About Twitter

I was an early adopter of Twitter and loved its rambunctious vibe for many years. It even brought me a brief moment of notoriety. 

I was relaxed about the change of ownership but gradually sensed a coarsening of the texture, hearty debate being replaced by shrill chanting, like a digital Millwall match. So I used it incrementally less and then, about a year ago, I stopped using it entirely. Few people noticed, I’m sure, but reports from those still in the trenches suggested I’d made the right move. I’m now on Bluesky which, for the time being at least, is more to my taste. And, since the recent US election, and Elon Musk’s prominent role in that unfortunate occurrence, a lot more ex-Tweeters have come on board.

But that’s just my take. Brian Klaas puts things into historical context (did you know about the lunar bat people of 1835?) and explains exactly how Musk weaponised his acquisition and why we should worry whether we use it or not: 

Our attention is finite, and the more we divert it to sensationalist lies, the more that we aid and abet actual conspiracies and corruption that warrant harsh public scrutiny. If we aren’t careful, we’ll meme ourselves straight into dystopia. Unfortunately, amid those embers of a dysfunctional society burning itself down, it’s clear that those who lit the match on the internet will inevitably become rich, now with the help of Musk.

About Bob Dylan

A currently popular model for online content is what I call “I went” journalism, in which a cultural product (a stage play, a theme park, a restaurant, you name it) is covered in the form of a narrative, in which the writer’s own personal experience takes precedence over any explicit critical engagement. So the banausic details of the evening (how easy it is to park, the variety of ice creams available in the interval, whether there was someone unusually tall in front of the writer) get equal billing with such trifles as acting or direction or the provenance of the hispi cabbage. 

Consider, for example, Kayleigh Cantrell’s piece about Bob Dylan’s recent gig in Liverpool. Yes, she gives some idea what it was like. The band “performed elegantly”, assisted by “stage lamps, which simply added to the classiness”. And, fear not, Bob “played his signature harmonica”. Kayleigh does namecheck several songs, and observes that Dylan played them differently from the way he did them on his records, but doesn’t explain how, nor does she ever venture an opinion as to why.

Because if she did that, she wouldn’t have had time to reflect on her excitement at going to her first phone-free gig. (“It added so much more to the experience” – OK, but what exactly did it add?). Or indeed for an extended coda about a busker playing Dylan tunes outside the arena, who appears to have made lots of money from the punters and Kayleigh’s wondering how much he made. (So why didn’t she ask him? Like a journalist might?)

Let’s not heap any opprobrium upon Kayleigh, though. She’s just giving readers what they want, a bare description of what happened, alongside how it made her feel. Nothing to frighten the horses. No analysis, no inference, no theory. After all, more people watch Gogglebox than read what’s left of the music press, let alone anything with “CULTURAL” in the title. And what she’s doing is far from new, of course. Think back to 2012 and Marilyn Hagerty’s legendary appreciation of a new branch of Olive Garden. Keep it up, Kayleigh. Never mind what might be going on inside the head of the Nobel-winning harmonica-blower. Just remember the breadsticks.

PS: If you’re one of the half-dozen people who still give a toss what old-style critics think, here’s David Thomson interviewing Greil Marcus.

PPS: I suppose this week I should have been musing about what’s happened on the other side of the Atlantic. I’ve got form, haven’t I? But then, all the success of the populist right appears to be based on surface observation and gut reaction rather than anything deeper or more intellectually testing, so maybe Kayleigh in Dylanland and four more years of Trump are just two manifestations of the same thing.

PPPS: Ah, another one of those old-fashioned music hacks – in this instance Richard Williams, formerly of Melody Maker and Time Out, and the original presenter of Whistle Test – also reviews a Dylan gig, this time putting the experience in some sort of context, and even going so far as to suggest that he wasn’t all that great, actually. And he doesn’t mention a busker, or what happened to his phone. Or, indeed, breadsticks. That said, Williams, his own track record notwithstanding, is reduced to putting the review up on his own blog. One-nil to Kayleigh, I reckon. 

PPPPS: Yet another oldie weighs in, this time Toby Litt. And he actually mentions history. The very nerve...

About A Martian

This morning I discussed Craig Raine’s A Martian Sends a Postcard Home with a group of bright, polite and (above all) curious Russian teenagers. The gist of the poem is that an alien is describing commonplace objects and phenomena to his friends and that once we decode the things – from books to toilets to dreams – that he’s writing about, we see them anew, as if through fresh eyes, or whatever sensory organs Martians have.

