Warm Leatherette

A couple of weeks ago, I managed to pass my driving test at the second opportunity. Today I completed the Pass Plus course, which covers things like rural driving and city driving. The last bit was motorway driving, which meant I had to drive to Leeds and back. Motorways aren't as difficult as I'd thought they might be, although travelling at high speeds is something I'll have to get used to. And I can't believe that some people drive for the first time on a motorway without having done any instruction.

In a couple of weeks I'll get the Pass Plus certificate, which will let me sort out a deal on insurance. Then I'll be loose on the roads, so some people may be more likely to get a visit.

Today will also be the last time I ever see my driving instructor, probably, which will be a bit weird, as I've seen him for two hours a week for the last eight months.

Germ Free Adolescents

I woke up this morning and found Twitter telling me that Poly Styrene, singer with the under-rated punk band X-Ray Spex, had died of cancer at 53. Here's their appearance on Top of the Pops in 1978, doing the single "Germ Free Adolescents":

A Blast from the Past

You don't expect to hear about people being arrested for possessing Semtex anymore: up-to-the-minute British terrorism seems to involve explosives made in your kitchen, which I suppose shows that the drugs trade is better funded than Islamic fundamentalism. Semtex, like the phrase "Christmas bombing campaign", belongs to a bygone era. It's only a matter of time before Peter Kay does a "Do you remember the Provos?" routine.

Thinking about it, I'm also amazed that Luke Haines has never formed a band called "Christmas Bombing Campaign", but that's another matter.

The Dustbin of History

I've deliberately not been commenting on Libya here, for fear that I'll end up issuing orders to General Steiner, but a turn of phrase in one of Gaddafi's speeches this week conjured something up from memory:

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on - into the dustbin of history!

- Trotsky to the Mensheviks, at the Second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, 25 October 1917

"The dustbin of history" is one of our terms for finality, for putting history behind us, where it seems to belong. There it was as Trotsky spoke on the stage of world history, our present-day ironies curling around him like an invisible snake. There it was in Hanover, New Hampshire, materializing right before your eyes if you were reading a certain story in a certain moment: no thing of the past or even for it, but a trap, a death sentence, or maybe a goal, a promised land, that can be found at any time. It can suck you in; perhaps it can be escaped. Leon Trotsky consigned the Mensheviks to the dustbin of history in 1917, and there they remain, with his shade now keeping their company.

- Greil Marcus, The Dustbin of History (1995)

Census

Inspired by this post:

1981 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents and sister.

1991 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents and sister.

2001 - Living in a student house in Nottingham.

2011 - Living at home in Stockport with my parents.

Hmm.

You Could Leave Your Door Open

The menace of the blackout gangs reached the headlines with the Skipton Street murder of seventeen-year-old James Bolitho Harvey, on Saturday 21 March 1942. Harvey and his younger brother had come out of the Elephant and Castle station at midnight on their way home from a West End show. They went to the coffee stall and then towards the stop for the Brixton tram. Almost at once, they were set upon in the dark by a gang seeming to consist of seven men, though only three were caught. Both boys were robbed, Harvey was beaten to death with a lead-weighted cosh, his fifteen-year-old brother kicked into semi-consciousness. Witnesses at the coffee stall heard their screams but assumed that it was yet another 'drunken squabble such as we often hear around here'. 'I'll never forgive myself for not going,' said one of the men at the stall.

- Donald Thomas, An Underworld At War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (2003)

My dad's mother, living in London during the Blitz, used to wander around the streets during air-raids rather than use the public air-raid shelters, which she believed to be wretched hives of scum and villainy*. The book suggests that she wasn't all that wrong.

* Not a direct quote.

Revolutionary Research Methodology

I've been refraining from commenting on Egypt here, on the basis that I don't know anything about Egypt, and that my main opinion - that an Egyptian democracy would be better than an Egyptian dictatorship - doesn't add much to the discourse.

Yesterday, watching the BBC's piece about the role of the internet in the protests, I was struck by how vast and diffuse the body of data is. Anyone who wants to write a history of the 25th January movement is going to have to get to grips with Facebook pages, Twitter posts, mobile-phone videos spread across a number of different sites. And that's without even factoring the ephemerality of those sources in. Somewhere in academia, someone must surely have begun working on research methodologies for the online age: I'd be really interested to see them.

My Eyes Never Sleep

Sheffield, January 2011.

An Idiosyncratic History of the Music Video, Part 3

Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

One for panto season this, but there's also the fact that the video to Adam & the Ants' Prince Charming (1981) is, from about 1.40 in, one of the finest music videos ever made.

The video serves to illustrate something that I think is missing from chart music at the moment. At some point in the late 1980s or early 1990s, pop music lost its ability to be as gloriously, brilliantly strange as this. It's probably to do with the increasing development of manufactured acts. Acts have always been manufactured to some extent, of course, but up until the 1980s it was a question of management finding a subcultural scene which developed from below and developing acts from it. The New Romantics are an excellent case in point. In the era of The X Factor the programme is its own scene, allowing things to be controlled almost completely from above.

If You Know Your History

University College London, December 2010.

Dreamers

On this lower level faint and far off I could just barely see some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money. Most of the field was a public park now, cleaned up and donated to the city by General Sternwood. But a little of it was still producing in groups of wells pumping five or six barrels a day. The Sternwoods, having moved up the hill, could no longer smell the stale sump water or the oil, but they could still look out their front windows and see what had made them rich. If they wanted to. I didn't suppose they would want to.

- Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939)