the Impostume

2009-12-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

Jacob’s (social) Ladder.

I haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder for almost twenty years and wasn’t expecting much of it on a re-watch. Actually, it’s not a great film (though Adrian Lyne is underrated as a director), though it has some great moments and it is interesting in couple of respects.

First of all it’s kind of a Po-Mo Ur-text in that the shifting between two or three different worlds and time frames, the connections between which and the grounding of one as “reality” are revealed in a final scene which retroactively gives you the key to piecing the whole thing together, (in other words the film as a kind of puzzle (but not as in “ Marienbad” an enigma) that the smart viewer tries to outguess as it goes along) has become one of the central diminishing pleasures of PoMo. Also because it involves a paranoid conspiracy element in which “reality” is a byproduct of the MiIlitary-Industrial complex, blah blah.

Maybe Atom Egoyan’s fractured thrillers (variously successful: from the Adjuster through the influential Exotica and the great The Sweet Hereafter onto to the needlessly non-abc Felicia’s Journey) got there first, but Jacob’s Ladder is certainly early .

What’s most intriguing about “ Jacob’s Ladder” however is, yep, its vision of class.

Jacob fights for his life in Vietnam and the film intercuts this world, which the viewer presumes are memories, with his hallucinations of a future purgatorial existence in New York until he finally lets go and climbs up to heaven with his dead son. The hell that Jacob lives in, in the hallucinated post Vietnam America, is proletarian life and there is in this something of the nightmare anticipation of the proletarianization of the American middle classes through the Eighties (and on). Jacob has a PHD but works for the post office, he has to pull extra shifts an d falls asleep on the subway, lives in a tiny flat with a petite but vulgar Hispanic sex bomb, his neighbourhood is full of rubbish and burnt out cars, he begins to hallucinate demons that he’s assured are just the plentiful wino’s and bag ladies that litter the streets, has run-ins with unhelpful nurses in public hospitals, hangs out at parties with non-whites and sexually adventurous drug takers, has health problems and in one memorable sequence is taken into a filthy and increasingly infernal hospital to be treated.

During a fever Jacob slips into a third world, the life he lived prior to going to ‘Nam, waking up in bed with his ex-wife in their large, well-appointed flat. He tells her he dreamed he was living with Jezebel (all the characters have ponderously coded religious names) from the Post Office, of all people, “what a nightmare”, before putting his angelic children to bed. This is the middle-class nightmare, low pay, low status jobs, dirty areas, poorly educated partners and unsophisticated friends, the inaccessibility of decent health care, the possibility of mental health issues, of legal problems that you can’t get representation for. When Jacob finally decides to let go he is taken by the taxi driver, who won’t go to Brooklyn, back to the luxurious apartment he presumably shares with his wife and where the doorman addresses him as Professor Sringer, ushering him in to both his appropriate place in life and affirming his status. The route to heaven is up the stairs of a duplex apartment in the expensive part of town.

Jacob is released. Hell is still around the corner.

2009-12-05T06:27:00.000-08:00

Three old records part 3.

I don’t want to mention Steve Albini again, but it is only in passing so......

Anyway, Big Black’s parting shot was a 7” that covered “The Model” by Kraftwerk, included in Songs about Fucking, the double A-side of which was a cover of Cheap Trick’s “He’s a Whore”. It’s a cracker actually and kind of offers up a possible direction for Albini’s post B.B. stuff that never materialized and in whose place we got the weird admixture of the smug irreverence and rockist-worthiness that characterised Rapeman and Shellac. Real drummers suck.

Strangely though I’d never bothered listening to Cheap Trick themselves assuming that B.B.’s version was an amped-up desecration of some wimpy soft rock abomination. For twenty years I’ve been wandering round with the entirely baseless assumption that Cheap Trick sound like Foreigner or Toto or something. I only bothered to listen to them because a work colleague with otherwise excellent tastes (although he does like the Beatles. And the Beach Boys, for that matter) goes on about how good they are.

And fuck me, he’s not wrong is he.

The first album is in by a whisker because it’s got “He’s a whore" on, the Big Black version of which is a bit graceless in comparison, though it’s possibly not as good as the second, “In Colour”, which includes a truly paint-stripping live version of “You’re All Talk”.

To say it rocks would be an understatement. Imagine a Mini Cooper with knackered suspension parked up in a lay-by somewhere outside Leighton Buzzard: Geoff Capes and Giant Haystacks are having a fisting session in the back seat. It rocks more than that.

A part of it’s rocking so gloriously is of course it’s silk-shirted, preening faginess. It’s half-glam, half-pop, half-incipient hardcore, 150 percent thrilling. Unbelievably, instantaneously memorable hooks, crotch-tinglingy propulsive riffs, stomping glitter drums, a more-ish even-MOR-ish in places, exquisitely balanced, salted and seasoned feast for the senses. It’s the sheer ranging musicality of the album (and actually almost all their stuff) from the bubblegum-disco core of “ Whore” to the hyper-bright Boogie of “Hot Love” or the billowy, pre-verbed vocals on the lovely ballad “Mandecello” every track offering up some smart but unsmug bit of wizardry without it ever getting in the way of the song’s impact.

Sexy, sophisticated, mercilessly entertaining, horribly addictive.

2009-12-02T05:54:00.000-08:00

three old records part 2

Van Dyke Parks.

A few months ago those three words would have conjured naught but a sneer of disdain from my, admittedly rather kissable, lips. I owned a copy of “Song Cycle” and had listened to it about five times since I bought it in a moment of malnourished half-drunken recklessness in Barcelona several years ago. So, I’ve gone without food, and most importantly booze in order to own this, have I? Admittedly there’s not much cultural product that can mitigate against a lack of food and booze, but still, verily I was eating dust and ashes when I stuck it on and got some hideous candy-striped confection of whimsical fuckwittery in place of the Avant-garde meisterwerk THEY HAD PROMISED ME.

I dug it out again month or so ago, imagining that perhaps like a fine wine it had matured with the years, nestling there in the bottom of the roughly hewn (but organic!) oakum ( Hand Picked by the NEW POOR!) and recycled-diaper CD sack in which I routinely cart around the miserable burden that the pre-digitized age foisted upon us. Nowadays of course this medium sized slagheap of unwanted cds (but which tantalisingly and therefore unbinnably promises the overlooked, the undisclosed, the finally understood) could be replaced by one small memory stick. But wouldn’t you miss the materiality of the thing itself, the way it seems to anchor you in a world unmappably in flux blah blah. Not when you have to shlepp (like a nebbish!) through the rain with your shoulder gently de-socketing in yet another housemove (can’t drive, you see). Veritably the cds of the past way like a nightmare on the forearms of the living.

Still, I digress.

“Song Cycle!” It’s still fucking horrible. I love “Vine Street” but twenty seconds into Parks' egregious acid-and-helium-infused Disney-fied reworking of it I’m gagging and reaching for the superlative “Nilsson sings Newman.”

