Beaten

Yesterday marked something of a watershed in the on-going, possibly never-ending, War on Capitalism. It bore many, if not all, the hallmarks of defeat, yet I'm hoping to salvage something from the situation, as you will see.

The catastrophe experienced at Parkway Parade in the late afternoon could not have been foreseen earlier. Then I had been complacently thinking, as I listened to the final movement of Bruckner's 8th Symphony, that I had a lot more listening to do to music I already owned on CD if I were to ever really do it all justice. In a similar vein, I was trying to figure out just how much of the remainder of the year it would take to get through the tasty pile of books in the back room waiting to be read. I reckoned I could keep going easily to late November. I suppose the foolish thing was suggesting to Noi that we should amble along to our favourite shopping mall (insofar as any of these places might be termed a favourite, I guess Parkway is it; at least I can walk there, so I don't have to find a place to park) in order to get something to eat.

Even then, I think I had lurking at the back of my highly devious mind the memory of picking up one or two CDs by The Kinks at Gramophone a couple of weeks back and being struck by the fact that: (1) I didn't own anything by them, despite regarding them as one of the great bands from the 60s/70s; (2) I didn't own anything by them, despite my awareness that Ray Davies was (and is) one of the great truly British songwriters, which meant there must be a fair few great songs of which I was not so blissfully unaware; (3) I didn't own anything by them, despite regarding Lola as possibly the most wonderfully subversive popular song of all time, which meant I was denying myself other possibilities of healthy subversion at a time of life when that would do me a power of good. Other thoughts in a similar vein had followed, lain dormant, I suppose and now (yesterday evening) emerged to bite me in the leg and not let go and force me to buy five of the early albums by the band up to and including Kinks Part 1: Lola Versus Powerman and The Moneygoround at around $23 a shot.

And that's not all. From Gramophone I staggered on to Borders where, I must confess, I'd been eyeing Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine for a while on previous excursions. I read No Logo with much appreciation a couple of years back, borrowed from the library, and had once or twice since thought I wouldn't have minded owning a copy in order to look stuff up. Now those clever marketers at Borders had got The Shock Doctrine in their 3 for 2 section, in order to tempt punters like myself, but had neglected to put anything else quite as interesting in that devilish section, rendering me reasonably safe. Then, a couple of weeks back, I noticed a rather nice edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude therein. My own Picador paperback had mysteriously disappeared from my collection, somehow never making the journey from Manchester to KL Still I was safe though, as the necessary third text just wasn't jumping out at me. Until yesterday. When suddenly the bright yellow cover of Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great (only two copies left) caught my eye and I was doomed. It's not that I'm terribly keen on the recent wave of primers for atheists; I'd thought of buying the Dawkins one because I like his science stuff, but what I'd understood of it from the reviews didn't suggest a terribly challenging read. But Hitchens seems a different sort of fish. His radical political material is bracing, lively and often funny and I must say I find his pro-war stance on Iraq interesting, if somewhat incomprehensible. I saw him the other week on a BBC programme roundly condemning water-boarding (after allowing himself to be subjected to a mild version of it) and found myself admiring what seems his innate decency & honesty, so an attack on religion by him might turn out to be genuinely thought-provoking. Anyway, that's how I found myself picking up the three books and then trying to feel better about one of them being free (but is it, really?) as I shelled out the readies.

And still, I'm afraid, that's not all. Noticing that there was a piece by John Updike on Turner (the artist) in The New York Review of Books, (amongst other goodies) which is not on the on-line version of the periodical, I guiltily added that to the pile. And I was sunk.

But here's my attempt to salvage something. Question: can we really regard books and CDs as wicked products of disposable consumerism? I'm pleading with myself for a moratorium on this issue until such time as I'm fairly sure I've got everything I need, for a while at least. The subtext of all this is that the hi fi system in the living room is beyond salvation (it's now nineteen years old) and I've got to find some way of justifying a replacement. Soon.

Finally: today has revolved around The Kinks, though not, for the most part, on the main hi fi. And very fine it has been.