About CBS

Who remembers Andrew Keen? He was (still is, I guess) the tech entrepreneur who foresaw how widespread access to the tools of media production would lead to what he described as The Cult of the Amateur. And as he was doing this towards the end of the 2000s, it was blogging that really provoked his ire. I was a bit harsh on him at the time but finally I’m starting to think he may have had a point. As Sid Vicious pointed out, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt.”

About silos

From Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman:

Because in Hendon there are plenty of people just dying to explain the meaning of life to you. I guess that’s true in New York too, but in New York everyone seems to disagree with everyone else about what the meaning of life is. In Hendon, at least the Hendon I grew up in, everything faced in one direction, there was nowhere to get a grip. You needed that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn’t smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you thought of your own.

Alderman wrote this in the mid-2000s but it has had special resonance in recent days. For example, in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting it became clear that a great many Americans on the political right were completely unaware of the murders in June of the Minnesota legislator Melissa Dortman and her husband. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, or regarded the Dortmans as being less worthy of sympathy. They simply didn’t know the deaths had happened. They’re all in a big silo, all facing in one direction.

In Alderman’s novel, the protagonist (who was brought up in an Orthdox Jewish community in north London) recalls escaping from her own cultural silo by perusing the magazines in WH Smith:

I didn’t properly understand the differences between them. I couldn’t have told you about their target audiences or demographics. I read Loaded and Vogue, Woman’s Own and the NME, PC World and The Tablet. In my mind they became jumbled, those scraps of other lives. There seemed to be so many different things to know about: music, films, TV, fashion, celebrities and sex.

And if you got your information this way, selecting your favoured text from the vast swathe of titles on the newsagent’s shelves, you inevitably pick up other data, almost by osmosis. Even if your own magazine didn’t cover the Hortman killings, or the new Primal Scream album, or Versace’s autumn/winter collection, or which Hollyoaks startlet is posing in her pants, glimpsing the cover lines of the others gives you a few droplets of fact. You may not have the full story but you know these things exist.

We blame the clunky algorithms of social media for forcing us into these political and cultural silos but maybe that’s looking at the problem in the wrong way. Rather than the presence of social media, it’s more specifically the absence of what it replaced, scanning the headlines as you grabbed a paper from the station kiosk or browsing aimlessly in Smith’s on the way home from school, that ensured we knew at least a bit of stuff from the other side.

(Godwin’s Law alert.) Also nudged into the light by the Kirk thing, with specific reference to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel et al:

About Vivek Ramaswamy

I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it: 

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.

About American English

Even as the American Empire follows its British equivalent towards irrelevance, it refuses to go down without a fight, on the linguistic front. I’ve noticed an increasing tendency on London menus to describe a key component of eggs Benedict as an English muffin; of course, a generation ago we would have called it a muffin.

And this, found in a recent crime novel. It reads at first like a bold assertion of cultural independence but really it’s just a desperate plea to have one’s strange Limey peccadillos indulged, and not to get punched in the process.

About pronouns

I must admit, I do have issues with the current vogue for preferred pronouns, not least because the singular “they” has always grated (give me a neopronoun any day), even before it was adopted by non-binary people. But if it makes people happy with themselves, and makes everyday discourse easier, that trumps my instinctive pedantry. I’ve never gone so far as wanting to eradicate a whole part of speech, which would appear to be the crusade of one Lavern Spicer, Congressional Candidate for the 24th District of Florida. Here are some of her recent pronouncements. 

There are no pronouns in the Constitution.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(Although the very first word is a pronoun.) 

Jesus Christ never introduced himself using pronouns.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(John 14:6)

So many people want to try and tell me about pronouns today and try to convince me that the Lord himself introduced himself to Moses using pronouns.

I can't believe how far some of y'all have gone down the rabbit hole with these pronouns.

God bless your hearts!

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

(Exodus 3:4) 

I always speak my mind and I think y’all have LOST your minds when you got the Vice President introducing herself with PRONOUNS.

I have never used a pronoun in my life nor do I go around calling people Filipinx or Latinx.

Y’all went so woke your brains went & fell asleep.

— Lavern Spicer 🇺🇸 (@lavern_spicer) July 26, 2022

The really amusing bit is that these comments sit alongside Lavern’s tirades about the failings of the American public education system. The less amusing bit is that, as the clown juggernaut of the Tory leadership contest proceeds up its own fundament, we Brits can’t really point and laugh at the silly colonials, can we?

About Missed Connection

I suddenly half-remembered this story a few months ago (What was the time frame? Was it in the New Yorker?) and started to wonder whether I’d imagined it. So this isn’t really a post, more a placeholder, something that in a few years’ time may assure me that it was real. 

I saw you on the Manhattan-bound Brooklyn Q train. I was wearing a blue-striped t-shirt and a pair of maroon pants. 

You were wearing a vintage red skirt and a smart white blouse. We both wore glasses. I guess we still do...

