THE UPSTAIRS TWATS

The twats upstairs who frequently keep my missus awake with random banging (we often speculate about what they're doing up there, I have the theory that, Robert Crumb-like, he rides her around like a prize race horse whilst, from that vantage slamming doors and cupboards like anyone's business) have surpassed themselves tonight. They came in from the pub with some mates - so far so normal- and put on music - again, normal. This would not bother me as I can sleep through anything; but what they chose to play was, I assume, Now That's What I Call Music 2007  - the "indie" version thereof, if such a thing exists.

What, quite apart from their shit taste in music, that really pissed me off however, was their singing along to whatever moronic choruses from the Kaiser Chiefs et al. The exuberant howling was something that even I could not countenance. It reminded me of a pub about 1997, I think, full of rugby shirted morons drooling away, arms around each other, to the whole of "What's the story.." by Oasis. They were engaged in a circlejerk of laddish bonhomie, but also singing at the whole rest of the pub - as if to say "this is it. We're having a great time, look at us; this is what a Friday night is all about".

I have nothing whatsoever against drunkenness. I have nothing whatsoever against singing, inebriated or otherwise...But that kind of thing is so fucking high street. The togetherness of the singalong chorus so designed. Leisure for those who have to grab it roughly, allowing themselves so little...I don't know, this is not well expressed - but they were singing along to Paul Weller for fuck's sake - not The Jam, Paul Weller! Unforgiveable.

So I'm glad that I heard the muffled, angry buzz of their doorbell not so long ago. One of the other neighbours went to complain, and it didn't have to be me.

WALK AND PERFORMANCE TODAY

Today at 4:00pm. Meet outside Hanbury Hall. From there we shall have a look at some bits of Shoreditch and Hoxton, ending up in Shoreditch Park. The original idea was to circumnavigate Hackney's Alcohol Control Zones - but Hackney stole a march on me and have turned the whole borough into a zone, with very little fanfare - well, none at all, I completely missed that one.

So, I have had to re-think things a little. If the whole borough is a zone, but it is clearly not enforced, what is it?

Councillor Alan Laing says in the comments to the Hackney Post article linked above "...this is not a ban on public drinking. This point has been made throughout the process and through the consultation. The council and the local police have expressly stated that it is not a ban on public drinking..." If it is not that, what is it?

It seems to me like Zizek's description of totalitarian regimes as regimes of tolerance. In such a state the law, if stringently applied, would make anyone guilty of something. So the state benevolently does not enforce the whole of the law, or not all the time. They keep it there just in case. Remarkable generosity. it looks like an extension of the de-normalisation strategy that is used in public health campaigns, previously against smoking, now against alcohol use - also latterly against recieving state benefits or living in council housing.

The problem seems to be not so much with alcohol as the people who are percieved to be the users of it. Hence, alcohol control areas frequently contain licensed premises, often with tables outside, as well as benches, walls or whatever other accommodation that street drinkers might find conducive. However, the licensed premises and their clientel are unlikely to receive the attentions of the local constabulary. 

If alcohol is so dangerous and corrosive to manners, health and morals why not ban it altogether? There are already laws that have been on the books for some generations against assault, threatening behaviour and public urination. This measure looks excessive because it is aimed at prevention, a drastically illiberal aim. Despite the advertisements exhorting us to "Drink Responsibly", there is apparently a class of people who cannot be trusted to do so. For their own good, they must be discouraged from drinking at all. Incidentally, I have often wondered about "responsible" drinking - responsible to whom? Purely by coincidence, the irresponsible class against whom pre-emptive measures are to be taken are those who drink on the street because pubs are too expensive. The poor should not be on the street at all, let alone congregating in groups.

Ironically, the designation of an alcohol control zone is DPP, (discussed here in some council minutes) a "Designated Public Place". That these places were public beforehand - streets, parks, benches - is not the point. The were providing a space for the wrong sort of public. The tautological nomenclature is necessary, the capital p "Public" is not the same entity as that negative designation of small p public space ie. not privately owned, open to all without the specifying the characteristics of "all". The "Public" who will use these spaces is brought into being by that designation. The spaces that they will inhabit are already demarcated and shaped by the law, an un-enforced ban. This is a sober, law-abiding, hard-working polity, the "hard working, law-abiding Britons/families" who politicians and columnists never tire of conscripting into whatever illiberal fantasy they are flogging.

Anyway, time is getting away from me, I have to leave very soon. Suffice it to say that I have re-thought the walk as a whole in light of this development and have moved from physical to psycho-geography as an approach. This seems to make sense as we are looking at something without edges, an undefined space - the space of the ban. Because it is not necessarily enforced it has no specific content, so everything exists under the ban. What can be done is to look at some tropes that cut across this contentless authoritarianism.

So, I have come up with, liquids, sewers - the possible derivation of Shoreditch, "sewer-ditch" - and holy wells, Holywell street. Liquids flow, they reflect, and constantly leak from wherever they are meant to be. The other two sites are the Curtain Theatre and specifically the character of Falstaff, and John Frankland's boulder sculpture in Shoreditch Park. Anyway, will post more on this later.

