brother in arms
September 21, 2008
I watched a game of baseball for the first time the other week. I’d spent the night being ill and was unable to sleep or do anything except stare at the idiot box. At four in the morning, when you’re entwining every limb around your stomach to keep it from flinging around like a Waltzer, Baseball, it turns out, is significantly less depressing than pre-housing-market-capitulation Location, Location, Location repeats. Kirstie and Phil’s directive that it’s ok to own as many country houses as you can afford, and bully to the environment, the local colour and the rural-displaced, doesn’t need an actual stomach bug to make one nauseated. Watching Channel Five’s coverage of the US-exclusive ‘World Series’ was, perhaps for the first time in my life, the best way to spend the night. The tumult in my gut and the mental turmoil of discovering myself a Channel Five viewer may’ve, I suppose, coloured my perception of the game. But, well, what a terrible game it is. No wonder America is in such a state. If I were to continue this idea, I might, sweeepingly and ungenerously, suggest that ‘The ballgame’, as I believe the definitvely typically incluisive colloquialism is, has a kind of dialectical relationship to the citizens: they’re so stupided that they invent a stupid game; and, they watch a stupid game and they’re stupided by it. Cripes.
But no, my perception was probably tyrannised by my illness; it’d probably still just be my stomach that was moved if Channel Five had been showing, I don’t know, some polar bear cubs stranded on a melting ice block in the middle of the Bering Sea mewling as they’re harpooned by some of George Bush’s rapacious oil-suckling goons. Stupid cubs. But, it was mostly that the Americans seemed so incapable of hitting the ball. A man would throw it; a man would swing and miss it; a man behind him would catch it; all three of the men would spit and scratch their crotches (not each others, this America, for God’s sake). And so it would go until - at an unspecfic, and seemlingly random time - the batter wandered back into a caged pit and another man came out to miss the ball. I watched for a couple of hours and if my hands hadn’t already been occupied balling up my intestines then I’d've been able to count on one of them the times the ball was hit. Meanwhile the crowd gobbled up with impunity the kind of snacks that, if there was any justice in America/the world, would surely tyrannise their guts for days to come.
All of this could be further worked into a memorable metaphor for American society, its relationship to the world, and sundry other specific things like the country’s governmental foreign policy directives. But I want to get on with the business in hand. As Rolling Stone notes: Vegetarian Eddie Vedder pens affectionate ode to Cubs. I’m paraphrasing the Stone, for I can’t remember the headline they used, but that one sounds about right. By ‘the Cubs’ the Stone (or my interpolation of the Stone) doesn’t mean polar bear cubs, but refers to the moniker of Chicago’s priniciple baseball team, the Chicago Cubs. Vedder has long been a fan of the Cubs, and as inexplicable as the game is to me, his support further underlines the significance baseball has to even unstupided Americans. Before I saw a game, I liked to imagine baseball as being a bit like cricket in the way that it’s mythologised and the cultural importance of it as a respository of national values and such like. I liked to think of it as virtuous and righteous and inclusive; that whatever problems American society has, the game provides a constant - a vestige of the way things used to be, a narrative to guide the people, the pitch and the ground a place where the threatened and in some cases lost, sense of communal identity, is reinstated and redeemed; a geographical place where people can gather and forge themselves as a collective, without the imputation of a government agenda which doesn’t represent them, where they are equally free from the despotic arms of capitalism and big business (ok, I knew that bit wasn’t true), the baseball ground a kind of pychogeographical leyline. That sort of stuff.
I have a fondness for cricket because it still maintains the pretence that it’s a game steeped in tradition and values; that the rules and etiquette still have a role to play in understanding how society works and we can be valuable within it. I also like it because many of these traditions are curiously English and slightly eccentric, somehow there are strands of local - or national - colour that are yet to be torn up or tied to globalisation. Maybe football - I mean ’soccer’, American readers - would be more analgous to the cultural significance of baseball, because cricket has slightly elitist and class-specific undercurrents. Football is ‘the national game’ of England in the same way that the ballgame is the national game of The America World. But the point is, I’d like to think that baseball has a role as a keeper of the national identity; a salve for the downtrodden and homogenised; a preserve for national identity threatened as it’s twisted like an intestine around the needs of big business and their governments. That sort of stuff.
