Eat y'self fitter

Inconsequentially: it occurred to me the other day that I'm firmly convinced that some kinds of food and drink are good for you. In most cases this belief doesn't appear to have any rational basis - although in some cases it's probably based on experience, which is almost as good. Anyone else have a similar list at the back of their mind, or is it just me?

Healthy Food

Ginger
Anything with ginger is good for you. Fact. A friend once advocated ginger tea to me as a cold remedy so persuasively that I was genuinely disappointed still to have the cold when I finished the pot. (It did do me good, obviously, just not quite that much good.) Chopped ginger in cooking is good, or sliced ginger. Crystallised ginger, even (lots of sugar is generally bad for you, but the ginger makes up for it). I'll reluctantly concede that chocolate ginger probably isn't very good for you. (Better than chocolate without ginger, mind.) Gingerbread. Ginger cake. Lebkuchen (although not the ones with jam in). It's all good.

Lemon
Anything with lemon is good for you, apart from sweet things. Apart apart from hot lemon with honey. Bizarrely, hot lemon with honey and whiskey is even healthier.

Chinese soups
Those clear broth ones. They're good for you. It's true. Not so much the ones with all the egg in or those crabstick ones. Hot and sour I'm not sure about, either. But the clear ones, they're great. Same goes for any of those Chinese main courses which are basically a slightly drier version of one of those soups, with noodles or boiled rice (not fried, sadly).

Goat's cheese
Not just goat, though. Blue Stilton, that's got to be good for you. And white's even better, if you can get it without the fruit salad stuck in it. Goes off in no time, mind you. So that's white Stilton before it goes off. Careful now.

Fruit and stuff
Yeah, I suppose.

Healthy Drink

Anything fizzy
Well, OK, not anything. But mineral water, certainly, and basically anything non-alcoholic. And a nice gin and tonic, that's got to be good for you.

Beer with yeast in the bottom
Bound to be healthy, isn't it? (As long as you drink the yeast. Whether you do this by swirling it up and drinking it out of the bottle or swirling it up and pouring it into the glass depends entirely on the type of beer. But you knew that.)

Beer
Not all beer, obviously. Not stout, and only some porters. And not keg beer, obviously. A nice well-kept bitter, that's what you want. Mild's even better.


So there you have it. Of course, you wouldn't want to let your life be governed by a list like this. Variety is important; custard, Guinness and curry are fine in moderation. But if you really want to pig out, go for Stilton, Hefe Weizen and a nice Chinese.

And ginger. Anything with ginger is good for you.

Music of the future

About twenty years ago there was a Radio 4 sketch show called Son of Cliché, scripted by the not-yet-celebrated Rob Grant and Dave Naylor. Nick Wilton was one of the regulars (what's he doing these days, I wondered when I remembered this; the answer's "panto, mainly"). The music was by Peter Brewis, including one of the funniest moments in musical comedy I've ever heard: the credits sung in the style of Bob Dylan, to the tune of "Knockin' on Heaven's door", with each verse ending

"And the music was by - Peter Brewis,

Peter Brewis, Peter Brewis,

Peter Brewis, Peter Brewis..."



Well, I liked it.



There's an interview with Peter Brewis in today's Indie. It's not the same one - this one's a member of Field Music - but I do wonder if he's any relation. Now, Field Music, although they're quite young lads - this Peter Brewis would have been in nappies when the other one was doing his Dylan impression - make angular, jerkily melodic, thoughtful music, heavy on the keyboards and woodwinds. They're so 1970s they ought to be on Caroline, in other words. They're not alone, either. The Feeling are Pilot on a good day (or Supertramp on a bad one), and the Klaxons...

The Klaxons are a bit more complicated (not better, but more complicated). The Klaxons (or is it just Klaxons? I neither know nor care, actually) are 'new rave', apparently. Judging from the track "Atlantis to Interzone" (on the B-side of their single "Golden Skans"), 'new rave' essentially means 'retro'; the track starts with whooping sirens and (I kid you not) a woman singing the words "Mu mu". Then the bass kicks in. A couple of minutes later it kicks out again and the sound gets stroppy and punky, with a kind of 1979 art-school cockney vibe; my son pricked up his ears at this point and asked if it was Adam and the Ants. (He's a fan of Adam and the Ants.) "Make it new" clearly isn't an injunction that's troubled the Klaxons greatly. "Golden Skans" itself takes me back to a period I'd completely forgotten: post-glam, pre-punk pop-rock. Think Graham Bonnet-era Rainbow, but without the metal cliches or the long hair, and with aspirations to make both three-minute singles and deeply meaningful albums. Think Argent earlier in the 1970s, or City Boy later on, or John Miles at a pinch. Punk cut a swathe through prog rock, but the pop-rock scene it destroyed. But it's back in the hands of [the] Klaxons. I think they can keep it.



