About Radio Einstein

Now here’s an interesting salvo in the war against stupid: an “unashamedly elitist” broadcaster to be known as Radio Einstein, that will resurrect the spirit of the long-defunct BBC Third Programme and with it the old Reithian mission to edify and inform. Radios Three and Four are dumbing down, we are told, and here are the cultural warriors prepared to put things right: the polemicist Tariq Ali, composer Michael Nyman, playwrights Howard Brenton and John Mortimer, which is impressive because I thought John Mortimer died years ago...

And only then do I realise that this call to the intellectual barricades comes from 1999.

About Sabotage

I don’t know how those extremely short blurbs for movies on TV streaming platforms are generated. Are they thrown together by the work experience kind or are they just farmed out to AI, which then pretends to be the work experience kid?

Whatever the case, it doesn’t appear to be anybody/thing that is experienced in discourse around cinema. Look at this example, for the 1937 thriller Sabotage, which on Amazon Prime is described as “Hitchcockian”. Now anyone who spends too much time talking about movies knows what it means to describe one as Hitchcockian. You know the tropes: paranoia, heights, voyeurism, a blonde, a MacGuffin. Anything that reminds you of films directed by Alfred Hitchcock: Brian de Palma, Claude Chabrol, Parasite, Witness for the Prosecution, Charade. Crucially, however, it’s not actually applied to films that Hitchcock himself made. They’re just called Hitchcock films.

And this is a problem, because Sabotage was actually made by Hitchcock, based on Conrad’s The Secret Agent but not to be confused with an earlier film he made called Secret Agent or a later one called Saboteur. So it’s not Hitchcockian. To describe it as such is to take a Baudrillardian detour in which the representation, the copy, the fake occupies the space that should be taken by the real, which in itself sounds like another Hitchcock trope, mistaken identity. And AI is supposed to know this because it’s got access to the whole internet, at least a slice of which is occupied by grumpy, middle-aged bloggers arguing about how to describe thrillers directed or not directed by Hitchcock; and the work experience kid is supposed to know this because he or she’s got a phone and can look it up.

The logical solution of course would be to hand the task over to the grumpy, middle-aged bloggers who actually know what they’re talking about. Although the problem there is that with knowledge comes opinions, and we’d be at pains to tell the viewers that 80 per cent of the films on Amazon Prime are rubbish. Not including Sabotage, which is one of his best pre-Hollywood outings, but I guess that would be little comfort to that nice Mr Bezos.

So, “Hitchcockian” it is, and always will be, I guess.

About Mastermind and Kafka

I’ve taken part in several TV quiz shows over the years, but the one that inevitably prompts admiring (I think) oohs and aahs is Mastermind, on which I appeared twice, once with hair and once not. Maybe not my very proudest achievement, but something that might get mentioned at my funeral.

But on Monday my former sort-of boss Jerry Thackray aka Everett True became not a Mastermind contestant but a Mastermind question. I think I’ll just slink back into my cave.

That said, I do think I should retire from the fray anyway, as my memory is playing tricks on me with increasing frequency. I was watching Orson Welles’s 1962 version of The Trial, which always feels like a minimalist dry run for Brazil, when I started to wonder why David Lynch’s take on Kafka always gets forgotten in the discussion of his work. And then I couldn’t remember whether Kyle McLachlan plays K in it, with Jeremy Irons as one of his anonymous persecutors, or the other way round. So I went to IMDb and realised that the reason it always gets forgotten is that it doesn’t actually exist. There was an adaptation by Harold Pinter with McLachlan; and Steven Soderbergh made a low-budget movie called Kafka, with Irons. And they’d got kind of mushed and mangled together in my head and Lynch presumably showed up uninvited, as he so often does.

It’s The Unconsoled (which may or may not have been inspired by any or all of the above, including the one that didn’t happen) all over again.

About a reality check

I recently had the pleasure of attending a book launch for the new opus of a very dear friend, at which a great many photographs were taken. Over the next few days, Paul placed loads of them on Instagram, taking the trouble not only to namecheck all the miscreants who’d showed up, but to explain who they were and What Their Thing Was, as used to be said. Here’s his screed for me:

...the creator of the ultimate 3-word description of Donald Trump (and I quote - ‘witless f..king cocksplat’ - Scotland is claiming it, but it was really Tim). He does other stuff too, like writing books.

