| Welcome to the website of the writer Diran Adebayo |
Autumn '07
Smoking - Sport England - Words, Words - Slavery
- You Tube (Forced Smoking)
|
Forthcoming Attractions:
Tuesday October 16
Reading/ Talk
Kingston College, Kingston
Wednesday October 17
'Goodbye Bafana' (Screening)
Chairing discussion for
'Film Education'
Dalston Rio, London
Tuesday October 23
7pm Speech/ Debate,
'On Post-Black'
York Union,
University of York
Sunday October 28
12:45 pm Debating Matters showcase Debate
on 'the future of libraries' (Judge)
The Battle of Ideas
Royal College of Art, London
Wednesday November 7
Talk on African cities and urban dynamics
Conference, 'Africa and climate change'
SOAS, London
Monday December 3
Reading/ Talk
Derby University
|
|
Smoking
'What, dost thou think because thou art virtuous there should
be no more cakes and ale?'
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Two things have left me flabbergasted this century. The first
was the invasion of the diminishing 'threat' that was Iraq.
The second, right now, is this ban on smoking announced by the
UK government last year, and due to come in force this July.
As of then, you will not be able to smoke in any bar, public
place, or even private club in England.
I am so agitated, so dispirited about this thing, this mean-spirited,
philosophically-stinky piece of social engineering, this outrageous
step for a 'free' society, I can barely keep it together to
write. I've started and stopped this enough times already. So
saddened too by the fact that this piss-poor government will
get away with it - there is enough social approval, and, vitally,
middle-class social approval, for this move. I predict a non-riot.
Confirmed that today when I quizzed a group of university creative
writing students about it - couldn't believe - well, I could
- the amount of support for it, and seeming indifference to/
ignorance of its wider implications If the more open-minded
of the younger generation can't see it, hunh, the game is truly
up.
I tell you, this is a dealbreaker, a country-leaver. But where
to, the growing problem, where to? Fuck me, the twenty-first
century.
I blame the Protestants, number one. I detect their dark hand
all over this. Four centuries ago we kicked out the most pleasure-hating
section of that pleasure-doubting crew, the Puritans, packed
them off to found (pretty much) white northern America, where
they banned drums and music-making among their slaves, then
liquor, for everybody, and currently ensure that Americans get
a mere two weeks holiday a year. But all the while, another
strain of them was growing in England - the Puritan-influenced
Methodists. They were partly behind the founding of the British
Labour party in the late nineteenth century, and the Temperance
and missionary movements of those years. These cats liked nothing
better than going to visit their 'lowers' - be it the British
working-classes or the darker races, and saying: 'You shouldn't
be believing/ drinking that, you've got to believe / drink this...'.
I know - my Mum's family were converted Methodists. Both Blair
and Bush big Protestants. Urgh! - give me a Catholic, at least.
Let no one doubt that this law is a piece of arrant moral condescension.
The powers have their notion of what a 'good', well-lived life
is, and they have decided to force their notion on other people
by punishing those who don't agree with them, thus trampling
on a principle that has been enshrined in liberal societies
since JS Mill's time: namely, that adults are allowed to risk
harm to themselves should they consent to it (hence contact
sport etc) It would have been perfectly possible, of course
for the powers to allow a compromise system that was largely
non-smoking, but where certain bars or sections that catered
to the still-sizeable minority that puff was permitted. You
would have found plenty of bar staff - smokers and non-carers
- happy to work there, perhaps for a little extra, and plenty
of their employers delighted to pay that extra. We've sent men
to the moon, devised the internet, we know about ventilation,
I think it would have been possible, no? The fact that they
haven't allowed this tells you all you need to know about the
self-righteousness, the intolerance, and the lack of empathy
of these people.
Most folk do jobs that they don't want to do, that isn't their
'dream', for fifty years; they pay their taxes, they don't have
much money, then they die. If some of these want to unwind after
a dreamless day, in a bar, with a drink and a smoke, amongst
consenting adults, away from home where the stress often is,
or the debts are, or the potentially passively-affected children,
God forbid, if some of these want to unwind in their long-legitimate
way, then allow it, for God's sake, allow it. What is
your problem? Is there some new law that's come in that says
that everyone has to live every last minute of life that they
possibly can? (There probably is, actually. I am reliably informed
that this government has brought in 3,000 new offences into
the statute book. Not including this new law that's coming whereby
children with some family history of criminal behaviour can
have some 'preemptive' order slapped on them aged 11. Soon,
you're gonna be banned before you've even begun...It just seems
that all we're allowed to do these days is to buy credit and
buy houses. Anyone with some other aspiration is made to feel
like a c**t.)
