cultural snow

In dreams

2012-01-27T10:34:00.001Z

Developers in Switzerland are planning a project that will house people with dementia in a mock-1950s village. Most of us who have spent time with someone suffering from Alzheimer’s or a similar condition will have noticed that long-term memories often remain clear long after the banal minutiae of today has become irreversibly fuzzy; the idea here, presumably, is that if someone thinks it’s 1952, why not create an environment that supports that illusion, free from any disturbing references to the recent. The present is a foreign country; we do things differently here.

One does wonder, though, whether the 1950s that will be created outside Berne will be an accurate replica, or one mediated through multiple subsequent representations of community life, whether it’s the wholesome innocence of Happy Days or the dark-underbelly school of David Lynch, The Truman Show or The Prisoner: carers dressed as gardeners and hairdressers will ensure that nobody leaves the village. Once again, we have a perfect simulacrum, a replica of something that never existed. I can see a small, silver-haired army shuffling across the trimmed lawns and past the hat shop, muttering “That is not what I meant at all; that is not it, at all.”

Komickino

2012-01-25T06:55:00.001Z

Long overcoats have gloomed their disapproval at news of Disney bringing out a t-shirt that squeezes the cover image of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album into the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. True, it’s a bit tacky, but I’m not sure that we should make the patronising assumption that those responsible don’t appreciate the bleak resonance of Peter Saville’s original design. It’s simply an act of recuperation, the absorption and appropriation of something that was once radical and challenging into the big, comforting womb of consumer capitalism. As such, it’s a) been going on for decades and b) a belated act of revenge for all the indignities that have been inflicted on the blameless rodent in the past in the name of détournement, recuperation’s persistent mirror – a process that increasingly feels like scrabbling for the crumbs that fall from capitalism’s table then waiting until capitalism has gone to the toilet and putting the crumbs back on the table in an amusing pattern.

Sixteen sexual positions on the sand

2012-01-22T07:43:00.001Z

Annie mentioned Philip Larkin’s poem Breadfruit, which got me thinking about some of the white, male inhabitants of Bangkok, negotiating the narrow line between depravity and pathos, as I’ve discussed in the past on CNN (see here and here). But then I thought a little deeper, and although Larkin’s specifically discussing the hopeless erotic fantasies of adolescent and/or senescent males, there’s more going on. The “dream of naked native girls” is any fond delusion in the head of anyone, whether a youthful yearning or a consolation in old age.

But while we’re on the subject of preposterous old predators surrounded by nubile flesh, a YouTube trawl provoked by the sad loss of Etta James somehow ended up here:

Citation not required

2012-01-19T11:21:00.001Z

So, where were you when Wikipedia went off on its 24-hour strop? The inevitable one-liners about journalists and students suffering emotional meltdown in the absence of their fountain of facts did raise a few questions. I mean, is it OK to use Wikipedia as a source provided you attribute and cite appropriately? Or has the haranguing pedantry of the Wiki editors forced us into a state of neurotic overcitation?

I’ve succumbed to this foible in the past, desperately ploughing through some arcane text that I haven’t really read so as to give a vaguely credible sheen to my inane ramblings. A little Adorno or McLuhan goes a long way. But Simon Reynolds has a better tactic, acknowledging that something is moderately interesting, but not important enough for a full-blown footnote. As he says in Retromania: “‘Plus/and’, a philosophical term of uncertain origins (I’m told Deleuze and Guattari used it), is the buzz concept.” The vague “I’m told...” is the clever bit. The Wikipedants would insist that he identify the person who told him.

Barbed

2012-01-17T08:30:00.001Z

There is a Facebook campaign afoot to encourage Mattel to bring out a bald Barbie, to offer encouragement to girls who have lost their hair because of cancer treatment. While I can’t argue with the core motivation at work here – making sick children feel a bit happier – I do have a few qualms about what appears to be the endgame. Rather than toe-poking the whole ghastly Barbie aesthetic into the prehistoric swamp where it properly belongs, these well-meaning agitators just seek to shift the parameters a little: it is as important as ever to be a beewootiful puhwincess, it seems, but you can still achieve that goal even if you’re as hairless as a porn star’s undercarriage and throwing up every few hours.

Moreover, the campaigners have apparently missed the chance to offer a sense of empowerment to the children on whose behalf they claim to act. Want a bald Barbie? Get a normal Barbie; cut its hair off. And the same goes for those who prefer their anatomically unfeasible homunculi to be black or amputees or multiply pierced; do it yourself. Many was the happy hour I spent inflicting ghastly tortures on my Doctor Who doll, including a doomed attempt to create a functioning iron maiden from Lego. Are kids today really so incapable of such acts of creative destruction? Answers, if there are any, to be carved into the severed head of Action Man and sent to the usual address.

Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt (and kept it in pristine condition in a vacuum-sealed bag for four decades)

2012-01-14T07:36:00.000Z

Simon Reynolds, in his excellent tome Retromania, discusses the historicity of rock ephemera, and the fact that psychedelic posters for concerts in San Francisco had become collectors’ items as early as 1968, only a few months after they first appeared. Which is interesting, but surely there’s a difference between trying to keep hold of souvenirs of a scene that’s still vital and happening on your own doorstep; and combing eBay for fragments of mojo from a phenomenon that was dead before your parents met? Or, for that matter, getting your stylist to find an original t-shirt featuring a glam-metal band whose music you’ve never heard? I think I still have a small cache of posters and flyers somewhere from the Exeter club scene of the late 80s; I didn’t think even back then that they were going to set the auction houses alight 25 years hence, but I hoped these two-tone scraps of Xerox and Letraset might remind me of a few good times (alongside the bad and mediocre ones). What the denizens of Haight-Ashbury were doing would become nostalgic/necrophiliac/retromaniac once they’d all sliced off their hair and become brokers; but in 1968 it was no more backward-looking than wearing that Nirvana t-shirt in 1992.

While we’re there, Retromania is the first book I purchased for my newly acquired Kindle; which says something, but I’m not sure what. Will I feel any nostalgic pangs about the grey-on-grey ones and zeroes, the way I might do about my copy of Reynolds’ previous book, the front cover of which was chewed off by a dog? And which will be more valuable on eBay?

Jocks trap

2012-01-11T06:39:00.002Z

Slightly camp gammon robot (© Caitlin Moran) David Cameron has got it all worked out. The party he leads has at its very core the notion of Unionism, the political and emotional shackling together of England and Scotland. But at the same time he knows that it is that very Union that has kept his party away from uncompromised power for many years; even when it can command a majority of English MPs, those pesky Scots just keep saying no, the noo. But I think he’s seized on a brilliant idea; declaring his attachment to the Union in such a bumptious, arrogant, toffee-nosed, stereotypically English manner that he will delight his own party’s Anglo diehards, while ensuring that at any referendum, the vast majority of Scots will be united against him, thus ensuring both his own position, and also Tory hegemony in the (geographically reduced) United Kingdom forever.

PS: In other news, Cameron wants Britain to make more formulaic, safe, mediocre films, because that’s what people like, isn’t it?

Horse sense

2012-01-08T07:26:00.002Z

I’ll admit to hypochondriac tendencies; not usually with regard to physical ailments, but sometimes when it comes to mental and/or behavioural quirks. For example, this moving but often funny article from the New York Times about the relationship between two teenagers with Asperger syndrome had me flinching with recognition:

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

But the glorious punchline came after the article was published, with a correction that seems by its very existence to celebrate Asperger’s not as a disorder or an encumbrance but as a lifestyle that contendly beats its own, slightly divergent path:

Harry Potter and the postcolonial intertextual metanarrative

2012-01-06T06:28:00.001Z

Hu Jintao, the president of China, has accused Harry Potter (among other manifestations of Western decadence) of being part of a cultural war against his country’s best interests. Which may be the case, but it’s one that the four-eyed wizardling is bound to lose, as for every upstanding Maoist corrupted by the insidious forces of Rowlingite decadence, there are 20 who will have tempered their Potter fix with a hefty slug of chinoiserie. Check out this list of fake Chinese Potter books, including Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk-Up-To Dragon and Harry Potter and the Filler of Big; not content with boring old death-eaters, the authors bulk out their narratives with dinosaurs, hobbits, belly dancers, acrobats and someone called Big Spinach. A significant theme that pervades many of these insurgent reimaginings is that Harry’s own feeble, round-eye powers often need help from a passing Chinese wizard or two, whose skills make the witless gweilo look like the tired, imperialist running dog he really is. We even encounter Voldemort’s Asian twin, Yandomort, who’s probably twice as evil, and cheaper too. This is not so much piracy as an act of postmodern genetic splicing that leaves poor old JK spluttering in the meagre dust that is all that’s left of Western civilisation. President Hu is not the one who should be worried.

Chiz

2012-01-03T11:28:00.000Z

RIP Ronald Searle.

Don’t believe in Beatles

2012-01-02T11:01:00.000Z

Popular crooner Cee Lo Green has, we are informed, caused something of a commotion by changing a key line in John Lennon’s popular ditty ‘Imagine’ from “no religion too” to “all religion’s true”.

Now, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that the original song is beyond improvement: it’s probably one of the ghastliest things its author ever wrote, and in any case the line should really be “no religion either”. My complaint is that Mr Green’s new contribution is even more nonsensical than Lennon’s own pappy, feelgood platitudes. If all religion were really true, why would so many people with comedy beards be inflicting pain or mayhem on other people with comedy beards – or, more egregiously, people who don’t have comedy beards because, for reasons of age or gender, they can’t grow them – simply because of what someone did or didn’t say in a very old book? I was particularly taken by the news of ultra-orthodox Jews yelling “whore” and “Nazi” at six-year-old girls who have the effrontery to wear short-sleeved dresses.

Sometimes I do wonder whether some of life’s more immediate problems could be solved by putting equal numbers of the most hardline, fundamentalist Jews, Muslims and Christians in a locked room together, and playing one of Cee Lo’s less contentious numbers on repeat for 40 days and 40 nights until they all break down, or die or start having sex with each other. If nothing, it would make for a most diverting reality TV show. I must suggest it to the newly honoured Peter Bazalgette.

Hootenanny state

2011-12-31T09:30:00.002Z

So, what’s your ghastliest ever New Year’s Eve experience?

Book face

2011-12-28T08:04:00.000Z

One of the more delectably useless features of LibraryThing is the author gallery function, which arrays portraits of the people who wrote the books in your library, in alphabetical order. This can throw up a few rather startling lookalikes – as distinct from lookunalikes – adjacent to each other. Who’da thunk that Anthony Beevor and Frédéric Beigbeder would be so similar; or Malcolm Bradbury and André Breton; Ian McEwan and Roger McGough? The only problem is that now I don’t want to split up these unlikely twins, which means I’ll probably never sample from the wells of Aphra Behn, Wallace Breem or Leslie McFarlane. Sorry.

Sproutrock, etc

2011-12-25T07:26:00.000Z

Mourning has broken

2011-12-22T10:01:00.000Z

I’ve posted this in several locations today, initially in response to Peter Oborne’s article on the Telegraph site, where none of the marmalade-flecked tweedbots complained about it, so I guess they approve. It does seem to be ideologically consistent, if nothing else. You can sign the petition here.

Since Lady Thatcher was renowned for “rolling back the frontiers of the State”, I find the notion of a State funeral grossly inappropriate. Could the event not be funded by private enterprise? I’m sure the financial institutions and utilities companies that did so well from her policies would compete furiously for the right to have their logos emblazoned on the coffin and the backs of the pallbearers; and perhaps advertising hoardings could be set up along the route of the procession. The minister in charge of the service would be expected to utter a few kind words about the generosity of these supporters alongside the conventional “ashes to ashes” stuff.

The mourners themselves could be asked to chip in, with the scale of their contributions reflecting their prominence in the service: big donors at the front, plucky constituency stalwarts in a more modest position; the relationship between party donations and awards of peerages, MBE’s, etc could act as a model.

I'm sure it’s what she would have wanted.

Pining

2011-12-22T07:39:00.000Z

Pretty soon it will be possible to concoct bespoke entertainments based on the preferences you express – possibly inadvertently – through your behaviour on Facebook, Amazon, iTunes and the like. A book or movie or piece of music will be cobbled together on the basis that on Monday you retweeted three jokes about Kim Jong-Il and once put a Jeanette Winterson novel on your wishlist. In fact, with the release of Tran Anh Hung’s Norwegian Wood, the process might have been perfected already. It’s based on a novel by Haruki Murakami, who gave this blog its name; it’s set in Japan, a country for whom I hold a befuddled affection; it stars Rinko Kikuchi, by far the best thing in the tiresome Babel; the director was responsible for the excellent The Scent of Green Papaya; and the music is by one of the blokes out of Radiohead, about whom I’ve written two and a bit books. Yesterday, I finally got round to watching it.

And it was... all right, I guess, but could have been half an hour shorter. I think the software may need tweaking.

That was the year that was

2011-12-19T06:54:00.001Z

One of the five or six people left behind at the BBC after the move to Salford asked me quite some time ago whether 2011 was One Of Those Big News Years. Here’s what I said, even though both Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il were ill-mannered enough to croak the wrong side of my deadline.

PS: Actually, I was wrong. It was 1848.

And she had to unlearn the trumpet as well

2011-12-17T09:50:00.001Z

I was going to say something about Dan Rebellato’s magnificent evisceration of the Daily Mail’s half-witted theatre critic Quentin Letts, but there really is nothing I can add: just read the bloody thing. Similarly, I’m not sure what needs to be said regarding the story, reported in The Sun so it must be true, of the Dorset woman who has spent 12,000 of your Earth pounds in her efforts not to look like someone who used to be in EastEnders. One does wonder if there’s a market for a lookunalike agency, which will hire out people who don’t look like George Clooney or Fiona Bruce or my favourite Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Bald, so they can hover at your party or corporate event, revelling in their antidoppelganger status. Over to you; who would you most like not to resemble?

Friction burns

2011-12-16T09:04:00.000Z

Following my passing comment about the potential empathy between Asian cultures and punk rock, news arrives from the Indonesian province of Aceh that a large group of skinny-jeaned wrong ’uns have been rounded up and sent for “re-education”. And at around the same time, The Protester become’s TIME’s Person of the Year, and Christopher Hitchens goes to Stage V. Tonight I shall eat oysters, and raise a glass to the grit.

