RIP David Johansen

 

By way of second-hand tribute, what I believe is the very first serious piece on the New York Dolls - by a Brit (Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth).  

Roy makes the case for the toppermost of the verdicts in that Creem poll based advert as well as anyone ever had.  (There's a second piece below that does the job even better), (More on who exactly Roy was, at the bottom)

This is from July 22 1972!.

bonus piece Roy Hollingworth does a preview of the Dolls tour of the UK 

Melody Maker, November 24th 1973

This is the story of the last rock and roll band. The New York Dolls. There won't be another. They are the last of propellor aircraft. What follows will mean nowt.

For the Dolls… Well, I would travel to Sydney, Australia — for they are the remnants of what it was all about.

Holiday Inn, Atlanta, Georgia. Clarissa was 19 when she first saw the New York Dolls. That was last night at Richards, Atlanta. Now she is 27, and knows everything about everything.

"They were like taking a legal drug man. I thought rock and roll was the Allman Brothers. It ain't. It's the New York Dolls."

After breakfast, and a cup of Chivas Regal whiskey which spread the tongue like acid, I wandered to the hotel bar.

Slaves

Two Georgia musicians sang scenes from Sgt. Pepper. The lead singer sang "How many moles in Blackburn. Lancashire." I laughed, and told him later that they don't have moles in Blackburn but holes.

"Why? said the singer, scratching his checked cowboy/John Wayne/Gene Autrey/Shirt.

"Because moles were banned from Lancashire in 1887 by Henry Plimsoll of Derby, who also invented white painted lines to put around the hulks of ships so they would not sink under the weight of slaves."

Ah! Slaves. Georgia. Where the main percentage of people who serve upon other people are Black. Some civil war!

"I want a slave" said David JoHansen, lead drinker of the Dolls.

It is 3.15 AM and I am stood on a street corner in Atlanta, and it is pouring. I am very wet. But as I wait for a cab, I am very happy.

Happy 'cause I just danced my thighs three inches thinner for the Dolls.

They crawled on stage. Arthur "Glib" Kane, Johnny "Nine Legs" Thunders, Sylvain Sylvain, Jerry Nolan, and Mr. Ego 1984 David Jo Hansen.

You know, my chums, this band makes Alice Cooper looks like the Bronte Sisters.

In other words, they are awful — in the truest and most beautiful sense of the word. Johnny Thunders left the stage in Chicago the other night and retched into the dressing room table of flowers. Now that is rock and roll.

Bombed

Audience seated sipping large drinks of vodka, mixed with pills and other luxuries.

"The critics really bombed us in Chicago," said David Jo Hansen, lead singer. "But we love criticism. We're not just masochistic about being put down. We're something else."

Lights on. Arthur Kane, bassist, mild as the very finest washing up liquid, stands. Arthur. Blond. He looks like a mutated Marlene Deitrich. But he plugs in and goes blmmm... blmmm... blmmm...

Sylvain Sylvain plays just one bloody chord and the blood runs. And that club moves.

Jo Hansen singing like a newspaper seller. He rips his shirt open and there is a white waistcoat and skin, and he bites the top off a bottle of California wine, and drinks it down, froth, bubbles and all.

And then he sucks the bottle. "WOW" say the girls close to the stage.

But I thought we were all singer songwriters now? I thought rock and roll was over? I thought when John Lennon sang 'All I Want Is The Truth' that it was the end and we'd all start singing Tom Paxton numbers again?

But nay. Here on this stage battles a baggage of balls and trousers and high-heeled shoes; and drunkeness and unwashed hair; and untuned guitars and songs that musicians would call a mess.

But a rock and roll child would say "God Bless You — You are so necessary!"

Rock and roll is sex. And the Dolls played on. And they played sex. Non-stop.

They scratched and broke picks and played licks that were sick and copied and had been played before. But never like this! Never like the Dolls played it.

And then there was the lovely looking lady who shook her lips and danced 'Personality Crisis'.

Robbery

She dances, and falls, and the guys around her laugh. It wasn't funny. I picked her up. The Dolls jive on. Jive like there was never, ever again to be a tomorrow. And in this case there wasn't.

My head aches, with enjoyment. 12-bar boogie, chords struck like a lumberjack struck a tree. Who are we?

There was a television in the lounge. There was a bank robbery this very evening. And you know — this was the worst bank robbery ever. There was a live film of it.

