Happy Monday one and all. There's so much going on between work and the usual dreadful events in the world that I don't feel capable of expressing it all and anyway, you must be bored with me ranting. Instead, how about a musical interlude - a round-up of what I've been enjoying recently?
Firstly, Euros Childs' latest album. He releases a faux-naif solo album every six months or so, always with a hand-written card tucked inside. I've bought everything all the ex-Gorky's Zygotic Mynci personnel have released since they split up. Nothing's quite like the unhinged Welsh teenage psychedelia they specialised in, but nothing they've done has ever been uninteresting. Annoyingly, Euros never tours near me.
Sticking with Welsh psychedelicists, the people behind Ectogram, Parking Non-Stop and various other groups have released what is for them a rather straight-forward album of lovely melodic songs under the name Spectralate.
crocodile tears from Robert Zyborski on Vimeo.
The follically-challenged chap was relentlessly rude to me about my taste in musics twice a week for ten years when I went to Cob Records, but we're great friends now and I have to admit (though you may not agree) that my tastes have if not improved, at least widened.
I've also recently bought the 4CD Bridget St. John album - a 60s/70s folk-rock singer I'd never come across before. She sings like Nick Drake mixed with Nico and the songs are reflective, thoughtful and lovely. Wish I'd come across her work before. The discs include this French live version - delightful to hear an English person speaking passably in another language for a change.
Radio 3 has been making a slight effort to include more female composers recently, which is good. Not because they should play anything by female composers just because, but because there are lots of really excellent ones who've been shamefully overlooked. R3 introduced me to Rachel Clarke's Viola Sonata: I love violas in general and this is a humdinger.
As it happens, I've bought loads of music by female composers recently so here are some of my favourites by Sally Beamish (more viola), Julia Wolfe and Pauline Oliveros (experimental drone accordion - what's not to like?).
I've also bought the latest New Order album, Music Complete partly because I buy everything they do, but partly because something interesting must be going on if they're referencing musique concréte. But I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, mostly because I've been listening obsessively to Gwenno Saunders' Welsh-language SF-inspired solo album, Y Dydd Olaf. She was in the rather lovely English-language band The Pipettes, but this album is entirely different: electronic, political, futuristic and compelling:
Slowcore heroes Low's new album Ones and Sixes hasn't quite grown on me yet - I'm quite an obsessive follower but this one doesn't have quite the impact so far as the albums I think of as their classics: C'Mon, Drums and Guns and I Could Live in Hope. It may be a grower though.
The final album I've been playing an awful lot is one I'm just not sure about. I went to Andris Nelsons' last concert as conductor of the CBSO, which was marked by a premiere of a new piece by Eriks Esenvalds, the Latvian composer. The piece itself isn't out yet but it was interesting enough to persuade me to buy his orchestral work Liepaja Concerto and one of his choral pieces.
The orchestral one is pretty good - quirky European modernism with a Baltic twist, but Northern Lights is troubling me.
It's just too pretty (I love the glasses though). There are heart-stopping moments of beauty but I'm not convinced that that's what contemporary classical music should be doing. It's where the post-minimalists went wrong, and Esenvalds' choral music is at least partly within the Baltic 'mystic minimalism' strand. I can see where it came from: even extreme modernists like Penderecki went from this to this as religion countered the version of communism in which they grew up. I'm not against beauty per se: we need it, but I do think that modernism in music (and literature) attempted to represent the world as it is – ugly, dissonant, often incomprehensible – rather than as we'd like it to be, and that seriousness requires us to confront what is (not just modernists: hurray from Oliver Cromwell demanding his portrait be painted 'warts and all'). The mystical minimalists (see also non-Baltic Lauridsen and Whitacre and here for a fan's view) moved a musical language on from one which exposed the beauty of structures to one which returned to a form of magical thinking (if I'm not careful I'll start throwing around words like ineffable), or of propaganda, despite often being a pointed response to propaganda.
It's like 21st-century novels which tell a nice neat story about comprehensible coherent characters who overcome challenges to live happily ever after, all within 250 pages. Hard to do with a clear conscience in the midst of decay, decadence, mass murder and environmental degradation. And yet that's what we all (me included) read and listen to most of the time.
Which is all a very long way from Esenvalds, but what I think I'm trying to say is that his choral music is too easy, too comfortable. I know we all need to relax occasionally but I distrust escapism as reactionary. You don't have to be miserable to be serious: lots of humour does it too (I liked Hope: a Tragedy as an example of serious hilarity) but I think my definition of Literature or Culture in general is work which refuses to reinforce the artistic status quo, even if only in small ways. It should unsettle, or nudge your perceptions in some way. Gwenno's Y Dydd Olaf does that musically, lyrically (for non-Welsh speakers, just by being in Welsh) and politically. While existing in the far reaches of 'high culture', Esenvalds manifestly does not.
And now I'm going to listen to Pantera's Vulgar Display of Power as an antidote.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Monday, 19 October 2015
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
Separated at birth? Sajid Javid and the Ferengi
In the wake of Culture Secretary Maria Miller's graceless resignation, she was replaced by Sajid Javid, an immensely rich financial speculator and plutocrat with zero (seriously, I looked long and hard) interest or experience of culture. The best the newspapers could manage was that he likes the film It's A Wonderful Life and Star Trek films.
