The Ice Saints - Frank Tuohy

 THE ICE SAINTS - FRANK TUOHY

In an age where practically any book imaginable if you know where to look and you're willing to pay is available somewhere on the Internet, what dictates that you choose to read one book above another? There's a number of reasons, isn't there? Hype, word of mouth, availability, synchronicity, visuality. If you have a decent-sized library of books, when it comes to choosing which one to read next can often be an instinctive decision, a kind of gut feeling. Almost as if the book chooses you rather than you choosing the book.

And so to The Ice Saints by Frank Tuohy, a book found one day in a second-hand bookshop and purchased on the strength of the pictures on the front and back covers depicting a pretty miserable looking woman wrapped in a shawl. And that's it but that was enough because to go into a book 'blind', without knowing exactly what it's about can also be of appeal and a deciding factor in choosing what to read.

Set in Poland in 1960, The Ice Saints is about life in Poland at that time, caught behind the Iron Curtain and caught in the cross-fire of Russia and the West. Using the character of a British woman visiting her sister in Poland where she now lives with her Polish husband, writer Frank Tuohy describes and somewhat explains the social landscape where poverty reigns supreme, upheld by the pillars of politics, ideology, paranoia, acceptance of fate, and loyalty to the one-party state following the scourge of the Second World War.

The British woman brings news that her sister's son has been left a substantial sum of money in the will of their departed auntie but it's news that once understood what it will entail brings calamity and disruption, adding additional unhappiness to the unhappiness already there.

Frank Tuohy was a lecturer for a time at Krakow University and it's this experience that informs and drives his book. There's very much a 'stranger in a strange land' feel about it and throughout conveys the feeling of being in the company of people talking a foreign language that you only have very little understanding of, leaving you therefore misinterpreting what is being said and misunderstanding what is going on. On top of this is also the ever-present awareness of constantly being monitored, spied upon and reported to the authorities. It's the perfect scenario for catastrophe to occur and occur it does, though leaving everyone in the end just as isolated from one and other as at the start and with no lessons learned.

Tuohy raises a very pessimistic question mark over Polish society and indeed paints a pretty bleak picture of it though thankfully it's a picture that can be said to no longer apply as Poland has now changed beyond all recognition, particularly following the democratic upheavals of 1989. As a testament to Communist era Poland it still stands, however, as a very human picture due to filtering the outcomes of war and politics through the lives of individuals and successfully depicting the very real but profoundly sad results.

John Serpico 

Therese Raquin - Zola

 THERESE RAQUIN - ZOLA

Does anybody nowadays read books by 18th Century writers of ill repute? No, thought not. Written in 1867, could a book from that long ago have any relevance to today's world? Could such a book have stood the test of time? The answer to both is, of course, yes. In fact, Emile Zola's book, Therese Raquin, is surprisingly still relevant if not so much to the modern world but to the human condition.

Though habits may change, human nature isn't a moveable feast but remains pretty well fixed. Whether or not this is actually a good thing is open to debate though the smart money says it's a double-edged sword. Human nature is obviously what has got us this far but at the same time it's going to be our undoing unless we take stock of ourselves and turn both inwards to become more self-aware and outwards to become more aware of others.

So, Zola's book is a story of human nature taking its natural course when presented with a particular situation, that situation being adultery. What to do when a husband is in the way of lust and a better life? One option though certainly not the only one is to remove the husband from the equation and this is exactly what Therese and her lover Laurent do by pushing Therese's husband into the Seine whereupon he is drowned.

To avoid the guillotine they bide their time and through the manipulation of others around them wait for the right moment to come together without any suspicion being roused. During that period of laying low, however, with Therese playing the part of the grieving widow and Laurent playing the loyal friend of the husband, guilt gestates until finally it is all that is left. Raw, horrific, relentless and unassailable guilt manifested as visions of the rotting cadaver of the husband forever in their minds and at their sides.

Zola's book turns from morality play, to murder plot to full-blown horror story without missing a trick or skipping a beat. It's reminiscent at times, even, of the kind of story Stanley Kubrick would make into a film, a la The Shining. There is an atmosphere of desperate dread throughout and a constant attempt at trying to escape that dread by any and all means. There's a claustrophobia about it - the kind that might be felt if buried alive and trapped in a coffin. If hell is other people, as Sartre stated, then Therese Raquin epitomizes this and shows us that through our helplessness we are the architects of our own doom. Blown on the winds by forces that Zola calls Naturalism or in other words an absence of free will. Controlled entirely by our nervous systems and cast adrift in - what that other great philosopher, Woody Allen, once put it as - a barren godless eternity like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste horror and degradation forming a useless bleak straitjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

All good, fun stuff, of course.