I think Paul, or the universe, or maybe just my own conscience, is telling me I need to get my arse back into gear with the writing thing, no?

About Matt Belloni

A few nights ago, I was in the edifice that I still insist on calling the National Film Theatre, where I picked up a leaflet claiming to be The Insiders’ Guide to the BFI London Film Festival. It’s produced by Puck, which is apparently “a news brand focused on the inside stories in entertainment, media, finance, politics, politics, artificial intelligence, the businesses of fashion and sports, and the art world”, which is nice. Included in the slim volume is a piece by one Matt Belloni, a founding partner of Puck and one of the brand’s “generationally talented journalists”, listing his “top 10 British films (and some TV) to see before you die”. And here it is.

Well, Matt, it clearly wasn’t impossible, because you did actually deliver a list. And it’s not really “across genres and decades” because there’s a distinct leaning towards Films About Men With Guns, and nothing in black and white or before 1962. But you are, as you said, forgetting some classics: no Ealing comedy or Hammer horror, nothing by Michael Powell or Danny Boyle, not even a Carry On. To be fair, you’ve chosen Guy Ritchie’s best movie, but that’s not exactly a high bar, is it? And you find space for two Bond films? Seriously?

Ultimately such lists can never be objectively right or wrong and exist merely to prompt and provoke discussion. Fine. But this is part of a tie-in with one of the world’s major film festivals. People who attend will probably have an above-average knowledge of film history and some strong opinions to go with that knowledge. And a hell of a lot of them will have seen all of these (before death, presumably) and will be wondering why the hell Matt Belloni presumes to recommend such dull, hackneyed choices as somehow relevant to their cinematic education.

PS: Also from the LFF, the trailer for Elsinore, about Ian Charleson’s (literally) death-defying Hamlet. “Was that Shakespeare?” does not bode well.

About Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” from Lloyd Cole’s song ‘Rattlesnakes’. And yes, I guess I’m a wee bit nostalgic for the days when a pop songwriter could casually toss in a reference to an actress from a golden age and not expect blank looks. That said, there were only 30 years between the release of On The Waterfront and the release of ‘Rattlesnakes’. If we were to make a similar excursion into the past, we might compare a cool girl to Kelly Macdonald in Trainspotting. Has anyone done that? Ms Saint’s Oscar-winning turn was 70 years ago and if Lloyd were to gaze that far back from the mid-1980s, he may well have been singing the praises of Mae Marsh in The Birth of a Nation, which would be all kinds of awkward, as well as making me feel very tired and old. As Mr Cole also remarked, “are you ready to be heartbroken?”

About radio

In common with anyone else too old to seriously contemplate a mid-life crisis, I often find myself grumbling at BBC radio’s faintly risible efforts to lure a younger audience. So it was rather comforting today to hear the Desert Island Discs of Parveen Kumar, whose operatic lollipops (Mascagni, Verdi, Offenbach, Richard Strauss) could have fitted unobtrusively into a Plomley-era show. Even better, over on 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie, there was a spontaneous F.R. Leavis gag. The old farts aren’t dead, we just look that way.

PS: My favourite Leavis quote: “They say I have persecution mania. Comes of being persecuted, you know.”

About clubbing

It’s been many decades since I set foot in a nightclub but this description, from Boy Parts by Eliza Clark,  of people dancing to the Smiths sounds painfully familiar:

I know I’m white, but there’s just a lot of white people White People-ing in a very small area, like it’s just some very, very densely packed mayo, you know? Densely packed mayo, jiggling about, doesn’t know what to do with its arms, doesn’t know what to do with its feet, undulating loosely, barely in time to the rhythm.

About exceedingly wide paintings

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.

There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit the iPhone lens. I guess as long as you’ve got a screaming woman or a melting horse sprouting from your ear or shoulder, you don’t need the whole thing. Your proximity to great art has been recorded and that’s what matters.

Over at the more staid Prado, cameras are still forbidden, which is possibly why my two favourite paintings there (like Anish Kapoor’s works), define themselves by their dimensional awkwardness. I give you Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, from the Black Paintings

and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by Bartholomeus Strobel

neither of which would look great on Instagram and to be honest they look pretty rubbish on Blogger as well. Which is a good thing, obviously.

PS: And I’ve just returned from seeing something even wider. And again, photos were verboten. Not, I think, something that was even considered when I first clapped eyes on it (gulp) 45 years ago.

