Charlie Hebdo and artists' dereliction of duty

So suddenly we’re all Charlie and we’re all in solidarity with freedom of expression. Sorry, not buying a word of it. In Britain artists of print, stage, music and whatever passes for indigenous film have all fought shy of the political in their subject matter. With a few honourable exceptions, not least within the cartoon and graphics community and the odd stand-up comic (Jerry Sadowitz reviled for his extreme comedy, ‘outed’ Jimmy Savile in his act 30 years before society caught up to him).

In Britain ever since Mrs Thatcher demanded that our art be self-financing so that market demands shaped content, and also since the arts community miserably failed to get to grips with the ideology of Thatcherism with god-awful ‘little’ films about relationships set against the backdrops of riots or demos, we have increasingly detached our artistic output from having any political message at all. And this was in the decade of the Rushdie Affair let us not forget. The ironic thing is that in an era when public discourse on anything has been eroded by the authorities (Blair happily carried this on from Thatcher), art failed miserably to step in to fill the breach. (Nor can twitter usefully redress the balance for that matter). The fact is our artists have been censoring themselves for the past twenty years, be it for economic or political reasons. And now we are proclaiming that we are all about the right to express oneself freely… 

In continental Europe, they just don’t even make the distinction between art and politics. Camus, Sartre and De Beauvoir went on every march going, while Malraux was Culture Minister in the government. Can you imaging an Amis leading a demo, either Kingsley or Martin? Sadly now that Harold Pinter has passed, there is no one to lead our artistic intelligentsia and get them out on the street (although he tended to favour agitation by dinner party). Europe’s refusal to categorise art as political and separate is exactly why you can have a radical magazine like Charlie Hebdo exist in the first place. But as more and more artists cede the political ground through fear of reprisal (or libel), then that leaves fewer arts’ bodies, each operating in isolation and therefore very vulnerable to attacks such as these. If there were a myriad of arts organisations making challenging, provocative, radical art, then those offended by it wouldn’t be able to strike at them all. They wouldn’t know where to bloody start. 

You want to show solidarity? Make some flipping political art for a change. I know I have. It’s what I do. 

The Charlie Hebdo Slayings In Paris

The first thing I want to say is that until the French authorities have definitively established the perpetrators of this atrocity, it doesn't do to leap to conclusions in pinning blame. Remember how in the aftermath of the Madrid rail bombings, the Spanish government blamed the Basque Separatists, so that when it turned out to be Islamic terrorists, they were made to seem completely out of touch and unable to protect their population and promptly got booted out of power at the election that followed soon after. That's how terrorism works, it engenders a sense in the population that they are vulnerable and unprotected by the powers that are charged with just that responsibility.


I am not taking it for granted that Islamic terrorists carried out this attack. But if one was a betting man, they would be the favourites, but the fact that we have a multi-billion global betting industry shows that the favourite doesn't always come in. However, this is such a specialised target (I'd never heard of the magazine before), a bit like going in and shooting up the offices of "Private Eye", whoever is responsible it represents an attack of the right to free expression. Satire is a means of poking fun and subverting whatever it is targeting and while that may cause offence, it is not illegal, it doesn't point a gun at anyone and it doesn't pull a trigger on anything except to fire words or images into the pool of human thought and cogitation.


Yet when people wring their hands about such an injustice, or that the right of free expression is inalienable, or even use the word 'atrocity', they are frankly failing to deal with the issues. Gunmen who would shoot up a magazine office full off journalists have a very different concept of justice than all the handwringers. They seek to make free expression a wholly alienable right, through the force of the bullet. Of course it is an atrocity in our eyes, but in theirs it is an act to politically advance their cause. These assassins are not troubled by the act of murder of unarmed civilians. Chances are they see themselves at war with that which they are opposing. Words like 'atrocity' actually manage to tamp down further useful discussion, because it admits that this act is so incomprehensible, so off the scale of understanding, that there is nothing more that can be added. Wrong.


There is nothing wrong with demonstrations of solidarity. I've heard suggestions of playing the Marseilleise outside Buckingham Palace, through to republishing the Hebdo front page cartoon in every magazine and newspaper front page tomorrow. I get these symbolic acts of standing together. I get the need for them too, representing both a collective grief and a show of strength. But what people need to do and I've said this consistently in books and blog posts, is not throw up our hands in disgusted stymied defeat at these acts being beyond the pale, but to come to understand how the terrorist thinks, acts and conceives. If we persist in dismissing something as unjust by our standards, then we will never come to comprehend his view of the just and the unjust. If we continue to vaguely wave a banner promoting free speech, then we fail to appreciate the nature of its threat to the terrorist, how and why he targets the agencies he does. If we blithely ascribe an outrage as an atrocity, then we miss how this is just business to their minds, their modus operandi. What lies behind, what are their aims, what generates their support, what are the economic, psychologically, social and cultural roots behind people becoming terrorists?


