About missing the point

Two examples of people who appear to be in the wrong job. A pub landlord who offers discounts to customers who order by app from their tables, thus discouraging the horrific prospect of bar staff actually having to engage with punters:

I’ve found that not having to be constantly serving people is way better for my mental health. Bar work can be really mentally tiring. This takes the stress away rather than having to constantly interact with different people for eight hours straight. 

And Adrian Chiles who, last time I looked, was still purporting to be someone who writes for a living, complaining about apostrophes and then

But, oh Lord, the agonising, circuitous routes around words you’d have to find to construct a bloody sentence.

Which sounds to me like a pretty good definition of Chiles’s chosen, and in his case, well-remunerated trade.

I don’t want to disturb anyone with an image of Chiles, so I’ll just leave this here, wondering whether in a year’s time we’ll have the faintest idea to what it refers:

About Roger Corman

Roger Corman, who died a few days ago, batting back accusations that his work was mere exploitation: “Show me a film which isn’t an exploitation film.”

Possibly a little trite, but when you give it even a moment’s thought, it applies to pretty much all art, doesn’t it?

About nostalgia(s)

In an otherwise tedious and banal article about, of all things, Virgin’s cruise line, the CEO comes up with this inadvertently fascinating nugget: “People like to be reminded of nostalgia.”

It sounds daft, of course it does; surely it’s nostalgia that does the reminding. But then I realise that when watching the old episodes of Top of the Pops that BBC Four is running on Friday nights, some of my favourite moments come from Darts, a band that achieved success in the late 1970s by providing kooky versions of songs that were even then already 15 or 20 years old. And then when I was at university, when mainstream pop was wallowing in post-Live Aid earnestness, my friends and I constructed a world that resounded to soul and funk from past decades (and an aesthetic that merged 40s zoot suits and 50s Soho and 60s Left Bank blankness). So, sorry Mr Saverimuttu, I guess I do like to be reminded of nostalgia. Just not the crappy nostalgia you’re peddling.

And now I find out that Britpop, another trend that had more than one eye on an imagined past, has apparently been revived (although it appears that translates as “wears a Fred Perry and has a St George’s flag in the back of the video” but maybe that’s enough).

PS: And then there are conflicting nostalgias. I was annoyed when stories covering the death of the actor Bernard Hill led with his appearances in Titanic and The Lord of the Rings, with (to me at least) his most important role, as Yosser Hughes in The Boys from the Blackstuff relegated to a later paragraph (even on the BBC, where Blackstuff was first broadcast). Of course Blackstuff was over 40 years ago; but Titanic was nearly 30...

About Courbet (yet again)

And so we come back to Courbet’s 1866 picture The Origin of the World (see here) and more specifically the passions it arouses in Luxembourg’s finest provocateuse Deborah de Robertis (see here) who has adorned the painting (or more specifically the glass protecting it) with a #MeToo tag “because women are the origin of the world”. Which is a bit like complaining about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because it’s called Sunflowers but, hey, it all adds to the sum of human joy, doesn’t it?

Except that then the French culture minister Rachida Dati weighs in with an intriguing contribution: “An artwork is not a poster to colour in with the day’s message.” Which may or may not be true but at least it suggests that Ms Dati has thought about the subject. And I remember that not so long ago my own country’s government gave the equivalent role to the ludicrous Nadine Dorries and not for the first time a bit of me wishes I were French.

About teaching and crying

Zadie Smith on teaching creative writing in New York (spotted by Padraig Reidy):

They said workshop, so I took a story of mine that I’d written when I was young and was bad, and marked it up in front of the class. And I took a story of theirs and did it on a lightbox. And the student started crying. NYU explained to me that that is not what they meant. So I went down several gears.

About horses

The recent incident that saw horses from the Household Cavalry running loose in the streets of central London is surely open to all sorts of interpretations: musing on the place of such ceremony in a modern army; questions of the relationship between humans and animals; hints towards the Book of Revelation.

But Simon Duke of Chronicle Live wasn’t going to follow the herd, was he? Faced with these weird, almost dreamlike images, at once beautiful and terrifying, surreal in the true sense of the world, Simon knew instinctively that what his readers would want to know was how Ben Shephard and his colleagues were covering the story on ITV’s This Morning. No analysis, no context, no insight, none of that poncey stuff. Just the fact that Cat Deeley said “Wow”.

Inevitably we can paint this in Baudrillardian terms, where the reality (terrified, blood-streaked horses weaving between bemused Londoners) is eradicated by the image (Vanessa Feltz’s reaction); or just see it as the death of useful journalism, where one set of media hacks cannibalise the responses of another set, the whole circus consuming itself like a massive digital ouroboros. And, to be honest, I’m just catching scraps from the table as well, aren’t I?

PS: Another urban tale that surely symbolises something even if we can’t agree what: the sails fall off the Moulin Rouge.

About Yoko Ono

 And Ms Ono also appears, in a roundabout way, to have invented the simulacrum before Baudrillard did.

(Both images stolen from Andy Miller on BlueSky)

About pretension

When my Radiohead book was published, there were a few rumbles that bringing the likes of Baudrillard into the conversation were a bit – perish the thought – pretentious. I’ve never been particularly stung by such a label (standing proudly alongside Ian Penman on the subject) but I was amused when I recently revisited my old copy of Will Pop Eat Itself? by Jeremy J. Beadle (no, not that one) and noticed that by the second page he was comparing This is the Day... This is the Hour... This is This! by grebo titans PWEI to The Waste Land. And now I wonder whether the modest sales of my book were down to it not being pretentious enough.