Sunday, June 28, 2009
Walking on the Moon
Seeing the TV shots of thousands of fans collecting for their mourn-ins for Michael Jackson in different parts of the world was a reminder that in the Internet age people will gather for a rave or a funeral, equally voraciously, driven by mobile phones, blogs and social networking. Twittering hype transcends any real depth of emotion as style drowns substance. Warhol’s fifteen minutes thesis is screwed a thread deeper as people submerge themselves in untold weeping minutes of fame-by-identification. The reality of their relationship with the pop star seems nothing but a hysterical projection. All the while Jackson’s images flit across Plato’s cave wall. Michael Jackson dancing like a wayward sprite. Michael Jackson singing - from the early years’ voice of a wayward angel fronting his elder brothers - to the man with the tonsils of a bi-polar castrato. The man who would be white. blanching his features and feminising them, step by step, as though no-one would detect the transformation. The man in the hospital mask. The man who went out in a wheelchair to malls dressed as an old lady. The man who slept with children. The man who pretended to nearly drop his baby from a great height. Now the man who would be king, now dead.
Outpourings of sorrow in this age seem proportionate to the dimensionality of the celebrities that are being grieved over. The realer the person the realer the grief. The more the person exists as a simulacrum constructed by mirrors, smoke and lanterns, the more the crowd will vent a momentary bathetic despondency before attaching itself to the next white or black hope for immortality.
Having entered my teenage years with pre-vinyl platters of hard bakelite, as rock and roll, itself, arrived, I have, like all my contemporaries and those that followed us, become fixated with this star or that, this band or that. What mattered always for me was an identification with the words and tunes and how authentically they were delivered. And did they speak for me? Thus it is that perhaps only one fragment of a rock star’s oeuvre may have appealed. One tune only.
So, probably already too old when Michael Jackson came along, I respected the dancing feet, the timing in the unique voice and the images but never at any time did I identify with the sad creature at the heart of it. Rilke’s poem, The Unicorn, suggests that the charmed, horned horse existed because people wanted it to. Similarly with Michael Jackson.
Bob Dylan has a great personal take on this phenomenon. People trying to get to the heart of Bob Dylan, the man, are rebuffed because, as the man himself has said, ‘he’s not there’.
Seeing the TV shots of thousands of fans collecting for their mourn-ins for Michael Jackson in different parts of the world was a reminder that in the Internet age people will gather for a rave or a funeral, equally voraciously, driven by mobile phones, blogs and social networking. Twittering hype transcends any real depth of emotion as style drowns substance. Warhol’s fifteen minutes thesis is screwed a thread deeper as people submerge themselves in untold weeping minutes of fame-by-identification. The reality of their relationship with the pop star seems nothing but a hysterical projection. All the while Jackson’s images flit across Plato’s cave wall. Michael Jackson dancing like a wayward sprite. Michael Jackson singing - from the early years’ voice of a wayward angel fronting his elder brothers - to the man with the tonsils of a bi-polar castrato. The man who would be white. blanching his features and feminising them, step by step, as though no-one would detect the transformation. The man in the hospital mask. The man who went out in a wheelchair to malls dressed as an old lady. The man who slept with children. The man who pretended to nearly drop his baby from a great height. Now the man who would be king, now dead.
Outpourings of sorrow in this age seem proportionate to the dimensionality of the celebrities that are being grieved over. The realer the person the realer the grief. The more the person exists as a simulacrum constructed by mirrors, smoke and lanterns, the more the crowd will vent a momentary bathetic despondency before attaching itself to the next white or black hope for immortality.
Having entered my teenage years with pre-vinyl platters of hard bakelite, as rock and roll, itself, arrived, I have, like all my contemporaries and those that followed us, become fixated with this star or that, this band or that. What mattered always for me was an identification with the words and tunes and how authentically they were delivered. And did they speak for me? Thus it is that perhaps only one fragment of a rock star’s oeuvre may have appealed. One tune only.
So, probably already too old when Michael Jackson came along, I respected the dancing feet, the timing in the unique voice and the images but never at any time did I identify with the sad creature at the heart of it. Rilke’s poem, The Unicorn, suggests that the charmed, horned horse existed because people wanted it to. Similarly with Michael Jackson.
