The Trials Of Arthur - Arthur Pendragon & Christopher James Stone

 THE TRIALS OF ARTHUR -

ARTHUR PENDRAGON & C J STONE

We've all seen him. Traipsing around the fields of Wiltshire dressed in all his finery; brandishing his sword, his dagger and his trusty staff. On our televisions espousing his rights of freedom and forever haranguing English Heritage. Who is that man, you may have wondered? Why, it's King Arthur, of course. Yes, but who is he? This is what writer C J Stone sets out to discover in The Trials Of Arthur - The Life and Times of a Modern-Day King and it would appear that Arthur is many things: Druid, media tart, devious bastard, nutter, bail breaker, renunciate; all self-proclaimed titles by the man himself. What his real name is, as in the name he was born with, doesn't really matter because in Arthur's case what they say is true: It's not where you're from it's where you're at. And where is that exactly? Where is King Arthur at? Well, not to be overly dramatic about it but Arthur is at the very heart of England, at its very core, battling against forces of invisible darkness made manifest through environmental destruction and the enforcement of laws through the physical presence of the police.

Having lived the life of a biker for many years and a full-on one at that, infamous for carrying an axe and a zip gun, Arthur's road to Damascus was paradoxically very gradual but also overnight. Essentially, he just woke up one day and decided he was going to be Arthur Pendragon, the Once and Future King of All Britain. It was as simple as that. What had led him to this was a life of brawling, drinking, 'bonking' and flirtation with various aspects of Alternative culture, including free festivals and in particular the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The taking on of his new mantle led him into contact with various Druid Orders who one year invited Arthur to act as a steward at an autumn equinox ceremony at Stonehenge. This was in 1989, four years after the Stonehenge Festival had been violently smashed by the police riot more commonly known as The Battle Of The Beanfield, and in the fourth year of the standing stones being fenced-off and an exclusion zone being thrown around them, upheld every equinox by hundreds of police. Witnessing for himself how entry to the stones was being denied by the police ignited a vague flame of indignation in Arthur; fanned, fed and made larger the more he thought about it.

Was it not religious discrimination to ban the Druids from Stonehenge - their church, their temple - every equinox? Did not the stones belong to the people of Britain, to the stars, to the Earth? By what right did English Heritage presume that they and they alone know what is best for Stonehenge? What unaccountable government body had implemented the quarterly exclusion zone? Whose vision for the stones was the purest and most practical? The Druids and their fellow pilgrims whose only wish was to worship and celebrate the stones and the turning of the seasons, or English Heritage with their tourist centres and extortionate tickets to be purchased for the privilege of being allowed to take holiday snaps of this magical monument to the sheer and utter mystery and wonder of life?

That autumn of 1989 Arthur found his mission. His quest. His cause. A battle worthy of his name. He was going to free the stones.

For anyone paying attention, the 1990s was the decade of escalating protest movements such as the anti-road building programs at Twyford Down, Solsbury Hill, Newbury, and Claremont Road in Islington; the anti-Criminal Justice Bill protests leading into Reclaim The Streets leading to solidarity with the striking Liverpool Dockers leading into the global anti-capitalist protest movements and the mega-protests in London, Seattle, Gothenburg, Genoa and so on. Arthur, through invitation and circumstance became involved with many of them and through his colourful garb and his wielding of Excalibur became a noticeable figure, in particular with the Stonehenge campaign even a figurehead. A living legend, almost. A symbol of an aspect of Englishness at its finest.

Of course, it needs to be asked, is Arthur simply a classic case of English eccentricity? For those who would say yes to this, it's merely by way of preserving their world view and the status quo. A way of attempting to contain what is actually uncontainable. A denial of a certain spirit that more often than not breaks the illusion of normality as defined by money, power, education, privilege, authority and one's relation to it. If Arthur is indeed an eccentric what then does that make King Charles, Britain's so-called 'real' Head of State? Is Charles too not an eccentric? Are the whole traditions and customs of Parliament not weird exercises in eccentricity also?

And it needs to be asked: If we are to have a king then who makes the better one? Charles or Arthur? The answer, of course, is obvious and on reading C J Stone's book it's even more so.

John Serpico

The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid - Michael Ondaatje

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

BILLY THE KID -

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

A strange book. An anomaly. An unusual book. Written by Michael Ondaatje, better known as being the author of The English Patient, made into the film starring Ralph Fiennes. The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is bricolage, a make-believe scrapbook of both the real and imagined. It's not quite just a book, however, it's more akin to a work of art; carefully thought-out and even more carefully composed, putting lay-out and design centre stage alongside the actual words. And what words they are, what beautiful turns of phrases. They are words of a poet, from the point of view of Billy The Kid who has 'seen pictures of great stars, drawings which show them straining to the centre that would explode their white if temperature and the speed they moved at shifted one degree.'

The only education Billy The Kid has had is that from violence of which the lessons have been many. He's been hot-housed in them from a very early age so acutely, so intensely that he's able to describe a man being shot in the head in the same way a scholar might describe a Cezanne. Unlike the well-educated connoisseurs of art, however, Billy is blessed with a sense of humour that's almost genius: 'When Charlie Bowdre married Manuela, we carried them on our shoulders, us on horses. Took them to the Shea Hotel, 8 rooms. Jack Shea at the desk said Charlie - everythings on the house, we'll give you the Bridal. No, no, says Charlie, dont bother, I'll hang onto her ears until I get used to it. HAWHAWHAW.'

Michael Ondaatje paints Billy The Kid as an Arthur Rimbaud-type figure, forever chasing a fugitive vision realised on occasion by such things as the sight of nature in the raw and sunlight beams in dusty dwellings. Describing himself as having a 'floating barracuda in the brain', Billy has a world-weariness about him that is at odds with one so young but then there aren't many others of a similar age who has a one-time friend called Pat Garrett on their tail.

'They say Pat Garrett's got your number,' as Bob Dylan once put it 'so sleep with one eye open when you slumber. Billy, they don't like you to be so free.'

So is Pat Garrett a Paul Verlaine to Billy The Kid's Rimbaud? The answer to that is 'Yes', or even a 'Oui, monsieur', particularly after being informed of how at the age of 15 Garrett had taught himself French but never told anyone about it and never spoke to anyone in French for the next 40 years. Garrett was 'an academic murderer', a 'sane assassin with a mind full of French he never used.' Apparently he was also 'frightened of flowers because they grew so slowly that he couldn't tell what they planned to do. His mind learned to be superior because of the excessive mistakes of those around him. Flowers watched him.' As in Baudelaire's Flowers Of Evil?

Did Billy The Kid ever stand a chance against such a man? Well, he stood a better chance than most but in the end only one could live and only one could end up in Boot Hill. Only one could end up with 'blood planets in his head', a 'fish stare', and buried still in handcuffs and leg irons. And of course, it was Billy The Kid, although like conjoined twins both he and Pat Garrett would pass into legend.

The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is indeed a strange book. An anomaly. An unusual book. A thing of strange beauty.

John Serpico

I Knew I Was Right - Julie Burchill

 I KNEW I WAS RIGHT - JULIE BURCHILL

The immediately striking thing about I Knew I Was Right, 'the controversial autobiography' of Julie Burchill is how short it is, clocking in at just 193 pages. All things considered, however, perhaps this might not be too much of a bad thing? I say this in the context of a lot of autobiographies being sprawling, bloated tomes recording every non-event in the writer's life elevated to preposterous heights, where a fall from a tricycle as a toddler for example apparently nudges them toward their sexual orientation in later life. Or how their Great Grandfather's penchant for dressing up in women's clothes in the trenches at Flanders is obviously a genetic thing, thus explaining a career in the theatre for the Great Grandchild. Burchill's autobiography on the other hand, if not exactly rushed, is dictated in a breathless manner, almost as if she's got an eye on it being made into a film one day and she's narrating over an introductory sequence of home movie clips before getting to the main storyline.

Where do you start with Julie Burchill? Well, in her hometown of birth in Bristol, I guess? Being a fellow Bristolian I recognise, of course, the places she talks of such as Southmead Hospital, Barton Hill (pronounced 'Bart Nil' in Bristolian), and Brislington (the area where she's from) although I don't recognise all her descriptions of these places.

'West Country life was so slow, so very, very slow' she writes, and she's half right but also half wrong, depending on your interpretation and perception of 'slow'. Compared to London, for example, Bristol can be argued to be slow but then I'd say London can be frantic. Personally, I think Bristol can be more favourably compared to Jamaica where life in the Mild West as Banksy coined it isn't so much 'slow' but 'easy going'. Bristolian life can be rudely interrupted at times by spasmodic bursts of violence but then even many of the fights I've witnessed appeared to be in slow motion and almost ballet-like, reminiscent of scenes from Sam Peckinpah films when people get shot.

