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.

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...

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.”

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.

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.)

---

About literalism

In the New Yorker, Namwali Serpell laments the excessive literalism that bedevils modern movies, exemplified by the Best Picture Oscar winner Anora, in which the viewer is not permitted to infer the narrative model for the story until a character actually bleats out the word “Cinderella”. Everything must be signposted, labelled, hammered home:

Artists and audiences sometimes defend this legibility as democratic, a way to reach everyone. It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.

No complaints from this end. Serpell is wary of endless perfect repetition (of themes, images, ideas) and calls on Freud to laud “the inexact reiteration of what came before”, the unpredictability of Nina Simone and Samuel Beckett, Andy Warhol and David Lynch, surprises, improvisations, imperfections. Again, all good. And Barthes and Baudrillard get invited to the party and I couldn’t be happier.

But... in castigating the generic, point-missing nature of fashion, she snipes: “we all wear Doc Martens but no one is actually goth.” Hang on? Are goths meant to wear Docs? Or more specifically, are Doc-wearers meant to be goths? Did I miss that e-mail? And then she says “da Vinci” when she means Leonardo. And you scroll to one of those deliciously deadpan New Yorker erratum notices that leaves you desperate to know exactly what horrible solecism has been excised:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the ending of “A Complete Unknown.”

In normal circumstances, I’d sneer at this catalogue of sloppiness and congratulate myself for knowing better. But I wonder whether Serpell is just practising what she preaches, embodying her enthusiasm for imperfection by getting stuff wrong.

On a similar theme, I’ve long despaired at BBC Radio 4’s habit – doubtless encouraged by the laudable aim of inclusivity – to gloss every cultural reference that might smell even slightly of high art. In other words, it’s never enough to say “Hamlet”; it has to be “William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet” in case  someone somewhere thinks you’re talking about a cigar or a football team in Dulwich or an omelette. 

That said, in a recent edition of the lexicographical panel show Unspeakable (go to 04.45), Russell Kane explained that he uses “Immanuel” (the forename of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason) as a euphemism for, well, the surname. But if Kane had uttered the surname, this might have disturbed the guardians of pre-watershed taste, so the gag remained inexplicable to anyone not on at least nodding terms with 18th-century philosophy. Although only minutes before, Kane had felt the need to explain that Pride and Prejudice was written by Jane Austen.

PS: Bookmark time: in the New York Times, the career vicissitudes of Generation X; while Gen Z yearns for an internet-free past it never knew.

About book lists

Of course the news that an AI-generated summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times was weighted heavily in favour of books that, er, don’t actually exist has embattled meat-and-mucus critics crowing over another thing that our new digital overlords have royally arsed up.

But hang on a minute. We don’t need ones and zeroes to invent new works from the likes of Isabel Allende or Percival Everett. Remember Jim Crace’s Useless America, which owed its (non-) existence to a mangled phone conversation with someone at Penguin? Or indeed my own Lady Gaga biography, which never progressed beyond a few weeks of research, but still garnered five stars on GoodReads. 

In any case, even when the product is real, do you really think the (human) author of such thumbs-up compendia has made a series of informed decisions about what should or should not be included? I spent several years on a strange planet called Lifestyle Journalism and, trust me, very often you have little to go on bar a press release and an advertising exec suggesting forcefully that it would be very helpful if specific products from her client might be included, or else. So, yes, this book (or holiday or necklace or vodka or cardigan or chi-chi gluten-free bistro or invasive surgical procedure) is good and you should buy it, because we say so, even if we’ve never been in the same room as the bloody thing.

Ultimately, AI succeeds not by doing things better than humans, but by doing them equally badly.

PS: Another example from the archives: in defence of the Black Crowes review that was more like an educated guess.

About paparazzi

In a complicated world where we’ve lost the notion that we can assume everybody is aware of a core set of facts, it’s considered rude to point and laugh at someone’s ignorance. But does this apply when that person not only draws attention to that ignorance, but attempts to implicate the rest of us in it?

On Threads a couple of days back, one Melanie J Tait asked: “Remember how we didn’t know the word ‘paparazzi’ before August 1997?” To which there were many responses, most of them variants on “We did, actually.” Several pointed out that the word has its origins in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and was also the title of Jacques Rozier’s 1964 documentary short about the making of Godard’s Le Mépris; its use became ubiquitous during the heyday of tabloid journalism in the 70s and 80s. Very few were actively hostile or contemptuous of Tait’s lack of knowledge; they just said she was wrong. Some charitably pointed out that there was indeed a large spike in usage following the death of Princess Diana but nobody fully supported Tait’s statement because it was empirically untrue (unless the pronoun “we” here refers only to Tait and her immediate circle, in which case a more appropriate response would be, “so what?”)

Tait (who describes herself in her bio as a playwright and screenwriter) could have graciously accepted this as a learning moment. Or she could have ignored the responses, or just deleted her post. But no, she had to double down, with a hefty dose of sarcasm: 

I certainly don't remember it being the word used in conversation around photographers and media. But I'm obvs not a linguistic genius like you and several others who've loved remembering which words they knew thirty years ago.

So knowing and remembering are acts of hostility all of a sudden? It reminds me, inevitably, of Donald Trump, who claimed that nobody knew that Lincoln was a Republican, or had even heard of Lesotho. What he meant of course was that he didn’t know these things, or hadn’t until very recently; but he has to claim that nobody else knows it either, because this excuses his own lack of intellectual curiosity and general failure as a sentient member of the human race.

Tait isn’t this bad, obviously. And ignorance isn’t a sin. But ascribing ignorance to others as an act of self-preservation comes pretty close.

About freshness

Another reason I find it hard to get worked up about the creeping tentacles of social media is that its supposedly all-powerful algorithms, tasked with sending precisely targeted advertisements to my brain, seem to know less than bugger all about what might flip any of my consumer switches. Although to be fair, that also applies to legacy media. Increasingly, my reaction to a product is less that I don’t want it, more that I don’t even understand what it is.

For example, I’m noticing an increasing trend for things that offer “freshness”. Not cleanliness, mind. That seems to come in another bottle. No, this freshness, when applied to your bedsheets or jumper or socks, would seem to send everyone else into a state of juddering bliss, a cocktail of catnip and crack that hits one’s olfactory nerve and from there envelops the whole body in CGI florals.

Which is nice, but I’m still not sure what this freshness actually is. Is it a scent, a sort of Lynx for the laundry? In which case why don’t they tell us that, give us some kind of hint that if we use it, our fabrics will smell of lemons or honeysuckle or fresh bread or Guildford or the late Pope? In any case I’ll pass, because I want my laundry to smell of precisely nothing, thank you very much. The aromatic equivalent of a sleep mask or noise-cancelling headphones would do me just fine. But no, it’s this ineffable freshness that all these ecstatic thespians crave, like some article of faith that can only be communicated to true believers. And I, apparently, missed that memo. By Vectron.