Oh seriously, just put the cigarette in the picture. We’re all adults here. We all know smoking isn’t cool - unless, perhaps, if you’re are a very particular type of actual bone fide rock star. And even then no rock mythology is adequate prtoection from the cancers and other life-destroying diseases and conditions with which it kicks out the jams. Those jams are so very far from cool that, even upon the most narcisstic reflection, it’s an absolutely tragically bad idea. And not even tragic in a cool way, kids. I wouldn’t do it, no matter how many pointy shoes you indie me with. But, terrifyingly gravitous medical ramifactions aside, these guys just look silly. And that’s no good when you’re young and undiseased and are endeavoring to connote this information through the cut of your jib and jeans.

If the point of this 50s-themed catalogue that plopped through my letterbox was to reprise imagery from back in the day - and it is a fashion shoot, after all - then what does self-consciously deploying cigarette cool without the cigarette connote? Like the imagined narrative is interupted by a pesky postmodern carcinogen. Like the cigarette is a phantom, but the vestige of cool is still there in the actions of smoking. ‘Hey guys, we can’t use cigarettes cos it’ll make us look like dafties, and it’s probably, like, against the law or sommat, you know. But, God, isn’t it just so cool, and so, like, now. So I’m thinking we’ll just stage the photos without the cigarettes. It’ll be, like, pretend smoking. Like this is the pretend 50s. And like I’m a pretend Visual Director pretending to have any visual litr’acy at all.’ If you’re enamoured by that imagery enough to want to wear it or sell it, then smoke - or don’t smoke. But do it empatically. A jejune third way of charade smoking surely undermines the founding principle of that sort of rebellious, smooth, gutsy, knowing, cool. As well as being tragic - in an emphatically uncool way, kids - one must also laugh. Paddington Bear is even pursing his lips to blow imaginary smoke like James Dean in an NHS TV commercial. ‘Look kids, this way you can still look classically signifier stupid, but be unadorned with the associated tumours and the palaver of carting dialysis paraphernalia around with your Fred Perry.’ It’s the spirit of rebellion captured, gagged, and packaged up in rolled up trousers with non-chafing and unrivetted seams. Brilliant.

For reasons that will become apparent once I conclude what is likely to be a typically droll preamble, this post was going to rely on RealPlayer for its cogency. Clearly, nobody should ever rely on RealPlayer for anything, least of all cogency. More times than not it just doesn’t work. And now is perfectly indicative of most times. ‘RealPlayer is unable to connect to the server to play your selection - would you like RealPlayer to try other ways to connect?’ it says after draining the sands of my hope through the jaws of its eggtimer. Oh, how thoughtful of you, yes please do. Excellent, what a helpful little RealPlayer you are. More jaws pinching hope, and it announces triumphantly:  ’Auto-Configure completed successfully. Your RealPlayer is now configured to playback using UDP protocol’. Yes, please, thank you. Good old UDP protocol! But then, seconds later: ‘RealPlayer is unable to connect to the server to play your selection - would you like RealPlayer to try other ways to connect?’ Oh dear, it seems I’m trapped in the spokes of a wheel. Why don’t you try Meccano, I think. Meccano never let anyone down. It’s from a time of greater certainty when men connected things in an honest and visible way using steel and muscle and hope and spirit. Meccano doesn’t rely on the interminable motherboard. It’s at the behest of man, we use it to build things. Like a computer, it’s literally stupid, but it doesn’t pretend to be sentient and speak to us like Peter Rabbit. It hasn’t been given a character and a will by some programmers in an office by a riverside. It doesn’t use it’s pseudo-character to trade in hubris and whim and spite and hudwink and New Updates. RealPLayer is a terrifying, heartless, dishonest, hope-pinching soul-stealer. Imagine being caught in its nightmarish clutches, tied to its wheel, doomed to forever listen to its triumphant pronouncements and its ingratiating simpering and its faux-humanism, ever more lachrymose sands draning in front of your eyes as a false representation of progress. Oh, glottal stop.

