tom’s fabulous weblog

new BP logo

3 August, 2010 – 09:32

I’ve been enjoying Greenpeace’s campaign to get thousands of people to try their hand at designing a new logo for BP in the wake of the Gulf of Mexico ecological disaster. I think the winning design is spot on:

Now the issue will fade from public consciousness and the lessons will be forgotten, until the next time our reckless determination to extract oil at any cost begets another tragedy.

But at least you can print out some little stickers and have fun keeping BP’s shame in the public eye for a bit longer!

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glorious english summer evenings

21 July, 2010 – 22:46

Took a day of annual leave from work today to attend a very inspiring workshop being run by Growing Communities in Stoke Newington.

The staff there are really passionate, transparent and practical about what they want to achieve, which is to spread their community-led organic vegetable box scheme model across the land, scattering the seeds (in a strategic and well costed way, mind you) of projects that can help communities be more sustainable and resilient in the face of the challenges of climate change and resource depletion.

Afterwards I wandered down to Spitalfields City Farm to take part in a campfire conversation about growing people, culture, food and plants in the city. Met a lovely bunch of people and we chatted about growing food, city orchards, hurricanes, Costa Rica, fermentation, London in the 1970s, courgettes and hope. At first we were sat in the blazing late afternoon sun, but as the afternoon turned into evening we lit the campfire and immersed ourselves in lovely wood smoke, just what I needed as I was a bit sweaty from the hot day and wood smoke is the best deodorant around, as we have probably known since the days of Homo erectus c. 2 million years ago.

Afterwards I took the tube to Kentish Town and then walked home. The last light was fading from the sky as it deepened to a clear dark blue. There’s nothing quite like walking in the late evening warmth of a long hot English summer day. The night murmurs with a sense of exhilarating promise, the long limbed teenager in me wants to go bounding off into the morning!

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they make us want what they have to sell

14 July, 2010 – 09:49

I’m reading Eat Your Heart Out by Felicity Lawrence at the moment.

It’s a very well written book, full of engrossing, accessible detail and interesting human stories, though at times it makes you want to scream with anger at the sheer extent of the nutritional, social and environmental damage big business have inflicted on our food systems over the last fifty years or so.

What’s most interesting I suppose is the way transnational food corporations have managed to arrange things so that most industrially processed products are made from the same handful of subsidised commodities: soya oil, milk powder, corn meal and starch, ground rice and sugar.

This stuff is cheap and plentiful and mostly has so little nutritional value that companies make a virtue of adding back in the essential nutrients that industrial processing has removed: vitamins, omega-3 fatty acids, minerals and so on.

Sugar is the great “zero nutrition” calorie source, deployed since the Victorian factories of the nineteenth century as a cheap way of feeding the masses. And it has found its way in ever greater quantities into industrially processed foods, along with fat and salt.

Sugar, fat and salt are the unholy triple gods of the modern diet, present in amazing quantities in industrial food, often in such quantities that they have to be disguised. There’s a whole class of additives that prevent the taste receptors in the mouth from registering sweetness, recommended in trade catalogues for processed cheese, meat and salad dressings. Quite bizarre.

Anyhow, I was thinking of this as our health secretary Andrew Lansley abolished, or nearly abolished, the Food Standards Agency earlier this week, removing what was one of the few (though mostly ineffective) bulwarks against totally unfettered corporate control of our diets.

Monbiot quotes a good government report that summarises how the sheer brilliance of corporate food science, marketing and packaging means we now live in an “obesogenic environment”, one where you have to work very hard indeed not to get fat, particularly if you’re poor.

For an increasing number of people, weight gain is the inevitable – and largely involuntary – consequence of exposure to a modern lifestyle. This is not to dismiss personal responsibility altogether, but to highlight a reality: that the forces that drive obesity are, for many people, overwhelming.

And as Felicity Lawrence says: “The genius of globalised capitalism is not just to give consumers what they want, but to make them want what it has to sell.”

