Archive for October, 2007
The Imagined Village: Update — Lost in England
The Imagined Village’s Myspace is a roaring success! They only signed up on 26 September and as of today they’ve already gathered 77 friends (including Tom)! That must be nearly all the villagers in England. Or all the participants. And I’m sure things will pick up during their November tour — concert dates to include question and answer sessions — by the end of which they’ll have raised a veritable duststorm of popular discussion among The People and have a workable popular definition of what “the English identity” is up and running in no time!
Posted by Neil
on October 19, 2007 at 5:45 pm
Tags: Music, Regionalism, antiquarianism, ventriloquism
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Provincial Swimming
WMFU’s Beware of the Blog yesterday featured a video from Rustic Hinge and the Provincial Swimmers, whose joyful embracing of ruralism was coupled with its despoilation through generic counterculturalism plus cross-dressing (whether in tribute to the antient custom of molly dancing).
The session that Rustic Hinge did for John Peel hasn’t made it on to The Perfumed Garden yet.
I’d like to think that Roger Deakin (obtuaries here and here) was inspired by Rustic Hinge’s provincial swimming as he researched his swimmer’s journey in advance of writing Waterlog.
Posted by Neil
on October 18, 2007 at 7:01 am
Tags: Counterculture, Individualism, Music, Sound, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism
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Hauntiquarianism in The Arts — The Imagined Village: “World Music” Celebrities Fly-Tipping a Revisioned Socialist National Culture in an Imaginary Rural Setting to Bolster Regionalism
Just when you think realism’s canvased its last audience, there’s a rough Halloo! as the media summons itself and gathers round yet another mytho-mimetic Englishness folly purporting to represent all of us in miniature. Herewith, The Imagined Village, on Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD-derived Real World Records. An early record sleeve boasts a mock-up of a brown, Highways Agency-approved heritage tourism signpost, which positions their product with excellent precision.
The Imagined Village identifies ‘the village’ as a recoverable national asset and seeks to tease out the essential village in even the most ghastly urban space by promoting the edginess of hidden histories and reanimating failed communitarianism in the only terms ‘we’ seem able to understand. The Imagined Village is cultivating the imaginary village as a site of contest, giving an ideal topos mostly placed in ‘the rural’ an aura of urban liminality. You might as well say that ‘the urban’ resides in the middle of rural England. Both positions are equally idiotic — as is interrogating one by applying the other as a text, lever, clamp or electrode. My dubjective antennae are drooping, stilled by non-sensation.
Turn left into The Imagined Village tourist destination
Before the off, there have been so many cogent criticisms of the continuing trend in English/British social life to revert to the archetypal, ideal topos of ‘the village’ in circumstances of distress, whether ironically to destroy the myth or in seeking empowerment through reclaimation, that I can hardly be bothered to take them to task over it. Read Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country (1985) for starters.
The reimagining of English folk music as Angliana has been a long time coming. It’s been a good four years since Jah Wobble’s English Roots Music. Even longer since Professor Brian Short’s editorial recontextualisation of rurality beyond ‘the village’ in The English Rural Community: image and analysis (1992). Taking its name from Georgina Boye’s excellent book, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (1994), The New Imagined Village, as I can’t help but think of it, limps in last. Full marks to them though for naming their ventriloquising after Boyes’ book, in which she agrees with a 19th century critic of folklore who said that folkism is “a fraud, a delusion, a myth” and “simply a name for our ignorance”. The Imagined Village is an imaginary community arts outing, an imaginary community memory project, an imaginary identity forum, facilitated to death by a handful of Eighties performers plus some newer ones, including:—
Benjamin Zephaniah
Billy Bragg
Chris Wood
Eliza Carthy
Johnny Kalsi
Martin Carthy
Paul Weller
Sheila Chandra
Simon Emmerson
The Copper Family
The Gloworms
Tiger Moth
Trans-Global Underground
Tunng
As if The Good, The Bad and the Queen (2007) wasn’t a revolting enough spectacle, with its metonymical music hall reimagining of the masses as full-on stoned prole metropolitan intellectuals — or was its sparseness about silencing the flow of sounds and voices the better to hear Albarn trill? — its cultural retrenchment and its hoarse Cassandraean wail of warning disguised as a paean. And isn’t the music hall invariably adduced when songwriters and popsters with pretensions to Englishness add the detuned pianoforte into their repertoire? As if Iain Sinclair’s increasingly provincial property pages hadn’t so effectively subborned space and community histories into narrative outcomes in the unfashionable commuter envelope. Disappearing even further up his own disappearance. As if class hadn’t been sufficiently reified in its unenviable non-metropolitan place by such meterorically entitled critical theorists as those working on The Idler’s hideous crap towns project. I think we’ve all cottoned on to the idea that these creatures actually mean crap people: povs, chavs, oaves, cider mums, with their ghastly wrong clothes and extraordinary manners and speech that the culturally entitled love to approximate nasally.