About literacy (the end of)

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting:

A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. Much of the history of reading might be characterised less as a story of social and cultural change and more as the progress of an esoteric secret passed down by elites.

It’s an eagerly anticipated book and everyone seems to be talking about it, by which I mean that people who are worried about the decline in reading (as evidenced by the latest PISA statistics) are talking about it by which I mean very few people at all give a toss. And as John Harris has suggested, the fact that it runs to little more than 200 pages might be an acknowledgement that some battles have already been lost. 

Much of the narrative focuses on the distractions offered by TikTok and doomscrolling, and some governments are actively attempting to encourage their citizens back to books. Singapore is even paying its people (a very small sum) to read. My own experience as a teacher is that AI is an even bigger threat, leaching critical intelligence and the need for creativity from young minds. It’s a happy coincidence for Marriott that his book appears at the same time that AI bosses themselves are urging a coordinated application of brakes to the process, although the fact that the most bibliophobic US president in history is telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about makes its own point. I mean, what sort of political leader would want a population lacking in critical intelligence? Oh, right.

PS: That time when Trump talked about his favourite books.

PPS: Two more from Marriott. First, via Gurwinder Bhogal, the notion that our bingeing on junk info has created an “intellectual obesity crisis”. And then, less happily, his contention that

...no actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.

to which I ask, “really?”

About getting 9/11 wrong

Donald Trump has been getting all in a tizzy about journalists suggesting that his memories of 9/11 and what he was doing that day are a wee bit confused. The strange thing is, I am uncharacteristically sympathetic to his plight, because it seems that I’ve been getting things wrong for 25 years as well.

A colleague asked me today where I was and what I was doing on that weird, ghastly day and I trotted out my usual story. That I’d been for a job interview that morning, then met a friend for lunch in Bloomsbury and, since neither of had anything more useful to do, we ambled over to the British Museum. There was an exhibition of projects by the architect Richard Rogers, including a proposed tower in Tokyo Bay that, had it been built, would have become the tallest in the world. To give a sense of scale, the model was presented alongside all the other buildings that had held that honour since the late 19th century. So when my wife phoned me to tell me that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, I was looking at a model of the World Trade Center, which had suddenly become more real than the thing in represented.

Except that belatedly, I just checked to see if I could find a photo of the models in question, only to discover the whole thing was a Norman Foster project and Richard Rogers had nothing to do with it. 

I apologise to all those I have unwittingly deceived.

Your turn, Donnie.

About yet another name

Another name that could have found a place in the works of Pynchon or Vonnegut – the journalist Garrison Lovely.

PS: The actor playing Draco Malfoy in HBO’s Harry Potter reboot is apparently called Lox Pratt.

About Shakespeare and Winterson

Not a little consternation a few days ago when contestants on BBC1’s evergreen quiz show Pointless were tasked with identifying a Shakespeare play with ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the titles and half of them couldn’t manage it. (Guesses included ‘The Inspectors’, ‘The Story of the Witches’ and my favourite, ‘King Richards’.) 

Colour me distinctly unsurprised. The oft-trumpeted policy that “every British child learns Shakespeare” really means that every British child spends a year being fed enough pre-chewed gobbets of either Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice (neither of which has ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the title) to enable them to pass a GCSE, after which they don’t need to read another Shakespeare play again, ever.

Not everyone is relaxed about these gaping holes in our cultural knowledge, hence the so-called Illiterate Boyfriend trend, in which women test their beaux on the pronunciation of difficult words. It’s meant to highlight widening education gaps between the genders (and let’s just say that it’s not women who come out worse) but it should be noted that of the three failures in the Pointless debacle, only one was male.

But I do wonder what normal people (if such creatures exist) really think about readers or, more specifically male readers. I don’t think we’re yet at the point Gary Shteyngart predicted, where people can confidently express nausea at the very notion of books, but I am sometimes conscious when reading in public of what might best be described as sideways glances, and not the nice kind. Today I found myself on a train, opposite a woman even older than me, who seemed to be scowling at the tome I was carrying. To be fair, I’m not sure whether it was the fact that I was reading that annoyed her, or the specific book, which happened to be Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, once notorious for its depiction of sapphic naughtiness. So, just to irritate her even more, here’s a bit that made me laugh.

Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubble gum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.

