A love that’s love - not fade away

Picked up Not Fade Away by Jim Dodge last week and read it in a few days, and now all of a sudden I’ve read all his novels. I’ve got to say that Fup is still my favourite, and I’m not sure whether this book or Stone Junction

should be coming in at number two. I think the only other thing out there is a book of poetry and I might get that before too long. What Jim Dodge does with the rest of his time I don’t know, I kind of surfed about the other day and gathered from skimming not reading interviews that he lives a woodsy kind of life, similar to Gary Snyder and the character who frames Not Fade Away’s narrative.

Gary Snyder… now his last book was good. Did you read it? Danger on Peaks. After I read it, I thought it kind of fitted in with some other recent-ish senex work from America’s grand old men – Burroughs’s Last Words, Hunter S. Thompson’s Kingdom of Fear, Vonnegut’s A Man without a Country , maybe Heller’s Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, Mailer’s Why are we at War?, Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War, Ram Dass’s Still Here (or that great documentary about him Fierce Grace – which also puts me in mind of Maybe Logic – the Robert Anton Wilson documentary…). So, anyway if you prefer the sage advice of your elders to whatever some radical young buck is telling you – there’s some elders for you to check out.

This reminds me of Neil Young’s comments in the LA Times recently about how he had to go out and speak against Bush with his Living with War album, because “I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer 18 to 22 years old, to write these songs and stand up, I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the 1960s generation.” I’m not sure how aware old Neil is that there are plenty of voices in the younger generations as vitriolic as him about Bush or the war, but if he’s looking to hear them on MTV or Clear Channel stations or the Billboard charts then he’s looking in the wrong places. The 60s youthquake that opened up a seam in mainstream culture that could be entered by contrary voices got sewn up a long time ago. Neil may not notice so much sitting on top of the seam there; he’s going to have dig the underground again to hear what he wants to hear.

But I love these old guys, and these old guys love and loved and helped manifest LOVE, so as they age and die off, I think we should listen to their final words.

a love that’s love - not fade away

Sideways 2.0

Ask and you shall receive. I love all that “manifestation” stuff that many new age books are full of, and its so worth believing in with, with so few down sides to believing in it that you might as well just believe in it.

That’s a bit of a preamble to introducing the fact that no sooner do I finish the previous entry (well a couple of days later) – I’m in a megastore (HMV – Southend-on-Sea if you must know, not been to Southend for years – HMV is where Golden Disc used to be – which features in Morrissey’s Suedehead video, and may even be where I bought the 12”, I certainly got The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays records there…). And anyway, back on track – I’m in the queue buying the new Six Organs cd when I see a basket by the till full of DVDs of Sideways the movie, priced at £3.99. I still feel the same about this DVD ownership thing, but wasn’t the universe saying something to me here? Hell it was even cheaper than my imagination!

So I bought it and watched it – and what can I say – the book was better. Of course I made the fatal error of watching the film too soon after reading the book. Too much of the book was fresh in my mind, so in my head I kept thinking “is this that bit?” or “they left that bit out”, or “this is in the wrong order” rather than just settling down and enjoying the nuances of the film version. I’ve always found Virginia Madsen attractive – so that worked for me as Maya – although wasn’t Maya a brunette in the book – that’s how I imagined her?

They should have kept in the bit with the hillbilly boy who tries to scare them though, I loved that bit (maybe they filmed it, and its one of those “DVD extras – deleted scenes” that I’m too bored to watch).

Maybe I’ll watch the film again in a couple of years (hell I OWN it now) and enjoy it more.

Other People's Lies

Well loneliness and depression, isolation from my friends and hellish commuting have certainly done wonders for my reading. Even fiction has sneaked its way back in, as you’ll have noticed from previous entries on Valis and Ecotopia. Two other recent reads from the non-factual section of the bookshelf have been the novels Sideways by Rex Pickett and Thinly Veiled Autobiography by James Delingpole. Both funny, both very male – perhaps this aspect of them appealed somehow to my new monadic self. I felt some alienation from some of the ‘masculine’ attitudes presented in both books (but perhaps, again, this is just my hang-up).

I’ve not seen Sideways the film, although I’ve long wanted to, without ever realising there was a novel preceding it. Well now I’ve successfully achieved the tick in the box to denote ‘read the novel before seeing the film’ I can feel relaxed about renting the DVD. Renting the DVD… Where have all the video stores gone (long time passing by)? Everyone just seems to buy the things now (suckers!) or apparently renting them via the net is trés populaire. But I always like to avoid anything with a monthly direct debit attached to it if I possibly can. Modern life seems to full of these things that come with monthly direct debits attached – mobile phones, Sky, broadband, plus-accounts, gyms etc. etc. – You know that shit job you hate? Well if you weren’t whacking out £££ on all this useless crap every month – you could afford to go and do something else.

