Today is the first day of the rest of your life - Dig!

I’ve just finished a book by Emmett Grogan called ‘Ringolevio’ and it struck such a cord with me that I thought I’d write a post about it.
Grogan founded the Digger movement in San Francisco in the mid 60’s along with other Haight-Ashbury cultural ‘dissidents’ such as Peter Coyote and Abbie Hoffman.

The 60’s ‘Diggers’ were carrying on the tradition of their earlier 17th century counterparts also known as the ‘Levellers’: Reclaiming public spaces, free distribution of food, the ending of private property and the collapsing of the social class/caste system among many other things.
Grogan’s book, originally written in ’72, is a part factual, part fictional account of his harsh working-class upbringing in Brooklyn, his escapades across Europe and his increasing political radicalisation via the West Coast counterculture.

But Grogan’s recollection’s of Haight-Ashbury and ‘The Summer of Love’, Spiritual Guru’s and the dropping out and tuning in generation is not misty eyed, but very cynical and reveals a ‘hippie’ or urban guerrilla rather, with a real social conscience. He catalogues the back-stabbing, avarice, daft thinking, racism, violence, shallowness and class snobbery of a movement that supposedly prided itself on egalitarianism, transparency and, of course, universal LOVE.

None of this criticism is particularly new of course (neither was it back then) everyone knows there was a very dark side to that period – Vietnam, race riots, terrorism, the Manson murders etc – but Grogan focuses more on a specific problem or group who are the perpetuators of what he calls “The workable lie”.

Here’s a direct quote from the book with Grogan raging about the ‘persecution’ of hippies by the poor immigrant population on New York’s Lower east side:

“They were really upset, he said, because of the hippies’ readied willingness to pay the higher rents and whatever-the–market-will-bear prices fixed by slum landlords. This overcharging, coupled with the fact that the poor residents of the area knew damn well that most hippies came from wealthy white suburbs of their American Dream and therefore didn’t really have to live in their low-class poverty neighbourhood, aggravated their already deep dislike for the outgoing, jubilant hippie style, and ticked off a series of violent outbreaks to ‘wipe the smiles of their faces.’ because what he fuck were they so happy about anyway!
This spawned an attitude that the hippies could afford to be happy, paying the increased rents and inflated prices with ‘money from home,’ while the people who were really poor and not just ‘tripping’ suffered the ironical burden of their presence.
Thus they became fair-game targets of people who needed some quick money fast, which was nearly everyone. The sight of a pair of well-fed hippies walking through the neighbourhood, panhandling change against a backdrop of desperate bleakness, may have appeared farcical to strangers, but to the people who lived their entire lives in the area, grew up there, it was a mockery, a derisive imitation of their existence and it got them angry. Plenty angry.

“What I’m getting at is that their dreams of someday makin’ it out of what they regard as a sewer are very important to them, ‘n when hippies come along riffin’ about how unhip it is to make it into middle-class society ‘n how easy it would’ve been for them to make it, but they didn’t because it was insignificant, those low-money people get confused and upset because here are these creepy long-haired punks who grew up with meat at every meal and backyards to play in and the kind of education which is prayed to God for, and they threw it all away for what? To become junkies like at least one member of every family on the Lower East Side? To live with garbage and violence and rats and violence and no heat or hot water and violence and disease and violence? Is that what hippies thought was the hip thing to do with their lives?
Well to these people and their sons and daughters who’ve had no alternative but to live their lives in the disaster of the Lower East Side, there ain’t nothing hip about junk or poverty or violence, and they have nothing but contempt for young, educated fools who think it’s exciting to live in a world they really know nothing about, the kind of world these kids’ middle-class parents built the suburbs to protect them from.

“However, these parents never figured their children would attempt suicide by scaling the fortress walls of suburbia and running to the ghettos which had become part of their generations fantasies – fantasy ghettos like the Haight-Ashbury and the Lower East Side where sidewalks were more real than the lawns of Westchester and where people were red-blooded human beings, instead of blanched, bloodless, cardboard automatons.
The poor have no sympathy for these young whites who’re searching out what was kept hidden from them. They have none at all because of the hippies’ arrogance, an arrogance they wear on their sleeves, an arrogance which mocks the poor for wanting what they’ve rejected, and insolently pities them for nor comprehending or understanding the reasons why they left the ‘American Dream’ behind.

