THE DRIFT

CHICAGO FOOTWORK

2011-12-12T17:09:00.004Z

Footwork is a style of related music and street dance that originated in the city of Chicago, USA. The dance involves fast movement of the feet with accompanying twists and turns, and usually takes place as part of a "battle".

GOT A PROBLEM WITH LA?

2011-12-08T16:56:00.007Z

Ice Cube visits the Eames House, LA.

Anthony Keidis takes a drive with Ed Ruscha around LA.

More details: Pacific Standard Time

A THOUSAND POLAROIDS

2011-12-06T14:18:00.002Z

BEYOND SURREAL....

2011-11-28T14:34:00.009Z

And just as I query mainstream music's capacity to express dissent in 2011 - or, more worryingly, even acknowledge reality - Miley Cyrus - yes, that Miley Cyrus - delivers her 'Liberty Walk'. Opportunism? Heartfelt compassion? A weird hybrid of the two? Either way, the surreal presence of this song - anchored to news footage that underlines the enormity of the Occupy movement - is a welcome gesture. While nobody is really watching MTV in 2011 (the year of MTV's 30th birthday, an occasion that past unacknowledged by the network) at least if they do then a fragment of reality can now break through into the gyms where it has been consigned to loop ad infinitum. What next? An X Factor contestant covering 'Liberty Walk' against a backdrop of footage of violent clashes between Occupy protestors and riot police? That will be a whole new realm of hyper-reality - one that would vastly improve upon the mind-numbing indifference of mainstream culture to the economic uncertainties everybody bar the 99% are currently confronted with.

SOUNDS LIKE 2011

2011-11-25T15:37:00.016Z

2011 has been a phenomenal year for new music, even as the mainstream continued its descent into a banality from which it sometimes feels like there's no escape. How many auto-tuned cyber-Pop clones can one culture take? Only time will tell, but as the Lady GaGa / Calvin Harris centre-ground hammers home its 'Music For Bowling Alleys' project with mind-numbing precision sanity can be preserved by looking left-field into the darker reaches of the 'Digital Village'. Indeed, life on-line is so enormous now there are infinite avenues of escape (making 'end of year lists' ever harder as 2009/10/11 blur into a vague period characterised by numerous styles and sounds seemingly just hanging in the ether and connected to little else - not even packaging.). If there is a notable - and alarming - absence amongst 2011's soundtrack it's the lack of dissent registering in traditional out-lets. After all, 2011 is looking like a water-shed year in how most people perceive the world Capitalism has constructed, the Arab Spring, Occupy Movements and a historically unprecedented global recession alerting everyone - bar the 1% - that something is deeply amiss in the way society is structured. And yet, the music of 2011 would give no clue to that.

Where in 1992 (to select a random pre-history, though one that happens to exist against a backdrop of economic recession) Kurt Cobain's scream alone registered primal objection on behalf of a generation, Ice Cube's antagonism demanded surveillance by the FBI and even Ministry's music videos spliced together TV news footage that captured the failure of Reagan's 'trickle down' economics and the perversity of living in a media village, a hard cut to 2011 reveals how that type of dissent is visibly absent. And what's in its place? Capitalist-friendly 'X-Factor' Pop (hence Beyonce at Glastonbury). To site one example, Jay-Z is now as likely to be profiled by Bloomberg TV as he is The Vibe (i.e he is part of the problem, not the solution). Or, to put it another way, when did you last hear a musician scream or get angry about anything or everything?

As such the musical highlights of 2011 tend to function as a coping strategy for the brutality of the world, more embalming fluid than fuel to rage against the social order. Nobody is contending that past-eras of pop culture that expressed political or personal discontent (from Dylan to Public Enemy) provided any constructive alternatives, but at least they conceived of there being a problem, and in turn set the imagination free and helped the individual decide what they were for and what they were against. In 2011 music culture is certainly sonically seductive, yet it increasingly feels disconnected from reality. Here are some personal favourites.

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON THE HERE AND NOW

2011-11-25T15:20:00.005Z

JOHN MAUS - BACK TO THE FUTURE

2011-07-21T14:07:00.005+01:00

"If we want something different then we need to struggle pitilessly as opposed to consuming, communicating & enjoying." - John Maus

Download John Maus's Rough Trade Mix Tape Here.

SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES

2011-07-16T09:18:00.002+01:00

The point @danhind misses about @DAaronovitch's Voodoo Histories is it simply applies evidence to popular conspiracy theories, which in turn exposes them as fallacy. At no point does @DAaronovitch deny history is littered with plots and subterfuge. Simply that grand scale 'history-as-fantasy' needs lancing. It's the difference between the Dreyfuss Affair or Watergate, and 9/11 Truth, Roswell and fears of a N.W.O. The former has historical precedent, the latter is founded upon speculation and misinterpretation alone. It's possible to acknowledge a network of complicity re Murdoch - one enabled by compromised individuals seduced by power, money or both - without descending into hysteria that "they" are controlling "us". If the latter had any validity, then how has Murdoch's power collapsed so quickly when confronted by public and political will?

POST EVERYTHING?

2011-07-13T22:40:00.005+01:00

The Drift continues - how could it not? - but posts are evidently much less frequent as full time writing and directing work dictates my schedule. The produce of such graft will surface here in the near future but for now you might be interested to read this review of Luke Haines's memoir 'Post Everything - Outsider Rock N Roll' kindly published over at 3AM Magazine.

THE ARTIST OF 'NEWNESS'

2011-05-31T21:54:00.014+01:00

The following extended quote about Modernism is from Chris Jenks's excellent text 'Transgression'. These paragraphs registered as worth quoting in full, detailing as they do the source of so many continuing preoccupations, from personal anxiety and dissatisfaction, to wider frustrations with contemporary art and popular culture. Jenks's thoughts seemed well worth sharing.

"Modernism carried with it an acute response to the developments that focused our attention upon the conflicts, meaninglessness, upheaval and ultimately the damage to the human condition that were wrought by the structural condition of modernity and the concrete processes of modernization. Modernism has come to signify the powerful clustering of intellectual trends - most particularly artistic initiatives - that emerged around the mid-nineteenth century. It is also apparent why the deeply rooted association of Marxism with critical tendencies in European thought can be seen in modernist terms – Marx was, after all, offering the disassembly and disposal of capitalism, industrialization and alienation. Indeed, Berman has described Marx as the ‘first and greatest of modernists’."

"Baudelaire saw Modernism as a new object for artistic address but also a new quality, experience and understanding of modern being. So, modern art becomes preoccupied with newness, with breaking rules, with stepping outside of constraint and convention. Such art inevitably moves towards the conceptual as it is dedicated to critically considering its own position in relation to the past. However, the artist of ‘newness’ is beset by an original set of problems, both intellectual and technical, concerning how possibly, let alone best, to record that which is ephemeral?"

“…in trivial life, in the daily metamorphosis of external things, there is a rapidity of movement which calls for an equal speed of execution from the artist……Observer, philosopher, flaneur – call him what you will; but whatever words you use in trying to define this kind of artist, you will certainly be led to bestow upon him some adjective which you could not apply to the painter of the eternal, or at least more lasting things, of heroic or religious subjects.”- Baudelaire.

Chris Jenks - 'Transgression' (Routledge, 2003)

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

2011-05-03T11:01:00.005+01:00

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them. The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. Until quite recently, public life in liberal societies was conducted in the shadow of a debate between defenders of “capitalism” and its critics: usually identified with one or another form of “socialism.” By the 1970s this debate had lost much of its meaning for both sides; all the same, the “left–right” distinction served a useful purpose. It provided a peg on which to hang critical commentary about contemporary affairs.

How should we begin to make amends for raising a generation obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth and indifferent to so much else? Perhaps we might start by reminding ourselves and our children that it wasn’t always thus. Thinking “economistically,” as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. There was a time when we ordered our lives differently.

From: Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land.

BRET EASTON ELLIS - REWRITING THE PAST

2011-04-13T21:50:00.027+01:00

Bret Easton Ellis's novel 'Imperial Bedrooms' re-casts the protagonist's from his debut novel 'Less Than Zero', now in their 40's, still in LA, still genuflecting to a Consumer culture that imprisons them whilst simultaneously selling them notions of escape. Yet, despite some critics suggesting such a revisit to his own literary past signifies that Ellis has run out of ideas, the truth is far from it. 'Imperial Bedrooms' is a taut, hallucinogenic novel - part Fitzgerald's 'Last Tycoon', part Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive', part Chandler's LA Noir - a Cocaine-addled stream of consciousness characterised by envy and desire. More pertinently it is very much of the moment. As with Ellis's pseudo-autobiography 'Lunar Park' the novel is haunted by ghosts, and not just via the resurrection of the 'Less Than Zero' characters - Clay, Julian, Blair - whose vampiric narcissism kick started Ellis's writing career with such velocity in 1986, when he was just 19 years old. No, there are freakier echoes here, geographic and cultural revisitations that Ellis expertly twists to lend new meaning (e.g "the billboard that read "DISAPPEAR HERE" in 'Less Than Zero' reappears as a bloody threat on the mirror in Clay's Condo). FM radio permeates the novel, no longer as a feel-good soundtrack but as fragmented Pop that drifts in and out of ear shot ("U2 Christmas songs drowning everything out" / "Bat For Lashes singing "What's A Girl To Do?" as "lightening illuminates a turquoise mural on a freeway underpass"). The temporary nature of this music heightens the eerie and pervasive silence that lingers in the lifeless apartments and on the lonely night drives Clay takes around LA (Ellis evoking the same deathly quiet of 'ice cubes rattling in the cocktails' that begin Bugolisi's Manson bio 'Helter Skelter'). Technology hasn't liberated interpersonal communication in 'Imperial Bedrooms', it simply means sentences now have to battle static, that images can pixelate and ghost. Clay receives numerous stalker's texts and incriminating CD Movies - but they only confuse him further, exacerbate his isolation, render him numb.

In this sense, Ellis's novel is very much 'Hypnagogic'. According to Simon Reynold's, Hypnagogic Pop (or Chillwave to give it its other, less formal name) - "is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave MTV pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters." 'Imperial Bedrooms' is conceived along the same lines, the pre-history of 'Less Than Zero' re-imagined to be both the same yet somehow different. 'Imperial Bedrooms' is a novel about how supposedly disposable Pop culture manages to linger and define, how consumerism enables our most anti-human instincts, about how isolated we remain in a world of Social Network chatter. Ellis filters his own literary past, ransacks his character's earlier lives and blurs them with the dull throb of mainstream Pop Culture. He regurgitates the same 80's DNA that fascinates Ariel Pink, Washed Out, James Ferraro et al and like them appropriates it to give new meaning to the present. Far from 'running out of ideas' then 'Imperial Bedrooms's' 'retromania' operates as a stark, astute vision on the very times we are all now living through. It is the past again yes, but it is utterly rooted in the present.

HAVE YOU GOT THE TIME, PLEASE?

2011-03-16T21:23:00.028Z

Christian Marclay's 'The Clock' is as revered for the meticulous work that enabled its creation as its capacity to mesmerise. In many ways, it's the seminal artwork of the era, a staggering exercise in 'appropriation', at its heart a series of very modern traits - 1) the editing of digital material in search of new meanings, 2) a nostalgia for Pop Culture and Cinema's history, and 3) the indulgence of past images in preference to shaping visions of the future. But perhaps more vitally than any of this, 'The Clock' challenges the management of our personal time by demanding that we stop. The inevitable reaction to this demand is resistance. Surely it's madness to think anyone has enough spare time to properly experience 'The Clock' in its full 24hour glory? After all, it's only art, and we get the gist after ten minutes from a cursory glance. What else would we be missing out on if we chose to indulge 'The Clock'? And because of this train of thought, the inertia that characterises modern life refuses to relent. We are exposed as hunters in search of what we can see and do next, disinterested in what we have the opportunity to do now. We are revealed to be in a constant rush, never properly engaging with the moment we inhabit. 'The Clock' urges us to stop, to give ourselves to the here and now - and yet we still cannot do it. Why? Because we feel we no longer have the time.

Christian Marclay's 'The Clock' is currently showing at the Hayward Gallery London.

THE CURSE OF THE ROMANTICS

2011-03-13T11:33:00.046Z

In 2011 we are still blinded by the Romantic Era’s definition of the artist, the tension between art and commerce pitched as a battle of two polar opposites completely at odds with one another’s objectives. There is an issue of denial here though, because as Raymond Williams details in his seminal ‘Culture & Society’ (1959) the ‘artist’ as we perceive him / her today only emerged in the 19^th Century because of Industrialisation and the emergence of Capitalist society, new economic circumstances triggering a divorce with the ‘artisan’ - the word that 'artist' originally came from. The evolution enabled a tension between 'purity of intention' and 'economic value' because as the 'artist' responded to the needs of the newly established market - enabled by a growing middle-class and the birth of the Printing Press - it became evident that art was now, among other things, in danger of being reduced to mere commodity. How then to re-define it for an increasingly competitive market? How to present more intriguing and thus sellable work than your rivals? How to retain its magic? In answer to these challenges, a radical overhaul of what the ‘artist’ should be emerged, partly out of revulsion to the economic reality, partly to satisfy market needs.

I was reminded of this listening to BBC 4’a Start The Week, when the artist Susan Hiller raised concerns about ‘what job’ the modern creative should opt for in order to bankroll their creativity. In 2011, it's a refreshing take on creativity, where the idea of material wealth remains at odds with the idea that the Artist can simultaneously possess 'purity of intention'. Indeed, the restrictive definitions that began with Romantic Idealism remain essentially limiting to the contemporary artist, as the fear of ‘Selling Out’ looms heavy over their work. And what of the ‘artist’ him/herself? The Popular Imagination is still dominated by a definition that draws upon that most long-suffering of painters, Van Gogh. Indeed, the way Van Gogh lived his life has largely been a disservice to all subsequent generations of ‘artists’ because it introduced a canon of clichés about what a ‘true artist’ should be – one who ‘suffers’ both emotionally and physically, the arbiter of 'taste', 'individualism' and ‘sensibility’ and - crucially – one who lives utterly divorced from economic concerns / motivation.

The extent to which this form tarnishes the Popular mindset is extraordinary. And yet it is a flawed definition, stressing the audience worries about the ‘purity’ of the artist’s life when assessing the actual art, and ultimately snap judgements about individuals ‘selling out’. There is now a Wikipedia entry for the phrase ‘Selling Out’? It begins - "Selling out" refers to the perception that someone is compromising his or her integrity, morality, or principles in exchange for money or "success" (however defined)." But what chance does an ‘artist’ have of not blurring the line between art and commerce when one considers the demands of modern life? How does the artist exist without accepting work that their creative instincts might rail against? This is a culture where the cost of living keeps rising with relentless speed, where artistic remuneration remains polarized between ‘too much’ and ‘too little’, and the average salaries in well-off Western societies remain indecently low (21K per annum is an average wage in the UK in 2011). This then is the battle ground that confronts the contemporary artist.

