On Recuperation and Karaoke Culture: Welcome to Glastonbury 2023

Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Tony James, and Paul Cook demonstrating 

the spectacular nature of punk rock at Glastonbury 2023 [1]

 

 

I. 

 

 

I hate - and have always hated - the Glastonbury Festival. 

 

And so, whilst 'Smash It Up' may not be my favourite track by The Damned, it contains one of my favourite verses of any song and I fully endorse the vitriol aimed at those zen fascists who continue to insist we all wear a happy face and share their vision of unity in diversity: You can keep your Krishna burgers and your Glastonbury hippies [2].  

 

Glastonbury may have started out in 1970 as a counter-cultural event rooted in the free-festival movement, but that's not what it is today, over fifty years on. Now it has become the coldest of all cold monsters, feeding on everything and everyone, and from whose mouth comes the monstrous lie: Art can make you happy and music set you free! 

 

Glastonbury, basically, is a means of establishing the total control and coordination of all aspects of what was once known as pop culture, or youth culture. 

 

The Nazis had a term for such a process: Gleichschaltung. Some translate this as bringing-into-line, but it more accurately means that everything is placed on a single circuit or network, so that it only requires one master switch that can be flicked on or off at the will of a single governing body or individual: Michael Eavis Über alles.   

 

 

II. 

 

For those who think this comparison with Nazi Germany is a bit over the top and who are uncomfortable with the use of the word Gleichschaltung, let's try another term - this time one that is recognisable in English, even though it's French in origin: Récupération ...

 

This term, often associated with the Situationist Guy Debord, refers us to a process by which politically radical ideas and subversive art works are defused, incorporated, and commodified within mainstream culture (usually with the full collaboration of the media) [3].  

 

Glastonbury is a huge recuperative machine making a spectacle out of aged rockers who were once the voice of teen rebellion; gleefully castrating the Sex Pistols, for example, and even managing to strip the songs of the Smiths of all negativity (their dark humour, their melancholy, their pain) by hiring the smiling anti-punk Rick Astley to show that Morrissey really isn't needed any longer. 

 

The audience sing along and wave their arms, or passively stand and watch the reified spectacle. It's an amusing irony that the festival takes place in fields where usually there are a large number of dairy cows grazing, because that is what these audience members essentially constitute - a human herd consuming pop fodder.     

 

Shortly before he died in April 2010, Malcolm McLaren bemoaned the fact that genuine creativity (which is a chaotic phenomenon that often ends in failure) was increasingly becoming impossible within what he described as a karaoke world - i.e., an ersatz society, that only provides us with an opportunity to safely revel in our own stupidity and the achievements of others; a life lived by proxy [4].

 

And, whilst I'm a little uneasy with his use of words like authenticity, he was making an important (though hardly original) point. Britain's got talent: but it's lost its soul.          

 

Notes

 

[1] I am grateful to Roadent for suggesting that Generation Sex are best understood in terms of the Spectacle (i.e. from the theoretical perspective of Situationism).

 

[2] The Damned, 'Smash It Up', single release from the album Machine Gun Etiquette (Chiswick Records, 1979): click here for the official video. 

      Alternatively, you can click here, for a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (6 November 1979), followed by a (curtailed) performance of another track released as a single from the above album, 'I Just Can't Be Happy Today'. 

 

[3] See Debord's seminal text La société du spectacle (1967). It was first published in English in 1970, trans. Fredy Perlman and friends.  

[4] Readers who are interested can click here to watch McLaren deliver his final public talk at the Handheld Learning Conference (2009). Originally entitled 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Txt Pistols', the talk is now better known by the title it appears under on ted.com - 'Authentic creativity vs. karaoke culture'.  

 

At the Polar Bear Hotel

 Photo: Xinhua / Rex / Shutterstock

 

 

I wouldn't go so far as Morrissey, who once described the Chinese as a subspecies of human being due to their absolutely horrific record on animal welfare, but, really, do the owners, staff, and guests of the new Harbin Polar Land Hotel feel no shame?

