Back then it was still cool to quote Baudrillard as if you’d read him in full.
Friday, July 26, 2024
About not reading Baudrillard
Wednesday, July 17, 2024
About Bacchus
(For some reason I suddenly find myself unable to post pictures here. It may be a signal from the digital deities that I need to upgrade my computer, or migrate from Blogger or knock the whole archaic blogging thing on the head just as I’m staggering towards my 20th anniversary but for the moment at least I’ll take as a cue to rely on text alone, an OuLiPo-like constraint that may or may not enhance my creativity. And just to demonstrate how constrained that creativity is, the post is almost certainly going to be shorter than this mundane preamble.)
Performative outrage aplenty at the images of a female tourist simulating coitus with Giambologna’s statue of Bacchus. Except that I can’t help but think that if you’re going to dry-hump a deity, who better to do it with than the god of fertility and madness?
[IMAGINE SUITABLY DIONYSIAN PIC HERE]
PS: Previous collisions of fleshy and carved naughtiness, but in Cambodia.
Wednesday, July 10, 2024
About crabs
Was teaching a group of Hong Kong teens last week. They’d just visited the National Gallery and I asked them to identify the picture they enjoyed the most and explain why.
One girl picked Van Gogh’s Two Crabs. She described it well enough, with emphasis on the colours. But why did you like this one in particular, I asked.
She beamed. “They’re delicious!”
Saturday, July 06, 2024
About the election, if only briefly
To an extent, Sunak’s failure was seeded in the unstable electoral coalition that Johnson assembled in 2019 with the promise to “get Brexit done”. Implementing an agenda in government that might satisfy the divergent interests of a culturally and geographically incoherent voting bloc – the ex-Labour working-class north and the traditional Tory southern shires – was an impossible feat of political alchemy.
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
About biography
Claire Dederer:
The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us... There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.
Germaine Greer:
I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Charles Dickens, read his fucking books.
The best part of a writer‘s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
Thursday, June 13, 2024
About indie reading
Anna Doble on being an indie music fan in the mostly-analogue 90s:
London Fields by Martin Amis sat on my shelf for at least a year in about 1997. Why? Because one of Blur once mentioned it in an interview. My copy wasn’t even mine – it was taken out on loan from my home-town library which led me to racking up a fine so insurmountable (£8-ish) that I eventually returned it under cover of darkness in a covert mission to the marketplace whereupon I shoved the book through the library’s awkward letterbox and ran panting for the hills. Other books on the curriculum in the School of Indie were Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (which we all actually read).
Do musicians tell people what to read these days? I know the likes of Dolly Parton encourage kids to read, but where’s the equivalent of Graham (I bet it was Graham, he worse glasses) begging up Martin Amis? And the Manics doing the same for Mishima and many others, Radiohead for Chomsky and Naomi Klein, Paul Weller for Colin MacInnes, Edwyn Collins for Salinger, Morrissey for Wilde and Capote (less so Keats and Yeats). Is literary prescriptivism not A Thing any more?
Saturday, June 08, 2024
About Kafka and crockery
Yet more musing on what we’re expected to know. This morning, in a discussion on Radio 4 about the overused adjectives “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque” Evan Lian (who drew the cartoon above) says, “I’m not the most well-read person, which is sort of embarrassing to admit on a BBC radio programme” which does rather play into the idea of the BBC (and, by extension, Britain) as being the repository of everything and everyone erudite. Which is nice.
And then on the same station’s Electioncast, broadcast immediately afterwards, BBC's own chief political correspondent, who read PPE at Oxford, says that he thinks he once read an essay by Orwell and then admits he doesn’t actually know what a Ming vase is.
Tuesday, June 04, 2024
About pumpkins etc
Far from new, stolen from Facebook, but it belongs here, I think.
And while we’re here, this can come out to play as well.
Friday, May 31, 2024
About Kindles
When Kindles and other e-readers first appeared, with the promise for travellers in particular that a whole library would occupy less space and weight in your luggage than a slim paperback, I did wonder whether the new form might have missed a significant consideration when it comes to reading in public: specifically, the act of letting other people see what you’re reading. Like the music you listen to, or the clothes you wear, or the flavour of crisps you eat, it’s part of the persona you present to the world. The latest Murakami, or a Richard Osman rip-off? Unfair as it is, people will make assumptions.
