Peter Forbes

Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal is surely the poem for our times. Written during and after the Munich Crisis of 1938, it is a diary of the delights and torments of ordinary life lived out against the backdrop of encroaching crisis. It captures the flavour of public and privet life intermingling better than any poem I know. Every event seems magnified by the external terror. His dog disappears and he thinks: “This is the end of the old regime”. But then she turns up at the police station and he breathes again.

He catches the lurid mood of the times – “Turn on the purple spotlight, pull out the Vox Humana,/Dig up somebody’s body in a cloakroom trunk”. So like our world.

For people of his time, of course, the worst duly happened a year later: for us the jury of destiny is out. Does he have answers as well as a diagnosis? Yes, he does but you will have to read the poem.

There is an air of unreality about much of the discussion  of the riots. The word “responsibility” is used a lot but in truth teenagers have never been big on responsibility: they don’t yet have any real stake in society so responsibility doesn’t come into it. You can’t compare young people with sober, settled middle-aged citizens. Young men have always created mayhem and enjoyed it.  

I despair when I hear these kids called the police “Feds”. They want to puff themselves up by imaging they’re in the tougher and to them more glamorous world of LA. It’s the old English cringe again. But then I remember the hippie ’60s when British kids called the police “the pigs”. They also got this from America. The generational divide was more extreme in America, the redneck v hippie conflict pretty vicious, but the term “pigs” was provocatively stupid and demeaning when applied to the British police.

So we have been here before? No, you don’t step in the same stream twice. There have been periodic moral panics about young people since WW2: teddy boys in the ’50s, mods rockers in the ’60s, hippies in the mid ’60s, skinheads ’70s, punks late ’70s. It has always been associated with music: rock ‘n roll, soul, rock, punk and for decades now rap and hip hop.

So nothing has changed? Wrong again. There is a clear escalation, as there has been in everything. Reality and its portrayal in film and the media have become more extreme, more violent, throughout this period. The only comparison is 1968 when it became very political and in France the regime almost fell. But what happened last week was the dispossesseds’ equivalent of the bankers’ short-termism: grab the kit and trash the joint. If there was nothing left tomorrow but a burnt out ruin, they wouldn’t care. But we care: the world is still worth building and nurturing. These spasms of nihilism have to be seen off.

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For Christmas 2005 Selfridges ran a newspaper ad in the colour magazines featuring a tableau of black  pimps and hos in sex kit bra and pants. The strapline read “Get you Christmas booty”. Selfridges weren’t the only ones. Gangsta rap was deemed to be chic at the time and so an upmarket store felt it could cash in on such glamour to sell their “booty”.

Gangsta rap glorifies criminality and violence, often against women. It is, needless to say, hugely influential.

I thought at the time that some appalling line had been crossed. If mainstream media and upper class department stores think gangsterism and prostitution are respectable and glamorous what do you expect young people to make of it?

In Manchester this week Miss Selfridge, which began as the young fashion section of Selfridges, was torched by the mob.

The BBC website has usefully listed 10 factors contributing to the riots, with comments by criminologists: Welfare dependence; Social exclusion; Lack of fathers; Spending cuts; Weak policing; Racism; Gangsta rap and culture; Consumerism; Opportunism; Technology and social networking. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14483149

I’m sure that all ten do contribute which shows just what sort of a task it will be to dig ourselves out of the hole we have created. Just to make matters worse most people will have a few factors the BBC missed, starting with their so-called popular dramas. Switching on for the Ten O’Clock News we usually catch the tail-end of scenes of gratuitous depravity. One of the worst was repeated in the same slot: a black boy had been murdered by a gang; the camera zoomed in on his corpse – the face had been destroyed. Last week, the image of a woman, bound and gagged in a car which was tipped into a crusher. When the jaws had closed, the camera zoomed onto her eye still blinking in the middle of this impacted steel cube. This goes on every night and the BBC programme are probably not the worst. What possible justification could there be for inventing such voyeuristic squalor and terror? And, to rerun the ancient argument, if it doesn’t coarsen and brutalize people why run it at all? What sort of effect do they think it has on people? Are you supposed to watch thinking: that’s fun? Really good entertainment? Let’s have another beer?

You can tell by the style adopted by the rioters how influential the glamourisation of gangsterism has been. These kids who call the Police “Feds” aren’t living in London but in an episode of The Wire. The mainstream media is guilty of fostering this subculture whilst neglecting the true stuff that still exist. The two best 2 cultural events I’ve experienced lately, the Gary Burton Quartet at Ronnie Scott’s and Marcus du Sautoy’s The  Code: Episode 2 - Shapes on BBC2 were hardly reviewed. Instead the culture pages remain obsessed with Beyonce and Jay-Z etc.

