Hot Dog (Another Postcard from Southend)

If anything symbolizes the soul of Essex Man, it's this grotesque anthropomorphic hot dog figure located in Southend-on-Sea: crude, greedy, infantilized, self-satisfied and, ultimately, self-cannibalizing.

It's meant to be amusing: but it isn't funny. It is, however, despite its obscenity, an authentic work of art in that, like Basil Hallward's notorious portrait of Dorian, it records the truth of human corruption.

If the locals had any shame, they'd hide this hideous thing out of sight, or toss it off the end of the pier. But, brazenly, they erect it on Marine Parade as a form of challenge and provocation; a passive-aggressive response to the culture of endless consumption that made them what they are.      

The Man With the Child in His Eyes

Like many people, I have a fascination with childhood photos of "myself". The glut of more recent images and selfies taken on a smart phone don't really mean anything to me. But those rare pictures of a young boy in a pre-digital world I find powerfully seductive.       

To be clear: it's not that I'm learning to love myself, or searching for the inner child. There's nothing therapeutic or healing about my interest in old snaps. Nor is there anything perverse or pathological in it; those who theorise about narcissistic exhibitionism or auto-paedophilia are missing the point.   

It's more a case of trying to understand how these objects frozen in time continue to play an important philosophical role - not by revealing or constructing my present self, but, paradoxically, in serving to disguise it and thus helping distance me from myself. 

Ultimately, we can never really see ourselves; not in photographs, nor in mirrors. And when I look at that nine-year old above wearing his favourite Fred Perry t-shirt, I glimpse a kind of stranger - albeit a stranger with whom I have a lot in common and who constantly haunts my writings.          

As Roland Barthes says, no one is responsible for their childhood, but if it marks you and stays with you, it's never completely done away with.

A Postcard from Southend-on-Sea

Southend-on-Sea, Essex, lies approximately 40 miles east of London on the north side of the Thames Estuary; a region that has produced its own virulent strain of English now spoken in many regions of this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Ingerland.  

It is home to the world's longest pleasure pier; a marvel of 19th century engineering that everyone from Princess Caroline to Arthur Daley has strolled along at some point. 

I first day-tripped to Southend with my parents in the early seventies. By then - although I didn't know it at the time - it was already in decline as a popular holiday destination. Everyone who could was jetting off to sunny Spain instead. For who wants soggy fish and chips and a mug of lukewarm tea, when you can have a big plate of paella washed down with a cheap bottle of vino? 

Still, I always loved my time in Southend as a child, beginning with the train ride from Romford via stations whose names had an exotic and almost magical allure - Shenfield-Billericay-Wickford-Rayleigh-Hockley-Rochford-Prittlewell - my excitement growing as I got ever closer to the coast and the thought of a fresh plate of cockles raked straight out of the mud at low tide, or an ice-cream from Rossi's.

There was no real beach to speak of and the grey sea was always out as far as I remember. But the place had a certain working-class Cockney charm (dare one say authenticity) and I had hours of fun in the amusement arcades and Peter Pan's Playground (which I preferred to the rather intimidating Kursaal full of young skinheads in their boots and braces and ageing Teddy Boys). 

What I enjoyed best of all, however, was sitting in the landscaped gardens of the Shrubbery eating a packed lunch, which always involved either a ham or cheese sandwich. There was a little stream and a waterfall, a fairy castle and a few left-over figures; remnants from its fifties heyday as Never Never Land.

Today, over forty years later, Southend is still on sea and many things have remained essentially the same; the pier, for example, still stretches a mile out to nowhere (although now you have to pay to walk along it).

But the deprivation of the town is as noticeable - and as shocking - as the tattooed obesity of the natives, or the large number of women hanging around the newly built lagoon wearing hijabs and burkinis and recreating scenes that more closely resemble Mogadishu than the lost world of Jane Austen and Donald McGill. 

      
 

In Defence of Trivia

Thou, Trivia, goddess, aid my song: 

through spacious streets conduct thy bard along

  John Gay (1716)

This just in by email, with reference to a recently published post:

"It's bad enough when writers like you try to persuade us that superficial and boring phenomena, such as fashion, have great import or interest. But what is worse is that when you do decide to discuss serious topics, such as cultural appropriation, which involve issues of class and race, you invariably reduce them to questions of style or semantics in a manner that is disingenuous, disrespectful and disappointing. Surely philosophy - even of a postmodern variety - should do more than trivialise everything with an ironic smirk; particularly things that have real consequences for real people in the real world." 

