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Adventures In Racism.

Maffu — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 20:31:55 +0000

I don’t have the words to express my feelings at Racist Tram Woman (youTube. Warning: NSFW language, NSFAnwhere diatribe).
My first emotion – shared, I would hope, with most decent and educated people – is obviously anger. Crude ignorance of this level breeds rage more easily than anything else – a fiery, white-hot ire that takes your tongue and leaves you only shaking and clenching fists and jaws. Unfortunately, this vileness feeds on and, in the eyes of one so ignorant, is validated by, that same rage. It’s a horrific vicious circle that takes every whit of my willpower to break away from.
Beneath the anger is a numbing incomprehension.
I believe we all tend to cast the world and everyone in it in our own image, and that image can be as simple or as complex as our upbringing and as all-encompassing or non-inclusive as our education. Our beliefs and attitudes are informed by the environment we find ourselves in, particularly – but not exclusively – in our formative years, and then we spend our lives (hopefully) expanding on those values. I have a dual heritage – black African on my father’s side, white English on my mother’s. I also have a duality in my upbringing – I lived as one of only two or three non-white families in a predominantly white-Irish area of Birmingham (though the post-code hinted at the rather gentler Hall Green, the reality of the locale was entirely working-class Gospel Farm). Brought up by a single, white parent in this down-to-earth white area, what racism I encountered – and I encountered it often enough looking back – was for the most part lightweight and low voltage enough to wash over me as the norm. It was the sort of embedded societal racism that is administered without thought or hate or any real judgement; it’s “just the way things are”. Sure, I occasionally got called Tarbrush, but at least they let me into their houses and let me play with their sons and daughters.
Don’t get me wrong – the area wasn’t a hotbed of racist fervour, filled with a gaggle of cross-burning hillbillies, chomping on chitlins and waiting for their next lynching. For the most part the families I grew up round were salt-of-the-earth hard-working folks, kind and generous, from amongst whom I still have friends to this day. But the world was a very different place then – the world of Mind Your Language and Love Thy Neighbour on prime-time telly. A world where we read the tale of Little Black Sambo in infant school and I took part – in full black-face – in The Black & White Minstrel Show for one year’s school play. A world of a thousand constant tiny reminders that you were different and therefore not quite as good or important as everyone else.
It was just the way it was.
And anyway, I was okay because I was “one of the alright ones”.
I suppose this sort of thinking led child-me to reason that racism was something that everyone faced to start with but you could earn your way out of it by being quietly good-natured about the whole thing.
This ‘merit’ system held unacknowledged sway in my head for some time and I flexed my own racist powers in the same learned, low-level way in my young years, using “pakis” – newly arrived Indian and Pakistani families – as a handy bullseye that I could share with my white neighbours . As an added bonus, acting this way towards these Asian families made me even more of an “alright one” with the people around me.
I don’t remember the specific catalyst for my own eye opening, but, through a mixture of education, self-awareness and exposure – both as a victim to more sinister and violent forms of racism, and to the victims of my own prejudice – I realised that the world was not my neighbourhood, and my neighbourhood not the world and that what people around you do and say, though seemingly The Way of Things, is not necessarily normal or the norm. I learnt that the pakis and the wogs and the ragheads and chinks were people. Like me. Exactly like me. So much so that I myself was a wog when spoken of in my absence. And that these epithets, though mildly used and low in voltage, were a convenient first step on a very dark and nasty road, full of shambling horrors and pitfalls and danger that leads eventually to places with names like Lynch-Mob and Pogrom and Genocide.
And yet all of this was simply a learned way of interacting with those new faces and sounds and smells around our neighbourhood. The people there weren’t evil, they themselves were second and third generation immigrant stock who twenty or thirty years before had faced similar prejudice. Ninety-nine percent of those people were fine people, though as ignorant of other cultures or the niceties of social integration as I was myself. If I meet any of them now they are usually lovely, warm welcoming people, sometimes a little rough around the edges, but never anything other than that.
But the other one percent…
I’ve rather bizarrely had some Facebook friend requests from some of them, only to check out their profile and see that they are BNP supporters or that every other status update was about immigrants doing this or “blacks and pakis” doing that
In these few the low-level, low-voltage seed took hold and produced unreasoning, unquestioning hatred. They not only have no frame of reference in which to reconfigure their perception of other people and cultures, they have no need or desire for it, only a world-searing, animalistic malignance that should not exist in this day and age.
No matter how many times I come across, or am the target of, such blind hatred, the thing that I find most difficult to process is not the injustice or ugliness of it, but the utter lack of self-awareness that it shows. I can’t comprehend of a mind so lacking in compassion and empathy or just plain decency, that they can’t see that the people around them are just people. That the racist could really see those people as less than the racist themselves, simply because of their colour, is so utterly bizarre to me that just about every time it has happened to me in my life, my first reaction has been a surprised half-chuckle, followed by a blinking mental reboot as I realise that no, this is not a joke: This is what this person actually believes to be true.
As I said, I believe we cast other people in our own image and we tend to project ourselves into them. I want to believe that Racist Tram Woman’s scattergun ranting is a product of ignorance and environment. That, given a light to shine on herself, she would see – as I once did – just how that way of thinking robs not only her victims but also herself – both of dignity and of experience.
But in this case I think she is of the one percent, and the light would only find a cold core of hate in a dry void.
For this reason, and those listed at length above, I am as reflexively afraid of Racist Tram Woman as she is of me and my brown skin. And like her, I can do nothing but wish her away.

