Category Archives: Bohemian

BOOK REVIEW: The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death, by Richard Holloway

Richard Holloway writes in The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death that all of us are guaranteed citizenship in ‘the great democracy of the dead.’ A typically witty and concise way of summarising human fate.

Holloway’s book is written with his characteristic gentleness of tone, but the themes are demanding and theological. In fact, the great strength of The Last Bus is that its author is able to masterfully distill terrifying and complex philosophical ideas into accessible, enjoyable prose.

A former Episcopalian bishop, and now something of a wistful agnostic, Holloway does not offer any priestly reassurances. His manner is more that of the Scottish headmaster you never had. A friendly but admonishing voice, urging us to face and accept the unknown. This may be a negative to readers hoping for self-help-style consolation. Holloway is artful and humane, but whatever hope there is in this book is to be found in strategies of acceptance, rather than of transcendence.

Early in the book, Holloway recalls visiting Kelham Hall in England, where he trained for the Episcopal ministry when he was still a boy. He finds this former haven of Christian contemplation converted into a luxury hotel, and the domed chapel hosting a colourful, Asian wedding. The austere beauty of his beloved church is now the home of a modern, multicultural union. Holloway is melancholy about the loss of his teenage memories in such a dramatic change, but insists that it also allows him to let go of it. Change can be wrenching, but without change, we would be left clinging to memories, stuck in moments that are now abstractions.

This introduces a theme which runs through all of Holloway’s meditations in the book. It is our clinging to experience that causes us pain. Time brings death and loss, but it also brings renewal, freedom and relief. If we cannot let go of what came before, we condemn ourselves to imprisonment in the past. The sense of nostalgia brings with it the heartbreak of disappointment. We are confronted with the dreams and hopes that never came to pass. But for Holloway, stark shifts such as that of a seminary becoming a luxury hotel can force us to release those disappointments, and to move on unburdened.

Holloway identifies himself with St. Peter, the apostle who began as a blustering and boastful defender of Christ but ended up betraying Jesus three times over when he was arrested. Holloway’s discussion of this biblical story centres around Peter The Penitent by Guercico (1639), which hangs in the Scottish National Gallery. Our image of ourselves is very rarely what manifests itself when we face the moment of truth, when our values are tested and our character is stripped of its masks. Like St. Peter, we are likely to burst into tears when we confront the horrible facts of our weaknesses, and the lies we have told ourselves about ourselves.

In the moment of betrayal, Christ looked upon Peter as the bible teaches he looks upon everyone, with compassion and pity. Jesus being human as well God, knows the self-deceits of the human heart. When Peter sees Jesus look at him with warmth and understanding, the apostle is thrown into shame and depression. Only when Jesus reappears after his resurrection and offers Peter a chance to atone, is he able to release himself from suffering.

Holloway seems to see the story of St. Peter as a way of viewing his own folly. It helps him confront the self-aggrandisement of his religious years, and to forgive himself for not living up to the self-image of the wise philosopher-scholar. The story also sheds light on the nature of forgiveness itself. We cannot undo the past. Peter cannot return to the image of himself as the fierce warrior of Christ. But Jesus’s pity gives him an opening to release the shame, and to move onwards in life with a renewed, more mature spiritual mission.

Quoting St. Paul in Romans, this leads Holloway to meditate upon the concept of ‘predestination’. We are sinners. We are weak in the heart and mind. We chose the very things we don’t want. But as Paul says, God is in charge and law is good. So in some sense even our sinfulness is part of God’s plan. We are who we are, warts and all, because God wills it that way. Our lives then, are predetermined. Though the passage from Romans has no definitive interpretation, its mystery would be the very faultline that fractured the church during the Reformation. Anyone interested in the minutiae of this theological controversy, will be impressed with how Holloway handles it here. He not only explains it in swift, approachable prose, but he manages to apply it to the everyday challenges of the human condition.

In acceptance of our sinful nature, we find the compassion necessary to forgive ourselves. We see that though we are responsible for our failures, they are also the product of our environments, the pressures of circumstance and countless forces acting upon our conscience. We may never be able to undo the damage done by our shortcomings, but we can learn from them if we are prepared to face the truth about who we are, without the posturing of narcissistic masks. Once we accept that we are not perfect, our imperfections cease to haunt us.

Holloway’s discussion of predestination marries well with his reflections on free will, earlier in the book. Again, a complex and persistent philosophical puzzle is tackled with a lightness of touch. To Holloway, free will is defined as the sense that we could have chosen differently, that we were somehow in charge. And it is a foundational notion to our sense of justice and free society.

But Holloway insists that our sense of control over our lives is at least partially a convenient illusion. Instead of being the supreme auteurs of lives, the truth is we are more like craftsmen. He cites a friend’s preferred metaphor, that our lives like woven cloth. The thread is inherited, the loom is time, and the pattern is often surprisingly complex. It manifests itself as we merely sit and work the mechanical process of our lives. We play a part, but there are many other forces that we can’t control, which will affect the outcome.

More examples can be found of Holloway’s ability to hit the sweet spot when distilling difficult problems into accessible prose. ‘Being dead is beyond or past experience. But dying isn’t.’ ‘The mind is its own place and does its own thing.’ Or, with a subtle wryness: fear of death is ‘an entirely ecumenical emotion.’

Holloway describes himself as having a ‘romantic temperament’, but he’s critical of this fact. As a child he dreamed of being a cowboy, escaping the central Scotland village he grew up in and discovering his great mission. This desire for new experiences, he says, stopped him from truly relishing the beauty of the world around him. Death, says Holloway, forces us out of this kind of romantic preoccupation. And if we cling to our ideals, we can do ourselves a disservice in failing to prepare for our end.

This somewhat jars with an earlier section of the book, where Holloway seems to affirm the power of beauty, the romance of ritual and creative sacrament in religion, in helping us to face death with defiance. In this discussion, Holloway says it’s through our songs and our imagination that we can find the only conquest of death available to us. Life after death, the notion of salvation, the promise of a messiah – all of these are ways of the soul remaining heroic in the face of our common fate. Through them we create meaning and beauty in our lives. ‘Death gets us all in the end, but it can never kill our songs. And that is they only victory they give us.’

So it seems odd that Holloway is so damning about the romantic instinct in a later chapter. Using John Wayne as an example, he seems to relish the difference between the projected image of cultural heroes and the ‘quotidian’ reality of their lives. Wayne appeared to be the paragon of courage and masculine resolve on screen, but he ‘finessed’ his way out of service during the Second World War. Only when the Duke was on his deathbed did he actually become heroic in real life. Certainly we must be cautious when revering images rather than genuine human character, but none of this condemns romance and the idealistic longing intrinsic in the human soul. Surely it possible to be both romantic and idealistic, while also accepting the facts of existence? The odes of Keats would stand in testament to that possibility.

That said, there is wisdom in the idea that if we spend our lives trying to escape who we really are, we risk losing the chance to see grace and beauty in death. The very shortness of life means we cannot afford to kid ourselves. Only by making friends with ‘the stranger’ that is our true self, can we hope to meet our end with strength, acceptance and poise.

Acceptance of our fragility does not imply capitulation to death. Rather it is a chance to show virtue in the face of that which we can’t control. As Holloway deftly puts it, ‘We didn’t get to deal our hand in life. We only got to play the cards we were given. And how we play the last card can win the game.’

The Last Bus: Reflections on Life and Death is published by Canongate and can be purchased here

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BOOK REVIEW: Peter Brook on meaning and language

‘What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence,’ Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the conclusion to his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. That line would spark off logical positivism, a kind of scientific fundamentalism about language, claiming that if the phrase has no real-world correspondence, and that correspondence cannot be demonstrated, the phrase is meaningless.

Wittgenstein himself would go on to show the folly of this thinking and repudiate any of his own philosophy that contributed to this narrow, and rather stifled view of language. Peter Brook’s Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and Meaning, makes no great philosophical or academic claims for itself, but it does drive home the futility of reducing language and communication to a fixed system.

In some of his earliest ‘reflections’ in the book, Brook examines the granular nature of each word in English. Like atoms, they may deceive us into thinking they are the smallest unit of meaning, but words themselves have multivalent resonances. Each word contains its own universe, potential pent tight and which can only be released in active use.

