Who remembers Andrew Keen? He was (still is, I guess) the tech entrepreneur who foresaw how widespread access to the tools of media production would lead to what he described as The Cult of the Amateur. And as he was doing this towards the end of the 2000s, it was blogging that really provoked his ire. I was a bit harsh on him at the time but finally I’m starting to think he may have had a point. As Sid Vicious pointed out, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt.”
For the record, I don’t think Bardot was a terribly good actor or singer, nor did she make very many good movies, but that’s not the point. Her arrival in the 1950s signalled a new perspective on female sexuality that resonated well after she ceased to be a major draw in the cinema. She was John Lennon’s first celebrity crush and her look influenced any number of 60s dollybirds (Christie, Faithfull, Rice-Davies, et al) as well as cementing in the mainstream media the association of Frenchness with sensual misbehaviour. She was important, and that’s what qualifies her for obituaries. Her later descent into far-right wingnuttery is neither here nor there. Incidentally, I’d disagree with Justin and also stake a claim for Norman Tebbit. He wasn’t the first senior Tory politician from a humble background – Heath, Powell and Thatcher came before him – but he was the first to eschew elocution lessons and as such must be a role model for the current crop of right-wing populists.
Talking of which, the question of how colossal a shitbag the teenage Nigel Farage might have been rumbles on. I don’t know, as I wasn’t there. But I do come from a roughly similar vintage, being four years younger than him, and am an alumnus of a similar school (selective, single-sex, sporty, cadet corps, faded grandeur, a strange blend of academic rigour and macho philistinism). And racism was bloody everywhere and as the only Jew among the student body, I was on the receiving end and I’m pretty sure that the handful of non-white kids got it even worse. The low point came in 1983 when we staged a mock election and the National Front came a strong second and I wouldn’t be surprised if even that result was massaged downwards to avoid some unpleasant headlines. I remember the names and I remember the faces. I’ll be charitable and assume it was all youthful bravado and they’re now respectable, productive members of society. I’m sure I said some pretty toe-curling things myself at that age. But if I see any of those names and faces appear over the parapets, perhaps by getting involved in politics, perhaps as cheerleaders for a certain former student of Dulwich College, maybe I won’t be so discreet.
PS: More about the good art/bad artist conundrum here.
An article about parents who hire tutors specifically to buy social advantage for their children is mildly depressing until one of those tutors rather lets the cat out of the Birkin with the admission that “an English accent implies that you're well-read, that you're well-educated, even if you're not.” Now it seems that we’ve got beyond Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital and Hirsch’s cultural literacy into a state where cultural plausibility is all that matters. And even then, we know it’s bullshit, but still go along with it. I mean, would anybody who’s actually read The Great Gatsby attend a Gatsby-themed party, let alone throw one?
I’m guessing Zadie Smith has read Gatsby, and a few other books as well. But the number of people who can say the same is falling, as she suggests in an article excoriating the British Library for its treatment of its staff:
You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out that what a country values can change over time. Sometimes, though, there’s a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you’ve actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word – but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass – and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island – even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.
The UK government has decided that migrants entering the country under skilled worker visas will now need to demonstrate the ability to speak English to a B2 level (equivalent to A-level). Now, having taught English to both native speakers and non-native learners, I actually have some personal experience upon which to base my usual scattergun pontification, but plenty of people have already come to the same conclusion anyway: this requirement would mean that any such migrant would be speaking the language at a standard that the majority of natives couldn’t hope to match. And in their comments about the change, the anti-migrant contingent just reinforce the point with all the eloquence one might expect:
And then I discover, in Joan Didion’s The White Album (named, of course, after one of the best records released that year), a line that trumps it:
By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968.
PS: Further good stuff from the Didion: discussing the mansion being built for then-California-governor Ronald Reagan, she observes:
In the entire house there are only enough bookshelves for a set of the World Book and the Book of the Month, plus maybe three Royal Doulton figurines and a back file of Connoisseur...And, yes, we used to sneer at the likes of Reagan and Dubya for their perceived intellectual shortcomings, but they now look like Socrates and Plato compared to what came after. Talking of which, the Trump presidential library is a thing.
PPS: And a further zinger:
The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.I hadn’t read any Didion before. I think I need to catch up.
