jed-thomas

[jed-thomas]

Freshwater

These days, of course, we hear that the American epoch is over. But for a man like Tom Hayden, it had never truly begun.

In almost any direction, it is only a short journey from the city of Royal Oak to the banks of Lake Huron. It is a sublime sight, a testament to the drama of the Northern landscape. The name is retained from the era of French occupation and refers to an indigenous people, otherwise known as the Wyandot.

A few miles south of Royal Oak is the city of Sterling Heights and for a few years in the late-1940s, John Francis Hayden would make this commute to his accountancy job at Chrysler. All the way down, there was a cool, clear breeze off of Lake Huron. An atmosphere of stillness, clarity. He’d served a spell in the Marines. Like so many others, the Pacific had knocked something loose inside of him, something brutal and scared. But now, the country his friends had died for was on the up-swing. Chrysler was part of that. In fact, they were looking to open an assembly plant in Sterling Heights, to build more advanced missiles than the Japanese had used.

By the end of the decade, though, the guilt (and the drink) had got the best of him. His wife and son had fled. At ten years old, Thomas Emmet Hayden, a good Catholic boy from a good Catholic family, was fatherless.

Indeed, Thomas Emmet was surrounded by the Church for most of his young life. Nuns in the classroom and the playground. Learn your verses, fear hell. He got his Sunday sermons from a Depression-era radio personality, a firebrand priest prone to vicious but vague polemics against “the elites”. These sermons made him aware of some rotten core lurking at the heart of the institution, driven mad by fear and misery. This man had seen America collapse around him. Just like Dad.

When Thomas Emmet got to high school, he edited the student newspaper. Seemingly, he was a controversial presence. It was all a bit typical, a boy used to people breathing down his neck gets a taste of power. He edited the school newspaper but they didn’t let him attend the graduation ceremony. One of the theories is that he formatted his farewell column to spell G-O-T-O-H-E-L-L with the first letters of each line. Thomas Emmet left the Church around this time.

Still on that same peninsula, the Northern tip of Michigan, surrounded on all sides by Lake Huron, he attended the state university at Ann Arbor, only thirty or so miles from his hometown. Again, he edited the student newspaper, but the name, Michigan Daily, made it sound like something more. He became involved in political organisations ran by students. At the National Student Association convention of 1960, the woman who would become his first wife, Sandra Cason, roused him from a certain apathy regarding the civil rights of African-Americans. This was the year of Thurgood Marshall’s landmark victory in Boynton v. Virginia, the ruling that kickstarted the Freedom Rides. Cason’s sense of solidarity and duty, in both that speech and the rest of her life, were the making of Tom Hayden.

Far from the bracing air off of Lake Huron, Hayden followed Cason into the heart of the unrest down in swampy McComb, Mississippi. One night, reporting on the Freedom Rides for the National Student News, he is attacked by a group of local white Mississippians, angry at his collusion with this destruction of their way of life, their dignity. He knows what it means when a man has that look in his eyes and that scent on his breath, red-faced and spitting. You don’t pass judgement, you pity the stricken heart and you curl up into a ball. He always thanked God when he passed out, as he did that night in McComb. What the sight of themselves in the mirror will do to men in precarious circumstances. He becomes a Freedom Rider a few months later.

Georgian nights are stinking hot but jail cells stay cold. A good Catholic boy from a good Catholic family stuck in a prison cell thousands of miles from home. But there was an atmosphere of stillness as the jailhouse settled down to sleep, an atmosphere of cold clarity, of chickens coming home to roost. You can’t ignore yourself in a cell. In the troubled calm of Dougherty County Jail, Tom Hayden begins to write what will become the Port Huron Statement, a radical declaration of the principles which will animate the unrest of the 1960s.

It is completed a year later, in conference with the rest of the members of the Students for a Democratic Society and a delegation from the United Automobile Workers at Port Huron, surrounded by freshwater. It was both a break from an older progressive tradition, wedded to Stalinism abroad and all forms of segregation at home, and a challenge to those newer movements unimaginative on issues of wealth and work. Above all, it is a call to spread democracy into all areas of life and thereby, to produce an engaged, thoughtful American, responsible for the shape of the nation to come. Tellingly, the first principle reads:

Any new left in America must be, in large measure, a left with real intellectual skills, committed to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools.

Deliberativeness, honesty, reflection… A child of Lake Huron air and the American Golden Age, Tom Hayden wanted the United States to be a world of clarity and thoughtfulness, its people to be capable of facing themselves.

The Lake Huron breeze coming clear through the passenger window, John Francis tried to use those silent moments before the day began to face himself, to face those things that he had seen and done that he could not attribute to himself or to reality without blinding fear or shame. He had seen the metal horrors of which America was capable, its recklessness with life. They had won and he had been proud. Proud and happy to leave those years behind. Now, they’ve got him cooking books for missile manufacturers and telling him it’s the Golden Age. He couldn’t get all of that straight in his head, couldn’t get the debris of his life straight in his head. But sometimes on those mornings, driving idly along in that wide, deep calm, John Francis Hayden came close.

Thomas Emmet Hayden passed away in 2016 at 76, after a life of political activism and intellectual work. This Tuesday, June 15th, marks the 59th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which you can read, in full, here.

[jed-thomas]

Without comment, I'd like to quote a section of a blog-post by the endlessly interesting Linda Stone, a writer on psychophysiology and technology:

[cpa means 'continous partial attention']

'With cpa, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in, and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?”

[...]

Continuous partial attention is an always on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that creates an artificial sense of crisis. We are always in high alert. We are demanding multiple cognitively complex actions from ourselves. We are reaching to keep a top priority in focus, while, at the same time, scanning the periphery to see if we are missing other opportunities. If we are, our very fickle attention shifts focus. What’s ringing? Who is it? How many emails? What’s on my list? What time is it in Bangalore?

In this state of always-on crisis, our adrenalized “fight or flight” mechanism kicks in. This is great when we’re being chased by tigers. How many of those 500 emails a day is a TIGER? How many are flies? Is everything an emergency? Our way of using the current set of technologies would have us believe it is.

Over the last twenty years, we have become expert at continuous partial attention and we have pushed ourselves to an extreme that I call, continuous continuous partial attention. There are times when cpa is the best attention strategy for what we’re doing; and, in small doses, continuous partial attention serves us well. There are times when cpa and ccpa compromises us.

The “shadow side” of cpa is over-stimulation and lack of fulfillment. The latest, greatest powerful technologies are now contributing to our feeling increasingly powerless. Researchers are beginning to tell us that we may actually be doing tasks more slowly and poorly.

And that’s not all. We have more attention-related and stress-related diseases than ever before. Continuous continuous partial attention and the fight or flight response associated with it, can set off a cascade of stress hormones, starting with norepinephrin and its companion, cortisol. As a hormone, cortisol is a universal donor. It can attach to any receptor site. As a result, dopamine and seratonin –the hormones that help us feel calm and happy – have nowhere to go because cortisol has taken up the available spaces. The abundance of cortisol in our systems has contributed to our turning to pharmaceuticals to calm us down and help us sleep.'

[jed-thomas]

Addiction as a Political Strategy

On Saturday, the Gaza headquarters of international media groups, including Al-Jazeera and the Associate Press, was felled by an Israeli air-strike.

According to the Independent, a spokesperson for the Israel Defence Force revealed that the building housed ‘Hamas military intelligence’, remarking that such a situation is common-practice for the organisation: ‘Hamas deliberately places military targets at the heart of densely-populated civilian areas in the Gaza Strip’.

Gaza’s contemporary population is estimated at just over two million. In terms of density, this estimate considers there to be, on average, around five thousand inhabitants per square kilometre. For comparison, according to the 2011 census, the population-density of the City of London is roughly equal. Can an area of this sort of density ever be a legitimate military target? Our nation’s capital remembers the Blitz with a shudder, still.

Indeed, there are serious questions to be asked. Asked of both sides, of course. For starters, if an offensively- and defensively-advanced nation-state is attacked by a far weaker neighbouring power, is it decent to expect some form of restraint from the former? Of course, it depends on the extent of the disparity between the two. But, given that there is such an inequality in terms of firepower, it is hard to discern what a proportionate response to certain attacks could be - one side simply cannot match the other, in any reasonable sense. Therefore, a focus on defence must be the answer. Perhaps, if paired with diplomacy, such a stance could contribute to meaningful, long-term de-escalation. But can a nation-state bare to suffer civilian casualties - or, even, fatalities - as a price? As has been evident from reporting on the latest conflagration, casualties in non-occupied regions of Palestine always outnumber the casualties in Israel. If you know that retaliation will endanger more of your opponent’s civilians as a rule, does it mean you must simply stomach the endangerment of your own civilian population? Nevertheless, that’s treating it like they are mere numbers, not human lives. On this asymmetry of death, however, must we simply reject claims that guerrillas use, to borrow a somewhat cynical phrase, ‘human shields’? Hiding amongst the crowds and the landscape is the recourse of the less armed. This does not, of course, justify the practice morally. But, again, given that you have considerable (but, necessarily, imperfect) defensive procedures, can your opponents’ guerrilla tactics justify your endangering civilians? Finally, is it proportionate to respond to evictions and police brutality with indiscriminate rocketing of civilian areas? In no uncertain terms, this is a terrorist tactic. But if you can expect nothing short of devastation, what do you have to lose? It may not be rational or moral, but it is understandable. It’s all understandable. Who of us would be rational?

In Britain, there is a species of common-sense which draws lines around areas of human activity deemed exempt from discussions of ethics and justice. Of course, in general, words like that tend to get laughed at or ignored - they smack of un-seriousness, a teenager’s petulance at reality. But of these international waters of morality, the war-zone is the most grey. Perhaps, this foggy British intuition grasps something: matters of war are also matters of the human condition, not only matters of geopolitics or morality. Despite the cynical manner in which it’s usually uttered, it allows us to raise questions about the nature of war which side-step the labyrinth of moral calculation as a facet of military strategy.

Last week, in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Israeli politician Zehava Galon raised these questions and others, penning a column entitled: ‘Human Beings Are Able to Talk, Not Only to Carry a Club’. Her writing is fiery, polemical, but one turn-of-phrase in particular is fascinating: ‘addiction to the club’.

In Israel, all Jewish citizens over the age of 18 are required by law to undertake at least two years of service in the Israel Defence Forces. Usually, states introduce conscription in times of war. For around a decade, the IDF has adopted a set of strategies with regard to the Gaza Strip that are colloquially referred to as ‘mowing the grass’. In short, it is a strategy of long-term deterrence, periodically weakening militias in the area in order to produce periods of respite. The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, which researches ‘Middle Eastern and global strategic affairs, particularly as they relate to the national security and foreign policy of Israel’, produced a study of the strategy, concluding that ‘Israel finds itself in a protracted intractable conflict’ requiring ‘a strategy of attrition designed primarily to degrade the enemy capabilities.’ The Center chalks this up to the nature of the conflict - it being against ‘hostile non-state groups’ - but, as Galon alleges, there may be an additional reason.