The Earlies, now - there's a fine band. I'm listening to their new album The Enemy Chorus at the moment, and even though it's only the first listen I can thoroughly recommend it. Most of the tracks have that "I'm going to like this later" itch to them, and a couple are instant synapse-flooding beauties. (Like a good strong cafe con leche, when it's cold outside. With two sugars. Like that.)



But even their music has its 1970s and late-60s echoes. It's stacked with them, to be honest - I've been reminded of Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, Faust, Neu! and the Beatles, and several times of Family (someone in that band knows Music in a Doll's House and Family Entertainment).

I'm not complaining about the Enemy Chorus - it's a wonderful album. But still... it'd be nice to hear something that would pin my ears back the way punk did - and, for me personally, the way the Desperate Bicycles and Scritti Politti did. The Fugees did it; cLOUDDEAD did it (cLOUDDEAD were very punk). Since then, not so much.

I wonder what they'll find to play at Noughties Nights.

The most cruel has passed

Newsflash.... General Augusto Pinochet of Chile has just died. His condition is described as 'satisfactory'.



(Thanks, Rob.)



Like Rob (and Ellis), my thoughts turned to Victor Jara, the Chilean Communist singer whose brutal murder would be enough in itself to damn Pinochet, even if Jara hadn't been one of 3,000. Jara's writing is vivid, poetic, charged with love, passion and humour - and it's deeply political. Look at this song, "Abre la ventana":



María

Abre la ventana

Y deja que el sol alumbre

Por todos los rincones de tu casa



María

Mira hacia afuera

Nuestra vida no ha sido hecha

Para rodearla de sombras y tristezas.



María ya ves,

no basta nacer, crecer, amar,

para encontrar la felicidad.



Pasó lo más cruel,

ahora tus ojos se llenan de luz

y tus manos de miel.



María...

Tu risa brota como la mañana brota en el jardín.



María...



Our life wasn't made to be eaten away by shadows and sadness



Let's remember one of the great unpunished crimes of the last century: a moment of revolutionary joy and revolutionary hope, snuffed out by the General. I could almost believe in Hell if I thought he'd rot in it.

Update 12th December

OK, OK, here's a translation.

Open the window

Open the window, Maria
Let the light shine in
To every corner of your house

Look around, Maria
Our life wasn't made to be eaten away
By shadows and sadness

Now, Maria, you can see
There's more to finding happiness
Than just living, growing, loving
The worst time has gone
Now your eyes are filling with light
And your hands with honey

Maria...
Your laughter breaks as the day breaks over the garden

Maria...

Pasó lo mas cruel. Gets to me every time.

Don't shade your eyes

I'm posting from work, because this is (unusually) a work-related question. And I do mean 'question': I will be expecting comments. Look sharp.

I'm formulating a research proposal, building on the work I've done on what went on in Italy between 1966 and 1980. Basically, you have two successive waves of protest: one which starts in the universities around 1966, spreads to the factories and goes crazy around 1969 before subsiding; and another which starts in the factories around 1972, spreads to working-class neighbourhoods and from there to the universities, and goes crazy around 1977 before subsiding.

I've made them sound reasonably similar, but there was one crucial difference between the two. The first wave died away because Communist-affiliated trade unionists got behind it, with the result that the workers basically got what they were asking for (on the condition that they stayed with the union). By the time of the second wave, by contrast, the Italian Communists were in their ultra-respectable phase: the second wave died away largely because the police forced it off the streets using armoured cars and live ammunition, with the Communists' full support. So in one case the protest achieved a lot and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't needed any more; in the other case it achieved next to nothing and stopped because, for most people, it wasn't worth the aggro any more.

What I'm looking for is examples of the same scenarios happening in Britain. Either:

1. Protest starts
2. Protest spreads
3. It all kicks off in a big way
4. Demands are more or less met with a little help from Labour
5. Protest dies away because most people don't see the need any more

or

1. Protest starts
2. Protest spreads
3. It all kicks off in a big way
4. Public order clampdown with full support of Labour
5. Protest dies away because most people don't think it's worth it any more

I don't think I'm going to have an enormous amount of difficulty thinking of examples of the second scenario - the 1993-4 period springs to mind straight away. I could do with some suggestions for examples of the first scenario, though. There have to be some...

