"photography poisons the world" (All the World's A Screen addendum)

Here's an entry from The Biographical Dictionary of Film in which David Thomson rehearses some of the concerns about "movie" addressed in the new book A Sudden Flicker of Light:

Fortuitously - but purely accidentally - timed for the tenacious Madonna's return to visibility with an alleged return-to-form album.

But what if the form being returned to is of no concern or interest to you? Or even actively repulsive, as with Thomson? 

I can't say I have never liked a Madonna record. The early club tracks, when she was almost a nobody,  on a par with the great Vicky D - had a husky exuberance.  "Into the Groove" conveys a timeless sentiment and really does sound carefree. "Vogue," as record and video, had a certain military ruthlessness that earned one's submission. "Justify My Love" has a good stolen beat and some heavy-breathing soft-porno appeal. "Ray Of Light" - if you could stifle your guffaw at the idea of Madonna taking a spiritual turn, getting into Kabbalah and all that - is pleasant pop trance. 

But you know how there are people who are born to sing? Madonna isn't one of them, which is why there is such a sinewy texture to her vocals. Nor is she nice to look at - not because of her looks but because the personality radiates through the face.

I always remember the unsentimental compliment paid by her freshly married husband Guy Ritchie, when you'd think they'd have been in the honeymoon phase: something like "she's a great girl. Such a hard worker".  

Can't find the exact quote but searching turned up a post-divorce compliment of sorts:

"She's a manifester, if there ever was one. First-rate manifester. Madonna makes things happen. Put Madonna up against any twenty-three-year-old, she'll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them."

Apparently her four-hour daily exercise sessions were a bone of marital contention. 

Still I suppose that stardom-at-all-costs drive does makes her glam, which is why she makes a brief appearance in the Aftershocks section of S+A, with five lines on "Vogue":

1990

March -- Madonna’s B&W retro-glamour video for “Vogue” either pays tribute to  or coopts New York’s gay subculture of balls and costumed competition, to create an anthem of escape-through-fantasy and magical masquerade. Learn from the screen gods and goddesses who “gave good face”, advises Madge;   “strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.” 

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Ah I have posted on this subject before - the Thomson commentary and my aversion to Madonna. A more detailed breakdown on that here. 

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia / the dangers of high self-esteem

Last of the Trump related posts, this one is from midway through his (first?) Presidency:

 

Magic Unrealism, or, The President of Ambrosia

The core of positive thinking - which is also the core of glam - is the power of Desire to override the Reality Principle.

The power of wish-speech (childish, magical, narcissistic) to reject reality as a facts-ist regime.

Hence, Billy Liar's opening line: "Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia"

(Fascism versus Facts-ism - in his fantasyland Ambrosia, Billy is a military hero / benign despot in the caudillo style -  fond of pageantry, parades,  rallies and the like. Beloved by his people). 

Hence, Trump's gainsaying of any element, however small, of consensus reality that is a blow to his own grandiose self-image. 

From the Washington Post:

"Trump plainly views the act of lying, or making things up, or contradicting himself with relentless abandon, as an assertion of power — that is, the power to render reality irrelevant, the power to roll right over constraints normally imposed by expectations of consistency or fealty to basic norms of reasoned, factual inquiry.

As Jacob T. Levy has written, these “demonstrations of power undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.” The whole point of them is to assert the power to say what the truth is, or what the truth should be, even when — or especially when — easily verifiable facts dictate the contrary. The brazenness of Trump’s lying is not a mere byproduct of his desire to mislead. It is absolutely central to the whole project of declaring the power to say what reality is.

Trump’s boast about making stuff up in his meeting with Trudeau comes close to an open admission of this. He lied, or made stuff up, because he could, yes, but also because what one wants to be true actually can be made true."

"Billy Liar - the boy whose imagination is larger than his life"

PR is a form of propaganda  - the StarSelf-as-miniState broadcasting how it would like to be seen by the general public

(cf Trump pretending to be his own publicist, variously known as John Miller and John Barron - later the name of his son, intriguingly - procreation as narcissistic duplication, plus he'd already reused Donald for his first-born

(oh yes he's the Great Pretender.... a pretense of Greatness)

The glam parallel supreme (although there are many - Alice "I love to tell lies" Cooper, Bowie) is Marc Bolan.

From an early draft of S+A:

"Right from the start of his career... Bolan told tall tales, offering journalists grossly inflated accounts of real events and circumstances, while promising that would never be delivered and that in most cases never got beyond being an idle fantasy:   TV cartoon series based around him and scripted by him, screenplays for “three European pictures... including one for Fellini”, several science fiction novels on the verge of UK publication. He boasted of having painted “enough for an exhibition” and having “five books finished which I`ve been sitting on for a long time”. Even on the downward slope of his career, he unfurled fantastical plans for a “new audio-visual art form”.

"Music journalists ate it up because it was good copy.  PR man Keith Altham compared him to Walter Mitty: “he knew that people always wanted something larger-than-life, so he always exaggerated. And sometimes he actually began to believe that himself”. Billy Liar is another parallel. The opening line of Keith Waterhouse’s novel is “Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia”—the latter being Billy Fisher’s fantasy-land, where he rules as a benign dictator/generalissimo.  For Bolan as for Fisher, reality was a facts-ist regime from which he was determined to secede.  Both came from  humble, hard-graft backgrounds (lorry driver father, market stall-holder mum, in Bolan’s Case) amid prosaic, color-depleted surroundings (the East End of London, rather than the imaginary industrial-mercantile Northern town of Stradhoughton in Billy Liar).  Both escaped through make-believe and making things up."

Positive thinking is a form of self-hypnotism, the beaming into the unconscious of "mental photographs", power-poses, heroic self-images, self-actualisation maxims, affirmations etc - a form of internally introjected propaganda. 

In The Power of Positive Thinking Norman Vincent Peale (Trump's pastor as a young man) advises: "Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding. Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade. Your mind will seek to develop the picture ... Do not build up obstacles in your imagination."

Poz-thinking infected forms of religion (e.g. Joel Osteen's prosperity gospel) (although positive thinking is itself a religion, a perversion of Protestantism) explicitly encourage believers to avoid contact with viewpoints that contradict one's wishful thinking. Osteen sermonises about how one's seed-of-greatness will not flourish in a soil of negativity - it is imperative to surround yourself with positive people (i.e. people who will not discourage you with their more reality-based judgements and lowered expectations, fatalists of every stripe). Similar to the techniques of Scientology, where the organisation encourages / forces the convert to abandon friends and family members who are not down with the positivity program and to instead spend one's entire social life within the belief-reinforcing enclosure  of the community of believers.

Another way of doing this is to constantly reshuffle your cabinet to get rid of realists, people who give any credence to the expertise of the reality-based community. 

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bonus beats - a related-to-the-above section from my afterword to Ghosts of My Life:

Where could Mark have gone next, as a listener, writer, thinker? Could Mark have created a new adventure for himself in the later years of his life – intellectually as well as in terms of finding music and pop culture that excited and stimulated him? .... We can barely guess where he would have taken Acid Communism if he’d lived to pursue its ideas to the finish line. And it’s anyone’s guess how he would have responded to the last six years of authoritarianism, nativism, and outright fascism.

What follows is speculative. I like to imagine he might have written a new book titled Capitalist Unrealism that addresses the paranoid delirium of fantasy and conspiracy that has consumed political life in much of the world. There is an unresolved tension in Mark’s thinking between a faith in the power of the fictive and a hunger for truth.  

From Ccru’s notion of Hyperstition (the self-fulfilling prophesy, the dream that achieves reality through the force of its projection) to glam’s artifice and reinvention of the self, Mark disdained ideas of authenticity and realism and believed in the power of fantasy. Yet Mark also excoriated the bullshit merchants of the mass media, despised Tony Blair as a dark magus of PR, critiqued magical voluntarism and motivational thinking as a form of privatization of hope, and wrote with painful honesty about his own depression, sexual abuse,  financial struggles, and “the wounds of class”.

I feel certain Mark would have been incandescently incensed by the mendacity of Boris Johnson’s Tory government, fascinated but appalled by Trumpism and other excrescences of post-truth anti-politics, and generally aghast at today’s world of influencers, corporate propaganda, psyops, disinformation. The fact that Trump was the first positive-thinking president, with Norman Vincent Peale as the family minister, would not escape his notice. His interest in David Smail’s concept of magical voluntarism might have led him to re-envision capitalism not as the realm of dour realism and deflated expectations, but as a fever dream of hype, irrational exuberance, market mania, and dangerously high self-esteem.  

As the recent cautionary tales of WeWork (retold on TV as WeCrashed) and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (The Drop Out) demonstrate, the scam artist is not an outlier or aberration within capitalism, but simply the extrapolation and amplification of its essence: speculation as wishful thinking, the IPO as image projection and illusion peddling. WeWork is a case study in the demonic glamour of disruptor capitalism, a feel-good enterprise fueled by the founding couple’s mantras and maxims (“manifest your desire,” “misery is a choice”, etc) and their employee rally-call “Thank God it’s Monday” – an uncanny inversion of Mark’s “no more miserable Mondays” in Acid Communism.

So it’s possible that Mark, confronted by a world run amok with the competing delusions and self-heroizing fantasies of right-wing Hyperstition, might come back to an idea of truth and reality as a bedrock. 

His taste took a surprising turn in the last decade. There was his endorsement of Sleaford Mods, whose brand of Happy Shopper realism is really not that far from earlier groups he’d despised like The Streets and Arctic Monkeys. And then there was his unexpected paean to The Jam. In songs like “That’s Entertainment” and “Down in the Tube Station At Midnight” –  sour and dour, chained to the mundane –  “Paul Weller sought to escape his fate in the very act of describing it,” Mark wrote. That could almost be a manifesto for the Free Cinema and the social-realist kitchen-sink movies of the 1960s like Billy Liar and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning -  a movement whose Englishness and everyday greyness almost certainly would have been anathema to the younger Mark, fired up on the visionary darkside aesthetics of cyberpunk and jungle techno. 

The gesture towards truth – to existential authenticity – is there even in the celebration of Joy Division in this book. “Depression is… a theory about the world, about life,” writes Mark, a theory whose foundation is the rock bottom apprehension of futility and emptiness, “the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.” There is a desolating pride in seeing clearly: “The depressive is always confident of one thing: that he is without illusions.”