they know that they probably won't even have the chance to drink, dance and deny it's happening like those before them. If many before found it disturbing to open doors further down from the 'Iceberg's Tip', the financial-crisis-kids are having to enter the world through those very doors. High tuition fees, and other things that deny them mobility, perfectly cap a hideous array of social, economic, environmental problems that, because they cannot escape like the young professionals of the 80's and 90's could, will have to be tackled, together. Does "Come together as one" sound so dated and corny now?
I'm not saying that this current crop of young people are our only hope, and it is sadly without-a-doubt that the marketing/publicity that has bombarded these youths is more intense than the life-long-course-in-how-to-be-a-slave-to-capitalism that we received, as is the case for my age group in comparison with those before me and so forth; the omnipresence of imagery that lures one into the consumerist mindset grows and grows, to open more doors for capitalism's insatiable thirst for more and more growth. However, the anger and politicisation is in itself an hope that new things are afoot, contrary to what everyone told us in the years following Thatcherism, that "there is no other way/there is no hope of the sort any more". "New things are afoot" was what a friend of mine (one of the creators of the Pandemic event idea) said to me, when I said how I fear being defeated from within, like my parents and their contemporaries were defeated by Thatcherism (even more cutting coming from an area directly affected by her defeat of the Miners Union) - and he is right, we won't be, whatever happens now.

Shoot speed kill light, the last track on Exterminator (UK edition) possesses the anger and energy of the rest of the album, but there is something massively encouraging in this song. Initially it became the song stuck in my head when I was leaving High school, thus the soundtrack of that moment. You expect something exciting to happen after you leave school, it feels like a moment when all will change, you're too naive to realise that things won't change that much at all, and people still treat each other the same, and have the same opinions (at least until they reach 20) "no togetherness, stick your headphones in a run away from reality". It was also the turn of the millennium, and our naive 16-year old selves expected life to get nicer and better as all the hollow aspirations and optimism's of the late 1990's fooled us into thinking. In 1999 I can remember that me and my fellow school friends used to joke about how we expected to see spaceship-like-flying vehicles appear in the sky as the clock struck 12 on the evening of the 31st of December, but behind these jokes was a serious expectation that our lives would be better, humanity would be better! A mega-comedown, finished off by the 9/11 terror events - the life truly did become an escape from reality, whilst dreams began to die off.
But dead dreams and fading hopes (which are wrongly labelled as 'just growing up') can become momentarily alive again whilst listening to certain songs. After the dystopia revealed in the rest of Exterminator, Shoot, Speed, Kill, Light is like a surge towards a better world, the world you can tell Primal Scream have never stopped dreaming of. Earlier on in Exterminator, in a calm moment in the middle of the storm of anger, Keep Your Dreams warns us to "be careful" not to sell our souls, and give in. Now, with Shoot, Speed, Kill, Light it feels like a call to all to get up and surge forward to get those dreams - it is the song that Vanishing Point, on the album Vanishing Point seems to have considered being, but just wasn't ready yet.

When I'm listening to it on my walkman whilst walking I get the urge to start running, faster and faster down the road, but never actually doing so due to the social taboo of expressing oneself in this manner. But this feeling emerges because of the sheer forward drive of the song; it uses all the energy of the album, and it feels like it is pushing through it all, moving to a different world, where things have changed for the better. It is fully modernist in its forward drive, never looking back in a search for a beautiful future. The words 'Shoot, speed, kill, light' conjure up images of smashing right through something; breaking the speed of light - demanding the impossible! It is almost that, as it turns the anger into a truly forward looking energy, it does full-circle and catches up with Screamadelica.
It has often been said that Primal Scream are capable of masterpieces and absolute crap; perhaps, whilst this reaction is harsh, it is maybe appropriate to dismiss the rest of the music in order for the masterpiece, created by the joining of Screamadelica and Exterminator to be complete. As the rest of Exterminator calls for us to wake up (something we are showing slight sings of doing), maybe the last track Shoot, Speed, Kill, Light calls for us to press forward now - a call from 12 years ago to right now!!
Maybe this song is the Geist of what The Now should mean. Which is why I make reference to the politisation of the youth (as well as an unchannelled discontent emerging in many previously defeated by Thatcherism): because it has an air of something of this sort about it. I always find that talk about spiritual well-being, as embraced in Screamadelica, a good thing, but useful for a world which has moved past the era we are in, to a place where this is actually achievable for the majority, not just a few who find their own way out. Have we awoken to Shoot, Speed, Kill, Light's ask, a realisation 12 years too late but better late than never, to push forward to this world? If so, maybe after the push, and we've arrived at this place, will the spiritual well-being of all be found, and we can truly appreciate things like Screamadelica again, full-circle.

If I don't document this and nobody except the rubbish collector picks these papers us, did it ever happen? (On trying to help the Pandemic cause)

2011-11-01T20:39:00.006Z

A twinge of self-doubt made me feel that I needed to prove that I had done this (Infiltrated copies of the free newspaper The Metro) for a cause I believe needs all the help it can get, and I was a little worried as I left the papers this afternoon that they may all just end up being collected by the train station rubbish collector, never opened up to see what new things could be found in them. Let's hope not! But just in case, here are some images to prove that this happened, giving me more space to mention the event/happening in question.

The event is Pandemic, a situationist art event, in Sheffield, Yorkshire, starting on Saturday 5th November, lasting for 2 weeks, consisting of a combination of experimental music, film, lectures and performance. Taking ample inspiration from the The Society Of The Spectacle by Guy Debord, the event aims to create ruptures in what is currently presented to us as normality, encouraging people to both participate, and to question the 'normality' of being passive spectators of the world.

I think The Metro newspaper is worthy of infiltration due to its un-asked-for omnipresence in our commuter/consumer lifestyles, and actually worthy of carrying 'Pandemic' - being objects that pass from one person to another as they are picked up then put back down on the train and bus seats. It is also produced by the same company who produces The Daily Mail; a deeply conservative, soft fascistic, powerfully pushy, very influential news paper, which (if not on its own) has certainly contributed to the maintenance and bolstering of some of the most backward, disagreeable aspects of this Island, the aspects which make one sometimes think "oh my, is there any hope for this place?".
These free papers have to be some of the worst papers, minus the soft porn/soft Nazi Red Tops. The fact that they are free thus available to all is not a plus-point: this un-asked-for presence, grabs our tired-thus-weak-from-commuting attention, with pages full of advertisement spreads, nullifying celebritism, and joke-equivalents of more serious news stories on the remaining scraps of available paper space, that are liable to put ones mind in a state of retreat from the public to the extent that they will switch on the televised equivalents of this shit when they get in, tired and haggard from spending so long getting to and from work.

So here goes an infliltration of 15 or so papers. Some are old ones, but rather than hampering the aim, it might actually encourage people to make a 'reality check' whilst reading this. Perhaps the post-modern-era phrase of encouragement of 'do something every day that scares you' should be replace by 'every day, make sure you have a reality check'.....

Pandemic - Sheffield

2011-10-28T07:53:00.002+01:00

Event of great importance 'beginning' in Sheffield this Nov 5Th.

"Reclaim reality reclaim space!"

Here is some information regarding the reasons for Pandemic, and it's aims.

PANDEMIC!
Pronunciation:/panˈdɛmɪk/
adjective - (of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.
noun - an outbreak of a pandemic disease.
Origin: -mid 17th century: from Greek pandēmos (from pan 'all' + dēmos 'people') + -ic

We are organising an event in Sheffield starting on the 5th of November this year - going on for 1 week (but will go on for longer if you wish). It is a socially inclusive art event based on the Situationist International and it's political ethos. Particularly "The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and the ideas of reclaiming space, reappropriating images and the concept that in an advanced capitalist society we experience life through a representation of reality in the form of advertising, prescribed gender and social roles via media manipulation which leads to the population living in a substitute for reality instead of living reality itself. Via television documentaries we have armchair tourism, via royal spectacles we have emotional tourism (see funeral of Princess Diana), via soap operas we have drama and intrigue, via reality T.V we are given "reality".

PANDEMIC incorporates a continuous programme of visual art - along with events every evening for 2 weeks which consist of a combination of experimental music, film, lectures, talks, workshops, readings and performance. We have several spaces already including gallery spaces, lecture rooms and less conventional spaces - we are going about it in a very D.I.Y way with no money changing hands There are significant gaps between performances for discussion/socialisation/screeching as well as a bar/cafe to lubricate this. We also have a 1 day warm up event on Saturday, October the 1st.

The purpose of the event is to inspire as many people as possible, to advertise the project in some unique ways to bring in a crowd who are not just the usual "converted" art types (we have some interesting advertising/marketing ideas). We want the project to continue in Sheffield as a continued and evolving social and creative platform once we have finished the residency (we are currently approaching other like-minded spaces to spread into and continue our work.) It is a political event in so much as it is designed to go against the prescribed nature of the artworld as well as outside the government funded stuff (which is often only commissioned because it ticks the right agenda boxes) - so truly independent.

It is in direct reaction to the artworld, in that it is incredibly elitist, and is often a series of cliquey institutionalised in-jokes, and fundamentally it's controlled by rich buyers and investors. As well as this see how the media (particularly the tabloid media - or bluntly the media aimed at the lower or "working" classes) constantly dumbs down art, or mocks it with a "my 5 year old could do that" mentality. and so art is kept this way a) to make said elite feel culturally superior and b) to disenfranchise the "working" classes from culture and thus developing critical thinking and broader ideas - to maintain the status quo by suppressing the ability to question authority. This is particularly important right now with all of the unrest over cuts, the rich/corporations getting tax breaks, censorship of Social Networking sites, banning legitimate protest, the cutting of benefits - we wish to maintain the momentum of the recent political unrest, university occupations and protests, but via a cultural and creative shift - and include as many people as we can in doing so.

As each performance/musical event/lecture happens it will be recorded and put on a continuous showreel in one of the gallery spaces, which will grow as each evening's performances are added every day. Any members of the public who come along and who are inspired to do something can also be written into the programme, be it music, performance, visual art etc.

We already have many visual artists, writers, activists, lecturers, dancers/performers and musicians involved - and there is room for more.

It is getting to be a big, excessively immersive - as we will be there everyday and night for 2 weeks. I understand that this is pretty all over the place, if you have any questions then do ask.

