Tears on Tape: the return of HIM

So, HIM are back with a blinding new album, Tears on Tape. But sadly, this comes with a ‘but’. As I write, singer Ville Valo is very ill, having suffered a severe asthma attack backstage on Friday, just as the band were due to start their US tour. It appears to have been accompanied by ‘presumptive pneumonia’, and fans worldwide are sending him our best wishes for a very speedy return to full health. Of course, the tour has been cancelled, and Ville’s condition gives this release even more resonance.

I bought my copy today, the special edition that comes in a pack with a copy of Metal Hammer, dedicated entirely to the band and edited by Ville Valo himself. I’m listening to it right now.

I’ve met the band a couple of times, both at Portsmouth Guildhall just before a gig. The first time, I was writing for a traditional music website and I have particularly special memories of this show. I flashed my card at their tour manager and hoped for the best, then he sought me out in the foyer and said there was a folk band following HIM on this October tour and they would love a write-up. Was I up for it? (Does a bear shit in the woods?) So I accompanied him through several doors, sat on an amp and waited. As I recall, Cathedral were supporting, that night, and I could hear enough from where I was to not be especially sad at not being in the auditorium at that moment. Anyway, after a short while, their tour manager came back out to fetch me and led the way to a door which, when I looked up, fingers crossed, said ‘HIM’. Ohhh, yes. The one time I hoped it wasn’t actually a folk band, and there they were – all five of them, plus former member Antto, crammed into the tiny dressing room, preparing for the gig. The tour manager offered me some water, and then, even better, Ville said to me, ‘Beer?’ ‘I’d love one, thanks.’ (Smug? Me?) Antto, Mige and Ville did actually play me some folk tunes – they’d just visited Ireland – and they were fucking great! And then we talked for a bit, I tried not to go redder with every minute that passed, tried not to stare at Ville and make myself completely obvious, and made the most of every single moment I was in there.

The second time, I caught them off the tour bus. A load of teeny fans were waiting in the car park for them, and a couple of them actually approached the bus, only to be greeted by curtains being shut on them. Well, did they really expect anything else? They disappeared. A couple of girls and I hung on. And were rewarded. The band signed my CD (Venus Doom) and I made sure they knew about the write-up I’d published, as promised last time, on the (now defunct) website. Ville said yes, he remembered. That made me happy. I took a photo with him and then they went inside.

These are lovely memories that I’ll keep forever, and the reason I’ve described them here is because recalling them makes me feel fond of all the band members all over again, and, now that Ville is so ill, my thoughts are especially with him.

The new songs are truly amazing, though I really didn’t expect anything else. HIM are a group of extremely talented musicians and, in a world where so many releases are just insipid crap, that’s refreshing. Ville’s vocals are beautiful as ever. The band are on top form. The Fucking Fabulous Finns are back.

Get well soon, dear Ville. We all love you.

Is this ever going to end?

Today, I read that a mother of four has left her children and husband behind after she committed suicide. This follows a sexual abuse trial where she was a witness, and the QC thought that she was lying about what had happened to her when she was younger. A WOMAN QC.

I find this sort of thing on an almost daily basis, now. Women being raped or otherwise abused, because certain men think they have the right or because they think women are worth less than dog turds on the street. My uncle rang this morning and said that a woman where he works (he’s a bus driver) was groped by a male colleague. When she reported it initially, a female manager stood up for her, but then she was told to retract her statement and the manager refused to back her up any more. It turns out this manager has been having an affair with the abuser. The woman who was groped has been told she has a choice. She can go to the police, in which case the abuser would get a criminal record and would have trouble finding another job (GOOD!). Or she can report it internally and get him fired, and it would be on his files and he would still have trouble finding another job (again – GOOD!). Apparently, the victim feels bad about that. Why? Why on earth should she feel bad about it? I wouldn’t! Let the fucker get what’s coming to him!