Strauss of fun

2011-12-14T08:27:00.001Z

Gilbert Adair, who died last week, was best known for his writing about film, but I’m pretty sure the first time I encountered him was via his book Myths and Memories, in which he turned his critical attention to all aspects of modern culture, in an Anglicised spin on Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (with a bit of Georges Perec thrown in as well). A later collection, Surfing the Zeitgeist, was a more conventional round-up of essays.

What did stand out in both books was Adair’s firm ideas about what was and wasn’t worthwhile; not just in the sense of rating a specific author or director or composer above another, but in lauding or dismissing entire art forms. Film was top of the pile; but he was bored by theatre; and yet he did like opera – aghast at some hapless bourgeois who had the effrontery to fall asleep during a production of Der Rosenkavalier – while holding popular music in baffled disdain. His answer to the vexed Keats vs Dylan debate was essentially that Keats is better, of course, and if you can’t see that, you’re a bit thick.

I suppose any critical standpoint is pretty much the critic’s gut prejudices hung on a retrospective theoretical framework. But it does help if, like Adair, you can make the whole thing read nicely.

I don’t know why

2011-12-11T09:43:00.013Z

...so I first saw this clip of Korean kindergarteners singing a Ramones song when Everett posted it on Facebook, and he wrote a book about the Ramones, I thought, so he should know, and I thought it was pretty damn cool, especially the kid in green who decides to do air guitar instead of pogoing, so I reposted it and few people whose opinions I trust said they liked it, as in *Like*d it, so that’s OK, but then the Daily arseing Mail caught up with it and said how heartwarming it was, in a slightly patronising way, and so I started wondering whether it was actually that good (a bit like last month, when John arseing Lewis retrospectively destroyed my teenage years) and then I calmed down a bit and had a cup of tea and started thinking about context and connotation and came to the conclusion that the clip’s still quite fun actually, even if I don’t really like small children that much. And maybe not absolutely everything that appears in the Daily Mail is entirely vile and squalid.

I must be getting old.

Hey ho, let’s – in a very real sense – go:

The 84829942-3a88-11e0-83da-000bcdcb5194 memorial blog post

2011-12-08T06:09:00.001Z

Both my regular readers will have noticed that recent posts have been enhanced by comments from an anonymous gentleman who feels himself traduced by the ladyfolk of his homeland. While many bloggers would simply have deleted his screeds, I find them rather charming, and see in them the germ of an artistic endeavour. Therefore, to acknowledge the appearance of a new William Burroughs- related tome, I present a literary cut-up, based on the Crimes Against Fathers comment with a few lyrical interpolations from elsewhere, and a nice picture of Charlotte Rampling wearing a dead animal in case it all gets too boring for mere words:

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Thanks for listening.
Turtle power!

But for a more coherent analysis of the whole hacking-stuff-up-and-seeing-what-happens aesthetic, do read this.

It’s not that long, is it?

2011-12-06T07:34:00.002Z

You know when writers and musicians and directors and restaurateurs and particle physicists claim not to read reviews of their own work? They’re lying. At least I hope they are, because they’d be missing gems such as this, from Amazon reviewer Mary B Jennings of Memphis, Tennessee, who also has firm views on a doll piano and a Harry Potter colouring book:

Tim Footman’s nose is long and he wears a truss
This is the worst biography I’ve ever read. The facts check out, and there are plenty of insightful quotes, but Tim Footman seems determined to come off as a pedantic elitist, and there is no end to his arrogance. He is unsatisfied with looking down his long nose at anybody who likes (or dislikes) Leonard Cohen, but he never misses a chance to slam Cohen for his early lack of success as a poet and musician, his tumultuous relationship with all women in general, and his drug use. Gee, a musician who had a lot of sex and did a lot of drugs. Imagine! Your honor, I suggest we string this man up by the nearest tree! Footman also manages to talk both down and up to his audience, no doubt a remarkable feat, but hardly one that will win supporters. He uses words like “solipsistic” and then, almost in the same breath, explains to us that Sake is Japanese rice wine. In short, this book is not a biography of Leonard Cohen at all, but instead a monument to Tim Footman’s self centered-ness. I want my money back.

Ms Jennings does raise a useful point about the balancing act that all writers must negotiate, between bamboozling their readers and insulting their various intelligences. But am I the only hack who “manages to talk both down and up to his audience”? OK, so I got it wrong for those who know what sake is, but surely she’s being solipsistic (HA!) if she thinks her own personal checklist of knowledge and ignorance is replicated precisely for everyone else who read the book. That said, I must thank her for one thing: from now on, the phrase “a monument to Tim Footman’s self centered-ness” will be plastered on everything, from book to cheese sandwich, that I create. Starting now.

wwwaugh

2011-12-03T10:48:00.001Z

Whenever anybody asks, and often when they don’t, I declare that my favourite book is Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh (1930). That said, I hadn’t actually read it since some time in the last millennium, and my battered orange-and-cream copy is currently hiding in a box somewhere in the south of England. So when I noticed it – an American edition from 1977 with a cover in that retro style that’s supposed to bring to mind the glamour of the inter-war years but really makes us think of the Gatsby movie with Redford and Farrow, and thus the 1970s – in a second-hand bookshop the other day, it just had to be mine.

I was dreading it not being as good a read as I’d remembered (although I might have explained that as a case of me being a better reader) but it’s held up remarkably well. Some of the scenes, such as Agatha’s appearance in the breakfast room of 10 Downing Street, remain laugh-out-loud funny, and plenty of Waugh’s sardonic little phrases still work their magic.

But one thing that I’d completely forgotten was Waugh’s own preface:

The action of the book is laid in the near future [which means that Cold Comfort Farm took even more tips from VB than I realised when Patroclus finally persuaded me to read it], when existing social tendencies have become more marked; I have postulated no mechanical or scientific advance, but in the interest of compactness and with no pretensions to prophecy, I have assumed a certain speeding up of legal procedure and daily journalism. In the latter case I have supposed a somewhat later hour for going to press and a greater expedition in distribution than is now generally the case.

Evelyn Waugh, it seems, invented Twitter.

Nicaragua or wherever you come from (The Ken Russell memorial blog post)

2011-11-30T08:06:00.000Z

Our cultural discourse is increasingly determined by trends and memes and hashtags and newsflashes that turn out to be as ephemeral as a dragonfly’s farts. It’s as if you could miss an entire artistic movement while making a cup of tea. In that spirit, I have decided to start a band called Fenton Marmite and the Tram Racists. We aim to be entirely forgotten by the weekend. And the ironic revival starts in January.

But just to prove that something doesn’t need to be new to achieve a similar level of fickle notoriety: from my new favourite website, here’s the Lactation of St Bernard, painted in about 1480. Funny, isn’t it, that people still get so worked up about the supposed sacrileges committed by Ken Russell, when this sort of thing was sanctioned by the Church for decades?

Quite useless

2011-11-28T06:51:00.001Z

You know, I rather like Brian Sewell. Even when he’s talking complete bollocks, it’s good value, entertaining, provocative bollocks. As in this interview in yesterday’s Observer, to plug his autobiography, which doesn’t mention his friend and mentor Anthony Blunt, but does retell the story about masturbating for the delectation of Salvador Dali. Asked to name the worst piece of art he’s ever seen, he says:

Well, there’s so much of it. It’s when the definition of art runs out and there is still stuff being produced. When Tracey Emin makes a neon sign, that’s not the “worst art”, it just isn’t art. When Anish Kapoor puts some wonky Meccano structure up at the expense of £16m for the Olympics, that’s a joke, that isn’t art.

Which is just daft. There may be perfectly sound criticisms to be made of Emin or Kapoor (although I quite like the look of the Meccano thingy, I suspect I’m pretty much alone) but to say they’re not art is just lazy, and a charge that’s been laid against pretty much every artistic movement since the invention of paint. What Sewell means is that they’ve hopped over some unspecified barrier beyond which he can’t or won’t follow, which says far more about his own inadequacies as a critic than about their abilities as artists. To blame them for his inertia is petulant in the extreme.

But then he gets something utterly right:

I’m often accused by people who should know better of trying to be academically clever. To that the answer is that I think I am academically clever and I’m not trying.

It does appear that after all these years Sewell has given up attempting to be an art critic and finally discovered, at the age of 80, his proper vocation – that of Being Sewell.

PS: If you want to see the sort of art that Brian does like, check out Ugly Renaissance Babies.

Anablog

2011-11-25T09:03:00.000Z

James Altucher is one of many authors who have gone from traditional publishing to self-publishing, and he encourages others to do the same. I see exactly where he’s coming from. I’ve now had seven books published under my own name, and have been an editor or contributor for about the same number. And with every one there was something about the final product that left me dissatisfied – although, unlike Altucher, I wouldn’t place all the blame for that on the publishers.

What I’m not so sure about is his notion that self-publishing is a no-brainer for experienced bloggers because they’re sitting on a vast treasure trove of material that just needs a bit of tweaking to render it into book form. I know that some people have pulled it off; blooks were all over the place a few years, what with One-Track Belle In The North About Whom White People Are Indifferent and all that. But I did get the feeling that the blogs from which these tomes derived were, for the most part, created with an eye to a publishing deal of some sort.

I didn’t begin Cultural Snow with that thought in mind. I hoped that it might draw a wider audience to my writing, and maybe get me some work as a result, and it did to an extent. But the closest I got to writing a potential book here came with the two posts about the uke-strumming existentialist Stanley Pidd, and his exploits have fallen foul of my usual problem when it comes to writing fiction, the inability to come up with a convincing middle. (The end is bloody brilliant, thanks for asking, and I may well post it here one day.) Most of the posts are written as, well, posts. You know, for a blog. Which means that many of them include explanatory links, and quite a few have video clips or the like; the sort of thing that doesn’t usually work that well on paper.

To be fair, Altucher is right that this blog contains plenty of stuff already. And all that stuff could be updated and expanded, and maybe bulked out even further with various doodlings from other sites. And hey, I could always turn some of the links into footnotes, which I bloody love. In fact, footnotes have been to some degree a sticking point between the publisher and myself in my last three books, but if I did the whole thing myself I’d be the publisher as well, so the arguments wouldn’t happen. Actually, they probably wouldn’t, but at least I’d win the argument this time. Actually, I’d probably lose.

The fact remains that I haven’t been writing a book for the past six years. I’ve been writing a blog. It’s on Blogger, which may give you a clue. And why would people suddenly want to pay money for something they could have freely accessed on line, since 2005? Altucher argues that they’ll be paying for the curation as much as for the content – but doesn’t this mean that they’d also pay to read this stuff online provided I just ditched a couple of the jokes that didn’t really work, changed the font, dealt with the overuse of the word “actually” in the previous paragraph and tweaked the order a bit?

Ultimately I’m a tad ambivalent about the whole idea. Would you buy and/or read a book made up, for the most part, of posts from Cultural Snow? Bearing in mind that I probably wouldn’t much want to read it. Even though, according to Altucher, I’ve already written it. Let me know in the space below. See, that’s something else you can’t do with books.

See his picture hanging on your wall

2011-11-22T07:17:00.002Z

Graffiti drawn by the Sex Pistols when they lived in a rented flat in London in the 1970s has been described by archaeologist John Schofield – who in no way, shape or form is reaching for a headline-grabbing bit of hyperbole that may just raise his media profile enough so that his name is buzzing around the media ether when some desperate producer gets round to making a show called The Real Bonekickers – as “punk’s Lascaux”. In fact, much of it appears to be indebted to the wondrous work of Leo Baxendale – begetter of the Bash Street Kids – and as such ought to be preserved for the time when LB finally gets his own exhibition at Tate Modern. This really shouldn’t have been a surprise, as Johnny Rotten was so clearly the bastard offspring of Plug and Steerpike, but hey, now we have proof, and the images that provide such proof must be preserved.

But wait – what’s that I hear? Is it the sound of Telegraph readers harrumphing that this isn’t really art, and what the Pistols did wasn’t really music, and protecting these doodles isn’t what archaeology is about? And the occasional fabulously witty one-liner about unmade beds as well? Leaving aside the fact that the only piece of art a Telegraph reader would really appreciate is a portrait of Margaret Thatcher kicking a wind turbine to death, painted on tweed, it seems as if they’ve been lured into a trap as deliciously effective as the one that ensnared poor Bill Grundy. The Pistols’ credibility has taken something of a knock in recent years, what with one of them hawking butter, and another joining Simply Red (although at least they haven’t yet taken the John Lewis shilling). With their anguished, blimpish howls, the ruddy-faced disgusteds are just proving that the middle-aged punksters can still provoke. Mr McLaren would have approved.

PS: In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones sneers at Schofield’s appropriation of pop culture – then quotes George from Seinfeld.

The sound behind our cornflakes

2011-11-20T08:57:00.002Z

I’m not sure that this needs any further comment. Borrowed from Include Me Out.

Mad women

2011-11-17T10:06:00.001Z

In case anyone needed reminding that the foam-flecked wings of Islam and Christianity don’t hold a duopoly on swivel-eyed witlessness, ultra-orthodox Jews in Jerusalem have taken to ripping down advertising posters that contain images of women. Which is an affront to freedom of expression and insulting to women – until you remember that feminists have had plenty to say about the depiction of women by the advertising industry, and quite a few have taken direct action to express it.

Hmm. Similarly confused thoughts come to mind when watching the following:

Now, according to AdRants, the clip has been “banned”, although I’m sure there was never any intention of using it in mainstream media; it will live and/or die on the web, where it exists as much to sell the reputation of the creative team as it does to shift units of denim (rather like Benetton’s latest attempt to foster intercultural harmony). It’s offensive, in the sense that quite a few people will be offended by it, although different elements will offend different people: the implied lesbianism; the implied necrophilia; the buttocks. I suspect, however, that the big problem comes with the pile of dead women, and the clear suggestion that someone is going round killing them for their jeans. The question is whether it’s less or more reprehensible when we know that the killer is a woman; we can hold onto the notion that killing women is A Bad Thing, but this time we can’t really blame it on the patriarchy, can we? As Camille Paglia said – and she’s a woman, so it’s OK – “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” But if there were, she’d almost certainly work in advertising.

