Last rites

So Gil Scott-Heron dies, and although it’s sad, it’s also pretty remarkable that he lasted so long. Less remarkable are the more odious responses to his Telegraph obituary, although they may have been excised by the time you read this.

I did think of posting a vaguely relevant bit of Scott-Heron’s music, but most of the good ones had been taken. And so the rhizomatic (il?)logic that underpins YouTube’s algorithms leads to Hubert Laws, who in the same year that he played on GS-H’s Pieces of a Man album, released a collection of jazz/classical fusion pieces. It’s normally the sort of thing from which I’d run five miles, but this take on Stravinsky works pretty well, I reckon.

“No decent career was ever founded on a public”

The actor James McAvoy has complained that British film-makers have taken to dumbing down their product in an effort to appeal to American audiences. It’s a charge that might have had a little more impact had not McAvoy  – a sort of 21st-century Dexter Fletcher – made it while he was supposed to be plugging his own leading role in yet another big-budget comic-book spin-off prequel. But, hey, let’s not quibble. Actually, scrub that, let’s quibble, if only a little, when it comes to dumbing down. Because in a culturally fragmented world, the world of the Long Tail, it’s increasingly hard to make accusations of dumbness stick.

There are exceptions. In a recent episode of the BBC current affairs show Panorama, on the subject of unemployment among the over-fifties, a luckless jobhunter explained that he’d sent out 490 applications; to which the presenter, Fiona Phillips, exclaimed “Four hundred and ninety? That's nearly five hundred!” Now that’s dumb, and especially egregious on a show that used to have a reputation for rigorous reporting and analysis. But once we move away from the empirical certainties of basic arithmetic, it’s harder to make a judgement. When the Ryan Giggs brouhaha began, I had no idea who Imogen Thomas was. Should reports of the case have explained her cultural significance in more detail, to remedy my ignorance? Would that have been dumbing down? Am I dumb because I don’t know who won America’s Got Talent the year before last, and wouldn’t be able to recognise the participants in The Only Way Is Essex if they sat in my lap? Or does that make me clever? How can I wear the stuff I don’t know as a badge of my cleverness?

Roger Ebert side-steps these conundra beautifully in his review of Woody Allen’s latest movie, Midnight in Paris, which involves a 21st-century screenwriter who somehow finds himself hanging out with the expats who cavorted in the city in the 1920s. Ebert remarks:

Some audience members might be especially charmed by Midnight in Paris. They would be those familiar with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and the artists who frequented Stein's famous salon: Picasso, Dali, Cole Porter, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel and, yes, “Tom Eliot”. Allen assumes some familiarity with their generation, and some moviegoers will be mystified, because cultural literacy is not often required at the movies anymore.

But Ebert doesn’t ram home an argument that those who do get the references are definitively better people, or even that Midnight in Paris is empirically a better film than, say, X-Men: First Class, the flick in which McAvoy appears. He simply says that he likes it, and that those who know who Man Ray are more likely to enjoy it that those who don’t. His only wider point is that “I’m wearying of movies that are for ‘everybody’ — which means, nobody in particular.” Whereas David Simon, creator of The Wire, achieved a level of bad-ass credibility by declaring “fuck the average viewer”, Ebert acknowledges that these days, the average viewer doesn’t really exist. Even the biggest, mass-appeal reality (or structured reality) show still only attracts a minority of potential viewers, and if Midnight in Paris is elitist, so is The Only Way Is Essex.

One-word biographies

In Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the nine-year-old (rather annoying) hero encounters a man who has created a biographical index: tens of thousands of cards, each containing the name of a person, and a single pertinent word:

Henry Kissinger: war!
Ornette Coleman: music!
Che Guevara: war!
Jeff Bezos: money!
Philip Guston: art!

and so on. I can’t decide what my one word would be. Possibly “words”. Or “baffled”. What about yours?

Bad books

Yesterday I spent a few hours at WordPlay, apparently the first literary festival ever to grace Bangkok. As enjoyable as the talks and events were, it was a passing sentence in the programme that really caught my attention:

If you notice anything strange or disturbing, please contact the event organisers.

Surely at a literary festival, it’s the absence of strangeness and disturbance that would be more of a problem?

Revenge of the analogue

When Mayor of London Boris Johnson decided to stage a Q&A on Twitter yesterday, he must have known that few of the queries would be about the microeconomics of bin collection. I was delighted to have one of my own posers identified as one of the more left-field.

