Interesting article by Patrick McGuinness in the LRB, flashing back to the case of his former teacher Chris Jefferies, who was spuriously accused of murder and dragged through the tabloid mire, apparently because he had strange hair, didn’t own a TV, didn’t like sport and, most reprehensible of all, appeared to have been an excellent English teacher. “Did they really think showing a Jean-Luc Godard film or reading Browning indicated murderous potential?” asks McGuinness. Well, yes, of course they bloody did. As always, these staunch defenders of Western culture run away screaming when presented with anyone who knows or cares about Western culture at any level deeper than a commemorative tea-towel from the V&A.

McGuinness also recalls the activities that Jefferies ran for boys who didn’t want to join the school Cadet Force: 

It was like a version of the Foreign Legion for misfits: the asthmatics and the diabetics, the boys with the hearing aids and the boys on crutches, the epileptic, the attention-challenged, the marginal, the sad and the emotionally combustible. We loved it.

PS: Now I’m reminded of the 1997 election and the deeply weird Tory candidate Dr Adrian Rogers, who declared that his opponent Ben Bradshaw “is a homosexual, works for the BBC, rides a bicycle, speaks German: he’s everything about our country that is wrong.”

Authors including Michael Chabon and Sarah Silverman are taking action against Meta (which owns Facebook) for using pirated copies of their books to train generative AI. In The Atlantic, Alex Reisner has published a searchable database of the authors who’ve been similarly exploited and many of these have expressed their annoyance.

As well they might. But do spare a thought for those authors whose words weren’t considered worth stealing. Because I’m bloody furious.

In 2009, I wrote a book about the decade that was then stumbling towards its demise. Inevitably it was going to be imperfect; not only did I have little more than 200 pages to tell the story, but I needed to deliver the manuscript about six months before the story ended. And, just as importantly, I was a white, educated-ish, straight male (also cis but I‘m not sure that concept would have even resonated then) in his early 40s, who’d never been south of the equator. The narrative was necessarily partial, in both senses of the word.

That said, I don’t think the story I told about the period was too far off. I argued that we’d been so fixated on the symbolic turning-point of the millennium that we’d never bothered to decide what the decade was going to be called. (“Noughties” was a best guess and plenty of people didn’t get the memo.) And, despite the historian’s desire to package stretches of time into next units that corresponded with the calendar (what Ferdinand Mount called “decaditis”), real life rarely obliges. I suggested that the 1990s, the decade of Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism when history supposedly ended, spilled over until September 2001; and the truncated decade came to an end when Lehman Brothers did, two collapses, just seven years and a few New York blocks apart. Fear and technology were the two themes that permeated the period and the meeting of the two created a characteristic sense of twitchy unease: should I be more worried about a terrorist attack, or about the CCTV camera that’s meant to prevent it? What was really lacking was a single image that encapsulated our (received) memory of what the decade was like, to compare with the dedicated followers going through the racks in Carnaby Street, punks striding across the King’s Road, a besuited yuppy on a slab-like mobile phone.

I knew my utter wrongness would become clear eventually. What I wasn’t expecting was that it would take so long to happen; and certainly not that the catalyst would be a nest-haired narcissist called Russell Brand. Because of the laws of libel (and possibly a worry about prejudicing any subsequent legal proceedings) all we can say openly about the man himself is that he wasn’t very nice and we never found him funny or, if you’re a devotee of his second career as a hawker of conspiracy theories and associated quackeries, that it’s the New World Order/Rothschilds/Mainstream Media/Giant Lizards trying to gag the gallant speaker of truths blah blah blah.

Instead, the finger pointed at... the Noughties themselves. Endeavouring to contextualise Brand, Sarah Ditum characterises the decade as: 

...a period of viciousness and excess, where cruelty was the norm and misogyny was celebrated... Lad culture, which had once seemed like a corrective to smothering Nineties niceness, flourished into a full backlash. Second-wave feminism had spent decades explaining why porn, objectification and rape jokes should be unacceptable. Now they came surging back, this time with a protective sheen of irony.

Others seem retrospectively baffled, even when they were right at the heart of the shenanigans, and presumably in a position to stamp out misbehavior; here’s Lorraine Heggessey, who was controller of BBC One at the time:

It's not actually that long ago. This was the 2000s, so let's not think it was the dim and distant past. It wasn't. I don't think it would be acceptable to say anything like that. I'm amazed that it was acceptable at that time frankly. 

