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Monday 19th May 2008
Picture: L to R Bob Devereux, Rod Bullimore, Anna Chen, Kelvin Bowers at the Salthouse Gallery reading Sunday 11th May 2008
Home from St Ives at last with end-of-holiday blues. Still haven't unpacked due to to an overwhelming urge to get my holiday pix and videos sorted.
Here's the first video of the batch. It's of me reading some poetry in Norway Square at the first of the lunchtime open readings in Norways Square as part of Bob Devereux's literature festival: "Daddy Freud", "Poe" and "To Adonis At His Toilet".
Monday 19th May 2008
China begins three days of mourning a week after it's worst natural tragedy since the last major earthquake thirty years ago. Following the debacle in Burma where the authorities, usually so quick to crack down on dissent, are criminally slow to react to the estimated 100,000 deaths from the cyclone, the Chinese rescue effort has been admirably rapid and efficient. It also compares favourably with the way the US government dealt with Hurricane Katrina and lost New Orleans, so the attacks on the rescue operation from some quarters are grossly unfair.
However, while some structures withstood the massive 7.9 shocks, schools bore the brunt with thousands of children caught in the collapse. As one mother says, "It wasn't the earthquake that killed our children, it was the buildings."
Deepest sympathy.
Saturday 17th May 2008
Picture: The first documented Chinese in Britain, Shen Fu Tsong, a Jesuit convert who translated the Chinese books at the Bodleian Library in the 17th Century and whose portrait hung in the bedchamber of King James II
The first of the two omnibus repeats of my series, Chinese In Britain, went out last night on Radio 4 at 9pm. It was originally a ten-part series broadcast April/May 2007 and has now been edited into two hour-long episodes.
Next one is Friday 23rd May at 9pm.
You can listen for seven days at: BBC Online
“A fascinating story” - Chris Campling, The Times
“Each episode sounded effortless only because it had been crafted with such supreme care” - Gillian Reynolds, The Daily Telegraph
Saturday 10th May 2008
Who'd have thought a dozen oysters and half a bottle of cava could have such devastating consequences? Either that or the clotted cream, the sun or the pasties (the Cornish kind you eat, not the ones you twirl, silly!).
Since Wednesday's molluscular treat this writer has been tethered to the, ahem, "facilities" by the state of her guts (shades of Chuck Palahniuk). As I'm only 20 paces from the beach that's not too much of a tragedy except that the incoming banks of cloud carried on a brisk Atlantic wind make it not as attractive a proposition as it was a few days ago when I was slapping on the factor 30 suncream. Let's look on the bright side, though. Nuthin' like a gastric upset or a tapeworm to trim the tum and mark a welcome return to one's summer sillhouette.
"I grow old, I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." Or at least wrapped up in thermals and my padded waterproof faux berber jacket with hood. I'd look like something that fell off the back of the Countryside Alliance if it weren't for the fact that I don't exactly fit the profile. Fooled by the sun earlier in the week, I took a trepidatious paddle in the sea up to my knees and beat a hasty retreat, not because filmmaker Nick Broomfield was chasing me with a camera, but because my feet immediately grew numb with cold.
Only mad dogs and Englishmen swim in the early summer sea. You have to wait til September for the sea to heat up enough in these heah parts for any sane person to fully immerse. Unless you are an energy-frazzling toddler or a surfer. By the way, isn't it amazing how a black rubber wetsuit can turn the average fat-slob Brit into a god, sleeked down and held in in all the right places? (And bulging where needed.)
Today is the start of Bob Devereux's Literary festival, beginning at 12.30 with daily open readings in Norway Square and various other events at the Arts Club (Cafe Frug nights), the Mariners Gallery, and Bob's own wonderful Salthouse Gallery. I'm reading from The Chop House on Sunday with my mate Rod Bullimore who's reading from his Unfinished Novels — memories of dead teachers, and generally larking about for the duration.
More info on the festival here
More on St Ives courtesy of Steve McIntosh here
Just to keep you going until I get home and upload pix and videos, here's a link to one I made last year of local musician Steve Jones performing Coconut Skins by Damien Rice.
Wish you were here ...
Wednesday 7th May 2008
Anna Chen reads from her autobiography, The Chop House, 8pm this Sunday 11th May at the Salthouse Gallery, St Ives, as part of the St Ives Literature Festival.
"Right now I'm trying to finish The Chop House, an autobiography about my upbringing by Chinese communists in Hackney from the Swinging Sixties, when I had Beatlemania screaming in one ear and Red Guards in the other, to life as an early punk when I hung out with various cultural reprobates and had my first catsuit made by Vivienne Westwood. My excuse for being in St Ives is that it gives me the opportunity to buckle up, knuckle down and get the damn book writ. But there's the beach, the Arts Club, the night life, my mates (old and new) and, of course, the literary festival ... "
More info here:
and here:
Monday 21st April 2008
"My dad's bigger than your dad and he's gonna do you, sunshine!"
"Yo mama so fugly, we gonna kill the lot of you."
"Yo Dalai so feudal he gotta suck Amurkin dick fo dollahs!"
"Yo side so oppressive we gotta give special dispensation for violence. Om!"
So what are we to make of the current tsunami of lunacy rolling around the world? It's crashing on my beach and I don't like it one little bit.
The end of the dream of China being a genuine socialist state was tragic. The last great hope. Elsewhere, political dregs that identify as socialist fight like rats in a sack. We've given up on the ingenuity of the human mind and retreated into mysticism while the social and cultural superstructure collapses into the base like the melting tiers of a soggy wedding cake. (Or, to quote replicant Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner, "Like tiers in reign".) Prophets and demigods and their MiniMees supplant Marx and Darwin. We're expected to be in thrall to the deities' earthly representatives, uncritically swallow their lip-service to Peace and be very, very respectful indeed ... or get bashed up or worse for our irreverent offences.
Having been raised on one personality cult, I've been pretty effectively immunised against all others. Full credit to Mao for leading the communists to victory against all odds in 1949. But if the sight of weeping 'n' wailing Red Guards in Tien An Men Square while the Great Helmsman beamed down from the Emperors' old heavenly throne set alarm bells ringing, the Book of Revelations written by his doctor, describing all his earthly excess in putrid detail, made you want to call in the emergency services.
That was faith dressed up in politics. We now have the real thing; The Return of Religion: This Time It's Personal. One of the most powerful and pernicious myths of our time, welcome to the cult of the Dalai Lama. He ticks all the boxes that spiritually impoverished westerners could ever desire (and there's me thinking desire was a no-no). He's an earth-bound deity. A god king. Kind and wise granter of redemption - unless you're a Tibetan serf. Coz it's all illusion, see?
But question the old fraud and suddenly you are met with some very un-Buddhist howls of protest and a plethora of "How dare you?"s. Don't they know it's the revolutionary's duty to give a kicking to a myth when they see one?
The search for the ideal benevolent father figure is a universal. Coca-Cola knew this when they created the modern image of Santa Claus. Add to that the muscle wielded when the other kids knock over your sandcastle or teecher won't acknowledge your true worth, and the result is intoxicating.
Do I want to believe? You betcha! In a disintegrating world, I crave certainties as avidly as the next sistah. I, too, seek comfort. The reassurance that, somewhere out there, lies a sea of love in which I can immerse myself and wash away all pain. Perhaps it's the siren call to my innate hunger for spiritual parenting that makes me kick up when I see the seductive powers of the image. I happen to like my capacity for original thought, and anything that threatens to turn my brain into jelly can expect a rough ride.
As a schoolgirl I was relieved not to have been kept in China for my education during the Cultural Revolution, as my gobby character flaws would have made kneeling on broken glass an inevitability. But I saw enough of it to recognise the Red Guard types: bellowing bullies tasting power for the first time, high on self-righteousness and confident of a strong daddy behind them. Lacking in imagination themselves, they whacked anyone who didn't conform to their tramline minds. They scared me sumfink rotten.
Many of these Red Guards are now middle-aged depressives: self-loathing, guilt-ridden, unemployable or suicidal. That's a post-party hangover to beat all hangovers.
What can we do but piss up against these fences?
So, in the Mean Time, I'll continue to batter my head against these walls even if it means signing them with splattered blood and brain matter. Don't worry — you can hose it down afterwards and obliterate all memory.
I am the lone dog pacing your purlieus; the barbarian at the gate. I am the carapace-free lungfish trapped where the sea has drained, gulping down the poisoned air and staring at the stars.