Time to get on the front foot people. And as the first act, that would be definitively determining who was responsible for this attack. It's no longer acceptable to ask 'how can this happen?' or 'how can there be people who act like this?' without also seeking the answer.

Hollow Point - Friday Flash

At the end of the tour they hit the gift shop. Her sightseeing hands explored blindly as she fingered the hanging trinkets and pendulous bagatelles. She rattled the wares as if divining for her elect through rhythm and resonance. And then she came upon the carousel of choice. Key-rings with die-stamped Christian names. “Five more minutes” her mother advised. She plumped straight to the tier with names beginning with the letter that initialled her own. She foraged through the rack but without locating her own cognomen. Nothing even close. Curse her parents for their impossible fancy for the foreign and the unfamiliar, yielding the exotic denomination they had conferred upon her. The locus for their dreams and hopes. She knew it was not long after her birth, that a prescriptive list of permissible names for babies had been drawn up and instituted into law. The registry offices would refuse to notarise any identification not on that list. Forlornly she started through other prefixing letters, in case her name had been misfiled. But when her mother yanked her hand to pull her towards home, she barely resisted for she knew her name had not been mislaid in the array. She was destined forever to be misplaced and unrecognised through the singular irregularity of her title.

A brown manilla envelope plopped through the letterbox and landed on the floor with a shrill reverberation. Since her grandmother had confined herself to her bed through unending grief, she stooped to pick it up. Something in the envelope shifted and clinked inside. She brought the package into her grandmother’s darkened room. As she proffered it in the direction of her grandmother, a hand shot out of the bedclothes and waved the envelope away. She retreated back to the doorway. She examined the typed label with the family name and correct address. She worked the sealed flap open and was met with the sight of a folded piece of paper hard up against the rear of the envelope. She removed it and opened it up to reveal a heading marked ‘INVOICE’. It was addressed or chargeable to her Granny saying ‘Expenses incurred (see enclosed contents) x3,  = 34,000 Pesos’. ‘Cost of burials at expense of the State x3, = 200,000 Pesos.’

She canted the envelope to spill its contents into the palm of her hand. Three bullets shook out. She gingerly picked on up between the pads of her fingers, as if somehow it could still discharge itself even without the accelerated access to barreling. It had something etched into its body. It was the name of her mother. Aghast she quickly referenced the second bullet, which bore the legend of her father’s name. She dropped it in her anguish, as if it really had discharged itself. She plucked out the third bullet still ensconced in the corner of the envelope. It had a name which bore some of the letters in that of her own, but not all of them. Nameless, rootless and stateless, her parents’ glamorous dreams of abroad had become her living nightmare here at home.

Taken form the Flash Fiction collection "Extra-Curricular" out now on in print or Kindle and I-Tunes

Alternative Xmas Song Chart

When you think of Christmas tunes apart from carols you probably think of Slade, The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl, Wham and flipping Cliff Richard. So for your relief & delectation I present a chart of alternative songs for Xmas

And in keeping with the season of goodwill, I shall refrain from my usual snarky comments appended to each song.

Festive greetings to one and all of my blog followers and here's to a good 2015

marc xx

1) Run DMC - Christmas In Hollis



2) Stiff Little Fingers - White Christmas



3) The Fall - No Xmas For John Quays



4) Poly Styrene - Black Christmas



5) The Ramones - Merry Christmas (I Don't Want To Fight Tonight



6) The Damned - There Ain't No Sanity Clause



7) Glas Vegas - Silent Night



8) Hard Skin - Ding Dong Merrily Oi Oi!



9) Jackson 5 - I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus



10) Galaxie 500 - Listen The Snow Is Falling



11) The Knife - Christmas Reindeer



12) Death Cab For Cutie - Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)



13) Tom Waits - Christmas Card Form A Hooker In Minneapolis



14) Snoop Dogg - Santa Goes Straight To The Ghetto



15) The Fall - Hark The Herald Angels Sing

Laundry List - Friday Flash

He’d always had beautiful penmanship. His mother had inculcated it in him at the point of a scourge across his knuckles. Reiterated by the Monks who were his teachers at the school, though they hit harder with their rattan reeds. They broke knuckles, yet still that could not stem the flow of calligraphy. Curlicues, flourishes and twirls, anything to banish the dread straight line of a letter. Even though Bibles and prayer books were all mass printed these days, still he was demanded to learn the ancient skills of writing for parchment and scrolls. “Fire and soul” that was the holy grail of scrivening, though to his mind it was unclear what promised land it begat. 

Perhaps his mother had been farsighted when she had invested her meagre savings in a fountain pen all those years ago. For he had secured an administrative job in the Civil Service. A precious sinecure in these days of dearth and scarcity. An ornate script for sparse times. Yet he was no longer scripting proclamations of the latest rationing ordinances. It was a different sort of quota he was fashioning in Baroque swirls and convolutes. A winnowing at the point of his nib. 

It would have been faster to use a typewriter, but his superiors were paranoid about leaving traces behind. Carbon papers and the ribbons themselves could be deciphered for their tidings. He did wonder if this hinted that they knew their supremacy would come to an end and were already taking precautions to entomb their actions. He pressed the blotting paper, another potentially incriminating humble mainstay of his work, down on to his finished page. He examined it and saw his words reverse imprinted. Their beautiful cursive flow had become blotchy and tumescent as the paper had absorbed and diffused the pressure of his carefully calibrated ink. 

Two copies of every list. One for operational use, one as a record until presumably the operation had been completed, when both would be set fire to. No lasting traces. Immolation, the same fate as for those listed on the paper. In this new incarnation of his job, he really was like the scribes of old transcribing copies of the Holy Writ by hand, junking any that were not divinely flawless.

From the interrogations, Señor Nunez begat Señora Ordonez begat Señorita Guillen to their inquisitors. And all their names were on the list in his beautiful swooping script. A single letter hard to read might mean someone innocent was taken for extra-judicial sentencing. Although the children on the list must have been innocent at the very least. The Junta were playing judge, jury and executioner. But only he could play god through manifesting mercy. With a few missing strokes of his pen, he could perhaps save a name or two, leave them off the list altogether. His hand was cramping up. There were so many names to write these days. He stopped writing to rest his aching wrist. He held up his half inscribed sheet of paper. He’d always had beautiful penmanship. 


Taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Extra-Curricular". Available in print and e-book from Amazon, CreateSpace and I-Tunes.

Suspect Device - Friday Flash

“We have visuals”


“Okay, approach with care”


The men pored over their monitors at the image of a rectangular object coming more into view.


“Steady as she goes”


“Which plane do you want to scan first?”


“Go nearest, the short side facing us”


“Wilco”


“Hold her there”


“Seems like… I dunno… lots of ridges”


“Bit like terraced agriculture like the Asia sector”


“Nothing nourishing about this bad boy”


“Chemical traces?”


“Bleach, pigmented dyes, cationic starch, calcium carbonate, other unknown solvents, but no nitrous concentrations significant enough for incendiary combustibility”


"Radioactivity?"


"Background levels only"


"Biological?"


"Minimal. It's human but sleight"


“Obviously. We're not dealing with monkeys putting this thing together. Move clockwise on to the long side see if there’s anything to be had there”


“More of the same, though the ridges display more degradation”


“There!”


“What? Where?”


“At the corner, there’s complete degradation. The ridges have collapsed into each other. But that there looks to me like a partial fingerprint we can lift”


“You’re right. Zooming in to photograph now”


“Scan for light-sensitive sensors, in case the flash sets off the detonator”


“Nothing detected”


“Okay snap the print”


“Done. Now scanning through database”


“Good. Carry on round. We’ve absolutely got to spot the wires”


“Same as the other short side. Ridges. Same chemical make up. No evidence of circuitry”


“Okay. least it doesn't seem to be a dirty bomb. Anything on the print yet?”


“Nothing yet sir. Still rolling through though”


“Let’s go blindside to the other long plane, then after to the flat surface plane”


“Easy there soldier! You nearly drove the robot into the bloody thing!"


“Sorry sir”


‘Well this all looks a bit different. Is that wiring? Seems like a spaghetti if it is”


“Don’t know sir, seems more straw or hemp than-“


“No evidence of conductor material”


“What have we got then?”


“Traces of emulsion adhesives, resins, thermoplastic polymers, but again nothing overtly explosive”


“What’s that there, that splurge of black just above the corner?”


“Some sort of image or icon?”


