The Year 1994 - The Twin Peaks of Nihilism

In terms of popular culture, 1994 was quite a remarkable one. It was the unofficial 'year zero' for Britpop, with the release of Oasis' 'Definitely Maybe' and Blur's 'Parklife', as well as genre-defining albums such as The Prodigy's 'Music for the Jilted Generation', and films such as 'Pulp Fiction' and 'The Shawshank Redemption'.

In amongst all this, it only recently occurred to me that 1994 also gave rise to two musical touchstones of creative nihilism from two disparate entities, that I believe have yet to be surpassed. Manic Street Preachers' 'The Holy Bible' and Nine Inch Nails' 'The Downward Spiral' are, two decades on, as dark and impenetrable as any albums ever made and marked a pivotal culmination point for both bands, linking the two together in a helix of hostility.

The concept of nihilism - essentially the 'negation of negation' - was first propagated in Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons', although its sacred text is widely accredited as being Dostoyevsky's 'Notes from Underground', a book that would resonate like seismic tremors of self-hatred and anguish through the layers of cultural strata, from the philosophy of Nietzsche to the existentialism of Sartre, Martin Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver', Anthony Burgess' 'A Clockwork Orange', J.G. Ballard's 'Crash' and the music of the Sex Pistols.

Nihilism as a philosophic concept involves the rejection of all moral and virtuous concerns, judging them as futile and irrelevant in the face of the crushing absurdism and oppression that the world represents. The romantic notion that often attaches itself to such advocates lies in their elusiveness, their lack of adherence to the mundane fatuities of the everyday, and the sense that from Dostoyevsky's 'underground man' to Camus' 'l'etranger', by repudiating the moral rules that compel us to aspire to fulfilment in favour of self-destruction they have arrived at a semblance of true freedom.

The post-war generation breathed a heavy sigh of new life into the concept of nihilism, as societal conventions slowly crumbled away into the birth of rock 'n' roll and James Dean's 'rebel' which encapsulated the era of the 'teenager' for which nihilism appeared custom made. The nihilistic phase is a legitimate rite of passage and those who haven't undergone it, I don't believe ever really were teenagers, just ready-made adults heated through by the microwaves of puberty as opposed to undergoing a tortuous and thorough hormonal thawing out.

Both 'The Downward Spiral' and 'The Holy Bible' pulsate with subversive and disturbing themes of alienation, anger and a seething malaise that screams of hopelessness and animosity.

'TDS' stands as a loose narrative of one man's solipsistic disintegration, inspired by Pink Floyd's concept album 'The Wall'. 'THB' explores subjects of exploitation, cultural decay, the horrors of addiction and genocide, and right-wing totalitarianism. Both albums are abrasive, represent a considerable challenge to first-time listeners, but also yield an astonishing depth and thematic strength that merits revisiting.

It is important to contextualise the respective abysses being explored by examining the separate paths that lead there.

Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails exploded onto the American scene with 1989's 'Pretty Hate Machine'; an album that perfectly amalgamated subversive industrial music by artists such as Throbbing Gristle, Skinny Puppy and Einsturzende Neubauten, with the new-wave electronica of Gary Numan and Depeche Mode. Modern industrial music was thus born. Mired in subsequent record label disputes, and extensive touring it would be five years before 'TDS', with only the release of an excellent but all-too-brief 'Broken' EP interrupting the productive hiatus.

Manic Street Preachers, a band of four outsiders from the Welsh mining town of Blackwood, had burst onto the music scene with their bombastic 1991 debut 'Generation Terrorists', a compound of 80's 'hair metal' bravado such as Guns n' Roses, and the self-aware rock intellect of The Clash. With songs like 'Motorcycle Emptiness' and 'You Love Us', the Manics encapsulated an ethos of 'culture, alienation, boredom and despair', with a mission statement being to sell millions of records before spontaneously combusting into the dust of rock legend.

Courting controversy by dressing as terrorists, wrapped in leopard-skin furs and lipstick, the band quickly attracted a cult following, largely attributed to the enigmatic Richey Edwards, the band's chief lyricist and sometime rhythm guitarist. Indeed, with the hindsight of Edwards' mysterious disappearance and assumed death, its hard not to consider him a latter-day Syd Barratt, albeit singing songs about anorexia rather than mice called Gerald.

Similarly to Nine Inch Nails, the Manics' difficult sophomore album 'Gold Against the Soul' was given a lukewarm reception, fuelling a broiling sense of tour-weary depression going into the creation of 'THB'.

Both bands approached their third albums with considerable notoriety flying albatross-like within close proximity. Nine Inch Nails had provoked outrage with the 1992 release of the ‘Happiness in Slavery’ video featuring reportedly genuine footage of sado-masochistic torture. This, alongside the news that Reznor had chosen as a recording base for ‘TDS’ (apparently in ignorance), the Hollywood Hills house in which Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate and friends were brutally murdered by members of the ‘Manson Family’ in 1969.

