Totterdown Rising - Kate Pollard

TOTTERDOWN RISING - KATE POLLARD

When approaching Bristol by train there are two sights to look out for that tell you you're there. The first is the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the distance on the left, spanning the Avon Gorge like a veritable Eighth Wonder of the World. The second, on the right, is a row of differently-coloured houses sitting at the top of the hill just before you get to Temple Meads Station. Those multi-coloured houses are in Totterdown, and in their not so subtle way are near-iconic. A recognizable yet unspoken feature of the landscape depicting Bristol in all its off-centre, polymorphic peculiarity. Unlike the Clifton Suspension Bridge which is a tourist go-to, far more people have seen Totterdown or at least a part of it if only from a distance than have actually been there. Moreover, far fewer people know much if anything about Totterdown's history and that includes a good many Bristolians themselves which is why Kate Pollard's book, Totterdown Rising, is an important  one.

Published by Totterdown Press, an imprint of Bristol's ever impressive Tangent Books, Totterdown Rising is the story of a depressingly shameful episode from Bristol's more recent past when a community was needlessly bulldozed to make way for what city planners saw at the time as the future. That future being to all intent and purpose the motor car.

During the post-war period of the 1950s, car ownership was being viewed as intrinsic to economic growth and by the 1960s car production figures had become a prime index for measuring that growth. Encouraged by car manufacturers, car ownership was presented as a symbol of affluence, convenience and freedom with urban renewal being shaped around that ownership. Public transport and environmental impact came a poor second whilst the impact upon communities wasn't even a consideration. Subsequently, when plans for a £30 million Outer Circuit Road for Bristol was devised in 1966, the fact that large parts of the Easton and Totterdown areas of the city would need to be demolished was an inconvenient but unavoidable necessity. The required displacement of local communities mere collateral damage.

Like homes and businesses built from bricks and mortar, bold visions come with a price but what price the lives, the love, the memories, hopes and dreams of people? Under compulsory purchase orders the properties of Totterdown standing in the way of progress were bought up and the occupants uprooted and moved away in what can only be described as an exercise in mismanagement. Chaotic, shambolic and ill-conceived mismanagement.

With bold visions, however, come caveats and the bolder the vision the larger the caveat. Unfortunately, no-one mentioned this to the residents of Totterdown, in particular the caveat that said 'we will uproot your families and destroy your community but to no actual avail if the road in the end isn't built'. And that's exactly what happened. The money ran out, the vision faltered, and the enthusiasm waned, resulting in the road in the end not actually being built and leaving Totterdown bereft. One of the oldest communities in Bristol had been vandalised, devastated, ripped apart and near-destroyed for no reason at all.

It's all water under the bridge now, of course, so let bygones be bygones and let's all just move on, some might say? And that's fine because things have moved on but it's still important to ask what lessons have been learned because some might also say 'those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it'.

There was a time when Bristol's city planners thought it might be a good idea to fill in the city docks, concrete it all over and sell it all off to the right bidder as highly desirable real estate. There was a time when the Council had actually sold the iconic industrial cranes down at the city docks for scrap, before being saved by local people incensed at the very idea. There was a time when it was thought to be a good idea to demolish Eastville Stadium, the former home to Bristol Rovers, to make way for the building of a huge, blue Ikea store in the middle of the housing estate there. There was a time when it was thought to be a good idea to turn buildings in the centre of Bristol over to developers to be turned into student-only accommodation. There was a time when the gentrification of Bristol was thought to be a good thing even when it meant the pricing out of locals from ever being able to afford a home there. There was a time when it was deemed the right thing that the statue of slave trader Edward Colston remain in place because apparently removing it would be 'denying our history'.

There was a time that in order to save Bristol it was thought it necessary to destroy Bristol. Totterdown being a case in point.

