St Andrew's Oxshott

There has never been anything Anglo-Catholic about St Andrew's, but in architectural terms it's a grand and impressive space. Its stripped-down Gothic style, grey stone and oak fittings reminds me rather of St John's West Byfleet - and so it should, as both were designed by Caroë, Oxshott church in 1910-12. And that's about all there is to say. The new edition of Pevsner says that the roundel west window was installed in 1970, but it does look as though it was composed of older fragments: where did they come from? Note the sedilia used to store kneelers, two things we presume St Andrew's no longer has a use for.

Trading In A Name

Except it’s not any more. I hadn’t looked in on the Louise Brooks Society website, pandorasbox.com, for ages, and when I did a couple of days ago found it had been taken down. And this sad fate had befallen not just the website, but the LBS presence on a variety of social media platforms too. Back in 2019, it seems, a gentleman in Florida managed to get the words ‘Louise Brooks’ registered as a trademark and since then has been increasingly active in making sure that nobody else makes any sort of money out of the use of the name of the actress, who died all the way back in 1985. The LBS took subscriptions for its fan club, in operation, as the banner suggests, for quite some time, and that counts, of course, as commercial activity, so down it came.

The story of how the trademark was registered is quite strange. At first the US Patent & Trademark Office apparently turned the application down, as the applicant’s mark ‘shows a false suggestion of a connection with the famous actress, Louise Brooks’, but reversed its decision after the applicant argued that Brooks had not left an estate to assert rights to her name. It obviously wasn’t in the interests of the applicant to mention that, whatever might be the situation with the actual words ‘Louise Brooks’, a company called Louise Brooks Estate did exist at the time in Kansas, founded in 1998 and since 2014 overlapping with Louise Brooks Heirs, which is still going; both entities were run by Brooks’s nephew Daniel, who is 76 and still lives in Wichita. Louise Brooks Heirs has a supportive relationship with the LBS, but unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to Daniel Brooks to do something as weird as copyrighting his aunt’s name.

Craftslaw.com uses this case as a way of talking about how trademarks work generally, especially in the online world. Most of the crafters who might use Brooks’s image, and even her name, aren’t claiming that their goods emanate from any kind of official source, only that a ‘Louise Brooks t-shirt’, for instance, is a t-shirt with Brooks’s face on it. That’s not a trademark, just a descriptor, and the law deems that ‘fair use’; but as Craftslaw points out, most online platforms such as Etsy or eBay (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) will just play safe and take down any contributor complained against, leaving it to the parties concerned to sort it out through the law. Who’s got the money for that?

The founder and organiser of the LBS is Thomas Gladysz. A couple of years ago I bought his book Louise Brooks: The Persistent Star, a compilation of many of his LBS blog posts. Like a lot of fans of a lot of celebrities, shows, or activities, Mr Gladysz comes across as amiably obsessive and the book is a work of delightfully loopy scholarship. I really don’t know how he manages to find out the things he does. My favourite example was this post, concerning billboard adverts on various suburban streets in Kansas City for the 1926 comedy A Social Celebrity, in which Louise Brooks took a prestigious second billing to the then major star Adolphe Menjou. This is, of course, nuts, and yet it does tell you interesting things about the way movies were marketed in 1920s America. A lot of the blog is like that: it explores times, places and manners through the medium of this one actor, and she becomes a prism for an entire world. It’s niche, but it’s genuine and even useful work.

This makes it all the more galling that the entity attacking the LBS is embodied in a slick-looking but horrible website whose articles are either weird, general stuff lifted from easily accessible online resources mentioning Louise Brooks from time to time, or personal attacks on Thomas Gladysz; and a ‘shop’ consisting of t-shirts or ‘art prints’ emblazoned with public-domain pictures of the actress run through a Photoshop filter. If you want to spend your money on that, think of it as charity. There is no sign that it will contribute much to what we know about Brooks and her times – to put it as mildly as I can. I'm not going to link to it.

I hope that, if the trademark holder had an intention to remove the LBS blog as well, he would have done so by now. It’s there that the most valuable aspect of the LBS survives, the astonishing corpus of work Mr Gladysz has amassed over the course of 28 years of study, and for that to disappear would be a tragedy indeed. 

Relic

In front of the Rectory at Swanvale Halt is a little strip of land no more than a couple of feet wide between the metalled surface of the roadway and my wall; it isn't part of the Rectory property. My neighbours tend to park there as the road is slightly wider at that point and it makes it a little less likely that their vehicles are going to be struck by the removal lorries and supermarket delivery vans that come pelting down the hill. This unfortunately means that the ground is being worn away by grinding tyres, and is at least six inches lower than it was when I arrived here. There will be a point at which the utility of avoiding the downhill traffic moves into negative territory against the inconvenience of the preposterous angle the parked cars will reach. In fact, you might be able to plot a graph.

Anyway. I could argue that the brambles, self-seeded sycamores, and green alkanet that periodically invade this small space are nothing to do with me, but I like to try to keep the vegetation under control. It was while doing this yesterday that I spotted a little disc of metal on the ground. Despite the blobs of corrosion, it was easily identifiable as a 1936 penny. A little dip in some vinegar cleared off all but the most fixed bits of decomposition.

How long had the coin been there? There were 154 million pennies struck in 1936, a total only exceeded in 1962, 1966 and 1967, so they were hardly uncommon. It might have been dropped even after decimalisation in 1971, but it's more likely that it was hidden since long before then, waiting for the sandy earth here to be disturbed and washed away and then for me to find. 

Come Holy Ghost, Do

On the second day of the Triennial Clergy Conference this week, I went for what was a short walk down the hill and back again, and got dreadfully lost, eventually making my way back to the conference centre hot, exhausted and half an hour after the beginning of the afternoon’s first lecture, but I got a nice photograph of some cows from a footpath I shouldn’t even have been on.

There were a lot of words. Revd Isabelle Hamley gave us a series of Bible studies examining examples of spiritual change (when the Bishop asked us to share with our neighbour what one insight we might take away from the conference, Fr Benjamin beside me claimed that it would be Revd Isabelle’s revelation that her native French has no separate words for tortoise and turtle – ‘I tell my husband, it’s just the same animal in a different place’); Bishop Ruth Bushyager of Horsham encouraged us to subject everything we did to the test of whether it took people forward in discipleship; Dr Sam Wells of St-Martin-in-the-Fields urged us to start doing ‘interesting things’ (the Church had abandoned all these to the Welfare State in 1948, he maintained) beginning with more interaction with our communities; and Bishop Tim Wambunya, who told us a tale of discrimination which has led to him going back into parish ministry in Slough. There was other stuff, but they were the headliners.

Over the years I have become less prone to plunge into a depressive spiral at the Triennial, questioning the worth of my ministry and even of my own existence. Partly this is because I’ve learned to see my clergy colleagues as just as frail and ridiculous as me, and their self-confidence, where it exists, as a bit of a show. It’s just as well, because the Diocese of Guildford’s descent into monocultural Evangelicalism has now reached the point where it feels hard for any other kind of crop to flourish. Accounts from my colleagues indicate without any shadow of a doubt that if Bishop Andrew can wrest a church from any kind of high-side-of-centre orientation, he will, without any regard to what it may have been in the past, or the health and viability of its current congregation. To stand in the main hall at The Hayes as we did this past week for Morning or Evening Prayer, and find oneself surrounded by people holding their hands in the air ‘like they’re trying to grab God’s bollocks’, as my old vicar Fr Barkley so picturesquely put it, does make one feel less than fully at home. I tend to keep my mouth shut because I know hardly anyone will understand anything I feel inclined to say.

I was glad I stayed for the final eucharist, though. The outgoing cathedral dean presided, a woman, I have been told by two people independently, ‘who doesn’t give a shit anymore’, not that that was particularly in evidence. The Bishop presided and, notwithstanding what he does, his words usually come across rather well. This time he decided to finish his sermon by reminding us of the truth of our ordination by singing the Veni Creator. For someone it was the most natural thing in the world to follow him intoning ‘Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire’ with ‘And lighten with celestial fire …’ – only sotto voce – and within a moment or two that whisper went round the whole hall so those of us who knew it were all joined in with that ancient hymn linking us, not just to Anglicanism past, but to the whole of the Western Church. A glorious moment, if a lonely one.

Stay-at-Home

This Autumn PJ Harvey tours her soon-to-be-released album I Inside the Old Year Dying, which lifts off from the poems of Orlam. There are two London dates (so far), and I have decided not to go. This isn’t primarily because of the cost: the whole evening including travel and so on will edge towards £100, but that wouldn’t matter if I could be sure the experience would be worthwhile, and I’m not convinced it will be.

When I saw Harvey at the Albert Hall back in 2011 she was, mainly, performing Let England Shake interspersed with some songs from White Chalk and a couple of old favourites. It was an intense, but static experience, somehow eroding both the ethereal strangeness of White Chalk and the shimmering beauty – which contrasts with the bloody subject-matter – of Let England Shake, and making both more ordinary. Catching PJH at the Brixton Academy during the Hope Six tour in 2016 was a different matter. The Hope Six Demolition Project was an uneven work as a recording: it truly came alive in performance, with a bigger band than Harvey had ever worked with, the volume turned up to drown out whatever doubts there might have been about the music. The concerts were deliberately theatrical, intricately planned, and grand: it was big music making big statements about human society and global citizenship.

