The moral perils of milk

[imomus]

There was an interesting appreciation of the 91 year-old Richard Hoggart on Thinking Allowed yesterday. Hoggart basically invented Cultural Studies in Britain, opening the Centre for Cultural Studies in Birmingham in 1964. His thing was to link English Literature with Sociology, which meant that for the first time people were being encouraged to "read" soaps like Coronation Street using the kind of practical criticism formerly reserved for the poems of Pound and Eliot.

Now, Hoggart, for my money, has always been a bit of a stuffed shirt; he never did anything as incisive, elegant or inspired as the work of continental semiologists like Barthes and Eco, and even at Birmingham he was eclipsed by the sharper, more Gramscian Stuart Hall. His public pronouncements -- and he was wheeled out regularly until the 90s -- were huffing, humanist, sentimental, slightly banal. When Hoggart defended D.H. Lawrence at the Chatterley obscenity trial, his main line was that Lawrence's rumpo romp was redeemed by being, in the truest sense of the word, "puritanical".

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This clay-footed quality to Hoggart emerged strongly in Thinking Allowed when they read out a passage from The Uses of Literacy about the corrosive dangers of milk bars. It seems quite incredible to us now, but there was a time when milk bars -- places where grown men sat around sipping milk -- were considered a social danger. The passages about them in Hoggart's book are hilarious, and I thought I'd give you a couple of pages (courtesy of Google Books) here:





Of course this isn't a Daily Mail-style rant about society going to the dogs, it's really a socialist protest against what Hoggart called "the new mass arts" -- trashy imported American popular culture, the thing Peter Fuller later called "the mega-visual tradition" -- mixed with a sort of Grammar School snobbism against those feckless wastrels of the industrial working class who hadn't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made it to university. But its judgmentalism is fairly shocking -- cultural studies, forty years on, wouldn't dare condemn popular culture the way Hoggart condemns juke boxes, pop hits, mass market magazines and, er, milk bars here.

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But there was a widespread association of milk bars with crime and delinquency in the Britain of the late 50s and 60s; we could almost call it a "moral panic about milk". Why else would Anthony Burgess have started A Clockwork Orange with "me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim... sat in the Korova Milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening.... The Korova milkbar sold milk-plus, milk plus vellocet or synthemesc or drencrom, which is what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence." Oo-er missus! Milk! With drugs in it!

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Back in the real world, milk bars only sold milk. Well, milk with various fruit and malt flavourings, vanilla milk shake, coffee and tea, and chemical-tasting orange squash dispensed from a swirly tank with a plastic orange bobbing around in it. Vaguely remembering a milk bar called The Hungry i on Shandwick Place in Edinburgh in the mid-60s -- it had a 1950s sci-fi design, raked sheets of glass, some sort of flying saucer-like motif -- I asked my mother about the place on the phone. She remembered it too, but started telling me, instead, about how she'd met my dad often at a milk bar on the corner of West Nile Street, after they'd both been cramming Latin (which you needed in those days for university entrance) at Skerry's in Glasgow. She didn't remember it being particularly criminal or delinquent, but she said that milk bars were often outside town, in fields in the middle of nowhere, spreading by ribbon development.

In fact, the Edinburgh Hungry i was named after a famous jazz den and comedy club in San Francisco. Some said the lower-case "i" represented the word "intellectual", or was meant to spell out "id" in the Freudian sense (but the "d" fell off), or simply meant that the ego was hungry. The club is still there in San Francisco. Its milky, delinquent Edinburgh imitation is long gone, replaced by a tourist information office... and by social evils even more sinister than milk-drinking. Trainspotting, for example.

Comments

It is objectively correct

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

to say that milk bars should be brought back, in all their flying-saucer glory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_bar

Of course, it is also objectively correct to stipulate that one of the stipulations of the New Milk Bar Movement should be that the music played in these establishments should be strictly monitored to exclude the vast majority of contemporary, popular sorts of music to which the kidz tend to cling these days.

[obliterati.livejournal.com]

Not so literary perhaps, but I've been quoting this sketch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JRvlUbeESA) to friends all week for some reason.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

Huh. It sounds like absolutely the ideal place to hang out for me.

Then again, I've just been diagnosed with Aspbergers, so I may not be the best judge!

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

I don't think it ever occurred to me, when I first read A Clockwork Orange, that there actually were milkbars, with or without synthemesc...

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Me either subalpine. I wonder what the American equivalent would be? Soda fountains and bobby soxers?

Also, isn't it impossible to read that passage from the book without hearing Malcolm McDowell's voice in your head?

[loveishappiness.livejournal.com]

...but milkbars were American.

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

according to endoftheseason's link, you are right. But I have never heard or read about them anywhere before. Maybe it is a regional thing?

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

maybe you mean, but milkbars were "American" (?)

from Hoggart above,
a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life

[subalpine.livejournal.com]

I've actually never yet seen the film and don't know what Malcolm McDowell's voice sounds like..!

