Justice for the Hillsborough Families
Posted by cathannabel in Football, Politics on December 19, 2012
Gerry’s blog, That’s How the Light Gets In, marks the vindication of the Hillsborough victims, survivors and families with Dickensian reflections on injustice. RIP the 96, and massive respect to the campaigners.
I’m currently reading The Old Curiosity Shop and, in one of those curious coincidences without which Dickens’ plots would have ground to a halt, I read the following passage shortly after hearing news that the Hillsborough families are one step closer to justice:
Let moralists and philosophers say what they may, it is very questionable whether a guilty man would have felt half as much misery that night, as Kit did, being innocent. The world, being in the constant commission of vast quantities of injustice, is a little too apt to comfort itself with the idea that if the victim of its falsehood and malice have a clear conscience, he cannot fail to be sustained under his trials, and somehow or other to come right at last; ‘in which case,’ say they who have hunted him down, ‘—though we certainly don’t expect it—nobody will be better pleased than we.’ Whereas…
View original post 531 more words
Marvellous Mistakes
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, Music on December 5, 2012
I’ve always been intrigued by the creative possibilities of mistakes. So many medical and scientific discoveries, after all, have come about through the combination of chance or error with painstaking research and experimentation. The key is to see the possibilities created by that chance or error, and to follow them through.
Tacita Dean spoke of the magic of mistakes in relation to her Turbine Hall installation – asked whether, if she could rewind, there was anything she would do differently, she said:
No. They are mistakes in the film, there are some shots misregistered that I use deliberately. Mistakes don’t exist in our digital world anymore. An effects man I spoke to in Germany said, “Analogue mistakes can sometimes be magical. Digital ones never are.” You know, the magic of mistakes and the magic of not knowing what you are going to get, these things are important.
When she talked to Michael Berkeley on Radio 3’s Private Passions, she chose as one of her pieces of music Allegri’s wonderful Miserere, a piece that never fails to make me want to weep. But the moment that does that most powerfully is the famous top C, which, according to some historians, is the result of a transcription error. If so, there have been few more marvellous mistakes in the arts.
There’s a difference between using creatively the mistakes that occur through chance or human error, and deliberately creating an environment where ‘mistakes’ are always potentially a note away.
Jimi Hendrix improvised constantly, whether he had an audience or not. He never played the same song exactly the same way twice, and given the chance (i.e. without an audience shrieking to hear ‘Wild Thing’ or ‘Hey Joe’) he’d mess around with the song, take it somewhere different and bring it back home again – the challenge for anyone else was to keep up.
But after his death the self-appointed keeper of his flame decided that we didn’t need to hear what he regarded as Jimi’s ‘mistakes’ and that we instead should hear doctored versions of his late unreleased work with other session musicians drafted in to cover the gaps and the glitches. Even when those musicians were of the calibre of the late lamented Bob Babbitt, this was a wretched way to treat the rich legacy of such an inventive and risk-taking artist. And not all of the musicians were of that calibre.
Greg Tate, in his fascinating book on Hendrix and the black experience (an oddly neglected area of study), says that Hendrix ‘took the odd pleasurable accident as not just serendipity but as a way to embark upon a new line of inquiry, the intent being not merely to duplicate the shock-of-the-new aspect of the thing but to intensely lyricize it. Like Jackson Pollock … Hendrix lived to transmute the accident into intention.’
Postwar composers such as Boulez, and Michel Butor’s collaborator Henri Pousseur, used what Boulez called ‘controlled chance’, where the possibilities are predefined by the composer, within parameters. The performer has choices to make, which leaves the audience – and fellow performers – faced with the unexpected. This does give the possibility that one performer’s choice will wrong-foot others, but this would still clearly be, in the composer’s terms, a mistake rather than a new line of flight. The overall course is fixed, only the ordering of the elements can be tinkered with. John Cage’s use of the I Ching in composition and in performance was far from random, but brought in an arbiter other than the composer or the performer, in line with his wish to take the preferences of composer and performer out of the music. But he did incorporate improvisation in some later works, in ways which did introduce elements of real chance. Could the performer in such works be permitted to ‘transmute accident into intention’ ? One suspects not.
