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Where to Stand in the Fourth Estate

8/22/2013

Juvenal

The torrid debates around the detention of David Miranda, partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and the actions taken against journalists in the phone hacking scandal have exposed a potential set of double standards that has red-top tabloid champions seething at the perceived injustice and the UK’s Guardian newspaper claiming the higher ground. The tone is unmistakable as both sides take the mastiffs of their prejudices out for a little walk around the Fourth Estate.

In one corner, Brendan O’Neill and many others deride the Guardian’s railing at the use of Terrorism legislation against what it defines as legitimate journalistic endeavour, whilst staying silent on the long judicial limbo hovering over their compatriots in the hacking scandal.

In the other, the broadsheets point to the moral chasm between investigative journalism that holds the Government to account and prurient muckraking amongst celebrities and the families of murder victims. In the digital din of perpetual content churn, it is not always Juvenal’s question ‘who shall guard the guardians?’ that is being answered.

Leaving aside the increasingly frequent instances when these two worlds collide and a broadsheet behaves like a tabloid and vice versa, the arguments on both sides have some legitimacy regardless of the context. Where you stand on Fleet Street should not determine how strongly you defend the principle of public interest over public prurience.

The use of legitimate investigative methods and being allowed to make a public interest case for the use of leaked whistleblower material that speaks truth to power should be a constant. The press should always be testing this principle and it is a tension that must exist if their role is to have any significance in the age of Yochai Benkler’s Networked Fourth Estate defined as ‘the set of practices, organizing models, and technologies that are associated with the free press and provide a public check on the branches of government.’ For some reason he doesn’t mention the upskirt shots of the paparazzi and the practice of ‘collects’ - those intimate photos of the murder victim, coaxed from grieving families usually by the unpaid interns now ubiquitous at both ends of Grub Street, but then he’s a busy man.

When politicians prohibited from conflating their personal financial interests with their public position are then found to be taking the shilling of those they award access to patronage, it is legitimate for that hypocrisy to be exposed and the argument can then be had about the methods used to discover this information. It’s just a shame it happens every news day. Repetition dulls the readership however proud curmudgeonly ancient Roman finger waggers such as Juvenal would be.

However if a soap star or local mayor has not suggested fidelity as the abiding tenet of their every waking breath, then the details of their fornication with the lower mammals or the surprising use of random items from the fruit bowl to satisfy their baser desires is interesting and may sell papers and groceries, but is none of our business. Entertaining though, isn’t it? But if the aim is to feed the entertainment industry, then that is not and never has been journalism. That is treating Juvenal to an up-toga shot. That’ll teach him to step out of his chariot without his knees locked together.

Both stories may have been exposed by similar means, but it’s the principle not the methods that need defending. Everything else is PR.

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Meditation for Misanthropes

8/18/2013

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Listening, not for the first time, to celebrity ex-addict Russell Brand expound upon the merits of meditation and how world leaders should all practice a daily cleansing dose of Transcendental Meditation to improve the planet and all its ills, I am reminded to pass on the tenets of a more pragmatic philosophy increasingly pervading the ranks of the less karmically inclined. The ones who bought all this New Age stuff and tried traditional meditation only to find they yinged when they should have yanged.

The best way to practice the radical mindset of Inconsequential Meditation is to find an actor whose vocal style most resembles Charles Bukowski, Kurt Vonnegut or Sylvia Plath and get them to record the following text in a slow, dolorous voice to assist you with your daily meditation.

“Now find your meditation posture. This can be cross-legged and upright in your local park, in the foetal position in the bed of a stranger you met only last night or slumped on a couch in the small hours. Take deep cleansing breaths. Concentrating on your breathing, calm your raging emotions and find your place in the Universe. Do not attempt to find your centre. You are not at the centre of anything. You are barely on the edge of a periphery. You are one segment of a Higgs Boson particle in one universe amongst an infinity of universes. In the great scale of all that exists, you don’t even qualify as a speck. You aspire to be a speck, an ambition that will never be realised.

