Infamy (They've All Got It!)

Fame and ignominy were ever ephemeral and, in the grand schemes of things, more often than not, fleeting and insubstantial.  Sometimes though, as with most things, there are exceptions and a conspiracy of forces write fame deep into both history and folk memory.  There are a few such notable instances in Scots cultural consciousness, for good or ill, which have ensured fame or infamy, in the manner of the cult of personality we tend to associate more with their contemporary strains.

The subject could not be broached without mention of Wallace and the Bruce.  And of course, Mary, Queen of Scots, who got her head chopped off.

Beyond those broad strokes of cultural infamy there are those whose fame is inscribed in finer detail.  This is a fame the machinations of which are brought to bear through association with achievment in a particular field, the half life of which is wholly dependent on the values ascribing significances in space and time by the society which gave rise to them.  Such a fame was won by the celebrated architect Sir William Bruce, both in his lifetime and beyond, through his great works which still stand testimony to it.  I have singled Bruce out here for his relevance also to the last of the three 'cult' like figures mentioned above, or at least to a building forever associated with her.

When Bruce began construction of Kinross House in 1686 as his own home, he intended to make a grand professional and personal statement.  It was to become one of his finest works and was called by Daniel Defoe 'the most beautiful and regular piece of architecture' as well as being widely regarded as the most important early classical mansion house in Scotland.

In laying the groundwork of the gardens and the foundations for the house, Bruce took great advantage of the grounds proximity to and alignment with Castle Island in Loch Leven, on the shores of which the house came to stand.  The island is home to Loch Leven Castle, once a prison infamously escaped from by Mary, Queen of Scots.  The castle is used as a deliberate, precocious and 'picturesque' orienting device for the mansion and formal gardens.

In this way, Bruce can be said to have telescoped or focussed the fame of history onto his works.  Thought to have first been built during the Scottish Wars of Independence, the Castle had associations with power, fame and of course infamy long before it became Mary's gaol.

Due to its strategic position, kings held court at Loch Leven Castle and it changed hands between warring  Scots and English sides on not a few ocassions.  It is thought to have been once returned to Scots hands by the forces of William Wallace.  Robert the Bruce is known to have used it on at least two instances of significance.  From the fourteenth century it came to serve as a state prison, holding mainly captives of some import.

It was thus Mary was imprisoned there from the 17th June 1567 until her infamous escape on 6 May 1568, during that period miscarrying twins from her ill fated union with the Earl Bothwell.  In 1675 the estate, including the island with castle, was bought from its owners, the Douglas', by Sir William Bruce.  After the building of Kinross House the castle was never used as a dwelling again, preserved only to give a focus for the principal axis of the house and gardens.

All of these things were fascinating to me when arriving at our new home in Kinross, very near Kinross House and Loch Leven, as a matter of respite and care for my disability.  Since then, there has been little to exacerbate the effects of Frontal Lobe Epilepsy which I could attribute to living among the gentle hills and folk of Kinross-shire.  That is until yesterday.

From late afternoon, throughout last night and today, likely persisting for the next day or two, the exacerbating excessive proximous noise levels, the erratic outbursts, the random chanting and screaming, the gathering crowds, all have irreversibly andf significantly impacted on my seizure thresholds.  This is to the extent, easily gauged through current clustering seizure activity, where I am certain to be still feeling the effects for a week or more to come.  Significantly impacted/lowered levels of GABA, the amino acid which regulates seizure thresholds and activity for all people with epilepsy and is of particular significance to those who are refractory (resistant to medication), as I am, since management of them is the only way to manage seizure acticvity and its impacts, will make sure of that.  (Fuller descriptions for greater understanding of Frontal Lobe Epilepsies and their impacts can be found here  and here ).  And this time it is due to the most unlikely of phenomema, that peculiar worship of transitory fame among young, mainly girls, in what currently masquerades as pop culture, known as Beliebing.

For yes, that contemporary update to infamy which is the curious gold fish bowl of a young 22 year old Canadian pop performer's life came to Kinross this weekend as the Justin rented out Kinross House, allegedly handpicked so he can enjoy peace and quiet away fromn screaming fans whilst he is in Scotland for his three sold out gigs in Glasgow.  The distance from the gated, locked and walled entrance of the frontage to the House is significant, perhaps 300 metres.  Barely a whisper of Belieber's noise will reach their idol's ears inside.

On the contrary, being less than 20 metres in the opposite direction from the gates, where I live has no room in which to escape the cacophony.  The erratic nature of the noise, its sudden eruptions when a sighting may be in the offing perhaps, has triggered direct instances of startle epilepsy.  The clustering nature of Frontal Lobe Epilepsy, wherein management of my condition tends to focus on attempting to restrict impacts so that my seizure count remains at the lower end of the 40-120 seizures I have every single day, means Justin, his entourage and all the willing Beliebers will soon be gone but I will be feeling the increasing impact of their visit for some time after.

As I write a group of stalwart fans remain outside the gates despite the convoy of blacked out windscreened cars having left, carrying the diminuitive popstrel gigward, over an hour ago.  A photographer or two remains too, encamped awaiting the later return but likely aware that the weekend's 'money shot' was caught on Friday evening.  It made national press, some international.  The most contentious the headlines got were that it was 'a little cold for this sort of thing'.

In what other world would we excuse, nay expect in certain quarters, a celebration of, this?  Where else would the potential headline '22 Year Old Man Dances In His Underwear for Teen and Pre-teen Girls' be considered 'just a bit of fun' or 'good for the local economy'?

Not only does the type of fame, constructed first by Disney, marketed, click baited relentlessly by others ever since, highlight its own, showboating, remain in the spotlight even when your not or the media wont propagate the myth further, ephemeral nature but also the cynical, touch the hem of his (absent) robe, opportunism of capital which even saw the local butcher try to sell more pies because Bieber was in town!  Yet the image of a troubled, some might say broken by fame, young man, dancing in his underpants outside one of Scotland's most significant classical architectural buildings may be the first many have heard of the building at all.  Its infamy, for the current owners may bring more business but it will be because of Bieber's boxers not Bruce's buttresses.

For this local, disabled resident, the direct implications to health are real and palpable and a result of that cynical placing of corporate interests and infamy above those of people and community.  I wonder too of the consequences for those vulnerable children staying in the CHAS Hospice at Rachel House, right next door to Bieber's weekend retreat.  Even if for some the excitement was a short lived joy, whether Bieber chose to visit his next door neighbours directly or not, I cannot help but think the longer term upset will be worse for at least some.