Personally and nationally, national service can take on a definitional function. To be blunt, if you have an enemy, you have an identity, a role, a community to which you belong. Perhaps, such negative-identifcations are an inevitable by-product of nation-building. But a video has been doing the rounds on Twitter which compiles a series of vox pops in Jerusalem that portray a violent scorn - ‘I would carpet-bomb them .. It’s the only way you could deal with it’ - for those in Gaza/Arabs/Palestinians - a sort of composite figure of the objects of the IDF’s strategies. One interviewee suggests that ‘Jews should have rights to hate them’. The interviewees justify these attitudes via the facts of the historic embattlement of the Jewish people, casting the state of Israel itself as representative of ‘divine justice’ or an incarnation of some redemptive new direction of history. Another video supposedly recorded by IDF soldiers has been shared widely. From the translated chatter, the video itself appears to have been recorded as part of attempts to capture exciting killings. This particular killing, seemingly of an unarmed young person milling around with another, is terrifically exciting to the group, the cameraman’s voice resounds with sheer glee at having caught it: ‘What a legendary video … He flew into the air and his leg was like…’

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, the founding charter of the organisation now known by a colloquialism, Hamas, abounds with poetic images of war. Article 33 reads:

Ranks will close, fighters joining other fighters, and masses everywhere in the Islamic world will come forward in response to the call of duty, loudly proclaiming: ‘Hail to Jihad!’. This cry will reach the heavens and will go on being resounded until liberation is achieved, the invaders vanquished and Allah's victory comes about.

In the ruins of the Gaza Strip, some may have sought to make a pact with their fear and despair, to discover in it the howlings of history. Let it point the way. The recklessness of the militias’ attacks on Israel resonate with this particular desperation - and the scorn for human life that is its price. In the Covenant, ethnic hatred is expressed openly and in unashamedly violent terms. Article 7 reads:

The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them.

In the Covenant’s view, the Jewish people represent a grand historic force which all Muslims must devote themselves to curbing. Article 22:

The enemies have been scheming for a long time […] They stood behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we hear about […] They stood behind World War I […] and formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains […] There is no war going on anywhere without them having their finger in it.

Organisations like the IDF and Hamas blend claims to land with existential certainties, rationalising violent desires. Like a junkie rhapsodising about his creative break-throughs, these are political and historical arguments which obscure an addiction. A newsletter from the National Institutes of Health, a branch of the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services, notes that at a certain stage of addiction, ‘people often use drugs or alcohol to keep from feeling bad rather than for their pleasurable effects.’ All addicts are, to use a pop-psych phrase, running from something. Under the influence of addiction, one’s despair and fear become engines of joy, pressing you onwards towards release. Therefore, like some anti-Addicts-Anonymous, organisations like the IDF and Hamas provide infrastructures of protection and facilitation for war-addicts.

And that is the kicker: none of this constitutes some personal particular fault with Jewish Israeli citizens or Arabic Palestinian Muslims. Nationalist political organisations are cynically perpetuating themselves through these methods. Indeed, they are the agents of these conflicts, ordinary people are merely their addict-conscripts. Your dealer is not your friend.

Therefore, we raise issues of justice in matters of war to avoid these all-too-human eventualities. Raising those issues retains our focus on the central questions of the validity of a violent action, of vested interests and consequences. What is needed - in any war, anywhere - is an orientation towards the discourse of war which accepts that it is always susceptible to the distortions of the addicted mind. Forever, the question is: should this war-zone exist at all?

Galon and Tair Kaminer - a 24-year-old Jewish Israeli citizen who, having served a short sentence for refusing national service, was arrested in Jerusalem over the weekend for organising a solidarity protest of Jews and Arabs - and the legendary Hanan Ashrawi are pointed examples of a banality which is nevertheless worth re-emphasing: no nation falls totally under the spell of this addiction. The collective delirium of war never swallows populations nor individual minds whole. Always, always there are other ways. For instance, questions of rights to land are the (literal) solid ground to which we can return. Bring them into focus.

Footage from the Snapchat of an attendee at a Free Palestine protest in Nottingham City shows a car aggressively parting a line of protestors. The perpetrator has not yet been identified.

[jed-thomas]

Debt and Unreality at a British University

Most of the time, when journalists or researchers ask students in Britain about their “concerns” and their “experience”, they’re not looking for answers like: ‘I don’t feel real.’ Because, well, what do you do with that?

A friend of mine sat on a stiff leather couch in the hallway, tiredly scrolling. She’d just clocked out. For nine grand, we were getting about 7 hours of teaching a week. The rest of the time, of course, was supposed to be devoted to reading all the material we’d be discussing in seminars or attending lectures on. But she was working part-time at a Pizza Express. The maintenance loans only stretch so far, especially with rent around here. And you have to catch a bus to get to campus. Lots of us, our parents helped out. But if the ‘rents can’t or won’t pay, you’re a little stuffed.

In 2019, it was reported that over half of young people are now attending university. These figures represent the fulfilment of a target set by Tony Blair at a Labour Party conference in 1999, during his first term as Prime Minister. In July of the year before, Blair’s parliament passed the Teaching and Higher Education Act, introducing tuition fees for universities across the UK. In 1990, around 25% of young people stayed in some form of full-time education beyond the age of 18. Today, most young Britons will have experienced the presumption that they’re a university student and frequently, the expectation.

Yesterday, the University of Warwick’s official Twitter account shared a link to a blog post on how to ‘relieve intense stress in 60-seconds.’ The post was written by a current student.

In 1962, towards the end of Harold Macmillan’s Conservative premiership, “ordinarily resident” students were exempted from tuition fees and made eligible for a means-tested maintenance grant. Shortly after the Teaching and Higher Education Act of 1998, maintenance grants were replaced with loans. In 2004, the cap on tuition fees rose to £3,000 and by 2010, it had risen to its current rate of around £9,000. There were protests over that last increase, of course. The protests were in 2010 and I went to university in 2017. I now owe the British government around £27,000 for tuition and around £10,000 for maintenance. If you’re going this year, you’ll end up owing roughly the same - more, if your family earns less than mine.

You hear things. “Oh, they’re antidepressants.” A friend with a weird flatmate who never leaves their room. Oddly intense desperation eking out of drunk students from some corner of a smoking-area. Vaguely recognisable names and their time of death. ��Honestly, just couldn’t be bothered to get up.” An acquaintance from your course drops out and moves back home. Barely concealed frustration in your professor’s tone, hushed rants in faculty corridors. And you notice other things. Admissions of 'suicidal ideation' and life-crises on a FaceBook page which is supposed to be about students sending anonymous messages of romantic interest. Sarcastic tweets about ‘mental health dogs’ and ‘mindfulness seminars’ have become cliché. A routinely empty chair in your seminar room. Strained eyes staring into the middle-ground, silence attending the teacher’s question. Dysfunction as normality. Your diagnosis in your bio next to where you go to uni.

In 2014, it was reported that one in seven full-time students also work full-time. The same report put the proportion of full-time students working part-time at a third. A number of reasons were given as to why they were doing this. I wonder, when they look at their bank accounts, or their accommodation, or their text on sociology, on Latin American history, on virology, existentialism, do they feel they have a handle on things? "I’m a full-time barista, full-time student." "Hello, I’m an impossibility."

For students, the British university is an experiment in unreality. Am I a customer or a pupil? Am I demanding a service from a business or being educated by my elders for my own good? Will it be my fault for selecting a ‘non-applicable’ degree or their fault for selling it to me? Everything is optional, even when it isn’t. You spend all week pouring over the text but feel embarrassed to correct or question the people who clearly didn’t because the professor doesn’t: “Don’t worry if you haven’t done the reading.” Next time, you just put in a sentence or two to fill one of the many silences, improvising off of what others have said, pretending you read whatever it was. Then, of course, coursework is set assessing your knowledge of the curriculum. You spend a couple of days stressed out, hoping to turn your lack of knowledge into a scholarly tone of caution and hedged bets. You go to a careers fair, a student union election, a party, a debate. Nothing sticks, tomorrow is the same day. Your teachers are devotees of a faith but you have to fill the ranks of their picket against the Church. The protestors mass, fill the campus with tension and noise, and then, in a couple of weeks, you’re sitting in the same seminar room with the same professor doing the same thing. You have to think surprisingly hard to remember that past, fugitive now in an opaque present. The only thing that changes is that a few new buildings emerge from their shells of scaffolding. When you miss almost five weeks, there is an email or two. One time, because of your chronic truancy, you get some mark or something, some strike against your name. Nothing happens. In fact, you find it incredibly hard to even find the place where that warning is actually recorded, displayed. You graduate with a First.

Recently, there has been a steady trickle of data, news items, and reports, gradually exposing the rate of suicide in higher education in the UK. It came to a head last week, as a Conservative peer, Lord Lucas, called for a bill which would give British universities a duty of care in the mental health outcomes of their students. Lord Lucas’ plea represents the mainstream of a movement by aggrieved parents of young people who took their lives whilst at university. One of these young people was Benjamin Murray, a 19-year-old in his first year studying English Literature at Bristol University. Shortly before falling to his death, Murray was told by the university that he would have to leave. A local newspaper reports that, according to sources at the university, his attendance was ‘sporadic’ and he had ‘failed to hand in expected work’. Discussing interactions he had with Murray which revealed that the undergraduate was suffering with an anxiety disorder, senior tutor Ben Gunter remarks that: 'A large number of students we see have varying levels of anxiety.’

I mean, look at it this way. You’re saddled with a debt, a sizeable debt. It makes you nervous just looking at all the zeroes. But this moment of selling your soul was planned, it was expected from the beginning. And there are voices all around you that keep coming up and whispering in your ear. It’s just a tax on spending after education. No-one’s expecting you to pay it back. It all gets forgiven when you hit 40. What’s a person to do in that situation? The same government that portrayed the national debt as an existential threat is the same government that turns around and says: Don’t worry. Does debt matter or doesn’t it? Is this real or isn’t it?

People are screaming, again. It's 5:35 in the afternoon. Earliest you’ve heard it this week. They’re really drunk. Or on something. You’re only dimly aware of it, really. It’s ubiquitous, it’s ambiance. Dimly, you wonder if they realise how loud they are being, how obvious their public intoxication is. You perk up when you recognise a few voices. People on your course - you’ve got an essay due tomorrow at noon. Down the ages, goes the cliché, students are drunk and reckless with deadlines. But you’ve been wondering whether it really matters if you get a 1:1 instead of a 2:1. Don’t they inflate the numbers, anyway? And besides, it's experience that matters on a CV, everyone’s got a degree these days. I’d just be another idiot with a 1:1. Your flatmate drunkenly knocks on your door and you seriously consider going back on your refusal to go out tonight.

