Category: And another thing…

Farewell then, the Mathew Street Festival: you will not be missed it seems…

So, Liverpool’s MSF has finally been axed in a torrent of righteous civic reasoning: its cost, its burden on the rate payer, the fact that it didn’t give Liverpool good marketing head, the dire quality of its lookalikee, soundalottee-like-the Beatles bands and the staple rhetorical ingredient that has everyone nodding vigorously: the plethora of out of control drunken youth and elders who should know better who spitted and slavered and vomited their way through days of debauchery, inchoate vileness and early morning urban horror when you forgot where you parked your car and which hedge you left that stash of Special Brew under. Oh sorry, where they forgot to park their car and forgot the hedge that they left that stash of Special Brew under.

The inability to find anyone who will speak up for the MSF is curious. Is there no-one out there who admits to having affectionate memories of its tawdriness? I for one will remember it fondly; the afternoons of hanging out with the squash team and assorted wives, girl friends and partners, strolling through the deserted commercial district, bereft of business purpose for a few short hours, as we guzzled down can upon can, stuffed kebabs into our faces and generally appreciated the diabolical renderings of songs we knew, loved and now felt sorry for as they were being mutilated by bands of cough cough aged hairy blokes thrashing at their guitars in misguided attempts to recreate Woodstock in the back alleys off Duke Street.

For all the mess and spit and spew, many of us did have some good times during those August afternoons and whilst the booking of the RLPO in Sefton Park might be useful in civilising us all a tad more, and those family friendly days will bring out the tots with their previously scared mums and dads, nothing will quite beat the experience of listening, astonished, to those assorted ‘tribute’ bands with hackneyed names and shocking hair styles.

No doubt within a couple of years, though, the call will go out for a city centre music festival that can capture the mess, sound and incoherent fury that all good rock and pop encapsulates. Until then, we’ll sit around Sefton Park lake like the good modern citizens we are, and applaud the endeavours of our city fathers in helping make the city a reasonable, polite place to live in.

What is an entrepreneurial city? What are its building blocks and whose doing the building?

We’d best be mindful that entrepreneurship is (at least) a double edge sword – carrying with it connotations of Delboy behaviour, illicit grey economy dealings, making a quick buck doubly fast but without a grain of civilising or moral coding behind it.

Whilst it can mean being creative, innovative, flexible, and focused on spotting income generation opportunities when none existed before, none of these things in their own right are necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’ things. It depends on what is done in the name of entrepreneurship as to its resultant value.

So, an entrepreneurial city could either be the city from hell – much like Tokyo in Bladerunners, or it could be an en-nobled, ennobling civilised space in which people’s entrepreneurial behaviour is directed towards the greater good rather than their own bank accounts. An entrepreneurial city could either be filled with wide boys, hoods and spivs – or it could be like Venice. Or both. The choice is ours – i.e. all the inhabitants of that city, not just the choice of the ‘entrepreneurs’ whose interest might just be focused on their own economic destiny.

The building blocks of an entrepreneurial city might be

…The way it treats its poor, its excluded and its disillusioned
…The way it gives air time and political influence to individual spirits
…The way it doesn’t preferentially focus on the ‘big boys’ of the economy but supports the development of nano-, micro- and mini- SMEs
…The way it recognises and values local culture – not just traditional, mainstream arts and museums but the myriad of ways in which people go about things and create value, difference and impact
…The way it values diversity and difference
…The way it doesn’t only tolerate dissention but appreciates it
…The way it regulates itself and public behaviours
…The way it values risk, challenge and uncertainty
…The way it engages with the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi: a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete” (Wikipedia)

So, if we want to start making an entrepreneurial city we’re probably best starting at home. Our offices and premises could be reflective of those building blocks; we should worry less about PR aspects and not be so anxious about making mistakes.

Entrepreneurialism is founded on risk, learning, making mistakes and recovery. If we want to encourage that, we have to breath the same kind of air once in a while too.

An Open Letter to Chris Evans: Score yourself out of 10: 1 billion? Well done you!

The British DJ, Chris Evans, has a slot on his primetime radio show in the morming where he invites children to tell the audience what they are going to do for the first time ever that day. The next day he phones them back and asks them how the experience was, and for them to “score yourself out of 10” as a way of self-evaluating the experience.

