Graham Stewart

Writing to discover what I think and believe in increasingly fractured times

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Julian Assange safe from extradition… for now

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I had a post all ready to go to excoriate so-called British justice, expecting the decision of Vanessa Baraitser this morning regarding the extradition of Julian Assange to go the way of the US. And, by contrast, definitely not in the way of Julian Assange. My post was going to be angry. I was going to use lots of bad language. I was going to label the UK America’s favourite rent boy, for instance. The UK is now happy to bend over for any abuse of law and rights at the behest of the US government.

Then I heard the result.

Astonishing.

Then I read a full report. For all the welcome news that Julian Assange will not be extradited to the US — pending appeals by the craven forces of evil, of course — Dame Vanessa managed to make Assange once more the cause, claiming that it was only because he was likely to attempt suicide should he suffer extradition. She gave no sense that she had any sympathy for the man or even any sense of the injustice she had overseen in her court. You could almost hear the sighs and tuts. She was blaming Julian Assange for not taking his medicine like a man. Real men can handle 175 years in solitary for exposing war crimes.

More than that, she accepted that the US government had won its case. Perhaps the most chilling comment came from the US justice department, whose spokesperson said, “While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised.” Every point of law. That is something for all journalists to ponder.

Jeremy Corbyn — unsurprisingly — put it best when he said, ” [it’s] alarming that the judge has accepted US government arguments threatening freedom of speech and freedom to publish”.

Julian is not free yet but this is certainly a victory, however tainted by the poor decision by a poor judge to temper the outcome with a sop to the US. In a better world I might think that the judgment was so worded to give everyone a face-saving way out. The US could quietly walk back into the shadows and make no appeal and UK subservience to the US would be fulfilled. That better world is not here yet, though, I don’t think. It would be nice to be proved wrong.

Oh, and by the way, there is now no mention of this case on the BBC home page this evening. These are the top stories — below some understandably important Covid updates — that the BBC feels are more important:

Hair ice: The strange phenomenon of ‘candy floss’ on trees

Zara Holland faces court for ‘breaking Covid rules’ in Barbados

Blue whales: New population found in the Indian Ocean

Woman’s Hour: The Queen sends ‘best wishes’ to show on its 75th year

EU firms refuse UK deliveries over Brexit tax changes

This is the national broadcaster, remember, with real journalists working there, who are now in real danger of being prosecuted for doing journalism after Baraitser’s judgement that the US had ‘won’ its case. It rather sums up the BBC, who barely reported during the lengthy hearing process at all. They have to be careful now. One slip from the corporate line and they could be on a plane to that super-max prison in the good old US of A.

Morning rituals and early rising are all very good but…..

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….they’re not enough on their own

It’s easy to rise early when you get to my age. The drive to visit the loo first thing is just one of the things that makes starting the day at 5am less of a chore than it was in my younger years.

I have learned, too, thanks to a combination of age and sobriety, that I need to keep busy once I’m awake. Busy in the sense of either knowing what tasks I have down to accomplish next or at least having books to hand that I am enjoying reading and want to return to. As my kids were growing up, whenever they said they were bored, I told them to read a book. “It’s impossible to be bored surrounded by books,” I would tell them. You may be surprised to know that my children — now adults — spend very little time reading books. Go figure.

But that’s enough about them; back to me. I have been an early riser for many years now. And I have used a bullet journal for the last few years to make sure I know what I am supposed to do next. In theory. Unfortunately, I have yet to master putting tasks in sequence in my bullet journal beyond the few tasks I repeat each morning and which form what can be called my morning ritual. By the time breakfast arrives, I have a list of tasks and I get to pick and choose what to do when. Which means, of course, that by the end of the day, many tasks are rescheduled for the following day (ad nauseum) as I scrabble to make at least a dent in the list of tasks outstanding. Ho hum.

But at least I’m not bored because I always have some books to turn to (even if they are not the ones I have tasked myself with reading at that time).

Here’s the thing. When I have a lie-in and get to my desk at 9am, say, instead of 5am, I feel that I have wasted four hours of the day. Any productive business person or prolific creator would feel the same, no? But what I produce at the end of a day in which I start at 9am is remarkably similar to what has been produced in a longer day. Not just similar: identical. Nothing.

My wife, after almost thirty years of marriage is, as you would expect, not only puzzled — and increasingly exasperated — by my need to ‘start work’ at 5am but also by the evidence of the great nothing that results from these long days of so-called labour.