Paris match

2011-11-14T08:20:00.001Z

A highlight of my last visit to Paris was Seconde Main, an exhibition of forgeries and pastiches at the Museum of Modern Art. And now we discover that, towards the end of the First World War, the French began building a massive replica of Paris, to confuse the Germans. This can be contrasted with the Americans, who now build massive replicas of Paris and other cities, mainly to confuse Americans; and then in Macao they replicate the replicas, as if anyone cares. But that’s just cheesy postmodernism, and you get quite enough of that here already. If the practical purpose of the decoy Paris was to protect the real city, and to do so the French wanted to create a simulacrum that was identical in all respects, surely there must have come a point at which the builders would have decided the decoy was so beautiful and romantic that it needed protection as well, and so another decoy would need to be built – a replica of the replica – and so on...

Which in turn reminds me of Borges’ story On Exactitude in Science, in which he discussed the notion of a map that was exactly the same size as the territory it depicted; the question being the extent to which a representation of an object becomes that object. Which almost certainly sounds better in Spanish:

J’en ai marre

2011-11-12T09:22:00.002Z

The Smiths, you see, were my band. I was born in 1968, and following the rule that the music that comes into your life during your 15th year is the music that will never leave you, the Smiths have been sitting on my skinny shoulders ever since. They didn’t offer a cure for my teenage ailments – the insecurity, the frustration, the acne – nor were they crass enough to tell me not to worry about them. Instead, they crafted an aesthetic in which all of them, the worry included, were nurtured, even celebrated. Life was indeed a Beckettian mess, but it might be survived, and you might even get to read a few decent books along the way. My flawed, misshapen humanity was as worthy of respect as that of the smooth-skinned, white-toothed hunks who could catch a rugby ball without bursting into tears.

And then the zits and the insecurity faded (although neither really went away) but the Smiths were still my band. I never became a devotee of Morrissey’s or Marr’s solo output, but the material they made between 1983 and 1987 remained, an anchor in bad times, even raising a goofy smile when it caught me unawares.

And then this happened:

Now, I know that in the download age, musicians and composers have to make a living. It’s not as if the Smiths are the first band to have farmed out their back catalogue to the advertisers; the Beatles have flogged running shoes, the Rolling Stones have hawked computers, and I suspect their financial needs are less than those of Morrissey and Marr. And I don’t really mind that it’s a crappy cover version; the song has suffered far worse. It’s not even that it’s John Lewis, a shop that I’ve happily used in the past, although I do wish they’d stop sending me promotional e-mails every few minutes just because I bought a washing machine from them a few years ago.

No. It’s Christmas that’s the problem. The modern, retail-driven Christmas is a festival that might as well have been designed simply to contradict everything the Smiths ever (claimed to?) stand for. It’s about optimism, sentimentality, consumption, warmth, family, hand-knitted comedy jumpers and chocolate liqueurs. It’s about a world in which the anguished yearning expressed in ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’ can be satisfied with a new pair of football boots or a games console. One can only assume that the person who decided to use the song in this context simply failed to understand it and – far more galling – its composers elected not to disabuse him. I wonder if there might have been a shortlist of other possible songs, if M&M had suffered an attack of scruples; perhaps ‘I Want More’ by Can, or ‘Having It All’ from the Absolute Beginners soundtrack.

It’s as if Morrissey had wandered into my teenaged bedroom, with its postcards of him and Oscar Wilde and Louise Brooks, and offered to do something about my acne, and then proceeded to deposit a huge, steaming, vegeburgery shit all over my face. And then Johnny Marr appeared at his shoulder, volunteering to clear up the mess with a big, fluffy John Lewis towel, which only made things worse. And then I realised they were both wearing Santa hats. And hand-knitted comedy jumpers.

...but there’s a prize for every one we show

2011-11-10T07:58:00.005Z

Last week, a cleaner at a gallery in Dortmund scrubbed a stain from a trough, thus ruining – or perhaps enhancing – ~~Marcus Ostwald~~ Martin Kippenberger’s installation When It Starts Dripping From The Ceiling. Much hilarity ensued at the revelation that ~~Ostwald~~ Kippenberger’s piece had been valued at 800,000 euros. It is not real art, we were informed by a phalanx of Sewell manqués. A child of five could do it, harrumphed the people who Know What They Like.

This week, Roy Lichtenstein’s 1961 painting I Can See The Whole Room!... And There’s Nobody In It sold for US$43 million, a record for a work by the artist. In this case, no voices were raised complaining that it’s not real art, although it does have something very significant in common with the ~~Ostwald~~ Kippenberger work; the fact that it relies on a joke. It’s a perfectly good joke (did you hear the one about the people who go to an art gallery to look at some pretty pictures and are forced to think a little bit harder about what they’re doing there?) but it’s not particularly new, and Duchamp and Magritte and Manzoni told it earlier and better.

To be honest, the existence of When It Starts Dripping... would almost certainly have passed me by had the unnamed cleaner not been so zealous in her work, which did make me more than a little suspicious of the whole story; in fact, I’ve long wondered whether such brouhahas as the attacks on Marcus Harvey’s Myra or even the Momart fire that destroyed so many BritArt pieces were not discrete events beyond the artists’ control, but a necessary aspect of the art works themselves. Maybe that’s what the difference is between Lichtenstein and ~~Ostwald~~ Kippenberger: although they tell the same joke, the latter needs someone else to deliver the punchline.

Oops. Ostwald is the name of gallery.

Now we are six

2011-11-08T07:12:00.001Z

I started this blog six years ago today. My first post mentioned the analogue/digital continuum, Bertie Bucket (RIP), Haruki Murakami (see last post) and vodka. Well, what did you expect? Progress?

Diacriticism

2011-11-05T09:07:00.001Z

The first page of the US edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is annoying me – well, I say the first page, but 1Q84 is clearly A Publishing Event, with all the bells and whistles and publicity budgets that entails, so you only get to the first page once you’ve negotiated the Chip Kidd cover, with its translucent dust cover that reminds me of New Order’s Low-Life album, and a title page that stretches over eight pages (each character in the title being repeated, with one character per page), and a quotation from the song ‘Paper Moon’, and page that reminds you that this is book one of a trilogy, and that’s not to mention the photographs of the moon and clouds, and the page that just says “HARUKI MURAKAMI”, black on white, in case you’d overlooked the prominent mention on the cover and somehow thought you were buying something by Julian Barnes or Zadie Smith or Malcolm Gladwell or Katie Price – then, only then, do you get to the first page. Although it’s actually page 3. And, on the offchance that you haven’t yet had enough of the cleverness, the “3” is printed backwards. That reverse, I’m guessing, is deliberate. I’m less sure about what happens when we get to discussing Janáček.

The action, you see, begins in a taxi on an expressway in Tokyo in 1984, and Leoš Janáček’s Sinfonietta is playing on the radio. The passenger, Aomame, muses on the circumstances of its composition and first performance, in 1926, which was also the beginning of the Shōwa era, the reign of Emperor Hirohito. The first couple of times the composer’s surname is mentioned, it’s as above, with the correct Czech diacritics in place, including the háček or caron, that upside-down circumflex thingy above the “c”. But then something goes a bit wrong in the typography department, and the next couple of times the háček has slipped sideways, so “Janáček” becomes “Janáˇcek”.

And that annoys me. Now, before anybody points a finger, I’ll admit that I’ve written books that contained mistakes. I’ve attributed a Schopenhauer quote to Nietzsche, allowed in a couple of stray exclamation marks, written “Columbia” when I meant “Colombia” (or was it the other way round?) and confused a Leonard Cohen novel with a Madonna song. On the other hand, my books weren’t quite so keenly awaited, their release didn’t coincide with the author being tipped for the Nobel Prize, and Chip Kidd didn’t do the cover.

On the other other hand, maybe it isn’t a mistake. After all, we are informed that the book is called 1Q84 because the Japanese for “nine” sounds like “Q”, so they carried the pun over into the translation, even though it doesn’t work in English, so maybe it will turn out that the disconnected háček has a meaning that I haven’t yet disinterred. I doubt it though. Incidentally, some people have taken to calling the book IQ84, beginning with a letter rather than a number, which may appear to make more sense, but probably doesn’t.

Fans of Murakami who haven’t yet begun the book may care to note that the first page contains no Miles Davis references, no cooking of spaghetti, no talking cats and no disturbed teenage girls into non-penetrative sex.

That said, regular readers of this blog (who will know that it takes its title from Murakami) must surely be delighted to know that there are another 922 pages to go.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Dr Chris Brooks, who once devoted a two-hour tutorial to the first sentence of Great Expectations. Flood update: watching, waiting. And here’s Janáček, trumpets and diacritics and all:

Everyone will become famous for 15 tweets

2011-11-02T06:37:00.001Z

In The Guardian, Chris Floyd presents photographs of his favourite Twitter users. Forget Stephen Fry and Ashton Kutcher, though: one or two of them, refreshingly, are those mythical beasts, “ordinary people”, not actors or musicians or even, um, Guardian writers (three of whom are on Floyd’s list). Although now that the temp and the civil servant have achieved this random jolt of mainstream media attention, they will of course cease to be ordinary people, and at same time, cease to inhabit a nice little secret corner of social media; perversely, when they stop being ordinary, they also stop being special. Everybody knows them, and they are ruined. “Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit,” said Lady Bracknell, accidentally inventing quantum theory while she was at it. “Touch it and the bloom is gone.”

Age of discontent

2011-10-31T07:46:00.012Z

From The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis:

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

I’m closer to fifty than I am to thirty-five, so I think I know what old Mart’s talking about. But then I’ve felt that way since I was about eight or nine.

(Flood update: the worst is behind us. Although that depends on which way we’re facing.)

I know a song that won’t get on your nerves

2011-10-28T08:37:00.000+01:00

In the Telegraph (I seem to be reading the Telegraph a lot these days, without becoming A Telegraph Reader – I hope), Lucy Jones asks why musical taste provokes such ire and vitriol. She mentions Chris Martin, head castrato of tepid skiffle combo Coldplay, who asked why van drivers yell abuse at him “because of the songs he had written”. I think he (and Ms Jones) may be missing the point a wee bit; although Martin’s music is bland and anaemic, it’s more likely to be his sanctimonious public persona that really gets on the collective moobage of van drivers (and, no doubt, teaching assistants and milliners and plumbers and actuaries and hired assassins as well), a state of affairs that cannot have been helped by his marriage to tearful platitude/recipe machine Gwyneth Paltrow. That and the fact that he looks like a pubescent tortoise. When the multi-millionaire song-and-dance man has the chutzpah to whine about this state of affairs, it only encourages us to reach for our revolvers once more.

But leaving aside the vexed critical conundrum of the extent to which one should play the man rather than the ball (BOTH! BOTH!), there is the question of why inoffensive music is, to many people, deeply offensive. This morning, I had a hotel breakfast (having finally been driven out of Bangkok, not by the encroaching floodwater, but by the abject uncertainty, the nerve-jangling space between flooded and not-flooded, neither waving nor drowning, a sort of Schrödinger’s catastrophe) to the strains of some sort of 80’s soul/pop/jazz concoction. I think Michael McDonald and Kenny G might have featured, or if they didn’t, it was people aspiring to be Messrs McDonald and G, which is worse. The music was clearly chosen for its inoffensiveness, but I found it almost unbearable, for that very reason. I fully understand that it’s impossible to choose a soundtrack that everyone will actively like, but is it so hard to pick something that nobody actively dislikes? Is there not a distinction between inoffensive (Coldplay, Kenny G) and not offensive? Nat King Cole, say; while his music wouldn’t be on everybody’s desert island selection, is there anyone on the planet who would run puking from the room if one of his songs came on? Ella Fitzgerald? One of the more restrained, non-Goddy bits of Bach? Over to you: name some music, or any other work of art, that might not send you into raptures, but is impossible to loathe.

PS: Another Lucy (Cage) opines on Coldplay covers, at Collapse Board.

If we shadows...

2011-10-25T08:08:00.001+01:00

Up to 80 people a night, we are informed, have been walking out of the current RSC production of Marat/Sade, revolted by scenes of torture, masturbation and dwarf/bishop sex. The Daily Telegraph would have us believe that those behind the show will be upset by this, I rather suspect that they’re rubbing their hands with delight, and even more keenly now that hordes of Telegraph readers are spitting thick-cut marmalade over their tweed pyjamas at the very thought of such goings on and yearning for the days when they could go to the theatre secure in the knowledge that the closest they’d come to moral depravity would be Richard Briers almost – but not quite – saying “bloody hell”. In a world where boundaries of taste and morality seem about as solid as Bangkok flood barriers, it takes something special to earn one’s transgressive Brownie points. (And would the notion of a transgressive Brownie provoke similar outrage? I wonder.)

That said, the “up to 80 people” (hmm...) are leaving voluntarily, rather than being carried out. I was lucky enough to see the Deborah Warner version of Titus Andronicus at the RSC, nearly a quarter of a century ago, and chatting to one of the ushers in the interval, I was informed that I’d come on a slow night: nobody fainted; nobody vomited; they hadn’t had a nervous breakdown in the audience for over a week. The dwarf and the bishop will just have to try that little bit harder.

(Image by djailledie, after Jacques-Louis David, from deviantART. Flood update: still dry.)

The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

2011-10-22T07:24:00.001+01:00

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.

Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

My heart belongs to Dada

2011-10-20T06:58:00.001+01:00

I seem to be stuck in a loop of post-literacy, my only creative impulse being to leach moderately amusing photos from other people’s Facebook posts (so thanks to the rum cove who goes by the handle Hegemony or Bust for these two). Is this what being on Tumblr is like?

PS: And, slightly perversely, a rather literate response to the above at Include Me Out.

Semi-detached

2011-10-17T10:50:00.000+01:00

There’s clearly something to be said here about semiotics and Saussure and probably Umberto Eco as well but frankly, it’s Monday. Did you know there’s a crater on the moon called Saussure? I really wanted it to be named after Ferdinand, the way I wanted the Scott Memorial in Edinburgh to be named after Terry, but it never is, is it?

Loud speakers

2011-10-15T07:50:00.002+01:00

As the news comes in that the old-skool, analogue TV signal will be switched off in the UK next year, one might be forgiven for thinking that the ones and zeroes have finally triumphed. But apparently not. First there’s the story of the Occupy Wall Street protesters getting round a ban on amplified sound by what they describe as the human microphone – essentially an agitprop variant on Chinese whispers. And then we hear of one Nyanza Roberts, a teacher from Hull who is accused of using Facebook to make some unflattering remarks about her students. The neat thing here is that parents only became aware of the comments when some thoughtful soul printed them off and pasted them on walls and lamp-posts around the neighbourhood. Which is, I suppose, nothing more than social networking gone analogue.

