anti-theatricality and politics: the Showdown (updated Nov 9)

"At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party. They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired. 

"We’re thinking of the scene from “A Face in the Crowd,” in which the charming and garrulous Lonesome Rhodes, a great network television star, signs off from his weekly show. The credits roll, and we see him talking in the background, silently. But he’s not sharing folksy wisdom, he’s telling an actor what he thinks of the audience. The sound is secretly switched on in the control room, and America hears it: “Good night, you stupid idiots. Good night, you miserable slobs.” 

"I suspect that kind of moment is coming. Another betrayal, another reason for Republicans to stand up straight and recover themselves."

- Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal

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“Trump has brought a Chernobyl level disaster to the Republican Party tonight,” Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant who advised former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s primary campaign in 2016, posted on X. “Tonight the Trump Show was finally cancelled. #BoxOfficePoison.”

- Atlantic

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"This season of Saturday Night Live has gotten a lot of mileage from inaction. Week after week, sketch after sketch—as James Austin Johnson’s version of Donald Trump interrupts whatever comedy might be at play—the show’s performers have done more than merely step aside as the president storms the stage. Instead, his presence leaves them comically petrified: frozen, at pretty much the moment of his entrance, unable to do anything else.

"Like much of what plays out on live TV, the gag works because, so often, it doesn’t quite; half the fun is watching stars such as Kenan Thompson, temporarily transformed into audience members, trying to stifle their laughter while Johnson Trumps it up. The freeze-frame device also works, though, because of its upstager in chief. Few jokes capture the president’s scene-stealing capabilities better than ones that find Trump like a modern-day Medusa, turning everyone in his path to stone. There’s a fine line, however, between running joke and crutch—and it’s one that SNL has frequently crossed. Only five episodes into the current season, the freeze-frame bits have become notably tepid.

"But on last night’s episode, the freeze frames were not just the point; they made a point. The cold open was an inevitable recap of the midterm elections: the blue wave that, on Tuesday, swept the country. The sketch’s action began in expected fashion, with the Senate Democrats Hakeem Jeffries (played by Thompson) and Chuck Schumer (Sarah Sherman) celebrating, and analyzing, their party’s landslide victory. How did they do it? What was the source of their historic rebuke to Trump, the MAGA coalition, and the political status quo?

"“Me!” said Trump, storming the stage. Johnson’s version of the president blathered (about Millennial cringe, about the long-gone sitcom New Girl, about men’s backsides); Colin Jost, as Pete Hegseth, at one point smarmed onto the scene. All along, Jeffries and Schumer were relegated to the background, present but vacant: two power players rendered awkwardly inert.

"The staging made sense—because the upstaging made sense. The sketch, dominated by Trump even in his moment of loss, hinted at Democrats’ famed ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It also visualized the fickle workings of American party politics. Power, particularly in this moment, is largely a function of attention: a matter of which politician can occupy the forefront of voters’ screens and minds. The sketch, as each character jockeyed for eyeballs, managed to turn that reality into comedy. American politics is a battle of attrition; last night, on SNL, the (power) struggle was real.

"The episode’s host made that opening salvo especially apt. The comedian Druski has made a specialty out of skewering the politics of race (which he brought with him to the show, including to a sketch co-starring Andrew Dismukes as a fictional Atlantic reporter) and rose to fame posting comedy videos to Instagram. He is the first digital creator to host SNL. His episode’s cold open fittingly, and elegantly, mimicked the workings of the phone screen and the brute dynamics of the digital economy. Images, vying for primacy: That’s how information works now. It’s how culture works now. It’s how politics work now. Candidates battle not just to convince voters that their way is the right way but also to simply be there, crowding out the other contenders—undeniable, unavoidable, and ever in the foreground.

"The sketch, in recognition of that, anointed a new scene stealer: Senator-Elect James Talarico, whose victory this week helped turn Texas blue. Operating in another long-standing SNL tradition, Talarico made a surprise cameo, closing out the sketch by upstaging everyone else, literally and symbolically. The lame-duck executive, the leaders of the legislative establishment—for the first time in a long time, they were relegated to the background as the young politician talked about a new day in American politics.

"“It’s clear people want something new,” Talarico announced, grinning, as SNL’s live audience whooped in approval. But true change—real transformation—is more easily scripted than done. And before Talarico shouted the customary “Live from New York” tagline, he ended his appearance with a joke that, ironically but perhaps appropriately, upstaged his own message. Americans want something different, he said, before getting to the punch line: “I’m talking, of course, about SNL’s cold opens.”

- Megan Garber, The Atlantic

Garber is the author of Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves Into a State of Emergency - an absolute bonanza of theatrical and anti-theatrical tropes. 

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"That Trump is something like the apotheosis of the dysfunction of the American system does not mean that he is the end of the story. He may well be the beginning of something much worse. Our job is to make him a blip in the history of American democracy and not the opening act of its demise.

- Jamelle Bouie

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Writing early in Trump’s first term, Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan economist and journalist, recalled how gleefully Hugo Chávez’s opponents denigrated the regime’s partisans, and he cautioned Trump’s opponents against doing the same.... “Don’t feed polarization, disarm it,” Rondón urged. “This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind.”

"Trump has given us theater for a decade now — a theater of cruelty, grievance, corruption and vulgarity — and no one should minimize the real injuries that people have suffered by his hand. Rapprochement does not require amnesia, and right now there is so much to investigate and legislate, so many to hold to account."

- Carlos Lozada, NY Times

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"At the end of the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” the aging and mentally ill silent film star Norma Desmond imagines that she is acting in a movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille, when in fact she’s being arrested for murder. “I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio, making a picture again,” she says to the police and reporters who are there to witness her demise. “You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else. Just us. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out there in the dark. Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”

Donald Trump may spend his final years enacting his own version of Norma Desmond’s delusion. He’ll stand in front of smaller and smaller gatherings at Mar-a-Lago or one of his golf clubs and address the dwindling group of admirers as though he was at one of those blazing 2016 rallies. He’ll drone on for an hour or two about nothing and everything, lapping up the forced laughter of the group at another lame joke, imagining that the height of his power and glory is right now, not in a past receding rapidly as he gets closer and closer to death.

That’s still in the future. Yet every Trump rally that takes place today is like a sad echo of the ones that really made a difference a decade ago. There will be more, but they will never be what they were. And even Trump himself knows it."

- Public Notice piece on the dwindlng of Trump's rallies but how he'll keep on doing them.

Amazingly the writer doesn't seem aware - nor any of the many commenters - that Sunset Boulevard is Trump's favorite movie, something he rewatches obsessively, and that he is particularly fond of that final "I'm ready for my closeup" scene. 

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Muskism and Main Character Energy

(Ezra Klein in conversation with Elon analyst  Quinn Slobodian) 

"One of the things we describe in the book is the way that being a minority privileged population, racially marked in South Africa, that drifted, through everyday life and one’s whole life course, in a way, past faceless colored masses of the African population helps to reinforce in very obvious ways a sense of the nonplayer characters and the playing characters.

- Slobodian on where Musk's worldview and sense of reality comes from 

There’s something that he says a lot. I was there in 2016 at the ReCode conference — I was, actually, I think, one of the first people to write about this — when he was talking about how he believed it was very likely we lived in a computer simulation.