I guess from you we are looking for support, promotional help, for you and your friends to get involved too - and any other groups that you know of being made aware. Particularly we are looking for spaces to utilise during and after the event itself as well as people to take part in whatever form.

We need as many people involved as possible - we need momentum as the main aim if for the idea to start something more permanent in Sheffield, PANDEMIC, like the great plagues that inspired it, will spread like a disease that does not discriminate. It can and will affect anyone, no matter what superficially constructed group they may identify with, no matter what class, gender, race, sexuality and income level. It is an ever changing vehicle for discussion, ideas and dissent.

2011-10-05T21:57:00.002+01:00

EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD AT PRESENT IS STAINED BY THE PISS OF "LIFE IS BRUTAL/DON'T TRUST ANYONE' NEOLIBERAL MANTRA. AND EVERYWHERE I LOOK LIFE REEKS.

"well done - you experienced anxiety (the right emotion) - now leave it to the proffesionals"

2011-09-06T22:43:00.007+01:00

"well done - you experienced anxiety (the right emotion) - now leave it to the professionals"

It's hard to avoid telescreens, especially when chain pubs don't just have them ganging up on their customers on every wall, but also have them on their windows beaming their images onto passers by. So I couldn't help but notice SKY's rolling news channel being beamed at me as I walked past a Weatherspoons in Leeds city train station.
Rolling news is the Mecca of anxiety anyway. As the words at the bottom of the screen run away from you, you feel both a sense of anxiety that something big and troublesome has happened, and also a sense of anxiety that you don't yet know what this thing that has happened was, and it's important that you do know because its important to be informed and its important not to look like you've been hiding with a pillow over your head when piers ask you "did you see the news earlier?"; but the words run away from you, the world's moving so damn fast!

Today's screen has a massive red arrow sign pointing downwards.

"Shit! What could that mean?! Dow Jones is down by some number so large that I have no clue whether it's bad, good, or very bad. Should I know more about economics? I mean, surely they wouldn't have used such a big arrow sign if it was small news?! So surely it's crucial that I know what's going on? I've tried to understand what goes on with the stock exchange before, and all I could figure out is that it all seems completely mental. Should I even worry about this? Does it even affect my life? It's worrying, but I just don't get all these numbers that are flying around. I know: I'll forget about this bit of news, it's obviously for those who are trained to understand it. I'll leave it to the professionals".

The above hypothetical conversation that I have just pretended to have with myself is an attempt to describe how I believe the global market is communicated to the larger population who have no say in how it functions: first of all, there is enough media attention, provocative imagery and widely recognisable scary uses of language (in times when the currencies are down) used to provoke anxiety in the larger market-clueless populace, making them worry that bad things will happen if things in the market go wrong. But at the same time, the entirety of everything else said, or shown to us is complete gobbledygook to anyone not actually fully educated in economics (and judging by the 2008 financial meltdown, it's probably gobbledygook to most of them too).
It makes you feel a strange sense of foreboding, but at the same time with no idea of what the hell makes these things go either wrong or right in the first place.

There's no claim of conspiracy here, but it's a massive convenience to those who truly benefit from the global market that most people are fed fear about it, but yet still have no understanding of it, so leave it to those who (supposedly) do understand - it makes for a very good way for markets to basically do what they want without much reprisal, because most people haven't got a clue what its spokespeople are saying to them. I am sure that the way market news is mediated to people (abundantly but confusingly) is a convenience that is being capitalised on, as it may add to the explanation as to why, even as protests against such measures are springing up around the world, nothing is truly standing in the way to prevent governments slashing welfare and public spending in order, they claim, to sustain economic growth. If that language of the market wasn't so intentionally hard to grasp, and everyone could get it, surely this would give weight to the protests against these pro-market measures?

Thus, basically, we are all being taken for a big crazy ride.

A past returning to haunt and all roads forward blocked

2011-08-31T21:33:00.000+01:00

A past returning to haunt and are all roads forward blocked? - a short story of my last 10 years
Returning to the hills I roamed in my early 20's for a sense of resonance with my own mental landscape.

"Individualise! talk about your self! but don't tell us about those sad things - don't tell us uncomfortable truths. Because then we may need to look at the issue through a systemic eye - and hell! that's uncomfortable" (the intention of my delving into personal accounts isn't personal because it was caused by the world I saw with my eyes) .

(an image took within January/February period of 2005, when I was 21)

I began writing this (using 'blind cell phone keying in', a skill picked up in a time of an information frenzy and endless precarity) whilst walking upon the pennine hills to the west of the urban settlement I have lived in all my life. It takes the best part of 2 hours, walking fast, to get to these hill tops. Some people reading this may be perplexed as to why I would walk at such a pace at which it is difficult to absorb/pay good attention to the obvious charms of this landscape, and I sometimes find I have slipped beneath this wheel of general common sense on how one ought to experience the barely inhabited (by humans) landscapes.
However, there is a certain need for aspects within my life that act as mental runways for my experience of life, and they have been present for some time, but never so acute and extreme as at the beginning of this life I lead now - when I was 21. And it is conjoined with many other needed aspects that, although for a while were dismissed as needs of my younger more naive self, I have now found myself having to explain because they have returned and are almost as acute and extreme as back then. It is becoming clear to me that many of the things I used to do, think about, and the music I listened listen to back then, were not signifiers of a late arrival of teen angst at all (which would be to patronise my own past anyway!) but were aspects of the adult I'd become, and the adult would have to be, in order to deal with the world I saw around me. In 2011 I think I have finally located the explanation lying behind a lot of these things I did, and do.

First off, this reason for walking up to the hill tops was never about the need to walk amidst nature's beauty (the conventional, and usually helpful, wisdom used), as although I obviously care a great deal about nature, this wasn't the appeal here at all, as it was quite the opposite of walking amidst the oasis of mother nature: it was the bleak minimalism, the haunting emptiness of these hill tops. They lie just before the heathland starts to take over and the Peak District starts proper. Objects in this place, due to the scarcity of them, take on a monolithic feel, and have an environing presence, due to being always in site for long stretches of the walk, like an outcrop at sea is to a boat (the wind turbines upon these hill tops quintessentially possess this haunting quality).
The bleak minimalism of this landscape is completed as a resonating feeling by walking along the long straight roads up here. Empty of cars, people and features in general, and sometimes seemingly endless, the roads complete this landscape as a resonating feeling in a way that makes the idea of stopping to absorb it all irrelevant to me - the totality speaks the appropriate words. The emptiness and the seeming futility of the slightly grueling walking down these roads, past the monolithic-like objects and hills (that do not seem to move as distance would demand of them) demands a march of a walk rather than a stroll.

(an image took within January/February period of 2005, when I was 21)

To drive (although I don't even know how to) up to these hills to then take the walk at a very steady pace would simply be to completely miss the neediness I have had for this 'marching' from where I box myself away to these places; as this whole procedure within this landscape evokes how I feel in my life, and how I managed to maintain my life, as I recovered from the illusionary bubble-like protection feeling of anorexia (as I experienced it).

Anorexia, as I experienced it, was me trying to seal my life off from a world which I was beginning to struggle to look at, once images and thoughts of how bleak the world could be had captured my mind (in particular, the events which stirred this were witnessing the awful events of Sept 11 2001, beaming from every screen, non-stop, and then a much smaller news story, regarding the potential for the asteroid NT7 2002 to collide with the earth in 2018 - both forced onto me a bleak nihilism which I just couldn't cope with). It was an attempt to get out of a humans' body; to not have to live a life within this world which seemed an unbearable experience, whilst still actually breathing in and out.

"I eat too much to die
And not enough to stay alive
I'm sitting in the middle waiting"
(4st. 7lbs, The Manic Street Preachers)

My teenage naivety to life (that sentimentalism that convinced me that any discontent I felt during these years was merely the making of something which would lead to an happy end) was eroding, and I really couldn't deal with this bleak nihilism which was planted in my thoughts by these events that had opened my eyes - and as the long summer 2002 of inner troubles wore on, desperate to land on the seemingly safer shores of autumn, the Smith's song 'This Night Has opened my eyes' (off the then-new-to-my-ears compilation Louder Than Bombs), became the last song of my personal soundtrack of the summer.

"This night has opened my eyes, and I
will never sleep again"

The day I saw the Sept 11 attacks, I fled the house (then by bicycle) and (to use the most appropriate word) escaped to the aforementioned hilltops, and would do the same most of the days of the summer that would follow on in 2002.
The intensity of routine and control that made me anorexic followed on from this summer. But I would be returning to these hill tops at the other side of Anorexia, and returning to the music that had freaked me out just before I went through anorexia, because it offered no illusions and cosiness from this bleak nihilism thrown my way, music I could only return to once there was no going back into the denial-base of anorexia: the music of Joy Division, in particular.

Your life is shelved when anorexic, mainly because to live it seems unbearably hard. Everything that us human is controlled. Food, drink, relaxation and socialising are controlled as if they are visitors making prison visits to your human self. The inward-looking watch tower makes sure there's no indulgence, that nobody gets too close - for that would be to sin in the eyes of that which is scared of being human due to being scared of having to try to live in a world that could cause irredeemable unhappiness. This inward looking watchtower also states that nothing is as important as maintaining a very active lifestyle and that all things should be sidelined in order for this to be maintained; standing when you could be sitting; walking fast when you could be strolling; running instead of walking fast; doing sit ups when you could be waking up. Looking healthy is never the objective: looking hard-worked and thin, looking the opposite of lazy, because it seems to suggest an exemption from the guilt of living in this world; you are constantly telling yourself "I am winning/I am getting better" - getting better at slipping between the cracks of the world; not touching anything. "My life is under control and I am exempt the this bleak world around me".
Anorexia isn't despair or hopelessness; it's an illusion of jubilantly flying over these seemingly bottomless pits; but it can't last, you've got to crash at some point(the only despair during this spell came when external convention demanded celebration/enjoyment from you, only for you to find that this is when such pain reemerges). Of course, the terror of being overweight also owes much to the advertising industry and the image world of late-capitalist ideology itself, but these causation's aren't separate to the other causation's; the images of horror (buildings collapsing/people jumping to their death from buildings) and the images of glamour (which may make you feel anxiety about your own body) double-up and are part of the same visual language which we are (force)fed.

