About bespoke

I got into a polite exchange of views a couple of days back over an otherwise unexceptional story about, of all things, expensive mince pies. Or, more specifically, over the language used by the good citizens of Orford, in Suffolk, where the Pump Street Bakery makes delicacies that are supposedly the priciest mince pies going. When one of the locals described them as “bespoke”, I was confused, because there had been nothing in the article to tell us this was the case. In fact, if they really were bespoke, or what I’d define as bespoke, created to the precise specifications of each customer, then the price (£25 for six) wouldn’t seem so exorbitant.

And it was only when a second person used the same adjective to describe the pies that I realised what was going on. “Bespoke” doesn’t have that specific meaning any more, the sense of having a suit made where every detail, the measurements, the cloth, the precise diameter of the buttons, is decided by the person paying the bill. It just means something luxurious, something posh. Something that costs £25 for six. 

I wrote about this a decade ago, discussing how I no longer use certain words (“iconic”, “surreal” and so on) because I can’t be sure whether they’ll be understood to have (what I regard as) the correct, precise meaning, or a more fuzzy definition (“famous”, “odd”). I’ve subsequently learned that there’s a linguistic term for this; semantic bleaching, a sort of meh-ification of our discourse, where the meaning of a word loses its intensity and, ultimately, its usefulness. “Curate” is another example. What once suggested a discriminating expertise employed to select pieces (pots, poems, plesiosaurs) for public consumption now means nothing more than choosing.

Does this matter? Well, if you think that it’s useful to have some words with a precise meaning, even if we don’t deploy them all that often, then yes, it does. But if it matters that much, what do we do about it? That’s where discussions on Friday tended towards the full and frank. I suggested that even though this use of “bespoke” was what the interviewees actually said, it was the duty of The Guardian to find some way of indicating that it wasn’t an accurate use of language. The pies aren’t bespoke, any more than they’re purple or three miles high or made in Burkina Faso. Maybe a discreet “[sic]” after the word? Or just replace it with what they really meant, which is “posh”. This does run the risk of insulting or demoralising people who may not have all the cultural capital of the average Guardian journalist, or editor, or reader but to be honest we do it all the time. If an interviewee commits a grammatical solecism (“you was”, for example) it will miraculously become “you were” by the time it’s published. Nobody’s yet died. 

And, yes, language moves on and the meaning of words changes. Which is great when the language is expanded, and we get neologisms like “skibidi” and “rizz” and “brat summer” and most of these will sound positively archaic in five years time but while they’re here they define a generation and baffle another generation and that’s what they’re for. But taking a useful word like “bespoke” and giving it a meaning that can be served by a dozen other words – essentially making the original word useless – doesn’t expand language. It makes it smaller.

And there’s a practical, mundane angle to this. I teach English to people who don’t have it as a first language. I always encourage them to aim first to be understood, and only then to worry about speaking “correctly”. But at some point they want and need to know what the correct version is, the right tense, the right conjunction, le mot juste, even if they don’t always hit the target. And if my students come across the word “bespoke” and ask me what it means, do I just tell them it means “posh”, so as not to upset two people in Suffolk?

About class and things

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

About Forster

Matthew Goodwin has put in so much work reiterating the thesis contained in his new book, and his enemies have devoted so much space to attacking it, that there seems little point in actually reading the bloody thing. I’ll wait for the movie. Essentially, Goodwin suggests that Britain is controlled by an “elite” of academics, media folk and the like whose left-leaning attitudes are way out of sync with the rest of the population. You thought it was property speculators and energy oligarchs who caused the current perfect storm of misery? No, it was Gary Lineker and Carol Vorderman, because they’re woke, an adjective so heinous that nobody can actually define it.

And then someone posts this on Twitter and it describes pretty much everything Goodwin describes and loathes and that says far more about Goodwin than it does about Lineker or Vorderman or even Forster:

About the BBC

The BBC, we are informed, will attempt to attract viewers from less affluent socio-economic groups by producing more sports documentaries, crime dramas and other “lighter” products. Except that nobody asks why such groups (allegedly) prefer such material. Furthermore, does an individual’s socio-economic status determine the media he or she consumes, or is it the other way round? Does the choice of media put them on the path to a specific rung on the socio-economic ladder? By giving the punters what they want (which is supposedly restricted to variations on what they already know), the BBC would be fulfilling its remit to reach out to all social groups, but at the same time reinforcing the inequalities that keep those groups apart – and pissing the Reithian mission to educate all over the walls of Broadcasting House. And then what’s the point of the BBC?