There were extra layers of decoding that the students had to do though. First, the purely linguistic, which I’d expected – what is impatience? But then I realised they were being tasked with identifying things which which they have only a very fuzzy acquaintance. Home phones. Wristwatches. Postcards, of course. And pretty soon we can add books and cars you drive yourself to the list.

I wonder how long before they’re baffled by the very idea of dreams.

About cruising

From the Instagram account (of all things) of The Face magazine (ditto), a piece that affects to investigate the phenomenon of Gen Z and younger millennials going on cruises. And among the factors they apparently appreciate is the fact that a cruise offers “a way to have everything from your day-to-day life replicated”.

So what the younglings really want from these cruises is a simulacrum of normality, but on a big boat. Damn, I’m so old, I remember when the whole point of a holiday to leave everything from your day-to-day life at home.

PS: They’ve deleted it now.

About Amazon reviews

Not having published much in recent years, I’ve got out of the habit of scouring Amazon and similar sites for what people have deigned to say about my offerings. Which is why I’ve only just noticed that, three and a half years ago, a user known only as “magic” declared that my book about the Noughties was

Fun, and easy to read

which I’m sure was meant kindly but feels like a variant on “Mostly Harmless”.

About these new-fangled mobile telephone things

I’m teaching a group in their late teens/early 20s (Brazilian, Korean, Swiss) and the increasingly preposterous textbook entreats me to throw out the following gem as a prompt to discussion:

Do you think the internet / smart phones have affected how you read?

Except that, given their age, this is a bit like asking whether their reading habits have been affected in any way by breathing.

About apostrophes (apostrophe’s?)

Over to Germany, where – in a cute inversion of the tiresome refrain, “if it weren’t for Churchill/America/Wonder Woman you’d all be speaking German” – language purists complain that allowing possessive apostrophes represents acquiescence to the cultural steamroller that is global English. The irony is of course that native English speakers are, for the most part, utterly clueless about how apostrophes work. If the Germans do deign to use them, they’ll at least learn to do it properly and then tut loudly about the mistakes when they come over here. 

About long books

Jonathan Bate’s worries about undergraduates’ declining ability to cope with long, complex books are taken up by the Daily Mail, which confidently pins the blame on social media. By which, inevitably, it means TikTok rather than inane globules of micro-celeb gossip emanating from certain tabloid... ah, right, that would be it...

PS: The Mail, obviously, has previous.

About Warhol

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:

When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.

The thing is, I still believe that...

PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:

...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.

About Poppy Baynham

There have been hundreds of (two, actually) complaints about an art work by one Poppy Baynham in a gallery in Hay-on-Wye which includes a black triangle with pink wool on top and those of you who recall (however vaguely) my past posts about Gustave Courbet and Deborah de Robertis and Egon Schiele and Leena McCall will realise that, yes, he’s talking about ladyparts again or, more specifically, images of ladyparts, with a side order of the hairy bits in images of ladyparts and the questions of whether said hair makes said images more or less dangerous.

Two new angles: one, that Ms Baynham is quite upfront that she’s actively seeking all this attention, and any comments received will be used in her final-year dissertation. (Will they then Become Art? Another day, maybe.)

The other is that in this blog’s new, pic-free state, I don’t need to agonise over whether any particular picture I use might be pandering to and/or subverting the male gaze. 

About class and things

Was with a mixed (teens and 20s, Italian, Brazilian, Turkish) group of students yesterday and the sometimes awkward subject of social class was discussed, and how it manifests itself in our various homelands. And we got on to cultural capital and cultural literacy and finally pieced together the phrase that defines us: The People Who Still Read Books.

About Oasis

The news that Oasis may or may not be reforming fills me, as Peter Cook put it, with inertia. That said, the varying responses from those who were around in the 1990s does rather reinforce my belief that Britpop was in fact two parallel movements, one populated by people whose first musical memory was Bowie, the other by pre-pubescent Slade fans. (And as Lester Bangs said of Slade, when they were trying to crack America, “Sure they’re the new Beatles – they’re all Ringo.”)

PS: Lifted from the Threads (I joined this week) account of a vicar (you meet the strangest people): 

The great thing about their songs is you'd learn the lyrics after hearing them once. That is a gift Noel Gallagher has.

But is it, though? A great thing, a gift, whatever?

PPS: There’s been acres (or however we measure it now) of coverage given over to the news, but this takedown by Simon Price is probably the best thing to appear: 

...nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans.

