68 Revolution theatre

Hello. Welcome to Border Crossing issue #68. I hope you’re doing well.

Thank you very much for supporting this email and my writing generally — and welcome onboard new subscribers.

This time, I write about arts funding rage in a pseudo-radical age.

ear update

Big thanks for your lovely concern and comments, which I feel guilty about, given my complaints were (are) incredibly mild. Basically, my ears work fine now, it’s almost entirely gone, pops back just occasionally. But I’m better and cheerful. After the last Border Crossing, Paul Goodwin (fine singer-songwriter from Cambridge and occasional online chess buddy) kindly sent a link to this device available at Boots and other pharmacies, which helps with glue ear. Neither my GP, nor any local pharmacists mentioned this gizmo, so I’m happy to see it. Thank-you Paul.

gems

1

Matthew Sweet’s full-length 2012 interview with the great Harry Belafonte for BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking series (which used to be the Arts & Ideas strand), shared since Belafonte passed away last month. Thanks to Allegra Mcllroy, who produced the programme, for flagging this.

2

Sascha Pare writes for LiveScience about the group of orcas on the Iberian coast who are responding to trauma by deliberately attacking boats, and even teaching their young to follow this new behaviour pattern.

3

David George’s lovely Quaker-led short, activist DIY film Why on Earth isn’t Ecocide Illegal? from Utility Films explains the legal meanings of ‘ecocide’, arguing for it to be a crime in international law. A useful primer at a key moment for a legal term that could genuinely help. Thank you Heather for sharing this.

4

DigItScotland interviews archaeologist and Iron Age specialist Dr Rachel Pope about the Celts. This is a really fun, up-to-date primer.

5

David Iserson reads his short story ‘This, but Again’ for Slate’s Future Tense podcast, followed by an interview. It’s a sort-of love story set in a future where all life has been proved to be a computer simulation.

potato gem

Sometimes when you have a potato, you can smell when they’re on the turn.
Jenny Eclair, Taskmaster series 15, episode 2

David Todd McCarty writes for LMNO (ellemeno) on Medium about the pure joy of the french fry. If I could write this beautifully about potatoes, this email would be a lot more niche. Thank you very much @Frankosonic for the tip-off.

soundtrack

Aoife O’Donovan — Age Of Apathy - Solo Sessions
Often an acoustic rework of an album, especially a recent one that already sounded great, is annoying. But stripping O’Donovan’s sophisticated folk-pop songs down to (gorgeously recorded) guitar and vocal is a quiet treat. Too much reverb, but apart from that, it’s golden.

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Revolution theatre

It’s weird to feel nostalgia for a pay dispute. But the last time Hollywood’s screenwriters went on strike, back in 2008, we got to go along in person. It coincided with when I was chaotically, half-arsedly attempting to ‘break America’, making a lot of music in California and, as the big TV productions all shut down, lots of people in LA including us took the picketing writers boxes of doughnuts and hung out. It was very different from UK strikes. People (say, KT Tunstall) sang in the street, Seth Macfarlane did a rabble rousing speech, except he spoke the whole thing as Stewie (his Family Guy character). I’ve got a treasured photo of Rifa marching with a placard, kept more because she looked way cool than to record our solidarity.

…

Last week, writing in The Guardian, alongside a general begging plea on his knees for more money overall, iconic big-shot theatre director Sir Nicholas Hytner proposed (sort of) splitting the Arts Council in two. He suggested taking community arts engagement out of the hands of Arts Council England, leaving that body to focus on delivering ‘great works’, that is, funding the big boss level organisations and their high profile projects, while a new body would be created to deal with the grassroots, participatory kind of art-making. He name-checked Sport England as a comparison.

With a nod of respect to Hytner’s huge experience (he ran the National Theatre, oyez) even a cursory, casual analysis of this idea reveals how daft it is, and how badly it misunderstands how street-level arts are surviving — or not. At the moment, ACE fights (not hard enough, far too politely) for government money that it scatters across the arts sector. It wins less than half of 1% of overall spend. If the UK were to create two separate bodies, they would end up competing against each-other for that money. They could easily be played off against each-other’s leaderships, rather than uniting to fight for the overall pot to be increased. At the same time, as a broader ethical point, hiving off the notional ‘great art’ from the rest of us — the community, the participatory — is just crazy, it can only drive a wedge between key facets of the creative life that are intrinsically enmeshed. We’re already at a place where audiences don’t show up, and don’t feel a part of things. They’re watching telly at home and worrying about the pennies. The right-wing culture war is alienating audiences once again from anyone different, and we know who that includes. Pushing all thoughts of engagement, participation and diversity out of the process of choosing what art to fund, up at the heady, negotiatory top-end of proceedings, is dazzlingly short-sighted.

