Sex, Booze And Guns

Children who drink alcoholic milk called Kefir are much less likely to get food allergies, says the Society of Chemical Industry. The fermented cow-juice inhibits the allergen specific antibody Immunoglobulin E (IgE). Reading this oddly reminded me of the conversation I had with The Mighty P.P. about decency.

I was recalling how in the first dot com boom, in 1998, a venture-capitalised US start up, using the domain www.www.com (it's no longer there) approached me to run their musical European operations. They had (don't they always) BIG plans to be the next big "content" channel. They offered me $50k p.a., a really nice place to live in California, shares in the company, and I was tempted. I was single, I was just coming out of my first sabbatical, and I was up for a change. This could have been it, so I researched the company and looked at what was on offer.

Pretty soon I realised a couple of things about this company which raised significant doubts about its long-term prospects. First, it was a put-together, top-down, formulaic affair, constructed by people with little or no knowledge of culture. This was evident by the fact that my would-be boss - in charge of the US - was possessed of one single claim to fame, viz, that he had sold Real Media to the US military. I searched in vain for some indication that he had editorial, journalistic or entertainment business credentials but found none.

Second, as I skimmed through the few deals they had in place, it was obvious that they were aiming this cultural offering right at the very narrowest, most conservative audience within mainstream America, and that this was not going to convince anyone outside of these communities, and especially not in Europe, used to art house radicalism and regular revolutions of the wheel which defy censorship. I remember having the nipple conversation with the lovely woman who was trying to recruit me.

Me: "The problem is censorship. For a European, a nipple or a bare bottom is quite normal and natural. In the States, it's indecency. How much leeway will I be allowed here?"

Her: "How do you mean? Are we talking pornography here?"

Me: "Um, no. Just the nipple. Not hard-core pornography. You know, like in paintings?

Her: "No I don't think we have those kinds of paintings here."

Me: "Ummm... you do. Maybe you haven't seen them? Paintings by Titian, for example, or any from the renaissance... you know, often they have religious or classical themes."

Her: "And these paintings show sex?"

Me: "No, just naked bodies."

Her: "I'm not sure about that."

Me: "It's just that we don't have any problem with these kinds of images. They have been part of our culture for hundreds of years and we can understand the difference between them and pornography."

Her: "I'm not sure that's a view we can take."

I decided not to take the job.

The Mighty P.P. is a British parent. He's fairly tolerant but he won't take shit, as we say in these parts. When it comes to drawing the line, he will do, but he rarely needs to - his kids seem pretty balanced. So, he was in the States, staying with some friends, and they were discussing alcohol. He said that he allowed his 13 year old to drink half a pint of cider (fermented apples) at a summer music festival. His American hosts were appalled by this - "Don't you know you can be locked up for administering alcohol or drugs to a minor?" - and so he ran through the arguments that supervised exposure is better than a ban, which fuels unguided experimentation, but they were having none of it.

As he told his tale, I recall being allowed the same indulgence as a child and smiled at the memory. I recalled my Italian friends calmly giving very watered-down wine to their five year old, just to make sure it was no big deal and that being left out didn't encourage over-curiosity. It had worked for them, they explained. Wine was food, was it not? A part of life which must be understood to be properly enjoyed.

So, The Mighty P.P. continued, he was staying with this perfectly nice, normal US family, and while they were chatting about these cultural differences, he heard sudden repeated shots and became alarmed. "Don't worry, that's just Tommy," he was reassured. "Tommy! Come here and show your AK47." Turned out that one of their two kids had a replica AK47 BB gun, and the other, a model Uzi. The kids, he was told, were encouraged to use these, and every so often, taken to a large canyon nearby, and given the real thing, with real bullets, just to make sure they could use guns properly. As the shots resounded and richocheted, a police car would sometimes turn up to check them out. Seeing a happy, gun-slinging, all-American family in action, the cop would simply say, "Be safe now!" and drive off.

Here lies an acute blindness on the part of the Great American Public, and some bizarre and twisted values. Sex, or more particularly, the public celebration of sexuality, is wrong and bad, and along with alcohol, drugs, gambling, part of the gushing font of liberal evil - but violence is absolutely wonderful. It's an embedded, condoned, feted part of the American psyche, this love of guns, and it goes to the very top - NRA being incredibly well-organised lobbyists - and down to the deepest roots of US family life.

I recall the murder rate on the Canadian side of the border being a hell of a lot lower than the American, with the same amount of guns available to both. I don't recall any children being shot to death in a schoolhouse by a nipple.

So complete is the conservative victory over the American mind, you'd think the 60s revolution, make love, not war, never happened.

It Feels Good When I Stop

"Why do you bang your head against the wall?"
"It feels good when I stop".