Meanwhile, the Manics’ disturbingly self-destructive aura had been sealed in blood by perhaps the most exquisite nihilistic statement since Van Goph cut off his own ear. Talking to journalists after a particularly gruelling gig, Richey Edwards proceeded to carve the epigraph ‘4 REAL’ into his forearm in response to the artistic credibility of the band being called into question.

‘TDS’ opens with the jackhammer onslaught of ‘Mr Self Destruct’, setting the sonic benchmark for all that follows. ‘Piggy’ is a bare-bones piece of industrial grime, in which Reznor repeats “nothing can stop me now", before collapsing in on itself with a cavalcade of drums. Both ‘March of the Pigs’ and ‘Heresy’ are bone-crushingly intense, before the dirty sleaze of ‘Closer’, perhaps one of the most orgiastic songs ever released by a white rock act. Synths, fuzzy guitar lines and conflicting drum beats build up in the climax like the throes of sexual fervour.

‘Closer’ is the crucial lynchpin around which the album is structured, offering as it does some semblance of relief - in contrast to the subject matter, musically it is album’s ‘poppiest’ track – before being plunged back into the discordant maelstrom of ‘Ruiner’.

‘THB’ opens with ‘Yes’, a song about sexual exploitation and the boundless limits of consumerism, that lays the textural framework for the rest of the album. Richey Edwards’ lyrics are so dense and sesquipedalian, with multiple references often jostling for dominance in each line that singer James Dean Bradfield frequently has a tortuous job vocalising them within the melodic confines of each song. The aesthetic of the music brings to mind Brutalist architecture with its jagged edges and uncompromising rigidity; the guitar riffs are often jarring and dissonant, the rhythm section taut and muscular.

The dominating track on ‘THB’ is ‘Faster’, an adrenalized thrombosis that the Manics have never surpassed; the lyrics invoking the intelligentsia of Plath, Pinter, and Mailer, whilst declaring ‘I know I believe in nothing but it is my nothing’.

‘Archives of Pain’ builds around a menacing bass line and concerns the morbid cult of fascination around notorious figures, name-checking Hindley and Brady, Le Pen and Nilsen, and written from the perspective of a right-wing extremist advocating capital punishment and retributive judgement - ‘give them what they deserve’. On ‘4st 7lb’, Edwards’ lyrics describe the torment of his psychosomatic battle with anorexia, epitomised by the exemplary line ‘I wanna walk in the snow, and not leave a footprint’.

The quality of the production throughout both albums is such that twenty years on they sound as innovative and contemporary as anything released in the interim years. On ‘TDS’, Reznor mines genuinely unnerving aural territory to create wholly original sounds – the screaming loops on ‘The Becoming’ invoking the arrival of the apocalypse itself; the susurration of insects; the ear-splitting drum blasts of ‘Eraser’, and so on. The zenith of epic industrial metal could be said to be ‘Reptile’, with sounds so inorganic and devastating that they invoke the image of a colossal factory system in the process of disintegration.

Similarly, ‘THB’ is suffused with audio samples from J.G. Ballard, Hubert Selby Jr., a mother of one of the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims, and Orwell’s ‘1984’, that shuffle in and out of the songs lending thematic dynamism.

The penultimate track ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ incorporates audio recording of the Nuremberg Trials with the mechanical puffing and panting of some kind of dehumanised production assembly line. It is as cold and oppressive as the album gets, and to me always sounds like a band almost cogently aware of their impending demise as a creative unit. Closing the album with the quite inconsequential ‘PCP’ has always felt like a misstep to me, as though self-consciously the band felt it necessary to make a small retreat from the necrotic and suffocating chill that had infused the album’s bones.

Despite the equal measures aggression and despair that course through the veins of both albums, there are equally moments of genuine beauty and respite. ‘A Warm Place’ on ‘TDS’ blooms into colour like a palliative, providing a temporary yet comforting numbness, with ethereal textures that wouldn’t be out of place on a Brian Eno album. It is one of the finest pieces of music Reznor has produced and without it as an interlude, ‘TDS’ would be a far less effective piece of work.

Of course, there is little that hasn’t been written already about ‘Hurt’, an anthem for the disenchanted, appropriated in the cultural consciousness by Johnny Cash, that still lays a finger on every raw nerve of emotional potency and is a breathtakingly poignant close to a ferocious monsoon of an album.

‘This is Yesterday’ from ‘THB’ is, similarly, a melancholic break in the dark clouds with shimmering guitar and yearning vocals that invoke ‘the only way to gain approval is by exploiting the very thing that cheapens me’.

The parallels between the two albums is also worth noting in the context of the subsequent impact on the bands’ respective trajectories. Following ‘TDS’, Reznor became further ensconced in addiction and depression that prevented the release of another album until 1999’s sprawling ‘The Fragile’. After heavy touring in the wake of ‘THB’, Richey Edwards disappeared, leaving his car parked on the Severn Bridge (a notorious suicide spot), securing his place in rock mythology as the mystery surrounding his whereabouts continues to inspire conjecture.

