UXD 2:The Next Five Years.

Five years ago, I wrote a blog about the then 31 year history of the Unemployed Xmas Dinner. I don't want to write one every year (I'd rather concentrate on enjoying the event) but I did think it'd be nice to now, a full lustrum later, write a little follow up. As I explained in 2019's blog it's just a case of holding on to some memories at a time when we reach an age when our memories, and bodies, start failing us.

In the 2019 blog I wrote about two events that were specific to that year. Firstly that Miriam and Ian were expecting a child and that that child might be born during the UXD. Arlow didn't quite manage that but he was born the very next day when Damon and I were enjoying a few, quite a few, recovery pints in The Three Guineas. A pub in Reading train station. Classy.

I also wrote about how 2019's UXD would be the first time we'd held the event since we lost Bugsy so it's really nice to be able to report that this year his son Dylan will be making his first appearance. Something I'm pretty certain Bugsy would have been proud and happy about. In the intervening years there have, sadly, been more losses. Particularly of parents (including one just this week). A silly little Xmas dinner isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things but, for me, getting together with friends and family is - and this event seems to be a pretty good way of doing just that.

In 2019 we went to House of Flavours in Reading and a few of us ended up in The Blagrave Arms, to the best of my knowledge Reading's only gay pub. It was a fun night and though Adam dropped the Man of the Year award he did raise a toast for Bugsy. Which was quite moving. I was set next to Damon and he put his hand on my back because he knew it was an emotional moment for me as it was for lots of us. Not least Carole.

Then in 2020, we missed a year. For the first time since we started this nonsense. It won't be a surprise that Covid was the culprit. We simply couldn't do it. I harboured an idea of having a very late UXD in the spring or summer of 2021 but that never really took off. We were back, some of us - everyone had to make their own decisions, for Xmas 2021 with an event in Brixton.

Drinks in The Effra Tavern, Mexican food in DF Tacos, more drinks in The Dogstar and then me (and, thankfully, just me) getting 'coronavirus' (as we used to call it) the next day and spending the rest of the festive season in splendid isolation. I rather enjoyed it though pleased to report that this year I'll be back in action. In fact, I'm not only having an unemployed Xmas dinner, I'm having an EMPLOYED Xmas dinner. At least two of them. I'm really enjoying my work and I'm really liking all my new colleagues. There's even a couple of familiar faces amongst them!

2022 we were back in Reading at Bill's (pre-meal drinks in The Fisherman's Cottage) and we voted against joining the young and cool set in The Purple Turtle aftewards (too packed, yes - we're old) and instead went to The Hope Tap (a Wetherspoons house on Friar Street) where we saw a man sat on his own, knocking back a pint, and repeatedly watching Mike Read's UKIP Calypso on his phone. Each to his own.

Last year we had the meal in the pub (the idea being it would be cheaper, an idea presumably that someone who has not looked at a pub menu recently came up with). The Bay and Bracket in Victoria (a few of us had drinks in The Greencoat Boy beforehand and a few of us in The Albert after - apparently some continued on in Brixton but I'd gone home by then) which was very friendly and we got Santa hats and all that. I wasn't super impressed with my meal (and Mesude ate my starter, presuming that in Turkish tradition it was 'for the table') but the UXD isn't really about fine dining, it's about getting together. 

This blog is as much about getting some photos of the last five years out there as it is about the meals but I'm looking forward to tomorrow and seeing the, hopefully sixteen - maybe more and maybe less, people that are coming along to The Boundary pub and then Las Iguanas after. Rob (who, as tradition dictates, has booked him and myself into The Premier Inn) has told me he's meeting with our old friend Sean Provis in The Purple Turtle beforehand and that will take me right back to the early days, 1989, of the UXD. Merry Xmas everybody, here's some more photos and see a fair few of you tomorrow for the 35th (THIRTY-FIFTH) UXD!

Albums Of The Year 2024.

At the end of 2005 I was working in an office and most people had finished for Xmas. I was pretty bored to be honest. So I decided to put together some kind of metacritic list of the albums of the year.

I chose five publications and/or websites that had listed 50 (or more) of their best albums of the year. Selecting the top 50 I awarded 50 points for 1st, 49 for 2nd, and so on down to 1 point for 50th. I then crunched the numbers and made a list of the top 30 scoring.

This silly piece of time wasting proved to be quite popular so I continued and have done every year since. I used to send the e-mails round to a few mates who had either expressed an interest or I'm trying to impress in some way. Now I have a blog I'm gonna use this to disseminate the data. So, here we are, no photos, just a list of 2024's Top 30. Incidentally, the 20th (TWENTIETH) consecutive years I've done this. Enjoy (or not)....

 

1.Kim Gordon - The Collective

2.Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee

3.Rafael Toral - Spectral Evolution

4.Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u

5.Arooj Aftab - Night Reign

6.Bill Ryder-Jones - Iechyd Da

7.Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch

8.Charli XCX - Brat

9.Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood

10.Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer

11.Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wild God

12.Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown

13.Gillian Welch & David Rawlings - Woodland

14.Moin - You Never End

15.MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

16.Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future

17.Shellac - To All Trains

18.Mdou Moctar - Funeral for Justice

19.Jack White - No Name

20.Fontaines D.C. - Romance

21.The Smile - Wall of Eyes

22.Nala Sinephro - Endlessness

23.Shabaka - Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

24.Dialect - Atlas Of Green

25.The Body & Dis Fig - Orchards Of A Futile Heaveb

26.Clairo - Charm

27.Ka - The Next Thief to Jesus

28.Peter Perrett - The Cleansing

29.English Teacher - This Could Be Texas

30.Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band - Loophole

 

sources:-

Pitchfork

The Quietus

Uncut

Mojo

The Wire

 

previous winners  (click on to see full list):-

2023 Lankum - False Lankum

2022 Kendrick Lamar - Mr Morale And The Big Steppers

2021 The Weather Station - Ignorance

2020 Bob Dylan - Rough And Rowdy Ways

2019 Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

2018 Low - Double Negative

2017 Richard Dawson - Peasant

2016 David Bowie - Blackstar

2015 Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness

2014 Swans - To Be Kind 

2013 My Bloody Valentine - mbv

2012 Frank Ocean - Channel Orange

2011 PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

2010 LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening 

2009 Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion

2008 Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

2007 LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver

2006 Joanna Newsom - Ys

2005 Sufjan Stevens - Illinois

Walking With Atheists:A Journey Into The Evolutionary Puzzles of Faith and Faithlessness.

"As an atheist I rape and murder as much as I want. The amount I want is zero" - Penn Jillette

I'm an atheist and it doesn't really cause me any problems in my life. In fact I'm very happy to be an atheist. I don't need religion, faith, or spirituality in my life to guide me. I sometimes do the wrong thing but I at least know when I've done the wrong thing. I have morality and I get it from my experience of being around others, being aware of their feelings, and trying to bring happiness and pleasure, rather than pain, into people's lives. 

I can, and you can, have a sense of morality and it doesn't need to, in my view - shouldn't, come from religion. If you're only being kind because you're worried that your God, or gods, will punish you at some unspecified later date then what sort of person does that make you? Can't you just be kind because kindness itself is its own reward? Because being kind is a basic condition for humanity?

Dr Will Gervais is a cultural evolutionary psychologist (these jobs exist! How can I get one?) for London's Brunel University and, with his team, he had spent over a decade scientifically researching atheism. He was at Skeptics in the Pub - Online (so very much not 'in the Pub') this week for Atheism, Religion, and Human Nature:The Evolutionary Puzzles of Faith and Atheism and it was an interesting talk, if one that went off on some rather strange tangents.

But, hey, atheists are weird right - so that's to be expected. Dr Gervais's belief is that it's not just atheists that are weird. All humans are weird are not just because, in his examples, they do things like ski-jumping and hammer nails into their face (told you some of the tangents were odd) but because we do things that other animals don't do.

Like build buildings and make art. Though I'd argue that animals do build buildings (the nests of birds, the dams of beavers, even anthills) and they do make art (not so much the painting elephants and more the bowerbirds and their collection of all things blue). Which Dr Gervais went on to concede himself. He did make the case, however, that one things animals haven't done is evolve, or invent, any religions.

As far as we can tell. We can't read the minds of animals (or each other) but they certainly don't appear to have any religious beliefs. But in the human story, religions appear in every part of the world and throughout all of our history and people get so into their religion they are willing to fight and, sometimes, die for it. For what I now imagine were reasons of contention, Dr Gervais suggested that one of the fastest growing religious groups in the world today is the group that includes me:- atheists and agnostics.

