The Badway Brothers

 

Witty - but also plaintive and touching - song by Lloyd Cole about a pair of rockstar friends, in a bad way in LA,  who come up with the - on the face of it not-so-bright  - notion that if they were to relocate to Berlin (then the heroin capital of Europe!) they can clean up and restart their aesthetic adventure. 

(hat tip Michael Azerrad) 

I know that I’m not doing great

But you’re almost translucent

You’ve taken it all too far and it was beautiful

The spirit in your swimming pool

Man, she’s got it in for you

Cherry might just drive on by

Next time you’re turning blue

We’ll move to Berlin

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll cycle and swim

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll rent an efficiency

You’ll take the serious guise

I’ll be the idiot

We’ll cycle to the studio

In our jeans and our leg-warmers

We’ll cycle to the discotheque

Then we’ll cycle home

LA is so 1975

We’ve got to get out - how are we still alive?

No more limousines

No more endless white nights

We’ll move to Berlin

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll cycle and swim

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll enter society

You’ll take the serious guise

I’ll be the idiot

We’ll find a better speed of life

In the cafes and the galleries

Just a pair of modern guys

Escaping history

We’ll move to Berlin

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll cycle and swim

Stop being drug addicts

We’ll rent an efficiency

You’ll take the serious guise

I’ll be the idiot

LA is so 1975

We’ve got to get out - how are we still alive?

No more limousines

No more endless white lines

How are we still alive?

How are we still alive?

How are we still alive?

Reminds me in its meta-meta, rock-history-aware way of Luke Haines's New York in the '70s. 

Which I reviewed in 2014 and which is in some ways the integument between Retromania and Shock and Awe. 

Funnily enough, in the review, I actually mention Lloyd Cole as a better exponent of this kind of thing.

LUKE HAINES
New York in the ‘70s

director's cut, The Wire, May 2014

by Simon Reynolds

Pushed by music magazines and rock documentary makers, “the place to be” is a perennially alluring notion. The conviction that a single city – London, San Francisco, Manchester, Seattle, Berlin—is currently pop culture’s energy center, a vortex fermenting  new sounds and styles that will bubble up from the underground to transform the mainstream, draws the ambitious, the curious, and a legion of misfits chafing at the constraints of their suburban or small-town home.  Retro culture adds a layer of elegiac wistfulness to this “anywhere but here” impulse, instilling the belief that that there was “the time to be” too, that born-too-late sense of being one of History’s provincials, stranded faraway in time from the action.  

On New York in the ‘70s Luke Haines seems at once seduced by and sceptical toward this idea that certain towns at certain times buzzed with extraordinary energy.  A mildly provocative figure on the periphery of the U.K. pop/rock mainstream for two decades now, Haines was the driving force behind The Auteurs and Black Box Recorder, and, since 2001, he’s been a prolific solo artist. New York is actually his tenth solo album. It also closes out a diverting if opaque-in-intent trilogy that began with 2011’s 9 and a half Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling From the 1970s and continued with last year’s Rock and Roll Animals.

Haines’s meta-musician tendencies were apparent from the start:  The Auteurs’s 1993 debut LP was titled New Wave, featured songs with titles like “American Guitars”, and was framed by its author as a celebration of quintessentially English “wryness and dryness” (think Kinks) in defiance of then dominant grunge aesthetics.  More recently, “The Heritage Rock Revolution”, from 2006’s Off My Rocker At the Art School Bop, mocked the reenactments of past glories served up by rock’s nostalgia industry. “It’s a middle-aged rampage/NOW!” Haines sang, wittily inverting the chorus of The Sweet’s glam-anthem “Teenage Rampage”.   Whether tacking against the tide of the contemporary scene or playing games with history, Haines’s music always seems to be commenting on other music.

The odd thing about New York in the ‘70s is that the period Haines is revisiting—post-Warhol decadence, protopunk, the Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs milieu—is that this was the point at which rock itself took a self-reflexive turn. The New York Dolls were Stones impersonators and girl-group fans who quoted The Shangri-Las and hired their producer Shadow Morton to do their second album;  Patti Smith covered The Who and Them, wrote elegies to Jim Morrison and Hendrix;  Suicide’s Alan Vega channeled Elvis;  The Ramones and The Dictators were virtually scholars of teen delinquent rock.  So what does adding another layer of reflexivity and reference contribute,  when the music in question is already self-consciously tangled up and tangling with rock history?

