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Eric is Awake

The Anonymous Citizen

Notes from a fleshy tube of chemicals in UK Inc.

Go Buy an Eric

Ana Mendieta and the Pitfalls of Clichéd Conversation

7/30/2013

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“Speak clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.” Cicero

You know, at the start of some conversations, where they are going to go.  As if following a well-worn track down a path you have travelled far too many times, you find yourself unable to stop putting one foot in front of the other down the highway to a place you have seen before and did not care for. Those conversational cul-de-sacs you disdain as the destination of intellectual featherweights with off-the-peg opinions on every subject. All the harder to accept when you see the path opened by others and fail to resist waltzing in yourself. You take the bait and you go there, even though alarm bells ring in your head and some small voice whispers in your ear, ‘Shut up. You have borrowed someone else’s clothes and dressed up in them even though they are full of holes and stink of laziness’. 

In an age of perpetual digital din, where maintaining an interlocutor’s interest above their smartphone is an achievement, the art of genuine conversation, an exploration of wit or ideas that provoke and stimulate, is almost impossible. In fact, the intellectual rigour Coleridge or Hume applied to such an extent that they held salons entranced is now expended on simply finding some small gap in which to place a half-baked observation or Twitter derived witticism.

But although the growth of communications technology exacerbates the difficulties, this has always been one of the eternal verities since we progressed from prehistoric grunt to Wildean epigram. The avoidance of the mundane, the repetition of a thought that appears ubiquitous but has not been analysed, remains a daily intellectual battle that fences constantly with convention and politeness.

Quentin Crisp observed that if you apply the avoidance of clichéd conversation, then you are defined by it. Fewer people tax you with them and do not expect the usual empty infelicities from you. ‘Nobody ever talks to me about the weather’ opined the Englishman from New York. So very un-English.

I speak as an arch exponent, a past and present offender, not as a reformed dullard whose every utterance is an aphorism, every riposte a devastating intellectual thrust. Back in the eighties, a grubby invitation to throw a cliché party was the subject of modern art. The very fact that it was labelled ‘modern’ art implied the disapproval of the man on the Clapham Omnibus. And we all like to be regarded as him, don’t we? Look in your heart and ask yourself whether you have ever started a conversation with a disavowal of your contribution before you even belch it out. ‘I’m only a layman, but…, I’m just an ordinary bloke, but…’ as if being alive and not at the centre of every subject gives you a right to weight your argument with a built in withdrawal mechanism, ready to press the negate button as soon as your inelegant theory is assailed by an impudent fact.

I went to Rome for the first time early in 1985 and visited an American screenwriter called Stephen Geller whose masterly adaptation of Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ won the Jury prize at Cannes in 1972 and is set to be unjustly eclipsed by Charlie Kaufman’s remake in 2015.

Steve arranged for my wife and I to stay in a small hotel close to the Pantheon in a small room with a roof terrace at the top of a long staircase where Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward always resided when visiting the city. It overlooked another roof terrace belonging to the apartment of Gore Vidal that was ringed with tiny bay trees. It was summer, and no doubt we English remarked upon the weather as if we were discovering it for the first time.

Steve’s apartment was at the top of a stunning 17th century house located in the historic via Beatrice Cenci, between "Campo dè Fiori" and the Piazza Navona. We were invited to dinner and sat drinking 20 year old grappa which I was unable to distinguish from grappa made the previous Tuesday.

Just before we were to sit down at the table, a telephone call and a ring on the buzzer heralded the arrival of a Cuban fireball called Ana Mendieta. She was short, lithe, beautiful and drunk as a skunk. Wait, we are trying to avoid clichés here. She was a glittering anchovy marinated in perfumed spirit, wriggling and flashing in the shallows before us, just out of reach. And drunk as a skunk.

I found out later she was a performance artist, sculptor, painter and video artist who had made her name with ‘body art’, reclining naked in landscapes covered in mud, stones, branches or feathers. One startling video work sees her holding the jerking body of a decapitated chicken as the blood spurts across her belly and groin until it hangs, drained and inert after the frenetic death throes pulsing through her scarlet hands. In fact, I came to know that much of her work somehow touched upon the violence, abuse and objectification of women.

That day, she showed us a catalogue of her exhibition of ‘art objects’ - sculptures of clay and earth arranged or thrown on the ground and highly coloured. She sat between my wife and I at dinner and supplemented her earlier consumption with some wine as she chattered animatedly in a scandalising fashion that was both beguiling and confusing.

I learnt that she and her sister had been sent to the States by her parents from Havana to escape Castro’s regime and had spent the first years in refugee camps before being fostered in Iowa. Her father had been imprisoned for his involvement in the Bay of Pigs debacle that so nearly wiped out the planet before I was even born.