John Serpico

Another Green World - Geeta Dayal

 ANOTHER GREEN WORLD - GEETA DAYAL

The thing about the Brian Eno solo albums from the 1970s, as in Here Comes The Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, and Another Green World is that they all demand repeat listens. Their complexity and peculiarity make them impossible to immediately take in, soak up and understand. Every new listen is almost a fresh listen as if you're hearing them for the first time or at least for the first time from a different angle. There are seemingly constant new things to be heard in them and it's this that makes them of constant interest.

Another Green World was recorded in 1975 and from its very feel it's obvious that it's a studio album, as in having been concocted entirely within the confines of a recording studio as opposed to being incubated over a period of time from notebooks and ruminations in the bedroom. The recording studio being used as a musical instrument in its own right.

Geeta Dayal's treatise on the album, entitled - what else? - Another Green World, is from the series of booklets published by Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. The word 'academic' rather gives the game away as to its seriousness of intent, forwarding the notion that these books are of an academic nature rather than fan-boy stuff.

In the preface, Dayal informs us that this short work of just 105 pages has been written and re-written over and over again, draft upon draft and unfortunately, it shows. The clumsiness of some of the sentences is at times almost jarring as are some of the geographical details about England. It's a casebook example of something being over-written, where you end up not being able to see the wood for the trees. On top of this, it comes as no surprise to see the author is based in San Francisco, which explains the geographical misconceptions in regard to the English cities and Universities that are mentioned.

Writing about music is like dancing to architecture, as they say. Writing to a deadline induces panic, and Dayal's book comes across as an example of that.

At the end of the day it's always down to personal choice of course, but Another Green World isn't actually Eno's best solo album though that's not to deny its classic status. The collaboration between the different musicians on the album such as Robert Fripp, John Cale and even a young Phil Collins make it an interesting proposition from the start though it's the inclusion of the track I'll Come Running that tips the whole thing into the realm of beauty.

I'll Come Running first appeared the year previously in 1974 on a John Peel session during the time when Eno after having left Roxy Music was playing with a band called The Winkies. The Peel session version had been called Totalled and was an upbeat, almost proto pop punk song. The version on Another Green World, however, is a lament. A contemplative daydream juxtaposing both resignation and enthusiasm. A perfect balance, a perfect moment, capturing the first tiny speck of light from the sun rising alongside the final, fading last glow from the sun setting. As a pure, fully-realised song it stands proudly, bursting with life yet possessed with sadness. A genuine work of beauty.

Of the fourteen tracks on the album only five of them actually have lyrics, the rest of them being instrumentals. As Geeta Dayat correctly points out, the album is the link to Eno's future. It's the bridge between Eno of old and new Eno, between rock'n'roll and Ambient, between the guitar and the synthesizer. It's near-equivalent is David Bowie's Low album, though where on Low one side of the album is composed of songs with lyrics and the other side is sprawling ambient pieces, the tracks on Another Green World are more evenly distributed, the ones with lyrics acting almost as segues.

Because of this 'crossover' status, Dayal is able to explore some of Eno's influences which led to the creation of Another Green World and it's here that the book proves to be most interesting. Steve Reich, Gavin Bryars, Harold Budd, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music album are all given mention, acting as a sort of road map to a musical education that if paid proper attention to is actually life-enhancing.

Nowadays when you think of Eno, you associate him with being a superb record producer and the perpetrator of, if not the well from which Ambient music sprang. You visualise him as either the alien person in feathers and leopard-print, twiddling away on an analog synth in Roxy Music times, or as the balding University lecturer polymath applying an intelligence to music and the arts whenever he pops up on YouTube. In Roxy Music days, however, Eno was apparently a veritable shag monster, cutting a picaresque swathe through the heartland of student virginity whenever out on tour. It's a sobering thought, betraying his past-life 'alien' persona and his subsequent studied yet relaxed seriousness, and revealing him to be as human as the rest of us. Though with added genius.

John Serpico

The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE -

JAMES M CAIN

There's the film starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange with the scene on the kitchen table and then there's the book by James M Cain on which the film is based. What might not be so well-known, however, is that the book was said by Albert Camus to have inspired his own book, The Stranger. You live and learn.

