bullshit rodeo

Mr. Postman usually just brings me junk mail and leaves rubber bands on my doorstep. Today he did better. He brought a fresh copy of Bullshit Rodeo, a 2010 novel by Texan writer Misti Rainwater-Lites.

Misti came to my attention when she co-authored a collection of poems and stories with my old friend M.P. Powers, an Illinois-born writer I've known for years online and with whom I've had the pleasure of drinking beer and Cuban coffee on trips to Florida, where he's been based for most of his life.

I bought the Powers-Misti book really to read M.P.'s stuff. But I also enjoyed the rough, tough hard and dirtysweet lines of his collaborator. Powers tells me that out of the oeuvre of the prolific Misti, he likes Bullshit Rodeo best of all. Hence my purchase. 

Powers says: "If you thought her poetry was good, or just alright, you will love this. It's almost unbelievable how good it is. A friend of mine said it reminded him of Henry Miller (before Paris). One other guy said it was as if On the Road had been written by Anne Sexton, only better."

The plot? According to Powers:  "it's basically about a woman's crumbling marriage and her son and how she develops a crush on a writer, and how she flies out to San Fran to see him only to come home disappointed because he wants nothing to do with her. Interwoven through all this are stories of her life growing up in Texas."

 I consider Powers to be a man of almost impeccable taste when it comes to writing. So I'll be mightily surprised if this doesn't push at least some of my joy buttons. Let's see.

do you hate the suburbs?

Have a look at details of this planned project by Sean Litchfield (a fine art and editorial photographer) and Zachary Violette (an architectural historian, writer and Ph.D candidate in American Studies at Boston University).

It's about the America suburb and "the way in which people's attempt at making a certain kind of landscape for themselves has ended up destroying the environment they wanted to create" because "Americans' fetish for the private automobile, and their insistence on highly-organized sites of mass consumption and technology-saturated, mass-produced homes, has removed Americans even further from the pastoral landscape the whole suburban experiment was about in the first place." 

Litchfield and Violette say they need $5000 to get their project started. Contributors get some goodies. So send them a few dollars if you think this looks a worthy endeavour.

It's interesting that the FAQs section of their project page has to include questions such as:

• Do you hate the suburbs?
• Do you hate America? The only people who hate suburbs are socialists 

the capitulation of educated men

In his introduction to Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis, Howard Jacobson writes that the character of Sir Roy Vandervane is conjured out of the nightmare that "after the capitulation of educated men to the child-speak of the 60s, we will never inhabit a serious culture again."

While probably only very few people see this as a nightmare, this does seem like an accurate  and concise capture of how we live now here in this England.

buttery biscuit bass

Editing genius to render you speechless, even if you don't watch/like Masterchef
(neither does this is my england):



This is from Swede Mason.

easier to imagine the end of all life

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism. 

Slavoj Žižek, 2005

Walking out of Warnock wonderland?

In the football world, a certain phrase generally seems to carry a meaning that is the opposite of the sum of its parts - vote of confidence.

Very often, if there is widespread media speculation about the future of a football manager, his club will issue, in some shape or form, a vote of confidence. In reality, while the club is stressing its complete faith in the incumbent gaffer, the search is already underway for his replacement. This is not much of a ruse - it might have been a cunning plan the first few times it was used, but it now seems woefully transparent.

So what are we to make of this week's statement from QPR? Sure, it's not a classically worded vote of confidence, but should Rangers fans be worried that the club feels it's necessary to deny rumours of Neil Warnock's resignation? The statement popped up on the club's website on Thursday.

David McIntrye, who has reported on QPR since 1999, strongly suggested, also on Thursday, that there does exist a worrying gulf between the Warnock and the club.

McIntyre claims that the Rangers manager told him last season that he expected to be encouraged to consider signing a number of Italian players this summer, despite the gaffer's own preference being for targets based in England.

This is a worry. Italian signings in the Paladini/Briatore/Ecclestone era have not been successful. Consider the cases of Alessandro Pellicori and Matteo Alberti. The former is a woefully awkward and immobile 'striker', signed by QPR in July 2009. He failed to score a league goal in his eight league appearances and I struggle to recall seeing many more horribly inadequate looking players in a hooped shirt. While scanning the club's official website this morning, I note that Pellicori has returned from his long loan spells at Mantova and Torino back in his native land. Surely he won't be considered as a meaningful challenger for a place in next season's Superhoops squad.

Also back from his loan spell is Alberti, who has been plying his trade in the third tier of Italian football. I don't remember Alberti being quite as poor a player as Pellicori, but you'd have to assume his time away at Lega Pro Prima Divisione A side Lumezzane will not have improved his game to the point where he'll be a strong contender for a place in a side about to embark on a Premier League campaign.

In this context, you can see why Neil Warnock would be reluctant to be pushed towards Italian signings. Moreover, according to McIntyre, Warnock's contract gives him full control over transfers. That would certainly explain the shift away from signing the likes of Pellicori and towards signing hard-working players with a proven track record in the English game, a policy that led to the club's promotion back to the top tier after an absence of fifteen years. Kenny, Orr, Derry, Hill: as much as the dazzle of the talismanic Adel Taarabt, these Warnock signings combined to make QPR an efficient and resilient side whose promotion rarely looked to be in doubt - until the rank stupidity of Gianni "dodgy paperwork" Paladini threatened for a while to derail the campaign and undo the hard work of the manager and his players.