I was 24 years old and ill-equipped for most conversations, let alone ones on modern art. But the path had been opened by Ana and I walked blindly in.

Although Equivalent VIII, usually referred to as "The Bricks", was bought by The Tate Gallery from minimalist artist Carl Andre in 1972, it was only noticed by the Sunday Times and the Daily Mirror (‘What a load of rubbish’) in 1976 when an article debased and derided the purchase of such a work with taxpayer’s funds and ensured this perspective dominated all conversations on the value of minimalist or conceptual art to this day.

The exhibit comprises one-hundred-and-twenty fire bricks, arranged in two layers, in a six-by-ten rectangle. Primed with my off-the-peg opinion, I understood that Andre had not constructed the work himself but had sent it to the gallery in a packing case with each brick labelled and accompanied by a diagram of how they should be placed.

I speculated in what I imagined to be a waggish manner on what would have happened if the curators had inadvertently misplaced a brick. Would the work then be regarded as valueless or could he sue the gallery for producing its own plagiarised limited edition of his work? The man on the Clapham Omnibus brayed his disdain, bolstered with all the authority of a memory of a conversation with someone who had actually read the article or seen the work.

There was an uncomfortable silence before Steve, intensely amused said quietly, ‘Ana has just got married to Carl Andre.’ I reached for some more grappa, not caring if it was older or younger than me and my dumb mouth.

The conversation moved on and I felt perhaps I had been forgiven when I felt Ana’s hand under the table moving up my leg and resting companionably on my upper thigh. Afterwards I discovered that she was doing the same with her other hand to my wife, so perhaps affection rather than absolution was on her mind.

After dinner, she offered to drive us back in her battered Volkswagen, but reluctant as I was to say goodbye to the lively life-affirming sensuality of La Mendieta, I didn’t want to be wrapped around a bollard. I kissed her cheek and whispered an apology. ‘De nada, kid’ she said and smiled.

In September, back in London, a tiny square of text in the London Evening Standard stated baldly that Carl Andre had been arrested for the murder of his 36 year old wife Ana Mendieta who had fallen 34 floors to her death from the balcony of the Greenwich Village apartment they shared. Sounds of an argument had been heard just before and several friends remarked on Ana’s fear of heights.

Andre was tried and acquitted in 1988 in a controversial trial which still reverberates today with some saying Ana was volatile and prone to suicidal thoughts and others saying Carl was the OJ of the art world.

Either way, all I could think about was how much life and vitality she exuded and how my only response to all that was a mundane cliché of a conversation on a warm and gilded Roman night.

Andre is, as I write, 77 years old and says in interview that his mind has been destroyed by alcohol but still entrances with his conversation. Ana and he certainly both drank a fair amount on the night of her death. Both were passionate artists and volatile spirits whose conversations, I can imagine, were not often beset by cliché.

The trial turned up a poem of Carl’s that was considered significant at the time.

The ways of love were
sometime my revenge when
I was wronged by something
done or said & she stood
naked by the window waiting
to be struck perhaps where
her white breasts were red


No one knows what happened the night Ana fell, but I’m guessing neither of them was guilty of discussing the weather.



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The Friendliest and Most Subversive Hotel in London

7/27/2013

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     It was called the Portman Court Hotel. 28-30 Seymour Street in London consisted of two terraced houses knocked together. It had unbearably creaky floors, four flights of stairs and no lift. It was convenient for Hyde Park and it had a blue plaque on the wall that informed guests with good knees and a taste for bohemia that it had once been the home of nonsense poet Edward Lear.

It is a hole in the ground now. Razed and reduced to rubble, a new iron frame fills the gap, waiting for more memories to move in. Perhaps when the new building is completed they will replace the blue plaque, but there will be nothing to mark the spot in the building, appropriately underground, where anti-apartheid warriors fought a clandestine battle against the South African government, the South African Bureau for State Security, MI5 and the British Government.

The hotel was owned by Chris de Broglio who was born in Mauritius but went to Durban, South Africa to study accountancy where he became South African Weightlifting Champion from 1950 to 1962 and trained, illegally, with black athletes in the gym he had set up in his garage.

He worked for an airline  in Johannesburg, a position that allowed him some freedom to help  other dissidents to leave the country and to maintain contacts and communications on behalf of the ANC. He never actually became a member of the organisation, as he disagreed with some of their tactics and because he knew it would draw attention to his activity. Alas he finally did draw attention and had to leave with his family very suddenly in 1964 and eventually washed up in London where he took over the lease of a hotel in a quiet street in the Marble Arch district of London’s West End.

