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Running On The Spot

"The art of Thespis developed, as its inmost nature required, as a scene of the morning and of the full sunlight. On the contrary, our Western popular and Passion plays, which originated in the sermon of allocated parts and were first produced by priests in the church, and then laymen in the open square, on the mornings of high festivals, led almost unnoticed to an art of evening and night. Already in Shakespeare’s time performances took place in late afternoon, and by Goethe’s this mystical sense of proper relation between art and light-setting had attained its object. In general, every art and every culture has its significant times of day. The music of the 18th century is a music of the darkness and the inner eye, and the plastic of Athens is an art of the cloudless day. The candle affirms and the sunlight denies space as the opposite of things. At night the universe of space triumphs over matter, at midday the surroundings assert themselves and space is repudiated."

Oswald Spengler, "The Decline Of The West"

For Oswald Spengler, the history of Western art was a constant striving to better represent an infinite sense of space, which for him was the essence of the Western "soul feeling". All the innovations of Western art were in the service of this ideal - the development of perspective on the two-dimensional canvas and the corresponding invention of new shades and textures of paint were mirrored in the perfecting of the acoustics of the concert hall and the ever-expanding range of instruments and tones of the symphony orchestra. Thus the essence of Western drama, of which "Dr. Faustus" and "Macbeth" were the earliest and most perfect representations, was to portray characters for whom time and space, interchangeable constants in Spengler’s schema, were always in mutation, most especially when both were being constricted.

There was never a more Spenglerian group than The Jam, whose music consisted of soul-dramas whose protagonists were forever meeting a receding horizon. Paul Weller instinctively understood that to run out of time is to run out of space, and to run out of space is to run out of time. The Jam’s songs were themselves projected shadows, invariably conveying the opposite of what their titles proclaimed. Therefore, for example, "Going Underground" is about selling out, "Start" is about the end of a relationship, "That’s Entertainment" is about ennui, "The Eton Rifles" is about the collapse of working-class solidarity, and "Absolute Beginners" is a rueful reflection on experience.



The impending sense of foreclosure in Weller’s songs had two sources. The first, difficult to recall nowadays, is the fact that for the pre-Thatcher era working and lower-middle classes, adolescence was the briefest moment of possibility in a life that had already been largely pre-ordained to consist of a steady job and a steady marriage. Pop music, like toys and comics, was something that you were expected to grow out of as you accepted the responsibilities (and limitations) of adulthood, and these responsibilities would closely resemble those of your parents. This sense of adolescence being a fleeting and precarious moment of freedom usually manifested itself in strongly enforced music taboos, concerning both competing contemporary genres and past musics. Although the late-70’s may appear to be a musical cornucopia to present day dilettantes, most of it was off-limits with respect to whichever cultural grouping with whom you'd thrown in your lot.

The second was the sense that the post-war consensus, and its possibilities for working class advancement, was coming to an end. Ironically, the subsequent destruction of the employment base, in conjunction with the new North Sea oil revenues, would result in the remnants of these classes entering a kind of permanent adolescence, with the blue collar working class pushed toward a lumpenised existence of benefits and casualised employment, and the white collar taking refuge in the expanded higher education sector; both groups leading oddly shapeless lives of instant gratification and trivia. It is this disconnection with the world that The Jam inhabited which gives them their curiously dated quality. Looking back from the present, it often seems difficult to understand what Weller was getting so uptight about.

The Jam’s final and finest album, "The Gift" was in many ways the last record of the post war consensus, and an open elegy for it, with Weller’s lyrical concerns reaching their fullest expression with two songs, "Running On The Spot" and "Happy Together".



"Running On The Spot" itself is the final expression of the social disillusion that began with "The Eton Rifles", with any lingering pang of youthful expectation curdling into a realisation that all they represent are "the next generation of emotional cripples". With "Happy Together", you can almost feel the walls closing in. Desperately trying to convince themselves that their only option is the best one, a couple attempt to reassure themselves that at least they have each other. It sounds like bad faith, but still represents an era when people could still look to each other for salvation, rather than be abandoned to the vagaries of "the market".

Charlie Don't Surf

Note: Dennis Wilson and Terry Melcher (actual son of Doris Day and executive producer of her TV show) were the friends and 'intended' victims of the Manson family, for petty showbiz reasons - not 'race war', helter skelter or any other hippie/punk/industrial rock bullshit.