As with the re-definition of the ‘artist’, it’s no coincidence that notions of ‘selling out’ also took root in the 19th Century against the backdrop of Capitalism's ascendancy to the being the dominant economic system. Indeed, to stress the degree to which charges of ‘Selling Out’ were largely reactive to the changing economic circumstances, consider that for most of the 20th Century the accusations have largely been cast by the Left, presumably because the Left has predominately assumed the role of adversary within the Capitalist system. Indeed, as Capitalism built to a crescendo in the 1960’s, so to it fueled the resistance against it. As Thomas Frank illustrates in ‘The Conquest Of Cool’ (1996), to a great extent the Counter Culture was defined by and facilitated by both economic growth and the subsequent escalation of the Music, Film, TV and Fashion industries. And as with their Romantic forbears, the Counter Culture found itself embroiled in exactly the same debate about ‘purity of intention’ and 'selling out', albeit now high on Marxist rhetoric and 'Free' love. Thus the pressure on artists not to ‘Sell Out’ had simply intensified, just as the Industries that gave the ‘artist’ a global audience demanded ever more investment in exchange for distributing the work. The ‘artist’ now blurred with the lowly ‘entertainer’. Marketing was born. Culture was awash with even more contradictions. The battle between art and commerce seemed to intensify, even as it consolidated its differences at market level.

Still, with subsequent generations raised upon the Baby Boomer mythologies of Rock N Roll and later Punk (essentially Romantic / Modernist hybrids) the war between art and commerce intensified in the popular mind. In 2011 these battle lines remain constantly blurred. Only last week Everett True called the Pitchfork Generation of musicians to account for 'Selling Out' in his article “No Alternative: Pitchfork and Indie Culture’s End Times”. The heart agrees with True’s rallying cry – as all the Baby Boomer, Counter Culture conditioning you've been raised on goes to work - but the head knows it’s no longer viable, certainly in lieu of escalating living costs and the absence of a contemporary loophole akin to Thatcher’s dole cheque in the 80’s.

And yet if we look closer at the lives of Great Artists – the ones most of us can agree were great - we quickly see there has always been an illusory quality to the back-story of the artist, one that time thankfully liberates from the immediate haze of concerns over their political and economic motivations. Divorced from the circumstances of its creation is the work of Caravaggio or Mozart or Goya any less great or subversive simply because it was bankrolled by wealthy social elites? Are the Romantics and early Modernists (Byron and Shelley, Baudelaire and Proust) any poorer as artists on account of their access to material wealth? Is the Godfather of ‘Beat Culture’ William Burroughs – the very DNA of the Counter Culture – reduced in cultural value on account his travels were paid for by a family trust fund? Francis Bacon made a fortune in his lifetime, as did Warhol and Picasso (who upon his death in 1971 was estimated to be worth $50M). Their cultural importance is in no way compromised by their economic circumstances. We do not consider them ‘sell-outs’ despite their privilege and / or fiscal extravagance.

Indeed, we readily forget that such distinctions between art and commerce have always been messy. Artists have always 'taken the money'. Certain artistic outlets are immediately subject to critical indifference due to their economic back-story, without any recourse to deeper contemplation – Television being the most obvious. But is David Lynch less of an artist for making ‘Twin Peaks’ with the conglomerate ABC? Is David Simon (The Wire) a less valuable writer for expressing himself through an International Brand such as HBO? Ditto the music industry. Did the founding of their Apple, heir own record label, undermine the Beatles’ music? Is The Stooges ‘Funhouse’ shorn of power because in his twilight years Iggy Pop’s knocked out a few adverts to pay the bills? Does Miles Davis’s love of Ferrari’s make his music any less mercurial? And consider Hip Hop, a rare Post-War Popular music divorced from the purist standards applied by 60’s Baby Boomers to Rock Music. Hip Hop was always as much about street culture and cultural appropriation as getting rich and self-empowerment. Life is full of contradictions, and Hip Hop’s 30-year evolution has embodied them with fluidity and adaptability, juggling both artistic demands and economic ambition in a way that Grunge say, couldn’t even get near. It’s partly why Ice Cube is still with us but Kurt Cobain has long gone, an indicator of the benefits of molding the future instead of paying reverence to the past.

We are now entering an era where digital technology and the Internet has liberated thousands of artistic voices, whilst simultaneously robbing them of the 1960’s and 70’s opportunity for a livelihood due to their subsequent inability to effectively protect copyright and publishing rights. Indeed, in 2011 one can even argue that wealth should be a pressing objective of an artist, as it is the only liberation from the grinding routine of the work place, of personal time being constantly invaded by the demands of employment, of the often high cost of laying one’s hands on artists tools, both new and old. It is pressing then that we adjust our views regarding how we perceive the relationship between commerce and ‘art’ if we are to successfully navigate this terrain without becoming our own worst enemy. Serve the work, make sure you get paid; judge the art, not the means of its creation. Not very Romantic then - but that just might be a good thing.

Further Listening: BBC's In Our Time - The Artist.

New Blogs soon....

2011-03-07T23:23:00.005Z

...on 'The Origins Of The Tortured Artist' and Christian Marclay's 'The Clock' - amongst others. That is when the long list of obligations that currently confronts me is dealt with. Until then, try this, some Scandinavian Jazz on the brilliant ECM Label.

GUN CULTURE

2011-02-03T12:49:00.019Z

The Gun has been at the heart of American Culture since Independence was founded July 4, 1776. 235 years later it remains one of the most controversial and intractable issues in US Politics, reignited every time an incident like the recent shooting in Arizona occurs, the debate always rotating around the 2nd Amendment’s ambiguous and always de-contextualised ‘right to bare arms’.

In the wake of the recent Arizona shooting, much has been made of Sarah Palin’s prior use of gun scopes placed over US states she deemed ‘too Liberal’, along with her firearm-based rhetoric to ‘load up and shoot’. One of her targets? Tuscan, Arizona. By any measure, it was reckless, inflammatory language. Yet it would be a mistake to believe Palin’s recourse to gun-based imagery is solely the preserve of the gun-toting Right. Indeed, whilst Pro-Firearm lobbyists tend to be Right Wing, as a cultural image the Gun has been just as readily deployed by both the Left and by the political neutral to express an opinion. Why? Because the Gun is an abnormally potent symbol in American life with real cultural power.

Larry Clark 'Tulsa' (1971)

Andy Warhol 'Gun Print' (1981)

Imbued with subtexts that evoke power and violence, justice and revenge, male sexuality and impotency, the Gun is practically the de rigueur image in American cultural life, a signifier that transcends the Political debate to be an autonomous and loaded image in its own right. Consider for a moment how many visual artists have deployed the gun in their work. Larry Clarke’s ‘Tulsa’ series (1972), Warhol’s ‘Gun Prints’ (1981), Richard Kern’s ‘Girl With Gun’ (1982) Mapplethorpe’s ‘Gun Blast’ (1985), and, most recently, David Buckingham's ‘Travis Bickle III’ - to name just a few. Pop Art and the Counter Culture embraced the Gun as an Icon of struggle, both personal and public. Consider in particular Chris Burden’s ‘747’ (1973) - in which he shoots a handgun at a passenger plane in flight - and arguably the most extreme use of a gun in the history of art, Burden’s ‘Shoot’ (1971), in which the artist filmed himself actually being shot. Indeed, the Gun image is communicating so much in Burden’s work about American Culture it’s chilling - evoking the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Luther King, Charles Whitman’s Clock tower siege, Vietnam, the Kent State Massacre and Son Of Sam David Berkowitz’s 1977 NY killing spree and beyond. Indeed, Burden’s work strikes such an ominous chord it transcends its period and ultimately portends the Columbine Killings, 9/11 and now Arizona.

Chris Burden - Shoot (1971)

Robert Mapplethorpe 'Gun Blast' (1985)

It shouldn’t surprise us that the Gun found itself the go-to icon for the Post-60’s artist. The revolutionary imagery of the 60’s and 70’s Radical Left and Black Power movements practically demanded it, along with the looped news footage of political assassinations and Vietnam that haunted the era. But Popular Culture itself had actually appropriated the Gun as symbol long before the Counter Culture embraced it. Hollywood is the obvious starting point, from its mythologizing of the Wild West - in reality a relatively short Historical period actually short on glamour and gunslingers, high on homesteaders and ranchers, but now re-framed via cinema to be the dominant founding narrative - and gangster culture (most notably 40’s Film Noir, but beginning in the 1930’s with ’Scarface’). By the 1970’s revenge movies (Dirty Harry, Death Wish) had brought these outlaw myths into the heart of urban Civilisation, presenting the Gun as a possible answer to rising crime and social decline, this source of power escalated to ludicrous proportions by the testosterone-fuelled Action films of the 80’s and beyond. The scene in ‘Terminator‘ (1984) when Schwarzenegger visits an LA gun shop is pure satire, whilst simultaneously thrilling the audience.

But really the absurd, gun toting imagery of Schwarzenegger and Stallone’s in their 80’s heyday, when they brandished ever-larger arsenal, was simply a cartoonish crescendo to the iconic Clint Eastwood and John Wayne films that preceded them. Indeed, Eastwood has arguably done more than any other American to assert the status of the gun as an image that expresses justice and masculine power, specifically in his Westerns and the Dirty Harry franchise. Notoriously, ‘Dirty’ Harry Callaghan talked about his Magnum .44 with a pornographic zeal (“This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off”) before he shuns the bureaucrats and administers to administer some actual ‘justice’. Callaghan’s ethos can be located to this day in significant Right-leaning Politicians, most notably George ‘We’re gonna get them folks’ Bush. Maybe this is why, now in his senior years, Eastwood’s attempted to stress the limitations of his earlier work’s gung-ho violence in more reflective work such as ‘Unforgiven’ and ‘Gran Torino’?

Feeding off the same symbolism, Popular Music has been equally entranced by the Gun. The Blues rotated on Old Testament mythology and that often veered towards the misogynistic, best embodied by the Murder Ballad Stagger Lee / Stack O’Lee, a tale of bloody folklore retold by everyone from John Lee Hooker to Bob Dylan and Nick Cave. This Gun-based violence, born of sexual jealousy, can be located in the evolution of Pop Music irrespective of which mutant strand you consider, from Country music’s Wild West persona, (Johnny Cash’s ‘Man In Black’ persona - is their a more violent song than ‘Delia’s Gone’? – and Tim Rose’s ‘Hey Joe’) to Hip Hop, where the deployment of gun iconography is used as both political weapon (Public Enemy’s logo evokes Palin’s scopes) to fetishized weapon of the street in Gangsta Rap (NWA ‘Ak-47 Is The Tool’).

But Popular Music’s use of the gun isn’t simply about male aggression and bragging rights. Even Grunge, an often feministic, anti-alpha male music, was fixated with guns. The obvious example is Kurt Cobain, who repeatedly referenced guns in his lyrics and videos, before using a shotgun to end his life aged 27. But the gun was far from limited to Cobain, and would reoccur again and again (Soundgarden ‘Gun’ / Pearl Jam ‘Once’, ‘Glorified G’ and ‘Jeremy’). Perhaps Grunge had embraced Gonzo Counter Culture writers such as William Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson too literally (both Pro-gun)? Perhaps the Basketball Diaries / Columbine Culture was simply sound tracked by Grunge? Or perhaps, Like John Lennon in ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, Grunge had embraced a heroin connection in the Gun’s symbolic arsenal? Most likely, the Gun image was simply ubiquitous and offered multiple applications to the artist.

But then why wouldn’t the gun keep reoccurring given its power as a symbol, and it’s ubiquity in everyday American life? Artists and Politician’s can only ever evoke and twist the world they inhabit, appropriating the images that colour reality, enhancing their prominence, embellishing their meaning. This problematic loop is perfectly illustrated by Martin Scorcese’s 'Taxi Driver' (1976) a film that is in part based upon the real life diaries of lone gunman Arthur Bremer, who shot Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1972. The real-life lone gunman is thus elevated by screenwriter Paul Schrader to a romantic and frustrated figure worthy of cinematic profiling - the ultimate anti-hero, part Ethan Edwards, part Raskolnikov. But then the film ‘Taxi Driver’ in turn inspires John Hinckley III to shoot President Reagan in 1981. Art imitates life just as life imitates art. ‘Taxi Driver’ itself remains a paradoxical piece of work, celebrated for its portrayal of Post-Vietnam male psychosis whilst failing to make the audience feel disgust towards Travis Bickle, rendering it oddly unsuccessful in its attempts to reject the Dirty Harry / Death Wish mythology (despite the chilling scene when Scorsese’s cab passenger evokes Harry Callaghan by telling Travis about the damage a Magnum .44 can ‘do to a woman’s pussy’.) Indeed, Scorsese to this day recalls his dismay when New York audiences applauded Travis’s last stand, as if he was the good guy.

As such, given this long and protracted hold the Gun maintains on America’s Popular imagination, condemnation of Sarah Palin’s gun-based rhetoric, whilst legitimate, shouldn’t overshadow the greater narrative in which she is operating. Gun Laws alone can deal with the presence of the Gun in America society. The precedent for a legal solution is evident from a quick look at other Industrial nations, once gun-toting, now relatively gun free. From 18th and 19th Century Europe (when duelling pistols were considered a solution not a problem), to Japan’s prohibitive, ultra strict anti-Gun and Sword Laws, to Australia’s strong Political reaction to Michael Bryant’s killing spree in Tasmania in 1996, the Gun has been contained in most modern industrial states by Laws and Laws alone. And by being expunged from these Cultures in reality, the Gun is now no longer shorthand symbolism for artists and politicians alike. It is a far healthier dynamic between life and art than the one that currently has momentum in the United States.

NOTHING'S SHOCKING

2010-12-29T10:20:00.036Z

Watching the print media rallying around to batter Channel 4 and Frankie Boyle is a strangely conflicting experience. Boyle's 'Tramadol Nights' has been in the firing line for eviscerating jokes about everything from Katie Price's handicapped child Harvey, Madeline McCann and now - and to such an extent it's caused MPs to get involved - accusations of Racism. This is on top of the repeated charges of misogyny that increasingly dogs Boyle (and many male comedians) also charged with 'going too far' - Jim Jefferies recent UK tour has received similar accusations as have Jimmy Carr and Chris Rock. Yet despite the abrasive material (and it is often a white-knuckle ride) Boyle's act (and Jefferies) are redeemed by being much funnier than they are unfunny and by the fact that ultimately nobody is that bothered who doesn't have a vested interest. Not really. Not like they were when Lenny Bruce did his routines about swearing and racism.

