What is it worth?

Holding Hands: Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills & Neil Young

We parked up by Goldhawk Road tube (always echoes of Jimmy the Mod for me) and walked back past the Pie, Mash, Liquor and Eel shop to my most unloved venue in London, the Empire in Shepherd’s Bush. Stephen Still’s blast from the past included his underground classic ‘51.5076 0.134352’ and concluded with ‘For What It’s Worth’ which resonated in a particular way after another week of global economic disintegration. What is it worth?

There’s something happening here
[the day before yesterday rounds off a 20% FTSE fall]

What it is ain’t exactly clear
[although I think we’ve all got a good sense of broadly what territory we’re in – how we got there is a bit more confounding]

There’s a man with a gun over there
[currently a cold-hearted woman, life-long member of the NRA: “our leaders, our national leaders, are sending soldiers out on a task that is from God. That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God’s plan.”]

Telling me I got to beware
[are they really going to elect a man who keeps calling the electorate “my friends” in a manner devoid of warmth or friendship?]

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down

There’s battle lines being drawn

Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong
[there’s a real opportunity here, with the merry-go-round ground to a halt, to get off the ride that goes nowhere]

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep
[anxiety is seeping out of every opening crack]

It starts when you’re always afraid
[yet fear is what holds us back individually and collectively]

You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down

Stop, hey, what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down

What’s that sound? It’s mud falling on a coffin lid. It’s ancient song shot through with deepest pain. It’s the sound of a single man burying 20,000 bodies one by one. On Tuesday Rev. Leslie Hardman MBE died. He featured as a key character  in a docudrama, The Relief of Belsen, commissioned by Channel 4 which was shown almost a year ago to the day (15.X.07).  He was one of the first Allied soldiers (an army chaplain) in to the Bergen-Belsen death camp in North-West Germany when it was liberated in May 1945. Auschwitz had been liberated by the Russians a couple of months of months earlier but it was Belsen that gave us in Britain our first terrifying view of what was going down. This was Richard Dimbleby’s report from the camp…

“Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which … The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.

This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”

Leslie Hardman was a man who knew what’s worth what. He insisted on burying each of the 20,000 corpses that confronted him as an individual with an individual ceremony (no question of mass burial). He restored in death the dignity they had been denied in life.

In a tribute to him on Radio 4 this morning, a resonant phrase from Kierkegaard (via psychiatrist Viktor Frankl) was cited to capture the man he was : The door to happiness opens outwards. 

Leslie Hardman dealt with the chaos he experienced in the front-line by dedicating himself to the well-being of others.

As Jonathan Sacks (the Chief Rabbi of the UK) put it on the same radio programme: He Chose Life. Now I always thought  – and this was reinforced by the Glasgow office of Channel 4 which has the words engraved on the glass of the entrance – that “Choose Life” comes from FilmFour’s Trainspotting. But apparently it comes from Moses in the Old Testament: ” I place before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. … Choose life that you and your descendants shall live”

  (which echoes what his predecessor and my namesake was told:  “You may choose for yourself, for it is given to you.”)

Now Jim (the God, not the Mod), much though I respect him, summarised his approach as being to “get his kicks before the whole shithouse goes up”. As things fall apart, I’d say the rock-striking prophet is a better bet than the pose-striking rock god: Choose Life. Choose sustainable living. Choose actually creating something instead of gambling nothing. Choose holding hands not holding hostages. Choose what’s going up. Choose what’s of real worth.

Find Our World in Yours

On Monday the artist Mark Titchner pulled by Channel 4 HQ to give some background to his new work, unveiled that day in front of the building, Find Our World in Yours. It is the latest incarnation of the Big 4, a 40 foot high figure 4 marking the 25th anniversary of the Channel and the advent of the Big Art Project, a bold cross-platform (TV, web, mobile, real-life) initiative focused on Pubic Art. Each quarter the Big 4 is reskinned by a different artist and this quarter it’s Mark‘s turn.

His approach involves punctuating the metal skeleton of the 4 with slogans in a style derived from trade union banners. Into the upstroke of the 4 is built a video booth, with echoes of the Right to Reply one at 60 Charlotte Street back in the day. Passers-by, staff or anyone who wants to can pop in and leave a message with their thoughts about Television. A selection of these is played out each week on the TV screens that pepper the framework. The main slogan reads: Find Our World in Yours, Find Your World in Ours.

What was most inspiring about hearing Mark talk was the eclecticism of his inspirations. In art history these ranged from Renaissance depictions of religious ecstasy to Duchamp op-art, from 60s psychedelia to contemporary advertising. And then beyond the art world he used everything from record labels to the aforementioned trade union banners, from the Black Panther movement to corporate mission statements from which to springboard ideas.

I’m a great lover of such eclecticism. At school I remember being given a book by velvet-jacketed Mr Fitch RIP (think Rob Newman’s Jarvis meets the Cyril from That’s Life) – it was a copy of Paradise Lost edited by someone called Broadbent (or similar) which had the most fantastically eclectic footnotes, from the biblical to the scientific, from the geographic to the historical, and all points between. Apart from turning me on to literature (I ended up studying English, French and German literature), it made me realise how interconnected all these disciplines are and how essential those connections are to creativity.

Which brings me to a peak of creativity, my favourite book, James Joyce’s Ulysses. One of the things I most love about the book is the fabulous ecelecticism of the novel – whether you want to know about the water supply of Dublin or the dynamics of grief, the family life of Shakespeare or the history of Irish Republicanism, it’s all in there. And, of course, the art of advertising (Leopold Bloom is in the business) which brings us full circle back to Find Our World in Yours which, like Channel 4, has advertising in its life-blood.

In the Beginning of the End (serpent mix)

 

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of everything that stands
The end, no safety or surprise
The end
I’ll never look into your eyes… again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free?
Desperately in need of some stranger’s hand
In a desperate land

In the beginning
God created
The heaven
And the earth

And the earth
was without form
and void
and darkness was upon the face
of the deep

Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain

And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters

There’s danger on the edge of town
Ride the King’s highway, baby

Weird scenes inside the gold mine

Ride the highway west, baby
Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake
He’s old, and his skin is cold

And God said: Let the waters bring forth abundantly
The moving creature that hath life
And God created every living creature that moveth

Be fruitful and multiply

And God made the beast of the earth after his kind
And cattle after their kind
And every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind
And God saw that it was good

Now the serpent was more subtle
Than any beast of the field
Which the Lord God had made

The Lizard King

King of the universe

So God created man in his own image
In the image of God created he him
Male and female created he them

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the East
In Eden
And there he put the man he had formed

The West is the best
The West is the best
Get here and we’ll do the rest

The blue bus is callin’ us
The blue bus is callin’ us
Driver, where you takin’ us?

And God said: Behold
I have given you every herb
And the earth brought forth grass

And God said: Let there be light
And there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good
And God divided the light
From the darkness
And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Divide the light from the darkness

The killer awoke before dawn
He put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall
And he came to a door
And he looked inside
“Father?”
“Yes, son”
“I want to kill you”
“Mother… I want to… fuck you”

And God blessed them
And God said unto them
Be fruitful and multiply
And replenish the earth
And subdue it

C’mon, baby, take a chance with us
And meet me at the back of the blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock, on a blue bus
Doin’ a blue rock, c’mon, yeah
Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill

What have you done?

In the middle of the garden were the tree of life
And the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

The voice of your brother’s blood
Cries to me from the ground!

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end
It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me

He made the stars also

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God
Wandering, wandering in hopeless night
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned
Immaculate

The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end.