It's A Wonderful Life is a poor and ironic choice for Javid to claim affection for. It's the story of George Bailey a small-town building society operator whose care for his neighbours leads to bankruptcy at the hands of Henry Potter, a thieving mega-bank operator. As he contemplates suicide, an angel shows him what a poor and broken place his town would have been without him. Persuaded, he rallies round and is repaid with the faith of his neighbours.
Sajid Javid became a vice-president of Chase Manhattan at the age of 25, and soon moved to Deutsche Bank as a director, then managing director and soon Global Head (appropriately, given his appearance) of Emerging Markets Structuring, before moving to Singapore to run the credit trading, equity convertibles, commodities and Asian private equity markets.
In short, Sajid Javid is no George Bailey. If you wanted a poster child for the global economic crash, for mass unemployment, privatisation, the erosion of the state in economic planning and the destruction of all the things George stands for (community, compassion, empathy, sensible economics), Sajid is your man. He's the living embodiment of the tensions at the heart of Conservatism: while they promote small-town values at home, their economic strategies tear down communities ruthlessly.
Turning to Star Trek, I'm also confused. In most of the ST worlds, money has been abolished as the cause of strife and inefficiency. The Earth of Star Trek appears to have abandoned money at the same time it abolished war. Only unenlightened and vulgar species pursue riches instead of knowledge, progress and harmony. I can only think that Sajid is rooting for the Ferengi, a species from the rather poor Deep Space Nine franchise.
Coincidentally, they look very like Sajid Javid.
It's A Wonderful Life is a poor and ironic choice for Javid to claim affection for. It's the story of George Bailey a small-town building society operator whose care for his neighbours leads to bankruptcy at the hands of Henry Potter, a thieving mega-bank operator. As he contemplates suicide, an angel shows him what a poor and broken place his town would have been without him. Persuaded, he rallies round and is repaid with the faith of his neighbours.
Sajid Javid became a vice-president of Chase Manhattan at the age of 25, and soon moved to Deutsche Bank as a director, then managing director and soon Global Head (appropriately, given his appearance) of Emerging Markets Structuring, before moving to Singapore to run the credit trading, equity convertibles, commodities and Asian private equity markets.
In short, Sajid Javid is no George Bailey. If you wanted a poster child for the global economic crash, for mass unemployment, privatisation, the erosion of the state in economic planning and the destruction of all the things George stands for (community, compassion, empathy, sensible economics), Sajid is your man. He's the living embodiment of the tensions at the heart of Conservatism: while they promote small-town values at home, their economic strategies tear down communities ruthlessly.
Turning to Star Trek, I'm also confused. In most of the ST worlds, money has been abolished as the cause of strife and inefficiency. The Earth of Star Trek appears to have abandoned money at the same time it abolished war. Only unenlightened and vulgar species pursue riches instead of knowledge, progress and harmony. I can only think that Sajid is rooting for the Ferengi, a species from the rather poor Deep Space Nine franchise.
"They're greedy, misogynistic, untrustworthy little trolls, and I wouldn't turn my back on one of them for a second."
"Neither would I. But once you accept that, you'll find they can be a lot of fun."
- Kira Nerys and Jadzia Dax, on Ferengi
As Quark once put it, "there is nothing beyond greed. Greed is the purest, most noble of emotions." Finally, the 10th Rule of Acquisition states that "greed is eternal."The Ferengi are ruthless in their pursuit of Latinum. They despise sentiment, culture and community, happy only when they're selling their grandmothers for cold hard cash. Often the objects of narratorial satire, we're not meant to be rooting for them.
Coincidentally, they look very like Sajid Javid.
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| Sajid Javid, Minister for Culture |
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| Quark, a ruthless Ferengi speculator |
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Art meets the Iron Curtain
I came across this cartoon today. Not sure the punch line does much except to me a bit snobbish about LS Lowry and British art in general, but it's historically accurate.
The Soviet Union had a 'workerist' attitude towards art and culture. The products of bourgeois pre-revolutionary cultures were admired and preserved - architecture, ballet, music, paintings, literature, but contemporary work was judged according to whether it fitted the state's concept of progressive values. So all workers had to be heroic, all employers damnable, all social problems soluble through revolution. What literature would be once the Revolution had liberated everybody was hard to say - boring, I suspect. Certainly the 'proletarian literature' authorised by the Soviet state was bloody awful, though some of the visual art was stunning. Architecture swung between jaw-droppingly science-fiction amazing and soul-crushingly terrible.
In the UK, plenty of bad writers were published because they were workers or pro-Communist, but many worker-authors of high skill were discovered: amongst them Lewis Jones, whose novels Cwmardy and We Live were presented as orthodox Communist propaganda. Actually, my PhD argues that they're actually a very subtle and intelligent critique of Stalinist Communism as well as of capitalism. They're stuffed with odd sex-and-death stuff too - not the kind of thing tolerated by the Culture Commissars.
Anyway, I digress. The cartoon is interesting because it refers to the Cultural Cold War, in which the CIA founded and funded lots of cultural bodies and magazines, such as Encounter, a very popular English-language current affairs/arts magazine. They used front groups and charities to put on touring art shows and concerts, all designed to show socialists inside and out of the Soviet Union that Western artists were free to do whatever weird stuff they wanted - Jackson Pollock was one unwitting tool of this policy. The Soviets had bagged realism, the CIA seemed to think, and so abstract expressionism must necessarily be the property of capitalism. Needless to say, lots of the artists promoted by the CIA weren't very good: just useful.
