My Riot Pt. 2 I Need A Poo

...As I walked to Clapham Junction there was a palpable atmosphere of danger in the air, like a fizzing and pulsating, a sparkling in the skin roots. The people coming towards me from the ‘the riot’ were chatting excitedly, talking to others on their mobile phones; there were displays of passion, real experience, expectations set adrift. This was not reported on the news, the excitement and exhilarating fervour, it felt strangely to me like the last night of a music festival, that kind of loose and lethal comradeship. I carried on walking, passing a Police car with a gaggle of officers chatting to each other with folded arms, I was expecting them to stop me but they didn’t, so on I went past closed shops and houses, many people were hanging out of their windows trying to catch a glimpse and a story of something. 

All of a sudden I was in the centre of it all, it just appeared before me like the entrance to hell or the secret world only accessible through he back of a wardrobe. I saw shops on fire, windows being smashed, people pouring into T K Maxx and out again with concealed faces, many were wheeling stolen suitcases and struggling with armfuls of random products; Starbucks had been obliterated, strangely there was a man and two girls sat inside in the middle of the wreckage drinking from Starbucks cups. Was I scared? Not really, there were the people doing the rioting and then there were quite a lot of people walking through as I was, standing, looking and egging-on like kids watching a school fight; again they were taking pictures, chatting on phones, excited, energised, taking in the atmosphere, trying to remember all the details to tell their friends the next day. A fully interactive film right before their eyes; they had imaginary screens around their bodies as if they weren’t really there. It was almost like promenade theatre, I stood with a group as we watched a man throwing a fire extinguisher at a metal shutter – to be honest if this guy represented the radical potential of the working class to overthrow its oppressors, I wasn’t holding my breath – he wasn’t even making a dent, he eventually got so frustrated he started to kick it, hmm, I moved on.

I could have stayed there all night, it felt good to be where it was all happening – the only thing was I was really desperate for a poo and it was getting more and more urgent, I walked out of the scene, but not before I saw two young men helping an old man in through the broken window of a sports shop. It was this strange type of community that was also missing from the media, they embodied a kind of contradiction part thug, part gentleman. Not linear.

Yes, humans can be bastards and if you promise so much and give so little, something will snap. But on this night some of them were also loving and compassionate siblings, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers – some of them. They are split too, between the reality of their lives and their place in an abstract system of money and things. Are we being run by humans or an abstract system that we created and now can’t control? Death of the author. The pure energy and emotion expended that night, gave a glimpse of the dissatisfaction and potential force of the collective majority – but they were fighting for the wrong team, by stealing stuff they are reinforcing and securing the system that keeps them in the place they are trying to escape from.   

Mercifully, I managed to find a bar just around the corner that was still open, I can’t remember its name now, at the time I only had one thing on my mind. I went in did my business and then bought a drink in the bar and started to watch the TV as they was relaying events that were literally happening 100 foot away. I had a very strange shrinking feeling, it was so weird, all I saw was violence, evil, destruction, some guy trying to break a cash machine,  all accompanied by the monotone, morose voice of the newsreader, relaying the objective, but subtlety derogatory, truth into my face.  Dear emotion, camaraderie, absurdity and inspiration, I’m leaving you, I’m going to live with banality, safety, boredom and the same old shit. All the complexity, energy and multiplicity was taken away and put into reinforcing all the same crap to placate and subdue all those sofa dwellers, shaking their heads along with all the condemnation and linear expected world, tutting and booing together against the evil men on the screen. 

At the same time it was terrible, some individuals lost property and were robbed and scared and disgusted; I saw it all on the news – I didn’t know any of these people and my experience was different, I don’t want to say that my experience is the real and genuine one and the one on the screen was a sanitised trite version intent on reinforcing the views of the audience, but fuck it I’m gonna, kapow; complexity, inspiration and anything new interesting and challenging about what was going on was wiped away.

People’s opinions on the matter after the fact were dreary for fear they have an original thought, stock phrases repeated over and over, blaming the people whose fault it was, whoever that was, and condemning all the senseless violence and destruction; where’s the violence and destruction full of sense? The stale interviews with the rioters full of bravado, made a brief appearance; I would like to see how different they would be if their mothers were also present during the interviews; they may not be as evil and violent as one was lead to believe. We were inundated with people playing roles, reinforcing that reality we are all so used to, there is no Other, we have incorporated it all. Step out of your own head and take a risk, see that shop window in your mind, keeping you from freedom and smash that git with a brick. To be a criminal. The Problem is freedom, self expression is seen in terms of having more things, nice trainers, this is the real crime, it’s all the wrong way around: to create should be our goal. This was what my Riot taught me.