The concepts of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ are intrinsic to human life, says Brook, and they are also intrinsic to human language. Language emerged out of a need to communicate what actions were ‘good’ and what were ‘bad’ and eventually the gradients in between. Levels, the idea of being better or worse, exist within words too. There are better words and worse words for communicating a given thing, and there are levels of meaning. As Brook puts it: ‘… an endless scale of finer or coarser vibration, of finer or coarser meanings.’

Brook’s book reads like a conversational diary entry, or perhaps extended programme notes to a theatre production. There is no real thesis. These are ‘reflections’ after all, they are not meant to constitute a literary or academic theory. Some readers may find this baffling, a kind of directionless meandering thoughtfulness.

However, there’s some advantage in Brook’s relaxed, meditative tone. We are not being led towards some promise of resolution, as there is no question being asked, no demand being made upon the reader. We are simply allowed to join Brook in relishing the bewildering beauty of language, the subtlety of the very idea of meaning itself.

Brook’s work in both French and English informs this book throughout. He describes a flash of enlightenment when teaching actors performing in French how to ‘do’ Shakespeare the English way. The French actors appeared to be rushing the lines, and Brook instructed them to slow down the delivery, to relish each utterance the way Gielgud might have done. But this didn’t work, because – Eureka! – as a language French works completely different from English.  ‘I had failed to recognise that, if in English we speak in words, the french speak in thoughts.’ That is, French sentences contain a complete and ‘rapier sharp’ rendition of a lightning fast thought, and thoughts are essentially complete and too quick to capture in words. The ordinary Frenchman, speaks his words the way we might recite proverbs. The idea is formed perfectly in the mind, complete, before it is uttered. In English, contrastingly, and most notably in Shakespeare, we feel our way to the end of the sentence, we improvise as we go.

An actor’s task is obviously not to improvise his words as he goes, but the effect of the language is to convey the impression that that is what is happening. Shakespeare’s characters are so real to us because they speak in the same intuitive process as we do. Brook says the sense of the unexpected must exist in the actor’s mind, a sense of the meaning being open and alive.

Carrying on his meditations on the difference between French and English, Brook points to a common occurrence between speakers in each language – the speaker comes against a block and says ‘how do you say?’ What’s amusing about this, says Brook, is that the words are very often the same. However, certain words and phrases may share the same meaning, but as spoken in practice they carry very different undertones. The sense is the same, but the practical nuance of meaning is not exactly the same as their correspondence in each language.

The English phrase ‘I’m out of sorts’ corresponds to the French saying ‘I’m not on my plate’. They both have a similar meaning, but they carry with them different cultural resonances. He also uses the example of ‘Why’ vs ‘Pourquoi’. They are both the same in a practical sense but the French subtext is one of interrogation, an answer is expected. In the English usage, the dominant ‘y’ is left hanging, as if the question is by nature open.

To Brook’s delight, English is brilliantly anarchic, and can subsume Americanism and street slang and we are used to the idea that it is constantly changing. Brook says that the language of Villon and Rabelais shared this ramshackle nature with English, but during the Age of Reason, the Academie Francaise developed a rigorous system of curation, whereby new words are accepted or rejected, effectively by committee. In French, a word, any word, is the mot juste – self-contained and needing nothing other than itself to coney meaning. In English things are never so simple.

 

Another theme of the book is what theatre can teach us about human nature. For Brook, the ideal theatrical moment is one of a subtle, heart-stopping revelation, where the audience and actors are brought into one common experience. However, there are more instructive lessons that Brook garners from his lifetime in theatre.

Brook tells the story of a ‘68 theatre group, who, desperate to maintain the energy of change and renewal of that year’s dramatic social revolutions, moved to Geneva en masse and started their own company, one that would break away from the traditions of theatrical space, one which would create a moveable home.

The group designs a dome, a collapsable and flexible theatre, which can travel with them and which can give them the freedom to create their own boundaries of performance space. Brook recounts meeting these young revolutionaries, helping them put the finishing touches to their craftsmanship. After two years of fledgling work, the group had become close and creatively single-minded, having faced the challenges of their own limitations and the pressures of the new and unknown, together.

This group was the idealist, socialist collective, the same that was dreamed of by George Orwell, William Morris or Oscar Wilde. However, Brook asked them, now that they had built their flexible space, what do they plan to perform? The group were silenced by his inquiry. They had no clue. When Brook bumped into the leader of the group shortly after, he spoke of sad news. The initial challenge being overcome, the theatre group had splintered, and the dream was over.

The theatre troupe had put form before content, says Brook. They had become so engrossed in the practicalities of form, that they had neglected the very meaning of theatre itself, the art of storytelling. The story is a cautionary one, for revolutionaries, or for anyone wishing to create change and affect the culture. It’s not enough to innovate new forms or vernacular, or to solve practical challenges. You have to have a sense of meaning, a kind of spiritual purpose, to drive your action and to make it lasting and worthwhile.

This touches on something very prescient. Today we live with the innovations and political fall out from the 1960s. For decades now, children have grown up being taught to worship the glorious revolution, to aspire to be revolutionaries and to themselves make a stand for something. The problem is that ‘taking a stand’ has become an end in itself. Being a ‘changemaker’ is a sort of identity, rather than means to an end. No one thinks to ask what you are rebelling against and what you propose as an alternative. Style has usurped content. Today, all that matters is that you are ‘counter’; culture, in its highest and most humanist sense, doesn’t seem to matter.

 

The theatrical innovation for which Brook is known is now a kind of orthodoxy. Regarding the concept of the ‘empty space’, he says:

‘Emptiness is a starting point, not for its own sake, but to help discover each time what was really essential to support the richness of the actor’s words and presence.’

He acknowledges that today, the ‘battle has largely been won’, but he seems to be saying that preserving this empty space is getting harder and harder, regardless of how cluttered the stage is, or is not. Beckett, Chekhov and Shakespeare, says Brook, all built silence into their scripts; what was in between the lines was always more important than the words, which were merely stage directions for the accomplished actor. ‘Theatre exists,’ says Brook, ‘so that the unsaid can breathe and a quality of life can be sensed which gives a motive to the endless struggle.’ In other words, what makes it all fall together is what is not obvious, it can’t be found on the page, but it is found through the actor’s connection with the poetry.

Emptiness and silence are theatre’s greatest weapon, according to Brook, when a peculiar hush comes over the actor and the audience at once, something special and truly human occurs. Brook is somewhat mysterious here, but he seems to be suggesting that this capacity for creating space, emptiness and silence, is what can make theatre a genuinely unifying art.

Brook also addresses something very important for the modern artist in any arena – the challenge of being both relevant and truly rebellious at the same time. Artists do battle with their times, but in the same breath they must also embody their times and the traditions which have formed it.

Today we live in a paradoxical age where rebellion has become the orthodox. To ‘swim against the tide’ is in some sense to actually give in to the overwhelming currents of the age. Shock tactics, conceptual befuddlement and angry protest are simply what is expected. Craft is not what will get you recognised, but adopting an arch attitude will, and it will do so because it is now the familiar, it is what the audience knows. The challenge then, says Brook, is for the artist to truly understand the nature of his times, before he can begin to go against them and confront them.

Ours is an era of consumerism, technological bombardment and perpetual innovation. And yet, many artists seem to think that the prevailing status quo is characterised the bowler-hatted, pin-striped establishment bureaucrat. Much of the art that is considered rebellious, is really rebelling against an ancien regime that is long gone. For an artist to be truly challenging, they would have to confront not the old empire or the stuffy, grey-haired bourgeoisie of the 1950s cliche; they would have to take on the glossy, trendy technocrat, who has a large hip hop record collection and owns shares in multiple tech companies.

Protest has become naive, outrage has become glib, according to Brook. What was shocking and groundbreaking in 1967 is now banal and unsurprising. To be truly swimming against the tide, would be to offer solutions, to offer a world-view, to give people something positive and life-affirming when they leave the darkness of the theatre and enter the glare of the modern world. To do so, however, is to have oneself regarded with suspicion. The trend for deconstruction and anger is still in mid-stream, even as the traditions and customs that caused that trend have long been swept away.