Despite the rest of the band continuing as a 3-piece, progressing on to have huge success with anthemic, mainstream albums 'Everything Must Go' and 'This is my truth, tell me yours', I have long thought that the legacy of the Manic Street Preachers would have been best left at 'THB'. To my mind, they should have continued under a different name as the members of Joy Division did subsequent to Ian Curtis' death, becoming New Order.

Twenty years on, the Manics' have maintained a prolific output of new material with varying degrees of artistic success. Whilst 2004's 'Lifeblood' was widely panned, I appreciate it inasmuch as it demonstrates a band dabbling in alternative directions. Whereas, 2009's 'Journal for Plague Lovers', which was warmly received, strikes me as a band desperately reaching back and trying to recapture the black magic conjured up on 'THB'.

By contrast, Trent Reznor's output post-millennium has been much increased and consistently worthwhile, constantly seeking to remain at the vanguard of the contemporary music scene. 2007's 'Year Zero' was an astonishing exercise in electronic (and marketing) experimentation; the instrumental double-album 'Ghosts' was similarly captivating, rich and diverse in scale; whilst his Oscar-winning soundtrack for 'The Social Network' was propulsive and engrossing.

Twenty years on, what is incontrovertible is that these two albums represent a very high watermark in the marriage between music and nihilism; which, as the waters have receded have left very few comparable peaks in their wake.

Views on Climate Change

For a time when I was growing up, a dehumidifier was placed outside the door of my bedroom. Before long this low level mechanic whoosh of circulating air became intermingled with the tides of my sleep and whenever it was turned off I found my fatigued mind wrestling with the silence that then seemed to drench the house.

You may consider it a tenuous association, but I see this as being analogous to the psychological conditioning of humanity to the background hum of impending global disaster. Predominantly, this is a 20th century phenomenon, as the industrialisation of war modernised the historic threat of land invasion to bring about death from the skies above from often unseen forces. This developed into the 'mutually assured destruction' of the Cold War when, in one giant leap for mankind, we finally mustered the firepower to bring about the death of the planet, or at least human existence on it.

This imminent threat of catastrophe sought to stoke the fires of the ingrained millennial Christian conviction that the physical world was proceeding on borrowed time before the arrival of the apocalypse and God's reckoning. Contrary to logical reasoning, I would argue that the background drone of possible global annihilation is the pessimistically comforting foundation blocks on which civilised societies construct obedience and maintain subordination to systems of power.

The potent concerns surrounding global warming and the major implications of climate change on human existence appear to fulfil this pathological criteria. It is interesting to consider, that the cultural stock of environmentalism has risen in parallel with the end of the Cold War, the pronounced 'end of history', and the relative decline in large-scale international conflict over the last two or three decades; almost as though it has sought to exploit this widening gap in the market.

Whilst fractious global politics ensure that the nuclear threat is still omnipresent, and fundamentalist terror has adopted the role of the 'unseen' spectre of death, climate change is now the single greatest threat to our survival. An IPCC report earlier this year stated that 'human influence on the climate system is clear. It is extremely likely (95-100% probability) that human influence was the dominant cause of global warming between 1951-2010.'

It has also been predicted that by 2100, a 4oC rise in average global surface temperature is increasingly likely; a scenario that would have profound consequences for large regions of the planet and untold numbers of wildlife species.

Of course, there are the deniers, the dissenting faction who persist in waving aside the evidence with deranged ambivalence that claims the world has constantly undergone natural fluctuations and man is powerless both the exacerbate the current cycle of warming and prevent its taking place. They point to the apparent hiatus in temperature rises since the end of the 20th century as evidence of global warming slowing and stabilising (although recent reports have discredited this as being illusory).

These nay-sayers may well be right, but it does seem bizarre that in their stubbornness they can be wilfully blind to the wealth of evidence as presented; akin almost to denying the affair of one's partner despite the sounds of their sexual activity penetrating through the wall. Before long they will be there in the same room and by then any attempt at denial will blatantly be futile.

And yet what is most alarming is that the clever pigs we elect to office appear content to obfuscate around real debate and meander around solid action until the whole farmyard inevitably immolates.

The latest Conservative-led coalition was promoted by an Arctic-striding Cameron as being 'the greenest government ever', and yet now he allegedly passes secret instructions to "ditch this green crap" when situations no longer suit him to keep to his promise.

Meanwhile Australia elect Tony Abbott, a climate-sceptic in all but name, who has rolled back many of the state's green initiatives, cutting funds for renewable energy industries, and frustrating G20 nations by omitting any mention of energy policies from the on-going summit discussions this year.

China, the world's largest-superpower-in-waiting, have built more coal-fired power stations than any other in the last couple of decades and, along with India, still plan for several hundred more in the next few years.

