Review of "All Together Now?: One Man's Walk in Search of His Father and a Lost England" by Mike Carter

 

Not a brilliant book, but quite a good one. It's a "journey across England" book, and they all have some things in common - the writer-traveller meets some nice people and has heartwarming experiences, and he/she meets some nasty people and has some horrible experiences. Sometimes people are welcoming and kind, sometimes the accomodation is really awful. The balance between these sets the feeling for the book.

But this is also a personal story, because Mike Carter is doing the journey to achieve some sort of reconciliation with his now-dead father Peter Carter, a Communist Party and UCATT militant who organised the early 1980s People's March for Jobs. I may be reading things backwards, but even at the time I was a bit underwhelmed with this project, and I think I was right...it feels and felt like an exercise in supplication, not militancy or direct action.

The parts of the book that are most moving are where he deals with the personal stuff - his estrangement from his father and his family via his brief bit of upwards social mobility, and it's interesting when he sets that in the narrative of the working class as a whole. Other parts read they've been cut and pasted from features in The Guardian...the increase in income and wealth inequality, the unaffordability of housing, the largely pointless expansion in higher education vs vocational education...foreign ownership of prime housing and strategic industries...it might have been better if he'd put that all in one place, or left it out all together and concentrated on his observations and personal reflections.

As regards what he finds on his journey, it strikes me that he is conflating several different things, al of which contribute to how shit a tour round most British small town are, but which are not at all the same. First, going on foot across the country you are going to experience a lot of "liminal spaces" - bits that are not for public view, like janitor's cupboards and service ducts. You find these in even the nicest public spaces if you look hard enough, and they are rarely pretty - it's part of what I hate about hotels. If you write about this, and if you pay attention, then things are going to look a bit grim.

Second, he is travelling through a country that is in relative industrial and economic decline. Britain was never going to be top nation for ever, and even if all the urban planning had been great and the inequality addressed by a benign and well-funded social democratic state, things would still have got worse relative to other places and countries.

Third, technological changes - especially the internet and online retail - mean that the face of town centres would have changed whatever. Online shopping is mainly a better experience; local shops can't afford to carry the inventory of everything that I might want, and it's unusual if the staff can help a customer much or even know what's in stock. And the cost of real estate - related of course to another thing that is wrong with Britain - means that online shopping is also going to be cheaper, even with delivery charges. So many local shops are going to close, and thus far what is taking their place is stuff that can't be delivered online - hairdressers, nail bars, tattoo places...

Review of Everything Everywhere All At Once

Too long, and much less than the sum of its parts. Good acting, decent special effects and cinematography, and early on there's a genuine feeling of unease and uncanniness that says we can't be sure whether the central character is really experiencing a breakdown...but it becomes more and more silly, and full of cod-symbols and philosophy, and I started to lose interest. If only they had spent a bit less on special effects and a bit more on the writing.

Watched on Amazon Prime via tablet and Chromecast.

The Smithsonian Incident

I spent my twenty-fifth birthday in Washington DC. Specifically, I spent it walking around The Mall, and visiting the museums there. I was on a paid-for research trip for my Ph D, but I felt I deserved to have my birthday off. So the afternoon found me in the Smithsonian Institute, a big and deservedly popular museum of American history. In the foyer there was a big display about the words of the song “The Star Spangled Banner”, which featured the actual flag from Fort M’Henry, a huge facsimile of the hand-written words and a picture of the poet Francis Scott Key, who had written them. Looking online I see that the flag is now part of a different display.

I had known a little bit about Scott Key, because he is one of the characters in Sabbatical, a novel by John Barth, an author that I was then rather fond of. In the book Scott Key is a sort of reluctant and belated convert to American patriotism, so his writing the poem “Defence of Fort M'Henry” is all the more poignant; the display does not mention the racist dimension to the lyrics, which include the words “No refuge could save the hireling and slave, From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave, And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave” referring to the fact that the British forces included newly freed slaves.

And while I was musing on this a coiffured southern woman began to tell her daughter, in a loud voice, about how the sight of the still flying flag had inspired Scott Keys to write the poem. She was reading from the caption to the display, but she hadn’t twigged that Francis Scott Keys was a man. Well, the black and white engraving showed a head with long flowing locks, and Francis - or at least Frances - is a woman’s name.

And hearing this, I was transfixed - held between the need to correct her mistake and the rudeness of contradicting a parent in front of their child. It would be worse because my voice would clearly identify me as British, and the Brits were the villains of this story (and most Hollywood films). I did a little wrestle with both sides of my conscience. Imagine the daughter in the future, repeating the same stupid error, and being humiliated by it. Imagine the woman’s humiliation at being corrected in front of her daughter, and by a Brit. 