And then I saw this:
Saturday, May 18, 2024
About missing the point
Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:
I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight.
And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then
But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.
Monday, May 13, 2024
About Roger Corman
Roger Corman, who died a few days ago, batting back accusations that his work was mere exploitation: “Show me a film which isn’t an exploitation film.”
Possibly a little trite, but when you give it even a moment’s thought, it applies to pretty much all art, doesn’t it?
Saturday, May 11, 2024
About nostalgia(s)
In an otherwise tedious and banal article about, of all things, Virgin’s cruise line, the CEO comes up with this inadvertently fascinating nugget: “People like to be reminded of nostalgia.”
It sounds daft, of course it does; surely it’s nostalgia that does the reminding. But then I realise that when watching the old episodes of Top of the Pops that BBC Four is running on Friday nights, some of my favourite moments come from Darts, a band that achieved success in the late 1970s by providing kooky versions of songs that were even then already 15 or 20 years old. And then when I was at university, when mainstream pop was wallowing in post-Live Aid earnestness, my friends and I constructed a world that resounded to soul and funk from past decades (and an aesthetic that merged 40s zoot suits and 50s Soho and 60s Left Bank blankness). So, sorry Mr Saverimuttu, I guess I do like to be reminded of nostalgia. Just not the crappy nostalgia you’re peddling.
And now I find out that Britpop, another trend that had more than one eye on an imagined past, has apparently been revived (although it appears that translates as “wears a Fred Perry and has a St George’s flag in the back of the video” but maybe that’s enough).
Tuesday, May 07, 2024
About Courbet (yet again)
And so we come back to Courbet’s 1866 picture The Origin of the World (see here) and more specifically the passions it arouses in Luxembourg’s finest provocateuse Deborah de Robertis (see here) who has adorned the painting (or more specifically the glass protecting it) with a #MeToo tag “because women are the origin of the world”. Which is a bit like complaining about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because it’s called Sunflowers but, hey, it all adds to the sum of human joy, doesn’t it?
Except that then the French culture minister Rachida Dati weighs in with an intriguing contribution: “An artwork is not a poster to colour in with the day’s message.” Which may or may not be true but at least it suggests that Ms Dati has thought about the subject. And I remember that not so long ago my own country’s government gave the equivalent role to the ludicrous Nadine Dorries and not for the first time a bit of me wishes I were French.
Friday, May 03, 2024
About teaching and crying
Zadie Smith on teaching creative writing in New York (spotted by Padraig Reidy):
They said workshop, so I took a story of mine that I’d written when I was young and was bad, and marked it up in front of the class. And I took a story of theirs and did it on a lightbox. And the student started crying. NYU explained to me that that is not what they meant. So I went down several gears.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
About horses
The recent incident that saw horses from the Household Cavalry running loose in the streets of central London is surely open to all sorts of interpretations: musing on the place of such ceremony in a modern army; questions of the relationship between humans and animals; hints towards the Book of Revelation.
But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.
Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?
PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
About Yoko Ono
And Ms Ono also appears, in a roundabout way, to have invented the simulacrum before Baudrillard did.
(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)
Sunday, April 07, 2024
About pretension
When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but I was amused when I recently revisited my old copy of Will Pop Eat Itself? by Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that one) and noticed that by the second page he was comparing This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by grebo titans PWEI to The Waste Land. And now I wonder whether the modest sales of my book were down to it not being pretentious enough.
Monday, April 01, 2024
About AI
In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.
Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:
Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need?
Friday, March 22, 2024
About art and men
In Tasmania, a man is claiming that his exclusion from the Ladies Lounge, an exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art, constitutes gender discrimination. The museum’s lawyer contends that his being turned away is integral to what the art is about: “Part of the experience is being denied something that is desired.”