One thing I do recognise is her class consciousness that in a place such as Bristol is pretty pronounced if you but care to look. 'We were thrilled the day the telephone arrived,' Burchill writes 'This was in the Sixties and we were profoundly working class, so it was like a yacht, say, would be to you people out there, whom, just between you, me and the doorpost I'll always, deep down, despise unless you started from prole position too, because that's just the way things are. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly and the smart money says that if you're not from where I'm from I'll never respect you.' And I concur.

There's also her realisation as a child that the life laid out before her was not the one she wanted: 'I knew as surely as I knew my own name that if I stayed (in Bristol) I would get fucked, pregnant, married. And after that I wouldn't get anything but old.' Not that there's anything wrong with such a life if you so choose it, but to the errant working class child it's a problem if like Oliver Twist you want more, or at least something 'other'. Because there is no 'other' presented to you. There is no alternative apart from the vague notion of 'bettering yourself' by moving into the environs of middle class concerns and status symbols. Implying, of course, that working class concerns and even a working class identity is somehow less than that held by the middle class. Which, of course, is nonsense if not insulting.

And then there's the subject of books, of which Burchill says: 'It kills me when middle class kids see Not Reading as some sort of rebellion. If you don't read books, you really have been fucked over in a major way. You have been castrated and conned. To read, voluntarily, is the first step to asserting the fact that you know that there is somewhere else.' That's not necessarily so, of course, but it's pretty close.

Books (and music) saved Burchill's life and led her at the age of 17 to getting a job with the NME and her moving to London. This is where her story moves up a notch but only because it was 1976 and the Nineteen Seventies were about to officially begin with the release of Anarchy In The UK by the Sex Pistols. The NME, though not quite being at the heart of the zeitgeist was still an important and very influential place to be at that time as it latched on to the coattails of Punk Rock and went spinning into the firmament like some mad dust devil. And Burchill was there. Fencing off her NME compartment with barbed wire to keep the 'ippies out, telling Johnny Rotten that at the age of 19 he was too old, spiking Country Joe McDonald's tea with speed so as to get him talking, having sado-masochistic sex with Mick Farren, being stalked by Jane Suck, ligging with The Clash, and being propositioned by Iggy Pop for a bit of anal - and that's just for starters.

So what happened? What went wrong? With all due respect, Burchill very successfully made the leap from the NME to the national newspapers but in the process lost something along the way, or rather, something within her was brought to the fore and nurtured to the point of it being all-consuming. And that 'something' was? Conservatism. Parochial, provincial, small-town conservatism blended with a healthy dose of Stalinism, fermenting into a pretty abstract if not toxic cocktail. What does it profit a man to gain the world but to lose his soul, as they said about Elvis.

On following Burchill's timeline it was on marrying Tony Parsons and moving into a maisonette in Billericay, Essex, that it all started going Pete Tong. Her productivity may have started going up but there was a price to pay and Burchill slowly but surely mutated into the brittle monster we all know and love/loathe in equal proportions to this day. Fueled, tempered and nurtured on a steady diet of speed and snakebites progressing to cocaine binges at the Groucho Club.

'Punk was about a break with consensus', Burchill tells us and that's probably very true as is her modus operandi that she declares at the very start of her book: 'If it ain't broke, break it would seem to be my design for living'. Which just about explains everything about her.

I tend to think that had I ever met Julie Burchill, particularly in her younger days that we'd have got along quite well. Who knows? She instead, however, fell into the clutches of the Tony Parsons and Toby Youngs of this world. Then again perhaps not, maybe we wouldn't have got along at all, especially after reading this bit in her book: 'My gran lives in a modern block of flats in Barton Hill, which sounds posh but actually has a reputation of being extremely rough. Well, like the Shangri-La song said about a boy, it's good but not evil, not like Easton. We Brislington babes lived in fear of Easton; a mean sprawl of council estates and sex pests (allegedly; none of us had ever been there), it was our definite no go area. Even as I grew to be a woman of the world, the word Easton could still strike fear into my sharply shod soul.'

I've got to laugh because even though I didn't actually grow up in Easton, I lived a good number of years there (I'm actually a Meader, from an area called Southmead, renowned for being one of the genuinely most roughest and toughest areas in Bristol). Which means I'm the kind of person Burchill would have done her utmost to avoid. In fact, the combination of my roots in Southmead and my life in Easton would probably have been the stuff of her nightmares. 

What can I say? Que sera, sera. C'est la vie. For the record, however, if Julie Burchill ever does decide to venture into Easton one day I'm quite happy to put in a good word for her. Just so long as she remembers to wipe her feet before entering.

John Serpico