“So, you better face the straight goods, brothers an’ sisters, you ain’t the new niggers or spics, ‘n you’re never gonna be. You have too much to fall back on whenever you want to or have to – good education, a home, family, the colour of your skin – ‘n the people in the neighbourhood know that, an’ also that your still the children of the ruling classes, whether you like it or not. As far as they’re concerned, you’re just having an adventure – an adventure in poverty which, if you aren’t careful, may prove more real than you’re ready to deal with.

“…they had to jettison the self-satisfying impression that they were the ‘new niggers’ – which was going to be difficult. It was very comfortable on the bottom of the social heap where you could lie back, stay doped up and not accept any individual or community responsibilities, feeling perfectly hip about having been classed the new losers and doing everything by doing nothing to justify the classification.
If they could get past that, Emmett continued, then they could apply their ‘fortunate’ backgrounds in serving the needs of the neighbourhood, not as ‘hip social workers,’ but as members of the community who wanted to develop it for themselves as a place where they could enjoy life and where their children could grow without being forced to attend the stifling institutions run by the city government.”

Grogan was found dead on at the age of 35 of a heart attack (thought to be related to a heroin addiction) on a New York Subway train in 1978, – his corpse had been travelling up and down the line for a number of days before anybody realised he was actually dead. Although there are many conspiracy theories surrounding the circumstances of his sad demise. Maybe the Hippies got him in the end?

Ringolevio is a great read though: sometimes sociological, sometimes pure thriller, and always entertaining. Oh and to know what ‘Ringolevio’ means you’ll have to just read the book…or Google it.
Should be read in conjunction with Penny Rimbaud’s autobiography ‘Shibboleth’ to compare and contrast Anglo-American perspectives on urban guerrilla warfare past and present.

The real me...for now anyway...I think

Its just over 2 months since I moved from the grim post-defunct industrial miasma that is more popularly known as ‘The Midlands’ to the somewhat more genteel, Harry Potteresque, cobbled stoned confection of Edinburgh.
As I’ve written in a previous blog, Edinburgh is really beautiful…well, most of it is. I’ve been working as a note-taker and personal tutor for an HNC student at a further education college in the Granton/Ferry road district of the city since early September.
I’m enjoying it a lot, but the early morning starts and bus travel has become a bit of a drag now that the honeymoon period is over and the damp Scottish winter is drawing in.

My girlfriend lives in a small village just on the outskirts of Edinburgh in West Lothian, I found lodgings in an adjacent village a couple of miles away and decided to make the move ‘up North’ because I was in love and knew that I would die lonely and regretful if I didn’t grab this opportunity (I am a bit indecisive sometimes – well a lot) and attempt to make a fresh start.

I have hardly any family left, just one sister and a very strange and deranged father: no kids, parents, ex-wives etc, I felt so incredibly free – thanks to my girlfriend though, who gave me a well needed kick up the arse to remind me of this on several occasions. Having both lived alone for a number of years we thought it wise to live within easy reach of each other while we got to know each other better on the more day-to-day domestic level (living in the same country really has improved our relationship as you can probably imagine).

All I took to Scotland were a few clothes, my favourite old battered guitar, about twenty of my most cherished books, laptop, passport, birth certificate, a wad of photo’s, paintbrushes and various other odds and ends. I sold everything else – white goods, furniture, most of my books, CD/DVD’s, electronic stuff – It was old anyway and I was glad to have a purge and make a few quid. All this moving lark was done courtesy of cheap online train bookings.

It is amazing though, when you finally think: okay what do I really need? What is essentially me? What can I live without? The answer for me was quite a lot really.
I used to be a bit of a hoarder in the past; stuff accumulated which I came to feel had a kind of psychic-organic quality, it had grown to be part of me, who I was, my essence - or so I thought.

Really I was just very insecure, and virtually all my collective shit was a patchwork armour to hold me back, protect me from the seemingly alien larger world, and of course it acted like a set of mirrors or idiot boards reminding me that I’m ME,
That’s the problem of course, I’d grown out of THAT ME many years before and my stuff was keeping me anchored to the spot - I was drowning. I’m 44 but was starting to feel 64 or 74 back in the Heart of Darkness of the midlands.

