I remain fascinated by literary and other creative works that acquire added superpowers by virtue of not existing and as such I’m delighted to offer a plug to this triumph of passive-aggressive sarcasm:

Release the Sausages! is an anthology of poems, with absolutely no poems in it. It is a celebration of the first twelve months of Starmer’s government – a monument to the towering contribution to socialist thought of Sir Keir Starmer KCB QC, and his decisive, principled and unifying part in the proud history of the British Labour Movement. And it is a moving tribute to his moral integrity and irresistible charisma, warmth and wit... It contains no poems at all, by over 50 poets who have nothing to say about a man who has nothing to say...

A couple of nights ago, I went to see 80s synth-pop pioneers Soft Cell in the slightly incongruous  surroundings of Hampton Court Palace. As the show was about to start, a hunched, elderly-looking gentleman was pushed in his wheelchair into place behind a keyboard; the realisation that this was Dave Ball, the quieter half of the duo but always present in the posters and Smash Hits interviews, cast a melancholy tone across the crowd, most of whom appeared to be of a similar age.

It turns out that Ball’s health has not permitted him to take place in many of the band’s shows in recent weeks and some have argued that they’d paid to see the band, all two of them, not just Marc Almond plus session musicians. At first I queried whether these complaints held water. Ball’s contribution to the act has always been as a tunesmith and studio tinkerer; live, he just tended to stand there, stabbing one-or-two-fingered at the synth, staring impassively ahead. And all the music is programmed anyway so his presence or absence really didn’t matter much, compared to the fizzing, flesh-and-blood impishness of Almond. (Incidentally, Marc is an unusual example of someone whose voice has actually improved in technical terms since his heyday.)

But this isn’t really about what the music sounds like, is it? It’s about nostalgia, homage, touching base with your own teenage self, about seeing the posters and interviews and videos come to life. I had a similar epiphany the last time I saw Brian Wilson; he spent most of the time sitting behind his piano, not playing, occasionally singing but letting his bandmates hit the high notes he can these days only dream of. We were there to be there with him, and that’s all.

What the disgruntled Soft Cell fans are after is the same sense of belonging, once expressed by writing the band’s name on your geography exercise book and as such the band, Soft Cell, not just Marc, just needs to turn up, to be present. And maybe sign one of those posters.

One surprise from this week’s budget was a grant to develop yet another Beatles attraction in Liverpool; suggesting that, to this government, culture is OK if it’s very, very old.

No doubt it will be successful; if people can be lured from the other side of the world to stand on a zebra crossing, they’ll be happy to pay to see an array of scrawled lyrics, some broken drumsticks and one of John’s old moustaches, and then go to a gift shop and buy 64 different varieties of yellow submarine. But there is the chance to put at the centre of the exhibit something that is old enough to be respectable but, to the vast majority of the visitors, utterly new.

Carnival of Light is a 14-minute composition, recorded by the Beatles in early January 1967 and played during the Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at London’s Roundhouse a few weeks later. Barely anyone has heard it since and although Paul argued for its release as part of the Anthology project, this was vetoed by his colleagues and Yoko Ono. Whether this is because its unveiling might upend the approved narrative and remind people that Macca was the proper avant-garde innovator in the band or, as some of the survivors of the Roundhouse have suggested, that it’s not very good, is unclear. (And if it’s the latter, it can’t really be as bad as the execrable ‘What’s The New Mary Jane’, can it?)

Paul holds on to the tape, apparently. Maybe he listens to it now and again. But I would suggest that the recording should be donated to the new gallery/museum/mausoleum; not to be heard, but to be sealed in a Perspex box and if anyone even tries to get inside, the whole thing, and indeed the whole building, will self-destruct, taking with it any last vestige of the notion that the myth should be bigger than the music.

But it’s going to be submarines, isn’t it? And lots of the buggers.

I’m quietly impressed by the Danish artist Jens Haaning, who was commissioned to reproduce one of his old works, but delivered a pair of empty frames, claiming that his failure to deliver on the contract was the art. Were I in charge of the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, which spent half a million kroner on said work, I might not be so enamoured.

Something I wrote in 2012: 

In 20 years’ time, will athletes be fencing and diving and underclad-volleyballing in near-empty stadia, accompanied only by the tap-tap-tap of a few accredited live tweeters?

(And that was only nine years ago.)

Tom Miller, an American artist who created a sculpture called ‘Nothing’, consisting of nothing, is suing an Italian who’s done something – or, indeed, nothing – similar. “If you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’,” he claims, “you can easily see I had this whole paradigm sorted out before before Salvatore Garau ever even thought of doing a sculpture of nothing.”

In fact, if you Google ‘Tom Miller Nothing’, the first thing that comes up is a news story about his law suit.

91 years ago today, on April 18, 1930, the BBC evening news bulletin consisted of the words “there is no news”, with piano music filling the rest of the 15 minutes. Cursory Googling suggests that this wasn’t a bad call, and that very little of historical importance occurred on that day; beyond, of course, the announcement that there was news, which became the only thing that anyone knows about that day, certainly raising its significance above that of the 17th or 19th. Once again, absence becomes a presence.