To judge by the first two pieces of music from the album that have been released, I think I Inside the Old Year Dying live will be more a 2011 experience than 2016, and this time I would be not sat relatively comfortably in the Albert Hall but standing for two hours in a hot and crowded Camden Roundhouse. So I will listen to the record, and enter into the strange world of the new album, which seems so much more suited to smallness and intimacy, at home, and summon the Maestra into my garden, perhaps, rather than glimpse her across a sea of heads. 

We've Come A Long Way, Mr Mayor

We live in an area of overlapping local authorities here in sunny Surrey. Back in Buckinghamshire, when local government was reorganised in 1974, the new authority centred on High Wycombe deliberately refrained from constituting itself as a Borough in deference to the feelings of the small towns of Marlow and Princes Risborough, who might otherwise resent being gobbled up by their big neighbour, and became Wycombe District Council instead. Here, though, the towns retained their Mayors at the same time as the overarching authority became a Borough with its own Mayor. So, as I plan the Civic Service for the new Mayor of the area (who happens to be Paula, Pastoral Assistant, councillor and many other things besides) to be held at Swanvale Halt church in a few weeks, yesterday I went to the equivalent event for the new Mayor of Hornington. I hope you’re following all this, not that I’ll be asking questions later.

This was a secular event and I wondered what to expect. Arriving a couple of minutes late, I found a hall full of people either clapping their hands or waving them in the air to ‘Dynamite’ by Korean boy-band BTS which I can fairly say fell well outside the parameters of anything I might have anticipated. The new Mayor’s keynotes for his year of office are ‘positivity’ and ‘inclusion’, and you can’t deny that his inaugural event expressed that, as we progressed through two local amateur choirs doing turns (though it struck me that ‘I Want to Dance With Somebody’ is actually quite a melancholy piece of work), funny children’s portraits of the Mayor projected on the wall, and culminating in Fatboy Slim. More clapping and handwaving: it curiously reminded me of evangelical worship, which shows how close that is to the wider culture. I will have to reflect on that.

The Mayor’s promises to serve his community, and ours to help him do so, said everything that needed saying. Life’s not all ha-ha hee-hee, though, I couldn’t help myself thinking as I was showered in all that community loveliness, in which it seemed absolutely required that we have a mild titter every minute we weren’t listening to someone sing, and without tremendous self-restraint I can see myself delivering a very jaundiced homily indeed when the Borough gathers at the church a couple of weeks from now!

Stages of Faith

Giselle the lay reader and I met to discuss one of the goals of the Church Development Plan, to establish a small group to pray deliberately and consciously for the work of the church and to wait on what God might want to tell us about it. Despite coming from very different experiences of the Church, we see this matter very similarly and I will be very happy to let her run with it and just occasionally turn up now and again.

Giselle gave me a print-out of an article by one Richard J Vincent (who I can’t find out very much about – his name is attached to this piece of writing and others) outlining a model for spiritual development which was probably news to his evangelical church audience in 2004 when he wrote it. His point, and I’m not sure how far it is his originally or comes from elsewhere, is that evangelical church communities tend to aim at getting their members to be committed, active and engaged, living the life of Christian service, and stop there, leaving them to run into the buffers when they undergo any kind of challenge to their faith, a challenge which Mr Vincent suggests is not only likely but actually a necessary step towards a further stage of development. That is a stage which leads inward, he says, detaching ourselves from the things we once thought were spiritually valuable, and ending in a greater degree of union with Christ.

I see the point of this, but I question any sense that it’s a tidy process. Mr Vincent and his sources also stress it isn’t, and yet the very fact of describing it in terms of ‘stages’ (even termed ‘early’ and ‘later’) tends to make it look neater than in fact it is. I can’t recall any single ‘Wall’ experience (that’s what the paper calls it) where my spiritual assumptions all had to be questioned and reformulated; rather it seems to be something that happens all the time, though perhaps I have yet to run into a very solid Wall. Meanwhile you continue to discover more and more about yourself, things that need unpicking and occasionally repenting; and in fact the spiritual life isn’t only about divesting yourself progressively of the bad habits of the past, but, sadly, also about chipping away the new ones, and the new delusions and illusions, that you develop as time goes on. The soul may grow closer to Christ over the years, but most of us need to go through the business of renewal and reformulation over and over again.

Then again, how much of this just comes from age? One would hope that a soul might progressively shed its illusions and attachments to nonsense as the business of merely putting one foot in front of another becomes more of a concern, and when I think of such advances as I may have made spiritually I find it hard to tell the difference between changes that show me growing closer to the Lord, and those that just result from getting older!