If you're one also, I'll shake you by the hand. If not, I'll probably want to shake you by the throat.
"Religion is the new social evil" Joseph Rowntree Foundation report (pdf)
Friday 4th April 2008
Torchwood: Wahey! My cock's on fire!
WARNING: SPOILERS TA RAAS
So. This was it. The final episode of the second season of Torchwood, execrable spin-off of the hysterical Dr Who, reinvented and revitalised by Russell T Grant, the world's most desperate Joss Whedon wannabe. The first two seasons of Dr Who, long before it jumped the shark by involving Catherine Tate, indubitably had their faults. A full list may possibly follow.
However, when you pull back and look at the big picture, the achievement was more than respectable: a successful update and relaunch of a franchise which had been essentially dormant for many years and in serious decline for many years before that. Dr Who was where Grant flashed his chops. Torchwood is where his reach exceeds his grasp.
In the beginning there was Angel, divine spin-off of the exquisite Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The title character, a superhuman given to long coats and long silences where Captain Jack is merely given to long coats, is played by the tall, handsome and brooding David Boreanaz. Captain Jack Harkness is played by John Barrowman, who is merely tall and handsome.
In one storyline, Angel, the vampire who can never die, is captured by his son, Connor, who's been driven bitter, twisted and a bit mad through torture by monsters in a strange dimension far away. Connor erroneously blames his father for abandoning him to his fate when in fact he has never stopped thinking about him. Connor buries his immortal dad at sea in a lead box so his torture will be eternal.
In tonight's Torchwood season finale, Captain Jack Harkness, the temporal agent who can never die, is captured by his brother, Gray, who's been driven bitter, twisted and a bit mad through torture by monsters on a strange planet far away. Gray erroneously blames his brother for abandoning him to his fate when in fact he has never stopped thinking about him. Gray buries his immortal brother underneath Cardiff AD 27 so his torture will be eternal.
Guess whose punishment is the most excruciating.
So. We continued to play the usual Torchwood game of spot-the-nick. I got the climactic scene of Fight Club where the buildings are exploding around the protagonists. My friend got Tasha Yar's prerecorded posthumous speech sprung on her surviving colleagues in the episode "Skin of Evil" from season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Toshiko dies and springs a prerecorded posthumous speech on her surviving colleagues. The poignancy was detectable.
Spike the bleached-blond vampire — magnetically and irresistibly played by the god in human form that is James Marsters — dies heroically in a magical conflagration at the end of the Buffy series finale, and is revived as an insensate ghost in Angel. Owen, the twitching ferretty Spike manque — soggily and resistibly played by the hole in the air that is Burn Gorman — dies earlier in season two of Torchwood and is revived as an insensate being and now dies again (did I say heroically?) in a nuclear catastrophe, tastefully bleached out to an oblivion whiter than Spike's Billy Idol barnet.
Functioning as the moral centre of the programme, the competent but winsome Gwen almost promises to leave on account of she can't stand it any more. We feel her pain.
And Joss's hits just keep on coming. The (Cardiff) Power Walk — smash cuts — helicopter shots of an ominous nocturnal metropolis. Team Harkness with porn-star good looks. Hey, check it out, it's just like LA with cheese on toast!
And of course - how could we forget? I mean, like, HOW? — James Marsters!!!!!!! Spike Himself!!!!!!!!! (As something called "Captain John".) Yet another morally ambiguous, sexually charismatic bad boy turned good guy with an almost perfect posh-punk English accent. And a bad 1980s jacket that fell out of an Adam Ant video threatened to upstage His Gorgeousness.
And the high emotion! If you milked a cow like this, the Animal Liberation Front would be camped in your yard and PETA would be on your tail. Why o why, ten whole minutes after the A-story has ended and Gray the evil brother has been vanquished, are they all still ladling on the sentiment? It's a fifty-minute telly show, ferfuxache! This kind of aggressive begging for BAFTAs would get you moved on by the cops if you tried it in the street. I haven't seen so much snot and grizzling since Respect imploded. [For readers sufficiently fortunate not to be au fait with the ins and outs of the cat's arse that is the British Left, the Respect split was a tragic tale of epic proportions. Two bald men, not just fighting over a comb, but over a comb that had no teeth.]
