A Strippers Requiem

Julie put on a really good show at the Doomed Gallery last night. With openings one is never sure whether people 'get it' or not, but people were looking thoughtfully at the documentation and the work on the wall, and Edie Lamort gave a smart little talk on how the stripping world was now shit. As far as Julie's work is concerned, I see it as (almost) Gerhard Richter on 'strippers', and I was very proud indeed.

But what sticks in my head was a very poignant and adult (rather than Adult) remark made by 'Billy' afterwards in the pub. She said (words to the effect that) 'I've been turning men on as a career for the whole of my adult life'. Well you could say, 'of course', but the matter of factness she gave to this expression was fabulous, as if 'don't you realise, thats what I do'. Of course, I was immediately 'turned on' if that is acceptable for a man of my age at this time in so called Western Civilisation.
Strippers tend to get really annoyed with guys who either want to 'save them' or want deeper meaning behind their entertainment; as if each man wants to get closer than anybody else and get some kind of secret. Blokes seem to thrive on that sort of competition, and the girls understand it, but it is at the same time rather pathetic. It is an unfortunate male trait; Homer understood it via Helen of Troy.
But when Billy said that simple phrase, I immediately 'got it' in a way I don't think I had before; it's a job, don't look into my life, pay me, and we are done. The fact she does this by rubbing her arse against a potentially erect dick makes no difference; it's a job, no worse than mining or steelwork I guess.
Edie Lamort had said much the same thing, but in lecture format. 'Why is there a problem with so called objectification? There is no problem for me!' This talk also rang with profundity; the garbage that surrounds discussion of this profession mirrors the garbage that litters our lexicon in general; 'emotional intelligence', 'wellbeing' 'focussed pluralism' are all attempts to square circles to a middle ground of limp dick. When 'Billy' said 'I've been turning men on as a career for the whole of my adult life' ; honestly and meaningfully, and even going on to describe the process in her terms; the bullshit was suddenly thrown in to the meaningless neoliberal trashcan to which it belongs.
Homer would have understood this too. No wonder strippers get bad press, they are some of the best, most honest, fun, people I know.

The show, who's subject is the East London Stripper Collective (ELSC) is open this weekend, and information is available via the Doomed Gallery website. Meanwhile, you could always contact Julie (who will be there over the weekend) via juliecookphotography.com. The image above is property of Julie Cook.

Willin'

Lowell George died at 34. Like so many who died so young, he really wasn't very good at living, even if he was gifted beyond belief. The drugs and the booze; bottles of brandy and pencil sharpeners full of coke for lunch; well, they got him, not that he didn't know. Listening to Little Feat now, and especially 'Willin', probably their best known song (and certainly my favourite) has me asking why I like this song so much? What is it about it; a truck drivers lament for Dallas Alice as he remains 'Willin'' after diving 'every kinda rig that's ever been made' to be 'movin'?  Really that has fuck all to do with me.
George was notoriously unreliable, and he knew that too. He let people down, but he could write it. His trio, 'Long Distance Love', 'Willin' and 'Twenty Thousand Things To Do' resonate of his failure to do stuff, but  also of the hope that he might. How can that not bring tears to your eyes? It should certainly give us a new perspective on 'Fatman in the Bathtub' (with the blues), a song that doesn't make any sense at all when you are eighteen, simply because when you are in the bathtub at that age, you are likely preoccupied with other things.
So it is perhaps George's distress and self awareness, as well as his hope against all odds, that gets to me. 'Willin' is one of very few songs I can think of that talks of simple, stoic, optimism, or perhaps, resignation;'Yes I'll do it....' and I'll do it again. It's not Springsteen, it's not licking the chrome off the fender, it's not Jagger/Richards, that glorious, boisterous, swagger, it is a poetic, plaintive thing, and that would seem to me to be very hard to do indeed in the theatre that is rock n' roll.
Perhaps he was a git, but you recognise a difference between any Feat track where he's on it and any that he isn't. He wanted it perfect, whilst he wasn't.