I should add here, in case you think I’m some sort of man of leisure pottering about reading books and tending to my smoking jackets, that I do also have a ‘real job’ out there — or, more recently, at home — in the real world. But I do carve out a lot of time for myself.

Which brings me to 2021. I have the early start mastered. That’s a life-hack I don’t need any more help with. I even have the writing down tasks and some sort of morning ritual down pat. I’m a self-help superstar for at least the first thirty minutes of every day. Then it all dissipates.

What I want to do this year, therefore, is plug this early morning success into a better ritual for producing stuff. Any stuff. Stuff I can show my wife and say, look, here’s what I did today.

Have I tried this before? Possibly. OK, most of the past ten years at least. So? Can’t a man dream?

Do I have a plan? Yes. It’s more of a tweak than a radical overhaul. Assigning times to task is a big part of the plan. And making sure I deal in priorities. I can’t believe — given what I know about priorities and urgent tasks and the difference between urgent and important tasks and all that 7 Habits matrix stuff — that I don’t apply this to my own life.

One of the things I want to do is write a daily post. I have been reading Seth Godin for over a decade and he has banged on about writing posts daily for as long as I have read him. I have nodded at the wisdom of such a statement. I know that writing is the best way to discover what you think about something and I know that writing is also the best way to uncover the real me.

That is priority number one for this year, then: a daily post. Scary.

Good information needs hard work

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Information that is too easy to come by is usually a sign that a lot of money has gone into making it available to you. Money is what removes the friction. Money is the grease that oils the cogs of message production.

Things work so well for the manipulators of the message — those who ‘manufacture consent’ — because they have full control of the media that is consumed with so little friction. Both TV and the newspapers are controlled by and for the interests of those who rule. And by ‘rule’, don’t think I’m talking simply of those in government. We no longer have a democracy (because money skews and distorts votes, policies, and management of the economy as a whole) so government tends to be simply the most amenable representatives of the dominant corporate interests. So, those in charge of government policy are also in charge of the media that presents those policies as ‘best for Britain’. What could possibly go wrong? Well, not much for them but a lot for the rest of us.

Alternative voices are available. Much of the writing and journalism on alternative media sites far outshines the stenography, repetition, and relentlessly on-message output available across corporate media. The friction in consuming this media takes the form of the effort involved in hunting it down. It’s not going to drop onto your doormat or shout loudly at you from the newsstands. It’s not going to be represented on political news shows on TV or radio. For all the mass penetration of social media and the internet in general, alternative media still struggles to penetrate the consciousness of many. This is not surprising. For people my age — and even a decade or so younger — we’ve been brought up on media that was both trusted and always readily available. That, of course, was the problem. May god forgive me, I used to read The Guardian. I may even have believed at some time in that distant past — and whisper this — that The Guardian was a paper of the left. I know, I know.

Thank god for RSS and feed readers. I used to use Google’s feed reader until they suddenly decide dto end its life. Now I use Newsblur. Whatever the reader, it works the same: I get a range of news articles — and other things, too; all work and no play etc — sent straight to my reader and I can scroll through the news in the morning. It’s my own personal newspaper but free of corporate cant, evasions, and propaganda. The friction is minimal now for me. In fact, the friction of finding the sites to read becomes both informative and fun. As with most people, I followed clues here and recommendations there and cross-references where I found them and have ended up with the beginnings of a comprehensive list that lets me feel confident that I can ignore what the corporate media spews out and I’m missing nothing of value.

For what it’s worth, here’s a list of some of the sites whose feeds I rely on:

2020 — Gratitude and Anger

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It’s too early to make a call about whether we’ll look back on 2020 as the year from hell or as the year in which things started to become even worse and what we thought was hell was merely hell’s reception area.

And was what befell us this year completely unforeseen? Well, yes, in some ways. But a pandemic was becoming increasingly likely as ecological damage continued, and its effects could be — and were — fairly accurately modelled both at the economic and health levels by large numbers of both national and international health organisations. In other words, the scale of the detrimental effects of this particular pandemic are a result of political decisions. And if we look especially at the UK and the USA — where the death toll and the economic impact for anyone already living on benefits or one pay check away from eviction and food banks — we can see that it is more than political. The profits-led, private-industry-focused, and corruption-riddled responses to the pandemic have been driven by ideology.