 

It's bad enough how the Chinese treat their own native bears - with the exception of the panda, which is regarded as a national treasure and thus afforded some degree of protection - but do they really need to import members of a threatened species all the way from the Arctic, just to make a sad spectacle of them for the amusement of tourists? 

 

The hotel, in the frozen north-east province of Heilongjiang, resembles a giant igloo and is built in a reverse panopticon manner around a brightly lit central enclosure, complete with fake rocks and icicles and a white painted floor, housing a pair of live polar bears. Guests can thus gawp out of their windows and watch or photograph the animals 24/7. 

 

To be fair, even some Chinese commentators are raising voices of concern. But the fact is that businesses are allowed to exploit animals in any manner they may wish without having to worry about infringing any laws. 

 

I suppose the best that can be said is that at least these snow-white bears are not being milked of their bile like their Asiatic cousins and that, push comes to shove, an air-conditioned enclosure is better than being kept in a cage that is not large enough even to stand up in or turn around. 

 

What's more, if those who bang on about melting sea ice are correct, then polar bears may be heading for extinction by the end of this century. So perhaps those individuals that find sanctuary of sorts - and a life in showbiz - at a theme park hotel might one day be regarded as the fortunate ones ... 

 

 

On Why Lawrentian Werewolves Are Not Vegans 2: A Reply to Catherine Brown

Benicio del Toro in The Wolfman (2010) 
Does he look like he enjoys lentils?

Interestingly, the attempt to not merely anticipate but invoke and affirm a vegan world in relation to the work of D. H. Lawrence is also now being made by the much admired literary scholar Catherine Brown, herself a recent convert to this militant form of ascetic idealism. 

Brown argues that although Lawrence wasn't a vegan - nor even a mild-mannered vegetarian - his thought contains much that resonates with veganism as it is understood and practiced today. This is perhaps true, but, having said that, I don't think we can simply equate Lawrence's work with veganism, nor allow his thinking to be co-opted by any single cause or crusade. 

For whilst I'm sure Lawrence would have despised factory farming as much as Heidegger - the latter notoriously suggesting metaphysical equivalence between mechanized food production and the Nazi death camps long before Morrissey came up with the slogan meat is murder - he remained, as Brown admits, "comfortable within the omnivorism and speciesism that was dominant in his as in our culture".  

Indeed, whilst the tiger and the wolf present terrible problems to those idealists who want to think life exclusively in terms of the lamb, Lawrence invariably sides with those beasts of prey - including man - that feast on the flesh of other creatures in good conscience. What's more, he makes no secret of his contempt for those domestic farm animals - pigs, sheep, and cattle - that fail to attain purity of being and lapse into nullity:

"They grow fat; their only raison d'être is to provide food for a really living organism. [...] It is given us to devour them." [RDP 41]  

You can try and get around this by adopting the trust the tale, not the teller defence, and find fictional passages in which a character might turn their nose up at a plate of beef, or, like Ursula Brangwen, thoroughly enjoy a tasty vegetarian hot-pot, but, still the stubborn fact remains that Lawrence's carnivorous vitalism ultimately trumps any nascent veganism.    

And if, as we have noted, Lawrence despises those creatures that lack creative impulse, so too does he abhor human beings who have become docile grazing animals, subscribing to what Nietzsche calls a herd morality - cry-bullies forever bleating about rights and bloated on their own sense of righteousness. Such people are, he says, "the enemy and the abomination" and he is grateful for the "tigers and butchers that will free us from the abominable tyranny of sheep" [RDP 42].

Ultimately, Lawrence wants men and women with large mouths, big teeth and sharp claws and we can even locate within his work something that might be termed a werewolf manifesto - cf. the vegan manifesto that Dr. Brown finds within his writing. This werewolf manifesto openly sets itself against the Green Age - i.e., the utopia imagined by cabbage-hearted vegans, environmentalists, cows, Christians, and social justice warriors in which the lion lies down with the lamb and "no mouse shall be caught by a cat" [RDP 275].