About Wodehouse

 By Sophia Money-Coutts, in the Telegraph.

About elites

Andrew Anthony on the elites who are allegedly to blame for the whole bloody mess we’re in:

It’s easy to mock metropolitan liberals for hypocrisy. After all, they’re often opposed to gentrification, while being the vanguard of gentrifiers. They’re the loudest proponents of multiculturalism while frequently maintaining a distinctly unicultural lifestyle. But even in this age of bovine anti-elitism, it would be the height of stupidity if people who like to visit bookshops come to be seen as the problem.

About mobility

An excellent radio documentary by Byron Vincent about how social mobility isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be. Two snippets:

So off you pop to uni and you do your degree but it’s not just accountancy you learn, you learn to eat quinoa and feign an interest in Murakami; you learn about passive aggression and that you’re not allowed to punch middle-class people, even if they’re being proper knobheads...

These strange hybrids, no longer proper working-class but not middle-class either, anomalies, sat around mashing Frazzles into our avocados and apportioning Jungian archetypes to the contestants on Love Island.

And on the same lines, look at this lovely interview with a very young Dennis Potter.

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 political correctness

The core idea of PC, I guess, isn’t too objectionable. All societies have codes of discourse, defining what is and isn’t acceptable, and all that has happened since some time in the 1980s is that these codes have been recalibrated so that people are more aware of the sensitivities of previously marginalised groups. Ideally, it makes it easier, smoother to converse with a wider range of people. At least if you offend someone, you’re probably doing it deliberately.

The problem with all such codes, both those stemming from PC and also the ones that preceded them, is that they become rigid and oppressive, ultimately making such discourse harder rather than easier. Even if one’s intentions are pure, fear of being misconstrued, deliberately or not (and the barracking that will inevitably ensue), inevitably shuts things down. And those who do have malign intent realise that it’s bloody easy to get publicity, simply by deploying the occasional outrage bomb. The rise of Trump, Farage, Bolsonaro, et al, can be seen less as riding the populist surge, more like a particularly ambitious burst of trolling. And while they achieved it on the back of the gammon tendency, the disgruntled,  the suspicious, the believers in a fake collective nostalgia, it’s clear that the pearl-clutching snowflakes have also eased their way to success.

A few examples from the past week:

• In a discussion regarding my last post, about the question of whether the rules of cultural appropriation apply to the interaction between two non-white cultures, I was taken to task for not considering whether the black man wearing the Vietnamese hat may actually have been Vietnamese. When I asked whether such consideration might be extended to white people wearing Native American head dresses... ah, let’s not go there.
• In another discussion, about the unproven sexual shenanigans of yet another bloody actor, I made the passing comment that the films for which he is most famous are pretty bad, and was sternly entreated to “read the room”. I wasn’t familiar with the phrase, but I understand it to mean “work out what everyone else is thinking, and don’t say anything that challenges it, because it might upset them.” Incidentally, it seems that many of the misdemeanours of which people are accused are down to this inability to read the room, episodes of social gaucheness rather than anything more serious. (Which does make me wonder, how much consideration is given to people on the autistic spectrum; or are some oppressed minorities more minor than others?)
• The construction “people of colour” (i.e., anyone who is isn’t white) has already been appropriated and tweaked into “people of gender” (which surely means anyone who isn’t non-binary, unless non-binary is a gender in and of itself); and this morning I heard someone on the radio referring to “people of class”. Which means... everyone, surely?
• Apparently the Oxford Union has invited the usual cadre of tiresome right-wingers to argue against the policy of No Platform and the equally tiresome cadre of student leftists want to no-platform at least one of them.
• [edit] And now, the whole ridiculous Danny Baker monkey story.

As I said, the core idea of political correctness has much to commend it. In execution, however, it has precisely the opposite effect to that intended, breeding resentment and suspicion and hostility where it claims to prompt support and respect.

About the Earl of Rocksavage

There may or may not be a rumour that the Duchess of Cambridge (the one who’s married to the bald one, not the one who’s married to the ginger one, who people hate because they’re racist, I think) has had a falling-out with someone I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago.

She’s called Sarah Hanbury in real life, apparently, but in the weird neverwhere where this sort of thing matters, she’s known as the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”, obviously), which is less a title, more a disreputable pub in Soho that puts on bad drag acts on Thursdays.

