Inspectors of the Heart

Apropos of nothing at all, here’s a poem I wrote a few years back. I was walking up St John’s Hill, past the hairdressers, when a siren cut through the moment and everything seemed to stop:

Inspectors of the Heart

A violent sound puts streets in shock -
cars stop to let the siren past.
It almost seems that nothing else is there;
just lights, that wailing and a fifth gear howl
that hurtles by, then up the road and on.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

Uniforms are knives to crowds,
slicing through them to arrest
someone maybe wanted, maybe not.
Pedestrians avert their eyes and freeze
resisting implication in this mess.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

They’ve gone, have left a space
where something trusting used to be.
Abusing stop and search they’ve shown us all
that they’ll invade us as and when they need;
remembered charges clog the muted streets.

Lord, let sirens quiet and silent traffic flow;
protect us from inspectors of the heart.

Prog folk metal mayhem

Well, a new day’s here and with it the new Chrome Hoof album, Pre-Emptive False Rapture. I’ve just started it playing it, and it’s delivering on everything that the reviews have promised. That is, it sounds like a metal band with a disco obsession playing Pentangle covers in a circle of Hell themed around 70s concept albums, which ironically is in many ways my definition of Heaven.

The Hoof are a ferocious live act; I saw them at Christmas, sharing a stage with the mighty Circulus. They represented darkness; Circulus were light. At the end of the evening, both bands merged to become *activates echo sound effect* HOOFULUS and gave us double headed folk metal Ragnarok, as the Hoof’s giant demon puppet capered around the hall, music merged with sword dancing on stage, and the audience went nuts.

No particular point in writing about this, beyond the fact that Circulus and Chrome Hoof are wonderful bands that everyone should hear. Tho’ come to think of it I’ve always been very inspired by Circulus.

A key part of their musical mission has always been to spread simple, uncomplicated joy. It’s very easy to get very hung up on the complexities and subtleties of creativity; and indeed, Circulus have spooky and interesting depths going on beneath the joyous prog-medieval mayhem.

But sometimes you’ve just got to stand back and say, ‘Isn’t it so wonderful that we’re all here just now, and we can all get together and do THIS!!!!’ – and that’s what they’ve reminded me to say to myself all the time, every time I’ve seen them play.

Prog horror

Normal service is officially on hold today. So, instead of the usual platitudes, here’s some groovy prog-comedy from the ever magnificent Matt Berry - some prog joy that sounds oddly like the gig I went to last night.

Horror followers will of course know MB as ‘Sanch’ from cult horror visionary Garth Marenghi’s deathless ‘Darkplace’ TV series - just as a reminder, I’ve dropped in the titles from that too. Who can forget the deathless tragi-horror of Skipper the Eye Child? Or the bleak curse of the Highlands? Or the searing romantic trauma of the broccoli from beyond time?

Enjoy, pilgrims…

Normal service will be resumed…

…as soon as possible, I was just going to type, as for various reasons I didn’t feel much like blogging today. But thinking about that phrase - and, oddly, ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ - made me realise that there’s much to unpack in it.

I love ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Partially for Yoda; partially for the fantastically depressing, open ending, which left me shell shocked when I was 11; but mostly for the fact that the entire plot hinges on the fact that the Millenium Falcon breaks down.

Han Solo’s malfunctioning hyperdrive is the broken engine that drives the action of the whole. That breakdown is very significant; it literalises the fact that all drama comes from disruption of one sort or another.

Whether it’s Godot not arriving, Oedipus sleeping with his mum, or the Silver Surfer announcing Galactus’ imminent plans to eat the Earth, plot starts when the expected, relied upon order stops.

‘Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible’ flags up that kind of moment. Disruption has happened, and the breakdown has to be dealt with. Normal service no longer exists.

Of course, chances are that normality will be restored - but it’ll be a new normality, and it won’t come until there’s been a little drama, because ultimately drama is the action either of restoration, or of the failure to restore.