Look, most people do want to live as long as possible. So the
fact that they're prepared to jeapordize the fulfilment of that
wish long after the age of cool by persisting in this expensive,
dangerous habit tells you they are deriving some serious benefits
from it. People are'nt stupid. In my case - yes I do smoke,
mildly, but I promise you my line on this matter wouldn't deviate
whether I did or not - I use smoking mainly as an aid in my
work, as do many in adrenalin-related activities. At certain
points in my writing day, smoking seems to help my thinking.
There are, as Sherlock Holmes once noted, three-pipe problems..
Clearly something psychological plus, no doubt, oral going on
too, but, hey, it's worked for me, better than gum or lollipops,
for twenty-five years. I have to weigh up the (mathematically
not-high) probability of cancer or heart disease down
the road against the certainty of my present work -
the rhythm and way of it - being affected should I quit. It's
a no-brainer. As part of that rhythm, I sometimes feel the need
to change my location, go for a walk, chew over some thoughts,
and 'exit' said thoughts in a quiet, warm-enough cafe or bar,
over a smoke. But now part of that innocuous little range of
options is denied me, anywhere.
Just because you can't X-Ray stress-relief or work benefits
or pleasure like you can a malignant lung doesn't make them
any less true. But at one stroke this law has killed off the
concept of both a a good work-out and a good night out - be
it a casino, a cognac, and a fat Cuban between the lips - my
preferred, or whatever's your fancy - for millions of people.
Cheers.
Can people not see how excessive this seems, when it could have
been worked out?
Okay, enough with the ugly part of this post. No bother even
going into the stack of legal philosophers who would point to
you why this is an ill law (and Blair read Law at the same place
I did. He should know), or how this is yet another coup for
the New Health (see posts passim), and has a lot to do with
this growing culture of offence, and entitlement (folk feeling
that their sense of offence should be the motor, the source
from which everything else should flow). Let me finish with
this final jab: have you noticed just how many people there
are who never had the balls to live their own dream - went for
the job in accountancy, and the mortgage and the security -
but are still insistent that everyone else must live every last
minute that they possibly can? As someone once said, life is
not measured by the number of breaths you take, but rather by
the moments that take your breath away.
So, what to do? Number one, we have to do what we can to ensure
that it all stops here. No further (the powers are clearly already
preparing the way to outlaw smoking outright within a generation).
Two, we must lobby, we must agitate, we must vote with the only
language they care for, our wallets, and boycott these new bar
rules ( an informed friend of mine, recently returned from business
in new, smoke-free Ireland, tells me that Guinness are already
bemoaning their losses). Most crucially, we must organise -
indeed a bunch of us already are. Details currently sketchy,
but anyone like-minded is urged to get in touch. We are ruling
nothing out (well, some things, obviously). For starters, I'm
making a general request for anyone with any smoking-related
trivia - great screen smoking moments, forty-a-day footballers
- to send me the info. It has been mooted that, in these role
model-minded times - unh!, don't get me started on that bull
- we set up a 'Smoking Awards that, in time, may rival, the
Oscars or Baftas in profile and prestige. I'll kick things off
with a few nominations: click here
for the Smoking Awards.
Sport England
 
Sexy Less
Sexy
Another couple of dismal football performances from England's
'Golden Generation' (ho-ho!) against Israel and Andorra the
other week. No surprise there. In thirty-five years of avid
sports-watching, bar a few games in Euro '96, I cannot think
of one England football team that has looked like world-beaters/
world contenders, still less - and this goes across all team
sports - an England team that is attractive to watch; that plays
what Surinamese-Dutch maestro Ruud Gullit liked to call 'sexy
football', the type that my club team the mighty Spurs have
been famous for for over a century. Only in England could a
sportsman like rugby player Jonny Wilkinson, a guy adept only
in the most prosaic parts of his profession - tackling and kicking
a dead ball - be accorded the status of national hero. As French
rugby coach Bernard Laporte said so eloquently before the 2003
World Cup semi-final, ‘No-one carries the English in their
hearts’.