Man's Best Friend: Straight on Till Morning (1972)

Straight on Till Morning (1972) is amusingly described here as 'like Ken Loach directing poor cow on LSD'; in fact it was the work of Peter Collinson, director of now ubiquitous 'Brit' film of the 60s The Italian Job (1969). If this was equally feted as a film of the 70s then we'd recognise something of the psychic/social extremity of that period. Spoilers obviously follow...

Rita Tushingham (Brenda) escapes from a spectacularly miserable looking Liverpool to a hardly much more thrilling 'swinging' London, claiming to her mother she's pregnant and going to find the father. Once there she sets out to find a man to make her pregnant, to give truth to her lie, deciding on James Bolam (not the most prepossessing swinging guy), but he, unfortunately, sleeps with her London 'best friend'.

Structured by bizzare editing the film opens and as truly disorientating, if not to say distressing, 'image' of 70s London/Britain. This is even before Tushingham, in scenes of painful awkwardness that perhaps belie Adam Kotsko's theory of the recency of this structural trait, meets her fatal partner - truly post-Norman Bates pretty boy psychokiller 'Peter' (played by Shane Briant).

Entering into a foile a deux, structured by Peter Pan, from which the film takes its title, they settle down in the mews house of the sugar mummy 'Peter' has previously murdered. He has one of those psychopathologies hopefully not present outside cinema (equal parts Norman Bates and Mark Lewis (Peeping Tom)) - murdering his surrogate 'mothers' and anyone he finds 'pretty' with that archetypal British weapon the Stanley Knife.
We see the depth of his pathology when he murders the dog 'Tinker' because Brenda as 'prettified' the poor creature to entice Peter. Settling into 'domestic bliss' (Peter regards women as there to cook and clean), eventually Brenda (now renamed 'Wendy') becomes pregnant. As she seems to have disappeared she is tracked down by her London best friend on behalf of her distraught mother. Unfortunately said friend meets up with Peter and, after sex, he murders her for being 'pretty'.

The most extreme and distressing moment is, unusually aural. Outside of the squelchy 'shunting' in Society, David Lynch's sountrack for Eraserhead, or the slaughtered pigs of The Exorcist, it contains one of the most horrifying sound sequences in cinema.

Peter likes recording his murders (parallel to Mark Lews's filming) and to prove his true nature to Wendy he locks her in the bedroom with a tape playing the sounds of his killing of the dog and the best friend. The sounds of the killing of the dog are truly horrible - obviously we're dealing with fiction, but there's something about the slow and painful killing of the dog that exceeds the sounds of the murder of the friend. I don't know how they got these sounds recorded and I don't want to know.

After escaping from the bedroom and trying to escape by Peter the pregnant Brenda/Wendy is presumably murdered by Peter (this takes place off camera). If we think of the literally suspensive ending of The Italian Job I doubt we could imagine a grimmer counterpart of the undecidable ending.

Of course the film inhabits the misogyny discussed previously here, in almost a parodic way, considering the general unpleasantness of the male characters and Peter's camply 'performative' masculinity (mixing in homophobia as well - it seems appropriate Shane Briant would later play Dorian Gray). On the other hand, the female characters are generally supportive, Brenda's mother is genuinely concerned for her and seems more confused by her daughter's fantasy life and disappearance. The best friend she meets in London may sleep with Wendy's prospective boyfriend and Peter, but she goes to find her and seem socially/sexually liberated, but not condescending or hostile to Brenda.

Therefore, we don't have 'anti-Oedipal' outsiders versus both straights and the newly-liberated hippies/hip, but rather hyper-Oedipal violent inversion. The fantasies of return to childhood are given a far darker edge than anything Denis Potter imagined, and the brutality, in the most banal 'British' way, captures a 'nihilism' that has nothing glamorous or punk about it.

It's the refusal of a 'social' or even 'psychological' explanation for this extreme but banal violence, beyond the usual post-Freudian cliches, that makes the film so misanthropic. A true product of the 70s, a film without hope.