About yet more lists

Lists of the best of things are dead and gone, kids, but what should replace them? The Independent offers us the most overrated albums, a stance that may have made sense 20-odd years ago, when Rolling Stone touted a canon ludicrously top-heavy with white male rockers from the 60s and 70s (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, et al). Now, however, there is no such consensus, no icons against which we can be clastic. Sgt Pepper and Astral Weeks are still in place, but who ever thought Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor or A Brief Enquiry into Online Relationships by The 1975 had risen to any sort of cultural prominence from which they deserved to be knocked down? Even the authors of the list lack the courage of their pitchfork-wielding convictions; the greatness of PJ Harvey's Let England Shake is acknowledged, it just isn’t necessarily as good as some of her earlier stuff.

Rather more coherent, in methodology at least, is a poll organised by the blog They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? This time there’s a defined canon against which rage (the 2022 Sight & Sound poll) but it’s not just the resulting list of 100 films in the crosshairs; it’s any of the 4,336 films that received even a single vote, and are excluded from consideration in this selection. So, in theory at least, this should be a list of overlooked, forgotten gems, the ones that established critics and filmmakers either hadn’t seen or didn’t want to admit they liked. And there are such nuggets; but it also reveals that the great and good asked to contribute to the S&S poll had managed to miss such copper-bottomed classics as Grand Hotel, Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Angels With Dirty Faces, Goodbye Mr Chips, Heaven Can Wait, Dead of Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Brighton Rock, Jour de Fête, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bad Day at Black Rock, Bob le Flambeur, Spartacus, A Fistful of Dollars, The Ipcress File, Wait Until Dark, Claire’s Knee, Little Big Man, Vanishing Point, Marathon Man, The Long Good Friday, Diva, Mephisto, A Zed and Two Noughts, City on Fire, Radio Days, Midnight Run, Man Bites Dog, Reservoir Dogs, Fallen Angels, City of Lost Children, Shall We Dance?, Pi, Audition, Tears of the Black Tiger, Lagaan, Downfall, Gomorra...

Which inevitably sets up another list, another canon, against which another band of discontents can vent their fury. A process that can continue over and over again, until we get to the point when someone complains that Sgt Pepper or Citizen Kane or War and Peace or the Mona Lisa doesn’t get the critical love it deserves in these polls and we start all over again.

About riots (2024 version)

The current urban unrest in the UK prompted me to look back the similar (but at the same time very different) outbreaks that took place in 2011. This time round, I haven’t seen a repeat of the observation that looters were consciously avoiding bookshops but maybe that’s because there are hardly any bookshops left to ignore...

About trousers

The BBC has run a story about some racist trousers. No, that’s not quite accurate. The trousers themselves are blameless but some of the marketing copy used to describe them accidentally included a racist phrase. No, wait, even that doesn’t quite cover it. The copy juxtaposed two entirely banal and innocent words that some racists have also juxtaposed because when combined they sound like a word that isn’t regarded as acceptable any more.

And already I face a dilemma. If I mention those two words (either of which in isolation is still acceptable in polite society) I’ll be implicated in the normalisation of racist discourse, albeit racist discourse of a particularly sniggering, juvenile kind. And if I don’t I’ll just be falling into the same trap as the BBC, and running a story that, for most readers, makes absolutely no sense. So I’ll take the cowardly middle path and link to a page that explains the phrase, ringfencing that link with all the necessary warnings about offence and triggers and maybe a few phone numbers in case it gets too much.

Because we are in a time of Voldemort words, when some language is seen as so dangerous and despicable that it can’t be mentioned even in situations where the language – as distinct from the thing the language describes – is the whole point of the story. In the case of the trousers, this is despite the fact that the verboten phrase was consciously invented to bypass such censorship, standing as it does for another word that’s even worse. The forces of moral purity are inevitably playing a game of ethical Whac-a-Mole, chasing down each iteration of evolving ideological impurity in turn, always a few steps behind. This despite the fact that the bad word – not the phrase used in the trousers copy, but the word that that phrase replaced – was until a few decades ago entirely unremarkable and happily deployed by the same people that it is now used to demonise. And, in some contexts, still is.

And as always with taboo language, this is only apparent if you are already aware of the bad syllables and if this is the case presumably you’ve already been subject to the harm they might present. Unless, of course you are part of some enlightened elect that can come into contact with the words and emerge unscathed. I’m reminded of the tendency of translators of Boccaccio in the 19th and early-20th centuries to leave the sauciest bit of the story in the original language, as if those bright enough to understand medieval Italian would be less corruptible than the rest of us.

