The revenge of the Belle & Sebastian fans

Ruminating about death and Wikipedia and Swells and the various levels of famousness, at Prospect.

He’s out of my life

You see, I’m in two minds about Michael Jackson. Of course, he was a genius, despite everything. So what I really wanted to do was to find a copy of the NME cover that ran after Elvis died, when they used a pic of him in his ducktailed, knock-kneed, 1956 glory with the legend: “REMEMBER HIM THIS WAY”, acknowledging that he was so much more than the bloated Vegas abomination.

But I couldn’t find the cover, and anyway it would probably have just looked stupid and insulting if I stuck a shot of ‘I Want You Back’ or ‘Wanna Be Starting Something’-era Jacko in the middle of it. And of course there was all the other stuff as well. If we’re really going to look back on his life, we need to include this as well:

Deflates

I was going to say something about how sad I am that Slaminsky’s chucked in the towel, but then I thought, hey, it’s her call, it’s not like she’s dead or anything.

Then I found out that Steven Wells (aka Seething Wells/Swells/Susan Williams) had lost his three-year battle with cancer.

I never met Swells. I did occasionally exchange e-mails, and once had a bit of a phone barney with him. (I called him a plagiarist; he called me a whinger; we both agreed that the idea of reviving the musical Hair in the 1990s was an affront to good taste.)

But at the same time, I knew him intimately, first because of my teenage obsession with performance poetry; and later because for several years he was the cleverest, funniest writer in the NME, in that late-80s/early 90s phase when it was past its best but still the best thing going. What was great about him was that even if you disagreed utterly with what he said (he loathed the Smiths, and I’m sure it was he who argued that Sonia had made a greater contribution to pop history than Morrissey ever could), he was still more readable that a dozen hacks who just regurgitated your own prejudices and served them back to you. Which is why, presumably, there was no longer a place for him at the NME, and he plied his trade instead at The Guardian, the Philadelphia Weekly and online spaces such as Quietus (where this gorgeous pisstake of Radiohead comes from).

He died on Tuesday, the same day that the editor of the NME was appointed to take over at Top Gear magazine. Little more needs to be said. (Although Betty says it.)

PS: Everett’s collated some of the many tributes; another from Akira the Don; and here’s the man himself on sport and blogging and stuff.

Laid out

Can’t for the life of me remember where I found this, and it was only two days ago. I feel like one of those respectable ladies who enters the menopause and starts nicking evaporated milk from Fortnum & Mason. Anyway, if it belongs to anyone, please yell, and I’ll acknowledge, and get my medication changed. And give the evaporated milk back.

Green graffiti

It seems as if I’m running some kind of anti-Banksy campaign here, and I’m really not; he’s fab, and so are the Art Hate guys. We cannot live on polite watercolours alone. But images from Tehran such as this


and these and these (at the excellent FryingPanFire blog) rather put received notions of rebellion and criminality into some kind of perspective.

PS: That said, here’s more evidence that Banksy’s outlaw brand has eaten itself.

Kunst

It probably entirely contradicts everything I was saying last week about the faux subversion of Banksy’s Bristol event, because this is just as hypey and adolescent, but National Art Hate Week does strike me as being a rather amusing wheeze.

PS: The word I was striving for with regard to the Banksy gig: authenticitude.

Gread

Snippet from an encounter with Jonathan Meades. Why eat if you aren’t hungry, asks the interviewer, Hermione Eyre.

“Why did Borges buy books after he was blind?”

Dead links to dead trees

Some bits and pieces, connected only by their location on the cusp of cyber and meat:

• The Times wins the right to unmask police blogger Nightjack, a move that seems to serve no purpose than allowing old media to remind the blogosphere who’s boss. The whole thing makes me exceedingly angry; fortunately, Chicken Yogurt is clear-headed enough to point out the essential hypocrisy of The Times’s position.

• On similar lines, tight-collared reactionary Simon Heffer in the Telegraph spews extraordinary quantities of nonsense about the rubbishness of Facebook, never once questioning the privilege that accords him a platform.

• Graphic design student Rob Matthews prints off 437 articles from Wikipedia and turns them into a book. “It makes people laugh,” says Matthews, “which is good.”

• Ann Kirschner tackles the format question that’s got publishing in knots, by consuming Dickens as book, audiobook, Kindle and iPhone.

• Everett True offers a quantitative comparison between blogs now and fanzines then.

• The whole Iranian hoo-ha raises a number of questions about politics and technology, not least the question of whether we perceive the result to be unjust because Twitter users are more likely to be Moussavi supporters. However, Harvard academic Jonathan Zittrain makes a wider point about this most misunderstood medium, and why it is so successful at times of civic upheaval: “The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

PS: More on the Nightjack case from Paperhouse, Anton Vowl and Girl With A One-Track Mind, who suffered similar indignities at the hands of Rupert’s catamites, and also ties the whole grubby affair up with what's occurring in Tehran.

PPS: And the bloggers, inevitably, strike back.