secret thesis (slight return)

 

The secreted thesis

more secretions

anti-theatricality and politics (a bit of a backblog)

"Can we return theater to the actual theater?"

Steacy Easton

All I know is that Donald Trump loves the drama and fighting and show.

He has nothing else in his life.

This fills him up until the next episode.

a commenter at New York Times

A second reading is to see Trump’s affinity for reposting fan art as Executive Cope. Here, the slop is a way for Trump to escape and imagine the world as he’d like it to be. In slop world, Trump is not embattled, getting screamed at by his supporters over what looks to them like a guilty cover-up on behalf of a pedophile. Instead, he’s arresting Obama. It’s pure fan fiction that depicts Trump having power in a moment when, perhaps, he feels somewhat powerless.

In this context, Trump’s Truth Social page is little more than a rapid-response account that illustrates a world that doesn’t actually exist: one in which POTUS looks like a comic-book hero, is universally beloved, and exerts his executive authority to jail or silence anyone who disagrees with him. This sort of revenge fantasy would be sad coming from anyone. That it is coming from the president of the United States, a man obsessed with retribution, who presides over a government that is enthusiastically arresting and jailing immigrants in makeshift camps, is terrifying.

.... The same explanation could be applied perfectly to Trump’s Truth Social posts over the weekend. Trump called for Senator Adam Schiff to be prosecuted. He appeared pathologically aggrieved—spending part of his Saturday night posting a detailed infographic intended to debunk the supposed “Russia hoax” from an election that happened almost nine years ago. (Propaganda experts say this is an attempt by Trump and his administration to rewrite history.) He posted a fake mug shot of Obama. And, on Sunday morning, he pecked out a 103-word message congratulating himself on his first six months in office. Rage, paranoia, pettiness, and desolating selfishness: Trump appears consumed more and more by an online world that offers him the chance to live out the fantasy of the unilateral power and adulation that he craves.

Talking about Trump and social media is complicated because, unlike most users, Trump can post ridiculous things, transform news cycles, and force the world to react to his posts. But lately, his posts are not having the desired effect. It’s possible that what observers witnessed this weekend is a tipping point of sorts. Trump’s posts, instead of influencing reality, suggest that the president is retreating from it entirely.

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic

Attorney General Pam Bondi didn’t just go on Fox News in February to tease that Epstein’s client list was “on my desk” — she staged an elaborate piece of political theater in which right-wing influencers were handed binders at the White House that said “The Epstein Files: Part 1.” When the binders turned out to be a dud, an aggrieved Bondi sent an accusatory letter to Patel suggesting that evidence was being suppressed.

This month, the Justice Department and FBI officially determined that there is actually nothing more of significance to see. That makes their early behavior something of a puzzle. Who thought the administration would benefit from all the anticipatory playacting if it never had the goods? 

Washington Post

Gavin Newsom laughing laughed at Trump’s social media post that seemed to criticize his own administration’s immigration raids on farm

“This is what he does: he creates a problem, and then he tries to be a hero in his own Marvel movie”, Newsom said. “He initiated those raids. He significantly increased the scale and scope of those raids. That’s why he wants the National Guard.”

“Even fans of the president’s theater can get sick of endless drama,” 

- New York Post

Adam Curtis, talking up his new documix, Shifty

Because a new kind of politician rose up, bred in the swamp of distrust. They saw that playing bad in an over-the-top way would give you a great deal of power. Because in a world of disenchantment, where no one believed that politicians could be good, being bad meant you must be authentic. I give you Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump: pantomime villains who are locked together with us in a feedback loop of shock-outrage-badness repeating endlessly

Outside this theatre, really bad people do really bad things – but we are distracted by the pantomime. Meanwhile, the classes that once made up society fractured. The liberals turned on those who voted for Brexit, using with one voice the word Amis had spat out 30 years before: “stupid”.

Jeff Sharlet thread on Bluesky I think

"The Right has theater. The left has critique." That's Avgi Saketopoulou, a radical psychoanalyst, scholar, & I think it concisely expresses so much of how we got here. The Right presents spectacle; the "left"--shorthand for a range--prides itself on seeing through it. 1/

It feels good sometimes to be smarter than the other guy, but remember high school? Being able to critique the cultural dynamics of football didn't make as many friends as being able to play football. We can deride spectacle, but the longing for "theater" is real. 2/

The Right has theater, the left has critique--scholars, takes, "strongly-worded statements." The Right has masked men w/ guns who look like a movie. We have condemnation. But what if we had theater? Better theater? 3/

One strand of though holds that "meet fire with fire"--aka tit-for-tat--is the spectacle the left needs to combat the Right's theater. They've got armored HYDRA operatives? No problem, we've got Bane from Batman on top of car. Touché! Or...  