There's obviously quite a lot here to which I might respond. But it's the idea of trivia that I think I'd like to address (briefly and obviously not in depth; nor with the appropriate gravitas that my critic seems to expect).

It's clear, is it not, that those who hate trivia do so from a moral position that is thought superior, but is in fact only snobbish and judgemental.

For what constitutes trivia after all other than forms of knowledge believed to be of lesser value or commonplace; fine for those of limited education or intelligence (and postmodernists), but not for those who have greater intellectual gifts and who, like my critic, prefer to discuss important issues from a serious perspective and not waste time playing language games or worrying about aesthetics.   

The Romans used the word triviae to describe where one road forked into two. And this too provides a vital clue as to why people such as my critic hate trivialisation.

For rather than being a reductive process, it's one that adds complexity and ambiguity; multiplying alternatives and proliferating difference; demonstrating that there is no single, super-smooth highway to truth, just a network of minor roads and what Heidegger terms Holzwege - paths that might very well lead nowhere and cause the seeker after wisdom to get lost. Ultimately, my critic is frightened of losing their way by leaving the straight and narrow. But I'm more like Little Red Riding Hood and prepared to take a risk; I might miss the point - but, on the other hand, I might meet a wolf (and there's nothing inconsequential about that).

Alternatively, I just might encounter a deity ...

For Trivia refers not only to fun-facts about popular culture or the minutiae of everyday life, but is the name of a goddess who, in Roman mythology, haunted crossroads and graveyards and was the mother of witchcraft and queen of ghosts, wandering about at night beneath the harvest moon visible only to the barking dogs who told of her approach. Again, one suspects all this rather frightens and repulses my critic, who would doubtless dismiss it as superstitious nonsense. But as the former editor of Pagan Magazine, the thought of encountering such a figure continues to secretly enchant.   

And so, in a nutshell, it's better to trivialise than to moralise and be forever bound by the spirit of gravity.
          

The Test on Miriam

Heather Sears and Dean Stockwell as Miriam Leivers and Paul Morel 

Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)

An anonymous member of the D. H Lawrence Society has emailed to complain that in a recent post I "inaccurately and unfairly portray the actions of Paul Morel towards Miriam as cruel and rather sordid".

If only, they continue, I "understood more about their relationship and the complex character of love", then I would be able to see that "Paul throws the cherries at the girl with affection in a teasing, playful manner" and his subsequent seduction of her in the pine woods is "an expression of phallic tenderness".

I think the only way I can answer this criticism is by looking closely at the text in question; Chapter XI of Sons and Lovers, entitled - tellingly enough I would have thought - 'The Test on Miriam'.   

Firstly, it's true that Paul feels real tenderness for Miriam. But although he courts her like a kindly lover, what he really wants is to experience the impersonality of passion. That is to say, he wants to fuck her dark, monstrous cunt oozing with slime, not stare into her lovely eyes all lit up with sincerity of feeling. Her gaze, so earnest and searching, makes him look away. Paul bitterly resents Miriam always bringing him back to himself; making him feel small and tame and all-too-human.    

And so, in my view at least, when he throws the cherries at her, in a state of cherry delirium, he does so with anger and aggression - not affection, or playfulness. He tears off handful after handful of the fruit and literally pelts her with them. Startled and frightened, Miriam runs for shelter whilst Paul laughs demonically from atop the tree and meditates on death and her vulnerability: so small, so soft.   

When, finally, Paul climbs down (ripping his shirt in the process), he convinces the girl to walk with him into the woods: "It was very dark among the firs, and the sharp spines pricked her face. She was afraid. Paul was silent and strange." Lawrence continues, in a manner which suggests that whatever else phallic tenderness may be, it isn't something that acknowledges the individuality, independence, or needs of actual women:

"He seemed to be almost unaware of her as a person: she was only to him then a woman. She was afraid. He stood against a pine-tree trunk and took her in his arms. She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her."

And thus Paul takes Miriam's virginity (and loses his own): in the rain, among the strong-smelling trees, and with a heavy-heart; "he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond ..." Miriam is disconcerted (to say the least) by his post-coital nihilism: "She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic."

