The Small Faces came
on the headphones this morning. Ian
McLagan’s tune, “Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire” from the 1967 album,
“Small Faces”, with its dreamy organ and stereophonic pans kicked in on the
walk over to the gym. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFU6qU0CWY8
Inspired, insipid air drums with Kenny Jones ensued on the 6:45 AM stroll with
branches as dangling high-hats, leaves as cymbals. By the time I was on the stair master I just
started the song all over again. This
was midway through their extraordinary output.
By 1969 they’d have disbanded with Steve Marriott’s huffy departure.
One of the few songs where McLagan actually sings, he pulls
it off, splendidly. I had figured that
Bedfordshire was simply another evocative English location, a 绿草如茵[1] like Chris White of the Zombie’s
song about Beechwood Park. Instead, this
psychedelic paean is actually a drawing upon and older song from 1936, which
British children like McLagan and the rest of his audience must have all been
quite familiar with. Dame Vera Lynn, who
later went on to become “The Forces’ Sweetheart” known for songs like “The
White Cliffs of Dover”, had her first recording with the decidedly
un-psychedelic, “Up the Wooden Hill to Bedfordshire” wherein the ”hill” is the
stairs and “Bedfordshire” your bed.
Researching it I came across another discovery, and another
new, if unfortunate assignation.
Profiling songs such as Ms. Lynn’s an article showed a typical
children’s bedtime story book from that time. The article’s author no doubt correctly suggests the “golliwog” on
the cover wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows at the time.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/up-the-wooden-hill-to-bedfordshire.html
I’d never heard the term.
It is what might otherwise be called a racist “mammy” or “minstrel”
image in the States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golliwogg I never heard the term “wog” used much
outside of “Lawrence of Arabia” but it seems to pop up with disturbing
frequency in Australia . I was dining in Sydney one evening with two successful businessmen, one an Australian of Italian descent and another of British descent. It was a like watching a physical body blow when the latter tilted his head, cracked a half smile and referred to the prior as a "wog." Nasty term.
Dame Lynn’s tune would have fallen flat during the swingin’
60’s but it would have fit right in, during the middle of my current read “The
Mating Season” by P.G. Wodehouse. It is
one thing to use facial expressions and accents and pauses in person to elicit
laughter. But writing something uproariously funny is an all-together different
challenge. Allow me to share with you
all a snippet that had me snorting aloud from the lavatory the other day:
Esmond Haddock, seen close to,
fully bore out Catsmeat’s description of him as a Greek god and I could well
understand the concern of a young lover who saw his girl in danger of steered
into rose gardens by such a one. He was
a fine, upstanding, sitting at the moment, of course, but you know what I mean,
broad-shouldered bozo of about thirty, with one of those faces which I believe,
though I should have to check up with Jeeves, are known as Byronic. He looked like a combination of a poet and an
all-in wrestler.
It would not have surprised you to
learn that Esmond Haddock was the author of sonnet sequences of a fruity and
emotional nature, which made him the toast of Bloomsbury for his air was that
of a man who could rhyme ‘love’ and ‘dove’ as well as the next chap. Nor would you have been astonished if you
were informed that he had recently felled an ox with a single blow. You would simply have felt what an ass the ox
must have been to get into an argument with a fellow with a chest like that.”
I hope you enjoyed that.
While I was typing, the phone rang.
An unmarked number. Hmm. It could be the deal I’ve waited all my adult
life for. It could be one of my
daughters calling from school. I answered
the call and was met with the Chinese equivalent of a Jerky Boy assault:
Yeah, well?
Hello?
HEY! Hey.
Sir. Who are you trying to reach?
I’ve got
all of them right here. What are you . .
.
I don’t
know what you’re talking about.
HEY!
Who are you
trying to reach?
These. These are all
mine! You know?
I see.
Hey.
And with that the gentleman withdrew. You may well ask, why not just hang up after
the first “Hey.” There are mountains of
spam solicitations here in China and that is of course, the default, but I’ve
gotten burned doing that to my children’s teachers and my wife’s business
partners, etc., who are making legitimate efforts to communicate with me, so I
make the effort through the veil of thick Mandarin accents, and what almost
always feels, pushy.
I was going to continue on with our gula theme. I’d written
yesterday about gluttony unbridled in China.
Gluttony as national policy. When
you go from a culture of great scarcity to surplus in a generation’s time, it
invariably strain’s the fabric of society. Just as British bed time
stories before and after Empire were notably different.
This, from the
Seven Deadly Starbuck’s (7DS) manuscript:
A flowering of rough, new money
behavior and first-class entitlements makes up the new normal, for a growing
slice of contemporary China. Moral
anchorage for any temperance has been snapped by the pull of the permissible.
China’s at the checkout counter. They’ve miraculously introduced an America’s
worth of people with copious disposable income.
First class behavior, necessarily gluttonous, that we helped define will
not be denied. First World behavior,
premised on surplus can only grow gluttonous.
Three more America’s worth of Chinese citizenry are still in line with
the same agenda, to be able to purchase comfort and distinction beyond
subsistence. Sprouting from the night
soil of a four-decade radical egalitarian experiment, it is all new money. Nothing about this new spend is refined,
materializing as quickly as it has.
Engineering the economic challenge of growth will wane in complexity
beside orchestrating the ethical challenge of temperance, that is pending for
the CCP.
Managing ongoing economic growth, at anything like the rates
enjoyed over the last two decades will be extraordinarily difficult. Will managing, nurturing, a new ethical
framework for an industrialized China actually be a greater challenge? Won’t the millennium’s old civilization
simply reassert itself once there is a surplus?
A people who understood civilization when the other side of the Eurasian
landmass were hunting deer with rocks should be able to manage. And this may be the case.
But the CCP understands its role as needing to actively
define and steward moral guidance.
Simply letting China be China is not the game plan. Moral frameworks will be articulated and
legislated towards. Select pieces
Confucian, Legalist and other traditions will be culled for what’s seen as
utile at the moment (as per the government’s 'China Dream' posters from a few
posts back) not revived wholesale.
The Party needs to encourage domestic consumption if the
next phase of economic development, moving from export-oriented growth to a
services economy, is to succeed. And this is quite at odds with pressing need to
tame the gluttony and waste that is everywhere manifest.
Decency and certainly temperance can be rather complicated
things to legislate effectively, as they are moving targets. Tensions of Empire built on butlers like
Jeeves and safe naptimes with characters like golliwogs all proved rather
dramatically unsustainable for England.
But the Party is the only permissible voice here and these moral matters
are begging for articulation. The Party will
simply have to try and we’ll all have to watch.
The greater their success with economic development, the greater such
amoral dissonance will yawn.
That word. It’s
contagious. It’s enough to make you tired.
“So please out the light, as I slip away.”
great small faces reference as i've just been listening to them again. interesting bit on the Party as well. love vera lynn. very evocative of WWII
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