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By Digby Warde-Aldam

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I’ve been watching a lot of crap recently. I’m in a strange sort of limbo at the moment, living on what is effectively a building site; my viewing habits have gone to seed. Being an unimaginative and lazy individual, my normal post college/work routine usually takes in two to three hours of internet TV or film per night, an allowance which cannot help but affect my disposition. Naturally when one fills up their time with tertiary material of such dizzying artistic merit as Masterchef and Celebrity Come Dine with me, there begins a slow descent into a state of zombification.

This isn’t to say I’m not enjoying my low-brow bingeing. I must have watched the opening scenes of the Guns of Navarone (possibly the greatest film about repressed homosexuality ever to have been subject to a twat like me writing something about it) about six hundred times since the end of August, and with each repeat viewing, the patriotic tear swelling in the corner of my eye becomes more and more jingoistic. There have been several instances where I have trawled the bowels of my DVD collection in search of long-forgotten gems, hidden amidst the horrific backlog of shit that really needs to be got rid of.

However, I have made one rediscovery that almost makes the hours of watching sub-standard thrillers, war movies and rom-coms (the shit that needs to go) bearable. This cinematic salvation comes in the form of the original Harry Palmer trilogy, or to be more accurate, the first two parts of it. The films themselves, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were the first three instalments of a series conceived by producer Harry Saltzman as “the thinking man’s answer to James Bond”, with some strong emphasis placed on the first part of that phrase. Spy thrillers they may be but both Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin require an unusual amount of involvement on the part of the viewer. Explosions, gadgets and supervillains simply do not figure, and Palmer, the reluctant antihero of the series (played by a post-Alfie Michael Caine) is more interested in buying tinned mushrooms than the shadowy world of international espionage. Unlike Bond, or almost any other action hero you’d care to mention, Palmer is a genuinely likeable figure, as confused and repulsed by the hypocrisy and double-dealing of his line of work as the viewer. Bespectacled and unglamorous, his only secret weapon is his perceived ignorance.

I had a lecturer once who claimed to only watch films set in places he knew. I imagine sticking to this, unless one happened to have an extraordinary knowledge of Los Angeles and New York, would be a rather restrictive and thankless task. However, in a funny way, I can see his point. Tracing Harry Palmer’s route around London is a lot of fun. Whether the undoubtedly great cinematography or an urban facelift are responsible I don’t know, but the familiar city is rendered almost completely alien. Kensington’s buildings are blackened, skeletal and resolutely Victorian, while Shoreditch may as well have been a battlefield, such is its squalor and eeriness. Similarly (and perhaps more understandably, this writer having been born not long before the wall came down), Funeral in Berlin’s juxtaposition of the titular city’s enforced no-man’s against its quasi-American shopping precinct the KuDamm, could not have presented a more unfamiliar picture of the city today had it been set in Beijing or Lagos.

I love these films as entertainment, but what really gets me is what I suppose should be referred to as “period detail”; the films are, to paraphrase John Cooper Clarke, a sociologist’s paradise. We see how shit life on a middling wage was in the 1960s (Palmer complains repeatedly about his salary, and is more than willing to make a buck or two on the side), and how the old order of the British establishment, represented by Palmer’s bosses had failed to come to terms with minor-power status, and the hilarious mediocrity of what passed for luxury circa 1966. It’s all a bit like laughing at your parents struggling with modern technology.

After Funeral in Berlin, the series lost its footing in the real world, and the final instalment, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain (directed, weirdly, by a sleepwalking Ken Russell), is an Austen Powers movie in all but name. The film, more plot driven than its predecessors is fun, but ultimately shit. It’s every bit as far-fetched as the Bond movies that the franchise had been supposed to act as a foil to. After this wet fart of a finale, Caine and Saltzman (and indeed, the rest of the world) lost interest, and Harry Palmer was put to sleep.

