Art & Criticism

Teardrop Manoeuvres in the Dark

Art & Criticism, Music
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Owen on Julian Cope’s autobiography, Head-on, his abilities as a writer and how wrong his musical preferences seen in retrospect: Part of what is interesting in it is in seeing just how wrong the Liverpool in-crowd (of which Cope was unabashedly one) were, how their coolness and their talent were in inverse proportion. As a rule, if the young Cope dismisses a band – John Foxx’s Ultravox, Visage, Japan, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – they will be very interesting, but if he takes them seriously – Echo and the Bunnymen, Wah!, his own group – then it’s Merseybombast all the way. .

Of course, even at the time Echo and the Bunnymen were a punchline on The Young Ones… Like Depeche Mode, they were a band always trying slightly too hard to be convincing. Cope’s own band, The Teardrop Explodes at least had the saving grace of having a sense of humour — how could it not, Cope having named it after a specific panel of a specific Daredevil comic? Cope could get awfully seriously and was convinced of his own importance as musical genius at the time, but it was always balanced by a certain playfullness his more poofaced rivals didn’t have. This is best seen in Kilimanjaro, the 1980 debut album and the Teardrops’ best, one of the best albums of the first half of the eighties: with all its punk and post-punk influences it also has a sparkling, natural lightness to it, cheerful keyboards and brass section, sort of hinting of what Paul Weller would do much later much more bombastically. There’s more than Merseybombast there.

(And isn’t that, or “Madchester” or Bristolian blagging just a localised version of second or even third city syndrome, where to even be noticed by the juggernaut that’s London you need to shout seven times louder? It’s not something we really have in the Netherlands, where Amsterdam may be the biggest city in the country, but is not much bigger than Rotterdam or Utrecht and while it may be so arrogant as to assume it’s the centre of all arts, the reality is that it’s just as provincial as any sleepy town out in the boondocks, endlessly gazing its navel, letting the other cities go on with actually doing things. But I digress.)

Fortunately Owen didn’t write this post just to slag off Cope and his pals, but to praise another of my favourite albums of that time, OMD’s Dazzle Ships:

If Dazzle Ships is a concept album, the concept seems to be communication, travel and distribution as enabled by technology, something usually carried out dispassionately, but here made overwhelmingly romantic, a pathetic fallacy for obsolete machinery, with an underlying terror at the prospect of turning ourselves over to abstractions, whether technology or capital. So there’s a willed innocence to much of it, with ‘Telegram’ making this wholly superseded technology wildly exciting – ‘I’ve got a telegram!’ he sings, attempting to tap into the joy of its early discovery. Elsewhere, it’s about deception as much as communication. The Dazzle Ships of the title are perfectly chosen, as this experiment in warpaint for Great War battleships was, until after 1945 Britain’s only major experiment with Modernist abstraction in public life, a utopian idea utilised for depressingly, if impressively atavistic purposes. The title track, with its collage of empty space, foghorns, forlorn drones and sudden, panicked alarms, is almost synaesthetic in its evocation of a locked-down landscape controlled by the defence industries, a blank lullaby to Cold War big tech.

What Dazzle Ships evokes in me is a feeling of retrofuturism. It sounds like it could be the sidetrack to one of those mid-seventies distopian big budget movies like Rollerball or Logan’s Run where most of the interest is in the set building, but unlike those movies aware that this future won’t happen. There’s an element of both repellance and fascination about technology in Dazzle Ships. On the one hand there’s that seventies view of modern technology as being inherently alienating through its use by big business and big government as tools to oppress and regimentise the life of its workers and citizen. By teh time Dazzle Ships came out this view was already oldfashioned, as both government and business were busily shedding their paternalism for other ways to screw us over. On the other hand, as Owen writes, OMD sings about these technologies with a sense of innocence, “overwhelmingly romantic”. Robots might put car workers out of work, they’re still fascinating pieces of equipment, as any twelve year old knows.

All of which evokes a certain continental view of the future as seen in the rearview mirror, of a time when it was possible to imagine the Cold War would stay semi-thawed forever and we would keep continue to have to imagine our futures under the shadow of World War III, with limited room for imagination but quite safe in a way.

And so the great freakshow comes to an end … not quite

Art & Criticism, Music
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Over at the Prattle, Feòrag is busy tracking the inevitable Michael Jackson conspiracies, most of which think he faked his own death. More dead celebs have been accused of this, but there was a special kind of inevitability about this one. Jackson’s life story, his public persona and the constant media focus on how much a freak he supposedly is makes that he faked his own death halfway believable. Surely I’m not the only one who tought of that when they heard the news of his death?

It’s fitting that he died in the same way the poor guy had to live his life over the past four decades, in a media freakout. A child star in the early seventies, getting weird at the end of the decade, sleeping in his scarecrow costume from The Whiz, reinventing himself as the biggest selling pop artist ever, Off the Wall, Thriller, giving way to fresh excentricities: Bubbles, Neverland, hyperbaric oxygen chambers and all the other nonsense real or made up by the tabloids, but still canny enough to once again see where pop music was going and be there before it did, followed by more and nastier rumours about his private life, the unsuccesful marriage to the spawn of Presley, the accusations of kiddie fiddling, the lawsuits, the depts, the intended comeback and death. And now the endless speculating about how he died, who’s to blame, what will happen to his heritage, his kids, the feeding frenzy of tv news and tabloids finally faced with a story that they understand, none of that complex financial stuff, that dreary endless slog of more bad tidings about the economy, the environment, Iran… Then later there will be the anniversary specials, the tie-in books, biographies, tell all stories and so on undsoweiter ad infinitum.