And so, preamble over, I was only going to mention this little piece from the Guardian of a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t get round to posting it until now, but I think the main point of the story is that David Miliband is an unctuous pillock. And that is as true now as it was two weeks ago. So I may just leave it at that. If RealPlayer’ll allow, you can hear how he’s even changed his voice to be even more repulsive and Franken. But whatever way he says it though, remember: he’s ‘working for a fairer society’. Good work Dave.

I can’t bring myself to continue this post. It’s unbecoming. I’m feeling alienated by this desperate world. But it’s music time, Lassitudinous readers. This’ll cheer us up. I just read that watching Laura Marling is like spying a young woman bare her soul for her cat. That’s the kind of soul-baring you can rely on. That’s the Meccano of soul-baring. Given that she lives in a liquorice cottage with a cat called Hansel, I suspect that some of her other songs may be slightly twee and etiolated, but, to furnish my ever-smug back-reference thread with a smothering comfort blanky of punnery, she makes a pretty good fist of hitting it out of the park here. Oh, glottal stop! 

‘How do I keep finding myself here?’ I dunno, Laura. I find I’m quite alienated and terrified by it all. If I were a taxi driver I’d say: Well, it’s an ongoing project innit Marling, the project of the self, the project of the world.

Laura Marling - Night Terror

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.

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.

…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.     

Ryan Adams - Magick

Ryan Adams - Fix It

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:

Ani DiFranco - Studying Stones

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: 

Mia Riddle - City Song

Mia Riddle - Tigers

*****

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.            

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’

Jenny Lewis - Acid Tongue

Susan Lincoln lives on a smallholding near Penrith on the outskirts of the Lake District. As far as I can see - though it may just be a romantic imagining - her painting studio is in a farmyard outbuilding that is a brimming menagerie of goats, sheep, horses and parakeets, and overlooks a few rolling acres of Eden Valley arable land and rough pasture. Her paintings are vibrant acrylic depictions of the rural life of nostalgia, the naïve style giving the imagery a fairytale quality. Her’s is an oneiric world where warm breezes caress cotton grass, starry skies give consonant glint to blue pools, and moonlight casts relief on a fecund land where shepherds, woodcutters, and fishermen are lone figures threshing a subsistence that is overseen by ethereal white horses, savant owls, and other equanimous creatures.

The images are familiar - the lone figure tending the land and living self-sufficiently is well-used iconography - but the connotations of such images are no less vital because they are well-rehearsed. It’d be interesting to contrast her depiction of the motif with those from the past to see the way that the nuance and significance of the imagery have changed and are different for an artist today. The inferred ideologies may be similar to those presented before - Lincoln’s fisherman looks a lot like Thoreau might’ve at Walden, for example - but artists make art which reflects the cultural climate particular to the time and society they’re working in. Lincoln, for instance, makes a decision to not depict the M6 tearing through the Eden valley, or a Foot and Mouth riddled countryside, or derelict farms, or the flooded holiday homes of people from Salford. All doubtless excellent fodder for art. But she chooses instead to paint something other than what is there, something which is really a reverie or a fantasy. All art is selective, and the way she selects and paints is different to the way that, say, Grant Wood paints a reverie of what was there when he dragged his easel up a hill next to his house. Wood wasn’t ostensibly painting what was like Lincoln is, but his paintings are likewise imbued with nostalgia and they work a similar set of emotions in the viewer - this is not now, this is what is not. And like Lincoln, this is accentuated by his flat semi-naïve storybook style.

I use Grant Wood as an example because a postcard I have here of Lincoln’s recent ‘Around the Tarn’ reminds me of Wood’s ‘Stone City’ painting from the 1930s. As well as the stylistic, and compositional and tonal resemblance, the two images perhaps make telling resonance of each other and the cultural and societal mise en scène.      

Wood’s painting could be seen to engage with the issues presented by post-industrialisation America, and prophesise the issues of the direction of progress of the country. At the same time it is has a nostalgic reverence for the small town agrarianism and regional farming of early 20^th century mid-America. Wood has said that he wanted to paint things the way they were when he was a child - the way he perceived them as a child, or even just the way he retrospectively imagined he had perceived them. This manifested itself aesthetically with the stylised faux-naïveté of the Plasticine hills and lollypop trees, but can also be read in the painting’s rhetoric and subtext. The image seems a simple one of rustic American painterly charm - an uncontested storybook narrative - but there are tensions within the frame that are an interesting comparison to Lincoln’s painting.

‘Around the Tarn’ is, as the title suggests, an image with a central anchor; the lines of roads and pathways lead to the tarn in the middle of the frame, the hills enclose it, even the trees lean into the centre of the picture, and the animals crane towards it too. This is a self-contained settlement. There is no suggestion of any relationship to the outside world; there is no of suggestion of any outside world. The only road that heads to the horizon leads to a house, and this has the effect of terminating the road in a destination and dissolving the sense that there is something over the horizon that the road could lead to. This is the valley as the known world, with the universe unknown, not relevant and only hypothetical. Everything needed for life is here in the valley-world - water, food, sunlight, shelter - and no roads have been built to accommodate the notion of leaving here or moving on from now.

‘Stone City’, on the other hand, has a tension between the self-contained valley-world and the outside world. It is perhaps an image of innocence thwarted or rescinded. Wood makes a central anchor of the houses and barns cosseted by the hills, but he then disturbs this by draping through it a seductively curvy road which leads the eye through the countryside of the distance and out of the frame unchallenged by the horizon. As it makes its way to the horizon it reveals other settlements on the periphery of the frame, and suggests that this is not the enclosed world it first appears. With these other farms comes the question of boundaries - this land doesn’t all belong to the inhabitants of Stone City, some of this arable landscape must be being used by some other people. The implication is that there must be many valleys like this one, and they all must be joined together. The road goes past the house on the horizon, it doesn’t terminate at the door like it does in Lincoln’s image, it’s left unrestricted over the receding plains. Rather than the distinct horizon and terminated road of ‘Around the Tarn’, Wood’s world is edgeless and uncertain. Trees funnel us over the horizon into possibility; but with moving comes leaving, with distance comes melancholy and the blue edgelessness of distance.

There is too the sense of passing through which emphasises the melancholy of this open horizon. All the windmills in ‘Stone City’ are powered by a west wind; they face left to right - the direction of progress. On the road Wood places a man on a galloping horse with the wind at his back. The figure is about to cross the modern industrial-looking bridge which separates the dark, enclosed, wooded left hand side and bottom of the picture from the light and open right hand side and top of the picture. He travels from the dark to the light, the past to the future, the bottom to the top, the restricted to the unbound. Interestingly too, the pattern of the light and dark areas are vaguely reminiscent of a Taijitu yin-yang symbol - though an inverted one. The rounded interlocking of the Taijitu is something which can also often be perceived in the harmonious lines of the knolls and sweeping pathways common to Lincoln’s paintings.

Despite the contented centred-community of houses, there is only one human figure in ‘Around the Tarn’: walking in the centre of the frame, his dungarees and sun hat mark him as a man-of-the-land. This man walks in the opposite direction to Wood’s figure - from right to left, or the direction of regression. From her studio in the 21^st century Lincoln paints images of the past as a simpler time, a time of greater certainty when the world beyond the horizon was unknown and insignificant. The man and dog represent a fantasy of walking back into that valley-world - disconnecting the telegraph poles, uninventing the inventions, unthinking the thoughts, unbridging the river, and redeeming innocence. 

Wood’s image is a more ambivalent one. The progress is founded on the past - the windmills that power the future are driven by the winds of the past. It is an image of a settlement relocated from the centre of the agrarian self-contained map, to a settlement which is perhaps on the hinterland of the new world but is still of founding economic importance to it. It could be seen as an image of the ambiguities of the self and the community in a national - or international - capitalist society. Amongst the cocks and the cows are telegraph poles. Bisected by the left edge of the frame and disappearing from sight is a large building that looks like it could be a church. The right hand edge of the frame is bounded by an advertising billboard half-shaded by a tree and positioned just after the road turns and begins its snake to the distance. A small path treads left to right from another church to the billboard. From behind the shade of nature and religion, agrarianism and regionalism, the billboard peers as a representation of the outside world (by its very nature it advertises something other, something that is not here) encroaching on the local. The economics of a new America are the turn in the road.

