Loretta's Lighthouse

Unfortunately at this time of year the pub is full of arseholes. The girls were complaining yesterday, over tea before their shift began, about the venal treatment men seem to want to vent on dancers at this time of year; and according to them it seemed to be getting worse too year on year; hardly a good sign. 'Joy' said she kind of understood, what with the world as it is; but she's into wellness; others are less sanguine, and I wouldn't like to find a 12" skyscraper stilleto wrapped around my ear in fury; so guys you should mind your manners. On reflection it appeared to me stripping is largely social work: not the usual impression given on their tough working lives by the powers that be and the idiots who despise them. Why men seem so put out by women in control is beyond me: other than that they might harbour serious and worsening problems of their own.

A career stripping is not necessarily a long one, in my life, nowadays like deans, chancellors and professors; favourites come and go: Verona, Alison, Blondi (above) Ellouise..the list rolls on. Me and my friend Nick sit there and he's always saying 'You've got to write a book about this place'; the cast is long and fabulous in variety, and you know I just might. 

We were going to go down this afternoon, Julie too, because Loretta's on. Loretta is quite something; she sports a twinkling butt plug; we call it Loretta's lighthouse. Her arse illuminates. In a crazy and crazier world, she's got it dead right. 

(Photograph by PD)  

Utopia

People seem to get in a worry about utopia, like it's something that didn't happen and can never happen and therefore has to be dismissed as not sufficiently of the moment. This is clearly a conspiracy: you can't sit down to design so much of a bedroom without hoping folks will put their socks in the draw; although one might be more reticent about your design making for better sex. Richard Neutra claimed the latter, but I forgive the old messianic modernist, his heart was in the right place, he just went a bit far. Almost every postmodernist critic has fucked the idea of doing anything decent in the name of making things better for decent folk, and that is a conspiracy, an unreality, a subversion.
Especially these days, when architecture students drown in a misery of their own making. Like, well, how am I supposed to critique a house for partying? Exactly where does that go; well nowhere, except for the Bartlett maybe: exit via the gift shop.

Mersea Mud

Always home somehow. Photo by Paul Davies.

Fifty-Three Today

Fifty three today, so it's Little Feat bootleg on the turntable (like being in a room with them and, it appears, recorded at a wedding) Shepherd and Jellicoe's 'Italian Gardens of the Renaissance' on my knee and John Lydon's 'Anger is the Enemy' under my nose. Soon I'll need a little lie down on the day bed. So, to the pleasures of ageing...

Strategy Against ISIS

It's somewhat paradoxical to get worried about a handful of people (in the UK) making decisions to go off and fight and die on whatever side in today's distant parts; when 57,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Somme with little idea why they were there at all. A little history goes a long way; shame on the government and the media in this ongoing propaganda of fear. Why not ask, on this media and in this government, WHY are these people moved to do this? What caused this conflict? Huh? Please come up with some decent answers.
I healthy start would be the free distribution to all of this cracking little volume (above) which begins in sanguine tone;

'How do wars begin? this is perhaps the most constant theme of the historian.Wars make up most of European history.In every civilisation there have been wars, at any rate until, we think, our own time. Wars are caused in all sorts of ways- wars of conquest, wars of imperial rivalries, wars of family disputes, religious wars.
In the eighteenth century they had settled down in to almost legalistic wars....'

Great man, AJP Taylor.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

We have become accustomed to Tate Modern's merchandise; their publicity seems as much orientated towards Christmas gifts at this time of year as art. And I can understand how the V&A might just become one huge great shop in twenty years time, sponsored by eBay. That seems the logic of things.
I suppose meetings in such places revolve around selections for Turner shawls and Rothko tea towels, and it's all terribly exciting for those involved, but I was a bit non-plussed to visit the newly renovated Imperial War Museum and find they'd done the same thing there, even down to the fur lined leather flying jacket for £650. What next? A Holocaust ashtray; the camouflage onesie?
The displays in the IWM have changed too. Gone is my favourite; the rickety (when you studied it close-up)  Fock Wolf 190 (above) and the armour pierced Jagdpanzer, and instead there is a rather nice BMW sidecar outfit and lots of moving image which didn't move me a great deal at all. There was greatly 'improved' lighting of all the exhibits too, like you were in Bond Street.
So instead of being moved, I became interested in the BMW sidecar outfit because I would like one of the later derivatives, say from 1975, myself, possibly in sunburst orange, and that isn't really the point.
They have also let the artists in. It a moment in the time of man where art and artists have made themselves conspicuously irrelevant, they suddenly get to condition my experience of wartime. There is a conspicuously blown up up vehicle now sitting on the main floor, but we were told it was not displayed as blown up, but as conditioned by some artist. There was also an exhibition of shirts on hangers, like we were in GAP. I left most concerned over our fatal strategy.

East London Stripper Collective

One of the criminal things that has happened to strippers in the UK has been the fact that the 'left' has criminalised them while the 'right' has corporatized them.
Outside of sheer prejudice, one of their problems is legal language (this should be of interest to any Critical Thinking student) as to how you might define their work. Defining strippers as 'sex workers' is highly contentious with many strippers; and I've just come from their latest meeting where it was suggested 'sexy work' might be much better, and I agree, but I don't think that's going to happen. Legally, girls and boys who take they clothes off in performance are now ranked under an act that deals with sex trafficking and paedophilia thanks, amongst others, to Harriet Harman (Policing and Crime Act 2009) and this is clearly incorrect, but the mass of middling conformists can't see it any other way (and never ask the dancers themselves because that might be just a little bit challenging).
While it looks like this society is more open (read soft, insipid, whining, silly, juvenile) to me (and all the pub strippers I know) it's becoming more closed. The East London Stripper Collective articulated this with absolute force yesterday evening, and I wish my own students could have made such presentations of such intellectual power.
So I am faced with the fact that empirically speaking strippers as a group are now the most intelligent critical thinkers I know.
Photo: Julie Cook