Bruce Lawson’s personal site

Last week, I managed to get a quiet hour to visit a favourite old London haunt of mine: Housman’s, the radical bookseller on Caledonian Road in Kings Cross.

Between the mid-eighties and mid-nineties, a Saturday wasn’t complete without a browse round the shop, picking up seminal works like Larry Law’s Spectacular Times pamphlets (a marvellous introduction to Situationaist thinking), Bob Black’s The Abolition of Work, and various free pamplets left there by hopeful wierdos like Christian Anarchists and Lesbian Vegans for Socialism.

It hasn’t changed much; it’s tidier, and some of its magic as being the only place to find such leftwing gems has been taken by the Web, but it’s still a great place. After a brief chat with the guy behind the counter about the anarcho-punk band Conflict (from the London suburb I used to live in) I’d been invited to the shop’s party on the night before this year’s Anarchist Book Fair. You don’t get that at Waterstones.

In some ways, I was a little surprised to find the shop still there, now that Socialism is a dirty word and we’re all shiny happy consumers in our post-historic world. But there it is, with lots of new stock, on the day that the invisible hand of the market almost brought down the bank that has all my savings and my mortgage and proved once again that tossers chasing massive bonuses do not collectively make a self-regulating money market that automatically brings joy and freedom to all.

I got the train back home, with some fascinating new books and pamphlets, and though that it is very unlikely that the UK’s “New Labour” government would keep me afloat if my savings disappeared and my house were repossessed, even though they’re prepared to use taxpayer’s money to shore up the dens of fuckwits who’ve caused the problems. (Really: who could have possiblyb foreseen that begging loads of American poor people to accept loans that they couldn’t repay was an unsustainable business strategy?)

A letter to the Guardian from Professor Anne Watson sums it up perfectly:

I resent taxpayers’ money being spent to shore up the glorified gambling den of the money markets. I have a better idea - taxpayers’ money could go to the lowest-paid to relieve them of having to pay so much. They would spend it and stimulate the economy. We could call it the New Deal. Even better, deal with the housing crisis as well by spending taxpayers’ money on new social housing. We could call it socialism to show we care about people.

Thank god Debord for places like Housman’s that still offer alternatives to the orthodoxy. May it last 100 years.

I don’t know whether it’s because of talking to Dutch people in The Netherlands, recently reading Richard Dawkins, or the preposterous accusations of institutional racism against my previous employer, but I’ve been thinking a lot about “Equality and Diversity” recently.

It could be because when got a taxi to the airport, my taxi driver told me that he felt so sick and sleepy because of the Ramadan fast that he was worried that he would crash.

That got me thinking. Would it be “religious discrimination” if I refused to travel with a fasting driver? There’s no way that I’d get into a vehicle with a drunk driver, or one who was driving dangerously because he was talking on his mobile all the time. A legal difference is that it’s possible to verify blood/alcohol levels, where as it’s not possible to do a test for “weak and hungry”. But I see no moral difference: all are choosing to do something that potentially endangers me.

Discriminating against someone because of their religion, like disability, race or sexual discrimination, is a no-no in today’s Equality and Diversity industry. But why? It’s obviously unfair to discriminate against things that people can’t control, like the colour of their skin, disabilities or sexuality. But religion is a lifestyle choice. No-one is born into a religion and (in the free West) a particular religion is forced on no-one. And if someone chooses a certain lifestyle, why should that be legally protected? Certainly, one’s right to choose is a legal right that I absolutely uphold—but why should the results of that choice have any legal or moral privilege?

Being gay, or female, or of a certain ethnicity has no bearing on your ability to do a job. Being disabled may, but employers have a duty to make reasonable adjustments because people don’t choose to be disabled. However, some people’s ability to do their jobs can be compromised by their religious choices. My wife was refused a morning-after pill by a doctor whose religion forbade family planning. Why should that doctor be allowed to foist her religious views onto a patient—a patient whose taxes pay her salary?