If you'd like to read more about this weird element of the Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid The Piper? is an excellent and readable introduction, as is Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. As they both used musical metaphors, I'll just point out that both the American and Soviet security services thought the Beatles were subversives.
The Soviet Union had a 'workerist' attitude towards art and culture. The products of bourgeois pre-revolutionary cultures were admired and preserved - architecture, ballet, music, paintings, literature, but contemporary work was judged according to whether it fitted the state's concept of progressive values. So all workers had to be heroic, all employers damnable, all social problems soluble through revolution. What literature would be once the Revolution had liberated everybody was hard to say - boring, I suspect. Certainly the 'proletarian literature' authorised by the Soviet state was bloody awful, though some of the visual art was stunning. Architecture swung between jaw-droppingly science-fiction amazing and soul-crushingly terrible.
In the UK, plenty of bad writers were published because they were workers or pro-Communist, but many worker-authors of high skill were discovered: amongst them Lewis Jones, whose novels Cwmardy and We Live were presented as orthodox Communist propaganda. Actually, my PhD argues that they're actually a very subtle and intelligent critique of Stalinist Communism as well as of capitalism. They're stuffed with odd sex-and-death stuff too - not the kind of thing tolerated by the Culture Commissars.
Anyway, I digress. The cartoon is interesting because it refers to the Cultural Cold War, in which the CIA founded and funded lots of cultural bodies and magazines, such as Encounter, a very popular English-language current affairs/arts magazine. They used front groups and charities to put on touring art shows and concerts, all designed to show socialists inside and out of the Soviet Union that Western artists were free to do whatever weird stuff they wanted - Jackson Pollock was one unwitting tool of this policy. The Soviets had bagged realism, the CIA seemed to think, and so abstract expressionism must necessarily be the property of capitalism. Needless to say, lots of the artists promoted by the CIA weren't very good: just useful.
If you'd like to read more about this weird element of the Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders' Who Paid The Piper? is an excellent and readable introduction, as is Hugh Wilford's The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America. As they both used musical metaphors, I'll just point out that both the American and Soviet security services thought the Beatles were subversives.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
Time to get off the cultural pot
I posted a piece today on cultural forms which leave me completely cold. Which now strikes me as being rather negative. So for balance, here are the things which do excite me. Some are 'highbrow', some are 'lowbrow'. Some are products of the capitalist system I so detest.
While you read, here's a song that's going round my head a lot at the moment, This Mortal Coil's Song to the Siren and their cover of Roy Harper's Another Day. I'd have hated them as a teen: tastes do change.
1. Church music and architecture. Even though I've not the tiniest shred of spiritual belief, resent the disinformation and cultural power of religion, they do (did?) have good taste in composers and architects.
2. Teen dramas and comedy. My So-Called Life. Buffy. The Inbetweeners. Degrassi Junior High.
3. Mid-afternoon TV. Did anyone watch Ed on Channel 4: slushy, self-congratulatory, often smug, always great? Cagney and Lacey is brilliant. Jeeves and Wooster.
4. Science fiction. Once, all SF. Now, I can't stand fantasy with the possible exception of LeGuin, Gwyneth Jones and Tepper, though the generic boundaries are unclear. I do adore 'hard SF' though: the stuff that deals with the cultural and political effects of technology. Books and music.
5. Minimalist and atonal classical music. But there is also a softer side: Vaughan Williams, Stanford, Bax and co. are tuneful, somewhat old-fashioned and altogether wonderful. And of course Bach's Cello Suites are the creates pieces every written.
6. Campus novels, which is very self-regarding. Also literary parodies, which are smug. I also collect an awful lot of children's literature. Given I haven't any children, it implies that I'm emotionally arrested.
7. Conservative, expensively tailored clothes. Yes, I know I look like a slob exclusively dressed by Oxfam, but I've even got one tailor-made suit, and some shoes which are well above my pay-grade. I'd love a 1940s wardrobe.
8. Old films. Screwball comedies, SF, westerns, noir, WW2 propaganda films (Casablanca is my all time favourite, but I'll watch anything with a Hepburn (preferably Katherine), Bacall, Leigh, Bogart or Stewart in it.
9. British films. Brief Encounter. The Titfield Thunderbolt. Passport to Pimlico. The Mouse That Roared. The Man In the White Suit. The School For Scoundrels. Carry-On. Holiday On The Buses. The Doctor In The… series.
9. British films. Brief Encounter. The Titfield Thunderbolt. Passport to Pimlico. The Mouse That Roared. The Man In the White Suit. The School For Scoundrels. Carry-On. Holiday On The Buses. The Doctor In The… series.
9. Quiz shows. Mastermind, University Challenge, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?.
10. Comics. But not cool ones. Unfashionable ones. Green Lantern. Atom Man. Etc.
11. Cricket, fencing, Stoke City, rugby league. GAA. Cycling.
12. Whiny underpowered indie music. Tiny record labels. Side-projects. Limited editions on coloured vinyl. Memorising the messages engraved in the run-off groove of Smiths singles.
13. Pork scratchings. Western civilisation's lowest point. Did I mention I have some scratchings-based chocolate?
14. Dumb pop songs. Symposium's Farewell to Twilight. Van Halen's Jump. Terrorvision's Oblivion. Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now. Camper van Beethoven's Take The Skinheads Bowling. L7's Pretend We're Dead. Devo's Mongoloid. Jane Wiedlin's Rush Hour (she was also in Star Trek IV and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. All of Shatner and Nimoy's musical output. Songs from the Simpsons.
