View allAll Photos Tagged Undercurrents
the waters in the jakarta floods were not static puddles but swirling streams with undercurrents turning streets into dangerous rivers. they require serious equipment with high whitewater rafting skills. on the night of the big flood this group had to jump up at 11 pm and rescue flood victims who saw the water rise within a matter of hours
Every now and again, I just have to moan and get a few things off my chest. Big time. If you don’t like it, read summat else and don’t cramp my style, innit. Maybe online isn’t the place to do things like this, especially these days in the twilight of social media’s initial glow, but it’s become something of a habit of mine and it’s better to get this stuff out there than bottle it up, because then the drama can’t spill out into other areas, like when updating my status about food contains vague references to disturbing local undercurrents, bizarre to the eyes of people who don’t know the background. More and more, I’m trying to get into the vibe that, despite liking many people here, although I am living in Kidderminster, I’m not of Kidderminster. It’s an approach I thoroughly recommend to many of the people around here who sense, like me, that there’s just ‘something’ about the place. It isn’t easy, though, because no matter where you go around here, there’s always a danger being exposed to the area’s mindset and culture and, before you know it, finding yourself with some sort of corrosive relationship with it.
I’ve been increasingly been getting into Reddit. I like it, preferring its often healthy flow of an agendaless, easy-going and informative conversation to what can take place on so many other networks online. It kind of reminds me of how things could be on the net before social media hit big, where the distinction between online and offline life was clear and very distinct, with the former representing something of an escape from the type of vibe you can find in my conservative, limited and potentially limiting locale of Kidderminster.
This morning was a classic example. There’s me in the pic, first thing, having a cuppa in town. Immediately prior to this, I get instant, unprovoked attitude from one of the Starbucks barristas who’s already succumbed to the Weavers Wharf corrosion of the spirit. Nothing major, but the place hasn't been open long and yet assimilation with what the worst of the local culture can do is beginning to take hold. In fact, she had the type of attitude locals usually try to make you look bad about, as they perform their usual rituals that have probably been doing the rounds for centuries (according to a local official, 500 years in fact), but just enough of the old Nero vibe to suggest that we’ve been here before.
This place is in serious danger of becoming Kidderminster’s Caffe Nero 2.0. It’s been on the cards for a while and Weavers Wharf, being the hotspot of concentrated small town primitive conservativism that it is, means that nothing can buck such a trend once it starts and there’s no reliable or competent local agency who could adequately resolve such a mess. It’s the way things are around here and, Worcestershire essentially being about ‘know your place...or else’, you’d better get used to it. I just wonder why, if David Attenborough’s supposed to be so impressive, he’s never done a series about the animals of this place.
There’s a new barrista at Starbucks - one of the old ones from Nero’s - a key character in me being banned from the local branch of the ‘Italian Coffee Company’ last year, though I shouldn’t need to have to deal with that. Then again, this is Kidderminster, innit. Blindly ambitious, the barrista rivals Macbeth, and jumped at the chance to advance with Starbucks while clearly making sure that what did the rounds at Nero’s about me - with the type of accuracy you’d expect from such a place - has started to do the rounds at Starbucks.
A few years ago, I’d started going to Nero’s to get away from it all, like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. I’d increasingly hang out there and drink coffee all day, gradually realising that all was not as it appeared. Me drinking a lot of coffee created a problem from the off, introducing an edge with some of the regulars of Weavers Wharf that spread, since they’d be drinking one or two cups a day, while I’d be necking it almost as if it was on tap. That was unwise. Very unwise. You don’t do such things around here. The primates of Kidderminster can get pretty territorial about such things and I should have known better.
From such small seeds can forests thrive. Fast-forward a few years, with increasing bullshit drama (especially after I passed a Masters), and the place is going tits, hyped up to the hilt. Carried away with their own gossip and territoriality, and fed by their lack of meaningful outside interests, the ‘white trash’ regulars of Nero’s, whose small town conservative desire to be sophisticated - though they’d never guess how - would drive them to become ever more bizarre and ritualistic with increasingly heightened emotion, along with a number of other locals they dragged into the vibe (Weavers Wharf isn’t exactly a hotspot for the intelligensia, eh), and you end up with a scene with a bunch of people so emotionally invested in getting me out of a coffee shop - I repeat ‘a coffee shop’ - that a confrontation was eventually engineered, the local police were called, middle-aged men were jumping out of their seats in disturbingly sadistic pleasure, and I was banned.
Here we go again. A while back I’d already told my mom that we wouldn’t both be going to Starbucks again, as it was pretty predictable that the in-your-face potential of the locals, if they don’t get the denouement their lives almost depend on, wouldn’t take long to start taking shape yet again. And again, something small, like an overly-ambitious barrista who got taken in by the Wharf’s bizarrely backward culture, could well escalate to me being banned from somewhere else. Luckily, he’s off in six months, though by then the culture in the new coffee shop will probably have suffered even further as a result. But then it always would in Kidderminster. It’s just how the town is and the older and wiser to it you become, the more you can see it and just accept that such places exist.
