Culture's absent friend
It might just have been a kitchen conversation, those interminable affairs that help to drag the boredom of hours spent washing up dishes into some kind of respectable tolerability. Marcus, a P.P.E. student, told me that culture was indefinable. I thought about it long and hard, and indeed it was. But however you try to define it, Oxford has something wrong with it, culture-wise.
We are to blame in part. Taking pride in pissing in famous places is always a student admission of a lack of respect for things that demand some. I often feel like Culture's absent friend when I am in Oxford. I really want to help it. But I'm not around, and no amount of long distance phone calling will help.
The Point closes on October 27th, to make way for a sports bar. The decor will most probably be tasteless, and it will only result in yet more over-priced liver damage, but Six Continents will make more money that way than they would from indie kids buying one pint per gig and crouching in the corner, 'lost in the music'. Money - there you have it. Forget about the local music scene, as if that meant anything, I mean, we have Park End, don't we? What better way to experience cutting edge music than drink eau de Heineken in the finest Shed since Seven? Still, Ria Hopkinson has already used up half the paper in the western hemisphere on this issue, perhaps I should take it from another tack.
In the same week that I heard about Oxford's sharpest music venue (d'oh!) closing down, I found myself marvelling at the new longer opening hours that McDonald's have somehow managed to whip out of their brow-beaten employees. Culture remained something abstract and distant, but when I arrived in Oxford on a grey Sunday, I wanted to be in Prague writing a novel and playing my harmonica to annoy American tourists in their vehement consumerist plague spreading around the world. Videotape me. Videotape everything. Videotape yourself videotaping.
Just a few days ago, the esteemed Jake 'the Snake' Ellwood told me that his friend had seen Thom Yorke in the Co-op. I was reminded of A-levels, studying Alan Bennett's Talking Heads when Graham tells us of his disapproval of Leonard exposing himself in Sainsbury's: 'Tesco, you could understand'.
That, I conclude, is where culture comes from. The void, the gap, which no one can define. It's a gut feeling. We know that the big towers across Oxford are culture. And we know that The Point was more than just a place to hear loud music. We know that Thom Yorke shouldn't have been in the Co-op. And we know that nothing will ever make sense again, as long as McDonald's keep opening later and later into the night. 'If in doubt, dig it up' seems to be the Council's solution, and it does make sense.
For as long as I have been here in Oxford, I've heard people bemoaning a lack of culture, too much culture, tweed, kebabs, essays, and even bad architecture. All I can say to this is as long as we don't pin-point our troubles, and as long as we keep making those long distance phone calls, and keep running our lives and our loves by text messaging, we remain culture's absent friends. Constantly trying to make a difference, and never succeeding.
The collapse of the Orange network was as important to this University as last years Mods. That was a benchmark to find out who exactly had done no fucking work, and this Orange collapse was a benchmark, to find out who really did have no fucking friends. Absent friends on the end of a telephone text service won't be there for you when a satellite falls from the sky.
A conversation with Gareth Healey, big G, St. Hugh's self styled sex machine, disheartened me. He was sad about The Point closing but wasn't going to do anything, because it wouldn't make a difference. Then I met my college father, who'd been in London on a protest all day. His efforts weren't going to change things. But he wasn't absent and neither should we be. I've spent a lifetime commenting from the sidelines, and it does nothing for the lines down the middle.
18th Oct 2001