In America, in place of (or alongside), aims at securing the natural resources of foreign regions, Obama has initiated a policy of energy isolationism, locking down the resource security of the country, and declaring that they will strive to achieve a "century of energy independence". This is a statement of such myopic stupidity that it barely justifies extrapolating into reasons.

As well as this, there is the fact that the 2001 Kyoto Protocol was undermined by Clinton signing the treaty but never ratifying it, before Bush withdrew the US signature altogether claiming it to be contrary to American economic interests.

Such a policy directly justifies Noam Chomsky's view that 'it is beyond irony that the richest, most powerful countries in the world are racing towards disaster while the so-called primitive societies are the ones at the forefront of trying to avert it'.

For instance, Ecuador has sought aid from richer nations to encourage them to leave their fossil fuel supplies in the ground instead of exploiting them, thereby escalating emissions. Venezuela, whose nationalised oil industry amounts to around one-third of the country's GDP, under Chavez started to strictly adhere to production quotas set by the OPEC.

In many way though, western civilisation has caught itself in a double-bind, whereby the prevailing thrust of industrialisation and post-war consumerism has seriously hobbled our ability, or our desire, to alter ingrained attitudes and expectations. The fundamental changes to human thought processes and actions that are demanded by environmental science represent an abrupt tack to a new direction that stands as a harsh contrast to the way we live now in the 21st century.

Two centuries of rapid industrialisation, as well as an unprecedented expansion in wealth and opportunity has been predicted on the mantra of 'more more more!' More of everything is good for progress; there is little sense in holding back, is the underlying principle that has fuelled the rapid explosion in human productivity and the simultaneous depletion of the earth's resources.

It is my view that, by our very nature, humankind is likely doomed to ineffective and reluctant inaction over climate change. The relatively fractional span of our lives renders it a natural humanism to be psychologically anchored in the short-term. The primary concerns that people consistently have are on circumstantial, economic and employment fields that are fertilised with policies and choices made with the immediate short-term in mind, whilst anything on a bigger or longer-term scale is left psychologically fallow.

The human sense of time is simply not engineered to effectively fathom centuries or millennia; the enormity of the scale only serves to emphasise the reality of our own insignificance which appals and demoralises us, and so instinctively we turn away and occupy ourselves with concerns on which we are more significant. Collectively, we prioritise our immediate needs over the needs of the generations to come.

This psychological cleaving to the short term can be seen, more effectively I think, by examining our relationship to our own self.

Humans have an age-old proclivity for intoxication through substance abuse. As we work longer hours and for diminishing returns, precious leisure time is often overwhelmed by the ritualistic vices of drinking, smoking and drug use; and adult obesity rates in the UK now stand at around 25% and rising. All stands as evidence of our prioritising short term pursuits of pleasure over concerns for future health. This ingrained complacency and a natural bias towards meeting ephemeral needs, represents the ozone layer through which the long term rays of decisive action are diminished to little more than a begrudging and fickle concern.

Governments, often themselves terminally short-termist, are more inclined to promote small scale policy initiatives that serve as little more than the guilt assuagement of the individual, who is lead to believe that by putting their recycling in the correct coloured bin and turning lights off on leaving rooms, they are 'doing their bit' to apply the brakes to civilisation's high speed train running swiftly out of track.

By focusing effort on this 'cult of the individual' (i.e. the latest 'Green Deal' initiative), governments are able to avoid tackling the big players - the major companies with their factories, infrastructure systems, and power stations.

In terms of the future, I think it's important to consider two areas - human and political.

It's already very easy to detect the amnesiac tendencies at play as soon as any environmental event is dropped from the news agenda. The public uproar at the winter floods are a prime British example of how such fevered concerns are quickly abandoned amidst the constant tidal surge of distraction and information in this digital age.

I think it's possible that this could signify a future whereby ever more frequent ecological catastrophes are dealt with by a stoicism and an acceptance that is only ever reactive rather than preventative. However, I think a society enlivened by youthful demographics may experience a profound surge in activism, a spate of eco-terrorism perhaps, and a strong desire for change to which governments - as they have with every momentous movement from Civil Rights to Women's Liberation - may eventually find themselves having to acquiesce.

Perhaps we might enter a new 'eco-Enlightenment', in which the social conventions, behaviours and belief systems of the masses are shaken into flux like an ideological snowglobe, before resettling into forms from which meaningful resolutions might be affected.

I believe that generations to come will look back on the Industrial Revolution and the environmentally-destructive epoch of globalisation with justified anger at their forefathers' short-sighted folly, and lambast their moral decrepitude as we do to ours for the slave trade and other archaic social prejudices.

Politically, energy resources have already become the major driver for any and all diplomatic international relations. Whereas in recent decades such motivations have been camouflaged by other issues as a pretext for war; in the future, wars will be waged explicitly as a means of securing or appropriating further shares of the world's natural resources, in what will for the planet as a whole be a zero-sum game. This is evident in the on-going Ukraine/Russia conflict as well as the broiling tension between the Chinese and Vietnamese over an deep-water mining rig the former have planted in the latter's sovereign waters.

