A great read but is this the same John Major?

I have been reading My Old Man, John Major's history of music hall. Of course Major was born to parents who had trod the boards as jobbing music hall artistes and political opponents later made the most of this, sneering in a way that implied that we should all have parents who were Marxist theoreticians or chairman of a knicker elastic company. Be that as it may, My Old Man is a wonderfully detailed history of the halls and the characters who worked them. Major writes movingly about performers who, no matter how rich and famous they became, never forgot where they came from and could reach out across the footlights to a working class audience and sing about a life that they had all experienced. Apart from his own parents, Major shows the most warmth toward the "Queen of the Halls", the wonderful Marie Lloyd. No respecter of authority and an outspoken champion of the underdog, Marie was an unofficial leader during the bitter 1907 music hall strike.  Is this the same John Major who happily sat in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet during the miners strike and later as PM himself oversaw the final days of the national coal industry and the devastation of so many working class communities? Surely not.

The powerful hate to be laughed at.

From Kim Jong-Un to IDS the one thing that political leaders hate is being made a laughing stock of. They truly don't like it up 'em. That's why political cartoonists are so precious to us and such a pain in the arse to the power elites of the world. "National treasure" might be a phrase banded about far too liberally but it's hard to find a better way of describing our own Martin Rowson and Steve Bell. More power to their elbows. Give yourself a Christmas treat and visit the Cartoon Museum why don't you?

First cast the beam etc.

Political Scrapbook quite rightly outed today's Sun for hypocrisy in it's dealings with Russell Brand. Whether you consider Brand to be our hope for the future or a terminal bell end of the first water is beside the point. The bloke can hardly be blamed for the tax avoidance of his landlord. The Sun thinks otherwise apparently, despite being tenants of an even bigger bunch of offshore scumbags themselves.
You wouldn't get this kind of thing over at The Grauniad. They lead the fight against corruption and tax avoidance. Oh hang on! What's this on page 49 of today's issue of the left-wing chattering class's favoured organ? "Guardian Investing is offering an exciting opportunity to visit the Guardian offices in London for a complimentary investment event." Subjects covered will include, "Inheritance Tax Planning". Or in plain English - how to avoid inheritance tax.

Getting free from Accrington.

I could weep for the unhappy, abused children of the world but I know that there is little that I can do about their lives. When they grow up a few are able earn money by unburdening themselves in an autobiography and good luck to them. But misery-lit as it's known in the book trade is not my cup of tea; there is a whiff of voyeurism about the genre. Having said that, I have just finished reading Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and although it would be hard to describe the author's childhood as anything other than miserable to categorise the book as misery-lit would be to do it a grave injustice. Winterson writes compellingly about love, adoption, politics and mental illness but what really gripped me was her description of Accrington in the 1960's. She could just as easily have been writing about the 1930's, or the 1860's. In the 50's we too shared an outside toilet but there the similarity between Leyton and Accrington ended. Up north, grim or not, it truly was a different world.

True Grit and false dawns.

I watched the Coen Brothers re-make of the old John Wayne classic True Grit the other day. The 1969 John Wayne version was I suppose the point in cinema history when the Hollywood western finally became well and truly politically incorrect. There was no doubting the right-wing views of Wayne and no doubting either that to a very large extent the story of the Old West is one of exploitation of people and degradation of the environment. But the story is also one of rugged individualism and high adventure that has struck a cord with generations of film and pulp-fiction fans. I think that both versions of True Grit paint pretty much the picture of a brief moment in history that we want to believe in and a set of values that, despite the best efforts of the moral gatekeepers of the left, we all have a grudging respect for.

Deep joy. TCA arrives.

The Cunningham Amendment thudded onto the doormat this morning. Dedicated to joy, irreverence and the arcane skills of wit, irony and letterpress printing, there is no point in Googling, Twitting or Facebooking to find this wonderful little magazine. There is no online presence. TCA is firmly anchored in the real, rather than the cyber world. You could try sending a few stamps and a grovelling letter to :

Peter Good,
Room 6.
Tangleford House,
The Street,
Bawdswell,
Norfolk.
NR20 4RT

You never know your luck!

Sale of the century.