And as for all the Beach Boys stuff, who cares? The Beach Boys leave me colder than a homeless Siberian’s gangrenous legs. “Surfs up”? A cringe-making rococo folly of epic proportions. Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson’s “Orange Crate Art”? An overegged meringue of sickly sweet eupeptic whooping and warbling, made all the more awful by the prospect, in the mind’s eye, of the grizzled, turkey-wattled gizzards from whence it pipes, an abomination to the ears of all those who Dwell in the House of Righteousness. Everything from and including “Clang of the Yankee Reaper”? A welter of smugly virtuosic, wildly overproduced, smart-arsed, waxed-tash-twirling, bow-tie-whirling showtunery.

Listen to Van Dyke Parks? I’d rather watch my Mother eat out a syphilitic Latvian pole dancer for crack-money. LOL!!!!

And he arranged that Joanna Newsom LP, innit? That’s a world of wilfully idiosyncratic Kookiness that Van has dished up. Surely, his crimes are Legion, there can be no forgiveness. To the scaffold, comrades!

Except we’re missing one thing, aren’t we? Van’s Calypso album “Discover America.”

Listen to a Van Dyke Park’s Calypso Concept Album? I’d rather bugger my own mother sans Vaseline (LOL) as she ate out (etc)(LOL). (hereafter BMOMSVASAOSLPDFCM)

Or rather at this stage I’d rather BMOMSVASAOSLPDFCM than NOT hear it again. Yep, so deeply have I fallen under twinkly-eyed and fleet-footed foxy Old Uncle Dyke’s Trinidadian mojo.

Partly it’s wit, though Park’s is always clever, here he’s actually funny. The first track “Jack Palance”, a scratchy take-off of a lost calypso classic in which the singer (presumably Parks singing with a Trinidadian accent) stumble s upon an elderly female family member having it large in a dancehall with a Yankee sailor and is suitably horrified and incredulous, especially as she is “ still going about at night with a face like Jack Palance”

But is it merely funny? Does comedy, after all, belong in music? Not merely, no, it’s also as infectiously groovy as the nonunheretoforeaformentioned syphiltic Latvian pole dancer. Unlike both his later and earlier stuff, its uncluttered, almost lo-fi in the production, there’s space to breathe whereas the others are simply so obsessed with the razzle-dazzle of full pelt, full tilt orchestration and arrangement that it’s hard to get a purchase on it. There’s a certain amount of space needed for the ear to slip between the interstices and work on the sound a little, if not it just bounces of the surface.

“Discover America”, more than his other work, precisely because of its looseness and restraint offers up Park’s extravagant gift for melody and harmony to the full. It’s achingly lovely at times, (Sailing Shoes) downright funky at others (Occapella) plays with dissonance and unusual tempos (Big Wheels) but never loses its exuberance, its rosy insistence on life’s pleasures.

Generally Parks is as exhausting as he is inexhaustible, as deadeningly full-on as a Jerry Lee Lewis or Jim Carrey movie, but “Discover America’s” measured panache and its heartfelt revelling in the beauty of Calypso, married to an affecting homage to the West Indies and some of Park’s musical influences produces a work that positively tickles you all over, from cortex to instep, from the tips of your snapping fingers to the balls of your tapping toes.

Van Dyke Parks? Absolute badman.

2009-11-30T04:47:00.001-08:00

Fuck me! This meme just won't die.

2009-11-29T08:34:00.000-08:00

Three old records I’ve been enjoying.

Part 1.

I don’t know how it is for anyone else but I’m constantly surprised by my own ability to like stuff I ostensibly have no interest in or which I’ve been dismissing for years, often, given my penchant for hyperbole and attention seeking declamatory bluster (well you’ve got to keep yourself entertained, innit? Have you met MOST PEOPLE?) in fairly strident terms. Then, whoops, suddenly you hear a particular record by an artist you’ve marked down in the SHITE file or discover someone in a tradition you’re less than wild about/ re-hear something you couldn’t get any pleasure out of when younger and suddenly it’s that old AHA! yet OH-NO! shamefaced and sheepish recognition that some clubfooted old duffer you’ve been mauling/ignoring for years has actually produced toweringly edifying work.

This is not to suggest that I haven’t heard lots of great stuff that came out this year too, in fact it seems to have been a bit of an embarrassment of riches really, in large part due to Dubstep’s transformation into whatever post-dubstep is currently being called. Let’s just say that between Hyperdub’s first releases and the newer stuff on their half-decade compilation and Mary Ann Hobbe’s first Breezeblock comp and “Wild Angels” there’s a huge difference, primarily via the incursion of all those unserious things, swagger, colour, groove, panache, tunes, playfulness and dare I say, it glossy Futurisim (loving that Martyn album’s Outernational Hyper-Capitalist no-space sheen*) that seems to have just overwhelmed the Millenial faux-moodiness of early dubstep. In another large part it’s because I also contrived to finally get round to listening to and liking the Ghost Box stuff, hopefully just as everyone else goes off it! But more about all that in a later post, I guess.

The first of the old albums that blew me away this year was…

…I’d just like to point out that you’ve already been listening to this for years and I am gratuitously late in hailing its genius, which you’ve known about since birth etc, yes, well done you..

Well it was..

And actually we managed a Moment Of Silent Communion Among The Elect (hereafter a Moscate) in my local Music and Video Exchange at the mere mention of the as-of-yet-unaformetioned work.

So it’s this.

It’s what I’d always hoped “Astral Weeks” sounded like i.e, genuinely cosmic, folk-based, long and beautifully free-ranging, lyrical, lyrically rich and strange with gorgeous melodies and a dramatic use of overdubs and multitracking on the vocals to fill out the sound with all kind s of celestial choiring and choral-ing . It’s in the blasted, blissful Pantheon with Bitches Brew and Starsailor and Inside Out. “Astral Weeks” is probably alright but it is a wee bit pedestrian and anally-retentive compared to Buckley or John Martyn and anyway, its potentially inviting shimmery languor is heavily compromised for me by Van’s great raspy, blaring Foghorn-Leghorn of a voice. More grain than a Ukranian wheat silo.

“Stormcock” also manages to be astral without being whimsical, ie most of the genteel music-hall surrealism that still inflects the Canterbury scene and on through Steve Hillage’s solo stuff (which is interesting, don’t get me wrong and has, admittedly, been bled out by the time we get through to “Rainbow Dome Music” (hello “Fuck Buttons”)) and Gong and down the line to Ozric Tentacles.

I have mixed feelings about this element within a strand of British psychedelia, what gets called “dilute surrealism” elsewhere with regard to British film, but which is also the pernicious legacy of Dada-ism in music in lots of ways i.e. wackiness. John Martyn had the advantage of being by all accounts a really horrible person, no slightly apologetic half-measure in his glass: he took himself seriously and was probably extremely keen to insist you did the same. No Goonish-tomfoolery and pot-headed pixiness.