The anxiety about my own body needed fears embedded by events inflicting a bleak nihilism in my mind for it to take such ruthless control over me. It says "become the photographs of all that has been show to you to be perfect,pure, exempt from participation and blame, but don't try to live a life outside these images".

"May I bud and never flower"
(4st. 7lbs, The Manic Street Preachers)

Once I began on the road away from anorexia, I knew that I'd have to find a way of facing this world I had once tried to escape from; I had to face what I'd ran away from 2 years previous. I quickly learned, as my body began to re-establish itself as a 20 year old male (as I regained weight) that I could no longer completely hide myself from the world, no matter how much I struggled to cope with what I saw and what that made me think of. And I began living the life that I have lived ever since.
My first steps out into society, after coming through the other side of anorexia, were to re-find old friends and venture out to where society informed me everything that is meaningful could be found within: pubs, bars and nightclubs (drinking culture in general); places where the people convene, and where we are told lovers meet.
For a short period I had what could be called an honeymoon period with the real world. I was new to it all (after missing the usual inauguration period which is roughly between 16-18); socialising with friends who were now in relationships and with stories to tell and new places to show me; I was enjoying other peoples' company; enjoying finding the opposite sex attractive again (you are sexless being when anorexic). I had also re-started university and I was having a flurry of ideas - the one thing that gives me more self confidence than anything else. I wasn't fully back to normal weight yet, but that seemed to help as I quite liked the way I looked, and it felt like I had sorted myself out between the best of both worlds (balancing my fear of being overweight with the need to live a full life again). It felt like I was in bloom after previously being a 'bud that hadn't flowered'. I felt my life be to heading to a happy plateau, where I would be mentally 'safe' from all that I had struggled to cope with: how naive I was; how much I still had to learn.

It was an illusion, a soft crust of optimism that had greeted me as soon as I found my way back into social circles. I knew this despair and this inability to forget thus cope with life was still there underneath - I'd been battling through it for a couple of months before I finally re-found my friends after anorexia, holding on due to this very promise. But I was fooled by an hedonistic vision of life, and neglecting the dark undercurrent, I was going to have to pay the price. Glitches had started to appear. Downers started to intervene. Then I had to have a hernia operation which made me housebound for a period well beyond my threshold for tolerating such immobility.
Before this, the underlying inability to cope with living was safely tame and massaged into my artworks and with my solitary Walkman moments with the music of Joy Division; a band I heard in 2002, but struggled to listen to at the time because of a bleak nihilism (that remains unchallenged in it's potency to my ears), were now resonating strongly with my experience of life. I knew that when I was getting hooked on the dark euphoria of the track 'Digital' that it was because I was relating closely to the lyrics "feel it closing in.....day in, day out, day in, day out", knowing that my own walls were still closing in on me and I'd have to face them at some point.
However, as soon as I was housebound/immobilised for that short period, and the hedonism of the honeymoon period was out of reach and fading, I started to realise that I had been fooling myself.

"So what you gonna do when the novelty has gone?"
(Novelty by Joy Division)

Housebound, and with what had sustained my optimism out of reach, I fell into the depression that the 'honeymoon period' with the real world had made 'out of mind out of sight'. In 2001/2002 the fundamental environmental worries/worries about our species' future (a previously unlocked door for my eyes to see now via the 'atrocity exhibitions" I saw on television and in newspapers) seemed far away; voices I respected scoffed at such ideas, and information proving things like climate change didn't seem to be there. In 2004, these concerns, far from going away, felt like they were still slowly closing in. I'd found out that climate change was a real and big threat, and, although it couldn't recreate the shock of my introduction to the bleakest of thoughts, it certainly reinforced the story that they told me.

As I mentioned above, the battle with my inability to cope did come back for some time between exiting anorexia but before my honeymoon with the real world period began. When I fell into depressed spells my eating habits kind of performed what my previously anorexic self has always warned me of whilst I became slowly obsessed with food as my body needed it more: I ate and ate way too much. This came back to haunt me again now I was immobile and stuck in the house with only my own thoughts to keep me company. Eating way too much, when the fear of being overweight for all the previously mentioned reasons clung on, magnified the depression.

When I finally managed to get out and attempt to restart where I'd left off, I was already in an uphill struggle; the aspects of me I had foolishly thought had been left behind had returned, and I felt that it was now a rush to get something meaningful from these nights out/and other socialising situations before these aspects caught up with me. I thought I had to get a girlfriend because I believed that this would 'eventually' be the anchor to secure me. I was still relatively happy with the way I looked - that gave me, even if not inner confidence, at least a belief that "something would surely come along sooner or later..." - but I was terrified of the depression chasing my tail, because if it debilitated me and I started overeating permanently then I would truly be left to rot in a pit of all my worst nightmares. The level of my naivety was well and truly put to test by the fear of losing to my depression.

Thus, with more expectation and desperation placed on nights out in a provincial town, uncontrollable disappointment was always on the cards. Every pub/club I went into, I would ask for Joy Division (preferably the track Digital) and dance endearingly but awfully to their tracks (which, on a side note, has made me concerned that the 'let's all dance to Joy Division' song by the terrible indie-pop act The Wombats may have been written about me; although, to save me the crippling embarrassment, this is highly unlikely, as I think the ultimate death disco feel of Joy Division's tracks has an almost universal appeal within our anti-depressant-dependent generation, mainly because it resonates with our general complete lack of optimism for the future; "get pissed and dance now, because there's no point in saving it for the future"). In almost one out of every two nights out, I would end up getting on a massive downer, and running away from my friends and out of the club to head home.

(an image took within January/February period of 2005, when I was 21)

The days after would be low days. I would feel stuck for reasons to do anything, whilst eager for something to do be done, for better or for worse, either to get me out of it or to at least allow the depression unconditional confirmation. This probably explains why I would then proceed over eat, which would exacerbate the unhappiness to dangerously low levels. That's when I started walking up to these hill tops. Cycling up there wouldn't have been enough; I needed to feel like I could keep walking further and further up onto those hills as if I wasn't coming back. I couldn't cope with the world I saw around me, so when bad things happened in my newly found social circles (girls fighting, friends getting their head stamped on, people saying things to me that hurt) it made everything unbearable and I it felt like it was all was closing in on me faster and faster.
During this period right at the beginning of being 21, suicide wasn't just a passing thought that strangely comforted when you'd just like the ground to swallow you up, it was much closer and much more pressing. I had no coping methods, no thick skin against the world, but I was no longer in a place to avoid life like I was when I was anorexic, I was now well in deep like everybody else. The walks up onto these bleak hillsides seemed like the only route available to me.

"I've been waiting for a guide to come and take me by the hand,
Could these sensations make me feel the pleasures of a normal man?"
(Disorder, Joy Division)

If I wasn't struggling so much to cope with living I am sure that the events around me wouldn't have made the impact they did. I'd left a massive gap in my growing up years 17-20, when I did almost zero socialising, which didn't help things when situations did start to go awry. This vague idea that if I found a girlfriend that it would somehow create a safety net preventing me from free fall, a safety net against all my biggest fears about humanity within the 21st century, got more desperate. More desperate in general, than desperate for love itself, I found walking up on these hill tops and listening to Joy Division (more than any other band) the only safe mental environment whilst either escaping from the state a bad night out had put me in or waiting for the next one, with the hope that something 'great' may happen within it. The gruelingness of these walks, which I tried to push further and further onto the moors each time, also tamed my despair over eating to much (linked to the despair of becoming undesirable thus unable to find this 'safety net', as the walking felt like I was "keeping the weight off"), as my mind was in a trance-like muteness-to-scattering-fears once I was well and truly within the middle of one of these walks.

(an image took within January/February period of 2005, when I was 21)

The landscape up there is beautiful, but it is also a bleak and minimal landscape, a landscape that offers no niceities, no signs that would point to false hopes, nothing that could find soul and and prise out this inability to cope with life. On the long, quiet roads, where I couldn't see where they ended, it felt as if I was walking up to the moon/never coming back down to the town below, and that was some sort of comfort I suppose.

(an image took within January/February period of 2005, when I was 21)

The long walks felt like a suspension of the closing in of things, as if there was no descisions/no other roads in life that had to be chosen whilst taking these roads further and further up on to the hill tops. Because there was inability to get on with my life, once I stood still (making an already ecological-armageddon-battered vision of my future even harder to look at) I could not move forward in life. I felt stuck. Yet again this vague idea of getting a girlfriend/partner felt like the only possible way forward, and without it these problems would close in more and more. The possibility of this being actualised seemed to far away though, just whilst suicide-as-the-only-viable-option-thoughts were breaking free from the safety net of passing thought.

"How could anyone know me, when I don't even know myself?"
(Giant, by The The)

What happened next? well, on one these nights out, I went up to a young (and very attractive) lady to tell her how much one of my friends liked her, only for her to turn around to me as I spoke and say "you're gorgeous you are" followed later on by "if I didn't have a boyfriend, I'd go out with you". Due to a ballooning naivity, made so by a desperate need to hear (these kind) of words said to me, I failed to understand the wider context of the situation; that it was a young person (not yet out of her teens) saying the kind of thing lots of young people say to other people they find (reasonably) attractive, when they are young, giddy on alcohol, and being flirtatious. It was just unfortunate that these words had a little more poise and intention than the usual flirting banter.
But these words sunk themselves deep into my mind, because nobody had ever said words like these to me before regardless of their genuinity. I'm ashamed to say, that this lady was very conventionally attractive too, and, for a western child reared on an image-diet of endless advertisments of conventionally attractive women, which seep into day dreams and expectations, this all seemed a little too good to be true. I'd been anorexic, I already knew how misleading this world of images could be, yet I was too niave to prevent myself being mislead when it came to appearance of others. (which shouldn't be read as a statement saying "all pretty girls are shallow and self-consumed" but should read as a confession about the falibility of my visual stimulation).
The big problem here was that I had spoken to this young lady on behalf of a friend who I had very rapidly become very close friends with. The last thing I would want to do is to pursue somebody with the likelihood of serverley uspetting someone, who in his own way was as sensitive to the world as I was; but at the same time I thought that this could be the very thing that could, well, 'save me'.

