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No, not the Ian Curtis flick, which I've still yet to catch and increasingly suspect I'm not that bothered about seeing. Just the theme of several recent bits and pieces:
- Aside from the Alice-themed Are Friends Eclectic? and a little light Saturday pubbing, most of my recent outings have seen me tramping around Islington via its libraries in search of some items they definitely owned at one point but now seen unable to locate. I've found various other stuff instead, of course, of which more in a moment, and I've also found things in between - a section of Regent's Canal I'd always missed before, for one, which feels like our own Little Venice. But also the city farm in Paradise Park (which, disappointingly for Divine Comedy fans, is not called Paradise Farm). A rather feeble effort compared to Mudchute's, it is nonetheless decked around with dozens of signs warning you to disinfect your hands the second you've stopped touching the animals AND wash your hands before you leave AND don't even think about eating in the area (except for the cafe, obviously, that has special magic anti-germ force fields). Yet I remember plenty of farm trips when I was young, or just wanders down to the end of the road to feed the cows, and while if they licked your hand it smelled rather pungently of baked beans such that you probably would wash your hand before eating anything anyway, I don't recall any of us ever being struck down by whatever terrible blight these signs imply we should fear.
- Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner - one of the other things I found in that library tour, and a book I borrowed without even reading the blurb, just for that name. While the story of gin's origins would be interesting in itself (its inventor was one Franciscus de la Boe of the University of Leyden - is gin the true Face of Boe?), Warner is more intrigued by the moral panic which ensued as a prototype of modern drug scares. And this is very much The Wire in periwigs, with the counterproductive legislation, the product getting stepped-on, the snitches and the underclass. The main difference being that the paternalism back then was more blatant:
"skirmishes over drugs are necessarily skirmishes over how people live - and sometimes seem to waste - their lives. When we react against a new drug and the effect it might have on other people's behaviour, we are also reacting against the culture in which the drug has taken root. This is what makes the rhetoric of 18th century reformers so refreshing: unlike modern reformers, they were unabashedly elitist. What they had to say may not have been attractive, but at least it was honest."
The lawmaking classes back in the gin age wanted the proletariat healthy and fertile, so the population would keep growing, so that there were plenty of soldiers and sailors to be expended, and plenty of labourers to keep wages low. Those priorities may have changed slightly as mercantilism has given way to consumerism, but not that much - just witness the horror with which the CBI greets any increase in the minimum wage, let alone the slim chance of that legislation actually being enforced. Warner is fully aware of how much continuity exists and, after a survey of the nineties War on Drugs, finishes with predictions about what might be the next drug scares now crack had been defanged, assuming they would either involve new drugs or new settings for drugs, not seeing implicit in her own account that you can manufacture a panic out of nowhere if you need one. Hence the absurd and mendacious 'super-skunk' fear being put about these days - because when you have a generation of parents and legislators who mostly tried dope themselves back in the day, you can't expect them to fall for the same 'reefer madness' lines unless you claim those reefers are a new and deadly upgrade. Hence 'binge drink Britain', essentially the gin panic with a miniskirt and a fake tan.
- As regards consumerism taking over from mercantilism, I finally saw John Carpenter's They Live. In 1988 this may have seemed like SF/horror, or black comedy, or satire - now, except for one interesting hypothesis about why governments and businesses aren't doing more about climate change, it's mainly stating the obvious. Carpenter proposes special sunglasses which enable you to see the coded messages in advertisements - messages like OBEY and STAY ASLEEP. In a world where Carling, a supposedly 'fun' beverage, plugs itself with a simple BELONG, who needs the shades? The CCTV cameras are obvious now too, we just ignore them anyway. And as for the big speech by the member of the elites who've sold humanity out to to Them: "I thought you understood. It's business, that's all it is. You still don't get it. There ain't no countries anymore. They're running the whole show. They own the whole planet. They can do whatever they want." Tell me something I don't know.
- Aside from the Alice-themed Are Friends Eclectic? and a little light Saturday pubbing, most of my recent outings have seen me tramping around Islington via its libraries in search of some items they definitely owned at one point but now seen unable to locate. I've found various other stuff instead, of course, of which more in a moment, and I've also found things in between - a section of Regent's Canal I'd always missed before, for one, which feels like our own Little Venice. But also the city farm in Paradise Park (which, disappointingly for Divine Comedy fans, is not called Paradise Farm). A rather feeble effort compared to Mudchute's, it is nonetheless decked around with dozens of signs warning you to disinfect your hands the second you've stopped touching the animals AND wash your hands before you leave AND don't even think about eating in the area (except for the cafe, obviously, that has special magic anti-germ force fields). Yet I remember plenty of farm trips when I was young, or just wanders down to the end of the road to feed the cows, and while if they licked your hand it smelled rather pungently of baked beans such that you probably would wash your hand before eating anything anyway, I don't recall any of us ever being struck down by whatever terrible blight these signs imply we should fear.
- Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner - one of the other things I found in that library tour, and a book I borrowed without even reading the blurb, just for that name. While the story of gin's origins would be interesting in itself (its inventor was one Franciscus de la Boe of the University of Leyden - is gin the true Face of Boe?), Warner is more intrigued by the moral panic which ensued as a prototype of modern drug scares. And this is very much The Wire in periwigs, with the counterproductive legislation, the product getting stepped-on, the snitches and the underclass. The main difference being that the paternalism back then was more blatant:
"skirmishes over drugs are necessarily skirmishes over how people live - and sometimes seem to waste - their lives. When we react against a new drug and the effect it might have on other people's behaviour, we are also reacting against the culture in which the drug has taken root. This is what makes the rhetoric of 18th century reformers so refreshing: unlike modern reformers, they were unabashedly elitist. What they had to say may not have been attractive, but at least it was honest."
The lawmaking classes back in the gin age wanted the proletariat healthy and fertile, so the population would keep growing, so that there were plenty of soldiers and sailors to be expended, and plenty of labourers to keep wages low. Those priorities may have changed slightly as mercantilism has given way to consumerism, but not that much - just witness the horror with which the CBI greets any increase in the minimum wage, let alone the slim chance of that legislation actually being enforced. Warner is fully aware of how much continuity exists and, after a survey of the nineties War on Drugs, finishes with predictions about what might be the next drug scares now crack had been defanged, assuming they would either involve new drugs or new settings for drugs, not seeing implicit in her own account that you can manufacture a panic out of nowhere if you need one. Hence the absurd and mendacious 'super-skunk' fear being put about these days - because when you have a generation of parents and legislators who mostly tried dope themselves back in the day, you can't expect them to fall for the same 'reefer madness' lines unless you claim those reefers are a new and deadly upgrade. Hence 'binge drink Britain', essentially the gin panic with a miniskirt and a fake tan.
- As regards consumerism taking over from mercantilism, I finally saw John Carpenter's They Live. In 1988 this may have seemed like SF/horror, or black comedy, or satire - now, except for one interesting hypothesis about why governments and businesses aren't doing more about climate change, it's mainly stating the obvious. Carpenter proposes special sunglasses which enable you to see the coded messages in advertisements - messages like OBEY and STAY ASLEEP. In a world where Carling, a supposedly 'fun' beverage, plugs itself with a simple BELONG, who needs the shades? The CCTV cameras are obvious now too, we just ignore them anyway. And as for the big speech by the member of the elites who've sold humanity out to to Them: "I thought you understood. It's business, that's all it is. You still don't get it. There ain't no countries anymore. They're running the whole show. They own the whole planet. They can do whatever they want." Tell me something I don't know.
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