The same goes for “Stormcock”: it doesn’t have Martyn’s glowering, Blues-derived Dionysian intensity; Harper’s album is more akin to “Song to the Siren” seeming to float in a bright space all its own, clouds build up, darken and pass, colour and texture sift through the sky, it grows cold and damp, weak rays offer up a pale, wind-torn dazzle, the sunlight ebbs then intensifies. There’s something runic, antediluvian, faintly Old Testament to “Stormcock” something of the beauty of the deeply weathered, the burnish of the well-worked, the passed-down. I’m tempted to say that its use of vocal effects and multi-tracking is even more audacious than Buckley’s on “Song” or even the track “Starsailor” itself, offering up a dense but diaphanous net of nacreous glossolalia that swirls into and around the singer. Pianos drop through the sky and explode, orchestra’s swirl into view, brass sections float past, percussion surges and scatters, everything runs backwards for a few moments, the aurora borealis scintillate in the middle distance, a comet flares, the night breathes mysteries, Roy spins and struts, crumples, yearns and drifts, howls himself awake and lulls himself to sleep: the normal laws of musical physics are suspended.

An utter and complete masterpiece. Actually this is also what I always thought “Sergeant Pepper’s” was supposed to sound like.

*In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that there’s a hidden Hauntological element to Martyn and 2562: this is the sound of the promise of HyperCapital that never materialised, a soundtrack to the pristine Wired world of gleaming globalised third spaces like Starbucks in which we would all be in a state of Post-Historical ecstatic communication! ie were in a continuum of nostalgia for a previous generation’s futurist/political optimism. I suppose that even if you want to deny that you have any interest in the future that only OLD people care about the future, which I suppose will be the rhetorical move against the Nuum-general’s complaint of the lack of futurism in contemporary dance culture, nonetheless what you’re inevitably picking up on in the past is someone else’s investment in it. The past is largely just a set of engagements with what the future may be, so even if you disavow the interest on the discursive level, practically you’re still caught up in it, futurelessly you drink deep from the libidinally-charged wells of futurism past!!!

2009-11-25T05:08:00.000-08:00

Finished!

better get back to some blogging then.

2009-10-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

I'm very slow on this but Sam's Post-rocktoberfest is basically a great service to humanity.

2009-10-12T05:41:00.000-07:00

Good work on Blissblog re Harry! I love all his stuff pretty much (even that stuff with Eric Idle) despite hating the Beatles. GO FIGURE! Someone has youtubed Knillson here.

"Jump into the fire" is in "Goodfellas", innit!

2009-10-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

R.I.P.

y

Gracias.

2009-09-08T11:14:00.000-07:00

Here's another bit....

Welshian heroism.

In his cameo in “Trainspotting”* Irvine Welsh is wearing an Exploited t-shirt, but despite this seeming advocacy the band are noticeably missing from the film’s soundtrack, which is comprised of “cutting edge” Britpop tracks by the likes of Blur and Sleeper, a smattering of techno and some middle-brow classics by Iggy and Eno. The lumpen antagonism of The Exploited is too alienating and alienated, too politicized, to soundtrack the onscreen hi-jinks and bright-eyed enthusiasm for heroin addiction. Nonetheless, Welsh feels the need to wear it, a pennant of his deathless allegiance to/knowledge of a punk underground nowhere else glimpsed in the film.

A part of the Exploited’s micro-mystique is that they were one of the bands, along with Conflict, Discharge and the Subhumans who took punk in a different direction, away from its co-option by the mainstream, into a subaltern world of anarchist commitment. They weren’t fashionable, they weren’t post-punk in any of its currently understood senses, there were very few major labels sniffing round them, and besides, a part of their commitment demanded that they would tell them to fuck off. The Exploited signify a kind of anti-plastic-punk Real.

Yet in an essay Welsh published at the time, reprinted as part of the ten year anniversary DVD of Trainspotting, in which among other things he defends the decision to shoot Trainspotting in a non-realist fashion (about which more presently) he can name someone like Liam Gallagher as a working class hero.

Liam is a working class hero, not because he has directly done anything for/with the working class but precisely because he’s got away from them, he represents the working class not through any specific set of political positions, class politics having been, after all, relegated to the dustbin of history, but through his “attitude”, his mad-for-it hedonism, his straight talking, his punch ups, his mocking sarcasm, all nicely combined with his reverence for an unthreatening resurgent strand of contemporary Heritage culture, namely The Beatles.

Heroism, you would think, entailed some potential danger to or sacrifice on the part of the putative hero, some risk-taking: where is the heroism in getting rich and buying a mansion on the basis of a few mild epaterings of the bourgeoisie plus Trad-rock? Indeed, generally, shock was a sure career path in all forms of culture throughout the Nineties: in the newly tolerant Third way, it was a virtual demand of the system. Neo-Liberalism can’t prove its Neo or its Liberalism without it. Capitalism without conservatism is effectively that having your cake and eating it Welsh identifies in the essay, and for which the Novel’s most effective advocate is Sick Boy, in his rejection of the attachments and allegiances of old Labour and the Victorian stridency of Thatcherism.

“The socialists go on about your comrades, your class, your union and society. Fuck all that shite. The Tories go on about your employer, your country, your family. Fuck that even mair. It’s me, me, fucking me..”*

Working class heroism is Liam Gallagher’s heroism, as opposed to the evident non-heroism of defeated, uncool relics of the past like Scargill. With Trainspotting Welsh in no way changes the world he writes about but somehow, heroically reporting on it, representing it, raising it from invisibility into consciousness, better still into “coolness”, he has fulfilled a duty. In a post-Historical scenario in which the conservative notion of recognition rather than any dangerously disruptive notions of equality are in the ascendant then coolness is perhaps the greatest, if not only, gift to be bestowed upon the subaltern classes.

Welsh might read at the Edinburgh festival his character’s despise, he might appear in cameos in hip movies made of his work, he might amass a small fortune and own homes here, there and everywhere, sensibly choosing Life in its any-colour-so-long-as-it’s-Neo-Liberal variety but he will wear his Exploited t-shirt at all times as an authenticator of his attitude, of who he is inside. Having his cake and eating it, moneyed, comfortable but still underground and cool, still real.

They can’t buy your soul, man, and I’ve got a T-shirt that proves it.

* Ironically it’s exactly Welsh’s non-pretty boy panicked grimness of face and figure that punctures Trainspotting’s diegesis. Who’s this ugly bloke and what the fuck is he doing in this promo video for smack use? He appears to have wandered in from an entirely other dimension. Aha! Must be the writer!

**In the film, Sick Boy, played by the handsome Johnny Lee Miller wears a really rather nice suit and has a funky, Beckham-style haircut, somewhat unlike that of the average Edinburgh junkie circa 1986, but very post Reservoir Dogs and Three Lions friendly. He’s a more minor character than Renton who is less attractive, more uncertain, who admits finally to being a bad person but who finally gets out. Renton has, at least, the politesse to confess to his imperfections. Sick Boy is too nakedly, gloatingly avaricious and cynical to be the perfect proxy, there must be some dissembling show of humility as you rip off your friends. I am bad person, but you know, to be a winner, sometimes you have to be…..