Indeed, in 2010 the reaction to extreme material in any art form is more often than not jaded, leading to boredom and indifference. When did art last genuinely shock anyone in Britain? When was anyone in the UK genuinely offended by art in living memory? In this context, abrasive Stand Up remains a uniquely potent force still just about able to test the standards of civilisation, the context of the Stand Up venue functioning as a laboratory in which extreme opinions can actually be explored. Boyle's problem is he's transferred this nihilism to TV (even though anyone watching would know well in advance what to expect). He hasn't said anything racist, just used racist terms to engage with an idea about racists (like Bruce, but lacking his dazzle and veracity). Boyle has also said stuff that was clearly 'out of order' - but still, nobody watching was incited to violent action, and nobody got hurt until the media removed the context and amplified a few choice sentences. It has left Boyle looking twisted - which won't bother him - and possibly unfunny (which probably will). After all, provoking no laughter is the Comedian's worst fear, not accusations of indecency.

I have written before how the notion we are desensitised to violence is patently untrue, that in fact we've never been more fearful of it (hence 'The Culture Of Fear'). The same is true of perceived "lowering of standards" - a standard claim ironically made about different things by both elitist intellectuals and rabble-rousing hacks. Tabloid TV may draw the highest ratings, from X Factor to The Apprentice, but then it always has because it's designed to be popular. Significantly though, it's audience is now fragmented between true believers and knowing ironists. Furthermore, increased choice now enables people who don't want to 'join in' to engage with something more intellectually rigorous on alternative channels ('A History Of The American Dream' say or 'Apocalypse: WW2 in Colour'). This wasn't an option in the 60's when 'Opportunity Knocks' was on. There was no escape.

Indeed, the idea that standards are lowering is such a fallacy when one considers the media furore itself. Newspapers are always given to hypocrisy, but in the 70's when Bernard Manning and his ilk were being genuinely racist in Comedy clubs across the country, when TV Sitcoms such as 'Mind The Language' (and even 'Fawlty Towers') genuinely marginalised minority groups, there was no outcry because back then standards hadn't been raised sufficiently to realise there was anything wrong.

Indeed, contrast the familiar sign in 70's boarding houses of 'No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs' with the European Court's defence of gay couples prohibited from staying at country Guest Houses. The battles fought in the name of Political Correctness (and as Stewart Lee illustrates they were conflicts utterly essential to the evolution of civilisation in the UK) were legitimate battles that have enabled the cultural terrain that comedians and artists work in to change significantly. It is a more ambiguous context now, harder to navigate, which is why some comedians still go 'too far'. But far better they have right to go 'too far' than that right is completely revoked. As Armando Iaanucci once noted, "If you're a comic you're bound to offend someone at some point. Comedy is all about exaggeration and distortion, you can't have comedy that is fair and balanced and accurate." As such, if you don't like it don' t laugh. Could it really be that simple?

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART (1941- 2010)

2010-12-17T22:23:00.005Z

So long then Captain Beefheart. The iconoclast's iconoclast, the artist's artist, the greatest modern Bluesman of them all. If a testimony can be made to his legacy perhaps it's that even now in 2010 he still sounds like he's ahead of everyone, his records still setting the standard for the Avant Garde in Rock music, still blazing the trail on how to take music far, far 'out there' beyond the norm. He hadn't recorded any music for years, long since seeking refuge in the desert where he painted alone. Yet somehow he'll still be missed, so enormous was his presence on the cultural landscape. There will only ever be one Captain.

LOOKING AT YOU, LOOKING AT ME

2010-12-16T10:28:00.050Z

This piece has been revised since it first appeared last week, owing to the fact I found myself disagreeing with what I'd written. Which may sound deranged - and perhaps ironic given the nature of the piece - but it also illuminates in part why this blog exists. As the old adage goes, "How can I know what I think until I've heard what I've got to say?"

Technological advances in digital cameras means that when a child is born now they are photographed immediately many, many times. Parents can even record a Quick Time movie that will enable the child to see their first moments on earth from the vantage point of adult life. This is unprecedented. Of course there have always been baby photos - and even films of births - but they were the preserve of the very few, the photos usually posed and the means of processing still limiting their quantity. But now every moment of your life can be visually recorded via hundreds of JPEGS and QT's saved for future perusal. An indication of what this might be like can be gained from watching Jonathan Couette's documentary 'Tarnation' (2003), a film made possible by the fact Couette's had sufficient filmed material of his life - from birth to present - that it could form the basis for an entire documentary film.

But what are the consequences for the subject? What happens if you see yourself on film and in photos all the time from your first moments on earth? What role does that leave for other people in your life? What if your own gaze becomes the opinion you increasingly covet and rely upon? Certainly, 'Tarnation' is very much the work of a Narcissist, the comfort provided by Couette's camera off-set against the hostility of the world he grows up in. Film offers him insularity, a protective wall between his outer life and his inner life. Reading Kenneth Tynan's Diaries, I came across this passage in which Norman Mailer is quoted writing about Henry Miller, which inverts many Popular assumptions about Narcissism - and in doing so, explains a lot about the modern predicament:

"The narcissist suffers from too much inner dialogue. The eye of one's consciousness is forever looking at one's own action. The narcissist is not self-absorbed, as much as one self-absorbed in the studying the other. The narcissist is the scientist and the experiment in one. It is not the love of self but the dread of the world outside the self which is the seed of narcissism."

Camera in mirror - the ubiquitous Social Networking Image.

The existence of Social Networking sites and the explosion of consumer photography presents the notion that we possess a heightened sense of 'self-awareness' simply because we look at ourselves more often - in some cases, all the time. Certainly Social Networking sites enable individuals to project a desired identity (and in doing so often facilitate self-delusion) to thousands of people in a way that is unprecedented. At its best it evokes a world where you can star in your own life, replete with an audience already logged on. You do not have to be who you actually are. You can be who you want to be and nobody will be any the wiser.

But it is obviously an illusory state. It is not increased 'Self-awareness' that is gained; quite the contrary. It is increased 'Self-Consciousness'. Obsessing upon your own image does not tell you who you are, it simply emphasizes what you look like. It enables physical scrutiny, not emotional or intellectual understanding.

Jean Cocteau's 'Orphee' (1949)

Part of what Digital Cameras aligned to the Social-Networking culture have done is amplified the same instincts that drove Narcissus to gaze into the pond, and invited a crowd to the gazing.* All of these anxieties combine in the Jonathan Couette film, and more recently in 2010 in Solve Sundsbo's frankly bizarre short film in which James Franco kisses himself. Partly because it parodies prejudices about Celebrities, partly because it taps a long cultural revulsion towards Narcissism that dates back to Ovid, there is something sickly about Sundsbo's film. But perhaps the greatest revulsion is triggered by the fear that someone's life could be so fixated upon themselves that there is no room for anyone else to feature in it? Wouldn't that be a chilling thought for people yearning for their own audience? Because if other people aren't even paying attention to us, then who the hell is? And so we are duly sent scurrying back to our own identities, in search of self-improvement, certain how we look, how we present ourselves, is the solution and truly important to other people. In doing so, we remove ourselves from action and risk our identities being entirely submerged into the visual, now a haven not simply for illusion, but a means for basic social survival.

*I have a theory that a large part of Twitter's appeal is that it alleviates some of the scrutiny MySpace and Facebook demand, and returns the emphasis to pure conversation. Certainly MySpace's recent woes are linked in part to fucked up HTML, but also I think to its inherent ostentatiousness.

NEW POSTS SOON.....

2010-12-13T14:42:00.003Z

For the first time in ages I have dared to take a break. But The Drift will return soon. It always does.

'ART' - ROBERT HUGHES

2010-11-23T13:55:00.000Z

THE THIRD GENERATION

2010-11-17T10:45:00.005Z

"The first generation was that of '68" said Rainer Werner Fassbinder, unpacking the genealogy of German terrorism telescoped into the title of his 1979 'comedy in six parts', The Third Generation. "Idealists, who wanted to change the world and imagined they could do that with words and demonstrations. The second, the Baader-Meinhof Group, went from legality to armed struggle and total illegality. The third the generation of today, which simply acts without thinking, which has neither a policy nor an ideology and which, certainly without realising it, lets itself be manipulated by others, like a bunch of puppets." Reductive as it is, Fassbinder's 'tragedy to grim black farce' formula is a useful tool for making sense of contemporary cultural phenomena which, born out of disappointment in the failure of earlier revolutions, appear driven to ever greater excess in order to be heard. Once locked into a trajectory of extremes, those all important little questions of 'why?' and 'to what ends?' are soon trampled under foot in the rush to be louder, more obnoxious or transgressive than the rest.

The above paragraph is Chris Bohn's Editorial, The Wire Magazine, Dec 2010

MILLENIUM MILL (2010) BY RICHARD KOVITCH

2010-11-14T15:59:00.006Z

MILLENIUM MILL (2010) from Richard Kovitch on Vimeo. Music: The Durells. Shot a few weeks back at London's Millenium Mill, East London. Very much a case of entering 'The Zone'.

THE ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORK

2010-11-07T12:13:00.013Z

'The Social Network' presents the viewer with various conflicts, but the one that lingered longest for me was how to reconcile the enjoyment of such a highly accomplished film with the sense that it was about a living person who was now a by-word for betrayal and social dysfunction. Without doubt Zuckerberg's legacy is not a wholesome one, but nor is it one worth elevating to that of a symbolic evil. He is not Stalin, Hitler or Mugabe - he's a computer programmer who made a fortune doing what he loves. Indeed, I cannot think of any film that has condemned a living person with such relish - not even a living person worthy of that condemnation (Mugabe, Charles Taylor). Lest we forget even George Bush got off pretty lightly in Oliver Stone's 'W.' (2008) and he presided over the establishment of Abu Graib and a highly controversial war in Iraq.

Isn't this a telling detail about a generation's values? The film is about business and the inevitable rivalries that grow when great ideas are born and then their ownership is contended. That is all. It is compelling, expertly crafted and just a little too given to feeding the audience what it wants (almost Jerry Springer-style). Maybe this in itself should drive the subject of a future story about a high profile writer who vilifies a living person he's never met in a film that is subsequently watched by an entire generation? How to live with that on your conscience? And what does it say about a generation prepared to lap it up as entertainment, 500 Billion of whom who have been gifted the technology the vilified individual created and at no fiscal cost to themselves?

These doubts about 'The Social Networks' ethics (despite the film's attempts to moralise) are brilliantly explored and expanded in Zadie Smith's compelling essay 'Generation Why?' (published in The New York Review Of Books). First Smith demolishes the fictional biography Aaron Sorkin has pinned to Zuckerberg and then she unearths deeper questions the film never gets close to exploring. As Smith asks;

"If it’s not for money and it’s not for girls—what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar. Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world."

Zadie Smith "Generation Why?" (New York Review Of Books) Full Article Here.

NOW THE RAIN HAS COME....

2010-11-03T18:23:00.010Z

"If I continue to make films about New York, they will probably be set in the past. The 'new' New York I don't know much about. It's not that I'm against contemporary film. I'm open to it in general, but I find the new colours of the city, the new Times Square, kind of shocking. I guess I'm stuck in a time warp." - Martin Scorsese.

"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets..." - Travis Bickle, 'Taxi Driver' (1976)

Scouting New York hosts a wonderful comparison between 'then' and 'now', considering the locations Martin Scorsese used in his seminal 'Taxi Driver'. Rightly, New York 1976 is identified as big a star in the film as De Niro in the title role. I have written about 70's New York before regarding the origins of Disco. Certainly there is an irony in feeling a sense of loss towards what was essentially a City in free-fall, so crime-soaked and rotten was its infrastructure, however vibrant the street culture. Furthermore it's a City that most people yearning for probably never experienced first hand. Scorsese's observations quoted above about colour palette's changing makes sense but this simply returns us to distinctions between living on a film set and living somewhere genuinely habitable. Such is the power of cinema, making even the squalid exciting and aspirational. After all, doesn't the narrative of 'Taxi Driver' depend on us rooting for the same "cleansing rain" as Travis Bickle? Well, now the rain has come and what do we wish for? Nothing less than the imagined certainties of the past.

Scouting New York link here.

THE SILENCE OF DOGS IN CARS

2010-11-01T17:22:00.006Z

Further Details: Martin Usbourne - 'The Silence Of Dogs In Cars' Here.

LIVING IN MOVIES

2010-10-28T12:19:00.039+01:00

Fantastic post at Ballardian on the films of Paul H. Williams, whose work documents the brave new world slowly emerging in Abu Dhabi. Rather like Patrick Keiller's 'London', the star of William's films is the geography itself, in William's case a seemingly otherworldly terrain inhabited only by static cranes, industrial scaffolding, ethereal mists and vanishing horizons. William's films tap a fetish for both ruins and futurism, part of a cultural lineage that is rightly identified as Ballardian, but can also be located in the writing of various commentators from Jean Baudrillard's 'America' to Iain Sinclair's 'Psychogeography' and Mark Fisher's 'Hauntology'.

Yet what really allies these writers is that they all view the world with emphasis upon the Cinematic. Territory - however remote - has been embraced as if it were a gigantic film set upon which they all cast endless possibilities and narratives. Indeed, this remains the sole reason Baudrillad's 'America' still works because without its role as literary fantasy, its historical arguments are utterly void, as Robert Hughes illuminated so effectively in his essay 'The Patron Saint Of Neo-Pop'. No, what Baudrillard has done is brought the desert to life, he's found poetry in the streets of New York and LA, and in an intensely cinematic way. Chris Petit and Sinclair both do the same for London's physical reality in their respective books 'Robinson' and 'London Orbital'; it is no small coincidence both also work as filmmakers.

This mentality is a very modern one, made possible only since Jean Luc Godard discarded the dependency upon the film studio in 1960 for the free form context of the City streets. From that point on, everywhere became potentially more exciting, more meaningful, knowing that a camera lens could focus upon it followed by the call for 'action'. Indeed, this sense of 'living in a film' has the capacity to bring mystery and excitement to the everyday to such an extent it is actively sought out, typified commonly by the iPod's capacity to soundtrack every walk or journey. The hunger to exist within one's own film liberates the mundane, even enabling praise for much-derided architecture solely because of its cinematic qualities. Now everywhere from a Hospital (David Cronenberg) to a Car Park (Get Carter), from a derelict building (Tarkovsky) to a neon skyline (Bladerunner) is imbued with a mythology far greater than its architects could have envisaged. Indeed, praise for Cities such as Hong Kong or Shanghai is commonly celebrated by Western travellers with the observation 'It's like living in Bladerunner.' In London, those generations in awe to the Cinematic have grown to love constructions once admonished by previous critics (e.g. The Westway, The Barbican, even the Thamesmead Estate) largely on account of their tremendous filmic qualities. Nobody actually wants to live at Thamesmead who defends it; they just want to witness it through a lens. And with every moment oozing the potential to be cinematic, the concept of 'living in a film' now fires a generation's mindset to the point where it is what is demanded of the present and yearned for from the future. There is no escaping it. We are all Directors now.