15. Star Trek. Not Star Wars. Falken's Maze. Mall Rats.
14. Dumb pop songs. Symposium's Farewell to Twilight. Van Halen's Jump. Terrorvision's Oblivion. Tiffany's I Think We're Alone Now. Camper van Beethoven's Take The Skinheads Bowling. L7's Pretend We're Dead. Devo's Mongoloid. Jane Wiedlin's Rush Hour (she was also in Star Trek IV and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. All of Shatner and Nimoy's musical output. Songs from the Simpsons.
15. Star Trek. Not Star Wars. Falken's Maze. Mall Rats.
What a sad life.
What leaves you cold?
I guess we've all got our cultural blind spots - activities or genres that you just don't get. It might be that you've grown up in a context which didn't expose you to particular activities, or or some more mysterious process.
I was thinking about this because I've just read The Smiler With The Knife. It's a political crime thriller from 1939. The author is Nicholas Blake, who is actually C. Day-Lewis, the wonderful Anglo-Irish poet (father of the actor). So I thought it would be great: good author, my period, my interests (it's about smashing a fascist coup), good title (it's a Chaucer quote): the signs were good.
Unfortunately, it just didn't do anything for me. There were some neat turns of phrase here and there, but the characterisation was poor, the dialogue awful, the plot twists nonsensical - and the politics confused. Perhaps it's just a bad book by the terms of the genre, but I have to say that detective thrillers in general leave me cold, as do crime, 'action' and romance novels. It's not that I'm agin genre literature: I read a lot of science fiction, and devour John Le Carré. So why is it that particular cultural forms are closed to me? I'm not marooned in my past: my tastes have changed over the years, but some things are beyond me, and not just from snobbery.
A short list:
Ballet - despite loving much classical music and understanding where ballet comes from.
Musicals and light opera (with the honourable exception of South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut.
Contemporary interpretive dance.
Horse racing.
Tennis.
Autobiographies
Reality TV.
Fashion.
Beach holidays.
Dance music/techno whatever it's called now.
R+B
Rap.
The Romantic composers.
Golf.
Horror novels and films. Too susceptible. I hate them. I'll never get rid of various scenes from Candyman.
BUT: I'm not saying that any or all of these things are stupid or rubbish. That would be arrogant and blinkered. And it's certainly true that the categories I like also contain a lot of what I'd consider junk. Instead, these are things that just don't do it for me. Take the electronica world, for instance. I'm addicted to the minimalists: Glass, Reich, Adams, Andriessen, Donaghy and more, so you'd think I would go for LFO and their spod allies, but I don't. Not one bit. It's not their failing: it's mine.
How about you? And how will you convince me to reassess my views on any of these?
I was thinking about this because I've just read The Smiler With The Knife. It's a political crime thriller from 1939. The author is Nicholas Blake, who is actually C. Day-Lewis, the wonderful Anglo-Irish poet (father of the actor). So I thought it would be great: good author, my period, my interests (it's about smashing a fascist coup), good title (it's a Chaucer quote): the signs were good.
Unfortunately, it just didn't do anything for me. There were some neat turns of phrase here and there, but the characterisation was poor, the dialogue awful, the plot twists nonsensical - and the politics confused. Perhaps it's just a bad book by the terms of the genre, but I have to say that detective thrillers in general leave me cold, as do crime, 'action' and romance novels. It's not that I'm agin genre literature: I read a lot of science fiction, and devour John Le Carré. So why is it that particular cultural forms are closed to me? I'm not marooned in my past: my tastes have changed over the years, but some things are beyond me, and not just from snobbery.
A short list:
Ballet - despite loving much classical music and understanding where ballet comes from.
Musicals and light opera (with the honourable exception of South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut.
Contemporary interpretive dance.
Horse racing.
Tennis.
Autobiographies
Reality TV.
Fashion.
Beach holidays.
Dance music/techno whatever it's called now.
R+B
Rap.
The Romantic composers.
Golf.
Horror novels and films. Too susceptible. I hate them. I'll never get rid of various scenes from Candyman.
BUT: I'm not saying that any or all of these things are stupid or rubbish. That would be arrogant and blinkered. And it's certainly true that the categories I like also contain a lot of what I'd consider junk. Instead, these are things that just don't do it for me. Take the electronica world, for instance. I'm addicted to the minimalists: Glass, Reich, Adams, Andriessen, Donaghy and more, so you'd think I would go for LFO and their spod allies, but I don't. Not one bit. It's not their failing: it's mine.
How about you? And how will you convince me to reassess my views on any of these?
Friday, 3 December 2010
Brrrr
Shivering in my freezing flat, I was reminded that warmth is very much a class issue, and remembered this from Eric Gill's rambling 1930s book, Typography. How would you like to live in a household shopping at Robinson and Cleaver, Belfast?
