Of late I’ve more or less accepted that I’m unqualified to write even lazy cultural theory.
Much to my frustration, and after realising I was applying for a Phd I couldn’t do, I’ve come to accept that I’ll never get a job in teaching or writing about something that interests me so much.
In part this is because I didn’t earnestly want to. Try as I did, I could never get my head around turning something that feels so real, raw, and ‘lived in’ into a profession that I can switch off from, and not get visually fucked up by at times.
Equally I was borderline illiterate until my 20s. Apart from map books of the urban areas of Britain, I’d only read one book before turning 18. This was ‘Jurassic Park’, the kids’ version, about 50 pages long, and full of photos from the film.
In Laura Grace Ford’s words (I think?) maybe I am also ‘always yearning for a time that has just eluded us’ as I see images of urban architecture that still existed around the time of the financial crash 15 years ago, but before each subsequent crisis, fracturing and dislocating our grasp on a continuity of such moments.
I could have looked at the nearby cities where much more redevelopment has happened, but there’s way enough in my home town, where all the memories still overwhelm, like they re-materialise, oozing out of the walls. Where the faces, the expressions are oh-so familiar; a specific hardened look almost unique to such a space, transcending the eras of late Blairism and the schizoid urban face-lifts of the Tory era.
...I’m working on a life-long project I’ll never get totally right, especially when it comes to this town, where…
Hi. The purpose of this activity isn’t to prove that ‘things were so much better in the past’, I don’t want to encourage the creation of a rose-tinted perception of the near past. But I think ‘reality checks’ are important, not just for individuals, but also for societies. Mainly because ‘reality’ is a constantly changing thing, but we can have a perception of reality being ‘fixed’, be it a perception both created by, and within institutions of power, but also reproduced by anybody and everybody.
When I read the now ‘classic’ cultural theory book ‘Capitalist Realism’ by Mark Fisher, sat in a cafe in 2010, it was almost identical to a moment in George Orwell’s 1984, where the protagonist finds himself reading a book that explains back reality back to him as he knew he knew it but could NOT articulate. I’d just read the first chapter; a sobering reminder of how ‘reality’ can shift whilst appearing to have remained the same.
Fisher compares the 2005 Alfonso Cuarón film ‘The Children of Men’ to the then current ‘war on terror’. The film uses the idea of a humanity which can no longer have children, as the symbol for a world that has lost all hope, but upkeeps a weird ‘keep calm and carry on’ normality, as “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”
“What is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism… …democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden, but, wisely, the film downplays all this. For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)“
Now, many many comparisons have since been made between our world and the film as we encroach upon 2025, the year in which it was set. Despite whether the war of terror is still ongoing, or whether it has transformed into a set of new indefinite emergency states, I set up this ‘activity’ (?), in what I see as the spirit of the ‘Capitalist Realism’ book; which is to neither give in to despair, submit to hopelessness, nor nostalgia, but to most importantly not to succumb to the state of the ‘amnesiac’ – somebody who has no historical compass, no sense of being in a world that was different, and could be different again.
I’d like this activity to be a way of asking ourselves to put ourselves back into 2010 (if we’re old enough!) and say “would this have shocked me at the time?”
Anyway, the exercise itself is simple, and like many aspects of the online work our collective have been doing in the past 3 years, it still remains, potentially forever delayed, but always on the way to becoming something, in spirit.
The Retro Bar invites anyone to anonymously participate in a socially-engaged artwork which will be exhibited in ‘A Radical Redemption‘, a solo show in early 2022 by the collective member, and artist in his own right,John Ledger.
We are currently inviting anybody to send the stories of their problems, their challenges that persist, and tell us about their most intangible glimpses of what they feel every day life ‘could’ and maybe ‘should’ be like in the 21st century.
Do you feel burnt out, but with little power to change your daily circumstances?
Do you feel guilt, shame, like you’re harbouring destructive behaviours that seem to repeat themselves in day to day life?
Do you struggle to find space and place that allows you to be at one with yourself?
Please be as honest as you can (!), as your voice will be totally anonymous, but please also allow yourself a little space to dream ‘the impossible’; tell us those wishful musings that you get when you are at your most vulnerable; perhaps in a state of semi sleep, or a state of being unable to sleep. We all have states in which we are vulnerable, where we, even if fleetingly, open up to possibilities that are liberated from our “lived in” every day experiences.
What if you woke up and every fixed certainty of the daily grind had melted into thin air?
The Retro Bar invites anyone to anonymously participate in a socially-engaged artwork which will be exhibited in ‘A Radical Redemption‘, a solo show in early 2022 by the collective member, and artist in his own right,John Ledger.
