About Love Island

An interesting piece about the dimness of contestants on Love Island, although the closing paragraph raises rather more questions than it answers:

All reality TV is a stage, and the men and women upon it are mere players. It is impossible to know whether the Love Island contestants know where Barcelona and Rome are, but are performing ignorance for the amusement of viewers, or if they really don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Are you not entertained?

Making yourself look stupid in order to be liked isn’t entirely a new idea, and in the current mood of anti-expert populism it almost certainly happens in circles other than reality TV; idiocy has become weaponised. But back to the adventures of the orange people in Majorca: couldn’t we have maybe one show per series where they all have to pretend to be cleverer than they are? Although, if we accept the findings of Messrs Dunning and Kruger, the main problem is that they probably don’t know how clever they are (or aren’t).

PS: Earlier vaguely relevant musings on the wondrous science of agnotology.

About Waters and SF

Two pieces to remind you that funny, clever journalism is still a thing, even in America; first, a Q&A with John Waters in Vulture:

Divine never dressed as a woman except when he was working. He had no desire to be a woman. He was fat. It was too hot to wear all that shit. He couldn’t wait to get that wig off. The tits were so hot. He hated it. He didn’t want to pass as a woman; he wanted to pass as a monster. He was thought up to scare hippies. And that’s what he wanted to do. He wanted to be Godzilla. Well, he wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor and Godzilla put together.

And from Hmmdaily, a (supposedly) AI-generated piece on San Francisco’s existential crisis:

List to become increasingly absurd until mention of either drones, food/laundry delivery robots, and half-joking/half-serious evocation of dystopian science fiction, including George Orwell’s 1984 (book), Blade Runner (movie), or Westworld (television program), including SEO-friendly mention of the premium cable network that produces it.

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 self-Googling

In a word, don’t.

About Walter Benjamin (yet again)

Obviously, it’s easy to trawl through the work of writers from decades past and find that they’ve (presumably accidentally) had the core idea for some phenomenon that only came into being in our own time. Going back over The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, though, I realise Benjamin leaves the competition standing. Writing in 1936, he comes up with social media...

For centuries a small number of writers were confronted by many thousands of readers. This changed toward the end of the last century. With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers — at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. 

And then reality TV...

In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this change-over has partially become established reality. Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense but people who portray themselves — and primarily in their own work process. 

...in the space of a couple of paragraphs. Nice work, Walt.

PS: Edward Ward asks, Where’s Walter?

About Norman Stone

The Telegraph has for many years boasted the finest obituaries in British newspapers, with its emphasis on interesting people who led interesting lives, rather than those who were merely famous or useful or even pleasant. But every now and then the DT’s competitors come good, as in Richard J Evans’s piece for The Guardian on the truly ghastly historian Norman Stone. Evans is scrupulous in pointing out Stone’s gifts as a writer and scholar, but is clear that they were seriously outweighed by his flaws. A small selection...

On one occasion he collapsed in front of [Margaret Thatcher], drunk; but she was well known for her indulgence towards alcoholics so long as they supported her politically.

Knowing that he did little research, never bothered to check his facts and relied on his literary flair to mask his mistakes, the publishers got serious historians to go through the text: one of them sent in a 20-page list of errors, but it was impossible to spot them all and so it was left to reviewers to point out the many further inaccuracies.

And, for dessert:

Journalists often described him as “one of Britain’s leading historians”, but in truth he was nothing of the kind, as any serious member of the profession will tell you. The former prime minister, Heath, was wrong about many things, but he was surely right when he said of Stone during his time in Oxford: “Many parents of Oxford students must be both horrified and disgusted that the higher education of our children should rest in the hands of such a man.”

PS: And, just to be fair, the heir to Stone’s throne as monarch of the right-wing rentagobs pays tribute.

PPS: And here’s Stone’s own hatchet job on another historian, EH Carr.

About Good Omens

I rather enjoyed the TV adaptation of Gaiman/Pratchett’s eschatological bromance Good Omens, and I suppose the fact that 20,000 Christians have petitioned Netflix to have it cancelled (one of their complaints is that God is depicted as having a female voice) is something akin to a badge of honour.

Especially since the show was actually made by Amazon Prime.

About masters

An extraordinary story by Jody Rosen in the New York Times, about a fire at the Universal Studios in Hollywood in 2008 that destroyed the masters of sound recordings by, among many others, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Bo Diddley, the Andrews Sisters, Etta James, Ray Charles, Burt Bacharach, Captain Beefheart, Al Green, Iggy Pop, Nirvana... essentially, a massive chunk of 20th-century American music ceased to exist in matter of minutes. I’m not sure what’s more astonishing, that such a calamity was allowed to occur, or that its full extent is only now being revealed, more than a decade on. 

But does it matter that much? I mean, it’s not as if the music is entirely lost, is it? Well, some of it is: it turns out that some of the material lost to the flames had never seen a commercial release, had never made it off the tapes in the first place. There’s a bigger point, though, as Rosen argues:

But the case for masters extends beyond arguments about bit depth and frequency ranges audible only to dogs. It enters the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself. The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. “You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,” [producer Andy] Zax said in his conference speech. “It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.”