You are not at one with the universe. You aren’t even a pimple on the arse of the universe. The universe has no interest in you. If the universe stepped on you on the way to infinity, your lifeless stain would not be remarked upon on because eternity is unaware of you. You. Don’t. Matter. And because you don’t matter, nothing matters. Your rage at the parking ticket, your frustrations at your work, the emptiness or turbulence of your relationships or your lack of them, your aches and pains, grief and loneliness, your impending death. All will pass into nothing within the briefest sliver of time on a river of eternity that will wash away your existence so that no trace can be seen because you were barely a trace in the first place. Now you know your place. Now you can find your purpose. Take a deep breath through your mouth and slowly release it through your nostrils over the following thought. You are here to unlearn everything you have been taught. You are here to fill your tiny segment of forever with as much sensation as you can cram into our lives. You are here to suspect widely held beliefs, shibboleths and Godheads. You are here to experience everything a fleshy tube of chemicals is capable of feeling. And you are to remember at every stage that if the Universe does not care about you, you can ignore it. You have your own Universe. You are at the centre of it. You decide whether it is a selfish or an altruistic place, where kindness reigns or tyranny prospers. You are in charge and you are mad with power.”

Repeat daily. The misanthropic meditator, like Brand, aims to become a better human being. But there are many routes to Nirvana and we who take the route of ‘No one Mindsfulness’ don’t even have Nirvana entered into our Sat Nav. We are on our way to nowhere and we can’t wait to get there. Have a nice day.

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Sports Boycotts Never Work Except When They Do

8/13/2013

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Following UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s rejection of Stephen Fry’s somewhat forlorn request for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in the southern Russian resort of Sochi due to the Putin government’s recent anti-homosexual laws coupled with a rise in homophobic attacks; several contributions really rankled in their implicit attitude to the exemplar of sports boycotts - South Africa.

Former UK Olympics Ambassador Sebastian Coe said he was against boycotts and maintained that they only damaged the athletes. Columnist David Fearnhead went further saying that ‘South Africa did not end apartheid because the Springboks weren't allowed to play international rugby’ in an aside that deals lightly with the most successful sports boycott ever mounted. People may forget that South Africa was barred from almost all international athletic competitions, including the Olympics, from 1964 to 1991 and campaigners like the poet Dennis Brutus paid a high price for their part in achieving this. Besides imprisonment on Robben Island, he was exiled and shot in the back. Tellingly, the first ambulance called to attend him when he was shot, was sent away as it was for whites only. Tread lightly on the sacrifices made in the name of sports boycotts. Dismissing them as ineffective is to deny a bloody and hard-won place in political history.

The truth, of course, is that boycotts on their own do not bring down oppressive regimes. Neither do the protests of the athletes themselves. But who can deny the effect on public opinion of the many examples where Olympians themselves demonstrated their commitment through their efforts? Jesse Owens confounding Hitler’s eugenics beliefs by winning four gold medals in the 1936 summer Olympics, Tommie Smith and John Carlos highlighting civil rights anger by raising two black gloves at their awards ceremony in 1968 and the many athletes who not only stayed away, but were loud and vocal in their reasons for doing so.

Perhaps in this case, as acknowledged by Fry, the answer is for athletes to make a stand against inequality in Sochi by protesting in similar ways, either by emphasising to the media and the Russian organisers that they are gay after winning their event and daring them to arrest them or by finding their own way of expressing solidarity through protest. After all, doesn’t every athlete want to compete on a level playing field? Isn’t that supposed to be part of the Olympic ideal?

