Kafka bus company

On non-biking days my journey home from the St Andrews Building often involves a wee walk up to Great Western Road to catch the number 6 bus. Then the mysteries start.

First of all, I almost never get there at the perfect time to board a bus.

1. Mostly the buses just aren't anywhere near - more about this case below.
2. Sometimes they get to the bus stop just before I arrive and I get to watch them disappear along Great Western Road towards the town centre, just before I actually reach the bus stop. I hate those days! Watching that bus come to a halt, pick up passengers, and move off again while I'm trapped on the other side of the traffic racing along Great Western Road, feels like one of those punishments visited in perpetuity for sins I no longer remember.
3. Sometimes I get to the bus stop just at the perfect moment. The bus is just a few yards away (this is the British Empire after all) and it comes to a halt so I can board it effortlessly, no hanging around at all, looking like one of those people who surf reality, stepping weightlessly from one perfectly timed action to the next.

You would think that cases 2 and 3 would occur at pretty much the same rate. If the bus is somewhere near, either it's just ahead of me or just behind me and if I and the bus are arriving randomly at the bus stop it should be 50/50 which actually happens. But it doesn't feel like this is the case. The punishments seem to occur much more often than the rewards.

Now these words seem like a silly little boy with a persecution complex. It seems possible that the frustrating days strike the harder blow so that they loom more numerous in memory. But I wonder if there might be some mechanism that would in fact make them more frequent? For example, my presence at the bus stop in advance of its arrival will make it slow down. If I'm running towards the bus stop with the bus in front of me, however, the oblivious driver will keep it travelling at a constant rate so the same interval of time between me and the bus will result in a bad consequence more often. That might not be right but I'm trying to imagine how this might be a real effect. I'd love to hear thoughts, by email, or in the comments below; and especially to discover that somebody else has already asked this question.

Even the most frequent and apparently straightforward occurrence, a bus still minutes away, is not unattended by mysteries. Our super-high-tech Glasgow bus stops include a digital display that shows the timings, updated apparently in real time, for the next few buses (I don't have a picture. Let me warn avid readers that I will edit this text and add a picture when I remember to make one). Perhaps this notice board tells me that the next No. 6 bus is five minutes away.

When I came to Glasgow as a student it struck me that Great Western Road resembled what it was, for me: the road home. An attractive, broad, straight thoroughfare, it rolls for miles and seems to lead inevitably and unavoidably out of Glasgow all the way to the small communities of the West Highlands: Oban, Campbeltown, Lochgilphead, Fort William. Standing at that bus stop on Great Western Road I can see about a mile along it to the west. I can see easily that no bus is five minutes away. Nonetheless that digital sign at the bus stop gets automatically updated. It tells me that the next No. 6 bus is three minutes away. Then one minute. Then it is "due", an acknowledgement that no bus has arrived and in fact none is yet visible. The same bus shows on the display as "due" for a few more minutes, then simply disappears. Another bus, previously 5 or 7 or 10 minutes away, moves to the top of the display.

Do these buses exist? Although we never lay eyes on them the digital sign tells us they move around the city, pass our particular bus stop, and move on. Where are they actually doing this? Maybe it's we at the bus stop who don't really exist. We're just brains in vats being fed fake sensory information that says, "a bus arrives and leaves again". Except it's bogus, incomplete, allowing us to pierce the veil. Just like The Matrix.

Or perhaps there's a slightly less baroque explanation: a bus service that runs according to its own internal bureaucracy of timetables and electronic notice boards and does not allow itself to be distracted by the reality of whether the buses actually exist or not. Nowadays it's easy to operate such a service, for example in a FirstBus digital simulation of Glasgow. Sort of a Kafka Bus Service.

Mumford and Sons

Last week I was in Prague, attending the 2013 CESRA Workshop; a super meeting, providing lots of fodder for future blog posts. Since I was co-leading one of the Working Groups there was little time for tourism but I was able to relax, in one of my favourite cities, for a while on Sunday. Passing the old Jewish cemetery I recalled the dark tale of the Golem, creature of dirt animated by arcane knowledge.

Back home I saw my brother, on Facebook, ask, "what do people like about Mumford and Sons?" I could reply only, "beats me". But I thought a bit more about Mumford and Sons.

You look so edgy walking down Byres Road in your Che Guevara t-shirt; but which shop did you buy it in? Who gets the money when you buy a Rage Against the Machine poster? All the symbols of protest and even the ideas behind them are vulnerable to commodification. Capitalism clasps its enemies to its breast and adds them to its product range. This is certainly one ingredient of the current "there is no alternative" mentality.

Since the 1950s popular music has been a mixed blessing for capitalism: a focus for dissent and a fabulous commodity at the same time. We see those tensions from day one in the desperate tale of Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker and Hill and Range (I've really enjoyed Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis biography, by the way). Music's never got very far out of control but it's been a troublesome little commodity from time to time, all the same. How much better if we could have the commodity without the possibilities for dissent, for "consciousness-raising" (sorry!).

My little theory is that this is where Mumford and Sons come in. Real folk music is risky. It deals in eternal truths, death, passion, archetypes. It makes you think about who you are and how you fit into the world (as long as you don't treat it as wooly-jumpered nostalgia); subversive stuff. How will we deal with this? We'll produce a bland, neutered commodity music that does none of this but has the visual trappings of folk music, clothes, acoustic instruments, and deals in a non-threatening sort of fake, overwrought emotion. We'll market it intensively and people will forget about the scary stuff. They'll feel cool because they're into "folk music", and they'll be happily surprised how little it distracts them from their roles as producers and consumers. This is what "folk music" will become, just as "rhythm and blues" has gone from John Lee Hooker to Beyoncé - who needs no weblink from me (a fact underlined as I type by the automatic appearance of the acute over her last "e"; BlogSpot has Beyoncé in its spelling dictionary!).

So I think this is how to understand Mumford and Sons: a sort of golem, animated by capitalism, set going to defend the established order from folk music. A Capitalist Folk Golem (and yes, isn't that a great band name? It's mine. You can't have it).

Of course this is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't "do" things, perceive enemies, animate golems. What on earth are we talking about? And while we're at it, could we really animate a man of mud in some moment of magic? Funnily enough I think the answers to these odd-looking questions might be connected, via ideas closer to my usual territory. Maybe we'll tackle those another day, if there is sense to be made of them.

Another, final little aside: the experimental music record label RER Megacorp is having a summer sale. Many of its titles are going for a fiver a shot. Do yourself a favour: take a chance on some of these, try some sounds like you never heard before, music permanently immune to commodification. Play them when you're doing other things around the house and see how these new sounds seep into your brain and what they do to you, happy in the knowledge that any profits are going to the musicians and the handful of people who keep the record label afloat.