About Wrapped

The years when your musical tastes truly mattered to your identity are long gone, we are constantly told. The younglings no longer define as metalheads or b-boys or goths or disco queens or indie shambles; they just leave themselves at the mercies of the blessed algorithm and let the music play, a title that only comes to mind because I heard Radcliffe and Maconie play it yesterday on their 6Music show, which shows how old I am, doesn’t it?

And yet... and yet. The continued success of Spotify’s annual Wrapped, which gives users a handy summary of their listening habits over the past year and – this is the important bit – encourages them to share it with everyone else, suggests that people think the things they listen to do actually matter, do actually express something about the listener, even if they happen accidentally. To this extent:

About the middlebrow

 You know, I could get behind this...

On the one hand, a supercilious and increasingly anhedonic critical taste. On the other, people who can’t make sense of what they watch or read . Oh no I’m arguing for a return to the golden age of the middlebrow

— Kevin Power (@KevPow3) August 6, 2023

About Jerry Sadowitz

I still don’t know for certain what Jerry Sadowitz did or said that was so distressing to (some) members of his audience that his subsequent show was cancelled by the venue, and that makes the whole episode even more annoying. The director of the Pleasance, who announced the ban, said only that his material “is not acceptable and does not align with our values”. It’s probably a stretch to equate Sadowitz’s treatment with what’s happened to Salman Rushdie. Nobody’s tried to kill the comedian, although it must be remembered that a furious Canadian (they exist, apparently), once punched him out on stage for beginning a Montreal gig with a cheery “Hello, moose-fuckers!” That said, the statement does bear some comparison with the Ayatollah’s fatwa, in that the precise nature of the crime was kept vague, thus enabling those disposed to take offence to create ever-increasing levels of imagined ideological transgression in their own heads, without ever feeling obliged to see Sadowitz’s show, or read The Satanic Verses.

More importantly though, as many have already said — what did people expect from a Sadowitz show? He’s been cavorting merrily on the wrong side of taste for four decades. And if they hadn’t noticed after all this time that some of his schtick is a bit unpleasant, 30 seconds on Google could have put them right. Modern cultural discourse is certainly sanctimonious and censorious, but far worse, I’d suggest, is the abject absence of curiosity.

About coronavirus

2016 was the last year that seemed to be characterised by lots of famous people dying and now as then the relative significance given to one dead celeb over another speaks volumes, dragging into its orbit issues of taste and class and the dreaded canon. Who, ultimately, matters more, the bass player of Fountains of Wayne or the fat one from Little and Large?

And if you don’t think there’s anything worse than death...

About William James

William James, brother of the more cinegenic Henry, in 1900, reflecting on his time spent in an idyllic middle-class settlement in western New York state:

Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, I cannot abide with them.

I think I may deploy “this atrocious harmlessness” with unseemly abandon from now on.

About Fleabag and After Life

Comedy that brands itself as dark and edgy requires a certain amount of resistance from its consumers to justify its existence, so I’m sure Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator and star of Fleabag (the second series of which is happening on BBC1) was delighted when several people popped up to declare that miscarriage was not something that should be joked about.

In fact, the miscarriage in the first episode was – apart from its initial shock value, because, no, it’s not something you do expect to happen in a sitcom – more of a McGuffin, setting the stage for a climactic, post-prandial punch-up and developing the awkward relationship between the chaotic Fleabag and her superficially in-control sister. It’s a brave, dangerous show, not least because the central character is a gloriously bloody difficult woman; but it still fits into a classic genre, the British comedy of embarrassment. And now (we’re currently half-way through the series) we’re getting properly self-referential and post-modern, as Fleabag’s droll arch glances and one-liners to camera have been noticed by the sweet, sweary, probably alcoholic Catholic priest (Andrew Scott) she’s determined to shag. If the asides were already Brechtian, the explicit reference to them adds so may layers to the artifice it’s hard to see how she can escape. Verfremdungseffekteffekt, maybe?

Of course, the whole idea of acknowledging the camera’s existence was a key element in the success of The Office, the show that brought Ricky Gervais to most people’s attention. This, however, was in the context of realism, as the cameras were there within the fiction (for the fly-on-the-wall documentary that many of us thought we were watching for the first few minutes of episode one) as well as in reality.