About killing books

The news that Russia has started targeting attacks on Ukraine’s printing presses and publishing companies – just as the school year is about to begin – should surprise nobody. Meanwhile, we have a US President who finds it easier to communicate his aspirations in AI gibberish than anything we might identify as language. And amidst all this, the news comes in that a woman who devoted her later years to encouraging children to read has been laid to rest. It’s a post-literate world, from the top down.

About dead famous people

It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing or making stuff. We still have the music, the movies, the art but not the blonde locks, the raised eyebrow, the fact of living in a psychiatric hospital. And of course we have the vexed question of how important each was, how much bandwidth the media should devote, why they get more or fewer column inches than, say, the Belgian lobber of custard pies Noël Godin or the Butcher of Bosnia Radko Mladic or the bodies now being pulled out of the Nepalese mud.

And in the midst of this (specifically, between Dolly and Tim), I go to a celebration of someone who pushed off a few years ago, Martin Amis. Well, some were celebrating him but there was a ghost at the feast, albeit one who‘d been invited. Will Self (for it was he), held court for about 40 minutes in a Soho bar, laying into what he claimed to be the inflation of Amis’s reputation, the various infelicities of his later career, his political right turn, even the fact that he couldn’t read French. And then Self, rendered even more haggard and baleful than before by his recent illness, acknowledged that, yes, Amis’s first five or six novels were actually bloody brilliant and it still felt like a stab wound.

Maybe he can do Dolly Parton next.

About bad TV

A very odd article in The Guardian, about TV shows that the writers can no longer bear to watch. Of the dramas and comedies under discussion, five (The Office, This Life, Entourage, Euphoria, Coupling) now fail to pass muster because the behaviours and attitudes they depict, mainly with regard to gender and/or sexuality, are bad. The other two (Good Omens, House of Cards) are dismissed because real people connected with them (Neil Gaiman, Kevin Spacey) are alleged to have done bad things. Not one of these show is rendered unwatchable because it’s, aesthetically speaking, a bad work of art, because the writing or acting or direction or special effects or choice of lame 90s indie music on the soundtrack is below par.

We seem to have slipped backwards a century or two, to a point where Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Wuthering Heights were castigated for their deviation from righteousness rather than their thin characters or predictable plotting. Criticism is dead. Long live the new moralism.

About Morrissey’s voice

From Michael Bracewell’s novella The Smiths, in which the narrator describes first hearing ‘Hand in Glove’:

And was there some stratum of attitude, somewhere in the lower register, that brought to mind the interior monologue of a drily cynical supply teacher?

About Anish Kapoor

I wrote a few months ago about my disappointment when viewing the Northern Lights, and becoming aware that no reality could match the psychedelic strangeness of the photos.

Anish Kapoor’s retrospective at the Hayward, on the other hand, offers the opposite. You are confronted with visual paradoxes, flat surfaces – especially those painted in his beloved Vantablack – that feel like tunnels into another dimension, breast-like bulges that dissolve into flatness when faced head-on. And none of this is reproducible in pixels. The larger installations, meanwhile, are crammed into the available space like prisoners who’ve outgrown their cells, defying the limits of an ordinary viewfinder. 

It’s a show that seems to set itself against Instagram culture. You can give an idea, a glimpse of it, but to experience it you really need to be there in there, confronting the physicality of the thing. It’s outmoded, it’s a bit elitist (the show costs over £20, and that’s assuming you can get to London) and it’s entirely correct.

About Pynchonian names

It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once. Please be upstanding for Manila-based crimebuster Winston Casio and the doyenne of indolent teachers everywhere, Tandy L’Enfant!

About The Goodies

In the wake of Bill Oddie’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies, has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all less clever than Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

For what it’s worth, I was always in the Goodies camp but that’s probably a question of chronology as I was just that tiny bit too young to appreciate the Pythons when they first appeared. Ecky Thump, though, might well have been crafted for seven-year-old me.

Not that it was really a kids’ show. The Goodies came from the same Oxbridge smartarse stable as their Python rivals and were regularly breaking fourth walls and giving it a bit of the old metafiction. And not just on TV either. The above clip is from the Cor!! annual from 1974, where our heroes work out that they’re not going to die purely from the geography of the comic strip layout. Many, many years later I learned that this was called metafiction. Which does suggest that an English literature course is less about teaching you new things, more about finding labels for what you already know.