Return of the old-style cultural theory post!

If I were to frame Larkin’s Law of Reissues, it would say that anything you haven’t got already probably isn’t worth bothering about. In other words, if someone tries to persuade you to buy a limited edition of the 1924-5 sessions by Paraffin Joe and his Nitelites, keep your pockets buttoned up; if they were any good, you’d have heard of them at school, as you did King Oliver, and have laid out your earliest pocket money on them... Everything worthwhile gets reissued about every five years.

Larkin was writing in 1969, in the days when music fans were expected to wait patiently for any audio scraps to fall off the table. But he also seems to speak of an era when nostalgia was rooted in accurate memories, with no potential for revisionism. For example, I certainly didn’t watch this



when it was first on TV in 1980. But in true postmodern style, I’m quite capable of retrospectively absorbing it into my childhood. If, as Roland Barthes suggested, the Author is Dead, did he take the Past down with him?

The Film of the Noughties

Last weekend, almost by accident, I caught Michael Moore’s latest salvo, Capitalism: A Love Story. It’s what you might expect from the man that Bernard Goldberg identified as the most dangerous person in America; let’s just say that the title’s a tad sarcastic. In fact one could argue that with this and Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore has created a cinematic diptych that defines the Noughties, a two-part Film of the Decade.

In fact, that’s what I thought for a few days: until I saw Chris Atkins’ Starsuckers, which reminded us that, even if our era is bookended by two New York institutions collapsing into dust, many of us have been distracted by Britney and Brangelina, by Jade and Jedward, and by the weird wish that maybe, just maybe, we could have a tiny slice of the same pie. Just a little too late for my book, I’ve found the film that sums it all up.

Bloody students

(via Mike Arnzen)

The quick and the dead

(Adopts Cyril Fletcher voice.) I am indebted to my old schoolchum Diccon Bewes (author of a forthcoming tome about all things Swiss), who alerted me to the Write Badly Well site, which may give some amusement to anybody who followed my Chasms of the Earth blog:

He slowly walked the slow, winding path towards the crooked, run-down old house. With one slow, hesitant hand he bravely, resolutely knocked on the dusty, pock-marked, ancient and frightening door. Slowly, it opened slowly. He slowly poked his brave head through the narrow, foreboding gap.
‘Hello?’ he slowly said, bravely.

Dear Nick Griffin...

Half of my ancestry is of the sort of Anglo-Saxon stock that you revere (possibly with a small dash of Celt, the sort of thing you mention to reinforce the notion that yours is a British rather than English party). The other half is Polish Jewish, a rag-tag bunch that came over in about 1900, economic migrants and asylum seekers.

Should I send my legs back to where they came from?

Meanwhile...

Thinking about Cohen and e-books at Rock's Back Pages; and it’s been a week of Stephen Fry and annoying choppers at the Noughties blog.

We could be heroes

Ah, the London Film Festival, a chance to star-spot (Steven Soderbergh and, er... Nigel Havers) and to feel smug because you’ve seen a movie about a fortnight before your friends get a chance. A few titles tickle my postmodern bone, as they turn in on the film-making process, and ultimately themselves.

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take comes from the Adam Curtis school of using archive footage, smartly juxtaposed with talking heads. Alfred Hitchcock finds himself introducing not his TV show in the 1950s and 60s, but broadcasters and politicians nervously assessing the Soviets' lead in the space race, and Nixon’s ‘kitchen debate’ with Krushchev. Via a plot borrowed from Borges, the focus shifts to Hitchcock himself, and a weird encounter that may or may not have occurred during the filming of The Birds. We never forget we’re watching a movie, as we’re shown Hitchcock’s body double and vocal impersonator getting into their stride; were Dick and Nikita playing their parts as well?

L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot appears to be a more straightforward proposition. It’s a documentary about the efforts of Clouzot (best known for The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques) to make a movie about paranoia and jealousy within an apparently happy marriage. The 1964 shoot was a catalogue of disasters: Clouzot didn’t get on with the female lead, Romy Schneider; his habit of waking up his colleagues in the middle of the night with new ideas alienated the technicians; the fact that the artificial lake that was central to the story was due to be drained 20 days after shooting started only added to the pressures. Things got so bad that the leading man, Serge Reggiani, walked away from the film; his replacement lasted a matter of hours; and then while he was filming a Sapphic dream sequence on a boat, Clouzot suffered a coronary, and the whole project was put on ice. The film was eventually made by Claude Chabrol, 30 years later.

The inevitable comparison is with Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's doomed attempt to film the Don Quixote story. But the footage here has added resonance, because many involved in the project – including Schneider, Reggiani and Clouzot himself – are dead, adding an extra layer of poignancy to the sense of missed opportunities. And, great as my regard is for Gilliam, he never used blue lipstick as shorthand for a dream sequence, did he?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s comeback, Micmacs, is less obviously *about* film, although there are numerous nods and winks: the hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is seen mouthing along to the (French dubbed) soundtrack of The Big Sleep; a security guard does an excruciating De Niro impression; there’s a neat reference to Jeunet’s own Delicatessen, and even to Micmacs itself (via film posters).

But there’s also an implicit reproach to modern Hollywood. Micmacs is essentially a warped superhero movie, in which a band of outsiders pool their talents (contortionism; arithmetic; making stuff out of junk) for the common good. They’re not really freaks; but, because this is Jeunet, they look far uglier – far more like us – than the ravishingly beautiful mutants of the X-Men franchise.

Micmacs is essentially the story of how Bazil, who lost his father to a landmine, and very nearly his own life to a bullet, takes revenge on the rival arms manufacturers he holds responsible. The immediate comparison is with another comic book adaptation, Iron Man, which essentially comes down to a final battle between a good arms dealer and a bad arms dealer (see Chris Morris’s Good & Bad AIDS sketch); whereas Jeunet damns them both. Which may be politically naïve (think Boy George’s analysis of military malfeasance) but does make for better cinema.

Dead Kennedy

From the Telegraph obituary of Ludovic Kennedy:

Indeed he never really lost a certain aristocratic contempt for television and dismissed as ludicrously self-important the views of those television executives who believed that “a thing said simultaneously to 15 million people will carry more influence than something said privately at a pub or dinner party or picked up elsewhere in the course of the day.”

I suspect he never got the hang of Twitter.

It’s real but it ain’t exactly there

Caught me a bit by surprise, as it’s not meant to be out till next month, but my new Leonard Cohen biography appears to be available from Amazon UK.

Feasting on Stephen

...and the next time someone suggests that poorly argued, badly written, self-indulgent blogs are debasing culture and making it harder for conscientious, thoroughly researched journalism to get a look-in, just refer them to this.

Jondrytay, Anton Vowl, Charlie Brooker and Michael Deacon weigh in, as do many others.

Eventually, Moir apologises, but misses the point. Her worst sin isn’t the snide fag-bashing that’s been a staple of the right-wing tabloids for decades. It’s the standard of her journalism that stinks; and it took the derided Twitterati to point it out.

PS: Another angle.