Ramping & Roaring

Situations have ended "sad"...

2012-01-25T22:38:00.004Z

OMG my two FAVOURITE THINGS EVER:

Miley and Dylan. Do you die? I die.

Especially Miley singing freaking DYLAN with the LEAST EMOTION since James Van Der Beek pretended to be sad about Tom Cruise's wife dumping him.

Do you remember Miley doing her sexy Britney pole-dance on an ice-cream cart at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards? (OF COURSE you do.)* This is better.

I mean, she sings about some hot girl with crimson hair across her face, and it's NOT EVEN SEXY! Amazing. Miley has no idea who Rimbaud is.

But WTF does Dylan care? He thinks it's hot. I want to be like him when I'm seventy, not giving a damn about my back-catalogue, and grinding with Victoria's Secret biatches.

And he's made anyway, cause of Adele. How is anyone still buying that album? Isn't it like a law that every person in the Western world must have owned it by the end of 2011?**

Well, you can't accuse anyone of selling out if it's for charity. Good old Amnesty International. It's all worth it for the prisoners.

*It's the choreography from 'I'm a Slave 4 U', loser. How did you not know that?
**I don't, but I'm a bitch who's totally bored by the New Boring. Also I literally only buy albums (and I am probably the only person left in Britain still buying CDs) that Peter Robinson tells me to.

London Parties: 1

2012-01-23T01:50:00.009Z

Let’s face it the most significant events in most people’s lives are parties. Obviously there are christenings, birthdays, weddings, funerals &c. but actually I’m talking about the weekly rounds of dinner parties, house parties, nights out, parrr-taays, do you like to party? parties (nearly-naked parties in St John’s Wood, blah, blah, blah) - whatever tickles your fancy or fancies your tickle - parties. So this year R&R will attempt to convey the character of some of the parties they have the good luck to be entertained at, hoping to catch the zeitgeist of 2012 amid the urban 26ish crowd.

Well, by the grace of God, Ramping was required in his slender house to host the leaving party of a highly-favoured civil servant+1, before they set sail for the Far East. It was an international affair the said +1 being a bona fide European, and it is a mark of our times that a europhile servant of her majesty’s civil service should find himself departing for a further shore.

As befits the foreign office there was a stack of ferrero rocher and tonic for quinine (though no one drank the gin [surprise joy in the morning]), as well as plenty of wannabe ambassadors. Roaring was in her element - there was wine - and as usual she sabotaged the playlist swapping my blues for jazz, and sneaking on her own tracks. Predictably half way through the evening, full of smiles, she closed my laptop and we had the Roaring music show, as always accompanied with furious dancing.

A refreshment trip to Nicholas brought us across some locals, enjoying a rare night out also with not a few glasses of wine and raucous stories. We stopped briefly for a glass of wine with them in Pardis a beautiful new restaurant on Connaught Street before leaving them to their booze and stories of being topless in Bromley. The hangovers didn’t seem quite to have left them on Sunday.

It was a lovely night, spoiled only by the imminent departure of friends. I am left even now with the brittle taste of adventure in my mouth, a little envious but also a little fatter on my couch, having mopped up the weekend’s booze with filthy domino’s pizza. But if I was thinking a couple of weeks ago how you can tell a person by their books, how much more can you tell a person by their friends? The evening ended with dancing irish girls, spilled red wine and three times as many empty wine glasses as there had been people. Oh and someone’s bag. Who forgets their bag? Turned out it was the same son of a bitch who drank a bottle of beer I’d been saving (in penance he did bring round a jolly nice beer the next day). The supremacy of said beer was verified that night by three superior people. It actually was the best beer ever, but now it’s recycled and I can’t remember what it was called. Still life has these perfect moments and it’s hopeless trying to recover them.

50 Books

2012-01-04T23:14:00.006Z

Lovely books. All middle class people like books - they are like the clothes of your home. You might leave a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost on your coffee table left open with a tantalising illustration by Gustave Dore; you might keep a large picture book of Venice in the hope of trapping someone in an intolerable and inescapable conversation about your tedious picturesque holiday there. Perhaps you have a travel shelf of Lonely Planets, Rough Guides and far flung languages that point to how cosmopolitan you are; or a book of cocktails on the fridge illustrating your cosmopolitan tastes; an eclectic array of erotica to intimidate guests into submission. In the loo are stacked magazines the size of books demonstrating how very a la mode you are, alongside retro photos of the good old days. Books are a paean to the ego. The gaudy haute couture of the soul.

Well this is all very well and good as long as you read them. Otherwise, as the metaphor goes, it would be like talking about fashion while wearing last season's George by Asda. And haven't we all heard people talking about books they obviously haven't read and been torn between the shared social embarrassment of exposing them and the gnawing demand of justice to shout "Mr Emperor! Mr Emperor! You've made a dreadful mistake."

Tangentially, one of the funniest experiences of my academic career (now retired) was being in a master's level seminar where an American student was giving a presentation on Jean Rhys's Good Morning Midnight. I believe she probably had read the book (a novel narrated by a woman), but for some reason still assumed that Jean [Zh-awn] Rhys was a man and laboured the entire presentation under this misapprehension. The supervisor, a fabulous man Anthony Fothergill, proceeded on a rambling discussion of gender and narration that recognised the lamentable faux pas while preserving her from the worst degree of humiliation.

Well this was during my studies at the end of which I believe I had read around 90% of the books I owned. To my very great shame the intervening years of greed, great wealth, laziness and lack of libraries has greatly increased my possession of books but less so my consumption of them so that I'm probably down to a lamentable 50%, and spend more time alphabetising them than reading them. Hence my New Year's Resolution this year is to finish 52 books within the year.

And may I recommend it to all who have more books than they deserve - it's not too late to start. But I'm in a bright and cheerful mood now because within the first week of the year I have just finished book 1 - Hilary Mantel's fludd - an absolute gem of a novel and the funniest thing I've read in years. Here's a little excerpt for your moral improvement:

Mother Perpetua would tell the children, with her famous, dangerously sweet smile: 'We have no objection to Protestants worshipping God in their own way. But we Catholics prefer to worship Him in his.'

The Protestants were damned, of course, by reason of this culpable ignorance. They would roast in hell. A span of seventy years, to ride bicycles in the steep streets, to get married, to eat bread and dripping: then bronchitis, pneumonia, a broken hip: then the minister calls, and the florist does a wreath: then devils will tear their flesh with pincers.

It is a most neighbourly thought.

The Christmas Anthem

2011-12-25T23:41:00.000Z

Scene: watching Downton Abbey in my living room, eating turkey sandwiches and drinking wine.

Aunty Roaring: "Nigel Havers is all right, isn't he? He'd do for Edith."

Mummy Roaring: "He's no George."

Cue a LOT of shrieking when the Nespresso ad appears.

Mummy Roaring: "Do you think he'll still come and visit me even though you bought me a Lavazza machine for Christmas and not a Nespresso one?"

There's only one place he'll want to be this Christmas, Mother:

Thank you all, and goodnight.

Advent Anthems: 24

2011-12-24T12:33:00.004Z

Ah, every now and again Ramping takes a break from the Hipster Atheism of the Guardian and is pleasantly surprised by a little media festiveness from less ideological newspapers. Thus forthwith today he was cheered by the total dominance of Christmas in the Financial Times. A lovely piece on forgiveness of debts that even anti-captialist RQT would have approved of, and some Judtian reflections on Christmas as the levelling of differences between god (sic) and man that, while perhaps standing in an awkward relationship to their supplement "How to Spend it", might speak to those who most need a Christian thought for the day. However, most pleasing was a piece on the difference between 'Fox Christians' and secularists. Its author reminded us that 'The Financial Times is not the place to seek spiritual advice.' SHOCK! Still QED more spiritual than the Guardian whose idea of Christmas celebration is probably goodwill towards Ed Miliband (it's his birthday on Christmas Eve - 42 today!) and signed copies of Polly Toynbee's autobiography. But in conclusion the FT encouraged 'To Fox News, we urge a little humility. In the gospels, Jesus urged his followers to render unto Caesar what was Caesar's and to God what was God's. By this he meant, pay your taxes and keep religion separate from politics. We wish you Happy Holidays. To the politically correct we urge you to lighten up. We also wish you a Merry Christmas.' Ok, so s/he gets Jesus wrong. But still a little humility and a little Christmas merriment is no bad thing.

In other news there is only one possible advent anthem for Christmas eve. The song that combines hope and hopelessness, love in all its painfulness, some insults that the Guardian would print in full in scare quotes and then frown upon, social realism and solidarity. A song for all time that has only ended in disaster every time it has been covered. Your penultimate Advent anthem...

Advent Anthems: 23

2011-12-23T23:57:00.001Z

So The Family Roaring have arrived. I have spent the evening eating, watching Niles Crane ironing his trousers and comparing make-up tips on the stairs with Mummy and Aunty Roaring. In a different place this year, but Santa will surely know where to find us.

So, naturally, I thought of this (it starts about 1:45):

"The main thing is that we're all going to be together, just like we've always been, that's what really counts. We could be happy anywhere as long as we're together."

Advent Anthems: 22

2011-12-23T16:19:00.000Z

The Spice Girls' first Christmas No. 1. Because safe sex is even more important in the holidays than the rest of the year.

This takes me back to being thirteen and in love. 'Putting it on' was just a distant dream, though. Ah, youth.

Advent Anthems: 21

2011-12-22T00:05:00.005Z

"hey Charley for chrissakes do you want to know the truth of it? I don't have a husband, he don't play the trombone and I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, and Charley, hey I'll be eligible for parole come valentines day."

I love Tom Waits. He has the voice of a man you want to listen to when you're drunk. He reminds me of the bad characters Gary Oldman played in nineties movies. I want to find someone who'll take me out dancing every saturday night. This video is a Christmas card for lost souls. It makes you want to lose control and not care any more. It makes you regret ageing and feel old. It makes you lean against a wall and wish for something else. It makes you nostalgic for something you never had. It is the happiness at the end of a bottle that never arrives. It is the feeling that people should be kinder than they are. In short, it's a little bit like Christmas.

Advent Anthems:20

2011-12-21T08:40:00.003Z

Christmas is going to the dogs. It's a thought my beloved Henry would approve of and since Christmas is a hard time of year for elderly arthritic retrievers, today's anthem is dedicated to him.

It's not Henry in the video but a fellow retriever. I think Henry would approve.

Advent Anthems: 19

2011-12-19T14:57:00.005Z

OMG - Hadley Freeman totally reads this blog. First she reinforces our message about the wrongness of Carey & Bieber (AA9) and then she reinforces our selection of East17 as the greatest Christian single of all time (AA14). Hadley had clearly stepped out as the foremost journalist upon writing an homagery column on Zoolander, so we're not too surprised at this synergy of opinion. In unrelated news I am still recovering from my vicar's blanket ban on "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" from any Christmas service. So here is the finest version I know of by the best live band I've seen:

Advent Anthems: 18

2011-12-18T17:51:00.000Z

Last night I finally watched Fifteen Million Merits, the second installment of Charlie Brooker's wonderfully depressing series of dystopias. I was very glad I recorded it, because if I had watched it straight after the X-Factor final, I would have been up all night worrying that Little Mix had been sold into porn-slavery. Luckily that never happens in pop.

Anyway, it was rather excellent, with added backstage-authenticity presumably provided by co-writer and Person In her Own Right Konnie Huq.

But even MORE excitingly, the Huq-Brooker collaboration has extended to making babies! Can you imagine??! I suppose this child will be an expert at video-games and making Tracy Islands.

It's hard to think of appropriate captions when you think of Charlie Brooker.

Luckily this is the right time of year for baby-themed songs. I was going to make you listen to the Lion King version of When a Child is Born sung by Il Divo, but I hurled all over my keyboard, so we'll make do with this. (You clicked the link, didn't you? Idiot.)

Dylan sung by Maria Muldaur. (If you're pious, you can imagine Mary singing it in the stable.)

There’ll be a time I hear tell
When all will be well
When God and man will be reconciled
But until men lose their chains
And righteousness reigns
Lord, protect my child.

Advent Anthems: 17

2011-12-18T17:32:00.000Z

Oops, we got a bit out of sync! Not my fault, Ramping is bounding all over London eating canapes and making people give him presents. (I have been watching small children pretend to be angels all weekend so I was legitimately busy.)

Here's a catch-up Anthem (see if you can spot Jane Leeves):

Advent Anthems: 16

2011-12-17T22:09:00.000Z

To remind you of the "Real Meaning (TM)" of Christmas:

Don't you wish this guy would run your Midnight Mass? Or would you rather preach a nice sermon about how Christmas is a time for all the family? Discuss.

Advent Anthems: 15

2011-12-16T12:10:00.004Z

This is a special Advent Anthem dedicated to Jon Morgan. The video is a beautifully crafted telling of the nativity and its message is the very meaning of Christmas. You may not remember reading about the vampires in the Gospel account of Jesus' birth, but how much more terrifying is that? They are always there. But Love will keep them from your door. So relax and enjoy the video.

Advent Anthems: 14

2011-12-14T10:42:00.003Z

It has been speculated that as Cameron boarded his private jet Merkozy was stood on the runway doing exaggerated hand gestures dressed all in white fur. Poignantly it began to snow, some of the flakes catching in its bizarre facial hair. Traces of this song could be heard above the roar of the propellers.

Perhaps the greatest Christmas song of all time, though apart from the church bells at the end (which could just as easily be wedding bells) it is more affectively than substantially Christmassy. Still as an homage to Continental drift I shall have it on repeat play all through today.

Advent Anthems: 13

2011-12-13T18:58:00.001Z

This is one of my favourite putting-up-the-Christmas-tree-with-a-glass-of-wine songs: Christina Aguilera belting out 'Merry Christmas, Baby' accompanied by the extremely wonderful Dr. John.

Christmas is about excess, and Aguilera invented the trashy-diva look, and always over-sings like a bad bitch. I love her.

Advent Anthems 12: Sex, Cannabis and Cake Edition

2011-12-12T16:16:00.001Z

After an exhausting weekend, with an ad-to-minute-of-actual-television ratio of about 3:1, Little Mix (aka Tulisa's "Little Moofins") were crowned champions of pop, beating Bruno Mars impersonator Marcus through Girl Power, Tears and Not Being As Thin As You'd Expect.

Really, they are inspirational young women. Did you know that they are the first group of girls to ever achieve anything? And that Jesy's seriousface is the best one in the business?

Teenaged girls cry A LOT.

Little Mix and Marcus got the chance to sing Christmas songs for their supper, but my highlight (apart from Leona Lewis' frankly bizarre cover of a Nine Inch Nails song) was the tremendously over-lusted-after Michael Bublé slurring his way through 'Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)' like your drunk big brother who thinks he's super-sexy embarrassing you in front of your friends on Christmas Eve.

Fun fact: Bublé's ex-girlfriend (allegedly) described him as a "self-obsessed jerk" who craves "sex, cannabis and cake". She told News of the World (oh how I miss it) that "Michael saw himself as a real ladies' man who could schmooze any women into bed, and had done on tours. He told me I was too uptight and needed to loosen up.

"Many times he told me, 'I have the perfect, best-looking penis.'

"He bragged about how it gave the ultimate pleasure to women. I just ignored him. But he was good in bed."

Advent Anthems:11

2011-12-11T16:34:00.005Z

Christmas for me IS Phil Spector. I still associate Motown with Christmas because my mother had a double sided tape with Phil Spector's phenomenally good Christmas on one side and his Motown classics on the other. So River Deep and Mountain High, Then He Kissed Me, and Why Do Lovers Break Each Other's Hearts all take me back to childhood innocence and expectation. Still, it's kind of a nice fit.