Never be your woman

Will:

Yesterday I was giving a talk on the egocentricity of the digital revolution ... and afterwards stood around chatting to some media lecturers, all seemingly left wing intellectuals. They were dolefully discussing how their students showed no interest in criticising brainless, celebrity-obsessed and pornographic magazines, deeming it to be purely a matter of choice what one reads, and whether a woman chooses to be photographed naked. One of these academics said that it is only around five years since every class contained at least one out-spoken feminist, but that these have either disappeared, or been silenced by a new majoritarian view that it is arrogant/pretentious to take up political positions in such a way.

Five years. The Blair government has coincided with an important generational-cultural shift, just as the Wilson government did 30 years earlier. If racism and sexism started to become unacceptable in the late 60s, thanks to a post-war generation that refused to accept them, then perhaps the defence of rights started to become unacceptable in the late 90s thanks to a post-Thatcher generation that refuses to accept it, on the basis that political rights arrogantly trump consumer rights.

Today the newspapers report that sexual harassment of teachers and pupils in schools is widespread, and that girls are starting to accept sexist language as the norm ... Have I simply dragged some value set from the distant past, which I want to see imposed upon this new social avant garde? My sense of frustration about this is doubtless no more morally sincere or keenly felt than that of the 60s conservatives, who despaired at what the kids were doing then. In each case, a moral gulf opens up, and politics struggles in vain to bridge it.

If history really is repeating itself, expect to see a 'conservative' backlash, whereby those born between 45-79 seize power and attempt to force some traditional values on the youth (more or less what we're already seeing, even from Ken Livingstone), followed by a bright new political dawn around 2020, in which a young fresh-faced child of Thatcher marches down Downing Street in a hoodie, swigging from an alco-pop, and announcing in faux-cockney tones that he's a pretty straight guy who used to be into 50 Cent.

The horror, the horror.

I don't know about the last paragraph - I just kept it in because it's funny. The part about sexism is interesting, though. Here's a comment I posted on Will's blog:

I am not a Hegelian... oh all right then, I'm a recovering Hegelian... but I think there's more historical cunning at work than your academic friends allow. As little as thirty years ago, it was widely assumed that women's only roles were to be decorative and look after children; women who 'made it in a man's world' were freakish oddities. (When Thatcher became leader of the Tory Party, a popular slogan on the left was 'Ditch the Bitch'. Right on, brother.) If seventies feminists did a lot of shouting, they had a lot to shout about.

So it's true on one level that magazines like Nuts and FHM take us back forty years, to the days of Titbits and Reveille - and it's true that pornographic imagery is degrading, oppressively so when it's ubiquitous. But it's also true that some of the core feminist arguments have been won, or at least conceded. The very language in which these students defend those magazines reflects the radical liberalism of mainstream feminism, or of the mainstreaming of feminism: why shouldn't a woman be a doctor/bus-driver/MP/astronaut? why shouldn't a woman go where she likes and wear what she likes? why shouldn't a woman take her clothes off for the cameras if she wants to?

Feminism also meant a much harder set of arguments, having to do with dignity rather than freedom of action. These are questions of what's good for women as women - and, more importantly, who gets to decide. I'd say that the problem on this front isn't that the gains of women's liberation have been rolled back, so much as that they were never really made. "Women shouldn't have to look sexy all the time" is a fine liberal argument - it's a subset of the belief that nobody should have to do anything. "Women shouldn't be expected to look sexy" is another matter, and finds a lot of liberals on the other side of the fence - after all, why shouldn't people have expectations of one another, and why shouldn't people sometimes choose to comply with other people's expectations?

It's an argument which was never really won - and, I would argue, it's come back to bite us in the shape of the hijab debate. Twice over, in fact: advocates of hijab play a distorted and sexist version of the dignity argument ("why should a woman be expected to put herself on display?") while advocates of other people's right to wear hijab play a version of liberalism that seems equally distorted by sexism ("why shouldn't a woman have the right to shield herself from prying eyes?").

So I think you can add to your list of prophecies that feminism will be back, but it won't be so liberal next time. And it'll probably be wearing a pinafore dress over jeans. (Why do people do that? Women mainly.)

---

While I'm in philosophical mode, a swift plug for Clive's dissection of Blair's weird and sinister maunderings on the 'social contract', which he seems to want to replace with... well, an actual contract (only this time round they would impose it on us, not the other way round). I rarely succeed in getting through Blair's statements, what with being overcome by outrage, panic or sheer pedantic irritation (no, look, it doesn't mean that...). Fortunately Clive is made of sterner stuff.

---

Q: Why is the Italian government letting convicted fraudsters out of prison?
A: It's all because of the Christian Democrats.
Q: But the Christian Democrats ceased to exist over a decade ago, didn't they?
A: Indeed they did, my knowledgeable questioner. But they're still making the political weather.
Q: Oh. What's that about then?
A: Read "Open up the nicks", new from me at the Sharpener. The second in a six-monthly series of commentaries on Italian politics. Possibly more interesting than it sounds. (I can't really tell - I mean, it sounds pretty interesting to me...)

