Dylan Malik Orchard's Blog, page 8

Unnoticed Art

Sometimes art struggles, even very good art. It emerges from the source with pure intent, hopeful that it contains some value, some message or potential to provoke thought that can and will make a difference even as it’s shared as a passive act of promotion. But then it falters, it finds an audience that circles and murmurs, offering praise or disdain with a detached separation, happy to admire or dismiss but still unaffected by the work. If that was always the case then it’s even more tangible now. Take something like The Wire, universally praised, endlessly discussed and held up as a totemic awareness of the state of the communities depicted. Brandished as whip for scouring the guilty conscience and framing the villains of the piece. The real people speak, actors give lectures, the producer meets the President, the whole enterprise becomes a watchword for the injustice of a system which even in itself bows down to take a measure of blame when confronted with the representation of it’s own actions.

But then nothing. The real people speak and nothing, the actors give lectures and nothing, the producer meets the President and nothing, guilt is recognised and even in its clarity continues to be ignored. The issue at the heart of it, the driving force of it, the message of it is marginalised and all that’s left is the circling curiosity of the crowd. We all get to enjoy the purchase of awareness, we all get to know what the problems are and add the understanding to the inventory of our possessions. Another act of ownership made abstract from problems which no one ever admits their share in, at least not enough to do anything about them. It’s defeating and not at all unique. Almost every book, film, show, exhibition or talk which contains any form of unspoken plea for action and change becomes muted into an artefact to be hoarded. A prize for those who mistake interest for concern and awareness for understanding. All the while leaving the same handful, the same struggling few to actually work towards solutions.

That’s understandable in most. After all from such an absolute distance what can be gleaned from artistic enlightenment other than a rarefied sense of awareness? The message exists exactly because the separation makes the truth so incomprehensible and blurred never mind the limitations of waking up every day and facing a world which, even before understanding it, seems already to be defeating our better selves. For others though that explanation can’t exist, any more than whatever value they see in their own indifferent, or at least shallow, understanding. There are those who can act and don’t, those who should be driven and aren’t, those who should beat themselves for their own culpability but instead do nothing but smilingly nod at their guilt. I suppose, if nothing else, the good art creates a hammer to use against them. A reminder that, even though they fail through their own lack of effort, they were warned, they were shown and there is no excuse for what came next. That’s a familiar outcome though, not much more. Anger is already the currency we have, resentment is already the comfort and at least once it’d be good to see those underdog attempts at levelling the field replaced by a positive passion for what can be done and what is allowed to be done. Otherwise the art that attempts to translate loses value and what comes next will be beyond culture, for better or worse.

The Primal Country

The US is hard wired to a violent fixation. What other country since Rome can trace it’s own existence so clearly in flowing lines of physical conflict, oppression, panicked escape and reactionary vengeance? The earliest colonists were running from a continent riven by religious conflict and into a self-proclaimed new world where the borders were to be re-drawn by survivalist intent, the gun held not as a right but as a perceived necessity for existence. And like Rome the first boatloads become almost deified, an active denial of the eclectic nature of their intents – after all, no founding myth can be honest.

A nation was born by revolt, not for freedom – the US was never Haiti except in it’s own blurred and militant view of it’s self and it grew by genocide which was with every shot veiled with the comforting blankets of self-justification. Strength made it right, God made it right, civilisation made it right but an itchy trigger finger made it necessary above all else because the only identity to be had was one of force.

Slavery fuelled it, more righteous acts loudly proclaimed over the inhuman other shipped in to lend their blood and bones to the foundation of something that needed to exist because it needed to exist. Not towards some glorious end but because the violence had to be expressed. An export from an old world overflowing with it perhaps, a gladiator’s arena for the suddenly aloof excesses of a Europe obsessed since millennia before by the power of it’s own aggression.

A civil war fought to retain the right to stamped down human foundations for the land of the free and more and more violence. Ideas always secondary, concepts always divine only as far as they lent themselves to the ongoing quest to fight, oppress and expand.