Welcome to Birmingham.

Maffu — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 19:38:50 +0000

And America thought it had the monopoly on weird rednecks…

Birmingham man who had sex with sheep jailed – Sunday Mercury.

Listen to Yourselves

Maffu — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:57:08 +0000

“You need to identify this man before someone kills me”
David Calvert

No, they need to restore order and reason before someone kills you.
I hope the tabloids are pleased with themselves when someone does get hurt.

44 Blues

Maffu — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:13:00 +0000

Had the blues, then got some new strings for my guitar and finally figured out a reliable way of mounting my camera onto my guitar without a/ making it unplayable or b/ being in danger of twisting the next off.
Anyway, for your delectation, here is my rendition of 44 Blues…

Best Photo-Cataloguing Software?

Maffu — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:58:00 +0000

I need your help.
I’ve been into photography – both as a viewer and a photographer – for a long long time. I’ve also been designing for web and print for some time. I also save any images that catch my eye on the internet, be they advertising, funnies, art, stock or erm… entertainment. This means that over the years I have accumulated many, many thousands of images spread across hundreds of folders on three or four different hard drives.
I have decided that instead of choosing folders in which to save images – followed at a later date by a frustrating search for the image when I want it – the answer is to simply dump the whole lot into a single folder. All of them, no sub-folders, or separate drives, nothing. then I’ll use tagging and/or cataloguing software to sort it all into a searchable, comprehensible image library.
The question is, what software to use? I know of Picassa but have not used it since its beta stage when it was ok but a bit… clunky
So, what software can I use to achieve the above scenario? Or are you thinking, “God, no! Don’t do it!!”
Oh, one more thing – free is the new black.
Oh, one more more thing – it must work with all image formats, or at least with PSD, TIFF, PNG, EPS, GIF and JPG.

Two Wrongs

Maffu — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 02:19:00 +0000

________

Update: YouTube got rid of the video on me so here’s the song again. Not quite the same without seeing Snoop line dancing and singing the chorus with Willie Nelson, but I still like it.
________

Two wrongs don’t make a right. That’s what my mother used to say to me.
There are many things that I have found over the years to prove my mother wrong. Unfortunately, as child I didn’t know what I know now so she got away with it all.
I didn’t know, for instance, that if you take the sickly-sweet wrongness of Malibu, mix it in equal measure with the equally, barfmakingly wrong Bailey’s Irish Cream and pour it over ice, the double wrongness become very, very right.
Similarly, take two other very, very wrong things:

Country & Western music and
Snoop Doggy Dog(g?)