‘A shock that awakens our indignation is cosy, and is quickly forgotten. A shock that opens us to the unknown is something else and makes us feeling stronger as we leave.’

For Brook, the mainstream must not be despised, even as the artist seeks to challenge it. As artists we emerge from a tradition, we don’t come out of nothing, no matter how unique we think we are. The challenge then, is to ‘find the vital currents’ even as we live in gratitude for all that has come before us. Only then can we avoid a merely adolescent rejection of the past and a unthinking worship of the new.

 

Brook says that Shakespeare’s genius was in combining the ‘esoteric’ with the ‘profane’. That is, for every moment of poetic grace and breathless insight into the human condition, there is an all too accurate expression of the every-day which brings us back to earth. For every moment of noble rhetoric, there is a crude joke. To emphasise one over the other is to lose the intrinsic significance and genius of the Bard. To play Shakespeare with only a perfect Queen’s English is overly-reverent; but to play him with only a modern swagger and vernacular is a ‘journalistic vulgarity.’

Brook says that contemporary audiences are right to pull back from anything that sounds too high-minded, too spiritual. However, to get caught up in only the earthly, materialistic struggles of human lives means one’s art will lack any of Shakespeare’s moments of lasting power.

Brook’s book is deceptively accessible. It is short, and it is not weighed down with citations, footnotes and references. It’s not an academic masterwork. It is however, deeply philosophical, in the sense of imparting wisdom, and rich with insight. You can dip into this book, and let the ideas and questions seep into your mind as you go for a long walk.

Someone who measures truth according to the level of new and surprising facts they are presented with, may well be disappointed by this book. However, for the jobbing artist, and in particular, anyone who is a performer, Brook’s writing here will be of invaluable, practical use.

Truth in the sense of literary and poetic truth, cannot be hit on the nose with specific words and precise descriptions. For the artist, truth is whatever falls through the cracks, whatever is implied, rather than what is said or pointed to directly. It cannot be any other way, because the great truths of the human condition transcend any one person or group’s experience, they are beyond the faculty of language in its evolutionary sense. If the reader is willing to abandon the idea that language should be a science, they may find themselves sharing in the same delight and wonder that Peter Brook has for the mystery of meaning.

Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and Meaning is available on Amazon. You can order a copy here

Kazuo Ishiguro and Bob Dylan: Two Nobel traditions

Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel Artist In The Floating World is a beautifully crafted story of Japanese culture immediately after World War Two. It tells the story of an ageing painter whose own suspect memory has blinded him to his own forgotten war crimes. The novel explores the limits of personal memory, and shows the dangerous flaws in the way we construct our own self-image.

When it was announced that Ishiguro was the new Nobel Prize winner for literature, it was tempting for me to unleash a critique. Still smarting from the ruthless and ignorant anti-Dylan responses to the songwriter’s prize last year, I wanted to fight back.

I wanted to fight back against the the repressed writers and Faber customers who themselves felt affronted by Dylan getting the prize.

Ishiguro’s prize marks a return to consensus, a return to the safe, clipped and codified view of literature. Artist In The Floating World has much to say about our own lack of objectivity about ourselves, as well as a culture’s view of itself. It is indeed the debut novel of a brilliant craftsman, a writer fully deserving of a Nobel Prize.

However, this same questioning of objectivity in the novel represents a subtext of arrogance, a novelistic delusion about what can be deemed certain and uncertain. It is the same arrogance that is found in broadsheet newspapers or BBC interviewers. It is the same self-aggrandisement that exists in the editorial pages of the New York Times.

By giving Ishiguro the Nobel prize, the Swedish Academy is re-narrowing the frame of the Overton Window, eliminating the subjective, eliminating the imagination, and salvaging a quasi-Newtonian pseudo-objectivity that is the only security blanket of the academic class.

Ishiguro’s first novel characterises this world view. By a calm and ironic dismantling of subjectivity, it is effectively affirming the post-modern cynicism of the age. The crimes of the twentieth century, we are being told, are the product of inflated self-image, of histrionic grandeur. Far better to return to an artistic palette of positivist blandness, lest we veer into superstitious folk-Romanticism.

The reaction to Dylan’s Nobel Prize revived a centuries-old disagreement about the nature of literature; between what Robert Graves called the ‘Bardic tradition’ and the ‘folk tradition.’

For all their sophisticated meters and systems of prosody, the Bardic poets were always propagandists. Not just for immediate campaigns and wars, but also for the overall world-view of the moment. The court poet’s job is to crystallise and entrench the king’s worldview into the cultural norm.

The folk poets by their nature were less refined in forms and meters, and they were outright dangerous to the political consensus. It was for this reason that Elizabeth I outlawed unlicensed ballad singing. After printing presses started to dominate the folk tradition, oral transmission became even more of a threat, as centralised printers could now distinguish between the ‘real’ versions of songs, the ‘wrong’, or oral versions of ballads.

This propagandist’s distinction existed for the fledgling newspaper industry as much as it did for the established art of ballad-mongering.

Dylan’s art emerges out of the latter tradition. As a result it has more in common with the idea of literature in the Romantics, the Beats, Blake and the many unknown, unofficial geniuses of the ballad tradition.
The crucial line of distinction between official and unofficial runs down this divide between those who see the subjective as valid, and those who do not.

The Faber&Faber, puritan positivism of the pro-Ishiguro, anti-Dylan camp, is the view of those who attack subjective superstitions, in order to salvage a reassuring objectivity. This objectivity, it must be said, doesn’t even exist in the most rigorous of scientific laboratories. However, it has become the refuge of educated elites, who wish to bolster their own status with claims to special insight.

The art of the subjective, beautifully exemplified in the work of Bob Dylan, has no need for this reassurance. As the poet says, ‘when you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ There is no investment in objectivity, in consensus, in a fixed frame of cultural reference.

An artist like Dylan is far more interested in a man’s flawed recollection of events, than the objective truth about those events. In fact, the very term ‘flawed recollection’ is meaningless. It doesn’t matter if it’s the product of a misremembered mistake of perception or not. What matters is the virtue and quality of the story, the positive drive of the narrative and the emotive response it evokes. The notion of objectivity, which is a kind of obsession for the Faber&Faber types, is merely a distraction for the Romantic poet.

This commitment to the primacy of imagination over objective fact, is often dismissed as a kind of primitive laziness. It’s not ‘real literature’ because it does not affirm the God-like authority of a world of facts. A post-modern deconstruction of the imaginative subjective, amounts to nothing more than the inverse of this lust for authority. Behind both the post-modernist and the Bardic authoritarian, lies a desire for the cosmic daddy-figure.

The folk tradition doesn’t recognise either. That is why far more is said about perception, recollection and flawed memory in Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue, than is ever said in Artist In The Floating World. The latter is a guilty, cynical examination of the idea of cultural authority and personal objectivity. The former is joyful, Dante-like journey into the mysteries of memory, shared experiences and the mysteries of the imagination.

The many praise-filled opinion pieces about Dylan’s Nobel Prize should not fool us into thinking that his art has indeed been welcomed into the realm of ‘proper’ literature. The gatekeepers of the Bardic elite have manifested their backlash in Ishiguro’s award.

 

 

Digital oppression requires a new counter-culture

A sneering , scoffing cynicism is the sign of a culture in decline.

The opposite of superstitious gullibility and saccharine Victorian emotiveness, is not as the modern generation seems insist, a snarky, nihilistic despair.

Even the existentialists like Camus and Sartre were not arguing for a sort of ideological belief in isolation and horror. They were not prescribing an ‘ought’ so much as describing and ‘is’.

In a world that is industrialised and where family and community and religion are no longer the engines of stability and security, an existentialist confrontation with meaning is inevitable and to be desired. The great contribution of the existentialists was that they fearlessly looked into the dark soul of the modern man.

You can see too, that this kind of society made some form of socialism or communism a seductive alternative to the grinding impersonalism of the machine age.

For centuries, a sense of tribal unity and familial rhythm maintained the psychological integrity of individuals in the context of political society, whether it was nation state of local villages. From the Homeric age onwards, small and localised intimate relationships were the tonic to mass war or the environmental uncertainty of life.

