The Dulwich Hamlet, SLHC Podcasting & Angela Carter: a round-up

Time for a round-up (and, no, not of the gulag kind)…

First, I visited The Dulwich Hamlet and recorded this charming little vlog about the day:

Secondly, have you listened to the South London Hardcore podcast yet? You should. Aside from their football alleigances the SLHC team are a pair of decent, hardworking, sponsorship-obsessed transpontines debating the issues that effect us everyday: the capitalisation of “south London”, our cultural heritage, and international antichrono terrorism.

I had the pleasure of meeting up with them in the Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre (drinking that lovely £1 Mamuśka coffee) to record an episode about my transpontinist mayoral campaign which should be up next week, so I’m giving you the heads up to listen to the other episodes before I blow them out of the water.

And thirdly… It’s twenty years since my fellow transpontine figurehead Angela Carter passed away. The as ever librarian fantastique republique Transpontine has dished out a lovely overview of her Southdom writings. I was once told, by a madly staring wide-eyed convulsively shaking gentleman at a squat party no less, that the exact moment he had heard of Angela’s death someone (never identified) launched a brick though their flat window. I bet Iain Sinclair would love that, the muppet.

Let her epitaph be the beginning our own:

“When the bourgeoisie got priced out of, first, Hampstead and Highgate – how long ago it seems! – and then from Camden Town and Islington, and the alternatives got priced (who’d have thought it?) out of Ladbroke Grove, there was nowhere else for all, repeat all, the poor sods to go, was there? That’s typical south London usage. Every statement is converted to a rhetorical question.”

Hmmm… controversial lack of a capital “S” there, Angie… On top of that, in today’s London Planned city of state-negotiated mass-produced gentrification (regeneration, urban renaissance and other cat-belly-tickling euphemisms) the old days of a few posh buggers drip-drip-dripping down here seems positively quaint, almost idyllic. Sort of.

Keep it real* comrades.

* = Enjoy defining that one.

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Embracing The Big Society

Comrades, it is with not a little difficulty that I have decided to make the best of a bad situation.

I have decided to embrace the Cameron administration’s fuzzy “Big Society” idea. And I make no apologies for using the word, “idea”. In its vaguest possible sense.

Anyway.

I am embracing “Big Society”. I shall conveniently ignore the fact it’s essentially a wishy-washy PR cover up for an intensification of the neoliberal accumulation & centralisation of wealth and power. Rather, I shall make like a village idiot and throw myself spreadeagled into the warm bossum of what will now be, I am sure, an explosion of volunturism to replace essential public services.

If you believe in something enough, it will happen. Yes?

I and my three beautiful wives will be available in four of South London’s busiest train stations (London Bridge, Waterloo, Clapham Junction & East Croydon) during the evening rushhour Monday to Friday, selling our handjob services to relieve stressed commuters after a hard day’s slog at the core abstract furnace of hypercapitalism. With the money we scrape together we will subsequently try our best to fund numerous services in our glorious half-city, including care of the elderly & benefit payments for the mentally ill.

I am willing to be whatever South London needs me to be…

It's BIG SOCIETY time!!!!

The “Decadent & Bourgeois” West of South London

A young fan by the name of Eddie writes in to ask a difficult question…

Wolfgang: what is your opinion of the excessively decadent and bourgeois South West of London? Do you include it in the Empire of South London, or do you disown it and its shameful ways?

It’s difficult because it demands an uncomfortable probability: a wound within South London. A non-whole. A division. An implausibility. Not so much an overlapping intoxicating duality as a distinct dichotomy between two separates. There is a difference between much of the South West and The Rest. Be it the sweep of gentrification or the longstanding suburban Surreyness of places like Wimbledon, there is something… nice, poncey, comfortably unrevolutionary about parts of the South West.

South London is as much an idea in abstract space as it is an entity on physical geography. Even it’s most defined physical border – the gloriously gloopy Thames – is (in an age of bridges and tubes) a predominantly symbolic border. But I would imagine all interpretations of South London include at least some SW bourgeois hubs. This is problematic.

Hope lies in the proles. Can it lie in the bourges as well?