“Zooming in sir”


“It’s a, I don’t know what it is-”


“Rotate 180, I think it’s upside down”


“It’s a penguin”


“Penguin? Do we know of any groups that use that for their symbol? Run a search of all terrorist groups and militias”


“Could it be Antarctic secessionists? The penguin was native to there after all”


“Okay include them too. Oh and environ-Mentalists since their flipping bird is no longer native to anywhere”


“Still nothing on the strands, just seems to be, well, string”


“Anything on my fingerprint search yet?”


“No matches sir”


“Impossible. Should have finished by now”


“It has. No one in the datatbase”


“Well either we’re dealing with a top terrorist who can wipe his records clean out of the system, or this guy is already dead”

"No, no. This has been deliberately planted here for us to find"


“Anything on the penguin colophon?”


“The what?”


“The mark sir, just the mark”


“Well just speak English next time man”


“Nothing yet from our records. We’re just about to scrutinise the Dark Web for anything in back channels”


“Okay. Let’s leave this vector for now. Elongate the arm and let’s take a look at the top surface”


“Elongating arm now sir”


“It’s an orange and white plane with writing on it and an enlarged version of the penguin identifier”


“Flush smooth surface, so no evidence of wires”


“Or explosive chemicals. Just dyes and sealants”


“Writing? What’s it say?”


“Dunno sir, seems to be an unrecognisable script”


“No language I’ve seen before”


“Are you a reader?”


“No sir”


“Is it code?”


“Again, don’t know sir”


“I haven’t got time to get a reader or a codebreaker down here. If they’re deliberately trying to communicate their poisonous message too us, whoever they are, I’m not taking any chances. Have the robot blow it to buggery!”


"Initiating detonation sequence sir”


“They’re trying to fuck with our minds and I’m not having it. Anything on any of the searches?”


“Nada sir. This is like nothing we’ve ever encountered before”


‘Well let’s hope once she goes up in smoke we never see the likes of it again”


"Fire in the hole!"


“There she blows sir!”


“Good job. Well done all. Don’t forget to scoop up the confetti, check it for radioactivity and then analyse it in full. We've got to find out what its purpose was”

Executive Toy - Short story (1500 words)

The divinity was sat at his desk admiring his handiwork. That perfect harmony of the spheres he had constructed all those eons ago. Each orb held up and impelled by the influence of its neighbours and then remaining mobilised under its own steam for eternity. A perfect model of equilibrium and conservation, even if He did say so Himself. It was His energy that was being conserved. Since setting things in motion, He had done nothing but put His transcendental feet up on the desk and observed His executive toy spellbound for millennia on end. Bliss exalting bliss.

All He'd wanted was a quiet life. But His creations wouldn't let him rest. The agglomerations of sentient bacteria and molecules He had sown the blue planet with, were always trying to track Him down. No doubt in order to complain about things. Bring him to book, waving His volumes under His nose, the bare faced cheek of it. They really were an ungrateful progeny. He'd sent them warning by way of that punishing flood, which wiped out all bar His chosen breeding couples. But they hadn't taken the hint.

Oh they continued to raise hosannas to the heavens in praise of the beauty of His creation. But they'd expected responses back from Him, which was patently absurd. He was all too conscious that they also raised their voices towards Him beseeching for favours and boons. Money, health, a beautiful spouse or bountiful harvest. Victory in their blood-letting disputes. They were utterly unaware of the disparity in scale between Himself, a builder of galaxies and infinitude, and they as little more than bundles of atoms. Such a gulf precluded any possible communication across the divide. Were He to speak, they all would have instantly been deafened. Or suffered cardiac arrests. The earth might have been knocked off its orbit. Hadn't the ineffable beauty of His creation on their behalf been sufficient to announce Himself to them?

Yet it was far worse even than mere petty selfish desires inserted into their prayers. There were those among them who wanted to dissect every part of His creation. To come to an understanding of its sublime works and in doing so, maybe arrogate such power for themselves. They worked out the parabolas of His spheres. So He tweaked their orbits to make them elliptical. Then they figured that out too. After some false starts which He was happy to imagine would lead them up the garden path, eventually they chased down gravity and the curvature of spacetime. It wouldn't be long before they came to an appreciation of the intricate complexity of multi-dimensionality and multiverses. 

Hand-in-hand with this inquisitiveness, came a more alarming scepticism. They dared doubt that He could ever have composed such wonders. Rather their very own innate physical properties would explain their coming into being. These little upstarts were getting a little too big for their booties. However the flood ruse wouldn't work a second time. Never revisit your past triumphs and besides, they had so messed with the atmosphere over their planet, they were raining down floods and tsunamis on their own heads and barely even blinking. Any weather-based cataclysm they would likely claim credit for at their own hands rather than His. He had to go deeper, bigger. More upscale. There had to be no doubt whose signature was on the next warning shot.