More wars, endless wars, everywhere – no worse than any other continent or country but untempered, unsullied by the march of history which turned all other founding myths into functional self-perception. Rome slaughtered Gauls long enough ago for the violence to be honestly separated from the result by minds too young and too short lived to tie the two together. The Mongols who flooded through the great Empire were defined by that same impulse of the violent as the inescapable but they’re long gone too, subsumed into a far from peaceful history but one that has at least had time to assimilate it’s own fallacies of civility. Only the US stands in our working memory as a clear presentation of an earlier state, a flourishing human expression of cruelty born out of some necessity that but for kneejerk expressions met with tired horror we’ve come to abhor as alien no matter how common it may still be. Only the US is there to remind us of the megadeaths of history which brought us all to where we are, the Imperial equivalent of re-enactors spending a damp weekend in a field playing at being legionnaires or nomadic horsemen.

There’s no reflection here on the people of the country. Although from across the world we all search active shooters and twenty-four hour rolling murders for proof of who the inhabitants of the last conquering Empire are. People are people though, undefined by their country of origin when held alone, even if collectively the nature of the nation formed by all origins, all crimes and all acts does manifest into some sort of whole. A whole gone full circle now, revisiting the violent tendencies drained from the old world back upon it with smiling vengeance. Wars, music, film, art, games – the country founded by the necessary violence of it’s own existence reflects it all back on us. Daily trying to sanitise it, mythologise it and rationalise it – turning their own macro version of the Rape of the Sabine women into a blessing – looking for the victims to finally nod that yes, it was all for the best, or if they refuse demanding their silence in perpetuity. An easy desire to disdain if only we weren’t all as susceptible to it ourselves but for the jaded and comfortable ignorance blessed unto us by the dusty detachment of centuries.

What the US will be, what pedestal or grave it will elevate or entomb it’s vital sense of violence on to is now and for centuries to come unknown. All anyone can do is wait and see what lies history leads the giant to choose for itself and how bitter the truth beneath them will taste when the acrid burn of the first experience fades away.

UOWN – Yes, you too can be a profiteering absentee landlord…

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways…

UOWN, founded by Shaan and Haaris Ahmed, is a brand new model for vulture landlordism.

I came across them by spotting one of their ads online and, feeling fairly certain I wouldn’t like it, clicking on through to see what they were about. The basic gist is that they use crowdfunding to act as surrogate landlords for anyone who fancies investing, or at least the (Ahmed) family business the Parklane Group does. So far so unsurprising, the UK housing market at the moment is dominated by profiteering investors whose only conception of their tenants is as figures jiggling about on a bank balance (or minor irritants, if there’s more money to be made by moving them on). What sets UOWN aside though, or at least what initially highlighted them from the rest, is the pawing theft of vaguely left wing phrasing they’re using to frame their get rich scheme. Their website spiel is loaded with terms like ‘city fat cats’ and calls to beat back those dastardly ‘privileged few’ in the name of the 99% – all by making yourself a low level imitation of those exact same people.

 

 

Investments potentially start at an affordable £20 which is, seemingly, just about the only point at which their sales pitch tallies with the reality of what they do although it’s a fairly safe bet that such low level investors aren’t going to be reaping much of the promised rewards. And it is all about the rewards after all, while they rattle off mantras of equality, power to the people and ‘democratising’ the process all it really boils down to is a quick shot for the greedy and the gullible to add a further dimension to the sticky fingered exploitation of the UK housing system.

Pretty much the sole mention I could find of tenants on their site was a vague allusion to a property management company that would fix ‘leaky pipes’ – a management company which I’m assuming is Parklane given the family links. And I’m fairly sure that anyone who’s lived in privately rented accommodation can vouch for how reliable agents can be, especially when there’s no direct landlord to talk to but a inaccessible mess of investors who’ll never know or care what happens with the property.

