Go and see Kris Kristofferson

There’s no point building up to it with witty repost in case you get distracted or bored by the detail and miss out on the point – go and see Kris Kristofferson.

Sure, he does some of his great old songs – Me and Bobby McGee, For the good times, Help me get though the night and so on – he even has an impressive support act – Roddy Hart and a friend – on a bill with No Support, and yes, he sings for longer that can be reasonably expected from a 72 year old Nashville great who’s so far from home. But those aren’t the reasons to go and see him.

Those things aren’t enough to drag me from the certain entertainment of Desperate Housewives, a moving episode of Scrubs or watching my rat-like rescue hamster run around the living room with gay hamster abandon. I have an unhealthy affection for being at home but sacrificing that assured, cosy enjoyment to see Kris at his 21st century best, was more than worth it.

Still ruggedly handsome with a deepening, deep voice, Kris is writing and singing about things that matter to everyone, whether they know it or not, in a way that moves people.

His stories in song about Layla al-Attar, an Iraqi artist who was killed in 1993 by missiles sent by Clinton’s regime when he had just taken office, and Argentina’s Disappeared, followed by a litany of murdered justice campaigners for the world’s poor – Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Jesus – stopped our cheery clapping in its tracks.

I learned that being a country music legend doesn’t always create a mysogonist, reactionary Republican and that having children with more than one woman doesn’t take away a tender love for all of them.

I saw a man who’s been hurt and done some hurting but isn’t cold or dismissive of love. And I saw how powerful it is to never give up on changing the world.

Kris Kristofferson’s concert made me want to show him that his great songs and good heart have made a difference. I wanted to say: Retire from the repetition and stress of touring and enjoy time with your family, we’ll fix the problems, stop the wars, right the wrongs and realise the worthlessness of greed and the pricelessness of love. Relax, we’ve got it covered.

But he made me know that I can’t say those things. That, although he’s done more than most to spread the word about the cruelty of American imperialism and our destructive adoration of it, still people aren’t listening.

At 35 I was one of the youngest people there … by a fairly long way. He is someone you can go and see for his new music not despite it, but still, the only people who are listening grew up in the 60’s and know exactly what mistakes the American Military can make. It was possibly an evening of comfort for them, where the 60’s dream was still alive and wearing retro leather jackets, recycling the odd beer can and saving money by avoiding a decent haircut are a sure way to Nirvana on earth. But they aren’t.

Seeing a man who sang beautifully, with power and passion, who was short of breath, wavering of voice and lost for reasons to hope, made me despair. Why weren’t younger people there listening to the wisdom of a once wild youth grown wiser? Who is singing to them with such care for their present and their future?

Why can’t I tell Kris I’ll fix it for him? Go and see Kris Kristofferson and maybe we can.

A Dogs life

play film here

Gordon and me

People don’t like change, Well… most of us don’t, except when we’re in real trouble. But on the whole, historians, psychologists and the like all agree that more than a passing dislike, people usually resist change with some force and passion. So what does it mean when, on a miserable Saturday afternoon, a man’s old friends all march to his house in a desperate bid for change?

It’s December and we’re at the end of our honeymoon period with Gordon. When we met him, Gordon was just our partner’s unshakable mate who we never really wanted around – until Tony started looking a little too fondly at our American cousin. Then it was reliable old Gordon who confirmed our worst fears and comforted us all at once. We struggled with Tony’s infidelity and when we had finally had enough we threw him out. But, instead of taking time to think about the series of megalomaniacs we’d attracted and how to avoid them, we went straight round to our new best friend. When Tony finally left town with his more successful friends Gordon still treated us well. He was honest and practical and told us some things would have to change and that they may be hard, but it was for our own good. Gordon was always there when things got rough like the time we couldn’t pay off our credit cards it was Gordon who stopped us turning to retail therapy or the bottle. We really missed Tony’s have-it-all attitude but we knew Gordon was right and we so wanted to trust someone again so we let him in. Gordon helped us keep to the tough decisions and in the end maybe we would learn to love him more sincerely than the passing fancy we had for Tony’s spoiling us.