Of rather more interest is her husband, who’s called David (so far, so dull), an Old Etonian (fancy!) and the Marquess of Cholmondeley (see pronunciation note above), but also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which I assume means that one of his ancestors was tasked with wiping George II’s bottom or suchlike. Even better, before his accession to that title, he was called the Earl of Rocksavage, which just has to be one of David Bowie’s more fleeting alter egos, probably less cool than the Thin White Duke but far, far better than Screaming Lord Byron. Just imagine swaggering around with that title in your teens and twenties, only to be informed, not only that your dad’s dead, but you’ve got a new, very silly name that you’ll have to spell out for people for the rest of your life. And that your 15 minutes of fame come when your wife has, or hasn’t had a row with someone that racist royalists prefer to the other one.

Never mind, at least they’re happy.

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 Shelley and Corbyn

From Joe Kennedy’s anti-Blairite screed Authentocrats:

When Corbyn quoted Percy Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” at Glastonbury Festival in the summer of 2017, various figures on the political right and centre were quick to take to Twitter to claim that referencing Romantic poetry was hardly an example of the common touch. Imagining how Raymond Williams might have responded to this idea is good fun, to say the least. If you’re tempted in any way to concur with it, think a little longer about the implications of saying poetry, books, music, painting and so on are only for the well-off.

Well, yes and no. Obviously, poetry, especially the poetry of a dazzling radical such as Shelley, *should* be on the lips of everyone. But it really isn’t, is it? If I were to amble into my nearest branch of Lidl and ask them who wrote The Masque of Anarchy, what sort of strike rate should I expect? In fact, I rather suspect that going to Waitrose wouldn’t be any more productive and the vast majority of those who Kennedy would define as “well-off” wouldn’t recognise a line of Shelley if crawled up their trouser legs and returned the trains to public ownership.

Which is, to Kennedy, probably Tony Blair’s fault, but it’s still true.

About the importance of music

I last saw the Flaming Lips in Singapore, eight years ago. It was a defiantly underground event, both literally (it took place in the basement of a convention centre) and culturally; the Lips’ trippy, shambling weirdness stands in direct opposition to the earnest, aspirational, fiercely drug-free ethos promoted throughout the Lion City.

It was also a strictly 18+ event, as good Singaporean children should spend their evenings scrabbling for a foothold within the brutally competitive education hierarchy. Whereas when the band played in London last weekend, headlining the Kaleidoscope festival at Alexandra Palace, small people were actively welcomed into the mix. To an extent this makes sense. Much of what the Lips do taps into the fusion of naïvety, nostalgia and melancholia developed by the Beatles, Pink Floyd and David Bowie around 1967; barely an image from Lewis Carroll or AA Milne went unchecked, albeit through a thick fug of hallucinogens. Lips mainman Wayne Coyne comes from Oklahoma and his references tend more to The Wizard of Oz but the process is similar.

However, there’s a difference between the childhoods half-remembered by the likes of McCartney and Barrett and Coyne and those enforced by the yummy mummies of North London. The Lips’ party atmosphere includes balloons, and lots of them, big, substantial ones, half-way to beachballs. In Singapore they bounced cheerfully over the heads of the punters until they burst or were otherwise forgotten. Here, they are grabbed by adult hands and passed over to little Mungo or darling Clemency to hold onto for dear life. Smaller children, meanwhile, are decorated with industrial-grade ear protectors, which does rather raise the question of why they’re being brought to a festival featuring lots of noisy rock music.

Actually, that question might be raised about plenty of the parents, it seems. From the absence of singalonging and an air of cheerful ambivalence towards any of the musicians, even the headliners, one wonders how many of the punters have even heard of the Flaming Lips; they were as much attracted to the event by the promise of face painters and balloon animals and gluten-free pizzas and other manifestations of a lovely summer’s day out. Which is all fine and dandy, and, yes, I know, music just isn’t that important a part of life for some people. But I wonder whether the next step will be a music festival without the expense and inconvenience of musicians.

And, the following day, this happened:

Hate the snobbery #desertislanddiscs sometimes brings out in some people with reference to castaways' music choices.

— Margaret Graham (@MarGraham) 22 July 2018

and I’m pretty certain it was a response to something I tweeted about yet another wholly admirable person who appears to have a pretty lame record collection. Again, I understand that many people don’t care as much about music as I do, and this applies both to the people who appear on Desert Island Discs, and many of the listeners. That said, I’d always assumed that the choice of music is intended to reflect some aspect of the subject’s life or personality in a way that can’t always be done through words alone. And as such, the music is available for public discussion and response in exactly the way the words are. If not, once again, what’s the point of having the music at all?