2009-09-08T05:23:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a long piece on British film, now overdue and still being hacked away at. I seem to be obsessing over Danny Boyle perhaps rather too much. Anyway, in order to break the protracted Blog-silence and assure my non-paymasters that I'm really doing something, I'll start to post stuff. The first rough one on Trainspotting is below.

2009-09-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

The constitution of the addressee.

It’s obvious, but it bears repeating: Trainspotting is not a film about four Edinburgh junkies in the late Eighties, it’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass” for Blairites. Ewan McGregor’s “Renton” is the fantasy projection of the Poorist middle classes, representing a brief, invigorating holiday in transgression they can return from replete with all kinds of sub-cultural capital, the clothes, the drugs, the music, the bars, the terminology. The Information.

Poverty and “social exclusion” are aesthetic and discursive playgrounds: being a junkie doesn’t mean you can’t look good or riff on pop culture in a knowing way. No need to mourn anything or wring your hands over anyone’s lots, in various ways everybody is having, as a book title of the time put it, “Adventures in Capitalism”.

If Trainspotting represents an attempt to elide the working classes through an “urban pastoral” it’s one in which underclass energy and savvy feeds directly into middle-class narcissism.* “The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor”. Trainspotting’s return to the Sixties, its Beatles-referencing and by extension its Cool Brittania/Brit-Pop stylization attempts a temporal elision of the bitter Seventies and combative Eighties, back to the last time England could reasonably have been said to be “sexy”, where class seemed momentarily a mirage and the prospect of brave new heterotopias spun giddily on the horizon. After all, with the abandoning of Clause Four a new form of post war consensus has emerged, T.I.N.A. “The working class are such a disappointment,” as Kureshi and Frear’s “My Beautiful Laundrette” reminded us, whereas the underclass are just so mouth-wateringly dynamic and unthreateningly unorganized.

It’s not simply that cheeky Brit-pop skaghead Renton finally decides, through some mysterious Neo-Liberal alchemy to choose life and thereby affirm, if not exactly all the stultifying choices he rejects at the start in favour of smack, then at least a lifestyle of high consumerism, “a fucking big telly” (with the lascivious “fucking” emphasising his libidinized more-Consumerist–than-thou new hyper-Realism), it’s rather that Renton IS the middle-class audience member herself, leaping as though through force of sheer, magical yearning into the frame and the film’s world from behind the camera in the opening shot and eventually with a knowing , conspiratorial wink, melting back out of it to rejoin herself at the end. The permeability of the screen, the looking glass through which the viewer passes, is the fantasy of the permeability of social barriers in the newly classless, New Labour Britain.

This is part of the film’s obsession with choice and its casting of poverty as something which one can opt in or out of at will, bridging the gap between underclass smack-addiction and the world of big TVs at one existential stroke. Poverty is a consequence of individual lack of graft or get-up-and-go, cosily re-affirming to the gap year and trust-fund brigade that a few years of chemical romance can easily be set aside when the time comes to re-join the real world you were only ever having a little vacation from anyway.

Indeed, in much of Boyle’s work there is no social or psychological fixity, everything is fluid and opt-into and out-able for the protean middle-classes: in “Shallow Grave”, “28 Day’s Later” and “The Beach”, psychopathology, that most useful of disorders, is also a temporary state, exploited as required in order to get the job done, just one more weapon in the armoury of Late Capitalist character traits. The primal savage is always there just below the surface, handily allowing, for example, the wispy Cillian Murphy to wipe out an entire platoon of soldiers in 28 Days Later.**

One of the fantasies these films gratify is the viewers’ desire to be a complete subject, a subject who is capable of everything, who knows everything, who has experienced everything. On the one hand grounded, responsible, “realistic”, capable of making the right “choices”, on the other hand secretly exultant at having achieved apotheosis, that they are the culmination of history. There is no realm of experience or state of being, form of experience or mode of communication in which they are not potential adepts, the fantasy of polyvalent, omniscient, final and culminatory subject of the end of history is what is spoken to in Boyle’s films.

A reasonable definition of Hipsterism, of which Trainspotting, though it will have no cache among hipsters themselves, is a formative work, is the assumption that there is no position which the middle class subject can not occupy, both class and identity politics have been overcome, or at least class has been subsumed into identity and identity is for the other. The middle class assumes a kind of transcendent, post-historical emptiness into which all cultures can be incorporated. This is not simply hyper-consumerism it’s also a metaphysical claim, a claim to superiority, thus while others are bounded by ethnicity, class, gender; limited, objects, with a finite set of facets and characteristics, the hipster, viewing everything as simply a lifestyle choice, views her own not just as one lifestyle among many but the lifestyle of lifestyles.***

Trainspotting’s ethic and aesthetic are a further extension and deepening of the American ethos, so ably represented by Curtis Hanson’s “Eight Mile”, that marshalling a set of given proletarian skills: linguistic flair, a negative cultural capital of realness, soul and more-than-rugged individualism bordering on sociopathy will allow you to prevail if and only if the individual is ready. In the state of Late-Capitalist precarity the readiness is all. “Opportunity comes once in a lifetime,” Eminem’s “Release Yourself” tells us; you will have your chance, if you blow it you know who is to blame: not the system, which democratically allocates an opportunity to all, it is the individual who has been found wanting. Trainspotting’s relation to the series of Brit Films (Little Voice, Billy Eliot, the Full Monty) wittily dubbed “Dance, Prole, Dance!” by Joel Anderson will have to be teased out elsewhere, suffice to say: if you cant sing or dance then there’s always crime, the two magnificent options generally afforded to America’s Permanent Underclass are now benevolently offered up as options for the atomized working class.

Renton’s escape is via a drug deal set up and orchestrated by others, his apparent friends, who he then rips off, except for the guileless Spud, who unlike Begbie and Sick Boy is in need of a bit of charity. It doesn’t matter how you get the money, the important thing is that you put a bit back, alms for the deserving poor. Spud’s discovery of the money in the locker in the films coda is the film's final strategy in absolving Renton/the viewer. This is how you get out of poverty, crime or culture. You may need to ditch your friends along the way: so much for all that sharing of scores and junk camaraderie, so much for solidarity, so much for refusal. At the end of the day when the opportunity comes you choose life and comfortingly affirm the conservatism you tokenly attacked in your youth.

This is how to live in Cool Brittania.

As the knowledge economy gears up, as London becomes the centre of finance, as a young, sexy, globalized Britain prepares to Start up and the boom years of cheap credit, massive personal debt, seemingly ever-rising house prices and an economy organised around orgiastic consumption and compulsory positivity are about to kick in we might be tempted to a more chastening conclusion than even late sixties/mid-nineties archetype Arthur Seaton managed.

A good time can also be a form of propaganda.