Just a few short months after our shared promise of commitment Gordon started to doubt us. He watched what we did every minute of every day in case were secretly meeting with Tony or a new suitor. He planned to take samples of our DNA in case we split up and he wanted to track our infidelity. But blaming us for the breakdown was a callous attempt to cover up his broken promises.

Gordon had promised, in front of all our friends and family, that he would build a happy, clean world for us and our children but, so soon into the marriage, he’s already whispering the same sweet promises to our sworn enemies. Sure he may have avoided the stag weekend because he wants to make a stand against Mugabe, but what difference does that make when he flies around the world agreeing deals with people who enslave our children in factories and pour their effluent into our relatives’ drinking water?

At least Tony’s changes were challenging enough to get the complacent majority marching against him. All Gordon did was force our mutual friends to go round to his and try to talk him into keeping his own promises.

But repairing the relationship with this recovering poweraholic will take more than another round of platitudes and promises of change. Can he demonstrate his commitment to our life and home together by enforcing its protection in giving tax breaks to people who consume less power individually for their light, heat and appliance manufacture by living in non-nuclear-family groups of over five people? Is he demanding that industries meet the costs of repairing any damage caused to the ecosystem even though it means they have to charge consumers the realistic, long-term value of their goods produced? Is he providing adequate incentives for people not to own any kind of car, not building more roads and possibly going as far as aiming to create an affordable, reliable way of getting around this relatively small island? Not a bit of it.

As we look around the spill of his broken promises we can feel heart-broken but know there’s nowhere else to go. But as they march for change our real best friends are out there, bravely the elements to tell us both the truth about Gordon’s failures, so lets break with tradition and listen to them by simply taking a break from the lies. It doesn’t have to be a permanent split but until he proves his promises are reliable lets rent him into a bedsit with some bin bags of his stuff and make it clear we’ll only consider having him back if he becomes he person he said he was when we agreed to get involved with him in the first place.

men and women, old and young

Ageing affects people really differently. Some rejoice in the freedom from children and social expectations, others pull out every single grey hair, wherever and whenever it appears – years ago I worked in an office opposite a woman in her late forties who would take her break at her desk and spend the time peering closely into a small, green compact pulling at greying eyebrows and temples as well as the regulatory rogue chin hair. As women age they change the clothes, make-up and expressions they wear. They cut or grow their hair, smother, smooth or soothe their lines and enjoy the sensitive, interesting company or mature men, chase a young lover for fun or stop wanting to be defined by sex. They realise that whatever they choose, the world now looks through them so the clever ones start to casually shop-lift from big, mean shops….I hear. However, almost all men continue to choose young women of any shape or intelligence and those women are just doing exactly what we did and are still kicking ourselves for.

I overheard my older brother’s friends talking about the most dangerous things they had ever done. They were 18 and it was England in 1989 so there were no hard drugs or guns, before that was expected, instead one had jumped out of a plane for charity, one had visited his dad posted to a war zone with the army, one had worried he got a girl pregnant and the fourth had been a little too dictatorial to his little sister but at the time he didn’t know how risky that was!

When I got to university my friends had a similar conversation but the dangers weren’t what they had done to themselves, they were all along the lines of not knowing how to say no without seeming rude. One to a man on the bus who followed her home and wanted to come in; another who felt embarrassed about asking a one night stand to use a condom; one who felt unreasonable being naked with a guy and saying no to intercourse and the last to being alone abroad and not knowing how to refuse a stranger’s offer of a bed for the night.

My friends are lucky, obviously, they met strange and sometimes unreasonable men, but none had been driven the way so many men seem to be: to take what someone is not offering or bully until resistance is abandoned. However, many of the nice guys still take advantage of this culture of ours in which girls are brought up to be polite and never nag or demand or be assertive for fear of the consequence: verbal abuse, social isolation or complete degradation as ‘punishment’. Britain has a veneer of manners to justify its subjugation of people it finds difficult while other countries are completely open about their intolerance of difference.