What you do get plenty of mentions of though is the potential returns, with payments guaranteed before a property is even purchased to be let out. And if there’s one thing you can have faith in it’s that tenants will be gouged to a profitable level regardless of all else.

These guys are far from a unique example of the property as detached investment trend and in the way they manage their holdings they may not even be that bad but that does nothing to negate the crappiness of their model. Their ‘for the people’ nonsense is a paper thin front for the company backing them whose profits run into the millions, their equality and democracy lines are a hollow boon to the basic model of greed that they’re operating on and the potential for further alienating and exploiting tenants inherent in it all is, throughout, a barely mentioned side note.

The ‘democratisation’ of housing doesn’t need to come from enabling more and more profiteers, it needs to come from opening up access to people who need it. What the Ahmed’s are doing isn’t serving any ‘99%’, it’s a cheap route for the greedy and the indifferent to try and shunt their way up to the 1% and with promises of returns in the background it’s only going to end as another stick to beat money out of people who just need somewhere to live. Stealing the language of people trying to fight against this sort of parasitism is just the icing on the cynical, greedy marketing cake.

Toxic Internet

Outrage about online abuse seems to be the erratically undulating fixation of the media and politicians at the moment. Whether you watch the display of professed outrage and think of cynical opportunism or earnest determination to moderate the social discourse moral indignation about such abuse remains an increasingly prominent feature of the commentariat and news cycle. Which is as it should be, really.

Our political (and social) landscape is a toxic place, abuse is ubiquitous and pretty much everyone who talks about pretty much anything is liable to find themselves on the receiving end of it. There’s no doubting either that as it’s fed into by sexism, racism, anti-semitism and general bigotry the force and prolificness of it ratchets up too. All the way to the point where someone like Jo Cox can be murdered while a hundred others, with minimal attention, put up with daily threats of violence and death, never mind the more routine insults and attacks. With that in mind it’d be nice to think that the voices of outrage which echo out the loudest were, as a rare show of society wide disgust, setting out a universal line in the sand which everyone could acknowledge and accept as one which we don’t want to cross. Unfortunately though there’s not much reason to believe that’s the case.

Instead the issue of abuse seems to be distilled into a commodity almost. Not by the victims, I’ll add that straight off, but by a wider political and media community which, in some cases, seems unable to simply condemn without trying to score some marginal profit or moral kudos off of it all.

Online abuse, online threats of violence and general hostility are societal issues. They effect everyone to one degree or another. There’s no opinion so mundane, no act so bland and innocuous that mentioning them on Twitter won’t result in some form of hostility from one corner or another. If you use Twitter, or any other social media platform, you probably know that already. Insults and threats are made mundane with the prevailing attitude being that you either suck it up or give up. The lazy response to any complaints usually being that ‘it is what it is’, a judgement commonly delivered by the perpetrators themselves. Work through the disparate demographics of social media and you can see the abuse build up too as racism, sexism and bigotry are all met with the same shrugging acceptance by people who usually aren’t in a position to be a victim of any of them.

It’s the ubiquity of this sort of thing that makes the mainstream discussion of abuse seem hollow really. There’s not a trace of doubt that the attacks on people like Diane Abbott and Laura Kuenssberg should be acknowledged and condemned but there’s plenty of doubt to be had about the way it’s done. With the former it’s often half-hearted and laced with sniggering disdain, with the latter it seems almost directly fuelled by political point scoring against a political left which is imagined to be far more coherent than it is. In neither case is it approached as the sort of society wide issue that it is. Some of the loudest voices of complaint seem to infinitely prefer recognisable totems for their outrage to genuine efforts against something which is increasingly universal in it’s effects.