From Disobedience, by Naomi Alderman:
Because in Hendon there are plenty of people just dying to explain the meaning of life to you. I guess that’s true in New York too, but in New York everyone seems to disagree with everyone else about what the meaning of life is. In Hendon, at least the Hendon I grew up in, everything faced in one direction, there was nowhere to get a grip. You needed that disagreement, we all do, so that we can realize that the world isn’t smooth and even, not everyone agrees with everyone else. You need a window into another world to work out what you thought of your own.
Alderman wrote this in the mid-2000s but it has had special resonance in recent days. For example, in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting it became clear that a great many Americans on the political right were completely unaware of the murders in June of the Minnesota legislator Melissa Dortman and her husband. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, or regarded the Dortmans as being less worthy of sympathy. They simply didn’t know the deaths had happened. They’re all in a big silo, all facing in one direction.
In Alderman’s novel, the protagonist (who was brought up in an Orthdox Jewish community in north London) recalls escaping from her own cultural silo by perusing the magazines in WH Smith:
I didn’t properly understand the differences between them. I couldn’t have told you about their target audiences or demographics. I read Loaded and Vogue, Woman’s Own and the NME, PC World and The Tablet. In my mind they became jumbled, those scraps of other lives. There seemed to be so many different things to know about: music, films, TV, fashion, celebrities and sex.
And if you got your information this way, selecting your favoured text from the vast swathe of titles on the newsagent’s shelves, you inevitably pick up other data, almost by osmosis. Even if your own magazine didn’t cover the Hortman killings, or the new Primal Scream album, or Versace’s autumn/winter collection, or which Hollyoaks startlet is posing in her pants, glimpsing the cover lines of the others gives you a few droplets of fact. You may not have the full story but you know these things exist.
We blame the clunky algorithms of social media for forcing us into these political and cultural silos but maybe that’s looking at the problem in the wrong way. Rather than the presence of social media, it’s more specifically the absence of what it replaced, scanning the headlines as you grabbed a paper from the station kiosk or browsing aimlessly in Smith’s on the way home from school, that ensured we knew at least a bit of stuff from the other side.
(Godwin’s Law alert.) Also nudged into the light by the Kirk thing, with specific reference to the silencing of Jimmy Kimmel et al:
“Too often people go to university to explore research and knowledge.”
—Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade
I picked up a copy of The Wire for the first time in several years and, despite it being the 500th edition, it seems somehow diminished, as is often the case on the rare occasions I chance upon a print periodical and yes, I guess I’m part of the problem, aren’t I? An appeal for donations (as distinct from subscriptions) means it feels more like the journal of some Trotskyite splinter group being sold outside Brixton station in 1991 than a magazine covering strange music.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that it’s more overtly political than I remember. An article by Mark Fisher’s biographer, arguing that hauntology was “concerned with the ways in which certain forms of fugitive music continue to resist recuperation by capitalism”; another in which Theodora Laird explains that “the solitude of my practice is a direct reaction to my experiences of racialised othering”. Moreover there appears to be an assumption that relatively new-fangled semantic orthodoxies need no further explanations. Two separate musicians are referred to as “they”, without the clarification that they (by which I mean the two of them, not either one individually using that pronoun and as I’ve said before the problem is not that non-binary people require a pronoun, it’s that they want one that’s already being used for something else) are (I assume) non-binary and this is their preferred pronoun; and a piece on using sign language to interpret music performances mentions “Deaf” (capital D) audiences, implicitly taking the side of those who refuse to acknowledge hearing loss as a disability. (For more on this see Ahmed Khalifa’s interesting post.)
There were some gems amidst the lectures, though. First, a quotation from the former Swedish PM Tage Erlander: “A politician’s job is to build the dancefloor, so that everyone can dance as they please.” Which is nice, even if I haven’t danced since about the same time I was buying Trotskyite journals in Brixton. And an article about the Chicago trio Bitchin Bajas, who are officially my new favourite band, even if I refuse to dance to them.
From Nicholson Baker’s A Box of Matches, regarding Marines’ predilection for short hair: “They want to look like penile tubes of warmongeriness.”
But it’s not just hair, is it? It’s Farage with a machine gun; it’s Milei’s chainsaw; it’s President Bonespurs renaming the Defense Department The Department of War. It’s elderly schoolboys indulging in performative idiocy and it’s at once dangerous and deeply, deeply boring.