"This is the day your life will surely change"
(This Is Day by The The)

In stepped the only record that could ever find its place within the desperate moments when Joy Division's music seemed like it was the only music that would suffice: Soul Mining by the band The The. The tracks seemed to engrave themselves as meaning to the events that were occuring.

"I've filled up my mind with perpetual greed
And turned all of my friends into enemies
And now the past as returned to haunt me"
(Giant by The The)

Down came the repeating bursts of guilt, then exictment that something great was going to happen, then despair that nothing was happening anyway near fast enough; then massive guilt again for wanting it to do so. If I couldn't deal with bleak nihilism, I certainly couldn't take on board nihilistic hedonism as my life philosophy; "fuck your mate, you gotta look after number one - ask her out man! life is shit man - gotta take what you can when it comes!". My mind never worked like this, and I'm very glad it didn't (but the realisation of the perpetuation of self-satisfaction as meaning of life by capitalist ideology, creating meme's such as these, was still years away).
Suffering from guilt on top of everything else was bringing me closer to suicidal thoughts - everything seemed to be closing in; I needed meaning and if anything helped it was the belief that I was a good person doing good things, as, if I wanted to see a good world, I too must'nt be selfish and greedy. But once narsissistic tendencies seeped out (through an obsession with the self due to attempts to confirm to oneself that others may be able to find you an attractive person , worth pursuing), there was a massive boat rocking of what I was, and what I wanted. It was too much too soon, I wasn't prepared for the world outside my solitary impressions of it. No thick skin could settle and harden whilst I was being rocked around within this new-found experience of reality. Dabbles with overdosing were both immature and ill-thought through, because I never actually intended to properly do it, only to affirm to the outside world that I was caving in and need some help, whatever the stupidly niave idea of help I thought I needed was (a mess that should be best-forgotten about, maybe, but it all plays a crucial part in my outlook and politicisation that would begin onwards from this spell).
I needed to sort something out, I eventually spoke to the friend, who, luckily, was getting attention from other members of the opposite sex at that point - people he also found attractive. I needed something to sort this mess out, my life was spent either walking up on to hills, waiting in anticipation for nights out; waiting then escaping, waiting the escaping. So I pursued this young lady.

Because of my predicament I'd built this whole situation up into something that none of the other early 20's/late teens people involved/or just there at the time, could have forseen. This is why when I tried my laughable (to anyone with experience of how the real world works) attempts at chatting her up (coaxed on by friends around me who couldn't grasp how much of a thing I'd made out of it all) I just completley cracked when she said to a friend (who then said it me) "I don't like him - he's too nice".
Regardless of whether it's wrong or right, or down to media manipulation of our desires, to not like someone because they are too nice -meaning that they are not the personality that the images convinced they would be - it wasn't anyone elses fault that I'd allowed my naivity to balloon to a dangerously high size. The let down was internally catastrophic; catastrophised further so by the fact that my aformentioned close friend also recieved a crushing (to his own sensitivity to the world) rejection that very same night - it felt like what we stood for (trying to be good and honest) had just recieved a massive kick in the face.
Of course, this wasn't the case: it was my niavety that had ballooned so much it had reached into dangerous territory. And it would be completley missing the point of writing all this down to then make a point of holding resent against certain individuals; we live in a society of consumers of spectacle, where we are reared to desire "the image of reality, rather than reality itself" (to quote a poster from the related Pandemic organisation), so if it wasn't this young lady, then it would have been another young lady with her own imaginings of reality hurting me as I was guided along by my own imaginings of reality. Nonetheless, I found myself in dangerous mental territory. It felt like the walls had finally caught up with me.

"Something always goes wrong when things are going right, you swallowed your pride to quell the pain inside" (Soul Mining, The The)

University was over for summer, in fact it had been over for somes months previous, but me and my close friend still spent any time between night outs milling around there in the canteens and corridors, possibly hoping for a postive sign if some passing fellow student made an appearance, and to avoid the unstable solemn moments spent in solitude in our edge-of-town houses. But now it seemed so futile to be there. So embarrasing, in fact, that I'd been hanging around in an almost empty building as a suspension of an unnerving closing in of a depression, between times of soughting after/day dreaming after this percieved saviour, only for it to result in nothingness.

Now, with the walls feeling like they were in front of my face, everything that spoke of escaping/moving sideways from the deadlock in front on me intensified. Ill thought out dabbles with overdosing restarted; my walks started stretching further and further, and I desperatley needed the music of Joy Division and The The. I doubly needed everything that seemed to suspend time, just as time itself seemed to reveal no future; I needed everything that reflected and understood the clash with bleak nihilism that I was experiencing down there, beneath the hills.
Two songs conveyed the feeling of an environing fear that was getting closer: the epic track Giant by The The and Dead Souls by Joy Division. They contained a despairing energy that seemed to feel like it is circulating you, like a airborne predator, waiting to finally strike. The exposure upon the minimal landscape of these hill tops, seemed to visually justify this feeling within the songs. Whenever I listen to Dead Souls now, I picture these slowly-turning viewpoints of moorland, moving to the circulatory-like rythem of the drum beat, getting more vivid and closer, until Ian Curtis's words burst through, some 2 minutes into the song...

"Someone take these dreams away
That point me to another day
.........They keep calling me"

The music seemed to create a euphoria of despair, which made all the trouble in ones life to be darkly savioured, as documentation on why one ought to feel this way.

The year would drag on, as a mess of excitment for something vague, and then destructive depressions, that lingered for days on end, when the nothingness appeared where vague once stood. But, over all, I was coming down with a bump. I would need to rebuild myself, I couldn't let my ill-conceieved dabbles with doing myself in carry on. The next year and a half was start and stop; finally accepting my creative endeavours within art and music to be my only possible saviour. But I still couldn't picture a future I could inhabit, without this percieved safety net of a lover in place.
Over time, people around me were (and are; social drinking groups continuously seem to have a younger and younger average age, as others move on) moving on, following more linear/normal pathways in growing up, by getting careers, having long term partners, getting their own places. It all seemed to be part of a world I just didn't get and couldn't maintain as a possibility. It just didn't make sense to me (even as I often wanted it to, for the safety nets it seemed to convey to me). The urge to create art as nessecity in the face of my huge concerns avout the 21st century (intertwined with concerns about a possible nearby fall into mental destutition), whilst maintaining order and morale to to it by having a softer-than-when-anorexic routine of exercise and eating control, was the only method that made sense to me.
But the acuteness of the sense that my despair catching up with me had become momentarily muted, with only short relapses. I knew there was going to be a time when I would no longer be able to use the urge to create art, blended with weekly blastings with alcohol and daily jogs around the block, as one huge procrastination, to avoid confronting it; I knew that there would be time when global issues would be too large to procrastinate around. But my defence mechanism was also rebuilding/thickening up the barriers that I had whittled down greatly after the control anorexia had over me. The production of art and music about the inseparable cases of personal and world problems was becoming the essential part of a routine, that build blockades to stop me actually confronting these problems in The Now. Then the exercise and eating control would keep a lid on the anxieties of being too socially inadequate (the unwanted one who is left to drown on a sinking world) to get anything from life, by actually perpetuating a control that prevented precisely this from happening; I was creating my own carrot on a stick, but its illusion seemed like the only way, aslong as denied them to myself. After previously trying to weaken these walls, I now knew that weakening them created a dangerzone, and realisation after realisation of this in 2005 continued to make them harden up to the point where life is just one big poker face.

A couple of years later, one further flirtation with the possibility of having a partner, seemed to set in the stone the truth about my inabiltiy to deal with life and relax into the world, as the chance vanished the more my desperation and neediness of a safety net shone through. A safety set for my life, in the face of a more informed and growing expectation of life getting bleaker and bleaker as the 21st century dragged on, is what drove the hopes of 'being saved' from it ( I was still being fooled by an instilled consumer-mindset day dream; knowing otherwise but believing that these good things will certainly come to me).
The crash didn't just coincide with the end of my university course, and a helping-handed feeling of "going somewhere" (which university provides), but I had just finally found what I'd been looking for, regarding my artwork: what I had been wanting to do/say had finally been pieced together. A tutor, who seemed to have an eerily good knack of envisiging what one was trying to say before they had even realised what it was they were trying to say, suggested to make climate change the main thing my work dealt with from now on; as opposed to what it was at that point; a stop-start-try-again jumble about my own mental state, worries about society, and climate change.
But the interesting thing was that by turning to focus on climate change, the large landscapes of ecological nightmares I began to make simply absorbed the entirity of these issues, embodying the whole. He (the tutor) seemed to get what was burning away at me which, by helping me focus on the large scale (the environmental), was shown to be the entirity, big and small. I was now at where I was always trying to get to: making a case against life as I saw it as a whole. (a realisation that came to me years later after reading an essay called Nihil Rebound: Joy Division from the K-Punk Blog, where the blog's writer Mark Fisher says how Ian Curtis's', seemingly naive lyrics from earlier Joy Division/Warsaw tracks about the attrocities of war, despotic leaders of men, were parts of the case he was making against life itself, as the horrors of the 20th century, and the slow tradegy of the defeat of the working class, washed us up on the nihilistic shoreline of the so-called 'end of history'. Indeed, I'd say that this essay possibly provided me the open doorway to realise that my early 20's obbession with this band wasn't something that can be signed off as immature morbidity - the way that many people refer to the adored music from their so called 'angst years' - but is music that appeals very much to the way, not just me, but many of us experience the world, existing whilst the amoral brutally of industrialised forces takes eveything away from us, and gives us a uncomfortable meaningless back in return - hence their rising popularity as the industrial capitalist machine drags us further and futher into hopelessness).

This breakthrough, felt like it should have been permanent, like I could have been in in forever, because nothing could really come aftwards. And other things I hoped for were vanishing, in a normal course of things that I just couldn't deal with. I was in freefall again. But I couldn't dabble with suicide again, as the desublimination of stomach pains the next day were a warning that you cannot escape so easily and so purely. It doesn't end easy, it lingers on. Just as the horrors of the 20th century didn't end so easily at the dawn of the so called 'end of history', at begining of the 1990's - they are still happening; history didn't peacefully end and fold itself nicely into an holiday package; we are fooled by the images we are shown of truth, forgetting that reality isn't quite as streamline as this.

The emotionally exhaustive summer of vanishing (what I foolishy thought could be) certainties, a summer metaphorically and literally clinging onto bottles, had weakened my sense of who I was and what I was capable/incapable of, to the extent that I was accepting any guides' directions on how to live my life; forgetting the mental minefields of mistakes, caused by a void when it came to the task of enjoying. I agreed to do something I would never have felt such nessecity to do if my routine had been ruining smoothly on the inside my mental barriers: I went to a music festival.
For starters, I struggle spending time in other peoples' company for full days, especially when the people stretches far beyond ones vision - I get paranoid, exhausted, wanting to walk off for a good while, then paranoid about what people think of me for attempting to do this. Then there's the fact that I have a very low tolerance for noise when I'm tired; I need a muteness to, and a dimming of the world when I'm too tired for my barriers to protect my wellbeing as they do in the day. When tired, after a while the sound begins to feel like violence. But it was the paranoia about things that made this event what it became.
Leeds Festival is notoriously not one of the most laid-back festivals; as well as the entire event sometimes seeming more like a topshop fashion parade (losing sight of friends within a sea of unfestival-like manicured girls, wearing hot pants and shades, and guys wearing leather jackets and Pete Doherty-inspired straw hats; so many people, at once, looked advert-friendly-perfect, aloof and indentical) it also seems to have a feeling that something could kick off at any moment, due to there being a football hooligan-like tribalism.
Then there's the drugs. It's not the pressure to take them in itself, it's the sense of complete alienation from groups of people, when they are on them. "And you've got 4 days of this alienation mate - that Strongbow won't suffice, that's for sure". Low on sense of self, I got convinced that legal highs would be a OK alternative for someone who doesn't take drugs. Again, due to being low on sense of self, I felt a much more acute need to fit in to the group I would be spending 4 days with. I'd be lying if I denied that the first herbal high I took felt very good, but, due to this, and the relentless noises outside, I had no sleep. Got up next day having had no sleep, and paranoia started to kick in. Only slightly, but everything seemed a little more tindersticks to me, like it would take just one false step for everything to blow its top off.

Nobody is to blame for the general deteriation of things from this point, my inability to cope with a life lived eclispes any claims that people who knew me should have discouraged me to do things, and taken into account that their own free choice may have alienatied me: like with the young lady mentioned above, this was young people doing what young people come to believe they ought to be doing; trying to have a good time, thus wanting everybody else to be joining in in the good time that they are having, by doing the same things to confirm the legitmacy of the reason for having this good time - but music festivals are a staple of the mass design of how to enjoy life, which not everyone can assign themselves to. Over the course of the next day it was becoming clear that sleep wasn't coming, and this fact itself caused me further anxiety and worry. After spending a very uncomfortable time around a camp fire, I made my way back to the tent. I was becoming more paranoid. I can never relax (caused by a perpetual unease instilled into us by capitalism's constant rebuilding, reshuffling, re-demanding that creates a society based on precarity, where your foremost desire to inhale oxygen and then exhale carbon dioxide is nagged to death by the reminder not to "get too comfy there, mate") so how I expected to enjoy an event that demands relaxation or a right old mess is completley down to my loss of sense of self during the summer of 2007.
Walking back to the tent there was these human-shaped sleeping backs on a banking. Security was hovering around with torches, talking on radios. It looked bad. I got back to the tent. Couldn't sleep. I was getting stupidly paranoid by this point. I thought the friends I'd gone with to the festival were about to run into the tent and beat me up. Why did I think this? Because they had been ever-ever-so slightly off with me in conversations earlier. My paranoia expanded this to an illogical extreme. I thought drugs had sent them violent. They'd done nothing of the sort. Every sound I heard sounded like them coming to get me; the noises I heard were being twisted by my mind into other noises to do with me.
When I went back towards where I have left off in the early hours, the place where the bodies in the sleepng bags had been was now a spot of grass surrounded by police barrier tape (something which was seen by other eyes as well as mine, but, for some reason, was never mentioned in the local news). This was the most awful feeling, and I couldn't forget the shape of the sleeping bags the night before - a shape that was inbetween that of a butterfly pupa and a body of someone who perished in Pompeii. It sent my current state of mind into overdrive. Something felt damaged in my brain. The words 'dead bodies' were being repeated over and over again in my head, like a film real of words taking my mind into canyon inside itself that it never should enter. My anxiety grew and grew.
I was hearing all sorts now. Everytime I heard a reveller at the festival speak, my mind altered what they'd said so that they were talking about me. I Kept on walking trying to shake it off. Didn't want to find my friends, because my mind was convinced that they were after me. Kept on walking. It kept on getting worse. This was, what I could only describe later as hyper paranoia. Everybody in the festival was saying "John Ledger, John Ledger" in my ears. The more worried I became, the more I panicked the worse it became, until it started to feel like I was in the middle of my own real-life version of the trippy Disney film Fantasia.
I eventually ran out of the festival. And after being scared out of wits by noises in a local village that came from no rational source, I finally found a bus back to central Leeds, and then a train to Barnsley. That night was spent at a friends because I thought I was going permanently mad, and didn't dare go home for that reason. I thought this was finally some kind of end. It felt like everything that I'd tried to wall myself up against was bursting through all at once. The day after when I went to the hospital after several days without sleep, I wasn't looking for help back to a sort of normality as much as I was handing myself in, as if I was saying to them "look, I'm a walking disaster, Ive failed to live a life - give me a break" as if the hospital was an arm of an all-controlling authority, and being at breaking point I no longer wanted to be my own person, I wanted them to make me from now on, to make me do what they tell me to do without having to question (which is why this memory of walking into the hospital reminds me of the fate of Winston Smith, towards the end of George Orwell's 1984, when, in the middle of having the humanity smashed out of him in room 101 by Big Brother, he eventually found himself in the arms of his torturer, O'brien, as if he was his paternal guardian, weeping for it to end, whilst O'brien momentarily cuddled and consolidated him - I felt my character couldn't withstand the way of the world anymore). But after sleeping pills and a Valium, this time issued by the doctor, I was yet again reminded that it doesn't end so easily.
In retrospect, many knowing voices have told me "you were just having a bad trip man" (which I hated to start with, as if I'd have had sense of self at the time I wouldn't have gone near pills, legal or illegal), but this doesn't take into account all the other factors at play, which culminated in this complete mess.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society"

(Jiddu Krishnamurti - oh, how this quote would have helped if only I'd found it when I was 23, not 26!)

I was a permenantley bruised atom in a rotten whole, which exacerbates its illness by refusing to accept its own mortalility - this is my predicament within the capitalist system's predicament. Something I couldn't quite describe in words at this point, was now making itself clear within my large scale drawings. The tracks towards the politisisation of myself and obbsessive dissection of the governing system were origninally laid by the breakthrough that my large-scale drawings gave me, but the events of these years made it the only way I could go.

Experience has left me with no choice but to be anti-capitalist. Its offer of no future, save weekly piss ups, is because it offers humanity no future worth living in, which has crippled any vision I would possibly have had for my own atomised future. This was being played out in my walking disaster of a life I was having whenever I tried to live it. Yet I didn't know this at 21 or 23.
It was only when I luckily stumbled upon a job working as a gallery attendant, just 1 week after the mess I got in at the festival, when I was confronted with an array other peoples' career goals (which is in no way a criticism or to claim that their goals are futile) that I was aggressively confronted with my relative aimlessness/no-space-to-move-forward-into reality, making it much more pressing, as I began to watch workers come and go as I stood still, that I felt it an urgency to sensibly home in on what I felt were the causes of this entrapment. This feeling was coupled with a expanding inferiority complex about my general lack of knowledge, in comparison with most other people I worked with. But this I began to feel positive about. Whether I was pushed or jumped, I needed to take this plunge into the world of books.

2008 to the present

I wished to read books that could help word the feeling that all the things that mentally knocked seven bells of shit out of me were all connected; that it wasn't just my imagination that the same thing that caused climate change, was the same as what was making society so homogenised and unknowingly unfree, which was the same thing that had caused my mental illnesses and social calamities, which was the same thing that caused so much internal violence through its endless mediation of images, which (through my eyes) was in general no less dystopian than the visions I had been reading in 20th fiction books written in the first part of the 20th century. Before I knew it my choice of reading had taken on a very direct course, and the word capitalism was on the tip of my tongue in every conversation I would have.
I knew what I didn't like in much clearer terms than before. But, whilst further hardening my inability to think long-term/think career plan due to a now growing cynicism to the whole language of aspiration within capitalism (knowing how all consuming of even the arts it is) it did nothing to help my sense of self whilst within social situations. Thus the career goals of those around me, continued to remind me of being left stranded; "no chance of that safety net of a partner now - nobody wants a person who is going nowhere". And it isn't that I think all careers are bad or destined to be doomed, it's just that I have come to realise that I cannot see a future past my next artwork/next exhibition, of which is intended to be the aforementioned case I have been building (which is why since I things changed when I started working I now have most of my lowest moments after an exhibition is over, when life caries on and still nothing feels "confirmed"). Any thoughts that try to go further than this hit a grey screen in my mind.

Nevertheless, for a short time, working for a wage and then making my own work in the evening was, although forming a eventless splodge of time, OK - not too bad. A small resignation to nihilism I suppose, but not too much. The lyrics from the first Strokes album, which embodied a quintessential "yeah, but it's not that bad" kind of nihilism, seemed perfectly fitting (as they did for me before my 'sigh' turned into 'gasp' between the 9/11 terror attacks and the 2002 world worries)

"I'm working so I won't have to try so hard" (Someday)

The problem is, as I was reading more and more, the more despairing and critical of the current world I became, and the drawings made the inevitable descent from climate change causation to the entirety of capitalism itself. Although part of the reason I wanted to understand the system that governed was for self help, I realised I was veering very quickly towards unconditional anticapitalism, this made me feel obliged to try to do more to highlight all the problems it caused and to try to help change things, as "I couldn't justify just ranting and raving in my work, to then sit back and do nothing in the real world". But this is when I began to feel even more trapped by those barriers I thought I was actually beginning to pull down; because the more I became aware of the matrix of injustices and advancing capitalist-caused problems surrounding our very existence, the more I realised how much some of these had their tentacles wrapped around tendencies/habits of mine that helped sustain the barriers that I'd instinctively built as necessity for my own safety. The truth is made clear by my compulsively pessimistic creative energy, and the morbid fascination that fuels it; because this was present before I'd even read all the words that would make me realise how trapped how felt. This makes it sometimes seem that the books that I read (including the mindful books that have tried their best to make me just be, just go with the flow in life) in order to free me, have only located the key so that it could lock my chains.

