Fireside Chat 1: Fuck Forever

[imomus]

Somewhat inspired by the vlogging of Jordan Fish -- and the fact that I've just discovered how to capture video from my built-in iSight camera using Apple's QuickTime Broadcaster -- I'd like to present the first in a series of video "fireside chats". Sitting in front of an electronic fire -- the sad and ironic fate of my television set -- I ramble here on the subject of "Fuck Forever" by Babyshambles.

(Actually, this is just a placeholder video -- it takes forever to load from my own server. I'll embed a Google Video here instead soon.)



The "Fuck Forever" video is provided below as a study resource -- you'll be instructed to pause the fireside chat and watch it half way through. You can find the Shoreditch secret gig referred to in the chat here.

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I'm not sure why I chose punk rock as the topic for my first fireside chat. Maybe it has something to do with my new Wired News column, Let Robots Sweat the Boring Stuff, in which (aided by our Waiters and Bad Faith discussion last week) I advance the opinion that "British people are spectacularly bad at services -- shining examples of Sartrean sincerity and authenticity, they're unlikely to wish you a great day if they aren't having one themselves. The sooner these grumpy, reluctant, inefficient people are replaced by robots, some might say, the better. (Unemployed, the British can go off and do something usefully authentic and human, like inventing some new kind of punk rock.)"

Comments

[chuckdarwin.livejournal.com]

"British people are spectacularly bad at services -- shining examples of Sartrean sincerity and authenticity, they're unlikely to wish you a great day if they aren't having one themselves. The sooner these grumpy, reluctant, inefficient people are replaced by robots, some might say, the better. (Unemployed, the British can go off and do something usefully authentic and human, like inventing some new kind of punk rock.)"

As a recent immigrant to Blighty, I've certainly noticed how catastrophically awful customer service here is. Everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much as it ought to, so when it's served with disdain (at best) or open hostility (at worst) a dirty foreigner like myself can be a littl put off.

I think it's all down to Class. No one here wants to be a servant, and they're really uptight about it. Ex: in a pub setting, if you try and tip a barman he'll give you a funny look but if you offer to buy him a drink he'll gladly take your money. It underscores his status as your equal: you can buy your equal a drink, but not tip him/her, as tipping denotes your superiority.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that's a persuasive description -- except that last week someone was telling me that you can tip Americans because of the class system. But I suppose he meant that you can because of the relative absence in the US of class consciousness; waiter and customer are both likely to call themselves "middle class", whatever income disparities exist between them.

edit

[chuckdarwin.livejournal.com]

That's a good point. In my opinion, there is a class system in the US, but it's very different to the British one (or any of the other versions of 'class' on the planet).

Some of the British paradigm exists, but there's NEVER a sense that you shouldn't 'get above your station' in America. The whole point of being American is to TRY and get above your station!

You can escape the coal camp and go to uni on a scholarship (as my father did) and become Middle Class. If I'd been the sort of person who wanted to, I could've gotten a professional job as a lawyer or a doctor and slowly become a member of the uptight, neurotic Upper Middle Class (I had the grades but no desire to become The Man). I could've won the lottery and automatically gotten bumped to Upper Class, but I'd still be called 'new money' and sneered at by the 'old money' crowd.

However, it should be said that most Americans take all this for granted and it doesn't spoil/colour social and business interactions as much as it does in Britain.

education/station

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

Can education answer the questions of class and station. Malcolm X wrote about poor people being educated by poor teachers in poor schools for poor lives. Can professionals therefore extend the culture of the poor to higher stations or somehow does it's taste disappear?

Re: edit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

I would say there's definitely class and classism in the States, though we're raised to believe there isn't. There's a sort of deep seated mistrust of class-based societies and this whole "american dream" that class doesn't matter. And while I think it'd be great to get past classism, the fact remains that it exists, only we've set up the discourse so that noone can talk about it and hence there's no way to get past the remnants. There's a lot more social mobility in the States than elsewhere (e.g. Europe), but there's not so much mobility as we'd like to delude ourselves into believing.

In many ways it's analogous to the belief that we're beyond racism (at least among white americans) which inhibits actually dealing with the subject. In reality, even liberal unbigoted americans are far more aware of race and ethnic tensions than you see anywhere else in the world. Even in xenophobic Japan there's a sense of self, of japaneseness, which allows one to separate the world into us and other, and all too often the other is seldom encountered. Whereas in the States everyone is different, everyone is other, and there's the constant threat that one's closest compatriots might be harboring some sort of racial or ethnic identity different from their own.

Re: edit

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's a lot more social mobility in the States than elsewhere (e.g. Europe), but there's not so much mobility as we'd like to delude ourselves into believing.

It is simply no longer the case that the US has more social mobility than Europe. Read this (http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm).

Re: edit

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

Heh. I was basing on old data then. In any case, I stand by mobility being far less in the states than americans believe it to be. While it's technically possible to cross class boundaries (which is not the case in some other places), the overwhelming majority of people will not or cannot.

Re: edit

[chuckdarwin.livejournal.com]

It's a good point - you cannot fix things once everyone thinks a problem has been solved.