Author Archive for John Kelly

Saudi Sinatra rocks the casbah

Published
by
John Kelly
on July 7, 2008
in Arts and culture and Middle east
. 1 Comment

The 10,000 crowd at the Fez festival of world sacred music were ecstatic—some literally so—when Mohamed Abdou (left) took centre stage on 15th June. The Saudi Sinatra is virtually unknown in the west, but in the middle east he is a multimillion-selling superstar. Backed by the magnificent syncopated strings of Abderarahim Mountassir, with a full mixed choir and desert percussion, the white-robed crooner rocked the casbah, or, more accurately, the magnificent gates of Bab Makina, surely one of the world’s most exotic venues, with a selection of hits old and new. His repertoire deals poetically with the poetry of the desert, sand, night and palms, but mostly Allah.

Non-believers were thin on the ground, perhaps because the event was unhelpfully billed as “Monotonous Chants of Heijaz,” but Prospect contributor and world music expert Joe Boyd and myself were converted. File under “you had to be there,” but George W needs to know that Islam has some of the best tunes.

Enough already with the smack, Shmu’el

Published
by
John Kelly
on June 11, 2008
in Media and Religion
. 0 Comments

There are less than 300 Jews in British prisons, and Samuel is almost certainly the only convicted (former) international drug trafficker amongst the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill in north London. “The Prisoner,” episode one of Jews, a three-part BBC4 documentary which starts on Wednesday 18th June, charts Samuel’s mission to reassimilate into a community which is in many ways more challenging than his previous nine years of hard time in Brazilian, Israeli and English prisons.

“A yiddische, haddische boy, with the curls and everything, what did I know about drugs?” Samuel, 38, muses, whilst allowing that Hasidic garb is a good drug smuggling disguise only up to a point, since it led to 12 years in jail. “He’s obviously unique: there isn’t another such case” his brother explains, adding that returning to a “very disciplined lifestyle” in a closed community with strict rules, severe dress code and segregation of the sexes will be very different from prison. Samuel must wear an electronic tag for five months following release, but this is almost unnecessary: everybody knows each others’ business in an enclave where people live according to rules fashioned in 18th-century eastern European villages.

The 20,000 Stamford Hill Hasidim have rarely been documented, much less filmed, by outsiders. Televisions are not encouraged in private homes. The internet is anathema. Women must not look men in the eye, and wear wigs and hats—in case the wigs are too realistic. One pious soul spends her days sewing up slits in skirts. Children wear tights from the age of three. People sway and mutter in constant prayer, including before and after using the toilet. While forgiveness and charity are part of the community ethic, Samuel himself must now choose between his former outlaw life and religious conformity. Having lived among criminals, not to mention non-Jews, he will never recover the carefree innocence of the young people scurrying about in black hats and coats, staring at the ground.
Continue reading ‘Enough already with the smack, Shmu’el’

Gordon Brown agrees to meet Dalai Lama in May

Published
by
John Kelly
on March 20, 2008
in British politics
. 1 Comment

Credit where it’s due. According to reports, Gordon Brown has today agreed to meet the Dalai Lama in the UK in May, after talking to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. “The Premier told me that subject to two things that the Dalai Lama has already said - that he does not support the total independence of Tibet and that he renounces violence - that he would be prepared to enter into dialogue with the Dalai Lama,” Mr Brown said. According to the Telegraph, The Dalai Lama said last Sunday that he would resign as spiritual leader of the Tibetan government in exile if the violence by Tibetans continues: “If things become out of control then my only option is to completely resign,” he told reporters at his Indian base in Dharamsala. He added: “Even if 1,000 Tibetans sacrificed their life [this would be] not much help”. “Please help stop violence from Chinese side and also from the Tibetan side.” Aides later explained that he would only renounce his political status as leader of the government in exile and would remain the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. So no need for a summit meeting round at our offices after all. What a relief.

The Dalai Lama, the Torch and Steve

Published
by
John Kelly
on March 20, 2008
in Foreign affairs
. 6 Comments

Two days after I posted our modest proposal that Gordon Brown meet the Dalai Lama, Buddhist eco-capitalist Steve Varon and his very lovely partner, Beth, happened to drop by the Prospect potala on a brief visit to London from New York. He’s a remarkable man with a vision (in fact, he literally had a vision) that the Dalai Lama should be invited to carry the Olympic torch on a part of its journey to Beijing. I think it’s a great wheeze (so will the Dalai Lama if he has to carry the flame up Mount Everest). Steve has produced a video, which is well worth watching. You don’t have to be a Buddhist to see the deeper logic of Steve’s suggestion. Pass it on (like the torch).

