Whether shed in obscurity or fame, all tears taste the same

Robin Williams - 1951-2014

As the world still tries to get its head around the sudden and tragic death of the comic comet that was Robin Williams, the righteous have started to creep about on Facebook, chiding those posting heartfelt expressions of shock and sadness at the news of his death on their pages, and exhorting them to spend as much time thinking about the “ordinary” victims of depression: i.e., those who suffer without fame to cushion them.

Whilst we now know that this man who made us laugh and cry across so many years as both comedian and actor was fighting the Black Dog the whole time, there have also been murmurings about his battle with drugs, and his “comfortable” life bought with the money he earned making millions of people all over the world forget their own miseries and smile for a while.

I seem to remember a similar sort of slime began to ooze all over my Facebook feed about Whitney Houston before her body was even cold. “She brought it on herself.” “Why focus on her when real people are dying of drug overdoses?” - Etc etc etc. The blazingly brilliant actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who died of a drug overdose earlier this year aged just 46 received exactly the same treatment. It made me think. We love to be diverted. We love our music and our films and our theatre nights. Most people have extensive film, and music collections. Often illegal downloads out of which the artists never make a penny. Generally speaking, the ‘ordinary’ folk just love to be entertained, but it seems that few have very much time for entertainers. Especially entertainers with problems. Such people receive "unfair" attention for their issues when ‘ordinary’ people suffer in silence. The minute a celebrity dies in tragic circumstances, it only takes a few hours before we find we are being admonished on social media for being upset about it, and told to pull ourselves together and think of the ‘ordinary’ people.

Performers don’t always “choose” their lives. Short and chubby as a kid, Robin Williams was bullied senseless in school, so used his talent at comedy to protect himself. After all, surely nobody would kick the funniest boy in the class or steal his chocolate milk, right? Good for him, he ended up making a living out of it, and in the process, gave joy to millions, but sadly it seems the demons never left him.

The fact that this final desperate act of a brilliant and world famous man might actually help to highlight the seriousness of Depression, and that sufferers can’t just “snap out of it”, seems lost on the self-righteous individuals championing the suffering of the common man and hijacking the death of a talented and tormented man to do it. All suicides are tragic, but it seems only those of the famous are accompanied by endless comment, speculation, and inevitable censure. After all, what does a famous entertainer need to be depressed about, right? Those telling us all off for being heartbroken at the loss of Robin Williams at the stupidly early age of 63 might do well to remember his wife and kids when they post. To have to read such things is something the grieving families of “ordinary” folk seldom have to suffer.

Personally speaking, as a nobody with three nervous breakdowns to my name, if I hear that someone suffers from Depression, I don’t care if it’s the road sweeper, or the President of the United States - they have my sympathy in equal amounts.

The fact is that Robin’s fame clearly didn’t “cushion” him, or he might still be here. 

 

Emmeline Wyndham

12 August 2014

The Alternative Page 3

Back in 2013, I wrote to the new Editor of The Sun, David Dinsmore, to make a suggestion. As the No More Page 3 campaign was garnering such support, perhaps there was a way he could rehash his Page 3 feature in such a way he could not only save face, he might well win himself a journalism prize to boot? All he had to do was throw the page open to the readers: drop the mute dollies exposing their breasts, and let the readers submit their own choices - people who had inspired them, people who had done great things, overcome the odds, and come up smiling. The page, I posited, could become a place where all the millions of ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things could be celebrated. He could be the man who made the change. Didn’t he want that? I asked him.

He ignored me.

I tried another address and sent it again.

He ignored me again.

So I decided to do something along similar lines myself. On Facebook. As a bit of comic relief for the serious debate going on over on No More Page 3, I decided to rip seven shades of urine out of what I considered to be the ‘Carry On’ crassness of Page 3, by featuring a different woman of accomplishment every day (except weekends – just like The Sun). A woman who had made her mark on the world using her brains, instead of just her breasts. Having heard the news somewhere that some 50-60% of girls in state education in the UK now consider studying for exams to be a waste of time when people like Katie Price have got rich by showing off a pair of surgically inflated mammary glands, I decided to try to demonstrate that there was so much more a woman could do with her life. The plan was to do this every day for a year, or until Page 3 of The Sun was consigned to this country’s embarrassing, seaside postcard past. Whichever came first.

On 2 July 2013, I set up a page called The Alternative Page 3. The pattern I set was that Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays would be for current / contemporary inspirations, Wednesdays would be for Historical (deceased) inspirations, with Fridays devoted to women comedians with clips of their performances - accompanied by the tagline “because of course, women can’t be funny...”