Monday, March 18, 2024
About comedians
Friday, March 15, 2024
About a classical education
An interesting piece by Emma Green in The New Yorker about a resurgence in what’s known as liberal arts and/or classical education. Whatever you want to call it, it stands in opposition to the modern mainstream of pedagogy, favouring the canonical Great Books (and implicitly Dead White Males), which makes it popular with right-wing politicians, although as Green makes clear, that’s by no means the whole story. And if I look at a Trump rally, I wonder how many present, including the main speaker, would understand this gag:
And then there’s literature: one New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante. In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.
And before I’m accused of snobbery, I’m well aware that there are vast gaps in my own cultural knowledge; opera, for example is little more than a blur. That said, I do know that Richard Strauss wasn’t Johann’s son, unlike the poor sap writing on the ENO website...
PS: And while we’re there, the Arts Council of England is condemning opera critics for, among other sins, “almost exclusively writing from a classical music perspective”.
Sunday, March 10, 2024
About ‘Hallelujah’
A while back, I wrote a book about Leonard Cohen, with a focus on That Song, which had become ubiquitous two decades or more after it had first been released (and mostly ignored). And today, in the midst of an online discussion about the incongruous uses to which it’s been put (see also ‘My Heart Will Go On’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’) I finally realise that I should have called the book SAD JEWS FUCKING.
Thursday, March 07, 2024
About pop
Just came across something I wrote for The Guardian in 2008, offering a sort of “OK, boomer” sigh avant la lettre, suggesting that old people should stop appropriating pop music. Which in turn prompted this delightful response:
Presumably by ‘old’ the author means himself; he’s bald and looks very boring. Probably not intelligent enough for classical though; Andy Williams fan? Nana Mouskouri?
Friday, March 01, 2024
About Brontez Purnell
I can’t claim to know much about the work of Brontez Purnell but it does seem to me that if you’re the subject of the New York Times’s By The Book feature, affecting not to read very much is an, um, interesting look.
Sunday, February 25, 2024
About Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
In, of all places, a news item about the death of Stuart Organ, who for many years played the headmaster of Grange Hill school, I see Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead described as “a spin-off of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. And the phrase strikes me as totally wrong-headed but the more I think of it, it feels about right. After all, R&G isn’t a sequel, nor yet a prequel. It takes place in the same fictional universe as Hamlet, the action of which is progressing at the same time, and occasionally intersects. It exists in relation to Hamlet in the same way that Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures exist in relation to Doctor Who, sharing characters and narratives, but with a different emphasis.
But then I still wonder whether the author of the piece actually knows that, or just threw the sentence together after a brief Wikipedia check. And do you know what makes me doubt her? It’s the fact that she refers not to “Hamlet”, but to “William Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. Someone who knew about theatre would instinctively offer the title alone, assuming that everyone knows what Hamlet is, who wrote it, approximately what it’s about, even if they aren’t able to quote it by the yard. Which feels a bit harsh, because her definition of Stoppard’s play is ultimately correct. But it’s accidentally correct and I wonder whether that’s good enough.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
About syrup
The clever people who sell Lyle’s Golden Syrup are removing the image of bees swarming round a dead lion from at least some of its packaging. “Our fresh, contemporary design brings Lyle’s into the modern day, appealing to the everyday British household while still feeling nostalgic and authentically Lyle’s,” says the brand director, which obviously means nothing whatsoever, so others have stepped in to fill the gap. “The story of it coming from religious belief could put the brand in an exclusionary space, especially if it was to go viral on X or TikTok,” suggests a marketing academic. “It’s woke!” screech the readers of the Daily Mail, but frankly, what isn’t these days, as far as they’re concerned?
I know as much as they do, so here’s my guess. They wanted to get away from the Biblical reference (“Out of the strong came forth sweetness,” Judges, chapter 14) not because it might offend anybody’s sensibilities, religious or otherwise, not because they’ve finally realised a rotting cat isn’t the most appetising way to sell sweet goop, but because nobody understands it. Nobody knows who Samson (who supposedly said it) is, and nobody really cares. Why would you buy something that confronts you with your own ignorance every day? The semi-abstract lion’s face that replaces it doesn’t particularly refer to anything, doesn't challenge or provoke anything, especially not curiosity.
Of course, being a pedant above all things, my main objection to the logo is that the quote’s about honey, rather than syrup, which is a different product. But who cares about that?
