anti-theatricality in politics (muscle memory posting)

Ever the performer, President Trump has lately been putting on a show of indifference.

…..Beneath all that bluster and makeup, he’s sweating.

-          Frank Bruni

 

The NYT sees itself not as a defender of journalistic principles or a champion of democratic values, but rather a theater critic for political actors.

There are no real-world consequences here, no pain or suffering for the common people who aren't in their social circles. It's just a parlor game

-          Kevin M. Kruse

 

 

[to Sec. of “War” Hegseth]

You’re an actor.  You’re playing Secdef.  At least try to play a good one

-          Adam Kinzinger

 

Everything is operatic emotion and bitter grievance. Politicians fail to recognize and adjust for that at their peril.

-  Frank Bruni

 

Frank Bruni / Bret Stephens dialogue, NY Times

Bruni: It’s called seizing a big, fat opportunity. Between Trump’s disgraced former labor secretary, disgraceful health secretary, demented F.B.I. director and bottomlessly avaricious brood of children, it’s as if all the president’s minions are staging some opera buffa about the Seven Deadly Sins, with different cast members jockeying for different depredations. I call gluttony! You’re doing envy.

Stephens: Pete Hegseth alone could audition for wrath, lust, pride and verbal flatulence.

 

  

 So Trump gave a speech today at the Villages in Florida. I just watched it so you wouldn't have to. You're welcome.

…. It's so bizarre how he's always talking about his people coming "from central casting." He constantly brags that people in his administration and cabinet are from central casting. He's more impressed with what they look like than what they can or can't do. (Like it's some kind of fucked up beauty pageant or something. Very strange.)

… The funniest thing about Dr. Phil coming on stage was when Trump introduced him and called him up he told him to speak no longer than 2 minutes. Then Phil went on for much longer than 2 minutes and Trump was standing behind him giving him dirty looks and swaying back and forth.

…. It's always disturbing to watch him at these things, but what was even more disturbing today was the audience cheering on every lie and fucked up thing he said. It was a pretty small audience today tho and he kept talking about all of the "front row Joes" and others who go to every one of his rallies who were there today. So the real audience was even smaller. Of course Trump claimed that the small room and small crowd didn't mean anything because there was an "overflow arena full to the limit" and "thousands of people watching on monitors outside." He had to lie because clearly the small crowd upset him. I just love that for him.

-          Mindy Fischer

secret thesis (slight unsightly return)

 

Is that bended knee meant to suggest an enormous deformed erection?

Not a good look - in both the clothing/coiffure sense and the steely gaze he's giving us, like some kind of cruel-eyed Dutch hardman. 

Both photos are eyebrow-less

Hauteur Theory (1 + 2)

Hauteur Theory #1: Unfamiliarity breeds Contempt   

 

I thought I had heard everything - but  the munificence of all the vintage Top of the Pops episodes on YouTube supplied surprise

Here, in 1977, savagely behind the times, a group I never even heard of: a late glam / artpop outfit called Contempt.

I suspect the influence palette includes Queen, Sparks, Roxy, possibly 10cc, possibly Cockney Rebel, possibly Bebop Deluxe, maybe even Sailor

Cynical and snooty wordliness meets a clean frilly guitar sound and a dapper and genteel non-rock image.... and a bit of pomo too (the song is essentially "Money Makes The World Go Around" from Cabaret merged with  "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend"

"Never even heard of" .... that might be because they only ever released a single single

Here's a funny thing, though - look closely, and this was produced by Martin Rushent. At roughly the same time he would have been producing The Stranglers and then a little later, Buzzcocks and 999. 

The name of the productions company is funny: Atit. 

As in "at it". Or "a tit".

Hauteur Theory #2: Declensions of Duncan 

Another late-glam group with a snooty sophisticate image.... like Contempt, caught out by New Wave, and rendered therefore untimely: Metro, whose core was Peter Godwin and Duncan Browne.

I think these adverts were printed in this sequence, teased out over three weeks.... 

Or maybe it was within a single issue, on successive pages. 

Top of the Fops!

Metro described their sound as “English rock music, but influenced by a hundred years of European culture… Baudelaire and Kurt Weill”

One of their songs was later covered by David Bowie - "Criminal World" (on Let's Dance)

You never told me of your other faces

You were the widow of the wildcat

And now I know about your special kisses

And I know you know where that's at

I'm not the queen so there's no need to bow

I think I see beneath your make-up

I'll take your dress and we can truck on out

This is no ordinary, this is no ordinary

Oh, what a criminal world

The boys are like baby-faced girls

What a criminal girl

She'll show you where to shoot your gun

What a typical mother's son

The only thing that she enjoys

Is a criminal world

Where the girls are like baby-faced boys

You've got a very heavy reputation

But no-one knows about your low-life

I know a way to find a situation

And hold a candle to your high-life disguise

I saw you kneeling at my brother's door

That was no ordinary stick-up

I'm well aware just what you're looking for

I am no ordinary, I am no ordinary

Oh, what a criminal world

The boys are like baby-faced girls

What a criminal girl

She'll show you where to shoot your gun

What a typical mother's son

The only thing that she enjoys

Is a criminal world

Where the girls are like baby-faced boys

Ooh look, a year before Bowie, Hot Gossip covered it 

Duncan Browne was one of those figures who just cropped up again and again, slightly style-adjusted, in different phases of the rock dialectic