Some peoples are honest in their expectations and genital categorisation but neither system allows people to behave freely and be treated equally. Neither Evolution nor religion has got us all far enough quite yet.

Its been a slow news week

By that I just mean there’s nothing new: more civilians, activists and soldiers dying in numerous conflicts from gang violence to official wars, G8 met again and given that little that they do manage to pledge actually comes to pass, its not worth reporting what they did or didn’t say about things, families with missing loved ones are still searching and people who read papers or watch the news thing they are compassionate because they wish for a happy ending.

Now, the same people show a little hypocrisy, or if you want to be less damning, naivety, as everyone feigns horror at the news that China is getting its official merchandise made for a pittance by denigrated adults and children. How do we think that things like sunny sandals get onto our high streets with their business rates and staff costs, for £2?

 

When did any of the outraged check where their summer shoes, bags and barbeques came from? I’m not religious, in fact I’m as against organised religion as I am political parties – which is a lot- but for illustrative purposes: Why pick on the speck of dust in your brother/sister/aunt/distant relative’s eye when you don’t know the origin of the designer sunglasses you use to hide the log in your own?

Generation I

Reality TV shows allow us to see intimate and social habits of people we would rarely otherwise see.

Big Brother 8 (2007) housemates constantly refer to their own snide, undermining comments and unnecessarily aggressive arguments as ‘being honest’ or ‘real’. They believe that expressing how they feel is inherently virtuous while it actually shows a serious inability to deal with anything more complex than their immediate impulses. There’s no room for the disquieting thoughts that allow the rest of us to feel remorse, embarrassment and, in our darkest hour, pure, unadulterated shame at having given in to our immediate feelings at the expense of everyone else.

More disturbing than that are the people living in cyberspace who attend chat rooms to discuss their intimate feelings about people none have met – in this case Charley. Not only do people not like her, they go to great linguistic extremes to explain how little they respect the few strangers who do. By linguistic extremes I mean messages comprised of almost indecipherably bad text language spelling, no grammar or punctuation and peppered with personal abuse and violent threats. Really. Take a look if you dare. It’s a terrifying extension, or expression, of Britain’s rising individualism and violent crime rate alongside lowering education standards and lack of care for personal reflection or criticism. We have produced Generation I who all believe that they alone deserve the nicer sides of fame and unadulterated fortune for ‘being honest’

The Big Brother, X Factor and Pop Idol culture of begging for votes is an extension of the self-indulgent behaviour. The only reason contenders can offer for people to spend money in phone votes to keep them in is their own desire to stay because they’re having such a brilliant time and want it to continue. Anyone want to pay for me to get professional training in my preferred field and lark around with my pals? I promise to really enjoy it.

The only redeeming character in ages was Britain’s Got Talent’s Baton Boy. His response was: If I go home tonight this has been a great experience I’m privileged to have. What a great approach to life – its short, the nice parts are even shorter and sometimes each of us will make a fool of ourselves so cut other people some slack when they do too. He may not have said all that but I’m sure that’s what he meant.

What’s in a tribe?

The recent Emily debacle threw up some interesting points, notably that identity is only visible when it’s in opposition to something different.

Since building of the British Empire British people developed a very distinct, and memorable, identity by dominating, subjugating and demeaning people from other cultures- mainly by taking over their countries, ruling with an iron fist and insisting on afternoon tea at four o’clock. It was an identity that stuck for as long as the circumstances lasted.

Other cultures developed their identities in opposition to that – notably the dominated, subjugated and demeaned, but they weren’t happy with institutionalised parenting and enforced tea breaks. Instead they developed their existing culture and danced, sang, told stories and celebrated their differences from the dominators.

Vibrant, defiant cultures maintain their strong identity, which leaves the more intermingled with a different sense of self. When abroad I enjoy being inherently interesting as an alien to the locals but when I come home I like being part of a non-identifiable British-ness so I can get on with my daily life without having to perform. It seems that the ones who want to be noticed, while feeling bland and weak like Emily, want to hide behind a strong tribe all the time yet they aren’t bright enough to see that it isn’t something they can buy with their shoes and music, less still, just take.