But I don’t launch into an unseemly Twitter Spat©, partly because I’ve got a horrible feeling that such disagreements tend to be ever-so-slightly gendered. Way back before I ever set foot in Singapore, I wrote a rather disobliging review of, among other things, Ruth Padel’s book I’m a Man. In it, she dismisses the (in her eyes) characteristically male tendency to think knowing stuff about music is very important, with a specific dig at Nick Hornby; this presumably offered her a get-out-clause for the numerous factual errors in her text. Since Padel is currently Professor of Poetry at King’s College London, I wonder whether she’s as relaxed about her students’ ignorance of Shelley or Plath. (Incidentally, when Padel herself appeared on Desert Island Discs, her music choices were perfectly respectable; which inevitably disappointed me, as I wanted her to choose eight slices of crap, just to prove I was right.

About football

I don’t know if you’d noticed, but there is some football about the place, which is fine; and a hell of a lot of talking and writing and singing about football, very much of which is not. Apart from anything else, I’m getting overwhelmed by overly helpful articles that aim to explain what the world was like in 1990, when England were last in the World Cup semi-finals, especially the fact that the country they played then (West Germany) no longer exists; and the country they play tonight (Croatia) didn’t exist then, nor did the country (Russia) where the match is taking place, at least as independent entities. I just feel old, especially when I remember that 1990 is closer to 1966 than it is to 2018. And don’t get me started on clickbait offering a gloss on what exactly Three Lions means...

England’s (up to this point) successful campaign has also prompted a few Panglossian pieces on how this ramshackle band with roots in Yorkshire and Jamaica, London and Nigeria, Ireland and Portugal, offers a vision of a new, inclusive rainbow patriotism, which is all lovely. But this multiculturalism in motion smudges over the fact that the country is also split along lines of age, class, income and levels of educational attainment. The sense of complicity that we snowflake libtards feel about the twin cataclysms of Brexit and Trump mean that social snobbery, especially when used against white males who don’t shop at Waitrose, is now almost as unacceptable as racism, sexism or homophobia; see how the tide has turned against the “gammon” jibe.

That said, on Saturday, after I’d watched and enjoyed the Sweden match, then made my way across London to a birthday party in (of course) Islington, where architects and psychologists and quite a few people who may not be able to stay around when Brexit finally bites, ate Spanish food and drank French wine. And on the way I encountered plenty of loud, drunk, aggressive, incoherent, beer-spraying, Caucasian men, draped in red-and-white flags, screaming that bloody refrain like a toxic battle cry and doing that weird fistypumpy dance, as if they were pulling on the teats of some enormous, mutant cow, encouraging it to spurt yet more lager into their pink, upturned faces. And three things came to mind; first, that if this is what they’re like when they win, God help us when the bubble finally bursts, whenever that is. (I’m writing this a few hours before the semi-final.) And second, the words of Martin Amis:

At my last football match, I noticed that the fans all had the complexion and body-scent of a cheese-and-onion crisp, and the eyes of pit bulls. But what I felt most conclusively, above and below and on every side, was ugliness — and a love of ugliness.

Which is sneery and snobbish and nasty, but then I didn’t have my taxi or ambulance smashed up, my shop invaded, my police dog hassled for being German. And finally, for some reason, I recalled an interview in the NME with oddball Chelsea/Everton winger and Joy Division fan Pat Nevin, some time back in the 1980s. “What do you love most about football?” he was asked. “Playing football,” he responded. “And what do you hate about it?” “Everything else.”

PS:

Three Lions is actually about heroin.

— Richard Blandford (@rblandford) 11 July 2018

About housing

Amidst the current brouhaha involving Facebook data being used to manipulate what we used to call democracy, it’s good to remember that lots of politics is carried out via good, old-fashioned leaflets through the door – and also that the tactics involved can be just as toxic. Here’s a glorious example of othering from my local Conservative party, in advance of the local elections. *Their* residents parking on *your* streets. Incomers, strangers, newbies, you’re not from round these parts, are you? Get off my land (or at least my parking spot). And, you know what? I bet it’s going to work.

And, on a related note, I posted the image below on Instagram, and within a few minutes it had been *liked* by an account called mortgageslondon.