So many of those rapt, peering through the railing fans were brought to the grounds by parents, some waiting, watchfully nearby, so they could add their excited voices to the chorus of Beliebing.  Is this the kind of fame, the levels of hollow infamy, you allow your children to worship at the altar of?  A cynical, money buys access to all areas, without moral question, and cares nought for local community or culture or the impact the blatant disregard has for it?  Shame on you all.  Shame on us all for allowing such a situation to develop and persist; time to stop your children beliebing and find something they can truly believe in.

And as for this disabled man facing the individual consequences, I say roundly and without regret, fuck you Justin and the circus you rode in on, your infamy will live little longer than your fleeting career, enjoy it while you can.  And stop dancing in your pants in front of our children, its just creepy.

Neurodiversity

(Edited from a draft first published on Kiltr a month ago)

This was my last post on Kiltr. I may pop back up again later, possibly sooner with an account for a current project or two than is likely for a personal one. For the most part, its not them, its me.

I’ve mentioned once or twice, while posting and in comments, that most of my posts have been exercises in cognition. I’m not sure everyone understood what I meant by that so I took a little time to explain before I left because its relevant as to why.

If your not aware of the concept of neurodiversity, the neurodiversity paradigm or the Neurodiversity Movement, perhaps understanding something about them will give you a little context, help me explain and move on to show how they all, those exercises in cognition and the neurodiversity ‘troika’ influenced my decision.

New paradigms often require new language. Neurodiversity has only really been used as a term since the late 1990s; it describes the diversity of human brains and minds, neurology, the infinite variation of neurocognitive functioning within our species. Neurodiversity is a biological fact. It is not a perspective, an approach, a belief, a political position, or a paradigm. Thats the neurodiversity paradigm, not neurodiversity itself,

Neurodiversity is not a political, social justice or activist movement, thats the Neurodiversity Movement. When an individual diverges from the dominant, often unnecessarily prescriptive, societal standards of ‘normal’ neurocognitive function, they are neurodivergent.

The neurodiversity paradigm provides a philosophical foundation for the activism of the Neurodiversity Movement, which is a social justice movement seeking civil rights, equality, respect and full societal inclusion for the neurodivergent.

The Neurodiversity Movement is not a single group or organisation. Having grown out of the Autism Rights Movement, there are still some overlaps between the two but they are not one and the same. The Neurodiversity Movement seeks to be inclusive of all neurominorities and there are some who advocate for Autism Rights but cannot rightly be considered part of the Neurodiversity Movement because they still consider autism to be a medical pathology or ‘disorder’, a view at odds with the neurodiversity paradigm.

Being neurodivergent means having a brain which diverges significantly from dominant societal standards of ‘normal’. It is a broad term which can describe mostly or entirely genetic and innate neurodivergence or it can describe neurodivergence which occurs as a result of brain/neurology experience, or some combination of both. Some forms of innate or largely innate neurodivergence, are seen as wholly intrinsic and pervasive factors on an individual psyche, personality and way of relating to the world. The neurodiversity paradigm wholly rejects the pathologising of such forms of neurodivergence and the Neurodiversity Movement wholly opposes any attempts to ‘get rid of’ or ‘cure’ them.

Other forms of neurodivergence, like some forms of epilepsy or the effects of traumatic brain injuries, can in many cases be 'removed' from an individual without also erasing fundamental aspects of the individual. In general, the neurodiversity movement does not reject the pathologising of some of these forms of neurodivergence but also recognises the nuances of more subtle forms and individual cases. Whilst the Neurodivergence Movement does not wholly reject consensual attempts to ‘cure’ some of these aspects of neurodivergence, it also recognises the dangers inherent in attempting to do so in those more subtle forms or in a non consensual situation. The movement most definitely and actively opposes any and all forms of discrimination, including and often in particular those aspects of discrimination which are difficult to recognise from positions of dominant social definitions of ‘normal’ (neurotypical), against any neurodivergence.

The terms neurodivergent and neurodivergence were coined by Kassiane Sibley, a multiply neurodivergent neurodiversity activist. Other aspects of the lexicon have been added as understanding and necessity have grown.

A neurominority is a population of neurodivergent people about whom all of the following are true:

1.They all share a similar form of neurodivergence.

2.The form of neurodivergence they share is largely innate and is inseperable from who they are, constituting an intrinsic and pervasive factor in their psyches, personalities and fundamental ways of looking at the world.

3.The form of neurodivergence they share is one which the neurotypical majority tends to respond to with some degree of prejudice, misunderstanding, discriminmation and/or oppression (often facilitated by classifying that form of neurodivergence as a medical pathology).

I have two strains of refractory Frontal Lobe Epilepsy. There are 265 people in Scotland with Frontal Lobe Epilepsy who are refractory, or resistant to medication, and are not candidates for surgery because their root epileptiform is in an area of the Frontal Lobe too deep or difficult to access without causing damage to other areas of the brain. People with epilepsy in this category are a neurominority.

For me, the innate nature of how epilepsy affects me didn’t become fully apparent until six years ago. The unusual, often bizarre seeming to neurotypicals, seizure patterns and high occurrence of seizures during sleep mean misdiagnosis or failure to diagnose until later in life is a fairly common occurrence. This also means it is not unusual for people with Frontal Lobe Epilepsies to find their diagnosis is only prompted when the seizure patterns have become more entrenched, virulent and debilitating. This also makes resistance to medication more likely. It further means a difficult route to understanding and management of seizures for the individuals concerned.

Whilst I’ve written fairly extensively about epilepsy in general, my personal social experiences of living with epilepsy in Scotland and of the crisis in epilepsy provision across our nation too (The Politics of Sleeping Pts 1 & 2, first published on Kiltr and republished on this blog give an overview), there are some aspects which I have deliberately omitted to mention. Explaining a few of them may elucidate my reasoning here a little more.

Discovering, at the age of 41, that I had been having seizures in my sleep for most of my life was disorienting to say the least. It made sense of the ‘random’ (clearly when my seizure activity during sleep had been higher and ‘spilled’ into waking hours, albeit briefly) times before then and increasingly so in the lead up to diagnosis, when seizures occurred whilst I was awake. What was particularly harsh and disturbing to discover, from my very first fMRI scans, was that a large part of the issue derived from a very clear, actual handprint on my brain, with three fingers digging deep into the frontal lobe. It grew even less palatable to discover on my first testing for genetic markers of inherited epilepsies that I also had an underlying Autosomal Dominant Epilepsy, a variant of male inherited seizures which when untreated or undiagnosed often lead to violent outbursts. There was a sick irony here in that my ‘handprint’ was extremely likely (I have no way of confirming with no family connections to verify further) was left there by a violent, undiagnosed father, who my mother left when I was just eighteen months old when he ‘lifted his hands to the bairn’.

A further exacerbating factor in me arriving at a point where I have between 40-120 seizures every single day, with the only way to keep them at the lower end of that scale being extremely careful management of how virtually everything can affect my levels of GABA and seizure threshold also has a sad irony to it.

