About James

From James, by Percival Everett, which is a reworking of Huckleberry Finn, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know if something similar occurs in the original book, which is rather appropriate:

...I don’t think he ever read no books, but he acted like the sort of man what reads books. You know what I mean?

And later, when the central (black) character blacks up to join a minstrel show:

What would they have done to you if they had figured out that you were exactly what you were pretending to be?

About Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has died. You may not be able to place the name, let alone fit a face to it, but you know the buildings, the ones that look like a stack of imploding loo rolls, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, the residential add-ons at our very own Battersea Power Station, beggin’ yer pardon, guvnor.

Not in the mind of a Daily Mail sub, though. In that strange, empty space, Gehry’s not an architect. He’s “Brad Pitt’s architect friend”.  And, look, a rock star employed him, and another actor wrote something. So he must be important. And moreover, the two actors and the musician require no clarification, but we need to have it explained to us that Gehry was an architect. Although if you need that level of explanation, why would you even care that he died?

About television

I was recently getting a bit self-indulgent about how blogging used to be a community but now feels like howling into the wind. Which I guess says something about its place in the continuum of massive leaps in communication technology that were identified as a big threat to existing formats, only to die in their own right (see faxes, BlackBerry, MiniDiscs, VHS, smoke signals and more). One of the victims of the social media onrush, or so we are told, was the notion of TV as a collective experience, the whole Morecambe-and-Wise-Christmas-Show meme, watercooler moments even before offices has watercoolers. It was best expressed during my brief, inglorious stint teaching secondary school English, when I asked a bunch of 13-year-olds what TV or movie they liked and one girl declared flatly that the only thing she liked was “stuff on my phone”.

But maybe announcements about the death of TV are premature. After all the basic grammar of the stuff on her phone (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram etc) is as much TV as anything else, albeit truncated and bastardised. As Derek Thompson recently observed: 

Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

I guess the only real change we have to countenance is that McLuhan’s characterisation of TV as cool media, in that it required the audience’s active participation to fill in the informational gaps, is now pretty passé. Nowadays it feels as if active participation, beyond an occasional tired swipe, is the last thing anyone – by which I mean the people who put the stuff out there – wants. Howling into the wind again.

About Stoppard

Reaching through the cigarette fug to rescue the best zingers among the tributes to Tom Stoppard, I find this, from a touching piece by Patrick Marber:

I like cliches! I use them often. With my work it helps for the audience to know where they are now and then.

PS: An earlier ponder from the great man on the accessibility or otherwise of his works; and less than a year ago, the critic who described one of his plays as intellectual masturbation, to which the only feasible response is, “you say that like it’s a bad thing.”

PPS: And just before I publish, I hear Marber describe Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as “showy-offy”, which misses the point even harder.

PPPS: And of course this letter, which has gone viral, or metastatic, or chaotic, or something: