The Ventriloquist or the Dummy? Part one

Like most people I suppose, I like to believe in the independent, autonomous self: A totally self-directed, self-willed, conscious being that is very particularly 'ME' and only 'ME'. (Although, admittedly I did want to be other people in my adolescence, ranging from Bodie out of the 'Professionals' to JJ Burnel from The Stranglers - but I don't think that counts does it.)

Being 'Me', no matter how painful, tragic, terminally pathetic or fucked up that may be, is a pretty essential prerequisite for having some kind of fixed identity in this strange and ever shifting world.

I appear to have a collection of retrievable memories, experiences and perceptions that belong uniquely to me. I am the author, the (relatively) objective observer and editor of my life narrative: in other words I take responsibility for the decisions I make whilst knowing there is a slight margin of error in the unpredictability of the world to match up to my expectations of it.

Over the last year or so though, I have found that I keep returning to a more Freudian interpretation of human individuality: that we are more products of parental, cultural and biological conditioning than our egoistic, seemingly 'free-spirited' conscious selves can or will admit.

Despite decades of criticism, the basic Freudian model of personality still holds water - its the emphasis on childhood sexuality that has been more or less dismissed.
The Oedipus complex and Penis envy are facets of the theory that have obscured the more revealing and genuinely interesting stuff in a cloud of sniggering and incredulity.

The idea that we are born with this unformed, amoral psyche, a swarming confused mass of insane biological drives: sexual fulfillment, hunger,fight or flight mechanisms and so on, that have to be tamed (repressed), formatted and organised via parental upbringing and culture, appears to me, to explain so many of the negative/deviant aspects of human nature, as well as the more positive traits.

Freud was really the first guy to identify and explore the hidden/unconscious aspects of the human mind, the first to evolve a theory of human motivation that included the cultural, religious and mythical influences that we all now, more or less take for granted.

Sigmund was a bit of pessimist its true. But if you fully comprehend that to be human is also to have a basic animal nature, a nature that is instinctive, impulsive, sexually charged, dictated by the 'Pleasure principle', and that the social contract of culture, the 'Reality Principle' is always going to be at odds with this atavistic creature inside us (the ID), this 'IT' that is so desperate to break free, desperate to satisfy the basest needs of the psyche - then conflict and a fundamental division within this thing called a self is inevitable.

On top of all this you have the 'Super-ego': the persistant nagging voices of mummy and daddy ticking away in your back brain; all those years of potty training, moral instruction, sexual taboos - all their baggage heaped on your still developing neural networks, laying down deep hard grooves, so smooth and waxed through use, that new stimuli will become rejected or assimilated via an almost instantaneous process. This part of the psyche becomes increasingly more militant and right wing with age.

When I talk of 'Me' what I'm really talking about is my Ego, that mostly conscious, self-aware slice of the psychic pie that interfaces with the everyday world. But this slice is so fragile and permeable, so susceptible to the hidden forces of the unconscious and the barrage of messages from culture and its civilizing processes, it is almost impossible to know at any one time who the real YOU is.
Is there ever a real you, or are you a series of subtly/dramatically different persona's, time and context dependent?

Numerous studies over the years have shown how our most personal and treasured memories have a certain degree of fabrication and fabulation about them. Memories are creative, always subject to an unconscious editing process, as well as the often conscious one too.

Human personality and experience is a cherry picking process, both the conscious and the unconscious aspects of our selves are seeking stimuli that will increase pleasure and cohesiveness, whilst decreasing pain and psychic fragmentation. The problem is, the animal self and the 'civilized' self cannot ever be fully integrated. No matter how much we appear like 'happy shiny people' on the outside, the cat is always trying to hop out of the bag and embarrass us in company.

We all have our little coping mechanisms though: Sublimation, Repression, Projection - and the way these psychic tools are activated and implemented in our everyday lives is what makes us somewhat unique.
Its a delicate balancing act this 'human being' thingy, and we're often the victim of processes we know nothing about, but we occasionally get glimpses of these ghostly machinations in our dreams and other involuntary ejaculations from the psyche.