I find it particularly pleasing that someone as troubled by globalisation, right-wing fuckwittery and the encroachment of capitalism on human values as Vedder is, can still be provided with a hopeful, unsullied narrative by a game. In the song he conflates the unity and optimism of a team’s supporters with a kind of good citizenship and a hopefulness, despite all, for his country and the world. What makes it particularly affecting is the way that he draws on the traditions and we’re-in-this-together edict of team games, to fashion what is really a protest song wrapped in an utterly disarming metaphor. But when he sings ’someday we’ll go all the way’ it’s almost as a call to revolution. He tosses in a bit of nostalgia for the pre-9/11, pre-capitalism-gone-mad, time of greater certainty, and evokes the keening-with-possibility of childhood, contrasting it with the unsaid of today. He posits the scoreboard as a source of wonder and home to the magical potentiality and transformative powers that are the gift of youth. It is times that are analgous with these that the globalised society has lost; magic has been replaced by calculating, keeping score is now the kind of malevolent term that Bush might use in his ’smoke them out dead or alive’ rhetoric. It is a song which uses traditional themes, values and narratives to throw into relief their systematic erosion. Like a mirror: Collectively what have we lost, what are we losing, what will things be like for our kids?
In this case baseball really is a bit like polar bear cubs.
Eddie Vedder - Someday We’ll Go All the Way (Live, Chicago)
MP3 via Fuel for Friends.
UPDATE: I notice that Heather at Fuel Friends has taken down the MP3 file, presumably because the track has now gone on sale. I’m going to crane my neck out an infitessimal fraction of a fraction and guess that Eddie Vedder wouldn’t mind me having his song here. But perhaps the harpooning goons at the record company might see me as a threat to the way they govern his work. So I’m siding with Ed on this, and I’ll wait until the scorekeepers smoke me out and spear my values and dreams with the long-arm of their law before I remove it. I’d wap out some baseball term or other that’d wittily close up all the strands of this snark, but I’m not familiar enough with the game. So, go figure, as Bush would doubtless say.
after all
September 19, 2008
I toyed with the idea - the concept, if you will - of not illustrating this post with a picture of the artwork I’m going to mention. Looking at that picture up there, you may think that’s exactly what I did - that I just popped up a few black holes to assist the conceptual ruminations of you, the audience. But no, that is a picture of the artwork. Well, it’s a photograph of a photograph of the artwork, which is itself made from photographic reproductions of found photographs. By the time it reaches you, Insidious Lassitude inteligentsia, then it’ll already have been passed around several cultural mileu and had it’s context gawped at and peered through, deconstructed and redeemed. That probably doesn’t matter though. I was only considering what the ramifications of not having a pictorial representation of it would be. Plus, I couldn’t be bothered to photograph it, because I’d have to put some palaver into trying to avoid accidently photographing the reflection of myself in the glossy paper I have it printed on.
After I did photograph it and I had avoided capturing myself, then I thought that I shouldn’t have avoided it at all, but should’ve purposefully attended to including myself. Though when Penelope Umbrico made it she managed to not include herself. And she’s the artist. But at least I was aware, and I made a choice.
Here’s what it is, and how she made it; which in this instance are the same thing really - they’re mutually dependant, and both requisite to the success, or otherwise, of the artwork. Umbrico collected images of TV sets she found for sale on internet classified tack-board Craigslist. Hence the title, which if I hadn’t witheld it might’ve made things clearer: ‘For Sale/TVs from Craigslist’. She then interpolates (presumably, as I doubt they’re photographed or advertised on Craigslist that big) them and has them printed at the size that the TV is in real life - 15″or whatever, though this is America so I’d guess some of them are gable end”. She then arranges them and installs them on a gallery wall. With a further - slightly leaden and superfluous, I think - conceptual flourish, she offers the image for sale at the price the TV was advertised at on Craigslist.
It’s not clear from how many images she chose these ones, but what I think is particularly appealing to me is that everybody chose to photograph their TV from the front - a aspect that all sets looks virtually the same from. And they’re all photographed when they’re off! So the differences between them become virtually lost, as it were, and they’re indistinguishable from one another and the qualities that might be used as criteria to appraise them - aesthetics, picture quality - are removed. Way to sell something, guys! No wonder the American economy is going capish.