They — the Georgia State Police — put 48 bullets in that robber. And when his body started to fall apart they stopped shooting. We heard the shooting. We saw the body.

Ever and anon, like a cigarette smoker takes a cigarette to his lips, we went back and danced to The Dolls. The Dolls. Now a pigsty of sweaty smell and stale alcohol. But they still play.

No! No messages. No instructions through song! Nothing to think about. Nothing to admire. Few words rhyme, or for that matter mean anything.

But when spewed by David Jo Hansen — then they are rock and roll. No! No protest songs that mean anything. Just... Just... Protest.

The hottest thing I've seen. Hotter than 12 pokers thrust in your eyes. Hotter than Marlene Dietrich — is the New York Dolls.

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images heisted from Kristian Hoffman, original superfan who is much quoted in Shock and Awe

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Who was Roy Hollingworth, apart from being the first writer on either side of the Atlantic to claim huge things for The New York Dolls? 

Richard Williams, his colleague at Melody Maker, in an obituary, pegs him rightly as Nick Kent before Nick Kent: 

Roy Hollingworth, 1949-2002

Richard Williams, The Guardian, 22 March 2002

Several years before a group of New Musical Express staff writers began presenting themselves to their readers in the guise of auxiliary members of rock bands, the Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth became the first English rock critic to look and behave in a way that made him indistinguishable from the musicians who peopled his articles.

Lesser writers adopting such a strategy often made themselves appear fools. But Hollingworth, who has died aged 52, was one of the most colourful and engaging writers employed by the pop music press in the early 1970s. His reviews conveyed a love of the music, while his interviews with the people who made it were often amusing and usually sympathetic to the characters who crossed his path.

Like many writers of that era, he saw his task as one of spreading enthusiasm for music that caught his imagination, and did it with flair. If a more urgent mission to become a rock star himself was less successful, despite occupying significant parts of the past 30 years, undoubtedly he saw it as a more fruitful way of spending his time.

I met Hollingworth in 1965, when we were both in our teens and attending a day-release course in various journalistic skills. Born in Derby, he was educated at Henry Cavendish grammar school.

We were junior newspaper reporters: his the Derby Evening Telegraph, mine the Nottingham Evening Post. When matters involving shorthand, the law for journalists and other elements of tradecraft had been dealt with, it was time to settle down in a coffee bar and discuss the latest visits to the east Midlands of the Who or Jimi Hendrix. Before long, both of us were pestering our editors to allow us space to write about such events.

Early in 1970 we were reunited at the Melody Maker, where half a dozen writers had been engaged by the editor, Ray Coleman, to replace defectors who had left to form a rival weekly, Sounds. The new talent helped boost the paper's circulation to the brink of 200,000 copies during the next few years, and Hollingworth became one of the paper's most distinctive and influential contributors.

An instinctive affinity for a life of hanging out until the early hours at the Speakeasy or the Revolution and of going on the road with bands across Europe and America eased his entry into London's rock society. For a while he and the MM's gifted photographer, Barrie Wentzell, shared a flat above a Soho pizza restaurant. Their convivial instincts and the flat's location, a few steps away from such musicians' hangouts as the Nellie Dean, the Ship, La Chasse and the Marquee, meant that it became a rendezvous for a bunch of rock eccentrics, notably Viv Stanshall and Legs Larry Smith of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

A posting to the Melody Maker's New York office broadened Hollingworth's friendships; it also increased his carousing, in a way that did him few favours in the longer term.

His tastes reflected his personality. The English whimsy to be found in the work of Syd Barrett and Marc Bolan appealed to his slightly fey, hippie-ish side, while the south Wales band Man, and the Irish blues guitarist Rory Gallagher satisfied a fond ness for unpretentious blue-collar boogie. And his writing, which was loose-jointed, warm-blooded and sometimes joyously surrealistic, in turn reflected the music.

He also cherished the moodier type of singer-songwriter, whose ranks he aspired to join. Leonard Cohen was a particular hero, and during an often-quoted interview in 1973, having discussed the manifold faults and wickednesses of the music business in a mood of gathering gloom, Hollingworth was astonished to hear the Canadian poet suggest: "Make this your last interview. And let's both quit together." Hollingworth took the opportunity to announce Cohen's retirement to the world – somewhat prematurely, as it turned out.

It was during a conversation with John Lennon quite soon afterwards that he began to believe that he could take Cohen's advice seriously. "Cut your hair," the former Beatle allegedly said, "and get a record deal, Roy."