I'm not looking for a fight right now. If you feel certain that's the spectacle that's needed, godspeed. I don't feel any certainty about my view. But as a spectacle-critic--that's a lot of my work--that seems unpromising. If the "image" is "violence," the house--the state--always wins. 5/

Problem is, not much of the "left"--broadly speaking--engages with the the theater of the Right, so they don't know that while it's big move is violence, it's also heavy on sentimentalism. And that's where it's weakest. When people who hate vulnerability try to play vulnerable, it's shaky. 6/

For context, I'm thinking of Lionel Richie's "Hello" played at Trump rallies, Fox News' heavy investment in "human interest," the appropriation & weaponization of veterans' genuinely disproportionate suffering as, paradoxically, a rightwing truth.

That's the theater of the Right's version of tenderness. My uncertain argument: The left *at best* could meet the Right tit-for-tat in terms of spectacle of strength or "violence," but probably not even close. But when it comes to tenderness, we can make the better theater, because it's true. 

It's the brilliant @jeanguerre.bsky.social's column on videos made by families of those abducted by ICE that helped me think thru this. If you haven't seen the videos she links to, please consider watching. Be prepared for watery eyes. 

Maria Bustillos:

Oh but the left has theater, the best there is: Power to the People

The problem is every time the left takes the stage, the oligarchs close the theater.

Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy 

by Stephen Duncombe 

From an acclaimed, original observer of media and culture: how we can draw upon popular fantasies to create an alternative politics through imagination and spectacle - a twenty-first-century manifesto for the left.

What do Paris Hilton, Grand Theft Auto, Las Vegas, and a McDonald's commercial have in common with progressive politics? Not much. And, as Stephen Duncombe brilliantly argues, this is part of what's wrong with progressive politics. According to Duncombe, culture and popular fantasy can help us define and actualize a new political aesthetic: a kind of dreampolitik, created not simply to further existing progressive political agendas but help us imagine new ones.Dream makes the case for a political strategy that embraces a new set of tools. Although fantasy and spectacle have become the lingua franca of our time, Duncombe points out that liberals continue to depend upon sober reason to guide them. Instead, they need to learn how to communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.  not merely as a tactic but as a new way of thinking about and acting out politics. Learning from Las Vegas, however, does not mean adopting its values, as Duncombe demonstrates in outlining plans for what he calls "ethical spectacle."

book published in 2007 

The tepid theatrics of Trump’s parade

by Carolina A. Miranda

For once, the showman president was the audience, not the performer.

With a president who was once a reality TV star and who, in news headlines, is frequently likened to a “showman” and “performance artist,” living through the Trump era is a bit like inhabiting an immersive theater 24 hours a day. On official Defense Department channels, Secretary Pete Hegseth posts cinematic photos of himself working out with troops, playing the role of enlisted everyman. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem appears at raids staged by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in tactical gear, acting the part of a front-line soldier. And of course there is the content maker in chief, Donald Trump, who turns everything he touches into theater, be it signing executive orders — onstage after the inauguration! — or transforming his office into a simulacrum of a golden palace.

Now add to the theater the tepid military parade held on Saturday in D.C., an event that began as a way to celebrate the Army’s 250th anniversary but was inflated to satisfy Trump’s ravenous appetite for show business — with tanks, jeeps, helicopters, horses, parachutists, robot dogs and thousands of soldiers. (The event landed on the president’s birthday, after all.) Yet, in this highly choreographed stunt, which provided the absurd sight of a president who never served saluting troops as if he were Gen. George S. Patton, Trump missed his mark — by a mile.

Theatrics in politics are intended to distract from reality. Hegseth might do a photogenic burpee, but he has done little to contend with quality-of-life issues affecting service members, such as housing, according to Military.com. What’s more, the Defense Department budget is running three months late. About a week before Trump’s parade, thousands of veterans descended on D.C. to protest proposed cuts to a separate agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will affect, among other things, the quality of health care they receive. In Trump’s speech on Saturday, he described soldiers as “our most precious resource” — yet his policies would make it harder for low-income vets and their families to access benefits such as food assistance.

The performative posturing is accompanied by genuine violence. Noem’s notorious ICE raids are spectacles of aggression featuring unidentified masked men in tactical gear popping out of unmarked vans to seize not violent criminals but farmworkers and roadside flower vendors. On Sunday, heavily armed ICE agents showed up at an L.A. area swap meet looking as if they were entering the battles of Fallujah. It has been a theater of cruelty designed to strike fear in the hearts of immigrants and perhaps in dissenting members of government, too. Last week, when Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California), who sits on a Senate subcommittee tasked with overseeing immigration functions at DHS, tried to ask Noem a question at a news conference, he was thrown to the ground and cuffed by men in FBI vests. A (gaslighting) statement issued by DHS after the incident described Padilla’s appearance as “disrespectful political theatre” — with the word “theater,” curiously, spelled in the British style.

