How does Medway Culture Matter?
Week two of our Local Democracy Café exploration on arts culture in our towns
The Local Democracy Café is our new live forum to discuss issues and possible solutions facing Medway. Next week is our second discussion: Does Medway culture matter? This week, Steven looks into whether culture matters and speaks to local cultural historian Chris de Coulon Berthoud about how it might.
What is culture? Our good friends at Wikipedia tell us that “the word culture is derived from the Latin root cultura or cultus, meaning to ‘inhabit, cultivate, or honour.’ In general, culture refers to human activity. We are specifically within the café looking at culture with regards to the arts. Wikipedia also informs us that the arts are “a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavours and disciplines. The arts encompass visual arts, literary arts and the performing arts – music, theatre, dance, spoken word and film, among others.”
Before we get to the local, I wanted to draw your attention to this TED talk by Ethan Hawke, who had previously said it is “okay to be pretentious.” In the TED talk, he speaks about permitting yourself to be creative. “We’re all a little suspect of our own talent,” he notes. Hawke goes on to highlight that “most of us really want to offer the world something of quality, something that the world will consider good or important. And that’s really the enemy, because it’s not up to us whether what we do is any good.”
“You have to ask yourself: Do you think human creativity matters?” he says. “Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry. They have a life to live, until their father dies, they go to a funeral, or somebody breaks your heart, and all of a sudden, you’re desperate for making sense out of this life.” This is where the arts, and where poetry can really matter to people.
For the purposes of this piece, I am looking at music, painting, and poetry as the three forms of Medway culture, which is in no way intended to ignore other forms of the arts in Medway, including photography, print, etc. There is a limited word count, and all art forms are valid, and some are more valid than others. Billy Childish of this parish once said, “I paint, write, and make music, but these are mundane descriptions. We are all creative, but some of us have it in our nature, or necessity, to maintain this and give whatever art form we choose preeminence in our lives.”
There is a strong tradition of Medway music. Our own Stephen Morris wrote a book about it, and we hope he will finish an updated version one day. “I call it a microclimate rather than a scene, completely separate to what was happening in the rest of the country. There are record stores in America that will have a Medway section,” Stephen told us in an interview. In the absence of his updated book, let me share with you this piece he wrote about different areas of Medway by song.
In an interview with us, Bill Lewis spoke about what makes a person a Medway Poet:
“That’s a difficult one, because there were a lot of writers here. I made up the title Medway Poets for the group. I know I upset a lot of people who weren’t in the group by doing that, but we just couldn’t think of a name. We spent a whole evening before a paid gig in Essex and we came up with all kinds of things. The Medway Movement was one of them, but it sounded too much like bowel movement. I said what we have got in common is that river so that’s what it was. I think we might have influenced people; I know a lot of young people who went on to do things came to our readings. Pete Molinari, the singer-songwriter, is doing very well in America at the moment. He would be sitting at the back when he was too young to be there, because it was in a pub. Holly Golightly, who later became one of the Medway musicians, was there. Lots of people who went on to do things. I think there are some good writers here now who I think are exceptional. Sarah Hehir, I believe is one the best poets going in in the country. She’s a playwright and poet, and I think she’s extremely good. Barry Fentiman-Hall has an amazing way with language.”
A number of Medway painters were founders of Stuckism before quickly leaving. The Stuckists, a reaction against conceptual art, launched a manifesto, which challengingly declared that artists who don’t paint aren’t artists. The Stuckist paints pictures because painting pictures is what matters. The Stuckist is not a career artist but rather an amateur (amare, Latin, to love) who takes risks on the canvas rather than hiding behind ready-made objects (e.g. a dead sheep).
Chris de Coulon Berthoud is a director of Oral History Medway, who recently produced a video on Gillingham FC supporters, and is working with Medwayish on the Kalomera crowdfunder. For Chris, the question of whether culture matters locally is a simple yes. To answer with more complexity, he notes that “it matters, because it’s the expression of what we are all as people and especially in the local, and I know you mean specifically sort of arts and culture, but it’s kind of, it’s about who we are and how we express it, it’s about how we can be together in spaces.”
Returning to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as discussed last month, does culture matter as a need? “It’s fundamental to our humanness, I think, and homegrown culture, culture which is created by, or people are involved with, from your own community, from your own friendship, is even more important, because it’s a part of knitting ourselves together.”
Local culture, Chris tells me, is important for people to express themselves and have an outlet. A venue for this is essential, and the slow diminution of venues locally has been detrimental to towns and villages. With transport and access to cultural venues in London, Canterbury and maybe one day through a tunnel to Essex, does this reduce the loss locally?
It is important that Medway can provide something specific to Medway. “The idea that you can walk out of your house and walk for ten minutes and go and see something which is uplifting or exhilarating or even depressing is incredibly important.” Cultural spaces that require no transport and are within walking distance are essential for that cultural impact.
If somebody organises a cultural moment, and nobody arrives for the audience, does it make a sound? For Chris, even if the audience is small, it is better than if the event had never occurred. Chris highlights that it is the openness that can lead to extraordinary events, highlighting Rikard Österlund’s celebration of the Black Lion Skatepark. “His presentation was brilliantly done, but also uplifting, beautiful, and sad, and it sold out the Glassbox Theatre. It was a presentation about architecture and youth culture,” says Chris, highlighting that it could have been an event people did not attend, “but there were points where it almost brought a tear to the eye. So brilliantly done.” Which it would have been if only 16 people had turned up.
Poetry events should still go ahead even if you, dear reader, do not attend. There should be a place for young people to write and develop experimental theatre. “It doesn’t feel like there’s a place where that could happen (in Medway). I think culture can exist in its own. Culture can have its own force.” As we discussed recently in the Kevin Younger interview, Medway has a history and a present of people finding venues and putting on music gigs. “Perhaps when the Brook Theatre opens,” says Chris, “something can happen there.”
Chris would like to see a return to 60s-style arts labs, “something where people can create without needing to be financially viable, create without needing to have an audience to justify it.” For Chris, a space to fail is essential, “because so much of our contemporary life is about achieving, excelling, pushing forward, becoming financially successful.” Billy Childish told AnOther in 2014, “I don’t fear or care much about an audience or possible failure.”
“A lot of people who create incredible things have stumbled, experimented and failed first, because you have to have the space to be able to do things that don’t work and then realise, ‘Oh that doesn’t work and I realise why now and now I can perfect my craft.’” Without spaces where people can be playful and experimental and try things out, we are missing “an incredibly important part of the process”. Without those spaces, Chris doesn’t know where future local culture can emerge. As he notes, “There are fewer spaces for people to experiment without having to worry about failure”.
“People can go to art college and to university, a good couple of years of fumbling around, but that isn’t a waste of time. That’s part of the process. You play with ideas until you can synthesise them into something concrete, which then can become something incredibly powerful.”
I want to finish off by returning to the Ethan Hawke TED talk with a final quotes from there: “Human creativity is nature manifest in us. We know this. The time of our life is so short. Are we spending it doing what’s important to us?”
Join us to discuss this further at our first Local Democracy Café at 7pm on Thursday 20 November at MidKent College. Attending the café is free, but booking is essential. You can reserve your spot via Eventbrite.
We hope you’ll join us in this experiment and help us find new ways to explore Medway’s culture.