Michael Jackson has been a background presence in my life for all my life, mostly an annoying one as I largely couldn’t stand his music and certainly didn’t need to have the Jackson freakshow shoved in my face all these years (and neither did he, I suspect). But only a complete ignoramus would deny his influence on pop music (step forward, Nick Cohen). He broke the colour ban on MTV and made it into the juggernaut it was in the eighties in those fabulous days when it still played music videos. If what he did with “Thriller” or “Bad” or “Beat it” (but never “Billie Jean”) looks corny now it’s because almost everything that came after it has build on his work. Zap through any pop-orientated music channel and half of what you see has been influenced by Jackson’s choreography or music. His influence is so pervasive that you don’t notice it consciouly unless you start looking for it. If Presley was the pop icon of the fifties and sixties, then Jackson was it in the eighties and nineties. To say that he “never was an important musician” is just foolish, but then the evidence that Nick Cohen is a fool is not exactly rare.

So Michael Jackson is dead but the show will go on. That a parasite like Cohen feels the need to attack the media coverage of his dead in service of yet another tawdry blogpost about the elitist ivory tower BBC/media is the best evidence for this…

Andy Remic should just fuck off

Art & Criticism, science fiction
Published on 4 Comments on Andy Remic should just fuck off

Some of the more thin skinned science fiction writers, as well as a certain breed of fan overeager to make everybody part of Club SF, have been whinging again about negative reviews. It’s the usual guff: “there are too many negative reviews”, “it’s all so meanspirited”, “positive reviews are soo much more interesting” and so on. So far, so tedious. But somebody had to take it one step further. One Andy Remic, a published writer though you wouldn’t in a million years guess it from his blog prose, has started the socalled ” Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project” which, in his own words (scroll down):

I believe there is a new wave coming. A new wave of positive genre fiction, as can be seen in de Vries Shine anthology, but also a positive movement in the industry and community. I believe there’s a lot of people out there sick of the constant whining and moaning and tearing down – after all, it’s much easier to destroy than create. That’s why myself, and so many other brilliant authors, are involved with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics project (the SFFE) because we want to promote a positive attitude in the industry, and make and ethical stand against the constant poison and vitriol which, I think, has been invading and escalating for a long time.

I chose the name “Ethics” not because I wanted to explore the ethical contexts of novels or films, but because I wanted to make an ethical stand against the motherfuckers who, to my mind, are systematically ruining the SFFH genres. In short, I wanted to do what I believed was intrinsically, morally, ethically and intuitively right. I want to celebrate everything that is good in SFFH, because it’s all subjective, right?? – and, hopefully, we can lead by positive example.

Shorter Andy Remic: I want to remake science fiction in my own image through the power of positive reviews. Not that science fiction needs remaking, certainly not by making criticism more upbeat and “positive”. Science fiction is far too protective already of its bad writers, fans and critics alike overlooking dodgy science and dodgier politics, cardboard characters and clockwork plots for any old bit of sensawunda.

Now it might just be observer bias, but I’ve always found it was the bad writers who moaned the most about negativity, who are obsessed with remaking science fiction into something positive, a return to some imagined golden age of sf writing. Remic at least is no exception. If the quote above is not bad enough, take a look at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics Project’s blog, which should be a showcase of what Remic and his followers consid good reviews.

I wasn’t impressed. The reviews largely consist of plot summaries combined with meaningless praise as in this review. The writing itself is awful as well, as seen in the following quote. “Williams’ storytelling is stellar throughout this novel. The writing never falters. His ability to paint a picture with words is undeniable. This is a real page turner.“. Not exactly sparkling prose.

To set yourself up as the great saviour of science fiction from the “motherfuckers” who are “systematically ruining” science fiction is obnoxious enough already, but then to fail so miserable at writing readable reviews as well? That’s unforgiveable.

Myth Conceptions

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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In an otherwise standard post about the misguided longing of readers for an imagined Golden Age of book publishing, Robert McCrum

Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader’s radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor’s marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.

What’s interesting is that this supposedly common “myth conception” (thank you Robert Asprin!) is the direct inverse of a common complaint of older science fiction readers. Hang out at any sf blog or forum and sooner or later you’ll hear some old fart complaining about how nobody writes short books anymore like they did in the Golden Age when a novel had a good idea, great characters and a proper plot and only needed 150 pages to do so! Readers who sample these classics without the benefit of nostalgia will quickly notice how shallow most of them actually were, with cardboard characters and barely developed plots, but that never stopped the old farts. One wonders what the current science fiction and fantasy reader, having grown up with fat fantasy bricks and 700 page space operas will moan about in thirty years….

Sounds familiar?

Art & Criticism
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George Eliot on Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, as written in 1856:

The heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond. Her eyes and her wit are both dazzling; her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity; she has a superb contralto and a superb intellect; she is perfectly well-dressed and perfectly religious; she dances like a sylph, and reads the Bible in the original tongues. Or it may be that the heroine is not an heiress — that rank and wealth are the only things in which she is deficient; but she infallibly gets into high society, she has the triumph of refusing many matches and securing the best, and she wears some family jewels or other as a sort of crown of righteousness at the end. Rakish men either bite their lips in impotent confusion at her repartees, or are touched to penitence by her reproofs, which, on appropriate occasions, rise to a lofty strain of rhetoric; indeed, there is a general propensity in her to make speeches, and to rhapsodize at some length when she retires to her bedroom. In her recorded conversations she is amazingly eloquent, and in her unrecorded conversations, amazingly witty. She is under stood to have a depth of insight that looks through and through the shallow theories of philosophers, and her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well.

Found via TV Tropes (don’t click if you want to do anything today), it shows Mary Sue is one of the oldest tricks in the book.