It’d be nice not to have to encounter it, but it’s endemic in the town and, like I’ve said, there’s nothing that you can do about it, as most locals feed off one another here, and can become so emotionally challenged that they’ll eventually come in your face to confront you with their latest belief system. Even my half-family, who are also best described as ‘white trash’, despite me having concrete evidence that they’ve misled the police in the past, clearly misled the police yet again last year in the lead up to me being detained after being assaulted at home and having the assailant successfully mislead the police (elsewhere, that’s called ‘perverting the course of justice’) to such an extent that I was busted and detained. The name of the game in these parts is to get the upperhand, regardless of the facts or the rights of individuals.
Yesterday, I called the Independent Police Complaints Commission. West Mercia Professional Standards stated that ‘there is no appeal right’ to the IPCC for a number of complaints I had about the force’s performance. According to the IPCC, however, the legal standing is that there is, in fact, such a right, after I’ve exhausted all local processes. Remember Royston Vasey? Well, I’ll probably have to follow up what the situation is, even after this, because anything’s possible here.
For example, it’s now obvious (though I knew this anyway and only have it off the record), that before I’m met with officials, I can be rubbished by other officials on the basis of an unchallengeable reputation, traceable to 1996, when a couple of gossips seized the initiative over my life to such an extent that, within about a year, I’d have to walk away from a course at Birmingham University (I’m only half-joking when I say this place can be like Royston Vasey), something I’ve thought about approaching the Uni about but concluded would get nowhere.
Once such things get a grip, there’s little you can do, and in the absence of any form of effective communication, fast-forward 17 years and there’s people in this community - some good people, too - who know that’s the case, but would move mountains rather than question the ideas they have over those events, despite the fact that it’s been a monumental mess and a thorough fuck up all along. Instead of that being confronted, the same old failed methods are almost certain to be imposed. After 17 years of failure, what do you expect? The processes that started from day-one have always remained immovable and have compounded over the years. Unfortunately, I still have to live with the consequences of that.
Kidderminster has its fair share of people who, once they get an idea in their head, would drive a juggernaut thorough fire to substantiate it. In the case of contradictory evidence, that’s usually seen as an inconvenience or a threat to be wiped out. In retrospect, the years between 1996 and 2000, were clearly only going to end with me being detained in a psychiatric unit, as I first was in 2000, although I was initially released when it looked like something unpalatable about my detention might get out (weren’t they naive. Nothing gets out round here). Looking back, my initial detention was part of the required denouement. Locals had got out of control and the persistent hassle I got for the 4 years needed icing on the cake. It was pure Hollywood, what was ‘needed’, for a number of locals. But it was Hollywood that stuck in the absence of effective mechanisms or communication.
On 26th October last year, I was assaulted at home and the assailant lied about it in such a way as to ensure I’d be the one to get into trouble. I’ve seen that type of thing countless times since ‘96, but this time I looked at my mom and realised something I hadn’t before. The assault had happened in front of her eyes, but she didn’t see it. Not only that, but the more lies the assailant told the Police when he phoned them (a recording that may go missing), the more my mom not only agreed with him, but escalated what he was saying. She only partly did this out of malice towards me, or rather what she’d come to think of me.
From early days, since ‘96, it became clear that certain people had an interest in characterising my relationship with my mom in a particular way that didn’t square with the reality of the situation, but which added weight to a story they’d come to live by. Quite a few people fed this, again with clear contradictory evidence being disregarded as can easily happen around here, even with the decent folk, once a bandwagon forms. What I had overlooked all these years is how that had influenced me and my mom’s relationship, almost moulding it anew - also with the help of my half-family - to the point that on that day in October there I was, and there was my mom, where even her real-time perception of what was going on in front of her had become distorted to the point where she’d falsely implicate me in a process that some locals have exploited for years.
That realisation proved to be a turning point in our relationship and now I know the processes involved. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t dangers ahead, as I’ve seen how even nothing can escalate to bizarre proportions around here. My mom can easily be exploited and hyped up, for example. One of my half-family’s cronies played the mental health card when my half-niece was kicking off in trying to settle scores, and alleged that my half-niece had been concerned for the safety of her children when I merely went around to pick up a telephone, not knowing that she was bearing a host of grudges about nothing much.
It was yet another misrepresentation of events, in a long line of misrepresentations down the years, as is clear from the Case Summary from West Mercia Professional Standards (which I can’t post because it’s marked ‘Restricted’). But they’ve got away with it again, for the next time, as I’d warned West Mercia Police years ago, where such misrepresentations were known through a third-party but are unlikely to have been recorded officially. No action could be taken as no-one would go on-the-record. Good, innit. Regardless, I’d criticised my half-family online in a Flickr post and told my half-niece that I was distancing myself from her family as they’d become conservative and very ‘Kidderminster’ over the years, so fair’s fair, I suppose, in a parallel universe, sort of thing.
