Tuesday 27 June 2017

Blog nine: a bit on Notts

Nottingham's Old Market Square. Image courtesy of Nottingham City Council.

I struggled to get started on this one - I didn't know what to write about or what could be an interesting idea/topic that could entice people into clicking and thinking about what I'd written. Would I do another blog about children and how literature and the arts act as a catalyst for, in my opinion, a fuller and fitter life? or, discuss the poetry of DH Lawrence, all bats and snakes? I could try and write many, many worthy blogs but I keep thinking that I've not really written enough about Nottingham - the place I'm supposed to be an "ambassador" for. So here goes...

Nottingham is where I've lived for all but 4 years of my life. It's a strange, oddly overlapping place that never seems to fully fit in a national picture. When I spend time in Sheffield or Derby, I'm stuck with some level of affinity between the cities - they have a shared feel, a heavier industry soul with their steel and locomotives heritage. Nottingham? We made bicycles and hosiery.

It's a place that defies definition - like Sillitoe says: "Whatever people say I am, that's what I'm not." It also reminds me of this from Douglas Adams: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” Nottingham is Adam's "bizarre and inexplicable" universe and Sillitoe's reinventing revolutionary, not that that's Arthur Seaton. More like Feargus O'Connor, the Chartist firebrand elected MP for Nottingham in 1840s, or our famous outlaw who overshadows everything associated with the city. And, yes, he is from Nottingham - none of this "he's from Yorkshire" rammel.

Yet, I'm struggling to write my letter to Nottingham here. And after much procrastinating, I've gone for the highest form of modern journalism to try (and fail) to sum up Nottingham: the listicle self-interview. Plus, I've borrowed Animator Troy Browne's Nottingifs from Leftlion! Here's my take on Modern Notts...

What's your default burger at Annie's Burger Shack?
Annie’s Burger Shack is a Anglo-American institution here in Notts – New Englander Annie started the shack in 2009 and makes the best burgers in the city. I’m a fan of The Hawaiian – a beef burger topped with two smoked grilled gammon pieces and fresh grilled pineapple ring, covered with melted swiss cheese – plus, I like to add a fried egg in there.

What’s your favourite Nottingham Forest memory?
This is a tough one – I wrote a whole play about how my relationship with the club has been a life long obsession and how I’ve been a Forest fan for longer than I’ve been registered as alive! Perhaps there’s another blog in this, but best NFFC moment: New Years Day 2008 - Lewis McGugan's 92nd minute match-winning free kick against Huddersfield. Glorious.

Tell us about Goose Fair?
With more than 720 years of history, Nottingham Goose Fair is one of Europe's most famous travelling fairs, but really is all about having mushy peas with mint sauce in a polystyrene cup and going on the Crazy Mouse rollercoaster.

As someone from Nottingham, do you have anything from Paul Smith?
I have a Paul Smith tie, which my mum bought me for my graduation – you can’t represent Nottingham at summat important without summat from Paul Smith on! And I’ve been to the stripey cinema in Broadway too. Plus, he’s a patron of the scholarship – if I’m meeting more important people in the States, maybe he’ll crash me a new on?

What’s your favourite thing about Nottingham’s favourite outlaw, Robin Hood?
An article I read recently, actually, about a chap called Jim Lees who tried to prove Robin was from Bilborough! Every visitor I’ve had come and stay has had the obligatory selfie with the statue by the castle. That and Kevin Costner. WHAT A FILM.

And Nottingham legendary venue Rock City?
I’m a product of that proud Nottingham establishment! My parents met at Rock City at a Blues Band gig in 1981, shoes probably sticking to the floor even then when it was less than a year old.

Have you been to Batman’s gaff – Nottingham’s Wollaton Hall?
According to my mum, I took my first steps at Wollaton Hall and, as I said in a previous blog, walking up the lime lined avenue to Wollaton Hall for a walk round the lake is part of my perfect Nottingham day! We went there last year in rutting season for the deer and it was amazing!

Tuesday 20 June 2017

Blog eight: Musical Map of 'merica

A musical map of most popular genres of music by state. Image courtesy of Digital Music News.