I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of behaviour myself, a long time ago. I was young and naive, and was temping in a local bakery. I was washing my hands after using the ladies’ and a man came up behind me and said that he wanted to wash his hands ‘all over you’. I froze, finished washing my (now shaking) hands and went back to work. I said nothing. Until I got home, that was. I told my parents and my dad rang the manager to explain what had happened and that I wouldn’t be coming back. The manager’s reaction? ‘Oh, that was [whatever his name was], he didn’t mean anything by it, that’s just the way he is.’ That’s just the way he is??? What the manager was saying, then, was that he was well aware that this employee of his had often intimidated women and he’d been told several times before, but had done nothing about it. Why? I may be going out on a limb, here (though I don’t think so), but I think he accepted it because he didn’t see anything wrong with it. I’ll repeat that: He didn’t see anything wrong with a man intimidating women and making them feel dirty. Who knows what else this fucker was capable of? And the worst thing is, it never got reported to the police, because all I wanted was to not set foot in there ever again. He, undoubtedly, kept his fucking job. If it had happened now, believe me, things would have been very, very different. I have my kung fu, for one thing, and I would not be afraid to use it. And then I would shout, scream, and gather all the women in the area (it was Portsmouth, if you’re interested) who had ever had something similar happen and have them all walk out of work and march on the streets. And I would go to the police (though, from what I’ve been reading recently, so many coppers accept that it’s OK to grope/rape/sexually abuse women that I’m not actually sure what that would achieve).

I can’t begin to explain just how angry I am, right now. I’m writing this blog entry so that I can let some of it out of my system without punching the wall.

Please, if you give a shit about this, tell people about this blog entry, let everyone know that something has to be done. Women are not objects to be played with. We are not inferior to men. We are human. It’s about time the law – and society as a whole – started treating us as such. Perhaps then, men who think it’s OK to abuse women – and women who may think they were ‘asking for it’ – would think twice.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re wondering if I have an opinion on what the punishment for rape should be, yes, I do. But I’m not naive enough to think a man would ever be castrated just because he thought it was OK to fuck a woman without her consent… Because that would be over the top… Wouldn’t it?

Laugh? They nearly died…

I knew it wouldn’t be long before the jokes started about this morning’s tragic crash in Vauxhall. I woke up to this news and it has quite rightly had hours of live coverage, as two people died and several more were injured, some badly.

I’m not going to say anything about the need for warning lights on top of cranes, because that’s so obvious that it goes without saying and the local authorities should have sorted it out months ago. What I will say is that it never fails to amaze me that so many people seem to find it funny to send jokes winging back and forth within mere hours of a tragedy like this one. I remember in 1997 when Princess Diana was killed. There were the jokes, predictable as ever. I didn’t listen then, and I won’t listen now. I can’t believe anyone would actually find it amusing to even think up these so-called jokes (correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought jokes were supposed to be funny, and people dying in tragic circumstances is never funny).

I may be way off the mark, here, but I’d bet a significant amount of money that those who are laughing wouldn’t be fucking laughing if someone they knew or loved had been killed or hurt, this morning. If they had been there to witness the helicopter coming down. If they had been the ones fleeing the fire, abandoning their cars before they exploded, running away from falling debris, being evacuated from their homes until it was deemed safe to go back in.

So, if you’re thinking of passing on a ‘joke’, think about it. If you’d lost someone you loved, would you like it if people laughed? No. Thought not.

To be or not to be… a nice person

So, this morning, Twitter is being bombarded with reactions against this article by Julie Burchill. I can see why everyone is getting inflamed about it. The language she uses is indeed inflammatory and people are quite rightly getting upset and angry. But there is one very important thing that most people (with one or two notable exceptions) are not saying, and that’s why I’m writing this now.

There is no reason or excuse for anyone to use language which is intended to offend certain members of society. (And no, I don’t mean swearing. I personally can swear like a navvy when I want to. I also know when not to.) If someone does use such language (and they frequently do), they must expect people to react badly and, in this case, they have, and Suzanne Moore (who wrote the original article) has been hounded to such an extent that she has deactivated her Twitter account to avoid more abuse. Julie Burchill has reacted to this so strongly, I suspect, because Ms Moore is a friend of hers. I have no qualms about saying I would defend my friend, too. What kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t? Even so, if I thought my friend had been out of order, I would say so, in the very same article I was writing in his or her defence.