I kicked off with a picture of a brave and nameless young woman smiling for the camera and showing her double mastectomy scars. I followed with a picture of the late Diana Spencer reaching out to an AIDS sufferer, and finished my first day’s work with Maya Angelou and Aung San Suu Kyi.

But the narrative I put with these entries deliberately aped the style of Page 3. I trivialised these amazing women, almost as if I was possessed by the spirit of Sid James. I referred to them as “babes” and “corkers” and coo-coo-ed at their achievements. Of Suu Kyi, I said that the “pretty Nobel Peace Prize winner” liked to play the piano and fight for democracy in Burma; of Maya, I said she liked to write books, and quoted her on the subject of Christmas Tree lights; of Martina Navratilova, she was “tennis tottie” who liked her strawberries and cream and winning a silly amount of Grand Slam titles, and for the “History Babe” that week, Righteous Among the Nations WW2 idol, Irena Sendler, she was a babe who liked helping people, especially those under threat of mass extermination.

The idea was to demonstrate just how absurd and inappropriate it was to discuss human beings in such patronising terms - simply because they were born female. Most of the page’s supporters totally ‘got’ my approach, and laughed along with it, but it was woefully misunderstood by others, who wrote to me in shock and outrage.

“I really don’t think you should be talking about (name) in this way, it’s most disrespectful.”

“If you’re trying to challenge Page 3, why are you trivialising women?”

I answered every comment and every message, explaining again and again the purpose of the page: that it was satire, that it employed the knife under the fifth rib to rip the guts out of ingrained, lazy sexism, but secretly, I was glad I was being challenged, because it meant that the word was hitting home.

Then, as the messages of support also came in, many of them from fathers thanking me for the page because they showed it to their daughters every day, I began to realise I would be very lucky if I could wind it up in a year.

“You can’t stop! You mustn’t stop!” Entreated one.

In fact, I was delighted to see just how many men were liking and contributing to the page. It made me think just how sexism sells men short too. How it drives a wedge between genders, how it kyboshes relationships, and how it instructs men as to what they should find attractive - jeering at them if they prefer the sort of woman who can put up her own damned shelves, to the more obvious fare served up in The Sun every day.

Eventually, my year was up. I posted up a collage of as many of the women I had featured over the year as would fit, and topped it all off with a picture of a mirror. A bit cheesy, because whilst of course nobody would actually be able to actually see their own reflection in a picture of a mirror, the idea was that every single person who supported the page was just as amazing as the people featured on it.

As more messages came in begging me never to stop the page, I threw it open to the supporters, asking them to nominate their own inspirations, and encouraging them to tell me in their own words, just why they considered their choice so fabulous.

I was thrilled as the pictures, words, and ideas came in. The likes leaped up again overnight, and we’re now standing at over 4,000. Not bad for a page that was started merely as a tongue in cheek, nose-thumb at an outdated and embarrassing ‘institution’.

So yes indeed, the page will keep going, and as the world turns, and we all grow up a little bit more each day, The media might grow up a bit too. It’s not too late for David Dinsmore to take up my suggestion. Who knows? He may actually find hearing from his readers rather more interesting than showing pictures of mammary glands every day.

After all, as 52% of the population grow them at some point in their lives, it’s hardly “news”, is it...?

Emmeline Wyndham

Editor and Admin

The Alternative Page 3
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealPage3/

1 August 2014 

Vague Magazine 2014 - The New Forest - a walk in the park...

I grew up in a park. Regent’s Park. A smaller version of Hyde Park that has provided the weary people of London with a beautiful green place to go for a spot of fresh air, a walk among trees, and for the more energetic, a game of rugger on the fields between the lake and the Zoo since it was opened to the hoi polloi in 1835.

That’s what parks do. It’s what they’re about. What they’ve always been about, ever since Julius Caesar bequeathed his private gardens to the people of Rome to “walk abroad and recreate” themselves. The very word “park” for a great many people means ‘playground’.

And so it is for the many who flock to the New Forest National Park every summer. Indeed, many treat it much the same as any other park they might visit of a weekend. Residents bracing themselves for the onslaught are told that tourism brings “much needed revenue” to the area. Hordes descend on Forest fords, paddling, eating ice-cream, throwing soiled nappies in the bracken, and parking on any unprotected verge, but where all the dosh they deposit actually lands up is hard to gauge. Apart from a few pubs and caravan sites raking it in when the Forest is in season (so to speak), I haven’t noticed my council tax bill getting any lower - or employment opportunities in the area getting any better because of it.