I know what you’re thinking – “there’s no need to worry about those two getting together beacuse… well… you know…”
Either one of these alone is enough to make me gnaw my own foot off to escape it and yet… Mom, you lied to me again…

An 80′s Odyssey

Maffu — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:01:00 +0000

Cheesy moments from history (and my record collection).
Looking through my old and neglected vinyl – purchased from the age of eleven onwards – I decided to see what I could find of it on YouTube. Here are some selected results…

Donna Allen – Serious
I bought the 12-inch of this when it came out because I loved the mad harmonies in the chorus (although they’re a bit lost in this mix. I still have it, I still love them, but I really wish I could turn the drums down.
Oh, and there’s no excuse for yellow spandex, Donna. None at all.

Five Star – Stay Out of My Life
I’d forgotten I owned this. Sound-wise, it’s a catchy one but I’m amazed at how much of an aural rip-off of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears. Not in the music itself per se but in the production and subtleties like the guitar sound and solo style and the arpeggio accent to much of the song.
Also, what the christ is going on with the lead singer’s eyebrows?

Rush – Countdown
Spread my entire album, single and CD collection around a football field, don a blindfold and fire an arrow into the air. Chances are it will hit something by Rush.
Here’s a song from the Signals album, written after they visited the launch of the Columbia Space Shuttle. It was a weird period for Rush, not one of their best but with brief glimpses of old glory and genius.

Judas Priest – Turbo Lover
Don’t tell anyone, but I love the album Turbo. People who love Judas Priest generally slag it off, but I’m not that big a Priest fan and I love it. Puerile lyrics and one long metal cliché, but by god, it rocks.
What a bizarrely shit video though.

Go West – Don’t Look Down Girl
Yes, I own Go West’s debut album. Again it’s the loud-drum-big-snare production that dates it, otherwise it’s a great album. Peter Cox may not win any prizes for his dancing (or his miming) but he’s got a voice I’d kill for.
I love this song although, as with all their videos, they’ve changed it somewhat for this and added some weird noises and such. Still as cheesy pop-rock goes, it’s excellent and I can’t help buzzing a little bit when I hear it.

Night Ranger – Don’t Tell me You Love Me
Yes, 80′s Hair Rock. Ok so they video (which they won’t allow me to embed so you have to click here) contains much guitar wanking and slo-mo hair but say what you like about NightRanger, they weren’t afraid of furious, chugging dual-guitar riffs, and they knew how to end a song.

The Sugarcubes – Hit
Not strictly 80s, more early 90s but this track from the album Stick Around For Joy is a classic and a reminder of just how fucking good the Sugarcubes were. Also the video is a reminder of just how beautiful mental warble-pixie Björk was before madness ate her face.

I think that ought to do you for now…

Found it!

Maffu — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 16:24:00 +0000

Remember when I asked what poem this excerpt came from?

Scratch’d by a fall, with moans
As children of weak age
Lend life to the dumb stones
Whereon to vent their rage.
And bend their little fists, and rate the senseless ground;

Well, I found it today after all these years of searching. It is actually from an epic poem by Matthew Arnold called Empedocles on Etna. The bit that I read all those years ago is just a small part of the whole thing but it is a small piece of genius and sums up my feelings on religion and the reasoning behind man’s apparent need for it…

Born into life—who lists
May what is false hold dear,
And for himself make mists
Through which to see less clear;
The world is what it is, for all our dust and din.

[...]

Nature, with equal mind,
Sees all her sons at play
Sees man control the wind,
The wind sweep man away;
Allows the proudly-riding and the founder’d bark.

And, lastly, though of ours
No weakness spoil our lot,
Though the non-human powers
Of Nature harm us not.
The ill-deeds of other men make often our life dark.

What were the wise man’s plan?
Through this sharp, toil-set life,
To fight as best he can.
And win what’s won by strife.
But we an easier way to cheat our pains have found.

Scratch’d by a fall, with moans
As children of weak age
Lend life to the dumb stones
Whereon to vent their rage.
And bend their little fists, and rate the senseless ground;

So, loath to suffer mute.
We, peopling the void air,
Make Gods to whom to impute
The ills we ought to bear;
With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

Yet grant as sense long miss’d
Things that are now perceive’d,
And much may still exist
Which is not yet believ’d
Grant that the world were full of Gods we cannot see;

All things the world which fill
Of but one stuff are spun,
That we who rail are still,
With what we rail at, one;

Genius.