I’m naturally a bit of a miserable bastard and not a gushing everybody’s mate type of person, but my ‘new life’ does seem a hell of a lot better: more interesting, stimulating, sociable, loving and creative than it was before, so 8 out of ten so far.
But really, anybody’s life is about ‘Experience’: the sensation of living through interesting perceptions and stimulations, seeing other perspectives and meeting new people.

I feel more comfortable in myself since I’ve learned to embrace the chaos and not to resist change, not to be scared shitless by the thought of different ME’s, morphing into different lives and pathways. Hope this doesn’t sound like esoteric hippie jive talk, its just me attempting to articulate and comprehend the newness and change in my life.
(incidentally, if you’ve always felt there is more than a grain of salt in the Punk adage “Never trust a hippie”, I’ve been reading Emmett Grogan’s account of the 60’s Haight-Ashbury/Summer of love thing called ‘Ringolevio’, and its fascinating to read such an intelligent social/economic/hilarious deconstruction of the ‘tune in-drop out’ aesthetic by someone who was at the centre of it all. Anyway I digress too much, and shall review it at length at a later date).

Calling the Spirits of my Ancestors!

Last night was the first Halloween me and my girlfriend had actually physically spent together (last year was a disembodied table tapping seance thingy on MSN...which I suppose is somewhat more appropriate considering the occasion.)

Anyway, after eating too many salt and vinegar Hoola-Hoops with an ice cream chaser and howling like a werewolf at Vincent 'Mr Camp' Price in 'The House on Haunted Hill' I stepped out into the frigid Scottish air to consult my personal oracle.
Said oracle is in fact a hand rolled cigarette with an extra-slim filter and the...eer night sky.

It goes like this: I take deep draws on the ciggy, watching the ember glow like the flaming hearth of Valhalla, then I expel the smoke violently into the Stygian depths of the cosmos above me. I see it as the breath of life, the fiery spirit attempting to connect to the cosmos - its a bit Shamanistic I like to think and paradoxically brilliant: I feel closer to life when smoking while all the time its speeding me closer to death (for some reason at this point in the ceremony I'm always reminded of that scene from 'Roots' where Chicken George holds up his offspring to the full moon?)

Anyway,summoning to awareness in abridged form everything I've learned about the possibility of 'life after death' - Terence Mckenna, Graham Hancock, Everett's 'Many worlds theory', Bohm's Holographic universe, Schrodinger's moggy, 'The Matrix' 3-disc set, Kant's noumenal/phenomenal dichotomy and Colin Wilson (when I'm desperate) - I silently raged at the threadbare veil that separates this world from the other/s on Halloween and called on my ancestors for some kind of communion.

My departed grandparents, my mother, my aunts and uncles were crowding the sky, their faces huge and shimmering in the scudding clouds like Hindu gods, monumental and timeless and beyond all knowing and understanding by simple living things - they were just there in the darkness with the rest of the dead and I could feel them.

When you're dead you become a myth for others, eternal and vast, you transcend space and time and spread out into shimmering waves of probability, coalescing here and then there, like exotic schools of fish, playful and finally free. The dead are poetic and have no roles to perform anymore, they are just essence, source, and essentially THEM as they always were in themselves unknown even by their closest lovers, friends and family.

This is something of a Halloween ritual for me this communion with my personal dead, I guess a lot of people do it this time of year too - our communal Day of the Dead. It becomes more poignant as I get older and more of my kin and friends become timeless apparitions and I am still so embodied and animated by earthly desires and petty concerns.

I just like to speak to them for a while, give them an update on my life, tell my mum I finally met a great girl and am okay and not to worry - its only life after all. Then I wave goodnight, stub my ciggy out and hurry indoors, leaving all the friendly ghosts whispering at my back.

Control

I finally got around to watching the Joy Division/Ian Curtis Biopic 'Control' last Saturday. I felt a bit numb afterwards -'numb' in the sense of impressed and like I'd really been somewhere else for a while. Which in a sense I had.
The Director Anton Corbijn did a superb job in conjuring up the bleak 70's aesthetic of northern England, every detail was spot on, nothing was too 'Hollywood'; in other words the movie never descended into daft romanticism like many others I could name.