A few children self deprecatingly give themselves a modest 6 or 7 out of 10 but many more jump into the self evaluation task with glee and award themselves anything from 11 to 3000 to a billion out of 10.

And well done them! If only every self evaluation process was so generous in its spirit, so forthcoming with the marks and the ticked-up boxes. Wouldn’t it be great if, on completing our driving test and being asked by the instructor how well we thought we had done after running over that cyclist, we could return with the answer ‘masterly’?

Wouldn’t it just take the biscuit if when being asked how much tax we had paid last year we could say, like all the big grown up companies out there, that we had paid a zillion pounds in corporation tax rather than the sixpence ha’penny our accountants had racked up on our behalf?

No more will OfSTED be able to rank a school as satisfactory when the children will say it is supercalfragilisticexpialidocious and award everyone working in it pay rises of over a squillion per cent.

Chris Evans is doing wonders for our future generations of children by encouraging them to inflate their self-worth beyond measure from a very early age. We’ll appreciate it in our dotage when when we visit those children who’ve turned into bank managers themselves. They’ll reassure us that our pensions have increased in value by the very fantastic sum of 33 gazillion per cent interest and they’re loving evey minute of it. Well done Chris!

Paddy Masefield: still sending out shock waves and unsettling foundations

It’s been a hectic few months what with Treasured at the Cathedral, the Serbian and Macedonian visit, the business start up work at Liverpool Vision and the myriad of other activities we are musing about, thinking of and trying to lay the foundations for. Paddy’s commemoration means that I can get away for a few days and think about all that fragmentation and stresses and strains in an environment which is a little quieter and offers the opportunity to reassess exactly what it is we want from the world ahead.

This was Paddy’s legacy for me. Working with him both at LIPA and within Aspire during times of organisational growth and stress and challenge meant that you had to step back from the common place, the usual, the humdrum, and completely reassess what we were doing, how we were doing it, and why we doing it at all.

His work with us at LIPA on establishing Solid Foundations sent powerful shock waves through the organisation, challenging established ways of thinking about disability, ability, arts training, arts development and who had a right in the first place to stand on stage and command attention.

His work meant we had to rethink everything about the student experience; how they got into HE, what he meant by accredited prior learning, the integrated curriculum and student progression. This of course had a direct impact on the students who joined solid foundations – but it’s impact and his influence were more wide ranging.

It meant that students on the so called mainstream programmes had to address their own concepts of identity, of ability and what was being asked of them when it came to not only developing and devising new work, but what it meant to rethink traditional ways of acting, of music making, and of dance for example. It meant that staff had to rethink how impairment might inform the student assessment process for example and whether there were other insights that disabled staff could bring to the process that couldn’t be accessed by their nondisabled counterparts. Far from providing solid foundations, Paddy was instrumental in rocking the very foundations which we thought held up conservatoire arts training in the UK.

Paddy’s influence was felt by many students and staff, although many may not have met him in their times at LIPA. Many of them are still working and have gone onto great things, Mark Rowlands, Mandy Redvers Rowe and Jaye Wilson Bowe to name just a few. I’d like to thank you Paddy for giving me that space to rethink, to replay and regalvanise. Your shock waves are still rocking our foundations to this day.

Testimonial for Paddy Masefield, 20 October 2012
Battersea Arts Centre, London

An Open Letter to Roy Hodgson: please prove the English FA wrong and fail gloriously

Dear Roy Hodgson,

I’ve got nothing against you and happen to think you were on a losing to nothing when you came to Liverpool last year.  We all know the results of that story and there’s not much to add to it now.

The new story you’re now part of though is alarming in the way its already being constructed: you’ve ‘steered West Brom to mid-table safety’; you’re a blazer man who ticks all the boxes; an FA man for the FA.  Well, lets hope your appointment doesn’t’ lead to sweet FA, or that if it does, you fail spectacularly and come crashing out of the football heavens burning on all cylinders.

Because Roy, your appointment has all the hall marks of what is tired and miserable about English sporting culture and indeed our public life in general.

