Infrequent posts are me. But I have been scattering comments around various people’s journals, at least.

Zotz posts about The (remaining members of the) MC5 playing a Levis-sponsored gig. I have to say that I’m not sure how I feel about this. I know I ought to feel upset that they’ve ‘sold out’ but I just can’t seem to get up the ire.

Perhaps I’ve become too accepting of the capitalist society in which we live. But it’s not like they’re being sponsored by a weapons manufacturer — or even McDonald’s or Nestlé, for that matter.

Not that Levis are likely to be angels, but I just wonder whether we should cut the MC5 some slack: why should we hold them to a higher standard than we hold ourselves? (and we all work for corporations or governments, ultimately, don’t we?)

At this point, though, I worry that I may be contradicting the spirit of something I wrote a few years ago , just prior to the 1997 UK General Election. in essence, there, I said that becoming a parent hadn’t made me more conservative, but if anything politically the opposite. This relative acceptance of selling out to corporate interests could easily be perceived as a step in the conservative direction. And maybe that’s so. But from where I’m sitting, it’s not me that’s changed, but everything else.

That sounds horribly solipsistic, but the political landscape has changed a lot in this country in the last five or six years. Though, if everything has moved right, that should leave the good Marx-fearing socialist* appearing to be even further left: unless they have been dragged with it.

Which means my parenthood piece’s assertion is contradicted; but it’s not because of parenthood. The question I have to consider is whether I want to be dragged around by society.

I should just add at this point that I feel that I was in no way moved to the right by the supposed move right of society during the Thatcher years. Obviously it takes a ‘Labour’ government to do that.

Then at the same time, Karmicnull tells us that Warner Hodges out of Jason and the Scorchers has formed a new band. This is a surprise, because I thought that a) he’d quit the music business, saying he didn’t really enjoy making music, and b) there had been a Scorchers tour planned, which was still sort of in a state of ‘might one day come to fruition’ if he ever did come back to it.

Still, people change (and moving ones do too); so what seemed right once may no longer seem so (and of course, having one band doesn’t preclude the possibility of playing in another; just ask Blixa Bargeld, for example).

The common theme here seems to be, ‘people change’. And in direct opposition to almost everything anyone ever says about that subject, I like change. Life is change: if you’ve stopped changing, you’re dead.


* This is irony.