Before long Hollingworth had left the Melody Maker and relocated in New York, where he appeared at the Mercer Arts Center, cradle of the New York Dolls, in front of an audience including David Bowie and Lou Reed. He later formed a band, Roy and the Rams, which included Lenny Kaye, another former critic, who later became Patti Smith's guitarist.

A few years later Hollingworth returned to London, where he eventually released an album, In Your Flesh, produced by his old friend Martin Turner, formerly of Wishbone Ash. He made several tours of Germany and occasionally performed in the back room at the Half Moon in Putney, a renowned rock pub not far from his last home.

Much loved by women, he had many relationships, the last of them with his wife, Anthea, who survives him.

• Roy Hollingworth, musician and journalist, born April 12 1949; died March 9 2002.

Roy on the left with the long hair

Roy at the front with the fake short legs (this whole MM staff shot needs to be wheeled out again for an Old Wave post)

More evidence suggesting that Roy's head was turned around by readings Bangs in Creem causing to see the Light, the Way and the Truth  (whereas for instance there is a wrongfooted in real-time review of the Stooges debut by Roy that dismisses it as horrid inept noise)

who's a pretty boy then

One moderately intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if John McKay and Kenny Morris had not quit the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP  signing session in an Aberdeen record shop

For sure, you wouldn't want to have missed all the amazing music that the John McGeoch and Budgie version of the band generated.

But equally a bit more of the severe (yet pop punchy, often) early sound would also have been nice.

Things like this flange-ferocious beauty - a medium-size hit single

I inadvertently left on the subtitle function when playing this video and before the lyrics start it says "intense postpunk music" - quite!

Well, look, here's a turn-up: some music made by McKay (who, like Morris, more or less disappeared from music after their abrupt departure) - a "lost album", Sixes and Sevens, made not long after leaving the Banshees. You can hear a track now but the whole release is not out until May. 

Release irrationale: 

"The Scream", Siouxsie & the Banshees' first album, was released late enough in the punk era to bear some claim as the first post-punk album, with only minor traces of 'punk' lingering) and enough hints of what had come even earlier to be, paradoxically, new.

Siouxsie was clearly the focus of the band, with her unique vocal style and lyrics, but the real star, we've always known, was John McKay, who wrote most of the album's music (as well as singles like "Hong Kong Garden"), creating a wholly new guitar sound - harsh and brittle, yet melodically intoxicating . . . best articulated by a somewhat confounded Steve Albini years later ". . . only now people are trying to copy it, and even now nobody understands how that guitar player got all that pointless noise to stick together as songs".

McKay's influence lives on; many of the most influential guitarists of the past four decades credit him as a major influence - Geordie from Killing Joke, Jim Reid of The Jesus And Mary Chain, U2's The Edge, Thurston Moore, Johnny Marr and even the two guitarists - The Cure's Robert Smith and Magazine's John McGeoch - who followed him in The Banshees. 

McKay's burgeoning status as the anti-guitar hero was halted when he and Banshees drummer Kenny Morris - at odds with Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin - fled the band just after the start of a tour supporting the group's second album, Join Hands. It was a weekly music paper scandal, later the subject of a BBC documentary, and Siouxsie's vitriol working its way into the lyrics of a later Banshees b-side, "Drop Dead / Celebration". Aside from a solitary single on Marc Riley's In Tape label nearly a decade later, no music was heard from McKay again.

So it comes as a major surprise to learn of a pile of excellent recordings made in the years just after he left The Banshees, unheard by all but a very few, some of which feature drummer Kenny Morris, plus Mick Allen from Rema Rema, Matthew Seligman of the Soft Boys and longer-term collaborator Graham Dowdall and John's wife Linda . . . the latter three of whom are now sadly deceased.

Sixes And Sevens is an historic lost album. Brazenly genius and bearing fair claim as the lost treasure of the post-punk era, the album collects eleven studio tracks, carefully mastered from original tapes. It's a masterpiece which best speaks for itself. 

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Severin's good looking and Siouxsie of course is a forbidding goddess, but in many ways, if you were going to point to a potential pin-up in the original Banshees it would be McKay. 

 

Those lips, that chin, the intense gaze, the Byronic hair. Moody and magnificent. 

If not pop, then - if he'd had more of a voice - McKay could probably have given Pete Murphy or Ian Astbury a run for their money in Goth's idol-atrous stakes.