A survey of undergraduates in seven universities in England reportedly found very high rates of dangerous drinking, with 41% identified as ‘hazardous drinkers’. It also considers that one in five students were likely to be diagnosable as alcoholic.

Every weekend students give in to the unreality. I know what you're thinking. Of course, young people have always experimented with substances, acted like they were invulnerable, ignored consequences. But many of the young people before us were unfamiliar with this level of unreality, this level of confusion. So the recklessness intensifies in those claustrophobic spaces that remain open to us.

I have deadlines, right now. A few days to go. I’ve been looking at the news, all the statistics on internships and jobs falling through for graduates and young people, in general. The worst hit. I’ve been talking to my friends, moaning about the job hunt, the rejections and the no-replies. Anecdotes tumble down the grape-vine of graduates from respected universities not even being able to get a part-time job at a supermarket because of the number of applicants or whatever. A couple of my friends are intermitting due to mental health problems. When I was home, before the most recent lockdown, a number of my friends and I worked at a pub. I’m back at uni and they’re still there. Class of 2020, all of us. Of course, they like it, it’s fine. But where do we go from here?

Don’t ask me, mate, I’ve got deadlines.

[jed-thomas]

Casting a Blessing in Two Languages

The chaos persists. News out of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Gaza and Sheikh Jarrah is constant and increasingly follows a menacing trend. Videos of rockets over dense neighbourhoods, flames claiming buildings and cars, hasty funeral processions, tear gas and gunfire in places of worship. Elected officials and over-earnest celebrities are drawn into a blizzard of discussion on social media. Ham-fisted commentary and ham-fisted apologies. Photos of grieving children and the faces of the dead, colourful infographics, angry stories by your Instagram friends decrying racial bias, tweets by state representatives, journalists, academics, all saying different things, putting together different chains of events, some stretching back hundreds of years… Who struck first? Why? Are the retaliations proportionate? Is this legal? Is this video even real? In the chaos, we resort to simplicity.

In 1948, the British state would lose its mandate in Palestine. It had obtained this mandate a few decades earlier, as a facet of agreements between it and a number of other countries to re-distribute the lands of the ailing Ottoman Empire.

Under British governance between 1920 and 1948, Mandatory Palestine, as it is now known, was a site of political chaos. In 1917, Arthur Balfour MP, then Foreign Secretary, declared that ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.’ Only a year or so earlier, senior British military officials assured leaders of Arab nationalist factions that His Majesty’s Government would support the establishment of an Arab state, the borders of which would have included Palestine, should the nationalists succeed in undermining Ottoman power in the region.

As a result, Mandatory Palestine was marred by the competing visions built on these competing promises. Both the Jewish and the Arabic people felt they had long been strangers in their own homes. Their nationalist desires had been whittled to a point by the ever-looming suspicions of their supposed countrymen, by the grating mundanity of prejudice - can a man not even cast a blessing in his own language?

In late 1947, the United Nations adopted a resolution dividing Palestine into Jewish and Arab states upon termination of the British mandate. The resolution also specified the exemption of Jerusalem, a city of immense religious importance for all Abrahamic traditions, from either jurisdiction. It would be administered by the United Nations itself.

In the early hours of Monday morning, on one of the last days of Ramadan, the metropolitan police of Jerusalem were ordered to disperse Muslim worshippers at Al-aqsa mosque. Supposedly, it was an issue of public order - there were to be marches for Jerusalem Day, a commemorative public holiday celebrating the capturing of East Jerusalem by Israeli forces during the Six Day War, and the police could not guarantee the safety of Palestinians if the marchers passed through the mosque, as they often did. In the interest of public safety, the Jerusalem police forces filled Al-aqsa with tear gas. An unidentified Palestinian filmed the scenes with his smartphone, commenting in Arabic: ‘There are grenades inside Al-aqsa mosque … This house has a lord that protects it … يا إلهي.’ This last exclamation is surely a reflex, literally ‘My God’. But in Arabic, it’s also a blessing, a call for divine intervention.

Since that morning in Al-aqsa mosque, the violence has escalated shockingly. Around two-hundred rockets were reportedly fired from Gaza towards Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, a number of which were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome system. The Israel Defence Force launched one-hundred-and-thirty strikes against military targets in the Gaza Strip, hoping to weaken Hamas. One of the strikes felled a multi-storey tower and Hamas retaliated. On Wednesday, the Israel Defence Force confirmed the death of Bassem Issa, a senior officer in the Hamas-affiliated Qassam Brigades. Both sides continue to exchange fire. Fighting and vigilante violence broke out across the region in areas of cohabitation between Arabs and Jews. At a press conference on Tuesday, announcing that Israel was now engaged in a ‘major campaign’, named ‘Operation Guardian of the Walls’, against ‘Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist targets in the Gaza Strip’, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ended his speech in customary Hebraic fashion: ‘תודה לאל’. It’s a thanking of God. A reflexive blessing, uttered without thought.

The chaos persists. News is cascading through the global media in countless languages, counting the carnage and death by the minute. The ultimate horror is that even if it all ends when I hit send, the biological, the psychological, the cultural fallout of just these few brutal days will outlast a number of us. In the chaos, we resort to simplicity.

[jed-thomas]

Ministers with and without Portfolios

When you want to demonstrate your sincerity, you write a letter.

The summer is nearing its summit and 1982 is disappearing in a confused fog. Somewhere, Micheal Foot opens up an envelope. An ambitious young candidate, recently selected in some leafy suburb of London, has written to him. You can feel the youth in his writing - and, regrettably, a palpable eagerness to impress. Nevertheless, there are some admirable phrases:

Socialism ultimately must appeal to the better minds of the people. You cannot do that if you are tainted overmuch with a pragmatic period in power.

For men like Foot, members of a modern British tradition, politics and oratory are not separable. Even the timbre of your voice comes into it. On some cold picket-line, at some bored union congress, or against the baying of the other half of the House, you have to fill the air and rouse the spirits. In so many ways, the tradition of British socialism is a poetic tradition.

Maybe, then, he spots it a mile away. A lack of inspiration, the absence of a real perspective. That faint sense of pantomime. Or otherwise, Michael Foot, soon to be an ex-leader of the Labour Party, dimly registers the writer’s display of party-loyalty and just puts the letter aside. This man had crashed the party’s vote-share in Beaconsfield. Tony Blair is saving face.

X

Last Friday, it was announced that the constituency of Hartlepool would return its first Conservative MP in 62 years. Labour’s vote-share crashed by 16%. Perhaps most astonishingly, the Conservative victory in Hartlepool is only the second time in 40 years that a party in government has taken a seat from their opposition.

In immediate response, Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer MP moved to reorganise the Labour Party’s campaign office. Importantly, Deputy Leader Angela Rayner MP was removed from her position as Chair of the Labour Party, the position ultimately responsible for election campaigns. As the Deputy Leader is elected separately, Starmer’s decision has been criticised as an attempt to undermine the influence of a senior elected official. However, as the days have passed, Rayner has emerged with a new position - or, more accurately, a few new positions. Angela Rayner MP now shadows Michael Gove MP as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and occupies the newly-created, elegantly-titled office of Shadow Secretary for the Future of Work.

Former MP for Hartlepool and Minister without Portfolio under Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson has been named by sources within the party to Guardian columnist Owen Jones. According to Jones, Mandelson signed off the press strategy for Shadow Cabinet members following the result in his former constituency.

X

It’s raining in Stockport. The King Street bridge is abandoned. Looking at the slow river, she knows that she is a cliché, a tired punchline. And she knows that she’ll have to leave school. Other girls have done it, so she’ll get through it, too. But it’s an abrupt and unceremonious change to whatever path she was on before. 16 and pregnant. A joke. Then again, wasn’t this always the intended outcome, in one way or another? Cornered. It was going to be a long time before she understood that there was anything that could be done about that.

The wind takes a few of the leaflets out from under his armpit and scatters them all over the carpark of Oxted station. A favour, he thinks. It’s 8 in the morning, they’re all commuters. No-one’s taking them. As if some serious city lawyer is going to read about the future of proletarian resistance, let alone in a pamphlet handed to him by a spotty adolescent. East Surrey Young Socialists. He isn’t blind to the humour of that. Some preachy privately-educated Surrey boy. He had tried to explain that he’d gotten into Reigate fairly and squarely, that it’d only just started asking for fees in the last few years. Much to his chagrin, by the way. People around here don’t listen. If they did, they’d see that there was nothing to be scared of. But they’re closed off, rigid. It’s enough to make you want to pack it all in, honestly.

His father was staring out at the snow falling on the houses of Hampstead Garden in one of his attitudes of preparation. He had an abiding sense of danger, of impending calamity. Peter always attributed that to his religiosity. Eschatology. The End Times. “Have you compiled your application yet?” “Of course, Dad.” Peter knew the counterpoint melody. Your mother and I have worked too hard. He would say it like that because his mother is the real concerned party. Descendants of the Labour Party aristocracy are obsessed with elite education. He is pretty sure that he will get in. He’s clever, goes to a good grammar. And when he gets in, he is going to have fun, the sort of fun you can only have at a place like Oxford. Judgement Day is a long way off.

The Hampstead Garden Suburb was the brain-child of two idealist architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. The pair were disciples of the Arts and Crafts movement, an aesthetic philosophy with global reach that found particular purchase among British socialists; indeed, Unwin was a life-long and active member of various socialist organisations. Hampstead Garden was to be spacious, communal and open to all social classes. It was built on land purchased from Eton College by a wealthy patron. The Hampstead Garden Suburb Trust Ltd., established in 1906, executed Parker and Unwin’s designs.

Peter Mandelson was born in 1953 to an advertising manager and the daughter of Herbert Morrison, the Leader of the House of Commons under Clement Attlee. He was raised in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, attended a local grammar school and then, studied at Oxford. As a teenager, he was a member of the Young Communist League. At university, he joined the Oxford University Labour Club.

As a veteran in public relations by the time of Tony Blair’s bid for leadership of the Labour Party in 1994, Mandelson, distrusted by trade union representatives within the party, played his part in the successful campaign in near anonymity, being referred to by staff only as “Bobby”. In his acceptance speech, Blair used the moniker when expressing gratitude to his campaign team. After running Blair’s successful general election campaign a few years later, Mandelson was appointed to the office of Minister without Portfolio, allowing him to attend Cabinet meetings without having any formal obligations. Critics have likened it to a sinecure. In 1998, Mandelson resigned from government, having failed to declare dealings with millionaire Cabinet colleague, Geoffrey Robinson. He is now a peer, happy to be part of the club.

