Examination dream

[imomus]

I had a dream, and in this dream I was back at university. I was sitting a test in English Literature. I took a seat at the back of a sunny lecture room. It was all very civilised; there were even bottles of red wine on the tables, and the exam papers were rendered in watercolour (but the effect was of menstrual stains). We were told to turn the papers over and begin. There was a certain urgency in the room as everyone scrambled to grasp the questions, and tackle the two that best fitted their revision and expertise.

In growing dismay I found there was nothing in the paper I knew anything about. All the poets and writers covered were people I'd ruled out for various reasons. I poured a glass of red wine. While others scribbled, I lay back and thought. At first I thought I might start writing soon, but then I began to know I wouldn't. I started gazing out of the window. I could see buses passing, filled with people heading to a working class area of the city. I envied those people. I knew that in their working class district life was dense and vibrant, there were people from all over the world there, poor people. Because they were poor, life was cheap there, and because life was cheap you could be free, living amongst them. You could be free, and live on cheap Chinese food.

Casually, I walked out of the examination hall. I would walk away from my university course. Why did I even need to be there at all? Why did I need to answer irrelevant questions set by other people? I would find my own problems, my own questions. I would become an artist, and live cheaply in a poor part of town, and be free.

I got into my Mini Cooper (I was already measuring it up as a removals van, wondering how many trips I'd have to make to move all my stuff out of the hall of residence) and drove south. Not to a poor part of town, but to an abbey where friends of mine were rehearsing a wedding. Anne Laplantine was rehearsing her wedding with Xavier, and Toog and Flo were there. Toog was deeply moved, and weeping. They were all very pleased to see me, but didn't interrupt the rehearsal (it was at the most dramatic part).

I woke up with a feeling of liberty (and my head full of the flu). I had the sense that the life I'd woken up into was the life I'd planned in my dream; a cheap life of freedom, a life as an artist in a poor, dense and multicultural part of a big, exciting city.

I think my dream was influenced by the fact that, just before I went to bed, I put six weeks-worth of photos on my Flickr page. Although it feels rather too much as if I've been staying in these last six weeks, documenting my old albums, the photos persuade me that I've been living a rather exciting life as an artist; giving an unreliable art tour, visiting people's apartments in Vienna, going to a Buddhistic house run by Sri Lankans, sitting with David Woodard in a replica of a Polynesian Men's House, visiting the designer Jerszy Seymour in his studio, and so on.

I don't want to sound too self-congratulatory; I'm not sure I use my freedom, even now, as effectively as I could. Just as I drifted, perhaps, too long through my education (a final year at school, a fourth year at university), letting the irrelevant expectations of teachers and family delay my leap into the productive, self-structured life I planned and wanted, so even now I might let the internet boss me around -- is that possible? Is the internet my new "exam"? -- or take on too many commissions from editors (I'm on deadline, as usual, for articles). Well, I do have to live, after all.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Don't quite get your objection to Jarvis, in the song he isn't pretending to speak as a representative of the working classes, just pointing out the wrong-headedness of a middle class idea that poor = cool. Only educated socially mobile middle class people with pretensions to slumming-it bohemianism can afford to entertain that paradigm, they have choice in the matter. That's all.

[(Anonymous)]

... and if songs are to be read as having autobiographical veracity, on recently posted evidence you are both a cannibal and a necrophiliac!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

... and if songs are to be read as having autobiographical veracity, on recently posted evidence you are both a cannibal and a necrophiliac!

Yes, but Common People is patently a much more autobiographical song than "I Ate A Girl Right Up", surely? He really went to St Martin's, he really met this Greek girl, she probably did say something about feeling comfortable with people from working class backgrounds (she was, after all, raised as a communist), or wanting to slum it, or something. But I know both this girl's parents, and they're left wing intellectuals, not banking people. And I resent a song which says to left wing intellectuals "Fuck off if you want to live like poor people -- like me! You'll never know how hard and shitty it is!"

Someone aspiring to celeb status can't preach to someone going in the other direction. And right now, in the world, we all need to go in the other direction. We can't all be celebs living on credit and peak oil.

[(Anonymous)]

she probably did say something about feeling comfortable with people from working class backgrounds (she was, after all, raised as a communist)

wha?

[(Anonymous)]

yes if her parents were left wing intellectuals she is almost certainly middle class!

also she didn't study sculpture

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

And I resent a song which says to left wing intellectuals "Fuck off if you want to live like poor people -- like me! You'll never know how hard and shitty it is!"

Resent it if you must, but refuting it is a bit trickier.

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Hah. It's impossible to refute.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

Was Jarvis lying about her dad being loaded, or were Greek Communists of the time quite well off?

