My home town

Evan Davies, prompted by some educational pundit on Radio 4's Today programme the other day, asked peevishly: "Since when did schools get strap lines instead of mottos?" I suppose it all started about the same time that free market management newspeak came to dominate public discourse and public services were sold off to private companies. Change and decay in all around I see.

My school motto was FORTI NIHIL DIFFICILE and although I never knew what it meant at the time I suppose it translates as To the brave nothing is difficult. Or perhaps 'It's easy when you know how'.

The Borough Council in the town where I grew up and went to school had its own motto: PER MARE PER ECCLESIAM (By the sea, by the church), a literal topographical description of the original settlement and, perhaps, a nod to the dominant forces in the community. I remember the smart blue and cream liveried buses in my home town, each of which carried this coat of arms complete with the Latin motto:

Southend Borough Council

These days what's left of the local administration operates under an illiterately punctuated tadpole logo, and without, of course, the Latin tag:

I shan't bang on about this but it's quite horrible, what's happened to my old town, although hardly unique. The elegant Edwardian and Victorian centre, with its shady iron arcades and handsome technical college, was swept away and replaced in the 1980s by the vast and lumpen Hammerson Development, a shopping centre that was never popular and is now semi-derelict. The heart of the town was ripped out, the High Street pedestrianised. The corporation bus services were privatised, to be run by the ghastly Stagecoach. Now I learn that there are plans to close and demolish the only good modern building in Southend, the fine Central Library in Victoria Avenue (below). It's one of the best brutalist buildings in Essex - and perhaps the best brutalist library in the country. It was designed by the borough architect R. Horswell, completed in 1974 and features a wall clad in ceramic tiles, an abstract design by the little-known Fritz Steller.

Between 1969 and 1975, Steller produced some of the most dramatic and innovative postwar architectural ceramics seen in Britain, including ten enormous stoneware panels decorating Huddersfield's Queensgate Market (see below). His work is seriously undervalued and much of what little remains is under threat. I can't find an image of his work in Southend, but it's worth a look if you're passing. The only reference I can find to his work on the internet is here: http://www.monoculartimes.co.uk/huddersfieldgem/texts/steller.shtml

Fritz Steller: Huddersfield panels

I spent long hours in the Central Library reference section as a teenager. The building was spacious, airy and calm, and there was a small theatre and a sculpture court, a cafeteria and an exhibition hall. It was a popular place to study and an asset to the community. The very expensive replacement will be something called The Forum, housed in the plug-ugly university at the other end of the town - you know the kind of thing: some brightly clad shed with no books. I hope the old library (which I shall always think of as the new library) is saved. It would make a brilliant gallery/studio space, or what these days is called an arts hub, less than an hour from Liverpool Street (and two hours from Barcelona via the local airport). In fact it's halfway to being just that already, because in recent years the building has been host to the Focal Point Gallery - the most serious (some might say only) cultural achievement in the town's collective memory. It's very hip indeed, an the website is worth a look: http://www.focalpoint.org.uk

Central Library

One artist who has exhibited at Focal Point happens to be a friend of ours - Milly Thompson. She designed the poster below as a part of an imaginary campaign to save the building. Is there a real campaign? 
 

Image © Milly Thompson / Focal Point Gallery

There's another good piece of 1970s town planning a few hundred yards to the north - the Civic Centre, complete with a fountain sculpture based on the two figures in the Borough Council's coat of arms. I have no idea who the artist was, and the thing is usually covered in slimy green mould, but it's a reminder of the town when it had some kind of identity which occasionally presented itself through real architecture. 

Birthday boys

Today  is the birthday of Slavoj Žižek, the prolific Slovenian sociologist, philosopher, film-maker and cultural critic, who was born in 1949 and seems to publish a weighty volume at least once a fortnight. My theory is that his name is actually Slovene for Ljubljana University Department of Philosophy, a collective enterprise. My wish is that they'd all take a two-year sabbatical to allow us to catch up.

Today is also the birthday of Vivian Stanshall, whose life overlaps with mine in some unsettling ways. We went to the same school (although not at the same time), from which he was expelled, reportedly for shaving his eyebrows off one lunchtime and therefore, in some way, breaking the rules. I now live in the same steep North London street where he spent his final ramshackle years (at number 23), and where he died in bed in a blaze caused by a cigarette. On my birthday, as it happens.

He shares this violent incendiary end with Dame Barbara Hepworth and the French music-hall star Julien Carette, who featured in Renoir films including La Règle du Jeu, La Bête Humaine and La Grande Illusion. But I am rambling.

Stanshall was an erratic genius much admired by chaps of my age but perhaps less well known today than he should be. He had a beautiful voice. Here are some scenes from his wildly original film Sir Henry at Rawlinson End:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa4gPaQjC1M

Photograph of Jesus

A dazzling six-minute short by director Laurie Hill, who digs inventively into the vast Hulton-Getty picture archive.

http://vimeo.com/2362113

On Mick Philpott

On 11 May 2012 a fire broke out in Victory Road in Allenton, Derby, England. Five children died in the fire, and one later died in hospital. The parents of the dead children, Mick Philpott (56) and his wife Mairead (31), as well as a third man described as a 'family friend', are currently on trial for their manslaughter. The motive appears to be a desire to get a bigger council house. It's a horrible case, and extensively reported.

Philpott, who has eleven other children, is quite worthless, the kind of man who bursts into dry-eyed sobs whenever he feels cornered (which is often, during the lengthy cross-questioning) and regularly collapses in the dock. He sees himself as put-upon, tragically misunderstood, fundamentally decent and essentially loveable, a bit of a character. He's none of these things, of course. His language is histrionic and entirely unconvincing - he'd stand a better chance of winning the jury's sympathy, if not an acquittal, if he sat down quietly and said nothing. He has pleaded not guilty, although the evidence against him is so overwhelming that his plea is practically a contempt of court. He has an oddly coquettish way of dabbing his eyes with a folded tissue, a daytime telly simulacrum of grief.