Some organisations seem to do well, though. Possibly the most noticeable feature of the open arms policy for tourism in the New Forest are the large competitive cycling events that run year round. Most notorious of these is the New Forest “Wiggle” - a giggly name for an aggressive, “ride” in which literally thousands of cyclists pay upwards of £30 each to event organisers to descend on Forest roads in large groups, defying anyone to overtake, and literally annexing vast swathes of the place for days at a time. It’s effectively a weekend curfew for residents, many of whom opt to hide in their houses rather than risk venturing out for anything other than an emergency.

Nobody minds anything... as long as there’s not too much of it. Despite the occasional protest along event routes, locals are not quite at the pitchforks and torches stage as yet, but these massive events have begun to test local patience and it’s not hard to see why. There is an appreciable difference between the weekend family on push-bikes enjoying a much-needed lungfull of green air, and swarms of riders, heads down on £thousands worth of performance bikes playing Bradley Wiggins, and seemingly more interested in getting around a course in record time than admiring their surroundings.

Of course, one of the main reasons the Forest looks so nice and inviting to them as they pedal about in their lycra, is thanks to the ancient system of Commoning - turning out ponies and other stock on the commons to graze. This keeps the whole thing looking trim and pretty. Thing is though, those pretty ponies all belong to somebody, and that somebody has to round them up every now and again to check them over, check their health, and judge whether or not they’re going to make it safely through the winter – otherwise we could have some very tourist unfriendly sights like emaciated, elderly animals shivering and dying by the roadside. Little wonder then that local people were disgusted – and furious - when it emerged that one of these vital roundups (drifts) was actually cancelled last year...to make way for a cycle event. Hardly surprising then, that many are now calling for an end to these races altogether.  

Of course, the cycle clubs are anxious to refute that any of these events are races, calling them instead “rides” or “wiggles” or “sportives”. Whatever organisers may claim though, it seems clear that many of the participants have other ideas. Having read some of the comments on their Facebook pages in which they enthuse about how they achieved their “best time ever” on some ‘ride’ or other, I am minded of Michael Palin in the Monty Python parrot sketch, eyes shifting left and right as he tries to convince customer John Cleese that in spite of the fact the bird is clearly dead and nailed to its perch, it’s merely “resting”.

A little humility would probably go a long way to ameliorate tensions. In all too many cases, the attitude of those who misuse the Forest tends to be one of bewildered entitlement when challenged. The woman caught throwing nappies into the undergrowth, and hurling stones at a pony who had wandered too near her family’s picnic - rejoined that the animal “shouldn’t be here”. The family turning what was left of meagre winter grazing into a massive spirograph with their mountain bike tyres simply pleaded that “nobody told” them not to. The couple with the large dog snapping at the pregnant mare on the road by the High Corner Inn “didn’t know” they should keep it on a lead and under control.

“We didn’t know”, “Nobody told us”, “nobody said...”

One is forced to wonder if, had the New Forest been designated a National Wildlife Conservation Area instead of a National ‘Park’, people might have more of an idea of the actual importance of the place, and rather more of a handle on how to handle themselves – and their dogs – when visiting.

It seems pretty clear then that education is what’s needed, and education at grass roots level. Education that reminds us all that to enjoy places like the New Forest is not a right, it’s a privilege, and with privilege comes responsibility. It is incumbent upon those who profit by, and promote tourism to the New Forest to ensure that the visitors they encourage arrive armed with a certain amount of knowledge, and that knowledge needs to be imparted and implanted in our city schools. Leaflets in Forest pubs and at information points in car parks can only do so much. By the time people get here, in many cases, it’s already too late.

Yes, I grew up in London; I lived in a park and went to school in a wood - St John’s Wood, but thanks to my schooling, by the time I first visited the countryside, I already knew the Country Code.

It’s time to put it back on the National Curriculum.

E. A. Wyndham Blake © 2014

Posted by Emma Blake at 13:55

Labels: Comment

Vague Magazine 2013 - It's all good...

Vague Magazine

Emma Blake dares say...

Saturday, 22 June 2013

It's ALL good...

It’s all over for David Dinsmore. Come Monday, he’ll be the new Editor of The Daily Tits (aka The Sun), and as he has gone into print to say: “"there's no better job in journalism" I guess the only way from there for him is down. 

