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...
I always found it fascinating how BH styled his hair a bit like John Cale, having it longer on one side than the other. A tonsorial signal of someone who is a bit off-beam, irregular, non-conformist.
ReplyDeleteAlso a bit odd come to think of it is how Joe Orton has faded away as a cultural reference. There is a strange unremarked phenomenon of how once-essential figures quietly disappear. Peter Greenaway is another example.
I suppose it shows how the epater le bougeois thing can fade really quickly. Occasionally I think of digging out my collected plays of Orton book and actually reading them (I never got round to it). Or watching the movie of Entertaining Mr. Sloane. But never do.
DeleteThere's also that great counterfactual regret that the Beatles didn't have the balls to do the Joe Orton script Up Against It. Or perhaps they would have, but Brian Epstein was against it. I can't remember.
Sometimes the things that seemed shocking and subversive when you were a nipper, they really seem dated. Black comic satires etc. E.g. I tried watching the movie of The Ruling Class but had to give up about 15 mins in.
Actually Peter Greenaway is another John Cale lookalike:
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Greenaway#/media/File:Greenaway_01.jpg
A definite type, methinks.
I tried watching a couple of Peter Greenaways recently and they were unbearable. I wasn't that much of a convert at the time - really liked The Draughtsman Contract, liked each subsequent film less and less - but yeah, not aged well. As you say, dropped off the menu.
ReplyDeleteHe belongs to the class of film I call "Time Out Movies". Given drooling coverage in that publication at the time... might even be a cover story... you'd troop out to see them and they might absorb in the moment of watching, but leave no trace in the memory ultimately.
I think that the underlying issue is that post-war British culture, popular music aside, just wasn't very good.
ReplyDeleteA lot of stuff got blown up because it touched a particular nerve, usually the class system, or sexual repression, or bitterness over the first world war, but once those issues faded, or the focus on them changed, you are left with generally mediocre quality work with dated themes.
I wanted to reject this, but as I was trying to thinking of people who were really good, I kept going "but what about?... No I suppose not" and "how about?... eh, not really."
DeleteSo what were the real achievements of post-war British culture, music excluded?
In writing: BS Johnson, Angela Carter, JG Ballard. Maybe some other fantasy and sci-fi: Moorcock, Brunner, Aldiss. I know many people rate Iris Murdoch, but I've never read her.
Poetry: Philip Larkin may have been a terrible human being, but his talent is undeniable.
Painting: Bacon and Freud are fantastic. Hockney sometimes interesting.
Cinema: Roeg from Performance to The Man Who Fell To Earth. A strand of brutal crime stories including Get Carter and The Long Good Friday.
Comedy: Monty Python and much of what that crowd did before and after.
Put it all together, it's not *too* terrible, I think.
Saying "popular music aside" is a bit of a dodge - pop music is the great British post-war achievement, as I argue here https://tidal.com/magazine/article/british-rock-achievement/1-91753
DeletePop and rock and etc justifies the country's existence, culturally speaking, and keeps it on the world stage
But to Ed's list...
DeletePython and post-Python diaspora - the best episodes of Fawlty Towers are as good as Shakespeare.
There's probably others in the comedy realm (David Stubbs has just written a book on British comedy, Different Times). Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Comedy tends not to achieve timelessness, by its nature, but perhaps that's not a reason to dismiss it.
I have never read B.S. Johnson but I do own and have started (if not got far with -it's a bit too thorough and painstakingly chronological) Jonathan Coe's biography of B.S., which appealed for some reason. Never got on with Angela Carter. Would substitute the young Ian McEwan - those creepy, twisted, macabre short stories and The Cement Garden novella (after that it gets it a bit "in the tradition" - with the exception of the marvelous On Chesil Beach - he seems to come into his own the shorter the work).
Roeg's films alone justify British cinema but I would add also Joseph Losey for The Servant and The Accident. And what about Powell's Peeping Tom?
Theatre - Pinter. Look Back in Anger. I was terribly impressed by Stoppard as a schoolboy but I'm not sure what I'd think now - a bit too Greenaway-clever-ish?
Writing - biased obviously but I tend to think of the music press as some kind of marvelous achievement (although again, like comedy, how much of it can escape its moment, it's hard to say - perhaps that's no reason to discount it)
No because I think popular music is generally the least British of all the popular cultural forms. I remember reading an interview with The Residents in the late 80's when they stated that The Rolling Stones were basically an American band, which made me bristle at the time, but I think in hindsight was uncomfortably near the mark.
DeleteWhat amazes me about a lot of those Sixties bands is just how effortlessly Americanised they were, singing in pure American accents about picking up women in Memphis, or sitting in the county jail or whatever. It's a British(ish) take on an American cultural form, and that ultimately is where its vitality resides.
Obviously there were some good post-war British films, plays, novels etc, but it wasn't exactly renaissance Florence, was it?
In the past you've said the opposite, more or less, that British rock surpasses the American original. I don't think it's true that the "vitality" resides in the source, so much more and different is brought to bear.
Delete"it wasn't exactly renaissance Florence, was it?"
DeleteHow many other places and times have been? It's quite a imposing benchmark.
In some ways, the truest and most telling post-WW2 British art / writing / etc is the stuff that reflects decline, dwindling or caged vitality, life passing you by, the humdrum, smallness of spirit, the provincial, a sense of being peripheral - of living where the action isn't etc
DeleteSo Larkin, Billy Liar, Alan Bennett, Morrissey, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads
It's going to work with bathos and wryness and understatement and non-drama, so necessarily won't have the dynamism and scale of I dunno Mailer or Scorsese or Coppola
I think the best 60/70's British bands were clearly better than their American peers, who generally didn't even come close. But I still think that if you were to make the "Britain as the 51st State" case, British pop/rock would be evidence for the prosecution, not the defence.
DeleteBut the argument I'm making about British post-war culture perhaps not being all that good, is that culturally it seems to resonate less and less, regardless of what you or I think of it. It genuinely amazes me how what I once thought was vital appears to be languishing in neglect.
It could be as Tyler states that these things are just cyclical, and a lot of stuff that appears to be fading out will be revived at some point, but I'm quite a bit less confident of that.
"In some ways, the truest and most telling post-WW2 British art / writing / etc is the stuff that reflects decline, dwindling or caged vitality..." Agreed, and that is what finally unlocked Michael Moorcock for me. As sword 'n' sorcery pulp, Elric - recently republished in a rather fine collected edition - is reasonably good fun. As an allegory of British imperial decline, it's amazing.
Delete"The Rolling Stones were basically an American band, which made me bristle at the time, but I think in hindsight was uncomfortably near the mark..." Up to a point, I think. Wasn't a lot of the energy and creativity in the British bands of the 60s and 70s created by their cultural differences from the Americans? I forget the exact quote, but there's a good line from some critic about how Muddy Waters had the blues because of the legacy of centuries of slavery and the enduring reality of American racism, while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had the blues because girls wouldn't have sex with them. An oversimplification, of course, but I think there's something in it.
(It may be Charles Shaar Murray, in his excellent Hendrix book Crosstown Traffic.)
DeleteMaybe this is a consequence of bring born in the 80s, but I've always found Clive James' persona as a man of letters ever-ready to pontificate on Dostoyevsky and Proust was always secondary to his true calling: introducing clips of Japanese game-show contestants having scorpions thrust down their underpants and Italian housewives exposing their breasts in order to win a washing machine, with the occasional sycophantic interview of Eric Idle and Geri Halliwell. I still find myself mildly shocked when Clive James makes an appearance in one of those unbearably chummy accounts of Mart, Hitch, Salman et al displaying their supposed rarefied wit at the sozzled after-party to some literary shindig nobody in the world has ever heard of.
ReplyDeleteGreenaway is still a known name with the younger film snobs I'm aware of, and I think Orton is just on one of those involuntary ebbs that certain cultural figures go through for no clear reason, generally ended with a big rediscovery/revival
ReplyDeleteThere does seem to be a quintessentially Australian sensibility that Humphries was a key figure of/in, and I think a certain amount of that is a particular kind of nihilism. He was a reactionary provocateur for provocateuring's sake, either untethered or actively opposed to the politically or culturally radical currents that typically accompany his areas of expertise (that got more acute as he aged with his increasingly pointed homo/transphobia - something he shares with Greer, interestingly enough), but what's funny is that even ostentatiously 'progressive' manifestations have a lot of the same flavor.
Reading the criticisms/thinkpieces about the Hannah Gadsby/'Pablo-matic' ruckus, it seemed like the problem to even those otherwise sympathetic to the presented arguments is that there seemed to be two currents at work in the exhibit - the positive idea of expanding and revising the canon in a more feminist direction, which seemed like it was thrown on by the museum curators as a grace-saving, unintentionally patronizing afterthought; and contextless, often apolitical mockery of the displayed paintings, which seemed to be Gadsby's primary interest and contribution. At least one person who noted this connected it to her Australian comedy roots - where the default mode is ruthless, indiscriminate puncturing of any hint of pretense or intellectualism from anyone. Humphries, for all his love of interwar high culture, operated in pretty much the same vein.
Whether Greenaway or Orton are having their flames kept alive by pockets of the cognescenti is not really the point. They used to be huge cultural presences - Orton was probably as well known as the Sex Pistols, the kind of person your mum would have heard of. Dennis Potter is another example, a man who was revered while he was still alive.
ReplyDeleteIt's strange how things like "The Singing Detective" or "Boys From The Black Stuff", which had enormous cultural impacts within living memory, have fallen off the radar. It's not like there was any kind of critical backlash against any of these figures, it's as though everyone has forgotten to remember them. Forgetting to remember is by necessity a widely unobserved phenomenon.
Anglo-American popular culture has devolved to the point that the 'cognoscenti' are the only remaining people expected to know about playwrights, so I'm not convinced that's a valid argument. (Ask a modern American who Edward Albee or Tennessee Williams were, and you've only got 50-50 odds they could even place the names.) Depending on how optimistic you are, they're (we're) either the keepers of the flame or the designated mourners (I choose to believe the former, though I would, wouldn't I?).
ReplyDeleteWhen Sam Shepard passed, I was genuinely surprised to see such a level of familiarity with his work from other people in my circle - I had already slotted him in that 'forgotten to remember, regardless of quality' category. So these currents can run awfully deep, not registering until they do. Look at Eve Babitz - someone who was periodically, often idly mentioned as an 'unjustly neglected figure' for decades before her mid-10s revival.
Well, it might be cultural devolution, but it might also be that a lot of that stuff just wasn't very good in the first place. Or at least it wasn't sufficiently universal to transcend its place and time. We can only wait and see.
ReplyDelete