Advent Anthems: 10

2011-12-10T13:57:00.005Z

Yesterday we followed a star out to a little town in a province far, far away. Birmingham. We went hoping to find a baby lying in a manger but unfortunately despite being due Thursday the little guy was late. We stayed as long as we could hoping for a dramatic rush to the hospital with towels, hot water etc. but were bitterly disappointed. In any case our marvellous hosts, Luke and Zoe, supplied plenty of cheer including reindeer sausages and Christmas music. Being a lecturer in the liberal arts (and possibly the dark arts), however, it was "arty" Christmas music and so we had the delights of Low's Christmas album. For those who don't know Low's music, it's somewhat bare and slow-moving at the best of times. The very fact that they have a Christmas album is almost hilarious, but this their version of "Little Drummer Boy" is exactly what you'd play if you wanted to parody them. Luke informed us that they are the only band to have ever set off Radio 1's trigger alarm on John Peel's show, for having too long pauses.

Here by contrast is also Bing and Bowie's 'marvellous... really fine' version. If you take out the little chat beforehand it's less than half as long. Love Bing. Am sure we'll be seeing some more of him later...

Advent Anthems: 9

2011-12-09T09:29:00.003Z

This week has been all about the cougar: turns out that annoying 32-year-old presenter Caroline Flack is dating Harry Styles (17) from One Direction. Jan Moir is, obviously, disgusted. (Harry's mum is apparently quite cross, too.) She'd probably have a heart attack, then, if she saw the below 41-year-old mother of two showing her pants to a boy who looks about 12.

You're welcome.

Advent Anthems: 8

2011-12-08T14:42:00.003Z

So I went to see Frisky and Mannish's excellent pop-parody last night at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. It was super-fun and being Christmas part of their set was given over to festive tunes. Arguably the most amusing moment was their deconstruction of "Mary's Boy Child", which apparently contains direct lies: "Man was saved forever more because of Christmas day". (Frisky [I presume Frisky is the man] made no bones that Man was in fact saved because of Easter.) But the highlight was the encore when they unveiled the most pernicious Christmas release ever; pernicious because it contained all the fatal flaws that Christmas songs may be heir to: stating the obvious (that it's Christmas), pathos, overly-catchy chorus, innuendo and political subtext. Frisky and Mannish are well worth seeing if you get the chance. The following video, for all the good it achieved at the time, really isn't:

Advent Anthems: 7

2011-12-07T13:10:00.003Z

Today's Anthem has something for all the family. Jon and Cindy with their personalised stockings cut a very fine couple. And the poignant lyrics pay homage to the dangers of being too caught up in a relationship: "My baby's gone, I have no friends". The guitar seems to hum "justice" in the background. And then there is the inspired rhyming of "relations" with "salutations". All in all a work of poetry that avoids all trace of festive-cliche. A masterpiece of Christmalia and all in just over 2 minutes.

And Cindy Crawford. So hot right now. Right now and always.

Advent Anthems: St Nicholas Edition

2011-12-06T20:49:00.001Z

Ok, so I went to the sweetest St Nicholas mass in an actual St Nicholas church today. We sang him a special song and everything. It was awesome. Then I felt so Christmassy I went and bought TEN strips (sheets??) of tinsel and some super-tacky baubles and some 'solar-powered' Christmas lights, because it's a ~~recession~~ credit crunch.

But I am also awesome because I've only gone and put up the freaking BOSS as today's Advent Anthem! OMG it also has Clarence Clemons being a legend in it. As you can tell, I'm a bit excited.

HE SEES YOU WHEN YOU'RE SLEEPING! (Honestly, Bruce is always watching you.) HAPPY ST NICK'S DAY!

Advent Anthems: 5

2011-12-05T12:11:00.000Z

Assuming you watched Ms. Kelly Rowland 'putting it down' (i.e. disappointingly not singing 'Dilemma') on the X-Factor last night, and you also told all your friends you were watching Charlie Brooker's new show about pig sex on C4 because you're that sort of Guardian reader, but you actually watched Beyoncé being incredibly hot on ITV because you secretly read the Mail, you will thank me for reminding you of the glory days of Kelly, Bey and the Other One.

Well, you won't thank me, because this is literally the crassest Christmas song ever recorded. I think it's called 8 Days of Christmas because of Hanukkah (that's what Wikipedia says anyway, and I am nothing if not thorough in my research). Don't ask me, I'm not some sort of prosperity-gospel-promoting R&B star.

Though if I was, I might be responsible for "ruining Christmas" like Beyoncé. See what happens? You record a capitalism-themed Christmas song in 2000, and by 2011 you're stealing video games from Joe the Plumber. It's like a parable about the real meaning of the baby Jesus.

Anyway, "enjoy".

Advent Anthems: 4

2011-12-04T14:36:00.001Z

I've just watched the pandas being FedExed into Scotland.

It is going to be rather snowy in their new home, according to the weather reports, but fear not! BBC Scotland correspondent Colin Blane reassured viewers: "I have been told the male panda, Yang Guang, is very fond of a roll around in the snow."

We'd like to wish Yang Guang and Tian Tian all the best in their quest for wintry sexytime. The following Advent Anthem should be inspirational to anyone trying to breed under adverse conditions:

Advent Anthems: 3

2011-12-03T18:29:00.003Z

Shine a light through an open door,
Love a life I will divide;
Turn away 'cause I need you more,
Feel the heartbeat in my mind.

We found love in a hopeless place.

It's the homeland of Roaring but it could be Advent in Palestine in any century.

Advent Anthems: 2

2011-12-03T01:38:00.000Z

Sometimes, you just know you've stayed up too late. And it's too late to post an Advent Anthem, but you know you have to.

Sometimes, Mariah isn't enough. It sounds ridiculous, but it's true.

Advent Anthems

2011-12-01T23:59:00.001Z

Darlings.

This is our first Advent Anthem, to warm your cockles. Or whatever. It's perfect if you're very shy. Or very outgoing.
This month, we're dedicated, no matter how drunk we might be (and we may be at the pub as we speak), to delivering your Advent Anthem each day.

To begin our Advent Adventure, here is your favourite (who just released an American-friendly Thanksgiving album) and ours.

Ain’t about the cha-ching, cha-ching.

2011-11-06T16:25:00.016Z

I recently bought the Jessie J album. Big mistake. One of those where you’ve heard a couple of good songs - 'Price Tag' and 'Do It Like a Dude' and thought this’ll be fun, only to discover it’s full of ballids (following the new spelling). Worse still, it has the most ear-wrenching earnestness that galls with a self-righteousness and banality ripped off fortune-cookie-wisdom. 'Price Tag' itself has its own 'Where-is-the-Love?' earnestness, but it’s forgivable - if only for the ridiculousness of a pop starlet at the very heart of commercial pop releasing a massive selling single that is ‘not about the money’. You’re laughing all the way to the Itunes store. (Not very far).

Unsurprisingly, this brought to mind the ongoing saga at St Paul’s - a veritable cacophony of earnestness and accusations of cha-ching, cha-ching. The most vocal people have been bawling about the unchristian behaviour of the city-grubby cathedral, whether Christian or not. Incidentally isn’t this typical? Why is it always atheists who bray with the highest spiritual expectations of the church, while also barking with laughter at the hopeless out of date, superstitious uselessness of it? So the cathedral is supposed to be pristine, idealistic, focussed on God and poverty. It is not supposed to worry about income, about balancing budgets and PR. And then a minute later it’s the woeful impractical buffoons who couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. Unless it's for bankers.

The criticisms of corruption, naivety, money-hoarding and unworldly don’t sit well together.

But at the heart of this situation is a moral ambiguity, which gets smoothed over with the peanut butter innocence of idealogues, or irritatingly brushed aside by pragmatists. It’s obvious that the cathedral will have a great deal of support for most of the issues the protest stands for. There is a widely held acknowledgement that reform is required, if little sense of what this requires - tacitly acknowledged by a protest that is not making demands and represents a great many issues and interests. The frustration of the former dean was genuine in his protest that the campers wrongly assume he doesn’t get it.

And it’s equally clear that the cathedral works towards many of the same ends. From street level charity to the ethical debates and reports of the St Paul’s Institute, and no less the community building and spiritual support which is the domain of every church. For all this it operates as any other charity or business, requiring, budgeting and planning its income. The crisis brought about by the protest will have thrown all that work into question, as the cathedral hears a little less cha-ching cha-ching.

On the other hand, there are a great many reasons to acknowledge an ethical imperative to support the protest in every way possible. It has raised the profile of and symbolically represented widely held public outrage increasingly echoed by politicians, clergy and the press. The point though is to acknowledge that this is costly. The loss of money will limit the mission of the cathedral. The cathedral community will suffer, people will stay away and there may well be considerable personal cost. It is a complex ethical situation which is not so much about right and wrong but hard choices in a situation of inevitable considerable loss, one way or another.

What is unhelpful in this situation are claims of innocence. One of the oddities is that now the cathedral has backed down from bringing in the guns, the loose canon Giles Fraser has already gone. If he cared so much, why did he not remain to battle in the chapter on behalf of the protesters (as it actually turned out without him)? Did he leave because the matter was simply discussed? Had the bling-ba-bling-ba-bling already become too much? Had he already slipped into the camp to look for Jesus, chuntering “we don’t want your money, money, money”. Who knows.

Regardless, any simple claim that the cathedral should not bear the bigger picture of its own community, local businesses, its income, wider work and supporters is as flawed as someone who claims that the church should simply kick out the protest because revenues are down. Complex situations require careful responses. The soundbites that have abounded about Jesus are just a facile way of caving in to hippy bullshit that slurs all institutions and people with responsible authority as inevitably corrupt. My sympathy here is much more with the Dean who wasn’t too busy washing his hands to acknowledge a genuine dilemma and at 60 has a lot more to lose. He has also managed to free himself from a situation in which public relations appears to have forced the hand of ethics. Not that it isn’t perhaps right to house the protesters - but to be cowed and bullied by the press is weak and ridiculous.

But ethics is never simple. Jonathan Freedland’s excellent take on Downton Abbey contrasts two types of Tory - the entrepreneur and the landed gentry - which he argues is being played out at St Paul’s. The English Romantic view of aristocracy pushes us all into the Granthams corner, spitting at the wicked Murdoch, sorry Sir Richard, just as Fellowes would have us. Here stands the church, dithering at the vaulting ambition of capitalism, surrounded by its inherited furniture. But this is total fantasy. Isn’t it a little hypocritical for us to mock Sir Richard for buying his own furniture?

Equally, the left is splitting more and more in two. On the one hand there is the middle class left of the LRB focussed on identity politics with feminism, postcolonialism, sexuality and the rest. But recently with figures like Maurice Glasman and Frank Field we’re hearing more about the importance of family and women as homemakers to get working-class men back in to work, of stamping out immigration to cut out the great British refusal of “immigrant jobs”. The very real tensions even within our political parties tell out a very real need to address ethical questions at the heart of society. And to discuss them in such a way as avoids the easy innocence of the right-on and the dismissive pragmatism of the utilitarian.

At the end of the day if someone decided to arrange a protest in your front garden you wouldn’t be impressed would you? Even if you agreed with what they were about. I assume the cathedral has an entertainments license for its music so maybe the best thing they could do is to blare out Jessie J on repeat at a trillion decibels. Perhaps that would shift the dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, suckas. On the other hand maybe they should take a roll call of bankers on Sunday morning and forming a whip of cords force them all out of the city. Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the pure of heart. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you...

A Theology of Gift

2011-10-11T17:56:00.000+01:00

In my seemingless endless quest to finish my PhD and spend my free time watching Buffy and eating hummous guilt-free (obviously I still do this but I feel bad about it at the moment), I just found this gem of eucharistic theology:

‘In reality, this is all one gift, forever repeated differently, whose lineaments cannot be disentangled without seeming to be laid out in stages: we receive our capacity to receive in receiving that which we are to receive; to receive our humanity, we must already receive the gratuitous excess of divinity, and to receive the gift of humanity and divinity, we must already have begun to transmit this gift.’

For some reason, it made me think of this:

Amen.

Gardens of Delight

2011-10-08T16:23:00.006+01:00

Every boy by the end of his teens believes he has eaten the perfect kebab. Usually this has happened in an early ecstatic intoxication, when the buzz of alcohol is undiluted by developed resistance, when flirtation seemed like transcendence and every night seemed endless and magical. I, no less, first in Swansea and then in Exeter delighted in this after-hours pursuit, chasing the dead lamb, finally coming to what seemed like perfection at Uncle Raj’s. Not my uncle you understand. Everyone’s uncle.

But, while foreign excursions to the Middle East barely registered, this all changed in Cambridge. Once I got my hot hands on a kebab from Gardenia’s I found out that heaven was wrapped up in fresh salad and tsatsiki. So good was this experience that I started going there for lunch after doing my postman’s round. Gardi’s remained unsurpassed for years (though it was approached by some excellent Nan kebabs from curry mile in Manchester).

Well. This has all changed and, like Augustine grimacing at a rotten pear, I have realised the errors of my puerile confusion. For happenstance has conveyed me to live within a stone’s throw of the Edgware Road. If you have not been transported by the epiphanic release of Lebanese shawarma, then I’m sorry but as far as I am concerned your life is a damned lie and you are unredeemed with poverty.

Just over a year ago a latish night turned into a hospital trip as a friend got sick. Finally she discharged herself at 6am and we stumbled down Edgware Road where, to our unsurpassable delight, Cafe Helen, queen of kebaberies remained steadfastly open inviting our trade for an experience both carnal and spiritual. This is the attitude that will take us out of dull austerity measures. Rushed lunches have since conveyed me to various establishments of “Londonistan” and to unrivaled pleasures.

My last heady trip, this week, left me guiltily failing to conceal cumin-stained breath and a soggy fat-greased paw as I greeted a pram-pushing parishioner. She smiled as she passed on her way to Edgware Road, though, so I suspect she too had indulged in the fleshly temptations of schawarma.

The sharpness of youth so often crystalizes into memories our experience later falls short of, as though the fiery sword of the cherubim guards the way back to our youth. The joy of newly experienced delight though is a reminder that for all the romanticising of youth, we are always on the edge of glory, or as the angel put it: ‘then the earth/ Shall all be paradise, far happier place/ Than this of Eden, and far happier days.’ Experience may bring us to a torture garden, but it may also bring us to a new garden of delights.

Tainted Love

2011-09-09T03:04:00.009+01:00

This Saturday Roaring is to become the Revd Roaring; a hard earned epiphet. By coincidence I also this week picked up Oliver O’Donovan’s very recently reissued commentary On the Thirty-Nine Articles. In the first edition Oliver had made no mention of Article 26 of which the guts is as follows:

"Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance taken away by [the minister’s] wickedness [latterly “unworthiness”], nor the grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by faith and rightly do receive the Sacraments ministered unto them; which be effectual, because of Christ's institution and promise, although they be ministered by evil men."

Given the schismatic pulls the Church of England currently endures he returns in the new preface to note how this Article should have ‘warded off this vertiginous nightmare’ that is the conservative doctrine of Sacramental Taint.

Sacramental Taint has been addressed elsewhere in these conversations being the most pernicious doctrine that any sacramental action performed by a women is ineffective if not blasphemous, thus undermining the faith of those who receive sacraments from women and in the case of those ordained by women denying their orders.

But as Ben Quash pointed out some years ago this sad doctrine parallels almost exactly the position of the rejected, schismatic Donatists, where identical liturgical and creedal positions were violently separated by alternative episcopal oversight. The sense with which the Donatists believed the Catholic church to be polluted was the result of the holy perfection with which they imbued the church. A holy perfection that drew a boundary beyond which grace could not transgress.

From this we can see why Ben Quash draws Irenaeus’ distinction between schism and heresy, where heresy is a fault of faith and schism a fault of love: that schismatics ‘are destitute of the love of God, and... look to their own special advantage rather than the unity of the Church’. In like manner O’Donovan insists that whatever the error the conservative cannot forget the promise to the Church that ‘the gates of Hell will not prevail against it and that Christ is in its midst’; so even with a conscientious certainty of the Church’s error, sacraments are always effectual because of Christ’s institution and promise.