My Riot Pt. 1 Pub Quiz

'A Multitude is a plurality of conscious and sensitive beings sharing no common intentionality, and showing no common pattern of behaviour.  The crowd shuffling in the city moves in countless different directions with countless different motivations.' - the Uprising -  Franco Beradi

I think it was on 7^th or 8^th of August 2011 that I was taking part in a pub quiz in Clapham, at a pub called the Lamb, and I was a tad squiffy. We were doing quite well, definitely in the top 3, we would maybe have won a bottle of wine or at least some money behind the bar, which makes what happened next even more galling. At a certain point in the evening, just over half way, there was a sudden and unexpected lull in the atmosphere and everyone somehow spontaneously got up to leave.  My companions and I looked around with confusion and didn’t really know what was going on, that was until a mysterious stranger, with straggly hair and wild eyes, put his ruddy hands on our table leaned in and whispered: ‘the riots coming’, before disappearing in an instant.  That may not be 100% accurate but that’s how it appears in my memory.

We got up, rather lazily I thought, but then again it was a hot day, dare I say perfect weather for a riot, and went outside, we stood for a while waiting for this beast with many parts to come over the horizon, but when it didn’t we said goodbye and headed in our relevant directions. 

***

It’s been 1,029,600 minutes, or nearly 2 years, since the riots of 2011 in London and suddenly the writing comes, like a brick through a shop window (apologies, due to that plastic resin they use, it may take a few hefty projectiles). Living in London I had a somewhat split perception of the events, both immanent and mediated – both in the flesh and through the media. The following is my experience of the ‘event’.

Ultimately, it wasn’t so much of a riot rather than an unauthorised consumer binge; the donkey bucking off its rider and finally munching the carrot, with as much intelligence and self consciousness as an ass would have. Was it born from a revolutionary muster, the people lashing back at their oppressors and sending them a message? The dissatisfaction with mediocre government, greedy bankers and mechanistic corporations, all lacking in emotion and spirit, spilling over into action? The actuality is no, well kind of, but I so wanted it to be more. Maybe so did everyone else. It seems to me that the press and media did its job in terms of conjuring a condemnation and general fear of the ‘terrible things’ that were happening, killing all the complexity and nuance, sounding out Professor Pavlov’s bell. My experience was very different and somewhat unaccounted for.

Ok, so I have studied many a revolutionary book and film relating to the French Revolution and May 68, so I was expecting principles and some kind of artistic spontaneous expression relating to a future freedom. I realise this may be a tad romantic and idealistic, but good, because that’s where I live. There was definitely spontaneity, expression and anger but there was also passion, humour and camaraderie and when it all kicked off and kept growing there was that fear that anything could happen, what if this was actually it, the end we have been imagining and playing out for years?  Sadly the only organising principle of the rioters seemed to be transient personal gain and there is nothing rousing or revolutionary about that, in fact it is quite the opposite.

For me, as well as other Londoners out on the streets, it was a thrill, the crack in a normal white line on a white page of existence. Things were out of their place, people were taking things and destroying things that used to be behind shiny surfaces; the surfaces were shattered, the boredom was shattered; it was exciting, an event for everyone; something happening in our own back garden. It had an eerie effect, things were misplaced; the mannequins were on the wrong side of the window, among us.

The images and news articles from the media (the unshatterable shiny surface) seemed to be coming from a different dimension to my empirical reality. It was an uncanny place to be, between the ‘real’ of the streets and the symbolic of the representation, it was presented like any other news story as if it was happening 500 miles away in some other place. I presume this is so that we could reassure ourselves that we are safe and morally superior, and maybe providing this detachment is the collective function of the media. The images kept it at a distance, but I looked out my window and it was there – I was caught in the middle and it made me re-evaluate how I thought about those news stories that actually were in places 500 miles away, what was I not seeing?

My only reference point for a riot was what I had seen on the news; I wasn’t sure which way around to work things. It was all so familiar on the TV: there were on the spot reports, replays of particularly lurid violence, we heard nothing from the rioters (just as we never hear from the Taliban etc). There were journalists that did interview some of the rioters after the fact, who were hooded and full of bravado, but this wasn’t on their own terms and produced mainly the same old crap fitted into the same old box; they fulfilled the expectations of the roles they were given – or edited as such.

Maybe there wasn’t a reason for the ‘violence’; it will go down as the great Dada revolution, no principles, no rules just expression – and a new pair of trainers.

***

As I walked to Clapham Junction...

 TBC