Even where that Hendrixian alchemy is not encouraged, the possibility of mistakes, the risk of them, is part of the joy of live music, where the artists are confident enough to respond positively – like Ensemble 360 who responded to one member contributing a repetition too many or too few, thus throwing them all off track, by pausing, laughing uproariously, and then resuming the piece with their usual panache. Back to Hendrix again (always), and a gorgeous acoustic version of his blues ‘Hear my Train a Comin”, where he plays it one way during the intro, stops because he’s been thrown off track by the cameras (not that anyone listening would hear that) and restarts it in a completely different version.
For those of us not so gifted mistakes are to be feared, to be remembered with hideous shame and self-flagellation, to be avoided either by careful preparation or by shunning activities where risks are high.
But we admire those who go ahead anyway – I always loved Paul Scott’s Daphne Manners: ‘She had to make her own marvelous mistakes. She didn‘t ever shrink from getting grubby. She flung herself into everything with zest. The more afraid she was of something, the more determined she was not to shrink from experiencing it. She had us all by the ears finally. We were all afraid for her, even of her, but more of what she seemed to have unlocked, like Pandora who bashed off to the attic and prised the lid of the box open.” (The Jewel in the Crown, pp. 104 – 105).
And artistically, we often respond emotionally to the imperfect rather than to the inhumanly perfect. (Some people illustrate that distinction using Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, which I can’t accept – Ella’s voice doesn’t have Billie’s fragility but it has such incredible warmth that it is never merely a perfect instrument, it’s full of emotion.)
I had been trying to finish this post for months, and then read this wonderful and moving blog which says so much that I will leave Gerry (and Leonard) with the last words:
http://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2012/12/04/scientist-reveals-how-the-light-gets-in/
- Greg Tate, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003)
A Hate Crime Named Destitution – reblogged from Sheffield RASAG
Posted by cathannabel in Refugees on November 22, 2012
“Whoever you are – I have always depended on the kindness of strangers”[1]
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away…”[2]
Hate crime occurs when an antagonist is able to hurt a victim, physically, mentally, financially, sexually or in any manner where the motivation for committing that crime against you, or the expectation of being able to get away with that crime against you is discrimination, inequality or intended hatred.
During a recent survey of refugees and asylum seekers of all categories of status from destitute through to permanent resident’s status, almost 85% had experienced hate crime. Among those 15% of people not having experienced hate crime 2/3 were destitute asylum seekers, so must be either lucky, scary, or fibbing.
The police do not have a sanctuary policy…
View original post 896 more words
Stiff Upper Lips
Posted by cathannabel in Second World War on November 2, 2012
From the Our Island Stories group blog about national identity, a bit of almost forgotten history, and the story of another, but rather different, official cover up.
Not an English phrase, as it turns out, but American. Who’d have thought it? Nonetheless, as Ian Hislop’s recent series showed, it came to sum up a kind of Britishness – stoicism in the face of adversity, keeping calm and carrying on. Hislop’s series, inevitably, raised as many questions as it answered – it would be interesting to analyse further how the notion of the stiff upper lip varied according to class, for example, or the different forms it took between the sexes, or whether it is British, or English.
Hislop missed one fascinating and pertinent story from WWII. It’s the story of the largest loss of civilian life in the UK in wartime, at Bethnal Green Tube Station, in March 1943. No bombs fell that night, but 173 people died.
So what caused the disaster?