The posturing of conservative Anglicans and Donatists is shown up by the measure with which they pretend innocence. Holiness. Andrew Shanks has developed a particularly rigorous attack on the idea of innocence drawn from Gillian Rose. But the essential point is actually quite simple: that every attempt to present ourselves as innocent is self-justification. To feel innocent is to judge others guilty and feel superior. It is an act of exclusion; of violence; of turning away.

The subject remains on my mind because voting is continuing across the Church of England on the consecration of women bishops. This question, though, of how we agree to be one church is effectively prior. If it is the Church that acts sacramentally, if it is effective through Christ’s institution and promise, if the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us, then who are they that turn their backs on the sacramental promises of Christ? Schism is a failure of love and faith.

This may seem like a sour note to welcome with joy the Revd Roaring to the Diaconate. I take it though as an assurance of her vocation; that the Church has chosen her, brave lioness that she is; that Christ has chosen her to mediate his grace. It is also a reminder that Anglicans above all must ‘keep their minds in Hell but despair not’ - that we must forego the lure of innocence and holiness, live with the agony of a passionately struggling church but cling on in faith, hope and love to the presence of Christ.

But this has ever been the way. Schleiermacher wrote in 1799 of the constant struggle Christianity rightly asserts at the heart of humanity, forever gaining and losing its religion:

“Even while the finite wishes to intuit the universe, it strains against it, always seeking without finding and losing what it has found; ever one-sided, ever vacillating, ever halting at the particular and accidental, and ever wanting more than to intuit, the finite loses sight of its goal. Every revelation is in vain. Everything is swallowed up by earthly sense, everything is carried away by the indwelling irreligious principle, and the deity makes ever-new arrangements; through its power alone ever more splendid revelations issue from the womb of the old; it places ever more sublime mediators between itself and the human being; in every later ambassador it unites the deity more intimately with humanity so that through them and by them we might learn to recognize the eternal being; and yet the old lament is never lifted that we do not perceive what is of the spirit of God.”

Or, as T.S. Eliot put it more succinctly:

“The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without”

Congratulations to an ever more sublime mediator...

Oliver O'Donovan, On the Thirty Nine Articles (London: SCM, 2011)
Ben Quash & Michael Ward, Heresies and How to Avoid Them (London: SPCK, 2007)
Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence (London: SCM, 2008)
Schleiermacher, On Religion (Cambridge: University Press, 1996)
T.S. Eliot, ‘The Rock’, II, in Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1963)

I'm a free bitch, baby (part 2), or HELLO AGAIN!

2011-08-10T23:25:00.001+01:00

So. While I’ve been away, supposedly writing my PhD and moving house (but actually going to G-A-Y Late and watching Glee obsessively), I have discovered xojane.com, thanks to the very brilliant blogger Lesley Kinzel.

Xojane.com is run by Jane Pratt, who invented Sassy and Jane. It is a very cool website with articles by a whole range of women, different ages, sizes, races, sexualities… etc. etc. etc it’s basically a feminist space of coolness tackling everything from shoes to sexual harassment.

The one thing all the writers have in common is that they are all ADDICTED. Addicted to painkillers, addicted to cookies, to coke, to credit cards, to affirmation from strangers, to throwing up,to buying dresses, to booze. They write about these things with wit and self-deprecation while informing you of the latest Asian beauty trend. Yes. It’s cool. (I’m addicted to Cat Marnell’s beauty column in particular at the moment. She is very funny, and very sad. Check out her “HUSTLER MAGAZINE’S DIRTY LITTLE BEAUTY SECRET: The Amazing Drugstore Skincare Product They Drizzle All Over Girls’ Faces On Photoshoots”. I bought three.) They don't always get it right, but I love reading about it.

And they all have big problems with their bodies.

Now, God forbid I would ever essentialize gender, but these sort of addictions and these sort of body-dysmorphias are, I think, peculiar to women, and they’re totally interrelated.* Not all the writers are full-on “X”-Anonymous addicts (some are), but they all pretty much use something or other to quell the difficulties they have with their bodies.

And reading about it is immensely cathartic.

I honestly don’t think I know one woman who doesn’t have at least a problematic relationship with food. I got mine partly from my mother, partly from all the other shit that goes on in our society. Hadley Freeman wrote a very good, unusually personal, column on her eating disorder recently: she made a good point about pictures not causing anorexia; but this stuff doesn’t happen in a void. Everything adds up, from Heat magazine to the cat-calls you get when you go for a jog (you don’t own my body, douchebag. It’s called the rape culture, look it up). And some of it I get from all the internalized stuff about perfection I have inside me. That’s me; it’s my responsibility. But everything (whatever that is) adds up, we don’t feel worth it, our bodies aren’t really ours; we are always policed, always wrong.

Most women do it. We count the calories. We feel the guilt. We don’t look at our reflections in the mirror. We exercise too much, or not at all if we feel bad, and then we beat ourselves up about it. And we know better. I’m doing a fucking PhD on the body and feminist theology. I know this is stupid. For every step forward, for every nice thing I say to myself, I’ve already said about a hundred hateful things I would lamp someone for if they said it to a friend.

So I am really enjoying reading the women on xojane.com be honest about what they’re doing, because I don’t feel so alone. Women don’t talk about this shit enough. We are always pretending. I had a conversation with a friend a while ago where we both admitted to doing the DIPE (documented instance of public eating) thing. It was amazing, and funnily enough it’s helped me do it less (less cutting back, post-pizza-days, I mean). Usually women are complimenting each other, but we’re not actually telling each other what it costs, how we feel about it, what’s really going on.

Because we’re ok. You’re ok. I’m ok. And the reality is, growing up is about accepting what we look like and loving it, because we are loved and held by others and by God. That’s what being anti-dualistic is all about, dude. If I tell my body it’s useless, my soul will feel it too. That’s the complete opposite of holistic and awesome.

I found xojane.com through Lesley Kinzel’s blog. She’s really into fat acceptance and she’s about the only xojane writer that seems to have some semblance of peace about what she looks like, and therefore, who she is. She writes:

Fat acceptance doesn’t simply advocate in favor of fatness. Fat acceptance is also about rejecting a culture that encourages us to rage and lash out at our bodies, even to hate them, for looking a certain way. It’s about setting our own boundaries and knowing ourselves, and making smart decisions about how we live and treat ourselves, and ferociously defending the privacy of those choices. It’s about promoting the idea that anything you do with your body should come from a place of self-care and self-love, not from guilt and judgment and punishment. It’s about demanding that all bodies, no matter their appearance or age or ability, be treated with basic human respect and dignity. That’s the world I’d like to build. For all of us.

So, because I have a date with Mr Schuester, I will leave you with, who did you think, Lady Gaga. What, did you think I would write a post without mentioning Gaga? You’re so weird.

What are you? That’s right, you’re a free bitch, baby.

*I know this is an increasingly a problem for guys, but as a woman, that's what I know about directly. And this is a BIG problem that intersects with lots of other things for women.

The Wedding

2011-07-18T10:46:00.008+01:00

I recently had the pleasure of attending a wedding of an English gentleman and a Dutch lady. It was a rather lovely affair, unusual for the fact that the sermon and the best man's speech was given by the same person. Below are the transcripts, as requested by the Dutch family. Most of the points are entirely unoriginal and are simply borrowed and stolen from Plato, Roland Barthes and Vince Vaughan.

The Wedding Sermon...

“Love bears all things”

We all understand love as a story. The sort of once upon a time in the romantic south of France story where a boy meets a beautiful girl. Obviously he falls in love, pursues her; she gets a bit woo’d - maybe they fall out over a misunderstanding, some students in Gent or a trip to a military base in Afghanistan. Eventually, after a gloomy mid-point, everything gets ironed out, they make up and she marries him before he can escape to somewhere else dangerous and inhospitable. We compulsively watch hundreds of identikit stories like this replayed again and again in Rom-Coms, chick-lit, and old episodes of Beverly Hills 90210; when we’re in love as part of the smug-partnered set, and when we’re not as a socially acceptable merlot-fuelled form of self-harm.

One of the most famous ideas behind love stories comes from Plato: the story of soul-mates. We get this in all those meaningful phrases, “she’s the one”, “you complete me”, “my other half”, or in John’s case “my better half”. The story goes that originally humans were odd eight limbed androgynous creatures with two faces who scuttled about causing trouble. Zeus, in his great wisdom, cut them in half and sewed them up to make them weaker but more useful. The only problem was that they naturally felt incomplete and died from hunger as they clung to their separated halves. Each of us, apparently, is in this state looking for our missing half to heal the wound in human nature. Love is the name for this desire for wholeness. Soul-mates appear in hundreds of films - It had to be you, Made in Heaven, Serendipity, Ghost, Monster in Law, Wuthering Heights, Romeo and Juliet - that one has a good book of the film - and of course the Runaway Bride.

The thing is, though, although Plato presents it very nicely, he also dismisses it as a load of rubbish - after all if we only fell in love with the other piece of our self that would basically make us all narcissists! He has his hero, then, Socrates, tell a quite different story. The context for these stories, by the way, is a dinner party where a group of drunk friends get together and each gives a speech saying how deliriously fantastic, beautiful and intoxicating love is. Basically, it’s a bit like a wedding.

So he says that after the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, the gods had a feast, and they all came along including the god, Re-source. Funny name but at least it tells you something about him - that he’s resourceful - and it’s no more odd than the most recent Beckham, who they named “Harper Seven”. After dinner the less fortunately named goddess Poverty, who was always in need, came begging at the gate. Now seeing Resource, who’d got drunk by this time, stumbling into the garden to have a nap, Poverty saw a chance to relieve her self of her perpetual lack and so snuck over and slept with him, becoming pregnant with his child. And this child was Love.

Now because he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love is always poor and far from being sensitive and beautiful, he’s tough with hard skin, no shoes and is always sleeping rough. He lives in doorways and by roads, and like his mother, Poverty, is always in a state of need. But like his father, Resource, he schemes to get hold of beautiful things. He’s brave, impetuous, a formidable hunter, cunning and full of tricks.

The point is this. We live in a world that idolizes love. Love actually does make the world go round, it lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love - don’t worry I’m not going to slip into Ewen MacGregor - but love is always something to aspire to, to dream of, like an American watching the royal wedding - it’s pure, sublime almost untouchable and only for the beautiful. But Plato’s point is that far from being pure, beautiful, clad in lace and soft lighting, - like a fairytale - love is a combination of poverty and resourcefulness. To love is to recognise a lack in yourself, something missing. Something you want very dearly, something you depend upon - that causes you pain not to have and be with. And we don’t really desire the things we have. I was very excited about getting surround sound for my TV. Now I don’t even notice it. Life has a way of numbing you to all pleasures but novelty. But to love is to keep recognizing something missing, something desired, to not take for granted, but to yearn for more and more of the beloved.

But love is also resourcefulness. Most English boys of course mope around listening to Radiohead during their teenage years, though knowing John he was whistling along to Marvin Gaye. I’m not sure if there’s a Dutch/Belgian equivalent since the only group I know from this part of the world is 2Unlimited, famed for their hit song “No, No Limit.” I imagine though that Gertje was perhaps reading something clever but miserable like The Sorrows of Young Werther - either that or just taking great delight in breaking boys’ hearts. But love doesn’t mope. Because to love is have your beloved as your highest priority; which means all your resources, your courage, your cunning, your charm will be directed towards possessing, pleasing and gaining the affection of your beloved.

And it stops at nothing. It is a continual desire to use what we have for the benefit and celebration of our love. Where most Romantic Comedies - thinking of say Speed - finish with a big heartfelt kiss, and subtly replace the heroine for a repeat storyline in a straight to Dvd sequel - love demands resources through and even beyond the wedding night. So that’s it for Plato - love is poverty and resourcefulness. Recognizing the depth of our need, affection and desire for another, which makes us vulnerable and dependent; and giving everything we have for the sake of that beloved.

And we see the same in the reading we’ve just had. If love is patient, kind, not envious or arrogant, insistent or irritable, then love is making itself vulnerable to its beloved. It’s giving over some of its independence and agency in trust. That’s why you’d better be pretty sure about that trust, maintaining that trust and always giving to each other genuine reciprocity. But whether we like it or not, love makes us vulnerable. But with this ‘it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’. These are its resources: it has endurance, trust, optimism and courage.

And there is no doubt that when St Paul is writing this he has in mind the crucifixion as the consummate picture of vulnerable and resourceful love. The hymn we just had is one people usually remember from school - and particularly, I think, the verse with the alliterative whipping and stripping tends to stick in people’s minds - it’s John’s favourite anyway. But again the theme is the poverty and resourcefulness of love. That through torture, execution and the hell of it all, the dance of love goes on through its resources of hope and kindness. And, through our poverty and resourcefulness, our love is fashioned and cannot be destroyed. Or to put it another way, the love God has for us and the love we are commanded to give one another, the love we promise, is never lost but kept safe with God.

If love is poverty and resourcefulness, if it depends upon trust, then it is not just a sentiment but a promise. “I love you” is not an ordinary statement. It is a question. There are only two responses. Either - “I love you too” - or anything else. Anything else here amounts to “I’m just not that into you.” Even “ohhh love you,” or, “you’re so hot right now,” or Patrick Swayze’s “ditto,” doesn’t cut it - “I love you” demands the formality of “I love you too”, because it’s also a commitment, a promise. Between You and I - out of the resources and poverty that is love. Marriage is this same commitment, between You and I, between Gertje and John today, to say “I love you” - “I love you too”, every day, out of poverty and resourcefulness, in an echo of the divine love that makes the world go round.

The quotation at the front of the order of service gives a picture of life and of a relationship as an exploration: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” Whatever our fortune we always begin and end in poverty. And to be an explorer requires self-chosen poverty. It is only by standing still that people accumulate. Beneath the quotation John and Gertje thank all of us gathered here. As we hear their vows now, then, we should recognize that we too are part of their love, their marriage, standing with them in their poverty at this new beginning - and after this wedding the poverty is almost certain to be quite genuine - and, as we are able, even if it’s only raising a glass of champagne, offering our resources to a lifelong love story. Amen.

The Best Man's Speech...

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, John has asked me to speak briefly, “speeching” as Gertje would call it, on behalf of the bridesmaids. And may I add my own thanks and praise to his. You are probably by now sick of the sound of my voice but have some compassion - if I had not had to give this speech I would have by now drunk at least three times as much champagne. And that’s just at breakfast. It’s not often you get the chance to speak twice at a wedding. John clearly felt I needed a practice run before this speech. Either that or he figured that getting in a priest would be damage limitation. I had worried earlier about picking up the wrong speech in church and having to explain the theological significance of John’s short-lived venture into cottaging. Merely, in this case, an internet search looking for somewhere we could go on holiday in the country that threw up some unexpected results.

My relationship with John began while he was a fresh-faced undergraduate at Exeter. It became clear we wold be close when we both found ourselves slipping away from college at 3pm every afternoon and sneaking home. Sharing a passion for the early series of Beverly Hills 90210 has always, for me, been the defining point in our relationship. I haven’t though been able to find out much about John’s early life. It is a testament to the fidelity John inspires that when I emailed round hunting for stories no one got back to me. Of course I tried hacking into John’s mum’s voicemail but that didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

Now everyone knows and loves John as an outstandingly charming, well-brought up boy with the very best of English manners. Everyone, that, is except my mother. And I only share this now so the Vanhouttes know what they’re getting into. We’d been to a party. Well several parties and two after-parties and, it being late, 4am, I realised it was time to go home. Seeing that John was deep in conversation with a new found friend I quietly slipped away. This displeased John. About twenty minutes later he realized that he had been abandoned and called my mobile. Upon reaching the answerphone he unleashed a fifteen minute stream of consciousness that James Joyce would have been proud of, varying between a caustic summary of his emotional dis-ease at being left behind and the various physical consequences this might have upon my person when he came upon me - alongside a detailed David Attenborough style commentary on the deteriorating nightlife, the habits and plumage of 4am Exeter.