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druid cycles

9 July, 2010 – 11:47

Just took Tom Palmer’s bike to be repaired at the marvellous Druid Cycles under the arches by Tower Bridge. He had cycled it down from Sheffield to London to launch his latest book.

I thoroughly recommend Druid Cycles, it’s so cool. They work with recycled and thrown away bike parts, there’s handlebars and grease and tubes and pieces of random art hanging from the cavernous walls, they make saddles and panniers on a bashed in electric sewing machine, and they work with volunteers, swapping skills and expertise where they can.

This is what all shops must become in the coming age! Human scale, flexible, resilient, with people who are willing to chat and barter… and have fun! How different from a big centralised shiny bike shop.

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lobster and goat

9 April, 2010 – 11:54

Matt and I were round at Jo and Martin’s last night enjoying, along with their uni contemporary Hugo, a rather splendid meal accompanied by natural wines!

Natural wines are fun, very lively, fresh and rough round the edges. One red wine we tried had an almost sweaty tart taste, a bit like a lambic fruit beer, with a similar appeal. I’m a convert.

They served us lobster paella for starter, lobster all the way from the wild coasts of Scarborough, then roast goat, along with some steamed vegetables, including the stems of wild alexanders that Martin had gathered. Then rhubarb to finish. All very delicious.

As we got more drunk, Martin got out his family’s antique spoon collection that he’s flogging on Ebay and then he and Hugo began to reminisce about car boot sales, leading to the getting out of the one item they were never able to sell: the Playboot.

Truly a wondrous item.

posted in dinner | 2 comments »

fit

29 March, 2010 – 07:32

Matt and I saw a great LLGFF film today, a really inspiring drama called Fit, created by Rikki Beadle-Blair for Stonewall to tackle homophobic bullying in schools.

It’s based on a play that toured around UK schools, built on the responses and questions of 20,000 kids, and attempts to occupy an attention-grabbing, relevant space not dissimilar to Skins.

It does it very well. I was prepared for it to be quite bad, you know sex education, school drama workshops, Leg Akimbo, but it’s not. It’s convincing, funny, warm and real. Partly that’s down to Rikki Beadle Blair, the fact he’s brilliant and stars in the film as a straightforward camp pink leotard wearing drama teacher. I presume he’s pretty much playing himself, which makes his character very convincing, there’s also an element of improv with the rest of the cast too, as Rikki writes the characters based on the actors and their personalities.

A copy of this film has been distributed on DVD to every secondary school in the country, I’m so impressed by Rikki Beadle Blair, Stonewall and the other partners in this film getting this involved with trying to tackle homophobia among school children. I never even dreamed there could be the possibility of ever coming out when I was at school. It seems that while attitudes are now shifting, there is a fair bit of backlash as well. A big issue that this film really confronts head on is the way the word ‘gay’ has come to mean lame, shit, rubbish, as well as bent. It’s become a real ‘hate’ word and the film really unpacks what it means to repeatedly use a word in this way. One of the cast was saying in the Q&A after the filming that they’ve been getting letters from straight teenage boys saying thank you, they had never thought about how much damage they would be inflicting on people around them by using the word ‘gay’ in this way.

The nature of the simple questions that came up again and again in the school workshops showed that ignorance of sexuality is what mostly lies at the root of homophobia in schools, as no one comes out in school and teachers don’t talk about it, gay and straight teenagers have no information to work with, other than fear and prejudice. This DVD is a really important little step in a better direction.

It also reminded me that although I didn’t get any guidance about being queer in my teenage years, I remember one particularly good sex education lesson at secondary school. The marvellous Mr Bibby, our eccentric biology teacher, decided the best way to do sex education with a load of uptight schoolboys was to show us Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. An act of genius, now I look back on it.

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uncle david

26 March, 2010 – 21:31

Talking of the avant garde, we went to see one of the most challenging films I’ve ever watched at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival last night.

