Problem solved

I just watched two matches with the sound off. OK, now for the oil spill, then the economy.

PS: Nice piece by Daniel Trilling in the New Statesman, comparing the maligned plastic bugles with some rather more respectable uses of drone, including Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris. (Loyal fans might recall that in Chapter 11 of my OK Computer book, I point out that the string arrangement for ‘Climbing Up The Walls’, in all its waspy, unnverving magnificence, was inspired by Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima (1960), which was also sampled on ‘You Love Us’ by the Manic Street Preachers.) But if vuvuzelas are appropriated by the musical avant garde – I can see Ornette Coleman getting into them, for example – will the armchair grouches stop complaining?

PPS: And more on the subject from the excellent Robin Tomens.

PPPS: And following on from that – vuvuzelas shit all over my adolescence.

I don’t know much about art but...

Lev Grossman in Time, on allowing technology to make our artistic choices:

Recommendation engines introduce a new voice into the cultural conversation, one that speaks to us when we’re at our most vulnerable, which is to say at the point of purchase. What is that voice saying? Recommendation engines aren’t designed to give us what we want. They’re designed to give us what they think we want, based on what we and other people like us have wanted in the past. Which means they don’t surprise us. They don’t take us out of our comfort zone. A recommendation engine isn’t the spouse who drags you to an art film you wouldn't have been caught dead at but then unexpectedly love. It won’t force you to read the 18th century canon. It’s no substitute for stumbling onto a great CD just because it has cool cover art. Recommendation engines are the enemy of serendipity and Great Books and the avant-garde. A 19th century recommendation engine would never have said, If you liked Monet, you’ll love Van Gogh! Impressionism would have lasted forever.

Play your cards right

Philip Larkin on his teenage years:

I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing.

(And check out some Larkin cartoons at themanwhofellasleep.)

I was adored once too

Putting the notion of the death of blogging into context (see previous post), here’s Something Awful on how, just as Proper Music Journalism was ultimately responsible for its own demise (see Chris Weingarten’s Music is Math speech), music blogging has nobody else to blame when punters get bored and walk away:

Blogs showed up because people got sick of listening to the bullshit these magazines were throwing around, and when people get tired of clicking links, watching videos, and then not saying anything about them, they'll find something else. And by then, we'll have the editor of Stereogum up on stage at some new Twitter conference, sputtering and pointing to his favorite videos, frowning for the loss of his glorious link-delivery system.

Whatever happened to Matt Belgrano?

Chris Bowers at OpenLeft describes how “the progressive political blogosphere” has been swallowed up by the professionals:

Only five years ago, the progressive political blogosphere was still predominately a gathering place for amateur (that is, unpaid or barely paid) journalists and activists unattached to existing media companies and advocacy organizations. Those days are almost completely over... It was, really, inevitable. Avant-garde, “outsider” developments which prove to have real support are invariably co-opted by any successful, institutional establishment. At the same time, these avant-garde movements are often willing to be co-opted, since established institutions usually have vastly greater resources than the independent, shoestring distribution networks of the avant-garde... RIP to the amateur progressive blogosphere. It provided a regular feeling of revolutionary ecstasy while it lasted, but there was no way it could last very long. It was a transitional period into a new media and political paradigm, not a new paradigm unto itself.

Bowers is talking about the US, and specifically political bloggers in the US, and more specifically still, left-wing political bloggers in the US. But I think he’s articulated quite nicely what’s happened to blogging as a whole since I started (nearly half a decade ago). Like punk rock, blogging managed to change the old order, but effectively burned itself out in the process, with old media’s embrace of the idea being something akin to John Lydon selling butter. OK, some of us old farts are still keeping the faith (Look! Patroclus is back!) but for the most part we’re just hanging around the King’s Road, charging American tourists to take photos of our preposterous haircuts.


PS: Vaguely relevant ponderings from the defiantly un-progressive Iain Dale.

The Blogular Post-It

Christopher Hitchens once described one of those dinner parties that you’d really only want to attend if you hadn’t been invited:

...somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied – and I find I must stress this – in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments.

Which is clearly a challenge to the rest of us: Shakespeare plays, or other classics, in whatever medium, relabelled as if written by the King of Epic Badness. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan could be The Mongoloid Truncation; and any of Thomas Hardy’s novels might qualify as The Dorset Mishap. Paradise Lost is inevitably The Eden Project. Your turn; and double points if, as in the case of Rushdie’s later efforts, you’re confident enough not to tell us what the original work is.

Chalk of the town

A cartoon that appears to refer to the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square has been printed in a Chinese newspaper. The image, in the Southern Metropolitan Daily, shows a boy drawing a person standing in front of three tanks. Online commentators have likened the image to the photograph of “tank man”, the protester who stopped a column of tanks during the demonstrations...

Full-ish story here.

PS: thanks to Agatha Slugg for the pic.

Que dividir!

Jonathan Coe, on his responsibility to his global readership:

I don’t put in as much punning and wordplay as I used to. I remember getting the Portuguese edition of What a Carve Up!, and noticing that not only was it full of footnotes but every footnote said the same thing. I found out from my translator that the words meant ‘this joke cannot easily be translated into Portuguese.’