Steering your team to mid-table respectability has an air of desperation about it, its risk averseness wearing its heart on its sleeve or on another respectable part of your anatomy.  Respectability?  So that we can look forward to saying things like “unfortunately we just missed out on scraping into the quarter finals but second place in the qualifying qualifying group stage is no mean achievement?’ Is that the extent of the endorsement we can expect from your boys at the FA after the summer?

Because those boys at the FA, Roy, are trying to anoint you as one in the image of themselves: Blazer Men, the stalwarts of the English sporting club tradition. We all know a Blazer Man. He’s the bloke on Saturday afternoon who kicks you off the tennis court cos you’ve not got your membership card with you. The bloke in the bar holding forth on all things, unctuously and loudly. The bloke in the car park who has driven his Jag up the back side of your Ford Orion and driven away, oblivious to the trail of damage behind him cos he’s as pissed as a Friday afternoon lunch time fart. The bloke who will lead us to mid table security making sure his blazer elbow patches don’t rip and tear at the strain of it all.  The Blazer Man. As exemplified by Trevor Brooking and his collection of gold plated carriage clocks. Cuck-bloody-oo.

Beware all those carriage clocks Roy! It’s no wonder you’re in danger of ticking all the boxes. All of them. Hoo bloody ray. A box ticker! We’re all living with box tickers every day Roy, they make up almost every department of every large organisation everywhere in England at the moment; they sit there in the neat and tidy offices, underlining things in red, covering their audit trail arses and ticking their boxes with a rapidity which puts the fastest PC to shame.

We don’t need box tickers Roy in our public life Roy,  we need our sports heroes to tear up the boxes and start again. We need our public figures to show us there’s life after the box, the target, the service level agreement.

We don’t need you to tick the FA’s boxes for them., Roy. We need you to win convincingly, after much struggle, heart break and living on the edge of our collective nerves; but failing that, please fail gloriously and utterly.  Please prove once and for all that the FA Blazer Men and their ticking clocks and ticking boxes should be thrown into a container and carted off to the South China Seas for them to live the rest of their lives in Rousserian decadence.  For Gods sake, for all our English public lives’ sake Roy, go and fail properly: disasterously,  noisily, embarrassingly.

However you do it, just do it with conviction.  We may not like the results but it will be infinitely better than being steered to mid-table respectability. No one wants that in their lives, never mind in their football team.

An Open Letter to Jeremy Paxman: how do you like your artists? Poached, fried or skewered?

The post below was written over 12 years ago but Damien Hirst continues to irritate the whole wide world with his approach to his art and making money.  

Dear Jeremy Paxman,

The recent and utterly predictable furore about Damien Hirst’s retrospective at Tate Modern has so far unsuccessfully (on the BBC at least) tried floating the same old questions when you’re talking about Hirst and his ilk: is it art? Is it any good? And hidden behind those questions – often poorly masquerading as intelligent criticism Jeremy – is the punter’s stealth bombing attitude that is appalled at the economy that surrounds Hirst. He makes money. Tut. He makes tons of money. Tut tut. He bypasses the traditional dealers and sells dead flies to rich foreigners. Tut tut bloody tut.

The question of whether or not Hirst’s oeuvre is ‘art’ is as dead a question as that shark in the formaldehyde. It just stares at you, demanding you look directly into its mouth and be scared, be very scared that you get the wrong answer. Worse, be prepared for your flimsy swimming costume of a rationale for what constitutes art will be torn from your human flesh, exposing you in all your idiotic posturing. No, the question of whether something is art or not just generates un-ending trails of snail mucus which never answer the question (because its always the wrong question) and just serve to reinforce the critic’s own habits predilections and prejudices. The slime trail wends its way slowly, inexorably over the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ tautology.

The more significant question about Hirst is what our concern about his earning capacity tells us about what we expect from our artists; how they behave, how they should look and what place in society they should feel content to inhabit. Our concern and sometime hostility to his relationship with the arts markets suggests not so much that we’re are appalled that his spot paintings generate a million times their value every time he adds another row of pastel spots, but that he has the nerve to make any money at all. Artists surely do what they do because they love it? They’re driven by a vocational call that has nothing to do with filthy lucre? Surely they should be living in hovels, surrounded by the dead cows they carve up with their chain saws: not living off their profits?