*The Ballardian Continnuum, Weird Paternalism and other strategies for an alternate, anti Cool Brittania canon promoted by Fisher, Hatherly, Power and others attempts to recuperate some of the features of the traditional pastoral, a weird pastoral perhaps, forging a re-evaluation of the dynamic cultural relation between the upper and the working classes which re-elides the philistine middle class

**There’s an interesting distinction between the entry into the worlds of “Trainspotting” and “28 Day’s Later”, part of Boyle’s talent for forcing identification. Renton springs into the film and immediately we are alongside him, running with him, the first POV shot comes early, a careening descent down steps into a side street and the collision with the breaking car. In “28 Days” we emerge slowly, waking into the world with the central character, then beginning to explore its unfamiliar emptiness, the camera moving out over a series of shots, from intense close ups of his opening eyes to extended long shots of him wandering through a deserted London. We separate out and take our place back in the audience leaving our proxy behind, lost in the deserted city, all our anxious care engaged.
.
*** In this respect the Ur-Hipster figure is Martin Amis.

2009-08-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well that Bristol takeover at Corsica Studios on Friday was neither very Purple nor very Wow, was it? In fact it looked a lot like favours–for-mates, Joker carrying his significantly less talented chums Jemmy and Guido, the set only really coming alive when he stepped up to the decks. Actually, the entire set seemed to be hung around Joker’s handful of big tunes. Last time I saw him he played for about forty five minutes and provided enough colour and contrast to the lumpen Dubstep that came before and after to shine: a short, sharp, shiny injection of sass and swagger, over two hours it kind of flags. Maybe my hardwiring is just too rusty after literally DECADES of existence but rhythmically, however vanguardist it might be on some arcane musicological* level, it sounded turgid and muddily clubfooted, meaning it’s still all about the bass and…

… heavy bass is a bit tedious, innit? I mean reliance on bass as the kinetic/galvanic element. Haven’t we had enough of dub? Is it not basically in K-Punk’s** avant-conservatism category? If you hear the term dub attached to anything these days how likely is it that it’s going to be doing anything interesting or pulse quickening? Apparently it’s not going to go away though as not only is the place pretty rammed, generally young and unusually for a dubstep night, about 60-40 male to female, but outside a young women, being held aloft by no less than Joker himself, hands me a fat wad of fliers called DubPack. Yet the most exhilarating of the post-Dubsteppers, if he really ever had much of an affiliation to it at all, Zomby, seems to have largely abandoned bass, with ravishing results.

*There’s an excellent example of what I can only call blog paranoia creep in the footnotes to Rouge's Foam’s review of Zomby. Blog Paranoia Creep is characterized by the marked suspicion that someone may have been talking specifically about YOU when they slagged off X trend/perspective/scene, tempered by the desire not to a) be seen to be arrogant enough to assume that anyone is paying the slightest bit of attention to little you b) make any enemies on the basis of an easily dismissed objection ( oh.. no.. I wasn’t thinking about you at all, actually….) and come off as a deluded, self-important hysteric. This is achieved by opening, as here, with a mini-testamonial to the writer’s standing/ importance followed by a comprehensive rebuke of everything they apparently stand for. I assume that it was occasioned by this from Matt which kind of calls into question RF’s project/area of expertise as of any use at all, as it does more or less everybody else’s too, actually, leading to a pretty Old Skool nihilation of Matt’s symptomatic defects, though frankly the tenuous claims on Matt’s check-list of sins seems instead to suggest he is in fact tilting at phantoms, some weird composite figure (Matt and the end of history/everything’s been shit since 93? He’s never been of that persuasion at all, has he?) who chimerically represents a looming, monstrous Old Guard haunting the imagination of those keen to be the New Custodians of Wonkville. Yes, you're praising it to the skies, but in the wrong way! It surely deserves better than your almost total endorsement! All of which suggest he may have been doing some magnified listening but he hasn’t been paying much attention while reading. Time for a new criticism perhaps? Ok… what will that be like, how will it…. AHHHH! You mean the stuff that precedes the footnote! Lots of description plus some pictures! A certain thoughtful professorial modesty having naturally prevented one from emblazoning the post with the title “ LOOKETH THEE UPON THE NEW CRITICISM!!!!!!" And then, hang on.. isn’t he disingenuously boasting about his emerging rep with the Lacanians down the bottom of the previous post…. surely hoary old Lacan has no place in the New Criticism?! To the scaffold with the old, if admittedly prestigious and very intellectually fashionable …although…it IS sort of gratifying in a way....

Disavowel is the new resentment, I see!

In which case, “Rouge’s Foam's work is not always worth reading, however his parapraxis-riddled footnotes……

** I love K-Punk, he's brilliant, I wish he was my Dad. I'm thinking of having costly and painful tounge extension surgery just so I can get it even further up his batty. Actually if I had it bifurcated... better still trifurcated ! I could do Reynolds and Hatherly at the same time and really extract maximum value from the depths of their erudition...

2009-08-06T05:07:00.000-07:00

I was all geared up to mock this.

2009-07-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

Spinoza? Chainsaws? Monsters? A CD comprised entirely of early Pulp b-sides?

You'd be a fool not to.

2009-07-27T00:11:00.000-07:00

Easily the best band I saw at Supersonic, leaving everything that came in their wake sounding flabby, cumbersome and old. More akin to seeing a techno set than anything, the first band to raise the hairs on my arms through sheer dymnamic invention in a long while.

2009-07-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

If we were to try and come up with a canon of Cold World* cinema then Kurosawa’s “Pulse” would certainly have to be included.

Pulse tackles the obligatory social themes of contemporary J-Horror, atomization and hyper-mediation, not to mention Japan’s extravagant suicide rate, via fears over technology as a vehicle for the return of destructive or vengeful spirits and the disease like nature of the curse, expanding them to apocalyptic levels hinted at but not fully revealed at the end of the later Ring.

Ring’s cheerless vision of the family, in which father and son meet each other in the street without acknowledgement, in which both effectively commit suicide (along with the wife/mother) by watching the cursed tape and who must then pass the death-curse on to the father/grandfather in an infinite chain of deferral, is perhaps actually more heartening than Pulses in which not only the family but any kind of compensatory peer group don’t exist at all. Did you have any friends? the heroine asks the nominal hero toward the end as all the energy is drained from the world, Japan implodes in a wave of mass suicides and they try to escape through a monumentally grey and emptied out Tokyo. Maybe one, but she died, comes the reply.

By the film’s end, as the heroine escapes with a few survivors on a ship, it’s obvious that the problem is international, a kind of Global Jonestown. Everywhere else is closed down, but the captain informs us they are still picking up signals from South America, so this is where they decide to head. It’s hard not to chuckle as this brilliant allegory for the depredations of Late Capitalism scans the globe for an alternative and finds it there. Accidental Bolivarianism.

*As an aside, Japanese doom band Corrupted (who sing in Spanish, for some reason) due to play in London and then at The Supersonic festival next week, have released a record called “ El Mundo Frio”.

2009-07-18T08:12:00.000-07:00

A thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper.

There’s a two shot sequence in Alexander Payne’s Sideways that’s as good as anything you’re likely to find anywhere. Payne’s work, Election, About Shmidt and Sideways have garnered him a rep as the middlebrow filmmaker’s filmmaker, but this shouldn’t be held against him as the fact is his sheer artfulness is often dizzying.