Listening to New York in the ‘70s, it’s not readily apparent what Haines is trying to say.  Just like that flatly descriptive album title, the songs sit there, blank regenerations of time-honored templates, ranging from precise pastiches of legends like Suicide (“Drone City” duplicates  “Frankie Teardrop” complete with psychotic gulps and gasps)  to generically NYC/1970s-evoking songs in a “Loaded” Velvets/ Lou Reed-solo style.  Not content with giving his ditties titles like“Alan Vega Says”, “Jim Carroll” , “Dolls Forever”, and “Lou Reed Lou Reed”, Haines often lets his lyrics devolve into a string of citations and famous-first-name allusions: Debbie, DeeDee, Bill (as in Burroughs), and so on.   

Lloyd Cole, another Manhattan-infatuated Brit songwriter, dubbed this lyrical technique “proper noun as metaphor and simile” and claimed to have invented it (Bryan Ferry got there first, surely?).  Cole is a telling comparison, actually: like his immediate predecessors Orange Juice, he translated Reed-isms into an authentically U.K. realm of   bookish bedsit romanticism (girlfriends who drive their mother’s old 2CVs, etc). But on New York Haines does nothing with the source material: takes its nowhere, barely even twists it.

Really, the only tint of difference is tonal: droll, with a hint of smirk. New York in the ‘70s ought to be filed under parody-rock, next to Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoia, the XTC side/psych project Dukes of Stratosphear, and ex-Bonzo Neil Innes’s tunes for The Rutles. As the literary critic Linda Hutcheon observes, parody sanctions what in any other context would be dismissed as derivative and redundant. Laughter (and perhaps also a smidgeon of appreciation for the craft involved in these replicas) excuses what otherwise is merely empty impersonation. 

The mirth on offer here is thin fare, for the most part. Certainly compared with New York’s  immediate predecessor  Rock and Roll Animals, whose Mighty Boosh-like conceit --rock history reimagined as an anthropomorphic children’s fable, starring “Jimmy Pursey, a fox...   Gene Vincent, the cat...  and a badger called Nick Lowe”-- was strong and strange enough to sustain a whole album.  The only time New York strays into a similar zone of surreal whimsy is “Cerne Abbas Man”, in which the 180-foot-high priapic figure cut into Dorset hillside turf aeons ago comes alive and goes to war with the Lower East Side’s junkie poets.   Swinging “his giant glans straight into Manhattan,” the original Rude Man gives Richard Hell the “heebie-jeebies” and jolts “the ghost of Johnny Thunders,” who rasps “don’t point that thing at me, buddy”.  The idea seems to be a battle of primordial mojo between ancient Albion and “mythic motherfuckin’ rock’n’roll,” with the older culture wiping the floor with those young pretenders from the New World. 

The blurb for Post Everything, the second of Haines’s two Britpop memoirs, argues that “if it feels like there's nothing new under the sun, that's because there is nothing new under the sun”.  The same applies to New York in the ‘70s which oddly resembles a project from the early ‘90s, roughly contemporaneous with The Auteurs: Denim, a group created by Lawrence from Felt, in which he swapped his own VU/Dylan/Television fixations for Seventies English glitter pop at its most lumpen and trashy.  New York and 1992’s Back in Denim share the same boxy sonics and vocals that clone Lou Reed’s sing-speak drone.  But not only were Denim’s hooks zippier and lyrics funnier,  Lawrence’s polemic also had real bite at that point in time: songs like “Middle of the Road”  junked hip taste and canonical rock for the uncool thrills of plebeian tat.   What came through too was Lawrence’s love for the music, his delight in rediscovering records by The Glitter Band and Hello.

But it’s never clear what Haines really feels about the proto-punk New York of the Seventies.  (Personally the period after Loaded and before Marquee Moon strikes me as historically significant and importantly transitional, but surprisingly thin in terms of actual musical achievement). My guess is that his younger self’s fascination for the era of Max’s, Mercer Arts Center, etc, and for that whole bohemian quest for some kind of truth or ultimate reality (Patti Smith’s “outside of society/is where I want to be” ) via hard drugs, onstage self-harm, and other extremes, is cancelled out by a middle-aged man’s feeling that  such anti-heroics were misguided and futile. All a bit silly.  Like a man who’s fallen out of love but can’t leave the relationship, Haines sees through the myth but is unable to move on.  So he’ll keep on picking at and picking on rock history; he bickers with it, parrots back what it said in an arch mocking tone.   

 

A kestrel for a knave, a merlin for m' lady

Kes is a film that made a big impression on me as a child. If I recall right, it was in a double bill with the rereleased Fantazia - at any rate, I saw it first on the big screen at our local cinema The Rex, with my mum, and then many times after that on the television. 