PS: This just in from the London protest:

China crisis

2011-10-12T11:04:00.001+01:00

An interesting (if you find yourself at all interested in that sort of thing) exchange between Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman on Radio 4’s Start the Week (about 13 minutes in, available until Sunday). If you can’t be bothered to follow the link, Mr Paxman (who used to present the show, but is there to plug his new book about the British Empire) thinks that the listeners will need a brief explanation of what prompted the Opium Wars of the 19th century; Mr Marr (who presents the show now) reckons they’re Radio 4 listeners, with all the assumptions about class and background and education that are implied by that, so they’ll have a pretty good idea.

I’m not sure. I vaguely remembered what it was all about, but that’s mainly because I did 19th-century history at A-level. Had the subject been the chemical properties of phosphorus or Greek adverbs or the impact of chaos theory on monetarism (or indeed vice versa) I might have appreciated Andy or Jezza giving me a gentle nudge in the right direction. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Any assumption about the level of knowledge and/or understanding that you can expect from your listeners/viewers/readers is going to leave some of them feeling patronised, others confused. The pervading atmosphere of media inclusivity, which means assuming as little as possible about the knowledge base of the audience, surely alienates as many people as it includes.

But need it be that way? Supposedly, in this glorious digital age, we should be able to tailor sources of news and information so that we are only told about things that we find interesting. So we could choose to receive less foreign news, more business, not so much celebrity schlock, more sport (but no golf) or any such combination. Maybe the next step is to offer bespoke factual programming that’s crafted to appeal not just to what we want to know, but how we want it expressed; to a specific level of understanding, so the individual listener is neither baffled nor bored.

You see, if it had been the Schleswig-Holstein Question they’d been discussing, I’d have needed some help.

Phil space

2011-10-09T09:56:00.002+01:00

In Prospect, Philip Hensher reviews four recent collections of essays, and draws a distinction between writers who voice an opinion, and those who just write about themselves. Which is entirely sound, until we get to:

When a report on personal experience is not that well-written, not particularly unusual, and focused entirely on the state of the individual rather than the experience, we may conclude that the place for this sort of thing in the future is online, in an unpaid and largely unread blog.

Oh dear. I thought we’d dealt with this years ago. No longer is there an impermeable binary divide between mainstream media (well-paid, well-written, well-read, authoritative, influential) and blogging (amateur, sloppy, ignored, unreliable, impotent). Newspapers and magazines are shedding readers quarter by quarter, and as a result the amount of money available to pay writers is shrinking at a similar rate: Hensher writes for The Independent, so I rather suspect he knows all this only too well. Moreover, the notion that poorly-written, self-indulgent witterings about the banal minutiae of a writer’s personal life (occasionally leavened by a smattering of inane opinion unencumbered by any evidence of journalistic research) have no place in mainstream media would be a personal affront to any number of successful columnists, who appear to have based their entire careers on such a technique.

And of course this doesn’t just apply to print media. Howard Jacobson (another Independent hack, and the author of one of the collections that Hensher reviews) describes the existential crisis of a BBC radio producer in his most recent novel, The Finkler Question:

After more than a dozen years roaming the ghostly corridors of Broadcasting House in the dead of night, knowing that no one was listening to anything he produced – for who, at three o’clock in the morning, wanted to hear live poets discussing dead poets, who might just as well have been dead poets discussing live poets? – he resigned. ‘Would anyone notice if my programmes weren’t aired?’ he wrote in his letter of resignation. ‘Would anyone be aware of my absence if I just stopped turning up?’ Again he received no reply.

The Steve Jobs memorial blog post

2011-10-06T01:16:00.002+01:00

I got a new phone this week. It’s not an iPhone, but it looks pretty damn iPhone-y in many ways: without getting into boggy legal territory, let’s just say that if the iPhone had never existed, it’s quite possible my phone wouldn’t have existed either (or would at least have looked and felt and behaved rather differently).

Meanwhile, in China, they’ve been selling bootleg iPhone 5s in eager anticipation of a launch that never happened. So if you’re in Beijing, 28 quid will get you a simulacrum of something that not only doesn’t exist, but has not yet existed, and may never exist.

PS: Lefty analysis of Jobs’s life and the (over?-)reaction to its end.

The word

2011-10-04T06:38:00.001+01:00

It takes a supreme effort to do anything that might make me feel sorry for the ghastly Texas governor Rick Perry, but his rival for the Republican nomination Herman Cain has managed it. Apparently Perry’s family once rented a hunting lodge that we will describe as N-----head, so as to spare the blushes of those who dislike the word “nigger”. (And as a mark of my equal opportunities policy when it comes to verbal offensiveness, “Paki”, “yid”, “cracker”, “faggot”, “fuck”, “cunt”, OK?)

Cain, who is black, and made his fortune from unpleasant pizzas, has declared that there is “no more vile, negative word than the N-word” and I can see how an association with the grotesque process of lynching must make it seem that way; but surely such vileness must attach itself to “rope”, “tree”, “torch” and “mob of inbred bigots” as well. And in any case, the Perrys took action to paint over the offensive word where it appeared on the property; although they didn’t do it immediately, and apparently it was still visible under a coat of white paint this summer. So it’s not really racism or insensitivity for which Perry is being hounded, but sloppy editorial protocols. On second thoughts, the guy deserves everything he gets.

Are you that somebody?

2011-10-01T08:06:00.000+01:00

Once again, proof that the 12th commandment (after the one about not getting found out) is “Thou shalt not self-Google”. A peculiar site called True Knowledge, that appears to leach text from Wikipedia and rephrase it as a question, like some clunky, opportunistic rewrite of the quiz show Jeopardy!, throws up the following: “What was Tim Footman’s profession?” Which feels like digital footprints over my grave. While we’re on that subject, my hideously Caucasian tones can be heard interrupting those of many better qualified persons, in the first instalment of Gone Too Soon, Radio 1XTra’s series about deceased black pop stars. This one concerns the lovely and talented Aaliyah, about whom I wrote a book some years back (still available at your local bookshop, if such a thing exists). It’s on at 9pm on Sunday, although you can of course hear it via Radio Teletubby (Listen Again! Again!) at your leisure.

Hacky sack

2011-09-28T09:51:00.004+01:00

I’m not really a journalist, you know. I mean, every now and then I do something that might loosely be defined as journalism, but ultimately I’m a bit of a dilettante. I’ve never done any real training (rather like Johann Hari, then) or taken any exams to prove my mettle; and I never quite got round the joining the union.

So I’m not really sure how it would affect me if Ivan Lewis’s proposal, that seriously misbehaving journalists should be struck off, were actually to end up on the statute book. I mean, the people who tend to get struck off are the likes of lawyers and doctors, proper professionals who have to ascribe to codes of ethical conduct. Is journalism in the same sort of zone? I would have thought that proper, trained, accredited hacks would rather welcome such a move, as it protects their jobs from the predations of cheaper, untrained wannabes, but it seems that very few of them have a good word to say about Lewis‘s proposal – possibly wondering whether certain indiscretions in their own professional lives might, under a new regime, provoke expulsion from inky-fingered Eden. In any case, the details are far too blurry: would struck-off journalists just be banned from working for newspapers? All print media? Broadcast as well? And how the hell could you stop them writing for an online product?

Talking of which, Italian lawmakers aligned with Silvio Berlusconi are trying to pass a clause that would enforce a right to reply for those who believe they’ve been defamed on a blog. The blogger would have just 48 hours to accept the submission, or face a potential fine of 12,000 euros. Which seems perfectly fair to me. If I’ve ever said anything horrid about you in nearly six years of blogging, please feel free to answer back in the receptacle provided. In Italian, though, naturally.

PS: Martin Moore of the Media Standards Trust on why a registry of journalists is a silly idea; Hari’s editor, however, seems pretty relaxed about the whole thing.

Hitler has only got one fishball

2011-09-27T11:38:00.002+01:00

Sorry, yet another attractive-Asian-teenagers-in-swastikas story, closely following the Japanese cosplay and Thai game show tales. And we’re back in the Land of Smiles, for the tale of a Catholic school in Chiang Mai where the kids interpreted fancy dress in a manner that the present Pontiff might find a little disturbing (albeit less so in his younger days). The link, incidentally, is to the Daily Mail, in case you’re sensitive about associating with such a rag; but since we’re discussing TEENAGERS dressing as HITLER, a certain sense of proportion might be in order here.

However, if you really don’t want to go there, this gist is this. The Sacred Heart school in Chiang Mai has a tradition of holding an elaborate fancy dress parade on sports day. This year the procession was led by a female Hitler; some students were dressed as SS guards (wielding toy guns) while others waved Nazi flags. Many offered up an enthusiastic “sieg heil” or two. Some of the expats in attendance voiced their reservations but many of the teachers, let alone the students, simply didn’t understand why anyone might take offence.

And this is the issue. The notion of Hitler as the epitome of evil, a sort of über-bogeyman, just doesn’t resonate in most of Asia, especially with the young. Sure, they know he was one of the baddies – but just one of them. It’s not as if he’s Voldemort.

Still, at least Hitler’s Café in Mumbai has changed its name now.

PS: And some even more startling images from prachatai.com:

Train round the bend

2011-09-25T09:20:00.001+01:00

The London Underground has banned a poster for the Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration Lulu because it resembles graffiti. Except that I’ve never seen a graffito that looks remotely like that. Lucy Jones, in the Telegraph, is glad that it’s been banned, but that’s because it glorifies violence against women. Except that it doesn’t, so far as I can see – although some of those commenting on her article probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with that anyway.

And that’s before we get to the fact that Reed took his inspiration from the works of Wedekind and Alban Berg, and the vexed question of whether some art forms (theatre, opera) are allowed to depict ghastly occurrences, while others (heavy metal, advertising posters on public transport systems) aren’t. In any case, I just listened to 30 seconds of the album, and I’m pretty sure the poster will turn out to be the least horrible aspect of it. When did anybody last ban anything on qualitative grounds?

Actually, the Chinese government has done just that, cancelling the talent show Happy Girl, apparently because it kept overrunning its time slot, and because the content was inappropriate for prime time. Although some have whispered that the real reason for its demise was that phone voting encourages notions of democracy; and that it proved to be far more popular than the earnest, plodding programming of China Central Television. Under this analysis, it was essentially shelved for being too good.

A postmodern post-mortem: or, the metafictional paradox of Ernie Wise’s hairpiece

2011-09-22T06:20:00.001+01:00

So postmodernism has an exhibition dedicated to it, which probably means that it’s dead. Hari Kunzru (in The Guardian) and Edward Docx (in Prospect) would both agree, although they differ over the precise cause: the former says it was 9/11 and the internet, while the latter thinks we all just got bored and decided to read Jonathan Franzen novels instead. They are unanimous, however, that: a) postmodernism as a movement was characterised by a desire to break away from pre-ordained notions of taste, morality, even reality, but aside from that it’s quite tricky; and b) the Talking Heads movie Stop Making Sense was very postmodern indeed, thank you. The problem is, though, that as soon as they agree on b), the validity of a) gets a bit of kicking; if postmodernism was tearing up the canon, it’s entirely inappropriate that it can only easily be defined with reference to a canon of its own. (Although in a truly postmodern universe, the concept of “inappropriate” also ceases to have any meaning.)

The same problem applies to such pieces of chinstrokery as Stuart Jeffries’ 10 key moments in postmodernism (also in The Guardian) and a slightly older 61 postmodern reads (from the LA Times). In this instance, if you *are* on the list, surely you can’t come in. Part of the problem is that postmodernism remains all but ineffable, and so rather than formulate a coherent definition of what it is, we find it far easier to point to individual fragments of cultural jetsam and say, yeah, that’s postmodern, so if you see something else like that, it probably is as well.

Which leaves me with two thoughts. First, if authenticity and sincerity and Franzenicity are the concepts that have replaced postmodernism in our collective affections, then how do we deal with the likes of Jade Goody or William Hung, who have commodified “realness” into a sort of hyperauthenticity, bewitching the media with their finely spun un-spun-ness?

The other notion is that to be truly postmodern is to be self-aware, to go through life flanked by metaphorical quotation masks. And yet if you point too hard and too long, it rather spoils the joke. Which is why the defining artefact of postmodernism should not be a Talking Heads movie nor a Philip Johnson building nor even a pair of Tracey Emin’s pants, but Ernie Wise’s wig, which became a cultural touchstone for an entire generation, despite the minor inconvenience of its non-existence. In fact, it took the notion of the simulacrum into places that even poor, dear Baudrillard couldn’t have conceived: you could see it as an original (Wise’s hair) pretending to be a copy (Wise’s wig) of something that purported not to exist any more (the hair again); or indeed as a reality that wasn’t real, masking – literally and figuratively – something that had never existed (Wise’s baldness).

Now, get out of that.

...than the sword

2011-09-19T07:41:00.002+01:00

I know writing isn’t perceived to be the most macho profession around. Sure, there have been writers with a propensity for guns and fighting and similar blokey pursuits – think Hemingway, Burroughs, Mailer, Hunter Thompson – but this usually took place separately from the actual process of wordsmithery; sometimes, indeed, the violence appeared to be a form of compensation for the fey inactivity of the authorial mode.

So I had to flag this one up: West Wing/Social Network scribe Aaron Sorkin has managed to break his own nose while working on a script. You have been warned.

Every day I edit the book

2011-09-17T09:29:00.000+01:00

I’m quite fond of Twitter, but every now and then I think of a delightful yet useless task that could be perfect for the medium, were it not for the pesky 140-word limit. What fun we might have with “Elvis Costello songs and/or albums that would make good titles for those Bret Easton Ellis books that aren’t already named after Elvis Costello songs/albums” if it could be squeezed into a hashtag and still leave room for replies.

That said, do you know what comes up first when you Google “Less Than Zero”? Not the Ellis book, nor the Costello song that provided its title, but the film. Which Ellis, in his most recent novel (named after a Costello album, give or take a consonant), describes as “...a beautiful lie... very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.” And if Costello hasn’t written a song called ‘Beautiful Lie’, or even ‘Busy But Grim’, he really should have done.