The M6 is a road with very few turns. It connects the industrial north of England to the economic centre in the south. Directions and signposts to everywhere are everywhere along this ‘Backbone of Britain’ as it moves a constant flow of traffic between named places. It’s possibly even visible from Lincoln’s smallholding-studio-farmyard as she paints a recognisable nameless place from back down the road in the Eden valley-world of a romantic imagining.

I’ve been searching long and hard for a true definition of ‘folk music’. Does a folk song need to be old and played on traditional instruments? Is it required to be of humble or unselfconscious origins, authored by an unschooled, isolated or in some way native person? Is it possible to find a communal identity in the textures, rhythms and poetry of certain songs? What is the music that defines us?

I’ve begun to believe that a song that is universally loved and understood will endure the test of time and become folk music because it has made itself useful to so many of us . . . Some are well-weathered and others relatively new . . . What they all share in common is that they remind us of our humanity, of what we share.

Sadly these are the songs that have been gradually slipping away from us. Since the abandonment of agrarian for urban life, the swift death of regionalism and the advent of recorded music, we have left many of these songs behind as relics in printed anthologies and the field recordings of musicologists.

     Natalie Merchant, sleeve notes from The House Carpenter’s Daughter

 *****

Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

     Banksy, from an ADbusters interview

Here’s a mystery for you. Renegade urban graffiti artist Banksy is clearly a guffhead of massive proportions, yet he’s often feted as a genius straddling the bleeding edge of now. Why? Because his work looks dazzlingly clever to idiots. And apparently that’ll do.

     Charlie Brooker, the Guardian, September 2006 

The other day the BBC used some footage of this graffiti to end a report about another calamitous day for Gordon Brown. It’s a very BBC sort of image I thought. The kind of glib graphic they routinely knock up and shove into the six o’clock news (or The BBC News at Six, as it’s now rebranded) for George Alagiah to stand in front of and deliver Third World disaster with his customary profound inanity. It’s the visual equivalent of the puns that BBC correspondent gowks like Robert Hall are unable to help themselves tossing into reports where they are inappropriate - like, say, those about poverty or environmental catastrophe - or reports where they add nothing to our understanding or experience of the story - like, say, all the other reports. Or perhaps it’s also bit like the facile way any report about the internet is nothing to the BBC but an irresistible opportunity to frame interviews in a YouTube screen or quotes in an email template.    

But the image wasn’t made by the monkeys in the BBC graphics basement; it’s actual art, lest you hadn’t noticed. I know this because it was in an exhibition: last week’s ‘Cans Festival’ of ‘Street Art’ in a tunnel in London. They called it ‘Cans’ because street art is (almost always) done with spray cans, and it ran concurrent to the Cannes Film Festival. In fact it might not’ve been concurrent to Cannes, but it was a bit like the same time and, God, it was probably just too much of an opportunity to be witty or clever or whatever it is that it is. The show was oragnised by stencil/graffiti artist and street prefect Banksy, whose publications have included - wait for it - ‘Existencilism’ and ‘Wall and Piece’. Crikey! Strangely these works haven’t been received with a groan, but with the critical intelligentsia collectively smirking and reading sententious Alagiahistic proclamations of genius from the autocue. Perhaps Cans was a joke on the perceived importance and Cristal-soaked prestige of Cannes; a sort of good ol’ fashioned kickin’ against elitism. There’s the haves in Cannes and the have nots in Cans - those who are downtrodden, gritty, and ‘4 real’. The joke is a bit like those puns the BBC use on their graphics - prima facie it perhaps connotes a wry cleverness and sparkling perceptive wit; do more than glance at it though and it turns out to be a load of bosh.

