About art and men

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

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

About images

I’m not going to add to all the partially-informed verbiage prompted by the story apparently involving the BBC, The Sun, £35,000 and some unedifying pictures, except to stroke my chin over one legal oddity the case has highlighted. Someone 16 years old or more has the capacity, the law says, to choose to display his or her or their naked body to someone older, provided said viewer isn’t in a position of responsibility. However, said 16+-year-old is not allowed to distribute an image of said body. The image, one might infer, is more powerful than the original. Baudrillard vindicated again. 

About dressing gowns

Ivan Goncharov, in one of the many 19th-century Russians novels I haven’t read, coined the word halatnost, most readily translated as “dressing-gown-ness”, to describe the sloppy idleness of the aristocrats of his time, a mode of existence that would come back to bite them a few decades on.

I wonder whether Jonathan Chew had Oblomov in mind when he appeared clad in such a garment during his trial for assaulting chief medical officer Chris Whitty. Although since the core of his defense appears to be “I feel like I’m innocent”; and his response to the judge’s criticism of his attitude was “What does cavalier mean?”, I rather suspect not.

About Electric Dreams

John Lewis has been criticised for the music used in its Christmas advert; not because it’s a lame, wimpy arrangement of a fondly remembered song (that goes without saying, sadly), but because it’s a lame, wimpy arrangement of a fondly remembered song that someone else had already done. Apparently a folk duo called the Portraits released something mighty similar as a charity single last Christmas.

Let’s be clear here. The Portraits didn’t write the song, ‘Together In Electric Dreams’; it was penned by Phil Oakey and Giorgio Moroder in 1984. Their claim is that they arranged and performed it in a particular way, and the people behind the commercial copied that. Now, I still maintain that you can’t copyright or plagiarise an arrangement, notwithstanding the imbecilic court ruling that the 2013 hit ‘Blurred Lines’ had copied Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up’, despite having no obvious connection in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm or lyrics. What happens instead is that as particular styles of music become popular, they bring with them particular tropes of arrangement or instrumentation or production (quiet verse/loud chorus, fretless bass, Auto-Tune, etc) and for a few months or years, it sounds as if everybody’s doing it, even if the songs themselves are different. 

Which is presumably why the Portraits offered up a lame, wimpy arrangement of a fondly remembered song – because they’d heard similar things done on John Lewis adverts. If it does get to the stage when arrangements can be the subject of a plagiarism claim – and I really hope it doesn’t – it could even be argued that it’s the Portraits who have absorbed the lessons of John Lewis Past, replicating the insipid abuse inflicted on the Smiths, Randy Crawford, REO Speedwagon and more and ruining the Oakey/Moroder song.

Anyway, here’s a recording that may be many things, but it’s far from lame and not the slightest bit wimpy. Take it away, Philip. And buy yourself a sofa when you’re done.

About nothing

Tom Miller, an American artist who created a sculpture called ‘Nothing’, consisting of nothing, is suing an Italian who’s done something – or, indeed, nothing – similar. “If you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’,” he claims, “you can easily see I had this whole paradigm sorted out before before Salvatore Garau ever even thought of doing a sculpture of nothing.”

In fact, if you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’, the first thing that comes up is a news story about his law suit.

About cover versions

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

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

About Banksy (not for the first time)

Bristol Museum is in hot water for selling prints of a Banksy work without the mystery stenciller’s permission. On the face of it, it’s a straightforward copyright issue; but of course Banksy made his reputation as a graffitist, a subversive, a lawbreaker, a defacer. He does things in galleries now, but derives his authenticity from his time on the streets, where copycats attract opprobrium, but not lawyers’ letters. One purchaser cancelled his order when he found the print wasn’t authorised, as if a picture of something that Banksy did (not the work itself) is only good if Banksy says it is.

Which reminds me – “authentic” and “author” and “authorised” and “authority” all come from the same root.

Blessed are the Piss-Takers

Thousands of Muslims descended on Google’s London headquarters last weekend to protest against the apparent “age of mockery” in which we find ourselves. This could easily turn into another anti-Islam diatribe (Jeesh, not only are they opposed to gay rights and bacon sandwiches, they haven’t got a bloody sense of humour either!) but these tiresome, beardy placard-wavers are far from the only ones. Indeed, some of the most unlikely people seem to have developed unusually thin skins recently.