In his new Netflix show, After Life, there are no furtive glances at the camera. The closest we come are the video messages that the terminally-ill Lisa has recorded for her journalist husband Tony (Gervais) and the clips he’s shot of the daft pranks he played on her in happier times. After his death, he declares that the only thing holding his back from suicide is responsibility to look after his dog; the dénouement is [SPOILER ALERT] that, despite his best efforts to become a walking, talking delivery mechanism for toxic abuse, there are plenty more people who love and need him: a new young writer on the local paper he is assigned to mentor; his sad, adoring godson; the amiable sex worker who cleans his house. If the narrative leans towards gloomy neorealism, the setting is defiantly artificial, a pleasant English rural location somewhere between large village and small town, constantly bathed in improbable sunlight, where everything seems to be within walking distance, including the beach. This of course only serves to set Tony’s seething agony in stark relief.

After Life has also prompted complaints, from those who think the nihilistic despair of the recently bereaved shouldn’t be a matter for comedy and, to an extent, I think they’re on steadier ground here, because that is actually what the show is about; where they’re wrong, though is that After Life isn’t in fact a comedy. Sure, calling a 10-year-old schoolyard bully “a tubby little ginger cunt” offers the same sort of transgressive giggle as Fleabag’s gynaecological mishap, but ultimately Gervais’s offering is a tragedy in which funny things are allowed to happen; Waller-Bridge is orchestrating a farce that occasionally throws up tragic moments. (Incidentally, with regard to the language, Netflix seems to be more forgiving than the Beeb; Scott’s priest character was originally meant to refer to his brother as “a cunt” but this had to be changed to something less offensive. So the absent sibling became “a paedophile”. Which is better, apparently.)

I still don’t buy into this notion that we’re in some golden age of TV; it’s simply that more TV is being made, so inevitably there’s more good stuff to be found. Sturgeon’s Law still applies. But Fleabag and After Life are both clearly in the top 10% of that top 10%. As to which is better, I’d just say that while Fleabag dazzles with its wit and sheer devilish attitude, After Life is more like getting a punch in the gut when you least expect it. Fleabag I watch behind barely parted fingers, gasping at its sheer bloody-mindedness; After Life I can barely watch at all, for all the right reasons. Fleabag is a superb piece of Art, while After Life is Life itself.

PS: This just in, via Henry Hitchings on Twitter: Nabokov reference (unreliable narrator?) at the bus stop

About arts

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

About anti-elitism

Everybody’s a curator these days, it seems — which probably means that nobody is. Including those who really should be curators, like Jamie Sterns and Andrew Edlin, who offered to show absolutely anything that anyone submitted for their New York show, irrespective of quality, provenance, whatever. The only restriction was size.

(Thanks, Emma.)

About Weinstein

Slightly off-topic in the context of all the decades-old pus oozing from the freshly-lanced boils in Hollywood and beyond, but this passing comment, from a New Yorker article by Molly Ringwald, makes a lot of sense.

I was always a little mystified that Harvey had a reputation as a great tastemaker when he seemed so noticeably lacking in taste himself. But he did have a knack for hiring people who had it, and I figured that’s what passes for taste in Hollywood.

I think we’ve all seen more than enough of Mr Weinstein’s face in the past few days, so here’s lovely, wise Molly instead.


via GIPHY

About Kenny G

The saxophonist Kenny G is simply horrid, from his banal, sugary smooooth jazz noodling to his nasty hair (and for a more cogent analysis of his musical, aesthetic and moral sins, do read this coruscating attack by Pat Metheny). But when I was alerted to the fact that he’s going to make an attempt on the world record for holding a single note (on a plane, for charity) I couldn’t help thinking that if some more credible musician were doing exactly the same thing, we’d be hailing it as a magnificent piece of performance art and it would probably end up being entered for the Turner Prize.

That said, his hair’s still ghastly.

Does this mean I’m blogging again?

Banksy and Warney

I’m afraid I haven’t yet made the pilgrimage to Weston-super-Mare, the site of Banksy’s theme-park-with-a-difference, Dismaland. It sounds like an interesting and different experience but from the coverage so far it looks as if he’s borrowed rather a lot of ideas from conceptual provocateurs such as Jeff Koons (zzzzzz) and the Chapman Brothers (love them). To be fair, when I raised this yesterday, several of his defenders pointed out that Banksy has never pretended to be original.