One of the things this makes obvious is how little it matters; that everyone has the same needs when it comes to TV - everyone is just another droided reflection, a slump to be framed by a screen. So it is that we have thousands - I don’t know how many she did, but I’d like to think it was lots - of black holes with an unintentional photographic trace of the owner peering into it with a light and finding themselves distorted and unrecognisable. It’s rather fabulous that they’re leering at and trying to capture a dead screen as they contort themselves to try to eliminate their own reflection, and are suceeding in nothing but futility - but (presumably) succeeding in selling their TV and keeping the material/economic lifecycle spinning - and appear as unwilling ghostly role-reversed distortions trying to hide from themselves. I’m reminded of Francis Bacon’s deliberate ploy of using glossy glazes so that his audience couldn’t avoid seeing distortions of themselves in his attrocious paintings. The whole conceit is deliciously loaded, and gloriously darkly comic.
Umbrico does some similar work with mirrors she’s found in catalogues, and reproduced shorn of the context so that a room full of them only shows the reflections of things which are absent, and when the viewer peers into them in the gallery their own image is vanquished and they see only a reflection of things they’re being sold. She scaffolds it all with some notions of the self in a consumerist, image-based, everthing-marketed, society, postmodern where the self is problematised and threatened. I read an interview with her that was quite interesting in casting a light on her ideas. I’d reproduce some bits of it here and add my own reflections on it, but I can’t be bothered to palaver over the cut and paste tool. But I did photograph her photographs. Though, as you can see, the paper wasn’t quite flat, so I have added a distortion of my own to her work, after all. How apposite.
“it was from a different time, like before irony, or something”
September 18, 2008
…Ryan Adams is talking about rock music in the 80s, specifically hair-metal. “It was like the roaring 20s, but with guys that looked liked really gruff girls”, he proffered between debuting songs from his new record in Boston the other week. Then followed a discussion of his BC Rich Warbeast, which he says is “basically, like, the most most badass guitar ever”.
I want to say that he’s being ironic about a time before irony, but I don’t know, and I don’t know that even he knows anymore. I could probably find some irony in that, but I can’t be bothered. Last the world heard from Ryan, he was shrieking “Guitaaaar solo!!!” in the middle-eight of a quasi-comicbookmetal song called ‘Halloweenhead’ that had thunderstorm sound-effects in it. And not even irony could provide a subterfuge for that. Though perhaps it was irony, for there followed not a solo, but the same couple of notes repeated metronomically for a few bars, like they were echoes still reverberating from the 80s. I suppose that middle-eight could be a metaphor for the 80s, and a self-effacing snark at Adams’ own recent output too.
The same could almost be said for his new song ‘Magick’.
‘What goes around comes around / Listen to the music play / Listen to the magic / And watch the record go round / Cuz what goes around comes around’
Ryan’s like some sort of magical thinker, constantly beleaguered and burdened by his endlessly vaunted ’songwriting gift’ and bewildered by his inability to understand and find causality for it, he’s forever seeking refuge in rock music, and in particular the rock of a simpler time, the rock of his nostalgic youth. He’s like a child trapped inside a man’s body, forced to live by cheek-by-jowl with an artistic ability he can’t fathom - the ‘gifted’ his name is forever prefaced with, and which only curses him to eternally fret about how it works. You get the impression that this bewilderment extends into his personal life and realtionships too. And so it goes that, trapped like that circular lyric, unwilling to engage with his mojo and waylaid with stasis, he tosses out what on first listen seems to be non-commital derivative nonsense like Magick. But the child’s spelling and the lyrics - ’Turn the radio up and get down/ let your body sway / its magic!’ - are perhaps just further evidence of Adams’ lost-in-adulthood longing for a simpler time. A time of comicbooks, and 80s rock records with their aspirational agenda of sunshine, girls and cars; a time when he didn’t have to think about his - ironically, always very witty and self-aware - grasp of irony, or understand his art, or engage in emotional sophistication and complexity in his life or his music.
As I’ve commented (at length) before, Adams has a fascination with magic. Back in 2003 in the first genesis of his proto-comicbookmetal subterfuge, he tossed - with a typically astoundingly deft fusion of vulnerability and arrogance - the potential masterpiece ’Anybody Wanna take me Home’. Even the title is sugestive of Adams’ duality - anybody wanna take me home, as said by an unhappy child; or anybody wanna take me home, as said by an adult in a bar to women, or by a drunk - and the song features a quintessential Adams apparently-throwaway lyric. Picking over the existential scabs of his lost youth, he sings of ‘disappearing like magic’. Like magic itself magically does once you’re an adult - once you can no longer just ‘turn the radio up, let your body sway and listen to ther music play, listen to the magic’. Like Adams oeuvre, it’s devastating in parts. In both senses of the word.