As our culture became industrialised, these things were no longer enough, and some of the bulwark against despair, such as religion, were shown to be epistemologically and morally insufficient to capture the anxieties of a modern life.

Such is the narrative of modernity that we have all read and all would recognise in some version or another. What has changed in recent years, however, is that the world went from industrial to digital, without giving philosophers or poets or social thinkers much time to alter their world-views in correspondence.

The result, is that the ancien regime is still perceived to be the old, white haired bourgeois factory owner; and the rebel-with-an-answer is still seen as the renegade revolutionary. Neither of these poles in the paradigm are of any use, because the paradigm has altered beyond recognition.

The industrialised model of commerce, doesn’t apply to modern business. That much we can recognise, and we see the massive shift for what it is. What has failed to change is the counter-culture. The counter-culture is trapped in fighting an enemy that no longer exists.

Trying shovel the digital world and all its failings and advantages into the same ideological ditch as the industrial world, treating labour concerns and social fragmentation in the same way we would treat slavery, industrial poverty and factory mechanisation, has resulted in a massive dislocation of the counter-culture.

As most of the poets, comedians and artists treat Trump and all that he represents as confirmations of their soggy-Marxist assumptions, a new world is being ushered in that threatens to alter human nature and relegate the individual to a mythic relic.

This is a world of big data, artificial intelligence and no privacy. It is a world of light-speed gratification and instant distraction. It is not New Lanark. It is not even Orwell’s 1984. We have no precedent to understand this new world, and yet the old counter-culture tropes of existentialist novellas and civil rights newsreels are all people seem to have to make sense of their feelings of oppression and anxiety.

The most glaring sign of the counter-culture’s inability to meet the challenges of this new emerging world, can be found in the tone of voice, the scoffing bickering anachronisms of your typical leftist debate.

Your averagely educated and ‘wised-up’ type will either still cling to outdated Marxist tropes, or will give you some lecture on the meaninglessness of life, and hopelessness of the human soul. Both of these are really just symptoms of the same problem – an inability to evolve new ideas and a new counter-cultural arsenal to meet the challenges of the age.

Ironically, the only way anyone has ever created a new paradigm, has been to reach back into the past. It is through the preservation of culture, that culture evolves. Today, such an assertion is regarded as a kind of blasphemy, as if to say anything positive about the past is to argue for the divine right of kings or a return to the British Empire.

Behind this fear of the past, lies a fear of ideas. The great collapse of the old world has left a vacuum in what Woody Guthrie called the human ‘hope machine’. The current despair is not that of Sartre characters in the 1930s, shuffling through the alleyways of Montmartre is a daze of horror at their own isolation. Rather, it is the despair of the endless distracted, the endlessly bombarded and saturated mind, whose self is submerged in the feedback loop of consumer driven algorithms. To adopt the ironic pose of the Camus character in the long jacket, smoking and shouting in the wilderness, is to do nothing more than signal to our monopolistic, corporate rulers, an aspect of a our buying patterns for them to target in the next email.

What we need then, is not a scepticism about meaning and ideas, but a reaffirmation of the culture. A return to first principles. However, we cannot do this, as long as the counter-culture is trapped in Marxist/Existentialist tropes.

Everybody these days operates under the conceit that they are an ‘independent thinker’. The modern cynic creates a dogma around his uncertainty. He uses doubt and scepticism as a kind of ideology, a default and easy way of approaching the world. When presented with a complex idea, or some challenging ideal – say Islam – he lazily and self-congratulatingly collapses into nihilism.

What the cynic wants and needs, is not an honest engagement with ideas, so much as a quick way of convincing himself not to bother. Far better to dismiss the challenge as unsolvable and irrelevant, than to discover that there is something new and potentially devastating in his midst.

The modern cynic gets away with this by giving the impression that his ignorance and disdain for ideas is worldly, putting the sheen of irony and detachment onto a stance about life that is really quite small-minded and stupid.

Like Dylan’s Mr Jones, the modern cynic scoffs thinking he is being satirical, is sarcastic where he thinks he’s being ironic and resorts to despair when he should take refuge in a conscientious uncertainty.

The very notion that one would want to engage in ideas, to take on an ever moving challenge of developing fresh responses to one’s environment, is an affront to the bougie, suburban luxury of our generation. However, instead of admitting to this middle class taste for ignorance, the better to adopt the pose of not needing to engage, to give off like you have been and there and come out the other end, and that your inability to develop ideas is really some form of hip, switched-on nirvana of the absurd.

Along with a disdain for ideas, comes a disgust at the notion of ‘meaning’. The idea that one’s life would involve duty and sacrifice towards a higher ideal, that one’s citizenship is part of a larger more sacred story than one’s minute concerns, is met with palpable rage among the modern generation.

If you are bold enough to live by a set of ideals, to affirm a positive or even traditional purpose to your life, this is immediately met with scoffing accusations of egotism. The cod-Freudianism of pop culture seeps into any discussion of common psychology, and those who prefer nihilism to duty, will traduce any sense of of a personal quest to evidence of a narcissistic complex.

The idea of a hero is seen as anachronistic and outdated. Ironically, however, it is this need to dismantle personal narratives that is the real narcissism. Those who seek to live out a sense of their own heroism are far more likely to sacrifice their own concerns for the wider good. The nihilist however, has no reason to make sacrifices at all; it’s all pointless and absurd, so why bother?

It has been shown however, that, far more than a trendy healthy diet or ‘lifestyle’, what is more likely to give longevity and satisfaction in life, is in fact a sense of purpose, being part of a grander project. To live life as if one’s own existence mattered is crucial to the development of healthy, happy and moral beings.

To assume the posture of post-modernist cockiness, is to at once affirm chaos and despair, while at the same time living by a very strict and immovable fundamentalism.
This is neither tasteful, nor is it in any way useful in leaving a legacy for future generations as they face the battle against a loss of individuality and privacy, a loss of conscience in favour of social algorithms.

What’s so bad about political correctness?

‘Be not too moral,’ said Henry David Thoreau. ‘You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.’

People who really live for change, the people who really care about their fellow man, are the people we never hear from, the ones who have no need to posture about ideologies, who have no need to lecture others about ‘tolerance’.

Political correctness is the ideology which props up a dangerously false niceness. It is the marketing strategy of the power hungry, the propaganda of the bully, who wishes to whitewash his reputation. Thus we have pictures of Harvey Weinstein wearing a ‘pussy hat’ and joining female celebrities on the Women’s March last year.

The point is not the hypocrisy. Anyone with ideals is manifestly hypocritical. The point is the way virtue is used as part of a power strategy, a way of securing status and abusive control over others through the manipulation of reputation.

Reducing good morals to a set of tick boxes or making complex ethical dilemmas into matters of sloganeering, robs human life of an essential part of its evolving value. Human agency requires a confrontation with competing goods. To do good, we must live with conscience, come to understand our own sinful natures and meet face to face with the capacity for evil in each of our own souls.

Political correctness is the creed of the godless. It turns moral action into a simplistic algorithm, an automated exchange of inputs and outputs. It requires no wrestling with demons, no dark night of the soul, no solitude of contemplation. And most of all, it comes at no real cost to the moral agent who lives by such a creed.

Jesus Christ said ‘I come not abolish the law, but to fulfil it’. The shift from rule-based religious dogma into the emancipatory truths of the Christian gospel, is a shift from prescriptiveness towards the moral growth of the individual self. In other words, Christ came to teach that it is not the washing of hands or the observance of ritual propriety that makes us a good person, or which secures our place in heaven. Rather it is quality of our souls.

Good behaviour does not emerge from simple algorithms of ‘niceness’. Good behaviour emerges from a cleansing of the spirit. Good actions are the fruit of a good soul, they are not ways of buying our way into heaven.

This too was the message of Krishna to Arjuna, as he stood poised on the fatal edge of battle. How can I do good, Lord, if I am to kill my brethren? Krishna’s answer was that it is the quality of one’s soul, the cleanness of one’s consciousness that marks a truly holy man, not the simplistic dogmas of right and wrong found in worldly life.
Some may defensively say that this is a license to rudeness and power-grabbing in itself.