The tale of Earl Butz is also relevant; he was fired as Nixon’s agriculture secretary for making a joke that was at the same time racist, scatological and entirely unfunny, but the primness of contemporary media meant that it was difficult for the casual observer to deduce what it was he’d said to provoke his ejection. (In our own time, the all-encompassing label of “inappropriate” would be applied.)

And finally, Conrad’s book that I suppose we should now call “The N-word of the Narcissus” or something similar. Except that when it was first published in the United States, it was called The Children of the Sea. Not because the language in the original title might be thought offensive to the ethnic group that it described (few in 1897 cared about that) but because white people might be dissuaded from buying a book about that ethnic group.

About not reading Baudrillard

As ever behind the curve, I’m only now reading Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface and I’m not going to feed some kind of global metanarrative by presuming to comment on its themes of cultural/ethnic appropriation and attendant rights/wrongs. Instead, I’ll pluck out one sentence and leave it hanging, like an image in search of an absence to conceal:

Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.

About Bacchus

(For some reason I suddenly find myself unable to post pictures here. It may be a signal from the digital deities that I need to upgrade my computer, or migrate from Blogger or knock the whole archaic blogging thing on the head just as I’m staggering towards my 20th anniversary but for the moment at least I’ll take as a cue to rely on text alone, an OuLiPo-like constraint that may or may not enhance my creativity. And just to demonstrate how constrained that creativity is, the post is almost certainly going to be shorter than this mundane preamble.)

Performative outrage aplenty at the images of a female tourist simulating coitus with Giambologna’s statue of Bacchus. Except that I can’t help but think that if you’re going to dry-hump a deity, who better to do it with than the god of fertility and madness?

[IMAGINE SUITABLY DIONYSIAN PIC HERE]

PS: Previous collisions of fleshy and carved naughtiness, but in Cambodia.

PPS: And in Olympic news, apparently it’s wrong to mock Christian images but it turns out to have been nothing more than a bunch of Greek gods after all, so that’s OK.

About crabs

Was teaching a group of Hong Kong teens last week. They’d just visited the National Gallery and I asked them to identify the picture they enjoyed the most and explain why.

One girl picked Van Gogh’s Two Crabs. She described it well enough, with emphasis on the colours. But why did you like this one in particular, I asked.

She beamed. “They’re delicious!”

About the election, if only briefly

I was going to say something profound about the political events of the past few weeks but Rafael Behr got in there ahead of me: 

To an extent, Sunak’s failure was seeded in the unstable electoral coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019 with the promise to “get Brexit done”. Implementing an agenda in government that might satisfy the divergent interests of a culturally and geographically incoherent voting bloc – the ex-Labour working-class north and the traditional Tory southern shires – was an impossible feat of political alchemy.

And Cold War Steve makes art from schadenfreude:

About biography

Claire Dederer:

The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us... There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.

Germaine Greer: 

I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Charles Dickens, read his fucking books.

PS: Also from Dederer’s book Monsters, a zinger by Vladimir Nabokov: 

The best part of a writer‘s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.

PPS: And in the spirit of her enquiry as to whether we are allowed to enjoy good art by blackguards and rapscallions:

About Chomsky

About indie reading

Anna Doble on being an indie music fan in the mostly-analogue 90s:

London Fields by Martin Amis sat on my shelf for at least a year in about 1997. Why? Because one of Blur once mentioned it in an interview. My copy wasn’t even mine – it was taken out on loan from my home-town library which led me to racking up a fine so insurmountable (£8-ish) that I eventually returned it under cover of darkness in a covert mission to the marketplace whereupon I shoved the book through the library’s awkward letterbox and ran panting for the hills. Other books on the curriculum in the School of Indie were Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which we all actually read).

Do musicians tell people what to read these days? I know the likes of Dolly Parton encourage kids to read, but where’s the equivalent of Graham (I bet it was Graham, he wore glasses) begging up Martin Amis? And the Manics doing the same for Mishima and many others, Radiohead for Chomsky and Naomi Klein, Paul Weller for Colin MacInnes, Edwyn Collins for Salinger, Morrissey for Wilde and Capote (less so Keats and Yeats). Is literary prescriptivism not A Thing any more?

About Kafka and crockery

Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.

And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.

PS: And a few hours later, I heard another BBC journalist refer to a calvacade.

About pumpkins etc

Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.

And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.

And then...

(And all the time I’m simultaneously worrying about and luxuriating in the exclusivity of all of these. Are they funny in spite of the fact that a lot of people won’t get the gag, or because of the fact? And somehow this ties into the most depressing article I’ve read this week, Elle Griffin on how nobody buys books any more.)

