I have to apologise again for the hiatus between the last posting and this. I'm afraid that continuing problems affecting my hand after a recent operation have made it difficult to use a keyboard.
 I awoke this morning to the sad news of the death of David Bowie. I mentioned in an earlier post that I had a brief, but not insignificant, interaction with the young David Jones when I was at secondary school, but I'll explain that later on. Suffice to say that his influence on generations of young people, as I learned in my later life as a teacher, was enduring and profound. He spent his life entirely devoted to pursuing his art and, while never being a real fan, I have great respect for him for being true to his multiple selves! 
I also heard on the radio this morning an interview with that dangerous fanatic, Jeremy Corbyn. He, as ever, appeared to be reasonable, honest, straightforward and humane. (You see his cunning!) Yet, everything I read in the press or see on the TV tells me that he is not this at all, but a leader of a destructive far-left cult that will utterly destroy the Labour Party and make it forever unelectable. What the current media presentation of Mr. Corbyn reveals very clearly is that every mainstream media outlet is, at heart, wedded to the interests of the powerful and will go to extraordinary lengths to discredit any element in society that appears to pose a threat to corporate power and the traditional political elites that defend their interests. I make no exceptions to this. The supposedly liberal/left 'Guardian' and its sister paper the 'Observer' have been publishing endless articles denigrating and undermining every aspect of Mr. Corbyn's leadership and presenting him as a threat to the very survival of the Labour party and, indeed, the country itself. My favourite example of media madness in this area came in an interview by Cathy Newman on channel 4 news during the Corbyn reshuffle. She was interviewing Ken Livingstone and began by suggesting that the planned changes revealed Corbyn to be motivated by revenge and a soviet style desire to purge the party of dissenters. When this nonsense was ably rebuffed by Livingstone, she immediately came back with, "Oh, so he's bottled it!" suggesting he lacked the courage to dismiss opponents. Whatever he does, Mr. Corbyn can only be weak and spineless or a dangerous tyrant.

 We are currently witnessing a perfect example of what Herman and Chomsky described in their seminal work on the media "Manufacturing consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media", as true today as it was in 1988 when first published. They show with great clarity how corporate interests, through an almost unconscious process to those employed in news production, but absolutely clear to those who own it, systematically reproduce and reinforce the status quo, shutting out any alternative viewpoint or analysis of society than that which protects the interests of the powerful. What was not around then, of course, was social media and even a casual glance at internet social media sites today gives an entirely different perspective on politics than is to be found in the mainstream press. Without, of course, the same power to define and control the political agenda.

At the end of the interview with Mr. Corbyn, he was clearly frustrated at the relentless focus on his opposition to Trident, our nuclear based defence policy, and his assumed unelectability. He made a closing statement focusing on the growing crisis in housing and the consequent rise in homelessness and the corrosive societal effects of the continuing increase in the wealth of the top earners and the stagnation of wages and job security for the rest of us. He made it clear that it would be his priority to rectify these injustices through planned growth of the economy rather than continuing cuts in all areas of government expenditure which are making the problems worse. The inaccurate and hysterical media presentation of what is a rather cautious, long-standing, broadly socialist programme which has been held within the Labour Party since my own childhood in the fifties brings shame on all elements of mainstream political reporting.