"This is a sort of idea that Nick Bostrom, that philosopher you mentioned, is very associated with. But he has kept saying it, actually in somewhat stronger terms. I want to play this clip. This is Elon Musk on Walter Isaacson’s show:

Archival clip of Musk: I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist, and they’re both leaders in their field. I asked: What do you think the probabilities are that we’re in a simulation?

The physicist said zero percent, and the computer scientist said 100 percent simultaneously. So I guess maybe I should go 50 percent. I don’t know. There are odd things that happen in this simulation, especially if you’re me.

Think about it: If you’re me, should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the moon and Mars? That doesn’t seem real.

The simulation theory is that, if you just imagine an advanced society would create lots of simulations, the way we make lots of video games, you just shouldn’t assume that we are living in the base reality.

That’s sort of the argument in a nutshell. But he goes further, and I get, in a psychological way, why. I’ve heard him say this now repeatedly that what really seems unlikely is to be Elon Musk — to be building starships and influencing global politics and having 250 million X followers, or whatever it is, and being the first trillionaire.

The mixture of a life that is so unlikely and also not grounded in some other ontology — not some religion or some other way of imagining the world — plus an attraction to the simulation hypothesis and, of course, to be a lifelong gamer.

I just think that for a person with as much power as he has, to have that kind of psychology to suspect that this is a game where your role in it is making big moves — I don’t really know how to describe that situation. But it is a distinctive one that we all now have a lot of exposure to.

There are a couple of varieties of the simulation theory, too. One is we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilization’s computer video game.

But the other is that most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually player characters. And it seems like that’s the one that orients him most.

....There’s this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible if you embrace this incredibly nihilistic reaffirmation of your megalomania. And the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion, because it is not true, and he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it’s not true.

If he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking, then he will never be required to be divested of that.

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"The Abracadabra Economy"

Bret Stephens: ... I think there is a deeper class divide — and a more legitimate resentment — in America. It’s between the real economy and the abracadabra economy. The abracadabra economy is wealth extracted from ether: cryptocurrency, for instance, but also a lot of modern finance and tech. 

There’s a big difference between this kind of wealth and the kind whose origin and value is easy to ascertain: Microsoft’s software, for instance, or SpaceX’s rockets. This is why, despite all my personal and political objections to him, I can at least understand Elon Musk as a guy who earned his riches.

Frank Bruni: Earned riches that immense? I disagree, in that there’s a way in which capital begets more capital begets more capital until the sums are utterly divorced from the substance. That’s its own abracadabra.

from "Is This The Final Unraveling?", New York Times

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Stragglers from recent months:

"Last Tuesday, President Trump demonstrated for the few who remain in doubt that his mind is trapped in a fictional world where he is the heroic savior of the nation, if not all mankind. That day, Trump honored the men and women who braved death or died on Sept. 11, 2001, but most of all he honored himself, portraying himself as willing to lose life or limb during the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Speaking at a Tunnel to Towers Foundation event honoring police officers, firefighters and other first responders, Trump recounted his memory of 9/11 and the days that followed. It has to be read in full to be truly reckoned with.

I want to just thank my people. I took a lot —— I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw.

Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.

And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here!” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.

... He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near ground zero that day....

In a Sept. 9 article, “60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality,” my colleague in the newsroom Peter Baker provided crucial insight into Trump’s macho, almost fantastical, notion of himself.

Over Labor Day weekend, Baker wrote,

President Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit.

There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”

The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.

On Thursday, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump pushed his narcissistic fable-making to the breaking point, telling the gathering:

Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3.

Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, pointed out in an email that Trump’s distortions of reality have an impact on much more than beliefs in his claims about what he was doing on Sept. 11:

Trump’s loose relationship with reality extends to the issues that define our life, like inflation, public health, the war with Iran, our alliances or whether our elections are valid. For every seemingly harmless story where he inserts himself into the tableaux of history, there is a torrent of dark conspiracies that shape how we are governed.

Every time he insults another country or world leader, it feels less like a deliberate diplomatic strategy as his followers insist, and more like an indicator of the absence of such work, marking the indifference of a social media addict craving his next dopamine hit.

Thomas B. Edsall, "Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality, Sept. 15, 2026

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The big show

The most riveting theatrical performances in New York aren’t on Broadway right now. They’re happening in Turtle Bay, in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, where hundreds of leaders of sovereign nations have gathered this week to debate (and maybe even address?) global issues.

It’s been super weird. Just seven months ago, Masoud Pezeshkian was running Iran from an underground bunker, trying to stay alive as American and Israeli missiles rained down. Now he’s moving around New York under the protection of the Secret Service. Yesterday, he accused the United States and Israel of “cowardly" attacks on his country, a day after President Trump mulled from the same lectern about whether to make a deal with Iran or “annihilate” the nation. It was the first time in the U.N.’s 81-year history that a leader whose country is at war with the United States had ever addressed the Assembly.

Here was President Javier Milei of Argentina whaling on the U.N. itself, a bunch of “fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” Nice to see you, sir. There was U Kyaw Moe Tun of Myanmar, the lonely representative of a government overthrown by a military putsch in 2021. The U.N. still recognizes his ambassadorship, but his own country doesn’t. He didn’t speak.

Dramatis personae

Let’s look at some of the main players in the show.

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran: Pezeshkian held up pictures of people killed by American and Israeli airstrikes and defiantly vowed that Iran could “not be made to surrender.” He said the country would never accept limits on a nuclear program meant only for peaceful purposes, though he allowed that Iran was “ready for dialogue.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine: He’s in a tough spot. His country is low on munitions that can intercept Russian drones and missiles, and so is the United States. He warned the General Assembly that without aid, his country might not survive — and that Russia’s “ridiculous and never-ending” war could spread beyond Ukraine. He predicted a harsh winter but pledged, “We will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia, too.”

Delcy Rodríguez, interim president of Venezuela: She’s in a tough spot, too. Eight months ago, U.S. Special Forces showed up in Caracas to snatch her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and lock him up in a Brooklyn jail. Then, the United States claimed a significant portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves. She spoke last night from the cultural capital of the nation that essentially appointed her, vowing to oversee elections and an “orderly legal transition” after years of authoritarian rule by her party.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada: Over the past year, Carney has emerged as the most prominent global leader to take on Trump. At a news conference at the U.N., he spoke about how nations can protect their mutual interests after a “rupture” in the world order caused by the United States and China. And in a discussion with The Times, he described in close detail how he is systematically reducing Canada’s reliance on the United States.

Offstage

A number of leaders are absent from the General Assembly. One is Xi Jinping of China, who arrived in Washington last night to see Trump. Their meeting today is expected to overshadow any speeches at the Assembly......

Sam Sifton, The New York Times 

Applause without ears

Came across this review of Shock and Awe online and was reading it, nodding along and thinking 'this is rather perceptive'  and then realised it was AI generated!

Still more acute than most of the actual reviews by living-breathing consciousnesses.

It's from a site called RetroForge about which I will be saying more at the other place in due course.

Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-First Century

Glam's artificiality is not an escape from meaning; it is the argument

Simon Reynolds begins Shock and Awe from a premise that immediately makes glam more interesting than the usual montage of platform boots, glitter and Top of the Pops. By the end of the 1960s, rock culture had invested heavily in authenticity: serious musicians were expected to be sincere, connected to roots, politically alert and suspicious of overt show-business construction. Glam arrived wearing makeup and effectively asked why everybody was pretending the stage was natural. Marc Bolan glittered, Bowie created Ziggy Stardust, Roxy Music looked like several incompatible art movements forced into one photograph, Alice Cooper turned horror into theatre and the New York Dolls exaggerated rock-star posing until the pose became the content.

Reynolds's 2016 cultural history argues that spectacle, artificiality and deliberate self-construction were not distractions from serious artistic meaning. They were forms of meaning themselves. That makes Shock and Awe an anchor text for RetroForge because glam becomes a network linking music, fashion, photography, gender, celebrity, nostalgia, technology and the politics of authenticity.

Glam arrives after the counterculture has become its own uniform

Timing is central to the book's argument. The idealism associated with the late 1960s had fractured under political violence, economic uncertainty and cultural exhaustion, while the visual language of supposedly authentic rock had hardened into convention. Long hair, denim, roots and seriousness could function as another uniform even while pretending to reject fashion.

Glam's response was not simply to become frivolous. It exposed the machinery. Why pretend that fame is accidental, the stage is natural or clothing has no meaning? Reynolds frames the movement as a reaction against one set of authenticity rules by exaggerating construction until nobody could miss it. That also creates an illuminating contrast with progressive rock, which was becoming grandiose during the same years through long-form composition, virtuosity and technology. Both rejected ordinary pop scale; one built suites, the other built creatures.

Marc Bolan establishes the flash point before Bowie becomes the grand theory

T. Rex occupy a foundational place because Marc Bolan's transformation from the acoustic psychedelic world of Tyrannosaurus Rex into concise, electric pop helped ignite British glam before Bowie became its most intellectually famous symbol. "Ride a White Swan", "Hot Love" and "Get It On" established a combination of simplicity, sensuality and visual sparkle that changed the atmosphere of the charts.

Bolan's later historical position can be distorted by the sheer length and variety of Bowie's career. Reynolds restores the sequence. Bowie did not descend into an empty field carrying glam fully formed; he entered a culture already being reshaped by Bolan and other performers. That matters because genre history becomes more accurate when influence is allowed to spread across scenes rather than being assigned retrospectively to the person whose later reputation became largest.

Bowie turns celebrity into science fiction

Ziggy Stardust becomes one of the book's central case studies because Bowie made celebrity itself part of the performance. The alien rock star is both character and machine: audiences understand that Ziggy is constructed, yet that knowledge intensifies rather than destroys the effect. Clothing, hair, photography, interviews, sexual ambiguity and stage gestures all become part of the artwork.

This is where glam breaks decisively with the idea that a performer must reveal an authentic inner self in order to move an audience. A consciously false persona can create genuine emotional and cultural consequences. Moonage Daydream is the ideal companion because Bowie and Mick Rock provide the first-person and visual evidence from inside the Ziggy system, while Reynolds explains why that system mattered beyond one artist.

Roxy Music allows nostalgia and futurism to share one sleeve

Roxy Music complicate any simple definition of glam as futurism. Bryan Ferry's persona draws on old Hollywood glamour, torch songs and highly stylised romance, while Brian Eno brings synthesizers, processing and a visibly futuristic presence. Album sleeves look backward through fashion imagery as the music repeatedly sounds like the future malfunctioning.

That collision makes Roxy particularly useful to Reynolds because it demonstrates how knowingly reused history can itself become modern. Glam does not need to reject the past; it can display the act of borrowing so conspicuously that nostalgia becomes part of the artifice. This idea also links Shock and Awe to broader questions in Reynolds's writing about popular culture continually recycling its own archive. The past is not outside glam's future. It is one of the raw materials from which the future is staged.

Britain and America glitter differently

British glam and American glam overlap without forming one identical scene. Alice Cooper's theatrical horror, Lou Reed's post-Velvet Underground solo career and the New York Dolls belong to cultural environments distinct from Slade, Sweet, T. Rex or the British chart machinery surrounding them. The American term "glitter rock" carries its own associations, and Reynolds moves between the territories without pretending that a later compilation track list proves everybody shared the same audience or intention.

This is an important corrective to retrospective genre neatness. Once famous songs sit side by side on playlists, scenes can look more unified than they felt in real time. Glam works better as a family resemblance involving spectacle, constructed identity and exaggerated style than as a rigid organisation with membership rules.

Gender, sexuality and the permissions created by performance

Glam's most durable cultural effects include what it allowed mainstream youth audiences to see. Men appeared in makeup, theatrical clothing and deliberately ambiguous personas, while Bowie's public statements about sexuality became culturally explosive even though his own descriptions of identity changed across later years. Roxy Music, the New York Dolls and other glam performers likewise unsettled conventional masculine codes through costume, pose and performance.

Reynolds treats that instability as central rather than decorative. A modern RetroForge page should nevertheless resist converting glam into a simple story of linear liberation. The scene could expand possibilities for gender presentation and sexual ambiguity while retaining conventional sexism elsewhere. Cultural permission is uneven. That contradiction makes the history more revealing than a celebratory narrative in which glitter automatically equals progress.

Teen pop, art school and the uncomfortable whole scene

One of Reynolds's strengths is refusing to define glam only through artists already accepted by serious critics. Slade, Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter and other chart figures belong to the history alongside Bowie and Roxy Music. That inclusiveness creates necessary discomfort. Gary Glitter's later criminal convictions make his place in glam history morally difficult, but removing him from the period would falsify the scale of his historical presence.

The records and visual culture existed and influenced the scene; later criminal acts are also documented realities. Both can be stated without sensationalism or nostalgic sanitisation. Genre history is valuable partly because it forces the archive to contain figures a modern curator might rather exclude.

Queen, Sparks and the movement after the first explosion

As the first glam wave evolves, Reynolds follows artists such as Queen, Sparks and Be-Bop Deluxe who carry theatricality into more elaborate forms. Queen combine hard rock, camp, vocal architecture and spectacular performance; Sparks bring art-pop wit and an unmistakable visual identity; Be-Bop Deluxe opens another route through sophisticated guitar-driven art rock.

These artists demonstrate why glam's legacy cannot be reduced to one sound ending when Bowie retires Ziggy. Techniques migrate. The use of image as artistic language, the permission to perform identity and the delight in exaggeration survive after the original chart configuration changes. By this point glam begins to look less like a fixed genre and more like a repertoire of cultural strategies.

Bowie after glam tests the boundary of the genre

Reynolds follows Bowie's later transformations because they expose the difference between glam as sound and glam as method. The Thin White Duke removes much of Ziggy's colour while intensifying theatrical identity, and the later Berlin work with Eno and Visconti moves decisively toward electronic and experimental language influenced by German music. Calling Low a glam album would stretch the genre beyond usefulness, yet the permission to construct and discard personas remains recognisably connected to the earlier breakthrough.