The big fat establishment organisations that guzzle the lion’s share of the cash will no longer need concern themselves with annoying stuff like broadening audience reach, explaining themselves, or community responsibility, or probably diversity and inclusion.

Honestly, if one sincerely believes that increasing competition-type ideals and deepening dividing lines (hello more capitalism) in the great creative splurge will somehow improve our overall situation, one is firmly on the side of the exact system that brought us to the precarious spot we’re in, right now.

[Sidebar. By the way, ‘great art’ (whatever the fuck that means) mostly doesn’t come from the established names: mostly it comes from unknowns, who burst (usually briefly) into the public sphere. They rarely manage to continue making ‘great art’. On the whole (with noble exceptions) mainstream success equals an end of true ‘greatness’. They did their bit, now they’re comfortable. In the modern era, the ‘greatest’ creative artists of all (who achieve success during their lifetimes, which isn’t as much of a given as we tend to imagine) take care to remain at arm’s length from decision-making power bases. People who come out of creative practice to embrace the power tend to have been headed that way all along, and never actually made anything ‘great’, just read the room well. Meanwhile, common notions of what actually constitutes ‘greatness’ also radically shift over time, until those who espouse expert contemporary understanding of it — who believe you can assess what ‘great art’ actually is, are, often, in time, proved idiots. /ends]

For me, I reckon the subtext of Hytner’s piece (and what renders it mostly harmless) is that he was speaking specifically to the Labour politicians who’ll lead Britain after next year. He doesn’t actually need them to understand what he’s banging on about, it’s just useful to remind them he’s out there. Fair play, if he’s hustling for a gig. We all are. The irony isn’t lost on me that targeted ads I was fed around the edges of the Guardian web page containing Hytner’s article were plugging blockbuster post-apocalyptic TV drama The Last Of Us.

I just finished Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s book Chokepoint Capitalism. The first two-thirds of this book visit each discipline of the creative industries one by one, to unpack how we’re having our creative life stomped out of us by the global corporate parasite. It’s full of stuff we already know, but laid out in finely researched detail, vividly written, with evidence and hard numbers attached. Chapter by chapter, it’s a viciously disheartening experience. The final third of the book is meant to be the uplifting bit, where they offer solutions. Unfortunately, Giblin and Doctorow’s positive forward-looking ideas, while provocative, inevitably require a rarely seen sturdiness of collective action, and/or immense individual determination to bypass industry altogether. I’ve come away with a lot more despair from the first two-thirds, than radical, restorative energy from that final third.

But I’m old. Perhaps the kids, so very inspiring, fighting all these other causes and corners right now, leaping for liberation, and also so resilient (unshackled from us, in exactly the same way we unshackled ourselves from oldies and their outdated ideas when we were young) will shake up the arts too. Find new ways forward, one hopes.

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While yearning (fighting) for system change and more money, we need to face the hard truth that the leadership level of the UK arts and culture sector is in a crisis of absent talent, which betrays everyone working on the front lines. It is still deeply class-ist, over-privileged and desperately under-visioned.

Earlier this year, everyone in the comfortable, dark-wooded corners of that establishment came out to fight, hard, on behalf of English National Opera, when ACE ended its ‘National Portfolio’ status and told it to move out of London. Never mind the ENO still got a parachute payment in the tens of millions to help it move house, nevertheless the change was felt (at the top) as profound cultural vandalism in a way that, say, the ten year apocalypse of small rock music venues was not. I acknowledge it’s kind of wrong to make that comparison. Both should be properly funded. ACE’s decision-making around ENO was a complex reaction to Nadine Dorries’ interference during her excruciatingly toxic, dysfunctional time as Culture Secretary. But I found myself thinking, well, it shows an unexpectedly healthy awareness of London bias (and ‘heritage classical music’ bias). For me, looking at what it does and for whom, how effective (or not) its outreach and inclusivity have been, as well as how many powerful allies it already has on standby, I think the ENO hasn’t really deserved that kind of rolling high-end ACE support for a long while. And honestly, it’s fine they’re being forced up north. Unpopular opinion.