In my memory, I think of it as a black and white film (well, we did have a black and white TV for the entire '70s) and so it's always startling to see that it's actually colour. 

But the black-and-white mind's eye misremembering fits the grey, grim world of the Yorkshire mining town in which the boy Billy lives - and the monochrome movie genre to which Ken Loach's film belongs (Billy Liar, A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner etc).. 

Looking into the story of the the film and of Barry Hines - who wrote the original novel and co-wrote the screenplay - I suddenly thought of another Northern lad with a thing for falcons: Bryan Ferry. 

 

The  model on the cover of Avalon is Lucy Helmore - who was a model but was also Ferry's posh young bride. But for the very first time in that long line of lovely ladies on Roxy covers, you can't see her face - that's Bryan's private  privilege.  

Indeed, c.f. the states of undress in which the Roxy girls hitherto have been exposed to the camera, Helsmore's body is encased protectively (chain-mail?). Not an inch of skin is visible -  her hand is covered entirely by a falconer's leather glove.

"The Avalon album cover was shot at dawn, on a lake at Helmore’s parents’ house in Ireland, with Helmore wearing a medieval helmet and carrying a falcon – designed to evoke King Arthur’s journey to Avalon, his final resting place and the mythical land where his sword, Excalibur, was forged" - Jason Draper

And here's his nibs himself, in the "Avalon" promo, brandishing a bird of prey. 

Filmed at Mentmore Towers country house

But what's the Kes connection? What bridges the gulf between Hines + Loach's Northern social realism and the aristocratic fantazia of Roxy Music? 

Well, those aristocratic fantasies stem from BF's reaction against his background - his dad was a farm worker who then toiled at a coal mine tending the pit ponies and descending with them into the Stygian depths beneath County Durham.

And in Kes, young Billy is soon to leave school aged 15 - although he looks about 12, small and scrawny and half-starved. One scene involves a meeting with the school's employment counsellor, who makes it clear that that the only real option facing someone without qualifications like Billy is the coal face - working in the same mine as his older brother Jud. 

Billy is adamant he won't work in the mine. (Bryan F has said that the best advice his dad ever gave him was: "Don't go down the pits, lad"). Hines himself was the son and grandson of coal miners.

The one bright spot in Billy's life (his mother's neglectful, his brother bullies him, the school is like "The Headmaster Ritual" ) is the kestrel he's captured, tamed, and trained. 

Wheeling in the sky, she represents transcendence: an aerial, unbound existence -  the inverse of the hellish heat and dusty murk of the coal face far below the surface. 

Billy's rapt by the raptor, an avian aristocrat.  

The film is Kes but the title of the novel is A Kestrel for a Knave, which comes from the fact that in  Medieval times a man of common birth was only allowed to keep a kestrel -  the more prestigious sorts of hawk were the preserve of the upper crust. 

"Falcons have long been considered the most desirable of the falconry birds because of their speed, dash and trainability. The fastest animal on this planet is the peregrine falcon in a headlong dive called a “stoop,” and this species has enjoyed a long history of being flown by aristocrats.   

"From highest to lowest, the ranks and their rightful birds are: Emperor – golden eagle; king – gyrfalcon; prince – peregrine falcon; particularly the “falcon gentle” or female peregrine (larger and therefore more desirable than the male); duke – peregrine falcon; earl – peregrine falcon; baron – male peregrine falcon; knight – saker falcon; squire – lanner falcon; noblewoman – merlin; page - hobby; yeoman (member of the landed gentry) – female goshawk; poor man – male goshawk; priest – female Eurasian sparowhawk; holywater clerk (clergy below the rank of priest) – male Eurasian sparrowhawk. Other references add the lowest stratum of society – the “knave” or male servant. He was accorded a bird that, in falconry terms, barely counted – the tiny Eurasian kestrel.

The Eurasian kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), a small falcon the size of a blue jay, was occasionally used by the common people. Its diminutive size meant it was limited to small, uninteresting prey like insects and mice, so nobility scorned it. They especially prized the gyrfalcon, largest of the falcons, and the peregrine, the swiftest. The merlin, no larger than a pigeon, was considered an appropriate noblewoman’s falcon, while the fast but delicate hobby was allotted to the page." 

- Wingmasters

According to the Roxy Music site, Bryan Ferry had done his research - he notes that Helmore "is carrying on her wrist a merlin – the bird of prey favored by lady falconers."