PS: This may or may not be relevant. But I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Monday, February 19, 2024
About new music
Sean Thomas in The Spectator claims to have found empirical evidence that music is getting worse. I agree with his conclusion, but don’t recognise his claim to objectivity; music is getting worse because I’m getting old and so, presumably, is Mr Thomas. If I were young, it would all be great, but I’m not, which is why I only get excited by the Top of the Pops re-runs on Saturday nights if they date from 1978 to 1983. Incidentally, Thomas’s characterisation of a modern lyric as “the desire of the singer to ‘kill his mofo bitches’ and celebrate his expensive car, hat and Rolex watch” suggests that he last listened to a rap record in about 1991, and then only fleetingly.
Moreover, it needs to be noted that this year sees the 100th anniversary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, and the 200th of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, two groundbreaking works whose influence is still being felt. But I bet that in 1924 and 1824, there were plenty of people who could come up with an algorithm to prove that they were rubbish.
There is great music being produced now that will still be heard and loved in 2124 and beyond. We just don’t know what it is yet.
Tuesday, February 13, 2024
About Gregg and Timmy
I mentioned a few years ago that the two best ever instalments of the Sunday Times magazine’s venerable A Life in the Day feature were both by actors called Tom. What I hadn’t realised, because like so many others, I’ve lost the habit of burrowing into the weekend papers, is that the Telegraph has for some time been running its own pallid simulacrum of ALitD and, unsurprisingly, it’s not as good.
Well, until the gurning greengrocer Gregg Wallace took his turn and, well, it still wasn’t good but at least it was funny.
Sunday, February 11, 2024
About Richard and Davros
There have been complaints that Michelle Terry is to play Richard III at the Globe. Not because she’s the artistic director of the theatre and appears to have nabbed the plum role for herself, but because the monarch has a disability, and Ms Terry doesn’t. (The fact that she’s a woman isn’t an issue, it seems.)
As always, these arguments throw up further arguments; now we’ve dug up Richard’s body, we know the nature of his disability (scoliosis), so does this mean that only actors with this specific condition should play him? And if actors with other disabilities (Arthur Hughes, Mat Fraser, Peter Dinklage) are allowed to take the role, would that not throw up the rather reductive and insulting implication that all disabilities are much the same? I’m also a little confused by Fraser’s response to Terry’s casting: “I will be personally boycotting the production if it goes ahead with this casting,” he says. “I’m done with the pretenders.” Isn’t pretending what actors do?
But wait – since Richard embodies that horrid old trope about the disabled villain, should the role even be played at all? Or, if it is, shouldn’t we excise all the references to his disability – “rudely stamped” and so on – to fit 21st-century sensibilities? I mean, that would seem to be the stance taken by Russell T Davies, who has declared that the evil genius Davros should from now on have legs. Which does mean that nobody can complain if Michelle Terry plays him.
PS: While we’re here, can we stop saying that art that doesn’t quite gel with those modern sensibilities (Friends is a apparently a main offender) is “problematic”? Art, especially drama, that doesn’t present us with problems is all but pointless.
Thursday, February 01, 2024
About the Sixties
An alternative reality, in which Swinging London was devised and documented not by Mary Quant and David Bailey and the Beatles, but by Samuel Beckett.
(Photo of Twiggy and Wilfrid Brambell by Burt Glinn.)
Friday, January 26, 2024
About Barbie and being good
Oh what a brouhaha there is about the lack of love Barbie has received in terms of nominations for the upcoming Oscars. (In short, it got a nod in the Best Picture category, but its female director and female star were less happy. Ryan Gosling, nominated for Best Supporting Actor, spoke up for his spurned sisters but not to the extent of throwing his own chance away.)
For the record, I enjoyed the movie, especially its design (definitely one that has to be seen on the big screen) although it probably wouldn’t be in any of my best-of lists. Gerwig and Robbie are talented people but they’ve each done better things (Lady Bird and I, Tonya). That’s not what this is about, though, is it? Barbie, beneath the pink gleam, is a satire of sexism and patriarchy and masculinist assumptions and, so the logic goes, to deprive it of recognition is to condone all those bad things.
