Paper shop run out of Daily Mails? Just read your latest missive from ARTROCKER.

Hold on, I thought homeless people were chic. Where's Momus to sort things out?

What is Artrocker btw?

Mailing list of gigs in London, run from http://www.artrocker.com - they also run a weekly club thing at the Buffalo Bar or some such place.

heh, The Divine Brown

It doesn't seem to be online yet, can you c&p it here? It sounds 'nice'

They did an incredible history of Rough Trade in an older issue, complete with compilation tape. Wish I could find either of them.

Hm I have that, Mike, and the tape was good (familiar stuff, of course, but I'm not complaining) but you clearly rate the 'history' higher than I did.

It's obv. dangerous to judge without context but the bits NK quotes up top seem idiotic at best.

So he's saying that homeless Albanians are more attractive than homeless Brits?

"By King's Cross Station I sat down and wept.

There are two things you should know about King's Cross; 1) it's the main
rail terminal for people coming into London from the Midlands and north east
and 2) it's hell on earth. It's the city that Heronimous Bosch might have
designed, a place of torments. It is, unless like Delia you live there, best
avoided at any time of day. Peter Ackroyd in his wonderful biography of the
city tells us that it was always thus, historically dark and dangerous.
The nearest I like to get to it is a hundred feet below as my tube slides
beneath it everyday on my way up to Highbury from Brixton. Yesterday I was
forced to face it, the train was terminated at King's Cross which meant that
I had to emerge, squinting and blinking, into the turmoil above.
Oh my God!
What visitors to London must think as they leave the station I cannot
imagine. Maybe they take the charitable point of view and assume that
they're on the set of a London based remake of Taxi Driver...only an awful
lot worse. I tend to think, no, I know (I have provincial relations who use
the station), that they leave with the impression that our city is Satan's
toilet.
Which is all by way of background, you get the impression? Babylon on smack.

So there I am, in a fuming rage because I now have a mile to walk, dumped in
the middle of Hades. In the tube station itself everything is chaos, a rush
of bodies in all directions, rushing to get out of King's Cross as fast as
possible. Carried by the human tide, I head for the streets. Then, as I turn
a corner I see two police people talking to a young man. Nothing unusual
there. He would appear to be about sixteen, tall and physically healthy. I
get a little closer. Beneath what, at a distance, appeared to be a 'Strokes'
haircut, I caught sight of his face, a bloody mess of open sores. His eyes
were two pools of red, his mouth a puss oozing slash across shattered teeth.
His clothes wore a sheen of black stinking goo, on his feet...nothing. Let
me repeat here, he was sixteen, at most. I'm afraid it got to me, my soul
plummeted, how can this be allowed to happen in our wonderful liberal
welfare state, how can a child arrive at such a point? And how can it be the
Police who have to try and help? Is that their job?

Well of course it isn't, we have multi billion pound social service agencies
and any number of charities with pockets stuffed with our money doing jack
shit. A survey I noticed in today's paper revealed that 37% of all charity
donations go to the relief of child poverty. Really? What the hell these
charities are doing with the money is anyone's guess but one thing is for
sure, it sure as shit wasn't going anywhere near the child at King's Cross.
Maybe he made the fundamemtal mistake of being British in Britain, maybe if
he'd been the son of Albanians it would have been a different story ( is
that comment racist? If so I suggest you report me to Trevor Phillips at
Thought Police Central). The liberal elite aren't too interested in the
problems on their doorstep, they're not 'sexy'. It's the same mind set that
sends the children of the middle classes scuttling over to Africa to dig
irrigation ditches or to Indonesia to run Aids education courses. Ask them
to pop down to Brixton, Hackney or Tottenham and help deal with the
appalling social and economic conditions endured by so many there and you'll
be ignored at best. Like I said, it just isn't sexy.