In fact, why should anyone’s religious beliefs be respected? If you are a jew who will not shake hands with a woman because she might be menstruating and therefore “unclean” believes that a menstruating woman is “unclean”, why should it be discriminatory if I decided not to employ you if you display such misogyny to female colleagues or customers?

If you are a hindu who believes christians and muslims should be killed, or a christian who thinks it’s legitimate to murder abortion workers, why shouldn’t I openly treat your views with contempt?

When I go and see a Shakespeare play, it usually takes me between five and ten minutes to get my ear attuned to the language, and a little longer to get accustomed to the non-naturalistic acting. Particularly with the tragedies, there is a possibility for histrionics but David Tennant managed to resist them. In fact, sometimes his acting was so understated it was almost TV acting, with its reliance on close-ups rather than the larger-than-life movements and voices required at the theatre. His was a witty, self-aware Hamlet, driven by anger rather than grief. His reserve only broke in the scene in which he and Gertrude have their showdown in her chamber, when you could have heard a pin drop in the full Stratford house. That was a bravura performance.

The whole cast was very strong. Patrick Stewart played the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and the murdering uncle. His was also an impressive performance, but I find him too theatrical, too self-consciously thespian. Penny Downie was excellent as Gertrude, Mark Hadfield supplied welcome comic relief as the gravedigger, but for me the best supporting actor was Oliver Ford Davis as Polonius, played as a pompous forgetful windbag.

This was a cracking production by Greg Doran, directed with verve and an eye for humour, but it was David Tennant’s show—after all, Hamlet speaks 1,507 of the play’s 4,042 lines. I don’t know whether his will be considered an all-time great Hamlet, but it was energetic and enjoyable and showed that he’s far more than just a sexy TV personality (although he is that too of course). Overheard on the way out: a fourteen year old girl breathlessly telling her mother, “Wow! In the second curtain call, he was definitely looking and waving at me!”

Last night, Nong and I went out with our mates Pete and Rachel to Birmingham’s Gay and Lesbian Pride, and took some groovy photos.

It’s five years since I’ve been city-centre revelling on a Saturday night, and much as I enjoyed it, it’ll be another five until I do it again: the crowds, the bouncers, the endless wait to be served are all too much for an old fart like me—and that’s without the feral atmosphere when the place is full of lagered-up straight teen men.

I was tidying up my bookcases I found my dog-eared copies of The Spectacular Times pocketbooks, a series written by Larry Law as an accessible introduction to situationist thinking, and rediscovered this momentous quote from Raoul Vaneigem:

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Readers from abroad might not be aware that England has been experiencing freak weather conditions for the past four days:

• It’s not snowing
• It’s not even raining
• The sky is full of this pale yellow disc causing double-digit temperatures

In short, it looks like summer might be upon us. It’s not possible to be definitive because, like a Big Yellow Taxi, summer can only be properly diagnosed once it’s gone—so after the mists of June, the squalls of July and the fogs of August we might look back at early May and realise that, yes, that was the summer.

It certainly has all the hallmarks:

• English people stop moaning about the rain and moan about the heat
• The air smells of barbeque charcoal and burning meat
• White Englishmen walk around in public with no shirt on

The last sign is something to be deplored. White English men are chiefly characterised by a concave chest and skin so translucent that, if you hold them up to the light, you can actually see intestines peristalsing fish and chips around.

Every schoolboy knows that on two occasions this dazzling translucence has saved our scepter’d isle: the Spanish Armada and Luftwaffe were repelled by every Englishman baring his chest simultaneously at the command of Queen Elizabeth and Winston Churchill respectively, thereby blinding the enemy captains and pilots and forcing a retreat.

Thereby, I make a plea at this time that may be summer: gentlemen, keep your shirts on. The balmy twenty degrees may compel you to bare your lily white pigeon-chests in a courtship ritual, but your country needs you to avoid a tan.