In any event, Coe’s view that boycotts never work needs countering. It is not acceptable to say athletes are above politics any more than it was right for the rock group Queen to make the same claim when they ignored the boycott of Sun City during the apartheid era before eschewing their ‘we’re just simple rock stars not politicians’ stance to play at Nelson Mandela’s birthday many years later. All of a sudden it becomes very necessary to line up and show your political commitment to something when the barometer of public opinion has swung behind the cause already won by those who were not so mealy-mouthed. It takes a lot more courage to do so, when everyone is lining up to tell you your gesture would be futile and that your training and ambition would be crushed by allowing such trifling matters as discrimination and inequality to affect your decision on whether to stay away or to compete and then protest.

“I don’t think one can place sport in such a high category as to say that it was instrumental in bringing about change, but I think what it did, it focused people’s attention on the fact that we couldn’t live almost a dual life in terms of which in everyday society we were denied basic rights, we were denied the opportunity to exercise our universal rights and then go and play sport as if it was a normal world. So from that point of view the political influence in sport played a tremendous role in bringing across to people that society is far broader than simply the question of where you stay and what you are allowed to do etc.
It also has to deal with interaction between human beings, and you can’t be equal on the weekend when you play sport but then for the rest of the week you are treated as being unequal.” Joe Ebrahim. Former President- South African Council on Sport

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Free Erics for All

8/11/2013

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Forgive the momentary diversion from a deep immersion in the topics of the hour into the shallow byways of commerce, but, well, you know.
For two days only 31st August 2013 -1st September 2013, the Kindle version of 'Eric is Awake' is free to download. This begins at Pacific Standard Time and after what Amazon says may be a few hours delay due to 'system latencies'. So I've extended it to two days to allow for the mysterious latencies. Remember you can download a Kindle app for IPad, mobile, laptop or PC and read it even without a Kindle device. Please take advantage and download, read and review it on Amazon. As Gore Vidal said, 'it is not enough to succeed, others must fail', to which we may add, 'it is not enough to publish, others must notice'. 12th August 2013 is Free Eric Day.

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Can Standing on your Head be Monetised?

8/8/2013

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As a teenager, George Orwell encountered his first love Jacintha whilst standing on his head. When asked why he was engaged in such a practice he said engagingly, ‘you are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up’.

From the moment we engage with the modern world via internet, national insurance, tax code, mobile phone, hire purchase, social security and all the myriad varieties in which we cede our privacy to scores of databases, we are a commercial asset to someone somewhere. We can be monetised.

In Ancient Rome, the goddess Juno was also known as Juno Moneta, the protectress of funds and in this role, the manufacture of all Roman coinage took place in her temples. From her, we get the cursed word ‘monetise’. ‘How can we monetise that? I’ve monetised my youtube videos. I’ve managed to monetise my outside toilet during the Notting Hill Carnival by charging £1 to use it. No, Ma, I’m not a prostitute. I’ve just monetised my physical real estate in a bull market, namely, Pier 45 at West 10th Street’.

It seems only a matter of time before the community of hacktivists grow weary of the denial of service attacks, released subscriber lists and writing ‘Free Bradley Manning’ on the PBS website knowing such activities cause a modicum of short-term inconvenience, but always end up being repaired and reinstated by the corporations and organisations targeted, by teams of ex-hackers employed to tidy up after their ex-playmates have finished their latest campaign. In fact, in 2011 they seemed to have already understood the next stage of the game and were noticeably more collegiate, clubbing together in loose alliances to wage operations like Operation AntiSec which campaigned against the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency among many others.

Recently these politically motivated hacking communities are engaged in activity that runs the gamut from attacking Walmart Canada for firing an employee over a dog to campaigning on behalf of whistleblowers like Snowden. But the actual number of serious disruptions of corporate or Government databases by campaigning groups has slowed to a trickle leaving the cyber war mainly to nations and corporations raiding each other for commercial or political advantage.

However, there is some evidence to show that the armies of commercial and nation state hackers have already gone a stage further, planting false rumours, affecting share prices with bogus information and generally making a higgledy-piggledy mess of their opponents data by deliberately mixing up and falsifying the database SQL structure and index itself. If this continues and proves much harder and longer to fix than a hole in a website’s security or a database that has been compromised through mere exposure, then we are in for an almighty extra threat to every individual’s liberty in the future.