Although things had been quieter of late, on the night of 3rd…
View original post 1,683 more words
Hidden
Posted by cathannabel in French 20th century history on October 16, 2012
17 October. A demonstration is scheduled in the heart of the city, against a curfew recently imposed on certain sections of the population. There are about 30,000 demonstrators, men, women and children, many in their Sunday best, a signal of their peaceful intentions. But the reception, as they emerge from the stations and move towards their meeting place, is anything but peaceful. The police are ready for them, their instructions to pay back one blow with ten, with the assurance that whatever happens, they have the backing of their superiors. Of the 30,000, 11,000 are arrested. Some of these are herded into buses and taken to a nearby sports stadium, where they are interrogated and beaten up. Some are beaten and thrown into the river, or hung from trees and lampposts. Probably – and we’ll never know for sure – 200 of the demonstrators are killed.
This happened in Paris, in 1961, to Algerians and others of North African origin, in the context of the Algerian War and terrorist activity by the FLN. That it isn’t widely known about – was barely spoken of at all until the 1990s – is the result of one of the most successful cover-ups of our time.
It’s not that there were no accounts of these events at the time – the arrest, beating and murder of so many could hardly go unnoticed in the centre of Paris. But in France itself, there was rigorous state censorship – films and photographs were seized and destroyed, and journalists found their reports buried or edited to match the official line that it was a riot that was firmly dealt with by the police. This was echoed by most of the international press, who at best suggested that perhaps the police response was a tad firmer than absolutely necessary. Amongst the Algerian community, fear of reprisals largely ensured that, even as people desperately tried to find out what had happened to family members who never came home after the demonstration, their experiences were not made public.
Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the massacre in her autobiography, drawing on her friend Claude Lanzmann’s first-hand account:
The cops were waiting for the Algerians at the exits to the Metro … [Lanzmann] saw with his own eyes how they kicked them in the teeth and smashed their skulls. Bodies were found hanging from the trees on the Bois du Boulogne and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine. … Afterwards, I heard the … bare-faced lies: two dead, when we already know of more than 50.
Plaque commémorative du massacre des algériens lors de la manifestation du 17 octobre 1961 sous les ordres du Préfet de Police Maurice Papon, implantée sur la Passerelle de la Fraternité à Aubervilliers (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
That there is now a plaque on the Pont St Michel, and films and TV documentaries about that night in October 1961, is due mainly to the fact that the person in charge of the Paris police force at the time was one Maurice Papon, who in the 1980s came under scrutiny not for his treatment of Algerian demonstrators twenty years earlier, but for his complicity in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux almost twenty years before that. During the course of his somewhat belated trial, the connection with the massacre was brought to light.
Didier Daeninckx’s noir policier Meurtres pour la Mémoire linked the massacre with the deportations (without naming Papon) in 1984, but interestingly was not the first fictional treatment of the massacre. Black American writer William Gardner Smith wrote The Stone Face in 1963, and Kristin Ross, in her study of the afterlife of May 68, writes that:
It is a mark of the success surrounding the official blackout of information about October 17 that Smith’s novel, written by a foreigner in France and published in the United States (it could not be published in France), would stand as one of the few representations of the event available all the way up until the early 1990s – until the moment, that is, when a generation of young Beurs, as the children of North African immigrants call themselves, had reached an age at which they could begin to demand information about their parents’ fate. Professional or academic historians have lagged well behind amateurs in the attempt to discover what occurred on October 17; investigative journalists, militants, and fiction writers like Smith, or the much more widely read detective novelist, Didier Daeninckx, kept a trace of the event alive during the thirty years when it had entered a “black hole” of memory.
For many, Michael Hanecke’s film Caché (Hidden) was the first introduction to the 17 October massacre. There’s only a brief mention of it but nonetheless it sits at the heart of the film, a film about memory and the burying of memory. It led me to try to find out whether – as seemed improbable at first – such a thing could have happened and left so little trace.
Cover of Cache (Hidden)
There are so many aspects of this story that fascinate. The connection between collaboration in the deportation of Jews during the Occupation and the violent repression of dissent by French citizens of north African origin even extends to the fact that an earlier crack-down on Algerian demonstrators by Papon had involved the use of the Vel’d’Hiv as a detention centre. And the fact that an event witnessed by so many could be so effectively hidden from view reflects the way in which the history of collaboration during the Occupation had to be dragged painfully into the light over decades.