Recently, though, Michael Caine has talked about resurrecting the character for one last blast of speccy triumph. Should this happen, let’s hope he’s evolved into a cantankerous OAP living in the suburbs rather than the director of MI6 or something- I’d feel slightly betrayed if he was anything other than average.

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

Camus: If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.

Dr. Arthur Neuman: We all wear masks . . . metaphorically speaking

Stanley Ipkiss: [on a bridge with Tina, holding the mask in his hand] You sure you’re not gonna miss this guy? Once he’s gone, all that’s left is me.

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The Mask is a film that uses the symbolic power of the mask (a staple motif of theatre, dating as far back as the persona of the Greek tragedies and the make-up of Japanese kabuki theatre) to highlight the existential dilemmas faced by a nobody-deadbeat-loser, Stanley Ipkiss. Stanley is a bank clerk, he hates his boss, who bullies him incessantly, and he is unable to get with the object of his affection, Tina. It is when Stanley finds The Mask (somehow a magical trinket belonging to the Norse trickster god Loki has turned up in ‘Edge City’) that he is able to unleash his ‘real’ self upon the fantastical metropolis he inhabits.

This version of Stanley represents a transformation that foregrounds the uncontrollable element of the unconscious mind, allowing him to act out the desires that ordinary Stanley hasn’t the balls too, he courts and becomes romantically involved with Tina and tries to rid the city of its gangster problems. But the metamorphosis of the ordinary man into super hero poses us an existential question; what is the reality that lurks behind our conscious mind. Stanley must wear a mask to reveal his hidden self and so we can never be sure of whom the ‘real’ Stanley is. It is thus that Stanley loses sight of the real Stanley. His use of the mask allows him to conveniently disable the aspects of himself that he doesn’t like whilst uncovering the self that he wishes he were; the loud, brash, charming funny man. This is not the real Stanley Ipkiss though, and he is forced into confrontation between himself, the mask, his enemies and Tina, what we are left with is a Stanley who has undergone a rigorous existential crisis and has faced himself in order to uncover and learn about what reality and existence actually are.

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“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” President Jimmy Carter, 1977.

The Voyager programme is NASA’s unmanned space operation that was launched in 1977 to escape the solar system and explore the far reaches of galaxy. The Golden Record was included on both of the Voyager crafts by one Carl Sagan, the records are meant to provide a document of human culture for any extra terrestrial life that might encounter them. In 2008 the Voyager spacecraft left our solar system and with them they took the history of our culture. At NASA’s most recent reckoning the crafts are 10 billion miles from our Sun.

The Golden Record itself contains a series of 115 photographic images and documentation, a selection of natural sounds, greetings in 50 languages and a selection of music from around the globe. The photos provide a visual documentation of the culture of the earth up until 1977, featuring photographs of nature, birds, whales, dolphins, humans etc as well as man’s achievements over nature, The Taj Mahal, The Train, Motorway, The Golden Gate Bridge and the Aeroplane. Finally there are photographs of human culture, Asian street scenes, The UN building, men fishing and Chinese people eating dinner.

Some of the photos from Voyager’s Golden Record;

The sounds included on the record can be found here.

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John Updike and The Modern American Aesthetic.

By James Maclaren.

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Martin Amis said of writing that it is not ever something you can choose to do or become, it is a compulsion, a need to make sense of the world – novels are vessels through which the world is furnished with meaning. Far more subtle and various than the everyday, they offer us a purpose – something innate in the human spirit, the need to make sense of our lives, to populate them with some notion of meaning or eloquence. Having a capacity for something so vital is part of a formation of an identity – in a rather high faluting kind of way many of the best writers feel that they were put here to write, and, as Dante’s Inferno tells us, one of the hottest sections of hell is reserved for those who have talent and do not use it. Updike as a young writer in his early twenty’s was trying to understand the changes that were happening in American culture – the post-war America of apple pie and Momma was being challenged by a new idea of what it meant to be young and American, something to do with being individual and choosing your own path rather then accepting the same choices and responsibilities as your parents. Updike wrote a short story in 1957 about a young grocery clerk in a sleepy suburb who is shocked out of the monotony of his work by a group of beautiful young women entering his shop in bathing suits, all buds and curves they peruse the shelves, and, all the other cashiers being busy come to his check out to buy their stuff. Breathless and stricken he serves them – they leave in a flurry of giggles, numb for a few minutes he tells his boss he quits and runs out of the shop in search of the girls. Of course they are gone and he is left with the desperate taste of something he could not quite touch. Updike was trying to get at the disparity between what this free liberated America promised and the reality of most young peoples lives – the same menial jobs as their parents but with the added resentment of having just missed out on something, something that was really first rate.

