Clinton Walker
Everything Clinton
  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • NEWS
  • BOOKS
    • Soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever
    • Suburban Songbook
    • Wizard of Oz
    • History is Made at Night
    • Golden MIles
    • Buried Country
    • Football Life
    • Stranded
    • Highway to Hell
    • Next Thing
    • Inner City Sound
    • Deadly Woman Blues
  • MUSIC
    • Silver Roads
    • Inner City Soundtrack
    • Buried Country CD/LP
    • Buried Country Roadshow
    • Studio 22
    • Long Way to the Top
    • Killer Sheep
    • Painted Ladies
    • Lagoona Records
    • D.J.
  • FILM & TV
    • Buried Country
    • Rare Grooves
    • Studio 22
    • Love is in the Air
    • Long Way to the Top
    • Sing it in the Music
    • Notes from Home
    • Monaro Pictures
  • BUY
  • BACKPAGES
    • Fanzines (1970s)
    • Journalism (1980s>90s)
    • digitaloosends (2000s)
    • Talking Head
  • RE-MIXED
    • House Without Music
    • Leaving Home
    • Bodgie Boogie
    • Rock Ink
    • Vinyl Age
    • Lowest of the Low
    • Low Biblio
    • Inner City Video
    • Co-Dependent
  • ART
  • PHOTOS
  • MEDIA
  • CONTACT

1%er: GOOD, POLITICS AND (MY) WRITING

27/3/2016

0 Comments

 
​The 2016 GOOD 100 list has now been released in full, and I am absolutely chuffed at being included but at the same time a little perplexed. I’m chuffed to be one of only four Australians on the list – the only (old!) man alongside three super young women (Nakkiah Lui, Genevieve Clay-Smith and Jane Marx) – and I’m extra chuffed to be on any list that includes artists I admire like DJ Spooky and expatriate North Korean painter Sun Mu! I feel like a bit of an interloper though because I am no great political activist – and this is an annual list of people all round the world doing politically good works, the assumption being that ‘politically good’ means left-liberalism, to put it as crudely as is the only way to broadly approach it – but then perhaps on the other hand I should be doubly flattered, because it means my approach is working, getting through… 
Picture
Like many dissident Chinese artists, expatriate North Korean painter Sun Mu - fellow includee on the 2016 GOOD 100 list - turns propaganda techniques he learnt under the oppressive regime against the oppressive regime. Trust he doesn't mind this reproduction of his work

​All of which has prompted me to think about my relationship with politics, if they can be separated out from holistic life anyway, and to try and put some articulation to that thinking, which might amount, heaven help us, to something like a bit of a manifesto. Because I do feel somewhat fraught. Certainly, I have little faith in party politics or parliamentary politics, and I sometimes wonder how effective activism can be because it ultimately has to filter through those channels too. I don’t have the right temperament for any of it either way.            
            Direct action, however, is something altogether different, and I am humbled by so many of these Good people who just give so selflessly in this service. My skill-set, however, is better suited I think to other uses, my action not so direct as it is more insidious, say, or slow-release…
            In my profile in the Good 100 feature I am described as a ‘journalist and musician’, which is funny to start with, because I’m actually neither. As a musician I was always just a pretender (but I am increasingly becoming a producer, sort of), and as a journalist, well, it’s a common misnomer, that I’m a journalist, because while it’s true that journalism is where I started out, it’s not something I’ve done now, in any concerted way, for more than twenty years. Which says a bit in itself: The reason I had to resile from journalism was that the mediocre mainstream media wanted to hammer me into its standard bland box. The higher I climbed the ladder – and I was making some good ‘career’ progress by the late 1980s – the more editors wanted to tell me what to write (about), refusing to allow me to pursue the sort of stories for which I am now here being acknowledged. So I had to go out in the jungle and, well, do-it-yourself…
            I do cultural history I suppose it’s fair to say, with an emphasis on the underclasses and their or rather our culture and its underexposed or even suppressed realities. But even before that, I am a storyteller. Before anything else, I look for originality, drama, and resonance – the in-built qualities any story needs to get across. I am deeply skeptical of ideologically driven art whether writing or any other form. Too much art these days is assessed and lauded on the basis it’s politically right-on. I’d rather have good art by bad people than bad art by good people: this is a tag I’ve come to use a bit lately. Because doesn’t Bad have just as much right as anyone or anything else? Note that I’m a guy who is highly amused by and identifies to a certain extent with the phrase, Wrong’s what I do best; who, in art, looks for artistic value first, and meaning second. But even if I am being disingenuous, playing for effect, as I do like to do after nearly forty years in showbusiness, let me put it this way: I want politics to inform my aesthetic, not the other way around. Because I think this way produces better art. And yet: Even as I am an avowed opponent of organized religion – and any and all organized religions, or medieval superstition systems designed to keep the lumpen masses in check, not that I’d ever try to impose that will on any Believer – I’m wont to love devotional music, like reggae, Indian music, American gospel. And yet again: Even as I’m an avowed opponent of organized religion, I am no fan of, say, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ; not because I don’t think people shouldn’t be allowed to offend, but because I think it’s a cheap shot: banal, petulant and ultimately boring. And in art and showbusiness, the first rule, to paraphrase the Ramones – and to which I subscribe – is, Do not be boring. As it happens, I happen to agree with the great Camille Paglia, that all that works designed to shock like Piss Christ are doing is further alienating contemporary art from any audience outside its already-converted urban elites. I look at an artist Sun Mu – what better example, fellow Good guy as reproduced above and below – and think, there’s a better way to get a protest out there, by turning the tools of the oppressor back on themselves…
            My personal politics – and even just typing those words, I think, who could really give a shit? but I press on because I know it’s the discussion I’m here to have right now – my personal politics could be described, at a pinch, as left-liberal humanist, if dry rather than wet, although the real best technical term, if I’m honest, is surely ‘libertine’. My literary/artistic predisposition is definitely iconoclastic, that is to say, post- or even anti- Western-classical/tradition. And so naturally those currents feed into my work, but with a deathly fear now of the sort of proselytizing I’m embarrassed to admit was a defining feature of so much of my (immature) early work in the punk/post-punk cultural revolution. The difference now is that I know the difference between reportage and polemics, and that I can pull back a bit from subjectivity; and I know that rhetoric is no way to ever advance a narrative.
             I think I believe that the class struggle, as we used to call it (which is also about race and other such 'othernesses'), is about culture versus economics; people versus money. And so I just look for stories in the culture that have those qualities of originality, drama and resonance that I already mentioned, to the extent that they will allow the story to stand for itself. You go into the field not to try and prove a hypothesis – which is the approach, I believe, that sullies the Academy, by encouraging it to selectively edit the evidence to suit its own Marxist/post-modern ideology – but to find no more or less than what’s there to be found, as is in its realworld context. I don’t want to moralise, and I’d rather not have to analyse (because, again, if nothing else, all that just slows down the narrative) – but if you have enough detail, you don’t have to. The story itself contains all it needs to go out into the wider world and reverberate its effect through the culture.
            This, I think – I know – is what happened with Buried Country, and now I understand all the more about the Good 100 list, I can appreciate how it was Buried Country that got me on it. I didn’t have to embellish Buried Country, or do any chest-beating or make demands, or rhetorically offer words like 'sorry' that might just as well be empty anyway; the stories were just so strong, with everything you could ask for already in them, I just had to tell them straight… or rather - as all this couldn’t be a more object illustration of the hoariest old aphorism in creative writing classes - let the power of show over tell assert itself.
            And so that’s why it’s so gratifying to get this Good recognition, because it’s a glimmer that my theory is working, that the stories are getting out there and they’re having an impact.
            To read an interview that the magazine did with me but which it didn’t run, all the more reason to post it here…
Picture
Picture
0 Comments