As Damon Albarn once wrote “music is my radar” and with the sheer size of the United States, I feel I may need some kinds of guidance system to negotiate the highways and byways, Amtrak and Greyhound buses that will whisk me across this enormous country. However, I’m swerving the practical and sticking with the artistic and I’ve made a playlist of one or two songs foreach of my stops, which hopefully you’ll enjoy!

First stop: New York. Home of the greatest band ever – The Ramones, who I’ve been more than a little obsessed with since I got a tape of their first three albums for my birthday and played it religiously every day. I’ve gone for the classic Rockaway Beach – about a strip of sand in New York’s Queen’s district – which has to be one of their most popular and best songs. 53rd and 3rd came a close second here. I’ve also picked Jonathan Richman’s Springtime in New York. Richman is a songwriter of rare quality, more of a poet with a guitar really and here the line “when demolishing a building brings the smell of 1890 to the breeze” is among his best. There’s a brilliant key change here too. So, as Johnny Ramone says “1234…



Washington DC’s musical pedigree is fairly small and I struggled to find anything I actually liked until I stumbled across this Pavement track about governmental corruption in the capital. Gotta love a bit of Steven Malkmus and this great verse: "Embassy row, the fumes they lay low / On lanes that are wide where the limousines glide / On the wrought-iron gates and the bone china plates / And don't forget your manners where the anthems play."


I’m combining my time in DC with a trip to Baltimore for which I’ve got Nina Simone’s 1970 hit named after the town. Listen to that bass line and Nina’s voice is as fantastic as ever. There’s also a very enjoyable guitar and violin duet at the end. Thanks Bradley for the recommendation…


Whilst Martha Reeves was “dancin’ in Chicago”, I’ve gone for the fairly obvious choice of Chicago by Sufjan Stevens from his Illinois album. This was a record I loved in my second year at university and still is very, very special. Plus, you can’t talk about Chicago without Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home…



Then we get to Iowa City, and I start to struggle. Whilst the Hawkeye State has produced bands like Slipknot (not my cup of tea) I haven’t found many songs about Iowa, so thanks to my friend Adam for this suggestion “Joni Mitchell-Dry Cleaner from Des Moines is one of my very fave Joni tunes. Awesome Pastorius bass and brass arrangement. V funky.” See for yourself…


At this point I’m off to the West Coast – San Diego, California to be exact. And I’ve found this grainy recording of The Mountain Goats and their track Going to San Diego and no discussion of music and the great Golden State without the haunting vocals of the Mamas and the Papas…



Next stop: Tucson, Arizona. And there’s only one choice, right? Wrong! There’s also Rory Gallagher’s cover of the Link Wray song named after the city from the rerelease of Tattoo. And, The Beatles – obviously…



After this I’m off to New Mexico and thanks to Jon, Adam and Rob for suggesting Prefab Sprout’s King of Rock’n’Roll (a song indelibly stuck in the ear of anyone who has watched Spaced) and it’s Albuquerque chorus! Also, what a video!!! Second pick, Paul Simon’s beautiful Hearts and Bones, about journeying through NM’s mountain passes. Thanks, Keeno for suggesting this one!



Last stop is Texas and I had loads of great suggestions here – Rick suggested Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas soundtrack and Phil went for Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Texas Flood, but I’ve gone for Elton John’s All the Way Down to El Paso. What a Watford lad was doing in South Texas is anyone’s guess but it’s classic EJ. And I’ve also plumped for The Flamin’ Groovies’ Heading to the Texas Border for some classic 1970s garage rock.


A huge and heart-felt thanks to Matthew, Clare, Loreto, Adam, Adrian, Rick, Paul, Jon, Phil, Barbara, Di & Steve, Julian, Beccy, Keeno, Rob, Kol, Bradley, Helly, Parisa, Neal and Andy for their suggestions! If you want to listen to the songs together as a playlist, click here, for them to play seamlessly together on YouTube! That’s my musical map of my trip – now to find a real one *click into Amazon and searches maps!