Like the fascist misuse of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Not so. It is merely a reminder that we do not become good, we do not find salvation, in simplistic moral prescriptions. The proof of this is to be found in the way abusive people use politically correct language to cover up the truth of their souls. Or the way vicious killers use the rhetoric of human rights to add a veneer of respectability to their murderous exploits.

ISIS understood the power of political correctness. Not only did they use hipster-quality video propaganda and publish their own glossy and attractive magazines, they also exploited the cognitive dissonance that would affect the bourgeois minds of western observers, by seeming to add PC behaviours to their barbarous tactics.

At one point, as they were executing gay men by throwing them off the rooftops of buildings – as cheering mobs slavered at the brutality below – jihadis would hug the men before hand, offering the supposed milk of human kindness as a precursor to brutal execution. This nasty fake compassion is a direct product of politically correct morality, and shows how sadistically it can be exploited.

If we were able to rise above PC prescriptiveness, we would feel no cognitive dissonance. We would not be susceptible to the confusion tactics of ISIS propaganda. It is the fact that we have reduced morality to a set of simplistic soundbites, that makes both genuine moral discourse impossible, and evil people able to market their dangerous ambitions as essential to human emancipation.

What’s so wrong about peace, love and understanding? Nothing, as long as it is not just skin deep. Very often the most moral among us, are not the best at marketing their own virtue. Anyone can talk about charity and goodwill, the real test of our humanity comes when it is not convenient for us to do so, and when talking about morality becomes irrelevant to a genuine moral outcome.

Liam Gallagher’s As You Were puts a much-needed stridency back into rock ‘n’ roll

It’s one thing to scatter new seeds, another thing completely to cultivate the land. With the tragic loss of Tom Petty, rock ‘n’ roll lost one its most important guardians. Thank God we still have Liam Gallagher.

From Wall Of Glass down to For What It’s Worth, we have a settling of scores, an uncompromising simplicity of purpose.

Wall Of Glass is a wailing, unapologetic explosion of masculine power. The song presents the chief emotion of the album. That being: ‘I’m at the top of my game, and more’s the pity for you.’

Many of the songs to follow have an enemy in their sights, and at all times it seems that enemy is an incarnation of the modern disease, the distracted, careerist, Blairite spreadsheet monkeys, with their green tea and hot yoga.

The thudding opening chords of Bold are refreshingly simple, carrying the opening line into a quiet euphoria. ‘Gonna take you off my list of to-dos…’ This is a mature and calm manifesto of the rebellious spirit. I ain’t dead yet.

Greedy Soul needs to be played live. Nevertheless, it’s an exhilarating rise in temperature, while maintaining the emotional voice of Bold.

Paper Crown is a child-like metaphor, but as the song progresses it becomes a deeper and more powerful image. What kind of paper is the crown made of? I can’t help thinking it’s yesterday’s newspaper, bringing you the hard truth you can’t bear to see.

Of course there are shades here of Dylan’s Queen Jane Approximately – where’s all your power now your beauty has faded? But it’s worse than that. It’s the vinegar-soaked paper of an old chip packet, the mistakes of the past that can’t be origami’d into something new.

The bridge is a direct lift from Lennon’s Jealous Guy, but adds a slight operatic and dreamy quality to an otherwise straight-shooting Ashcroft-eque indie ballad. My favourite line is: ‘The hounds of hell won’t lie down on the ashes of your Paper Crown’.

Musically, a change of gear occurs with Come Back To Me and Doesn’t Have To Be That Way. The first of these is a jumpy, britpop stadium anthem. In its heart it’s a seduction song in the vein of Hendrix’s Foxy Lady. This track has one of the few outright rock solos on it, but nothing proggy or masturbatory. The Gallagher tone is never compromised, and the piano driven coda adds a swaggering, Happy Mondays feel to the fade out.

Doesn’t Have To Be That Way has some surprising shades of Human League and eighties Bowie, with a powerful opening homage to Hacienda techno. This song is new territory for Gallagher, but you can tell he is having fun, stretching his vocals and allowing the snarl of his voice to ride a different kind of beat.

This song has the quality of many radio tunes of the nineties, songs that Oasis would have given a wide berth. The guitar solo is very Doorsy, a searing slide psychedelia adding a vintage seasoning to what is really a dance-floor pop track.

For all its ‘back-to-basics’ qualities, this is a fresh and creative album that doesn’t rest on cliches and ‘the right way’ to write a song. There is a stridency, and that, more than any other factor, is what Gallagher brings to the table.

Some musos will object to Gallagher’s branding of modern music as boring and ‘beige’, but he’s not saying there’s no talent, or that people don’t rock out. He’s pointing to the fact that what passes for a ‘good song’ these days is technical accomplishment, rather than a desire to drive home a point.

Go to any open mic in London, and you are likely to find many great writers and musicians, content only to sing to their own navels. The lyrics are merely brushstrokes in self-contained little masterpieces. Nothing grabs you by the throat.

The missing link in modern music is not the talent, not technique, not the ingenuity of the songs. It’s an attitude, a point-of-view, a desire to wrestle with the perceptions of the audience, to carve experience down to potent bullets of common human understanding.

Gallagher makes no excuses for the fact that he is not re-inventing the wheel. The tendency towards demanding innovation for innovation’s sake has led to the conflation of ‘difference’ with ‘originality’.

Just doing something new and different doesn’t mean you are creating a shift in the culture. And doing something familiar doesn’t mean you are resorting to cliches either.

Anyone can be different. Being original requires being in the right place at the right time with the right tools.

Liam Gallagher’s album is an opportunity for rock ‘n’ roll to regroup.

Strange Days: Revisiting a classic Doors album

 Edinburgh in mid-Autumn can be a cold, lonely and haunted place. The sky is blanketed by a faceless mask of cloud, and at night the orange streetlights reflect a dreary turmeric pall across the city.

And it’s windy. Irritating winds, that muffle your conversations and your thoughts. Winds that cocoon you in a morose isolation.

On Saturdays at my boarding school we were allowed ‘uptown’ for a couple of hours in the afternoons, and the typical day out would be a trip to HMV on Prince’s Street then a milkshake at MacDonalds, and then run home for a dinner of dry, chewy beef and roast potatoes. Maybe you could steal a brief conversation from a pretty girl if you sat at the right table.

All the while the breezy darkness was closing in on you. Time running out, and your rationing of privacy and freedom running out too.

On one of these horrible windy days, I walked up Cockburn Street to a newly opened Fopp. Having recently discovered The Doors, I spotted a cassette of Strange Days, which I immediately bought for £4.99.

I wish I still had this tape. In the coming weeks, huddled in my icy room with bear walls and linoleum flooring, I’d listen to Strange Days over and over again. The barren, banshee-like screaming organ lines were perfect for the strained whine of cassette, which added to the discomforting and exhilarating circus-gothic mood of the album.

September 1967, when this album was originally released, would have been the anxious comedown after the naked highs of the Summer of Love. The choice of title and the first track being all the more fascinating as a result.

Strange Days. An echoing Manzarek organ gives way to chiming guitar and a rolling jazz-march on the tom-toms. ‘Strange Days have tracked us down…’ This is not the manifesto of liberation, this is not a flower power declaration of intent. Morrison’s voice glides across the beat like a melted liquorice narcotic.

‘The hostess is grinning, her guests sleep from sinning.’ Free love anyone?

You have the feeling of falling into a death-trance, the clouded hangover vision of backstreet whorehouses and doss rooms, the lantern glow of chinatown. The word ‘strange’ repeats through the lyrics like a dance motif, a lyrical melody, and Morrison draws out is drawling vowels like he’s spinning silk.

The deep cuts are the best cuts. Love Me Two Times is on every good compilation, but Unhappy Girl is a lost masterpiece. Along with Lost Little Girl, this song paints a picture of broken innocence, urban corruptions chiselling away at the mind of the American prom queen.

Unlike Dylan’s Miss Lonely, however, Morrison’s lost girls are a little more knowing, a little more complicit in their own intoxicating demise. For Morrison, losing one’s virgin soul is not the stuff immortal tragedy, it doesn’t symbolise the unthinking hubris of a generation. It’s simply the seductive self-destruction of freedom. It’s human nature. There’s no shock of surprise realisation.

Perhaps the strange days are the days of aftermath, when the sexual revolution turns to the terror of unshackled desires and liberation becomes licentious hunger. ‘You’re charged in a prison of your own device.’