Back together again

2011-09-15T07:35:00.002+01:00

The popular and successful rap singer Mr 50 Cent has, we are led to believe, made another motion picture. Unfortunately, the intended title of the movie was to be Things Fall Apart, which rather annoyed the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, seeing as how he wrote a fairly well-known novel with that name a few decades back. The rapper’s lawyers have explained that “the novel with the said title was initially produced in 1958 (that is 17 years before 50 was born),” (always the get-out clause of dim people on TV game shows) but Achebe has insisted that the title must be changed, to avoid any possible confusion.

Which might provoke a certain degree of amusement among fans of WB Yeats, from whose poem The Second Coming Achebe borrowed the phrase in the first place.

Rhineland’s a fine land once more

2011-09-14T11:45:00.003+01:00

There’s been a bit of digital thinking aloud with regard to The Guardian’s abortive @911tenyearsago experiment (although not in The Guardian, oddly enough). Ian Hepburn at False Doorway explained his unease: “We lack neither the immediacy of the events happening now, nor the distance of – say – the World War 2 tweets in a similar vein put out by the National Archive.”

Distance is key it seems, both chronologically and geographically. But as Hepburn suggests, it’s not simply a case that the further away you are (whether in three- or four-dimensional terms) the more you can get away with. I’ve previously discussed the pervasive view of Hitler in Asia, that he was a historical figure who was probably a nasty piece of work, but not really the absolute archetype of evil that he might be in the west. And as such, the idea of dressing up as a Nazi doesn’t seem quite as terrible to Japanese or Indian people as it might to the British (let alone the Germans). Yes, of course people still do it, but those in the public eye rarely avoid a public flaying, as that amiable halfwit Prince Harry discovered to his cost a few years back.

The odd thing is that as the events of the Second World War grow more distant, the public reaction against this sort of behaviour gets not more indulgent, but less. And then a friend (who happens to be half-British and half-Japanese, which may or may not be significant) reminded me that in 1986 it seemed rather amusing that a cricketing hero should doll up as a Colditz commandant. I doubt his heirs in the current squad would be let off so lightly. Although the Indians might find it moderately amusing.

How soon is too?

2011-09-11T17:27:00.004+01:00

Odd. A Twitter account appears, apparently under the auspices of The Guardian. It is called @911tenyearsago. It describes the events of September 11, 2001, in real time, beginning with “Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari board American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston Logan airport” at 0735 EST. Reaction can best be characterised as surprise, rather than shock; but it picks up nearly 4,000 followers in a couple of hours, so there seems to be a level of interest. Flight 11 hits the North Tower at 0846; President Bush, preparing to enter the Florida classroom, is informed of this nine minutes later. And then... “This account of the events is now ending”. Time freezes at 0905, the South Tower unscathed, Flight 93 still chugging to San Francisco, oblivious to its fate, its role in history and folklore, its forthcoming movie career.

So what went wrong? Were there complaints? Did someone’s bad-taste radar go bleep? And if so, why? Why should an accurate, purely descriptive report of the events of 10 years ago upset people so? No hymns; no prayers; no flags at half-mast; no Paul Simon or James Taylor (baby-boomer sensibilities are more tender than those of mere mortals); no released doves. (Were there doves? There must have been doves at some point.) Feelings are permitted; the facts, suddenly, are verboten. Emotional fascism, Elvis Costello called it. Odd.

PS: The Onion gets it right, but doesn’t it always? And Sam Burnett puts things in their proper context.

9/11: I never could get the hang of Tuesdays

2011-09-11T08:19:00.001+01:00

A couple of years back, I wrote a book. Maybe you noticed me mention it. Did you read it, or at least buy it and mean to read it? Some people did, which was nice. It’s still available by the way; as far as I know, no copies were looted. Anyway, it was a book about the Noughties, and as such, there was rather a lot in it about the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that I cast 9/11 as the main character in the drama of the decade, the point around which everything else revolved. Which is hardly a radical piece of historical revisionism, but almost as soon as the book had gone off to press, I began to have my doubts. A few years before, I’d written a piece for The Guardian about the way that, post-9/11, the slightest disturbance in New York City seemed to trigger alarms in editorial offices in all corners of the world, even if it turned out to be caused by a common-or-garden accident; so a plane crash in NYC that kills two people is the headline in Le Monde, edging out a train crash in France that had killed 12. But in writing the book, I’d put my scepticism to one side, and worked within the mainstream, Applecentric perspective.

But it still niggled: was this agenda really viable? Was 9/11 really the lynchpin of the decade, for everyone from Beijing to Bamako? Were the 230,000 people wiped out by the 2004 tsunami really a smaller blip on the decade’s radar than the 3,000 who died in the terrorist attacks? In some of the articles I wrote to tie in with the book, I did try to raise the possibility that the overwhelming significance of 9/11 was a question of geopolitical perspective, but I really didn’t have the courage of my convictions. (I hope, however, that I’ve earned a little kudos for linking the phrase “false dawn” to the election of Obama.) Anyway, multiple brownie points to David Rothkopf, whose Foreign Policy article identifies 10 – T*E*N! – things about the past decade that were bigger than 9/11.

Also: the late David Foster Wallace, in 2007, tells the truth by asking questions; Rupert Cornwell on a wasted decade; Blackwatertown offers the journalist’s angle; Mrs Peel checks out the visuals; and Christopher sums up everything so neatly and sweetly that I don’t know why the rest of us bother.

But I will anyway. Since everyone’s been pitching in with their where-were-you-when story over the past few weeks (we’re all Zapruders now), I’ll bore you with mine one last time. I was in the British Museum, which had a small display dedicated to the work of the architect Norman Foster. I was particularly interested in the Millennium Tower, a projected development in Tokyo which, had it been constructed, would have been the tallest building ever. To give some idea of scale, they put the model alongside simulacra of about a dozen other buildings that had been, at the time of their construction, the tallest in the world, going back to the Eiffel Tower. So, when I got the call telling me that the first plane had hit (I seem to remember the news of the second strike coming while I was looking for a pub with a telly) I was standing over a model of a building that never was, and a couple that very soon wouldn’t be.

(The image above is an Indian pharmaceutical ad from around 2003, courtesy of Gothamist. And below is a place where the towers still stand.)

Jiving us that we were voodoo

2011-09-09T07:14:00.000+01:00

Sometimes people send me links to things, in the hope that I’ll mention them on the blog. Apparently they’re not terribly bothered whether I’m nice or nasty or indifferent about them, provided the product gets a mention. I will however take this opportunity to note that Anatomy of Norbiton is delightfully odd; and that High50 isn’t my sort of thing quite yet, thanks, although I did catch myself last night ranting about why people today are rubbish because they listen to Justin Bieber when they could be enjoying Marlena Shaw, so maybe I really should spend more time there. Oh, and I just got an e-mail to remind me to remind you that Rock’s Backpages will be 10 years old in November, but since that’s got some of my stuff on it, that’s hardly a disinterested plug.

A link, however, is just a link; every now and then someone sends me something analogue and meatyspacey. The estimable Howard Male, for example, who put my way a copy of his novel Etc Etc Amen. And I think the solidity, the realness of the book is what caught my attention, rather more than an e-book might have done. The author has had some copies made up through the auspices of lulu.com, but it’s fairly clear that this is just a means to an end: he wants a proper, old-school publisher to pick it up. And there are plenty of arguments to be had around that notion, and whether a book only becomes a book when a publisher says it is (and backs that up with hard cash) but we’ve been there, haven’t we?

Etc Etc Amen is a novel about rock music. Except that it isn’t of course, because plenty of people have attempted to write novels about rock music and failed: the best stab was, in my far-from-humble opinion, Nik Cohn’s I Am Still the Greatest says Johnny Angelo, but that’s another story, literally and figuratively.

The plot revolves around Zachary B, a glam rock star whose identity clearly owes much to David Bowie and Marc Bolan, but is specifically distinguished from either (Bowie lends him his Stylophone). He’s clearly clever and talented, but not as much of either as he thinks he is. Success makes him something of a petulant ponce; failure just makes him a self-pitying git. Male wisely avoids attempting to render the actual process of music-making in fictional form, apart from a deliciously bathetic comeback gig in Trafalgar Square. He’s far more interested in those that feed off rock’s festering corpse: the journalist who gets too close; the eerily calm stalker; the fans who turn his slightest utterances into a religion. And this is where things get interesting.

The narrative, which boogies back and forth between London in the 1970s and Marrakech in something approximating the present day, is broken up by philosophical screeds expounding the KUU, the Knowing Unknowable Universe. It’s a sort of fundamentalist agnosticism, and I personally found its details eminently skippable, but then I gave up on the poetry in Pale Fire, so what do I know? That’s not really the point, though. Just as the nature of Zachary’s music is all but irrelevant, so is the content of the KUU. It’s the effect that each of them has on people that matters, the ability of rock and religion to persuade people to do bloody stupid things. It’s not necessarily an original idea (think of Bowie’s leper messiah) but Male is more convincing than most in persuading us that fandom can snowball into something bigger and worse: the climax is like the Jonestown Massacre choreographed by the Marx Brothers. And who’s to say that’s not feasible? People must have looked on the early Christians in a similar manner to the way we see those Bolan fanatics who gather at Barnes Common every September.

Male hasn’t written the Great Rock ‘n’ Roll novel, but then I don’t think anyone ever will. What he has done is to write one of the smartest, most knowing books about fandom since Nick Hornby’s early stuff. The text could possibly do with a modest trim, and there are a few typos here and there, but that’s what publishers are supposed to deal with, right? So, publishers – deal with it.

Before I finally go insane

2011-09-06T06:46:00.004+01:00

In the absence of any plausible earworms these days, I make up my own. For some reason I can’t shake from my head the notion of Frankie Howerd singing ‘Black Betty’ although – as far as I’m aware – he never did. No worries, because 90s electro-japesters Fortran 5 had a similar idea. The whole point of their version of ‘Layla’ revolves around the moderately amusing fact that ‘Derek and the Dominos’ sounds a bit like ‘Derek Nimmo’. So this is what they did:

A straightforward concept, perhaps, and the execution was even simpler: just plonk Mr Nimmo in the studio with a pink gin and a lyric sheet and you’re done. A little tougher was their attempt at recording Pink Floyd’s song ‘Bike’, replacing the ethereal voice of Syd Barrett with the rather earthier tones of Sid James; the problem was that James had died in 1976. They resorted to some rather elegant splicing of existing recordings, effectively resurrecting the old rogue as a whimsical hippy:

Which rather throws down the gauntlet, doesn’t it? Should I root around the thricenays and oohmissuses of Howerd’s audio oeuvre to make real the bizarre performance that’s banging around my brain? Or is there a more fitting combination of 70s rock anthem and dead comedian that might more profitably occupy my time? Do let me know.

The end

2011-09-03T15:47:00.001+01:00

These are trying and confusing times for those of us who make words do vaguely interesting things and hope to be paid for our efforts occasionally (apart from full-time Scrabble hustlers, they’re remarkably sanguine about everything). Oh noes, says Ewan Morrison in The Guardian, the book is dead, and pretty soon “writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.” Hey, chill, says Lloyd Shepherd in the same fine publication, it’s just changing, not dying, y’know, like a Time Lord. (I made that last bit up.) And John Walsh in The Independent awakens from a long lunch just so he can worry that kids today don’t read Fowler’s Modern English Usage like they used to. He then worries even more, because his publisher’s buggered off without paying the bill. (I’m afraid I made that bit up as well.)

Meanwhile, Waterstone’s stops doing its 3 for 2 offers.

I know it’s not quite what Roland Barthes meant by the Death of the Author, but it does feel as if the Death of the Author or the Writer or Writing or the Book is only being forestalled by an infinite number of writers writing about whether they are or aren’t dead yet.

Quality control

2011-09-01T09:35:00.001+01:00

Sean Adams, top banana at the splendid Drowned in Sound music site, yesterday tweeted thus:

Persnickety perfectionist comment posters unite! Donate to a fund for full-time sub-editors for websites you’re charged nothing to read...

Well, um, yes and no. It must indeed be deeply galling to devote huge chunks of one’s free time to an online project that has brought entertainment and information to hundreds of thousands of readers, none of whom have paid you a farthing for the privilege, and then have one of them point out that in the midst of a 7,000-word retrospective on the career of the big lad who looks like a farmer from Boyzone, the author uses “affect” when she really means “effect” and thus must be a bad writer who knows nothing of the big lad’s work and thus the whole site is entirely worthless. And Adams does hint at one of the dirty little secrets of mainstream media, the fact that plenty of people who appear to be Good Writers (whatever that may mean) probably wouldn’t be labelled as such if it weren’t for the assistance of subs and fact-checkers and other mostly anonymous troubleshooters. Their contribution to journalism is as great as that of plastic surgeons to Hollywood, and don’t you forget it.

Moreover, as budgets at mainstream media outlets get tighter, while at the same time the sheer volume of content required increases, the need for such quality control become more transparently obvious. Every few days, it seems, a local newspaper somewhere outsources its sub-editing function, and the result is never an improvement (except, possibly, on the balance sheet). And then there are those established papers that have jumped on the blogwagon, but don’t feel the need to extend the benefits of an editorial once-over to those who huff and puff under their brand identity. I do find it amusing that Toby Young, who has become a standard bearer for the Free Schools movement, still makes egregious grammatical errors on his Telegraph blog, which are only eradicated after readers (the digital ghostbabies of Simon Heffer, perhaps?) have pointed them out.

But at the same time, that shouldn’t be a permanent get-out clause for writers who don’t have big money behind them. Andrew Keen and his like sneer at bloggers and other one-person bands because they’re not Proper Journalists, even when they’re not trying to be Proper Journalists (which is, of course, different from Good Writers, but that’s another thing). However, that doesn’t mean that bloggers don’t have a duty to use language accurately and appropriately, and even more importantly, to get their facts right, and to respond graciously if someone points out a mistake. To shrug and say, “What do you expect? It’s only a blog,” is to do the haters’ work for them, and reinforces an us-and-them scenario in online media which should have been redundant five years ago. (And incidentally, I know that’s not what Sean Adams was doing. He was, after all, decent enough to let me write a piece for him a while back.)