That’s possibly reasonably denotive of the weakness of street art. The premise of the movement (I suppose they’d consider ‘school’ a bit elitist; “we’re edgy self-taught mavericks from outside The System, man” they’d harp) is that it’s the voice of the people - that it is art that speaks cogently for those marginalised by society or not represented by other, less inclusive, art. By the people; for the people. It’s an ‘outsider art’ movement high on rhetoric and propaganda keen to promote its politically-engaged agenda and anti-establishment ethos as the key tenets of its drive for social change. It’s therefore a particularly debilitating problem that the art itself is so impoverished of anything politically cogent, sapient, vital or interesting. When D*Face paints a sticking-out tongue onto the queen and scribbles guff on No Entry signs it is the kind of anti-establishment drivel that adolescent boys sometimes absently-mindedly piddle on their pencil cases when they’re bored in a GCSE history lesson. If this is the voice of the people then it’s no wonder Gordon Brown thought he could steal a few grand off them by rescinding the 10p tax rate. He probably took a peek at Nick Walker’s ‘Moona Lisa’ and saw that the proles were too busy mirthfully snickering at hopeless pictures of bums to care about anything. And even if they did care then they’d not have an articulate voice for their dissent; they’d probably just do some puerile doodles in a tunnel and then get back down the factories where they belong.

Its proponents see street art as a sort of folk art for the ‘urban generation’. Not just folk art that provides a light and momentary aesthetic relief from the drudgery of life, but a folk art that aspires to profoundly engage with our times, express current universal human truths and emotions, and embolden a politicised counter-culture uprising. “Look at the hope it gives the oppressed” they weasel. “Our art can be vehicle for social change, man. We’re gonna rise up and transform this fucking country!” they holler. But although it could conceivably be a powerful medium for expression, and even be a voice which contributes to political change, the art - even with the lofty rhetoric - has no substance. The rebellion is not propulsive, dynamic, witty or coherent. Calling it a rebellion is probably already overstretching it. The annunciation is callow and dumb. It doesn’t lock rigorously into anything vital or expansive, and it doesn’t even meekly suggest transformatism in a meek cowardly disembodied voice cloaked in seductive clothing. It’s a movement characterised by dilettantes basking in a perceived image of themselves as subversive sods scourging London with stenciled rats. It’s a bit teenage, like an emo kid cocking a snook from behind a sofa in Starbucks by sticking a finger up at a policeman outside while all his friends guffaw into their espressos and feel naughty and eye up the some girls wearing Topshop the Clash T-shirts.  

Street art don Banksy and his mob of simpering coat-tailers would probably chunter something about art affecting social change from within - that they are using The System to break The System. Leaving aside for a second the question of whether the art is any good, there is first the question of whether it’s feasible to be part of the system - by which I suppose we basically mean capitalism, and it’s attendant asperities - and also stand apart from it and oppose it. Today everything is co-opted by commerce - the radicalism of the 60s was a packaged product in the 70s, and so on. Everything which has appreciated value - artistic value, emotional value, intellectual value, whatever value - quickly accrues economical value. If a street artist is valued on an artistic scale then it follows that they’ll also be valued on an economic one. (Or it can even work the other way round.) That’s problematic for all art, but particularly art which is founded on an antithetical ideology. Opposition is now virtually untenable or unsustainable. Whatever opposition there is quickly becomes co-opted and assimilated and ceases to be opposition. The market economy society doesn’t accommodate opposition; it eats it up and regurgitates it as another product of The System.

Oppositional politics have been chewed up and digested into single issue politics. Politics doesn’t offer alternative structures or ideologies, just ways to manage the one we have. Campaign to have some windfarms, if you like; or campaign not to have them. Lobby for a congestion charge; or be against it. Protest at the fuel price rises or don’t. But whatever issues are politicked it’s all within a system. This system accommodates simple art on single issues. The innocuous anti-capitalist cartoons of Banksy and his crew are accommodated by capitalism. In fact capitalism finds them rather useful. They’re not threatening; they won’t undermine society’s fabric, and they can be alchemised into something which has all manner of economic malleability. They’re not seversive or dangerous, but they appropriate the look of it effectively. The government are unlikely to be coerced into giving Banksy a tunnel to fill with propaganda if it was threatening to the Western order. They wouldn’t, for instance, let al Qaeda have the tunnel for a festival. Or even the BNP.         

