Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Really quite good fun. Bugger all to do with Doctor Who, though.



(more follows)

Thursday, December 21, 2006

And so this is Christmas....



1st Shepherd:

Hayll, kyng I the call! Hayll, most of myght!
Hayll, worthyst of all! Hayll, duke! Hayll, knight!
Of greatt and small thou at Lorde by right;
Hayll perpetuall! Hayll, faryste wyght!
Here I offer,
I prey the to take --
If thou wold, for my sake,
With this may thou lake--
This lytyll spruse cofer

2nd Shepherd:
Hayll, lytyll tyn mop, rewarder of mede!
Hayll! But oone drop of grace at my nede;
Hayll, lytyll mylke-sop! Hayll, David sede!
Of oure crede though art crop: hayll, in God-hede!
This ball
That thou wold resave --
Lytyll is that I have;
This wyll I vowche-save -
To play the with all
An go to the tenys.

3rd Shepherd:
Hayll, maker of man! Hayll, swetyng!
Hayll, so as I can! Hayll, praty mytyng!
I cowche to the than, for fayn nere getyng;
Hayll, Lord! Here I ordan, now at oure metyng,
This botell --
It is an old by-worde,
It is a good bowrde,
For to drynk of a gowrde --
It holdys a mett potell.

Mary
He that all myghtys may, the makere of heven,
That is for to say, my son that neven,
Rewarde you this day, as sett all on seven;
He graunt you for ay his blys ful even
Contynuyng;
He gyf you good grace;
Tell furth of thise case;
He spede youre pase,
And graunt you good endyng

Saturday, December 16, 2006

The US vs John Lennon

The way things are going, they're gonna crucify me.


'I suppose they tried to kill John,' says Yoko Ono in the last moments of David Leaf's documentary about John Lennon 'but they couldn't, because his message is still alive.' Yoko has made a career out of inviting people to imagine that the moon was a grapefruit, but this is a baffling remark even by her standards.

Who are 'they'? In 1998, Sean Lennon revealed that he believed his father had been murdered by the U.S government. Does Yoko also now believe this theory? In the newspaper adverts she took out on the 26th anniversary of Lennon's murder she admitted that she could not forgive 'the one who pulled the trigger' -- as if she thought there might indeed have been other people involved. But if this is what she thinks, the subject is not mentioned, or even alluded to, anywhere else in the film.

If you like conspiracy theories, here's one. The makers of the U.S vs John Lennon set out to prove that the C.I.A murdered the singer. They assembled the evidence; they recorded their interviews--, but at the last moment, the studio decided that it was too hot to handle and deleted all references to the assassination from the film -- except for that one elliptical comment from Lennon's widow.( Oh, and if you play the film backwards, you can hear President Nixon saying 'I buried John.') Completely bonkers, like all conspiracy theories, but it does account for one otherwise inexplicable fact. How did such a dull movie as this ever come to be made?

If you are a John Lennon fan then very little in the film will be new to you. If you are not, then this isn't a particularly good introduction. For one thing, it is relentlessly Yokocentric. 'When he met Yoko' we are told 'He found the other half of his voice.' If Lennon had a song-writing partner before he married Yoko, then they are never mentioned by name. Indeed, but for a few bars of 'Revolution' and 'The Ballad of John and Yoko', you would hardly be able to tell that John Lennon had ever been in a group called the Beatles. And it is a very selective account, ignoring facts which don't fit in with the story it wants to tell. Yoko may have been half of John's voice, but during the period covered by the movie, Lennon walked out on her (or perhaps she kicked him out) for two years. Since the movie celebrates a Johnandyoko who believed in non-violence and compared themselves with Ghandi, it conveniently ignores his rather embarrassing sympathy for the I.R.A. ('You Anglo pigs and Scotties / Sent to colonize the North / You wave your bloody Union Jacks / And you know what it's worth... / ....Though Stormont bans our marches / They've got a lot to learn / Internment is no answer / It's those mothers turn to burn!') Occasionally, the film is downright misleading: John is allowed to describe himself as working class without anyone pointing out that while Paul lived in a council house, John decidedly grew up in the middle-class part of town and even went to grammar school. And the song which begins 'What a waste of human power / What a waste of human life' is placed over footage of the Vietnam war, even though it is actually about a prison riot.

The film starts with a brief recap of the 'bigger than Jesus' debacle. It isn't really clear what bearing this has on the overall argument. It is certainly true that some people in the Bible Belt were inexplicably offended by Lennon's suggestion that 'Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right'. I wonder how extensive the ensuing antibeatlemania actually was? It's always the same Beatle records we see being put on the same bonfire: if that's the only footage anyone has, how widespread a phenomenon can it have been? Is the film trying to say that America hated Lennon from the beginning because he wasn't a Christian (except on the days when he was)? But I have never heard it claimed that his subsequent troubles with the U.S government were religiously motivated.

We then proceed to Lennon's marriage to Yoko Ono, and the story of how the couple turned their honeymoon into a publicity stunt against the Vietnam war. This is pretty familiar stuff, although the scene where he records 'Give Peace a Chance' lying in bed and surrounded by miscellaneous hangers on most of whom can't quite manage to clap in time with the music remains very funny and rather moving. At some point after this Bed-In for Peace the Beatles split up, but this isn't mentioned: what matters is that John and Yoko relocate to America and get involved in the peace movement and radical politics there.

The film argues that the pivotal event is John's appearance at a benefit concert in December 1971 to campaign for the release of one John Sinclair, a political activist who'd been given a ten year jail sentence for possessing two joints of marijuana. John wrote a protest song (possibly in his sleep) and performed it at the concert. Astonishingly, 55 hours later, Sinclair was released from prison. The following February, John and Yoko's temporary visas were withdrawn and they were told to leave America. I don't think anyone now doubts that this was not, as the immigration department claimed at the time, because John had a trivial conviction in the UK for possessing marijuana, but because the Nixon administration was frightened of him as a political activist and peace campaigner with an influence on newly enfranchised young people. J. Edgar Hoover himself wrote 'All extremists should be considered dangerous' across his F.B.I file. The film shows documents which appear to prove that President Nixon must have known about, if he didn't personally order, the campaign against the Lennons.

Lennon hired a clever lawyer and staged publicity stunts and 'happenings' to further his campaign to be allowed to stay in America. We see some very amusing footage of the press conference at which he announced that he had founded a new country, declared himself an ambassador of it, and therefore granted himself diplomatic immunity. It was not until 1976 that he was finally given indefinite leave to remain in the U.S.A by which time Nixon had resigned in disgrace.

The film ends with some unfamiliar home movies of John during his 'Househusband' phase, including an amusing recording of him interviewing Sean while changing his nappy. This sequence is cut short by the sound of five gunshots, but nothing else is said, either about Chapman or the circumstances of John's death. And it wisely avoids mentioning the appalling fact that if President Nixon had been successful in his attempts to kick him out of America, John Lennon would almost certainly be alive today.

So there is a massive gap in the film. We are being asked to draw a line between the 'bigger than Jesus' controversy; the attempts to deport John from the U.S.A; the acknowledged criminality of the president (we actually hear Mr. Bernstein himself explaining what a bad egg Richard Nixon was); and what happened outside the Dakota Building in December 1980. But so far as I can tell, no link is proven to exist. The immigration department acted legally (if in a petty and paranoid way) in trying to deport a political agitator with a drugs record. If it is true that the F.B.I bugged Lennon's phone then I believe they were within their constitutional rights to do so if they thought he was a threat to national security. His anti-Christian remarks were not (so far as I know) cited as a reason for removing his visa. And I'm sorry, but Mark Chapman was a lone nut who thought (rightly) that he could gain a kind of fame by selecting a famous person and murdering them. So what, in the end, is the film saying?

'I suppose they tried to kill John, but they couldn't, because his message is still alive.' What message? This film is possibly worth 90 minutes of your time because it gives you the opportunity to look at clips and recordings of John Lennon. His charisma jumps out of every frame: this poorly educated, pretty obviously damaged young man, shooting from the hip, saying whatever comes into his head, angry, passionate, witty, surreal. In the middle of answering questions about Vietnam when he is still a mop top, he suddenly interrupts himself to do a riff about 'show business, darling.' When asked how he feels about the people who tried to deport him he says, apparently off the cuff 'Time wounds all heels.' And his energy and commitment as a performer take your breath away. 'It ain't fair / John Sinclair / In the stir for breathing air' is a terrible, terrible song -- yet this doesn't seem to matter as Lennon uses it to channel the anger of a stadium full of people. I defy anyone not to be moved when we see Sinclair coming out of prison hours after Lennon sung this song. So the film does nothing but reinforce my admiration for Lennon the man.

But Lennon's message? The film suggests that he allowed himself to become a political tool of left wing activists like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman (who he later described as 'Mork and Mindy'). It rather pointedly doesn't say that he was also a tool in the hands of a radical surrealist named Yoko Ono. Lennon seems to have been one of those natural forces that needed to be harnessed and pointed in a constructive direction by someone. But can he really be said to have had a 'message' of his own?

Lennon's later work consists of powerful, memorable, but ultimately meaningless phrases, endlessly repeated: 'Woman is the nigger of the world'; 'War is over, if you want it', 'Just Give Me Some Truth'; 'Power to the People, Right on!', 'Free the people, now!' There is no suggestion of what the people are going to do once they are empowered, or what feminists need to do to improve the position of women in society. He refuses point blank to make any specific critique of U.S foreign policy. When someone asks him 'What should the President do?' he replies simply 'He should declare peace.' Yoko once suggested that people should go naked for peace. (How? Why? To what end?) 'Peace' seems not to be a political concept or a state which can exist or not exist between nations: it's a magic word to be said over and over, like one of the Maharishi's T.M mantras, until it stops meaning anything at all.

Lennon may have believed that he was literally raising people's consciousness, that repeating a phrase could somehow release peace and love into the world: instant karma. One can't help thinking that much of this came from Yoko, and that the authentic voice of Lennon comes through only in the (often inaudible) intermediate stanzas. 'Everybody's talking about ministers, sinisters, banisters and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis and popeyes, bye bye.' There speaks the true voice of the man who used to think he was a walrus.

Above all, Lennon was a performer. Aligning himself with the 'peace' movement – on the days when he wasn't sitting in paper bags, demanding acorns at the wrong time of year, or making 45 minute films of his penis (*) -- was indeed a powerful political act. But take away the surrealism, the bottoms, the silly little drawings, the records consisting of nothing but feedback and try to present him as primarily a peace campaigner and revolutionary and it becomes painfully obvious that he didn't have a message. All he was saying was 'give peace a chance.'

What we really need at this stage in the day is a long, joyous documentary with lots of complete recordings of Lennon's music and lots of unexpurgated interviews and footage of John Lennon: swearing, angry, silly, infantile, magnificent. What we don't particularly need is to rake over this ancient quarrel.

I saw the movie on the 26th anniversary: the cinema was empty.



(*) A good joke, to be fair. He'd previously made a film called Erection which turned out to be nothing ruder than a 20 minute film of a building site, this one, called Self-Portrait was a film about a prick. Like most conceptual art, once you've heard it described, you don't actually need to see it.

I say what it occurs to me to say

Andrew, I've noticed that in the last few months you seem to have increasingly devoted your weblog to the sillier rantings of your country's right. Given, though, that the utter lack of chance that there will be a Conservative government in the near future renders these folks ineffectual buffoons, why bother? It merely raises your blood pressure.

Andrew Reeves

As a matter of fact, I would welcome the replacement of the Blairite junta by a genuinely Conservative government. (That is: I would prefer a Socialist government to a Conservative government; but I would prefer a Conservative government to a Blairite one. But neither Socialism nor Conservatism are on offer at the moment.) That said, I happen to believe that after a six-month interregnum under Gordon Brown, David Cameron will get his statutory three terms in Number Ten. Since Thatcher, we have had a Presidential system in all but name, and I don't believe that The People will elect a dour, clever, dull Scotsman as President when there is a photogenic young blair-lite toff on offer.

You assume that the right-wing press won't have any influence unless and until Cameron becomes Prime Minister. This assumes that New Labour is on the political left. And it assumes that the tabloids don't have any influence until 'their' party gets back into power. I don't think this is true. And incidentally, the Sun has said 'Vote Labour' at the last three elections.

There were four pundits on last week's Any Questions (a political talk show on BBC Radio 4.) They included the sensible ex-Tory minister Ken Clarke and the surprisingly coherent evangelical Anne Atkins. All four took it for granted that 'councils' were trying to stamp out Christmas, that it was jolly silly of them and they should jolly well stop it.

The next Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a speech in which he said:

Just this evening, I was told that some Sure Start centres are being urged this year to call their children's Christmas parties 'winter celebrations'. The fact is children of all faiths all over Britain will be looking forward to Christmas in a few weeks time, and it is right that they can celebrate Christmas.

Gordon appears to be working on the old-fashioned (pre-2005) theory that 'Christmas' is a secular festival, one that all British people should join in, and you shouldn't really try to bring God in to it. At least, I assume that's what he means: surely his mad plans for a national holiday called Britishness Day and everyone putting Union Jacks on their lawn doesn't include the idea that 'children of all faiths' should be forced to participate in specifically Christian ceremonies? But he as made a conscious decision to associate himself with the 'Christmas is canceled' mythology, knowing perfectly well how the tabloids will report it.

Gordon doesn't commit himself to saying that Sure Start Centers (or nursery schools, as they used to be called, are replacing Christmas parties with Winter parties; he only says that he has 'heard' that person or persons unknown are "urging" them to do so. This just as well: the Sure Start website contains no references to a Winter Party or Winter Celebration. The Warrington branch is holding a Christmas Card competition, though.