So. As Ann Robinson would demand, who is the Captain Jack Sparrow and who is the Captain Jack Harkness? If I may quote myself rather than simply repeat myself: there is STILL only one Captain Jack and Keef Richards is his dad.
So. There.
Saturday 22nd March 2008
Tibet or not Tibet: Shangri-La la land
Just got back to find this powerful post at the Socialist Unity website on the subject of Tibet. It's an admirable contribution to the debate in a worrying climate of knee-jerk attacks on China from the West.
China has many faults, of which we're all aware, and is not the socialist paradise many once hoped for. But neither is Tibet the last repository of spiritual transcendence on Earth as presented in the media. So what's motivating the current focus on China as the Big Bad? As opposed to any of America's client states? (Saudi Arabia and Israel heave into view, to name but two.) The green-eyed monster takes on the Sleeping Dragon now that it's waking up. The Chinese are the US's biggest creditors, so I guess US fury is understandable. And it's a useful diversion from their own criminal actions in the world. Similarly with the British establishment's demonisation of the Chinese that goes way beyond legitimate and thoughtful criticism, and could just possibly be motivated by old territorial ambitions.
I may not have a deep knowledge of Tibet but I catch on eventually.
Some have asked, "Madam Miaow, does lil ol' Britain really have evil designs on the Kingdom at the Roof of the World?"
To them I say, remember British Empire, grasshopper? Encroachments from India into the Himalayas and Afghanistan? The East India Trade Company? Opium Wars? Do fish fuck in water? You betcha! The Brits have been sniffing around Tibet since it began secretly mapping it in 1865 (see Wikipedia). In the 1904 invasion, British troops under Colonel Francis Younghusband occupied Lhasa and machine-gunned a load of locals, finally imposing a trade agreement and sticking it to their Tsarist Russian rivals. How's that for spiritual? There's been a lot of destabilising going on behind the scenes, especially in the cold-war lead-up to the events of 1950. The CIA funded a Tibetan guerilla war against China, backing the Dalai Lama, until at least 1969 (or 1972, depending on source). Officially, that's when it ended, but who knows what they're up to now?
A few years ago I was asked to attend a parliamentary meeting set up by some of the political elite in support of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. My first utterance was, "Baby, have you got the wrong vampire!" [Ref: Jewish vampire played by Alfie Bass when confronted with a crucifix in Polanski's Dance of the Vampires.] I had to explain why I was not enamoured of Dolly Llama and his Shangri-La nostalgia for feudalism.
Unfortunately, after a promising start when whole sections of Tibetan society welcomed them as liberators, China behaved with the same degree of sensitivity as the British in Ireland. China raised literacy levels massively, lifted life expectancy from 35 to 67 [according to the Chinese authorities in 2003. Unescap says 59 in 1990 - see note below], redistributed the land once held by the tiny ruling elite, and ended feudal ownership of serfs. But torturing nuns, no matter how much you disagree with them, is unlikely to win you friends. I do wonder, though, if this behind-the-scenes, ahem, "interest" from old imperialist forces is helping keep China in a constant state of alarm?
While I'm on the subject, is everyone aware of Dolly's background? That his mother, Dekyi Tsering, was one of the biggest owners of serfs prior to the 1950s? His own website describes him as being born into "a farming family". Yes, farming like the Duke of Cornwall is a "farmer". Yet all 18 families working at Shexing village were serfs owned by Dolly's Mum, and worked on her manor. How convenient that in 1935 the new Dalai Lama was located in the ruling class! I wouldn't buy a used prayer-wheel from His Slipperiness.
Dolly comes from a long line of loan sharks, issuing usurous loans right up until 1950 for 20 to 30 percent interest pa. And who is aware that the DL along with the rest of the monastic and aristoctratic ruling class had the power of life and death over the population and that his predecessors used it? Punishments meted out by the courts and prisons (privately owned by estate owners and monasteries) included amputation, eyes gouged out and flaying. Had Dolly come out and condemned these feudal practices, relinquished his privileges, and worked towards a fair society instead of one where the five percent made up of officials, nobles and upper clergy owned absolutely everything, and the 95 percent of the population who were serfs and hereditary slaves didn't even own their own bodies, I might have been sympathetic. As it is, I'm not impressed with this Trojan Horse for imperialism.