An extraordinary story by Jody Rosen in the New York Times, about a fire at the Universal Studios in Hollywood in 2008 that destroyed the masters of sound recordings by, among many others, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, Bo Diddley, the Andrews Sisters, Etta James, Ray Charles, Burt Bacharach, Captain Beefheart, Al Green, Iggy Pop, Nirvana... essentially, a massive chunk of 20th-century American music ceased to exist in matter of minutes. I’m not sure what’s more astonishing, that such a calamity was allowed to occur, or that its full extent is only now being revealed, more than a decade on. 

But does it matter that much? I mean, it’s not as if the music is entirely lost, is it? Well, some of it is: it turns out that some of the material lost to the flames had never seen a commercial release, had never made it off the tapes in the first place. There’s a bigger point, though, as Rosen argues:

But the case for masters extends beyond arguments about bit depth and frequency ranges audible only to dogs. It enters the realms of aesthetics and phenomenology. Simply put, the master of a recording is that recording; it is the thing itself. The master contains the record’s details in their purest form: the grain of a singer’s voice, the timbres of instruments, the ambience of the studio. It holds the ineffable essence that can only truly be apprehended when you encounter a work of art up-close and unmediated, or as up-close and unmediated as the peculiar medium of recorded sound permits. “You don’t have to be Walter Benjamin to understand that there’s a big difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting,” [producer Andy] Zax said in his conference speech. “It’s exactly the same with sound recordings.” 

A man fell into a hole. More specifically, he fell into Anish Kapoor’s art work Descent Into Limbo, which is a big hole, currently in a floor in Portugal.

Two thoughts. First, since this is part of a temporary exhibition, how does one transport a hole, a gap, an absence? How does one insure it? How much does it weigh?

Then, presumably the unfortunate gentleman stepped into the hole because he thought it was only an image of a hole, a picture of one. But it wasn’t; his fall was ultimately a confrontation with empirical reality. As is so often the case, I blame that Belgian rascal Magritte. Ceci est un trou.

I haven’t seen the movie A Quiet Place yet, but the concept sounds fun and anything that shows up the noisy eaters has to be good. That said, it does reinforce the idea that silence per se is vanishingly rare; removing sound only reveals more sound beneath, as these Quakers found when they squeezed their 30 minutes of quiet into a podcast.

But, as usual, someone got there first:

1. It’s about 239 people.
2. It’s about an aeroplane.
3. It’s about mystery.
4. It’s about absence.
5. It’s about the families and friends.
6. It’s about the several meanings of “missing”.
7. It’s about the pilot.
8. And then it isn’t.
9. It’s about Anwar Ibrahim.
10. It’s about blondes in the cockpit.
11. It’s about the point at which the certainty of grief would be better than the ignorance of hope.
12. It’s about corridors.
13. It’s about Schrödinger’s cat.
14. It’s about 9/11 but, seriously, what isn’t?
15. It’s about China. Ditto.
16. It’s about too many disaster movies.
17. It’s about pings.
18. It’s about being told to pray.
19. It’s about the sneaking suspicion that the much-vaunted transition to the so-called Asian Century may involve more than a few mis-steps along the way.
20. It’s about stolen passports.
21. It’s about –stans.
22. It’s about conspiracy theories.
23. It’s about the Zionists.
24. It’s about the Illuminati.
25. It’s about electric cars.
26. It’s about the point at which Buzzfeed does a “What sort of MH370 conspiracy theory are you?” type of thing.
27. Or maybe there’s a Hitler parody.
28. It’s about cockups.
29. It’s about the internet.
30. It’s about how 24-hour news has to be filled with something, anything, even if it’s nothing.
31. Especially if it’s nothing, because that’s cheaper and easier.
32. It’s about sharks, circling, jumping.
33. It’s about wondering how this story would be turning out if more than three Americans had been on board.
34. It’s about press conferences.
35. It’s about The Rapture.
36. It’s about the Marie Celeste.
37. It’s about Lost.
38. It’s about Glenn Miller.
39. It’s about how quickly we forget Ukraine. And Oscar Pistorius.
40. And Syria. 
41. And whatever it was we were concerned about before Syria. I forget. Edward Snowden? Phone hacking? 
42. Dave Lee Travis?
43. It’s about 4’ 33” by John Cage.
44. It’s about Smile by the Beach Boys, or at least Smile as it existed in our imaginations, at the point where multiple different bootlegs intersected, before they actually released the real album and all the fun went out.
45. It’s about Google Maps.
46. It’s about people who are suddenly experts on aviation.
47. It’s about Chris Goodfellow and his startlingly simple theory.
48. It’s about Rupert Murdoch.
49. It’s about Courtney Love.
50. It’s not about you.
51. It’s about _____________

Some stuff that should probably gone into the previous post.

