When I told my friends I was going to emigrate if Boris Johnson won the election, they didn’t believe me.

This blog will probably be inactive for a while. Pic related.

Better late than never. Read the rest of this entry »

I got an email from an Indian friend who currently lives in Aberdeen detailing a run-in with the local Polizei. I’m sure he won’t mind me reproducing the relevant section.

“Talking of policemen, I was questioned by one the other day for half an hour. I should have taken his name down. I was looking for parking and this copper car followed me around the block until I pulled over. Then, this guy says, ‘You were driving carefully. I have to check if you’re an illegal immigrant.’. When I asked him what the connection was, he said he wasn’t sure if I was driving slowly looking for parking or because I was scared. Now only an idiot with an IQ of 30 would think an illegal immigrant would slow down when he sees a copper. If I were an illegal who panicked, I would speed wouldn’t I? Then, he tried to prove my Indian license was invalid - he was positively shattered when he found that that was valid as well.

“He then called immigration; he was so disappointed to find I was legal. And then he said something like, ‘if I catch you with your visa expired, or after your license has expired’. Bah. Then, I went into the corner store next door for a fag, and the owner (a scottish pakistani) says, ‘Ah, you committed the biggest crime, yeah? Driving while brown.’ Apparently, that guy had been pulling Asians over in the area all day, including the shop owner. This guy was born here, and the copper did the same thing trying to prove he was illegal. He called immigration and they said they had no records of the guy; and the copper goes, ‘Uh-huh. you’re illegal here!’. Took him a while to realise that immigration doesn’t keep records on British Pakistanis.

“Rant ends. I used to think the British police are better than their Indian counterparts - now I realise they’re all the same, irrespective of nationality - largely populated by the arrogant, quasi-educated, and self-righteous.”

On a very related note, In a few days time I’ll be posting pictures from yesterday’s anti-Bush demo in Whitehall, which ended with police using batons and truncheons on protesters and making random arrests. In the meantime, Flickr user ‘bolshie’ has some excellent ones.

Edit: The incident reminds me of this sketch from legendary comedy programme Not The Nine O’Clock News:

The SPG mentioned at the end of the sketch is the Special Patrol Group, who notoriously beat to death an anti-racism campaigner in 1979, and were found to be in posesion of baseball bats, crowbars and sledgehammers. They were disbanded in 1986 and replaced by the Territorial Support Group, who were deployed against protesters on the anti-Bush demo last Sunday.

Alright, Culture Vulture, point taken.

Here’s what I’ve been listening as of late:

1. Little Baby Nothing- (The Manic Street Preachers):  I know, this song is old news, but it’s still blows me away.  The kids I teach in the morning listen to the ‘Veggie Tales Theme’ non-stop and the girl I  teach in the evening  is into Hannah Montana, so the  music I listen to in between shifts needs to be a pretty strong antidote to scary Christian singing vegetables and Disney teeny-boppers, naturally, the Manics ‘Generation Terrorists’ album is the only thing in existence powerful enough and ‘Little Baby Nothing’ is easily my favorite track.

2. Long Red Hair- (Vermillion Lies):  I’ve been into cabaret style music for some reason and this is a great comically haunting little song.

3. Bella Ciao- (No Land Folk): This selection is more than just a blatant plug for my friends’ band, it’s really just a damn good song.  According to wikipedia, “Bella Ciao is a song that was sung by the left anti-facist resistance movement in Italy comprised of anarchists, communists, socialists and other anti-facist partisans,” which you can gather from the lyrics.  The only other English language version I’ve heard was done by the Red Army Choir, and I like this rendition much better.  (A copy of Bella Ciao doesn’t happen to be on the No Land Folk website, but check out the band anyways.)

4. Ultimate- (Gogol Bordello): Much of Gogol Bordello’s latest album “Super Taranta!” explores the human need to party and the refusal on the part of the Western world to embrace and satisfy that need.  “Ultimate” starts the album off by exploring this concept, while in classic Gogol Bordello, being extremely danceable.

5. Death Whispered a Lullaby- (Opeth): A cheesy choice perhaps, but I’m not apologizing.  Opeth sing me to sleep every night.  The title of this song reminds me of the title of a Kathe Kollwitz painting- “Man Embracing Death as a Friend,” so in my mind the song and the painting are intertwined.

