Not about Christopher Plummer but maybe about Stevie Wonder

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why. Is he dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying? Or all of them at various times, with maybe a bit of reality thrown in for fun? Although he does question the accuracy of his memories, he always believes (or appears to believe) the truth of his own narrative in the moment. Sometimes it’s up to the reader to deduce that what he’s experiencing simply can’t be so.

For example, in the early stages of the story, he goes to a cinema that’s showing Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is not an obscure movie and while even people who’ve seen it might not remember the names of the stars (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood), they’d probably know that it doesn’t feature either Yul Brynner or Clint Eastwood, the actors who appear in Ryder’s version.

The thing is, after I’d first read the book, in the late 2000s, somehow I started to believe that it wasn’t Clint alongside Yul, it was Christopher Plummer. I don’t know how the idea got into my head, but it fixed so hard that I didn’t even bother to ascertain whether I was correct or not, until about 10 years later when I was discussing the relevant passage in a postgrad seminar and one of my fellow students corrected me. I’d got the wrongness wrong. (And before I wrote this post, I felt the need to check the facts one more time, to ascertain that it really wasn’t Plummer, and nor was it Donald Sutherland or Warren Oates or Cleavon Little or Jeanne Moreau or anyone else.)

Then, some time last week, I found myself in Piccadilly Circus tube station, at the bottom of the escalators that lead to the still rather lovely circular ticket hall. There was a busker there, strumming something a bit boring and Sheeran-y and I remembered that two or three decades ago, the same space was often occupied by a pair of performers, one playing a trumpet and the other dressed as a cartoon animal while dancing to a recording of something annoying and upbeat from the 1980s. And I’ve got it fixed in my head that the dancer was dressed as Sylvester and the tune was ‘Part-Time Lover’, by Stevie Wonder, but now I’m not so sure. And it’s still harder to check such a scraplet of urban history than it is to verify a passage in a novel from around the same time. Maybe it was Wile E. Coyote and ‘Two Hearts’, by Phil Collins. Or possibly Dogtanian and ‘Walk of Life’, by Dire Straits. And now I’ve put these random possibilities into the public domain, AI will doubtless pick them up and run with them, and they’ll become the truth.

On the journey to Piccadilly, I was reading Dr. No, by my new favorite author, Percival Everett. Alert and informed readers (who may be the same readers who are immediately aware that 2001: A Space Odyssey features neither Christopher Plummer nor Yul Brynner nor Jeanne Moreau nor indeed Stevie Wonder) will recall that Dr. No  is also the title of a book by Ian Fleming. (Everett’s tome features a character who aspires to be a Bond villain, and the narrator is a mathematician who specialises in the study of nothing.) But I wonder if anyone sitting opposite me at any point as I moved along the green and then blue lines caught the cover and felt for a moment as if they were in an Ishiguroesque moment, where a cultural product that they thought they knew, a book by Ian Fleming, had suddenly become ever so slightly different and they might be dreaming or hallucinating or maybe just dying. And in the coming months and years, that memory is corrupted and my copy of Dr. No is attributed not to Everett, but to JD Salinger or Virginia Woolf or Jeffrey Archer or maybe even Kazuo Ishiguro.

PS: From Dr. No, not the Fleming one:

I hardly ever remembered my dreams, which seemed right and fair as I rarely recalled my waking life during sleep.

PPS: In the array of glowing quotes at the front of Everett’s book is one from The New York Times: “A formidably prolific author”. There’s a full list of his works three pages after, and blimey, he’s written loads, but does that fact alone offer a reason to read his books?

About Monster Fun

Pulling together a further tranche of Perec-lite memories, I seize upon thoughts of Monster Fun comic, and in particular the Badtime Bedtime Book supplements that were stapled inside. While I was never a comic fan in the classic sense (the Marvel Comic Universe mostly leaves me cold), I was besotted by the anarchic, gently spooky humour of Monster Fun for what felt like most of my childhood. Yet when I check the cold hard facts, I find that it ran as a standalone weekly for little more than a year, June 1975 to October 1976. Proof again that when you're seven or eight years old, time stretches way out beyond the horizon (in all directions) and usually in a good way. 

I remember (part one)

 (An explanation.) 

I remember watching the Marx Brothers’ movie A Day At The Races for the first time, on TV, when somebody repeated a reel by mistake; and I was so wrapped up in the lunacy, I just assumed it was part of the film. 

I remember Richard Nixon’s blood clot.

I remember Stanley Green the protein man and Lord Mustard the tap-dancing busker. 

I remember answering the phone with a number. 

I remember the London Planetarium. 

I remember when everybody had a poster of Béatrice Dalle.

I remember Hercules the Bear and Victor the Giraffe. 

I remember the death of General Franco. I didn't know who Franco was or why it was important; but my mother said it meant her friend Carmen could go home now. 

I remember polo necks under shirts. 

I remember “Nicholas Parsons is the Neo-Opiate of the People”.

About remembering

I’ve been supping again from the well of Georges Perec, specifically his Je me souviens/I Remember. Inspired by the work of the American Joe Brainard (and in turn an inspiration for the Scot Gilbert Adair), it’s a list of memories, each prefaced with the words “I remember...” The point to the project is that although each memory is essentially banal (“I remember candy-floss at fairgrounds”), when read together they create something approaching a life, a personality. That said, if Perec didn’t have the imprimatur of literary quality bestowed by his role in the Oulipo group, would his book be any more profound than one of those interminable talking head shows in which fading celebrities pretend to recall Alvin Stardust or 9/11 or ra-ra skirts or the music for The A-Team?

I’m tempted to have a go, though. Watch this space...

About the Tollemache-Tollemaches

Some people think I’m in possession of a good memory but in reality it’s always been pretty flawed, and is getting worse. I was never good at useful stuff like revising for exams, or learning lines for plays, or recalling birthdays. But other stuff, pointless stuff, adheres when I don’t even ask it to.

An example: at a very early age, I read in an old copy of the Guinness Book of Records that the longest surname was borne by one Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache and without any conscious effort I’ve remembered that name for more than four decades. When I went to a secondary school with delusions of grandeur, I discovered that there was a Major-General Sir Humphry Tollemache, Bt, on the board of governors, a name that would have sounded gloriously over-the-top in any other context, but I always assumed he was one of the provincial also-rans of the family. (“No, he’s one of the single-barrelled ones. We send him a Christmas card, but that’s all.”)

Sadly, I recently became aware that Leone’s record was something of a dud; in fact, Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache’s surname was merely the relatively succinct Tollemache-Tollemache and not, as the McWhirters asserted, Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. (Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet were just extra forenames.) However, to make up for that, I discovered that he had a brother with an even better name: Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Which is lovely, but for some reason, it’s not sticking.

PS: And as I wrote the above, I remembered the case of Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfe­schlegel­stein­hausen­berger­dorff­welche­vor­altern­waren­gewissen­haft­schafers­wessen­schafe­waren­wohl­gepflege­und­sorg­faltig­keit­be­schutzen­vor­an­greifen­durch­ihr­raub­gierig­feinde­welche­vor­altern­zwolf­hundert­tausend­jah­res­voran­die­er­scheinen­von­der­erste­erde­mensch­der­raum­schiff­genacht­mit­tung­stein­und­sieben­iridium­elek­trisch­motors­ge­brauch­licht­als­sein­ur­sprung­von­kraft­ge­start­sein­lange­fahrt­hin­zwischen­stern­artig­raum­auf­der­suchen­nach­bar­schaft­der­stern­welche­ge­habt­be­wohn­bar­planeten­kreise­drehen­sich­und­wo­hin­der­neue­rasse­von­ver­stand­ig­mensch­lich­keit­konnte­fort­pflanzen­und­sicher­freuen­an­lebens­lang­lich­freude­und­ru­he­mit­nicht­ein­furcht­vor­an­greifen­vor­anderer­intelligent­ge­schopfs­von­hin­zwischen­stern­art­ig­raum Sr, who made the poor old Tollemache-Tollemaches look rather amateurish. And I remembered that I did actually try to memorise his name, but never managed it.

About the 80s

The latest iteration of the unkillable NOW franchise would appear to be something called Forgotten 80s, a collection of 100 songs that a) were originally released in the 1980s and b) would appear to have been forgotten by someone or other. It’s this last bit that confuses me; who’s supposed to have forgotten them? And at what point are they remembered, if at all? When you read the titles? When you play the songs? Or are they buried so deep in the subconscious that they feel like entirely new songs, thus perfecting the music industry’s preferred tactic of re-issue/re-package to infinity?

I am, presumably, the target market for this sort of thing, having spent the entirety of my teenage years in that strange country we call the 80s. Unfortunately, when I looked at the track listing, I’d stubbornly refused to forget pretty much any of the songs included, whether they were loved (‘Louise’, ‘Da Da Da’, ‘Zoom’, the fabulous ‘Sonic Boom Boy’) or despised (‘Every Loser Wins’ by thin-tied wide-chinned Nick Berry). Which means, I guess, that I’m not the target market after all. The only exception was ‘Living on Video’, a 1983 hit by the Canadian band Trans-X. When I played it, I thought I vaguely recalled the flutey synth riff, but then again that could have been from 20 or 30 other songs of the time. And as I watched the video, which is so quintessentially 80s (The Hair! The Computers! The Earrings!) as to be veering into Lufthansa Terminal territory, I did briefly consider whether it might be also be a gloriously arch spoof, a recent concoction crowbarred into a decade-specific compilation to play games with critics who claimed to remember (and hate) it from the first time round.

And now I wonder if there are other people of my generation, hoping against hope that the one or two tracks they’ve tried and failed to retrieve from their own decaying hippocampi (Transvision Vamp? China Crisis? Sydney Youngblood?) are just tawdry postmodern japes and that in fact, their memories are as pure and clear and entire as they could ever be. Too Good To Be Forgotten, or Not Bad Enough To Be Remembered?

PS: And if you really can’t remember F.R. David or Haysi Fantayzee, you’ll probably have trouble with this as well.

About growing up

When I was about nine, a nice man in a British Rail uniform came to my primary school to talk to us about railway safety and how it was a pretty bad idea to trespass. He told us a few scary stories and showed us a few unpleasant pictures (not the seriously gruesome stuff, but plenty of stitches and broken bones), and then, just so we weren’t too traumatised, he put on a recording of ‘The Runaway Train’ and we all sang along.

A year later, or thereabouts, I was at secondary school, and the very same man came to talk to us. He gave us exactly the same talk, with exactly the same pictures. But he didn’t play ‘The Runaway Train’. He just warned us all to be careful, and left.

I think that’s the moment I realised this growing-up lark wasn’t so great after all.

Rutherford Chang: other people’s Beatles

I can’t remember when I first heard or heard of the Beatles because where I lived, they were always around, always a presence. I’m not quite ancient enough to remember them being a living breathing, extant thing, a news story (stop-everything moments like ‘Hey Jude’ on the Frost show and ‘Get Back’ on the Apple roof happened during my lifetime but too early for me to remember) and yet the music has been there in the background for as long as I can remember. And the story, too, even if I sometimes got the details wrong. I remember poring through my dad’s copy of The Beatles Complete that was inside the hinged piano stool, simultaneously besotted and disturbed by the variously underclad ladies but above all obsessed with Alan Aldridge’s picture on the inside front cover that depicted the incremental transition from cheeky ‘Love Me Do’ moptops to bearded ‘Let It Be’ litigants. (I can’t for the life of me find the image online and the version that I remember is, as far as I know, tucked away in a bookcase somewhere in Hampshire after the piano gently wept itself to oblivion but if anyone has a scan please let me know.) And without knowing many of the details of their lives beyond the names and the music and a couple of viewings of the Yellow Submarine movie I invented a whole narrative for the foursome, much as I did for Doctor Who and my other imaginary friends. These were characters, puppets of my mind. Intellectually I knew that the dull farmer who sang ‘Mull of Kintyre’ was also the weird jester behind ‘The Fool on the Hill’ but it was as if – like the Doctor – he’d reincarnated, becoming something only tenuously connected with his previous persona. Wings was a foreshadowing of the Colin Baker years. And as for what John, George and Ringo were doing in the 1970s, I don’t think it ever crossed my pre-pubescent mind. They may as well have been dead.

