Through the portal of a television screen Netflix’s new Woodstock ‘99 documentary [Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99] is like a whiff of Molotov cocktail…brief but seductively incendiary nonetheless. “Truss and Sunak take note” cautions the NME on behalf of its young readers. The channel’s Fyre Festival doc was one of the surprise hits of 2019, laying bare the influencer-addled world of a private island party-of-all-time debacle. Now, as the nation steels itself for hardship seldom seen, and the cries for parliament recall and mass non-payment of bills grows louder, the festival-fail-as-societal-metaphor seems increasingly apt: organized by shysters and curated by idiots a vaunted greatest-show-on-earth descends into anarchy.
“It’s Lord of the Flies, I guess,” shrugs one survivor before a backdrop of flames, as what was supposed to be a reprise of the peace and love festival becomes a Portaloo Vietnam. Whether it was a good idea to book the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit and Rage Against The Machine to soundtrack the rebooted Age of Aquarius is debatable; what’s less in doubt is the litany of crimes the organisers perpetrated on their 400 000 customers. Kettled in the 
asphalt heat trap of a decommissioned air force base, confiscated of their own food and drinks, drowning in garbage, frolicking in shit, unattended by any security worth the name and gouged right, left and centre for faeces-tainted drinking water the festivalgoers respond with an orgy of violence so huge the aftermath resembles the landscape of a Baghdad suicide bombing.
Women are assaulted, facilities vandalized, hoardings ripped up as the frat boy crowd turns first on sponsors MTV then on festival staff themselves. By the time the sound tower comes crashing down and the festival grounds are set ablaze an uprising is in place whose resonance to our times is unmissable. The anger of those scalped by the system is something to behold. Autumn’s coming recession augurs in the mind like a boiling cloud.
I have a nightmare
Into a popping microphone at Whalley Range’s Jam Street Café writer Melvin Burgess speaks a few introductory words about his friend Peter Kalu’s new dystopian novel. “History tends to be written by the winners,” he says. “But what if they wrote it directly onto your mind?”
It’s the question at the heart of One Drop, which conjures a dystopian UK under the boot of a white power regime, as lovers Axel and Dune find themselves trapped in a prison camp for blacks where the authorities erase minds and reprogram identities. “Myself, Peter and Tariq Mehmood decided to create a parallel UK and each set a novel there…an outpost of a fascist America. Mine [Three Bullets] came out last year. Tariq’s still working on his.” As Kalu’s hits bookshops this week you can read about the Ruled Brittania triptych on their website [click].
Mixing sci-fi with race politics for a young readership makes for powerful stuff. While Burgess has penned some of the most celebrated YA fiction in the canon – and is credited with having pioneered the genre – all-rounder Kalu followed in Lemn Sissay’s footsteps at the helm of Commonword, Manchester’s development agency for black and Asian writers. “You know, I used to have an afro myself…” he laughs in reference to his youthful protagonists. There are extracts from the new work then he looks on proudly as daughter Naomi performs songs inspired by the tale.
Father and daughter…how much should we fear the novel’s scenario becoming real? “Sometimes I feel like a Jeremiah saying the world is terrible,” says Peter. “It’s a miserable thing to be writing this stuff. But there is a drift. A drift. We saw it with Trump.
“The right tell a great story. They work in poetry. ’We had a glorious past, and we can have a glorious future’. The left works in manuals for operating machinery. So it’s the duty of the left to learn to tell better stories.” 
He pauses.
“You know what, though? I’ve done my politics. Naomi, you take the questions. Tell us how you feel about the world. This dire vision your dad’s writing about…do you think there’s hope?”
Kalu junior is momentarily on the spot. “No one knows what’s happening with the world,” she reflects. “Next year something random could happen, the whole of society could shift. So stay optimistic…and whatever happens, have fun.”
And with that she draws the warmest applause of the night.
Grant me the strength
At Manchester HQ Modernist Society founder Jack Hale picks apart the grammar of a nuance. “We’re not imperilled,” he says, slowly, “but there is peril.” How could this be? When the email went round last month announcing the rejection of their latest funding bid all had seemed to be ashes. The thought of architecture’s zen kagool-masters having to box their stuff and vacate their temple was difficult to process. “The application was about extending our operations in other cities,” says Jack. “Currently we’re without a grant, which is concerning, but there are other bids which will go in in due course.”
It had seemed such a surprise for an organization which has in its ten years pulled off the extraordinary trick of making the likes of concrete housing and municipal bin design – plus countless other overlooked aspects of our evolving landscape – unaccountably sexy: largely 
through their hipster periodical The Modernist. You need only drop in to their Port Street premises to check out the gallery, giftware and self-published books to enter a world of civic navel-gazing fit for a super-nerd. “We started in response to the notion that Manchester is deeply Victorian in its story, its buildings, its sense of self. We wanted to ask: what about all the stuff that happened in the 50s and 60s? All those buildings that will never, ever be listed?”
That means far more than brutalist tower blocks and utopian town planning, mind. In learning about Galt Toys or Olympic pictogram graphics we access an era when designers worked with the dream that better living could be inspired through simplicity, truth in materials, form in function…rather than leaving everything for the market to shit on. If you’re in the northern quarter, then, with twenty minutes or so to spare you could do worse than pop in, pick up the latest edition of the mag (current themed issue ‘Library’ including features on Droylsden’s, sound effects records, and fancy shelving), check out the latest exhibition (Architecture on Record Sleeves, curated by Andy Votel) browse the newest publications (Brian Lomas’s photobook of 1980s shop fronts is exquisite), book a modernist mooch of Leicester (with ‘sleb tour guide Steve Marland) or pick up a birthday present from the gift shop (there are some excellent pin badges and tote bags at the moment). All in a very good cause, right now – what with the anarchy coming and all that.