There’s also the contrast with the public response to the brutal suppression of a demonstration in February 1962 organised by the Communist Party – the eight who were killed became the symbols of state violence during the Algerian War. One might have thought that this would have brought the October massacre back into public consciousness, but it seems to have had the opposite effect – it was simply eclipsed. Le Monde even reported the suppression of the Charonne demonstration as the most violent state action since 1934. Why? The only plausible explanation is the fact that the October demonstrators, unlike those who were killed and beaten a few months later, were overwhelmingly Algerian or North African.
Of course, the notion of an official cover-up is terribly pertinent today as we await prosecutions, 23 years after the event, in relation to Hillsborough. In both cases, what happened was both known and not known. Known because these things happened in public places, because there were eye-witnesses, photographs, films, newspaper articles. Not known because, in the case of the 17 October massacre those accounts were suppressed by the machinery of the state, and in the case of Hillsborough because no matter how often the truth was published and asserted it barely seemed to dent the falsehoods that had been disseminated at the time so vigorously by the police and others.
It took forty years for the victims of the 17 October massacre to be commemorated officially. We don’t know how many of them there were. We don’t know all of their names, or exactly what happened to most of them. But the events of that night in 1961 are no longer hidden.
- http://17octobre1961.free.fr/index.htm
- Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses (Gallimard, 1963)
- Didier Daeninckx, Meurtres pour mémoire (Gallimard, 1984)
- Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille de Paris: 17 octobre 1961 (Editions du Seuil, 1991)
- Jean-Luc Einaudi,’17 octobre 1961: un crime toujours pas condamné’ L’Humanité, 13/10/01
- Richard J Golsan (ed), The Papon Affair: Memory & Justice on Trial (Routledge, 2000)
- Daniel A. Gordon, ‘World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom’, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, I (2000)
- Jim House, Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror, and Memory (Oxford UP, 2006)
- Jacques Panijel, ‘Le 17 octobre 1961 – un crime d’état’, L’Humanité, 24/10/97
- Kristin Ross, May ’68 And Its Afterlives (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
- http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/algerians_liberte.htm
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1604970.stm
- http://www.english.rfi.fr/visiting-france/20101202-1961-algerians-massacred-paris-streets
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/17/france-remembers-algerian-massacre
Butor – a guide through the labyrinth
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor on October 5, 2012
Professor Jean Duffy of Edinburgh University is one of the major Butor scholars – her work Signs and Designs: Art and Architecture in the Work of MB (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2003) in particular has been invaluable to me. Her website, which has just been substantially updated, redesigned and relaunched, provides ‘a research and reference apparatus which will assist orientation within Butor’s vast oeuvre’. It most certainly will. My gratitude to Professor Duffy
.
15 April 1989 – finally, the truth. Now for justice?
Posted by cathannabel in Football on September 12, 2012
On the last anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, I wrote this, which summed up my feelings about an appalling tragedy which happened just across the valley from my home:
…the awful truth is that no matter how many of those fans were drunk and how many were there without tickets, if there had been stewards in front of the entrances to the Leppings Lane pens, directing fans away from the already crowded central pen, then no one would have died. No one. It’s horrifically, tragically, simple.
Taylor called this a ‘blunder of the first magnitude’. From this blunder stemmed the desperate attempts by South Yorkshire Police to cover their own backs, to blame the fans, to propagate distortions and falsehoods that would persuade the public that what we had here was yet another example of football hooliganism, rather than a terrible error by those in authority. That’s why, despite the regular calls for the victims’ families to ‘move on’ and ‘let it go’ (clichés favoured in general by those who have not experienced anything approaching this degree of trauma ), there is still a need for information to be brought into the public domain, for light to be shed and records to be set straight. If there had been a swift acknowledgement that a hideous mistake had been made, and the energies of the authorities had been channeled with as much vigour into helping both the victims and their families as they were into blaming them, then the families would be grieving rather than campaigning, commemorating the ones they’d lost rather than fighting for the truth to be told and the lies to be nailed once and for all.
Today we have a report which vindicates the victims and their families, which confirms that the biggest disaster at a sporting event in our history triggered the biggest police cover-up in our history.
There’s now a mass of information available, and analysis of that information, and I don’t intend to attempt to summarise that here. The thing that has struck me most forcefully is how early the ‘disgraceful lies’ began. Even whilst people were still dying on the terraces and on the pitch, the allegation that a gate had been forced influenced the initial reaction to the unfolding disaster. The first reference to ticketless fans came soon afterwards, and by the following day the ‘surge’ of fans had become ‘crazed’ and allegations of drunkenness were introduced. The language became more and more extreme and hostile – violent, beasts, frenzy – and, on Tuesday 18 April, ‘writing in the Liverpool Daily Post, John Williams noted that ‘the gatecrashers wreaked their fatal havoc’, their ‘uncontrolled fanaticism and mass hysteria … literally squeezed the life out of men, women and children …It was ‘yobbism at its most base’ (2.12.24). The allegations that would form the basis of the Sun‘s infamous ‘The Truth’ report appeared in the Sheffield Star on the 18th – ‘yobs’ attacking and urinating on the emergency services and this was elaborated further with stories of thieving from the dead and dying. Subsequently, as we now know, police and emergency service records were changed to support this version of events, and to camouflage the loss of control and the failures of judgement of those in authority on the day.
How was it possible for the truth to be buried so completely under a mountain of lies? You start with a little lie, that plays on a potent and widely accepted stereotype. You let that little lie grow, and accrue details that add to its verisimilitude. You allow comments made in the middle of chaos by distressed and traumatised people to be disseminated as objective first-hand statements, as long as they back up the little lie and its accretions. And you bury, redact and suppress all testimony that contradicts them.
The odd thing is that the little lie was corrected on the day of the disaster. No matter, its work had been done. And the Taylor report nailed most of the stories that had grown from that first lie. No matter, every time Hillsborough was mentioned in the ensuing decades, the calumnies would be trotted out again, and again.
Maybe now that will change, finally, with the report and the apology from South Yorkshire Police, which acknowledges not only the loss of control on the day but the disgraceful attempt to cover it up with lies.
But now that we have the truth, the survivors and the families of those who died – the 96 who need not have died if a football match had not been hideously mismanaged, the 41 who perhaps might not have died if the emergency services had responded swiftly and appropriately – want justice. And with the possibility of criminal prosecutions, and new inquests, maybe justice too will prevail.