Frankie Boyle, for example, scourge of political correctness and all that, is suing a newspaper because it said a horrid thing about him. And check out the guidelines on the comments thread of the Liberal Conspiracy site: “Abusive, sarcastic or silly comments may be deleted.” So silliness is a threat to liberal values now, is it? Some have argued that the problem is about excessive reliance by the police and others on section 5 of the Public Order act, under which a student was arrested for calling a police horse gay, among other travesties. I just think it’s a sign of the coming apocalypse, which probably puts me in the same boat as some of the bores and loons of varying religious and ideological persuasions who are complaining the loudest. Funny old world, innit? Oh sorry, I forgot, you don’t do humour, do you?

It should be fairly obvious, and I’ve gone over it umpteen times before, but I’ll spell it out. If an institution, whether it’s a religion or a political party or a football team or whatever is liable to fall apart at the first hint of piss-taking, then it’s probably a pretty decrepit institution in the first place and the mockers are only hastening an inevitable decline. And if said mockery offends you or hurts your feelings, well just sit yourself down while I list all the things that offend me on a regular basis until you die of abject boredom.

Are we really entering an age of mockery? I don’t know, but looking around, I bloody well hope so.

Julian Assange, Pussy Riot and the sacred art of fence-sitting

When it comes to the subject of Julian Assange, it appears that agnosticism is not an option, at least not in polite society. But I really don’t know whether he should be deported to Sweden or spirited to Ecuador or asked to stay on in London for the moment in case England’s batting line-up needs further bolstering. Pundits of impeccably leftist credentials such as Owen Jones and Cath Elliott have snapped at soi-disant liberals whose support for Assange appears to trump any sympathy for the women who accuse him of raping them. I certainly see their point, but A-HA! say the conspiracy theorists, this is why St Julian’s opponents have framed him as a sex offender: they know it will cause divisions among his instinctive defenders, whereas an accusation of, say, bank robbery (the offence that the South African secret services tried to pin on Peter Hain) wouldn’t be taken as seriously. Had Assange been accused of something else, would Jones or Elliott have been so eager to distance themselves? And, for that matter, if he had been accused of saying something rude about Islam, would George Galloway now be so steadfast in his defence? Rape is a heinous crime and accusations of rape need to be taken seriously; even in democracies, there are some people in positions of power who are prepared to use underhand means to silence those who oppose them. Neither of those is a particularly outrageous point of view, but right now it seems to be difficult to hold both of them at once.

I’m less conflicted about the case of Pussy Riot, the Russian punks who were sentenced yesterday. Modern Russia is a corrupt, dysfunctional plutocracy and the fact that Putin has managed to get the hierarchy of the Orthodox church onside just adds a thick layer of mumbo-jumbo and a dash of misogyny to the ghastly cocktail. The three women should not be in prison. But (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?), they were fully aware of who they were going to upset and what was liable to happen when they made their protest inside the cathedral in February; otherwise there would have been little point in doing it. Let’s be honest, if the verdict had come through yesterday and they’d been found not guilty and Putin apologised for the misunderstanding and said he loved their records actually, their righteously, rightfully indignant supporters around the world would probably have felt a little let down. Like Eliot’s Thomas Becket, they were seeking martyrdom and Putin, the clown, has handed it to them. I’m not entirely sure what Assange is after, or whether the weird dialectic created by his opponents and supporters will hand it to him or not. Adding to the confusion is that the three defendants in Moscow come across as fun, feisty broads with whom you’d like to have a pint; Assange seems to be a pompous dick. Which shouldn’t matter, but it does.

And there’s another paradox. Pussy Riot were caught bang to rights. We may not like the law they broke, but it’s pretty clear that they broke it. Even if Assange were to stand trial in Sweden, no verdict would satisfy everyone and the conspiracy theories and other grumbles would persist. Perversely, the legal process in Russia has been far more transparent than what’s happening with Assange in the nominally free and open West.

How can I plot the downfall of civilisation on the back of a fag packet when there are no fag packets left?

From December, all cigarettes in Australia will have to be sold in uniform, olive-green packets. I’m not going to get into a fight over the rights and wrongs of tobacco laws, beyond mentioning what a doctor friend pointed out to me, that it costs rather less to treat a terminal case of lung cancer for 18 months than it does to manage a cocktail of dementia, osteoporosis and various other age-related conditions for 20 years. No, what really interests me is that the battleground on which the government and the tobacco companies have been slugging it out isn’t actually the thing that actually kills people – tobacco itself and its various noxious components – but something apparently peripheral, the pictures that surround the tobacco. First it was the advertising, now the boxes. They’re getting closer to the stuff itself, but they’re still not there. It’s as if someone had reframed that cliché in defence of the US Second Amendment: “It’s not guns that kill people, or even people that kill people – it’s the designer holsters that the guns come in.”

The reason Big Tobacco has resisted these encroachments so stoutly is that they know that they can’t hope to keep making profits based on the quality of their products alone. Branding and packaging are what keep their industry going but it’s a bigger fight even than that – without pretty pictures, huge chunks of capitalism would wither and die. Even supposedly sophisticated consumers can be gulled by a good label, as academics have shown with tweaked wine tastings (but let’s pass over the fact that that article was the work of pretty-boy auto-plagiariser Jonah Lehrer). BAT and Philip Morris aren’t just sticking up for your your right to kill yourself; it’s also about your sacred right to bullshit yourself as you do it. But which amendment covers that?

PS: In the Guardian, Alex Hoban predicts that the tobacco companies will make a virtue out of the enforced uniformity, as part of their strategy of co-opting anti-corporate adbusting techniques. Nice.

Known unknowns

An actor involved in one of these super-injunction thingummybobs has – according to The Sun, at least – confessed all to his wife. Which strikes me as odd, because the man’s identity, along with that of the footballer and the other actor and the comedian and the chef, has been all over the web, and has even made it into mainstream media, albeit in the form of terribly coy, nose-tapping innuendo. If his spouse didn’t at least suspect that something was up, surely one of her friends must have twigged. I don’t want to kick her when she’s down, but she must be a terribly incurious woman.

You see, the whole point of these injunctions is not to stop people knowing about the moral mishaps of the rich and famous: it’s to stop the *wrong* people knowing. And this is something that goes way back. The Abdication Crisis of 1936 gripped the attention of the British masses once it became public, but the upper classes had known all about Edward’s unsuitable girlfriend for some time, and had been happy to gossip about the constitutional ramifications, provided the hoi-polloi didn’t know what was going on. Such information might create havoc, weaken their moral fibre, don’t you know?

I first got came to understand this social distinction in the world of celebrity tittle tattle in the early 1990s, at about the time it was beginning to fall apart. I’d started my first proper job, in a legal publishing company, which meant that I was for the first time operating in close proximity to people who knew where the bodies were buried. I got wind of Paddy Ashdown’s tarnished halo some time before The Sun splashed it, and also heard some startling rumours about a couple of then-Cabinet ministers. These were pretty analogue days, so the tales were literally word-of-mouth. But I was standing by the fax machine when the Camillagate transcripts came over from Australia. Technology had done away with the social apartheid of gossip, to extent that even after the injunctors have joined Andrew Marr in realising the sheer daftness of their position, they will be remembered not for illicit shagging, but for using their wealth and status to hush up said shagging, which looks far, far worse.

Camilla herself was doubtless embarrassed by the publication of her phone messages, but she realised she could do little about it. So she backed off, bided her time, and is now the Duchess of Cornwall. And she’s making speeches lauding the freedom of the press. Maybe one day [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] will do the same.

I’m old enough to remember Buster Mottram

I’m worried by Robert Dee’s attempt to sue the Daily Telegraph for identifying him as the world’s worst tennis professional. His argument seems to be based on three key points: that there is a Guatemalan player who is just as crap; that he couldn’t have been crap in 2008, because he didn’t have a world ranking then; and that what with all these people saying he’s crap, he might have trouble getting coaching work.

The last bit is the most irritating, because it suggests that nobody is allowed to say anything that might cause any inconvenience to anybody else, with the logical end point that all objective criticism is now potentially libellous. I don’t know enough about tennis to judge how crap or not Robert Dee is; but if he wins, I might just have to sue him, for depriving me of the right to make money from saying that anything is crap, whether or not it is.

PS: A parallel conversation on Facebook reminds me that this is the only way to play tennis:

No, I’d never heard of Trafigura either

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights... The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament...

But for how long can such an injunction be effective these days? Go here. And please pass this on. Carter Ruck can’t sue the entire blogosphere. Although the idea doubtless gives the buggers a collective erection.