When the Tories and other parties of the neoliberal death cult talk of the economy they don’t mean the health of the nation as a whole. Their idea of economy is the profit-gobbling transnational corporations that destroy the planet, shatter communities when they shift production in search of smaller overheads, seek to continually depress wages, and campaign feverishly against the rights — and safety — of workers.

Living in the UK now means living in a country that is likely to see one of the world’s highest death rates from Covid-19 — and that was before the onset of new, apparently more aggressive strains of the virus began popping up like unwelcome molehills in the immaculate lawn of our self-regard. And, of course, to add that little extra irony, a major health crisis hit these shores after the Tories had spent the previous decade seeking the best ways to undermine, underfund, and ultimately sell off the NHS. Hospitals were hugely understaffed before the pandemic hit. NHS staff were already working over one million hours of unpaid overtime every week before the pandemic arrived in the UK. One million hours. Every week. Nurses and midwives account for over 400,000 of those hours. You know, those nurses that have lost their bursaries and been refused a pay rise by the Tories?

Add to all this a Tory government led by ministers both corrupt and incompetent — and with a majority in parliament that makes them almost untouchable — and it is hard to see what anyone could be grateful for. It hasn’t helped, of course, that the so-called leader of the opposition is not much of a leader and seems to believe that the best way to oppose austerity, corruption, and incompetence is to abstain in crucial votes or, when he is particularly exercised by the blatant lies engaged in by the Tory front bench, to tut.

So much for anger. Or, at least, the fertile ground on which my anger is laying its ever stronger foundations.

But gratitude I do have. It may be a short list but it’s full of important things. Here it is:

  • My health and that of my family. My wife, my three adult children, and I have all escaped illness so far this year.

  • I have a built-in support network in my — for now — Zoom-based twelve-step meetings. The humour in the rooms and the ability to right-size problems and put things in perspective has been, if not exactly a life saver, a balm for my sanity.

  • The love of my wife. She shows me how to love and be loved. After twenty-nine years of marriage, our marriage grows stronger every year. We have faced this year together.

  • I love reading and I love books and this year I have found in the books I’ve read worlds of hope and joy and knowledge. Not escapism, perhaps, so much as a source of strength for all the best that we can be. Turning from a news report containing the flippant evil of a Boris Johnston or a Donald Trump (or any of their toadying, self-serving acolytes) to the essays in My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy or a novel like Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House, for instance, is to inhale hope like fresh air in a world that seemed enmeshed in the smoke of a billion fires.

The danger is that I let my gratitude crowd out my anger. That way lies silence and silence is fatal to us all at this time. I hope, therefore, I will have the strength throughout this year to add my voice to those who are agitating for change, for an end to free-market capitalism — of any sort of capitalism, to be honest — and for saving the planet for our children.

Happy New Year.

Until recently, Bollywood had a serious make-up problem

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Indian Institue of technology, Mumbai by Aman Ravi
Photo Credit: Ravi Aman via Unsplash
The last time I was in Mumbai it was still called Bombay. I stayed at the Taj Hotel, which is close to the Gateway to India. It’s easy to feel like an extra in a Bollywood film in such surroundings.

On leaving the hotel in the morning I would hail a taxi for the short ride across town to the Reuters office on Nariman Point. I wasn’t particularly lazy but the taxis – Indian built and perfectly sized for the crowded and anarchic roads of the city – gave me an almost armchair view of the city. This sense was emphasised by the fact that the taxis appeared to be carpeted from floor to ceiling.

Nariman Point is a stubby peninsula that by 2006 was estimated to be the 7th most expensive location in the world for office space. It was an architectural paradox. On one side of the road leading onto the peninsula stood the office blocks aspiring to be high rises. The opposite side was occupied by a decidedly low rise shanty town.

Bombay presented such contrasts wherever I walked. Street food stalls across the pavement from fancy new hotel restaurants. Cattle strolling unconcerned – and unmolested – across busy traffic intersections. Businessmen in suits pursued along the uneven paving by legless beggars on wheeled boards.

But there was a hidden contrast at work in the city at the same time. The glamorous face that Bollywood showed to its devoted fans across the world had a problem with its make-up.

The problem was nothing technical. It was a simple matter of sexism. The Cine Costume, Make-up Artists and Hair Dressers Association (the CCMAA) refused to grant membership to women make-up artists. And as the CCMAA were a closed shop in the Bollywood studio system, it was their rules or no film for the most part.