X Factories

I used to quite enjoy the X-Factor (UK’s Pop Idol equivalent) audition round; the combination of the deluded, the talentless, the clearly taking-the-piss and the odd gem was just wonderful.

I think the first time I saw it was about when I was running a cabaret night down in Brixton – as a rule, I’d have booked the acts that the judges rejected most directly, because they tended to be the most eccentrically individual ones.

I didn’t have too much of a problem with judge harshness. They seemed to be pretty selective with their responses, and there always seemed to be an effective good cop / bad cop balance going on. So, when I turned on this year’s X Factor the other day, I thought I’d get half an hour or so of enjoyable mayhem.

Instead, I got bullying. Pre-selected acts were marched through to be shredded, directly and brutally. There was a coarseness and absolute lack of empathy I hadn’t seen before, combined with a lack of any sort of balance on the judging panel itself. I watched about five minutes, then turned over.

I’m sure I’m not the first blogger to rant about judge brutality on the X-Factor, and I certainly won’t be the last. But I suspect I’ll be one of the few to link it to the ethical problems implicit in 3 act narrative structure.

Let me explain. As I’m sure you know, three act narrative structure is the dominant modern model for building narratives. If you follow the classic Hollywood version of it, you use Act 1 to establish motivation (‘Luke wants to rescue Princess Leia’), Act 2 to frustrate achievement of that motivation (‘Luke can’t rescue her because of Darth Vader, the Death Star, etc’) and Act 3 to show what happens when that motivation is achieved (‘Luke blows up the Death Star, defeats Darth Vader, and rescues PL’).

Implicit in that structure is a very basic binary opposition – good vs evil. At the start of the story, somebody is shown to have a ‘good’ motivation. The action of the story is generated as the ‘good’ motivation is frustrated by ‘evil’ people or events. The protagonist’s triumph comes when he finally and absolutely overcomes ‘evil’, and his / her little moral universe is thus purged and rendered exclusively ‘good’.

What’s that got to do with the X-Factor? Well, within that structure only the good succeed and only the evil fail. Success itself becomes a basis on which to reach a full and final moral judgement on any given character. If you fail, you fail because you’re evil – you’re worth less than the protagonist, in a very real sense.

And that’s the morality that’s infected the X-Factor. Successful people judge failed people – and, because success gives automatic moral justification, they’re free to inflict any kind of humiliation on those in front of them. The failed X-Factor singers aren’t just bad singers; they’re flawed people, evil, representing the kind of weakness and failure that any true hero can and must leave behind.

And of course, in the X-Factor narrative, the true heroes do leave this perceived mire behind, rising up into another world of one-on-one engagement with Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh and the rest.

Subsequent episodes become a drama of detection; individual contestants are found out as impostors, not potential winners, but rather people who stand in the way of the final winner’s ascension. Deemed impure, they’re booted out until only unfrustrated goodness remains.

But that’s utter bollocks. The show isn’t a ritual of purification; rather, it’s a ritual of commodification, as the contestants are ruthlessly stripped back to reveal the most commercial performers. And ‘commercial’ as a category is very limited, aiming ruthlessly for that which is closest to the already successful. It demands repetition, not originality; homogeneity, not personality.

And that reflects back on three act narrative structure, too. Far from achieving ‘good’, its most simple (and therefore most common - for we live in a world that privileges the simple) variants achieve ‘smoothed over’, ‘polished’. Anything awkward is banished; anything complex is broken down into neat categories, until we’re left in a landscape that’s both a moral and an emotional pablum.

It’s a key problem of our modern culture that that pablum is taken to represent absolute moral truths, rather than a passing entertainment. Much as I didn’t enjoy the X-Factor, I have to admit that it shows us back to ourselves very effectively; bullying the weak from a position of absolute righteousness, and using the extent of that bullying as a measure of our virtue.