It is one thing to be targeted and penalised by an efficient surveillance network that has catalogued all your personal data correctly; but what more lasting damage can be done to credit records and official information that make you eligible for all manner of legitimate access to international, national and municipal services if the information is deliberately altered and falsified? The greatest threat as far as the corporations and governments are concerned is not to our privacy but to their capacity to monetise our data. Damage that and you are hitting them where it hurts.

In my book, ‘Eric is Awake’, a man who believes himself to be Orwell, although it is clearly impossible, becomes involved in a campaign to reduce Government intrusion and surveillance in the 21st century.

In effect he suggests that instead of attacking the government servers and disabling the databases, hacktivists should be sabotaging the actual information; replacing names and details, mixing them up, changing them around. A bad insurance risk becomes a triple A ‘person of high financial worth’. The subscriber to a Harrods store card becomes the owner of a Lidl Cash account. The fencing enthusiast becomes a baseball card collector. The bid on the hoover becomes a bid on a hovercraft. A Coutts bank account holder gets entered on to a credit blacklist. A true counter-intelligence Data War in which we lowly citizens are merely bystanders caught in the crossfire. Not an attractive prospect for personal liberties already under threat and compromised at every turn. The world turned upside down. A true counter-intelligence Data War. After all, you are noticed more if you stand on your head than if you are right way up.

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Is Living Outside of Society a Crime?

8/7/2013

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When Orwell set off in 1946 to live in the remote northern end of the Isle of Jura in a house with no electricity, he planted fruit trees, started a vegetable garden and shot rabbits to sustain himself and his small household as he struggled to complete the final draft of ‘1984’. His aim was to absent himself from the demands of a ‘literary life’ where he remained constantly in demand to write articles and columns that he regarded as bread and butter work keeping him away from what he felt was his true calling. He loved the remote and inaccessible hermitage he created in the farmhouse at Barnhill, 30 miles away from the island’s only shop. But I wonder how easy he would find it to exclude himself today and how many legal hurdles he would have to overcome?

In a world where an increasing number of people feel the many forms of tax they pay seem to increase as the benefits and safety nets society is supposed to provide are eroded, more and more are seeking to live outside of society.

There is a common view that Governments around the world have, in their desire to control economies for their own short term electoral objectives, blindly and irrevocably started to dismantle their own legitimacy. The gap between rich and poor, between the haves and the have-nots has so widened that it is said by those who subscribe to an inherently anti-government stance that those who are supposed to represent the populace have fatally increased the number of the disenfranchised. In this, they believe, lay the seeds of their downfall.

The accepted orthodoxy of people who like to think of themselves as rugged individualists goes something like this. If you can no longer get free access to treatment when you are ill, if you can no longer afford a home in the first place, if you can no longer get a job or receive help to obtain one, if you can no longer protest without being arrested, if your children are sent to fight in wars you did not vote for, if your life savings are not safe in the bank, if you are not taken care of when you get old, if your taxes rise whilst your bins remain un-emptied and your schools become the graveyards of ambition, if your leaders enrich themselves and the corporations that helped them into power and not society at large, if your children kill each other on the streets because they have no aspirations worth speaking of, if the authorities no longer police with consent, but suppress and collate your every movement and communication, if you cannot vote against any of these things because no party represents your desire, well then, why are you here and to what are you contributing? Well, that’s a question that may become more materially evident to them when they attempt to do without it. Home made antibiotics and amateur surgery anyone?