By a fluke of technology my 3210 Nokia had strangely diverted the call to my parents’ home phone. Mother, fearing an emergency, struggled out of bed in the middle of the night and arrived just as the message clicked on. My mother, a rather conservative and fretful woman, listened throughout with growing horror to the sick pervert who was planning on hunting down her beloved child. By the time I was reunited with my phone I had 18 missed calls from her and my entire family were mobilised. To this day Mother remains unconvinced of John’s suitability for diplomacy.

But all of you here will know John as an outstanding friend with a natural ability to bring people together and to create a sense of community and fun wherever he goes. While he was a postgraduate I had the honour of presiding over the postgraduate society with him, which he turned from a handful of geeks playing chess to Pi Gamma Sigma, a thriving social scene that brought all sorts of people together. And it’s good to see Professor Tiger come all the way from Boston to be here today. I love you Tiger.

The highlight of the year was the annual Christmas party, which at John’s insistence had a snow machine and a Santa’s grotto. In a spirt of collaboration we had both dressed up as Santa Clause but John was able to take the role much more seriously. When I finally made it into the grotto I could see John had been taking up the slack left by me as he sat there with a girl on each knee, listening to what I assume was their Christmas lists.

On our way home we were stopped by a police woman who rightly castigated us for drinking wine as we walked. Curiously, and perhaps irresponsibly, rather than just confiscating the bottle, she insisted that the two Santas immediately finish it off and I can report that John manfully, great friend that he was, took his share without complaint. Afterwards, spurred as always by a keen moral sense, and taking seriously his role as a surrogate Santa, with great energy he reminded the passing eateries, all of which were closed or closing, that their lack of generosity would be rewarded only with coal.

But to return from such ancient history, I must say that I know of no one more loyal or tolerant. Even on his stag weekend, when a bout of seasickness had me decorating his wetsuit on the back of a jet-ski, or when I threw him off into the sea, not a word of criticism was voiced. I must thank Christian, the better best man, for organizing this. Aside from a rather intemperate request for an unusual local dessert from Michael and Dave stumbling round the ring road for half the night and losing his shoes, it was a very respectable affair. Unlike Gertje’s stag night in which I hear she dressed up as a pirate and went round the seedier parts of Amsterdam [The speaker had meant to add “including a once-in-a-lifetime motor boat trip”]. I can see who’s going to wear the trousers in this relationship.

And may I take this opportunity to say how beautiful you looked today, Gertje. A dress even more perfect than Pippa’s at the royal wedding. I hope you didn’t find there was too much praying at the service. And thanks to Gertje’s parents - it takes a man to give away an angel.

But to return to John. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how bright, talented and successful he is. A friend of mine remarked to me years ago on how John always seems to land on his feet, and although Gertje is reason enough to suspect that John is a lucky, lucky man, this is not without his own considerable courage and determination. Having already served in Afghanistan and looking towards Pakistan this courage is readily apparent. And he’s hugely lucky to have found someone to share this sense of adventure with - as Gertje has already had her own adventures in China and elsewhere, and matches him for courage, ambition and fun every step of the way. I’m sure you will share many more adventures together - I don’t know of any couple more suited to it. I’ve been privileged to see your relationship develop and I’ve never known John more in love or more happy. I know that you will both enjoy a wonderful life together.

So treasuring in our hearts all our personal memories of John and Gertje, and looking forward to sharing many more with the both of them, let us once again be upstanding for the bride and groom...

Church of Glee

2011-06-14T22:54:00.012+01:00

A friend of mine has recently got into evangelism. He invites me over for dinner once every week or so and we watch four or five episodes of Glee. I usually drink too much wine, miss the tube and fall asleep on the bus, ending up lost in the hell-hole that is the Paddington basin at 1am, frightened and alone.

Anyway, given this protracted viewing I have worked out the script-writing strategy behind the program. Basically - choose 2 or 3 massive 80s power-pop ballads. Slip in a few Mean-Girl-esque bitchy lines and for the other 30 minutes have beautiful people flimping and flomping about with pained/ecstatic expressions.

And it’s the best TV ever.

What is so awe-inspiring about it is that even when it is dealing with some pretty dark subjects it manages to be utterly, relentlessly up-beat. Whether it’s teenage pregnancy, paralysis, being disowned by your parents, assaulted or dumped the answer is always a perfectly choreographed, perfectly arranged ballad. There is something eschatological about it as though every human experience is raised to an absolute pitch of expression and then released in a communitarian outpouring of polyphonic soul.

Don’t ever go running with the Glee soundtrack though. It literally becomes impossible to take breath.

Anyway I was thinking about this as I read a newly added friend’s blog, who seems to come from a more charismatic tradition. She notes that charismatic worship consists of ‘dramatic... HUGE statements’, and questions whether we really ‘mean’ it or ‘feel’ it. She wonders whether inserting “I’m trying to” before some of these phrases might make them a bit more honest. But as she herself notices, “I’m trying to surrender everything” or - I’d really like to rise up like an eagle - or - I wish I actually did want there to be nothing I desired that compares to you - don’t have that Glee-good feeling that’s going to make you feel close to God or transformed in any way.

This perhaps is a strength for traditional hymns in that they tend to be creedal statements, which don’t make presumptions about what sort of place you’re in or exactly what you’re expecting to happen. And while it may be easier to throw heart and voice into “My Jesus, my boyfriend, this song is all about me”, most Anglo-Catholics manage a similar joy with “Jerusalem the Golden” - except maybe for that high F, before which some quite rightly get a little faint.

Anyway, the same thing came up at a recent training meeting with some curates from central and west London. Certain evangelical priests confessed to feeling really low on Sunday mornings, not being able to get out of bed etc. and I suddenly thought - omg how freaking stressful it must be to feel you have to create this gleekmosphere of transcendent praise, to tease out emotions so as to force the sort of confrontation needed for conversion, to deliver that raw emotional force to make people vulnerable. I’m not being disingenuous here - these are Godly people, though of course God is not necessary to create this kind of atmosphere - but I’m not surprised that it would be totally exhausting.

My church takes an easier approach to creating atmosphere and invokes the Spirit for Pentecost by lighting shots of sambuca at the back of the church. And I know what you’re thinking - how Presbyterian with your individual shot glasses. But seriously a shared chalice of flaming sambuca would be a death-trap.

But should we gleek our worship? My mother used to call me Pollyanna but even I’m not sure we can trip through life gleeking up the crap that happens in four-part harmony. Not unless we’re Bono. There is something eschatological and something beautiful about Glee but if you tried singing through other people’s problems they’d probably just think you were an asshole. Or if they’re your problems you're likely end up like Britney trapped in a tragedy of parodic art-imitating life-imitating awfulness.

Glee club gives its own warning to wannabe Glee churches:

“Glee club... it's about expressing yourself to yourself.”

Votes for Women

2011-04-16T23:59:00.026+01:00

I had the chance this week to vote on the issue of women becoming bishops. The vote didn’t count for anything except to give a wider national picture to someone at some point. It was a pretty typical church debate. The liberals umm-ed and ahh-ed about including everyone, while a conservative stood up and gave an impassioned plea on behalf of the “oppressed minorities”.

It was moving though. He spoke from the heart and the liberal catholics probably all thought of friends and churches they knew, people who would be hurt and feel excluded by a changing church. The only problem is that any women who might already be feeling hurt and excluded are easily forgotten. If someone’s going to get hurt it always seems more charitable to do nothing but, without slipping into Edmund Burke cliches, doing nothing, in an unequal world, can be equally unkind.

The Church has already previously ruled out any possibilities that would lessen the significance of diocesan bishops or leave women in a less full expression of this. (This didn’t stop them tabling a second proposal to effect this at the meeting.) These options would just serve to introduce more schismatic divisions to a church already fraught with contradiction, or again engrave inequality on the broken stone tablets. But this means that the current proposal, with whatever code of practice is to come, is the only possible means to remove one of the most significant remaining inequalities from the church.

We have traditionalists on one side and disenfranchised women on the other. The choice is not doing nothing or hurting traditionalists. The axe is laid at the root of the tree. Either we again surrender our credibility and capitulate to injustice and bad theology, or we accept that the Gospel today requires us to fully recognise the ministry of women.

My deanery voted against the measure. It shocked me. I would not have thought it possible that a majority of people would reject a basic principle of equality. It is a misplaced kindness that is unkind. An ungenerous generosity. An unreasonable compromise. It is time that liberals find their voice and ring the changes.

Lenten Reading

2011-03-09T00:37:00.007Z

This is the most ridiculous sentence I've ever read:

'She would say: 'At last, one can breathe!' and would roam the soaked paths - too symmetrically aligned for her liking by the new gardener, who lacked all feeling for nature and whom my father had been asking since morning if the weather would clear - with her jerky, enthusiastic little step, regulated by various emotions excited in her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the power of good health, the stupidity of my upbringing and the symmetry of the gardens, rather than by the desire quite unknown to her to spare her plum-coloured skirt the spots of mud under which it would disappear up to a height that was for her maid always a source of despair and a problem.'

One sentence. It's more convoluted than 2 hours of Inception; the characters have crawled inside so many clauses that the outer-layer "real" narrative has entirely stopped and the characters are all lost inside the infinitely tedious wallowings of their own dreams within fantasies within dreams. Like a child sans ritalin scribbling out all her thoughts till she forgets what she's doing and goes back to gaping, wild eyed, little legs pumping up and down on a pint-size trampoline.

Only a little later down the page we have:

'My poor grandmother would come in, ardently beg her husband not to taste the cognac; he would become angry, drink his mouthful despite her, and my grandmother would go off again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling for she was so humble at heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and the little fuss she made over her own person and her sufferings came together in her gaze in a smile in which, unlike what one sees in the faces of so many people, there was irony only for herself, and for all of us a sort of kiss from her eyes which could not see those she cherished without caressing them passionately with her gaze.'

It's like a little Homeric excursus into utter banality. It's nearly a book in two sentences. And we all know the real story, written (much better) by yours truly:

'The old swine boozed down his cognac while his mean old girl played out her usual passive-aggressive routine.'

This, I suppose, is why I'll never be a novelist.

SEXORCIZE

2011-02-15T23:27:00.026Z

Roaring has demanded that I review RiRi’s ‘S&M’, recently exhibited on a screen near you, claiming that she is going to write some ‘theology’. I think this is code for climbing into bed with a Chinese take-away, a bottle of wine and Gone With the Wind (again).

Having been banned in 11 countries, with MTV apparently considering a re-edit, and suffering a pre-7pm anti-curfew by

Radio 1, I was ready for a Massive Spontaneous Orgasm upon pressing the play button.

I think though The Mirror captured it quite nicely with their insightful comment:

“Oo-er!”

Aside from the mild hilarity of actually seeing that expression caught in print, it’s not exactly the response you’d be pleased to receive if you’d burgled Ann Summers and pulled all the Valentine stops out for when your man gets home.

"Oo-er" is a bit more Carry on Camping.

The Carry On movies weren’t sexy for a whole different reason though. After all Rihanna is more attractive than Kenneth Williams and Barbara Windsor combined. (Just imagine.) S&M is actually an anti-sex video, which I’m afraid can only be explained by reference to a Roland Barthes essay on strip-tease as the exorcism of sex.

Writing in 1957, he observes how the props of the music hall and the exoticism of the dress imply the unreality of what lies beneath:

‘the nakedness which follows remains itself unreal, smooth and enclosed like a beautiful slippery object, withdrawn by its very extravagance from use.’

And this is before the Advent of Photoshopping.

And speaking of the allegedly erotic dancing of strip-tease, he points out that the ritual gestures and the constant motion actually conceal nudity and the fear of immobility. The ease and seamless nature of the act make them remote and non-erotic - a fact immediately verified by considering amateurs or our own partially bungled, awkward and embarrassed attempts, which by their fear and vulnerability actually succeed in being erotic. Provided we don’t fall over and start crying.

So through all her different poses, which bring to light in silly ridiculousness all kinds of fetish (even her Scary Spice impression from the video... [sorry this was Roaring's observation which my shameful lack of interest in Spice Girls videos is unable to corroborate]) that depend upon being secret, shameful, forbidden &c. for their allure, she magically weaves a vacuum of anti-sex through her flawless, glazed hips, sexorcising the world. Except presumably for teenage boys who wank off to it anyway because it’s apparently a WOMAN, although a WOMBAT would probably do the trick in a fix.

Also, the oft-repeated line: “Sex in the air, I don't care, I love the smell of it.”

Seriously. Oo-er.

Barthes essay is most amusing because what he really hates is the amateur strip-tease competitions; that stripping can now be thought of as a career, that it is made ‘familiar and bourgeois’, that we ‘could not conceive eroticism except as a household property, sanctioned by the alibi of weekly sport’.

Pole-dancing classes anyone?

The story gets even weirder though when you read in today’s Guardian Joy Nilsson, postgraduate student at a London university, on a protest march against the closing of lap-dancing clubs: “If they close the clubs many women will drop out of higher education... I love my job and I’m very proud of what I do - it fits perfectly with my studying, it’s very flexible and you get your money up front. What other jobs give you that kind of freedom?”

Apparently 1 in 3 lap-dancers in Leeds are doing it to fund their education. This presumably fits in to the government's “Big Tits Society” area of policy.

So what MTV tells us is that our culture has successfully exorcised itself of sex for money. Culturally sex has become banal. Just think of Bridget Jones’ casual reference to anal sex - you probably didn’t even notice it. This hasn’t in anyway diminished the fact that sex is still sold everywhere for money and that bodies in poverty are exploited. But in a sexless culture this ceases to be a moral concern, it becomes simply an economic concern.

Incidentally, these themes come together in Mike Figgis’ production of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia. The libretto is vicious to poor Lucrezia and throughout we are treated to the ENO's garrulous shouts of “WHORE WHORE WHORE EVIL WHORE EVIL INCARNATE &c.” Figgis has worthily sought to combat this misogyny by interspersing a series of films, which speculate on her earlier life with mood pieces suggesting a decadent, incestuous and violent family life through which her later actions become the result of familial abuse.

Although this does at least introduce some complexity into this flatly evil woman, these short pieces all have the soft lighting, arty posing and mannequin-actors of soft-porn movies - or a music video. The distance this builds from reality destroys the actual vulnerability of Lucrezia and we’re left with LuLu sucking her brother’s finger in a sort of unreal sexless incest. It is somehow both non-erotic and sexually abusive.

Which really is the worst of all possible worlds.

Really fabulous singing though.

What's that coming over the hill?

2011-01-16T16:38:00.004Z

(Trigger warning)

When I first saw the (leaked, probably unfinished) video for Kanye West’s ‘Monster’, I felt a bit sick. Then I thought, Kanye is an asshole. Everyone knows he’s an asshole. And the concept for the video is not that original. Basically, monsters have jumped the shark.

Some thoughts on the video:

1) Yes, it's misogynist. Glamorizing brutalized bodies of dead women, totally eroticized. The scene with Kanye in bed with two dead women where he puts one of their hands in the other's crotch is particularly gross. It’s just hacked-up bodies of dead women, waiting to be fucked.

2) The lyrics are predictably anthemic ("Everybody knows I'm a motherfucking monster! Imma need to see your fucking hands at the concert") and inevitably sexist. Jay-Z's contribution is particularly disappointing (I have delusions about Jay-Z given his awesome wife):

Murder murder in black convertibles
I kill a block I murder avenues
Rape and pillage a village, women and children...

3) The racial aspect is interesting. The blog Racialicious points to:

The dichotimization of women as it pertains to race; in the video, white women are predominantly locked into roles of subordination to the point of gruesome lifelessness while black women are cast as aggressive, angry and threatening sexual beasts.

The point of the video might (might) be a pointed comment on the stereotype of the Black man as dangerous (to white women) monster; but honestly it's a pretty weak reclamation if so, and not worth the sexual violence it takes to make the point.