Clearly, artists shouldn’t be linked to the word profit at all. Their place in the world should be at the altar – or better still, in the kitchen gallery ready to be poached, fried or plain old skewered on our prejudices that artists should be poor, anonymous and plain old dead before they’re entitled to benefit from the madness that is the arts marketplace and the market in general.

Hirst will only really have ‘made it’ once he dies and leaves instructions in his will for his own body to be drenched in formaldehyde and then strung up on a plinth in Trafalgar Square. When that happens Jeremy, you and your colleagues will no doubt be leading the campaign for the sanctification of Hirst because as you know, the only great artist is a dead one.

Number 1 in the series Write an Open Letter to a Famous Person!

It’s World Spinach Day! A salutary warning.

It’s world spinach day!

No, really it is. Time to dust off all those Popeye cliches and remind ourselves what an impertinent little vegetable that spinach is. Frisky, unreliable and a complete lack of deference to greens everywhere.  If it wasn’t for spinach, our dining tables would be much quieter places with less haranguing by parents of their offsprings reluctance to engage with the Big Green. Without spinach in our lives, we might have taken to the 5 A Day mantra a little easier, with a little less rebelliousness in our eating habits. If it were not for spinach, the teenage years would have been a time of studiousness; of youth knowing their place in the wider world; of people everywhere knowing their place.

The early introduction of spinach into our diets has, like rock and roll, clearly been a major disruptive force in the last part of the 20th century on the youth of today. National Spinach Day does at least allow us to sombrely reflect on how the world might have turned out had it not been for this most troublesome of vegetables.

I blame the parents! Perhaps the Daily Mail has been right all along

Dear Daily Mail,

There has been more in you today about how parents need to be castigated for their wayward offsprings behaviours, morals and ongoing general bad taste in music. Now, that’s not a very nice way to talk about the Royal Family or Ed Miliband but we’ll let that pass.

What would be a more interesting angle on this would be blaming parents for the behaviour of bankers – Fred Goodwin – just where was your dad when you were growing up?  Perhaps he was in the betting shop, placing a fiver on a nag that was going to end up in a Belgium meat market as you were going through your formative years- that would account for the devastation you and your company wreaked in 2008 wouldn’t it?

Politicians too need to be reminded of just how irritating they have become due to the parents foibles: Chris Huhne, did your mum smoke when she was pregnant with you? Perhaps that’s the reason for your terrible driving skills… oh, and your lieing skills… And your sheer bloody nerve skills…

And let’s not forget the parents of the press barons – what did Rupert Murdoch’s parents do to him which have led to oversee the immoral and corrupted media machines we see feeding filth to the public on a daily basis? And what of those who chose to hang around the back of the bike sheds with him? Their parents must shoulder some of the blame too.

But you, The Daily Mail, on second thoughts, perhaps you have got it right: although some parents need more blaming than others.

RIP Lanternhouse, Cumbria. Lest we forget.

Like a cantakerous old Uncle, I’ll remember Lanternhouse in Cumbria as a somewhat distant relative – but whose influence over my professional growing up was always keenly felt: hovering over my shoulder, whispering exhortations, yelling out criticisms and the ocassionally deranged epiphet which caused the rest of us in the extended community arts family to look at each other in that modern, knowing way. Uncle John was clearly not on form we might mutter; he’s seen better days someone else would offer.

What we shouldn’t forget that without Uncle John, we would not be stood where we are now. Sometimes the shoulders of the giants we stand on start to tremble– and its at that point we’re obliged to stand up straight and take the load off them rather than castigate them for not being who they have been, and for what they’re not doing any longer.

Farewell Lanternhouse and everyone who was fortunate to benefit from your lights. They’ll continue to shine into the darkness of this recession long after the politicians who put you there have faded into miserable obscurity.

If you have a memory of Lanternhouse – or indeed any of the arts companies that are now fading away in the cultural freeze of this recession, please feel free to send them in and we’ll post them up here.

From Paul Kleiman:

Lanternhouse magical moment: a beautiful midsummer’s evening concert, with the band starting in the streets of the town, a tower of instruments and bells, and at the climax, a hot-air balloon flying right over the top of the tower. (the balloon was pure coincidence!!)

For an ongoing list of companies MIA click here.