When these processes are brought to light and spread like a diagnostic map over the lives of individuals (especially artists for example, as Freud did), the idea of a consistent, self-determined, self-aware 'Me' becomes a bit of a fiction. Its also a bit scary and liberating at the same time.
Where does this leave individual responsibility? Its a fascinating topic that I want to write more about later.

On being a Sladist

I once saw Dave Hill in Waterstones in Wolverhampton.
I know, its incredible isn't it! There he was waiting at the till just like any other mortal, just buying a book, and I was standing next to him.
I watched him discreetly: The flamboyant signature on the receipt, the small but powerful physique, leather jacketed of course, sans fringe and stack heels, but it was Dave, you could tell.

The final sequin on the glitter suit of identity though, was the parting smile he gave to the sales assistant as he swiveled majestically toward the stairs...the gleaming, bucking incisors, spilling like tusks over the lower lip, coupled with that slightly puzzled but happy expression in the eyes.

"Dave!" I wanted to scream,"I bought the 'Old, New, Borrowed and Blue' LP when I was 15 on holiday in Wales and it changed my life!"
After listening to that, the 'Black Country' (that Bermuda Triangle of post-industrial decay and spiritual vacuity in the British Midlands) seemed a far more cooler place to live.

I saw the the endless shopping malls, soot blackened pubs, grey council estates and 60's tower blocks of Wolverhampton and Dudley through a new lens.
These were the scratched and broken specs that never-the-less illuminated a new and enchanted landscape of gritty, dark urban myths, of likely lads on pub crawls through dingy streets, of local 'Characters' and colour, of love and loss...well, everything really.
Most of all, it was just FUN!

Whoa! I can hear a lot of readers crying out in puzzlement: What's he rabbiting on about? And who the hell is Dave Hill when he's at Home?
Apologies for the late introduction to the uninitiated (philistines?), but David John Hill (Dave Hill) was the lead guitarist in the most funny/ironic/iconic, comic/serious, talented Glam rock band known to Western snivelization... SLADE.



I have to admit, Slade were a bit of a rediscovery, rather than a completely unheralded assault on my still developing musical sensibilities.

Along with Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust (well Scary middle-aged Elvis impersonator who pointed at you a lot), Sweet, Mud and of course, T-Rex, Glam was the audio-visual backing track to my 70's Telly watching childhood. The colour TV helped of course: mind blowing in its literally kaleidoscopic distortions; remember how the colour's strobed leaving fizzing poltergeists of after-image? This effect was exploited by technicians on top of the pops and Doctor Who - bleached out polarization was psychedelic man.

The music for me then, was kind of unintelligible but these people looked so cool and strange, like Pirates, characters from a fairytale, clowns, multi-coloured, funny and dangerous at the same time.

At around the age of 13-15 I'd started to get into more 'serious music': Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin,The Who, and all those other bands who appeared to have some kind of political or esoteric message oscillating within their 'oeuvre'.
As you're supposed to do with childish things, Glam and Slade were folded away into the dusty bottom drawer of my unconscious - along with Trumpton, Mary, Mungo and Midge and Pipkins (Funny, but Tizwas was always cool and Swapshop lame. Tizwas semiotic deconstruction next post?)

My abrupt re-awakening to the glory of Slade occurred on a rainy August afternoon at the 1981 Monsters of Rock festival in Derbyshire.
So, you had Whitesnake, Blue Oyster Cult, and AC/DC headlining.
I thought okay that'll be a laugh, didn't know they were still going, bit tragic really, hope they don't make too much of an embarrassment of themselves for old times sake.

The thing is, they were the most entertaining, musically tight, genuine rock 'n roll band who played that day. They put the Aussie legends and everybody else to shame. I read that they did the same at the Reading festival that year too.
I was suitably chastised as I got lost in the sea of long hairs in my Rush t-shirt and denim jacket with 'Rainbow' embroidered on the back (by my mum...how rock 'n roll is that.)

A week later on a caravan holiday in North Wales I came upon a tiny record shop in a tacky little seaside resort.
There was basically nothing in there except a few disco LP's, Abba, lots of Elton John, Barry Manilow and Bowie. And then I came upon the 'Old, New, Borrowed and Blue' album by Slade. It was a sign.