He stared at his arrangement of planetary discs but it sparked no new creative burst. Perhaps He should just sweep the whole thing away and start again. But He really couldn't face the prospect of all that toil again, it had been such a long time ago after all. To commit six days (in the old currency, when Methuselah really did live nine hundred and sixty-nine years), to labouring, when He had been off his feet for an epoch, well it didn't bear contemplation. Even if He decided to forgo seeding this version with back-chatting bacteria, that only knocked what, a day and a half out of the equation? No He would again have to make do and mend with the materials at hand. He suddenly apprehended that His calculations on a piece of papyrus the size of Texas, represented the first 'work' that His desk had played host to in generations. Gad His ingrate offspring had really got to Him. He would sleep on the matter, just for one day in the old currency, before that diabolic protozoa Albert Einstein had dared challenge His notion of time. 'Big Bang?' He'd see to it they'd all get a big bang in their comeuppance alright...

He awoke feeling refreshed and flexed His superhuman arms to banish the stiffness. By accident His holy outstretched fist smote an outlying planet in the Milky Way and sent it crashing into its neighbour. He held His perfumed breath as he anticipated a conflagration, but none was forthcoming. Instead, the two planets took it in turns to rebound and recoil off one another with each fresh collision. As there was no air in space, sound lacked a medium through which to travel and report these impacts. He leaned in over these two outlying planets and breathed some numinous air just in order to receive the sound effects. The two planetary bodies crashed backwards and forwards into one another with a sharp click-clack. He could not help but pull a little rueful smile. For had He not just conducted an experiment the likes of which He constantly berated his insolent young pups down there on earth for?

He ceased His miraculous breath. The two planets continued their 'After you Claude' dance across the celestial spheres in silence. He decided to introduce a third planet to their charming duet. And how pleasing was the result! The outer planet cannoned into the centre planet, halting its own progress immediately, while sending the centre one careering into the other planetary orb on the outside. It in turn was hurled out into the void, before reaching its zenith and swinging back into the centre sphere and stopping instantly, while for its part the middle ball retraced its weary steps back in the direction from which it had just come.

At a stroke, the Master Designer had His new executive toy. The pleasing thing was that this too was still perpetual motion. No degrading of energy of momentum. A perfect, frictionless system. The periodicity of the orbs never changed. Maybe He should have insisted that rosary beads were like this, then the believers may never have encountered any crisis of faith. He experimented with five planets and found the variety of combinations and effects for Him to observe increased exponentially. When he pulled back two of the planets on one side and three on the other, they thrillingly swapped back and forth between which were the threesome and which the pair. Everything was ripe for transferring to the earth.

He devoted some thought as to which of the five spheres the earth should be positioned as. It seemed to Him that the middle ball actually did the least travelling of all, transferring on the received energy almost immediately to the next orb. If it wasn't to be the middle rondure, equally it couldn't have the mighty Jupiter slamming into anything for it would just disintegrate poor old Mars. While Saturn was made of gas and therefore of unreliable solidity.

So His first move was to downgrade His design to just four planets. The first four closest to the sun. Earth would pinball between Mars and Venus. Additionally, the heavenly bodies had to be of identical mass to preserve the energy transfer. So the otherworldly One wrought His thaumaturgy and beefed up the internal mass of the other three less weighty planets and augmented their diameters to match that of Earth. If the denizens of that wretched planet happened to train their telescopes up at their familiar neighbours they would see that they had inexplicably expanded their girth. But He trusted their insufferable arrogance to prevail and that they would be casting their lenses further afield than the local neighbourhood as they tried to pierce the secrets of His craft. He couldn't suppress a smile from his supermundane features, as He thought of them seeing Venus and Mars looming large and ever closer with their naked eyes soon enough. That would scare the Bejesus out of their doubting hearts. He positively rubbed his hallowed hands together in anticipation.

So the Supreme Executive sucked in His breath and inhaled Mercury towards the Sun, at the maximum of the amplitude of the swing He had calculated was required. Just as He was about to let go the tension line of His empyrean breath, He suddenly remembered the sound effects hadn't been enabled. He carefully restored Mercury back to its orbit and breathed oxygen to extend the atmosphere of all four planets into one seamless plane. He regathered Mercury back to its full extension. And then He let go...