What he does offer is the ability to grab attention in mainstream media where other contemporary artists can’t get a look-in (Hirst and Emin excepted, possibly). And of course the best way to do this is with bourgeois-bating outrage, with which Dismaland is liberally endowed, whether it’s a kitschy re-staging of the Diana crash or Punch and Judy with the male lead recast as Jimmy Savile.

Bad taste? Possibly. But Banksy wasn’t the only deployer of bad taste this week. There was also Project Harpoon, the self-defined “collaborative art project” that refashions images of larger women (without their consent) into proportions that are more acceptable to its creators. And then of course there’s the painting that spin-bowling legend Shane Warne has commissioned for his Melbourne home; featuring a barely clad Angelina Jolie among the throng. It’s horrific, obviously — but if it showed up in Dismaland, might we see it differently?

Crazy Rich Asians and the irrelevance of getting things right

I’m not certain how accurate the recent story was of one Tao Hsiao, who supposedly killed himself after enduring a five-hour shopping marathon with his girlfriend. I mean, I’m sure the poor guy died, but there’s just something too neat in a narrative that has someone’s last words being “don’t you have enough shoes already?” before he leaps to his demise from the seventh floor of a Xuzhou mall. It encapsulates so much that we feel about consumerism and gender and above all the social and economic changes that have overtaken China in the past few decades that it feels more like an urban myth than a random slice of domestic tragedy.

On one level, I suppose Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, doesn’t warrant such scrutiny, since it admits to being a work of fiction. (Incidentally, I only came across it because of a review by my dear friend Leyla Sanai, who I’ve never actually met, as is the way of friendships lately, and she’s been a bit poorly lately, so please send her all your love and good vibes.) As the title suggests, it’s a satire about a group of fabulously wealthy ethnic Chinese and there’s good fun to be had in the clash between brash ostentation and what we might once have had the confidence to define as good taste, a battle that’s going on throughout the Sinosphere. As I type this, I’ve got in front of me the menu for a Bangkok restaurant that lists scallops done three ways, incorporating the holy trinity of culinary flash – caviar, truffles and foie gras – on one plate. Maybe it works, maybe it tastes great; but ultimately that doesn’t matter as long as you’re eating something most people can’t afford. There’s a certain degree of richness beyond which you’re allowed to get things totally wrong – factual goofs, not just aesthetic solecisms – and nobody’s going to point it out. This is where I roll out my story about seeing a group of high-rolling Thai-Chinese businessmen ordering the most expensive claret on the list and dropping in ice cubes.

Back to the book. Hey, I understand how irony works and I understand that what characters say and do and think may not reflect the attitudes of the author. As you’re probably only too aware, American Psycho is one of my favourite novels, and I know that when Bateman misattributes songs by the Ronettes and the Rolling Stones we’re meant to be in on the joke. But you can’t always assume that. If one of Kwan’s characters says that a hotel is nine blocks from Piccadilly Circus tube, or that someone’s double-majoring at Oxford, should we chuckle because these silly Asians, no matter how rich they are, don’t know how British cities or British universities work, maybe because they’re too rich to have to care? Or should we hope that for his next book he gets himself a better editor?

The role of the cultural critic in the Asian century (LOL)

(Just before I press “PUBLISH” I start to think that the following post might be interpreted as some sort of reiteration of the Yellow Peril scares that began towards the end of the 19th century. It’s not; some of my best friends, etc. It’s simply an observation that, while the cultural changes wrought by technology over the next few decades will be immense we should at the same time be aware of how a shift in economic and political significance towards East Asia and elsewhere will also have an effect on what we consume and how we’re expected to consume it. Whether this is objectively A Bad Thing as such, I leave up to the reader.)

Will Self discusses Mark Kermode’s new book and muses on the technology-driven shift from declarative (implicitly elitist) forms of criticism to collaborative, conversational, nominally democratic models:

At the moment, the wholesale reconfiguration of art is only being retarded by demographics: the middle-aged possessors of Gutenberg minds remain in the majority in western societies, and so we struggle to impose our own linearity on a simultaneous medium to which it is quite alien. The young, who cannot read a text for more than a few minutes without texting, who rely on the web for both their love affairs and their memories of heartache, and who can sometimes find even cinema difficult to take unless it comes replete with electronic feedback loops, are not our future: we, the Gutenberg minds have no future, and our art forms and our criticism of those art forms will soon belong only to the academy and the museum.