If you believe, as many do, that national character, national
aspirations, comes through in countries' sporting teams, then
the long history of Sport England tells you that this is a country
where mediocrity is celebrated; one that likes, nay fetishises
hard work - that Protestant mindset again - but has little regard
for flair or rigour. Any fule, with a schoolboy level of physics,
could tell you that the key to success in most ball games (and,
indeed, in chess) is force, space and time, and the
manipulation of these. But because the vast majority of English
football players are so lacking in touch and passing ability,
they constantly lose out on these last two. Just look at the
Dutch, a country that has had to think very seriously about
the best use of limited space - given that most of the country
is under water - and how creatively successive generations have
played (Bergkamp, Cruyff etc)
Right now, there is the usual BS in the newspapers about the
English Premier League being the best in the world, on account
of three English sides making the semi-finals of the Champions
League. Don't make me laugh. It wouldn't surprise me if the
Faroe Islands - population, 10 - had a higher general quality
than the Premier League. What England has are five good club
teams, and most of these stuffed with foreigners - Spurs, Arsenal
(the blackest Euro club team since Ajax' great mid 90s team),
Man U, Liverpool and that little Fulham-offshoot who I can't
stand who think they're a big club but can only muster about
a thousand supporters for away games. The other fifteen are
mediocre or worse. They just hoof the ball about. The League
is popular because it's exciting; there are lots of goal chances
because neither side can keep posession for longer than thirty
seconds. That, plus the fact that there's untold money in the
game here which means big glamorous 'stars'. In terms of money
against real quality, the Premier League, along with the art
market, are the two biggest scams in the world.
For any aesthete, anyone sensitive to the potential beauty of
a sport, watching England play anything is an excruciating experience.There
are only three things that can save Sport England. One, improve
the education system. Intelligence helps in everything (just
compare, say, Scottish football players to English players in
a post-match interview, never mind the continentals, and you'll
know what I'm talking about). Two, stuff the England sides with
recently-arrived immigrants (where would the English cricket
team be now without Kevin 'too many blacks in South Africa'
Pietersen?). The third is a proper cultural Reformation.
In the meantime, let us pray for the Windies in the World Cup
cricket. Arh! - too late already.
Words,
Words...
So, I had to do this UK radio show, the 'Today' programme recently
- during that whole "Big Brother-Shilpa 'Race' row - and
I was chuffed that day to realise another ambition. You know
how you have your major ambitions - Nobel prize, world domination,
blah, blah, and your minor ones - visiting every continent,
sleeping with someone from every continent, and - a writer's
one this - having a scholarly essay written about your work
whose title has a colon in the middle ("From roots
to routes: Images of journey in Diran Adebayo's 'Some Kind
of Black'" ... Loved that.) Well, I've a long-time
nursed a couple of minor media ambitions. The first was to write
for every national newspaper in the country (accomplished, bar
'The Sun' and 'The Star' and those two will be hard). The other
was to be appearing on some radio or TV show, and to drop a
little Latin into the mix - a subject I'd loved as a child.
You're chatting about something, and out would drop a deft '...ad
hominem', in would slip a sly '...sui generis' or, best of all,
my father's favourite - 'mutadis mutandis'.
So the 'Today' guy calls the evening before, as is their custom,
and I'm chatting to him about what I might say on this matter
and very quickly, in my ruminations, I see my chance, a gift-horse
opportunity... 'Yes,' I said excitedly, 'I'll do it'.
He rings off and I pick up my dictionary, to confirm the meaning
and pronounciation of one 'pace'(for 'pace' it is). Being something
of a traditionalist in these matters, I'm a 'hard c' man, but
I did see that my glossy, new 'Encarta' dictionary was promoting
the rather controversial modern trend in this dead language
of a 'soft c'. I rolled this around my tongue, I tossed a coin.
Okay, let's 'parchay'.
More worryingly, I could see, now that I'd refreshed myself
on its meaning, that to use the word in the manner I intended
("Pace Blair's talk about Britain being a tolerant society
that welcomes difference, this "Big Brother" has shown
the UK to be a less benign animal...") was looking less
a gifthorse and more a crowbar. And, of course, to use a poncey
word wrongly would be extremely not good. Oh, I paced a while
away, to 'pace' or not to 'pace'. In the end, I decided to go
for it. The usage was just about okay, you don't know when the
chance will present itself again, plus this year I'm all about
action, about doing, rather than drafting and filing away.