It’s not that an art that has the qualities and role of what we term folk art couldn’t exist today in urban Westernisation. It needn’t even necessarily be characterised by its oppositionality, though it’d perhaps be difficult for it not to encompass it. There is no reason too why it couldn’t use media that reflect the times. Technology like mobile communications and the internet have fundamentally altered our relationships to each other and to the world, and changed society and culture. Folk art reflects day-to-day life. It’s not that graffiti and internet-circulated stencils, digital tools and propaganda couldn’t be used in a meaningfully progressive, genuinely witty or artistic way. But it seems a bit like graffiti has suffered in some of the ways that other forms of art and expression have. It feels less cogent; more superficial, inconsequential and diluted. Perhaps there is a correlation between the development of a commercial art market for graffiti and the general dissipation of its content. Maybe this is just nostalgia. There’s always been vacuous infantile nonsense daubed on walls. But I think a reasonable argument could be made that the stuff that has now become seen as art - the marketable and the stuff that copies it, most of which it’s indistinguishable from - represents less diversity of ideas and aesthetics than it did in even in the 80s.

This is perhaps indicative of a loss regionalism, or the flattening out of culture. People who consider themselves graffiti artists or street artists are now more likely to stencil a symbol they found on the internet than mural a locality from their day-to-day lives. Dialects are abandoned and a broader idiom - often American - is used. Likewise there is less visual vernacular - a stencilled Banksy rat in Waterloo can look just like a rat stencilled by a kid in Sunderland. It was quite possibly even made by the same stencil - reproduced and held by another pair of hands and sprayed in the same way on the side of a different Starbucks in a different city. It’s not a wry comment on the homogenisation of culture, it is the homogenisation of culture.  

‘The stencil [is] fast, it’s the speed of now, it’s the speed of music and TV channel hopping’ says Paul Jones, owner of Street Art gallery Elms Lester. Perhaps Street Art is just a consequence of its time, but - unlike a true folk art - it doesn’t engage with the vicissitudes of this time. It may well be a product of the time - in two senses of the word - but it isn’t necessarily an art. It doesn’t have a dialectical or didactic relationship to people, society or culture; it doesn’t aid the construction of individual or communal identities. The identities of the individual and the community are the same - far from militating against this, Street Art is just another facet of it; just another gable end to the same building reproduced throughout the urbanised West.

These ‘guerrilla’ stencils on gable ends increasingly look not like the propaganda of a militant bunch of agit-artist government-botherers, but like adverts for the canvassed versions on sale for a few grand in Bonhams or Sotherby’s. Banksy and his peeps are driving around - possibly literally - in capitalism’s signifiers wittering about their radical movement in the same way that the BBC pries through Amy Winehouse’s curtains and squeals about drugs, before scurrying away making a ‘Wino’ pun and retiring of an evening to get smashed at a cocaine party round George Alagiah’s gaff. Any sense of art is inconsequential when there’s money to be made in reductionist tittle-tattling about what goes on behind artist’s curtains and pictures of bums to be sprayed on walls.

The Cans Festival wasn’t much like the counter-culture festival or exhibition of folk art that it proclaimed itself; it was more like a theme park. A little local goverment bank holiday charade where refreshments were sold and people milled around thinking about investments in a brightly coloured tunnel while their kids ran around excitedly. Or a zoo: where wild animals are domesticated, penned up and captivated and trinkets or images of them are sold in the gift shop. The artists themselves insisted on anonymity. They truculently faced away from the camera for TV interviews, repeating the street art anti-establishment manifesto in a collective lip synch with hooded heads bowed. Banksy has always been anonymous, and since he became famous other street artists began replicating this paradoxical quirk. Identity was lost already though. Their work is reproduced by stencils. Their slogans are appropriated. Their signatures are stencilled brand names.