Lawrence writes:

"This is the [...] golden age that is to be, when all shall be domesticated, and the lion and the leopard and the hawk shall  come to our door to lap [soy] milk and to peck the crumbs, and no sound shall be heard but the lowing of fat cows and the baa-ing of fat sheep. This is the Green Age that is to be, the age of the perfect cabbage." [RDP 275-76]

Of course, Catherine is perfectly at liberty to read Lawrence however she wishes: as am I. And, as a matter of fact, I'm very sympathetic to her idea that if we conceive of veganism "not as a dogma, identity, or state of putative purity, but as a queer nexus of perceptions and affects, then Lawrence can, at moments, be described as vegan".

Although, of course, we could easily replace the word veganism here with any other -ism - including fascism or feminism - and this sentence would still make perfect sense: that's the beauty (and the danger) of Lawrence's text; it invites anyone and everyone to play within the space that it opens up and to invest it with their own forces.  

See:

Catherine Brown, 'D. H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World'. This paper was originally given at the 33rd annual international D. H. Lawrence conference held at the University of Nanterre, Paris (3-7 April 2019). It can be read on the author's website: click here. 

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Reality of Peace' and 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). 

Readers interested in part one of this post - in which I address the comments made by another vegan Lawrentian (David Brock) on an earlier post to do with dental morphology - should click here.

Why I Love Carry On Teacher

Print by artandhue.com 
based on the original film poster

Carry On Teacher (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1959) is the third in the long-running Carry On series of film comedies and one of my favourite movies set in the classroom (as it is one of Morrissey's) ...

It features Ted Ray, who does a sterling job in this, his only Carry On role, alongside the usual suspects. Leslie Philips also puts in another ding-dong performance in what, sadly, will be his final Carry On until the much mistaken last entry in the series, Carry On Columbus (1992), once voted the worst British film ever made.    

Fans of classic seventies sitcom Man About the House, will also note the presence of a young Richard O'Sullivan as one of the Maudlin Street pupils (coincidentally, he's even named Robin).

And finally, since we're discussing the cast, special mention should also be made of the very wonderful Rosalind Knight, as the severe (but sexy) Ministry of Education Inspector, Miss Wheeler: that hair! that face! those clothes! 

But, apart from the actors, what is it that I love about this film so much?

It's the fact that, like all of the early Carry On movies written by Norman Hudis, it has a warmheartedness and a gentle good humour that's hard to resist; a quality that was lost over the years and films that followed as sentiment was increasingly sacrificed for sauciness and character gave way to caricature. 

Of course, there's nothing wrong with bawdiness and some of Talbot Rothwell's scripts have elements of genius. But one increasingly finds the sight of Bab's bursting out of her bikini top less amusing than that of Miss Allcock ripping her shorts. 

Notes

To watch the Carry On Teacher trailer on Vimeo, click here. 

For a sister post to this one - Why I Love Carry On Cruising - click here. 

They Eat Donkeys Don't They?

A box of donkey-hide gelatine from the 1960s 

Photo: George Knowles / South China Morning Post  

I. Meat is Murder - and So is Traditional Chinese Medicine

I suppose most people are aware of the Chinese practice of grinding up tiger bones and rhinoceros horns in the belief that these things have magico-medicinal properties and can help relieve numerous chronic ailments, cure disease, boost vitality and improve potency.

And I suppose most people are also aware that these crackpot claims lie behind an illegal international trade in body parts from critically endangered species; there are now less than 4000 tigers in the wild and only around 30,000 rhinos.    

But how many people, I wonder, are aware of the fact that the Chinese are also responsible for the dramatic decline in donkey numbers, both domestically and abroad? Twenty years ago, China had around 11 million donkeys; now the figure is less than 6 million.

As we will discuss, this, too, is mostly due to the mania for traditional medicine, although the fact that the citizens of the People's Republic of China also like to chow down on donkey meat - including so-called donkey burgers in which chopped or shredded meat is placed within a warm flatbread, known as a shaobing, and seasoned either with green pepper or coriander - is an added factor. 