Courtroom portraits are aesthetically negligible - a hangover from the days of The Illustrated Police News - but they are instantly recognisable for what they are. For legal reasons they are not made in the court but done from memory outside, presumably using photographs of the protagonists sourced elsewhere. They have a curious function, between the documentary and the didactic. In this case Elizabeth Cook, the official artist covering the Philpott trial, has produced some images that capture something of the man and his behaviour in court. Her vivid backgrounds are interesting.

Her images are emphatically democratic, just as likely to feature in the broadsheets as the red top tabloids. Although Philpott has deployed every strategy within his gormless repertoire ("Look into these eyes and tell me that I'm guilty!") the one thing he has so far failed to say is that in the face of his terrible loss he's 'contemplated suicide'. This is odd, because in these dire times, when every celebrity is obliged at some point to undertake their own version of the Stations of the Cross, it is this lowest of ebbs that invariably comes before salvation and re-birth. This is the direction in which Mick Philpott's concocted narrative leads.

It's a phrase that's too easily used, and has become a glib shorthand in public life. Contemplated? Contemplated? Being in extremis, at the deepest pitch of misery, at the very limits of what one can bear; it's not a contemplative state, is it? Contemplation suggests a degree of spiritual resource and self-knowledge that Philpott entirely lacks. Saying that one has 'contemplated' suicide really means 'feel sorry for me'. Of course nobody ever says 'I considered suicide', which strikes a false note somehow, as if suicide is but one of a range of varyingly-attractive options at one's disposal.

If I am harsh I suppose it's because Philpott's manner is so swaggeringly cocksure, so transparently manipulative and his crime so entirely lacking in mitigation, that I want to feel good about feeling bad. The court-room artist captures something of the nature of the accused. It's a missed opportunity that the courts do not commission prison artists to record the punishment.

Image © Elizabeth Cook

On Marlene Haring

An interesting conceptual artist:

http://www.vargas.org.uk/pdf/marlene_haring_13_E.pdf

On 'edge'

Listening to a 1950s episode of The Goon Show on Radio 4 Extra with Eddie, who is 12. This takes me back to my own childhood and listening to recordings of the programme on crackling 33rpm vinyl discs, wondering at Spike Milligan's wayward genius and the unvarying roster of mad, instantly unforgettable characters - Bluebottle, Eccles, Gritpype-Thynne, the Cruns and so on.

We were listening to an episode called 'Dishonored Again', and after a few minutes something struck me as very wrong.  This wan't the show I knew. The edits were rough and clunky and there were odd losses of continuity making some gags quite baffling. For instance:

Ned Seagoon: I disguised myself as a Zulu warrior of the Matibile rising. Even my own mother wouldn't recognise me!

(A deep throaty masculine voice says "Hello Neddy!" To which he replies brightly "Hello mother!")

I hardly need to spell out the joke here - that Ned (played by Harry Secombe) is a short fat Welshman, a patriotic simpleton and the butt of most of the gags in the show, and would make an utterly unconvincing Zulu warrior, because Zulu warriors are noble, athletic, courageous and warlike. But the line was cut to become simply: "I disguised myself".

Later in the show, as the culmination of an increasingly hysterical running gag in which person A asks person B whether he would care to join the River Police, then hurls his victim into the nearest stretch of deep water with a tremendous splash, the following punchline was cut:

Moriarty: Welcome to the Indian River Police little boy

Why? The setting now is India so the variant on the earlier geographically-specific punchlines (which omit 'Indian') has a point and, in the context, is essential.

There are many other instances in this show alone. What's being cut is - well what, exactly, and why? These are not offensive words, neither are they inoffensive words used offensively. They do not disparage, demean or provoke our scorn. They are words merely, and prompted by the episode's setting which, as was often the case in The Goon Show, is a far-flung backwater of a derelict British Empire, a place where only the magnificently corrupt, cowardly and flatulent Major Denis Blodnock is able to forge a living, where crooks and thugs and idiots are subject to dramatic sudden reversals marked by huge explosions, where British prestige is mocked and colonial pretensions subverted.

I suppose my real concern is this - that current thinking at the BBC (and not only the BBC) is predisposed to find offence in the perceived shortcomings of the past but keen  to endorse deliberately offensive material  as 'edgy' and 'ironic'.  You know the kind of course-grained crap I mean - the 'edgy' late night comedians, who do 'dark' material to the shrieking approval of their fans. They dare to swear too, the radical scamps. But they lack wit, originality, charm or intelligence. They lack humour. They lack heart.

This is all very hateful, this straining at politically-incorrect gnats and swallowing boorish camels - an example of what E. P. Thompson called 'the massive condescension of posterity'. There is, finally, a terrible and hypocritical intolerance in an approach that cuts, willy-nilly, lines from archive programmes on the assumption that they may offend some hypothetical and hypersensitive listener, yet is still prepared to broadcast the crudely mutilated versions. There's neither respect nor professionalism in that. No respect for the writer. No integrity. No love.

Kongō Gumi

Kongō Gumi was a Japanese construction business and was, until 2006, the world's oldest continuously trading independent company.

The family-owned firm was founded in Osaka in 578 and, astonishingly, remained in business for over 1,400 years, specialising throughout its existence in the construction of Buddhist temples. At the time of the company's liquidation in 2006 it had around 100 employees and the president, Masakazu Kongō, was the 40th Kongō to head the company.

How about that?