A Taste Of Fanny

"As the nation declines in power and wealth, a universal pessimism gradually pervades the people, and itself hastens the decline. There is nothing succeeds like success, and, in the Ages of Conquest and Commerce, the nation was carried triumphantly onwards on the wave of its own self-confidence. Republican Rome was repeatedly on the verge of extinction—in 390 B.C. when the Gauls sacked the city and in 216 B.C. after the Battle of Cannae. But no disasters could shake the resolution of the early Romans. Yet, in the later stages of Roman decline, the whole empire was deeply pessimistic, thereby sapping its own resolution. Frivolity is the frequent companion of pessimism. Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. The resemblance between various declining nations in this respect is truly surprising. The Roman mob, we have seen, demanded free meals and public games. Gladiatorial shows, chariot races and athletic events were their passion. In the Byzantine Empire the rivalries of the Greens and the Blues in the hippodrome attained the importance of a major crisis.

Judging by the time and space allotted to them in the Press and television, football and baseball are the activities which today chiefly interest the public in Britain and the United States respectively. The heroes of declining nations are always the same - the athlete, the singer or the actor."

Sir John Glubb - "The Fate Of Empires" (Blackwell, 1978)

Of course, Sir John’s pantheon of the heroes of a declining nation should also include chefs, whose celebrity incarnations have spread like a plague across the nation’s television scheduling hours since the beginning of the Blair era. Although the 1970’s are frequently considered to be an era of decline for Britain in particular, there is much evidence to suggest that in many ways the country still possessed a formidable fortitude and virility. This was not least manifested in its dire cuisine, prudishly coy "sex industry" and dilapidated sports stadia, all of which suggested that the British public were a long way from being the passive spectators of spectacle and addicts to instant gratification that Neoliberalism demands.

British food in the 1970’s was heroically Spartan, with the meat-and-two-veg wartime/austerity culture still lingering two decades after it had become redundant, and combining with industrially derived "instant" foods such as Cadbury’s Smash and Angel Delight. With its powdered vegetables, powdered desserts and substitute fruit juices, the average British family ate like NATO soldiers on exercises or Soviet Cosmonauts. The late ‘50’s had nevertheless seen the appearance of the first real celebrity chef in the bizarre Norma Desmond figure of Fanny Cradock, a viciously snobbish petit-bourgeois matriarch with pisshole-in-the-snow eyes and a back story out of a Catherine Cookson novel. Although Cradock’s menus appear rather modest by today’s standards, at the time they were considered to be almost impossibly grand and pretentious. Nobody who watched her show was remotely interested in emulating her cookery - the main sources of entertainment were her waspish asides to her dipsomaniac husband Johnnie, who would wander haphazardly around the rear of the set, bottle in hand, pausing only to get in his wife’s way.

There was always something poignant and sympathetic about the Cradocks, however. They were the kind of archetypal couple that don’t exist anymore - the type that stayed married for reasons of business respectability, regardless of how incompatible they might be. Fanny’s ruthless social climbing was of the desperate kind that had to derive from real experience of poverty, and her underlying insecurity was always bound to lead to disaster sooner or later. Nemesis was to occur in 1976 when she verbally flayed amateur cook Gwen Troake on BBC’s "The Big Time", an incident that so appalled the public that it effectively finished her television career.



Fanny’s position as the Nation’s most recognised cook was taken by the Gwen Troake-like Delia Smith, an innocuous working-class girl who created the kind of pleasant, unpretentious recipes that met the overwhelming approval of the British public, who still very sensibly confined oral gratification to the margins of their culture. It couldn’t last however, and a combination of the instinctive cultural cringe towards the "food culture" of the Continent, American standards of big-portion gluttony, and the vast loosening of credit standards following "The Big Bang" allowed an entire collection of wide-boy entrepreneurs and metropolitan food-snobs to open ever more exotic restaurants and otherwise dine in them. The end result is a gruesomely disgusting food-fetishism in which a whole slew of vulgar public schoolboys can appear on our televisions flambé-ing veal steaks with arc-welding kits on improvised sets in the open countryside.

The deeper tragedy of course is that the public of the 1970's would have been far more fit to face the austere future we are being promised following the collapse of Neoliberalism. When future generations get to laugh at our decline, you can forget about news reports about George Osborne. It’ll be footage like this that will be the focus of their derision: