What will Boris do?

 

Many Londoners are wondering the same thing I am, for better, for worse, for whatever. Boris Johnson is our new Mayor, and I’m looking forward to watching these things unfold, living under this new leadership:

Buffoonery

There is going to be a lot of it, and I get the feeling that Boris, in addition to outsourcing his entire professional team, is also recruiting a top comedy performance coach to keep his public laughing, as we get dragged along for this ride.

Comedy Sketch Shows

Can’t WAIT to see what the top British comedy talent comes up with. Will Matt Lucas step up to the plate on this one? There is plenty of material for him already.

Fancy Dress

Festival season, fancy dress parties (hey Americans, that means costume party) and club nights are going to be sprinkled with Boris look-a-likes. I suspect the fancy dress shops are now stocking up on floppy blonde haired wigs. Better get my order in.

Documentaries

I suspect that brainstorming is now in progress among Channel 4’s Dispatches, the BBC’s Panorama and all the other fantastic British documentary producers, who are planning for the next investigative piece about how and why Boris Johnson won the London Mayoral election. I’m looking forward to some hilarious ‘docudrama’ about the subject, and wondering who will be cast as the lead role for...Boris the West End Musical, or for Boris the Movie? Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis could dye his mop blonde, gain weight, and give a fantastic OTT moving performance, something he is great at, as a bonified card-carrying member of the Overactors Annoynmous. He won't take the gig though, as for him to play Boris, it would require him to do some actual acting.

Virals

I’m already seeing some citizen-created viral campaigns appear in response to this election, such as the folks over at I Didn’t Vote For Boris, who invite non-Boris voting Londoners to tag a photo with ididntvoteforboris and add it to the Flickrstream. The conservative viral online campaign viral Boriswatch, has had its day, and now I’m looking forward to other Citizen Journalist reports, such as the eye view of Sunny Hundal, from the frontlines of what may be a new sport in London of Boris Watching. Clearly with 2,000+ already signed up to the Facebook group, it will be a popular activity here.

Celebrity Commentary 

“Boris has as little knowledge of multiculturalism as I have of life on Jupiter. He used to go to this club in Oxford called the Bullingdon Club, full of snobs and creative conmen. The man has not only no physical ability to run anything, he is immoral and a bully. Boris as mayor would be like discovering you had piles and there was no cure for it.”

Vivienne Westwood

“In Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, there is a scene where a character is talking

about another who is a card player and he’s described as ‘a fucking liability’. That’s my idea of Boris. The mouth engages before the mind does. He doesn’t have any sense of diplomacy or tact. London is a cosmopolitan city. You can’t have someone who makes quotes like that [Johnson’s “piccaninnies” comment] representing London, regardless of the fact it was in the past [Johnson wrote the comment in 2002]. Of all the things people say about Ken, in my view he’s done a lot for London. When you go into the city it looks like a European capital now with all the regeneration, and it didn’t before. Trafalgar Square is a much more welcoming place.”

David Mitchell
Comedian, Peep Show

“Boris is mad. He wants to bring back bus conductors, but that’s never going to happen. I think he talks rubbish. He’s

out of touch and he doesn’t understand Londoners. People say Ken is obnoxious, but what can you do? One thing about him is he knows London.”

Charlie Brooker
Guardian columnist and Television Presenter

Thanks to this election result, I’ve now got a powerful retort to the next Brit who blames me for the conservative politics of George Bush, because clearly it can happen here as well, and I will not be surprised if David Cameron is this country's next Prime Minister.

 

I’m watching Boris,

-Lisa

 

Who’s Lisa Devaney?

I head the Hai Media Group, a multimedia communications company based in London, offering client’s traditional public relations, combined with new technology marketing strategies. I also perform, creating original Cabaret-style comedy skits for festivals, theatre and parties. Find out more about me, and the talented entrepreneurs I collaborate with, by visiting: www.haimediagroup.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here in the UK, the mainstream media has (finally!!!) latched onto plastic bags. Plastic bags are making headlines in

the Daily Mail, a report that saw Marks & Spencer respond by putting a price of five pence to grocery bills for every plastic bag used. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called for new green legislation that requires supermarkets to end reliance on plastic bags in the next year, or be required to charge customer’s 5p for plastic bags.

Bravo for all the hoopla and attention to the issue, and for listing the facts about the damage these horrible convenience items do to our wildlife and environment, a result in Britain alone of 13 Billion free disposable plastic bags being offered to shoppers. Worldwide, The thought of turtles being strangled by plastic bags on the bottom of the ocean, is a nightmarish image, among other innocent wildlife dying because of plastic bags. In my own nightmares over this issue, I had a dream that I was walking along and somehow was made entirely of plastic bags, then the wind came, and I blew away. I think it comes from a scene in the movie Brazil, where a man disappears among newspapers, view the trailer for Terry Gilliam’s film below.

The Consumer Climate is Changing

Politicians, businesses, the media and hopefully your average person-in-the-street are getting motivated to change behaviour with the attention to the issue. I’m glad that leaders are seeing the benefit of supporting and activating people on a grassroots level. Hey, it seems to boost viewer ratings and sells a lot of newspaper that will hopefully be recycled. The people of Britain are great at responding quickly to campaigns like this, a case in point is the recent Chicken Out! Campaign initiated by Channel 4, that I blogged about here.

Now, the demand is so high for free range, happy chickens here in the UK, that my local Tesco has big signs apologizing to customers about the fact that the supply of these chickens is not enough to meet demand right now. Instead, they are pointing us toward an alternative brand of chicken, and a sign on the shelves proclaims how this company’s chickens are also very happy, having been raised in well-lighted and spacious barns, with plenty of places to perch and lots of colourful balls to play with. The situation is somewhat comical, but I’m just glad to see this consumer power in action.

Mass consumer consciousness and activism, can totally make a difference, and these recent examples have given
me renewed hope about the state of the world. You see, I used to be more of an environmental activist, back in my high school and college days on Long Island, in New York. During the summer of 1987, a notorious garbage barge  was floating around off the coast of my favourite beach spots. The public watched the story unfold as the smelly barge travelled hundreds of miles trying to find a dump that would take it, facing rejections everywhere, including Belize and Mexico. The issue was quickly latched onto environmentalists, and at the time I got involved in helping out the New York Public Interest Research Group canvass suburban neighbourhoods across Long Island to raise attention to the issue, and raise funds for NYPIRG campaigns. It was a great learning experience, and certainly very hard work. The environmentalists got accused, as they always do, for messing around with the facts about the garbage barge and incorrectly stating that the roaming garbage barge was a result of a lack of landfill space from excessive waste. The

issue nonetheless, did compel people to increase recycling efforts at the time, and this was certainly a positive outcome of it all.

When Idealism Deflates We All Lose Out

Returning to the University of Stony Brook in the Fall, where I was studying

politics and journalism, I kept working with NYPIRG and even got to meet and have dinner with its founder Ralph Nader one evening. At the time, I was also fascinated by Abbie Hoffman, a radical 60s political activist, a founder of the Yippies! movement and author of Steal This Book. He was doing a campus lecture tour that year, debating neo-conservative G. Gordon Libby. I got to watch Abbie that year at University as well, and it was a great year, where I was really motivated and feeling positive that what we were doing as young activists on campus was going to start making a difference. At least it felt that way.

I’d volunteer to man the NYPIRG booth in the student union from time to

time, sharing space alongside SUNY Stony Brook’s legendary life-long political activist and poet Mitch Cohen, and was glad to be keeping the environmental issue alive, at least as a visual presence among students and faculty. Often, a group of radical Young Republicans on campus, made it an ongoing mission to visit my booth and try to debate and attack me in public. Of course they have a right to their opinion, but their sabotage approach was really mean. They’d come over, with smirks and giggles on their faces, and start arguing loudly with me about what a useless and erroneous left-leaning, hippie liberal cause I was wasting my time with. I could argue with them only so far, taking them on by myself often, and it would just deteriorate into foolishness that made me blush and want to run away and hide in my dorm room. I’m just not that tough in that kind of hostile situation.

The negativity that group was seeding against the environmental issue at the time, was certainly working on many other people’s opinions. It seemed that so many people were just looking for any excuse to not have to believe, and especially not have to do something about it. Long Island is all about convenience, and recycling for most was such a hassle that they didn’t want to bother with it. Meanwhile, depressingly so, scientists were finding out plenty of quantitative facts to show why dire consequences were in the works for the planet. Al Gore, waaaay prior to his success with An Inconvenient Truth, who was also someone I admired at the time and still do, was trying to get the powerful politicians to listen to the same warnings the environmental activists around me were talking about. It seemed the general electorate was a stubborn, lazy bunch back then, getting into the early nineties, and whenever anyone talked about environmental issues, they were quickly called tree huggers, lefties, freaks, hippies or other names invented to deflate credibility, and kill passionate spirit. I never thought I fell into the hippie category, as I was radically opposed to the heady over used scent of patchouli, and  couldn't  stand   birkenstocks, and didn't ever want to dreadlock my hair, although plenty of people on campus did and they did look pretty cool with dreads.

Adding to the negative climate against environmental activism, Abbie Hoffman tragically committed suicide, and reports came out citing that his own spirit was dis-heartened for the youth of America, who he did not think were motivated to make a positive difference. Watching his debate on campus with G. Gordon Libby prior to his death was difficult, because the audience was completely split between fans of Libby and fans of Hoffman, and the two disparate groups sparred verbally, and even to the point of physical fighting. Hoffman was viciously heckled by a large group of young Marines who came to support Libby. I guess Hoffman’s fans (being typical pacifists toward violent situations anyways) shied away from strongly defending Hoffman that evening, because, I think, we were scared.

My Memory Lane: Environmental Reporting

In the early 90s, graduating from college, I went on to work as a reporter at small newspapers in upstate New York,

and then later in Western Pennsylvania. I continued my interest and thoughts about the environment and, with editoral support and encouragment, carved out a niche focus in covering the issues, people, and places involved in the environmental movement in the community. I featured groups like Scenic Hudson, a non-profit that made an incredible difference in cleaning up the Hudson River, and I featured a family living in Pine Bush, New York, who, ahead of their time, lived a sustainable lifestyle, and also worked and volunteered in efforts to clean up the environment. The area I was living in, and reporting on, was called the Wallkill Valley, and one summer, I worked really hard to write researching a huge series of articles about the river that fed this valley called the Wallkill River. The series, published in The Wallkill Valley Times was well received, and was packed with a mix of historic tales of the river, the people who live beside it and plenty of well-researched facts about how modern pollution was causing problems for the waterway. The series won attention among a lot of people in New York State, including (I was told) getting the attention of Albany politicians, and being read and referenced by the then-Governor Mario Cumo at one point.

In covering environmental issues, I was, again, attacked at every angle by opposing views. The majority of readers

were very appreciative of the stories I was writing and that I was featuring efforts that were so often ignored by the media. However, in one case, a lawyer for a major land developer in upstate New York phoned up the newspaper’s office one day and began screaming and threatening me with every kind of legal horror possibility he could pull out of his sleeve, demanding that I not write anything about a controversial development plan that was coming up for review by a town’s planning commissioners, that activists were saying would have a severe impact on the water basin of the Wallkill Valley. I’d like to tell you that the story was published, but, as I remember the situation, the editor had to ask me to back down. It was a very small paper, and the threat was so severe that it would jeopardize the existence of the publication. It was a long time ago, and I think we still covered plenty of breaking news reports about what was happening with the controversial development, and plenty of other land use issues, but our plan to dig deeper into some of the happenings, in the style of investigative journalism, had to take a pause, because of the newspaper's own need to survive as a business in the community, and to maintain its thin editorial staff resources in covering a very wide geographic area. I understood the situation, and wasn't such a radical that I was going to insist on carrying on with the asssignment at that level of depth, was mattered was that that small community newspaper kept on covering the important development and land use issues in the area, and kept on paying attention, in a more detailed level, to the nitty gritty items that larger outlets would never make space for in print.

By the mid-nineties, after spending nearly a decade reporting about what was happening in the environment, among

the usual cop beat, school board meetings and other reporting requirements, the years of spirit crushing anti-environmental criticism started to tire me out. Along with keeping informed about the issue, and reporting relevant news items, I was also choosing to be an eco-consumer in my personal life, with recycling, composting and never ever littering. By the late 90s, having moved into New York City, the issue had seemed to nearly evaporate from all public discussion, news headlines and politicians agendas. It didn’t exactly go away, but it felt like it wasn’t a priority at all and the topic had gotten branded as such a naughty political thing to talk about, that, then, working in PR, you really had to be careful about what you expressed among business associates. I remember  one moment, where I tossed a bit of trash onto the street  in New York City,  I think it may have been a cigarette, which I had sadly started smoking at that point, and watched it  blow away  into a  clogged gutter, already filled with  garbage.  That was a really depressing moment, and  I just had that curshing, horrible feeling of:

"What’s the point???

It had been more than a decade of being devoted and focused on the envirionmental topic, and the fact was that among the people who were really powerful in the world at the time, no one was really paying attention. Even worse, so few people around me in my daily life were doing anything about it, and seemed to have a bad opinion toward those who were doing something. It was honestly like you felt you had to secretly recycle, and not really talk about it, in some circles.

My long tale has a point (I swear it does!!!) because as I watch the news media latching onto this plastic bag issue, along with members of all political parties, and so many big businesses now embracing this new ‘green’ movement. Well, it makes my ideological heart so happy. Sure, there is a lot of politicking silliness in it all, with David Cameron now suddenly ‘green’ and even Boris Johnson being shown frequently riding his bike. Yes, it is showcasing and has an air of fake ness about it, but who cares!!!! Good for them!!! Give them an Opray Winfrey-style hug the next time you see them. I should have done this to Boris, who I happened to be sitting near in a local Crime Summit, hosted by the West London borough of Hammersmith & Fulham here. I'm not a Boris fan, but I'm glad he rides a bike and shows off about it because his fans might also take note of that visual message and ride bikes instead of driving. With Boris, and others, it is great to see that after all these years, the climate of opinion is changing and the environmental issue is not, about what political ideology you belong to. You can be a Tory, a Republican, a Labour Party member or a member of the Pink Fluffy Bunny party and still recognize the importance of simple things like not using plastic bags.

This blog post turned out to be a lot longer than I wanted it to be, having accidentally taken yet another wander down memory lane, and I’ve now realized that the weekend is coming to a close and I have a LOT to do.

Thanks so much for reading if you got this far.

Popping out to the shops, toting my Onya bag, 

Who’s Lisa Devaney?

I head the Hai Media Group, a multimedia communications company based in London, offering client’s traditional public relations, combined with new technology marketing strategies. I also perform, creating original Cabaret-style comedy skits for festivals, theatre and parties. For a reference key to this blog, visit this post. Find out more about me, and the talented entrepreneurs I collaborate with, by visiting: www.haimediagroup.com