Andy Bungay hosts a weekend late-night radio show in Central and SW London – Riverside Radio DAB, which aims to take a deep conversational, post-prandial dive into ancient and modern culture wrapped around some broadly jazzy and folky music and poetry. Having a bop around the kitchen before settling on the sofa is very much advised.
Andy Bungay
4.5 hours today deep cleaning the gaff, the sort of thing that typifies domestic vortices of umbrage, or not. I am contemplating getting someone in, if it is ethical to put them through it – either way, there is the eternal hunt for stuff you’ve mislaid in the frenzy of the task.
I must say this time, in the wake of a lost a romantic opportunity and precious sunshine in the past, there is something of accomplishment and clearing the decks a bit. I wonder if Zarah Sultana has this feeling now that she is prepared a suit for defamation, at no little cost, then withdrawn it for the sake of the party. On the face of it, a bit like staying together for the sake of the children. In decades past, when “…Divorce never, murder frequently” was a darkly snorkful fixture of snugs and tearooms such was the stigma of the former, The Left was so often splintering and fissuring rather than uniting.
I think this is where some of my more conservative friends, and indeed traditional rites of passage lore, get the idea of idealistic shooting star-ism yielding to pragmatic time-serving and comfort in the fact that the adversary will eventually screw up given enough existential rope.
In the Our/Your Party case this was about modes of joining, and it has the distinct feel of the Judean People’s “Popular Front v The People’s Popular Front of Judea”. Until perhaps you look across other headline-grabbing nations and observe the strident motley crews essaying childlike unswerving piety.
Tony Bennett used to say that it took 15 years to learn how to walk out on stage.
His politics consisted in marching for Dr. King with Harry Belafonte and singing; “Lost in the stars” against apartheid a cappella, mic-less in the Albert Hall. Not much Political Theatre short of Churchill is going to measure up to that.
What has changed over Mr. Corbyn’s long career is the default expectation that someone or something is pointing a camera/ mike at you when you are not planning for it. Frank, informal, off the cuff takes a little bit of technique and amplification, but not much. Corbyn is a natural at this in talking to any audience. The command is borne of experience and principle, often rooted in obscure rationales that don’t break themselves down into soundbites.
You/Our Party launches itself in an age where people can make a sort of living out of being offended, a variant on being an ‘influencer’. That young Zarah chose to be one is her right of course, but the conversation she is having now with Corbyn is one she might have had months ago.
This business of being sidelined can simply be being part of an orchestral tutti, rank and file as the Musicians’ Union calls it. Collectively a mighty instrument. Gabrieli wrote his Canzone in working out the beginnings of large ensemble heft as phasing in and out of prominence. There’s a social and socio-political analogy in there, sometimes called the collective.
The non-musician who might follow this analogy has to feel they are being heard in the right context, that their accompaniment is idiomatic and simpatico.
But how do you blend air guitar with a male voice choir singing a lullaby a tad raggedy.
This brings me to a novella about raggedy men and offended women by my friend Cam Dunham called “The justice league of fathers”, which opens with what might or might not be a cinema treatment/dream sequence in the vortex of umbrage that is Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Actually, Cam likes the place as a son et lumiere and so does his daughter, who has gone from 7 to 15 during the writing process. This slow food creativity is unfashionable but in this case works and emblematically fits the sort of timescale on which custody proceedings are pursued.
Defamation suits are relatively brisk. Fitness for parenthood has to be assessed, whether by hair strand test for intoxicants (sometimes cosmetic/prescribed unguents can trigger a positive reading), or in one case by continuous observation while perched on the sofa for the best part of two weeks (I kid you not).
So there’s an example of where an intimate or formative phenomena, whether your ‘child’ is a physical child or a brainchild, the result of conceptual deliberation and seizing some moment. Which, unlike parental junctures, at least until flee-the-coop time, is a long old innings.
Enter now, I would suggest, a third element into the political weather – my former supervisor Denis Postle’s Humanistic phrase. That of the Balladeer and the Poet.
We are Many, They are Few said Shelley in “Prometheus unbound”.
In “Letters to Miranda”, Gabriel Moreno addresses his son while the muse and at least figurative Mum lingers and cats meaningful glances made from shadows and light
In our recent radio interview, G talks about Miranda as a partly-abstracted vision of a Muse who has taught him, for one, a more forensic approach to the English language —the stuff of poems and spats— as opposed to the phantasmographical tilt of Spanish as a tongue. Thus a sort of Yin and Yang creative tension optimised. Is co-leadership a bit like that in any arena? Beyond the literal-minded, if axiomatic, societal point that principle and big money, sometimes even adequate money, are inimical there’s the fact that parenting properly is an idealistic pursuit, rooted in the here and now, informed by the past hopefully, and with a hopeful to a future, their future.
As the denizens of the late night trains departing from Blackfriars after Wall Street has closed, reading bedtime stories to their kids on their mobiles, all too often recording on the hoof, delayed, when they could, it’s not all about the money.
Some kids without this felicitous wind-down will tell you otherwise. Some of them enter a state of permanent remonstration towards anyone who will listen. I’m not saying that Zarah Sultana is a child of this chip-on-the-shoulder-ism, not least because she has stuck her elegant neck out on contentious issues with bravery and commitment.
She has, I think, fallen victim to the solecism that you have to show your (inner) working as an organisation in order to be properly transparent. In social and new media, being always on means being in the firing line for opprobrium compounded from whatever you are complaining about, where J’Accuse gets dumped in the same remainder bin as “Mea culpa” and “We was robbed”. Which is where this argument sounds a bit blokes muttering outside Radio Rentals checking the pools scores on a rainy Saturday afternoon, no rosettes among them other than for their pigeons or petunias.
Here are the shows with extended conversations with Cam and Gabriel (also featuring my reporter Pamela Mounter in Italy): Saturday 30th August ft. Cameron Dumham on ‘The Justice League of Fathers’ Pt.1, Sunday 31st August ft Cam Dunham Pt 2, Snuggs Pieward Esipode 14ish, Saturday 13th September ft Gabriel Moreno, La Mounter in Lecce and Sunday 14th September ft La Mounter En Italia Pt 2, Gabriel Moreno’letters To Miranda’ Pt 2
(Photos: Pixabay)
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