Friday, December 20, 2024

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 hereI'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 hereThat might fill your heart and soul with fear;But don't you worry, no don't be afraidI'm not in the magical mystery trade.
My imagination begins to purrAs 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 laughI see all the universe as a comfortable bath;I drown my body so my mind is freeTo indulge in pleasurable fantasies.
There's something strange going on down hereA sickening implosion of mistrust and fear.A vast corruption that's about to boilA mixture of greed and the smell of oil.
This is a song from the bottom of a wellI didn't move here, I just fell.But I'm not complaining, I don't even careCause 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 

Sunday, December 15, 2024

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.


Saturday, December 7, 2024

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”



Sunday, December 1, 2024

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."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

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."







Sunday, November 24, 2024

pop ventriloquism

 



Amazing how close these Sweetsong demos made by Mike Chapman are to the finished record. (you'll want to skip ahead past the early abject bubblegum pap to the "Wigwam Bam / Little Willie" onwards stompy stuff.)

Particularly on the level of the vocal inflections, the campy ad libs, the whole pitch of hysteria  - almost all of it was worked out in advance.  

Eventually the dummies assimilated the implanted style - so well they could generate their own material and dispense with the ventriloquist  - a kind of self-parody but with the original "self" invented by another

Saturday, November 2, 2024

anti-theatricality + politics (the finale?)

A wise person once said: “When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.” Donald Trump is a clown. Let’s prevent the presidency from becoming his circus.

-  Richie Torres

On the ever darkening bronzer

The more extreme he becomes politically, the more theatrical his public persona must be. The dictator persona is full of obvious artifice: the sunglasses, the macho posturing, etc.

- Ruth Ben-Ghiat


At Vanity Fair, Gabriel Sherman gets the mea culpa from NBC chief marketing officer producer John Miller about The Apprentice and its role in elevating Trump to world-historical figure

Miller believes that without The Apprentice, Trump would never have been in a position to run for president. “He didn’t have a real company. It was basically a loose collection of LLCs. They’d been bankrupt four times and twice more when we were filming the show. The Apprentice helped him survive that,” Miller told me. “People thought he would be a good president because I made him seem like a legitimate businessman.”

.... Initially, we leaned into the idea that it was a show from Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor. But when we saw some early takes, we realized Trump was going to be a big character. So we created the title sequence with the theme music of the show, which was For the Love of Money by the O’Jays. We shot the promos with Trump in his limousine, in his helicopter, in his jet, and at Trump Tower. We created the sense of an American royalty. We kept pounding that message over and over again. I called it “ruthless consistency.”

 .... Trump made Mark Burnett rent two floors in the Trump Tower. One of the floors was used to create a false entryway into Trump Tower. So when you came out of the elevator, there was this big fancy place and a receptionist that didn’t exist. And then another part of that floor was the boardroom that was entirely created to make it look like it was a big, important boardroom. Because Trump’s real boardroom was shabby. You would never think of it as a big-time businessman’s boardroom.

.... When I retired in 2022, I started writing a book called How I Ruined American Culture

.... The show aired on Thursday nights and he would often call me on Friday and say, “John, how did we do?” I would just say, “We did very well.” And he would say, “We were the number one show on television!” I’d say, “No, we weren’t but we did very well.” That happened a number of weeks and I kept thinking, Does he just not read the ratings? And I just realized, that’s what he did: He said something he wanted people to believe over and over again, and eventually, it will be true.

 ... We had a wrap party after the third season at Lincoln Center. I was at the bar waiting to get a drink for my wife, and Trump came up to me and said, “John, I’ve got a great idea for season four: Blacks versus whites.”.... I said, “I can understand why you think that’s a great idea because that would be a very noisy idea. Headlines would be everywhere. Everybody would be talking about that, but you make most of your money off of the [product] integrations in the show. And there’s no company that’s going to take part in that, so this is going to hit your pocketbook pretty hard.”

He said, “The ratings would be huge!” 