Strange Days is an album that proves psychedelia doesn’t need to be mass, sprawling guitar jams and self-indulgent riffs and muso compositions for the initiated. Strange Days is mostly made up of tight, well-written and crafted pop songs, with suggestive, imaginative lyrical flourishes and dynamic mixes of tenderness and explosiveness.

Whatever you feel about The Doors, they knew how to lay down a song. Their albums are always crafted, thematically complete and integrated works of art.

Strange Days is a kind of drug album – of its time, but the antithesis of the zeitgeist of that moment. The psychedelia exists in the open spaces of the chilly soundscapes, as well as in the open-ended lyrics, which point to unseen torment rather than laboured dread.

Minimalism is not a word associated with The Doors, but in terms of how the actual compositions relate to the overwhelming effect of the songs, it’s absolutely appropriate. The organ riffs are manic but never crammed with notes. The drumming is thunderous but equally capable of a calm, massaging accompaniment.

Krieger’s guitar takes flight when the moment calls for it, and yet he never takes centre-stage. The solos are more like country or early rock and roll solos than they are hard cock rock eruptions of sound.

Morrison’s vocal style here is studied and restrained. He is experimenting with mic technique, adopting a lullaby intimacy as a counterpoint to his trademark booze-soaked yawp.

Horse Latitudes is a poem about death, and again, human nature. The performance here still creeps me out, and acts as a kind of avant garde balance to the streamlined pop songwriting of the first side of the record.

Two back to back hidden beauties, My Eyes Have Seen You and Can’t See Your Face, are Morrison at his most uncomfortably voyeuristic.

My Eyes is a short precursor to LA Woman. It’s a song of lust and sex – go figure. But whereas The Stones’ Straycat Blues is a one-dimension and lovable testament to groupie orgies and sixties free love, Morrison’s imagery creates a cinematic noir around the urban, transactional awkwardness of sexual encounters.

‘Free from disguise,
Gazing on a city under television skies,
Television skies, television skies

Let them photograph your your soul,
Memorize your alleys on an endless roll,
endless roll, endless roll’

The city and the female form are deliberately and subtly conflated. As in LA Woman, the girl’s body is a fractured landscape, an untravelled world to be captured in time, in the ripeness of the dying moment. Imprisoned in the polished gloss of celluloid. 

‘Carnival dogs consume the lines’ – no idea what that means but it is wonderfully predatory and manic. Can’t See Your Face is a paranoid song, but the delivery from Morrison is liquid elegance, allowing his voice to easefully trip off the consonants with relish, despite the almost schizophrenic nature of the words – ‘I can’t seem to find the right lie’.

Both these songs revolve around love as a doomed photographic effort, the futility of seeking to apprehend the shadowed soul of another. As a result, both these masterpieces are songs about loneliness and despair, just as much as the more overt People Are Strange is.

Legend has it that The Doors recorded the music for When The Music’s Over without Morrison, the singer being somewhere on the Sunset Strip boozing and fucking.

The lyrical improvisations in the band’s epic rock crescendos like The End and Music’s Over, were made on top of crafted spaces left by the band. They weren’t winging it, in other words.

Densmore’s drumming in particular evolves itself around Morrison’s careful, cat-like phrases. The band know when to pull back, and to push behind Morrison when the eruptions of angst come.

A great example of this is the way Densmore’s rolls curl round Morrison’s delivery at:

‘The face in the mirror won’t stop
The girl in the window won’t drop
A feast of friends alive she cried,
Waiting for me outside’

‘I want to hear the scream of the butterfly’ is said to be a reference to Chang Tzu’s poem about a butterfly, the sound being the inaudible sound of the soul beyond the veil of death. Or something like that. In any case, that’s probably what Morrison was getting at.

As life-affirming as this tour de force is, Morrison’s Birth Of Tragedy philosophy always teetered on the edge of nihilism. At times it seemed the best he could hope for was one final burst of poetic thrills before death came stalking.

However, there’s something overtly Romantic – in the Keats/Shelley sense of the word, about Music’s Over. Life is not worth living without art. Without beauty and self-expression, we are reduced to boredom and selfishness. Our vision is impaired without the primal and ecstatic growth offered to us by the ritual of rock n roll.

Without this song there would be no Patti Smith’s Horses. The poetic improv about raping the earth, points to the idea that it is the communal ceremony of togetherness and erotic connection afforded us by rock n roll, which frees us from our own narcissism.

Throughout Morrison’s poems and lyrics there is this homage to the primal and primeval. Music’s Over, like The End, reaches an orgasm before sinking back into a melodic coda. But unlike The End, there is an uplifting sense of possibility; we’ve undergone a ritualised death, a bacchanalian form of worship that helps us expunge our inwardness and exorcise hopelessness.

In that dim, lifeless study over twenty years ago, I think I was captivated by this album because of its atmosphere. Paranoia and aloneness are woven delicately with strains of fragile melodies and bluesy vocal phrasings. Pain and joy wrapped together like lovers in a tantric statue.

I was also enthralled by Morrison’s observational writing, the way he could capture a soul, photograph it, with only a few lyric strokes.

These days, it’s not as cool to like The Doors as it is to profess love of The Velvet Underground. However, Strange Days is the best counterexample to the tired and typical charges thrown at Morrison and this band. There is nothing overblown, nothing extraneous. You’ll find no extra fat on the cinematic bones of these songs.

What stops The Doors, and this album, being more popular is the fact that despite all the noir and the sexual paranoia, the songwriting is optimistic and poetically earnest.

Nothing could be more uncool these days, of course. And yet nothing could be more needed than the poise, subtlety and life-affirming craft exhibited by The Doors on Strange Days.

Strange Days will be reissued on an anniversary double disc remaster on November 17. Pre-order your copy here

 

BOOK REVIEW: Business for Bohemians, by Tom Hodgkinson

In George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying, the main character Gordon Comstock declares a ‘war on money’, devoting himself to loneliness and poverty in order to pursue his dream of being a poet. Comstock’s predicament represents the doomed aspirations of any artist in a commercial world, caught between the machinery of wage slavery on the one hand, and the alienating bitterness of rejection and poverty on the other.

For Orwell, there is no inbetween. Comstock’s desire to live a bohemian, free and creative life eventually gives way to inevitable capitulation to commercial values. It becomes simply unsustainable to live at odds with the wider social values.

Tom Hodgkinson’s Business for Bohemians, offers a third way, a middle path between alienated artistic destitution, and corporate enslavement. Hodgkinson is the managing editor of The Idler and has written a series of books on the importance of Idling – living a life devoted ‘bohemian’ pursuits. The central aim of this Idling Philosophy is creating freedom to develop a rich, fulfilling life.

Bohemianism, according to Hodgkinson, is not about dropping out and being a careless gypsy. It is about carving out freedom for yourself and living on your own terms. One of the hardest messages of the book is that being bohemian means becoming a businessman.

The difference between you and the hurried, stressful corporate world is not that you reject money, systems and routine. It’s simply that you create your own systems, rather than be dictated to by the systems and routines of larger, faceless entities.

‘Bohemians often are excellent salespeople. This is because they believe in what they are doing. And whether you are the editor of the new-agey Resurgence magazine, Satish Kumar, or Damien Hirst, or hedge fund manager Crispin Odey or the headmaster of Eton, your job is the same: asking people for money so that you can continue to do what you do. Enjoy it.’

Hodgkinson gives us some uncomfortable truths, based on his own mistakes trying to manage a business by being the laid back, ‘nice guy’. You have to learn how to use a spreadsheet, and you have to learn to love sales. You also have to be prepared to be the tyrant boss sometimes, to avoid being screwed by pseudo-bohemian losers who will inevitably see your creative values as easy prey for their lazy, hustling ambitions.

At times, it sounds like Hodgkinson is telling you to give up the very bohemianism he is supposed to be helping you foster. However, the truth is that living a bohemian life has nothing to do with being ‘anti-business’ or looking down on marketing and disciplined book-keeping. It’s not about declaring a ‘war on money’. It’s about freedom.