I suppose that I am back in (or never left) the existential situation I was in during anorexia. The situation that is explained so brilliantly by the sample at the beginning of 4st.1b by the Manic Street preachers (if one makes the subject wider than that of food)

"...... too much to die
And not enough to stay alive
I'm sitting in the middle waiting"

My mental rooting system is too entrenched in ground that, although is slowly killing it, is stopping it from instantly toppling over. Which one is the worst is debatable, but ones natural instinct is to side with the former rather than the latter. As well as not even knowing how to, I'm pretty sure that this is the force which is preventing me breaking free of my now barred-up, passive (going nowhere) existence: an instinctive awareness that doing so could be fatal; making a big mistake, such as putting my utter trust in something or someone, giving myself to them only for it to leave me where it left me before, but with less niavety/optimism to pick me back up each time it happens, which is why I now don't dream of finding a partner, and actually wall myself up away from the possibility, consciously now denying the one thing I thought would 'save me' and revving up the motor of my routine again, industrialising discontent as a force to keep going.
This is why I sometimes think that my only possible place within life is - due to being unable to deal with the world as it is, but also unable detach myself from it in order to help to think of something better - to be a maker of works that highlight the hell we have made, not as someone to help create the better but to warn and inform those who may be able to go forth and do just this. And I think that, due to the feelings of alienation and messing up whenever I do try to be alive and live for the moment (as the 'able' anti-capitalisters would advise to me) always (as yet) winning over, this is my only way.
But the reason for explaining this whole inability to deal with life, isn't to leave it just as my own inability, because this inability is caused by capitalism's saturation of our lives, it's relentless erasing of anything not subject to direct/or indirect commodification, whilst simultaneously entrenching itself within all paths of thought so that any unsaturated spaces we find we instantly tarnish with it so that what was once an alternative is now using capitalist reality to make itself look appealing. The claim by many modern philosophers that "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism" is so much more cutting once one becomes aware of the sheer scale of the environmental issues that now face us.
We have a mass inability to picture a future worth living in. Some of us are better at denying it, and hoping for that cosy domestic life the system promised to us, but can very doubtfully give to us. But I think the inability plays itself out in the actions of so many of us; the weekly piss-ups instead of saving for the future; the general obsession with that pursuit of hedonism; the obsession with retro; the rising popularity of Joy Division with a generation of young people born years after the death of Ian Curtis. I couldn't explain this when I was 21. I couldn't explain this when I was 23. I still can't explain it as I would like to here and now.
Just as the reaction that it is wrong to put this quite personal account on the net is missing the point, one is also missing the point here, if the reaction to this writing is to tell me how everybody has got problems, and one just needs to learn how to cope. The example used of my own depression/inability to cope is referred to here as an example of the co-ordinates of a certain depression/inability to cope which is specific to our late 20th century/early 21st century era, and is not just an age-old tale of how the young find their way in the world.

Our generation lived/grew up in an era coined by intellectuals as the era of 'the end of history'. On the surface this meant the end of grand narratives that told a story of human progression to an era of total equality of living standards, freedoms and rights between fellow humans. What was also meant by this phrase wasn't just that we should accept capitalism but that we should all accept that a global capitalism of unrestricted commerce had triumphed as the only system that works; a belief that was shoved into the peoples' minds by the constant rhetoric of "there is no alternative (to capitalism)" by the Thatcherites and Reagonites. But as well as things seeming so exciting to us, as we lapped up Music Videos, Games Consoles, and then the internet, Ipods, and Cell phones, life all too often also seemed to lack meaning and purpose - there seemed to be a severe void to life behind the good-times-frenzy spewed out by the adverts. Our generation was the first to grow up knowing (without doubt) that our species had made a real mess of the world, and even if global warming didn't seem such a big threat when we were children, there was still the pressing stories like the one about how an area the size of a football pitch is being destroyed in the rainforests every second. You had to learn to try to cut the truth out, but once you did, what else but a life lived through the images of a consumer fantasy - and there begins so many of our mental illnesses.
Whilst growing up, one also learned to believe that if you aren't willing/or unable to play the (capitalism) game, then there isn't much choice of a life left over for you, except one of loneliness and destitution, and that "it was your own fault" if this was the life you found yourself living. If you don't aspire to strive up the career ladder; if you don't attempt to immerse yourself in a consumerist fashion niche; if you don't strive to be beautiful, clean and lean; if you don't smile and say pleasantries to people when you feel like shite inside, "well, it's your own fault" if the world feels like it has left you behind to fester in a no-new-messages-for-you-matey misery pit. All of these 'learnings' doubtlessly have a major role in the creeping mental illness epidemic of our times.

I don't want it to be true that there is no hope of a way out, and there is maybe hope in the very fact that my inabilities don't seem to affect others on the same level (regarding the mental gridlock I have). However, when I referred to the able anti-capitalisters, it was with a cautious irony; sometimes questioning whether the stance of those who claim to know how to, in the face of us who seemingly just refuse to stop carrying on as per usual, is itself a niche within the system; another version individualism. This questioning agrees with the description of capital as the unnameable thing; something which can incorporate anything, no matter how anti-capitalist it claims to be, and change into anything for the goal of profit-making - and this poses the scary possibility that it will never die, as long as it can live off the remain segments of humanity. And it is, sadly, true that many people who blame the individual for not stopping its advance-thus planet-wrecking of capitalism, actually start to sound like eco-Thatcherites when they start telling everybody "its your choice - you can make a change - it's up to you!!", even if they detest what Thatcher did. This is why I usually find it inappropriate to personally criticise friends when they take steps that, when taken by many, I see as very destructive to both the idea of resisting capitalism and destructive to the planet - steps such as learning how to drive and getting their own car. They are only doing what they feel they have to do within this system to have any kind of reasonable life, and not fall into a life-less-liveable - and that's not rampant selfishness, it's just trying to get on with life in the only way they deem to be possible (and many of them are very angry about the way capitalism is taking us, but they feel trapped and "try not to think about it"). But this isn't to detract from the importance of informing, encouraging and asking individuals to live their lives differently. But to use the 'blame' rhetoric ,which just rounds-up on the individual, whilst they are trapped in a system that necessitises and necessitises itself further into ones life (the more it recreates/reshapes as it continues to find new things to commodify) is counterproductive and also close to bullying.

Thus, it's hard to picture a future because it's hard to picture how on earth one can get out of the grips of capitalism; both on a personal and species level. It sometimes seems that our predicament is like a long drawn out take on the fate of an animal caught inside the coil of a constrictor snake: every time we try to fight back, to challenge its grip, the grip gets tighter, and it keeps on getting tighter until there is no space in which to breathe. This brings me to perhaps one of the most appropriate visually-stimulating things written that I have ever read. The passage comes from John Holloway's recent book 'Crack Capitalism'. The usage of a room of four walls, and the walls are closing in, as a metaphor for the suffocation of everything under capitalism seems to describe the predicament at every level of the system; our own mental states (where, although "some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not") and the entirety which is made up of all of us; both the physical and metaphysical predicaments. It brilliantly describes our inability to see outside the "room" capitalism has shut us away in.

"We are all in a room with four walls, a floor, a ceiling and no windows or door. The room is furnished and some of us are sitting comfortably, others most definitely are not. The walls are advancing inwards gradually, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, making us all more uncomfortable, advancing all the time, threatening to crush us all to death.

There are discussions within the room, but they are mostly about how to arrange the furniture. People do not seem to see the walls advancing. From time to time there are elections about how to place the furniture. These elections are not unimportant: They make some people more comfortable, others less so; they may even affect the speed at which the walls are moving, but they do nothing to stop their relentless advance........

As the walls grow closer, people react in different ways. Some refuse absolutely to see the advance of the walls, shutting themselves tightly into a world of Disney and defending with determination the chairs they are sitting on. Some see and denounce the movement of the walls, build a party with a radical program and look forward to a day in the future when there will be no walls. Others – and I among them – run to the walls and try desperately to find cracks, or faults beneath the surface, or to create cracks by banging on the walls........"

Although more directly to do with both environmental destruction and the undemocratic nightmare that relentless state-protected commerce is taking us it, It also explains my own mental state to a tee. I think it probably explains the majority of peoples' mental states also. I think has to be the case.

But something prevents me from believing that we are truly doomed, even as I feel so trapped within myself. Something still gives me hope in our species now and again, and something still gets me out of bed in the morning, with hope that something still will coming into my life and things will get better. It has certainly worn thing though, which is why I have found myself requiring the same aspects that resonate with the bleak nihilistic outlook, as I did at other points during the past 10 years.

After each mini-breakdown period my artistic endeavours still drag me along, but more is demanded of me now than it used to be, both from myself and from others who are aware of the despair at capitalism which runs through everything I make or write. But I don't think I can give what's needed. The undercurrent motive for writing the events of my past 10 years is to explain why the demands of me now to participate more in activism against capitalism and for something else seem to be reviving the intensity of the feeling of everything closing in, and this inability to act seems to be precisely because cannot end up in back in the place where these events put me, as I have less reserves than I used to in order to get back out again. This is why the more awareness I have, thus the more the demand to act now I know much more, followed by the inability to act is making me revisit the experience of life I had when I didn't know what I know now, but felt it: it is returning the need for the feeling of a suspension of time, in the landscape that seems to resonate with this feeling of having nowhere to go, whilst things are closing in fast; the hill tops west of where I live, and the need to listen to Joy Division (in particular).