The film was Uncle David, a new 95 minute improvised dark comedy offering from the Avant-Garde Alliance, which includes the fabulous and acerbic RVT regular David Hoyle and porn star Ashley Ryder.

It was shot over three days at some beautifully bleak locations on the Isle of Sheppey, with an entirely improvised script, every performance the first and only take. And it looks beautiful for a film made on a budget of £1,800.

The film is about the close sexual relationship between middle aged uncle David and his teenage nephew Ashley. It’s a deeply believable and unsettling love story. David Hoyle plays a character very like his cabaret persona, dispensing by turns bitter sociological musings on the fucked up state of humanity and optimistic exhortations to create an anarchist paradise, while Ashley plays an earnest, almost childlike, young man who turns to his witty uncle for spiritual, political and social guidance of every kind.

As the film progresses you realise they have visited Sheppey to prepare for something, they are going “to release” Ashley from this world that isn’t worthy of their unconventional love. At first I took it to mean that he was going to send Ashley off into adulthood, but then you begin to feel an awful darkness brooding beneath the surface. David and Ashley have a mutual loving pact to kill Ashley, to “set him free” while he is young and untainted by any compromise with society, perhaps to heal the world, or to escape from it. What feels at first like a very humorous, eccentric, English film slowly twists into a nightmare; I desperately wanted it to end some other way.

For me, it wasn’t so much this scenario that gave the film its brutal impact, the plot itself is not so extreme, it was more my emotional engagement with the relationship between the two main characters. Ashley is an extremely attractive actor, he’s a great porn star after all, but his character is also very appealing: boyish, open and earnest. The film shows what must be a powerful factor in intergenerational relationships: the intense combination of the caring protectiveness of parental love and the electric intensity of sexual love.

This film was also entirely improvised, and that gives it even more power. Seeing improvised films always reminds me of what strong believable characters you can create through improvisation. Like the characters from a Mike Leigh film, David and Ashley feel deeply genuine, their love for each other is tangible, heart stirring and utterly convincing. Ashley Ryder said in the Q&A after the film that they had been improvising these characters for six months, talking to each other in character, writing letters, and so on. So the three days of filming on Sheppey was the creative culmination of this intense months long improvisation session. Hence Ashley’s death pact is like an unstoppable whirlpool that draws you into its horrible depths.

The death is really drawn out as well, David kills Ashley with three lethal injections, presumably overdoses of something like heroin, and I was just praying for it to end, but it goes on and on! A couple of people left the cinema after the first injection, but most of the audience seemed to be able to handle it. Many of us seemed to be RVT regulars, stalwarts of David Hoyle’s various entertaining and challenging cabaret performances in Vauxhall.

I got the feeling that the film had emerged from the gay cabaret scene, this tradition with its own morality forged in the face of massive homophobic repression. The film has the creative, bitter defiance of cabaret, resisting mainstream social attitudes and giving visibility to identities that are considered taboo. I think what I’m left with after seeing it, is broadly agreeing with its implied disgust and frustration with mainstream society, but utterly unable to identify with the idea that the extinguishing of a life could ever be a creative response to that.

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forever’s gonna start tonight

24 March, 2010 – 21:00

LLGFF film last night, Forever’s Gonna Start Tonight, the story of San Francisco transgender drag queen Vicki Marlane, who started out as a travelling carnival performer way back in the 1950s.

She’s like a walking piece of LGBT history, now 75 and still lip synching to epic power ballads at Aunt Charlie’s in San Francisco. She tells her inspiring and humorous story through this fascinating film.

Total Eclipse of the Heart is her favourite song, and I was pretty much sobbing as she did the whole tune at the end of the film.

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the myth is in the art

23 March, 2010 – 10:42

Matt and I were at Kings Place last night with Filipa and Ian to watch a recreation of Yves Klein’s Monotone Symphony, a rather avant garde concert given in Paris fifty years ago, curated by Theatre Nomad who are currently doing a series of blue projects based on Yves Klein’s work.

