Howard: Film Review

For a company of film makers the natural way for the studio to process grief or extra special events and colleagues, is through the medium of film.  This is a biopic I am excited to review.

 

 I've had some extra time to watch film and found a good amount of documentaries about Disney.  The latest one is Howard (2020)

Howard died during the AIDS pandemic.  There's a lot we can learn from him and the gay community who fought through the pandemic.  

It's also a highly entertaining movie.  I grew up with all his musical numbers and have been aching to get out in the world but have been stuck inside like everyone, with my piano.

So here's the subtext from the stories he is remembered by (and endlessly remixed by Bootie San Fransisco nightclub DJ's)

Part of your world is making you fall in love with the character.  It's about a girl, dreaming about what she wants, Howard drew inspiration from a few off Broadway musicals of the last century.  And also every classic Walt Disney animation like Wish Upon A Star.

Kiss the girl is Sebastian trying to persuade them to kiss because if they don't it won't end well.  Under the Sea is "Sebastian" trying to get her to stay under the sea and not get in trouble.  (It won an Oscar).  He plays around with many different basic musical instruments improvised out of objects in the scene.

The artist might have drawn inspiration from the Mob Song in Beauty and the Beast, from the crowds of anti gay protestors.  And when he was dying, the parallels between the beast's rose losing its last petals, or Jafar robbing Aladin of his powers.  (Deleted "song": "My finest hour")

I need to go back and look at those last 2 songs.  Hopefully they made it into the cut!

Go watch Howard on Disney+

One person's opinion on the resurgence of Coronavirus

 I'm quite a politically aware citizen and coronavirus is deeply political.  It has dwarfed all other issues as the top of voters' minds on a huge majority of people who've been effected by the outbreak and continue to be challenged by it.

When it first broke out the Government was quick to seize emergency powers.  It already had that anti-democratic instinct when Boris Johnson lied to the queen to prorogue parliament.  (As a remainer, I am accepting of Brexit but I'm disappointed in the way the right wing extreme brexit government has carried it out)

I am also disappointed that they're still in power and still pushing for emergency powers.  These are powers most police didn't use.  I don't think it's such an urgent emergency any more.  The main reason we're having a resurgence as bad as we have is the mixed messages coming from the top.  I'm not a nut-job libertarian but I still think that the government's power-grab could be more dangerous in our lifetimes than the health crisis itself.  

A few more examples:

-The Mayor of London has been denied the same rail subsidy as the rest of the country as the army and other national bodies take more powers.  London Councils are regularly given directives that they just have to follow with basically their hands tied.

-The virus itself could have been brought further down if the Government hadn't encouraged its spread for instance through eat out to help out, going back to the office, and Dominic Cummings' keeping his job and political capital being wasted defending his breaking the rules.  Trust is essential.

That said I was aware from the beginning that if we didn't all do it voluntarily that would lead to more severe punishments being brought in.  People are behaving as if it's a massive surprise, on the radio.  Maybe I didn't realise how much people would be in denial.

There was plenty of time after SARS to plan and we knew that the next pandemic could be a coronavirus.  Governments and business did have plans in place - but for instance Councils thought it would be a flu which has different immunity and different characteristics, in spread and symptoms.  I think they've been slow to adapt - but the answer isn't to side step democracy.  MPs can't communicate a policy they don't understand themselves through scritiny and debate.  The public can't be expected to follow common sense if they don't understand the reasons for instance covering their mouth and nose with face coverings.

On A Levels - my story

 I took my A levels around 15 years ago.  Some of the grades were based on AS level results.  Knowing these rules I worked hard for the previous year's sets of exams too and despite flagging a bit at the end I achieved top grades.  Attending independent school and having private tuition and lots of support from grandparents as well as parents, and of course the local library, I worked hard and was able to sail through without distraction; as well as succeeding in exams I had some education in how to be happy and some extra curricular activities and activism.