Even the cliche ‘what goes around comes around’ in the Magick chorus is vaguely magical thinking in its construction - or lack of. But, typically, Adams counterpoints it immediately with a kind of knowing self-aware wink to the limitations of rock music and his own desire to toss out rock records with riffs appropriated from other rock records: ‘Watch the record go around and around’. They’re both cliches, but are both deployed to cock-a-snook at one another, and illuminate each other. The magical thinking is summoned as refuge, then immediately kicked into touch. What a predicament.
The other song here is another tossed-out piece of nonsense. Complete with typical Adams one-liner flourish. ’If I could I would fix it’ he sings to a woman in sincere and self-pitying style. And then, naturally, he twists the olive branch and cheats the sentiment: ’so I would always win’ - it becomes clear that he doesn’t seek to fix the situation by redeeming himself, but by changing the rules of the relationship on which the interaction takes place on. In much the same way that a child might, he sees it as a contest, in black and white - or magic and non-magic - and it’s apparent it isn’t and complexity rears its head he feigns disinterest, throws his comicbook toys down and stalks off to cradle his BC Rich like a comfort-blanky and toss out some songs he desperately hopes are meaningless and don’t betray him. But in the end the songwriting gift always betrays him, even if it’s just a line or two these days.
futureproofing stones
September 17, 2008
Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither Louise Minchin nor Colin Jackson is a natural TV presenter. One’s a former hurdler, and the other is apparently a radio presenter. Shunt them in front of a camera, as it appears increasingly habitual for the BBC to do, and they’ll grin at each other until the glaring intrusion of the lens becomes unbearable and digging their finger nails into their palms no longer relieves the tension and they must at last speak. To each other simultaneously, naturally. Then it gets even worse. It’s as though the viewer is privy to some nightmarish arranged wedding and the camera is a priest who the couple must be polite to, and simper social embrassment at, whilst cloying to be free of his presence so they can crack open the Keighley mini bar and get on with their joyless wedding night.
The other day I saw them presenting Sunday Live - or Sunday Life, I can’t recall what it’s called, I’d guess it’s the former because of the surfeit of dead-air/forced-grin time. Whatever it’s called they had on it had a story about a guy who’d home-videoed his family every day for the past 30 years. He’d got a cine camera in 1978 and had moved onto a VHS camcorder in the eighties, and then through to a digital one now. They showed some bits of his films while Jackson gayed it up with his Golden Retriever-enthusiastic commentary. As well as recording all weddings, birthdays and Christmases, the guy had - as one would inevitably have to if everything had to be filmed - trips to the shop, meals, evenings playing board games, and other dramatic everyday moments, like sunbathing and watching TV.
Currently the guy was engaged with transferring his archive from VHS - which is magnetic degradation prone - to DVD - which is apparently ‘indestructible’ - one can only imagine the hours of enjoyment the future desert-adapted species of beings are going to have when one realises that in millions of years the only thing that’ll remain from the Anthropocene is boxsets of Lovejoy and Bergerac. Ah, only then will the true nostalgia of antiques, classic cars, and drama from the eighties apogee of TV really matter. But I digress. As well as the Sisyphean project of transferring the past to the medium of the future, the guy also has to make sure he films every day’s events. He is endlessly engaged with the peculiar obsession of futureproofing (as I note the curiously modern term now is) both the past and the present simlutaneously. By futureproofing the media, of course, what he’s really up to is futureproofing himself; giving himself the best chance of living on when he dies. Then there’ll be an almost real-time record of his life. And since it is nearly real-time, should anyone want to watch it then they’d have to give over their own life to watch his. Which is almost what he’s doing himself, because he spends so much time protecting the past from the fututre that there is no present. It’s a baffling conceit. I love it. And it allows me, for the umpteenth time, to reference the scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox is in the past and looks at a photo of himself in the future and sees the effect his curerent actions are having on the future by whether he is represented in the image or not.