Updike, in early 1959 started writing Rabbit Run, in, as he called it, a “haze of cigarette smoke and dizziness”. His first full novel, started life as a novella; a small comment on sport as a type of hyperreality that elevates people to some sort of pinnacle before dropping them back into their second rate lives; grocery clerks, gas attendants, factory workers. It quickly became apparent that Updike had found his man, through the character of Harry Angestrom he could survey America in a big way – ventriloquising his own experience as a young man born into this new generation as well as looking beyond his own patch – he was married at the time of the novel’s creation, bound as we all are by decisions and restraints, he needed a narrator who would be there for him, another story to say what he needed to say. We meet Rabbit as a 26 year husband and father, demonstrating kitchen appliances in a store – in his school days he was a basketball star, by contrast his domestic life is full of demands and regrets. His small apartment is dotted with drained whiskeys glasses, bland food prepared without care or thought. There is a private moment of repulsion as he notices new lines in the corner of his wife’s eyes, rendering her plain rather then perky, as he knew her when he had courted her in the dime store they had both worked in. Updike’s gift is in saving this passage of prose from being gratuitous; he does not appeal toward anything base or misogynistic even though his protagonist is judging his wife in such a mean way. He is showing us a life drained of meaning; the idyllic picture of the American family is for Harry a prison where even the conciliations of lust and sex are being eroded by childbirth, familiarity, and the passage of years. These new lines are felt keenly because they are emblematic of living a second rate life, of having become irrevocably settled at twenty-six.

The novel’s title Rabbit Run can be seen then as an instruction to its hero, to get out and break away – the poverty of everyday life surrounds Harry, his parents live in a small dark house, his dad has given his life to the print factory in which he works and his mother gossips and resents Harry’s choice of wife; the small, spiritless Janice. His wife’s family run a car-lot, small minded people who never offered their daughter much love - her father pouring out his heart into his sales pitches, a cultivated artificial kindness. Even the towns reverend lives a beleaguered small existence, escapes to the golf course, his only respite from the web of his wife’s resentments and failed ambitions; at a time when Christianity and community were pillars in the functionalist family dogma, Updike shows it as failing, coming apart at the seems. Why not then should Harry want to break away, like the young cashier quitting his job and running out into the sunshine in search of girls. It may be a futile rebellion but it is a small attack on a American life that no longer works and maybe never did.

Another early novel then, about youth and freedom, tuning into the zeitgeist in anticipation of the 1960’s. No in fact Updike, even as a young man of 27 felt a distance from the reformists and freewheelers that were beginning to emerge out of the legacy of post-war consensus America ( this distance was not just imaginative but political, Updike was always patriotic- in contrast with the new wave of writers critical of American life, such as Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). He remembers a particular resentment toward Kerouac’s “On The Road” published in 1957, because although Updike was aware of the limitations in American family life he saw Kerouac’s celebration of individual freedom as dangerous because it did not stress enough what was left behind. Where we can understand Harry’s motivation for running, we also feel as readers that he’s mean and selfish, leaving a young girl only just out of her teens to look after his kid, as well as facing the twin humiliations of her parents intrusions and the towns gossiping cruelty. Updike does not think that this unbridled search for sensation is something writers should laud around – he looks at the disintegrating weave of late 1950’s America and sees it, at least in part as a loss.