Oxted is an incredibly old town. When William the Conqueror ordered a survey in 1086, Oxted had its various assets - hides, churches, ploughs - recorded. It remained a sleepy time-capsule until it was reached by the new railway system in 1884 and run-off trade from London began to bring money into the town. At the beginning of the last decade, it was the twentieth richest town in Britain by income.

Born to a nurse and a toolmaker in 1962, Keir Starmer was named for the first parliamentary leader of what would become the Labour Party, Keir Hardie. He attended a grammar school and was the first in his family to graduate from university, obtaining an undergraduate degree in law from the University of Leeds. As a result, he undertook postgraduate study at Oxford and became a barrister in 1987. During this time, he edited Socialist Alternative, a controversial magazine associated with various factions on the Marxist left.

Starmer is a relatively green politician, having only been selected as a candidate for Holborn and St. Pancras in 2014. The majority of his life has been spent working in the legal system. In 2010, Starmer successfully prosecuted 3 Labour MPs and a Conservative peer on charges of false accounting. In 2011, he encouraged the rapid prosecution of several rioters, sometimes on the testimony of undercover police officers. In 2012, Starmer brought a case against former Energy Secretary Chris Huhne which resulted in the only resignation of a Cabinet Minister over legal proceedings in British parliamentary history. In 2020, as Leader of the Opposition, Starmer ordered Labour MPs to abstain on the third reading of the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill, which granted undercover police officers full legal immunity for all actions undertaken on duty. Desperate to be heard, Starmer re-tweeted a Guardian column by Angela Rayner MP, adding: ‘We’ll make sure you know Labour is on your side.’

Stockport lies just south-east of the City of Manchester at the point where the Rivers Tame and Goyt become the Mersey. Although bisected by the feudal borders of the counties Cheshire and Lancashire, it belongs to a different epoch. Stockport is a town with almost 300 years of industrial history, home to one of the first mechanised silk factories in the entire British Isles. Surveying all of England for his 1845 history ‘The Condition of the English Working Class’, Friedrich Engels remarked that Stockport was ‘renowned as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes’ to be found in the industrial heartlands.

By the time Angela Rayner was born on a Stockport council estate in 1980, the country seemed eager to be free of this history. This eagerness sometimes manifested as a disdain for trade unionists and benefit claimants. Both of Rayner’s parents were eligible for benefits. And at 31, Angela Rayner was a senior official for the public-sector union Unison.

Having left school at 16 to raise her first son, she got her GCSEs by studying part-time at Stockport College, where she eventually qualified as a social care worker. At work, she clashed with management, discovering a flair for negotiation that would get her elected as a union steward. Finally, after years and years of confusion and uncertainty, someone was being made to answer.

[jed-thomas]

St. Helier Scene

This morning, an unidentified person wearing a bicorn and a high-vis jacket was caught on camera firing a musket towards the harbour from the ramparts of Elizabeth Castle. They are believed to be a member of a Jersey Militia re-enactment group.

Letting off bright red and orange flares on a choppy sea, between sixty and one-hundred French fishing vessels crowded the harbour at St. Helier. It was a protest. Post-Brexit licensing decisions taken by the local authorities have been unexpectedly stringent, according to Paris.

Her Majesty’s Ships Tamar and Severn departed for Jersey’s capital in the small hours of the morning. Boris Johnson PM ordered their presence as a defensive measure. A French police boat and patroller have also arrived at the harbour.

In 1337, on the orders of King Edward III, the Royal Militia of Jersey was established. In 1953, its descendant unit was disbanded, to be re-established in a considerably altered form as a regiment of the Territorial Army some 30 years later. The true descendants of the historical militia are, however, the island’s re-enactment groups. They organise on Facebook.

Jersey officials are currently meeting with the protesting fishermen in pursuit of a diplomatic solution. Speaking to the BBC as external relations minister, Jersey senator Ian Gorst expresses faith in “talk and diplomacy”.

Almost two months ago, in his first interview as Prime Minister in a European newspaper, Boris Johnson PM stated, referring to the world-historical Parthenon marbles:

“But the UK government has a firm longstanding position on the sculptures, which is that they were legally acquired by Lord Elgin under the appropriate laws of the time and have been legally owned by the British Museum’s trustees since their acquisition.”

There have been threats from the French government regarding the supply of electricity to the island if the dispute is not resolved amicably. Represented internationally by the Crown, Jersey is nevertheless self-governing.

Ashore in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voters are deciding appointments to local office. In London, the campaign of Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey, whose grandfather, a British veteran of World War II, migrated to the UK from Jamaica in 1947, focussed on cuts to the Metropolitan Police Service introduced by Labour’s incumbent Sadiq Khan, whose grandparents migrated from Pakistan in 1947 following the partition of India.

In mid-March, four were arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service at a vigil for Sarah Everard which doubled as a protest against misogynistic violence. One placard asked: Why do you fear witches but not the men who burn us? Almost a year ago, one-hundred were arrested as protestors clashed over historical monuments in Trafalgar Square during Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Loic Farnham, a Jersey fisherman, commented on the scene at St. Helier to the BBC, saying of his French counterparts:

"They are professional fishermen, the same as we all are, we'd like to keep it all amicable so we can have access to the markets and they can carry on earning a living in our waters."

[jed-thomas]

Why do you hate Betty Draper?

                                                     --SPOILERS--

In my opinion, Betty is as essential to Mad Men’s narrative mission as Don. Although it is unfortunate that her screen-time decreases as the show progresses, I do not think that her character’s journey was, in any way, inadequately depicted. She is, to me, one of the show’s most terribly real characters, and it was her fraught relationship with her daughter, Sally, that, as the show progressed, gave rise to some of the show’s most emotional scenes. There are no words in Betty’s final moment in Mad Men - in fact, it is a very simple panning shot, reminiscent of those we have seen in the final moments of many previous episodes - but it is so piercing that little else in the show is as achieved. 

You will therefore understand my surprise when, reading through all the opinions online after I finished the show, Betty was constantly referred to as one of the least-liked main characters. Constantly, I would see positive opinions on Betty prefaced with an assertion that they could not forgive her treatment of Sally or some reference to her emotional unavailability, hypocrisy or immaturity. In a community where praise for characters like Don, Joan, Roger, Pete or Peggy is rife, why is Betty thus criticised?

I honestly do not think that these criticisms have anything to do with misogyny, because anyone who watches Mad Men is coaxed into unravelling the fallacies which support sexist attitudes. Instead, I think it has something to do with the general tendency within the Mad Men fan-base to afford the social conventions of the time far too much importance in determining characters’ actions. It is, to my mind, part of the genius of the show that it refuses its audience the opportunity to wholly absolve any of the characters with any assertion of such things as ‘X was only adhering to social expectations’ or ‘X was influenced by societal convention to act such a way.’ Unfortunately for us, it seems to me that many of the characters, by virtue of their personalities and personal histories, would have a tough time operating even in today’s vastly less oppressive world. (I understand that there is nothing perfect about our current state, but we might agree that much has been improved upon since the 1960s.) It is not simply the social conventions that effect the development of characters but the relationship between these conventions and a character’s emotional drives. 

For example, would the barriers to Peggy’s ambition have mattered to her if she was not ambitious? And is she, like Joan, not uniquely ambitious, even by male standards? Would Don’s impulsive promiscuity be considered much less of a destructive habit in today’s post-marriage world? Is the confusion that consumes all the characters regarding their priorities in life not simply a perennial problem? Sometimes, we genuinely do not know what we want, and it is not social conventions which confuse us but ourselves. 

This focus on the influence of social conventions appears to me to lie at the heart of the criticism surrounding Betty Draper. She is not simply, as some would have you think, the subversion of the “perfect housewife myth,” frustrated by the limited opportunities afforded to her and driven to the point of insanity by boredom. Of course, she is those things and, I will admit, she was raised to value the life that she came to hate but, much like Don and Peggy, she is consumed by an innate yearning for completeness that leads her on an endless search for that mythical something-else and, whilst this feeling may be particularly American, it is not alien to the emotional world of any person. It might therefore be instructive to view Betty’s dissatisfaction with married life as being partly the product of a jealous, perennially-dissatisfied temperament, complexly formed by her upbringing, subjective experience and the social conventions of the time, rather than the sole cause being the external realities of marriage and the specific realities of being married to Don Draper. Betty Draper is as sympathetic as someone struggling to realise themselves can be - which is to say, not often all that much, given the mistakes one often makes. 

 As the show progresses, Betty becomes so deeply entangled in a web of a sad confusion that she is not emotionally-mobile enough to navigate her increasingly complex circumstances. Self-hatred, betrayal and grief all conspire to ensnare Betty Draper and therefore, in attempting to escape or rectify, her actions need not be allowed but they can easily be understood. She mistreats Sally and, much like the fans that this post is criticising, I do not forgive her for that, but what she sees in Sally is the person she was before she was blunted by her own confused sadness. Sally still has the ferocity that Betty sacrificed on the altar of her own beauty. To her, it is a hateful sight and she becomes resentful, treating her daughter with alienating contempt. 

Betty loves Sally. There is no question of that. She just does not know how to communicate that love. Partly it is because she, like Don, was not given parents from which such a lesson could be derived. At a loss, she upholds their values, despite her own understanding of the ways in which they left her so sad and confused. Partly it is because, at that time, a mother was required to raise a daughter to be a certain way, namely physically beautiful and feminine. Sally, prematurely perceptive of the hell that results from an extreme observation of these rules which bred secrecy and alienation in the marriage of her parents, rages against these conventions until such time as they become important to her. Partly it is because Betty cannot love herself in any sustainable way for she has little access to the areas of herself that would enable such an ability. Her self-worth revolved around her beauty, and despite being successful in other areas - amongst others, we learn of her degree in anthropology -, it was first and foremost for her outstanding beauty that she was admired. As sexual creatures, we cannot help but respond to beauty and thus men act as differently towards Betty as women towards Don. That is not a malleable convention but a fixture of human society. She cannot be blamed for wanting to preserve that which sets her apart from the crowd. But what happens when that isn’t enough to keep her husband faithful? What crippling self-doubts so deep beneath the surface are confirmed? What hell does betrayal release on poor Betty Draper?

She is no innocent victim, no one in Mad Men can be viewed this way, all are complicit in the horrid game, but Betty Draper is no malicious monster. It is a horrific experience to see her fade from a life that brought her such misery and despair, but it is even more of a terrible marvel to see her finally reconcile with her own pain, to see her eschew her dependence on her sexual attractiveness and to find contentment in the striving for, not the achievement of completeness. And as the final light drew closer, finally she could see her poor daughter for all she was and not reject her. In her final moments, she found herself at peace with her loved ones and at peace with her life, miserable as her experience of it was, knowing finally her own blindness and feeling, at last, that no one so dangerous or spiteful was out to get Betty Draper as herself. 

