Monday 26 March 2012

NUC: London Particular, New Cross


Have I not written about this place before? Apparently not. I travelled here dragging a big book to read, but finding myself compelled to muse on this café instead. Last year I'd come here a lot. It's small, with one table filling the room and a couple of shelf-tables on one side, with stools. Capacity is limited and before long you're sharing space with some other hapless flaneur, reading a paper or waiting for an associate or two. The table juggles us: those in groups move to the more spacious spaces; the solitary individuals fill in the gaps. Today I am the latter.


Occasionally, conventions crumble and we lapse into conversation. Once, I was sitting at the end, by the window, and a decorative classical guitar. Despite the café being at street level, there is a stark drop out the back, and I feared for the life of the man cleaning the windows, balancing on the ledge outside. Bad things don't happen if you aren't watching, I told myself, and continued to read. On this day I met Carol, from Bermuda. I must look trustworthy because she asked me to keep an eye on her phone, which was plugged into a wall, while she disappeared for a few minutes. Keep an eye on it for what purpose? So it doesn't gets stolen. Stolen by whom? A stranger. And, what am I if not a stranger? The chance to liberate an expensive phone from a preoccupied Bermudan had at last arrived. Was I to take it? I glanced towards the door. Only a busy barista was there, rearranging pastries. Behind me, the window cleaner regained his balance and kept cleaning. My coffee was half full, as they say. I envisioned the imminent dart out the door, yanking the phone from the socket en route, laughing hysterically as I ran down the centre of the road with my prize. Perhaps I'd steal a car while I'm in the mood, and flee the country.


The Bermudan was back. She thanked me for watching her phone and took a seat on the table. Just the two of us here, overlooked by the secondary characters, the barista and window-cleaner. She introduced herself as Carol. During our conversation it materialised that she was drawing me. The brief subjection to a photograph is unnerving to me, so imagine what being drawn was like. At least it's not as accurate as a photo; that's its redeeming quality. Sadly I know no way to get in touch with Carol now.


Today, prospects of negotiating a conversation with another human seem slight. The day just doesn't seem to hold that promise. Air's second album is on. It holds memories about which I am uncertain - memories yet to become classified, but are aroused by this album like a scent transports you to a forgotten past.


Like I say, last year I came here a lot. Less so now. Maybe I'm too busy or too poor. It's £1.80 for a 'long black'. I think the coffee may have got slightly worse, or perhaps my standards have raised. Or maybe it's an off-day. I still find it a place well worthy of my time though. And the effect on the brain of this not-bad coffee, combined with the pressure of the day - which I put down to the weather and the unmanageable things in life which require endless lists, ordering and reordering, before inevitably refusing to be sorted anyway - is still, I must say, pretty remarkable.


The staff chatter and clatter their pots. The atmosphere in here is nearly at bursting point. I think if someone said something to me - 'can you pass the sugar' - the moment would be so profound, so at odds with this strange dream, it would throw me from this circulating inner conversation I am having with myself, throw me back into something like reality, and I'd break right down.

Thursday 22 March 2012

NUC: Gallery Café, Bethnal Green



Today [this was back in January] I went to Bethnal Green. Tube-hopping up from Deptford took me on the Overground, Hammersmith and City line, and the Central line. The Hammersmith and City line goes through the oldest stretch of underground railway in the world, between Farringdon and Paddington, which opened in 1863. I did not go through there today.

Instead, I went east. More history: Bethnal Green Underground Station witnessed the biggest civilian tragedy of World War Two, when a rocket was fired nearby and caused a panicked rush into the safety of the station. 172 people died as a result of being crushed in the stairwell.

I'm here for Amy's Word House, which is a spoken word night. I'd never been to one till I came here a few months ago. I always enjoy it. Tonight I'm 'doing' the sound: mics, gains, levels, speakers etc. I'm 'slightly' apprehensive. I did some sound tech things in university, and experience tells me that technological equipment in all its variety is not my friend, especially when it comes to pivotal moments when pressure is high. Tonight is going to be one of those occasions, and I'm marching into the arms of fate.