On 2015 and Trump's entry into the race

I thought, Has there ever been somebody who is less qualified to be president than Trump? And has there ever been anybody that’s more telegenic and understands how to manipulate the media more than Trump?

 ... I do think he would like to be a dictator....   This time.... he’ll hire yes-men and he’ll hire loyal people. And so the government, at best, will function badly, and at worst, he will do his best to make it authoritarian. 

 


Live by showbiz, die by showbiz - a snippet about the Madison Square Garden hate-rally from this  fascinating report by Tim Alberta  at the Atlantic behind the scenes of the chaotic Trump campaign

The prime-time show playing out just beyond their corridor had been eight years in the making. Trump, hailed as “the man who built New York’s skyline” by a roster of celebrity speakers, would stage an elaborate homecoming to celebrate his conquest of the American political psyche. It seemed that nothing—not even the $1 million price tag for producing such an event—could put a damper on the occasion.

And then, before some in the audience had even found their seats, the party was over.

The first presenter, a shock comedian named Tony Hinchcliffe, told a sequence of jokes that earned little laughter but managed to antagonize constituencies Trump had spent months courting. One was about Black people carving watermelons for Halloween; another portrayed Jews as money-hungry and Arabs as primitive. The worst line turned out to be the most destructive. “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now,” Hinchcliffe said. “I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”

The blowback was instantaneous.... who, exactly, had the bright idea of inviting a comic to kick off the most consequential event of the fall campaign. In truth, some of Trump’s senior staff hadn’t actually watched Hinchcliffe’s set. The Garden was a labyrinth of security checkpoints and political processions, and the event had barely been under way when he spoke. Now they were racing to catch up with the damage—and rewinding the clock to figure out how Hinchcliffe had ended up onstage in the first place.

It turns out to have been the operative who persuaded Vance to go with the Haitians eating cats and dogs thing: 

Alex Bruesewitz. Technically a mid-level staffer—formally a liaison to right-wing media, informally a terminally online troll and perpetual devil on the campaign’s shoulder—Bruesewitz had grown his profile inside Trump’s orbit. The candidate’s appearances on various bro-themed podcasts were hailed as acts of strategic genius. But there was one guest booking Bruesewitz couldn’t secure: He wanted Trump to talk with Hinchcliffe on his show, Kill Tony. When word got around that Trump was looking for opening acts at the Garden, Bruesewitz made the introductions. Trump’s head of planning and production, Justin Caporale, ran with the idea. No senior staff ever bothered to vet Hinchcliffe themselves....   colleagues would spend the coming days savaging Bruesewitz for his recklessness when really—as ever—the culprit was a man whose addiction to mayhem creates the conditions in which a comedian who was once dropped by his talent agency for using racial slurs onstage could be invited to kick off the closing event of the election without a single objection being raised.


Bonus non-Trump bit

Queen Elizabeth II thought Boris Johnson "better suited to the stage" than politics and two days before her death, after he resigned, she told a senior courtier in jest: "At least that idiot won't be organising my funeral" - Tim Footman


post-11/5 nightmareland update:

"Donald Trump won because he offered a majority of Americans what they wanted: anger and drama

In the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

- Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. 

- Joseph O'Neil , New York Review of Books


On the cabinet picks so far

"It’s like he’s releasing the casting list for the final season of America" - Keith Edwards


Why are we even participating in this piece of BAD political theater There are remedies that could be utilized even before the votes are certified We are WILLINGLY allowing the complete overthrow of our Constitution and our Government And nobody is doing a thing about it

- Rick Taylor

The Biden show was boring. They want the Trump show back. Americans can handle almost anything except boredom.
- Tom Nichols


Megan Garber at the Atlantic on Trump as The 21st Century’s Greatest, Ghastliest Showman - "Donald Trump has made himself a spectacle—and inescapable" - and cites the 1962 book The  Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the more useful things I read while researching Shock and Awe

In early 2017, just after Donald Trump took residency in the White House, the New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo engaged in an experiment. He spent a week doing all he could to ignore the new president. He failed. Whether Manjoo was scrolling through social media or news sites, watching sitcoms or sports—even shopping on Amazon—Trump was there, somehow, in his vision. In those early days of his presidency, Trump had already become so ubiquitous that a studious effort to avoid him was doomed. “Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever,” Manjoo observed....