I am mainly aware of writer and journalist James Meek through The Peoples Act Of Love, his epic tale of Revolutionary Russia, the Czech Legion, castration cults, armed trains and the Siberian winter. If it were possible for a Scot to write a great Russian novel in the 21st century Meek is your man. Earlier this year he wrote one of the most insightful articles about the current situation in Ukraine that I have come across and now turns his attention closer to home with a new book Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else. The great British knock down sale of national assets may not have been quite as traumatic as the Russian equivalent but it changed the face of this country and there is little sign that the increasing polarisation of wealth is likely to stop any time soon. There will be no going back. I look forward to James Meek's contribution to understanding how it all came to this.

The Farm and The Valley.

Richard Benson was brought up on a small farm in the Yorkshire Wolds but turned his back on the rural life to become a journalist and eventually editor of The Face. When his parents were forced to sell up Richard returned to help with the farm sale and went on to write a best selling book about the trauma of the decline of both a small family business and a way of life. The Farm should be compulsory reading for all those townies who think that the countryside is populated mainly by premier league footballers, rock stars,  hedgefund managers and second homers, or for that matter that most British farmers are foxhunting barley barons. In the The Farm,  Benson gives an amusing but moving account of one family, one farming community and how the global food and financial markets impact on them. The author's father came from farming stock but his mother's family were miners and  now in The Valley the failed farm boy turned London trendy is taking a long hard look at that side of his family history. If he writes about the final days of mining as convincingly as he did about the decline of the English smallholding it should be well worth a read.

Art and Anarchy in the UK.

From Ali Sloper to Tank Girl, from Viz to V For Vendetta there is no more subversive form of art than the comic. Comics Unmasked, the new exhibition at the British Library, is a real treat for fans of comics and the wonderful cast of iconoclastic anti-heroes who have stepped out of their pages from Victorian times to the present day. It's all recorded here in this wonderful exhibition and so too is the effort of the establishment in all it's guises to ban this form of expression. Everyone from Mary Whitehouse to the Communist Party have at one time or another got their knickers in a twist over comics. It's just a shame that the British Library now charge admission for exhibitions. Some of the people who might get the most out of Comics Unmasked will probably be put of by the £9.50 demanded on the door. I note that the British Library have made a big effort to warn parents about all the sex, drugs and rebellion on display. Under 16's parental guidance and all that - no mention of the possible effect of us over 70's getting over excited.

Understanding Ukraine.

Is the Ukrainian Republic about to unravel before our very eyes? If so it will almost certainly not be in a good way. Few places can have a more complex history than the Ukraine but in order to have any chance at all of understanding what is happening now it seems essential to try and make some sense of the past. No doubt there are many notable textbooks but I have found Neal Ascherson's Black Sea helpful and also The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder. The period after the First World War was hugely turbulent for Ukraine and anarchists in particular have always been fascinated with the exploits of Nestor Makhno. There is an interesting overview of Makhno on the Warfare Historian site.

Coming Up For Air.

I'm not that much of a re-reader only rarely returning to a book no matter how much I have enjoyed it the first time around. There always seems to be so much other stuff to read. One exception to this, and a book that I have read many times, is George Orwell's Coming Up For Air.  The narrator and central character George Bowling is a fat forty-five year old insurance salesman living with his wife and two kids in a typical suburban semi. Mortgaged up to the hilt, trapped in the rat-race and with the constant fear of war and Fascism at the back of his mind George is not a happy man. A chance flashback sets him to reminiscing about his pre-First World War boyhood in the small Thames Valley market town of Lower Binfield. In his description of Edwardian small town England, of George's growing up and his obsession with fishing, the secret pool inhabited with giant carp, in all of this Orwell surpasses himself.
In the final third of the book George decides to take a few days off and re-discover his old home town after an absence of over twenty years. It will be like "coming up for air" he reckons. In what is I suspect   everyone's favourite part of the the book, George is driving toward Lower Binfield, approaching the crest of a hill from where he will be able to see the old town. The anticipation is palpable. He crests the hill only to find that Lower Binfield has gone, been subsumed by a vast industrial town, another Slough or Dagenham. George perseveres with his visit. Stays a few days. Drinks too much. The final straw is when he discoverers that the secret pool with the carp had been drained and used as a rubbish tip for a back to nature woodland garden development. And all the time there is the incessant backbeat of the coming war. The jackboots, the bombers overhead, rubber truncheons in the face.
George slinks back to his wife in the suburbs. He is not the most sympathetic of characters and in many ways the book is quite misogynistic but something about the wonderful descriptions of simple things draws me back again and again. Perhaps there is another, darker reason why I continue to return to Coming Up For Air. These days it's easy, listening to the chatter going on around you, all that stuff about house prices, all that personal aspiration, Waitrose, "lifestyle", it's easy to feel like you have been shipwrecked on an alien shore. I feel like that myself sometimes. In a strange way I find the fictional George Bowling somehow reassuring. He would understand. George reaches out from the pages and pats me on the arm just as he might if we were sitting together in the saloon bar. "Fuck it Old Chap". "Fuck it all". He rises to his feet. "Same again?"

What's done is done.

Munching my way through a slice of toast and marmalade with a background noise of the Today Program on the radio. It was Bishop Tom Butler's turn to speak on Thought For The Day and I wasn't paying much attention. I heard mention of the 1190 massacre of the Jews in the city of York. The Bishop then went on to talk about a proposal by the Spanish government to make amends for the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews some five hundred years ago. Apparently decendents of these Jewish victims of the inquisition may be offered Spanish citizenship. Having practised on the Jews the devoutly Catholic Isabella and Ferdinand proceeded to get rid of the larger Muslim population. Would the decendents of expelled Muslims also be entitled to a Spanish passport? Like much else in life there would of course be an EU dimension to all of this. I spread marmalade on another slice and poured coffee. I always have misgivings about historical hand wringing. Apologising for past injustices that happened generations ago always seems a bit pointless somehow. I mean how far back do you go? Roman Empire? Norman Conquest? Far better surely to try and do the right thing now. Anyway, as I say, I was only half listening. Suddenly the Bishop had my full attention. Did I hear him mention Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean? That some Sephardic Jews took revenge on the Spanish crown by looting the Spanish Main and sailing under both the skull and crossbones and the Star of David? Was the Bish having a bit of an ecclesiastical wind up? I know that Tom Butler is fond of a drink but surely he wasn't pissed at quarter to eight in the morning? Not a bit of it. It's all true. There is even a book. Bound to be at least one website devoted to Jewish Pirates. A whole new field of anoraky enquiry opens up. If only Harriet Harman had nailed the NCCL colours to the mast of the Jewish Pirate Appreciation Society rather than to that of the Paedophile Information Exchange how much easier would her life be today. But like I say, what's done is done.

How skiffle inadvertently told the truth about the Wild West.

Popular culture frequently distorts history, and usually presents a sanitised version of the past that fits in with the "national story" of the status quo. If you relied on the Hollywood and pulp fiction version of the American West you could be forgiven for thinking that the frontier was a peculiarly white undertaking. When I was a kid  Western films, comics and novels influenced  how we viewed "adventure" and also helped form our ideas of what it meant to be a "hero" and in this world of hard riding, fast drawing action a black face very rarely appeared.

More recently this version of the past has been challenged and we now know that as many as a quarter of old time cowboys were black. In the first half of the twentieth century the cowboy was seen as the epitome of the decency and honest self-reliance that was central to the American Dream. To admit that this square jawed hero was just as likely black would question the right to treat Afro-Americans as second class citizens so the black cowboy was airbrushed from frontier history.

At the same time that pop culture portrayed the western hero as exclusively white the black male was shown to be generally decent but dim, downtrodden and subservient. The reality was that even in the worst years of Jim Crow many blacks refused to toe the line and lived a dangerous, marginal, renegade life. There were black outlaws as well as black cowboys.

Meanwhile, in the wild east of Leyton I was graduating from practising fast draws with my Gat air pistol and starting to take an interest in music and leaning provocatively against the jukebox in the local cafe. Lonnie Donegan was popularising an up tempo version of American folk and few of us had a clue what he was singing about or about the roots of the music. Railroad Bill was a favourite and if the identity of Railroad Bill remained a mystery the idea of, "A 38 pistol on a 45 frame" sounded unbearably cool. It would be years later before I discovered that the Railroad Bill referred to was one of those black gunfighters who's very existence was denied by books and film.

Pain and pus in suburbia.

