Standards
If you read the small but dense body of literature which concerns itself to a greater or lesser extent with our Parent Discipline, it’s difficult not to notice that there are certain subjects (cultural artefacts; films, TV Shows, bands) which have become….not so much canonical objects or articles of faith, but more like Jazz Standards: things you need to study and learn and get happy with riffing and improvising on before your original compositions can be taken seriously. The interesting thing for me is that most of these objects were already ones I was intimately familiar with from my adolescence. This isn’t because I remember them First Time Around, or because I was particularly perceptive in my selection of forgotten objects; mostly by coincidence, they wandered into my line of sight and I engaged with them. After that, they became cherished parts of my personal cultural milieu, and whilst I adored them, I never particularly cared about interesting others in them, largely because it never occurred to me that anyone else would be.
The expression ‘standards’ has two connotations, one of which we just discussed, and the other of which also concerns us here. That other meaning refers to standards, approximately, of human behaviour. It’s worth saying now, because the point will be made quite often, that a terrible side-effect of the long cancellation of the future,with its attendant short-termism (why think about the future when there isn’t likely to meaningfully be a future – and this is not connoting hysterical, marketing led Apocalypto of the kind Douglas Rushkoff describes [“our intolerance for a world without endings”], and especially not some kind of End Times event [of the kind that attention-seeking environmentalists love to harangue about, as though they’re part of any solution to any problem at all….assuming they’re not the same thing] but rather, a Time further in the future, which is appreciably different to the one at this moment late in 2019.) is that nothing is built to last; the bad joke being, of course, that things are expected to last for many many years of being used to the exact same application, but nothing is built with any eye for how it may adapt or withstand change or dynamism: the forces of modernity. Let’s be very, very clear on this: the implementation of methods of industrial production are better now than they have ever been, and that is easily demonstrable. Motor Cars and Industrial Workplace Safety are now built to such demanding levels of survivability that Suicide has surpassed Motoring Accidents and Industrial Accidents as the leading cause of death of white men under 40. Which is a victory of sorts, although it would be much better if the outcome hadn’t been that suicide is now at the top of the list. One doesn’t have to even rely on statistics to understand that Things are just built much better now than in the past. Take some time to look around an aviation museum at some point, and you don’t even have to look very closely to see the shoddy, badly-spaced riveting, the panel-beaten-and-offered-up fuselage panels (with the attendant risks of metal fatigue which are the inevitable result of sheet aluminium which has been beaten and not pressed), the will-this-do manufacturing tolerances and improvised steam-age engine mountings. Disciplines improve with practice, and that’s absolutely how it should be.
But….(you knew there was going to be a But, right?), what we’re looking at when we visit those aviation museums is a shoddiness born of technology straining beyond its ability. The riveting is badly done because the aeroplane you’re looking at is a prototype, banged out in a frantic hurry by craftsmen and designers and technicians who only half-understood the problem they were trying to solve, because the full scope of the problem wouldn’t even manifest itself until the thing they’d built tried to fly at the edge of the Stratosphere, or go at twice the speed of sound. How can you design in safety when you don’t even understand what the risks are? A 1944 vintage Douglas DC3 is estimated to be over-engineered by anything up to 40% which on the one hand is a terrible squandrance of resources but on he other results in a piece of engineering that can likely be rebuilt, repaired and re-engines into its 100th year.
So I’m not buying, even for a second, that post-war engineering is superior to its 21st century equivalent. It’s been a stick in the hands of the Right for sixty years that (their country)’s industry is perfect, and it’s the risk-adverse politicians or the Nanny State or the Unions that have been responsible for every rung that’s been slipped. And whilst the imperfections on display at Cosford or Hendon are precisely artefacts of the very modernity which bred them, it’s not like standards and modernity are somehow incompatible. As a wise man said, one shouldn’t have to choose between social security and the internet. By ‘built to last’, of course, we are invoking the spirit of the chronic short-termism which is the inevitable result of the inability to determine how tomorrow might be different to now. Recently, I found myself involved in a conversation will a thoroughly-reasonable co-worker who opined that no-one should ‘expect’ to receive education for ‘nothing’. I replied with what I assumed was a fairly rote, unremarkable rejoinder to the effect that no-one expected to receive higher education for ‘nothing’; they expected to pay more income tax, and therefore repay the investment which their Culture had made in them; and furthermore add to the value of the Culture itself by contributing to its excellence. I’d assumed that some sort of counter-rejoinder would be in wide circulation by now, at least in the UK, a country I hadn’t spent much time in during the many years leading up the conversation, but….there wasn’t one. Short-termism has taken hold with such tenacity that it is, evidently, not even questionable any more. It’s how things are and there is no alternative.
Standards, of course, has another meaning, the one alluded to right at the start here. It can also refer to ‘pieces you need to be able to play and improvise on before you can be considered to have chops worth a damn’. Hauntography has acquired by inheritance quite a few of these, which will now be visited in turn. You may have heard ‘Someday my Prince will Come’ before, but not the way I play it. Putting new life into old standards, of course is one of the defining characteristics of Modernity, whereas Postmodernism occasionally seems content to wire bits of dug-up corpses or rusted tank-hulls together in a way that qualifies as art, but crucially doesn’t do anything. (The difference here is renewal, or fitness for a new purpose. The whole point of Victor Frankenstein’s allegedly triumphant cry of ‘New Life!!’ is that it’s hubristic; Frankenstein has not done anything Promethian at all. All he’s done is stitch together cadavers and give them the simulacrum of life, in fear and envy of women who can really, actually give birth to small human beings which will (unlike Frankenstien’s homonculus), with enough support, become self-supporting human beings capable of participating in community.) I’m coming to the Standards of Hauntography, in some cases, freighted with baggage. Sometimes, the baggage is not my own. I don’t have anything to say about ‘The Wicker Man’ that hasn’t been said more or better by others, except, possibly, to say that I first saw it at a church film club meeting, in a 50-person capacity village hall on a beautiful early-summer evening, surrounded by enough ageing hippies, folkies, Gaia-worshipping eco-feminists, pagan bikers and muttering Permaculturists (many of whom would probably have seen the film first time around) to make me feel like the nominal Earldom of Summerisle was thriving and well in Worcestershire in 1989. The fact that the keynote address (from the BFI introductory material) for the film was delivered (and the 16mm projector operated) by the real, actual vicar whose church hall the film society used for its Saturday meetings was merely the delightful capstone that the event needed. Conversely, it was necessary to Get Over Myself a bit in order to write about (amongst other things) ‘Children of the Stones’, ‘Sapphire and Steel’, ‘The Owl Service’, ‘Penda’s Fen’ and the Quatermass series, because these have been part of my critical / creative DNA since I first encountered them in the years between 1988 and 1991 via various BBC videotapes; diligently-preserved off-air original-broadcast recordings; recordings from New Zealand TV and West German Satellite broadcasters and in one case, a Sony U-Matic tape on load from BBC Pebble Mill, and I baulked a little at all these come-lateleys (many of whom, I suspect, would have been extremely disdainful of the brand of music and TV anorakism which was my stock-in-trade throughout my adolescence) getting marmalade fingermarks all over the stuff I’d been writing about in long-forgotten fanzines decades ago. But there’s nothing more loathsome than the kind of “I’ve been into this for longer than you, so my opinion is gold and yours is worthless” bore, and not just because that’s an attitude that contains all the very worst psychopathologies of Capitalism ( Owning Stuff not merely because you want to have the use of it, but to Prevent other people having the use of it ), but because it actively shuts down new avenues to appreciate things that one thought were familiar. And besides, ‘Artemis 81’ is still untouched territory.