Tuesday 13 June 2017

Blog seven: the best New Deal, the Great Society & the legacy of LBJ

President Lyndon B. Johnson. Image courtesy of History.com
When Marc Antony stands over the body of Caesar in Act 3 of Shakespeare’s play, he delivers one of the more prophetic lines of the bard’s entire works: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones” – that is unless you have a kind biographer (see my notes on Kennedy a few weeks ago). FDR is remembered as the President who got America going again after the crash of ’29 and then guided them through the war years after the attack on Pearl Harbour, but short of dropping the bomb – a weight forever around the neck of his successor Harry Truman. This got me thinking of legacy and the importance of fact in those legacies. This was also prompted by the last 2 blogs I wrote, looking at school funding, arts funding and other liberal legislation in America. The dates in which these were passed 1965-68 were one President – Lyndon Johnson, a man perhaps with the unfairest domestic legacy of all.

Having just read a huge article on Johnson and his transformative presidency on domestic matters, I struggle not to think of the early Blair years, and how both will always be remembered for imperialist foreign policy and wars in Vietnam or Iraq. I don’t want this blog to become side-tracked by a discussion of the New Labour policy achievements after 1997, but this that whilst Blair is irrevocably stained by the blood of millions killed in Iraq, his domestic achievements are impossible to scoff at. The same can be said of Johnson where the tragedy of Vietnam has created a dark cloud obscuring the full picture of his Presidency. From Roosevelt’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal and Kennedy’s New Frontier, to Johnson’s Great Society, this is the great progression of American liberalism and it was the last, which arguably achieved the most.

In those tumultuous Great Society years, Johnson submitted, and Congress enacted, more than one hundred major proposals in each of the 89th and 90th Congresses. In those years of do-it-now optimism (Johnson’s signature admonition: “Do it now. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Not later today. Now.”) presidential speeches were about distributing prosperity more fairly, reshaping the balance between the consumer and big business, rebuilding entire cities, eliminating poverty, hunger and discrimination. In the Johnson years America did reduce poverty; did broaden opportunity for college and jobs; did outlaw segregation and discrimination in housing; did guarantee the right to vote to all; did improve health and prosperity for older Americans; did put the environment on the national agenda.

When Lyndon Johnson took office, only eight percent of Americans held college degrees; by the end of 2006, twenty-eight percent had completed college. His higher education legislation with its scholarships, grants and work-study programs opened college to any American with the necessary brains and ambition, regardless of financial resources. Below the college level, LBJ passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, for the first time committing the federal government to help local schools (This, to me, is massive – GM). He anticipated the needs of children with English as a second language with bilingual education, which today serves four million children in some 40 languages across the United States. His special education law has helped millions of children with learning disabilities. Then there is Head Start. Millions of pre-schoolers have been through Head Start programs in nearly every city and county in the nation – increasing life chances and opportunity – and forming the basis of Blair’s Sure Start policy, which continues to be one of New Labour’s lasting and most enduring achievements.

Protesters against segregated education during the 1960s. Image courtesy of Civil Rights Resources. 


Closely related to LBJ’s Great Society health programs were his initiatives to reduce malnutrition and hunger. Today, the Food Stamp program helps feed some 27 million men, women and children in 12 million households. The School Breakfast program, building on Truman’s Russell National School Lunch Act, has served more than billions of breakfasts to needy children.

Johnson put civil rights and social justice squarely before the nation as a moral issue. Recalling his year as a teacher of poor Mexican children in Cotulla, Texas, he once told Congress:

“It never even occurred to me in my fondest dreams that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance—and I’ll let you in on a secret—I mean to use it.”

And use it he did. He used it to make Washington confront the needs of the nation as no president before or since has. With the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Johnson tore down, all at once, the “Whites only” signs and social system that featured segregated hotels, restaurants, movie theatres, toilets and water fountains, and rampant job discrimination. The following year he proposed the Voting Rights Act, which it passed in the summer of 1965, to which Martin Luther King, Jr. told Johnson, “You have created a second emancipation.”