[jed-thomas]

Thoughts after Mad Men

                                           -----NO SPOILERS-----

I don’t really like TV that much. I’m not very organised and so I can never keep up with things as they go along and binge-watching things always leaves me with this horrible sense of dread. So I usually steer clear of any show that lasts longer than two or three seasons. I’m really a movie guy.

I mean, I have seen a fair few seasons of a number of comedy shows like Arrested Development, Parks and Recreation and Community because they don’t demand too much of you. It’s fairly easy to just keep on watching because you’re only there to laugh and not have too much a well-rounded experience. Sure, Community had moments which elicited intense emotions other than laughter but that was mostly due to my caring for the characters in whatever limited way that a comedy show allows and that any change in tone from silliness was effecting because of the infrequency of such moments. The stakes aren’t much higher than making you laugh - although that is no low bar, by any means - and any emotional connection to the show and its characters is a by-product of how funny they are to you.

It’s just that I’m way too reluctant to start watching dramas of all types because they just feel like big, expensive wastes of time to me. Why watch 80+ hours of a TV show when the same themes, characters and storylines can be explored in a good two-hour movie? The added benefit of the movie format is I find that it makes the sort of stories that are likely to be told on TV so much more potent, requiring the director to strip it off its excess fat, and prettier, given the extra budget and time allocated to each to each scene. Most TV centres around cops, doctors, businessmen and crooks, anyway, so why not save yourself some time and make a movie?

I mean, I watched Breaking Bad, touted as one of - if not the - greatest TV show of all time, and I liked it. Whilst I was watching it, I was in awe of it, constantly telling me friends to watch it and excitedly discussing how great it was with those who were watching it, too. But, especially in the last season, it began to move awkwardly. I was really excited to be inducted into the group of people who were privy to this cultural moment, especially in the final few episodes, but I just wasn’t quite sure why I had spent so long watching this show. When it came down to the crunch, great acting, pacing and cinematography managed to keep the show from completely imploding. It was an absolutely riveting and often emotionally effecting show. The show was flashy, edgy, pretty and exciting. It had moments of extremely exciting dialogue, iconic characters and heart-stopping scenes. But, at the risk of sounding pretentious, when all was said and done, it wasn’t deep enough. 

This was why the last season, which took so many pains to show itself as the end of an era, replete with moody meanderings and explosive twists, as if engineered to convince us that the past five seasons were as deep as this ending wanted us to think that it was. In all honesty, it was routine TV. You can see all the jarring changes in tone and the arbitrary changes in characters’ directions, all the confused experimentation of a show that thought it could never be. Breaking Bad, like most TV shows, just wanted to get picked up for a second season. It wasn’t ready for anything else. 

But, in its defence, that’s what all TV seems like to me. The constant struggle for ratings that spurs on internally-unprecedented narrative directions and character-arcs. Did you see the new season of X? Yeah, not my favourite, they did some weird stuff this year. Unlike movies, there is no beginning, middle and end to the series as a whole. It is the amalgam of a whole host of mini-arcs that are never fully satisfactory because they are unforeseen, obvious, and ultimately irrelevant. Yeah, they'll build up a romantic relationship for a while and the main relationships will have certain rules that they abide and break in satisfactory ways but there's nothing else beneath all of this aside from a desperate ploy for audience-attention that encourages a sort of schizophrenia that can never give the right idea their time. 

And after six season of this schizophrenia, you get some sentimental ending that tries to trick you into believing that you didn’t waste your time watching the show. It will play on confirmation bias and the knowledge that there will be some form of mourning for the show whatever the writers do for the sole reason that it has been a mildi-entertaining aspect of the viewer’s life for this long. It’s akin to leaving school and feeling a sense of loss for those people who you had only a passing affection for but happened to feature in some recurring events in your life i.e they sat next to you in a class, walked the same way home, shared a hobby with you. These were by no means bad people - in fact, you greatly appreciated and enjoyed their company -, it’s just that you didn’t have quite the same relationship as you do with your closest friends and so probably won’t keep in touch. All in all, they never meant that much to you but simply by virtue of the fact that there is a void now where once there was a person, you feel as if you have lost something important. It’s just familiarity, really.

So I have avoided long-running TV dramas since Breaking Bad. I gave up on shows that have started airing in the last few years, already spying the cracks, shows like Better Call Saul and Silicon Valley (it’s not a drama, but it’s not a pure comedy either), despite desperately wanting to fall in love with both. The only dramatic TV that I had thoroughly enjoyed were anthology series, shows like Fargo, True Detective and Freaks and Geeks. They were just like extended movies, purposeful and effective. Fargo and True Detective even look like movies. I think I watched the first season of Marco Polo, too. The only non-anthology show that I’m excited to follow is Donald Glover’s Atlanta, but I've only seen the first season. Nevertheless, I was content.

That was until a big chunk of free time rolled my way and I decided that I might as well try and get through something longer. I’d heard good things about Mad Men after I’d finished Breaking Bad but I never got around to it because it wasn’t on Netflix in my country. So I went for it. 

I finished it yesterday. I’m not sure how Weiner and co. did it. It’s the first time that I earnestly feel as if I should rewatch a whole TV show. It is a purposeful story, told masterfully, that now appears to have been aiming at this ending the whole time. For the first time, running back through the seasons in my mind, you can see that the trajectory of each character is crafted, at every turn, by something in the character or the world that is visible in the first few episodes. The show is in no way predictable, discounting the general thrust of Peggy’s arc, and yet is so totally understandably now that it is over. The finale, unlike any usual TV ending, seems firmly in reach of the beginning. It is a powerful piece of storytelling that is more akin to a novel than any other TV show, it is so intricate and well-crafted. 

I picked a couple of episodes that I wanted to skim through yesterday after I was done just to see if these thoughts had any basis in reality. I ended up watching ‘The Suitcase’ (S4E7) in full, re-mesmerised by the dialogue between Peggy and Don and newly in awe of how well this fits in with the events of later seasons. The achievement of the show hit me squarely in that instance. I didn’t feel like I had wasted my time. I felt that I had been given an invaluable gift. For the first time, I preferred that it was told televisually. The terrible intensity of its truth could never be communicated in any other medium. Mad Men focussed squarely on topics that we don’t often like to look very closely at, and its gaze was like a razor, excavating horror after horror. It characters were nothing less terrifying than the monsters that we are and know others to be, its world was, although separated by time and artifice, no less real than our own and its grip on the painful was unflinching.  It was everything and it was honest. 

Don’t waste your time and watch it. 

[jed-thomas]

Steve Jobs

Monday Madness       Wednesday Wamble        FRESHday (or Friday)

                                                        Trailer

Director: Danny Boyle

Cinematography: Alwin H. Küchler

Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin

Score: Daniel Pemberton

Starring: Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, Jeff Daniels

A sizzling biopic with a stellar cast, Steve Jobs tracks the rise of the titular innovator and his rotating ring of fraught relationships throughout the backstage preparations for three product launches (the Macintosh in 1984, the Black Cube in 1988 and the iMac in 1991).

Despite the obvious hagiographic aspect of Steve Jobs, Sorkin and Boyle work hard to find something less than likeable about the eccentric titular ‘genius.’ Fassbender’s Jobs comes across undoubtably endearing in a misguiding yet pleasurable performance as was deployed previously with the acid intelligence of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. We all understand that nobody is capable of the intensity of speech wielded by the main characters in both The Social Network and Steve Jobs but whilst Sorkin’s versions of these men may not be the most realistic appropriations, they are supposedly the most truthful to their actual emotional state during their careers. In honesty, it seems impossible to believe that the goofiest billionaire of all time, Mark Zuckerberg, could be as vital and witty as Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him yet in the motives and emotions of the character it seems clear that there would exist a connection between Zuckerberg and his cinematic analogue.

Therefore, it strikes me as important that we must deal with Steve Jobs as a movie, first and foremost, not as the cultural moment its creators desire it to be and, in turn, we must deal with Steve Jobs as the character portrayed by Michael Fassbender. To be swept up in its ‘importance’ is to disallow the film and its creators their fair time in court.

So — knock, knock — order!

Although David Fincher, who was in talks to direct Steve Jobs before Danny Boyle as an attempt to repeat the success of The Social Network, is perhaps the greater talent, Boyle, with great effort, manages to hold his own against the indisputable force of Sorkin’s writing. Where, in The Social Network, there was an obvious sharing of the creative load between Fincher and Sorkin, the original material of Steve Jobs gives limitations to visual scope and as such restricts the power of the director as overseer of visual storytelling.

Unfortunately, this whole charade seems to be a product of Sorkin’s ego. An intentional decision was made, no matter how effective it ultimately was, to construct Steve Jobs as a piece of theatre existing upon a singular stage with rotating decoration and driven by the verbal confrontation of characters. It is material which I perceived to be anti-cinematic. In an act of self-destructive selfishness, the boundaries were retracted so as to force the audience’s attention towards the script and Sorkin’s whip-cracking dialogue.

However, Danny Boyle, via his subtle cinematic mastery, seems to have dragged this potentially-unsalvageable material out of the darkness of Sorkin’s narcissism and into the light of brilliant collaborative filmmaking. In a resplendent display, Sorkin and Boyle have captured some of the most vital cinematic moments of recent years (disregarding all the cheesy and unpalatable dialogue which inevitable comes with a Sorkin drama). For Danny Boyle has turned Steve Jobs into a vibrant and hugely effective movie with some of the most subtle yet brilliant directing I have yet witnessed. As a testament to the masterful editing of Elliot Graham, the film possesses a rare kind of motion, aided by Sorkin’s invigoratingly speedy exchanges, which proves to be an utterly awesome cinematic experience. Steve Jobs is dazzling in a special if somewhat fraudulent way.

Despite its obvious cinematic drawbacks, the beauty of its unique structure is its clear anatomisation of the man Steve Jobs might have been. For Steve Jobs, to the credit of Sorkin, is a far shot from the toted hagiography of its press junket, exploring Jobs’s personal tensions and influences rather than the effect he had on the world - something that, interestingly, only Jobs addresses. Steve Jobs, as its title suggests, is about the man and not his machines. It is a thematic point that is stressed with skill and precision yet without optimism. This film exercises a thoroughly vicious assessment of Jobs’s personality without turning the audience completely against him or completely towards those he harms. Whether or not Sorkin’s conclusions are factually accurate is irrelevant, he has constructed truly three-dimensional characters containing brutally realistic mixtures of morality and amorality.