Which is all appropriately downbeat and as such makes me think of Eliot (Are the Gutenberg minds inside the heads of the Hollow Men, waiting for their inevitable, whimpering demise?) but I also wonder if there’s something missing in the analysis. There’s a new monied elite coming from China and elsewhere which, unlike previous generations of nouveaux riches feel little need to pay tribute to the purported peaks of Western culture, beyond insisting that their offspring take violin lessons. Sure, they like Western things, but not the sort of Western things we expect educated, successful, wealthy people to like; their Old World aspirations are Versace rather than Vermeer, Louis Vuitton not Louis XIV. Wealthy women see Victoria Beckham as a role model and they don’t see why they should apologise. In the Asian century there is no cultural cringe. (And yes, there are exceptions to this rule but they tend to be rather quiet, marginal ones.)

And this has an impact in the Old World, not only because distances are shortened and national boundaries blurred by the www; as big chunks of London and New York and Paris are being bought up with money made in Shanghai and St Petersburg and Dubai, so the cultural norms of those places begin to apply. There may not be all that many Chinese or Russian billionaires in London but their influence is disproportionate to their numbers. (Hey, did you really believe that the digital revolution would be a great leveller, with one voice on Amazon or TripAdvisor being no louder or softer than another, no matter the size of the owner’s bank balance? How sweet.) And if they, rather than the Carnegies or Guggenheims or Gettys are to be the go-to guys for philanthropic munificence (I can’t see state funding for the arts existing in another two decades, given the prevalent double-whammy of austerity and sneering philistinism) how will their tastes – or lack thereof – trickle down to affect the wider cultural life of Britain and other countries? If you were running a big gallery, would you tell someone waving an eight-figure cheque that no, you won’t run an exhibition devoted to Donatella Versace even if she’s BFF with the donor’s trophy wife? I mean, it’s all Art, isn’t it? Isn’t it? And sure, the vast majority of British people would never set foot inside the National Gallery or the V&A or any of the Tates; but what goes on in them has a massive effect on how Britain presents itself to the world and ultimately, incrementally, over decades and generations, on how Britain feels about itself.

When people grumble about how immigration changes societies it’s usually a question of numbers and demographics, with dire warnings about how more Mohammeds are being born in the UK than Joshuas, as if one Middle Eastern name is scarier than another. And, yes, there are very real problems associated with such changes and the political elite has been very bad at addressing them, either damning any worries as being tainted with racism or going to the opposite extreme with the likes of the inept and crass “GO HOME” van campaign. And if we really were operating in a digital democracy the presence in Rochdale or Leicester of several thousand people from the backwoods of Bangladesh would be more significant than how a few rich Chinese guys opt to extend their largesse in London. But we don’t. The world is still analogue and still ultimately plutocratic. The cultural time bomb is being primed not by bearded Muslims in northern industrial towns but by people who are assimilated enough and, more significantly, wealthy enough to slip under the radar of even the most paranoid demagogues of the BNP/EDL/UKIP school. And that could lead to a “reconfiguration of art” that would dismay Self and Kermode even more. Not with a bang but a ker-ching.

PS: In more immediate terms, this touches on the areas I was discussing in my previous post. Here I’ve included links that might explain references to a TS Eliot poem and Donatella Versace. Different people might have required one or the other or both or neither and I made a belt-and-braces decision based on that. But as the centre of the world shifts eastward, the criteria upon which I base such decisions may shift as well. Please read the very common-sensical response of The Chicken’s Consigliere to said post and hope that more people think that way, otherwise I think I might just go insane.

PPS: Aaaand... Priority visas for rich Chinese. 

PPPS: Back to the Will Self piece; Simon Price gets stuck in. “A world with uncriticised art gets the art it deserves.” Yes.

PPPPS: (Oct 19) Last night I attended the launch of the Bangkok spin-off of a big, posh Singapore bar/superclub. My inner teenage Trostkyist stared on in horror. I have seen the future and I don’t want to go there. 

PPPPPS: (Oct 20) Does it never stop? “Chinese buyers tend to be interested in British popular culture – I’ve had clients who want to visit Tesco because they’ve read it’s where William and Kate shop.” 