He also has these stirring words, which mean even more in an economy predicated on turning our workforce into mechanical adjuncts on minimum wages:
There are echoes of Marx (alienation) of Arts and Crafts and of Tressell's Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist here. What strikes me is that of course the working-class occupations have been reduced to drone-work, but so have the jobs which we self-deceptively call professions. Here I am in a warm office surrounded by books, smugly thinking that I'm free, but it's not true. We're under constant electronic and intellectual surveillance, some of which has been internalised (Foucault had plenty to say about internalised discipline). Our work is being reduced to that which can be conveyed electronically: outcomes and metrics which any decent teacher would reject as reductive, philistine and ridiculous. Anything important I manage to discover in conversation with my students can't be expressed on a module evaluation form, a flowchart or a statistic. Intellectual labour isn't like that - but the institution thinks that measurable things are essential and unmeasurable things are beside the point. The modern lecturer isn't an artist, and nor is the modern student. They should be, but the Browne Report, Cameron, Cable, Clegg, Gove and all their friends would respond to the question of whether they should be with a resounding OF COURSE NOT.
Which is why we're all in it together. As long as 'it' refers to a big bucket of intellectual, philosophical, cultural and economic shit.
'Best blankets at 80s per pair, blankets 'for the spare room' at 65s, blankets 'for servants' bedrooms' at 25s, and blankets 'for charitable purposes' at 18s'.
He also has these stirring words, which mean even more in an economy predicated on turning our workforce into mechanical adjuncts on minimum wages:
'…the most monstrous characteristic of our time is that the methods of manufacture… of which we are proud are such as make it impossible for the ordinary workman to be an artist… That the ordinary workman should or could be an artist, could be a man whom we could trust with any sort of responsibility for the work he does… is an idea now widely held to be ridiculous; and the widespreadness of this opinion proves my point as well as I could wish. When I say no ordinary workman is an artist, no one will say I am lying; on the contrary, everyone will say: Of course not'.
There are echoes of Marx (alienation) of Arts and Crafts and of Tressell's Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist here. What strikes me is that of course the working-class occupations have been reduced to drone-work, but so have the jobs which we self-deceptively call professions. Here I am in a warm office surrounded by books, smugly thinking that I'm free, but it's not true. We're under constant electronic and intellectual surveillance, some of which has been internalised (Foucault had plenty to say about internalised discipline). Our work is being reduced to that which can be conveyed electronically: outcomes and metrics which any decent teacher would reject as reductive, philistine and ridiculous. Anything important I manage to discover in conversation with my students can't be expressed on a module evaluation form, a flowchart or a statistic. Intellectual labour isn't like that - but the institution thinks that measurable things are essential and unmeasurable things are beside the point. The modern lecturer isn't an artist, and nor is the modern student. They should be, but the Browne Report, Cameron, Cable, Clegg, Gove and all their friends would respond to the question of whether they should be with a resounding OF COURSE NOT.
Which is why we're all in it together. As long as 'it' refers to a big bucket of intellectual, philosophical, cultural and economic shit.
Thursday, 13 May 2010
Lost in a cultural void
Trapped between election depression and marking hell, I feel my 'hinterland' is disappearing rapidly. I'm reading dissertations and non-fiction (still The Spirit Level, I'm afraid), and my research is gathering dust. Plashing Vole is becoming a wasteland of politics: buttock-faced Cameron is taking over my life.
One dissertation reminded me of a brilliant example of Daily Mail evil. The UK edition campaigned against giving teenage girls the cervical cancer vaccine, because of 'health fears'. Meanwhile, the Irish edition (usually a different front page and nothing else) campaigned, er, for giving the vaccine to teenage girls. Full coverage here.
So come on, readers, distract me. Recommend books, music and TV for the moments I snatch between awarding F grades. I get home after 10 and gormlessly stare at whatever's on. Soon I won't be able to tell the difference between Newsnight and Mitchell and Webb, or whatever else is on 'Dave'. Catching celebrity polluter Clarkson on an old QI yesterday made me apoplectically angry. But that takes me back to BumFace: they're mates.
Heeeeeeeeelllllllpppppp mmmmmeeeeeeee…
One dissertation reminded me of a brilliant example of Daily Mail evil. The UK edition campaigned against giving teenage girls the cervical cancer vaccine, because of 'health fears'. Meanwhile, the Irish edition (usually a different front page and nothing else) campaigned, er, for giving the vaccine to teenage girls. Full coverage here.
So come on, readers, distract me. Recommend books, music and TV for the moments I snatch between awarding F grades. I get home after 10 and gormlessly stare at whatever's on. Soon I won't be able to tell the difference between Newsnight and Mitchell and Webb, or whatever else is on 'Dave'. Catching celebrity polluter Clarkson on an old QI yesterday made me apoplectically angry. But that takes me back to BumFace: they're mates.
Heeeeeeeeelllllllpppppp mmmmmeeeeeeee…
Tuesday, 13 April 2010
For your pleasure…
Don't know what to say about this extract from a Czech animation of Alice in Wonderland other than it's very disturbing and seems to be about death. It's by Jan Švankmajer (via BoingBoing)
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
Mr. Chips is in the building
How's the afternoon gone? It was light last time I looked up, and now it's gloomy. I've had a very stimulating couple of hours: droned through a lecture to my captive audience (well done, man who turns up 50 minutes into a 60 minute lecture), then had a really enjoyable seminar. It was one of those afternoons where everything goes right, thanks to a lively and interested group of students.
We decided to get into the arguments about what and who defines 'Culture' by presenting the students with this website, on which people have nominated 'icons' of 'Englishness'. 'Englishness' is a massively contentious term, as befits a constructed category, and as we discussed the choices, really interesting arguments ensued, based on history, class, ethnicity, region… very enjoyable, though I did struggle with the argument that the Bible is an astrological conspiracy!