The original concert saw a ten piece orchestra play a twenty minute single note while three naked women made body prints in blue paint on pieces of paper. At the end of the twenty minutes, there was a meditative twenty minute period of silence.

Matt and I joined in with the spirit of the original, when the audience were all in black tie, and dressed up. Hardly anyone else did though – do these people have no commitment to the avant garde?! The orchestra were a diverse bunch, some of them looked like they were trying not to burst out laughing at various points, must have been strange playing a concert of one single note for twenty minutes. Their music provided this strangely comforting drone, but the real interest was in the three naked models. We got a bit of a frisson of excitement when they first came into the room, we immediately all stared at their pussies for the first five minutes, well I did anyway. Then we got used to it.

They painted themselves and each other and then rolled around on various bits of paper making body prints. Filipa was disappointed because it seems they didn’t use International Klein Blue, which is the very intense deep blue paint that Yves Klein patented in the 1950s. It was designed to have the same colour brightness and intensity as dry pigments, which it achieves by suspending dry pigment in a clear synthetic resin. Perhaps that would have been quite expensive to use so they used blue poster paint instead?

This concert followed the same formula as the original, ending with the cry “The Myth is in the Art!” but they added an extra twenty minutes where two models did some more body painting while the orchestra played a very discordant descending tune and two singers in black tie and cocktail dress made sinister yelping noises over the top.

Afterwards, we spent some time at the bar upstairs getting a little too drunk and merry for a Monday night. But such is the way with the avant garde.

posted in art, music | no comments »

nestlé palm oil PR cock-up

18 March, 2010 – 13:18

A little feeling of campaigning glee this morning. Nestlé forced YouTube to remove Greenpeace’s campaigning video about the palm oil in Kit Kats fuelling the destruction of the orangutan’s habitat. As a result, it’s getting way more publicity than it was. Even The Sun has weighed in with one of their brilliant headlines: KitKatstrophe

For those of us who felt that the costs of inviting the most boycotted multinational in the world to use the Fairtrade Mark on Kit Kat outweighed the benefits, this is a pleasing development.

There are no Fairtrade standards for palm oil, so there are composite products (containing more than one ingredient) on the market that are certified Fairtrade and contain palm oil, which may or may not be of dubious provenance. The Fairtrade Foundation, understandably, tends to stick to its remit as a certifying body, rather than weighing in on other issues. They have stated that they don’t think it would be fair on the producers of other Fairtrade certified ingredients in composite products to immediately refuse certification of all composite products that contain palm oil.

Interestingly though, they have stated that “this situation is continually under review”, so if this gets out of hand, we could see them formulating a new position.

Mind you, any glee I feel is tempered by the awfulness of the issue. Panorama looked into palm oil in a depressing programme earlier this month, detailing how the biscuits, margarines, bread, crisps and soap we buy is feeding a growth industry that is deforesting the vast rainforests of Borneo and driving the orangutan towards extinction.

I read an interesting article in New Scientist recently about the earth’s nine planetary life support systems which are vital for human survival. These are things like the oceans, the ozone layer, fresh water, nitrogen and phosphorus, climate change and so on. The idea is they form nine boundaries within which we have to operate. It’s a nice approach because rather than saying that we have to minimise all our impacts, it implies that we have parameters within which to operate, a breathing space for our development.

Overall, we are only transgressing three of them at the moment: the nitrogen cycle, climate change, and, most dramatically, biodiversity loss. It is biodiversity loss that is the deepest danger zone at present. The background extinction rate of around 0.3 per million species per year is currently running at 100 per million and rising, at least ten times what is safe. It isn’t entirely clear to science which species are the key players, not how much loss can be tolerated before ecosystems collapse, or at what point our whole world will change dramatically. But this seems to me to be the most immediate and frightening precipice that humanity has to pull back from.

Which is why you should not be buying Kit Kats!

posted in activism | 3 comments »