So where does that leave our boy at King's Cross? In the tender mercies of
the constabulary. The people whose job it is to prevent this happening are
far too busy ticking boxes and meeting their race and gender quotas to
actually do the job we're paying them for. We really haven't moved on from
Dickensian squalor and misery at all, we just ignore it. How much longer
must it be allowed to fester before these people get their Moholo's dirty?

I left the station utterly depressed, the image of that boy burned into my
consciousness - forever! There but for the grace of God go your children and
mine. It simply broke my heart and if it doesn't do the same to yours I
guess you're either inhuman, stupid, mean or a public sector employee paying
a mortgage out of the misery of this child and planning your lovely summer
holidays.

As for me? By King's Cross Station I sat down and wept.

TOM ARTROCKER. "

I think in context I would at least recognise the feelings expressed even if I wouldn't necessarily agree with them...

A combination of the blindingly obvious, and meaningless right-wing scrawlers' catchphrases ("The liberal elite", "children of the middle classes" etc) that Littlejohn probably considers hackneyed. Stick to garage rock, eh?

Although I did actually like their club, and enjoy much of the music they promoted, I had to stop getting the Artrocker mailout because the creeping right wing politics was getting too much for me.

This is not the first time I have had fallings out with Garage Rock scenes over this sort of thing. I don't know why it continues to amaze me that some people who are conservative in their music tastes might be socially or politicall conservative as well as culturally conservative.

Me, I loved the freedom and the experimentalism and the DIY attitudes of much of 60s garage and psych. Some people want to return to the music of the past as a metaphor for just returning to the past. They take the "Be A Caveman" line quite literally.

Dear Tom Artrocker,

I live in King's Cross. And you ARE a fucking racist. Fuck you.

Yours,

Joe

"Trevor Philips at Thought Police Central"!!!

Kings Cross isn't that bad.

B-but... a MILE?!

Kate OTM.

A mile is a long way when faced with "the human tide"!

I think you'll find he was being carried by the human tide.

Compare:

Bosch

King's Cross

Yes but Norman none of the people in Bosch have a Strokes haircut.

When was that picture taken? 1900? Where is the construction?

E-mailed Tom to tell him to unsubscribe me - he
attached responses to his article he's already received including doozies like this from Jack Kane@Record Collector: 'A point about your comment about being british in britain and therefore
>ignored by charities; every age has its heresies, and in ours it is the
>subject of race. to even discuss race nowdays leads to one being treated as
>a heretic, but i find that more and more english people are becoming
>heretical. i live in ealing, and the number of slavs here is incredible --
>they're not in the eu, so how can there be so many of them? when poland
>joins later this year, the floodgates will open! that's not such a bad
>thing
>in itself, but what is bad is that they will all come to london."

Hilariously he Tom ends his own script with the somewhat sarcastic advice that I should just 'ignore it and it'll all go away'. Clearly doesn't realise his 'zine has just become another little pamphlet of dread albeit one that doesn't have a blood-red masthead and an offer inside of a dream house for life. Makes the mistake of thinking that just because nowadays you can't get away with blanket racist comments without expecting criticism as proof of some PC reich governing what people can say.
Dumbkopfs all. Another wasted opportunity.

King's Cross is a fucking shithole, no mistake. The problem is, Tom's following the typical knee-jerk right-wing reflexive fuckhead path of blaming the weak and the suffering while playing out the role of the victim, a quite delicious contradiction for those with the proper lack of morals and/or intelligence to pull it off.

So he sees a homeless guy who's in a bad fucking way. Obviously, this is the fault of Albanian immigrants, African AIDS victims and liberals.

Tom Artrocker, what have *you* done to help the poverty and squalor of Kings Cross? Anything fucking at all, or do you just continue on with your shit band and your self-righteous anti-establishment bullshit and your tedious and ill-informed and offensive diatribes? Are you any use to this universe whatsoever?