Watch Paul H. Williams here.

MAD ABOUT THE BOY

2010-10-15T23:51:00.014+01:00

Despite television budgets collapsing with terrifying velocity and traditional advertising struggling to find impacts there still remain moments when commerce and creativity align to deliver work that somehow transcends its commercial origins and achieves artistic autonomy on its own terms. Laurence Ellis's mood pieces for Topman are a case in point. Ellis claims Harmony Korine as inspiration, but one can also see traces of Gus Van Sant and even Wim Wenders 'Paris, Texas' in these portraits of young guys hanging out. Shot on 16MM, the films posses certain ironies. First, the imagery evokes Americana; it feels hipster and the score smacks of US Indie. Yet when subjects speak we hear Estuary English, throwing us slightly. But more significant is perhaps the exploitation of male sexuality. As with both Abercrombie & Fitch and Calvin Klein, the work is distinctly homoerotic. David Byrne mused upon this trend - known by advertisers as 'Gay Vague' - after a visit to Abercrombie & Fitch's Mayfair store, where half naked models stand in the entrance foyer.

"What does it mean that gay kitsch sells to straight youth? Calvin Klein has been doing it for decades. Surely using this sales tool is intentional. Do the straight kids who shop there think, “Oh, they’re just cute guys”? - David Byrne, Blog.

One must presume the instinct lies within male narcissism, something especially prevalent during adolescence irrelevant of sexual orientation. As James Franco's girlfriend recently explained to The Advocate when asked again why so many of her boyfriend's films have homosexual themes (i.e "Is Franco Gay then?") Franco's interest in sexuality is less about homosexuality and more about boyhood, masculinity and journeys of self-discovery. Where better to locate these themes than in homosexual narratives that deal almost exclusively with individuals coming to terms with who they are, how they look and what they desire?

Indeed, it's an age-old practice, as Germaine Greer illuminated in 'The Beautiful Boy', citing that culture has long objectified the young, male form with as much if not more relish than the female form, from Cupid Of Apollo through to the ubiquity of David Beckham's image (once again presented with homoerotic emphasis even when he's embracing his wife.) The Beckham images hold the key due to the presence of Victoria Beckham, illuminating how 'Gay Vague' advertising functions. Rather like Mark Simpson's 'Metrosexuality', actual confirmation of sexual orientation is never provided, even thwarted by specific visual cues (location, female models, brotherly friendships etc). This is crucial to how these ads work because the love that dare not speak its name always remains silenced. Why? Because explicitly Gay-themed ads have notoriously crashed and burned (see Guinness). The preferred trend is to trigger notions of male self-love, but never act upon them. In this respect, Ellis's films are a highly successful balancing act - born of commerce yet appearing bohemian; shot through with homoerotic tendencies, whilst talking straight to Topman's target audience.

THIEVES OF TIME

2010-10-09T10:47:00.027+01:00

'I certainly admire people who do things. People who do things are important. I never seem to do anything.' - Anthony Bruno, Strangers On A Train (1951)

Amusing musings about 'Book Guilt' - the pressure to commit to reading books even if we aren't enjoying them - over at booktwo.org. As it notes:

"I frequently have several books on the go at the same time, and until recently I’ve suffered pretty heavy pangs of book guilt. The practice, no doubt common, of stacking the un- and partly-read next to the bed doesn’t help. It’s taken a long hard look at myself to be able to say: “you’re not enjoying this book. Move on. Read something else. It’s OK. You’re allowed. You don’t have to finish it.”

This relates to a recent post at Pechorin's Journal about 'abandoning books and restarting them'. The reoccurring circumstances in both pieces see procrastination, choice fatigue and external social pressure colluding to cause internal dilemma - the inability to filter and decide when spoilt by growing multiple options, all of which antagonise and impair decision-making and committing to action. The New Yorker currently carries a timely essay by James Surowiecki about procrastination that tackles this predicament head-on; significantly, it isn't a modern condition. The Greeks defined it as 'akrasia'—doing something against one’s own better judgment." Yet it has grown more problematic perhaps, compounded by an increase in obligations and choices, so freely available are most cultural experiences. As Surowiecki observes;

"Philosophers in the collection of Essays about Procrastination - “The Thief of Time” - have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” As Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem."

It's a familiar condition, which is why singled-mindness (often bordering upon obsession) and a commitment to action has long been a defining characteristic of successful people, especially notable in artist's who wilfully seek out solitude to achieve their goals (see below in the 'In Search Of Silence' Posts). But it also ties in to how well we off-set what matters to society against what matters to us - and where these two points meet. One of the instincts that triggers 'book guilt' is the fear that we might be missing out and unable to be part of a wider conversation should we not have read say, the latest Jonathan Franzen. But this is surely irrational? How in the grand scheme of things can having not read the latest Jonathan Franzen possibly be detrimental to you, irrespective of the merits of the work itself?

And which voice(s) are we actually listening to when we make these conclusions and enable such dilemma's for ourselves? Is it simply Marketing colluding with peer pressure? Or do we sense on a deeper, more primal level that there just might be something about engaging with this work that will improve our chances to get on in the modern world - and how counter-productive is this instinct? Because if it only leads to procrastination, then such anguish can only be futile. And how often, with multiple voices raging inside and out, do we actually tune out and decode all the data that we're ingesting? To appropriate Paul Morley in a recent discussion about music on BBC2's Late Review, "What is culture for?" - has it simply been reduced to just another thing to be consumed and hoarded, a mere soundtrack / backdrop to life that we retain as if it were a possession and not an experience? Or is it still something to properly engage and grow with, that enables self-reflection? Because without silencing the voices both internal and external, we will not hear that most evasive of sounds - our own mind making itself up - and isn't that the most important sound of all?

21st CENTURY HUNTER-GATHERERS

2010-09-26T16:50:00.009+01:00

From Pat Kane's illuminating review of Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows' (The Independent).

"Carr's psychological charge against the Net is simply put. The excess of possibilities that an average web page gives us, the way it crowds our short-term memory with scores of relatively inconsequential choices, is reverting us to our earliest human state. The average click-fest makes us into twitchy hunter-gatherers. That same propensity to be easily distracted which saved our haunches from slavering predators on the savannah is that which makes the hotlink and Flash animation so compelling. Depth of thought is being sacrificed to our nervy addiction to interaction."

"Carr may be genuinely worried about the internet turning us all into "lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of... nourishment". But I think he would do better to defend its potentials; zoom back a little on the internet, putting its daily churn into perspective, and it comes to look more like a glorious amplification of the creative plenitude of human nature, rather than a shallowing of our minds. We seem to have inadvertently built a socialist infrastructure out of code and computers, guided by the principle of "from each according to their ability and to each according to their need". Its example is inspiring social change in many non-digital areas."

Full Article: The Independent

THE ROAD TO RUINS

2010-09-25T10:59:00.031+01:00

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' - Percy Shelley 'Ozymandias' (1818)

'I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?’ - James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

"Of course all life is a process of breaking down..." - F. Scott Fitzgerald 'The Crack-Up' (1936)

Paul Nash - 'We Are Making A New World' (1918)

Masahisa Fukase 'Solitude Of Ravens' (taken 1950's, published 1986)

Ruins have long fascinated mankind; urban decay has fired the imagination since the plains of Troy all the way to the rubble of the London Blitz, stirring the creative instincts, reminding humanity that there remain natural forces far greater and more omnipotent than even it can contain. Indeed, Urban decay triggers a weird and intoxicating mixture of excitement and melancholy in the observer, evoking the fantasy world of the film set, whilst simultaneously undermining it with a very real sense of terminus. How is this so? What is rubble and decay communicating beyond its own decline? Perhaps, as Fitzgerald implies in the above quote, the fundamental rhythms of life are located in decay? Fallen towers, crumbling buildings - they remind us everything will come to pass, that attempts to outlive ourselves and plan for the future are futile, that we should embrace the here and now.

'Eraserhead' (1976) - David Lynch

Stalker (1979) - Andrei Tarkovsky

Ruins communicate this drama directly to the soul as if music; they transcend mere description and express a mood, part melancholy, part fear, part relief. The imagination ignites to consider both possible narratives for how the decline occurred whilst speculating upon what will now follow. No wonder Ruins obsess creative minds. At different periods of the 20th Century ruins were used by artists to exorcise the horrors of total war (Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash's paintings, Masahisa Fukase's 'Solitude Of Ravens') and represent the combustibility of political ideologies both Left and Right (Tarkovsky's 'Stalker', Marchand and Meffre's 'Ruins Of Detroit', Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'). They have been used to frame inner turmoil (TS Eliot's 'The Waste Land', David Lynch's 'Eraserhead') and even found expression in music (Pere Ubu, Eisturzende Neuabauten, William Basinski). In all instances, there is a transformation of initial horror into something eerie, yet starkly beautiful, the brutal stripping away of frivolity and intrusion both cathartic and purifying.

Marchand and Meffre's 'Ruins Of Detroit' (2010)

MAD MEN AND THE STATE WE'RE IN

2010-09-22T12:28:00.031+01:00

Adam Curtis's take on Mad Men is an interesting one worthy of consideration:

"The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today. In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck. I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck. And above all has no real vision of the future. And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history. The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be." - Madison Avenue - Adam Curtis

Curtis's explanation for Mad Men's phenomenal appeal reflects the way certain previous landmark television series have mirrored the prevalent aspirations and anxieties of their time. In the 1980's, both 'Brideshead Revisited' and 'Jewel In The Crown' simultaneously furnished British living rooms with an intoxicating mix of wealth and Nationhood, the former evoking Thatcher's emerging Yuppie Class, the latter exploring patriotic uncertainties at a time of domestic upheaval. That Mad Men taps into themes that are contemporary is in no doubt; but notions of waiting for a 'return "to the on-rush of history" are less convincing. After all, ten years on from 9/11 (a date Douglas Coupland signifies as the emotional terminus of the insular 90's) there has been nothing but global uncertainty and a political and social scramble to understand and shape the emerging 21st Century world, be it via market forces, military might or technological innovation. Far from being an era where nothing has happened, this is an era where arguably too much appears to be happening, and all of it demands clarity - little of which is provided by the 24 hour news / Internet streaming that provided the data in the first place.

No - what Mad Men is offering is indeed 'reassurance', but of a different, more subversive kind. Because it subliminally contends that whilst work can be stifling, it remains your best option when faced with the alternatives. It is significant that, despite enduring more turmoil and free fall than the average man could stomach, Don Draper always returns to the sanctity of his office, irrespective of how bad it gets (Season 4's poster labouring this point explicity). I have previously observed how Mad Men repositions the viewer on the side of Madison Avenue against the 'Counter Culture', as made explicitly clear in Don Draper's nihilstic dismissal of a Beatnik in Season One. This then is a view point of the 'Counter Culture' that embraces the arguments Thomas Frank makes in his seminal 'Conquest Of Cool', principally that Counter Culture 'rebellion' was just another lifestyle ripe for exploitation, that the seeds of it lay in the 50's amidst a marginalised 'Beat Culture' and were simply mass marketed in the 60's, resulting in the 'Hip Consumerism' that has defined the last fifty years. Fascination with Mad Men endures largely because it seems to be telling us the story of how we ended up in our current predicament.

Moreover, it is the pervasive sense of futility when challenging 'the system' that chimes with the modern viewer. The ideological battles that defined the 60's, 70's and 80's have long been vanquished in the Popular imagination - despite the best efforts of think tanks on both the Left and Right to continue a debate - and Mad Men speaks to this uncertainity. Don Draper's charismatic acceptance of chaos is perversely what is so 'reassuring' about Mad Men; his heroic cool when confronted by the terrifying existential nothingness of modern life liberates the viewer from feeling guilty about their own inaction. Draper justifies a blanket dismissal of 'Consumer Culture' as the 'big enemy' as presented by everyone from Herbert Marcuse to Douglas Coupland and Naomi Klein and in doing so, Mad Men moves beyond the superficial smokescreen of loathing focus groups and marketing demographics to tackle a core crisis at the heart of the Postmodern identity. Capitalism itself is not the problem; being alive is the problem. As Don explains; 'There is no big lie. The Universe is indifferent.' How to deal with that?

IN SEARCH OF SILENCE PART 3 - VISUAL ARTISTS

2010-09-14T23:59:00.034+01:00

"If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” – Edward Hopper

1. David Birkin’s 'Confessions' (2009). It is silence that resonates and with it mystery, as the camera fails to capture the confession the muse has made, their face blurred and lost amidst the long exposure. ‘Confessions’ stresses the limits of technology and reminds the viewer that there still remain unchartered moments and a capacity for the unsaid in spite of the media blitzkrieg and social networking that over-saturates our lives. Fittingly, Birkin's photos are rendered in murky black and white, evoking a mid-period Francis Bacon Triptych, foreboding and mystery enabled by a shortage of data. This work is in many ways the perfect antithesis to the digital landscape, robbed of language and yet, inadvertently, communicating so much more.

Matthew Stone’s art is intensely physical both in its use of trash and its depiction of the human body. There is nothing abstract here, nothing concealed or unreal; indeed the work could only have emerged from intense sociability and collaboration, a process far removed from the insularity the Internet enables. Indeed, like David Wojnarowicz before him, Stone lived and breathed his work at street level through the 00’s, squatting as part of the !WOWOWOW! Commune in Peckham’s disused buildings. As with Joseph Beuys, Stone would use society’s detritus and re-appropriate it as bold, artistic pieces. But rather than utilizing trash to make something entirely new, Stone often used refuse to re-imagine the distant past, notably in his striking recreations of Caravaggio’s work. In doing so, his work removes the audience from the present by conjuring the historical, whilst re-stating the power of real, physical interaction. His photography collection ‘Body Language’ couldn’t state this objective clearer, both in title and action. Stone is not anti-Internet (he keeps a blog), but he does sense its trappings all too clearly, which is why he continues to savor a real, functioning Bohemia quite out of step with a generation's migration on-line. As he explains "new forms of communication, communities and human networks have become tangible and commercialized. (For me) to be part of a group of creative, dynamic people was what mattered. It was really important to create that reality."