Back to the falcony fansite Wingmasters

"Medieval falconers, men and women, used hooded falcons as props. Since the hooded birds, a symbol of the aristocracy, would stand virtually motionless on the falconer’s glove, they could be carried anywhere. Hooded falcons accompanied their noble owners to court, into banqueting halls, even into church....

"Among the lord’s attendants at every residence would be young squires, noblemen’s sons intent on learning the knightly skills of riding, fighting, hunting (large game like wild boar and deer) and hawking....  falconry, thanks to the new Norman aristocrats and the feudal system they imposed on England, had become a pastime of the nobility. It had also become a symbol of nobility. A hooded falcon was now just as much an accoutrement of an aristocrat as a well-bred horse or a sword.

" Falconry became so firmly entrenched in society that by the 1100s even the merchant class of London was aping the nobility and flying “ignoble” hawks -shortwings like the sparowhawk and the goshawk. The “noble” hawks – the longwinged, desirable falcons – were the traditional prerogative of the privileged class because of their flying style and hunting prowess, as well as their beauty."

- Wingmasters

"Noblemen’s sons" - one thinks inevitably of Ferry's fanatical fox-hunting scions Otis and Isaac. Who make a cameo appearance in S+A:

Outraged by the Labour government’s ban on these ancient blood-rites of the English aristocracy, Otis - a member of the Countryside Alliance and joint master of the South Shropshire Hunt – joins a storming of the House of Commons. There’s a pattern here that causes Bryan’s boys to be labelled “the feral Ferrys”: two years earlier, Isaac got suspended from Eton after sending an abusive email to an anti-hunting campaigner. Their father, meanwhile, continues his drift rightwards, alluding quietly in interviews to having Conservative political views, in between more lively talk of wine connoisseurship, pheasant shooting with the Earl of Arundel, and his growing collection of paintings by the Bloomsbury Group.

Remembered that one of my favorite poems, "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins,  is inspired by and named after the kestrel in flight (windhover being another name for the bird). 

The Windhover 

To Christ our Lord

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

     

   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Always thought that there was a resemblance between Mark E. Smith and the young lad who plays Billy in the film (David Bradley)

Hines did a bunch of other collaborations with Ken Loach, including a 1977 BBC double-play The Price of Coal. 

"The two plays have the same actors, but are different in tone.

The first is comic, and deals with the preparations for an official visit by Prince Charles. The humour revolves around the expensive and ludicrous preparations that are required when there is an official visit from a member of the Royal Family. The workers recognise this and cannot take it seriously. Management recognises it but has to play the game. Special toilets must be constructed "just in case" and then destroyed after the visit. A worker is instructed to paint a brick holding up a window. On the eve of the visit the slogan "Scargill rules OK" is painted on a wall. The manager comments "When I find out who did that I'll string him up by his knackers". It is a surreal situation for many of the miners who obviously bear no love for Royalty.

The second deals with a pit accident where some men are killed, and attempts to rescue some trapped men. It is loosely based on the Lofthouse Colliery disaster in 1973." - from YouTube.

Here's the first one 

Love the so-Seventies look of Barry Hines in this clip. 

There is also a "lost" play by Hines about the Miner's Strike and its socially destructive aftermath, After the Strike, that finally got put on posthumously in Sheffield.  

Talking about devastation, Hines's other great claim to fame is writing Threads, the nuclear war TV drama that depicts the consequences of a multi-megaton bomb being dropped on Sheffield. 

Well, I got (almost) to the end of this post before noticing that it's an unintended sequel to the one about Adrian Street and his Welsh coal miner dad -  the dialectic of grime and glam. 

What working in a UK mine is like in the 21st Century. 

What working in a UK mine was like in the 1980s and 1970s.

Lord knows what it was like back when Bryan Ferry's dad was doing it....

 

John Cameron's score for Kes, as issued by Trunk Records some years ago. Flute, that most airy of wind instruments, features prominently.

 

antitheatricality + politics round-up - first Republican debate / 4th arraignment / the Mug Shot special

Ronald Brownstein at the Atlantic wittily compares the first Republican debate to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - the peripheral characters take centre stage;  the hero upstages them by his pointed absence. 

"For much of the play’s three acts, they strain for even glimpses of the man at the center of the tale, Prince Hamlet. The eight GOP candidates onstage last night often seemed like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with their words largely stripped of meaning by the absence of the central protagonist in their drama."