Now we have to contend with ‘classless’ — but fully racialised and gendered — artistes from The Past ventriloquising The Idiom of The People back at us, much as their dead mentor Cecil Sharp did with the tired corpse of a Cambridgeshire peasant shrouded in a shepherd’s smock to hide its horrid puppet-master’s diddling fingers.
The IV website is pretty anaemic: headings in copperplate, text in accessible non-serif, light pink background. The banner image is a faded blue willow-pattern print effect representing ‘the rural’ as what’s left of an open space on the edges of a heavily built-up urban area, with blocks of flats in the background, a jet flying overhead, what appears to be a lad in a shell-suit claiming through walking a small hill that could be a long barrow. The low wall running round the boundary of this open space is perhaps a piece of 1950s or 60s landscaping or maybe an survival of an earlier ruralist development statement made during the emparkment of an earlier village demolished so as not to ruin the view from a nearby country house. The policeman in a high-vis vest inspecting a burnt-out motor in the right foreground is clearly not preventing crime.
Even as I write, cadres of hauntologists and other more minor cultural figures are literally sweating ectoplasm trying to reconfigure, degrade and mash-up the past and make things better now by renarrating decades’ worth of educational material, antiquarian fictions, future sounds from the past, signifincant conjunctions of this and that, and whatnot. And some of them — notably Ghostbox — are doing a grand job, too. Clearly, the more graphically minded among the hauntologists were not asked to participate or refused and thinned out and the job went to a less switched on motherfucker.
A glimpse of home in The Imagined Village
I give standing ovations to affective imaginings and I’m all for letting the voices out/in/through — but not like this. The Imagined Village says it’s engaging with the great debate on “what constitutes the English identity”. Well, listen to this. The English identity envisaged by Billy Bragg’s mates in the Labour Government is an archive of data taken from citizens that, under the increasingly doomed-yet-inevitable identity card scheme, the state would own and sell back to the individuals who provided it under licence.
Bragg, like Cecil Sharp before him, is ventriloquising wildly. He’s using The Imagined Village project as a way to underwrite the Government’s failed regionalisation project, thinking that given people’s love of history, folklore and place — apparent in the popularity of Time Team, etc., they’ll eventually come round to appreciating the new territories of the invented regions. His imagined village is a reanimated Festival of Britain search for the best — a local identity competition with the usual penalties for not joining in. It’s habitus, but without the fun element.
Bragg supports the economic and cultural regionalistion of England, which was soundly rejected by the plain villagers of England in the only direct vote on the subject so far in the north-east, but which is currently going full steam ahead and overseen by the spookily generically titled Government Offices Network, which covers the Government offices for the regions — effectively the regional civil service — that administer the unelected regional development assemblies and the regional development agencies they serve.
What historical English regionalism looks like: a flag for East Anglia, invented around 1900 by George Henry Langham, later president of the London Society of East Anglians
According to the South East England Development Agency, the regional development agency with responsibility for corralling culture in the imaginary village I don’t live in:
A SEEDA document called “Culture Counts” spells it out even more clearly: “We must harness the energy and abilities of people to improve the productivity and the standard of life for all.”
The imagined Village seeks to harness the English villagers’ imaginations, the most powerful weapon in the political arsenal, in the cause of economic regionalisation.
19th century infrastructure in the imagined village
It’s a fact that the or even a English identity has lessened me. English identity — its weight, distance and proximity — has by turns made me crazy, afraid and ashamed. England gives black people schizophrenia and gives the wretched poor cancer to kill them off. England is the sound of my mum and dad excusing themselves. English identity is not forgotten, unclaimed. We threw it away and don’t want it back. Or if we’re willing to countenance its return, we want its weirdness called to mind, visibly altered by our scarring it on ejection, whited-out and/or felt-tipped in, like Belbury or Rawlinson End.
The Imagined Village: “We all walk in the footsteps of our Victorian song collecting ancestors but feel it is more relevant now than ever to question who decides what it is to be authentic and English and more importantly what it is that makes us proud to be English musicians.” I don’t walk in the footsteps of Victorian song collectors. Many of my direct ancestors were unlettered rural peasants from whom songs may have been collected. If I walk in anyone’s figurative footsteps, it’s those of late 20th century record collectors.
