Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...
Monday, June 16, 2025
About Obama
In the light of the strangely half-assed military parade in Washington over the weekend, here’s something I wrote 17 years ago about how the American populist right perceives even a passing interest in anything foreign as weird and dangerous. The names have changed but very little else has.
Thursday, June 12, 2025
About Brian Wilson (four fragments)
2017, Hammersmith Apollo, London. Billed as the last time Brian would play Pet Sounds in London. Brian looks baffled, barely touches his piano, more a protective shield than an instrument. His voice is croaky and hesitant, and Matt Jardine handles the high notes. But in some ways it doesn’t much matter. This is a fan gathering, a chance for us to say thank you, one last time. In the interval, I get chatting to a hardcore devotee, who’s been following the Beach Boys since 1963. He tests me, asking if I know the names of the dogs on Pet Sounds. I pass the test.
2012, Singapore Indoor Stadium. The Beach Boys 50th Anniversary, although most of the band is from Brian’s solo outings. Mike Love is as much smarmy MC as frontman, and even he must realise most of us aren’t here to see him. Bruce offers a luscious ‘Disney Girls’ but all eyes are on the chubby guy on the left of the stage. They’ve scheduled several short breaks in the set and Brian shuffles off in a hurry, as if he’s being chased. They encore with ‘Kokomo’ and I scowl. (Review here.)
A few months later, Mike fires Brian. Or does he?
2002, Royal Festival Hall, London. The greatest gig I’ve ever attended. Two memories stand out. In the second act, the band plays the songs from Pet Sounds in sequence but instead of ‘I Know There’s An Answer’ (side two, track two), he sings ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, the original lyrics that Mike Love nixed because they were too druggy, or too anti-Maharishi, or something. And the crowd roars its approval, because we all hate Mike Love.
And then, during the encores, we’re all dancing insanely to ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ and a small boy, no more than eight, seems even more possessed than us old farts and looks in serious danger of dancing over the balcony to his doom. But at least he’d die happy. No, ecstatic.
1990, Doonesbury. Andy Lippincott is the first openly gay character in an American syndicated comic strip, and the first to succumb to AIDS. In his last days, he is serenaded by the just-released CD version of Pet Sounds and after he dies, a pad is found in his hand, bearing his last, scribbled words:
“BRIAN WILSON IS GOD.”
Friday, June 06, 2025
About not going to the cinema
Wes Anderson is one of the few remaining filmmakers whose work demands to be consumed on the big screen and a few days ago I was all prepared to sample his latest, The Phoenician Scheme, when the potential cost and the journey and the likelihood that half a dozen muppets or more would leave their phones on and the journey back home and the fact that his last couple of efforts have been a bit crap, frankly, conspired to keep me at home, waiting for it to reach the telly. Which wouldn’t be as good, obviously, or The Aesthetic Experience That Anderson Intended, but maybe, deep down, I’m not that bothered any more.
And I felt sad and a bit guilty and not a little middle-aged and tired. And then I turned to my current commute read, Paul Beatty’s Tuff, in which the eponymous 19-year-old, 320-pound cinéaste (he digs Truffaut) muses:
I go for the disappointment, I guess. I’m used to being disappointed, and I know I’ll find it in the movie theater.
Tuesday, June 03, 2025
About Rushdie and Stoppard and AI
Salman Rushdie has declared that writers are safe until AI learns how to tell jokes. At about the same time, I was asking Chat GPT to write my biography in the style of Tom Stoppard and, if not rip-roaringly hilarious, it’s whimsically droll, I guess. Uh-oh.
Title: “The Footnotes of Footman: A Play in One Side Note”
(Lights up on a room of half-written manuscripts, empty coffee cups, and a battered copy of OK Computer spinning silently on a turntable. The stage is crowded but static, like a mind in motion.)
CHARACTERS
FOOTMAN: A man of letters with the ink still wet.
RADIOHEAD: A spectral, five-headed muse.
LEONARD (COHEN, presumably): Appears when quoted.
GUINNESS: Not the drink, the book.
A VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST: An omnipresent trivia host.
ACT I: The Inventory of a Mind
FOOTMAN (monologuing to no one in particular):
"I was born in the year Orwell prophesied, yet it was not the boot but the beat that left the deepest imprint. 1968. A year of revolt. Convenient, perhaps, for one whose pen would later revolt against silence."
(A pause, as a record skips.)
FOOTMAN:
"I edited Guinness World Records—not the contents, mind you, but the tone. It had grown dull, a tax ledger of the extraordinary. I gave it wit. Gave it wink. Not just tallest and fastest, but silliest and strangest. We are not merely recorders of records, but narrators of the absurd."
(A newspaper floats down from the rafters. It reads TIME OUT. He snatches it midair.)
FOOTMAN (cont'd):
"Ah, the freelancer’s waltz: The Guardian, Mojo, Prospect, Time Out—a roundelay of voices in need of a ghost."
ACT II: Welcome to the Machine
(Enter RADIOHEAD, glowing faintly in minor chords.)
RADIOHEAD (in unison):
"You tried to decode us, Footman.
You wrote us down in linear form.
Did you think art could be alphabetized?"
FOOTMAN (smiling wryly):
"I tried only to document the elegy of the album. OK Computer was the requiem, and I its monkish scribe. You made postmodernism hum. I gave it subtitles."
ACT III: Hallelujah Anyway
(A desk lamp becomes a spotlight. Enter LEONARD.)
LEONARD:
"They said I was depressive. You said I was deep. You saw the difference."
FOOTMAN:
"Your hallelujahs were not triumphant, but truthful. That is the great lie of biography: to pretend lives resolve. They don’t. They echo."
EPILOGUE: The Quizmaster’s Lament
(A disembodied VOICE thunders.)
VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST:
“Specialist subject: The absurdity of knowledge.”
FOOTMAN (chuckling):
"I’ve played Mastermind, University Challenge, The Weakest Link. I have been both question and answer. And what did I learn?"
(He turns to the audience, deadpan.)
FOOTMAN:
"That even trivia has meaning when given a microphone."
CURTAIN
(As it falls, the record finally finishes its loop and starts again. Because nothing is ever really over. Just reissued with bonus tracks.)