Also harking back from undergraduate university is a certain 'Katie'. She has joined us for an elderflower cordial. Chris has turned up too. He comes with nerves in tow as he will be reading out a poem tonight to a packed room. He's also got a plan for the café that we will one day open, and discussions are imminent. It's a very cold January day, and your glasses steam up upon entry to the café. That is, if you wear glasses, like me. Cool people in East London also wear glasses even if they don't need them, but they don't have lenses in them so they're OK.

It's mid-afternoon and the place is rammed. I had to commandeer a lone chair from a man with a Veggie Tempura. Amy buys me a coffee. The prices are reasonable but you pay a premium for alcohol, which is fairly typical when cafés do alcohol. It's one of those charity cafés. As far as I know they help fund local good things. I expect they make a ton of cash here, especially if the takings of the Word House are anything to go by. It's a really popular night, well worth going to. For my part, I will soon be writing a thesis on charity, so I'll leave reflections on that for another time. One steadfast criticism I will make is this: they have tablecloths. I don't like tablecloths.

Monday 12 March 2012

Collection of Reviews



Recently the good people of the Internet have colluded to get things I wrote on to their websites. These have included reviews of theatre, poetry, music, even a poetry/film and a café. Here is a list of them.

On the Fringe
Language and stand-up: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=844
Mediterranean musical: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=895
Heartfelt sibling drama: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=948
Two plays from Kingston University: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1046
Butoh Dance inspired by Artaud and The Cenci: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1100
Comic book guy stand-up: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1117
One-woman show about a troubled Blondie fan: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1130
Olympic themed musical play: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1132
One-woman show about house-sharing: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1143
Performance poetry at The Word House: http://onthefringepaper.co.uk/?p=1217


LiveMusic.fm

The Flaneur

Canary

Friday 9 March 2012

NUC: Notes, Charing Cross


Notes from Notes, the music-themed café in Charing Cross. To the left is a long bar stretching back, back, to a door which leads below where you can buy music or go to the toilet. Behind the bar smartly dressed people smile and take orders in a slightly conveyor belt-esque manner, and charge quite substantial prices for their drinks, discouraging the unemployed. Wine and olive oil are set amongst the glittering decor. At the back of the room is a space, with long tables and solitary people with laptops or newspapers. CDs on racks peer down on these folks, and are for sale - go below for that. Amongst them, a TV plays Woody Allen's Purple Rose of Cairo, which funnily enough I have only just seen quite recently. I tell this inconsequential fact to Niina, with whom I am coffeeing today; she responds with appropriate indifference.


She sits there examining her hair in the mirror, one of those mirrors that spans the wall and makes the room twice as big, and her hair twice as big. We discuss all things Finnish, and the irritations of city life. The coffee is strong and I wish I had had milk. I already had one coffee earlier and the amount of caffeine in my bloodstream is reaching tipping point. This place is one of those that strives to personalise itself and choose its clientele. The mid-thirties executive with the afternoon off, perhaps, who switches between Radio 3 and Radio 4 as he prepares his Weetabix, but can't name any of the composers and feels ambiguous about Europe. "Well obviously it's good that we didn't go in for the Euro... Having said that, I do enjoy a weekend away in Venice."


Notes is a music café, but it seems to be more of a theme than a passion. Like, it's more geared up for those who would like the idea of a music-themed café, as a kind of oasis within an emotionally cold city, rather than those who would go to a café for the music it played. How patronising of me. Notes is certainly nice, I can't say otherwise, it is peaceful. Maybe today is not the day for peace, though? Another judgement is needed, I feel, and so I will save up especially and return. In the meantime, can someone tell me which café really plays excellent music? One that really goes out of its way for it? And if it doesn't exist, can someone open it? Potential names could include: Coffee Beats, Puccini's Panini, Caféphonics, The Rolling Scones, The House of House, Gabbaguette, Café Grindcore, and Grubstep.

Monday 5 March 2012

You Can't have Your Police and Eat Them - Thoughts on police, power and privatisation.