It was here that guests from around the world experienced the peculiar rackety charm of the Portman Court. If they were lucky and passed muster, they would be invited to epic three to four hour lunches cooked by Chris in the basement kitchen, the old dolls-eye switchboard in reception switched to emit an ear piercing alarm when a call came from one of the 31 rooms or from outside.

Alternatively reception and the switchboard would be left in the charge of my mother (the manager) or sometimes, me, the teenage denizen of the basement flat. To be honest, the ear-piercing alarm would be on duty more often than I. But every week, without fail, the shady gentleman of MI5 would practice their inadequate tradecraft and come wandering in enquiring about a room we both knew they would never occupy, their eyes darting around, trying to catch sight of the various people disappearing through the door to the basement rooms. It never occurred to them that although they were working in rotation, we were not and we came to know their faces and roughly the times they would choose to visit. Perhaps they just didn’t care.

For behind the bohemian bonhomie and the expert cuisine of Chris de Broglio, in a basement office beneath Edward Lear’s blue plaque, lay the headquarters of SAN-ROC, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee formed in South Africa by the dissident poet Dennis Brutus,  John Harris and fellow weightlifter Reg Hlongwane in October 1962 and established in London by Chris in 1966.

Over the next few years SAN-ROC played a major part in getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games, helped with the Stop the Seventy Tour’s disruptions of the South African Rugby team’s 25 match tour of the British Isles, enlisted Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe to highlight the sports boycott, organised a boycott of the Miss World competition and generally campaigned to ensure that South Africa was excluded from all international sporting events. It was no wonder our clandestine gentlemen were so interested in the likes of Peter Hain, Manny Brown, Breyten Breytenbach, Archbishop Trevor Huddlestone and many others descending the stairs to the seditious basement of the Portman Court Hotel. 


In August 1966 Dennis Brutus was allowed to leave South Africa on an Exit Permit and joined Chris de Broglio in London. Together with Reg Hlongwane, their three men team intensified their action. SAN-ROC met with FIFA delegates in London, travelled to the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica, attended the IAAF congress in Budapest, the Weightlifting Congress in Berlin, Inaugural meeting of the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa (SCSA) at Bamako, the IOC meeting in Teheran in 1967. At that meeting it was decided to send a three-man delegation to South Africa. This Commission composed of Lord Killanin, Judge Ademola of Nigeria and Reg Alexander of Kenya. Their report which was presented to the 1968 IOC meeting in Grenoble was very confusing. It neither condemned Apartheid nor cleared SA of racism in sport. On the basis of that report and organising a postal vote from absent members (which was unconstitutional) SA was invited to the 1968 Mexico Olympics.

When the decision was announced SAN-ROC, in close cooperation with the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, organised a massive boycott of the Games if SA was allowed to participate. Most African and Asian countries joined the boycott which forced the IOC to withdraw the invitation. That was the most important victory of SAN-ROC which led to the final expulsion of Apartheid SA from the Olympic Movement at Amsterdam in 1970.

This decision was a great blow to the friends of Apartheid South Africa at the IOC and International Federations. After massive demonstrations organised by SAN-ROC (with Peter Hain as Chairman of Stop the Seventy Tour) in opposition to the 1969-70 Rugby tour of Britain, Rugby tours to and from SA were cancelled. The cancellation of the 1970 Cricket tour of England followed. SAN-ROC amplified its activities in close collaboration with the Supreme Council for Sport in Africa, the Anti-Apartheid movements in Australia, New-Zealand, France, Holland, the US etc. which led to the expulsion of South Africa from most international sport.

In 1987 Chris de Broglio and Breyten Breytenbach became involved with the Institute for Democracy in Africa (IDASA) in the organisation of the historic meeting between ANC Officials and 60 leading Afrikaners which was held at Dakar, Senegal under the Auspices of President Abou Diouf and Madame Daniele Mitterand. That Meeting contributed greatly to the dramatic changes which followed leading to the final defeat of Apartheid and the creation of the New South Africa.

In an acknowledgement of the political reversals that had taken place, and after all his battles with the International Olympic Committee, Chris de Broglio was awarded the Olympic Order in 1997 in recognition of his actions against Racism in Sport and in defence of the Olympic Charter.  He defended its principles all his life, especially through the apartheid years when the IOC seem to have forgotten them. 

There are many untold stories of the price paid by those involved in direct action against the apartheid regime, battling with domestic security services only too happy to work hand in glove with BOSS and others to defeat the objective of making South Africa a pariah state in the area it held most dear - sport.

It is the nature of underground activists who use code names and covert routes in and out of the prisons Breytenbach called 'No Man’s Land' that the majority of the battles remain secret and forgotten. The price the players in this underground game paid was also exacted on their families and has been documented in Hilda Bernstein’s brilliant book, The Rift - a searing document of the South African exile experience.