About Kindles

When Kindles and other e-readers first appeared, with the promise for travellers in particular that a whole library would occupy less space and weight in your luggage than a slim paperback, I did wonder whether the new form might have missed a significant consideration when it comes to reading in public: specifically, the act of letting other people see what you’re reading. Like the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear, or the flavour of crisps you eat, it’s part of the persona you present to the world. The latest Murakami, or a Richard Osman rip-off? Unfair as it is, people will make assumptions.

And then I saw this:

About missing the point

Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:

I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight. 

And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then

But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.

Which sounds to me like a pretty good definition of Chiles’s chosen, and in his case, well-remunerated trade.

I don’t want to disturb anyone with an image of Chiles, so I’ll just leave this here, wondering whether in a year’s time we’ll have the faintest idea to what it refers:

About Roger Corman

Roger Corman, who died a few days ago, batting back accusations that his work was mere exploitation: “Show me a film which isn’t an exploitation film.”

Possibly a little trite, but when you give it even a moment’s thought, it applies to pretty much all art, doesn’t it?

About nostalgia(s)

In an otherwise tedious and banal article about, of all things, Virgin’s cruise line, the CEO comes up with this inadvertently fascinating nugget: “People like to be reminded of nostalgia.”

It sounds daft, of course it does; surely it’s nostalgia that does the reminding. But then I realise that when watching the old episodes of Top of the Pops that BBC Four is running on Friday nights, some of my favourite moments come from Darts, a band that achieved success in the late 1970s by providing kooky versions of songs that were even then already 15 or 20 years old. And then when I was at university, when mainstream pop was wallowing in post-Live Aid earnestness, my friends and I constructed a world that resounded to soul and funk from past decades (and an aesthetic that merged 40s zoot suits and 50s Soho and 60s Left Bank blankness). So, sorry Mr Saverimuttu, I guess I do like to be reminded of nostalgia. Just not the crappy nostalgia you’re peddling.

And now I find out that Britpop, another trend that had more than one eye on an imagined past, has apparently been revived (although it appears that translates as “wears a Fred Perry and has a St George’s flag in the back of the video” but maybe that’s enough).

PS: And then there are conflicting nostalgias. I was annoyed when stories covering the death of the actor Bernard Hill led with his appearances in Titanic and The Lord of the Rings, with (to me at least) his most important role, as Yosser Hughes in The Boys from the Blackstuff relegated to a later paragraph (even on the BBC, where Blackstuff was first broadcast). Of course Blackstuff was over 40 years ago; but Titanic was nearly 30...

About Courbet (yet again)

And so we come back to Courbet’s 1866 picture The Origin of the World (see here) and more specifically the passions it arouses in Luxembourg’s finest provocateuse Deborah de Robertis (see here) who has adorned the painting (or more specifically the glass protecting it) with a #MeToo tag “because women are the origin of the world”. Which is a bit like complaining about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because it’s called Sunflowers but, hey, it all adds to the sum of human joy, doesn’t it?

Except that then the French culture minister Rachida Dati weighs in with an intriguing contribution: “An artwork is not a poster to colour in with the day’s message.” Which may or may not be true but at least it suggests that Ms Dati has thought about the subject. And I remember that not so long ago my own country’s government gave the equivalent role to the ludicrous Nadine Dorries and not for the first time a bit of me wishes I were French.

About teaching and crying

Zadie Smith on teaching creative writing in New York (spotted by Padraig Reidy):

They said workshop, so I took a story of mine that I’d written when I was young and was bad, and marked it up in front of the class. And I took a story of theirs and did it on a lightbox. And the student started crying. NYU explained to me that that is not what they meant. So I went down several gears.

About horses

The recent incident that saw horses from the Household Cavalry running loose in the streets of central London is surely open to all sorts of interpretations: musing on the place of such ceremony in a modern army; questions of the relationship between humans and animals; hints towards the Book of Revelation.

But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.

Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?

PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.

About Yoko Ono

 And Ms Ono also appears, in a roundabout way, to have invented the simulacrum before Baudrillard did.

(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)

About pretension

When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but I was amused when I recently revisited my old copy of Will Pop Eat Itself? by Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that one) and noticed that by the second page he was comparing This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by grebo titans PWEI to The Waste Land. And now I wonder whether the modest sales of my book were down to it not being pretentious enough.

About AI

In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.

Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:

Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? 

In other words, the processes by which people engage with all the gubbins of society is as significant as the content itself, and that’s what AI is stripping away. But it’s not as if the purveyors of AI are doing this deliberately, is it? They’re not consciously proposing policies that will make humanity that bit more stupid are they oh wait hang on...

