"This Must Be The Place"
“I’ve sold monorails to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, and by gum it put them on the map!”
Maybe your moral compass hasn’t been set by the CRT glow and magnetic tape of popular culture that mine has, but this Simpsons quote by a traveling con-artist who sells Springfield a dangerous lie is what first sprung to my mind as an opener for this article.
Don’t get me wrong (That’s The Pretenders), of course it would have been great to get the City of Culture 2017 title, be brimming with civic pride and to have all this cool stuff happening around the city, and I of course appreciate the amount of effort that people put in for our bid, and in the run up to it.
However, and there isn’t the trace of a single sour grape on my breath as I say this, I don’t think we need it and I can actually see the benefit in not having it.
I have no experience of Hull, whatsoever, my only knowledge of the place is as a Reeves & Mortimer punchline of a place: chosen for its bleakness, its middle-English nowhereness. To that end, and from what I have heard about it, CoC may be the temporary economic and cultural injection it needs. The shot in the arm that hopefully it can build on, and I genuinely hope it does.
I have visited the Olympic village in Barcelona, and the winter Olympic village in Calgary and these places feel like forgotten white elephants, derelict or at least run down, “all alone at the ‘54 world’s fair” kind of places.
And that’s my point. Culture grows like yoghurt. I feel Dundee has a lot going on, building solid foundations from an already active cultural sector. The bid only exemplified this. These things are all mostly grass-roots, sustainable and progressive. They’re things that are done by people who have just loved something into existence. The way we’re doing it is right already, so please keep ploughing away at your zines, your music, your temporary exhibitions, your speakeasies, whatever it is you consider your creative passion.
Having an influx of artists or activities or a falsified interest in the arts just for one year is not necessarily beneficial, long-term. When the rug of funding gets pulled from under a city at the end of that year, well, is that entirely helpful? That opera house no one goes to anymore becomes a chain pub, the artists here to work on various projects fuck off back to London or Glasgow and that’s the end of that.
It’s like cheating at The Sims; a quick fix but ultimately unsatisfying and unsustainable. We don’t need any ‘fix’, quick or otherwise, because nothing’s broken. The only thing that was maybe in need of a bit of encouragement, or to be put in a cast for the world to sign, was our civic pride. This Dundonian self-deprecation and apathy that at times went all the way to being brutal self-flagellation.
In my opinion the WeDundee bid was incredibly encouraging, and did go a long way to uniting, well, everyone rather than a privileged few in a zealous fervour of Dundonian pride. Asking of us, what do we love about Dundee? I find that, along with the V&A and our continually improving waterfront as well as countless others, utterly inspiring and these things truly are legacies that we can get behind and then shoot beyond. The bid did such a good job that I won’t waste any more of my ever-dwindling word count on “what makes Dundee great”. It really did feel like the end of Ghostbusters 2 where sheer civic pride and rallying together gets shit done.
So c’mon, let’s still get shit done. Hire free venues, make enquiries, put on events. Let’s do as much as what we said we would do anyway. Let our asses cash the cheques we already wrote. Let us brim with that civic pride instead of looking at ourselves like a half-empty glass.
Are we there yet? Well, we’ve always been there. When we get there though, promise me I’ll get the cushy monorail driving job.