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from an argument I had with someone about the Banshees: 

....in many ways it's as much sense to see them as a second-wave glam group as it is a postpunk group. 

In that perspective, the Banshees's real peers would not be PiL or Joy Division, but Japan and the John Foxx-era Ultravox - what could be called "late glam". And also Adam and the Ants.

Siouxsie and Severin are intensely invested in the visual and theatrical sides of music. 

I's also interesting that Siouxsie has on at least occasions situated herself in a larger tradition of glamour and showbiz - with the brassy cover of the Mel Torme standard "Right Now" in the Creatures, and then with "Kiss Them For Me" with all the Hollywood glamour goddess references.

.... The two core members met at a Roxy Music concert; their second B-side was a cover of a T. Rex song. When they did Through the Looking Glass, several of the songs covered were from glam-aligned artists. Glam was at their core.... 

antitheatricality + politics (the return) - "performative imperialism"

I did say I wasn't going to track this kind of tropery anymore - but couldn't resist reactivating for this beaut of a phrase "performative imperialism", in re. Trump's annexatory theatrics toward Canada, Greenland, Panana, renaming Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America....  

From an Atlantic piece by Jonathan Chait:  

"Since winning a second presidential term, Donald Trump has made a curious pivot to a kind of performative imperialism....  When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario..... [But] we cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

"An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones....A second reason is that Trump uses his international bullying as fan service for his base. The actual, concrete policy agenda of Trump’s presidency consists largely of boring regulatory and tax favors to wealthy donors and business interests—priorities that most of his voters don’t care about. Trump seems to grasp the need for public dramas to entertain the MAGA base.

"Spectacles of domination play an important role in Trump’s political style. “Build the wall” is the classic example: Trump never did build his “big, beautiful wall” along the length of the southern border, yet his fans don’t hold that against him, because the physical manifestation of a barrier on the southern border was beside the point. They thrilled instead to the idea of a wall as an expression of strength and defiance. When Trump would respond to criticism by saying, “The wall just got 10 feet higher,” he was performing dominance. The real wall was the threats he made along the way."

"There is little evidence that Trump is interested in any kind of practical deal [with Greenland]. He wants to menace allies.... Renaming the Gulf of Mexico isn’t even plausibly related to any economic or territorial objective. It’s pure symbolic bluster."

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So, kind of talk LOUDLY and carry no stick at all?

I am amazed that nowhere in the analysis or commentary on this subject that I've seen has the word  "lebensraum" come up.

My completely uninformed take on Trump's bellicosity

1/ Putin-pleasing push to crack apart NATO

2/ Gets people used to the idea that bigger countries have a "natural" right - in the Hobbesian state of nature that is geopolitics - to dominate or outright absorb adjacent countries.  Which would instill acceptance of Russia's designs on Ukraine and probably the Baltic States, prepare people for US non-pushback to China taking Taiwan...

3/ Part of Trump's late-19th-Century, McKinley cos-play - tariffs, trade wars, protectionism... the Gilded Age and robber barons ... Manifest Destiny (a phrase used in the inauguration speech) and the explicitly imperial expansionism (Hawaii et al) of the USA when it emerged into superpower status, as opposed to the covert imperialism and soft-power manipulations of the post-WW2 era. 

And then of course as others have said, it's a distraction from the coming failure to improve things on a kitchen-table level, the back-tracking from other unrealisable promises. 

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Follow up piece by Chait on shameless rationalizations of Trumpy bluster by former conservative non-interventionist American First type

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And another Atlantic article - this one on Trump's threatening phone call to the Danish PM and the illogic of the unrealisable demands: 

"But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map."

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Talking of "spectacles of domination" as referenced by Chait in the first of the pieces... here's an essay by T.J. Clark in the LRB entitled "A Brief Guide To Trump and the Spectacle".  Clark being a former member of the British chapter of the Situationist International and associate of King Mob - and also, in his later role as head of the Department of Fine Art at Leeds University,  a mentor / influence to Gang of Four, the Mekons et al. So he knows whereof he speaks on the subject of the society of the spectacle. 

I quite liked the anti-trope "marionette theatres of ‘democracy’" but overall didn't get a whole lot out of this essay. Yet another addition to the heaping mound of high-flown eloquence, undereath the floweriness for the most part things we've read before many times on this subject of Trump as dark magus of media, things we've worked out for ourselves or just viscerally grasped. 

