The computer I use here has been fixed - it conked out on Sunday night, so I could not post anywhere about how good the new Jane Eyre is - it ran on Masterpiece Theatre over two weeks and I will happily watch it again, whenever it's rerun, later this year...it is rather fast at first, like a video, but then slows down enough to bring the main characters to life, and almost all the key points are there (I missed the speech at the end about how she did not consider marrying him a sacrifice). The actors are all well-cast and superb, especially the leads - Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens...

Being unable to write here has clogged me up a bit mentally, and I've been out most days doing this and that - getting a new OHIP card, working with Cal, going to the library, buying books at the sale in the Atrium across the street...(two cookbooks, though I doubt if I would cook from one - the Surreal Gourmet's Bites: Showstoppers and Conversation Starters and Retro Food Fiascos, a book full of the sort of...productions that usually need gelatin and/or a cast iron stomach...)

...in any case, I found a third book on Tuesday afternoon, after my Cal shift, I was dead tired but not completely out of it...

...and being the Penguin Classics freak that I am, I looked at them again, thinking, there has to be one for me - hiding...just the one copy...I almost got Our Mutual Friend but then figured he had it, I mean, c'mon, the title alone makes it one of Dickens' best...so I opened my eyes and saw...

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The Golden Ass by Apuleius! A book I've always heard of, but never read, and also, more importantly, a book that has a nice leisurely telling of the Cupid and Psyche story in it (for what purpose I don't know - have to read it, obv.)...the book itself is a story about a man who for some reason is turned into an ass, then goes through a series of comic misadventures and eventually gets turned back into a man by Isis. I think. Anyway, it's a Roman classic and I'm happy to have it...more on it later...

Recently at Dissensus there was a thread about Scritti Politti (no, I didn't start it and didn't contribute to it either). It was interesting in that Green & Co. seemed to be a thorn in the main dissenter's side - anyone could have been his scapegoat, but no, it had to be Green. Reading through the whole thread I realized that the spirit of 1985 was quite alive - I should say, the spirit of the NME in 1985. Green's crime then as now was...to be a white person making black music! Oh dear, call the music cops! Get Beyonce to ring the alarm! Warning...this is a plot complication...

...when I was in kindergarten - no more than 6 - we had a heritage day. All students were to come to school wearing clothing reflecting their heritage, whatever it was, and so I went to school wearing a black dress with minimal decoration and a white lace cap. I was a little Mennonite girl, as that was much simpler and easier than trying to 'go' as my mom's side, which was a mix of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and God knows what else - no country strong enough to have a decisive say in the matter. I forget what we did, I don't remember the point of it, but I've always looked more like my father than mother, so it went okay...

Costume is one thing; clothing is another. And so it is with music. It is, like any creative thing, something that comes from within; an expression of what you like and what you want to do. Green happened to like (and still does) all kinds of music that this guy probably thinks he shouldn't, so guess what, it comes out in what he does. That is what makes CP85 the blithely revolutionary album that it is - because it's Run-DMC meeting Robert Wyatt; Wittgenstein and Derrida standing in their b-boy stance; the old world and new world mixing it up, in a way so danceable and full of this-that-ooh that-yes OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH yes that it sounds like the best ride at the fair. It is not at all a 'political' album in the NME sense - the Hornby sense - wherein you can 'tell' what the song is about easily, even before it's over you know the point that is being made. It is plain and simple, expressed in music which is much the same - direct, earnest, and likely as not, boring. Music that was rigidly ideologically correct was approved; music that seemed to exist merely for pleasure or that was making a point in a way that was not readily understandable was not.

To subscribe to this way of thinking meant you only listened to music that was 'real' and 'honest' and 'passionate' that invariably 'meant something' and so on. By mentioning, quoting and yes, sampling Aretha Franklin (one of the artists who was the very definition of what the NME considered to be required listening for all the soulboys/girls), Green leapfrogged right over this whole tiresome and yet understandable (in the light of Thatcher, socialism had to have some kind of voice, though how socialist the NME were I don't know - that certainly was the politics it espoused) position. He crossed the line, and in return, the NME didn't even have CP85 in their year-end best-of list, not even at the very bottom. It was wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong, and some people out there, who believe he should have stayed in his Camden commune instead of going to America, still think that way.

I'm not writing this book to justify Green's ways to them.

Nor am I writing it because it was so haughtily dismissed by a certain British critic who really should know better, because once you start that list, it's hard (in retrospect) to stop.

I love this album, and that is the only, the best reason. But I have to note the opposition when I find it, if only to show what Green, unwittingly or not, was up against, and won.