Azerbaijan advertising

The Southbank was playing a fabulous jazz set last night, led by the impressive pianist Shahin Novrasli, who has an official website here but I prefer this one. He reminded me of Keith Jarrett, but Novrasli I think is quite some better. Or perhaps more interesting. Later in the evening, Novrasli was joined by two spectacular fellow Azeris playing Azeri string instruments, but I can’t for the life of me find out who these two men were. The audience fell for them above all the others, including Novrasli. But I liked Novrasli. Anyway, what I hated about the evening were members of the audience talking and chatting as if they were in a pub with the jukebox on and taking pictures with their phones and discussing their emails with their friends. What I loved about the evening, however, was the Azeri advertising that was being handed out as we left QEH. On glossy A5, white font against black background with some flames at the bottom, was printed:

YOU BRITS

LOVE OUR OIL

- YOU’LL LOVE

OUR ART TOO

Never was a truer word spoken. Bravo to the Azeris for saying it as it is. I laughed and laughed and laughed. Indeed, as the musicians had walked onto the stage at the beginning of the night, huge words appeared on the screen behind the set:

OIL

&

JAZZ

I am now waiting for the Angolans to host their own jazz festival at the Southbank. They’d do this so well. So very well.

turks & caicos & tories & cash

My interest in Turks & Caicos is growing, especially since reading this report in The Independent. I especially focused on the last two paragraphs:

‘Lord Ashcroft has made five speeches in the Lords in nine years. In his first, he urged that Britain must retain a military presence in the Caribbean to protect its former colonies, including Turks and Caicos Islands, where he declared he had business interests. He last spoke in December 2008, in a foreign affairs debate. Before that, he had not made a speech since November 2006, when he criticised the legislation which bans political parties from receiving donations from abroad.

‘Lord Ashcroft had a condition attached to the award of his peerage, in which he was told that he had to make the UK his permanent home for tax purposes by the end of 2000. Michael Oakeshott, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman in the Lords, is planning to introduce legislation in January that would force every peer to choose between paying UK taxes or giving up their seats in the House of Lords.’

And to that last line, one might add… and choose between being a British citizen and paying taxes or being kicked off this grey island once and for all. If you don’t pay taxes, you shouldn’t be here at all.

Maka!

Angola blog

At last Rafael has begun his blog. About bloody time too! Maka Angola is in English and Portuguese so many people can read it without any problems. And should. Rafael is an excellent reporter and investigator, who gets information that most of the rest of us can only fantasise about. After he’s dug up corruption among the Angola elite, I hope he’ll start digging over here, in our City, for example, finally putting paid to the notion that worthy Westerners must put Africa straight. The real revolution is coming… and remember, you heard if here first.

I should have said that Raf’s blog ironically coincides with an intriguing event: the Angolan president, José Eduardo dos Santos (ZeDu), declaring zero tolerance on corruption. What? I hear you Angolans shout! Yes, Zedu says no more corruption will be tolerated. There have been some marvelous and funny comments about this on certain facebook pages.

poesia

 

I wonder,

she said, lying in bed,

if anyone’s ever done that

with a John Lewis

curtain rail.

Texts’ Bones

‘When I was young I thought that words meant something; now it seems that meaning is the last things words are required to do; semantics getting in the way of honest, playful textual decoration – and here is me without overalls or wallpaper table to hand.’

Twelve short stories inside The Facebook of Dr Caligari has just been published by SKREV PRESS thanks to the sweat, blood and caffeine intake of editor and also poet, Daithidh MacEochaidh. If you want to buy the book, drop Daithidh an email, details on the SKREV site. One of those short stories is mine, and first came to life via Barbara Campbell’s 1001 nights arts project. Thanks to Dai Vaughan whose interview at Ready Steady Book led me to Daithidh’s work and on to SKREV. I’ve recently read Vaughan’s Germs, which I loved, and was recently given his latest novel, The Treason of Sparrows, which has a splendid first line: I’m an old man and I want to scream. Shame I missed the launch here.

Israel & Angola

I’ve only just found this, having entered into conversations with the author, an interesting journalist by the name of Yotam Feldman who works for Haaretz. It’s a nice piece, and I hope he writes more. I hope, in particular, that an Israeli journalist might find out for us whether it really was the Israelis who killed Jonas Malheiro Savimbi. How I wish I’d met him. How I wish. I remember feeling sick with regret the day I heard he died. I was in Lisbon, interviewing Unita members, when the news came through that he had been killed. We turned on the television and watched the images of this extraordinary rebel leader, his heavy bullet-holed corpse being dragged and dropped infront of the cameras in eastern Angola. I felt sick for all the Angolans who’d been killed in the war for it to end with such a pathetic sight. A vacuum suddenly sucked through decades of lives and history and memories. Just for this. Shot dead to nothing. It was a tragic and awful day. Not tragic for Savimbi’s loss of life but for so much loss of life that ended in one miserable body being pushed about the floor for the cameras. Oh my god, I felt sick. And I saw grown men in Lisbon weeping and collapsing to the floor, unable to contain the years of waiting for the war to end, for a better Angola, only for it to end like this.

walthamstow

 

‘Nah, I live in Chingford now.’

‘Oh right. I’m not far from you then. Walthamstow.’

‘My mum was born in Walthamstow, and drives the buses there now. Teenagers are awful.’

‘Which buses?’

‘Well, mainly coaches now.’

‘And my dad’s on the underground.’

‘Do you like Walthamstow?’

‘Nah. I hate it.’

‘What? Even the market?’

‘Especially the market. Bunch of pervs eyeing you up all the time. Forget it.’

‘What like?’

‘Saying pervy things.’