The guy’s life is like one prolonged legacy tour, where he permanently clamps a camera to his eye to make film to corroborate his own image to the self that he can’t otherwise engage with or recognise. It reminds me of Martin Parr’s photograph of the tourist on horseback with a camcorder pressed to his eye whilst being led through sights by a disinterested local. Much of the set of photos that one comes from (Small World) lays open to ridicule the curiously tyrannical stupidity of the tourist process - where people aeroplane around the world with a compact camera recreating scenes from tourist brochures; photographing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Mount Rushmore, or filming the Statue of Liberty so they can draw the curtains and watch it on the idiot box when they get home. Or too, it reminds me of a the oddly poignant photograph I took of an elderly man gleefully filming Stonehenge. It didn’t move, and nor did the man for quite some time; it was like he’d become stuck there, staring at his future in the stone past, and tormented that he’d have to press stop and move on. But, for what it’s worth, once he did press stop and his wife dragged him away, he had it captured for posterity.
On the following episode of Sunday Live, they had another man on who had filmed his life. This man was now blind. But in attempting to reach for the poetic, poignant and profound, the camera-jittered Michin could only ham-fistedly retrieve and polish the reflection of her face into the absurd. To the blind ex-filmmaker she said, ‘And what does seeing these films now show you about your memories of the past?’
One can only hope that when the desert-beings of the future unearth from the sunken landmass that was Britain a carton of indestructible DVDs there are some Sunday Live episodes along with the Lovejoy boxsets and the amateur films of stones. Nothing else could so eloquently demonstrate the futile, poignant absurdity of the Anthropocene.
And because Insidious Lassitude now comes music-enhanced:
Mia and cat
September 16, 2008
Oh YouTube, mother to so many millions of mirthsome shoddy-resolution clips of shnorkelling, strawpedo-ing, kitten kicking and beery leering that there is barely any space to left for anything which isn’t ‘the funniest thing ever’. Several million YouTube clips can’t all be the funniest thing ever. And that they amuse a countryful of office saps is perhaps quite tragic. The government need only upload a video of a man gurning into a toilet bowl to unleash a viral distraction that’ll keep the nation stupided until the next tea break whereupon the Sun can take over the stupifying baton. Though they may impact on productivity, the affect is negligible compared to the unrest that might occur if the proles weren’t distracted and stupided. Paradoxically, overall productivity is higher when the workers are chortling at YouTube every few minutes. That’s how things get done.
It’s a bit of a riddle, that one. Yeah, that’s right, I was lurching this Mia Riddle post toward a ‘mere riddle’ joke. That, my droves of dear readers, is the kind of crystaline wit that’s been cleansed from the internet and supplanted by videos of stethoscope-hung nude doctors mowing the lawn. So, Mia Riddle then. In the time it’s taken me to get round to posting this video, the high-resolution version has vanished. I imagine it was sluiced off YouTube to make space for a monkey on a spacehopper. Monkeys on spacehoppers is how things get done.
Such is my command of the comic, I could cue up a ‘Missing in Action’ witticism here if I wanted to. But I’ll forgo it for now, and get on with giving the Insidious Lassitude patronage to swoonsome Mia Riddle. It’d take but a faction of my many readers clickying the YouTube clippy for us to get the counter past 1000 views. Wow. If a million of my readers clicky it then that’ll only be about a million more than I have, and we’ll only be a million shy of the views a rude man dicking around with a lego set has garnered since afternoon Sun break. That’s a lot of millions. It’ll be a virtual uprising of unstupifying.
Mia’s often very good indeed. Which’ll explain why her videos are in a non government-subsidised YouTube backwater and her records can’t be found in shops. It’ll also explain why in America she plays to even fewer people than the crowd of a handful she can attract in Britain. Nevertheless, by the great democratisation of (usually spacehoppered) information that is the internet, you can lughole more of her music on her MySpace. And, now I’m doing MP3s and am hipping up this Insidious Lassitude vanity vehicle to be the hypest musical tastemaker in the whole of the Gumdropped virtual world, here are some fully downloadable clickers for all you hipsters and pop pickers to drown out the office snickers:
*****
As an addendum to yesterday’s post about - well, whatever it was about, here’s another snippet of sniping about class-alienation - replete with more Sun bashing! Excellent. This time I’ll let the famous-for-being-famous (vegetarian) Russell Brand continue the story in this stand-up clip from an Amnesty International gig.