Trump’s parade — because let’s be real, it became his parade, whatever the intentions of the Army — likewise offered a dystopian split screen between idealistic reverence for the military in D.C. and images of the National Guard and Marines stonily guarding federal sites on the streets of Los Angeles, where I live. This is an immigrant city that has historically rejected Trump’s nativist policies, and the military was deployed over the objections of California’s governor to help quell anti-ICE protests in a few square blocks of downtown. It has been a deployment that has brought tension — not to mention irony worthy of “Veep”: The first person detained by the Marines after they arrived was an Army veteran.

Each of these elaborate performances is targeted at a specific audience. Hegseth perpetually plays the character of red-blooded enlisted guy for the “Fox & Friends” flock. Noem and her ICE raids deliver action-movie levels of violence to the White nationalist base. Trump’s parade was purportedly designed to play to the nation at large in advance of the country’s 250 years of independence — not to mention to other global superpowers, since a military parade invariably conveys military might. “We have the greatest missiles in the world,” the president said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. “We have the greatest submarines in the world. We have the greatest army tanks in the world. We have the greatest weapons in the world. And we’re going to celebrate it.”

As The Post reported earlier this month, the celebration, in its early stages, was conceived as a relatively demure affair on the National Mall. When the Army filed a permit application last year for an anniversary celebration, while Joe Biden was still president, the plans included the participation of some 300 soldiers and civilian personnel, as well as a concert by the U.S. Army Band. As part of the proceedings, four cannons would be fired. The scale of the event, however, ballooned under Trump — who’d been itching to stage a military parade since his first term in office, after attending a 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris.

Appetite for this sort of spectacle in the United States, a country with no strong tradition of military pageantry, however, was muted from the start. Jim Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary during his first term, was reported to have said he’d rather “swallow acid” than stage a parade. And, though Trump now has a more obliging defense secretary, many GOP lawmakers opted to sit out the spectacle, as Politico reported last week. Crowds were also sparse. A viral clip on social media, captured by Scripps News correspondent Liz Landers, shows a pair of tanks squeaking along Constitution Avenue before half-empty stands.

Ultimately, the audience for this military parade wasn’t the nation. It was just Donald Trump. This marks a disconcerting inversion of typical political theatrics: Rather than Trump performing for the United States, the country was performing for Trump — at an estimated cost of up to $45 million. It’s the sort of action intended to keep a dear leader believing that he is wrapped in a mantle of glory. Call it a Potemkin parade, after the fake villages reportedly created by a Russian nobleman to impress Catherine the Great during her 18th-century tour of Crimea.

The Army, to its credit, did its best to keep the parade about the Army. An announcer delivered facts about its roots in the Revolutionary War and the ways its various units had evolved over time. There was also plenty of information about hardware. The Bradley Fighting Vehicle, named for Gen. Omar Bradley, we learned, “is fast, it is tough, and it is lethal.” But also part of the event were the rather jarring ads for sponsors including Palantir, Oracle and Ultimate Fighting Championship. And the interstitial films that played on jumbotrons behind the dais seemed to contain more footage of Trump than of any Army general.

Rather than Trump performing for the United States, the country was performing for Trump.

Things got truly bizarre about an hour into the event, when an Army band started playing instrumental covers of popular songs, including Heart’s “Barracuda” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child of Mine” — which set a vibe that was part music video, part 1980s bar mitzvah. Though whoever chose the music clearly has a barbed sense of humor. On the set list was Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” a ’60s-era tune about rich kids getting out of fighting in Vietnam — which could have been written about Trump, the son of wealthy real estate developer who avoided that conflict after a timely diagnosis of bone spurs.

On television, the parade felt listless. As members of the Army Special Forces passed by, an announcer stated that the unit “is always combat ready, mentally and physically tough and prepared to fight our country’s adversaries.” Yet its march was an uncoordinated shuffle. Soldiers carrying drones looked like boys carrying toys. On the whole, the parade, wasn’t “America, hell yeah!” It was “America, okey dokey.” And it violated a cardinal rule of governing by theatrics, which is that the drama should be absorbing. Cut to the viral footage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio barely stifling a yawn. And, at the end, a speech by Trump lacking in oomph. As he declared, “We’re the hottest country in the world right now,” he sounded as if he was ready to nap.