The Japanese fear of milk bars

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

You can't help noticing that Hoggart's fear of the supposed evils of "American" popular culture with regard to milk bars (how it dares to compete with and even win out over what someone in that radio program describes as "indigenous" British, working-class culture) sounds much like Japanese worries about holding off the influence of all sorts of foreign devils on Japanese culture. The woman in that program describes this element of Hoggart as a "crude," "glib," and "problematic" nostalgia for a non-existent golden past--in other words, a load of delusional, judgmental, snobbish, and downright unacceptable nonsense. Does that sort of criticism then also apply to all those noble Japanese worriers worrying about the sanctity of Japanese culture?

Re: The Japanese fear of milk bars

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm actually a fan of cultural protectionism, which can come either from the left or the right, politically. It can be fueled by narrow nationalism and Golden Age-ism, but also by socialistic resistance to American cultural imperialism. The French are more likely to impose quotas on American pop on the radio or protest American fast food on their high streets than the Japanese are.

Sure, "indigenous" culture has to be re-invented when you impose a cultural tariff. For instance, the career of an artist like Dominique A was really boosted by government requirements that 40% of all pop music played on French radio be in the French language; Dominique very consciously proposed himself as the inheritor of the mantle of Golden Age chansonniers-a-texte like Brel. Philippe Katerine initially did the same, but was (I think) a lot more creative in the way he later developed and adopted, for instance, ironic disco tropes. By being less "pure", Katerine paradoxically created a new French tradition rather than just extending the shelf life of an existing one.

National Geographic is not the only fruit

[(Anonymous)]

This is where real contradictions lie. I think France can only be so protectionist because it prioritises impartiality (the atheist banning of religious symbols for instance). If Israel was to limit music it found 'un-Israeli' the story would complicate. And how far back does protectionism go - how many gigs and reels do Radio 1 listeners need to hear? Ultimately, in an oppressive regime, listening to "American music" (would that be rap or Cajun?) can be a political tool to tell your government something. Protectionism has the potential to become enforced flagwaving.

Defining culture by geographic blocks is a tweedy, detatched, adult thing to do. Youths are happy to adopt foreign culture as their own. If it's really popular - then it obviously has more to teach us!

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

Kyoto: At the Detached Palace

Struck by the soft look
Of stone in rain, wet lake,
By the single evergreen
Wavering deep therein,
Reluctantly I sense
All that the garden wants
To have occur.
Part of me smiles, aware
That the stone is smiling
Through its tears, while
Touched by early frost
Another part turns rust-
Red, brittle, soon
To be ferried down
Past where paths end
And the unraked sand
Long after fall of night
Retains a twilight.

-merrill

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

It's always good to wake up and have my opinion changed. I can't ever recall going to a milk bar in the UK, but I did used to go to various bar mleczny when I lived in Poland from 83-85. Never having read Clockwork Orange, or seen the film, I'd assumed the milk bar was as much a reference to the Eastern Bloc as the UK version. Hmm, probably not.

Similarly, I've always thought that the conception of the milk bar owed something to kosher laws over not mixing meat with dairy. Milk bars would offer a safe option - although perhaps not strictly Orthodox - since they didn't serve meat, at least not in mid-80's Poland. Of course, they didn't serve meat at that point because it was strictly rationed and in short supply. Hmm, again, probably not!

Here, in Orthodox Stamford Hill, there's a still a milk bar sign dangling from a shop front on a side street and it's a wonder it's still there. There's this intriguing comment on a web site:

"A place in The Annals of Jewish History from the late 50's to the early 70's London Heritage should put a blue plaque above the building which was frequented by former soccer stars Ron and Alan Harris ex chelsea soccer stars Marc (Feld) Bolan,Mike and Bernie winters,And Lionel Blair Eric Hall to name just a few,Phil with The saggy eyes and 1,000 keys round his kneck plus the odd fag behind his ear was a legend,Famed for its Juke Box at the end of the arcade and the silver ball bearing landing in the miniature potts with win or lose and should you have won out would pop a cigarette,what memories gone but not forgotten,And after you lost most of your money there was always the A and E milk bar round the corner where u can enjoy a top class salt beef sandwidge.Then off to the Victoria boys and girls club around the corner in Egerton road.Can still visualise it if it was yesterday gone but not forgotten !!!"

Blimey, add local boy Malcolm McLaren to that heady mix of talent...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

"Mark would hit the Stamford Hill catwalk, passing the Fairsports amusement arcade (known colloquially as the 'schtip house', literally "to take your money")..."