A further, far more recent head trauma is likely to be responsible for the significant slowing I have over my left temporal lobe and is the reason why, when I secondary generalise, my seizures also act like temporal lobe seizures. The trauma was inflicted by an ex partner who, in a flashback moment, mistook me for her violent ex partner lying in bed and attacked me to the point of extended hospitalisation with a marble-based antique phone.

The ‘thumb of the handprint’ also leads to occasional occipital lobe activity to exacerbate everything else. I dont say any of this to garner any sympathy, merely to explain more in depth, in lieu of promoting a greater understanding generally, the nature of my neurodivergence and of how there are many instances where neurotypicality can become neurodivergent; it could happen to anyone. 

Before all of this became clear to me, I had a relatively successful career as well as a fairly adventurous life. I brought my son up as a single parent. I worked my way through two degrees, my first PhD and various design qualifications. I'd lived a good few years in other countries. I'd made a lot of art and music.

When the seizures started hitting harder, faster, more debilitating, I had been building up a fairly unique arts hub, which I had sunk my savings from my previous job into. I’d worked with a local property owner in my hometown and after a couple of years things were getting somewhere. It had helped me realise a dream of owning and running a design and music studio as well as opening a boutique organic cafe with the love of my life.

I have none of those things now (except the love of my life) as a direct result of the impact of the seizures.  I have other things instead.

I founded a non profit company three years ago now based on the neurodiversity paradigm and inspired by, drawing on, my own experiences socially and of trying to access absolutely necessary, but not always easy to access or obviously forthcoming, social and clinical services in Scotland as a person with epilepsy, which I intended to use as a representative force for people with Frontal Lobe Epilepsies as a neurominority. I wanted to utilise all of my varied skill set in such a way as to benefit the company and its aims whilst hoping to minimise the impact of that on managing my own seizure thresholds and patterns.

The model which was developed for the company, proving fairly successful, was to provide a discrete graphic and web design service as well as social media management/marketing and SEO for third sector clients at significantly below market rates. I’d worked in design and marketing for long enough to know how much could be trimmed from the bottom line and still make a profit whilst freeing up budgets for our clients by not overcharging, a virtuous circle.

Initially working alone, I trained others with epilepsy who were having difficulty accessing employment to work on aspects of the contracts. The profits made were/are used to provide other much needed advocacy for people with epilepsy in Fife, the Lothians and Perth & Kinross, anything from helping with training, CVs or benefit applications to helping compile and fight hate crime cases, to the simple things, like dropping in some healthy, hand made, microwaveable meals to someone struggling to feed themselves whilst their seizures cluster. They also pay for my second PhD, which is ‘A Political Ethnography of Frontal Lobe Epilepsy in Scotland’ in hopes of directly influencing future NHS and social policy on epilepsy.

You might wonder how I manage all of this whilst having an average of 80 seizures a day. The simple answer would be, with great difficulty.

In this regard, whether the good folks at Kiltr know it or not, Kiltr has provided a beneficent public service. Here’s where I get round to explaining a bit more of that cognition thing.

Most of my days begin in secondary generalised seizure, with simple and complex partial seizures having clustered tighter whilst I have tried, inevitably unsuccessfully, to sleep. This is an extremely disturbing and disorienting way to start your day, even without the cumulative issues around failing cognition just due to the insurmountable sleep debt of never sleeping more than two hours a day, without the exacerbating, debilitating nature of seizures. There are days when the overall impact of cumulative sleep debt and seizures affects my cognition to the degree where I cant recognise my loved ones or my home. Sometimes the upset of that can send me straight back into another cluster of more violent seizures.

In order to function at all, it has been necessary for me to develop a system of management for my issues with cognition on waking, both to avoid this and the increased possibility of continued clustering of seizures throughout the day, instigating cycles which can seem never ending if allowed to perpetuate. Tipping over the 80 seizures a day often leads to much worse cognition, in turn leading to accidents, frustrations, all of which leads to a much higher likelihood of me having to be hospitalised for my own safety. The patterns of hospital routine do not settle my clusters, in fact tend to exacerbate them.

So I have developed patterns of familiar behaviour to repeat on waking which do not cause frustration and more often than not lead me into sharper cognition and fuller functionality. Because some of the gist in doing this is to enable me to do the good works I have set out to do, much of which involves me writing and/or designing, before I am fully aware, most days, I am sat in my home office doing aspects of one or the other.

Now, what comes out of my addled neurodivergent brain at that point is mostly disjointed words, notes, ideas and scribbles/sketches. Somewhere in them though, when I look again a little later, there will be some sense, a theme or at least the germ of an idea. When I notice that, I hook onto it, write or draw (with pen, pencil or mouse) some more. Almost directly parallel to me developing this system of cognition management, I discovered Kiltr..

Kiltr, as a new media platform, gave me a safe space within which to make something a little more of those cognition exercises. Every single piece I’ve written here began that way; ideas I remembered, things significant to me, sometimes just a little snippet of cultural effluvia I have ultimately felt worth sharing, which emerged as I fought back to cognition. In order to utilise the system for best benefit to me, I have deliberately set about gathering supplementary evidence for and prepared for presenting ideas in a similar way I might in my academic work, just in a more informal and (attempted to be) more entertaining way. Working through writing the pieces has geared up my cognition for my work on virtually a daily basis and I can never thank Kiltr enough, for both providing an open platform which would allow scope for this and for encouraging and disseminating my writing further. Thank you and thank you again, Brian Hughes, for setting the ball rolling on all this Kiltr thing, Brian Beadie and Erik Sandberg in particular.

Kiltr may have been unaware of the public/private service it was doing but it also seems many of its users, and of course those yet to find it, are unaware fully of its multifarious benefits. As a model, Kiltr was in there as a Scottish variant to platforms like Medium relatively early on in social media based development. It requires content to survive though. Content produced by its members.

Models like that depend on something I am forever wittering on about to my SEO and SMM clients – reciprocity. I’ve tried over my time on Kiltr to read and like as many posts as possible. I may not have wholly agreed with the content every single time but I fully appreciated the effort to put something together worth publishing on the platform. How many of you have put up a post and thought, no one realy bothers, I only got two likes, whats the point!? How many people read posts on Kiltr directed there from other platforms without even needing to be a member or signing in? How would you know? How many people post their stuff up on Kiltr but never click a like on anyone else’s posts, even if others always click on theirs? How many newbies to Kiltr make their first post, no one clicks like so they decide not to post again or they think their efforts weren’t much cop, maybe even give up on the thing they were posting about, even though quite a few people may have read the post? Reciprocity for Kiltr, internally and across other platforms, and for other Kiltr members, will only see it going from further strength to strength. Just saying.

