When I were a lad (tear) Slade and Wizzard fought for the Christmas number one spot. Before that Elvis, Phil Spector, Lennon and virtually everyone else regularly released yuletide hits. During the punk wars you were nobody unless you had released a three chord version of a Christmas carol. Then came the eighties and (apart from Cliff of course) nobody bothered any more. I realise it would have been hard for miserablists such as Morrissey to sing tinsel-themed ditties but surely someone could have had a go?

Anyway in the spirit of “another rock n roll Xmas” (wonder if he had anything to do with the death of Xmas songs) here is The Punk Rock Advent Calender (use its power wisely.)

Favourite seasonal songs (I expect an avalanche of votes for the Pogues,) your own lyrics for Xmas songs, explanations for the demise of the Xmas single and memories of the Wombles dressed as Santa or strange teenage feelings of attraction to members of Boney M should be added and discussed below.

(This post is really designed for anyone who plays bridge. For those that do not, as you would with a newspaper bridge column, simply pass over this post as it is likely to read like gobbledegook. )

The game of bridge is a fascinating game. Anybody who plays the game can recount fabulous hands that have played where as declarer they made a contract by perfect play. As well as recounting the great hands, most players can also recall their worst disasters. Having a bridge game disaster when playing for money is not just a painful financial experience but also an embarrassing one not least because how seething with anger your partner can be for your mistake even if they are too polite to express what they really think about your inexcusable action.

My worst disaster occurred in a late night partnership rubber bridge game at the St. John’s Wood Bridge Club. My partner is used to playing at a much higher stakes game than I am and my opponents were the man who runs the club and an experienced club player. I knew I was the weak link in the game and I was to find out exactly how weak.

In a game when my partner and I were vulnerable, my right hand opponent opened 1 no trump. I had 4 points and a shape of 3 spades, 5 hearts, 3 diamonds and a doubleton club. My points were the king of spades and the Jack of hearts. Naturally, I pass. My left hand opponent bid 2 clubs (Stayman).My partner then doubles which I realise is a lead directing double. My right hand opponent redoubles. This left me in a quandary. I knew I could pass as my partner could correct, but I thought I would give him the opportunity to be aware of my long suit and as such I bid 2 hearts. My left hand opponent doubles, my partner redoubles, my right hand opponent passes, and now to me.

I did not think and I should have done. I simply passed. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong. My partner’s redouble was a rescue bid, it informed me to bid any other suit apart from hearts as he saw a heart contract failing with a massive penalty. My pass was simply dreadful. My left hand opponent led and the horrors of my error would become quickly known to me. My partner grimaced but controlled his anger and left me to stew in the problems of my own making. The dummy came down with not many points and a singleton deuce of hearts. Not only did the opponents have a lot more points than we did, but they also had more trumps.

I shall spare the details of the play, but the summation is that my opponents took their winners, cross-ruffed me and over ruffed me. I only ended up making one trick. I was off 7 tricks in a vulnerable redoubled contract. This was not just a massive penalty, it was a redoubled massive penalty. I had to jot down 4,000 points against me on the scorecard. I shall never forget the sad and sorry experience.

There is not a bridge player out there who has not had a disaster at some stage in their playing career. I have recounted this story to other bridge players in the vague hope that I would locate someone who has had a disaster at least as bad if not worse than mine. I have heard of a good few disasters but none quite as points painful as the one I suffered.

In the event that you play bridge, please let me know your worst disaster, it may not be a bad as mine, but I should like to hear it in any event.

If a viewer were to look at a reproduction of Vermeer’s ‘Artist in His Studio’ and notice the four nails holding up the wall-map he or she might not make that much of it. A more ruminative viewer might feel reassured that what appears to be quite a sturdy object is firmly supported. Now if the same viewer were to look at another reproduction or even the painting itself, they may be disconcerted to find only two nails supporting the map. Not only have two nails disappeared, but also their substantial shadows. A viewer may reasonably conclude that the evidence has been tampered with, but to what purpose?

It is doubly ironic that a painting which allegorises vision should be altered after the event, making it more difficult to establish what the artist intended to convey, yet at the same time this act draws attention to what hitherto may have been overlooked.