But of course I agree with the collective beliefs of all those who are trying their hardest to take action to try to make a world not ruled by money, a world which is no longer in peril from the relentless attack on the ecosystem that sustains us (and there is truth, regarding the undercurrent motive for the writing of all of this, that I'm trying to explain this to those who know me and are perplexed and sometimes frustrated by my inactivity in the face of things I know full-well are destructive). If there's one good that may arise from writing all of this, it is that by explaining all of this I might actually be able to let the last 10 years of my life now rest in peace, so I can move on; a hope that understanding it all will help me break through the grey-screen which covers all images of my future, a grey screen the events of the last 10 years helped to create. And, with this, I hope that with - what seems to be - a hell of a large amount of thinkers racking their brains on how we can move away from capitalism, now that the need is crucial, that this is also a point of letting our past rest in peace; let it rest so that our species can get over the false dreams capitalism gave to us and move on to something else, something better.

Images taken and words from the first Globalsapiens exhibition

2011-08-23T19:52:00.040+01:00

GLOBALSAPIENS

Globalsapiens: an introduction to Parallel Paranoia, Humans In Cages and Silently Chained - the respective alternate names for artistic collective Mikk Murray, John Ledger and Jade Morris. Each artist has, at some point in life, stumbled across these titles and found them poetically fitting descriptions of their own predicament as young adults in the 21st century: tied to lifestyles that they know are destructive to the planet and most often self-destructive; struggling forwards from this, trying to find cracks in a hegemonic social landscape that drags humans toward an ultimate battle with nature that we are certain to lose.

Thus this show cannot be a means to an end for Globalsapiens: it has to be the start not the end; one of many 'atoms for peace', clustering together, always growing never standing still, until their shout is big enough to make one final stand against a world ruled by money. This exhibition aims to resonate with all those who care but feel trapped and helpless to make a change, and possibly then inspire them to believe that they need not feel trapped and helpless.

WHY GLOBALSAPIEN?

As a society, our actions, our expressions, our reactions, all show signs that we are aware of living in end times. Make no bones about it; no matter how much we talk about getting married, getting a house, settling down, we reek of a dying civilisation.

This exhaustion of everything in our merry-go-round swap between being the exploiter to the exploited has to end. Nobody can predict what ‘end’ we can expect, but we can guess what the prolongation of this current manmade nightmare will lead to. But we can also guess and hope; to hope that “surely this can’t be the end of the human story just yet…!” Grim resignation is dangerous; hope generates possibilities – but hope is sometimes hard for one to maintain.

Globalsapiens are artist’s who are desperately trying to find a way forward into a future worth living in. Our instinct is to express – we may not be the most pragmatic/practical people, but our contribution is a desperate attempt to realise a new way of living for the sake of the human race (sound self righteous? No: all species battle to maintain their existence). The time is right. Artists have no future in this old world, they must end their post idealist malaise/capitulation to the business mentality and join the cause to act now to make a future worth living in.

We felt aligned by a feeling that our artwork seems too driven, and too real merely to be for exhibitions only - which often seem to just castrate it and make it nothing but mere consumer spectacle. This is a pressing concern that is played out within the show: we know that this is all our works may be, but we are still often driven by a powerful dream-boat of blind optimism that refers to the opposite, and seems to be generated by the ideological coding of the very system we are trying to help unwire. We want to help pave a way out of this bleak place our species (and the planet it has dragged down with it) has stumbled into, but we too often get too trapped in our minds to be/or do anything but what the system would happily have us be/doing – what keeps it thriving off human day-dreams and desires.

Nobody is in any place to preach. To resonate with others to generate in others. To alienate is to disintegrate. Let’s take the No Them, Only Us belief seriously again.

Human beings offer fundamentally special qualities to life on planet earth, and wherever else life may flourish. However, we are not better than the rest of life; if we were better we wouldn’t need it; but strip the life away from under our feet and we’d be dead before you could say the words ‘Easter Island’. Nevertheless, this is what out species is currently doing. But to say that we are a species of existential contradictions is to give up without even trying, and to let the idea of perpetual profiteering drag our eyes to the grey floor, where we watch our feet take one step at a time, in a potentially lethal small-world view.

This exhibition wishes to contribute to the voices of reason in this time of collective insanity.

Inside Humans In Cages's isolated cell

Humans In Cages is feeling a little trapped, and without a vision of the future at present.

The weekly ASDA shop likes this

The capitalist system still advances across the face of the planet, destroying the world that we depend on to survive, and pressing the boot further and further into our faces, as freedom/democracy become obstacles stood in the way which must also be destroyed. But here I languish; informed but passive; not knowing which foot to put in front of the other; so letting faint hopes of something better do the walking for me.

Here in my cell there will constantly remain the doubt that my artworks/artist shows may end up as nothing more than self-profiling within the capitalist dictatorship of individualism; the fetishisation of the self in the forced-competition of status advancement, based on the ultimatum of prosperity and a terror of failure. Thus, everything I have done within my isolated little world sometimes feels so counterproductive: that the truth may be that I am simply bolstering the realism of a system my work fundamentally opposes in its messages, by seeking recognition, and respect from it, for my individual endeavours.

The cell contains the informed but passive self, critical but tangled in a knot of unwillingness and inability to step out of the capitalist version of reality. Most of the time I see no light at the end of the tunnel, and it has been said by many contemporary thinkers that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism’. But, now and again, there is a glimmer of something outside the cell; a crack through the screen of this ever-deteriorating normality.

Outside the cell, you will find traces of both what once was but was sectioned and boxed away, and what still just might have a possibility of re-emerging. A creativity that has no means to an end, but is perpetual/part of something moving. Even the creation of the videos in this exhibition reminded me of the act of being healthily spontaneously creative before the pressures of business objectives, and wage necessities in the latter and post-education years constrained me to (if I’m not careful) an ever-tightening ‘specialisation’, which could be described as an alienated endeavour, with the opinion of how the world will rate me amongst others always harpooning genuine concerns in my mind.

But this is only one side of the truth. The other side being that making these art works has been the most accessible and direct way of expressing concerns and wants for something massively more than just a hand up the status ladder, for years now, and is, actually possibly the only bringer of confidence to my self which has allowed this voice to be heard at all in the first place. It is the most accessible and direct way of expressing them. So, as well as this critical distance to the possible futility of making works for show in a late capitalist society, I still have hope that the messages in them can help change things, if not, I lose my only present voice.

I’ll do my best, but it’s hard trying to stop an exhibition become a means to an end from where working towards one final goal, (as anyone who as put on a major show will resonate with) leads to anti-climax, depression and a defeated-slump straight back into the realism of capitalism – to start right back at the beginning, but with less time than before.

Achieving And Getting Things Done

Inside Silently Chained's isolated cell

They all smiled gingerly and meekly.
Had they simply forgotten, or had they never known anyway? I guess it is neither.
They're neither alive nor gone.
Not until the hour of the moon crosses the path of the sun.
Then they will know, and they will realise, what they had known all along.
But for now, it is too late. Too late. Too late?

Inside Parallel Paranoia's isolated cell

This painting (above) is from a series of works called Where have all the bees gone? Where a parallel universe was created to highlight the importance of bees to the ecosystem and our food supply. Without the bees that pollinate roughly a third of our food crops there would be less food around. The chain reaction could be devastating to the human race and all life on Earth. The disappearance and death of bees or Colony Collapse Dissorder (CCD) as it is somethimes known is puzzling scientists and researchers still with mites and pesticides being the main concerns.

In the parallel universe the bees have been lured into a lab by a mad scientist and experiments have taken place. For some reason the scientist becomes psychically connect to the bees and finds they will do as he wishes. The scientist sets about creating his own Utopian vision. Using the soldier bees to hold the planet under siege and turn things around. Food, shelter and equality for all. Harmony with all living creatures and the landscape the ultimate goal. Organic produce, waste reduction, ocean cleanups, knowledge and wisdom passed on to all. The trouble was the scientist did such a great job that he became some sort of a celebrity. A leader and ultimately was devoured by power and greed. Alan is a dog and he spends most of his time walking around in his horse suit. Alan is the mad scientist's best friend. The horse suit is an extension of Alan and his status/power and also the scientist's eccentricity. The portrait of Alan was painted by Mikk for the Scientist in 2027. "I didn't have a choice!" he said.

Outside the cells. What's happening out here?

Many of our endeavours are maintained by reliance on oil. Many of our endeavours are purely narcissistic - taught by the system to be so. Reflecting on this can sometimes make one see their own 'achievements' in a very different light. And is it really that precious? (this piece was once used in a Seawhite Of Brighton arts suppliers brochure, not black gooey paint, with a look of oil about it, drips down it).

Parallel Paranioa is in the process of filling up a paddling pool with needless consumer plastic waste. In another water filled area (The Pacific Ocean) a floating island of plastic trash twice the size of Texas is currently existing.

The Bretton Woods conference 2011

In the summer of 1944 delegates from 44 countries met in the midst of World War 2 to reshape the world’s financial system. The location of the meeting – in rural Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA – was designed to ensure that the delegates would have no distractions, and no pressure from lobbyists or congressmen, as they worked on their plans for post-war reconstruction. The New Hampshire Bretton Woods is part of a land grant made in 1772 by royal governor John Wentworth, which he named after his ancestral home (West) Bretton, in Yorkshire, England.

In the summer of 2011, Globalsapiens met in the midst of a global meltdown (financially, environmentally and socially) to throw around their own ideas of making a better world, with changes being needed now more than ever – A HUGE ALTERATION IS NEEDED. The location of the meeting – In rural Bretton woods in West Bretton, Yorkshire, England – is a symbolic gesture: the USA Bretton woods conference reshaped the world after the war, to prevent the problems (financial crisis’s for example) which led to the war; shaping the world for the past 60+ years, and beginning global capitalism as we know it today.

We need a Bretton woods conference now! Not to reinstate capitalism but to figure out how we can move beyond it. The sources of power whom we would usually assign these tasks to have gone insane; a systemic press-ganging on anything which tries to halt the forces of big business – which leaves this conference to people assumed-powerless like us (Globalsapiens). In this mock-version of an all-important conference, we will speak about, and demand a better world; suggesting, through the thoughts and words they never speak, both what these all-important meetings should really be about, and also emphasising what is more important; assigning the decision making to the assumed-powerless.

(clip from video)

Waking up and staying awake has never been easy....

what next?............