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James Maclaren is an undergraduate student of English and Drama at Queen Mary’s University. He will be regularly contributing articles about literature for Off Modern.

On British Film

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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It was Francois Truffaut, I believe, who once said that the English could not make films. Before I launch into my heroically unoriginal, whingeing diatribe, I must affirm that this is as ludicrous a claim as saying that Germans can’t rock (they can), or Syrians don’t use A4 paper (not so sure of this, but you get the point). However, to refine the statement somewhat, there is something sadly one dimensional about British film-making.

I can’t, off the top of my head, think of another major film-producing country with so narrow a spectrum of cinematic styles. Generally speaking, British films tend to fall into three categories (and I’m not counting the running, nay, collapsing asphyxiated joke that is the costume drama); heartwarming romantic comedies, which, with what I am loathe to call ‘typical British reserve’, rarely risk the volume of vulgarity which either makes or breaks a similar Hollywood flick. Then there is the kind of film we used to be revered, rather than shunned for making, namely the “gritty” (those commas must now be added by law) work of social realism, which stretches from the kitchen sink school of the late 50s to the gruesome (and in my mind, rather tedious) likes of Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton.

Somewhere in between these categories lies the Underdog film- from The Italian Job to Billy Elliot and beyond, it has ooh-erred and Bob’s-yer-uncle’d its way into characterizing our national cinema. I’m pretty sure that the skewed image of Brits as incompetent charmers with bad teeth can be attributed more than anything to these nauseatingly predictable movies. All three categories do, of course, contain within their ranks a number of films that are perfectly watchable. The trouble is, though, that they are paragons of perfect watchability- mildly humorous, tasteful and completely unmemorable. Last night I struggled for half an hour to remember the title of Hot Fuzz, and still recall nothing of the plot, simply that it was about policemen and it had Simon Pegg in it.

There have, of course, been exceptions. These tend to be Powell and Pressburger productions or the work of directors in thrall to European or American movements. Take, for example, Chris Petit’s wonderful 1979 road movie, Radio On. With its grainy monochrome, pulsing new wave soundtrack and muted dialogue, it has the air of a mid-70s Wim Wenders film. As the credits roll up, it comes as little surprise that Wenders himself produced it. Alas, for those few British reviewers who didn’t completely ignore it, this was a step too far. With an uncomfortably xenophobic ire, Petit was condemned for jumping ship, going over to Johnny foreigner’s camp. While the film doesn’t deviate hugely from Wenders’ style of the period, it succeeds in documenting a culture which, thank god, we have all but lost. The viewer is left with the impression that the England of 1979 was not a nice place to be- the Irish war looms large, psychotic hitchhikers abound, and one can almost smell the stale gut-punch of the Ginsters pasties sold at the rudimentary motorway service stations. Petit, like Godard at his best, gives English parochiality a hint of the dignity which has made the quotidian culture of our North American cousins so iconic. Petit realized the hitherto unimagined notion of the English road movie, and breathed mythology into the second-rate motorway system and damp bedsits which constitute the mise en scene. As a work of art, the film defines its era far more successfully than many of the often melodramatically staged kitchen sink dramas of the previous decade, and thus succeeds by stealing its best moves from abroad. Similarly, Lindsay Anderson’s If and O Lucky Man borrow liberally from the canon of Bunuel and Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, but their incoherent structure and whimsy only add to their overall depiction of Britain in the late 1960s, one defiantly at odds with the platitudinous image of beads, flowers and swinging London that has come to characterize our collective memory of the era. Prior to If, in 1968, it should be noted that the only true counter-cultural masterpiece set in the Britain of the 1960s was Blow Up- a film directed by an Italian.