McIntytre writes that according to some inside the club, there is now a feeling that this clause which gives the manager full control over player acquisition may now have been breached, apparently entitling Warnock "to a full pay-off were he to walk away."

McIntyre alseo alleges that "the situation has reached a critical stage and is...being monitored by the League Managers’ Association, which is a very significant development."

Even without such doubts over the future of QPR's excellent incumbent manager, I am already massively displeased with the way with club is being run, reserving the most withering criticism for the scandalously over-the-top increases in ticket prices. Warnock being ousted would be too much to deal with. The various Rangers message boards are currently peppered with comments to the effect that losing the popular manager could lead to a serious escalation in expressions of supporter discontent. 

The Spoiler yesterday made the case for why the club would be very unwise to push Warnock out or create the conditions that might cause him to leave under his own steam, noting that cases of newly-promoted sides changing manager and managing to stay up are "the exception rather than the rule."

QPR, then, would be best advised to leave the business of signing and picking players to their seasoned manager, who is an old, old hand at these vital tasks. The owners, let's not forget, have no track record in the game and Rangers fans know very well that having Mr. Briatore take too active a role has thus far been a recipe for chaos.

nothing left to burn

When you have nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

Douglas Campbell (1922-2009)

docklands

a disappointment and a discovery

this is my england has for some time been fascinated with a rectangle of white paint on the Eversholt Street side of the Camden Town Housing office, which stands on the corner of Eversholt Street and Crowndale Road.

Back in April, it was noticed that this whitewashed patch bore the blue stencilled message: THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE - not just once, but twice. It appeared in quite large capital letters in the bottom right-hand corner of the white painted rectangle, and again, smaller and in lower case letters in the top left-hand corner. The smaller version is also appended by the addition of 'but I want to talk.'

Was this a comment on the whole of London? Or just on Eversholt Street? Or just the Camden Town Housing Office? Answer: unknown. Whatever the case, it seems someone other than the stenciller took objection to the message - another hand had placed a clumsily executed black X through the slogan.

The gimlet eye of this is my england was applied to the camera viewfinder and a picture was taken. It was not a well-composed shot so it did not make it onto these pages.

On May 5th, the Camden Town Housing Office took on another role, serving as a polling station for the referendum on proposed changes to the way that Members of Parliament are elected in the United Kingdom. As all British readers will know, a vote on the issue was one of the few concessions given to the Liberal Democrats when they disgracefully agreed to renege on every promise made in their General Election Manifesto in order to grab the junior role in the Coalition Government. Happily, the 'Alternative Vote', a grubby and over-complex halfway house between the current first-past-the-post system and truly proportional representation, was rejected by an overwhelming majority of the 42% of voters who could be bothered to get off their arses. I guess 58% of adult Britons don't give a fuck how the electoral system works. They would rather be scratching scratch cards and watching Coronation Street, I guess.

Any road up, one in the eye for that smarmy cunt Nick Clegg. So it's all good.

On the evening of referendum day, this is my england noticed that a 'POLLING STATION' sign had been placed very close to the white painted rectangle and the crossed-out stencilled message. The slogan took on new life, offering a comment presumably never planned by the sloganeer.

Lighting conditions were not ideal. But, imperfections notwithstanding, the resulting co-occurence of the machinery of British democracy with a somewhat nihlistic stencilled slogan created an image that did seem right for these pages.

Of course, the 'POLLING STATION' sign was removed the next day. 

Over time, the blue slogan has survived well, remaining clearly legible. The black X has, on the other hand, faded almost to the point of disappearance. In an exciting development, another slogan, probably put there by some other sloganeer, has appeared below the original one. This reads: I TOLD YOU. 

Is this one message? I TOLD YOU that THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE? Maybe.

Someone has also added a rather drab purple tag. But we won't dignify that with a comment.

Yesterday, this is my england was passing the scene of all this action minus a decent camera. The lack of the camera was instantly regretted. Some new absurdist had added some colour to the oblong patch of white paint. This was in the form of letters closely resembling the kind that appear on fridges everywhere in magnet form, especially in houses with young children. These had somehow been stuck to the wall and arranged to form the message: YOUR MUM RANG

A photo was needed. But it was only possible this evening. So this is my england was praying that the recently applied letters had not been removed. Disappointingly, some of them had. The message now reads: Y U   U   A G - the letters R, M, M, R and N have all disappeared. The O has been shifted to a position above the slogan THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

The strong sense of disappointment, however, has been somewhat mitigated by a discovery. A little to the right of this painted patch (not in shot in any photos here) is a bench. Who would sit on it? Could it be used very much? It does, after all, stand close to a busy road junction, opposite a seedy massage parlour and in a generally non-picturesque location. It seems, however, that this wooden seat is quite well used. This is proven by a visit to a website whose existence is now flagged up by having its handwritten URL appearing at the top of the white painted rectangle: 

www.fredericksbench.weebly.com

The unnamed creator of this site has, since some time in 2010, been taking photos of people who stop to sit on the bench. If you've ever sat on the seat in question, perhaps you've been caught on camera. Have a look.

THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE? So, so not true.

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