John Serpico

Street Art Exmouth Style (Part 23)

 STREET ART EXMOUTH STYLE (Part 23)

You find them in almost any tourist/arty souvenir shop: bits of wood, roughed up to make them look like bits of driftwood picked up from the beach, usually painted blue with a stencil slogan on them saying things like 'This way to the beach'. They're ten a penny and probably made in Hong Kong. There's one that caught my eye though simply because it's open to interpretation. It says 'Exmouth is not a destination it's a way of life.' 

Glam! - Barney Hoskyns

 GLAM! - BARNEY HOSKYNS

The problem nowadays with glam rock is that its reputation goes before it and its reputation isn't a good one, not helped by Gary Glitter driving a stake through its heart with the exposure of all his crimes. At the time, however, glam rock was the sight and sound of a wedge being driven between generations. Decades don't normally cut off neatly from each other but tend instead to bleed into one and other. Subsequently, the Sixties didn't end in December of 1969 and nor did they end at Altamont. Likewise, the Seventies didn't begin in January 1970 nor did they begin with Bowie announcing he was 'gay and always had been'. Culture is never cut and dried and neither is history

According to Barney Hoskyns in his book Glam!, it was Marc Bolan who began the glam rock 'revolution', driven by his desire for pop success, by changing his musical style from hippy whimsy to cosmic electric, and by applying glitter make-up to his face for his appearance on Top of the Pops. According to music producer Tony Visconti, however, it was Bowie and Bolan simultaneously who invented glam, with Bowie pushed in that direction by his then wife Angie. According to Lou Reed on the other hand, glam came from Andy Warhol and in particular his Factory Superstars Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn who for some time had been making costumes out of things they found in the street, and wearing make-up, nail polish and glitter.

Who we should thank for glam is academic, of course. More importantly and as conveyed by Hoskyns, what glam's great gift to legions of disaffected teenagers was the implicit invitation for them to reinvent themselves. To strike a pose, to revolt into style. This is precisely what Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Wayne County, Cherry Vanilla, Candy Darling and indeed all of Andy Warhol's coterie did, transforming themselves from freaks and outcasts to instant superstars. Bolan and Bowie did the same, all of them in the process helping to build and add different elements to the torch that could be passed along and held aloft by future torch-bearers from the Sex Pistols to Marc Almond to Lady Gaga.

The phenomenal thing about glam was how very quickly it became the vehicle to take such things as androgyny and bisexuality into the mainstream, making it suddenly acceptable for blokes to put on a bit of make-up and to sport multi-colored tank-tops, platform shoes and feathered haircuts. Groups such as Slade, Sweet and The Glitter Band whose members wouldn't look out of place on a building site or behind the wheel of a lorry became the main representatives, pulling a host of other groups such as Roxy Music in their wake. With their retro-futurism Roxy Music in turn created another wake that broke down the barriers between high and low art, an attribute that Bowie ascribed the New York Dolls as also having.

Saying it before anyone else had the chance to, come 1973 Bolan was declaring that glam rock was dead though in response Angie Bowie replied that 'It may have been Nero fiddling, but he was playing a hell of a tune.' And she was right.

All in all, Barney Hoskyns' book is an adequate overview of glam, the only problem with it being he over-stretches himself and casts his net a little too far, in the process applying the glam label to Kiss and even Bette Midler. Kiss may indeed have been an attempt at appropriating glam but to the glam purist they never cut the mustard, at best being a kind of third-rate glam metal. The devil is always in the detail. To the glam purist there's a distinction between Mud, for example, and Showaddywaddy. That distinction might only be the cluster of baubles pinned to the ears of Mud's guitarist but it's an important one.

Hoskyns' book ends in 1997 with Gary Glitter having been arrested on suspicion of harbouring child pornography. There is then a footnote adding that he had been charged and was due to appear before magistrates. The rest is history. The Leader of The Gang was dead and so too 24 years after Bolan's original announcement was glam, Glitter's downfall being the final nail in the coffin, leaving many a good memory and many more good tunes but a very desecrated though still very glitter-encrusted corpse.

John Serpico

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