Not so much street art Exmouth style but art all the same and in Exmouth. There's a fellow who goes down the beach and he spends ages building towers of pebbles and rocks. Slowly and very carefully balancing the pebbles on top of one and other in full knowledge that come the end of the day when the tide comes in his sculptures will be washed away.
I was watching him doing this and I was thinking: 'This is art and this man is an artist.' And I thought: 'That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to build my own pebble sculptures. Physically and metaphorically.' And I thought: 'That's what I'm going to be when I grow up. I'm going to be an artist.'
You can't really beat a good clenched-fist salute, can you? Power to
the people and all that. Che Guevara? Power to the people! Wolfie
Smith? Power to the people! Noam Chomsky? Power to the people! Jeremy
Corbyn? Er...
The thing about Noam Chomsky is that for the past forty years or more
he's been the holder of the crown for the world's foremost
heavy-weight political thinker and whenever anyone steps up to
challenge or criticise him they're fully aware of this. Or they
should be. For this reason any critic or challenger is almost always
going to be viewed as trying to make a name for themselves on the
back of defeating Chomsky in an argument or even as a contender for
the title.
In a lot of instances it's patently obvious that the challenge being
made to Chomsky's political analysis is purely for the kudos in
throwing a hat into the ring, so as to somehow prove the challenger
or the critic is not intimidated by Chomsky and that they are, in
fact, Chomsky's equal if not intellectual better. Apart from this
there's nothing really to be gained from having a go at Chomsky.
There's certainly nothing to be gained politically, which means the
challenge or the critique is only being made as a bid to shoot
Chomsky down.
Whenever Chomsky is in a position to be able to offer a reply
(particularly in live situations) he will very calmly draw a pen from
his pocket, tap it on the table, and in his typical mild manner, very
politely tear the challenger or the critic apart like a Samurai
warrior drawing his sword and cutting down a would-be assassin. More
often than not, the challenger/critic is left hapless and exposed by
Chomsky as the intellectual pygmy they always turn out to be. See
Chomsky's interview on YouTube with BBC journalist Andrew Marr as a
perfect example.
In Class Warfare, Chomsky touches upon this subject and admits
that it worries him: 'There's a real invisibility of left
intellectuals who might get involved.' he says to David Barsamian
"I'm not talking about people who want to come by and say,
okay, I'm your leader. Follow me. I'll run your affairs. There's
always plenty of those people around. But the kind of people who are
just always doing things, like whether it was workers' education or
being in the streets or being around where there's something they can
contribute, helping organizing - that's always been part of the
vocation of intellectuals from Russell and Dewey on to people who are
doing important things. There's a visible gap there today, for all
kinds of reasons.'
Another problem he highlights in the book is the 'personalization'
involved in the public talks he gives and the gap between the huge
audiences that attend the talks and the follow-up, as in the far
lower numbers actually physically getting involved with things
politically.
This is evident with events such as the annual Anarchist Bookfair in
London where thousands of people pass through the doors of whatever
venue it's being held at but when it's all kicking off the following
week or whenever, they're nowhere to be seen. All those thousands of
people never seem to make an appearance on the street. You see some,
of course, and you subsequently get to know them but for the vast
number, you never catch sight of them again - until the next
bookfair.
Not that Chomsky is infallible at all, as evidenced only recently
with the social media kerfuffle following Chomsky's remarks about
Antifa being a "major gift to the Right, including the
militant Right, who are exuberant." Such a comment would be
par for the course from most other quarters but because it came from
Chomsky it was immediately controversial. Just search the Internet
for the arguments it caused. As a caveat, however, Chomsky does
always say "Don't believe anything I say. Go out and find out
yourself."
For all that, Class Warfare as the title for this book is a bit of a
misnomer as it hardly touches the subject at all. In fact, the only
time Chomsky actually mentions 'class warfare' is when describing
corporate propaganda: 'The U.S. has a much more class-conscious
business community, for all kinds of historical reasons. It didn't
develop out of feudalism and aristocracy. So there weren't the
conflicting factors you had in other places - the highly class
conscious business community, very Marxist in character, vulgar
Marxist, fighting a bitter class war, and very aware of it. You read
international publications and it's like reading Maoist pamphlets
half the time. They don't spend billions of dollars a year on
propaganda for the fun of it. They do it with a purpose. For a long
time the purpose was to resist and contain human rights and democracy
and the whole welfare state framework, the social contract, that
developed over the years. They wanted to contain it and limit it. Now
they feel, in the current period, that they can really roll it back.
