Quick daily update, I just saw the noon showing of We Are The Best at the Greenwich Picturehouse where my wife works and I massively recommend it, here's the trailer:
1982 Stockholm, three 13-year-old girls form a punk band. It's the best film about being in a band I've ever seen.
Really sunny today, off to find my way towards some drink, then Chelsea later - I love that Mourinho has come back to Chelsea at the same time that I've come back to Blogger.
God I love being back on Blogger, it's almost better than the first time around because I used to collect ideas for posts, craft them in my head etc (content!!!), now I just feel in the mood for a bit of a blog and I just open the spigot, it's lovely. I mean I'll try to keep it readable! But less pressure to polish it is great, really great. My mind still feels open, with a natural irregular shape, like a heritage English apple.
When I was a proper Twitter and Facebook user, broadcasting my life, offering up tasty moments and thoughts to no-one in particular, my mind was reformatted and I became like a journalist covering my own life, living became a form of work. I quit both in a drunken impulse during the Day of the Broom Twats and I swear my head, my peripheral vision, my consciousness immediately felt physically different, like it had expanded from some kind of vice. I felt like I had got back in touch with my 19-year-old self, not that there's anything particularly special or true about that guy, but I liked feeling reconnected to some sense of continuity. Anyway, Blogger! I was worried I might go back to journalist mode if I started blogging again but so far I'm staying loose.
(haven't totally forgot rules of content, breaking it up with some visuals!!)
I read a lot of Pierre Bourdieu during my MA. He developed the notion of cultural capital. He redefines it a few times over his career, but in Distinction, his seminal work, he defines it as a mix of a) exposure to / ownership of cultural artefacts, b) a propensity to detect or ascertain distinctions between high (legitimate) and low culture and c) a propensity to produce distinctions between high and low culture.
This propensity to produce distinctions is what is supposed to make the "capital" metaphor work - that once your cooler older brother teaches you that the Velvets are better than the Monkees, you then pick up a sort of knack that allows you to pronounce authoritatively on new stuff. You are not discerning essential distinctions between good/bad or high/low, you are producing what are actually arbitrary distinctions in order to further your own social goals. This is sort of like how capital works, in a "rich-get-richer" kind of way. Cultural capital begets cultural capital. The metaphor doesn't stand up to too much scrutiny, but it's a good "intervention", or certainly was in 1970s France - he was trying to show that the "legitimate" culture of opera blah blah blah was a just a tool for socioeconomic elites to shore up their own positions.
Picture of Bourdieu:
(He was a scholarship boy from the sticks, a Marxist meritocrat, who was utterly enraged that his posh classmates seemed to "do better" than him in intangible, slippery ways, even though he got better marks. Taste seemed like a weapon.) (It might seem fucking obvious that people use cultural taste as a social strategy, but it wasn't then, at least in 1970s France.) (Some people think post-modernism made Bourdieu redundant just after he was published - 1979 in French, 1984 in English. Stephen Fry's asinine quote about it being OK to like opera and darts gets quoted a lot. But obviously these postmodern taste collages of high/low are still very carefully curated. There is still "good" low culture.)
Um so where was I? Yes - in N+1's book What was the hipster? one of the writers attempts a sort of Bourdieusian analysis of the hipster, running along the lines of: some graduates choose to pursue economic capital and become boring bankers, while some choose to build up stocks of cultural capital, taking low-paid jobs at social enterprises or what have you and living in gentrifying but still edgy neighbourhoods.
The idea, though, is that cultural and economic capital can be exchanged. The banker can buy his/her way into being a weekend hipster (the moustache was an attempted barrier against such 'weekenders', Movember smashed it down), while the people with the cultural savvy to enjoy living in 2005 New Cross or 1995 Shoreditch etc can covert this to economic capital through home ownership or starting higher-end, "safe-hipster" businesses.
(Stefan has a good thing on this - if you make a lot of money in London you probably don't have a great deal of time to spend figuring out what's cool or taking risks on finding good new things, so you end up just doing the pre-packaged, Time Out-approved overpriced version)
But as exchange markets go, it's dicey and prone to bouts of illiquidity. To skip to the conclusion, cultural capital is a fucking terrible bet. There are loads of opportunities to convert economic capital to cultural capital but very few opportunities to convert the other way. And cultural capital perishes - this is kind of where the whole "capital" metaphor breaks down. It requires constant work (as Bourdieu says, the production of distinctions) to continue to distinguish yourself from the boring rich, to convince them you have access to something they don't. Eventually they just stop indulging you, and you're left trying harder and harder to carve out some interesting pose that makes up for your zero bucks. Living abroad works for a bit, that's low hanging fruit. What next? How do you back out of that trade in a dignified way?