IN SEARCH OF SILENCE - PART 2 - MUSICIANS

2010-08-22T18:27:00.014+01:00

Further examples of stepping back from the digital Blitzkrieg, this time from the traditionally ostentatious world of Popular music.

1. Amanda Brown of LA Vampires who tells this month's Wire magazine how she is seeking refuge from 'the Twitterisation and Facebooking of the planet'. "There's already way too much clogging the world, I don't want to add to it that way, so I have no plans to make a website or MySpace or anything for LA Vampires. I love music, not knowing the story behind a band, or who plays on what record. We live in an age of excess information and everyone's always hustling to expand and grow and conquer, it feels choking." This then is a way of framing creativity free from Marketing, the very essence of the age that has enabled certain critics to make the case that artist's such as Damien Hirst's work are actually all about the marketing, not the art itself. By resisting this process Amanda Brown places her work back at the centre of the debate, whilst arming it with intrigue and mystery.

2. Producer Dave Sitek - along with James Murphy defined the Brooklyn sound. Turning his back on Williamsburg, he has now sought refuge in the remoteness of the Hollywood Hills, cutting himself off from the NY Hipster scene completely. His motive was to flee what he defined in the Sunday Times as "this constant exposure and instant loop of feedback, this perpetual cycle of reaction". Internet-spread negativity was a key target of his scorn. "It's like we're sucking on this digital nipple. You would think, given the amount of reverence we have for it, that the Internet would have created this completely more awesome world, and the last time I checked, we can't say that all of a sudden all these diseases are cured, all these social situations resolved. You kind of think, 'OK, you have the Internet . . . how has it changed your life? I feel we are having mild allergies now as a result of this superconnectivity. And those allergic reactions are increased anxiety and hubris, broadcasting opinions solely to knock someone else down and get more hits on your blog."

3. Burial. Like Banksy, Burial remained anonymous for the formative part of his artistic ascendancy. Divorced from any public engagements, his presence was as ghostly as his music, with barely more than two photographs existing of him. Liberated from having to endure the usual format of tell-all that the contemporary magazine article demands (the usual potted history, details of childhood and musical influences reduced to a tick list) Burial revelled in his unknowability. You could only access him via his music. As he told the Guardian in 2007 in an ultra rare interview, "It's just the way I am. I can't step up, I want to be in the dark at the back of a club. I don't read press, I don't go on the Internet much, I'm just not into it. It's like the lost art of keeping a secret, but it keeps my tunes closer to me and other people. I love that with old jungle and garage tunes, when you didn't know anything about them, and nothing was between you and the tunes. I liked the mystery; it was more scary and sexy, the opposite of other music. What I want is that feeling when you're in the rain, or a storm. It's a shiver at the edge of your mind, an atmosphere of hearing a sad, distant sound, but it seems closer - like it's just for you. Like hearing rain or a whale-song, a cry in the dark, the far cry."

IN SEARCH OF SILENCE - PART 1 - WRITERS

2010-08-21T20:30:00.030+01:00

"I know that I would be more productive (and less twitchily dissatisfied) if I could partially withdraw from cyberspace , where much of my activity - or rather interpassivity - involves opening up multiple windows and pathetically cycling through twitter and email for updates, like a lab rat waiting for another hit." - K-Punk - 'Too Wired To Concentrate'.

The action of 'filtering' grows ever more important when confronted by the deluge of information enabled by the digital landscape. How we manage the vast quantity of data available on a minute-by-minute basis is becoming key to both personal well-being and issues of productivity. It is this deluge of information that has created the illusion of 'Accelerationism' - the idea that life is speeding up under Capitalism and leaving us 'too wired to concentrate'. Life isn't actually 'speeding up', as I have argued previously, but concentration levels are indisputably in decline. Yet cast your mind back over the previous decade and it seems much slower with hindsight, far more manageable than it did when you were shackled to its forward trajectory. Even its obsessions seem containable, the festisation of technology that has so energised the last fifteen years actually a continuation of a long, drawn out history that began with Marienetti and the Futurists almost 120 years ago -as Tom McCarthy's novel 'C' recently took time to remind us. Yet the illusion that everything is accelerating remains potent when one is constantly logged in to 24hour news feeds / twitter / facebook etc. How then, to tune out, and why?

1. Nicholas Carr observes in 'The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing The Way We Think, Read And Remember', that the web is a 'distraction machine' that is fundamentally altering the way the human brain works. It does this via 'neuroplasticity', a method that enables the human brain to adapt to new experiences. As Prospect Magazine details, Carr believes that neuroplasticity provides the “missing link” to understanding how the media has “exerted their influence over the development of civilisation and helped to guide, at a biological level, the history of human consciousness.” The Internet 'scatters our attention' and “turns us into lab rats constantly pressing levers to get tiny pellets of social and intellectual nourishment.” The long term problem with this is that biological evidence suggests some brain functions will actually atrophy if we don't use them. His vision is bleak - "We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in electronic data." There are solutions to this process, but they require a willpower quite at odds with the cultural imperative to procure data and culture with relentless ease.

2. Time Magazine notes this month that the novelist Jonathan Franzen "works in a rented office stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the Internet, he not only removed the the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked it's Ethernet port." Franzen is not alone in working this way - Phillip Roth, James Ellroy do like-wise, renouncing even television - but it significantly it is the antithesis of David Shield's call for a more immediate, fragmented form for the novel. Solitude is key to enabling Franzen to tackle a subject as enormous as 'Freedom' in his new novel, and to expose it as a dangerously entropic concept, arguing "there is something beyond freedom that people need: work, love, belief in something, commitment to something." In other words, a less transient existence, away from the Internet's rampaging curiosity and hard sell. Could Franzen's novel have been achieved if he was wired to the Internet 24/7, and reduced to a fragmentary prose inspired by Twitter? It is very unlikely. Rather than emulating digital chaos, Franzen cites Soren Kierkegaard's idea of 'busyness' - a state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities - as the very symptom that the modern novel must tackle if it is to remain 'socially useful'. Franzen says: "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world."

RIP TONY JUDT (1948 - 2010)

2010-08-21T16:39:00.008+01:00

A belated tribute to Tony Judt, one of the great Historians and Essayists of the last fifty years. Judt's reputation as a scholar was secured by his masterpiece 'PostWar', which detailed the painful rebuilding of Europe from the ashes of total war and extremist politics. These themes were developed and expanded upon in his searing collection of essays, 'Reappraisals'. Yet perhaps his last published work, 'Ill Fares The Land' will be his most debated work. As he wrote in the New York Review of Books; "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them."

PICTURES IN MAYFAIR, 2010

2010-08-13T11:52:00.012+01:00

Pierre Soulage - Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London

Marco Sanges - Hay Hill Gallery, London

Polly Morgan - Haunch Of Venison, London

THE TYRANNY OF NOW

2010-08-06T15:09:00.004+01:00

"America has to deal with the past; past is prologue. If we don't remember we are condemned to the tyranny of the now - and we will always make mistakes." - Oliver Stone, BBC Hardtalk, 2010.

CRITICAL CONDITION

2010-08-03T16:42:00.008+01:00

Excellent post at 'Ruthless Culture' about the nature of criticism in 2010. It evokes the loss of power the critic has endured after being assaulted upon two fronts in the modern era. The first offensive was launched by the blogosphere, the egalitarianism of the Internet enabling everyone to be a Critic at a basic level, the old academic elites no longer holding absolute power. Secondly, by consumerism's co-option of the critic, reducing them to an individual who simply makes superior shopping recommendations. Both are inevitable outcomes, impossible to resist, yet the capacity for debate has not necessarily weakened as such, rather it simply requires greater concentration to filter out those voices that don't validate themselves. Because great critics do still exist (Robert Hughes, Ian Penman, Jon Savage, David Shapiro, Mark Fisher, Clive James, Kim Newman, the late David Foster Wallace to name just a few), writers who continue to facilitate what Jonathan refers to as "the creation of engaging conceptual spaces. The elaboration of intellectual playgrounds. The building of a testing ground for ideas and identities." It is a fine art indeed, but not one that feels like it is in crisis, just a healthy state of evolution.

Full Article: Ruthless Culture - Purpose Of Criticism

CAN I HAVE MORE PLEASE, SIR?

2010-08-03T14:53:00.018+01:00

Too often a book is a symptom of the very problem it has set out to treat. So it goes with David Shield's 'Reality Hunger'. Essentially an extended essay by Shield's on his problems with the modern incarnation of the novel and its continued recourse to the 19th Century model of narrative fiction, 'Reality Hunger' is a passionate collage of thoughts and quotes, appropriation and all out solipsistic complaint that, whilst energising a continuing debate about literature in the 21st Century, also diagnoses the circumstances under scrutiny via emotion, not rational analysis. This enables Shield's to sustain many illusions about the state of the novel - and more pertinently, about what people can reasonably expect from art period - that are simply ungrounded. Indeed, 'Reality Hunger's' greatest irony is how excited it leaves the reader about the state of modern literature. Someone should tell the author.

Shield's book has been widely debated since its publication. From detractors to champions, there remains a consensus of opinion that whilst 'Reality Hunger' misses the mark as a manifesto, it has certainly stirred a debate about writing that feels vital. Yet, it is the nature of Shield's argument that concerns me here, in particular its recourse to Confirmation Bias. This is what happens when someone assumes a circumstance exists then sets out to prove its existence posthumously - the thinker sees the problem everywhere, and ignores any contradictions to their argument en route. It makes for a very muddy, unconvincing argument because there are always cursed exceptions - or, put more grandly, the Problem Of Induction. So when Shield's yearns for an Internet-inspired literature, a 'short-short' literary style that evokes the blog and tweet, or the collage-style of everything from Cubism to Hip Hop, it makes complete sense until you realise 1) it's been done and is called Flash Fiction or 2) it's already evident in the cut-up experiments of Burroughs, Ballard and their disciples, and finally then 3) why should a readership's attention deficit disorder prevent deeper, more substantial musings from co-existing with more immediate work? Just as the Slow Cinema movement reacts against Hollywood's MTV-inspired edit style, so substantial and prolonged reading sessions can sustain the individual amidst the media-blitzkrieg. As Jonathan Frazen suggests in 'How To Be Alone', reading remains a powerful way to preserve privacy in a crowd; it provides sanctity from the mass media, and enables the individual to imagine, reflect and essentially be alone with them self.

'Confirmation Bias' though is the enemy of critical analysis and a characteristic of modern media. Make your mind up, then make your argument. We all do it, driven by instinct, misled by illusions, both our own and those inflicted upon us. When Shields claims he's hungry for 'Reality', the real subtext is he's prepared to consume it. His problem then isn't really the state of modern literature as such; how could it be given the vast reading options available to him on a minute-by-minute basis? It's that he's been rendered insatiable in his desire for the next big thing by a consumer culture that has put art and entertainment on tap, free to torrent, seed and re-seed, night and day. There's so much of everything, there doesn't seem to be that much of anything. Or to put it another way, how spoilt might a teenager from 1958 feel were they transported to 2010 in search of entertainment? The richness of the present is too easily underestimated. We are not hungry for 'Reality'; that happens everyday without fail. We are simply hungry for more - much, much more.

PSEUDO-COMMUNICATING

2010-08-03T13:46:00.006+01:00

Radio Show Host: What's your latest obsession?

Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People... they don't write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English.

Radio Show Host: Yet you're part of the problem, I mean you're out there blogging with the best of them.

Hank Moody: Hence my self-loathing.

From Californication, Season 1, Showtime.

KILLER IMAGE

2010-07-28T18:07:00.024+01:00

K-Punk excellent on the cultural subtexts fuelling the recent Raoul Moat spectacle, locating it as an anti-Diana moment, “in which the rituals of consensual sentimentality were violently inverted (flowers on the grave of a killer)”, a media-fuelled narrative that combined “a reactionary communicative nihilism freighted with astonishing and genuinely frightening levels of misogyny”. Indeed, there was a disturbing sense that somehow the institutions that dealt with his rampage (the police, social services) were the real problem, not Moat’s murderous and jealous instincts.

Indeed, the crucial aspect of Moat’s fall and subsequent rise (notoriously via Facebook) were his direct communications and pleas for love to a television audience – all made as he dished out only hate. These gestures alone distinguished him from the anonymity that befell Derrick Bird (another fallen man, but not one who stuck around long enough to form a line of communication with his enemy, nor appear in an especially iconic image). The presentation of Moat’s back story was potent, liberating him from outright condemnation for his terrible actions and perversely offering him a cult, outsider status, with both media and public quickly associating him with mythologized memories of Robin Hood, Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde (none of whom the modern reflector has any historical grasp on other than via their legacy as charismatic outlaws in Hollywood films.)

Yet, Moat does possess more plausible predecessors in British culture, just beyond Hollywood’s reach. The most obvious historical comparison would be to Harry Roberts, who like Moat shot a policeman (three actually) and then survived on the run living wild in the 1970’s before he was finally arrested, earning a cult status amongst football hooligans who would sing police baiting odes about how “Harry Roberts Is Our Mate, He Kills Coppers!”. (Jake Arnott took this as a title for his novel that applied an Ellroy-esque splice up to the Robert’s story.) Indeed, Roberts is now thought of less as a cop killer, more a poor unfortunate worthy of vigils and a campaign to release him that alleges human rights violations. If Facebook had existed back in the seventies, no doubt Roberts would have found a home there. Instead, his name was sung and mythologized at football stadiums and in anarchist’s pamphlets. Eerily Moat's legacy has followed suit with Harry Robert's football chant already reappropriated by Carlisle and Newcastle Fans claiming Moat as 'their mate'.

The Football Factory

It was fitting that Paul Gascoigne, another troubled, fallen icon whose struggles have been so well publicized / exploited by the media, should be personally linked to Moat because British football (and in particular British Football hooliganism) evokes the disturbing paradox witnessed amidst Moat’s downfall, blurring kinship and passion with violence and hatred. Towards the late nineties, reinvigorated by the New Laddism spearheaded by Loaded magazine, Hooliganism finally found an artistic legacy in the novels of Jon King (‘Football Factory Trilogy’) and Kevin Sampson (‘Awaydays’). King’s novels in particular were an excellent diagnosis of Churchill’s ‘warrior race’ left to wage war with itself in the absence of overseas military deployments. The books tapped into a violent facet of the British character. Jeremy Paxman pinpointed it as part of England's DNA in his book ‘The English’, observing that ‘alongside the civility’ there’s always been a ‘natural taste for disorder’; ‘Tis no revel unless there be some fightings’.

