I Can See a Better Time

You're a bum, you're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap, lousy faggot
Happy christmas your arse
I pray god it's our last.

If you are subjected to a fair dose of radio during the December months, you are bound to build up a solid hatred for nearly every canonical Christmas classic. Smoothened voices sing smoothened words, and you are supposed to believe that the paper-thin veneer of tradition can overcome, just for that small pocket of time, those few days, all your sorrows and troubles.

But even a more honest song, like The Pogues' Fairytale of New York, becomes an endangered animal, on the brink of annoyance, on the brink of kitsch. Admittedly, Shane MacGowan is toying with the idea of kitsch here, time and again. He comes up with lines like "I've got a feeling this year's for me and you," that feel comfortably at home in the Yuletide repertoire (even if, to me, it does not sound like he really means it, he is merely trying to convince himself).

It amuses me to think of families with rosy-eyed, freshly-showered little kids sitting around the hearth, trying to match Shane's shambolic Irish accent and Kirsty's in-your-face performance (perhaps solemnly turning the volume down when the uncouth verse quoted above comes up). It amuses me that every December, when the song is played to death all around the world, Shane MacGowan will be handed the money to sustain his non-stop drinking and smoking habits.

It is a feelgood song, all in all, but Shane does give you a rough and bumpy road towards that Christmas spirit. "I could have been someone," Shane offers, sounding unsure of himself, more a question than a declaration. Kirsty counters: "Well, so could anyone."

Unlike most Christmas songs, this one does not play itself out next to the Christmas tree, shacked up together in warm, unfashionable sweaters, with the aroma of good food around, and happy faces in abundance. It starts out in the drunk tank, with a moping old man, in a desperate bid for a little attention, a little love, stating - like every year, no doubt - that this will probably be his last torturous December. Next thing we know, Shane bets on a horse with long odds and wins what for him must be a small fortune, after which he no doubt turned right around to go on a binge.

They dance and kiss their way through the night. Outside. Perhaps, they too have dreams, tucked somewhere far away, of the Christmas as we always try to picture it, where they are warm and inside and everything is finally okay, but they will never admit it. But either way they have dreams, dreams that, as they start to realize, they need to put together, in order for them to be realized.

All of the above, only really to try to help you understand the beauty of that line at the end, that line that could easily be kitsch when placed in a different song. Here, it is heartwarming, the sincerest of gestures when you most need one:

“I've built my dreams around you.”

Regarding an Unnamable Non-Manifesto

On the 5th of February, 1909, in a local newspaper in the Italian city of Bologna, the Italian poet Filippo Tommasso Marinetti published a Manifesto that would herald everything that was about to come in the century ahead, both good and bad. It was, of course, the Futurist Manifesto and it started (or just made visible) a storm that is brewing until this day.

Ugo Gianattasio (1888-1958), untitled, 1920

Even if Marinetti's manifesto is, for all intents and purposes, an Art manifesto or, perhaps pluralized, an Arts manifesto — it discusses the best way to produce beauty, after all — it has always had more value as a timeless meditation on how to approach the Great Unknown of the future.

Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!

For Marinetti, the future is the unfathomable reservoir of the absurd, it is a monster, with immense mouth and breast. Years later, Kevin Barnes of the band Of Montreal, would invert Marinetti's words, calling the past “a grotesque animal” in whose eyes you can see “how completely wrong you can be.” But Marinetti and his companions, when they saw the past, saw only something dormant, a sleeping giant turned to stone, a statue memorializing something nobody can even remember. They saw the age of the Novel with capital N, of men with beards encompassing all life in the flimsy pages of their works. They saw Tolstoy and Balzac and Dickens. “Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.” It's easy to see where they were coming from.

And yet it spawns from such a different world than we witness today! It is, like most manifestos (and especially in those days) an attempt to shake things up, to blow life into everything that comes within earshot. It is, in Marinetti's own words, an ode to the beauty of speed. “Beauty exists only in struggle,” he states. It calls to mind André Breton, nearly two decades later, in Nadja, proclaiming that “beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be at all.” Reading this, you'd like to travel back in time, and warn them. Be careful what you wish for: speed will come to you, convulsions will come to you, and then they will immediately pass you by and disappear in the distance. We are now, perhaps, at the other end of the spectrum, where we could do with some dormancy, where we could do with memorials that have no meaning to them. Everything is buried under the dust of words, while the vacuum cleaner of Time, which used to clean up the Ozymandiases of this world, has been constrained. Nothing disappears anymore. Everything is cumulative. Time and Space died long ago and we are “living in the absolute”, “moving at eternal, omnipresent speed.”

Therefore, it is not so odd that John Freeman calls for the beauty of slow, in a Manifesto for Slow Communications. He condemns “the tyranny of e-mail”, where we are all slaves to the non-stop onslaught of communication. However, it does not do to wait for the past to come (back). Perhaps we should take the thesaurus's hint, when it does not even have a good antonym for Futurist. There is simply no such thing as a Manifesto for the Past. But let's at least agree that speed does not look as beautiful when you are inhaling the exhaust fumes of that “roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire”. Looking at it from behind, I think I would prefer the Victory of Samothrace after all.