It seems to me, that some kind of overarching global autocracy will necessarily need to be established. Perhaps adopting the guise of an Eco-United Nations, in which equal nation's delegates may sit in governance, above their respective national powers, to negotiate and cooperate on tackling climate change.

As such an imperative issue that ultimately threatens the entire world, it strikes me that remaining embedded in the often-intractable international rivalries and short-term obfuscations that gestate naturally from democratic systems, imperils the chance of real progress and dilutes it down into an inactive sludge that does nothing but generate further apathy.

With that in mind, the idea of less democracy and instead a form of benign despotism on the subject of global environmental policy might be the preferable option. Instead of governments formulating policies aimed at galvanising the individual, or that adhere solely to self-interested aims; a transnational body would have the executive power to enforce policy and emissions targets with punitive economic sanctions aimed at countries that fail to comply, as well as the strength of authority to resist powerful nations such as America from riding roughshod over any proposals.

On a micro level, perhaps an attitudinal shift away from consumerism towards environmentalism might result in more provincial eco-economies, with small communities banding together to produce and meet their own energy needs. On a macro level, maybe China, India or even Africa, as the 21st century's fastest developing continent, will launch game-changing space-based solar power capability, in which case the geopolitical structure of power could shift dramatically.

Or maybe, thinking of a utopian ideal, future generations might bastardise the utilitarian principle to proceed based upon seeking 'the maximum eco-efficiency (happiness) for the greatest number', whilst reducing emissions (pain and suffering) as far as possible.

Either way, for global warming to be decisively tackled so that human life on earth manages to sustain itself long into the future, drastic changes to personal and political attitudes need to take place, particularly if we hope to ever be able to sleep peacefully without the comforting hum of impending doom rolling on ad infinitum in the background.

REVIEW - Irvine Welsh at Southbank Centre

“I don’t hate the English, they’re just wankers. We on the other hand are colonised by wankers.”

So said Mark Renton in 1993’s ‘Trainspotting’. But if Irvine Welsh is enthused by the prospect of divorce from the English wankers later on in the year, he’s content to give little away, merely suggesting that after 30 years of a “neoliberal impasse” it’s good enough to see something, anything, drastic happening in British politics.

His perceived neutrality might have something to do with his relocation a few years ago to America; specifically, Miami, in which he has set his 9th novel ‘The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins’.

He explains the novel’s preoccupations with modern culture’s obsession with statistics, body image pathologies, the vapid means of measuring human beings’ worth and achievements, and so on. The way he sees it, “consumerism has ticked all the boxes it can, and we’re still not really any happier”; instead, humans are held captive inside a zoo for which they are seldom emotionally designed.

Welsh is a novelist whose recent output has been on a decidedly downward trajectory – perfectly readable, albeit no longer reaching the gloriously grotesque realism of early novels ‘Glue’, ‘The Acid House’ or ‘Filth’. He was in a league of his own as the gutter poet of Leith, drawing reprehensible characters better than pretty much anyone in contemporary literature. But inevitably, the transition Stateside was never going to yield the same raw and instinctive creativity.

That being said, the move has served to prevent him re-treading worn ground on a path to turgidity, as has happened with Bret Easton Ellis, who I have often thought of as being Welsh’s American counterpart. Both achieved notoriety and subversive success – Welsh with ‘Trainspotting’, Ellis with ‘American Psycho’ – both were firmly embedded in the psychology of their locality – Welsh’s Edinburgh to Ellis’ LA – and both have hit a post-millennium creative decline (rather steeper on Ellis’ part). Perhaps what Ellis really needed was to relocate to Scotland…

I ask Welsh how he felt seeing his debut novel 'Trainspotting' being adopted as to key text for the 90’s Britpop and ‘Cool Britannia’ era (one that is currently ablaze with renewed nostalgia on its 20th anniversary despite nostalgic saturation being its original raison d’etre). He agrees that it was odd to “suddenly see my novel become Danny Boyle’s film, and then become Richard Branson’s train advert”.

On the point of whether, in 2014, the literary scene would be capable of cultivating a novel of such subversive significance he takes a rather sceptical tone, blaming the global nature of culture that largely prohibits any work of art from building an underground swell of appreciation.

All in all, Welsh is both affable (signing books and posing for selfies after the event for a long queue of people), and a consistently entertaining literary force. After all, which other modern writer could have crafted such hideously iconic characters as Francis Begbie, DC Bruce Robertson or a tapeworm with an existential crisis?