I (or better, someone with a real platform) should write properly, in analytical depth, on how dismal the current leadership of large British arts bodies are at listening to their own teams, at vision, proper strategy, at collaboration, at all these things, even as they puff on about flat structures and loudly signal their inclusivity. We ought to name names. Scratch a big cultural organisation in the UK right now and (not always but too often) you’ll find entitled, braying fools running the show on instinct and delusion, using the sector to add colour to a career portfolio, while in their downstairs offices and on endless Zoom calls, their exhausted, harassed, underpaid staff spend their days fire-fighting the impacts of their leaders’ gibberish and harebrained schemes. I have friends and acquaintances inside enough major organisations to know this. I’ve heard enough first-hand pub accounts for a full-length book, if more of them felt able to whistleblow. But also, when the arts are threatened, we leap to their aid — and those questions and concerns slide to the back of our minds, overwhelmed by a need for unity. These divide-and-rule feelings pervade locally, too. When it’s people we know and admire, we’re upset on their behalf if they lose crucial funds. Yet at the same time, if it’s organisations we’ve watched under-deliver, or fail at inclusivity, or just faff around, for years, it’s hard to sympathise.

Here in Brighton, it’s been Festival and Fringe month and both are wan shadows of their former selves. It seems as if, in only half a decade, we’ve leapt from a point where tickets instantly sold out to ‘Friends of Brighton Dome’ before anyone else could get hold of one, to a point where nobody’s buying tickets at all and they’re still desperately punting them on show day. It doesn’t matter whether the show is innovative and locally produced, or some cheesy mainstream touring I.P. hired in to prop up the festival. Two of this year’s key things were hobbled by tech and site problems. The smaller fringe venues, producers and artists, already boot-strapped enterprises at the best of times, are in an abject state, post-Covid, fighting tooth and nail for survival. Turns out the Cultural Recovery Fund, generous as it felt, was precisely the short-term sticking plaster we warned it would be (and of course, like anything Tory, skewed grifter!) Brighton Festival used to be the second largest in the entire northern hemisphere, behind Edinburgh. Now, nearby Charleston House has a more impressive lineup of names for its annual bash — and that’s just one artsy posh estate in the Sussex countryside.

Here’s the thing, though, about all of it (and about the basic structures used to fund specific organisations in the first place): when the money vanishes, good people lose their jobs, even if the organisation might deserve a knock-back. For the most part, the flawed leadership remains and regretfully lets go the people who did good work. The system works the gears like capitalism, like business, not like groups that exist to do a thing. This is such a fundamental, profound flaw.

So what are we left with? In the end, like every other sector struggling through the mire of Tory Britain, it is jobs and livelihoods — actual people devoting their actual lives to enabling creativity — that needs funding and saving, not ‘great works’ or old buildings or big established brand names. This will take root and branch change, not scratching at the edges. And in the end, I do exactly what Chokepoint Capitalism does: I lay out a horror, then fail to propose how to mitigate it.

…

The woke blob needs a military wing. And that needs cosplay. Theatre with live ammo. The arts need to regather with our most subversive elements, not to drag them back towards a sensible centre-ground with nice middle-class handwringing, but to drive them in a more potent direction as only true art can — and must. For real, on mass, not just leaving it to the children.

I think of Franz Nicolay’s wonderful song ‘Do The Struggle’, title track of his 2012 album, singing its story of beautiful, quixotic art terrorism. I think of Nina Simone. Or Taylor Swift in tears trying to persuade her management to let her endorse a moderate Democrat political candidate. Or my friend Shardcore’s incendiary, cynical generative visual work. I think of Laura Poitras’ documentary All The Beauty & The Bloodshed, though I haven’t actually watched it yet, but I know its tale of fine artist Nan Goldin and her powerful late career direct activism, as she recovers from oxycontin addiction, challenging the Sackler family’s disgusting hold over a world of museums and galleries. I think of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, which he composed in September and October 1963, when he was 22 years old and a newly rising star. I’ll stop now and leave you with Dylan’s crazy-brilliant verse of the generation gap:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agein'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'…

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get in touch

email: chris@christt.com
Insta: @cjthorpetracey @thebordercrossing @folkhampton
Twitter: @christt | @folkhampton

Jim Bob action

The new Jim Bob album Thanks For Reaching Out is now available to pre-order in all formats (even cassette) from Cherry Red Records. I played a chunk of piano and sang backing vocals.

Ahead of Jim’s full band tour in July (mostly sold out) I’ll join Jim for a short run of record shop instores: Rough Trade East (London, 30th June), Resident Records (Brighton, 1st July), Rough Trade (Bristol, 2nd July) and Jacaranda (Liverpool, 4th July). In September, Brexit willing, we tour the Netherlands and there’s a Berlin show at Urban Spree on the 18th.

always there

All my nonsense via LinkTree.

You can still get my complete annotated Chris T-T lyric book Buried in the English Earth via the Border Crossing shop. Down to the last thirty copies.

My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too.

Please look after yourself and your people.

All my love, as always.

Christopher
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