Flattering amnesia

John Clute makes a fascinating point in the current Interzone – ‘[contemporary planetary] horror is what happens when amnesia fails’. He goes on to reference W. G. Sebald, who alas I haven’t read, so of course I fell to thinking about H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe – and, of course, amnesia itself.

What’s fascinating about the amnesia comment is its implicit definition of the human condition. As people, it makes us forgetters of a disturbing truth we once knew very well. Human-ness – with all its positive qualities – isn’t a fundamental feature of ourselves, of our moral universe. It’s an escapist construct, designed to comfort and protect.

Given this, truth becomes implicitly Lovecraftian. To seek it out is, by definition, a debasing experience. Where, historically, pursuit of truth has been seen as a transcendent activity, it has now become a descendent, devolutionary one. To uncover the truth is to find out that you are in fact much less than you thought you were.

Lovecraft had this down cold. His truth seekers either go mad, retreat into willed ignorance, or just discover that they aren’t in fact human after all. Read from a non-humanist standpoint, the only sane people in his universe are the cultists. If truth breaks any higher good, then you might as well just have fun (and make sure that you’re either the first or the last to be eaten by Elder Gods etc, according to preference and temperament).

By contrast, Poe still has a sense of morality to him. Dig into Lovecraft, and you end up in an existential void; dig into Poe, and you’re condemning murderers, being shocked by necromancers and feeling contempt for swingers. Poe’s world is horrific, but that horror is an aberration, not an innate quality. It’s a place where uncovering truth is cathartic, not caustic. For him it’s the crime, not the context, that’s an act of amnesia.

Poe’s a 19th Century writer, Lovecraft a 20th Century one. We’re in the 21st Century now, and I can’t help wondering what the 21st Century definition of horror will be. I suspect Clute will be able to help there; when I’ve got a minute, I think I’ll be picking up his recent book, ‘The Darkening Garden: a Short Lexicon of Horror’, an apparently fascinating contribution to horror criticism.

But for the moment, I’m not sure what I’d define it as. The real question to ask is, I suppose, where do we find our sense of cultural security at this point in time? Horror subverts security. But that question leads to despair. Poe subverted moral order. Lovecraft subverted flattering illusions of moral order. We remain a culture that finds security in illusion. Where do you go from there?

‘50% Homme. 50% Dieu. 100% Sauveur.’

This week’s conversations about Gnosticism made me remember a slightly, erm, punchier take on the Messiah. So, from the early 90s, here’s the continental take on it all. Stallone stars in ‘Jesus II - The Return’, from French comedy heroes ‘Les Inconnus’. Oh, and this version is subtitled…

Dreaming nations

Well, a fascinating couple of days at the conference, not least for some very interesting insights into the sometimes wildly fantasised views that the American and British political classes have about their respective countries, and their place in the world.

First of all, the US. Advertising maven Keith Reinhardt works in various ways with the US business community to improve America’s standing in the world. He’s very aware of the issues that American foreign policy has created for people’s perception of the US; but his response to those issues was oddly schizophrenic.

His awareness that the US could only regain its popularity by finding a more humble, co-operative and role to play in world politics was laudable. But the genuine constructiveness of this approach was undermined by a very strong sense that America is the natural world leading culture.

Reinhardt seemed to be incapable of seeing the US as just another country, neither morally inferior, nor morally superior, to anywhere else. Rather, the issue as he implicitly framed it was how America could use its undoubted and impregnable superiority to keep on leading the world, but in a humbler way – something of an oxymoron, but there you go.

The muted (but very real) triumphalism of his presentation was clearly tailored for an American audience; the mostly European gathering he spoke to was, as far as I could make out, more than a little underwhelmed. I found his fantasies of moral leadership disturbing. Living at one remove from reality can only be destructive, as several hundred thousand dead and several million displaced Iraqis would seem to demonstrate.

And then, there was British fantasising. Various backbench MPs pontificated about the UK, describing a country I’ve never visited. In their homeland, cycling old maids would represent the cutting edge of radical activity; its single finest cultural achievement would no doubt be Prince Charles’ Duchy Originals brand.