Eddie refers to a decadence of South West London. Or, as I like to call it, west South London. I see what he means. But my response may suprise him. I demand not a puritan reduction in decadence, but a reckless indulgeflation in it. The decadence of places like Wimbledon and Clapham is a very (culturally) poor, stoic, boring decadence.  We need a more rugged decadence. I’m thinking 1920s Berlin. I’m thinking opium dens. I’m thinking posh teenage girls on the game for the sheer experience of it. I’m thinking elite-yet-revolutionary culture that would make Adorno smile. NOT bloody Christmas decorations from Habitat. Spread the rebellion southwestwards. I want Walton-on-Thames to be Walton-on-Smack. Thames Ditton to be Thames Shit-on an escort girl’s breasts.

Not-decadent-enough west South London is perhaps our biggest revolutionary challenge. But, also, maybe, our biggest opportunity.

Hope does indeed lie in the bourges. As long as they’re fucked up enough.

Musical Differences

I’ve received a few complaints about the music used in my revolutionary re-educational short film The Gentrification of Clapham?…

Angry, of Tulse Hill, and Frustrated, of Woolwich, both complained that I used pop. songs with no link to South London. Instead, my music came from Sheffield (ABC) and Louisiana (Dr. John). My response is as simple as it is eloquent. Fuck off! South London is an international multicultural melting pot of various influences. Indeed, my choice of Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya is symbolic of this. I comprehensively explain this in the bastard video. Stupid cunts.

Sneering, of Tottenham, pointed out that the opening credits music, The Lambeth Walk – something of a national anthem, wasn’t even written by South Londoners… To which I respond thrice. 1. We classify them as a revolutionary converts to our transpontine brilliance. 2. I actually used a French recording of it for the video- Le Lambeth Walk. In a fucking French accent! Stick that beautiful lump of multiculturalism in your pipe and choke. And, 3. Do you think the English Defence League stop to worry about Richard The Lionheart being gay?! Course not!

End of.

ROAR!

The Gentrification of Clapham?

I, Wolfgang Moneypenny, took a revolutionary tour of the Clapham Common area last week. Here, pulsating with the roaring flames of truth, is the video of said event. It is something fairly remarkable. Intense. Never before have I felt so alive, so in love with my beautiful transpontine motherland.  The dualities of South London literally came vigorously alive on tape. Several innocent  bystanders shat themselves with joy/fear.

Oh well! You have to guillotine a few eggs to rape an omelette.

The Stockwell Question

Well, well, well. Stockwell. There’s a tremendous synchronicity to the events of the last week. A General Election has been called and establishment politicians have poured out to meet “their” people. I too am a politician. Of the soul. And that same week I commenced meeting my people. I started canvassing hearts, minds & revolutionary spoilt ballots in sunny Stockwell.

My host was community figurehead and fellow member of “the South London twitterati” (according to @est1859) Jason Cobb, who blogs at the wonderful OnionBagBlog. It is he who is responsible for photographic, video and audio truthblasts (see bottom of the post).

It was during this trip that I had one of my fairly regular profound realizations. I shall call this one The Stockwell Question. You see, Stockwell is… nice. Give me Stockwell with its cardboard-mass-reproduced iconic bus station its muralled bomb shelter over any part of North London any day of the tenday revolutionary week.

Stockwell is the kind of place that showcases the gentrification of innercity South London isn’t isolated. It’s a process sweeping through huge swathes of South London. On the most immediate level, South London is getting what she deserves after decades of toil. But on the imaginative-revolutionary level, this is the shackling of South London’s revolutionary potential into a normative hegemonic global project of postmodernity.

To burn, or to earn. That is the question. The Stockwell Question.

Artefacts Of My Tour

Ah, Stockwell is one of the few places in South London deemed worth of having a tube station by the estabLIESment. But these few crumbs brushed from the table of centralisation will forever be compromised by the tragic shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes. RIP.

The Stockwell bomb shelter, decorated with a mural featuring South London’s own French revolutionary Violette Szabo.

Outside the iconic and cardboard reproduced Stockwell Bus Garage. Once glorious. Now trashious.

When Jason told me he wanted to take me to “the Priory”, I thought he was an MI6 agent. But before you could say “Michael Foucault” I realised it was a public house, where we recorded this interview on the subject of South London independentis politics:

Listen!

And why not settledown with your loved ones, with your favourite Meantime brewery drink and perhaps a few Brixtonian herbals for the kids and watch the video of my Stockwell tour:

{{{TECHNICAL FAULT!!}}}

Wolfgang Moneypenny’s Mothering Sunday Video

This one goes out to ALL the mums of South London… but most of all my own dear mum.

Peace, Respect, Revolutionary Love xxx