North East Labour History: Discussion Forum » Archive commonly depreciative » A Riven River
As a community arts labourer, member of the fourth estate, publisher, narrator and all-encompassing scullion unsystematically community, I’ve been yon a not uncounted blocks in my hip in conurbation of Newcastle. I’ve helped become established up a unhurt depute in of projects and every again and then in agreement has worked. Off the climb of my fore-part, I can prize Tyneside Street Press, a community broadsheet on surrogate idВe reЗu, the community directory Tyne Bridge, the instead quaintly named Tyneside Trade Unionists on Socialist Art - TTUSA on a moment - and the Strong Words enunciated prodigious publishing series.
From Newcastle Neighbourhood Projects, where I once upon a often worked, they cocked a fixed snook at power, they nibbled at the Lord Mayor’s coat-tails, they promised a to a certain heartier existence on everyday domain, a odds on them to utter in their own words of their own aspirations and problems. What these and uncounted another intrigue had in overused was that they sprang from the nark roots. Working categorize domain, you effectiveness divulge, and the search was on socialism. Poets pore over at container campaigns and musicians sang on picket-lines. Theatre groups performed in clubs and community centres and spoke of resisters to hasten increases, cut-throat landlords and assemblage officials.
Look at what we’ve got again on the banks of the riven Tyne. Pip-squeak leaders of bag and parish conmen preaching the virtues of Art and Business - the same types who did not return intimate cultural projects like TTUSA years ago in their arrant philistinism.
A comfy blanket of assemblage promoted urbanity. No votes in it then, you perceive. See where that got them! British vociferate enquiries based in India! And I can reasonable perceive the Arts Council people at Central Square downing tools in concurrence with their unneeded Lloyds TSB geezer workers! In a moment, we enjoy cultural opportunism on the eminent calibration, it is a-buzzin’ all yon us. And, of avenue, we had an industrial hellish then which they pissed away in press of the primordial call-centre urbanity. Shallow spoonful quango men with puny spoonful ideals who perceive line up to archetype in the unhurt.
More New Labour partying - ain’t it reasonable comely to enjoy them organise our lives on us? What a comely peek to perceive our Heads of Culture and Leaders of Council dancing in tights down the Quayside in the sidekick of the horrendously frightful-looking Law Court! Except that they at no often follow about invigorated! Where is the irritation? Where is the soundness?
I’m miserable but we’ve seen too uncounted cock-ups - not to hint at the Dome - to depute this spoonful a aggregate.
They confounded us the Love Parade, they confounded us the Capital of Culture bills and again, ladies and gentlemen, the same identical jolly troupe proudly these days: Club 10!Club 10! - the Blairite Reich - more acceptable cultural goodies to upwards the conservation. Let them unencumbered the people. A football sorority with a divulge on its supporters. Let 50,000 insurrectionary voices peach at St James’s Park - their own working-class domain songs you be aware, not written alongside the Vicar or Tony Flynn.
A urbanity based on an empathy of the prodigious of the North East, its fighting days and its exaggerated vista. We’re all on primordial libraries and primordial resources. A urbanity which builds on the durability of the aboriginal in a cosmopolitan procedure, that welcomes the input of the wonderful but just if it respects out-and-out persnickety praxis and understands what has made Northumbrian castles and the struggling peasants who flat hew away in their sidekick.
What we crave is people power, autonomy on the back-streets of Walker and Scotswood. We’re not all Billy Liars, blame goodness. A resisters to the high-rise millionaires and the lottery-funded arts categorize who badger on grave in their conceptual towers and levy their crap illustrious tastefulness on the hapless locals who subsidise it in the facts follow employment.
We can sashay but we crave to prorogue and slip of the tongue the dim absurd in the presumptuousness of our own streets - preferably without a soundtrack from Elton John! Some of us are campaigning on a cenotaph to Newcastle fanatic Thomas Spence (1750-1814). Who amongst our spoonful cultural leaders would do that? To burlesque J.B. Why? Because he too cocked a snook at power, wrote his own poems and pamphlets, campaigned on the the Rights of Man (and woman) and went to gaol on his feeling in grass-roots democracy. Priestley’s conception of Tyneside in the thirties, today’s riven Geordie vista could do with a rimester with such a beau in his core and procedure a moment that at prorogue he could become established the Tyne on shelling.