Depressingly, it’s doubtful whether any studio exec would see fit to fund a project by a latter-day Anderson, Petit, or Michael Powell. Even indie studios won’t risk turning over a loss in the name of great cinema, which only serves to tighten the straps of our current cultural straightjacket. We have failed miserably to move on, and as our industry grapples desperately to recreate the commercial triumphs of ten years ago, we are forced to view our contemporary cinema culture as a parade of smudged facsimiles of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and (aaaaaaargh!!!!!) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

As is clear, this is indeed a sorry state. However, from the left field, there are what you must forgive me for calling, green shoots appearing. Despite the lamentable state of British mainstream cinema, several art films have emerged over the last couple of years that offer some hope for infiltration into our multiplexes. Offerings from the likes of Steve McQueen and Julian Schnabel have surpassed all possible hopes, doing what all successful art movies should, and forcing the viewer to confront received opinions whilst exploiting the full possibilities of the moving image. It’s a long shot, but if talent of this caliber can succeed in this country, and, of course, continues to do so, there is a very real possibility that at some stage in the not too distant future, we will be able to visualize the beginnings of a new culture of British cinema. For now, however, I can only dream, and congratulate myself that I have never knowingly bought a ticket to a Jason Statham movie…

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He will be contributing monthly to this blog. Enjoy.

Jack Cade’s Caves by Ian McQuaid

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My former flatmate just came back from Climate Camp where he sat around with other hippies and communicated with hand gestures they had learnt from a book. They had special ways of saying hello and I agree and I strongly agree and I strongly disagree which apparently sped the decision making process up, although I suspect it might simply have made them look like the cunts I suspect everyone is that isn’t me.

I’m pretty sure none of them knew as much about history as I do, probably.

I knew that while they were bleating away about the end of the world on Blackheath there was a series of secret caves lying under their sandeled feet. These caverns are called Jack Cade’s caverns. Jack Cade was a revolutionary from a date I cant remember ago who came up from Kent and rattled his sword on the London Stone which is a filthy pebble in Guildhall and said Now London is FREE and fought a massive battle on London Bridge. He’s dead now, they had him hung, drawn and quartered. But before he did the stone knocking business he hid out in these caves outside London where he worshipped Satan although the only people that really think that last bit are internet specials who think the world will end in 2012 with Boris Johnson shitting Tesla lizards out of the Queens Jewish cock.

Anyway, after Jack Cade fucked up, the caves disappeared until they were found by accident and opened them to the public in 1777 and people came from far and wide to see them. Until the stinking gases of an old fashioned world rose up and killed, yes killed, a person. So the caves were closed down again until some Victorian wag decided to stick a bellows in to suck out the shitty air, stick a chandelier up and build a bar in the corner. Then all the Victorians came and danced and for a while it was all good, but then as usually happens it all got A LITTLE OUT OF HAND and tales of morality free wantoness abounded and Victorians who only liked sexy time if it was being done by a wog or a 12 year old boy decided to close down the caves.

And then they were opened for a week in the 1940s when the government thought they might hide people down there from Nazis, but then didn’t.

And that time when they opened them is when they found the devil paintings on the wall, which is why mentalists think Jack Cade worshipped Satan, but about 23 other people could have painted that so I say he didn’t.

And then the caves were finally and properly closed up and know no one knows where they are really although holes open up in Shooters Hill sometimes and if all the Climate Camp people had known about history as well as me they could have started fucking digging and then they could have had an eco cave for themselves to live in.

You can check all this on the internet.

A SINKHOLE IN BLACKHEATH

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UPON EASTER ISLAND

I.
Memory refers to; a personal ability to store memory on the one hand; and the actual memories; but then there is also the technological definition of memory in which pure information is stored digitally inside a computer for retrieval.