Some commentators were relieved that the parade wasn’t a full-blown authoritarian display of goose-steeping troops and deadly missiles — a la Russia or North Korea. But you don’t have to go full-on dictator to put on a good parade. The Bastille Day parade in Paris features the remarkable sight of troops marching in perfect formation down the Champs-Élysées — including members of the French Foreign Legion in eye-catching historic uniforms that include leather aprons and axes. In my mother’s native Chile, the annual military parade features horsemen in historic Prussian-style uniforms, special forces in snow camouflage bearing skis, a large canine unit that includes dogs wearing helmets, and a mounted musical division that plays drums at full gallop.

Trump needn’t travel all the way to France or Chile, however, to find an impressive military spectacle. He could just pop over to Mexico, which every September puts on a truly epic Independence Day parade. Set in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, it begins with the president saluting the country’s independence leaders from the balcony of the presidential palace with shouts of “¡Viva!” and is followed by the sort of extravaganza that makes Bastille Day look tame. A ginormous flag is raised and a military band plays — the drum corps’ instruments are encircled with golden fringe that quivers with each step. Afterward begins a procession of troops in a range of historic and contemporary uniforms, from peasant fighters wielding machetes to special forces in jungle camouflage. Also included is a large canine unit of Belgian Malinois featuring a troop of puppies in training. Puppies! Now, that is a show.

On Saturday, America got a far less inspiring production: a limp attempt at pageantry that felt more like a thin pantomime staged for one man. America, okey dokey.

New York Times piece on Trump versus Los Angeles on immigration

Trump often advances his goals through images, and the images his administration was producing in Southern California were as filmic as anything in Hollywood. There were the videos of men in balaclavas and unmarked vans swooping down on farm fields and garment factories, which drove protesters into the streets in and around Los Angeles. There were the images of federal agents facing off against the protesters with tear gas and pepper balls. There were images of demonstrators waving Mexican flags in front of burning cars, the backdrop for Trump’s pronouncement on Truth Social that a “once great American City, Los Angeles, has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens and Criminals” and overrun by “violent, insurrectionist mobs.” He authorized administration officials to “take all such action necessary to liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion, and put an end to these Migrant riots.” And finally, here were the Marines, rolling into Los Angeles as if it were a foreign capital.

But the story the images from Los Angeles were telling did not always extend far beyond the frame. The undocumented immigrants swept up in the raids by ICE and other agencies in recent months, based on the limited data available, appear to be overwhelmingly without criminal records, not the violent invaders that Trump had conjured in so many speeches and all-caps Truth Social posts. And apart from more serious disturbances like blocked freeways and some damage to businesses, the rioting might have underwhelmed anyone who had been downtown after a Lakers championship victory; it was the sort of disturbance the Los Angeles Police Department was easily equipped — enthusiastic, even — to contain.

“This whole thing is Kabuki,” Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic governor, told me. “There are some professionals here, some patriots,” in the military, he said. “They’re struggling under very difficult circumstances and recognize the absurdity of this.”

Still, something very real was happening amid all this unreality — a production that the president was intent on staging, one he seems keen to perform again. 

A week into the conflict he engineered, though, it was beginning to look as if Trump had miscalculated. After the cinematic clashes of the first few days, the protests generated few of the images that served the narrative of Democratic fecklessness and impotence. The theatrical harshness and ominous secrecy of the immigration raids, meanwhile, had forced Americans to confront their ambivalence about immigration.

The Rolf Harris glam connection

 

As covered by Alice Cooper on Love It To Death

Here the connection is not a cover but a rip-off

Although Adam Ant adamantly insisted he never heard the Rolf Harris song and was inspired by the same Maori  song that Rolf himself ripped off - "I've got a large collection of ethnic music"

Unfortunately the other glam connection with Rolf Harris is much more seedy and evil -  something he shared with Gary Glitter  and a lot of glam-era types regrettably. 

After that, other songs by him take on weird undertones

Bestiality?

Suggestive

In The R.Elms of the Senseless (the style press then and now)

 

NME cartoon circa 1981 nicely skewers the self-declared aristocracies of club culture 

Apropos

Oh the myopic narcissism of the young!  Or in this case, the once-young....  

Of course there was rather a lot more to the Eighties even within the narrow realm of trendy clothes worn and trendy sounds danced to than what went down at Blitz

A preponderance of  right-time-right-places... and we won't even get on to rock's claims on all that

I'm sure it's just a subtitle to sell books and he doesn't actually believe that Blitz set the template for the entire decade.

Would be tragic if he did... 

In The R.Elms of the Senseless....  Actually I don't mind his Face-era writing at all -  a naturally gifted rhetorician, in full command of those cadences that announce "listen up, I'm about to hip you to the score", carrying you along despite yourself. 

The Hard Times piece, while risible in its complete reversal on Blitz-escapism, is a rhythmically exciting read - redeemed (or at least, made effective) by the sense that he really does believe it, in the moment of typing. 