Anyway, rent the DVD – mind you it’s the sort of thing you see in Megastores for £4.99 these days – and how much less than that does it cost to rent a DVD in 2006?

Perhaps the film is better than the book? Write in if you’ve done both and let me know. It certainly made me want to learn more about wine. We could all do with more food and drink awareness – bring back taste!

Thinly Veiled Autobiography has no associated film, does include wine (but informs you little about it) and has the great advantage of being set in the UK and being written by a proper Britisher. So if you’re the same you can relax in its un-exoticness. Mind you its written by/about a public schoolboy who went to Oxford and wrote for the Telegraph and hung out with loads of posh rich people (its also about his anxiety about not being posh and rich enough to fit in) – so explained like that it hardly appeals and frankly you’d have had a hard time selling it to me with that write-up – but its also goddamn bloody funny. Humour is the great redeemer – and its the comedy of embarrassment to boot!

I only picked it up in the first place because I read Delingpole’s review of Shroom in Literary Review. In his author blurb, it talked about his preference for mushrooms over acid – since during a LSD trip he’d had his soul stolen by a man at the end of his cigarette called Mr Migarette. You can read all about that in Thinly Veiled Autobiography – reason enough surely?

Grow Your Own Hope

It’s a truism that speculative fiction tells the reader more about the present it was written in than about the future – a fact born out yet again by two pieces of this week’s reading.

If this fact is more evident in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia than it is in the “Ecopolis” articles in this week’s New Scientist (17/06/2006) then that only reveals our blindness to the conventions of our own time.

In Ecotopia the pungent reek of the early Seventies issues from practically every page. The fashions, the sexual politics, the marijuana usage – all speak of a particular hippy moment and now tend to detract from the deeper intention of the book to present a vision of a sustainable society. It’s easy now to fault Callenbach for this, but equally easy to see how important it was for him to present some vision of how a change in social mores could parallel and allow a change in the wider society. For me personally a degree of uneasiness was brought on by the louche promiscuity of Callenbach’s utopia. I’m prepared to accept that this could just be my hang-up – but it also seemed wrapped up in a vision of liberated womanhood more to do with male fantasy than female emancipation. The admirable intention of presenting a more feminine society, female leadership and sexual equality felt somewhat tainted by the air of a free-wheeling Lothario who really ‘understands’ and ‘digs’ women. Again, perhaps these are just my hang-ups.

If I’ve gone on at length about these aspects of the book that didn’t gel with me, that’s only to precede my declaration that I felt pretty down with most of the rest of its vision. Ignoring the conceit of the Pacific North West seceding from the USA, much of the novel seemed to present a realistic vision of a future society.

What is interesting comparing Ecotopia and Ecopolis are the similarities of vision presented 31 years apart (that very little has been implemented across the span of most of my entire life thus far - which that 31 years also personally represents - is rather depressing.)

The proposed new Chinese suburb-city of Dongtan is pedestrianised with electric vehicles, trains, urban greenery, urban food production, mass recycling and alternative energy generation. Not at all dissimilar to Ecotopia’s San Francisco. Peer a little deeper however and the cracks appear – both in the divergence of Ecotopian and Ecopolitan visions – and in the sustainable vision of Dongtan per se.

Dongtan is a new build – an entirely new satellite city for Shanghai “20 minutes drive” away. It is thus a very different beast to the retro-fitted San Francisco in Ecotopia. In this way the city sized debate mirrors the eco-home debate. One can start from scratch and build a brand new eco-home to the highest standards possible – but not everyone can do this. Our existing buildings also represent decades if not centuries of embodied energy that we are likely to waste (which we can ill afford) if we reject them, demolish them to build anew. If we could do it all, we could only do so by exploiting even more excessive amounts of the global energy supply –and this vision is clearly not sustainable on a local or global scale. We must follow a more earthy path of converting our existing housing stock to greater sustainability – retro fitting.

To the great credit of New Scientist it makes a critical analysis of Dongtan’s eco-credibility. The Dongtan vision proposed as a possible model for China’s future cities aims for a per-resident carbon footprint of 2.2 ha. This both exceeds the current footprint of the rural Chinese population (1.6 ha) that are migrating to become the new city dwellers (thus increasing China’s total footprint) and the “idealised global per capita footprint” (1.8ha – based on 2006 population levels). Dongtan is therefore not as bad as our conventional cities – but does not present in itself a sustainable vision. We could perhaps hope that developments like Dongtan will be bridging solutions to ever more sustainable implementations – but would we be correct in doing so? Retrofitting Shanghai for sustainability may have been a more useful activity. In fact, given that so much of Shanghai is itself new-build, one wonders where the true vision for sustainability lies. That Dongtan is perceived as having value as a tourist attraction perhaps indicates something of its showcase function.