Margaret Thatcher: witches and wankers

The refusal of BBC director-general Tony Hall to ban the song ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead’ from the airwaves has provoked the inevitable harrumphing from those who still believe that the whole nation ought to be united in grief for Margaret Thatcher’s death and gratitude for her deeds whether they bloody well want to be or not. It’s an odd situation, because unlike some of the other songs that saw an uptick in popularity after Thatcher died (Elvis Costello’s ‘Tramp the Dirt Down’ being the most obvious example), ‘Ding Dong’ was only co-opted to the cause many years after it was written. If its appropriation by anti-Thatch revellers puts it beyond the bounds of taste, does this mean that it must be pulled from all productions of The Wizard of Oz, including the one currently running at the London Palladium, under the baggy eye of arch-Thatcherite Andrew Lloyd Webber? And for how long? Once her ashes are scattered, does the tune suddenly revert to being a harmless, jubilant camp anthem; or must it be forever verboten, like an episode of Top of the Pops featuring Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile?

The whole concocted outrage is, of course, nothing more than a further opportunity for the Thatcherite faithful to kick the BBC; a campaign that’s inevitably being led by the increasingly unhinged Daily Mail, which accuses the Corporation of bias while at the same time slamming newsreaders for not wearing black ties. Surely unbiased providers of news should not be wearing black ties for anyone; they should report a significant death, soberly but without sobs, describe the response to it (including the mourning) but not take any active part in said mourning (nor kick the coffin). The alternative, if the Mail really wants balanced coverage, is for approximately half the newsreaders to wear black ties and the other half to boogie on their desks sporting ruby slippers and waving SWP placards.

The not-a-paedophile-but-still-preposterous Alistair McAlpine says that the BBC is “letting the charts be hijacked for political purposes”. A more intelligent Thatcherite would have realised that the charts are in fact a perfect manifestation of the market forces that they’re supposed to revere. If more people spend money on a piece of music, it goes higher up the charts. That’s capitalism, guys. If Tony Hall allows ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead’ to be played on Radio One, he’s just acknowledging the inevitability of the philosophies that Thatcher espoused. Which is a statement (albeit a fairly passive one) of political bias in itself, but presumably the sort of political bias of which Margaret Thatcher and her dimwitted disciples would have approved.

And while we’re on matters of taste and the BBC, several years ago Jonathan Ross interviewed David Cameron, who wasn’t long into his stint as leader of the Conservative Party. Ross provoked synthetic outrage (from many of the same people now pretending to give a shit about a Judy Garland song) for asking Cameron whether he’d ever had sexual fantasies about Thatcher. Now, I was at Exeter University in the late 80s, at around the same time as a fairly vociferous Tory cabal, several of whom subsequently on to be MPs. Quite a few of them, let’s be frank, seemed a tad socially awkward in the presence of women. There was one story about a right-wing hack (not one of the future members) who opened the wrong door at a party, found himself confronted by a young lady wearing nothing but stockings and suspenders and promptly fainted. Moreover, the adulation that many of the circle bestowed upon Margaret Thatcher was, if not explicitly sexual, then undoubtedly fetishistic – something, in fact, rather akin to the veneration that many gay men feel for Judy Garland. Ross’s question to Cameron is certainly one that has crossed my mind over the years, even if I wish it hadn’t.

Today, the Thatcher acolytes aren’t really upset because songs and jokes and street parties are disturbing what they want to be an all-pervading mood of mourning; they know that their idol was a divisive leader and she herself knew it and accepted the fact, sometimes even revelled in it. Those partying in Brixton and Glasgow were as much testaments to her success as all the obituaries and black ties. No, the truth is far more banal; Maggie’s brats are just irritated because this background noise is distracting them from one final, massive, celebratory circle jerk.

PS: Interesting piece in Vice about the Thatcher government vs acid house; and the family context to Glenda Jackson’s Commons broadside.

PPS: Further perspectives from Mark Steel and Sturdy Alex.

PPPS: Dorothy never surrendered. But the BBC just did.

Fifty Shades of Grey: taking your mind off the ironing

No, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, EL James’s mummy-porn blockbuster. The last time I made a conscious effort to read a book simply because people were arguing about how bad it was, I ended up creating a whole new blog about the bloody thing in a vain attempt to analyse the weird, compulsive appeal of its awfulness and I really don’t want to take another trip into that cul de sac of brain-sapping banality.