OK, you persnickety perfectionist comment posters, tell me what I’ve done wrong.

I’ll take that as a maybe

2011-08-29T07:58:00.001+01:00

(From the Huffington Post.)

There and then

2011-08-26T15:07:00.001+01:00

I’ve just noticed something that the director Rowan Joffe said last year about his version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock; specifically regarding his decision to update the action to 1964: “...1939’s a very, very long time ago and it almost feels like a foreign country to a contemporary audience.”

I’m not sure whether he was consciously referring to LP Hartley’s famed line about the past, or just expressing the widely held feeling that mainstream audiences are unable to cope with the notion that life happened well before they were born (and it wasn’t just in black and white either). But the idea may need reworking these days, intensifying even, as cheap travel has ensured that many of us have far more experience of foreign countries than most contemporary readers of Hartley or Greene would have done. Meanwhile, globalisation ensures that that experience contains within far less of a feeling of difference or strangeness. There will be wi-fi and Starbucks and soft toilet paper and people in Manchester United shirts. A 20-something from Brighton would probably find it easier to survive in modern Bangkok or Budapest than he would if he stayed on his home turf and travelled back 70-odd years. 1939 feels even more foreign than a foreign country does.

PS: Alistair @ Unpopular picks up the baton with regard to commodified youth culture, which came into being some time between the two dates.

Broken glass or honey

2011-08-23T06:51:00.000+01:00

An interesting remark from a recent interview with former Throwing Muse Kristin Hersh: “The intensity of good music is too much to bear. And bad music is so offensive that that’s also too much to bear.”

I sort of half get that. I certainly know what it’s like to encounter a piece of music, or a film or a painting or whatever, that overwhelms with its emotional intensity, and it’s too distracting and you’re not in the mood and you just want to hide. (Oddly, I’ve never found that with a book: I’ve been so utterly gripped by a novel that I’ve stayed on the bus to the terminus, even though reading on buses makes me nauseous, but I’ve never had to put a book to one side because it overwhelms me. Has anyone?)

Where I part company with Ms Hersh is over the matter of bad music. I don’t mind a lot of bad music, in fact I often like it, whether it’s bad because it’s a bit cheesy (like this) or simply incompetent (like that). What I can’t bear is music that’s simply bearable and polite and does its job and doesn’t charge emotional overtime. And I won’t post a link to it, because it encompasses about 95% of the music that surrounds us.

Whatever happened to Dirty Gertie?

2011-08-21T10:28:00.002+01:00

Ah, if all those behooded young persons watched stuff like this in their formative years, maybe they wouldn’t riot. Boom, and in a very real sense, boom.

Post about something other than the bloody riots (mostly)

2011-08-18T00:18:00.001+01:00

Inspired by a notion of Annie Slaminsky:

"..."the offences of the night of 9 August ... takes them completely outside the usual context of criminality". [link] At what point will James Murdoch deploy the Top Gear defence, that it's just *banter*? @dickon_edwards Only one of them was the subject of a Chas 'n' Dave song, I believe. Books people claim as influences, without having read them: The Great Gatsby; Breakfast at Tiffany's. Cigarette makers sue over graphic warning labels [link] Does free speech include right *not* to say something? @Treepixie Nabokov on excellent form, I see :-) @StiffPigeon At least you took the trouble. Inciting acts of violence gets you four years? Well, Louis Walsh makes me want to punch his face in. Get your trousers, Lou... @jamescrabtree Let me guess... Criticises the rioters for their abysmal standards of grammar? @jamescrabtree Fourth Reich? Jesus, not even Nicholas Ridley was that demented. Tonight am going to a production of Carmen in a nightclub. If I don't drown en route. Lawks, if you haven't seen @rhodri's Bad Date Compendium... [link] Well, that was different. @aethelflaed Yeeees. In Thai. With binbags and a breakdancing terrorist. @aethelflaed Well I didn't, and i think I got an OK deal. @CathElliott For Su Pollard it's a lifetime.

The barbarian

2011-08-15T11:47:00.003+01:00

I don’t know whether David Starkey is a racist. I doubt very much whether he knows either, because the word has ceased to have any empirical meaning, now being little more than a Humpty-Dumpty term of socio-political abuse (see also “politically correct”). But – probably inadvertently – he has raised another issue, about black culture. Or rather cultures, as his fellow panellist Dreda Say Mitchell argued, rightly pointing out that black British people should not be defined as a group in terms of second-hand gangsta archetypes.

But if this is the case, that there is no single, homogeneous black culture, surely the same applies to the majority (dominant, mainstream, white, British, Judeo-Christian, whatever you want to call it) culture. Starkey probably wouldn’t wish to be defined by the antics depicted on The Only Way Is Essex. Indeed, I suspect he wouldn’t wish to be defined by comparison with Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson either. And if it’s impossible to define culture at the micro-level of self-publicising TV historians, (What would the collective noun be? A pontification?) then how the hell can you do it on a broader scale? What is white culture, English or British or western culture? It’s everything, and as such is nothing.

While the neds and scallies and oiks and rudies of all colours were smashing windows and burning buildings, it was Dr Starkey who – again by accident – laid waste to culture as we know it.

(Five Chinese Crackers weighs in, with just the right combination of passion and forensics; and you’ve probably already read Charlie Brooker on bling, but anyway. And then Rhodri Marsden on how the above video clip fits into everything. You may be none the wiser, but don’t say you aren’t better informed. PS: And also something about the contribution of urban [non-]planning, by Owen Hatherley. Do I spoil you or what? That said, I might write about something unriotous next time.)

The sins of the sons

2011-08-14T07:45:00.000+01:00

It was a pleasure to burn...

2011-08-12T07:14:00.004+01:00

Apparently bookshops have for the most part evaded the attention of the looters; and a Waterstones employee was heard quipping that this is a pity, because “if they steal some books they might learn something.” Which did prompt me to throw together a quick reading list that might throw a little light on the situation, and it was looking something like this:

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
Abbie Hoffmann, Steal This Book...

...when I noticed the delightful Bidisha pointing out that a TV show made for Amnesty International was made by a team of 11 white men and... er... that’s it. And my boring liberal conscience kicked in, and I wondered whether it really matters, but if it does, are there any books by women and/or people who aren’t Caucasian that might be added to my list?

(Title half-inched from the opening of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Image ramraided from the delectable Photoshoplooter. And while we’re vaguely on the subject, if you think reading matter is sacrosanct, look at this.)

PS: As if someone heard me, Bookmarks has come up with a list. It’s more inclusive than mine, but not that much.

Corporate raiders

2011-08-10T08:58:00.002+01:00

From the Telegraph, of all places. (Click to enlarge.)

The revolution will not be televised if they nick all the televisions

2011-08-09T06:23:00.003+01:00

(Those who have been following me on Twitter over the past few hours may find some of these observations a little familiar. My only defence is that, in true postmodern spirit, I’m just looting myself.)

A year and a bit ago, there was a period of civil disturbance in Bangkok. I wrote something about it at the time. It’s not helpful – nor is it my place – to divide the participants into goodies and baddies, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the protesters originally came to the city with honestly held grievances. In their view, the democratic process had failed them, after elected governments aligned to Thaksin Shinawatra were forced out of office, first by the army, then by the courts. Non-violent protest degenerated into something nastier, 90 or more people were killed, and much damage was inflicted on the city. But, as far as I’m aware, nobody stole any flat-screen TVs.

Some of the more strident opponents of the protesters argued that if this is how ordinary Thais behaved when they had the merest sniff of democracy, it might be better for the country if it were sealed off from these new-fangled notions for a few years. To his credit, Prime Minister Abhisit rejected such a move, in due course called an election, and was soundly defeated by Yingluck Shinawatra, Thaksin’s sister/proxy. So the protesters got pretty much what they wanted but – crucially – they got it through the ballot box, not through brute force.

Recent events in London and beyond seem to have followed an initial trajectory that’s superficially similar to that of the Bangkok protests, with a peaceful demonstration against a perceived injustice getting out of control. But what happened next was at once less serious (nobody, so far as we know at the moment, is dead) and more reprehensible, as participants quickly ditched all pretence to a political motive and began to loot and burn for its own sake. Condemnation was quickly and rightly forthcoming from all quarters, even if some of the proposed responses (water cannons, troops on the street, martial law, shoot on sight) suggested that some people don’t follow recent events – those in Bangkok, for example – as closely as they might. And some other rumours banging around Twitter, such as the meme that the animals had been released from London Zoo, just prove that some people read too many John Irving books.

The looters in London and Birmingham and Liverpool and elsewhere don’t have the excuse that they were the victims of an anti-democratic fiddle; moreover, they’re considerably wealthier, in material terms, than most of the farmers and labourers who marched under Thaksin’s banner. The electoral system in Britain is far from perfect, but by chance, last year’s election gave an outcome that was closer to the intentions of the voters than many in recent times: as ever, no one party took an overall majority of votes, and unusually, no one party was able to govern unaided. It wasn’t the result I wanted, and maybe it wasn’t what the people lugging flat-screen TVs through smashed shop windows wanted (an analysis of voting behaviour among the hooded opportunists might throw up some surprises, although I suspect not) but it’s what happened.

But just because the looters aren’t noble, selfless freedom fighters, it doesn’t mean their behaviour doesn’t warrant analysis. It was in that spirit that I tweeted:

The looting is an unholy synthesis of welfare dependency and consumer capitalism. Discuss.

...and while some appreciated the contribution, and some agreed, and some didn’t, one or two hinted that such Hegelian chin-stroking is inappropriate right now, that our responses should be practical or emotional, but not intellectual; after all, not that many bookshops were ransacked over the past few nights. It’s pretty sad when the word “understanding” becomes freighted with negative connotations; if you’re trying to understand a criminal, does it really mean that you automatically want to hug him and forgive him and buy him a Wii? Surely it’s quite consistent to want to understand and analyse an act of wrongdoing, and at the same time to sympathise with the victims and punish the wrongdoers and try to prevent the whole fiasco from happening again.

Or should we just say fuck it, and wheel out the water cannons?

PS: Hurrah! Zoe Williams brings Baudrillard to the (street) party!

PPS: And at Prospect, David Goodhart throws a slug of Fukuyama into the punchbowl...

Androzani McCarthy

2011-08-06T11:15:00.001+01:00

Despite the assertions from the producers that American money would not have a detrimental effect on the new series of Torchwood, things aren’t looking so good. It’s not just the bit where the undead CIA bloke had to have Wales explained to him, or the tiresome pants/trousers badinage; it’s the feeling that they’ll be using the show as a dumping ground for Brat Pack stars whose careers started to falter in the 1980s. In fact, the whole show could be seen as something akin to one of the overflow camps into which the should-be-deceased beneficiaries/victims of the Miracle are being herded.

In the most recent instalment, we were blessed not only with Mare Winningham (St Elmo’s Fire) but also a barely recognisable C Thomas Howell (The Outsiders and the frightful Soul Man); this coming on top of the President from Independence Day, Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park and Winston from Ghostbusters, the whole thing is a delight for devotees of the “hey-didn’t-you-used-to-be...?” tribe. But surely it’s a warning sign as to where Torchwood, and the whole Whovian universe is headed. Within a couple of series, I can see Jack Harkness (Emilio Estevez) crashing his dad’s car because he’s so angry that Amy Pond (Molly Ringwald) won’t go to the Gallifrey Prom with him, preferring as she does the smooth charms of The Master (Rob Lowe, in a cap-sleeved t-shirt). Co-starring Ralph Macchio as Davros and Demi Moore as The Rani, with the theme tune arranged by Wang Chung.

Actually, it all sounds rather marvellous.

It’s all about meme meme meme

2011-08-04T06:55:00.002+01:00

As AnnaLittleRedBoat suggests, the blogosphere isn’t – notwithstanding the haters – dead, but every now and then you do wonder whether it might be a bit kinder to whack it over the head with a shovel. (Whether or not it’s still social media or not I’ll leave to Patroclus.) Who remembers how it was in the olden days, like 2007 or something, when Amy Winehouse was always in the News of the World and we bloggers used to exchange memes? Well the dangerously brilliant and devilishly cute Annie Bookcrossing Slaminsky has deposited a new one in our collective digital lap. Feel free to pick it up and run with it:

1. Movie you love with a passion.
Casablanca. For all its flaws. Damn it, because of them.

2. Movie you vow to never watch.
That new Planet of the Apes thingy. The trailers seem specifically constructed to dissuade me.

3. Movie that literally left you speechless.
Festen. The whole audience stumbled into the light, as if we’d all been kicked in the face for the duration of the film.

4. Movie you always recommend.
Tampopo, because everyone who watches it feels hungry and frisky at the end, and they can’t decide which urge to satisfy first, which is a pleasant dilemma to have.

5. Actor/actress you always watch, no matter how crappy the movie.
A whole load of British character actors, especially those who were good at underplaying; let’s say Denholm Elliott. No, John Le Mesurier.

6. Actor/actress you don’t get the appeal for.
Jennifer Aniston. I don’t even get her hair.

7. Actor/actress, living or dead, you’d love to meet.
Orson Welles. Damn, that man could racont.

8. Sexiest actor/actress you’ve seen (with picture).

9. Dream cast.
The Misfits was a pretty good combination, although most of the actors had at least a toe in the grave.

10. Favorite actor pairing.
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Brainy sex.

12. Favorite decade for movies
The 1940s.

13. Chick flick or action movie?
Action movies can distract you from their essential crassness with a big explosion or the like. Chick flicks can only deploy yet more crassness.

14. Hero, villain or anti-hero?
Anti-hero. Jean-Paul Belmondo in A Bout de Souffle.

15. Black and white or color?
Black and white; specifically, black and white films made from about 1960 onwards, when going mono became a conscious decision rather than a default position. (Whistle Down The Wind, The Manchurian Candidate, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, Branded To Kill, The Last Picture Show, Eraserhead, Manhattan, Down By Law, Clerks, Ed Wood...)

Your turn.

PS: Only just realised that I missed out question 11, which is:

Favorite movie setting

The Dali-designed dream landscape in Hitchcock’s Spellbound. I’m not a huge fan of Dali’s paintings, to be honest, but this makes me wish he’d done more set designs.