Sideways is easy to take for granted, it glides pleasantly and intelligently along, beautifully filmed and framed, features stellar performances from its leads, a great script: a superior, more mordant, literary Indy Rom-com and, as befits a film about quiet despair, the incremental daily defeats that swamp lives, the small concessions or acts of kindness that salvage them, Payne’s technique is often unobtrusive. An Autumnal tone-poem in dusky amber and gold Sideways is a buddy-movie in which the two opposed central characters, refreshingly, learn nothing from each other via their week long stint together wine tasting and playing golf in California in the run up to the irresponsible Jack, a kind of ludic Prince of Bad Faith, getting married. Miles, his chaperone, is a depressed would-be-writer struggling to get over his divorce and certain that life has nothing left to offer him. Much of the film’s comedy revolves around the central pairs understandable frustration with each other.

The sequence in question comes about two thirds in, after Jack has had his nose broken by the enraged Stephanie, his latest conquest, who has just discovered he’s due to get married. Nonetheless, Jack proceeds to chat up the plain, overweight waitress in the Steakhouse they’ve fetched up in who has recognized him as an actor from a hospital-set soap, much to Miles’ dismay.

He decides to head to the toilet to escape, a strategy we’ve seen him use disastrously before with Virginia Madsen, when his nerve fails and he misses the moment only to try and claw it back a few minutes later. That sequence is in itself wonderfully done, the way we the camera gets up close to Miles as he urges himself on in the bathroom mirror and then hangs back peeping between its fingers in the doorway as he goes on alone into the kitchen for the rejected kiss.

This time the effect is beautifully comic, gently absurd. Where’s the bathroom? Miles asks and is told - it's over there, past the buffalo-. The buffalo has immediate comic resonance because it emphasises the lowbrow tackiness of the restaurant and Mile’s unexpressed sense of disdain for it as well as accentuating the bovine stupidity of Jack and the girl’s exchange, which continues as Miles disappears off screen, Jack, nose in plaster, grinning in a goofily winning way up at the gullible girl. The next shot, not exactly a matching shot but a kind of visual equivalent of consonance at least, frames the stuffed Buffalo’s face up close, staring out at the audience as Miles strolls laconically down the corridor toward the bathroom. He flicks the tiniest of looks up to camera as he enters, then the camera pulls round to frame the door swinging closed and the sign MEN is held on for a few seconds. It’s a sly and subtle breaching of the fourth wall, this sudden onscreen exclamation, the quick look to camera suggesting we are either in Miles’ mind at that moment as he struggles to contain his disapproval at Jack’s “plight” (his insatiable libido) or the director’s, suddenly puncturing and punctuating the film with this exasperated aside on the audience’s behalf. Either way it’s a bravura moment that partly militates against those where the film almost gets a little too objectively-correlative for its own good (the discussion about why Miles likes Pinot, the bottle of 61 he’s got hanging a round and which is close to spoiling etc).

2009-07-12T06:49:00.000-07:00

I’m currently watching and re-watching a lot of films as part of a longer piece I’m writing on British film, so I’ve decided to start blogging some rough pieces on a variety of films, Brit and non-Brit, as I watch. Expect them to be pretty broad.

Here’s the first.

The Essential Elements of a Hip-Hop classic.

“What about homosexuality Tony? Do you like men? Do you like to dress up like a woman?”

Re-watching De Palma’s Scarface (watching it really, I last saw it when I was about fourteen) I was struck immediately by HOW camp it is.

We’d never expect De-Palma to be too far away from the operatic or melodramatic, and the film is essentially a remake of a melodrama anyway, but driven along by Moroder’s cheesily eupeptic synth motifs (tellingly, variations on a theme for both wife and sister) and Scarfioti’s extravagant sets the whole film looks to be set in the kind of revisionist Sirkian non-space that Todd Haynes, for all his gusto, was just too self-conscious to get to in Far From Heaven. The shots alternate between a kind of nostalgic, Fifties soft-focus Edward Hopper and a hyper-bright David Hockney, along with a mawkish, idealised Homesteadery in the domestic scenes with mother and sister and the requisite angelic lighting effects on Mastrantonio’s face*

From the start, with Pacino’s lispy, pouting, alternately unctuous and defiant Tony Montana being predatorily circled by tough-guy crotches ( the neophyte’s first night in the Gay bar ) until a hand strikes in across the side of his face, by his open mouth, fingering his scar, asking him if he got it from “eating pussy”, you know you’re in for a long mince down Queer street. Indeed, it’s hard not to read Pacino’s scar as an emblem not of his tough guy past or his fundamentally flawed character, the outward manifestation of the greed that undoes him, but as a symbol of his repressed gayness, a big pussy if you will, that cuts across his eye. Tony Montana is looking at the world with half a woman’s perspective. Queer eye for the straight guy. The rest of the film is a parade of camp icons, from F. Murray Abraham’s prissy henchmen through to the suavely refined aristocratic Bolivian drug-lord who tells Pacino pointedly and hilariously, twice, that Montana should never try to fuck him. Most significant of all is of course Tony’s friendship with his boy, Manolo, a doe-eyed, hip-swivelling Greaser, who he eventually kills for getting married to his sister.

There’s a couple of extremely protracted close ups, complete with over-zealous rage-motif on the soundtrack, on Tony’s Queer-eye: first when he watches Mastrantonio flirting with a guy and getting her ass grabbed (and loving it!) in the disco, another in the murder of Manny. The standard interpretation is that Manny has broken his word and Tony is obsessed with his sister as a reserve of purity in a corrupt world: not my reading. Both Tony and Manny are singularly asexual in the film, there is no sex scene between Pacino and Pfeiffer, she’s the marriage-of-convenience/trophy wife, nor equally do we ever see Manny getting laid, and his couple of onscreen attempts at picking up broads are singularly unsuccessful. In fact, his pursuit of Tony’s sister is pure Happy Days' wholesomeness, as is the cornball meringue castle they live in, all white and light compared to Montana’s blood red, fur-lined den which actually seems to have been designed to look like a huge Pussy. This could of course represent the womblike safety that Montana yearns for, but given the way the film reads from the start it’s hard not to see it as one more expression of Tony’s femininity, especially when he emerges with his little friend levelled at crotch height to repulse the men trying to invade.

If there is a more exquisitely camp moment than the scene in which Pfeiffer and Pacino marry and the assembled throng skip giddly down to gaze at the three-way symbolic tiger ( taming the beast of American capitalism, melting Pfieffer’s hauteur and burying own illegitimate desire) that Tony has bought and chained up by the lake I’d love to see it**. Montana’s rage at the end and his murder of Manny is only explicable in that he has betrayed him by refusing to live in Queer-limbo as Montana’s unrewarded fag-hag. Equally I take his sister to represent exactly that part of himself that he can not express and that must remain dormant, hence his rage in the club when she disappears off into the men’s toilets (!) to get banged by some louche, cocksure bozo. By the time we get to the film’s infamous finale in which a gang of invading boys get introduced to a shrieking and flouncing Tony’s “little fwiend” before he submits to a bukkake bullet-fest and finally (FINALLY) gets nailed from behind with a big, long, shiny shotgun the film has entered a zone of delirious, hilarious kitsch that in fairness, one should only expect from arch-Queen De-Palma.