4) I have been tempted to write about Nicki Minaj for ages, but haven't seen enough to make up my mind whether she's the Hip-Hop Lady Gaga or not.

"Pink wig thick ass give em whip lash..."

She appears in the video at 3.37 and basically outshines the others by far as S&M Nicki and a tied up Barbie Nicki (and the only woman with any agency in the whole thing). Barbie Nicki isn't passive though: she takes up the gauntlet and defends herself pretty thoroughly to the other Nicki. There's a good depiction here of the internal struggles related to the image(s) of women in the public eye.

On a side note, it sounds like her experience of working with Kanye would come under the heading of 'bad working environment'. She has this to say of her time with him:

I heard through Drake that Kanye wanted me on his album, and I got on the next thing smokin’ to Hawaii. I didn’t think that he was gonna like me. I always figured that he was one of those conscious rappers, so I thought that he wouldn’t want girls to be dressed overtly sexy—and I go to the studio and he has nothing but pictures of naked women on his computer that he’d invite me to look at... He was watching porn when we were in the studio—no shame in his game.

Kanye has said tons of stuff in interviews about his major interest in porn, and there is a big conversation to be had about the usual (and increasingly humiliating) depiction of women in porn, alongside the racial depictions of both men and women and how this is filtering into the mainstream - especially music videos. The hard thing is to do this without (for example) blaming teenage girls for pandering to boys' fantasies (as a Sunday Times article recently did under the guise of 'concern'*), or saying that women sex workers themselves have no agency.

But anyway, for a 26 year old woman to be working in that environment - it's going to be tough to retain any sort of pro-women integrity. The saddest thing possibly about Minaj's comment above is that she thought West was a 'conscious' rapper. Yikes.

5) LADY GAGA'S USE OF THE MONSTER TROPE IS MUCH MORE INTERESTING, PROVOCATIVE, PRO-WOMEN AND WAY COOLER.

There, I said it.

6) At the risk of undermining all of the above, here is a 'Sesame Street' reinterpretation of the video.

*This is by Natasha Walters, whose book 'Living Dolls' is quite good, but largely denies teenage girls' sexual desires, blames them too much, and is pretty unsubtle in its approach to porn and young people.

BIG SOCIETY Vs little society

2010-12-16T00:08:00.019Z

What is becoming apparent is that, as promised, The Big Society is terribly fair.

And the Emperor Coalition has now pretty much guaranteed us a terribly fair approach to higher education. After all their bleeting and foot stamping, anyone who has looked at the proposal cannot but agree it is terribly fair. You pay for your education when you can afford it. How reasonable.

The problem with the little society is that they don’t think Big. I’ve been into the poorest schools in Devon and Dorset doing widening participation work and this is the main issue. In the Big Society a university education costing the individual £50,000-£60,000 is an investment; a transaction. The figures are comprehensible, the pay-off is a known commodity (from their own experience), and there is a safety net of savings, salaries, and contacts to fall back upon.

If only the little society could see beyond the size of the figures and the pressure of debt, they could man-up and break into that terribly fair Big Society.

Still, even for The Big Society, it’s hard times when you’re down to your last five million and isn’t everyone feeling the squeeze?

It’s only money anyway.

And it's all terribly fair.

What’s particularly fair about this education policy though is that it’s based upon a perfectly measurable equation: education=earning potential. Because higher education is not a right, it is not a good to be pursued for its own sake and it doesn’t necessarily benefit society itself (this is not the Good society! Lol). Education is something that improves the earning potential of the education-client (EC). The EC makes an investment and thereby sees returns for which the EC will pay later. Given the significance of these returns it is natural that the EC should pay upfront. It is a little gamble upon the EC’s ability to get ahead. The Big Society is a marvellous melee of confident competitive individuals and the fittest will flourish. The runts will stay runts forever! Ha. That’s just the law of nature.

The other fair thing about the fee rise is that it allows all universities the chance to better themselves and for this to be transparent. So Oxbridge will naturally as top dogs immediately raise fees to the max. The Russell group will all be in the +£6000 bracket and will play off in friendly competition the bargain vs. prestige of having lower or higher fees than one another. It will be like a marketplace of education! How exciting. And the genius is that even if the public school children go to the most expensive university, it’s still cheaper than their school fees.

BARGAIN!

And for the rest it's about time there was a bit more teaching on debt management. This system ensures a life-time's training on the job. Wooooooo!!!

Of course there will be closures - but only of the little society universities. And there were too many of these quasi-universities anyway.

The Big Society is about playing with The Big Boys. Like King Cameron and Sir Cleggalot.

And it all echoes delightfully with that blueprint for society, found in the Gospel:

“To those who have, more will be given, and to those who have not, even what they have will be taken from them.”

The Lord’s prayer, on the other hand is of no use to our terribly fair Big Society:

“Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.”

Admittedly, they strip, but it's witty, like a quip...

2010-12-14T12:26:00.000Z

I was very excited to see so much female empowerment on display at the X Factor Final.

Screw the Daily Mail! Burlesque is totally ironic.

It's confusing though. I can't decide whether to be liberated by wearing no trousers, or by being as self-deprecatingly shy as Rebecca "Don't look at me" Ferguson. The two options seem to be mutually exclusive.


How to get into the final: don't be as gobby as Cher Lloyd.

Anyway, congratulations must go to Matt Cardle, who won the competition, and, it seems, a cat.

Or possibly many cats? I can't quite seem to lipread exactly what Harry from One Direction is saying to him here.

Remember Matt, no matter how famous your Christmas no.2 makes you, a pussy is for life, not just the festive season.

Must be... Bob Dylan!

2010-12-09T07:38:00.002Z

Early morning. Must be to serve cava to a bunch of friends. I hope the party doesn't turn out like this....*

Who's got a big red cherry nose?

Hooray for Christmas! (and Advent, but I totally don't want to get in that argument).

And yes, La Maison Roaring definitely has columns too. Men with wigs, come to my party!

*I'm very sorry, but Bob in his wisdom has decided I can't embed the video. Which puts me in a bad mood. I'd better watch it again.

Why you should get drunk, eat as many mince pies as you can and snog someone at your office party...

2010-11-29T00:42:00.018Z

I just read reallyquitetired’s post “adventageous” and the worthy sentiment of a Lenten approach to the season of goodwill. He’s right of course, Christians celebrated a good 1500 years of fasting and abstinence before our jolly pre-Christmas Christmas. And even in our judgement-averse culture RQT’s call for justice must strike some harmonic chord.

What I liked about RQT’s post and paradoxically I like about our silly commercial Advent is that both have a lovely sense of hope about them. Commercial Advent does move people and make them smile and laugh and get drunk with their friends, because for a couple of weeks of the year people do sometimes manage to believe however briefly that love-actually-does-make-the-world-go-round, or some approximately trite but genuinely warm notion.

Now before the DARK-LEFT-LIBERAL-VOICE inside your head starts quoting statistics about people dying of cold, feeling murderous pressure to keep up with the Jones’ kids or whatever, Christmas will always leave some people out in the stable or the cave. The way to deal with this, however, is not to ban feasting.

And if RQT wants to celebrate JL’s gut-churning, if optimistic, “War is Over” as an Advent Hymn (and PLEASE PLEASE GOD can we NOT have Matt Curdle singing that in a special Xmas X-Factor) then he’s clearly already hit a bit of the cheap festive spirits.

But WHAT IF actually Coca-cola and the season of office parties have made a very suitable theological innovation?

Because all that stuff about judgement was rather nasty anyway and after a couple of thousand years I think we can stop taking the Jesus-is-coming-look-busy motif so seriously.

To be a little cryptic, I think the truth is that we had the experience but missed the meaning. Christmas happened and we live in the mess of a world at war with itself, a vast wasteland of half-finished efforts to recapture dreams and shadows of stories that elude us.

In order to look hopefully-forward we need to look back for some fragments to shore against our ruins.

So we should feast through Advent, the beginning of the Christian year and allow ourselves what joy and magic we can. Because that secular feast, cutting in just after the rousing “Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiyyyve Goooooooooooowwwllllllld Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiingssssszzz”, will snatch us back to a freezing Narnian winter, national unrest and the hardship of paying for gifts and hospitality we couldn’t afford.

Here’s to feast and then fast, and 4 weeks of avoiding the living-in-time that prematurely batters us to death:

Fragment of an Argument about the Feast

How shall we behave the day after the feast?

If there is enough elation to recall at least

There's little enough disappointment : so act

As if things were usual, which they are in fact.

A little flat perhaps a little lacking

In fire in dramatic cadences we sing

'Our streets are not paved with gold and never were'

As best we can as consolation for a threadbare

Everything it seems at times is our complaint

Complaining it seems falls everywhere like rain

And great's the tension to be merely quaint

To recreate a golden age and to refrain

From further effort - and there I would have loved

And there I did - superbly conscious not unmoved

No moved but reconciled to some sort of end :

'The historical drama is over and

Only the epilogue remains though it may

As with Ibsen be drawn out into five acts.'

How shall we behave the day after the feast?

If there's no elation to recall at least

There's little enough disappointment : so act

As if things were usual, which they are in fact.

- John Riley, Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1995)

I WANT MY PINK SHIRT BACK!

2010-11-23T18:32:00.001Z

Forget the cuts, forget the ridiculous Royal Wedding (TM), forget the fact that Wagner is still in X Factor. Things suddenly got a lot worse.

Mean Girls 2 is coming out.

And it is SO not fetch.

I would post a more scathing critique of this nauseating tosh, but I'm afraid I'll be removed from public ministry by Ramping, who requires me to annually pledge my allegiance to Queen Lohan.

In other news, Joss Whedon is NOT going to direct the new Buffy film; I think I might have to go and have a very long lie down. Wake me up in 2013, won't you?

The Gossip Girl State

2010-11-18T01:46:00.008Z

I thought up a facebook application the other day called “slept with”. Beneath your friends list: ‘Leonidas Naboombu has 4310 friends’ and your mutual friends list: ‘you and Leonidas Naboombu have 62 friends in common’ you could have a ‘slept with’ list: ‘Leonidas Naboombu has slept with 106 people’ and a 'mutual slept with' list: ‘You and Leonidas Naboombu have 84 sex partners in common’. Not only would this be in perfect keeping with the Facebook raison d’etre of self-promotion, narcissism and stalking, but it would be incredibly useful in terms of tracking the progress of STIs. There could even be facebook-world-traveller equivalent of country tally - ‘you have slept with 4% of the world population... (and have an 84% chance of Chlamydia infection).’

What is terribly frightening is that I have absolutely no doubt that people would do it. Of course some people would overstate their e-conquests in the way that it was quasi-cool for teenagers to pretend they were married to their best-friends or dogs a while back. And people would do it “ironically” or “satirically” (but be scrupulously honest). And then Charlie Brooker would bitch about it, and even more people would do it.

But they would do it.

Georg Simmel wrote at the very beginning of the twentieth-century about ‘the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture’ - that in big cities people tend to get lost and feel insignificant amid the extraordinary number of people. With the Wars and all that there was plenty more reason to get pretty concerned over the individual. The “I”, the first-person of everyday speech, by the forties was getting liquidated as a “grammatical fiction” (Arthur Koestler’s phrase) by the fascists on one side and the Stalinists on the other and was beginning to look VERY small.

Perhaps this is why now, as one among 6 billion, the “I” has become so bloated - e-bloated by blogs and profiles, and 5 minutes bawling on shit television (not including the X-factor which is awesome [ugh. secret shame...]); bloated by desperation to prove how real, how unique, how authentic it is. The BIG “I” vindicates the victory of liberal capitalism against the big STATE.

Well I’ve been watching a lot of Gossip Girl recently (second occasion of secret shame). And it occurs to me how completely terrifying it is. Apart from the obvious absurdity of the never ending betrayals, bed-hopping &c. and still all remaining friends - who is this Gossip Girl? She never appears but only skulks like a SPECTRE in every shadow and nook of the Upper East Side, refusing the possibility of an undisclosed secret, of the very possibility of privacy.

But the means of Gossip Girl’s panopticon surveillance state is the characters’ own refusal of privacy - both of their friends and their own. They entirely eschew privacy and live fully public lives, delighting in the utter transparency to the world of every motive and action.

It is like reality-facebook.

Zygmunt Bauman, friend of the Millibands, has recenly written on the shift from a need to protect the private from the public, in the first half of the century, to a need to protect the public from the private in the Brave New World of Jeremy Kyle. But the danger is actually the same danger. The danger of blending the public and private so that our internal lives fall under the monitor of public authority. This is potentially more achievable under facebook than it was even by the Gestapo or the Stasi.

So now we have begun a spate of crime, tragedies, and comedy-arrests. A South-Florida teenager taking his own life live on webcam, Phoebe Prince, the victim of Massachusets mean girls, Freshman Tyler Clementi... and then the bizarre recent stories: the Tory councillor arrested for tweeting a poor joke and the recent pheomenon of “I am Spartacus” support for Paul Chambers fined thousands for venting his frustration at an airport by threatening to blow it up.

On the one hand these twitter-crimes appear absurd and a compromise of a right to freedom of speech. On the other, if you send out private thoughts into the abyss of the public realm, how surprised should you be when a humourless-crisis-ridden-terror-suspecting abyss snaps back on your beak? What is this need to constantly drive our private lives into the public? And how dare we spy on our neighbours and construct our own little Gossip police state?

A liberal society depends upon a differentiation and discernment of what is properly public and private. It also requires a bit of common sense.

You know you love me? I don't think so xoxo

Bad Boys

2010-10-17T17:25:00.006+01:00

*Trigger Warning*

So. Charlie Brooker has given up his Guardian column, Screen Burn. The man who called Cilla Black “the result of a unholy union between Ronald McDonald and a blow-dried guinea pig” has had enough of his misanthropic ways and is calling it a day, in terms of skewering TV “personalities”, anyway.

Brooker claims that meeting his victims and discovering they were actually quite nice, and feeling like a “witless bully” has encouraged him to leave the celebrity-bashing alone. But you and I know better. Why has Brooker mellowed? Because, obviously, he married a delightful young woman I like to call Konnie Hug, on account of the fact that she hugs every single person she interviews on The Xtra Factor.

Huq: Good at hugging wannabies.

Her hugs make the contestants glow and smile and think that maybe they might be able to win. I wish she’d hug me. It would make me less of a bitch. And hugging Huq has clearly charmed Charlie down from his bitter perch. Perhaps. Presumably also having a post-Blue-Peter-presenter-partner means he can’t write things like, “it’s a bit like watching a programme in which children queue up to be punched in the face by Father Christmas. Absolutely riveting for all the wrong reasons” about X Factor. (But she is very funny too: witness this segment she did for Screenwipe, where, apparently, they met.)

While I admire Brooker’s new-found love for the human race, I am also hugely disappointed. Which says two things: 1) I am a bitch who likes reading these brutal put-downs, much in need of a Konnie Hug; and 2) I am a complete stereotype of a woman who finds ‘bad boys’, or at least men who are appalling to other people to be funny/ exert their own sense of power, to be quite attractive.

The absolute apotheosis of my love for the Bad Boy comes in my admiration for (obsession with?) another Charles, Gossip Girl’s beautifully dreadful Chuck Bass.

**SPOILER ALERTS BELOW **


Dude, I'm Chuck Bass. Even Europeans must know what that means.

Oh Chuck, with your bowties, your thick frowning brows, your billions of dollars, your little black book and your “I’m Chuck Bass” catchphrase, you make me swoon. Your machiavellian machinations are even more devious than Blair’s, and I can’t stop watching. (In the season 4 evil-off between B. and C., my money’s on C.)

And Chuck is also (temporarily) saved by a beautiful, kind, good woman (who incidentally seems to be a good hugger). He starts believing in the goodness of humanity. He gives money to charity. He realises his chauffeur is a person with a family who has feelings and needs a raise.

And – and this is something I’ve been watching out for since the beginning of season one – Chuck admits to the attempted rape of Jenny Humphrey. GG is a guilty pleasure for me, but even more so given the positioning of Chuck as a constant sexual harasser right from the first episode. It takes over three seasons for anyone to come out and call it rape. He’s shown to be penitent, and a changed man, but when his relationship breaks down (of course his girlfriend-saviour is really a golddigging prostitute), can we be sure he won’t revert completely?

Maybe I’ve talked myself out of my crush. What does it say about us that women are expected, encouraged, nay, assumed to watch Gossip Girl naked while rubbing ourselves with Creme De La Mer and fantasising about Chuck? Oh yes. Rape culture. And before you say, “Blah, blah, blah, humourless feminist,” the intersections of misogyny, racism* and unbridled consumerism are all there – it’s called western capitalist patriarchy in some parts.

And let’s not forget, Charlie B (the other one) has his moments of total sexism (but it’s funny!!! cleverly, he anticipates the reactions of humourless feminists and tells us we’re stupid in advance) and making homophobic slurs. But of course, that’s all in the past. His love of a good, here’s-one-I-made-earlier-let-me-give-you-a-hug woman has changed him.

So I’m back to sex and violence. Nothing wrong with falling in love with a foul-mouthed, preferably handsome man who has a reasonably big ego.

And nothing wrong with drooling over the delicious teenagers, yummy clothes** and sensational martinis in a silly but glamourous TV show.

But careful, readers; while they look like they taste good, these Upper East Side treats might just stick in your throat.

You know you love me... xoxo

* The way Chuck and Blair treat Vanessa is totally indicative of their sense of entitlement and incessant casual racism.

** Two references for clothes this season are GG and Mad Men: obviously MM is a million times cleverer than GG but still at risk of the same glorification of misogyny if watched without attention.

Et tu Brute...

2010-09-21T23:57:00.022+01:00

Friends, Romans, Countrymen,
lend me your ears;
I come to bury Secularism, not to praise it.

The pope has had his visit and said what a wicked third world, sorry secular world, we are. (“Kasper, Kasper, shhhhhhh...” It is Fortunate Fr Lombardi was close by to translate “third world” as “a cosmopolitan reality, a melting pot of ordinary humanity and all of its diversity and its problems". Kasper himself was unable to comment being laid out in bed with gout that week, only emerging to attend a dinner in his honour at the German embassy.) ...And Christendom is terribly pleased because the atheists and the National Secular Society all looked a bit silly.

My personal highlight was watching Richard Dawkins lay out all the terrible abuses of the Catholic church, including spluttering that the pope didn’t even recognise Anglicans as having real priests! What a bastard. Hooray for Dawkins, defender of the faith.

Now the Pope didn’t say that atheist were just like Nazis. But there can be no doubt that by first talking about the Nazis as those who “wished to eradicate God from society” and only a breath later warning against “aggressive forms of secularism”, he intended to link the two, and for anyone who’s had anything to do with Radical Orthodoxy this won’t be an entirely surprising move. Even today I was speaking to the Bishop of London who argued the same choice: it’s either Faith or Nihilism.

So the catholics would have it that the good is interred with Christianity’s bones while the evil of secularism is that which lives after it, the festering parasite of Christ’s un-resurrected corpse. And Secularism has become ambitious leading to a ‘truncated vision of man (sic) and of society and a reductive vision of a person and his (sic) destiny’.

Only history tells a different story. For was it not the man who became Pius XII who made a concordat with Hitler establishing freedom of catholic religious practice and education in return for the Vatican insisting upon the withdrawal of all catholics from social and political action? And while, under the Vatican’s pressure, the last remaining democratic party collapsed, was it not Kaas, a Catholic and close personal friend of the pope to be, who agreed to the Enabling Act in exchange for the Reich Concordat?

If ever there was a Faustian moment for the church that was it.

So the noble catholics have told us that Secularism is ambitious, a grievous fault as they claim. But under leave of these honourable catholics, and they are all honourable men - I would like to speak at Secularism’s funeral.

The pope says Secularism is ambitious, and the pope is an honourable man. But hasn't Secularism brought us human rights, which attempt to legislate basic freedoms for all people. Did this in Secularism seem ambitious? And Secularism has brought about equality legislation in the attempt to make society fairer. It has developed a suspicion of power and an interrogation of those who presume entitlement. It has put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble. When the poor have cried in Latin America and Africa, Secularism has wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:

Yet the Pope says Secularism was ambitious; and the Pope is an honourable man.

The truth is that Secularism is the younger sister of Christianity. It is a necessary force of Reform which continually calls the church to order. Its foundations are in Christianity and without its care it might fall into the abyss of nihilism, but that is only the more reason to tether this force to its older sibling. It is the natural counterpoint to the elements of authoritarianism and conservatism in the church. It can be fresh, creative, unbounded in its analysis, and at its best uncovers the undisclosed sins of faith and leads the way in societal reform and social justice.

For the church to cut off the secular and retreat back to its bones is to fail the people the church is called to serve. It would be to become isolated, out of date and cultic. Worst of all, it would risk a return to an authoritarianism that would once again put the church on the wrong side of the cross.

O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason. Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with Secularism, and I must pause till it come back to me.

Sex and Violence

2010-09-02T14:07:00.014+01:00

[Trigger warning for discussion of domestic violence.]

So. The Eminem/ Rihanna video, featuring Dominic Monaghan and Megan Fox:

There has been an awful lot of discussion of this video online over the last month. It's great for Eminem: just out of rehab, 2nd single from his new album, the most controversy he's generated in a long time.
Asking Rihanna to appear in the video was a canny move: she's second only to the Free Bitch in terms of fame atm, and she's a survivor of DV so it's a good way of adding credibility and generating comment.

(Fox has donated her appearance fee to a women's shelter; and it's slightly odd seeing a hobbit look so hot.)

A couple of points regarding the song and video (with emphasis on the video):

1) There's a great debate to be had (as always) about the relation of the artist's personal life and past to the actual piece of art; a discussion of intention and who is reading. I don't feel particularly qualified to talk about this: I can't bring myself to watch a Polanski film (for example), but I'm prepared to give Eminem the benefit of the doubt in terms of assuming he's not just released this to further his career, and I like the song. But some of his back catalogue - e.g. 'Kim' - is fairly distressing and to listen to a song about DV by a guy who actually has perpetrated abuse - am I condoning it?

2) There is a pretty big disjunction between the video and the lyrics to the song in terms of the framing of the relationship that's described (as Shakesville points out). The song has an imaginably realistic description of a cycle of violence, with Eminem rapping from the abuser's point of view, Rihanna singing from the abused's (though another reading could be that she is voicing his fantasy of what his partner is thinking). But the storyline of the video is much more ambivalent, with both the partners fighting with each other and their hot hot steamy making-out following the violence and certainly sexifying if not glamourising the whole thing. (NB I am not saying that DV survivors don't fight back; or that if an abused partner tries to protect hirself that zie is an 'abuser'.) Fox is beautiful; Monaghan is stacked; Rihanna is only wearing pants and not much else. There's a lot of fire. It's a sexy video.

What interests me really is the 2nd point: especially given that the song has been so incredibly successful. What are people relating to here? Perhaps not much. I asked my sister about it and she said "It's about domestic violence? I hadn't even listened to the words - I just like the tune." It is a great hook, I love Eminem's voice (at the risk of sounding like the awful Julie Bindel) and it's a hot video. But that gives me pause for thought. What does it say about our attitudes to sex and violence that we like this song?

Clearly, there is a strong connection between sex and violence in our society. We do live in a rape culture, where aggression and misogyny are linked. (The link is a great introduction to the concept if you're not sure what I mean.) However, does this mean that there is no 'good' violence in sex and sexuality? When we watch and enjoy the glamourised 'fight-fucking' in I Love the Way You Lie (or Mr & Mrs Smith, or Buffy, or an infinite number of [sometimes even pro-feminist] films/TV shows/books) is it inevitably false consciousness? Are we enwrapped inextricably in patriarchy and misogyny and is there no way out?

The answer is with Rihanna's lyrics. She sings:

Just gonna stand there/And watch me burn
But that's alright/ Because I like/ The way it hurts
Just gonna stand there/ And hear me cry
But that's alright/ Because I love the way you lie
I love the way you lie

"I love the way you lie": this is in every way describing a relationship which is dishonest, disrespectful, abusive. But "I like the way it hurts" is much more ambivalent.

The thing that struck me most when I first watched the video was the real sense of straining towards something transcendent: expressed through passion, sex, pain, fire, music.

Sex is inherently 'violent'. It's a giving up of oneself, it's a vulnerability, it's a kenotic act. It is a straining towards the Other. What it doesn't have to be is abusive in the sense of being coercive - and this coercion is in our society more of a risk for those coded as women/feminine.

With the inevitable turn to theology, we can see this in Sarah Coakley's work. She is concerned to see sex in terms of a longing for the divine, and the longing for God as an erotic desire. She writes of the self-emptying in prayer and contemplation that is based in erotic yearning. This is a positive vulnerablity, and, crucially, it is a mutual kenosis grounded in the incarnation. Arguing with Daphne Hampson, who wants women to be independent (from men/the divine) and closed, she says

for me, the right sort of dependence on God is not only empowering but freeing. For God is no rapist, but the source of my very being; God is closer than kissing… indeed God, being God, is closer to me even than I am to myself.

Back to pop music: the track 'Sex and Violence' from the Scissor Sisters' new album (which is fantastic) sums it up excellently:

Sacramental Insurance

2010-08-16T23:12:00.011+01:00

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* to go towards the rebuilding of a notable London church.
** inc. floods, fires, third parties and acts of God.

Lovers Electric

2010-07-30T23:09:00.008+01:00

I went to a concert last night at a church in the city where a "community of spiritual travellers who seek to live in a way that is honest to God and honest to now", called Moot, meet. They'd arranged for a few bands to play and a friend of mine, who knew the FATHER of one of the musicians, invited me.

That made me feel old. I'm sure I'm still of an age where I'm supposed to know musicians, not their parents. Still there's good reason in this case to blame the friend.

I don't think the bands were chosen for any particular connection to the church, or church in general, as was highlighted by one of the musicians, after extolling the virtues of the building, proclaiming "I'd love to get baptised in that!"

Pointing at the pulpit.

Anyway these guys were hot, entertaining and super-super-good.

(For a clearer version of the song [not live] click here.)

How to have a crap time camping

2010-07-26T14:16:00.003+01:00

Why doesn’t Bella Swan just get a hobby? Like knitting. Or kayaking. Or stabbing herself in the face with a chopstick. I think I would rather have spent last night watching K-Stew take two hours to choose between two M&S ready meals than the drippy and curiously asexual vampire and wolf.

“I LOVE duck with noodles and hoi sin sauce. I want to eat it for the rest of my life.”
“But chicken and mushroom fried rice is so delicious.”
“No. I will have the duck. Even if it means I become a serial killer.”
“But the chicken! It’s so tempting. Maybe I can have a bite of it and still eat the duck.”
“Gosh I LOVE the duck so much. And it knows I want the chicken, and yet it still wants me to eat it. That makes me feel special.”
“Yummy chicken... It’s calling to me, saying, ‘Eat me too! I don’t care if you’re eating duck most of the time.’ But it’s wrong to have two dinners. Perhaps I’ll take them both camping and that will help me decide.”
“But I LOVE THE DUCK. Even though it’s cold. Maybe I should put it in the microwave.”
(And so on, for 300 hours, ad nauseam)

Of course the metaphor breaks down in that M&S ready meals don’t tend to want to have violent sex with teenage girls. And for such a tedious film, Eclipse has a lot of potential sexiness (mainly Taylor Lautner being half-naked for the whole thing).

Jacob: "Let's just face it, I'm hotter than you"

But where Buffy shags the vampire(s), takes responsibility for herself, keeps her soul, and has a lot of great sex, poor old Bella suffers the indignity of having her two boyfriends argue about which of them can be more paternalistic while she’s asleep (not to mention the fact that the boys have more homoerotic chemistry than you can shake a stake at). Talk about female passivity. And the cooking every meal for her dad. And the kenotic making herself bleed to win the big fight. And thinking her only options are a lifetime of domestic abuse with a dead guy or an animal. And sitting in that bloody meadow with Edward glittering away, as if he’s Anakin Skywalker. Worst. Female. Character. Ever.

There’s no hope of redemption here. Bella literally can’t win. She can ‘choose’ (i.e. be manipulated into) to defer her desires until Edward agrees to have the violent sex with her (after marriage, of course)and then lose her soul, risk having the violent sex with Jacob immediately, or remain unloved and invisible (except to her loving parents, but what teenager cares about that?).

But the real answer is not for her to remain independent and isolated, but to search for a mutual relationship with an Other who gives as much to her as she gives to it. Not for a love where her lack and her longing drives her to let herself be annihilated.* Because while feminism is not about self-abnegation, nor is it about the Woman Alone, able to fight and survive, and relish her island-status. If Buffy has taught me anything (and really, it’s taught me everything) it’s that superwomen need support and love, and mutual vulnerability. When Buffy tries to work on her own, she fails – and her tribe gets more powerful and more effective the more she leans on them. But Bella doesn’t even try. She just waits to be taken, and hopes to be taken care of.

Grown-ups are so afraid of sex education, the cervical cancer jab, girls going wild, the bad influence of sexy Miley Cyrus photos. Really, just don’t give your daughters the Twilight books. And advise them to get a hobby. And if they go camping in the snow, tell them to pack a freaking jumper. Good grief.

*(Obviously, this is really about theology: where the ultimate Other I desire also desires me, and the desire sweeps me onwards and upwards, through the eucharist, culminating in but not finishing or being consumed by the resurrection. I’ve been reading Graham Ward’s essay on the Body of Christ in Radical Orthodoxy, if you’re remotely interested.)

Bishops-Without-Penises: an appraisal.

2010-07-14T12:14:00.001+01:00

The Church of England General Synod has inched even closer to the day when we might see people who don't have penises in the episcopacy. As a person who doesn't have a penis, and is in favour of people with all sorts of different genital make-up being ordained, I am very pleased about this.

We might even have a Bishop-Without-A-Penis in the next few years!

Katherine Jefferts Schori: Doesn't have a penis.

Now, I know what you might be thinking. Surely (you might say to me), these people who don't have penises shouldn't be Bishops! (In fact you might even think they shouldn't be priests but they are already, and you don't want to get sidetracked into a conversation about priest-genitalia.)

People without penises are definitely equal to people who have penises, but it is quite obvious (you might argue) that the having of a penis makes a person completely different to a person without one. For instance, those who don't have penises are actually more special than people with penises, because the non-penis people can be mothers! They can actually produce babies out of their no-penis area, and look after the babies! This is something that God likes, for sure. Especially because God was born from a person without a penis.

Anyway, to side-step the obvious point that Jesus had a penis (God couldn't possibly have been incarnated as a no-penis-person) and all his disciples had penises, the really important thing is that only people with penises can ordain priests (you might tell me). Thus people who are ordained by people without penises aren't actually priests and can't say mass. This is crucial, because the most important thing a Bishop does is to ordain priests. ('Theology of taint' sounds like an innuendo but in fact is very very serious.)

What Synod should have done was to make sure that for every diocesan Bishop-without-a-penis consecrated, there would also be a proper Bishop-with-penis to help out, so that those who realise that penises are crucial to sacramental authority won't have to put up with fake priests, fake eucharists, and a fake Bishop. Otherwise, any privilege usually gained by having-a-penis in the secular world is totally undermined by the fact of being under a non-penis-'Bishop' in one's diocese and puts one on a level with in other oppressed minorities, which is unacceptable. Instead we're going to have to trust that 'Bishops'-without-Penises will look after the pro-penis Anglicans.

So, you will conclude, though you are very fond of the Church of England and would like to stay in it, your only option is a) if you're Anglo-Catholic, to leave and go to the Roman Catholic Church, which is entirely governed by penises; or b) if you're an evangelical, to not pay any of your parish's huge income to the Bishop-without-a-penis. Unfortunately, the Roman Catholics don't pay very well, and you can't take your building with you; and if you don't pay your parish share, the diocese won't help out with your 10 new church plants.