Culture - April

Books Read:

Noam Chomsky - 'Occupy' (non-fiction)
Thomas De Quincey - 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'
Jorge Luis Borges - 'Collected Fictions'
Jean Baudrillard - 'The Spirit of Terrorism' (non-fiction)
Joseph Conrad - 'Lord Jim'
Hunter S. Thompson - 'Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80s' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Love and Death' (Woody Allen)
'Dead End' (Jean-Baptiste Andrea & Fabrice Canepa)
'Martyrs' (Pascal Laugier)
'Match Point' (Woody Allen)
'Barry Lyndon' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Calvary' (John Michael McDonagh) (at the Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley)
'Irreversible' (Gasper Noe)
'The Parallax View' (Alan J. Pakula)
'Candyman' (Bernard Rose)

Calvary is the Latin term deriving from 'Golgotha' which denotes the location of Jesus' crucifixion. Acknowledgement of this precursory fact should serve as an adequate primer for the dark, misanthropic narrative terrain on which John Michael McDonagh's new film unfolds.

Brendan Gleeson gives a lithic performance as a priest in a rural Irish town who is given a week to live by an unknown assailant as revenge for sexual abuse inflicted whilst a child at the hands of a separate priest. The film then proceeds to count down the seven days as Gleeson attempts to uncover his prospective assassin.

The central tenet of the film is the constant tug of war between maintaining religious faith and the atheological forces being bombarded from all sides. It serves as a reflection of a very modern crisis of faith that many must battle to reconcile in the face of so many examples of venality and greed, as personified by the pantheon of periphery characters, all of whom vary in their degrees of detestability.

Despite the serrated subject matter, there are some genuinely funny moments; and in fact, it treads the same blackly comedic path as 'In Bruges', with only slightly less success. The script is acerbic and full of bile, clearly inspired by vintage Tarantino, with lines like "I always thought anyone who signed up for the army during peace time would have to be slightly psychotic".

It is far from flawless however, there are several scenes that appear to hang quite awkwardly before dissipating into little of real value. The characters of the adulterous woman and the male gigolo are honkingly stereotypical, and provide an unfavourable counterweight from Gleeson's nuanced relationship with his suicidal daughter.

Despite its flaws, 'Calvary' is a very worthwhile watch, in that it escalates tension to a satisfying conclusion and cleverly examines the resilient faith and conviction in the Stoic individual when all that seems to surround him is a cumulus of apostasy.


Albums Played:

Philip Glass - 'The Essential Philip Glass'
Marvin Gaye - 'What's Going On'
Kraftwerk - 'Tour de France Soundtracks'
Damon Albarn - 'Everyday Robots'
Lykkie Li - 'I Never Learn'
Tune-Yards - 'Nikki Nack'


Theatre:

'12 Angry Men' at Garrick Theatre, London
'Let The Right One In' at Apollo Theatre, London


Exhibitions:

Richard Mosse: The Enclave (at The Vinyl Factory Space, Brewer Street Car Park)

A human skull lies cushioned amidst the velvet grass; a pubescent soldier sits upon a tree stump, clutching an automatic rifle with a proud resilience; camera footage paces along a dirt road passing over the body of a man left lying by the way side as perfunctory as though it were a sleeping dog.

Down beneath the Brewer Street car park, the intestinal tract of Soho, is a new video installation/photography exhibition by Richard Mosse, documenting his travels to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country ravaged by tribal conflict and widespread poverty. To capture his images he used an outmoded infrared camera that was employed by the military to detect camouflaged combatants in the field of battle.

The effect is to create images of lysergic candy-floss pink splendour that embody the destabilising contradiction between the undeniable aesthetic appeal on the one hand, and the unsettling realism on the other.

There is a literal interpretation of the images which is that they vivify the land scorched by the blood of countless civilians spilt through angry divisions that reach back generations; any discernible root cause being long since mired in intractable discord.

There is a certain logic to the placement of this exhibition, whether by design or accident. The subterranean, heavily-urbanised setting stands in stark contrast to the expansive tracts of open grassland, agriculture and shanty town settlements that arouse in the Western observer perhaps a modicum of profound sympathy but predominantly just a hopeless ambivalence; aware as we are of the impenetrable geopolitical and tribal fissures that seem to defy any rational attempt at resolution on the part of the international community.

If Mosse's work achieves anything, it might be that it presents a simple yet radical revisualisation of a landscape saturated of any emotional registration through journalistic coverage that compresses regional turmoil into a news-friendly 'spectacle', reinforcing the intraversible gulf that persists between our lives and theirs.

Weekly news - Labour rent policy

Visiting my parents in Cornwall over the Bank Holiday weekend, we passed the village of St. Just where a recent affordable housing scheme has given rise to 36 new houses for purchase or rent. In proportional terms this is a sizeable increase in property for the area, yet begs the question as to what exactly these new inhabitants are supposed to do with themselves regarding sustainable employment once they arrive? The village pasty shop will not provide work for them all.