I had an offer from Durham and a lower offer from Nottingham Uni, but I already had my heart set on Nottingham.  We had a wonderful professor there who later joined the royal society as a fellow.  Nottingham was not too far and often my friends with cars would let me hitch a ride, often arriving to my door at the bottom of the M1 in a couple of hours without even a break.  Sometimes I would get the train or hitchhike, and I visited London for national demostrations, and meetings of the Board of Deputies or UJS advanced political and educational training. - Nottingham was the biggest and fastest growing J Soc in the country at the time and was the campus where Limmud took place.  Being in the Midlands also allowed me to travel the country and experience the UK beyond London, more directly.  It was also, I'm told, less costly than living as a student in central London, while being able to live outside my parents home for the course.

I graduated into a recession and financial crisis triggered by sub prime mortgages, and struggled to get my foot on the job ladder, moved back to my parents, and volunteered in a charity shop for Age UK / Help the Aged.  I volunteered for Caroline Lucas' successful election campaign and to re-elect Green councillors, as elections and campaigns officer on the national committee of the Young Greens, England & Wales, and was involved in the London Young Greens and local Green Party here in the Borough of Barnet.  After attending a Jobcentre course, I got my own gardening business off the ground.

Thanks to my science background - GCSEs, A-Levels, and my B.Sc. - I was able to get into my chosen career of horticulture - with fees paid for by my family, and did some work experience on the course at Avenue House, a local stately home and arboretum.  I've always loved trees - and my plans to carry on with my degree subject, I later saw as unrealistic.  Though vocational qualifications in the UK are lower status than a degree, there was an over-supply of graduates in the job market and underqualified perhaps, I am always able to find work with my BTEC and though I now get offered employment in many locations, I turn down these offers to work self-employed as my own boss, my own way.

 If I was hiring some staff in the gardening business who might want to make their own career in that field, I could do so one day a week as part of the BTEC course with accreditation in the practical side of things.  I realise my back and knees aren't always going to be as strong as younger garden labourers - but the best way to get ahead in the gardening trade is to also teach practical and business tasks to a trainee. 

In the summer before Uni, I seriously considered going straight to work in a trade after meeting an electrician on my travels.  Probably for class reasons, my grandparents dissuaded me from dropping out.  I did have to drop down from 4 to 3 years of Uni partly due to lack of enough income, and partly because I wanted to do something new.  It might have been cheaper to go to college and get a trade before university in later life, who knows!  But it was partly my science discipline that I had on my CV that made me a good candidate to study horticulture.

Over the years I have come to become suspicious of mortgages (maybe because of the 2009 crash).  My boss after college actually passed away shortly after having paid off his mortgage.  At university I went in quite sexist and snobbish, and left less so, and less keen to work for British Petroleum or in polluting chemical industries.  I wanted to do something to make the world a better place and realised that maybe the best thing would be to do something that kept me going and surviving, while able to devote some spare time to activism and things worth doing.  I was very lucky that I've been given the chance to do a job that I love and am in many ways, in my ideal job.  People at the agency placement I worked at temporarily says I'd have to be mad to give that up and work for them.

music and the arts in isolation and economic collapse

I am a gardener and amateur musician and wanted to feed in to some of the ongoing blogging asking what the collective response is going to be to sustain the arts as the self employment scheme and furlow are phased out, universal credit starts to bring back conditionality, and any live music is rare, elite or underground.

Things that have moved me:
The first thing that made me corona cry was washing my hands and singing a song... It seems like an age ago, I can't remember the name of the tune.

Experiences I have enjoyed:
I am part of activist circles.  Having visited Bristol, it was heartening to see the statue of slave trader Edward Coulston, rolled along and thrown into the water.
Black Lives Matter, an artist reading out the names of black people fallen to racist violence, over on BBC Radio 3, was important, realising the connection between jazz and Black Lives Matter.
Meanwhile International Jazz Day was quite a treat, lovingly curated from homes in many countries, of solos or duos along with video messages and recordings of past Jazz Day celebrations including one in the hall of the United Nations general assembly!
Playing music loudly - classic film sound track by Jimmy Cliff.
Having a break from Radio 4 news programmes and the 8.55am slot giving theatre artists the chance to perform when their shows are closed.  Theatres are still closed?  Why have they stopped this slot? It should continue until theatres re-open - because it's important.