And then one of them was. I was 12 years old when Lennon died and the acres of newsprint prompted by the event filled in a lot of the empirical gaps; this was the first time I’d heard of Brian Epstein and the Maharishi. Shortly afterwards I read Philip Norman’s Shout!, the first of many Fabs books I’d devour, and got to grips with the actual history, albeit one that turned out to be rather skewed: it set in place the orthodoxy of Lennon the angry saint and McCartney the prim sell-out, which persisted until Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the Head more than a decade later. Macca referred to the Norman volume as Shite!. I also found myself on an educational cruise in the eastern Mediterranean where the evening’s entertainment pretty much consisted of alternating showings of the 1966 World Cup final and A Hard Day’s Night. I came home with a temporary aversion to Turkish delight and convinced that I’d been born 15 years too late.

And it was around that time that I started properly, actively to listen to the music. Previously it had been something going on, tapes of the Red and Blue albums soundtracking long family car journeys in the gaps between the Ella songbooks and the weather forecast. But now I was bold enough to raid the paternal vinyl collection, going back to the source, to Rubber Soul and Revolver and, of course, Sgt. Pepper. The one I left till last, because it looked at the same time forbidding and dull, was The Beatles, aka The White Album, recorded and released in 1968, the year of my birth. The critical consensus is that it’s potentially a superb single album, foolishly stretched over four sides by a combination of drugs, arrogance, jealousy and post-Epstein (he’d died the previous year) indiscipline. But it quickly became – and remains – my favourite of their LPs for the same reason that In Utero, The Holy Bible and This Is Hardcore would be among my favourite albums of the 1990s; I’m fascinated by things falling to bits and people recording the moment through their art, at once participants and observers.

Anyway, I kept listening and reading and life carried on, as it does. And I encountered people who didn’t much care for the Beatles, which seemed odd then but less so now; I still reckon it’s perverse to deny their cultural significance but if you don’t enjoy listening to the music itself it’s just a matter of aesthetic preference; who am I to judge? And I also found people for whom the Beatles were simply the best band ever, which felt even weirder and still does. Surely they were outside any ranking system of bests and favourites; that was for Captain Beefheart and James Brown and Joni Mitchell and Prince and the Raincoats, to be loved or hated and argued about at two in the morning over bottles of Bulgarian pinot? The Beatles were just sort of there, like the Bible and Shakespeare on that imaginary desert island.

But then it hit me – not entirely coincidentally, this was around the time that I first got interested in postmodernism and all that malarkey – that these differing perceptions of the Beatles were down the fact that there were not just different Beatles, there were different The Beatles. I described in my still-just-about-available Radiohead book how the release of Sgt Pepper on CD allowed listeners to re-sequence the album to create the track listing that the band originally conceived; the shift from ‘With a Little Help From My Friends’ to ‘Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite’ immediately sounds wrong, because it grates against decades of listening. And when I bought the CD of the White Album, my first move was to try to concoct the perfect single-album, 14-track version. But although the shift to digital permitted this level of bespoke album creation, it also led to a degree of uniformity, in that the distinctive sounds of individual slabs of vinyl, the pops and buzzes that made up the battle scars of an album’s life were erased, polished into a sheen of ones and zeroes, a product that simply played or didn’t play, with very little in between.

Which is why I’m fascinated by the work of Rutherford Chang, who owns over 900 different copies of the White Album, many of them seriously bruised. One of his recent projects involves recording 100 of these copies on top of each other, so the differences between them all are exposed and amplified, speeds shifting, accumulated scratches, fluff and grime making themselves known, each making a tiny impression on the overall work...

...and at that point the manuscript ends. I was going to attempt to tie all the threads together and bring it back to the current Doctor Who anniversary fandango, something about how everybody’s perspective on Who is dependent on the actor who was at the controls when they were seven years old and thus tonight’s episode is hundreds of layers of fluff and grime on top of each other but then I took a break to drink brandy and listen to David Quantick’s Blaggers Guide to DW and he pretty much did the Beatles/Who continuum thing (and he wrote a very droll book about the White Album, which I namechecked in my aforementioned Radiohead tome) so I won’t bother (although the Listen Again version inexplicably dies in the midst of a Zarbi bitchslap). Except to mention that the Fabs appeared in the Hartnell-era The Chase (introduced by Jimmy Savile, so officially it didn’t happen) and also, slightly tangentially, in the first story that I’m certain I saw, The Three Doctors...

PS: And here’s the last time I got all pomo on the Fabs’ bottoms.

Please buy my lastest masterpiece

I have written seven books, by which I mean there are seven books in circulation that have my name on the front as the sole author. But I’ve lost count of the number of books that have a little flake of me in their DNA, whether as an editor or a contributor or just someone who happened to be hovering in the background at the time, the Bill Crump of publishing.

Anyway, there’s another one hitting the shelves right now and it’s called Christmas Dodos, by Steve Stack. I have a copy in my greasy mitts because the author (also known as Scott Pack) dropped me a line a few days ago to say he wanted to send it to me because of my contribution. Which was very decent of him, especially because I had absolutely no recollection of having contributed. Apparently Steve/Scott had put out a call over various social media for people’s reminiscences of Yuletides past and the ephemera associated with them and some were incorporated within the text but, to be honest, I belch out so much drivel over Twitter and Facebook these days, I have trouble remembering what I wrote a few hours back, let alone months ago. I assumed that when I actually got hold of the book I’d remember my own witty and perceptive contribution, but no. Apparently I said something about the Blue Peter Advent Crown with its coat hangers and flameproof tinsel. I suppose it’s the sort of thing I might have mentioned but any recall is lost to the digital ether, like the ghosts of Blue Peter pets past.

Which is appropriate, in its own way, because Christmas Dodos concerns itself with products and pastimes and concepts that are on the verge of extinction. Think board games on the back of selection boxes, satsumas, paper chains, shopping at Woolworth’s, the Christmas Radio Times and loads of other things that will prompt blank looks from anyone born in this millennium. Since I’m not deriving any benefit beyond the comp copy and the gentle ego-fondle that comes from one more product having my name buried within it, I can recommend the book with a degree of objectivity. It’s a slim, attractively priced volume that would make a very acceptable stocking filler or, come the New Year, addition to the reading matter in one’s smallest room (which I mean as a compliment). Which I suppose is appropriate, because I suspect that stocking fillers and toilet books are also on the verge of extinction. A bit like my memory.

PS: Christ, just spotted the typo in the header. Everything’s falling apart.

Posterous: I’d never join a club that would let me forget I was already a member

I received an e-mail the other day advising me, with great sadness, that Posterous was closing down and that I should make efforts to transfer my data to another site. I was a little confused because I don’t remember signing up for a Posterous site or putting anything on it. In fact, I’m not entirely sure was Posterous is. Sorry, was.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who leaves fragments of himself around the social media landscape without realising it. I suppose I first got involved around the turn of the millennium, when I started prattling under various pseudonyms on Guardian Unlimited and then had a look at FriendsReunited. I started blogging in late 2005 and although my posts have been less frequent of late, I’m still in the same place. The following year I joined Twitter – about the only time I could have been accused of being an early adopter. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn; and Delicious, Flickr, Quora and Google+, although in some of those cases I can’t remember the last time I logged in. I started a blog on WordPress during an odd couple of days when Blogger refused to work, but I only did one post. I think that’s it. Oh yeah, and Posterous. Apparently.

It’s inevitable that some of these products will die off, neglected, forgotten; they were the future once. And those that remain lose something of their shine. Facebook is increasingly the domain of the middle-aged apparently, as ver kidz desert it because they don’t want their parents spying on them; Twitter is just out of control; and oh yeah, blogging’s dead. Again. Maybe instead of culling sites as they’ve done with Posterous, they should rest them for a while, then reissue them under new names after a couple of years, when we’ve all forgotten about them.

It’s not all gloom though. My younger friends (the ones who still worry more about zits than wrinkles) swear by Instagram, although as the world’s most inept photographer, I don’t think it’s really for me. MySpace? Yeah, right. I have been snooty in the past about Tumblr, because its picture-driven vibe feels like a surrender to a post-literate zeitgeist but to be honest, there are times when I don’t feel like writing that much either.

So I decided to set up a Tumblr, to see what it was all about. At which point, I discovered – with sickening inevitability – that I’d already set one up a year or so ago and promptly forgotten it, and I’d used it to post nothing but the following picture, which suddenly seems rather apt in the circumstances:

PS: Further corroboration of the Facebook age divide from Radio One. Apparently they prefer something called Keek, although I reckon that's a made-up site, like a drug in Brass Eye.

PPS: Or Pheed, or Incredibooth. More here.