America’s cultural fantasising at least has the virtue of great expansiveness. Our ruling class, by contrast, would seem to harbour an entirely inwards looking, retrospective world view – one that makes an existential threat of any sort of contact with modernity.

Thinking about it, I suppose these two attitudes represent two opposing ways by which excessive fantasising can trap you. One externalises an unreal world that exists only to be changed by the heroic, imagined self; the other dreams up an embodiment of stasis, and then heroically battles change to protect it. In both cases, there’s a retreat from reality, and thus from the possibility of real achievement, real learning and real, constructive evolution.

Tiger city

Well, a short one today as I was dining at the conference last night (in the Stationer’s Hall, with some Ethiopian diplomats and the bloke who’s job it is to make sure that Parma Ham is really Parma Ham - fascinating evening after a fascinating day!) and now have an early start to get to it.

So, here’s a very groovy animation to be going on with:

Gnosis, meatware, cinema and the Cathars

Well, I’m off to a conference today and tomorrow about branding nations – should be fascinating, might well post about it – so an early morning post, written on Sunday. It’s today for me, yesterday for you, so one or other of us is travelling in time. Whoah…

Anyone, I was pottering round the flat wondering what to talk about, when I noticed my copy of Theodore Roszak’s ‘Flicker’. Now that’s quite a book; it’s actually more interesting than Marrakesh, which I found out when I went to Marrakesh and couldn’t stop reading it. So what’s so great about it?

Well, it’s the only Gnostic conspiracy thriller that conclusively demonstrates that cinema was invented by the Cathars in the Fourteenth Century while also rewriting the modern history of cult movie making that you’ll ever need to read. Put simply, it rocks like a bastard, and everyone should have a copy. Go buy now!

OK, now you’ve been to Amazon, or your alternate book seller of choice, let’s ponder why it’s so engaging. It’s not just the taut, gripping writing or the fascinating conspiracy that’s unveiled – it’s the book’s roots in Gnostic thinking, which reflects back in so many interesting ways on how we live in the world now.

Gnosticism was an early variant of Christianity, suppressed (I think) in the 5^th Century BC or thereabouts. The Gnostics radically recast Christian cosmology, understanding this universe to be the flawed creation of the Demiurge, a kind of fallen sub-god who mistook his own partial divinity for absolute god-ness. His mistake trapped the sparks of light that were our eternal selves in the flesh.

Hence, this flawed world – essentially, it’s the physical expression of an almost-almighty egomaniac’s wildly self-indulgent power trip. Our basic mission in life is to transcend the meat he’s trapped us in and return to eternity, leaving his flawed creation behind us. Of course, that’s an incredibly reductive and simplistic take on Gnosticism – but as a working definition, it’ll do.

What’s interesting is the extent to which Western popular culture is now built on an implicitly Gnostic worldview. The flawed material world / ideal conceptual world duality exists everywhere. It’s most evident online; as Erik Davis points out in ‘Techgnosis’, virtuality’s desire to escape meatspace is a directly Gnostic attitude.

But it’s also evident in our broader culture. My conference tomorrow is one part of it. Brands exist within an idealised world, one that points up our daily imperfections and promises escape from them. They’re simultaneously unreal, and more real, than anything that’s physically present around us; platonic ideals that we aspire to reach but never quite can.

That sense of an unreachable, perfect world that – if only we were good enough – we could reach pervades our world. It’s present everywhere, from our shared hunger for celebrity lifestyles to our destructive political preferences for a dream of the Middle East.

Though looking back over that, I can’t help thinking that I’m being unfair to the Gnostics. Back in the day, they felt that achievement of the Pleroma was an escape from illusion, not an escape into it – the reverse of the examples I’ve given above. So perhaps our real problem is not our desire to transcend but rather our inability to do so, as we remain as tangled as ever in the great false nets that the Demiurge – that most lethal of failed gods – has thrown out to perpetually hold us back.