Some years ago, I remember seeing an artist's representation of all those too-fast-to-live rock stars, and how they’d look if they’d made it into their 50s and 60s. I was particularly taken by Jimi Hendrix who, had he lived to take part the Miles Davis collaboration that still captures the imagination of people who like noodly jazz-funk-rock fusion with occasional loud bits, would now look like Lester Freamon from The Wire. Apparently.

Of course, these reconstructions can have a practical benefit, especially when it comes to working out what missing children might look like. If Madeleine McCann is still alive she will now be six years old, and her parents have released an image depicting what she might look like. Of course, what they’re really doing is acknowledging that, what with the credit crunch and Jade Goody and swine flu and Susan Boyle and everything, even the mid-market tabloids had completely forgotten about her, so they needed a useful gimmick to get her back on our radar, if not to the days when her fate was so central to our very existence.

In the absence of anything approaching solid evidence, I guess they’ll be commissioning similar images every couple of years, and the media will feel duty bound to publish them. They know what sells.

So, in 12 years’ time, will we be able to enjoy reconstructions of what Madeleine McCann might look like, pissed and bleary, snapped from the gutter, as she stumbles out of a nightclub with her knickers on display?

Apparently, Brokeback Mountain was shown on Italian TV on Monday night without the gay bits. Which is more ludicrous than Hamlet without the prince. Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Jethro Tull without flute solos? Your turn.

PS: More disappearing homosexuals here.

Richey Edwards, lyricist, ideologue, stylist and half-assed guitarist for the Manic Street Preachers has finally been declared dead, nearly 14 years after his disappearance; as such, he warrants an obituary in the Daily Telegraph. I can't help but think that, had his body been found in 1995, he wouldn't have earned such a niche among the war heroes and Tory MPs. So essentially he's being honoured for his post mortem achievements, and the hotly debated Cult of Richey; we are encouraged to remember the myth and the mystery rather than the man.

From the background notes for Dr Who, in the BBC archive, to which James Blue Cat so kindly directed us:

"Therefore, we do not see the machine at all; or rather it is visible only as an absence of visibility, a shape of nothingness..."

Production meetings in those days were clearly spun off from Cambridge philosophy tutorials. It amazes me that the show ever made it to the screen.

My memory's definitely getting worse. Yesterday, I couldn't remember the name of the woman who played Victor Meldrew's wife; or the capital of Latvia. (Don't write in; they came back eventually.)

The funny thing is, it's not as if I had any need for those facts; I just suddenly became aware of their temporary absence from my mind. It's similar to that jolt of fear when you realise your keys or phone aren't in your pocket, because the weight that you're used to isn't there. A gap makes itself known, like a hole in the brain.

Maybe it's CJD.

I'm so lazy that I've only just bothered to look at the plans for the 9/11 memorial. And I'm so shallow that the only reason I did that was because I saw a news story informing an awestruck world that Billy Crystal is going to be a director of the fundraising committee, and I thought, crikey, Billy Crystal's 60 years old, I wonder whether Soap has aged better than he has. And I'm so cynical that, when I noticed Robert De Niro was on the same board, I immediately surmised that they're doing it to promote a threequel called Analyze The Other.

Anyway, the memorial will (if Billy and Bob and their slebby pals get their various acts together) go by the name of Reflecting Absence, which is, I suppose, what memorials should do; offer a physical representation not just of those who are no longer around, but of the emptiness and loss that their absence creates. This is the opposite of Baudrillard's analysis of the successive phases of the image; in the third phase, he opines, the image masks the absence of a profound reality. But you knew that. A memorial, by contrast, draws attention to the fact of that absence.

The problem is that nothingness is a difficult thing to represent: you have to create an environment in which one expects presence to make the absence apparent. This is why Cage's 4'33" is not just any old silence; it needs the musicians, the conductor, the audience to remind us what we aren't hearing.

I'm not Stephen Bayley's greatest fan, but I did agree with him that the only way the Millennium Dome might have been redeemed would have been to leave it completely empty (as distinct from vacuous, which is what in the end happened). Coincidentally, of course, the most lasting and successful monument to that great calendrical non-event was a structure that moves but goes precisely nowhere.

Still in London, while I like the various conceptual witticisms that pop up on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square, I did prefer it in its unadorned state, when you could imagine whatever you liked there, provided it was something that didn't mind getting covered in pigeon shit and Italian exchange students who'd been kicked out of the National Gallery for snogging.

And if you don't mind getting your hands dirty, how's about Kerry Katona's new perfume, Outrageous, as reported in the Liverpool Echo, via No Rock And Roll Fun:

The French-made scent, whose bottle has a spiky black rubber top, aims to reflect the mother-of-four’s personality and the “outrageous” lies about what she has not done.

Untruths about non-events, eh? I'm impressed. Nature, as I vaguely remember from the time before I dropped physics, abhors a vacuum. Art, it would seem, rather likes the idea.