Articles:
One in Spectator arguing for squatting of abandoned buidlings which occured in East Germany.  It is important to have anarchist free thinking artistic creative ecosystem neighbourhoods where artist can live at very low rents and have affordable studio space.  Meanwhile theatres could be used creatively for other groups.  Essentially arguing for innovation and to get out where the people are, and countering the narrative from the arts establishment of more subsidy being sunk into projects that like the Southbank, have been criticised for poor acoustics and not being commercially viable.  And an article arguing for cheaper ticket prices - yes I would like to be able to afford more theatre and music.

Society itself needs to change.

Before Covid, as now, inequality was the furthest in the world between incomes and wealth.  That meant that tickets for stadium gigs, seem to me, much more expensive.  Ticket websites and ticket touts, would re-sell them at market price much more expensive than the average audience member could afford.  The young tend to have less budget, but the most appetite for the arts especially certain artistic groups.  Before covid, the record industry was competing against piracy and players like spotify which rip off artists with very low royalties that meant records ran at a loss that was re-couped from ticket sails.  Am I alone in seeing a problem in this business model?

Less commercial but still fairly mainstream:  as an activist I've been invited to many rallies with a panel of speakers.  Virtually no art or music has been present.  This is a real turn-off and I think it's incredibly uncool.  If you look back to woodstock and Glastonbury, they were all incredible peace movements that art was a major part of the philosophy behind the whole thing.  And the sort of drugs then were less damaging than what young people are faced with now: of risky quality, probably full of synthetic highs that poison rather than enhance the creativity.  Due to the prohibition of less harmful drugs, alcohol is a major part of the festival business model, damaging public health, every organ in your body, and endangering social distancing.  To sell more alcohol, many venues turn up the music, making it impossible not to raise one's voice.

Specific sectors: Progressive trance  It's very easy to organise music at a so-called "quarentine rave"  - Rave drugs make people enjoy dancing to repetitive beats - though I do not use drugs other than caffeine myself, I have researched the policy changes that could go along with social change and keep people out of prison.  There's specific laws against these large gatherings.  But what we can learn from them is the idealistic sense which I believe in which is a dream that "everyone was there for the music" and everyone was dancing.  There have been many DJs turning to the promising new platform Twitch, which allows live streaming and can be monetised.  I use it as a phone app on a new smartphone.  I've also been enjoying DJs who are on twitch now, via podcasts, from a large american night club that remained open to it's hard core of plague survivors until around May.  As a cyclist, I enjoy putting this podcast on my phone: it's a very inclusive space with non gender conforming DJs, and it can let pedestrians know that I am coming so they should get out of the way!  I note that Extinction Rebellion, who are returning to the capital on September 1st, own 2 very good decks which were mounted on bicycles.  Bicycles by their nature, tend to stay 2 metres apart and are an effective way of reclaiming the streets.
I recall Radio Head's Tom Yorke doing a DJ set on a large climate justice event in London. In that case it was difficult to stay 2 metres apart!
Early on in lockdown, a viral video went round from Italy where police turn up with guitars and sing and dance and get the whole street cheered up.  That's the sort of thing that has policing by consent.  I am not going to organise parties that endanger the public, of course, but at some point at the end of all this, there will be time and place for it at which point the community will have power and the state would be wise not to be a party-pooper.  At such a point, I call this "day X", I would like an infrastructure where acts can be booked for day X, be paid a few weeks in advance to reherse, and then perform at street parties and garden parties.

Again as a gardener if I can help make the place nice I would be happy to help.

Acoustic music currently falls foul of many licensing laws and I believe is harmless.  It's amplified music that has the potential to be a super-spreader.  In order to encourage acoustic music, there needs to be less traffic and background noise so you can enjoy, for instance while queueing for the bank.

Radio.  Needless to say that the most natural way to listen to music at home is on the wireless.  This should be advert-free, thanks to the BBC, and other public service broadcasters.  Again this is an evolving technology.  I am getting around digital.  I have heard that more pirate stations are starting during "lockdown".  The target audience for these channels is older people: a huge population who deserve the utmost respect and care.  The quality of television is atrocious.  Entertainment can perform a public service in unifying people and also encouraging people to stay at home and stay safe.