In regard to Cain's book, by page 9 the two main protagonists are at it with a 'Bite me! Bite me!' and well, I don't remember reading anything like that in The Stranger or indeed in anything Camus has written. And hang on a minute, when was this written? 1934? And there was me thinking (as Philip Larkin once put it) sexual intercourse didn't begin until 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.

By page 45, the cheating wife and her errant lover have murdered the husband and with a 'Rip me! Rip me!' and a 'Yes! Yes, Frank, yes!' they're at it again down in the dirt and dust next to the crashed car where the husband's body is, after staging the crash to make it look like an accident.

If The Postman Always Rings Twice was a competitor in a 100 meter sprint then before the starting gun had even been fired it would be half-way down the track ahead of all the others. In its immorality it certainly sets the pace and in terms of being no holds barred, for its time it's way ahead of its time. Of course, nowadays it's all pretty tame stuff but for its mix of sex and violence it comes as no surprise that it was banned in certain states in America.

The influence upon Camus is discernible in its depiction of immorality and the subsequent reckoning with the Law, though in The Outsider it's not so much for the crime that the main character is tried but for his general attitude toward the mores and values of society.

In its style of writing, The Postman Always Rings Twice is very straight to the point; very lean and very mean. There are shades of Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment in there as well as Zola's Therese Raquin but it's all condensed into a much purer and much more easily read form. It's pulp fiction, essentially, but pulp fiction at its best.

John Serpico

Gramsci - James Joll

GRAMSCI - JAMES JOLL

The importance of Antonio Gramsci cannot be overstated. It wasn't me who said that but Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest intellectuals of our modern era, and when such a man says such a thing about another person it's intellectually sensible to take note. Gramsci, I would argue, holds the key to understanding the world and how it's run but that's not to elevate him to any sort of guru status as that would be wholly missing the point and would negate the reasons for making such a suggestion. Gramsci is there if you're interested in such matters and he should be read as part of that general discourse, though on reading him it's akin to laying down the final piece of the jigsaw to complete the whole picture.

Gramsci's greatest doctrine was that of 'hegemony' that he used to explain how a particular social and economic system maintains its hold and retains its support and how a minority can impose its leadership and its values on a majority. Gramsci saw that the rule of one class over another does not solely depend on economic or physical power alone but rather on persuading the ruled to accept the system of beliefs of the ruling class and to share their social, cultural and moral values.

Echoing Chomsky's assessment, according to writer James Joll, Gramsci is one of the most interesting and important thinkers of the twentieth century and the most important European Communist theorist since Lenin. He's not wrong in this and so it's somewhat baffling how so few people have ever heard of Gramsci - but then again, maybe not so baffling when taking into account Gramsci's hegemony theory?

Joll's book, entitled simply 'Gramsci', is an interesting and very readable account of Gramsci's life and of his Prison Notebooks that Gramsci composed after being condemned to twenty years imprisonment by Mussolini. Not that Gramsci should be read, Joll points out, as any kind of guide to revolutionary methods or as a key to a successful revolution because Gramsci was more interested in the long-term process by which a revolution would come about than in what society would look like after a revolution. Moreover, Gramsci was concerned to reach a general understanding of the nature of historical, social and economic change, along with the role of the working class, the intellectual and the political party in it.

Apart from the importance of culture and its relation to politics, Gramsci's attention was also focused on the rise of Italian Fascism but then how could it not? Mussolini at the time was making inroads into the seizing of power although to Gramsci it was obvious that Fascism was the only remaining way at that time in which the capitalists could maintain their authority and preserve their economic system.

Herein lies the lessons from history.

