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.

About book bans

Nobody likes the idea of banning books, or restricting their circulation, but it’s never that straightforward, is it? I don’t think I’d be much perturbed if my local library chose not to make available volumes celebrating global jihad, or denying the Holocaust had ever happened; or if my nearest Waterstone’s refused to stock hagiographies of Stalin or Pol Pot or even Andrew Tate. And if the books in question are intended to be read by young people, it’s understandable that literary gatekeepers, well, keep those gates.

That said, there seems to be a tendency within school libraries in the UK in which, to put it charitably, the watchword is excess caution. See, for example, the case of a school in Greater Manchester, where the removal of a book about (not endorsing) incel culture spiralled into bans on, among others, The Da Vinci Code, The Time-Traveller’s Wife, White Teeth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Girl Who Played With Fire, a graphic version of Nineteen Eighty-Four and works by Terry Pratchett, JK Rowling, Robert Ludlum, Margaret Atwood and, er, Britney Spears. What the hell was going on?

Well, two things. One, inevitably, was that the list of inappropriate texts was concocted with the help of AI. Effectively, whoever ultimately wielded the axe was too stupid and/or lazy to actually read the purportedly dangerous books. The other is that one of the criteria for removal was that a book was “not written for children”. Which (apart from the fact that it would exclude most texts on the GCSE syllabus) suggests that the school’s policy went beyond censorship to a form of infantilisation, protecting young minds from anything even remotely challenging to emotion or intellect. In an environment where only a third of people between 8 and 18 say they read for pleasure, that’s little short of cultural vandalism. Which does raise the question – what do these people think schools are ultimately for?

PS: In slightly more cheerful news, it seems that reading is cool again, even among the much-maligned Gen Z. Although, since this manifests in the form of £2,400 Dior tote bags emblazoned with the titles of French novels, I won’t pop the champagne just yet.

About the future

It is inevitable that the most perceptive prediction about the near future I’ve seen so far this year comes in the form of a meme. It’s also appropriate that I have no idea who created it, and rather piquant that, partly because of the technological and social changes it implies, hardly anyone under the age of 45 will get the joke.