This week, the former president made himself inescapable once more. He will have another four-year term in office, the Trump Show renewed for a second season....
 
Trump is a showman above all, which has proved to be a major source of his omnipresence. He is image all the way down. He is also narrative shed of its connection to grounded truth. He has endeared himself to many Americans by denigrating the allegedly unchecked power of “the media”; the irony is that he is the media.

...  Boorstin pointed to Phineas T. Barnum, the famous peddler of spectacular hoaxes and lustrous lies. Barnum was a 19th-century showman with a 21st-century sense of pageantry; he anticipated how reality could evolve from a truth to be accepted into a show to be produced. Barnum turned entertainment into an omen: He understood how much Americans would be willing to give up for the sake of a good show.

....  Barnum, too, converted his fame as a showman into a second life as a politician. While serving in the Connecticut legislature, he crusaded against contraception and abortion, introducing a law that would become infamous for its repressions of both. 

..... Trump is Barnum’s obvious heir—the ultimate realization of Boorstin’s warnings. The difference, of course, is that Barnum was restricted to brick-and-mortar illusions. The deceptions he created were limited to big tops and traveling shows. Trump’s versions go viral. His humbugs scale, becoming the stuff of mass media in an instant. 

... In the introduction to his 2004 book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the future president includes a quote from a book about the rich—a classic Trumpian boast doubling as an admission. “Almost all successful alpha personalities display a single-minded determination to impose their vision on the world,” it reads, “an irrational belief in unreasonable goals, bordering at times on lunacy.”

When Trump announced his first presidential candidacy, he staged the whole thing in the gilded atrium of the New York City tower emblazoned with his name, a building that was real-estate investment, brand extension, and TV set. Many, at the time, assumed that Trump was running, essentially, for the ratings—that he might try to channel his campaign into an expansion of his power as an entertainer.

.... In 2015, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, HuffPost announced that it would not report on him as part of its political coverage; instead, it would write about his antics in its Entertainment section. “Our reason is simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow,” the publication declared. “We won’t take the bait.”


That category confusion explains a lot about Trump’s durability. He defies the old logic that tried to present politics and entertainment as separate phenomena. 

... The effect of attempting to hold Trump accountable, whether in the courts or in the arena of public opinion, has been only to expand the reach of the spectacle—to make him ever more unavoidable, ever more inevitable.


“It’s probably not a good idea for just about all of our news to be focused on a single subject for that long,” Manjoo wrote in 2017... 

....Trump once again has carte blanche to impose his vision on the world. And his audience has little choice but to watch.

Some interesting points and some facts I didn't know....

But increasingly it feels like all that could be said and understood about Trump and Trumpism - analytically -  that work had already been done, thoroughly, as far back as 2016. Even before he was elected the first time.

All that eloquence and penetration was for naught - and the endless tsunami of great writing on the subject that continued, wave upon wave, riveting analysis after riveting analysis - all of it ultimately just contributed in its own way to the absolute annexation of consciousness, the attention-economy occupation that was Trump's victory. 

All eyes, all minds, on him.  

The absolute focus, the main-est of main characters.

So as much as I remain still fascinated by the theatrical and anti-theatrical tropes, I think I won't be bothering to read this kind of analysis any more.... 

It doesn't get you anywhere. There are no further insights to be gleaned. 

It doesn't do you any good, it probably does you bad, both in terms of exposure to the toxicity of the personality and the personality cult, and in terms of fooling yourself that it's any kind of way of staying on top of things, keeping ahead of events by keeping abreast of them ... the illusion that knowledge is power, that thinking and analysing is a contribution. 

