Depressing news this morning that once again The Cock Tavern, one of north London's few remaining traditional pubs, is again under threat.
The Save The Cock Tavern facebook page covers some of the issues, which seem to centre on the owners of the property's desire to sell it off for housing, something that has been seen across London on hundreds of occasions over the past decade. If The Cock goes, I am struggling to name another pub of its type, either in Camden or more broadly across north London.
What is to be done? Apart from publicising the issues, the best thing anyone can do is to make sure that the next time they are in the Somers Town/Euston/St Pancras area, they pop in and have a drink. You won't regret it.
I have not always been very positive about the Paralympics, arguing in the past it gets publicity out of all proportion to the actual interest in it.
It is time to change my views - firstly through meeting a couple of the athletes, and secondly because, at least in the UK, the interest now is there. One stroke of genius by Channel 4 has been the promotional video it has used for its Paralympics coverage, with features the very apt 'Harder Than You Think' by Public Enemy. Just listen for the line 'thank you for allowing us to be ourselves'....
I used to love Public Enemy. I saw them the first three times they played in Manchester (and believe me, Hip-Hop gigs were heavy in those days) and I still regard 'It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back' as one of the greatest LPs ever. In terms of innovation, I can't believe 'Sgt Pepper' was as innovative in its day as that album was in 1988. I never really took the Nation of Islam controversies around them seriously - if you are going to get angry about science fiction - and the NoI is nothing more than science fiction - you may as well get angry with the Scientologists.
In time, my interest in Public Enemy, and to a large extent Hip-Hop faded. Other things took over in my life - mostly getting very drunk at Class War meetings and talking nonsense. Watching the video for 'Harder Than You Think' on You Tube a lot of PE's greatness comes back - to make a track like this aged well into your 40s is a real achievement. It is also a clever piece of work - twenty years on and they are not portraying themselves living it up on the West Coast surrounded by gold and bimbo's, but filling up skips and driving an old van around suburban New York. And that of course is a lot closer to the reality most of us are in.
Way back in 2007 I blogged about a depressing visit to Centerprise, the Community and Arts centre on Kingsland High Street in Dalston.
My post was entitled "The Decline of Centerprise". A recent visit suggested this has continued apace. The cafe was empty, many of the books a series of slapshod piles, the counter mostly unmanned and some of the content pretty close to the knuckle as regards anti-Semitism (Check out some of the more conspiratorial DVDs, or the Nation of Islam books that are stocked to see what I mean).
The current issue of Hackney Citizen informs us that Centerprise is on the verge of eviction, after Hackney Council's November 2011 decision to increase its rent from £10 a week to £37,000 per annum. Peppercorn rents were often charged by left wing Council's to community organisations in the 1980s, with varying degrees of justification. It is harder to justify such practices today, or why Centerprise should get the location they have, in perpetuity, ahead of any other group or organisation. Especially given the state of the place.
There is an online petition to oppose 'Hackney Council attempting to close down Centerprise Trust Ltd'. I won't be signing it. If Emmanuel Amevor, the grandly titled CEO of Centerprise wants to make a go at running a bookshop and cafe, good luck to him. He should however do it without the subsidy of Hackney's council tax payers.
In a month where we seem to be rediscovering that 'Britishness' might not be so bad after all, Stewart Lee is to be found examining the British roots of electronic music.
A Sound British Adventure takes us as far back as the 1940s, and whilst I had heard of Daphne Oram and her influence on contemporary experimenters such as Sonic Boom, much of this history is very new to my ears. To learn more tune in to BBC Radio 4 at 1100 on Tuesday 14 August 2012.
I carry no brief for President Obama, but this is ludicrous, and not untypical of a strand of Islamist discourse that is very rarely comented upon. And never, in my experience, commented upon by UK academics:
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