So, you write down your three points that you're definitely
going to make, and five others you'll say if you have time and,
if you're like me - with three moody alarm clocks, and only
one definitely-working but rarely-heard mobile alarm to wake
you up at 6am - you don't sleep. The cab guy comes - an old
Naija familiar, but a new Bentley (thanks for that! The Beeb
pay you peanuts, but you do get a nice ride) and drops me and
I'm pleased to see that Jim Naughtie is the presenter/ interviewer.
Naughtie is a man I have seen present Opera on the box; a man,
I feel, that will appreciate a little nod to the classics. My
moment comes and Naughtie turns to me, and I parchayed away,
and I did detect a little, happy, gleam in his eye...I Bentleyed
back, took out ye olde eighties filofax, and ticked another
one, finally, off the list.
All of which preamble is to say something about the joy of words.
Especially poignant now as, in western black popular culture
at any rate, we are in a very unvocal, unarticulating, adolescent
period. There's nothing like hearing a good, rarely-heard word
properly used. The good word is often as good a guide to the
truth or otherwise of the speaker as any - so easy to cover
emotions not truly or deeply felt in verbal banality. It's just
a little bit of creativity that anyone can do. My faves are
a common word used with a now rare meaning (like 'passion' for
suffering), or hearing a word used in conversation that I've
hitherto only seen written down. The other day, at this Arts
Council board meeting, our Chair, Christopher Frayling, with
a verbal felicity not shared by many knights of the realm, said,
'Look, I don't think we should get too dirigiste about
this..." Ahh! A little warm something went through me and
my respect for the man - already healthy given his pioneering
study of my man Sergio Leone and spaghetti westerns - rose a
notch. Dirigiste - I'd never heard that before.
And this is one of the reasons why slang is so great. I was
having a little debate recently with some friends about the
recentish importation of the phrase, 'My bad!' to mean 'Sorry',
courtesy of our American friends. My friends were a bit down
on this development, for a couple of reasons, me not at all.
I welcome it. The phrase has the virtue of being 'right' - if
English had to come up with a new phrase for 'Sorry' , it could
not do more accurately than 'My bad!' One of those phrases that
does exactly what it says on the tin, and a hell of a lot quicker
than 'Entshuldigen Sie, bitte'. And also, as a bonus,
there is a pleasant echo of 'mea culpa' in there, which
brings us back, funny thing, to Latin...
Slavery
I've spoken/ written a bit about this 200th anniversary year
elsewhere - see 'Slavery - Q and A' in the 'Articles
section' for fuller thoughts and the text to a short 'testimonial
speech given at the Brtitish Museum - but, for here, just a
couple of things...
One, being of direct African descent whose family were not involved
in the trade, either as victims or abettors, slavery was never
a part of my story, and as such , I do feel that those UK black
folk who are descended from the Americas should have main 'dibs'
on this matter. Having said that, we are all global Africans
and therefore should all have an interest in this issue, not
least because its legacies continue to affect relations between
us (til now, there are no direct flights, and so little economic
business, between Africa and the Caribbean. A bit strange, no?)
Secondly, what a glorious opportunity this year presented for
our licence-fee BBC to film SI Martin's delightful, rumbunctious
novel 'Incomparable World'. This book is set in the
little-known sizeable black-British London community of the
1780s, its numbers enhanced by ex-slaves from the Americas who
won their freedom often by fighting for the British in the American
War of Independence. You have white and black Covent Garden
low-life in there, a la Hogarth, walk-on parts for famous black
historical figures of that time, the Equianos and the Ignatius
Sanchos, with sharp, character portraits from the time, as it
were. Rather than all these white benefactor lovefests, like
the Wilberforce 'Amazing Grace' (or 'Amazing Disgrace',
as it's being called. I had to say no to the pre-screening of
that, when I saw the cast list), here was a chance to present
something about this period where black people were fully-rounded
human beings, and to give some great parts to black actors.
But no, the lazy, ignorant, liberals in our TV and Filmland
probably haven't even heard of it.
Thirdly, I do recall that in the mid 90s there was a move, in
certain UK Black circles, to try to start an 'African Remembrance
Day', in which the commemoration of slavery would feature. But
various people said, 'Oh, slavery's old hat. Why bring that
up?' and the Day never got off the ground. But as soon as it
became clear last year that Blair and the Queen were going to
be involved in this whole abolition business, these same folk
rushed to get in there, which leads me to my main point. It
would be the biggest travesty, the most dishonouring slur, if
this year has white - white charity, blacks' desire to make
an impression on powerful whites - at its core rather than black.