That is how a legacy history differs from a scene chronology. Influence survives after surface traits disappear. The glitter can vanish while the deeper assumption, that identity itself can be designed as part of popular art, continues travelling.

Aftershocks across punk, pop and the twenty-first century

The final sections trace glam's legacy through punk, post-punk, New Romanticism, goth, hair metal, Prince, Madonna, Suede, Marilyn Manson, electroclash, Lady Gaga and later pop culture. Not every lineage is equally direct, and the book becomes most stimulating when those connections invite argument rather than obedience.

Reynolds is tracing echoes: theatrical self-invention, gender play, decadence, retro-futurism, exaggerated celebrity and the deliberate use of image as artistic language. A later artist does not need to sound like T. Rex in order to inherit something from glam. That broader argument is the reason the book remains relevant beyond readers assembling a 1970s record collection.

What it does especially well

Context is the major strength. Reynolds treats clothing, gender, fandom, politics, photography, performance and celebrity as part of music history rather than secondary decoration. The scale also lets critically unfashionable or morally difficult figures coexist with Bowie, Bolan and Roxy Music, giving the reader an actual scene rather than a curated hall of approved geniuses.

The legacy section is equally important because it prevents glam becoming a sealed museum period. Reynolds is willing to argue about influence instead of merely cataloguing records, and that argumentative energy makes the book more useful for RetroForge than a neutral chronology would be. It provides concepts the site can use across artist, album-art, fashion, photography, punk and post-punk pages.

Limitations

The book is enormous enough to become exhausting, especially for readers whose real interest is one artist rather than the entire cultural system. Reynolds's framework is openly interpretive, meaning readers may disagree strongly about which later artists count as glam descendants or about how particular scenes should be weighted. The treatment of gender and sexuality also enters territory where contemporary scholarship and lived perspectives can add nuance beyond any single broad cultural history.

Those limitations should remain visible because Shock and Awe is criticism, not a neutral database. Its purpose is to produce a large argument about glam and its afterlife. Disagreement is not evidence that the argument should be removed; it is part of how the book earns continued use.

Who should read it?

Anyone who wants to understand why glam mattered, rather than merely identify the records, should start here. It becomes especially useful after a Bowie, Roxy Music or T. Rex article because it turns individual style into cultural history. For RetroForge, this is an anchor book with natural routes into fashion, album art, photography, synthesizers, punk, post-punk and the politics of authenticity.

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The first clue that it wasn't a human doing it was the references to "Moonage Daydream" which I don't recall even mentioning once in the book. Here and there some glam-knowledge derived from other texts appears to have crept in. 

The other clue is that there isn't any real sense of music - of glam as a genre of sound as well as vision, which is something of an obsessive concern of mine in the book. Instead, it's entirely about meanings, things that could be worked via sifting through writing as opposed to direct sensory experience. 

I wonder what it's sourced in, beyond the original text itself? Reviews, Goodreads and Amazon comments, Reddit etc? 

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Perusing some of its other reviews, I paused on the analysis of a glam related text - Re-Make / Re-Model .  Under "Limitations", it notes:

"The book is much more interested in becoming than in career. Readers wanting Avalon, extensive touring history or the later Ferry and Eno trajectories should use David Buckley's The Thrill of It All and David Sheppard's On Some Faraway Beach. Bracewell's cultural connections can also feel overdetermined at times. Influence is illuminating, but an artist is never simply the sum of every idea encountered beforehand, and a dense network of plausible precedents should not be mistaken for proof of direct causation."

That last sentence is pretty darn perceptive! 

I found the decision to end the book before Roxy record any music to be perverse and frustrating, if "original".

Also (similar but not quite the same as RetroForge's point) found the relentless credentialling of Roxy to be both wearying and unconvincing. 

As if  a/ it somehow elevated the band in the scheme of things to have once been taught by or rubbed shoulders with figures who went on to be a "distinguished" professor of art somewhere or other. (Minor figures, for the most part). 

As if b/ the company they kept was really part of their make up, one of its secret ingredients, the X Factor that made them different from everybody else. 

Thing is, I don't remember this critique being voiced anywhere, so I'm wondering where the AI got it from. Could it possibly have worked it out itself?!?!

In which case, what an insightful entity...   And all without every once hearing "2 H.B." or "The Bogus Man"...

RIP Tim Curry

A glam icon obviously for his Frank N Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie much darker and more interesting than I had first imagined and great fun to write about in S+A. (Interviewed Richard O'Brien who said the character was his own secret self.) 

But I also love Tim Curry's turn as Stevie Streeter in the TV music biz satire Rock Follies (something else I managed to squeeze into S+A). 

In particular these scenes where Streeter talks about his stage concept for the song "Street Signs" - a backdrop of urban decay: "filthy, violent, and honest" - and then rehearses the song with garbage underfoot and a chorus of sex workers. 

It's interesting for the way it shows the theatricality that inevitably lurks within any attempt to bring "reality" onto a stage.

But I wonder who it's actually meant to be a parody of? 

Springsteen? 

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band with their "Vambo Rules" graffiti aerosoled onto a backdrop of a fake brickwork like a tenement wall? 

The Heavy Metal Kids? 

Also rock-adjacent - and punk-adjacent - is Curry's memorable role in Times Square as a late-night  radio deejay who helps turn the teen punk she-rebel duo into folk-heroes 

Here's what I wrote about it in this Pitchfork piece on the Best and Worst Punk Movies.

Producer Robert Stigwood thought he’d do for New Wave what his Saturday Night Fever did for disco—which is why the Times Square soundtrack was a double album, crammed with tunes by the likes of XTC and the Ramones. The John Travolta counterpart here is Robin Johnson as Nicky Marotta, a raspy-voiced runaway who takes sheltered posh girl Pamela Pearl (13-year-old Trini Alvarado) for a walk on the wild side. The backdrop is sleaze-soaked midtown Manhattan, those same streets that Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle imagined a real rain sweeping clean. Pamela’s urban developer dad plans to do exactly that. But street life, incarnated in Nicky, fights back, stealing his child and revealing that Real Life exists “outside of society,” as Patti Smith sang it.

A busker, Nicky is herself a punk poet in the Patti / Jim Carroll mode. The story of the rebel duo, who call themselves the Sleez Sisters, enchants late-night radio DJ Johnny LaGuardia (Tim Curry). When Pamela sends a letter denying that she’s been kidnapped but rather “Nicky-napped, happy-napped,” the DJ reads it out over the air and turns them into Bonnie and Clyde-style outlaws at war with “banality… boredom… television… doing it for all us stay-at-homes.” Now a band with songs like “Damn Dog” and “Your Daughter Is One,” the duo inspire a copy-cat movement of girls wearing bandit-style eye makeup. Then they become urban guerrillas throwing TV sets off the top of buildings. Although increasingly implausible, Times Square works as a beguiling modern-day fairytale. A bomb at the time, it became a touchstone for latterday punks like Kathleen Hanna and Manic Street Preachers.

 Complete with an unconvincing American accent, Curry appeared in the Armchair Theatre play Vérité,  not as a rocker but as an underground film maker called Mik. It was written by Howard Schuman, who wrote Rock Follies, and  aired on 23rd October, 1973.  

BBC Archive report on the making of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

He had a role in the curious little film The Shout - which has scenes of John Hurt doing musique concrete - but I can't remember anything about Curry's contribution.

Hair today, gone tomorrow... 

anti-theatricality in politics (the theatre kid trope) (the bling king) (the throne of illusion)

Sometimes you get a bonanza - and so it with this Atlantic piece about the the new right-wing insult-trope of "theatre kid"

"The White House assistant press secretary, Davis Ingle, recently dismissed Senator Jon Ossoff as a “cringeworthy, feminine theatre kid.” The taunt was hardly novel. Theater kid has become a curious little term of abuse on the right. Another Trump White House spokesperson castigated Senator Alex Padilla for pulling an “immature, theater-kid stunt” after he was forcibly removed from a news conference last year for asking then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question. Spencer Pratt recently branded New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani a “theater-kid commie.” Conservative pundits have decried progressives for engineering a “theater-kid-occupied government.”

"The elastic insult is meant to belittle the target as inauthentic, attention-hungry, unserious, and unmanly. In adding feminine, Ingle handily made the subtext text."

But as writer Erik Forrest Jackson shows, the ultimate theatre kid is Trump. 

He draws on an 2004 interview he did for the magazine Show People in which Trump "gushed" about Broadway and in particular musicals. He'd seen Evita six times and was a particular fan of Patti LuPone. Other faves included Chicago, The Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady, and Hello, Dolly!

“I have attended Broadway shows for years. It’s one of the great things about New York.”  

Aged 23, he'd been involved as an associate producer of / investor in Paris Is Out!, "a 1970 comedy about a married couple planning a vacation. The show lasted 96 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Clive Barnes in The New York Times called it “almost totally pitiable,” “trivial and silly,” and “a bad play.” "

Trump said: “Making it on Broadway is no easy feat.. I know what a difficult business it is and that the odds of success aren’t great, so I respect anyone who has managed to create a successful career there.... Wall Street may be tough, but the theater business is tougher.” 

He compared it the manly hard-hat endeavour of the construction industry: “a lot of details, a lot of foundation work”.

Returning to the Republican trope-du-jour, Jackson notes that

 "Ingle’s barb about Ossoff is useful for the way it clarifies the sneer’s intent: to turn expressiveness into weakness, enthusiasm into neediness, performance into fraud. The implication is that stage types and progressive politicians are craven, submissive, and insincere. Yet the actual work of being a theater kid demands a toughness Trump plainly prized.

"Then there is Trump himself. If theater kid means somebody with an instinct for showmanship, then he is an odd figure for the prosecution. Trump has a keen understanding of an entrance, a refrain, a music cue, and, perhaps above all, an audience. “You’re fired” was less a management philosophy than a line reading. Show tunes tend to be Trump’s music of choice at his Mar-a-Lago resort. As president, his compliment of choice is to praise people for looking their part, as if they came from “central casting.” Despite leading a movement that sneers at theater kids, Trump loves putting himself center stage.

"Instead of spending the time to seriously consider intelligence briefings warning that Iran would likely seize the Strait of Hormuz in a war, Trump has preferred to concern himself with showbiz. Take the Kennedy Center—as he certainly did. After replacing trustees with allies, Trump inaugurated his first board meeting as chairman last year by reminiscing about the 1982 opening night of Cats and proposing bringing some of his favorites back to the center, including Hello, Dolly!, Phantom of the Opera, Camelot, and Fiddler on the Roof. Here, at last, was his chance to graduate from theater kid to impresario.

"But, as he told me decades earlier, in the dramatic arts “the guarantee of success is not so solid.” Artists canceled their Kennedy Center appearances. Hamilton withdrew a planned engagement. By the fall of 2025, the organization was selling only 57 percent of its available tickets, down from 93 percent a year earlier.

"Worse still, his revered Patti LuPone responded to this state of affairs by calling him a “buffoon.”"

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"There’s no doubt Trump has taken advantage of something ugly in the American soul: A few years ago, I compared his relationship to the Republican base to that of a burlesque performer who, with one discarded piece of clothing after another, brings out the inner lewdness of an audience."

- Bret Stephens

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Another Atlantic piece tries to explain MAGAworld's ridiculously melodramatic over-reaction to Ossoff's mildly insinuating remark about Natalie + Trump:

"In 2016, Trump found a constituency already primed for grievance, and taught it to want more. His supporters have kept themselves in a state of frenzy ever since. They need to be perpetually outraged, aggrieved, and insulted. MAGA world has become addicted to the feeling. It delivers a jolt of adrenaline, it provides a feeling of social belonging, and it gives people a sharpened sense of purpose. They see themselves as warriors in a drama of their own construction. They view their opponents—Democrats, progressives, critics of Trump—as personifications of evil. Inflicting pain on their enemies feels good, really good, and it feels just."

After exploring the unhealthy to put it mildly relationship of Harp and Trump - the bubble of ego-reinforcing disinfo she has wrapped around the unPresident - writer Peter Wehner, draws an analogy from fiction:

"Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch is about an unnamed dictator, an illiterate who rises to power and brutally takes control of a country. We’re told about “the perfidy within the presidential palace itself” and of “the greed within the adulation and the wily servility among those who flourished under the umbrella of power.”

The “autumn” in the title refers to the corrupt patriarch’s physical and mental decay, his growing paranoia, his psychological isolation, and his inability to form genuine human connections. He surrounds himself with sycophants, creating a false reality, complete with fake news and newspapers, including a single copy of the national daily newspaper—the news rewritten to please him, created only for the dictator. He needs it to maintain his “throne of illusions.”

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Tangentially related to anti-theatricality via spectacle / luxury / kingliness and other things the Puritans didn't approve of 

Reminded me of this pre-Trump book by Peter York

As referenced in this recent piece by Matt Viser

 Let Them Eat Gold: Taxpayers are now financing President Trump’s love of anything gilded.

When you approach the freshly gilded twin statues near the Lincoln Memorial, there is no mistaking that they are gold. Very, very gold. Distractingly gold—or, more precisely, covered in 23.75-karat gold leaf costing $5.1 million. The 19-foot statues, called The Arts of War, were once easy to miss but now look a bit like oversized children’s trophies, especially next to the classical and austere Lincoln Memorial. Seeing them is as if, on the walk between Arlington National Cemetery and the National Mall, you’d suddenly stumbled upon a P. F. Chang’s.

This is how President Trump is approaching his redecoration of Washington: glitzy and gaudy, even if out of place. He has already splashed gold all around the White House, but these statues are the most prominent symbols of Washington’s new gilded age. As the scaffolding around the statues came down this week, marking one of the few completions of a Trump-ordered renovation project, the president giddily posted photos on social media—and tourists, commuters, cyclists, and runners paused to take photos of their own of the capital’s latest can-you-believe-it attraction.

Trump has worn his love of gold like a blinging billboard. Mar-a-Lago’s ballroom is inspired by Versailles, and he has proudly bragged of golden bathrooms, golden airplane-seatbelt buckles, and a gold-infused penthouse suite. The Oval Office now looks like a Middle Eastern bazaar crossed with an opulent Cracker Barrel. Thick, gold frames line the walls; gold vases and ice buckets adorn the fireplace mantle; gold stars form a circle on the ceiling; and gold appliqués fill any gaps. (Trump insists that these are real gold, and not painted flourishes from Home Depot.) Last year, he exempted gold bullion from his reciprocal tariffs, and he named his special visa program for wealthy foreigners the Trump Gold Card. He has taken his personally designed presidential challenge coin (which is golden) and glued it to the center of the Oval Office door, at about eye level. The coasters are gold, the curtains are gold, and guests know to come bearing gifts of gold.

When FIFA President Gianni Infantino awarded Trump the first FIFA Peace Prize, it was a golden orb of a trophy. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook presented the president with a 24-karat-gold base to hold a glass sculpture. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year gave him a golden pager to commemorate an operation in which members of Hezbollah were killed when their pagers detonated. “See,” he said during a meeting with his Cabinet in March while riffing about all of the projects he’d launched in Washington, “I’m a gold person.”

It’s one thing for Trump to have a personal fascination with one of the world’s most expensive metals. It’s another for the president to flaunt it at a time when many Americans are struggling to pay rent, losing their health insurance, and seeing high prices at the gas pump. It may not quite be a “Let them eat cake” moment, but it is one where he seems to be saying: Let them see that I just spent  $5 million in taxpayer funds on golden statues.

Trump for decades has loved gold and marble, liberally sprinkling them about his development projects and his personal spaces. Ivana Trump, his first wife, who was the Trump Organization’s vice president of interior design, encouraged Trump’s gold obsession, according to Regime Change, the recent book by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan that has a golden cover. (Ivana’s love of the color proved lasting: She was buried in a gold casket.) In the 1980s, Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in South Florida and went on to put $7 million worth of gold leaf on the walls, plus gold-plated sinks near the ballroom. He hired the designer Henry Conversano, known for infusing golden flourishes in the Golden Nugget casinos, to remodel his Trump Tower penthouse apartment and work at his Atlantic City casino. In 1988, he purchased from the sultan of Brunei a yacht that was bathed in gold—couches, sinks, ceilings—and named it the Trump Princess.

“It was so gaudy. Almost shockingly gaudy. And he loved it. He thought it was the most beautiful thing out there,” Jack O’Donnell, one of Trump’s former casino executives who helped him host parties on the boat, told me. He speculated that Trump may have been inspired by the yacht when he remade the Lincoln Bathroom almost entirely in gold and marble.

Years later, in 2008, when Trump built a hotel in Las Vegas, the 406,000-square-foot facade was coated in a layer of gold-infused glass. More recently, when a group of Trump supporters erected a 22-foot statue of him at his golf course in Doral, Florida, they opted for a gold finish.

“To him gold was the essence of richness and class,” Barbara Res, who oversaw construction for the Trump Organization and was placed in charge of building Trump Tower, told me. “To him it meant, This is gold. This is mine. It’s the best you can get, and I’m the best. That’s how his mind works. I’m going to show you the best by buying the best.” Sometimes, she said, it wasn’t the best. It was a cheaper alternative that looked like gold but actually wasn’t (although she found that he was willing to spend his money for something that was his idea). He liked the design concept trompe l’oeil, a French word that means “deceive the eye,” where painters could make a column that looked like marble.

“It was tricking the eye of the consumer. He loved it,” Res said. “And he took an interest in the gold finishes. It reflects his taste and his ability to spend endless money on something beautiful. That’s what he wants people to believe.”

Whether it’s in his long, red ties; his swooshed-over hairstyle; or his “Thank you for your attention to this matter” social-media posts, Trump is all about branding. Perhaps nothing is more on-brand for him than his affection for gold. “I love the gold, but if you don’t use 24 karat gold, it doesn’t look good,” he told reporters last August. “It just beams,” he marveled in September. “It’s all real stuff,” he said in March. “You can’t imitate it. Someday they’ll discover a paint that will look like gold, and the guy’s going to be the richest man in the world.”

Peter York, a design and culture columnist, wrote in Politico Magazine in 2017 that Trump’s design style is “aspirational, meant to project the wealth so many citizens can only dream of.” Although it’s often associated with Italian Renaissance or French Baroque, York says a better  comparison is more recent. “The best aesthetic descriptor of Trump’s look, I’d argue, is dictator style,” he wrote.

Gold has often been used to represent imperial power, whether in 18th-century France or 19th-century Russia. When Trump went to the Middle East for his first foreign trip of his second term, I watched as he marveled at the gold and marble in the palaces of Doha and Abu Dhabi. “Versailles is not a gold leaf,” he said in June ahead of a trip to the palace. “Versailles is the real deal.”

The two Arts of War statues, called Valor and Sacrifice, were sculpted by Leo Friedlander and cast in Italy. They were dedicated in 1951, offered to the United States as a gift from the Italians for helping rebuild their country after World War II. Each statue shows a nude man and a seminude woman. Two other statues, collectively called The Arts of Peace, are nearby but still undergoing their golden glam-ups.

Each of the statues sits on a granite pedestal ringed with 36 stars, representing the states in the Union at the end of the Civil War. The statues, cast in bronze, were last regilded in 1971 and had since faded. Trump added them to the list of eyesores he wanted fixed before the nation’s 250th birthday, on July 4, and federal officials scrambled to meet his demands.

When I reached out to the White House to ask about the project, the president’s role in it, and his choice of gold, the spokesperson Davis Ingle responded with a statement that made no mention of gold and said, in part: “No other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.” He said that the president’s “bold vision” was ensuring that the 250th birthday was filled with “glory and pride.” He referred other questions to the Department of Interior, which did not address any of my questions about the project, its delays, the choice to heavily apply gold, or Trump’s involvement. “Residents and visitors are excited to see the city revitalized to the grand destination it was meant to be,” the department offered in a statement.

Federal officials did not seek competitive bids for the work on the statues, bypassing the typical process and awarding a contract in April for $5.1 million. The project was treated as a high priority by the National Park Service, according to The New York Times, which cited internal documents that referred to it as “a visible, high-impact example of how the N.P.S. is responding to presidential directives.” Extensive market research was not done to determine whether $5 million was a fair price, according to documents obtained by NOTUS, and the agency determined that only one company could meet the requirements of the work and the timeline: the Gilders’ Studio in Maryland.

The company, which did not respond to my message, has done a large number of regilding projects around the country, including the dome of the Georgia State House, the cupola of Faneuil Hall in Boston, and—perhaps most similar to the statues in Washington—the Sherman Monument in Central Park. A description of the project had a mandatory competition date of July 1. But for the past few weeks, as it had for the months before, the scaffolding remained up, and tarps read: We are making DC safe and beautiful.

Only now is the project coming into view, and although Trump is clearly pleased, others are less so. “Fit for an oligarch’s ballroom,” a review in ARTNews reads.

As I rode my bike past the new gilded statues Friday morning, I couldn’t help but wonder what would next succumb to Trump’s Midas touch. If a triumphal arch is constructed across the bridge, will it be just as glaringly golden? Will Trump cast the John F. Kennedy statue outside the Kennedy Center in gold? Is Abraham Lincoln, sitting nearby, at risk? Or the pensive Thomas Jefferson standing in the dome across the way? How far will Trump’s new golden age extend?