(And yes, the death of Charlie Kirk and all the platitudes and hypocrisies that follow in its wake come from the same place.)
I’m not even sure if it’s possible any more to identify a left/right divide in politics, especially as the two sides increasingly seem to share each other’s behavioural clothes. I mean, what are the recent outbursts of flag mania around England if not a recuperation of what, when done by leftists, was decried as “virtue signalling” (taking the knee, for example)? And Gavin Newsom’s knowingly unhinged tweets are clearly intended to troll of The Orange Toddler but I have no difficulty imagining a left-wing populist doing that sort of thing for real.
And in the possibly irrelevant world of books and similar clever stuff, Philip Hensher rails against “progressive gatekeepers” for elevating ideological purity above any concept of literary quality. But, as Hensher himself acknowledges, this is just the same tactic that the forces of conservatism deployed when they wanted to get rid of The Well of Loneliness (and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Last Exit To Brooklyn and Ulysses and Tess of the D’Urbervilles und so weiter).
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Mad-eyed, foam-flecked rumours on social media that Saturday will see a mass invasion of Dover Beach. Not one led by migrants, though. This time it’ll be stout-limbed, pink-hued defenders of the British way of life on the sands, doubtless screaming bleeding chunks of Matthew Arnold at the baffled boat people until they skedaddle back home.
...and we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
From what I’ve heard of Kneecap’s music, I don’t particularly care for it and wouldn’t want to go to one of their gigs. And their political stances on Ireland and Palestine carry the scent of the obnoxious self-confidence and certainty of the student activist, when both issues demand nuance.
That said, they have played the recent spate of controversies like Karajan drove the Berlin Philharmonic and frankly who can blame them? Consciously or not, they are following the tradition of the Sex Pistols (swearing at Bill Grundy) and John Lennon (bigger than Jesus) and whatever the rights or wrongs or realities of the situation, the politicians and journalists demanding they be banned will ultimately be seen as the fuddy-duddy bad guys. When so much contemporary music seems to consist of bland platitudes and whiny solecism, at least they’re saying something about something that matters. I’m glad they exist.
PS: And, in case there’s any doubt, calls for Rod Stewart to be banned from Glastonbury should also be ignored, despite his support for the preposterous Farage and his acolytes. Basically, censorship in all but the most extreme cases is usually a bad thing and inevitably causes more harm to the censor than the censored. The fact that Stewart hasn’t made a decent record since about 1974 is probably more significant...
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...
Obama's weakness is not that he's black, or young, or left-wing, or that he used cocaine; it's that his background is dangerously cosmopolitan... Why would any sensible person go abroad, where they talk funny and you can't get Cap'n Crunch? What is he? Gay, or French, or something?... And this would explain the paradox by which the supposedly patriotic American right consistently attempts to undermine Vietnam veterans (John Kerry, Max Cleland, even John McCain), while lauding those who avoided serving (Bush, Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, the egregious Saxby Chambliss, et al). These guys weren't cowards, you see: unlike Obama, they just loved America too much to leave it...
In a complicated world where we’ve lost the notion that we can assume everybody is aware of a core set of facts, it’s considered rude to point and laugh at someone’s ignorance. But does this apply when that person not only draws attention to that ignorance, but attempts to implicate the rest of us in it?
On Threads a couple of days back, one Melanie J Tait asked: “Remember how we didn’t know the word ‘paparazzi’ before August 1997?” To which there were many responses, most of them variants on “We did, actually.” Several pointed out that the word has its origins in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and was also the title of Jacques Rozier’s 1964 documentary short about the making of Godard’s Le Mépris; its use became ubiquitous during the heyday of tabloid journalism in the 70s and 80s. Very few were actively hostile or contemptuous of Tait’s lack of knowledge; they just said she was wrong. Some charitably pointed out that there was indeed a large spike in usage following the death of Princess Diana but nobody fully supported Tait’s statement because it was empirically untrue (unless the pronoun “we” here refers only to Tait and her immediate circle, in which case a more appropriate response would be, “so what?”)