Kiltr defines itself as a new media platform, it is not strictly a social media site but it does utilise some of the tools of social media, mainly its means of promotion and in comments sections. I have always found it frustrating when users have attempted to use Kiltr more in the manner of 'traditional' social media since I have also found this to undermine the cohesiveness and community of the new media platform model.  Just because it has 'social' in its descriptor, doesnt mean it makes us a more social animal, social media is generally 'healthier' for businesses, advertising and big data than it is for individuals and does not necessarily create civic, civil, social, inclusive spaces, often the opposite.

Perhaps I misunderstood but I always saw a Habermas-ian impulse to the kind of virtual civic space created by Kiltr. In the same way that academics could publish claim and counterclaim, I saw the potential to circumvent the divisive traits of social media by avoiding the knee jerk reactionism of excessive trolling of articles or profiles. If you disagreed with something you could just publish a counter piece.

This was actually extremely important to me, since I’d found those impulses in social media to be detrimental to my neurology. You may have noticed I write on some fairly weighty matters and have not a few worldly concerns, as well as the stuff which I just find academically or culturally interesting. They are all subjects dear to me which I am rarely not thinking about, clearly even when my neurology and cognition fail me in so many other ways.

Now imagine, if you will, a situation where someone who rarely publishes anything detailed but comments a lot and often at length on social media, comments regularly, belligerently, on others' articles and subjects, commented on articles I wrote.  Try to remember in that imagining the cognitive situation the pieces were conceived in and how precious they might sometimes feel. So imagine then a situation I find myself in all too often where, after having worked myself into full cognition, I have spent almost all of it again in a day, often with some disturbing and harrowing impacts if the day has been spent in our advocacy office or in ethnography collection working alongside other people with epilepsy. I’m trying to relax with what little cognition I have left and look to see if anyone has liked or commented on my pieces, there are comments like that.

I can’t rely on myself to reply in a way which reflects the fullness of my cognition or understanding of the subject but there is more than an overwhelming necessity to do so. As my cognition wanes and seizure pattern intensifies, neurological tics occur in interictal periods.  Neurologists call iot 'forced thinking'. I retain information I’ve seen, read or heard and it repeats on a loop between seizures, more so as the seizures tighten in clusters, it feels like an alien invasion of my neurology. So I try to reply as fully as i can and close matters, to most comments, to avoid this. Anything ‘unfinished’ will be the loop for that night.

Avoiding this is difficult to do if the person commenting is tinged with the belligerent persistence associated with social media trolling and ignores attempts to explain why it is dangerous for me to persist, both in terms of where my cognition may lead me in reply and in terms of interictal impact later, which in turn can lower my seizure threshold. Still they persist despite pleas to stop and urging to publish their comments in another piece rather than on mine.

I consider the failure to understand the explanations, or wilful ignorance of them, the wilful ignorance of neurodiversity and a hallmark of the inherent privilege and complacency of neurotypicality. The risks involved to my person through the direct physical repercussions of other people’s ignorance is the main reason I don’t do much personal social media, I have to keep myself safe and their opinion really isn’t worth the risk. I also have a tendency to always be the guy speaking out against any form of bullying, wherever I see it, online or in the real world, and have taken too many risks to do so. Social media is where cowardly bullies lurk aplenty behind keyboards, neurotrash weilding neuroprivilege like virtual claymores, cutting through to the actual.

Kiltr wasn’t like that, isn’t like that. Some members, an extremely small minority are, a very small percentage of the time. Compared to other platforms Kiltr is still a veritable civic and civilised oasis!

Unfortunately though, just such a situation arose between this writer and a chief representative of where I found that noisy minority. I tried a few different tacks to minimise the impact of what I see as a distinctly male, infantilised approach to debate. To my shame, on one occasion I even resorted to mirroring their behaviour; in my slight defence I fairly soon realised the futility of the gambit, relented and published a counter piece. I have never been afforded the same courtesy.

When someone grows increasingly belligerent whilst becoming more reductive in their reasoning, following an oversimplified syllogistic logic (‘Most climate change science is derived from studies of increases in levels of CO2/ I know CO2 is a only trace constituent gas in the atmosphere therefore most climate change science must be wrong – including this writer for agreeing with it’) and ignores pleas to not comment any further, refuses to prove their convictions by publishing anything, but continues to hector and badger repeating the same lines in other ways, to the point where, not for the first time, I have not only had an increased seizure count as a result but have found myself calling out their redundant arguments between seizures, for nearly three days, I simply can’t take the chance their ignorance may impact in the same fashion again. I have far more important things to do.

If you've found yourself here, thanks for reading, for considering what may be a widened lexicon for you.  Try to be understanding of the neurodivergent and the constraints of neurotypicality, maybe more so in the froth of social media, support the neurodiversity paradigm and the Neurodiversity Movement in all its guises by promoting greater understanding and speaking out against discrimination and discriminatory practices wherever they may lurk.

Space Or Bust!

(Originally published on Kiltr 8 days ago)

The rise and rise of Neoliberalism, that great catch-all, contemporary demon, crushing all which may have provided succour or hope to the huddled masses, transferring it instead to an ever more exclusive elite’s elite, 1%, 0.1%, 0.001%, appeared to find little point in expending vast amounts of time and precious money on the apparent vanities of space exploration. There can have been few more incongruous entries on its balance sheets than the billions spent by governmental space agencies on projects where the only payback was prestige or a much more nebulous and insubstantial 'hope for humanity'.

So neocons and technocrats strip mined every available asset, including of course human resource, for hedge funds, shareholders and the nefarious controlling interests of elite corporatocracy. On blindly they charged through the eighties, nineties and most of the noughties, with the will of a clunking fist, beyond boom and bust and trickle down deceptions. Hope, at least for 99% of humanity, slowly became an increasingly scarce commodity. Until the global economic crash of 2008, when against all sensible indications, scarcity quickened.

During those ‘boom’ decades, when the exponential growth for everyone pitch was still in ascendance, almost inversely proportionate to the rise of neoliberal economic agendas across Western representative democracies was a decreased investment in space exploration. Beyond the ‘golden age’ of a cold war ‘space race’, being unable to show any tangible quarterly monetary profits meant space was an increasingly untenable investment portfolio.

That relentless strip mining continued unabated though and has left our home planet in some peril, with precious dwindling resources and the first geological era determined by human action, the Anthropocene, dawning upon its inhabitants. ‘Business as usual’ was allowed to continue for so long, with regulation of markets growing lighter and lighter touch, finding alternatives now seems increasingly desperate. The US, China and now India have finally agreed to ratify the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement in a year where month after month global temperatures exceeded record highs. The 2DegreesC above pre-industrial temperatures, long a mantra of the climate change movement and cited in the Paris accord, regarded as an upper limit for a ‘safe’ level of global warming, is now looking less, not more, attainable. Efforts to engage the global community with the 2DegreesC target, ambitious as it seemed, may still be too little, too late.