Here’s a man so out-of-whack with the cultural leanings of those who know of him that his fame is almost as tragically of-our-times as those monkey-hoppered office goons snickering at a Wellington boot full of ice cream. What I knew of Brand was the terrific haircut that appears in the gutter newspapers everyday and the occasional snatch of attention-seeking childish TV goonery. Turns out that he’s rather more than that. Aside from all the showing-off, he’s as intelligent, left-wing, articulate, and witty as the people that read about him in gossip mags and the Sun are stupid, reactionary, illiterate, and inane. (I may be gernaralising a wee bit here.) Given his tendency for grandiloquence, arcane references, knowing snarks and informed hectoring, some chunks of his more erudite oratory (for there are attention-seeking diversions too) must be incomprensible or bewildering to your average man in the street. The average Sun reader knows no interest in socialism and animal rights, is bamboozled and stymied by literary and philosophical references, and cares not a jot for post-structuralism or thermodynamics.
Brand comes from a very working-class background and much of his schtick seems to based on the alienation of the ’feeling of not belonging to my own culture’ and the ‘perpetual embarassment of being an outsider in my own home’. This is an age-old problem that many people born (what I’m simplistically terming, for argument’s sake) working-class struggle with as they grow up educated and begin the ghetto-vaulting. Education at once liberates and estranges you. So it goes that you’re forever on the hinterlands, and culturally displaced - feeling rooted in working-class culture, but at odds with it; moving in educated circles but feeling adrift and unrooted in them. Stranded, perpetually peripheral; unhinged from each place and unaccomodated.
Around here the local WHSmith doesn’t have a rack for the Guardian. So few are sold that they sling the ones they do get in on the floor underneath the branded plastic rungs for the Mail, the Express, and the Star. Brand says he always buys the Sun alongside his morning Guardian because he still yearns to feel part of that culture and has a nostalgic fondness for it as a kind of signifier of where he came from and the ideologically uncomplicated days of childhood. But his attempts to accomodate himself are endlessly thwarted everyday he looks at it and is repulsed by what he tries to cling to as his own cultural roots. This too is familar to me, though I’ve never bought the Sun.
her good looks could’ve sailed a ship / but her will alone could’ve sunk it
September 15, 2008
As part of what will doubtless be a returning theme, here is a post about a famous (relatively speaking) vegetarian. I may use subsequent posts to evince the eons-old postulation that vegetarianism begets a more artistic disposition. And a clearer understanding of one’s place in the cosmos. Amongst other things.
But before I get amongst those other things, Jenny Lewis has a new record coming out later this month. She’s a vegetarian, has an artistic disposition, and thus logic has my thesis proved incontrovertibly. I need only write up my findings in an irreverent prose style befitting of my ’significant findings about the human condition I’ve garnered from pop culture/art and delivered to the people with whimsy’ schtick, and I shall surely be acclaimed as a ghetto-vaulting populariser of philosopher responsible for social reform and the empowerment of the masses. I’ll be regarded as a kind of 21st century Bertrand Russell, my teachings allowing the downtrodden to escape the monopolising clutches of Wal-Mart, reject 99p battery farmed chickens and embrace a self-sufficient vegetarianism which halts global warming kyboshing meltdown and allowing man to live on for centuries in a newly fecund gaiaed-up world climate. All this from my insights into a new record by a vegetarian? But oh, what insights they must be.
Before I commence writing up this proposed thesis, I’ll first conclude this unfocussed blog post about the record. Ok, here goes: I’ve not heard it, but it’s probably very good. Now, back to more fabulous freewheeling drivel from which great truths of humanity can be gleaned. Earlier, before I started to imagine emancipation and a Wal-Mart-free world, I was - rather more prosaically - thinking I could also file this post within the ‘culturally dislocated’ or ’culturally hard to place’ Insidious Lassitude dossier on (relatively) famous people. Cultural dislocation and vegetarianism are one and the same where I grew up. Being a vegetarian is but one of the incongruent things a person like me could get up to in a place like this. Others could include, say, being a bookish fop, knowing what the lumpenproletariat is, or not being whacked-out on horse tranquilisers. Though, if I’ll allow myself to betray this whilst writing a high-falutin’ discursive essay thing, I also digest celebrity gossip, have on occasion bought slacks and plimsols at Topman, and know rather a lot about about football - especially for a vegetarian, to whom stereotypically the game is boorish and unsophisticated and rather too un-limp-wristed. I mock because the lie is clearly given to this good/bad, low-brow/high-brow, working-class/some other-class paradigm. Lest it seems I’m setting this up in too (or two) simple terms, the point is not that one set is good and the other bad or whatever - the point is that they aren’t even necessarily a set; a single person needn’t be a bookish fop or a pot-bellied football goon. One can be both, as it were.
As if to prove this I shall now recount a neatly appropriate football anecdote from my vast mental repository of things I read in the Sun. (It almost certainly wasn’t the Sun, for reasons which’ll become clear.) Chelsea and England midfield dynamo and goal-machine (yuh huh, I can deploy this vernacular too) Frank Lampard has always been regarded as somewhat of a outsider in football. His father - West Ham legend Frank Lampard Snr - used the money he made in the game to send his son to private school, and ghetto-vaulting East End boy Frank Jr even has a GSCE in Latin to show for it. The working-class that traditionally make up the majority of football players and fans have always seen this (often perhaps only subconsciously) as a betrayal of the family’s working-class roots and a slight on the working-class culture - of which football is itself a big part. Lampard Jr has consequently forever been regarded with suspicion and considered a ‘Charlie’ or a charlatan. Hence even when he was voted the second best player in the world he was still routinely barracked by England supporters who still seemed unwilling to accept him as an Englishman. And hence too the hollering of ‘Fat Frank’ from the terraces - a nickname that seems less about Lampard’s physical appearance and is more indicative of fans’ distrust of the class outsider - since the industrial revolution the fat have been up in the townhouse scoffing roast while the scamps were running the machines on the factory floor. Up in the townhouse is no place for a modern dynamic midfielder to be; witness the footballing vernacular: the midfield is the ‘engine room’.
As an extension of this, it might also be worth noting the English football fan’s enduring love afair with Lampard’s England midfield partner, Liverpool’s Steven Gerrard. The received wisdom of the football fan is that Gerrard and Lampard can’t both be accomodated in the same England team as they’re too similar. Too similar in footballing senses - both box-to-box attacking central midfielders, both goal-scorers, both deadball takers, both among the best in the world. They are habitually discussed in what football managers would doubtless called an ‘either/or situation’; the accomodation of them both in the team makes the team unbalanced and dysfunctional. The similarity as players - what they are ostensibly judged on - makes clear the dis-similarities which are really what the face-off is about. They make a revealing binary construction which the average football fan and the gutter press barely make any attempt to disguise (though they’re probably not aware of it): Fat Frank the untrustworthy class deserter, and Stevie G the loyal working-class hero. One is northern - from the industrial heartland; one is southern - from the economic centre. One is a fat stroller; the other an athletic grafter. One is vaguely aristocractic to the average footie bloke; the other is a scouser. One has a Spanish wife; the other took a local lass. One is a dark handsome man who earns £130 grand a week; the other is an earthy rugged man of the people who ‘plays for the shirt’. Lampard probably even eats organic vegetarian food at a gastropub, for God’s sake; while Stevie is dependably nourished with hearty down-to-earth fare. One of these men is bad; and one is good. As football players there’s nothing to choose between them. But after all, this is a national team, and so what is really being mostly laid bare and discussed through a veil of footballing euphemisms is the identity, the consolidation of the meta-narrative, the appearance, maybe even the morality, of the homeland.
As I have neatly demostrated the world of low-brow/working-class football can be appropriated to my higher-brow/some other-class learned writings. The twain shall meet and be effectvely conflated. Identity needn’t be delineated so crudely, and indeed can encompass a kind of multiplicity of sub-identities. This multiplicity of identities is of course a principal feature of postmodern society, and has problematised the project of the self. These sub-indentities (as I am now calling them, without ever having considered if that tag makes any sense) can perhaps be confusing to one’s sense of self, and there are identity-forming activities/interests which militate against one another - and there could, I suppose, be those which are deleterious to each other and morph the self into an unbearable contested being. But let’s lighten up! So, to get back to Jenny Lewis, here she is: shimmering hot pants-wearing, fashion-curious, former child star, and LA resident. And here she also is: vegetarian, erstwhile vegan, politically and ethically engaged, articulate songwriter, who says California is a ‘desperate’ place. Because she grew up there she says that she spends most of her time avoiding ’almost everyone’ she’s ever met. Familiar.
Her last record was called Rabbit Fur Coat. The Independent said of it: ’It retains a thoroughly modern feel thanks to songs whose bittersweet and sharply observed lyrics reflect the US’s current moral crisis and articulate Lewis’s confusion at a God-fearing/God-searching America splintering under the weight of religious, racial and economic divisions, while California basks complacently in its shallow obsessions with cash, youth and beauty’. But, though Lewis feels alienated and repulsed by Vegas and LA and California, there is a part of her which she says is always drawn to fashion and appearance and the Californian shimmering of a spectacle. The assimilation of this with the rest of her identity is a constant project. She needn’t live in LA, but chooses to continue to do so. There is a sense of not belonging to her home, to her culture, to her peers. In a broader sense, maybe this is something that many American artists have been engaged with post 9/11, and the search for a national identity, narrative, and morality is certainly a recurring theme in recent US art, Rabbit Fur Coat included.
David Byrne - another (more) famous vegetarian - says of Lewis: ’her lyrics are some of the best around - they take some unexpected turns and hit some resonant truths in completely unclichéd ways.’ And then, dismissively of her penchant for what he calls ’spangley’ dresses and acoutrements: ’The showbiz elements are meant ironically’. Perhaps they have the playful touch of irony, but I think Lewis has spoken candidly enough times to make clear that she really does love spangley things. They are maybe not just acoutrements to her personality and identity.
Can she - or anyone - be a serious artist with a genuinely intelligent and enagaged agenda, and also sustain and furnish a love of designer frocks and LA parties? Are these oppositional interests, or can they arrise together and co-exist? The binary construction is depth vs surface. And like dark and light, good and bad - and even knowing and unknowing - we know one by its counterpart or opposition - Fat Frank’s not one of us, he’s other; Stevie G is one of us. In her essay ‘Some Thoughts on Feeling at Home’ Lily Markiewicz argues, in more complexity than I can be bothered to go into here, that we also understand, feel, or know involvement through disengagement - and that it is the principal project of art to alchemise this binary construction into a mobilisation of our comprehension of our self and identity. Artistic practice, she says, is a the making of place which is synonymous with feeling at home. But - and this may be the most pertinent point for those who are displaced in their own culture or hometown or country or team - home ‘references other meanings of the word to accomodate: to become familiar and even familial. Yet in paradoxical turn, the notion of becoming accomodated also references a dimension of already inscribed ‘unbelonging”.
Rather than become further waylaid with Markiewicz’s sematics, I’m grasping for a Talking Heads lyric to liberate a rather less academic denouement from this journey - a lyric to be the ’two’ of the old journalistic ‘one-two’ article punchline. ‘Once in a Lifetime’ has been going through my head, and led me into this Talking Heads cul-de-sac, so there must be within it a line or two that can redeem me from this dead-end and get me out on the open road to a dazzlingly neat and perceptive conclusion. I think I’m just striving to make some comment on feeling alienated by you’re own culture, or being bereft of signposts in your hometown, or looking for a reflection of yourself in the window of these places, or just seeing a reflection of the clothes draped on an estranged and unrecogised body. Or something. As the Independent says, Rabbit Fur Coat was about all of these things; the wish to find your self - or something else - despite yourself.
When my brain refrains the Once in a Lifetime chorus, I think I’m thinking of it as an interogation of the need to be one thing - have one fixed self or identity - in your life, and that there are things which are untenable with that. There are things which people are concurrently, things which seem deletrious to one another, but the challenge is to sustain them all, or to encompass or accomodate them all within one sense of your own identity. Maybe these could be things like being poor and valuable, rich and ethical, or other things which are posited as competing dichotomous essences. Like being pretty and intelligent, or hot-panted and literate, or spangley and serious. The project is to accomodate the unbelonging of ‘this is not my life / this is not my house’.
Here’s an MP3 of the title track from Lewis’ new record. The record may be a further set of ruminations on the perpetual wrestle betwixt a self/God/others/internal and external personal identities that we present to the world and ourselves and which life enternally unresolves.
‘He took one look at my face / And said ‘I can fix the hole is you’