And yet, affordable housing schemes in areas of the country in which might more realistically be inclined to live and work are at an absymally low level. Ed Miliband this week unveiled Labour's policy plans for trying to tackle the woes of 'Generation Rent', which has seen a 13% rise in average cost of rent since 2010. His proposals stipulate a ban on landlords imposing more than one rent rise a year; a ceiling cap on those rises in line with inflation and/or market rates; the installing of 3-year tenancy agreements; and scrapping letting agency fees.

At surface level, these look like commendable ambitions yet, like his energy price policy, smacks of a child dipping his toe in the sea and scampering away as the waves chase him up the beach. It's a welcome start but self-confidence will need to develop before wading out any deeper where he's more likely to be knocked down.

Any punitive aims to restrict landlords will undoubtedly be circumvented and costs routed back to tenants. Instead, far more council properties should be built, as Simon Jenkins on 'Question Time' said, by renovating and fully utilising existing inner-city properties lying either derelict or empty, rather than spreading out still further onto greenfield land.

In London, instead of this deranged hoisting up of 'luxury apartment' high rises like halberds across the city battlefield, developers need to be incentivised to provide property that the average person trying to live and work in London might actually be able to afford. (This week I became aware of a reality show on Channel 4 'How to get a council house', which I assumed, until I was informed otherwise, would be the latest morality plunge-pool whereby desperate applicants regale their sob story before being put before the public vote to determine the lucky winner of a council house in Tower Hamlets.)

As a fully-fledged member of 'Generation Rent', I welcome any political shuffling towards at least trying to address the worsening problems. At the same time however, I cannot help but feel that the primary aspiration of our parents and grandparents to own property as a central driver of social mobility has, for many, already fallen from the branches of reality. An incremental shift to the continental Europe mode of renting and parental cohabitation would appear to be the only realistic progression, not only economically, but for the engrained psychological expectations of the younger generations.

The instant hyperbole and scorn poured out by the Conservatives, trying to douse Miliband's latest announcement, is indicative of just how redundant any hope of a serious debate on the issue has become. The idea of any rent caps is 'Venezuelan' whilst the notion of freezing energy prices of 'Marxist'; as though everyone should bray in mindless agreement with the derogatory deployment of both these labels.

It is this moribund level of debate that contaminates politics and encourages apathy. In the same way as the current cross-party demolition squad zeroing-in on Nigel Farage and UKIP. It may be open season on UKIP - with one 'fruitcake' after another popping up to be whacked down like a prejudiced mole - but the juvenile efforts being made by left wing fringe groups and the mainstream media to try and discredit them by force can only strengthen the stubborn resolve of the rising numbers of those who find empathy with their policies.

Confessions of a Revolutionary Anarchist in the City of London - Part 2

Read Part 1 here

I feel it incumbent on me to clarify, just for the record and before we begin, that I am not some crazed fanatic or a lunatic extremist whose vision of utopia is for everyone to be left scrabbling around in rags under tarpaulin amidst the meagre wreckage of their once fulsome possessions; all whilst being demonstrably free from the tyranny of state rule and humdrum grind of capitalist oppression. I’m not advocating that we be free with nothing rather than enslaved with things.

Merely, I aim to derail the speeding locomotive of vacuous valorisation that impoverishes the soul and disintegrates the morality and the spirit of the masses. I want to inspire others to join with me to shatter the ruthless economic despotism that holds industry (or, more appropriately, finance) to be everything and men to be subservient.

If that worm Alan Greenspan’s driver of a healthy economy can be said to be the steady growth of worker insecurity, then it’s up to a Guevara of the City to provoke these insecure antibodies to attack and weaken the central nervous system with a cancerous temerity.

In the words of Karl Marx – ‘the task is not to understand the world, but to change it’. Of course, to understand you need only rely on your own mind, but to affect change you very often need comrades, brothers-in-arms, who will band together with you in your cause. It’s axiomatic that any radical movement will be seen as more legitimate the more are aligned behind it, as opposed to being dismissed as the ramblings of lone political obsessive.

Therefore, the first recruits, my trusty lieutenants if you want to get militaristic about it, are my two housemates Noam and Pierre. We met at university and quickly gravitated together with amicable adhesive only born out of the insecure telepathy of misfits. We shared a sense of moral outrage and righteous anger about the economic meltdown that we rightly felt had been poured like slurry onto our generation, cementing the generally shite prospects for anyone who hadn’t already bought into the stable career/mortgage/young family template.

We would sit around on interminable evenings getting stoned and listening to ‘intellectual’ German electronica like Tangerine Dream and Neu! We would lament the dearth of any prominent left wing movement in the country and would ripple the air with disparagement regarding any ‘media lefties’ such as Billy Bragg (“he’s got a big house in the country, he’s a cunt”), and Russell Brand (“exactly how many TV producer dicks did he have to suck?!”)

At the time it was often mooted that we would migrate our angry sentiment into solid action by some kind of idealistic alchemy, but inevitably time conspired to unpick the loose stitches of these intentions.