However, Ms Burchill had the perfect opportunity to make a point, here, but she has spectacularly failed to do so, and people are getting so fired up about the issue that they’re forgetting the most important thing just as completely as she is. What is the most important thing according to me, you may ask? Well, personally, I don’t give a flying one whether someone is a woman, a man, a transsexual, gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, black, white, Chinese, Christian, Muslim, pagan, Jewish, or whatever the fuck else. The most important thing, in my opinion (and you may, of course, take it or leave it), is whether or not someone is a nice person. What Suzanne Moore said was wrong, I agree. I get her point about the ‘ideal woman’s body’ being an impossibility, but she was still wrong to phrase it the way she did. But for the transsexual community to rise up against her and hound her so badly that she deactivates her account makes them no better than she is. It’s simple mob mentality.

Unfortunately, all Julie Burchill has done by writing about it has made the situation even worse than it already was. I had no idea it had happened until she highlighted it by writing the article. Perhaps she thought it needed to be highlighted. Who knows? But people are right. No one should diss transsexuals. But by the same token, no one should diss women, either. (And yes, I use the word women deliberately.) Or men. Or gays. Or people of different racial backgrounds. At the risk of sounding like a cliché, are we not all human?

The point Ms Burchill makes about trans women being ignorant about the issues ‘natural’ women face every day is a good one. I agree. No man (and no one who was born male) can ever really know what it’s like to be a woman. The same way no biological woman can understand what it’s like to be a man, either pre- or post-op. And I can’t begin to understand how terrible it must be to feel you’re living in the wrong body and want it surgically changed to what you consider to be the right one. It must be a living hell. But that just illustrates the fact that no one can know what it’s like to be anyone else. Not really. We can try our best, and we can empathise and we can sympathise, we can try to imagine what it would be like to be someone else. We can even, given our propensity for anthropomorphising things, imagine what it’s like to be something else. But we can never really know.

And this leads me to believe that whether or not someone considers themselves a woman, unless they are biologically female, they’ll never truly know what it’s like to be one. In the same way, a man who was born female can never really know what it is to be a man.

I know this blog post is going to piss a few people off, and I do regret that. But this is my opinion, and I’m as entitled to express it as anyone else.

I’m going to repeat here what we say when a new child joins the kids’ kung fu class: Always treat other people the way you’d like to be treated yourself. If you see something happening, ask yourself, ‘Would I like that done to me?’ If the answer is ‘No,’ don’t do that thing to someone else. It’s easy enough to remember. If you’re a horrible person, you can’t expect people to be nice to you, and it doesn’t make any difference who you are or who you used to be. Who you are may increase the odds of others being horrible to you. It may not. Does that mean you have to be horrible to other people, just in case? Of course not. What we give is not always what comes back to us. It’s sad. But it’s true.

So what would my reaction have been if I were in that situation? Anger? Undoubtedly. Hurt? Most certainly. But would I hound the person who’d upset me so badly that my own actions meant I’d lowered myself to their level? No.

Be nice. People won’t always be nice back, but the chances of them being nice are significantly increased if you’re a decent person. I went to a lecture yesterday, a talk about Daoism, one of a series by our Chief Instructor. I took a lot of notes, and a couple of things are pertinent to this issue. “All actions have repercussions.” So if you do something, don’t expect there to be no comeback on yourself. Or on other people. And something one of the other instructors, a scholar of philosophy, said: “If the end justifies the means, you need to take full responsibility for the means.” And that is something that far too many people forget. So the end goal was to upset Suzanne Moore by telling her what a cow she is. Well done. Mission accomplished. But will those people who hounded her take responsibility for their actions? I’m really sorry, but I very much doubt it. And that’s one of the least attractive traits of the human species.

I’m not saying I’m whiter than white. But I do my best. And really, that’s all I ask of anyone.

Ten years on… My musical hero returns triumphant

Well, well, well. That was some news on Monday, huh? I checked my Twitter feed to discover people talking about David Bowie. Some random tweets, others more specific, but to find out that Bowie had released his first new material since 2003 was a shock, to say the least. I had to stop myself dancing round the room. And I cried. I actually cried, I was that happy.