They'd go right back to satanic mills, murdering poor people,
basically the social structure of the early nineteenth century.
That's the situation we're in right now. These huge propaganda
offensives are a major part of it.'
Apart from this, it's business as usual with Chomsky being questioned
about the manufacturing of consent, American government policies,
Indonesia, and the Middle East. One of the most interesting parts is
when he talks about an address he'd made at an anarchist conference
in Australia where he'd spoken about how he'd like to strengthen the
federal government: 'The reason is, we live in this world, not
some other world. And in this world there happens to be huge
concentrations of private power which are as close to tyranny and as
close to totalitarian as anything humans have devised, and they have
extraordinary power. They are unaccountable to the public. There's
only one way of defending rights that have been attained or extending
their scope in the face of these private powers, and that's to
maintain the one form of illegitimate power that happens to be
somewhat responsive to the public and which the public can indeed
influence. So you end up supporting centralised state power even
though you oppose it.'
The relevance of this in the wake of Brexit and the backing of Corbyn
by a lot of anarchists in the last General Election is glaring.
The best bit in the book, however, is probably what appears to be
almost an aside that Chomsky makes, when he says: 'The question
that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer
is: 'It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the
answer.' The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any
answer other than: Get to work on it.'
And that's as good advice - if not better - as any that could be
given.
The last time I saw Joe Strummer on a stage I thought yes, that's a
genuine living legend up there. A rock'n'roll icon personified. I had
the same feeling when I saw Johnny Cash, that yes, we should be
humble in this man's presence. It's like when you see a Van Gogh
painting in real life or a wonder of the world like the Statue of
Liberty; it's confirmation that beauty and greatness and true art and
soul actually exists and that you know it's true because you've seen
it with your own eyes.
A similar accolade I would bestow upon Marianne Faithfull who, when I
first saw her live on stage practically filled the venue with the
history she carried. It was like watching an eclipse of the sun. Some
are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night, as William
Blake put it. Marianne Faithfull is one of those born to sweet
delight though of course, it's not all been plain sailing.
First published in 1994, Faithfull is Marianne's autobiography
and it's very good indeed. It's no holds barred. A big, healthy dose
of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll and suicide a-go-go.
Cast as the quintessential English rose by Rolling Stones manager
Andrew Loog-Oldham, Marianne immediately puts that myth to bed and
reveals something a little more stranger. She is, in fact, the
daughter of an Austrian-Hungarian refugee who married an English
eccentric so as to escape the tumult of post-war Germany. To boot,
her mother's great-uncle was Leopold Baron von Sacher-Masoch whose
novel Venus um Pelz gave rise to the term masochism, which in turn
inspired the track Venus In Furs by the Velvet Underground.
Marianne's own grandfather was a sexologist who had run off with a
circus dancer and who had invented a proto-orgone accumulator called
the Frigidity Machine.
A whole gamut of topics, incidents and events are covered by Marianne
but then seeing as she's lived through the Sixties, Seventies and
Eighties, this is only to be expected. One obvious topic is the
Rolling Stones and her relationship with them, and Marianne duly
delivers along with unique insights and interpretations of Dylan and
The Beatles.
Dylan's Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands is apparently about her, as is
the Stones' Let's Spend The Night Together. Under My Thumb and 19th
Nervous Breakdown are about Jagger's then girlfriend, Chrissie
Shrimpton. Dylan's Just Like A Woman is about Allen Ginsberg. Were we
all meant to know these things already, I wonder?
Brian Jones: No Godstar he, as Psychic TV once declared but rather 'a
mess - neurasthenic and hypersensitive... a self-indulgent and
brittle monster', made worse by copious consumption of LSD.
Keith Richards: Everything you've heard about him, everything you've
read about him, and everything you imagine about him is true. On top
of this, for Marianne, the best night she's ever had in her life was
the night she had sex with him.
Mick Jagger: Mild mannered and middle class. Not a huge drug taker
(compared to most) but with two sides to his personality, revealed to
Marianne during LSD sessions with him. Bisexual rather than
polymorphous and a bit tight with money. A narcissist - surprise,
surprise.