By shooting it in a bleached grey scale with an eerie angelic light drifting through the frames, Corbijn made Manchester ethereal and continental, like a French new wave flick, but with a kitchen sink English chic (if you know what I mean!)
The movie was compassionate without being sentimental and you could really understand how the various combined forces of guilt, epilepsy and fame squeezed the last drop of hope out of Curtis.
The final scene with the smoke billowing out of the crematorium chimney was really powerful and beautiful, one of many scenes though that highlighted the very atmospheric, spooky cinematography.

Edinburgh Stories

I haven't written for a while, because I've been in the process of moving up to Edinburgh from the Midlands, starting a new job and feeling ever so slightly stressed by all the minutiae and loose ends that need tying up in situations like this.
Its been a reasonably relaxed move though overall, folk have been great, Edinburgh is a stunning and very cosmopolitan city which I'm going to explore in greater depth when my head's been screwed back on properly.

I particularly like the quirky little charity, coffee shops and secondhand bookstores in the Stockbridge area of the capital.
Stockbridge is like a village within the city, it has a more laid back, arty vibe going on, in contrast for example, to the screaming bagpipes and international tourist clientele of Princess Street (I have to catch buses there, and during the 'Fringe' I'd never seen crowds like it, not even in big bad old London).

Edinburgh is very hilly and labyrinthine. There are hundreds of narrow, cobbled back streets and cute little mews in which to wonder, and all around the implacable grey stone and big sash windows, choked with history and an almost academic seriousness.

I can understand why the place was one of the pillars of the Enlightenment (The Athens of the North), wherever you are, there always appears to be a vista, some monument or building to deconstruct, a quiet square, or a long, almost Parisian boulevard in which to wander and reflect on the big philosophical questions.

On the surface, the ghosts of Edinburgh's past - the harsh scientific empiricists - appear to be slapping your face with a cold hand at every turn: the architecture is fortress-like and heavy, a force of nature, timeless in its monolithic solidity.
And everywhere that searing, unforgiving light, no place for shadows, nowhere for truth to hide.

Edinburgh in daylight is a laboratory of hypotheses tested and refuted, cool Presbyterianism meets the Bell curve with lazy superstitions given short thrift - the perennial "Och Pish!"

At night the city wraps a warm cloak around itself, snuggles up in front of the fire, and allows the telling of fantastical tales.
The intellectual severity of day gives way to the good-natured alchemy of night. Burns' tales of apparitions and the exotic elixir's of Stevenson are more believable in the narrow, cloistered medieval gloom.
The pale, stiff academic of morning becomes the Renaissance magi of evening, stirring his crude porridge of chemicals in search of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The Scots I've met so far, and know all seem to have this curious mix of an almost frightening practicality and earthiness, mixed in with a romantic interest in the more esoteric/occult phenomena of human experience - especially after a couple of drinks.
But then again, I guess its the Yin and Yang, the tension between the rational and the irrational, young and old, science and magic that so enriches cities like Edinburgh and keeps them diverse and fascinating.

I've very much become part of this night/day, empirical/magic world myself since moving up - I'm a note taker and personal tutor in the day and an amateur hermeticist in the evenings...well I do psychology in the day and read Colin Wilson and Terence McKenna books in the evening (quite like 'Most Haunted' too.)

Alternative realities, whether drug induced, cosmological or quantum related have always been more appealing to me, than what passes as the (often) psychopathological banality of everyday life.

But hey, some empiricism is quite fun - Edinburgh highlights so far: Microwave haggis with 'neeps' and 'tatties' and witnessing the fake Pope mobile while I was on a bus to work (seriously!). I was a bit suspicious from the off though, it looked more like an ice cream van for Hobbits.

Anyway,I feel so much more settled now and can see my past and present in a much more objective way. I feel a bit like an alien, but a very curious and happy alien, just watching the wildlife saunter past my cafe window - not getting too hung up, just reflecting on it as it passes by.

The problem is how to articulate this chaotic swirl of emotions and epiphanies when they spring to consciousness?
I'm going to try some different methods of expression in future, different tools for getting the depth of feeling across: stream of consciousness, prose poetry, whatever - I find the narrative convention a bit wooden sometimes, a bit of a strait-jacket.
Anyway, I'll give it a try.