There are no blue plaques for Chris, Dennis and the others. Nothing to mark the spot of the part that dingy basement played in the dismantling of apartheid. Nothing but memories of the endless convivial lunches, the faces of people far from home around the table, some of them on the run and in fear of their life, mixing happily with a German painter or a happy Australian couple on their anniversary European tour. Laughter mixed with fear and pain and above it all, the profound excitement of les actions clandestin. Lear and de Broglio lived here. A house of nonsense and significance. 


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Is everyone mentally ill?

7/21/2013

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The art of retrospective diagnosis has never been more prevalent amongst the literary/psychology axis powers that blog themselves a few inches in the press by confidently applying their theories to characters such as Einstein and George Orwell. Christopher Hitchens suggested George Orwell’s difficulty in social situations might be a symptom of Aspergers Syndrome, whilst Tony Percy suggested any psychologically based analysis showed that his flawed analysis, lack of patience with abstract thought and his romanticised view of socialism all confirm this diagnosis. Percy even rues the ‘fact’ that Asperger’s Syndrome prevented him from being a more useful social critic, which belies the wealth of social criticism Orwell accurately analysed in his diaries and his many essays. This also ignores Orwell’s capacity for self analysis. Of his wartime diaries the writer observed that whenever it was possible to be wrong, he had been wrong. Both Right and Left are able to claim him because he could, as biographer Gordon Bowker observed, ‘hold two opposing views simultaneously’. If changing your mind when the evidence you relied upon is shown to be unreliable is a telling characteristic of a mental disorder, then this suggests the unchanging ideologues of Right and Left such as those amongst the Socialist Worker’s Party and the Fox network, who reject any evidence that does not conform to their world view, are perfectly sane. And that’s just mad.

Whilst there are some aspects to Orwell’s character that may lend themselves to any number of mental disorders, (those obsessive compulsive lists and calculations in his domestic diaries that leaked into some of his essays) the more pertinent question is not whether Orwell and several other historical figures whose names are always dropped in these analyses, (Churchill, Hitler, Newton et al) are mentally ill but whether the human condition puts us all ‘on the spectrum’ of madness to one degree or another.  

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is seen as a person attempting to control their environment and ultimately their fate. When we are children and most of our environment feels completely out of our influence and affected by the large slow moving adults around us, we often display what psychologists might term typical OCD behaviours. ‘If I touch every single fencepost on the way home, Mummy will not discover the broken teapot I hid under the dresser and if I correctly guess kippers for tea, Daddy will not be killed by the Germans for I am the ruler of the universe and am in ultimate control of my fate’. As we grow up, these insecurities are subsumed by a growing confidence or suppressed to a degree that is manageable or, in the minority of cases, retained to be diagnosed by a man in a more expensive suit  than we could ever afford for $140 an hour plus tax.

Orwell’s paranoia is also cited as another indicator. But how many of us can put themselves in the position of a writer who had already appeared on one death list during the Spanish Civil War and who believed by retreating to the remote Isle of Jura he might escape the worst effects of a third Atom Bomb explosion? Given the time in which he lived and his previous experiences, one might think it a healthy precaution to be ever so slightly paranoid about over-friendly strangers and high profile social situations.

The truth is, we may regard our response to the world, our environment and our immediate personal experiences as being ‘on a spectrum’ of response and behaviours that are shaped by formative episodes in our childhood or genetics or physical injury to the brain. These responses are over-characterised for conveniences sake by professionals who desire a scale against which these things can be weighed, measured and treated. I have never experienced an age where there has been such a desire to label people as suffering from Bipolar Affective Disorder. The reason? Because, helpfully, a list of heavily promoted drugs are listed against such a diagnosis and prevent your GP or mental health professional from having to think very deeply about the appropriate treatment for how you feel when in a temporary or intermittent period of intense stress, anxiety or depression. Far easier to see the recommended Pharmacopoeia choices available for such a diagnosis and prescribe them.  

That is not to say that human beings with high levels of manic anxiety or depression do not genuinely benefit from a period (perhaps a long period) of medication to control the life-altering levels of pain and suffering caused by real and demonstrably disabling conditions. No one who has seen the distressing effects of delusional psychosis on the sufferer and their families would deny they need some chemical intervention to relieve their pain and stabilise their racing minds. But we have to be careful in a world dominated by Big Pharma not to become blind to the degrees along that human spectrum and allow a default position that can pathologise every aspect of human behaviour.