It’s an instinct, I think, which has become inherent to the media and politics these days. Real moral outrage is consistently subjugated to individual narratives. You can see the same happening in the US with almost every declaration Trump makes – like his recent NFL nonsense. What started with a protest against the treatment of black Americans has ended with Il Douche picking more or less personal fights with people he doesn’t like and the mainstream opposition gleefully ‘taking a knee’ against him without any real awareness or interest in what made Colin Kaepernick do it in the first place. With both issues the narratives have increasingly become ones about a small cast of individuals rather than real, society wide problems. Something I’m pretty certain that none of the oft cited, recognisable, victims would want never mind it being of actual use in confronting the issues at hand.

As things stand now, as the mainstream narrative appears to be playing out, this story has a long way to run. By myopically framing arguments about online abuse with individuals who are quite clearly classified in the reporting as members of one ‘side’ or another there’s no room for anything to be solved. The perpetrators get a constant free pass to justify their actions by their objections to the individual. With a shrug of ‘I know it’s not right’ there’s always a ‘but…’ allowed to follow it up. A completely hollow defence, no doubt, but still one which has been allowed to fester into being. And while commentators eagerly lay the blame for the abuse on the faction that they don’t belong too it’s always set up as an adversarial fight – whose bigots are worse, whose death threats merit more column inches, whose Trolls are nastier. A line you can only really push if you yourself are safely out of the groups likely to be effected. Whereas what we really need is a wider acknowledgement and blanket condemnation of the realities of abusive behaviour. Not because it’s reached a recognisable name but because it reaches millions of people, repeatedly, every day. And in all it’s forms, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic and broadly bigoted it’s a problem for all of us. Not a story we need to be told about any given politician, journalist, celebrity or sportsperson.

When We Loved

You cornered me with love

a contortion into hate

between what you said

and what you did

who you claimed

and who you were

a chaotic contradiction

out of which I ended up believing

that to control

was to care

and to fear

was to feel

You wielded over me all the power I longed for

through force you shaped my self

while I wished to have a different form

but incapable I gave myself over to you

to make me what I thought was better

but which turned out to be just you,

your image,

your dream

and your ideal

broken imitations

of who I used to be

and corrupted lies

of who I should be

In the end I broke our love

or so you said

yanking at frayed ropes which had bound me

trying to drag me back into your world

as I sought out a new one

I’d like to say the power is mine now,

that my hands took over

but I know that’s not true

over every move I make

lingers your so called love

eager to recount

another cruel fable

of who I used to be

and who I should be

Time stands at my side though

the time I need to forget

and regrow

beyond the chaotic contradiction

of your love

A Connection, I Suppose

This body politic is infected

broken down by a pathogen that’s half self aware

half selfish

insidious in nature

consuming in scope

and proud to say it’ll get us

before any other disease will

a form of connection

I suppose

This country’s economic ghetto

is under the thumb

held in stasis by a financial Cosa Nostra

maintaining order through exploitation

and tradition through corruption

with ageing Dons counting cash

assuring the hungry that it only gets worse

when new gangs arrive

holding us safe from invasion,

only to kill us themselves

a form of connection

I suppose

This home and castle

has a Lord

claiming Prima Nocta

to fuck us

and calling it Right

because who put up the walls that keep the enemy out?