Television and computer games:
I really enjoy quality music and a good place to find it is for example, Microsoft's computer game Age of Empires.  Many other games have the most ground breaking music.  I have also been enjoying Grand Theft Auto 4 during Lockdown.  But I wish I could give more local examples.  The reality is the UK based orchestras that recorded many a Netflix soundtrack, are going to disappear from these shores.

Outdoor entertainment:
Many years ago when my family used to spend Summer in Cambridge, we enjoyed outdoor Shakespear.  People would pay to get in.  A similar thing has taken place at North London's Capel Manor Gardens near the M25. 
As a gardener I would be interested in collaborating to bring theatres outdoors.  Theatres have been outdoors for millenea and scientists say that outdoor spaces have better conditions for fighting the infection:  Ultraviolet light to clean surfaces, and good ventilation, that is not viable indoors.
I strongly believe indoor theatres should be re-purposed for schools which in any case need more space and more drama lessons.  Schools could also organise their own theatre based extra-curricular activities and invite parents.  Occasionally there might be temporary school closures in line with public health procedures, whereas that would not be viable unless theatres are given serious public health infrastructure.  Would that be possible, for the theatre and live music sector to be given real control over its own public health?  I very much doubt it.  It would first reqiure greater power to unions in this country and less centralised approach to the NHS that has been outsourced to large companies, that have imposed a monopoly on any apps - for instance asking the symptom study to close down. It has 3 million users.

Chamber music:
I myself am lucky to have a concrete floor and no complaints from neighbours about my practising piano - an upright that is ancient, slightly out of tune, and not always played with great skill.  The greats composed music for publication as sheet music for amateur musicians.  I wonder if chamber music might be brought into the next century.  I've certainly enjoyed broadening my repertouir by downloading scores for screen or printer, but I much prefer the texts in a quality music book such as my Well Tempered Clavier volumes.  I would buy sheet music if it appeared on the high street.  Sometimes I used to find it in charity shops but it's very rare.  I would like arrangers such as Kyle Landry an absolute star on Youtube I found when wanting to figure out Game of Thrones.  The trouble is this isn't a mass thing unless as in socialist Venezuela, the government issues everyone with a musical instrument and pays for their tuition.  I am massively biased in saying this but I think a Disney Fake Book would make a great Christmas present for any family!  Most of these are published by Hal Leonard and there are online digital retailers of sheet music.

Liturgy:
As a person of faith I can't wait to get back in shul but I know it won't be any time soon.  I hope my fees that go to leadership training continue to have a part that goes to continuing the cantorial tradition.  Cantorial records exist and modern recordings are available on the internet.  When in America I brought home a song CD called "at the Shabbat table" or something.  It was just some guy with a few friends, got round, harmonised, and went through all their favourites for 70 minutes.  Many songs were composed by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach whose music is an institution, even after his death we've found some of his private life wasn't so great.  There are many other composers and cantors.  One who attends my synagogue, is Jacky.  Our own Rabbi and his wife are also very musical.  We continue to have zoom services before and after Shabbat, but I think it's important to document the pre covid liturgy that often hasn't ever gone in a recording studio, because the tradition and the great minds may be lost.  I mean the whole idea that you can just wander in, and hear the music - that is an idea that has been paused by social distancing measures.  Just before restrictions I went to Jacky to go through preparations for a first-time leading the service event but that's been postponed indefinitely.  It is just not the same over Zoom, I'm sure church choirs feel the same.  You can see an example of a good synagogue choir - Naomi Alderman's film Disobedience features a cameo from her brother.

Actors:
Maxine Peake has been having a lot of criticism.  I hope the Indy paid her well for that interview.

Stand up comedy:
It is hard to imagine stand up returning.  Personally I don't do mainstream stand up comedy.  Most of my favourite artists were already struggling to get enough support on Patreon... or were shot...  basically it really is possible to have a laugh without being a dick.  But late night pub upstairs packed like a fire trap - it was funny at the time...  I'm a big fan of Robin Ince If you know how to find his show with Brian Cox on BBC sounds app maybe tell me how.  stupid app.

Storytelling:
Rachel would kill me if I didn't plug national story telling week.

So yeah that's my thoughts.