The ecological problems faced by China will inevitably lead them towards some lower energy solutions, and the world can usefully benefit by learning from them. But will China put sustainability before growth? If it does not, can anything it does be truly sustainable?

Ecotopia is a steady-state economy that has sloughed off the demon driver of ‘growth’ – that totemic bugbear of capitalism eating away the world like a necrotic virus. It is the vision of capitalism, its modus operandi and belief systems which are the contemporary conventions permeating the speculations of Ecopolis. We can only hope that 31 years hence those seem as amusing and of their time as some of Callenbach’s seventies-ism. Otherwise we are well and truly screwed.

"Salary: N/A" - devaluing work at the BFI?

This post is a little moan from my own professional world, but I think it has some wider implications for all sorts of organisations and reflects the status of cultural workers in the UK.

The British Film Institute has recently advertised for "Database Volunteers" - unpaid workers, "Salary: N/A," to add and correct data on the BFI's Film and TV Database .

This comes hot on the heels of the Institute's call for "postgraduate researchers who, as part of their studies, can view and catalogue holdings of important Channel 4 programmes held in the bfi National Film and Television Archive."There is an obvious benefit to all concerned for organisations to provide volunteer and internship opportunities, much experience and many contacts can be obtained by volunteers and interns - all of which will help them in their future careers. Collaboration with academic institutions, their staff and researchers can add value to an organisation's records and information that would otherwise be missed. However, should an organisation depend on unpaid labour to do some of its core work (to create and maintain accurate records)?

Using unpaid labour creates a situation where the volunteers subsidise the work of an organisation by taking on the cost of the work they do. They meet those real costs in the form of lost income, and having to arrange their lives to allow this "free" work to take place. The costs do not go away, they are merely outsourced.

Funding bodies, stakeholders and others, almost always ignore the contribution of unpaid workers when mapping the cost of running anorganisation against the results it achieves. Therefore the more an organisation uses unpaid labour the more necessary unpaid labour becomes to its existence. Attempts to obtain more funds to do the same work when volunteers leave are not generally met with success.

For those professionals doing the same or similar work in salaried positions, the use of unpaid labour can only lead to wage suppression and a reduction in both their professional standing and their perceived value to an organisation.

Publicly funded cultural organisations like the British Film Institute, and the many others in the UK working in a much more parlous situation must out of necessity try to achieve their aims against a background of limited funds. Imaginative solutions are always being called for, and all options must be considered.

But is this the way forward?

Rubedo refelections

Things have been a little quiet on Yourmindfire this last week, due to my administrator duties on two new sites: Rubedo and Mark Jones - Peaces.

Rubedo is currently featuring three new poems by Jon Hellier, an article by Keith Hackwood on "The Absent Anima" on the feminine voice in contemporary ecology, and skip a bit back in the archives and you'll find my most recent article "To burst in the heart of sunrise" on the subject of Cassandra.

Mark Jones - Peaces features 17 poems from a planned forty written by Mark Jones over the last 12 months. Peaces is a meditation on the death of his father and the meaning of Christ.

Rubedo readers will already be familar with Mark Jones's work on the archetypal, these poems show another side of his work.

If... the Oil Runs Out

If… the Oil Runs Out was the ‘peak oil’ programme in the BBC’s Climate Chaos strand. A largely unsuccessful attempt at bringing the issue into UK public consciousness.

As with the Attenborough documentary I wrote about previously scheduling was an issue here (23.20-00.20 Tuesday night, BBC2) you had to be pretty much a self selecting viewer to catch the programme – i.e. you are probably a viewer who is informed and interested in the subject (in which case, like me, you probably hoped that the programme would be more focussed on appealing to such viewers). There seems little likelihood that that this programme attracted the kind of random casual viewer who could usefully be apprised of the concept of peak oil and benefit from learning more about it.

A second factor working against this programme communicating the issue of peak oil to a wider audience was its incorporation in the ‘If…’ format. For those of you who haven’t seen one of these before, the basic deal is: ‘If…’ was a series of shows looking at what might happen “if” various different disastrous things happened, such as ‘If… a big fuck off asteroid hits the Earth’ or ‘If… a shitting big wave strikes’- you get the idea. All these programmes were presented in a drama-doc style, inter-cutting actual factual interviews with a dramatised presentation of the proposed outcomes of the particular ‘if’ examined. It has to be said that this is not a wildly successful format, especially in the case of a situation like the decline of a finite resource where ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ seems a more appropriate proposition (The programme also did not particularly address the concept of peak differing from the titled “runs out”). The ‘If…’ format is tainted with a simplistic, populist bad science reputation that ill serves an issue as important as the peaking of oil.