A thought which led Dr Gervais to asking himself two questions. (1) How is it we became the only religious species on the planet? (2) How come religion is not universal? How come people like me don't buy into it. Slightly disappointingly, the doc then didn't really answer those questions and, instead, went on a different, although interesting and illuminating, angle. 

One that involved lots of graphs, illustrations of (the late great) Hannibal Lecter, Richard Dawkins, Johnny Cash, and the 19th century philosopher William James as well as bizarre references to ivory poaching, unicycles, and smoking crack. At one point he even managed to shoehorn in a fictional story about a man having sex with a chicken carcass before cooking it and eating it. You had to be there, perhaps. At the talk that is, not in the chicken fucker's bedroom or kitchen.

About twenty years back there was a boom in interest in studying atheism. Popular books and scholarly papers were both released and some of them had it that religious belief was somehow 'natural' or a cognitive default and that atheism was something you had to work at and is somehow 'unnatural'. Although I'd contest this. Atheism came very naturally to me and though I asked myself questions about it, and continue to do so, it's always been the answer for me.

So how many of 'us' are there? How many atheists are out there in the world? It's not an easy question to get an answer too. Not least because atheism is illegal in some countries (Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Afghanistan, and the United Arab Emirates). In all of those countries (and others including Yemen, Pakistan, Qatar, Maldives, Brunei, Somalia, Nigeria, and Mauritania) atheism, or more specifically apostasy, is punishable with death.

Understandably, people in those countries who don't believe in God are reticent about saying so but even in more liberal countries there is no serious or reliable data. Some say there are about seven hundred million atheists/agnostics on the planet. In the US (in places, a very religious country) a 2017 survey showed that 3% of the population identified as atheists but when the same people were asked if they believed in God, 12% of respondents said they did not.

It seems they don't want to be labelled atheists - even though they are atheists. That's because there is, in America certainly - but also in many other countries, a negative view of atheism and atheists. Another American survey asked people if they would vote for or let their son or daughter marry various different types of person:- a black person, a Muslim, a Jew, a woman (for the voting one), or an atheist.

Atheists scored lower than all other groups (this survey is regularly carried out and until twenty years ago the gays used to be voted lowest but they overtook the atheists about twenty years ago) and in one survey people said they would rather trust a convicted rapist than an atheist. Which is shocking but sadly not surprising when you see who they've just chosen for their next president.

What drives the negative perception of atheism is, to return to Penn Jillette's quote, a belief they are untrustworthy, that they have no religion to guide their morality and are therefore free to do as they wish. For some reason, some religious people seem to assume that without religion everyone wants to go around raping and murdering whereas most people have no desire whatsoever to rape or murder.

One survey found respondents suggesting that atheists were the most likely group to commit incest, kick a puppy, or become a serial killer and yet I've never done any of those things and to the best of my knowledge neither have any of my atheist friends. Slightly depressingly, these survey results were replicated in countries other than America (which can be a bit of an outlier, let's be honest).

Even in Canada and even in the world's most secular country, Czechia. Finland was the only country where respondents didn't think that. Good on the Finns. This was all interesting stuff and it was made very clear that atheists are hugely discriminated against all over the world but at the same time I've never felt discriminated against because of my atheism (though, thankfully, I don't live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar) and, more to the point, why didn't Dr Gervais answer the two questions he asked at the start of the talk.

I can only assume it is because he is an atheist and therefore highly untrustworthy! He was, however, a good speaker and it was a good talk. A Q&A took in humanism, neurodiversity, utilitarianism, the 'Buddhism problem' (a religion but with no gods), and the difference between atheists and agnostics (in my view, all agnostics are atheists even if not all atheists are agnostics) and even Will's dog (an atheist dog) made an appearance. Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Dr Kat Ford for hosting, thanks to Dr Gervais, and, most of all, thanks to God. You non-existent bastard.

 

 

 

Gravity Grave:Jeff Wall @ the White Cube.

People fall from trees, they lie in the street, they lie on the grass near their horse, and they lie - looking suicidal - on their kitchen floor beneath a table. There's a room in Bermondsey's White Cube gallery (which is where, earlier today, I went to see Jeff Wall's Life in Pictures retrospective) where the art historian James Fox speaks knowingly about the 78 year old Canadian photographer and artist's penchant for showing people returning to the earth from where they came.