Furthermore, this act adds to the disturbing and uncanny nature of the painting as exemplified by the rear view of the painter whose face cannot be seen. It is only an idle thought or intutition at this stage, however, it appears that there may be a link between the absent face of the artist and the two absent nails and their shadows.

Four nails or two? Your indefatigable art correspondent, Gijsbrechts, is on the case.

To be continued.

A History of Scotland is a first person documentary, with the talking head, Neil Oliver, taking you over battlefields and poring over parchment documents like the Declaration of Arbroath.  There is a little reconstruction, when a couple of bearded fellows pull out swords, but mostly you focus on the presenter’s words.  Neil Oliver shows the right amount of serious passion for his subject.  He is not bouncing in and out of helicopters or running around busily, or otherwise distracting you from the material.  The scenery is grand, among the hills or in sun dappled woods or in ruined castles.  It has great atmosphere.

Another history documentary on at present is World War II: Behind Closed Doors.  It is in the third person, that is there’s a narrator on the sound track rather than a talking head.  Actors play characters, e.g. Stalin on the phone, shouting in Russian, sub-titled in English.  There are also interviews with those who actually experienced the events (record them while you still can).  Again, it is a detailed look at what happened, without any thesis to expound.  It’s pretty good, giving you a sense of the cunning and shiftiness of politicians, and with the fear as well for those politicians under dictatorships.  One scene that sticks in my mind is Stalin asking his Cabinet if they should abandon Moscow, speaking to them as if to a group of school children, and when no-one puts up his hand, singling them out in turn.  You can imagine the dread of giving the wrong answer.

These documentaries seem to me to be superior to recent Starkey and Schama series, which each had a thesis.  Schama’s A History of Britain was about the development of liberty and democracy in the UK, Starkey’s Monarchy about the necessity of monarchy, and they seemed  to be obviously marshalling evidence for the defence of their big idea. Also, both Starkey and Schama have become insufferable as personalities.

In another kind of historical documentary you have experts being interviewed for about ten seconds each, as if they were celebrities on Channel 4’s Hundred Greatest Gross Outs.  That style insults the historian and his life’s work, and insults the viewer as well.

Here’s a lazy list of my favourite history documentaries.  As happens in these lazy lists, giants, however ancient, remain in your memory, while small workmanlike programmes are forgotten, unless they are recent.

1. The World at War   I can hear Carl Davis’s score and see those burning photographs in my mind now.  It’s harrowing to watch.
2. The Civil War  Photos, diaries and letters flow together in a haunting and beautiful account of the American Civil War. 
3. A History of Scotland Excellent so far.
4. Battlefield Britain  I found myself rooting for Harold and the English at the Battle of Hastings then for Owain Glyndwr and the Welsh at the Battle for Wales.  Exciting stuff.
5. Christina, A Medieval Woman One I saw recently, which explained ownership of property and the power of church courts in medieval times.   I’ll forget it soon, but it was a neat low-key programme, giving some idea on how history is researched, through church records and the like.

I’m sure their collection includes several albums by Mickey Katz. Katz was a clarinetist in Spike Jones’s comical band in the 1940s, and went on to record Yiddishized parodies of popular songs of the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the songs featured a klezmer break in the middle. (Katz was the father of Joel Grey of “Cabaret” fame.)

Anyway, one of Mickey Katz’s albums was in rotation in my home while I was growing up, and here are a couple of songs I remember from it.

“Duvid Crockett”:

And “Kiss of Meyer”:

As a member of Spike Jones’s band, I assume Katz helped record what is surely one of the best anti-Nazi songs ever:

… that The Smiths first appeared on national television. Yes, it was 24 November 1983 on the BBC’s Top Of The Pops, that Morrissey sang ‘This Charming Man’ into a bouquet of gladiolas, a stylistic affectation made possible by the fact that TOTP was entirely mimed.

Well, here it is:

I wish I could say I witnesed the moment, or was in some way a part of the moment, or has even the vaguest memory of it… but of course, in 1983, I was 15, in sunny Cape Town and probably memorising Catullus for a Latin exam, about as far away from the dank bedsit world of Stephen Morrissey as it was possible to get.