I’d like to think that if I were a journalist, I would be aiming a little higher, something along the lines of a Robert Fisk, or Anne Leslie, but then again, it seems that at least these days, what most people believe to be aiming “high” is highly relative. 

Way back in the 1990s when I was a “sassy and risk-taking” chick jazz singer on the London ‘scene’, and politicians were all still people who were older than me, I received a call from a piano player who was looking for someone to do a duo gig with him at some restaurant up in Hampstead.

“What’s the money?” Was my first question.

“£70. Plus they’ll feed us” he said.

“Lemme check my diary and get back to you.” I said.

I then called around my musician friends to ask about this guy. I’d never heard of him, so I needed to know if he was any good; could he read, could he keep time – that sort of thing. Nobody had heard of him however, and couldn’t give me any kind of a steer as to what to expect. Finally, I called my usual bass player and he exploded into laughter on the other end of the ‘phone. 

“Ha ha! He’s TERRIBLE!” He chuckled. 

“Oh God...” I began.

“Take the gig, Em...” he carried on, “you’ll be ok. He knows a few chords and you’re good enough to busk it to keep it together, but just don’t look at him when you’re singing or you’ll wet yourself.”

“Why?” I asked, desperate.

“I’m not going to tell you. Best you find out for yourself, but just remember, I warned you...”

And with that, he left me to call the guy back to confirm. 

I confirmed.

I showed up professionally early to the gig in my little black Mini Mayfair with my charts (music) and my mic stand and my honed professional manner. He was already in a state. Nerves. Panic. Fumbling with the leads on the back of his keyboard, dropping stuff. I waited until he was completely ready before plugging my mic in to his amp to soundcheck in the last three minutes before we were actually due to hit. 

Halfway through the first number, I couldn’t resist a peek to see what was going on behind me when he took his solo. He was like Animal at the drum kit on The Muppets. Flailing, hammering, sweating, gurning. He looked like he was giving birth to a wasps’ nest. It was a sight to behold. Sometimes the lower lip was almost touching the keys, I was fairly sure he went cross-eyed at one point. The point though, was that the impression he gave to the audience was that playing the piano was the most difficult thing in the entire world.

Meanwhile, I was up at the mic giving the impression that singing complex rhythms, stretching phrasing, improvising, and providing hook after hook for this lunatic to keep to the beat was the easiest thing in the world.

I have never been so exhausted in my life. It was an ordeal. Singing percussively and snapping my fingers and beating my bangles on the mic stand in such a way that this berk could keep up and sound halfway listenable had all but wrung me out, but all the while, my smooth jazzness and my smug jazz grin never wavered. Not once. Brought up in a theatrical family, to let the audience “see the wheels going ‘round” in a performance was akin to drowning kittens down the bog. Anathema. Unspeakable. No matter what is going on, you present a professional front to the audience.

When it was all over, I staggered to the bar for a bucket of Merlot.

To my annoyance,  I watched as members of the audience lined up to congratulate HIM on his “amazing” performance and offered to buy him drinks. Not one of the bastards offered one to me.

It was a salient lesson. That night, I learned that very few people out there seem to be able to tell the difference between good, mediocre, and downright appalling. It seems the fact that anyone can get up on stage and do anything at ALL seems to please most people to the point of pant-wetting amazement.

I learned too, that if you strive for perfection, if you work to be the best you can be, if you practice and rehearse and try stuff and reject stuff before you present it, be sure you understand you’re doing it for yourself alone. If anyone notices, that’s nice, but essentially, the only person it’s going to matter to... is you.

If however, you're one of the rare and wonderful people who does notice, and delight in it when someone has gone to the bother of learning their craft in the service of your entertainment, no need for a fanfare, or even a song and dance; just buy ‘em a drink.

Posted by Emma Blake at 13:45

Vague Magazine 2011 - Antitaurino

Tuesday, 2 August 2011

Utter bull...

'Antitaurinos' in Lima

With a family man killed by a tormented bull goaded to madness at a fiesta near Valencia last week, perhaps it is time for Spain to wake up and smell the blood.

When I was a feature writer on an ex-pat rag in Spain in 2007, I was disgusted when our editor gave over the centre spread to a colleague for a flatulent article in defence of bull fighting. John Davies, the then ‘sports’ writer, expressed the sneering ‘regret’ that squeamish Brits were missing out on the full Spanish experience if they failed to embrace it as part of the ‘culture’.