Minister for Veils, Jack Straw used his column in his local newspaper to say:

If I may speak on Gabriel's behalf, I'm very clear on his view for 2006. Put the tinsel in the office. Celebrate Christmas publicly and Muslim and Jewish festivals too, and those of other faiths as well. Jesus was a prophet for all of us.

Lets pass over the question of whether Muslims would be comfortable with singing 'veiled in flesh the godhead see' and 'our god contracted to a span incomprehensibly made man' or whether Christians would necessarily agree that 'Jesus was a prophet'. I actually prefer Straw's ham-fisted syncretic Christmas to Brown's secular one. I only want to note that Straw has uncritically accepted the lie that there is a movement on to stop us putting up Christmas decorations, and the even bigger lie that this is 'so as not to offend non-Christians' (i.e Muslims).

The 'tinsel' bit is particularly good value. It has been pointed out that hanging tinsel around computer monitors is a really bad idea, because it could easily cause a fire. The Mail and the Express, have, as we've seen, adopted the tactic of treating every 'health and safety' rule as an instance of 'political correctness'. Straw appears to have been fooled by this trick, and accepted uncritically that we've been banned from putting tinsel in our offices because it might offend Muslims. The Express and the Mail have dictated the terms in which he thinks: he's been sucked into Express-land without even noticing it.

The normally sane Archbishop of York preached a harmless little sermon about how in very real sense we shouldn't be like the innkeeper who said that there was no room at the inn but that in a very real sense we should all as it were invite Jesus into our hearts and our lives blah-de-blah-de-blah. Doubtless all very true and the sort of thing that any Vicar might have said at any time in the last hundred years. However this year the Bish is not saying that all the hustle and bustle of Christmas might, in a very real sense, make some of us forget what is, in a very real sense, the meaning of Christmas. This year, secularization is part of a plot. We Christians are being prevented from celebrating Christmas by people who think that 'a Christian festival is offending other faiths'. He doesn't blame the Political Correctness Brigade or the Muslim Hoard; and (for some reason) he doesn't mention whether he thinks it is particularly bad to ban Christmas from white areas. His preferred bogeymen are 'illiberal atheists and aggressive secularists.' (Has Richard Dawkins made an ex-cathedra statement about tinsel? I thought he was okay with residual religious traditions provided you didn't actually believe in them.) Yet these illiberal atheists and aggressive secularists seem to be doing very much the same things as the PCB: the statement begins:

'Responding to media enquiries over the banning of Christmas celebrations in workplaces, nativity plays which no longer include Jesus and playgroup 'winter festival' parties where Christmas has been removed, the Archbishop issued the following statement...'

So even Most Revd and Rt Hon Dr Sentamu has been dragged into the fantasy world of Daily Expressland.

Last but not least Tony Blair himself made his incoherent 'integration' speech. I have to say that I don't actually know what he was talking about: I cannot translate phrases like 'The right to be different. The duty to integrate. That is what being British means.' with any confidence.

(If he thinks that 'the right to be different' defines being British in the way that liking cheese defines being French and taking your clothes off defines being Greek, then I would say that he is simply wrong. I think the British have always had a rather endearing low-level stay-at-home xenophobia. I can remember when using garlic in cooking was thought to be dangerously European. Are we really better at dealing with people who are 'different' than, say, the United States? But I think that the whole idea of defining 'Britishness' is dangerous nonsense. 'My parents were British'; 'I have a British passport'; 'The immigration office granted me British citizenship'. That is what Britishness means. That's all Britishness can ever mean. That's all Britishness should ever mean. )

Blair concludes:

Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don't come here. We don't want the hate-mongers, whatever their race, religion or creed.

But Tony, Tony, Tony. The July 7th bombers didn't come here from anywhere; they were British. The Admiral Duncan nail bomber didn't come here from anywhere: he was British, and, in some perverted way, even Christian. The Tory councilor who wrote 'me have hobby, it called breeding' didn't come here from anywhere (except possibly cloud-cuckoo land) she was British. And the millions of Sun readers and Mail readers and hundreds of thousands of Express readers who salivate over 'All terrorists are scrounging asylum seekers' and 'Migrants taught how to scrounge' they are British, British, British. The London bombers were British people with dark skins. Harold Shipman was a British person with a beard. They didn't cease to be British when they became murderers; they simply became British criminals. Yet Blair slips imperceptibly into saying that the forces of Intolerance are aliens which came to England from Outside and can be sent back there.

Tony Blair is not a xenophobe. But the Mail, the Express, and the Sun control the political agenda to such an extent that he slips into their way of thinking without noticing it. Or else he pretends to be a xenophobe to get positive coverage in those papers. The fantasy world of the British media is not something which may have an influence if the Continuity Conservative Party ever get back into power. It is causing the political class to inhabit a fantasy world, here and now.