It was only when I got back home in Wolverhampton that I was first able to play it.
Noddy Holder and Jim Lea were the Lennon and McCartney of the Black Country I now realised, great songwriters but also (more than L&C) great performers too.

Of course, Reeves and Mortimer captured the Slade aesthetic perfectly in their 90's homage 'Slade in Residence' spoofs. It was all about having a good time and never taking your self too seriously.

A couple of years later, after the 'Dave Hill episode' I ate a Balti across a table from Jim Lea the co-songwriter and bassist/violinist with Slade. A friend of mine did Am-Dram in a local village, and Lea's wife was the director of the production.
After watching my mate in a very clunky production of Blithe Spirit, the cast and crew (and hanger on - me) retired to a local curry house.

Lea's wife was lovely and friendly, the Slade icon himself seemed moody and distant, and I heard her say she had to tell him off occasionally for being rude to fans...I decided to refrain from gushing out my admiration, or god forbid, ask for an autograph.

Thus have my paths crossed with Slade members over the years in the most banal of circumstances, but that's very Slade too I suppose - they are just four Black Country guys who still keep to their roots.
And when all the hilarity and theatricality is put aside for a moment, you have to remember, the band had 6 number 1's and 17 top twenty hits overall between '71 and '76. Respect.

They starred in one of the best movies I've ever seen about a rock band too. 'Flame' released in 1975 was described by the Critic Mark Kermode as "The Citizen Kane of its genre".

Slade will always occupy a little cupboard in my soul to remind me of where I come from, and never to take myself too seriously. I hope to bump into Noddy and Don Powell someday and say I forgive them for 'Merry X-mas everybody' LOL. They also wrote some fantastic tunes, just ask Liam and Noel.

Tales from the Aberystwythian Underbelly

I started reading Niall Griffiths around seven years ago, when, still unfamiliar with the internet, I actually procured books from the well known bibliophilic retail chain known as Waterstone’s.
It was one of those 3 for £15 deals that they do every year. You know the story, you get a couple that you’re really chuffed with and then there’s the difficult 3rd choice: shall I chance an unknown author? Play it safe with an Ian McEwan or Umberto Eco - short, tight plotter, or big historical rambler?

I noticed the title first, “Sheepshagger” in brush styled graffiti day-glo orange. Okay, eye’s rolling, it’s an Irvine Welsh clone again: a Poundshop Martin Amis for the ‘underclass’. Brace yourself for the cartoon stereotypes and faux ‘Street’ slumming. Yawn.
I read the blurb on the back and noticed it was set in west Wales, and how the writing was “Steeped in the wild forces of nature” of that region.
Having been on many a caravan holiday in that area back in the 70’s, my curiosity was pricked and I thought, sod it, I’ll give it a go.

I suspected it might paint a more dramatic and dark narrative of Welsh culture than memories of my mum flashing the lights off and on in the caravan to guide my nan back from the toilet block at 1 in the morning.
Landing lights for the cognitively dispossessed.

And indeed it did.
The ‘Sheepshagger’ of the title is the uncharitable label often slapped on the indigenous population of that landscape by the wealthy English incomers, who rape the local housing stock to rent as holiday homes or weekend retreats for themselves.
The main character Ianto is an awkward, parentless, disturbed teenager, who, after finding himself homeless after his grandmothers death, sees the loss of his material home to a London Yuppie as symbolic of a much greater loss – the disappearance of his ancestral roots, his spiritual Welsh homeland, to cold, avaricious English colonialism.
Also, and most importantly, it reopens a very personal wound for Ianto, it literally becomes an unspeakable crime for him.

As the clever plot unravels we realise that Ianto’s alienation and pain is representative of a much wider abuse of Welsh culture and landscape, and Ianto’s subsequent trail of violence is perfectly intelligible (if horrific) when viewed from this context.
There’s a great twist near the end here, which is sooo Griffiths: when Ianto seeks brief sanctuary for his crimes in the home of an old Welsh crone who reminds him of his grandmother…they can’t communicate in any meaningful way because he doesn’t speak Welsh. The ultimate and final rejection.