What does stencilling a ten pence piece with Brown’s chops on it say? What does doing it in a council-approved place say? What does using it in a BBC political report say? Perhaps it’s really a problem with context. Had I noticed the graffiti on a bridge as I was walking through town then I probably would’ve smiled as I glanced at it while continuing with my life. It would’ve elicited a response consistent with its qualities, and I would’ve forgotten it as instantly as I forgot the billboard advertising a new mineral water. But the roles that it has been given - of art, of social voice and conscience, of political agitator, of serious critically-engaged work - are ones that it is doesn’t have the substance to support. That it is being used in such roles, and that it is seen as commensurate with folk arts of the past, is perhaps indicative of the problem. It may be the way in which it is mediated - by the BBC, by galleries, by Sunday supplements. These contexts ask it to support all sorts of meanings and ask us to apprehend it entirely differently than if we had spotted it on an underpass while were stuck in a traffic jam on our way to work.

It’s not that Banksy’s work is bad. I shrug my shoulders aphateically a bit if you call it art, but it’s ok; and his aims seem reasonably laudable. But even he himself has become representative a creative and critical malaise which inflects art now. His hangers on and copyists have stymied the movement, and its patrons have held it up as radicalism and inflated its significance in line not with its quality or content but with its ubiquity. When it is posited as the principal form of expression and visual language of Western urbanisation then it looks as depressingly vapid and apathetic as the society that it targets. The voice of the people is only represented by the odd glib pun or cheap visual snark and the issues it seeks to raise and communicate - like the change to the ten pence tax rate - are quickly forgotten or whitewashed over. There’ll be no lasting artistic legacy, even to issues with far wider-reaching humanitarian implications than that. If there’s any art to engage us with ourselves and the complex interweave of society, culture and humanity, than it probably isn’t street art. If there’s an art which accurately stands for - represents, or is indicative of - the homogenisation and the subjugation of expression by capitalist artifice then street art is probably significantly more eloquent.  

*****

‘Bold Jamie’ sounds like a traditional song, but was in fact written a couple of years ago by young Irish folk singer Cara Dillon. It tells the story of a young girl who elopes with a mysterious man. Her rich father catches up to them, brings his daughter home and wants the man killed for stealing his daughter and the family’s riches. It’s a typical folk tale of misunderstood identity and class suspicion replete with an ‘individual fancy vs. the judge and jailer of societal establishment’ motif. A complex and more intangible or immeasurable value - in this case love - is subjugated by economic value, or conflated with it. The girl finds emotional wealth but this is taken away from her by father. He wants her be happy and human and fulfilled but those expressions must be within his bejewelled estate of avarice.

The studio version Dillon did for the record is slightly less convincing than this rather brilliant and lucent live version. On record she sounds a bit too like some other people. Yes, that’s not necessarily a problem in folk music. But it probably is if those other people are the ones heard on the Starbucks stereo. When Starbucks goes kerching for the final time, the internet goes caput, the online repository of ‘live’ singing goes kapow, and humanity dies out in a technology-induced global warming meltdown, it’ll be the CD version that earth’s new life-forms will find. That’ll be a shame. But the record - imposition of the apparatus of commercial expedience upon human expression that it is - will at least allow the new colonisers of the planet to get to grips with the complex interweave of nature, culture, and society that humanity was subject to. They can conveniently pass the record around and burn new copies. Obviously all this presupposes that the new life-forms speak English, have CD players and copiers, and indeed that they can hear or hear in the same way as us and have a societal structure that they can relate ours to.

It may be a blessing if they only have the CD and not this internet film, because they then won’t have an opportunity to snigger and snark at humanity’s inability to correctly reproduce the aspect ratio or synch the singer’s precisely to the audio while copying a video onto YouTube, even though it’s a medium and operating system that humanity itself invented.