Who swings the sword against the outsider

even before we’ve heard their name

or had a chance to know why they came

attention drawn away

by cap doffing obedience

to Regal right

a form of connection

I suppose

This story has no ending

not the way it’s told

the dulcit tones just carry on

until the body’s cold

always reassuring

that the teller’s got it right

always disavowing

any poor, unknown insight

It’s words are getting louder

it’s silences obscure

and the chance of thinking round it

ain’t quite there any more

a form of connection

I suppose

But we still have one reminder

of what we were and are

beneath all of the diseases

and Mafiosi power

we’re the one’s who live life

not the ones who say it loud,

not the ones who run it

or build walls

and steal crowns

and sooner rather than later

the body will react

locals will stop paying dues

all that bowing we’ll retract

we’ll find the final fullstop

start on another page

and all of those connections

will be from a dying age

An Easy Discovery

It wasn’t caged

it did not hide

nor deny it’s rightful place

It wasn’t new

it wasn’t found

it came through no new grace

It wasn’t yours to gift to me

nor any bodies else’s

But still I found it

though never hoped

to discover long lost faces

In memories I saw it pass

in fleeting, nervous moves

in lonely hopes

and doubtful moods

I clung to unseen truths

And only now

in silence’s maw

do I finally see

that one true missing aspect

was all that was meant to be

Charlotesville & Violence

The reaction to events in Charlottesville has been a major part of the news and social media cycle recently. Rightly so, although it’s worth remembering that banner head events like this are just the peaks of what can and does happen on a daily basis throughout the US and here in the UK too. It’s size makes it more prominent, but perhaps not massively more important than the daily acts of intolerance and hatred that some people set out to encourage and take part in.

One of the strands of reaction, one which I find perhaps more confusing than any, is the condemnation of those people who set out to physically resist the Fascist presence on the streets. It’s not the loudest line, fortunately, but it does have enough prominence to be a disturbing one so I figured I’d throw in my 2p’s worth of opinion on it.

I don’t understand how, or why, people try to analyse physical action as a political or philosophical act, I’m not sure everyone involved in it does at any rate. Even if you believe that some Fash or fellow travellers can be talked to and brought back from where they are (and I do) that’s a moot point when it comes to actual, street level action. The only question there is what effect their presence has on a community and what measures are needed to limit it, I don’t understand how anyone with any experience of the world can honestly try to break that down into a comfortable political talking point to be chewed over with sorry recriminations from a safe distance. When these people go out to march, or more usually just act up in their day to day lives, they’re not setting out to convert people, or convince people of their righteousness, they’re trying to assert their power, they do it solely to make themselves feel bigger and to intimidate and threaten the people around them. Saying no violence in return as a personal position might feel morally right to an individual, it might even be morally right to an individual but it’s still a myopic position and a selfish one to impose on other people.

Try to impose the same thinking on others, imagine it’s your family, your friends or your kids who are walking around that area when the Fash are out. Imagine it’s them being told they deserve to die, that they’re less than human, that they should be lynched or thrown in gas chambers. Imagine that it’s them being physically attacked for the colour of their skin, or their religion or for believing that Fash thinking is wrong. And that’ll all happen even without them being involved in any counter protest, it’ll happen just because they exist. It happens every day in fact. To condemn people who take physical action in return, or who defend those who are attacked in that way is, tbh, a fucking disgusted moral imposition to make on anyone especially if you’re taking your stand from a safe distance where you’re fairly sure you won’t face the same.

I’ve posted a statement from a former member of the clergy above (click to enlarge). To me that’s a truly decent position for any pacifist to take if they hold their beliefs honestly. You don’t have to fetishise violence or think it’s good or get a buzz off of it. You just have to accept that your moral stand (if that’s really what it is) isn’t viable or reasonable for everyone and perhaps even acknowledge that, if it were, it wouldn’t just be the philosophically peaceful counter-protestors who’d get a beating for it. If Fash felt they could act with impunity on the streets, whenever and wherever they are, it’d be whole communities who’d have to live with it. Day in and day out.

Suicide and Cowardice

I’ve never listened to Linkin Park, or Korn for that matter, and long and varied as I hope my life’ll be I hold out zero desire to experience either band in the course of it. So when I touch on Chester Bennington’s suicide and the reaction to it here I’m not coming to it from any particular fan-ish or grieving angle, more a personal one given my own experiences with the suicidal and the depressed.

Chester’s death didn’t really come on to my radar to be honest. Someone I’d never heard of killed himself, sad but no more interesting or relevant to me than the deaths of anyone else whose time comes before it perhaps should. What has popped up on social media within my usual blank faced staring at the screen though is the angry reaction from Korn’s Brian Welch.