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Instead of funding universal healthcare or investing in solutions to the climate crisis that's burning up  natural beauty and choking the world this superhot summer....  all the resources of the American state are going to "beauty" and cruelty   

And senseless wars, a foreign policy that is like a Viking fantasy, looting the treasures of other counties... 

anti-theatricality in politics (the drama king) (enter: the love interest)

"The scriptwriters obviously decided to introduce Natalie Harp to spice things up in season three of 'Trump.' Viewers were getting bored by Vance, Miller, Hegseth, Blanche et al. The question: Is this mini-plot just a temporary diversion in the story? Or a major inflection point?" 

- Bill Kristol

"Mr. Trump seems to have a real fear of boredom. Even at his age he is restless; when there’s peace and quiet he seems to become anxious, as if he can’t tolerate normality. He shows little faith in quiet progress, as in: Set good policy in place and hope it succeeds inch by inch. Instead he creates drama or a crisis, arouses a counterforce, attacks this new enemy, experiences fear—will my luck hold?—defeats the new enemy, feels relief, relaxes. Then, restless again and on the prowl, he creates new drama . . .

That is a real weakness in life, needing drama. It will find you on its own. When you need it you’re always generating new stakes, and in a presidency they’re often high, and when you fail that is some big failure."

- Wall Street Journal

"Trump is willing to undermine and destroy any institution, law, norm or ideal cherished by Americans in a bonfire of his vanities"

- Maureen Dowd (the anti-theatricalism quite buried there, via the reference - probably mediated through Tom Wolfe - to the proto-Puritan Savoranola and his bonfire of the vanities). I haven't read the whole piece though

Ah she's used the pun before.

"Donald Trump refused to leave the World Cup stage. He clung to the trophy as though it belonged to him. The players celebrated around him while the cameras searched in vain for an adult willing — or able — to explain to the president of the United States that the ceremony wasn’t about him.

It happened in plain sight. It was real — yet it remains almost impossible to believe.

The psychological fragility on display was breathtaking. It was narcissism stripped of disguise, vanity without inhibition, neediness elevated to statecraft. Historians will study the footage because it captures, in a handful of seconds, something speeches and books can’t: a man so consumed by the hunger for adulation that he can’t surrender the spotlight, even when the world’s greatest athletes have earned it.

There are images that explain an era better than any speech. This was one of them.

Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico and Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, looked less like honored guests than reluctant hostages, unwilling participants in a spectacle they neither chose nor could escape. They trailed as far behind Donald Trump as protocol and dignity would allow, instinctively placing distance between themselves and the strange gravity of the moment, as though proximity itself carried risk.

Trump shuffled ahead, slightly stooped, moving with the slow, inexorable certainty of a lava flow — impossible to hurry, impossible to redirect, consuming every ounce of attention in its path. It was a procession of malice wrapped in vanity, instability wrapped in power, all bundled into a slovenly suit and Florsheim shoes straining around the swollen ankles of the American Nero.

There was something almost Shakespearean in the grotesquery of it. The leader of the world’s most powerful democracy behaved not as a statesman, but as an aging monarch who no longer distinguishes between the state and himself. Every trophy is his trophy. Every triumph is his triumph. Every stage is his stage.

Roald Dahl gave the world Veruca Salt, the spoiled child who believed every prize belonged in her hands. Lewis Carroll imagined the Mad Hatter, imprisoned inside his own absurdity. Donald Trump has accomplished something neither author attempted. He has fused both characters into a single living performance while occupying the presidency of the United States.

Then came the boos.

The stadium rejected him. It mocked him. It reviled him.

It no longer mattered.

There was a time when applause and condemnation occupied different chambers of the human heart. There was a time when shame retained the power to restrain conduct and public humiliation could provoke reflection. Donald Trump crossed that frontier years ago. He no longer distinguishes between admiration and contempt because each satisfies the same craving. To be cheered or jeered is irrelevant so long as the lights remain fixed upon him. The crowd’s hatred has become merely another form of attention, and attention is the only currency he has ever truly valued.

President Norma Desmond has reached his final cruising altitude.

There’s no longer a Donald Trump who performs for an audience. There’s only Trump performing for Trump. The man has been consumed by the character. The character has been devoured by the caricature.

The cartoon has swallowed the man.

He now exists as self-parody made flesh — a photographic joke requiring no caption, a punchline that no longer needs a setup because his mere appearance completes it. Satire has become obsolete. Exaggeration has become impossible. Reality has outrun parody.

This is the final destination of narcissism. It isn’t merely vanity. It’s the obliteration of the self beneath an invented persona until nothing authentic remains. The individual disappears inside the performance. The mask fuses to the face. Every moment becomes an audition. Every stage becomes compulsory. Every camera becomes indispensable.

The tragedy isn’t simply personal. It’s national.

The presidency was created to embody constitutional restraint, republican virtue, and public service. Donald Trump has transformed it into an instrument of perpetual self-validation. He mistakes visibility for leadership, celebrity for greatness, dominance for strength, and spectacle for achievement. The office no longer elevates the man. The man diminishes the office.

History has a merciless eye for such moments.

Long after today’s arguments have dissolved into the fog of forgotten headlines, this image will remain. A lonely, grasping figure refusing to release a trophy he didn’t win. World champions celebrating around him while he inserts himself into their triumph. Foreign leaders hanging back as though they had wandered unwillingly into someone else’s fever dream. A president incapable of understanding that the greatest office in the world confers responsibility, not ownership.

The footage will endure because it distilled an entire political age into a handful of unforgettable minutes. It required no commentary. It needed no narration. The picture explained itself.

The ceremony belonged to the champions.

Only one man believed it belonged to him.

- Steve Schmidt

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Yet another reminder of the impotence of eloquence

Even as the argument of the piece (images are the language of today) is expressed using the very linear, sustained-thought mode that has been rendered irrelevant and ineffectual

As if finely wrought tropes and subtle thinking could defeat the pathological vulgarity of Trump

It's just comfort food for the educated, isn't it?

Shocking how a single monster ego could cancel and collapse everything

And that the pushback - if it does come finally - is more to do with gas prices and the cost of living, than principles values standards and all those norms one unwittingly depended on and probably felt free to scoff at or disregard...

Still, surely those who mocked the liberals's "over-reactions" and dire warnings, who talked of Trump Derangement Disorder, are having some second thoughts now... 

Bubblegum Revolution

 

As powerful - and as political - as Spacemen 3's "Revolution"

(Don't be too quick to understand that sentence)

The Monkees perplex -  when the results are as a pleasing and potent as the "real thing", does intent / content / context matter? 

And how "real" is the real thing anyway? 

"Street Fighting Man" had completely different words up until almost the last minute, you know. 

The Fame Monsters

Strangely no mention of the Blondely Ambitious one in this piece about ambition in pop and "a certain monstrousness" of the popstar personality. Published in the winter 2009 edition of GQ Style, it's a Madonna-free zone,

Also absent is her inheritor Lady Gaga. With the long lead times with a quarterly magazine, I must have written it the late summer.  I hadn't heard The Fame, was barely aware of singles like "Paparazzi" and I doubt I would have known a revamped version of the album titled The Fame Monster was coming out in November . But clearly there was something in the air. 