In a world convinced of the Marxist view that we are either enslaved or the enslaver, the idea of becoming a shop-keeping petty-bourgeoisie is far from cool. It fits into neither the romance of poverty nor the worship of material success. However, argues Hodgkinson, it is the only way to live an independent life.

He refers to Lenin, who thought that anarchists and individualist bohemians were merely bourgeois exploiters in disguise. This probably accounts for the continued suspicion of artists trying to make money and run a creative business.

There’s a reason why the petty-bourgeoisie shopkeeper types are hated by the rich exploiters and the Marxist revolutionaries alike: they don’t follow the crowd. They are loners, they hate ideologies and have no interest in joining anyone’s club. This kind of independent thinker is what Hodgkinson is trying to persuade us to become.

The point of bohemianism is to live a free, creative and self-determined life, and we can only do that if we, ironically, are prepared to put the work in. Idling is not about being lazy, it’s about being truly yourself.

‘Your business is a way of communicating an idea and creating a living for a group of people. It is a shared endeavour, a collective enterprise. Therefore, it must provide freedom and fun for the people you work with, as well as for you. After all, what is the point of it? If you just want to make money, then don’t start a business. Go and work for some awful money-making machine and wallow in your own amoral wretchedness. Join a corporation, climb the ladder and enjoy paid holidays and multiple departments.’

The fundamental point of this book is to show you the basic, unavoidable aspects of business that you must force yourself to love, before you can carve out time to live the Good Life. We must become practical in order to become creative. We must become disciplined, in order to be free.

Those who reject this call to arms as a kind of ‘selling out’ are in fact tacitly standing for the values of wage slavery and exploitation. They are basically admitting that the only people who can afford to be free and creative are those with established wealth.

‘It would be easy to grumble about all of this [becoming a creative entrepreneur] – to think that it is all beneath you. But this aristocratic contempt of the lowly tradesman will get you nowhere. And aristocratic contempt for trade is itself absurd. For the aristos, whose ancestors were royal lickspittles, murderers, thieves and rascals, to look down on those who choose to open a shop and sell stuff is patently ridiculous. It’s all right for the aristos to be anti-materialistic and scorn trade when own 20,000 acres and have a ton of serfs paying them rent every month. Does that give them the moral high ground? No.’

Hodgkinson’s point is that the creative life is available to us all, if we simply master a few basic tricks of the trade. You don’t have to declare ‘war on money’ to become free. You don’t have to avoid business to salvage your values from the corporate monster of modern life. You just have to be smart, knowledgeable and willing to do some heavy lifting in order to liberate yourself from agendas that are not your own.

You can order a copy of Business for Bohemians at idler.co.uk

A new online course is now available, with Tom Hodgkinson guiding you through the main principles outlined in the book. You can book your place here 

EXHIBITION REVIEW: Sixty Years at Tate Britain

Sixty Years at Tate Britain is a journey through the events of British post-war history, seen refracted in the prism of work by artists from 1960s to today.

The opening blurb tells us that each piece in the collection is a response to narratives and issues such as ‘immigration, feminism, racial and sexual identity, AIDS activism, music and club culture’.

The show is explicitly political, and political in a very particular, post-modern sense. The Britain presented here is not the Britain of Churchill, empire and high gothic ambition. Each piece appears to have been chosen for its explicitly non-historic, anti-patriotic sensibility.

Jon Savage’s Uninhabited London series is a strong example of the kind of searching, slightly nihilistic eye that this exhibition wants to celebrate.

His pictures show empty back streets, overpasses, rail bridges and derelict housing blocks, all in black and white and all of them devoid of human activity or the comfort of identity.

The photos were taken between 1977 and 2008, in and around North Kensington and west London, and they show a London still peppered with bomb sites, still reeling from the damage of war.

This could be East Germany as much as London. There is no civilisation here, but only concrete and the carcasses of Victorianism, the bland, hard edges of dreary development.

This is a London that is somewhat unrecognisable today. However, following the horrors of the Grenfell Tower tragedy in Kensington, you do catch yourself searching for anything that might resemble that building. There are skylines with high rise blocks, and the general texturelessness and loneliness of the landscapes presented here does speak to this recent trauma.

However, much of these areas have probably been gentrified now, and the London we see through Savage’s eyes is only one side of the city – there is no creativity, no bustling energy of optimism. All you are allowed to see is the forgotten, vacant lifelessness of desolate alleys and parking lots.

The pictures themselves, however, are clean, well composed, and show a technical control for depth of field that allows for maximum impact in conveying the shape and form of the city Savage was trying to present.

Cunt Scum (1977) by Gilbert and George, presents a similar face of London. We are still seeing a dour, post-war Britain, only this time with slightly more explicit political flavour.

Gilbert and George give us the prophetic images of what we will come to know as ‘Thatcherite Britain’. Working men in crowds, Bobbys on the beat, homelessness, inner city high rise developments.

The photographs used are not as technically pristine as Savage’s, but the over and under-exposed quality of the shots deliberately contrast the stark light and grim shadow of a Britain gutted of its identity.

If anyone still has doubts about the power of Abstract Expressionism, and the thrust of its techniques, they should look no further than Ataxia – Aids Is Fun (1993), by Derek Jarman.

Almost certainly the most moving of the works in this exhibition, Ataxia hits the viewer in the most vulnerable aspects of the subconscious. No amount of description and campaigning can compete with this image of the fragmentation of the nervous system caused by AIDS. It is a terrifying work, that leaves no one in any doubt about the meaning.

AIDS was not just a cull of gay men, it was, and still is, a tectonic natural disaster for every individual affected. This painting is hard to look at – violent, uncompromising and entirely precise.

Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (1957) by Richard Hamilton, is possibly the most technically impressive part of this show. A masterpiece of negative space, and a proto-Pop Art achievement, the work explores the sexuality of women and motorcars – a staple of pop culture already by the time it was painted.

In this painting you see so much of modernity captured in the slick curves and urbane textures – everything from Kerouac, to the Velvet Underground to Madonna’s aggressive slut-empowerment in the early 1990s.

As a primary source, this painting will communicate to future historians unspeakable truths about the post-war age in the west, so much more than the nihilistic trends that emerged from the 1960s.

Michael Fullerton’s portrait of disc jockey John Peel (2005) opens this patchy exhibition, and it’s a brilliantly understated and traditional work.

A reference to the portraits by Thomas Gainsborough in the 18th century, this work captures the loveable paradox of Peel. He was on the frontlines of counterculture for the best part of four decades. However, he was a national treasure, as well-known and loved as the Queen herself, by the time he died.

Painting him in this way, allows the viewer to see Peel and all that he represents, through a lens of continuity and cultural endurance. The other works in this exhibition lack this sense of connection.

Peel’s love of the underground was not a post-modernist quest, but rather and desire to keep the tradition of British art alive and thriving. To be counter-culture, for Peel, was not to be anti-culture. He was a kind of spiritual patron, rather than an iconoclast or revolutionary. We see Peel here where he belongs, in the Pantheon of British creative innovators and leaders, not as some snotty champion of disaffection.

Fullerton’s portrait reminds one of Robert Goodloe Harper Pennington’s Oscar Wilde portrait (1884) also showing in the Tate. The same deep colours, the same ironic, but accessible creative expressions on the subjects.

There is a deliberate dislocation of Britain from its past in this exhibition which seems designed rather than simply observed.

Taken on their own, each piece has something important to say about this country. However, there is a disingenuous agenda in the collection, as if the only things relevant to post-war Britain were issues of immigration, sexual health, gay rights and feminism.

Britain is a divided nation, and in some sense that divide runs down the fracture between a historic past, and a post-Thatcherite economic identity.

Explicit in the form of this collection seems to be the assertion that nothing of Britain’s past is fit for purpose, nothing about the identity formed over centuries up until the 1960s speaks to the issues that face the country today.

Sixty Years presents a cultural orthodoxy which is itself archaic and mismatched to the reality of the times. The creative disgust of punk and post-modernism are far more connected to time and circumstance than their advocates would have us believe, and the idea of being liberated from the past is no longer the seductive, working class utopian vision it once was.

Far more powerful, would be an exhibition that tried to link the fractured world seen in the works of Savage and Gilbert and George, with the through-line of art history in Britain.

The moral eye of this exhibition is bankrupt, and the forms have become fetishes.