LBJ had his heart in his War on Poverty. Though he found the opposition too strong to pass an income maintenance law, he took advantage of the Social Security budget. He proposed, and Congress enacted, whopping increases in the minimum benefit. That change alone lifted 2.5 million Americans 65 and over above the poverty line. Today, Social Security keeps some thirteen million senior citizens above the poverty line.

Johnson’s Great Society programmes are still going: Head Start, the Job Corps, Community Health Centres, Indian Opportunities (now part of the US Labor Department), and Migrant Opportunities (now Seasonal Worker Training and Migrant Education) are all helping people stand on their own two feet today. Only the Neighbourhood Youth Corps has been abandoned—in 1974, after enrolling more than 5 million individuals. Ronald Reagan quipped that Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty and poverty won. He was wrong. When LBJ took office, 22.2 percent of Americans were living in poverty. When he left five years later, only 13 percent were living below the poverty line—the greatest one-time reduction in poverty in the US’s history.

Another Roosevelt, Theodore, launched the modern environmental movement by setting aside public lands and national park. If Teddy Roosevelt launched the movement, Lyndon Johnson drove it forward more than any later president—and in the process, in 1965, he introduced an entirely new concept of conservation: “We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction,” he said, “we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection and development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation.”

Cascades National Park, which became a National Park during LJB's Presidency. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

That new environmental commandment spelled out the first inconvenient truth: that those who reap the rewards of modern technology must also pay the price of their industrial pollution. It inspired a legion of Great Society laws: the Clean Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments, the 1965 Solid Waste Disposal Act, the 1965 Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act, and the 1968 Aircraft Noise Abatement Act. Johnson created 35 national parks, 32 within easy driving distance of large cities. The 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act today protects 165 river segments in 38 states and Puerto Rico. The 1968 National Trail System Act has established more than 1,000 recreation, scenic and historic trails covering close to 55,000 miles. No wonder National Geographic calls Lyndon Johnson “our greatest conservation president.”

These were major areas of concentration for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, but there were many others. Indeed, looking back, the sweep of this President’s achievements is breathtaking.
Yet the historian Irving Bernstein, in his book, The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson, dedicates a chapter entire chapter to “Lyndon Johnson, Patron of the Arts.” The Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts (named after his predecessor), where each year two million visitors view performances that millions more watch on television, was a Great Society initiative.

The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities are Johnson’s, after he asked Congress to establish them and for the first time, to provide federal financial support for the arts to increase “the access of our people to the works of our artists, and [to recognize] the arts as part of the pursuit of American greatness.” LBJ used to say that he wanted fine theatre and music available throughout the nation, and not just on Broadway and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In awarding more than 130,000 grants totalling more than four billion dollars since 1965, the Endowment for the Arts has spawned art councils in all 50 states funding arts nationwide.

By the numbers, the legacy of Lyndon Johnson is monumental. It exceeds in domestic impact even the New Deal of his idol, Franklin Roosevelt (LBJ was Texas director of Roosevelt’s New Deal National Youth Administration). It sets him at the cutting edge of America’s progressive tradition. Robert Caro, LBJ’s biographer, describes him as “the lawmaker for the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed…the President who wrote mercy and justice into the statute books by which America was governed.”

Lyndon Johnson died in 1973. But his legacy endures in the acts he passed. It endures in the children in Head Start programs across America, in the expanded opportunities for millions of minorities. It endures in the scholarships and loans that enable the poorest students to attend the finest universities and in the base funding from a federal government ensuring a level of education for every child. It endures in the public art and theatres supported by the National Endowments, the clean air Americans breathe, the clean water in their rivers, in their National Parks.

Tony Blair in a Sure Start Centre. Image courtesy of The Daily Mirror.