Then there was another turn of the cycle - Hard Times (clubbing as political, deejays as militants, torn jeans as recession wear. "Money's Too Tight To Mention") was followed a few years later by Good Times (not quite an overt celebration of casuals and their expensive sweaters but it does say "money is in")

The concept of "Style" discussed on the Oxford Road Show by Elms, Annie Clayson and Peter York (who opines that "Money is stylish") 

Talking about self-declared aristocracies 

“Picture angular glimpses of sharp youth cutting strident shapes through the curling grey of 3 am. Hear the soaring joy of immaculate rhythms, the sublime glow of music for heroes driving straight to the heart of the dance. Follow the stirring vision and rousing sound on the path towards journeys to glory.”

That's Robert hymning Spandau on the back cover of Journeys To Glory 

The 1980 NME live review (no worries about conflict of interest in them days! he'd only named the band.... ) that launched it all

"Their strident elitism means that unless your ears are pinned firmly to the 'right' ground your chances of seeing them are at present slim. On the evidence of their latest performance it really is your loss"

NME pisstake Elms's I-wanna-Face-of-me-own venture New Sounds, New Styles

A novelist, yet... Wilde gives him a hard time, boom boom

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In the Eighties, I used to think of the style bibles as the enemy but I read them avidly - well they had loads of good writing, including a lot of people who once used to write for NME and the other weeklies. The Face had some of the sharpest columnists around - Savage, Burchill, Marek Kohn.... and the super intellectual team of Steve Beard and Jim McClellan, who seemed to oscillate between The Face and iD.

And in truth I would have been happy to write for them and in fact did write for iD, sporadically in the second half of the Eighties, and then after a pause, again a few times in the '90s.   (Eventually I did write for The Face too - in the 21st Century). (Oh yes and well before that, in the early 90s, I did some stuff for Arena - which was a sort of men's magazine offshoot of The Face, yet another Nick Logan invention with Neville Brody design). 

In the 1980s, the style bibles were useful adversaries, ideologically speaking. They beamed out this fantasy of metropolitan chic and rock-is-dead eclecticism - the idea that there's a place where it's all happening, an in-crowd subworld - they beamed this dream out to hair salon owners and aspiring fashion designers in the sticks. 

We at MM pushed our own quite different fantasies. 

The thing that surprised me when I went around to the iD office, which was then quite near Melody Maker, Drury Lane / Holborn, is just how shabby and cramped it was. Melody Maker was incredibly messy but it was quite a large space.  And quite bustling. The iD office was empty apart from the editor Dylan Jones and assistant editor Alix Sharkey, whose face I recognised from fronting the Morley-hyped but spectacularly null funk outfit Stimulin.

And apparently it was much the same with the Face in its first decade or so - a shoestring operation. Not the chic salon-like place that the design and the look of the magazine would suggest. 

Both magazines were done on a meagre budget yet managed to concoct this mirage of hip London that they transmitted all across the country and indeed internationally. (Joy bought both religiously).

If you look at an old issue now, especially early on, you can see how Face and iD were cobbled together in a last-minute dash just like the music papers. All kind of no-hope chancers getting featurettes, completely forgotten groups and motormouth types hawking something or other.

I remember Kodwo Eshun - I had no idea then who he was going to become! - came up to interview me (supposedly for the Oxford student mag Cherwell - I think he just wanted to meet). During a lively conversation at an outdoor table in Endell Street, he expressed disappointment that we hadn't gone straight from Monitor to The Face and iD. Like it hurt him to have to pick up a copy of Melody Maker every week, this broadsheet that left ink on your fingers.  

But I rather liked the idea of operating from this supposedly clapped-out, obsolesced institution, going against the grain of times.  (When the grain of the times was things like Absolute Beginners). 

Besides, the format was in alignment with what we were pushing - a resurgent rock underground.

Also the music papers came out 51 times a year, whereas the style mags came out monthly. So there was just vastly more space for our verbosity to frolic in. 

I should imagine it was very hard for a freelancer writing for a style magazine to make enough to live on, given you only have 12 paydays a year. And I seem to remember the iD word rate was modest, no better and possibly worse than the frightful word-rate at MM.  At MM, if you were prolific and voluble, you could make a nice living as a freelancer, simply because there was so much space to fill. 

The 51 issues (Xmas a double, lasted a fortnight) enabled you to construct more of an ongoing world.

That's what all these magazines were about - world creation, world maintenance. 

I miss that. Is there any publication today, print or online that does that?

Well, No Bells does. They have meet-ups, events where people read music criticism aloud. It's a social space, not just a disembodied discourse space. The magazine is a locus of vibe. 

