grieving for a world i thought i knew
I've been finding it hard to write this January and sometimes it feels important to let my own little cosmos of thoughts coalesce before trying to sketch them out.
Together with our very small but crack team, we've been working on our plans to distribute Power Station - but as many of you know we've run into some obstacles getting the film over the line.
While all this is going on, we've been looking out at America - the greatest power in the West, re-electing the greatest buffoon in the West. 77.3 million people actually voted for this??
And we've been looking on in horror too at the tens of thousands killed in Gaza. It's been particularly hard to see how many children have been killed.
Great: we have a ceasefire - there's peace for now, but justice? I don't think much of that will be evident. Jared Kushner praises the "very valuable potential" of Gaza's "waterfront property."
I studied history at university in London, and I chose it because I wanted to make a difference, through storytelling and I was considering being a photo journalist. In my interviews I'm pretty sure the slightly cynical professors were somewhere rolling their eyes. Another idealist for the meat grinder!
I believed that the violent and terrible story of the Twentieth Century was a wake-up call to all of us for kinder times. I was aligned with the counter-cultural artists of 1960's America and Britain that I loved so much - The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the beats; the French New Wave. And I remain doggedly loyal to those visions. "Under the paving stones, the beach."
One of my favourite ever artists was Leonard Cohen, whose final album "You Want It Darker" seemed to be a kind of resignation letter from the world. He released it only 19 days before his death in October 2016 - nearly 10 years now. He poured everything in. It's like black and bitter coffee. It wakes you up from your slumbers into the nightmares of this fascism that is on the rise.
Weird that one of the biggest insults people like me get is that I'm woke. But while the world sleep walks - maybe it's ok to get out of bed, pick up a torch and get out of dodge.
The revolution of thought and imagination that erupted in the 60's stood against the violence of two world wars and the nuclear bomb. It stood against political oppression and for freedom - but it was relatively short-lived, and the 1970's saw brutal state-sponsored put-downs using whatever levers came to hand. Economic levers. Cultural levers.
Harnessing the police into politics in the UK. Rounding up communities of resistance and criminalising them.
Back in the late 90's though, there was an optimism that underpinned thoughts of a brighter and happier future in the UK, despite the cruel interludes of Thatcher's Britain.
I have remained an optimist in the face of state and cultural cruelty for my whole career - I've kept the fire of hope for a better world alive inside me.
But with Trump re-elected, I am grieving for what I genuinely thought was an arc bending towards justice.
So it's a very strange world to be launching a film into about renewable energy, community, kindness and imagination.
I constantly find myself needing to go back to my compass, my manifesto. The exterior realities are fleeting - "reality is just a stage set" as JG Ballard wrote, and idealists like me have almost no control over the big events of our times. But the ideals of
Democracy
Kindness
Imagination
Real fraternity
Love
remain inside of me and if not all around, I can at least try and live them with my family, my immediate circle, this email list and through my work. And I come back to them and choose them every day. That's the one power I have.
Steeped in grief for what could have been, I still want to hold a flag up nonetheless - maybe idiotically. But whatever it takes to try and live with those simple ideas alive, I will try my best to give.
There it is - just straight down the line at you all from my East London attic.