In 1983, I’m pretty sure most of my school friends were either into reggae or Duran Duran. I, on the other hand, had just got my first acoustic guitar (which I was attempting to make sense of) and worshipping at the altar of Neil Young, while dreaming of the day I could leave school, grow my hair and… well, I think that was about it. Ah, avoid the army, that was the other thing.

It would be at least a decade before I first heard The Smiths. I really don’t know why it took that long. By that stage I had gone through Joy Division and The Cure already. How The Smiths stayed under my radar, I have no idea.

My friend Brett Collings, the drummer in one of my bands, first introduced me to them. I liked some of the songs and went out to buy a CD, but the 2nds hand CD shop I used to frequent didn’t have any. So instead I came home with ‘Viva Hate’. I don’t know why it didn’t do it for me, because I love the album today, but it stayed on the shelf for years.

A decade later, I’d settled in England. And for some cosmic reason, it all started making sense. But what’s more, it started making retroactive sense, so much so that How Soon Is Now, There’s A Light That Never Goes Out and indeed This Charming Man now seem painfully biographical. I often think “Jesus, that was my life!”

Perhaps in my little queer world, sunny Cape Town wasn’t that far from damp and danky Manchester after all. The Smiths didn’t provide the soundtrack from my teens and young adulthood, but bizarrely, listening to their records now is like opening a diary.

So here’s to a quarter century of those charming men. Dis you see the original broadcast? What are your memories?

A few weeks ago I saw War Horse at the National. The play is based on a children’s book by Michael Morpugo which sees WW1 through the eyes of a horse. Now, I have no prior affinity with horses at all, and no special sentimentality about animals in general.

The horses were represented by impressionistic outline structures in wood and metal, manipulated by puppeteers who work unconcealed alongside the horses.

Although they reproduced very realistic movement and sound, there was much suspension of disbelief required. Yet by the end, never mind the millions of humans in that conflict, my tears coursed down at the plight of the horses.

The same motif stunned me when it leapt out in Waltz with Bashir.

Film maker Ari Folman interviews a post trauma specialist in the course of his quest to recover his blanked out memories of his participation in the 1982 Lebanon incursion. The specialist recounts how one of her clients coped through the distancing strategy of viewing the unfolding mayhem through the eye of an imaginary camera. (Folman in turn uses the distancing technique of animating the documentary interviews and his own recollections rather than filming them directly.) The specialist relates how this soldier’s “camera” broke down on witnessing a herd of beautiful Arabian horses wounded and in their death throes.

Neither of these two artistic dramatisations anthropomorphises the horses. ( I don’t know if the play War Horses is a departure in this regard from the book, which apparently sees the event through the eyes of the horse.) Direct identification with the horses is not then the simple explanation for this powerful emotional impact. There is a sense of a mystical empathetic bond between man and horse in the play, which it is not necessary to buy into to feel the emotional impact of the play. It is also not the same as the anthropomorphism of poor noble working horse Boxer in the allegorical Animal Farm. [footnote: I have a dim recollection of am English period drama on TV where events are seen through the eyes of an ill treated horse. Does anyone remember this?]

My experience of these two dramas was this. The suffering of the horse is supra historical; his suffering is the same as it was 600 years ago, outside of the human historical and political issues which tend to disguise the universality of human suffering. The horse’s suffering shatters that encrustation of history to sharpen our perspective. The suffering of the humans in war seems the inexorable outcome of a particular political historical road; the suffering of the horses, seen from outside that particular history, intensifies the tragedy of those historic choices man has made. This is not a simplistic anti -war- at- all- costs view I am expressing.

To me, this mediation through the plight of the horse, illuminated the perspective that war is often folly but also sometimes is the tragedy of hard choices.