PS: And even if you’re not that bothered about AI destroying the canon of Western literature, you might want to know what it’s doing to your fridge. 

PPS: And, following on from Musk’s tweet, I think this is supposed to be an April Fool’s gag but these days, who knows?

About art and men

In Tasmania, a man is claiming that his exclusion from the Ladies Lounge, an exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art, constitutes gender discrimination. The museum’s lawyer contends that his being turned away is integral to what the art is about: “Part of the experience is being denied something that is desired.” 

So Lau’s exclusion from the show is art, as is Lau himself and patriarchy and the court case and the women doing the conga to a Robert Palmer tune, no, follow the link, I’m not making it up. The only question must be, if that’s all art, what isn’t?

About comedians

Once again, I just record these observations with little or no comment. One day, they’ll have a place in my magnum opus about cultural assumptions, the bells-and-whistles box set spun off from my MA dissertation. But till then...

In Radio 4’s slightly contrived panel show One Person Found This Helpful, Frank Skinner feels obliged to explain that Tom Stoppard is a “famous playwright”, and given that the gag is about which of them, Skinner or Stoppard, would grab the headlines if they both perished in an air crash, that need for clarification is significant. (A few years ago Stoppard himself mused gloomily about what needs to be explained these days.)

And on the same day, in The Observer, Stewart Lee, a comic of a roughly similar vintage, lobs in a reference to Messiaen’s birdsong and finds himself under no such obligation. 

About a classical education

An interesting piece by Emma Green in The New Yorker about a resurgence in what’s known as liberal arts and/or classical education. Whatever you want to call it, it stands in opposition to the modern mainstream of pedagogy, favouring the canonical Great Books (and implicitly Dead White Males), which makes it popular with right-wing politicians, although as Green makes clear, that’s by no means the whole story. And if I look at a Trump rally, I wonder how many present, including the main speaker, would understand this gag: 

And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.

And before I’m accused of snobbery, I’m well aware that there are vast gaps in my own cultural knowledge; opera, for example is little more than a blur. That said, I do know that Richard Strauss wasn’t Johann’s son, unlike the poor sap writing on the ENO website... 

PS: And while we’re there, the Arts Council of England is condemning opera critics for, among other sins, “almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”.

About ‘Hallelujah’

A while back, I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen, with a focus on That Song, which had become ubiquitous two decades or more after it had first been released (and mostly ignored). And today, in the midst of an online discussion about the incongruous uses to which it’s been put (see also ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’) I finally realise that I should have called the book SAD JEWS FUCKING.

About pop

Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response:

Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s bald and looks very boring. Probably not intelligent enough for classical though; Andy Williams fan? Nana Mouskouri?

PS: On a happier note, I’m now in the dictionary. For context, go here.

About Brontez Purnell

I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look.

About Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

In, of all places, a news item about the death of Stuart Organ, who for many years played the headmaster of Grange Hill school, I see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead described as “a spin-off of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. And the phrase strikes me as totally wrong-headed but the more I think of it, it feels about right. After all, R&G isn’t a sequel, nor yet a prequel. It takes place in the same fictional universe as Hamlet, the action of which is progressing at the same time, and occasionally intersects. It exists in relation to Hamlet in the same way that Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures exist in relation to Doctor Who, sharing characters and narratives, but with a different emphasis.

But then I still wonder whether the author of the piece actually knows that, or just threw the sentence together after a brief Wikipedia check. And do you know what makes me doubt her? It’s the fact that she refers not to “Hamlet”, but to “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. Someone who knew about theatre would instinctively offer the title alone, assuming that everyone knows what Hamlet is, who wrote it, approximately what it’s about, even if they aren’t able to quote it by the yard. Which feels a bit harsh, because her definition of Stoppard’s play is ultimately correct. But it’s accidentally correct and I wonder whether that’s good enough.

About syrup

The clever people who sell Lyle’s Golden Syrup are removing the image of bees swarming round a dead lion from at least some of its packaging. “Our fresh, contemporary design brings Lyle’s into the modern day, appealing to the everyday British household while still feeling nostalgic and authentically Lyle’s,” says the brand director, which obviously means nothing whatsoever, so others have stepped in to fill the gap. “The story of it coming from religious belief could put the brand in an exclusionary space, especially if it was to go viral on X or TikTok,” suggests a marketing academic. “It’s woke!” screech the readers of the Daily Mail, but frankly, what isn’t these days, as far as they’re concerned?