II.
George Santayana has said two interesting things about memory; that memory is an internal rumour; and that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

III.
Let us consider Easter Island then, specifically as a symbolic representative of Atlantis to the modern world, in this role it is something integral to the collective unconscious make-up of humanity. It is modern, in the grander scheme of human history; the first settlement of the island only dates to 300 AD, at the earliest. Which places the island inside a very different timeline to that inhabited by the rest of the world. It exists outside of all the traditional Judao-Christianic-Sino historical narratives that we normally consider when tracking the large scale developments of human history, Easter Island subsists in its own unique teleological progression, that of the mini-history.

For a people so historically insignifigant they created a system of beliefs that centred on the worship of a series of non-existent ancestors and the Ariki kings, whom they built the famous ‘Easter Island Heads’ in tribute too. In praise of their birdman god they harvested all the forests on the island, history has a way of throwing a curve ball at people, and as they set about destroying their delicate ecosystem they were attacked by raids of Portuguese slave traders. Twelve islanders managed to escape from captivity and upon brought smallpox back with them upon their return. The smallpox began to kill off a large numbers of Easter Island’s inhabitants; this rapid population decrease and the deforestation ruined the island’s eco-system and drove their race to the very brink of extinction. Amongst all this, they started to wage genocidal clan wars between the survivors for the remaining land. Almost all of those who hadn’t died because of the famine that followed the destruction of their eco-system had now been killed in sweeping merciless acts of tribal warfare.

In the space of 1500 years (the great disasters that befell Easter Island happened in the 1800s) they had created their own history that encapsulated the macrohistorical timeline of the rest of the world; war, disaster, famine, disease, extinction, stupidity, religion.

IV.
Easter Island is a memory bank, a totemic summarisation of grand histories of many different cultures in one tiny place, adrift in the world’s biggest ocean. The Rapa Nui people who inhabit it are only part-human; or more correctly they are genetically homo-sapiens but are defined by their lack of human contact and historical socialisation in the creation of their society. Yet still they are engaged in the acts that classify human endeavour and civilisation, in them we can actively see the creation of the human artifices that we use to define ourselves as being more than animals. We see the creation of religion, (nature triumphs over man), we see the destruction of ecological systems that humans rely on to survive (man triumphs over nature), we see ware (man triumphs over man).

The birdman god whom they worshipped is symbolic of the freedom they are geographically and historically excluded from; set apart as they are on their tiny, remote island from a human history that doesn’t exist for them. Their invented ancestors, the Ariki, are the creation of a history that doesn’t exist. Their mini-history shares many parallel motifs with our macro-history, the creation of the human from the homo-sapien in the worship of god and in violence. Here we see humanity engaged in the actual creation of a history and the invention of a collective unconscious memory in order to give a meaning to the id that allows them to be human.

Easter Island is a modern Atlantis, geographically and historically. The larger activities of humanity happen there at a sped up historical rate, the passage from the creation of gods that give meaning to life, through to destruction and almost extinction, happen entirely within the larger narrative of modern western human history. What haunts modern man about Easter Island is what is left behind, a series of sculptures in praise of forgotten gods, they are incomprehensible, artistic religious iconographic artefacts. They come to symbolise a memory of humanity, they make us ask ourselves what we will leave behind and thus what will be found of us.

V.

He invented a face for himself. Behind it, he lived, died, and was resurrected many times. (‘The Other’, Octavio Paz)

The rise of the modern age, which we can claim to have truly started in 1781 with the American Revolution and then also in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, represents the abandonment of the belief in the power of theological models and its subsequent usurpation by the supremacy of the ideological. Up until the French Revolution religious belief had defined human history; as the modern era progressed, through industrialisation, capitalisation and then into the twentieth century, theological belief dwindled and stagnated, becoming a cultural petit four with little philosophical power over the populous in general. Theology and ideology are the two primary ways of measuring the progression of man through time. Theology provides a constant cultural id to the pre-modern existence; it gave man the existential solace of a belief in something beyond the sufferings he experienced in his everyday life. As the living conditions in the modern western world got better there was less need for the kind of grand schemata that was offered by religion. Thus, to fill the void left by faith, ideologies begin to take root; they place man as being fully in control of the creation of his own existential definition by actively demanding of man to make the utopian visions of theology into an earthly reality; this is the new historical progression of the modern era. In the modern era time is measured by the progress of man’s achievements, the goal of progress becomes progression itself, it is no longer defined by a development to a promised land that exists only beyond the corporeal.