Even graves, and graveyards, crop up fairly regularly and he's got some fairly offbeat themes too - kitchens and cleaning utensils aren't normal fodder for photo art. But Wall is a different kind of photographer. He meticulously plans his images and arranges people to pose for them. Though it's not exactly clear how he managed to capture the boy, above, in full flight as he falls from a tree. A childhood accident Wall wanted to revisit.

Confrontations appear in his art, too. The two guys in suits and dickie bows having a set to or a pair of well to do looking young lads boxing in a front room of a nice tidy house. Most of the works at the White Cube didn't have titles attached (the ones I've added come from their website) but that's not particularly relevant. Surely a photograph is as good as a photograph is whatever it's called.

The little girl lying on the sidewalk on a sunny day in Vancouver is a powerful, ambiguous, image as is the one of a young woman standing up and talking on a telephone wearing a white coat. All looks very serious. I'm less impressed with the lady in the sombre looking black dress and her gentleman friend but others seem to start telling stories that we must finish ourselves.

The woman surrounded by, trapped even, her library of books. What's going on there? As for the topless guy on rough ground, he seems to be on the receiving end of some kind of violence but what kind and why? Wall's been doing this kind of stuff for over forty years now so he's learned how to use his (mostly very big) lightbox photographs to tell these stories.

 

Recovery (2017-18)

 

Insomnia (1994)

 

What to leave in and what to leave out. Recovery looks an outlier at first as it's a photo of a painting but you soon notice that one of the faces is that of a real man. What's he doing there? Insomnia is the photo of the suicidal looking man even if the title suggests a different diagnosis. What of the man surrounded by lightbulbs? I overheard fellow gallery visitors suggesting his wife would be pretty pissed off with the amount of electricity he's using up. It costs money, you know.

 

Wall looks at life's little, and sometimes big, moments with an eye for detail and an eye for the curious. There are some works at the White Cube that are so big I couldn't get a decent photo of them (so they're not included here) and there are some black and white photos too which aren't included in here because I didn't really like them. I'm on a downer when it comes to black and white photography at the moment. I can't see the point of it when colour is so much better - and truer. It's like listening to records in mono.

 

Mimic (1982)

 

There's a woman coming down some stairs, a cleaner in a fancy Frank Lloyd Wright style house, and a load of people hanging around outside a nightclub. None of them particularly life changing or memorable moments but all very much part of the rich tapestry of life and all rendered as beautiful by Wall.

 

Then there's Mimic, a recreation of an ugly racist incident that Wall witnessed on the streets of his hometown Vancouver many years ago. The Flooded Grave, with its starfish and everything, plugs right into what seems to be Wall's obsession with death (mind you, who's not obsessed with death? It comes to us all, it's the one certainty) although I prefer the thoughtful man perched high above a Canadian city (Toronto perhaps?) pondering something. Mortality? Affairs of the heart? Work? What to have for dinner? Who knows.

 

The Flooded Grave (1998-2000)

In the Legion (2022)

 

Bands play, people do improbable aerobics in legion bars, somebody falls off a horse, people go for a walk in the desert, girls play in the river, somebody sits under what looks like a motorway bridge, a heavily tattooed man in a Charles Bukowski t-shirt reads a book on a sunny day, and there are some very dirty kitchens.

 

Oh, and there's a giant naked woman in some sort of library complex. Because .... why not? It's known that Wall spends a long time using technology to alter and define his photographs but I'm still not sure if that giant naked lady is some kind of Duane Hanson artwork or if it's a normal size naked lady that Wall has increased in size to give the image an uncanny edge.

 

The Giant (1992)

 

The Sicilian lady standing by a wall in her native island is a reference to a classic Italian film (one I can't bloody remember now (!) and one that was also pastiched by The White Lotus) and that's very much the kind of thing Wall gets up to. Returning to the aforementioned video, Fox talks about how some of Wall's paintings are inspired by artists like Manet, Goya, and Delacroix.

Though, to be honest, I couldn't get it from my visit to the White Cube. I liked (almost) all of Wall's photographs though from a young woman meditating, or just relaxing, on what appears to be the roof of a car to a group of people hanging around outside a theatre showing a play, or film, with Glenda Jackson in. All life, it seems, is in Jeff Wall's work and it's not so much as if he's raging about gravity and the grave, so much as he's celebrating our (hopefully) long journey towards it with all the bumps in the road that every journey will inevitably have. I'm glad I went (and I also enjoyed my pie and mash in Manze's on Tower Bridge Road beforehand too).