A study released earlier this year by the US National Bureau of Economic Research used a ‘harmonisation’ methodology to reconcile and compare as many existing future energy outlooks as it could, from governmental, academic and industry sources. By synthesising the outlooks, adjusting for biases and allowing for growth in renewables in uptake of a general forecasted major growth in energy demand, the paper concluded that:

‘Global carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise under most projections and, unless additional climate policies are adopted, are more consistent with an expected rise in average global temperatures of close to 3DegreesC or more, than in international policy goals of 2DegreesC or less.’

This week a joint paper by Stephan Lewandowski, John Cook and Elisabeth Lloyd for Synthese also exposed some of the truth behind climate change denial, concluding:

‘There is considerable evidence that the rejection of (climate) science involves a component of conspiracist discourse...We provided preliminary evidence that the pseudo-scientific arguments underpinning climate science denial are mutually incoherent, which is a known component of conspiracist ideation. The lack of mechanisms to self correct the scientific incoherencies manifest in denialist discourse further evidences that this is not the level at which rational activity is focused, and we must explore to a higher level, looking at the role of conspiracist ideation in the political realm. At that political level, climate change denial achieves coherence in its uniform and unifying opposition to GHG emission cuts. The coherent political stance of denial may not be undercut by its scientific incoherence. Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.’

Lewandowski et al find the motivating factors behind climate change denial conspiracy theory are in the science being incompatible with neoliberal economics of hydrocarbon investors. The study also finds compelling evidence for the idea being inversely 'projected' onto climate change science by prominent deniers, being that the science is driven by pools of ‘dark money’ aimed at undermining the world’s prosperity (when in reality climate scientists have transparent and relatively small sources of funding), while it is the denial movement which sallies forth from ‘dark-money-funded think tanks’ whose investors are almost without fail, when they can be traced, revealed to be hydrocarbon billionaires.

They are formidable foes with deep pockets, intent only on maintaining their position, ruthlessly and exploitatively gained, utilising every ill-gotten resource at their disposal to do so. It can seem a futile and wearing fight, one in which our home planet and its precious resources are lost in the battle, in the problem reaction, solution of perm-austerity for 99% of its inhabitants. The hope inherent in that golden age of space exploration can seem as distant as the stars it seemed we would one day, inevitably, reach.

Instead, now, as tech billionaire Elon Musk prepares to unveil further, at the 67thInternational Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, his grand vision to turn Mars into a ‘back up drive for humanity', our efforts look increasingly like last ditch, desperate attempts to undo or escape damage done. Musk is so convinced that if humanity is to survive long term we must colonise Mars with a million people, he almost emptied those deep pockets of his funding his aerospace company SpaceX in 2008.

One of the initial drives of SpaceX has been to develop next generation rockets in order to practically realise the possibility of travel to the Red Planet. Ahead of tomorrow’s keynote speech, entitled ‘Making Humans a Mulitplanetary Species’, Musk shared the first photos of a new rocket engine, being called Raptor, designed to be part of his ‘Interplanetary Transport System’, this morning. The photos are of the rocket’s first successful test firing.

The Raptor uses methane burned with liquid oxygen because methane is an affordable and dense enough fuel which is also readily available on Mars. Jeff Thornburg, a former SpaceX propulsion engineer, said:

‘You’re kind of looking at two things: What does the fuel cost, and if you want to use and develop exploration architecture...where can you live off the land? Now that you don’t need to take your propellant to get home as part of your camping gear and you can make it on Mars, you can take a whole bunch more stuff!.’

Musk has previously said he would like to land one of his Red Dragon spacecraft on Mars by 2018. He has also said his first major goal is to get 100 people and 100 tonnes of gear to Mars as part of the long term goal of colonisation to save humanity. Beyond that, the world knows little else other than some tech specs.

Tomorrow’s event description says Musk will ‘discuss the long term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining presence on Mars...(the) presentation will focus on potential architectures for colonising the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.’.

India, set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, will certainly be watching with interest. This week the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Mars Orbiter completed two years in orbit around Mars. ISRO is the fourth space agency to successfully send a spacecraft to Mars’ orbit and India became the first country to do so at the first attempt.

ISRO said this week the Orbiter has accomplished its planned mission objectives and all of its scientific payloads are in good health, with it continuing to provide valuable data regarding the planet’s surface and its atmospheres. The ‘payloads’ among other things, include a Methane Sensor, which is said to have collected ample data sets.

Perhaps then, in increasing and impending necessity, humanity is about to enter a new golden age of space exploration, this time with new players and far more pointed intent. The timescales involved for possible colonisation of Mars appear to take all too real account of the grim realities of climate science. What undermines the hope which should be inherent in the desperation is in it being driven by commercial interests. It is not too difficult to imagine a scenario where those who have denuded this planet of its resources, and perhaps its ability to replenish them, in a relentless pursuit of profit above all else, are the ones who will control access to, and will be the only ones who will be able to afford, an escape from the dystopia they have created.

For 99% of us, we live in faint hope of a last minute direction change. We live in hope of prying the grasping hands of neoliberalism from humanity’s tiller. Perhaps the beautiful and poignant, animated short film from Supamonks Studios directors Loic Magar and Roman Veiga, ‘Voyager’, released this week for viewing on Vimeo after a successful, award winning festival year, is closer to the truth of the only faint hopes most of us should have.

Drawing on the mythos of the first golden age of space exploration, in particular 1977’s Voyager 1&2 missions sent into space carrying gold plated copper disks full of images and sounds from Earth, like a ‘bottle into the cosmic ocean’, the film imagines one of the Voyager spacecraft crashing back to an immeasurably changed Earth and humanity in a not too distant future. Whilst trying to avoid spoilers, it is worth pointing out, amidst the film’s seeming pessismism, it concludes in a manner befitting the sentiment of Carl Sagan, who chaired the committee curating the content of the disks, when he said:

‘The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilisations in interstellar space’, adding that the endeavour said ‘something very hopeful about life on this planet.’