Donovan-ish in the Sixties 

(lovely song I think)

Pioneering rock critic Richard Goldstein described this album as "Pre-Raphaelite Rock"

Then folk-tinged singer-songwriter (Murray Head on the moors)

                           His one hit, produced by Mickie Most (former Donovan producer turned glamglitterpop producer)

Then glammy-aristo in the Seventies, with Metro

Lotta nostril energy in this band portrait 

Then there's a later phase where it's yacht rock, more or less.... or in alignment with post-reformation Roxy slickness / Bryan Ferry solo

This cover is like a Roxy Music cover combined with an early Bryan Ferry solo album cover

I do enjoy this thing where artists keep moving with the times, adjusting their basic thing according to the new style - whether through desperation to finally score a hit, or simply their taste changing in alignment with everybody else. 

And why not? Fans do it, critics do it too.

Still Duncan B had the integrity* at least not to go "New Wave" - he couldn't move that far from his basic debonair mode. 

Greil M on DB

Unlike Bryan Ferry (but like Kevin Ayers), Browne was the genuine poshboy-in-pop article: 

Duncan Browne was born on March 25, 1947. The only child of Air Commodore and Mrs. C.D.A. Browne, Duncan initially intended to follow his father into the Royal Air Force. He was turned down on health grounds while still at the Workshop College, where he was a promising schoolboy actor and clarinetist.

A classical guitarist, he attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art for three years, where he studied Composition and Harmony with the legendary Anthony Bowles, who encouraged him towards a career in music

* (Actually Metro did go "New Wave" but without Browne's involvement)

* Actually I am wrong here  - Metro, with Browne involved still, did a very short-lived alter-ego as Public Zone, with Stewart Copeland on drums, and it's totally New Wave. 

Detailed bio of Duncan Browne's involved career. 

Godwin carried on being None More New Wave

folk versus glam (1 of ??)

Hubert Parry: "in true folk-songs there is no sham, no got-up glitter, and no vulgarity"

Folk is associated with naturalism - the idea that there is no artifice involved, no element of show. 

Performance, stripped of performativity or exhibitionism. The singer as the ego-less vessel or conduit for the people's consciousness. 

Green Gartside on Anne Briggs: "The beautiful melodies Anne sang unaccompanied were profoundly affecting, her unornamented voice a precursor to the anti-professionalism of DIY."

Folk would be the Quaker option, the nonconformist option (in the religious and Puritan-ical sense).

Everybody equal in this society of friends; the liturgy, barebones, stripped of ceremonial flatus. 

(Whereas opera, or heavy metal - at least in the 70s - is obviously Catholic. Pomp rock).

The Puritans despised and feared the theatre. 

The diagram below relates to anti-theatricality  - and the idea that some sorts of performance (the folk mode and the art approach) can actually be "real". That reality can be brought on to the stage, either through the performer as representative of a community, or the artist expressive of their inner self, their emotional reality.  

(More on the Diagram below)

Peter Sellers’s  spoof on Lonnie Donegan: Benny Goonagain (starts at 4.30 minutes into this satire of a current affairs show): 

Goonagain: 

Rock'n'roll? -  No! I'm a folk singer, man -  I sing blues, work songs - songs of the people and the peasant, you understand, cos they're ah workin on a railroad...

Rock'n'roll as something to diss-associate from - on count of it being commercial, amplified, gimmicky, substance-less. 

Reminded that Guthrie-remodel minstrel Billy Bragg went on to write a whole book about skiffle. 

"Roots, Radicals and Rockers" - you couldn't get a better articulation of the Folk axis of my triangle!

It's notable, though, that Donegan and his band wore suits and bow ties when they played live (at least on TV shows). Donegan sang Leadbelly songs but he didn't wear denim dungarees like Leadbelly (which was, if I recall right, an idea of his handlers, to pitch him at the folk revival scene - working men's clothes. 

Barefoot too! The full story behind this image is shocking.

When left to his own druthers, Leadbelly - like most blues performers - preferred to wear a sharp suit. and a bow tie. Singing - even about gritty subjects - was still showtime. (So in that sense, Donegan's fancy get-up was actually - inadvertently? - authentic).

White gloves!