Any political theory is only really relevant if it has a relevancy to the present-day world. Gramsci's doctrine of hegemony is blatantly relevant to modern-day Britain, for example, in regard to the culture wars that inform politics of all stripes but more profoundly it's in regard to who controls the mainstream and even indeed the independent media. Right-wing and conservative values are ubiquitous, insidiously seeping and oft times brutally bludgeoning their way into everyday life and becoming so much the norm that they are presented as being 'common sense'. 

Subsequently, conservative liberalism as practiced by the BBC can be cast as Left-wing bias and no-one bats an eyelid.  A centre-right Labour Party under the governance of Kier Starmer can be cast as Socialist when clearly it's no such thing. Judges, lawyers, chiefs of police and other pillars of the Establishment can be cast as 'woke' when not bending to the will of the Tory government. Political agendas, prejudice and propaganda can be cast as both 'news' and entertainment.

More disturbing, however, are Gramsci's thoughts on Italian Fascism and how his descriptions of it very much match the politics and characteristics of prominent elements within the British Conservative Party. 'The cold contemplation of the suffering of others', for example, is Conservative MP Suella Braverman's modus operandi to a tee.

Whether or not such a thing as hegemony is a good or a bad thing is a moot point. What matters is that hegemony is a very real thing. It exists, whether those living under it or indeed those enforcing or pursuing it are conscious of it themselves or not. To be aware of hegemony and to understand how it works can be eye-opening though that's not to say this can be of any actual, practical use. It can be the same thing - as Gramsci points out - as when politicos use revolutionary language without preparing for a revolution and without actually believing that a revolution is even possible.

Far more important is to be aware of Fascism - of what it is and what it entails - because to not be aware of it is to leave the door wide open for a population to sleepwalk into it, before waking up and finding itself under totalitarianism where those deemed to be inferior or problematic are being pointed to the gas chambers or whatever their modern-day equivalent might be. 

When it comes to such matters, the importance of Antonio Gramsci cannot be overstated.

John Serpico

Utz - Bruce Chatwin

 UTZ - BRUCE CHATWIN

Another book that I went into blind, not having a clue what it was about before starting it. Sometimes, of course, that's the best way. Bought on a whim for something to read when my train was cancelled and I had to catch a bus which means Great Western Railway are to thank/blame for this. Utz, by Bruce Chatwin. Consisting of 154 pages, so a relatively short read. Short enough to be read on a bus journey, at least.

It turns out that Utz is actually the name of a person - Kaspar Utz, to give him his full name - who is a collector of porcelain figurines. His hobby has amassed him a spectacular collection that he has managed to keep safe from the ravages of the Second World War and the subsequent imposition of Stalinism upon former Czechoslovakia where he lives. It has, however, become the focal point of his life to the extent that it has come to define his life, or so it would seem. Utz is the proverbial hunter captured by the game.

Utz keeps his collection of over a thousand figurines crammed in a tiny two-room flat where he resides, a reflection and result of his antipathy towards such beautiful objects being housed in museums.

'An object in a museum case' according to Utz 'must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies of suffocation and the public gaze. The collector's enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years, and their collections returned to circulation.' In addition, he surmises that 'wars, pogroms, and revolutions offer excellent opportunities for the collector.'

The book starts with Utz's funeral attended by the author who by this process plants himself at the centre of the story. The author has only met Utz on just one occasion in the past but such a fascinating character was Utz that he is the perfect subject for a book. He is also the perfect pivot on which to spin ideas and points of interest which is what Bruce Chatwin as the author does, and it is here that the book excels. 

Alchemy, identity, entomology, idolatry, iconoclasm, the legend of the golem and obscure figures from history; all these things are woven around the story of a man in Czechoslovakia who collects something so apparently innocuous as porcelain figurines. All told and channeled through a sense of humour not too dissimilar from the wit and comedic eloquence of Vivian Stanshall when reciting the story of Sir Henry At Rawlinson End.

Utz, as in the book, is brilliant and clever, and little wonder it was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize. It didn't win - the prize that year being taken by Peter Carey for his book Oscar And Lucinda - but it probably should have done.