You see, I had honestly thought that was it from him. Certain of the (admittedly rather obscure) lyrics on the Reality album convinced me that Bowie had decided to hang up his musical jacket and replace it with familial slippers. I never blamed him, of course. Even such geniuses as Bowie need to chill out sometime. But even so, I regretted the possibility that there may be no more new material from, as Juliet says, ‘the god of my idolatory’, whom I have held in awe since I was 15. (In case you haven’t worked it out and / or don’t already know, that was a few years ago, now…)

So now that he’s released a new single, Where Are We Now?, which reflects back on his time in Berlin in the 70s, it’s the talk of the music business. An ‘it’ girl, who I can’t be arsed to name because to me she’s frankly no one, warned against ‘Bowie hysteria’ because if he were new on the scene today he would be nothing more than a ‘jumped up Pete Docherty (sic)’. What complete bollocks. He was always new, always fresh, and always, but always, way ahead of his time. The fact that he turned 66 on the day of this new release just goes to illustrate the fact that if you stay young in your soul, you’ll never really get old.

I have always been one for listening to music. From Steeleye Span to Neil Young, Black Sabbath, Elvis, a-ha, Then Jerico and even some classical (Holst’s Planets suite remains my favourite), I was weaned on music from a very early age. With David Bowie, although that obsession didn’t change, I had a hook, a home base, if you will, someone to idolise, someone to admire. Listening to his music always brought me to a special place within myself, somewhere I can’t always find, and sometimes I even forget it’s there, but when I hear David Bowie’s music, there it is again, instantaneously bringing me back. Like a magic spell, like clicking red shoes together, like snapping my fingers. And no matter who else I listen to, whether it be folk, rock, electronica or opera, in the end, I always come back to David Bowie. Because everything always does.

A new year and a new mindset

What you are reading now are the words of a more determined, more disciplined me. As 2012 came to a close, I was in Brighton with my honey, and I welcomed in 2013 with my folks. It was a calm, quiet holiday, and it was lovely.

The first kung fu class I went to this year made me feel amazing. I think it was a combination of things. Firstly, because this happens every year, after a couple of weeks of hardly any classes, and around a week of none at all, that first class draws me out of the languidness of the winter holidays, pumping adrenaline and dopamine around my body like an express train, no matter how tired it makes me feel. Secondly, the trip to London that evening was a nightmare, people everywhere apparently not knowing where they were going, dragging those irritating fucking suitcases behind them on long handles so I was struggling to avoid tripping over the bloody things. I was in a bad mood when I arrived at the university where we train on Fridays, but in just a short while, I had perked up immensely. Also, that day, I had written a few hundred words before I left, having forced myself to start on a new chapter, part of my resolve for this year, to write daily. I’ve had a couple of lapses, but we’re still only ten days in, so I don’t feel too awful about it, just determined to do better from now on.

Last night’s class, also, gave me a boost. I realise I’m saying this as though I’m a beginner, unused to it, when the truth is that I’ve been training for almost five years and am learning 5th pattern, which officially makes me a senior student (the idea of which exasperates my instructor, I’m sure, but he has the patience of a saint!). This feeling shouldn’t be new to me, and indeed it’s not. But it’s a feeling I never, ever get tired of. If I’m down, it lifts me up, if I’m pissed off, it alters my mood significantly, and if my muscles feel tight, it loosens me up physically. If I’m loosened physically, my mind feels freer and I begin to feel more like me again. Only a better me, a more confident me, a stronger me.

Which helped me when I had a moment the other night. In the light of that poor Indian girl who was gang raped on a bus and later died of her horrific injuries, Laz found an article online about another rape, this time in America. A group of college boys took advantage of a girl’s stupefied state having drunk too much (or did they engineer it? Who can tell?), picked her up by her arms and legs, and raped her, one after the other, while she was unconscious. What made it worse was that these guys were completely without remorse. There was a video at the end of the article, with one of the witnesses to the ‘event’ explaining how fucking hilarious it was that his friends had raped this poor girl. I couldn’t watch. Laz sent me into the bedroom while he watched it, but even he couldn’t stomach it all. And I broke down. The only reason these girls, in America and India, were raped was because they were women. That’s it. No other reason. Nothing they could have done. They were women.