In the mid-nineties Football Hooligans played out a mythologized historical narrative that made utter sense (as did the rehabilitation of those other thug icons The Krays and latterly Charles Bronson) as Britain broke free of Thatcher’s grip, blindly swaggering into Blair’s shapeless void, Union Jack held high. Diluted for cinema in Guy Ritchie’s ad-inspired Mockney gangster flicks, along with the occasional film that with hindsight was a work of substance (Gangster No.1), Britain’s history of violent, dispossessed men, who loved their mums / boys / football team and would do harm unto others to prove it was re-energised, made palatable again, aided and abetted by an enthralled middle class readership who reveled in their capacity for action, as evidenced by a series of iconic images (courtesy of David Bailey, Rankin et al). These photographs remain the key. They enable the protagonist’s ghosts to speak from beyond the grave and they ensure the subjects are never measured by their actual history, but by the potency of the images they left behind. This is where Moat’s seductive power ultimately lies, in the mind of his audience. It is a long way from the muddy bank where his steroid-addled body finally collapsed.

THE SECRET PUBLIC

2010-07-21T13:28:00.009+01:00

Jon Savage's 'The Secret Public' is currently showing at the Boo-hooray Gallery in New York, supported by this rather excellent interview in GQ. I saw a version of this exhibition at London's ICA in 2007 - though there seems to be a different emphasis now, the earlier show charting the last days of the British Underground between 1978 and 1988, this New York show the 'Secret Public' magazine Savage spliced together amidst the Manchester Punk scene. No matter, here were my musings on the latter exhibition back in 2007 (it seems like another age), which hopefully will wet appetites for this latest incarnation.

The ICA's show, The Secret Public focuses upon a variety of artists operating at ground level in Britain during Thatcher's first two terms. It's a compact show, and well worth a look, taking in a variety of media, from Leigh Bowery's performance art, to the experimental films of Charles Atlas or Derek Jarman, to the ambient soundscapes of Brian Eno. What you sense is that the civil and economic changes that defined British culture in this period provoked a mixture of political rebuttal and escapism, just as the frustrations of the 1970's had provoked Punk on one hand and Disco on the other. Bowery's alternative personas were just as much a rejection of Thatcher's austerity as Eno's introspective non-music her rhetoric. By opting to avoid outwardly political sloganeering a great deal of 1980's culture was by its very nature fiercely political, providing the individual with space to think, free of the market forces that the government were increasingly relying upon to define everyday life.

Talk of 'The Last Days…' of anything is needlessly dramatic phraseology, and subcultures continue to come and go, however brief. But if the show has a lesson for the present, it is the stark contrast it provides to the over-saturation of colour, sound and information that dominates the landscape today. As mainstream culture is ever more homogenised into a blur of life style choices, this exhibition reminds us that society did still exist despite Thatcher's denials, revelling in its diversity with a very human heartbeat.

KEEP YOUR FANS CLOSE, YOUR ENEMIES CLOSER

2010-07-18T20:06:00.025+01:00

A good friend works at a major British television broadcaster and for a long time was privy to witnessing the public at its absolute worst. Armed with only a pseudonym, he was on the front line registering both compliments and complaints from the viewing public, the latter predictably outweighing the former. The viewer’s vitriol, their rage, their complete and utter animal response to whatever they had been watching (or as was often the case had not actually been watching), it all went on record, noted down and filed for whom to read exactly, well, that was never clear. But the rage was on the record, and maybe that was enough in itself.

This sort of disproportional reaction to television or films or literature is the dark side of a culture able to dissect itself at will, in a public forum. Just read the comments sections on YouTube or chat forums and you wonder if the same people could possibly inhabit society without being committed. The anonymity of the digital terrain has furnished all those who previously would have been too idle to write and send hate mail with an easy outlet for their incoherent prejudices. What is more curious is how ready people are to react, responding to ‘controversial work’ often without seeing it, stoked by a media that relies upon inflammatory copy to keep the converted coming back for more. It is a gigantic purging of negative emotion, and it never ends.

Perhaps few authors in the modern era have been on the receiving end of this sort of vitriol and obsession as much as Bret Easton Ellis, whose enfant terrible status is the reason he keeps both his fans and detractors obsessively close. Speaking at London’s South Bank Centre, he cut a curiously relaxed and jovial figure when off-set against both his well-publicised torturous personal life and the dark musings of his work. Perhaps long-exposure to a readership that is happy to inhabit the harrowing terrain places his novels cover has given him a healthy perspective on all the rage and hate mail that has come his way over the years. As he explained, ‘people react with emotion to work, never rationally. Everyone’s response is deeply personal, and each response is legitimate.’

For a writer who had to spend the majority of the evening fielding questions about his most notorious novel, ‘American Psycho’ and little else his good humour was refreshing, and increasingly revealed him to be one of the sanest people in the room. He reflected that once a girl wrote to him and told him that ‘Psycho’ had changed her life by instructing how to masturbate when she was 14 years old. Contrast that with the guy who told him that ‘Lunar Park’ enabled him to fix a lifetime of warring with his Father whilst his old man lay on his death bed. The extremity of reactions is great, but as an author he felt it was well beyond his jurisdiction to get involved with either of them. Power lies always with the individual.

It’s not a surprise that Ellis’s work reaps such an obsessive response. His novels may drone in often catatonic prose, but they’re garnished with sexual fantasy and pop culture references that enable their sinister depictions of sexy teens in Los Angeles and homoerotic, murderous fantasists in New York to invert the intended negativity and revel in decadent, Pop culture squalor. The corpses are always beautiful, the sexuality ambiguous and nobody judges anyone, every character’s morality cauterized, dismembered and long since abandoned. A paradox then for a writer who also claims to be a moralist, and nothing fuels an audience's obsessions than a mass of contradictions and ambiguities.

Indeed, the audience itself was a collage of hipster chic, Clay-and-Julian-look-a-likes and outsider English. Lit students, the living embodiment of the ‘Less Than Zero’ / ‘Informers’ characters with which a strange, subterranean bond had clearly been formed. It was a total victory of subject matter dictating popularity, because if truth be told Ellis’s work is too often flawed, his plotting often clumsy, his narrative passages either offering too little emotion, or, weirdly, overloading upon hyperbole. If he wrote like he talked, it would be a different story, his speech oozing wit and insight in equal measure. But it doesn’t matter, because the books do enough despite this, locating a universe to which an audience is already willing to flock, drawn by lust, by confusion, by the freedom to react however they please, irrespective of society’s mores. This is his genius. It’s what keeps his fans close, and his enemies forever knocking on his door.

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?

2010-07-17T16:38:00.021+01:00

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ has justly been the recipient of considerable critical accolades (and one ludicrously contrary one star review by Anthony Quinn), all of the praise well deserved for a summer blockbuster that despite various excesses delivers cinematic spectacle and intellectual speculation in relatively equal measure and to very fine effect. ‘Inception’ isn’t without its flaws (indeed, Hans Zimmer’s pounding score makes it difficult to immerse at times and compunds the blitzkrieg of imagery and sound) but it stands out as one of Nolan’s finest films, and is certainly his most emotional work. You will be hard pushed to find a better looking, more unforgettable cinematic experience at your local multiplex. The sumptuous wardrobe is worth the price of admission alone.

Most critical responses have emphasised the film’s exploration of the nature of dreams, well travelled terrain that is exploitated fully to fuel a Sci Fi heist film that would make both Philip K Dick and Michael Mann perk up with interest. Yet, there is another major theme within the film that nobody has really drawn attention to about the power of ideas themselves. As DiCaprio’s Cobb points out – "What is the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.”

Yet, the power of ideas is a risky buy-in for a modern audience. Dreams are good fodder for cinema, which by its very nature shares common ground regarding the imagination and the displacement of time. Yet ideas are not only harder to visualise, but received with ever greater scepticism by individuals. As the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis noted when he spoke to Little Atoms, “We now live in a world where there are no ideas that can inspire people and take them to another place than where they are….we are deeply distrustful of big ideas because the last hundred years tells us that big ideas often lead to disastrous consequences.”

Indeed, in an era of hyper-individualism, the onus is increasingly on the individual to decide their destiny, not to be led somewhere by an abstract elite. The distrust of big government has never been so hard felt, the disillusion with mainstream politics compounded by the damage wrought to political institutions by the might of the international financial markets. And yet this distrust of utopian ideas simply enables a culture of self-help and the medicalisation of normality that - paradoxically - breeds a sense of stasis, as everybody starts looking at everybody else for definitions of living. It results in homogenization and a feeling one is trapped.

‘Inception’ hints at the dramatic consequences an idea can still impact upon the world, but only in the context of its ramifications for the stock market. The idea that DiCaprio attempts to incept is not utopian, nor does it relate to nationhood, religion, science or politics, simply that it pertains to a family business and how its break up will impact upon the global market. Pertinently then, ‘Inception's’ biggest idea is discreetly placed in the viewers mind amidst all the chatter about dreams, that the truest measure of human influence is via market forces. What happens economically is the axis upon which all our hopes and dreams ultimately hinge. It is a chilling vision, yet one that is eerily recognisable.

TWO STEPS FORWARD...

2010-07-15T16:21:00.015+01:00

The era of the magpie musician comes of age with M.I.A's appearance on David Letterman this week. Her performance underlined the vital importance of context when it comes to art, which saw Suicide's 'Ghostrider'....

....mashed-up and spat out as 'Born Free' (replete with Suicide's Martin Rev on keyboards assisting in the recycling).

It should have been much more electrifying than it was. Yet the moment it actually evoked was Jimmy Page's hook up with Puff Daddy, when 'Kashmir' was recycled as 'Come With Me' for the god awful 'Godzilla' movie (1998). There were no winners then. Ditto now.

Given M.I.A's hipster credentials, and Martin Rev's cult outsider status, one might have relished the collision between their aggressive performance and the straight, smart alec arena of the David Letterman show. Except it doesn't really come off, the audience don't react (perhaps because they've seen it all before) and ultimately the show robs the performance of real impact, reducing it to theatre at best, but evoking nostalgia at worst, the very enemy of innovation. The myth of rebellion that underpins popular music is further exposed as counter culture folly institutionalised by the mainstream, diluted and made user friendly at point of download, demonstrating that in an era dominated by artists / celebrities that continually attempt to shock, mere spectacle is never enough to sustain an emotional impact - and the absence of emotion is always the point the soul disengages and opts out.

THE BRIGHTER THE LIGHT THE DARKER THE SHADOWS

2010-06-29T17:16:00.016+01:00

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” - Edgar Allan Poe

What is it about the dark stuff that is so seductive? Why is fear and foreboding so susceptible to being eroticised? Why does despair stimulate the libido in a way that happiness can never attain? These are the thoughts triggered by LA artist Alex Prager's striking new exhibition at the Michael Hoppen Gallery London and the release of her first short film, 'Despair'. Undoubtedly, Prager's Californian routes are the key to her work - both Hitchcock and Lynch lurk in the atmosphere, along with the painters and photographers that inspired them (William Eggleston, Edward Hopper, Guy Bourdin). Yet from this weird cocktail, Prager's own voice has emerged, producing work that presents itself as enticing, ironic, pop culture detachment whilst remaining curiously moving and at times, disturbing.

Yet, look further afield and we find traces of this instinct to blur Pop Culture with the weird in recent music, specifically the Lo-Fi 80's pastiche currently dubbed 'Chillwave', which embraces a nostalgia for the FM Radio of yesteryear whilst applying a Credit Crunch era cynicism to the final product. Fittingly, both Prager's work and Ariel Pink et al's explorations are conducted in Los Angeles, but not amidst the familiar terrain of show business glitz, rather from drawing upon the legacy of the Ferus Gallery and its artist's urge to deconstruct the Pop culture that so defines West Coast consumerism. Indeed, there is something similar in intent about Ariel Pink's mashed up reinterpretation of FM-friendly Pop music and Edward Kienholz's use of LA's trash. Both re-frame modern, consumer driven obsessions with wit, cynicism and subterranean concerns.

Edward Kienholz 'Back Seat Dodge '38' (1964)

It is as if the brighter the LA sun shines, the darker the shadows fall, and into this darkness subsequent generations of bohemians submerge and explore, bringing depth and meaning to the surface sheen that would otherwise be written off as one dimensional and asinine. Indeed, Prager's work continues to grow in both intrigue and stature, as she explores ever new dark and twisted narratives to befall her cast of Mad Men-style beauties, all circled by malevolent forces just out of shot but governing each personal nightmare -the 9/11 plane that hovers overhead, the noose-like rope that leads to nowhere, the body face down in the reservoir. It is the constant presence of the 'other' and it tantalises with its promises of transgression and seduction. We are all in danger of being consumed by the world around us just as we try to consume it, asphyxiated by the medium as we desperately search for the meanings behind the message. These LA artists are expressing that paradox. It is fast becoming an impressive body of work.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS, SAME AS IT EVER WAS...

2010-06-26T17:38:00.006+01:00

"The past is not a prologue to the present; it is the present—morphed a bit, stretched, distorted, and with different emphasis. It’s a structurally similar, though very much contorted, version of the present. Therefore in a sense, time—history—can, at least in our heads, flow in either direction, because deeply, structurally nothing has really changed. We think we’re going in a line through time, making progress, advancing, but we might be going in circles."

"What we call history could be viewed as a record of how basic social forms have distorted or morphed. It simply changes shape, but the underlying patterns and behaviors are always there, under the surface—as they are in biological forms. Aspects, organs, limbs and appendages swell and others contract to the point of atrophy in order to accommodate current evolutionary needs and contingencies, but they could just as well flow and shrink in the other direction, should specific needs and surroundings change. History might behave in the same way - the names and numbers change, but the underlying patterns remain."

From David Byrne's 'The Bicycle Diaries' (2009)

WHAT WILL WE RETAIN?

2010-06-13T18:27:00.009+01:00

“Today history is hard to keep in mind as we struggle to keep up with the barrage of information that assails us. We are now exposed to more images in a day than anyone in the 14th century would have known in a lifetime. We’re surrounded by the fuzz and rumble of endless imagery, the white noise of everyday life, signals of information and desire that blur into each other punctuated only by the bright highlights and sudden shouts of images that cut through the chaos. Most of it is garbage, most of it needs exorcising, even if we are fearful that we might be missing something. We’re probably not. We have to discard. We have to throw things away, cleanse the doors of our perception and work out what is worth looking at, what is worth remembering, what are the images that actually matter. What will we retain?”