At this end, do we need to look at our opinions on many things, not least the left’s (which I consider myself a member of) of Tony Blair, whose achievements are remarkably similar - Introduced the National Minimum Wage, Funding for every pupil in England doubled, 85,000 more nurses, 2,200 Sure Start Children’s Centres, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, 36,000 more teachers in England and 274,000 more support staff and teaching assistants, A million pensioners & 600,000 children lifted out of poverty, scrapped Section 28 and introduced Civil Partnerships, free entry to national museums and galleries, cleanest rivers, beaches, drinking water and air since before the industrial revolution, free nursery places for every three and four-year-olds and free fruit for most four to six-year-olds at school. Plus, his own New Deal – helped over 1.8 million people into work.

The late John Kenneth Galbraith, another leading critic of the Vietnam War, has called for “historical reconsideration” of the Johnson Presidency, saying “The initiatives of Lyndon Johnson on civil rights, voting rights and on economic and social deprivation…must no longer be enshrouded by that [Vietnam] war.” – would this approach to Blair be a productive one, or are the wounds of Iraq, still not yet fully investigated or healed (if they ever will), too fresh. To any Labour friends reading this, I’ll quote Shakespeare’s Marc Antony again: “Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny.”

Wednesday 7 June 2017

Blog six: arts funding to the fore

Stalin, FDR and Churchill at the Tehran Conference, 1943. Image courtesy of Politico.

Yesterday was the anniversary of D-Day – the great strike back against fascism in Europe in 1944 and huge coordinated effort from, amongst others, Britain and the United States. During these war years, there’s the popular story that FDR’s British counterpart, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was once asked to cut funding for the art in order to support the war effort. Churchill refused, according to the story, and said: Then what are we fighting for?

Sadly, the quotation isn’t Churchill, or anyone else for that matter – as confirmed by the International Churchill Society, but Churchill did express a similar sentiment about the importance of the arts in 1938:

“The arts are essential to any complete national life. The State owes it to itself to sustain and encourage them… Ill fares the race which fails to salute the arts with the reverence and delight which are their due.”

I struggle to disagree with Churchill’s rhetoric, although this was before the war and a battle for Britain’s survival against tyranny. Sadly, we see the same thing happening today and there is a real threat to the continuing of arts subjects and teaching in schools in both the US and the UK. President Trump Donald Trump has proposed eliminating both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities - funding that was introduced to legislation in 1965 (again by LBJ for previous blog readers) because 'any advanced civilisation' was expected to value the arts and humanities. In the UK, specifically looking at education, arts subjects are on the retreat in classroomsThe Cultural Learning Alliance have shown that since 2010 there has been a decline of 20% in arts GCSE entries (using provisional Ofqual 2016 figures) and 2% in the number of pupils taking at least one Arts GCSE 2010 to 2015. Whilst Department for Education figures show there has been a decline of 10% in the hours arts are taught in schools and 11% in arts teachers in schools.

Children at Welbeck Primary in Nottingham dancing. Image courtesy of Welbeck.

Arts Participation (defined as defined as involvement in artistic and creative activities, such as dance, drama, music, painting, or sculpture) has a small impact on improving cross-curricular academic attainment (roughly two-months’ worth) but is also relatively low cost, according to the EEF. Improved outcomes have been identified in English, mathematics and science learning. Benefits have also been found in both primary and secondary schools, though on average greater effects have been identified for younger learners. In some cases, specific arts activities have been linked with benefits on particular outcomes. For example, there is some evidence of a positive link between music and spatial awareness. Wider benefits on attitudes to learning and well-being have also consistently been reported. This again hints at the social aspect of the arts in learning and I’ll quote Dr Catherine Burke, who is, reader in history of education and childhood, Faculty of education, University of Cambridge:

“Fifty years after the publication of the Plowden report, it is timely to take a respectful look back to when the arts were recognised as fundamental not only to education but to building a healthy, socially just and democratic society… the arts, [were] recognised as a civilising influence and fundamental to human development. A child’s capacity for expression through movement, drawing or music was a means to strengthen identity and therefore social cohesion. Education through the arts, it was believed, was at the heart of the regeneration of democracy. Today the rationale for the place of the arts in public education is primarily economic.”

Perhaps the market, rather than the fascist demagogues, is what we ought to be fighting now when it comes to saving the arts from the swingeing cuts axe?