The whole situation created around Emily’s idiocy highlighted the complexity of modern tribes. She couldn’t find her own identity to be comfortable with, so in order to assert her involvement in a tribe with a clearer identity, she tried to pass of other people’s language as her own – and she was rumbled. By her own admission, but not really addressed by Big Brother/CH4/Endemol, other people in the house used the same words as her, but they didn’t get in trouble.

So I contest that when Emily tagged the word nigger on the end of a sentence she wasn’t being racist (in the form of looking down on people because of their skin colour). She wasn’t using words to intimidate or demean Charley nor to incite racial hatred in the audience. She was just being a 19 year-old white girl with no common sense or personal strength, desperate to belong to a different tribe.

You know you’re big when…they invent a new sizing system for you

I unashamedly watch Big Brother and Corrie and follow Stacy’s story in Eastenders. I’ll happily watch a documentary on anything from ultra slick and informative The Corporation to Tragic Teen Boob Jobs in which parents assert “she’ll just get it done when she’s 18 anyway so to avoid having her whinging for two years, we paid for her to go to Belgium and get it done now”.  But even I can’t bring myself to watch Daytime TV. 

I’m not sure if the actual programmes put me off; the relentlessness of cheap, ill-informed audience-participation chat shows hosted by people who think in reactionary binary or just that it’s daytime, when the sun provides free, carbon-neutral heat and light to allow us to go about our daily business outside. Daytime is when many others are up and about and it seems to be wrong to be down and in….unless you’re really ill. 

A while ago I was actually ill. I hadn’t had a bone fide illness for years so it was novel and exciting and I sat down to be entertained by the TV before calling my friends to tell them how ill I was. But when Rikki Lake appeared and started teaching me things about weights, measures and culture, I had much more important things to impart.

The educational episode went something like this: A woman of about 30 walked onto the stage in cycling shorts and a vest-top. She squeezed herself into a chair next to a slightly smaller woman who was applauding her – presumably for managing to fit.  The now wedged-in ‘guest’ explained, quite aggressively, that her clothing was very ‘appropriate’ but that she was embarrassed by her older sister going to public swimming pools in a swimming costume. 

Rikki wanted to know how big her sister was. In an adorable southern accent  she said: “she’s like a fah-ve” and quickly added “but she thinks she’s a three like me”. 

Three and five are pretty low numbers for anyone, especially the nation that prides itself on dealing in the highest of things: per capita heart attacks, debt, diabetes, home deliveries, carbon emissions, blind patriotism and the like. So maybe they were working on the greatest numbers of such things giving them the Number One rating, sort of an inverse numbers system. In such a system, a five person is a little smaller than the three, who would be dwarfed by a one who would probably also rate highly on the heart attack, diabetes, pizza home deliveries scale.  

So, if the sister thinks she’s a three but is actually a five – further from the number one spot than the three, she may have misplaced lack of confidence.  The woman I was looking at was pretty big, about a UK 22. So if her embarrassing sister was two random number sizes smaller she’d be about a UK size 18.  No real problem for even a bikini to cover a confident woman.   

Just as I was wondering what all the fuss was about, the size five sister appeared. She walked, no, to be fair she very ably strutted, up and down a catwalk in an overstretched one-piece costume. The audience whooped, cheered and jeered, during which time I worked out that the folds of skin around her bikini line were actually just very squashed fat, rather than the personal exposure I initially thought I was facing. 

As the Arts Council sponsored debate ‘There’s no such thing as too fat to flaunt’ raged, I ruminated on the relative measurements and realised that I was wrong to think that the Three and Fah-ve inversely correlated with our 8-12-16-22s.  They’d maxed those out years ago. This new system directly related to how L-arge a person is….so at five she’s XXXXXL which is two sizes bigger than her younger XXXL sister.

You know you’re dealing with American logic when the smallest size is both Zero and L.