Together we travelled to London, tanked up on rotgut red wine, to take part in the protests against the tuition fee rises, glorying in the adrenaline at Milbank ‘Tory HQ’. I remember thinking, ‘finally something’s happening, this is it, this is France in 1968, this is the spark of the revolution’. I couldn’t have been happier if, instead of dropping fire extinguishers on their fellow students, the frenzied mob had brought out David Cameron’s head and paraded it through Westminster on a stick.

Upon graduating it was inevitable that we would end up drawn together in London, if anything out of a mutual dismay at the prospect of having to forge strong relationships with any other people. Times have changed now though, and despite the camaraderie often taking on the same forms, I cannot shirk the feeling that for them it was all a student affectation, ill-fitting clothes to be shaken off once the real professional world beckoned. I often feel, not that I lack their intellect or their maturity, but instead that their purported ideals have been contorted with the malleability of insecurity, to fit the expectations of the society that prompts them.

Noam, insecure about his weight yet unhindered by the initiative to do anything about it, was always a stereotypical ‘nerd’ and destined to work in an IT company talking exclusively in code and metadata tongues.

Pierre, tall and with his prominent, angular features, was always more adept at relating to people, impressing them with what I recognised as ‘false charm’, and generally ‘getting on’. He had accepted a graduate scheme programme at Deloitte, to which I had been mortified, until he mollified me with assurances that his anti-establishment credentials remained intact but that every underground movement needed someone with first-hand experience of how the ‘overground’ operated, and with this I concurred.

At university he had wallowed in the nihilism of Nietzsche, affecting a carefully measured dosage of scorn and derision for just about everybody. He would wear charity shop tweed jackets worn thin at the elbows and stroll around campus smoking with a cigarette holder like Hunter Thompson.

The problem was though, the changes I recognised in Pierre were nowhere near as subtle as they were in Noam. Noam still professed to be trying to mastermind some kind of ‘super-virus’ that could infiltrate the security systems of major financial institutions and wreak untold data damage. Either that or he was spending a lot of time in his room watching porn. I can never really be sure…

Pierre, on the other (cleaner) hand, had got himself a French girlfriend Marie, and together they spent most evenings in his room watching pretentious Godard films like ‘A Bout De Souffle’, listening to The Smiths, reading Oscar Wilde, and, I imagined, engaging in the most intellectual sex of any couple in London. They reminded me in many ways of the hatefully portentous Kooples fashion adverts that were enough to make me step out in front of any bus that was emblazoned with them. As I write this, I cannot help but see Pierre as having been a little too taken in by the high-flying business world. He has even started keeping bottled water in the fridge. Sometimes I think I hate him.

On the subject of hate, I find myself beset on occasion with irrational bursts of resentment that leap like geysers from the firmament of my composure. This morning’s bus, for example, was swollen with people insulating themselves from the migraine of boredom within micro-worlds of mp3 players, ebooks, and smartphones. Such efforts were futile however, as a fat tuba of a woman blared away into her phone whilst her obnoxious offspring blew raspberries louder and louder against the window as though trying to compete with his voluminous mother.

It remains a source of resentful admiration I hold for such people that they can proceed through the world so strikingly oblivious to the blatant ire they provoke from those around them. As she bleated away about the status of one vintage clothes store over another I could not help but remain perplexed at how it seems those with very least to say of any value always seem to say it the loudest.

At times of such crimson rage I begin to long for a new Stalin or Mao to hammer down these nails of irritation into the hard wood floor of a totalitarian state. Or if they still insisted on rearing brats and spouting inane platitudes on crowded public transport then they should face the risk of being taken out by secret agents of the state who would patrol such quarters and summarily executed.

Alas, I digress onto facetious authoritarian tracts of thinking, and I would be advised to veer back on course before I begin to compromise my convictions prematurely.

That evening, I broke the news of my dismissal to my compadres, who appeared were a little bemused by my rambunctious reaction to such a perceived misfortune. Pierre made a muted inquiry about me being able to pay rent, but aside from that we were all agreed that such a development was positive in that I could now dedicate my time to the revolutionary uprising which I feel firmly must be approaching fast in the slipstream of my personal circumstances.

With my fevered encouragement, Noam expostulated further on the ‘super-virus’ he was concocting like some kind of cyber Dr. Frankenstein just waiting for an opportunistic lightning bolt to enervate his creation with life.

“It works as a stealth attack, these thousands of micro-viruses proliferate through the mainframe of the data system and implant themselves like barnacles on the hull of a ship. Then, once we know everything is in place, we hit detonate.”

...And watch as chaos reigns. Maximum data loss, cataclysmic fiscal losses, the banks would be caught completely off-guard and once and for all people would recognise the futility of the system in which they have been conditioned to place such begrudging yet tacit faith, reduced to little more than placid units of consumption with our trans fats, air pollution, ISA savings accounts, 5% mortgages, digital footprints, new fashion seasons, buy-one-get-one-free, incentive schemes, happiness defined by wealth…. Enough. The fight back starts here…