Reading and re-reading Orwell with a degree of intensity that may seem, dare I say, Obsessively Compulsive, I would conclude that during his time in Barcelona, on a death list and on the run from Fascist and Republican alike, I would have prescribed Lithium to bring down his manic tendency to believe that everyone is out to kill him with a side order of Zopiclone to help him with those sleepless nights. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Mad is Sane.



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The Cockney Commissar

7/20/2013

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I no longer have the battered cassette tape on which I recorded an interview with the 89 year old Harry Young back in 1990, but I can hear his cracked north London vowels in my head.

All writers have a bottom drawer where lurk the ‘projects that never were’ or the ones that have yet to find their time. Harry’s film was one of my obsessions that, like the subject of my next book, were about figures who existed largely in the footnotes of other people’s stories, not as the star of their own. I scribbled notes during our several conversations in his home and at City University. Reading them now and imagining that voice, his incredible untold story comes alive again.

Born in London in 1901, the son of an unsuccessful bicycle shop owner and an East End woman of fiery determination, he attended a Socialist Sunday school and became in his teens a well-known speaker at public meetings where he admitted he tried to impress girls with his impressions and satires of left wing figures during the early pre-war days. ‘Whilst I wasn’t paying attention’, the Communist Party sent out a directive that a Young Communist League should be formed. As the only member of the Islington branch under 21, he was elected Chairman after several of his mates yelled his name from the floor of a meeting in the International Socialist Club in City Road. He arrived in Moscow as the British YCL delegate to the Third International in November 1922 and at the age of 21 he became the only British born Comintern apparatchik to master German and then Russian, albeit, as Zinoviev observed, with a Cockney accent. 

Harry arrived with a cardboard suitcase and noticed a long queue outside the Kremlin. Knowing that there was always something rare and worth having at the end of the queue, he joined the tail end. He noticed during the two hour wait that all the prominent Communist Party members were ahead of him. Bukharin and Zinoviev amongst them. As he finally got to the head of the queue, a Red Army soldier emerged from behind a heavy carved wooden door and muttered ‘Your turn Tovarisch’. He stepped inside to find the Czar’s warm water flushing toilet, the only one in the world. Welcome to the Revolution, comrade.

Harry knew Zinoviev well and even ended up on a committee that met to discuss the infamous Zinoviev letter where it was proposed a real one should be sent. Harry, being the Englishman started to draft it, but it was never sent.

He saw Lenin speak still swathed in a bandage from the removal of a bullet from his neck and was present when Trotsky was expelled from the Party. He was still in his Moscow Dynamo Sports Club singlet and shorts when he followed the crowd and the four Red Army Guards who physically carried Trotsky out of the meeting and down to the railway station.

‘For seven years I lived at the Lux Hotel and was paid 110 roubles a month by the Party. I had an office, a secretary and I travelled up and down the Trans-Siberian railway, pinning the Order of Lenin on enormous peasant soldiers. They’d never seen a foreigner before and once, one of them grabbed me by the cheek and shouted “Look! He is an Englishman and he has white skin like me.” Somehow they had the impression that all foreigners were black.

‘People ask me what I did in Russia for seven years. If I’m in a good mood, I say, “working hard for Socialism, attending meetings that shaped history living an exciting and charmed life.” If I’m feeling cynical I say, “What did I do? Why I sponged off the Russian proletariat, of course”. 



In effect, Harry was witness to the collapse of World Revolution and Soviet Communism as a concept and, of course, to the inexorable rise of Stalin. He told me how a meeting in the Kremlin had he and several others yawning with boredom. He observed Stalin enter and stand at the back, making occasional contributions from the floor but always looking in his bulky coat and hat as if he were about to leave. At one point he turned his head to see if the influential party member was still at the rear and was in time to see Koba the Destroyer disappearing through a secret panel in the wall. As he caught sight of the young Englishman staring at him, Harry said Stalin gave him a conspiratorial wink before disappearing into the old servants hidden walkways first designed to prevent the Czar seeing the minions who kept the place clean.

Harry’s unpublished autobiography is a rambling, disjointed document, shot through with his affairs and polygamous relationships that caused the kind of damage within the family that he freely admitted caused him profound regret. ‘I came to Moscow a fag smoking indolent youth and the revolution had me doubling around the Moscow Dynamo Club running track, giving up tobacco and ready to conquer any young revolutionary girl who would look twice at this fit young Commissar with the cheeky Cockney charm imported direct from the Holloway Road. I behaved like a left-wing Don Juan as any young man would. But that doesn’t mean it was right. ‘

Before the extraordinary turn of events that turned Harry into the Cockney Commissar, he worked as a magician’s assistant in Antwerp and there is a tinge of the conjuror in the timeliness of his disappearance from the Soviet Union.