PS: And more false dichotomy from the local Tories: street art (can be) good; graffiti bad.

About class

Facebook is apparently developing technology that determines users’ social class. But I don’t know why they bothered. You can immediately judge anyone’s class on the basis of how they refer to their grandmothers. If you call her “nan” or “nanna” you’re almost certainly working class. If you call her “grandma” or “granny” you’re probably middle class. And if you call her “the Dowager Duchess of Chorlton-cum-Hardy” you’re proper posh and there’s no mistake, missus.

Alfred Hitchcock as a middle-class pleasure

I spent a few hours yesterday watching a couple of silent movies made by a young whippersnapper called Alfred Hitchcock. It was part of Bangkok’s first ever festival devoted to the cinema before sound and it was gratifying to see a good turnout. Well, it was good in terms of numbers, but the bulk of punters seemed to fall into one of two groups, namely young, faintly beatniky Thais of both genders; and farang gentlemen d’un certain âge. It was essentially a middle-class event. Which is sad, because both the films (The Pleasure Garden and The Ring) were intended to be commercial crowd-pleasers aimed at all strata of society in their day; they each took as their milieu a form of popular entertainment (music hall and boxing respectively); and since they were silent movies, shown here with bilingual intertitles, the language barrier that can often discourage locals from enjoying a wider range of entertainment was considerably lowered. But no, it was all skinny-jeaned hipsters and old farts who are starting to look more than a little like Hitch himself. The lady selling little packets of tissues outside the ladies wasn’t interested, nor were the people offering all manner of stuff in the foyer. (Is Bangkok the only place where a legitimate cinema can host a stall flogging bootleg DVDs?)

Of course, things are much healthier in the relatively classless West, aren’t they? Aren’t they? I came home to a Facebook post by my (virtual) chum the arts editor of a mid-market tabloid, wondering why people who make much noise about the need to have art that reaches out to the masses can’t be arsed to talk to her paper. And then there was this article by Mark Cousins in The Observer, complaining about the way that so many British arts venues — presumably inadvertently — conspire to make working-class people feel unwelcome. As he puts it: “But so often, their sleek lines, or facades that look like office buildings, their malbecs and chorizo-studded menus are too culturally thin.” Against this, of course, is what happens when art becomes too popular for its own good, as expressed in Rachel Donadio’s piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago: “People now swarm the paintings, step on anyone to get to them, push, shove, snap a photo, and move quickly on without looking at the painting,” says a Florence-based travel guide. When I first moved to London it was genuinely exciting to go to the Streatham Odeon and watch something like What’s Love Got To Do With It in the midst of an audience that was for the most part young, working-class and African-Caribbean as they bellowed abuse at Laurence Fishburne in the guise of Ike Turner. Would I have been so delighted if they’d followed me up the hill to the Ritzy and given the same treatment to a Peter Greenaway double bill? Cousins argues for fish finger sarnies alongside the chorizo but it’s not quite that straightforward, is it?

(Class is tied up with money, of course, but they aren’t the same thing. People with unlimited funds can also make the oddest cultural choices — like the Brazilian plutocrat who set about buying up pretty much every record ever released, although he isn’t quite sure why.)

That interview with the Mellons

A New York Times interview with Nicole and Matthew Mellon has been bouncing around my various social media streams over the past few days. One thing that’s interesting is that the people posting it haven’t been offering much in the way of editorial comment: variants on “just read this” appear to be enough. So maybe you ought to read it, then come back here and we can discuss it a bit more. Off you go.

There. Well, then. Obviously the bit that people have been chewing over the most is Nicole’s “I’ve never been to Africa, but I feel like I have this deep affinity for it,” with the punchline about the Meryl Streep movie but really, for the full impact of the couple’s vacuous self-entitlement to sink in, you have to read the whole thing. But I’m less interested in them as people than I am in the way the article was written and published and then disseminated further, and the motives and thought processes behind that.

First, why was such an a piece commissioned in the first place? The couple have launched a clothing brand, the website for which is conveniently embedded in the story and the interview appears in the Style section. Having a vague idea of how such transactions work, I’m guessing that the Hanley Mellon will be advertising in the Times and the decision to run an interview with the founders was not unconnected with that contract. The title is after all “The Mellon Lifestyle as a Brand” rather than “Talking to Two Random Rich People”. It’s an advertorial, effectively, although I’m not sure to what extent the Mellons got copy approval. 