China’s Tibetan Shooting Team in Olympics Training

Published
by
John Kelly
on March 17, 2008
in Asia, China and Foreign affairs
. 7 Comments

Who says China isn’t involving Tibet in the run up to the Olympics? It sounds as though they are as acutely aware of international sentiment as was the USSR when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. I suppose the thinking is that if they get the purging, quelling and brutal suppressions in well ahead of the summer everyone will have forgotten by the time the Olympic flame is lit in the National Stadium. Maybe they will: we’ve already discounted the uncomfortable rumours that tens of thousands of people unfortunate enough to live in or near land required for the Olympic village were forcibly evicted. According to Kurt Streeter of the LA Times, a news blackout applied to any CCN report on Tibet and the streets were full of (not-so) secret police last week during nothing more controversial than a Dodgers’ exhibition baseball game. It doesn’t sound too welcoming. I’m surprised that there is a news blackout if the government is confident that, mischievously, Tibetan protesters are shooting and stabbing themselves to death in large numbers in Lhasa, Sichuan and elsewhere. That’s what I call news.

Tibet won its first gold medal for China before the Games even started. That old splittist the Dalai Lama, a well-known advocate of violence if ever there was one, received a Gold Congressional Medal last year from the US Congress for “human compassion, courage and conviction as his tools in carving a path for peace. For half a century, he has struggled to better the lives of the Tibetan people. In doing so, he has been a shining light to all those fighting for freedom around the world,” according to Senator Dianne Feinstein. Renowned Peacenik George W. Bush presented the gong in a private ceremony - in marked contrast to our lovely UK leaders who daren’t offer the twinkly old reincarnation of Chenrezig, Bodhisattva of Compassion, a cup of buttered tea when he comes to England this May.

Perhaps this is not so surprising: Britons never, never, never, will be slaves but we don’t mind other people having them so long as there’s a quid in it. And we aren’t slaves to the US, despite what cruel foreign devils like the French and Germans might sneeringly say. We uncharacteristically defied our US cousins and sent a crack team of hopefuls to the 1980 Moscow Olympics (and still didn’t win much against Togo and the Faroe Islands apart from Daley Thompson who won the three-legged race and probably would have won anyway). In passing, it’s ironic that the US boycotted the Ruskies for invading Afghanistan in a vain, brutal and savage attempt to form a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. Was this the same US who armed the ‘freedom fighters’, brought down the Soviet Union and - invaded Afghanistan?

The Dalai Lama has never urged Tibetans to rise in violent protest, and continually avows that he is not an advocate of independence for Tibet, merely free autonomous status, which China claims it already has, so what’s the problem? (It might be that the Gelugpa leader leans towards feudal theocracy, to be fair). This much we know. Several millions have died, been exiled or have been imprisoned since the invasion in 1950. Innocent Tibetans have been forced to endure Richard Gere, Prince Charles, The Beastie Boys, Bjork, ‘comedian’ Russell Brand and Steven Seagal, yet we still turn a blind eye to their plight.

The autonomous region of the Publisher’s office at Prospect has decreed that if you like, you can sign a petition asking Gordon Brown to show an ounce of gumption and meet the Dalai Lama. He probably won’t, but Mr Lama is welcome to come round here and write an article. People outside the UK (though probably not in China) can sign a petition here. To make it fair, Hu Jintao is also more than welcome to drop round if he’s in London provided he asks his mates to stop allowing these misguided Tibetan monks to shoot, stab and stomp themselves to death with such monotonous regularity.

China Design Now at the V&A

Published
by
John Kelly
on March 12, 2008
in Arts and culture and China
. 13 Comments

When the Triumph Bonneville was sex on wheels and Roberts radios were avant-garde, “Made in Japan” meant cheap and garish. Those silly little transistor radios— hadn’t they heard of valves? How we laughed at their little noddy bikes that didn’t leak oil and kick started without breaking your ankle. Sony who? Raw fish? Well, the rest is history. 
So we should not be in the least surprised that “Made in China” means stylish, futuristic, smooth. The only shock is the transition from agrarian to Bladerunner in less than a decade. Young Chinese designers smorgasbord sources from industrialised East Asia, China’s communist past, Russian constructivism and US counter-culture with cosmopolitan nonchalence. But they need to work harder in a world where multicultural western seven year olds understand the kitsch semiotics of Hello Kitty, love retro mobiles, and forgive Mao his eccentricities (those caps and suits were divine).
It’s racist, patronising and tiresome to even affect surprise at how modern China has become, but if you still have doubts, visit the V&A and enjoy the Angry Pandas, delicious graphics, beautiful installations and the agitprop skateboards for what they are: the finest Fusion design. I doubt if this exhibition reflects anything close to the reality of life for 98% of Chinese citizens, any more than Hoxton represents Heckmondwike, but why should it? Don’t look for subliminal messages: some of the work on display is mildly subversive, but only in the same way as Chop Suey is authentic peasant fare. Nothing I saw here made me think of tanks and students in big squares; some made me think of Neuromancer, but the overall effect was uplifting and, well, optimistic.I still don’t like sweatshops and the cultural genocide in Tibet, so you’ll be relieved to know that I haven’t been brainwashed. But if China Design Now signals a world which is coming, in one form or another, to your shopping mall soon then we should be as grateful as bikers were when Honda made motorbikes that started in the rain.This is an inspired and well-curated exhibition, (admirably and lavishly sponsored by HSBC).
Mao was a bit of a monster, but his kids are good at art— with a surprisingly western sense of humour. Let a thousand designers bloom. In the semiology of global contemporary design, China is proving an expert linguist. 
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An Award for the Oddest Book Title of the Year Award.

Published
by
John Kelly
on February 22, 2008
in Arts and culture, Books and Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Often I fawn in abject admiration at a very good publishing idea. Sometimes I own up to it. This is one. I am normally allergic to awards (horrible food in underground ballrooms, frocks like tents, Spitting Image old newsreaders making rentaspeeches etc.) and would normally only put on a dinner jacket for an East End boxing night, but the Bookseller’s Diagram Award for Oddest Book Title of the Year more than merits a trip to Moss Bros.

The shortlist includes such gems as ‘I was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen,’ ‘People who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: from King Canute to Dr. Feelgood,’ ‘How to Write a How to Write Book,’ ‘Cheese Problems Solved’ and ‘Are Women Human?’ Regrettably, none of these titles were offered to Prospect to review. ‘If You Want Closure in your Relationship, Start With Your Legs,’ the last title on the shortlist, would certainly appeal to the sensible bluestockings who own up to reading our magazine and we often debate cheese problems, so publicists are clearly missing a trick. You can vote online for this joyous initiative and I urge you to do so.

Perhaps we can start an award for the oddest named shops that could equally be book titles. My favourites, seen on a recent trip oop north, are ‘The World of Living Fires,’ ‘The House of Shoes’ and ‘The Booze Nest.’ ‘Wig World’ on Stroud Green Road would encourage me to ‘live a little’ with its permanent 3 wigs for a tenner special offer. I can feel an Odd Book coming on . . . ‘The Folk Art of Ice Cream Vans cries out to be published’ . . .Stop me before I go to lulu.com.

The KLA in Islington

Published
by
John Kelly
on February 18, 2008
in Europe
. 0 Comments

It is a little known sidebar to the Kosovo conflict of the late 1990s that a temporary car park in Islington Green was briefly annexed by the KLA. At the time I had offices across the road, above Regulation, a retailer of torturing equipment for S&M gays—but hey, this was north London.

I used to park my Mafia staff car—a stately black Mercedes—on a weekly, cash-only account of varying amounts. My new friends the Kosovan refugees rewarded me—for my custom, for having a cool car, shaved head and for bothering to talk to them at all—with a gaudy red and yellow keyring emblazoned with a black eagle and the initials UÇK. The car park chieftain, proud (nay, amazed) to be free to walk the streets of London, emotionally made me an honorary member of their brotherhood and invited me to invest in a scheme he was developing involving renting rooms in Soho to provide work for pretty girls. I politely declined.