‘I had to leave. Stalin was going mad, but that wasn’t the whole reason for me checking out of the old Lux Hotel. There was a girl, of course. But it was lucky I did. Two years later, some of my friends were ordered out of the Lux and told to leave the country immediately or face arrest. They were the same rank and higher than I and they were all foreign delegates. Some of them saw what I saw and left quietly. Others didn’t and Stalin had them dragged from their rooms and shot on the hotel steps. That’s what I mean by a charmed life. I’ve been lucky, not wise’. 




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A reassuring message from Seamus the Irish Setter

7/19/2013

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Now I don’t want any of you to panic. I’m here to provide a character reference for my old master Mitt Romney who I hear through a clairvoyant taxidermist in Des Moines has purchased Plasma Resources UK, which provides blood supplies to the UK’s National Health Service. Of course, this lady is not always reliable. It was only a little while ago that she told me UK ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair had become a Middle-East peace envoy which was clearly a by-product of her methamphetamine habit. But she had three crystal balls up and a handful of tarot cards so I guess this time she may not be fooling. Just so you know, there was no foul play and no Mormon ex-Governors of Massachusetts were involved, but I am, ever so slightly, dead. This makes my opinion just as valid as any US senator or semi-recumbent member of the UK House of Lords. More so in fact as I no longer have a drooling problem.

Mr Romney, through his private equity firm Bain Capital can be relied upon to show the same judgement he displayed when he strapped me to the roof of his car for a 12 hour, 650 mile trip to Ontario.  That is all.



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The triumphant talent of Paul Bhattacharjee

7/18/2013

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The actor Paul Bhattacharjee who went missing from rehearsals at the Royal Court on 10 July has been found dead at Splash Point cliffs in Seaford. Obituaries have yet to be written and they will be penned by people who knew and loved him well, but headlines will no doubt focus, as they often do, on the sadness that they will presume must have been part of his life. But I want to celebrate his talent.

I met Paul in 1981 when I was 20 and he 21. He came to my house in Kensal Green accompanied by Tara Arts director Jatinder Verma, the founder of the UK’s first Asian theatre company. Jatinder had good cause to feel he should accompany Paul to this meeting. All he knew from my conversation with him on the ‘phone was that we were an independent touring theatre company looking for an Asian actor with a romantic nature to play a ticket collector at Camden Town underground station who is stabbed towards the end of the play by a racist skinhead. The Asian character as a victim. Typical white perspective, he must have thought. We were a large cast of 18, a large number of whom had been asked to shave their heads for the play. I overheard someone asking the box office staff who was rehearsing in the theatre and receiving the response, ‘Oh some bunch of teenage yobs’.  The play and its cast made all the characters victims of some sort of prejudice or another.

We were due to debut the production called ‘Tube’ at the Cockpit Arts Theatre in West London. The whole theatre had been dressed as an underground station and climaxed with a riot in which most of the set was broken up by an intimidating and visually aggressive bunch of skinheads. My first play was not a sophisticated piece of work, but it was driven by the murder of an Asian ticket collector in the East End and the scenes I witnessed waiting at Camden Town station for 90 minutes prior to a violent gig at the Music Machine venue (now Koko) nearby.  I wanted the audience to get to know all the characters whose lives are smashed by the act of violence at the end. To understand the inner lives even of the disturbed, repressed and abused young man who stabs his victim.

Paul was nervous, quiet and shy, but with Jatinder’s approval and encouragement he agreed to be in the play with this funny bunch of largely white teenagers and musicians. It must have been an intimidating prospect, but he was an absolute revelation. He fleshed out a character with even more charm and romance than I had written, so that when he was attacked, the audience audibly groaned. The play was designed to attract young people who never went to the theatre. It was about something they knew about and it featured people their own age. Punk poet Patrik Fitzgerald played a busker and joyful performance poet and musician Attila the Stockbroker played a set in the play’s interval. The youth of the nearby Lisson Green estate turned out in force and we were packed out most nights. It was a joyful and terrifically bonding experience and Paul became more relaxed and funny as the run progressed.

Over the years I kept up with his career and watched him master his craft. He acquired gravitas and insight always carrying a tremendous authenticity, particularly in the theatre. 50 is a dangerous age for a man. Anxiety and depression are often the ruffians lurking on your stair after this age. I can’t imagine what sadness lurked within him, but watching his amused and playful gaze in ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ accompanied by that thoughtfully modulated deep voice, you can see the wealth of talent and experience he had gained in his career. He shone and we all bathed in the glow. That’s potential realised and a life well-lived. Goodbye Paul.



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How the Database State made me a terrorist.