After watching the extras, including the Def Jam homage to a Hip-Hop classic (!), I watched the deleted scenes. Yep. They deleted two takes of scene that's an expression of love between Tony and Manny, which stops just short of a kiss and is approvingly watched by an audience of Trannies, in a part of the dorm where Montana just happens to have made his bed. The implication in both scenes is that maybe Manny is a little uncomfortable with Tony’s love for him, in the second that Tony may have been “partying” with the drag queens. Either way it contains the immortal double-entendre, “Assholes drive me crazy, Manny.” There is also a later scene in which Mastrantonio is confused for his wife as he buys her a sexy-but-chaste white dress that he himself is just too short to carry off, and which she changes into in the final scene when she confronts Tony over his desire. He doesn’t want to sleep with you love, he wants to be you!

Tony Montana, a great big faggot, just waiting to get fucked.

* there is I think a kind of bleeding through from Scarface to Blue Velvet to Cronenburg’s A History Of Violence/Eastern Promise which I may well elaborate on later, especially as my post on Lynch is well overdue.

**although the sequence directly after Manny’s murder with Mastrantonio holding his corpse (after the extreme close up on Pacino’s angry face/eye and a slow motion run down the stairs in another floaty white gown for Mastrantonio) in which she tells Pacino, “we just got married yesterday, we were going to tell you today” surely isn’t going to get beaten for mordantly camp bathos anytime soon.

2009-07-09T07:02:00.000-07:00

is it the wrong moment to link to this?

2009-06-26T04:32:00.000-07:00

well, he had been looking pale.......

2009-06-19T07:42:00.000-07:00

2009-06-13T12:20:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Ramsgate about ten years ago I had two drinking cronies, Paul and Martin. I tended to drink with them separately as, while I got on with both of them, they didn’t get on especially well with each other.

Paul was old-school Left in his politics, extremely argumentative and deafeningly loud, Martin was apolitical, generous and funny. There’s no doubt that the intellectual and rhetorical force was on Paul’s side, he was bracing company for twenty minutes but then slowly the feeling began to creep over me: this is it. This is the only thing we’ll do, talk about, culture, politics, theory. More importantly we’ll only talk about it in one way, high-volume, non-stop velocity.

Paul laughed uproariously at his own jokes in the absence of anyone else’s laughter, seemed to be addressing someone behind or beyond the person immediately before him most of the time, peppered his talk with references no one else could understand, dismissed anyone he perceived as not being on his intellectual level and at the same time took a certain pride in his connections and interactions with the local underclass: buying weed and hanging out with the bad boys.

I was about the only person in the pub where we regularly drank who had any time for him at all, and even I found him deeply fatiguing, in many ways one-dimensional, stifling, irrespective of all the drugs he’d ingested in the Sixties, the sit-ins he’d participated in, the fact that he’d gone to University with Genesis P’Orridge or that one of his best friend was a widely-regarded poet. All very intellectual, but still, just not enough to get you through the night.

Women especially disliked him. A part of it was his assumption that knowledge itself was impressive and seductive: it wasn’t that he didn’t have fairly bog-standard lusts, he liked the same generically pretty girls anyone did but he was incapable of speaking to them without patronising them. His seduction technique was to try and undermine their ideas of themselves, they would grow dizzy under the spell of his furious mentation, he would crack them open and they would melt worshipfully into his arms. It never worked, and as it became apparent to him that it wasn’t working, that the girl in question was simply bored and repulsed by all this grandstanding he would become more aggressive: he would leave her wounded, if she wouldn’t gratify his ego by submitting to his superior intellect he would do his best to destroy hers. Then he would affect to have disdained her all along.

At this point I also lived with a large, extended and anarchically free-wheeling Family of Gothy, Bo-Ho painters and artists down from London, (we’ll call them the Clan). I was their favoured surrogate son at that point. They liked neither Martin, nor Paul. Paul because he exposed their intellectual hollowness, their lazy, Radio-Four-quoting lack of any real intellectual rigour, Martin because he had no especial interest in their sub-cultural capital and was always fidgeting to get away and do something more interesting. The idea that there might be a more richly multidimensional way of living than sitting round their enormous, Huysman’s style black dinner table listening to left-field music and yelling incomprehensibly at each other, or that “experiences” weren’t necessarily the things you had after ingesting large amounts of chemicals, offended them. They threw fairly extravagant parties full of artists and left-field types at which neither Paul nor Martin were particularly welcome and of which I grew increasingly bored.

My friendship with Martin was regarded as odd from both Paul and The Clan’s perspective: what I was after all was a combative, word-wielding Swans-and-Pansonic-loving drugs-and-booze-binging CerebroGoth.

What Martin had was shiny, non-partisan “people skills”, something the others deemed an irrelevance, if not an outright offence, not because they had ever had them, found them useless and abandoned them along the way but because they valorised what they had always been, socially-awkward, anxious outside a narrow domain of taste, nervous around “normal” people. Martin, however, seemed to find talking to people, almost anyone, rewarding, seemed to be able to engage with them on their own terms, patently enjoyed others. This was an enormous part of his charm, whereas the charmless Clan and the charmless Paul were thrown into a panic meeting people who might oblige them to come out of the corner they had assiduously painted themselves into and were proudly proclaiming themselves kings of. You must enter my empire, my citadel, I will not meet you on the border of yours! They regarded themselves as open-minded but their ego-world was too fiercely guarded for anything genuinely illuminating or disrupting to get in. The air was stale and heavy with desperate mutual affirmation, shot through with muffled hysteria.

The fact was that on a night out with Martin there was sense that things might happen, there was a foretaste of what I found later in Spain and in South America, that you could start the night with one group of people and end it with a completely different one, the process of moving about putting many other options and interactions in your path if you were open to them, a different model of conviviality and sociality to England’s*.

Paul seemed confident in many ways but it was a strident, inflexible confidence, underneath it there was the inability to listen to anyone else: his endless, urgent theorizing and riffing seemed neurotic, the fear that if he stopped for a moment someone might ask him how he was feeling, how his love life was going, what his hopes and fears were, ask him to tell them a joke or expose him in some way. A conversation would largely start like this : How are you? I’m reading Deleuze. Do you know Deleuze? No. Well, what Deleuze says is….

With Martin conversation was a more supple, broader medium, plus he was funny whereas Paul was dour, inquisitive where Paul was dogmatic, gentle where Paul was shrill, open where Paul was impermeable. Conversation, putting the world to rights, ideas, weren’t the entire purpose of the evening: the night was a series of possibilities, an arena of potential for finding out new things, a form of playful investigation. This was a large part of what Paul disliked in Martin, the ease with which he encountered others, his refusal to consider the question closed, his ludic qualities. Paul had read Kapital and he knew what reality was. Paul wanted converts and acolytes and got none, or at least not for long. Martin was widely loved.

One night things came to a head.