So many of us living in the West still have white people at
or near the centre of our beings, our head space, something
that I guess began with slavery and really needs to change if
we are to regain full psychic health and ease of being. We have
ease of walk, a lot of us, but not true ease of being.
To give an example of what I mean: I was appearing on a certain
TV show a while back, and a prominent black personality was
also on the show. At one point, the white presenter asked me,
'what does the black community think of such-and-such?' and,
after trying to undermine the notion of a monolithic community,
I answered the question as frankly and truthfully as I could,
as I always do. After the show, this black person was angry
with me for saying whatever things I'd said to a white person
and a mainly white TV audience. 'You Africans, ' this person
said, 'you're so naive about white people. We've been dealing
with them for 500 years...' You hear this kind of talk a lot
from so-called radical, but actually deeply white-minded blackheads,
the same ones who are irked with me for calling this site 'the
blessed monkey'. I explain elsewhere on this site why I call
it that but suffice it say that I only remembered years after
I first decided to 'brand' my affairs with this name that 'Monkey!'
was an epithet some whites use on black folk. Now was I going
to change a long-cherished idea because of what some eight year-old
kid once said to me on the playground, or what some other person
I probably don't respect might think? Of course not.
Ease of being, please. You should have yourself at your own
centre, not even black, and certainly not white. Not least because
we owe it to some others who never had the chance. It's about
time.
You Tube (Forced Smoking)
'We talk about law: batty law and smoke law.
How can batty be legal and smoke illegal, enh? How can man sex
man an' ladyboy up there and the police dem nah interfere, but
still police come an' start wit' we. What kind of state we livin'
in?...'
Diran Adebayo, 'My Once Upon A Time'.
Ah, there was a time, there was a time...Back in the later nineties
when I first got this thing - the internet - what a joy it seemed.
In particular, the concept of the search engine. I must confess
almost the first thing I did was type in the name of a certain
delectable American actress - let us call her JA. In those times
she was only known to us early spotters, by dint of her appearance
on a couple of no-rating TV shows, and the hits for her numbered
not many. I checked out the fan site and chat was thick there
about the projects folk wanted to see her cast in, and how these
directors didn't understand her. She was even known to visit
the chatroom back then, logging in under a pseudonym and floating
views in her cheeky, fetchingly post-modern way.
But then she had a couple of bootylicious breakthrough movie
roles, and now everyone with an eye on such things knows about
JA. Her Google count is in the zillions and what was once a
tasteful connoisseurs' circle has been buried under so much
'latest hollywood-hottie' nastiness from the Leery-Come-Latelies
that the originals have long fled the scene.
As with JA, so with 'Youtube'. I first came across 'Youtube'
a year ago courtesy of the smoking-fetish sites (the nearer
smoking has got to illegality, the more it's become a Fetish-ful
area). People would post alerts, 'Great cafe scene - two Prague
girls in boots and Sobranies - go to You
Tube...,' and I'd be thinking, 'What is this Youtube?' So
I logged on and, man, it was great. In particular I loved all
these 'forced smoking' videos they had. Some evian-drinking
jogger, or some weights-lifting health-club nut, would be pounced
on, dragged off and forced to smoke. These vids were hilarious.
But as it emerged last autumn that 'Youtube' would be being
shortly taken over by 'Google', speculation grew in the, ah,
Extreme Smoking community as to what this might mean for our
favourite films. I opined that it would likely only be the uploaders
of TV copright material that would have to watch their backs,
but wiser heads were less sanguine.
And sure enough, for a number of months now, we have typed in
the names of the 'Forced' auteurs, only to be greeted by that
doomy red line: 'This user account is suspended'.
Why? We can only imagine one of two things. One - 'violence'
to women or to men (hardly seems likely, given these vids are
so clearly not 'real'). The other and, I submit, likelier possibility,
is that someone high up at 'Google' is an avid, evangelical,
anti-smoker.
Bizarre, because I do notice that various possibly even more
controversial minority tastes remain amply catered for on 'Youtube'.
From crossdresser- and tranny-action to a whole heap of rather
singular man-on-man business. That's all cool , but smoking
- hell, no.
Once can only sympathise with my character Hope in 'My Once
Upon A Time', whose (slightly amended) words I quote above,
and hope that Daily
Motion, where many of said auteurs have fled, proves more
simpatico.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