Maybe my sarcasm shows that I don’t take that crap too seriously as that type of behaviour’s commonplace, but so is my Mom’s reaction at times, and that’s where the dangerous part is. She’s great - especially when she thinks and lives as independently as she should - and our relationship thrives when we relate to one another as we are, even when we argue. But, like I say, threats remain. When I mentioned that I’d passed on concrete evidence that my half-niece has lied in interview to West Mercia Police in the past, my Mom, aware of the crony’s allegation and dismissive of it, suddenly changed and, instinctively trying to protect her family regardless of their behaviour, soon mischaracterising me in ways that chimed with the crony. That, too, is a commonplace occurrence around here, as is many people's tendency to eventually believe in such ideas, even when they've falsely initiated them. Again, though, understanding the mechanics behind my mom’s reactions offers psychological protection against them, and I now know she can’t help it, partly because it's been a feature of life for so long, and so things don’t deteriorate drastically as they often did. However, the institutional consequences are largely out of my hands.
Not only, then, is there the threat of further limits in the future to what should be my rights, but the official records on me, which have clear inaccuracies dating back years, could have influence over my life in the future. Already I have a highly unreliable diagnosis from the local hospital, from two officials (one of them being a Psychiatrist who all too easily claimed my allegations that I was assaulted at home and that the assailant lied to the Police was evidence of paranoia; the other being Paul Rushworth, who I’d only met twice and let’s just say both meetings weren’t exactly meant to go my way - see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-iw7VJz4V4), a diagnosis that makes it difficult to pursue irregularities, though it may already have been changed.
Ever hopeful of a constructive and open approach to how this reputation originated and the implications it continues to have, I remain optimistic. However, one of the things apparent from day one in 1996 was that, behind the smiles of the originators of my reputation - a couple of people from a local town - there was something unsettling that was anything other than friendly. I saw that a mile off and I’ve seen the implications of that play out so often that it offers a comfort of sorts. However, that, matched with many locals’ juggernaut ability to force a 'truth' and my complete rejection of it could yet again lead to difficulties.
Next, I have to appeal West Mercia Police Professional Standards' conclusions to some other body within the local force and, according to the IPCC, once I have exhausted local avenues, I can pursue it with them. I’ll wait and see. To me the whole thing looks like a mess, but I can’t see the assailant on 26 October 2012 or my half-family fessing up to things that would implicate them as well as lead them to lose face (which is remarkably important to such people). And I can’t see the Police’s poor performance being dealt with. Not locally, at least.
Also on the cards is counselling for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, something I should’ve had a long time ago, but we’ll see on that one. Without more openness from local officials in the medical profession, along with the acknowledgement that my involvement with them has been a fuck up from day one, it’s unlikely to even happen. Again, we’ll see. What I am doing as part of preparing for that is requesting access to my medical records, though some of those may be withheld in a way that's unchallengeable.
Clearly, one day, I’m going to want to do stuff that’s worth doing and I’m almost certainly going to leave Kidderminster. What’s more, I’m pretty sure I won’t live in a place with a culture such as that in Worcestershire again. I don’t think it’s good or healthy for people in many ways and I’ve seen countless examples of that. I also know the institutions don’t work like they should - there’s always ‘ways,’ you understand. The trouble is that there’s a whole load of official records attributed to me now that clearly owe more to the culture and mindset of Kidderminster and some of its people than reality, so I’m trying to rectify that in more constructive ways.
In the meantime, don’t rule out me being made to feel uncomfortable, or banned, from another place in town at some stage in the future, in no small part thanks to a reputation initially triggered all the way back in 1996, even though it wouldn’t be bad to be able to just have a quick cuppa, without the drama of life in Kidderminster, which is, IMHO, the best example of a real-world version of Royston Vasey as you're likely to find.
Every summer, teenagers jump off the suspension bridge into the River Dee in Chester to cool off. But considering that a fair few people have died doing this over the years (this particular stretch of the river is notorious for its strong undercurrents), it's really not a wise thing to do
"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way our visual field has no limits." --Wittgenstein
Tomàn and their unknown friends smiling for a picture in the centre of Antwerp, Belgium. April 2005.
Despite their dark lyrical undercurrents, the good cheer that emanates from Mother Mother is contagious. The skilled songcraft of this avant-pop quintet from Vancouver, founded by Ryan Guldemond and his sister Molly, has evolved from quirky, jazzy experiments (2007’s Touch Up) to indie rock anthems (2008’s O My Heart) to lush, three-dimensional new wave scorchers (2011’s Eureka), with rhythm and flashy vocal interplay always at the forefront.
This piece is one of my favorites. It was created for the Autumn Challenge for EAST (EarthPath Artisans Street Team) on Etsy. The theme was "Autumn Leaves".
When I visualize autumn leaves (or autumn, at all), I see colorful leaves of all shapes and sizes, blowing in a brisk wind, piling in changing heaps.