We were in disco above a hotel that was also a Language school I used to work in. Paul had been haranguing me inexhaustibly for the past few hours and when Martin turned up it was a relief. A game of pool, maybe, or table football, or a dance around. Maybe nipping out for a late night swim in the Sea, or a chat with some of the students who avoided Paul, who actually taught them, but who were friendly with Martin, who ran the local internet café. Any change of colour and tone, anything but this, was deeply welcome to me.

Paul was a big guy, almost as tall as me, Martin was all of five-foot seven. We were already drunk, Martin had come out late. Paul was loud and overbearing and could be intimidating in a way, nonetheless I would describe all three of us as physical cowards.

The conversation started approximately like this:

Martin (warily) “How are you Paul?”

Paul (bellowing) “ Alright. You still in love with the Twentieth century, are you?”

Harmless enough, really, funny in a way. Coward that I am I escaped to the bar to get Martin a drink. At some point while I was queuing up a bottle got smashed and waved around and by the time I got back Martin was visibly shaken, Paul gone.

You’re kidding me.

What the fuck was that all about?

What did you say to him?

Nothing. Really, nothing!

That was ten years ago, but still, certain things stick in your mind.

Martin’s coming up next week, as it happens.

I haven’t seen Paul in years.

*Outside ULU last week there was a Brit/Non-Brit split perfectly exemplified. Two girls were introduced to French guy by a mutual Spanish friend. Hello, they said , then immediately turned to each other and began talking furiously about an absent third party who would be joining them later as the French guy stood there looking surprised and awkward. Their eyes locked on each other they went breathlessly gabbling on, desperate to maintain the little, fearful bubble of private space until the French guy, realising he wasn’t going to get a word in stepped heavily back a few paces and began looking distractedly around, pretending he was intrigued by the ebb and flow of the crowd. The two English girls visibly relaxed, the tension went out of their postures: thank god, thank god, now we won’t have to find out anything about him until we’re good and drunk in a few hours time.

2009-06-11T02:44:00.000-07:00

Mrs Impostume once said to me in passing, when I was raging no doubt at the iniquity of it all, worked up into an ecstatic lather of righteous fury by my own rhetoric, promising that there would be a day of reckoning, let Armageddon come and wash us ALL away if necessary, “ First destroy and then we’ll see!” all that stuff…

Well, what she said to me, her face a combination of irritation, boredom and dismay was,

“I never trust anyone who hasn’t had their nose broken.”

I remember it well, we were on Nou de la Rambla at the time.

Talk away, you’re going to scuttle off back to your room with your books and your drugs to hide the moment a confrontation comes. When you come up against power in its most naked form, you’ll shrink from it and all this wonderfully impressive talking will have meant nothing,

There was a large, cold noise in my ears, the sound of something ringing hollow. The wind whistling mockingly through the gap between words and deeds.

She knew my type, you see.

2009-06-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

I don’t know much about Charlie Brooker: I know he’s on TV in some capacity (but I haven’t had a TV for about five years), that he writes a column in the Guardian, that he co-wrote the desperately muddled, unfunny Nathan Barley with Chris Morris. People I rate seem to rate him so when I saw a photocopy of an article from Monday’s Guardian on a colleague's desk I picked it up and read it.

I was surprised by how trite it was.

I’m not going to start casting aspersions on the entirety of his output on the basis of one piece, but the essence of it was: men are eternally and immutably deluded little boys, only women attain any real maturity. Ladies, take over and save us by relegating us to the playpens where we belong (and where we secretly long to be) so we can sit around masturbating, whooping senselessly and smashing each other over the head with our toys.

There is of course sufficient ironic hyperbole to offer a get out clause, but the germ of what’s being riffed on remains the same: men just don’t grow up and need women to shepherd them. This facile, shame-faced pseudo-feminism is everywhere in the culture at the moment. Check out your local video store for Family Guy season seven or Role Models, or hey, pick up Platform by Houellebequ for that matter.

Men either remain a grotesque third child for the women to rebuke and teach lessons in “responsibility” to, or if they are capable of adulthood at all it’s only once they get into a domestic situation with a suitably forgiving (but also Hot and Smart!) wife/mother. Indeed, the deeply conservative gesture in ostensibly risky and outrageous films like “Knocked Up” is that maturity is exactly that: acceding to the inevitability of the family unit. But don’t worry guys you’ll still be able to like, act retarded and shit with your buddies at the weekend. Essentially what she actually digs in you anyway is your being a “boy”, she kind of disapproves but finally can’t help but laugh and love you for your irresponsibility ('cause really she’s too serious and career minded at the end of the day and you’re the perfect antidote when sometimes she needs to be reminded to laugh at herself a little), so you won’t have to change too much either.

Who is this version of being male supposed to serve? It hardly seems to serve women’s interests given that even in the most matriarchal societies ie Norway women still do a disproportionate amount of the housework and child care. Women, take over and then you can have the additional strain of looking after us men too, but don’t worry we’ll kind of grovel around abasing ourselves so you get to feel morally superior. But is it really in men’s interests either, a deliberate cleaving to some kind of half-life, an ontological stuntedness: we are and must always be little boys. Why read books and stuff (you know you don’t want to!) when you can sit around comparing hot actresses and playing practical jokes on your friends?

Being a man is ridiculous, being a father even more absurd. Be a helpmeet or a friend, be a partner, kow-tow to your wife and child at all times, don’t be disciplinarian, learn how to compromise, learn that you need to put other people first for a change. You always fuck up anyway. Just look at the world financial system, if women had run it, it would have been nice and fair and honest, women are the Good Daddy, the Real Daddy, women are what men could be if only they weren’t always boys, the system needs a women’s hand on the tiller: then it will REALLY work, really be an ETHICAL capitalism.

More than that, women are basically the Universal Parent, the figure whose love can always be relied upon, whose forgiveness is guaranteed, ( Nobomommy, maybe). Because just as we know that for example, women are sexually much more faithful than men and don’t have men’s nasty lusts and wildly roaming sexual fantasy life ( which makes them ethically better i.e. less likely to break up the family unit) so we know that basically they’re just not as competitive and ego driven as men and are much more into “collaborating” and “communicating” both of which are unequivocally good things and must produce beneficial societies. They’re just more level-headed than men and all that stuff about them being screaming, irrational hysterics who disrupt the settled order and unto whom one should take one’s whip was plain wrong. Women, specifically women in what might be called their Bourgeoisie Late Capitalist formulation are going to save us and we men can regress even further, from men without chests to kids without brains.

Of course Brooker wants it both ways, part of the sucking up to the Holy women by treasonously revealing the essence of men is the implication that our Charlie is the Holy (if not, you know, wholly) the exception. Ironically, at the foot of the page Charlie tells us not to be discouraged by the Loaded style cover to McMafia ( the book he got halfway through this week: well, he is a man!!!!) while dishing up a wittier form of archly Loaded content.

The knee-jerk response to my objections is to say, oh so you want the fierce Victorian Patriarch back do you? No. Oh so you want militant feminists kicking your door in every time you sneak a Jazz mag out from under the mattress? Neither.

But I am sick to death of this stuff.