Have a look at the site and see what you think. Deciding on the nationality of tea and tea-drinking is quite vexed. Some things I see as British, or regional (the Routemaster Bus, the Angel of the North) whereas others are a product of England's highly multicultural history.
We decided to get into the arguments about what and who defines 'Culture' by presenting the students with this website, on which people have nominated 'icons' of 'Englishness'. 'Englishness' is a massively contentious term, as befits a constructed category, and as we discussed the choices, really interesting arguments ensued, based on history, class, ethnicity, region… very enjoyable, though I did struggle with the argument that the Bible is an astrological conspiracy!
Have a look at the site and see what you think. Deciding on the nationality of tea and tea-drinking is quite vexed. Some things I see as British, or regional (the Routemaster Bus, the Angel of the North) whereas others are a product of England's highly multicultural history.
Tuesday twittering
Morning all. Not much from me today - I'm writing a lecture on What Is Cultural Studies for this afternoon. It's a big subject with lots of tempting tangents. I'm trying not to talk about the Frankfurt School for the whole time…
On the up side: my new Mac has shipped. Mmmmmm
I'm listening to the wonderful sounds of Angie Hart. Older readers may recognise her from Frente! the 90s band who had a big (indie) hit with an ethereal cover of New Order's 'Bizarre Love Triangle'. I love New Order and collect cover versions of their songs, and I also have a massive soft spot for Australian dreampop: especially Paradise Motel, Huon, The Cat's Miaow and Hydroplane.
On the up side: my new Mac has shipped. Mmmmmm
I'm listening to the wonderful sounds of Angie Hart. Older readers may recognise her from Frente! the 90s band who had a big (indie) hit with an ethereal cover of New Order's 'Bizarre Love Triangle'. I love New Order and collect cover versions of their songs, and I also have a massive soft spot for Australian dreampop: especially Paradise Motel, Huon, The Cat's Miaow and Hydroplane.
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Ich bin Frankfurter
If you're not familiar with Melvyn Bragg, he's a soi-disant public intellectual with massive hair and a smug air of false humility. To me, he rivals Jools (Julian really) Holland in the slappability stakes.
However, his Radio 4 show about the history of ideas, In Our Time, sometimes comes up trumps. Today's discussion was about the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others), from whose ideas my own critical theory approach is descended. They were a bunch of radical post-Marxist Germans in the 1930s who tried to work out why the proletariat couldn't see they obvious oppressiveness of capitalism (they weren't keen on the Soviet Union either). They were horrified by the uses to which popular culture could be put (having observed Nazi propaganda) and by the popular culture they found when they fled to the US: to them, popular culture (the Culture Industry as they called it) generated false consciousness, leading the proletariat to consider their lives under capitalism perfect, or at least natural.
They despised pop culture because it wasn't oppositional: true art, they believed, should remind us what's missing, what life could be like. So they were connected with Freud on regression and to the avant-garde literary and musical movements. Like those creative groups, they believed that 'pretty' or sentimental art was conservative and dishonest: how could a composer write pretty tunes after the Somme, or Auschwitz? To do so was to deny reality on a cultural and personal level.
It's a hard message. It suggests that we should never settle for comforting or relaxing cultural products: no It's a Wonderful Life, no Notting Hill (no great loss), no Clueless, no Elgar nor Gilbert and Sullivan. They were for 'high' culture: Berg, modern art and the like. I confess to being an unrigorous Frankfurtian: I'm postmodern enough to enjoy popular culture in some of its forms, but I'm uncomfortable enough to distrust the lazy assertion that pop culture = democracy and high culture = reactionary. I'll certainly be taking a Frankfurt approach for my upcoming Anne of Green Gables paper.
If you're still with me: you can see what they're on about if you consider 'celebrity' culture. The Frankfurters had come from Germany, where film was the primary mode of propaganda, creating an idealised image of a dictator who would solve all Germans' problems. Arriving in Hollywood, they found an art form which wasn't oppositional but seemed to be a conformist dream factory. Central to this was the creation of 'stars' from fairly ordinary people - stars who persuaded audiences to endorse the values of conventional consumerism.
What would the Frankfurters make of Big Brother, Pop Idol or any of the other 'reality' shows (and the papers and magazines which make a living amplifying these shows)? They'd be both unsurprised and horrified. They'd be unsurprised by the dominance of 'celebrity' (is there a single issue which hasn't had a 'celebrity' slapped on top of it and a TV show created?) and they'd be horrified by the extension of 'celebrity' culture to the populace via Big Brother and the like. There's no room for opposition, but there's also no room in popular culture for difference of any kind: we're all assumed to want the same things as 'celebrities' and we know how to get there - by acting the idiot for the amusement of the nation. Even the sporadic bursts of resistance are manufactured: so-called oppositional voices in the media use the same tactics of hype and outrage to get their points over, thus becoming part of the system rather than standing outside it.
Doomed, I tell you, we're all doomed. Just keep reading Heat and I'll go away. Or read Baudrillard, who thinks it's all a game and there's nothing we can (or should) do about it. You could listen to In Our Time though - the podcast will be available in a few days.
However, his Radio 4 show about the history of ideas, In Our Time, sometimes comes up trumps. Today's discussion was about the Frankfurt School (Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and others), from whose ideas my own critical theory approach is descended. They were a bunch of radical post-Marxist Germans in the 1930s who tried to work out why the proletariat couldn't see they obvious oppressiveness of capitalism (they weren't keen on the Soviet Union either). They were horrified by the uses to which popular culture could be put (having observed Nazi propaganda) and by the popular culture they found when they fled to the US: to them, popular culture (the Culture Industry as they called it) generated false consciousness, leading the proletariat to consider their lives under capitalism perfect, or at least natural.