“We have had a gutful of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is ‘slow art’, art that holds time just as a vase holds water. Art that grows out of modes of perception and making, thats skill and doggedness make you think and feel. Art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in 10 seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep running in our natures – in another word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.” - Robert Hughes, The New Shock Of The New, BBC4 (2004)

A BRIEF HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

2010-05-29T18:59:00.013+01:00

Received opinion has long dictated that we have become desensitized to violence, that the ubiquity of disturbing imagery in films, television and video games has somehow reduced our capacity to appreciate it or what its consequences can be in life. Yet watching the visceral violence in Michael Winterbottom's 'The Killer Inside Me', - adapted effectively but unevenly from Jim Thompson's excellent novel - it is evident that this is an over-simplification. Because when Casey Affleck's sociopath launches brutal attacks on both Jessica Alba and later Kate Hudson, it is stomach churning and almost impossible to watch. Looking around the cinema I saw the audience collectively flinch and look away. There was anguish and horror at what was being witnessed. Nervous systems reacted, moral concern was displayed. It did not simply wash over them.

This is of course how audiences have long reacted to extreme portrayals of violence in cinema. Lars Von Trier's 'Antichrist', Gaspar Noe's 'Irreversible', Michael Haneke's 'Funny Games', even the hipster violence of Tarantino's 'Reservoir Dogs' to name a few - all have induced outcries, walk outs and public revulsion whilst simultaneously being praised by critics for their artistic virtues, both reactions located in the works capacity to show violence as it really is - nasty, destructive and pervasive. All of which undermines the case that we have become 'desensitized'. Quite the contrary.

Certainly, violence remains ubiquitous in popular films and video games. Yet crucially, it is theatrical and it is this unreality that makes it tolerable as a staple of most mainstream entertainment. Film and Video games are simply modern outlets for age-old anxieties and aspirations. It is here we contain the terrors of existence, explore them, and attempt to release ourselves from the awful dread they have always induced. It has always been this way. From Caravaggio's paintings to Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus', from Goya's visions to Dostoevsky's novels - the arts are where we have always contained violence and attempted to explore it, just as we have probed every other human instinct and obsession in the same way.

That there may be more violence on film and in video games now than in the past is evident but it is attributable to a collusion between the growing ubiquity of perceived danger - attributable to the global expansion of 24 hour news media - and the reduction in prominence of other, more traditional artistic outlets such as painting and theatre. Just as we know that in the 20th century violence has simply been enabled by science and technology to new levels of horror, not neutralised or negated, so it would be absurd to believe that its presence in art would recede simply because the arts have found increasingly commercial outlets. Indeed, how could the perceived 'Culture Of Fear' and the myths of 'Broken Britain' take root were in not for the perpetual dread experienced by a generation that remains increasingly senstitive to violent behaviour and its awful consequences. That violence remains at the heart of popular entertainment is simply evidence that it remains at the centre of existence. Nothing makes this point as effectively as when Casey Affeck's sociopath unleashes upon Jessica Alba. Yes, we are still extremely 'sensitized' to violence, and to imagine otherwise would be to deny our deepest instinct for survival.

JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID (DOESN'T MEAN THEY'RE AFTER YOU)

2010-05-29T18:11:00.020+01:00

"Freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individuals potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously." (Erich Fromm, 'Escape From Freedom')

"To know how to free oneself is nothing; the arduous thing is to know what to do with one's freedom." - Andre Gide

"I envy paranoids. They actually feel people are paying attention to them." - Susan Sontag.

David Bond's documentary 'Erasing David' about the rise of the surveillance society is a curious failure because ultimately it reassures rather than alarms. As documentary it commits two fundamental errors. The first is it contains what appears to be bad acting, instantly robbing it of any sense of 'reality'. The second is it begins knowing its conclusions - that the databasing of citizens has reached epidemic and crisis levels - and then seeks to prove its case via artificial conceit rather than exploratory debate. As such there is no sense of a journey nor genuine inquisition, as characterises the very best documentary films ('Capturing The Friedmans', 'Murder On The Lake', 'The Most Dangerous Man In America', 'One Day In September', 'Taxi To the Dark Side', the majority of Werner Herzog or Errol Morris's work) all of which expose the shifting nature of reality and the impossibility of certainties. Great documentary never functions as support for intellectual dogma - rather it locates the fragmented reality that makes dogma so reassuring and exposes it as folly.

As such 'Erasing David' inadvertently answers its tag-line "He has nothing to hide but does he have anything to fear?" with such an unconvincing 'Yes, he does !' that it inverts into a 'No, he doesn't!' by the films end. The protagonist's have learnt nothing and neither have we, save for the peculiar irony that there are now so many databases and surveillance systems at work in the UK that - ironically - we have never been more anonymous or difficult to locate. There's simply too much information to disseminate instant and workable meaning. And yet, in the rabid debate that followed at the Ritzy Q&A, only the author Will Self seemed to grasp both the film's shortcomings and the rather skewed nature of the debate regarding the surveillance society.

As Self underlined, as a former drug addict and someone who has long been associated with political activism, he has both a criminal record and a very public persona as a dilettante. And yet still he walks around 'free as a bird', simply because he's white, middle-class and affluent. CCTV culture in itself simply doesn't identify him as a threat, because neither does the society that permits the technology to exist. If he were a young, Muslim male say he might not feel quite so free and that is where the emphasis must lie, not with the technology but with the principals that drive it. Or to put it another way, just because the Stasi used cars to impose draconian restrictions on political life in Easy Germany, it would be stupid to identify cars as the problem. Perhaps most people actually understand this and that is why the public - in principal at least - want technology should it help to reduce crime and fight terrorists. And this, argued Self was the crux of it all - the permissive role of the citizen when assessing surveillance culture, not the nature of surveillance technology itself.

Indeed, what is being stressed is 'collusion', the deal citizens make when they use social networking sites or shop on-line or buy things on credit. John Kampfner diagnoses this very predicament in his book 'Freedom For Sale' as "'the pact' - an unspoken trade-off for an easy life - the State will resist the urge to intervene in the private realm as long as the citizen does not “cause trouble” in the public realm." We are as responsible for that as the administrators who run the databases. That Facebook shares private data to enable advertisers to target consumers is well documented, just as it is well known discarded receipts can be used by fraudsters. As Self observes all you need do is avoid those sites you don't wish to make such an exchange with and shred your receipts and the problem doesn't exist. It's the same reason you lock your door upon leaving the house.

And yet the rest of the panel - David Davis MP, Phil Booth of NO2ID, Henry Porter and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty - would not concede this point, and insisted the problem was deeper, that the principal of being monitored, stamped, filed and indexed was in itself the issue, and that this reduces all citizens to the status of McGoohan's 'Number 6' trapped in a global village from which there was no escape*.

The grandeur of which immediately transports their concerns from the rather fragmented, uneven 'reality' 'Erasing David' should have explored into the realms of the fantastical - a far more exciting, cinematic domain than the mundane murk of the everyday. What could be more enriching than to think somebody else might be fascinated by your inner life? You only need to see how Phil Booth has established himself under the banner 'No2ID' to sense the theatre at the heart of the resistance. And yet the rise of 'talent shows' and 'Reality TV' underlines the ruthless disposability afforded to individuals, not a substantial public fascination with them. To invert, Woody Allen's dictum, 'Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you' - well, it doesn't mean 'they are after you' either.

*In a bizarre Postscript, Henry Porter recently announced that he has relinquished the struggle to preserve Civil Liberties now the new British government has 'promised to respect Civil Liberties'. One can only fathom how real his fears were given this is all it has taken to alleviate them. Or maybe he was listening to what Will Self was saying after all?

THE MARKET PLACE OF IDEAS

2010-05-23T19:51:00.004+01:00

Colin Marshall's 'The Market Place Of Ideas' is one of the very best Podcasts where cultural discourse is freely available. Always stimulating, it underlines that whilst the landscape of commercial television increasingly moves away from debates conducted with intellectual rigour, new technology readily enables the practice to flourish with aplomb. Of a similar vein, a further recommendation goes to Melvyn Bragg's 'In Our Time', also available as a Podcast via the BBC.

REALITY BITES

2010-05-23T18:58:00.009+01:00

"It is only narrative that promises a reason for early death; reality offers no such assurance." - Sarah Churchwell

Perhaps the strangest effect of David Aaronovitch's 'Voodoo Histories - How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History' is the way his reasoned and researched historical explanations for traumatic incidents in the past (the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, Pearl Harbour, JFK, Princess Diana, 9/11 etc) now read like alternate, almost secret accounts of history when set against the wild and fantastical explanations that have increasingly driven the narratives of popular culture. Indeed, in 2010, the 'truth' has never been more abstract nor less lucrative that its feverish alternatives. Or to put it more explicitly, there are now more books about the JFK assassination and what probably didn't happen than what probably did. This is not surprising if one considers the function of art as a dumping ground for anxiety and aspiration, where the author occupies an almost God-like role. By contrast, 'Historical truth' offers no such reassurances because it too readily leads to conclusions too panifully final, too terrifyingly random, too beyond our control. And what use is this when traumatic incidents such as Kennedy or Diana have already sent the majority into a state of existential anguish that can only be appeased via narratives that absolve blame and provide reasons precisely where a lack of reason threatens to dominate. Aaronovitch considers this 'the untidiness of reality';

"One way in which we might want to exorcise them (these incidents) is through constructing or accepting a version of history in which they were extinguished by something clearly 'other' than ourselves. It was not out thirst for gossip about celebrities that killed Norma Jean or England's Rose, but the CIA. It wasn't an ordinary Joe with a rifle who murdered the young President, but the Mafia or the FBI. 'What is assassination after all' wrote Todd Gitlin, 'if not the ultimate reminder of the citizen's helplessness - or even repressed murderousness?' Conspiracy theory may be one way of reclaiming power and disclaiming responsibility." - David Aaronivitch, Voodoo Histories, (p162).

THE NEED FOR NARRATIVE

2010-05-14T12:18:00.022+01:00

Julie WheelBright writing in The Independent on the role of storytelling and narrative in the modern world, in particular its role in marketing and business. It's a great piece, though one might consider that Literary sales are down simply because they reflect the trend across all culture that all consumption levels are down - cinema, music sales, newspapers, TV ratings - and the reason is simply because there's more to consume period, thus the audience is more fragmented. It's difficult then to argue that the decline in any one area is on account of a failure of that medium / genre, simply indicative of the vast choices available to the consumer. No matter - there remains food for thought here in her review of both Christian Salmon's 'Storytelling:Bewitching the Modern Mind' and David Shields 'Reality Hunger - A Manifesto'.

She observes: "American academic Ben Yagoda, writing in Memoir: A History last year, offered a provocative explanation of the slump in sales of the literary novel. "Fiction has become a bit like a painting in the age of photography" – a novelty item that has its place in high culture and low but is oddly absent in the middle range: "fiction's day is done". In Reality Hunger, David Shields argues that we live in an age of such pervasive narcissism and are so saturated with half- and untruths that imaginative works are rejected for those that promise authenticity. He sees the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction growing increasingly fragile. The boom in memoirs, from James Frey's A Million Little Pieces to Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, is equally problematic for Shields. There is no guarantee of authentic experience since "memoir is as far from real life as fiction is". Memory is unreliable, memoirists turn themselves into characters, and this genre rightly belongs to the world of imaginative writing. But does anyone care? Where the future of fiction lies is in cyberspace, where reading will be increasingly determined by "relationships, links, connections and shar[ing]". Shields has identified a problem that publishers and writers have been slow to grasp; that the rise of web writing, blogging and reality television is having a huge impact on how books are read."

"What seems like an ancient and benign desire to tell a simple story has, according to Salmon, been appropriated by post-capitalism to serve its own ends. Advertising has moved on from the Kodak and Bacardi campaigns beloved of Mad Men, he argues, to inventing narratives that make the message digestible, emotional and bleached of reality. The goal of "storytelling marketing" is not just to persuade consumers to buy but to involve them in a story. Consumption has become a way of relating to the world, so that by your purchases shall you be known."

Julie Wheelbright writing in The Independent: Full Article Here

WHAT'S HIP POPS?

2010-05-08T11:04:00.012+01:00

Kudos to Blissblog for pointing out the L.A Times article (still the most interesting newspaper on earth when it comes to Pop culture writing) 'Hipster Is Having A Senior Moment' about a growing Internet phenomenon that revolves around a cult of senior citizens, best illustrated by the YouTube show 'Breakfast At Sulimays'. In part, this could be dismissed as mere Pop Culture Irony, yet there is still something to be argued about the merits of assessing the constant deluge of new music, film and styles through the eyes of people not necessarily plugged in to nor targeted by the culture industry. As the L.A Times notes: "For the self-aware, self-obsessed members of the X, Y and Z generations, the constant presence of social media reinforces a myopic worldview, allowing them to surround themselves with like-minded people. That makes the virtual eruption of elderly voices both novel and bracing."

I have noted previously the artistic effectiveness of kicking against the ABC-1/ demographic obsessed marketing culture that lurks at the heart of all mass media when in 'How To Grow Old Disgracefully' I observed that the most aggressive and ambitious guitar albums of 2008 had been made by cantankerous rockers in their fifties - Nick Cave's Grinderman and Indie stalwarts The Fall (with its anti-youth anthem '50 Year Old Man'). The 'Live Fast Die Young' ethos that has dogged youth culture ever since James Dean's career was cut tragically short was being put through the shredder in a way that reinforced the same culture's simultaneous cry for a constant state of rebellion. It was a novel paradox, but one that shone a more effective light on the state of things than one dictated by the traditional rebellion of youth.

Indeed, what is ultimately exposed is the increasing madness of attempting mass communication by targeting demographics. As BBH's Jon Hegarty has previously observed there exists the process of the 'Youthening' of personal identity, which locates a major flaw in the demographic approach. He observes: “There’s a general misconception that as people grow old they want old things. Yet as any old person will tell you, the last thing they want to be is old. Today’s 55’s are younger than the 55’s of ten years ago. The real task for marketers is: how do you talk to a group of people who are sharper, smarter and ‘younger’ than they’ve ever experienced before? This generation will be open to persuasion. What they won’t be open to is vacuous nonsense.”

HARD TARGETS

2010-05-06T10:45:00.023+01:00

Superb piece by Ruthless Culture dissecting the French film 'Heartbeat Detector', which explores the dark heart of the Post-Industrial society and the culture of de-individuation it cultivates. It reminded me of this excellent post by K-Punk ("Calling Kafka") that reiterated why Kafka's observations about systems remain so prescient in the modern world. K-Punk observed: "The call centre experience distills the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller – there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could."

Anyone who has ever experienced business at a corporate / public sector level will know the immense difficulties in trying to rectify failing systems and the resistance to change that ensues even when countless flaws are evident. Get too close to the machinery and you'll get chewed up by the cogs. This condition has been compounded by the prevalent Neo-Liberal tendency of the past twenty years to collate vast quantities of data, focus group every decision and quantify success by consulting 'targets' alone, an instinct that finally led to the implosion of the New Labour experiment. Indeed, it wasn't an illegal war that ultimately felled the New Labour project, it was the enormity and -ironically - sheer inefficiency of the project itself.