6. The Marsh of Rhuddlan- (Welsh rebel song): I was going to try to get through this list without any harp geekery, but why bother?  This little tune has some chords which can only be described as maddeningly sexy and some great bloody lyrics.

7. Aly, Walk with Me (The Raveonettes): Why haven’t I listened to the Raveonettes before last week? I’m not entirely sure, great band, cool song, weird video.

As for who I’m gonna tag with this list, no one, Culture Vulture already got everyone I know.

That’s about the long and short of it. The BBC tactfully says that ‘Liverpool Street was closed to ease overcrowding, after about 2,000 people began partying there.’ Allow me to describe events in more detail, if you will.

I arrived at Liverpool Street at 8:50pm to find the ticket barriers closed and a large crowd of revellers gathering in a huge array of silly costumes and carrying plenty of alcohol. A large police presence was already visible- evidently they’ve discovered Facebook- with several riot vans parked outside each entrance to the station. By 9:00pm the crowd, which must have numbered several thousand, was spilling out of the underground station and onto the main concourse. At this point the gates were opened, and we all headed to the clockwise Circle line platform, which is shared with the Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan lines. The plan was to get on the first clockwise train after 9:00. The first train was Hammersmith & City, the next Metropolitan, and when the Circle line train arrived, with a party on-board already, it went past without stopping. The police then declared the station closed, sent everyone back to the main concourse and pulled the shutters over the entrance.

With nothing else to do, a party ensued, with police officers lurking on the stairs to the top level watching thousands of people do the conga and chant ‘Boris is a wanker!’ At one point I saw the police drag a photographer up the stairs and outside, to boos from the crowd. After wandering around for a bit making friends and taking photos I headed over to Moorgate station, hoping to get on the Circle line there. While the station wasn’t actually closed police presence was heavy, with lots of police dogs. The Circle line was being closed and revellers kicked out of the underground system. I headed back to Liverpool Street with some of them to find that someone had set up a sound system in the middle of the concourse and a mass rave was in progress, the underground station still closed. After a while the police charged into the crowd, dragged someone out and arrested him, for reasons unknown. Bottles were thrown and it looked like things were going to get nasty, but thankfully common sense prevailed from both sides, and the situation did not escalate.

After the guys with the sound system headed off, the party fragmented, some following them, some staying in the station, some heading to Brick Lane. I later ended up on the District line, where people were partying on the trains- in the absence of the Circle line, the whole of zone 1 seemed to be fair game for partying. Even when I eventually got back to Leytonstone there were revellers who had randomly ended up at the station trying to figure out how to get back to the centre. So it was good fun, and pretty surreal. This event was a prime example of the peculiarly British trait of wearing silly clothes and getting drunk in public with strangers, which can be seen every year at the Glastonbury festival. It was also a very young crowd, few people seemed to be over 30. And they all seemed to hate Boris.

To pre-empt the naysayers, firstly there was little danger of people falling on the tracks or otherwise getting injured- I’ve been in more dangerous and crowded situations than that- suited businessmen trying to push people out the way cause much more danger than a few drinkers. There was relatively little physical contact with the law, all of which was initiated by the police themselves. A few people caused minor property damage at the station by sitting/climbing on things which they weren’t supposed to, but that’s no-one’s fault but their own, and I’m sure the £4 penalty fares TFL got from all the Oyster users kicked out of Liverpool Street will pay for it. Across London, six people were arrested for being drunk and disorderly, which is probably below average for a Saturday night.

Photos will be posted when I get the films back from the chemist. Yeah, I’m old-school, me. Now I have to go clean the Pimms off my camera.

Update: for pictures, Read the rest of this entry »

If banning alcohol on the underground is the worst legislation passed during Boris Johnson’s reign at City Hall, we should all be relieved. The appointment of Tim ‘Prince of Darkness’ Parker as the new boss of Transport For London does not bode well for the future of the tube network on the more serious issues of staffing and safety. But anyway, there’s a pre-drinking ban party being ‘organised’ (in a very loose sense of the word) for the last evening before the ban comes into force on the Circle Line. The event is reminiscent of the Circle Line parties ‘organised’ by legendary Anarchitect collective Space Hijackers during the early years of this decade and looks like it should be a lot of fun. Bring dinner jacket and Pimms!