I know as much as they do, so here’s my guess. They wanted to get away from the Biblical reference (“Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” Judges, chapter 14) not because it might offend anybody’s sensibilities, religious or otherwise, not because they’ve finally realised a rotting cat isn’t the most appetising way to sell sweet goop, but because nobody understands it. Nobody knows who Samson (who supposedly said it) is, and nobody really cares. Why would you buy something that confronts you with your own ignorance every day? The semi-abstract lion’s face that replaces it doesn’t particularly refer to anything, doesn't challenge or provoke anything, especially not curiosity.

Of course, being a pedant above all things, my main objection to the logo is that the quote’s about honey, rather than syrup, which is a different product. But who cares about that?

PS: This may or may not be relevant. But I’m pretty sure it’s true.

About new music

Sean Thomas in The Spectator claims to have found empirical evidence that music is getting worse. I agree with his conclusion, but don’t recognise his claim to objectivity; music is getting worse because I’m getting old and so, presumably, is Mr Thomas. If I were young, it would all be great, but I’m not, which is why I only get excited by the Top of the Pops re-runs on Saturday nights if they date from 1978 to 1983. Incidentally, Thomas’s characterisation of a modern lyric as “the desire of the singer to ‘kill his mofo bitches’ and celebrate his expensive car, hat and Rolex watch” suggests that he last listened to a rap record in about 1991, and then only fleetingly.

Moreover, it needs to be noted that this year sees the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and the 200th of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, two groundbreaking works whose influence is still being felt. But I bet that in 1924 and 1824, there were plenty of people who could come up with an algorithm to prove that they were rubbish.

There is great music being produced now that will still be heard and loved in 2124 and beyond. We just don’t know what it is yet.

About Gregg and Timmy

I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.

Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.

The problem was that, unlike the Toms’ takes on their respective days, Wallace wasn’t trying to be funny, and the fact that his pride in being able to get into the gym half an hour before mere civilians, his staunch defence of Harvester, his wargaming, his lack of body fat, all speak of someone with such a total lack of self-awareness that Alan Partridge comparisons were inevitable. “Is this a parody?” we chorused.

No, it wasn’t. But this is:

This, Brian Blessed gong, Frazzles, the ghost of Patrick Macnee and all, is the work of Mark Bowsher but inevitably the whole thing developed a life of its own within hours and several people thought it was genuine. Well, genuine in the sense that Timmy Mallett himself had written it, not that it was in any way an accurate representation of his life.

Because ultimately all of the other articles are artifices, constructions hovering in a liminal space between objective reality and how the subject wishes to be presented. The difference is that the two Toms (and Jeffrey Bernard, who collaborated on Baker’s piece) were fully aware of what they were doing and Gregg Wallace wasn’t. And I’d like to think that if Timmy Mallett (with whom I once shared a lift, sandwiched between him and Tony Blackburn, which does demonstrate how easy it is to drift into Partridge territory) were to do a real article on these lines, it would be closer to the Toms than to what Gregg did. But a tiny bit like the parody version as well. Just to keep us guessing.

About Richard and Davros

There have been complaints that Michelle Terry is to play Richard III at the Globe. Not because she’s the artistic director of the theatre and appears to have nabbed the plum role for herself, but because the monarch has a disability, and Ms Terry doesn’t. (The fact that she’s a woman isn’t an issue, it seems.)

As always, these arguments throw up further arguments; now we’ve dug up Richard’s body, we know the nature of his disability (scoliosis), so does this mean that only actors with this specific condition should play him? And if actors with other disabilities (Arthur Hughes, Mat Fraser, Peter Dinklage) are allowed to take the role, would that not throw up the rather reductive and insulting implication that all disabilities are much the same? I’m also a little confused by Fraser’s response to Terry’s casting: “I will be personally boycotting the production if it goes ahead with this casting,” he says. “I’m done with the pretenders.” Isn’t pretending what actors do?

But wait – since Richard embodies that horrid old trope about the disabled villain, should the role even be played at all? Or, if it is, shouldn’t we excise all the references to his disability – “rudely stamped” and so on – to fit 21st-century sensibilities? I mean, that would seem to be the stance taken by Russell T Davies, who has declared that the evil genius Davros should from now on have legs. Which does mean that nobody can complain if Michelle Terry plays him.

PS: While we’re here, can we stop saying that art that doesn’t quite gel with those modern sensibilities (Friends is a apparently a main offender) is “problematic”? Art, especially drama, that doesn’t present us with problems is all but pointless.

About the Sixties

An alternative reality, in which Swinging London was devised and documented not by Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Beatles, but by Samuel Beckett.

(Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.)

About Barbie and being good

Oh what a brouhaha there is about the lack of love Barbie has received in terms of nominations for the upcoming Oscars. (In short, it got a nod in the Best Picture category, but its female director and female star were less happy. Ryan Gosling, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, spoke up for his spurned sisters but not to the extent of throwing his own chance away.)

For the record, I enjoyed the movie, especially its design (definitely one that has to be seen on the big screen) although it probably wouldn’t be in any of my best-of lists. Gerwig and Robbie are talented people but they’ve each done better things (Lady Bird and I, Tonya). That’s not what this is about, though, is it? Barbie, beneath the pink gleam, is a satire of sexism and patriarchy and masculinist assumptions and, so the logic goes, to deprive it of recognition is to condone all those bad things. 

Except that it really isn’t, is it? Films that are on the side of the angels aren’t inherently great films and yet the Oscar voters have long had a tendency to reward movies on the basis of their social values alone. The nadir of this came at the 78th awards, when the Best Picture gong went to Crash, a movie at once incoherent and simplistic, the script of which is pretty much the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ stretched over two hours. To add to the fun, it edged out Brokeback Mountain, so even as the Academy patted itself on the back for acknowledging that Racism Is A Bad Thing, it was panicking in case anyone might think it considered homophobia not to be equally reprehensible. Barbie’s relatively slim pickings may be a sign that Hollywood is finally shaking its way out of such ethical quandaries.

Society as a whole isn’t there yet. Maybe the problem is that at the same time as we have become more confident, even to the point of sanctimony, in our moral and political opinions, we feel less able to make aesthetic judgements, to declare that one film (book, song, play, etc) better than another by virtue of imagination, craft and skill rather than just, well, virtue. To argue on purely artistic grounds that X is a better actor or director or composer or balloon sculptor than Y takes us too close to assumptions about class and education that feel too uncomfortable to express. (Incidentally, we are in similar territory when it comes to language. We are encouraged seize on instances of misgendering or outdated racial epithets, but suggesting that the phrase “would of” is in some way incorrect looks plain rude.)

It almost feels as if we’ve slipped back to the Victorian era, when finger-wagging critics dismissed the likes of Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not for any inherent literary faults but because they were morally suspect. The specific criteria have changed (racism and misogyny and homophobia rather than fornication) but the priorities would be familiar to Hardy or the Brontës. We know what’s good, but not what’s good.

PS: My old mucker Clair, who used to hang around these parts as the Urban Woo, deals with the matter in characteristically brisk, no-nonsense fashion in The Independent.

PPS: Reductress, as it tends to, also gets it right:

About Barthes

Stolen from someone. Can’t remember who, which is grimly appropriate, I guess. Not for the first time, I think how much Barthes would have relished social media.

Also, from John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure: 

Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes is to be found in its assertion of the fact that each of us has a body, and that this body is different from everybody else’s. This is tosh. The real meaning of our dislikes is that they define us by separating us from what is outside us; they separate the self from the world that mere banal liking cannot do.

About Ballard

In 1974, JG Ballard gave an interview to an 18-year-old admirer, Akihiko Kokuryo, and offered a message to readers of the speculative fiction magazine in which it was published. Translated into Japanese and then back into English it feels like a pretty good way of coping with the modern world that he predicted so well, so often: 

I hope that you will always be skeptical, passionate, analytic, revolutionary, idealistic, dream-like, serene and hallucinated.

And in searching for an image, I find this clipping. We all have those mammoth novels deep inside, don’t we?

About Mean Girls (and mean girls)

The new movie Mean Girls (which is in fact the film version of the stage musical of the old movie Mean Girls) would appear to have been stripped of its, well, meanness. 

“If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the hospital,” says screenwriter Tina Fey, although whether she means it would provoke actual fisticuffs, or that Gen Z-ers are so fragile that verbal hostility might provoke a full-on breakdown, isn’t so clear. But then she seizes on what’s really changed, and what hasn’t: “People are still horrible, they're just more likely to anonymously type it. I would like to take but not teach a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they ever were, but now they couch it in virtue.” In other words, people are still reassuringly vile but maybe not in a way that transfers so easily to celluloid.

But it’s not just nastiness we need to be warned about. For a forthcoming show at Stratford East, we are alerted to “themes of joy, loss and grief”. I wonder whether you can experience so much joy it puts you in the hospital.

About Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, aka Trigger’s Broom, isn’t quite the same thing as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, but it occupies a similar space. And it does emit some lovely memeage.