P.S.  I have mentioned Zoom, Netflix and YouTube -  These are big monopolies that don't pay their fair share of taxes, and must be broken up.  They have many competitors.  I hope some of the headliners will move away from them.  For instance NT Live, or really any of them, can do without the branding.  International Jazz Day had their own live stream that wasn't dominated by a big corporation.  For one thing it's a much better aesthetic. 

For another - YouTube are a major spreader of misinformation, a pandemic in itself, conspiracy theories.  One time, at Extinction Rebellion I had to heckle an artist who started some lyrics about anti-vaxxer ideas.  These platforms are profiting out of - for instance - far right extremism, and are constantly battling to ban them and kick them down in to darker corners of the internet.  Tech nerds have long campaigned for net neutrality.  As for Zoom, it's designed for business meetings; the arts have other apps that are more appropriate.  For instance HouseParty is designed for social occasions.  To support those that can't afford higher specification devices, I recommend a platform I didn't have time for before, as it contains some antisemites, who I've had to block, discord is an app which works well on Linux and open source machines as well as many platforms.  For Zoom, I just can't get it on my linux machine.  And finally I'd just like to big up Reddit - the front page of the Internet who've started streaming music which is fun.

Mental health
For my own efforts during lockdown I have enjoyed much of it but struggling with boredom of staying at home and not having social contact, the arts has helped me stay active and stimulated, and given me life saving tools.
As mass redundancies are announced - If you're affected get help.  My heart goes out to you and I wish I could help.  It's quite bad luck.  It's a sector where there are plenty of people that would struggle with applying for the UK's humiliating benefits system, negotiating with its profit-driven landlords, and navigating the NHS' badly resourced mental health service that has been more under strain than ever as NHS staff themselves go through trauma of seeing their patients dying every shift.  But as Sam says - maybe we can advocate and help you navigate the political system because the arts lobby has not been as strong or unified as other sectors.

An apology

You might have noticed a theme following my previous blog post.

I joined Extinction Rebellion quite naive as to how narrow its focus was.

I learned today that when co-founding it 2 years ago, it was considered too urgent to include any social or climate justice in the demands. 

This has undone decades of work from People of Colour around the world to make sure you can't have a climate movement that doesn't address social inequality.

From Extinction Rebellion in the UK, London, I apologize and mourn for all the good people who have suffered the racism that XR has been built on, or left realising that they'd been played by another skinny white old man.

A lazy piece of work

I am just reading the controversial book that has been condemned by Germany's Green Party, when the author made comments to Die Zeit.  The article I've seen in a Swiss magazine makes similar reading.  When an author gets himself kicked out of Germany Extinction Rebellion - some of the loveliest people in the movement against dirty lignite brown coal - It rings alarm bells.
Extinction Rebellion does have a conflict process but for some reason it doesn't have a way to re write the guy out of history.
What role does someone play when on page 14 he uses the statistics of the number of people murdered in the holocaust, as some kind of sick way to visualise large numbers of deaths. (Basically most European Jews were systematically and intentionally killed).  As with the author, I am absolutely no expert in History - the question of whether governments are equally genocidal with regards to environmental violence against our climate.  They aren't.  Genocide is a clearly defined international crime and it's wrong to use that word to try and create through a media storm, some higher awareness of the climate change situation.  For one thing climate change and the ecological breakdown has a basis in international law - in the 1990's ecocide, a concept pushed by extinction Rebellion co-founder Gail Bradbrooke, was proposed and not adopted as a crime against humanity.  It's been pushed heavily in Europe as a citizens initiative.  But it's a long jump between that and petro-states coming to the International Criminal Court in the Hague and being sentenced as the biggest criminals.

I am not a fast reader but page 14 is crass.  It's not inclusive and co-opts the Jewish community and German community - with whom we've worked over the actual rebellion last year.  The outcome of the conflict process was some quite good new governance structures, including an actual conflict process made up on the hoof.  He made quite a personal apology for what he said and said he won't talk about it.  So I'm not going to get into a row with him, which is what he wants, to attract attention.
Sadly while words in newspapers and magazines quickly get buried in the news cycle, books continue to exist and be sold.
I'm not going to give this guy a public platform to sell his book.

