Layer 489 . . . Bluesy Roots, Bad As Me, Tom Waits, Dogs' Lives, The Wire, The Hole, Faith in the City, and the St Pauls' Protests

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It's A Dog's Life

I'm back on dog duty, picking up doggie dumps on a daily basis. Coincidentally I came across this is the New York Times -

Dogs have a blissful appreciation for the simple pleasures in life. Like four-legged Zen masters, they grasp the importance of living in the moment, and along with being loyal and protective, can teach humans a lot.

Perhaps, that is, if their masters stopped setting such an anthropomorphized agenda and simply let them be dogs. Not that the canines are complaining. In many ways, a dog's life has never been so lavishly pampered, emotionally elevated or sartorially splendid.

In America alone, the pet industry pulled in $55 billion last year, despite a shaky economy that has led to a rise in animal abandonment. For those lucky dogs that still have a home, The Times reported, the perks can include rain slickers and sweaters fit for a fashion runway; gourmet dinners of pheasant and pan-seared duck; organic treats of pumpkin and yak milk; antidepressants, psychic readers and medical insurance.

Canines troubled by flatulence might benefit from the $28 "Fart & Away" aromatherapy candle. And neutered males can hope for a pair of $1,000 Neuticals, prosthetic testicles designed to help "your pet to retain his natural look and self esteem" following "the trauma associated with altering." For another $1,000 or more, a deceased animal can be freeze-dried and mummified.

That's $55 BILLION. Only in America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/arts/music/tom-waitss-new-album-bad-as-me.html

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Here's a guy who represents the good stuff in the US of A.

Bad As Me


Tom Waits Reclaims His Bluesy Roots


by Jon Pareles 


Adrenaline and restlessness course through “Bad as Me”, Tom Waits’s new album.


At 61 Mr. Waits is acclaimed as an American marvel: a songwriter who can be smart and primal, raucous and meticulous, ethereal and earthy, bleak and comical. He has sung about drunks, tramps, carnies and killers, spinning tall tales and reeling off free-associations that somehow add up; he has also shown a vulnerable side in tender, unironic love songs. 


It’s an album of love songs, cackling contemplations of death and, most often, songs about hitting the road. “I just want to get lost,” he declares over a blurred but robust rockabilly backbeat in “Get Lost.”


There are half a dozen blues stomps, with none other than Keith Richards joining in the guitar scuffles with David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos.


Mr. Waits is cherished by his generation of musicians, as skillful songwriter and uncompromising outsider. “I identify with those guys that draw with Tabasco sauce on cardboard with a nail, outsider guys,” he said. Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Rod Stewart and lately Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss on the Grammy-winning album “Raising Sand”) are among the many who have covered Mr. Waits’s songs. Yet his audience, he noted, is “not just old-timers like me listening to old-timers like me.”


When Mr. Waits emerged in the 1970s, he had clearly studied Beat writers, jazz pioneers and Delta bluesmen. Now indie-rockers study him, emulating not only his rasp-and-growl vocals and spiky arrangements, but also his self-guided career path. He has never been beholden to airplay and — far more adamantly than younger bands — shuns deals with advertisers, whom he has successfully sued when they have tried to use Waits sound-alikes.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/arts/music/tom-waitss-new-album-bad-as-me.html

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Checking out the Waits album on Spotify, I remembered he did a vocal on the the album of music (and voices) from "The Wire", on a track called "Way Down In The Hole", which Tom wrote back in in 1987. Each season of The Wire used a different vocalist or band to play and sing the song, which was the title track for the entire series.

Lots of brilliant, edgy stuff on the rest of the album.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ymBaAsSqDE&feature=fvwrel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Way_Down_in_the_Hole

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzIuUW9VUr0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVDMSndC8as&feature=related


Sound bites from the album of The Wire -

"Why would anyone ever want to leave Baltimore? That's what I'm askin'."

"We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."

"You need to start looking at this world in a new fuckin' light. Start thinkin' about this shit like grown fuckin' men. Not some niggas off the fuckin corner. You heard me."

"Sell the shit. Make the profit. Later for that gangsta bullshit."

If you really want to know about gangs and drug culture, don't waste too much time with Top Boy. More of the same on Channel 4 last night. Not great. Not really very good.