Just for sanity's sake, I will have to ration the amount of exposure, the bandwidth of awareness, going forward.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia / the dangers of high self-esteem

Last of the Trump related posts, this one is from midway through his (first?) Presidency:

 

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia

The core of positive thinking - which is also the core of glam - is the power of Desire to override the Reality Principle.

The power of wish-speech (childish, magical, narcissistic) to reject reality as a facts-ist regime.

Hence, Billy Liar's opening line: "Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia"




(Fascism versus Facts-ism - in his fantasyland Ambrosia, Billy is a military hero / benign despot in the caudillo style -  fond of pageantry, parades,  rallies and the like. Beloved by his people). 




Hence, Trump's gainsaying of any element, however small, of consensus reality that is a blow to his own grandiose self-image. 

From the Washington Post:

"Trump plainly views the act of lying, or making things up, or contradicting himself with relentless abandon, as an assertion of power — that is, the power to render reality irrelevant, the power to roll right over constraints normally imposed by expectations of consistency or fealty to basic norms of reasoned, factual inquiry.

As Jacob T. Levy has written, these “demonstrations of power undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.” The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, or what the truth should be, even when — or especially when — easily verifiable facts dictate the contrary. The brazenness of Trump’s lying is not a mere byproduct of his desire to mislead. It is absolutely central to the whole project of declaring the power to say what reality is.

Trump’s boast about making stuff up in his meeting with Trudeau comes close to an open admission of this. He lied, or made stuff up, because he could, yes, but also because what one wants to be true actually can be made true."

"Billy Liar - the boy whose imagination is larger than his life"

PR is a form of propaganda  - the StarSelf-as-miniState broadcasting how it would like to be seen by the general public

(cf Trump pretending to be his own publicist, variously known as John Miller and John Barron - later the name of his son, intriguingly - procreation as narcissistic duplication, plus he'd already reused Donald for his first-born

(oh yes he's the Great Pretender.... a pretense of Greatness)

The glam parallel supreme (although there are many - Alice "I love to tell lies" Cooper, Bowie) is Marc Bolan.

From an early draft of S+A:

"Right from the start of his career... Bolan told tall tales, offering journalists grossly inflated accounts of real events and circumstances, while promising that would never be delivered and that in most cases never got beyond being an idle fantasy:   TV cartoon series based around him and scripted by him, screenplays for “three European pictures... including one for Fellini”, several science fiction novels on the verge of UK publication. He boasted of having painted “enough for an exhibition” and having “five books finished which I`ve been sitting on for a long time”. Even on the downward slope of his career, he unfurled fantastical plans for a “new audio-visual art form”.

"Music journalists ate it up because it was good copy.  PR man Keith Altham compared him to Walter Mitty: “he knew that people always wanted something larger-than-life, so he always exaggerated. And sometimes he actually began to believe that himself”. Billy Liar is another parallel. The opening line of Keith Waterhouse’s novel is “Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia”—the latter being Billy Fisher’s fantasy-land, where he rules as a benign dictator/generalissimo.  For Bolan as for Fisher, reality was a facts-ist regime from which he was determined to secede.  Both came from  humble, hard-graft backgrounds (lorry driver father, market stall-holder mum, in Bolan’s Case) amid prosaic, color-depleted surroundings (the East End of London, rather than the imaginary industrial-mercantile Northern town of Stradhoughton in Billy Liar).  Both escaped through make-believe and making things up."

Positive thinking is a form of self-hypnotism, the beaming into the unconscious of "mental photographs", power-poses, heroic self-images, self-actualisation maxims, affirmations etc - a form of internally introjected propaganda. 

In The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale (Trump's pastor as a young man) advises: "Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture ... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination."

Poz-thinking infected forms of religion (e.g. Joel Osteen's prosperity gospel) (although positive thinking is itself a religion, a perversion of Protestantism) explicitly encourage believers to avoid contact with viewpoints that contradict one's wishful thinking. Osteen sermonises about how one's seed-of-greatness will not flourish in a soil of negativity - it is imperative to surround yourself with positive people (i.e. people who will not discourage you with their more reality-based judgements and lowered expectations, fatalists of every stripe). Similar to the techniques of Scientology, where the organisation encourages / forces the convert to abandon friends and family members who are not down with the positivity program and to instead spend one's entire social life within the belief-reinforcing enclosure  of the community of believers.

Another way of doing this is to constantly reshuffle your cabinet to get rid of realists, people who give any credence to the expertise of the reality-based community. 


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


bonus beats - a related-to-the-above section from my afterword to Ghosts of My Life:

Where could Mark have gone next, as a listener, writer, thinker? Could Mark have created a new adventure for himself in the later years of his life – intellectually as well as in terms of finding music and pop culture that excited and stimulated him? .... We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he’d lived to pursue its ideas to the finish line. And it’s anyone’s guess how he would have responded to the last six years of authoritarianism, nativism, and outright fascism.

What follows is speculative. I like to imagine he might have written a new book titled Capitalist Unrealism that addresses the paranoid delirium of fantasy and conspiracy that has consumed political life in much of the world. There is an unresolved tension in Mark’s thinking between a faith in the power of the fictive and a hunger for truth.  

From Ccru’s notion of Hyperstition (the self-fulfilling prophesy, the dream that achieves reality through the force of its projection) to glam’s artifice and reinvention of the self, Mark disdained ideas of authenticity and realism and believed in the power of fantasy. Yet Mark also excoriated the bullshit merchants of the mass media, despised Tony Blair as a dark magus of PR, critiqued magical voluntarism and motivational thinking as a form of privatization of hope, and wrote with painful honesty about his own depression, sexual abuse,  financial struggles, and “the wounds of class”.

I feel certain Mark would have been incandescently incensed by the mendacity of Boris Johnson’s Tory government, fascinated but appalled by Trumpism and other excrescences of post-truth anti-politics, and generally aghast at today’s world of influencers, corporate propaganda, psyops, disinformation. The fact that Trump was the first positive-thinking president, with Norman Vincent Peale as the family minister, would not escape his notice. His interest in David Smail’s concept of magical voluntarism might have led him to re-envision capitalism not as the realm of dour realism and deflated expectations, but as a fever dream of hype, irrational exuberance, market mania, and dangerously high self-esteem.  

As the recent cautionary tales of WeWork (retold on TV as WeCrashed) and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (The Drop Out) demonstrate, the scam artist is not an outlier or aberration within capitalism, but simply the extrapolation and amplification of its essence: speculation as wishful thinking, the IPO as image projection and illusion peddling. WeWork is a case study in the demonic glamour of disruptor capitalism, a feel-good enterprise fueled by the founding couple’s mantras and maxims (“manifest your desire,” “misery is a choice”, etc) and their employee rally-call “Thank God it’s Monday” – an uncanny inversion of Mark’s “no more miserable Mondays” in Acid Communism.

So it’s possible that Mark, confronted by a world run amok with the competing delusions and self-heroizing fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition, might come back to an idea of truth and reality as a bedrock. 

His taste took a surprising turn in the last decade. There was his endorsement of Sleaford Mods, whose brand of Happy Shopper realism is really not that far from earlier groups he’d despised like The Streets and Arctic Monkeys. And then there was his unexpected paean to The Jam. In songs like “That’s Entertainment” and “Down in the Tube Station At Midnight” –  sour and dour, chained to the mundane –  “Paul Weller sought to escape his fate in the very act of describing it,” Mark wrote. That could almost be a manifesto for the Free Cinema and the social-realist kitchen-sink movies of the 1960s like Billy Liar and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning -  a movement whose Englishness and everyday greyness almost certainly would have been anathema to the younger Mark, fired up on the visionary darkside aesthetics of cyberpunk and jungle techno. 

The gesture towards truth – to existential authenticity – is there even in the celebration of Joy Division in this book. “Depression is… a theory about the world, about life,” writes Mark, a theory whose foundation is the rock bottom apprehension of futility and emptiness, “the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.” There is a desolating pride in seeing clearly: “The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.” 


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 se...