Tait (who describes herself in her bio as a playwright and screenwriter) could have graciously accepted this as a learning moment. Or she could have ignored the responses, or just deleted her post. But no, she had to double down, with a hefty dose of sarcasm:
I certainly don't remember it being the word used in conversation around photographers and media. But I'm obvs not a linguistic genius like you and several others who've loved remembering which words they knew thirty years ago.
So knowing and remembering are acts of hostility all of a sudden? It reminds me, inevitably, of Donald Trump, who claimed that nobody knew that Lincoln was a Republican, or had even heard of Lesotho. What he meant of course was that he didn’t know these things, or hadn’t until very recently; but he has to claim that nobody else knows it either, because this excuses his own lack of intellectual curiosity and general failure as a sentient member of the human race.
Tait isn’t this bad, obviously. And ignorance isn’t a sin. But ascribing ignorance to others as an act of self-preservation comes pretty close.
For the past couple of years I have been teaching foreigners to speak English, a pursuit that’s far more rewarding and, frankly, easier than what I was doing previously, teaching English-speakers to speak English.
So I was intrigued to see the news that anyone intending to migrate to Britain for work purposes will have to reach a standard equivalent to an English language A-level. Presumably this is one of the policies that Labour hopes will lure back from the bosom of Reform UK voters who become enraged at hearing the language of Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Piers Morgan elbowed out in favour of Urdu, Bulgarian, Farsi or Yoruba. Insisting that incomers can speak to local language to a high standard will encourage integration, harmony and all that lovely Coke commercial stuff, right?
Um, really? As I recall, getting native speakers to jump through the hoops required to pass English language GCSE (the qualification usually taken at 16) is a massive effort and many of them fall flat on their faces. Even to suggest they attempt an A-level (normally taken two years later) would provoke abject ridicule. Indeed, the combined entries for English language and English language/literature A-level last year came to just under 20,000. (In comparison, there were over 100,000 for the various flavours of maths.)
Of course, students could reasonably argue that they don’t need to take an English A-level, because they already speak English very well, thanks for asking. Five minutes on any UK-based news site that permits comments would disabuse you of that argument and, intriguingly, it’s the people who are most vehement about the horrible foreign types coming over here and talking funny who seem to have forgotten what spelling, grammar and punctuation (especially punctuation) they were ever taught. (One recent example: “Well don't Reform 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧you have given us hope at one stage it was like is it worth living but Nigel you are the man Thank you 👏👏👏👏❤️”)
So what will be the effect of importing thousands of migrants who can speak the local language more accurately and mellifluously than the natives? I just imagine them stepping out of immigration at Heathrow, their minds a jumble of cream teas, Harry Potter and the London Eye, asking in cut-glass tones of all the cabbies and bobbies and chirpy Cockney flower sellers they encounter, “Why don’t you speak ENGLISH????”
PS: Of course, George Voskovec got their first, in 12 Angry Men.
Interesting observation from a DJ about what he does and doesn’t play:
My own moral approach has always been to remember that a DJ’s job is to spread joy to every single person in that room. Morrissey has made too many statements seen as hateful for many people to enjoy, I can report. Yet the fact that several 1970s rock stars slept with underage girls doesn’t seem to be an issue for older people’s morality on the dancefloor. I paused playing Lizzo when her former tour dancers accused her of sexual harassment and body shaming, and stopped playing Diplo after allegations of sexual misconduct arose. Their innocence or guilt is oddly immaterial: I just don’t want to even risk that someone on my dancefloor might feel bad, period.
So there is indeed an element of judging the artist rather than the art. But the person who actually plays the music passes the buck to his punters, determining that they would find Bowie’s indiscretions less heinous than Morrissey’s rants and leaving it at that.
But the key line is that “innocence or guilt is oddly immaterial”. If the people who pay his wages think a performer is a wrong ’un, and think thus so forcibly that they won’t enjoy his music, he takes it off the list. It may be a sensible approach in our judgmental age, but I’m not sure I accept his assertion that it’s a moral one.
The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.
I don’t go into politics so much these days, mostly because it makes me sad and angry. But I was interested by what Vivek Ramaswamy, soon to get a plum job in the Trump administration, had to say about American culture, and the response to it:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers. (Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates). More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
And there’s much in there I might agree with. On the other hand, this is also the culture that venerates a semi-literate charlatan like Trump, so without all that intellectual mediocrity, Ramaswamy wouldn’t have his new job.
