My habit of pitching up in Paris for little meetings with old friends is disquieting for some of them, I suppose. They may have not seen me for two or three years and I come out of the blue, arriving at what may be an awkward moment for them. And then there is the intellectual challenge of finding a way to summarise in a few minutes the chaos that has been going on in the last couple of years, a chaos that might resemble a Jackson Pollock, all action and dripping. In their accounts some people are precise, controlled and abstract (Mondrian); others anecdotal (Spencer); some unable to produce order (Dubuffet) or only interested in partial accounts (Sickert); or else impenetrable (Rothko); others too afraid to show up (Munch The Scream).

peoplearerubbish.com

Reading Zola these days (La Bete Humaine, Nana, L’Assommoir, Au Bonheur des Dames). His notions of heredity and class, though unfashionable in our era of ‘choice’, find a sympathetic ear with me. These are almost unbearable narratives to a modern reader. L’Assommoir is like watching your mother being relentlessly beaten and humiliated time after time. It is a series of terrible Stations of the Cross on the road to a disaster that is signposted in every chapter. Now and again, Gervaise (the main character) by sheer force of will manages to stagger to her feet only to be bludgeoned down to the ground again. It makes you realise how much modern narrative has come to skirt away from these dreadful truths.

Exceptional stories blind us to the great swathe of truth which is that even today we do not easily escape our class and our background. The choice of the individual is the contemporary mantra, and of course this flatters our sense of agency. But if I look at myself: I don’t drive a car or take long haul holidays. My carbon footprint is probably quite low. But these aren’t my choices. They are due to my upbringing (my dad didn’t have a car till I was fourteen and we didn’t fly). But some people who have a great interest in save the planet activities will have a bigger carbon footprint than me, despite their save the planet choices. My behaviour is dictated less by my choices and more by the thick psychological and economic identity that my history has worked upon me. So I’m with Zola and Marx I suppose.

peoplearerubbish.com

My mum used to tell a story of her mam and dad (my grandparents) and breakfast.When my grandmother used to serve up an egg for breakfast, just one, her husband used to say, much to the fury of his wife, I knew a man. He had two eggs. He’s living yet.

I remember once my dad revealing to us an important discovery he had just made. You know what I had this morning, he said, as we assembled together to hear what he had to say. No, we said, me; my mum, my sisters. Hot toast. We looked back at him. Hot toast, he said again. Much to the fury of my mum. Toast was supposed to be hot. If he hadn’t been so slow buttering it, he would have been eating hot toast all his life. We all laughed at him. He only shook his head sadly, as though he knew we were all of us in it together, pretending to know about hot toast just to gang up on him.

My friend Andrew cannot abilde hot toast. It is anathema to him. Toast, yes. But not hot toast . And this obvious truth (cette evidence in the French) has spread through his family like a virus. Jacob, his nine year old, looked at me in shock and horror, as though at the revelation of an ‘orrible murder, when I mentioned hot toast. This crime against humanity is som thing I believe he still holds against me.

peoplearerubbish.com

I saw an ex-pupil of mine in the gym the other day. I had vaguely noticed his entries on Facebook over the last few months, wondering how a relatively undynamic and ineffectual young man could be living such such a fulfilling life what with all the parties and events and friends he seemed to be juggling. In the gym it didn’t look that way. He had noticed me and wandered apologetically across to say hallo. Pehaps a bit overweight and not looking as if he was flourishing particularly. Of course, I had confused his Facebook persona with his real life.

It got me thinking about Uncle Joe and Auntie Peg and their holidays in the Seventies and how they regaled us with how remarkable it was in Minorca orMalaga or Benidorm, and how we who holidayed in Blackpool or Colwyn Bay envied them. Only years later in accidental, tangential comments did some truths about the holiday experiences of Joe and Peg come out. They hadn’t been such great holidays after all.

peoplearerubbish.com

Talking to artists at their own exhibition is tricky. I try to engage then with their work sometimes though I mostly find I am interested in things they are not interested in. That is, of course, when I am interested in anything at all. At private views the conversation turns around things other than art. The artist probably has two or three little things to say about his work, usually it poses questions about our status as a viewer or it poses questions about what we mean by art and he soon gets sick of trotting this out (don’t blame him) and us of hearing it. Often there is an elephant in the room, which is the price. What! £8,500 for an old boot with some paint dripped onto it and a frame round it called Traces of Life? £7650 for framed canvas with a rip in it and black and white photo of a bloke with a camera looking out of the picture stuck on called voyeur? Are these figures plucked out ofthe air? Yes. Because it only takes one individual to buy one of these things. One single act of lunacy can happen in a London where a lot of people have a lot of money.

What we have learnt, surely, is that discourse can be produced form anything? It doesn’t need to be designated as art and it doesn’t need a price tag. Thought is still, just about, free. My suspicion is that art school kids tend to be kids who were better with images than with words. So they go to art school only to get fed lots of fancy theoreticians whom they, of course, will never read in a hundred years. Baudrillard, Cixous, Walter|Benjamin. And then they feel they have to reference this to give their work legitimacy. We have given contemporary art great legitimacy, so much more than contemporary classical music which it is still cool to have no appreciation of. I suspect it is because rich people can own contemporary art whereas music cannot be hoarded by a fetishising individual in the same way.

peoplearerubbish.com

A new cafe has opened up on Kennington Road, but it is something of an enigma. There is only one table inside and two paltry benches on either side of it. There is posh bread for sale, and posh cakes, organic things, some posh people fussing. I peer through the window at it, confused. I have done this on a number of occasions already but not gone in.