This bit is quite interesting - on Trump not being a larger-than-life figure:

But all of these previous technics of persuasion spoke or shone down from a distance. They addressed an audience, they made a totality. Of course, the demagogue pretended to identity with his demos, but the technology did not exist to do the complete lying job. The affix ‘-agogue’ admits as much: the demagogue was still a magician, a mystagogue, a bearer of charisma. And Trump has annihilated the idea of charisma. The new leader is not above us. He’s on the screen in our hands. We manufacture him: our fingers are just his size.

Trump, being extremely old, is attached to the old-fashioned pageantry of spectacular power  - rallies,  parades, inaugurations and other ceremonies attendant to high office.  All that Billy Fisher as President of Ambrosia stuff - marching at the head of regiments, addressing rapt crowds in stadiums through tannoy systems. He is famously obsessed with crowd sizes, etc. But he's not any good at oratory, he's a leaden speaker when given a high-flown pre-written speech to read off a teleprompter. Can't summon a grand cadence or soaring climax to save his life. His forte is the rambling inner monologue conducted in public, aka the weave. Which if not as cogent as a tweet certainly seems to have more in common with the driveling rants and quickfire riposte of , message boards, text messages, influencers, social media, blogs even.  That sense of unguarded exposure... "being yourself" but with an audience...  like a webcam YouTuber. A rhetoric-free mode, not anti-theatrical but un-threatrical

The relaxedness of  his appearances on manosphere podcasts and the like is said to have played a role in his reaching young men - see this Kieran Press-Reynolds feature - the candidate just shooting the shit, one of us. Unlike other pols, Trump doesn't have talking-points, he has obsessions and antagonisms that erupt regularly and endlessly as organic leitmotifs... less slogans or catchphrases as mental tics.... the kind of self-image bolstering or anxiety-warding catchphrases, mantras and affirmation that go through anybody's head, except he's doing it aloud, in front of a microphone. Trump doesn't go off script, there is no script - it's unscripted entertainment ("unscripted television" being the genre in which reality TV among other things is classified in the biz). There's no ad libbing because it's all ad libbing. 

So Clark is right insofar as this is not Spectacle 1.0 where there's distance traversed by awe, a superheroic figure on a dais, grand gestures. It's not "all eyes on me", it's more like an abject bleed-through, a ghastly intimacy....  (for his fans) he-is-us-and-we-are-he...  a commingling of id impulses.  

(For sure, throwbacks paint those beyond-kitsch paintings of him as a military leader, muscley fighter/vigilante, saviour etc  But I don't think this is the bulk of his magnetism.  The fantasy is "wish I could be that full of myself, that honest about my prejudices and paranoias, that openly and unashamedly base".

It's a different kind of identification, going far beyond the older ideas of representative politics. 

We're not looking at a show, we're pulled into his show... it's the inner fantasy of Ambrosia leaking out abjectly to cover the entire surface of reality, displacing and supplanting and absorbing it. 

I think this why instinctively a lot of anti-MAGAs people are tuning out, rationing their following of the news, keeping off of Twitter... it's Baudrillardian recalcitrance, an attention-economy boycott, a refusal to be conscripted into the unscripted entertainment.....  perhaps a kind of tonic immobility....

 

tres debonAyers

Some people have compared Kevin Ayers's debonair image to Bryan Ferry - the genuine genteel article as opposed to the faux. Some even see him as a prototype, glam just a little too early

Not sure about that, the music in the first three or four solo albums is nowhere near glam. But I am struck by the use of eye make-up in these Soft Machine appearances

There is another intersection with glam: the theme of decadence, broached by name in this double-edged tribute to Nico, and implicitly in the apocalyptic hedonism of "Song from the Bottom of A Well" - capturing the disillusion / dissolution / dissoluteness of the post-hippy backwash

Watch her out there on display

Dancing in her sleepy way

While all her visions start to play

On the icicles of our decay.

Fading flowers in her hair

She's suffering from wear and tear

She lies in waterfalls of dreams

And never questions what it means.

And all along the desert shore

She wanders further evermore

The only thing that's left to try¡

She says to live I have to die.

She whispers sadly well I might

And holds herself so very tight

Then jumping from an unknown height

She merges with the liquid night.

Lovers wrap her mist in furs

And tell her what she has is hers

But when they take her by the hand

She slips back in the desert sand.

But what she leaves is made of glass

And lovers worship as they pass

Each one says - now she is mine

But all drink solitary wine.