Talking of style bibles, on a recent trip to New York, we went into a store that was choc-a-block with magazines into cutting edge fashion. Sort of modern day equivalents to iD and Face (both of those still going of course, as print entities - and bigger than ever in a literal sense - each issue is a monstrous paving stone of glossy fashion spreads, adverts, something you could injure yourself with if you picked it up without bending your knees properly, or injure someone else with, if wielded as weapon.) 

I was staggered by how many of these style magazines there were - piled up everywhere, not an inch of space in this hipster newsagent I guess. From all over the world, with Steve McQueen-esque ugly-as-beauty images on the front. 

Rather like with art books, I wondered what the financial and production logistics are when doing a magazine like this  - quality paper stock, full gloss ultra-vivid images.  The bottom line. 

Do all the photographers and models and make-up and styling people just work for free in the hope of furthering their careers? 

Advertising must bring in some money, from fashion and beauty products and trendy shit. But the cost of doing something so luxurious looking and feeling, and in presumably quite small print runs, must be enormous. And then the physical cost of distributing something so bulky. The shops must take a hefty mark-up given the amount of sheer volume each issue takes up.

Also rather like with art books, I wondered who actually buys these things,... They seemed to be retailing anywhere from $20 to $40 bucks each.  I have a mental block with paying that for a magazine. 

So I guess very rich people, or cutting edge fashion obsessives (same difference?).

And they doubtless function less as something to actually read and more like a coffee table book. Something to flick through desultorily or just have sitting there. 

Still mystified by the title of this sports-as-style-microculture magazine

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Paul Oldfield fires a salvo at The Face on the occasion of its 100th isssue.

And also analyses Neville Brody's work.

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Wandering around NYC I was amazed how saturated everywhere was with fashion advertising. I mean, yes it's always been there, but it was really kind of total in places like SoHo. Enormous, glossy images. Everything hyper-real and supersaturated. Often on LED screens rather than just posters. 

Was also startled by the fashionization of Dr. Martens

I remember in the 1980s having to going to a rather poky, plain shop next to Camden tube station to get DMs.  The kind of place that would do shoe repairs and cut keys as well as sell shoes. (Actually I might be imagining that aspect but it certainly had nothing fashion boutiquey about it). 

DMs were "cool" through the skin and punk connection, but they still had some kind of residual currency as practical footwear, the kind of thing someone who worked in a factory or on a building site might wear for protection against things falling on the foot. 

I expect this chic-ification has been going on for a while and I hadn't noticed. 

Our kid asked for a pair of DMs some years ago and only wore them once - I was furious. They cost about $130. 

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"the treacherous Elms"

The Way We Bore

Carlyle had this type figured a century plus earlier

"First, touching Dandies, let us consider, with some scientific strictness, what a Dandy specially is. A Dandy is a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that as others dress to live, he lives to dress. The all-importance of Clothes, which a German Professor, of unequalled learning and acumen, writes his enormous Volume to demonstrate, has sprung up in the intellect of the Dandy without effort, like an instinct of genius; he is inspired with Cloth, a Poet of Cloth. What Teufelsdröckh would call a 'Divine Idea of Cloth' is born with him; and this, like other such Ideas, will express itself outwardly, or wring his heart asunder with unutterable throes."

Deaf Leper

I have a little riff on Def Leppard as glam fans and glam epigones in S+A's aftershocks section, mainly based on my great love of "Pour Some Sugar On Me".

Somehow I completely missed this video off Hysteria - "Rocket"

 

The whole thing is a citational fiesta of glam and glitter references - including images of Gary Glitter, Freddie Mercury, Bowie, Slade, The Sweet.... 

On the array of TV sets scattered around the sound stage, covers and features from the UK music press of that time are flashed up - some images I recognise from my own research archive of yellowing Melody Makers and NMEs of that time

And then there's the lyrics, which contain interpolations of titles like "satellite of love" and  "jean genie"

It's as pomo referential as... well, The Jesus and Mary Chain, actually.

Or The Cult circa "Love Removal Machine" 

Something in the air in those mid-to-late Eighties

But then again, Marc Bolan and Bowie and Roxy liked to quote riffs and interpolate lyrics from 1950s and early 60s songs....  rock 'n' roll and blues usually in Bolan's case...  The Sweet and Bowie recycled the same riff (Nashville Teens? almost certainly sourced in something American) in "Blockbuster" and "The Jean Genie" at the exact same time, their rip-offs were jostling with each other in the higher reaches of the pop charts (The Sweet won the battle)

So maybe it isn't postmodern at all, it's just the magpie-eyed way pop works

And talking of repetition - I just realised that seven years ago I did a similar post on "Rockit", the start of which make some of the same points above!

Self-kleptomania, aka Ever Decreasing Circles.

Also Ever Deteriorating Memory.