Obviously I’d completely missed all this in the book but I can console myself that pretty much everyone else did at the time. It’s taken nearly 14 years for that decade-defining image to make itself known; it‘ll be a clip of Russell Brand getting away with it (“it” being, if nothing else, a sort of non-specific nastiness, enabled by his gender and celebrity status), and the rest of us letting him.

PS: And while we’re talking about partial memories of a decade, this morning the Absolute 80s radio station heralded a day celebrating one-hit wonders with a tweet (or whatever we call them this week – Xpectoration?) depicting ‘Come On Eileen’ by Dexys Midnight Runners, a band that enjoyed seven more Top 20 singles in the decade. The usual suspects jumped in to point and laugh at the cock-up, but one brave soul asserted that his own limited awareness of the Dexys oeuvre trumped any silly ideas about empirical reality:

Yeah they were. Might of had one other song no one can really name

— not_me (@stop_changing_7) September 25, 2023

 Can’t think of much to add to the conversation, but this says it all.

"Il va falloir répéter encore et encore que rien ne justifie une fatwa. De quel droit des individus, dont on se fout totalement de savoir qu’ils sont des religieux, s’arrogent le droit de dire que quelqu’un doit mourir ?" #SalmanRushdie https://t.co/XCoQJTVIQN

— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) August 12, 2022

I’m intrigued by the story of the judge who spared a young man from jail on terrorism offences, provided he committed himself to reading a prescribed list of works by Jane Austen, Dickens and the like. What’s not clear is whether he intended the mere effort of reading – and submitting to the judge’s test of said reading after Christmas – to be a sufficient distraction from plotting neo-Nazi unpleasantness; or whether those books in particular might reset his befuddled brain, because of some inherent moral qualities. Pride and Prejudice, most would agree, is a good book in an aesthetic, literary sense, which is what fixes its place in the canon; but does that make it good in the same way we’d describe a good person, someone who is essentially righteous? And even if it were, might something more overtly didactic (To Kill A Mockingbird, say) do a better job in changing hearts and minds?

Of course, if Judge Timothy Spencer QC had just told the accused to go away and read a few books, he might have curled up with a copy of Mein Kampf. Or even The Picture of Dorian Gray, wherein he would have found this snippet of subversion:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

Journalists and other writers are encouraged to avoid tiresome repetition of words by employing what’s known as elegant variation, the use of synonyms to make prose less of a trudge. This can sometimes be taken to preposterous extremes of course, as in the Guardian’s fondly remembered “popular orange vegetable”.

And still it goes on. One would have thought that a recent court case in Edinburgh, in which an unfortunate gentleman had part of his tongue bitten off by a woman, and then saw the morsel snatched away by a seagull, might have been exciting enough as it stood. But no, the writer and/or the sub-editor (if the Edinburgh Evening News can still afford such fripperies) decided that on a second mention the body part had to become “the fleshy muscle”.

I’m seeing lots of simmering rage across social media that journalists are getting the balance wrong in their coverage of the death of Phil Spector, or maybe just put things in the wrong order; he was a convicted murderer, they argue, who also produced some records.

Just as it happened 35 or so years ago, while I watched Johnny Marr’s Glastonbury set I gawped at his dexterity, musical imagination, effortless cool and implausible absence of body fat. Of course, in 1983 his serviceable singing didn’t come into the equation, because someone else was handling those duties.

Ah, yes, Mr Morrissey. What started out (apparently) as arch, subversive flirtation with the trappings and iconography of the far right has tipped right over the edge into full-on Faragerie and worse. He is, officially, no longer charming, and people are lining up either to agonise over the delight they once took in him and his mots (bon and mauvais alike), or to crow that they never liked the preening bigot in the first place. I’m in the first camp, but I guess you’d worked that out already.

So, when Marr trawls through his old band’s songbook, what reaction should we expect from the woke crowd? Awkward shoe-gazing? A mass turning of backs? A petition on change.org? Or ecstatic bellowing along from thousands of sunburned people who know all the words and the B-sides and probably the messages etched on the inner grooves as well, which contrasts with the polite response accorded to the guitar hero’s own solo work. (Note to self: remember that in the real world, Smiths fans always resembled the rowdy lads on the inside of the Rank gatefold more than they did Alain Delon or even Yootha Joyce.) Hate the singer – or at least express disappointment in how he turned out – while still loving the songs; that would appear to be the best option. Of course, the spirit of Morrissey still lingers over everything Marr does; at once there and not there, Schrödinger’s lyricist, Banquo at the vegan feast. This was meant to be a blog post about Johnny, but it’s not, is it?