Indeed, the journalist Pat Kane recently suggested this tendency was so all-pervading in Blairite thinking that it seeped into every crack of the British culture, from major institutions such as the N.H.S and Education to such television fodder as 'Location Location Location', 'Supernanny', 'How Clean Is Your House?'. In many ways it reflected an age old tension between the individual and the state, but this past thirteen years it has been accelerated to new levels of dysfunction. It was no small irony that the faceless, Kafka-esque bureaucrat was the main protagonist of Labour's recent Party Political Broadcasts, when that is exactly the 'individual' the Blair / Brown era has become associated with.

DIG IT UP AND DANCE AGAIN

2010-04-19T20:08:00.027+01:00

It's impossible not to warm to a book about Disco that begins with a quote from serial killer David Berkowitz but that's how Peter Shapiro's 'Turn The Beat Around' commences. "Hell from the gutters of N.Y.C which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood," Berkwotiz growls reminding us that in the mid-70's to many observers New York was symbolic of Civilisation's last days, a metropolis on its knees that, when it wasn't experiencing blackouts, heatwaves and street violence, produced howls of despair such as Martin Scorcese's 'Taxi Driver' (1976) and the CBGB Punk scene . It's an extreme portrait but one which provides a valuable geographical context for Disco's origins because, despite its superficial sheen, Disco was far from a disconnect from it's urban habitat. On the contrary it was utterly defined by the sordid underbelly, discordant politics and urban dread that haunted New York's streets, as Shapiro so persuasively observes.

"Disco was a retreat back into the body -both the newly liberated body of its prime constituents and the body politic. As Peter Carroll wrote, 'Rhetoric ran freely in 1970 - rhetoric about the war and about peace, rhetoric about social injustice and possibility. There was also considerable rhetoric about rhetoric.' After wars and traumatic events, American popular music has always returned to the body as a locus of meaning and turned its back on language: after the Civil War, barn dances and squares dances were all the rage; the end of World War I saw the dawn of the Jazz Age; World War II heralded Rock N Roll. But Disco wasn't simply an escape from the language that divided America, it was at the same time an embodiment of the very tensions and schisms that the rhetoric sought to express and resolve. Disco was at once about community and individual pleasure, sensation and alienation, orgy and sacrifice; it promised both liberation and constraint, release and restraint, frivolity and doom. Disco was both Utopia and Hell." (P30)

Punk scholar Jon Savage concurs: "Many of the qualities that were celebrated in Disco that were so derided were mirror images of those qualities that were celebrated in Punk: an annihilating insistence on sex as opposed to puritan disgust; a delight in a technology as opposed to a Luddite reliance on the standard Rock Group format; acceptance of mass production as opposed to individuality. It was the difference between 1984 and Brave New World, between a social realist dystopia, and a nightmare all the more realistic because accomplished through seduction."

Perhaps no Disco producer exemplified these paradoxes as effectively as Bob Blank. As Shapiro noted in his recent The Wire review of the Blank compilation 'The Blank Generation'; "Despite the threat of violence between socio-ethnic groups, it was not at all unusual for people to be aware of what was going on sonically on the other side of the tracks," and to illustrate this he reminds us of the many Punks and Avante Gardists who frequented Blank's Manhattan studio, luminaries that included John Cale, Lydia Lunch, James Blood Ulmer and Arthur Russell. Indeed, this fusion would find its full expression in the No Wave scene with its emphasis of the bass guitar and abandonment of traditional guitar riffs that even Punk remained a slave to.

It's fitting then that in 2010 Disco reissues are coming thick and fast. In particular, the Disco Discharge compilations of last year were a fantastic reminder of Disco's full 12" splendour and returned a new generation to the very DNA of contemporary Dance music. Indeed, it's worth observing that despite Punk holding strong over time, its legacy is less sonic, more a mind-set. By contrast Disco remains a potent source of sonic inspiration - Brian Eno was right when upon hearing Moroder's 'I Feel Love' he declared he'd just heard 'the future' - whilst the Discotheque itself remains the template for every venue in Clubland, from the Ministry Of Sound to The Coronet.

Indeed, if one moves beyond the press releases of the big albums of 2010 (Hot Chip, Massive Attack, Groove Armada, Gorillaz) to the actual, physical music, then one finds a magpie instinct at work that is directly inspired by the studio wizardry of Bob Blank or Larry Levan. This is music that surrenders to 'sound' and dispenses with angry polemic, submerging the listener in electronic pulses as Futuristic as they are primal. Look to mainstream entertainment and you'll find song and dance once again at the heart of the culture as manifested in popular hit TV such as 'Glee', 'So You Think You Can Dance?' and 'Strictly Come Dancing'. Which raises the possibility that in 2010, faced with economic free fall, bloody wars overseas and a pervading sense of social fragmentation the temptation has returned to retreat 'back into the body' and escape from the horror once again.

FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN

2010-04-19T19:21:00.014+01:00

Jon Savage is quoted below discussing Punk in The Independent, a piece written in response to Malcolm McClaren's death. He provides an interesting contrast between the late 70's and the present, even if the source of teenage boredom has perhaps mutated from having nothing to do to having so much consumer attention that it can result in equally mind-numbing and claustrophobic consequences. He writes:

"Today, punk is an acknowledged part of 20th-century cultural history – a youth-cult template, to be sourced and sampled. You can see its traces throughout the media – along with all the other images from the peak years of mass culture. It is in history: its influence is so diverse as to seem almost meaningless. But there's no point in pretending: it is now well over 30 years ago and the world is completely different. Punk's furious insistence on praxis and creation – without any thought of building a career or satisfying a focus group – now seems wilfully naive. Most importantly, it was the product of a scarcity that now almost seems inconceivable, almost 19th century."

"Britain in 1977 still felt like a country struggling to shake off the Second World War: in central London there were still hundreds of bombsites, whole areas that were derelict with nothing but corrugated iron and the wild, sweet-smelling buddleia. Born in the 1950s, the punk generation were the children of people who had fought and suffered in the 1940s. Since then, there have been more than three decades of increased, if not highly selective, prosperity. The media in particular has expanded in an almost exponential curve: a development predicted by the situationist theorists (like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem) who provided a strong, if shadowed, influence on punk. Today there is so much youth media it could seem like a paradise."

"But as the economic cycle has swung from boom to bust, punk presents itself as a spirited response to crisis. It's not that it will "come back": it never will, and it never should. But it offered an alternative way of looking at the world – a last echo of 1960s radicalism – that remains inspiring, not as a style but as an irreducible historical fact. It is very tempting to draw the parallels between the late 1970s and today, as recession returns with its morbid symptoms: developing political polarisation, street violence, industrial unrest and severe youth unemployment. But things are never the same, even if the economic cycles and the patterns of history appear to repeat themselves."

"Britain in the 21st century is a much more controlled society, with rising levels of surveillance. In contrast, the wildness of punk seems like a product of an unintended freedom. The "flowers in the dustbin" – as John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, so memorably called the forgotten teens whose plight he embodied – have not gone away. How the youth of today will react to the crisis of 2010 is a matter of national importance."

CRUEL BRITTANIA, SECRET BRITAIN

2010-04-05T17:25:00.020+01:00

From 'Cool Britannia' to 'Broken Britain' the United Kingdom has been plagued in recent decades by media buzzwords that owe far more to popular hysteria and government-fuelled PR than any historical reality. The truth is Britain has always been a hybrid, fragmented state - the hyphen in 'Anglo-Saxon the vital clue to the national make-up - the English language itself a mongrel dialect that exploits Olde English, Latin, Greek, German, French, Scandinavian, Indian and - bizarrely - American and Australian. No land that has been invaded so much could have survived with such pluck were it not so adaptive, nor perhaps could its Empire have been so effective without its capacity for conciliation merged with aggressive might. As such, it has always had the paranoid mindset of an Island, its historical identity traditionally hinging upon the presence of Christianity, a powerful Navy and the Royal Family, then in their absence The Beatles and a self-deprecating sense of humour. If the 'Great' in Great Britain can be traced to anything it is surely the nation's ability to function as a collage, one that has grown richer and more varied Post-War with the same pace that its detractors have cried out in despair at its supposed decline. It has always been a muddle. It has neither been significantly 'cool' nor especially 'broken'.

Jez Butterworth's 'Jerusalem' has been burdened with the suggestion that it is a 'state of the nation' play. Hyperbole aside, it's certainly very good, and largely because it functions as a dramatisation of the very fragmentation that has always defined Britain's make-up. Drifting from folklore to modern celebrity, its burnt-out protagonists blur the line between William Blake and Susan Boyle with wit and purpose, Albion now just a dream, one that exists solely on the perimeters of the new housing estates that increasingly play the villain in British fiction (see 'Eden Lake', JG Ballard).

"A Clockwork Orange" (1972)

The old world - the one traditional British conservatism so depended on- has indeed given way to a culture devoid of paternalism but high on officialdom. There is of course an irony in this. That a typical West End theatre audience would be rooting for the main character Johnny 'Rooster' Byron in his last stand against the Local Council seems at odds with the NIMBY mentality that would seize them should he deign to move in next to their house. No matter, this is entertainment that explores a romantic mythology, not the tawdry reality.

Don McCullin 'The Guvnors' (1954)

The play is effective nonetheless because it understands the alternate history of Britain has always resonated strongest in the peripheries. If the Hoodie culture of today seems like a modern social menace, it is fundamentally no different to the teen gang violence of yesteryear, the Bootboys and Suedeheads, the Mods and Rockers, and the Razor gangs before that who once so thrilled Graham Greene and Don McCullin. When Anthony Burgess published 'A Clockwork Orange' in 1962 it was a response to the violent gangs that swaggered the streets of Britain, not mere fiction to provide for his family. Indeed, the reality of Britain has always been shadowed by a cast of characters who played out the disenchantment with the official narrative - David Shayler, John Stonehouse, Lord Lucan, The Krays, Aleister Crowley and the modern pantheon of murderers Britain has yielded, infamous around the world - Fred West, The Yorksire Ripper, Dennis Nielson and the Moors Murderers.

Marcus Harvey 'Myra'

What is more curious is that this 'secret history' that is so rarely explored in Britain's mainstream popular culture. In the United States, the 'Subculture' can make significant claims to being the 'Official Culture', with protagonists such as Howard Hawkes, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Charlie Manson, Michael Jackson and the Kennedys somehow fitting effortlessly into both categories, their deficiencies and weirdness readily acknowledged even as they are celebrated as popular icons. In British culture, the subtext is harder to locate. Certainly a few musicians have embraced the underbelly in search of inspiration (Morrissey, Luke Haines), a few visual artists (Derek Jarman, Marcus Harvey, Russell Young) whilst several authors have attempted to utilise James Ellroy's fictionalising of history to locate local truths (David Peace, Jake Arnott, Iain Sinclair, Gordon Burn), yet they remain the exceptions. A major figure in the arts such as Francis Bacon still feels like the exception despite the vast sums his paintings sold for and when contrasted with his American equivalents - Jackson Pollock, say or Andy Warhol - he continues to lurk in the shadows. Perhaps it's simply all in the sell? Certainly though, Butterworth's play reminds us that to truly understand Britain in all its weirdness and complexity, we must visit these fringes, the beaten-up woodland and motorway lay-bys after dark, the business parks and the theme pubs, the wild terrain that separates the major Cities, the new town Cul De Sacs and pristine shopping malls accessible only by car. Because this is where British culture ultimately lurks - beyond class, beyond heritage, beyond the 'Great' in the name - mundane and weird, but full of meaning.

L.A. AND THE NOW-NESS OF EVERYTHING

2010-02-28T11:38:00.026Z

Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” is a powerful and timely adaptation of Isherwood’s autobiographical novella, haunted by the ghosts of both Marcel Proust and Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, there is no small irony that it has taken Ford, former uber-Brand manager of Gucci, to make an expressionistic film that ultimately tells us to ignore the sales pitches and culture of fear that hangs over our lives, and savour the everyday for what it is.

Framed through the prism of grief, this is a film that applies a value to life, simply by casting it against the terrible nothingness of death. Indeed, the evocation of Dennis Potter’s last observations when he himself was on the brink of oblivion hover over everything. Potter told interviewer Melvyn Bragg that for the first time he truly saw the blossom on the tree outside his study, only now his life was running out. “The blossom is out in full now, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white. It’s the whitest, frothiest blossomest blossom that ever could be, and I can see it. Things are both more trivial than they ever were and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter. But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous.”

Indeed, the film I was most reminded of when watching ‘A Single Man’ was that earlier Los Angeles cult classic, ‘IvansXTC’. Both tap into a curious paradox that haunts much West Coast art. They frame their protagonist’s existential crisis, in both cases triggered by a heightened awareness of their own mortality, against a dreamy L.A backdrop of consumerism, oceans and blood red sunsets. Or as John Rechy observed in ‘City Of Night’, a place where ‘the sun gives up and sinks into the black, black sea’.

(The Informers, 2008)

There are evident ironies here. That the home of the entertainment industry is producing these existential musings reminds us that Hollywood’s history has actually been one giant working through of a collective existential crisis. From Film Noir’s exploitation of death’s shadow’s and people’s base unknowability, to Post-Watergate 1970’s howls of despair that draw on peculiarly L.A visions (Arthur Penn’s ‘Night Moves’ perhaps the most doubt-fuelled and elegiac of them all) to the 1980’s and the sickly glamour of ‘Less Than Zero’ and the mortal future projected in ‘Bladerunner’, through Michael Mann’s ghostly visions of fragmented mindsets in ‘Heat’ and ‘Collateral’ right up to the present with the Post-Altman, HIV-fuelled anguish of ‘The Informers’, Hollywood’s muse has so often been death herself, framed against the beauty of the unique light that established it as the base for the film industry in the first place.

(Phillip dicorcia Lorca)

It is the same otherness that lingers in the visual art from the City, in both Ed Ruscha’s later portraits of the City at night, and in Phillip diCorcia Lorca’s photos of hustlers on the Sunset Strip around twilight. Intelligently, Tom Ford embraces all these visual metaphors that have dominated L.A’s symbolism for so long, and compiles them into a film that essentially argues that simply becoming one with the present is the only sanctity from the unstoppable forces of termination itself. Just as Casanova suggested the secret happiness was to reminisce, just as Proust argued that life could only be truly cherished in all its fragmented strangeness at its end, so Ford implores us that the only way to survive the inevitable drift of life into death, is to let the chaos swirl around you, and simply behold the moment you’re in.

(Ed Ruscha)