Once again, the police are back in the spotlight. It's that contentious subject of privatisation, which gets into every pore of the public services at the moment. We have now become familiar with Conservatives advocating competition and private investment, and citing the conditions of austerity and bureaucracy to free public services from the shackles of the state and promote the pseudo-natural logic that beholds that selling off things and leaving them to the market makes them work better.


Generally, we know where we stand when it comes to the sell-off. We point to the ideologies in the Tory armoury; we point out that bureaucracy isn't inherent to state institutions and the private sphere lacks the accountability that public ownership provides; we question the ethics of creaming profits from ill people or students, and the logic of replacing state targets with business targets. We generally fight every bit of privatisation. Education, last year, met huge opposition, and inevitably happened anyway; the NHS is undergoing the same treatment. But is the standpoint which posits state ownership as the problem-solving antithesis to private ownership conducive to substantial change?


Perhaps one of Žižek's jokes can help us here. Here he is in full swing in Violence:


Under socialism, Lenin's advice to young people, his answer to what they should do, was 'learn, learn, learn.' The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, 'A wife!' while Engels, more of a bon vivant, opts for a mistress. To everyone's surprise, Lenin says, 'I'd like to have both!' Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind this austere revolutionary image? No - he explains: 'So I can tell my wife that I'm going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife...' 'And then, what do you do?' 'I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, learn!'


Aside from the old knowledge is power maxim, this tells us both to not be seduced by the existing opposition and to step back and look at the bigger picture. Perhaps our outrage is misdirected...


The privatisation of the police brings out a problem for the anti-private brigade, or, rather, it illuminates a peculiarity of the privatisation issue itself. Our impulse to condemn another privatisation initiative is put on hold when we acknowledge that the police are not the same as other institutions. The police are the ones standing before us, intimidating us, when we march and protest and shout slogans. While the teachers and nurses join us on the strike, the law prevents the police from doing so. They stand for the last line of civil defence for the state, put in place for us via the state, to preserve the state, and thus preserve us, civil society. For Walter Benjamin, the police, as an arm of the democratic state, are a 'nowhere-tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence' in our lives, operating with a form of violence which is both lawmaking and law-preserving. Police violence asserts the law when the state's legal system is insufficient in attaining the aims of the state, and in victory this violence preserves existing laws and establishes new ones. With the dispersed, self-governing power we have under the modern democracy, this self-affirming, creative violence is harder to locate than if it were wielded ruthlessly by an absolute monarchy, but this does not exonerate it from its position as guardians of existing institutions of power. We need only consider the tame justifications used for police tactics at protests, or the number of deaths in police custody and the lack of convictions for those deaths, to see how the police operate with a skewed and productive version of the law. And the suppressive force at the protest is legitimated (especially if we watch the news) due to the fear that the Hobbesian 'state of nature' ready to burst through as soon as we become complacent about our own security. While we watch the stand-off between 'thugs' and cops, we should be aware that it is the barricades around shops which show where the police's real priorities lie. And equally so at the (physically) non-violent end of the spectrum, where the media/police/state tripartite exposes to us the grease that keeps the power-machine working, capital.


So, the police is by no means safe from the two-headed monster of power and capital. It's increased privatisation exemplifies the complicity between the state and the private sphere in a manner of self-regulating security, not simply in the name of the state and its power, nor in the name of private capital and its continued accumulation, but for the neoliberal amalgamation of the two. Like the way CEOs take advisory positions in government (with the controversial appointments of A4e's Emma Harrison and Andy Coulson exposing the rule, not the exception, of the state's power/business interests) the state's privatisation of the police is a joint effort, not for or against the state or the private sphere as such, but for the continued protection of the newly defined ruling classes. This elite, increasingly indiscernible if we focus on categories of gender, race, private or public, and the traditional distinction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, are, as David Harvey shows, a class determined by neoliberal economics, and re-establishes the lines of class division in its most contemporary form.