I’d really like to know what it is that makes them proud — PROUD! — to be English musicians. They don’t care to say on the website and I missed the Newsnight featurette yesterday evening at 11pm. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’ve found a forum for their collective ignorance. I can wait to find out more…
An illustrated talk in the imagined village hall
The most pressing task for all hauntiquarians is avoiding at all costs a dialogue with Billy Bragg, a future peer of the realm in waiting due to his support for Tony Blair’s plan for a mainly non-elected second chamber in Parliament and for his championing regionalism at a time when no politician will touch it. We hauntiquaries won’t be dragged into the village hall under false pre and subtexts yet again for another of his talks, illustrated with magic lantern slides, about the joys of common land, vintage socialist processions and Englishmen in shirtsleeves standing proud without flags to cover their pride.
I’ll set up my own talk about the dead villages of England, remembering their tight surveillance-mindedness and all the fighting with villagers from other villages.
A hauntiquary intuitively appreciates authenticity as a strategically dialogically useful experiential counter-factual. A hauntologist, thinking authenticity an unutterably dreamy fiction, would of course purposefully collide two past experiences — genuflecting over their meaningful dissolution/compaction and the specificity of the (culture) space they describe in their implosion/explosion, in the empty garden at the end of (history) time — and stand ruefully regarding the vista of their own regarding.
John Clare in the 1860s, from Johnclare.info
It’s no surprise that The Imagined Village don’t mention John Clare, England’s best nature poet, for whom the village represented a community from which he was excluded, albeit partly through inclination and choice.
I end with Clare’s poem, “I Am” (1840), which should put to rest any lingering doubts about the worth of reviving the village idea. After all, Clare was a conscious man, an autoethnologist, aware of the ebb and wane of folk tradition and village life, which he put behind him at every opportunity, walking out and away into the fields and woods and sky, till he was “out of his knowledge”. The imagined village left him a conscious psychedelic husk. Do ‘we’ all now relish immediately being entitled to the thing Clare rejected?
I am: yet what I am no one cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live — like vapors tossedInto the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest, that I loved the best,
Are strange — nay, rather stranger than the restI long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below — above the vaulted sky.
Edit: Eliza Carthy has entered into a dialogue on this post (see comments). She does right in calling into question the dualism of the ventriloquist/dummy idea I used to characterise Cecil Sharp’s internal colonialism and links that with a thought-provoking line about people’s conscious continuation and appropriation of musical traditions, especially in respect of families who sing and play music: “When exactly do you stop being the ventriloquist and become the dummy, do you think?”
Posted by Neil
on October 13, 2007 at 1:16 am
Tags: Ecology, Regionalism, Spatiality, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
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Rockhunter: Cover Versions
I’ve finally got round to photographing the original artwork for Rockhunter Nos. 1 to 4. My reason for doing this, other than for completism’s sake on this site, is because I’m compiling a book of Rockhunter articles for publication early in 2008. I’ve managed to retrieve cover art, some original typed pages and even a couple of original copies from the collective archive and I’m hoping to reproduce some of this stuff in an 8-page photoset in the middle of the book, much as you’ll find them in true crime books, special forces memoirs and movie novelisations, etc.
I’d like to finish all Rockhunter activity before 31 October, when Rockhaunter, my new and occasional journal of hauntiquarianism, commences. It seems inconceivable that both projects could exist at the same time.
Posted by Neil
on October 7, 2007 at 10:54 pm
Tags: Art, Ladybird books, Rockhaunter, Rockhunter, hauntiquarianism, hauntology, ventriloquism
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Straining Towards A Dubjective Geophonics
Arvid Tomayko-Peters makes music, which he calls geophonic, from time series data, producing tonal pieces that can be manipulated by the listener and played any which way — faster, slower, backwards and forwards. His main work to date is an installation that plays geological data relating to climate changes over 5.3 million years. What’s more, he’s created sequencing software called Maestro Frankenstein that’s intended to enable others to produce similar results from other time series data. As he says: “Although designed with geologic data in mind, Maestro Frankenstein creates a score from any timeseries data and plays it back in realtime with any instrument (MIDI, VST or built-in synth) that you specify.”
Gough map of East Anglia, c.1360, from Foxearth.org.uk
I’m trying to get my hands on time series data sets relating to regional socioeconomics in the UK, specifically the eastern counties, that I could work on and make music from. It’s early days yet, but I’ve got it in my mind to produce a tonal representation of retail, transport and certain geophysical data as part of my attempt to map in intrapersonal detail my journey out of the eastern counties. Any links to and hints about relevant material gratefully received.
Clearly, there are problems with using empirical socioeconomic data in versioning the people, not least of which is its pre-determined structuration of the archive. I’m with Doreen Massey and Benjamin Keith Belton in regarding the archive as simultaneous space/flow rather than a series of knowledge paths — no matter how local or how deeply trodden.
Posted by Neil
on October 5, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Tags: Eastern counties, Ecology, Music, Proletarian Postmodernism, Regionalism, Sound, Spatiality, antiquarianism, hauntiquarianism, hauntology
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