Here's the remainder of it: 

Beyond the overblown artifice and concocted excess of their sound - those shrill breath-blasts of  oddly centreless vocals, the puff-pastry layering of guitar overdubs  - another glammy thing about Leppard is a self-reflexive aspect. Not so much songs about being a rock star (although I daresay there's some, I haven't investigated that thoroughly to be honest). But more like a rocking-for-the-sake of rocking element.  (Admittedly that's quite a metal thing too).

By the next album Adrenalize and lead single "Let's Get Rocked" , this thing of announcing their intention to rock the listener, of declaring that they're in the business of rocking - it was starting to feel a little threadbare.

The cartoon teenage boy is such a revolting creation - imagine having that as your avatar

You sense that the pure meta of The Darkness, and Andrew W.K., are not that far off.

"Party Hard" has that Leppard-Lange millefeuille sound but achieved as much through stacked vocals as stacked guitars. "Hard" yet insubstantial.

Much later on - 2006 -  Def Leppard  explicitly return to the glam era with this really rather decent cover of Essex's "Rock On" (again, rock-about-rock).

Oh, well I never noticed that this was off an album - Yeah! - of cover tributes to favorite Leppard songs that with a few exceptions are all from the early Seventies - and that include such glam classics as  "20th Century Boy", "Hell Raiser",  "Street Life", "Drive-In Saturday", and "The Golden Age of Rock 'n' Roll", as well as the stompy proto-glitter John Kongos hit "He's Gonna Step on You Again."

Yeah!'s CD booklet has photos of Leppard each in a pose that recreates an iconic cover image from the glam-aligned early 70s: Rick Savage is Freddie Mercury from the album Queen II,
Vivian Campbell does Bolan off of T. Rex's Electric Warrior, Joe Elliott pretends to be Bowie from the back cover of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Rick Allen does Lou Reed off of Transformer, and Phil Collen poses ghastly a la Iggy on the front of Raw Power.

They also did one with the whole band imitating a Roxy inner gatefold

Oh, looky here - a recent thing in Rolling Stone where Joe Elliott talks about his favorite glam artists

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Flashback over... 

Now what made me think of "Rocket" was this appreciation of Hysteria by Pitchfork's Ian Cohen for their Sunday Review reappraisal series

Disappointed to learn that Mutt Lange did not record each chord individually and then retune the instrument because of the infinitesmal drift out of tune caused by each strike of the plectrum!

That is a myth - but it seems he did record one specific chord string by separate string to get an absolutely crystal clear sound on each, that he then recombined on tape

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Despite Wiki-Fear and Wiki-Fizzle (one day I'll write that post), Wikipedia really is one of the great boons of the Internet era -  how else would I be able to find all these wonderful little snippets about  Mutt Lange, eh?  

In 1978, Lange wrote and produced Ipswich Town's FA Cup Final single "Ipswich Get That Goal", his connection with the club due to their South Africa-born player Colin Viljoen. (MUTT'S FROM SOUTH AFRICA, YOU SEE]

Beginning production work in 1976, his first major hits came in October 1978 with the UK No. 1 single "Rat Trap" for the Boomtown Rats, followed in July 1979 with AC/DC's hard rock album Highway to Hell (No. 8 UK, No. 17 US). He produced a total of five albums for UK band City Boy from 1976 to 1979.

He produced two more albums with AC/DC, including Back in Black (1980) which is, as of 2019, the second-best-selling album of all time.  [IS IT REALLY? I DO NOT THINK IT CAN BE]

After hearing Shania Twain's music, he got in touch with her and they spent many hours on the phone. They finally met six months after the initial contact and were married on 28 December 1993. Lange is a teetotaler and, as a result, they had non-alcoholic champagne at their wedding... [WHAT A SPOILSPORT! FINE IF MUTT DOESN'T WANT TO DRINK PROPER CHAMPAGNE, BUT WHY DENY IT TO YOUR GUESTS AND PALM THEM OFF WITH THE WRONG-TASTING BUZZ-LESS STUFF?]

On 15 May 2008, a spokesman for his employer Mercury Nashville announced that Twain and Lange were separating, after Lange had an affair with Twain's then-best friend and secretary Marie-Anne Thiébaud, with whom he reportedly continued the relationship and moved to Switzerland. Lange and Twain divorced in June 2010. On 1 January 2011, Twain married Frédéric Thiébaud, the former husband of Marie-Anne.... [I WANNA KNOW MORE! SURELY THEY ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE THESE SECRETS TO THE GRAVE WITH THEM...]

Lange is a strict vegetarian and a follower of the egalitarian teachings of Sant Mat. [????] He has not given an interview for decades and prefers to live a secluded life, primarily in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland....