Anyway, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether my portrayal of Paul - and my reading of Lawrence - is inaccurate and unfair. Or whether my anonymous correspondent and critic has, like many Lawrentians, such a partisan and wholly positive view of their hero-poet - and such a cosy, romantic view of his work - that they entirely miss the point of the latter and do the former a great disservice. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It is interesting to note that Lawrence makes the same connection between cherries, sex, cruelty and death in his poem 'Cherry Robbers', which anticipates the scene in Sons and Lovers described above. Click here to read the verse.

Mondongo

Mondongo: Blonde Teenie Sucking (2004) 

Black Series, biscuits on wood, 60 x 80 cm

Mondongo is an Argentinian art collective founded in 1999 by three artists in Buenos Aires: Juliana Lafitte, Manuel Mendanha, and Augustina Picasso. They typically create realistic images with  provocative content out of unusual materials including bullets, matches, nails and various food items (from dried meat to burnt toast).

For the so-called Black Series, the group transformed pornographic images taken from the internet into mosaics of cookies and crackers. The use of such base materials is intended, one assumes, to provide a critical commentary on the pervasive commodification of life within contemporary culture.

However, despite their laudable aim to produce a form of pop-art that retains a high level of aesthetic and theoretical integrity, this hasn't stopped them exploiting young bodies and producing portraits of the royal, rich and famous, just like other artists looking for patronage and well-paid commissions.

So whilst I admire some of their work, I take their radical political posturing with a pinch of salt. Soup is good food, but, as Nietzsche pointed out, ultimately no one is more corruptible than an artist ... 
  

I Love Cherries (But I'm Not a Royalist)

Cherries on a Pale Orange Background 
 SA/2016

Your tastes change as you get older, so they say. 

And, annoyingly - 'cos I hate it when experience lends support to anything that Das Man has to say - I've discovered this summer that I much prefer eating cherries to strawberries.

It's not that I've suddenly been seduced by the somewhat dodgy sexual symbolism of the former, subscribed to by writers including Lawrence (in Sons and Lovers, for example, Paul cruelly pelts poor Miriam with a handful of cherries from atop a very large tree hung thick with scarlet fruit, before then popping her cherry in the pine woods).

Nor is it merely that I find the sleek, cool-fresh cherries more aesthetically pleasing to look at in a bowl.

Rather, I now genuinely like the sophisticated sour sweet taste of them more than the simple sweetness of strawberries which, let's be honest, usually needs to be supplemented with sugar, or enhanced with cream.

So I suppose I should be grateful to Henry VIII who, when not having heads cut off or dissolving monasteries, ordered the introduction of cherries into England at Teynham, in Kent, having tasted them in Flanders.

But the words Thank you, Your Majesty will never pass my lips - not for all the cherries in the world! 

Reflections on My Shiny New Red Kettle

Morphy Richards Red Accents 
2.5 Litre Whistling Stove Top Kettle

As D. H. Lawrence often stressed, it's crucial that people form connections with the external objects that populate their world. Not just other men and women, but animals, plants and inanimate objects such as favourite items of clothing, pieces of furniture, works of art, toys, tools, or weapons.

Of course, for some people - including Lawrence, unfortunately - when it comes to these inanimate objects it seems that only old things invested with dignity by the passage of time and individually crafted by human hand rather than mass produced by machine, are truly worthy of our love and respect. 

But I think anything that enters into our lives and touches us in some manner - establishing a powerful circuit of exchange - whatever its age, status, or authenticity, deserves our affection. And so I'm pleased to report that my shiny new red kettle has arrived - and I love it!
 
Love it, that is to say, precisely in all its shiny red newness and don't need it to be - or even want it to be - saturated with my own magnetism - like Lawrence's boots!

As a matter of fact, I'm sick of being surrounded by things heavy with the dead weight of the past and covered in dirt, dust, cobwebs and indecency. I find things rich in history and steeped in tradition almost unbearable these days; things that literally drain the life - and the joy of life - from out of us.

And so Mellors can keep his rotten old iron kettle; Connie may have found it glamorous, but I'm happy with my stainless steel Morphy Richards ...

In Defence of Cultural Appropriation

Karlie Kloss on the catwalk for Victoria's Secret in 2012: 
So wrong, its right ...?

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. These elements range from fashions, hairstyles and dance moves, to spiritual beliefs and religious practices.

It is seen by its opponents as almost always illegitimate, particularly when elements of a minority, marginalised, or subordinate culture are appropriated by members of a dominant mainstream society outside of their original context of meaning in an inauthentic and insensitive manner.