"... Nikki Haley, who has often seemed a secondary player in this race, delivered a forceful performance—particularly in rebutting the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy on policy toward Ukraine—that made her the most vivid figure onstage to many Republicans. But all that sound and fury fundamentally lacked relevance to the central story in the GOP race"

"Sound and fury" - nice use of Shakespearian soliloquy there (albeit from Macbeth not Hamlet) and moreover it's a meta-theatrical if not quite anti-theatrical figure when you see the full quote:

“Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” 

Brownstein brings it back to his opening conceit in the closing para: 

"The final act of Stoppard’s play finds Rosencrantz and Guildenstern drifting toward a doom that neither understands, nor can summon the will to escape. In their caution and timidity, the Republicans distantly chasing Trump don’t look much different."

Incidentally, debate co-moderator Bret Baier is to be commended for the nifty description of Trump as “the elephant not in the room”

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic on "An Inane Spectacle" (aka the first Republican presidential debate)

"When the Beatles were just kids playing in cheap bars in Hamburg, a club owner would push them onstage and yell “Mach Schau!,” meaning something like “Give us a show!” That’s what happened last night: Fox and the audience turned on the lights, hollered “Mach Schau!” and let it rip.

"No one was better suited for this inane spectacle than Ramaswamy, whose campaign has been a fusillade of high-energy babble that has often veered off into conspiracy theories. Ramaswamy has perfected MAGA performance art: the Trumpian stream of noise meant to drown out both questions and answers, the weird Peter Navarro hand gestures, the cheap shots sent as interruptions to other candidates while whining about being interrupted himself, the bizarre and sometimes contradictory positions meant only to provoke mindless anger.

"And the crowd loved it." 

New Yorker's Jay Caspian Kang on stand up guy Vivek Ramaswamy:

"Ramaswamy’s insult-comedy show had its desired effect on the press.... Reporters from media outlets like CNN ignored other candidates in the post-debate scrums and beelined for Ramaswamy.... So begins a now familiar sequence of events: Ramaswamy’s gleeful trolling got the most attention, which will, in turn, drive more press coverage, which then will lead to better name recognition and a boost in the polls. As long as he’s willing to entertain—and it must be said that Ramaswamy’s provocations were the only lively part of an otherwise boring show—he will be following the Trump playbook for staying in the headlines."  

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on Trump's mug shot

"Last night, the 45th president became inmate number P01135809 of Georgia’s Fulton County Jail. Trump had his mug shot taken. It was shared with the public. We looked, of course. And he was prepared for our gaze: hair, makeup, angle, pose. In the portrait—it is a portrait, in the end—Trump glares directly into the camera. He seethes. He glowers. He turns in a studied performance. Photos like this are typically exercises in enforced humility. Trump’s is a display of ongoing power. He treats his mug shot as our menace...

"... The typical mug shot, usually taken after the subject’s unexpected arrest, bestows its power on the people on the other end of the camera. The alleged criminal, in it, tends to be disheveled, displaced, small. But Trump, trailed by the news cameras that confer his ubiquity, found a way to turn the moment’s historical meaning—a former president, mug-shotted—into one more opportunity for brand building....

"Hhe looks straight at the viewer, seemingly incandescent with rage, taking the advice he has reportedly given to others: Perform your anger. Turn it into your script. Make it into your threat. His menacing glare gives a similar stage direction to the people who follow him and do his bidding—both in spite of his disrespect for democratic processes and because of it.

"Welcome to the age, then, of mug-shot rule. Trump, evidently pleased with his portrait, broadcast it on social media. (The platforms he used included X, formerly known as Twitter, which had once banned him for spreading violent lies to its users.) The image he shared is doctored, of course. Its background is stripped of the Fulton County seal, as if it were a mere headshot for an actor seeking the role of “autocrat.” 

"....Trump, reportedly, orchestrated the logistics of last night’s surrender so that its melodramas would play out on prime time."

Vinson Cunningham at the New Yorker on the mugshot as Trump's true Presidential portrait (I thought it could be a new US postal stamp!) 

"One thing that the picture makes plain—not for the first time, but in a definitive way that won’t soon be forgotten—is how many of Trump’s cues are cribbed directly and consciously from the cinematic literature of romanticized criminals. Trump’s the kind of guy who thinks Scorsese movies are straightforward celebrations of tough guys on the come-up; here’s how you make it in America if you’ve got enough guff and a high tolerance for trouble. He seems to have styled himself, for a long time now, after the “goodfellas,” let some of their leering rhythms slip into his facial bearing and his speech....  This mug shot’s been a long time coming—it is, perhaps, the point toward which the entire asymptote of Trump’s life has bowed. He might be angry in the mug shot; he may well be scared. But he damn sure doesn’t look surprised. Nobody is.

