About plausibility

I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009, in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, until we quickly realised they were bollocks. But that initial moment was the important bit: 

Yet this was also the decade in which we allowed ourselves to believe, for a while at least, the silliest, most implausible narratives. Or to put it more clearly, we allowed ourselves the pleasure of half-belief—which, especially when a million people are doing it with you, is one of the most deliciously satisfying human emotions. 

And now we have AI, which offers us stuff that can’t possibly be real but we believe it anyway and keep on believing it and get grumpy with people who tell us otherwise. And are we deliciously satisfied? Are we?

About speaking English

 1957:

 

2026:

About dead pop stars

The director Kevin MacDonald on Hollywood’s penchant for glossing over the murkier corners of dead celebrities’ lives, and punters’ happy acquiescence to the phenomenon:

Audiences don’t seem to care... Many of these films are pure fan service. Which is fine as far as it goes. Maybe we were all naive for believing that popular artists were worth looking at seriously, critically?

Not only are we entreated not to yuck another’s yum, we are not even allowed to yuck the yum’s creator. In the words of another genius whose private life would probably prompt cancellation or worse today (for a slightly different reason from what got him cancelled in 1895), the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But today’s celebs, or those running their estates, don’t even want them to be talked about, beyond the blandest of platitudes. As long as the cash keeps coming.

About Magritte (or not)

In case it still needs explaining, the whole point of René Magritte’s 1929 painting La Trahison des images is that the apparently inaccurate caption in fact tells the truth. It is not a pipe. It is merely a picture of a pipe. 

Unfortunately, like most jokes, it loses its effectiveness when repeated. I haven’t yet seen the newish Belgian TV show This is Not a Murder Mystery (which includes Magritte himself as a character) but it does appear to be a murder mystery, so it’s all wrong before its starts. (Of course, they could argue that the murders aren’t real, because it’s fiction, or maybe we find out who the killer is from the beginning, Colombo-style, so there’s no mystery, but I’m not hopeful.)

And there’s no get-out clause for the Belgian football team, which has put a tweaked variant of Magritte’s zinger on their shirts, which definitely are shirts, not pictures of shirts, so that’s just wrong. Although the fact they’ve tucked the words inside the garments, so they can’t be seen during the game itself, suggests they’re well aware of the cock-up and are a bit embarrassed about the whole thing.

PS: And in vaguely similar territory, another social media platform is encouraging me to purchase this natty garment, which apparently offers one the sensation of getting shot without the mess and inconvenience and possible death stuff of, er, actually getting shot.

About April 2016: And then Prince died

After the initial shock (for those of my cohort) of Bowie falling off his perch, 2016 settled down to be just another year. There was going to be a referendum on Brexit (but the only question was how big Remain’s majority would be) and in November the Americans would catch up with the rest of the world and elect their first female president.

In retrospect, it wasn’t until April that 2016 really started to happen, that it became The Year When Famous People Died. Not that other famous people (Antonin Scalia, Umberto Eco, Tony Warren, Asa Briggs, Sylvia Anderson, et al) hadn’t died since Bowie, but it was as if we suddenly noticed the strange intensity, the feeling of “wait, not another one” when the news came in. And the thing that woke us up, that prompted the same sort of generational, communal grief that Bowie brought, was the death of Prince. As I said at the time (on Facebook, because 10 years ago Facebook was still a useful way to share pain and condolence, rather than a weaponised cesspit):

The thing is, a lot of us (by us, I mean nerds, obviously) have been imagining that the God Who Only Exists For Us When Famous People Die has been creating a heavenly supergroup, with Lemmy [who’d actually died in the last days of 2015, but retrospectively felt like part of the continuum] on bass, Maurice White on drums, Bowie on vocals, sax and oblique strategies, Victoria Wood on piano and wry Lancastrian one-liners, plus George Martin to produce and keep them all in order. But now Prince, who can do all of that, is up there, will God be sending the others back? 

And as we shared tearful memes relating to the purple imp of sexy fun, we also thought, hey, I guess this is as bad as this year can get. Oh well. 

One more thing. In January there had been a moment of dark levity in the Celebrity Big Brother house, when Angie Bowie was informed that her ex-husband had died but Tiffany Pollard (no, me neither) thought the news referred to fellow-inmate David Gest (who was asleep). Piquantly, the whole farrago got more coverage than Gest’s actual death would attract a few months later, in April. Needless to say. I didn’t find a place for him in my celestial band. 

About SMiLE

Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day: 

For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.

Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he doesn’t feel it necessary to explain a reference to Walter Benjamin, because the readership would get it (or feel too embarrassed to admit they didn’t get it). That said, given his previous form, I suspect he’d have done the same thing when he was writing for the NME.

About staples

A fun interview with the Pet Shop Boys, focusing on the visual aspects of their work, in which Neil Tennant is egged into saying “Gesamtkunstwerk” as if it’s a big, dirty swear. He also muses on which magazines have survived the protracted Death Of Print, and which have withered: 

The New Yorker. The Spectator. The Atlantic. The stapled magazine opens invitingly, whereas the instinct of a perfect bound magazine is to close.

I love the idea of a magazine having an instinct. But could it also be that a perfect bound magazine (essentially, one with a spine), more closely resembles that most toxic of things, a book?

About the post-literate world

And I thought I was feeling a bit apocalyptic. By Will Self, via James Marriott: 

We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America... Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point... We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence, which is when we were brokering the integration of different ethical systems into some kind of workable, decent country. Instead, we’ve abandoned reading books. We’ve abandoned deliberating.