About cover versions

The Guardian, shamelessly intending to wind us all up, has created a worst-to-best list of every Abba single — although, for a change, I reckon they’ve got it pretty much right. SOS is in the top spot, and the passing reference to Portishead’s magnificent reworking made me realise that the best cover versions aren’t those that, like Baudrillard with a beatbox, obliterate the original, but the ones that make you go back to to the initial offering, reinvestigating it, looking for things you might have missed the first time around; Nick Cave’s The Carnival is Over or Aretha Franklin’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, for instance. Any other examples?

And, on a vaguely related note, the news that Ed Sheeran is being sued over the supposed similarity between one of his tiresome ditties and Let’s Get It On (hint: there isn’t one) puts me in the difficult position of defending the inexplicably successful strummer against the genius that is Marvin Gaye (or at least his estate). And the fact that this comes on a day when the most sensible voice on Brexit comes from Danny bloody Dyer suggests the world really has gone mad.

About the cleaners

A brief stop in the SOAS bar last night and I realise that, in aesthetic terms at least, today’s student radicals are still yearning for the good old days.

About the possibility of a podcast

How come blogs have been replaced by podcasts when they take up even more of your time and attention?

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) 22 June 2018

This blog has been running for nearly a dozen years and about half that period has involved labouring under a metaphorical cloud labelled “IS BLOGGING DEAD?” Seriously, should I finally do the decent thing and become a podcaster? Or a vlogger? Or whatever people will be doing in six months’ time that will have people discussing the death of podcasting and/or vlogging?

About Monkey Jesus

Older readers may recall the tale of the fresco in a Spanish church that was subjected to an overenthusiastic restoration job, resulting in what was immediately dubbed The Monkey Jesus.

It did provoke a few heated discussions about the intersections between artistic accomplishment, religious devotion and tourist dollars, especially when the revised version started attracting far more punters to the church than it had in its earlier form. But is the whole notion of a Simian Redeemer so unusual? Ambling through the V&A yesterday, I came across this, from 14th-century Bohemia. And I suspect it’s not the only example.

About Bourdain

To be honest, I’ve met rather too many chefs who were trying a little too hard to be Anthony Bourdain, whose death was announced today; some of them ended up closer to Ainsley Harriott. One thing that distinguished him from many of his contemporaries was that he could write. (Or, to be less charitable and because I know how these things work, he had a ghost writer/editor who decided Bourdain’s schtick might appeal to people who could read.) This, from Kitchen Confidential:

I was a sous-chef at a very fine two-star place on 39th, where I dimly recall preparing a four-course meal for Paul Bocuse; he thanked me in French, I think. My brain, at this point, was shriveled by cocaine, and I made the mistake of telling a garde-manger man that if he didn’t hurry up with an order I’d tear his eyes out and skull-fuck him, which did not endear me to the fussy owner manager.

About Kate Spade

A genuine Facebook exchange I just saw:

“OMG, RIP Kate Spade” 

“They closed down?”

Wrapped up in there is a whole narrative about the extent to which capitalism is trouncing real life but for the moment I’ll just let it hover here.

About women’s things

I report, without comment or gloss, that the BBC’s forthcoming series of monologues about women’s lives over the past 100 years will be called Snatches.