But it’s so easy to take the piss with a keyboard. As pointing and laughing and shopping and banking and flirting and everything else migrates online, it’s far more heartwarming to find the real world flexing its muscles. First, author Andrew Kessler has opened a bricks-and-mortar bookshop in New York City, selling just one title – his own book about the 2008 Phoenix Mars mission. Obviously it’s a publicity stunt – a deception in which I’ve just implicated myself – but it still serves as an impudent yah-boo to Amazon and e-readers and everything else that threatens the world of paper and foxing and remainders and mildew and tachiyomi.

And then there’s the indignity meted out to Fang Binxing, the man who designed the so-called Great Firewall, that restricts what Chinese netizens can see. A virus or a concerted spamming or some other digital inconvenience might have been the obvious tactic, but no: someone threw shoes and an egg at him. It’s Ai Weiwei meets Noël Godin, and quite right too.

A book where men may read strange matters

Annie recently mentioned a bright but book-averse 13-year-old, and now a survey for Pearson indicates that 70% of boys can’t make it beyond the 100th page of a book. It’s suggested that the fault lies with the choice of set texts, but since the books singled out for criticism include Macbeth (violence and skulduggery that make the Bourne series appear rather tame, and a hero who’d fit in quite nicely on The Apprentice) and Of Mice and Men (doomed, dysfunctional bromance, plus violence), I can’t really see it; in any case, neither of them is particularly long.

So should we tinker with reading lists, and include more books that will engage the attention of pubescent males? And if so, which books? Or should we just accept that, as long as they’re functionally literate, plenty of people – not only boys – are happier in a book-free world?

Thoroughly spoiled

Sorry if you’re getting bored with Doctor Who, and apologies also if you’re getting fed up with all these underclad women who’ve started populating my blog  – see previous appearances of Charlotte, Helen, Lily, some feet, etc, – hey I don’t make the rules – although of course the nipples-for-eyeballs transaction is purely abstract if Blogger enjoys another spectacular global brainfart – in which case I’ve already staked a preliminary claim over at WordPress, a bit like a Nazi in around 1944 trying to get his paintings out of Berlin – anyway, yes, Doctor Who – that’s Katy Manning, incidentally, who played Jo Grant, an assistant to the Third Doctor, in the early 1970s, but she usually wore more clothes – but yes, chief writer Steven Moffat has unleashed a fearsome diatribe – I think he was probably wearing clothes at the time – against people who leak plot details of the show before transmission:

It’s heartbreaking in a way because you’re trying to tell stories, and stories depend on surprise... Stories depend on shocking people. Stories are the moments that you didn't see coming, that are what live in you and burn in you forever. If you are denied those, it’s vandalism.

Is it really? Is that what stories depend on? There must be a literary equivalent to Godwin’s law, something along the lines of “As a discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Shakespeare becomes one” and if there wasn’t, there is now, and it shall be called Bradley’s Law, after the deliciously anachronistic Bardic scholar, but anyway – when people went to see Shakespeare’s plays, most of the time they knew what the story was going to be, who was going to die, who was going to get the girl and so on. Before him, the same was true of medieval mystery plays and, even earlier, Greek drama. It’s only in the past few hundred years that the unexpected has become a key element in fiction and drama – think of the Dickens fans in New York calling out to arriving ships “Is Little Nell dead?” – and that readers and viewers have really started to enjoy not knowing what happens next. Indeed, it’s become something of a marketing gimmick, especially for thrillers. Audiences at The Mousetrap and Psycho being entreated not to give the ending away, and TV shows as different as Dallas, Twin Peaks and The Killing being hyped on the basis of the identity of a murderer, successful or otherwise.

But although the revived Doctor Who has helped to recreate the notion both of event TV (it’s nearly six, got to get home for Who) and family viewing, we’re also in a cultural universe that is at the same time more atomised (I’ll watch Who when I choose, not with my family while we’re having tea) and more connected (but if I do watch it live, I’ll Tweet it at the same time). The notion of an entire nation simultaneously gasping as River Song is revealed to be the bastard love child of The Master and K9 belongs to another, happier, less wibbly-wobbly time. And in any case, many of those for whom  stories – according to Moffat – depend on surprise then go and watch the same stories over and over again, having bought the box set. For all the Spoiler Alerts Moffat can try to deploy, he’s fighting a losing Time War. Just ask anyone who’s tried in recent weeks to protect his dignity with a superinjunction.

That said, I only got round to watching the first episode of The Killing last night, so shush, OK?

Known unknowns

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

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

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

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