Good god!

17/3/2016

0 Comments

 
As pre-production on the Buried Country roadshow continues apace (scroll down for previous newspost) and Sydney continues to experience heatwave conditions, late March/early April, for me, is hotting up even more. In the foreshadow of going to Brisbane over April 2-3 for Australia’s first-ever (OMG!) Rock & Roll Writers Festival, it is with disbelief almost that I can report I have been included on Good magazine's 2016 ‘Good 100’ list of, well, 100 good people doing good things all round the world, which has just been announced at a bang-up launch party at the South X South-West festival in Austin, Texas, that I was sadly unable to attend. And there I was thinking I’m just a ratbag-cum-schlepper at best!   
Picture
Picture

​To be honest, I'm not exactly sure how the dominoes tumbled that got me on the Good list (though it had to have had something to do with Buried Country) and I still can't quite work out how it all goes fully public either, short of being published in the hard copy of the magazine, which I understand is in the process of coming out at time of this writing. I can make a link here to a sample 10 Good people on the list that is thus far available online, but beyond that I can really only quote from the magazine's press-release, which reads:

     GOOD Magazine’s 2016 “GOOD 100” list captures 100 individuals who are improving the world through creativity and innovation. The 2016 GOOD 100 includes honorees from 37 countries in six categories: health; earth; justice & equality; spaces; information; stories. (Whether I'm the only Australian on the list is just one of the details about which I'm still unsure…)
     “There’s an impressive sense of urgency that we’re celebrating in our fifth installment of the GOOD 100, which honors people who are acting right now,” said Caroline Pham, deputy editor, GOOD Magazine. “None of these 100 individuals are doing this work for the accolades—which is precisely why they deserve all the more recognition.”

     Certainly, since the only prize I've ever won in my life was a so-called Academy Award in the Under-15s for being the biggest poser (and I'm still scarred by it, can't you tell?), I'm deeply flattered, in all seriousness, to receive such an honour. At risk of appearing in the slightest churlish, I hope it might help bring a bit more recognition in my homeland, where I'm just becoming sick and tired of being an eternal outlier. I will post up more details as they come to hand...

     As for the rockwritefest, well, I just hope it will be a hoot. Organisers Leanne de Souza and Joe Woolley have been rewarded for their boldness (rare in this country) with a lot of support and a really good vibe surrounding the whole thing in the lead-up. See here the program in full, here me spruiking it at Scenestr, and here theaureview's preview, whose five highlight picks include the two sessions in which I will participate. Hope to see you there. 
0 Comments
    Picture

    CLINTON WALKER

    clintonwalker.com.au

    Archives

    March 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    June 2024
    January 2024
    July 2023
    June 2023
    April 2023
    November 2022
    September 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    July 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    September 2013

    Categories

    All
    Festivals
    Publications
    Speaking Engagements