They despised pop culture because it wasn't oppositional: true art, they believed, should remind us what's missing, what life could be like. So they were connected with Freud on regression and to the avant-garde literary and musical movements. Like those creative groups, they believed that 'pretty' or sentimental art was conservative and dishonest: how could a composer write pretty tunes after the Somme, or Auschwitz? To do so was to deny reality on a cultural and personal level.
It's a hard message. It suggests that we should never settle for comforting or relaxing cultural products: no It's a Wonderful Life, no Notting Hill (no great loss), no Clueless, no Elgar nor Gilbert and Sullivan. They were for 'high' culture: Berg, modern art and the like. I confess to being an unrigorous Frankfurtian: I'm postmodern enough to enjoy popular culture in some of its forms, but I'm uncomfortable enough to distrust the lazy assertion that pop culture = democracy and high culture = reactionary. I'll certainly be taking a Frankfurt approach for my upcoming Anne of Green Gables paper.
If you're still with me: you can see what they're on about if you consider 'celebrity' culture. The Frankfurters had come from Germany, where film was the primary mode of propaganda, creating an idealised image of a dictator who would solve all Germans' problems. Arriving in Hollywood, they found an art form which wasn't oppositional but seemed to be a conformist dream factory. Central to this was the creation of 'stars' from fairly ordinary people - stars who persuaded audiences to endorse the values of conventional consumerism.
What would the Frankfurters make of Big Brother, Pop Idol or any of the other 'reality' shows (and the papers and magazines which make a living amplifying these shows)? They'd be both unsurprised and horrified. They'd be unsurprised by the dominance of 'celebrity' (is there a single issue which hasn't had a 'celebrity' slapped on top of it and a TV show created?) and they'd be horrified by the extension of 'celebrity' culture to the populace via Big Brother and the like. There's no room for opposition, but there's also no room in popular culture for difference of any kind: we're all assumed to want the same things as 'celebrities' and we know how to get there - by acting the idiot for the amusement of the nation. Even the sporadic bursts of resistance are manufactured: so-called oppositional voices in the media use the same tactics of hype and outrage to get their points over, thus becoming part of the system rather than standing outside it.
Doomed, I tell you, we're all doomed. Just keep reading Heat and I'll go away. Or read Baudrillard, who thinks it's all a game and there's nothing we can (or should) do about it. You could listen to In Our Time though - the podcast will be available in a few days.
Tuesday, 8 December 2009
Order of the Vole: Ronan Tynan
Dermot Desmond, a businessman of the most revolting kind (tax exile, brash, selfish capitalist, asset-stripper, financial conjuror: exactly the breed who sunk Ireland's economy) has proposed a 'global university of the arts' to revive Ireland's fortunes.
All well and good you might think. However, The Kerrywoman has sent me a letter from the Irish Times which nails Desmond's twisting duplicity (and that of the political class which encouraged these chisellers) perfectly:
Ronan Tynan: you sir, are The Plashing Vole's Hero of the Week.
All well and good you might think. However, The Kerrywoman has sent me a letter from the Irish Times which nails Desmond's twisting duplicity (and that of the political class which encouraged these chisellers) perfectly:
Madam, – Dermot Desmond, when making his proposal for “a global university of culture and the arts” suggests that the unique Irish spirit is “undefeatable”; and while I agree with the latter, I regret he did not add if we all put our shoulder to the wheel (Front page, December 5th).
In case Mr Desmond, as one of the country’s leading tax exiles, has not noticed, we already have a number of potentially world-class cultural institutions, and they all share one thing in common – they have sustained, and are about to sustain further brutal cutbacks in State funds because of the collapse in tax revenue. The best thing he could do at the moment if he wants Ireland to reach its full potential in this area is to start paying tax like the rest of us.
Indeed, what was even more depressing about his proposal is that it reminds us that we live in a country where paying tax for the super rich is optional, with the first of the 163 published names he wrote to being Bono and U2, who also, coincidentally, moved the core of their empire out of Ireland to reduce their tax bills.
But should anyone have the right to become an “exile” in their own country for tax purposes? More to the point, with our country virtually bankrupt, does any member of the super rich have a right to hold an Irish passport if their families are living here, and they are claiming to be “exiles” for tax purposes, when they are in the papers more frequently than their peers, who are paying tax?
Surely the culture that makes such anti-social behaviour possible has contributed massively to the horrendous financial mess we find ourselves in at the moment? In the budget, the Minister for Finance must address this scandal. – Yours, etc,
RONAN TYNAN,
Blackrock,
Co Dublin.
Ronan Tynan: you sir, are The Plashing Vole's Hero of the Week.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Congratulations?
Emma and I went for a drink last night to celebrate her seventh anniversary of immigrating to this great nation. I like to think she blended in well, fitted out in a lovely bowler hat and cricket whites, tucking into salt and vinegar Yorkshire scratchings and discussing the routes we took to the pub. That about sums up Britishness, doesn't it? Doesn't it?