Re the riots:  if you promote a cult of designer brands and an ethos of shop-till-you-drop to the exclusion of notions of work, good making and artistic expression you will die by them. The looters have no idea where this stuff comes from – they don’t see it as something to be invented, designed and made, it just flies in by ju-ju magic. The fact that the warehouse they burnt down in Enfield was Sony’s sole distribution point for the UK would be unknown to them. They know nothing of the world that builds and makes and sustains us. They would trash the entire world if they could and then sit there with a begging bowl saying that someone must feed them.

Just as the US promoted globalization in its own selfish interest and has been bankrupted by it, crass consumerism has created a monster that is devouring it.

I didn’t expect to enjoy Rome nearly as much as I did. I’d been once before and it rained incessantly, driving us from refuge to refuge (the Pantheon was a favourite, even though it rains through the hole in the roof). The Sistine was closed. But this time we stayed in Trastevere, Rome was instantly laid out before us, walkable, and the sun shone.

Of course the set pieces were wonderful. Seeing the Sistine ceiling for the first time, I realised that the colours I so loved in Poussin – the apple green, sky blue, terracotta and orange –  were of course, really Michelangelo's colours. This time around I have a real interest in the Roman world, not the rather baffled distant respect I had before. Having become interested in prehistory and human evolution, the Rome of 2000 years ago seems virtually yesterday.

But what really struck home was the persistence of traditional Rome – the classic Roman cuisine of saltimbocco and osso buco – and its pleasant unthreatening version of international street life. Campo Fiori and Pizza Navona were the main hangouts.

The buskers were excellent. Everyone knows the Great American Songbook but in Rome the Latin and Rock songbooks rule. Girl From Ipanema, Autumn Leaves, Besame Mucho were the standbys. There is also a great European Songbook: even if some of hails from South America,  it’s the perfect music to hear in Roman streets. A really fine rock guitarist in Navona played Little Wing and Sultans of Swing with real fire and technique.

But most striking of all was a street artist with a fabulously theatrical graffiti airbrush technique. People watched him for the theatre more than the results which were usually kitsch but sometimes transcended it. He worked very quickly, rotating his armoury of cans and stencils with hardly a moment's pause. Occasionally he flamed the picture, which was dramatic but had the unfortunate effect of giving the paint a sickly glossy patina which make kitsch unavoidable. His favourite subject was the Colosseum. He painted the planets by request and the joy lay in their eventual emergence from behind a veil of screens and stencils.

From Roman grandeur, through Renaissance harmony, to the hip-swinging joy of Latin guitar music on  the streets, it was possible to embrace all of this. The only really jarring note is Victor Emmanuel’s Palace. Enormously tall, overbearingly visible from everywhere, Fascist architecture avant la lettre, this building is wrong in every way. The Corinthian columns piled above ugly masses of stone; the appalling, meaningless decoration in place of standard neoclassical motifs – this seems to be the point where Italy started to go badly wrong. We heard a lot about that, of course, the four-point Referendum was a few days away and the national shame that is Berlusconi hung heavily over the city. But Rome makes a better fist of city life than most of the more touted contenders. It is smaller, more intimate; the bird life in Trastevere, with raucous gulls and air-dicing swifts and swallows, and the majestic plane trees along the Tiber, remind that rus in urbe is Latin. Inspirational.

Just done a podcast for Guardian Books with Tim Radford. Tim's new book, The Address Book, is just out. We share many interests (especially Primo Levi, Darwin), having both working in both science and the arts and, well prompted by Claire Armitstead and Richard Lea,  covered a fair territory in half an hour. Check it out.

Christopher Lloyd is a historian for the big picture, believing that history should now include our relationship with the natural and material worlds. Now, he's followed his large illustrated books What on Earth Happened? and What on Earth Evolved? with a Wallbook that opens out to tell the human story from the Big Bang to now. Cunningly arranged, with more information than you'd think possible in such a span, it's a great way of taking your bearings on how we got to this point. The text on the reverse of the chart also does a brilliant job of topic selection. It is particularly good on the emergence of our culture, picking up techniques along the way, especially domesticating crops and animals. The What on Earth? Wallbook is currently available at £15 from the What on Earth? website or call 01443 828811.