This modern progression provides a framework for the revolution as the method of achieving it. The revolution is the implement of modernity. When the sans-culottes started demanding bread and prosperity (utopia) they set in motion the French Revolution. Then when the sans-culottes start demanding Terror and Vengeance (dystopia) we see the actuality of the French Revolution, the very first act of modernity was to turn the dreams of utopia into a reality of dystopia.

In the novels of Lewis Carroll we have a movement into a world in which the normal laws regarding probability and logic are suspended in order to illustrate the illogical and absurd nature of the real world that Alice leaves behind. On her adventures through the Looking Glass and also in Wonderland, Alice meets certain characters that pose ontological questions to themselves and her, but because in these magical realms there is no normal logic there can be no logical answers to those questions. The novels are both theological and ideological; Alice must struggle through the existence she is forced to endure in order to reach the promised land of normal life – this is both an affirmation and inversion of modernity. Alice only has Alice; she must struggle to make things better, to return to the real world of Alice; but this real world exists outside of the existence she is stuck in inside the books; it is thus also a theological fable about god and heaven and the tribulations of man. Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass are both modern and pre-modern, this paradox creates their absurdity; we can transpose our reading of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass onto the current situation in Iran in that is also paradoxically modern and pre-modern.

So then, Iran, in 1979, almost 300 years since the first tremors of modernity began to be felt there occurred an Alice-like inversion of its founding principles; in the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeni we are witness to an alternate pathway of modernity, whereby the assumption that modernity is about a replacement of theology with ideology is confused; the Islamic Revolution and the system put in place as a result of it is a Religious ideology, fundamentalism more or less. Revolution, the implement of modernity, has here been historically appropriated for the purposes of theology, the leftovers of the pre-modern, there is an anomaly in the chronological superstructures of the development of the Western world whereby a ghost from its past comes back to haunt it, it shows it its own distorted reflection.

The current situation in Iran opens up a vast field of land upon which to form historical and philosophical assumptions about the state of modernity, especially in relation to the intersections between the theological and ideological ideas of progress. Revolution is naturally cyclical, it is in the name, and one cycle of revolution brought a theological system of governance into creation just as another can replace it. Revolution and the modern age cannot be permanent, in order for there to be progress there must be another revolution, an act of creation that unites man with god, a return to the origin in order to move forwards. This is how Modernity operates, it built in its own demise as a necessary by-product of its being able to exist.

Glasgow

Football clubs form identities. There are the Jewish clubs, Tottenham and Ajax, who historically have had large numbers of Jewish supporters and whose supporters have become known as yids. In this instance there is a level of Jewish identification that exists between a Spurs or Ajax supporter and the idea of being Jewish, that is by supporting Spurs or Ajax one becomes aware of the club as being ‘Jewish’ and adapts subconsciously to that idea in order to conform to the idea of the club. The football club’s identity is created by its fan base which then becomes part of the identity of the club on a deeper level which then forces a club’s future supporters to adhere too. This is the basis of the identification process of football in which an individual identity is subjugated to a collective idea of identity.

For example after a series of goalkeeping errors by Artur Boruc against Northern Ireland in a world cup qualifying match legendary Polish keeper Jan Tomaszewski insisted that Boruc was being punished by God for starting a religious war in Glasgow. Boruc, from Catholic Poland plays for Celtic, a club with a strong Catholic identity. Boruc frequently makes the sign of the cross whilst playing against Celtic’s Protestant rival club, Rangers. Both Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers become two symbolic outlets for the deeply ingrained sectarian religious identities of Scotland. They make visible the divisions in society by becoming easily identifiable semiotic devices for the conflict.