Except that it really isn’t, is it? Films that are on the side of the angels aren’t inherently great films and yet the Oscar voters have long had a tendency to reward movies on the basis of their social values alone. The nadir of this came at the 78th awards, when the Best Picture gong went to Crash, a movie at once incoherent and simplistic, the script of which is pretty much the song ‘Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist’ stretched over two hours. To add to the fun, it edged out Brokeback Mountain, so even as the Academy patted itself on the back for acknowledging that Racism Is A Bad Thing, it was panicking in case anyone might think it considered homophobia not to be equally reprehensible. Barbie’s relatively slim pickings may be a sign that Hollywood is finally shaking its way out of such ethical quandaries.
Society as a whole isn’t there yet. Maybe the problem is that at the same time as we have become more confident, even to the point of sanctimony, in our moral and political opinions, we feel less able to make aesthetic judgements, to declare that one film (book, song, play, etc) better than another by virtue of imagination, craft and skill rather than just, well, virtue. To argue on purely artistic grounds that X is a better actor or director or composer or balloon sculptor than Y takes us too close to assumptions about class and education that feel too uncomfortable to express. (Incidentally, we are in similar territory when it comes to language. We are encouraged seize on instances of misgendering or outdated racial epithets, but suggesting that the phrase “would of” is in some way incorrect looks plain rude.)
It almost feels as if we’ve slipped back to the Victorian era, when finger-wagging critics dismissed the likes of Wuthering Heights and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, not for any inherent literary faults but because they were morally suspect. The specific criteria have changed (racism and misogyny and homophobia rather than fornication) but the priorities would be familiar to Hardy or the Brontës. We know what’s good, but not what’s good.
PS: My old mucker Clair, who used to hang around these parts as the Urban Woo, deals with the matter in characteristically brisk, no-nonsense fashion in The Independent.
PPS: Reductress, as it tends to, also gets it right:
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
About Barthes
Stolen from someone. Can’t remember who, which is grimly appropriate, I guess. Not for the first time, I think how much Barthes would have relished social media.
Roland Barthes observes somewhere that the meaning of any list of likes and dislikes is to be found in its assertion of the fact that each of us has a body, and that this body is different from everybody else’s. This is tosh. The real meaning of our dislikes is that they define us by separating us from what is outside us; they separate the self from the world that mere banal liking cannot do.
Monday, January 15, 2024
About Ballard
In 1974, JG Ballard gave an interview to an 18-year-old admirer, Akihiko Kokuryo, and offered a message to readers of the speculative fiction magazine in which it was published. Translated into Japanese and then back into English it feels like a pretty good way of coping with the modern world that he predicted so well, so often:
I hope that you will always be skeptical, passionate, analytic, revolutionary, idealistic, dream-like, serene and hallucinated.
And in searching for an image, I find this clipping. We all have those mammoth novels deep inside, don’t we?
Thursday, January 11, 2024
About Mean Girls (and mean girls)
The new movie Mean Girls (which is in fact the film version of the stage musical of the old movie Mean Girls) would appear to have been stripped of its, well, meanness.
“If we really had people speak to each other the way they spoke to each other in 1990, everyone would go to the hospital,” says screenwriter Tina Fey, although whether she means it would provoke actual fisticuffs, or that Gen Z-ers are so fragile that verbal hostility might provoke a full-on breakdown, isn’t so clear. But then she seizes on what’s really changed, and what hasn’t: “People are still horrible, they're just more likely to anonymously type it. I would like to take but not teach a graduate school class on the ways in which people are just as divisive and horrible as they ever were, but now they couch it in virtue.” In other words, people are still reassuringly vile but maybe not in a way that transfers so easily to celluloid.
But it’s not just nastiness we need to be warned about. For a forthcoming show at Stratford East, we are alerted to “themes of joy, loss and grief”. I wonder whether you can experience so much joy it puts you in the hospital.
Sunday, January 07, 2024
About Theseus
The Ship of Theseus, aka Trigger’s Broom, isn’t quite the same thing as Baudrillard’s simulacrum, but it occupies a similar space. And it does emit some lovely memeage.