Adios Underwood Street and building culture from the ground up

Yesterday was the last working day at Friends of the Earth's London office in Underwood Street, before moving into the new place south of the river on Monday morning. I got to see the office one last time on Wednesday evening and bid it farewell. I didn't hold the building in any particular affection - unlike my respect for the people working within it - but it ticks all the boxes for the end of an era.

A phrase that's been kicking round in my head a while is building culture from the ground up - the idea in moving to the new office in Stockwell is that my colleagues in London have a chance to do just that. Yes, pure physical space matters, but space and how you use it also has a knock-on effect on ways of working. 

Moving gives them a chance to declare a do-over - to ask and answer all those questions about establishing a creative, dynamic and mutually supportive culture, in a space which hopefully fosters all of this.

A timely question for local campaign groups might be: does the space where you meet, work and play together foster a culture like that? Rare is the group who can create their space - but even the smallest town offers a choice of venues.

Brain permitting, I might run through my Top 5 favourite local group meeting venues with you in the coming days.

Pulp with depth: Roger Zelazny's This Immortal

What I like about Zelazny's This Immortal – and I'm wondering if this is characteristic of his work as a whole (see Lord of Light) – is that it's about mind games. Below its post-apocalyptic pulp setting lives a very clever long con being played on the protagonist. And it's all the better for not telling you just how many of the supporting characters are complicit in it.

The plot is deceptively simple – one of Zelazny's usual Ubermenschen is detailled to give an alien a tour of a shattered Earth, its real estate effectively up for the sale to the highest bidder. They are joined by assorted friends, enemies and frenemies, against a backdrop of monuments and mutants. It being pulp – there is a lot of conflict. It being Zelazny – a most conversational author – most of is verbal.

This Immortal (which I keep wanting to call My Immortal, after the notorious Harry Potter fanfic) has its faults. The novel is short to the point of being brusque in its set-up and execution. Were it not for the con coming to fruition at the end would feel as if Zelazny simply tired of the conceit. The superimposition of Greek mythology onto the mutants feels like a crude dry-run for the greater sophistication he was to employ in adapting the Hindu pantheon for Lord of Light. And while pretty good by the standards of the time, This Immortal still presents a fairly masculinist view of the future and the people who inhabit it.

But Zelazny also uses this little puzzle box of a book to nod to colonialism and anti-colonial resistance, to the complicity of native culture with the former as well as its underpinning of the latter. There's a wonderful comic scene covering all these bases in which the tour party witness the dismantling of the Great Pyramid, which is ostensibly being done so that the film can be played in reverse to recreate its construction.

This, I think, illustrates why it bagged a Hugo back in the late sixties. This Immortal might be pulp, but it's pulp with depth.

When in Bear Gardens... do bearface!

March mission: no book left unread on my shelves

I worked out today I have a good dozen books at least which are still wholly or partly unread. As I am running out of shelf space I have set myself a March mission of either reading them or moving them on.

To anyone who bought me any of these as presents, I'm sorry. At least I'm going to give them a good (if belated) read now. And they could be awesome! [hopeful look]

Here are that dusty dozen:

Made it half-way through... but deserves a second chance

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Geoff Ryman, Was
Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Busman's Holiday

Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements
Fritz, InExActArt - The Autopoietic Theatre of Augusto Boal: A Handbook of Theatre of the Oppressed Practice
Kamer, The Faciliatator's Guide To Participatory Decision Making
Nichols & Jenkinson, Leading A Support Group

Was worried it'd be too grim

Maggie Gee, The White Family
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Wandering lonely in search of muse

The Chatto Book of Love Poetry

Wildly ambitious (version francaise)

Paul Verlaine, Poems Saturniens

Frighteningly thick

Stephen Inwood, A History of London

Wonderwoman alive, well and working as a local journalist in Devon?

The Mask Scene

The Mask Scene hit the party.
The mark of Legion on each face.
The Mask Scene take to the dancefloor.
Strike one down and two more take their place.

The Mask Scene got will to power
Say they've got shoes to fill.
They reassure the host, whose smile's a ghost.
They're only here with time to kill

The Mask Scene got culture of change.
And you can hear them say.
On our way.
ON OUR WAY!

The Mask Scene beckon to the belles and beaux
An offer they dare not refuse
They slow dance while they wait for the capture of the state
The Mask Scene are making the news.

The scenesters are rolling the drunks down the hill.
Their masks are starting to fall.
From the commanding heights they bid us goodnight.
That damn mask scene is running it all.

The Mask Scene got culture to change
And you can hear them say.
On our way.
ON OUR WAY!

Elegiac-critical conservativism

It's an uncomfortable truth that Tradition sometimes has alternative, sometimes more effective ammunition against society than Radical alternatives.

Consider the interests and powers inevitably aligned behind the status quo. Regard

also the emotional appeal of what is and what was – of things endangered by the exorable trudge of progress – and what may have been - the half re-constructed, half imagined past of Downton Abbeyland.

You can come across this kind of discourse on both sides of the political spectrum, especially now the democratic Left have something to be nostalgic about, but its exponents can often be found among a certain kind of more or less thoughtful, civic-minded, small-c conservativism.

What I want to suggest, however, is that this discourse's prevailing relation to society is elegiac-critical. Elegiac, for they mourn the past, engage in nostalgic reconstruction, or at least find no faith in the modern.

Critical, because at their satirical best, the middle-class small c-conservative is clear-sighted enough to expose the foundations of present folly, even if he or she sees no ultimate solution. Even at their most apolitical, each look back in languour or existential crisis allows the reading that 'things were once better.' 

And that gives us space to have a conversation.To understand what they value. And to discuss how to preserve what they value in a better now.