Not that I really need to read Fifty Shades to hold an opinion on it, because the debate has moved on beyond whether the book is any good or not, in literary terms at least. The word is that it’s reaching out beyond the main book-buying markets, luring previously reluctant readers into bookshops (real and virtual), reminding them that reading isn’t just something that other people do. And, goes the argument, if a small fraction of those converts go on to become regular book-buyers and/or book-readers, that can only be a good thing. It’s another matter whether the potential benefit of these eager new customers turns out to be enough to counteract the depressing reality that agents and editors will ignore for the next three years any author presuming to write anything other than monochrome-covered tomes oozing with female-friendly spanky smut. On the other hand, in the last decade it was all pubescent wizards, so at least this is something slightly different.

One thing that many observers have noted is the way Fifty Shades has divided its readers, with the number of 1- and 5-star reviews on Amazon dwarfing the middle ground. This is probably inevitable when so many people are reading it less in anticipation of pleasure and more to see what all the fuss is about; I guess Lolita or Lady Chatterley would have elicited a similar spread of reactions. The difference is of course that Nabokov and Lawrence were deemed to have written proper literature; EL James is writing for a mass market and her fans inhabit a broad demographic. A skim through those who gave her book full marks throws up the likes of:

I am not a fan of reading but all girls i work with are reading the triology and everyone rated it so i gave ib an actually bought all three at once (the only books i have bought in past are for uni. I started reading them on Saturday 2nd June and by the evening of the 5th /june i has finished the lot, i loved everey book and gutted that i have finished them, its true they are kinkier than expected but there is a story line behind it. I just hope the movie livesd up to the book when they decide on a cast :)

...which may simply reinforce the prejudices of Grey-haters, as well as giving some ammunition to those who bemoan the current state of higher education. More interesting is this comment:

I read with interest the reviews before buying. They seem to come from two angles. Those with their literary glasses on and those expecting a bit of escapism. Now I've read it the literary reviews seem laughable. Prose? Grammar? Syntax? This is simply a book that is meant to take your mind off the ironing and it certainly does that.

Rather than taking on the one-star haters, who criticise the clunky, repetitive style and the two-dimensional characters, the argument seems to be – to the above reviewer at least – that such niceties simply don’t matter. No, EL James is not Prince Nabokov, nor was meant to be. A book such as Fifty Shades of Grey is allowed to be poorly written from a strictly literary point of view, but can still succeed on its own terms, temporary displacement of domestic duties included. The real question is – and I asked this about The Da Vinci Code and never really came to a satisfactory conclusion – does it actually *have* to be badly written? 

PS: And then there’s the brown sauce story.

PPS: And this is quite funny (with a tangential Fifty Shades mention at the end). 

PPPS: And for more Amazon reviews that fart in the face of the critical consensus, go here.

PPPPS: And yet more – this absolute gem, flagged up by the lovely Broken Biro, makes me even more glad I never bothered to read the bloody book. 

PPPPPS: But what’s this? A defence of the book, in the New Statesman no less.

Céline Dion playing the bagpipes while riding a hippo

In his rather wonderful Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, essentially a book that asks why cool people loathe Céline Dion and what that says about them, Carl Wilson discusses the work of the Russian-born conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. For their People’s Choice project they commissioned polls in 11 countries to determine what exactly people wanted from visual art. Preferences varied in small details according to location, but in every country there was a distinct fondness for large, predominantly blue pictures featuring historical figures and animals. So for the Americans they created a big landscape with a lake, George Washington and (you can just about make it out to George’s left as we look at him) a hippopotamus.

But, you may ask, what the ruddy flip does this collision of conceptualism and chocolate box have to do with the angular, honking, forever-entwined-in-our-collective-consciousness-with-interminable-maritime-calamity Québécois songstress? Well, for their next trick, Komar and Melamid asked what people liked and disliked in music. And what they liked was a song about love, played in a modern rock/R&B style, at a moderate tempo, featuring guitars and saxophones and drums. And it had to last about five minutes. Essentially, they liked the sort of songs that Céline sings. What they didn’t like included accordions, bagpipes, banjos and tubas, rapid transitions between extreme tempos and pitches, atonality, rap, jingles and lyrics about cowboys. And they didn’t much care for songs that went on too long. Inevitably, after the artists asked their musician friend Dave Soldier to create songs that matched these specifications, it was the 25-minute cowboy song that people preferred. Which really means that the next time someone says that they don’t know much about art/music/poetry but they know what they like, they’re only half right.