I did nothing. The moment passed, they walked away to look at something else. I’m still not sure if it was the right choice. 

Review of "Barcelona" by Robert Hughes

I haven't read any Robert Hughes for years - not since The Fatal Shore, about Britain's penal transportation colonies in Australia. That was great, and so is this. He's an art historian by background, and I'm not all that interested in art history, but the descriptions of what is called modernism (and is really art nouveau rather than what everyone else means by modernism) in art, architecture and planning are just wonderful. He's really good on Gaudi, the man and his buildings, but also on some of the other architects and buildings. A bit of a shame that it stops with Gaudi, because it would be nice to hear what he'd make of later architecture too. I've spent a lot of time in Barcelona - I went there every year for Mobile World Congress for years, but even so this book made me want to go there again right now.

I didn't like every aspect of the politics, which is present all the time, but he's rather good on the smug superiority underlying Catalan nationalism and separatism. Mind you, he's not going to win any awards for predictions, since he seems to think that Catalan separatism is over and done with, and that it will gradually fade away.

Review of Words on Bathroom Walls

Well-meaning young adult film about a young man with schizophrenia, which attempts to convey something of what that's like. Sometimes scary, but the film almost makes it seem a bit cool - I note that like John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind" he is haunted, if that's the right word, by some consistent imaginary people - a young hippy woman, a cool dude version of himself/best friend, and a group of threatening African-American bodyguards with a baseball bats. Do real schizophrenics experience their hallucinations like that? I don't know - other reviews seem to hint that the film pretties up what it feels like to be schizophrenic.

It was a decent enough film to watch, on Netflix, despite a rash of high-school movie cliches.

Review of "Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement" by James Horrox

This is, for the most part, 137 pages of disappointment, with the feeling that somewhere in there is a better book struggling to get out. I'd hoped that the author really had uncovered some unknown-to-me connections between proper class struggle anarchists and the people who had founded developed the kibbutz movement. Spoiler alert; he hasn't. The book is about how the early kibbutzim were, to an extent, inspired by the writings of some utopian socialists and spiritually oriented Tolstoyans, and not only driven by necessity towards communal living, but that's hardly a surprise. After finding out that Emma Goldman had written favourably about anarchist comrades among the Jewish settlers in Palestine I was hoping to find out more, but I didn't. 

Instead we learn that some of the founders of the utopian and "nonpolitical" socialist currents among the early Zionist settlers had read Kropotkin. Others were inspired by a mainly-forgotten German utopian called Gustav Landauer, who had once been a class struggle anarchist but moved towards the slightly creepy spiritual-awakening, personal transformation tendency. Ironically, Landauer ended up Education Minister in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic before being murdered by the Freikorps as the republic was overthrown. 

More familiar figures are also discussed, like the prophet of Jewish personal transformation through physical labour A D Gordon and the Labour Zionist Chaim Arlosoroff - the book doesn't mention it, but his former girlfriend Magda became Mrs Goebbels, which surely merits a Netfix mini-series. Horrox cites both of these as influencers of another sort of socialism, distinct from the Marxism of the Labour Zionists in Poalei Zion and Left Poalei Zion, in the emerging Jewish settler community in interwar Palestine, which he chooses to call anarchism. I'd be very surprised if either Gordon or Arlosoroff ever thought of themselves as anarchists. Arlosoroff was a big fan of staying close to the British, and was also intrumental in the Haavara agreement with the Nazis, so not exactly your typical anarchist.

Weirdly, there is almost no account of the historical and political context in which this was happening. Zionist immigration, the construction of the Zionist state-in-waiting, and the creation of the network of utopian communes on which the book focuses, all took place in the framework enabled by a British colonial occupation. Zionist settlers could be Marxists or anarchists or anything else, but they could not do without the shelter of the British military force and civil administration. An independent, majority-ruled Palestine, democratic or not, would have put an end to Jewish mass immigration. 

Horrox touches on this in passing, but it's far from the focus of the book. And he entirely buys into the Zionist argument that the refusal to employ Arab labour was a principled, moral refusal to be exploiters, rather than a conscious attempt to create an ethnically segregated labour market, explicitly on the South African model. He treats the Histradrut as if it were a "normal" trade union, rather than an instrument for the construction of that segregated labour market, ignoring the historical analysis of - for example Zachary Lockman's "Comrades and Enemies". 