 

ANTI-DESIGN FESTIVAL 2

Was a very fun night. McGowan and I attempted to foment a riot in the audience, and the Psychick Self Defenders did their Velvet Underground/Drunk and nasty Hawkwind thing. There was a bear as well. The whole thing was deliberately ritualistic confrontational; McGowan's attempt to split the audience in two and get them to fight each other, and the band, then me, screaming threats and imprecations over a background that throbbed and droned like "Sister Ray." A good night for all. I have posted a video of the performance here, I appear somewhere towards the middle.

ANTI DESIGN FESTIVAL

Tonight I perform at the Anti-Design Festival with Mark McGowan and Rex Nemo and the Psychic Self-Defenders. As is usual, but perhaps more so than usual, I have no clue what I will be talking about. There will be some sort of reference to football hooliganism - or at least that's what Mark's piece will be. I think that I will be touching on this, largely due to the EDL's chant, borrowed from the terraces: "You're not English any more". The "any more" part is telling; you were English, but now you're not. However, you are still included in the category English, as "Un-English"; an entirely different matter from "You're not English". It is a clear example of the state of exception in spatial practice.

McGowan's recent video plays with a similar disjunction, Irish music accompanying scenes of what one assumes are English (possibly nationalist) hooligans disporting themselves.

The festival itself is a manifestation of a clapped out aesthetic, full of "punk" references and "interactive", if not "relational" elements that needs a design context to look subversive rather than simply tired.

I'm intrigued by the statement on the website that claims that the festival is "a response to 25 years of cultural deep-freeze". I can't work out where the twenty five years comes from - why not 13? Election of New Labour, or 31 - the Tories? Or, in my personal opinion -21 - fall of the Berlin Wall? I suspect that twenty five would be about the average age for someone graduating from an art or design M.A at this time, and roughly half the age of a good few of the participants, but I don't know what this might mean.

THIS IS ENGLAND

I liked Shane Meadow's film largely for its performances - the kid was especially good - but was less convinced by the "period detail" (music, dad killed in Falklands) that quite a lot of the critics enthused about. I'm also more than a little ambivalent about skinheads, anyway; I know there were anti-racist skins around, but there weren't any where I grew up. What seemed to get a lot of people excited when the film came out was its apparently shocking premise that the working class were not all knuckle dragging xenophobes.

Anyway, to the series - which follows the characters from the film a few years on. I haven't yet watched the second part, so maybe what I'm going to say will be proved redundant. Brendan O'Neill in Spiked has already pointed out what is probably the most telling sequence of part one:

"One of the most striking things about the first episode is how people-free the settings were. This was most clear in the scenes in the hospital...Utterly bereft of other patients, doctors and nurses, the hospital becomes a playground for the good skins to muck about in...having a wheelchair race...or to resolve their personal differences in..."

There are no other people. The whole point about youth subcultures is that they were oppositional, you defined yourself by your tribe and your tribe was defined against not just other tribes but society in general. Meadow's skins exist in a bubble, they are not in opposition to anything. In this, it is absolutely unfaithful to the 1980's in particular and to the meaning of youth cults in general. However, in this it is faithful to the 21st century.

O'Neill makes the comparison to "Friends", which I think is pretty accurate. That enormously successful sitcom was a quintissential product of the "Happy '90's", its protagonists occupied a de-politicised (one assumed that they were vaguely liberal/left)and largely depopulated void. Their semi-incestuous inter-relationships were posited not just as a defense against the world, they were the world.

SHOCK HORROR - THE POPE (or his aides) STILL CATHOLIC

This in the Guardian.

OUT-PATIENTS

There is a street - I see a street - a long street; lined with sick beds. People visit, murmuring good wishes, delivering flowers and fruit. But the patients are swapped around during the night, every night. The friends and relatives deliver their food and solicitude to a different person each day. No one seems to mind, or notice.

Uniformed nurses parade along the street several times a day, dispensing drugs and taking temperatures in no particular order.

Patient's notes are clipped to the end of each bed; but, of course, the notes do not often correspond to the occupant. Details of each condition, medication and treatment are considered interchangeable. The patients do not mind this- winks of complicity are frequently exchanged between adjacent beds - because they all consider themselves incurable; therefore, they are. It makes logical sense that the treatment for another's malady has as much chance of success as their own. Their nightly shuffling from bed to bed, executed by silent, masked orderlies facilitates this process.

The doctors make their rounds weekly. They look at the patients' notes and ask a few questions. To the question "And how are you feeling now?" the patients invariably reply "Quite poorly, today." The doctors ask "- and your symptoms?" To which the only reply is a shrug; neither party knows what these symptoms are, the occupant of the bed because the notes clipped thereon are not theirs, and the doctors because they have only given the notes a cursory glance.

It is not unknown for a nurse or an orderly to find themselves occupying a bed as a patient. This might happen to the doctors, too, but they are taken elsewhere; perhaps to a special street reserved just for them. In the case of nurses and orderlies, a particular protocol is observed. Both parties - new patient and their ex-colleagues - will pretend that they never knew each other. In response to the mechanical questions, they will reply "quite poorly, today". After being swapped from bed to bed a few times as is customary, patient and staff have forgotten that they ever knew each other.