7/17/2013

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Not long ago, I received, through the post, an invitation to a Nowruz celebration in Golders Green. Nowruz, as any fule kno, is the Persian/Iranian New Year. Now the juxtaposition of Golders Green and Iranian festivities was already surprising; add to this the fact that the event was taking place in a Christian church and that I am a white, atheist, Englishman and you have some idea of my state of confusion. I could not fathom what unconscious connection to Iranian politics had elicited this invitation until, later that same night, after a solitary wine and cheese fiesta; it came to me in a vivid dream.

I was, as usual, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee with the moderately dead comic actor, Zero Mostel. I sat calmly beside him sipping Burgundy, occasionally handing him a cracker whilst he defended himself against a series of increasingly absurd questions from the assembled senators and their whey-faced counsel. Joe McCarthy wasn’t present as he was rehearsing for his appearance in another dream I had scheduled, along with popular singing sensation Dana, a Serbian mime troupe and a bucket of whelks.

Suddenly the Committee’s attorney left off baiting Zero and turned his attention to me. Caught in the spotlight, my mouth full of crackers and my wine glass tantalisingly out of reach, I spat a snowstorm of dry shrapnel over the back of Fred Flintstone who was waiting to plead the Fifth against accusations of being socialist and two-dimensional. My accuser’s eyes turned black and right there in the middle of my innocent Fitou-induced dream, he stabbed me with an ugly shard of reality.

‘Mr Shaw, outside of this tawdry little fantasy, in your conscious waking life, didn’t you once give £200 to Mujaheddin el Khalq, a proscribed terrorist organisation?’

I spluttered a denial and quivered before his outstretched inquisitorial finger.

‘Come now, Sheik al Shah, surely you knew when those smart-suited men approached you, mooching around Leicester Square waiting for your chosen movie entertainment to begin, that you were funding oppression and torture?’

‘Doesn’t he do that now, through the Limey tax system?’ asked Zero rushing to my defence. I nudged him and hissed ‘Stop helping me, you fat, Commie putz’.

‘Surely you knew’, counsel continued, ignoring my portly compadre, ‘that these men, purporting to be representatives of a charity, were directly funding Saddam Hussein’s suppression of opposition groups?’

I gulped guiltily and looked to Zero for support, but now his comb-over quivered with disgust. I swallowed hard and squeaked feebly ‘I just wanted to help the little Arab babies.’ I awoke, sweating, just after Zero slammed me with a custard pie and screamed ‘Plead the Fifth you dumb anti-Semite, you’re making me look bad.’

The next morning I fished my invite out of the bin (Please RSVP so that we can make catering arrangements) and smoothed it out on my cracker-stained dressing gown. At once I was taken back by a harp glissando and a wavy dissolve to a warm summer evening over a decade ago. The men seemed so nice and the pictures of frightened children abused and imprisoned by the mullahs, simply because their parents opposed the regime, were heartbreaking, married as they were to an inspiring plan to spirit them away to safe houses in neighbouring countries with the help of my donation.

I am a sucker for a sob story and have funded enough lame ducks to cast my own differently-abled waterfowl version of Swan Lake, so I forked out the cash and forgot all about it, until, some weeks later, a photograph arrived of several smiling Iranian tots, standing in a garden, apparently liberated by the money I’d been saving for a musical cracker barrel.

That would have been the end of it, had an acquaintance with a brother at GCHQ not informed me that the charity was ‘on a little list’ at MI5 and that the Charity Commission were investigating. In fact the Commission concluded that although they were not in a position to tell whether donations were being funnelled to Iran’s internal security thugs, they had determined that the donations, some £5 million per year, were all paid into an individual's account in a country other than Iran, which clearly wasn’t er, kosher. Their concerns also focused on some donors being misled into believing that they were personally sponsoring individual children. The implied feeble-minded wishy-washy liberals weren’t mentioned by name, but I blushed anyway. The Commission consequently wound up the organisation and transferred its assets to a new, independent and genuine, charitable foundation.

Over the years, I periodically received written appeals from a variety of allegedly Iranian committees and charities, no doubt using my details from the database of donors who were snared, like me, in a weak moment on a warm day in the West End. I ignored them all and gradually the begging correspondence dropped off. Until my Nowruz invite, which tells me that my donation has not been forgotten and still sits ‘on a little list’ not only on some Iranian based database, but probably with British Intelligence who were evidently watching the smart-suited men and their fellow travellers. On the face of it, like Kafka’s ‘K’, I have nothing to worry about. As a guileless dupe, I have a clear conscience. But then, I did look up the Mujaheddin el Khalq on this laptop whilst I was researching this article…and I can’t help thinking back to all those currently sitting under control orders who left their browsing history un-deleted… It doesn’t look good, does it? A naked name and address held on a database and a search for a proscribed organisation on your computer doesn’t allow room for an explanation, a justification, a defence. The Database State doesn’t care. Someone just knocked on my door while I wrote that last bit and suddenly the crackers have turned to ashes in my mouth. My all duck paraplegic ballet opens Thursday at Belmarsh Gaol. 