(drink it to Marlene)

This is a song from the bottom of a well

There are things down here
I've got to try and tell;
It's dark and light at the very same time,
The water sometimes seems like wine.

I learned some information way down here
That might fill your heart and soul with fear;
But don't you worry, no don't be afraid
I'm not in the magical mystery trade.

My imagination begins to purr
As things don't happen, they just occur.
Softly crackling electrical smell,
There's something burning at the bottom of this well.

Sitting here alone I just have to laugh
I see all the universe as a comfortable bath;
I drown my body so my mind is free
To indulge in pleasurable fantasies.

There's something strange going on down here
A sickening implosion of mistrust and fear.
A vast corruption that's about to boil
A mixture of greed and the smell of oil.

This is a song from the bottom of a well
I didn't move here, I just fell.
But I'm not complaining, I don't even care
Cause if I'm not here, then it's not there.

Glam can be nutshelled as "illusion and disillusion"....  a reversal, an inside-outing of the Sixties's belief in truth and revolution 

"Oh! Wot A Dream" captures that slide from Sixties inordinate hopes to 70s atomized numbness   - it's an elegiac tribute to friend Syd Barrett but also an entire era. Barrett being the decade's prime casualty, someone who had "too much to dream" 

Oh! you pretty thing - a pop star that should have been but never was....  and in the career slide twilight, he puts out a single titled "Star"

Not to be confused with the earlier much more stellar-sounding 1971 tune that was absurdly thrown away on the B-side of "Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes"

"Feel like a million sparkling stars"

More thoughts on our Kev 

anti-theatricality and politics (slight return)

 "Assad's cult is a strategy of domination based on compliance rather than legitimacy. The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them. Assad's cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader ... It produces guidelines for acceptable; it defines and generalizes a specific type of national membership; it occasions the enforcement of obedience; it induces complicity by creating practices in which citizens are themselves "accomplices", upholding the norms constitutive of Assad's domination; it isolates Syrians from one another; and it clutters public space with monotonous slogans and empty gestures, which tire the minds and bodies of producers and consumers alike ... Assad is powerful because his regime can compel people to say the ridiculous and to avow the absurd."

- Lisa Wedeen, "Acting "As If": Symbolic Politics and Social Control in Syria"

You could substitute another five-letter leader name here and it would work just as well.

Struck me as an interesting way of describing the mechanisms of autocracy. It's like a particular authoritarian mutation of the Spectacle 

The dictator  forces everybody to participate as extras in a giant theatrical production that is the State 

Individual mass spectacles are part of this (as in the North Korean style synchronized stadium pageants)  but at the ultimate degree the spectacle encompasses the entire social field

As a subject, you simultaneously spectate the collective fakery even as you play a bit part in it

It's all for show, but it doesn't work through convincing people that it's true, it works through making people pretend, participate is a mass lie.

Does the dictator believe this pageant of make-believe? Is it the externalisation of his own grandiose inner fantasies,? Like Billy Liar imagining himself the caudillo of Ambrosia - except a dream come true, in this case, as exacted social fact. 

Doesn't matter - the point is the submission to the charade that is enforced and obeyed.

Quentin Crisp - glam theorist

from a 1981 interview with Paul Morley

Interesting comments from Quentin Crisp about music here (similar to Nabokov and Freud's antipathy to music as disequilibrium) which confirms my belief that music in its essence is Dionysian whereas the glam-stylist-dandy impulse is Appollonian.

 

x

Ed directs our attention to this Cherry Red Miniatures compilation track by Quentin Crisp 

More glammish perceptions from Quentin C

“ Charisma is the ability to influence without logic. I recommend limiting one's involvement in other people's lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave”

hideous tricks on the brain / the Mael of the species

Morrissey on Fame

Nick Kent:  There's a quote about fame in a play by one of your favourite writers, Heathcote Williams, that it's God's way of punishing people, of marking them out. Can you relate to that?

M: I just think that human life is considered so insignificant now that the only thing one can do, in order to do anything at all, is 'to become famous'. This current obsession with 'fame' runs rife through all the people I know. They have to do it or else their life is absolutely, shambolically useless. And I don't believe that was always the case. I believe that pressures have driven people to this monstrous over-emphasis on fame, on 'doing' and 'being seen'. Not even 'doing' now. You just have to be 'seen' doing something and you're famous. That's strangulating."

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Morrissey on Sparks

"At 14, I want to live with these people, to be - at last! - in the company of creatures of my own species."