Norris’s norks

2011-08-01T07:24:00.000+01:00

Although it’s many years since I worked for Guinness World Records, some sort of primeval instinct asserts itself now and again when a relevant news story comes into view. Would I have included it in the book, I wonder? Would it have warranted a picture? Would I have had to mediate over tantrums regarding its validity? All these thoughts flashed through my mind when I heard of the good ladies of Worcester, who had attempted to break the record for the most bras linked together, but were forced to call it off when the relevant undergarments became entangled. As such, it wouldn’t have made the cut. But it is, in its own way, the perfect British silly season story, in that it combines three highly attractive narrative components: admirable charitable instincts; breasts; and plucky failure.

Never mind, maybe a nice picture of a young Charlotte Rampling in a bra will boost my viewing figures again.

You can’t touch this

2011-07-30T11:07:00.001+01:00

In the New York Times, Nick Bilton describes his dilemma as he moves to a new city; what to with all his books. “What’s the point if I’m not going to use them? I have digital versions now on my Kindle,” he asks. “If I was talking about throwing away my CD or DVD collection, no one would bat an eyelid.”

The latter is probably true; but if he’d been talking about a collection of vinyl records, eyelids would bat like Stuart Broad with something to prove. Maybe I’m showing myself up – like Roger Ebert – as an analogue diehard, but might it be the case that when we can get hold of stuff by digital means, whether by downloading it or ordering it from Amazon, it ceases to mean that much; and is thus easier to jettison?

(That said, this post is based on a conversation that began on Google+, so maybe I’m not as analogue as I make out.)

PS: And here’s someone quietly raging against the dying of the reading light.

Stuck in a moment you can’t get out of (unless you buy a big new telly)

2011-07-28T06:49:00.001+01:00

Marshall McLuhan was born 100 years ago this month. Here’s self-confessed McLuhagnostic and analogue native Roger Ebert to provide a personal/historical perspective – with the help of a couple of Russians – on MM’s “rearview-mirror” concept of the social and technological environment:

I grew up in a world of books, magazines, radio, black & white television, and movies that were shown in movie theaters. I was well enough established in that world that it created an “invisible environment.” It never occurred to me that there was anything new about those forms of media. When Gorky saw the first silent films, he called them “the Kingdom of Shadows,” and added: “If you only knew how strange it is to be there.” When Tolstoy saw a movie for the first time, he said: “You will see this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and the cold machine.” He rather liked movies. “The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is its greatness.”

Have you ever (have I ever?) given much conscious thought to the fact that movies move? The very term “motion picture” was coined in a world in which pictures did not move. Yet within a few years after Gorky and Tolstoy saw the first films, Charlie Chaplin was the most famous man in the world, and nobody gave it a moment's thought. The invisible environment had changed to accommodate a new kind of visibility.

Or, as Douglas Adams put it:

...everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

(Image from picturesofwalls.com.)

Something to spray

2011-07-26T09:29:00.001+01:00

Concern has been expressed at the ease with which someone was able to spray red paint over Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf in the National Gallery last week, and the event has prompted calls for security checks, protective glass and entrance fees to our great art collections. The latter argument is particularly odd, as it implies that someone with an insatiable urge to damage great art would be deterred if it cost a fiver or so to exercise his or her critical faculties.

In fact, responses to the Poussin attack became rather more measured once rumours arose that it wasn’t motivated by sheer philistinism, but by some quasi-mystical stack of conspiracy theories that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Dan Brown schlockbuster. It wasn’t just dumb vandalism, you see: it was, in a strange way, a work of art. The fact that the damage caused (minimal, as it turned out, thanks to the prompt action of the National’s resident troubleshooters) was just the same as if it had been some bored drunkard wielding the can is irrelevant, apparently.

The notion that it might be some kind of religious protest is certainly feasible; to be honest, I can’t think of an instance where an attack on a major work of art has turned out to have been conducted in the same spirit that possesses a disaffected, Adidas-clad 12-year-old inking a spunking cock and balls on the wall of an underpass. Such assaults usually turn out to be prompted either by genuine madness, or the desire to make some sort of political point (the suffragette who slashed the Rokeby Venus; the attack on Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley portrait). And then of course there are defacements sanctioned by the art world itself, such as the Chapman brothers’ hijacking of Goya etchings; or Duchamp’s doodle on the Mona Lisa. The danger invariably comes from someone pissing within the tent. The outsiders don’t care enough about Poussin’s work even to ruin it.

If there were any chance that some priceless work in the National’s collection were to fall victim to the nihilistic whims of a trackie-bottomed ned, it wouldn’t be entrance fees that dissuaded him; it would be the fact that it was in the National.

Truthy

2011-07-23T10:30:00.001+01:00

(By gaping void)

Gloup, Gloup

2011-07-20T09:07:00.002+01:00

The consensus seems to be that Jonathan May-Bowles, aka Jonnie Marbles, the man who tried to liven up the Murdochs’ appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport committee is something of a berk, a wally, a twunt and possibly even worse. A few conspiracists have even argued that he has to be in the employ of News International, because his intervention provoked sympathy for the embattled Rupert (who of course would then deny having anything to do with him, and he certainly didn’t pay him).

The language used to cover Marbles’s contribution is interesting: most hacks have reported the empirical reality that his weapon of choice was “a paper plate of shaving foam” or words to that effect. Had it been defined as a pie or a tart – since, after all, shaving foam is the main constituent of the pies that a circus clown might fling, although you have to let them stand for an hour or two to get the sting out – the attacker might have been seen as a confrère of the heroic Noël Godin (aka Georges Le Gloupier) the Belgian entarteur whose victims include Bill Gates, Nicolas Sarkozy and Jean-Luc Godard.

Those who criticise Marbles suggest that his activities distracted from the bigger story, the ritual inquisition of those ultimately for the hacking scandal; the Labour Party has primly suspended his membership. In reality, with the exception of the redoutable Tom Watson, the committee’s questions were pretty bland, and I’m pretty sure that at one point Murdoch Senior actually nodded off. Marbles is on the naughty step, not because he attacked Murdoch, but because he implicitly attacked the whole rotten system that implicates politicians, police and media, smug pigs with their expensively manicured front trotters in the same trough. He’s in trouble not for what he did, but for what he meant. And the fact that his Twitter following rocketed in the minutes after that sublimely “WTF?” moment should also raise a question mark or several with regard to the shallow, transient celeb culture that the Murdoch press has helped to foster over the past few years.

Which is not to insist, of course, that he isn’t still a bit of a twunt.

PS: Mr Marbles in his own words; and, at Pickled Politics, Sunny Hundal comments on the comments.

Desynchronosis blues

2011-07-17T08:51:00.001+01:00

I am suffering from jet lag, but as is usually the case, it is somebody else’s jet lag. Whereas I ought to be operating under the gentle, understandable befuddlement of one who is in Bangkok, thinking it’s Istanbul, a few calculations indicate I actually feel like someone in Lima whose rhythms are still shaking their circadian thang in Mumbai. As a result, when I fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, it’s not just embarrassing, it’s inexplicable. I reckon every airline on which I travel slips some weird anti-melatonin in my drink, simply to ensure that no matter how ghastly the flight, how loud the shrieks of the feral children, how toxic the snuffles and coughs of the dodgy Vietnamese businessman at my shoulder, once I get off the plane, it will be even worse.

Nothing new under The Sun (on Sunday)

2011-07-14T14:34:00.001+01:00

Against the current

2011-07-12T06:51:00.001+01:00

The sainted Roger Ebert has torn into an intermediate level ‘retelling’ of The Great Gatsby that replaces great slabs of Fitzgerald’s heady prose with unspeakable blandness:

There is no purpose in *reading* The Great Gatsby unless you actually *read* it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about *how the story is told*. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby's lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style – in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process. You are left with the impression of having read a book, and may never feel you need return for a closer look.

Well, yes, but... As several of Ebert’s respondents have suggested, in the real world, the choice is not so much between reading emasculated Fitzgerald and reading real Fitzgerald, but between reading emasculated Fitzgerald and not reading anything whatsoever. This is a line I used often when I edited the Guinness Book of Records, which was often attacked for being glossy and sensationalist compared to the glory days of the McWhirter brothers: at least we’re getting 12-year-old boys to read books, I said, and that shut them up. Sometimes I almost convinced myself.

Meanwhile, that other great sage Prince Charles has declared that it is “awful” for young readers that there are no more Harry Potter books on the horizon; which would suggest that children eased into the world of literature by the Rowling brand are unable to break out of Hogwarts and attempt more challenging texts. That said, would that be such as great loss if the next thing they reached for was Gatsby Lite?

Screws

2011-07-09T09:10:00.001+01:00

My grandfather was a respectable member of the bourgeoisie who ran his own drapery shop and played bowls. I think he may even have been a Freemason. And he read the News of the World, because the sports reporting was good, and because “we need to know these things are going on in the world.”

I don’t think he would have felt the need to know these things.

If the News of the World, as has been suggested, is replaced by a Sunday edition of The Sun, I make one suggestion: that Rebekah Brooks should make the tea. And that she never be permitted to take a holiday.

(Image by Political Scrapbook.)

Pants

2011-07-06T07:13:00.002+01:00

In the midst of a stack of papers, including a 60-page radio script that has my name on the cover, but I’m damned if I remember writing it, I find the filleted remains of a 15-year-old cheque book. The first thing that strikes me as I flip through the stubs is how scrupulously I noted the payee, the amount, and often the product that was being paid for. I even carried over the resulting balance in my account. Apparently I was in the black as well, which is odd.

But some of these messages from the last century now conspire to baffle me. Who or what was JM Cave, and why did I pay him/her/it £1.50 for underwear? Even in 1996, that would only have bought a single pair of pants, surely? Did some unspecified mishap leave me in desperate need of boxers, but bereft of cash? Perhaps I’ve erased the memory of such a predicament from my mind.

And then I turn to the next stub: one of your English pounds to A. Mannion, for something identified as deliceuse. And then £1.20 to L. Hoggett for suicidal lemons and it suddenly all falls into place. These – Underwear, Deliceuse, Suicidal Lemons, R*E*P*E*A*T, All About D, Michael Bolton Looks Like A Potato and so on – were all fanzines. I sent cheques to people, perhaps with stamped addressed envelopes, and they sent fanzines back to me, fanzines full of earnest, whimsical, cute, bitchy, profound, tortured, confused prose about Pulp and Bis and the Manic Street Preachers and how John Peel was going to live forever. Some even had glitter on the covers. I even thought of starting one, went as far as putting a small ad in Select magazine, asking for demos, and some arrived, and most were rubbish, but the mag never quite happened. Bikini Machine, it would have been called. In many ways, Cultural Snow is the fanzine I never wrote. All that’s missing is the glitter.

Hacks and hackers

2011-07-05T07:31:00.002+01:00

I know some of my regular readers think I’ve been a little soft on Johann Hari. For what it’s worth, I think what he did was wrong, and I’ve never done it myself; but I’m probably guilty of other varieties of journalistic sleight of hand, and I’m pretty certain many of the hacks who joined in the digital lynching over the past week would also admit to having taken the occasional liberté with the actualité if you bought them a drink or two. In any case, if the latest revelations about the phone-hacking saga are accurate, Hari’s misdemeanours begin to look more like silly youthful indiscretions by comparison.

Anyway, in The National I’ve written a more considered piece about the ramifications of young Johann’s shenanigans. On reflection, I should perhaps have included Keats’s gag about truth and beauty, but that would have been on top of Capote and Eliot. Excessive quoting probably isn’t appropriate in this context.

PS: Some have taken exception, it seems. “Uric philosophy”, indeed.

Orient excess

2011-07-02T12:28:00.003+01:00

Two angles on greyish-pink Brits in unfamiliar climes, each of them to some extent food-related. The first is from Stewart Lee’s most recent TV show:

And then from AA Gill’s Table Talk collection, a discussion of durian:

Inside, the flesh is marmoreally slimy, some say silky. Personally, I think it’s like lost babies who have been drowned in baths of whey. The flesh clings to the stones like putrefying muscle. You have to suck and nibble. Few Westerners manage that twice... It defies categorisation and nothing so marks the yawning gulf between hot East and cool West as this strange, misbegotten Caliban food – a vegetable that thinks it’s a cadaver.

Wayne on a plane

2011-06-30T13:44:00.002+01:00

I’d heartily recommend the efficient and friendly services of Turkish Airlines to anyone, provided you cover your eyes and ears when the safety video comes on.

Leaving aside the fact that for every customer who responds positively to the Manchester United brand there will be at least one who retches, the treatment of the footballers reminds me of how black actors were expected to perform in Hollywood movies in the 1930s: all that’s missing is the eye-rolling. Is it really surprising that millionaires who are paid to goof around like overgrown eight-year-olds might lose any grasp they may have had of the niceties of social behaviour or responsibility that are expected of other adults?

I’m Johann Hari! No, I’m Johann Hari...

2011-06-28T20:27:00.002+01:00

The journalist Johann Hari stands accused of plagiarism, but plagiarism of a very specific kind. He has admitted that when writing up interviews, he sometimes takes remarks that his interviewees have made in other media and inserted them in his own piece, if they make the relevant point better.

The fact is that printed interviews are seldom accurate transcriptions of the words spoken. “Um”s and “ah”s are excised; evident malapropisms and grammatical infelicities are corrected, especially if someone is not speaking in his or her first language; very often, what goes in is what the speaker clearly meant to say, not what was said. If this didn’t happen, interviews would be all but unreadable. If journalists are being dishonest in tidying text up in this manner, then I plead guilty to dishonesty.

Hari has been accused of deception, in suggesting that his interviewees have said things to him that, in fact, they said or wrote on other occasions. But people who are interviewed on a regular basis often find themselves being asked the same questions, and inevitably come up with similar answers each time. (I mentioned this phenomenon in my Leonard Cohen biography, if anyone out there has yet to acquire a copy.) All Hari has been doing is to offer the most elegant variation on a theme that his subject has uttered.

In fact, it could be argued that Hari’s behaviour is marginally more honest (less dishonest?) than that conducted by most hacks. When someone just tidies up a transcript, the resulting phrase is something the interviewer never said; when Hari lifts from the interviewee’s previously reported comments, at least it’s the real deal.

(Although, come to think of it, if Hari’s lifting from an earlier interview, who’s to say that the relevant journalist hasn’t already done a bit of judicious tidying to the text? And if he’s lifted from the interviewee’s own writing, it’s quite possibly been edited to a greater or lesser extent – by someone other than the writer – before seeing the light of day.)