I always got this joke, even as a very young child, when infants like myself were aghast at the concept of self-inflicted pain and couldn't move past the mental-patient image to the punchline beyond. It was mostly fun being a savvy seven year old, but other times, my schadenfreude would cause concern among adults.

"Miss, he's saying horrible things!" whinged and whimpered a young classmate to the useless Australian replacement teacher. "He says he'll put pins in my head and scratch my brain!"

The teacher was often just as shocked by the details of the warped suggestions I was making as I tested the power of words almost randomly - certainly with no malice - on the subjects of my experimentation.

Once I was taken out of class and found myself facing the Headmistress, who was a lovely woman. She seemed tired as she looked across at me, standing on the other side of her desk, keeping my face bland so as not to appear too pleased with myself.

She interrogated me gently to probe the reasons for my shocking language, and I feigned innocence. I did not intend to harm their delicate psyches, Miss. I was only joking.

"Not everyone shares your sense of humour, Deek," she said, frowning, wondering what adult environment I was being exposed to which would produce such a variety of colourful and unpleasant scenes I was conjuring up to play across the ever-ready TV screen minds of my young colleagues.

I didn't know enough at that stage to refer her to my medical notes and reassure her that this was not early-stage psychosis, but actually post-traumatic stress disorder from my parents' divorce, with the added crunch of real adult brainkiller drugs.

All children go through phases where they test the boundaries of their power; early on I realised mine would never be in brute strength or physical performance, but words it was going to be.

For my own amusement, I would think of the most excruciating thing I could, tortures, situations of pain and terror, and then find the words to quickly impart the information to my unwilling, unsuspecting victims. I avoided being punched by appearing to be offering them a secret thrill. Some girls (particularly girls, who being more advanced would appreciate all the more) having received the sick shock, squirmed and cringed, ran off to try to rid themselves of the evil thought that now had a hold of their mind, would return with friends, to observe them as I spoke the disruptive magic formulae.



I was immune, of course. I had stopped banging my head, and it felt wonderful.

Back in March 2007, I wrote:

I've not been able to write much recently... how many blog posts start like that? Not Blog of Funk, which has managed a consistent 3.26 posts per week since June 2004, and that average doesn't take into account the other blogs I've written along the way. Not that I am blowing my own prolific trumpet. I have on several occasions wondered why the hell I am still blogging... what pleasure do I still get from this activity, which once provided me with such reward?

I used to feel connected through blogging; to myself, as I checked into my journal, reviewing and remarking upon things present and past; to others, as reactions came in to something I had written. But as podcasting and blogging have become more central to work, the freedoms of expression and to simply be able to speak my mind and be myself have diminished, and these have been replaced by a growing sense of responsibility which runs counter to art, and to maintain verbal output comes to seem a necessity rather than a natural product of my interests and enquiries into the substance of life. Leaving it alone for a while is always an option.

Someone once defined Web 2.0 as internet which relies on Google, and when I deconstructed that, actually it is scarily true, and I do not feel good about it at all.

In the words of Spike Milligan, just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they are not after me. Google is far more insidious than you think and this is not a joke - just like the Borg, they will assimilate you. They don't just want to own ideas (Google Books), mechanisms of income (AdWords, Checkout) and the planet we inhabit (Google Earth) our streets and homes (Street View) - they want to own our future. With Chrome, they even released a web browser which de facto owned your intellectual property. For similar reasons, I resisted Microsoft as broadly and as consistently as possible ever since starting to use computers, to my great benefit.

So in the same way that I fear not telling you this short tale of a childhood long since departed, because I am not seeking approval or attempting to comfort you, I not only know that I am going to stop writing this blog, but I now have a clear vision and reason for stopping, which has been nagging away at me over the past two years.

With our collective future in general hanging precariously in the balance, I've decided to do things differently. I am not going to disappear, at least not in that "where's he gone?" way, I'm just changing my modus operandum.

This is going to be fun.

Mabon: The Beginning Of Everything

It's coming up to that wonderful time once more, the Autumn Equinox, another Pagan holy day stolen by the Christians and turned into Harvest Festival. Mabon was the son of Mordon, the Goddess of the earth, the Pagan festival celebrates his birth; and of course, this is John Keats' season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Day and night are of equal measure. Here in the north, it's getting dark at 8pm and there is a freshness to the mornings, even though the afternoons can still turn your skin brown.

I love this sketch of Keats; it gives him a romantic intensity and reminds me of his awful tubercular death.

The coming of Autumn always brings out in me a deeply introspective side, the balance to the energy which we experience as we anticipate winter and all our rural collective memories tell us to fix the roof and fill the cellar with turnips, apples and potatoes. I still possess notebooks full of whimsy, produced by the season which all romantics love the most, because, as Patrick Keiller pointed out to me, it is the beginning of everything.

John Keats - To Autumn

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.


II

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

III

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.