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Orwell is Alive and Well and Drowning in Data

7/16/2013

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During World War II, whilst Bletchley Park laboured in the front line of code breaking, the British Government were employing vast numbers of mainly female operatives to monitor and report on telephone, mail and telegraph communications in and out of the country.

The biggest problem, of course, was volume. Without even the most primitive algorithm to detect key phrases that later was to cause such paranoia amongst the sixties and seventies counter culture, causing a whole generation of drug users to use a wholly unnecessary set of telephone synonyms for their desired substance, the army of women stationed in exchanges around the country were driven to report everything and then pass it on up to those whose job it was to analyse the content for significance.

Orwell’s vision of Big Brother’s omniscience was based upon the same model - vast armies of Winston Smiths monitoring data to ensure discipline and control. He saw a culture of betrayal where every citizen was held accountable for their fellow citizens’ political and moral conformity.

In fact, up until the US Government’s Big Data Research and Development Initiative and the NSA’s development of the Prism programme, the fault lines always lay in the technology used to collate or collect and the inefficiency or competing interests of the corporate systems and processes that interpreted the information. Not for the first time, the bureaucracy was the citizen’s best bulwark against intrusion.

Now that the algorithms have become more complex and the technology tilted towards passive surveillance through automation, the volume problem becomes less of an obstacle. True data mining starts with the capacity to completely encompass all data in the cloud repositories and across all means of communication. It ends with the filtering tools that segment that data into areas for human analysis. Ex-NSA whistleblower William Binney confirmed that the algorithms go through the data base looking at everybody.

It seems Western democracy teaches citizens all of their civil rights and how to exercise them in the same way that it teaches first aid. They use them only in the direst circumstances and seldom more than once in a lifetime. Curiously the most rebellious act of a citizen in today’s society is not to storm Parliament or hang the last priest with the entrails of the last banker. It may simply be to never accept credit, never to shop beyond your immediate needs (and then only in cash), never to appear on a database for any product or service, never to use the internet, never pass before a CCTV camera without disguise and most importantly, never register to vote. It seems the greatest threat to a Bureaucratocracy (a horrible term invented by leftist sociologists) is not to participate. This is a deeply unsatisfying method of dissent because it is so passive, although it would be a pleasing phenomenon for a revolution to be achieved purely by indolence. ‘Yes, he was a model revolutionary. He wilfully neglected his admin.’

It is a well-worn cliché that what the NSA have been doing is anti-constitutional and at odds even with its founding fathers. Benjamin Franklin said ‘They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.’

What is more ironic is that this radical encroachment started post-9/11 with a desire to seek out Muslim Jihadists. The word ‘algorithm’ derives from Muhammed in Musa al-Khwarizmi, a 9th Century Muslim mathematician who practically invented algebra - clearly a man ripe for targeting by the NSA where he not ever so slightly dead.

Under the guise of anti-terror measures and efficient delivery of municipal services, more and more information is required on each individual. The technology for obtaining this information, and indeed the administration of it, is handled by corporations. The Government, driven always by a creed that suggests private companies are better administrators than civil servants, has auctioned off the job to a dozen or more favoured corporate giants who are, as always, beholden not only to their shareholders, but to their patrons within the Government itself.

Inevitably, modern capitalism demands more than one method of exploitation and most citizens don’t appear to have actively consented (except implicitly) for their personal details, credit record, purchasing choices, health, wealth, secret perversions, criminal records, DNA, sexual preferences and political beliefs to be hawked amongst the corporations as currency. By this method they are approved or denied insurance, employment, housing, benefits, education, health services, transport, passports and patronage of any kind.

At the same time they are touted by the same corporations or their clients for everything from luxury apartments to pile ointment depending on the ‘profile’ the accumulated data procured on them draws in the ether. It was once a civil liberties shibboleth that the frontier of this battle against intrusion and personal liberty lay in the area of identity cards or passports. In fact, the authorities do not need such things. Everything a citizen does or says, every offence committed, every book purchased, every trip taken, every song composed, every article written, every subscription, every Saturday night observed on camera, tells them all they need to know.

The only problem the state had, was managing the scale of the information gleaned from so many people in so many forms. Not any more. The volume problem has been overcome.


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    AuthorBot

    Dom Shaw is the author of 'Eric is Awake' and also a fleshy tube of chemicals working as a writer, scriptwriter and filmmaker in the UK. Was a boy, now a man. He lives.  

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