'Voyager’ is here for your delight and delectation, enjoy:

Voyager Short on Vimeo 

You can follow Elon Musk’s presentation live at 1.30-2.30pm (that's local time, GMT is 7.30-8.30pm) today, here, likewise, and video of the event afterwards enjoy:

SpaceX Link

A Harvest Moon and Luna 2

(Originally published on Kiltr 16 days ago)

The Harvest Moon rose heavy over the hills of Navitie and Benarty, its reddening hue, as nightfall and the penumbral eclipse drew near, setting the sun and welcoming a planet's longest serving satellite’s rise with the coming pass of shadow, colouring the land formation they make, known locally as the Sleeping Soldier or the Sleeping Giant dependent upon disposition, with Autumnal fiery hues. The outer edge of Earth’s darkening chased light across Loch Leven like a laird betrayed, raging in pursuit of infamy and an escaped captive both. On nights like this portents of hope and of foreboding are born into the imaginations of humankind. Not only of scrying and future sight, these visions, but of looks to the past too, beyond the scales of victors' eyes written in history and of tributes to their penmanship.

This celestial array seemed that to me then, honorific not only of the equinox and penumbra’s passing across the scarred face of Luna but to history’s diminutives of it too, of one landed there some fifty seven years since. The stretch of barely conceived of technologies which made it possible, made all other such landings possible, not least that feted mission a decade later, is not told now much, as part of our story, because it was eclipsed too by that climactic moment in what we came to call the Space Race; because the victors of that history would have us believe a demon was slain, perhaps we know a demon they created, but on July 20th 1969, it was slain nonetheless, when Apollo 11 'won'.

Just a decade earlier though a sombre voice crackled through radio diodes and told the world part of a different story, it declared, ‘Attention, Moscow speaking. Today the 14th of September at 00.02:24, Moscow time, the second Soviet cosmic rocket reached the surface of the moon. It is the first time in history that a cosmic flight has been made to another celestial body’.

A fledgeling NASA, born just two years before in reaction to the Sputnik missions, struggled to comprehend the success of their nemesis. Their scientists, not for the last caught in an arrogance of hubris, believed Luna 1, ancestor of this success, glorious in its demonstration of Soviet guidance systems failings, shooting wide of the moon’s moving target by some 3,725 miles, was testament to the challenges ahead. As Vanguard TV3 exploded on its launchpad, becoming ‘Kaputnik’, at Cape Canaveral, NASA prayed the race was a paced marathon and not the sprint Sputniks 1&2, with the unlikely heroine Laika provoking a nation's mourning in their triumph, seemed to indicate.

Like Sputnik, Luna 2 was spherical and antennae protruded across its surface, for detection and broadcast; geiger counters, radiation and micrometeorite detectors and a magnetometer bristled there. These mapped the Van Allen radiation belt surrounding Earth, tested if the moon was encircled with a similar ring of magnetically charged particles and, as the little probe who could descended to hard land on the moon’s surface, with a final flourish released a cloud of orange sodium gas in orbit, not only so observatories could see its trajectory but also so the dissipation of gas in the vacuum of space could be observed. British scientists dismissed any claims of Soviet subterfuge by intercepting the final transmissions at Jodrell Bank Observatory, confirming the unprecedented success of the mission. Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev, due to arrive in Washington on 15th September, for a high profile tour of the US, came armed with bragging rights no one had ever before had.

It no longer mattered to Krushchev to have been banned from Disneyland, 73 pages of a security pamphlet issued of instructions for his safety during the trip unable apparently to guarantee it there, when he handed President Eisenhower an honorary replica of the sphere shaped ‘pennants’ Luna 2 had left across the lunar surface before it finally ended its mission.

Fitting then on this anniversary to be watching the sky, to see the moon tinged orange and red, as if that flourish of gas burst had enveloped it since. Better still that beyond the flaring of Mossmorran’s petrochemical stacks into the local skies of our home, which have lit them up this week and which prompted a young tourist couple, walking earnestly toward the orange pulsing horizon, to ask me what this was, just the night before; better still that as I tried in vain, between the failings of language and incredulity, to explain, I could draw upon the promise of nature’s shade and light show to come the night after, still able yet to eclipse all of humankind’s follies and achievements, just. Eight years until there will be another eclipse like it, what kind of changed Earth, with all humankind can muster writ large across the mid morning of the Anthropocene, will it shadow then?

(This is first of an occasional series intended to fuse folkways and observances with contemporary narratives; it's likely to be a little more 'poetic' than usual, I'm loosely calling it 'Howked Fae the Digital Dreel')

peripheries

(First published on Kiltr 22 days ago)

Being a little late to the party for ‘Big Gold Dream; Scottish Post-Punk and Infiltrating the Mainstream’, with it initially gaining plaudits on first showings last year and further praised as it toured festivals this year, had more than a touch of ironic synchronicity for me. Removed a year or two by virtue of my relative youth and by a distance of some miles, which seemed even further at the time due to the strange machinations of Scotland’s rural public transport system, from the firework rise and burst of musical creativity which has come to be known as ‘Scotland’s post punk scene’, I still came a knocking, full of vim and vigour, at its door.

There were others like me, waifs and strays blown in from the provinces, having missed the starting gun realising just how significant the main affair was, hoping to extend the celebrations just a little longer as the party wound down. Bob Last may have been fast wrapping up the last of Fast, Scars may have departed for the not so gold lined streets of the Big Smoke but there was still some old school Art School dancing to be done; big brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles had their record collections raided over time and a slightly younger generation gathered the brass necks to enter Edinburgh and Glasgow’s pubs and venues, and in my mid teens I found myself among them.

So having the opportunity to view ‘Big Gold Dream’ a little beyond its initial dissemination was apt and fitting for me. My thoughts on viewing were no less synchronous for running parallel to those forming around a piece I was trying to write on monoculture, with the film’s thematic concerns and subject matter, the comments of the interviewees, virtually every frame relevant to how I saw the process of the death and resurrection of it applying in a Scottish cultural context, I just had to tease out the relevant strands whilst doing the film no disservice because it is a vital and vibrant submission to Scotland’s collective cultural archives.

Getting the (minor) grumbles off my chest first is probably a good idea because it's all gravy from there. Stylistically, ‘Big Gold Dream’ links its archive footage and interviews well with suitably aged segues, which work for the most part. Possibly my only, small, lasting dissatisfaction with it came from this source though, which on occasion foregrounds traffic shots clearly not contemporary with the era under discussion, the most jarring being when an advertisement on a bus side is doubled and foregrounded showing an advert for the risable Johnny Depp vehicle ‘Mortdecai’. It’s a small observation, and a stylistic point, which could easily have been edited out for greater authenticity/cohesion of narrative thread, but ultimately didn’t deter from my overall enjoyment of the film, which is so strong in other areas.