When this occurs, say the critics, then cultural appropriation reveals itself as a disrespectful and aggressive form of colonialism - often inherently racist in character - in which native peoples are robbed of their essential self-hood and intellectual property rights, or reduced to the humiliated status of exotic other.

Now, it just so happens that I'm not entirely unsympathetic to these arguments. Indeed, as a youthful reader of Nietzsche, I used to subscribe to a form of cultural puritanism (and cultural pessimism) myself.

Having said that, such views increasingly strike me as not only untenable philosophically, but politically pernicious. Push comes to shove, I think I prefer modern barbarism with its chaos of styles and superficial artifice; I like the ironic use of symbols and a sacrilegious refusal to take anything too seriously.    

For unlike those who fetishize the notion of culture as something that has to be revered and preserved in its pure form - particularly if it happens to be ancient and non-Western in origin - I don't regard it as a sacred quality possessed by a people which developed organically from within the conditions of their existence and shaped their unique identity. Rather, I think it's basically a form of masquerade.

Members of the culture cult regard modern civilization as the coldest of all cold monsters; something fundamentally antagonistic to genuine cultures rooted in blood and soil; something that sucks the very soul out of indigenous peoples the world over and transforms Geist into that which can be commodified and made kitsch. They desire a world in which everybody keeps it real.

But I'm quite happy for people to fake it and cheerfully borrow or steal ideas and looks. Quite frankly, I'd rather live in a world of fashion models wearing feathered headdresses on the catwalk than Indian braves solemnly preparing for war. 


Note: those interested in reading another couple of perspectives on this topic might like to see:

'In Praise of Cultural Appropriation', by the sociologist and cultural commentator Frank Furedi (Spiked, 15 Feb 2016)

'Victoria's Secret's Racist Garbage Is Just Asking for a Boycott', by the writer and columnist for Indian Country Today Media Network Ruth Hopkins (Jezebel, 11/12/12)

Moloch

18thC German depiction of Moloch

During a memorial Mass for the murdered French priest, 85-year-old Father Jacques Hamel, the Archbishop of Paris accused the young men responsible of crying Allahu Akbar in order to disguise the fact that they actually worship at the altar of Moloch - the ancient pagan deity who gloried in human sacrifice.

Essentially an Old Testament take on the official line that acts of Islamic terrorism have nothing to do with Islam, Cardinal Vingt-Trois told the faithful not to be fooled by these self-proclaimed jihadists, whilst warning the latter that those who wish to serve and promulgate a god of death - one who demands bloodshed and promises paradise to those who slay the innocent - cannot expect all of humanity to surrender to their madness. In the face of evil, he concluded, Christians must do what they've always done; spread the Gospel of Jesus and find their strength, their courage, and their salvation in Almighty God, the God of Love.

   

Of course, this is as mendacious as everything else that comes out of the mouth of a religiously motivated speaker. For acts of Islamic terrorism have everything to do with Islam and, more widely, with Abrahamic monotheism in general; Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are apocalyptic spiritual traditions with a common origin and they share many beliefs, traditions, and moral teachings.

And so, just as there is very little difference between Yahweh and Allah - both are judgemental and jealous gods who demand submission and sacrifice from their followers - there is genuine theological kinship and continuity between the God of Love worshipped by the Archbishop of Paris and the Canaanite idol known as Moloch.

Indeed, reviving a medieval rabbinical tradition, both Georg Friedrich Daumer and Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany published influential works in 1841 arguing that Moloch and Yahweh were actually one and the same figure and that the cult of the latter developed out of that of the former. 

It's probably best, therefore, that Cardinal Vingt-Trois doesn't say anything else along this line in future; 'cos he's on a very slippery slope. Modern followers of the major religions are essentially no different from ancient pagans with their savage superstitions. Muslims and Christians, for example, are often just as willing to martyr themselves for their gods (and to kill others) without ever asking - or even caring - whether their gods are worthy of such fanatic devotion.

Bertrand Russell - not a philosopher I would normally turn to for support - sums this up nicely in the following paragraph:

"Pathetic and very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods ... The religion of Moloch - as such creeds may be generically called - is in essence the cringing submission of the slave, who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet acknowledged, Power may be freely worshipped, and receive an unlimited respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain."

- Bertrand Russell, 'A Free Man's Worship' (1903)