Bob Dylan has a great personal take on this phenomenon. People trying to get to the heart of Bob Dylan, the man, are rebuffed because, as the man himself has said, ‘he’s not there’.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Missing the link – out of the loop
Very occasionally, owing to the exigencies of fate, you can travel blissfully unaware of something that has been going on for years. I’m not talking about a spouse’s affair or a tumour silently gorging itself on some part of your body, or the fact that an inter-stellar domino effect of galactic implosions will be catastrophic for Earth, a billion years from now. A bit more small scale than that. Nevertheless, given that I have an interest in cinema and slightly more than an occasional interest in television, what has transpired as an unfathomable blot on my mental landscape, a lacuna in the ebb and flow of my tentative grip on culture, has turned in a curious way to my advantage. Like finding a donkey’s years old winning lottery ticket in that pair of trousers I forgot I bought and left in France for the next visit, only to find them two years later.
How can it have happened that I would miss something so riveting and better than anything else I’ve seen for years. Not only miss it but miss the hype? Can it be that my travelling between countries has been a passage of neat sidesteps so that every time there has been an eruption of popular debate and a deluge of critical acclaim, I have just happened to be occupied elsewhere, my head fixed on my navel, or in the clouds or in someone else’s business. Who knows?
Yet here I am, years after its inaugural run, buying the first four series, with another one to waiting. This is, in itself, a first. Going on the recommendation of my younger son, confirmed by the opinion of one of my oldest friends, an internationally lauded writer of children’s fiction and a sardonic critic of most things popular, I just went out and bought eighty quid’s worth of TV episodes. It could have been exactly the kind of aberration that catches us out now and then in life, the kind for which you never truly forgive yourself. But it wasn’t.
It was made in cine-heaven by angels with dirty mouths. It transfixes me each night as I limit myself somehow to two episodes an evening. I dream dramas in Baltimore street patois. Like a junkie from the series (there are plenty of them) I flop about, stare distractedly, scratch and mumble my way through the day, until I allow myself to switch on the DVD player.
Oh bliss! Two and two thirds series to go. Over thirty episodes at around 45 minutes a time. And another thirteen episodes in series five which I will buy on the way back to Ghana.
I am high on The Wire.
Very occasionally, owing to the exigencies of fate, you can travel blissfully unaware of something that has been going on for years. I’m not talking about a spouse’s affair or a tumour silently gorging itself on some part of your body, or the fact that an inter-stellar domino effect of galactic implosions will be catastrophic for Earth, a billion years from now. A bit more small scale than that. Nevertheless, given that I have an interest in cinema and slightly more than an occasional interest in television, what has transpired as an unfathomable blot on my mental landscape, a lacuna in the ebb and flow of my tentative grip on culture, has turned in a curious way to my advantage. Like finding a donkey’s years old winning lottery ticket in that pair of trousers I forgot I bought and left in France for the next visit, only to find them two years later.
How can it have happened that I would miss something so riveting and better than anything else I’ve seen for years. Not only miss it but miss the hype? Can it be that my travelling between countries has been a passage of neat sidesteps so that every time there has been an eruption of popular debate and a deluge of critical acclaim, I have just happened to be occupied elsewhere, my head fixed on my navel, or in the clouds or in someone else’s business. Who knows?
Yet here I am, years after its inaugural run, buying the first four series, with another one to waiting. This is, in itself, a first. Going on the recommendation of my younger son, confirmed by the opinion of one of my oldest friends, an internationally lauded writer of children’s fiction and a sardonic critic of most things popular, I just went out and bought eighty quid’s worth of TV episodes. It could have been exactly the kind of aberration that catches us out now and then in life, the kind for which you never truly forgive yourself. But it wasn’t.
It was made in cine-heaven by angels with dirty mouths. It transfixes me each night as I limit myself somehow to two episodes an evening. I dream dramas in Baltimore street patois. Like a junkie from the series (there are plenty of them) I flop about, stare distractedly, scratch and mumble my way through the day, until I allow myself to switch on the DVD player.
Oh bliss! Two and two thirds series to go. Over thirty episodes at around 45 minutes a time. And another thirteen episodes in series five which I will buy on the way back to Ghana.