PS: It’s gone Stateside.

Antonin Scalia is a monkey fighter and he can suck my lozenge

It’s not often I find myself rooting for the Murdoch empire, but when it comes to Fox TV’s challenge to the US Federal Communications Commission policy on swearing, I’m in the same corner as nasty old Rupe.

Essentially, in the wake of St Bono offering up a wee swearie at the Golden Globes in 2003, the FCC elected to operate a zero tolerance policy against bad language on network TV. This extends even to so-called “fleeting expletives”, usually unplanned, unscripted moments on live TV when an inadvertent flip or blimey slips out, the verbal equivalent of Janet Jackson’s nipple. And now the Supreme Court has voted 5-4 to uphold the Commission’s judgement.

The most vociferous of the anti-rudeness judges is the charming Antonin Scalia, who suggests that references to “sexual or excretory activities” trump any footling need to uphold the First Amendment. Now, I’ve never quite understood what’s wrong with sexual or excretory activities. I’m not sure where Justice Scalia thinks his nine children came from: maybe the stork brought them; maybe the same stork then removed all his bodily wastes when he wasn’t looking. But personally, given the choice between Scalia’s bumptious primness, and a clapped-out rock star saying “fuck”, I know which one I find obscene. The only good thing about the man is his passing resemblance to the Angelo Muscat (the butler in The Prisoner).

And without resorting to sneering generalisations, I think it’s useful to point out that on British television, this is a joke; in the States, this is reality.

The bodyguard's last sigh

Thought it had got a bit quiet on the embattled author front...

I do wonder whether Salman Rushdie sometimes wishes that books had never been invented. They have provided his fame and fortune; but they've also given him more than his share of grief.

The latest tome to unsettle the literary knight is On Her Majesty's Service, the work of Roy Evans, one of the special branch officers who protected the author after Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa in response to The Satanic Verses. According to Evans, Rushdie (or "Scruffy" as they dubbed him) so exasperated his guards that they shut him in a cupboard while they went to the pub...

More smoked Salman here

The love song of Judge Leonie Brinkema

Zacarias Moussaoui, the Mr Bean of Al-Quaeda, has been sentenced to life imprisonment, with no chance of parole. Judge Leonie Brinkema told Moussaoui: "You came here to be a martyr in a great big bang of glory, but to paraphrase the poet TS Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper."

This is an interesting choice of words. Not the quotation itself - that's pretty obvious. It's the linguistic furniture that's peculiar. She could simply have said that Moussaoui would end, not with a bang, but a whimper. Many people know the expression, even if they don't know where it comes from. Even those who didn't know the phrase beforehand must surely be able to understand what she's getting at. Not bang - whimper. Capisce?

But Judge Leonie, being a fine, upstanding woman, did what all good quoters should do, and attributed her reference. In case anybody might think that Judge Brinkema has literary talents that match her jurisprudential aptitudes, she notes that it's a line by Eliot.

Hang on, though - what if someone out there doesn't know who TS Eliot is? Better flag up the fact that it's "the poet TS Eliot" (rather than the actuary or the welder). Presumably, then, this is for the benefit of people who hadn't heard of TS Eliot before - otherwise the job title would be extraneous. And, if this is the first time they've heard of the poet TS Eliot, they can't have any idea whether he's a good, bad or could-do-better versifier. And why leave it there? Why not remind them that it's from 'The Hollow Men'? Tell them the year it was written, and who the publisher was? Give a brief summary of ol' Tom's works and attempt to define his place within the Modernist pantheon? With specific reference to Ezra bloody Pound?

And, in any case, what effect does all this have? If a judge alerts a criminal to the fact that his fate can be encapsulated in a few words from a poet, does this make him feel better or worse? What will the 9/11 relatives think? "I really wanted to see the bastard fry, but at least his sentence has been endorsed by a Nobel Prize-winning poet." I have this image of crims trundling into Shawshank, getting the bug powder and the hosing down, the Bible talk from the governor, and all the while whispering to each other:

"Who d'ya get?"
"I got the poet Walt Whitman."
"That faggot! I got the poet John Milton. What about you, fatso?"
"Oh, I got the poet Dylan Thomas."
"Yeah? What line?"
"Something about not goin' gentle into no good night."
"Uh-oh. Been nice knowin' ya, fatso."

Ah, what the hell? I bet she Googled it.