A significant episode that Marianne expounds upon is the police raid
upon Redlands, Keith Richard's manor house in Sussex, from which
Jagger and Richards faced jail sentences for possession of drugs and
Marianne became forever associated with Mars bars. It's obvious from
reading her book that if the Mars bar incident was in any way true
then she would be candid enough to confess to it. After all, if she's
candid enough to confess to a tryst with Alex 'Hurricane' Higgins
then there's not really much left to be shy about. The fact that she
denies it begs the question 'How did the Mars bar myth come about?'.
Well, according to Marianne it came from the police as a way of
destroying her, the Stones and subsequently the culture the Stones
were part of - or the British annexe of it, at least. All brought
about through collusion between the Establishment and its Home Office
minions, MI5, the police and quite probably the CIA. But it doesn't
make sense, you might say, why would the Establishment be bothered
about a few hippies taking drugs? After all, Marianne Faithfull was
only a silly pop star and the Stones just a stupid rock'n'roll band.
And you wouldn't be wrong. At the time, however, they were all being
viewed as the harbingers of the collapse of Western civilisation.
Enemies of the State, even.
According to Marianne: 'While the Stones did, in one sense,
represent anarchy in a much more concrete way than the Sex Pistols
ten years later, the whole thrust of their rebellion was far too
disorganized (true anarchy!) to have been any real threat to anybody.
But what is a revolution, even a revolution in style, as ours was,
without stepping a few feet over the line? It was the symptoms of
something beyond their control that bothered the little men in frock
coats. Blatant hedonism, promiscuous sexuality, drugs, mysticism,
radical politics, bizarre clothes and, above all, kids with too much
money! It was all trundling in its own feckless way towards
destruction of the status quo without even actually intending it, and
the standard bearers of this children's crusade were the Rolling
Stones. And there was I behind them all the way, urging them on.'
Rather than being self-styled street fighting men as perceived by the
old men of Eton, the Stones et al were more the children of William
Burroughs with drugs being their true forte. This too was the arena
in which Marianne excelled to sometimes tragic but often comic
effect. At a party in Kensington she's offered cocaine, a drug she's
never seen before. Six large lines are laid out by the host and
Marianne's given a hundred dollar bill.
'What do you do?' she asks. 'You put it in your nose and
you snort it,' she's told. 'I knelt down and snorted all six
lines. His face was a scream: half amazed that I'd done it all and
half appalled. I didn't know the drug etiquette. I quickly learned.'
Her new found hobby led to the song Sister Morphine, Marianne's
attempt at making art out of a pop song that subsequently became - if
not a pop hit - her signature tune. For all that, it was Anita
Pallenberg who starred alongside Jagger in the film Performance,
rather than Marianne, which is the point that signalled the end of
Marianne's and Jagger's relationship: 'Performance changed
everything,' as she puts it.
The album Broken English was Marianne's piece de resistance but
before recording it she had spent two years sitting on a wall being a
junky in Soho but even this episode is of interest: 'Out on the
street I began to see how kind and compassionate people could be. It
was junkies and winos who restored to me my faith in humanity. People
think that my time with Mick was this glorious moment in my life
because of all the money, fame and adulation and, while it's true I
do like a bit of glamour now and again, I knew that the life Mick and
I were leading wasn't reality; real life is what's happening on the
street.'
These were the Punk years, and whilst Jagger was getting the door to
Malcolm McLaren's shop slammed shut in his face by Johnny Rotten (or
so the legend goes), Marianne was sharing the same drug dealer as Sid
Vicious and inviting Rotten and the Punk 'elite' to her wedding.
Though even then she wasn't entirely safe from barbed criticism as
shown by when Vivienne Westwood visits Marianne in her mansion-like
squat: 'So this is how you old hippies live is it?' Vivienne
sneers.
There's so much relayed in Marianne's autobiography that it's
impossible to convey how good it is. Practically everything she
writes about is of equal interest and of equal importance. As a
document of the Sixties and Seventies it's invaluable because not
only was she there in the thick of it but because it's also from a
woman's point of view rather than from another member of the boys
rock'n'roll club. Those that only know of Marianne from her début
single As Tears Go By may well be quite shocked by her confessions
but those who also know the re-recorded version and even view it as
the superior one will be mightily satisfied, as will those who love the track Why D'Ya Do It?
As an end note, Marianne now lives by herself in Paris. She's still with us. She's survived. And above all - she's happy.