The true genius of this pursuit is exemplified in the film’s climax. It is almost spectacular in its ambiguity as it positions Jobs amidst a flurry of camera flashes, his visage blurry as if at last his ego has superseded the broken man behind it and he has become less a cohesive person than a collage of the various ways in which his enthralled audience perceive him. The achievement of the ending (as I seem to have just displayed) is that it forces those watching to assess Steve Jobs and his actions throughout the film by giving you the choice to decide what he is doing in those cryptic closing moments. Is he extending his hand towards his daughter to finally and publicly reckon with his feelings for her? Or is it a publicity stunt on the biggest night of his life thus far and his recent kindnesses towards her simply a manipulation to set this plan into motion? Or is he simply beginning the first stretch of his presentation paces and about to turn his back on his daughter in favour of his machines once again? The question ultimately becomes: Was Steve Jobs a good man?

The closing moments also afford Wozniak, portrayed in loveably simple fashion by Seth Rogen, a distinct deal of screen time and provides the audience with one of the most peculiarly affecting moments of the entire film, reenforcing the film’s (and Woz’s) key thesis about Steve Jobs via his ruined relationship with perhaps the most sympathetic character in the piece. Unlike many of the other characters in Steve Jobs, with the exception perhaps of Kate Winslet’s Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak seems to be free of malice and narcissism (traits possessed in some form or another by the other characters). Woz remains Steve’s most loyal disciple despite the fact that he represented more technical genius than any other coder in America at that point and should, in fact, be the commander of his own legion of disciples. Many analysts of Jobs’s career find great sympathy for Wozniak as the man behind the man, the understated and humble pioneer of personal computing.

Steve Jobs goes further to draw out the torturous relationship between the two men, incorporating into the hectic final moment an oddly touching shot of Jobs and Wozniak in the garage (presumably after their fight over customisability shown earlier) in which only the word ‘Woz’ is audible, said by Jobs as he turns towards his friend accompanied by a shot of Wozniak as the dazzling flashes sent up in favour of Jobs dance upon his sullen face. As Jobs had revealed earlier during his outburst to John Scully about ‘putting Woz up to’ denouncing him after he left Apple, there existed a very tender and powerful relationship between the two men of the sort Jobs had trouble constructing elsewhere. Wozniak was, in a lot of ways, Jobs’s equal and, in his stoic humility, a healthy counterweight to his narcissism. He was, also, perhaps Jobs’s only true friend.

In the same way that Jobs blocks out his daughter as a good thing whose existence he had no initial desire for, Wozniak and the Apple II represented ‘something good…that [he] wasn’t in the room for’ and thus, in service of his ego, an irrelevance. Although the closing shot and the preceding dialogue scene between Jobs and his daughter may suggest a turning point in Steve’s engagement with his loved ones, Sorkin and Boyle are careful to remind us with the saddening images of Wozniak that Jobs was pathologically destructive towards the ones he needed and loved the most.

Steve Jobs may not be much more than an interesting exposé or an exercise in theatrical filmmaking but it carries with it a highly complex analysis of character and motivation disregarding its historical accuracy or even its subject. Sorkin, despite his own insistence as to the emotional accuracy of this film, seems in service of discovering a greater truth here and the ultimate conclusion is universal and prescient in our newly digitised age, a furthering of ideas explored in The Social Network: those who pursue gratification via the perfection of the machine, as an escape from the pain inherent in meaningful human relationships will find no solace or happiness only death.  

7/10

[jed-thomas]

Blood Simple

Monday Madness       Wednesday Wamble       FRESHday (or Friday)

                                                         Trailer

Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Cinematography: Barry Sonnenfeld

Screenplay: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Score: Carter Burwell

Starring: John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya, M. Emmet Walsh

This twisty neo-noir thriller sparked off the careers of both the Coens and Frances McDormand with a tale of lies and deceit spiralling around an affair committed by married Abby (McDormand) and bartender Ray (Getz). Upon discovering this development, Abby’s husband and Ray’s employer Julian (Hedaya) sets an assassin on them but the result he desires is not the result he receives.

UNLIKE MANY DEBUTS Blood Simple is strikingly assured and robust in its construction with a fairly astounding skill for capturing tension. Many of the great debuts have possessed this selfsame quality as if the directors had planned the development of their unique style ahead of time, predicting the works to come with an odd directness. Reservoir Dogs, for example, seemed the embryonic stages of Pulp Fiction with its snappy irreverent dialogue, disregard for linear storytelling and Japanese appreciation for violence as aesthetic and subsequently remains almost stunningly competitive within Tarantino’s filmography despite mounting pressure under some recent masterpieces. Yet, unlike many of the great debuts, and Reservoir Dogs in particular, Blood Simple is simply not good enough to stand alone.

Although Blood Simple is an undeniably skilful film and it plays tension with a confidence usually acquired through years of filmmaking, it feels overwrought and boringly plain, a cinematic exercise rather than a feature film. Despite simplicity of story often yielding the richest experiences (as the bloated, weaker works among the Coens’ filmography testify) in terms of character and theme, Blood Simple is quite pointedly the exception to the rule. A seeming lack of effort in the way of character and theme did not necessarily distract from its most powerful scenes, which rely on the singular force of their tension, but failed to evoke anything in me once the credits began to roll. Indeed, this is a revealingly unique emotion within the Coens’ work which so often leaves you in a hazy mixture of existential confusion and raw fear. The overall thinness of the experience left me wondering at the rave reviews which clogged both the internet and the DVD casing.

To Coen Brothers fans, the storytelling mechanics of Blood Simple are old hat by this point, both in terms of its story and whatever frail strands of theme that it manages to retain. For example, the film revolves around the initial decision of a character within the opening moments - in this case, Abby’s decision to sleep with Ray - which the rest of cast (and the strange karmic forces of the Coens’ world) act in accordance with, creating a real-time butterfly effect as the story descends into depravity and mania about the axis of the original action. Otherwise the stories revolve around inaction and the seemingly unwarranted destruction of a character yet, in both instances of storytelling, the key theme remains the assertion of chaos by the environment upon a character whether deservedly or not. You may spot this anarchic format in Burn After Reading, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, The Big Lebowski and Barton Fink wherein the characters become caught up in vast conspiracies outside of their control, revealing always the fraudulence of human attempts to give form to and take control of the forces which rule them. Bleakness seems to be the Coens’ Nietzsche-inspired niche.

All is so in Blood Simple but the trademark emptiness of the Coens’ later works is only in the training stages here and is illustrated without any clarity or conviction. It is a poor approximation of the Coens’ talents which can barely hold a candle to the majority of their subsequent endeavours despite it being a highly useful blueprint for the capturing of movement in cinema. Even amongst their detractors the Coens’ genius in the editing room is lauded and Blood Simple, for all its flaws, is testament to that skill. Its central scene in which Ray buries Julian plays with a silent grace that is singularly gruesome even against No County For Old Men. The Coens’ capture movement in Blood Simple in a mesmerising and highly communicative way with the majority of its memorable moments playing out in silence or ushered gently forward by the subtle kick of Carter Burwell’s understated score. In its singular victory, Blood Simple is able to execute some of the Coens’ most visceral visual moments with a rigid clarity of storytelling despite being unimpressive in many other key areas.

Put plainly, Blood Simple is No Country For Old Men if it were bad. Despite the technical brilliance of the film and the familiarity of its structure, it completely lacks the fierce thematic drive of the Coens’ greatest works or, at least, they are unable yet to communicate it. A surprisingly underwhelming film from two of America’s most interesting filmmakers.

5/10

[jed-thomas]

Green Room

Monday Madness       Wednesday Wamble       FRESHday (or Friday)

                                                        Trailer

Director: Jeremy Saulnier

Cinematography: Sean Porter

Screenplay: Jeremy Saulnier

Score: Julia Bloch

Starring: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Sir Patrick Stewart

An anarchic punk band (Yelchin, Shawkat) is locked in the changing room of a neo-Nazi establishment and set upon by its owner (Stewart) and his skinhead goons.

LUCKILY, WE ARE gathered here today to let out a collective sigh of relief safely in the knowledge that Jeremy Saulnier has surpassed himself. It is undeniably the sign of stagnation and fear when a director dives off into the bushes of safety and mass appeal so what better way to prove progression and courage than repulse every audience member who comes to see his new film, Green Room. Not only is it horrifically raw and one of the leanest displays of slasher cinema to emerge out of the rather unimpressive modern era but it is also the angriest movies I’ve seen of late.

Green Room is anything but shy and, much like the passionate punk music created by its protagonists, is more happy to be obnoxious and loud and vulgar in order to get its point across. The whole basis of the punk aesthetic is its affront to respectful behaviour and decency. What is exciting or powerful about safe, easy-listening music? What does it ever accomplish? Green Room poses the same question but to the stagnant world of contemporary cinema whose pathetic attempts at activism of late have produced perhaps its worst films ever. Green Room knows this. Saulnier’s film is rooted deeply in the liberal culture of Hollywood’s past where ordinary people refused to be coddled and engaged with cinema not only on an artistic level but on an entertainment level. Although I suppose it is rather obnoxious to say that this culture is gone completely, it pretty much has. Only those from the old liberal era who make films or remain critics of film, and their respective disciples, have any clue as to what has gone wrong with movies in recent years. And the answer is simple: They aren’t fun anymore.

Green Room straddles the ever-widening gap between respectability and fun; a situation that, for many, contains the essential nature of cinema. Jeremy Saulnier’s new iconic masterpiece is undeniable fun and entertaining but it also retains the razor-sharp, serrated edge that Blue Ruin first began sharpening. For Green Room is a timely scourge against ultra-nationalism and far-right thinking and it is snarling and bitter and unforgiving. It is a seriously political work; full of anarchic brooding and desire for an artistic attack on these ideologies exemplified not only by the protagonists angrily covering the Dead Kennedys’ ‘Nazi Punks F*** Off’ in front of many titular ‘Nazi Punks’ but in the film itself and its full-bodied, bloody assault on the protagonists’ captors. Saulnier masterfully maintains the unrecognisable Sir Patrick Stewart’s white supremacist character at an even keel for the entirety of the film, painting him as an almost sane conductor of hatred, a man about his business not a man pointedly harbouring fascism. Righ up until his final line, Saulnier allows you to remain somewhat warm to him, playing on the audiences preconceived fanaticism for the man himself. Then, in his final line of the film, he warns his timid disciple (a complex and effective Macon Blair) of the ‘n***** dope’ that is making the rounds, calling it a ‘bad batch’ as the camera pushes in to highlight the madness and hatred burning in his eyes, almost as a condemnation of the audience for allowing themselves to be lulled by this evil psychopath - a contemporary allegory that I am sure many of you will immediately be able to locate.