Vindication

Vindication is not a pretty word. Perhaps to be proved right is not something intended to roll easily off the tongue. As a sound, there is acidity to it. Karma on the other hand is almost the opposite, a nice word, whilst meaning almost the same thing. Otherwise I just refer back to my rock psychology, remembering the lilt of 'the same people that you use on the way up.....you might meet up with on the way down'; track four on Little Feat's Dixie Chicken, but written by Alain Toussaint.
You don't get proved right in education, students roll in and they roll out, thats the way it is. You love them but they leave you, and it takes a heavy toll. You never expect a student to turn round and say you were right about this or that, it's just not the way it is. Perhaps that is why David Dunster once said to me, 'remember teaching isn't your real work'. I think he was right, and I certainly took him seriously at the time and have always pursued my own stuff. Teaching is a conduit and it can take up a great deal of your time, but in the end there is nothing but that which leaves in the mind of the student, sometimes to be appreciated years and years later. But what you do outside that becomes a thing of your own. Those who confuse teaching with doing are using teaching to substantiate themselves via an entourage, and whilst we all might have been guilty of that at one time or another, this is probably not such a good idea.
But sometimes you can come home feeling that awkward word; vindicated. I had a student studying housing, he's spent pretty much the whole year studying the hows and whys, and right at the end, in our last tutorial before he hands in his dissertation he said something very beautiful. He said (words to the effect that) he'd spent the whole of his six years studying with me avoiding the subject of Le Corbusier, because he knew it was my thing.....but then added... 'but you know what....the solution is the unite'.
I leapt up and grabbed that Last Works off the book shelf to discuss the section drawings of the Firminy Unite. I could have laughed or I could have cried.
Meanwhile, they are beginning to strike the scaffolding from Yates House, our home in Bethnal Green, and I gaze up in wonderment. All those fucking awful meetings, all the miserable encounters along the way, and Romeo, our construction manager, the last of many many construction managers and the one who has stuck it out and done the job, is now walking around like a cat who's got the cream. I talk to the workmen and thank them from the bottom of my heart! Who could have believed it. Together we resuscitated 1959, and isn't she beautiful.
Sometimes, the struggle is worth it.

Cleaning My Machine

There's a joke that Harley riders take their machines out for half an hour than then spend three hours cleaning them. There is much reason behind this apparent madness, and much psychological stuff too.
It's something Harley Davidson themselves understand. You clean the brightwork because it is there to be maintained; if you didn't you'd be a slacker. After all, you've just pummelled your lovely machine for hundreds of miles and you and it are filthy. Sometimes you get to like that road dirt, you appreciate it as evidence of the struggle, but sooner or later, there is the obligation to clean. By cleaning you don't just restore your machine to start all over again, but inspect it for faults; you are running your fingers over everything.
Cleaning a motorcycle or, in my case, trike, is not like cleaning a car. My brother gets furious that in Lincolnshire, people can't be bothered to clean their cars. Actually, he gets furious that local folks don't do it and the market is secured by enterprising Poles. That's not the point for me. If you don't clean your vehicle yourself, you stand no chance of understanding it.
There are many tools for the job, from toothbrushes up, and there are many custom devices to clean difficult or inaccessible parts. It is even a methodical process, clean this before you clean that, clean that with this, clean this with that. Your life, after all depends on it.
It's an exhausting process almost as much as riding itself, but the pleasure in making sure the bright bits are still bright makes you check every bolt and connection, so you are in the process of identifying with your machine. Matthew Crawford's book The Case for Working With Your Hands is a kind of contemporary Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It has much to say about a world, as in the film Wally, where humans drift about staring at screens with a sense of entitlement to do so; a world without engagement with such things. Even Wheeler Dealers' Ed China quit the show when the knew owners found the bits that made the show interesting, the fixing bits, too arduous for a millennial audience.
An old lady said to me, in passing, that you could live in my garage. Well no, but it does represent a form of second life. Even walking there, I find myself standing a little taller as I approach. I methodically release the locks, always in a particular order. If that order wasn't there, there would be more chance of error; both on the trike, and in life.
Julie smiles at my indulgence with the calendars; it's quite a collection.

Doing a Lecture

Preparing a lecture (see earlier post) is different from doing one. To recap, I'm thinking that my going to the pub beforehand is some kind of transcendental preparation, because you never know what's going to happen when you actually engage with an audience. And engage you have to, for the experience should be unique. Of course this runs directly against notions of order and structure now built in to whole tomes of university documentation, which attempts to condition exactly what a student might get, and exactly what a lecturer might say.
As far as it goes, this might as well mean that eventually material will soon (and inevitably) be sold facelessly over the internet, and universities seem oblivious, or perhaps embrace, such a concept; it appears safe. The fools! Such an approach will destroy the point of their existence! So I suppose this is another occasion where I fundamentally oppose the technological fix; which will end up with robotic, synthetic, inhuman (and bad) communication.
I never know what is going to happen in a lecture, it is pretty much spontaneous. OK, to paraphrase Keef, if I'm dancing around it's either going very well or very badly, but dancing around
I do anyway. It is an age old method towards engagement. Sometimes the gesturing surpasses the words.
By the end of it, I'm generally pleased of smiling faces, but there can be a horrible comedown. 'Christ .....what did I actually say?' might creep up, like some spectre of self doubt, the morning after. After all, I'm trusting Dionysus over Apollo. And after the immediate effect, you are, pretty much, left on your own. When I realised on Monday evening at Doomed Gallery (above) that my performance more resembled a political piece of rabble rousing than the dispensing of information, I collapsed into morbid circumspection.
But a colleague of mine was once very circumspect herself about that sort of thing, she said, 'Well Paul, you are a critic, you don't just dispense information'. Just as Dave Hickey demands the world splice in to farmers and pirates, I might be satisfied that maybe lecturers divide into those providers of information and 'critics', those infused with a quest, a spirit, that even they don't understand.
Academics don't trust the Dionysian spirit, especially these days. They too have become cow-tailed in to procedure, to method. Whatever their revolutionary credentials they never trust to luck, which is to my mind a fatal flaw. If, politically speaking, you believe humans are basically OK, don't browbeat them with theory as a prop; in teaching terms, don't worry too much about the referencing, but consider what might be being said, or at least enjoy the manner in which it has been delivered.