Human beings formed tribes, then villages, then parishes, then counties, then cities, then governments to draw warmth from the flames of the campfire and to support each other; to protect their children and to make decisions collectively for the greater benefit of the people, for the enrichment of that nebulous thing ‘society’. But increasingly many believe that if told that society can no longer afford any of these hard won basic rights to life, then people can rightly ask the question, ‘what is society for?’ They will increasingly reject and live outside of it. It is already happening. Some no longer see the point of contributing to a society that offers so little but requires so much of them. People are disengaging. But how easy is it and is it legal?

Firstly, it seems there are an interesting mix of political factions who choose to drop out of society. In America, a dominance by survivalist cults of gun-wielding anti-government black helicopter fearing paranoid conspiracy theorists seem closer to self-sufficient private militias than the British ‘Good Life’ style conservationists whose principal motivation seems to be to decrease their reliance on processed food and wasteful energy. Even the milder types simply trying to scratch a living in the loneliest of deserts in California are harassed and evicted through the use of ‘Nuisance Abatement’ when their independence threatens a future land development or road building scheme. This isn’t to say swathes of the great British public aren’t paranoid or anti-government. They just aren’t as heavily armed and they drink a lot more nettle tea.

It’s also true that separating yourself off into a wilderness that is public land and becoming self-sufficient is considerably easier in the US than it is in the UK where the proportion of what is known as common land decreases yearly. This may be something to do with the sheer size of the US in comparison or it may be that Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ is a classic of American literature outlining a model of hermit living albeit on land owned by his friend Emerson and with occasional trips to town for a decent meal. As we will see, compromise lurks around every corner on the road to nowhere.

If the aim is to be simply ‘off the grid’ in terms of power, water, phone, internet or sewage and waste disposal, then the process can be an expensive one. Even if you buy enough land to grow enough food, the UK planning laws will bite you in the behind when it comes to living on it, as one couple in Devon who fell foul of them can attest. It seems society would rather you were living off benefit in a council house than attempting self-sufficiency on your own plot with what is deemed to be an ‘inadequate business plan’. If you are allowed to exist in your own way on your own land, woe betides you simply seeking to survive. They want you to turn a profit.

Being British, you won’t only have the local and central government officials to deal with. The average UK citizen loves nothing more than to prove you are in some way sponging off the system rather than being truly independent. Therefore you will have to be pure in your self-sufficiency. Even barter will be seen as an engagement fraught with compromise. On the other hand, you are unlikely to see their splenetic criticisms on the web as you will be, by now, coping with a backed up composting toilet and wondering if your £20,000 wind generator will ever garner enough watts to let you watch the cup final.

However if your aim is not only to be independent but also to be invisible and private, then you are stuck with an intractable problem. The tax system allows you to be exempt from tax, but it does not allow you to be exempt from the tax system. It is not enough to have no taxable income; you must be registered and assessed as such. To truly disappear from government systems and databases, you run the risk of committing an illegal offence at every turn.

Forums offering advice on the topic reveal some hair-raising motivations and solutions. One plaintive contributor to a discussion of off-grid living asking what advice anyone had for ‘when the ‘sh*t gets real and I wanna drop out of society completely’ received the following responses:

‘Become a monk.

‘Council House, Benefits and day time TV.

‘Win lottery, buy island, and employ peasants...

‘Learn how to sail and buy a boat at least 30ft - more if you don't want to go alone.’

The more practical advice included the view that whatever you choose to do will be a compromise and that all manner of contortions will be necessary to stay within or outside the reach of the law. They also maintained that it would seriously decrease your lifespan although the quality of that life may be richer than you will find amongst the wage slaves on the 8.10 to the City every weekday.

So, you can be legal and compromised or a renegade and short-lived. Either way, it seems to confirm a truism that to be one of society’s outsiders is no easy occupation and something in me suggests that this feels wrong in what increasingly feels like a societal model that has lost its purpose.

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NSA & MI5 Hand in Glove. Are You Really Surprised?

8/2/2013

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RAF Menwith Hill

Edward Snowden’s latest revelation that the US National Security Agency funds the UK’s Security Service is, of course, a shock and a surprise in the same way that the Pope being of a certain religious persuasion and ursine mammals depositing spoor in wooded areas is a disturbing new development that merits a serious re-evaluation of all that we have thought to be true and fair and right.