I am high on The Wire.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Of Kakis and Coconuts
I’m in France again under a sky like half a starling’s egg. The garden has survived the winter (it rained and there is still snow on Mount Canigou to feed the rivers). I had a bad dream that the kaki tree would have died but it is there, glossy leaved and sprightly. If you haven’t tasted the fruit, it is an exotic shock to the system. When the leaves have turned red and orange, they drop away in early November leaving bright lanterns of orangey red, rather like peppers from a distance. They stay firm and if you eat them the juice turns to sour sand in your mouth. (I was once given a wine tasting lesson by a great UK importer, Simon Loftus in Southwold and I proved ok at bouquet, taste and the look of the wines but was really bad at the texture. I couldn’t differentiate gravel from sand from satin, from silk,,,,). The Kaki is no such paragon of ambiguity. You have to leave it until it starts to rot and then, presto!, the sand turns to something slightly satin and gloriously sweet and you spoon it out like a Moroccan fruit yoghurt. It is a great reward after abandoning my daily mango from the garden in Accra with an exquisite perfume and taste that is lost when the fruit is exported.
On the way here I stayed in a B&B on the Roman Wall, near Hexham. I don’t usually advertise but it is called the Carraw and beats any hotel. Heavy complex breads, local black pudding and organic farm produce complement the views of the fells where the Romans once walked, their faces (I imagine) twisted into despair like visitors to Cromer in late autumn, hoping to catch a rare glimpse of a Keatsian autumn sun but instead being knifed by Siberian winds. Remember this was June and it was snowing in Yorkshire!
A few miles away is the archaeological dig that has produced the greatest find in British archaeology – very human letters from Roman civilians and the military that show we have not progressed in needs or desires much since those days. I prefer social history to old buildings. Anything to throw light upon the opaque business of existence.
So here I am for a week or two. Ghana is far away but does not lose the allure of its rawness and challenge to most of the cosy assumptions and expectations of western Europe. I have the wine and I have the cheese and can sit out in the tranquil mountain air but I have had to exchange it for my daily coconut water (which is a substitute for blood plasma in battle zones and fortifies the body against the constant heat and humidity of Accra life).
There must be a novel in it. The Kaki and the Coconut.
I’m in France again under a sky like half a starling’s egg. The garden has survived the winter (it rained and there is still snow on Mount Canigou to feed the rivers). I had a bad dream that the kaki tree would have died but it is there, glossy leaved and sprightly. If you haven’t tasted the fruit, it is an exotic shock to the system. When the leaves have turned red and orange, they drop away in early November leaving bright lanterns of orangey red, rather like peppers from a distance. They stay firm and if you eat them the juice turns to sour sand in your mouth. (I was once given a wine tasting lesson by a great UK importer, Simon Loftus in Southwold and I proved ok at bouquet, taste and the look of the wines but was really bad at the texture. I couldn’t differentiate gravel from sand from satin, from silk,,,,). The Kaki is no such paragon of ambiguity. You have to leave it until it starts to rot and then, presto!, the sand turns to something slightly satin and gloriously sweet and you spoon it out like a Moroccan fruit yoghurt. It is a great reward after abandoning my daily mango from the garden in Accra with an exquisite perfume and taste that is lost when the fruit is exported.
On the way here I stayed in a B&B on the Roman Wall, near Hexham. I don’t usually advertise but it is called the Carraw and beats any hotel. Heavy complex breads, local black pudding and organic farm produce complement the views of the fells where the Romans once walked, their faces (I imagine) twisted into despair like visitors to Cromer in late autumn, hoping to catch a rare glimpse of a Keatsian autumn sun but instead being knifed by Siberian winds. Remember this was June and it was snowing in Yorkshire!
A few miles away is the archaeological dig that has produced the greatest find in British archaeology – very human letters from Roman civilians and the military that show we have not progressed in needs or desires much since those days. I prefer social history to old buildings. Anything to throw light upon the opaque business of existence.
So here I am for a week or two. Ghana is far away but does not lose the allure of its rawness and challenge to most of the cosy assumptions and expectations of western Europe. I have the wine and I have the cheese and can sit out in the tranquil mountain air but I have had to exchange it for my daily coconut water (which is a substitute for blood plasma in battle zones and fortifies the body against the constant heat and humidity of Accra life).
There must be a novel in it. The Kaki and the Coconut.