I’ll take that as a maybe

(From the Huffington Post.)

There and then

I’ve just noticed something that the director Rowan Joffe said last year about his version of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock; specifically regarding his decision to update the action to 1964: “...1939’s a very, very long time ago and it almost feels like a foreign country to a contemporary audience.”

I’m not sure whether he was consciously referring to LP Hartley’s famed line about the past, or just expressing the widely held feeling that mainstream audiences are unable to cope with the notion that life happened well before they were born (and it wasn’t just in black and white either). But the idea may need reworking these days, intensifying even, as cheap travel has ensured that many of us have far more experience of foreign countries than most contemporary readers of Hartley or Greene would have done. Meanwhile, globalisation ensures that that experience contains within far less of a feeling of difference or strangeness. There will be wi-fi and Starbucks and soft toilet paper and people in Manchester United shirts. A 20-something from Brighton would probably find it easier to survive in modern Bangkok or Budapest than he would if he stayed on his home turf and travelled back 70-odd years. 1939 feels even more foreign than a foreign country does.

PS: Alistair @ Unpopular picks up the baton with regard to commodified youth culture, which came into being some time between the two dates.

Broken glass or honey

An interesting remark from a recent interview with former Throwing Muse Kristin Hersh: “The intensity of good music is too much to bear. And bad music is so offensive that that’s also too much to bear.”

I sort of half get that. I certainly know what it’s like to encounter a piece of music, or a film or a painting or whatever, that overwhelms with its emotional intensity, and it’s too distracting and you’re not in the mood and you just want to hide. (Oddly, I’ve never found that with a book: I’ve been so utterly gripped by a novel that I’ve stayed on the bus to the terminus, even though reading on buses makes me nauseous, but I’ve never had to put a book to one side because it overwhelms me. Has anyone?)

Where I part company with Ms Hersh is over the matter of bad music. I don’t mind a lot of bad music,  in fact I often like it, whether it’s bad because it’s a bit cheesy (like this) or simply incompetent (like that). What I can’t bear is music that’s simply bearable and polite and does its job and doesn’t charge emotional overtime. And I won’t post a link to it, because it encompasses about 95% of the music that surrounds us.

Whatever happened to Dirty Gertie?

Ah, if all those behooded young persons watched stuff like this in their formative years, maybe they wouldn’t riot. Boom, and in a very real sense, boom.

Post about something other than the bloody riots (mostly)

Inspired by a notion of Annie Slaminsky:

"..."the offences of the night of 9 August ... takes them completely outside the usual context of criminality". [link] At what point will James Murdoch deploy the Top Gear defence, that it's just *banter*? @dickon_edwards Only one of them was the subject of a Chas 'n' Dave song, I believe. Books people claim as influences, without having read them: The Great Gatsby; Breakfast at Tiffany's. Cigarette makers sue over graphic warning labels [link] Does free speech include right *not* to say something? @Treepixie Nabokov on excellent form, I see :-) @StiffPigeon At least you took the trouble. Inciting acts of violence gets you four years? Well, Louis Walsh makes me want to punch his face in. Get your trousers, Lou... @jamescrabtree Let me guess... Criticises the rioters for their abysmal standards of grammar? @jamescrabtree Fourth Reich? Jesus, not even Nicholas Ridley was that demented. Tonight am going to a production of Carmen in a nightclub. If I don't drown en route. Lawks, if you haven't seen @rhodri's Bad Date Compendium... [link] Well, that was different. @aethelflaed Yeeees. In Thai. With binbags and a breakdancing terrorist. @aethelflaed Well I didn't, and i think I got an OK deal. @CathElliott For Su Pollard it's a lifetime.

The barbarian

I don’t know whether David Starkey is a racist. I doubt very much whether he knows either, because the word has ceased to have any empirical meaning, now being little more than a Humpty-Dumpty term of socio-political abuse (see also “politically correct”). But – probably inadvertently – he has raised another issue, about black culture. Or rather cultures, as his fellow panellist Dreda Say Mitchell argued, rightly pointing out that black British people should not be defined as a group  in terms of second-hand gangsta archetypes.

But if this is the case, that there is no single, homogeneous black culture, surely the same applies to the majority (dominant, mainstream, white, British, Judeo-Christian, whatever you want to call it) culture. Starkey probably wouldn’t wish to be defined by the antics depicted on The Only Way Is Essex. Indeed, I suspect he wouldn’t wish to be defined by comparison with Simon Schama or Niall Ferguson either. And if it’s impossible to define culture at the micro-level of self-publicising TV historians, (What would the collective noun be? A pontification?) then how the hell can you do it on a broader scale? What is white culture, English or British or western culture? It’s everything, and as such is nothing.

While the neds and scallies and oiks and rudies of all colours were smashing windows and burning buildings, it was Dr Starkey who – again by accident – laid waste to culture as we know it.

(Five Chinese Crackers weighs in, with just the right combination of passion and forensics; and you’ve probably already read Charlie Brooker on bling, but anyway. And then Rhodri Marsden on how the above video clip fits into everything. You may be none the wiser, but don’t say you aren’t better informed. PS: And also something about the contribution of urban [non-]planning, by Owen Hatherley. Do I spoil you or what? That said, I might write about something unriotous next time.)

The sins of the sons

It was a pleasure to burn...

Apparently bookshops have for the most part evaded the attention of the looters; and a Waterstones employee was heard quipping that this is a pity, because “if they steal some books they might learn something.” Which did prompt me to throw together a quick reading list that might throw a little light on the situation, and it was looking something like this:

• Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
• Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces
• Abbie Hoffmann, Steal This Book...

...when I noticed the delightful Bidisha pointing out that a TV show made for Amnesty International was made by a team of 11 white men and... er... that’s it. And my boring liberal conscience kicked in, and I wondered whether it really matters, but if it does, are there any books by women and/or people who aren’t Caucasian that might be added to my list?

(Title half-inched from the opening of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Image ramraided from the delectable Photoshoplooter. And while we’re vaguely on the subject, if you think reading matter is sacrosanct, look at this.)

PS: As if someone heard me, Bookmarks has come up with a list. It’s more inclusive than mine, but not that much.