The story of how ‘post-punk’ exploded in Scotland’s two major cities and could realistically lay claim, as one interviewee in ‘Big Gold Dream’ does, to giving birth to ‘indie’ music as we would come to know it, has been tragically airbrushed out, glossed over in far too many ‘post’ cultural reviews. Where its influence has been acknowledged at all in general, it has largely been given footnote or lip service status, despite the wider cultural and musical resonance of the bands, the ‘scene’ and the labels which built it. Director Grant McPhee sets out to give an alternative, visceral retelling of the narrative, adjusting the timeline to accommodate, acknowledging both the importance of this space and time creatively, musically, in a wider sense, for what was to follow, for every band or musician who was to claim one of these artists as an influence in years to come, and for those who lived through it. In cultural terms, this was most definitely a case of where the periphery came to influence the centre ground, how monoculture shifted to accommodate.

To explain a little further and before a continuing review, a few words on monoculture are probably relevant, since it explains the other strand to that synchronicity I was feeling on viewing ‘Big Gold Dream’ and saves me boring you with another post on that too, call this a ‘two-fer’! It’ll take flashing forward a little, whilst noting the slightly obvious point that I’m not referring to either the scientific or agricultural definition of the term but its growing use as a cultural reference…

…some twenty five years ago now, as the ubiquitous wonders of the world wide web geared themselves up into existence, cyber utopians began looking askance at the oft vaunted and celebrated ‘cultural unity’ of what has come to be referred to as monoculture and offered up something else instead. Cultural commentator and music journalist Touré now laments the death of what he calls ‘Massive Musical Moments’, alongside the attempted assassination of monoculture, moments which would perish alongside it.  He describes his lament this way:

‘In these moments, an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it is impossible to ignore it, because the songs are holding up a mirror and telling you who we are at that moment in history.

These sorts of moments can’t be denied. They leave an indelible imprint on the collective memory; when we look back at the year or decade or the generation, there’s no arguing that the album had a huge impact on us. It’s pop music not just as a private joy but as a unifier, giving us something to share and bond over.’

For the newly emergent cyber utopians though, in the vanguard of what they saw as an ultimately democratising force, monoculture and ‘Massive Musical Moments’ were the hegemon to be opposed and dismantled by the new nascent medium. No more would popular taste be dictated by three or four television channels, a handful of radio stations and a restricted number of news sources. The internet would offer a wild and unfettered range of options, ushering in an eclectic digital paradise. Every aspect of niche culture would have an audience and the very notion of a mainstream, an almost obligatory monoculture which everyone was expected to like and engage with, had been eclipsed, rendered defunct and meaningless.

This of course, in popular culture terms, fits the narrative trajectory of much post modernist thought, which saw the influence of meta narratives, the grand over arching theories, history, science, culture etc, as being no longer able to adequately describe the nature of human social or cultural existence and so were proclaimed ‘dead’. For popular cultural tastes, restricted and defined by a delimited mainstream market for most things, those unifying moments were illusory, a matter of market perception and perception was about to change irredeemably. 

Skipping even further forward, beyond that wide eyed optimism, yes, the internet has indeed brought greater availability in diversity and made it slightly more possible and acceptable to survive culturally only on the most niche of tastes, but the overwhelming centre of cultural gravity still sits preponderantly, smack, bang, in the very market determined, middle of the mainstream. There may indeed be a wider access to a more varied cultural output, and lots of it, but general media and concomitant social media coverage, how most people hear about what music, what movies etc are being released and ultimately what matters for narrative/market dominance, is increasingly controlled and restricted.

As with all else dictated by manipulated markets, cultural capitalism has tended towards a monopoly and has had very little by way of a cohesive counter to it. Musicians, actors, directors (or of course their staff acting as avatars on their behalf) fill Twitter feeds and other social media streams, draw in supine media outlets, manufacture narrative dominance until their ‘brands’ are ubiquitous. For most people, amidst the onslaught, it seems, if everything is available all the time, being overwhelmed by it becomes as much the norm as falling back on the easy choices, what seems safe, best known or most aggressively marketed.

New York magazine traced the changing proportions between the popular and the fringe in music. In 1986 in the US, 31 songs hit no.1 in the charts and came from 29 differing artists. By 2012 half of the no.1’s came from just six artists, shifting to a ‘monopoly at the top’.

In a similar study examining web trends, Wired magazine found that, in 2001, the top ten websites accounted for 31% of pageviews, by 2010 it was 75%. With Facebook and advertising driven social media increasingly being the way most people get their news, and with ‘news’ also being far more inclined to include aspects of popular culture as inherently newsworthy, too, the faux consensus around popular culture generally looks set to grow even tighter still.

Peripheries have become sandboxes, market testing grounds for niche appeal, accepted into the mainstream, the hegemon, the monoculture, when its market is proven. And the internet, our interactions with it, has become wholly complicit, compromised into consent for it. In the first stage of the long battle between hegemonising cultural forces and the cyber utopians, the former appears to have prevailed; monoculture is dead, long live monoculture, right?

 It isn’t difficult to see how the usual suspects benefit from the monopoly at the top of cultural capitalism. Guy Debord and his situationist acolytes could see it coming but their powers of foresight failed to predict how their resistance would ultimately be subsumed by it. However Malcolm McLaren may have intended his willing construction of The Sex Pistols as a punk boy band, a curated, collated, living, breathing, music playing, posturing, sloganeering advertisement for the latest iteration of selling rebellion in popular culture, a process easily traced back to the ‘birth of the teenager’ with Rock n Roll, as situationist concept or cynical marketing ploy, it made damn well sure these rebels became the establishment with rapid success:

Punk, conceived as the ultimate outsider, oppositional genre, had quickly swept from the periphery to the centre; the situationist inspired posturing of the artwork on record covers, in fanzines, in Malcolm McLaren's head, became part of the spectacle it was expected to oppose. Its anger dissipating, punk had become part of the monoculture it had set out to oppose; punk made money.

And this is where we slipped sideways, not quite where we came in but where a wee tangent proved necessary, or just before here, when punk still proved inspirational, still seemed genuinely rebellious. As Hilary Morrison, as instrumental in the formation of Fast Product, Scotland’s proto indie label and inspiration behind a lot of what Factory would go on to do later, as her more well known partner, Bob Last, charts in anecdotal evidence in ‘Big Gold Dream’, something shifted in young Edinburgh’s cultural consciousness when the ‘White Riot Tour’ came to town.

Morrison, who alongside Last would become responsible for birthing and nurturing a wider post-punk as well as Edinburgh’s ‘scene’, recounts how most of the scenesters, in the face of the unrelenting faded, austere monotony of mid to late 1970s Scotland, simply couldn’t afford the clothes marketed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm MacLaren as punk ‘uniform’ and made themselves just ‘look as cool as possible’. From their flat at 2 Keir St, Edinburgh, behind the Art College, as they began to collect people and ideas, the DIY ethic which would come to inform the ‘scene’, much of ‘indie’ to come, as well as the self marketing and releasing revolution of much later Internet fuelled generations, was born. This was as much necessity becoming the mother of invention as it was any opposition to McLaren's cynical marketing or the tendency of cultural capitalism towards monopoly.

Whilst this emergent scene was not above fanboy/fangirl naivete, as perhaps best evidenced by Morrison’s anecdotal gleeful curation of John Lydon’s autograph accompanied by his studied, oppositional nihilism (lets not forget Johnny Rotten was a fabrication, a constructed character, who even in Lydon’s own recollections owed as much to Shakespeare’s Richard III as it did to punk rebellion), as he obliged with a signature and a snarling ‘I despise you!’. What becomes clear throughout the film is that among those inspired to create Edinburgh’s nascent scene in the aftermath of the ‘White Riot’ tour, there was an awareness of this artifice, of the fabled authenticity of punk rebellion, all too quickly co-opted by record companies and tour managers to sell records, tickets and merchandise, inscribed through ‘punk’ like a lie through a stick of rock, diffusing its anger and reactionary force. Punk’s inherent capitulation, virtually engineered in by McLaren, allowed the quick and seamless transition into post and new wave, here and everywhere else too.

What became lamentable in this was the apparently, ultimately, built in lack of confidence in the small independent music labels it created to genuinely take on the big record companies on their own terms. Bob Last eventually, after disbanding Fast Product, moved into lucrative, Svengali like management roles for those self same companies. Alan Horne, having run the original Postcard Records, an almost quintessentially Scottish ‘indie’ template, infamously run from a wardrobe for two years, was to later found Swamplands in London as a continuation of his vision. The motown parody pussy cat from the Postcard logos would become a prowling tiger on those of Swamplands, an insecurity complex written in design code.

The irony of ‘Big Gold Dream’, which was also the name of the follow up to Fire Engines’, a seminal mainstay of the Scottish scene, most successful single ‘Candy Skin’ failing can’t have been lost on songwriter Davy Henderson, nor on director Grant McPhee or his screenplay/production cohorts like Erik Sandberg in choosing it for the title of the film, some ten years in the making. Ultimately the ‘Big Gold Dream’ was a shimmering mirage. At every turn, where those interviewed and documented in the film who chased it hardest and failed to find it, cautionary tales flashed neon and went unheeded. If there is one, this is the film’s moral.

As A&R men from London based record companies began hoovering up Scottish bands as a result, the successes of Edinburgh and Glasgow based post punk bands and labels provided a new direction beyond the now bloated behemoth of punk, its anger and momentum dissipated in a slew of cynical, co-opted situationist art inspired marketing, the temptations of the almighty market ultimately puncturing this creative bubble too. One of the most poignant moments in ‘Big Gold Dream’ was watching maverick genius Davy Henderson, formerly of Fire Engines and lured away by Alan Horne to form Win on his new Swamplands label, grow visibly tearful, even behind shades, lamenting his shunning of his ex-bandmates and friends in pursuit of ‘pop’ stardom.

Scars-Horrorshow b/w Adultery

There are of course nuances to these stories, some subtleties to the shifting of narratives ‘Big Gold Dream’ pursues. Where Scotland’s post punk scene has been mapped out at all before it has generally been cited as having an inception point with Orange Juice’s ‘Blue Boy’ on Postcard. The film, rightly, takes this back to the release of Scars ‘Adultery'/ 'Horror Show' on Fast. Postcard has been given some due credit for its influence before but ‘Big Gold Dream’ re-contextualises the impact and import of Fast Product, as well as the rivalry between the two, as perhaps being of more significance, particularly as the template for a later Factory, which Bob Last, unbeknownst to them gave a Fast Product code. All of these details are lovingly teased out in ‘Big Gold Dream’s two hours or so and are vital contributions to a restructuring of Scotland’s popular cultural narrative.

This is not just the narrative of a Scotland in seclusion. As the film's subtitle suggests, these bands and labels were influencing the mainstream from the outside in. In this position they maintained a strength, coherence and artistic integrity, which caught a mainstream, still struggling to catch up with punk, wholly by surprise. As the maelstrom of the market drew them in though, and almost inevitably brought to bear its all too brutal truths, from the inside out, their direct influence waned.

It is the early incarnations, the Fast Product playing with pop art merchandising and situationism, the Scars seminal sound borne partly of a hand-made guitar and an obsession with the use and structures of language, visceral Fire Engines live shows lasting around twenty minutes with no cymbals, hihats or chords, the sophisti-pop of the early Orange Juice/Postcard releases which set the tone for change to come, which continued to influence bands for decades.

Directly though, the smackback to these young Scottish upstarts came from the loaded market they had come to challenge and which it seemed would always find a way to reassert its dominance. ‘Big Gold Dream’s reveal, its punchline comes (spoiler alert!) as it describes the situation with Win’s (third wave Scottish post punk) single ‘You’ve Got the Power’ failing to achieve the no.1 its sales should have determined. The dream, big, gold or otherwise was over for Henderson and his Win cohorts and Horne’s Swamplands imprint as they realised Scottish based sales could be discounted from the charts by vested interests. The cynicism of the market had reasserted itself towards the monopolies of cultural capitalism it could understand, but the band's it couldn't had changed it irrevocably.

The impetus, drive and energy of the ‘scene’, its DIY ethic and arthouse/literary influences, would re-emerge as a key influence in both the C81 and C86 movements as well as on much later bands like The Rapture and Franz Ferdinand. Chasing the Big Gold Dream may have been an aspect of the narrative to being in a band bought by many who made up what would become known as Scottish post punk, but the lie was given to this in it already being within their grasp, a shimmering idea to inspire generations to come, bloated markets, A&R men and monoculture be damned.

Charting the course of all this, with footage and interviews never seen before, intimate and unflinching was the joy of 'Big Gold Dream', giving due nods to bands who may have languished as sad pub 'also ran' anecdotes, growing ever more bitter, giving essential context to what may have disappeared, tragically dismissed as random cultural effluvia rather than the vital, exuberant components of a story they belong to.  It's a story, if your interested at all in Scottish contemporary culture you should absolutely hear, if you haven't managed along to a showing, when 'Big Gold Dream' hits your terrestrial television screens sometime soon or your coffers are suitably swollen enough to extend to investment in independent film making in Scotland with a DVD purchase. You won't be disappointed.

This is story which needed, demanded telling. It's a story beyond the unifying power of 'pop' as shared experience in some of Scotland's own massive musical moments, beyond a telling of where young Scotland was at in time, both of which it absolutely is too. Above all, it's a story, in its constituent parts and for those narrating their context, conceived as a challenge to accepted creative norms, their markets and routes to them, and a relentlessly hegemonic establishment; that's well worth celebrating, ye dancin?

Watch 'Big Gold Dream' here!