Griffiths is like a Welsh John Burnside, he has that same poetic quality, fascination with the wounded outsiders of society, macabre twists and superbly written plots.
Griffiths though, makes the landscape itself come alive, the trees, hills, valleys, slate, stone and sea, the birds, foxes, fish and fowl are the pan-psychic manifestations and pawns of his dark God as much as the people are.
Its an obvious comparison, but I think there are more than shadows of Dylan Thomas in Griffiths work too; the organic sinewy language, the landscapes and blind force and elemental mystery of nature.

“Grits’ is a tale of a group of drifters, drunks, junkies, petty criminals and dole bandits who live out there fragile existence, raging against the machine in the seaside town of Aberystwyth (the chaotic attractor that most of Griffiths’ novels are set in or near too). Grits is Shakespearian in its multiple interlacing narratives and colourful characters, who are given there own first person narrative and perspective on a shared event, a conversation, a biography – it’s a beautiful psychological examination of how there really are two sides to every story.

Another clever device Griffiths uses is to have the same characters cropping up in different novels, sometimes as bit players, cameo’s, or subjects of anecdote. He creates a perfectly self-consistent dramatic world.

The Welsh writer often likes to use the phonetic spellings for regional accents and idioms, which can make it hard to read smoothly at first, but you soon get into it. Of course, Irvine Welsh did this too, but that’s about where any similarity begins and ends.
Irvine Welsh, the Poundshop Niall Griffiths. Yeah I like that.

“Stump” is the story of a one-armed, alcoholic Liverpudlian attempting to start a new life in Aberystwyth while living on incapacity benefit and evading a pair of bumbling gangsters. I know, its as funny and bleak as it sounds.

I’ll leave the Griffiths ‘deconstruction’ here with the words of the main character of Stump as he describes the existential torments of the square peg in the landscape of round holes - he’s been told that he’s fit enough to try a call centre job by the DHSS, despite being treated for alcoholism and missing a limb:

“I’ll probably fail the personality test anyway, unless I play daft. Them kinds of places, the interviews and tests and stuff, they’re just designed to work out whether yer dim enough for the job, cos there’s no way a work-force made up of lively imaginations would ever put up with forty hours of low-paid drudgery and tedium every friggin week
Most people, of course, are too bright for such jobs, but they get compelled into accepting them by the dreary demands of daily life, the usual financial imperatives. Which only ever results in one thing; a deep, deep, frustration. Disillusionment goin to impotence goin eventually to a terrible fuckin anger.
Peter Salt, me caseworker in the rehab clinic, on one of the rare occasions when we conversed about something other than meself an me cravings, referred to this mental state as one of ‘cognitive dissonance’, meaning the dislocation we feel with arselves when we begin to behave in ways that drastically contradict ar self-image, such as that necessary alteration of behaviour demanded by certain jobs; in the case of the call centre say, havin to talk politely to a hundred thousand disembodied voices when you’re a naturally shy or at least not particularly garrulous person. Or havin to be polite to rude fuckers when all yer really wanna do is tell them to fuck right off. Yer forced to behave completely out of character, always, an its awkward and unsettling and it jus goes on and on, along with thee unrelieved monotony of the job itself.
Its an awful fuckin state of affairs, an to counteract it, to give yerself some sort of renewed self-respect or empowerment or wharrever, yeh start to behave in petty and puerile ways; yer start stealing things from yer workplace or indulging in gossip, or participating in the persecution of a workmate, all that stuff.
The phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’ is a good one here; it suggests that yer mind doesn’t rhyme, doesn’t chime. Yer mind doesn’t rhyme cos acting in these puerile ways begins to erode the sense you have of yerself as essentially a good an decent person…and so begins an endless cycle of pettiness, triviality. A world of the immature and inconsequential from which the only real escape is to jack in yer job, walk out. Shite on thee entire fuckin thing an go straight to the humiliation of the dole.
Or die.”

Always look on the bright side of life, de dum-de dum-de dum.