About Bernie memes

So much of the tension that’s sprung up around both Trump and Brexit is cultural rather than explicitly political, revolving around assumptions (some of them justified) about what people think and do and know, and the extent to which those things place them on a binary divide. So I’m risking accusations of being a snooty, metropolitan elitist remoaner if I post my favourite of all the memes dealing with Bernie Sanders’s grouchy, bemittened appearance at Wednesday’s inauguration ceremony – simply because the most delicious thing about it is that Trump Won’t Get The Joke.

(If he’s reading this – maybe it’s raining on the golf course – full explanation here.)

About Trump (please God for the last time)

A splendid essay by Matthew Walther on the appeal of Trump – it’s camp, daahling:

Trumpian aesthetics is a catch-all of the great artificial modes in Western art: rococo, Art Deco, vaporwave. It is above all anti-pastoral. (Like the denizens of Versailles, Trump can only encounter the natural world third or fourth-hand, in a tweet about the imminent signing of the 2018 farm bill embedded with a clip of him singing the Green Acres theme song at the Emmys.)

Also this, my favourite ever clip of the man, in which he pretends to have read a book:

  

About Trump

 

About Fran Lebowitz

From The New Yorker, Fran Lebowitz on lockdown:

The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone. A couple of people invited me to their houses in the country, houses much more lavish than mine. Some of them have the thing I would love to have, which is a cook, since I don’t know how to cook. And I thought, You know, Fran, you could go away and you could be in a very beautiful place with a cook, but then you’d have to be a good guest. I would much rather stay here and be a bad guest. And, believe me, I am being a bad guest. 

(Thanks, Clair.)

About Trump and Parasite

Donald Trump’s comments about Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture have done what they were meant to do – energise his base and annoy his non-base. The film has all the necessary attributes to make it a hate object for the president, being cast entirely with people not lucky enough to be white Americans, and it’s subtitled, which requires reading and concentration. His ignorance is genuine, but it’s also performative and weaponised. This is not just about people who don’t watch foreign films with subtitles, which doubtless covers most Americans; it’s about those who react to such films with an instinctive fear and loathing, as if they represent all that is wrong with the world. People who do enjoy them are weird, dangerous, the other.

And if Trump had actually bothered to watch the film, he’d have discovered that it’s about the perils of an unequal society, especially because it pokes fun at rich people who, like Trump himself, barely manage to conceal the visceral loathing they feel for the poor people without whom they would be unable to function. He compared it unfavourably with Gone With The Wind, which he obviously hasn’t seen either, because it’s too long and isn’t about him, or porn, but he does know that it’s reassuringly racist and sexist and was directed by the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Victor Fleming, so it must be OK.

The paradox of Trump when it comes to matters of culture is that, despite his feeble attempts to pass himself off as a man of the people, he was born into enormous wealth, and enjoyed an eye-waveringly expensive education; an education, however, that seems to have passed straight through him like cultural Olestra, never touching the sides and leaving nothing but a greasy residue.

PS: Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

About Trump

Re-reading Mystery Train, in which Marcus dared to reframe the mythology of American popular music – and wider culture – in explicitly literary terms, the careers of musicians and politicians alike compared to Huckleberry Finn and Captain Ahab and Jay Gatsby. He’s particularly cutting about a man who was, at that time, the personification of political venality and vulgarity, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

But even LBJ might have had a vague idea who Huck and Ahab and Jay were, what they meant. What, asks New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik, of a man who hasn’t even read the books he pretended to write, a veritable President for a post-literate age?

Mr. Trump has been playing himself instinctually as a character since the 1980s; it’s allowed him to maintain a profile even through bankruptcies and humiliations. But it’s also why, on the rare occasions he’s had to publicly attempt a role contrary to his nature — calling for healing from a script after a mass shooting, for instance — he sounds as stagey and inauthentic as an unrehearsed amateur doing a sitcom cameo.

About cartoons

A couple of reminders that, even when words can be defanged – often these days by the tiresome canard of “fake news” – the image can still bite. First the great Art Spiegelman’s overview of the comic genre’s ability to speak grainy truth to power, given added resonance by the revelation that the current chairman of Marvel Comics found the whole piece just a little bit too truthful for comfort:

In today’s all too real world, Captain America’s most nefarious villain, the Red Skull, is alive on screen and an Orange Skull haunts America. International fascism again looms large (how quickly we humans forget – study these golden age comics hard, boys and girls!) and the dislocations that have followed the global economic meltdown of 2008 helped bring us to a point where the planet itself seems likely to melt down. Armageddon seems somehow plausible and we’re all turned into helpless children scared of forces grander than we can imagine, looking for respite and answers in superheroes flying across screens in our chapel of dreams.

And then this, from an old friend in Hong Kong:

About German magazines

“

In the past few days, two German magazines have put out covers depicting two right-wing foreign leaders in highly unflattering guises. That said, the difference in tone suggests that one of the countries in question, as awful as its current boss might be, still needs to be taken seriously. The other, perhaps not so much.

PS: More stuff:

PPS: “...how the others must see the faker...”