Perhaps the mailouts should come accompanied by a 'topical' cartoon from Dave Gaskill

The guy sounds like a tool and a half -- rah to Neil for telling him where to stick it (and Kate and Stevie and etc.). I would prefer to think of a better reference:

Someone told me Monday, someone told me Saturday
Wait until tomorrow and there's still no way
Read it in a book or write it in a letter
Wake up in the morning and there's still no guarantee

Only last night I found myself lost
By the station called King's Cross

Perhaps next week, Artrocker's renaissance man could share the pain of his return journey to Brixton where BLACK people live. Perhaps he could talk to some of his Brixton neighbours and ask what effect such pernicious, covert racism has had on their lives. Maybe the columnist accepts blacks as they have a longer history here, and black culture has been assimilated to, adopted by, and influenced more traditional white British pursuits (even some of the music you like, eh, Tom?) Maybe in, ooh, 30 years' time, he will accept Albanians, long after everyone else has accepted/welcomed them and hence lived a more interesting life.
I'd also be very interested how he managed to walk one mile and get from King's Cross to Highbury. His geography would appear to be another weak point.

He should have got himself a 19

shit, i meant a 30

I especially love the fact it's really sad that this bloke is homeless because he's young and he's got a Strokes haircut. Like, who gives a fuck about an old tramp, eh? Rock on.

Reactionary thought remains an impenetrable mystery to me. It is as if there was a wall inside the mind of people such as this, and the person who Neil Kulkarni quotes the email from, which prevents them from seeing beyond a certain point. Who in their right mind believes that the poitical and cultural agenda in this country is set by some liberal 31337? Take a look at a fucking newsstand someday and actually read the fucking headlines on the papers. Who in their right mind thinks that "english" people are in any way whatsoever oppressed by immigrants? God, it's fucking pathetic.

The clip from the email Neil quotes is a fucking classic as well. You wonder why provincials like me moan on about London bias in the media all the time? I quote:

"The floodgates will open! that's not such a bad thing in itself, but what is bad is that they will all come to london."

Well fuck! Here's the solution!! Send them all to Liverpool, or Bristol, or fucking Alnwick then, then you won't have to look at them!!

Jesus. Mysteries of the reactionary mind....

there is a point in that though in that yes London is #1 destination of choice for so many people (not just immigrants or the destitute) and it's just getting too crowded, though it is difficult to argue about that without coming across as a xenophobic, snobbish, ungrateful, unsympathetic arsehole a lot of the time.

this has always depressed me about artrocker mailouts, because in addition to feeling bad about the content, it makes me wonder how someone who's so all-around wonderful in person as tom is can spew stuff like this in print. he seems much too smart for that, but alas...

right wingers use YOOF forum to spread gospel of hate. wot's new? its all over the damn place. but good call bringing it forward, neil.

It isn't the "they will all come to london", though stevem, it's the "what is bad" bit.

x-post Doom-e! Hello!! I was just wondering where you were these days!!

hey norman. just busy. HEY! I'm going on tour with the libertines, writing my freakin' arse off (editted 120 pages of book and finished that short story edit (not sent it too you because I was ashamed ha ha, written one rough), reviewing, of course and keeping up with new year's resolution to a) go out more, b) watch five movies a week and c) read a book a week.

can i posit the thought that he's maybe not evil but just quite dumb.
for the record, he writes for a magazine that i write for and i will be mailing this out to all editors involved in it just to let them know the offensive guff he spews out in his own forum. i will also be mailing him personally.

aaah - 'the banality of evil'

well it's hardly sophisticated is it - there are enough holes in this piece to drive a bus thru... it's rubbish. if it was more solid,i'd be more worried

this is all uncomfortably reminiscent of the stuff (inspirational to me at the time) that Neil used to write about Britpop in MM. which reminds me: does anyone else remember when Bluetones singer Mark Morris came out with (I think - it *might* have been a Steven Wells setup but I suspect not) some decidedly paranoid stuff about "too many immigrants" in an NME interview? This would have been well after their commercial peak - probably when they released "Keep The Home Fires Burning" in 2000.