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That said, there is no explanation of how he got his off-putting nickname Mutt

Amazing Grace

 

Grace Jones on the Pee Wee Herman Christmas Special from 1988

Jones clip via the fascinating, poignant HBO documentary on Pee Wee Herman, which shows how much he came out of the whole Andy Warhol / Theatre of the Ridiculous / Angels of Light / John Waters lineage

A fellow traveler with Club 52, B-52s, Klaus Nomi (some image cross over there), Devo et al

An ancestor (in his collecting of kooky Americana) of World of Wonder  

Paul Reubens was also an alumnus of Cal Arts, doing performance art and weird films and such... a trip to see shaky old super-8 footage of things performed in the corridors and halls that are now very familiar to me 

The Grace Jones appearance is almost like this

filtered through this 

Until the doc I never even heard of this big bump in the upward trajectory of his career 

For reasons best known to himself he wanted to have the longest kiss in cinema history

pro-theatricality in pop (Act present Showtime)

 

Me on Act and ZTT in New Statesman

The full epic version

"The song is taken from the Leer-Brücken musical 'Name Dropping (songs from beyond the me-decade)'"

"This is the age of entertaining"

Minelli-laced version

The Naked Civil mix hahaha 

(Quentin on being cold and splendid - crisp to the eye)

Champagne dreams, caviar wishes

And watch them grow from rags to riches

Money to burn, money to give away

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

And look and them who can blame us

Lessons in the subject of decay

Come tomorrow, the dream might blow away

Guilt and sorrow, the price you have to pay

Snobbery and decay

Snobbery and decay

You’ve got yours, I’ve got mine

Obsession, just like Calvin Klein

Fantasy, ecstasy, designer dream, obscenity

Snobbery and decay

Snobbery and decay

Nothing to do, nothing to pay

Nothing but snobbery and decay

Land of the free

How can you tell?

The bigger they come the harder they sell

Here’s to you

Here’s to me

A future aristocracy

Property, poverty

An unstable economy

And decay

And decay

Snobbery and decay

Snobbery and decay

I am the repertoire

Snobbery and decay

The CD single version - nice visual pun there

The album Laughter, Tears and Rage wasn't on a par with the single, sadly.

Funny...

Leer at his best - six years earlier

So many "Snobbery" mixes

A mix for Stephanie Beacham (as in Dynasty)

"Strong Poison", even

Now this is glamorous

Fassbinder-fanboy directing?

"Duel" / "Jewel" the only time Propaganda really swayed me

A beautiful melody, written to suit Claudia's voice, no strain, and the product is, well, cut-glass

"Duel / Jewel" run on as on the album A Secret Wish

Cut Rough / Rough Cut - is there a difference?

The other one was originally meant to be the singer but Trevor Horn insisted Claudia do it as the other one was not up to the job

Eye to eye, stand winners and losers

Hurt by envy, cut by greed

Face to face with their own disillusion

The scars of old romances still on their cheeks

And when blow by blow

The passion dies sweet little death

Just have been lies, some memories of gone by time

Would still recall the lies

The first cut won't hurt at all

The second only makes you wonder

The third will have you on your knees

You start bleeding I start screaming

It's too late the decision is made by fate

Time to prove what forever should last

Whose feelings are so true as to stand the test?

Whose demands are so strong as to parry all attempts?

And when blow by blow

The passion dies sweet little death

Just have been lies, some memories of gone by time

Would still recall the lies

The first cut won't hurt at all

The second only makes you wonder

The third will have you on your knees

You start bleeding I start screaming

S+M bondage Skin 2 fetish wear and all sortsa kink were kind of hip in the early 80s...  that sort of pomo postfeminist moment

The glassy yet brutal sound and crashy drums seems to anticipate Jam City Classical Curves and SOPHIE "Faceshopping"

Glitter shards to cut your face to ribbons 

Classical Curves was “a record about being repulsed and fascinated by the glossy surfaces of a certain 'high-end', hyper-capitalist consumer society” 

e.g. “Her” with its robo chant and sounds like a battery of camera flashes  "Work work work flash / Work work camera flash work / Work camera flash / Work work work flash". Poses being struck as blows struck to the eye...

Obliquely inspired by ballroom and vogueing I should imagine

Back to Propaganda...

Mr Brücken has a go at remixing

I should imagine it was Morley's idea to cover Josef K's "Sorry for Laughing", direct some money towards one of his favorite writers, Paul Haig

The Unapologetic Mix, haha

Everyone involved should apologize for that version 

A live version

Later career is the definition of Wiki Fizzle (trust me, don't look)

but...

I was oh so prepared for this to be terrible but it's actually rather good 

Claudia's got good taste - this is my favorite song by The Band and it's quite a sensitive treatment

The Band are about as anti-glam as it gets it, funnily enough.