The indiscreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie. Bauer. Gscene magazine.

The indiscreet charmlessness of the bourgeoisie          Gscene Magazine. 2015.

Don’t you just love it when the papers warn us about the spreading denizens of skid row and the shunting of the mobile masses making way for the new homeowners. Land where the homeless slept one week, as if by magic, becomes worth millions overnight. Ah, the alchemy of the wasteland.

What’s actually happening is that ‘skid rows’ across the world are growing. But somehow not morphing into the surrounding areas - they use exactly the same footprint but grow at an ever-expanding rate. And as these communities become even more of an ‘eyesore’ more middleclass homeowners encroach on the areas like vultures (I so wish we would have bought here ten years ago…) and so the homeless are relocated yet again. Of course the problem with this expansion is that the space just turns it into a ghetto, with people on top of more people, eventually disbanded by law. (Actually, so we don’t see that eyesore from our new dining room window - call the council!)

Of course these same people wouldn’t have touched Hackney or Streatham ten+ years ago. Hackney et al was filled with the low-lifes they so desperately needed to avoid. Hackney represented the bottom rung of society in the same way Rachman once did to the residents of Notting Hill - two black and mixed-race areas considered slums in the 1950’s. So, where did those first generation diaspora communities go?

‘Oh - elsewhere…’ comes the clarion call from the nouveau bourgeois.

It was the same in Harlem when all those white people bought up the brownstone cold-water, walk-ups in the 90’s, then waited up to ten years before the areas became gentrified by oiling palms at City Hall. They were actually waiting for their investments ‘change of use’ contracts - from crack-house to banker-palace - before they would consider moving in. Most bought off-plan, that is before they’d even seen the property. It happens all the time,  however not on houses built over a hundred years ago.

“Go to Harlem? Just give me the floor plan and I’ll see you in ten years!”

In the UK, the embourgeoisment of the land-grab is now reaching saturation. It seem that there will be no financial crash leading to more homes for the poor. There will just be now a sprawling mass of middleclassness which will look to the average eye to be ‘progression’. Meanwhile, we won't consider where all the homeless people have gone. We passively watch on as all that 20^th century social reform turns to béchamel before our very eyes.

This is unless they too are bought out by Saatchi. Like Hirst with his diamonds and Tracey with her particular brand of McFeminism 

This sinking back into bourgeois entitlement or ‘The Bourgeois Zeitgeist’ as the poet Gerry Potter aptly calls it, will not follow through. He’s right when he says these ersatz values permeate every single crevice of our very existence. And then to think, the media have got it all wrong, the homeless and the born poor don’t even want this so-called mobility, they just want the money. Their money ‘Step aside Cameron, I think that’s my house you’re spending…’

Unfortunately, like the suffragette movement and the anti-slavery drive that preceded it, the change will only come from the compassion of bourgeois consciousness. And usually from a solitary soul, be it Wilberforce or Pankhurst.

This bourgeois barmcake was firmly in place at the end of the 19^th Century, before the middle class was even invented and was reinforced by the growth of capitalism. It has become again the Zeitgeist - the spirit of the age - to hoard both capital and property, but this time its different. Back then, the specter of modernist thought, radical socialism and global social reform were bubbling under. Now sadly, they’re not.

Social reform translated into the hubris for middle class people to own their own homes and spread out to the suburbs. Then, along came that damn working class aspirationalism - aspiring to some outdated middle class model which of course only bankrupted them.  Hells legs - the nastiest trick in the book is to sell you something you already own. Just like Thatcher did during her rein of terror.  

Culturally, we are in a cesspit of mainstream blandness where it’s going to take a coagulation of millions to make up a single unit of vital force. (cf Quentin) At least, that is, in the mainstream. What may happen, something that won't be seduced by The Bourgeois Zeitgeist, will be the movement of artists, writers and poets; as there was Van Gogh, Genet and Lorca - those who refuse to be bought off simply because they are the ones who put their heads on the line. This is unless they too are bought out by Saatchi. Like Hirst with his diamonds and Tracey with her particular brand of McFeminism. 

 

In the late 19^th century, the writer Emile Zola mentioned in passing that he’d had it up to the back teeth with all the shite on the Parisian stage – nonsense that only luxuriated in the profits of industrial progress. He announced publicly that he wouldn’t get through another summer with the constant round of cheap pap of Boulevard Theatre thinly disguised as culture.

However, toward the end of that summer, Henrik Ibsen premiered his new play Ghosts and things changed. Ghosts is the fine story of a bourgeois family with inherited venereal diseases. In this case the bourgeois audience left their own lavish dining rooms in opulent Oslo and witnessed a staged version of their own lives but vile, rancid and decaying under the strains of its own heredity. This symbolism summed up the culture and the zeitgeist perfectly and became the rock that eventually cracked the mirror. And after this play, this piece of art, things were never to be the same.