The singer/song divide does appear to be an increasingly popular tactic, whether it’s Quincy Jones playing lots of Michael Jackson songs without ever mentioning Michael Jackson, or Nick Cave’s calm response to the misdeeds of Morrissey himself:

I think perhaps it would be helpful to you if you saw the proprietorship of a song in a different way. Personally, when I write a song and release it to the public, I feel it stops being my song. It has been offered up to my audience and they, if they care to, take possession of that song and become its custodian. The integrity of the song now rests not with the artist, but with the listener.

Which, the two or three loyal readers of this blog will know, is pretty much what Roland Barthes (a French theorist who never heard the Smiths but died a beautifully Morrisseyesque death) argued in The Death of the Author. As soon as the author publishes, or releases, or presses “SEND”, he or she leaves the party. I’ve often deployed this as a critical get-out clause; for example in my book about Radiohead’s OK Computer (all good bookshops, etc), I pointed out that the fact Thom Yorke hasn’t read Philip K Dick’s Valis, or can’t remember that the poem that inspired ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’ was by Craig Raine, doesn’t invalidate those works’ relevance to consideration of his own music. I never thought it would also allow us to skip gaily over the sexual or political misdemeanours of our fallen idols, and I doubt old Roland did either – which rather proves his point, doesn’t it?

I’ve written two proper books about popular musicians (and, if you haven’t had the pleasure, you really should, no, really), and I reached a similar frame of mind by the time I’d got to the end of both of them; that the music was ultimately less interesting than the people creating it.


I recently had my prejudices reinforced, twice over. First, I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of Nick Broomfield’s upcoming film, which tells the tale of Leonard Cohen and his long, complex relationship with his Norwegian muse Marianne Ihlen, which lasted from 1960 to 2016, the year they both died, just three months apart. At first, I thought it would appeal only to die-hard Cohen fans, a strange bunch, as I’ve discovered. But ultimately Cohen’s music fades into the background of a narrative that’s really about love and loss, death and ageing, and the search for personal peace. It’s gruffly tender and drily romantic, like the best of Cohen’s work, but exists beyond that oeuvre.

I have a similar attitude to Radiohead; I haven’t been particularly swept away by anything they’ve recorded since the Amnesiac album in 2001, but I still find them weirdly, awkwardly fascinating, not least in their constant awareness of the paradox they embody, a band that forges its identity through its opposition to global capitalism, but can only feasibly exist thanks to the operation of the same capitalism.

And that paradox bubbled up again this week when, after someone hacked into an archive of sessions from the OK Computer period, and held them to ransom for a six-figure sum, they made the whole lot available for £18, with proceeds going to Extinction Rebellion; the glumly realistic – and very British – sales pitch being that the sounds are “only tangentially interesting”.

Michael Jackson fans, we are told, are annoyed that a forthcoming Quincy Jones concert appears to have shifted its emphasis from being a tribute to the King of Pop, to a non-specific trawl through music from the 80s, with occasional nods to Jacko.

But what’s more interesting is that the posthumously disgraced Jackson himself barely seemed to figure, even in the original marketing. Sure, there was plenty of emphasis on his three most important albums (all of which Jones produced) but his tarnished name is conspicuous by its absence. Which is, I guess, a way to get around the whole problem of how to appreciate Great Art By Bad Men; we are allowed once again to appreciate a sculpture by Eric Gill, a film by Roman Polanski, an album by Michael Jackson, without any moral awkwardness, simply by dropping the Bad Man’s name from the credits. I’m pretty sure that this is not what Barthes was thinking of when he posited the Death of the Author – but hey, he’s only the author anyway, so who cares?

Every time I try to gather my thoughts on whether we have lost the ability and/or right to enjoy good art that’s been made by bad people, the goalposts shift once again. Obviously the Michael Jackson saga hangs heavy over the whole subject, disinterring old, half-forgotten scandals involving figures such as Bill Wyman; a documentary about him has been pulled from a film festival, because of his relationship with Mandy Smith in the 1980s. And if we’re not supposed to listen to Jackson any more, does this mean Wyman’s contributions should be excised from old Stones tracks before we can hear them? Or are singers held to higher standards than mere bass players?

But it’s not just about criminal activity. A cartoonist called Nathan Pyle apparently holds some robustly traditional views about abortion, so some people are suggesting we shouldn’t share his designs. Not that he uses his art to express his thoughts on reproductive rights, you understand; it’s just that he thinks these things, so he’s bad, so his art is bad. Hmmm...