Hari may have been rather more cavalier with his sources than his readers might have guessed, but provided the meaning is intact, little real harm has been done. Perhaps those of his fellow hacks baying for his blood should be required to swear to the absolute accuracy – remember those “um”s and “ah”s – of the quotations in their own material.

PS: And then, the inevitable Downfall video...

PPS: Hari’s own take on the brouhaha.

The Turks and their tortoises

2011-06-28T08:08:00.000+01:00

Osman Hamdi Bey, The Tortoise Trainer (1906), Pera Museum, Istanbul.

Fikret Mualla, Circus In Red – The Tortoise Trainer, Istanbul Modern.

Bosphorescence

2011-06-26T15:28:00.004+01:00

Hagia Sophia in Istanbul began life in 360 as a cathedral, became a mosque in 1453, and then reopened as a museum in 1935. The resulting juxtaposition of Christian iconography and Islamic calligraphy says much about the city’s location at the cusp of Europe and Asia, and one can derive all sorts of optimistic fortune cookies about people of all faiths and cultures and races just getting along fine. It also suggests that there was a time when Muslim culture was a little more relaxed about depictions of human figures.

As you come out of the main dome area, and a sign to your right points you to a gallery. It’s not quite clear whether this is meant in the architectural sense – a long balcony – or the more conventional modern notion, of a place to put pictures. In fact, if you wind your way up a series of cobbled ramps, you find that it’s both. The area offers a a closer look at the magnificent dome, and also a view down on the nave, and all the other tourists taking photographs. But there are also a few more artworks hanging here: and at the moment they are photographs of the mosaics that you’ve just seen, and that the people down there are photographing. I can’t decide whether it’s deliciously postmodern, or all just a bit redundant.

Then we go to the gift shop and buy fridge magnets.

Dog whistle politics

2011-06-24T08:04:00.001+01:00

At CNNGo, I admit to not understanding the Thai election campaign, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one...

Bad news bared

2011-06-23T08:11:00.001+01:00

It’s been argued that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but the phenomenon of organisations deliberately creating negative stories about themselves would appear to be a relatively new one. It started in a small way with food manufacturers releasing made-up stories that they planned to modify or do away with treasured brands (such as Vegemite iSnack 2.0) and comic publishers killing off beloved characters, or just threatening to do so, as has happened to everyone from Superman to Desperate Dan; the latest victim of this trend being poor old Spider-Man. The only risk is that devoted fans won’t be quite as outraged as was expected, and a valuable property will be sacrificed in ignominious obscurity; or, more deliciously, they’ll have to go through with a move that they never intended to execute in the first place, because consumers don’t tell them not to.

Virgin took things to a new level in early 2009 when they released a letter complaining about the standard of their in-flight catering, although they rather gave the game away by having the letter begin “I love the Virgin brand”, thus immediately identifying the author as an advertising executive; real people don’t love brands, or if they do, they’re not aware of it. But things have really kicked off in the past few months, when Simon Cowell got in on the act: first with the whole Cheryl in the USA saga; and then the distinctly fishy e-mail that essentially accused Cowell of grooming a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent. And this week we have the “news” that the dating website beautifulpeople.com has accidentally allowed 30,000 uglies onto its books, and has had to kick them off again. Cue outrage from those who believe that beauty lies within: cue free publicity.

I just think it’s odd that high-profile entities are paying good money to concoct unpleasant stories about themselves at the same time that certain high-profile individuals are also shelling out in order to quash such stories. And I wonder if it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one or more of the stories that are being suppressed by injunctions (super or otherwise) might turn out to have been entirely concocted as well.

The appetite may sicken

2011-06-20T09:27:00.000+01:00

I used to be a music journalist of sorts, and more recently I’ve been a food journalist of similar sorts, and I’m well aware of which one gives me more countercultural brownie points. I still retain enough of a Camden-backroom sneer to have snorted with derision when I saw the advert for Harvest, the latest wheeze dreamed up by bassist-turned-cheesemaker Alex James: it’s described as “the food and music festivals”, which sounds like the ultimate bourgeoisification of rock and roll Avalon: for people who might quite fancy a gentle boogie in the field, provided they won’t get their Boden chinos and Cath Kidston accessories grubby, and that there’ll be something suitable to eat for the kids, because young Hengist’s iridologist has warned us that he might become temporarily bipolar if he goes within 50 yards of non-organic ciabatta, while dear Melpomene is flirting with pesco-fruitarianism.

And then I looked at the line-up and thought, ooh, Hughley Fergley-Wergley, I like him... and Mark Hix, went to one of his places, that was good... Jay Rayner, writes amusingly grumpy reviews... Gennaro... Yotam... this sounds fun... And I thought, God, it’s happened, I really am middle aged.

But, in a move that might have been calculated purely to make me feel a whole lot better, the music line-up appears to be a load of bland, lame, Jools-friendly toss. Food has become the new rock and roll, simply because the rock and roll isn’t rock and roll any more.

More thoughts about Andy Warhol and stuff

2011-06-18T07:07:00.001+01:00

But I was talking about Andy Warhol, wasn’t I? I suppose I first became interested in Warhol because of the Velvet Underground, and I was interested in the Velvet Underground because of Joy Division, and how much further back do you want me to go? I was in my first year at university when he died: I remember the nascent artist/film-maker Nick Abrahams leaping out at me, hissing “Have you heard? Have you heard?” as I ambled along the High Street. I’d imagine we were both wearing Doc Martens, but that his were cooler than mine.

The following year, I took a course in writing radio drama, and one of my submissions was a sort-of-interior-monologue-cum-collage about Warhol’s last few minutes, largely drawn from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. I vaguely recall Edie Sedgwick making an appearance as the Angel of Death (which was in turn influenced by Jessica Lange’s role in All That Jazz). The funny thing was, at that stage I knew very little about Warhol’s life, beyond the stuff he chose to make part of his public persona. It wasn’t until I read Victor Bockris’s biography of Warhol that I found out he was gay, for example.

I know, it seems astonishing now, but even in the mid-to-late-Eighties, such things weren’t as widely discussed as we might remember. There was simply an assumption of heterosexuality, the sort of thing expressed in this airline commercial. Diehard Queen fans would get aggressive if one suggested that Freddie Mercury might not be entirely straight. John Inman and Larry Grayson, Kenneth Williams and Frankie Howerd refused to be drawn on the subject. Even the Pet Shop Boys refused to confirm or deny. Men flew Braniff because they liked the girls, unless they explicitly stated otherwise, which for the most part they didn’t. Remember this when people say Warhol made his life his art. Or was it the other way round?

It wasn’t just about sex, of course. Until I read the Bockris book, I don’t think I’d sussed that Warhol wore a wig either.

And I’m just about to post this when I realise that a few months after Warhol died, the Smiths broke up, and remember that we’ve just passed the 25th anniversary of the release of The Queen Is Dead, and I can’t think of much to say that hasn’t been said too many times already (often by me) but I’m certain that for some reason the occasion does need to be marked.

Haroun and the sea of pixels

2011-06-15T08:22:00.002+01:00

Salman Rushdie has decreed that television is really great, and that’s where all the good writing is, although whether he worked this out before or after someone offered him loads of cash to write a TV science-fiction show isn’t clear.

It does raise a useful question, though: at what point does an art form achieve intellectual respectability? English literature, for example – y’know, Shakespeare and Milton and that – wasn’t considered a subject worthy of serious academic study until the second half of the 19th century. More recent manifestations of creativity, such as video games, are still on the periphery, to the extent that it’s quite possible to admit that you have no knowledge of or interest in them, and still be regarded as an intelligent, informed person. Some have suggested that LA Noire will be the tipping point for games, although it’s interesting to note that many critics have indicated its cultural worth by saying how similar it is to another form (in this case, film); in the same way that cheerleaders for The Wire and The Sopranos compare them to 19th-century novels.

The problem is that, once an art form is judged to be worthy of attention from the Rushdies of this world, there’s a retrospective rewrite of cultural history; works that we now see as canonical often barely registered when they first appeared. Here’s HL Mencken, writing in December, 1927, by which time DW Griffith had already produced his best work, Chaplin had made The Kid and The Gold Rush, Murnau had created Nosferatu and, at the beginning of the year, Fritz Lang had released Metropolis:

I have now seen about twelve movies, four or five of them to the end. I liked them all pretty well, but am not tempted to go back.

PS: Although some seem sceptical about the pretensions of games to Hollywood standards of plausibility just yet.

Amina that most sincerely, folks

2011-06-13T06:50:00.003+01:00

Following the revelation that Amina Arraf, a lesbian blogger in Damascus, was in reality Tom MacMaster, a straight, male American postgraduate student in Edinburgh (who had borrowed Facebook photographs, taken in Paris, of a Jelena Lecic, a Croatian woman living in London), now seems as zeitgeisty a moment as it could ever be to admit that I am not, as I previously claimed, a straight, balding, grumpy British man who occasionally writes about restaurants in Bangkok, but a celibate Belgian woman who runs a small hardware shop in Montevideo, Uruguay. I hope my readers will a) forgive me; and b) take note of the special offer we have this week on rawlplugs.

While we’re on the subject, though: who are you, really?

PS: Zeitgeist update: now the woman whose photos were hijacked has her own publicist.

PPS: And if fake lesbians are what floats your boat, here’s another.

Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel?

2011-06-12T07:32:00.001+01:00

Andy Warhol, in addition to painting soup cans and movie stars, and making extremely long films, and getting shot, and generally being Andy Warhol for a living, was nominally the manager of the Velvet Underground in their early days. However, it’s probably fair to say that his duty of care to the degenerate art rockers was no more hands-on than his attitude to production of his art (which, once he’d had the idea, was often undertaken by his acolytes). In one interview around that time (1967-ish), he admitted that the band members didn’t actually get paid for their labours. “But how do they eat?” asked the journalist, aghast. “Um, well, they go to a lot of parties,” deadpanned Andy.

This came to mind a few days ago, when a marketing guy from one of the big riverside hotels in Bangkok asked me if, in my sometime capacity as a food journalist, I’d like to come over and sample the delights of the Italian restaurant there. I said I’d be delighted, but I wasn’t sure whether the usual outlets for my prandial witterings would be able to find space any time soon. “No problem,” he said. “If you could just give it a mention on your blog, that would be great.”

It all falls into place: Warhol had unwittingly created the model for journalism in the 21st century. Readers don’t want to pay for journalism, and advertisers are increasingly unwilling to subsidise it. The only way a hack without a private income can survive is on freebies, scraps from capitalism’s table (almost literally, in the case of food writing).

Two problems present themselves here. The first is that it gives an unfair advantage to those writers who specialise in the necessities of life, such as food and shelter and clothing. I have an image of emaciated literary bloggers desperately attempting to trade in their review copies with their foodie colleagues in the hope of getting a decent meal for the first time that week. That said, perhaps it might be a good idea if media were to focus on what people need more than what they can be persuaded to desire. [Thinks: Damn, does that mean nobody will want to send me free books any more?]

The other potential glitch is that the hacks might feel obliged to say only nice things about the products they’re being offered, since the alternative is starvation. But this has always been a problem under the old system, as publishers try to keep advertisers sweet, while also maintaining their hacks’ delusions that they’re morally pure seekers after truth, rather than enslaved rearrangers of the cultural slush. So it’s fortunate for me that the meal was most enjoyable (especially the whipped salt cod with avocado), and I have no hesitation in suggesting that Giorgio’s at the Royal Orchid Sheraton is very good and you should all go there, provided you tell them I sent you.

Don’t vote, it only encourages them

2011-06-10T10:14:00.001+01:00

An election looms in Thailand, and the roadsides are festooned with images of awkwardly gurning candidates, most of which survive a matter of days before being stolen or defaced. The most interesting are those put up by a spin-off of the People’s Alliance for Democracy which, notwithstanding its name, argues that popular democracy isn’t entirely suitable for Thailand. Although PAD activity was to a great extent responsible for the accession of current Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in 2008, the organisation holds all the mainstream parties in fairly low esteem, albeit reserving its fiercest condemnation for former Premier Thaksin Shinawatra and his cronies; as such they are depicted in unflattering animal guises.

As such, the Electoral Commission has banned the posters, on the basis that they don’t advocate any particular candidate, and because they’re the wrong size. The notion of “a plague a’ both your houses” seems just a little too nihilistic for Thailand’s image as the Land of Smiles. A pity; I liked the monkey. (More on posters here.)

Meanwhile, the big talking point is the success of the Bangkok-set über-sequel The Hangover II, and whether it presents Thai culture in a positive and/or accurate light. My friend Cod deals with the conundrum at CNNGo. And if you don’t understand the minutiae of local politics, you’ll just have to trust me: the following, from Thai White Papers via Punk Planning, is rather amusing.

Shot by both sides

2011-06-09T12:43:00.002+01:00

I haven’t seen the movie The Human Centipede, which is about a scientist who grafts people together, mouth to anus. Nor have I scene the sequel, brilliantly titled The Human Centipede II, which is about a man who watches the first film (postmodern, self-referential horror porn ahoy!) and is persuaded to repeat the experiment. The latter gem has joined the select band of films that have been banned outright in the UK.

While I’m instinctively opposed to censorship in general, it does strike me that the director, Tom Six, was rather setting himself up for this. Banning something on grounds of taste alone is impossibly subjective; but the likelihood that a work might provoke violent or destructive behaviour in its viewers should at least be considered. Mr Six has apparently made such a provocation the central feature of the sequel, which suggests that the first film should be banned retrospectively as well. Although the bigger issue, as poor Ryan Giggs has discovered, is that it’s all but impossible these days to ban anything that exists only as a string of one and zeroes; and trying to do so only brings further notoriety to it.

On a less tawdry note, Channel 4 is defending its decision to broadcast uncensored footage of extra-judicial executions carried out by the Sri Lankan military against Tamil militants. There’s a compelling argument here to override viewers’ squeamishness, as the whole point of the programme is to demonstrate that such atrocities did occur. But according to Channel 4’s head of news, Dorothy Byrne, while we should be allowed to see people being shot in the back of the head, any images of genitalia will be blurred out. I mean, we wouldn’t want to offend anyone, would we?