The special relationship between the US and the UK has, since the Second World War, been the same as that of a vassal state or town to the Roman Empire. Roman emperors knew certain regions subject to the Pax Romana had skills and products they needed but simply could not supply at the heart of the Empire. They therefore entered into arrangements whereby they supported chieftains and tribal elders who would ensure the free flow of the required commodity, be it glass, oil or slaves with particular skills. They were, of course, the dominant power in these relationships, but the Roman Peace consisted of a combination of military might, cultural and financial patronage and really, really straight roads. The Pax Americana consists of blue jeans, hamburgers, movies, HBO and SIGINT. The UK is rather like the ancient Roman town of Baelo Claudia in Southern Spain, which produced the finest garum or fermented fish sauce in the known world. It layered rotting fish in deep wells and allowed them to ferment and liquefy in the sun before exporting the pungent condiment to all corners of the Empire.

In return the town received from the Emperor Claudius the status of Municipium - a form of self-governance within the Empire. In other words, it made the little villagers feel as if they were independent and sovereign whilst clearly being financed and propped up by the City of Rome.

The UK has been for a long time the principal exponent of surveillance and SIGINT technology and methodology. Their special brand of sauce has been a tasty must have for the US since Bletchley Park first provided the basis for modern encryption, decryption and computing and, like downtown Baelo Claudia, it stinks to high heaven but no one is really surprised.

Knowing something is inevitably true, believing it to be so and then discovering a material fact that confirms your belief is received by the brain and processed into a stage reaction worthy of the double-take in a creaky murder mystery performed by a member of an amateur dramatic society in a shabby provincial church hall on a rainy Wednesday night. We are unconvinced by our own incredulity. We know this stuff goes on and we gasp wide-eyed indignation, protest, campaign and then move on, tacitly accepting it because we don’t believe it can be stopped.

Let us suppose a future new generation of politicians, energised by the protests of the early twenty-first century grows up to wage a radical political campaign against the surveillance state. In a new era of political thought resembling the Kennedy administration’s engagement with civil rights in the US and the Attlee government’s radical construction of the welfare state in the UK, they successfully legislate against the worst excesses of data capture and analysis of all citizens in the Empire and its vassal states. They throw open the doors of their intelligence agencies and emphasise the danger of burning liberty in the quest for security. What then? Will the technology go away? Will every country in the world regard itself as subject to the same respect for individual privacy at the price of increased security? Of course not. The spooks will consider it their duty, as now, to ignore the concerns of libertarian politicians paying lip service to liberty and will continue to ensure that they have absolute access to you and everything you do, say or think.

Orwell said ‘The same pattern always reasserts itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.’ Whilst this is true, there have been marked changes in our lives as a result of discounting this counsel of despair and fighting back. But who will be the Rosa Parks of the Data Wars? Snowden?

The one fatal flaw in the encroachment on civil liberties is that it relies on young minds in back rooms devising ever more intelligent means of surveillance and data analysis. The hackers find themselves recruited as security analysts rather than kicking their heels at home with an electronic tag on their leg and a banning order preventing them from even touching a keyboard. The technology is both the werewolf and the silver bullet.

There is an arms race going on and in the Data Wars, the corporations and intelligence agencies are the dominant armies on the plain. But there are undoubtedly rearguard actions and resistance maquisards, some not yet born, who may find a way for a citizen to be, as far as possible, guarded against unwarranted state and commercial intrusion. Many already exist, albeit with holes. But it is possible that drills of the data miners will be blunted by a clever bit of code combined with legislation and controls that will limit the price exacted for the Pax Americana. It will not be foolproof, but political equilibrium in the course of its progress from one end of liberty to another may, for a while at least, tilt in the direction of the truly private citizen.

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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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