Bolan: the rise and fall of a 20th century superstar (http://books.google.com/books?id=63lchQOhltIC&pg=PA20&lpg=PA20&dq=Stamford+Hill+fairsports+Amusement+Arcade&source=bl&ots=vGbKb-YvB-&sig=CVSqZC4INu86YUC_vWvzFJzWIxs&hl=en&ei=MHaWSsjCJNaK_AbGuYjGDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=Stamford%20Hill%20fairsports%20Amusement%20Arcade&f=false) by Mark Paytress

[sarmoung.livejournal.com]

Intriguing! There's not much sign of that going on these days. The diaspora of the diaspora has moved on, leaving the frummers to get on with it. There's nowhere for Jewish kids to go that isn't sanctioned by the local community. Even the forthcoming shwarma bar - ready to go for the last two years - remains unopened due to local fears that it might attract the wrong sort of Jewish youth to the area and thus lead to a life of tapdancing, glam rock or similar.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Penguin Classics (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Uses-Literacy-Aspects-Working-Class-Classics/dp/0141191589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251385821&sr=1-1) actually republish The Uses of Literacy, with a new introduction by my friend Lynsey Hanley (author of Estates (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jan/06/communities.housing)), on October 1st.

Lovely Queen Mary

[endoftheseason.livejournal.com]

She (Hanley) went to Queen Mary. This is a good thing (now, why would I think that?) and something Hoggart would or should approve of.

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

The thing with Hoggart is that he was pretty much supplanted and rendered obsolete by *the very territory he'd himself pioneered*. Right from the start, he was at odds with some of the other Birmingham academics who, unlike him, were actually Marxists (and therefore saw popular mass culture as an ally of convenience for the exact same reason Marx saw capitalism as such, namely as a force that could help them blow away the old, feudal establishment, represented in the UK of 1957 - the time and place where you once told me post-modernism began - by the aristocracy and those immediately "below" them who still had a decent amount of political power). The text quoted here is far closer to the writings of Robert Blatchford (the socialist pioneer who lamented jazz, industrialism etc. and has been the subject of a feudal-right / Third Positionist hagiography) than it is to any of the academics who later came through via the discipline of cultural studies, in large part because the younger academics (and most of them were younger than Hoggart even in 1964) had, especially as time went on, formed their thinking post-Suez and therefore simply couldn't relate to older ideas of British culture which for them were permanently discredited, the stuff of a former power that couldn't let go. For them, Hoggart was little different from your average Mail hack (and if you want prove of how easy it was for journalists to move from trad-left to trad-right check Paul Johnson: when he wrote 'The Menace of Beatlism' it was in the name of socialism - he was at the New Statesman then - yet in its alarmist anti-pop tone it's indistinguishable from anything he wrote after he jumped back to the right).

And yet now that that very same American pop culture has become the absolute norm, the establishment culture, and in the process become every bit as insular and tediously self-obsessed and self-reflective as the culture of Eric Coates and Ronald Binge was in 1957 (worse still, it has given that very same Etonian tribe the platform to remake/remodel themselves and push towards their greatest power since *before* 1964 - far from an escape from elite power, pop has become part of that same elite's self-justification) I wonder whether he was *necessarily* all that wrong. Perhaps he was right by mistake. Right for the wrong reasons. There is sometimes an intelligent argument waiting to get out of even a trad-right rant. There may well be one waiting to get out of this piece of Hoggart, if you can cut through the melodramatic, outraged rhetoric, pretend it's not there. Imagine it is, instead (as I think it *also* is, just hidden and hard to decipher today), a warning that pop culture will not, in and of itself, put an end to the power of an unrepresentative elite the way organised socialism possibly could. In the age of Coldplay/Cameron it's impossible to disagree with *that*.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

pop has become part of that same elite's self-justification... I wonder whether he was *necessarily* all that wrong. Perhaps he was right by mistake. Right for the wrong reasons

Oh, I have a lot of sympathy for his disgust. (Not sure about The Menace of Beatlism -- will have to search for that online.) It's not far from Adorno's attitude to "the culture industry".

Cultural Studies grew increasingly craven and complicit, unable to judge popular culture as it grew closer to the value-free relativism of anthropology and drew further from the "scrutiny" of the literary analysis it began with (because you can say a poem is bad when you do prac crit). I think you're right that Hoggart may have been "right by mistake", though. There was a measure of snobbism in what he said, and of moral panic, and Golden Age-ism.

I'll come back to some of these themes tomorrow, I think. (I thought you might find them interesting, Robin!)

[robincarmody.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't recommend 'The Menace of Beatlism'. It's worth reading as a historical record, but it's not all that different, in essence, from what Johnson later wrote ad nauseam in the Mail. It's much worse than anything Hoggart did, and much less discernibly left-wing (I tend to agree with the journalist Alan Watkins that Johnson was never really of the left, he just thought it would suit his interests for a while, perhaps because he - like many other traditional conservatives - didn't like the consumerism Macmillan's govt was ushering in and saw the left as, yes, allies of convenience).

as mckenna says

[(Anonymous)]

yes, yes, once again, (popular) culture is not your friend.

Re: as mckenna says

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Unless you like milk better than LSD, naturally.