It's a painful, distressing decision to make, and I have a great amount of sympathy for it. If only there was a way of thinking about sex and gender that could make it all easier: if only there was a way to trust each other that wasn't all about what we look like naked.

In My Beginning is My Spiritual Hologram...

2010-07-12T21:53:00.032+01:00

“We are nothing without our image. Without our projection. Without the spiritual hologram of who we perceive ourselves to be, or to become, in the future.”

Amen. Thus spake the seraph aka Lady Gaga in the new-libertine creed. And forthwith the scoffers wagged their heads at “spiritual hologram” and gnashed their teeth at the po-mo superficiality of venerating the image. But wait a minute; isn’t there some ancient text that actually refers to as image, as the image of God?

And are we so sure that the glamour-gloss of Andy Warhol’s diamond dust shoes and myriad Monroes are quite so banal as arching [high-]brows, critical of mass culture would tell us.
What if Gaga has a point?

Subtly introduce the more acceptable language of imagination and it all starts to sound a little like contemporary theology. And if it’s conceded that the age of the photograph and silent film took to pieces the aura of the work of art, then high speed broadband
must surely be the death of all romantic notions of the original, authentic work of art. Perhaps we are all copies, and copies of forgeries, and counterfeit plagiarisms of copies of forgeries, and if we truly did make it to becoming perfect images then we might avoid that pernicious Augustinian originality.

Roaring introduced me last year to Martha Beck who has a lot to say about “starting from the end.” About imagining how you want a situation to resolve itself before you find yourself 1000 miles from home hacking your way through the Mekong Delta. This means a literal imaging/imagining a future that might bring you a little closer to who you are. And if my beginning can be found in my end, and my end in my beginning, this might give us an authentic spirituality which can be achieved by copying and forging ahead. But, as every successful school-girl/boy knows, the art of successfuly copying is to give it a twist, or, as Warhol would have it, a myriad of copies in negative, high contrast, technicoloured hyper-reality.

So let’s all imagine lots of lady bishops and gay bishops and see what spiritual holograms we can uncover that are unfettered by all the reactionary boredom of people with little imagination.

We are nothing without our image.

After School Videos

2010-07-03T00:01:00.005+01:00

You know, today's been a sad day. Andy Murray was knocked out of Wimbledon. Ghana's football wasn't good enough to beat Uruguay. Paris Hilton was detained for smoking pot at the World Cup. I had to fish a lot of my possessions, including a ton of work, out of a bin filled with maggots in true I'm-a-celebrity style without the consolation of meeting Ant & Dec.

So, naturally, to feel better, my thoughts turned to the beautiful D'Angelo and his gorgeous 'Untitled'; my favourite after-school-video of all time:

It was also Kelly Brook's favourite video back when she was a VJ in 2000. She would get all misty eyed when she played it, and can you blame her?

Of course the video was very 'controversial', and ended D'Angelo's mainstream career even as it started it. Never mind. We can keep watching (bearing in mind some excellent questions about masculinity, sexual objectification, race, and whether the, em, 'climactic' gestures are real?) and feel cheered.

How does it feel?

Daddy's Girl

2010-06-20T16:58:00.006+01:00

In honour of Father's Day, I'd like to direct you to the best father-figure in television, Mr Rupert Giles. (And if you haven't watched Buffy, really - what are you thinking? go and order the whole thing NOW.)

(Sorry it's in Spanish! Fox are dreadful about copyright)

I love the Slayer/Watcher dynamic they have - thrown into nice relief by Wesley - not without problems and growing pains (remember her 18th birthday?), it matures into a really loving relationship of equals that still has a familial aspect. From the beginning he sees how special she is, tries to support her and guard her independence, even to the extent of becoming completely anti-institutional and losing his job for her sake. Who wouldn't want a dad like that? It's an often subversive model of fatherhood (Buffy's birth father is absent and uninterested), placing love above authoritarianism, where Buffy herself is confronted with Giles' past (as Ripper), sexuality (getting over the 'grossness' of grownup relationships) and knowing that grownups often don't get it right. He's comfortable with her sexuality (while there is never a directly sexual dynamic between them), and the show never descends into daddy-protecting-daughter's virtue nonsense. He leaves Sunnydale to let her learn to be self-reliant, but he comes back when he's really needed.

So (to change tack ever so subtly), this sort of subversion is why I think 'Father' language for God is often ok - as long as you have flexible, unessential ideas about gender. This is not to say that it's not unproblematic language, because both women and men can have damaged relationships with fathers/father-figures/priest-figures that make father language difficult if not impossible. Those of us with good relationships with our fathers/father-figures should constantly recognize that privilege and resist reifying father language in a way that is damaging for others. And it's important to remember that we all have women in our lives who display some of the best attributes of 'fathers'.

Janet Martin Soskice puts this subversive element well in her essay 'Calling God Father', where she relies on Ricoeur’s symbolic interpretation of the notion of a father as a way of reading of the biblical texts in which the flexibility of the concept of fatherhood comes to the fore:

What ‘father’ and ‘son’ mean here [in Jesus' calling God ‘Abba’] cannot be read off woodenly from normal family relationships or the Arians would have their case. Rather, ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ function as loaded ciphers, their full significance disclosed only with the unfolding of the ministry of Jesus.

Good theology starts with this, the relationship between Jesus and the 'Father', rather than legitimizing and reifying some inevitably flawed, and often essentialist notion of human fatherhood. Balthasar does this in the worst sort of conservative-bourgeois way, and it's insidious in its influence on Roman Catholic theology.

So happy Father's Day, all. Go hug your father. Or someone else's father. Or someone you love. And if you're father to someone else, remember Rupert Giles and be inspired.

Taking in the Holy

2010-06-10T17:41:00.000+01:00

Ok, ok, you know I had to write something about it. The Alejandro video has more Catholic imagery than you can shake a thurible at.

Bill Donahue (of the Catholic League) isn't very happy. Big surprise. Though at least he grasped that the video is essentially one big Madonna homage. He claims that LG 'is treating us like Muslims'. A searing critique, really. The CL reminds me of certain other protesting priests... (Though the phrase 'manages to get raped' is less funny - nice intimation of victim-blaming, Bill).

It's no Telephone, but there's even more gender 'performance', and I like the bit where she ingests the rosary. Stephen Klein, the co-director, suggests that it's about "the desire to take in the holy." Coupled with all the sexual and S&M-y moves, the video comes across as an overwhelming and oppressive take on physicality. The nun as ascetic escape from pain/sex/embodiment?

(Katy Perry has described the video as "cheap". Ha.)

(I promise not to blog about Lady GaGa again for at least a week. Honestly.)

I’m a free bitch, baby!

2010-06-03T00:06:00.003+01:00

‘I am here to proclaim your liberation,’ she told us. A preacher for the night, a high priestess who couldn’t imagine any other death than one that took place in the sanctuary of the stage, a messiah sacrificing herself for our love. ‘Some say I’m an irreligious woman,’ she cried over Alejandro, ‘but tonight, let’s go to church, London!’

Such was Lady Gaga’s charisma that, right up in the gods of the O2 arena, when she lay down on the stage as if it was a psychiatrist’s couch and explained that she was nothing – nothing – without the love of her fans, that our love had spoilt her for a relationship with anyone else, I felt like I was the only one there. When she sang, ‘I’m your biggest fan, I’ll follow you until you love me’, the curious inversion of the dynamics of watcher/watched felt oddly intimate (and less manipulative than you might think).*

She hates money and plastic surgery and the fact that she loves alcohol-dependent men like her father. She loves difference. Again and again she told us to be free – free to be freaks and geeks, gay, straight or bisexual, to do what we wanted and to tell those who say we aren’t good enough, ‘Fuck you!’

She lay on her piano upside down, conducting her band and playing the piano with her stiletto. This lady is talented. Her voice is enormous. Her clothes are huge. She told us that she also has a very big penis. And her breasts actually shoot fireworks.

She was Dorothy, Tinkerbell, the Pied Piper, Mary. She was a monster-slayer who wanted us to kill our own demons. She was the Mommy to her ‘little monsters’. She very consciously sees herself (at least when she’s performing) through the eyes of her fans. It’s the love/applause of others that brings her to life. Christ or Tinkerbell?

Be free, she said. Be in the moment (we were told off for photographing her - ‘I’ll be back again!’ - a command to experience the present I wish had been emphasised when I went to mass at St Peter’s). This is no Madonna crucifying herself in the ultimate act of self-reference. Lady GaGa is something else altogether. ‘I promise I’ll be kind’, she sang to me. In the end, I believed her.

*Her tweets from the MEN Arena tonight, responding to a fan’s complaint that people weren’t being let into the venue with coke cans in their hair, are very cute. Sounds like she gave the arena staff a bollocking for being mean to her babies...

All Women are Liars

2010-05-27T09:42:00.012+01:00

[Trigger warning]

This week Roaring sent me Penny Red’s blog post on rape, which articulates the prevailing cultural attitude that all women are liars. She points to the government’s planned changes to allow men accused of rape anonymity and rightly notes that those accused of child abuse do not get this anonymity, which does seem to suggest that women are more likely to lie and are less reliable witnesses than children.*

By chance also this week I received the latest dispatch from the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament (CBS) which argues that Catholics in the Church of England cannot receive the sacrament from women because of “sacramental assurance”:

“A woman might be a priest, or she might not; it might be a Eucharist or it might not; it might be the Blessed Sacrament or it might not!”

As its author, Fr Christopher Pearson, rightly points out (for the wrong reasons) "This is nonsense". Anglo-Catholics of this view have devolved the divine mandate on grace, on the very presence of God, to man. The worst part about this is that it’s not even to the church to which they belong, which with provision, has broadly accepted the ordination of women - but rather to a selective group of men. Never mind that the church has called women to be priests; it is a certain group of men that are granted divine powers.

And theologically this is an immense problem. It is the worst excess of clericalism in placing all sacramental authority in the hands of the few, not the domain of the church (let alone seeing sacramental presence throughout creation), and it relegates grace to superstition and magic in supposing that the hands of a selected few are able to conjure up the power of God. Didn’t the Church deal with this one and a half millennia ago?

What is more, for the now thousands of women priests in the Anglican church, it says ontologically - in your very being - you are liars.

* I don’t want to dwell on the recent case of the two ten year old boys and eight year old girl but it does appear to be a ghastly parody of adult rape cases insofar as a power dynamic of shame motivated the girl into claiming she had earlier lied about her experience of abuse: she said she lied because she had been naughty and was afraid of not getting sweets. Both the evident criminalization of the boys - in which society already others them (criminals/sex offenders) and the sexualization of a pre-pubescent girl as shameful suggests that the most harmful pressures of society are quickly imputed upon children. The media’s assumption that Of Course she lied (she’s a woman-to-be) and that this is all just innocent horseplay is equally horrifying, in its washing over of both bullying and sexual violence, and demonstrates the sheer folly of the Tory policy of killing off compulsory sex education.

After-School Videos

2010-05-12T19:36:00.005+01:00

When I was a teenager, when I got home from school I would make myself a cup of tea, pour myself an enormous bowl of Cornflakes and settle down to watch MTV Select (which boasts such alumnae as Cat Deeley, Donna Air, Lisa Snowdon, Kelly Brook, Edith Bowman, Richard Blackwood ['member him?!]...) until dinnertime.

Videos ruled my life then much as now (forget about homework), and the on-demand nature of Youtube and current cable programming doesn't have the same charm as waiting through an hour of Donna Air chuntering on and on to callers while you're waiting for the latest Britney single to finally come on.

Anyway, After-School Videos will be an occasional, totally self-interested blast of nostalgia for no other reason than I love nineties pop.

So here is Texas, 'In Demand':

Crap song, but ALAN RICKMAN! Doing the TANGO!

Look at Sharleen's face - never has a woman been so happy. And what is she doing to him with her knee?

Amazing.

(And note the 'twist' at the end - you see what they did there? You see? Clever.)

Britney’s New Clothes

2010-05-07T18:26:00.047+01:00

So I was reading Roaring’s thoughts on being perfect and I was thinking what is this desire to be perfect and is it gendered? After all I’ve listened to Whatta Man, I’ve seen Justin dance and I’ve read 40 ways to get perfect abs in Men’s Health, but I suspect it’s not quite the same. What really struck me about what Roaring wrote was how quickly perfection for her became about flawless physicality, and although popular culture has shifted dramatically towards androgynous youthful beauty for men and women, I suspect men do better in the plurality of male types over the most obvious and prevalent female prescriptions.

It reminded me though of Rousseau’s differentiation between self-love and amour-propre - the love of ourselves through the eyes of others - and his exasperation at the way in which natural desire and self-love get shifted into resentment, fear and envy when we start comparing ourselves with one another. These people exist as the projected negative of imperfect humanity. So much so that even the people whom it creates - like Britney - are themselves alienated by their own projection. She is like the naked emperor who has to suffer all fools complimenting her on her dress - only in this case it’s more likely that her clothes, along with the tattoos and cellulite, will be airbrushed out than imagined on.

Feuerbach thought that God was just the projection of human desire. Clearly today the media, and particularly celebrity culture, has taken the place of God.
And with celebrity diets of maple syrup and skipping, with make-up tips and fashion-lines, with the X-factor, we have detailed accounts of the soul’s journey into Britney. Only of course it’s not actually Britney - it’s perfected Britney in her emperor’s clothes that we’re all pretending to see. It’s not real - it's alienated-Britney. And this is bad for Britney because she’s left naked with everyone staring at her and it’s bad for us because we’re signing up to a pipe-dream that’s going to leave us frustrated and bitter.

The poet Edward Young wrote “Born originals, how comes it to pass that we die copies?” Our society depends upon us being copies, with dreams of naked Britney. Copies always turn out to be reactionaries, though, to play it safe in public and furtively masturbate over the forbidden in private. The anti-progressive return to the Conservative/Labour binary at this election demonstrates a fear of thinking differently about our selves and our society. It’s herd mentality. And depressing.

There’s a lot written today about interdependence and community and blah blah blah, but I think now we actually need a bit more talk about superwomen and supermen. We need to stop comparing ourselves with others and need to stop copying the person on the billboard next to us. The election has shown that collectively we’re unable to think progressively and if we’re honest for most of us the majority of our resources are applied to becoming more and more perfected copies - rather than finding and developing our own authenticity.*

So even though I’m surrounded by tories and even though I live a stone’s throw from Oxford Street, I’m going to try to be a superman this week. And I’m not going to be dreaming of naked Britney.

Well, you can’t control your dreams can you?

* Roaring is currently into being a feminista. I still have questions about the politics of this kind of feminism but I’m sure she will harangue me for the overly-male individualism of this piece anyway...

CH8XC28GDMJ7

"It's time for a women's reformation"

2010-05-01T15:53:00.003+01:00

In the wake of Hans Kung's open letter to the Catholic bishops, and before commenting more fully on the Catholic situation, I'd like to point you in the direction of Tina Beattie's marvellous call to arms over at her Marginal Musings blog. She rather unfortunately begins by saying

On reading this, I realize it's an extravagant polemical gush, but I decided to publish it anyway

which caveat, though I hate to be so essentialist, a man would never have given.

Given she's seen as pretty strident anyway, she should just own it and say what she really thinks (if you haven't read her intro to New Catholic Feminism, a fantasy of mourners getting up to all sorts of sexy high jinks in Rome at JPII's funeral, you should - most grabbing introduction to an academic book I've ever read). And note the references to Philip Blond and John Milbank... Feistyness is good, Tina! The conversation needs to be pushed on...