My laptop is fine, it literally fixed itself in front of the repair guy in the shop. Just got back from Rushey Green Medical Practice in Lewisham for some blood tests, nothing serious, just a precaution. I've realised that the only way to get regular check-ups in the NHS is to go in with some vague symptoms (mild but persistent chest pains, almost certainly just muscular, in this case), and trick them into giving you X-rays, ECG etc. Obviously I'm hoping for the all-clear, but if they do catch some horrible illness I'll feel quite smug, amidst the existential terror.
Peak content.
Just to quickly set the scene, I was doing fine up until about the end of March, ticking along and keeping myself sort of busy, always had some kind of reasonable answer when people asked me how the job hunt was going, "building my portfolio", "first this, then I'll approach X, and if that doesn't work I guess I'll Y," that sort of thing. Had more or less convinced myself that I was on track, and was uneasily enjoying my "sabbatical". Sometime around the end of March, staring at 7000 words of notes I'd taken from interviews ("The Class of 2013: how new UK breweries are adapting to a busier beer scene"), something inside kind of snapped and I froze up. I just put it to one side and diverted myself with something else. A few days later, walking home from Monday night band practice, I fell into a hole completely and spent the rest of the week in bed.
While in bed I watched all three seasons of Portlandia available on Netflix (a friend gave me a login, another friend called me a 'freetard' when I told him). I then read the AV Club's "TV Club" reviews of each episode. And the comments. I felt reassured that the United States is in no danger of running out of cognitive and intellectual capital anytime soon. There could literally be a plague that wiped out 90% of Americans and there would still be enough cultured and intelligent people to keep government and civilisation going. They're just sitting around in their bibs and tracksuits, keeping warm on the touchline.
I'll skip to the conclusion - I don't want to make content anymore, there's too much of it. Peak content. I mentally resigned from my job as an aspiring freelance writer on Easter Sunday and immediately felt a wave of relief. I was drunk on the Eurostar after a boys' weekend in Paris with my dad, a 1980s Ogilvy & Mather ad man. You can imagine what he thinks about list-icles and various shitty digital content-farts. He can still crank out an OK living from it based on past glories though, leaving the really soul-destroying execution shit to junior people - I need to get out now. I need to get out yesterday.
(This blog will get more fun soon, I promise. Just need to finish off this report.)
My debut post might have sounded a little depressing, that's not my intention, although I guess I wanted to set a marker from which the blog would get more and more upbeat and pleasant to read. Post by post, the blog will (I expect) focus more and more on the present moment, like a daily update of stuff going on, but I have to set the scene first I think, give some account what's been going since late August, when I handed in my MA dissertation and lost my contract with the Scottish Government in the same week.
Here's something that IS really depressing:
D is an experienced and qualified
gardener who has volunteered at [X] for five years. He has been
unemployed during that time. Last November, however, he was hired as a gardener
at Hyde Park.
D left New Cross each morning at
5:30am for a 6:30am start. The job involved 40 hours a week of physically
demanding work in cold weather for national minimum wage.
When D was nearing three months on the
job – a threshold that would have triggered an improved contract from the
agency that employed him – the agency ran a spot check on all of the gardeners
who had started at the same time as D. Anyone without a hi-vis jacket or a risk
assessment form had to leave the site that day. The risk assessment form was
supposed to be filled in every day, but after a few weeks most workers realized
that the risks were the same every day and let it slip. None of them had a risk
assessment form that day and all were sacked, including D.
D decided not to complain about this as he hopes to get the job again next
winter, when he will be 60. D is back volunteering at [X]. That's from an evaluation report I'm writing for a local charity, one of the few lingering commitments I have from various personal initiatives launched over the last six months. The total list is:
- Write research report for local charity - Finish series of pub landlord interviews for hyperlocal website (five interviews completed, four published, three to go)
It's quite a short list, I hope to be free of commitments pretty soon so I can just enjoy the countdown to the 2014 World Cup!
I'm putting off a lot of major life decisions until after the 2014 World Cup. I don't regret booking my trip to Brazil but I kind of wish the tournament had been held in February. The money runs out at the end of September, if I stick to my austerity budget. I'm using my two week holiday at the World Cup as an excuse not to apply for jobs, because who would take me on if I'm about to go on holiday? But really I'm not interested in applying for work. I'm relying on sheer fear to settle the employment question, and I'm not close enough to the money running out to panic and actually get a job.
Job ideas I've thought about and then scrapped without much effort to properly explore:
- social researcher
- market researcher
- beer/pub "expert" I.e. mix of research and journalism, focus on community/social aspects
- beer/pub trade journalist
- trade journalist
That's not including various stupid ideas for my own businesses, eg micro pub that only sells cans, a combined TEFL school and pop-up kitchen, etc
Ideas still being considered:
- PhD
- copy editor
- TEFL teacher
- local government job
But really I'm pinning my hopes on panic after the World Cup. London is finally coughing me up.
My first thought when my laptop broke yesterday was "fuck" but my second thought was "good". I hate pretty much everything about the Internet. So I'll just run this blog until the World Cup using my phone or the computers in Goldsmiths library. I kind of hope my phone breaks.