There is another book to be written about the subjective commitment to socialism and even Marxism by people who were objectively engaged in a colonial enterprise that was tied to British imperialism. It's not a straightforward matter of hypocrisy. History is full of ironies like this, with the eco-anarchist Rojava enclave in northern Syria that sheltered under the umbrella of US air power is only the most recent. The Zionist socialist parties were mainly accepted as such by their comrades in other countries, even in apparently revolutionary internationals like the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, in which Left Poalei Zion and Hashomer Hatzair participated at the representatives of Palestine alongside the Bund from Poland and the POUM from Spain.

Horrox does describe the minutiae of kibbutz organisation in the glowing terms I remember from my days in a Zionist youth movement, but doesn't give a moment's cosideration to the the fact that some kibbutzim were built on the ruins of depopulated arab villages, or that almost none of them have ever admitted an arab member. Oh, and he repeats uncritically the assertion that there was "no crime" within kibbutzim, ignoring all that has come to light about sexual harrassment and rape.

It's really a shame, because there is an important book to be written about what the kibbutz experience means for at least one kind of anarchist model of the transition from capitalism to something better. Despite all the above, and despite the awful context, it's possible to still be enthusiastic about the kind of self-managed enterprise and collective consumption offered by the kibbutz, and to see a very high level of communal sharing and a very low level of private property as a viable and even luxurious alternative to privatised individual and family existence. Even knowing what I do about the history, I still retain a great affection for the feel of kibbutz life that I experienced in the 1970s and 1980s.

These ideas about "secession" and walkaway, of building an alternative economy within the shell of the existing society, are increasingly popular, as they often are when more direct political programs for change seem hopeless. There is a lot of hope placed on Community Land Trusts, cooperatives, social enterprises, and mutual aid networks.

And the kibbutz experience was perhaps the best opportunity that this model has ever been given. The kibbutzim were not marginalized or despised outsiders in the Zionist proto-state, or later in Israel; they were cherished, cossetted, and treated as an elite, akin to the English landed gentry. They had access to cheap land from the Jewish National Fund, and cheap credit from state and semi-private financial institutions. 

So the ultimate failure of the kibbutzim to thrive, even in these favourable circumstances, but within the overall context of an increasingly unequal and consumption-driven society, ought to be instructive. Rather than radiating socialism, however defined, out into the wider Israeli society, the kibbutzim instead absorbed the worst aspects of it into themselves. Horrox does describe what can only be seen as the degeneration of the kibbutz model, even within its own terms, though he doesn't really explain why the kibbutzniks themselves don't for the most part seem to have thought it was worth preserving or defending. There's some quite interesting stuff in the end about new forms of urban collective living, and about the small anarchist groups in Israel that are, to Horrox's disdain, mainly uninterested in the kibbutz history, but it can't make up for the missed opportunities of the book.

POSTSCRIPT: On p58 the author writes "During the 1930s many anarchists within the kibbutz movement travelled to Spain themselves to join the CNT-FAI militia." Although the book has a lot of footnotes he doesn't cite any source for this. I couldn't find any trace of it in web searches. There isn't any mention of it in "Madrid Before Hanita", the film about Jews from Palestine who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War, though that does focus on the International Brigades so is more about volunteers who were Communist-oriented. So I wrote to the author, and he hasn't responded yet. I also wrote to a few others with some expertise in this area, including Professor Raanan Rein, who knew nothing about it. I am left with the unavoidable conclusion that this "fact" is just made up to suit a narrative.

Review of "Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery"

Knives out was good, so I had high hopes of this, but it was over-long, over-hyped, obvious and boring. I dozed off a few times. I know the characters are supposed to be nasty, but couldn't they have been a bit nuanced, and...interesting?

I could summarize the plot, but I can't be bothered. You can read the Wikipedia article if you want. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Shiva Baby

A low-budget independent film which takes place almost entirely in a shiva at a house in suburban New York, this is a gem...funny (in a painful way), clever, well-observed, well acted. It brings up lots of issues, some more obviously than others. The main protagonist is a young woman trying to live independently but without much cash, and selling sex for money to a single client, who she then meets at the eponymous shiva, where she's gone with her parents, and where she also meets her ex-girlfriend...and the client's wife and baby...

I note in passing that I didn't recognise any of the actors except Fred Melamed, who has been in lots of films, mainly playing the same awkward Jewish man. But the budget for the film was apparently $200k, so did he work for nothing?

There's a lot of sex stuff, and food stuff, and less obviously there is a story about young people and how impossible it is for them to get decent jobs (rather than unpaid internships) or find anywhere to live. Some of the scenese with Jews eating are grotesque and bit sickening, but this is more than made up for by the dialogue and the acting. Well worth seeing.

Watched on All4, which annoying re-started a little way into the film.