A Brave New Girl

2010-04-26T16:28:00.023+01:00

I started thinking about perfection this week when a friend noticed that I say ‘Perfect!’ a lot [seriously you have no idea - Ramping]. ‘That would be perfect!’ ‘You’re perfect – thank you’, ‘It’s been a perfect day’, ‘Having coffee with her was perfect’, and so on, ad nauseam (apparently).
Now if I was living some sort of charmed life, wafting about looking flawless (rather than tired, slightly hungover and a bit dishevelled), fragrant with exactly the right amount of Gucci Rush (rather than putting on so much I smell, in the words of Janis Ian, ‘like a baby prostitute’), being gracious and clever and witty (rather than grumpy and needy and inane) then, truly, ‘perfect’ would be the, um, perfect adjective. But alas, in reality, perfection constantly eludes me.

I put myself under a lot of pressure to be perfect. Maybe it’s in my genes, maybe it’s the Protestant work ethic I grew up with. Or maybe it’s something of a cultural imperative. Who (and especially what woman) doesn’t, at some level, think our bodies/work/homes/relationships/sermons/G&Ts should be perfect?

One woman who is excruciatingly familiar with the pressure to be perfect is Britney Spears, who ‘bravely’ published photos of herself before and after airbrushing. See how perfect she isn’t?

Britney has enormous power as a symbol and story for most women my age. Since the Baby One More Time video started preventing the boys we hung out with from standing up, we’ve watched her grow up in celebrity parallel to ourselves, going through (some of) the same sort of things: the boy you’re dating kissing and telling, losing your virginity instead of doing the proper evangelical thing, one-night-stands, marriage, babies, breakups, going through the sort of craziness we all do in our twenties (but to the nth degree and under scrutiny I can’t imagine), weight loss, weight gain, booze, drugs, being popular, being alone, having controlling parents...

I've always liked her music. I have a playlist on my ipod of songs that make me feel sexy (however superficially) and make me want to dance, and there is a lot of Britney on there. If you track the themes of her songs, even right back to the the early stuff, there is a good stream of feisty lyrics, stories of having your own fun, avoiding being overprotected, being outrageous, becoming your own woman, being brave, screwing instead of being screwed, being a bitch. But it’s always made me sort of anxious, because these songs aren’t written by her. So whose story is it? When do you become what is projected onto you? When is it healthy, and actually empowering, and when does it make you want to shave all your hair off you’re so distressed? When are you being objectified, and colluding in your objectification?

Britney looks phenomenal in the un-airbrushed photos. And even if it’s cynical (look how hot I am in real life now! Buy my record!) it’s good to see how completely ridiculous advertising is. Because, and I suspect this is true for loads of women, I’m not very good at looking and ads and remembering they’re fake, they’re unrealistic, and real people (even celebrities) actually have KNEES. When was the last time you saw knees? Apparently famous women don’t have to bend their legs. (Perhaps, like Mariah Carey, they 'don't do stairs'.) And it’s important to remind ourselves that even someone as gorgeous as Britney must be airbrushed in ads, because attractive as she is, she’s still not hot enough.

So we get to add this to the story of B. She hasn’t got a perfect body, but she’s ok with showing us her cellulite. And no matter why she’s really doing it, maybe I can add a bit more honesty into my narrative – the one I tell myself, and the one I reveal to others. Because it turns out that people quite like honesty, and vulnerability can be attractive. I’ve been surprised recently at how much admitting I’m not perfect has been good for my friendships.

So excuse me while I put on my bikini, go outside, and show everyone my knees.

Whip It, dude!!

2010-04-15T18:54:00.004+01:00

I went to see Whip It last night. I'm not a great movie-goer (claustrophobic) but this was totally worth it.

I can't remember the last time I saw a film that passed the Bechdel Test (has two women in it, who talk to each other, about something other than men/babies/marriage) but this did, and more than made up for all the other crap films (hello, Jennifer Aniston!) I haven't gone to see this year.

Directed by a woman (the cute-as-hell Drew Barrymore), written by a woman, and with a mostly-women cast (starring the wonderful, and feminist, Ellen Page); lots of girl-sport action, great young-woman-coming-of-age plot, female co-stars with more than one dimension and some good twists at the end which make it a lot less cheesy than it might otherwise have been. Nice directing from Barrymore too (in her first stint in the chair).

A film, in other words, that made me wake up with a smile on my face this morning.

So I grabbed the latest copy of Empire magazine to peruse over my morning tea, forgetting, you see, that I'm not supposed to read film magazines. Because (whisper it) I'm a girl.

You see, Empire had managed to get FULL ACCESS! to the set where DREW BARRYMORE! and ELLEN PAGE!! who are totally HOT!!!!11! were filming. And, in case readers think that Whip It was some sort of rubbish chick-flick (a woman directing? written by a girl? a mainly-chick cast??? sounds crap, dude!) we ('we') are reassured that they are totes wearing short skirts!! and FIGHTING and shit!!111! So don't worry that your testosterone levels will go down, bro, if your lady drags you to the cinema (though a real man only does what his gf tells him to if he's getting some later), because you can totally secretly MASTURBATE to this film!! Someone give me a high-five, dudez!!!

Whatever. I shouldn't read Empire thinking it's aimed at me, and I wasn't too bothered, until I noticed the full-page photo opposite the story. It took me about 4 minutes to figure out what it was (an ad for Lynx? or Nuts? or the new Corden and Horne film?). Seriously.

I wasn't going to link to this, but it's become a bit of a theme in our posts, so here it is:

Turns out Empire has just used, apropos of nothing, an old shot from September's US Marie Claire. Bizarre. I'm not even sure why MC did this, but apparently Barrymore and Page were promoting the film in the US by, you guessed it, flirting outrageously with each other and doing some Katy-Perry-style IKAG shots.

Which is fine - there are lesbian subtexts in the film, Barrymore is bisexual, and they obviously have phenomenal chemistry.

But... Empire? please. Apparently the only way to get a man to see a great film that's not all about men is to pretend that there are HOT CHICKS!!! MAKING OUT!!! Dude! Sweet!!!!!

Anyway, go see this film.

"Let the little children come unto me"

2010-04-10T15:55:00.067+01:00

So perhaps the now super-sensationalist E4 series Skins has finally gone the way of all shock-TV in trading its original subtlety and humour - or at least lightness of touch - in portraying the teenage underworld of Bristol, for a more shock-and-awe/smash-and-grab approach. Still, what it has maintained throughout is an overriding preference and sympathy for the boozing, pill-popping, promiscuous wastrels - at the expense of the adults who, celebrity not withstanding, unfailing come across as dull, stupid, thoughtless, lumbering or downright evil.

While the easy condemnation of Daily Mailers, for whom Skins fits into the Ban This Filth list of programmes, corrupting the innocent, eager minds of our children,* what is really striking in this contrast is that despite the sex, drugs and foul language their authenticity and freedom returns to them a new definition of innocence. This of course sits oddly with their total eschewal of traditional forms of morality, but perhaps in our post-60s secular age it is authenticity that provides the new framework of ethics.+

Of course for the last several thousand years ethical systems have been dominated by an eschewal of self - a kenosis (emptying) of self - for the other. But while this is all very well if we’re martyring ourselves out to another world, or if we’re brashly empowered jocks who need taking down a peg, for the one who has been othered, it is conservative rather than radical, and there will always be an emperor Constantine to maximise that effect. Series 4 of Skins has a real thing about names and self identification. So we have Katie at her nadir moment screaming “I’m Katie fucking Fitch, who the fuck are you?”, and of course the climactic final moment of the series: “I don’t think you know what I am mate... I’m a fucking waste of space... Just a stupid kid... I got no sense....A criminal...I’m no fucking use...I am nothing...so please... please... get it into your...you know...into your bonce....That you killed my friend.... And... I’m Cook... I’M COOK!”

Both these scenes are about authenticated otherness, about the one whose voice has been stolen, by those in authority and the fake WAGs and wankers, screwing their courage into a ball and flinging it out in high density self-expression. This sort of “everyone’s-ok” right-on attitude is pastiched in scenes such as High School Musical’s "Stick to the Status Quo", but in Skins it achieves a properly tragic quality as the flawed characters are dragged down to their fated ends in the full glory of their realised flaws, which nevertheless preserve them ethically as authentic.

Now one might argue here that, although this might make them Enlightenment heroes, independent, free and authentically themselves, theologically they are no more to be praised than Milton’s Satan, no more justified than Macbeth. But in every series what is most remarkable, most notable, is the incredible solidarity shared amongst the teenagers, the seemingly limitless forgiveness they show one another - between Freddie and Cook fighting over Effie, Effie nearly killing Katie in series 3, but then being the person who helps pick her up when all is lost (by teaching her how to smoke!), Naomi betraying Emily, before their textbook happy-ending reconciliation. It is this “solidarity of the shaken”, as one theologian has called it,§ this self-authentication in otherness, that hopes, believes and endures all things.

They may not have taken on a Pauline eschewal of fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, the effeminate or abusers of themselves, but there is more of Christ about them than most Christians I have met. So perhaps authenticity does provide a clue to contemporary ethics in realising a counter-point to the saintly self-giving of the holy empowered. And perhaps from this other city the authentic poor provide their own tragic homage to what it is to participate in the crucified God.

*There is a suggestion of irony in these articles. Note the accompanying erotic image and what about the critique of True Blood: “More offensive than all this is the sheer distasteful nature of the content. There's oral sex, overt discussion of genitalia, graphic sex scenes bordering on the deviant, and foul language"? Apart from seeming ridiculously dated, the building up of criticism to that pinnacle of “foul language” is hard to take seriously.

+ For a great Laudamus te to authenticity,
and for its relation to secularism, see Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I’ve spent the last year reading for review but still only got to page 400.

§ Andrew Shanks, see his The Other Calling and Faith in Honesty, among others for this pervasive theme in his work.

Spot Ze Difference

2010-03-31T14:04:00.005+01:00

This is Ze Man:

And this is Ze Woman:

Ze Man, he has ze microsite. It is for ze Real Men.

Ze Woman, she has no microsite. But she can recline, and ze men will come to her. Lucky Woman.

"Bless God and bless the gays!"

2010-03-20T14:59:00.010Z

Plenty has been written this week about Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’, a ‘homoerotic rampage of capitalistic ultra-violence’ . From the Tarantino, Meyer and Thelma and Louise references, to the ‘Baby One More Time’-esque dance routine, to Gaga’s crotch, the video – on its way to being the most watched video ever, beyond even MJ’s ‘Thriller’ - has been analysed to death (smelling suspiciously of rat poison).

As LG herself put it, this was for me a super-exciting pop event, and I’ve got to admit I had shivers down my spine (and elsewhere) the whole way through the 9-minute epic (I was on retreat all weekend and couldn’t bear the thought that Ramping had posted it to my Facebook page and I couldn’t get to it. Most distracting when I was trying to be all Lenten). Glorious colours, hot outfits, awesome dancing, Beyoncé pushing her image more than she’s done before (this being the teenager in Destiny’s Child whose mother didn’t let her listen to hip hop because of the cursing; even being Jay-Z’s wife hasn’t shaken the good girl projection).

But... as a feminist? Gotta say it’s not unproblematic.

Tarantino references, nipple stickers, girl-fights, Beyoncé faux-lezzing it up with a Twinkie, Gaga actually lezzing it up, mass-murder, lots of Beyoncé breast shots, the ‘dick’ comment, the unbelievable product placement... Shocking? Not really. Titillating. Probably. Feminist? Well...

Certainly Gaga has been wary about the feminist label, saying in the past that she’s definitely not a man hater. (Though if you want to show your man-loving credentials, probably best not to make a video populated almost entirely by queer women and killing off the men.) Still, one of my (female) friends called the video totally misogynist and couldn’t watch the whole thing; another loved it. What is going on here, and is Lady Gaga exploiting lesbianism/her sexuality/pussy for cheap thrills and selling music? Is this just a slightly more sophisticated, bigger budget ‘I Kissed a Girl’? (Anyone who goes out with Russell Brand: probably not a feminist icon.)

After a brief round of searching ‘Lady Gaga + lesbian’ on google, I discovered that the woman who kisses LG in the prison yard is called Heather Cassils, and is ‘an artist, stunt person and a body builder who uses [her] exaggerated physique to undermine and interrogate systems of power and control'.

She seems very cool and articulate on gender performance, which is clearly her thing. When asked about whether the video was problematic in terms of LBGT representation, Cassils replied:

No, I find nothing problematic about Gaga's video. For some one to say that it is bad to have representation of LGBTQ people in prison in a music is just ludicrous to me. To be able to poke, to parody ourselves means we have come a long way. They are missing the point. In addition, Gaga is exploiting all images in the video, including herself. The structure of the video claims everything from Thelma and Louise to early sexploitation films. My friend Michelle Johnson who is an EXCELLENT filmmaker has made a film recently called Lezploitation, which reclaims exploitation films of this era through a lesbian gaze. While Gaga may not be a lesbian, Gaga is clearly not straight but certainly she is queer. I don't see any problem with her reclaiming these images as well!

Exploiting oneself? My knowledge of performance art is limited, but this is a complicated thing to say, especially when you’ve publicly committed to fighting sexism, as Lady Gaga did at the National Equality rally in October:

We say that this country is free. And we say that this country is equal. But it is not equal if it is [only] sometimes... As a woman in pop music, as a woman with the most beautiful gay fans in the whole world, to do my part, I refuse to accept any misogynistic or homophobic behaviour, in music, lyrics or action in the music industry... I love you all so much. Bless God and bless the gays!

She argued this week that the video is getting so much attention purely because of the homosexual themes, and clearly putting trans women, lesbians etc. in the centre of the video is a political statement:

There are transsexual women and transgender women [in the video] and suddenly it becomes poisonous and something else because there are some people in this world that believe being gay is a choice. It's not a choice, we're born this way.

It’s hard to walk this line, isn’t it? On the one hand, reclaiming sexist imagery and using your own body to do it can be incredibly powerful (as long as you are definitely the one in control). On the other, there is no way of separating symbol from history and context; how do you use previously exploitative imagery without retaining the original meaning? But this stuff is fun, and it’s sexy. It’s an event. I watch it and it makes me want to be more creative. But it’s also designed to make money – to sell phones and Diet Coke apparently – and this is where using/selling/exploiting your own body becomes so heavily enmeshed with capitalism it’s hard to see the possibilities for stepping out of the patriarchal paradigm even if you do have Beyoncé to drive you off into the distance on Tarantino’s Pussy Wagon.

Gaga claims that the idea behind the video is to say ‘that America is full of young people that are inundated with information and technology, and turn it into something that is more of a commentary on the kind of country that we are.’ This is, then, a statement about, not a critique of American capitalism, and if she wasn’t a burgeoning feminist, if she wasn’t a LBGT campaigner, if she wasn’t the most interesting and articulate pop artist around at the moment (one with money behind her anyway), perhaps it wouldn’t matter. But I expect more.

Lady Gaga told Barbara Walters that ‘I want to liberate [my young fans]. I want to free them from their fears and make them feel like they can create their own space in the world.’ We need more space – and we need a space where we can make out with other women without there being a mobile phone on sale. We need a space where we can look like a fierce blonde Amy Winehouse without it being sponsored by Coke. We need a space where Beyoncé can actually say the word ‘motherfucker’ out loud without it destroying her ‘image’, and by extension, career. We need a space where no one gives a fuck whether Lady Gaga has a penis or not, and she’s still hot.** We need a space where, if we’re lucky enough to possess our own bodies enough to exploit them, we can reach out to others who don’t have that autonomy.

So I expect more. But for now, I’ll have to be content to watch Gaga and Honey B escape into the sunset.

*This is a fascinating story – assuming it’s true – because Heat claims that putting the dildo down her trousers was all her idea. One can speculate that if she was under pressure to be topless and felt vulnerable, this was a was of regaining control.
** Though one could do a bunch of Freudian stuff with the video and LG’s explicit lack of a phallus...

2010-03-19T14:59:00.001Z

If church was like this they wouldn't have to worry about falling attendance

A link to the marvellous Popjustice to start us off...