Somewhat karmically, the paper went bust two weeks later.

Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero’s recent woeful decision to give Bull Fighting official status as an ‘artistic discipline and cultural product’ may have come as a shock but not really that much of a surprise. With the bull fighting ban now enforced in Catalunya, and having first-hand knowledge of Spanish politics having lived in the country myself, one has to suspect this had rather more to do with point scoring against the Catalans than any real interest in an outdated and controversial bloodsport. As bullrings close down, and television coverage of corridas gets pulled due to falling viewing figures, feeble defence of this vicious nonsense has become almost a cultural relic in itself. Yet out the arguments still trot - like the crudely stitched up horses of the Picadors, but with far less nobility. I have read incredulously of ‘brave bulls’ earning ‘glorious’ deaths, and wondered how it is possible in this day and age for anyone using such ridiculously anthropomorphic language to expect their argument be taken seriously in any sort of rational debate.

Bravery and/or cowardice are human traits; the preposterous ‘transference’ demonstrated by attributing such qualities to animals should surely be greeted with derision, not given column room; yet my former colleague earnestly claimed in his 2007 article that “fighting bulls are born on a strict pedigree of ‘proven courage’ for six years before they go into the ring. Any sign of ‘cowardice’ in that six years and they will be dispatched to the slaughterhouse. The prospect before them is a place on the butcher’s block or a hot-blooded death in the Plaza de Toros.”

Gosh.

So what does this actually mean? That in demonstrating either ‘courage’ or ‘cowardice’ (at least in the swivel-eyed opinion of the humans who control their lives) they somehow earn the right to choose their own fate? How frightfully decent. However, one has to ask just how, exactly, this generous ‘deal’ is conveyed to these creatures? And how may they be seen either to consent or not? Via contract? And how might that be worded, we wonder? “Choose one: a) run away from the homicidal maniac brandishing a sharp instrument trying to hurt you, or b) charge at him and earn the right to be stabbed to death in front of a cheering crowd...”

Assuming our ‘brave’ bull plumps for option B, he then enters into six years of ‘training’, during which time he is made to believe he is playing some sort of game and so gets used to the flapping cape and running around a ring...er...thing. At the end of this, he is packed into a truck and taken to the arena, where the game turns decidedly sour and he is rewarded with a confusing and distressing death. Commencing with metal lances being plunged (and twisted) between his shoulder-blades by the mounted Picadors to weaken him as he enters the ring, the ‘game’ continues with three or four banderillas being thrust into his already profusely bleeding back, until, dazed and staggering, he is finally put out of his misery with a sword or dagger, severing his spinal cord. It is thus that it would appear bovine ‘bravery’ is established – i.e., by how long agonised, confused and deranged animals can keep on charging.

This would also seem to have a bearing on how potent the bull’s gonads are going to be when they are chopped off and served up for the matador’s dinner, the notion being that eating the testicles of a strong animal will confer certain macho powers on the raving delusional sitting with the plate in front of them.

Last time I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary, the definition of sadism was still ‘a form of perversion marked by a love of cruelty’. How else can one describe the practise of goading and tormenting a living, sentient creature to its death? I totally dispute that it’s any kind of a fair fight. The bull is knobbled as soon as he enters the ring by not only the methods outlined above, but bulls have also been found to have had vaseline rubbed in their eyes to blur their vision. Real level playing field that. What bravery. What entertainment. Qué ‘especta-culo’ (look it up).

I had to laugh when I read of the pro-bullfighting lobby in Spain jeering at horrified Brits by saying ‘The English come to the corrida to cry for the bull, then go home and beat their children.’ With marches in the streets against the ever mushrooming problem of domestic violence in Spain, that would seem rather like the pot calling the kettle black. Just as I do not believe that in order to love England one has to embrace foxhunting (still illegal by the way - despite the sycophantic coverage given to Boxing Day meets by sympathetic rags), neither will I accept that one must swallow savagery and ritualised bloodshed in order to fully appreciate Spain. In fact, I frankly wonder at the sort of English, and other foreign nationals who choose to make their homes there who are apparently so desperate to be seen as assimilated they believe they have to suck-up to it.

I find it depressing that to so many, any expression of concern or sympathy for the pain and suffering of animals is cause for derision. The legendary King Arthur is supposed to have said that ‘violence is not strength, and compassion is not weakness’.

Myth or reality, the sentiment is irrefutable.

© Emma Blake 2011

Posted by Emma Blake at 22:54

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