Thank you.

My old mate and wrox refugee, Pete Fletcher, is an odd one. His latest project is “Sneezecount“, which sees him counting his sneezes, recording the time, date, location, relative strength of the sneeze and what he was doing at the time.

And I thought my Spam letters were pointless…

Naturally, my music taste is impeccably eclectic, sophisticated and erudite. My favourite bands are better than your favourite bands in every possible way.

But sometimes, even I get infected with earworms: some ghastly mass-produced crap like The Spice Girls or Take That finds its way into my brain and will not let go. This week, for example, my car CD mix of Burial, Amritakripa, The Pop Group and Natacha Atlas has remained entirely unlistened-to as I guiltily polluted myself with the latest earworm—“About You Now” by The Sugerbabes (for chrissake).

But I’ve cured myself, through the simple remedy of going to YouTube and overdosing on the self-made videos of angst-ridden teenage girls singing it in their bedrooms.

Actually, I still found myself thinking, that last link is pretty good. So I needed a magic bullet. Here it is:

Hey Presto! Earworms are gone.

…from both me and my teddy bear, Shiva Anubis Jesus Zeus Mohammed Buddha Yahweh Jupiter Dalai Lama Odin Jah Wicca Flying Spaghetti Monster (pictured left).

The Sudan is fortunate to have very hard-working clerics. You’d think they would have enough to do, protesting against female circumcision and the Sudanese government’s Darfur genocide. But, valiantly, they’ve recently stayed up really late in order to concentrate on the top-priority stuff—the case of a British primary school teacher jailed for allowing her class of seven year olds to name the class teddy bear “Mohammed”.

When I am an eccentric billionaire philanthropist I shall add Khartoum to my list (which already includes Tehran, Jerusalem, Mumbai and the American mid-west) of places that need me to fund urgent humanitarian airdrops of Richard Dawkins‘ books.

That nice Jule Howell invited me to go and see the first night of the Sex Pistols’ reunion gigs. As I was just a little too young and provincial to see them back in 1976, I couldn’t resist the chance for a little nostalgia. For a band whose premise was a musical “burn the museums”, there’s a special irony in their being a nostalgia act, yet that’s what they are (bear in mind that we’re as far away now from the release of Never Mind The Bollocks than it was from the end of the second world war).

There was a real air of expectation in Brixton. The pubs were full of forty-somethings having conversations like “Did you see Sham in Southend in ‘79?” and “…so that’s when Sid punched me”. The excitement was not completely scuppered by the miserable shitty venue with its two rows of corporate hospitality seats in front of us, and scowling bouncers telling everyone to “remain seated at all times”.

The (crappy) support band were dispensed with, Dame Vera Lynne’s “There’ll always be an England” concluded on the P.A., and out came the band—at which point the bouncers gave up on the “seated at all times” rule and retreated to the sidelines.

Age has mellowed Johnny Rotten. He actually hugged Glenn Matlock on stage and told us that “we fucking love each other”, told us that Matlock, Jones and Cook are “a fucking good band” and—heartwarmingly—that he is “one lucky cunt” because of them. Don’t believe me? Check out my video:

Age has improved Matlock, Cook and Jones’ musicianship. A guy behind was commenting that they were immeasurably better than they were 30 years ago, and they were certainly tight, well-rehearsed and oh so loud. Rotten, on the other hand, had a book of lyrics bought onto the stage by a flunky, and still managed to fuck up the words to No Feelings, Liar and (for chrissakes!) Anarchy in the UK. You’d've thought that someone who’s made a mint for thirty years on the same dozen songs would know the damn words! Never mind, though; it was the occasion that mattered.

The band worked their way through note-perfect versions of all their songs except (I think) I Wanna be Me and Satellite, and a reworked version of Belsen was a Gas called Baghdad was a Blast for an encore, and a splendid time was had by all.

Here’s me and Julie—the MS Pistols—all excited on our way to the gig.