We are currently inviting anybody to send the stories of their problems, their challenges that persist, and tell us about their most intangible glimpses of what they feel every day life ‘could’ and maybe ‘should’ be like in the 21st century.
Do you feel burnt out, but with little power to change your daily circumstances?
Do you feel guilt, shame, like you’re harbouring destructive behaviours that seem to repeat themselves in day to day life?
Do you struggle to find space and place that allows you to be at one with yourself?
Please be as honest as you can (!), as your voice will be totally anonymous, but please also allow yourself a little space to dream ‘the impossible’; tell us those wishful musings that you get when you are at your most vulnerable; perhaps in a state of semi sleep, or a state of being unable to sleep. We all have states in which we are vulnerable, where we, even if fleetingly, open up to possibilities that are liberated from our “lived in” every day experiences.
What if you woke up and every fixed certainty of the daily grind had melted into thin air?
Don’t throw out the baby along with the baby in charge.
There’s many reasons why Wetherspoons is bad. If it’s how poorly they pay their staff, how they can outcompete smaller establishments through price wars, the fact that their owner tries to push a specific angle of propaganda that tars all of its customers with the same political brush, or simply the fact that they are a huge company in a time when the last thing any sane person could do is praise the existent of huge growth-based companies.
Yet I’m reminded of a similar point made by Mark Fisher (aka K-Punk) in ‘a post capitalist desire’ which posthumously, has grown into one of his most important essays. In a nutshell Fisher’s argument that the the left focuses too much on ‘anti-capitalism’, rather than producing new forms of desire that transcend capitalist relations, then closes in on a common assumption that people who are anti-capitalist shouldn’t go to Starbucks. Fisher looks at our contemporary urban landscape, it’s lack of genuine public space, and turns this ideas on its head, suggesting that the desire that Starbucks caters for isn’t a desire for good coffee (he says it tastes crap), but our desire for communism. He means that Starbucks, like Costa and Nero, provide a space that is neither home nor work, where one can be in a space that is quasi-public, or an urban commons in a hyper capitalist landscape.
To some extent I think this is the fundamental reason we shouldn’t be so critical of the popularity of Wetherspoons. Not only has it recreated a commonplace familiarity that is neither home nor work, which has kind of replaced the gap left after the demise of working mens clubs, Wetherspoons is also the kind of quasi common place where you can bump into anyone, or no-one if you want to be by yourself. Unlike many pubs that in a contemporary craze for ‘realness’ create a space that feels implicitly specific to tastes and types, you’re most likely to come across a much broader demographic in a Wetherspoons, whilst not feeling obliged, out of the specificities, to engage with them. Wetherspoons is a great place to be anonymous in an age of competitive individualism, where sometimes you’d rather just be in a public space but not have to be anyone to anyone.
On a trivial note, I’m a big fan of carpets too.
Carpets are great. Many contemporary spaces, that focus on either being ‘edgy’, ‘slique’ or ‘alternative’ seem to adore hard floors. Not only does it make it incredibly hard to hear people sat across the table from you, when pots and pans are clanking in the kitchen, but from September to May they are occupied by people who are too polite or proud to admit that they are freezing from their thighs downwards.
I worked for years at a front of house point in a busy gallery with a stone floor. Not only do I think its ambience has damaged my ears far more than playing loud music on earphones has. But I learned to love carpeted spaces for how much easier it was to tell somebody something once, and not have to repeat it, two or three times. One of the plus points of Wetherspoons is that it’s convenience for meeting people for conversation is doubled up by the fact that you’re more likely to be able to hear them. And not be freezing at the same time.
But fundamentally, I guess what it boils down to is are Wetherspoons bad because they are big and kind of generic? Or is it because what Wetherspoons provides has been captured by an aggressively competitive company in a time where we are sick of such arrangements, that treats its staff poorly, and is run in the interests of one person’s ego, and not a collective one? I believe it’s the latter, I believe Wetherspoons like the internet 2.0 is a good example of the ‘capture’, or privatisation of the desire for the commons.
I’d much rather see the continuation of these organisations, albeit organised totally differently, than town centres full of small connoisseur pubs. I admit this comes from somebody who feels the need for spaces, not just for drinking, but to be in, think in, read in, even create in, that aren’t work or home, but I believe it’s a right essential to 21st century living – for what that’s worth now.
No, it’s not an hypothetical transformation of the M25 London orbital into a railway, it’s an orbital railway network that circulates the Peak District, or South Pennines, and here’s why.