"uncomfortably reminiscent" = "depressing that certain indie-rockers haven't moved on at all"

He's really pissed off that he has to WALK A MILE - a MILE!!!!!!!! What a fucking TWAT. Haha.

Representing King's Cross -
I don't think you can describe it as a ghetto like other ghettos, it's a central location for a lot of things and most people (whatever state they're in) are they by choice as they find it congenial to them. This applies to first-wave gentrifiers (as I like to excuse myself as being, instead of 'semi-employed derelict-appearing social deviant') as well as junkies. The guy described in the editorial - who's to say he didn't wake up the next morning and say "Man, what a cool time I last night, did I get fucked up or what!" as a student would after some drunken atrocity. I mean, the place isn't some Alcatraz built on the edges of the city like some council estates are, it's just got a looser code of conduct that suits certain people. And if they don't like it they're always Camden

btw I do find the editorial depressing. In a 'fuck, not another one' kind of way. Lately people I know who never ventured an opinion before on anything are coming up with 'swamped' type of shit, it's worrying.

I meant 'there's always Camden' of course. Although a King's Cross-Camden fite might be cool. (George Romero vs Danny Boyle)

Camden is Hades

Yeah, especially now that there's all these cops with drug-sniffing 'Cerberii'. It used to be a convenient place to get weed. Good too, only got ripped off once.

Oh look, Artrocker's been reading Vice.

The thing about Artrocker, though, is that they sorely need a sub. Or just an IT person to fix the semi-colon/colon key on the keyboards in their offices?

Do you know, I miss Swells. Where is he now? Hmm, but then some of the stuff Vice prints crosses that irony/offensive line quite sharply.

"But, when you start censoring the peoples
right to use their own language as they see fit you fuck around in the
garden of freedom and the fruit trees die. Where am I going with this?
Today's Times carries a story headlined: "The word that dare not speak it's
name," and continues: "The word homosexual, coined in 1869, is to be phased
out by the government after complaints from the gay community." It is to be
replaced by the phrase "Orientation towards people of the same sex".
So Ilooked up the word in the Artrocker "My First Dictionary" and guess
what?
Yep, that's the definition of homosexual. (Interestingly enough, our 1968
edition does not contain the word Homophobia, a good example of a new word
gaining currency in our developing language.) Leave our language alone
please, it is not yours, it's mine and I'll use it any damn way like."

Someone send this boy on a crash course in sociolinguistics...

What is the point you are trying to make?

He doesn't seem to grasp why someone might object to being labelled 'homosexual' rather than gay, displaying ignorance of the connotations of the word as a) old-fashioned b) a little derogatory c) overtones of medical/psychiatric language. Mostly, though, it reminded me of Daily Mail-ers saying 'But why can't we call them Pakis? That's where they're from!'

Yes and "orientation towards people of the same sex" isn't windy or patronising at all. The guy strikes me as a dick overall but your pop at him seems as kneejerk as most of his columns

I didn't say it wasn't windy etc. Just that it's pretty obvious to most people why certain words might be considered a little outdated or offensive....

It's PC gone maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad, isn't it?

I've only come across Artrocker in the printed form before so have never seen any of the columns before coming across the thread. The only thing I pick up from the mag is that it's a little too fanziney to take seriously as an alternative/antidote to NME.

We can probably both agree that it's a pretty pointless thing to write a column about. As for the magazine, it manages to combine an alarmingly narrow musical outlook, as is their prerogative, and completely undiscerning praise for anything that falls into said outlook. They big up the Coachwhips a lot though, so fair play

I thought it was all very 2002, really. Homeless people that look like the Strokes? How early-millennium. And it reads as mostly irrelevant to those of us up in the provinces.

this thread is over a year old!

*buys a little cake*

Happy belated birthday, thread.

Hey, are you Stelfox of livejournal.com/~robincarmody comment fame?

i still can't believe that kid is in such bad ways if he can afford a strokes haircut.