‘They don’t say pervy things to me. But that’s the great advantage of getting older: men stop seeing you as a body.’

*

Others might be leaving, but we’re here to stay.

Turks & Caicos, and the BBC

If a government buys ‘a fleet’ of Land Rovers for its ministers, does that amount to corruption? If the leader of a country has a bullet-proof car, does that amount to exuberant extravagance? If a prime minister has a private jet – don’t they all? – is that really enough to destroy an island economy? A few parties for celebrities? Is that enough for our government – that’s the British government – to decide that enough is enough and these little children need to be put back in their box so that we can take over and show them how to run a country properly? I’m thinking multi-million houses in Mayfair. I’m thinking tens of thousands of pounds on PM’s wives’ hairdressers. I’m thinking BAE systems, a story that the BBC itself has reported at some length, if not enough.

Apparently the former premier of Turks & Caicos, Galmore Williams, lied to the people of the islands about money and parties and a few other things. But as far as I know, old Galmore did not lie about going to war in Iraq, he didn’t fiddle a report that has since contributed directly to the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the Middle East. He didn’t fix his eldest son up with an internship in the US Republican party, or buy flats to rent out in Bristol. He didn’t believe he was the voice of the son of God, and insist that war was a Christian endeavour that would save the lives of millions and make the world a better place. No. Galmore Williams bought some Land Rovers (I wonder who was behind that deal), sat in the back of a bullet-proof car (even I’ve done that), and had himself a private jet and a few celeb friends. Isn’t that standard behaviour for many British bankers, the accountants who work in The City, a chunk of British businessmen, lots of grade C celebrities in the UK, let alone the grade As and Bs, and our delightfully superior prime minister and ministers?

The BBC Today programme ran what you could hardly describe as a report on the Turks & Caicos, this morning, three months after the Queen’s men decided to take it back. Mike Thomson, who seems to report on any country between the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, made no reference to the outstanding hypocrisy of our tiny island lording it over even tinier islands. The Queen’s Governor, pink-cheeked Gordon Wetherell (he looks more like a turnip farmer than a diplomat, but still…) told a local news agency on his arrival, ‘Right now I’m the Governor of the TCI and very glad to be here.’ You bet he is. He has an entire island to himself, according to the BBC report, which the BBC reporter had to fly to in a plane (in a BBC private jet? how much did it cost to send Mike Thomson there? presumably T&C don’t have decent local journos as well as no decent local premiers…) to meet him.

Listen out, if you can, for more reports on the T&C; and listen out for the extraordinary failures of BBC reporting. The line, I think, that made me laugh (or was it swear?) most was when Thomson suggested to a local politician that ‘high-level corruption’ had destroyed Turks & Caicos economy entirely. And yet, according to the BBC website’s own material, the Turks & Caicos economy comprises no less than a little lobster and conch exports. No irony here, Mike? Reporting as a Brit about ruined economies and corruption and lying? It seems it bypassed the man. And, of course, it bypassed the self-satisfied unbearably smug Justin Webb, the latest white male to join the Today team. He made what I can only describe as a chirpy grunt off the back of Thomson’s report, which ended with a local T&C man insisting that direct rule from London had pushed local people back to slavery. Absolutely hilarious, Justin.

Buhari’s silk

Buhari came to me in the night. Yes, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the man who has been both the head of the state of Nigeria and the failed head of state. He came to me in the night with his hands full. He stood beside me and opened his palms, releasing hundreds of weaver birds into my bedroom. From beneath his golden boubou, he pulled out a roll of scroll which he unfurled in his heavy fingers until it was stretched flat to the length of his upper body. Read this, he said. And I read. Silk scarves for sale woven by the weaver birds that were now weaving nests in my ceiling and my bookshelves. There were a wide range of prices, from fifty-nine ninety-nine to one-hundred-and-sixty-nine ninety-nine, depending on the size and the design. The most expensive were those that portrayed Buhari’s beautiful face. I couldn’t remember, though, whether weaver birds can spin silk and weave silk. I lay asleep unable to resolve this puzzle. And then Buhari vanished. I spent the night trying to call Adewale, to ask him whether weaver birds weave silk or whether Buhari was lying. But I couldn’t get through.

Perhaps Michael Peel is to blame. His book, A Swamp Full of Dollars, has been on my mind. Good old Michael: he has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. And you can read a chapter here. I highly recommend it: Michael challenges our complacency and challenges the judgements we, up here in the north, make of governments and peoples in the south. Well done Peely. But perhaps Adewale is the one to blame. I’ve just started reading his Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays (which you can buy signed copies of by emailing adewale@thenewgong.com for just a tenner!), which should be read by anyone who has a serious interest in Saro-Wiwa.

racist stereotyping on channel four

These people don’t want to look white. They don’t want to look Western. They want to look like photoshopped pictures that appear in magazines. It’s an outrage that Channel Four could present a documentary that is absent of any serious analysis or reflection about race, but also about consumerism and perfection. We all live amidst the pressure to look like botox beings, regardless of colour. White people aren’t the only people who have long legs. Lots of white people are short and fat or knock-kneed. White people don’t all have chiselled chins and jaws and noses. A growing number of white westerners are obese. And there’s no such thing as an African look or an African body. It’s nonsense. Have none of these people been to Ethiopia?

Is the BNP funding this show?

There is real racism in this country. Of course there is. But the people in these programmes want to look like animated stars on computer games. Their desire to be white is a desire to look like an image in a magazine or an advert, a faked image. And Channel Four is, for some bizarre reason, promoting the idea that white equals Angelina Jolie. (Where did she get those lips?) Scream it: a defined jaw is not mainstream!

Wee bit sinister: isn’t that man doing the skin lightening a South African? Or is that just me?