Next, we have to consider the motives of the article’s writer, one Marisa Meltzer. Was she seeking – either before or during the interview, or after it took place – to stitch the couple up? She could certainly defend herself with a straight face, because they appear to damn themselves with their own words. Of course this may be the result of judicious editing: maybe Matthew made any number of thoughtful, cogent, witty, perceptive remarks, which she ditched in favour of the bit where he made a dick of himself by confusing Sam Taylor-Wood with Taylor Swift. But in any case, even if Ms Meltzer had a hidden, malicious agenda, the article would have been seen by several other people before it came before the public gaze. If there is an subversive intent, she couldn’t be the only one in on the joke. Any conscious attempt to make the Mellons look like inbred cretins would have had to be collective.

It’s been several days since the interview was published and I don’t doubt that many people have commented on it. Not within sight of the article itself: those who run the Times website have not permitted their readers to say directly what they think of the Mellons or their views on art or on Africa and how it smells, or whether Tuleh is an appropriate name for a teacup Yorkie or even whether the clothes they sell are any good. What will have happened is that someone at the Times will have noticed that this particular article is getting lots of attention on Facebook and Twitter and elsewhere and is thus racking up plenty of traffic for the newspaper’s website. And that, in the modern media economy, is a good thing. What would not have been so apparent to the number crunchers, although I hope someone within the organisation has worked it out by now, is that people are not encouraging their friends to read this article because they will be enlightened or inspired or because the Mellons seem like nice couple: it is because they appear to be stupid and vile exemplars of the undeserving one per cent and if the rest of us can’t actually be bothered to organise an end to the preposterous state of affairs that spawned them and their like, the least we can do is point and laugh.

The other question is: at what point did the Mellons themselves realise what was going on? Because they must have done by now. Musn’t they? Or maybe they’re so rich and so fabulous, with their apartment at the Pierre and their Basquiats and their dog and their fashion company and their children with faintly daft names, that they just pay someone else to do their self-awareness for them.

Race in Asia: shades of beige

I haven’t written very much about the current brouhaha in Thailand because the whole thing’s at once too deadly serious – a battle for the very soul of an entire nation – and too bloody silly – uh oh, Frankie Valli just cancelled his Bangkok gig sceduled for Wednesday. But I was tickled by this stand-off last week between John Sparks of Channel 4 and Dr Seri Wongmontha, or “the flamboyant Dr Seri” as it’s almost obligatory to describe him, a supporter of the anti-government protests. It’s all entertaining stuff, with a sort of ramshackle panache that would enliven Western political debate immeasurably. But once the duel was over, Seri apparently addressed his adoring fans thus:

Do they think we’re stupid? It’s proven people with yellow skin are smarter than people with white skin... Thais who study abroad get better marks than their classmates.

Well, that’s unpleasant, although I suspect the good doctor is simply expressing what a lot of people in these parts think. The problem is that his reference to yellow skins (implicitly those of Chinese ancestry, albeit sometimes at a remove of several generations, and overwhelmingly the sort of people who tend to study abroad) bestows this supposed genetic superiority on the Bangkok elites while potentially excluding the far darker-skinned rural Southerners who have provided much of the heavy lifting for this month’s attempted shutdown. And since the organisers are attempting to stamp out the notion that the protests are all about maintaining class privileges – despite some of their most ardent supporters going off-message when there’s a microphone in front of them – that’s a bit awkward.

But hey, it’s not just Thailand that’s got caught up in a bit of hey-aren’t-foreigners-a-bit-rubbish? embarrassment. Thanks to Richard Lloyd Parry for directing me towards this gem from Japan:

PS: And this, by Patrick Winn, is another good take on the class aspects of the struggle for Bangkok’s streets.

PPS: Oh, it’s all coming up now. This, from China, courtesy of James Crabtree. It’s the line drawings that are particularly noteworthy: 

Why the Smiths are better than Oasis

Noel Gallagher, one-time leader of 90s comedy beat combo Oasis, has ventured into the realms of literary criticism. In an interview with Don’t Mention The War Monthly GQ, he damns all fiction as “a waste of fucking time” and complains that 

people who write and read and review books are fucking putting themselves a tiny little bit above the rest of us who fucking make records and write pathetic little songs for a living.

Meanwhile, another Mancunian curmudgeon who writes pathetic little songs, himself no stranger to the absurdities and cruelties of the English class system, has realised that the best way to take revenge is to write a book.