This relates to a system theatrical identification; literature, theatre, poetry, the arts in general all act as ways for us pose ontological questions to ourselves. Specifically they work through the examination of roles and events that then cause us to consider our identity and how it changes over time. For example Shakespeare’s ontological questioning in Hamlet is naturally different from Beckett’s in Waiting for Godot. In football though we have a subjugation of questions of identity, for the purity of a moment of collective anonymity as a spectator who is never forced to question religious or political affiliation, only to accept every victory and defeat as a facet of a great cultural struggle. Identity is formed on the level of the communal, not on the ontological.

Italy

Before Mussolini’s Fascist Party turned to football as a way of creating a collective identity for his state he initially, in tandem with the Futurist movement, used theatre.

In Florence in 1934, 20,000 spectators amassed to witness a spectacle play that aimed to connect the masses to a new theatre of the average man, the project totally failed because the play’s protagonist was a Fiat 18BL truck. It was done on a huge scale, featuring 2000 amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry brigade, one cavalry brigade, 50 trucks, four field machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. It was trying to create a fascist/futurist theatre of the mass identity, to cause a crisis and end what they perceived as a bourgeois theatre. The complete and utter failure of this artistic project to connect the masses to theatrical performance resulted directly in the creation of Fiorentina Football Club as a way of focusing fascist identity upon a different type of spectacular performance.

Yugoslavia

In Yugoslavia football also became a way of focusing national identity, as the country split into independent states, clubs like Dinamo Zagreb from Croatia clashed with Red Star Belgrade, a team whose supporters identify themselves with Serbian nationalism. They played what was to be the last football game in Yugoslavia, before the country collapsed; the game was abandoned after ten minutes as the two groups of nationalist paramilitary hooligans started a riot that ended with the whole stadium being burnt to the ground. Zagreb player Boban assaulted a policeman who was trying to stop the Zagreb ultras from attacking the Red Star fans. Then at a game between fierce rivals Red Star and Partizan in 1992 a group of Serbian paramilitaries appeared in the stadium brandishing road signs from Croatian towns that had fallen to the Serbian Army. The two sets of opposing fans were united by their hatred for the Croats.

When Communism still existed in Yugoslavia, the hooligan ultras of these clubs used the violence of football as a way of asserting their own freedom from politics; their identity becomes one of freedom through the actions of mindless violence against the ‘other’ defined as opposing supporters. In a political system of collectivisation the collective identity of the football club can become, ala Fiorentina, a facet of the states control of identity, but in Yugoslavia the collective identity of the football club became a giant negative subversion of collective identity by using it as a rebellion against a state enforced collectivisation of identity. The individual becomes free to create their identity within the collective identity of Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Fascist, Anti-Communist et cetera in relation to the football club by existing outside of traditional definitions of what this identity should entail.

Football becomes the oxymoronic expression of the freedom of the individual identity in the manifestation of a collective idea of identity.

Reg Ward, first Chief Executive of the LDDC, speaking at a local meeting in 1982 described the Docklands as “a blank canvas upon which we can paint the future”. However, when the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC) moved into its Isle of Dogs offices, there were still local working docks, many small industries and a population of 56,000 people, mainly living in high-rise council tower blocks with poor amenities.

The LDDC was the Thatcher government’s favourite quango, it trampled all over the working class and created the ultimate sore thumb in Britain’s privatized metropolis - Canary Wharf. Headed by Ward, a former Chief Executive of Hereford and Worcester County Council and Hammersmith and Fulham London Borough Council the LDDC began planning internationally funded office buildings in the early 1980s.

Left in the dark, the local Docklands community soon saw scaffolding superstructures protruding out of their neighborhood. The gross negligence of the suited cronies with their gravy-dripping fingers provoked an intense backlash from the formerly silent majority. This backlash culminated most poignantly in poster campaigns and bizarre protests by artists, local representatives and Labour politicians.

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