So how to we express ourselves when the threat of police privatisation arises? On the one hand we want to save things from the invisible hand of the market as it grabs for everything in sight, but on the other hand we recognise the problematic position that the police currently holds. Furthermore, whilst appreciating this problematic position, we hope the police to be nearby to protect our houses when the next round of riots breaks out, and tackle the bad guys to the ground. Abolishment of some kind of protective force is just not something society can take seriously. So we want the police, or something like it, but do we want it in its current form, being haggled for by two sides of the same coin? Accountability is often something we often fall back on. We want the police to be accountable, and privatisation inhibits this. So do we call for the nationalisation of everything - education, healthcare, energy, transport, banks...? Some would say yes, but this prospect would ignore and only encourage the tendency to be ruled by a narrow business-oriented technocratic elite. Instead, we need to conceive of a distinction beyond the private and public and turn the notion of accountability on its head, no longer relying on 'public ownership' for it. Equally so for the other institutions we fear we are losing to the market. Instead, as Georges Sorel says, control of the means of production enables the shift in the balance of power. The neoliberal capitalist elite blend the state and the market, conflating the existing categories of public and private instead of simply squeezing out the public. What they increasingly leave behind, or indeed create as the wealth gaps widen, is a new form of masses, and with this comes the Sorelian clarity of class distinction. 'The middle class is a luxury that capitalism can no longer afford,' said John Gray, and, to slightly amend the words of Marx, they have nothing to lose but their consumerist possessions. The middle is being 'squeezed', as they say, or more accurately, it is being relocated. Some go up, some go down. The police, given this distinction, are protectors of both the state and capital, and neither nationalisation nor privatisation changes this. So do we have them or eat them? Do we fight for the institution as it stands or let it be swallowed by the neoliberal program? We eat, digest, and shit out something new.


Friday 2 March 2012

NUC: Truly Scrumptious, Camden



To Camden we travelled, plectrum in hand, for band practice. New drummer in our cohort, enthusiasm was high, prospects were good, weather was bad, and the rain was trickling in where Chris' guitar case's zip has broken. Well, Chris, if you will buy your guitar accessories from Argos... Once, I now recall, I bought a MP3 player from Argos which turned out to be a dud, a fake MP3 player maybe used in the display cabinet, with buttons that didn't click. I returned it and they would only give me vouchers to be spent there within twelve days. These twelve days passed by without me returning. I'm sick n tired of this type of shit - who's with me?? It must be riot season soon...

In the lobby at the Roundhouse, we waited for Chris who had the necessary clearance codes for the studio. We've been here before and the rules always seem to change. Whatever logic they have to decide their rehearsal room policy confounds us. The situation presents itself now as follows: Chris is a member and can have three guest passes over the year. Two, according to the computer, have already been used, meaning one is left. With one pass but three other band members present, we can't go in. However, only a few weeks ago we had six people in there in one go and before that we had five. (And Chris comes here on other occasions to use the space with his theatre company.) The price also changes. Previously it was £5 overall, for five people in there for five hours. When Jacob turned up on a previous occasion, he was asked to pay £5 himself but then, upon enquiring why this should be, was told not to worry about it. Now we are told that we each individually have to pay the same amount for the number of hours spent, even though we can't go in because of the aforementioned clause relating to guest passes, which prevents us getting through the second door anyway.

Dumfounded, dejected and dismissed, we decamped and disembarked to some other destination. This became Truly Scrumptious, which is a greasy spoon in smart clothes. Turnover is quick, hurried all-day breakfasts for busy north London people dining alone. Sausages supply the local fragrance. Peckish is a word that comes to mind but I stick with an Americano. It's £1.50. It has quaint seaside paintings on the wall, in total contrast with the damp Camden outside. You wouldn't come here to read fine literature and ponder philosophical questions, and you wouldn't bring your parents here to show them what Camden was all about, but the place serves a purpose, and seems to satisfy those in need of that, and without descending into greasy spoon decadence.

The four of us sit on cold aluminium chairs. We apologise to Jane the drummer for buggering up the first session with her. Jacob, on the other hand, has undergone some kind of psychic mutation, for which we hold the English breakfast tea responsible, and has convinced himself to walk to Primrose Hill in the rain. Chris and I will go to my house, get drunk and record ourselves singing in keys which are not very flattering to our limited vocal ranges.