So it isn’t just a slasher film, although, with this brilliantly executed film, Jeremy Saulnier demonstrates exactly how much fun just a slasher film can be. And, as a fairly new initiate into the gory cinema club, I can tell you that it can be very fun. Thus, Saulnier manages to bring us a hugely enjoyable and immersive slasher with a warm-blooded political heart thudding incessantly beneath it. It seems that we are allowed our bloody cake and also, consequently, allowed to eat it.

(Do not think that I have drawn only its political message from the film. I appreciate its exploration of the formation of one’s ideology and attempting to look at the villains in a somewhat sympathetic light, exemplified most clearly by Imogen Poots’s characters and the Nazi-traitor Daniel. Saulnier rages most wholesomely against Sir Patrick Stewart’s character as the architect of these feelings whilst allowing his disciples the emotional freedom that they would realistically possess and giving them ample chance to redeem themselves, which Macon Blair’s character ultimately does. It is at once a scourge against the Right and a demand to be objective when dealing with the human conduits of ideology; an oddly, and refreshingly, humanist, nuanced sentiment in a very politically charged film.)

Not only is it politically and emotionally ravaging but is also somewhat masterful in its craft. For a sophomore effort, Saulnier displays great ability in the construction of tension and violence. It is a wonderful experience to be led through this suspenseful hurricane of gore and drama without the faintest idea of how or if the band-members will escape as they are faced with such insurmountable odds. It is a long time since I have been generally gripped in this way by a film, truly unaware of how it may end and enjoying the cool-down session of its closing moments as I attempted to calibrate my mind once more with reality. Green Room hits you harder than any film of the past year will do. Green Room knows exactly what it is that audiences want and how to play them like a virtuosic pianist. It is nasty and exciting cinema delivered with the utmost artistry and passion.

Green Room’s genius and timelessness lies not in its beautiful craft or political fervour but in its delivering my generation (spoilt, sensitive, disillusioned millennials) a reason to be passionate and excited about movies again outside of the huge corporate structures of the Marvel and Star Wars universes (both owned by the same company, folks: the Disney Corporation). Alongside High Rise, I see Green Room as the spearhead of a grass-roots movement of angry film fans demanding better and more diverse (not in the SJW way - for they do not care for artistic diversity, their ideologies penetrate but skin-deep) films. You can hate High Rise and you can hate Green Room but you cannot deny that they do something and attempt a change. I would rather enter into the situation depicted in Green Room than be forced to sit through another screening of another Marvel or Star Wars film which draws gasps only at pandering fan-service and intertextual references.

I thank High Rise’s Ben Wheatley and Jeremy Saulnier for treating film-goers like adults and not children. The newly-bloated and -putrid Disney Corporation with all its live action remakes and its comic-book drivel can get lost. Move over and let the people be treated with respect by artists with visions not plot points to hit.

9/10

#MAKE MOVIES GREAT AGAIN

[jed-thomas]

In Anticipation of Green Room

Monday Madness       Wednesday Wamble       FRESHDAY (or Friday)

                                                         Trailer

Hello and welcome back to reallydecent. I thought I’d jump right in with a wamble just to kick it all off again. Things will probably be a little different from now on but the film chat will remain the central part of the blog. I hope you enjoyed the short fiction pieces that I put up earlier as you’ll have to put up with them for some time. Anyway, we’ll see how this whole thing turns out over the coming months as to what it is and what it can be. I hope you’ll stick around.

AS A BIG FAN of Jeremy Saulnier’s blood-soaked debut effort Blue Ruin (you’ll find my review of it here), I am very excited to see what he does with his upcoming project Green Room which has frequently been described as a ‘punk horror’ and from what I can tell seems as jagged and raw as its predecessor. I’ll be seeing it tomorrow and a hopefully-favourable review of it shall be up on FRESHday (Friday) the morning after.

The most striking aspect of Blue Ruin was its intimacy and the horrid effect such intimacy had upon you during the terrifically visceral violent sequences that operated far beyond the flashiness and confusion most often deployed in American thrillers. Forcing the audience into such a real and uncomfortable place proved a degree of courage on Saulnier’s part for engaging seriously with the effectiveness and aesthetic opportunities of violence in a truly refreshing way. Blue Ruin managed to remain cryptic without tempering the strength of its bite and stood alongside Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Drive and Only God Forgives in a brief resurgence of gritty B-movie fare amidst a rising tide of ineffectual filmmaking over the past few years. Its utilisation of the revenge structure simply adapted allowed Saulnier room to explore the true darkness of his character and his mission, dragging the audience into the depths of the human soul stunningly realised in lurid blacks and blues - a testament to Saulnier’s primary skill as a cinematographer. Blue Ruin careened down a hellish landscape of the mind with its eternal whirlwind of blood and revenge. It is a truly thunderous work.

The problem is that it seems a fairly singular piece and one that, in all honesty, comes very close to not working, so forceful is the conviction. Its simplicity allows its beauty freedom but the format is such that it is very clearly the product of a debutante. Naïvety can seem like an ominous omniscience if lit correctly. Although Saulnier has had his fair share of filmmaking experience through his cinematography work, Blue Ruin’s raw quality hinged on the fact that he didn’t really know what was going to happen. In the only locatable and deliberate actions, he found the emotion and grounded the characters but he lucked out in capturing something so potent and exciting which is an occurrence just as likely accidental as planned.

It seems like a horror is the next logical step for a fierce atmospheric director like Saulnier and the idea of a pressure-cooker situation in which the band members are locked in small rooms is almost perfect for his intimate style. From the trailers, it seems that he has moved away from outright violence to a more suspenseful tone for Green Room. Or so it seems. I doubt that he will shy away from it after his successes in Blue Ruin but it seems to be that it is the threat of violence which fuels this film. Not that I necessarily want him to redo Blue Ruin with a different colour scheme and a larger cast, I just hope that he is able to retain some of his debut’s cryptic ferocity. Although I shouldn’t be telling an artist how to create, it seems clear that he’ll need to prove that he has progressed as a filmmaker whilst still displaying all of the qualities which made Blue Ruin so exciting.

Either way, I’m sure he will be able to deliver something special with Green Room, especially with Sir Patrick Stewart seemingly operating at full villainous capacity. Whatever happens, Green Room is set to be an exciting and intriguing experience much like its predecessor but, fingers crossed, just a little better. God speed, Jeremy.

[jed-thomas]

THE LINGUIST 

3

Tired of festering with hatred wrapped in the sheets of my motel-room bed, I find my keys and push through the screen door out onto the walkway, a fierce wind laden with some odd stench pushes across the pot-holed parking lot below and up towards me. I take a rotten moment to absorb it, sweaty from the aforementioned-festering and thus welcoming of the sporadic intervals of cold that the hot wind offers. A tight moment of joy is achieved in the arms of its foul odour. A rare thing.

And it is to it that I now surrender once more. The closest thing to the spirit-realm that I have ever encountered are these fraught moments of small pleasure in otherwise repulsive situations. To me, some tiny, amiable God floated amongst the pungencies of this late-afternoon wind, backlit by the great orange sun, revealing the translucency of his tiny pixie-like body. If humans had lived like beasts for millennia previously, who was I to crave luxury? If a man had for aeons before found brief solace in the putrid warmth of his dying animal prey, who was I to want a million dollars?    

The walkway seems wobbly today, as if it was a raggedy bridge spanning some hideous ravine. Up here (the first floor), I can feel the gravity of such a situation acting upon me. I feel like Indiana Jones when I hit the stairwell ten screen doors down from my own hovel, I motion a whip-crack and, scanning the area with my tiny eyes, feel embarrassed about it, slam the heel of my weathered hand against the blue rail. There is no-one else around.

Scattered amongst the general litter of pale blue Impalas with characteristic missing doors and smashed windows are a couple of hulking SUVs, big and black, built for war, quiet and sparkling in the dusk light. Great mechanical bulldogs painted in matte black, hungry and off their leash, fixing to bound out onto the endless road in search of blood and life, tear it to shreds, fall asleep. I had heard their growls last night, mixed up in the tiny sounds of late-night business, and I had clutched the sheets of my motel-room bed tightly around me in the dark, their delicate tangibility some vague shield against the evils out at play in the starless night. They had hunted for hours, the bulldogs and their owners, whom were only parasitic in the relationship and simply in search of blood transfusions (blood into power, petrol, or money), bloodying the churning soils of the Mid-West. I had heard the delighted yaps. I had heard the snarled exchanges. I had heard their claws sing in the dark, tearing at the fabric of the world (the ripping sounds reverberated about the plain) as they attempted to escape it, as if the night air were a net ensnaring them which they were desperate to escape. This was now obvious to me, not so as the wet sounds of their euphoric blood-letting filled my motel room, as if a great red tide were slowly filling the space up . A hundred, a thousand, a million beasts had died last night at their hands, their blood pooling infinitely out on the plains, crimson and scarlet and black in the thin light of the early morning. The hills to the west were drenched in gore. I know. I had seen them. Spots of light dancing upon their bloody surfaces, filling my mind with vivid thoughts.

(Cave walls and giant, slowly gyrating shadows of supple young bodies thrown upon them by roaring fires. Massive, cow-skin war-drums and early wooden instruments straining at melody, capturing moments of tune that seem so basic that they feel as if they are emanating out of your own bones. The owners of these supple young bodies slowly gyrate in accordance with their shadows though tiny beneath them, all sweat and fervour, perfect and identical crystalline blue eyes locking onto one another as the dance speeds up. Passion incarnate.)

But now the SUVs are benign and still, bereft of their previous savagery, breathing low and long. I swing wide to avoid them, skirting the outermost white lines which mark the parking spaces until I see my own weak little Impala, pale blue and unrecognisable save the tiny, mint-green strip of metal that I nailed to the apex of the front-left wheel arch, almost white in the sunlight now shooting horizontally across the parking lot in the fading afternoon; a tight semi-circle mirroring that of the wheel-arch although bisected by a thinner piece of metal with a single nail hammered through the top of this bisection. It was a symbol I had concocted in the heat of one distant midnight, as I lay splayed out on the patchy pink carpet of some other motel on an alien planet, head shaven bloody and teeth falling out, monstrous demons seated at the throne of my soul. It meant, in the simplest terms, For all the tired and hungry, I bestow upon you an escape from hellfire. That was a damn fine summer.

Feeling maybe young again, I lurch towards the Impala across the steaming tarmac. Upon arrival, I slowly clasp my fingers around the handle of the driver’s side feeling as the heat of its steel begins to sting against my palm but do not stop. A moment of pain brings clarity. Search my mind for the important memories; where my daughter is, if she is dead, how I got here - come up empty handed and hopeless.