When women worked on set, they had to be prepared to hide when union officials toured the studio. And, of course, they never received credit for the work they did. The result was that few women saw make-up as a potential career. That was until a campaign started by Charu Khurana, a make-up artist trained in LA who experienced the fines and prejudice of the CCMAA first hand and took legal proceedings against them.

Finally, in late 2014, the Supreme Court of India ruled the CCMAA’s restrictions illegal and demanded that they allow women to become members and work as make-up artists on film sets.

Another make-up artist with an international reputation who has previously stood up to union bullying and refused to pay the fines imposed is IIFA award-winner Namrata Soni. Namrata, who studied at Delamar Academy in Ealing Studios and worked on the record-breaking Om Shanti Om, at first worried that the CCMAA would renege on their promises as soon as the glare of publicity over the Supreme Court decision faded away.

Luckily, this has not happened so far and the number of women working as make-up artists in Bollywood continues to grow. At the same time, the standard of work is steadily increasing. Namrata believes this is down to the way the women themselves approach the work. “Women are perfectionists,” she says. “This pushes the standard higher and it is now finally inching towards that seen in the rest of the world.”

Women who see the potential for a rewarding career are now looking to travel to find the best available training. “Women are willing to pay to get trained because they see the benefits of that training,” says Namrata. “It gives them the confidence and knowledge to go out there and face the challenges that the industry throws their way.”

Those who ask Namrata’s advice about where to train are recommended to try to follow her own path to London. “I’ve met a lot of naturally gifted professionals but training is an important aspect of growth. I feel it’s important to go where you have the opportunity to be trained by the best in the business. I believe Delamar is the best school because it has the best teachers and you leave there prepared for world class achievement.” In fact, Leda Shawyer, Delamar’s Managing Director, reports a large upturn in applications from India since the start of 2015.

Things change. The shanty town that kept in check the hubris of the office dwellers on Nariman Point remains but the rental value of those same offices has plummeted. Business has moved to newer and more central locations within Mumbai. In Bollywood itself, meanwhile, women remain, for the most part, second class citizens but at least when it comes to using their talents as make-up artists, they can now start to compete with their male counterparts on what is rapidly becoming an equal footing.

Disclaimer: I work as an occasional freelance consultant with Delamar Academy and came across this story while talking to Delamar’s Managing Director, Leda Shawyer.

Painting The Modern Water Lily

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Water Lilies
[Image by Pamela Nhlengethwa via Unsplash]

Laura and I went to see the Painting The Modern Garden exhibition at the Royal Academy last Thursday. It’s only around for another fortnight, so we took advantage of being ‘Friends’ of the RA and booked a visit after hours. This means there are fewer bodies to each gallery and it’s possible to get close enough to the paintings to smell the flowers.

There was much to enjoy. I especially liked seeing a Klimt (who I had always associated with stately Austrian women in gold emerging from heavily patterned wallpaper rather than flowers), a Munch, a Van Gogh, and three small Paul Klee canvases all within a few feet of each other. The theme of the exhibition, as hinted at in its title, was the modern garden. Modern in the sense of the discovery of gardening among the haute bourgeoisie rather than in the sense of a path, a compost heap, and the neat lawn of more recent urban versions.

Monet loomed large, of course. In the first room, there were adjacent paintings by Renoir and Monet from the 1870s. In the former, Renoir paints Monet painting in his garden. In the latter, Monet is painting the painting he was quite possibly painting as Renoir painted him. Luckily, it was clear that no vegetation was harmed in the process. At this stage the techniques and subjects of Renoir and Monet are remarkably similar. I actually preferred the Renoirs.

Monet then moves to another house — and garden — and his painting style changes. Colours are richer and the paint is applied more thickly. Or perhaps with greater confidence. These are the paintings of Monet I most enjoy: those from the 1880s.

Then Monet moves to Giverny and he creates the pond and discovers water lilies. God, does he discover water lilies. It seems clear that Monet simply went mad in the last quarter of a century of his life. Perhaps there is some undiscovered chemical in water lilies — certainly in the hybrid species he cultivated at Giverny — which turn a person monomaniacal. His wife must have wondered what was going on.
“Claude, darling, what are you doing today?”
“Painting, my sweet.”
“What will you be painting?”
“I thought I might give the water lilies another try.”
“I see. I’ll call the doctor.”