Even jamming, he's done up to the nines

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

 

I created this diagram as a teaching aid. It depicts the discursive space of pop music - it's about talk and rhetoric, rather than praxis and genre per se.

- how fans and critics imagine and understand the music…

- how artists explain what they do, to others and to themselves. 

(But could there be a fourth side, making it a square? See if you are as clever as some of my students)

Some artists are firmly established on one side or other of this triangle, and stay there.

But the most interesting careers either involve an artist located somewhere between one axis and another (Roxy Music exist between Art and Showbiz but are nowhere near Folk).

Either that or they are equidistant between all three sides (can't think of a good example here).

Or even more interesting, when the artist goes on a trajectory within this triangular space, starting in one place and moving to another (Dylan is archetypal, moving from Folk to Art, and then creeping back a bit, at times). Some veer all over the place, doubling back, and contradicting / erasing the previous location: consider the literally careering careers of John Lennon and David Bowie.

In The R.Elms of the Senseless (slight return)

Interesting reflections on the Robert Elms book Blitz: The Club That Created the 80s over at Michaelangelo Matos's substack Beat Connection

 

Although he takes a poke or several at the Elmscentricity of the Bob universe ("has no problem tooting his horn") and he firmly sides with the ravers against the nightclubbers ("I....  have no patience for anybody’s door policy"), Matos is more generous to this kind of "I'm-in-with-the-In-crowd-ism" than I am. 

Perhaps geographical distance, and not having to live through it in real-time, accounts for it! 

He satisfyingly skewers the Elms assertion that Rusty Egan invented modern deejaying (drily pointing out that Egan used just one turntable). 

Also satisfyingly skewered is the strained Elms argument that New Romanticism was not in ideological lockstep with Thatcherism. Regardless of who they actually individually voted for in 1979 or 1983, the whole slant was escapism combined with make-it-at-all-costs (with a strong vein of fake-it-till-you-make-it in there too). 

Matos mentions and highly recommends a doc I have never heard of: Soul Boys of the Western World:

"It it goes over the sun with the Blitz footage. This club took place in a Soho dive bar, and when the camera sails through it in this film, the walls pulse. It’s the most alluring thing I’ve ever seen in above-board filmmaking. I wanted to enter it and not leave. Within seconds, everything I’d ever read, or written, about the place came suddenly to life." 

While I shudder at the idea that this is an entire documentary devoted to Spandau Ballet, I might have to steel myself and watch it. 

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

Earlier bloggige o' mine about Blitz and about Bob. 

Glam bandwagon jumpers (1 of ??)

Is this undignified, or just Donovan reclaiming the small debt that Bolan owed him?

Visconti-ish strings.

Here he performs "Cosmic Wheel" sitting down a la Tyrannosaurus Rex, stripped of the record's adornments.

Mickie Most produced the Cosmic Wheels album (Most of course wsa Donovan's original producer in the Sixties but by 1973 one of the kings of glamglitter production)

Suzi Quatro supposedly sings back-up on "The Music Maker", although she doesn't sound characteristic - I wouldn't have recognised her. 

The album was recorded in the next door studio to the one Alice Cooper did Billion Dollar Babies, and they got Donovan to sing on the title track. 

"Maria Magenta" - here Donovan seems to be aping Bryan Ferry a bit. 

But then again, he was doing this kind of prissy vocal in 1966....

"Wild Witch Lady" is T. Rex meets Dr John. Bolan-esque vibrato and whoops. 

Also seems like a Marc / Electric Warrior style tribute to a "dirty and sweet" young lady. 

Now, the genuinely undignified thing Donovan does on this album is "The Intergalactic Laxative"

Personnel

Donovan – guitar, harmonica, design, vocals

Chris Spedding – guitar, strings, bouzouki

Dennis Ball – bass[3]

Clive Chaman – bass

Phil Chen – bass

Cozy Powell – drums

Alan White – drums

John "Rabbit" Bundrick – piano, Moog synthesizer, mellotron

John Cameron - electric piano on "Appearances"

Tony Carr – percussion

Jim Horn – alto saxophone

Bobby Keys – tenor saxophone

Patrick Halling – violin

Jack Emblow – accordion

Leslye Ash – vocals

Valerie Charrington – soprano vocals

Nick Curtis – vocals

Lesley Duncan – vocals on "The Music Makers"

Julie Forsythe – vocals

Leslie Fyson – vocals

John McCarthy – vocals

Suzi Quatro – vocals on "The Music Makers"

Gaynor Stewart – vocals

Jill Utting – soprano vocals

Cary Wilson – vocals

Street (in)credibility

 

Don't want to do any spoilers but this pettishly flirtatious encounter between Russell Harty and Adrian Street takes a dramatic turn... 

An earlier post on the glam wrestler

A kind of sequel post, connecting Ken Loach / Barry Hines's Kes and Roxy Music's Avalon...

Son and father, glitter and coal dust