Broken glass or honey

An interesting remark from a recent interview with former Throwing Muse Kristin Hersh: “The intensity of good music is too much to bear. And bad music is so offensive that that’s also too much to bear.”

I sort of half get that. I certainly know what it’s like to encounter a piece of music, or a film or a painting or whatever, that overwhelms with its emotional intensity, and it’s too distracting and you’re not in the mood and you just want to hide. (Oddly, I’ve never found that with a book: I’ve been so utterly gripped by a novel that I’ve stayed on the bus to the terminus, even though reading on buses makes me nauseous, but I’ve never had to put a book to one side because it overwhelms me. Has anyone?)

Where I part company with Ms Hersh is over the matter of bad music. I don’t mind a lot of bad music,  in fact I often like it, whether it’s bad because it’s a bit cheesy (like this) or simply incompetent (like that). What I can’t bear is music that’s simply bearable and polite and does its job and doesn’t charge emotional overtime. And I won’t post a link to it, because it encompasses about 95% of the music that surrounds us.

Middlebrowbeaten

In The Guardian, Sam Leith unpicks the nature and meaning of a long-running spat between avuncular lakeside raconteur (and Kevin Eldon’s attic picture) Garrison Keillor and sometime lumberjack, teacher and poet August Kleinzahler, who several years ago kicked several shades of sarcasm out of one of Keillor’s poetry anthologies. Now, I have no domestic animal in this particular scrap. My usual response to to Keillor’s work is that for some reason I always used to get him mixed up with Spalding Gray; and as for Mr Kleinzahler, I only discovered his existence when I first read Leith’s article. (I assume he’s not one of Keillor’s own creations – GK doesn’t strike me as someone who’d go all postmodern on his readers’ bottoms.)

But I did follow the link to Kleinzahler’s article, and he makes some sound points, not least that poetry is a minority pursuit and probably always will be. As he puts it:

Ninety percent of adult Americans can pass through this life tolerably well, if not content, eating, defecating, copulating, shopping, working, catching the latest Disney blockbuster, without having a poem read to them by Garrison Keillor or anyone else. 

And he’s very funny as well, characterising Keillor’s tastes thus:

The typical Keillor selection tends to be anecdotal, wistful: more often than not a middle-aged creative writing instructor catching a whiff of mortality in the countryside – watching the geese head south, getting lost in the woods, this sort of thing.

But Leith is right that Kleinzahler overstates his case, retreating into a state of “Olympian scorn” at the notion that poetry might even aspire to be popular. His reaction to the poet’s notion “that bad art is worse than no art at all” is simply “Nobody sensible can think so.”

Leith is too restrained. Kleinzahler is more than not sensible in speaking up against bad art: he’s actively sabotaging his own identity as a poet. Good art needs bad art as a benchmark, to quantify its quality, to reassure its practioners and its fans of their superiority. In his extended diss of Keillor he throws up references to the poets Roy Fisher and William Carlos Williams, and spreads his net wider, to the music of Bach and Albert Ayler, and the theatre of Artaud; he even says “fuck”, the wee scamp. It’s as if he’s putting up a series of signposts of artistic integrity, but these people don’t exist in a vacuum. We don’t really understand the goodness of Ayler and Artaud unless we have the badness of Kenny G and We Will Rock You with which to compare them. Ultimately, August Kleinzahler needs Garrison Keillor, but Garrison Keillor doesn’t need August Kleinzahler.

It’s really just an aesthetic variant on the Cleese/Ronnies class sketch, but with brows standing in for socio-economic groups. And yes, the picture above is of your author, half as old as he is now, reading some of his poetry that would probably be classed as upper-middlebrow, not clever enough for Kleinzahler/Cleese, but at the same time too unpleasant for Keillor/Barker. No geese ever went south in my verses. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the piece I was offering at that very moment was called ‘I’d Never Join The Young Conservatives For You’. Happy days.