The FALLen

I am very much looking forward to this book

no such thing as society #3: and i'm in-between

Saturday's 124th Miners' Gala in Durham followed on from a visit to the Tullie Gallery in Carlisle to catch the 'No Such Thing as Society' exhibition before it closed and moved on to Poland. This confluence of social and class interests was also marked by finishing Michael Collins' 'The Likes of Us' biography of the white working class communities in South London. Overlapping images from the Gala and the exhibition dominated: industry and men, tied to history & communities. Collins' strident chippiness (a positive thing for me) might have found some company at the Gala.

Among the exhibition's images of how people were coming to terms with nothing (having, doing, being seen as etc.) was Derek Boshier's astonishing psychogeographic-motorik along Byker's streets in 1975. This broken sidelong glance at the everyday: presenting a re-design of this front street, a patching together of high-street colour prints in a way that isn't allusive towards animation or such cliched storyboard visual tropes but - rather - jars your experience as observer/viewer. Not a straight social-doc. pic, that.

Post-completion, it's interesting to view Collins' often furious line-in-the-sand alongside two other Granta books I've not long finished: Lynsey Hanley's 'Estates' & Julian Baggini's 'Welcome to Everytown'. I know I might be coming a bit late to each of them (as a guy behind the counter in Carlisle's incredible second-hand bookshop remarked on my purchases last Friday) but this sharpening and refocusing on the documentation of class ('the lost identity of identity politics') seems to be marking a cultural turn.

The dis-location first glimpsed in Paul Graham's DHSS Offices (Liverpool, London, Bristol) and Tish Murtha's quasi-Clockwork Orange bombed-out / unemployed Newcastle youth is fully realised in what Collins, Hanley and Baggini seem to want to readdress. Tying each of these three books together is an attempt to discuss how and where we (want to) live, notions of the everyday and of lived experience and how we might record a community's social history. More significant is a growing discomfort / simmering resentment / plain-fucking-fury with a mediated image of (my/our/their) community and the rituals, habits and behaviour that are marked out as the not-us and as such are, again, marked out for a continued collective kicking (although the whys and wherefores of each author's own critical position is another matter entirely). This morning the Fabian society seriously argued that 'chav' should be obliterated from our collective vocabulary.

no such thing as society #2

carlisle-bound tomorrow to catch this before it finishes on saturday. review to follow. how this will measure up with the rest of the weekend i don't know: durham miner's gala on saturday, then beamish museum on sunday. saturation level approaching...

Boar Lane Leeds

from the City of the Future exhibition (2008). Patrick Keiller

Not being able to get to this exhibition I'm interested in what it did and how it did it. As someone who'll hold their hands up and profess a devotion to Patrick Keiller I'm fascinated by whatever he's doing.

no such thing as society

Photograph: Daniel Meadows 1974

Tullie House, Carlisle (May 10 to July 13)

"These images tell of the human cost. The devastation they record recalls Bill Brandt's photographs of Britain in the 1930s, or the work of the crusading photojournalist WF Lestrange in the same period. The latter, in his outraged polemic Wasted Lives, toured Wales and the industrial north to ram home their deep deprivation.

Now that the mid-1970s and the early 80s have become the subject of mainstream pop nostalgia - Life On Mars, Ashes to Ashes - the work of photographers Meadows, Murtha, Ian Dobbie and others provides a corrective to these simplified retro stylings. Their impulse was documentary, and their forebears included idealistic ventures such as Mass Observation and the neue sachlichkeit ("new objectivity") of 1920s Germany."

from Jon Savage's review in The Guardian March 24 2008

the likes of us

Michael Collins: 'The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class'. 

Granta Books. 2004

Not finished this yet, but very much enjoying it. More to write about it but in the meantime parts relating to the middle and upper-class fascination with proletariat life (and revolutionary communism) and with the emerging fascist blackshirts in the late 1930s reveal something (hopeful) of the English temperament:

"When Mosley's blackshirts marched to the Elephant & Castle and into Bermondsey in 1937 singing 'the Horst Wessel Lied' and the hymn of Mussolini's fascist party, they were confronted by communists singing 'The Red Flag'. But all these voices were drowned out by the collective renditions of 'Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory' from the majority of those living nearby who had turned out on the streets, or witnessed the events from windows and balconies." (p.123)

a clean slate