Wanna read something disturbing? Stroppyblog has done a survey on the what lefties do in bed (part 1, part 2, part 3.) Okay, so most of it is just an excuse for a load of in jokes between the various sections of the British left, but there is some interesting information to be gleaned from it.

The clear majority of respondents (72%) were male. Around two-thirds of respondents use porn at least occasionally. A third of respondents think porn degrades women, with a lot of ‘not sure’ answers. A similar number (28%) think that porn should not exist under socialism; 23% think that sex work should not exist under socialism, with a lot of people answering ‘depends what type.’

So what does this tell us? Firstly that lefties, who tend to have a theory on pretty much everything, have no unified approach to sex. In my experience most left-wing bloggers, who are generally male, tend to avoid or fudge the subject. It does however come up quite regularly on Splintered Sunrise and A Very Public Sociologist, and Madam Miaow can be also very funny when she deals with the subject.

The survey also tells us that a lot of people- presumably men, as they are primary users of porn- are hypocrites, in that they use porn even though they think it degrades women. I also suspect that the ‘hmm, not sure’ response may be code for ‘yes, but I don’t want to admit it’. Now, this is interesting because we are running up against the biggest problem with socialist theory, namely that creating a world in which people are not exploited or degraded might not be compatible with human desires, in this case male desires. And human desires are not so easily circumnavigated, nor should they necessarily be. Sometimes ideology doesn’t translate well into real emotional life; lots of liberal minded people are totally in favour of free love, right up until the point when their partner sleeps with someone else.

Again my mind returns to Valerie Solanas and the SCUM manifesto. It almost seems to me that she has the right idea, but unless you seriously want to suggest the creation of a female only society, her conclusion does us no good. At the opposite end of the spectrum from the conservative feminists (who are usually anti-porn and indeed anti-men and anti-sex altogether) are the libertarian feminists, who produce porn for women and organise female centred, sexually uninhibited club nights. Although Female Chauvinist Pigs has it’s flaws, it does effectively tell the story of how these two branches of feminism diverged after the successes of the seventies, and the damaging this effect this had. So we get ultra-feminists working with the religious right to ban porn, and libertarian feminists working with the porn industry to attack sexual inhibition. Both approaches are far from satisfactory.

There’s an analogy to be made between the sex industry and the drugs industry. The progressive attitude towards drugs is much more clear cut- decriminalise, legalise, treat addicts. Here’s my own opinion- recreational drugs (cannabis, ecstasy, mushrooms etc) should be legalised and sold to adults in dedicated shops, which are either run by or heavily regulated by the state. Drugs are extremely cheap to produce, and the current market price reflects how much people are willing to pay rather than the cost of production. Prices could be maintained at current levels through taxation, the revenue from which could then ploughed into addiction treatment centres and other public services. Harder drugs (heroin, crack cocaine etc) should not be sold to the public but prescribed to recovering addicts in accordance with the wishes of their doctor, free of charge.

Why do I and other progressives make these arguments? Because you can’t stop people taking drugs. Drugs are fun. This is the simple, undeniable truth. Hence, you will never eliminate the consumption of drugs for pleasure. This begs another question- why would you want to? Is people taking drugs for pleasure so intolerable to society that it must be prevented at all costs?

I would argue that it’s not. The actual negative effects of drugs on people are usually no worse to that of alcohol, for example. Friends of mine who are much more into hard drugs than myself tell me that in their experience the drug which has the most potential to fuck you up is alcohol. This is probably true in the short term; in the long term, tobacco undoubtedly takes that title. Flipping through the free London Paper today, I read Babyshambles guitarist Drew McConnell arguing that alcohol and heroin are the ‘big two’ to be wary of, and he criticise anti-drugs campaigns for making an unnecessary distinction between legal and illegal drugs. I agree with him.

What is most undesirable about drugs is the industry that goes with it; pushing drugs to kids, gang wars for territory, dealers trying to hook recreational users onto more addictive drugs. Simply put, the worst thing about drugs is making the financial transaction, having to deal with the people you have to buy them off. These problems can be eliminated or at least reduced by legalisation and regulation; denial and criminalisation just works in favour of the gangster capitalists who run the drugs trade.