RIP the 96
Jack Alfred Anderson, 62
English: Hillsborough Disaster Memorial – 2, Hillsborough, Sheffield 1254629 1254666 1254673 1182326 725321 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Colin Mark Ashcroft, 19, student
James Gary Aspinall, 18
Kester Roger Marcus Ball, 16, student
Gerard Baron Snr, 67
Simon Bell, 17
Barry Sidney Bennett, 26
David John Benson, 22
David William Birtle, 22
Tony Bland, 22
Paul David Brady, 21
Andrew Mark Brookes, 26
Carl Brown, 18
Steven Brown, 25
Henry Thomas Burke, 47
Peter Andrew Burkett , 24
Paul William Carlile, 19
Raymond Thomas Chapman , 50
Gary Christopher Church, 19
Joseph Clark, 29
Paul Clark, 18
Gary Collins, 22
Stephen Paul Copoc, 20
Tracey Elizabeth Cox, 23
James Philip Delaney, 19
Christopher Barry Devonside, 18
Christopher Edwards, 29
Vincent Michael Fitzsimmons, 34
Steve Fox, 21
Jon-Paul Gilhooley, 10
Barry Glover, 27
Ian Thomas Glover, 20
Derrick George Godwin, 24
Roy Harry Hamilton, 34
Philip Hammond, 14
Eric Hankin, 33
Gary Harrison, 27
Stephen Francis Harrison, 31
Peter Andrew Harrison, 15
David Hawley, 39
James Robert Hennessy, 29
Paul Anthony Hewitson, 26
Carl Hewitt, 17
Nick Hewitt, 16
Sarah Louise Hicks, 19
Victoria Jane Hicks, 15
Gordon Rodney Horn, 20
Arthur Horrocks, 41
Thomas Howard, 39
Tommy Anthony Howard, 14
Eric George Hughes, 42
Alan Johnston, 29
Christine Anne Jones, 27
Gary Philip Jones, 18
Richard Jones, 25
Nicholas Peter Joynes, 27
Anthony Peter Kelly, 29
Michael Kelly, 38
Carl David Lewis, 18
David William Mather, 19
Brian Christopher Matthews, 38
Francis Joseph McAllister, 27
John McBrien, 18
Marian Hazel McCabe, 21
Joe McCarthy, 21
Peter McDonnell, 21
Alan McGlone, 28
Keith McGrath, 17
Paul Brian Murray, 14
Lee Nicol, 14
Stephen Francis O’Neill, 17
Jonathon Owens, 18
William Roy Pemberton, 23
Carl Rimmer, 21
Dave Rimmer, 38
Graham John Roberts, 24
Steven Joseph Robinson, 17
Henry Charles Rogers, 17
Andrew Sefton, 23
Inger Shah, 38
Paula Ann Smith, 26
Adam Edward Spearritt, 14
Philip John Steele, 15
David Leonard Thomas, 23
Pat Thompson, 35
Peter Reuben Thompson, 30
Stuart Thompson, 17
Peter Francis Tootle, 21
Christopher James Traynor, 26
Martin Kevin Traynor, 16
Kevin Tyrrell, 15
Colin Wafer, 19
Ian David Whelan, 19
Martin Kenneth Wild, 29
Kevin Daniel Williams, 15
Graham John Wright, 17
http://www.fleetstreetfox.com/2012/09/hooligan-n-rough-lawless-person.html
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/hillsborough-documents-released-brian-reade-1318730
Our Island Stories
Posted by cathannabel in Patriotism on September 8, 2012
We need to talk…
… about Britishness, about patriotism and national identity. About these questions, prompted by our recent, slightly embarrassing, outbreak of national pride:
So, do we treat Danny Boyle’s vision of the Isles of Wonder as a requiem for what we value about our country, or a celebration? Or even, perhaps, a warning and a call to action? Do we allow our ‘normal state of being’ to be reinstalled in the British psyche, without protest, without attempting to hold on to what we briefly experienced? As Billy [Bragg] asks in his blog, ‘Has the euphoria of the past two weeks has caused a seismic shift in the meta-narrative of Britishness? … Can a new spirit of engaged and transformational patriotism emerge from this experience? One that seeks to build a fairer, more inclusive tomorrow, rather than constantly rehashing a narrow vision of the past?’
The Our Island Stories blog is a place where that conversation can continue.
We’ve launched it with a powerful piece by Mike Press. He says that
‘Following the Olympic and Paralympic Games, a number of us starting discussing a new sensation we were experiencing – national pride. For those of a certain generation who are broadly speaking on The Left, national identity and patriotism have been problems over the years. … My contribution is far less any form of profound reflection on these questions – more an explanation of how I ended up having a highly vexed relationship with the idea of Britishness. Flagging up the issues focuses on my experiences during two days in 1977. If strong language and descriptions of violent acts offend or disturb you, then please do not read it.’
My own piece is a personal reflection on Englishness and insularity. We hope to feature diverse contributions that are academic, political, philosophical, personal (or all of the above). If you’re interested in being part of the conversation, contact me here.
Passing Time 