Still wearing flares

Do you have some jeans that you really love,
Ones that you feel so groovy in ?
You don't even mind if they start to fray
That only makes them nicer still

I don't have a lot in common with Donovan Leitch, but I can agree with him on this one. I wore the jeans that I really love last weekend, briefly - they were £5 from Dunne's Stores and worth every penny - but I had to change out of them later; the fraying certainly makes them nicer still in my eyes, but it's reached a point where few other people are likely to share this view.

In short, they're now my decorating jeans. For wearing outside the house, they had to be replaced some time ago, even at the cost of another fiver. (It's a good five years since I stopped paying proper money for jeans. Not having a permanent job will do that.) On that occasion Dunne's Stores came up with a bit of a curate's egg: a pair of jeans whose cloth is a pleasure to behold in both weight and texture, but whose cut features a high waist and what I believe professional tailors refer to as a huge baggy arse. I tried to persuade myself I'd get used to the style, but it was no good - I had to haul the waistband up to my navel, which left me feeling as if I was auditioning for the Drifters.

So it was back to the mostly-reliable Dunne's Stores, where a "20% off" promotion gave me a third pair of jeans for a mere £3.20. (I know, but I wasn't going to argue.) The cloth isn't as nice this time round, but at least the waist is where it ought to be. The cut of this pair does have one disconcerting feature, though: the leg's got a slight flare.

I haven't worn flares since 1977. For the benefit of readers who don't immediately understand that statement (I know that some will), 1977 was when everything changed: music changed (both what it sounded like and who could make it); politics changed (what mattered and who could say so); and, perhaps most enduringly, trousers changed. Robert Elms said once that punk was first and foremost a trouser revolution, and I have to admit that the slimy little soulboy has a point. I was wearing flares in 1972 (and the kids I looked up to were wearing big flares). I was wearing flares in 1975; at my sister's wedding in that year I wore a brushed denim suit with aircraft-carrier lapels and, yes, big flares. I was forcibly reminded of that suit this summer - the evidence is preserved in my sister's wedding photographs, a set of which we found when we were sorting out my mother's things. (Not visible in the picture is a pair of fudge-brown platform shoes with chocolate-brown piping, of which I was enormously proud. Those were different times.)

Come 1977, I was still wearing flares - at least at the beginning of the year. And, if you were around at the time, so were you. The flares, the wide lapels, even the platform soles became mainstream after a while; the soberest 'business suit' would have broad lapels and a discreet flare. One of the less obvious changes made by punk was to banish the flare and return jacket lapels to their previous modest, Graham Parker-ish proportions. Punk, in short, didn't just change what the kids wore; it changed what the next generation of kids wore, and even what the kids' parents wore. By 1979, if you were wearing flares, you were by definition still wearing flares. It's hard to imagine any subsequent wave of musical fashion - the cocktails and zoot suits of the early 1980s, say, or the tatty jeans and lumberjack shirts of grunge - having effects as far-reaching as this.

The 1970s, it seems to me, really were different times. Looking through my mother's old photographs - and there were plenty of them; even the ones taken by my father go back to 1950 - I was suddenly struck by how different the clothes didn't look. Show me a flared trouserleg and an acre of lapel, and I immediately know we're in the early 1970s - but where were the blatantly obvious fashion statements which signalled the 1960s, the 1950s, even the 1980s? Before and after the 1970s, people just seemed to be wearing stuff.

There's a school of fashion writing, associated in particular with men's tailoring, which I find unutterably boring; I just don't understand how Elms (among many others) can get excited about the presence of four cuff-buttons instead of three, or about a chalk stripe being 1/12th of an inch across instead of 1/16th. A set of those tiny differences adds up to a whole different style, I realise that - and consequently much of the history of fashion is ultimately about these tiny differences. I realise that, but it doesn't move me. Why should I choose between white and pale blue when I'd rather choose turquoise? Why should I agonise over switching from dove-grey to battleship-grey, when I could be wearing jet black with a purple lining? And if I couldn't, why not?

The history of counter-cultural fashion (hippie, punk, goth) is the history of sweeping challenges like these, just as the history of mainstream fashion isn't. Perhaps what happened in the 1970s - something that may never have happened before or since - was that the boldness of a particular counter-cultural fashion went so unchallenged for so long that it actually permeated the mainstream. (It's only a shame it had to be that particular fashion.)

Or perhaps I'm just more conscious of fashions that were around when I was a teenager.