Some place First Contact as the "invasion" of 1950. Yet, in the 7th century it was Tibet which invaded China. Even now Tibetan nationalists are making ugly noises about "historic Tibet", referring to territories lying outside its borders. According to Wikipedia, it was the Qing emperors who established the Dalai Lama as spritual and political head of Tibet. There have been alliances and even a royal marriage in the 7th C, so I reckon China has a better claim than the UK has over some of its regions.
BTW, I've had Cornish nationalists crawling all over my YouTube vids of Cornwall, so perhaps I should take to lobbying for their independence. And the Welsh. And the Scots. And the Irish. (Whoops! Done that already.)
That "invasion": in 1950 there was a power struggle going on between the Tibetans themselves; one of the aims was to expel the imperialist forces supporting the pro-separatist Regent Dagzha. The Brits had effectively tried to annexe Tibet using their proxies in 1949. One infamous letter of 1949 signed by Dagzha and the 14th Dalai Lama asks the US, Britain, Nepal and India for combat training, a US loan and World War II weaponry. And the Living Buddha Geda, who was lobbying for the Chinese government, was poisoned by Robert Webster Ford, an American telegraph station director at Qamdo, in August 1950. Is it any wonder that the government sent in the troops?
Han Chinese make up 6.1 percent of the population. That's about the same proportion as non-whites in Britain, one difference being the Han are perceived as dominating the jobs market and business. How far down the BNP anti-immigration road arguing cultural genocide do we want to go? Is the Disneyfication of Tibet the answer? I can see Mickey Mouse and Dolly bringing a little bit of Hollywood to the Himalayas. Should we protect the cute traditions of burying babies in the corner foundations of the monasteries to bring luck? Or owning human beings? None of which you will find in the Dolly hagiographies.
China needs to deal with what rampant capitalism is doing to all its people. To present this as Chinese "communism" oppressing a rebellious religious minority is to miss the point and distort the picture. Just who are the Tibetans who are rebelling by attacking the Han Chinese and Hui Muslims, anyhow? Descendents of the serfs? The clergy class? They may have legitimate grievances in that they feel they are being treated as third class citizens and fear they'll end up the same way as native Americans and Australian aborigines. Cutting the pursestrings by granting some faked-up "independence" where they'd be dependent on UN handouts and subservient to their new western political masters is probably not the answer.
Finally, in case you hadn't noticed, it's not China which is the biggest threat to world peace. I think the US and UK are at the head of that queue. Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Palestine, Syria, China: these are all within their sights (sorry if I missed any). Fans of Dolly should think about boycotting themselves over the chaos wreaked by the US and the UK and their friends in giving us World War, the sequel. "This time it's personal."
LINKS:
Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth by Michael Parenti. "Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese after 1959, they did abolish slavery and the Tibetan serfdom system of unpaid labor. They eliminated the many crushing taxes, started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They established secular schools, thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. And they constructed running water and electrical systems in Lhasa."
Andy Newman at Socialist Unity on Tibet
Liam Macuaid on Tibet
CIA in Tibet, "a covert attempt to arm the Tibetans" and annexe the country.
More CIA activities in Tibet
Times report of Tibet riots
YouTube: peaceful Tibetan protesters
Eyewitness account of rioting by Shenzhen woman shopworker in Lhasa
What does China Think? Stephen Marks at Pambazuka News
UN - "Mortality and Life Expectancy: After the Democratic Reform in Tibet, mortality declined by a large margin. The decrease in the mortality rate has slowed down since 1970. The mortality rate had fallen from 28 per 1,000 in the 1950s to 6.60 per 1,000 in 2000. The model of age-specific death rates is in the stage of transferring from the traditional "U-shaped" model to the modern "J-shaped" model. The death rates for males were higher than those for females. There was a wide gap between urban and rural people in the death rates. Mortality at all ages in Tibet was much higher than the national average. The death rates in each age groups in rural areas were higher than those in urban areas. The infant mortality rate was very high in Tibet with a great difference between the sexes. But the infant mortality rate had fallen from 430 per 1,000 in 1951, 91.8 per 1,000 in 1990 to 35.3 per 1,000 by the year 2000. In 1990, life expectancy in Tibet has reached 59.64 years, 57.64 for male and 61.57 for female."
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