Globalsapiens; An introduction

2011-08-15T07:37:00.003+01:00

Globalsapiens: an introduction to Parallel Paranoia, Humans In Cages and Silently Chained - the respective alternate names for artistic collective Mikk Murray, John Ledger and Jade Morris. Alternate names that speak of lifestyles that they know are destructive to the planet and most often self-destructive, whilst trying to find cracks in which to get out and make a change. This exhibition aims to resonate with all those who care but feel trapped and helpless to make a change, and possibly then inspire them to believe that they need not be this way.

2011-08-03T09:48:00.004+01:00

GLOBALSAPIENS: AN INTRODUCTION

Friday 19th August - Sunday 3rd September

CADS, 7 Smithfield, Shalesmoor Sheffield

Preview: Friday 19th August

Thus this show cannot be a means to an end for Globalsapiens: it has to be the start not the end; one of many 'atoms for peace', clustering together, always growing never standing still, until their shout is big enough to make one final stand against a world ruled by money. This exhibition aims to resonate with all those who care but feel trapped and helpless to make a change, and possibly then inspire them to believe that they need not feel trapped and helpless..

Photographs from Making A Mark

2011-07-28T20:38:00.004+01:00

Photographs from Making A Mark exhibition.
Featuring 5 Barnsley-based artists whose work revolves predominantley around the practice of drawing: The artists are, Richard Kitson, John Ledger, Jade Morris, Mikk Murray and Louise Wright

Daytime openings: Friday 22 July - Sunday 14 Aug
Opening days Thursday - Sunday, 12-4pm

Hive Gallery, Elsecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley, S74 8HJ

John Ledger - "I want none of this" and 'The index for child wellbeing'

John Ledger -Global Ghetto, 2045, marks the centenary of the defeat of fascism (2010/11)

Mikk Murray - Making a mark

Mikk Murray - A dogs life

Works by Jade Morris

works by Louise Wright

Works by Richard Kitson

Photographs from Ill Equipped show @ Access space, Sheffield

2011-07-13T22:05:00.002+01:00

Thanks to people at Access space for giving me the chance to put this show on. It's really good to see these works behind an active environment. Probably should have used flash, then I'd have got more than one image that wasn't slightly blurry. But after spending (what seems like) a lifetime invigilating a gallery where the visitors are now allowed to take photographs, I realise how bloody annoying it is to be trying to do what one has to do whilst in a storm of flashes of light.

Making a Mark - upcoming exhibition

2011-07-09T21:51:00.005+01:00

Making a Mark

John Ledger Richard Kitson Louise Wright Mikk Murray Jade Morris

22 July - 14 Aug (Thurs - Sun)

Hive Gallery, Elsecar Heritage Centre, Barnsley, S74 8HJ

Open evening: Friday 22 July, 7 - 9pm

This exhibition brings together a collection of young local artists who are heavily dependent on the practice of drawing, or even work primarily through it. The artists all live or were raised in the Barnsley area.

A collective who, through degrees of separation, share friendships and common interests, and this is a great chance to show to the rest of the area that is has a strong community of artists.

The artists use drawing for very different purposes, whether for understanding, for relaxation, exploration, the projecting of messages and even the exorcism of burning thoughts. All of them use it as a voice, perhaps their strongest voice.

Postpassive?

2011-07-09T20:11:00.000+01:00

The ideas about changing the world for the better are still just fleeting fantasies for me. Why can't I break through? Why can't I truly be gripped with my own beliefs in what is right? Why have I befriended so many fears throughout my life? Every ounce of knowledge confirms to me that the human race needs to change its ways, and that this current world order won't register these alternatives - it won't allow our survival.

I am half-baked in conformity and obedience, but I got out before they fully cooked me until I was completely ready-made for their view of the world. I got out, but I am still burnt/scarred by those ideas. Maybe, since I escaped, I have been undergoing an healing process. But it is moving too slowly! I (and we) need to act now! - there isn't much time left (if any) to steer ourselves from this humanityphobic future. But even as I write this in an attempt to rouse myself, I am still chained to the cellophane-wrapped life. Why can't I break out right at this moment?!

This nation (The UK) views itself as a nation of calm, passive, critical-but-obedient people, who will do nothing but grumble and turn to comedy as the building blocks of our democracy are taken away one by one. But this is a fabricated truth which has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because this is certainly not the case. More true is that the ruling class have been very adept at taming any threat to their rule by handing small concessions to the working people (the very concessions that have since been taken back off us during the past 30 years), which were not so much compromises but diversions from what they wanted (needed).

But now, with a huge helping hand from the pacifying patronising-patriotism of the media, which now bounces off every wall, we (as a nation) seem to have convinced ourselves that we are this calm and obedient 'race', who do simply "keep calm and carry on". It's the perpetuated idea of the aspiring middle-class, basking in the sunset of late-capitalism with our Sunday paper supplements. But as much as many of us have come to believe that this is us, it isn't. There is as much anger and potential for violence in this nation as anywhere, but it has been confused and misdirected, and usually finds its only outlet when thrown at others who share our predicament, on a weekends evening in a boozy town centre.

But this may all be beginning to change, as many young people seem politicised to an extent that would have been unimaginable during the hedonist-nihilist peak-time during New Labour's governance, and, unlike previous generations, they seem to be under no illusions about the hopeless future capitalism promises for them. The current Government's polices may have pushed too many too far for them to carry on being passive spectators of the misfortunes of peoples' in far away countries/fiction movies but not here. So maybe, bubbling underneath this state-caused misery, there is hope of radicalism in Britain again. Just remember radicalism isn't always the evil that postmodernism would tell us it is: our generation needs to be aware that this system offers us nothing but the slow advance of misery, thus our radicalisation in rejection of it in full is utterly essential. But this is hard, and I just hope that I am close to breaking my own chains also, or if this never happens then at least that my predicament is an anomaly and not the diagnosis affecting most of us.

British citizens need to remind themselves on a daily (even hourly) basis that what they hear more than any other view about how we are democratic, in contrast with The North African/Middle Eastern countries (for example), is a manipulation of the truth, and that our nation has long-passed the threshold from democratic to undemocratic. The words which repeat themselves in my mind to force me to think of our predicament come from a Thom Yorke song about the suicide (or a government-orchestrated assassination, as many completely sane people believe) of weapons inspector David Kelly (Harrowdown Hill): towards the end of the song Yorke repeats "I feel me slipping in and out of consciousness". It is so easy to be distracted, to forget about all the warning flares, such as the wars that nearly all citizens opposed; the illegal measures taken by the police forces against participants in relatively peaceful, and utterly justified protests; the Orwellian-jargon used to ensure capitalist accumulation remains unchallenged; the massive increase in the surveillance of us over the past 10 years. It is also easy to forget that extreme measures the state has used in the past would be used again if deemed necessary, such as the shooting of striking miners by armed forces in the late 1800's/early 1900's; or the brutal clampdown on peaceful protesters in the notorious Peterloo Massacre (London Mayor Boris johnson has already jested about how he'd like to see police forces come down much heavier on strikes in future).

Thus, the idea that revolution could never happen in Britain maybe needs to be reversed: if revolution could happen in Britain, then in could (and would probably) happen everywhere. If one sees the USA as not just the heir to Britain's imperial thrown, but that sources of all current imperial oppression trace back to British shores, perhaps a revolution in Britain is the only place where it can happen if it is to spread around the world with confidence. Not to hand over too much importance to this poxy little island, but it certainly does owe a lot to the world!

Exhibition at Access Space, Sheffield

2011-07-08T22:34:00.002+01:00

Ill Equipped

John Ledger

9 Jul - 30 Jul 2011

Access Space, 1 Sidney Street Sheffield S1 4RG

(This exhibition will run alongside Hyatt Plaza Retrospective, an exhibition by Tony Goddard)

Opening evening: Friday 8 July 5.30 - 8pm

John Ledger’s chaotic and warped landscapes observe the structures of civilisation with a sense of suspicion, irony and dark humour. Influenced by his environmental work and writings from literature, lyrics and journalism, John’s paintings are a form of resistance and catharsis as he peers into the 21st century, challenging ideologies and aspirations along with his own feelings of helplessness.

In Ill Equipped, four works depict mutated natural forms and a disorderly play of power, technology, social relations and mediated information, punctuated by large scale centerpiece The Alpha Forest, a metaphor for extinction and struggle for autonomy in the landscape of late capitalism.

The Index For Child Wellbeing (2010/11)

2011-07-05T22:17:00.001+01:00

The Index For Child Wellbeing (2010/2011)

The little brother of all the previous

"I want none of this" (2010/2011)

2011-06-29T20:22:00.000+01:00

I Want None Of This is not a direct critique of the build up to the recession and the cut-backs that are following. It is a landscape in which I do my best to express my experience and feelings about the whole of the system. With the aim to show the suffocating and constricting feeling I, and I am sure lots of others get as it blocks out any light, forcing us to sink or swim/live this way or fail, only for it to fail us as it errs, again and again – which we must dutifully accept as inevitable.

In today’s world, people acknowledge that I’m no fool to the world, yet they simultaneously tell me that I see no sense. Likewise, I am often told that I am living in a dream world whilst they live in one big illusion – an illusion of the durability and the ability to deliver of this infrastructure in which we can all ‘specialise’ in a certain career path and allow all the other ‘specialists’ to do their bit so we don’t have to. This is my experience of coming into contact with a general logic that has gone insane in its elder years. We all have to capitulate to the insanity or sink into destitution. I find that I am eternally in deadlock, and it doesn’t end no matter how many times others tell me that I mustn’t be because ‘this is the way of the world and you’re not going to change it’. It is destroying the planet, eroding our harmony with it, but it is also blatantly no longer giving us the better quality of life, which it could previously have always claimed to be doing. But this is when we face its tyranny in giving us no option but proceed this way.

The child-like images of young people shouting out what they want to be when they grow older is an important signal for my own predicament, as nothing suits me, I have no career in mind, from when I was a day-dreaming child to a anxiety-ridden young adult, I never have done and never will. At a social level, this provokes ceaseless anxiety. I cannot move, but I feel that I am been pushed; the precarious, and (supposed to be) terrifyingly unaccommodating landscape is an attempt to picture this feeling. It’s not that I criticise others for having careers plans. I just can’t see a future for careers in this fragile world we are heading into. But I fear that I will sink sooner than the rest, as the social tide rises and am left baffled and stranded, before we all do in physical reality as the sea levels rises.