John Serpico

New Poems Book One - Charles Bukowski

 NEW POEMS BOOK ONE - CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Charles Bukowski was never an alcoholic as such, though he was certainly a drunkard. Let's just say he liked a bit of a drink and that he made a good drunk, if there can be such a thing? Bukowski knew how to drink. Often he would just shut himself up in his rented room, close the curtains, prop himself up on his bed and swig down bottles of the most noxious, cheapest wine he could find and drink himself into oblivion. He knew, however, to always lie on his side when slipping into unconsciousness so as not to end up choking on his own vomit. It's the little things in life such as this that are important and what differentiates the amateur from the professional. It's a sort of life skill, in a way. One that in the scheme of things is probably more important than being able to write. And Charles Bukowski certainly knew how to write, just as certainly as he knew how to drink.

New Poems Book One is part of an archive of  work that Bukowski left to be published after his death in 1994. It's a collection of random poems though I'd hazard a guess and say a fair few of them were originally written as vignettes and then edited into poems. Some of them are but cursory glances and wry observations but others are moments of reflection and illumination captured for eternity.

In one piece, entitled The Column, Bukowski describes how in 1942 at the age of 21 he's sitting on a park bench alongside a bunch of other bums when 'the war chariots' roll by, and how the soldiers on their way to war see him and hate him. Bukowski describes the soldiers yelling, cursing and screaming at him because they want him to be going with them. After the column passes, one of the old bums next to him asks Bukowski why he's not in the Service, at which Bukowski gets up and walks down to the public library where he sits down at a table and starts reading. The meaning of the book is too deep for him, however, so he puts it back on the shelf and walks back outside 'to wait'.

There are some who won't understand what Bukowski is talking about here but for those who do, it's like suddenly recognising a kindred spirit.

If you feel there's something wrong with the world, something you can see with your own eyes but that you can't put into words, then what do you do? Well, there's very little that you can do. How can you talk about it if you don't have the words? How do you explain not only to others but to yourself? And then one day if you finally have the words then who do you talk to if others don't share those words also? The answer is that you don't talk, you write. And that's exactly what Charles Bukowski did.

In a piece entitled Commerce, Bukowski remembers his father's words of 'work hard and you'll be appreciated' but later Bukowski learns that this is true only if you make much more for them than they pay you. 'America at work, where they rip out your intestines and your brain and your will and your spirit. They suck you dry, then throw you away. The capitalist system. The work ethic. The profit motive.'

In another piece entitled The Great Escape, Bukowski relays a conversation between himself and a colleague at work one day, where his colleague is comparing working for the postal service to a bucket full of crabs. Every now and then, his colleague tells him, a crab will climb on top of the others and begin to climb toward the top of the bucket and just as it's about to escape, another crab will grab it and pull it back down. Mid-conversation, a supervisor approaches Bukowski and his colleague and says 'you fellows were talking. There is no talking allowed on this job'.

Eleven and one-half years Bukowski has been working there so he gets up off his stool and climbs right up the supervisor, reaches up and pulls himself right out of there. 'It was so easy it was unbelievable,' Bukowski writes 'but none of the others followed me, And after that, whenever I had crab legs I thought about that place. I must have thought about that place maybe 5 or 6 times - before I switched to lobster.'

Bukowski became a writer and years later as he describes in another piece entitled About The Mail, people write to him to say that his books have helped them through tough times. And there was Bukowski thinking his writing was for the purpose of keeping him from going under but it now appears he's helped any number of others. 'Well, being helped happened to me too,' he writes, and then goes on to list those who he means: 'Celine, Dostoevsky, Fante, early Saroyan, Turgenev, Gorky, Sherwood Anderson, Robinson Jeffers, E E Cummings, Blake, Lawrence and many others.'