[(Anonymous)]

Being raised as a communist is not the same as coming from a communist family, her dad could indeed have been loaded, presumably he would have been paying her college fees.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

She has a dad and a step-dad, neither of whom were by any stretch of the imagination loaded. Her dad was (and still is) a poet, her step-dad (now dead) was a novelist who traveled often to the Soviet Union. He and her mum lived in quite an impressively big flat in the centre of Rome, but only because they got in early and enjoyed rent control. Her mum was forced out a few years ago when the service charge payments became too much for her to pay (and if the service charges were that high, imagine what the rent would have been at the commercial rates the landlord would clearly have preferred to be charging).

But, you know, poetic license and all that. "Her dad was a novelist and by no means loaded" would have disrupted the binary the song is so carefully balanced upon -- its fulcrum of self-righteousness.

(Needless to say, Jarvis is a lovely man, and the song makes a good point about some people at art school, I'm sure.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

the wrong-headedness of a middle class idea that poor = cool

I do think that poor is virtuous in many ways -- endless economic expansion is not an option, we don't have enough worlds for everyone to be affluent. We need to re-learn poverty, smaller eco-footprints, etc. And who better to teach us than the poor?

But I should point out that this dream -- and my lifestyle -- is not about joining the poor. It's about living cheaply amongst the poor, but enjoying a freedom many of them don't have. And if that sounds bastard-like, well, is it any better to live in freedom amongst the wealthy? Or to live in poverty amongst the poor?

[(Anonymous)]

It's a simple fact you have the choice that 'they', on the whole don't, and this is as much a fact of class, education and economics as it is of anything else. I'm sure that 'they' are so grateful that you deign to move among them reminding them of the virtue in their poverty and how much the rest of the world can learn from them.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I repeat: If that sounds bastard-like, well, is it any better to live in freedom amongst the wealthy? Or to live unfree and in poverty amongst the poor? Because one of those solutions endorses decadence and unfairness (celebs in gated communities), the other endorses the virtue of poverty for its own sake, and unfreedom as some kind of plus.

[(Anonymous)]

The structure that allows you to live among your virtuous poor, is the very same structure that keeps them poor. Being from a relatively privileged educated middle-class background, you have chosen to live the way you do. Now I'm not blaming you personally for any of that or criticising you for choosing your lifestyle or living among the poor, but it seems a bit disingenuous and pompous to be making pronouncements about their virtue to your fans on a blog. Your 'dignifying' their poverty is not making one iota of practical difference to them positively or negatively, or making the slightest dent in the structure that creates these levels of urban inequalities. To or for whom are you 'endorsing' poverty, and to what ends? Surely not just to justify your own lifestyle choice? I suspect that most of your poor, immigrant, ethnic minority and working class neighbours happily aspire to leaving their poverty behind and it would be very interesting to hear their views on the virtue or otherwise of their own poverty. But the way things are they just have to get on with it, they are not in the class of people who make pronouncements on blogs or in songs. Anyway, in short, I think the situation is far more complex than the 'better or worse' binaries you are proposing.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It is complex, I agree.

The post-materialist "slumming" lifestyle is quite an important engine of urban regeneration -- and that brings good and bad things to any city -- but it would be a mistake to over-estimate its impact. Slummers -- people who deliberately adopt austere lifestyles in order to buy themselves the freedom to be creative -- might be at most 10% of an urban population. Possibly slightly higher in a place like Berlin, but not much. And although you do see a certain amount of "die yuppy scum" and "gentrify this" graffiti around here, there's very little tension between the slumming bobos and the upwardly mobile immigrant population -- who both do and don't embrace austerity: Turks (as muslims) don't drink, for instance, though they are likely to work quite hard in small businesses and be moderately "aspirational".

I've written quite a bit about the common points between the downward and upwardly mobile. Both groups, for instance, are markedly more cosmopolitan (http://imomus.livejournal.com/217216.html) than the dominant indigenous population, and both are likely to be selective and critical when deciding which values of Western culture they adopt, and which they reject.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Some of that graffiti (http://www.flickr.com/photos/imomus/3039238888/) is written by the yuppies themselves, of course. The rest is written by embittered class war types like the kind being condemned here (http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Freuterkiez.net%2F2008%2F11%2F18%2Fandersdenkender-go-home%2F&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) (sorry for the bad google-translated English).

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

The whole "noble savage" bit seems a bit condescending to those of us actually on the bottom rung of the income ladder, but never you mind, we like the slummers-- who else is going to buy our weed?!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

we like the slummers-- who else is going to buy our weed?

Well, quite. But that's a Shamen song, not a Pulp song, innit?

[rob-kun.livejournal.com]

Out of interest, would your opinion be different if endless economic expansion were an option?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes.