About Roland Bothes

I was recently wittering about how our (my?) concerns regarding authenticity have shifted from the analogue to the digital and accidentally came up with the notion of a ones-and-zeroes semiotician called Roland Bothes. Well, I couldn’t let that lie so I turned to ChatGPT (which would have given Barthes endless pleasure since in French it sounds like “Chat, j’ai pété”, or “Cat, I farted”) in an attempt to find out how it would deal with the sort of questions upon which Barthes himself chewed. (For the uninitiated, in Barthes’ most celebrated book, Mythologies, he considered to be familiar aspects of French culture and attempted to deduce not what they were but what they represented, what they meant.) 

Thus, in his chapter on steak-frites, Barthes declares that: 

...steak is in France a basic element, nationalized even more than socialized. It figures in all the surroundings of alimentary life: flat, edged with yellow, like the sole of a shoe, in cheap restaurants; thick and juicy in the bistros which specialize in it; cubic, with the core all moist throughout beneath a light charred crust, in haute cuisine. It is a part of all the rhythms, that of the comfortable bourgeois meal and that of the bachelor's bohemian snack. It is a food at once expeditious and dense, it effects the best possible ratio between economy and efficacy, between mythology and its multifarious ways of being consumed. 

Whereas. when I asked the farting cat what steak-frites represents, the best it could manage was:

French and Belgian bistro culture: It's a staple of traditional cafés, brasseries, and bistros, especially in France and Belgium.

Simplicity and quality: The dish is built from only a few components, so the quality of the meat, cooking technique, and fries are emphasized.

Comfort food with elegance: Steak-frites is considered both approachable and refined—suitable for a casual meal but also common in more upscale restaurants.

A culinary classic: It has become one of the most recognizable dishes associated with French-speaking European cuisine, much as fish and chips are associated with Britain.

All well and good, but ultimately it’s a French bistro dish that represents French bistro dishes. Hardly incisive. Hey, I guess most people asking questions about food will want to know about food, what it tastes like rather than its role in a universe of signification. So I suppose if I went for an area where semiotics was intrinsically bound up with the subject I might find something more interesting. OK, then, flatulent feline:

What does “Roland Barthes” represent? 

And this is what it came up with:

Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic who had a major influence on literary studies, cultural studies, semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), and post-structuralist thought.

If you're asking what Roland Barthes "represents" in intellectual history, he is most closely associated with:

1. Semiotics (the study of signs and meaning) — Barthes analyzed how everyday objects, images, advertisements, fashion, and media communicate cultural meanings beyond their literal function.
2. The idea of "myth" in modern culture — In his book Mythologies, he argued that societies turn cultural values and ideologies into things that appear "natural" or self-evident. For example, an advertisement may sell not just a product but ideas about success, beauty, or patriotism.
3. Structuralism and post-structuralism — Barthes helped develop structuralist approaches to literature and culture, then later moved toward ideas that influenced post-structuralist thought.
4. "The Death of the Author" — In one of his most famous essays, Barthes argued that the meaning of a text should not be determined solely by what its author intended. Instead, meaning is created through the reader's interpretation and the cultural context of reading.

In a single sentence, Barthes represents the idea that culture is a system of signs and meanings that can be decoded, revealing the hidden assumptions and power structures behind everyday life.

Well, that’s a pretty efficient summary of the ideas expressed in Barthes’ major works, but in his own terms it misses the whole bloody point, doesn’t it? Just as steak-frites is about far more than an embodiment of French bistro cuisine, let alone meat and potatoes, Barthes is bigger than his semiotics. He represents Paris, the postmodern, cigarettes, being more fun than Adorno, Gilbert Adair, tequila-fuelled arguments in student flats at 3 in the morning, that Eng Lit undergraduate with kohl-rimmed eyes you were trying and failing to impress, being a bloody smartarse, doing a masters in cultural studies, still grinding on with this blog after two decades. AI knows all about Barthes and utterly fails to understand him. “Roland Barthes refers to Roland Barthes” indeed. Shades of Gradgrind.

Facts notwithstanding, ChatGPT also leaves out the best reality nugget of all, that Barthes died after being run over by a laundry van, following a long lunch with François Mitterand. (What does Mitterand represent? Best not to ask, I suspect.) And that of course wasn’t even Mitterand’s most memorable meal.

About Gianni Infantino

It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes, fake beaches, Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake). It’s almost as if Barthes and Baudrillard had been sent as decoys, so we wouldn’t notice that the real fakery was creeping up on us in the forms of ones and zeroes and then suddenly your job’s been handed to a bot. (Placeholder: an AI semiologist called Roland Bothes?)

In related news, for reasons of ethics and taste and lack of emotional bandwidth, I probably won’t be watching the World Cup, which finally shudders into effect in the next few days. But the whole shebang will doubtless offer much material over which bedroom postmodernists can stroke their chins. Barney Ronay has started early: 

This is Gianni Infantino’s world now, a man who carries with him at all times that oddly alluring sense of complete conviction in his own inauthenticity...

About the White Stripes

I’m pretty sure the White Stripes were one of the last bands to tickle my fancy at the time they were getting big. (I got into the Magnetic Fields and Maher Shalal Hash Baz at around the same time, but they’d already been around for longer and never went on to enjoy/suffer the level of success as Jack and Meg did.) So I must admit to having experienced a warm, almost proprietorial glow when they were accepted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, even if that was tempered by the faint hope that Jack (Meg was absent) might have had the guts to tell the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to stick itself up its own self-satisfied arse.

He didn’t, obviously, but in a way he did, by namechecking a whole load of bands that influenced the Stripes but haven’t been similarly honoured. What I always found excitingly different about the White Stripes was the way they fused single-minded purism (vintage instruments, analogue recording) with a cheerful postmodernism that fused any number of apparently jarring genres. 

And his list carries on that eclectic tradition, combining those whose effect on the band are obvious from space (the Troggs, Merle Haggard, Beefheart), those who remain so obscure I had to look them up to check they weren’t some sort of arch in-joke (oh, that Dexter Romweber, right) and those whose inclusion is, shall we say, just a tad surprising (Jethro sodding fluteybollocks Tull???). But the whole thing did remind me why I fell a little bit in love with them 25 years ago and why I still hold out some forlorn hope of a similar romance in the autumn of my years.

About Barthes

Stolen from someone. Can’t remember who, which is grimly appropriate, I guess. Not for the first time, I think how much Barthes would have relished social media.

Also, from John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure: 

Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes is to be found in its assertion of the fact that each of us has a body, and that this body is different from everybody else’s. This is tosh. The real meaning of our dislikes is that they define us by separating us from what is outside us; they separate the self from the world that mere banal liking cannot do.

About a fiddler

I need to say from the outset that I do not disbelieve Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman when she says she got a job pretending to play the violin while a CD played, at the behest of a man she describes only as The Composer, who didn’t recognise Beethoven’s Fifth when he heard it. Instead – and her current role teaching creative writing at Northern Kentucky University may be relevant here – I might suggest that her account of her time with The Composer, her poverty-stricken Appalachian childhood, her drug addiction and mental collapse occupies a sort of Schrödinger’s Cat space on the fact/fiction continuum. Essentially, it’s better all round if we’re not quite sure if it’s true or not, whether this is a raw, honest memoir or an arch, postmodern, subtly metafictional conceit adopting the trappings of a raw, honest memoir. A solid decision either way makes the narrative a bit less interesting.

I dealt with this area a while back, discussing Salman Rushdie’s attempts to block a memoir by his own protection officer, which had apparently dipped its toe into the jacuzzi of fantasy; the problem being that Rushdie’s whole career had been based on a similar creative fudging of the boundaries.

Again, I’m not saying that Ms Hindman is playing similar games; just that I wouldn’t be surprised or upset if that turned out to be the case. But I would experience a tinge of regret that the ambiguity is over.

Not about Morrissey

Just as it happened 35 or so years ago, while I watched Johnny Marr’s Glastonbury set I gawped at his dexterity, musical imagination, effortless cool and implausible absence of body fat. Of course, in 1983 his serviceable singing didn’t come into the equation, because someone else was handling those duties.

Ah, yes, Mr Morrissey. What started out (apparently) as arch, subversive flirtation with the trappings and iconography of the far right has tipped right over the edge into full-on Faragerie and worse. He is, officially, no longer charming, and people are lining up either to agonise over the delight they once took in him and his mots (bon and mauvais alike), or to crow that they never liked the preening bigot in the first place. I’m in the first camp, but I guess you’d worked that out already.

So, when Marr trawls through his old band’s songbook, what reaction should we expect from the woke crowd? Awkward shoe-gazing? A mass turning of backs? A petition on change.org? Or ecstatic bellowing along from thousands of sunburned people who know all the words and the B-sides and probably the messages etched on the inner grooves as well, which contrasts with the polite response accorded to the guitar hero’s own solo work. (Note to self: remember that in the real world, Smiths fans always resembled the rowdy lads on the inside of the Rank gatefold more than they did Alain Delon or even Yootha Joyce.) Hate the singer – or at least express disappointment in how he turned out – while still loving the songs; that would appear to be the best option. Of course, the spirit of Morrissey still lingers over everything Marr does; at once there and not there, Schrödinger’s lyricist, Banquo at the vegan feast. This was meant to be a blog post about Johnny, but it’s not, is it?

The singer/song divide does appear to be an increasingly popular tactic, whether it’s Quincy Jones playing lots of Michael Jackson songs without ever mentioning Michael Jackson, or Nick Cave’s calm response to the misdeeds of Morrissey himself:

I think perhaps it would be helpful to you if you saw the proprietorship of a song in a different way. Personally, when I write a song and release it to the public, I feel it stops being my song. It has been offered up to my audience and they, if they care to, take possession of that song and become its custodian. The integrity of the song now rests not with the artist, but with the listener.

Which, the two or three loyal readers of this blog will know, is pretty much what Roland Barthes (a French theorist who never heard the Smiths but died a beautifully Morrisseyesque death) argued in The Death of the Author. As soon as the author publishes, or releases, or presses “SEND”, he or she leaves the party. I’ve often deployed this as a critical get-out clause; for example in my book about Radiohead’s OK Computer (all good bookshops, etc), I pointed out that the fact Thom Yorke hasn’t read Philip K Dick’s Valis, or can’t remember that the poem that inspired ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ was by Craig Raine, doesn’t invalidate those works’ relevance to consideration of his own music. I never thought it would also allow us to skip gaily over the sexual or political misdemeanours of our fallen idols, and I doubt old Roland did either – which rather proves his point, doesn’t it?

About postmodernism (not for the first or last time)

"This is not the Paul Morley biography I was anticipating." pic.twitter.com/FCUqAHBctJ

— Phil Norman (@MrPhilNorman) 2 March 2019

About Harry Leslie Smith

Harry Leslie Smith has died. Well, the real, meat-and-mucus Harry Leslie Smith, the war veteran and political campaigner, has died in a Canadian hospital at the age of 95, but the Harry Leslie Smith known from the @Harryslaststand Twitter account transcends such banal considerations.

Most of us are aware that lots of celebrities’ social media accounts are in fact run by PR acolytes who churn out the sort of things we expect said celebrities to say, just as “their” autobiographies and other books are ghosted by people who can actually write. We only point and laugh when it becomes obvious that the celeb in question hasn't even bothered to read the bloody thing.

The problem comes when a celebrity’s USP is his or her “authenticity”. @Harryslaststand rather blurred the distinction, as most people were aware that Harry’s son John was doing the heavy lifting on the account, although it generally represented Harry’s views. There were rumours that certain political entities – dear old Momentum was the main suspect – had more influence than might have been clear from “Harry”’s impassioned jeremiads against austerity and the like. But we bumbled along, not willing to interrogate any apparent anomalies, because the guy was 95 and still quite feisty, a sort of lefty David Attenborough, and it would have seemed mean.

Of course, in his last few days, when the whole point of him was that he was dying in hospital and really not up to explaining why Trump was such a bastard, the pretence was unsustainable. Smith Jr came into his own, taking advantage of the sad circumstances to cue up some jibes against the effect of austerity policies on health services in the UK and Ontario. It was a bit like the reveal in a late Ian McEwan novel, when the real author lifts off the mask and mutters that s/he would have got away with it if it weren’t for you pesky Booker judges. 

Unfortunately, the other thing that came to mind as Harry slid to his inevitable end in full view of us all, was the protracted demise of another figure whose relationship to reality was fuzzy at best (and whose socio-political views were similarly forthright), the lamented Jade Goody.

What a pity Harry never launched his own perfume range.

About postmodernism in the contemporary workplace

About 2017

Possibly because I wanted to blot out the increasing ghastliness of the real world, this was the year I rediscovered the joy of blogging, which in 2017 feels a bit like expressing a fondness for CB radio or meerschaum pipes. There’s a different vibe about it now; the happy little virtual posse that collected here a decade or so ago, some of whom have become real-life friends, is no more. Occasionally this feels like a private diary for my own amusement rather than The Conversation that Patroclus of blessed memory posited. Nevertheless, in the past two months I’ve posted more than I did in 2015 and 2016 combined, which must mean something or other.

Anyway, this is the last post of the year, so I guess that means the inevitable cultural best-of. My favourite book was Laurent Binet’s The 7th Function of Language, a postmodern caper about postmodernism and its adherents, many of whom are tormented with gleeful savagery in the course of a bizarre plot that begins with the death of Roland Barthes and then turns into something like The Da Vinci Code for people who’ve read far more books than is good for them. Binet endured a late challenge from Ryan O’Neill’s Their Brilliant Careers, a collection of deadpan potted biographies of Australian writers, all of whom are, the reader quickly deduces, are entirely invented; I was especially taken by the arch-plagiarist Frederick Stafford, author of Odysseus, Mrs Galloway and The Prodigious Gatsby. Fiction about people who exist; or non-fiction about people who don’t? Meh, I don’t have to choose because the O’Neill was either published last year (in Australia) or won’t be until next year (in the UK), so they can co-exist, defiantly elitist (if one believes that it’s elitist to appeal to readers with a pretty good grasp of the 20th-century literary canon) but with a delicious sense of silliness as well.

Elsewhere, the musical event of my year should have been Brian Wilson in concert in Hammersmith, although his evident discomfort and the decline in his vocal abilities made it feel more like a final gathering of the faithful to honour an elderly Pope than a gig per se. So let’s set that aside and give the gong to the Magnetic Fields for 50 Song Memoir; as the titles suggests, a year-by-year autobiography of the band’s leader, Stephin Merritt, spread across five discs. It doesn’t quite hit the astonishing heights of their 69 Love Songs, but, hey, what does? I did also enjoy the antics of Leo Pellegrino at the Mingus Prom, but I only saw it on telly so it probably doesn’t count.



In other categories, my favourite evening at the theatre was Patrick Marber’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (more cerebral daftness for people who aren’t ashamed of knowing stuff) and in a gallery it was James Ensor at the Royal Academy. The TV adaptation of Decline and Fall was huge fun, especially the performance of Douglas Hodge as the reprehensible Grimes. (Moreover, it was on old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg on-at-a-certain-time telly, rather than Netflix or Amazon, so there.) And in the cinema? A dead heat between mother! and Paddington 2. There’s a double bill to be cherished.

But just as my finger hovers over the Publish button, I realise that everything I’ve selected was essentially the work of white men. Which isn’t a good look, is it? OK, here’s your job for today: if you can be bothered to find your way into Blogger’s arcane comment set-up, recommend something from 2017 that wasn’t made by someone who looks like me.

See you on the other side...

About reality (again)

Via the lovely Hegemony Jones: a heretofore obscure governmenty-type chap announces that Baudrillard is dead, we’re not in The Matrix and, er, that’s it. (I paraphrase.) He’ll do Nietzsche vs God next, but he’s having his tea right now.

About Benjamin (again)

More classroom antics. We’ve been nosing around the lower reaches of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, a massive, unfinished tome that’s superficially about Paris in the 19th century but manages to pull in Marxism, surrealism, postmodernism, flânerie and more; I’m tracing lines from here to Borges, Perec and more. It’s delightful and frustrating in equal parts that what we have left is a vast selection of fragments, but it does occasionally give a hint of the average writer’s working method. For example:

Play on words with “-rama” (on the model of “diorama”) in Balzac at the beginning of Pere Goriot.

which is essentially a placeholder, a comedian’s [INSERT JOKE HERE]. Another particularly appealed to me with my restaurant reviewer’s hat on, although this is one I’m almost glad he didn’t finish:

There is, to speak once more of restaurants, a nearly infallible criterion for determining their rank. This is not, as one might readily assume, their price range. We find this unexpected criterion in the color of the sound that greets us when [broken off]

About Miffy and Tom

In class yesterday, we had a sort of cultural studies show-and-tell, where we each brought in an object and got a bit theoretical on its arse. My piece was a Chinese pencil case that I picked up in Bangkok in 2001. The main design revolves around iterations of Miffy (aka Nijntje), the rabbit character created by the late Dick Bruna in 1955 and (to his chagrin) something of an inspiration to the Japanese Hello Kitty.

But what’s special about this slab of turn-of-the-millennium cross-cultural kitsch is the slab of text on the right; some very slightly mis-spelled lines from the last section of TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. Now, I have no idea why these two elements were juxtaposed. I’d guess that whoever designed the piece wasn’t a devoted fan of Modernist poetry; it was just a chunk of the English language and could just as well have been the Shipping Forecast or a recipe for pesto. Serendipitously, though, it tied in with one of the readings we’d been assigned for the class, Andreas Huyssen’s plea for students of culture to get beyond notions of “high” and “low” art and become aware of more significant distinctions (geographical, political, economic, etc). Here were two manifestations of culture, which most people in the room (and reading this) would define as “high” (Eliot) and “low” (or, less pejoratively, “mass” – Miffy); but to the anonymous individual who actually created the thing, there was probably no such distinction.

So, in one piece, high meets low and east meets west. But it gets better. One of my classmates turned the case over and pointed to a few Chinese characters, explaining that they were a reference to the scholars who passed the rigorous civil service exams in imperial times, the only way for poor, unconnected people to make any kind of social advance. So, in addition to high/low and east/west we had ancient/modern. And crucially, in these death-of-the-author days, all of these connections/collisions were pretty much accidental.

And you can even keep pencils in it.

About cover versions

There’s been lots of chin-stroking happening about Ryan Adams covering Taylor Swift’s album 1989 — see this article for a quick taster. Boiled down, the mood is that while Adams intended his versions to be a salute to Swift’s songwriting ability, some critics don’t take it that way. Why does a cheery female pop artist need the validation of a glum bloke with a guitar before she’s taken seriously? (At a tangent, this is similar to the argument that Jeremy Corbyn’s defenders offered when he gave all the top Shadow Cabinet jobs to men — the assumption that the Foreign Office is somehow more prestigious than Education is in itself gendered. Well, hmmm. 

The arguments do rather support my thesis that pop music is (maybe I mean should be) always less about music than it is about something else (gender, race, sexuality, teenage rebellion, whatever) because what’s at stake here is credibility. Earlier this month I was in Singapore (which is in itself a glossy cover version of a real city) and saw a performance by Postmodern Jukebox, an American ensemble that reworks modern pop tunes in a dizzying array of earlier styles. As the name suggests, there’s a mood of droll irony going on here, but the performers also appear to take a genuine joy in what they can do with the material — they’re working with it, not against it. 

So is that OK? I’m kind of guessing that Ms Swift, who appears to be a pretty level-headed woman, doesn’t really give a toss as long as she gets paid. Although some people seem to believe I think too much about these things...

Postmodern beer and the ultimate death of everything and nothing

The problem with postmodernism is that nobody can really agree what it means. Except that tangled up in it is something about the absence of a fundamental objective reality to which meaning can apply. As such, the labelling of a bottle of beer as postmodern, thus stripping the word of what few tattered shreds of lace ever protected its modesty, is at once the death of postmodernism and its ultimate triumph.

And it didn’t taste very nice either.

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.

Gaga and Reed: Artpop will eat itself

In the wake of Lou Reed’s demise, Suzanne Moore writes in The Guardian:

Watching Gaga writhe on the neuro-disco is a daft parody of Walk on the Wild Side. Amusement. Art does not have to be about transgression, it can be about anything – of course, it can. But look at us mourn the time when it felt that way; this loss is immense.

To be honest, that single article ticks so many of the boxes that I’ve been trying to cover in this blog that it almost makes what I do feel a bit redundant. Time for a rest, maybe.

Peaky Blinders: my problem with the music

I’ve only managed to watch two episodes of the BBC drama Peaky Blinders so far, but I quite like what I see.* It seems to fit into an interesting sub-genre, the period drama with a (post?-)modern sensibility; along the lines of Desperate Romantics and the show with which I’ve seen it compared most often, Boardwalk Empire. What distinguishes these shows from, say, Downton Abbey is that the period details (clothes, décor, contemporary historical references) appear to be for the most part accurate but the script and performances have a swagger and a self-awareness that is strictly 21st century. Once again demonstrating the extent to which Quentin Tarantino has become the dominant cultural influence of the past 20 years, shows such as Peaky Blinders are also packed with references large and small to other media, especially film; so the activities of a gang of Brummie crooks in the years following World War I conjure up The Godfather Part II and Once Upon A Time In America, provided you can imagine Robert De Niro supping pints of mild from a bucket. Or maybe it’s The Long Riders in flat caps. That’s the joy of postmodernism; you can just find a reference point that fits your own prejudices and viewing history and insist that it’s so, and Roland Barthes’s laundry van will squash anyone who disagrees. 

In theory, the music should also fit with this theory. The background tunes are for the most part culled from the back catalogues of Nick Cave and Jack White, singer-songwriters whose music survives in the modern rock era while also gazing back at a semi-mythical past of bar-room brawls and devils at crossroads; it’s anachronistic but, hey, Celine Dion wasn’t around when the Titanic sank either. And the diegetic music (mostly Irish ballads and a bit of Puccini so far) sounds pretty authentic. Again, a precedent was set by Boardwalk Empire, which is set in 1920s Atlantic City and has as its theme a song by contemporary psychedelicists the Brian Jonestown Massacre and nobody seems too bothered.

But somehow I am bothered by the use of Cave and White. Part of the problem is that I’m too close to their music; I see how the clanging anvil of ‘Red Right Hand’ fits into the industrial hellscape that is Peaky Blinders-era Brum but to me it’s also track five of the Let Love In album, which I’m pretty certain I bought at Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus on its week of release in 1994. Even more confusing, they use music from Cave’s soundtrack compositions, for The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which inevitably makes me think of those films; not in the vague, thematic sense in which I think of The Long Riders but it a very straightforward, nuts-and-bolts manner of how soundtracks are put together. Which in turn makes me think about how films are put together and before long I’m thinking about where I’ve seen the actors before and the Scarecrow from Batman Begins is staring out the grumpy dad hero from Jurassic Park. Maybe the makers are trying for a spot of of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, making you aware all the time that these are just actors speaking lines, that the music is stuck on afterwards, that it’s all just make-believe. And I know this is what Tarantino does with music, but there’s something ever so slightly camp about QT’s deployment of familiar (or for that matter unfamiliar) tunes and I don’t think Peaky Blinders is trying to be camp or funny. Or maybe, as usual, I’m just over-thinking stuff to the point where I can’t enjoy it any more. Maybe I should just drink mild from a bucket.

* Is that enough? I’ve just read the first few pages of Douglas Coupland’s new book and my initial thoughts are that it’s a bad parody of Martin Amis, with occasional interruptions from a bad parody of Bret Easton Ellis. Is that fair?

Luhrmann’s Gatsby in all its dimensions

I’ve been awaiting the arrival of Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby for many months with the same giddy excitement that I used to reserve for the Eurovision Song Contest. I’d be hoping for some Abba-esque flash of brilliance, all the time knowing deep down that my enjoyment would be of the cruel and camp variety, gazing on open-mouthed as a bunch of hapless mannequins staggered through ineptly choreographed routines to shudderingly banal music; and there would probably be a clown or two. As such, Gatsby is a disappointment. As an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s novel, it’s not atrocious enough to be funny but it’s certainly not brilliant either; as a movie in its own right, it’s quite interesting. And Bonnie Tyler’s not in it.

To run through the basics, Luhrmann and his co-writer Craig Pearce stick to the basic plot pretty faithfully, with the exception of a framing narrative which had Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) recounting the story from a drying-out clinic; more of that later. A kid writing a book report having only watched this version would at least scrape a pass. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby is rather good, convincingly swinging between insouciant bonhomie at his bacchanalian parties and quasi-teenage gawkiness as he awaits the reunion with Daisy. Maguire, by contrast, is awful, depicting Nick as a one-note klutz, his Wall Street suit-and-bowtie get-up only reinforcing his resemblance to Pee-Wee Herman. Carey Mulligan can’t do much with the impossible role of Daisy although she does have the acting chops to remind you what a fickle cow the character is; and she looks nice, which helps.

Indeed, the whole film looks nice, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from Luhrmann. The party scenes are suitably brash and energetic (with inevitable nods to Cabaret and Chicago) and some of the big, swooping shots across Manhattan and the yearning gap across the water that separates Gatsby’s mansion from the Buchanans’ place are proper heart-in-mouth stuff. They make good use of the 3D format but elsewhere Luhrmann seems compelled – as do most directors who appropriate this stupid, expensive gimmick – to get his money’s worth. So we get champagne corks and footballs hurled in our general direction, lit cigars and the tumbling characters of Carraway’s typescript; all embodying the paradox that a process that is supposed to make a movie more real, more lifelike only reminds us of the artificiality of the form.