It's an interesting reading list, particularly in regard to his admission in The Column that he didn't understand the book he had pulled off the shelf at the library and therefore had 'to wait'. Waiting obviously paid off because once he was ready he devoured the most heaviest of books and this time understood their meaning. Consecutively his own writing came bursting out of him. Roaring out of him, even, as it should do if you're ever going to call yourself a writer.

Bukowski can be a divisive figure. His writing appeals to some but to others it repels. It's undeniable, however, that when he's good he's very, very good indeed. The main problem with him was that he was never consistently good and sometimes came across as a sexist, negative boor. Happily, there's no such problems here in this particular book.

John Serpico

White Line Fever - Lemmy Kilmister

WHITE LINE FEVER -

LEMMY KILMISTER

Well, it starts off with an anecdote about being thrown off a plane after being spotted sipping from a bottle of Jack Daniels by a stewardess, and Lemmy's explanation for boarding a plane with a pint of Jack Daniels in his pocket is that he finds it helps with the sobering up. And it continues in the same vein from there, really.

There's a knack when it comes to writing an autobiography and whilst some people have it others clearly don't have it at all. 'A man needs to know his limitations', as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry says in The Enforcer, and Lemmy against all the evidence clearly knew his which is presumably why he got in writer Janiss Garza to help out? Lemmy might well have been a God as Dave Grohl once stated but he was also a professional who knew he owed it not only to his fans but also to his reputation to not present a badly-written book. You only write one autobiography in your life (unless you're John Lydon) so it should never be a half-arsed one.

White Line Fever reads as if you're sat down in your living room at the end of an evening and Lemmy's there with you, laid out and relaxed on your sofa, drinking double brandies and pulling on a cigar as he regales you with the story of his life. It's very personable, very friendly and very entertaining. But what would we want from a Lemmy Kilmister autobiography? Well, we would want things we never knew before. Little facts and details to fill the gaps and flesh out the bigger picture. And we would want anecdotes and good ones too about 'huge women doing things to him with raw carrots', as an example - and those are Lemmy's words, not mine.

'Motorhead', of course, is American slang for speedfreak so with such a blatant drugs reference from the get go, it's no surprise that Lemmy has a lot of drug anecdotes. His time in Hawkwind in particular is an example of drug taking on an industrial scale with tales of three-week speed binges, going berserk on belladonna, and of talking to trees on acid, with the trees sometimes winning the argument.

Come 1980 Lemmy put in for a blood transplant, the same process Keith Richards is rumoured to have gone through. After some blood tests, however, his doctor informed him that it's not going to be possible because he no longer had human blood anymore. 'Pure blood will kill you,' his doctor told him 'And you can't give blood either. Forget it, you'd kill the average person because you're so toxic.'

So Lemmy was a medical phenomena. Half man half pharmacy. 

Drugs do things to a person, and according to Lemmy they certainly did something to Mitch Mitchell, the drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience who bounced up to Lemmy one day in the middle of Oxford Street and exclaimed 'Hello, I don't know who I am!' before running off again. Drugs also might have done something to Dave Brock of Hawkwind who Lemmy says developed a habit of leaning out of his car as he drove along and yelling at schoolgirls 'Spank! Spank! Spank! Hello, girls, spanky-spanky!' As for Nik Turner, let's just not go there, shall we?

When it came to a lot of things, Lemmy was totally unreconstructed. Some of his more lurid tales in regard to his relationships and backstage conquests are questionable and though his attitude toward women was one of macho hyper-sexuality he always held women in much respect and love. Interestingly and thankfully he always remained very perceptive, at one point in the book when talking about him getting gastric flu even going into Nostradamus mode: 'These viral things are gonna keep getting stronger, 'cause every five years a new strain comes out that they didn't plan on, and some day one of those bugs is gonna kill half the planet.' He was saying this in 2002.

White Line Fever is a good read and is definitely one of the better rock autobiographies. Though seeing as it's the autobiography of the once snorting, drinking rock god legend that was Lemmy Kilmister, you really wouldn't want or expect anything less.

John Serpico