My corona story

My experience of getting health advice from NHS 111 the weekend before the WHO declared a pandemic, they should have advised me to stay in London if I had reported symptoms but at the time they followed government advice of business as usual. The railway system too was slow

Why is this election different from all other elections?

Politics is in Chaos.  Our nation state (remember the UK?) is crumbling before our eyes and local government is out sourced, under funded, and as a consequence, has very little power or confidence.  But what will replace them?  One radical solution might be a city state as in the first European democracies of Athens, in ancient Greece.  The Mayor of London, including outer London, represents almost 10 million people.  London is part of a network of mega cities.  S/He's probably one of the most powerful directly elected people in the world in terms of her or his mandate and her or his voice.  Whether that's as part of Mayors for Peace, or the Mayors that will get together at this year's climate change conference.

The London Green Party is London's 3rd party - if you're counting from the last London elections in 2016.  We also came 3rd in all parts of my borough, Barnet, which is the largest in population and land mass.  Every vote here for City Hall Greens in the Assembly, counts, to elect people like your Green Assembly members Berry and Caroline Russell.

Sian knows that we in London Green Party are backing her, and only her, but following that debate, when we decided not to vote Sian then Khan as 2nd preference; this thing happened with the 2nd preferences.  We discovered that many people voted for the Labour mayor as their 1st and Sian as their 2nd preference.  Sian is obviously the best and this means many people don't understand why this election is different from normal elections.  It uses a voting system called the supplementary vote.  It was designed by Ken Livingtone in the Greater London Authority Act , so that there will always be Green Party in City Hall, holding the Mayor to account.  We've done so with initially 4 seats on the Assembly and now 2.

So how does this supplementary vote work? Here is how it works.

By voting #SianBeforeKhan you can support the party and candidate that you like the most (@SianBerry)
and still have a backup choice for the final round. 

And if thousands vote #Sian Before Khan, Sian has a real chance of winning!

Policy Fest

Around last year when policy fest happened in Newport, we were tasked by the Green Party Executive, to review the Green Party's Rights and Responsibilities policies for a sustainable society.  It's sort of not been coming together until very recently.  Separate to policy fest, it's started to happen with real focus involving some of the key movers and shakers, led by the policy coordinator on the executive.  I wasn't at those sessions but we did come together for lunch and tea breaks.

We co-opted two more guys to Policy Development Committee.  One actually called Guy, from London, another one is a guy called from North Yorkshire in the North East of England.  He was telling me how we have to drop being a remain party now it's basically over, and one of the kind venue hosts voiced total agreement.   The brew was good, and the food was fully vegan, until one member insisted on real milk in their tea, citing inclusion.

I attended discussions on XR, transport, economics, and security.

Notables present on transport were Richard and Sue who are local councillors and have a lot to contribute.  There was also a woman from Liverpool who is keen to contribute to improving policy and would like the policy process to be improved too.

It was great to be back in the city I spend 3 years studenting.  The Arts Organisation is under new management but still very arty and now goes by a different name, as a "coffee house and bar".  I had breakfast with my friend in another cafe, independent, which had a good pile of the latest XR newspaper.  But with great wifi, charging points, 4G / 4.5G / 5G mobile Internet, I didn't really have time to read a newspaper.  A very busy day, and our duty well-done as policy development committee.

Cut fares, not staff: letter

Thursday 2 January 2020

Dear Charlie O'Macauley,
As a constituent I am concerned that while fares rise - and the timetables are in chaos - cuts are being made to services and staffing across our entire rail network.
There are fewer staff at stations, ticket offices are closing, guards are being removed from trains and essential rail maintenance and engineering is being cut, meaning a less safe service.
I would be grateful if you could support a publicly owned railway, with affordable fares and safe staffing levels.
This includes Thameslink, services from Mill Hill East, Brent Cross, HS1, Crossrail, Crossrail 2, and an outer orbital route, as well as a better deal for rail investment outside of London. Tube fares for a Zone 1-4 travelcard have increased up £252 a year since Labour promised to freeze tube fares... While a Green Party mayor could have saved Zone 5 commuters an annual £299. This is unaffordable.
Yours sincerely,
Ben Samuel