"Far from surprise: can there be any doubt that, hours before his surrender, before the camera ever flashed, Trump stood in front of some gold-framed mirror and practiced this lipless pout? He knows better than anybody that his supporters—who still make up the formidable majority of the Republican primary electorate—will take this picture and make it a banner....  And so, of course, he must have stood for countless minutes at the sink, perfecting his sourpuss expression, hoping it would convey manly disapproval and unshakable belief. Here I go again, he’s saying to his people through the pose, doing this for you." 

"...Trump knows from symbols, knows that this new one will stand more as a Rorschach than as an automatic indictment, knows that it works as well for him as it does for his adversaries. And let’s face it: he can be perversely funny, and the picture will give him a new, tight five minutes of fascistic standup material."

Mark Leibovitch at Atlantic with yet more analysis of the shot seen around the world 

Clichés are always bad, and sometimes quite wrong, but the conceit that this would be a “split screen” week for the Republican campaign—eight GOP debaters on one screen, Trump’s co-defendants getting processed on the other—was spectacularly amiss from the start. One screen this week would blot out all of the rest. ... Trump’s mug shot, probably the most anticipated in history, seems destined to also be the most analyzed and disseminated....  You can assume that the subject, a figure of uncommon vanity, obsessed like hell over his bureaucratic close-up. How should he pose? For what aura should he strive? Tough guy, defiant, or wounded pup? Would makeup be allowed? Thumbs-ups or no?

"Finally, around 8:40 p.m, the mug shot landed. Trump’s hair and eyebrows were more feathered than usual, like he had brushed them out. Lips were pursed, eyes stern and severe, his brow zig-zagging like lightning. The former president looked like the Grinch—the Grinch Who Stole Georgia (or tried)... ".... Trump’s photo offers a rough visage, formidable and extremely serious—which is what I assume he was going for. He made an effort here. It paid off. He gave his haters nothing in the ballpark of vulnerability. "

Twitter folk on the over the top motorcade

Charles M. Blow at New York Times on "why  Trump's indictments don't feel like the finale"

Trump achieved this by capitalizing, to an almost unprecedented degree, on Americans’ addiction to celebrity culture. He’s not the first president to accrue and employ celebrity: John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did so, too.

But each of those men married his celebrity to our politics; Trump has used his celebrity to pervert our politics. He sensed the fragility of our political system, its overreliance on precedent, norms and decorum and its inability to anticipate chaos — chaos that he was able to weaponize.

Trump recognized that for many Americans, celebrity was more powerful than character or civics. That celebrity allowed for a curated reality, one that acknowledged the flower but hid the thorns.

In this environment, some people’s desire to belong and be affirmed and validated transcended truth and reality. And in that space, he could be the captain of their team, the leader of their band and the minister of their church. 

For them, Trumpism became a form of identity entertainment, a carnival for the like-minded guided by an impresario who mixes amusement with anger, fear and grievance.

In this environment, it’s also easy for Trump to fend off challengers who appeal more to the mind than to the soul.

His closest rival for the Republican nomination is Ron DeSantis, whose campaign is struggling as Republicans continue to rally around Trump. DeSantis possesses no magic. Never has. He’s dull and boring, a beta male cosplaying bravado.

David Remnick at the New Yorker on "The Mobster Cosplay of Donald Trump'

Trump, Daniel Richman added, has “the affect and sometimes the communication style of a mobster. It’s a combination of clear signalling as to who has power and the source of that power with an obliqueness of expression that, intentionally, barely conceals the threat.” Trump used the same tactics, Richman said, during a 2019 phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, in which Trump leaned on him to “look into” the Biden family in exchange for unlocking a weapons sale. Richman said that in many rico cases, the government will display charts that resemble the orderly hierarchy of the Ford Motor Company. But the Oval Office in the Trump years seemed more like a mob social club, in which “people come in and out without clear titles, and access is freely given as long as they pledge fealty. If you say you have a good idea, you’re told to run with it.”

Paul Attanasio, who wrote “Donnie Brasco,” a 1997 Mob film starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp, told me that Trump, though he deploys the swagger of a mafia boss, is in no way a wise mafia boss. “It would be highly unusual for the boss to get involved and make a call like the one to Raffensperger,” Attanasio said. “There’s no way Vincent (the Chin) Gigante would make that call. He’d have someone do it for him. But it’s Trump’s arrogance, his belief that he can do it better and successfully intimidate Raffensperger.”... 

Trump, the unwise wise guy... long enjoyed the sleazy glamour and cynical counsel supplied by Mob-adjacent figures like Roy Cohn... [but] has no code and shows no loyalty. Despite his mobster cosplay, in short, he lacks even a gangster’s sense of dignity. Carmine (the Snake) Persico, for all his many sins, would have found Trump unworthy of the Cosa Nostra. Before the Mafia’s disintegration, a boss was obliged to help a fallen or legally entangled soldier. And yet Trump won’t even pay the legal bills of Giuliani, his loyal sidekick. The most lasting image of Giuliani will not be of a valiant public servant inspiring a grieving city but of a cynical mook lying about stolen votes on Trump’s behalf while rivulets of hair dye course down his cheek.

 Hillary Clinton, asked by @maddow about the disconnect between Biden’s record and his approval ratings, says Biden has a tougher time breaking through the info ecosystem because Biden is “not a performer in a political theater sense” but “a producer in a political results sense”

And a couple of stray older-vintage tropes:

"Trump is a truly authentic fake - always acting, always on stage - but that is all he is. He's not introspective, retrospective or prospective. In his mind, he is more a persona than a person, more a primal force than a fully realized human being.”

 - NWU psychologist Dan McAdams

"One great danger of the Trump presidency is that he’s uninterested in performance [meaning here, results]  as long as he can create the image that he’s been successful. Actual success is irrelevant to him. The image of success is what’s important.”

- Max Skidmore

plus

all-purpose trope that fits any Trump&cru situation then, now and forever

Teri Kanefield: 

Of course, Trump is doing what he always does: inventing his own version of reality and expecting people to go along. As Timothy Snyder said, he writes the script and forces everyone to become actors in his reality play.

Just suddenly struck me the theatricalism in the expression "stage a coup"

"grotesque with gratitude" (RIP Edna / Barry)

Watching a bunch of Dame Edna Everage stuff  - a doc, chat show appearances, those An Audience With Dame Edna specials done in front of an invited congregation of her peers, people in entertainment  and media and arts, where the guests get to ask sycophantic questions.... it struck me what a clever, penetrating parody of the hierarchism of showbiz had been wrought and sustained for decade after decade.  

In the doc, John Lahr notes the way that Dame Edna constantly reminds her audience of the distance between her and them. They are nobodies, grotesque with gratitude (her phrase I think - I scribbled it down on hearing) for the privilege of admission into her presence.  

Or they are nearer to being nobodies, in the case of the celebs invited to An Audience With Dame Edna or appearing on her own various chatshows. She similarly constantly reminds the guests of their lower rank in the pecking order (the humiliation of having a name tag stuck on their breast, should Edna mentally misplace the name of Gina Lollabrigida or Julio Iglesias). Their starpower wattage is so much dimmer than the supernova of the housewife-turned-superstar (in later declensions, gigastar).

Stardom as noblesse oblige is wittily, wickedly lampooned in her theme song "My Public"

Talking of obsequiousness -  hierarchy - fame as a form of non-hereditary royalty - and indeed Australians...  or even dead Australians.... 

..... how remiss of me not to mention the most embarrassing piece of writing I have ever read in my entire life! 

I refer of course to Clive James, expatiating in The New Yorker upon the subject of his "love" for - and his close personal relationship with - Princess Diana. 

The cultural cringe is harrowing to witness.

Such suppurating humility and humble-braggery...  but worse still is the way James tries to balance Diana-adoration with staying on the right side of then-Prince Charles - there's a lot of forelock-tugging about the virtues and admirable qualities of the monarch-to-be.  

Back to Barry Humphries.... you can talk about Bowie and Blackstar and the elegance of the way he stage managed his exit from public life... but maybe this surpasses: the dying entertainer arranges for his comedic creation to compose the "eulogy" for one of the quality newspapers... 

Oh and here's another self-written obituary, for an Australian paper

Clive James is actually in the audience for this sequel to An Audience With Dame Edna and asks her a "probing" question. 

Yet another audience (this time 1988)

The Aussie version 

An early documentary

I think this effort below is the doc I watched - good contributions from Germaine Greer and others, with stuff about the bohemian demimonde of 1950s Melbourne, Humphries as the dandy aesthete flaneur provocateur.

I have actually sat through the whole of this Barry McKenzie movie, I'm not sure if I could say this was an hour-plus well spent... 

Humphries had a great passion for Dada and Surrealism and the whole épater le bourgeois bit. As a teen I was impressed when I read about his pranks e.g. going on an airplane flight and secretly filling the air sickness bag with Heinz Sandwich Spread, then later - during turbulence ideally - pretending to puke copiously into the bag, making so much noise that everyone in the vicinity noticed ... only to immediately, with a flourish, produce a spoon from his pocket and commence to eat his own regurgitate. This exploit had a similar admiration-stirring and aspirational effect on me as reading about Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell's defilement of library books.

Ah here's the story, as kept in an old scrapbook of mine circa the age of 15. A different Heinz product, but otherwise exactly as I remembered - shows the impression it made on teenage me!

One expression of Humphries's antagonism to the conventional was his interest in abject arcana and human peculiarity, which resulted in the compendium Bizarre.

Which I picked up surprisingly cheap a few years ago. But I confess to being somewhat underwhelmed - the contents are not nearly as grotesque and disturbing as e.g. Apocalypse Culture or even things that my old pal Paul Oldfield would assemble out of pages photocopied from Victorian era encyclopedias full of strange antiquities and anthropological curiosities from all around the world, the freakshow appeal masked by a fig-leaf of edification.

Still, in 1965 when it came out - well before Humphries became anything like a household name - Bizarre would probably have been mind-bending stuff.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Looking at that 15-16 years of age scrapbook, I was surprised to see no less than two Dame Edna features cut out and glued in there. Music was creeping in as an interest, but the bulk of the stuff in there is either science fiction / futurology / alternate history, or it's comedy related (the post-Python diaspora). Don't laugh, but at one point, I thought my future would be in comedy... 

Lots of rank-pulling and pecking-order pokes vis-a-vis her fellow thesps in the above!

An early cameo as one of the Seven Deadly Sins - Envy - in Bedazzled, which might be my favorite filmed comedy, although there's a lot of competition. 

via Andrew Parker, the work that Clive James was most proud of -  the series Fame in the 20th Century 

"I would have been lost without a mirror" - the mod > glam continuum

 

"I'd say that Mod was mentally a very homosexual thing, though not in any physical sense. I was too hung up on myself to be interested in anyone else" - Mark Feld aka Marc Bolan 

"I was completely knocked out by my own image, by the idea of Mark Feld" - Feld / Bolan

"... they danced by themselves, lost in narcissistic dreams and, wherever there was a mirror, they formed queues. Often, they would wear make-up - eye-liner and mascara - but that didn't mean they were queer, or not necessarily; it was just a symbol of strangeness..." - Nik Cohn.


From Today There Are No Gentlemen (1971)

Oddly, Marc and crew look very much like gentlemen in this photo for the Town spread. 

Oh yea we're the London boys

Do you remember

Going to Petticoat Lane

With all the conceptions

Moving in your brain

Oh yea we're the London boys

Don't you remember that we're just the London boys

Oh yea we're the London boys

Mighty mean mod king

Dressed like fame

London to Brighton

And then back again

Changing life's patterns

To get to the top

And when you get up there

You don't know if you're there or what

Bright lights, Soho, Wardour street

You hope you make friends with the guys that you meet

Somebody shows you round

Now you've met the London boys

Things seem good again, someone cares about you

Oh, the first time that you tried a pill

You feel a little queasy, decidedly ill

You're gonna be sick, but you mustn't lose faith

To let yourself down would be a big disgrace

With the London boys, with the London boys

You're only seventeen, but you think you've grown

In the month you've been away from your parents' home

You take the pills too much

You don't give a damn about that jobs you've got

So long as you're with the London boys

A London boy, oh a London boy

Your flashy clothes are your pride and joy

A London boy, a London boy

You're crying out loud that you're a London boy

You think you've had a lot of fun

But you ain't got nothing, you're on the run

It's too late now, cause you're out there boy

You've got it made with the rest of the toys

Now you wish you'd never left your home

You've got what you wanted but you're on your own

With the London boys

Now you've met the London boys 

66 in 73 - Bowie revisiting his mod 'n Marquee days on Pin Ups.

Ghastly turgid rendition

"Shipes... things before my eyes"

mirror mirror mon amour

 

“When I was modelling, I spent half my life staring at thousands of perfect reflections. It got to a stage where I was losing all sense of reality, so after I quit modeling, I took all the mirrors out of my house.”

- Grace Jones, 1981, on sitting shiva for her media-ghostified self

"Who can account for facial expressions made in a mirror of people?" - Iggy Pop

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We're what's happening

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We're an ice machine

Nightclubbing we're nightclubbing

We walk like a ghost

We learn dances brand new dances

Like the nuclear bomb

Written by Sting, covered by Grace but could equally have done for Iggy - it's almost like a rewrite of "Search and Destroy" 

"it only takes a camera to change her mind"