In the pub a small group of non-rugby fans chatted while most of the punters remained glued to the telly. The talk touched upon parents moving to leafy, expensive suburbs because the schools are good. For "good" read "white". For "poor" read "poor". It's the kind of conversation that I find it difficult to be part of without losing my temper so I was pleased that it was mercifully brief. Back home Michael Mosley's excellent Pain, Pus and Poison concentrated this week on the control of infection and in particular the eradication of smallpox. The dedicated band of workers who set out to inoculate smallpox into the history books had a selfless concern for all children not just their own offspring. A huge gulf of neo-con individualism separates such concern from the narrow interests of today's chattering classes. It was with some delight that I discovered that my own leafy suburb has been given a mention in Crap Towns Returns. Needless to say there has been considerable response from estate agents and suchlike pond life. Here is an example….. "With it's prime location next to the River Thames on one side, Bushy Park on the other, outstanding Ofsted-rated schools, leafy avenues, a buoyant property market and a thriving town centre filled with unique independent shops etc. etc."  I think I had better take one of my tablets and have a lie down!

Where is today's English Journey?

For me, reading JB Priestley's English Journey has always been a bit like decorating the hall, seems like a good idea but I just never get round to it. Well the hall remains as scratty as ever but I have finally got a copy of what Priestley described as, "being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933." It's a wonderful celebration of England and English working folk written during hard times  when there seemed little to be pleased about. Priestley had been through the First World War and in the year that Hitler came to power could have had few illusions about what the future had in store. But the book remains an incredibly optimistic one. Priestley beams out at us from the pages. An avuncular figure who  never seems to doubt for a moment the potential of ordinary people to stand together and build a bright socialist future. Today, in a world where talk of a 50p in the pound tax on the very rich is considered radical, I find it difficult to imagine a JB Priestley for our time.

Time For Outrage.

Someone gave me a copy of Stephane Hessel's little pamphlet. It escaped me when it was first published but is credited with being a prime motivator for the Occupy Movement. Hessler was 93 when he wrote this and had had what you might call a full life. A true hero of the Resistance he twice escaped from the Nazis having endured torture and the dreadful conditions of Buchenwald.  After the war Hessel was involved in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and throughout his long life remained an outspoken defender of the oppressed. What surprised me about Time For Outrage was not that this old fighter was able to so eloquently equate today's anti-capitalism with the struggles of the Resistance or that Hessel in his advanced years could still proclaim , "To create is to resist - To resist is to create". No, what amazes me is that this little pamphlet should have topped the bestseller list in France. I fear that a UK equivalent would have sold a couple of hundred with the rest of the print run gathering dust in Houseman's. C'est la vie.

The Pike wins Samual Johnson Prize.

We have all known, perhaps had as friends, people like Gabriele d' Annunzio. Complete shits to women they were always surrounded by girls. Never short of incendiary ideas and grandiose schemes these people don't seem capable of much empathy. They would never allow concern for fellow human beings to get in the way of a good idea. Serial womaniser, poet, proto-fascist, self styled leader of the Free City of Fiume,  d' Annunzio was many things but he was never boring. Lucy Hughes-Hallet has won the Samual Johnson Prize for The Pike, her biography of this awful but fascinating man. Those of us who might feel a bit sniffy about Gabriele d' Annunzio should perhaps just be grateful that the prize was not won by the Thatcher book.

The Exiles. A great forgotten film.

Film 4 recently showed The Exiles at two o'clock in the morning. I had never heard of it but the film was duly recorded and last night I finally got round to watching it.  What a classic movie. Wonderful footage of a long since gentrified working class area of LA. Mind blowing lighting and photography and, most importantly, a perceptive insight into the lives of city dwelling American Indians shot some time before AIM and the plight of Native Americans becoming a cause celebre.  Watch The Exiles if you get the chance.

The Cunningham Amendment.

Oh! Joy. Deep joy. After a protracted and detailed vetting procedure I have been accepted as a subscriber to that most august organ The Cunningham Amendment. There really isn't anything quite like  TCA. Amusing but pertinent, wonderful letterpress printing, fabulous graphics, superb production values and as sound a political journal as you are likely to come across these days. Don't bother searching for TCA online, they eschew such fripperies. That's a point - why am I still behind this keyboard when TCA awaits me downstairs?

Epiphany at the bookfair.

Next Saturday will see the annual pilgrimage down the Mile End Road for that cornucopia of libertarian delights, the London Anarchist Bookfair. Once again the organisers have brought together a stellar line up of just about every conceivable branch of anarchism. This year the bookfair will also stage the premier of Suzy Gillett's blockbuster movie Epiphany featuring those stars of stage, screen and assorted disturbances, Martin Wright and Ian Bone. See you there.