I remember as a boy when I used to run down Graham Road to buy some things in the local shop for my mum. One day the local shop was closed and I went a few yards further on to where another shop had recently opened. Its name was SPAR. I looked in through the window, confused. People were picking products up and putting them into metal baskets themselves, without the mediation of a shopkeeper. This was the first supermarket I had ever seen. I did not go in. I looked for a moment, then ran home. I  was reminded of this when I looked in the confusing new cafe this morning.

peoplearerubbish.com

I have few callers on my landline now. Today I had Twelve, not twelve callers but a company called Twelve, as the bloke told me before I had the chance to hang up. You recently answered a survey and said you sometimes play the Natinal Lottery, the man from Twelve said. This, of course, is a a lie. I do not and have never played the lottery. Well, I said, to stop him talking and give myself time to frame a response. Talking to cold callers has become an important part of my life, much as inviting Jehovah’s Witnesses in and talking to them used to be. That is false, I say. I am AGAINST the lottery. I say this with religious fervour. There was a pause. All right, said the man from Twlve and put the phone gently down, or clicked it gently off. As if to say, it’s a fair cop. The business of revealing the untruths of cold callers has become a necessary chore, a modern ritual. Which reminds me. I haven’t heard from the man who tells me that I or a member of my family have been involved in a minor or major accident recently.

More telephone fun today though. With BT this time. I now have Infinity, put in last week. Immediately no blue light on, no connection. And so, after a week of putting it off, the painful call to India fior technical support. The usual procedure. The verbal humiliation as he asks me questions using computer terminology I am unable to understand. He is trying to disguise the exasperation in his voice. For these people I must be some kind of mental pygmy. Then the physical humour where they ask you to manipulate random parts of the differemt hubs and sockets that the engineer installed last week. Me trying to unravel wires round the back of the hub whilst cradling the phone in my shoulder hollow. At least this time he did not ask me to find a long pin from among my household objects, insert it into a specific hub orifice and wiggle it around for thirty seconds.

peoplearerubbish.com

Red Nose Day a couple of days ago and the continuation of the remorseless self-fetichisation perpetrated by the BBC upon itself. I spend the evening avoiding all BBC outlets. I have nothing against charity but am not interested in various BBC hangers-on making dull exhibition of themselves in roles for which they have no discernable talent. I had always presumed they did it for free. I hear that might not even be true in some cases. It could be that I am rubbish for worrying about celebrities rather than celebrating the fact that money is raised for good causes.

Another BBC complaint: their obsession with so-called packages. Guests are invited to give their opinions but no-one can explore any issue because of constant trailing and mini-films exploring in slow motion (if it is sport, reshowing a goal or a race or a try with staccato imagery or in such a way that you can’t see it properly anyway). There’s no time left for the guests. More fetichising.

The Six O’clock News. Headlines.: The pound drops to a  four year low against the dollar! Picture of a graph and a grimacing pound heading downhill. Cue the newsreader: The pound sank to a new four year low against the dollar today. Cut to a reporter standing outside the Bank of England: So, Dermott, the pound sank to a four year low today. That’s right, Fiona. the pound sank to a new four year low today. It dropped one dollar 32 or whatever, which is the lowest against the dollar since March 2009 or whatever. Which represents a four year low. Back to the studio. Dermott’s in there with Fiona now. So, says Fiona, the pound sank today. Yes, says Dermott. It’s a four year low against the dollar. A couple more sentences. Then back to Fiona. Fiona swings her seat round for camera one. Thank you, Dermott. Dermott Whatsisname there with news of the pound sinking to a new four year low. And it’s not over there because half way throough the News we get the headines again and the revelation that the pound has dropped to a new four year low against the dollar. Arrrrgggghhhh!

peoplearerubbish.com

Last night I had a significant variation on a recurrent dream motif. In dreams I am often trying to dial a number but constantly missing my finger aim on the old style phone dial and so never getting to the end of the number to contact whoever it is at the end of the line, whatever shadowy figure half beast half human who represents the preoccupation of the moment or of a moment summoned up from my primeval past. I make countless attempts to dial the number but will always wake up before succeeding.

In last night’s reworking of this recurrent moment I am in possession of a mobile phone (dream iconography upgrade), but the key pad has diminished to just the top line 1,2,3, so that when last night I was trying to dial 999 it couldn’t work because there were no nines on the phone pad. I am now deeply integrated into technology. It inhabits my unconscious.

The other tiny issue that bothered me in the dream was that I only had 24p of credit left and I didn’t want to be cut off half way through my conversation with the police. They might do me for wasting police time. Lesson learnt; I put some credit on my phone this morning.

peoplearerubbish.com

There is a distinction between the so-called epistemic verbal mode and the deontic mode. The epistemic mode deals with alternative worlds which could exist instead of a given world at a given point in time (what may be). The deontic mode also deals with alternative worlds but they are ones which could develop out of a given world (what should be).

The world we act in is a ninuscule fraction of the eddy of possible alternatives that flurry around us. The shoulds, the woulds, the mights. Our doing world is a small thing, a tiny nucleus around which spins the realm of not doing, intending to do, fantasising abouit doing, fearing to do, forgetting to do. And perhaps, the more conscious and sensitive we are, the less the doing world impinges.

peoplearerubbish.com