Allen Ginsberg who died 11 years ago at the age of 70 was a famous American poet. He was a central figure in the Beat Generation, bohemians who wished to destroy bourgeois morality. If it did not conform to the norms accepted in society, Ginsberg and others of this 1950s Beat Generation were attracted to it. In the words of the New Jersey Poet Laureate, Amiri Baraka, (who himself has courted substantial controversy for his poem alleging the Israelis were complicit in the 9/11 attacks) who published the work of Ginsberg , the Beat Generation were those “who came to the conclusion that society sucked.” Homosexuality, free love, copious consumption of drugs and vagrancy were examples of rebellious qualities to be admired. Ginsberg simply glorified in his homosexuality and use of LSD and other drugs. As one critic commented, for Ginsberg, “going mad in America was the only way to be sane, to get high on drugs was the only way to be sober” and “the perverse was infinitely superior to the normal.”

An example is the 1956 poem, “Howl,” that he wrote “under the influence of various drugs” that shot him to fame and recognition. This poem contained the following lines:

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness.”

Many critics believed “Howl” to be magnificent, a masterpiece and something to be admired. This was by no means a one off poem. In 1982, by the time he was in mid-fifties, Ginsberg wrote the following lines, allegedly based on an incident he had personally experienced:

“…he fucked me in the ass

till I smelled brown excrement

staining his cock

& tried to get up from bed to go the toilet for a minute

but he held me down & kept pumping at me, serious & said

‘No, I don’t want to stop I like it dirty like this.’”

Poems such as this went on. There are the lines in his collaborative effort:

“Fuck me & fist me

In your army enlist me

Poop on me when you’re at ease.”

Some may consider the above pure pornography, but not the critics – “Ginsberg is responsible for loosening the breath of American poetry at midcentury” and that he was deserved of “a memorable place in modern poetry” was a typical comment from a prominent poetry critic. Nor did the educational establishment shun him. Ginsberg was proud to exclaim, “I have achieved the introduction of the word ‘fuck’ into texts inevitably studied by schoolboys.”

If Ginsberg’s poems are not shocking enough, how about his membership and active promotion of NAMBLA, the North American Man Love Boy Alliance, an organisation largely devoted to promoting the legalization of homosexual pedophilia? He was quoted as saying,

“Attacks on NAMBLA stink of politics, witchhunting for profit, humorlessness, vanity, anger and ignorance … I’m a member of NAMBLA because I love boys too — everybody does, who has a little humanity.”

This was a theme in one of his poems, “Old Love Story,” which was critical of those who “think the love of boys is wicked.” In an interview he commented, “I don’t know exactly how to define what’s underage” and added that he had “never made it with anyone under fifteen.”

None of this stopped Ginsberg from winning the National Book Award, the national Arts Club Gold Medal for lifetime achievement and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The praise was not limited to Americans as he also impressed the Europeans and not ably the French as the French Minister of Culture awarded him the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (the Order of Arts and Letters). Nor did it stop him getting rich, when most poets struggle to get paid anything for their work, Ginsberg was paid a publisher’s advance of $160,000 for poetry and Stanford University went on to pay $1.2 million for his papers.

So my question is as follows: Was Ginsberg a poetic genius and someone whose work is deserved of study and criticism by in the English departments of the worlds great universities, or is he someone that deserves no better than to be forgotten and his books of poetry to remain gathering dust in library bookshelves, only to be used by doctoral students in sociology departments researching an obscure subject such as twentieth century literary perverts?

Where is the line where bigotry becomes hatred and hatred becomes incitement? Racist Oi! bands have been flirting with this blurry boundary for decades. Does this verse from a song make you sick?

“Aint no other way to say it
He’s a fucking nigger
Gonna get my rope and gas
Hang him from a tree
And burn his nigger ass.”

It certainly sickens me, and is an example of the only instance where I would urge speech to be banned: when it incites violence. Incitements to violence aren’t examples of free speech, they are the enemy of free speech.

The threat of violence closes down free speech. It is an anathema to free speech. Free speech is valued because it facilitates the free exchange of ideas. Those who threaten to halt that exchange by threats and intimidation are not exercising free speech, they’re destroying it.

In the climate of hostility that such lyrics might generate, it would be impossible for black people’s voices to be heard or for them to defend themselves.

I expect that many would agree with me. But would you be shocked to discover that the CD expressing those sentiments is on sale at Amazon and HMV? Would you be horrified to learn that the BBC gives the artist airplay?

Read the full article here….