“Honestly, Chester’s an old friend who we’ve hung with many times, and I have friends who are extremely close to him, but this is truly pissing me off! How can these guys send this message to their kids and fans?! I’m sick of this suicide shit! I’ve battled depression/mental illness, and I’m trying to be sempethetic, but it’s hard when you’re pissed! Enough is enough! Giving up on your kids, fans, and life is the cowardly way out!!! [sic]”

There’s been a strong response to the above, even though he’s now apparently deleted it from Facebook and while many others have already touched on the feelings I share towards it I figure it does no harm to put it all in my own words. Some lazy, cheap headlines reported the statement as an outright attack on the man rather than one couched in a more personal disappointment from someone whose own experiences, apparently, have some comparison to Bennington’s. Some of the initial outrage was mediated when people bothered to look beyond the misleading hackery that they first saw. Even if the statement had been nothing more than third rate editors decided to label it as though the aggressive response wasn’t, in my opinion, necessarily fair.

Suicide, and to a degree the depression that can precede it, can be taken in two ways and the closer you are to the individual in question the truer that becomes. On the one hand the factual realities of mental illness are, as any decent person can realise, tragic ones. People who drift so far into their problems/condition really shouldn’t be judged or attacked for the manifestations of them, any more than a victim of more clearly physical disorders should. On the other hand though mental health problems, while they may be illnesses, aren’t as easily quarantined into disdain as physical ailments. It’s easy to section off a physical disease from the person afflicted, it’s easy to hate what the former does while never for a second losing love for the latter. But with mental health the illness can become so insidiously wired into the behaviour of the individual that it’s hard, or even near impossible, to be objective about it.

From my own personal experience I’ve known individuals who’ve committed suicide and been driven to the point of attempting or openly considering it. And my reaction, like Brian Welch’s, wasn’t exactly as detached and understanding as some of those attacking him might have liked it to be. In fact at times it’s been downright bitter and disdainful and even if I didn’t term their actions as ‘cowardly’ I can’t deny that my views weren’t much more friendly or considerate. I was angry at them, or more accurately at my inability to help them, or the world for leading them to a place where the hope I wanted for them became such an impossibility in their eyes. I was even disgusted by them at times, although never openly, because I wanted their problems to become a matter of choice. Helpless in the face of them I wanted it to be a simple matter of personal strength to escape that trap they’d fallen into. Much as I told myself that it was the manifestations of an illness and not the nature of a person I was dealing with that was a hard line to maintain in day to day life, where that truth wasn’t just considered as a ‘right’ thing but was tested as a daily requirement.

Now, with a measure of hindsight and more comfortably separated from the more visceral immediacy of things I can certainly say that my reactions could have and should have been better but at the time, as I experienced the loss, or was around the destructive force of people being driven into that extreme darkness, I reacted as a human being being effected by someone close to them. I reacted, I think, naturally for the circumstances. Which isn’t to say I didn’t do what I felt to be best to help them but it is to say that the understanding, benign feelings I would have liked to have felt towards them and within myself were near impossible to maintain.

And that’s an important thing to remember when it comes to comments like Brian Welch’s. His insensitivity, his cruelty even, weren’t the sum total of his broader reaction to mental health, they were a reaction to a death which to everyone who isn’t in a place where suicide becomes a necessity will always seem avoidable. They were a reaction to the loss of a friend who, as everyone whose been around similar situations will know, will always leave him wondering whether there was some way to stop it from happening. That they seem so personal, so vitriolic is a testament to the nature of the illness rather than the failings of the man himself. As I said, depression is insidious, consuming and winds its way into every aspect of who a person is. To hate it is, in part, to always risk the act of hating it’s victim too. And as abhorrent as that may seem from a distance, as much as we may all want to be the sound voice of reason which can judge the condition as wholly separate from the person, the closer you are the harder that gets to do.

More Art

More art, all drawn in London over the past month or so.