The death of David Bowie reminds me of how important music is to most of us as we grow up, not just aesthetically, but also in our developing sense of individual identity. I have always been sympathetic to Herbert Marcuse's analysis of art as perhaps the only sphere of human life that can free itself from the material determinants of our existence. “The truth of art,” he wrote, “lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real." I have just been suggesting that it is within our power to challenge the 'reality' so carefully established by the corporate media if we have developed the imagination to envisage a different kind of reality, a quality that art can initiate in us all. The life of the imagination, in Marcuse's view, can free itself from the claims of social determination and, in a Freudian sense, free the individual consciousness in ways that can frighten, but also liberate. It is this power that, for me, has always privileged the aesthetic over the analytical - it gives us back some autonomy and a means of challenging societal control, initially perhaps only in our individual consciousness, but this can coalesce around potent figures and ideas to have the potential to disrupt social constraints. Something like this happened in 'les evenements' in 1968 in France and in the rise of the counter-culture more generally in the sixties and seventies. 
I have previously described how, as a young child, literature took me to other worlds and provided me with a different reality that could be more powerful than the one I lived in. Music also had this capacity to not just take me away from the reality of my fairly tough circumstances, but to give me something positive, though elusive, to pursue. I loved the new 'rock n' roll' sounds that could be heard on radio, though rarely television. My maternal grandparents, at whose house we three children spent quite a lot of time, since we went there after school, owned a huge radiogram that sat proudly in the corner of the front room. This housed not only a record player and radio, but also the collected discs of the household. There were the soundtracks of fifties musicals and some Nat King Cole that were the choice of my grandparents, but also some records of my two aunts who still lived at home. Frank Sinatra ('Songs for Swingin' Lovers') belonged to the elder of the two, but the younger, who was only about eight years older than me, so a teenager at this time in my life, had records of a different order. Lots of The Platters that I soon knew by heart, and still do, but one that entered my soul and stayed there for good - 'Jailhouse Rock' by Elvis Presley, and its B side, 'Treat Me nice'. It was the pounding beat that claimed me completely, not the lyrics (which today I realise are actually very strange with their comically innocent homoerotic qualities), and it is the feel of music that still first grabs me today, the lyrics always coming later. I knew I wanted more of the rock beat of the Presley disc.
I began to pester my mother for a record player of our own, and, to my surprise, it wasn't long before she came home with a second-hand Dansette player. Where she got it from, I don't know, but there it was, handsome in its red and cream covering, but without any records or, as I quickly noticed, a plug to connect it. We had no spare plug, but my mother, ingeniously, removed the bulb connector from a defunct lamp and was able to connect the record player cord to the light socket in our front room. We turned it on, it hummed and we pulled the turn-table arm out to the on position. The platter began to whirr round just as it should. We turned the speed switch to 78 and the table span even faster. All we needed now was a record to play on it.
This was not long in coming. From somewhere, my brother got hold of a 78 record of Buddy Holly's 'That'll be the Day' with, I think, 'Lookin' for Someone to Love' on the B side. This was played again and again. I saved every penny I could, and clubbed together with my brother to buy our first 45 - Forty Miles of Bad Road by Duane Eddy. Again, played to extinction. And so began my life-long addiction to music and to the peculiar pleasure of owning it in all its recorded forms - though nothing ever beat the almost mystical power of the vinyl LP, especially when first purchased and in its virgin state. We never did change the plug on our 'Dansette' so always had to take out the light bulb from whichever room we were in and climb on something to plug in the player, sometimes having to perch the player precariously on piles of books so that the cord could reach the light socket. I did, though, realise why my mum got the player itself so quickly. She really wanted to be able to play music of her own. Soon Buddy Holly had to compete with Peter Pears and Bejamin Britten or Kathleen Ferrier.
 We slowly added to our store of recorded pleasure and I would spend any money I was given for birthdays etc. on records, spending hours poring over discs in high street stores and listening to them in the booths that were ubiquitous in specialist record shops and in department stores, although the assistants were often obviously reluctant to allow small boys like myself to occupy the booths at all. I would usually be met with "well are you going to buy it?" when I would ask to listen to the disc, to which I would invariably reply "I don't know until I've heard it" to which the response was always, "Well alright, but only this one, then that's your lot".
     There was one store only in Bromley High Street that didn't seem to mind kids like myself listening to the records in their little soundproof booths, and I would spend many Saturday mornings there, competing with groups of teenagers, sometimes listening to seven or eight different records before the tolerance of the staff began to wane. I would specialise in asking to hear EP's because you got two tracks on each side. In this way I discovered music that I couldn't have found elsewhere very easily, in particular, the blues. I was taken first by the pictures on the covers of blues records. The agonised expressions on the faces, the harmonica held over the mike. It just looked authentic in a way I couldn't have explained.
I will never forget taking one record up to the counter to listen to. It was an LP, so I wasn't sure if I would be allowed. But the assistant was kind and signalled the booth to go to. I sat down and the first scratchy hiss began as the needle hit the record, then an insistent beat, hard and rough from drums and guitar with a pounding bass - and then a voice the like of which I had never heard in my life. It shook me with its power and its primal force. By the time the harmonica entered I was a changed person. I had had my first encounter with Chester Burnett, otherwise known as Howlin' Wolf and my life would never be quite the same again. By the time the record got to 'Smokestack Lightnin' I knew I had to have this disc and that it was the only thing that mattered. I was probably ten years old and the blues had got my soul. It expressed everything I felt about the world, not in its lyrics so much as in its elemental musical power. Still today, after developing my musical fixation into almost every musical form there is, the sound of a slide guitar, a harmonica and a voice like Mr. Burnett's or Elmore James or Muddy Waters......... a feeling beyond analysis or explanation takes me over and I'm in an intensely pleasurable pain - that is, someone else's pain, but to begin to imagine that - to feel that - is the beginning of the capacity to challenge the reality that the powerful insist we should accept.