PPPS: And, by David Foldvari:

About The Handmaid’s Tale

The use of imagery from The Handmaid’s Tale by those defending women’s hard-won rights over their bodies is a clever piece of visual shorthand, instantly reminding us of the theocratic dystopia heralded by policies such as Alabama’s effective ban on abortion. However, I can’t help but think it also reinforces a further message: essentially, “We read literary fiction (or at least watch TV adaptations thereof) and you dumb hicks don’t.” Which may well be accurate, but in the current sociopolitical climate, is hardly helpful.

PS: I’ve been looking at the list of the state senators who voted for the Alabama ban; such names! Jabo Waggoner. Garland Gudger. Shay Shelnutt. Less a political process, more a Pynchon novel. Although that remark presumably makes the same mistake as the red-caped protestors...

About Pete Buttigieg

Looking ahead to next year’s presidential elections, pundits in the US are earnestly talking up the chances of one Pete Buttigieg, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and mayor of South Bend, Indiana.  He’s also gay, a graduate of Harvard and Oxford, speaks eight languages and his 10 favourite books include Ulysses and The Little Prince. While it would be interesting to see him run against a man who has probably not read 10 books in his life (not even those with his name on the cover), the tragedy is that such an admission of literacy will do him more harm than good. Imagine how such information can be weaponised among the Trump base.

PS: On similar lines, earlier today I was listening to a radio programme reuniting some of the last surviving veterans of the French Resistance in World War II, a meeting that, given the current state of frenzied unpleasantness over the whole Europe thing, was even more poignant than one might have expected. Someone mentioned that one of the code phrases broadcast to announce the imminent Normandy landings was “Wound my heart in a monotonous languor”, a line from Verlaine’s Chanson d’Autumne; a nugget that will simply serve to reinforce every available prejudice going, confirming to Remainers that the French are romantics and poets even in the most trying circumstances, and to Leavers exactly the same, but that it’s a bad thing.

PPS: Oh hell, this is from 2011.

About university

The whole sorry Brexit saga is at once tragedy, farce, soap opera and an interminable lecture about Parliamentary procedure, so sometimes it’s worthwhile to get an outsider’s view on the whole bloody mess. Here’s sometime Dubya aide David Frum’s version of articulate, informed sighing. He points out what I’ve said all along, that very few of the votes on either side were really about the EU per se; the leavers on both right and left were touting their own flavours of nostalgia, and those who wanted to remain pushed against that. He also trots out the statistic that a very important indicator of voting intentions was whether or not you’d been to university, with graduates voting two to one to remain and high-school dropouts (do we have “high-school dropouts” in the UK, David?) offering a similar statistical profile in reverse.

Which suits both sides nicely, since remainers think leavers are thick and leavers are sick and tired of hoity-toity experts. Except, of course, the idea that being a university graduate, even from a so-called elite establishment, imbues you with any particular level of cleverness is utter bollocks. I’ve known many people – a disproportionate number of them privately, expensively educated — who learned nothing at school or university bar a misplaced confidence in their own talents that, paradoxically, became a marketable skill in itself.

And on that note, we read about the lengths (and depths) to which rich Americans will go to get their moronic spawn into the best schools. Donald Trump has been unusually Trappist on this story, for some reason; and I don’t know whether this is any reflection on his own college days, because he got Michael Cohen to force the institutions to keep his grades secret. The only inference I can draw is that his marks were astonishingly high and he doesn’t want the fact to leak out in case it damages his credibility with his base. I mean, clever people are the problem, aren’t they?

PS: In related news, the Ivy League-educated son and grandson of millionaires, whose entire career has been in his dad's companies, tells us how bad the elites are.

PPS: More on the university entry scandal, by Amanda Hess in the New York Times:

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered... are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them... Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

About Conrad and Disneyland

Two things I learned this week.

1. When Joseph Conrad’s novella The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ was first published in the United States it was re-titled The Children of the Sea; not because potential readers might find the original title offensive but because if they knew it was about a black person they probably wouldn’t want to read it.

2. When Tokyo Disneyland first opened in 1983, rival theme park operators nicknamed it kurofune, a reference to the American “black ships” that forced Japan to open up to the wider world in the 19th century.

About the midterms

Two years ago I was in a restaurant in Bangkok, surrounded by people from all ends of the planet, even Wales, all working happily together, when Donald Trump (metaphorically) walked in and did a big shit in the kitchen. I'm going to bed now, hoping against hope that by the time I wake up, good people will finally have got their act together and rubbed his orange nose in it.

About arts

An interesting collision on West 57th Street in New York; the anonymous graffitist is saluting Norman Rockwell’s words while at the same time obliterating them. But this isn’t a straightforward high-vs-low tussle. For many years, Rockwell was held at arm’s length by the art world, the cosy sentimentality of his Saturday Evening Post covers outshining his sometimes radical intent; street art, meanwhile, has become big business. Would Rockwell have retaliated? And would his retaliation have been art?