Fake Weather

One of the more reliable bits of news coverage might be the weather forecast. You would have thought, with all the meteorological science, the weather is now pretty predictable, at least more predicable than it used to be.
But the recent Easter period of non-stop rain here in Norfolk has had me thinking that this is not necessarily the case, despite the undoubted credentials of the presenters themselves and the science they rely upon. At least on the internet, I brandished one forecast for Saturday showing bright sunshine all day, when in actual fact it chucked it down. Being on the trike we looked at several forecasts and in the end I, personally, didn't trust any of them.
We could put this down to my paranoia, but when it feels like you are on the edge of forty days and forty nights, with Britain sat in an atmospheric war zone between a chilly east and a wet west, and the consequences of global warming on everybody's minds, the relentlessly cheerful countenance of weathermen and women might become suspicious. It is as if bad news is not allowed; there always has to be an upside; like better skiing in Scotland when the rest of us are bloody miserable. Why can't there be miserable news? Just now I even heard reference to 'Dunkirk spirit' on BBC East- smiles on faces no matter what across swathes of soaked coastal resorts- a kind of pushy happiness I might expect from Starbucks.
The charming graphic above occupies a condition where you will even find sexy weather girls on porn sites. Tellingly I found one reference to weather girl sexiness being 'better than porn'. And whilst this image is clearly just a bit of a giggle, I still wonder at whether this TV weather incident might or might have happened, that this is actually quite a good representation of the appeal of Carol Kirkwood. I found it by googling 'weather girl pin-ups'. All credit to it's creator(s), whoever they are, for demonstrating so neatly where we are.
The precursor to my anxiety lies once more in the USA, in Steve Martin's fabulous portrayal of a weatherman in LA Story (1991). He wrote it as a comedy.

Cosmonauts

In the Washington Aviation Museum a very log time ago I did at least recognise that the American lunar orbiter took the shape of a Coke can whilst the Soviet equivalent resembled a collection of onion domes. It was perhaps my first revelation as to the cultural elements that unexpectedly manifest themselves within something you would assume to be pretty scientific and factual. Later it would be German Tigers vs Russian T34's, or BMW vs Harley motorcycle engines that would emphasise the same cultural distinctions brought to technological devices.
But a stirring documentary on the Soviet cosmonauts I drifted in to watching the other evening brought home further geo-political differences of an even more worrisome kind, even if they were rather understated.
The Soviet space programme experienced a great many difficulties despite initial success and ended up being a pretty slow burn affair. The American space race was exactly the opposite; whatever spin off technologies that made it in to the American household, or whatever household technologies were employed to turn the stitching of brassieres in to space suits, it was a competition with a finish line, and once that finish line was crossed, the Americans, or rather the American public, got bored and they ended up playing golf on the moon to keep everybody entertained. This grotesque spectacle should should still raise the quizzical eyebrow, as well as throwing in to perspective the aspirations of both Richard Branson and Elon Musk. Space tourism would seem to me a contradiction in terms.
The Soviets ended up with Mia, an actual space station that was under permanent occupation by human lab rats undergoing 'research'. Where this research would lead was unknown but some people somewhere believed it had to be done in our long-term interests. So long-term was the interest (and so short was the cash) that it was even opened up to non-Soviet astronauts and became the 'International Space Station'.
This effort came to a grim end with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outsourcing of supply rockets to the Ukraine. In the most entertaining part of the documentary Tim Peake managed an admirable demonstration of the British stiff upper lip when describing his own imminent demise as one of these supply modules approached at ninety degree angle to that which it should with disastrous consequences, and this meant pretty much the end of Mia.
Now if all of this doesn't make us aware of the perilous nature of the late capitalist, neoliberal, trajectory I don't know what does.