II. How Eeyore is Turned into Ejiao 

Ejiao - or, as it is known in English, donkey-hide gelatine - is obtained from the skin of a donkey via a process of drying, soaking and stewing.

What was once believed to be a humble blood tonic, has successfully been re-branded as miracle product and marketed at China's expanding middle class. As well as being found in a wide variety of medicinal goods, ejiao also features in foodstuffs and expensive beauty products; for ejiao is said to not only make you feel better - but look better.

Not surprisingly, therefore, the ejiao industry has now become a global mega-business, with Dong-E E-Jiao, the world’s largest producer, reporting sales of £700 million in 2016.

But there's a problem: according to the ejiao industry's own figures, they process around 4 million donkeys each year, producing 5000 tonnes of gelatine. As domestic supply is capped at less than half this figure - 1.8 million, to be precise - it means manufacturers have to find an extra 2.2 million donkeys elsewhere and are thus heavily reliant upon imported skins often purchased from illicit supply networks at over-inflated prices and an unsustainable rate.

The shortage of genuine Chinese donkey hide has not only sent the cost of raw material through the roof, but it has encouraged the poor in Africa into (literally) selling their asses in order to cash in, undermining the long-term stability of rural economies.    

Whilst I'm vaguely sympathetic towards these people being exploited by Sino-capitalism, it's mostly the poor donkeys I feel sorry for; malnourished and mistreated during their short lives, they are then brutally killed and butchered in the unregulated slaughterhouses that can be found popping-up all over Africa, Asia and South America. 

As for the Chinese, who keep the ejiao industry grinding on ... one is almost tempted to share Morrissey's assessment of them - though, ultimately, aren't carnophallogocentrism and cruelty defining characteristics of humanity? 


Notes

For a related post on cruelty towards donkeys and the politics of zoosadism in Pakistan, click here. 

For an earlier post on Chairman Mao and the swindle of traditional Chinese medicine, click here. 

Anyone interested in doing something to help donkeys, should visit the website of The Donkey Sanctuary: click here. 

Welcome to Taiji Cove

Despite what I wrote in a recent post (Delphinophilia), some people neither wish to swim with dolphins, nor have sex with them. Rather, they wish to corral dolphins, kill dolphins, and eat dolphins: welcome to the blood-red waters of Taiji Cove.

Every year in this remote bay, thousands of wild dolphins are rounded up by fishermen. The cutest looking are sold into captivity and obliged to spend the rest of their lives performing in the entertainment industry. The rest are slaughtered with knives or by having a metal spike thrust into their spinal cord. When they have bled to death, they are then hauled to a harbour-side warehouse and prepared for exclusive Japanese dinner tables along with whale blubber and shark-fin soup.

This annual festival of cruelty came to public attention after the release of Oscar-winning documentary The Cove (dir. Louis Psihoyos, 2009). The film followed a group of eco-activists attempting to gain access to the the hunt. It met with predictable opposition in Japan from groups saying it was racist and an affront to an ancient way of life.  

And so, despite continuing international protest, the government of Japan staunchly defends the practice on the grounds of cultural tradition - a phrase that effectively functions as a moral release clause and which is used to justify all of those things which lack any other form of legitimacy, from badger baiting to female genital mutilation.

   

Taiji's mayor, Kazutaka Sangen, remains particularly defiant and almost belligerent as he reminds Western devils about the bombing of Hiroshima. This, of course, is insanely besides the point. But, on the other hand, it's certainly fair to question our eating of other warm-blooded and sentient mammals, such as cows, sheep, and pigs. 

For ultimately, as Morrissey says, all meat is murder and there's no easy way around the fact that the brutal and systematic exploitation and destruction of animals on an industrial scale (an aspect of what Derrida terms carnophallogocentrism) is a global phenomenon and not one peculiar to the Land of the Rising Sun.