I did a bit of publishing business with Russia at the time. Checking into Pulkovo Airport after an enervating couple of days in St Petersburg I was vividly made aware of the significance of my kitsch gift. Passing through the metal detectors I was marched to a side room and interrogated as to my connections with the Kosovo Liberation Army, darlings of Islington and the rest of the free world, symbols of a tortured and oppressed majority, but not so well thought of in the Slav-inclined CIS. A desperate mobile call to a friend—a crime writer, PEN activist and former Amon special forces operative—and all the roubles I had left got me on the plane home. The kleptocratic Russian customs folk contemptuously returned the keyring—it’s somewhere round the house to this day.

So welcome to independence, Kosovo. I can’t imagine the Russian view has changed that much. For this particular westerner, ill-informed involvement with the KLA yielded a couple of hours of tension and a dinner party anecdote. I fear the west may pay a bigger price for backing the lesser of two evils back in those terrible days of Balkan conflict. Still, how were we to know those sad-eyed Albanians in their black leather jackets would turn out to be genocidally jihadist neo-Nazis? We were too busy helping them usurp the genocidal Serbian neo-Nazi Christians (in their black leather jackets).

No Country for Old Men

Published
by
John Kelly
on January 11, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 2 Comments

The latest Coen brothers’ film opens in the UK next week, based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. Most of the important US critics have already made it their top movie of 2007 I won’t argue: No Country for Old Men is the best film I’ve seen this millennium. Great books too often make bad movies—but not so in this case. The plot of McCarthy’s darkly Irish postmodern western unfurls like a rattlesnake against a backdrop of blacktop, blue sky and desert scrub. Trailer trash and wetbacks live and die violently in cheap motels and pickup trucks. An ennuied sheriff on his last case before retirement, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is the “Old Man” of the title, whose country and whose post-Vietnam values this landscape no longer represents, one step behind their golem, Anton Chirgurh, played with menace by Javier Bardem, whose medieval haircut is the second scariest thing in the movie.

No Country for Old Men resonates on a heroically symphonic scale, but does so with no background music whatsoever, apart from an abrupt burst from a Mariachi band midway through. Roger Deakins, the Coens’ cameraman of choice—and surely the inheritor of Jack Cardiff’s mantle as finest living English cinematographer—can frame a dead dog as a Caravaggio. This is an art movie, a thriller, a western set in the badlands of West Texas, 1980, with a bleak existential message that is paradoxically uplifting in the manner of a rousing requiem. We can’t do much about the hand fate deals us, but it could be a lot worse. Thank goodness we don’t live in a trailer home near the Mexican border where the weapon of choice is a cattle gun. Whether or not you love the Coens, and provided you’re not too squeamish, you must see this film, and listen to the music while the end credits roll and we fade to black.

It’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled…

Published
by
John Kelly
on January 9, 2008
in Arts and culture
. 0 Comments

…or less than a month, actually

Following on from yesterday’s rock-birthday greetings, it seems appropriate to congratulate another living legend on refusing to go quietly: Jimmy Page, who today turns 64. Back in 1967, a young McCartney imagined himself renting a “cottage on the Isle of Wight” after reaching this particular milestone. For Page, of course, the last time he rock-and-rolled was in front of 17,000 people in December 2007 in arguably the most-anticipated rock reunion of all time—Led Zeppelin at the London 02 Arena (AKA the Dome).

The group, which surpassed the heights of heavy metal hedonism in the 1970s, disbanded following the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980. The three surviving members, joined by Jason Bonham, son of John, delivered a rapturously-received performance (featuring some extravagant violin bowing on Jimmy’s ‘58 sunburst Les Paul) which surely put a final nail into the coffin of “popular” art as something the young do best. It has long been accepted that “serious” musicians and artists can produce some of their most shocking, original and successful work in later life; at least in terms of performance, popular music has caught up.

Mothership, a wonderfully bright anthology of Led Zep classics, remastered by Jimmy and 50 something sprog John Davis, has turned on a new audience of air guitarists to Black Dog and Stairway to Heaven. Singer Robert Plant recently duetted with country diva Alison Kraus on Raising Sand, a thoughtful baby boomer easy listener, but what we oldsters really need now is some cranked up kerrang from our sexagenarians to kick out the jams and show the young ‘uns how to lose their hearing with dignity. Rock on Jimmy.

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