OK, as somebody who’s fascination with urban geography, its flows, how power interests shape it, and how it in turn shapes culture (and cultural divisions) has rarely left informal conversation, my disclaimer is that this isn’t at all serious. However, the infrastructural problems that beset this densely populated country have also been complicit in the making and (temporary) unmaking of this very artist-led collective – so, why not, on this page, throw a few flippant ‘what if’s into the air – you never know what might catch on.
To begin with, I’m not in a place to give a well-researched overview of the problem of England’s (and by extension the other countries that are dragged along by it) infrastructural imbalances. Yet, through years of urban meandering, weary confusion over the nature of life in provincial towns, and post-industrial settlements now homes for suburban commuters, I’ve certainly developed my home-made overview of Britain’s built-up spread, and how it behaves.
Perhaps around here, in the former coal mining heartlands of Yorkshire, where the industrial past has been swallowed up by the ‘pre-industrial look’ that preceded it, we can more directly begin to see a problem predating industry, when the majority of English people were rural peasantry. Many of the largest cities outside London have had a renaissance in recent decades, a support in regenerating their civic pride and economy, most notably Liverpool and Manchester. Yet it still seems that the reciprocal relationship of power interests, infrastructure, and, on a most noticeable level, the self-importance of places, still means that the rest of England is just that; an afterthought; a kind of large-scale industrial accident. And it somehow feels a uniquely English problem, when you begin to think about the former city states of Europe, and that many of those countries have numerous important cities.
Without even going into the dynamics at play in Greater Manchester Andy Burnham’s stand off with the Tory Government, and Sheffield City Region mayor Dan Jarvis’s’ near-enough capitulation to the government’s implement of tiers during this pandemic (the former, showing a growing confidence of Manchester, whilst the latter showing just how defanged post-industrial Yorkshire has become since the Battle of Orgreave; disclaimer, I’m purposely personifying large areas of the country here), the pandemic has certainly shown this infrastructural prejudice in full light.
I really just wanted to focus on the mad rush at St Pancras last night, after news of tier 4 restrictions, in a quasi-Roland Barthes style, looking at the ‘mythologies’ of London, and ‘Londoners’ that were playing out in that footage on TV and social media. Despite the more formal myth that Londoners have it better than Northerners being so boringly obviously incorrect that it isn’t worth having to explain it; London and ‘Londoners’ carry a mythology that dominates the rest of life in England, if not Wales and Scotland too. Within those words, there is an whole cultural narrative that haunts the infrastructural mess of this country. To be a ‘londoner’ (whether born there or not, in fact more so if you’ve moved there), means to ‘be something’ in way that someone in Hull, Leeds, Stoke, Sheffield, Nottingham cannot (even being a Mancunian is some way off). The mythology of ‘Londoner’s fleeing St Pancras, (in-spite of the social media outrage at a potential ‘super-spread’) is one that, unpacked, reveals signifiers relating to successfulness, importance, not to mention the ‘Blitz Spirit’ the ‘heroism’ of being a ‘Londoner’; going home for Christmas to your family in, when you live and work in London, is something that turns heads, unlike “so and so down the road who works 2 miles away from where he was born”.
Of course, behind a myth there is always a reality, and the reality is that most people in London don’t have it better than anyone else, and are just trying to get from one day to the next like the rest of us at the moment. But there is also a reality to a myth, and this reality has a direct impact on the infrastructure for ‘the rest of England’. So, in a playful, yet serious manner, and not one that idly disregards environmental destruction, I propose ‘H2-O (High Speed Orbital)’, a railway orbital, that follows the densely populated ring of the West Midlands, the North West, West/South Yorkshire and the East Midlands. The ring connects a section of England that, although less concentrated than the London sprawl, rivals it for population, and rivals it for size. The only major different is that it is an inversion of the M25 orbital. Because HS-O circulates an area of large hills (the Peak District, South Pennines) which is largely rural. This would hypothetically turn the Peak District into the a huge city park for the North and Midlands.
I guess, however, even such a flippantly suggestive blog needs has some environmental accountability. My argument for HS-O would be that the current infrastructure, it’s dysfunctions (and of course our excessive working hours – another thing to have been put under further scrutiny during this pandemic) is far more harmful than an infrastructural rebalance that would only intend to serve a pre-existing population and urban spread. I hate the violent disregard of ripping 300 year old old oak trees down, but my main opposition to HS2 is that it seems to be an acceleration of our problems, divisions, that already beset this country.
A resting place, somewhere to nest is important in these times. It also should be a place of safety and sanctuary. This nest is empty, and to all intents an purposes, abandoned by its makers.
The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe 