mr verge's prize

mr verge has given us something to chew on in his choice of prize for unpicking the covert scottish nationalism embedded in the Scottish Makar's poem illustrated by a drone show over Edinburgh on New Year's Eve. I liked the drone show. 

"I vote for a recap of the Jimmy Galligan/Mimi Groves story (American madness, Mr Mike) with a John Cooper Clarke video clip counterpoint, say "Some Cunt Said The N-Word", which would also serve as a counterblast and antidote to that ghastly Scots Makar drivel...v./" 

 

 Here we go with the recap:

15 year old American Mimi Groves, on getting her driving licence, took a 3 second video of herself, saying:  I can drive, niggers. She didn't say I can drive, niggas, which is the spelling used by rappers and black chaps talking to other black chaps, in an allowed, ironic sort of way. I tried to find an unexpurgated video clip - but they have all been beeped over, however, you can determine the spelling from the lip movements. It's a triumphalist moment. It's not very nice. If she'd said:  I can drive, fatties,  or I can drive, spazzes, that wouldn't have been very nice, either. She was 15. That's young. 15 year olds are often intemperate and characterised by immature judgement.

The habit that young people have formed of filming their lives, their meals, the patterns formed on the foam on their coffee, themselves, and then posting them on platforms that render them liable to be reposted has brought grief to many, especially when their dic pics are viewed by their employers. In Mimi's case, not only did it have life-changing consequences, but it triggered a massive, still on-going controversy, played out ponderously, academically and polemically in the United States. This was because her 3 second video was sent on to her fellow school pupil, Jimmy Galligan, who then complained about it to his teachers, who took no action. I don't think Jimmy liked Mimi. Jimmy, also a young teenager, kept the video clip for three years, when he used it to scupper Mimi's chances of entering the College of her choice - now 18, she was required to withdraw, because of the racism she had displayed in the 3 second video. Here are your Book Club Questions:

1. Was Mimi a racist?
2. Was Jimmy spiteful or motivated by altruism?
3. Why would the College authorities pay any mind, when the High School teachers didn't?
4. Can you hear a Bandwagon?  Or is that a Medicine Show?
   
5. Why doesn't Mimi change her name and apply to Cambridge, or Luton?

 I have said many times that America is a foreign country, where they do things differently. There used to be dissenting voices, but now a vast porridge of uniformity clogs national debate, thickens individual thought and proscribes freedom of speech. Lenny Bruce challenged the thought police back in the mid century but he couldn't get away with it now. Well he didn't then - in and out of Court and prison cells. Here's a line or two from mr ishmael:  

 

Lenny Bruce was a little before my time and I discovered him through LP recordings and transcripts of his gigs;  he remains the funniest man I have ever heard, the most gracious and empathic, one of the connected ones, a warrior, as Joan Rivers described him. An accidental  martyr to his drug addiction and to his persecution by the US  authorities, Bruce's last performances were convoluted rants against his legal tormentors, harrowing rather than entertaining but his body of work - Didn't Ya Ever Piss In The Sink, He Said Blah Blah?, Religions Inc. and the rest are comedic scripture.  There is not much videotaped  stuff and the 'seventies film Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman is just a Dustin Hoffman film but there are a lot of gig recordings and books about Bruce on How To Talk Dirty And Influence People..... 

The moral upheavals of the twentieth century - racism, Vietnam, Chicago were chronicled and stage-lit by Bruce and his followers. Like the Rolling Stones ripping-off Ry Cooder, successive generations  of UK and American comics have built careers on Bruce's improvisations. He influenced his contemporaries, The Smothers Brothers and George Carlin, and  his  black successors, Richard Pryor and  the ghastly, fabulously successful  Chris Rock and his actually humourless  automatism of shock, motormouthing offence without light, grievance without remedy.

Before he OD'd in Phil Spector's toilet, crazy-saint Lenny Bruce, well, he perfected the art of How to Talk Dirty  and Influence People.

He was a profound influence, his raps accenting  much of what appears here. I heard somebody say shagging, in a BBC play the other day, they meant fucking; contextually, fucking was the right word but they said shagging, shagging just wasn't right. It was a bit like when people of a certain age say Oh Shh --ugar, everybody knows they mean Oh Shit, everybody hears Oh Shit in their minds; the person who said Oh Shhh-ugar wants people to think Oh Shit without them having to say the filthy word in their nice clean mouths but nobody has actually said or heard Oh Shit, even though, in code, they have. Coded swearing, that is some fucked-up shit.

 

Now, what if young Mimi had said,  I can drive, n..ninjas. Coded racial slurring.

 

mr ishmael profoundly admired John Cooper Clarke,
 born 25 January 1949, he is an English performance poet, who first became famous as a "punk poet" in the late 1970s. mr ishmael was so moved by Evidently Chicken Town that he read the poem to the ishmaelings when they were about 14, and told them there are no dirty words. Just dirty minds and evil intentions. Here's an extract:  

The fucking cops are fucking keen
To fucking keep it fucking clean
The fucking chief’s a fucking swine
Who fucking draws a fucking line
At fucking fun and fucking games
The fucking kids he fucking blames
Are nowhere to be fucking found 

Anywhere in Chickentown

 

Here's the great JCC in performance:

mr ishmael again:

And this, as the world is barracked and harangued, fettered and coralled, lectured, abused and short-changed by pinstripe, banker mafiosi, is our ration,  white male millionaires, interviewing each other in deathly non-debate;  white male hacks scribbling to order for their whoremasters and  white male comics, like The Crazy Gang on valium, wanking away there, on telly, at their failed, limp, geriatric crotches, as funny as cancer, rank and cloying, like piss in an old people's home.