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Eric is Awake

The Anonymous Citizen

Notes from a fleshy tube of chemicals in UK Inc.

Go Buy an Eric

A Safety Pin Still Stuck in Our Hearts

10/27/2013

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Great to see Patrik Fitzgerald on good form supporting Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats last ever gig at London's Roundhouse last night. The after-show party consisted of me trying to avoid getting crushed in the stampede of young gun networkers trying to get close to Alan McGee. 
I made this film about Pat a couple of years ago and we have struggled to fund the clearance of the music publishing since, so it has been stuck in limbo with no release or distribution. But I am about to put together a crowdfunding proposal to get it done and available on Itunes or DVD, so this trailer is on here for your delectation. If you've never heard of him before, there's a little biog below. 
‘All The Years of Trying’ is an ode to the Stratford Bard of London’s East End produced and directed by London based film makers Dom Shaw and Daniel Carboni of music documentary specialists Anonymous Films. Patrik Fitzgerald. Known as the Punk Poet and composer of the ultimate anthem 'Safety Pin Stuck in My Heart'; Fitzgerald kicked against the brash three-chord orthodoxy by performing waif-like and vulnerably alone with an acoustic guitar and a tattered book of poems at the height of the punk revolution.

Although never making it to the dizziest heights of pop fame he continues to be a well respected figure, cited as an early influence by author and poet Benjamin Zephaniah, and legendary journalist and Nirvana biographer, Everett True. The new millennium has seen a resurgence of interest in this determined, brave performer who battled on with his music through much travail and now seems set for new appreciation by a whole new generation charmed by his stripped down honesty and integrity.

The film is directed by film maker Dom Shaw who first met Patrik 32 years ago and filmed him for his seminal punk documentary ‘Rough Cut & Ready Dubbed’ which won the John Grierson award for best documentary. Featuring some of his best known songs and interviews with people influenced and entranced by his music, the film is an affectionate tribute to an old friend. ‘I knew Pat long before I met him’ says Shaw ‘because every song was soaked with his own vulnerability and humour that myself and many others could completely identify with.’

‘Everything I've ever read about myself has said how shy and self effacing I am, so I really shouldn't blow my own trumpet about this film. Having said that, I have watched and kind of enjoyed it, I think. I've probably written some good tunes and there are some of them in this film. Being stuck into celluloid is a bit like having your soul stolen, however.  But there you are... Enjoy the film. ‘ Patrik

‘It seems as if all those old bands from the punk era and later are getting their renaissance’ says producer Daniel Carboni, ‘and to be truthful, some of them aren’t worth the attention. But Pat never seems to have got the attention he deserved except from a well respected network of influential artists. We hope this film will help to change all that.’  


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Voting is Dead

10/26/2013

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In the week that a strident UK comic Russell Brand declared the need for a political revolution that eschewed the conventional democratic means of voting, one thing at least has emerged from the twitterati slapping him on the back and sparking a barely submerged debate about modern democracy. It exposed an undercurrent that has been present for some time, particularly but not exclusively among the young, that party politics and polling booths are not presently an effective means of change. In a way this is simply the cycle of political consciousness swinging around again, except far from being excluded from voting by a lack of emancipation, more and more people on this side of the pond at least, are disengaging from a cross in a box, but not from politics. Looking at history one can align certain periods when Chartists and non-conformists successfully altered the agendas of the ruling elites until they were grudgingly admitted into the organs of Government to participate. George Orwell was a great believer in a socialist democracy, but was even more passionate about political campaigning, although he retained a cynicism about the effectiveness of the Left against the rise of totalitarianism. What would he make of the current political middle-ground where no party seems able to engage the voters with their bland and less than radical manifestos?

In ‘Eric is Awake’, Eric Blair, the man who has re-awakened in the modern world believing he is the reincarnation of George Orwell, is on the tramp across the country pursued by the authorities for identity fraud. Stopping to take advantage of free tea and cake at a village hall in the English countryside, he discovers a local election meeting and gives the politicians and the villagers his view of the redundancy of voting.

EXTRACT: Emily and Simon watched the shaky and slightly murky camerawork in the dimly lit hall as the Mayor of Shipston-on-Stour, a dumpy middle-aged woman who looked the image of Margaret Rutherford, fielded questions from the audience including one earnest young man spouting planted entreaties for more access to the hi-speed Interverse for poorer Olders in the area. The Mayor cut off the response from the middle-aged sitting MP to say that there was time for only one more question.

At first, Emily could not discern Eric’s face amongst the serried ranks of spectators, their plastic cups rising and falling in rows. Then he stood up right at the back and she was shocked to see him wearing a pair of army camouflage trousers beneath a thick hooded top of the kind she knew he loathed.

He cleared his throat in that familiar fashion and started with his usual diffidence and apologetic posture, hands cupped around his plastic beaker like a supplicating penitent, his resemblance, as she remembered, eerily unmistakable with the unruly shock of dark hair, lined jowls, piercing blue eyes and thin ridiculous moustache.  His voice was fluting and higher pitched than anyone might expect from such a face. He started quietly and the audio failed to pick up his first words. She heard an old woman in the audience mutter ‘Nutter’ to her neighbour and, nearer to camera, a man who looked like a farmer nudged his ruddy faced son and said loudly and boisterously ‘That’s that loony from the paper thinks he’s Orwell.’  His boy, chewing fruit cake, responded with a puzzled look on his wind-burnt face ‘Isn’t that a song? Like the boy down the chip shop thinks he’s Elvis?’

Eric seemed to falter and the Mayor leaned forward to her microphone and said primly ‘Please can contributors state their name before they ask their question. Thank you.’ A nubile blonde volunteer shoved a portable microphone into his hand and Emily saw Eric blanch slightly before reluctantly accepting it, his other hand still clasping his tea.  After a moment’s pause she sensed him taking a deep breath as people craned their necks to see the country’s newest celebrity madman.

‘My name is Eric and I am barely a citizen. I don’t even know if I am allowed to vote. Several times in this meeting, you have talked about voter apathy. A couple of the audience members have said that they feel it a waste of time to vote. You have all responded with predictable piety that people died for that right. This is true, of course. They did so because it was the most credible route to emancipation, to be heard. It was important.  It mattered, because there were polar opposites on the ballot paper, but not anymore. Politicians don’t seem to realize it, but everyone else has known for some time that voting is futile, moribund, and redundant. It may be resurrected someday when the contours of our politics have been levelled and rearranged. But for now, it’s dead. That is due to your apathy, not the voters’.

‘As far as I can tell, no one voted for the seemingly perpetual wars in China, Iran or Afghanistan. No one voted to bail out the financiers and enrich the dividend takers, leaving the rest of society to face cuts in services and lower wages, all the time being told that they had been living for too long in a fool’s paradise, that they were to be punished for their profligacy even though they did not engineer the reckless barely regulated lottery of the gaming houses in the City.

‘No one voted for means testing in the National Health Service, traducing the main principle of the single greatest post-war achievement of the British parliamentary system. No one voted for low-grade proletarian exam factories in place of schools. No one voted to make protest of any kind mostly illegal, all the time being told that it is to prevent terrorists hijacking legitimate dissent. No one voted for the database state, a network of information slowly joining up across Europe and the world to spy on entire nations of the apathetic voters you so disdain. No one voted to arm our law enforcement officers and to forget that they are supposed to police with our consent, not their contempt. No one voted for celebrity culture instead of a genuine news agenda. No one voted for the basic necessary things of scale that the state controlled like transport, health, power, education, the mail, the rubbish collections, the army and the municipal services to be auctioned off to a thousand private companies and entrepreneurs only to watch them deliver disastrous results at a far higher cost which only serves to drive down an already unsustainable rampant capitalist economy.

‘Those people who died for the right to vote, they also died for the right to choose. That includes the right not to vote. The future isn’t an X in a box. None of you truly offers a genuine choice. Not until a significant proportion of the population come together to demand one and you respond enthusiastically to meet their desires by including political aims that are not filtered through your perception that the middle ground agendas are always safe and will not frighten the horses. It is a well-worn cynical cliché but nonetheless true that most citizens believe there should be a box on the ballot paper that simply reads – ‘None of the above’. Your lack of political courage is to blame for that.

‘I can tell from your rhetoric that not one of you entered politics to change the world. You came to make careers, not vocations and to better yourselves, not the country. I do not condemn. It is a natural atavistic streak in human nature, hard to resist. The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong sort of people.

‘But forgivable or not, it is you, the power seekers, who lulled us into a dreamless sleep and stole our souls while we slumbered. Maybe the tipping point has finally been reached. Maybe now is the time, I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I feel it and I think you do too. That is why you are panicking in this election, ramping up the fear and calling for more bread and circuses. Maybe they will swallow the ruse again. They have before. But looking at the news that does still filter through, it is clear that some, at least, mostly the young, are not as dulled by television, vacuous celebrity and total immersion games as you might have hoped.

‘I think much of the more restless population, increasingly separated from the conventional political process, un-cowed by the slow subliminal removal of their civil liberties are stirring in their chambers, having slept too long.

‘There are poems from the past that might, half-remembered as if from a dream, express the taint in the air. “For we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.”

‘Loudly and clearly from every rooftop one feels more and more that we should all be shouting the truth of Juvenal. Asking who will watch the watchers? Who has taken our lives and sold them to the highest bidder?  Is it possible, as I fervently hope, that some are rising, stretching and asking bleary-eyed, ‘Is it time to call a halt and reverse the tide? Is it now? Is it today?’

Emily watched Eric hesitate and the audience filled the silence with a mixture of jeers and applause. She saw him hand back the microphone and walk crab-like along the row of plastic chairs, the smaller figure of Pedro following quickly behind. Someone threw a cup at the stage. Another followed and as the clip came to an end, the camera panned to the podium where the four politicians and the Mayor sat glumly whispering to each other, a few laughing wryly as the white plastic shrapnel began to fall around them, some bouncing off their heads. END OF EXTRACT



'Eric is Awake' is available in paperback or on all e-readers or on your IPad. Please read and review. 



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1984 and All That

10/26/2013

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I was the guest of a very welcoming writers group in Brighton the other week run by Bridget Whelan to talk about Eric is Awake and publishing in general.  It was really interesting staying on after the talk to hear the writers pitching their assignments which were for stories with the theme of Spring. Concentrated writing tasks of this kind are what writers groups are all about and it certainly seemed to have stimulated some intriguing and amusing ideas. I have never been in any kind of collegiate community of writers except for a brief period chairing the TV & Film committee of the Writers Guild of Great Britain. Television writing in the UK is seldom as collegiate an exercise as it is in the US, but I have really enjoyed the few occasions when I have worked on shows that allow a bunch of writers to sit in a room together and bounce a script around.  It is why US TV currently leads the field in innovative and compelling drama. They can afford to throw writers in a room and leave them alone.  Most of the time, however, you are on your own. Writing my first novel therefore was just more of the same. The application of the arse to the seat of the chair until you come to the end of the book or the end of you. 

The novel has as the central premise a man waking up in the body of a homeless man in the 21st Century in a broadly contemporary version of our own world, claiming to be Eric Arthur Blair who wrote under the pseudonym of George Orwell and died in London in 1950.  

One question that came up in the talk has occurred before in another context when a TV producer asked ‘Why doesn’t Eric wake up in the world of his own novel 1984?’ It’s a fair question as this is probably what you would expect when you read the premise of the book. The answer is that I was totally uninterested in that scenario because it would almost write itself. Eric would wake up as Winston Smith working in the Ministry of Truth and suffer interrogation by O’Brien in a world that would probably look as close to Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ as you can get. You know how that novel would develop and so do I. I’m sure there is a novel writing machine somewhere that could do it. But not this fleshy tube of chemicals.

Instead the book forces Eric to confront all the issues we deal with concerning surveillance, a disengaged democracy and a Big Data world where, far from being forced to give up personal privacy, the populace actively volunteers it in order to engage with social media and commerce. That makes his journey a little more unpredictable and also occasionally funny. The abiding characteristic of Orwell’s ‘1984’ is that it is resolutely gloomy; a fact that he acknowledged and attributed to his declining health at the time he wrote it.  Me, I don't have a terminal diagnosis and tend to enjoy a lot of very satisfying biscuits whilst writing so consequently, I am not a literary icon and a more frivolous writer. In my book, Eric struggles to survive in a world that seems familiar to us at first but soon appears to have moved slightly further on in our present drift towards a total surveillance society.

It is, of course, the height of audacity to attempt to speak in the voice of one of the world’s most celebrated literary icons. Everyone feels that they own him and they have their own idea of what his voice sounds like, what he might think and how he might express himself. I have a Houdini-like escape clause for this perfectly understandable sentiment. The man who wakes up in an alley in my book believes himself to be Orwell. But it is possible, of course, that he is deluded or ill.  As he says to a Judge in the book whilst appearing in court  over his detainment under the Mental Health Act:

‘I really don’t know if what I now believe is what I have always believed. As I have no memory of this existence and this place, I cannot truly determine whether I am deluded or dreaming. If the former, it appears a curiously convoluted fantasy rooted in an arcane knowledge of an all too well documented life. If the latter, then nothing you recommend about what people choose to call my ‘care’ will make any difference at all. We occupy two opposing perceptions of existence, my Lord. To you, I am an ex-army petty offender with a medical record and a history as Harold Lewis Allways. To me, I am who I have always been; or, at least, who I now perceive myself to have always been.  More prosaically, I can’t convince you that my perception is any more valid than yours. On the other hand, you cannot convince me that I am anything other than Eric Arthur Blair. We are, as far as I am concerned, in a stalemate position, existentially.’

You’ll have to read the book yourself to make up your own mind about whether Eric really is awake.



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Two for one on Heroin and Your Money Back for a Bad Trip

10/12/2013

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It seems as if top cops in the UK are repeatedly calling for the legalisation of drugs to reduce crime. The latest to do so is Durham police chief Mike Barton who advocates Class A opiates for addicts being made available through the National Health System. So far, no government has deemed it a vote-winning measure and have done little more than juggle the various substances between legal categories for judicial purposes. But it feels as if the tipping point might be only a few years away with a petition calling on the government to follow the advice of the Home Affairs Committee and introduce that fabulous device for kicking an issue into the long grass, a Royal Commission on drug law reform. But leaving aside the timidity of politicians, there are some indications that some legalisation may be instituted in the next decade. If it is, a number of the options proffered by pressure groups and advocates among the police have come with expansive claims about the effect on the criminal enterprises that control the import, export and sale of drugs in the UK that need to be tested against the available evidence.

Firstly there are the stated aims of legalisation. Top cops of course like to highlight the reduction in organised crime. Drugs legalisation advocates of various hues tend to soft-pedal this angle over a general belief that the state should play no significant role in what citizens choose to inject, sniff, smoke or otherwise ingest to get their rocks off. The headlines tell us drugs only lead to addiction and death and that legalisation would simply lead to increased use and a generation who would thus treat substance abuse in the same way they do alcohol.  Too late. This has been a feature of my parents generation, of mine and that of my children. In fact, drugs were much easier to obtain than alcohol when I was 16 and considerably cheaper.

The Home Office expresses the perpetual view of all Governments cowed by the task of allowing the commercial or medicinal exploitation of drugs: "Drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. They destroy lives and blight communities. The UK's approach on drugs remains clear, we must help individuals who are dependent by treatment, while ensuring law enforcement protects society by stopping the supply and tackling the organised crime that is associated with the drugs trade." Well, good luck with that pious mixture of hubris and delusion. One notorious member of a family of gangsters grown fat on exploitation of a lucrative Colombian drugs cartel that reportedly owned its own submarine, was fined a million pounds and reportedly asked the Judge with a wry smile if he preferred cash or a cheque. The fight against organised crime has been a pathetic drop in the ocean in a war in which the culprits are more likely to eliminate each other from the growing empires of  organised crime in the endless power plays between the controlling syndicates than to succumb to a knock on the door from an under-funded constabulary.

In 2009, the lobby group Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s report 'After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation' financed partly by, amongst others, the J. Paul Getty Jr. Charitable Trust was careful to highlight the difference between drug use and drug addiction or dependency using the usual arguments every teenager caught with a quarter of dope in their laundry by their parents utilises when backed into a corner. Alcohol, caffeine, anti-depressants, tobacco make us all drug users to a greater or lesser degree and all are legal.

It’s always been a convincing argument, particularly when walking home late on a Saturday night or Sunday morning in any major town centre. There is a striking feature about wandering around London in the early hours that is as regular a sight as rubbish trucks growling down the streets at dawn. The city bus stops are full of young women alternately crying or throwing up. Their male counterparts always seem to be missing, perhaps not as resilient or more incapable having a greater capacity if not tolerance for gallons of  the electric soup.

But what police advocates of legalisation through the NHS seem to forget is that most drug use is recreational. Far from being wrinkled husks gasping for another hit and queuing for the chemist to collect their methadone prescriptions, most are casual, occasional and social users who regard their substance of choice as just another choice amongst the panoply of prerequisites for a good night out.

Given this subtlety, it’s easy to see how organised crime would adapt to changing legislation by cornering the market in new designer highs that can’t be found amongst the prescribed versions that would be available through the health system or even over the counter at your local chemist. The model that seems to suggest a way to completely circumvent them or at least put a serious dent in their business is the free market or supermarket model that suggests commercially available through licensed premises, off-licence models aligned to those for alcohol or caffeine energy drinks. This has the disadvantage of doing little more than handing control of the market from an underground cartel of loosely associated and competing criminal exploitation specialists to suppliers with an advertising budget. But given the worship of free markets over state intervention, this may well be where it all ends up. Tobacco advertising bans will dissolve under the weight of such a prospect, which would suggest the cigarette lobbyists should be hyping this as the panacea to a wealth of schizophrenic state proscriptions.

But what would a commercial drugs company with advertising dollars to spend and a research and development department dedicated to producing market-friendly innovations and designer highs to all price bands and demographics look like? Whilst the current atmosphere persists, it is possible that we may all soon be about to find out.


 

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Spying on Orwell

10/2/2013

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It was while I was finishing 'Eric is Awake' that I decided to travel to the remote Hebridean Isle of Jura and stay in the house, nay the very room where Orwell wrote '1984'. It was a slightly oppressive narrow cell in a lovely house looking over a seal-draped bay that held a little of the sadness that came with knowing that although the house, Barnhill,  was a refuge for him, the remote location and the painful illness he was already suffering from, along with the Herculean task of typing out his final draft, (no typists could be convinced to travel there) helped him to an early death. 

While we were there, My friend Steve and I attempted a ludicrous experiment with a micro-camera and a kite. Always slightly clumsy and inept with practical tasks, George Orwell, real name Eric Arthur Blair, would have been amused by the results. 
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    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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