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Some more points of view from the Guardian:

As our own Patrick Kingsley discovered spending a night in the camp last week, their message can't be boiled down to a 10-word marching song. "They're not interested," he wrote, "in making petty demands on a system they see as irreconcilably flawed. If anything, the camp itself is their demand, and their solution: the stab at an alternative society that at least aims to operate without hierarchy, and with full, participatory democracy. And to be fair, in its small way, it kind of works."

"There is no such thing as all the answers. The journalists do not have all the answers, no one does." Others quickly rallied to the who-needs-answers? flag. "It's pretty obvious what people want first off," declared hotairhead, "to show how damn angry and frustrated they are with the status quo and how much they want change. It will take a long time, longer even than a winter's camping on St Paul's cobbles, but this is as good a place to start as any."

"Finally, a short word in response to Ian Martin's inspired nostalgic rant in Monday's G2, which concluded, "So yeah, I'm a reactionary socialist. I want national pride in our compassion back. I want public ownership back. This country's been swindled by neo-liberalism – Thatcher and her property boom, the lying shit Blair and his 'whatever works'. I demand a refund."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/oct/27/readers-room-responses-to-g2

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St Paul's protests: faith in the City

Whether or not the old song is actually sung, 'which side are you on?' is the question that every protest poses

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/nov/01/occupy-london-london

Having pursued ethical economics ever since the crash, an interest refreshed in a Financial Times article today, Rowan Williams is now well placed to get involved with the Occupy London debates. The protesters, meanwhile, now face a Conservative home secretary and the sub-democratic Corporation of London ranged against them. And all parties are a little clearer about which side they are on.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/nov/01/st-pauls-seeks-new-direction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/blog/2011/nov/02/occupy-london-live-coverage-of-st-paul-s-protests

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/nov/02/st-pauls-protests-legal-land
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Layer 488 . . . Top Boys, Dealers, Secateurs, Pavements, Cities, Teenagers, Gangs, Psychopaths, Intelligences, Profits, Crimes and Hackney

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Reclaim The Pavements

You can say what you like about capitalism, globalisation, bankers and the like, but my pet hate at the moment is people who let their trees and shrubs grow unchecked and thereby block our pavements - sidewalks if you prefer. Even partial blocking is intolerable.

I was thinking about this yesterday, and had a sudden realisation. Why wait for the local Council to take these idiots to task and send them a warning letter? We're supposed to be a Big Society, aren't we? Clearly direct action is the answer.

Therefore I'm proposing a Reclaim The Pavements movement, whose members carry a pair of secateurs in their pocket or their bag and simply snip off the bits that grow across boundary walls and fences, which annoy passers-by.

To begin with, it shouldn't be necessary to do a wholesale pruning job. Just taking  off a few bits of privet or buddleia or whatever ought to send the right message to the idle sod who can't be bothered to keep their garden in check, especially if the debris is left lying on the ground as a mark of shame. Seeing the cuttings and the debris (and the snipped shrubs) would also give encouragement to fellow RTP activists, who would know they're not alone.

But what if the offender is shameless, or has gone away, or is too old and feeble and poor to do the pruning themselves? In that case, I reckon we should carry a standard supermarket plastic bag and fill it with snippings, prior to disposing of the bag in a dustbin or recycling bin - or possibly just leaving the bag in the offender's garden.

Job done.

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Top Boy

Last night saw the start of a new series on Channel 4 -

A thrilling and raw four-part drama about young lives lived on the edge in east London - an honest and gripping rendition of inner-city drug and gang culture

It's worth taking a look at the Top Boy website, and maybe watching it on 4oD if you missed it.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/top-boy

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/top-boy-reviewed-by-hackney-residents-panel

Personally I find this kind of stuff almost unwatchable - like a hyped-up and even nastier version of EastEnders - but it's better to have writers and programme makers dealing with these sorts of subjects than just ignoring them. Entertainment it isn't. (I feel the same way about "We Need To Talk About Kevin" - it's important to think about psychopaths and the nature of evil, but I personally don't want to see the film.)

There's plenty of evil on show in Top Boy. One of the nastier highlights concerned the use of a pair of secateurs to cut off the finger of a rival drug dealer in order to demonstrate to a drug supplier (baron!) that the new boy on the block is capable of such snipping - such ruthless and psychopathic violence. There were plenty of guns and knives on show and in use as well.

