A fantastic night on Tuesday, with Ewan Morrison reading from his books: Tales from the Mall and Close Your Eyes. A far ranging discussion involved the audience in Ewan’s ongoing interest with the conflict between free-market capitalism run amok, left-wing idealism, and his own upbringing in a middle-class “violent hippie” environment. Ewan is a man at odds with his world since childhood, compelled to question the well-meaning assumptions of those around him (particularly the do-gooders), since history teaches that dogmatism of all kinds, no matter how well-intentioned, leads to disaster.
Ewan’s views on the living (or zombie) metaphor of the shopping mall were fascinating, and his book features such choice anecdotes as the cleaning lady who saved a suicide’s life by racially abusing him, and another cleaner who took revenge on his management tormentors by wiping miles of flooring with his own urine.
We have all become Japanese tourists, ceaselessly recording and broadcasting our own lives, even to the extent of photographing our food in some vague tribal sharing ritual. Feminism, it seems, is losing ground and running backwards as OMG style stories routinely objectify women in the name of cheap Yahoo headlines.
Ewan recently viewed the first edit of his book’s film adaptation, Swung, on whose screenplay he collaborated; our fingers are crossed that it can find wide distribution in the near future. No violence, but plenty of sex. We’re British…or are we… the evening concluded with Ewan’s take on Scottish Independence. His view: that it is now highly likely but that the debate, let alone the populace, has not yet risen to the maturity necessary for such a momentous responsibility.