Monday, 19 October 2009
Welcome to the book cave
It's a cultured week. Despite having an enormous amount of dispiriting work to do, I'm seeing Frank Turner tonight (meant to be very good), going to the Manchester Blog Awards to see if Cynical Ben and various other friends win, then to the Anish Kapoor exhibition in London, which will no doubt make me very, very angry - not at the artwork (probably) but at the general air of foppish superiority which pervades such events.
My new flat is gradually getting more organised - I even hosted post-histrionics drinks there on Friday night. Some new pictures here.
My new flat is gradually getting more organised - I even hosted post-histrionics drinks there on Friday night. Some new pictures here.
The rhino is part of a set dressing - apart from some heavily annotated books, it's all I have from my dead English teacher, Mike Caswell - a very great man.
Laura gave me Marvin - now I've finally found a place he'd like.
Enter the book cavern
My 1971 Soviet poster commemorating a decade since Gagarin's flight (and my degree certificates)
Cynical Ben and his Map Twat groomsmen
One of a pair of Michael Portillo Roman Salute bookends, courtesy of Neal
My paltry achievements. The figurine isn't an Oscar. It reads 'Least Worst Best Man', and is from Cynical Ben.
All's right with the world
Well, obviously it isn't, but I've had a good few days after the intense pressure of last week. The sun's shining and it's a beautiful crisp autumn day. Leaves are piling up and the chill is invigorating.
Added to that, I've been to the theatre with my friends and then had a weekend in beautiful North Wales with more friends.
The Revenger's Tragedy was… interesting. The play itself is dark, bloody and malevolent - brilliant. The production was… rubbish. Very poor acting for the most part, as though melodramatic lines required melodramatic acting (or in some cases, speaking the lines as though they were in an unfamiliar and unpleasant language). The set consisted of a curtain and four chairs. More than a third of the audience left at the interval, including one of my many bosses, but not including, unfortunately, the drunk posh schoolchildren who talked loudly throughout, despite my feisty chum Hilary requesting them to 'cut it out, arseholes'! After that - a fine curry and a nightcap at my place, where my library was criticised for its shortage of Shelley (guilty).
Added to that, I've been to the theatre with my friends and then had a weekend in beautiful North Wales with more friends.
The Revenger's Tragedy was… interesting. The play itself is dark, bloody and malevolent - brilliant. The production was… rubbish. Very poor acting for the most part, as though melodramatic lines required melodramatic acting (or in some cases, speaking the lines as though they were in an unfamiliar and unpleasant language). The set consisted of a curtain and four chairs. More than a third of the audience left at the interval, including one of my many bosses, but not including, unfortunately, the drunk posh schoolchildren who talked loudly throughout, despite my feisty chum Hilary requesting them to 'cut it out, arseholes'! After that - a fine curry and a nightcap at my place, where my library was criticised for its shortage of Shelley (guilty).
Thursday, 10 September 2009
Take a strong draught of Meades
I'm agitating to get Jonathan Meades an honorary doctorate next year. What do you think? He's the sharp-suited, sunglassed, freakish architecture fan, food writer, offbeat Victorianist and cultural historian who alone justifies the licence fee. He even wrote presented a documentary about Birmingham called Heart By-Pass.
Watch some of his work at the Meades Shrine. His books include Filthy English, English Extremists, and Incest and Morris Dancing. Documentaries include: Jerry Building: Unholy Relics of the Third Reich, Queen Victoria died in 1901 but is alive and well today, Surrealism and Magnetic North, in which he explored the cultures of Northern Europe, to stunning effect.
He's also a leading secularist and humanist.
Here's a taste of Heart By-Pass:
Wednesday, 12 August 2009
Manichaean…
As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.
How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).
Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.
On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.
Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Brown paper parcels tied up with string…
Happy Bastille Day - how I love sharing a birthday with a purge of the idle rich.
I went straight to work from my parents today, and was greeted by two wondrous things. The first was a massive pile of parcels: seemingly all the books I've ordered recently have come in the same delivery. OK, it looks like I've bought myself a load of birthday presents, but I'm still childishly excited by opening parcels and smelling new paper.
One of the books was To Hell With Culture: Anarchism and Twentieth-Century Literature edited by H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight, the latter of whom was one of my PhD external examiners. Funny that to buy the book at its cheapest (£25 second hand), it had to go from Wales to India and then be sent to me… Coincidentally, Knight wrote the definitive 'biography' of Robin Hood, and another of the books which arrived today was Adam Thorpe's revisionist Hodd. The others were the massive pile of OUP sale books (on medieval literature, modernism and the Victorians), Kiberd's new book on Joyce's Ulysses, and most wonderfully, the fourth volume of the Moomins strip cartoons. Just as a physical object, Drawn and Quarterly (PDF sample on that page) have produced a thing of beauty.
The other weird and wondrous thing this morning was receiving an email from Hilary Wright. It took me a few minutes to work out that this was my sister, returned from honeymoon and starting a new life with a new name. Regardless of your views on marriage and surnames, it felt like a significant moment even to those around her: I have a sister but after 26 years, her new position in the world and new relationship to us all are aurally and visibly announced.
Saturday, 9 May 2009
It might just work
How do we feel about starting a slow-motion, online book/cultural activity club? We could set up a blog and share the passwords, then agree to read the same book, see the same play or film, listen to the same album or attend concerts by bands or orchestras which are touring the country, then leave our critical judgements on the site. We'd take turns, agree not to suggest anything just to annoy everybody, and steer clear of anything course-related (and I'd promise not to pull rank).
It's just an idle thought - what do you reckon?
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