Old white guy has wonderful evening at Brixton's Black Cultural Archives inauguration

How often do you get to enjoy a full evening of great music,  poetry, dance, and inspiring speakers  on a warm summer's evening surrounded by thousands of happy people, then cycle home in 10 minutes with your soul fully re-charged? And all for free?

And how often would this event include one of your all-time heroes, the original Dub Poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson?

About once in a lifetime - if you are lucky. Well, tonight I was lucky, thanks to this evening's opening event for  Brixton's new Black Cultural Archives, a three-hour bash which (among many other things) made you realise what a great space Windrush Square really is.

So, thank God again for the people of Brixton, who seem to be the last part of this weird and scarily changing city who have the ability to make me feel truly alive. Even before the public celebrations began, you realised this was a much bigger event - bigger even than Brixton. The BCA is the result of a 30-year battle, and the victory that this evening represented reverberates right across the country, not just south London.

The new Archives open to the public tomorrow with a big inaugural exhibition, Re-Imagine: Black Women in Britain.

The  centre occupies the two completely refurbished  Regency townhouses (formerly Raleigh Hall) and a new education/refreshment area - an elegant piece of architectural melding and blending, which actually enhances this great space opposite the Town Hall and next to the Brixton Library and the (now sadly troubled) Ritzy Cinema.

Thanks, especially, to all the people who made this amazing new institution a reality. And the amazing performers who ripped up all your notions of the worthy benefit show. Especially good were the poet, rap artist, and blues singer Floetic Lara.
 We saw her two years back at the "Bob Marley Way" event. Then she seemed raw and exciting. Tonight she was even more exciting but far from raw. The layer upon layer of ironies and barbed line-endings, her sudden taking flight into deep Nina Simone or Aretha territory, it was moving, inspiring, funny, and amazing all at once.

It inspired me, a 61-year-old burnt-out case, so heaven knows how good she must have been for the 15-year-old aspirant artists in the crowd.

LKJ was a cool and white-hot as ever, the old stories fresh again as he reminds us of the New Cross Massacre, and all that followed back in 1981 - events which led to the determination to build this archive. When he read his poem about  the 1981 riots, Di Great Insohreckshan - well, at first you miss the heavy reggae backing of Dennis Bovell's band, but then you realise he doesn't need any accompaniment. There's already fire in the air, LKJ has ignited it.

The artists who follow him - spoken-word artists Akala and  El Crisis, and the calypsonian protest singer Alexander D Great, seemed to pick up on LKJ's mood. Unfinished business is very much in the air (see the latest Met revelations). We felt strong vibrations of 1981 and 85 and 1993 and - what 2014? in Akala's amazing Uzi-style delivery - he builds up to a hailstorm of words, each  so carefully and beautifully chosen, so sharp so deadly. You want him to slow down so you can catch it all but he can'tt slow down - and then his nice trick of separating the final word, so it hangs there like a barrage balloon of meaning.

Stuff  hanging in the humid air - there's still feeling of outrage here tonight, it was a night for white people (i.e., me) to be made very aware of how they (i.e., we) dragged their (i.e., our) feet through those decades. How much more we could all have done to help these beautiful, forgiving people who make this city so much better than it ever really deserved to be. Yeah, anyone can do more than nothing, which  with one or two exceptions (but not me, tbh), is what we did.

Read a good history of the project here on Brixton Buzz.

Penguin pulls off classic wind-up with Morrissey autobiography

This Thursday, Penguin is to publish Morrissey's autobiography in the black covers of the revered imprint, Penguin Classics.

And so, another notch is cut into the stock of the big fat gun used by cultural relativists to blast elitist traditionalists out of their rank and stinking waters. Or is it the other way around?

Penguin justified their decision by suggesting the Morrissey tome could indeed one day be regarded as a classic. A very large question is begged here, blatantly - but there you go.

Penguin founder Allen Lane might well be thumping his coffin lid - but there again, if so, he would have been splintering the boards with much violence already, many times over.

The thing is, all of the people most likely to kick up a stink - people, let's face it, who most probably left school in the 1950s or 1960s and spent most of their 5/- pocket money on a 3/6d Penguin Classic such as Turgenev's Sketches from a Hunter's Album or The Bhagavad Gita - are now, in terms of cultural clout, totally impotent.

And most of that lot - the Penguin fetishists, and there are plenty of them, believe me - for I am one - would tell you that the Classics really lost their way back in the 1980s, when Penguin started messing around with formats and colour bands and so on.

Or maybe the rot set in even earlier, in 1961, when the original "roundel" design covers were replaced by Germano Facetti's first Black Classics.  Or a few years later, when the original Penguin Classics editor E. V. Rieu - translator of  the first Penguin Classic in 1946, The Odyssey – was replaced by Betty Radice and Robert Baldick.

(I am still searching for a copy of a strange Penguin classic, Betty Radice: The Translator's Art. Her reign at Penguin, in my view, was the golden age).

There are still some much younger types ready to put up a fight. For example, Brendan O'Neill, a writer for Spike,  but here blogging for  the Daily Telegraph, maintains that Penguin has at a stroke destroyed its own reputation for upholding the highest literary standards - at least in this area of its catalogue.

But his argument is cliché-laden: "Plato, Julian of Norwich, Darwin – they must all be spinning in their graves right now. In essence, Penguin is sneering at the public."

But is it sneering? The public gets what the public wants, as one of Morrissey's rivals once offered.

The public loves Morrissey, or loves to loathe him or find him loveably odd and irritating and puzzling. He's another of the many national treasures that the post-punk generation was so good at producing. All that Manchester lot, or at least the ones who survived. Mark E Smith. John Cooper Clark. The one who was not Ian Curtis. Shaun Ryder. Etc. Still a bit unpredictable, you know, and therefore - classics.

And then the lads from Sheffield. Jarvis, they are all called Jarvis. .

Look at them - they now run BBC Radio 4. Or so it seems sometimes. Anyway, why should they not be Penguin Classics, all of them?

Wasn't one of Brixton's favourite sons also a Penguin Classic? Didn't Linton Kwesi Johnson get his poetry into one of those slim volumes, a few years back? He did. It was called, Mi Revalueshanary Fren.  Yeah, but he was only a "Modern Classic". In the same league as Kafka, F Scott Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Lorca,  Camus, etc.

A nice distinction that Penguin used to make - a soft grey spine for the writers whose impact in the 20th century was such the they would almost certainly become fully-fledged classics in time - but not yet so long dead and so much studied as to get the full black of Balzac, Gogol, Dostoyevsky or Dante.

Morrissey, on the other hand - well, how could anyone deny him his place at this table?