This dislocation was painfully available to us in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. Protestors and rabble rousers leaped upon the deaths of impoverished families, as if they were somehow catapulted back to 1981, to a world of miners strikes and the Falklands war.

In trying to present a distinctly modern Britain, this exhibition comes off as suspiciously nostalgic for a time when a clear, Marxist model of social forces was convenient and offered clarity in an era of confused, class emancipation.

Sixty Years goes out of its way to avoid any sense of continuity. For a worldview obsessed with identity, that very concept of identity itself seems incredibly impoverished. Beauty is seen as something representative of the evil establishment, a veneer of the old guard.

It may or may not be true that the classical beauty and Victorian baroque of British art is linked to its imperial past. However, what Sixty Years shows is that the fractured aesthetic of sex-club fetishism and class-war concretism is dangerously anachronistic and ill-fitted to meet the challenges of contemporary Britain.

Even seen as a retrospective, this exhibition is curiously limited, confined to one narrow view of Britain’s recent history. For all its celebrations of alienation and working class anxiety, the world view implicit here could only emerge from someone on the affluent sidelines of the culture, frustratedly clinging to an academic model of urban Britain that is simply not relevant any more.

‘Equal marriage’ is a phoney emancipation for lifestyle activists

After the weekend’s LGBT marches in Northern Ireland, and the German parliament’s vote in favour of gay marriage, the great non-issue of ‘equal marriage’ is back in the headlines.

Writer Colm Toibin, in a recent interview, said that the referendum vote in the Republic of Ireland a couple of years ago, marked a historic moment for gay people like himself. In a religiously conservative culture, the acceptance of gay people’s right to marry in a church, said Toibin, is final proof of inclusion for LGBT people.

It is certainly part of civil freedom to allow any one of us to declare love to another person in any which way we want, and have that recognised and protected by law. One thing the reactionaries like the DUP have right, is that marriage is a vital force of social cohesion.

When we make a commitment to another person under the law, we promise to invest the power of our citizenship in their lives. We are making a symbolic gesture of the very meaning of citizenship itself, that with one’s freedom comes a responsibility to protect that same freedom for another. Marriage is a very intimate way of expressing that responsibility.

There are differences between marriage, civil partnerships, and civil marriages. However, these differences are purely material. What each contract embodies, is the same level of freedom to love and the duty of care that involves. Whatever imbalances may exist between civil partnerships and Christian marriage, these are not matters of human rights, but legal procedure.

Colm Toibin may be right in claiming that allowing gay people to marry in church is profoundly symbolic, especially in countries where the church has wielded serious political clout. If that is true, then it should be permitted, without question.

However, the idea that this campaign is the new civil rights question of our age, or is a matter of ‘equality’ and human rights, is tiresome and fatuous. The hard political battle over LGBT rights has been won. The reason that it is still treated like some great fight for emancipation is because it makes people feel like revolutionaries, without actually calling on campaigners to expose themselves to any risk.

The recent resignation of Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron shows how twisted the issue of ‘equal marriage’ is. Farron is a typical Westminster centrist, and a committed human rights advocate. His own personal beliefs about the nature of marriage are of little consequence.

Part of what it means to be a liberal, is an ability to separate questions of civic justice, from personal conscience. The balance of liberty can only exist if we tolerate opposing views on what constitutes the moral good, while we protect each person’s right to determine the answers to such moral questions on their own terms.

‘Equal marriage’, as it is pompously called, is a perfect way to see into the heart of modern liberalism. We can see why the free press and free speech are issues treated with contempt by the left. Liberals have no interest in allowing people to form opinions based on personal conscience.

The ‘good’ in society is prescribed before one’s conscience even comes into play. If you fail to fall in line with what has been determined as right thinking, you are branded a bigot, excluded, just as gay people were ostracised before 1965.

The DUP in Northern Ireland are indeed wrong. They are stunting democracy and imposing their own views by abusing their veto on gay marriage. However, this is the very same tactic used by many of the LGBT side, especially those who called for Tim Farron’s resignation.

Liberty means that no one’s personal whims can be imposed on the constitution. The benefit of this, is that we are all free to express love, hate and indifference to each other as we please, as long as that doesn’t amputate aspects of each other’s citizenship.

‘Marriage equality’, bears no resemblance to any case of emancipation.

What are the core features of a real act of emancipation? The first has to be that there is some form of social and conservative oppression. The great trick of the modern left, of course, has been to redefine ‘oppression’ to be so broad, so abstract and invisible, that it exists everywhere. But the real moments of emancipation – the freeing of slaves, the civil rights act, the legalisation of homosexuality – conversely, happened against the backdrop of identifiable crimes.

To go out and protest these crimes meant you were up against an infrastructure of repressive state violence and corruption, and this meant a direct threat to one’s physical safety and livelihood. Speaking out meant ostracisation, blacklisting, or being beaten up.

The second feature of authentic emancipation is a clear and tangible miscarriage of justice. What’s interesting about the great movements of emancipation was the fact that they involved fighting an internal contradiction between the proposed values of the state, and the way the state was actually behaving.

Today, protesters and activists are not going up against miscarriages of injustice, so much as claiming that the very structures of society are unjust. This must be treated with suspicion. It’s not enough to mouth off about ‘inherent privilege’ or contort everyday unfairness into some evidence of hidden structural inequality.

Real emancipation can only happen when real violations of basic rights have occurred. In the case of marriage, it’s not a right. So it cannot, by definition, be an issue of equality. The only question of rights would be whether people are free to declare their love to each other without fear of persecution or danger.

Yes, it is wrong to stop people from using their Christian faith to declare their love. But allowing this to happen is not a matter of human rights or justice.

The final feature of an emancipation is that it radically alters the society from a restrictive one to a free one. Can we really claim that allowing ‘equal marriage’ does this? Is there some great attitudinal shift at the heart of this issue? Are people who were once deprived of basic human dignity now tasting the fresh air of liberty?

The only people who are actively against ‘equal marriage’ are evangelicals and reactionary conservatives. These people are a laughable minority, and their views have no hope of oppressing anyone politically, or violating anyone’s human rights in a legal sense.

And yet, the social justice movements, and the triangulating politicians that feed off such movements, give the impression that the bowler-hatted 50s Tory is still the great threat, that we are still fighting forces of establishment aristocracy and Victorian conformity.

These activists need to invent an archaic establishment to fight against, and refuse to see the massive social changes that have happened since the 60s. The bowler-hatted man is dead. And the stuffy, bourgeois conservatism that was so dangerous to gay people, has been deposed.

This is the problem with the Left in general. It has been ossified, trapped in history and over-saturated with 1960s iconography, to the point where it is wildly ill-equipped to identify the real, modern battles for justice, and to see new challenges and new forms of oppression when they present themselves.

And the new establishment of the Merkels and the Camerons and Mays love this delusional kind of activism, because it acts as no real threat. As long as people mistakenly battle against an idea of the establishment that died years ago, they pose no danger to the yuppy, neoliberal, corporate globalism that is doing the real damage to people’s lives.

You can tell this is a non-issue by the feebleness of those objecting to it. The celebrations, protests and marches are completely disproportionate to the moral and political victory that is supposed to be had by making equal marriage legal.

Protest has become a lifestyle choice. Since Apple Mac’s ‘think different’ ad campaign in the late nineties, freedom-fighting has become a kind of branding, a social status symbol, rather than a moral necessity.

Essential to this neutered, narcissistic version of emancipation is the fighting of causes that have little or no impact. Nothing substantial is achieved by allowing gay people to marry in churches. Most people, gay or straight, probably get married in civil ceremonies anyway.

Virtue-signalling about ‘equal marriage’ is an easy way to give yourself a moral high-ground, but the truth is it has little to do with gay rights, gay health, or the well-being of individuals struggling against religious fascism or political persecution for their sexuality.

There is no need for barricades, no long nights starving in the flanks. There is no danger involved. It’s a false issue. A great way to make yourself seem like a revolutionary when what you are is really the worst kind of bourgeois sheep.

All the while gay people are thrown off roofs in the middle east, and the best they can hope for from their LGBT brothers and sisters in west is the signing of a few petitions and some Facebook outrage.