Now, back to porn and prostitution. The act of having sex is certainly not harmful or immoral in itself; if we can make the case that taking drugs for recreation is okay, then we can surely say the same about sex. What is harmful is the act of paying someone to have sex, whether it’s directly with the client or to be filmed in a movie. Simply legalising the sex industry does not work; despite operating legally the porn industry is extremely sexist and exploitative, and legalising prostitution does not necessarily provide an improvement in working conditions. If you’re in any doubt about that, read some reports about the conditions in legalised brothels in Nevada. The Netherlands take a much better approach, with a recognised sex worker’s union leading to much better working conditions, but it’s still hard to escape the conclusion that having sex for money is fundamentally degrading and should ideally be eliminated from society.

So what do we do about this? I’m not in favour of legalising prostitution, but decriminalising those who work as prostitutes, and giving them the help they need to achieve a change in career. This problem is analogous to, and indeed crosses over with, the attempts to tackle drug addiction I expressed support for above. As for the ‘recreational drug’ of the sex industry- pornography- we need to take an approach similar to recreational drugs. Porn is already legal, and rightly so, but the production of porn should be regulated more heavily than it is at the moment to protect the rights of those who appear in porn. It should also be noted that there is an inverse correlation between the availability of porn society and the incident of sexual assault, as frustrated men can relieve their tensions without resorting to physical violence. Another argument against criminalising porn, then.

Finally, here’s a more radical solution to porn. Given that it is the exchange of money for sex and not sex itself which is the problem, why not eliminate the financial transaction from the equation? Place a ban on people paying others to be filmed having sex, and paying for material of people having sex, but not on the creation or dissemination of pornography itself. Thus the porn industry would become something done by amatures out of their own volition. If you don’t think that people would be willing to film themselves having sex and have that distributed on the internet for free, you probably haven’t been keeping track of trends in this area of commerce. Amature porn is fast catching up on professionally produced porn, and there’s more than a few people who get a thrill out of making home movies and having strangers watch the results. What this would result in is a reduction in the amount of porn featuring unrealistic models doing unrealistic things, but then that’s probably a good thing, and would make our perception of sex as a whole somewhat more realistic.

I can see a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, if you’re not charging money for distributing something, you have no control over copyright. I can sympathise with someone who makes home movies but doesn’t want them ending up all over the internet. However, I’d say that the only way to avoid that is not to put material of yourself on the internet; given the nature of the beast, it’s best to assume that everything you put on the internet will be seen by everyone you know. (I remember a minor scandal a few years back, when it was discovered that ‘Friends Only’ Livejournal posts could be read by searching for them in Google.) Secondly, it’s possible that an underground industry dealing in the more violent and unpleasant aspects of pornography may spring up, out of the reach of state regulation. This could be dangerous; the only solution is vigilance against such activities. The government is already planning on passing a bill against ‘extreme pornography’, which covers the sort of things that people really would have to be paid to do rather than do out of their own free will.

So, that’s my two cents. Anyone wanna start a debate? While you’re chewing that over, here’s a huge phallic symbol to feast your eyes upon.

Insert joke about the thrust of British capital here…

Yes! Our new address is culturesluts.com. This is part of an ambitious plan to make this small corner of teh internets look less like a blog and more like a proper website. The next step will involve transferring the WordPress software to our own server, which will require a fair bit of PHP and MySQL knowledge on my part.

Don’t worry if you’ve linked to our old WordPress address or any of our posts at that address, you won’t need to change them. Your visitors should end up at the right place as if by magic.

I watched Camden burn on Saturday night. I was smoking shisha with nimuwe in a café on the west side of Camden High Street, when the air suddenly became thicker with smoke which smelled of wood instead of apple or cherry. The market was on fire, and it quickly spread to engulf most of the east side of the high street.

Despite becoming something of a tourist trap, Camden remains a genuinely unique part of London. Many of my favourite shops and market stalls were destroyed by the blaze and hundreds of people have lost their livelihoods as a result. It’s a great shame, and I really hope that when the market is rebuilt the original character is maintained as far as possible, and the fire is not used as an excuse to gentrify the area, as has happened in so many places of cultural importance. There is now a Gap on the corner of the Haight Ashbury intersection; I dread the thought of Camden High Street becoming the preserve of Top Shop and Tommy Hilfiger.

The lovable Bolshies at Through The Scary Door have an interesting post about the idea of a unified theory of music. Go take a look.