Which, oddly enough, is where things get interesting. Because 3D demands these big scenes, the characters often seem like figures in a diorama, or the inhabitants of a dolls’ house. When Gatsby’s nerve breaks and Carraway snaps, “You’re acting like a little boy”, the viewer can’t forget that, as good as DiCaprio may be, yes, he is still acting – the scene comes over like a high school production of a Noël Coward scene. The film doesn’t find the emotional heart of the novel (the most moving moment in the book, the appearance of Gatsby’s father at the end, is missing) but Luhrmann’s not trying to do that. Instead, he’s taken the most essential component of the main character’s story, the sense of desperate reinvention and pretence, and extrapolated it into a whole movie. It’s postmodernism, stupid.

So we get the nods Hollywood’s past intimations that success and fame don’t bring happiness. DiCaprio’s boyish confidence has more than a little Charles Foster Kane about it and his home is Xanadu; his final exhalation of “Daisy” may as well be “Rosebud”. And then he is found floating, not on a mattress as in the novel, but face down, like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. Some of the other cultural tips of the hat are more clunky, and seem to play fast and loose with reality. Carraway has a copy of Ulysses, which was published in Paris in February, 1922, so it’s just about feasible that a copy may have evaded the attention of the US censors and made it to him by the summer of that year, when the story is apparently set. But Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue didn’t appear until two years later, so rather than being a useful period detail it feels as if Luhrmann just asked for something familiar and 1920s-y to fill in a gap. 

But hold on; this isn’t real, remember. There’s no room for historical pedantry in Luhrmann Land (and neither Jay-Z nor Beyoncé nor Amy Winehouse were around in 1922 either). If the 3D hasn’t done the trick, the framing narrative should, although at first it appears to be wholly gauche and clunky. Making Carraway an alcoholic just reinforces the fairly banal inference that he might be a fictional stand-in for Fitzgerald himself but no – he’s actually Luhrmann, pushing around these funny little ciphers of people in the vast toy theatres of his imagination, playing the music he wants to play whether it’s historically plausible or not. Who’s to say that the action we’ve just seen played out in 3D isn’t the dredged from his booze-sodden imagination, or just a ploy to get the psychiatrist off his back? Indeed, this may explain the oddest piece of casting, that of Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan as the racketeer Meyer Wolfshiem. When Pete Postlethwaite browned up and took a Japanese name in The Usual Suspects it made no sense until you realised the whole story was an off-the-cuff spiel by a master deceiver. Could Wolfshiem be Indian? Yes, if Luhrmann/Carraway becomes Keyser Söze and wants it to be so. It’s just a story, after all.

So how can we explain Luhrmann’s Gatsby? Well, not really by reference to the original novel, or to previous adaptations thereof. Nor to Hollywood’s previous ruminations about the downside of riches, or even to its depictions of the Jazz Age and all its debaucheries. Baz has cherrypicked them all, but with a level of discretion and decorum that may surprise his detractors and none of them tells the whole story. No, the closest connection I can see is with a British movie, one that failed as an adaptation of a beloved book, that didn’t even bother to depict the time in which it was set, but later came to be seen as a wry satire on the culture and society that prevailed at the time it was made. And it had some fun party scenes. Luhrmann won’t thank me, but his Gatsby is a kindred spirit to Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners. I wonder what that would have been like in 3D...

PS: Oh hell. I’ve just realised that the gap between 1959 (when Colin MacInnes’s novel Absolute Beginners was published) and 1986 (when the film appeared) is the same as the gap between 1986 and now.

Die Hardly

You know, in our (post)modern, virtual, hyperreal world, it’s terribly difficult to maintain any notion of quality. I mean, what’s more impressive? Pretending to be one celebrity on Twitter in order to invent the death of another, as Tommasso Debenedetti does? (Shades of Luther Blissett there, I reckon.) Pretending to be a deaf paraplegic and then killing him? Hiring gamers to (virtually) kill your own son, in the manner of Mr Feng? Or just inventing a whole damn war, which stood undetected on Wikipedia for half a decade? I suppose the body count from the last was the highest. Is that how you measure it, then; the number of people you haven’t really killed?