And now, in the midst of a scandal about rich parents exercising undue pressure to secure prestigious university places for their stupid children, Netflix appears to have cancelled Felicity Huffman’s new movie. The return of the morality clause? Looks like it.

PS: Nick Cave sees the potential for some sweet darkness to be reborn amidst the bland, tiresome light:

However, in the world of ideas the sanctimonious have little or no place. Art must be wrestled from the hands of the pious, in whatever form they may come – and they are always coming, knives out, intent on murdering creativity. At this depressing time in rock ‘n’ roll though, perhaps they can serve a purpose, perhaps rock music needs to die for a while, so that something powerful and subversive and truly monumental can rise out of it.

The whole sorry Brexit saga is at once tragedy, farce, soap opera and an interminable lecture about Parliamentary procedure, so sometimes it’s worthwhile to get an outsider’s view on the whole bloody mess. Here’s sometime Dubya aide David Frum’s version of articulate, informed sighing. He points out what I’ve said all along, that very few of the votes on either side were really about the EU per se; the leavers on both right and left were touting their own flavours of nostalgia, and those who wanted to remain pushed against that. He also trots out the statistic that a very important indicator of voting intentions was whether or not you’d been to university, with graduates voting two to one to remain and high-school dropouts (do we have “high-school dropouts” in the UK, David?) offering a similar statistical profile in reverse.

Which suits both sides nicely, since remainers think leavers are thick and leavers are sick and tired of hoity-toity experts. Except, of course, the idea that being a university graduate, even from a so-called elite establishment, imbues you with any particular level of cleverness is utter bollocks. I’ve known many people – a disproportionate number of them privately, expensively educated — who learned nothing at school or university bar a misplaced confidence in their own talents that, paradoxically, became a marketable skill in itself.

And on that note, we read about the lengths (and depths) to which rich Americans will go to get their moronic spawn into the best schools. Donald Trump has been unusually Trappist on this story, for some reason; and I don’t know whether this is any reflection on his own college days, because he got Michael Cohen to force the institutions to keep his grades secret. The only inference I can draw is that his marks were astonishingly high and he doesn’t want the fact to leak out in case it damages his credibility with his base. I mean, clever people are the problem, aren’t they?



PS: In related news, the Ivy League-educated son and grandson of millionaires, whose entire career has been in his dad's companies, tells us how bad the elites are.

PPS: More on the university entry scandal, by Amanda Hess in the New York Times:

You sense, in some of the stories to emerge from these fraud charges, an odd form of intergenerational class conflict, in which wealthy people who did not grow up pampered... are now trying to impose middle-class values (a good education is important) on superrich kids who see little use for them... Many kids compete for elite college slots in an attempt to gain access to a higher social class, but some of these parents are surely seeking the opposite effect — a degree that suggests their kids are not simply coasting on their inheritance while cultivating vanity careers. They are heaping money on their progeny in an attempt to correct for how rich they are.

The documentary about the Fyre Festival farrago (in which hundreds of rich twits were persuaded to pay good money to trek out the Bahamas for a big party that didn’t happen, because some pretty ladies on Instagram said that was a good idea) prompts a couple of thoughts.


First, and sorry about this, but the whole thing is a perfect Baudrillardian simulacrum, in which the glossy, bikinis-and-jetskis imagery precedes and occludes a reality that, in the end, didn’t exist and never would. But, while the idea of flying out to a beach, staying in a wet tent and being fed bad cheese sandwiches isn’t exactly on my bucket list, the social media version of it, where influencers were paid good money to flaunt their bronzed, waxed, purged bodies to say how ruddy wondrous the whole thing was going to be, looked even worse. I’ve done bad camping. I survived. The other thing would have prompted a heady cocktail of aneurysm and psychosis irredeemable by any IG filter.

Also, the overriding feeling from watching footage of Billy McFarland, the man behind the whole thing, is that right up until the very last hours, he looks as if he believes it will really come off. It didn’t, which is why he’s currently doing six years as prisoner #91186-054 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York; but if a scammer manages to scam himself into believing his own hype, is he still really a scammer?

PS:

There I was, wondering whether to write something about the Gatwick drone, but it looks as if I don’t need to.

the drone was pretty Baudrillardian to begin with but by transfiguring itself into pure simulation it has become the most Baudrillardian thing ever

— bat020 (@bat020) 24 December 2018