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AMBITION

GQ Style, winter 2009

by Simon Reynolds

Just a few months before Michael Jackson died, I felt the urge to write about him for the first time ever. I was in a café and "Don't Stop Til You Get Enough" came on and even though I must have heard it hundreds of times since first seeing the video on Top of the Pops in 1979, for some reason the song hit me like a lightning bolt. For all its falsetto-funk silkiness , the sheer aggression of the sound--the coiled rhythmic tension, the stiletto penetration of Jackson's voice--seemed to attack with the force of The Stooges or Sex Pistols . But what I really came away with was a vague idea, just a phrase really: "total music", the idea of a category of pop set apart from the merely excellent. Listening, rapt, I imagined the electricity of the Off the Wall sessions: Quincy Jones assembling the highest-calibre session players available, no expense spared, and pursuing perfection with an almost militaristic focusing of energy. The achievement: flawlessness so absolute that it didn't so much transcend commercialism as blast right through it, such that domination of the radio and the discotheques was merely a by-product, a secondary benefit, of the quest.

"Total music" occurs through the synergy of talent, limitless funding, a really good idea… and something else: a superhuman drive, the "right stuff" that Tom Wolfe wrote about in connection with NASA's moon missions. I imagine this intangible elan infused the making of Abba's music, or the classic recordings of the Beatles, Phil Spector, Brian Wilson. There's loads of music that I love and that probably means more to me than "total pop", records made by artists both more unassuming yet in some ways more narcissistically self-absorbed and idiosyncratic. But there's no denying the special charge that imbues music when it's made by people who know they're making history, who can be confident they're taking it out onto the largest stage available.

In the Sixties there was a long moment where the best pop (in terms of constantly pushing forward and sheer musical quality) was also the best-selling: Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, Byrds, Dylan, Beach Boys, Doors. (There's really only a few exceptions: Love, Velvet Underground). Aesthetic ambition and commercial ambition were indivisible. This folk-memory of this ideal persisted long after it ceased to apply, inspiring everyone from Bowie and Roxy to the major punk bands to the likes of U2, Bjork, Radiohead. But over the last couple of decades the two kinds of ambition have come to seem more and more tenuously connected, to the point where a phenomenon like the Beatles seems almost implausible, a fluke.

My dad had this maxim, something like: aim for the top, because if you fall short, you'll at least reach higher than if you'd aimed for the middle and fallen short of that. It's not completely true: o'er vaulting ambition can result in "EPIC FAIL", whereas a shrewd strategy of modest aspiration might lead to steady sustained successes. Still, remembering this motto led me to this thought: if you want to do great work in music or any art form, just as important as talent or imagination is the desire to be great. You might have the most refined melodic gift, the subtlest musical mind, but if you don't have that will-to-power, the balls and the gall…

Certain bands only make sense at the top of the pop world: Springsteen and U2 were made to work in widescreen, to issue the most sweeping, speaking-for-Everyman statements. "Overbearing", "bombastic": the insults are merely the measure of their achievement, and nobody can take away those moments when they mattered (Born To Run, then again Born in the U.S.A., for Bruce; the majestic sequence from "Pride" to "Streets Have No Name", for Bono and Co). Of course, there are artists who have the temperament of the world-historical genius but who don't actually have anything worth saying. Jim Steinman, the fevered brain behind Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell, Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", and Celine Dion's "It's All Coming Back To Me Now", exemplifies this syndrome. Steinman is far from deficient in the will-to-greatness: he's got an unbridled flair for the grandiose, plus the requisite perfectionist streak (he's been known to spend huge amounts of his own private money on projects when the original budget's run out). Unfortunately his ambition is not accompanied by the filter of taste, to put it mildly.

Talking of finances, the rise over the last decade or two of home studios and digital audio workstations, has meant that it's possible for artists to make massive-sounding and expensive-seeming albums for a fraction of what it once cost. It's much cheaper and easier to create the illusion of luxuriant orchestration or to pull off ear-boggling sonic trickery of the kind that would have taken days of intricate labour by George Martin and Abbey Road's white-coated technicians. Artistic ambition, in the old days, had to go hand in hand with commercial ambition, just to pay off the bills. Nowadays the two kinds of aspiration have become severed. The Colossal Sounding, Colossally Ambitious Album is today a sort of specialist subgenre of rock, purveyed by groups like Flaming Lips. And not just rock: take Erykah Badu, who renovates the tradition of politically engaged, autobiographically personal "progressive soul" masterpieces by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye. Her vastly ambitious New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) sold pretty well but it could never hope to achieve the mass cultural impact of Songs In the Key of Life or What's Goin' On. These are different times and Badu, like her buddies The Roots and Common, is catering for a niche market of historically-informed cognoscenti who still listen out for that kind of takes-the-measure-of-the-zeitgeist Epic.

Although a singer, Badu regards herself part of hip hop. Surprisingly, given its sketchy record with the Album, rap has been one of the main places this decade where commercial ambition and artistic ambition have remained tightly entwined, with performers like Outkast, Jay-Z and Kanye West putting out sonically adventurous, alternately self-glorifying and socially-conscious albums that sold in huge numbers. It stands to reason that rap is richly endowed with "the will to be great" because the genre is all about self-aggrandisement. What LL Cool J called "talking on myself" still defines the art's core: MCs exalt their own ability to dominate and defeat the competition, finding the most vivid, witty, unique and creatively brutal ways of describing their prowess.

Rap expresses and exposes the ugly side of pop's ambition: its profoundly inegalitarian streak, a drive towards status, glory, preeminence. The aspiration to greatness often comes with a certain monstrousness of personality *. Look at Morrissey. Pop stardom was always, he frankly admitted, a form of revenge exacted on the world for his outcast adolescence. But when society's "mis-shapes" (to use Jarvis Cocker's term) become stars, the result can be unsightly. The retaliatory narcissism of early Smiths lyrics ("the sun shines out of our behinds", "England owes me a living") is one thing when the singer is a skinny wisp only a few years out of obscurity. But from a fifty year old pop institution with the build of a bouncer, striding across arena stages and tossing the microphone cord with lordly disdain, it starts to look like any old showbiz prima donna. Rap has its own Morrissey in Kanye West. I never used to understand hip hop fans complaining about his monster ego (this is rap, what did you expect guys?). But after the bloated self-pity of much of 808s & Heartbreak and his disruption of the MTV Video Awards, I'm starting to see their point.

The supreme case of the will-to-be-great turning rancid is Michael Jackson, of course. Around the point he started calling himself (and insisting on being called) the King of Pop, Jackson 's output shifted from "total pop" to "totalitarian kitsch": the nine gigantic statues of MJ as a Dictator built at his requirement by Sony and installed in European cities to promote 1995's HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book 1, the fascistic promo film for that record with Jackson in full Khadaffi-style regalia amid hundreds of soldiers. Think too of the Versailles-like indulgence and corruption of Neverland, and that peculiar quasi-dynastic marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the King. When pop stars try to externalize the grandeur inside their music, to make reality match up to its utopian absoluteness, the results can be grotesque, a tragic-comical catastrophe of nouveau-riche kitsch.


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