I guess the point of Top Boy is to show how young kids become corrupted and ruined by gang culture. We already know well enough that gang culture exists, and gangs run the trade in drugs in our cities and towns. We certainly need to do a lot more to protect the children in our neighbourhoods - to give them decent supervision, support and housing would be a start. To lift their lives out of poverty would also help.

By themselves, however, these things are not enough. There's a brand new block of flats near where I live, which is now populated by at least a couple of dozen teenagers and their families. I see these kids hanging about on the streets. Yesterday one of them actually lifted his bike from the position where it was lying on the pavement to allow me to walk past their group. "All right, boss?"  he said as I passed. "Thanks," I said.

Politeness, respect, consideration, civility. To recognise you're blocking the pavement, and then do something about it.

We need to talk about the Kevins of this world - the psychopaths as well as the mere teenagers - and we need to address their actual needs, if our societies are to function and thrive. There's no point in just telling  them what to do - it's in the nature of a 'normal' teenager to be a rebel and a non-conformist. It's in the nature of a psychopath to just do whatever they're going to do, regardless of the feelings or wellbeing of those they damage.

Psychopaths clearly have no 'better nature' - they have no capacity for empathy, and their concern is only for themselves. They seek only power, pleasure and personal gain. With teenagers it's different, and they're capable of developing personal, social, emotional and spiritual intelligence, if we only care to show them how . . . if we only know how to educate them. Preferably beginning a long way before they even get to teen age. How come we're not doing it? - or not doing it well enough, in the majority of cases.

As for Hackney - bottom of the bloody 'league table' for the speedy adoption of kids according to news bulletins yesterday - Top Boy could be yet more bad publicity. [Is it necessarily a bad thing to take time over the proper placement of kids with adoptive parents? Maybe the 'bottom' in this case could actually be the top? I speak as someone who likes to take time to do things properly and thoroughly.]

Although an article in Sunday's Observer which pre-viewed Top Boy banged on about Hackney, it wasn't particularly noticeable from the actual programme that it was set in Hackney. The estates and the streets could have been in almost any of our cities or districts - obviously the poorer parts.

For those of us who live in Hackney, we won't recognise, for the most part, the characters and the activities depicted in Top Boy. Day to Day life in most parts of Clapton, Dalston, De Beauvoir, Stoke Newington, Stamford Hill, etc, is decent, civilised, courteous and polite. People of all backgrounds, skin colour, religions and ethnicities don't just 'tolerate' one another - they enjoy living together and befriending one another, even when life is hard and it's a struggle to survive.

That said, I fear for what may happen in the years ahead, as council budgets are squeezed ever harder, as provision for the poor and the needy becomes ever scarcer. I still have strong memories of life under the Tories last time around, as mass unemployment hit the poorer communities that already had little enough, and people found it ever harder to buy decent food, clothes and household items. People who have nothing have nothing to lose - as Bob Dylan reminded us all those years ago.

Last time around teenagers found new ways of making money - such as mugging, 'steaming', and stealing car stereos. There was also a huge increase in tried and tested ways of getting money, such as burglary and shoplifting. In recent years these forms of criminal activity have seen a marked decline - in Hackney and elsewhere.

Meanwhile corporate kleptocracy increases at a phenominal rate. Yesterday Barclays announced massive multi-billion pound profits for the year so far. And this is a bank that contributed hugely to the financial crisis that's still continuing. What's more, the profits announced yesterday weren't from merchant banking - from the banks' casino operations. These are  profits from the 'High Street' - from ordinary punters, like you and me. Do they think that people still don't realise they're being ripped off by the City, by the banking cartel? Those profits are OUR money. As are all their bale-out funds, which saved the entire financial system from collapse.

The only people they're not making profits from are the already-rich (who do their banking differently, let's say) and from those who have no money to begin with.

More of this in the next blog.

Incidentally - the main fault with Top Boy is that the actors - as good as they are - all look too nice. They look like decent, pleasant, intelligent individuals - which of course is exactly what they are. Just like the majority of people out on the streets - like those who cleaned up Clarence Road after the riot. Just like the majority of those who took part in the Pembury/Clarence Road riot, in fact, and haven't been involved in violence or wrong-doing since the riot took place.
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