I throw the car door open ignoring the brief flaring up of pain upon withdrawal and clamber into the car and switch on the ignition involuntarily with keys whose location is still unknown to me. I slowly ease the car forward and begin to curl about the other parked cars towards the exit. Man at the toll booth is pale, squat and shiny in his hairlessness as if he were an escaped marble bust of a Roman senator disguising himself with a beige Starlight Motel uniform.

I plunge forth into the twisting pink winds of the plain writhing upon the horizon undulating back and  forth across the world.

[jed-thomas]

THE HUNTER

2

There is smoke. A thickening plume of it. Sprouting from his left and lazily flowing in front of the village, licking at the ground every now-and-then. Twirling like the ballerinas down at the Big House. It is, he notices, less pretty than they are. Yes, much less pretty. They look nothing like smoke.

It is a graceful thing to watch, twisting in its way, floating all the way up to the sky. There is nothing quite like smoke. He certainly can’t think of anything. Smoke is so slow and dreary, almost sad. Like it knows that it has no control over where it is going, just knows that it is going somewhere, knows that it will fade away eventually.

Most things have some idea of what they are and where they’ll go. Not smoke. Smoke just goes.

He is tired already. He really shouldn't be tired yet, he’s only a few hours in. But his body is starting to do that thing where it sort of hums and aches and seems to think that you don’t want to use it, so it just stops. His face feels as if it is slipping off of his skull.

There is a fly on his wrist, right where his sleeve ends, that is stomping around and spinning in its way. It tickles. It’s nice. It makes him feel calm. It’s almost warm. It’s like…Oh, he can’t remember. Something in the past. Far in the past.

The past, as he tries to imagine it now, appears as a car. A dusty car that’s falling apart as it moves, leaving a trail of unrecognisable chunks on the road behind it. He can’t tell quite what they are, but he knows they’re important to the car somehow. In the car that he is in now, he passes this car and as he does, he can see it clearly in all its ragged glory; he can see his chocolate-covered face in the passenger seat and his blue tooth. He can see Mother…

But, only for an instant. Then, both cars continue on their way. As these exchanges end, he is never sure which car he is meant to be in or, rather, what car he wants to be in. Briefly, as they depart, he feels strung-out between the two of them as if they are two very different forces and they are pulling him apart. Limb by limb.

Limb by limb.

He squashes the fly. He takes his time with it, too. Twisting his thumb in a semi-circle. Back and forth, back and forth. Like a boot-heel on a cigarette. For the fly had overstayed its welcome. He never overstays his welcome and that’s something he thinks flies should learn. He thinks of the squashing as a lesson to all flies.

The wind picks up and stoops to throw a cloud of dust into the air. As it rises, it forms thin pathways between larger clumps as if they were helping some tiny beings to get to work or something. Then, the dust rotates a little faster and the already-thin pathways crumble and evaporate. He thinks that he can hear the screams of the little people, but he knows that he can’t. He tells himself that he’s being silly again, that he is spending too much time thinking about stupid things.

The sun drops and plunges the world into orange.

There is no use in waiting any longer, no use at all. He grabs the rifle from the dirt, slings the strap over his head and begins the march down the dusty slope, suddenly energised. His stride is long, purposeful; he knows where he must go and it was silly to think it useful to sit up on that mound, staring out across the dusty plain, doing nothing for hours on end. He is a man of force and efficiency, he will not lay around all day because some young idiot told him so.

The hairs on his arm rise with the wind, which is suddenly more noticeable. His shirt is pressed hard against his right side and billowing madly on his left as if he is two different people. One calm, the other unhinged.

Most men don't know how to deal with the sort of people that he deals with. And he knows that you can’t lounge about and wait for them to do what you want, because they won’t do it.

He has known many types of man. All sorts. Frail ones. Angry ones. Stupid ones. Fast-talking ones. Loud ones. Pointless ones…

All of them can be bad. All of them can be good. It doesn't really matter. The place that they live in, the work that they do, he will always be there with them at the end.

He knows that all men have an end. And he knows that all men hate that they do.

The building is the first that you come to, right at the edge of the dust. An apartment building. It is tall and thin, so tall and thin that it looks precariously balanced, unsafe. He puts his hand on its jagged concrete. The wall seems to be gentle scraping along his palm in alternating directions.

It’s swaying.

The wind is so powerful now that it hurts. Tiny, razor-like bits of dust slice across his face and neck. He moves around the corner to the side with the sliding doors but the wind seems to be blowing just as hard this way.

Suddenly, his eyes feel like they are on fire. He slams them shut and covers them with his hands, shaking with pain.

They feel sliced open and the terror of it all seems to be turning the darkness under his eyelids an awful purple colour. Like he is still stuck at that terrible Hallowe’en party with the weird lighting and that girl who wouldn't talk to him no matter how hard he tried. And he tried so hard.

In the swelling panic, he crashes to the floor, knocking over a table loaded with refreshments. He scrambles about on the carpet, now soaked in peculiarly strong-smelling liquid. Mother said that there wouldn't be any alcohol here, that’s why he came. He hates what happens to him when he drinks.

A boy dressed in a skeleton costume runs to help him up but he doesn't want his help. Swiping away the skeleton’s hands, he climbs to his feet and sets off towards the host. Betty. Yes, Betty.

“BETTY! What is this?” He holds out the bottom part of his Modern Baseball shirt. He doesn't like dressing up.

She smells the liquid on his shirt and smiles.

“It’s just a bit of Jack Daniels, Mike,” she purrs.

He rips the dumb green wig and witch hat off of her head and shoves her towards the puddle of alcohol. Two kids grab him from behind as he lumbers towards her. They drag him backwards, his legs thrashing out at the carpet, trying to claw his way back to her. He screams at her. He screams so loud. He screams like some manic beast being slaughtered. He screams like the world is ending.

And he can’t stop. He can’t stop screaming. No matter what he does, he cannot stop screaming and thrashing. He feels like he is dying. He is going to die.

Before he knows what is going on, he has kicked away the kids who were holding him but he doesn't turn back. He runs through the sliding doors and shoots the receptionist in the head.

[jed-thomas]

THE HIKER

1

Sweeping. Gorgeous. Green.

Green like an ocean. Shoals of red float atop its gently rolling waves. Shimmers of yellow dash across its surface.

He takes off his boots and tosses them into a flower bed. As they land, they bend the stems so that the flowers point away from the boot like fish darting away from a disturbance. He smiles at this, content.

But his heart skips a beat when he realises just how bent the stems are. He sprints to their aid, quickly shedding his bag as he runs. Before he even reaches the plants, he falls to his knees and scuttles the rest of the way in the dust. On arrival, he carelessly flings his boots over his shoulders and begins to delicately reshape the plants, muttering reassuringly to them.

Green like hope. Beautiful pinks stumble nervously down a far away slope, all scattered out, not talking to each other. They’ve always been weird like that, he thinks to himself so that the flowers he hurt don't spread it to the others. He glances nervously up at them anyway, paranoid.

When he’s finished with the last flower, he rises and stands with his hands on his hips, carefully assessing each plant that he’d hurt. Slowly, he tilts his head to the left like some peculiar, gangly bird of prey. Then, just as slowly, he brings his now-grinning face back up to its normal position. Just as his head clicks back into place, he flings himself towards the cusp of the hill, suddenly transfixed with a new venture. He jumps towards the spot and lands with a sickening crunch. Here he lies on his belly in the wet grass, beaming face held up to the sun and the infinity of the green world before him.

Out to his right, flashy blues dance in swirling circles, calling to him. Calling.

Green like peace. Deep brown trunks shoot from the earth, erupting in dazzling green made gold by the steadily rising sun. Purple, thick in the deep bowls that dot this place, pokes out from the dirt in surprising places, as if hiding.

“Don’t hide, it’s only me”, he whispers through the grass with a friendly smile.

He gazes out across the green world. Watching as the ground swells, fills with colour, falls. Nature infinitely sprouts from its endless plain, colourful and lively. The world oscillates smoothly and often, following its contours pulled you into a sort of dreamy haze; the colours spilling into each other to create one great, foaming waterfall of life that crashes downwards through your vision.

“Heaven.” Feverish eyes dart quickly along the landscape and the joy explodes within him once more.

He pushes himself up quickly with his knuckles and almost falls backwards in his haste to turn around. The forest atop the hill is quieter and less overwhelming than the massive clearing but every bit as beautiful. He doesn't take time to soak it in, though, as he scrambles around in the flora for his bag and boots, moving as if he has no real control of his body. As if his giddy, childish excitement was propelling him about the place like some crazed spirit. The sounds of trees being collided with and dust being kicked up can be heard from all around but their owner is never at the scene for long enough for you to understand exactly where in the forest they came from.

All of sudden, he bursts from a nearby thicket, dusty and ragged. He scrambles across the earthy centre of the area on all fours, his arms and legs giving way intermittently from the pure joy of it all. His boots hang by their laces, gripped furiously between the teeth revealed by his manic smile. The small clearing disappears in a cloud of dust as tears across it.

Shortly, the dust settles and all is quiet. The birds anxiously peer around the tree trunks to scan the area. Some of the bravest ones let out snippets of song. A squirrel darts into the middle of the place and turns her face to the trees, then to the bushes and finally, to her nut that she holds so proudly between her tiny little hands. The birdsong gains new voices. A fox, further into wood, rises and stays staring towards the open space, quietly enjoying the new peace. Fresh morning light floods into the clearing, giving every living thing in it a fresh coat of paint so that each of their colours shine with renewed life. The birdsong swells to greet the sun. The forest sits humming with nature like this for a while.

He explodes from behind a tree.

He runs through the centre of the clearing, barely holding on to the straps of his bag. A cloud slides slowly over the sun.

He runs down the slope. He falls, hard. But he doesn’t stop, simply clambers to his feet.

He runs right across the deep green bowl. Other forests rise lush and thick atop hills like islands rising from the sea. A flock of deer glide up next to him as if floating on the grass. He turns to smile at them but they bounce off.

“Typical”, he mutters. He tries to sound angry but does not say it too loud as, secretly, he admires their grace and would not want to anger them.

He runs around one of the forest-islands, running his hand along the sharp incline at its base. He grins wider, now, almost painfully. Even more so when he gets past the island and sees the Old Oak rising high above the other in the distance.

He begins to run so fast that he can’t feel his legs. So fast that his head hurts. So fast that he can’t hear anything, just the wind whizzing by.

He is flying. Flying home.

Then it’s there. Right there. Just in front of him.

He holds his hand out. He inches closer, smiling so wide it seems unhealthy. Nearly home. He’s shaking. A little closer. Closer.

The axe splits his world in half.

[jed-thomas]

(reblogging stuff from The Café because I’m closing it down today)