Mount Jupiter Reports

World War Z (2013)

Dear Mount Jupiter, I live in Glasgow. Where can I find the will to live?

Some challenges are much too great to be solved by snark alone. Where does one draw the strength to outmanoeuvre the combo of rampant landlordism, lithium explosions and their happy alliance with a civic ideology of self-immolation… In this Clydeside ditch which is perennially on fire (literal, sacral and allegorical), we must surely investigate and absolve the original sins which hath wrought this hell.

This despatch is not a reader on Trongate 103, the CCA, nor the creaking of any other 2000s lottery-backed redevelopment, yet, as dust to dust, ashes to ashes, so all critical thinking points to the crucible of neoliberal mediocrity itself, Glasgow City Council. To find the will to live is to somehow overcome the didy-ocracy that promotes the city as a bargain basement location for the Hollywood monoculture whilst strangling every possibility for homegrown talent with the vim of Bible John.

Excepting students and the 35-year-old wannabe students who earn precisely £12,570 every year, you, the working people of Glasgow pay the HMRC who pay the Scottish Government who pay Creative Scotland who pay arts organisations who pay the landlord who pays the council. Your Council Tax (up 5.9% this year) pays that same council, who pretend they’re not the landlord, who extort the arts organisations, and so on. If you played the national working-class predation scheme in the 90s and 00s—it could be youuuuu!—then you also paid for the bespoke renovation at Trongate 103, the centre whose fate left in GCC hands would amount to a six-storey mega vaporium, money laundering mall and incidental investment for an offshore sovereign wealth fund.

The vital link in this chain is City Property, a quango empire of 1,800 assets ‘wholly owned by Glasgow City Council’ but ‘a separate legal entity.’ This arms-length unaccountability machine, much like Glasgow Life, which recuses itself from the matter, is twice-removed from the voter and twice as opaque. The board boasts councillors who claim to advocate for progressive whatevers (one even has a starring, self-congratulatory role in Everybody to Kenmure Street) yet now seem entirely hapless and helpless to do anything material at all.

What, then, is the deeper force that animates the whirlpool stasis of GCC’s Jekyll-and-Hyde victim and perpetrator complex? That’s right, the problem is never within, it’s all down to posh people in the suburbs. When Glasgow District Council was hacked up in 1996 and we were left with the shrunken GCC, suburbanites stopped paying into the metropolitan coffers, creating a concentric ring of freeloaders whose ample taxation is redirected to… rhododendrons? (We don’t really know what they do there).

The answer to your happiness is thus threefold. Firstly, ignore the facts in front of you. Secondly, blockade all roads from Newton Mearns and Bothwell, in the style of the Paris Commune. We might re-use any number of film sets from franchises that were shot here and later written off for tax reasons (circular arts network?). Tell them they can’t get none of this candy unless they start paying. Thirdly, have you gone to see the Highland calves at Pollok Park?

We’re all drinking from the same puddle,
but some of us are looking at the stars.

Twink Spider Man prepares for death on Hutcheson Street, Merchant City.

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Mount Jupiter Reports is a new monthly bad faith stream-of-consciousness and agony aunt service. Do you have artworld troubles? Write to mount.jupiter.conspiracy@gmail.com with your symptoms and an exorcism may be provided.