Now, it hasn’t escaped my notice that I’m also a woman. So where does that leave me? I’m glad I do kung fu, but the fact is I shouldn’t feel I have to, at least not for that reason. The very concept of feminism would never have come into being were it not for the fact that women have been marginalised almost from the word go and we feel we have to fight back. I’m very glad, every day, that I’m with the most wonderful man, with whom I feel truly loved and at ease and safe. He gets wound up about feminist issues, too, but he understands that he can’t possibly be as angry as I am about such things, because he’s a man. That’s not to belittle him in any way, but unless you’ve had experience of what that feels like, it’s impossible to imagine. However, I believe he understands more than a lot of men, even most men, because of his racial background, and he will have felt marginalised because of that. That night, we discussed some of those things in depth, as we often do, but the one thing I wanted more than anything else was a close hug, to feel enveloped, and Laz was happy to provide it. Hugs are one of the things he does best.

I don’t always get so het up about feminist issues, but the more I see, the harder it gets to keep my temper in check. Certain websites (I shan’t give them credence by linking to them here) tell men in great detail how to conquer women, how to ‘get more pussy’, or inform them that women are oddball creatures that need to be tamed and controlled, even giving examples of how women have treated them unfairly. (And how did they treat those women? Ah, with respect and kindness, clearly…) So I hate the fact that I’ve found myself looking at men differently. As a woman, I’ve always been on my guard. Always cautious. Thankfully, I have had generally positive experiences of men, with one or two exceptions that every woman has (just ask – there’ll be something, I guarantee it). I shan’t bother talking about my last relationship, because I’d rather, frankly, forget. I have some lovely kung fu brothers, with whom I can laugh and joke, and when I partner with them in class, yes, I feel safe. It’s a great environment, because there’s an enormous amount of trust between us. But as I was leaving, last night, on my way to the Tube, yes, it crossed my mind. Be careful. Remember what you’ve been taught. Remember not all men are so nice… Remember you’re a woman.

Getting things done, part 1

On Monday the 3rd of December, I met up with Ian Chisnall in our local Plot Bunnies pub, the Caxton Arms. Ian ran in the elections on the 15th November to be the Police and Crime Commissioner for Sussex. Sadly (in my opinion), he came only third (the position was won by a Conservative lady), but nonetheless, he agreed to meet me as planned after the election to discuss various issues.

The aspect of the campaign that made me want him to win was that he had signed the IFAW pledge which would have meant that one of his priorities as PCC would have been to enforce wildlife protection laws. I had signed a letter to all the local candidates, and he not only emailed me back, but also asked me what I would be doing myself to help wildlife in this area. I told him I keep this blog and often write about such issues and he agreed to meet me and said I was free to report whatever I wished.

We began by chatting a little, of course, but it didn’t take long for us to get around to talking about the pledge he had taken. Apparently, he had received around 260 emails from various charities and organisations asking him to sign the pledge, including the RSPCA, although he thought that what the RSPCA were asking was a little unrealistic. They wanted Ian’s commitment to retain the current number of wildlife enforcement officers, but this would not have been possible if funding had been cut. Ian had not given much thought to wildlife crime until he received the emails. His focus was, and still is, on ‘faith, charity, public and private sectors’, as it says on his Twitter profile, and he was always aware that to have any chance of success, he needed to engage with people like myself: writers, bloggers, and those who use social media. The Lib Dems used no social media, he said. UKIP (don’t get me started) also used none. Labour and the Tories did use social media, but in a rather ‘flat way’, wherein they would respond to queries rather than communicating themselves. Indeed, it was his initial response that made me warm to him in the first place, so I can only conclude that he is correct about that.

Next, I asked him for his thoughts about the riots in summer 2011. (One of those evenings, my instructor cancelled a class so that everyone could go home and avoid getting caught in the crossfire and / or get arrested. I wasn’t there, that night, but I heard looters had raided a local cafe and got away with a few biscuits…) Ian’s reply pleased me. He said that had the police been more open to the public, on a one-to-one basis, the riots would have been less likely to have occurred. The Met did not deal with the Mark Duggan shooting competently, Ian said, and suggested that if you do something like that and don’t then reassure people, shit happens. ‘The Met got what they deserved,’ he said, ‘in that sense,’ and I am inclined to agree with him. People arrested were locked up. Minor offences were punished using long sentences. And even though some people did some evil things, community sentencing alone is not enough – the consequences of these actions on other people, Ian said, also need to be considered. One of the big concerns at this time was that police forces need to support other forces. The political role of the PCC would be to put pressure on the Met or whoever was responsible to improve the relationship with the community.

We were talking for around an hour, so of course much as said, but the rest will be in a separate blog entry.