The approach of the format creates the third factor frustrating utility in the programme. The drama-doc style was both cloying and ineffective. From the UK perspective it was also frustrating that it took the form of some spurious transatlantic storyline that seemed designed solely to make it USA saleable (much as Brit movies feature a token yank in some attempt at US box office success). The programme was co-funded by Discovery, so I guess that explains some of this – but doesn’t the UK audience deserve (if they have to have drama-doc) dramatisation of what might happen in the UK, instead we had to watch an American couple deal with the situation in the USA.

Reviews of the programme give some indication of how successful it was in communicating the issue of peak oil.

1)The Daily Mail’s Peter Preston gave a schizophrenic response in ‘Are We Really Over a Barrel?’ (Wednesday May 31st, p.49) where he spends a few paragraphs disparaging the “puritans” of the green movement and the “Kyoto fanatics”, then takes issue with the whole idea that we’re in a difficult position energywise, before getting into a good slagging of the programme itself – “a cack-handed attempt to produce a drama out of the oil crisis”. In the middle of all this he finds time to praise Sheikh Yamani and quote his pretty scary vision of the future without further comment. His review ends with “So down with the Cassandras, I say. I’m off for a drive around the block”. It seems that public attitudes may still have a way to go. Does anybody remember these days, that Cassandra was right but ignored? It’s all painfully poetic.

2)The Guardian guide featured the programme in its ‘Watch This’ sidebar, but called it an “annoying drama-documentary” and, like me, thinks that “the subject doesn’t benefit from being dressed up as a soap opera”. It also finds fault with the programmes research stating “one caption informs us that “all the world’s biggest oil reserves are in the Middle East” – actually, the second-largest oil reserves on Earth are beneath Canada’. I’d like to know what expert research Andrew Mueller put into the issue for his review. The idea that Canada has large ‘oil’ reserves is a questionable one, given that they are not in liquid form but locked in bitumen, an issue the Guardian itself raised in 'The next big thing or a risky gamble: Shell looks to turn sand into oil' (June 2nd 2006). This little aside is yet more evidence of how much we need a proper investigative, scientific programme on this issue.

3)I will leave you by quoting in full the review of the programme I received direct from Keith Hackwood – demonstrating his typically acute analysis:

"did you watch that bbc 'if' thing the other night? what a waste of space that was (apart from seeing sandra dickinson looking like my nan) - fatuous 'drama' bollocks, why have Matt Simmons on and then not use him - not have any of his punchy soundbites? the whole thing was just an edited meek drivel of weak idea-less drip drip, extremely conservative in every way (the figures they used, the implications they side-stepped - like violence and collapse of social order, like agricultural despair, for fuck's sake - even after the trucker got laid off and the transport network seized up in this joke programme there were people still shopping at wal-mart! It made me angry and disappointed - a waste of my licence fee on a shitty treatment of a real issue that was somehow left dangling like a bad cracker joke with no punchline - frankly, pathetic."

If Attenborough Speaks Will You Listen?

Last night BBC1 showed part two of David Attenborough's programme on global climate change Are We Changing Planet Earth?/Can We Save Planet Earth?. Primetime telly on a mainstream channel fronted by a widely loved and respected broadcaster telling us this is a "planetary emergency".

It's hard to think of what else you could do to try and convince people of the seriousness of the issue. Until the President of the United States, or a body like the UN or EU issues a widely supported statement saying we need to change our way of life to avoid catastrophe - this is surely as an effective a message as can be put out. Framed within the rest of the BBC's Climate Chaos strand, I think that this is likely to be the most public assault on UK consciousness regarding this issue we'll see until disasters start hitting.

I have to say though that I was a little disconcerted that we ended up getting a section wandering around an average home with an expert suggesting we turn the thermostat down, don't put our tv on standby, use eco light bulbs and only boil as much water as we're going to use. Man, if we're still stuck at the stage of cajoling people at this level you really wonder if anything is ever going to change. The suggested plans for larger scale reductions in carbon emissions seemed a bit specious and ill supported. Nuclear was again presented as a carbon free energy source, typically skirting over the issue of CO2 emissions during the whole nuclear cycle (similarly the emissions, and chemicals used in the production of solar pv cells and wind turbines were elided). Carbon sequestration was also featured without any detailed analysis. Don't we deserve a better investigation than this?

The programme suffered from mixed ambitions, combining an attempt to communicate hard science and the reality of the global situation with an aim of reaching a wide audience and convincing them to turn their TV off at night.

Within the Climate Chaos strand one would have hoped there was room for both ambitions to be realised without them conflicting in one programme. This was a valuable programme, but it could have had greater value - and we don't have time to muck around now.