Blog No. 19

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Well in response to the question about tattoos. I included tattoos in the list because I was trying to be funny but it is true that there do seem to be a lot more tattoos about these days and there does seem to be an element of addiction in how many some people posess. For example David Beckham and Robbie Williams, two people with clearly addicitive and OCD tendencies, are covered with the things.

I’m in Liverpool at the moment and I saw two guys in the same day with this look: they were both very stocky and overweight and in their mid twenties and they wore those long shorts with pockets in the legs that finish well below the knee. (There is a lot of inappropriate shortage about these days which I might discuss at a later date) but in this case the reason these two guys were wearing those particularly unflattering shorts that made them look like obese schoolboys was to proudly or obsessively display the elaborate tattoos on their lower legs. I don’t remember that being something you saw twenty years ago. It was like their heads belonged to white guys while their legs belonged to sort of bluey-greeny guys. Maybe I'm completely wrong about this and I'm writing it quickly because I feel guilty about not blogging for a month and at least I suppose people getting tattoos are supporting small independent businesses, as far as I know Asda doesn’t have a tattooing division but it does seem remarkable what you can get people to spend money on. In a sense this ties in with the argument about human nature. All those movements that have tried to compel people to be good, most notably communism, have foundered because selling stuff to each other and buying stuff off each other seems to be a basic psychological drive in human beings and if you attempt to force them to act in a different way you open the way to terror and dictatorship. On the other hand this inclination that was once simple bartering has grown into this enormous monster called capitalism. However capitalism, being based on an elemental human impulse is enormously adaptable. One of the things it does organically is to incorporate and nullify anything that challenges it.

I am still full of admiration for the way we got from Radical feminism to “Girl Power” in about twenty years. With radical feminism once they’d bought the Citroen 2CV and a few pairs of baggy dungarees there was no way you could make money out of young women whereas with girl power and the subsequent ideas of “post feminism” there is not one element that isn’t commodified. You have to gasp in admiration. What all people strive for is significance and happiness and one of the things our society does is that it persuades them that you can achieve these two things by buying stuff. Of course this isn’t true, indeed what capitalism says is that its the next thing you buy that’ll make you happy, not the things you have now, so there is a permanent sense of disatisfaction built into our society. All I wonder, since you can’t compel people, is whether there isn’t a way to persuade them to give up the idea that buying things will make them happy without of course destroying our society so we end up living in a violent dystopia catching and eating mice for dinner.

I think I’m nearly there I just need to design a good logo and we’ll be off.

Blog No. 18

The alexeisayle.com site is run by someone called Martin Lewis who was my first manager when I started out in showbusiness a long time ago. It’s a testament to the destructive power of feelings of bitterness and resentment that the poor man can still be mad at me a quarter of a century after we last spoke.

Resentment and rage are things I have experienced myself in the past, so I know what a corrosive and destructive effect they can have on your life if you don’t make an effort to address them and sort them out.

Or it could be that I’m just a really, really annoying person and if you met me you too would still be fuming about it twenty-five years later.

But this does bring me neatly to a couple of points that have beenraised about CBT/REBT, Cognitive Dissonance and politics.

To respond to Pat’s comments, if I understand it correctly, I agree with what you seem to be saying that all the bad things about human behaviour, racism, consumerism, addiction, are a coping mechanism gone wrong. That in trying to make themselves completely safe people inflict damage both on others, themselves and the planet.

Now I may be misunderstanding the second point but you seem to say that because people have so much invested in non change that nothing can be done. Well I agree that people do have a huge amount invested in non change and to get them to alter their behaviour is very difficult, George Monbiot pointed out in a recent article that of every ten people who have heart attacks only one changes their diet and exercise patterns.

Still here’s my thinking on all that. One of the things that seems now to be foolish and wrong about my parents’ and my owncommunism and about so much of left wing discourse is the way in which we used to typify our opponents. We referred merrily to “fat capitalist pigs, or greedy snout in the trough bankers, or brutal fascist cops, thick, stupid squaddies etc, etc”. We were able to talk about these people in this way because we lived in a closed-off world where we never met anybody who wasn’t entirely like us. However in the last few years I have tried to meet and understand people who are not like me and who are, to my mind, involved in practices which I think are profoundly wrong. And they do not live up to their stereotyping (well some do, some are absolute bastards). What they are is people who have adopted a false coping mechanism to try and make themselves feel significant or safe - amassing great wealth, unscrupulously gaining political power, stealing somebody else’s country. These people, in my experience also generally seem to be tremendously unhappy and beset by the problems that tend to go along with such aberrant behaviour - rage, anger, bitterness, excessive self-justification, addiction to drink, drugs, plastic surgery, tatoos or material things, obsessive compulsive disorders and so on.

My only thought is to wonder if you can somehow bring that realisation into the political discourse to say to those who you consider the oppressors of humanity - corrupt politicians, CEOs of multi-national corporations, Amanda Holden, that the fight for a fairer world will be of benefit to them as well as to the oppressed, that they will be freed from their fears and bitterness just as the mass will be freed from hunger and subjugation.

It’s a long shot I know but it seems worth trying. I propose we will spread our message via Rabbit phones and fax machines and if we are attacked we will defend ourselves with the shipment of M1 Garands and BARs in 30-06 I hope we will be getting from the States any day now.

Blog No. 17

I been at our house in Spain for a little while and it is difficult to get internet there, I either have to go to the BP garage in the next village or steal broadband from the local discotheque which makes the owner really mad. When he sees Brits skulking outside his building trying to hide their Apple G4s he often switches it off.

It was really hot out there, we went into Granada one day when it was 40c to see our lawyer and afterwards bought a mirror in a furniture shop on the Paseo de Ronda that we like. Then I had to take it back to our hire car, which was some way away in an underground carpark beneath the Neptuno shopping centre. It was much heavier and bigger than it looked in the shop. So I found myself carrying a giant gold metal mirror, on my shoulders, through the centre of Granada, under the blazing hot summer sun. At one point I carried it right past the walls of the summer home of Federico Garcia Lorca - the Huerta de San Vicente, the house from where he was taken by Nationalist forces and murdered.

Then I recalled Lorca’s words.”We must leave, but Granada remains. Eternal in time, but fleeting in these poor hands - these hands of mine, the smallest of her children.
Yet no man can truly understand Granada until he has carried a large gold mirror on his back down Calle Virgen Blanca.”
So swings and roundabouts really.

Important news! Just before I left London I saw a Rabbit Sign, it was on the sign of a building at the corner of Euston Buildings and North Gower Street. If you’ve been following these blogs you will know that a Rabbit Sign means there is or was a base station somewhere in the building which in the early 90’s meant if you had a Rabbit phone as I did and you stood within a hundred metres you could make a phone call. So now what I need to do is buy one of those Rabbits phones off E-bay, go to North Gower Street and see if I can make phones calls, possibly to my younger self back in the late1980s or early1990s. If it is a portal to the past I would ask myself why I’d bought those unstructured Armani suits that made me look like BBC executive and arts presenter Alan Yentob.

In fact there is a photograph which I think Yentob has in his office of him, me and Salman Rushdie taken at a BBC function in the 80s where we look like some Levantine cabaret act, “The Three Mustaphas-Magical Realism, Comedy and Programme Planning.”

Blog No. 16 (& 16a)

In her book “A History of God” Karen Armstrong points out that when God hands down the Ten Commandments to Moses, the first five commandments are about him, God that is. God goes on about how he’s the Lord and how he brought them out of Egypt and how they should have no other God but him and he’s a jealous God before he even remembers to mention the stuff about not killing people and coveting oxes and so on.

I of course am not like that, I am not a jealous Website Host, even when I am shown to be wrong about ammunition on my own goddam website, you go ahead and talk about whatever you want, you can even say nice things about Ben Elton and I won’t mind too much.

I thought I should make an attempt this time around to explain in a little more detail my ideas concerning Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) andRational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and how they might have significance in the political realm, rather than just in the area of personal development but when I started writing it all just came out as sounding terribly pompous and if there is one person on thie earth who foreswears pomposity it is I. (Though I did just compare myself favourably to God). I was also aware that you should be extremely wary of any ex-performer like me who suddenly becomes messianic about any form of psychology or pychotherapy.Ruby Wax and Pamela Stevenson are two obvious examples of entertainers who retrained as psychotherapists after their careers went on the slide and I’m not sure I’d put a great deal of faith in anything either of those two mopes had to say. To channel ‘Bunk’ Moreland for a moment there.

Perhaps it works better when spoken out loud so I was thinking once I’ve finished with the memoir I might do a tour expanding on my Liverpool speech, we’ll see. At that Bookclub benefit I’m doing on Thursday I think I’ll read from a brilliant book called “Mistakes Were Made (But not by be): why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions and hurtful acts.” This was written by two social psychologists called Aronson and Tavris and details the psycholgical processes that lead to people to doing the wrong thing while thinking it is the right thing.

There is a wonderful quote from George Orwell on that subject.

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

This book would make an ideal present for Gordon Brown and any number of ex-CEO’s of giant banks right now but of course even if they read it they wouldn’t be able to absorb it. I was watching footage of Fred Goodwin etc “apolgising” to the parliamentary financial committee a few months ago and they all said they were sorry for ”the events that had occured”. Note, not the things they had done but “the events that had occured”. Classic Cognitive Dissonance dawg.

Blog 16a

Evelyn you raise an interesting point which is slightly difficult to deal with here in that I need to be concise and I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about. However I would say that in pointing out that certain bankers and politicians are being dishonest both with the outside world and with themselves, it should not necessarily be regarded as transference but just as an acknowledgement that there is another way to handle the business of making mistakes. This is simply to admit that you have made them and to try and not make the same mistake in the future. I would also add that people who admit mistakes and accept that they are fallible, will most likely suffer less rage, self-loathing and anger than those who go around trying to shape the world to their own distorted view of it. They will also of course make less mistakes.

Finally, here's a little song I've done asking Leonard Cohen not to play a gig in Tel Aviv this summer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTPe42b4Dsk

Blog No. 15 (& 15a) +15a.1

I should really answer some queries and write more about my theories concerning Behavioural Therapy and its potential to entirely revolutionise our political discourse but for now its more fun to write about faxes and other failed technologies. 

I do like the idea of the guy sending the faxes to nobody and the fax virus tape roll and oddly enough I know Charlestown (I assume its the one in NSW,) I was stuck for three months making a movie near Port Stevens in NSW and I think Charlestown was our nearest mall.  We were awfully bored, I remember me and Linda became obsessed with a particularly dirty, unkempt-looking sheep that lived just outside town and we were really worried on our last day there that we wouldn’t see him as we drove to the airport, fortunately we caught a glimpse of him behind a shed "There he is!"  I shouted "There he is!" much to the confusion of the guy driving our taxi.

In writing my memoir I’ve realised that one of the things about my parents communism was that it came with an odd sort of anti-Britishness, they thought if you were in any way patriotic you were revelling in the achievements of the Empire as if supporting England (though not N Ireland Scotland or Wales) or Great Britain at football, cricket or athletics you were somehow saying slavery,  the Opium Wars and the Peterloo Massacre were a really good idea.  My reaction to this was that I went the other way and became sort of patriotic in an off-centre fashion, mostly for years I tried to buy British products.  Of the six cars I’ve owned, four were Britsh-an old Triumph, two Rovers and a Landrover.  

The oddest British product though was my “Rabbit” phone.  The Rabbit phone came just before the spread of the mobile phone and it used CT2 technology which now only exists in your home digital cordless.   The “Rabbit “was your home phone but also if you took it out in the street with you, and then stood within a 100 metres of a “Rabbit” sign, a sign that denoted you were near a “Rabbit “ base station, you could then make a phone call.  Of course if you tried to ring home nobody could answer,  because you were walking around the street with your phone.  They also said you could use it in a station so I’d take my “Rabbit” with me on trains and would sometimes be able to talk for 45 seconds or so in a very crackly way until the train left the station.

Occasionally you can still see the “Rabbit” sign on newsagents doors but the whole network collapsed and they gave me a mobile instead.

BLOG 15 a

One more thing.  Russell it’s very good that you now know what a Bren gun is and perhaps vital to our collective project.  I seem to remember a Bren gun plays a central role in Graham Greene’s great novel “The Comedians”.

A week or so ago an actress friend of mine rang me up and left a message saying she had to read an extract from Brokeback Mountain at a benefit, there was a rifle calibre mentioned in the short story and she wanted to talk to me about its pronunciation. I can’t tell you how exciting I found this! I called her back and forced her to listen to me for hours going on about ammunition. 

The calibre in the novel is written as “30-06”  but before I told her how to say it I went on about how it was the standard calibre of the US military and how it was similar to the British .303 (as used in the Bren gun) and how  later it was the standard NATO calibre when it was referred to as 7.62 mm and then sated I finally told her the correct pronuciation was “thirty aught six” and she had to act grateful.

It got me wondering though whether there isn’t some possibility of a premium  phone line where men can call women with sexy voices and talk to them about calibres, ammunition, rates of fire and trajectories.

Oh one more one more thing, I’m thinking of introducing a new line in my imaginary sandwich bar.  The whole organic porridge thing has been going for a couple of years now so I was thinking you could do the same thing for gruel. Organic gruel as featured in Oliver Twist.  I just have to find out what gruel is.

15a.1

A good mention in Sunday's Independent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/tim-lott-our-land-changes-by-the-hour-but-novelists-have-nothing-to-say-1693382.html